L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Pipilotti Rist, Pour Your Body Out, 2009, installed at MoMA.

“A kiss puts form into slow and stretchy motion,” writes Sylvia Lavin. A kiss “renders geometry fluid.” Our relationship to buildings can be like that too — slow, stretchy, fluid. So Lavin suggests in Kissing Architecture, her new book with a bright pink cover and a delightfully sensual take on architectural criticism.

Lavin is interested in that problem that plagues design disciplines “as a net result of convergent histories of capital and culture”: should contemporary architecture establish itself as autonomous or work to engage its public, and which aim is nobler?

Kissing Architecture begins with a description of Pipilotti Rist’s Pour Your Body Out, an embracing 2008-2009 installation in MoMA’s atrium, where a fleshy, floral, 25 foot high video projection played out. Visitors could sit on pillows on the ground or on a round seating “island” the artist designed. The installation occupied space designed by architect Yoshio Taniguchi as an addition to MoMA in the late 1990s, which is, argues Lavin, decidedly banal and meant to push people through (the “peripatetic visitor” becomes almost an obstacle). Pour Your Body Out didn’t subvert Taniguchi’s banally tall white walls, though; it just offered a “vivid moment,” a “pulsating pink swerve.”

William Leavitt, California Patio, 1972. Mixed media construction. Dimensions variable. Collection of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Courtesy of William Leavitt.

L.A. artist William Leavitt, whose 2011 MOCA retrospective made a good number of year-end “best of” lists, has since the 1960s devised space for such vivid moments. He’s more interested in the vocabulary of interior and furniture design than architecture, and his “Theater Objects,” sets and curtains and props, tend to be conventionally modern but set up in such a way that they’re also all about the gap between “modern,” “progressive” taste and real people’s real lives.

Leavitt, though much better known in the visual art world than theater, has long written plays that take place inside his sets. One of them, The Particles (of White Naugahyde), played last night in Margo Leavin Gallery’s Annex and will play again tonight and next weekend. Though Leavitt wrote the play in 1979, it hasn’t been performed. The set is characteristically minimalist chic — rock wall, glass table, slick white couch — and the plot retro.  A family is stuck in a desert colony, auditioning to be among those sent by NASA to live in outer space. There’s nothing pretentious about the story or the script; none of the dialogue attempts to be needlessly profound and the absurdity is more Modern Family than Harold Pinter (at one point the characters try to scientifically bond with each other by making arm gestures and saying “hydrogen,” “copper,” “aluminum,” etc.).

William Leavitt, set design for The Particles (of White Naugahyde. 2012. Courtesy Margo Leavin Gallery.

But the living room set is a little pretentious, as the family’s neighbors point out during the play, and all throughout the three acts, that slick white couch keeps making characters uncomfortable. They find it sticky, slippery, cold. Then in the last scene, a mohair blanket arrives (the circumstances behind its arrival are a little bit complicated) and is draped over the couch. It’s this lumpy furriness that finally allows the characters to relax. I love that idea: a bit of tactile, sensual material can be redemptive, at least for a moment or two.

An exhibition of two adjoining shows by Slavs and Tatars and Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan is on at Kiosk, Ghent till 22 January 2012, featuring works that deal with interpretations and associations surrounding historically significant events.

Friendship of Nations: Polish-Shi’ite Showbiz by Slavs and Tatars presents a re-imagination of an Iranian Polish Solidarity. Even to an eye unfamiliar with Iranian and Polish traditions, the strong reference to craft is apparent. On entering the dome-shaped gallery, the works appear to be part of a commemoration, with large and colorful handcrafted banners and woven objects.

Installation with banners by Slavs and Tatars, 'Friendship of Nations: polish shi'ite showbiz'. Courtesy the artists, Kraupa-Tuskany, Berlin. © Yana Foque

‘Pajaks’, crafted according to local customs and hang from the ceiling, are part of an annual Polish harvest celebration. In context of local customs, several of these ‘pajaks’ are made with Christmas lights, yarn, glass balls and even a Christmas tree.

Slavs and Tatars, 'Resist resisting god', 2010. Courtesy the artists, Kraupa-Tuskany, Berlin. © Yana Foque

Mirrored mosaics were invented by the Persians in the 7^th century to distinguish themselves from Arab neighbours. They are today exported by the Iranian republic as a symbol of its ideology. These are reconstructed in a recognisable form of a painting and when viewed from an angle, reveal the words “Resist Resisting God”.

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Stan Douglas, Flame, 1947, 2010. Digital silver print mounted on Dibond aluminum. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

To make the images for Midcentury Studio, a selection of which are at The Power Plant in Toronto until 4 March, Stan Douglas not only constructed a working period studio stocked with authentic equipment from the post-war North America that these images ‘document’, he also invented an impressively resourceful fictional character, a working photojournalist of the time, to make them. Douglas cast himself in the role, and in an extended interview with David Balzer, he talks about the photographer of these pictures in the third person, discussing the work with a distance that is disorienting and fascinating.

Installation of Stan Douglas: Entertainment at The Power Plant, Toronto, 10 December, 2011 - 4 March, 2012. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.

With characteristically intensive research and attention to detail, Midcentury Studio looks at the years just after the war, 1945-51, a time still twinged with darkness and desperation, but one looking forward to the optimism of 1950s  America, when a working hack with a camera might just as easily shoot a murder victim  or a brawl to sell to the papers as he might a cricket match or a magician to run in a magazine feature or as a print advertisement. Vancouver stands in, as it does so well, as anytown, its Hollywood North reputation perfectly matched for this exercise in projection and role-play.

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#Hashtags: Viral Thoughts on Politics, Arts, and Culture

#Hashtags provides a platform for longer reconsiderations of artworks and art practices outside of the review format and in new contexts. Please send queries and/or ideas for future to hashtags@dailyserving.com.

“Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and of making it obsolete.” – Susan Sontag

In her 1977 essay, “The Image-World,” Susan Sontag wrote that the practice of photography – and the overabundance of images that come along with it – leave us desensitized to the “real” world. Despite the fact that photographs are considered traces of their subject, we typically see photographs as independent, material objects – separate from their original subjects and somehow more palatable. They even occupy a specific moment of time, different from our own, turning the present into the past and the past into the present.

But Sontag was writing about the role of the photograph as she knew it, which never included sculpture, or photographs functioning not just as traces of objects but as actual simulations, or three-dimensional copies.  The last year has seen a rise in artists working with photography in sculpture, with more than a few of these artists choosing to juxtapose “real” objects with their 2- or 3-dimensional, photographic copies. Is there a difference between images functioning like this in the world and “the image-world” that Sontag describes? Or are they one and the same?

Jerry McMillan, "Wrinkle Bag," 1965. Black and white photographic bag construction with shelf and Plexiglas cover. 12.75 x 11.75 x 7 inches.

Ironically, even as Sontag was puzzling over “The Image-World” and the rest of the essays that would become On Photography, searching to delineate a niche in the fine art world for photography, curator Peter Bunnell took an even larger step. In 1970, Bunnell launched “Photography into Sculpture” at the Museum of Modern Art, “the first comprehensive survey of photographically formed images used in a sculptural or fully dimensional manner.”

The show included a work by Jerry McMillan called “Wrinkle Bag” (1965) – perhaps one of the first of its kind. “Wrinkle Bag” was not merely a photograph, but a high-quality, black-and-white reproduction of the texture of crumpled paper, cut into the shape of a brown paper lunch sack. In its recent re-manifestation at Los Angeles’ Cherry and Martin Gallery, “Wrinkle Bag” looked eerily contemporary, perhaps because this type of photographic reproduction has resurfaced recently in the works of contemporary artists, like Urs Fischer, amongst others.

Installation view of "Who's Afraid of Jasper Jonnson," Tony Shafrazi Gallery, 2008.

In 2008, Fischer collaborated with Gavin Brown on the exhibition “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?”, at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. Fischer and Brown hired a photographer to document the gallery’s previous show – “Four Friends”, which included work by Donald Baechler, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf – and then wallpapered the gallery with the images, printed in a 1:1 scale.  The results were chaotic, with the photographed work punctuating, even interrupting, the current exhibit.  There were even moments where a photographed object was juxtaposed against the original, as in the case of the security guard.

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Welcome to HELP DESK, step into my office! Each week I’ll be answering your queries about making, finding, marketing, buying, selling—or any other activity related to—contemporary art. Together, we’ll sort through some of art’s thornier issues. Email helpdesk@dailyserving.com with your questions, or use a free anonymizer like Anonymouse.org to send an email to the same address. Comments are enabled, but be good or be gone! All submissions will be treated as anonymous and become the property of Daily Serving.

Your counselor, hard at work.

Some galleries provide artists with information on who is purchasing their artwork…others do not. What’s up with that? I feel like smaller galleries are super paranoid of artists selling out from under them while bigger more stable galleries offer full contact information to artists.

I’m not a gallerist, so I asked around to see if anyone could help me shed a little light on this subject. Catharine Clark, of Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, generously provided this information for me to share:

“We disclose the name of a collector to an artist when a sale is made. Often collectors and artists enjoy meeting one another, and we help to facilitate that when it’s possible. We disclose additional contact information when artists are in the process of determining what work can be available for a museum exhibit, for example, or if they ask for it because they want to write a thank you note or correspond in some way with the collector. Some collectors are very private, and the information about them is proprietary, so we evaluate each request as it is made and determine whether the use of the information will be respectful. We have had the unfortunate experience of the information being inappropriately shared and the collectors have then felt betrayed. Since we work on loan agreements with the museum registrars, collectors, and artists, usually it is at that point that all contact information becomes most transparent. We also maintain relationships with the collectors so that we are able to follow the whereabouts of work as people move or re-sell their collections.”

Nathan Lynch, Alternative Therapies, 2010. Found object, reclaimed fir

Of course, Catharine Clark Gallery is an established and highly professional operation. You might find a different set of standards at work with another, smaller or newer gallery. While I can’t speak to the “paranoia” of a gallery, I can offer some advice to artists just starting out: ask for a contract that specifically states that you need to be given collector information when a sale is made. I do believe that you have a right to know where your work is going.

I also want to stress that you don’t want to use collector information in an improper way. It would be indecorous and short-sighted to pester your collector, or to try to make a direct-from-studio sale next time and skip the gallery’s commission. If you’re represented, don’t ever ever do this; and if you’re not represented and the buyer connected with you through a gallery, then you owe the gallery a percentage of the sale anyway—unless you like bad blood and never want to show there again. But it’s not a bad idea to have at least basic collector information so that you can keep a spreadsheet on the whereabouts of your work. That way when PS1 offers you a retrospective and then makes you track down and then pick up all your own work—like they did to a certain unnamed young female artist recently—you can find it all. I also refer readers to Chapter 13, “Gallery Representation” of the excellent Art/Work by Heather Darcy Bhandari and Jonathan Melber, which goes into more detail about the ins and outs of working with galleries.

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Since the invention of the motion pictures, films have captivated their viewers. Today we pay tribute to the innovation of precedents such as Stan VanDerBeek, and look forward to the innovators of now (who have some seriously big shoes to fill, ones that are often left completely empty). The 2012 Sundance Film Festival, New Frontier, opened in Park City, Utah yesterday, and features two of Daily Serving’s oft-reviewed artists, Ai WeiWei and Marina Abramović, among others. “Presenting work of artists, journalists, game designers, and media scientists, New Frontier 2012 explores the integration of human forms with the techno-sphere and ushers in a media environment of the future that nourishes the cornerstones of our humanity—our social nature, vulnerability, and creativity.”

New Frontier 2012 will be on view from January 20, 2012  January 28 and at the Salt Lake City Art Center through May 19.

The following article was originally published by Catherine Wagley on January 22, 2010:

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Stan VanDerBeek with his Movie-Drome, Stony Point, NY. Courtesy Yale School of Architecture

Making films is not easy. Most people know this and almost as many find the difficulties of movie-making enthralling, which explains the proliferation of articles, TV interviews, and radio specials on the subject. Just last week, I nearly pulled off the freeway to better concentrate on radio host Elvis Mitchell’s interview with Oren Moverman, the directed of The Messenger (who, apparently, had 3 different directors, including Sydney Pollack, walk away from the picture before he took the helm himself), and I don’t think I’ll ever tire of Quentin Tarantino’s story (told most recently on Tuesday’s Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien) about how his hands, and not the hands of Nazi Colonel Hans Landa, came to strangle Diana Kruger’s character in Inglourious Basterds.

This fascination with filmmaking has something, if not everything, to do with the fact that, while the production process may be a tangled mess of misplaced funding and last-minute game-changes, the watching process often feels effortless. Well-made mainstream features are meant to pull you through a seamlessly self-contained fiction that twists and turns, periodically threatening to derail but never actually doing so. They’re meant to leave you strangely satiated, even if you just witnessed an apocalyptic blood bath. Video art and art films, on the other hand, tend to be neither seamless nor satiating; and sometimes, watching them feels like it must be at least as difficult as making them.

On Tuesday night, in a crowded basement auditorium at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I listened as Tate Modern curator Stuart Comer talked about, among other things, organizing experimental film events at a museum that has practically obliterated its film budget. Snaring potential backers can be difficult, since Comer’s programming has a reputation for being “aggressively avant-garde”—which is another way of saying films at the Tate require a bit too much of their viewers.

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Bibiana Suárez, Aves raras (mexicanos) no. 1 / Strange Birds (Mexicans) no. 1, 2005-2011, archival inkjet print on aluminum panel (map courtesy of the University of Chicago’s Special Collections), 24 x 24" & Bibiana Suárez, Aves raras (mexicanos) no. 2 / Strange Birds (Mexicans) no. 2, 2005-2011, archival inkjet print (map courtesy of the University of Chicago’s Special Collections), 24 x 24"

2012 has arrived and it can mean only one thing: the apocalypse. Will the End Times be ushered in by the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar reaching its end date? We can’t be sure until late December! What has become painfully certain, however, is that we are in an election year. And, while the economy looms large on the minds of most Americans, immigration is not far behind. Will America eventually choose a candidate who would grant “amnesty” (read: anything resembling legal status or *gasp citizenship!) to the millions of undocumented people living and working in this country, ushering in the likely demise of the U.S.? Or, will we the people elect a man patriotic enough to send all the illegal Cuban, Chinese, Honduran, and Southeast Asian immigrants back to where they came from; namely Mexico? The fate of the country and the soul of freedom hang in the balance!

At least that would seem to be the choice as presented by the Republican candidates during the never-ending cycle of G.O.P. primary debates. The language surrounding immigration, espoused by the candidates as well as other jingoist hardliners, has become so vitriolic and so reduced that hyperbole strategically crowds out any sober dialogue that addresses the complexity of the issue or pathos for the individuals most effected by immigration enforcement.

Bibiana Suárez’s exhibition entitled Memoria (Memory) at the Hyde Park Art Center attempts to catalyze that discussion through playful moderation. Tracing the influence of Latino culture in America, Suárez expresses hope and frustration while eluding anything that would resemble rhetorical bombast. The show is such a disarmingly tempered analysis of themes of Pop culture representations, identity, labor, and the dynamics of integration that it takes all the steam out of this hot button issue.

Bibiana Suárez, Ai pledch aliyens no. 1, 2005-2011, acrylic paint and digital transfer on aluminum panel, 24 x 24 inches

In order to create her large-scale installation of mixed media paintings and ink-jet prints, Suárez borrows the format of the game “Memory” in which players selectively turn over cards placed face down in order to find pairs of matching cards. The gallery walls are filled with one hundred and eight “playing cards” sized 23.5 inches by 23.5 inches with images depicting maps, body parts, historical images, or various phrases in English, Spanish, and Spanglish. Text boxes featuring an assortment of inclusive and derogatory names for the Latino Diaspora are meant to depict the “backs” of the playing cards. The game aspect of the installation invites viewers to seek connections within the available images. It also serves as a metaphor for the ever-shifting boundaries of integration within American culture as well as the gamesmanship of the national debate.

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