For Best of 2011, our West Coast Editor, Danielle Sommer, fell in love with Catherine Wagley’s article, Feminist Finish Fetish, from her weekly column, L.A. Expanded. “I loved Catherine’s piece on Judy Chicago. Not just because of the snappy name, but because she managed to reframe Chicago’s practice for me.” – Danielle Sommer. We hope you find Feminist Finish Fetish as enlightening as we do.

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

Judy Chicago, "Car Hood," Sprayed acrylic lacquer on Corvair car hood. 42 15/16 x 49 3/16 x 4 5/16 in. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © Judy Chicago. Photo: Donald Woodman

Pacific Standard Time, a nearly year-long paean to SoCal art history, has barely begun and, already, I’m experiencing PST fatigue. Funded by the Getty Institute and the result of at least a decade’s worth of scholarship by the Getty researchers and others, PST will include 60 or so exhibitions and more artists than you can count, all of whom were working between 1945-1980. Over 60 institutions are “partnering” with the Getty, which means SoCal galleries and museums will be ablaze in the glory of their own history for much of the foreseeable future. Shows have titles like Greetings from L.A.: Artists and Publics 1950–1980 or Best Kept Secret: UC Irvine and the Development of Contemporary Art, 1964-1971, mouthfuls that would be at home on textbook covers. The draw of the PST initiative is, of course, that some of the work on display will have barely been seen since it was made, and uncovering overlooked gems makes a canonized period of L.A. history feel open and alive again. However, even this draw exacerbates the fatigue. Obscure, surprising gems from the 1950, ‘60s or ‘70s will undoubtedly send you reeling back through history; you’ll want to learn more about the work’s making and reconsider its makers. And how will you ever get through 60-plus exhibitions that way?

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As we welcome in the new year at DailyServing, we take the time to reflect on some of the 365 articles, interviews, and reviews we have completed over the last 12 months. Our writer, Catlin Moore, loved Matthew Harrison Tedford’s article from our new series on art and politics, #Hashtags. We are so proud of our regular series, LA Expanded, Fan Mail, and #Hashtags, and we are thrilled to continue our series and have #Hashtags twice a month in 2012!

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#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.

Anti-Qaddafi graffiti in Benghazi, February 25, 2011; artists unknown. Courtesy of Al Jazeera English.

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.

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As we welcome in the new year at DailyServing, we take the time to reflect on some of the 365 articles, interviews, and reviews we have completed over the last 12 months. Today, we have Michelle Schultz’s pick for her favorite article of 2011 — Seth Curcio’s interview with Katy Grannan. ‘I love discovering new artists – and found work of Katy Grannan instantly seductive, but like the light in California, also relentless…’ – Michelle Schultz. We hope you enjoy revisiting some of our personal favorites over the next week.

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Roaming the streets of a metropolitan area, it is easy to become overwhelmed by the scale of urban architecture and the number of individuals that occupy the space. So often, the individual gets lost in the equation; attention is turned to the sum over the parts. For the past three years, San Francisco-based photographer Katy Grannan has walked the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco observing what many choose to overlook — subjects for whom life has been hard and despair has been plenty. Working within the grand tradition of portraiture, Grannan has selected a wide range of subjects for her recent body of work, Boulevard, which is currently on view at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. Grannan turns the city into her studio, shooting each subject on a variety of white surfaces found on location. Relying only on the strong California light and a stark white backdrop, the physicality of her chosen subjects open a myriad of narrative possibilities that simultaneously evoke hardship and optimism. I recently spoke with the artist about the series, Boulevard, her upcoming film project, The Believers, and the shared history between the viewer and her subjects.

Katy Grannan. Anonymous, LA, 2009. Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

Seth Curcio: The portraits in your new series Boulevard are striking in their simplicity. Yet, given the reductive context, each photograph speaks volumes about the subject. The physical qualities of the individual make evident their distance to the what most call the American dream. With the narrative possibilities being so strong, I wonder what are the guiding principles used to select your subjects?

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Commonly founders of organizations are so caught up in the building, growing, and running of the organization that questions of the sustainability after said founder leaves are left unanswered. This is far from the truth for Curator Dan Cameron, the founder of Prospect New Orleans, an international art biennial in its second iteration. He kindly sat down with me to discuss his imminent departure from Prospect to become Chief Curator at the Orange County Museum of Art.

Dawn DeDeaux, The Goddess Fortuna and Her Dunces in an Effort to Make Sense of it All, 2011. Photograph by Michael Smith.

Tori Bush: How does it feel to leave Prospect after over five years founding and cultivating the biennial? Have you accomplished what you wanted to in New Orleans?

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The dark, dreary weather at this time of year casts a shadow over even the most upbeat of Londoners. The shortest day of the year is upon us, with Winter Solstice bringing less than 8 hours of daylight. And with the characteristic haze of grey clouds and drizzle for which England is notoriously known, it is quite difficult to resist the urge to lazily sleep the days away in the comfort of your home.

But artist James Yamada is fighting back against the winter blues. His installation, The summer shelter retreats darkly among the trees, is the first in the aptly titled Parasolstice – Winter Light, a series of outdoor projects in the back garden of London institution Parasol unit, which aim to address the phenomenon of light.

James Yamada: The summer shelter retreats darkly among the trees, 2011, Parasol unit installation view. Photograph by Stephen White.

Yamada’s constructed shelter invites you to sit under it, and bask in its full spectrum light – the same wavelengths used to clinically treat seasonal affective disorder (SAD). The work gives off an otherworldly blue glow reminiscent of the Turrell bubble that descended upon London last winter, but the work of this James has a completely different intention – to restore a sense of normality and functionality to the user, rather than immerse them into anarchic alternate universe. While also a case of science and art joining forces, this installation is far more innocuous than the Turrell, and admittedly, not quite as much fun.

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Grasping the nebulous zone of art and politics can be arduous at best. The curatorial project of Agitated Histories attempts to do just that by compartmentalizing the political narrative. The Re-enactment, The Archive, The Persona, and The Intervention give some scaffolding from which the viewer can approach the work. The artists in this exhibition engage with the political, the social, and the personal through formal concerns and artistic research. We are looking at history (recent) here, through a distinctly political lens.

THE RE-ENACTMENT

One of the most compelling pieces in the exhibition is Mexican artist Yoshua Okón’s Octopus (2011). Created during a residency at the Hammer Museum, the 4-channel video piece grapples with what is both humanizing and alienating. Day laborers re-enact the civil war in Guatemala, wearing in black or white clothing, depending on which side they had fought for. On the set of a Home Depot parking lot, the laborers replay scenes from their country’s history, but now the opposing sides point invisible weapons at an invisible enemy, not at their historical foes. “Octopus” is Guatemalan slang for the United Fruit Company, alluding to the company’s ambiguous role in Guatemalan politics and complicating the narrative further.

THE ARCHIVE

The pliableness of the document becomes evident through Zoe Leonard & Cheryl Dunye’s The Fae Richards Photo Archive (1993-1996). A fictional African American performer is created through an archive of snap shots, film stills, and head-shots. Photography’s role in the construction of history becomes clear as we are left to conjecture about the possibilities of this figure.

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In a recent BBC documentary on J Dilla, the deceased beatmaker’s family and fellow industry folk recount the seminal producer’s style, marked most notably by a counter-quantizing of his drum machine: a drunken mechanization, a meeting point of analog practices (the mythic process of searching through crates of records) and digitization that concurrently sounded ill-programmed (off-beat), yet intentional and on-point. This is man-made modernism, in contrast to the conventional image of crisp lines and sharp edges. So what would J Dilla’s sound look like? Jack White’s Neo-Totems, on display at the African American Art and Culture Center, come to mind.

White is a native of rural North Carolina and has taught in art programs in the American South and Northeast. He describes his work as “Abstract Impressionism”; still, much like underground or “backpack” hip hop, White’s sculptures imagine a future as much as they point to a past. In Neo Totem #11 (2009), discarded and weathered lumber lies next to mass-produced combs, nails and objects: an over four-foot piece of found wood, dusty and handled pieces of metal peeping through stains, and a not immediately visible hair pick. The objects come together, but they are slightly off, or not perfectly symmetrical. Although it might be predictable to state as much about such work, White’s sculptures are soulful.

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