There’s a sweetly prophetic story about Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in Calvin Tomkins’ iconic art-crowd chronicle, Off The Wall. The story, which makes the gap between innovation and belonging look extremely narrow, goes like this: it was the summer of ’55 and Johns and Rauschenberg lived symbiotically, popping in on each other at least daily and swapping ideas with so much success that they even tried making one another’s work. By this point, Johns had begun his flags—a new direction that “came to him in a dream”—and Rauschenberg found Johns’ encaustic process seductive. “It smelled so delicious, and it looked so good,” said Rauschenberg, quoted by Tomkins, “all those aromatic bubbling waxes.” After some begging, Johns let Rauschenberg add a stripe to a flag, but Rauschenberg, too infatuated by wax to pay attention to composition, dragged a heavy red stripe right across an already-painted white one, ruining his chances of ever touching Johns’ work again.

Around the same time,  Johns tried his hand at some Rauschenberg works. “I thought I understood,” said Johns. “But mine weren’t convincing at all.” A few years later, and the two artists barely spoke.

This hexed collaboration gets at something predictably true about art-making in general—it’s not vision that pulls most into the business of making, at least not at first. It’s wanting to be part of a vision you’d observed from the outside, or a world you saw other artists building. But entering someone else’s vision, it turns out, can be excruciatingly difficult, maybe even impossible. It’s sometimes easier to find a vision of your own.

Mark Grotjahn, "Untitled (Face for Greece 843)," 2009, Oil on cardboard mounted on linen. Courtesy Blum & Poe Gallery.

Mark Grotjahn’s current exhibition at Blum & Poe intermittently innovates and belongs.  Called Seven Faces, it’s full of lanky yet dense almost-abstractions, paintings with as much primitive gusto as de Kooning’s Woman and as much flat, psychedelic guile as Fred Tomaselli’s Geode. Surprisingly economical—oil has been layered on top of cardboard which has been stapled to stretched linen, and the cavities and protrusions represent come from cardboard that has been layered or cut into, not paint that has been lathered—each work consists of scraggly calculated stripes that all seem to radiate from an imaginary point or boundary line. Tucked in among these stripes, eyes, the kind that exist only for looking out and don’t claim to be windows into anything, glare into the space right in front of them. Sometimes, toothy monster mouths break through the stripes, too.

Mark Grotjahn Untitled (Black Over Red Orange "Mean as a Snake" Face 842), 2009, Oil on cardboard mounted on linen. Courtesy Blum & Poe Gallery.

Grotjahn’s work announces itself as smart. Whether his sleek, perspectival hipster abstractions, or these rougher, stranger faces, a Grotjahn painting exudes self-knowledge. It knows that it fits into a legacy, and embraces every nuance of that legacy from Picasso, whose distorted figures had similar, overly-wide petal-shaped eyes, to Johns, who was pioneered painterly but cooly controlled line-making; it knows that it’s derivative, but it also knows that it isn’t redundant and that it doesn’t seamlessly belong to any pre-existing category. This sort of uber-awareness doesn’t feel contrived, however; it feels like a personality trait.

I would recognize Grotjahn’s work anywhere because of its quirks, including an obsession with perspective and symmetry that may not be original but has never quite looked the way Grotjahn makes it look–slightly cagey precision that paradoxically coexists with liberal painterliness. I like to think of Grotjahn as a big fan who found a signature not because he was a visionary with something cataclysmic to say but because he still wanted to talk about how perspective skews perception and paint adheres to surface. To have a conversation, you need a voice. But you don’t need an aggressive, groundbreaking one to keep the talking going.

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

"We Live in Public," Film Still, 2008.

Josh Harris welcomed the new millennium from the basement of a New York bunker. He was surrounded by a posse of jumpsuit-clad creatives, and, at one point, all of them watched as a naked man whipped a barely dressed woman around underneath a running shower head. The scene made about as much physical sense as Bernini’s The Rape of Prosperina—the bodies twisted perpetually but never quite met in the way you’d expect them to. Harris and his companions watched the crude assault as though it were on television.

One of the first entrepreneurs to channel the potential of internet TV, Harris used a significant portion of his dot-com  fortune to build the bunker, which he called Capsule Hotel and filled with over 100 mini living pods, a shooting gallery, interrogation room, banquet hall, bar, and obscene number of cameras and video monitors. By the time New Years’ Eve arrived, 150 people had lived in the Hotel for nearly a month.

Residents (including Alanna Heiss, P.S.1’s haughtily fearless matron) submitted to constant surveillance and interrogation in exchange for admittance. Not only were members of the panoptical community watched, but they could watch one another by tuning in to any channel on any of the readily-available monitors.

"We Live in Public," Film Still, 2008.

“Everything is free except the video we capture of you. That, we own,” says Harris in We Live in Public, an unpretentiously efficient documentary released on DVD this week. It’s a telling quote because it suggests that the opposite of free is not costliness but being owned, and it pushes Harris’ experiment out of the realm of asset-swapping and into soul-selling.

Directed by Ondi Timoner, We Live in Public follows Harris through the birth of his dot-com fortune and his subsequent series of ahead-of-their-time media experiments. Harris plays villain and hero, acting as a self-appointed artist-prophet who exploits people’s penchant for attention and thus exposes a future in which “we’re going to increasingly have our lives exposed in very personal and intimate ways and we’ll want it to happen.” Chuck Klosterman would almost certainly call Harris “advanced.”

Not long after Quiet, the 24/7 bunker surveillance venture, was shut down by the NYPD  in early January, 2000, Harris invited his girlfriend Tanya to move in with him. Together, they went public. They installed nearly thirty web cameras in their home, including one in the toilet, and streamed their whole life onto the web. When they fought, they would run immediately to their computers, to see which of them had the allegiance of chat room regulars.

It ended badly, of course. After the dot-com crash, in which Harris’ fortune all but disappeared, Harris ended his relationship with Tanya (later he would call her a “pseudo-girlfriend,” though she claims they loved each other) and pulled the plug on public living.

As the rest of the world caught on to online chatting and video streams, Harris pulled away, initially living on a rural apple farm and later disappearing to Ethiopia to evade creditors.

Gustavo Artigas, "Vote for Demolition," 2009. Courtesy LAX Art.

Exposure doesn’t mean what it used to mean. Now the well-trafficked terrain of mainstream websites and reality TV, it often seems contrived and redundant when it appears in art. Many of the best artist-driven social experiments I’ve encountered this year refuse to invaded peoples’ privacy and, as a result, they seem perfunctory, even impersonal.

In Vote for Demolition, artist Gustavo Artigas invited people to vote for which over-priced, over-sized Los Angeles’ building most deserved the wrecking ball. The voting booths at LAX Art were perfectly spaced, giving voters plenty of room to deliberate, and Artigas asked for no personal information. The “surveillance” in John Baldessari’s recent exhibition is carefully unobtrusive–a camera watches you watching art, and, while art-viewing may be a genuinely intimate experience, it’s one that tends to play out in public anyway. Baldessari’s experiment feels more like documentation than invasion. Its aloofness makes the loneliness of experience painfully evident; no live streams or chat rooms can combat the fact that, most of the time, we navigate the world alone with our bodies. But maybe that’s okay.

When Harris moved to his apple farm, an interviewer asked him, “Are you a lonely man?”

He responded, “The implication when you say ‘am I a lonely man,’ is that it’s worse than being together. It’s just a different state of being, and one I’m quite comfortable with.”

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

Leslie Hewitt, "Make it Plain (2 of 5)", 2006.

The Pew Research Center caused a stir this week when it released a study portraying The Millennials, those who came of age during the first decade of the 21^st Century, as the most even-tempered generation in recent history. Unlike the Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers, The Millennials have sidestepped almost all reactionary impulses. “They look at themselves and they say, our generation is quite different than our parents’ generation. But they don’t say it with any rancor,” Pew president Andrew Kohut told NPR’s Robert Siegel. “The only thing they criticize the older generation for is their lack of tolerance.”

This sounds suspiciously rosy, even toothless, as though, by some accident of history, a whole generation of non-judgmental diplomats emerged at the exact moment the U.S. entered Iraq. But the Pew study has more bite to it than Kohut suggests. Refusing the spectacle of rebellion that your parent’s generation reveled in is another way of breaking history’s patterns.

After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy, on view at the California African-American Museum in Exposition Park, revisits 1968 through the work of African-American artists who grew up in its wake. None of the included artists–most of them belong to last leg of Generation X even though their art-making careers coincided with the rise of the millennium–were cognizant when Martin Luther King Jr. and JFK were shot down or when the Black Panther Party peaked. And none of them pretend to have any precocious insight into  history they didn’t experience. What they do quite well, however, is acknowledge the still-opaque role the past plays in the present.

Hank Willis Thomas, "The Liberation of T.O. I'm not goin back ta' work for massa in dat' darn field," 2003/2005, Lightjet Print.

Hank Willis Thomas‘ stunningly sleek photographs, culled from advertisements and digitally stripped of all text, dominate the  gallery space’s center. All part of Thomas’ Unbranded, the ads originally appeared between 1968 and the present; Willis has been painstakingly moving  through the history of branding, selecting images that portray blackness or target black audiences. The images create a strange visual paradox. They retain the staged melodrama of the initial advertisements yet their deliberate serialization makes them feel like specimens in a study, each something to get close to and pick apart. In Willis’ 2006 rephrasing of a 2004 Peace Corps ad, unambiguously title Don’t Let Them Catch You!, young black children, who might have been from Harlem as easily as Brazil or Niger, leap  into a muddy pool of water as if on the run. A blurry haze covers the whole image, romanticizing the picture’s narrative and recalling too-close-for-comfort episodes in US history in which African-Americans have fled authority. The most disturbing aspect of  Thomas’ images is their ability to cleverly manipulate history’s visual tropes while still living in the realm of glizty glossies that suggest history doesn’t matter.

Leslie Hewitt, "Make it Plain", 2006

Leslie Hewitt’s large-scale photographs and sculpture also reconsider images of the past, but her considerations are more intimate. In the Make it Plain series, Hewitt combines loosely connected historical objects in an attempt to piece together a history different than that of sit-ins, protests and riots. In the second of the five photographs in the series, Hewitt has placed two worn books, representing two divergent perspectives, on a shelf: Black Protest: History, Documents, and Analyses, 1619 to the Present and the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. An empty frame leans above that and a photo of a ’60s era gathering, flipped on its side, hang above the frame. Another photo of two men hangs on the wall to the right. It’s like an impossible game of connect the dots–the relationship between the objects is buried in a palimpsest of history that only those who have read the books and were there when the photos were taken could decode, and even they might struggle.

In his recent book Timothy, essayist Verlyn Klinkenborg mentions how easy it is to ” walk through the holes” in human perception. It’s hard to overlook the big events, the ones that cause fires, change laws, and are embedded into history books. It’s harder to look between the spectacles and find the threads of truth that have slipped through. Hewitt and Thomas are looking through the holes.

After 1968 continues through March 7th. The exhibition also features work by Deborah Grant, Adam Pendleton, Jefferson Pinder, Nadine Robinson, and Otabenga Jones and Associates.

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

Hans Holbein, 1521.

Hans Holbein painted The Body of the Dead Christ Laid Out in His Tomb in 1521. In it, Christ’s harrowed face and tortured body don’t actually look dead; they look comatose with pain and on the verge of dying, but not quite gone.  The fact that most of his peers took a more lyrical approach to the crucifixion makes Holbein’s grittiness all the more provoking. In Albrecht Durer’s Lamentation for Christ (1500-1503), Christ is held upright, and though his face looks pained, he still seems capable of posthumously comforting the people around him. In Heironymous Bosch’s Crucifixion with a Donor, Christ’s body seems supernaturally lithe, despite its inhumane positioning. Only Holbein placed Christ all alone and flat on his back.

Holbein’s relentlessly deathly Christ has captivated intellectuals and artists  for centuries. One of them, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, mentions the painting more than once in his melodramatic 1869 social commentary, The Idiot. The character Ippolit, a young man dying of consumption, gives a long-winded speech the night before he fails to commit suicide. He’s impressively incisive when he speaks of Holbein’s work: “Looking at that picture, you get the impression of nature as some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or . . . as some huge engine of the latest design, which has senselessly seized, cut to pieces, and swallowed up–impassively and unfeelingly–a great and priceless Being.”

David Wojnarowicz, "Untitled (Peter Hujar)," 1989. Courtesy of P.P.O.W. Gallery.

122 years later, David Wojnarowicz, whose depiction of his dying friend Peter Hujar feels uncannily parallel to Holbein’s Christ, tried to tear into that “dumb beast” Ippolit described. Wojnarowicz, like Ippolit, saw nature and man-made systems as weird collaborators. “After witnessing . . . Hujar’s death . . . and after my recent diagnosis [with AIDS], I tend to dismantle and discard any and all kinds of spiritual and psychic and physical world or concepts designed to make sense of the external world,” wrote Wojnarowicz. He wanted to get to the raw core of a body’s disintegration. “I’m a prisoner of language that doesn’t have a letter or sign or gesture that approximates what I’m sensing,” he continued. If his photograph of Hujar tried to make  a prison break, it didn’t succeed. It still spoke the language of portraits and image planes.

I thought of Wojnarowicz when I  saw John Baldessari’s Blue Line (Holbein) at Margo Leavin Gallery, an exhibition that coolly and minimally rephrases Holbein’s Dead Christ.  Baldessari has always struck me as a savvy manipulator, an artists who reveals language’s limitations through images and imagery’s limitations through language, and doesn’t seem too interested in any truth beyond that. But Blue Line, which confronts the gaping failure of signs and gestures to say anything honest, made me think I’d misread him. Baldessari has confined Holbein’s Christ to an elongated, thinly pristine, blue-rimmed rectangle that angles up against the gallery wall.  Taking in the whole image requires walking the length of the rectangle, maybe even multiple times.

John Baldessari, Installation Shot, 2010. Courtesy of Margo Leavin Gallery, Photo: Brian Forrest.

A clandestine camera records visitors as they navigate the rectangle and the recording’s slightly delayed stream plays on the wall of the next gallery. When you enter that gallery, you are watching yourself watch Dead Christ, further distanced from something that was distancing to begin with. The clean lines of minimalism and the mediation of digital feeds are Baldessari’s beast, the thing Ippolit described and Wojnarowicz fought: the engine that “impassively and unfeelingly” swallows bodily truth.

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

Joe Sola, "In a Kitchen", 2008

In a Bridgestone Tires ad that aired during last Sunday’s Super Bowl, a car resembling the Batmobile speeds along a dark, rainy highway. It turns a corner and slams on its breaks to avoid hitting a brightly lit roadblock set up by eccentric-looking villains. The villain in charge says, over a loud speaker, “All right here’s the deal. Your Bridgestone Tires or your life.” A shivering blond in a leather bodysuit is shoved out of the imitation Batmobile, which then spins around and speeds away. The punch line? The slighted villain whimpers, “I said ‘life,’ not ‘wife.’”

In a Dodge spot that also ran Sunday, a series of men with glazed over, submissive eyes, say things like “I will take your call,” “I will listen to your opinion of your friends,” “I will put the seat down.” But being put upon by their women can’t keep the men from making their “last stand” and driving cars they wants to drive. The ads end with a shot of a speeding car on a lonely highway. Apparently, there is only one kind of legitimate masculinity—the kind for which fast cars are metonymic—and women are its natural foils. That Super Bowl Sunday would arrive hand-in-hand with advertisement misogyny shouldn’t have surprised me, but, still, I expect more gender nuance even from my commercials.

In 2001, artist Joe Sola put himself at the mercy of a high school football team when he made the film Saint Henry Composition (2001). Included in LACMA’s 2008 exhibition Hard Targets, the film showed Sola, wearing no gear, being tackled by well equipped award winning football players. It was a weirdly contradictory performance—on the one hand, Sola had taken on an impossible task (success would have been supernaturally heroic, an alpha male triumph); on the other hand, his failure made him looked foolish, like he lacked a certain intuitive knowledge of sport that real guys should have.

Sola’s soon-to-close exhibition at Happy Lion Gallery in L.A.’s Chinatown, called I found some Bic pens by the railroad tracks, takes gender into a more whimsical but still confrontational arena. It includes a lighthearted collection of self-referential watercolors, a brutally funny video pitting a [male] artists against a [male] collector, and, on January 30th, it also included a performance by Sola and collaborator Michael Webster. The performers—though it was mainly Sola that we watched, while Webster sat behind the piano and provided a perfectly timed soundtrack—wore red and yellow striped vests and black pants that made them look like circus performers. Their slapstick personae were reminiscent of a Charlie Chaplin-Marx Brothers’ hybrid, totally masculine but mocking of masculinity at the same time. Sola had typical junk food, glitter, feathers, and some explosives hidden inside a top hat that had been affixed to a table top (there was no attempt to maintain an illusion as Sola reached through the hat to pull out his props). He also had a blow torch, and the night consisted of dancing;  the placing of containers, filled with milk, cheerios, glitter, and the like, on precarious platforms around the gallery; and periodic explosions.

Toward the end of the performance, Sola set us up to expect something big. He’d built a contraption out of carboard, feathers, and glue that looked like a miniature horse. And he’d pulled out the blow torch, wordlessly warning people in the front row to don the protective glasses he’d passed out. In preparing for the big explosion, Sola accidentally slipped onto the floor, and he stayed down, waiting for an eruption that never happened. Then, like an injured and disgraced warrior, he pulled himself along the floor with his arms, stopping under each platform, letting bowls of milk and cheerios that had been placed on precarious platforms around the gallery fall on his head. By the end of the evening, his pants were collages of feathers, glitter and food, glued together with milk. This was as rewarding a game as any Super Bowl I’ve ever watched, because it showed how much the failure to perform could hurt, but it also showed failure to be an inevitable part of performing gender or anything else.

Note: Images from Webster’s and Sola’s Happy Lion Gallery performance are not yet available. The above images depict a 2008 performance at the Hammer Museum, called Bananas at the Hammer.

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

"Joint Dialogue," Lozano/Graham/Kaltenbach, curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer installation view, Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles

“Becoming a human being isn’t just something you get with your birth,” novelist Zadie Smith told Bookworm’s Michael Silverblatt in 2006. “It’s an exercise and it takes your whole life.” Smith said this following the publication of On Beauty, her relentless opus in which 450 pages of identity-searching ends in disaster—slander, scandal and death, all somehow stemming from the characters’ frustrating fixation on the question, “who am I?” The better question, according to Smith, and the one art should really help us ask, is, “Do other people exist in the same way I do?”

I thought of Smith earlier this week, while viewing Joint Dialogue at Overduin and Kite. This new exhibition of old work by Lee Lozano, Stephen Kaltenbach, and Dan Graham certainly treats being human, like being an artist, as a lifelong project. But, more provocatively, it also questions whether people can exist through each other and refuse to be each other at the same time.

Curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, the exhibition looks deceptively pragmatic, with text pieces tastefully spaced on each wall of the first gallery and a series of old Artforum magazines placed on wall-mounted pedestals in the second.  But Joint Dialogue (the title, a double entendre, refers to joining together and smoking together) is actually irreverently curious and funny, and it  traces a convergence that would make even Lawrence Weschler proud: in New York in the late 1960s, Lozano, Graham, and Kaltenbach were all grappling with the difficulty of living honestly and using drugs, sexuality and money to pull others into conversations about being artists (and just being in general). In fact, the explorations of Lozano, Graham, and Kaltenbach seem so entwined that, at time, it’s easy to forget they are three distinctly different personalities who would go on to have three distinctly different legacies.

"Joint Dialogue," Lozano/Graham/Kaltenbach, curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer installation view, Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles

The psychology of Dan Graham’s Income (Outflow) Piece (1969/1973), in which Graham attempted to sell shares in himself and to become solvent by “coming on” in the right way, seems to extend into Lee Lozano’s Real Money Piece, in which she offered a jar of money to other artists, who could either contribute or extract funds at will. Lozano wryly recorded people’s reactions; some, like Brice Marden (who apparently laughed at the idea), refused to take anything; others, like Graham, took and returned money on loan.  It became a document of artists’ divergent opinions about money and its distribution. Lozano’s Dialogue Piece (1969) worked similarly (and again, Graham played a key role: “Dan Graham and I have important dialogue in that definite changes were immediately effected because of it,” Lozano wrote). She contacted, or tried to contact, art world all-stars like Robert Morris and (less successfully) Jasper Johns, simply inviting them to talk.  The openness or aversion her peers had to this idea of dialogue, coupled with the fact that Lozano made herself vulnerable in order to draw others into an undefined, possibly precarious experience, give the piece its backbone. Lozano’s diaristic descriptions, which pointedly omit the actual content of each conversation, give the piece its  charm. One of my favorites: “we discuss ‘the Revolution,’ Brice [Marden] talking almost entirely abt shitty business practices in the art world, & shitty treatment of artists by each other.“

Around the same time Lozano made her Dialogue Piece and Graham made Income (Outflow) Piece, Stephen Kaltenbach was attributing his work to others–he attributed a clock he made to Lozano–and gifting to and borrowing from the practices of his peers. His mostly steel  Time Capsules, two of which he included in Joint Dialogue and some of which he dedicated to friends or acquaintances, were often engraved with pithy instructions (one said “open before my retrospective at the Tate in London”) and gave his seemingly transient, interaction-based art a comical permanence. Like Graham and Lozano, he set himself apart by wholeheartedly engaging other people.

"Joint Dialogue," Lozano/Graham/Kaltenbach, curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer installation view, Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles

Originally published on: August 7, 2008

The artists in Environments are living in the here and now, responding to Global Warming, going green, and pollution with down-to-earth sincerity. Curated by Al Nodal, currently president of the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commissions, the exhibition emphasizes the role artists play as citizens and is part of the 18th Street Art Center’s Future of Nations Series.

Environments is ultimately about engagement: How can citizens actively and effectively engage environmental problems? The artists involved represent a confluence of international, socially active aesthetes. The multi-disciplinary team Los Animistas, 18th Street’s current artists-in-residence, explore the cultural relationship between humans and nature; Ala Plastica is an Argentina based organization that collaborates with scientists and environmentalists; Lauren Bon is best know for her Not a Cornfield project, in which she turned inner city brownfield into a fertile community cornfield; Natalie Jeremijenko runs a research lab out the art department at UC San Diego, studying landfills, pollutants and other environmentally pertinent phenomena. Each artist or collective in Environments is taking a different, aware approach to citizenship and the exhibition as a whole is a hopeful glimpse into what might happen if the boundaries between art and life continue to break down.