Byline: Leanna Robinson

The Food Group, an ongoing project by Ry Rocklen, is a comical exploration into the relationship between mankind and food. Human subjects (friends of Rocklen’s, mostly) dress up in life-sized food costumes à la Fruit of the Loom that are either rented or fabricated by Rocklen. The costumed subjects are then scanned and replicated by a 3D printer in miniature, food-sized form. The result is a collection of work that is part kitsch, part comedy, part camp, and draws viewers in to see just what exactly is going on.

The miniature sculptures are rooted in Surrealism as Rocklen plays with the idea of scale. We are used to seeing humans in silly food costumes. What makes the project novel is the manipulation of scale. When the subjects are inside of the costumes, the food is out of proportion and too large, while when the subject is shrunken down, the food is the correct size while the subject is not. “I’ve always had this dream of making something big and bringing it back to scale,” Rocklen says in a phone conversation. In his works, the subjects are “taken for a ride.” Last October, Rocklen debuted “Food Group” at Team gallery in New York; the series will be the focus of an upcoming major exhibition in Los Angeles in 2019.

When asked about the psychological nature of the project, Rocklen points to a few common emotions. Because these foods are familiar, there’s an intrinsic delight and nostalgia on viewing them, because who doesn’t like pizza? On the other hand , “there’s a kind of humiliation that’s going on with the costumes,” he says, and who wouldn’t feel at least a little embarrassed walking around and being immortalized as a sculpture in a giant hamburger costume.

Rocklen succeeds in bringing in pathos with his humor, something often missing in artistic works. “I kind of have the clown card, I have a kind of wry sense of humor,” he says, which isn’t surprising one bit, as it’s indeed his first name.

The wave of women coming forward with accounts of sexual harassment and assault has swept the art world like the Santa Ana winds in a California brush fire, and all I have to say is “Finally.” Historically, women have served as objects of sexual desire within the context of art, and a blind eye has been turned to their exploitation by powerful men. Still, just because women are coming forth with their stories doesn’t mean that the art community has been particularly receptive. An anticlimactically lackluster response has led me to question: Is the art world sweeping #meetoo under the rug?

When Knight Landesman, former publisher and current co-owner of Artforum, was accused of sexual harassment this past October by staffer Amanda Schmitt (among others), an open letter titled “We Are Not Surprised” was published on the internet and signed by over 1,800 people. The open letter called for the resignation of Landesman, which was fulfilled in that he was fired from his publishing position. As to his removal from co-owner, there has been no progress. And as a shareholder he continues to benefit from Artforum’s new “intersectional feminist” point of view.

This scandal was bookended by accusations against portrait painter Chuck Close, when he was accused of sexually harassing two women. In response to the accusations, Close gave a half-hearted response, saying “I am truly sorry, I didn’t mean to. I acknowledge having a dirty mouth, but we’re all adults.” While some museums have chosen to postpone exhibitions by Close in solidarity with his accusers, others, such as MoMA and the Met, continue to show his work.

This question of whether or not to show Close’s work at museums begs the greater question that many people in the art world seem to be grappling with, which is how do we separate the artist from their art, and should we do so at all. In historical terms, if we were to remove all works by men who exploited, harassed and assaulted women, most of our museums would be half-empty, and there most certainly wouldn’t be any Picassos on view. (Picasso allegedly physically abused women, beat them into unconsciousness, burned them with cigarettes, and leveraged his power to sexually take advantage of models.)

On one hand, it would be interesting to imagine every museum removing all instances of sexism and works by sexual abusers in their halls. It’s a revolutionary idea—and if these institutions removed all of these works, it would provide space for minorities and women that have been denied for so long. Imagine: every piece of art by an abuser in a museum replaced by a work created by a woman artist. While this solution may be considered radical, it is no less radical than continuing to honor work by abusive men.

On the other hand, many curators and artists believe that the work should remain intact despite the artist’s wrongdoings. Something I hear often, even by forward-thinking women in the art world, is the fear of creating an environment in which artists are scared of saying something that is offensive and where everyone must behave according to some prevailing cultural code. While I agree that censorship has typically acted against, not in favor of, the creation of art, the “free speech” of some, oftentimes means the silence of others. Take, for instance, established male artists who think it is appropriate to tell emerging female artists that they are “pretty little painters,” or gallery owners who tell female artists that they can “work their way in… if you know what I mean,” or male professors who tell female students “you should paint nude self-portraits because that’s the most interesting thing you could create”—all of these, by the way, have happened to myself and close friends. When men wield their power under the guise of “free speech” and “talking like adults” it often leads to an inadvertent censorship of female artist.

If museums and galleries insist on carrying artists who have historically been abusers, like Picasso and Close, there must at least be a caveat to contextualize their work. Sexually suggestive works of underage “muses,” nude paintings of women by known abusers, and works evoking a lack of sexual consent should not be exhibited without accompanying descriptions of their painter’s and society’s wrongdoings. Still, this feels like an inadequate reaction. As long as owners and curators of museums and galleries remain largely male, there should—and will—continue to be a fight for not only more female representation, but also for radical art and action for the rights of women.

“We’ll play to 700?” John Tottenham asks, but really it’s more of a demand than a question. It’s my second week of trying to combine an interview with him on his drawings of the Manson girls (as he insists, “You don’t have to focus on that series”) and our weekly game of gin rummy. This week there are too many people in the bar and we have to wait half an hour standing around, something that both of us vocally despise.

Each meeting functions like clockwork—we complain if we don’t get our regular waitresses, he whinges over not feeling well for some toothache or heartache, we order identical drinks, and he goes to the bar to fetch a handful of paper napkins, one of which is used for scorekeeping. The rest of the napkins John uses to hastily draw portraits of women’s faces; half-distracted as he watches me shuffle cards or listens to me gripe about some insufficient lover.

John’s bar-napkin sketches remind me of his portraits of the teenage girls involved in the Manson murders. He insists that the Manson portraits are markedly different, as they took much more work, and involve more erasing than actual drawing. It’s not the technique that’s similar though, but the way he so effortlessly captures the likeness of his subjects.

Another striking feature about both the napkin sketches and the portraits are their subtle and implied sexuality. I ask John if he drew the Manson teenagers because deep down he wanted to fuck them. He answers no, but that maybe he could have. But John admits, “I projected most of my adolescent romantic longing onto them, though there was a lot to go around.”

John doesn’t only do portraiture, he also draws landscapes or as he calls them, “emptyscapes.” They are usually more tightly rendered and illustrated in pen or ink, and depict dilapidated small towns in the west. “I tend to find myself in those types of places,” he says. The compositions are all the same—a landscape of “timeless decay” with a line of text on the bottom. “They began as an afterthought and someone told me to write on them, so I did.” When I ask if he draws the images from memory or photographs, he answers in his quintessential self-deprecating style, “I don’t have imagination, spontaneity, or memory, and what I just said wasn’t spontaneous either.”

If I say something especially clever while playing cards, I know so because John takes out his little black notebook where he keeps his repository of quips and writes it down. That’s where he gets his lapidary one-liners that turn his haunting depictions of the emptiness of small towns into the poignant antithesis of those awful motivational posters you see in a guidance counselor’s office: “Kill off your expectations and settle in.” It only makes sense that John’s work includes text, as he is a published poet and author of such melancholic titles as The Inertia Variations and Antiepithalamia & Other Poems of Regret and Resentment.

I beat him in the next hand, 80 to minus 40, and he admits that he doesn’t feel like a real artist. We are on our second drink, but it’s a screwdriver not a greyhound because the bar ran out of grapefruit juice. “I am an academic primitive, an educated outsider, I went to the worst art school in England and the only thing I learned is to drink, do drugs, and have sex.” He is disappointed when I tell him that his experience is typical.

John Tottenham is a purist. He tells me he is constantly torn between art and writing, and that he would rather spend his efforts on work that he feels to be filling a void than work that is not singular or adding anything to the conversation. He’s the same in art as in writing, as in gin rummy as in everything else. He reminds me, “Better than sex, gin rummy. You said that once. It says less about the quality of the sex life than the quality of play.”

Just as there is a certain metaphysical link between acknowledging one’s existence and looking in the mirror, there exists a similar link between the acknowledgement of a culture’s experienced reality and its representation in media.

When a cultural group lacks representation, the variety of their experiences is suppressed. At times, then, they are fueled to create an artistic response outside of the conventional hegemony. Chicano artists throughout the movement of the 1960s and beyond are known for doing just that through public artworks. What are the implications, then, when those self-created representations are erased?

¡Murales Rebeldes! L.A. Chicana/o Murals under Siege at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes documents the life, and inevitable death (or purgatory in one case) of eight murals created by Mexican-American artists throughout LA. The exhibition is different from any I had ever been to, most notably because none of the works actually exist anymore. What is on display is a re-assemblage of parts that remained of the murals, including photographs, preliminary sketches, paintings and pieces of rubble. These scraps are relied on to give the viewer an idea of what the murals were like when they were on public view.

The archival care given to the remaining fragments greatly contrasts with the flippant actions of their destroyers. Viewers have the chance to catch a rare glimpse into the ghosts of these past murals. Many of the pieces, such as reference photos of people within the finished works, humanize and give context to the murals.

Censorship is a major thread present throughout the exhibition. Many of the murals were commissioned and approved by institutions, only to be deemed too controversial after their completion. It seemed that institutions and the public at large felt discomfort when viewing the uncomfortable reality of Chicano life and history. Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma’s Fountain Valley Mural (1974) was initially censored before it was inevitably destroyed. The mural, which consisted of various Chicano portraits, depicted what appears to be a young Chicano man being dragged away by police officers. The violent section was spray-painted white to block sensitive viewers from having to face what was, and is to this day, a fairly common scene.

Barbara Carrasco’s L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective (1982) was similarly deemed unfit for public view after being commissioned by Los Angeles’ Community Redevelopment Agency for the city’s bicentennial celebration. The work depicted the Zoot Suit Riots, the whitewashing of a mural by Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Dodger Stadium, which displaced thousands of Mexican-American landowners and families in the Chavez Ravine. The bicentennial decided to not allow Carrasco’s work due to these historical depictions. Carrasco, with the support of historians and community groups, petitioned to show the mural during the 1984 Olympic Games in LA, but the proposal was rejected.

One of the examples of whitewashing that I found most painful to stomach was that of Roberto Esteban Chavez’ The Path to Knowledge and the False University (1974) at East Los Angeles College (ELAC). The sprawling, brilliantly colored mural was painted along the side of the Rosco C. Ingalls auditorium. Above the mural was a plea to bring Chicano studies to the college. Five years later, the college president claimed the removal occurred because the auditorium needed repairs. Mysteriously, the only wall touched was Chavez’, leading to the widespread belief that the whitewashing was merely an attempt to discourage the Chicano movement at ELAC. Chavez later created The Execution (1982), a film which depicts a man being electrocuted and Chavez playing the part of the college administrator destroying a mural.

Not all of these works were destroyed for political reasons, however. East Los Streetscapers’ Filling Up on Ancient Energies (1980), which depicted such colorful, apolitical images as dinosaurs and classic cars, was destroyed by Shell Oil through what can only be described as apathy. The company later lost a lawsuit to the Streetscapers, and laws were passed to bring murals under California’s protection. While the muralists created a victory for future artists, it’s impossible to ignore how much more history the community would have if the mural was still intact.

While the censorship, destruction and abandonment of these murals happened decades ago, it plays into a larger narrative about public expression of Chicano artists and the censorship and silencing of a culture. To this day, Chicano muralists are creating new murals in areas like Boyle Heights, where the community is actively fighting against gentrification, which, it can be argued, is one of the most powerful agents of censorship.

While Chicano activists rally against developers to keep their roots in the neighborhood, artists continue the tradition of public art. Adrian Ulloa’s Love Our Mothers (2017) on the side of a Dollar store on Cesar E. Chavez Avenue depicts an indigenous woman with a powerful stare; perhaps she is Mother Earth, surrounded by butterflies, hummingbirds and nature. Nearby is Nani Chacon’s ¡RESISTE! (2017), in which two women touch hands in front of the earth and huge red lettering that says “RESIST.” One of the women wears a red bandana around her face—a piece of clothing emblematic of recent protests both in Boyle Heights and across the country.

While a select few murals of Chicano artists at LA Plaza are commemorated and others along a strip in Boyle Heights continue to be created, there are still many across Los Angeles that continue to vanish from lack of upkeep. In a time when public awareness of Chicano struggles—whether over displacement, police brutality or class struggle—has all but disappeared, public art continues to have a vital place in the streets and not just in the history books.

¡Murales Rebeldes! L.A. Chicana/o Murals under Siege
LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes. Runs thru March 19, 2018

Karen Finley’s The Expanded Unicorn Gratitude Mystery unfolds similarly to a dream that makes complete logical sense when experiencing it, but is difficult to piece together the linear structure upon waking. The one-woman show lasts for an hour and a half (no intermission) and I was impressed by the endurance and vitality of the sometimes-panting, sometimes-yelling, always passionate Finley.

The performance is divided into four parts where the artist embodies four different identities, each preceded by a video except for the last section.

The first video explicitly made fun of the art world and the lack of empirical evidence of art history. The video was definitely subtle ‘art humor’ that the audience was in hysterics over. The following act, part one, was the unicorn—a visual metaphor for complacent white supremacy wrapped up in the individualism, uniqueness and self-centeredness of the art world. While there are props and costumes on stage, most of this act, and the entirety of the performance centered around poetic spoken word.

The next act was the embodiment of Hilary Clinton, and was what I found to be the strongest part of the performance. Finley sharply observed the BDSM dynamics of the public wanting to ‘punish’ Clinton and have her admit that she was a very bad girl. Finley doesn’t stop there, as she muses over power dynamics, Bill and Hillary’s romantic relationship, and Hillary’s misguided resilience and ‘gratitude’, something that she seems to regard as Hillary’s downfall. During this section of the performance, the audience is enveloped in blue fabric that symbolizes Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress that had Bill Clinton’s semen on. The climax of the section is a literal one, with Finley draped in blue dresses covered in fake semen.

In the next part, Finley embodies Donald Trump. Since the president is so easily mocked, I was curious as to how the artist could come up with a new way to analyze him. Finley concluded that Trump is the stereotypical dumb blonde that he seems so keen to objectify, and accompanies this fact with a hilarious slideshow of Trump’s face photoshopped onto the bodies and faces Ivanka, Melania, Marilyn Monroe and other famous women.

Finally Finley appears in the last section as herself, and reads a poem on war, police brutality and other political grievances. This section was the most raw and poetic of the performance. The poem begins in an absurdist story of a woman (possibly Clinton) who gets off on war, and enjoys having sex with veteran amputees’ ‘stumps’ and ends on musings on death and dying. Finley ended the performance with an American Flag around her shoulders while taking a knee—an obvious nod to the NFL controversy. By confronting the sometimes-ridiculousness of the art world, combined with the explicitly political content of the performance, Finley is using her platform as a performance artist to possibly make change within the art world.