Artillery Magazine

Tag: Cubism

  • Edward Burtynsky – Industrial Abstract

    Edward Burtynsky – Industrial Abstract

    Edward Burtynsky’s principal subject over the last decade or so has been the industrial landscape, or more specifically, large-scale, frequently aerial views of major industrial operations, grids, excavations, or industrial waste sites. The photographs in his current show at Von Lintel continue in this vein – part of a larger project Burtynsky has titled (not surprisingly), Anthropocene. What is fascinating about the current body of work is that it returns us to the roots of visual abstraction, even the notion of landscape itself. The history of 20th century abstraction begins in landscape (e.g., Picasso’s proto-Cubist Horta landscape studies; and arguably before that). It could be argued that our entire notion of visual abstraction, of visual description, is rooted in our apprehension and appreciation of landscape as referring to a larger notion of environment and exterior surroundings generally. It is the way we define a world within our scope and grasp; also our place in it. Not unlike some of that pre- and early Cubist work, Burtynsky’s angled, aerial perspectives tease our perceptions of foreground and horizon-line, flatten surfaces and ambiguously shadow contours. More to the point, the photographs emphasize a further extension of the peculiarly human impulse to demarcate place – and the human place within it – through aggressive mark-making. Consider the stark quasi-Cartesian geometries of the ‘Salt Pans’ at Little Rann of Kutch, Gujarat (2016) or the flattened, almost Tanguy-esque desert of Silver Lake Operations #16 (2007, above) interrupted by a kind of ‘flying’ spiral festoon. Considered in the aggregate, the Anthropocene makes the notion of an earthwork or land art seem almost redundant. Humankind’s ever more aggressive industrial-scale excavations and exploitation of mineral and other resources have dramatically transformed vast swaths of the earth’s surface. Our single-minded predations have changed the way we see landscape and in turn ourselves. ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ as a biblical prophet once wrote. In the end, too, apparently – and beyond this terrifying beauty, it means still less.

    Von Lintel Gallery
      2685 S. La Cienega Blvd.
    Los Angeles, CA 90034
    Show runs thru April 22, 2017

  • Iva Gueorguieva

    Iva Gueorguieva

    The title of Iva Gueorguieva’s show “Spill/Frame” seemed almost a naked admission of its strategies and ambition with a concomitant risk of crashing, careening failure. In almost all of the works on view there was both a willful, self-imposed notion of the edge or, especially as elaborated in the relief-constructions, the frame, the box, the armature, machinery, as well as the sense of a flow, falling away or threatened breach of that frame or edge.

    In the context of this expansive show, the constructions (three in all) seemed compressed vessels of the exploded array of objects, incidents and machinery—”real life” referents—”framed” by the collage-paintings (six, including one from 2011, the largest on linen or canvas, with one on paper). What in its totality might appear a galvanic fury of lines, notional designs or geometric configurations, revealed a precise choreography of separately painted collaged segments of canvas or linen, slotted into the “machinery.” There should be no confusing it with gestural abstraction. This is really a revival of Cubist (or even Futurist) conventions by other means to other ends—those ends having less to do with illusionistic space than with illusionistic time.

    A subject like Man Hunt (2013) might be expected to spill out of its frame—the painting is by far the largest (110 x 180 inches) of the works in the show; but in fact, it’s as controlled as the smallest, Shadow Blister (2013), the most “Cubist” in its neutral palette, which has an almost poetic elegance—a Cornell “slot machine” construction filtered through Braque. In Man Hunt, as elsewhere in the show, Gueorguieva’s dynamic palette energizes the triptych; its modulation between a slightly acid yellow-green “zone” through a dense varicolored mid-section to a darker, steel-blue dominated section almost demarcate its segments. But the “machinery” of the painting is far more complex. Instead, structural elements, screens, cabling and circuitry—industrial flotsam—eddy and arc around a black vortex well off-center.

    The title of Seated Woman: 1974 (2013) itself underscored the sense of reaching back in time. The entire composition is a kind of reversal (again Gueorguieva’s palette is expressive)—with a “window” of blue in the upper left framing brown extensions (architectural or anatomical?) that descend obliquely into a larger cascade. The energy of the composition comes in downward thrusts—oblique strokes in collaged acrylic and oil-stick, a shower of brown lines, two-by-fours, jagged boxy elements in orange and putty or burnt brown and sienna amphorae—all collapsing into a blue void—an abstracted defenestration or a private sea—as if to penetrate the “mechanics” of time and movement.

    Shelter (2012) was the most “totemic” of the constructions. On a rectangular cubic construction (like the frame of an old electric sign), the artist mounted pieces of steel industrial venting (or possibly an old Jeep grille) cut like wings, amid lithographed and printed fabric that abstractly suggested architectural elements—girders, crossbars, cranes, balusters and rigging. Panels of lozenged blue fabric curled toward the rear on parabolic tubing—wing-like extensions into a dubiously sheltering sky.

  • Under The Radar

    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