You never really know which exhibition is going to make you cry. I certainly didn’t expect it to happen at Heather Day’s “Ricochet” at the Diane Rosenstein Gallery. None of the work was particularly sad and I actually had low expectations based on what I saw online. I remember I had even bemoaned to my editor; would this show just be another contemporary artist pining after AbEx?
Yet from The Persistence of Memory to Fever Dream, I could tell that Day was not pining after anything. Instead, she had cracked open the very center of her mind and laid it out on canvas for us all to see. Her works are free and expressive, with large fields of flooded pigment acting as the backdrop for floating ribbons of paint. They are chaotic and improvisational reflections of her inner world—her “mind maps,” as Day calls them.
And like any good map, they are also well-planned. Every stroke of paint falls just so, every flood of pigment only extends so far. These discrete elements work in harmony like dancers in perfect choreography; responding to one another, forming and disintegrating, flowing around each and every line.
These two poles of Day’s work—deliberate planning and improvisational chaos—do not necessarily explain my strong emotional reaction to her work. I’ve had a lot of difficulty putting my reaction into words, but I can share these few connections I forged in the hope that you’ll forge them too.
Day’s paintings show the entire spectrum of universal experience. They are fetuses forming in the womb; stars collapsing in on themselves. They are embryonic, and they are nebulous. I cried while walking through “Ricochet” because I was looking at art which so strongly reminded me of the beautiful, mystical and sometimes terrifying knowledge that I am alive.
I can’t promise you’ll have the same experience as me, nor can I promise that you won’t cry, but I can promise you that “Ricochet” will still be rebounding in your mind for days and days.
Diane Rosenstein Gallery
831 N. Highland Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90038 Show runs through Oct 24th
Appointment Only — No Walk-Ins
It is easier than it has ever been to feel distant, from one another and from the world at large. I was seeking to traverse that distance when I visited the Charlie James Gallery, and I found the path through Duke Riley’s new works in “Far Away.”
In Riley’s glittering seashell mosaics and delicate inked prints, the artist constructs the artifacts of a world distantly removed from our dystopic surroundings. His tattoo-style ink drawings depict fighting cocks, carrier pigeons, and fantastical ocean scenes, complete with crashing waves, teetering towers and finely-detailed, lithographic hedonism.
The most impactful pieces were the two mosaics, Far Away and I’ve Been Using the Same Razor Since 1947. The former, a shell mosaic depicting a bottle lost in the surf, works in tandem with the latter, a rat adrift in a tin can, to create a synchronous feeling throughout the space. Combined with the choice of mosaic as a medium,the show is more a historical review of imagined, crumbling islands than a contemporary art exhibition. This is not to say that Riley’s works lack perspective, as they are littered with the symbols of our present moment – some more obvious than others. In the large painting Everybody Knows, one can find Laika, the Soviet space dog, flying alongside a bald eagle clutching an ICBM, soaring high above McDonalds bags, nuclear waste, and skulls wearing MAGA caps floating below.
Accompanying Riley’s collection is a group show of Californian artists Sadie Barnette, Shizu Saldamando, and Ramiro Gomez. Saldamando summons fascinating, finely-rendered portraits onto large wood panels, while Barnette has blown up archival prints of peaceful, domestic life for Black Americans onto monumental scale. Gomez, a highlight in the group show, showcases in acrylic on cardboard the anonymized lives of Los Angeles’ under-appreciated laborers. The work of the group show is timely and prescient, as this year continues to emphasize the importance of essential workers, representation of the Black American experience and forging meaningful, thoughtful connections.
Charlie James Gallery
969 Chung King Rd
Los Angeles, CA 90012 Show runs through Oct 17th
Appointment Only — No Walk-Ins
Exiting the 110 degree heat at the end of a brutal Los Angeles summer and entering into Matter Studio Gallery to view Brian Atchley’s Being Matter, one name immediately jumped to mind: Robert Mapplethorpe. And for those who visit this show who are familiar with Mapplethorpe, I’m sure he’ll come to mind as well. The immediate comparison between Atchley and Mapplethorpe is an easy step to take, and is a comparison that Atchley welcomed – to my surprise. While I have neither the authority nor desire to attempt to unpack the complex history of Mapplethorpe’s work, it’s suffice to say that he is controversial across the board. Conservatives found him offensively explicit, and many others were quick to point out the fetishization of Black men as deeply problematic (See: Notes on the Margin of the Black Book by Glenn Ligon for a far more informed investigation.)
But there is a critical difference between Mapplethorpe and Atchley: Atchley is a painter, and a very good one. The ultra-realistic portraits do not objectify or overly-sexualize their subjects like Mapplethorpe’s portraits; in fact, the sheer amount of care and attention paid to the tiniest detail of these paintings demonstrates an overwhelmingly empathetic eye, as opposed to Mapplethorpe’s depersonalized photography. And while the black-and-white compositions with their large range of values and emphasis on light evoke Mapplethorpe, the emphasis is more on Atchley’s technical ability than the subject matter. Atchley wants us to focus on the light itself, not whatever the light is hitting.
Though the monochrome portraits are technically brilliant, my favorite works were his “Suspension” series, which is his most recent series of works. Here, we see a departure from the grounded, Mapplethorpe-esque portraiture. These three works – Jackson, Celena, and Diego – represent an evolution for Atchley. He is no longer singularly focused on light, but also explores color, movement, tension – all while preserving the fine detail and focus on musculature that can be found throughout his work.
Matter Studio Gallery
5080 W Pico Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90019 Show runs through Oct 11th
Appointment Only — No Walk-Ins
Major religions don’t do much image control; with his long hair and white skin, the hippyesque Jesus of the 21st century looks identical to the savior of the 11th century. The Buddha is also presented as the same old, same old; hair or no hair, it’s the smilin’ guy with the big gut and funny hand. And fuhgeddaboud Muhammad, he’s been the same unshaven guy for centuries. With new converts daily to each of these faiths, its apparent that the priests, bhikkhuni and imams see no need to modernize their CEO upstairs; to paraphrase a famous Zen meditation, if you see the buddha on the road, don’t give him a gym membership.
According to Voodoo priestess and occult expert, Bloody Mary, “many scholars believe Voodoo to be the world’s oldest religion.” Unfortunately, being the “ur-religion” of this mortal coil hasn’t resulted in Voodoo having the legions of faithful enjoyed by more popular systems of belief. Enter Justice Howard, a notorious and remarkably talented photographer who recently decided it was time to bring the Voodoo spirits, mediums, priests, and priestess mothers into the 21st Century. So, even though 999 AD was a helluva year, and those traditional robes are stunning, it’s a Post-Millennial world now and a new look is in order.
Baron Samedi, photo courtesy of the artist
Howard realized that, “a modern Voodoo photo series on this complicated, often misconceived religion had never been done like this before.” With the guidance of Bloody Mary, Howard embarked on a photographic crusade to style-up the images of particular Voodoo entities. The result is the book “Justice Howard’s Voodoo”, and it features a foreword by the famous cultural renegade John Gilmore .
Papa Legba, photo courtesy of the artist
What Howard achieves in this book is quite remarkable; with her skillful photographs she creates entirely new images for many established Voodoo deities. Consequently, when paired up with Bloody Mary’s “who and why” revelations regarding each individual sprite, the reader is presented with a “Thoroughly Modern Legba.” Styled by Howard herself, the models representing the different Voodoo players are young and attractive, featuring hair styles and tattoos that would make them seem equally comfortable both at Burning Man and a ritual in the backroom of Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo on Bourbon Street. Followers of traditional Voodoo style and dress may resent their religion being associated with contemporary Alternative Culture, but Howard is cognizant that traditional concepts must be made attractive to initiate a new generation of Voodoo devotees.
Photo courtesy of the artist
With this in mind, contemporary religions that refuse to update their sacred texts or modernize their main players for the New Millennia would seem to be guaranteeing their eventual obsolescence. Consequently, Howard’s work acts as photographic proselytism for a belief system beneath most people’s radar. None of the major organized religions seem to be averting global disaster, so why not take a tip from Howard and get involved in something attractively mysterious before the lights go out?
Please attend the Los Angeles book release party for Justice Howard’s Voodoo, beginning 8 PM on October 5th at Lethal Amounts Gallery, 1226 W. 7th St. LACA
In much of his work, Paul McCarthy explores juvenilia to an uncomfortably advanced degree, finding profane inspiration in all things coprocentric and aesthetically offensive. But McCarthy’s current exhibition at the Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles gallery appears to eschew those fonts of creativity, concentrating instead on Disney’s vintage reimagining of the Grimm’s fairy tale character Snow White, who is as removed from procreative juices and shit as her name suggests. So, according to the Hauser & Wirth press release, instead of McCarthy’s usual scatological paeans to the “messier realities of human drives and desires,” massive freestanding black walnut sculptures of Snow White fill the gallery space. The largest piece WS, Bookends tops out at 36,000 pounds and resembles a pair of gigantic Japanese netsukes. But although the sculpture is impressive for its size, it projects a weird three-dimension digital sterility; machine carved from computer mapping, there’s little of McCarthy in these McCarthy sculptures. Still, utilizing “his staged process of producing ‘abstracts through merging’ to restructure reality,” McCarthy has produced some fascinating psychedelic abstractions of Snow White, the Prince, and the Seven Dwarfs. Its great if that’s all you want, because then you don’t have to buy the idea that these sculptures are a direct attack on Disney morality or “disrupt traditional notions of art and culture” in any way. After all, it’s been fifty years since Wally Wood inked his famous Disneyland Memorial Orgy, so exposing the American Nightmare by lampooning Disney is hardly late breaking news.
WS, Bookends, 144 x 120 x 175 in., Black walnut, 2013 Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Photo by Genevieve Hanson
But one needn’t look far for McCarthy’s usual grotesquerie; in fact, it’s right there on the gallery walls, in a series of monochromatic wall hangings called the Brown Rothkos. These foul works began as pieces of floor carpet “repurposed as a medium of expression”, then arranged to let residue aggregate on them from the creation of props for a much larger installation. That’s right, and apparently shit tinted glasses are also required to understand how McCarthy could elevate what is effectively studio garbage to the stature of a commercially viable finished piece. They are the fine art world’s diarrheic equivalent of a toilet left unflushed, its meaning only in its making. There’s no value to them other than being evidence of someone else’s excremental enterprise. It’s worse than the art world’s usual let-‘em-eat-cake mentality since all that’s left to consume is actual droppings.
Installation view, Photo by Anthony Ausgang
Which is fairly horrible in itself; but the biggest insult is that McCarthy attempts to bamboozle his audience with his aesthetic discharge, and instead of being in on the joke, this time the joke is on us and not Disney, family systems, or “mass media and its effects on the development of children.” Meanwhile, the reluctance of the other viewers in the room to make eye contact with these pieces was obvious, and even I preferred to look at the Brown Rothkos through the lens of my cell phone.
Rothko Carpet 19, 149 x 84 in., Carpet and mixed media, 2012, Photo by Anthony Ausgang
At a certain point an artist has to decide where their loyalty lies; its either with the Fine Art Mafia or the audiences in the galleries who are just there to take it all in. So maybe its time that McCarthy remembers he can only kick that fabled turd so many times before it sticks to his shoe.
Paul McCarthy. WS Spinoffs, Wood Statues, Brown Rothkos. 1 July – 17 September 2017. Hauser & Wirth, 901 East 3rd Street, LA CA 90013
Throughout our evolution we’ve been afraid of the dark. As creatures primarily endowed with encephalic gifts, we aren’t well-equipped to vie with nocturnal animals, full of tooth and claw and with more finely attuned senses. They make quick work of us when we don’t see them coming. Darkness holds for us a sense of foreboding; in the dark we deliberately slow our breathing to hear what in the world is happening around us. Even in our aggressive modes: hunting and exploring, we quiet ourselves in the dark, peer into mystery, trying to make out the meaningful forms on the horizon.
Adam Katseff’s work, “In the Course of Time,” at Sasha Wolf Gallery stands out from the crop of contemporary photography in New York galleries by presenting staggeringly beautiful nocturnal landscapes of lacquered shadow that are unironically mysterious. Method and content come together to make them so. A meditative, patient eye is required to gather these images—Katseff sets up his camera at night with the shutter wide open so the film can siphon up errant light from the moon and stars, before the dawn intervenes. The images require a meditative approach to perceive them as well. Shapes are initially hard to decipher. One’s eyes adjust and then lakes appear, made into smoky seamless marble, valleys morph into passages to the underworld, and snow-capped trees become circumspect honor guards (the “Night Landscapes” series, 2012-13). Katseff’s work is well and truly liminal: astride the border between the now and the ancient, the visible and the clandestine, the pedestrian and the mythic. We become acquainted with the night, looking at these landscapes. We learn patience, waiting for the Fairie to appear.
The works in the “Flames” series (2010) aestheticize another of the primeval elements, in addition to earth and water. In these images fire appears to pour itself over the object, inhabit it, ravage it rather than simply consume it. Though these photographs are not as mesmerizing as the landscapes, they may make a viewer want to discount scientific accounts of fire as excitation of molecules in favor of more animistic explanations—possession, for example. The “Whole Night” series (2011) on the other hand demystifies the night sky, making it a kind of clever designer-wallpaper with stars leaving lighter traces of their passage in a graphic rather than organic style.
Katseff’s use of a black-and-white palette makes him very much a part of the history of fine art landscape photography following those like Edward Weston, Minor White and Ansel Adams. The attention to formal qualities is made more evident in his “Interiors” series (2012-13) where Katseff shows us model homes that are the opposite of the dark we left: simplified, defoliated, flooded with light, so that no corner allows for hiding. All is visible and known. But where Katseff’s work is most compelling is in its sense of not knowing what is up ahead, therefore causing us to scout the landscape with our senses on guard, fully alert.
“Chris Burden: Extreme Measures,” at New York’s New Museum is the artist’s first major exhibition in the U.S. in over 25 years. A legendary provocateur, Burden has challenged traditional concepts of art through his galvanizing performance pieces and later thought-provoking sculptural work, consistently questioning physical, moral and structural limitations over the course of his 40-year career.
I first encountered Burden as a goggle-eyed schoolgirl, introduced by my much older cousin, an art historian, who showed me a catalog of his work. I remember poring over Shoot (1971) and Trans-Fixed (1974), trying to make sense of them. They profoundly disturbed me because they seemed to shake the very foundations of what I thought, not only about art, but about rationality itself. In the end, my “why?” questions unanswered, I gave up, dismissing Burden as a complete loon.
Of course, as my thoughts about contemporary art evolved over the years, I came to appreciate him and his enormous impact, and to accept that back then, putting himself at risk, using his body to test his and his audiences’ limits, was central to his artistic expression.
But I’m still not sure if having yourself shot in the arm (I discovered via a BBC interview playing on a continuous loop at the show that Burden actually had intended only to be grazed by the bullet) or nailed to a Volks-wagen, qualify as visual art. They’re certainly something, but to me it’s more akin to a theater-philosophy hybrid. Burden was not alone in this type of art-making. Plenty of post-Duchamp artists engaged in this, often shocking, dematerialization of art. For Burden, as for others, it served its purpose, recalibrating things in such a way that a return to the object once again became possible. Chris Burden, L.A.P.D. Uniforms, 1993 With his objects, one thing’s for sure: Burden is obsessed with weighty issues (pun intended). Big ideas and big work abound. Nearly all his pieces are immensely heavy, and those that aren’t: A Tale of Two Cities (1981), All the Submarines of the United States of America (1987) and L.A.P.D. Uniforms (1993) make up for it in their size. It’s as if when he made the switch from nonobjective (weightless) performance art to sculpture, he used bulk as a means to anchor himself.
Burden has quite literally taken over the New Museum, with work on the roof and every floor below. He’s even on the front of the building where his 2-ton 30-foot wooden Ghost Ship is mounted. It’s a strange apparition against the sleek Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA façade. In 2005 the unmanned vessel made a 400-mile journey between Fair Isle, Scotland and Newcastle upon Tyne, England, navigated by computers. It’s in far stranger “waters” here. A meditation on the nature of energy, Burden’s The Big Wheel (1979) features an enormous cast-iron flywheel with a 1968 Benelli 250cc motorcycle positioned in front. When the bike’s backed up so rubber wheel touches metal and the motor revved to 200 rpms, the flywheel is set spinning. This kinesis continues for 2.5 hours after the motorcycle is switched off. Cool, huh? It’s also really cool looking, a 19th-century/20th-century pastiche of esoteric bright blue motorcycle and simple, yet massive rusted flywheel. Chris Burden, The Big Wheel, 1979, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los AngelesOn the other side of the gallery, Porsche with Meteorite (2013) features a 400 lb. meteorite dangling on one end of a long steel beam. On the other end, hangs Burden’s acid yellow 1974 Porsche 914. It’s a wonderful counterbalance arrangement not just of weight, but of form and substance. The sleek automobile, so interesting in terms of design and color—a triumph of human engineering—paired with the hunk of ancient, alien, raw matter.
Then there are the bridges. This is where Burden wins my heart. I love his obsession with these early structures of industrial design and the painstaking care with which he recreates them using metal toy construction parts—and in Three Arch Dry Stack Bridge, ¼ scale (2013), hand-cast concrete blocks. They are things of beauty and testaments to his devotion to his art. I think my favorite one is actually unbuilt. The ultimate Erector set, it’s the Tyne Bridge Kit (2004), which he came up with after he’d gone to such lengths to produce the original downscaled version of that bridge. Weighing in at a ton, the kit consists of the tools, blueprints and the 200,000 parts needed to erect the model, all of it housed in an elaborate wooden chest. Burden’s idea is not so much that you would build it, but that you can see the bridge in condensed form. I love the uselessness of it: the enormous effort put into something that has no practical purpose. All the parts are there, but the bridge exists only as an idea. To me, this piece tells you what you need to know about Burden: his integrity, vision and unflagging commitment to his art, all of which are so eloquently embodied here. Chris Burden, Three Arch Dry Stack Bridge, 1/4 Scale, 2013, courtesy of the artist
“Chris Burden: Extreme Measures” at The New Museum in New York, runs thru Jan. 12, 2014; info newmuseum.org
Artillery was always skeptical about the selection of Jeffrey Deitch as director of MOCA. In 2010 we did a cover story musing on the idea of Deitch at the helm. Preposterous! was our first reaction. And we backed it up with interviews from Los Angeles and New York dealers, curators and artists, all expressing their misgivings. (see Volume 4, issue 4, March/April 2010) After Deitch took his position, rumors spread like wildfire about the disharmony between Chief Curator Paul Schimmel and Deitch, and we awaited the departure of either one of them; who would be the first to go was anyone’s guess. It turned out to be Schimmel.
Now Deitch has stepped down. It’s been referred to as a resignation, but one can only assume he was asked to leave. Deitch gave up a lot—and was paid a lot—to come out here and take over a museum, so I can’t imagine that he resigned voluntarily. Now, he most likely can’t wait to get the hell outta Dodge. What a fiasco.
From the moment I heard Deitch speak at the first MOCA press preview, it was obvious to me that the guy was out of his element. He always looked like a deer in the headlights behind that microphone. His diminutive stature and barely audible nasal voice made me feel sort of sorry for him. What was he thinking when he accepted the position at MOCA? What was he doing in LA?
On the few occasions that he allowed himself to be quoted, I liked what he had to say. He always talked about pushing the envelope and doing things that maybe not everybody would agree with. I do appreciate his gutsy far-out ideas for museum shows. I’m actually sorry I won’t get to see the disco show. I was sort of looking forward to that; it’s sort of a funny idea. It would have been better than Urs Fischer’s muddy mess over at MOCA’s Geffen now.
It appears disco was the last straw for John Baldessari, who had reached the limits of his tolerance with Deitch and resigned. And I can understand and appreciate that. I really can’t see Baldessari at a disco—what a scary thought! And of course Schimmel’s firing didn’t help much with the rest of the board members.
Some say Deitch’s crowning achievement at MOCA was the 2011 “Art in the Streets” show. It was controversial, but that’s what art should really be. That’s why hiring Deitch was intriguing, to say the least. We were all willing to give him a chance. Then Deitch tapped into Hollywood, and why wouldn’t he? LACMA Director Michael Govan schmoozes with celebrities all the time. But Deitch seemed to be only wining and dining the stars, and not letting them pick up the tab.
We tried to like Deitch at Artillery, where we just tell it like it is. Sure, our gossip columnist had a field day with Deitch. There was constant fodder for Mr. Mulholland’s On The Wag column with Deitch’s Hollywood love affair: Cary Grant’s homestead, James Franco’s James Dean reinvention, Kalup Linzy in the soaps, the human head center pieces for a MOCA benefit.
MOCA made a mistake. They traded substance for glitz. They let Schimmel go and now he’s onto greener pastures, and MOCA is left with nothing. They sold their soul. No director, no cutting-edge chief curator and a sans-artists board. But guess what MOCA still has? Eli Broad.
“We are not solely regionally focused,” says Miki Garcia, executive director of Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, which will change its name to Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara next week. “The artists that we show are local, national and international, so the projects that we’re doing here are on par with what the MOCA and the Hammer are doing [in Los Angeles]. It’s smaller in scale because of the footprint, but the kind of work that we’re doing in terms of contributing to the field is just as rigorous. We are expansive in our mission to present the most compelling contemporary art being made today.”
Miki Garcia interviewing guest curator Laura Fried
The newly named Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara has been an alternative arts space since 1976. Admission is free. According to Garcia, who has been in charge of daily operations at the nonprofit institution since 2005, MCA Santa Barbara has always been concerned with and engaged in process, and supporting—not canonizing—artists. Without a permanent collection, the exhibitions come and go about every three months.
“Our job is not to say this is the best art of all time,” Garcia says. “We are not an encyclopedic museum whose mission has a retrospective, historical position. Ours is: This is what’s happening now. That’s the more interesting story for us.”
Although museum is now part of its title, MCA Santa Barbara has no immediate plans to acquire work for a permanent collection. Ideas have been circulating about how to restructure its membership, and in April, a Founder’s Circle was created for donors who give $2,000 or more for the purpose of growing the museum. Twenty people have already signed up.
“By becoming a museum, it gives us more resources to bring in more schools and bigger audiences so there’s a better understanding of what we do,” says Garcia. “The big difference is that with the exhibitions there will be more thought to having them be more engaged with the public, not a quiet space just for artists. We want to have more of a dialogue with the community, and not just Santa Barbara, but the arts community in general.”
This isn’t the first time Garcia has set out to make contemporary art more accessible to a wider spectrum of people. Previously, she worked at New York’s Public Art Fund and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego before taking over at MCA Santa Barbara, where, through donor gifts and grants, she has grown the operating budget from $300,000 to $1 million.
“It’s exciting for us,” says Garcia. “We have this mission where we are advocates for art and artistic practice. We want to carve out a space in our community in Santa Barbara and the Central Coast where artists can be avant-garde and think at the highest, most experimental levels, and then we try to make that accessible for our audience. It’s like the space is a conduit between the artist and giving them resources so they feel like it’s a lab, but to have the audience come in and be a part of that process, to be engaged.”
New logo!
Even with the name change, MCA of Santa Barbara’s physical location will remain the same and funds will be allocated to upgrade the current facilities. Its main site is located on the Upper Arts Terrace of the Paseo Nuevo Shopping Center off Chapala Street in downtown Santa Barbara. Here, in addition to regular exhibition viewing, guests can attend live events, like performance-based Forum Lounges on the first Thursday of every month, and smART Talks. The satellite location, about seven blocks away, is Hotel Indigo on State Street, which is in the middle of the burgeoning arts district known as the Funk Zone. Garcia was introduced to the hotel’s owners, Marc and Laurie Recordon, just a short time after visiting 21c, a hotel-museum partnership in Louisville, Ky., operated by collectors who decided to exhibit artwork in their hotel.
“If MCA Santa Barbara is asking artists to think in terms of risk-taking and experimentation, if that’s our mission, we have to take those ideas to heart on an institutional level,” says Garcia. “What we’ve been doing in the last couple of years is broadening our audience and rethinking how contemporary art museums work. How we can adapt to a changing demographic and attract a younger audience.”
Dasha Shishkin, Non mi toccare, 2012
Garcia approached the Recordons about hanging art on the walls of the hotel’s public spaces. The couple loved the idea, and Hotel Indigo’s first exhibit, titled “Open House,” coincided with its opening in March 2012.
“It creates a much more open, accessible environment,” Garcia says. “It’s such an interesting way for me to look at how people who wouldn’t go to a museum would have this critical-thinking hat not on as they walked in, and have a different experience. In a hotel, their relationship to the artwork is much more curious and open. It’s along the lines of how I want our public to interact with contemporary art.”
Hotel Indigo’s current exhibit, “Limuw: An Ode to the Sea,” runs through January 1, 2014. MCA Santa Barbara’s next exhibit features work by Dasha Shishkin and Edgar Orlaineta and opens July 6.
Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara is located on the Upper Arts Terrace of the Paseo Nuevo Shopping Center on Chapala Street, Santa Barbara. For more information, call 805-966-5373 or visit mcasantabarbara.org. Hotel Indigo satellite location is located at 121 State Street, Santa Barbara. For more information, call 805-966-6586 or visit indigosantabarbara.com.
More than 30 venues—166 international artists within a few square miles—a forum for ideas rather than conspicuous consumption: it’s Documenta 13! Held every five years in Kassel, Germany, and founded in 1955 by Arnold Bode, an art professor and designer from Kassel, this is the world’s most important and enduring contemporary art show. Depending on the curatorial vision of the exhibition organizer(s) that shape the content, you might encounter a scolding, pedantic treatise on colonialism, or a Teutonic, oppressively intellectual “march-of-death” experience. Thanks to American-born artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, this iteration of Documenta was accessible to nearly anyone with interest in the larger world around us, and provided conceptually rich art while also feeding the senses. The overarching theme of the mega-exhibition was “bearing witness,” with all that the phrase implies.
Don’t get me wrong: I love art fairs and revel in such market-driven events. But after the parties and the bright shiny happy pretty things, Documenta was the perfect antidote. Where else in the world could you see, under the same roof, one-quarter of all the ancient carved-stone “Bactrian Princesses” known to exist in the world, then go to debate the relationship between art and philosophy in a closed seminar? The exquisite Earth Goddess-like sculptures from Central Asia date back to the 2nd millennium B.C. and were borrowed from a private collection; the seminar was German philosopher Christoph Menke’s “What is Thinking? Or a Taste That Hates Itself,” held on Tuesdays from 11–1 p.m. in one of the galleries at the Fridericianum museum, the main Documenta venue. This brings a saying to mind: the French eat; the Italians make love; and the Germans think.
Among the most memorable projects was Chicago-based artist Michael Rakowitz’s installation, featuring shards from the destroyed Buddhas of Bamiyan (“All we are breaking are stones”); the burnt remains of books ravaged when the Fridericianum was bombed by the Allies in 1941, and deemed too unimportant to restore; as well as beautiful stone books symbolizing the lost volumes carved by contemporary Afghani carvers using stones quarried at Bamiyan. The emotional impact of this powerful installation was that of a body blow, as our complicity in the destruction of cultural treasures crept into conscience like a bad memory. The title of Rakowitz’s installation (What dust will rise from one horseman?) was taken from an Afghan proverb on cooperation.
Michael Rakowitz, “What Dust Will Rise?,” 2012, Commissioned and produced by Documenta 13 with the support of Dena Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris, and Lombard Freid Projects, New York, courtesy the artist; Dena Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris; Lombard Freid Projects, New York, photo by Roman März.
At the Neue Galerie Kassel, Sanja Ivekovic’s “The Disobedient (The Revolutionaries),” 2012, was a stand-out. The Croatian artist assembled plush toy donkeys of all eras, shapes and sizes, and displayed them in a glass case, capturing the attention of hordes of German schoolchildren touring through the galleries. (Note to self: art education is alive and well in Europe!) The piece provided a great example of an artwork that is cute on the surface but has a dark underbelly: adults were absorbed by the text on the opposite wall, describing the political protestors and martyrs symbolized by each cute lil’ stuffed animal, from Anna Mae Aquash to Primo Levi—a broad international assortment of political protestors who died because they were stubborn—like donkeys are reputed to be.
Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s wonderful sound installation “Forest (for a thousand years)” featured a recording of a choral piece sung by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, set in a glade deep in the recesses of the landscaped Karlsaue Park. Speakers were hung in the trees surrounding the tree-trunk stool seating arranged in the center of the clearing, and if you found your way there through the mud, your reward was 25 minutes of transcendent, blissful listening to a composition by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Cardiff and Miller had another site-specific installation at Documenta, in Kassel’s Hauptbahnhof train station. The “Alter Bahnhof Video Walk” used augmented reality to guide audiences on an engaging walk through the station. After borrowing an iPod from an office inside the station, you were told to take a seat on a bench and wait. As you held the media player in front of you, Cardiff guided you on a walking tour through the station as various video and audio vignettes unfurled. You proceeded as directed, often wheeling around since the recorded events were both mundane and convincingly realistic—people running to catch trains, a dog barking, a baby crying. At one point, Cardiff guided viewers to one of the train platforms, the same platform where Nazis loaded victims onto cars bound for the concentration camps. At another point, Cardiff stopped the narration and “turned off” the video at the request of a mysterious man who preferred to remain incognito.
The tour ended with a duet dance performance, a wonderful chance encounter made all the more powerful by Cardiff and Miller’s playful manipulation of temporality. At Documenta 13 there was nothing to buy—just pure experience to remind you what contemporary art can be.
