It’s the burning question floating around London’s artworld these days. The number of smug souls who have entered James Turrell’s giant sphere at Gagosian Gallery slowly grows as the days pass, while others desperately long to get inside and experience first-hand what the buzz is all about.

James Turrell, Bindu Shards, 2010. Mixed media, 421 x 653 x 607 cm. Image Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

For decades, the illustrious Californian artist has used light as his medium. His aspirations have never been modest. From transforming the Roden Crater in the Arizona desert into an astronomical observatory for the last thirty years, to the ongoing Perceptual Cells series informed by his studies in experimental psychology, Turrell seeks to transform our perceptions. He constructs environments that allow us to open our eyes and mind, and ‘see‘ in a way we have never before. Part of the Perceptual Cells series, Bindu Shards (2010), is an immersive psychedelic experience concocted by Turrell, who mixes light and sound to create a drug-like potion with all the fervour of a mad scientist.

If you have secured one of the much sought after appointments (Bindu Shards spots filled within 48 hours of opening bookings), you are one of the lucky ones, able to confidently stride up and drop your name with the same prestige of being on the VIP list at a highly exclusive event – while a gallery of observers look on enviously.

James Turrell, Bindu Shards, 2010. Mixed media, 421 x 653 x 607 cm. Image Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

The spaceship-like structure of Bindu Shards seems to have landed straight out of a 1970s futuristic sci-fi film – the present as envisioned in the past. The impossibly chic, labcoat-wearing technician, who herself could have come from the same film, asks you a series of questions – Do you suffer from seizures? No. Have you taken any illicit drugs today? No. Which setting would you like – Hard or Soft? Sign the disclaimer and you’re in.

Leaving all your possessions behind to lie in a small white drawer, the technician rolls you inside. ‘Relax. And Enjoy,’ she says as the door slams shut – ‘And remember – there’s a panic button to your left if you need it…’

Hypnotic colors begin to wash over you in quintessential Turrell-like fashion, accompanied by resonating sonic tones meant to aid your passage into the alpha state of consciousness – somewhere between waking and sleeping. The intensity escalates as the light pulsates and shimmers, approaching you and in an sudden shift, fuses with your eyes. It is extremely disconcerting, however if you relax and ‘turn on, tune in, drop out,’ you will be rewarded.

A visitor entering Bindu Shards, 2010. Photo credit to Johanna. http://www.flickr.com/photos/johanna/

Bindu Shards is truly an immersive experience – and least of all because of the environment. What Bindu Shards does is infiltrate your mind, overtake your synapses and blur the boundaries between what is real and what is not. Vision predicated on what you see in front of you is destroyed in favor of perception that stems from the inside – it is a completely new way of retinal ‘seeing’ based on what the mind produces in response to light and sound – it is in your eyes.

The fifteen minutes spent alone with your visions of light are intense, and most definitely not for the faint of heart. What you create, what you see and what you take away on your ‘trip’ is unique. You emerge with your possibilities for perception infinitely expanded and like a drug, long to go back for more.

With Turrell able to transform our state of consciousness so drastically within this tiny bubble, we can only await with breath that is bated to experience what he has spent the last three decades concocting at the elusive Roden Crater.

The serial artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloging the results of his premise. – Sol Lewitt

Operating on logical relationships that rule out unpredictability, seriality, as Jean Baudrillard argued in decades past, is a phenomenon inextricably tied to industrial production and modernity. To those who live in the twenty-first century some half a century later since Baudrillard’s pronouncement, seriality is the comfortable, complacent but reassuring – if not mundane – lull of continuity that contains few, or if any, unexpected surprises. The examples of seriality are many and remain constantly unquestioned: weeks-long drama serials that do not always have an end in sight, the serial numbers found on the outer packaging of daily necessities that hint at the gargantuan processes behind their mass production – all of them caught in continual (or endless) processes of production whose beginnings or the ends few people have the opportunity to witness.

Argie Bandoy, Untitled #2, Collages and mixed media on paper, 28 x 20.6 cm, 2010. Image courtesy of Taksu gallery

To artists like Andy Warhol and Sol Lewitt, seriality meant a rebellion against a romanticized standard of art as a wholly distinctive and non-replicable product of an artist’s personal vision. Consisting of the repetitive, patterned production of images or objects that reflected the mechanics of mass production and the sterile, impersonal processes that formed the backbone of twentieth-century society, serial art’s modular, homogeneous precepts provided a semblance of order and routine through measured logic and its subsequent rational output. Lewitt’s series of drawings and obsession with cubic structures for instance, consisted of the repetition of basic forms and lines in systematized arrangements adhering to strict patterns in an effort to serially reproduce images. Neither illustrative nor denotative, Lewitt’s forms were meant to be intuitive, prioritizing ideas that spawned it above its physical nature. To Lewitt’s contemporary Andy Warhol, seriality was spawned in the multiplication of images via the silk-screening techniques of mass production, his works of replicated soup cans and images of celebrities parodying mechanization’s threat to artistic uniqueness.

But to destroy notions of seriality might just be akin to the destruction of coherence and structure, releasing a wave of arbitrariness that sweeps through the repetitive and ordered mainstream, as suggested in Serial Killers: From Tate Modern to TAKSU Singapore, a fusion of works by several contemporary Filipino artists as they consider the consequences of deconstructing institutions of order.

Jason Oliveria, Ten Shit 6, Oil, collage and mixed media on paper, 28 x 20.6 cm, 2010. Image courtesy of Taksu Gallery

Artists like Jayson Oliveria and Condardo Velasco seem to unanimously conclude that the elimination of structure and method is to introduce randomness and unpredictability, coupled with the excitement of layering a new – and not necessarily sensible – narrative atop that which already exists. In Oliveria’s Ten Shit (2010), Velasco’s Metallurgy of Desire (2010) and Argie Bardoy’s mixed media collages, the perfunctory canvas – whether they are the backdrop of an advertisement of a branded item or an aged photograph – is defaced by a collision of forms that obscure strategic features of the original background, deterring the formation of any coherent narrative.

Conrado Velasco, Metallurgy of Desire #4, Collage with silver tinsel on paper, 30 x 22 cm, 2010. Image courtesy of Taksu gallery

In these works, a superimposed series of images and forms hint at what each might represent to the individual viewer – an already arbitrary move in the work – but remain sufficiently devoid of reason so as to reject the axiomatic principles and rational intellect that are resonant in serial art. Gary Ross Pastrana’s Stray Bullets (2010) is not unlike Bardoy’s collage, a work that invites stabs-in-the-dark kind of guesswork – attempts that invariably end in an intellectual cul-de-sac. Take for example, Pastrana’s canvas’s (imagined) right half could appear to resemble the top-body collage of a male office worker in a suit and a tie, or even an over-stretched artist’s palette; such subjective and flawed interpretations are merely concessions of the infinite possibilities of meaning that puncture the monotony and knowablility of seriality. If the role of the artist is to empower the viewer to gain access to a particular aesthetic vision, the process of discovery here, is halted before it even begins.

Gary-Ross Pastrana, Stray Bullets 1, Collage 20.3 x 25.4 cm, 2010. Image courtesy of Taksu gallery.

The alternatives to serial killing do not always however, involve tentative steps through unchartered territory; the intense, Dionysian elements running amok in most of Serial Killers exhibits are curiously absent from Norberto Roldan extremely ordered Quelques Fleurs: Assemblage with found objects (2010). In each box, Roldan’s found objects recur in an almost predictable, composite arrangement: a sepia photograph is tacked to the center of a larger brand advertisement, like a sentinel guarding an unknown reality beyond our reach and comprehension, surrounded by common, locally available objects (cosmetic tubes, a toy figurine, empty bottles). Roldan’s mathematically calibrated grid-assemblage is itself a troubled text in pursuit of layered metaphors of continuity and change, mass-production and individuality. As it maintains a dialogue with or even reinforces the discourse of seriality and consumerism that engaged Lewitt and Warhol half a century ago, the assemblage’s strange beauty sidesteps the brilliant hues of Pop Art or the visceral abstraction of Conceptualist Art in favor of muted nostalgia.

Simply put, the divergent paths of aesthetic convictions that Serial Killers leads us through are polemical and unanticipated. If the uncertain terrain that we are escorted into by the works of these artists who try to delineate the limits of seriality is as much dependent on our sustained engagement, the elusive meanings behind them leave us in an unreferenced mire of artistic wilderness.

Norberto Roldan, Quelques Fleurs Assemblage with found objects, 122 x 183 cm, 2010. Image courtesy of Taksu gallery

Serial Killers: From Tate Modern to TAKSU Singapore was brought to the TAKSU gallery in Singapore after a run in the No Soul for Sale Festival at the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London, earlier this year. An exhibition program started in 2008 by independent artist-run initiative Green Papaya Art Projects in Manila, Serial Killers explores parallel themes of seriality, non-seriality or counter-seriality – producing art works in groups or series.

The exhibition is a part of the Philippine Art Trek IV 2010, organized by the Philippine Embassy in Singapore. The exhibition runs at the TAKSU gallery until November 27, 2010.

Today, From the DS Archives reintroduces you to Walter Kitundu, an artist with an extraordinary range and incredible energy. Kitundu continues to add to his repertoire—working in sound, photography, design and more—my new favorite being his bird blog.

This article was originally written by Arden Sherman on November 21st, 2008.

The cryptic sounds of hidden nature, wild animals, and native cultures are not only found in the numerous stacks at the Library of Congress or between the grooves of an exotica record. Artist Walter Kitundu utilizes these very sounds and ideas in his acute musical compositions. Sound artist, instrument maker, and composer, Kitundu finds a harmony between traditional musical forms, nature and sculpture. He has created an array of instruments including the Phonoharp, a multi-stringed instrument made from a record player, and the Ocean Edge Device, a life-size structure which utilizes wave motions to create a composition. These elements and Kitundu’s fascination with birds, geology, water, and air have led to various projects and installations throughout the United States and Europe.

The Bay Area artist is a 2008 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and is a current artist in residence atHeadlands Center for the Arts. Kitundu has collaborated widely with notable artists and musicians such asMatmos and Kronos Quartet and has been appointed the 2008 Wornick Visiting Distinguished Professor of Wood Arts at California College of the Arts.

Today’s article is from our friends at Art Practical, where Renny Pritikin discusses the exhibition, Hauntology, at the Berkeley Art Museum.

Hauntology, co-curated by Larry Rinder and Scott Hewicker, at the UC Berkeley Art Museum, posits that the past inhabits the present in the same way that an individual’s past shapes how he perceives and acts in the present. By extension, art history and contemporary art are not so much in an ancestor-descendent relationship as they are roommates cohabiting the studio and the gallery. As roommates will, the past and present forever borrow from each other’s wardrobes; that is, the past and the present are not two things but one, participating in a constantly evolving mutual creation of meaning.

Paul Sietsema. Ship Drawing, 2009 (detail); ink on paper, diptych; 50 3/4 x 70 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

One of my teachers, the late Stan Rice, said that if you can’t title a work, you haven’t figured out what it is about. The flip side of this flip remark is that you can title a project and ignore the title; this practice is endemic to the stated themes of art biennials and is something that curators can do in their smaller exhibitions, as well. A provocative title can finesse the flaws in obscurely or randomly assembled objects. At the same time, it is no secret that public institutions’ collapsing budgets make relatively inexpensive shows sourced from museums’ permanent collections desirable—as are shows of recent acquisitions. Hauntology is a group show of some fifty works, mostly recently acquired objects augmented by older pieces from the Berkeley Art Museum collection. An intelligent and economical endeavor gussied up with reference to Jacques Derrida, Hauntology nevertheless contains many wonderful individual art pieces and some very touching or clever arrangements.

After walking through a photography exhibition that juxtaposed works from the history of photography in groups of twos, threes, and fours, the late photographer Larry Sultan remarked that he preferred the sets in which he was forced to ponder what exactly the curators had seen that he at first failed to see, as opposed to those in which he found the shared thematic threads more obvious. Halfway through Hauntology, two medium-size works are placed to the left and right of the entrance to the second gallery. Essentially identical at first glance, the two works, Abstract Painting #3 (1960), by Ad Reinhardt, and an untitled work (2008–09) by Carina Baumann, appear to be grayish black monochromes.

Paul Schiek. Similar to a Baptism, 2007; chromogenic print; 30 x 40 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the UC Berkeley Art Museum.

The Reinhardt contains a nearly invisible rectangle of a slightly different hue at its bottom center. The Baumann, on close inspection, reveals a face emerging from the gloom. Two artists, one living and one dead, separated by the gulf of an empty wall, collapse time by addressing the same retinal phenomenon from the point of view of two different generations.

The exhibition is at its best when the curators avoid the spooky-for-its-own-sake. As wonderful as death-drenched folk art can be—who can resist an eighteenth-century mourning embroidery for a lost-at-sea husband?—Twirling Wires (2001), a Roger Ballen photograph of a bald man, wrapped in a blanket at the bottom of the print and cowering beneath an unexplained gigantic ball of razor wire, is far more uncanny. Similarly, Okyo’s 1750 Ghost of Oyuki—the wall label suggests that Oyuki is the source for much of the manga stylebook—is great fun. However, sussing out the relationship between one of Vincent Fecteau’s always-perfect shelf sculptures and Mitzi Pederson’s large 2009 untitled floor-based mixed media is much more satisfying and moving.

Julia Couzens, an underappreciated Sacramento artist, is represented with a charcoal drawing. Being Exposed #41 (1991) definitely depicts something organic—a body part or a vegetable—but I couldn’t describe it in any other way than to say that it is inarguably luscious. Nearby is a dreamy watercolor by Laurie Reid and Nocturne (1878), a James McNeill Whistler riverscape that is shrouded in mist. D.L. Alvarez’s drawing titled Dead (2009) depicts young people at a rock concert, transfixed, in a grouping that includes Goya’s famous Sleep of Reason (1799) and explores people sleeping or swooning.

Paul Sietsema’s 2009 diptych Ship Drawing is a large drawing that suggests a found and damaged photograph of a two-masted nineteenth-century sailing vessel that evokes the (ever-creepy) legendary Flying Dutchman ghost ship. The left-hand panel appears to be the back of the same print or an erased version of it. This kind of exercise—a haunting of Rauschenberg’s 1953 Erased de Kooning—is as evocative as anything else in the show. Finally, Paul Schiek’s Similar to a Baptism (1977) is a photograph of foamy ocean turbulence in which the splashing water suggests the arms of an octopus, among which can be seen a swimmer’s head. It is a perfect metaphor for Hauntology’s argument that we are all just trying to keep our heads above water amid a flood of images, memories, associations, and histories.

Hauntology is on view at the UC Berkeley Art Museum through December 5, 2010.

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

Thomas Edison, "Fun in a Bake Shop," film still, 1902.

Stop motion lends itself to stilted narratives about creativity. Some of the earliest films for which the frame-by-frame technique was used tell stories about eccentric characters making something almost as eccentric as themselves. In Thomas Edison’s 1902 project, Fun in a Bakery, a baker smothers a rat he sees with a glob of dough, then proceeds to sculpt that dough into a robust face; for some reason, his effort gets him thrown headfirst into a barrel of flour by other men in baker’s hats. In J. Stuart Blackton’s 1907 film, The Haunted Hotel, a table is set by invisible hands that go on to create an exquisite, frightening evening for a tired traveler.

Blum & Poe’s current exhibition, called Stop. Move., attempts to show that this storied, low-tech medium is just as possibility-rich today as it was a century ago, or at least as compelling. It includes four artists, three based in Berlin (at least part of the time) and one based in Los Angeles. Each has been given a single darkened gallery space, and the films by Hirsch Perlman, Robin Rhode, and Nathalie Djurberg are projected onto a single wall, while Matt Saunders’ three-channel installation takes up two additional walls and occupies Blum & Poe’s biggest gallery. Because three of four films have soundtracks, the music that bleed from one gallery to the next become a tainted cohesive, causing the work to mingle and mesh in unexpected ways–the Johnny Cash and Miles Davis tracks paired with Perlman’s film add to the comic effect of Rhode’s work, while Djurberg’s music makes everything else in the show more portentous.

Matt Saunders, "Kuhle Wampe Bikes 108," Edition of 3, 2010. Courtesy of Harris Lieberman Gallery, New York.

Something about the Stop. Move. feels old, and while this has to do with stop motion’s datedness and visual simplicity, it also has to do with the fact that the artists have chosen to present fairly basic, unencumbered narratives. This isn’t a bad thing, and the exhibition’s two most engrossing works narrate stories about creativity that fails. In Robin Rhode’s Canon, a man wearing a sweat suit and red beanie sketches a television on a blank white wall. He then spends the duration of the film trying to “kill” his sketch, by shooting and then exploding it. The problem is that each weapon he draws quickly dissolves into a dirty sea of abstract marks or disappears altogether. Finally, giving up on the canon he’s tried to use, he drags a canon ball across the wall, manhandling it until it collisides with the television. This sort of frustrated effort to make something (or make something work) translates beautifully to the “start, stop and repeat” nature of stop motion.  And even if Rhode’s experiment in failure does veer a bit close to William Kentridge’s charcoal-drenched, foible-filled approach to animation (an acknowledged influence), his nonchalance sets him apart.

Nathalie Djurberg, Still from "We are not two, we are one," clay animation, digital video 5:33, Edition of 4, 2008. Music by Hans Berg. Courtesy of Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Giò Marconi, Milan.

Nathalie Djurberg’s We are not two, we are one steals the show with its lyrically tender weirdness. The Swedish artist’s claymation always feels like the perverse version of Wallace and Grommit; it has a visual wholesomeness that its subject matter totally destabilizes. In this film, a wolf with a slight blond girl growing out of his lower spine navigates a kitchen, making some sort of meal. At first, wolf and girl seem to coexist effectively, though the she tends to pick up after him and finish tasks he starts. Yet the wolf becomes progressively less considerate, and the film ends with both characters naked, battered and in tears. The ever-increasing intensity of Hans Berg’s music, composed specifically for this film, enhances the story line’s formidability, making you feel always on the brink of panic. The characters never finish making their dinner, and the kitchen is left a mess.

It’s not necessarily clear how the four artists in  Stop. Motion. inform each other, but sometimes such  looseness is okay. In the end, the exhibition seems to suggest what we already knew: any medium, wielded by a clever and thoughtful maker can be a success. That stop motion is a strategy artists continue to explore simply means they are keeping their options open.

Isaac Tin Wei Lin’s current exhibition at the Print Center is his first solo show in the Makeready series, entitled One of Us. Consisting of a silkscreen installation, 26 gouache paintings, and a freehand mural, the framed gouache drawings greet us and reveal a bit of the extensive processes in the exhibition. More interesting as a group than they are individually, the power of these sketches is fixed to the creativity found in difference. Each seems to be an unsystematic exploration of formal relationships: solid to open, curved to jagged, contrast to complement. The Space 1026 ethos runs through these works, with the emphasis on exploration and investigation and hand-worked art.

One of Us, Installation, 2010. Photo courtesy John Pyper.

The installation is centered around a pattern inspired by non-latin alphabet calligraphy, printed in edition of 650, and pasted onto the walls and floors of the space. When viewed with 3-d glasses, the high-contrast patterns starts moving and space opens up. The floor you are standing on gets deeper and you are not sure where the floor begins and ends.

One of Us, detail of calligraphy, 2010. Photo courtesy of John Pyper.

It would not be hard to read psychedelia into this installation. The odd floor layout with six foot cartoon characters interrupting your movement, the intense pattern covering every surface, and the high contrast colors unrelentingly poke at your eyes and brain. I agree with the gallery handout that his work offers a “contrast to the sixties retro work,” but rather than referencing older and culturally loaded psychedelia (Like Justin Lowe’s Matrix 159 at Wadsworth Athenaeum) Wei Lin instead creates an attack on our contemporary senses. The references to arabic and hebrew text shift our paranoid minds to the middle-east. The oversized cartoons bloom into fearful exaggerations, impacting how large we feel. These nervous images command the space, leaving very little to consider beyond it.

One of Us, Detail of mural, 2010. Photo courtesy of John Pyper.

The dense patterns, expert color separations, and skillful overlays matched with the playful depth created by the installation and the 3-d glasses form a riot of information to untangle. If letting the images just wash over your eyes and wander freely is too much, you can always rest your eyes on the relatively peaceful hand-painted mural of calligraphic lines surrounding a circle. But even this mural is surrounded by hand-painted line work, that in a faulty mind (altered somehow) could find their vital motion alarming.

Isaac Tin Wei Lin’s One of Us will be on view at the Print Center through November 20th.

DailyServing recently had the opportunity to catch up with Chicago-based artist Michael Rea to see what he has been up to since his inclusion in the 2009 DailyServing curated exhibition 1000 DAYS, in Los Angeles. Rea has been busy with all types of new studio projects, many of which have culminated in two concurrent exhibitions on view in Chicago.

Images Courtesy of Ebersmoore Gallery

Seth Curcio: So Mike, its been almost a year and half since you participated in the DailyServing  1000 DAYS exhibition at the Scion Installation gallery space in LA. What have you been up to lately? Tell me a little about the projects that you have been working on?

Michael Rea: After LA, I was out in San Francisco for a solo show at a down town office building 101 California.  After that, I was a group show at Western Exhibitions where I showed the Tasvo Maneaters Part 1 which later went on to show at Next art fair in Chicago.  Last spring, my work was exhibited in a group show at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. The show was curated by Vallerie Cassel-Oliver and was titled Hand+Made The Performative Impluse in Art and Craft. For the show at CAMH, I rebuilt the instruments for my 2004-05 performance piece I Yell Because I Care. The Instruments were displayed along with a video of the performance. After returning for the show in Houston, I began work on a solo show at Ebersmoore Gallery. Around August I took a break and traveled to Darmstadt, Germany to build a site specific sculpture as part of a residency/exhibition called Forest Art. After returning in September I seem to have spent every waking moment in the studio preparing for the show at Ebersmoore Gallery.

Images Courtesy of Ebersmoore Gallery

SC: In addition to your exhibition at Ebersmoore, you are included in the exhibition Inside Out at the Northern Illinois University’s Art Museum. Tell me a little about what is on view at each show.

MR: Well the show at the NIU art museum is a group show curated by Karen Brown, a faculty member in NIU’s art department. All of the  work in the show has a connection in some way to clothing/garments. There is a real nice variety of work in the the show. The two pieces that I am showing are Olympia and a Prosthetic Suit for Stephen Hawking W/ Japanese Steel. While Olympia seems to fit into the show a little more traditionally due to the use fabric and latch-hooking, It was really nice to show the the Stephen Hawking suit in this context.

The exhibition at Ebersmoore Gallery consists of work I made over the last year. In the main gallery space there is a large cannon like structure titled Benita. The cannon begins in the gallery and penetrates through the gallery wall and the living space adjacent to the galley pointing towards an exterior window.  Surrounding the cannon are multiple kegs, a bong, and a collar and chain tethered to the gun. There is also a scope a top the cannon, which has a video loop of a shower scene taken from the film Stripes. Oddly enough the video’s composition is rather similar to that of Les demoiselles D’avion. Viewers are invited to climb up and sit in the cockpit of the cannon. In the living space along with the 20′ barrel I have a few works on paper, which I have worked on throughout the last year.

Images Courtesy of Ebersmoore Gallery

SC: Much of your work is derived from, or abstractly references specific films. Constructing these objects out of wood essentially renders them useless, and they become stand-ins for real and imagined forms. So, I’ve got to ask, if you could activate these sculptures who would you like to see tethered to a death star-like ray gun surrounded by multiple kegs and a bong, and what would he or she being doing?

MR: Well I was considering using a muscular young man at the opening, but did not have time to place and filter the Craig’s List ad.  I wanted my friend’s brother to do it, but he moved away from Chicago.  He would have been perfect. Stylish, bitchy, young, works out all the time, and parties when he is not at work or in the gym. I figure I would have had him wear an outfit he would have normally worn to work at Sidetracks, and just had him drink, flirt and pout.

Images Courtesy of Ebersmoore Gallery

SC: Since you have had such a productive year culminating in the residency in Darnstadt and then these concurrent exhibitions in Chicago, what do you think will be the next object that you will tackle in the studio?

MR: Well I have been talking about making a video. A short remake of the pottery scene from Ghost. The pottery wheel will be replaced with a table saw. I suspect the dust sticking to flesh, respirators, and ear protection may spice things up in an aesthetically pleasing fashion.   I have also been thinking about making a pin ball machine.