All things considered Work of Art: The Next Great Artist was not nearly as bad as it could have been. In fact, the descriptor benign springs to my mind. I’m not going to lie, though – it was touch and go at the beginning. The first time I heard that a reality television show along the lines of “America’s Next Top Artist” was in the works, my stomach clenched a little. Of course the art world is predominantly a fickle, market-driven star system – but a reality television show? Will we so easily surrender all semblance of substance? Should we not maintain at least the veneer of scruples? I quickly dismissed the whole thing but several months later, I received an email from a curator friend announcing the premier of the show. In the subject heading she had typed simply, “It’s here.”

After watching all the episodes, however, I can honestly say I cringed not once. Not unlike Sarah Jessica Parker’s other little project you may have heard of, the most interesting aspect of the whole situation has been the fervor of criticism surrounding it. Regarding the critical hysteria surrounding Sex and the City 2, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian noted, “a new army of bloggers has challenged and reinvigorated movie writing.” Similarly, the weekly examinations of Work of Art featured on various Web sites, including those of the participants themselves, and the ensuing conversations that have played out in the comment sections have been far more interesting that the actual show.

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This Sunday’s From the DS Archives unearths a feature on artist Kathy Grayson that presents a compelling example of contemporary painting.  While Grayson’s work is realized in paint, her process capitalizes on the technologies of globalization.  She appropriates You Tube footage and then uses computer programs to capture and abstract the transference of data, which facilitates digital broadcasting.  Grayson’s Bangalore series visualizes an otherwise invisible everyday process.

The translation of information from an original event to a digital screen takes many forms. While the process of transferring data from the camera to satellite to analogue broadcast to a digital screen device occurs countless times each day, we usually absorb this information with little to no awareness of the process. Fueled by this topic, painter Kathy Grayson is currently presenting a new body of work titled Bangalore on view at Kim Light Gallery in Los Angeles. The artist has taken televised sports footage of professional tennis matches for the subject of her new paintings. Utilizing YouTube footage of the matches, the artist examines the abstraction that occurs from the digital compression of data. Grayson runs footage through computer applications to distort and abstract the images, reconfiguring the digital remains to create what she calls a “stirring up of the video data to make interesting ruptures in figurative painting.”

Grayson is a graduate of Dartmouth College and currently lives and works in New York City. The artist serves as the director of Deitch Projects in NYC and works as an independent curator, essayist and book editor. Recent exhibitions include works at Park Life in San Francisco and D’Amelio Terras in NYC.

Francis Alÿs in collaboration with Olivier Debroise and Rafael Ortega. A Story of Deception, Patagonia, 2006 still from 16mm film (4:20). Courtesy of Francis Alÿs and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich © Francis Alÿs.

A Story of Deception is the title of Francis Alÿs‘ current retrospective on view at the Tate Modern. The title of the exhibition, which spans the artist’s two-decade long career is borrowed from a work of the same name, and appropriately provides the exhibition’s subtitle and introduces the gallery visitor to Alÿs’ work. The 16 mm film, A Story of Deception, captures a mesmerizing and unobtainable mirage on the horizon. The camera centers itself on a road, halved by a dotted white line and follows it across an arid Patagonian landscape. The film’s imagery and intent are oblique and deceptively simple – allowing a variety of creative, metaphorical interpretations. The road can be read as representative of a border and the unobtainable mirage as the often out-of-reach goal of border crossing.

Francis Alÿs, Ambulantes (Pushing and Pulling), Mexico City, 1992-present Slide projection. Courtesy of Francis Alÿs and David Zwirner, New York. Image by Francis Alÿs © Francis Alÿs.

While Alÿs is most readily associated with the film or video documentation of his actions, this retrospective takes care to illustrate the multi-media nature of the artist’s practice and is curated thematically. Film and video work is presented with related photographs, paintings, drawings or other ephemera. In one particularly successful example, Paradox of Praxis I or Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing (1997) is shown near photographs taken in Mexico City dating as early as 1992. These projected photographic images from the series Ambulantes (Pushing and Pulling) feature street vendors and workers bearing loads in the streets. The connection is evident between these photographs and Paradox of Praxis, in which Alÿs pushes a block of melting ice through the city’s streets. Both point to the often comical futility of contemporary labor.

The artist typically begins his work with an action, allowing other media to play a supporting or planning role, but that is not always the case. The artist works in a variety of media, including photography, sculpture, animation, drawing and painting. Paintings such as Le Temps du Sommeil (2003-present) and Silenco (2003-present) illustrate that Alÿs is influenced by urban advertising. They also reference the precedent – intentionally or not – of past artists like Magritte.

Film or video documentation of Alÿs’ carefully planned actions remain the most compelling and most capable of conveying both subtle and overt political messages. In Re-enactments (2000), Alÿs references the gun violence of his adopted Mexican homeland. When Faith Moves Mountains: A Project for Geological Displacement (2002) is one of Alÿs’ most well known works for its sheer monumentality. In it, the artist directs 500 volunteers to form a line and physically move a sand dune located outside of Lima, Peru. Armed solely with shovels and the spirit of collective effort, these volunteers complete a task whose apparent futility belies its profound metaphorical statement. This great effort of ‘geological displacement’ points to the immense shared burden of geo-political displacement.

The contemporary nation-state border, as a contradictory line that is both increasingly restricted and crossed, is an important theme in Alÿs’ art practice. The artist addresses the hypocrisy of the border in works such as The Green Line or Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic (2005) in which the artist walks the 1948 armistice border line between Israel and Palestine. Trailing a leaking can of green paint behind him as he walks a now defunct border, he quietly and profoundly points to the idiocy of human suffering caused by an arbitrary line of division. Loop (2007) chronicles the artist’s purposefully ludicrous route across the US – Mexico border as he travels from Tijuana to Australia, up the Pacific Rim to Alaska, and then finally to California. The epic route of travel taken in lieu of the actual distance between Tijuana and San Diego highlights the difficulty of this border crossing for illegal economic migrants. Also referring to the theme of border crossing, The Rehearsal (1999-2004) features a red Volkswagen Beetle that continually tries and fails to reach the top of a dirt road.

The exhibition makes a strong conclusion with the premiere of Tornado (2000-2010). This newly completed, 55 minute video documentation from hand-held camera footage was ten years in the making. It captures the artist as he places himself in the path of high-altitude tornadoes in Mexico – enduring severe winds and no visibility brown-outs in attempts penetrate the tornado’s central vortex where the air becomes eerily still. Alÿs places himself in peril – throwing himself blindly into chaos in hopes for resolution through the extraction of meaning. Or, as curator Mark Godfrey argues Tornado is again concerned with the border crossing and the immense difficulty of entering and leaving geo-political zones in our increasingly mobile world.

Francis Alÿs Tornado Milpa Alta, 2000-10 Video documentation of an action and related ephemera 55 minutes Courtesy of Francis Alÿs and David Zwirner, New York Image: Video Still © Francis Alÿs

Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception remains at the Tate Modern until 5 September. The show’s next stop is Alÿs’ home country where it will be presented at Wiels in Brussels (9 October – 30 Janurary). The exhibition comes state-side next year to New York’s MoMA (8 May – 1 August 2011).

Francis Alÿs is represented by David Zwirner in New York and Galerie Peter Kilchmann in Zurich.

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

Andy Warhol, Dennis Hopper, Screen Tests Reel #4, 1964-65.

I spent Sunday looking at boys. It began at LACMA, where I saw Catherine Opie’s quarterbacks, linebackers and surfers  followed by Thomas Eakins’s rowers, wrestlers and athletic but stationary nudes. It continued at the Egyptian Theater, with ten of Andy Warhol’s four-minute screen tests: Buffy Phelps with delicate, defiant eyes and blondish curls; John Giorno of Sleep, darker and rougher than Buffy; Kip “Bima” Stagg, equally dark but not as rough; Dennis Hopper, twenty-eight but looking younger; Hopper again, still near twenty-eight, but suit-clad and looking older; Gregory Battock with Clark Gable jauntiness; Richard Schmidt and Paul Winterbottom; Kenneth King and Richard Markowitz, who, along with Giorno and Hopper, would appear in the compilation The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys.

Because Warhol’s tests are meditative and slow, I lost myself in their static silence, and didn’t think about gender until the reel played out. “They were all men, weren’t they?” I said to the friend sitting next to me. He’d noticed before I had.

Collier Schorr, "Jens F.," 2005.

Three weeks ago, when Catherine Opie’s unprovocatively titled Figure and Landscape opened, Opie talked about her work in LACMA’s Bing Theater. She mentioned comparisons often made between her sports photographs and the work of Collier Schorr, which depicts, among other things, young male bodies posing and sparring. “Collier wants to be her boys,” said Opie. “I don’t . . . I’m not interested in seeing my butch body through them.” What she’s interested in is bearing witness, and she’s been witnessing a precariously in-between generation, some of which has gone to Iraq, some of which has died.

Being versus bearing is not so simple a distinction, of course–Opie’s boys, as poet-critic Eileen Myles has pointed out, tend to adopt the Opie expression, which resembles a “scary duh.” Even so, it’s possible Schorr wants to be her boys while Opie wants to be aware of her boys; certainly, Eakins wanted to be with his boys while Warhol wanted to collect them.

Thomas Eakins,"The Champion Single Sculls," 1871. Courtesy LACMA.

It’s Warhol and Schorr who most prominently prefer male subjects. Warhol’s Screen Test Reel #5 includes only two women and, like Reel #4, Reel #6 is an exclusive boy’s club. Schorr, when asked why she doesn’t photograph girls, has said she does; she just uses boys to do it. But the strange, sports-focused mannishness of the paired Opie-Eakins exhibitions is even stranger in light of both artists’ genuine interest in women. Opie’s girl-only Girlfriends series showed at Gladstone Gallery in New York last year, and Eakins consistently included women in his work, and even in his controversies. It was his uninhibited disrobing in front of female students and his insistence on the removal of a male model’s “loin cloth” during a drawing session women attended, not his obsession with his “beloved” (as one wall label reads) young men, that forced him to resign from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1886.

Catherine Opie, "Untitled #10 (Surfers)," 2003. Courtesy Regen Projects.

In Manly Pursuits and Figure and Landscape, Eakins and Opie, both realists, show themselves to be exquisite technicians with a virtuosic, if predictable, eye for poetic composition. In Eakins’s The Champion Single Sculls, a burnt sienna scull cuts smoothly across royal blue water and its inhabitant looks elegantly, if illogically, casual as he turns to look back. In Opie’s portraits, skin, eyes, pose, gaze, the position of the football helmet, have all been carefully considered; royal blue makes frequent appearances in her work as well. But both artists render the trappings of a conventional masculinity and gender-play to which neither quite belong–to which no one quite belongs–and it’s the work that revels in inaction that seems most gaping and honest.

A room at the back of Figure and Landscape features only surfing images, and, though Opie has made striking portraits of surfers she’s shadowed, none of those portraits are included here. Instead, there’s just expansive gray rectangles in which far-off bodies float, largely unmoving, waiting for a chance to resume their sport. They’re certainly skilled surfers; everyone Opie photographs seems to be good at what they do. They’re also like little pawns or bobbing black buoys. They don’t look volitional but they do look comfortable; like the artist who made them, they’re virtuosic and yet awkward precisely because they’re virtuosic.

One of the worst things about summer is also one of the best: it’s transitory.  Like an awkward first love affair, that fact that it’s all over so fast is exactly what makes summer such a mythologized season.  In the art world, summer is the spiritual home to the group show, a time to test out new ideas or bring together artists still in an experimental phase of their own.  Summer Show 2010 at Fourteen30 Contemporary takes the ubiquitous August group exhibition and gives it a raison d’etre by actually being about summer, proving once again that the simplest premise is often the best.

John Sisley, Ice and Polaroid 1 (2010). Archival inkjet print, 11 x 15 inches. Edition of 3, AP I/II.

John Sisley, Ice and Polaroid 12 (2010). Archival inkjet print, 11 x 15 inches. Edition of 5, AP I/II.

The front and back rooms of the gallery are hung mostly with paintings and photography.  In the front, John Sisley’s two pieces Ice and Polaroid 1 and Ice and Polaroid 12 (both 2010) are small black-and-white inkjet prints.  1 shows a set of ice cubes sitting beside an undeveloped Polaroid photograph; 12 shows the now-developed Polaroid (a shot of the original set of ice cubes) next to a puddle of water.  The clean, evidence-based approach to depicting a process—here is the start, here is the finish—gives the pieces a quiet gravity and the photograph-in-a-photograph plays with ideas of representation, duplication, and the passage of time.  On an adjacent wall, Devon Oder’s Bleed (Tree Cave) (2009) provides a counterpoint to Sisley’s stark vision.  The enlarged vintage photograph depicts a sunbleached view of a cave of overgrown brambles and twigs hunkered at the edge of a forest, and it’s unclear whether it’s a natural formation or man-made and abandoned.  No matter, it’s an eleven-year-old’s summer reverie, the mysterious thing that she hopes to stumble on during long unsupervised hours.  Fingerprints and age spots mar the edge of the photo, attesting to its beloved status: this photograph has been looked at many times, and the smudges make for a wistful feel, conjuring that back-to-school pang of impending bus rides, structured days, and having to wear clean clothes.

Devon Oder, Bleed (Tree Cave) (2009). Lightjet print, 35 x 35 inches.

In the next room is Jesse Sugarmann’s I’m on Fire (2010), a deliciously masculine two-channel paean to frustrated love.  The left screen depicts, in succession, a Lincoln Town Car parked in a field, then backing forcefully into reflective mylar; or a man in a grey suit, sunglasses, and white shoes (presumably the artist) playing an amateurish version of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” on an electric guitar.  On the right screen, the same car does hydraulic tricks and falls off cinderblocks; or has the front end propped crazily on (and then falls off) a tall four-by-four; or churns out clouds of smoke that billow over bright green grass and into the hot sky.  In the middle of all this, the arms of a forklift bang an old electric keyboard clumsily; later, the forklift lowers the entire car so that one tire mashes the keyboard, honking out a cacophonic accompaniment to the guitar solo on the adjacent screen.  Somewhere in all of this is a yearning that manifests itself as a pyrrhic desire to destroy things just to get a little fire going in the middle of a dry month.  Whether inspired by real or fictional unrequited love, Sugarmann’s video is pitch-perfect, a charming mix of boyish cool, summer heat, longing, frustration, and semi-dangerous stunts.  I left the gallery with Springsteen’s lyrics in my head-

Jesse Sugarmann, I'm on Fire (2010). Dual channel video, sound: 8:53 minutes. Edition of 5, AP I/II.

Sometimes it’s like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull
and cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my soul

At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet
And a freight train running through the middle of my head
Only you can cool my desire
oh, oh, oh, I’m on fire

"It's My World", installation view of downstairs gallery at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions; image courtesy of BRX Exhibitions

It’s My World, a current group show at Baer Ridgeway Exhibitions in San Francisco, is compelling in its approach to a somewhat dated subject matter: the landscape. The show successfully combines the apparent solid thesis of the exhibition: “a strong emphasis on the use of unexpected materials, abstracted forms and the examination of time” in a bid to approach issues raised by humans’ complicated relationship with the ever changing environment. The group exhibition is comprised of ten artists working in a variety of mediums: painting, video, drawing, photography and sculpture and the cohesiveness that permeates from each artist’s contribution is fantastic.

Claude Zervas, "Skagit," 2005, Green CCFL lamps, wire, inverters, steel, Wall: 70 x 50 x 1 inches; Floor: 37 x 65 x 60 inches; image courtesy of BRX Exhibitions

Claude Zervas’ Skagit, 2005, a vibrant installation of Green CCFL lamps, wire, and inverters that is modeled after the Northwest’s Skagit River, and protrudes out of the wall alive and active. Zervas’ arranges the inverter cords to simulate the river’s many tributaries, allowing the installation to course through the gallery space.  Christopher Taggart’s But Now You Know You’ve Seen the Worst, 2010, changes the term “process” to an entirely new level. The image is of a car’s driver side mirror that has been recreated, and pixilated, by small cut outs of UV laminated photographs glued to a board. To call this work a collage doesn’t seem to do it justice. The precision in which Taggart is able to assemble these small, seemingly picayune pieces while at the same time inferring the motion of a driver’s view of the landscape passing him by, is impressive.

Christopher Taggart, "But Now You Know You've Seen the Worst," 2010, UV laminated photographs glued to board with pigmented archival adhesive, 32 x 40 inches; image courtesy of BRX Exhibitions

If these eye- catching works draw you in, it is the more subtle pieces that will make you stay. David Wilson’s charcoal on paper drawings of public spaces serve as illustrations to his larger performance works of reinvigorating public spaces. Wilson arranges public events, or “gatherings”, within these depicted landscapes, as a way to serve as a conduit for others who have yet to figure out how to get back to nature. Sean McFarland’s series of Polaroid photographs, though small in size, are breathtaking. McFarland collages together a variety of mixed media – paint, image cutouts, etc., and then re-photographs these elements to create an entirely new image of an otherworldly landscape. These images are ethereal, elusive and affecting. Even if the image doesn’t stay with you for very long afterward, the mystical feeling it invokes within you of a lost world will.

Sean McFarland, "Plane and Land," 2008, Polaroid, 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 inches, edition of 3; image courtesy of BRX Exhibitions

In my opinion, to be an artist in these contemporary times is no small feat. At this point, it would seem that there is no topic that hasn’t been broached, no genre that hasn’t been explored, and no medium that hasn’t had its limits pushed. This is the second reason why It’s My World succeeds—the ability of the selected artists to take a theme that is almost as old as art history itself and to continue to innovate upon it.  Here’s hoping that other artists heed their call.

Vortex 2006, Gunpowder on paper, 400 x 900 cm, Collection of Deutsche Bank Collection, commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG, Mathias Schormann © Cai Guo-Qiang

Cai Guo-Qiang began experimenting with the properties of gunpowder in his drawings in the 1980s. He used gunpowder of various grades and forms and exploded it on paper, leaving burnt and smoky charcoal-stained residue marks behind.  Born out of his desire to subject his practice to the dynamic elements, Cai’s work expresses how beauty and violence are often intertwined. Much of this experimentation has lead to a practice which encompasses the use of explosives on a massive scale, and Vortex, a drawing depicting hundreds and thousands of wolves chasing one another in a circular motion, as if sucked into a vortex, is emblematic of Cai’s work.

Head On, 99 life-sized replicas of wolves and glass wall. Wolves: gauze, resin, and painted hide, Dimensions variable, 2006 Deutsche Bank Collection, commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG. Photography by John Yuen, Fotograffiti

Cai’s work are also recognized by a strong sense of movement, weaving together the extremes of emotions and states within nature. Head On was created in the wake of the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and reflects on the remaining fissures in spite of the political reunification of East and West Germany. Ninety-nine life-sized replicas of wolves are seen to be leaping in a pack towards a glass wall. While those leading the pack strike the glass wall and collapse in a heap, the wolves at the rear continue surging forward. Seen from afar, the leaping wolves form an arc of force and power, a reminder of the power of collective ideas and actions, and also, its consequence of blind pursuit.

Reflection - A Gift from Iwaki installed at MAMAC in Nice. Copyright: Crédits Ville de Nice

While Cai’s work often relies on context, it also draws on symbols and materials from Chinese culture. His works are marked by a certain theatricality and require a sizable production crew, perhaps a vestige of his background in stage design at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. His aggressive, set-like design brings together historical context and theatricality in Reflection – A Gift from Iwaki, comprised of a 15-meter long boat, excavated by ship makers of the Iwaki village in Japan where the work was created. The beauty of destruction is evident from the decaying shipwreck lying against a mountain of broken ceramic deities. The placement of broken deities in a museum was a deliberate gesture to question the point at which a religious statue relinquishes its spiritual significance, towards its function as mere artistic representations and commercial goods. First presented in 2004, Reflection – A Gift from Iwaki is reconstituted for each exhibition by seven fishermen from Iwaki.

Head on and Vortex are currently on view at Cai Guo-Qiang: Head On which runs till 31 August 2010 at the National Museum of Singapore. Reflection – A Gift from Iwaki is presented in Cai Guo-Qiang: Travels in the Mediterranean at Musée d’Art moderne et d’Art contemporain, Nice, France till 9 January 2011. Cai was born in 1957 in the city of Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China. He was awarded the Golden Lion at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, the 7th Hiroshima Art Prize in 2007, and the 20th Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2009. He also held the title of Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. In 2008, he was the subject of a large mid-career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. He has lived in New York since 1995.