Artillery Magazine

Tag: Mark Steven Greenfield

Racial Reckoning
Mark Steven Greenfield Illuminates the Black Experience

In 2020, Mark Steven Greenfield unveiled a new body of work, “Black Madonna,” followed by “HALO” in 2022, both at the William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica. Gallery owner William Turner told me in an email that the “Black Madonna” show was a natural progression of Greenfield’s career of investigations into race and racial identity. “It was a sensation when we opened it in the fall of 2020,” Turner says. “It was purely coincidental, but after the summer of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, our show became a catalyst for people discussing these issues.” Turner witnessed viewers staying nearly an hour in the gallery studying Greenfield’s intricate paintings. “We have never had a show that had that kind of depth of impact.”

Mark Steven Greenfield Portrait, Photo Credit Tony Pinto

A native Angeleno, Greenfield is receiving well-deserved recognition. Besides being a full-time artist, he has had an
extraordinary career as a significant cultural producer in the roles of arts administrator, curator, juror and teacher in Los Angeles. Like many artists who have a hybrid career in the arts, Greenfield worked as Art Center director at the Watts Towers Arts Center and director of the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery for the Cultural Affairs Department, City of Los Angeles. His associations with over 25 cultural and service organizations are a testament to his ethos of service and support for artists and community.

Toppling, 2020, Acrylic and Gold Leaf on Wood Panel, 24” x 18”

Raised a Catholic and a long-time practitioner of meditation, Greenfield infuses his work with allusions to ritual, ceremony and spirituality. Painting images of Black and brown persons on gilded panels in a meticulous narrative, representational style, “Black Madonna” and “HALO” become symbols of empowerment and unification. When Greenfield alludes to the protective and healing purposes of traditional religious icon art, he suggests his work is also meant to offer similar forms of protection. Both his series clearly respond to the killings of African Americans by the people who are supposed to keep our communities safe. Greenfield says of his recent paintings that they “conjure up memories of the church and the reverence once paid to statues and images of saints,” but are now redirected to those who have taken up the struggle for social justice. He adds, “I made the choice of honoring those little known heroes, martyrs and personages from whose stories we might gain strength.”

Escrava Anastacia, 2020, Acrylic and Gold Leaf on Wood Panel, 24″ X 24”

Greenfield’s art practice explores and illuminates the Black experience, focusing on the effects of stereotypes on American culture. Always provocative in an unexpected way, his work stimulates a much-needed and often long-overdue dialog on issues of race. His recent summer exhibition, “HALO,” has created another conversation. While “Black Madonna” played with the idea of role reversals—revering and worshiping a Black Virgin Mary and a Black Baby Jesus as symbols of love; what if white supremacists were the victims instead of the oppressors—“HALO” evolved as a next natural progression, highlighting historical Black figures. They have been chosen from the period of the slave trade during the 1400s–1800s. He wants his subjects—often legendary in their time yet now overlooked—to be rediscoverd. Greenfield’s use of gold as a material connotes value and importance, but also currency. Most of the people depicted in the series were enslaved and treated as commodities. His figurative painting is particularly striking. Greenfield explains,“The figures are rendered in ‘ultra-black’ in keeping with their political designation and not so much for their degree of melanin. It is the element in these paintings that unifies, regardless of association, wealth, class or prestige.” Almost all of the paintings have circular glyphs, a visual device that is a through line in much of Greenfield’s work. These evoke the mantras he uses as a vehicle in his daily meditations.

Lesson, 2002, Ink Jet Print, 37″ X 28″

In Greenfield’s work, each series has developed its own stylistic approach. For example, his 2007 exhibition “Incognegro,” at the 18th Street Arts Center, consisted of appropriated photographs. They are mainly of white people in black face, who in turn were appropriating African American culture. For this body of work, he made Iris prints and lenticular photographs. The mirror effect of lenticular photography heightened Greenfield’s intention to expose and dramatize the complexities surrounding issues of race, identity and perception. With the photos of turn-of-the-century black-face performers he superimposed a subversive message that looks like a optometrist’s office eye chart. They contain direct, challenging statements and questions about race and identity. “Incognegro” caused a stir about the use of Black stereotypes and whether they were helpful or hurtful. Mark says of this experience, “Work dealing with the indignities associated with black face has always been a messy proposition.” He believes that black-face images have haunted communities of color for a long time. His intention with this series was exorcising the demons that these images have conjured up; without that, he says, “We’ll never really be free. “Incognegro,” while problematic in 2007 for some segments of the Black community, is starting to impact whites, compelling some degree of introspection on their part. It has brought into focus the responsibilities associated with social justice and allyship. Both “Black Madonna” and “HALO” expand this conversation and engagement with a larger audience that is willing to listen and learn from the social reckoning occurring globally and locally. At a moment when many younger artists of color are gaining national attention for their identity-based work, Greenfield has always been creating conversations about racial reckoning, both as an artist and cultural producer. His unswerving commitment to self-examination and community has made him a change-maker in the best sense of the word.

September 6, 2022
Let Me Talk
Witness Trees, Melting Gates, and Quiet Breathing

Let me talk. How often have I had to say that? Or wanted to say that? Or conversely, put it back to an interlocutor—‘no, go ahead—you talk; I want to hear what you have to say.’ Or in yet another mood or set of conditions, thought to myself, ‘let me hear this out.’ Sometimes—more often than not—the problem, the information vacuum, or alternatively the ‘noise’, is in what remains unsaid, the predicate to the subject at hand, the underlying assumptions and conditions to what is under discussion, or its unspoken (and frequently uncomfortable) implications.

Like a number of other shows over the last six months to a year or so, this was a show originally conceived partially in response to the conditions of the four or five years preceding late January of 2021, but delayed because of the SARS-CoV2 pandemic of the last couple of years (though to some extent, the “hateful environment” that curators Ada Pullini Brown and Jill Sykes reference as both conditioning and provoking artists represented here was undoubtedly amplified and aggravated by the often capricious tensions and isolations induced over the course of the virus variant surges).

Writing about art—or for that matter technology, politics, urban social or cultural issues—often seems more about writing about what I want to know rather than something I already know or can readily describe. But the scope of this show is almost beyond what any single artist—or even 24 of them—could hope to somehow encapsulate or apostrophize in one or two works, or conceivably even a substantial body of work. The multiple helices of global socio-political and power divides are on the order of the kind of ‘hyper-object’ some people refer to with respect to global climate change, artificial intelligence, augmented or parallel realities and parallel universes. In other words, the artists here are effectively in the same place, trying to ‘geo-locate’ something that can scarcely be described much less fully comprehended. “And yet,” as art historian and critic Betty Ann Brown writes in her foreword summary, “artists, who allow their life experiences to flow through them and emerge in aesthetic form, continue to create works that ‘speak’ to the volatile issues of contemporary culture.”

Catherine Ruane, “General Pico” (2021)

This is merely supplemental to the review that Genie Davis already wrote in this space and not intended as a further overview, but simply a response to some of the extraordinary works channeling and responding to that ‘volatility’. By far the greatest source of such volatility (even today, as humans find themselves in a battle for their freedom from authoritarianism and repression) is the destruction of the biosphere wrought by human predations across the entire planet. The best work here, both large and small, had a (not necessarily literal) immersive quality. It was appropriate, I thought, that viewers should be greeted by Catherine Ruane’s General Pico, which framed and seemed to almost spill into the entry into the main exhibition space. The subject tree—an ancient sycamore that has stood on the Irvine Ranch for centuries—has its own dark back-story of intra-species violence. Ruane explains in the exhibition’s accompanying text that the tree was used for multiple lynchings, including a pair by one of its principal ranchers, General Pico. Ruane’s beautiful articulation of light and shadow in the looming section of the tree’s bough eloquently set the mood for the exhibition.

A sense of entrance, exit, and overhang permeates the exhibition—distance, departure, loss, migration loom in the shadows of much of the work here. Walk-through can seem to foreshadow a kind of walkabout in an almost aboriginal sense. (We’re in transition here and wherever we’re going near or far, we’re not all likely to survive.) Miyo Stevens-Gandara brilliantly uses the notion of the Japanese noren or doorway hanging (that many of us are familiar with in Japanese restaurants and noodle shops) to convey the sense of transitions from the micro-biome to the macro-cultural (in indigo-dyed fabric and embroidery). Then, in Dismal Cycle: California Flora, deliberately invoking a parallel to the ‘dismal science’ of human economic life, she traces on kozo paper a kind of devolution of California plant life—from its oldest native plant life at the center spiraling out to more recent native, non-native and the monocultured species of agriculture at its circumference—a delicate and poetic ‘bead’ on the strikingly indelicate impact of human life on plants. (Stevens-Gandara—with the help of Self-Help Graphics and 26 other artists—has also curated a fantastic portfolio of prints for the show, Utopia/Dystopia, that’s worth more than a black-jack flip.)

Sierra Pecheur, “Ghost Heart (humanity)” (2019)

Some of the most striking works on view were also the smallest—Sierra Pecheur’s porcelain Ghost Hearts, more or less human-scaled and modeled hearts, but variously distorted, mutated or simply scarred; or in one instance, Ghost Heart (humanity) nestling (or clotted with) other human hearts in progress. No need to wait for plaques and platelets to congeal into deadly obstructive blockages and emboli; mere procreation should do the trick. Pecheur characterizes the work (part of a series, related in turn to other interconnected bodies of work) as “a grieving,” which, absent color, seemingly drained of life force, makes sense. But she adds that the work is also partially “warning”—which makes even more sense. It is a sophisticated, highly efficient, yet vulnerable engine, destined to fail—its maturation synchronous with its scarring. The show has us looking at memory here on many levels—muscle memory, earth or geological memory.

Mark Steven Greenfield, “Incognegro” series (2005-07)

There is every kind of scarring, ‘inflammation’, and degradation available here—some of it left in our wake as residue, some of it impossible to really leave behind—carried forward generationally in one form or another and for all we know surviving the planet’s obliteration. (Can we hope those dark stars and black holes dispose of any of this in the astral domain?) With his Incognegro series (2005-07), Mark Steven Greenfield touches on a specific specimen of this dark cultural/historical stain in humanity’s scarrifying trajectory across the planet—specifically white actors and vaudevillians (or conceivably ‘costumed’ non-professionals) in blackface. Greenfield arranged his lozenge-framed lenticular images (blackface/blancface) into a similarly lozenged configuration of four, which heightened the tension in the dubious convergence of ‘double identities’—which aren’t really identities at all, or even masks. (It’s truly astonishing to realize how long ‘blackface’ minstrelsy and other entertainment forms persisted in Euro-American culture.) The shock lies not simply in the degradation of the ‘other’, but negation of the underlying identity—really identity altogether. It’s the dirtiest of psychological crimes at the diseased roots of paranoid authoritarian strains in American social and political culture.

Margaret Griffith, “101280” (2021)

Margaret Griffith’s magnificent melting ‘gates’, 15th, 17th, and Pennsylvania (2017)—as in Pennsylvania Avenue, or more specifically, the White House gates, in Washington, D.C., provided a signature ‘melt-down’ moment for the exhibition, exemplifying the illusion of entrance and exit, of barrier, (and as she puts it in her statement, “permanence”). Its political dimension can hardly be magnified—doubly ironic, given the ‘melt-down’ level confrontation between riot police and a throng of protestors in Lafayette Square three or so years later as the former president (already pressing to invoke the Insurrection Act!) was escorted to St. John’s Church for a photo-sitting that fell far short of its promotional objective. Griffith’s spiral of chain link fencing—in paper, 101280 was no less show-stopping, evoking the sanitized and stateless hell of migration.

Cynthia Minet, “Seconds to Last” (2021)

Cynthia Minet’s work has long concerned notions of passage, transition (and their mechanics), migration, duration (or even shifting notions of duration), the environment beyond the human domain, and throughout, significantly, sustainability. (I may be exaggerating, but almost all of her three-dimensional work has been made with recycled materials—frequently recycled/discarded plastic fragments, mechanical, and color and lighting elements.) Two of her 2016 gouache/watercolor Spoonbills—part of her Migrations series—were on view here. But above all, Minet’s work is alive to the pure drama of animal movement, from the avian to the canine; and here she filled an installation space with one of her most dramatic constructions to date, Seconds to Last (2021)—a single large rhinoceros (a Northern White, to be specific) constructed from beautifully articulated fragments of recycled camping tents, inflated, and lit from within by sequenced LEDs, which enhanced the multicolored fabric panels—the head and horn a pale amethyst color, the shoulders in buff, gray and chartreuse panels, the mid-sections in amber and umber, and rear in deeper green and umber. Unlike some of her previous motile animal figures, this rhinoceros was not specifically in motion. Then, too, there was only so far it could go—literally and figuratively: it’s not merely threatened, the species is nearly extinct; there are only two surviving Northern Whites on the planet. The effect, as the light moved through the gorgeous beast, modulating, and finally dimming to grayed-out, blacked-out darkness, was of a quiet, labored respiration fading to the last breath. Nothing further needed to be said—then or now (missiles fly and bombs fall on the other longitudinal hemisphere as I write this). It is a kind of conjuring by re-animation and witnessing as meditation. Just let me listen.

Let Me Talk — co-curated by Ada Pullini Brown & Jill Sykes — The Brand Library & Art Center – through March 19, 2022 (Including work by: Margaret Alarcon, Dawn Arrowsmith, Ada Ppullini Brown, Lavialle Campbell, Eileen Cowin, Bibi Davidson, Bianca Dorso, Mark Steven Greenfield, Margaret Griffith, Dean Larson, Laura Larson, Cynthia Minet, Sierra Pecheur, Serena Potter, Catherine Ruane, Shizu Saldamando, Leigh Salgado, Barbara T. Smith, Miyo Stevens-Gandara, Theodore Svenningsen, Jill Sykes, J. Michael Walker, Cathy Weiss, Nancy Youdelman, Self Help Graphics) The Brand Library & Art Center – 1601 West Mountain Street, Glendale 91201

March 18, 2022
Ezrha Jean Black: My Favorite Things of 2020

“Jesus, you know, it wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Even if it strikes me now as having been inevitable….”

“I want to know what it will be like once all this (all this: the inexorable, the inexpressible) has become distant memory. I’ve always hated the way the most powerful experiences so often end up resembling dreams, I am talking about that taint of the surreal that besmears so much of our vision of the past. Why should so much that has happened feel as though it had not truly happened? Life is but a dream. Think: Could there be a crueler notion?”

                                                                                          Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through (Riverhead)

These words from one of my favorite things from this year in which we felt death press upon us as ephemerally as a gust of wind, as ponderously as the mechanical wheeze of a ventilator, deadly as live fire, even as we insisted that life mattered—in particular those lives which our law enforcement agencies valued least of all. Why should one murder be the breaking point? It must be said that George Floyd’s murder was preceded by what seemed like an unprecedented string of outrageous police homicides. That so many saw it as it unfolded no doubt was a contributing factor; but after a four-year subversive shit show of constitutional democracy under assault, of undisguised brutality, racism, and xenophobia, of unrelenting cruelty and callousness under color of law and the trappings of state, we were all face-to-face with a mushroom cloud chain reaction whether on the street or behind plate glass.

One thing I think can be safely said about 2020: although it actually did feel very dream-like and surreal intermittently as the days unfurled and events unfolded, as we continue through its last act bleeding into 2021, its long-term consequences will not be experienced anywhere remotely as dreamily or surreally. If we are not already experiencing the scarifying cruelty of its devastation to our health and well-being, our personal and household economies, the altered conditions we face due to climate change, and the material changes to our lives imposed by economic and environmental shifts well beyond 2021, we may feel as much or even more of a restraint on our accustomed activities, movements, habits and behaviours, as the present lockdown and the last. To the extent we are required to change our lives, we must expect that such changes may not necessarily correlate with what we regard as the “pursuit of happiness.”

And in essence this is the first of my ‘favorite things’ of 2020, and the keynote: the end of what we once might have called ‘normalcy’. Part of this is simply a matter of shifting perceptions. The Trump regime (with an assist from other autocratic, authoritarian or totalitarian, fascist or other right- or sectarian-leaning regimes, as well as the global coronavirus pandemic), not simply through an unrelenting assault on the social, political, and ethical ‘norms’ of executive procedures and prerogatives within a constitutional government, but its assault on the integrity of the institution and institutional identity itself, certainly accelerated this. But it was hard to ignore the extent to which mainstream media played along. Jordan Peele could write a movie about it (and probably has).

How is it that we normalize what we know to be wrong? And I mean we—because we all do it to some extent simply by the way we address or reference the status quo, the things which have always figured in large or small ways in our lives—the way we live and work, the ways in which we’re schooled and educated, aspects of the technology that supports these functions, aspects of our government, legal and judicial systems.

I think the playwright and screenwriter, John Patrick Shanley may have summed it up best in his script for the 1987 Norman Jewison (M-G-M/Star Partners II) film, Moonstruck: “Snap out of it!” Sometimes that’s what it takes: a snap, a slap, a traumatic break—and one of considerable force. It is more than an intellectual or conceptual leap to arrive at, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…,” to say nothing of its potential implications.

Return of the Birds

I’m not sure at what point I began to notice an increase in the number of birds, but it wasn’t that long after the initial shut-down. Timing had something to do with it: the first lock-down/shelter-in-place orders in Los Angeles and the rest of California more or less coincided with the beginning of Spring. No more than two weeks later, the difference was sharply noticeable – just as the decline of birds — their numbers and activities — has been at least as noticeable over the last decade or two. I can only speculate, but I have to wonder if this has something to do with increasing observations (and appreciations) of birds in many different quarters over the last nine months from coast to coast.

It’s not as if I suddenly took up the amateur study of ornithology in my pandemic lock-down time or organized bird-watching in my neighborhood or Griffith Park. But it was as if birds had dialed up the volume on their morning, early afternoon, and evening chirping and singing. To hear that music again and realize what it meant was an ecstatic moment. Some of my favorite music is inspired by nature, natural sounds, birds. Beethoven is clearly inspired by birdsong in his 6^th F major (“Pastoral) Symphony. Messiaen was obsessed with birds and makes a special study of birdsong with his Catalogue d’oiseaux.

Postscript: We’re not out of the woods (apologies for that chestnut) on this decline yet: e.g., the bird sanctuary in Griffith Park is still woefully under populated (though also simply under-populated with bird habitats — i.e., trees); there were reports of massive bird die-offs over Arizona and New Mexico this past summer—birds just dropping from the over-heated skies; etc. We have a long way to go.

Black Lives Matter / Trans Black Lives Matter / All Black Lives Matter

Between Breonna Taylor, Eliljah Cummings, and the on-camera murder of George Floyd (really a species of lynching), as with so many Americans, something in me broke, and has yet to mend. Although I could not go out for more than one demonstration, terrified as much by transmission of the coronavirus as by the L.A.P.D., I poured my pathetic earnings into at least half a dozen organizations and would have happily given more, had my attention not turned (after Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders failed to secure the nomination) to the priorities of unseating the first fascist psychopath to occupy the Presidency (to be honest about this, the entire duration of the Trump administration felt like a foreign occupation), securing and building on the Democratic House majority, and turning as many Senate seats blue as possible. Racism (like authoritarianism, totalitarianism) will always be with us on one level or another, but #BLM, like the battle to save the planetary biosphere, is one of the campaigns we carry forward until our last breath.

Democratic presidential candidate author Marianne Williamson speaks during the Democratic primary debate hosted by NBC News at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, Thursday, June 27, 2019, in Miami. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)

The presidential candidacy of Marianne Williamson

Don’t get me wrong: I went with Elizabeth Warren, with Julian Castro a close second and Bernie Sanders a distant third. (Politics is hard ball; and—forget about bats—the other team and their fans have their knives out for you.) But I fell in love with the notion, the sheer guts it took to bring a foundationally alternative agenda to the 2020 field, to those kangaroo-court-beauty-pageant-game-show-cum-debate stages. You think socialism is radical??? Forget about the ‘God’ stuff — this is about love — as in “what we were born with”; as opposed to the fear that “we learned here.” Too bad hate is always such an easy sell, as 73 million-plus Trump voters will happily confirm. Easy to distrust love when half of those presuming to offer it are not really offering love at all. Also easy to see why love might be conflated with religious faith — love is always a leap of faith. Setting to one side Williamson’s ‘God’ construct, her agenda is really on a continuum with most consciousness-expansion movements since the Enlightenment — building a kind of radical empathy as if through a cognitive behavioral approach, opening and expanding the imagination. If there’s a hiccup in her ‘program’ to speak, it’s probably the notion of ‘practicing forgiveness’— a little dangerous where humankind has already pushed way beyond the tipping point, inflicting so much unforgiveable damage to the planet (and, needless to say, each other). Still, as we were fighting off the haters with bricks, bats, choice nouns and adjectives, and a whole lot of dollars, it was something we needed to hear.

Re-reading Rachel Carson

Speaking of birds, long before we had a clue the pandemic was going to be moving anywhere beyond Wuhan’s borders, I had chanced upon an early title of Rachel Carson’s, originally published well before The Sea Around Us or her landmark call to environmental action, Silent Spring, Under the Sea-Wind, and began tearing through it, as I might through a great poem or piece of inspired fiction. Describing the life-cycles, processes and functions of aquatic and avian life — and inter-connectedness of it all, she isolates individual specimens and creates fictional trajectories for them, propelling us alongside as if we were part of the same flock, swarm, school. (We are, of course.) I had wanted to look at Silent Spring again after reading Andrea Wulf’s fantastic biography of Alexander von Humboldt, The Invention of Nature in 2018 or 2019, and now began going through all of Carson’s books again, rediscovering the breathtaking poetry she observed in nature (and the literary poetry she referenced and drew comparison to in, for example, The Sea Around Us), and the poetry of her own writing, her voice and sensibility.

Sigrid Nunez: What Are You Going Through

Poised between radical empathy (specifically, empathy in extremis, as articulated by Simone Weil, who inspired the novel’s title) and a clear-eyed reading of the variety of human experience of the world, including its worst corruptions and pathologies and what they have made of it, What Are You Going Through feels at moments as if Nunez picked up right where she left off in her celebrated last novel, The Friend. Again death is cheated, only to return—not with a vengeance, but absurd and inexorable, in full view of our ravaged legacies, the catastrophes looming just beyond the horizon. We don’t necessarily need the “reality of sickness,” the truths “born of affliction” (I’m quoting Sontag here) because we’re immersed in it. Nunez’s book is a puzzle of paradox and contradiction, unblemished by false consolation, but not without moments of quotidian transcendence.

Aside from a few stand-out novels like this one, I can’t say I actually read all that much during 2020—preoccupied with politics and activism, a seemingly continuous stream of assaults and outrages on bodies planetary and politic, an often demanding job, and the minutiae of daily life under a global pandemic. In addition to Carson, I re-read a bit of Sartre and Genet; also Leonora Carrington. The few other highlights included Jenny Offill’s Weather, read alongside the late poet, Holly Prado’s chronicle-poem, Weather; Reginald Dwayne Betts’ searing collection of poems (not a few of them composed in extremis), Felon; Bill McKibben’s Falter, Wayne Koestenbaum’s Figure It Out, Eugenia Cheng’s x + y; Fayette Hauser’s The Cockettes: Acid Drag and Sexual Anarchy; Jim Carrey’s (with Dana Vachon) Memoirs and Misinformation, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court.

Rediscovering Television / Michaela Coel: I May Destroy You

Viewed against the context of my life, it’s amazing how little television I watch generally, and even more amazing how little I’ve watched over the last few years, which many view as a kind of zenith of the medium. Having caught bits and pieces of this series or that through various launch screenings over the past several years, it wasn’t as if I was entirely clueless as to what might be in store, but as I dove a bit deeper, my eyes and ears opened again to different ways of telling the story or putting across a set of ideas, feelings, actualities, moment by moment. Here’s the thing:   during these zenith years—really the past decade—television has been transformed (partially through the influences of streaming services, YouTube, and the gamut of digital media). Far from the packaged, 3-camera thing it was once, it’s an entirely different grammar and syntax. You could almost reduce the whole of it down to camera(s) and editing – cameras and cuts, jump-cut of jump-cuts: here’s where you were, here’s where you are—and suddenly we comprehend an entire stretch of ground.

I can still become a bit impatient with it. It’s generally slower than print and I am occasionally tempted to fast-forward through certain streamed series (though there are instances when the opposite is true). I had to jump forward and back to really sink my chops into the stew of content. And then I came to Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You; and, well you know how it is when you encounter that thing that swallows all media; that is words and music and stage and screen and street and theatre and contemporary life and a swath of eternity — okay we’ll set aside ‘eternity’ for the moment. But Coel has created something that both snaps our heads around in several directions almost simultaneously while meeting us (okay I’m about to exaggerate again) right where we live. Alright where some of us (or our friends?) live. Or where we lived about 10 years ago. Except that we didn’t learn as much as Coel has about that place — that multi-compartmented consciousness, those tangents, those boundaries — that keep flexing, moving (did someone just move the goalpost? am I being too sensitive??). Personhood, respect, joy, integrity, freedom, love.

Other favorite television encounters of 2020: Phoebe Waller-Bridge/Fleabag, Olivia Colman (in The Crown), Trevor Noah/The Daily Show, The Queen’s Gambit.

Gunda (Victor Kossakovsky, dir; written with Ainara Vera; Neon/Hallstone/Larsen/Phoenix)

It almost goes without saying that I saw very few films in 2020 (I’m one of those die-hards who prefers seeing movies on the big screen); but given that Netflix was already there, it was inevitable we would have opportunities to take in what would normally have been theatrical releases. Gunda might well continue as one of my favorite things of 2021—it streamed for viewers through New York’s Film Forum the first part of December, but will not officially open or be available for commercial distribution until March of this year. Although many of us have certainly imagined seeing the world in this fashion (and conceivably have — say, on a playing field), we’ve never seen it on film, and through an entirely different mindset — which is to say, another species’ perceptual, cognitive and behavioral apparatus — in this instance, that of a prodigiously large sow, who has very recently given birth to a litter of piglets. Gunda takes us to a specific place on the planet, and another way of encountering, experiencing, reacting to an environment and set of relationships that’s largely non-human (though humans, along with their ghastly machines, do intrude intermittently) — much closer to the ground, the skin of the earth itself (and the underside of that skin). As with the earth itself (or for that matter the farm that is Gunda’s habitat), there are physical, sensory (and yes, intellectual) limitations. But what does it mean for the human viewer that pigs also experience the wonder and delight of sensory experience of the physical environment — the sun, rain, earth? That — without anthropomorphizing — they clearly have thoughts, emotions, individual characteristics, (dare I say it?) personalities. Without spoiling the experience, the film’s ending is not everything one might like it to be. But you will not easily put Gunda or her children out of your mind regardless of what you choose to put on your plate.

Aside from this film that practically pushes all others out of my sightlines, I enjoyed Radha Blank’s The Forty Year-Old Version (Netflix); and Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Netflix/Likely Story) was pretty irresistible — but don’t jump to any conclusions.

Instagram

Although most of us are too well acquainted with Twitter (and after four years of non-stop tweets from a very public criminal psychopath may be on the verge of complete exhaustion from it, Facebook and any number of social media platforms), there is nothing quite like Instagram—especially for artists who, however secretive about their projects, studio practices, or techniques, almost always have something to show us. Here are just a few that kept me going through 2020.

“White Blank Stare,” 2020

Karen Finley: Anyone who read the excerpts from my conversation with Karen Finley in the last issue knows that ‘White Blank Stare’ stopped me dead in my already catatonic early morning tracks, but that’s what these streamed images at their best have the capacity to do. We don’t need to be primed; context be damned—all it has to do is move us in the moment and trigger those multiple interior dialogues that ultimately propel us to action.

Carolyn Marks Blackwood, October 10, 2020, “The world is still beautiful.”

Carolyn Marks Blackwood: The sheer beauty of Carolyn Marks Blackwood’s landscapes is utterly transfixing, but implicit in that transfiguration is a kernel of dread that such idylls might be threatened or—goddess forbid!—polluted, damaged or in any way irreparably altered. In other words, another kind of ‘wake-up call’ inspiring simultaneously hope and urgency.

Brendan Lott:    Since some point during the first pandemic lock-down, Brendan Lott has been posting images from his Safer At Home series. The subjects are mostly his neighbors across the street, whose loft windows are shot at just the right angle to preserve anonymity while disclosing sufficient detail of lives lived, interests pursued or in suspense, the masquerades that continue behind closed doors. Lott is certainly not the first or only artist or photographer to peer into the windows (rear, side, or façade) of his neighbors. But he captures something crystalline about this moment—not simply about the nature of solitude or sequestration or the way we live now, but the way we frame our lives, the ways in which we encounter and (conceivably) know ourselves. Yes, there is loneliness, frustration, even desperation — but it’s as much our own as its subjects’. With apologies to the late, great John Prine (one of Covid-19’s first victims), say “hello in there.”

Jeremy O. Harris:   The chameleon intellect, genius playwright of Slave Play, fashion-plate, insouciant raconteur and de facto on-line magazine-maker viral enough to stare down the corona-virus. Simply one of the funniest and most brilliant feeds on the platform—which is sort of what we expect and certainly what we need. His Coronavirus Mixtapes are pitched somewhere between a Tod Browning or John Waters freak-fest and a Paris Review for the TikTok generation.

Susan Silton: A potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past; MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY!; Quartet for the End of Time

To look at Susan Silton’s projects over the last four years (or conceivably, the last 20), you might think she anticipated all or some part of the disasters that have unfolded over the last four years since a certain psychopathic racist-fascist corrupt/failed real estate mogul television personality was installed as the head of the executive branch of the American government and commander-in-chief of its armed forces. Silton began releasing the sequence of 1930s New York Times front pages that comprise A potentiality… in 2018, but had been showing them again on Instagram as the House prepared its articles of impeachment against the currently sitting president. That the failed impeachment might be followed by a global pandemic could hardly have been anticipated (except, notably, by a number of scientists, artists and writers); but Silton was prepared to address the actuality in real time, initiating a mail project intended to go ‘viral’. The result was her participatory mass-mailing of ‘in-memoriam’ letters consisting simply of the name of an individual who had died from the virus mailed to the sitting president with the emergency signal MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY! emblazoned on the envelope.

Even prior to these projects, though, her re-imagined and re-conceived staging of the Olivier Messiaen Quartet for the End of Time had sounded a quiet but brightly piercing alarm for the darkness to come. In her staging (which included that non-pareil pianist of contemporary music, Vicki Ray), one of the performers steps forward to recite in staggered fashion a line quoted from Hannah Arendt’s Men In Dark Times: “Even…Even in…Even in the…Even in the darkest….” (The actual sentence reads: “Even in the darkest of times, we have the right to expect some illumination.”) In her book, Arendt goes on to say that “such illumination may come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time-span that was given them on earth.” That flickering light is all we ever really have and Silton manages to connect it like a beacon to the community around her.

Kim Dingle — Red Dresses and Restaurant Mandalas

Sometime mid-year (around the time we once might have expected the final shows in a gallery’s exhibition calendar before summer group shows or the brief summer hiatus when big gallerists and bigger collectors make their way to Aspen or Banff or Italy or Salzburg or Santa Fe), probably around the time we were first emerging from the first pandemic lock-down, Kim Dingle posted a kind of souvenir of a painting on her Instagram feed—the kind of pinafore dress we associated with “Priss” and her pre-school pack of girl-pals—except shorn of its pinafore-puff shoulder sleeves and sleeveless, just slightly longer, layered, elaborated, zhuzhed—and red—the kind of red we wear when we mean to start something. Dingle captioned it as a “DROP DEAD” RED dress—and I didn’t even have to read the rest of her caption—”to wear the day our ‘president’ drops dead.” Perfect mind meld—but that’s the genius of Kim Dingle. I could not get that dress out of my mind. On the one or two occasions I felt up to addressing wardrobe issues (did we really have any anymore?), I strolled through racks of exquisite designer frocks I had not a shred of interest in, only to return to that one red dress in my mind’s eye that I would wear like a Baby Snooks out of the Village of the Damned.

I never found it; and in the meantime Dingle had (of course) moved on, seemingly in a vein both philosophical and nostalgic, with what she called “restaurant mandalas” (at Andrew Kreps in New York)—what evoked (and surely were when they were initiated) restaurant seating and party catering plans. Dingle famously operated a café called Fatty’s in Eagle Rock; and although these paintings felt quite distant from that particular café experience, in their diagrammatic, pattern-and-decoration—spiraling table-settings against the grids of checkered floors — composition, they evoked something of a pre-pandemic attitude — of continuity, of camaraderie, community and hospitality. We miss our girlfriends — and for that matter, the boys, too.

Lisa Adams / Kelly McLane: “Unreality”

Is it okay to just say they got there and got it before the rest of us? The dysfunction running like fault-lines through entire societies and not simply their outer limits (though certainly more visible there); dystopian outlooks (and largely human-created, corrupted wastelands); and despair (something that really comes across in Kelly McLane’s paintings and drawings). I had already seen some of the paintings Adams showed alongside McLane’s works at Santa Monica College’s Pete and Susan Barrett Art Gallery, but they still looked so fresh and alive, as did the empathic vibrancy of McLane’s new work—always evolving and finding the ever more precipitous edge.

Mark Steven Greenfield: Black Madonnas

As anyone acquainted with Greek Byzantine, Russian (and Turkish) icons knows, some of the depictions of their saintly subjects are quite darkly complexioned, which makes some sense given their original inspirations. So it’s easy to understand how Mark Steven Greenfield might have been inspired to leap to wholesale transmutation of a flock of iconic Madonnas (whether actual icons, icons of art history, or icons entirely reconceived). These were all wonderfully rendered (at the William Turner Gallery where I saw them), but also brilliantly re-imagined and re-contextualized, encompassing not simply mythic or historical references, but willful revisions and corrections to those dark legacies (the largest and most encompassing of these being simply white European racism and brutality, especially as replanted on American soil). What’s particularly wonderful about these paintings is the darkness they encapsulate about the infernal machine of civilization yoked to life’s eternal cycles, even in its most tender moments.

Yuja Wang, February 18, 2020, Disney Hall

Before she even stepped onto the stage at Disney Hall that Tuesday evening, Wang announced over the auditorium’s PA that she would play the program in exactly the order her mood dictated, without regard to the printed program. She opened with a sonata by the proto-classical Venetian, Baldassare Galuppi, that unfolded like a prayer in delicately arching C major fifths and sixths before plunging into the dark, glittering waters of Ravel’s Une barque sur l’océan, then laid into Alban Berg’s Opus 1 Sonata in a way Thelonious Monk would have instinctively connected with. Then on to the Scriabin F# major sonata and the ecstatic fireworks to ensue; Chopin, Mompou, Brahms, more Scriabin — and, well you get the picture. Wang is already a pianist of legend (perhaps the Argerich of her generation), with any number of celebrated concerts and recitals under her Leger ‘bandages’; but some dates simply soar into unimagined stratospheres, and this was one of them. In only a month Los Angeles would be going dark, but this was a musical performance to keep one’s spirits aloft for the rest of a very dark year.

Boris Giltburg

I’m always discovering new pianists (mostly of the jazz and classical variety), and Giltburg is my discovery of 2020 (not that he hasn’t been around for quite some time). What hooked me was an amazingly leisurely yet gorgeously articulated and ever-so-romantic rendering of the Rachmaninov 3^rd piano concerto. Someone compared him (disfavorably) to Alexis Weissenberg and Sviatoslav Richter (both incomparable masters it must be acknowledged); but this entirely misses the point of Giltburg’s performance of style. This is another kind of barque sur l’océan, or maybe just a blanket of romance, and was I ever ready for it. You will never hear those harmonics and sonorities in quite the same way after this immersion. You should check out his renditions of the Rachmaninov Opus 39 Etudes-Tableaux and the Corelli Variations, too.

Raymond Pettibon: Where the surf is up per omnia saecula saeculorum.

Oh—and I almost forgot one: my favorite Person of 2020:

Stacey Abrams: She saved constitutional democracy in America.

Now it’s up to us to save everything else.

January 7, 2021
Gun Crazy: Playing with fire at Liz’s Loft

Let me just start by applauding Liz Gordon and her team for the bravado and sheer celebration of mounting a show titled, Guns, in the current political environment. I was about to say ‘contentious’ – but there’s really nothing contentious (or new) about it. Guns are are an ineluctable aspect of American life and civilization, and, to one extent or another, an essential instrumentality of life and civilization globally. How can we not be talking about them – or for that matter be making art of and about them?

Cheryl Dullabaun, “Sure Shot (ii)”

My understanding is that Liz and Betty Ann Brown had been discussing this show for some time before it was actually scheduled and that no one had any idea how ‘yuuuugge’ gun issues would be blowing up (well…) about now. But let’s face it, this is not something that is ever far away. Somewhere on your block is someone with a gun. Maybe guns. Or in your building. We can’t live without them – although some of us (e.g., me) can’t live with them, either (which makes me one of the freaks – gee what else is new?). We lean a bit on our gun-toting fellow citizens; and they know it and we know it, which is why we try to amuse them and keep their minds off their lethal, uh, resolution facilitators.

I get (got?) the Second Amendment. It is essential to the ‘democracy’ component of our constitutional ‘democratic republic’ (not going to get into other legal issues here), second only to the First Amendment (and naturally followed by those specifically ‘legal’ ones – the Fifth and Sixth). Why? Because, like the First, it directly acknowledges and addresses our humanity and, well, equality – and the instruments by which we move the scales closer to that egalitarian ideal, or at least some acceptable median. With the gun (or similarly effective weapon), the peasant can kill the king. Sure, we can mock the king, denounce the king, embarrass the king, and incriminate him (and it’s usually a him); but the gun shifts the needle. Long live the new king – or peasant (although the peasant most likely dies, too; gravity will not be denied). We don’t call it the great equalizer for nothing.

Ed Ruscha, “I Have Not Forgotten,” 2007

We’ve always been fascinated by and covetous of guns and firearms, ballistics, and weapons (including projectile and edge-type) generally. Guns and firearms are actually direct descendants of projectile weapons – flaming arrows, and more specifically, fire lances, which used a prototype gunpowder to accelerate propulsion. (Which gets us into our fascination with magic powders – but that’s another subject.) There was art in the making of these instruments and art to be made of them. LACMA’s collection is not particularly notable for its collections of armour and weaponry; but the Met’s collection is positively staggering, and I can remember being fascinated by it as a child. (LACMA hosted an exhibition of samourai armour only a year or so ago.)

(No, this wasn’t part of the LACMA exhibition — but what a samourai!)

Humans, like other large predators, are inclined to kill; and with our surging populations, it could almost be said that we kill with every breath we take. Amongst this most predatory species on earth, Americans are the super-predators. We’re not alone in killing for sport, in our cruelty and viciousness. But we tend to be pretty shameless about rationalizing or excusing it, or inventing fictitious theories of causality to explain or justify it. And we just love our guns to death.

So why not a show celebrating them? And why not share it with Artillery readers (though I am away without official leave quite frequently)? There are more than 20 artists in this show, which is a bit crowded; and I almost expected the show to thin itself out with gunfire sound effects signalling the elimination of the weaker specimens; but when I left (although one of the best was marked sold), most were right where I saw them. I thought Cheryl Dullabaun’s Sure Shot (iv) – with its gold leaf heart pierced by a bullet-hole in its center, set squarely in a field of velvety (blood?) red edged by gold, went right to the, uh, heart of the matter; and her other ‘gunshot’ pieces had a similar craftsman-like charm. Clayton Campbell’s digital photograph, Clean Hit on an Easy Soft Target (2016), with its assassin’s gun trained on an unsuspecting traveler’s back, from his series, The 1% War, was probably the most forward-looking. But then, as Harry Lime (Orson Welles) pointed out in Carol Reed’s The Third Man, the Renaissance was a pretty violent time, too (to say nothing of the insanely bloody violence that ushered in L.A.’s early industrial history). Ed Ruscha is represented here with a few of his (Gemini-published) dry but mordant ‘cut-out/redaction’ hold-up/ransom lithographs. Helen Chung made a lovely ‘Kalashnikov-koffin’ (RIP) that would have made a great housewarming gift for Marcel Duchamp; and I could appreciate the quiet economy of Jane Goren’s Cold Dead Hands with its lighted handguns. Joyce Dallal’s Fun Guns amounted cumulatively to another inventory; but more is not always more, especially where guns are concerned. The viewer needs more fun for his/her gun.

Michael Flechtner, “Shotgun Shack: Living the Amerian Dream,” 2016

It’s hard not to get a bit jaded around the subject. I mean – it’s an everyday experience today. Children – even fairly affluent children – go to school not entirely sure whether they’ll have two, one or no parents at all to come home to. Even children not traumatized by violence before puberty – increasingly a minority in our violent, globally war-ravaged, terrorized, gun-crazy, open-carry, increasingly chaotic societies – are fairly inured to representations of guns and gun violence. Ted Meyer’s Suburban Killer Barbie would have probably elicited little more than an ironic smile from my nieces and nephews before they were even six. I tend to appreciate the more straightforward and matter-of-fact renderings. In that regard, the gun can be a pretty blunt instrument; it implicitly puts a lot of silence around it – which in visual terms, usually means space. Meg Madison’s cyanotypes were eloquent in their quiet floating echoes of our weapon obsession. Other notable artists here include Mark Steven Greenfield, Shepard Fairey, and Michael Flechtner, whose gorgeous animated neon Shotgun Shack: Living the American Dream (2016) pretty much summed it up. It Never Ends This Pretty, as Miles Regis points out in his 2016 acrylic (and sequinned!) gun on canvas – and it’s usually, as I think Racine put it, pretty bloody in the end, too; but at least their aim is true.

September 30, 2016
Mistaken Identities: What We Miss In Our Quest for the Next

It’s time for a little retrospect here at AWOL – as in looking back in an attempt to take in the whole of something. An impossible task – but you have to start somewhere. It’s also about taking the proper measure of something or someone you thought you knew – loosely, casually, but also in the largest sense. I’m not one to shoot from the hip; but after a few decades of looking at just about every kind of art imaginable, one tends to size up an artist and the artist’s work fairly quickly, in a kind of shorthand categorization and classification of theme, scheme or overall conceptual frame, style, sensibility, media and handling, context and studio practice. Sometimes it doesn’t take more than a couple of seconds. That sounds more arrogant than it is; but it’s really just a matter of economics and time management. We’re not going to be able to see examples of every significant art production, or even the very best of them, the masterpieces – what may eventually be destined for the art historical canon – over the course of our lifetimes. I no longer pay any attention to what doesn’t immediately interest or intrigue me for the simple reason that there are another thousand things waiting in the queue right behind them, and I have only a few hours a day to take it all in.

So I miss things – as I think most observers of the fine arts industry inevitably do, even if they read every important art magazine or journal cover to cover. I was reminded of this last Sunday when a colleague nudged me out of my Sunday Times-papered nest and down to Exposition Park for the closing of Mark Steven Greenfield’s show at the California African American Museum. I was somewhat familiar with Greenfield’s work, of course; and had taken in a show at the Offramp Gallery in Pasadena only a few years ago – which also bore on the perceptions and performances of African-American identity (as well as its distortions, deceptions and exploitations – secondary to the great denial and violence at the heart of American history and the American Holocaust); and so its placement here made a bit of sense.

Whatever preconceptions I might have had walking in were almost instantly vaporized in an explosion (almost literally) of cosmic dust. First of all, regardless whether it took the full compass of Greenfield’s work, this amounted to a 40-year retrospective. (The title, Lookin’ Back in Front of Me: Selected Works of Mark Steven Greenfield, 1974-2014, also implied a certain degree of introspect, which was borne out in the work itself). Secondly, it was immediately apparent that Greenfield had taken the largest possible world-view from the very start. His first astronomically-inspired paintings embrace the cosmos, from exploding nebulae and galaxies to our own dark star. But also in terms of his approach to media, materials and motives, he seems to have taken the largest possible view of his creative domain.

There’s a continuity between the mark-making of his more abstract work, his portraiture – frequently rendered in an exuberantly graphic style, which in turn veers into the domain of performance so evident behind much of his conceptual, identity-themed work. Figure and ground are worked over, sometimes densely (in alternation, or woven through into a more or less unified field) with a kind of abstract calligraphy of not-so-universal symbols, icons and ciphers. This extends to his use of materials and media, whether collage, film or digital media, or materials like coreplast – a kind of corrugated plastic Greenfield used as surface and scrim (e.g., in his Doodahz series); or the painted wood Russian-style nesting dolls he used in “The Pushkin Paradox.” Greenfield’s work navigates the signs and symbols of identity, culture, community, society and state, juxtaposing and inverting implied and intended meanings that function as both masks (cultural/racial/ethnic/gender) and scar tissue in the larger social and cultural tapestry.

In its totality, it was almost overwhelming (at least for a too-brief afternoon). You don’t have to take my word for it. Another colleague (Peter Frank) reviewed the show for ARTILLERY. (You can read the review here.) This was a life’s work; yet – for this viewer, particularly – it felt like a door opening onto an alternate universe; and I wondered if it indicated other doors and new directions for the artist himself. Leaving the show, I had the sense that Greenfield’s ‘third act’ might be his richest.

July 13, 2015