Eschewing portrayals of the pastoral life, Shambhavi Singh’s canvasses are visceral, nebulous and profoundly spiritual, tending towards the cosmic and perhaps, even the anti-idyllic pastoral. Lonely Furrow, her solo exhibition at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute, re-centres our focus on the harsh existence of rural workers in her native Bihar but refrains quite remarkably, from any social commentary of the rural-urban divisions plaguing rapidly industrialising nations.

Portraying instead a preoccupation with the macrocosmic, Singh’s vision is ungoverned by socio-political boundaries and is worked out through the most basic of forms; in this case, through the elemental shapes of the farmer’s tools: the curve of the sickle and the roundness of the seeds that he sows. Even the production processes of the works exhibited in Lonely Furrow parallel the tactile, labour-intensive processes of the agricultural industry. The Hasiya (2011) clusters and Beej Brahmaand Ek/Cosmic Seed (2011) – first engraved in copper plates and later chemically corroded – seem to pay tribute to a communal resilience that inevitably wears thin against the brutality of life. The Illumination series is created out of painted layers of pigmented paper pulp onto freshly made paper, the fibrous textures of the pulp presenting the known universe as it must have looked like to the inhabitants of pre-history.

Yet for a figure so central to the show’s melancholic tone, the farmer himself is missing from her canvasses perhaps, this is where elegiac quality of Singh’s work emerges most powerfully. Anjor Teen (2011) and Dhibri Ek (2011) – among those in the Illumination series – depict oil wick bottles and bowls used for sustenance and energy. The turmeric wall sculpture Griha Do Sanctum (2011) is a bare, circular indentation carved into an uneven and cracked surface, illustrating human life as it is lived at its barest and most minimal. We know of the farmer through his tools, his home and his living materials but not the individual. These physical structures embody his marginalised life – they paradoxically express the sense of the transitory – yet hold the collective and enduring memory of a toiling group whose karmic reality is a designed dependence on and perhaps, the eventual consumption by the cyclic forces of nature.

Lonely Furrow will be on view at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute until 10 September 2011.

Along with nine, hand-selected participants, artist Desirée Holman has spent the last two years developing a series of avatars. The resulting project, Heterotopias, 2011, a video and supporting drawings on view now at the Berkeley Art Museum, refers to corporeal reality’s relationship to virtual reality, the physical process by which the digitally rendered avatar is formed, and the ironic stasis of the body whilst the imagined self is set free.  Unfortunately, Holman only refers to these ideas.  While aesthetically engaging and fun to watch, Heterotopias fails to delve beyond the surface of her topic.

Shot as a sort of music video, the participants sit before laptops in similar, homey interiors.  They dance, are transformed into both live-action and digitally animated superhero-like characters, and engage in battle with long staffs. Considering the care taken in creating the colorful and fanciful costumes and scenery, as well as the richness of the concept, a viewer expects much more from these characters than what is delivered.

One cannot help but wonder: is sitting in front of a computer the extent of the lives of these individuals?  Even Superman’s Clark Kent has distinguishing characteristics, personal dramas and quirks.  If these avatars are an opportunity to exist in a space untethered by the bounds of the real, why do the avatars perform feats no more complex than hitting one another with sticks?

Not one of the actors or avatars has any true individuation, despite the potential offered by their appearances. The elaborately developed avatars are little more than costumes: digital exoskeletons worn by the subjects.  Holman and her participants supposedly spent a great deal of time and effort in the development of these fictions: why is the audience not granted access to this aspect of the project? We have all played video games, seen superhero fiction, or engaged in social networking sites as digitally warped versions of ourselves.  In each of these scenarios, the stories generated by fictional or semi-fantastic characters are engaging and multi-dimensional: both morally and socially complex.  We should be granted similar complexity from these characters.

The show’s accompanying drawings are an interesting addition. Pieces such as Dancers Dancing in their Own Digital Ectoplasmic Cocoons are beautifully executed and freeze time in a manner that allows us to attempt a more in-depth connection with these individuals.  The “ectoplasmic cocoons,” incidentally, work better in the drawings than in the videos; in the latter, the pink lining on the characters as they jump between fantasy worlds seems to be a result of poor color-keying. Though not all of the works are as successful, one drawing of a costumed face alludes to information promised but never quite delivered: a man stares ahead, awkwardly, wearing a humorous headpiece.  His eyes indicate that he is unsure of the world in which he belongs, torn between his virtual self and actual self.  He is self-conscious, but nonetheless set free by his ridiculous garb.  Is this a drawing of the man, or of his digital armature?  Where in this spectrum does the drawing, and in fact, all art—itself a virtual rendition of reality—fall?

On view from September 8 – October 22 at Gagosian Gallery (London), Mike Kelley continues his investigation on the inconsistencies in the story of Superman. Kelley began his quest in 1999 with the Kandors series, and the newest iteration, Exploded Fortress of Solitude, highlights the devastation and destruction of Superman’s home planet.

The following article was originally posted on February 2, 2011 by Caitlin Moore.

Mike Kelley claims he doesn’t particularly like Superman. The jury is out on whether or not this qualifies him as a communist, but his claim does provide a source of perplexity when evaluating the inspiration for his ongoing Kandor sculpture and installation series – the newest of which being currently displayed at Gagosian Gallery (Beverly Hills) alongside the latest chapters of his filmic project, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction (EAPR).

In its original graphic incarnation, Kandor is noted as the fictional capital city of Superman’s native planet, Krypton. By the swift and conniving hands of the villainous Brainiac, the city was taken hostage and miniaturized for purposes not entirely sensible or mildly coherent – but not without valorous retrieval by our hero. Despite Superman’s Samaritan ways, the omnipresent plague of a haunting past hinders him from true emotional and psychological liberation – not to mention, visible underpants. For Kelley, the conceptual appeal lies in Kandor’s embodiment of an alienating victim culture for our protagonist: the notion of a burdensome present dictated by a labyrinthine past. Kelley’s unorthodox fusion of fragmented narrative, medium and sensory immersion seem nonsensical and queer at first encounter, yet the further we delve into his sensational rabbit hole, the closer we come to the truly bizarre fidelity of the human condition. Kelley confronts our latent attitudes and popular convictions relating to sexuality, socioeconomics, education and history with jocular finesse and – well – candor.

Like glowing orbs, a handful of Kandor sculptures pepper the multiple galleries within the darkened Gagosian megaplex. The dwarfed cities encased beneath colorful bell jars appear relic-like, yet also profane at times – their jutting skyscrapers evoking a curiosity born of both estrangement and familiarity. The two primary microcosms – Kandor 10 and Kandor 12 – bear oversized tubes that snake into tanks of (presumably) atmosphere, per the accuracy of the comic book reference. Each is situated within environmental installations that embellish upon two distinct anecdotes central to the exhibition: the carnal Moroccan harem featured in EAPR #34, and the bleak sooty chamber that appears in EAPR #35. In merging his previously autonomous Kandor and EAPR projects, Kelley suggests an innate relationship between our own respective microcosmic realities and subsequent conditional behavior.

By way of illustration, Kelley’s EAPR #34 videos largely examine the lascivious conduct of society’s upper echelon when handed unrestricted power and entitlement. Directed in the style of a maladroit stage play, EAPR #34 shifts between a piggish male King belittling his covetous female harem and a group of scornful Queens admonishing a male servant. In both scenarios, the authoritarian’s disposition to abuse of influence and insatiable gluttony bespeaks a cyclical global history of flawed paradigm and deep-rooted desire for accumulation. Beside the video installation, Kandor 10 is nestled within a life-size stony grotto reminiscent of EAPR #34’s exotic Moroccan setting, as if displaying the incubator in which these voracious human mannerisms were nurtured. When the Kandor’s luminous mini-cityscape appears more familiar than it does foreign, one can only muse on how fictitiously reconstructive Kelley’s staged milieu really is.

Conversely, EAPR #35 jettisons us into a place of somber isolation and denial. Grimy clownish gnomes aimlessly shuffle around a murky cell, their void gazes searching for an ambiguous cue. Homogeneous in tired costume and ashen faces, the destitute prisoners amble in silent futility – resigned to the dim prospects of their ordained condition.

The analogous Kandor 12 shares an equally inauspicious aesthetic; the cloudy brown bottle houses a municipality more reminiscent of chess pieces than modern skyscrapers – as if underlining the inmates’ loss of an unassailable game. The sparse backdrop of the gnomes’ cellar intimates a societal tradition of abhorrent secrecy and muted abuse of the weak, a ritualistic convention of marginalizing the vulnerable in order to preserve the greater hierarchy. As if acting as the underbelly to the rapacious actuality in EAPR #34, the vignette captured in EAPR #35 exposes the ensuing trauma that occurs in the wings as we strive to fulfill our socially performative roles – most of which remain immutably out of reach.

In fact, Kelley’s inclusion of the sets from the EAPR #34 and EAPR #35 videos in this exhibition make us feel but a mere player in one hell of a bewildering production. In tandem with his Kandors, the sets feel like an abstract extension of a transient ecology, a faux mise en scène demonstration of how we enact our own mortality. Do we unconsciously fall victim to institutional constructs in our quest for repute and satisfaction, acting a character merely to clinch our chances of eminence? Or do we find ourselves waiting in the wings for a cue – a protagonist – that may never come?

For this edition of Fan Mail, Curtis Amisich has been selected from a group of worthy submissions. If you would like to be considered, please submit to info@dailyserving.com a link to your website with ‘Fan Mail’ in the subject line. Two artists are featured each month—the next one could be you!

In 1964, Time magazine published an article entitled “Op Art: Pictures that Attack the Eye,” in which MoMA curator William Seitz explains that works from the budding movement designated “[Optical Art] exist less as objects than as generators of perceptual responses.” The paintings of Curtis Amisich quite evidently echo the work of Op-Artist Bridget Riley, but also more subtly reflect the influences of Minimalist art like Frank Stella’s “Protractor” paintings and Barnett Newman’s “Zip” paintings. Yet, while this work clearly represents an extension of this lineage, they also address more contemporary issues by virtue of their production in the 21^st century.

In an era when such intricate works could quite easily be produced on a computer, Amisich meticulously executes his paintings in a process that lasts a number of weeks. He begins each painting with a single line, creating adjacent lines that mimic every characteristic of its neighbor – to the extent possible by a human hand. The opticality of this formal approach is enhanced in these paintings through layering and sharp contract. The resulting paintings – with Testing 1, 2, 3 … Your Patience an exemplary example in my mind – are full of movement. It is hard to believe that what appears to vibrate is simply a series of stationary lines.

Over the past several years, Amisich has worked on two separate, but closely related, series: Scrambled Porn and Scrambled.  Both bodies of work refer to the act of intense viewership, an ever-pertinent issue in our media-driven society. The most recent “Three Screen Report” by the Nielson Company – which measures TV viewing, online activity, and mobile phone usage – confirms what everyone already suspects: American media consumption continues to rise, with over 35 hours spent watching television and about 4 hours surfing the Internet each week. In Scrambled Porn, Amisich connects this consumption to the distinctive visuality of Op Art by evoking the feel of staring at an electronic screen. He furthers this conversation in Scrambled, where he focuses more intently on the impact of color and the ways they can be mixed, combined and woven together, to beautiful effect in a painting like I Think I See Something II.

A solo exhibition of Amisich’s work, entitled Scrambled; Who’s Afraid of Pink, Yellow and Blue, will open September 7th at Peak Gallery in Toronto.

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

When sculptor Lynda Benglis published her scandal-worthy Artforum ad in 1974, the one where she held a double dildo up to her naked, oiled, and fit-as-a-biker-chick body, the din of criticism that followed came mainly from art world insiders. It was the insiders Benglis made the ad for, reacting against potently macho ads by artists like Robert Morris, who had appeared in the magazine to promote one of his exhibitions topless, buff and wrapped in chains. A few women, most notably Rosalind Krauss, resigned from the publication in the wake of Benglis’ stunt. Others jumped to the artist’s defense: Peter Plagens wrote in a letter that, those offended should cover “the offensive anatomy with a small Don Judd inset.” Plagens wasn’t saying no one had a right to object to a double-wide dildo, just that Artforum editors in particular had better acknowledge their double standard before skulking away, put-off by a one-time provocateur who’d made a clever jab.

Plagens’ jab was pretty clever itself—what would fit over a dildo better than a Donald Judd?—and I quoted it recently when reviewing the traveling Lynda Benglis’ retrospective currently at MOCA Los Angeles. I actually tried covering the offending anatomy with one of Judd’s “specific object” sculptures, a blue one from 1967 as shiny as Benglis’ oiled up body.  Of course, it fit perfectly.

My photoshopped Benglis-Judd image ended up on facebook, where it received praise from a few of today’s art insiders. Unfortunately, one of my mother’s friends saw the image too. She’s not an insider, and while she’s not a prude either, without context, the image struck her as bald-faced and, yes, offensive.

I felt badly. It hadn’t been meant for her. But I also wondered if offense would have been taken as easily at a different kind of blatancy.

An art critic for public radio with whom I often work reviewed the Benglis show as well. When he went to post a version of his review on the web, as he always does, his editors objected to one of the images he’d chosen: the Benglis ad sans Judd insert. Liberal art aficionados might be able to handle this, the editors said, but it was too risque for their more general audience. Only a few weeks before, the same critic had posted a far more explicit image on the same site, Courbet’s famous The Origin of World, of a reclining woman. All you can see is her stomach, thighs and what’s between.

I know we now have decades’ worth of arguments about women as objects in art (“Do women have to be naked to get in to the Met Museum?” the Guerrilla Girls asked in 1989) and the unease that’s caused when the male gaze is subverted (“[T]he woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, …always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified,” wrote Laura Mulvey in 1975). However, I think it’s something more basic that makes the Benglis ad hard to take for those not in on the joke.  Certainly, Courbet’s  The Origin of the World would have caused uproar had it appeared to the public in 1866, when he first painted it. Instead, it stayed in private collections until a 1988 exhibition at the Met, and today it’s seen unarguably as a painting. Benglis’ ad is harder to classify. It’s part advert, part social critique, part photo project; with its “unnaturally” sculpted body, it riffs off the visual language of pornography; most overtly, it mismatches genitalia. It seems to me that that’s what we still can’t handle: provocation that collides categories.

Much is written about the biography of Ralph Eugene Meatyard. A Navy man, born in Illinois, he attended Williams College through the Navy’s V-12 program. He became a licensed optician and lived most of his life in Lexington, KY. In 1950, before his first child was born, he made a life changing decision: he bought a camera.

That’s when he found his new calling. He fell for the technical questions that plague all photographers. To this run of the mill mix of lighting, focal lengths, and shutter speed he added things things that were found in his personality and in the counterculture of the 60’s. It seems like such a cliche to be a beatnik cultural warrior, but he was, and the body of work he produced during the 60s is remarkable.

Starting in 1961, he gave himself a decade to master photography. He had been a member of the Lexington Camera Club for six years by that point and was comfortable with standard photographic issues. Instead of casting a wider net he dug in to a narrower focus: Rolleiflex mid-size monochrome negatives and small prints. After eliminating any question of what camera to use, he was free to care about what would be his subject.

On weekends, Meatyard would drive around looking for the crumbling ruins in the rural poverty that surrounded Lexington, KY, but not so he could shoot “ruins porn” or look for the personification of rural life like Shelby Lee Adams did in Appalachia. His children, who had grown up with a shutterbug dad were often his models. The images he took of them were not casual shots of kids at play in the backyard but were arresting compositions guided by his counterculture beliefs and framed with serious technical skill.

The Art Institute of Chicago currently has a first-rate exhibition of the images from his peak output. Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Dolls and Masks collects together Meatyard’s dense compositions, structures of silver and gray with doll faces hiding in the corners of crumbling architecture. He would allow his children to pose as they wanted to, there are a few repeats in their positions, but it adds to the mystery. His formal compositions and his subject matter seems impenetrable. His photographic explorations, motivated by zen philosophy and jazz improvisations, are a dense network of subconscious associations and uncanny resemblance. The natural, fleeting poses of his children fracture against the ponderous old man masks and oversized hands in which they are posing. Their bodies stand out against the stark and worn naturally lit backgrounds that often contain thick, unlit darkness.

Many of his images violate what we know to be true, but he never intended to photograph what was there. He was uninterested in mere optical facts or creating reassuring images. Instead, he wanted to create anew a universal subject that stood for something. He quotes Ambrose Bierce’s Devils Dictionary in at least one title “Romance, n. Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are.” His “sympathetic general subject” looks back to the type of images religions around the world used to teach the illiterate: Buddhist Thangkas, Eastern Icons, Catholic Altarpieces, etc. These images of people idealize rather than describe their subjects. Meatyard too does this, consciously forcing the subject into the uncanny valley between living creature and lifeless doll.

Like the religious icon, Meatyard’s figures are telling us something about how to live, who we are, and what we should expect in the future, it’s just impossible to definitively know what they are saying. A combination of “The Child is father of the Man” and “Show me your original face before your mother and father were born” these images challenge the viewer with “unfair arguments with existence.” Do the masks cover up the person, or does the person fill in the mask? Every subject in Meatyard’s photos are challenging the lens of the camera. Actively standing up to any amount of objectifying gaze, deformed but confident, these subjects go eyeball to eyeball with us. Even the youngest and presumably most innocent of these subjects stands facing us, boldly answering the questions his father was asking.

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

In honor of last weekend’s events in Libya, DailyServing kicks off our newest series, #Hashtags, with an article by writer and editor Matthew Harrison Tedford on street art and politics.  #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.

In the last ten months there has been a rash of high-profile arts censorship incidents. Late last year, following complaints, David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly was pulled from the Hide/Seek exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. That December, a mural at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles by street artist Blu was painted over, again, following complaints. In April, the work of Mustapha Benfodil was pulled from the Sharjah Biennial. In June, Aidan Salakhova’s work was removed from the Azerbaijan pavilion at the Venice Biennale. And of course, there was the arrest and detention of Ai Weiwei.  I would like to continue listing these incidents, but they would fill this column.

There is no shortage of negative consequences to censorship, and I trust my readers are well aware of many. But there is an odd silver lining to take away from all of this. It says something about the power art possesses when one of the most important lawmakers in the United States, a powerful Emirati Sheikh, and the governor of Maine all become involved in art criticism, as has happened over the last year. These acts of censorship only exist because powerful people and organizations recognize that art influences the world—something that is all too easy to forget.

The positive side of this power has been witnessed this year in turbulent North Africa. Alongside the protests and insurrections of this year’s Libyan civil war, there has been an equally vociferous artistic outpouring. Rather than mere epiphenomena, resulting from but not influencing the revolution, the explosion of street art and graffiti in Libya has been a pragmatic part and parcel of the uprising.  My own biases and doubts sometimes lead me to question the role of artist-as-activist. But the artists of the Libyan civil war have faced challenges far more dire than those of most North American or European MFAs or career artists—I’ve never even seen a Kalashnikov on an art school campus. By examining a situation where artists risk their lives and the future of their country is at stake, one can cut through biases about the immediacy of art and see its relevance to political situations that appear less pressing or dire.

In a June 18 Al Jazeera English report on the post-uprising street art of liberated Benghazi, journalist Sue Turton stated that the anti-Qaddafi graffiti had grown increasingly sophisticated since the beginning of the revolution. The images shown in the report depict the colonel’s head in a trashcan, in a meat grinder, being punched, hanging from a noose, and scrawled on with a confusing mix of swastikas and Stars of David. Unlike barely-legible Sharpie tags, these murals exhibit technical skill and are often large scale. Some even appear to have been created with paint, palette, and patience. Not only have artists taken the city as their canvas, they have done so with more confidence and pride than was possible under the Qaddafi regime.

In the same report, cartoonist Akram Briki stated that prior to the uprising he would draw pictures of Qaddafi and his crimes, but he could not show them to anyone and had to tear them up, out of fear of repression. Briki’s actions suggest a fundamental need to express political convictions or concerns, so much so that he felt compelled to do so, if only for himself. If humans are truly political animals, then a lack of substantive political expression is a torturous form of dehumanization. Another street artist, Radwan Zwae, reported that before the uprising, he was arrested and beaten for attempted graffiti, and his friend was shot and killed for drawing a caricature of Qaddafi. Now, in an atmosphere that allows for political expression, he is allowed to actualize himself as Radwan Zwae, artist. It is worth noting, however, that my research found no evidence of pro-Qaddafi graffiti in rebel-held Libya, or an indication of what the reaction would have been from the rebel National Transitional Council.

Journalist Rory Mulholland reports in the Guardian that, when the uprising began, Briki (also romanized as Akram al-Bruki) and a group of young men took up arms with their art. The group handed out paper caricatures of Qaddafi, intending people to publicly display them. On March 20, a member of the group, Qais al-Halali (also Kais al-Hilali), was killed by gunmen, suspected by some of being secret police, just after finishing a piece on a Benghazi roundabout. Undeterred, Briki and his colleagues continued their aesthetic insurrection, believing that murals and street art boosted the morale of the armed rebels.

Another interesting observation is that many murals and graffiti scrawls contained English text, suggesting they were intended to be viewed by foreigners just as much as by locals. The word “freedom” appears on countless walls, along with phrases such as, “We don’t give up; have victory or die,” “We are not your puppets anymore!,” “Game over,” and the Obamanian “Change we need,” among others. For these artists, graffiti is more than self-expression; it is also a means of communicating with the outside world. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand tweets.  The international support rebels have gained is indebted to their public relations campaign, of which images of these murals serve as an assertion of dissatisfaction with the ruling regime.

In both the resolve of these artists and in the confidence of their murals, one can witness one of the essential elements of politics. Philosopher Jacques Rancière argues that politics arises when people make “pronouncements on the common which cannot be reduced to voices signaling pain.”[i] That is to say, when one is only a victim, he is not engaged in politics, but is the subject of oppression. The majority of the murals and graffiti of liberated Libya, however, are triumphant and optimistic. With these works, large segments of Libyan society have not just argued, but have shown that they are equals that can co-star on the political stage with the Qaddafi regime. Graffiti is an aesthetic assertion of freedom and power.

These works are the beginning of a post-Qaddafi culture and set the groundwork for the state that will follow, should the rebels succeed in dethroning the colonel. Freedom of expression is quite literally splashed on the walls of the country. Kleptocracy and oppression have been openly criticized for all to see and rally against. To be sure, revolutions rarely end swimmingly, as the messy French Revolution and America’s apartheid revolution quite plainly illustrate. There is no guarantee that democracy will prevail even if the National Transitional Council establishes total sovereignty between the Egyptian and Algerian borders. There is almost no doubt in my mind that graffiti will be viewed as criminal vandalism, as it is all over the world. But the more the messages of these murals are seen, openly discussed, and digested by the Libyan people, the harder it will be for a new regime to usurp these hard won freedoms.

As graves fill in Libya, one could accuse me of failing to understand that the end of the civil war will come through warfare or diplomatic negotiations or something else far more “practical” than adolescent taggings. My approach to understanding the political role of art, however, is holistic, appreciating that no gun, no diplomat, and no mural can change the course of a revolution alone. But politics and culture are not separate spheres, not even separate sides of the same coin. They are inextricably weaved together. To understand this is to acknowledge that cultural producers are politicians—revolutionary or counterrevolutionary politicians, depending on one’s own disposition. We must fight against censorship with vigor, but when Eric Cantor and John Boehner personally attack an exhibition, we can at least take solace in their fear of contemporary art. Libya’s aesthetic insurrection documents the immediacy of the political role of art, but it is not more immediate there, just more present.

For galleries of the graffiti and street art of the Libyan civil war, see:

The International Business Times

The Huffington Post

The New York Times (this blog post by C.J. Chivers is necessary reading about racist and anti-Semitic strands of Libyan street art)

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[i] Jacques Rancière, “Aesthetics and Politics,” in Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009), 24.

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