Your cart is currently empty!
Category: z-Past Issues
-
Tristan Espinoza
Los Angeles Municipal GalleryPoetic, internal, observational and mysterious—all describe Tristan Espinoza’s “Index, Interiors,” currently on display at the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery. Both inscrutable and mesmerizing, Espinoza’s work uses the mediums of hand-made cyanotypes and AI, a fascinating combination of media that also includes augmented reality.
Surreal and delicate, perennial (2020), the work within “Index, Interiors,” takes the experience of surveillance and renders it into a lace-like latticework of diaphanous beauty. Paired with elliptical poetic phrases, the exhibition offers a site-specific web-based artwork, that serves as a personal and eternal history, one that shifts in patterns of white drifts like snow. The images move across and through a rich blue background, reminding the viewer of blueprints, only in this case they are blueprints to the soul.
There is a sense of both grace and unease in the images, which fits with how the artist describes them, as created while under self-imposed pandemic quarantine, seeing the world essentially through screens, viewing “place… as synthetic observation.” By identifying visuals as “a view of a mountain range in the water” and “a black and white photo of a giraffe,” Espinoza encourages the viewer to see each as linked, rather than disparate; connected as the body is to the earth, as the earth is to space, as the eye is to the camera.
Beyond that, the artist works to stimulate a conversation about what we as viewers are actually seeing. What are the relationships of one thing to another, one being, one observational tool? he asks. How are immediate images connected to memory? Along with an embedded, absorbing two-minute video, Espinoza’s cyanoptypes draw us to participate in these images, despite a physically closed gallery space.
The works are created from patterns of orange tree leaves, but by combining their intense and intimate detail with descriptive phrases, the artist indicates they represent something “other,” something that leads us to different or deeper layers of understanding along a journey through space and time. Espinoza references the way in which the citrus genus moved through the world until it came, via agricultural and labor-based migration, to California.
Just as the fruit trees themselves were dispersed here in 1493, and put down literal and metaphorical roots within California culture, so too did its growers, pickers and packers. The journey that the artist takes us on, through a wondrous and minute visual labyrinth that resembles many things beyond the empirical truth of the images, is richly representative of the journey of migrating humans, flora and fauna. We are all together in this world, the artist appears to say, a collective sum of its strange and closely observed parts, growing in experience.
-
Jessie Makinson
François GhebalyThese new paintings by Jessie Makinson are absolutely wild. From large-scale soiree tableaux to small-gathering social vignettes and intimate, symbolism-rich character portraits, her singular swirl of posh post-male society is both feral and fancy, cheeky and courtly, surreal and sophisticated. It’s tempting to get lost in their narratives; in fact, it’s impossible not to be seduced by the sinuous self-possession and lightly animalistic personalities of the women, the mannerism of their bodies, the weight of the atmosphere, the eccentricity of the architecture, and the unexplained ubiquity of seeded pretzels. But once you’re done solving these and other puzzles, there is also the matter of Makinson’s very fine and wide range of techniques —from convincing pointillism to whispers of translucent layering, to painterly, visibly worked quasi-impasto and patient, over-the-top passages of pattern and decoration.
The eponymous centerpiece of the exhibition is Something Vexes Thee? (all works 2020), a diptych, six-and-a-half by nearly 11 feet, which opens like a window onto an entire world. The pictorial space is neatly divided into interior, exterior and distant landscape components, with lawn and gravel pathways tipped toward the viewer like an invitation. She uses ingenious visual devices to slide the eye around the image—filigrees of robes, outstretched legs, curling tails (oh, yes, some of the women have long tails), stabs of sunlight, or hands offering snacks. The variation between settings gives Makinson a chance to flex all her painting muscles, so that the grounds, structures, furnishings, lavish textiles, sunlit far-off vistas, and most importantly the cliques and cohorts of the remarkable minglers is each rendered in a unique visual style. It’s amazing that the forces of gravity and light hold together across such a panoply, but in this and in each of the works, the scene possesses a sort of internal logic, a dream logic, in which it all makes perfect sense at the time.
Jessie Makinson. Better Days and Kinder Seas (2020). Photo by Paul Salveson, courtesy of the Artist, François Ghebalyand Lyles and King. In the context of the optical overstimulation, the proliferation of techniques helps mitigate the surrealism, giving another set of entry points into the works—form, style, surface and matter. In works like Better Days and Kinder Seas, Your Leafish Light, and Don’t Bite Anybody Else, smaller groups of women get more privacy. Whether clothed in fabrics, tattoos, or just the auras of their own adorned flesh, these women are comfortable in their skin, including the long tails, the pattern of wildcat fur, the feathers and flowers, the peaked elf ears. Their languid posture is not, or not always, sexual; it’s more that a rich sensuality defines the ambience, appropriate to the otherworldliness of the figures. Partly private and partly performative, the entirety of each room and story is exquisitely designed to arouse curiosity and desire—right down to the juicy peaches and the ostrich feather motif of the velvety drapes.
-
ON OUR COVER
March-April, 2021; Volume 15, issue 4See our feature on 8-bridges, an online art platform based in San Francisco, story by Barbara Morris. Get your copy today! Subscribe today!
Don’t Mess with Me by Jas Charanjiva in her studio. -
From the Editor
January-February 2021; Issue 3, Volume 15
Dear Reader,
I was going to start this letter with a Happy New Year! I should, right? It will be 2021 when this January/February issue comes out. We will have brought in the New Year, albeit with less fanfare than usual—it doesn’t take a soothsayer to predict that last year’s malaise will follow us into the New Year.
Yes, we have a new president and VP. I’m very happy about that, but they have their work cut out for them. The art world has its work cut out for itself too. In this issue, which we call Brave New Art World, we present a determined and adaptable art world with a relentless drive to seek answers and make new discoveries. Galleries closed? That hasn’t slowed down artists from making art; quite the contrary. This is the bravery that these working artists are displaying—they can’t be stopped.
There’s nothing like a tragedy to get the creative juices flowing. In these catastrophic times, the art world couldn’t be more alive. Artists are adapting to all the changes by utilizing social media and mobile art, or just holing up in their studios, away from the chaos, attempting to maintain their perspective, but still producing work. Artists naturally respond to their environments, whether it’s domestic strife or global mayhem.
Boldness, honesty and perseverance are the key ingredients of the Brave New Art World. Our cover artist Math Bass paints in a bold, vibrant way—familiar yet strikingly original. LA performer Dynasty Handbag defines bold in her idiosyncratic way. Her performances have been canceled, but she creates new opportunities for herself continually. Honesty and integrity are in abundance in contributor Kelly Rappleye’s story on Mara McCarthy of The Box gallery and Skid Row’s performing arts organization Los Angeles Poverty Department. Legal art columnist Stephen Goldberg addresses the machinations within museums that are struggling with ethical issues and responsibilities to their communities. Museums must strive for equality in their collections and employment, but not at the expense of ill-considered deaccession.
Clayton Campbell checks in with Monument Lab addressing the current trend of long overdue statue-removal. And when our columnist Zak Smith just wants to visit a museum, even a courtyard will do. There’s plenty more in this issue, proving once again the enduring vitality of the art world.
It’s been a tough year indeed; millions of people have died, millions are unemployed. (That’s millions, people!) We who read this letter are the lucky ones. I’m surprised Artillery has even survived throughout all this. In many ways we should look back on 2020 and be grateful for what we have now. Maybe I can squeeze in a Happy New Year after all, and let’s make the best of it, learn some valuable lessons and move on to a better, braver New Art World.
-
On Math Bass
“Got a Light?”If one wanted to be very art historical about it, Math Bass’ work resembles Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers (1875) with its beautiful detritus and bones and dust and longing bodies and skin-as-paint-as-floor and new life emerging from every crevice. The predecessor for both Bass and Caillebotte might be the darkly excessive and comical “unswept floor” mosaics by the Ancients, paintings of castaway fruit and bones to prove that you were rich enough to eat heartily. Yet the art historical always seems smug, paranoid, dissecting and penetrating in a non-consensual way. Art history relies on reductive biomorphism and it relies on an identity politics that has no room to dream, no lustful orifices that spew forth heretofore unimagined, tentacled shapes. Art history aims to fill all holes when those holes might prefer to remain agape or to be filled only with fluids and gasses. Art history hates bottoms.
One night, late one night, late, before dreaming, Math and I talked about Twin Peaks: The Return on the phone. We were both sad and queer that night, I think, queer and sad, queerly sad and sadly queer. For good reason and for reasons unknown, queers get sad pretty easily. I always think of Math now when I cruise through the curves and bumps of Mulholland Drive (the street) or Mulholland Drive (the film). My interactions with Bass always remind me that art is a necessary and reckless and activist and nostalgic and reclusive and spectacular and blithe and mysterious and denuded state of free association through the hills and valleys, lit only at times by brake lights and far-off lighthouses and swiftly tilting planets.
“Snakeskin Ring” (detail), 2021, Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles On that night, I told Math that they needed to watch episode eight of Twin Peaks: The Return, which features a monster in the form of a lumberjack or logger or some other manly profession. The monster always has a cigarette in his mouth and, before he crushes your skull, fists you even, he asks menacingly, “Got a light?” That there is an iconographic association here in that Math’s paintings sometimes involve smoke and cigarettes (and that every queer in LA, myself included, is air-quotes “quitting smoking”) is less important than the fact that with each cigarette, with each request for a light, there is still more detritus, still more floors to be swept by beautiful monochromatic housewives. Ash is blown into the wind or accidentally mashed onto a finger or intentionally driven into flesh. The butts that once housed said ash are wet and dry and featureless and painted like whores. The environmental toll these castaways have notwithstanding, we could more optimistically understand them as traces, as markers of touch or closeness or distance, as the paused, disintegrating frame between life and death.
“Not Yet Titled” (detail), 2020, Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles The trace and its concomitant longing are indicators of proximity. The smoking man in Twin Peaks: The Return begins far away. He infects the nondescript town via radio signals. Then he comes closer, as a monstrous amphibian that enters the mouth of an All-American girl while she sleeps. Sweeping may indeed be a part of her chores, and who knows if that will get done in the morning? It is a quaint rape like so many others we have seen before onscreen or on canvas. The smoking man’s desire for a cigarette is not just a non sequitur or a way to convince others that he is just a normal guy. It is an earnest need for connection (nobody does manage to produce that archetypal light, and that must be so sad). It is also a means of further spreading the leftovers, the ash of whatever evil drives him, burns him. Sympathy for monsters is a passé hallmark of modernism, yet it remains the quintessential way to relieve ourselves from the fear of being fundamentally anti-relational, or even evil.
“Newz!,” 2019, Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles Yet sympathy or empathy for the destructive thing or body are not the same as proximity. In Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, the impending end of mankind (via the ultimate end of proximity—the apocalyptic disintegration of Earth itself) is a source of fear for some and the only source of life for others. Surrounded by Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Earth and Melancholia swing past each other and loop back, getting closer and closer, just like the erotic anti-climax of the “Liebestod,”which throbs and throbs frustratingly until the very last second, until the very last drop of pigment or fascist cum. As Leo Bersani argues, the planets in Melancholia, not unlike Bass’ similarly cosmic Wizard-of-Oz-tornado of creatures and objects, become metaphors for the receptivity constantly being negotiated in the psychosexual sphere. What he means to say, I think, is that we are all, even the earth itself, bottoms at heart. We long to be the eye/hole of the storm, to be inside the cyclical conclusion of “Liebestod” or to take the vengeful and kind planet inside us so that we might expand to the point of exploding and producing a cloud of smoke, or we take our phallic cigarettes and ask that they be lit so that we might take pleasure in watching the flame engulf them, because we wish to do the engulfing; to be the generative void that pleasurably gobbles up everything, crushes things, creates fissures, bleeds, and places unexpected things next to each other or inside each other.
Math Bass, photo by Steven Taylor, 2019 A strained, stretched, widening, loosened metaphor, one that gives lights and receives them, might be the best way to describe Math Bass’ work. Yet metaphor is an easy interpretational mode that relies too heavily on iconography. Morever, description logo-centrically implies that all that is felt can be written or painted, that you actually can describe what bottoming is like to someone who has yet to do it. A simile might be better. In this moment, it seems more capacious. Bass’ work is like a ride on the Long Island Rail Road, winding through a certain kind of world, in which crushed skulls and young love happen simultaneously and often unnoticed, where aspiration and reality meet, where the Piano Man’s jar is filled up with cock-like bread, where hearts are broken and lose their three-dimensionality, only to unflatten at the sight of beautiful arms at work on a floor. And then, eventually, you reach the lighthouse, where the water crashes up against the shore, and there you lie, naked, hoping the droning illumination will project you into yet another narrow strip of land filled with memories.
-
Velvet Revolution: Yasmine Nasser Diaz
In visiting Yasmine Nasser Diaz’ show, “soft powers” at Ochi Projects, I had the rich pleasure of speaking with the artist about her process, intimate spaces and how soft powers are not only a cause for hope, but are—and always have been—a female superpower.
“Soft powers” is a breathtaking series of fiber etchings on velvet-patterned jewel tones, resplendent pearls, and ebonies—the images sourced from Diaz’ personal archive and collected from Yemeni-American girls she knew in her native Chicago. Diaz works with the images manipulating silkscreen stencils and then employs a burnout technique where the mixed-fiber material undergoes a chemical process to dissolve the cellulose fibers, revealing a semi-transparent pattern against the more solidly woven fabric. Burnout fabric—fashionable in the ‘90s—dates back to 19th-century France in Lyon, and served then as a less expensive, but still opulent, alternative to lace. Diaz explained that its proper name, devoré, is rooted in the French verb dévorer: to devour. As she detailed the intricate work of shaving tiny bits of velvet to trace the photographs, I felt the acute satisfaction found in redirecting destructive forces as an avenue toward beauty and preservation.
Yasmine Nasser Diaz, Say No To Drugs, 2020. Courtesy of Ochi Projects. Each work in “soft powers” is mysterious and alluring in its own right, offering the same pleasure in discovery one experiences thumbing through antique film negatives at a flea market. With the facial features scraped away and blanched out, the viewer seeks not to identify who the figure is, but what she is doing. The nature of the burnout velvet allows Diaz to favor outlines and shadows so that we are drawn toward the position of a girl’s hands resting on her lap, or the way she holds her best friend around the waist. If in the original photograph their cheeks were pressed together as they embraced, in the etching, their cheeks now appear to merge—the devoré fabric allowing sisterly care to look how it feels.
Yasmine Nasser Diaz, On Hold, 2020. Courtesy of Ochi Projects. Silkscreen stencils can conjure references to guerrilla art and punk rock, yet the use of velvet in the chosen color palette gives Diaz’ work an anachronistic charge. Burnout was not only popular in the ‘90s dELiA*s catalog, but used in dir’oo—a style of dress worn by engaged and married Yemeni women. Diaz explained that her mother was drawn to these shades in rich plums and burgundies, despite their colors not being traditionally found in Yemen; the jewel-toned palette speaks to hybrid culture in Diaz’ neighborhood, a mix of SWANA and Yemeni people. Although the shades undermine Yemeni authenticity, they clue us into the dynamism of third-culture identity.
Yasmine Nasser Diaz, Graduation Day, 2020. Courtesy of Ochi Projects. According to Diaz, “soft powers’” premise of “attraction rather than coercion”—is something innate to feminity. The term encompasses the cultural code-switching familiar to children of immigrant parents; it is never articulated that this is what you do, but is born from watching closely those around you. When Diaz stressed to me the importance of showing girls existing in their own spaces; that being in each other’s rooms afforded a retreat from the feeling of being hyper-surveilled and judged by family and the world, I realized it would be a misreading of her work to see these rooms as spaces of confinement; these are spaces where multiple identities can coexist and flourish. In these teen spaces, now nostalgic, where our friends felt like magical beings who might usher us into our next iteration, where the objects inside are imbued with emotion and experience, watching is reimagined. Close-looking occurs not to monitor and control the girls, but to delight in and celebrate them—girls look to each other and wonder at how she dresses, how she wears her hair, what tape is playing in the boom box. I told Diaz I felt she beautifully honored the “girl gaze”—the gawking impulse to admire, adore and document: Didn’t we all have an older girl who was a demigod to us? Who taught us how to dance? Who we’d mimic to the point of embarrassment? Diaz smiled and drew my attention to a tiny poster of the indie band Sebadoh in one of the works, explaining, “I kept that in the image because my sister was obsessed with them, and so, of course, I was too.”
Yasmine Diaz Portrait. Courtesy of Ochi Projects. Diaz’ etchings were born out of her collage practice; what began with wanting to incorporate fabric onto the collages soon became working entirely with the textile. While the allure of collage is in the snipping away of images to serve a precise and controlled impression, burnout is fussy and unpredictable. Once she’s begun the chemical process, she must work quickly, and despite her intention and precision with stenciling, “when I begin etching, I realize the velvet will do what the velvet wants to do,” she said.
Yasmine Nasser Diaz, Thick as Thieves, 2020. Courtesy of Ochi Projects. In my favorite piece in the show, three young women pose together for the camera. By the tilt of their heads, we know they are playful. Their bodies merge like a mountain range, the particulars of each arm trailing off, melting like amber. According to Diaz, the velvet did what it wanted, and she was pleasantly surprised with how it evolved. As we moved through the show, Yasmine would hold up her phone, using the flashlight function to illuminate the pieces. She was gracious and inviting, and when I looked where she did, the background textile would sparkle through the velvet that had been scraped away: a girl’s peasant blouse was now flecked with gold dust, a curlicue of a landline snaking down a breastbone appeared 3D, taking on the sensual pleasure of a shadow box
In trusting that the velvet will do what it will do, in going towards the spaces and women she loved, Yasmine Nasser Diaz offers us a retreat to a space where watching is not about surveillance, but about care, where we can be invited into feminine space and leave astonished.
-
The World Needs Dynasty Handbag
A Voice of Unreason for Uncertain TimesI sat down recently to chat with comedian, performer and artist Jibz Cameron over Zoom about—what else?—making art during a pandemic. Cameron’s stage persona and alter ego, Dynasty Handbag, has been giving vaudevillian performances that fly in the face of social boundaries and etiquette for over 15 years. In the Before Time, she hosted a monthly Weirdo Night at Zebulon in Los Angeles.
The variety show brought together disparate performers and comedians, all of them—you guessed it—Weirdos. Dynasty Handbag, resplendent in neon spandex and smeared lipstick, is the steady but irreverent leader of the weirdos. She comes on between acts to make fun of each of the performers. “I tie [each act] together, conceptually—in the wrong way. If something’s like, really heavy, I’ll come in, and I’ll be able to get everything on track again,” Cameron tells me.
Photo by Indra Dunis. But of course, 2020 flew at everyone, and Dynasty Handbag was no exception. She was only able to host one live Weirdo Night this year, in February. “Honestly, my pandemic fatigue started right away,” she says. “I went to the black hole immediately. I was really stressed about how I was going to make anything happen… I was very depressed because all the things I had been working towards were just canceled. I’m generally a pretty high-spirited person, except for when I’m not,” she laughs. “But I was a little bit shocked at how bleak my outlook was. Part of that was because it was just at the very apex of a bunch of big things that were happening for me.”
Not only did the pandemic take away Weirdo Night, it also hit Cameron at a high point in her work. March’s Weirdo Night had already been canceled because she was shooting her TV show Garbage Castle, which was picked up to air on FX.
Dynasty Handbag at “Weirdo Night” “We made the pilot, and it was great. Dynasty Handbag lives in a one-room SRO on top of a pile of trash. This dandy possum lives in the garbage bin in there… and Maria Bamford is in it. She’s the hippie landlord,” Cameron tells me. “They ordered four episodes. So, me and my writing partner, Amanda Verwey, went and wrote four scripts. We turned them in on a Friday and then the lockdown happened the next Monday. And we haven’t heard anything since. Not a peep.”
I don’t know that I have ever heard a more attractive pitch for a show. “It’s so good, if I do say so myself,” Cameron agrees excitedly. “We had this, like, Henson puppeteer [playing the dandy possum]… she came in and did her puppeting on set like a total fucking pro. We made this pilot, and they liked it a lot. It was super exciting that we sold it! Cuz, Dynasty Handbag is a hard sell. You know, you would think the world would be ready.”
Smiling Beth at “Weirdo Night” I do think the world would be ready, especially in 2020. But apparently not.
Nevertheless, Cameron hasn’t stopped working. She produced a virtual Weirdo Night, which is available to rent on Vimeo. “A lot of people I knew were really scrambling to make content and livestream,” she says. “People really needed to connect that way, and I definitely watched stuff that way. But I did not feel like jumping into that vortex.” After enduring months of the pandemic, in June or July, she started envisioning what the ideal way of continuing the performance series might be. “And lo and behold, with my lesbian spells,” she smiles, “in late July, [Zebulon] got in touch with me. They love Weirdo Night and are really supportive of me. They wanted to do it right. It was a four-camera shoot, and ultimately kind of a film. It was really fun. And, such a relief to talk to artists again.”
Dynasty Handbag at “Weirdo Night” How was it transitioning a performance meant for a live audience to video? “It’s really easy to be activated [when there’s a live audience],” she says. “So when I went out to do my opening monologue, I thought of it as kind of a late-night talk show. And man, I was stiff as a board, cause I had NO energy coming back at me. It took me a while for the gears to get going. And then I just performed for the camera people. There were entities there!”
What’s next for Dynasty Handbag? “I have no idea,” she sighs. She has made another live show to be performed in 2021, complete with live animation and a choose-your-own-adventure ending. “It’s based on the Titanic. You know, a giant, luxurious, gluttonous ship headed to destruction. It was topical when I came up with it two years ago, and now it just keeps piling on. Like, titans of industry, climate disaster, there’s material for days, you know?”
Dynastry Handbag, I Hate This Place I do know. “The main character is like Jack, but it’s a kind of nongendered octopus that’s escaping the warming waters and disguises itself as a giant lady’s hat. And then the Rose character is like… I haven’t quite figured out yet, actually. She’s either a cunty spoiled rich girl from the Upper East Side or she’s like a dowdy, I’m-never-going-to-be-married heiress who is the shame of her parents. And she finds this queer romance with this octopus.” And with the live animation? “It’s going to be wild. The sex scene is really good, because [the octopus] has eight arms and is doing all this work!”
The world needs Dynasty Handbag—the voice of unreason tying things together in our uncertain times. Otherwise, where are all the weirdos supposed to go?
Zoom glitches, and Cameron’s last few words run through several digital octaves. “Great glitch right at the end!” I say.
“Well,” she says, holding a tiny banana up to her ear, “I got another call coming in, that’s why.”
-
A Reckoning: Monument Lab, Joel Garcia, Ken Lum, and Paul Farber
Monument Lab, based in Philadelphia, and founded by curator Paul Farber and artist Ken Lum, is a public art and history studio whose moment has arrived. Defining monuments as “a statement of power and presence in public” they’ve intersected with the active national movement to remove monuments and statues that reflect the racist history of the United States. Their values reflect progressive antiracist, de-colonial, feminist, queer, working class, ecological, and social justice perspectives working to inform our understandings of U.S. history and its monuments. In just a few years they have expanded from local projects to having a national and international profile. They just received a $4 million grant as part of Mellon Foundation’s $250 million Monuments Project. Monument Lab’s grant will support the production of a definitive audit of the nation’s monuments. This will help identify the stories and narratives that have been ignored and do not exist in monument or memorial form. They will be opening ten field research offices, one of those offices may be in Los Angeles next year.
This past year has stretched our capacity to imagine what comes next, with the confluence of the pandemic, a heightened movement for racial justice, and an election with its caustic aftermath. Throughout we have seen offending statues and monuments pulled down around the United States as well as Europe. Questions are unresolved about how to contextualize these faded, flawed icons. While some want to see problematic statues reflective of our racist past disappear, others would prefer for them to stay, so long as placards and descriptive texts that contextualize and educate the public surround them. Beyond this however, how do we then begin to memorialize our country’s many ignored and suppressed histories in their place?
Ken Lum is the Artistic Director of Monument Lab, but also a prolific Canadian visual artist, writer, and teacher of Chinese descent. He has produced numerous powerful public works challenging established worldviews about how we see ourselves. Artist Hans Haacke says of Ken, “ Over many decades he has pointedly challenged ruling classes in many regions of the world, religious suppression, racism and other horrors. Driven by a deep sense of humanity, his engagement, backed by a wide knowledge of history and pertinent literature, is reflected in his thoughtful writings on art and life.”
Next year Ken will be having an exhibition at Royale Projects in Los Angeles. His new works are photo-based images screen-printed onto mirrors. They make a strong commentary about bias in our popular imagination, cultural legacy and received histories. At sizes up to 6 by 6 feet, works like Anna May Wong, Batista, or United States at Night, cover a range of his social justice concerns by looking at Asian American stereotypes, U.S. foreign interventions, and climate change.
Ken Lum, Anna May Wong, screen print on mirror, 6’ x 6’, 2020 Ken Lum, Batista, screen print on mirror, 6’ x 6’, 2020 Ken Lum, United States at Night, screen print on mirror, 6’ x 6’, 2020 I asked Ken what public art commission he would like to do in Los Angeles if asked. His response was immediate. “The Chinese Massacre. Do you know about it?” I did, in fact, know a little bit because there is a plaque about it in the sidewalk in front of the Chinese American Museum on Los Angeles Street in downtown LA. What I didn’t know was that Los Angeles Street was the original location of Chinatown in what had been named ‘Negro Alley’ after the dark skinned Spaniards who first lived there. It was also the red light saloon district where Chinese had been segregated to live. The plaque is all that marks the site of what is known as one of the worst mass lynchings in US history, a part of Los Angeles’ history. It corresponded with the rise of Nativism, as anti-immigrant hostilities boiled over in 1871 when a mob of Anglo and Hispanic people attacked, robbed, and hung 17 Chinese. This history was more or less erased when Chinatown was moved to its new location in 1938. The site of the massacre is now an off ramp of the 101 Freeway. Not long after the massacre the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was passed to maintain white “racial purity” and placate complaints that the Chinese were taking jobs. They comprised .002% of the population at the time. Why does this refrain sound all too familiar today? Over and over again Los Angeles has been an epicenter of anti-immigrant hostility, racism towards people of color, and the erasure of indigenous people. With dysfunctional immigration and homeless policies, we are in the midst of yet another chapter of a long and tortured history of abuse and neglect.
Chinese Massacre site, 1871, Los Angeles Historical Society archives In speaking with Paul Farber, who is a scholar, curator, and the Director of Monument Lab, one gets a clear sense of an organization driven by passion and forward movement. They have had numerous projects, and in particular Shaping the Past has been significant. The project facilitates a transnational exchange program bringing artists and activists together in dialogue to highlight ongoing critical memory interventions in sites and spaces in North America and Germany. It supports civic practitioners, artists, and activists who critically reimagine monuments and emerges from the ongoing Monument Lab Fellows program. These collaborations and conversations are seeking to offer innovative models for how we might memorialize the past, create dialogue, and strengthen democracy through public spaces across the globe.
https://monumentlab.com/projects/shaping-the-past
I wondered what happened after an offending monument comes down. When a statue is pulled off of its pedestal, does the question of what to put in a newly vacant town plaza become important to that site and community? Do we find meaning in leaving something behind, some kind of marker, or is it better to leave nothing at all?
Paul visited a site in Richmond, Virginia, where Gabriel Prosser, an enslaved blacksmith, was hanged after a failed rebellion in 1800. In a New Yorker article by Hua Hsu from September 15, 2020, Paul said, “When I arrived, I was deeply moved. I have visited numerous cities where empty pedestals were removed or cut off from public activity. In hindsight, it was a mistake to try to erase struggle. The deeper harms of racism were not addressed in those sites because there was no space or time to heal. In Richmond, it seemed the grassroots activists and artists changed the monument into something that reflects on the past and imagines it anew. A platform for truth, reckoning, and actual care.”
Joel Garcia has been deeply involved with indigenous issues and the removal of the Christopher Columbus statue in Los Angeles. This past April he was also part of the actions resulting in the toppling of the Father Junipero Serra statue. Joel is an artist, activist, and cultural worker whose practice intersects with the national movement to remove monuments that reflect the racist history of the United States. He is the former Co-Director of Self Help Graphics and has worked in and around Los Angeles for a long time. In 2019 he was a Fellow in Monument Lab’s Shaping the Past project.
Joel Garcia, United for Stolen Lives, 2020
On October 22, United for Stolen Lives, myself and youth from East LA helped convert the steps of City Hall in Los Angeles into an altar commemorating the 650+ lives killed by the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department.Recently, there has been some strong push back from the Catholic Archdiocese over the numerous Serra statues that have been pulled down throughout California. This contrasts to longstanding opposition of the presence of the Serra memorials and the Mission history narrative about Serra’s benevolence towards the native population. We spoke about this and other issues related to his activist practice, monuments, and his concerns.
Clayton Campbell: Let me start with your work around the Junipero Serra statue. Serra was canonized in 2015 by Pope Francis. It seems this is consistent with Catholic teaching despite long standing opposition by native people and now a broad array of the public. The Catholic Church has said of the toppling of the Serra statues “evil has made itself present here.” Yesterday, October 20th in San Francisco, Archbishop Cordileone performed an exorcism rite at the Mission San Rafael and called the statue’s destruction “an act of blasphemy.” He also did this in Golden Gate Park in June. Archbishop Cordileone decried the “mob rule” that led to the statue of the saint being “mindlessly defaced and toppled by a small, violent mob.” He must feel the same way about what happened here in Los Angeles.
Can you tell me what is going on in LA now that the statue is down? The Los Angeles Archdiocese is the biggest in the US. Where do they stand? Can the Catholic Church be a progressive force in retelling the history of California? Is the Church moving in the opposite direction of efforts such as San Francisco’s school district to rename schools inappropriately named after Serra?
Joel Garcia: Initially, the Archdiocese was pressuring the Mayor to reinstall the toppled statue, and then it was trying to get the city to gift it to them. Rather than seek dialogue they’ve dug in and remain committed to their own narrative. Even when the Columbus Statue was in process of being removed the LA County Department of Arts & Culture had offered the statue to the Archdiocese and they initially accepted the gift but had to back out because they had recently a new set of protocols with the First Nations of Los Angeles.
“Consultation to take place with local tribal or band leaders in order to assure accuracy in the presentation of cultural and historical displays relating to Native Americans at the missions, parishes and schools within the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.”
The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has proven over and over that it can’t be trusted and because they do have a small constituency of members that are Indigenous to California, they act as if that this is an out for them. That they don’t have to be accountable; but they do.
CC: What is next with this project? Is an empty pedestal more powerful after the act of removal? Is there a time limit to the cultural memory around this? Has something else taken its place to revalue this contested site with a different story, perhaps the one the community wants to tell? Will it last; does it need to be maintained to be “alive” and understood?
JG: Until the land is returned to the First Peoples of Los Angeles, it will be a contested site. At the moment there are efforts to ensure that there is an accurate and equitable representation at El Pueblo Monument aka Placita Olvera. For the moment, that empty pedestal does resonate in a bigger way than removing it outright. As with the Columbus Statue, it is important that the city removes that in partnership with the Indigenous community of Los Angeles and dedicate resources to authentically represent what has happened here in LA.
For the time being the community, those that were there during the toppling and others have started to use that park more consistently with relation to issues concerning Native/Indigenous folks. It is good to also see that the management team of El Pueblo Monument also desires an accurate narrative of LA’s history and more equitable resources to make that possible.
So by removing the statue, it has opened up space for more constructive dialogue with the city but it needs to be consistent and it can’t always be because the community needs to topple something in order to be heard.
CC: How do you change the narrative in K-12 education about something like the Mission history in CA? Can new monuments and memorials jumpstart this process?
JG: New monuments and memorials can definitely change the way K-12 education around the Mission System is currently offered to students. Cindi Alvitre, a Tongva member and professor at CSULB just released a children’s book about one of their creation stories. Her alongside some colleagues at CSULB were also selected to offer programming through a project I designed in partnership with the LA County Department of Arts & Culture, titled “Memory and Futurity in Yaangna” where they will offer a VR experience about Puvuungna, a site of origin for many California Indigenous Peoples. In addition to that program, Mercedes Dorame, a Tongva artist will install a temporary monument at Grand Park as well. Both of these efforts are ways in which we shift that current educational model. On Indigenous Peoples Day, Cindi led a reading of her book for families and this was sponsored by Los Angeles County Library. These programs came as a direct result of the Columbus Statue being removed.
https://heydaybooks.com/waaaka/
CC: I paraphrase, but you said in a conversation with Paul Holdengraber (Executive Director of Onassis Foundation, LA), that LA is a segregated city. It seems to me that LA is indeed comprised of so many different communities with so many untold stories, often quite separate, that I wonder how do you break down these barriers, how do we move forward together? Are monuments and memorials of unification and celebration possible right now? If not, what has to happen to make them possible? What might they look like if they are?
JG: The early ‘00s had such a unique overlap of communities that came together through the music and art scene and it was a direct result of the ‘92 Uprising here in LA and the ‘94 uprising by the Zapatistas, but that dissipated because of a lack of understanding of what is widely now known by many as intersectionality. That wasn’t a framework many understood back then. That is a concept that needs to be understood by the everyday person, by my mom, my uncle, etc. But outlets like social media have offered youth such a sophisticated understanding of race, gender, class, Indigeneity, etc. that new monuments and memorials, not crafted under a European influence, can bring communities together.
At the toppling of the Serra Statue, present were members of the Black, Armenian, Puerto Rican, Chicana/o, Phillipino communities among others alongside Native/Indigenous folks. This accurate representation of history isn’t simply important to us Native/Indigenous folks but to many other communities as well, because if as a city we are willing to be dishonest about our history, what else are we willing to be dishonest about?
Joel Garcia, Toppling A Statue At Olvera, 2020
June 20th (Summer Solstice) toppling of the Serra statue at Olvera. Seconds later, youth claim the statue and the pedestal, begin covering it with flowers, fruits, and other items and reclaim the space.Joel Garcia, Toppling A Statue At Olvera 2, 2020 
Joel Garcia, Empty Site and Pedestal, 2020
September 22 (Fall Equinox) members of the Native/Indigenous community of Los Angeles repurposed the site and pedestal where the Serra statue stood and converted into a site of ceremony and reclamation using prayer flags. These same collared ribbons were also used to obscure the plaques recounting the inaccurate history of Los Angeles.Joel Garcia, Native/Indigenous community of Los Angeles repurposed the site and pedestal, 2020
September 22 (Fall Equinox) members of the Native/Indigenous community of Los Angeles repurposed the site and pedestal where the Serra statue stood and converted into a site of ceremony and reclamation using prayer flags.CC: It seems that indigenous people, almost decimated in CA, have not had the power to keep their histories from being written by others. If money were no object, etc. what are the 2 or 3 stories (or just the one story) you would like to make as monuments in Los Angeles? And what shape might they take, what would their location be?
JG: As part of Shaping The Past a partnership between Monument Lab, the Goethe-Institut, and the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (German Federal Agency for Civic Education/bpb), this is a conversation we had on Indigenous Peoples Day (to be broadcasted soon) with Cindi Alvitre and Guadalupe Rosales of Veteranas & Rucas, and I feel I am not the best person to offer such suggestions as California is not my ancestral homeland, but I can share what Cindi offered up, and she and others would like to see their ways of memorializing their ancestors with “Ancestor Poles” be visible within the city. Maybe a field with a hundred ancestor poles. In order to reconcile with our past here, we have to make space to honor what we destroyed in order to have this city. Some possible sites could be Olvera, the California State Park along Alameda, Grand Park, for example.
https://www.instagram.com/veteranas_and_rucas/
CC: Monument Lab is planning future work on the West Coast with its audit of monuments, maybe setting up field offices on the West Coast, and an exhibition of the Shaping the Past project you are a 2019 Fellow in. Can you give me a preview of this exhibition for Artillery’s readers?
JG: Part of this work has begun already as on the Fall Equinox we took over the site where the Serra Statue was and converted it. We changed the aesthetic of the place by simply using ribbons as you saw during the interview with Paul for Counter Memories. Because of COVID safety guidelines, we’ll be doing most of this work outdoors changing the way some of these places feel and look like to infuse them with ways of memorialization by Indigenous folks. For example, on November 2nd in East Los Angeles, we will be installing altars at 15+ sites where our community members were killed by the Sheriffs, and that’s just in the last 4 years, just in the East LA area.
But this work will also come in the form of the DIY culture prevalent in the Punk scene I grew up with, with some zines on how to do this work alongside the community.
CC: What work are you doing now and in the next year or two around the themes of monuments in the context of your overall practice as an activist and artist?
JG: Much of the work that exists at the moment around monuments is not sexy at all, it is mostly about shifting existing policies and funding streams to create truly equitable opportunities for marginalized and targeted communities to be represented, specifically the First Peoples of this city. I approach this work as an artist, as a hacker, finding loopholes to do things now and identifying current restrictions that need to change to be better reflect where we are now as a society.
And as an activist, I have to also keep a pulse on what the moment is feeling like. The Serra Statue was something many folks for decades attempted to remove but it was also recognizing the “Go” moment at the time to just get it done. But not recklessly either as it was meticulously planned, recognizing the legalistic realities of a toppling, and ensuring people’s safety as we had families present.
As an artist, you create big moments to uplift underrepresented voices and similar to the 2018 Banner Drop at the World Series in support of the Trans Community, we would probably be doing something just as big again during this World Series, so keep an eye out.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/world-series-trans-pride-banner-drop-translatina-coalition
At this writing, we are in the aftermath of a contested Presidential election. The challenges ahead do not suggest collective acceptance of cultural narratives that can be easily agreed upon. How artists and creators like Joel Garcia, Ken Lum, and Paul Farber (along with their socially engaged colleagues who collaborate with new organizations like Monument Lab) go forward from here may tell us a lot in the next few years about our social and political destiny. It seems the necessity to speak truth to power by our artists and creative organizations is more important than ever before. Can artists contribute to activating a transcendent, collective healing and reconciliation? Will their memorials and monuments, whatever shape they take, be reminders of when we as a country authentically embraced a willingness to listen to each other without judgment? Is that our mandate, what must be accomplished, if our new and yet unrealized monuments are to endow future generations with wisdom, celebration, and truth?
Joel Garcia, Translatinal Coalition Banner Drop, 2018
On October 28, 2018, the Joel and the TransLatin@ Coalition, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that advocates for the specific needs of the TransLatin@ community in the U.S., unfurled a large banner reading “Trans People Deserve to Live” over the upper deck of left field during the game’s fifth inning. -
Finding a Place (for art) in Skid Row
The LA Poverty Department and The Box GalleryThe Skid Row neighborhood of Downtown Los Angeles remains emblematic of the city’s ongoing epidemic of housing deprivation. More than 66,400 people were estimated to wake up each morning without stable housing in LA County as of LA Homeless Services Authority’s annual January count—even before the disastrous economic effects of COVID. While city officials call this recent wave a crisis, Angelenos are beginning to wonder if homelessness should be considered endemic to the core functioning of the city, rather than a recent anomaly. The glaring disparity in conditions of life for LA’s wealthy property owners and its impoverished, unhoused residents has been a recurring and increasing “crisis” since the 1980s. In fact, Skid Row has been a focal political flashpoint since the 1930s and remains the site of recurring experiments in urban planning. Yet, such attempts to target or contain city municipal services and social services have failed to provide the most essential need to the working class—housing.
Installation views: Los Angeles Poverty Department’s State of Incarceration, 2010, The Box, Los Angeles. (Images courtesy of The Box gallery e-mail newsletter) Bordering Skid Row is LA’s acclaimed Arts District, where a period of extreme gentrification ushered in upscale venues, thriving breweries, an influx of wealthy, loft-dwelling homeowners and skyrocketing rents, along with 12 leading commercial art galleries. The convergence of urban gentrification, art production, and LA’s “homeless crisis” in this area starkly illuminates the paradoxes of contemporary art, where radical artistic content is beset by the extractive gallery system. Cashing in on the cultural capital of the “art world” has been integral to developer and real-estate interests that have completely transformed Downtown LA, and brought immense pressure and heightened policing to Skid Row’s unhoused residents.
I spoke with an Arts’ District mainstay, The Box gallery, and a Skid Row performing arts organization, the Los Angeles Poverty Department (also known by its cheeky acronym LAPD), to understand how an art space can bring its unhoused neighbors into the gallery space, physically and virtually.
Installation Images: Skid Row History Museum at The Box, 2008. Images courtesy of LA Poverty Department. (Images courtesy of The Box gallery e-mail newsletter) Since 1986, LAPD has amplified the voices of Skid Row residents through performances and public art projects that form a counternarrative to the handwringing tragedy-porn espoused by liberals and right-wingers alike about Skid Row and its inhabitants. LAPD’s founder John Malpede was one of the first performance artists to work primarily with homeless actors, writers and participants. The mission is simple, yet profound: to share the concerns, needs, dreams and stories of Skid Row community members, in their own words.
The supportive and experimental relationship between LA Poverty Department and The Box’s founder and curator Mara McCarthy began in 2008 with the “Skid Row History Museum” exhibition at The Box’s former Chinatown location a few miles north of Skid Row, which hosted a flurry of participatory events, performances and musical acts, alongside an exhibition of archival material on Skid Row’s largely untold community history.
Installation Images: Skid Row History Museum at The Box, 2008. Images courtesy of LA Poverty Department. (Images courtesy of The Box gallery e-mail newsletter) LAPD’s Associate Director Henriette Brouwers fondly remembered the lively crowds when Skid Row came to The Box, with people hanging out of the windows for live performances, and crowds from all walks of life sharing a recognition of Skid Row beyond the dire conditions of American poverty. This vibrant exhibition demonstrated to Brouwers and Malpede the importance of having a physical art space to gather and exchange knowledge and care within the community, for the community.
They went on to create this space in 2015, opening the Skid Row History Museum & Archive, now located at 250 South Broadway. The space hosts performances, exhibitions and the Skid Row History archives, along with numerous ongoing community-led artistic and archival projects.
Installation Images: Skid Row History Museum at The Box, 2008. Images courtesy of LA Poverty Department. (Images courtesy of The Box gallery e-mail newsletter) Over LA’s lockdown summer of 2020, McCarthy saw an opportunity to highlight her gallery’s history with the LA Poverty Department through a digital campaign for gallery audiences stuck at home. The Box’s email newsletter series shared images and material from the 2010 “State of Incarceration” exhibition and performance series with LAPD that focused on the urgent issue of California’s prison overcrowding. The exhibition filled The Box with large, steel prison beds (paid for by the CBS soap opera, The Bold and the Beautiful in a quintessentially LA moment), where LAPD actors sat and rehearsed scripts developed from their lived experiences in prison. Brouwers recalled the unique interchange that occurred when gallery attendees, unlike the usual theater patrons, observed quietly and patiently. This allowed for a generative silence to develop as they occupied the prison beds together, mimicking the long silences and boredom of life on the “inside”, in a profound moment of non-theatrical performance.
Los Angeles Poverty Department, Walk the Talk parade/performance. Top image photographer: Austin Hines. Bottom image photographer: KCRW’s Avishay Artsy, 2012. Images courtesy of LA Poverty Department. (Images courtesy of The Box gallery e-mail newsletter) The exploratory projects between The Box gallery and LAPD provide a poignant example of how art spaces can create meaning with their communities. McCarthy reflected on her motivations to defy the social enclosures of the commercial art world by opening her space as a resource to LAPD, in the simple acknowledgment that the Arts District and Skid Row are part of the same Downtown community and need to learn how to act accordingly, and respect each other as neighbors.
Screenshot of LAPoverty Department website, Walk the Talk digital archive. Website created by artist / technologist Rob Ochshorn. Permission granted from The Box gallery. (Images courtesy of The Box gallery e-mail newsletter) Throughout June and July, @theboxla celebrated the LAPD’s newly digitized “Walk the Talk” Archive, with short video excerpts from the archive’s nearly 70 hours of interviews with local heroes, activists and important figures who lived, worked and sometimes experienced homelessness in the Skid Row community since the 1980s. LAPD’s “Walk the Talk” began in 2008 with plans to create a Skid Row Walk of Fame to publicly hail unsung community leaders of Skid Row, complete with sidewalk plaque-stars mirroring the Hollywood Walk of Fame. They gathered the life stories of chosen local icons from transcribed interviews, which later provided scripts for a series of public performances. Years of bureaucratic barriers evolved the sidewalk project into a bi-annual “Walk the Talk” neighborhood march, inaugurated in 2012 with three days of boisterous marchers filling the streets of Downtown and Skid Row, performing these narratives. The digitization of this archive was finally completed this year by software designer Rob Ochshorn, providing an invaluable resource for a people’s history of Skid Row. The archival interviews capture the ingenuity, grit, and unfathomable strength of daily survival on the streets of Los Angeles, along with the truly affecting grace and wisdom of its dwellers.
The “Walk the Talk” digital archive interview series can be found on the LAPD website (lapovertydept.org) and @LApovertydepartment, and video highlights remain on The Box gallery’s Instagram, @theboxla.
-
SHOPTALK
SoCal Museum News, Pantone Color of the Year, and more.SoCal’s Museums
Museums have been shut down (again), which doesn’t effect the city of Los Angeles too much as museums weren’t reopened except for a very short week or so. Neither LACMA nor the Hammer ever reopened after mid-March shutdowns and, alas, the Hammer-Huntington’s joint exhibition “Made in L.A. 2020” (reviewed in this issue) is languishing in their galleries.
Pomona College’s Benton Museum of Art, in a brand new $44 million building, was supposed to open this fall, but COVID postponed that plan. The three opening exhibitions are installed, however, and after months of planning and re-planning, I finally made it in for a visit. It’s a simple, contemporary building organized around a courtyard that opens on one side to the street. In one corner of the courtyard is a commissioned bronze sculpture by one of LA’s most celebrated artists, Alison Saar. The 12-foot-tall Imbue (2020) depicts Yemoja, West African deity of the waters and mother of all living things, a protector of women and children. She stands with a series of buckets and water containers on her head, while pouring out a stream of water from a pail. As typical of Saar’s oeuvre, the figure is strong and bold, a force to be reckoned with.
Inside, the exhibition space is twice the size of the old building’s, and the flow from gallery to gallery feels a lot more comfortable. Two galleries display “Of Aether and Earthe,” an exhibition of Saar’s sculpture and installation, as well as drawing and painting. The show is thematically woven around the elements of water and earth, says senior curator Rebecca McGrew. (A parallel exhibition will open at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena in 2021.) It is arguably the best installation of Saar’s work I’ve ever seen, with the 3D work very beautifully laid out and lit, thanks to exhibition designer Gary Murphy.
One sculpture that’s especially memorable is Breach (2016) which shows an African American woman poling through imagined waters—on her head is balanced her worldly possessions, a stack of trunks, a chair, a barrel, and several pails. There’s something about trying to balance all those things atop a human frame that feels both daunting and also very heroic. Breach was inspired by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, with its echo in Hurricane Katrina and its disastrous aftermath.
Other inaugural shows at the Benton are a selection of Alia Ali’s work and a look at what Pomona College holds in its own collection – quite surprising, ranging from Renaissance painting to contemporary ceramics. Ali’s photomontage work is in the reception area and corridor and her video installation in a special gallery. McGrew says they will continue to show contemporary and historical exhibitions as before, although “We hope to showcase our collection more, it’s been an underutilized resource.” For more information and projected opening date, check out their website: https://www.pomona.edu/museum.
New Year; New Color
Somber reflection and bright optimism are the watchwords as we look to the New Year. There will no New Year’s Eve bashes, no Rose Bowl Parade, no January 1 potlucks, but maybe we will raise a toast in small RL gatherings or on Zoom, as some of us mourn the untimely passing of friends and family. Those two sentiments, somber reflection and bright optimism, are signaled in the very choice(s) of 2021’s “Color of the Year” by the Pantone Color Institute.
Probably better known to designers than artists, the organization helps set a theme color for each year, although this year they’ve chosen two—PANTONE 17-5104 Ultimate Gray and PANTONE 13-0647 Illuminating. Ultimate Gray is a medium-dark, warm gray, neutral but serious, and Illuminating is a lemony yellow. “The selection of two independent colors highlight how different elements come together to express a message of strength and hopefulness that is both enduring and uplifting,” said Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, in a press release, “conveying the idea that it’s not about one color or one person, it’s about more than one.”
Yes, the decision was made with COVID and politics under consideration. “We know we’re living in an unusual time,” said the Institute’s Vice President Laurie Pressman in a TIME magazine interview: “Whether it’s about the pandemic or the uprisings around the world, we’re trying to imagine the future as we move into this very different time.” Since that announcement, our first COVID vaccine has been approved by the FDA, and the Electoral College has declared Joe Biden the next president of the United States, both very good news.
Gallery Glimpses
Kirsten Deirup, Oracle, 2020, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in, photo by Jacob Vasa. Here are a couple shows I thought especially good on my recent (limited) rounds. One was “Kirsten Dierup: Remote View” (through Jan. 2) at De Boer Gallery, south of downtown LA. Deirup’s paintings of various women’s shoes in Surrealistic landscapes are kicky and imaginative. A lime green stiletto poses in the midst of a gnarled forest clearing in Oracle, a platform shoe sits in the soupy stew of Swamp Pump. The gallery is small but choice—be sure to ring and arrange your visit before going.
One of the best shows of the year has to be Mark Steven Greenfield’s, “Black Madonna” which just closed at William Turner Gallery. His small paintings are jewels of artistic insurrection, with a format appropriated from Renaissance devotional paintings featuring Mary cradling the baby Jesus. Except now both mother and Jesus are African American figures, with updated backgrounds of Confederate statues being pulled down in public spaces or a hooded Ku Klux Klansman being burned at the stake. These works are exquisitely painted and reinterpreted. They suggest that, yes, we can remake history by reimagining it.
So here’s to remaking history in 2021—first we imagined the change, now we will live it. Happy 2021, in all its solemnity and hope!
-
Decoder
Just Give Me the MinimumI don’t want to paint anymore.
I want to go to a big gallery or a museum. It doesn’t even need a roof anymore—I would go to a courtyard at this point.
Not a nice one, necessarily; it can have one end open to a field of that grass that precedes that kind of boring line of trees that screens an exurban stretch of one-car-per-three-minutes interstate.
It can have the interstate, even, if it’s just not too many cars too often.
I just need weather warm enough that I don’t have to move around to keep warm. It can be gray, I’m alright with that and even alright with the other three sides of the courtyard having institutional baked-brick facades, like a junior high.
I won’t need a bench and I don’t even mind the courtyard having other visitors, as long as they didn’t ask why I was laying on my back in my fall coat on concrete flagstones that have that awful sesame-candy texture and the big gaps between. Just as long as they walked at a respectful distance and assumed I was eccentric. It would be nice if there weren’t ants.
I’m okay with the courtyard having one of those metal sculptures, like the frame inside a globe finished wrong or not finished, with some of the welds sanded down into silver all scrabbly. Where just by looking at the texture of the steel you can hear the iron squawk of someone installing it who doesn’t care.
I’d also let there be one of those late-Surrealist things that’s like a little over man-height with a man-face implied or half-carved at the top like a humorless chess piece, with those lidded deathmask-eyes.
Even one of those mosaics where everyone looks like earthenware and has robes—yes I am saying I would even look at Byzantine art at this point.
I don’t want to be presumptuous, in these desperate days, where push and shove have come together. When people are dying. When all-else did fail.
But… if I am allowed requests:
Something all-yellow would be nice. Like a nice Yayoi-Kusama-yellow. To put that cartoon-light up against the paleness of the real sun and sunlight. A lemony-candy-colored thing to see would be nice. If you could.
A St. George painting from the Middle Ages or northern Renaissance, with a real slippery-looking dragon, darker and more detailed than the rest of the picture. I like to look at St. George’s face as he slays it, and contemplate his expression. I’ve always liked that. Princess optional.
Something very mechanical, where I can see the little parts. They don’t have to move.
Something involving lots of details or angles from which to view it—where you have to look at it for a long time to feel sure you took it all in.
If possible I would like to avoid anything that looked or felt chalky or featured a newspaper photo with some clear or blurry newsprint text. I think each newspapery or chalky thing would count as an anti-thing which needed a new extra good thing to counterbalance it.
But I’m not entirely sure, at this point, that I’d need to see anything good there at all. Just: a lot. Or, okay, even, just five things. Five things in a bad courtyard would be okay.
I just want to lie there, somewhere, listening to the sky noise in a forgettable mid-day (maybe hear the overhead crackle of a passenger jet once in a while), someplace that might tolerably be described as “far away” from familiar places, feeling my nerves un-knot and open out into awareness of the knowledge that I am surrounded by persistent, physical human endeavors, undertaken by other, now-absent lone consciousnesses who had the intent of inventing for the world something not broadcasting 24-7 that I needed them or they needed me.
I wouldn’t need more than half an hour, I don’t think. Just to bathe in the luxury of being not-quite-alone but still not messaged-at.
I’m afraid liking art is a little selfish: to want to be in the presence of the content of the human without the pressing need and mutual obligation the presence of the real human must imply. Just for a bit. It’s been so long.
Just give me the minimum. A cafeteria roll, an overpriced flask of vitamin water, some other distant and ostensible art lover with a leather bracelet going “Hmm!” and nodding at their partner or spouse. A guard or dealer who can only look as if they are stoically suppressing physical pain at the sight of having to allow non-collectors near the work. A bored desk assistant in a custom-built pressure-treated wood cubicle whose surveilling head conceals plans about after-work drinking, lazily generous takes on this month’s Things, or both.
Just one more time before I die I want to just be near something that was arguably trying, near objects unnecessary and at least semi-mysterious.
-
Art Brief
The Art World Gets Woke, Part IIIn last issue’s column I discussed the influence of the Woke movement in shaking up stodgy art museums to diversify their staff and fill gaps in their collections caused by decades of turning a blind eye to artwork made by minorities and women. Sure enough, a backlash emerged causing chaos to engulf the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), which had one of the broadest diversity plans. Additional controversy erupted around the postponement of the Philip Guston retrospective that planned to spotlight his Ku Klux Klan parody artworks.
Last spring’s Black Lives Matter movement lit a fire under museum directors and boards of trustees in several cities, with The Met, the Guggenheim and SFMoMA announcing diversity programs. On November 23, The New York Times reported that The Met was appointing its first diversity officer in its long history—but only after a letter from the staff asked that the board recognize that the museum had “a deeply rooted logic of white supremacy and culture of systemic racism at our institution.” The City of New York also put pressure on The Met to diversify or lose public funding. The Met said it was setting aside $10 million to diversify its collection—a pittance, considering its large endowment.
Christopher Bedford, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art in front of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye in the museum’s ‘Generations’ exhibit. Photo by Matt Roth. The BMA’s art collection does not adequately reflect the contributions of minority and female artists to America’s art history—that Baltimore is 68% Black made these omissions even more egregious. BMA’s courageous director, Christopher Bedford, began diversifying its collection in 2018 by selling seven artworks to purchase works by minority artists and women. However, the museum’s October 2020 announcement that it intended to sell major works by Clyfford Still, Brice Marden and Andy Warhol’s important Last Supper (1986) at Sotheby’s November contemporary art auction brought howls of protest from the art establishment. Los Angeles Times’ art critic Christopher Knight, who has persistently opposed sales of works by museums to diversify collections, called BMA “the leading poster child for art collection carelessness.”
In local reaction, a number of former BMA trustees wrote a joint letter to Maryland’s attorney general demanding the sale be stopped, and two former board chairmen said they were withdrawing pledges totaling $50 million. In addition, two artist members of the board of trustees who are Black—Amy Sherald and Adam Pendleton—resigned amidst the turmoil.
Bedford announced that the sale of the three works would generate enough funds for BMA to offer free admission, pay staff higher wages and enable diversity and inclusion programs. BMA admitted that it had adequate funds to cover operations; therefore, the museum was violating Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) rules. The AAMD contacted the board and Bedford to object. As a result, BMA agreed to pull the three works just hours before the Sotheby’s auction was to take place. Bedford vowed that, nevertheless, his diversity initiatives would continue.
Meanwhile, another major controversy embroiled four art museums: the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.; London’s Tate Modern; and the Museums of Fine Arts of Boston and of Houston. The show, “Philip Guston Now” was supposed to open at the National Gallery in June, in the wake of the George Floyd protests, and travel to the other venues.
Philip Guston, The Three, 1970. Oil on Masonite. © Estate of Philip Guston. Photo: Harvard Art Museums, © President and Fellows of Harvard College. Philip Guston was an important abstract expressionist of the 1960s, who invented a unique style—self-caricatures accompanied by a personal lexicon composed of shoes, cigars and various household items—creating a mordant portrayal of his everyday existence.
The controversy concerned the museums’ intention to display a series of 24 paintings from the early ‘70s depicting hooded Klansmen as cartoon characters riding in convertibles, smoking cigars or walking through city streets in broad daylight—the banality of evil. Guston, who was a leftist concerned with civil rights, was clearly poking fun at the KKK.
However, the museums were fearful that the KKK paintings would be misconstrued and chickened out—postponing the show until 2024 (after blowback, including an open letter signed by dozens of artists, many of them Black, the museums agreed to curtail the postponement to 2022).
Many among the art cognoscenti wanted the show to go on, but the museums and their sponsors said that the Guston show needed to be “contextualized.” The museum establishment overreacted, sending a condescending message that its patrons are not perceptive enough to handle a parody ridiculing the KKK, and demonstrating that wokeness can sometimes go too far.
-
Fake Nudes
Alison Jackson’s “Truth is Dead”Artists can make the invisible become visible, but that doesn’t mean they have to. Photographers in particular find it necessary to provide visual confirmation of a chosen moment; in the case of some Pulitzer Prize winners, their captured image has become the official record of an event. But what’s most important is the assumption, particularly in news photographs, that the information presented is authentic. Unfortunately, that trust has been sullied by the biggest Postmodern hat trick of all: fake news.
“Truth is Dead,” 2020, at NeueHouse Hollywood, photos by Alison Jackson. Although ostensibly providing what she considers images necessary to parse current events, British photographer Alison Jackson seems more concerned with how to exploit a viewer’s fantasy concerning those events. For her NeueHouse exhibition, “Truth is Dead,” she photographed celebrity impersonators in farcical situations: doppelgängers of Lady Diana and other Royals are presented in unflattering poses, as is Donald Trump. But by the authority vested in her as an artist, she is somehow allowed and even praised for, as LA Times contributor Leah Ollman writes, “in the age of fake news …making fakes that become news.” In the same LA Times interview, Jackson claims that, “people are still wanting to believe the image more than anything. It doesn’t matter …that it’s not real.”
“Truth is Dead,” 2020, at NeueHouse Hollywood, photos by Alison Jackson. Ignoring such an important distinction makes it easier for people to believe that Jackson’s photographs, although not legit documentation, still accurately represent events that happened. After all, people are primed for it, for although they may shout God Save the Queen as loud as the next bloke, they secretly want to see how Queen Elizabeth II looks when stripped of her inviolability. If it takes a staged photo by Jackson to reassure people that the Queen shits like everyone else, so be it. The question is, however, whether or not that really needs to be seen.
Alison Jackson, “Royal Jewels,” 2020. In the art world, there is no sin greater than presenting a counterfeit work of art as one that is genuine; it’s an act that is legally considered criminal. But a work of art presenting a counterfeit event gets no such condemnation; in fact, grayheads will debate its finer qualities. This once again proves the disconnect between the art world and its secular equivalent, the world without art. Art is the only arena where something without usefulness becomes essential; plus, it’s a place where impersonators seem to represent what transpired far more accurately than the actual players.
“Truth is Dead,” 2020, at NeueHouse Hollywood, photos by Alison Jackson. For all her black leather and vaunted no-bullshit approach, Jackson still delivers art in a weirdly boring traditional manner; that is, as expected. Jackson’s work is obviously created to play into the anticipations of Trump detractors, and there’s plenty to incite their rage. But while reality has limits, fiction does not; so maybe instead of presenting Trump doing what we already believe him to have done, Jackson could show Trump doing something completely unexpected: like working in a soup kitchen or helping an old lady across the street. Now that would really prove truth is dead.
-
CODE ORANGE
Winner and Finalists for January-February 2021Congratulations to our winner Sarah Plenge and our finalists. Plenge’s photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery in the January/February online issue of Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists. Please see the info below on how to enter for our March/April 2021 online-only photography column Code Orange.
Sarah Plenge Dead Ewe At Dawn January 2020, Africa Film Photograph 
Maureen Vastardis, Election Eve November 2020 Prescott, AZ, Digital Photograph 
Cecilia Arana, Church 2020, iPhone 
Eve Wood, Today’s Real Estate, 2020 Riverside Drive Toluca Lake, Digital Photograph 
Eric Axene Mario, Albina & Jim September 23, 2020, Digital Capture, color Mario’s Italian Deli, Glendale, CA 
Molly Schulman, Uninvited Intervention—LACMA 2020, LACMA demolition site, Wilshire Blvd., Digital Photo 
Karen Constine, Covid LA – Day 149, August 15, 2020, LACMA, Digital Enhanced Color Infrared Photograph 
Isabelle Abbitt, “Ventucky”, 6/29/2020, Ventura California, Film (double-exposure) hand processed by me. 
Lillian Abel, Shadow Dance, 2016, Color iphone photograph ~ My garden behind my loft at the Santa Fe Art Colony, Los Angeles CA 
Carolyn Doucette, Smoke on the Water (California wildfire smoke as seen from Canada) September 2020 Pender Island, BC, Canada Digital Photo 
Yecenia E. Hernandez, Turn Left Ahead August 20th, 2019 Sequoia National Park, 35mm camera 
Diane Cockerill, God Grant Me December 2020 Downtown Los Angeles, Digital Photograph CODE ORANGE is a recently added Artillery feature; a web-based photography column and opportunity to have your work published in the magazine, curated by LA artist and photographer Laura London. Chosen entries will be published online in Artillery and finalists will appear online. CODE ORANGE is a documentary photography project and outlet for artists to express how they feel about the current state of the world.
Tumultuous times like ours have historically produced some of the most interesting, captivating, and timeless art; we hope to find and share similar works today. Images submitted should capture how our country and the world are affected by political, environmental change, social, personal, universal, identity issues. Photographs can be produced using a film or digital camera or smartphone. Black-and-white and or color images are accepted.
Twelve photos are selected by London, one winner and eleven finalists. They will appear on our website and in our weekly Gallery Rounds newsletter.
Good luck and we look forward to seeing your photographic submission!
DEADLINE for our March/April issue: February 19, 2021
Specifications for photo submissions:
• Only one photo per person
• FOR WEB: 72 dpi; 600 pixels wide. (hang onto your original large file in case you are selected for publication)
• Include: Artist Name, Title, Date, Place, and Medium (in that specific order)
• Email your photograph entry to lauralondon@artillerymag.com
-
Bunker Vision
SpookedFifty years ago, when the Manson murders were daily headline news, the reporting emphasized anything that might pass for “hippie behavior,” while playing down Manson’s intended goal to start a race war. The dog-whistling, race-based law and order tropes of politicians couldn’t have this degenerate agreeing with their we-don’t-say-it-out-loud messaging. Manson didn’t pull the idea out of thin air. He was just being honest about what his actual goals were. At just about any protest nowadays you are likely to see a gaggle of beige Gravy Seals waddling around with giant guns that they barely have the strength to lift. They are armed and ready for anything that doesn’t require too much physical exertion. So, who exactly was this war against?
In the late 1960s the Black community started to really get organized. The Black Panthers offered a visual flourish of paramilitary style that triggered the worst fears of the white hood set. In 1969 a novel by Sam Greenlee dealing with Black militancy finally found a publisher in the UK (after being rejected by numerous US publishers). In 1973 it was adapted into a film. Both were titled The Spook Who Sat By the Door. The titular “spook” was a double pun. It was a word that derogatorily referred to both Black people and spies. Although the film came out at the height of the Blaxploitation genre, it feels more professional than many films of that ilk. The filmmaker had spent five seasons (1965–71) as a cast member (the sole Black one) of Hogan’s Heroes.
“By the door” was code for placing a minority where they would be the first person that people saw when they visited your place of business. The plot concerns a call by higher-ups to integrate the CIA. The head honchos of the CIA (crackers in polyester) recruit a number of Black men and devise a training program so rigorous that nobody can pass it. With each round of eliminations, one small unassuming man in glasses survives. He refuses to join parties, and toes the line so completely that the others start calling him an Uncle Tom. His humble demeanor causes the bosses to actually be happy that somebody survived, to sit by the door. He is given a really fancy title that translates to “photocopy machine operator,” where he continues to build his data base of knowledge. When politicians come to visit, he is tasked with giving them the tour. He is the perfect token.
Then he quits to pursue “social work.” This social work turns out to consist of teaching his fellow community members everything he learned at the CIA. The community is portrayed much like the Black Panther communities in a best case scenario. They employ some Oceans Eleven–level subterfuge to appropriate a giant cache of weapons. The movie ends with well-trained and well-armed Black militias staging the first volleys of a race war in every major US city.
Bowing to government pressure, the film was buried by the studio, until somebody decided to give it a DVD release in the mid-aughts. The negative was found in a mislabeled film can. It is now available on DVD and a full version often turns up on YouTube. This year it was featured as a revival selection at the NY Film Festival. Given how well this film has aged, its second life is well deserved.
