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Category: reviews
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JJ PEET
JJ PEET’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles is a well-installed show that offers a beguiling look at the New York-based artist’s practice. Three sculptural works from the “Floating Heads” series (2012-13) are sparingly placed in the darkened main gallery, accompanied by a stop-animation video Psych_UP Animation (2006-ongoing) projected against one wall. All of these pieces are assemblage works, making intricate and involved use of both found and made objects. The sculptures hang from the ceiling—inverted, dystopic versions of classic sculptures that sit on pedestals on the floor—while the lively animation spools through an endless parade of random objects moving to and fro. All the works have a dark, steampunk aesthetic and are well composed, intriguing in their odd juxtapositions of things like burnished steel columns, clunky ceramic doughnuts, discarded coffee cups, buttons, a brown paper bag, work gloves, a petrified lime, and so on.
There are of course narratives and historical frameworks that accompany PEET’s production. For example, the animations are never-finished, never-ending compendiums of all the footage ever taken by him, and the sculptures are conceived of as idea clusters or personalities, with each one having a designated “brain” component. In addition to commenting on the history of sculpture, the assemblages also comment on the history of ceramics—PEET is a master ceramicist, and he usually includes perfect porcelain pieces in the sculptures, which as he points out, will last longer than any of the other components, including the mild steel bases.
It might be most illuminating, however, to consider PEET’s work through the historical lens of assemblage. Looking at the “old masters” of the genre—postwar mavericks like Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell and George Herms—we see a rugged individualism at work, with the artists struggling to wrest meaning and magic out of the debris of modern life; there is a concentrated heaviness to these works that lasts to this day. In contrast, younger artists of the current boom in assemblage works—as seen in such recent LA shows as “Voluntary Sculptures” at LM Projects featuring David Gilbert, Charlott Markus, Ian Pedigo and Kathrin Sonntag, and “Weird Walks Into a Room (Comma)” by Lisa Williamson and Sarah Conaway at The Box—make much lighter use of the overwhelming plenitude of disposable objects, both found and made, that crowd our postmodern existence. This generation seems to simply accept the fact that we live in a vast, incomprehensible world of random things that may or may not carry degrees of fluctuating meaning; they freely construct floating, open-ended worlds out of these items.
While PEET’s work is charming and smart and certainly well executed, it also seems to exist in a closed loop of its own making. His practice feels like a busy factory dedicated to making approved contemporary art. There are good references and conclusions here, but ironically, there are no messy ends. Thus, while we may be delighted on a formal and aesthetic level, we are ultimately left craving a way forward and a reason to stay intrigued over the long haul.
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LONDON CALLING
The contemporary German artist Rosemarie Trockel, calls her current exhibition: “A Cosmos.” It’s a bold claim to announce that you have created a universe (though the title does take the indefinite article as opposed to the definite). Pre-Socratic thinkers used the word kosmos to signify “order,” though for us moderns it has come to mean the universe or outer space—“the set of all things that exist.”
This show at the Serpentine, which has just come from the New Museum, New York, is a veritable Wonderland of objects that would do Alice proud. Born in Schwerte, Germany, in 1952, Trockel is part of a generation of pioneering women artists who were concerned with developing a feminist language that was democratic and non-hierarchical. She came to prominence in the ’80s with her knitted paintings—produced by stretching threads of wool across canvas or wood in monochrome and patterned abstractions. Here she reconfigures relationships with the selected art works within that now-familiar 20th-century trope, whereby the viewer becomes a part of the artwork, and the artist the subject rather than object.
“A Cosmos” reflects her interest in creating a dialogue between different discourses. Her own work is placed in the company of other artists—both historic and contemporary— who have largely been ignored. Many of the pieces create an arena for inquiry within disciplines such as natural history, natural science and geography. Watercolors painted by the pioneering botanist Maria Sibylla Merian sit alongside intricate models of marine invertebrates crafted by Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, initially created as research tools for naturalists who had no access to living specimens. Among the most intriguing of these “found” objects are a series of tiny notebooks from the Spanish artist, Manuel Montalvo. Full of microscopic OCD drawings of birds, fish, pigs, maps and people; they cover the pages of these Lilliputian volumes with an obsessive calligraphic language. Worn and leather-bound they look as if they might emanate from some 16th-century monastery. In fact, Montalvo, who was something of a recluse, only died in 2010. Works by self-taught artists, such as Judith Scott and James Castle, sit alongside Wladyslaw Starewicz’s pioneering 1912 animation, The Cameraman’s Revenge.
Juxtaposed with all these strange and exotic artifacts are Trockel’s own artistic contributions that defy any signature style. There is collage, video, photography, ceramics and a whole array of minimalist striped “paintings” made of bright lines of wool. Given that this tradition of abstract art was largely a male domain, and its language intellectual and heroic, Trockel has subverted these iconic works by creating objects of surprising beauty that are craft-based and relatively easy to make. The exhibition constantly reframes questions of classification and hierarchy, theories and bodies of knowledge, as well as issues of self-definition, to ask what art is and what constitutes an artist. What Trockel has attempted to create is a sort of map of associations that mimics memory and thought processes.
Walking beneath the rotunda of the darkened central gallery is like entering the Victorian Pitt Rivers ethnographic museum in Oxford. Strange objects abound in glass vitrines: a tacky Barbie-Doll style ballerina reminiscent of Degas’ little dancer, an array of roughly constructed paper birds, a prosthetic leg. On the wall are a series of “expressionist” paintings, entitled “Less Sauvages than Others,” that turn out to have been “painted” by the orangutan, Tilda. Presumably these have been included to question the nature of creativity, an action that we consider something unique to humans.
Trockel has produced a sort of psycho/art/geography, returning us to a kind of Kunstgeographie shaped by the German explorer and naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt, who created a wunderkammer for the 19th century American polymath Charles Willson Peale that is recorded in The Artist in His Museum, 1822, to be found in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia. This highlights the 19th passion for the categorization and understanding of the natural world. Eschewing a linear retrospective, Trockel’s concerns range from the insatiable curiosity of the Enlightenment to the readymades of Marcel Duchamp. This is an exhibition full of juxtapositions and allusions.
But it will not be to everyone’s taste; it will annoy some who’ll see it as pretentious and ticksy but delight others who will enjoy its surreal and surprising relationships. As single artworks what Trockel produces is not that interesting. But the sum of the whole is a real challenge. It speaks of inquiries into the very processes of human thinking, and asks questions about what it is that forms the body of knowledge that defines the western world.
www.suehubbard.com. Her latest novel, Girl in White, is published by Cinnamon Press, and her forthcoming poetry collection, The Remembering and Forgetting of Air, by Salt. -
FILM: SPRING BREAKERS
Last year’s James Franco–curated “Rebel” show at the Joel Cohen/MOCA space included a collaboration between Hollywood’s polymathic heartthrob and indie enfant terrible Harmony Korine, in the form of a video entitled CAPUT. The rooftop rumble between bare-naked gang ladies wielding machetes and BMX bikes was one of the installations that sought to deconstruct Rebel Without a Cause and the movie’s camp, tabloid and mythical dimensions. Korines’ latest film, Spring Breakers, also features Franco and it too inhabits the interstitial psychic space between movie and art. Known for creating semi-abstract subcultural anthropologies, beginning with the Larry Clark collaboration Kids, Korine has stated he considers narrative film as a medium to be basically unchanged since the days of D.W. Griffith. With Spring Breakers he demonstrates that it can still be an experimental form, in this case a dubstep-fueled melodrama which is both self-referential and heartfelt. On the surface this is his most conventional, or at least narrative, film. The plot has to do with four college girls, including über–tweeny-boppers Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez, as pussy-riot-grrls on a nihilist spring-break bender. When they hook up with Franco’s white-trash gangsta rapper they become rebels with even less of a cause than erstwhile Hollywood antecedents like, say, the kids from Natural Born Killers. But amid the beer-bong bacchanalia Korine is really crossbreeding genre conventions with video idioms and self-reflexive cultural camp to produce a sort of pop-infused avant-garde sexploitation flick: a legitimate art movie. We asked him about it as he began the press tour in Beverly Hills.
Artillery: Are you a big spring breaker?
Harmony Korine: Actually I never went, but growing up in the South everybody did, we called it the Redneck Riviera. For a long time I had been collecting spring break imagery and photographs, you know—girls pissing in golf carts and, like, people setting houses on fire and passing out on kegs in the ocean. I had thousands of these and I started dreaming up this story. The first image that came into my mind was of a girl on a white beach in a bikini during spring break with a pink ski mask holding a gun. It was like ‘How would that happen?’ And I started thinking of these girls coming from out of town and robbing tourists on the beach. And I thought of some people and characters and things that I had been cataloging and I just invented this kind of strange beach nightmare.Bad Girl, Good Cop Thematically the film is kind of a Scarface on acid, but you also operate on the language of film; the repetitive slow motion, the exaggerated melodrama. Was that important?
Yes, hugely. I see films differently, I always have seen film differently and with this movie I wanted to make something that was more of an experience, more like a feeling—something that was experiential, almost like in electronic music or in trance music there’s this lulling sense, almost like a drugged-out effect. I never understood why directors don’t play more with the medium, because film’s possibilities are really endless. And so with this movie it was very much about a specific style of filmmaking, a feeling I wanted more than any type of articulation, I wanted the movie to work in a physical way, for it to go through you, to almost batter you, like it’s a barrage or an attack.Some people would say that kind of visceral effect is the purview of video art? Do you think it’s still meaningful to make films?
It doesn’t bother me whatever you call it anymore—it is what it is. I’m just trying to create a mood and a feeling and something that is transcendent and powerful and it doesn’t bother me where you show it or how it’s seen or what you call it. I’m not concerned anymore how people watch things or where they watch. I just set out to make the most perfect thing I can make and put it out in the world and I guess just walk away and hope for the best.Define “thing.”
I’m not making films necessarily in the traditional sense, I don’t care about a perfect logic. It’s like the real world, except pushed in something more “hyper.”Werner Herzog has said your movies may not conquer worldwide cinema but so what?
Yeah, but I think this one is different from a lot of the other stuff I’ve done. I view it as kind of a slight step into the mainstream—know what I mean? Kind of more “pop”…
Your blockbuster?
Blockbuster! Yeah!Above: Bad girls with bikinis and Franco, courtesy of A24
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LONDON CALLING
Gerard BYRne works from the premise that what constitutes the historic is constantly shifting and that there are a series of presents. In his artistic practice the interview and conversation become scripts to be performed in order to open up a number of critical possibilities. The texts he employs are found rather than, to use his word, “authored” and, therefore, considered devoid of baggage. He makes films and videos, working with actors, as a way of engaging in a critical debate around notions of representation. His subjects range from a conversation with Jean-Paul Sartre, to science fiction writers Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov discussing the future. For Byrne art is discourse rather than being the subject of discourse.
Over the last 10 years he’s made a number of works using text appropriated from magazines. These have allowed him to question how the mechanics of our collective now are constructed. Magazines are a barometer of a certain cultural moment. They encapsulate the zeitgeist, yet are transient and easily discarded. Using articles from the recent past he attempts to unlock ideas about the present. A piece from a 1973 issue of Playboy becomes both material and motif in the restaging of a discussion on the sexual mores of the day. But there are odd disjunctions. The cast speaks with Irish as opposed to American accents as the original participants would have done and the conversation about swinging and group sex now seems both anachronistic and naïve.
The installation “1984 and beyond” (2005) takes another discussion from Playboy. Here a group of famous science fiction writers muse about the future. It’s not only their rosy view of what lies ahead that seems outmoded but that watching ourselves mirrored through recent decades allows us new insights into the present. These re-examinations from our recent history illustrate that the past is palpable and that things might well have taken a different course. Time is presented not as linear but as palimpsest, something complex that can be manipulated.
Born in Ireland in 1969, Byrne graduated from the National College of Art & Design in Dublin before attending The New School for Social Research in New York and becoming a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program there. In 2007 he represented Ireland at the 52nd Venice Biennale.
Now the Whitechapel Gallery has mounted the first major U.K. survey of his work from 2003 to today. This includes seven major film installations, a series of photographs and the U.K. premiere of his multi-screen installation, “A man and a woman make love” (2012), recently shown at Documenta 13. This is a reenactment of one of only two of the Surrealist group’s published roundtable discussions. The emphasis is on the masculine and misogynistic nature of the group in this restaging of the first of 12 conversations about sex and eroticism initiated by André Breton in 1928. Not a single woman takes part despite the discussion revolving around questions of sexual reciprocity. Men wave pipes in smoke-filled rooms and discuss the female orgasm, while musing on sex with nuns. Surrealist notions of masculinity have largely gone unchallenged but, here, Byrne reverses John Berger and Laura Mulvey’s articulation about the supremacy of the male gaze so that these men become central to the viewer’s attention. In his recreation Byrne uses humor and irony to deconstruct idealized notions of early 20th-century bohemianism, illustrating how we construct fantasies of the past. What the piece suggests is that, despite their perceived radicalism, the Surrealists were very much products of their time.
In A thing is a hole in a thing it is not (2010) Byrne’s five films trace Minimalism’s emergence and impact. The narratives often appear fragmented. Screens suddenly go dark and there is a sense that one is missing something crucial. There’s no clear structure, so you need to spend a while building up a sense of what you see. The work suggests that it was in the ’50s and ’60s, when criticism took on a newly influential role, that a new codependency was established between artist and critic.
Photographs of French tabacs or newsstands suggest their encyclopedic nature by catering for all tastes and interests. Yet their provisional nature is suggested by the constantly changing nature of their stock of publications. This transience is emphasized in that the title of the work is changed each time it is shown, leaving the problem of naming to the institution in which it appears. Byrne’s interest in theatricality is emphasized in the series of photographs that take their inspiration from the famous stage direction that sets the scene at the opening of that most famous of Irish plays, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: “A country road. A tree. Evening.” Though there is a paradox here, for Byrne seems to be trying to suggest specific geographical locations in his brightly lit photographs, whereas Beckett was using these minimalist elements as universal symbols. And this is the problem with much of Byrne’s work. Informed, clever and witty though it often is, it does seem to strive very, very hard to insist that it is being intelligent and serious.
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Under The Radar
Ever since 1912, when Picasso and Braque first collaged actual newspaper clippings and trompe-l’oeil woodgrain fragments into the first Synthetic Cubist oil paintings, the confusion between mass media and fine art has been one of the central engines of contemporary human creativity. Two recent art books bring into focus the extravagant range of effects that have been achieved through this dislocation of “high” and “low” image-making—and how powerful such breaches in protocol remain to this day.
The man known simply as Jess (1923–2004) was the quintessential West Coast modernist bohemian, not least for the fact that he worked as a chemist on the Manhattan Project and subsequently abandoned his career in atomic weapons research in favor of a long-term union with the Bay Area poet Robert Duncan and a lengthy, introspective journey as one of the most unjustly overlooked American visual artists of the 20th century—consciously abandoning a tenure-track position in the military-industrial complex for the freedom of radical subjectivity and the love that dare not speak its name.
Jess’ paintings and collages were steeped in the esoteric and occult philosophical traditions that informed much of the proto-psychedelic art of the Beat era, but were equally indebted to the modernist formal innovations of figures like Max Ernst and James Joyce. His oil paint “Translations” appropriated everything from theosophical diagrams to Victorian children’s book illustrations into a curdled, hyperarticulated impasto that comprises one of the most idiosyncratic bodies of painterly investigation of the postwar era.
But it is Jess’ “Paste-Ups” that garnered him the most attention, and are now the subject of O! Tricky Cad & Other Jessoterica, edited by LA critic Michael Duncan and published by Siglio Press. The most signal inclusion in this collection is the almost-complete Tricky Cad collages, which, in spite of being Jess’ best-known work, have never been reprinted in one place before.
Often cited as either prefiguring Pop or legitimizing comic art, the Tricky Cads do both these things and much more. Produced between 1952–59, the 8-installment saga, made entirely from cut-up fragments of Chester Gould’s classic newspaper comic strip Dick Tracy, constitute a primer in poetic deconstructionism, reconfiguring the hard-edge graphic semiotics and right-wing bombast of the original into something rich and strange, splitting the atom of normative symbolic ordinance to unleash a torrent of mythopoetic mutation.
Only five of the eight TC collages could be tracked down, but Duncan fleshes them out with an abundance of amazing material, much of it previously unseen. There are several other comic cut-ups, some ribald homoerotic mash-ups of contemporary advertising, elaborate patchworks of old engravings, and even an actual-size reproduction of O!—an entire collage zine from 1960. Proof again that—using only the leftovers of commercial mass media—Jess was making some of the most self-consciously sophisticated cultural artifacts of his time.
The same can’t quite be said for the remarkable hand-painted movie posters from Ghana, collected and promoted by LA gallerist Ernie Wolfe at the tail end of the 20th century. Wolfe’s initial enthusiasm culminated in a stellar 2001 exhibit at the UCLA Fowler Museum with the accompanying Dilettante Press volume “Extreme Canvas”—which soon became a prized collectible, particularly among painters. As exhaustive as that hefty tome seemed, Wolfe’s bulky follow-up “Extreme Canvas 2” offers twice as many examples of these unintentionally avant-garde pictures.
Originally created as advertisements for traveling DIY video
theaters, this peculiar niche medium flourished in pre-digital Ghana, beginning in the mid-’80s and disappearing by the turn of the millennium—except for replicas intentionally made for the folk/outsider art market. While there are many compelling examples flogging Bollywood and homegrown African cinema, the richest vein of material is the painted translations of familiar mainstream American movies—from Raiders of the Lost Ark to Jason Goes to Hell to Jumanji—where the almost Mannerist anatomical distortions and paranoiac attention to the rendering of clothing, hair and musculature add layers of sociopolitical critique to the already convoluted archetypal pictorial content and formal exuberance.I’ve often heard the argument that so-called Outsider artists are victims of a condescending, exploitative assignment of contextual meaning, but my bottom line is always “What will the Martians think when they excavate the ruins of our civilization in 50 years?” Regardless of intentions, both the extremely individuated, culturally informed works of Jess and the collectively evolved ur-capitalist utilitarianism of the Ghanian poster painters demonstrate how the application of creative human imagination can unlock enormous potentials of conceptual and aesthetic novelty lying just beneath the surface of even the most conventional commercial symbolic language. I don’t think the Martians will see much difference.
O! Tricky Cad & Other Jessoterica, edited by Michael Duncan 192 pages Siglio Press, www.sigliopress.com
Extreme Canvas 2: The Golden Age of Hand-Painted Movie Posters from Ghana by Ernie Wolfe III 488 pages Kesho & Malaika Press 2012, www.erniewolfegallery.com
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Peter Soriano
Having redirected his energies over the course of 20 years, from cast-resin sculpture to wall-based works combining painting with steel cables and short lengths of pipe, Peter Soriano has lately dispensed with objects, working on the wall in spray paint and acrylic unencumbered by sculptural concerns. In five elegant, playful paintings, the artist variously recombines graphical elements such as circles, arrows, Xs, brackets and miscellaneous irregular polygons in sprawling, diagram-like configurations that might at first glance be taken to represent cognitive operations—explication, transformation, synthesis—but ultimately refer to themselves and to the wall as a provisional picture plane.
Playing loosely sprayed markings against others that are meticulously hard-edged, these works are executed according to a set of instructions, in the tradition of Sol LeWitt. They are subject to minor variations even though Soriano himself often installs them, the spray can being an imprecise tool. Down the left side and across the bottom of the 13-foot-long CDG #1 (all works 2012) runs a long, sprayed arrow in stop-sign red, which terminates at the base of a segmented column of crisply outlined boxes (Judd stack? Ladder? Filmstrip?) which intersects a downward-sloping series of rectangles made by masking and spraying with bristling dark-brown hatching. The spraying magnifies the vagaries of the installer’s touch, and the way those components overlap provides clues to the sequence of mark-making.
In the case of the nine-foot-high, 38-foot-long Bagaduce #3, installed in the gallery’s narrow front space, Soriano’s working method presents a problem of tense. As a sequence of predetermined operations, his paintings (even when not physically manifest) exist in the perpetual present and are replicated for exhibition, but the experience of a large work is subject to the specifics of its installation and here, an overview of the work is possible only from an acute angle. This awkward placement compels a particular kind of scrutiny. At necessarily close range, the viewer absorbs the work episodically, as one might read a scroll painting. The whole visual field is engaged by a system of symbols and signals in ambiguous relation to its entirety.
This immersion in a wall work’s vocabulary and inner logic is of a different kind than that which we experience in front of a very large canvas. In that case, we understand that the composition extends as far, at least in the literal sense, as the painting’s edges. When the wall is commandeered as the working surface and the picture plane, its physical nature and architectural function are inescapable even as its whiteness dematerializes to become infinitely deep pictorial space. In a sense, a wall work extends as far as the wall that is its support, and transforms that support into something visually elastic, dynamic, contingent. Soriano’s work underscores this paradox of visibility: portable but not “site-specific,” the work’s free-floating figure/ground construction depends on the white of the wall as its site and foundation even while, for a time anyway, rendering it invisible.
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Althea Thauberger
Marat Sade Bohnice records the restaging of Peter Weiss’ 1963 play Marat/Sade. The play imagines that during the Marquis de Sade’s institutionalization in the Charenton Asylum in 1808, he wrote and directed a play about the death of Jean-Paul Marat, a radical during the French Revolution. While Weiss’ work was set in the bathhouse of Charenton Asylum, Thauberger’s 2012 production is staged in the decommissioned laundry facilities in Bohnice, the largest mental health clinic in the Czech Republic.
This complex and multi-layered film critiques institutions of thought, politics and health, and their inherent hierarchies that perpetuate inequities. Thauberger’s collaborators for this piece include the Prague-based experimental theater company Akanda, theatrical director Melanie Rada, the patients and staff at the hospital and a general audience. The resulting piece layers the practices of film, documentary and theater as it blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction.
Cinematographically accomplished frames that attest to Thauberger’s adept skills as a filmmaker contrast unpolished sequences that blatantly expose the presence of technicians, musicians and audience members. By including footage of the reactions of patients, which vary from calm observation, distressed hand-wringing and improvised dancing, the artist emphasizes the multiplicity of perspectives on the complex issues addressed in the film.
The play opens with the actors simultaneously assuming the roles of mentally ill patients and historical figures, dancing onto the stage like a frenzied circus troupe. This cuts away to clips introducing staff and patients who provide commentary throughout the piece. At key points in the production, the interview clips continue in voiceover as the film audience views the play, which competes for sound. The resulting bilingual cacophony is emphasized by the necessary English or Czech subtitles, and at times both.
In Scene 6-Stifled Unrest, the sentiments of a French bourgeoisie character are echoed by commentary from a Czech orderly who speaks of his foolish expectation that the 1989 revolution would amend the deficits imposed by communism. A sentiment of frustrated disappointment is reinforced when the character of Marat later states: “We invented the revolution but we didn’t know how to run it,” suggesting that the energy required to realize a successful social movement is rarely followed by the implementation of a cohesive alternative.
Other points in the play are similarly complemented by the words of hospital staff, who identify challenges within the systems that respond to mental illness. They recognize that ill-considered institutions lead to and maintain sickness. In the context of the play, this sentiment is applied to corrupt political organizations. In this way, Thauberger identifies recurring, systemic problems that arise from both social movements and political (in)stability. She reveals institutionalized ideas and ways of thinking by giving voice to the dissident hospital staff working to affect change, meanwhile enabling the participation of patients—vulnerable people who rely on, but are disempowered by a deficient system.
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Gaela Erwin
Felicitously hung in the former drawing room of a 19th-century castellated Gothic Revival villa, Gaela Erwin’s exhibition of pastels reveals first a mastery of light that both sculpts and dissolves form, patterned after the dramatic innovations of Caravaggio. But far more than laudable technique, the show also offers an unvarnished exploration of aging, together with a penetrating glimpse into familial relationships, particularly those of mother and daughter.
In My Mother My Sister Back to Back (2012), the two women sit, spines touching, in front of a wide, open window, their positions symbolizing underlying hostilities. Her face puffy and slack, with protruding lower lip, the mother on the right, a recent victim of Alzheimer’s disease, hunches over slightly. The younger woman on the left sits up straighter, but her deeply shadowed face and lined brow betray melancholy. Suffusing the pair from behind, light falls on the mother’s profile and on her daughter’s back, contrasting their dark garments with the brighter abstracted greenery outside: human pain foiled by nature’s sunny indifference.
Dressed in fur against the chill—both weather-related and emotional—Erwin and her mother stand side by side in Self-Portrait with My Mother and Lacey (2011). Staring dispassionately out at the viewer, they reveal no intimacy other than physical proximity. Even the lily that reaches from the mother’s hand toward Erwin—a symbol of fertility and generation—remains merely a formal link between the two, rather than one of affection. Seemingly deeper is the artist’s bond with her puppy, a diminutive hairless breed. Held under her left arm, Lacey reveals a knowing glance, suggesting that she is a veritable “daughter” to the artist. In Erwin’s original conception, the skull of her father was faintly adumbrated upside down between the women. His shadowy presence, now painted over, throws into relief the primordial aspect of the mother-daughter relationship.
Other portraits underscore Erwin’s virtuosic treatment of light. Splashed against the pink inner garment her mother wears in The Purple Dress (2013), light creates delicate shadows of blue at the same time that it transfuses her elaborate peignoir into a dazzling expanse of purple, indigo and rose. Countervailing this visual opulence, however, is the ambiguity of the figure herself. Is she sitting or lying? And eyes closed, is she dead or alive? Is she donning a ball gown or a shroud? In Winter Mother (2012), light from the left falls on the woman’s age-marked face and white hair. And as if underscoring vanished beauty, her garment is unzipped, revealing an aging chest, its imperfections emphasized by the illumination. A raking diagonal of light cuts across the artist’s Self-Portrait with Autumn Light (2012), sculpting her features and casting on her chest a triangular shadow of lavender—the color of mourning—and in the center another triangle, a geometrical figure associated since prehistory with the female.
Her intense scrutiny of Caravaggio’s techniques allows Erwin to explore the issue of caring for aging parents when it is made more difficult by past emotional conflicts. But in depicting her mother’s decline, Erwin also projects her own inevitable mortality, as well as that of everywoman. “My mother’s face,” she says, “is my own.”
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Ursula Brookbank
“SHE WORLD” invites us to embark on a dark journey through the mingled lives of a group of women of a past generation. Ursula Brookbank’s archive of objects—once belonging to these unrelated women—is installed in deliberate and moving vignettes, creating a collective diary as a monument to their shared and individual experiences of female life in the 20th century. The viewer is quickly struck by how strongly the cards were stacked against them.
On another level is the bone-chilling sensation of fear and unease that “SHE WORLD” evokes. From the first moment, the viewer is thrown off guard, entering through the gallery’s rear pew room—a space often serving as a theater for video, here functioning as more of a lobby. A low red pedestal houses a collection of odd objects propped on random stools and music stands: an ugly table lamp, a pelvic X-ray mounted with a clothespin and sprouting rusty curling wires, a jar of hairpieces. The soundtrack (by Emily Lacy) emanates from this room and sets the tone for the experience. Music and vocals, heavy on the reverb—suggesting echoes in some vacant and lonely place—include schmaltzy organ tunes and ’20s dance hall music, like the kind in the background of the bar scenes in The Shining. Past and present coexist in an eerie shift.
The viewers receive small flashlights to navigate the next two rooms, which have been completely darkened, intensifying the sense of trespassing into an intimate experience with absent women. One wall houses an assortment of needlepoint samplers, including a homely oval image of a horse’s head. Satin boxes designed to sort and display jewelry or toiletries contain instead plastic grapes, doorknobs or a sheet of buttons. In the rear room, a creepy carving of white roses and gold leaves, a massive spray, is mounted on one of the pillars, suggesting someone’s bad taste morphed with an aura of funerary accoutrements.
The contrast of seeming randomness—objects piled haphazardly on the floor, or perched in the rafters—with carefully and precisely arranged displays, such as a table bearing pieces of shoes, lacings and rotting bits of soles almost assuming the significance of holy relics, signals clear dysfunction and bittersweet poignancy.
A collection of papers anchored with specimen pins documents Brookbank’s research into the lives of the women to whom these objects belonged, often chronicled in obituary format, along with an inventory of the objects and related pictures. These strike a rather clinical note. Also in the mix are Brookbank’s shadowy self-portraits, dark and haunting veiled faces and torsos, which relate closely to her video work and suggest a mingling of Cindy Sherman and Matthew Barney.
By transforming bits of yarn, buttons and soap dishes from kitsch into icon, Brookbank makes a strong case for the power that objects themselves may yield. As symbols for the otherwise forgotten lives of women, they convey a collective energy that becomes hypnotic and gut-wrenching in this remarkable environment.
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Richard Kraft
Since its invention, the camera has often acted as an intruder, an interloper or an uninvited guest. Walker Evans photographed subway riders from a camera hidden in his coat. His black-and-white images depict men and women gazing at the camera while immersed in their own thoughts, unaware that they were being photographed. Evans engaged in this act of surveillance before it was embraced by artists. Since Evans, numerous artists and photographers have captured their subjects unaware. In the 1990s in lower Manhattan Merry Alpern photographed people engaged in various sex acts, pointing her camera out the window from a building across an alley. John Schabel used a telephoto lens to capture passengers in windows of departing airplanes. Now people assume surveillance cameras follow them in public spaces. While most don’t like that we are watched, it is a fact of contemporary culture and not often challenged.
In his exhibition entitled “Eyes Words,” Richard Kraft has created a series of voyeuristic (video) snapshots that take cues from Evans’ project. While traveling on the London Tube, Kraft captured footage of fellow passengers by using a hidden video camera. While Evans, Alpern and even Schabel’s images depict location, Kraft has cropped his photographs to remove any reference to place, focusing instead on gaze and expression. Isolated, anonymous faces fill the frames. Enlarged to almost six feet wide, and completely desaturated, the crispness of the pictures dissolve and meld with the vertical screen lines imported from the original videos. Face and screen become one. Basic facts of these travelers’ journeys become less important than their vacant stares and blank, zombie-like expressions. In surveillance footage one image replaces another, erasing what came before; here, Kraft carefully preserves these “lost” moments.
In contrast to these seven enlarged portraits, Kraft also presents a grid of 100 stamp-sized video stills offering multiple views of the same person. But several nuanced expressions offer no more insight. The grid of small images, each floating in a large white matte, suggests the passage of time and the insignificance of the individual.
As for the second half of the exhibition’s title, the central space of the gallery supports three of Kraft’s word collages. Ulysses (2012) the largest of the three, is a work on paper in which James Joyce’s novel has been cut into small pieces and reassembled. Each triangular shaped text offers a poetic snippet from the original. Joyce’s book is a daunting read, but Kraft’s re-presentation makes reading in the traditional manner impossible. The montage of words produces random associations and a yearning to connect a part to the whole.
Clearly, Kraft’s exhibition of Tube portraits is an exercise in editing. His choices are specific, as he selects only isolated individuals who communicate a certain kind of grim blankness. No one appears happy or sociable. In his word collages he explores a different kind of editing that parallels the lack of individuality in the portraits. Using all the supplied text, he carefully arranges its placement, somehow obscuring any references to proper names.
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Rebecca Ripple
At the core of Rebecca Ripple’s practice is the question of historical authority and traditional truths—who sets the stage for what truth means and how it gets enforced. In past works, she has examined the bounds of Catholicism, the issue of constraining the female body and how the dictates of ideological or political systems are transmitted. She continues these investigations in “licking yellow fog,” an exhibition of sculpture and drawings. Here she also delves into how domesticity—specifically suburban rule systems—and individual perception entwine.
Typical of Rebecca Ripple’s artwork, Scorpion (2012) explores the contradictions at the heart of a life under scrutiny and interrogation. A makeshift set of wooden struts supports a jagged, fragmentary group of linoleum tiles erupting upwards. From the center of this improvised floor, two interwoven tendril-like elements emerge, at first carefully covered in the kitchen linoleum and then progressively encased by faux wood material. Two cast aluminum elements crown the work. Located somewhere between a set of blunted scissors/forceps or an enlarged speculum, the open hinge looks like alternately threatening blades or the hand signal for A-okay.
Rebecca Ripple’s sculptures typically combine both found and fabricated sources, making use of heavily worked materials, through which she continues in her exploration of the contradictory intersections between art and the everyday. In particular, her 3D work evokes a simultaneously visceral physical response together with a protracted intellectual quandary, pulling the viewer into her musings.
Paradox is often a strategy Ripple deploys in her search for the schisms she sees between the religious and the secular, the generalized and the idiosyncratic, the reasoned and the emotive. In a work such as belt (2012) the leather fragment of a belt, looking much like a wizened black tongue, is affixed via transparent tape to a linoleum tile set off the wall by a clear acrylic box. Is the fetish meant to conjure up the act of licking the kitchen floor clean, being tongue-tied, or is it simply two unlikely fragments of domesticity which collide in an abject assemblage celebrating brute materiality covered with the signs of a past life? The strength of Ripple’s work resides on being able to straddle those multiple interpretative axes without losing pungency and significance, whichever axis any given viewer favors.
Her drawings give insight into the poetic construction she is creating. Notes to herself about how many haloes of meaning to incorporate into a given sculpture bear witness to the complexity of inferences she is building up. The scrawled images themselves favor the conditional and variable: conditions that are a part of her working process. A passionate fixity to her desires is tempered by a provisional quality to her results, underscoring the anxiety of her interrogatives.
Like the title of the exhibition, which refers to the yellow fog of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, with its difficult stanza, Ripple’s sense of the inscrutable is that it is something to be seen and felt, rolled over in the imagination, but not ever entirely consigned to the bounds of language.
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Tom Dowling
Two dozen drawings, paintings, constructions and hybrid pieces from 2011-2012 express Tom Dowling’s keen knowledge of architecture and art history. These pieces allude specifically to theories of modernism as expressed in early 20th-century architecture and in mid-century visual art, the latter including German Bauhaus, Minimalist and Hard-Edge movements, and artists Mondrian, Rothko and Diebenkorn. Within Dowling’s deliberately non-painterly works, circles and squares are elevated to visual harmony, grace, and even to meditative and iconic states. Further, the configurations of these are pared down to their basic elements, resulting in impeccable design that bridges reductive aspects of modern art with the simplification and “form follows function” aspects of modern architecture. Indeed, many of his paintings suggest architectural depth, while his constructions employ paintings within three dimensions. As a collection, they provide “Insider Information” (the exhibition title) about the nature and beauty of architecture reduced to its essence.
Four drawings on paper in the series “Sacred Geometry” each contain a small abstract, colored design made of circular and square shapes interacting. These organic drawings reveal myriad ways to reconfigure simple shapes. A second series of double panels, with titles like Equinox and Solstice, features circles and squares and other basic shapes intersecting at odd angles. Several pieces—Chiesa, for example—have conceptual elements, revealing just a segment of the circle, leaving the empty space to our imaginations. Aventino is dramatic with a deep magenta rectangle dominating the left panel, contrasting a textured gold panel on the right. Isoloa Tiberna and a few other pieces are playful exceptions with flowing strokes on solid backgrounds.
The hybrid constructions in this exhibition are miniature architectural masterpieces and attain coherence for the show. Several, 30 inches wide or less, are created from wood, metal and cardboard, with acrylic paint and graphite; each is a reductive version of a building that the artist has visited. Dowling’s interest in architecture, particularly Italian, compelled him to spend a year in Rome, perusing Baroque churches, paring the buildings down to their essential, classical shapes, using his imagination to remove the flourishes. Along with his understanding of modernist art movements, the artist has distilled the nature, beauty and harmony of classical European buildings in these sculptures.
Apparently serving as models for larger constructions to hopefully be created in the future, each maquette features a wooden platform and frame, while several have slender linear “zips,” the term used by Barnett Newman referring to lines that traverse his canvases. But “zips” in this exhibition are free-standing, painted wooden sticks that the viewer is invited to pick up and move. In Frieze, Tower Gateway, Golden Path and Passamezzo the artist again employs circles and squares in his designs, several echoing the configurations of the smaller two-panel paintings. Yet with warm wood for the framework and platform, and inclusion of the zip—to engage the viewer, to be moved in any desired direction—the hybrid work is its own world, a minimal version of Joseph Cornell’s assemblage boxes, welcoming the viewer inside.
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Enrique Martinez Celaya
Stating that visual art derives from a “poetic impulse” reduces the experience of looking at a particularly seductive or engaging work of art to a passing mystery, some moment of gloriously inexplicable inspiration that is bound to pass. While the work of Enrique Martinez Celaya, who was born in Cuba but spent much of his youth in Spain and Puerto Rico, is luminous, and perhaps even “poetic” in the very best sense of the word, both Celaya’s paintings and sculptures push way beyond the single transformative gesture that poetics all too often suggests, to encompass a territory of staggering complexity.
Celaya’s paintings beg no obvious questions, but instead provide strange and sometimes incongruous vantage points into a universal human narrative. Celaya’s images are illusory, and at times wondrous, and have a distinctly filmic quality like stilled images from a Guillermo del Toro film, wherein the narrative is simultaneously beautiful and haunting, seductive yet terrifying. The One Who Has Taken Its Place (all works 2012) suggests an ecstatic if perilous relationship between reality and the world of dreams—a German shepherd overtaking a terrified unicorn could represent the struggle between the known world and that of imagination. Celaya’s animals don’t function as anthropomorphized stand-ins for humans but instead operate as incontrovertible reminders of the struggle between the conscious and the unconscious mind, between desire and denial, and finally, between reality and imagination. Artists like Marino Marini and Rene Magritte come to mind as influences, as both engaged mythic imagery in the service of the imagination—Marini especially, as he, like Celaya, utilized the horse as a metaphoric symbol of transcendence.
Celaya’s exhibition is filled with dualities. In the painting The Tunnel and The Light (For the Ones Who Hope to Come Out), the darker interior space of the cave, replete with a cluster of dangling and sharply delineated icicles, gives way to a misty field of spring flowers, implying a relationship between the known landscape with the more sacred but brutal topography of the artist’s own interior world. It’s tempting to read this work as an image of rebirth or redemption, yet like the exhibition’s title, “The Hunt’s Will,” Celaya posits the simultaneity of life and death. Perhaps the “hunt,” i.e. the journey through life, is autonomous as though it were a viable and traceable phenomenon that acts upon us and propels us forward.
Other images are more concrete. Celaya’s sculptural work The Enchantment, for instance, creates a visceral relationship and yet another duality between nature and the desire to contain it as a small bronze birdhouse rests wedged between the branches of a low tree. As with Celaya’s paintings, the narrative is fractured, the bird hunted to extinction or simply walled up inside a manmade container. Either way, this work, like poems written by Celan, Martinson and Frost—among Celaya’s favorites—derives its power from the complex relationship between disparate ideas and images, deliberately fragmenting narrative in order that we, as viewers, might lean in closer to glimpse the otherworldly.
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Featured Review: MexiCali Biennial 2013: Cannibalism in the New World
The moment the elevator of the Vincent Price Art Museum opens onto the second floor, one is immediately confronted with artist Matt MacFarland’s cartoon sandwich boards, part of a body of work called Steakation (2012). The nearest one depicts a heart-shaped steak with face, arms and legs proclaiming, “I want to be inside you!”—A rather forward sentiment, not to mention a graphic one. Mental images of red meat consumption are instantly conjured, seasoned with the uncomfortable psychological intimacy of a wide-eyed cartoon character who wants to enter your digestive system. The experience is funny, grotesque, highly physical and disturbingly mixed in its messages.
After walking through the entire MexiCali Biennial exhibition, packed enthusiastically into a single large gallery, it becomes apparent just how apt of an opening line the sandwich board is. The 2013 edition of the seven-year-old exhibition series is built around the historically loaded theme of cannibalism—which, as the curators note, was one of the rationales for colonialism in the New World—and is filled with works referencing food, consumption, sacrifice, violence, trafficking, appropriation and conquest. The show, whose subject matter boils down to the strange detritus and occurrences that erupt out of cross-cultural pollination, succeeds in getting under one’s skin; its effects are tactile and visceral, sometimes literally so, as many of the artworks are interactive and invite touch. There is a sense of much being at stake, but at the same time, an infectious humor is maintained.
Matt MacFarland, Steakation, 2012 Judging from accounts provided by helpful museum staff, Latin American border issues were especially highlighted by performances that occurred at the raucous opening reception. At the gallery’s entrance, artist Sergio Bromberg had installed an untitled contraption that mimicked the recording devices commonly found at border checkpoints; a “guard” ordered everyone entering the exhibition to submit to having their photo and fingerprints taken. Inside the gallery, Dino Dinco and Rafa Esparza served Paletas de Sangre (blood popsicles) out of a real Mexican ice cream cart. The popsicles were actually hibiscus flavored and made by the popular company formerly known as La Michoacana, which had to change its name in order to distance itself from the notorious drug cartel, La Familia Michoacana. This interactive work, which made for many bloody-looking mouths that night, is a clever metaphor for the violence of border commerce.
Other works in the exhibition evoke in less direct ways the strange mutations, or sense of not belonging, that can occur when mismatched phenomena collide with one other. Matthew Carter’s intriguing Five Stacks of Death, Dread and Darkness (2012) is a gooey black sculpture that attempts to capture in material form a catch phrase from the reality show Ghost Adventures. Christopher Reynolds offers an eccentric series of works addressing food consumption—among them, Appetite Apparatus #1 (2011), an understated sculpture that proposes, via chromatherapy, to suppress the viewer’s appetite through deployment of the color Baker-Miller pink.
There is also a sense in the exhibition of bodies literally moving through space, across zones of determinacy. Nancy Popp’s Untitled (Street Performance), Concept Drawing (2013) is a photograph of a building under construction in Mexicali that is stitched through by the artist with thread to trace her proposed bodily movements in a future action. On the grittier side, The People Movers (2012) by Fred Alvarado records the artist’s travels through California via jumpy video footage, coloring books depicting the state’s prisons and yoga mats spray painted with all of the prisons’ acronyms.
Natalia Anciso, Two Spics and a Dude (“The Smile Series”), 2012 There are times when the exhibition seems excessive. In one section of the gallery are crammed Juan Bastardo’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (2012), Natalia Anciso’s Platicando con las Comadres (Chatting with the Gossips) (2012), and Reynolds’ The Pleasure of the Table (2012), all within yards of one another. Despite the theme of the biennial, there are an awful lot of overly-dramatic, dinner-referencing installations for one exhibition. Similarly, Marycarmen Arroyo Macias’ harrowing Tomad y Comed (Take and Eat) (2012), in which the holy communion phrase is spelled out in pig’s blood on the wall, is right around the corner from the blood popsicle cart. Still, one can’t deny the delicate beauty of Anciso’s piece, which weaves drawings of border arrests and other sad situations into the soothing comfort of domestic decorations, or the succinct effectiveness of Macias’ virtual scream of protest against unsustainable growth. And perhaps it could be said that such histrionics are warranted—both as an accurate reflection of the vivid subject matter and as a curious means of force-feeding its effects to viewers, making us, in the end, the ultimate cannibals.
MexiCali Biennial 2013 runs through April 13; info at vincentpricemuseum.org; all images courtesy Mexicali Biennial 2013
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Duron Jackson
Duron Jackson gives us a key to decipher his Blackboard Paintings (2010-2012), the most compelling parts of his installation “Rumination,” the latest of the Brooklyn Museum’s “Raw/Cooked” series. The wall text is that key, informing us that the enigmatic glyphs are prison aerial views: Riker’s Island in New York, River Junction in Florida, Pelican Bay in California, and several others.
The symbols are powerfully charged ideographs despite their abstracted, cool precision. It is right to call them ideographs, because these glyphs represent more than floor plans. They signify an entire socio-historical discourse that, when it has been heard at all, has often been rendered in the thunderous voice of denunciation: generations lost to prison, male impotence and rage, an invisible underclass, fear of the monster who comes in the night, brooding black bodies packed in cells, our culture’s inability to deal with those it cannot control and won’t control themselves, and the costs of having a civilized society. The paintings conceal these meanings behind cool surfaces of burnished silver-gray graphite on a matte, black wooden substrate. What they quietly signify is awful.
However, Jackson does not trust us to grasp the underlying sociopolitical history or the critiques of the prison industrial complex his visual symbols call up. That, or he does not trust his logographic language to clearly relate these meanings. He adds other pieces to point to the relation of the slave trade to black men’s current state of incarceration, but in doing so dilutes his most forceful statements. Included in “Rumination” is his didactic painting, a body print of a male figure tumbling head first, fiery red on white paper, Devils’ Exit (2007). The middle of the room, meant to invoke a parlor, is taken up by a throne-like chair covered in white ceramic dominoes sitting atop a contrasting dais made of black dominoes (Ruminations 2012). Finally, in case we still do not get that his references are to black bodies, he includes Malvina Hoffman’s representational bust titled Senegalese Soldier (1928), borrowed from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. The head, slightly larger than life, has beautifully stylized African features. The premise of the “Raw/Cooked” series is that new artists might take inspiration from existing work in the museum’s collection. Here, that inspiration is manifested too literally.
Jackson fails to keep faith with his own symbols that have carved out sense from absence. His paintings are the strongest elements of the exhibition, reading as cuneiform communiqués broadcast from another sociohistorical reality, or the lost hieroglyphs of an extinct branch of the human family. Ultimately, he would have benefited from more restraint. Less needed to be said here. Too much of “Rumination” is his earnest attempts to generate serious contemplation using wizened metaphors. The truly unnerving question his abstractions raise (that appears over and over again in history) is: What happens to the unregulated body, when in our collective consciousness we attempt to make it disappear?
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Facing the Sublime in Water, CA
NOTWITHSTANDING THE RECENT HURRICANE THAT FLOODED New York City’s galleries, the mundane act of pouring four liters of sea water from the nearest shoreline and leaving it to evaporate on the gallery floor creates a profoundly moving effect. Emilie Halpern’s installation, Drown (2012), in a ritual of self-effacement, utilizes the amount of water sufficient for a person to drown. The trace of sea water which remains, before it is replenished each day, is portentous and suggests the fragility of life.
“Facing the Sublime in Water, CA” is divided between works, like Halpern’s, that employ water as a reflection of sublimity, or expose the futility of human actions, and works that address the socio-political considerations of water and scarcity. Pieces in the latter category tend to look back historically, calling to mind the dynamics of planetary geology. At this scale, humanity is merely a drop in the bucket.
Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn’s single channel video All Together Now (2008) suggests the possibility of a future collapse, or perhaps a vision of life into the first few decades of such a sea change. The rambling and nebulous narrative offers a dystopian view. The handheld, whipsaw camera work is likely to induce a measure of discomfort, if not nausea, and provokes anxiety—or more likely, primordial fear—as access to clean water becomes a defining challenge for humanity in the 21st century.
The show addresses, elliptically, global issues surrounding water rights. Enid Baxter Blader’s HD stop-frame animation from her 16mm film The West (2012) examines the history of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, William Mulholland, the Owens Valley, the damming of rivers in the western United States, and the Reclamation Act of 1902. The historical realities observed in the West—he appropriation of water and the persistence of humans in outstripping natural resources—acutely illustrate human folly.
In a slightly different vein, Luis Hernandez poses the transportation of water across borders as an indicator of cultural preconceptions. Untitled #12 (fountain) (2010), a water fountain made with ordinary materials, allows visitors to slake their thirst with water imported from Mexico.
The most absurd and eloquent expression of the sublime can be found in Ger Van Elk’s The Flattening of the Brook’s Surface (1972- 2001), a video in which the artist, paddling along a channel of water in a rubber dingy with a trowel, attempts to smooth the surface of the water that he has stirred up in his passage.
The expansiveness of “Water, CA” incorporates a wide range of ideas, while wrestling with contradictory impulses, in some cases, sacrificing continuity for breadth. In a somewhat obvious curatorial gesture, Roi Clarkson Coleman’s early 20th-century romantic painting of the California coast,Seascape, hangs in close proximity to Dodge and Kahn’s video, Van Elk’s The Flattening of the Brook’s Surface, and Hernandez’ Untitled #12 (fountain), signaling that we have left far behind any idealized notion of California.
