Leap Into the Void

Rusty Scruby at PYO Gallery

2011-02-02T08:59:00.000-08:00

Rusty Scruby's Density Study #1
Image courtesy of PYO Gallery

Rusty Scruby's show On The Beach at PYO Gallery in Downtown Los Angeles runs through February 25, 2011. For readers here interested in my two cents, my review in the current ArtScene and on line.

Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space at MOCA

2010-12-14T19:26:00.000-08:00

One of the essential problems facing artists (and art viewers for that matter) is the relationship between the fabricator—the artist—who constructs meaning, and the viewer who passively consumes. This problem was first articulated by Plato, who saw the actor transmitting their illness (pathos) into the empty vessel of the viewer. Things get even worse with Brunelleschi’s painting of the Florentine Baptistery, nailing the viewer in place with one-point perspective.

By the time the 20th century rolls around, the moral implications of inaction became visceral. What’s ethical the difference between impassively standing by as occupying soldiers of the Third Reich cart off your Gypsy, Queer, and Jewish neighbors, and wearing a Nazi uniform and supporting the regime? As Krishna points out in the Mahabharata, one must assume personal responsibility for the ramifications of both action and inaction.

For visual artists of the last century, two possible solutions to viewer impassivity emerge. The image can be made abstract, forcing the viewer to complete the work, closing the gap between the signifier, and whatever the viewer wants to be signified. The other choice is for artists to physically involve the spectator, where some action (taking a piece of candy or poster) completes the work.

Carlos Cruz-Diez' Cromosaturación, 1965/re-fabricated 2010
If you've experienced Flavin, you know the art looks nothing like the pictures.

At MOCA’s Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space (through February 27, 2011) my personal baggage was my previous encounters with many of the works on view. In Caracas, the city seemed to be infused with the specter of Op artists past, as if some distinguished local had made a name for himself in the scenes of Paris and New York, then retuned home to lay out the path to success (by following the optical footsteps of the master). In my fictitious scenario, the lead could be modeled after Jesús Rafael Soto, friend of Jean Tinguely and Victor Vasarely, and director of Venezuela’s Escuela de Artes Plasticas. I came across a variation on his hanging grid theme at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. Essentially a room-sized grid of plastic tubing, Soto’s Penétrable formalizes the optical effect seen when driving by an orchard of evenly spaced trees. The work is so kid-friendly; it’s enough to make any museum educator precum. The iteration I saw in Caracas (made of white tubing) was a grimy grey at the level of a child’s hands, evidence of a generation of field trips to the museum. At MOCA’s Geffen, Soto’s forest of blue confronts Plato’s conundrum of the impassive viewer by encouraging visitors to literally entangle themselves in the art. Unfortunately, interactivity thwarts the optical intentions of the work.

My short clip of Jesús Rafael Soto's Penétrable BBL bleu. A MOCA staff saw me taking pictures and said, "I don't think photography is allowed." To which I replied, "It's easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission."

The big advantage of the MOCA show is that all the works have been built anew by their fabricators and preparators. For work that relies so heavily on formal and optical properties for effect, clean installations that are shiny and new help reinforce the artistic intent. When seen in Spain, Julio Le Parc’s work—dusty and poorly lit—looked like something from a Tijuana Cineplex lobby. His Lumière en mouvement-installation at MOCA—shiny and new—would be at home next to the museum’s permanent collection of California Light and Space artists.

Jesús Rafael Soto's Penétrable BBL bleu, 1969/re-fabricated 1999
Photo courtesy of MOCA

Which brings to mind a lost opportunity. While the rest of the Geffen showcases MOCA’s permanent collection, there are few ways that the two exhibitions speak to each other. Crated in the dank of the museum’s warehouse are the works of other Latin American artists and works by the likes of Robert Irwin and James Turrell that could compliment the curatorial efforts of Alma Ruiz. It’s unfortunate byproduct of the Balkanization of curatorial departments that is the antithesis of the cross-pollination occuring when artists talk to, read about, and look at the work of their colleagues.

My video clip of Julio Le Parc's Lumière en mouvement-installation, 1962/re-fabricated 2010

Speaking about curatorial inspiration, I thought I’d mention another work I’ve seen before, Hélio Oiticica and Neville D'Almeida’s Cosmococa—Programa in Progress, CC4 Nocagions. For Cosmococa (which I might translate as Cocaine-Cosmos) the artist team integrates the spectator into their work in ways that force the viewer to become part of the piece itself. In many ways it speaks to the Fluxus art being produced at the time. In Cosmococa’s other variations, viewers lounge on pillows and file their nails while viewing images of work by Luis Buñuel that have been augmented by powdered cocaine. In another version, the space is slung with hammocks and the viewer is invited to lounge while listening to Jimi Hendrix and view album covers with more white powder.

Hélio Oiticica and Neville D'Almeida's Cosmococa—Programa in Progress, CC4 Nocagions, 1973/re-fabricated 2010
Photo courtesy of Diane Calder
At the top, your intrepid scribe tries to hit on the hot lifeguard (and fails miserably).

For me, the white powder evokes the hallucinatory nature of artistic inspiration; it represents the subversive element in the best art, and it mirrors the sex, drugs, and rock and roll triad with the viewer, installation, and artist trinity. Oiticica’s work can be seen as the forefather of present day relational aestheticians. Compared to Rirkrit Tiravanija fencing off rice paddies from hungry Thai villagers so it can become art, the swimming pool at MOCA positively shines.

My short clip of Hélio Oiticica and Neville D'Almeida's Cosmococa—Programa in Progress, CC4 Nocagions

My first encounter with CC4 was at Art Unlimited in 2007. The pool wasn’t heated, but it provided welcome relief after the Bataan Death March that Art Basel has become. Putting on my Vilebrequins and swimming in MOCA's tepid waters made me wonder why this particular Cosmococa was selected. Art Unlimited was a convention center full of the best museum-quality installation art available. The escalators were papered by Buren’s stripes, Christoph Buchel’s signature detritus took up the better part of an acre; you get the idea. It’s as if Galerie Lelong did the heavy curatorial lifting, so that collectors and curators can select work with the proper cachet as easily as ordering combo number four at McDonald’s.

Hélio Oiticica and Neville D'Almeida's Cosmococa—Programa in Progress, CC4 Nocagions, Photo courtesy of MOCA
What goes better with coke? Kids!

Of course one can argue that the swimming pool resonates particularly well with Los Angeles audiences. And it’s hard to look at Oiticica’s pool with cocaine and not see MOCA’s director purchase of the former residence of LSD-dropping Cary Grant, or the possibilities of Deitch hosting cocaine-laced pool parties in the future. But if all these inferences and associations were resonating with MOCA’s staff, presumably adding layers of complexity to art that invites participation, why do they send out press photos with children splashing in the glow of blow? It’s almost as if they don’t understand the work their exhibiting.

Empty vessels indeed.

Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space; It almost sounds like Ecstasy: In and About Altered States. The drugs, the funhouse installation style permeates both shows. Can Suprasensorial be read as an Latino addendum to Paul Schimmel's efforts? Perhaps if women and artists of color were included with more regularity and prominence, there would be less of a need for shows like WACK! or the recently censored Hide|Seek.

Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains

2010-11-04T22:15:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains, 2010
A pricey vacuum cleaner store in a pricey Pasadena neighborhood.

Back when I attended Michael Asher's Post Studio Art class in the mid-eighties, a transfer student from Berlin presented slides of her work. From what I remember, her practice was a kind of public art Raku, where she would take local clay, build a quasi architectural form, burry it in a pile of scrap lumber, then set it on fire. The finished piece would exhibit various degrees of hardness and coloring, but because of the imperfect technique and impurities in the local dirt the works would eventually succumb to the elements and decompose into soil. The work she showed us from Berlin was sponsored by a local redevelopment organization. Artists were commissioned to install temporary work in areas of urban blight: abandoned apartment blocks and empty lots occupied by squatters and refuse. The neighborhoods where cleaned up, the art was put on display, then afterwards the buildings were gutted prostitutes and drug addicts were pushed out, and new developments were put in their place.

Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains, 2010
Grommets are an artist's best friend.

Over the course of the critique––which went on well past midnight––the point was made that by participating in the temporary art program, the artist essentially functioned as a pawn in a process designed to surreptitiously evict an already disenfranchised group of individuals, create profit for rich developers, and gentrify a neighborhood at the expense of the weak and the poor. Her praxis functioned as the inverse of the institutional critique: she was the institutional stooge.

Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains, 2010
Pay no attention to the space behind the curtain.

A critique of the public/private art enterprise was made by Andreas Siekmann's Trickle Down at the most recent Sculpture Project in Muenster. Siekmann's trash compactor fuses together the fiberglass shards of those urban mascots (here in Los Angeles it was in the form of an angel), given to artists to decorate shopping districts. In Trickle Down, wheat-pasted posters occupying the same courtyard as the compacted sculpture tells the story of how public space becomes privatized, allowing business districts to employ private police (deemed safety patrols) to push the riffraff off public property. In Andre Rottman's review of Seikmann's work, he asks the question,

What does it mean today to create public works when the site of their display--whether we understand it, according to the typology developed by Miwon Kwon, phenomenologically, institutionally, or discursively--has become the object of market forces and public-management policies? This is the fundamental, unsettling question posed in Trickle Down. If the "lure of the local," as outlined by critic Lucy R. Lippard, was once able to account for site-specific art's attempts to counter the increasing homogenization of public space, Siekmann here suggests that even this dynamic is now part and parcel of the commodified urban landscape.

Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains, 2010
Or the slap-dash hem job.

Ironically, September 2010 Artforum's 1000 Words that gave voice to Siekmann's project was followed this month by Jennifer Bolande and her Plywood Curtains, introduced by Sharon Lockhart. Briefly, Bolande (as part of West of Rome's Women in the City series) has silkscreened an over-saturated color image of a sheet of plywood on a poplin fabric and had it hung behind the glass façades of empty commercial storefronts. In Artforum, the spread is accompanied by Photoshopped proposal images along with actual pictures of the curtains in situ; this flattening of difference between the proposed and the actual underscores the fact that one need only understand the components of the project, and imagine it in an empty storefront in one's own neighborhood to get close to the full effect of actually seeing the work in real life. As Christopher Knight said in the LA Times, "…in person there's just not much to look at."

Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains, 2010
Sounding like a realtor, Sharon Lockhart calls this, "...a beautiful but decrepit example of midcentury Moderne (sic) architecture."

If however, one does look closely it's easy to see that the piece of wood that modeled for Bolande's photograph was of a high quality; there is nary a knothole, split, or eye-shaped plug to be seen. This is not an image of the cheap exterior-grade wood that boards up broken windows or construction sites. This is the stuff of custom gallery office shelves or trendy-industrial restaurant table tops. It is a veneer that is well suited to the upscale Lake Avenue in Pasadena, or a newly remodeled commercial space on Hill Street in the arty part of Chinatown. Oddly though, the Hill Street location was partially occupied even though the curtains covered all the street-facing windows. This necessitated the cumbersome parting-of-the-curtains for the leasers, reminding me of Mies' Lakeshore Apartments in Chicago, where the architect designed the curtains in a way where they could only be left fully open or fully closed, putting aesthetic consistency above the needs of the individual.

Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains, 2010
Through the taggers art, Bolande's.

Unfortunately, in the real world of economic downturn, the complexity of the real-estate market isn't as simple as a duality of occupied or empty. Landlords, in an attempt to keep rental prices high, will rent to "pop-up" enterprises to keep a commercial district's space seemingly full, and thereby eliminating the leverage a longer term tenant may have in negotiating a lower price (aka fair market value in an economic recession). As you drive around town, notice the Halloween or Christmas decor stores. Another practice is to buy a truckload of furniture floor samples and pay someone minimum wage to "sit" in the space. A couple of sofas sold a month can be enough to pay wages and keep the lights on, an affordable strategy when one considers that the same landlord may have another tenant next door paying dollars per the square foot. These spaces occupied by nameless furniture stores and animatronic reindeer from China fill the the liminal space between the full-price tenant and the "Space Available" sign.

Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains, 2010
Lockhart continues, almost wistfully, "Here, too, I peered behind the curtain; this time, I saw an American flag, unmoored from its stand, propped up alone in a corner. I found myself looking at the rest of the neighborhood from a different perspective."

It is in those low income neighborhoods where the better part of the block sits empty, signifying that the charade of the faux and transient business falls apart. Here in the Long Beach ghetto, the city's practice for empty storefronts is to deluge the owner with petty building code violations, pushing the owner to either rent at a reduced cost (thus creating the appearance of economic vitality) or condemning the structure and razing it. Boarding up (except as a temporary measure) is not allowed. Thus the empty boarded-up storefront has become a trope that has disappeared along with the sub-prime loan.

To see Bolande's Plywood Curtains as anything other than an aesthetic instrument in the service of landlords who conspire to artificially inflate the cost of commercial space, place her at poles opposite from the intentions of artists like Siekmann and Hans Haacke's indictment of New York City slumlords-cum-Guggenheim trustees.

Not Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains, 2010
Next to the installation on Lake Avenue, not a boarded up store, but a space being remodeled for a new tenant. Here, one can see the traditional CDX plywood used for boarding up storefronts.

Sadly too, the comparison of the September/November 1000 Words exposes the vacuity of that contemporary art journal of record. In a nutshell, the magazine sees art as fungible (every art praxis is worth 1,000 words), and the position or view of the artist––the things that individuate art objects––become interchangeable in the grand scheme of the art market. It's no wonder we haven't seen anything that approximates an art movement in twenty years! Artforum becomes a compass held at the magnetic pole, spinning wildly, pointing in all directions at once.

Underscoring this turning away from an artist's intent is the format of 1000 Words. The actual text (which is considerably less than a thousand words) is conducted in the form of an interview, with the relevant questions removed. It's as if an artist can't be trusted to articulate their position, and have fewer words to squeeze out of their tiny brains than a critic, curator, or historian. Artistic intent becomes a tertiary mumble and primary meaning only comes from the skilled typing of the writer/editor.

Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains, 2010
On the corner of Bernard and Hill Streets, newly remodeled gallery/studio space available.

But back to Asher's critique. The artist didn't internalize fourteen hours of post-Marxist critique, and went on the create a teepee-shaped structure on a corner of the CalArts lawn that overlooks Interstate 5. I can't imagine something like that being allowed today, with the fire marshall and the physical plant nipping it in the bud (in the name of safety).

When I returned for my MFA twenty years later, the location of the structure was now an overflow parking lot for the five hundred additional students now packed into the CalArts campus. As Siekmann has shown, economic power trumps artistic intent.

Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains, 2010
Pay no attention to the tenant behind the curtain.

And as Julian Stallabrass noted in Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction,

... the most celebrated contemporary art is that which serves to further the interests of the neoliberal economy, in breaking down barriers to trade, local solidarities, and cultural attachments in a continual process of hybridization. This should hardly be a cause for surprise but there is a large mismatch between the contemporary art world’s own view of itself and its actual function.

OCMA's 2010 California Biennial

2010-10-25T01:14:00.000-07:00

Brian Dick's (in collaboration with Christen Sperry-Garcia)
The Nationwide Museum Mascot Project presents: OCMAscot, 2010

In the recent history of biennials, art writers--from academia to the rags of cyberspace--have tended to rate these semiannual showcases of contemporania on a scale ranging from feh-plus to ugh-minus. As a fellow typer in the blog-o-sphere once said,

…we long ago discovered what has come to be known as Perreault's Percentage. No matter how talented the curator(s) or how vast the pool of artists, not more than 10 percent…of any large survey is worth looking at. Why is this? Judgments are limited. Plus, art worth saving is simply too hard to make…

Brian Dick's (in collaboration with Christen Sperry-Garcia)
The Nationwide Museum Mascot Project's Piñata Cozy with Glowfitti Room (detail), 2010
Inside the darkened van-cave one can "draw" on the glow-in-the-dark painted walls with the provided pen lights;
above is my temporary Lascaux hand.

One possibility is that the sheer volume and diversity of art being made today is far beyond the capacity and taste of any one observer. It's like every all-you-can-eat buffet in Las Vegas stretched end to end: cordilleras of previously frozen shellfish, herds of cattle at the abattoirs of the carving station, plethoras of petit-fours, and enough iceberg lettuce to tear a fatal gash in the hull of the Titanic. Translated into art, the viewer trudges form object to object, picking at the familiar and sniffing at the new until declining blood sugar forces an aesthetic harumph and retreat. Besides curatorial shock and awe, the another survey show tactic is to arbitrarily narrow the curatorial parameters by geography or age.

David Adey's Flock, 2010

From my experience, it seemed no worse to let pure capitalism guide the curatorial process (à la Art Basel's Art Unlimited) than pretend that your curator is presenting some zeitgeist--when in reality the show show is predominantly white, male, or the artist's come from a small coterie of galleries.

Looking at things from the other side of the fence, one can almost pity the damned-either-way curator: be inclusive, and be accused of hodgepodge-ism and lack of curatorial rigor; narrow the focus and suffer the slings and arrows of argumentum ad-hominem.

Los Angeles Urban Rangers' Portable Ranger Station, 2009-2010
The illegitimate love child of the Center for Land Use Interpretation and Ikea.

I think that even the most sophisticated viewer attends these surveys with the secret hope that some curator will pull back the curtain and reveal the Next Big Thing; some artistic movement or collective rejoinder to our cultural moment and the art that came before.

Way back when our love of art eventually brought us face to face with Gardner, Jason, or Hartt in the guise of Art 101, those color plates were like jewels in a literary saga--movements spread like communism across Asia and the Americas, and misunderstood artists went boldly against conventions like Jimmy Stewart went to Washington.

Electronic Disturbance Theater/b.a.n.g. lab's The Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT), 2007-2009

Perhaps some historical perspective is in order.

A hundred years ago to the month, Roger Fry curated Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Gallery. What would be considered a pandering blockbuster today, the show was universally panned, and for a laugh London's Tatler printed a Van Gogh sideways, calling it "Plague-Stricken Rats Up a Tree." In those Edwardian times the conventional art came from the academy, work that is usually seen as kitsch today. But the art of 1910 shouldn't be seen as a simple dichotomy between the likes of Alma-Tadema and Cézanne. Concurrent with the ruckus in London, Kandinsky was creating his first abstractions, Meiji period artists in Japan were incorporating Western styles, and movements like analytic Cubism, Futurism, Die Brücke, the arts Nouveau and Crafts, along with the Fauvists, the Ashcan School, and photo-taking Eds--Steichen and Weston (among others) were all making stuff. What plays out today like dominoes (or sequential pages in an art history text) were essentially a jumble of reactionary, conventional, interacting, and isolated movements.

Sherin Guirguis' Bein El-Qasrein, 2010

What is different today is that we have the tubes of the internet connecting academic art journals; mainstream art press; dead tree dailies, weeklies, and monthlies with paid and edited art writers on staff; along with the writers, picture posters, and linkers of the blog world, and of course all the folks that participate by leaving comments. The world isn't more multi-cultural than it was a hundred years ago; the difference is that we now have the capacity to cobble together artists with divergent interests who aren't at all interested in communicating with each other. The political activist, formalist, conceptualist, pseudo-institution, and relational aesthetician get lined up shoulder to shoulder with the painter, drawer, assembler, photographer, and video artist, and the only thing this fake multiculturalism does is make it easier to mow all the artists down with our critical-conceptual machine gun.

Nikki Pressley's Untitled, 2010

Some 700 words ago I had set out to review the Orange County Museum of Art's California Biennial. Compared to past iterations, there seemed to be more state-wide and less mid-career artist representation than past shows. There doesn't seem to be any theme, which is perhaps a theme itself in this post-movement world we live in.

Patrick Wilson's Romeo, 2010

Driving back home, I had that same feeling I sometimes get after visiting LACMA, that other named-after-a-county museum of art. As interesting as Latin American Art, Korean Art, or privately amassed collections are, one can't help sense and underlying urge by the museum to pander to their various constituencies, e.g. Los Angeles' large Latino population, the museum's Mid-Wilshire Korean neighbors, and most importantly, the major donors and collectors who sit on the board of trustees. As Euro-centric as the East Coast's encyclopedic museums were, one doesn't feel the Met was buying their Titian or Caravaggio to entice the folks in Little Italy to come visit their museum.

Nina Waisman's Between Bodies / Tijuana, 2008-2010
Image of your faithful scribe (looking like the Professor Farnsworth from Futurama); image courtesy Diane Calder.

Like other late capitalist institutions, each aspect of the museum's function is driven by a cost-benefit analysis that must ultimately support the long-term fiscal viability of the institution. It should have come as no surprise that MOCA--in it's darkest financial days--was so quick to consider selling off parts of its collection. Education departments foster the museum's future visitor base, the web presence sends it tendrils into social media sites to create interest among the electronically connected, and opening night galas create value for the regular members.

Agitprop's The Third Party, 2010
Can art that's made from stuff bought at Home Depot be lumped together as an art movement?

From this post-Marxist viewpoint, one cannot help but see Patrick Wilson's, John Zurier's, and Sherin Guirguis' abstract paintings--as beautiful and technically astounding as they are--as appealing to an older donor base with more conventional tastes. The Relational Aesthetic of artists Brian Dick, Los Angeles Urban Rangers, and Agitprop/David White are so kid friendly that it must warm the hearts of those in the education department. (Come to think of it, I didn't see anything in the show that warranted a "Parental Discretion Advised" warning label; even Wu Tsang's transgender hookers are family friendly!) The collective Electronic Disturbance Theater/b.a.n.g. lab, Camilo Ontiveros, and Carlee Fernandez give props to Orange County's growing Latino population as well as the critical-political aesthetic.

Gil Blank's No Title, No Date
Image Courtesy LaMontagne Gallery, Boston

The problem with eclecticism in a large show is that artists that flex both critical thinking muscle and aesthetic skill--like Nikki Pressley, Drew Heitzler, and Eve Fowler--can get their subtle voices drowned out in an everything-into-the-pot biennial. Nina Waisman's sound installation reads quite differently depending on if it gets conceptually lumped with Brian Dick's interactive piñata mascot or EDT/b.a.n.g lab's Transborder Immigrant Tool.

Zoe Crosher's Like Miko Smiling for Christopher Williams, 2008
Image Courtesy of the artist and DCKT Contemporary, New York
Bonus points for referencing an Artforum cover!

My biggest head-scratching moments came when looking at work that made me think far too much about another artist's practice. Why was Gil Blank included and not Larry Johnson (who has a much stronger connection to California)? Camilo Ontiveros' Free Entry smacks of Michael Asher's piece in the last Whitney Biennial, accomplishes less, and in the end gets trumped by the museum's citation of the UCRA. Zoe Crosher's Unraveling of Michelle duBois smacked of Kaari Upson's Larry Project, and Alex Israel's Property is essentially a lobotomized and testosterone/Jason Rhoades injected version of Megan Cotts prop installations from the year before.

Alex Israel's Property (Detail: Desire), 2010

The best advice might be to buy OCMA's $20 ticket for the run of the California Biennial. The wall tags list the time and day of associated conversations and talks. Return and hear the artist's talk, or give some quality time to a few of the works that appeal to you. Most of the artists don't have long exhibition histories (I counted two each in their 40's and 50's) and many live, show, and work in points far from the Pasadena to Santa Monica art axis.

On the Wall Next to Drew Heitzler's OCMA Stack (detail) 2010
This is one of the problems inherent in today's multiple modes of production. There were several "stacks" in the biennial, reminiscent of Felix Gonzalez-Torres' unlimited editions. Los Angeles Urban Rangers, David Wilson, and others and take aways and work you could touch. Eventually the viewer gets put off when he becomes frustrated by different expectations from art that is identical on a formal level.

The Orange County Museum of Art 2010 California Biennial runs from October 24 through March 13, 2011.

California Biennial 2010: Orange County Museum of Art

Eye for the Sensual at LACMA's Resnick Pavilion

2010-09-30T18:46:00.000-07:00

Context: Silk Ficus with Hot-Glued Plastic Lemons

Full disclosure: I'm not a big fan of Mannerism, Rococo, or paintings of the Paris Salon, so my take here on The Eye for the Sensual: Selections from the Resnick Collection will be an impression of my own gestalt of the show rather than a nuanced look into 17th to early 20th century European painting, sculpture, and decorative arts. One of a trio of exhibitions that opens LACMA's new Resnick Pavilion, the show showcases the private collection of the building's primary benefactors, Lynda and Stewart Resnick.

In Bill Lasarow's review of the new building at the Huffington Post, he offers a great depiction of "going through" the show:

The artifacts of civilization carted over from their Beverly Hills manse is hyperinflated fluff that is laid out in a series of temporary enclosures that feel like a forced march, as back and forth you go. The entire effect is so unremittingly repressive that when it finally spits you back out into the open central space in which the superb "Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico" exhibition holds forth, the spirit is immediately lightened, the mind ready to read lots of labels instructive on the subject of ancient Mexico. The contrast makes a sage of Mr. Piano.

In reality, when the show spits you out, it's into the giftshop, that other pillar of capitalism and art museum solvency.

Claudet's Cupid Playing with a Butterfly, Early 1800's bronze

When I look at a work of art, it is fundamentally the completion of a link between the artist's intent and me the viewer. In the best art, this dialog and still be heard, savored, and appreciated over the din of the work's patron and commissioner, the history of its provenance, and the multiple contexts where the was bought, stolen, stored, or displayed. Seeing a Greek bronze in a Grecian villa means one thing; another layer of meaning gets added when the work is plundered and finds a place of honor in a Roman Villa. Still more complexity is added when a work is buried and forgotten, then rediscovered and recontextualized at a place like the Villa Borghese. When in Rome, it was difficult to see a sculpture or painting of Leda and the Swan as anything more than a thinly veiled attempt at showing off a nice set of hooters. So what should I think about a 500 year-old bust of a young Roman emperor that decorates a Beverly Hills home, carved a millennia after the fall of the Roman Empire? Work without a strong voice of its own is bound to get drowned out by the tastes and intentions of the collection's amalgamators.

Far Left and Right:
Cordier's Said Abdullah from the Tribe of Mayac in the Realm of Darfour and African Venus, 1848, 1851, bronze
center is Lehmann's The Sirens Luring Ulysses, 1847, observed by Diane Calder

With the primacy of Modernism, Salon painters like Henri Lehmann have fallen out of favor and now come across as hackneyed and clichéd. Ninetieth century busts of African tribal leaders may have meant something different in the era when the slave trade was falling out of favor--and the argument put forth may be that Africans can be noble and proud instead of commodities--but 160 years later these busts are also reminiscent of French Colonialism; could a pair of busts consisting of a named man and a woman labeled as an object--African Venus--speak any lounder about the subjugation of women? You wind up getting a lot of other strange juxtapositions that drown out anything approaching the artists' intentions. Consider the pairing of Ingres' Virgin with the Host and Fragonard's erotic Two Girls on a Bed Playing with Their Dogs on display in the Resnick's bedroom amidst their collection of Art Deco furniture.

Widmann's Two Gladiators in Combat, circa 1740's marble

With the 18th century Bohemian take on antiquity (above), I'm reminded of Leonardo Da Vinci's take on other artists' representation of the human form (without a corresponding understanding of anatomy), with bodies that look like "a sack of rocks." The fact that the net in the vanquished gladiator's hand looks like a hunk of tripe doesn't help matters. Knowing that the Resnick collecting started by buying a work that was misattributed to Antonio Guardi points to the inversion of the museum's traditional process where knowledge and investigation precedes the ability to purchase a work for the collection. Another example comes from their purchase of a large marble portrait of Napoleon, bid on sight unseen, which turned out to be much larger and heavier than expected. With anecdotes like these, the primary signifiers are of affluence and power, and a return to the disposable income and economic disparities not seen since the industrial revolution.

Art Deco Decorative Arts around Maillol's Torso of l'Action Enchainee, 1905-06 bronze

There are a few small works where the voice of the artist still communicates directly with the viewer, but for the most part, it feels good to finally step out of the galleries into the fresh Olmec air.

The Ecumenical Atheist

2010-09-29T14:05:00.000-07:00

Image Source: Friendly Atheist

The New York Times has a story on a new Pew survey (a quiz really) asking Americans about religion. Turns out that atheists scored the highest, with an average of 20.9 correct answers (out of 32) and Hispanic Catholics pulling up the rear averaging only 11.6 right. Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists is quoted in the article:

“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people. Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”

This makes me wonder if the relationship between knowledge and belief would hold true for politics as well. Are anarchists more politically astute than your average Federalist Papers-reading Tea Partier?

On the September 28, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone, reporter Matt Taibbi makes a strong case for an "us versus them" reminiscent of the Old Testament:

The individuals in the Tea Party may come from very different walks of life, but most of them have a few things in common. After nearly a year of talking with Tea Party members from Nevada to New Jersey, I can count on one hand the key elements I expect to hear in nearly every interview. One: Every single one of them was that exceptional Republican who did protest the spending in the Bush years, and not one of them is the hypocrite who only took to the streets when a black Democratic president launched an emergency stimulus program. ("Not me — I was protesting!" is a common exclamation.) Two: Each and every one of them is the only person in America who has ever read the Constitution or watched Schoolhouse Rock. (Here they have guidance from [Dick] Armey, who explains that the problem with "people who do not cherish America the way we do" is that "they did not read the Federalist Papers.") Three: They are all furious at the implication that race is a factor in their political views — despite the fact that they blame the financial crisis on poor black homeowners, spend months on end engrossed by reports about how the New Black Panthers want to kill "cracker babies," support politicians who think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an overreach of government power, tried to enact South African-style immigration laws in Arizona and obsess over Charlie Rangel, ACORN and Barack Obama's birth certificate. Four: In fact, some of their best friends are black! (Reporters in Kentucky invented a game called "White Male Liberty Patriot Bingo," checking off a box every time a Tea Partier mentions a black friend.) And five: Everyone who disagrees with them is a radical leftist who hates America.

My sense is that the standard liberal arts education that American universities dolled out from the G.I. Bill through the seventies used the humanities as an armature on which to hang some essential critical thinking skills. When institutions of higher learning became what are essentially vocational tech schools to learn business, art, lawyering, nursing and the like, a good chunk of the human mind went fallow, allowing for a return of things like mysticism and xenophobia. More and more, it seems like the beginnings of the second dark ages.

College Night at the Getty Villa

2010-09-28T14:10:00.000-07:00

Back when I was an undergrad (and J Paul Getty was a living miser, instead of a dead philanthropist) my art school classmates and I would attend the Malibu Getty's Thursday evening lecture series. Some visiting scolar would wax about their current interest, and afterwards a floor of the museum would be open to the small crowd, and a wine and snacks (dinner for starving artists) would be served.

One of my favorite nights--feeding my fetish for the obscure and esoteric--was entitled, "Warts, Wrens, Moles, and Carbuncles: The Skin Blemish as a Sign of Infamy in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Art." How could I ever forget a title like that?

In the spirit of enticing college kids to look at art by offering free food, the Getty Villa in Malibu is hosting a night for college students on Tuesday, October 19, 2010 from 6:00 to 9:00 pm.

More on the point of this post: if art institutions are in the business of supporting the the arts, shouldn't they be encouraging new, younger audiences and the next generation of artists by letting them in free all the time? Generally speaking, todays poor college students will be tomorrow's museum members, donors, patrons and trustees. Why not cultivate and encourage their interest by letting them in for free when they can least afford it? Take a clue from the music industry. Kids don't buy a tune or a concert ticket until they've heard it first for free. Or take a clue from drug pushers, who give away the first hit of herion. In the cacophony of creative media, there are plenty of opportunities for kids to cultivate other interests that will develop into a lifetime of expenditures, by creating financial hurdles for young audiences, museums are then forced to stoop and pander and offer shows of motorcycles, video game screen pulls, and celebrity-photographs-as-art (both of and by).

Both LACMA (which charges ten bucks to students) and MOCA (which charges five) should follow the Hammer's lead, and offer free admissions to students with ID. And in the same spirit, the Getty should offer free parking (instead of fifteen bucks) for students. I can't imagine that the Getty's, LACMA's or MOCA's budget hangs in the balance by the few bucks they wring from college kids.

LACMA's New Resnick Exhibition Pavilion

2010-09-26T13:55:00.000-07:00

Members of the Press

I attended the press opening for LACMA's new exhibition space, the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion. What follows is some information about the space, some first thoughts, and a bunch of pictures.

Michael Govan

It seemed appropriate that the opening remarks were held in the open-air entrance. The space functions as sort of a nexus, connecting an incomplete spine that runs through the campus, eventually connecting the old May Company to the tar pits. The other axis allows for ingress, connecting the parking structure and eventually a subway stop (in someone else's lifetime).

LACMA's Newest Additions

The new space blends travertine and fire engine red structural elements, the sawtooth roof of the Broad, and cloisters it behind Robert Irwin's palm garden. The total effect eliminates anything that could be thought of as façade or grand entrance, and despite the fact that it is a recent addition, the structure is completely integrated and unobtrusive--shocking qualities in the current era of look-at-me philanthropy.

Easily Adapted Space

Renzo Piano aptly described the space as ecumenical, easily adapted to light-sensitive artwork, pseudo-period salons, and the standard ethereal white cube. Expanding the museum's exhibition space by an acre, the pavilion provides much-needed flexible space, since LACMA (like most museums) can only exhibit a sliver of their permanent collection.

Science-Fiction Scenes:
Terracotta Figurines in the Foreground, and an Olmec Head Through the Doorway

For the opening of the building, the Olmec show takes advantage of the copious amount of natural light, forming a central 'T' that deftly makes use of the north-facing wall of glass. The right third displays part of LACMA's costume collection, strangely displayed in shipping crates--as if their display budget was drained by the watered silk walpaper and ornate molding that frames the Resnick collection. A byproduct of this eclectic amalgam are the surreal views of a glowing Olmec head through a vitrine of neoclassical terracotta figurines.

The Saw-Tooth Roof

At some point I expect the bamboo and palms will enclose the lawn north of the building, creating an outdoor sculpture room that can be viewed through the glass wall.

Los Angeles Light

The central space makes ample use of natural light. I'm reminded of Lawrence Weschler's musings on the atmospheric qualities of Southern California light. Rezo Piano has infused the space with an expresso shot of while Los Angeles haze, palpable across the length of the room. What Geary has done to our hearing at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Piano has done to our sight. In future posts I'll comment more on the art on display, Suffice to say the use of Michael Heizer to create the sculpture stands is nothing short of brilliant.

The Resnick Exhibition Pavillion

Walking around the perimeter, I looked for some iconic ways the building may be pictured in future years. Perhaps it will be the air conditioning duct enclosures, placed at the four corners.

The Resnick's Iconic Red HVAC System

For those interested in experiencing LACMA's newest exhibition space, member's only events will open the space. For those short on cash, the entire museum--including the new pavilion--will be open free to the public October 2nd and 3rd, 2010, and free tickets can be had on-line at LACMA's website.

Lari Pittman’s Hysterical Seduction

2010-09-22T18:03:00.000-07:00

Lari Pittman's Untitled, 2010

If a case can be made for a CalArts-style of painting, it would—at least superficially—include an amalgam of text and iconography from the historical past to the capitalist propaganda of Madison Avenue. More substantially, what separates this work from the modern past is a realization that the clever tropes of painting’s practice—novelties of form, representation and presentation—have played out their endgame. If there is to be a life for painting after modernism, I will only come through the re-presentation of our visual, verbal, and cultural bits and pieces, combining them in ways that articulate new meanings. Call it the triumph of substance over style. An exemplar of this methodology can be seen in Lari Pittman’s current show in West Hollywood.

It’s easy to be seduced by the meticulous skill of the artist’s technique, on display in a clutch of new work at Regen Projects. There are greater rewards for the viewer willing to look beyond the surface to the roiling stew of the artist’s iconography. In Regen Projects second space we’re presented with a three-decade survey of Pittman’s works on paper. Like the Orangerie that protects tender citrus in harsh climates, this salon-style exhibition allows us entry into the artist’s formative process, as tender ideas come to fruition and eventually make their way to canvas.

In the main gallery, familiar Pittman tropes—from the phallus to the picket fence—are shattered and recombined in ways that make the strange reminiscent of something familiar. André Breton was speaking of automatic writing, but the same can be said of Pittman’s canvases:

“Plunged each day into the fog of received ideas, man is led to conceive of all things and to conceive of himself through a dizzy series of quickly hidden stumblings, of false steps rectified as best as possible.”

Pittman’s method of working ideas directly onto canvas—without intervening filters of representation (photographs, preliminary drawings, and the like)—allows us access to the artist’s view of our collective unconscious, and in the process, make elements of Surrealism relevant for contemporary viewers

Before Surrealism, Breton studied under Charcot at Salpêtrière Hospital. On the 50^th anniversary of hysteria, Breton proposed this new definition,

“Hysteria is a more or less irreducible mental condition, marked by the subversion, quite apart from any delirium-system, of the relations established between the subject and the moral world under whose authority he believes himself practically to be. This mental condition is based on the need of a reciprocal seduction, which explains the hastily accepted miracles of medical suggestion (or counter-suggestion). Hysteria is not a pathological symptom and may in all respects be considered a supreme means of expression.”

Under Pittman’s authority we can witness his subversion of the moral world and vicariously engage in some reciprocal seduction.

LARI PITTMAN: New Paintings and Orangerie
September 11 – October 23, 2010
Gallery Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 10:00 am – 6:00
Regen Projects
633 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90069

Jeffrey Deitch and MOCA's Future

2010-06-20T12:09:00.000-07:00

Jeffrey Deitch via The New Yorker

In the current (Summer 2010) issue of Artforum, MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch reminisces about his gallery days and his plans for Los Angeles.

“I would provide artists with up to twenty-five thousand dollars in production or travel money and living stipend; if we sold the work, the twenty-five thousand dollars would be reimbursed and we would split the remaining proceeds. If we didn’t sell it, we could be very relaxed. The artist didn’t have to worry. I would just keep and equivalent amount of work for my own collection to cover the investment and production.”

As an economic model for exhibiting art, I don’t know if I’m flabbergasted or appalled. As purely an economic model, it’s hard to imagine any other object making enterprise that would be willing to enter into a similar arrangement. Would it be possible if Mr. Deitch was instead a haberdasher, and he approached a Guatemalan sweatshop with the same proposal? “I’ll give you twenty-five grand to buy some materials, employ garment workers, and fly to New York to put the clothes on display. If I don’t sell twenty-five grand of your product, no problem; I’ll just keep an equivalent amount that you invested in labor and time.” In the Jeffrey Deitch model, the greatest economic risk is hefted by those least equipped to shoulder it.

But the responsibility doesn’t stop at making and installation. Deitch talks about being amazed at the huge crowds that turned out for the Barry McGee show at the drawing center, and the artist’s built-in marketing department.

“I was inspired and, after visiting him (McGee) in Saint Louis, finally persuaded him to do a show with me. Sure enough, there were a few thousand people in the street the evening of the opening. It turned out that Barry had brought some friends along to “get the word out,” tagging the neighborhood. This really opened my eyes.”

If one of the roles of the museum is to introduce a non-art audience to their collection, it is understandable that say, the Getty Villa would exhibit Aztec art as a way to entice Mexicans, whose numbers are woefully low at the Getty Villa. This brings in a new audience, who then may wander through the permanent collection. But since Aztec art is outside the purview of the Getty Villa, they are forced to weave a convoluted thread that ties together 16th century European interest in Greco-Roman polytheism, and a handful of objects that weren’t found and destroyed by the Conquistadors.

For museums like MOCA, LACMA and the Hammer—which may show the work of living, currently producing artists, the temptation to show work by an artist who comes with his or her own marketing department and built-in audience. This isn’t as much about tapping into a new audience as it is tapping into a new marketing department. And in the process, whatever is written into the mission statement of the institution gets knocked down a rung on the ladder of priorities.

For MOCA, Deitch is planning “‘Art in the Streets’—the first ambitious exhibition by a major US museum about graffiti and art inspired by street culture. Here again, a lot of the material comes from LA, where we see a big subculture with a lot of skate and street brand shops.” It isn’t difficult to image the Louis Vuitton store becoming a skate shop and the Geffen getting a half pipe. But questions remain; do these visitors return to engage the Rothkos? And for an exhibition called "Art in the Streets," is MOCA willing to venture outside their enclave into the streets on the level they did for the Kaprow Happenings?

Queer Territories at Sea and Space Explorations

2010-03-31T06:00:00.000-07:00

Michael Buitron's Body without Organs (detail) 2010

UPDATE: A couple of recent reviews of the show at The New Gay and Fellows of Contemporary Art.

It's been a while since I've posted here, so I thought I'd put up my latest news and an update about LITV. I'll be showing new work (3 pieces) that grew out of conversations here and at Nicholas Grider's blog, Everything, Everywhere, All of the Time about queer abstraction. The show, Queer Territories, is curated by Grider. If you'd like to rehash the conversation, read the posts (and comments) here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 and Part 9 (and there's probably some missing additional parts as well).

Here's the 411:

Artists: Kaucyila Brooke, Michael Buitrón, Eric Lindley, Joanne Mitchell, Lee Perillo, Matthew Siegle and Nicholas Grider, who curated the show.

Location: Sea and Space Explorations

Opening: Saturday, April 3, 2010

6:00 to 9:00 pm

Location: 4755 York Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90042

I hope to see you there!

I thought I'd also post an update on the blog. Unfortunately, my current circumstances leaves me little time for LITV. I continue to write for ArtScene, and my previews and recommendations can be read there. In April's issue (on line at the end of the week) I have short pieces on Miller Updegraff and Jack Pierson. I do plan to return to LITV, so consider the current dearth of postings as a sabbatical of sorts.

Drift Into the Void

2009-11-16T01:00:00.000-08:00

Today is my birthday; I am forty-eight years old.

This is as good a time as any to reflect and assess, and make plans for the future. When I started this blog nearly four years ago, it was an attempt to record my passing thoughts and chisel them into Google's servers. I expect these words and images will hang here in the ether for the medium term, at least until new technologies and fancies throw them on the pile with floppy disks and IBM punch cards.

In the beginning, Leap Into the Void served as my written thesis for my time in CalArts' MFA program. Later LITV became a place for me to articulate my thoughts and experiences in the visual arts and our culture at large. I never expected to have a few thousand page views a week, or a couple hundred subscribers, and as of today, to have made 370 posts.

Last month, with my COBRA benefits winding down, my HELOC nearly used up, and no teaching or writing jobs in sight, I've returned to research; this time as a quasi statistician slash database manager on a neuropsychiatric study of HIV and cognitive decline. From California Institute of the Arts to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center I've been able to call myself a colleague of some very talented and remarkable people. Strangely though, there seems to be no overlap whatsoever of these two worlds or in the parts of my brain I call into service.

These are though economic times, and I count myself as fortunate to have a steady income again. Unfortunately, door-to-desk is a two hour commute each way, and is exhausting, even with Metro doing the driving. I haven't posted here in about three weeks, and I don't expect to return to regular posting anytime soon. I'm saving up for a netbook, so that some of that time my be put to productive use. In the meantime, I'll be assessing my priorities and deciding if I will continue here, move on to another forum, or devote my remaining minutes to the production of art.

Thank you all for reading; your site visits, comments, and email messages have kept me posting here for as long as I have. I have been looking at art, and I hope to make a few more posts to close things out. Until then, a fond adieu.

CalArts On Location

2009-10-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

CalArts as Lyle Pavilion

This is probably my final installment of my CalArts filming location festival. There is also an episode of Airwolf filmed at CalArts, probably from season 3, that can be streamed on Netflix, but I can't bring myself to scour through 22 episodes of such a god awful series. Even the show's theme music sounds like it was lifted from an 80's porn movie.

The Lawn Between the Main Parking Lot and the Mod; Dorms in the Distance

This episode of Banacek is from season 2 (1973) and is worthwhile for seeing what the campus surroundings looked like in the early years. Even when I was there in the 80's, there was no Stevenson Ranch or shopping mall. The remote location forced students to make their own entertainment.

The Green in the Foreground is Now the Ahmanson Dorms, the Brown Patch is the Apartment Complex Across Tournament Road

The episode is titled, "If Max is So Smart, Why Doesn't He Tell Us Where He Is?" and involves a gigantic supercomputer that vanishes overnight.

CalArts Lobby

The opening sequence (the image above and the two below) is a long tracking shot that follows the research hospital's main patron and hypochondriac (in pink pajamas) as she walks from the lobby, past the modular theater, through the L-Shape Gallery and down the stairs outside the cafeteria.

L-Shape Gallery

The shot is a treasure trove of fake art.

Gallery D300

This particular episode called for a shitload of extras in nurse uniforms, which makes me think of Richard Prince paintings.

Lulu May von Hagen Courtyard

The next scene picks up as they cross the old graduation courtyard to a prop building that convincingly matches the main campus architecture--which is more than you can say for the the metal buildings and FEMA trailers that clutter the campus today.

The Steps From the Patio Outside the Tatum Lounge

Sitting outside of the C-block was a 10' high geodesic dome, which also appeared in the climactic scene of the Invasion of the Bee Girls Movie (not seen in either post).

Looking South, A-Block

The other main shooting location was the hallways on the first floor of the A-block. Throw in a wheelchair and a few nurses and presto, you get instant hospital.

Looking Toward the Super Shop

By positioning himself on the board of trustees of places like CalArts and the Pasadena Museum, Thornton Ladd inveigled his way into architectural commissions for both institutions. Sadly, the little architectural details that sign for modernism--like the indirect lighting and the stained walnut phone booths--slowly have been stripped away as economic necessity trumps the ideals of modernism. Even the refurbished elevator looks like it was lifted from Morongo Casino.

If Only it Was Real: Drinking Screwdrivers on the Terrace of the Cafeteria

Irving Penn's Little Trades at the Getty

2009-10-23T11:30:00.000-07:00

Irving Penn's Calfskin Grader, NY

Back in the day when I ostensibly functioned as a job counselor, I would refer to my dictionary of occupational titles which arranged jobs to match personality types. It was within these pages that I became aware of jobs that were worse than one's own, and that in the postwar period when the classifications were developed, there were many more petits métiers, or small trades, than there are today. A recent NY Times article points to the dying and injured remnants of these professions. When I visited the Getty Center's exhibition of Irving Penn's photographs (exhibition closes January 10, 2010) it brought to mind the anachronisms of the Holland Dictionary, as well as the ways and means of (mostly) men.

Irving Penn's Buchers, Paris

It was in this time before women entered the workforce and Freud entered popular culture that male bonding was not restricted by internalized homophobia. Lives were lived more intimately, with cramped living quarters, shared bedrooms and shared beds. One of the tragedies of post-war affluence is that made us more isolated from each other and now days borders on a phobia.

Irving Penn's Fireman, Paris

My first encounter with Penn's work came before my art education, when magazines like Vogue would run Penn's images of Mud People. It was a time when art still intersected with popular culture.

Irving Penn's Fireman, London

I attended Colin Westerbeck's lecture held in conjunction with the show. What I found interesting is Penn's identification with his subjects. He would show up for work in a denim shirt and jeans, dressed as the working class archetype. In the 60's when Penn again pulled out these negatives and made new palladium prints, Westerbeck describes Penn "painting" the palladium solution onto the paper. These later prints were made for a fine art market rather than reproduction in a magazine. So in some sense, Penn adopted the "trade" of the fine artist when reprinting the series for a new audience.

Irving Penn's Fireman, NY

What was also interesting was how much credit Westerbeck assigned to those working around Penn. It was Penn's editor Alexander Leiberman who suggested to Penn that he take up photography when Penn was employed as a graphic artist. Leiberman also suggested Little Trades series and enlisted the help of Edmonde Charles-Roux and photographer Robert Doisneau who recruited and cajoled the tradespeople to climb six flights of stairs (often lugging up the tools of their trade) to Penn's studio. It was with Charles-Roux's (the newly appointed editor of Paris Vogue) aesthetic eye, and Doisneau's knowledge of the city that made the series a success.

Irving Penn's Busboy, Larue

The show at he Getty is extensive--over 250 prints. From a quick overview, the variety of poses is amazing, considering the similarity in format. Looking more closely, the redundancies enhance the small differences: the aloof or serious French, professionalism and formality of the Brits, and the smiling and confident Americans. It's a reflection of each city's recent experience during WWII. Paris was occupied by the Nazis, London was bombed but not invaded, by contrast New Yorkers fought overseas, while those left behind remained out of harm's way.

Irving Penn's Busboy, Larue

Since I saw the show, Irving Penn has died (1917 - 2009) at the age of ninety-two. There are now oodles of posts on his life and work. Rather than clicking links, head over to the Getty and look at the real thing.

Irving Penn's Artist's Model

There are a few women in the show, including several versions of the artist's model pictured here. Perhaps this anomaly can be read as Penn's self portrait. Unlike the famous people and fashion models he photographed, Penn turned away from the press like this model turns her back to the viewer. And Penn's conception of himself, he was a worker in the art trade, much like the model above.

Irving Penn's Studio, Paris

Random Internet Slices

2009-10-21T11:00:00.000-07:00

One of Many Baby Photos from This Website

The picture above shares something in common with all the other photographs on this post. They were all taken with a Nikon, and were posted to the Internet with their digital image naming convention intact; that is, they are all named dscn0281.jpg.

A Test Project to Inject CO2 Into a Dry Oilfield to Extract the Remaining Oil; from This Website

Years ago, before the days of Google or Bing image search, I would use the search engine of the day to view jpegs and gifs with similar names. It was a way to sort of randomly cut though the Internet--extracting a core sample of sorts--to view the visual imagery that was being injected into cyberspace.

The Vibrating Mistress from This Website

I first played this game more than 15 years ago, and it has been years since my last attempt. Based on anecdotal memory, there seems to be a lot less porn, and certainly a lot less of the home-made stuff from the days of the BBS systems. There is also a lot more posting being done outside of the United States. Outlaw content has shrunk, and banal posting has grown exponentially, with commerce as the main generator of content. That includes bloggers like myself who post on art; the subjects of our discourse are the objects and gestures that are promoted, advertised, and sold through galleries, museums, and publications--all components of the larger art market.

The Nanjing Women's Federation Send Relief Supplies Worth 1.5 Million Yuan to Sichuan Province; From This Website

What caused me to play this game again was an email I received last week from an old trick I hadn't heard from in more than a year. As it turns out, he lives close to my new job, and his invitation to come over would (in addition to a roll in the hay) allow me to avoid most of the traffic on my commute home. His email to me included a picture (which I cropped to disguise his identity) was named by his Nikon.

Matsushima Air Show with Japan's Blue Impulse from This Website

What also caught my attention was the unsolicited inclusion of the sexy photo. He goes to the gym daily to earn his physique, so I'm sure it was sent with a sense of pride. But the main reason to include the photograph with the invitation to come over was to have it function as an enticement. Basically he is objectifying himself to gain some potential future benefit.

Cute Surfer Boy from This Website

The primary thing all these images have in common (except maybe the first one) is their objectification of one sort or another. They all nail down a particular time, place, event, and/or thing, then add value though photography's documentation function. Every image in this post can be titled, This is a Signifier of my Privileged Experience. If nothing else, the photographer/posters are a members of the small minority of the world's population that both own a digital camera and have access to the Internet.

Bush, Crazy Bastard! from This Website

I mention this not to bash folks who happen to be born in the developed world and use their cash to buy and sell things and take vacations, but to point out that us human beings also function as objects in these systems. The objection to being objectified comes from the fact that we start out like the first image in this post, a pudgy ball of flesh that is loved but contains no inherent use-value. We are miffed when others treat us like objects because it reminds us that the world (unlike mom) doesn't love us for ourselves.

Pissing Girl in Brussels, Also Home to Pissing Boy; From This Website

What I find interesting is the ease with which gay men objectify themselves. Frankly, I feel better when I'm valued as a piece of meat rather than slathered in some normative social trope designed to disguise the stench of homophobia--like a mortician using stage make-up to disguise a rotting corpse as a loved one. I'd rather not experience the polite hypocrisy of you returning my smile when we pass in public, then have you vote against my interests in the privacy of the ballot booth. At least show the courage of your beliefs and call me a fag, so I can return the favor and punch you in the nose.

Not a Mike Kelley, But it Should Be; From This Website

So other than a string of letters and numbers, what does my dscn0281 share with these others?

Christo's Gates from This Website

For a few moments last week he was my baby; I was his driller and extractor of fluids.

American Version of the Austrian Steyr AUG Semi-Automatic Assault Rifle with Laser Sight; from This Website

He was my vibrating mistress and my relief effort.

An Ancient Amphitheater in Cyprus from This Website

We were each others impulse and shirtless hottie.

Cannabis Seedling from This Website

I have been his crazy bastard and his pissing boy. We have role-played this in front of others.

Foxy Angel, a Ft. Lauderdale Transgender Escort and Porn Star from This Website

We have been each others incongruent aesthetic object and phallic weapon.

Summer Camp in Taiwan from This Website

I think he's exotic and I feel ancient; perhaps the reverse is true.

A C130 on Kwajalein Atoll from This Website

We function as each others drug, porn star, and furtive encounter.

High School Reunion Photo from This Website

And like these last images show, we had our reunion, and that time apart made evident the aging process.

Oranges

From the website:

My interests lie in discovering new structures within the latter stages of decay in the cycle of life. When the outer layers of decayed fragile fibres are peeled back they reveal a new array of fractal surface structures; some of these new images are incorporated into my experimental art work.

DSCN0281.jpg

We are objects objectified, and objectifiers ourselves. But unlike some of the normative examples above, we didn't commodify the encounter or each other. And perhaps that is what makes us queer.

CalArts Plays Something Else

2009-10-19T09:00:00.000-07:00

Stairwell in the Back of the Main Gallery

Part of my infrequent posts of Hollywood location shooting done at CalArts, these stills are from Escape from New York the John Carpenter film starring Kurt Russell, Adrienne Barbeau, and a pre-Chef Isaac Hayes. In the future (1980's) crime got so bad that a giant wall was erected around Manhattan and the city was turned into a federal prison. Considering what a shit-hole New York became in the 80's, the scenario is almost believable.

Kurt Russell, AKA Snake Runs to the Mezzanine

There is so much trash and vandalized property in the movie, it's hard to make out CalArts locations, other than these scenes shot in the Main Gallery. Why does movie graffiti always look so fake? Maybe because it's legible.

New York in the Future: The Late 90's

These scenes are near the end of the movie as the protagonists scramble from the supposed lobby of the World Trade Center to the building's roof.

Heading Towards the Music School

Looks like the CalArts Halloween party.

Charles Burchfield at the Hammer Museum

2009-10-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

Approximate look (remembered) of card 19 of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

Harry Sullivan coined the term parataxic distortion to describe the fantasy projections we foist on unknown individuals who cross our path. Fantastical projections used to be the bread and butter of psychoanalysis, with famous tests like the Rorschach inkblot test used to prime the patient's confabulating pump. Though less well known in popular culture, the TAT was the second most used projective test, even though there was little to support it's reliability. Interestingly, a latter version of the TAT used images from Edward Steichen's Family of Man exhibit at MoMA, and was shown to offer more reliability as a diagnostic tool, though it never replaced the earlier TAT in popularity.

Charles Burchfield's (and now MoMA's) The Night Wind 1918

One if the reasons for the TAT's popularity is that it used existing art, which often functions like the person across from us on a blind date: a barely read surface that we use to project our thoughts and feelings. Christina Morgan, one of the TAT's creators attend the Art Students League in New York after completing training as a nurse. Her talents as an artist were called into action, partly to select the images used, and in some cases, to re-render them for the test. When she arrived in New York in 1918, MoMA's first solo show for an artist--the work of Charles Burchfield--was on display. The Night Wind (above) can now be seen in Heatwaves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield at the Hammer Museum through January 3, 2010. Go and project.

The Weaver House in Salem, Ohio, next door to Burchfield's childhood home, and now restored as part of the Burchfield museum complex.
Jim Burchfield, a grand nephew of the artist, and Greg Courtney, a Salem realtor, are shown holding a black and white reproduction of "The Night Wind."

The instructions (as I remember them) asks the subject to look at the image and explain what is going on. She is then asked to explain the events that led up to the things happening in the picture, and what took place later. In Wesley G. Morgan's (no relation to Christina) history of some of the TAT's images, he writes,

On September 22, 1916, Burchfield made a note that seems to presage the painting. In it he mentions a high wind out of the southwest, clouds with black irregular openings that seem like strange creatures above a house with an evil yellow window amid black clawing trees (Townsend, 1993). In that same year, suffering from severe depression, fear and hallucinations, Burchfield made some sketches in his notebook, "Conventions for Abstract Thought," in which he developed various symbols from abstract shapes to represent various moods or pathological states including "fear," "insanity," "brooding," "morbidness," and "imbecility." The spiral symbol of fear can be recognized as the gale sweeping across the sky, and the empty-eyed mask of night over the house is recognized as the symbol for imbecility; morbidness (evil) can be found in the shape of the windows of the house(Baur, 1956; Baigell, 1976; Townsend, 1993; Weekly, 1993). These "conventions," "...make it clear that Burchfield was first and foremost a psychological artist--an expressionist and subjectivist, as it were." (Kuspit, 1997, p. 127). Kuspit (1997) maintains that fear is the most fundamental emotion in Burchfield's art. In fact a few months after painting "The Night Wind" Burchfield was drafted into the military service for the First World War.

So fear, insanity, brooding, morbidness, and imbecility might not be your reading of the middle jpeg, your therapist's reading of your reading of a black and white reproduction, an art historian's reading of the art, but it is Burchfield's intention, which should count for something.

Earlier this year I sent some TAT images to Dennis Cooper to be used as inspiration for his blog's periodic Self-Portrait Day. The readers, writers, artists, musicians, and lurkers of his posts responded to the images with their own creative output--which is another legitimate way of responding to a work of art or it's reproduction. The fruits of their talents can be seen here, here, and here. There is some amazing creative work there, in particular the description of an image of a plowed field being being described as the view looking out from the back of someone's mouth. What I find interesting is that their creative output would be pathologized in the context of the actual test. But then, psychology has a long history of pathologizing creative output, from Van Gogh to images of cats.

Fall 2009 CalArts Visitng Artists

2009-10-13T09:35:00.000-07:00

Sylvère Lotringer

I've been meaning to post the Paul Brach Memorial Visiting Artist Lecture Series with the famous cryptic posters and infamous gallery opening night parties that follow. Lectures take place at CalArts room F200 on Thursdays at 7:00 PM. Call or check the school's website calendar to confirm.

October 15, 2009 Amy Granat
October 22, 2009 Kori Newkirk
October 29, 2009 Zhang Peili and Zhu Jia
November 5, 2009 TBA
November 12, 2009 Sylvere Lotringer
November 19, 2009 Uta Barth
December 3, 2009 Gerard Hemsworth
December 10, 2009 TBA
December 17, 2009 TBA

On Location at CalArts: Sleeper

2009-10-12T09:00:00.000-07:00

Miles (Woody Allen) wheeled into CalArts' Modular Theater to be Revived

Welcome back to CalArts Movie Mondays, my little film festival of TV shows and movies shot at California Institute of the Arts. Probably the best known of all the films shot on campus, Sleeper tells the story of a man revived after being frozen for 200 years.

The Hallways Around the Upper Levels of the Mod Theater c 1973

Inside the modular theater, the floor is broken up into four-foot square segments that sit on hydraulic lifts. Since it's possible for the floor to be quite high in some places, there are these seldom-used hallways with banks of doors on the upper level. I'm amazed at how often the school becomes the institutional face of a dystopic future.

Run Away!

This looks like the hallway on the first floor of the C-Block, leading from the Broad Studios to the A-Block. On the left would be the Film/Video school's sound stages with upper level undergrad artist studios on the right.

Woody Allen's character reminds me of the boys of South Park, as both shows' protagonists prefer not to express any ardent political position, but rather occupy some pseudo-insightful middle ground. By painting both the left and right as wacky extremists, Parker, Stone and Allen put a shiny gloss on the apathy of a fictional middle ground.

A Day in LA: Washington Boulevard Art Concert

2009-10-10T19:27:00.000-07:00

A Day in LA: Washington Boulevard Art Concert will take place Sunday, October 11, 2009 from noon until about six pm. Most artists will be set up along the marathon-length street in an east-to-west fashion, meaning that if you get there early, performances, installations, and happenings will be taking place on the east end, with the general creative mayhem following the sun. Detailed information on who is where is at the washblvd.tk website.

I'll be anchoring the east end in Whittier from noon until 2pm, and fellow CalArtian John Burtle will be Washington Boulevard's other bookend, getting sand in his shoes. I'll be handing out "Star Maps" that point out different historic sites along the way. A Google Map version of historical sites of Washington Boulevard is at this link. Below is the event's press release:

“A Day in L.A.” shows work from over sixty Los Angeles artists in unused public outdoor spaces along the entire length of Washington Boulevard’s 27 miles, from Whittier to Venice Beach. For one day artists will perform works, create installations, facilitate happenings, and make music in unexpected spaces, such as on the sidewalk, between dumpsters, along railroad tracks, as well as inside the audience’s cars as they traverse one of LA’s most iconic boulevards. An official map of the day’s events along with schedules and other downloadable information will be available to the public on the event website (www.washblvd.tk).
Works range from performances and installations to writings and discussions. The audience can choose how long they want to spend at each spot, skip spots or drive at different speeds between destinations as they traverse Wash. Blvd from Whittier to Venice Beach, culminating in an end performance at Venice Pier. Audience members are additionally invited to car pool with some artists between spots and to switch car pools at their leisure.
Building on the success of his last curatorial endeavor, The San Fernando Road Concert in 2008, Curator Stephen van Dyck seeks to investigate the possibilities of Washington Blvd as a site for artistic exploration. Washington Blvd is LA’s longest east-west street and one of the longest municipal streets in the world. This event will highlight this space as a way to view how the Los Angeles metropolis grew, and the massive in-between and negative spaces it left behind as it expanded. Additionally, this day will examine the Blvd as a cross-section of the city's diversity of landscapes and people. This exhibition/event/experiment asks, “How can we generate a new kind of LA experience, bringing meaning and attention to a collection of less obvious destinations?”
Participating artists include musicians, artists, writers, non-artists and residents of Washington Blvd's many neighborhoods: Danielle Adair, Karen Atkinson, Lara Bank, Ama Birch, Cindy Bravo, Bernard Brunon, Michael Buitron, John Burtle, Audrey Chan, Caroline Chang, Carolyn Chen, Andrew Clinco, Samantha Cohen, John D'Amico, Ken Ehrlich, Daiana Feuer, Flint, Robert Frashure, Nancy Ganacheau, Cary Georges, Mary Beth Heffernan, D Jean Hester, Julia Holter and the Open Academy Youth Orchestra at LATTC, Maryam Hosseinzadeh, Alexis Hudgins, Sarah Ibraham, Islands of LA, Katie Jacobson, Ian James, Shaun Klaseus, Sojung Kwon, Andrea Lambert, Eric Lindley, Elana Mann, Emery Martin, Anita K. Marto, Meghann McCrory, Joe Milazzo, Tracy Molis, Robin Myrick, Tucker Neel, Paul Pescador, Ali Prosch, Faith Purvey, James Rojas, Ally Sachs, Janet Sarbanes, Nate Schulman, Veronica Shalom, Katie Shook, Cynthia Simonian, Mark So, Mariangeles Soto-Diaz, Jennifer Styperk, Robert Summers, Jade Thacker, Mathew Timmons, Carlin Wing, Austin Young, Luis Zavala and Yelena Zhelezov.

Attack of the Bee Girls at CalArts

2009-10-05T09:00:00.000-07:00

CalArts Entrance Looking Across McBean Parkway

The ranch-type fence across the street was fake, a faux rural prop of the Newhall Land and Farming Company. Once it dipped out of sight, the fence ended, the began again as it rose up the other hill.

The Evil Brandt Corporation, AKA CalArts

That looks like Michael Asher's Bug on the left, but then, they all look alike.

CalArts' Lobby

From 1972, when this film was shot, until the Northridge earthquake, the school pretty much looked the same.

Outside the Bijou Theater

Of all the movies shot at CalArts, Invasion of the Bee Girls made use more locations on and around the campus.

In the Library Stacks

The poles are the hydraulic lifts for the floor of the Modular Theater, one floor above.

Hillside on the South Side of Campus Photographed for the 2007 Open Studios

A Naked Couple Having Sex While Rolling Down the Same Hill

Oh, for the days of gratuitous nudity!

CalArts' Library as Cocktail Lounge

If they actually served cocktails, I probably would have got more reading done.

CalArts Photo Lab as Chemistry Lab

Toss in a Schlenk line and you're good to go!

Entrance Behind the President's Office

The requisite creepy night shot.

Fourth Floor Hallway around the Modular Theater

There's now a ramp on the short flight of stairs; the elevator next to Gallery A402 is in the rear of the shot.

Inside the Mod

I give Invasion of the Bee Girls two thumbs up for most extensive use of the CalArts Campus, and
outstanding use of gratuitous nudity. There's even a gay character who's not a sociopath!

Buitron the Scrivener

2009-10-01T12:59:00.000-07:00

The Despotic Finger: Michelangelo's Moses for the Tomb of Pope Julius II

I’ve been accused in the past of making James Burke-like connections between one thing and another, so at the risk of reinforcing assumptions; I thought I’d post on my new job and what’s going through my head.

I remember reading somewhere that when a person achieves a certain level of proficiency in a field; they will come to despise large parts of their métier, for its theoretical inconsistencies and bureaucratic regalia. Having gone from research psychology to fine art and back again, I’m beginning to see similarities in both systems that drive production. From my desk in the Thalians Mental Health Center I can descend the grand trapezoidal staircase, cross the intersection of George Burns and Gracie Allen Way and stand in front of a reproduction of Michelangelo’s Moses. It makes sense that a Jewish hospital would have such a sculpture, just as it makes sense that the building that sits on an intersection named for the comedy team of Burns and Allen be named for the muse of comedy. But rather than muse on the muse of comedy sitting across the street from Michelangelo’s depiction of Old Testament judgment and tragedy, I’m thinking about the muse-function; that is, what motivates and inspires us to act.

Hermenaut Wilhelm Dilthey pointed out how things like art, politics, psychology, and law are different than the natural sciences, which take a mechanistic view of the world. While I muse, eating my lunch on the trapezoidal steps, I catch out of the corner of my eye a person running around the corner. The natural sciences do a bang up job of explaining the parts of the brain that are engaged when she puts one foot in front of the other, and the chemical reaction that causes her muscle cells to contract, but the social sciences are in the dark about what motivates or inspires her movement. Is she exercising on her lunch break or did she get a call that her child is in the emergency room? And even if I saw the lycra shorts and matching sweatband, I still wouldn’t know her essential motivation. Does she fear dying of a heart attack at 62 like Gracie Allen and runs from death, or is she burning off some pent up energy from working in a stressful but sedentary job? In the end we all grope about for essential meaning, but are no better than random chance at pointing out important art, predicting economic fluctuations, stopping self-destructive behaviors, or writing rules that serve our collective best interests rather than react to our passions.

In Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, we are presented with the demise of an office when Melville introduces Bartleby, a worker excised of all motivation. When ask to accomplish some task related to his position, the titular character responds, “I would prefer not to.” Eventually the lawyer moves his office because Bartleby won’t acquiesce to anything, including termination. In the constantly shifting lexicography of the DSM, individuals who are unable to appropriately respond to the social conventions of a particular time and place are pathologized under the rubric of Axis II. In plain English, any action can be held in high moral regard in one time and place, and be seen as symptomatic of some underlying mental disorder in another. The passive resistance of Gandhi or Act Up is viewed differently than that of Bartleby. Painting a haystack at dusk can be hackneyed and clichéd in one time and place, and groundbreaking and innovative in another.

For an artist or a research psychologist to be successful in their respective fields, they need to be fluent in the current language of their trade, appropriately and expectedly advance understanding, and function within the social conventions of their tribe. I would think that Jackson Pollock pissing in Peggy Gugenheim’s fireplace displays a high degree of social and cultural fluency. For one, he was well versed enough in mid-century social intercourse to get invited to a private party at an incredibly wealthy collector’s home, he was able to remain in good graces long enough to fill his bladder to capacity, and most importantly, he reinforced social expectations about artistic temperament and exceptionalism. For a contemporary therapist with a client engaging in behaviors similar to Pollock’s, the appropriate career move would be to diagnose the client with an Axis II disorder. The act of pissing in public or diagnosing a patient are quite similar, by one measure.

In my mid-residency review for my master’s at CalArts, I told Sam Durant that the things I was being evaluated on and expected to do for my mid-res show—make objects, install them in an aesthetically appropriate fashion, light the work, advertise it, talk about it, write about it, invite faculty, cater an opening reception—all amounted to CalArts being a finishing school to the social graces and conventions of the art world. “I would hope so,” was his response, “We don’t want you to leave here without those skills.”

I would prefer not to.

Race: Unpacking the Invisible Portfolio

2009-09-28T08:00:00.000-07:00

Jeff Koon's Michael Jackson and Bubbles

A Coda

Posting my review of 9 Lives has given me an opportunity to reread my thoughts amid our nation's ongoing conversation about race. While it's important and good to critique the curatorial enterprise, it is also necessary to discuss the cultural system that allows a biennial survey of Los Angeles artists to exclusively exhibit white artists and not have a single critic or reviewer mention the fact. Individual actions (or inaction)--be they by artists, curators, or critics--are symptoms of systemic forces. As responsible viewers and thinkers about art, we need to critique the players and critique the game.

The economic expansions and contractions or the art market not withstanding, the art world functions like a zero-sum game; for every artist included in a museum biennial or a gallery's stable, there are many more artists who are not. If "winning" exhibition space and column inches were solely based on talent and creativity, then the proportion of black or women artists showing work would be closer to their proportions in the population at large, and there would be less need for compensations like the Studio Museum in Harlem or the Women's Building. Recent shows like Your Bright Future, Phantom Sightings, and WACK! tacitly affirm the privilege of white artists and male artists as they attempt to ameliorate them.

Glenn Ligon's Malcom X

When we were in the editing process for the previously posted review of 9 Lives, one of the editors highlighted the word "overtly" next to "racist" and asked, "Isn't racism by definition overt?" My sense is that like most things, racism occurs on a continuum, from tying a rope around the neck of a black person and lynching them, to curating or collecting art predominantly made by white artists. The thread that weaves together both actions is the entitled sense that no explanation or reason need be given. I haven't talked to curators or collectors like Ali Subotnick or Eli Broad, but I expect that they would say that their choices were based on personal taste or some other factor, and the race or gender of the artist was not part of their selection criteria. I would not disagree, but add that their choices are symptomatic of an unquestioned position of privilege. In the long art historical view, their selections will seem as myopic as 19th century supporters of French academic painting.

Ken Gonzales-Day's Erased Lynching

Los Angeles is now a white minority city. For 9 Lives to reflect the ethnicities of the environment where the Hammer Museum is located (and still include Subotnick's personal choices), she would also need to include ten more artists that were Asian, Black, and Latino. As I said above, the exhibition of art is a zero-sum game. For the cake that is the limited amount of wall space available over a given period of time, it becomes necessary to slice off smaller pieces--or not serve--some white artists so as to avoid ghetto shows that attempt to compensate for the egregious inequality.

Byron Kim's Threshold

Issues around race and art are not always black and white, and will become more complex as time marches on. Like the president of the United States, my mother is white. From my graduating class at CalArts, one in five of us were born to parents of different ethnicities. Hispanic surnames not withstanding, most of us are light-skinned, acculturated, and we enjoy access to supposedly racially neutral group shows, while at the same time being aware of the privilege of whiteness that compounds the privilege of obtaining a well-regarded MFA.

Kip Fulbeck's Part Asian, 100% Hapa

Reading over Peggy McIntosh's White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack made me wonder if her list could be remade to expose some of the invisible systems of the art world:

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank checks.

Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in women's studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, "having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?"

With that in mind, I've attempted to remake McIntosh's metaphorical knapsack into an art world portfolio.

Gilbert Buitron (My Father) Performing

The Effects of White and/or Male Privilege in the Art World

I can if I wish, arrange to be in the company of white artists, curators, and collectors most of the time.
I can avoid spending time with people who wish to discuss my artwork in terms of race, gender, political, or economic issues, when I don’t see those as subjects that pertain to my work.
If I should need to move to another large city, I can be pretty sure of finding another art community made up of people like me.
I can be pretty sure that people I ask to visit my studio will be neutral or pleasant to me.
I can go to an art opening in a sketchy neighborhood, pretty well assured that there will be a critical mass of other people like me to make me feel safer.
I can turn through pages of art magazine or read reviews in the paper and expect to see artists of my race and gender widely represented.
When I study art history, I am shown that people of my color and gender made it what it is.
I can be pretty sure of having my race and gender represented in a group show.
I can be casual about art made by a woman or person of color that uses gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity as a subject matter, dismissing it as overly political or didactic.
I can go into an encyclopedic art museum and count on finding the art of my race and gender well represented, along with smaller galleries that separate our art from more “exotic” crafts.
I can expect to find straightforward depictions of my race and gender in portrait galleries, made by artists that share the sitter’s race, and portrayed in a sympathetic way.
If I’m the only male or white artist in a group exhibition, I can assume my inclusion is based on the merits of my work, and not as a ploy to be “politically correct”.
When meeting with a collector or curator for the first time, I seldom think about their expectations about my race or gender.
I can act out in socially inappropriate ways and have others attribute it to my “artistic temperament” rather than my race or gender.
I can speak to audiences about my art and not be asked questions that begin, “As a white artist... ?”
I am not referred to as a white artist, or a male artist.
I am never asked to speak on behalf of all the artists of my racial group or to speak for all men.
I can be pretty sure that if I’m introduced to a collector, I will be facing a person of my race or gender.
If I make artwork that is critical, it is not seen as being motivated by my race or gender.
I can choose to ignore shows at museums or exhibition spaces that exclusively feature the work of women, African-American, Latino, or Asian artists or I can disparage them, or learn from them, but in any case, I can find ways to be more or less protected from negative consequences of any of these choices.
I can worry about racism or sexism without being seen as self-interested.
I can create artwork that focuses on many topics, without wondering whether my art will be seen as a product of my race or gender.
If I am not successful as an artist I can be sure that my race or gender is not the problem.
I can imagine my art as a continuation of the historical timeline that stretches back to European cave paintings.
Photographic film and lighting equipment are manufactured to best register light skin tones, so I needn’t make any special adjustments or color corrections to photograph other people of my race.

Nine Lives at the Hammer: Whiteness and Nostalgia

2009-09-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday: Charlie White

Video Still from White's American Minor

In the darkened but incongruously white room showing White’s video American Minor (2008), I began to suspect a “white” subtext in Nine Lives. In one scene, semen-white drops of milk glisten on the girl’s puerile lips. Later on, the Caucasian protagonist seems to transform into a glossy white fiberglass sculpture.

Doubling back through the exhibition, I realized that the only prominent depiction of a person of color by the nine white artists was a photograph of the King of Tonga posing with Jeffrey Vallance. For Vallance, a visit to Polynesia grew from nostalgia for the tiki décor in his parent’s home.

“In a sense, I’d gone full circle: My ancestors came to Southern California from northern Norway and decorated their home with Polynesian pop, which aroused my curiosity and inspired me to travel to Polynesia, which in turn inspired me to return to my ancestral Nordic Homeland*.”

Ironically, the appearance of the King of Tonga is just a detour on a nostalgic journey that ultimately ends in snow-white Scandinavia.

Vallance's King of Tonga

The white subtext I was sensing was not an overtly racist one, but white in the many senses of the word. In Hollywood, the white Stetson was a cipher for good. Subotnick portrays Foulkes as the hero or the Hollywood good guy. White can also be seen as the absence of color or the absence of meaning. Like the white screen in a darkened theater, Upson’s grotto offers up a void where the artist can project her imagined space of the Playboy mansion. Vallance’s work reverses the path of white colonialists from far-flung exotic locales back to Europe, conjuring up the white of old-fashioned imperialism. And there is also a virginal white, as represented by White’s teenage girls.

But in the multicultural (minority-majority) present, a white Los Angeles can only exist in the movies, as a historic (and nostalgic) memory, or in an group exhibition of exclusively white artists. One wonders how many visionary artists Subotnick would have to include before she found art made by a person of color to her liking. For both Subotnick and Faulkner, Los Angeles’s civic boosterism and filmic depictions preceded the employment opportunities that drew them west. In both Golden Land and Nine Lives, there's a longing for, and an attempt to represent a mediated Los Angeles that doesn't exist.

Video Still from Playboy After Dark

An intriguing clue can be found in the reprint of William Faulkner’s short story “Golden Land” (1935) that appears in the exhibition catalog. Faulkner’s protagonist Ira longs for his whiter home, in all connotations of the word—clean, homogeneous, and pure—in contrast to his sexually precocious daughter and effeminate son, who do not share their father’s history or connections outside Los Angeles. For transplants to the city, Los Angeles can be disorienting, with its heterogeneous population and a civic life that connects less with a (white) European history than does the East Coast, but instead orients towards Latin America and the Pacific Rim.

In the vestibule that leads to the Hammer’s vault gallery, an iPod offers up a selection of Llyn Foulkes’s jazzy laments on Los Angeles. “What did they do to ol’ L.A.?” he asks on one track. Like Ira in Faulkner’s short story (which provides a similar coda to the catalog) Subotnick sees a dystopic city, which must compete with nostalgia for a better time or place.

One need only compare a real hospital's staff to a televised hospital drama, or go to Grauman’s Chinese theater to catch glimpses of disappointment on the tourists’ faces as they step off the bus and confront the reality of Hollywood, discovering that they’ve spent too much time staring at flickering images in a darkened room.

Chinese Theater, Hollywood, CA

*Subotnick, 103-4.

Monday: A Coda

Nine Lives: Charlie White at the Hammer

2009-09-25T11:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday: Jeffrey Vallance

Charlie White's Teen and Transgender Comparative Study #1

Less compelling in Nine Lives were work by artists who chose to represent subcultures outside their own, but perhaps there are no Sámi painters of reindeer viscera or transgender photographers of note living in Los Angeles.

Charlie White’s photographic series Teen and Transgender Comparative Study #1 through #4 (2008) harkens to the gridded backgrounds of 19th century pseudoscientific photography of Eadweard Muybridge. The side-by-side, typological portrayals encourage the viewer to compare and contrast a teenage girl and transgender adult. In Teen and Transgender Comparative Study #3, is it possible to decipher the scar from a tracheal shave, an operation designed to reduce the prominence of the male Adam’s apple? White’s specimen-like depiction, which foregrounds his subjects’ pathologies, separates us from their humanity.

Significant differences exists between the life of a white, male photographer and university professor in his mid-30s and the experiences of his teen and transgender models. For one, both his subjects’ identities—teen and transgender—occupy a liminal space between child and adult, or between male and female. The burden of understanding White’s subjects is left to the limited cultural identifiers within the frame. But even a reading of those identifiers is thwarted. We may infer that a teen girl and a transgender woman are both attempting to advance to their own ideals of femininity, but what we see are the efforts of an unseen hairstylist, make-up artist, and photographer who work in concert to reinforce similarities and eliminate individual identity and difference.

In The Cyrilla Strothers Project (2004-6) (an earlier work not in the show), White presented an archive of 11,000 photographs created when he gave cameras to friends and family of the titular teenaged subject. The pretext and form of The Cyrilla Strothers Project more ably diffuses at least some of the objectification and layers of removal that distance the viewer (or the artist) from the teens depicted in White’s video and photographs in Nine Lives.

Video Still from Charlie White's American Minor

Tomorrow: Whiteness and Nostalgia