We recognize the legacy Jacqueline Humphries is working from the moment we set foot in Matthew Marks’ two gallery spaces; yet something throws the viewer slightly off. It’s the echt gestural vocabulary of post-World War II art, but as if viewed through a scrim or screen, which in more than one sense it actually is—a highly processed, thoroughly post-modern actuality, in which the processing itself breaks down with pigments dissolving, disappearing, reappearing through, or floating above an interwoven mesh of screens, coding, and emoticons.
The residuum of Humphries’ gravitation towards certain well-defined styles and gestures is fairly manifest—e.g., mid-1950s Philip Guston, Clyfford Still, or color field painters like Helen Frankenthaler. But Humphries resisted the figurative direction of so many of her neo-Expressionist peers to meet the screen(ed) world of the media-saturated Pictures Generation head-on. Four decades later, her interrogation is even more foundational, almost ontological: not simply the perception, projection, or reflection—the materials of her art—but messaging, meaning, and interpretation; the ambiguity of figure and (always shifting) ground; and what one view tells us about the next.
Screens complicate the traditional picture plane; and Humphries throws the viewer through a screen (or screens) very darkly from the onset. JH456 (all paintings 2024) floats a volcanic storm of black cinders over Still-esque pours and drips of crimson and anthracite against a fine mesh that itself shadows chalky blue ‘shadow’ pours or underpainting. And as for the pours—are they actually? Or just more stencils? The artist’s title/signature initials in the upper-left quadrant just barely gives that away. Gravity will have its way in this ambiguous domain of the pre-determined and free-floating. (Or will it? Humphries might conceivably rotate the linen panel to further confuse or ‘cross-examine’ figure or ground or both.)
The largest of the paintings, JH123 (127×114 in.) gives us a waterfall of slightly pallid rainbow pours in amber yellows, pale blues, and pinks, from the center of which looms a cluster of black hulking, almost exploding fountain of pours—conceivably as stenciled as other parts of the painting. But pulling back from the painting dead center, we register horizontals parallel to the upper and lower edges; and we’re suddenly made aware of another layer of painting/stenciling that could make something else of this entirely. It’s impossible to say whether Humphries played with a Johns style array of block letters or numerals (or if such effects were stenciled on and immediately washed over); but it was hard not to be reminded of those classic fluorescent half-tone Colby Co. posters that once blanketed southern California, advertising everything from rock concerts and prizefights to business liquidations and the 2012 Hammer Museum Made In L.A. biennial. Here (as elsewhere), Humphries floats a quasi-anamorphic stencil of her initials and assigned number for the work (or series of works), as if to assert both authorship and a certain detachment from these ambiguous and slightly volatile conundrums.
Amid these first few paintings, we start to reconsider relative definition and uncertainty as it enters into the moment of conception and execution; that everything is mediated between image and object on either side of lens and retina. That uncertainty (and some drama) is at play in “Crimson Shatter”✨, which bears some resemblance to JH456, but on a slightly larger scale (111×100 in.), magnifying its impact. Their similarity alone throws the determination of pours/drips and stencils (as well as underpainting) into question—the three larger stenciled pours of JH456 here reduced to a kind of rent in the ‘fabric’ (that ‘bleeds’ black), and even the ‘sparkle’ emojis screened mostly in black and sinking into the underlying screen mesh. Between this vivid crimson—slightly brighter than actual blood—and that coal black of JH456, it’s hard to resist a mental leap to associations with disaster. Paler, cooler underpainting, whether pink, blue or grey, only seems to magnify the violence.
Our culture has evolved a fascination with encoding clearly shared by the artist. But Humphries also seems conscious of the dubious filtration of screens, a kind of passive suppression such media ‘shorthand’ can willfully or inadvertently promote. The pours (conceivably accompanied by other applications, whether by stencil, brush or both)—mostly in deep red—are almost entirely obliterated beneath a larger black mass in JH123✨, except for a cloudy cluster of red that drips to the edge of the panel; and suppression seems to be half the point; also fracturing.
A 3-D printed panel in white enamel on PLA (a kind of biomass plastic), Untitled (2025) recapitulates (at about 10 percent scale) the screen/pour/drip imprint of JH123✨, with the clear difference that the sparkle emoji screen printing—deeply embedded, though almost ghosted (grey)—in the painting, scarcely appears in the panel. It made for a coolly analytic bridge between the slightly violent chromatic drama that seemed to scream off several of the linen panels preceding it, and the latent violence that wafted off of Humphries’ series of aquatint etchings of Paul Schrader’s scenographic outlines (all handwritten by the director in blue and red ink on yellow legal pads)—clearly an hommage to the director/writer. (Humphries is an admirer of the filmmaker—apparently not just for his films, but also his insight into classic noir cinema.) Mishima and the iconic Raging Bull to one side, the range of Schrader’s film work is riveting.
After the drama in the main gallery, the works in the galleries facing Santa Monica Boulevard seemed almost coolly elegiac. An all-over stenciling of large green dots that seemed to uncannily cluster like grapes over dripping black puddles and pours in a smaller Untitled were a nod to Roy Lichtenstein’s Benday dots and his own comic-book graphic send-ups of AbEx heroic gestural brushstrokes—these, including equally organic-looking splotchy white overpainted drops in the upper section, decidedly less heroic and almost deliberately pathetic.
One of the most striking paintings in the entire show) was a second JH123✨, in which the sparkle stenciling takes on an exceptionally ironic cast. That suppressed sparkle quietly underscores Humphries’ re-cast definition of the work—articulating form and processing into a far more complex statement. The tumbleweed mass of black pigment of the first painting is rotated slightly off center here, with new bits of underpainting and drips or ‘spray’ exposed (although the lower edge is strikingly similar). Beyond rotating the stencil(s), additional screens, stencils or under- or overpainting shadow the upper-left portion of the off-center mass, almost bleaching away its right section—placing this ‘absent’ mass at its rose-pink scrimmed center.
This latest body of Humphries’ work comes at the viewer with an almost existential directness and estrangement. Without sinking into the quicksand of over-interpretation, disaster seems to float towards us amid these ambiguous archipelagoes of form and re-cast, re-framed, re-screened gesture. But the work also moves the viewer towards a reconsideration of the ‘ground’—or the void beyond the ground. Humphries meets her viewer in a familiarly skeptical terrain, where fear or dread are less significant than the disintegrated actuality—the flip side of the ‘sparkle’, if you will, which is an infinitely twilit absence.
Jacqueline Humphries
Matthew Marks
1062 N. Orange Grove
Los Angeles, CA 90046
February 20 – April 5, 2025
T.J. Dedeaux-Norris had already segued from performance and music to painting and printmaking before completing her MFA at Yale, but she foregrounds the performative aspect of her approach in “Breach of Confidentiality,” her debut solo exhibition at Walter Maciel Gallery. Dedeaux-Norris developed the exhibited works around a kind of personal story, or as she might have it, a “narrative.” Upon entering the gallery, our first glimpses of that tale are willfully fractured; we see cut and collaged fragmented images, transformed into unique acetone transfer prints. These “reclaimed” images (as the exhibition text describes them) remap and recompose the artist’s identity over time and space; but the works are not merely about identity.The subject matter is an uncertain terrain, which the artist makes visually and materially manifest.
Throughout the exhibition, Dedeaux-Norris employs a variety of media and compositional strategies to self-reflexively tease out the generative implications of printmaking and explore the notion of what is actually ‘imprinted’. In Plaintiff’s Testimony: Visual Reclamation (United States) #1 (2024), Norris maps, plots, subdivides an image of her own face—the ‘plaintiff’s’ terrain, conceivably one and the same with her ‘testimony’. Eyes are freely sliced and spun off a facial ‘compass’, while a chin floats assertively in the lower quadrant.There’s a grisaille cast to the whole of the composition.Although flesh tones in certain fragments pop, others seem tamped down, almost greige.The fragments seem on the verge of floating to the periphery of the compositional field—a visually diasporic identity.
Two other iterations of Testimonies selectively repeat or reconfigure this bodily and facial ‘mapping’, variably reflecting presumed expressions of complaint (regret, sadness, anger, or consternation) and challenge the viewer’s instinct to construct or reconstruct the image into something easily recognizable. Dedeaux-Norris’s challenge —to our culture’s claim (or ‘imprint’) on personal identity—is expansive. As plaintiff, Dedeaux-Norris asserts a claim to everything she might be or wishes to become.Her Deposition series extends this challenge, positing herself as defendant, while fragmenting the field even more aggressively.Apparent concern or anger trouble eyes and facial fragments, although Deposition of Identity: Art As Witness, U.S. v. Dedeaux-Norris (#3), (2024) foregrounds fingers that might touch such troubled eyes.
Hanging weavings—of found or discarded fabrics woven through with yarns—extend and complicate Dedeaux-Norris’s inquiry into how identity is deposed and imprinted, highlighting the subjects’s inherent fluidity and uncertainty. Pale blue braided yarns or bits of vaguely plush animal-like garland snake through bits of scarves or sweatering, do-rags and discarded underthings in North Hollywood Hearsay (2024), while long, twisted braids or lanyards of fabric and errant threads drip from its lower edge as if seeping away from a dubious field of causality.In Reseda Remains (2024), a long wrinkled length of printed sheeting spirals to the floor beneath, suggesting flight from long ago catastrophe—which may be more than just notional:the artist’s pursuit of a hip-hop career between high school and university exposed her to an environment easily as sexually predatory as it was creative.
The process of ‘imprinting’ is one thing, Dedeaux-Norris seems to say; while what remains—what stands or falls—is quite another.Along a corridor leading to the rear gallery, a series of hanging works further test out this theme. The artist collages onto small (8×8 sq.in.) wood panels hand-cut, variously hand-tinted, or glittered dry-transfer Roman style letters over printed fragments of diary entries and various writings from her childhood, with occasionally superimposed silhouettes or colored pencil drawing and doodling, the whole epoxied over into a kind of glossy souvenir of an impossible-to-memorialize, much less recapture, past.Titled Evidence of Silence (Exhibits A through N (2024)), they are anything but. These works are resonant, almost meditative objects that simultaneously whisper and shout.Some of the letters appear to flake or separate from the surface, underscoring their instability, or simply the distance between plausibility and proof.
The last gallery is given over to a tour de force display of work that is both exuberantly performative and subsumed within what the artist has compressed into a not-merely-decorative backdrop.Against one wall is an almost banner-scale inkjet print of the artist all but spread-eagled in an expansive, wildly balletic leaping pose within a wispy, vaporous aura (Body of Evidence: Latent Print, 2024).Against the other (and filling it floor to ceiling) is what appears to be a block-printed wallpaper that, on closer inspection display repeating matrices of asterisks which are themselves composed of identical miniature prints of the artist in grand jeté leaps—like a six-pointed ‘Spirit (or snowflake) of Ecstasy’.Perched salon-style across the wall are small (9×12 sq.in.) transfer prints of the artist in variously balletic or yogic poses, with gestural watercolor and pencil markings.Also titled Body of Evidence (January through December, 2024), they collectively offered a kind of reification of the aspirational ‘reclamation’ staked out in her Plaintiff’s Testimony—not of identity, per se, but of a fully realized self.
Organized in concert with the Getty’s PST ART initiative, this re-mounting of Survival Piece #1: Air, Earth, Water Interface or Annual Hog Pasture Mix (1970–71) — in keeping with the entirety of the Harrison collective’s output — is less about a “collision” (per PST’s subtitle “Art and Science Collide”) than the convergence of the two. The Harrison Studio, a collaborative team that encompassed Newton (1932–2022) and Helen Mayer (1927–2018) Harrison, and later including Gabriel Harrison and other artists, approached its subjects with an ethos that was — beyond their environmental character and scope — above all social.
Moving past a superb and beautifully complementary exhibition of work by another gallery artist, Sarah Ippolito, the viewer is confronted by the Hog Pasture in its raised redwood planting bed (or “growth box”), roughly eight feet across and extending twelve feet into the main gallery space — and by engaged viewers mingled around its perimeter. The dimensions approximate those of its original incarnation — at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in 1971 (a 2012 iteration at MOCA here in L.A. was slightly larger). Suspended approximately five feet directly above is a lighting truss studded with LED grow lights configured to the measurements of the planter.
The planter is filled with topsoil, compost and other planting media more or less comparable to previous iterations (also 5,000 European night crawler worms), from which various grasses—the product (as in the original) of R.H. Shumway Seedsman’s Annual Hog Pasture Mix—are already growing abundantly, albeit not to the density seen in prior installations. (The VSF team had far less than the many weeks of advanced growth prior museum iterations were afforded.) Still, it is something that a pig might conceivably pick at. And that was precisely the objective—not to sustain or nourish a pig necessarily (though at least one museum “pasture” installation did just that), but to get the human viewers looking and talking about it.
“All of a sudden, people are looking at the environment in one way or another, and they’re looking differently. In other words, it’s bringing their attention in a way that is meaningful.” The comment comes from Helen Harrison herself; a video loop taken from the closing of the MOCA 2012 Land Art exhibition runs on a monitor directly behind the viewers as they enter the gallery. This is exactly the sort of conversation the installation engendered. Setting to one side the dire condition of topsoils globally (consider the disastrous deterioration of the Amazon basin), through the “Survival Pieces” and indeed the entire body of their work, the Harrisons sought to press forward discussions among humans about the larger conversation of the human species with its natural and built environments and the global biosphere generally.
Press materials for the show reference Donald Judd and Dan Flavin as influences for the Harrisons’ design templates, but the more pertinent influence here is Robert Smithson. Unlike Smithson, the Harrisons’ focus was the environment; but as quintessential “non-sites,” “the Survival Pieces” (Hog Pasture through Full Farm) present closed-off arrays of “determinate uncertainty,” placing the ecological in a deeper dialogue with the cultural—with a view towards reconciliation, restoration, and sustainability.
There is something inherently contentious about an exhibition juxtaposing the work of a contemporary artist with another whose work has some place within the art-historical canon, more particularly one of the most resonant antecedents of the late 19th- and early 20th-century avant-garde. Markus Lüpertz, who has practically made a career of this sort of provocation, has engaged the work of, among others, Corot, Courbet, Picasso and Poussin.
The artist selected here for appropriation, deconstruction and more is the willfully classicizing proto-Symbolist painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (hereinafter Puvis), who exerted a profound influence on Post-Impressionist artists including Gauguin, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Bonnard, even early (e.g., “Blue” period) Picasso, and still later, various Surrealists. For this show, Lüpertz and his curatorial colleagues at Michael Werner contextualized the contemporary artist’s body of work (18 paintings variously executed between 2013 and 2022) amid 38 paintings, drawings and sketches by Puvis. This aspect of the show, which abundantly evidences Puvis’ extraordinary gifts, also serves to track his enduring influence on avant-garde art.
Art historian (and Puvis scholar) Aimée Brown Price writes in the catalog for the show, “[Puvis] was an aesthetic wolf in classicizing sheep’s clothing.” This might be a slight exaggeration, but there was no denying the lupine ferocity of his pursuit of beauty, a specifically French understanding of classicism and a sheer mastery of execution. Lüpertz might be similarly described. Generally characterized as Neo-expressionist, Lüpertz’s work has zigzagged over the years, encompassing everything from Pop to the quasi-conceptual. But what comes across most consistently is an unsettled, even distrustful, relationship with both the past (especially classicism) and the very notion of an avant-garde. In one of the very first paintings seen here, Lüpertz remakes Amor + Psyche (2020)—against an almost schematically color-field backdrop, with its chubby, black-eyed Cupid figure all but fleeing his would-be seductress, both figures modeled in slashing high-contrast strokes—into an allegory of petulant disavowal.
Where Puvis meets his muse in a domain of infinite Baudelairean “correspondences,” for Lüpertz, such correspondences may be entirely illusory, or simply don’t apply. Consider the two “classical” figures that faced each other across the same gallery set against almost identical riparian or estuarial landscapes (no less “classical,” but perhaps closer to an actual German landscape familiar to Lüpertz). In both Caput Mortuum (2020) (literally “dead head,” also a purple-brown pigment) and Russian Green (2020), some portion of the setting, or the figures’ engagement with it, is suppressed, as if to suggest the “pastoral idyll” is itself an arbitrary construct.
Lüpertz’s approach is not simply to appropriate, but to isolate, to foreground, to take apart—sometimes physically: not just diptychs, but even dividing the field into multiple panels, as in the six-paneled Lido (2020), within the same frame. Here too, he draws from disparate classical sources, including Titian and Ingres, as well as Puvis. But more telling are those works in which the isolating—a kind of collage or flotation effect—happens in a single, self-contained field, as in Untitled (2016), with its uprooted and slightly unhinged “allegory.” Here, inconvenient details intrude on already displaced, defrocked “gods”: the fractured trees on the horizon, the soldiers’ crosses at the feet of a “Venus” or “Daphne.” Without overstating the contextualization of the Puvis master drawings here—e.g., a Christ with Tormenters (1858), that is almost a perfect inversion of the Daphne/Venus in the Lüpertz painting—could such an “Eden” be anything but a killing field?
Setting aside the strengths (or weaknesses) of the derailed allegories of the first gallery, the strongest works exhibited may be the paintings dominated by a solitary figure, only one of which owes a clear debt to Puvis (Narziss II [2016]—the title figure appropriated from La Fantaisie [1887], with Puvis’ own “blue hour” palette intensified to a twilight translucence). Lüpertz has a way of articulating what’s misshapen about a subject within a minimalist schema. In Orpheus (2014), a vertical diptych, the full figure viewed from the rear, head bowed and roughly modeled in Lüpertz’s aggressively tachiste slashing strokes, is pitched forward into an almost monochromatic and flattened lake-centered landscape. In both Nacht and Rotes Boot (2013—essentially the same composition), the same silhouette viewed from the waist up (also from the rear) emerges from the prow of a boat.
Plainly referenced here is Puvis’ somber, iconic Le Pauvre Pêcheur (1881), a study which was included in the show. But although Lüpertz seems to underscore a contradictory aspect within the overall body of Puvis’ work—more explicitly in Besuch von Pierre (2018), inserting his palette, soldier’s helmet and skull into the foreground—Puvis was in pursuit of something well beyond this fatalism: the overview as well as the underside, vast and transcendent.
‘Man proposes, but [God] disposes’—or so went the biblical proverb as distilled more or less through various Christian medieval iterations. In this simultaneously sunlit and dark-star doubling of two operas—George Lewis’s and librettist Douglas Kearney’s dark distillation of the W.E.B. DuBois 1920 proto-Afro-futurist (and Afro-pessimist) short story, “The Comet,” pushed up and played against (and in and out of) a pared-down rendering of one of the foundational operas of the classical canon, Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea—it is as if this fatalistic chain of causality is viewed in reverse. The ‘gods’ disport, while their human pawns, play at games of dominance, possession, power and pleasure.
Monteverdi’s own Incoronazione plays at ‘doubling’ both in composition and execution—the gods of love and ‘fortune’ (frequently secondary roles for the principals) wreak havoc with their human playthings and messengers, while the principal characters and their accessories plot, scheme, disguise and dissemble in the pursuit of, well—not love exactly—maybe simply a bit of light. (What would any coronation be without it?)
But Lewis and Kearney have put this doubling at the dark center of The Comet—in striking contrast to the bright, willful, triumphalist glow of Poppea. The constellation of characters surrounding Poppea and Nero plot and maneuver, disguise themselves and their motives, but know where they stand and where they want to go. Only the Emperor and Seneca (James Hayden—outstanding voice and stage presence), his counselor and former tutor—in essence the opera’s ‘conscience’ (standing in for what might—but obviously cannot—be Nero’s own) and its voice of Stoic virtue—have neither need nor inclination to be anything but themselves. Not so simple for the characters of The Comet, and more specifically for Jim (Cedric Berry): working class, clever but poor—and Black. In 1920s Manhattan, he is that ‘invisible man’ made suddenly visible amid masses of dead men in the wake of a comet’s freakish brush with some part of New York. From a vault that might have become a tomb, he has found his way to the street, and up an elevator to a still-elegant restaurant. Yet in what amounts to a mass displacement—unlike his privileged ‘foil’ (Ottone) on the other side of history in Poppea, returning “like a line to the center”—he has a clarified sense of place in this ruined landscape. “Where I come from, disaster is a home away from home,…” But the immediacy of his experience of the past, has not disappeared. “Now the avenue is crowded with the silence in my ear / and yesterday they would not have served me here.”
While the demigods of Fortune, Virtue, and Love (Joelle Lamarre—superb) contend with each other over the four-way tango between Nero (Anthony Roth Costanzo), Poppea (Joanna Lynn-Jacobs, Nardus Williams in the June 16th performance) Ottone (Amanda Lynn Bottoms—who doubles as Virtue), and the out-going empress, Ottavia (Whitney Morrison), the practical New Yorker pushes himself past the dead, finds emergency flares and heads to the building’s roof. But predictably, the next arrival is no less random—however appropriately dressed for the setting: a woman (Julia—Kiera Duffy), elegantly attired (the costumes—by Oana Botez—are sumptuous), but reeling in shock—and white. Seeming to take stock of the situation, the two survivors are also—only slightly less consciously—taking stock of each other. Meanwhile in the sunlit domain of the mythically aspiring ancients, Poppea’s seductive spin on the dynamics of power and perception becomes an ironic counterpoint to what is unfolding in the soft lights of this posh restaurant.
“You say you see me. / You don’t see me. / Hidden in your heart, / I cannot be seen by your eyes.”
(The selected arias and duets from L’incoronazione di Poppea were sung in the original Italian–rendered for brevity and clarity in the English translation of the super-title cards.)
Poppea sings this against the brightly lit, tiled and imposingly stepped set for the Monteverdi opera—appropriate to a court ritual, an offering to the gods, or a luxury spa. (It’s a Roman bath that might easily become a sarcophagus.) In the dim light of the restaurant interior (on the other side of the circular, turntable stage), it is glaringly apparent that Jim is seen as more than slightly incongruous. “Have you had to work hard?” Julia asks Jim? Her question is already answered by Jim’s physical presentation; and his one-word response discloses nothing further. Lewis and Kearney use Poppea’s and Nero’s duet as a kind of echo to the “double-consciousness” at play here. (“You see me always, / yet you never see me.”) Place and placement are a kind of imprisonment here, regardless of the circumstances. Where Jim might be seen in one ‘light’ on the street, working in a bank vault, he is seen in quite another in an establishment of luxury consumption; and he clearly judges that distance, that displacement. Responding to Julia’s newfound perspective, “How foolish our human distinctions seem—now….” he underscores the social and racial brutality of his uncertain status in the 1920s—all the more striking against the plush rose and gold velvet Art Deco acanthus wall-covering of the restaurant backdrop. “Yes—I was not human, yesterday.”
The glass ‘windows’ and the elevator are important details. Lewis and Kearney—together with the production team’s superb scenic designer, Mimi Lien—have made the luxe restaurant a kind of telescopic vessel poised at an ambiguous remove from the mortal world below. Jim is also a kind of messenger (the program’s original cast credits list him as ‘Jim/Mercury’)—signaling to Manhattan and the boroughs beyond that life endures in at least one New York neighborhood; and the counterpoint between the two operas emphasizes the fraught ambiguity of the messaging. The message—whether to Seneca (or Seneca’s own admonitions to Nero) or Jim’s flares to the world beyond Manhattan—can only signal, not predict.
While Lewis’s score for The Comet sings of disaster and displacement, the counterpoint between the two scores seems to highlight the more interior oppositions and contradictions. Love and Fortune both are gods of chaos here; yet Love inevitably lends insight to Virtue. But the ‘triumph of love’ (or imperial whim) is brief (as history bears out). Neither the world of the Roman Empire nor any other will be ‘acting on Love’s commands’ any time soon. Lewis and Kearney, alongside director Yuval Sharon, emphasize the fickle transit of these ‘gods’ through these terrestrial and cosmic landscapes—each of them happy to step out of Nero’s Rome (and off the slowly revolving stage) only to step into Du Bois’s 1920s New York moments later. As Ottavia shoves off to obscure refuge, the gods celebrate both Poppea’s destiny and simultaneously Jim’s and Julia’s seeming meeting of hearts and minds—a moving but short-lived moment that makes for a bitter contrast with both operas’ finales. Hope is less a brilliant jewel than the bitter pill that must be swallowed.
Transformation in its most expansive and contradictory sense was at work throughout Claire Chambless’ exhibition, “Role Play.” Both individually and taken as a choreographed ensemble, the work—while clearly influenced by such abstract surrealists as Miró and Tanguy—probed a full spectrum of contentious forces.
Chambless’ sculpture TOTAL MEMORY (2023) came at (or fell away from) the viewer like a Miro-esque beast, tenuously attached to its packing-crate-like platform and plywood backstop—an ambulatory skeleton, or conceivably those of two “creatures,” once at odds, now joined to monstrous common purpose. In addition to wood and steel, Chambless uses materials like hydroxyapatite, a calcium phosphate material more commonly found in dental settings, enameled here with epoxy resin. Skeletal limbs are variously spiraled and encrusted with costume jewelry pearls—“eyes” or “coral” giving life and luster to this lumbering form. Its orifices appear to vomit the memory foam that fills them. Sewing pins both fasten the structure and stand in for ravenous incisors—form and function obfuscated in a seemingly subaquatic metamorphosis.
From the far side of this beast, Shelley’s Doppelganger I (2024) looked almost like four Gumby-like creatures playing a contentious cat’s cradle with their winding limbs. On closer approach, the work—the armature for which is a folding camp chair (replete with sunken mesh cupholder now dangling from its thumb-like “arm”)—gave the impression of an amorphous hand-like formation arrested in some strange blastocystic mitosis. An intimation of foreshadowing shared by all the works sustained the continuity between them, which was underscored by the title of this piece, as Shelley’s gravestone famously borrows from Shakespeare’s song for Ariel (The Tempest): “Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea change / Into something rich and strange….”
Claire Chambless, Ghost Complex II, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Carlye Packer.
Throughout the exhibition, works threatened to cohere or fissure—bodies and spirits divided against their own psyches, or, as the show’s title suggests, engaged in a kind of role play—within themselves and with one another. The sense of haunting is exemplified by what might be a model for a haunted house (Ghost Complex II, 2024)—its exterior skin and roof molded in laminated hydroxyapatite, presenting a shrouded silhouette shielding what is revealed to be a more conventional, rectilinear, three-story array of domestic spaces obscured behind arched and lancet windows—suggesting the ambiguous and ephemeral confabulations of the moment and past repositories of hidden, decaying spirits.
In the same vein, the skeletal configuration of TOTAL MEMORY is answered by a kind of willfully flamboyant monster in the form of Spare Me the Heroics (2020–23), in which a lumbering, well-upholstered form, topped by what look like two pearl-encrusted wheels of yellowish foam and crowned by a lamprey-mouth orifice at its top, is cloaked in a cape of oyster shells—an absurd LewisCarroll touch that echoes something of the grandiosity alternately mocked and heralded in the preceding works. In a suite of three masterful pen-and-pencil drawings on paper, Chambless animates possible variations on the choreography of these four (of seven) sculptures, underscoring the sense in which they relate to each other, and the extent to which their variable configurations and trajectories devise shifting and more than slightly chimerical narratives.
The title of Griselda Rosas’ exhibition, “Donde pasó antes (Where it happened before),” recalls the classic fairy tale preamble, “Once upon a time…,” but also suggests a cautionary sense of place, a reference to location that doesn’t frame so much as foreground the action depicted there. Which is slightly ironic because the works Rosas has created here—in watercolor, embroidery, collage and other materials—are vessels for a volatile chemistry of color and texture that variously congeal, smolder and sublimate into a nebulous array of babies, battles, conquistadors, vortexes, regalia, insignia, animals and tissues. Alive, or in some transitional necrosis, they remain highly resistant to the perspective offered by narrative. They come at us like fluorescent fever dreams in bubbles, balloons or thought clouds—all but exploding as if from some alchemical retort.
Consider one of the first works encountered in this exhibition, La Batalla de Vortex (2024), in which pins or arrows seem to fly toward a vortex of escalating violence—with a hapless goat or ram set upon both by hunters outside the frame and a well-muscled cougar intent upon making this blood feast (rendered in dense velvety red dispersed into a skein of cross-stitching) its own. But who is in the eye of this vortex? The predator is itself subjected to these arrows. And what of a camouflage-like patch of green, right of center, (with fringed “mane”) overlapping a tessellated swag of petaled fans—greensward or devouring reptile? An incident on the verge of self-immolation—or simply decomposition? (Rosas pricks out the decay in decadence.) Or just a dream evaporating—like that rosy aura effervescing off the pale-blue peak of this food chain of fancy?
Griselda Rosas, Untitled (Coyote), 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.
Rosas uses embroideries not merely as embellishment, or as an alternative to pigments or graphic crosshatching, but almost as if she were devising new life forms—lacy passages like lichens. (A separate series of cyanotypes with collage are actually subtitled “Tejido Vivo,” translated as “living tissue.”) The works have a way of evolving before the viewer’s eyes. However simple the arrangement of figure, pattern, or incident, its narrative content is always mutable, transitory. Rosas is fascinated with pattern—the way we use it to shape, order, subdivide and punctuate. It might almost be argued that the “insignias” of Artifice de insignias reales 7 (Faux regalia 7) (2023) are the patterned sections that seem to demarcate or vectorially direct the viewer’s eye. Yet why does that sienna head-blob float off to the side of our playing card Aztec queen? We are regaled and beguiled.
Other works give us a harlequinade of figures (which seem to borrow variously from Persian Mogul and Indian miniatures, ancient Chinese and Aztec figures, and cartoonists from Steig to Steinberg) traversing terra not-at-all firma in various states of blithe terror or delight—some of them quite explicitly monstrous (e.g., a densely woven pink and blue-laddered SuperPerroMonstruo! (2023)). In works that almost defy categorization, Rosas seems intent on showing us that you can go a long way without really going anywhere. As Goya captioned one of his Caprichos “The Sleep of reason produces monsters,” what plays through these pieces is a sense that reason may as easily enable them.
“January in the last extant stable society.” Joan Didion, “In Hollywood” (1973) — included in The White Album (1979)
“You can get there from here,” was something like the thought rippling just beneath my immediate observations, coming upon several Jessie Homer French paintings just being unwrapped and propped against a gallery wall sometime between 2016 and 2017. (Nothing to do with Shirley MacLaine—though why not?) I can’t remember exactly when, though I do recall a group show in progress. I’m not sure if a show was anticipated at the time, but I hoped there would be. A naïve, ‘outsider’ quality was immediately apparent, though a certain focus and attention to detail conveyed an attitude and ideas adding further dimension. I recall a kind of small-town centripetal aspect: schoolhouse, truckstop, post office, church, cemetery (a landscape that might be located anywhere between New England and the Midwest). Only later did I learn that the ‘regions’ her work described were far more specific—and far closer to home (or at least California).
Homer French has described herself as a “regional narrative” painter; and, depending upon scale and verticality, her pictorial composition is organized along corresponding lines—foreground (or occasionally underground or subterranean), middle ground, and horizon; with a nod to perspectival depth but also an insistent frontality. Recognizable figures and incident populate these ‘regional’ landscapes, but—unlike the sort of ‘primitive’ to which her work might draw naïve comparison—without sacrificing coherence or clarity. They could almost be maps—like a map with illustrated landmarks or regional survey with diagrammed geographic or geologic features. The Dying Sea (2021) is just that—rendered in fabric, with some embroidery and cut-out elements, and others detailed in fabric inks. The subject here is the endangered Salton Sea—literally dying, its suffocating tilapia rendered as white cut-outs with x’ed out eyes washing over the shoreline, pressing against a jagged red San Andreas Fault line with “Joshua Tree(s)” inked in on ‘tacked-on’ pink fabric above a thin white “10 freeway.” (Homer French has done others, more frequently rendered simply as drawings or paintings.)
Jessie Homer French, Rewilding In Chernobyl, 2021.
It would be absurd to try to pin down Homer French’s specific ‘narrative(s)’ in these paintings—almost counter to their spirit. But if there’s a common thread, it’s something like the continuity of communities and their life cycles common to both human and non-human species—even in death. Cemeteries abound in Homer French’s paintings, but their inhabitants persist, still perfectly attired in their burial costumes and neatly arrayed horizontally in the rectangular frames that stand in for their coffins or burial plots—their symbolically remembered state. (One of the paintings here is actually titled Remembrance Day (2021), which, although its soldiers’ crosses topped with memorial lights (and a bagpiper) clearly indicate a military burial ground, also includes a child or two in its subterranean foreground.) Although Ojai Valley, with seemingly endless hectares of variously lush and verdant and dry scrubby terrain would seem to offer her an abundance of landscape possibilities, Homer French singles out two cemetery sections, each with enclosed ‘family’ plots—one without the arrayed bodies.
Jessie Homer French, Ojai, California, 2022.
Yet something of the strain to that ‘common thread’ is also visible in the last couple of decades (a period that largely coincides with Homer French’s increasing isolation from Los Angeles and metropolitan cities—she has lived in Pinyon Crest, between the Coachella Valley and the Santa Rosa Mountains since the early 2000’s—as if those human ‘spirits’ were not quite so persistent—or simply no longer relevant. Moving through isolated desert expanses (and presumably above bodies of water), Homer French locates an ecosystem of ‘ghosts’ and machines. In Ghosts (2012), five wind turbines turn (or rest) against a wash of placid morning light in an empty sky, while somewhere in the distance the distinctive silhouette of a stealth bomber plays a kind of ghost moth to what might once have been plant (or other) life covering its ground. Animals and other life persist, however—and seem to comment in humanity’s absence or simply its ineptitude. In North Sea Wind Farm (2023), wind turbines turn against a stormy gray sky, while a shark’s ever-so-slightly curled lower jaw expresses an anthropomorphic dismay at their intrusion in its waters.
We like to think nature is resilient, but successive waves of human devastation leave their mark and take their toll. In Rewilding In Chernobyl (2021), lush growth appears to be overtaking what were once offices or apartment blocks (and the bright radiation warning signs that dot the landscape), but a moose looming out from the green canopy and a catfish in a nearby stream appear freakishly large. The nature that does persist, as Homer French continues to depict it with care and clarity, is stunningly indifferent to human presence. In After Burn and Jimson Weed (2023), beneath a sapphire sky promising moisture already replenishing the green terrain in the middle of the painting, and amid blackened half-dead trees and the weed blooming magnificently out of ashes that match his or her coat, a solitary olive-eyed coyote stares right past us. As Homer French seems to see clearly, the ‘last extant stable society’ might well be a pack of wolves.
You’re in an otherwise familiar room or space, struck by how unusually airy and refreshed it seems. At the same time, wafting through the interior that constitutes your “mind’s eye,” you’re struck by a sense that, in one way or another, you’ve been here before. The art itself is like nothing you’ve ever seen before; but again, oscillating and permeating through it all is the sense of something that has come before. Then the title given to the exhibition impresses itself upon the visitor: “I am here.”The whole of it is all here and now—as the viewer awakens to the realization of everything that has happened throughout the past 40 or 50 years, what is happening in the present, and what we can see will happen in the next four or five decades.
On the second-floor gallery at what was then Blum & Poe—now BLUM—the show’s title (like the titles of the individual works themselves) was rendered in Alur, the western Nilotic dialect spoken in the southern West Nile and Great Lakes region of Uganda—“A NI EE” (I am here). The Ugandan artist—Acaye Kerunen—was there, too (chicly suited in shocking pink), with videographer Cyril Ducottet, her collaborator in producing her 2023 three-channel video installation, Iwang Sawa, or In the eye of time.
Time is a theme that recurs in her work—drawing attention to both the process through which the work is crafted and constructed into art, the raw and finished materials with which it’s made, the terrain where many of those raw materials originate, and the time reclaimed by the artisans themselves in refashioning or deconstructing otherwise utilitarian materials into the stuff of art. In playing on this connotation of “burning time”—a colloquial expression in the Alur dialect, implying “wasting time”—the work also becomes an implicit retort to the legacies of patriarchy and colonialism that once relegated women—and the entire region—to serving the ends of others, whether merchants on the other side of the world, or farming and trading men who effectively governed their lives.
Acaye Kerunen, ATUK–Alur for “I have taken to Flight,” 2023. Photo: Evan Walsh. Courtesy of the artist and BLUM Gallery.
Downstairs, the visitor was invited to pause at a tent-like installation—Kendu (or “hearth”), constructed mostly of barkcloth draped over a small hive-like dome structure—for a coffee or tea, as if to similarly burn time, or perhaps more accurately, contemplate the time burning outside. (Kerunen has collaborated on several iterations of this work.)
There are few such pauses for Kerunen due to the growing praise of her work. Nevertheless, she was able to make a few comments by email in response to my queries. I mentioned the implicit dualities and ambiguities in the works (and their titles) and wondered what an “eye of time” view might be from such a perspective. Her remarks were sometimes quite direct, but also occasionally as enigmatic as the works I referenced. In Aneni (“I see you/I have seen you”), a circle of banana-rind fiber floats in a rectangular field of blackened barkcloth, seemingly held in place by three raffia bracelets. The circle is looped over three times into irregular intersecting figure eights—as if testing the proposition encapsulated in the title. It’s tempting to draw comparisons to what might superficially be regarded as precedents from the
European or American modern canon (Jean Arp in this instance), but between material and mathematical dimensions, Kerunen toys with and challenges the viewer’s assumptions and expectations. The way we see, and what or who are seen, are constants in the dialectic of art, but the intersection of media and the moment magnify the significance of what is playing out in the work.
Themes of metamorphosis and flight run through the work, beginning with the beautifully articulated chrysalis-like Nyalak (2023)—or “The one who crawls about”—with braided cords flailing around it as if to lasso its “caterpillar” into a safe berth or just failing to prevent its escape. In Atuk (2023)—or “I have taken to Flight”—a beautiful piece of raffia woven into grids of interlocking red and green lozenges is draped and turned as if a bat, bird or butterfly poised to do just that.
Acaye Kerunen, DAADWONG–Alur for “The Matriarch,” 2023. Photo: Evan Walsh. Courtesy of the artist and BLUM Gallery.
Kerunen’s work as an artist and curator is only one large part of a career dedicated to communicating her ideas about ecosystems, societies, African Great Lakes and wetlands of Uganda—which notwithstanding that country’s efforts at preservation are under threat no less than other regions of the continent.
“I grew up like a jungle girl,” said Kerunen, “foraging for vegetables, climbing trees, knowing where to find the best fruit. I realized later how fast my little green world was disappearing. Wetland mass coverage has been reduced by more than half in the last 10 years. This is scary.”
These Ugandan regions have long sustained a thriving craft culture that includes the kind of weaving and basketry that provide the foundation of materials used in the production and assembly of Kerunen’s works, and she has drawn on some of the best of these craftswomen in fabricating them. Depending on the work or project, she may have anywhere from seven or more women working with her, some of whom are well on their way to becoming artists themselves.
Acaye Kerunen, NYALAK–Alur for “The one who crawls about,” 2023. Photo: Evan Walsh. Courtesy of the artist and BLUM Gallery.
There was a tension between the cultural and even geographic specificity of the materials and their reimagination and reconfiguration in the works, which brought me back to her comment regarding “more sides to familiar narratives.” Was there a larger, more contrapuntal narrative or commentary here? “Yes. Social and political revolution. My personal growth and liberation from many things, people, contexts.”
Reexamining how that counterpoint plays out in the individual works, the viewer sees just how the personal narrative Kerunen has constructed in “A NI EE” is bound in the Kampala hills, Ugandan wetlands and with her own family’s story—a kind of matrilineal mythos.
“I turned to poetry and imaginary worlds for escape and to engineer my own kind of fair world,” said Kerunen. Art was first a vehicle for “competing mostly with my elder sister for the selective attention of my mom. Later, it was to earn her love, since she was an artist herself. Still later it became rebellion—a way to spite her by making things in ways I knew would trigger her attention. Now I do it for me—as catharsis, for healing, for joy. I love joy.”
Breathless is not always an indication of on-coming medical crisis or pathology. Events (including cultural events) can stop us short or knock the wind out of us. And although the experience may be more common at live music events, it happens in galleries and museums, too. But at the close of 2023, the breathlessness we may have experienced intermittently in galleries blurs with a breathlessness we now encounter on an almost daily basis. The dark days of Fall 2023 are giving way to a spectral winter at the start of a political year where it seems as if the entire planet hangs in the balance.
Whether or not we saw this darkness specifically in work exhibited in L.A.’s galleries and museums, there was a great deal that reflected the bleak poetry of a planet and biosphere on the brink of catastrophe; a reflection of the earth’s generosity and a sense of irretrievable loss beneath it; the reflection of humankind confronting one another—alternately frightened, fascinated, and repulsed. In the meantime, L.A.’s galleries continue to burgeon and thrive. Galleries are now as strong as the artists they represent—reflected in the fact that some of the best shows of the year were group shows. The same might be said of its museums—and one show and one museum in particular. Closing out a year of stellar exhibitions, the Hammer Museum’s 2023 Made In L.A. biennial was perhaps its strongest ever. As Ann Philbin prepares to close out her tenure as Director, the L.A. contemporary art community owes her a tremendous debt of gratitude.
Max Hooper Schneider, Falling Angel (2023) Aircraft wreckage, fluorescent light tubes, Tesla coils, vintage neon signs, chains, crushed concrete, mixed media fiberglass pond, microcontroller, 156 x 99 x 162 inches (396.5 x 251.5 x 411.5 cm.). Courtesy François Ghebaly Gallery.
Max Hooper Schneider — Falling Angels François Ghebaly Gallery May 6, – June 20, 2023
Here’s a riddle: how many Lucifers does it take to crash a planet? The title carried a whiff of Milton’s Paradise Lost brimstone, and the exhibition’s drama fully measured up to it. The Lucifers crash, proliferate and burrow down into Schneider’s visionary lab and landscapes that many of us who have followed Schneider’s career over the last decade might have seen as nothing less than a promise fulfilled.
“Pictures Girls Make”: Portraitures — curated by Alison M. Gingeras Blum & Poe (now BLUM) July 2, – October 21, 2023
A breathtakingly expansive survey of portraiture (from the mid-19th century to the present), Gingeras both recontextualized and redefined its domain in an exhibition that would have felt at home at the Met. “Portraits are pictures people make,” she declares definitively, embracing not simply the flux of personal, sexual, racial, ethnic or cultural identity, but an expanded notion of how this can be represented—entering not merely other worlds, but the shadow selves and lives within those worlds.
Martine Syms — Loser Back Home Sprüth Magers – Los Angeles June 2, – August 26, 2023
Given the timing, one could almost be excused for thinking Syms planned all along to pull the rug out from beneath what would become the summer’s blockbuster commercial film releases—which coincidentally navigated a similarly fraught domain of self, identity, and something that bore some resemblance to the ‘dysplacement’—the geography of self, its skewed nexus with place, and their continuous decoding, deconstruction, and reconstruction at the heart of her sprawling exhibition. (Or rejection: we might well want to burn it all down). Whether fragile domicile, the skin we inhabit, or merely the point our games come full circle—Syms’ ‘home’ is never less unsettling than the world erupting around it.
Mai-Thu Perret, She escapes the diamond pitfall and eats up the prickly thorns (2022) glazed ceramic (18 1/2 x 16 x 3 1/4 in. / 47 x 40.6 x 8.3 cm); courtesy David Kordansky Gallery.
Mai-Thu Perret — Mother Sky David Kordansky Gallery March 18, – April 22, 2023
Perret has worked in a variety of media over the years, but her affinities for ceramics have come to the fore in recent years, most recently in a residency at the CSULB Center for Contemporary Ceramics, which yielded the expansive circular wall piece at the center of this show—simultaneously a mapping (interior as well as exterior), landscape, and exegetically expressive exorcism. However central to Perret’s ‘sheltering sky’ vision, this title work could not eclipse other works in the show which evinced a similar visionary genius. Words cannot touch it, thought cannot reach it (her haiku-like title for a 2022 work)—yet somehow Perret did just that.
Martha Alf, Four Pears (1989) Verithin colored pencil on paper (22-1/4 x 30 in.) Courtesy Michael Kohn Gallery.
Martha Alf: Opposites and Contradictions Michael Kohn Gallery June 24, – August 26, 2023
Alf summarized her approach and intention: “It is about the perfection of the banal and the seriousness of the ridiculous.” This show was that and a whole lot more—really a phenomenology of perception and intention, variously influenced by Minimalism, Pop, and Fluxus, but unique and far more rigorous. She tested spatial and perceptual relationships to their limits and made magic of them. This superbly curated exhibition was nothing less than a poetics of perception.
Installation view, Barbara T. Smith: Proof, ICA-LA” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
The Way to Be, performed at various locations between San Francisco and Seattle, 1972. “Barbara T. Smith: The Way to Be” at The Getty.
Barbara T. Smith: Proof Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles October 7, 2023 – January 14, 2024
Barbara T. Smith: The Way to Be The Getty [Getty Research Institute]
February 28, – July 16, 2023
The personal is both political and cultural—need proof? Really two shows, taken in conjunction with the Getty Research Institute’s extensive archive of Smith’s documentation, Xerox art and books (or “Coffins”), photographs, objects and memorabilia, Proof, alongside The Way to Be (originally a peripatetic performance repeated in locations between San Francisco and Seattle in 1972 and now the title of her memoir), is effectively a reconstruction of the scaffolding of an artist’s life. Born out of curiosity and inquiry, the feminist second wave, Fluxus, and the frustrations of a one-time suburban homemaker in a broken relationship (a story that could be a template for Six Feet Under’s Ruth Conroy), Barbara T. Smith wrote her second, third, fourth and final acts on her body (almost literally), pioneering performance art, and assembling a body of work to stand alongside a pantheon of her peers.
Faith Ringgold, The United States of Attica (1972) offset litho. (21 5/8 × 27 3/8 in. / 55 × 69.6 cm).
Faith Ringgold: A Survey Jeffrey Deitch – Los Angeles May 20, – August 19, 2023
Summer isn’t exactly the season it used to be, and aside from being an ‘off-season’ for the commercial art world, our calendars are as likely to be taken up with disaster preparation as vacations. Deitch’s concise but surprisingly comprehensive survey—the first in L.A.—of Faith Ringgold’s ground-breaking work—an authentic protest art at its best and most impactful—was the perfect corrective, distilling the last decades’ human social and political disasters, and simultaneously dissolving distinctions between art and craft into story-telling and perhaps a kind of prayer—anticipating the disasters just around the corner.
Dike Blair, Untitled, 2020, oil on aluminum (18 x 24 in.; 45.7 x 61.cm.) Courtesy KARMA Los Angeles
Dike Blair KARMA – Los Angeles September 16, – November 4, 2023
Dike Blair’s uncannily recomposed photo snapshots rendered in various pigments and supports (in this show, mostly oil on aluminum) remind us of something about the way life actually unfolds, how we remember it, and how we piece it back together. It’s a flash that’s a shadow—or that we might be a little too comfortable relegating to the shadows. It’s about moments and pictures that don’t necessarily tell a story—the interstitial, the in-between, but somehow indelible. This is an art of imagery that doesn’t flinch from banality, yet remains luminous, even incandescent.
Soumya Netrabile, The Water Hole (2023); oil on canvas (72 x 86 in. / 182.9 x 218.4 cm.) Courtesy Anat Ebgi
Soumya Netrabile: Between past and present / Between appearance and memory Anat Ebgi – Wilshire Boulevard September 16, – October 21, 2023
We’re spoiled for great painting in Los Angeles of the 2020s, and for that reason we’re impelled toward making ever more expansive, almost capricious demands on it. But beyond the formal persuasion of the masterpiece that will not be denied is the delight of being taken by surprise—which is what really keeps us coming back. Nor is it necessarily about something entirely new. (The shock of a recovered memory may be sufficient.) Netrabile has her finger precisely on this pulse—recovering a space, a landscape, its features and objects, but reconstructing it without inhibition; retracing steps, but also reinventing her trajectory through it—committing the memory to dream. That approach extended to her palette throughout this show, which recalled Post-Impressionists from Bonnard to early Matisse. Hard to imagine recovering that mythic ‘bonheur de vivre’ anytime soon, but it was alive in this show—and (no doubt) Netrabile’s imagination.
Angeline Rivas, Temporal Narcosis (2023) Acrylic on canvas (36 x 48 in. / 91.44 x 121.92 cm.) Courtesy Chris Sharp Gallery.
Angeline Rivas — MKUltramarine Chris Sharp Gallery June 24 – July 29, 2023
The intersection of memory and magic (or at least its invocation) is a complicated, even treacherous domain. I never saw the Joseph Sorrentino film, MK Ultra (2022—although Rivas’s show prompted me to look it up on-line), but I’ve read Philip Agee and listened to a lot of Frank Zappa’s music, which will probably suffice. With airbrush and fluorescent gradients of pinks, blues, greens, and all those colors you thought were liquid sunshine, but were actually just a grease puddle, Rivas channeled the visual dynamic of Kenny Scharf, the spirit of Judy Chicago, a Guimard-nouveau whiplash frenzy and that five-alarm fire where the transcendental gives way to sheer chaos in the most auspicious solo debut of the year.
The opening for Kim Jones’ exhibition had a kind of homecoming spirit, reflected in its title, “Walking Home.” Several of Jones’ first post-graduate performance pieces in the 1970s were marathon “walks” between various landmarks in Los Angeles, performed in the “Mudman” sculptural guise he devised out of sticks and twigs twined together with electrical tape, foam rubber, cheesecloth and chicken wire—a kind of wraparound lean-to—plastered to his body with mud and not a little of his own excrement. Some of the documentation for these performances is on display, along with sculptural constructions and installations built upon these constructions which he moved on to in later decades.
Conceivably his entire life led up to his practice—graduate education and early work in LA were turning points, as was his 1967–68 service as a Marine in Vietnam. A crippling childhood disorder sidetracked him intoobsessively crafting diagrammatic war-game strategy drawings interspersed with cartoon incidents. (One of these drawings is collaged between figures in an untitled pen-and-ink drawing from 2009, reworked in 2020.) He has carried these forward long after graduate school into large, late-Renaissance stylestrategic plans of cities, fortifications and projected attack lines. There are four on view, executed and/or reworked between 1997 and 2021. The freestanding Stars, from the 1990s, which seemed to evolve in part from his “Mudman” constructions, actually bears a closer resemblance to the kinds of “hedgehog” snaresdeployed in anti-tank and mining defenses.
Kim Jones, “Walking Home.” Installation Image. 2023. Courtesy of the Artist and The Box LA. Photo Fredrik Nilsen Studio.
Jones’ drawing style has evolved into a dense and heavily crosshatched, quasi- Victorian satiric style reminiscent of British illustrators Arthur Rackham, George Cruikshank and John Leech. Figures are rendered mostly in profile, frequently in disproportionate scale and distorted, emphasizing their character (but without the sort of irony or humor we might see in, say, Saul Steinberg). Extensions are frequently truncated, bodies dissected to expose segmented viscera. The conflict implied in his war-game/map drawings is frequently transferred to the figures, which present more than one “shadow” figure alongside a more prominent caricature-type subject. The effect is frequently magnified by the underdrawing of the war-game map.Using photos as a support adds another light and amplified dimension to some of these deeply interior, psychological drawings. Nonhuman figures are in short supply, though a toad occasionally prances into the picture.
Rats are a troubling obsession. Two iterations of Rat With Long Legs (2016)—large black rubber rats atop what look like abbreviated ski poles—flank a video of one of his “Mudman” walks from 1979. A tarry black ball of them, Rat Ball (2) (2008–09) sits in one corner. It’s clear that Jones has a dark, rather Manichaean view of the world, and certainly humanity. The quasi-human specimens of Jones’ imagination give birth to shadow or divided selves; conceivably evil or indifferent to it. Whether such specimens might be little more than “rats on stilts” (and this is not to excuse Jones’ horrific “performances” in 1972 and 1976) is a more tendentious proposition. Then, too, considering the political climate of the past few years, he may have a point.
Portraiture has been a constant in art-making since the waning Middle Ages, and really since art first appeared (though they wouldn’t have called it that), which may extend back into prehistory. I would further conjecture that such early art itself encompassed a kind of portraiture, whether or not its first subjects were even human. The earliest worlds were also wild places in which predator and prey were probably on slightly more equal footing—each keen to deconstruct (in every sense) the other’s world. Plus ça change.
It’s hard to say whether the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns of 2020 were an impetus for a fresh revival of portrait-making and viewing. But the timing of shows like the Met’s 2021 Alice Neel retrospective, People Come First and the David Zwirner Gallery’s re-mount of the Diane Arbus 1972 MoMA retrospective in 2022 seemed to respond to a moment in which people were re-examining their relations within societies and polities, both with each other and with themselves. ARTILLERY itself made portraiture the subject of its March-April issue this year. Part of that reexamination might well be viewed on a continuum with political and cultural developments of the preceding decade, though on-going brutality and violence inflicted upon communities of color also reminded us that our republic’s own barbaric ‘pre-history’ was never too far away.
Aleksandra Waliszewska, Untitled [Face], 2022–23. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & PoeSuch issues of identity and representation are one of several points of departure in “Pictures Girls Make”: Portraitures, curated by Alison M. Gingeras for Blum & Poe. Both parts of the exhibition’s title are key. “Pictures Girls Make” alludes to a comment Willem de Kooning reportedly made to his partner, Elaine, dismissing her penchant for portraiture, as a kind of “pictures girls make.” Whether or not Willem ever saw the irony in his remark, Elaine de Kooning, like so many artists before and since, was undeterred. The feminist second wave did not necessarily change the way we see, but certainly it helped change the way we think about seeing (also, I think, the way we look at each other—perhaps even more so for men than women). And what, after all, does “portraiture” entail or imply? Likeness, ‘identity’ scarcely scratches the surface, even when the subject’s face entirely fills the frame. Again, it goes back to visual art—and portraiture’s—earliest foundations: not merely depicting what was seen, but telling a story—the how, what, and why of it. In the best of these portraits, the viewer finds access to another world and learns something about the way that world looks (or looked) back.
The sheer quality of the work exhibited, alongside Gingeras’ curatorial scholarship and shrewd insights into the larger historical and cultural contexts in which artists forged their styles and which shaped their (and our) view of the world, make this a museum class show. But Gingeras has a gift for inter-weaving stylistic, aesthetic, cultural, thematic and narrative threads across historical periods, simultaneously refreshing our view of both historical and contemporary work and bringing them into sharp focus, which puts this exhibition into a class of its own.
Umar Rashid, Autumn in the Schwarzwald (Black Forest)…, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe
The scope of her reframed and recontextualized view of portraitures is apparent from the viewer’s first glimpse. The gallery’s entryway space (“This is what these lives looked like,….”) is hung with a spare selection of 19th and 20th century and contemporary paintings that variously document, reflect, protest, celebrate, fantasize, and mythologize African-Americans’ views of themselves and their worlds. Andrew LaMar Hopkins’ Bridgerton-worthy fantasy Creole Duchess (2023) is flanked by Joshua Johnson’s early 19th century Portrait of a Woman (a white woman, who was likely a patron) and an unknown (‘Louisiana School’) later 19th century Portrait of a Creole Gentlemen. Winfred Rembert’s haunting Pregnant in the Cotton Field (1996) is literally worlds away from the Stettheimer-like charm of Rosalind Letcher’s The Bunny Hop 1965. The incomparable Ernie Barnes gives us a full-on guts-and-glory vignette of a world he knew inside and out in his 1966 Football Players (executed before his retirement from the game!), while the coolest Prussian general in the Black Forest reins in his beautiful white mount en route to a strategy session with his fellow officers in Umar Rashid’s Autumn in the Schwarzwald….
Chidinma Nnoli, They are you, You are them, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe
From this alternately sobering, reflective, and soaring entrée, Gingeras gives us a selection of portraits and self-portraits alternately meditative, deconstructed, tentative, self-reflexive, matter-of-fact, and fanciful—or all of these simultaneously (in keeping with her keynote quote (from Joan Brown), for this section of the show, “I am not any one thing….”). Besides Brown, the artists include March Avery, Chris Oh (paying tribute to the 16th century painter Sofonisba Anguisola—only recently receiving long overdue recognition for the power of her portraiture); Katja Seib, Devin Troy Strother (rendering his auto-portrait by way of brilliantly displaced deconstruction), Nigerian artist Chidinma Nnoli, evoking the divided self in a manner and palette rarely seen since Serusier and Denis; the young Polish artist, Agata Słowak’s self-dissection, recalling the most scabrous of post-Expressionism Weimar painting (and for many of us, Stephanie Barron’s brilliant New Objectivity exhibition for LACMA), Mela Muter’s quietly assertive ‘palette-portrait’; June Leaf, and more.
Alice Neel, Nancy Greene, c. 1965. Courtesy of Blum & Poe.
The spirit of Alice Neel anchors the next gallery. People may not “come first” exactly; but certainly she was dead-on in noting that “People’s images reflect the era in a way that nothing else could….” We see this directly in the way people move. Gesture (and style and fashion) are also a huge part of this. But the times (cultural, political, economic) also leave their distinct imprint on the face separate and apart from the toll imposed by gravity, heredity and the elements. Even so, the range of this very concise selection is astonishingly broad—variously coy, casual and forthright, even defiant; illuminated, haunted and almost hermetically surreal. There’s a kind of electricity that radiates off these portraits whether it’s the billowy shadow aura that echoes the contours of Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita’s bobbed-hair beauty or the northern light glow that seems of a piece with the charged gaze of Chicago Surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie’s 1936 self-portrait. The paintings are all extraordinary on their own terms, but the second Muter canvas here, Zigeunerfamille (Gypsy Family) (1930)—a breastfeeding mother all but projecting herself (and her infant) into the foreground, her seemingly reticent musician husband some paces behind her—has a visceral power that almost propels it out of its place in time. But no one escapes history—or mortality.
Here Gingeras pivots to poetry—a digression, not a distraction. The portrait is simultaneously mask and unmasking. Larry Rivers famous O’Hara Nude with Boots (1954) is here, alongside Elaine de Kooning’s own 1962 portrait—with O’Hara’s distinct features blurred beneath a pale pink cloud from her brush. (Why does unmasking always seems to portend some kind of legal challenge?) Mark Grotjahn’s Untitled (Skull) nods both to ultimate unmasking and the ultimate mask—no longer to be betrayed by that ‘tongue that could sing once’ or ‘politicians’ that might ‘circumvent god’ (quoting from Shakespeare’s Hamlet).
Elaine de Kooning, Frank O’Hara, 1962. Courtes of Blum & Poe.
The last two galleries confirm and consolidate the main points of Gingeras’ recontextualization of portraiture and more expansive redefinition of its domain. Setting the Neel affirmation that “People come first” to one side, Gingeras emphasizes both inclusivity and the life stories represented. “Portraits are pictures people make,” she declares, embracing not simply the flux of personal, sexual, racial, ethnic or cultural identity, but an expanded notion of how this can be represented and what it might look like. Her inclusion of works by relatively unknown artists (e.g., Jerome Caja, whose work has a fetishized, almost devotional charge, or Elisabetta Zangrandi, who appropriates Velasquez’s Las Meninas to her own ends), as well as the auto-fictional domain of Karolina Jabłońska and Robin F. Williams’ dissolving film still, confirms this sense of redefinition. We are some distance from Arbus here—not merely entering into other worlds, but the shadows and shadow selves and lives within those worlds.
Gingeras makes clear the extent to which contemporary art has expanded our sense of what portraiture means and what it conveys. But what further sets the show apart from museum shows of similar scope and quality is a connective harmonic resonating from gallery to gallery, even painting to painting. There’s a poetic and musical cadence to the exhibition independent of its affinities with Ashbery, O’Hara, Shakespeare, et al. There’s no ‘discorrupting’ (Shakespeare to Whitman to Grotjahn) the bodies or whatever fascinating traces they’ve left for the rest of us to contemplate. What “Pictures Girls Make” ‘sings’ is an air as free-floating as consciousness itself, and it’s exhilarating.
Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Skull), 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe.
Blum & Poe
2727 S. La Cienega Boulevard
Los Angeles, 90034
On view through October 21, 2023
At least once a week something happens to save my life. Usually it has something to do with some scientific discovery or biotech breakthrough that has managed to save, preserve or forestall further damage to some part of the biosphere. Or some reminder that nature might bounce—or more likely strike—back against all the human pollution, destruction, toxicity, etc. Sometimes it’s a musical performance that simply destroys me—in a good way. Sometimes it’s just some fantastically charming dog or cat I happen to fall in love with and I’m reminded that as long as there are such creatures around to help civilize my fellow humans, the world has a chance of remaining a bearable place.
But sometimes it’s just a picture. I look at a lot of pictures as some of you may have heard. Movies, television, photography, advertising, design, photo stills from this or that, and oh yeah—fine art. Paintings, drawings, photos too; pictorial—or abstract—art in various other media. Forget about the pictorial or the abstract—sometimes you can’t even define what exactly it is. (Sometimes that’s the best kind of work. And then sometimes it’s just the most ridiculous bullshit you can’t even believe that you left your apartment to look at.)
And then it happens. It’s standing (or hanging) right in front of you. And you just go ohmygoddessthisisitsomebodyjustsolvedtheproblemofhowdoweexist—howdowegoonisthereanypointtoit. And you howl or laugh or cry or babble something insane or all of the above and just . . . wow. Thank you for that. And then move on to the next thing.
Last week was a pretty good week for such moments—or something approaching a state of elation if not perfect illumination. There was Sean Scully being Sean Scully and all of us thoroughly enjoying that. There was Dike Blair. There was Vivian Suter—and no one ever brought anything like that back from Boring—I mean Burning Man. There was Steve McQueen, whose Sunshine State managed to bring a very dark kind of hope to the land of Sunshine Noir. (Not to be confused with that mis-nicknamed “Sunshine” State that should now be re-nicknamed the “Skin Cancer State of Emergency” State.)
And then I was suddenly confronted by “Hand Holding Scribble” in Karl Haendel’s Daily Act of Sustained Empathy, his show of large scale drawings in pencil and ink on paper that opened Saturday afternoon at Vielmetter Los Angeles, and it was as if a mystery of the universe was unfolding before me. First of all, it is a Karl Haendel Scribble—which should be a trademarked thing no different from a Slinky or a Spirograph or a Frisbee or Silly Putty or a Gumby. (Wait a minute, maybe Gumby is something else. And then what do we do about Pokey?) A Karl Haendel Scribble has its own wave or fluid dynamic, geometry, maybe even logic; and this one was of a complexity that took it onto a different plane (okay I’m not talking about the paper), a different sphere or domain, even a different universe. The universe. It’s like that piece of star logic, insight, harmony, that you flash on in the course of some bit of problem-solving sitting at your desk or at your job staring at some spreadsheet spelling out your (or someone’s) demise, or just walking into the drug or liquor store thinking the bottle you’re buying is too expensive and should you buy a lottery ticket, too, or vacuuming under the couch and discovering some dead cockroach that looks as if it was around when Cleopatra was crossing the Nile or the Red Sea or the Mediterranean and thinking she’d rather be sitting at home with a hieroglyphic romance. You dive for a notebook and just start writing notes as fast as you can or maybe you try to hold it in your head until you get back to your apartment. But then someone comes up to you and asks you what happened to the storyboard, script notes, timeline, flow chart, subpoena, draft judgment, stock quotes, futures contracts that were supposed to be on their desk an hour ago. Or you’re finally home but here comes the cat and you’re suddenly hungry and what’s in the fridge and oh yeah you have to pee.
Well so there it was and I could just stand there rolling it around in my eyes and head (it was already in someone else’s hand) and it was sort of like watching three or four or even five virtual roulette wheels rolling around or just hovering above someone’s hand, the bouncing ball itself tracing micro-cycloids or roulettes above the spinning wheel. “Faites vos jeux, mesdames et messieurs.” I might be in ‘Jackie’s head’ (the character Jeanne Moreau plays in La Baie des Anges)! Maybe not quite that far gone. (Oh who am I kidding?) Or somewhere along the edge of one (or all) of Loie Fuller’s skirts or capes or scarves swirling in every conceivable direction as she danced furiously across a stage. Or Tonya Harding putting a few Simone Biles leap-into-the-void gymnastic tricks into her next triple axel. Or the arcs and crazy-eight cross-court dashes Roger Federer or Serena Williams might have to make to lock down the next point. Or the trace of Leonard Bernstein’s baton conducting a Shostakovich symphony or Strauss tone poem. Or Gödel’s generalized continuum hypothesis (or something like that), or (getting a bit darker now) his “Loophole.”
And back to the moment. You’ve barely moved. Standing stock still, watching this cat’s cradle blow up and out and swirl over this open, flexed, threading, slightly grasping human hand. Yes I see the place where the line stops (or is it just beginning?), but you can’t prove that and what about Gödel’s incompleteness theorem? Just. Breathe. Take in the rest of the show.
I go home to my apartment. At the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo. The waves of the Mediterranean dazzle like a magic carpet of sapphires in the sunset. ‘Vous ne devez jamais laisser passer la chance—jamais!’
Like many other pictorial artists, Molly Segal is a storyteller. Her preferred medium is watercolor applied in various degrees of thickness to a special plastic-coated paper that is less absorbent than conventional papers, but also more easily re-worked. The titles of these works—variously satiric, scabrously funny, foreboding and matter-of-fact—function essentially as captions to her narratives. Her show, “What We Whispered and What We Screamed,” is the apocalyptic Anthropocene—social disintegration in the wake of the collapse of the biosphere and civilization—already in evidence everywhere from city-wildland interface to derelict patches of urban and suburban real estate.
Her approach is both technically and narratively irreverent. She stains, shadows, swipes, swirls, sponges, even salts the surfaces of the paintings. And certainly (with a built-in assist from the plastic surface)—leaving no 20th-century painting trope unexploited—she drips; but the gesture here serves the narrative first, underscoring its absurdity. Her draftsmanship occasionally suffers in her apparent haste to get the picture. In Gobble Me, Swallow Me (2023), a fire scissors down a kind of ravine and back up a hillside, billowing black smoke up a foamy backdrop of turquoise and amethyst.
Molly Segal, I Am Truly Sorry About All This, 2023.
In another, Make It Rain (2022), she takes a more minimalist approach, crisscrossing the paper with slashing brushstrokes, raising an embankment with a palisade of vertical black strokes, hatching out foreground and back with umber horizontals, while fiery yellows and reds bubble up against it. The Old Familiar Sting (2022) is by far the most specific—an explosion among a chain of electrical transmission towers—and, not coincidentally, the most texturally and chromatically variegated.
Her eye is drawn to the fraught and sometimes fatally flawed human intervention. In I’m Gonna Make Noise When I Go Down (2023), a dozen scattered firefighters appear with threads of hose, hiking up a smoky hillside, the terrain of which is barely discernible in the purple haze of smoke and fire. But her real penchant is for the human figure in its less-than-heroic posturings and the unrelenting ferocity of its carnal appetites. An image that looks composited from more than one source, I Am Truly Sorry About All This (2023) features human figures (male and female, but mostly male) clustered around a beached whale (not an uncommon sight in recent years), most of them with their hands clutching their crotches, which I confess made me think first of the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee.
She isolates a heterosexual couple in a related pair of 2023 paintings—with the titles When Smoke Changes the Color of the Sun and There Is No End to What A Living World Will Demand of You—with faces blurred, extensions somewhat crudely elided. The figures seem to literally consume themselves—mirroring, as in other works, the apocalypse as a self-cannibalizing spectator sport. As a corrective to the blithe optimism and “forward thinking” encountered in so much of the art world (and its press), Segal’s vision is refreshing in its blunt honesty. The problem here is that art demands “whispers” to be registered as dramatically as “screams.” The real-world stakes warrant nothing less.
“Where the spent lights quiver and gleam, . . .” Matthew Arnold, “The Foresaken Merman”
“ . . . — you can see / the whole sky pass through this head of mine, the mind is hatched and scored by clouds and weather—what is weather—when it’s all gone . . . .” Jorie Graham, “The Violinist At the Window, 1918” (from Sea Change, 2008)
A quality of suspense suffused Virginia Katz’s exhibition, “Transitory Nature,” at the Long Beach Museum of Art (now closed); and alongside the Museum’s curatorial and installation team, Katz deliberately emphasized it in the exhibition design and mounting of the exhibited works. Katz has frequently referred to herself as an artist whose focus is, above all, landscape—but her work continuously re-works and re-defines what is encompassed by the term. The conventional understanding of the term implies a singular prospect that, however sweeping, is usually more or less static. But for the last decade and more, Katz’s work has expanded the parameters of that definition, composing and recomposing landscape from within the landscape itself and through the elements that define it.
I became re-acquainted with Katz’s work a decade or so ago when I had an opportunity to see a group of paintings that were, once again, re-defining what landscape could be. Landscape or landscape elements were progressively built up over a support surface (panel or canvas or both) into what were essentially relief paintings. These were not simply a composition or arrangement of pigments, but what seemed like an appropriation of the terrain, of the earth itself. There is a long tradition of this kind of heavily impastoed landscape painting that probably begins in late 19th and early 20th century Expressionism, and continues right through Abstract Expressionism to more recent variations and practitioners (e.g., outstandingly, Kiefer). (Then, too, there are those artists for whom earth appropriated directly from a site is itself is a medium, e.g., Michelle Stuart.) In various iterations, these took on jewel-like metamorphoses (in some instances actually threading semi-precious materials through the pigments), becoming almost other-worldly. To build a slag heap out of a goldmine—isn’t that one definition of the human enterprise? This was not—could not—be viewed simply as landscape per se, but a kind of earth art, or land art.
I was not surprised to hear Katz speak of Robert Smithson and Andy Goldsworthy as influences. It’s almost impossible to look at these relief ‘landscapes’ and not think of Smithson; or more recent ‘interventions’ (as Katz would characterize her variously site- and non-site-specific assemblages) and not think of Goldsworthy. But a quick scan of her work for the past two decades makes it clear that she has been, in the largest sense, a ‘land’ or ‘earth’ artist from the start. Perhaps ‘Earth’ is the more accurate term, since her work has embraced both land and sea—from ocean waves and currents to the winds and the planetary atmosphere itself. Both nature and its transit have consistently been at the heart of her work. Also process and abstraction—and this is where ‘landscape’ becomes a useful term to describe her art: it starts from the artist’s perception—from a specific place and a certain perspective that may shift or be re-directed by forces within or outside the artist herself. I would also posit that data imaging—and increasingly as such technology has evolved (by way of NASA and Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory)—has further validated conceptual aspects of her work that appear very early in her career.
Katz, Expanse II, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
Time is the element we feel most acutely walking through an exhibition like Transitory Nature—its simultaneously constant and continuous passage, and its suspension within the walls of the light-filled ground-floor galleries of the Long Beach Museum’s downtown satellite. The underlying propositions here, as in much of Katz’s art, are existential. We are both in and of nature, its product as well as its conceivable means of extinction and self-annihilation; and our views and understanding are limited by placement and perception, which shift and evolve over time (subject to whatever further ambiguities we might consider, pace Einstein, moving through the cosmos). A sense of these limits is at the heart of this exhibition, but also what is seemingly limitless, constantly variable within those physical limits—which is a sense of illumination and transformation. This is an experience that may be available randomly, casually on one level or another, at any moment of time or day. Katz’s means of capturing and crystallizing it are, essentially, light and color, structures found and improvised, both natural and man-made, and what she would call “interventions,” which, when you get right down to it, are really just an extension of earlier process-driven art that specified siting, placement, intervals. As in earlier work, she’s probing the notion of extension, but also its limits, more specifically the liminal zone between light and darkness.
We see this most explicitly, elaborately in the unique intaglio monoprints that map a complex terrain of light, shadow, depth and shallow, ‘ground’ and ‘surround’, emergence and submergence, projection and depression; the moving, shifting, floating horizon that can literally be anything and anywhere. Katz and the Long Beach Museum curatorial/installation team have emphasized this aspect by moving them away from the walls and (literally) hanging them from the ceiling at oblique angles to one another—so the viewer can weave through them, experiencing a sense of weaving, flux, floatation, contingency. (It sounds like it might induce vertigo, but it doesn’t.) Another aspect we might consider—practically a synonym—is simply uncertainty, and more specifically an uncertainty that engenders some degree of apprehension. Katz certainly has—Uncertainty (2022) is the title of one of the monoprints; and even within the serenity of this light-filled exhibition space, it set off quiet alarms. Reds are almost always the primaries of alarm—ignition, fire, lifeblood, labia and soft tissues, the most vivid blooms. But it’s also the burn itself—the deep, angst-laden psychological burn we’ve considered in work like Mark Rothko’s—to which contemporary artists continue to respond. Katz may herself be responding to its sustained declamatory force long spectral sustain here. But what once might have been an expression of private anguish is now externalized and almost immersive. Alarm and upheaval are keynotes in any news briefing; ‘days of rage’ are today any and every day of the week. We are in fact on the brink, at the edge of life and death; and our proximity may register at almost any moment, but we feel it particularly acutely at sunrise and sunset.
Reds are tamped down and variously modulated in Uncertainty, softened to an amber glow at the ‘horizon’ line and deepened into an almost blackened burnt sienna and still more complex browned-out zone at the very top, complicated by purple and blue undertones. Between this soft ‘ceiling’ and the lower ‘earth-bound’ quadrant of deep umbers and charcoals and browns shot through with pale umber and verdigris are various gradations of rose, sienna, and maroon. It’s both a ‘sunset’ as the familiar landscape cliché, and something more uncertain, even ominous—the sea of fire just over the horizon, with a promise of catastrophic destruction to come. The foreground itself offers an uncertain ‘landing’—less probable as ‘refuge’ than as sheer wasteland. (It’s a familiar scenario given the industrial wastelands that appear everywhere from the U.S. rust belt to China’s relentlessly overdeveloped landscapes.)
Katz pulls back from the sunset edge to works that appear inspired by aerial or satellite imagery of broad swaths of terrain and sky, simply titled Expanse. Expanse II (2020) first recalls views from ascending aircraft, as a plane might veer away from the temperate zones we presume support life like our own towards an arid terrain of mountains and deserts. Except—not exactly; and maybe not at all. We’re in a domain of free abstraction that complicates the existential angst of Uncertainty. Nothing is certain here, either. But we move in and out, through waves and eddies and prominences and depressions, overpainting and backwashes that give us a ‘landscape’ we’ve never actually seen in the real world. The lower quadrant seems less sedimentary than Uncertainty’s, less an accumulation than an accretion of disturbances—not a ‘desert’, but a duststorm. Yet nothing here is entirely implausible. The bright white ‘horizon’ line beneath an azure gradient might suggest the earth’s (or a coastal) edge, the light following the curve. But in a more straightforward sense, we’re staring straight into (not across) a mesmerizing void, the unknown—the ‘unknown unknowns’ (unlike the deep blue of the distant atmosphere pressing toward the ionosphere), to give it a Rumsfeld spin.
It’s beautiful and it’s terrifying and we’re still making it up as we go along. It’s an ‘expanse’ that expresses not simply a landscape, but a phenomenon, a way of seeing. We’re still learning how to see and narrate it, and so much is lost in the dust, smoke, and haze of it all. (I sometimes think that for all the technological advancement and all the millions of human minds and digits scraping wholesale the databases of civilization up to the present moment for so-called large language/data model AI programs, Silicon Valley is still (and just barely) the high-tech version of Hollywood—where the most foundational postulate is that “nobody knows anything.”)
Katz, Unrest, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
Unrest (2020) references satellite imagery of the billion or so ‘points of light’ that indicate significant human settlement or development across the planet—and the energy consumed to make them visible from space. Here the eye moves in two directions, towards both the top and bottom quadrants of the rectangular print, with the pale white horizon line becoming the planet’s sunlit edge against the blackness of space, and pale red-orange flecks scattered through a soft grey kidney-shaped nimbus or archipelago signaling the energy disturbances given off by conceivably living inhabitants. The print creates its own abstract terrain—something we might read as variously mist-enshrouded, arboreal, volcanic, mountainous; but we’re also aware of the extent the ‘disturbance’, the ‘unrest’ is part of it. Those ‘points of light’ are part of this ‘natural’ landscape, as integral as any other element. The sense of distance and darkness or keynotes here. Reflection does not always come easily in the clear light of day, when the unrest, the constant churn and upheaval of animal activity is all around us.
Katz, Australia – Continental Burn, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
In Australia – Continental Burn (2020), Katz directly references Australia’s long history of uncontrolled (almost uncontrollable) bushfires and wildfires in areas of urban/suburban and bush/outback interface. Records of such wildfires (also astonishingly high atmospheric temperatures) go back as far as the mid-19th century—making the continent a kind of leading indicator as to where uncontrolled human activity and climate change might take us. (Australia’s bushfires of 1974-75 all but incinerated vegetation across almost 15 percent of the continent—before climate change was even a major preoccupation of environmental scientists; and the situation hasn’t improved much over the decades leading into this century.) Here, Uncertainty’s sunset reds have literally bled into the ‘terrain’. The only suggestion of green—really the palest turquoise occurs on a gradient in the upper quadrant of the print. In the lower two-thirds of the print there is only blood red surfacing over a sediment of purple, mauve and amethyst mottled grays and blacks—the ‘bruised’ terrain beneath the open wounds at its surface. Human imagination generally goes to sites of military urban immolation (Hiroshima) or systematic mass murder (the systematic genocide of the Holocaust, Cambodian killing fields, etc.); but we’re reminded here that ‘killing fields’ encompass entire continents (or in recent years, oceans—as impossibly overheated waters off the coast of Florida this summer destroy the coral reefs that were once a frontline of coastal protection). By now it’s clear to most of us that the Sixth Extinction is already under way (and literally under our feet), and Katz is channeling its carnage in these unique prints.
It’s not all fire and brimstone (or smoke and ashes) in these monoprints. As her palette of inks and paints shifts toward the cooler end of the spectrum, Katz offers a more serene, almost tranquil perspective on nature’s ‘transitions’ (though the titles of these works (2020-2022) readily convey their underlying fatalism—e.g., Slipping Away, On the Brink, Omen). Always Katz reminds us of the juxtaposition of perspectives: our placement, vantage point, perceptions, apprehensions, versus the conceivable geophysical actuality of a planetary surface, heat, friction, gravity, reactivity, movement, circulation, nature, the life around us (and its end), entropy. The ‘end’ (which is always a ‘beginning’) is beautiful, too. (Okay, so I’m human—apologies for that.)
As is fairly clear from the unique intaglio monoprints—which are worked over with various materials conventional and unconventional (e.g., aluminum foil, natural and synthetic materials), inks and hand-painting and drawing in pigments and pencils, Katz is continually experimenting—as she has since the very beginnings of her career; and like artists since the turn of the last century, she is prepared to use whatever is at hand—or (not surprisingly) under foot. “Beauty’s where you find it,” said somebody once. It takes an artist to know what to do with and make of it. This can be anything from desiccated leaves and brush, lost petals or decaying foliage, or stuff that goes straight from our bags or toilet racks into the garbage. Or the facial tissue that just left your cheek or nose. Again, as with her larger works—work more easily recognized as ‘landscape’ or encompassed by the term—the other works here are as much about seeing and the way we see and how our imaginations are engaged by perception, however fleeting or ephemeral—what might be glimpsed, almost literally, in the blink of an eye. In a series of tiny watercolors, executed on squares of facial tissue, the dominant color frequently registers first, almost as if caught within a flash of light (the ‘blink of an eye’). The flash or flicker is the starting point. A larger impression or color modulation unfolds out of what might be a kind of stain catching the folds, wrinkles and textural imperfections of the material. We might read a ‘horizon line’ in Disposition (2022), but this is only the starting point of what could be a tiny dream fragment—a marsh, an imaginary ruin, shadows contained within shadows, with indigo and watery blues above and below.
Katz, Singed, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
Katz has a fascination for the material simply as a medium for color—its simultaneous capacity for diffusion and intensification; but she’s taken the fascination to another level to build an analogue to the fragile material itself: the ephemeral but unforgettable fragment. It’s that world disclosed within the blink of an eye, instantly forgotten or discarded, only to be recovered and revered in all its talismanic potency: a patch of true green lost in a pale meadow framed by torn, blackened edges (Singed, 2022); a smouldering blaze of light folded between velvety dark blacks closing in on it (Last Light, 2022); a harmony (or counterpoint?) of greens that leave the tissue fragment in shreds Katz titles ironically A Vision of Completeness (2022). Yet that is exactly what it is. The idea, thing, vision is consumed, consummated; and there’s nothing else left. That’s life—if we’re lucky.
Katz, Last Light, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
Katz’s Interventions return us full circle both to her conceptual foundations and her intense, immersive engagements with landscape painting which had some of the qualities of earth or land art. Yet her focus here is not far from the ephemeral, cast-off quality of her fragile Watercolors—the casual, fleeting encounter or engagement that is somehow sustained over an interval of time. We find this sort of thing anywhere and everywhere—from private wooded properties and tranquil leafy neighborhoods, to forlorn carparks, scarred post-industrial city blocks, and the grittiest of urban wastescapes. Nature seems to have its own artifice; and in L.A., it’s frequently that random, scrappy bougainvillea torn this way and that that simply won’t die. It’s a gritty green interface that inspires Katz to return the favor with the artifice of her own tools and synthetic pigments.
The balance is fragile and the installation makes this evident—in “Transitory Nature,” the “interventions” are set into the brick walls of the Long Beach Museum’s downtown galleries. Unstable (2021) is a tangle of commingled painted wire and found tree branches supporting a nest with eggshells painted in gouache. The precarity could not be more explicit. Devolved Anatomy (2023) is a kind of curve of intersecting branches, the lower of which (in painted wire) drags a loose piece of fencing. ‘Nature’ may or may not be ‘winning’—but it’s not as if death is ever very far away. Then on an actual piece of fencing set into the brick, a cascade of rosy pink, fuchsia, and pale pink blossoms (in paint) seems almost celebratory, while giving the lie to it all.
Katz, The Nature of Things, 2022-23. Courtesy of the artist.
Taken in its entirety, “Transitory Nature” had a tremendous luminosity. The work fairly glowed in the Long Beach Museum’s sunlit downtown galleries. Still its dark, fatalistic undercurrent made itself felt both within and beyond the visible spectrum. Katz’s titles for some of the works might be taken as signposts, but the viewer scarcely needed a precise mapping of the chromatic, phenomenological or epistemological terrain. There is what we see and what we know, what happens in between, and what we can neither see nor know (at least with any degree of certainty or comprehension)—which, AI notwithstanding, seems to dwarf the first category. Nature, life—we sometimes try to tell ourselves—has a way of pushing back and pushing through. But the physics of our planet and universe are unforgiving; and there have been many successive warming and cooling geologic phases of this planet and biosphere that killed off massive numbers of us (meaning all indigenous earthly life forms). Glaciers and volcanoes once ripped open and scarified the surface of the planet. Now humans do, as they have for the last few centuries. But Katz isn’t simply abstracting our ant farm of extraction into a succession of aerial anthill views. Nature’s transitions are never simply uni-directional—nor are our own, even viewed simply within a social context. (Katz’s Interventions are a conceptually audacious demonstration of this.)
Horizon lines measure out the time of most creatures inhabiting the land, yet our two-legged breed continues to press relentlessly beyond them. We see and know more than ever before in human history. But there’s no telling which of our fleeting illuminations will survive our star’s death. Most of the fire and light driving us forward (and back) are on loan. Katz’s haunting Long Beach Museum exhibition puts forward the modest proposal that our species pay it forward with interest.
“I just don’t know what to do with myself….” Burt Bacharach / Hal David, 1962
I’m not sure if Barbie is a new kind of cinema, but it’s not the sort of film we’re accustomed to seeing in wide theatrical release on the biggest screens and dressed in the highest of high-gloss Hollywood production values. In fact, it’s a form of entertainment we’re far more likely to have encountered in a theatre—meaning, the stage (and rarely, if at all, musical theatre). And although Barbie is many things—including simply a continuation of Greta Gerwig’s very personal cinema of self-actualization; and yes—a commercial advertisement for Mattel and the Barbie doll by way of cultural and political (more than slightly intertextual) deconstruction (not the sort of advertising vehicle we’re accustomed to seeing from Mattel, nor likely to be seeing again)—it is also very much a musical. But more importantly, it’s a kind of enchantment.
Barbie may be far from perfect in formal or dramatic terms (though even its imperfections seem willful, penetrating the Mattel/Barbie high gloss (all that pink!), another aspect of Gerwig’s very personal imprint); but it meets the cultural moment in full—sweeping up the full spectrum of political, cultural and existential anxieties in its wake. Any Hollywood movie (especially a Hollywood movie-musical) can create a parallel universe, defy the space-time continuum and the laws of physics. Barbie does all this while turning every facet of the film story, its frame, and physical production inside out. What it is a kind of meta-cinema. It is a kind of pageant of its mannequin-heroine-goddess—her apotheosis, and her return to mortal incarnation, with the heroine simultaneously acting out the drama and glorification of her manufactured perfection and puncturing it. But Barbie (the doll, too, as engaged by many girls’ play over the last half-century) embodies many different aspects, personalities, aspirations. Any number of personal destinies may evolve—or devolve. We see several distinct aspects of this—some at Mattel’s own unintentional instigation (e.g., variations in the standard model, auxiliary and supporting characters, etc.).
In a sense, Gerwig uses Barbie herself (or more specifically, Barbie, the idea) as the singular meta-instrumentality—simply by inferring an empathic connection between this pink dusted, glitter-bombed, vacuum-sealed Hollywood sound-stage world, and the world where actual children play with actual Barbie dolls (Barbie, the product).
‘Weird Barbie’ (Kate McKinnon) is yet another manifestation of this—but a critical one, in that she performs it within this domain of subconscious and unconscious fantasy and radical empathy. Weird Barbie doesn’t entirely understand this phenomenon herself; but she doesn’t have to—she manifests it with her idiosyncratic metamorphosis and her own isolation within this hermetic domain. We recognize this Barbie, too. You can usually find at least one shoved in back of just about every other girl’s closet or stash of toys—the ‘assisted readymade’ Barbie someone’s slightly bored, frustrated, fed-up or otherwise alienated sister, daughter, or niece took a Sharpie, pens and crayons, and pair of scissors to; and we can imagine the scenarios they probably invented to accompany them: the Barbie that took a left turn (maybe even politically), that got kicked off (or just quit) the cheerleading squad in spite of her flawless splits, the one that rebelled, that went punk, that dropped into a death metal club, or an S&M dungeon and was intrigued; the Barbie that dropped out, blew off to India or Africa (that would make for some intriguing wardrobe hacks), and suddenly turned back up stateside at MIT working on an experimental vaccine or AI (from biker leathers to white labcoats—it happens).
But Gerwig is tapping into something still larger here—not simply a cultural pulse, l’air du temps, the Zeitgeist (though there’s all that, too), but a collective unconscious as acted out in a kind of overlapping real and fantasy world spectacle. I wouldn’t compare it directly to something like Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (which some critics put forward alongside Hamlet as another, almost airtight ‘metaplay’), but Barbieland is a kind of fairy domain, and Barbie—not a ‘fairy’ exactly, but a kind of ‘changeling’ (again, quite distinct from the AMND variety), a chameleon. They’re here in the ‘real world’, too, after all. It’s a kind of transference—and Gerwig hints at it from the onset with her pastiche of Stanley Kubrick’s Strauss-transfigured ‘Tools’ prelude to 2001: A Space Odyssey (M-G-M 1968), accompanied by Helen Mirren’s sardonically hilarious narration. (I suppose you would have to call it “Dolls.”) And simply transfer—or transition. (Consider the trajectory that film sets its accidental hero on.)
One thing almost every successful musical theatrical (or film) production achieves is a kind of neutralizing of the background noise or hum that happens to some extent in any public setting or for that matter electronic transmission. In Gerwig’s Barbie, from very early in the film, it’s almost as if instead of noise or hum, a low-level anxiety or apprehension seeps beneath every scene, and threads among the musical elements—from dance extravaganzas (Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night”) to elegiac reveries like Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?”), magnifying it in a way that almost sinks into your skin. Our entire conception of this ‘packaged’ environment seems predicated on the notion of sealing it (or any consequential danger or even risk) off; yet here it is, ‘free-floating’ or free-falling—take your pick—from roofs, closets, classrooms, cubicles, toy boxes.
Somehow this angst, this dread, this anxiety has insinuated itself into the Dream House of the quintessential, the iconic, ‘Stereotypical’—blonde, blue-eyed, classic physics-and-physiology defying proportions—Barbie (Margot Robbie). But this time it’s not coming from some bored, frustrated, rebellious, angry or alienated girl—but the mother of one (America Ferrera) who just happens to work as an administrative assistant at the white-hot center of everything Barbie, the Mattel CEO’s office. As the chief executives and corporate officers confab about a possible fugitive Barbie with a crisis threatening to break down this air seal between the world of Barbie and our world of barbarians (a stand-in for the current existential cultural conflict, to say nothing of our biosphere on the brink of a death spiral), Gloria (Ferrera) sits outside a conference room doodling an imaginary ‘Unrelenting Thoughts of Death’ Barbie and similarly existentially angst-ridden and anhedonic models.
How do you accidentally step into a cold shower when the ‘shower’ isn’t even real? How exactly do you come down to earth when you can no longer defy gravity? These are Stereotypical Barbie’s first rough steps as—still unaware anything is seriously ‘wrong’—she begins her transition from ‘perfect-Barbie-hood’ to actual personhood—paralleling the earthly model in which we chisel out our own personhoods within physical, social and cultural gravitational and magnetic fields.
Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) Courtesy Warner Bros.
Barbie’s pilgrimage to Weird Barbie’s slightly twisted (but niftily equipped) ‘dream house’ is a critical stop on this long pink highway—where she’s asked to choose between two—well, not ‘grails’ exactly (of course they’re shoes), but a kind of dual instrument and expression of role and self-acceptance. Weird Barbie already grasps the painful truth: self-acceptance is not necessarily the imagined or pre-conceived aesthetic ideal. Gerwig isn’t exactly fashioning a Rohmer-esque ‘moral tale’ here, but she uses an aesthetic domain to illuminate a moral universe. I’m still not sure about the mandatory roller-blades here—whether keeping her (and, yes, Ken) on the ‘straight-and-narrow’ trajectory back to the sources of her fracturing stereotype, or simply facilitating the not-so-perfect ‘blend-in’ transition to the so-called ‘real world’ on the Venice Beach boardwalk.
With Ken (Ryan Gosling) in the back seat, it gets complicated before they’re even half-way down the pink brick road to that scary crazy fantasy corner of the world some of us actually call home. Gerwig isn’t just breaking a fourth wall here; civilization’s trappings—its dramas and rituals—aside, we’re in the wilds here.
This continuous re-definition and revision of personhood involves reciprocal observation and scrutiny, an acceptance of pain and (at least occasionally) its infliction. Again, we have a little ceremony: a post-arrest booking at a police station, accompanied by a small tidbit of useful ‘education’—that leads our heroine and (for now anyway) sidekick to a ceremony they’re already familiar with: costume change. Alas they’re still blissfully unaware of the retail part of that ceremony in the late-capitalist real world—though, as we will see under their flawless plastic/skin, they may they have some intimation of it. So it’s back to the precinct station and then on to the Santa Monica Courthouse where, not surprisingly, our heroine needs a time-out on every level, because in addition to developing a sense of identity, she’s also discovering time.
The external gaze—her own as well as others’—leads her to the next level of self-awareness: irony. Naturally she goes to an actual school to learn this—by way of a group of disaffected (and long past Barbie) schoolgirls—bringing her still closer to the source of her torment (though also, conceivably, liberation). And while Barbie is learning everything she isn’t in the real world (a scene which will later be answered by Gloria, summarizing everything a woman is supposed to be), Ken is discovering the not-so-hidden joys of patriarchy—at least to those ‘Kens’ who might become patriarchs. Also horses.
Barbie’s ‘descent into the underworld’ turns out (appropriately enough) to be an express elevator to the top floor of a Century City high-rise (though Mattel is actually headquartered in El Segundo). It turns out to be not merely an ‘underworld’, but also a kind of infinite after-world. Time and space bend here, too—a foretaste of Barbie’s ultimate cross-over to the country she’s just discovered and the undiscovered countries that lay beyond. There are Kubrick quotations here, too—including a ghost kitchen where the original Barbie creator, Ruth Handler’s ghost (Rhea Perlman) offers the now fugitive Barbie tea before her flight back to Barbie World.) But of course Barbie must be tempted and tested—retracing her ‘origin story’ back to ‘the box’—with all the accessories and wardrobe essentials the stereotypical Barbie needs, neatly sealed off from the world of dirt and dust outside the plastic window.
Barbie (Margot Robbie) mediates the ‘Beach-Off’ between the Kens (Ryan Gosling and Simu Liu) Courtesy Warner Bros.
While Barbie is retracing her roots, Ken, master of all things Beach, is discovering a few new things to master. He’s also learning what it means to be seen—unencumbered by any serious awareness of just how he might be seen. But here’s the thing—Shark, Jet, Barracuda, Sting Ray, or dude on a horse—this Ken can’t seem to catch a wave, a predicament Gerwig orchestrates elegantly in the first reel (which may owe something to the “Seahaven” crafted by Peter Weir, Andrew Niccol, et al. for The Truman Show (Paramount, 1998)). This is a Ken who’s “actually not sure” about what he wants from Barbie (where have we heard that before?), nor is he exactly sure of what he wants from himself. Back in Barbieland, Ken builds himself a jury-rigged man-cave fit for a no-jury-required patriarchal fantasyland, all but acting out Susan Faludi’s Backlash (1991) and Stiffed (1999) in the process. (Jessica Bennett’s invitation to Susan Faludi to weigh in on these parallels in last Sunday’s New York Times Opinion section was a stroke of genius.)
Undoing Beach Ken’s and his Ken-bros’ mischief requires craft and cunning—qualities the Barbies and their real world-schooled allies (Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt—who plays her daughter, Sasha) have in abundance. It turns out that upholding (and saving) a republic—even a Barbie republic—is a fraught business. (Gee, where are we seeing that lately besides every screen and metro daily front page in our ‘real-world’ United States?) The Kens’ hobby-horse republic, which seems to stand for nothing more than their capricious dominance, beer-buddy leisure and relegation of the Barbies to handmaiden status might just be a funhouse mirror version of the real not-so-post-patriarchal world where, as Ferrera’s Gloria sums up, women pretty much have to be everything to everyone at exactly the right time. You have to “always be extraordinary”; “always looking out for other people”; “answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane”; “never show off, never fail”; but “somehow we’re always doing it wrong.” (I can’t replicate the entire speech here, but it would almost be worth seeing the picture just to see that scene play again. I’m not sure Betty Friedan said it much better in The Feminine Mystique.)
The speech is a litany of contradictions, which occasionally strike ambiguous, almost discordant notes (“Never forget that the system is rigged.” The patriarchy? Late capitalist corporate America? The government? The ‘Ruling Class’?—no, not the 1972 Peter Medak directed movie—though who knows? The film’s central character lives in more than one world—conceivably as many as three.) Having successfully accompanied Barbie back to Barbieland, is Gloria playing devil’s advocate? Insisting there is no point, no advantage to crossing back over to the mortal domain where Stereotypical Barbie might well “stand out,” but better not “get out of line”?
We take her point (do we ever!); but somehow it all seems bound up in the insupportable, impossible questions of life itself. Gerwig and her co-writer (and regular creative collaborator), Noah Baumbach seem continually drawn to these questions and situations: the unstable, tentative, contradictory, near-paradoxical, and ambiguity-suffused conditions and conundrums of human life and our emotional, quasi-romantic attachments to and within it. It’s a terrain she (and they) share with any number of cinematic and theatrical artists (not just Shakespeare). With an emphasis on the romantic and familial aspects of this social and emotion quicksand—borrowing directly from Stephen Sondheim—Baumbach has his alter-ego, Charlie (Adam Driver) spell out the contradictions explicitly in an impassioned rendition of “Being Alive” (from Sondheim’s 1970 Broadway musical, Company) in his 2019 film, Marriage Story. Gerwig’s emotionally sprawling 2017 film, Lady Bird (A24/Universal/Focus) is riddled with these questions—they’re practically a connective scar tissue through the film.
Barbie, the character, stands out in another way that connects her with other unseen populations in the human ‘real’ world. ‘Stereotype’ or no, she begins her journey a cipher, an anonymous (albeit distinctive) figure in a sea of similarly uprooted figures voyaging from one nowhere to the next anywhere—desperate for a place to physically exist much less project a self. we carry our fully (or not-so-fully) realized selves, pretty much alone.
Barbie’s (or anyone’s) journey to personhood requires more than a little grit. The modeling, molding and ‘chiseling’ that goes into it is real. It’s not just editing the ‘doll’, the mannequin, the persona to fit an audience—though as Ferrera’s Gloria reminds us, there’s that, too. Humans must jettison (or maybe just recycle) a lot of baggage. It’s as if we never stop running, defending, prosecuting. There are losses, there is triage; we walk into our dreams and we walk out of or simply away from them before that “one ending,” as Ruth Handler’s ghost reminds Barbie, we all have to face. We don’t take any of it with us. Self-acceptance is as awful and crushing and shattering as it can be exalting and empowering. There will always be those of us who never quite feel we’re ‘enough’ (yet also feel as if we’re a bit ‘too much’).
Gerwig doesn’t leave Barbie at a ‘promised land’, as she might have in an actual M-G-M musical of 60 years ago (which its’s quite clear she would have no trouble executing)—though Santa Monica isn’t the worst place to start over. But it’s a moment of reassurance that arrives at a moment when we have lost any sense of assurance or certainty. Sometimes it’s exhilarating just to show up and be acknowledged as the person you dared to think you might actually be.
Barbie (Warner Bros./Mattel) directed by Greta Gerwig, written by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach — is in wide release — in theatres everywhere in Los Angeles and the U.S.
![The Harrison Studio [Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison] Survival Piece #1: Air, Earth Water, Interface or Annual Hog Pasture Mix (1970-71) at Various Small Fires](data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAA+gAAAKbAQAAAABOGZ2SAAAAAnRSTlMAAHaTzTgAAABoSURBVHja7cEBDQAAAMKg909tDjegAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA+DZIWQABJR+pQgAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==)
Well so there it was and I could just stand there rolling it around in my eyes and head (it was already in someone else’s hand) and it was sort of like watching three or four or even five virtual roulette wheels rolling around or just hovering above someone’s hand, the bouncing ball itself tracing micro-cycloids or roulettes above the spinning wheel. “Faites vos jeux, mesdames et messieurs.” I might be in ‘Jackie’s head’ (the character Jeanne Moreau plays in La Baie des Anges)! Maybe not quite that far gone. (Oh who am I kidding?) Or somewhere along the edge of one (or all) of Loie Fuller’s skirts or capes or scarves swirling in every conceivable direction as she danced furiously across a stage. Or Tonya Harding putting a few Simone Biles leap-into-the-void gymnastic tricks into her next triple axel. Or the arcs and crazy-eight cross-court dashes Roger Federer or Serena Williams might have to make to lock down the next point. Or the trace of Leonard Bernstein’s baton conducting a Shostakovich symphony or Strauss tone poem. Or Gödel’s generalized continuum hypothesis (or something like that), or (getting a bit darker now) his “Loophole.”
![The Harrison Studio [Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison] Survival Piece #1: Air, Earth Water, Interface or Annual Hog Pasture Mix (1970-71) at Various Small Fires](https://artillerymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/HAR007_Survival-Piece-2_1971_24x36_Install-View-01.jpg)
Well so there it was and I could just stand there rolling it around in my eyes and head (it was already in someone else’s hand) and it was sort of like watching three or four or even five virtual roulette wheels rolling around or just hovering above someone’s hand, the bouncing ball itself tracing micro-cycloids or roulettes above the spinning wheel. “Faites vos jeux, mesdames et messieurs.” I might be in ‘Jackie’s head’ (the character Jeanne Moreau plays in La Baie des Anges)! Maybe not quite that far gone. (Oh who am I kidding?) Or somewhere along the edge of one (or all) of Loie Fuller’s skirts or capes or scarves swirling in every conceivable direction as she danced furiously across a stage. Or Tonya Harding putting a few Simone Biles leap-into-the-void gymnastic tricks into her next triple axel. Or the arcs and crazy-eight cross-court dashes Roger Federer or Serena Williams might have to make to lock down the next point. Or the trace of Leonard Bernstein’s baton conducting a Shostakovich symphony or Strauss tone poem. Or Gödel’s generalized continuum hypothesis (or something like that), or (getting a bit darker now) his “Loophole.”
