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

Carl Cheng, "U.N. of C.," 1967, Film, molded plastic, Styrofoam and Plexiglas, 15 x 20.75 x 9 in

Artist Craig Kauffman had been living in Europe and was on his way home to L.A. in the early 1960s when he stopped in New York and saw the work of former friend and neighbor, Billy Al Bengston, on view at Martha Jackson Gallery. Bengston, one of L.A. cool motorcycle-savvy surfer artists had been an abstract painter at the end of the 1950s, as had Kauffman. But now, his canvases were lacquered, spray-painted and shining. That’s what I need to be doing, Kauffman decided, and, when he returned to the Sunshine state, Bengston helped him out, teaching him to spray paint on glass and plastic.[1] It was when Kauffman discovered vacuum-formed plastic, however, that his work really hit its stride. He started using the same technologies the aerospace industry used to make its curved plastic plane windows, creating sleek, clean plastic wall reliefs that he called plastic “erotics.” They had the newness of industry innovations and the lightheartedness of pop.

Craig Kauffman, "Untitled," 1968.

Because, for me, vacuum forms have more or less become synonymous with Kauffman and cleanness, I was thrilled to discover a different take on molded plastic at Cherry and Martin gallery in Culver City last weekend. Cherry and Martin’s current exhibition, Photography into Sculpture, restages a seminal exhibition that initially occurred in 1970 at MoMA, then traveled across the country. Curated by photo historian Peter Bunnell, the original show put its finger on the pulse of a trend: 3-D photography. Bringing L.A.-based artists and photo-conceptualists together with Vancouver-based photographers, Bunnell showed images that had been re-embodied, so that the flat, condensed space of the picture plane  no longer “depicted” but became multi-sided, dense and object-like.

Carl Cheng, "Sculpture for Stereo Viewers," 1968, Film, molded plastic, wood and Plexiglas, 16.5 x 18 x 8 in

Photographers, it turns out, were tuned into plastics, too. But their take didn’t optimistically celebrate the finish fetish of industrial production. Instead, by using molded plastic to “inflate” formerly flat camera imagery, artists like Carl Cheng and Michael Stone made photographs feel overstuffed in a sort of messy way. In U.N. of C., Cheng’s humping  yellow bears and top-heavy waving U.S. and California state flags are visual comedy: regionalism is blown-up like a flimsy toy, and the vacuum-forms that looked so imperturbable when Kauffman used them, here look like cartoons. That the L.A. Look–which critic Peter Plagens defined in terms of “permanence,” “technical expertise,” and “preciousness (when polished)”–had a more complicated, less polished underside isn’t news, but it’s great to see in the flesh nonetheless, because it drives home the point that no aesthetic trend, not even one toward pristine plastic, is incorruptible.

[1] Hunter Drohojowska-Philp gives this account in her new book Rebels in Paradise.

Across the San Francisco Bay, Oakland can often seem like entirely different world compared to “The City.” There is a general air of anything goes, as you wander down the streets filled with people from all walks of life. Punks, hipsters, young, cool professionals who used to be vegan anarchists before they had kids and got a real job, all contribute to the truly unique nature of the deceptively vast city of Oakland. Because of its particularly diverse inhabitants, our diamond in the rough promotes a kind of raw creativity that can result in artistic voices that ring true.

Bischoff Soren Black installation image, 2011. Image courtesy of Johansson Projects

The current exhibit at Johansson Projects is how Oakland often seems; vibrant, mysterious and disorienting, with an underlying hum of recognition. The title of the show, BISCHOFF SOREN BLACK, when said aloud sounds like it could be part of a chant or spell, or the name of some mythical creature, when it is simply the last names of the three featured artists, Brice Bischoff, Tabitha Soren and Ellen Black. The works of all three artists combine to create a narrative of time, space, humanity and chaos.

Brice Bischoff, Bronson Cave VI, c-print, 2011

Upon first entering the gallery, you’re confronted with the contrast of Ellen Black’s stark, abstract geometric sculptures housing small video screens, and the dreamy cave interiors created by Brice Bischoff, that look like he was somehow able to get a whole rainbow to sit (relatively) still long enough to release the shutter of his camera. The caves filled with the unintelligible blurs use the magical capabilities of photography to illuminate and emphasize the mystical, contrasting qualities of caves and the light that fills them. The depth of each location anthropomorphizes the earth’s occupants before living creatures evolved – giving  life to the elements.

Tabitha Soren, Panic Beach 15759-3, pigment print, 2011

This quiet, pre-human interaction between earth, fire, water and air crashes into the violent un-worldliness of Tabitha Soren’s photographs. By inverting the images, Soren presents us with a tumultuous world that brings to mind the primordial soup from which we all came. With water crashing everywhere, it is sometimes hard to firmly orient oneself on the ground, causing the same kind of uneasiness one feels when stepping off a boat after being on the water for hours.

Tabitha Soren, Panic Beach 06734-20, pigment print, 2011

As soon as you feel like you’re finally getting a grasp of what is going on, Ellen Black’s video installations throw you back into the abstract. The white containers that hold her tiny video screens are more like quantum cubes than “boxes,” with edges and corners jutting out as if an unexpecting polygon was frozen while in transformation from one shape to another. The video pieces reflect their containers’ fluctuating desolation, with bleak beach scenes layered on top of other geographic scenes that break through the video’s digital deterioration, while miniature silhouetted figures wander with no apparent purpose across the landscape, some may be playing or drowning in the surf.

Ellen Black, Last Summer, single channel video, 2011

The experience of viewing the exhibition is one of quiet turmoil in contrast with the inherent beauty of the natural world. Like watching a video of a forest fire with the sound off, you know that something destructive is happening, but you know it will lead to regeneration. And of course there’s no denying how beautifully mesmerizing it is.

BISCHOFF SOREN BLACK will be on view at Johansson Projects until October 15, 2011.

A walk along Toronto’s west Queen West these days is a journey through a neighbourhood still in the throes of gentrification. With a thriving gallery scene now fully entrenched, the condos are going up, taking shape amidst the soaring cranes and massive construction pits. A little jaunt south of the main drag, a newly-renovated 99 Sudbury now holds a fitness club and event spaces, as well as a commercial gallery—a newly-minted 6,000 square-foot white cube. The inaugural exhibition, which opened on August 25^th, is a whimsical group show curated by Art Spin, their second annual show, and something of a coda to their regular contemporary art bicycle tours.

James Gauvreau, Really Long Lake (installation view), wood and video, courtesy 99 Gallery, photo: Jesse Milne

Though the show consciously avoids a thematic framework, the individual works (by a dozen Ontarians), gain a certain coherence here—not only in relation to each other, but to the relatively majestic space they occupy—it would be possible, you feel, wandering through the gallery, to make a bicycle tour of the exhibition itself, and the breathing room is crucial to the larger energy fields many of the pieces project.

Gareth Lichty, Enclosure, construction fencing, courtesy 99 Gallery, Photo: Jesse Milne

But it’s the relationship to the neighbourhood that’s most compelling, to me at least, as raw, industrial materials, some of which seem like they could have been scavenged from nearby construction zones, are here creatively re-purposed inside the gallery.

The room is anchored by James Gauvreau’s Really Long Lake, which narrows to the top of the 17-foot ceiling and incorporates a projection and a mirrored floor—a kind of meditative, rustic, fun-house.

James Gauvreau, Really Long Lake (interior), wood and video, courtesy 99 Gallery

It’s flanked by new work by Gareth Lichty, who turns vibrant orange construction fencing into minimalist vessels, and by Hamilton collective TH&B’s Transmission, an industrial radio tower topped by quietly sonic satellite dishes overgrown, seemingly organically, by a hive of burrs—a worthy follow-up to 2008’s Swarm, which generates a similar sense of electric energy and an underlying, pervasive anxiety.

TH&B, Transmission, burrs, radio tower, cable, satellite dishes, found objects, courtesy 99 Gallery, Photo: Jesse Milne

Surrounding wall-mounted works reinforce the sense of intensive craftsmanship and renewed interest in the art object’s meticulous construction. On the far wall, Markus Heckmann’s Reg Ex flashes neon lines that evoke the light works of Dan Flavin, but are here formed by whitewashed 2×4s mounted in vertical lines and generative animation, displacing the source of light as an external projection.

Vanessa Maltese, Wall Grid No. 2 (Studio Sculptures), wood and acrylic paint, courtesy 99 Gallery, Photo: Jesse Milne

On the other side of the room, the tiny, perfectly formed pieces of sculpted wood that make up Vanessa Maltese’s Wall Grid No.2 (Studio Sculptures) are a geometric counterbalance, revisiting modernist forms in the gem-like, obsessive shape of miniatures. With a similarly pared down aesthetic, Sarah Elizabeth McCaw’s suite of works pair texts like “I am not 100 percent sure we can do this” and “Everything is going to be all right” with wooden models reminiscent of broken wall clocks, with simple moving parts: completely mesmerizing exercises in futility.

Sarah Elizabeth McCaw, I Am Not 100 Percent Sure We Can Do This, wood, acrylic and motor, courtesy 99 Gallery, Photo: Jesse Milne

The first and last piece you see in the space is a panoramic painting by Toronto-based Gillian Iles, Eden is Tempting but Not to be Trusted, a vibrant canvas that foretells and reflects the restless imagination and sense of absurdity in the room.

It’s worth a spin.

Gillian Iles, Eden is Tempting but Not to be Trusted, oil, acrylic and pastel on canvas, courtesy 99 Gallery, Photo: Jesse Milne

With additional work by Wrik Mead, Keith Bently, Tom Ngo and Scott Eunson. Art Spin’s Second Annual Exhibition at 99 Gallery is on view Tuesday to Saturday, noon to five, until September 24^th.

I am as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
- John Dryden, The Conquest of Granada, 1672

At this point, everyone knows that street artists leave completely unexpected artworks that don’t last long but that are often more absorbing than the works we usually get to see in museums. Because of the ambitious and courageous nature of illegally staking your claim to expression, translating the fresh thoughts and passion of street art into the sedate world of the white cube has always been near impossible.

Swoon, Anthropocene Extinction (detail), 2011, Courtesy of the artist, Photo: John Kennard

To me, Swoon has always been aware of this. She stands out as having an inherent understanding that “street art” in the modern art market involves that translation. She has unabashedly kept her work from being simple objects; slick, archival consumables that works within the limits set forth by collectors and institutions. To use an analogy, she wants to produce the symbolic rawness of the Andre the Giant sticker, not the corporate efficiency of the Obey brand.

Swoon has been commissioned to create “Anthropocene Extinction” for the Boston ICA’s fifth installation of the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall (on view through Dec 30, 2011). Her work is a sermon built from international symbols of humanity’s relationship to planet Earth. It’s an alluring mural of cut paper and relief prints with an umbilical cord of cut paper party-streamers running to a bamboo sculpture that lives next to the museum’s giant glass elevator. It enlivens the space like no other Fineberg Art Wall installation. The work shows off her skills with lines and drawing, her ability to control color, and the quality of her printing techniques.

Swoon, Anthropocene Extinction, 2011. Photo: Geoff Hargadon for Brooklyn Street Art.

The rhythm and composition of the individual prints/paper cuts is exceedingly regular and controlled. The mural is a hodgepodge of stuff with no given proportion. It’s a scalable image capable of being resized for almost any application. The bamboo sculpture takes after Asian scaffolding. It seems like a pagoda, but has what looks like wedding cakes on it and a beehive surrounded by butterflies at the top. No matter how attractive it is, I’m not sure what it’s supposed to represent or how it relates to the mural.

Swoon’s message relies on the myth of the noble savage. Ms. Bennett, the last living nomad personifies a blameless innocent, a buddha sitting on top of a string of Tibetan deity masks, surrounded by animal totems that represent the extinction in the work’s title. Why Ms. Bennett is 20 times larger than the animals, I’m not sure. It certainly encourages the reading that the animals are less significant than the human. It also seems very Victorian to send out an artists to bring back the last living nomad to a museum setting.

Swoon, Anthropocene Extinction, 2011. Photo: Black Rainbow Extraordinaire Magazine.

Not that it makes it less of a work, but this installation has nothing to do with street art. It uses wheatpaste, but is that all it takes to be a street artist? The work as exhibited is a printstallation; a hybrid format (of installation made from or about prints) that has been a part of the print community for years. Do street artists get shipping budgets and 9 days with a crew of 5 plus an equal amount of student assistants to put up their work? To insist that this is a street art piece implies that her work is so unexplainable and independent from the norm of contemporary art that she’s some kind of freak outsider. She is an artist. An artist who still leaves jewels for people to find on the street, but an artwork in a museum does not parallel the relationship between artwork and street.

Over the course of its three-day installation in July 2011, Richard Serra’s "Sequence," on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, both reveals itself and conceals the expansive space it inhabits. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is engaged in a dangerous experiment, and it is not the levitation of a twenty-ton piece of Richard Serra’s steel sculpture, Sequence, 2006, thirty feet into the air. Nor is it the gyration of a 200-foot tall crane lifting the first of twelve panels—each almost thirteen-feet high and between thirty- and forty-feet long—from a flatbed trailer onto a concrete slab three-quarters the size of a baseball diamond. The ironworkers from the Hauppauge, New York, rigging company, Budco Enterprises, have handled all of Serra’s North American installations for the past 20 years. The dangerous experiment is, instead, the transplantation of the sixty-five by forty-foot labyrinthine sculpture into a site that the artist did not specify when he first created the piece.

Two 20-ton plates from Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, swing into place. Video: Rob Marks, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Serra is famous for his site-specific sculptures. Of Tilted Arc, 1981, the 200-foot long grandparent to arced works like Sequence, Serra proclaimed, during a U.S. General Services Administration hearing to determine the disposition of the piece, “To remove the work is to destroy the work.” Commissioned and approved by the Carter administration, and constructed in lower Manhattan’s Federal Plaza, Tilted Arc was eventually decommissioned, forsworn, and bundled into storage by the Reagan administration. We can never know whether the Tilted Arc controversy—the first salvo of the 1980s culture wars—would have subsided had the surrounding political context not pre-empted the community’s process of coming to know the sculpture. Many of Serra’s public works, however, are now valued by the communities that first rejected them.

Other Serra pieces, including Clara-Clara, 1983, and Torqued Spiral (Closed Open Closed Open Closed), 2003, have, with Serra’s participation, found second homes. Sequence, however, may evolve into the most itinerant of Serra’s behemoths. Conceived for a gallery at the New York Museum of Modern Art and installed there in 2007 for Serrra’s 40-year retrospective, the sculpture traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008. This year, Sequence, now owned by the Fisher Art Foundation, traveled from LACMA to the Cantor Arts Center, where it is currently on loan from the foundation and where it will reside until in 2016. Then it will move, perhaps finally, 35 miles northwest to a new wing of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Left: Trailer as it prepares to move a plate from storage lot to installation site. Riggers remove the chains holding a plate to its trailer. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Can Sequence, removed from its place of origin, sustain its prodigious capacity to shape space and lead us to the conscious and embodied experience of what we often take for granted? Will it still unmoor space and time from the feet and inches, seconds and minutes that define them in everyday life and provoke the reorientation of thinking and the individual psychological experience that Serra seeks for participants who engage the sculpture? In 2007, Serra told PBS’s Charlie Rose, “I think these pieces really need the definition of architecture,” referring to Sequence and its two gallery siblings. “They need a flat floor. They need a certain contained volume. I think these pieces might be able to be in a courtyard, but if you put these pieces outside, say in a big field, they’re going to get lost.”

Left: Master Rigger Joe Vilardi (center, in black shirt), and riggers John Barbieri, Joe Berlese, and Bill Maroney, survey the concrete slab. Right: Master Rigger Joe Vilardi (right) and rigger John Barbieri (left) plot reference points that will guide the installation of Richard Serra's "Sequence" (on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation). Photo: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

The gallery at New York MoMA, an awkward H-shaped space with a low ceiling, seemed barely able to contain the three pieces. For some, this was the exhibit’s flaw: the sculptures had no room to breathe. We are used to viewing sculpture from the outside, framed by an expanse of space. For Serra, who seeks always to confound the viewer’s desire to see the entire sculpture at once, the cramped MoMA quarters may, in fact, have been preferable. Indeed, the frustration some visitors felt may have stemmed from the sculptures’ ability to stymie the creation of a purely visual experience separate from the body’s active engagement with them. In New York, Serra had produced new space in a place where visual inspection suggested there was little to spare. Within each sculpture’s orbit, the participant’s perception of space expands and contracts, independent of the gallery’s concrete dimensions. In this context, Sequence seemed akin to a magician’s hat from which emerges far more matter than could be contained by the dimensions of the magician’s head.

How then can such a piece successfully reconform itself—and the experiences of its participants—to an exterior space 3,000 miles away? How can the activity of getting lost in what Serra describes as “a seemingly endless path between two leaning walls” about which “you cannot recollect or reconstruct a definite memory” be preserved in a courtyard where landmarks—a roof, a terrace, a tree, even a hanging cloud—continually orient the participant?

Left photos: Lost inside Richard Serra’s Sequence (on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation). Right: Parapets of the museum’s old wing peek above the sculpture. Photo: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

On Monday, July 18, the bare concrete pad seems to provide some reassurance. Two- to three-feet thick and doubly reinforced with rebar, according to Cantor Operations Manager, Steve Green, the pad should satisfy Serra’s desire for a flat floor. More than this, however, nestling the bulk of the sculpture into the cul-de-sac formed by the Cantor’s original building, its octagonal extension, and its new wing, seems to realize the “definition of architecture” Serra had specified for Sequence and its siblings. Further, Museum Director Tom Seligman said that the Cantor Center had been in close contact with Serra, and the artist approved of the site.

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

#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.

Ryan McGinley, "Tom (Golden Tunnel)," 2010, C-Print, 72 x 110 inches. Courtesy Team Gallery.

Ten years ago today, on September 11, 2001, at 5:46 am Pacific Standard Time, I was asleep in the semi-darkness of an Oregon dawn.  I was still asleep at 6:03 am.  By 6:37 am, however, I had been jolted awake by the ringing sound of a telephone in another room of the house, and then by the sound of footsteps coming towards my door, and—eventually—by the information that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.  For better or worse, I missed the initial confusion, the questions about irregular flight patterns and problems with air traffic control.  By the time I got to the television set, Bush had held his moment of silence, there were reports of a fire at the Pentagon, and it was clear that this was a planned attack.

I watched as President George W. Bush sent our troops into Afghanistan, eventually dragging the rest of the world—in the form of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force —behind him.  In March of 2003, I finally saw the negative space punched out of the Manhattan skyline with my own eyes.  Coincidentally, it was the same week that Bush dropped thinly veiled threats via his press secretary that if the United Nations did not take action against Iraq, other “international bodies” would.  And we did, despite the fact that the motives given were dubious and lacked hard evidence.

I was twenty-five in 2001.  I was not a child, or a teenager whose nightmare became the bogeyman in the form of Osama bin Laden.  My nightmare, post-9/11, has been many the frequent and many betrayals of the citizens of the United States by its government at the levels of accountability and policy.  Watching President Barack Obama announce the death of Osama bin Laden, I felt no relief.  The War in Afghanistan is listed as ongoing (2001-present).  Our engagement with Iraq is ongoing.

It has been a decade, long enough to have begun to talk about post-9/11 trends in art and literature, long enough for those artists and writers whose practices weren’t quite set on September 11, 2011, to have grown up and to have incorporated their own personal nightmares into their production.  Earlier this summer, OHWOW Gallery in Los Angeles staged “Post-9/11,”  with work by New-York-based-artists Ryan McGinley and his circle.  The keystone piece, McGinley’s Tom (Golden Tunnel), 2010, features a naked man walking toward a golden light at the end of a stone or concrete tunnel with his hand guarding his eyes.  The light washes everything in the photo.

The exhibition title itself was merely meant to be provocative, as well as to encapsulate McGinley and his milieu.  This was not a grand curatorial retrospective of Post-9/11 art.  But I have gone back to McGinley’s photo multiple times, made a little nauseous by the combination of the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel metaphor, McGinley’s capital-R Romanticism, and the double-entendre of the show title.  Are we post-9/11?  Have we survived and come through to the other side?  If we have, we are irrevocably changed.  The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.

For this edition of Fan Mail, Denver based CO-LAB 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!

CO-LAB (Chris Coleman & Laleh Mehran). Installation view of "W3FI" at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Interactive Installation.

I remember arriving at college as a bright-eyed freshman and recognizing familiar faces within moments. It was not because I went to a small school or because I had met these classmates at orientation events in my hometown, but rather that I had done my due diligence on Facebook. Today, not a week goes by that I don’t find myself googling unfamiliar names or wishing a friend Happy Birthday by e-card – or dare I admit it, text – rather than by phone or hallmark card. And yet none of this feels strange.

It is this unprecedented interconnectedness fostered by the digital world that CO-LAB founders Laleh Mehran and Chris Coleman take as a point of departure for their most recent project entitled W3FI. An unmistakable play on words, W3FI is a combination of WiFi, the word “we” and the slang use of the number 3 in place of the letter “e” as a nod to the digital parts of our lives. The W3FI project encourages people to consider their online identities – referred to as S3LF – and how we can use technology to interact with one another in positive ways. The artists explain, “[t]he W3FI project is much more than an awareness campaign, it is a movement in social activism to ask a new set of questions for each of us every time we click, text, or share a photo.”

In its manifestation at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, W3FI is an interactive installation in every sense of the word. The project’s central tenants are presented on the gallery walls as a series of moving texts and symbols alongside dynamic statistics about national and international use of the internet, cell phones and social networks. Broad statistics – usually difficult to grasp in real terms – are made more tangible through their juxtaposition with data that relate directly to the Boulder area. A topographic map of the region is overlaid by animated visualizations of internet use and signal data. Live tweets from local residents utilizing the words “I” or “we” punctuate the gallery walls as well. Museum visitors can become a part of the W3FI network by having images of their faces taken and integrated into an ever-growing forest of interconnected trees projected along the gallery walls. While many museum galleries offer limited seating – encouraging visitors to rapidly proceed through the galleries – seats are deliberately interspersed throughout the W3FI project space in order to facilitate discussion, learning, reading and quiet contemplation.

CO-LAB (Chris Coleman & Laleh Mehran). Installation view of "W3FI" at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Interactive Installation.

CO-LAB does not merely demonstrate a philosophy and data with W3FI. They bring this concept to bear by relying on Open Source software and hardware in designing the installation. Open Source encourages the sharing of knowledge and work by having contributors make all the files they have developed available online for others to copy, supplement and improve. Generating the terrain of Boulder for the map, controlling the glowing seats and the forest of faces on the “W3FI tree” were all made possible through various Open Source programs and hardware.

While the project unfortunately closes tomorrow, never fear – W3FI will live beyond this singular venue. CO-LAB’s goal is to continue promoting the W3FI presence in both real and digital space; online it will be represented by websites, pages and social networking media. And in the “real world,” Mehran and Coleman will continue to organize traveling exhibitions.