Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995). Middle view of a triptych of gelatin silver prints, each print 49 5/8” x 39 1/4”. Courtesy private collection, USA.

Ai Weiwei is without a doubt one of the most intelligent makers negotiating the art/craft divide.  Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon is his first museum exhibition on the west coast, and a fitting venue for an international contemporary artist engaged in a deep dialog with Chinese culture, art history, ceramics and craft.  The exhibition addresses ceramic tradition but is satisfying on visceral and theoretical levels as contemporary art.

(Making of) Colored Vases (2006). Single channel video, 13 minutes, 09 seconds. Courtesy Ai Weiwei, Beijing.

Colored Vases (2006) Vases from the Neolithic age (5000 - 3000 BCE) and industrial paint; between 10” x diameter 9” and 14 1/2” x diameter 9 1/2”. Courtesy AW Asia collection, New York.

The best works in the exhibition are those in which Ai takes archaic Chinese vessels and treats them as readymades.  These include paint-dipped pots, pulverized urns in a jar, a pot with a superimposed Coca Cola logo, and a photograph of the artist casually letting a Han dynasty urn smash on the ground.  Of these works the cheerily-painted Colored Vases (2006) immediately catch the eye.  Ai treats the ancient pots irreverently, dipping them into buckets of industrial paint so as to leave some evidence of the original surface decoration and, thus, their age.  The off-the-shelf colors pop brightly against the original dull brownish tones of the vessels, a gesture of cultural washing that nearly obliterates the past in favor of a brighter new plastic-colored future.  Dust to Dust (2009) follows a similar conceptual path: Ai crushed Neolithic-age pottery to powder and stored the gritty remains in a clear glass jar. Here, the funereal act of memorializing an old urn in a modern urn coupled with the implied violence of the grinding gives the work cerebral and visceral force.

Urns of this vintage are usually cherished for their anthropological importance.  By employing them as readymades, Ai strips them of their aura of preciousness only to reapply it according to a different system of valuation.  However, this is not the well-worn strategy of the readymade famously applied by Duchamp to his urinal Fountain, wherein the object lacked cultural gravitas until placed in an art context.  Instead, Ai’s chosen readymades already have significance.  Working in this manner, Ai transforms precious artifacts—treating them as base and valueless by painting, dropping, grinding, or slapping with a logo—into contemporary fine art.  The substitution of one kind of value for another occurs when he displays the transformed urns in a museum vitrine, reinstilling value but replacing historical significance with a newer cultural one.

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

Kalup Linzy, Conversations wit de Churen III: Da Young and Da Mess, 2005. Performance documentation. Courtesy the artist and Taxter and Spengemann, New York.

Because I don’t believe that big and bright equals beautiful, I am not a fan of West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center. A mammoth, reflective blue box that towers over the otherwise low-to-the-ground Melrose Avenue architecture, the PDC has more than its share of empty retail space. Inside, it often feels like a manicured ghost town. I voted for its simulated destruction last fall when artist Gustavo Artigas staged his Vote for Demolition project, which asked Angelinos to select the city’s least attractive building. Artigas virtually razed the winner, which turned out to be the Kodak Theater because, apparently, not everyone sees the world the way I do.

Despite my PDC resentment, I am fond of MoCA’s mini Pacific Design Center, a quiet beige cube that stands in the shadow of its big blue neighbor. It seems like an almost-joke—a Mecca of materialism’s carefully sized nod to the arts. Usually, design-related exhibitions that run in this MoCA satellite, like Las Vegas Studio and Folly–The View from Nowhere, cater to the curious without undermining the over-fabricated sterility of the whole PDC complex. But this past month, the MoCA mini-me has suddenly become a theater for outlandish projects that turn “over-fabricated” into a race toward synthetic delirium.

On June 24, during the invitation-only event Soap at MoCA, General Hospital filmed an episode starring James Franco. Franco played a demented artist, MoCA played the site of his opening, and artist Kalup Linzy performed in drag. Wearing a wig with bangs and a red and black floral print dress, Linzy recited the lyrics to Mad World while Franco yelled, “Don’t kill me! I know where the baby is!”, and then fell from a balcony to his fictional death. Linzy, accustomed to the drama of soap, wasn’t phased.

Ryan Trecartin, "Sibling Topics (Section A)," Video Still, 2009.

In his own soap, All My Churun (2003), a distraught, big-haired, striped-skirted woman (most women in Linzy’s films aren’t actually women) talks about the memorial service she’s planning for a murdered love named “Jo-Jo.” “Girl, you need to stop,” says her sister over the phone. “She needs to stop,” says her brother over the phone. Her mother and grandmother, also talking over the phone, act as if a memorial service for a dead man is the most flamboyantly frivolous thing a person could have.

Video artist Ryan Trecartin uses phones as liberally as Linzy, though his rarely have cords and sometimes they’re just pinkies and thumbs extended in the “call me” gesture. Phones turn life into a series of affected soliloquies and now that Trecartin has commandeered MoCA for Any Ever, a show that opened two weeks after the museum performed for General Hospital, soliloquies have become lurid and omnipresent. “You won’t recognize the PDC once you enter,” Trecartin’s New York gallerist Elizabeth Dee told the LA Times.

The downstairs bookstore has become a dark gallery. Cluttered with brand new benches, space heaters and superfluous metal chains, it looks like a graveyard for un-bought patio furniture. Trecartin’s Trill-ogy Comp (2009)—note the “trill”—screens on the wall opposite the entrance.  Comp consists of three videos, all of them loosely related. K-CorealInc.K (section a) follows a group of all-blond white collar workers called the “Koreas”; Sibling Topics (section a) follows four quadruplet sisters, all played by Trecartin. P.opular Sky (section ish) is a bit of everything. Upstairs, in a bedroom, office space, faux-stadium and family room–each with nick-free Ikea-style furniture–four videos from the R’Search Wait’S series play out. But following storylines is precarious. As Trecartin pointed out in a recent lecture, “Consequence can just pop out of nowhere and cause can have no effect.”

Ryan Trecartin, "P.opular S.ky (section ish)," 2009.

Everyone wears some form of garish make-up, women play men acting like women, or men play women posing as men dressed as women. The physical gets slippery. With rare exception, characters use winy, effeminate teenage voices and speak confrontationally. No one is melancholic, though plenty are restless. All wear brightly colored clothes that match their bronzed, painted faces and, since Trecartin is an obsessive editor, the brash, sashaying footage has no non-orchestrated lulls. Soliloquies–there’s never really dialogue, even when characters purport to address each other–use language in a way that feels almost-but-not-quite familiar:

“She hates diversity and women. She’d probably shoot me if she saw my very extreme breast reduction that I love.” “Put your breasts back on.” “I never had any.”

“How will I make drive to find you when I’m in automation?”

“Cut my hair shorter. I like that kind of person.”

“Put on your comfort pants and say things in nice voice because.”

“I can go on and on but I won’t. I can go on and on but I won’t. I can go on and on but I won’t.”

About thirty minutes in, Any Ever begins to feel like a dream that’s apolotical, political, apathetic, aggressive and increasingly fluorescent. It becomes exhausting and disorienting, enough so to make me want to hate it. And this means it’s perfect.

Note: Critic Jennifer Doyle recently wrote more extensively about James Franco and Kalup Linzy for Frieze Magazine. Read her essay here.

Psychedelia is a state of mind. It is a particular mode of perception that upends our assumptions about the way that the world works. It is about heightened color, glimmering patterns, and swirling constellations of form that challenge gravity and the very boundaries between discrete objects.

Al Held, Eagle Rock III, 2000

The exhibition Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art Since the 1960’s at the San Antonio Museum of Art takes these ideas as a net to gather a wide range of artists. The 1960’s, as the well-worn story of post war America goes, was a moment of civil unrest driven by a youth culture that was suspect of authority and newly intoxicated by sex, drugs and rock and roll. It also was a time when artists were riffing on the newly invented methods of image making that Surrealism and hard edged abstraction introduced. As a result, artists such as Richard Anuszkiewicz and other Op Art innovators explored pattern and abstraction to create hallucinatory visual paintings.

Philip Taaffe’s Trinity (1985) extends these ideas from Op Art, creating an image with silkscreen and collage that makes one’s eyes buzz. The image makes us feel like we are falling into it and at the same time repelled by its churning space. Taaffe uses a color spectrum and concentric arrows of modulating scale to create a sense of movement that picks us up off our feet and drives us through the picture plane.

Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1987

Jack Goldstein - an artist who emerged in the 1980’s, disappeared from the art world in the 1990’s and then surfaced again to public acclaim in 2000 until his suicide in 2003– made images that used filmic and photographic sources for his paintings. Included in the exhibition is Untitled (1987), which uses a photograph of a spectacular moment in natural phenomena. Taken in space, the source image for this painting could be abstract but either way, the radiating degrees of hot pink that emanate from an electric blue ground construct a visual field that is arresting.

Fred Tomaselli, Ripple Trees, 1994

Another part of psychedelia that the exhibition’s curator David S Rubin seeks to distance himself from is drugs. But the exhibition does include Fred Tomaselli’s Ripple Trees (1994) combining pills and hemp leaves with paint and resin to construct an image of a landscape at dusk. This magical time of day – when trees and mountains are reduced to mere shadows against the soft glowing light on the horizon – is heightened by a web of luminous orbs that radiate pixilated color.

Jeremy Blake, Reading Ossie Clark, 2003

Shifting away from two dimensions, Jeremy Blake’s Reading Ossie Clark (2003) uses montage to combine short, barely legible clips of shot footage with highly saturated digital color. Each clip morphs into the next creating a dreamlike state of ecstasy. Using sculptural installation and an actual light show, Richie Budd’s Bon Voyage Somnabulating De Pileon (2010) builds on the psychedelic impulse to overwhelm the senses with a fog machine and an array of household items and gadgets. It also includes a sound piece that incorporates Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), a communication model applied in psychotherapy that studies the structure of subjective experience.

Richi Budd, Bon Voyage Somnambulating De Pileon, 2007

Taken together, an exhibition about psychedelic experience in art is in many ways the most extreme exploration of radical forms of perception – something which is at the core of what Marcel Duchamp called “retinal art.” The best work in this show transcends the quaint utopianism of 1960’s psychedelics, choosing to change the way we see instead of changing the whole world.

Artist Rachel Khedoori explores encounters with space and their psychological implications.  According to the Venice Biennale’s Making Worlds catalog, Khedoori’s art practice ‘invites viewers to see hidden or forgotten spaces’ – spaces that are ‘generated by the limits of memory’.  In Cave Model, presented at that show, Khedoori referenced Plato’s Cave Myth and cited it as a source of inspiration.  Yet her art practice deviates from this allegory by not seeking to escape ‘the cave’ and thereby gain philosophical clarity.  Instead, Khedoori directs us towards the untenable shadows that more often define the human condition.

Untitled (Iraq Book Project) 2008-2010. Installation view, Hauser & Wirth London, 2010. © Rachel Khedoori. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Peter Mallet.

Khedoori experiments with ambiguous spaces through a diverse practice that includes installation, sculpture and film.  The artist’s current solo exhibition of new and recent work at Hauser & Wirth in London is remarkable for the artist’s foray into documentation.  The Iraq Book Project, an ongoing documentary piece, was first shown at The Box in Los Angeles in 2009.  It is comprised of online news articles dating to the start of the Iraq War – 18 March 2003.  Sourced from around the world, the articles are retrieved using the search terms ‘Iraq’, ‘Iraqi’ or ‘Baghdad’.  They are then translated into English, compiled and presented in a series of large books arranged chronologically.  The articles are printed in a uniform, seamless manner and each is demarcated by title, date and source.  These large books are arranged in the main gallery space at Hauser & Wirth on tables along with stools for gallery visitors to interact with the work.  Khedoori’s Iraq Book Project is an on-going effort that is updated continuously.  Its conclusion will depend upon the length of the war.

Khedoori is certainly not alone in responding to the Iraq War, but has typically eschewed such content in her work. While The Iraq Book Project is somewhat of a departure, it can also be viewed as a repositioning of Khedoori’s engagement with space.  In this work, Khedoori locates information within the digital realm and extracts it.  This process allows viewers to explore the changing face of and attitudes towards the war.  It also stores information as a part of our collective memory that would otherwise be dispersed and largely be forgotten.  Khedoori preserves war coverage and places it within the physical world.  She chooses book form, which is a lasting and traditional mode of recording and passing on knowledge.

Untitled (Iraq Book Project) 2008-2010. Installation view, Hauser & Wirth London, 2010. © Rachel Khedoori. Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Peter Mallet.

A film installation and a photographic series are found upstairs in the American Room of the gallery.  Film is an important medium for the artist, who has returned to it throughout her career.  The photographic series is set in a natural Australian landscape at 5.00 am, while the film is set 12 hours later at 5.00 pm.  For the film installation, Khedoori returns to the device of the mirror to manipulate the moving image.  The film is projected onto a screen that meets a mirror at a 90 degree angle – causing the looped footage to appear to continually separate from itself as it plays.  The Hauser & Wirth gallery points out that the affect is much like a Rorschach ink blot test.  Yet, in this instance it is set in landscape and in motion.  This work allows the gallery visitor to encounter ambiguous, psychologically-tinged space.

Rachel Khedoori’s work has shown internationally since the mid-1990s.  In 2001, the artist’s high-profile solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland brought her work increased international attention.  Subsequently, Khedoori has taken part in several noteworthy group exhibitions.  In 2008, the artist was included in the traveling exhibition Visual Tactics or how pictures emerge, which opened at Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Seigen, Germany.  Khedoori’s work received a lot of attention in 2009 when she took part in the Venice Biennale’s Fare Mondi/Making Worlds exhibition and Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life: Part 2 at the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco.

Born in Sydney, Australia, Rachel Khedoori is the identical twin sister of fellow artist Toba Khedoori.  She currently lives and works in Los Angeles CA and is represented by Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner in New York.  Khedoori received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1988 and her MFA from the University of California in Los Angeles in 1994.

Untitled, 2010 (Film, 3:33 minutes). Installation view, Hauser & Wirth London, 2010.© Rachel Khedoori. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Peter Mallet.

Rachel Khedoori concludes at Hauser & Wirth in London on 31 July.  It marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK’s capital city.

Ben Eine, 21st Century City, n.d. Spray paint & black gloss on canvas, 39.5 x 27.5". Courtesy Eine Signs, London

When President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron met at the White House yesterday, they spoke about growth, stability, fiscal responsibility, the conflicts in Central Asia, and the special relationship between the two nations. The most interesting news, in our opinion at least, was the gifts they exchanged. Foremost amongst the gift swap was a painting by British street artist Ben Eine and a work by American pop artist Ed Ruscha.

The British government’s request for an artwork took Eine — who is known around London for his typographic graffiti — by surprise. “The work that I do appeals to a certain kind of demographic and Samantha Cameron does not fit into this,” he told Sky News Online. “So it was amazing when I got a call from No 10 to ask if I’d mind giving one of my pictures to President Obama… I mean, the President of the United States, and a call from the office of our Prime Minister — it was unbelievable.”

Ed Ruscha, I Think I'll..., 1983, oil on canvas, 55.75 x 63.75". Courtesy the artist & National Gallery of Art

Obama’s gift — Ed Ruscha’s lithograph Column with Speed Lines — was more in keeping with the President’s taste. Ruscha donated work to benefit the Obama campaign in 2008, and his 1983 painting I think I’ll …, which is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, currently hangs at the White House. According to the Guardian, the Ruscha print “resembles a single column government building with horizons in red, white and blue, the colors of the US and UK flags.”

The art swap is reported to be a definite improvement over the gifts exchanged by Obama and Cameron’s predecessor, Gordon Brown who presented Obama with an “ornamental pen holder made from the timbers of the Victorian anti-slavery ship HMS Gannet.” Not to be outdone, Obama gave the former Prime Minister “25 DVDs which turned out to be unsuitable for UK players.”

Content and images from today’s article have been brought to you by Flavorwire.com and the writer Paul Laster.

DailyServing.com selects two notable artists each month from the submissions we receive to be featured in our series, Fan Mail. For a chance to have your work appear below, with an article written by one of the DailyServing contributors, please submit a link to your website to info@dailyserving.com, subject: Fan Mail. You could be the next artist in the series! (We will try to contact chosen artists prior to publication, but please be sure to check the site everyday.)

William Powhida infiltrated the art industry with his unapologetic attitude, insightful drawings, lists of enemies, letters to collectors and curators, and other written and visual material that prey upon the “catastrofuck” of the art world. Merging his background in art criticism with his visual art practice, Powhida graphically dissects the complex capitalistic structure of New York art using graphite, gouache, watercolor, colored pencil, and incisive text. The artist has garnered much attention for his controversial cultural products.

How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality, seen above, depicts floating heads of several members and affiliates of the New Museum, suspended in the composition and surrounded by sharp and satirical handwritten text questioning the institution’s alliances and decisions. The drawing, which the artist describes as “a modest drawing about the New Museum’s terrible decision to show a trustee’s private collection,” appeared on one third of the covers for Brooklyn Rail’s November 2009 issue, fueling an ongoing debate about institutional ethics. Powhida was a regular contributor for the Brooklyn Rail for three years before he “decided he could no longer keep helping other artists develop careers,” and began concentrating on his own artistic inspirations.

The artist completed his M.F.A. in painting at New York’s Hunter College in 2002 and is represented by Schroeder Romero in New York and Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles. Powhida co-organized the group show Magicality, currently on view at Platform Gallery in Seattle until August 5th, with Eric Trosko. Magicality investigates the parallels between the disciplines of art and magic and includes Powhida’s series of thirteen prints, which double as talismans and hexes, entitled Ars Magica Portfolio.

This Sunday’s choice from the DS Archives is based on the reality that present curatorial practice is quite often guided by pedagogical concerns – making education programs increasingly important to exhibition-making.  In light of this trend, we bring our readers a previously published interview with Denise Gray of MOCA’s Education Department.

DailyServing’s Sasha Lee recently had the chance to sit down with Denise Gray of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Education department to discuss her role as an educator, both as an individual scholar in the field and also within the MOCA’s philosophy. Denise, along with others in her field, are extraordinary examples of a vibrant voice shaping how we understand contemporary art today. Whether organizing special events, or working with the fantastic MOCA apprentice program, Denise’s hard efforts are all conducted in the name of inspiring passion for art in others, and lending the public tools to appreciate art. Denise’s educational philosophy begins not with a lecture, but what the participants themselves know and have experienced. In light of the recent events surrounding MOCA–Denise’s interview reminds us the invaluable resource that the museum & educators such as Denise provide.

DailyServing: Can you talk a little bit about your position at the MOCA and the various projects you oversee, maybe your favorites?