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

Jasper Johns, "Map," 1961, Encaustic, oil, and collage, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Art (C) Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

A block of Grand Avenue in downtown L.A. was  completely blocked off a few days ago, but hanging across the barricades was a big red arrow pointing down Bunker Hill with “jurors” written across it. No other signs told passers-by anything about the construction or about detours, but to let the jurors get lost would be un-American. A friend of mine, an artist, was recently “Juror one” in an L.A. case thrown out after only a day. In that day, however, she parked below Disney Concert Hall and got in for free at MOCA. Jurors, it turns out, get certain perks.

Robert Rauschenberg, "Canyon," 1959, oil, housepaint, pencil, paper, fabric, metal, buttons, nails, cardboard, printed paper, photographs, wood, paint tubes, mirror string, pillow & bald eagle on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.

The jury happened to include another, younger self-declared artist, who at first struck my friend as savvy.  The two of them decided to visit MOCA together, and, walking through the room with the Johns and Rauschenberg work from the museum’s permanent collection, G. asked the question: “Rauschenberg or Johns? Who’s best?” “Well, I really liked those Rothko’s,” the kid she was with said, “but I guess Rauschenberg, if I had to choose, but Pollock’s my favorite.” Clearly, he didn’t get it. Rauschenberg vs. Johns is the litmus test. Your answer shines a mirror on what you want from the world, and on the art scene, it’s a way better personality gauge than, say, Meyers Briggs: The repressed, introverted and calculating Johns vs. the all-out exhibitionist Rauschenberg.

Jasper Johns owned the work of indomitable ceramicist and Dadaist Beatrice Wood, currently the Santa of a Monica Museum of Art retrospective. Wood attended the Arensberg salon (“an inconceivable orgy of sexuality, jazz and alcohol,” according to artist Francis Picabia’s wife), with Duchamp in the 1910s, and then continued art-making, mostly in California, for the rest of the century, until her death in the late 1990s. She made drawings, figurative ceramic sculptures and then whole armies of outlandish teapots, plates and cups, getting all the more daring as she got older. One teapot from 1983 is shaped like a fish. Johns never owned that one, however. The two of the works that were his in the current show include a small brown chalice and a gold plate, both relatively conservative objects but both still exorbitantly shiny, fair examples of the Wood’s oeuvre.  It’s hard to imagine Rauschenberg choosing those two though; I imagine him going for the bolder, weirder shapes—like the teapot with figures dancing on the lid.

Beatrice Wood in her studio

Wood wrote a book called I Shock Myself in 1985, beginning with the line, “While the substance of ceramics is clay and chemicals, the stuff of life is most certainly people.” Which, I guess, is why thinking about the fact that Johns owns Wood, and playing the Rauschenberg vs. Johns game remain endlessly interesting: they acknowledge that what art you want and like have some bearing on who you are as a person.

With the work of over forty artists, History in Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow is a sizeable exhibition; but its scale is not only warranted, it is necessary.  If the internet age ushered in a global culture of multiplicity, then History in Art demonstrates the contemporary attitude toward the formation of a historical record: individual voices make up a flexible, imaginative whole.

Accordingly, there are many approaches to exploring the past in this exhibition.  Some artists take history itself as a subject, while others focus on particular events from the world-shaking to the minutely individualistic.  The overarching theme is solidly postmodernist; a conspicuous refutation of the existence of any single version of events.  In fact, History in Art reinforces the preference for subjectivity by presenting work by artists working in all media and at different stages of their careers.  In this way, the exhibition examines history from almost all angles and media, and the diversity is rewarding.

Shinji Ogawa, Then and Now, Krakow, 2010, acrylic on book

Shinji Ogawa’s practice involves a series of techniques that investigate the image by drawing, overdrawing, halving, doubling, and layering.  Along one wall are three vitrines that encase picture or travel books from various cities.  One example, Then and Now, Krakow (2010) shows two views—one antiquated, one more modern—of the city’s main square with its famous Cloth Hall.  Ogawa has drawn the architectural elements that are cropped out of the originals across the gutter of the book.  His work links the two individual pictures, extending the scene and bringing the past in touch with the present.

Krystyna Piotrowska, I Left Poland Because…, 2010, video, 31 min

Loss haunts many of the works in the exhibition.  Krystyna Piotrowska’s I Left Poland Because… (2010) is a two-channel video projected into the cleft of two angled walls.  Very simply, the two images show a close-up shot of a person uttering sentences beginning with “I left Poland because…” On the left, the person speaks in Polish; on the right, she speaks in English.  When one side is speaking, the other is frozen.  One quote: “I left Poland because it was the only country where I couldn’t be Polish.”  The components of this installation all contribute meaningfully to the whole: the angled walls create a setting where the speaker looks at the audience, but also nearly faces her estranged self.   Additionally, the switch between Polish and English very deftly facilitates an awareness of how language creates identity. The immobility of one side while the other talks points to the barriers of language and the slippage of translation.  In the gap between languages, how much is lost?

Robert Kuśmirowski, Processing, 2011, installation

Robert Kusmirowski’s Processing (2011) is a room-sized installation wherein classical sculptures are ground to dust.  One side begins with the figures in packing cases, then on leftward to threshing and winnowing machines, to a flourmill, a drill, and a sawmill cart.  This allegorical factory reduces even the most durable members of art’s legacy to mere grist for the mill.

Boaz Arad, Marcel, Marcel, 2000, video

Videos presented on flat-screen monitors are scattered throughout the exhibition.  It seems fitting that digital video, that most plastic of media, should be used to examine and recreate history.  Boaz Arad’s work, for example, uses the flexibility of video combined with humor to address the legacy of Hitler and the Nazis.  100 Beats (1999) lampoons Hitler as a pervert masturbating onstage by looping a short clip of der Führer moving his hand in his pocket.  Shalom Jerusalem takes short clips from various archives of Hitler’s speeches to create a public address that never happened: Hitler saying, “Shalom Jerusalem, I apologize.”   In Marcel, Marcel (2000) Hitler’s mustache is playfully re-imagined.  This strategy of using absurdity to counter fear and brutality brings welcome levity to the exhibition as a whole.  Hitler’s reign may seem both geographically far and historically distant to an American audience, but the effects of World War II are still keenly felt in modern-day Poland.  By heightening the buffoonery of a murderous little dictator, Arad swabs old wounds with new laughter.

Today’s feature is brought to you by our friends at Flavorwire, where Alison Nastasi briefly discusses Berlin-based street artist EVOL’s newest project.

In Nordkreuz (“Northern Cross”), Berlin-based street artist EVOL has created a miniature, underground city in the fields of Hamburg, Germany. The installation — which took him eight days to complete — found the artist outside of his typical urban environment, digging into a picturesque meadow to create a grid that viewers could actually walk through. The buildings’ compound-like, grey facade provides a striking contrast to the scenic surroundings, complete with dirt “roads.”

Check out the making-of the installation and the artist’s other work here.

Modernity—in all its West-centric incarnations—has been debated, deliberated and disputed since the last feudal lord packed it in.  Baudelaire lambasted the arbitrary parameters that dictate “advanced” civilization; Machiavelli’s antecedents celebrated them. The very notion of a “modern” world results in a perpetual discourse on the factors that prescribe it. Within the walls of Ambach & Rice’s new Los Angeles gallery, the dialogue persists with Alon Levin’s staggering solo exhibition, Conclusion to the Big Ideas, a collection of insightful works supplemented by the artist’s publication, Modernity in Very General Terms, 2011.  Through its meticulous scrutiny of power structures, capricious rules, and sociological myth, Levin’s work accentuates the irrational aspects of so-called rationality. And yes, he’s privy to a bit of satire.  DailyServing contributor Catlin Moore recently interviewed Alon Levin about his work.

Installation view, courtesy of Ambach & Rice.

Catlin Moore: Let’s start with the book, Modernity in Very General Terms. This piece spans the course of ten years’ worth of writing and research for you, and also serves as a tutorial for your  exhibition currently on view at Ambach & Rice in Los Angeles, Conclusion to the Big Ideas. For those unfamiliar with your work, how are the concepts in the book incarnated in the exhibition, or are they? Is this a relationship you have forged in previous bodies of work?

Alon Levin: I wouldn’t really call the book a tutorial, it is more of a collection of notes to myself. I made the book before I made the work for the show, and I included the book to serve similarly in the context of the exhibition: as a companion piece that is on the one hand a work in and of itself, but that at the same time provides a kind of background to the rest of the exhibition.

CM: Some sections of the book are more minimal than others. For example, “An Introduction to Europolis” consists of incredible detail, empirical evidence and formulas, while “The Object As Never Seen Before” is more allusive.  Why the variation in presentation, and how does that manifest in the tangible artwork?

AL: All the texts and works within the book were originally made with different intentions. Some segments were written to myself, some to friends, some for publication, and still others as works [of art] in and of themselves. “An Introduction to Europolis” was a work that was published in dot dot dot in 2004, while “The Object As Never Seen Before” was part of a reader that accompanied an installation in 2010. Since the book was not written at once or in any linear way, it is as fragmented and seemingly under construction as the rest of the work in the exhibition. Both the written and the physical work range from the severely abstract to the absolutely concrete, while dealing all the while with whatever issues are of interest to me. In that sense, they don’t seem so at odds with one another to me. They are two poles of a language that sometimes clash and sometimes merge.

Book view, courtesy of the artist.

(more…)

Betye Saar, "Red Time," 2011. Installation view. Image courtesy of Roberts and Tilton Gallery.

For the moment, the beating heart of Los Angeles’s Pacific Standard Time is Betye Saar’s installation Red Time, 2011, at Roberts and Tilton.  Saar has transformed the middle room of the gallery into a shrine for past, present, and future, painting Roberts and Tilton’s interior room a bright red and allowing a variety of her customary assemblage works to act as friends and neighbors to each other, despite where they were collected from or when they were made.  In fact, one of the most striking things about Red Time is the position it takes on memory and history.  While Saar has divided Red Time into three separate sections–”In the Beginning,” “Migration and Transformation,” and “Beyond Memory”–she has also unified them through her use of a singular, strong background color and their enclosure in one small room.

Betye Saar, "There Will Be Blood," 2011. Mixed media assemblage. 22.25 x 22.25 in (56.5 x 56.5 cm). Image courtesy of Roberts and Tilton Gallery.

Betye Saar, "Red Time," 2011. Installation View. Image courtesy of Roberts and Tilton Gallery.

Saar first rose to prominence in the 1960s as a Joseph Cornell-inspired assemblage artist who insistently tackled issues of race and history, and these issues remain central, both figuratively and literally.  Many of the pieces that make up the “Migration and Transformation” section of Red Time, which occupies the wall opposite the room’s entrance, are radical détournements of Aunt Jemimah and Uncle Tom figures, a technique that Saar may have been the first to utilize and perfect.  In fact, it is the juxtaposition of the pleasing formal rhythms, the coziness of the physical space, and the chilling historical narratives referenced by pieces such as There Will Be Blood, 2011, To the Manor Born, 2011, and Is Jim Crow Really Dead, 1972, that drives the work.

Betye Saar, "To the Manor Born," 2011. Mixed media assemblage. 11.5 x 20.5 x 2.25 in (29.2 x 52.1 x 5.7 cm). Image courtesy of Roberts and Tilton Gallery.

Betye Saar, "Red Time," 2011. Installation View. Image courtesy of Roberts and Tilton Gallery.

Among the works that Saar felt absolutely needed to be present in the installation is Red Ascension, 2011, a wooden ladder hung toward the top of the wall in “Beyond Memory.”  Nestled amongst the rungs are wooden sculptures that tell a familiar story:  an African mask, several wooden ships, chains, and a crescent moon and star.  The ladder points viewers to the wall that is both the first and last in the exhibit, the wall to which their backs are turned for the majority of time they are in the room.  It is the wall with the entry and exit door, on which a series of masks hang, looking back at the viewers with all manners of expression.  Red Time is not solely a time of despair or anger.  It is also a time of rebirth and open-ended questioning.

In honor of the beginning of Autumn, today from the DS Archives we bring you the sobering mystery of Johannes Kahrs. Kahrs’ second solo exhibition at Luhring Augustine is on view until October 22, 2011.

The following article was originally published by Julie Henson on February 16, 2010.

I have to admit, there is nothing more impressive to me than a well executed painting, and spending some time with the work of Johannes Kahrs has done nothing but revive this fascination. Living somewhere between film, modern news media and history painting, Kahrs’ work seamlessly merges the beauty and tradition of painting and portraiture with banal yet grotesque objectivity, seducing the viewer into a reductive, saturated palate only to confront them with an aggressive yet all too familiar imagery. Choosing images generally experienced through second hand sources of information, Kahrs infuses his paintings and drawings with the drama of film, creating a sense of constant motion and closeness within a still and fragmented plane. Claiming imagery typically referenced through our daily interaction with media sources, Kahrs builds on the diversity of photographic images infused with the seductive palette of artists such as Richter and Tuymans, but invests them with a grotesque, bodily relationship to the viewer seen in the work of Jenny Saville. Kahr’s dark and alluring palette creates an ominous sensation surrounding his shrouded, anonymous figures that instantly builds a narrative within his intentionally extracted context. Kahrs’ film-like color references the emotive palette seen in work such as Luc Tuymans’ Gaskamer, but builds another narrative context that remains familiar but unidentifiable.

Nevertheless, it is his hybridization of media that keeps me coming back to his work. The sensation of moving film, rather than a captured photograph, comes not just from rendering from video stills, but showing sequences of images with a subtle shift in time. Kahrs employs a blurring and shifting of images, but also blurs the identity of his subjects, contributing to his seamless combination of the banal and the grotesque. This obscuring of subjects to a point of abstraction, allowing faces to melt off the subjects like those of Francis Bacon’s portraits, elevates while disguising the identity of the mundane, drawing on our cultural over saturation and disconnection from the physicality of violence. Further complicating his role in creating the image, Kahrs paintings and drawings are often shown behind glass, emphasizing the viewer’s separation from the work and further masking the artist’s hand. This masking and obscuring of time combined with the multiple references to media builds more questions than answers, giving someone a place to investigate and question both the history of painting and its relationship to modern life.

Kahrs recent exhibitions have included solo shows with Luhring Augustine in New York and GAMeC in Bergamo, Italy, in addition to several group shows at the Phoenix Art Museum, the SFMOMA and Museu Serralves in Porto, Portugal. Kahrs currently lives and works in Berlin.

A Premonition of the Future, 2011; used and new books, reclaimed timber; dimensions variable. Courtesy of Sorcha Dallas

Gary Rough’s solo show, ‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. …’ was developed during a residency of five weeks in the galleries of Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow.

A Premonition of the Future, 2011 (detail); used and new books; reclaimed timber; dimensions variable. Courtesy of Sorcha Dallas

In the first gallery, copies of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ sit on shelves, lining the upper perimeter of the gallery. An installation of Rough’s ongoing attempt to acquire one thousand, nine hundred and eighty-four copies of ‘1984’ that are either used or gifts, the ominously titled work A Premonition of the Future carries with it the text’s dystopian notions of censorship and suppressed freedom.  On one hand, the described attempt represents a feat of encountering and collecting the literal and symbolic meanings of the text as it passes through the hands of others. Viewers are presented with a state in-between that speaks of potential, and a sampling of book covers reflecting the proliferation of the text across various publishing and distribution channels over time. On the other hand, the sparseness of the installation and its out-of-reach display alludes to a quest that cannot be attained, contrasting with the narrated ambition.

Top: Untitled, 2011; emulsion on wall; dimensions variable. Bottom (Left to Right): Failed Pattern (Left), 2011; Failed Pattern (Wrong), 2011; Failed Pattern (Right), 2011. All drawings framed pen on paper; 63.4 x 50.8 x 3.5 cm. Courtesy of Sorcha Dallas

The curious admixture of endeavor and futility is strongly apparent in the second gallery, displaying three pen drawings from an ongoing Failed Pattern series where deliberate errors are created that distort the regularity of harlequin patterns. These drawings are distinguished through titles that play with the sense of both space and failure, and dialogue with a lone pen drawing, Failed Pattern (Away from Here) that is hung in the office of Sorcha Dallas as part of the exhibition. The exercise in creating intentional failed patterns is paralleled along corners of the gallery walls that appear to be painted at the same height of the shelves of A Premonition of the Future, creating a visual continuation across both galleries. While the cumulative effect of the distortions in the pen drawings creates curvatures and a slightly optical effect; the use of paint for the patterns of the wall make room for the mistakes to be demonstrated through drips and cracks, presenting a sense of beauty that arises from exercises in failure.

Top: Untitled, 2011; emulsion on wall; dimensions variable. Bottom: Failed Pattern (Left), 2011; framed pen on paper; 63.4 x 50.8 x 3.5 cm. Courtesy of Sorcha Dallas

Across both galleries, the installation and drawings compel one to think of the ways that narratives and practices of effort and failure act as recurring patterns in the rhythm of life one encounters on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. …

Born in Glasgow, Rough (b.1972) is now based in New York, and has presented solo exhibitions at Inverleith House, Edinburgh; PS. 1 MoMA, New York; McCaffrey Fine Art, NY, and Yvon Lambert, Paris.