Matt Ashjian, "Then, They Told Me That The Most Current Theory is About a Rejection of Theory. . .," studio debris.

A grad school classmate of mine, one of the more resourceful people I’ve met, had a studio that looked like a carpenter’s shop. Though not clean per se, it was functional and organized, with shelving units and a storage loft above a small couch. When he got stuck or couldn’t decide why he’d gone to art school or wondered whether there was any use in having a “critical discourse” around his work, he’d build something useful: a surf board, a book shelf, a cabinet.

One late evening, I walked past his studio, and from a distance, it looked like everything was gone. Then from the doorway, I could see that he’d piled it all — his old paintings, the surf board he’d crafted, his metal shelving unit, wood, his office chair — up against the back wall.  I sort of loved it. It seemed more like piled up frustration then outright anger, and the pile itself spoke the language of the art world it reacted against: two painted rectangles on the floor and the small, perspective-driven paintings at the base led into a towering triangle of stuff, all the trappings of a studio breakdown built up into a handsome structure.

Math Bass, "Body No Body Body," 2011. Courtesy Overduin and Kite.

It was a not-quite-rejection, a sculpture made by someone who really just wants to make stuff, but can’t quite get out of the realm of art-as-idea even if it frustrates him (“Then, They Told Me That The Most Current Theory is About a Rejection of Theory. . .” is what he titled the pile, once he’d decided it warranted a title). The New Museum’s Unmonumental show in 2008 grappled, I think, with a similar problem: can you be unheroic, unambitious and still genuinely thoughtful?

Not-quite-rejection art has popped up from time to time these past few years but, right now, it seems suddenly rampant in this city. For Overduin and Kite’s current exhibition, Il Regalo, the artist Math Bass made a series of overturned and sideways wood frames that look like easels, chairs or sawhorses and covered them in canvas, painted with picnic-umbrella-worthy stripes. “Body No Body Body” these sculpture/paintings are called. In Brian O’Connell’s exhibition Ways and Means, on view at Redling Fine Art, the artist combined balsa wood and cement in oak frames, and the balsa and concrete butt up and over the edges like they’re uncomfortable in their allotted space. At Carter and Citizen in Culver City, David McDonald’s Self-Portraits are all strangely structural hodge-podge combines of netting, cement, re bar, paint, Palm Tree wood.

Brian O'Connell, "Concrete Painting no. 17," 2011. Courtesy Redling Fine Art.

There’s an essay by jack-of-all-trades feminist Katie Roiphe that appeared in the Sunday Review of Books the first week of 2010. Roiphe was writing about how the male novelists of today (David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers) have given up on that charged, power hungry sexuality of the male writers of previous generations (Roth, Updike, Mailer, etc.), and I think of her argument in relation to art surprisingly often (certainly, art’s got its own great army of former chauvinist kings). If you take out the words “male” and “sex,” you’re left with something pretty generalizable. “Even the mildest display of . . . aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically un­toward. For a character to feel himself, even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé,” she writes. To her this should be taken negatively, as evidence that we’ve lost real resolve and desire has been replaced by  perpetually replenishing ambivalence. But I guess I think being a conquering hero is passé, and I’d rather look at art that’s trying to find a new model even if that means swimming around in ambivalence a little longer.

Eleanor Antin as Eleanora Antinova in Before the Revolution at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1979.

“At this moment, my iPad is totally f–ing me up,” said Eleanor Antin last Sunday at the Hammer Museum, in Act V of Before the Revolution, a remaking of her originally one-woman ballet. Act V was actually called “The Interruption,” because the performers were slated to stop performing and the artist to come up on stage and muse about meaning and ownership. The iPad f-up was not scripted, however; the machine really was interrupting the planned interruption. “There’s something here that says ‘undo or cancel,’” she announced. “I don’t want to do either.” She could’ve played it off and attempted to finish her monologue without the script, but, instead she waited until a technician and, I think, her son had made her screen functional again. Then she continued.

Before the Revolution was first performed in 1979, and Antin played all the roles–12 in total–with the help of life-size, two-dimensional Masonite dolls. It told of an imaginary black ballerina (Eleanora Antinova) dancing in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and evoked the great hope that modern art could break down walls that, of course, never quite fell. Antinova, the talented black ballerina hopes to play the real, iconic roles, but is instead offered primitive ones (“For you we will re-stage Pocahontas,” Diaghilev says). Antin has always been interested in the self being more than just one thing, so, in 1974 when the modernist idea of the single identity still festered, impersonating a fictive character that couldn’t have existed felt radical.

Eleanor Antin as Eleanora Antinova in Before the Revolution at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1979.

Reactions to the original performance were apparently mixed.”I guess [people] wanted actors who were smooth and effortless, seamless, what they called professional,” Antin wrote in the program notes for the new Before the Revolution. This one, co-directed by Alexandro Segade of the collective My Barbarian, was, in some ways, seamless. It included a “professional” cast. Daniele Watts, who played Eleanor Antinova beautifully, has guested on network television. Matthew Henerson, who played Diaghilev, appeared in A Christmas Carol. They traveled across the stage and interacted with trained, practiced intentionality that isn’t often found in performances by artists who took “Theory and Practice” rather than, say, “Advanced Movement.”

Rehearsal for Eleanor Antin's Before the Revolution in 2012. Courtesy The Getty Research Institute.

But still, the whole program played out like an interruption, of history, of professionalism, of artistry, of expectations. It starts out with Antinova learning to curtsey, to defer to her audience while still upholding her veneer, then follows her as she tries to wrangles for real, “white” roles (but “we love you because you are black,” Diaghilev protests) and as she impersonates Marie Antoinette and tries to rewrite the history of another woman trapped in misunderstandings and circumstances beyond her control. It was the tone of the performance, though, that made all the difference. Antinova, who remains optimistic though less and less naive, never lets go of the idea that her enthusiasm could change the system (of the Ballets Russes). And Antin, who during her “Interruption” said that she was going to make this ballet, the one about the ever-misunderstood Marie Antoinette, “her ballet, my ballet and fill the stage with credit, my credit,” never lets go of the idea that a self could become a multitude that together takes back history.

Pipilotti Rist, Pour Your Body Out, 2009, installed at MoMA.

“A kiss puts form into slow and stretchy motion,” writes Sylvia Lavin. A kiss “renders geometry fluid.” Our relationship to buildings can be like that too — slow, stretchy, fluid. So Lavin suggests in Kissing Architecture, her new book with a bright pink cover and a delightfully sensual take on architectural criticism.

Lavin is interested in that problem that plagues design disciplines “as a net result of convergent histories of capital and culture”: should contemporary architecture establish itself as autonomous or work to engage its public, and which aim is nobler?

Kissing Architecture begins with a description of Pipilotti Rist’s Pour Your Body Out, an embracing 2008-2009 installation in MoMA’s atrium, where a fleshy, floral, 25 foot high video projection played out. Visitors could sit on pillows on the ground or on a round seating “island” the artist designed. The installation occupied space designed by architect Yoshio Taniguchi as an addition to MoMA in the late 1990s, which is, argues Lavin, decidedly banal and meant to push people through (the “peripatetic visitor” becomes almost an obstacle). Pour Your Body Out didn’t subvert Taniguchi’s banally tall white walls, though; it just offered a “vivid moment,” a “pulsating pink swerve.”

William Leavitt, California Patio, 1972. Mixed media construction. Dimensions variable. Collection of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Courtesy of William Leavitt.

L.A. artist William Leavitt, whose 2011 MOCA retrospective made a good number of year-end “best of” lists, has since the 1960s devised space for such vivid moments. He’s more interested in the vocabulary of interior and furniture design than architecture, and his “Theater Objects,” sets and curtains and props, tend to be conventionally modern but set up in such a way that they’re also all about the gap between “modern,” “progressive” taste and real people’s real lives.

Leavitt, though much better known in the visual art world than theater, has long written plays that take place inside his sets. One of them, The Particles (of White Naugahyde), played last night in Margo Leavin Gallery’s Annex and will play again tonight and next weekend. Though Leavitt wrote the play in 1979, it hasn’t been performed before and the set is newly built and characteristically minimalist chic — rock wall, glass table, slick white couch — and the plot retro.  A family is stuck in a desert colony, auditioning to be among those sent by NASA to live in outer space. There’s nothing pretentious about the story or the script; none of the dialogue attempts to be needlessly profound and the absurdity is more Modern Family than Harold Pinter (at one point the characters try to scientifically bond with each other by making arm gestures and saying “hydrogen,” “copper,” “aluminum,” etc.).

William Leavitt, set design for The Particles (of White Naugahyde. 2012. Courtesy Margo Leavin Gallery.

But the living room set is a little pretentious, as the family’s neighbors point out during the play, and all throughout the three acts, that slick white couch keeps making characters uncomfortable. They find it sticky, slippery, cold. Then in the last scene, a mohair blanket arrives (the circumstances behind its arrival are a little bit complicated) and is draped over the couch. It’s this lumpy furriness that finally allows the characters to relax. I love that idea: a bit of tactile, sensual material can be redemptive, at least for a moment or two.

Banks Violette, "Untitled (Church)," 2005

I have a checkered brown and white shirt with sleeves and a collar that looks like something Ashton Kutcher would have worn in That ’70s Show. I still wear it, though I bought it at a thrift store when I was in high school. I had written a play about U.S. college students trying to find their true selves in the years right after the Vietnam War and devoted weeks to finding vintage or faux-vintage, orange, green, brown and denim clothing. I also found a vintage record player, which was playing The Beatles’ “Golden Slumber,” from Abbey Road, when the protagonist offed herself at the end of Act I (Act II was all about her friends coming to terms with her death, and, of course, about finding faith in the face of despair and other such sublime ideas).

Friends and I staged the play in a sanctuary because my father was a minister and the church was the closest thing to a theater we had at our disposal. The suicide took place at the altar. We’d covered a pew with cushions and blankets to make it look like a couch, and that’s where the poor actress was, spread out with hand hanging limply toward the floor, when her roommates emerged from the sacristy to find her dead. It didn’t seem sacrilegious at all, suicide and The Beatles on the altar, since, really, the whole play was about hope, despair, belief, disbelief — all concerns that are supposed to get hashed out at altars, right?

A new exhibition of Banks Violette’s opened at Blum & Poe gallery in Culver City last week, which, like his past shows, grapples with over-belief and explores the place where reverence and sacrilege meet. Violette’s exhibition features big black steel speedway railings and the number 88 sculpted and drawn, after race car driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. who drives the No. 88 car, whose father died in a Daytona 500 accident 11 years ago, and who has been voted “Most Popular Driver” for 9 years now.  The sculptures have the same minimalist stoicism of the sculpture he installed at the Whitney seven years ago, a salt-covered, burn-wood and polyurethane skeleton of a  traditional church. “It’s almost the platonic representation of burnt church,” said Violette, whose piece was informed by a series of church arsons perpetrated by heavy metal fans who took the Satanic musings in their music as clarion calls.

Nikki Pressley, The Messiah is Forthcoming, 2011, mixed media, dimensions variable

Even though it depicted the ruins of a sacrilegious crime, Violette’s burnt church felt nearly reverent. It acknowledged that religion, like music (and art) had power over us and it set up religion, pop, and fine art to interact on the same level. Another piece that I saw this week, by Nikki Pressley in the group show “Go Tell it On the Mountain” at Charlie James Gallery, has a similar effect. It’s an installation of six narrow communion railings  with cushions for kneeling set up around a platform that says “The Messiah Is Forthcoming,” and laid in front of the railings are theoretical books. Among them are writings by Frantz Fanon, the incisively combative post-colonialist, who ended his book Black Skin, White Masks with this exquisitely reverent, hopeful line that’s more or less the message of Pressley’s sculpture: “My final prayer: O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”

]]> http://dailyserving.com/2012/01/burnt-church-and-other-sacrilege/feed/ 0 http://dailyserving.com/2012/01/not-a-person-today/ http://dailyserving.com/2012/01/not-a-person-today/#comments Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:36:12 +0000 Catherine Wagley http://dailyserving.com/?p=22407 L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

An image Miranda Grosvenor sent to a beau

In one of the snapshots Miranda Grosvenor sent to her famous beaus, she appears blurry and blond, sitting in a convertible parked with its front end in the street and back end on the grass of somebody’s manicured lawn. In this and other photos, she is always alone, and always suspiciously attractive, naïf-like as a young Nastassja Kinski in a two-piece bathing suit or full-bodied as Marilyn Monroe. None of these actually were her; she clipped the photos from magazines or catalogs. Her name did not officially belong to her either. In addition to Miranda, she went by Ariana, Briana and, on rare occasion, her real name, Whitney.

She would call up famous men and, in her “mellifluous, accentless voice,” seduce them within 20 minutes, according to Bryan Burroughs who wrote about mythic Miranda for Vanity Fair in 1999. Buck Henry, who co-wrote The Graduate and now makes guest appearances on 30 Rock, first heard from her in 1980 or ‘81, when she called him long distance in the middle of the night, name-dropping and charming him with her exquisitely vast knowledge of his career and of that of many other men in his bracket. She knew where Henry ate lunch and with whom, and, sometimes, when Henry was on calls with her, Senator Ted Kennedy or some other impressive personality would beep in.

Pipilotti Rist, "Ever is Over All," 1997

Henry became mildly, understandably obsessed, determined to find out who this woman really was. “I have a book’s worth of material on her,” he told Burroughs. “I couldn’t begin to tell you the whole story.” Or all the stories, because there are many, all vague, rarely with Miranda making an actual appearance. “I kept seeing this image of a . . . girl, sitting in a room somewhere,” said Cynthia O’Neal of Miranda, whom her husband, Patrick O’Neal, fell for in the decade before his death. Cynthia turned out to be right more or less — Miranda, or Whitney, was just a girl alone in a room somewhere in Baton Rouge, an isolated dilettante with a collection of names to fall back on and no one, tangible identity, who eventually, once found out grew old still alone. Or so the story she’s been straddled with by Brian Burroughs goes. Her story, told by herself, never came out in full, even though, once discovered by Burroughs, she purportedly made a book deal with Harper Collins.

Andrea Fraser, "Little Frank and His Carp," 2001.

I first read Burroughs’ story the year it was written, when I was in high school. The idea that you could so effectively create a persona that was arresting but vaguely so — in Miranda’s case, her persona was largely faceless –, and that you could use that persona to seduce in a matter of moments was as haunting as it was compelling.

The same idea of the vague persona and instant seduction recurs in the work of the photographers and performers I’ve since come to respect: Pipilotti Rist, particularly in her video Ever is Over All, where she moves through smashing car windows with a rose, is a vague seductress. Collier Schorr’s Jens photographs, where she poses a young man in the positions Andrew Wyeth put his muse Helga in, have that instant appeal.

But it is Andrea Fraser, who, rather than seduce, often falls victim to seduction in her work, that I have been thinking of most, largely because, on January 23, she will debut a new performance, one in which she plays the parts of four different men. At the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown L.A., she’ll reenact a conversation that aired on the radio station KPFK forty years ago, where four men talked about feminism, their allegiance to it, and their fears and hopes for it.

In 2001, Fraser wandered around the Guggenheim Balboa, listening to the audio tour and gradually becoming more and more excited, more and more “seduced.” The same year, she performed at a private party, stripping down to a Gucci thong and declaring, “I am not a person today. I’m an object in an artwork.” Which is how Miranda seemed and still seems in her story: not a whole person, a figure in a narrative, even though it was she who allowed, created and perpetuated that narrative.

The Kaufmann House in Palm Springs. Photo by Tim Street-Porter.

The Christmas arsonist began setting fires under cars in L.A. the day after his German mother’s extradition proceedings due to fraud allegations, including the charge she falsified the down payment for her breast implants. In a courtroom, he purportedly went on an “anti-American” tirade, then went out on a particularly anti-L.A. crime spree, targeting cars in a city that’s unusually dependent on them. He set fifty fires before being apprehended the day after New Year’s by a reserve deputy who is an Iranian immigrant. By Wednesday, news had circulated that the arsonist was wanted for a fire set in Germany as well, and he was put on suicide watch. “If this didn’t exist, someone would have created it in fiction,” said Denise Hamilton, a crime writer who, when interviewed on public radio, suggested twice that noir novelist Nathanael West might have written these very characters, given the chance.

I heard about the arsonist’s arrest while driving home from Palm Springs, after a New Year’s weekend that started with a perfect desert dinner in a mod strip mall and ended in the emergency room when a friend’s fall cut short a hike up the hill the Frey House is built on.

In a way, Palm Springs feels like an even more fitting setting for L.A. noir than L.A. itself, partly because it’s where L.A. goes to vacation and its modernist monuments feel especially exclusive and portentous because they’re set out in the desert, nearly 100 miles from the big city.

The Frey House in Palm Springs.

All we knew of the Frey house before climbing was that it was tucked into the hill, and was orange, delicately angular and equipped with tennis courts — which you see perfectly, if you venture off the Palm Springs Museum Trail at just the right spot. I found out later that the house, designed by the Zurich-born Albert Frey who apparently all but invented “desert modernism,” had been home to the architect up until his death in 1998, at age 95.

Maybe we would have seen slightly more of the house if my friend hadn’t slipped and fell against one of the craggy rocks, if her sunglasses hadn’t shattered, cutting her above and below her eye and causing perfectly red blood to flow down her face almost instantly. But somehow, now that the cuts have been stitched up and danger is passed, the image of her feeling her way down that especially steep incline with an injury you’d have to be blind to miss feels dangerously, glamorously treacherous in a Palm-Springs-appropriate way.

The day before the Frey hike  led us to the emergency room, we drove to the Kaufmann house, built by Richard Neutra and commissioned by the same Kaufmann who commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. The house glows in the sun, but doesn’t settle into its surroundings as deferentially as Frey’s desert modernism does. It “seems to absorb the mood of the surrounding desert,” wrote Edward Wyatt in the New York Times, which would have been more Kaufmann’s taste. The department store magnate preferred to take over the surroundings while acknowledging he was very much aware of the mood and flavor of what his houses commandeered.

Still from "The Damned Don't Cry," with Frank Sinatra's Palm Springs home in the background.

There’s another house we tried to see twice but got lost each time: Frank Sinatra’s Twin Palms estate. I realized only later that it was this house that featured in the Joan Crawford film, The Damned Don’t Cry, though, apparently, Sinatra refused to let any of the cast inside, so interiors were shot  in Hollywood. In the film, Crawford become entwined with a big time gangster who lives at Twin Palms. And this pairing of villain and modernism drew notice in one of the greatest documentary artworks ever made: Thom Anderson’s Los Angeles Plays Itself.

Anderson pegs The Damned Don’t Cry as the first in a long line of Hollywood denigrations of mid-century modernism. “Accidents happen, but some lies are malignant,” he says  of this trend toward marrying iconic residences with everything villainous. “Don’t talk to me about self-respect,” says Crawford in the film where she becomes as corrupt as her gang boss boyfriend. “That’s something you tell yourself you got when you got nothing else.” Which of course, is the opposite of what these modernist houses were supposed to represent: an intense, informed and resourced version of self-respect that could resonated well into the future.

Unknown Artist, Performance at CalArts (date unknown). Courtesy of the CalArts Archive.

“I basically did two things with my class,” said artist and teacher Michael Asher. “We took the clock out of the room and forgot about time.” That quote is pinned to the wall at RedCat gallery, along with a host of other quotes from students and instructors working at California Institute of the Arts  and at other emerging institutions in the 1970s, in the heyday of California Conceptualism. Each expresses a similarly rigorous, risky but wholly idealistic idea of how to think about art: artists were “learning the techniques of thinking,” according to photographer and sculptor Barbara Bloom; there was a “sense of social change” without “aesthetic preferences,” according to architect Craig Hodgetts; “every piece we acquired made it possible for us to live another day,” according to collector Judy Spence.

At this point, it is common knowledge in art circles that CalArts of the 1970s, and the institutions many of its artists worked within, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Arts and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in particular,  emphasized ideas over objects. Certainly, things got made, but the thinking behind those things was always the point.

An Unknown Artist, Outdoor Confab at CalArts, ca. 1971. Courtesy of the CalArts Archive

In the  RedCat exhibition, called “Experimental Impulse,” thinking is the point, too. If you go, you should be prepared to sit, look, listen and watch. It’s almost more like a carefully edited research library than an art show. There are rows of tables, each with “authentic” art school chairs up against them — the kind with layers of paint and masking tape on their seats and legs –, lined with print outs and images documenting different activities and performances. In one photo, taken just after the Art and Technology show Maurice Tuchman curated at LACMA, including only male artists, a group of women appear outside the museum all wearing “Maurice masks” and holding balloons that say “Where are the women minorities?” Others document gritty performances by the Kipper Kids duo, or the L.A. Cowpunk scene. Pick up some of the telephones and you can listen to conversations about, say, reading Derrida in a CalArts course taught by artist Charles Gaines.

Allen Ruppersberg, "Al's Grand Hotel," 1971. Courtesy the artist and Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Gary Krueger.

Because one of the show’s curators, Thomas Lawson, edits the journal East of Borneo, an online literary component accompanies the show. You can read essays about and by conceptualists working in that era, watch footage,  and browse photos. It’s worth a visit, and it’s worth considering whether the idealism they expressed exists now  in a period that’s just as anxiety-ridden as the Vietnam- and Nixon-scarred 1970s were (does the Occupy Movement suggest it does?), and, if it so, what to do with it.

I wrote the below in 2008, for a design blog, D/visible, that has since gone into hibernation. But I’ve been thinking about the same ideas this week — essence and monumentality — and wanted to revisit.

William Cordova, "The House that Frank Lloyd Wright built 4 Fred Hampton and Mark Clark," 2006 (installation view)

“It may have escaped your attention,” says Elizabeth Costello, the title character in a 2003 novel by J.M. Coetzee, “but I slipped in, a moment ago, a word that should have made you prick up your ears. I spoke about my essence and being true to my essence.” Costello, an aging writer, has dropped the bait. She has invited the other writers, artists and scholars in the room to squirm and argue, to ask how she even knows she has any “true essence.” If they do ask, however, she won’t be able to answer because she’s not sure she knows who she is.

Artists, architects, writers—people who craft objects and narratives—have spent much of the last forty years questioning what they don’t know. It’s an exhausting, endless cycle. If you don’t know who you are, how can you understand the world around you? If you don’t understand the world, is it irresponsible to fabricate a new object or tell a new story? How will you know that what you’ve made has improved, not tainted, its environment? Pertinent as these questions are, it would be nice if they would stop stymieing artists, keeping them from doing what they want to do, which is make art.

If you can’t go forward, one strategy is to back up and interrogate predecessors who didn’t have the problem you have. Sometimes they have something to offer. Frank Lloyd Wright is one such precursor, someone who thought art, nature, lifestyle and edifice could intermarry. He believed he knew who he was, he believed in essence, and he peppered the landscape with hundreds of large, self-confident structures that didn’t apologize for their essentialism.

Ryan Taber,"Light Screens: breaking and entering ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny; An evolutionary chain locking the windows to Frank Llyod Wrights' home with the Hydrozoan microcosms of Ernst Haeckels' 'Art Forms in Nature': Frederick C. Robie House, 1908-1910, with Discomedusae, Plate 8. Kunstformen der Natur, 1904," 2006, Graphite and Watercolor on Paper

Wright wanted to break architecture down to its archetypal core and begin at the very beginning. For him, finding the beginning didn’t mean being the ultimate visionary. It meant being able to start again and again. It meant devising a foolproof methodology that would allow him to organically harmonize form, function and site each time he designed another structure.

Fallingwater, Wright’s majestic 1935 Pennsylvania house, is a love song to essence. It’s geometric, concrete slabs practically rise out of their stone foundation, like rocks that have suddenly decided to loose their souls by embracing high modernism. Whether the water falling over the cliff at the house’s base flows out of a river or a central font in the living room doesn’t matter—the cliff, the rocks, the water, and the house are all Fallingwater together.

Eric Lloyd Wright, Wright’s grandson and an architect himself, describes the methodology he shares with his grandfather as “architecture which grows naturally and usually from the inside.” Ideally, organic architecture starts from a seed of inspiration and grows outward until it emerges as a structure that validates itself and its surroundings. “It becomes an extension of the environment, although it’s designed by man,” Eric Wright explains. “But, of course, man is of nature. We can’t divorce that.” Maybe that’s what we need: a divorce. Maybe if we ended the marriage and distanced ourselves from our intimate partner we would no longer feel invasive and inferior to waterfalls, peak, and planes. “Whatever we humans do is part of nature,” Wright continues. “The thing you want to be careful about is that it’s not a cancerous growth.”

Elizabeth Costello doesn’t know how to distinguish healthy growths from cancerous ones. Also, once she puts her work out into the world, she doesn’t know how to keep it from becoming cancerous later on. “When the storyteller opens the bottle, the genie is released . . . and it costs all hell to get him back in again,” Costello thinks, “better, on the whole that the genie remain imprisoned.” She no longer trusts her narratives to venture out on their own and so, instead, she makes comparisons, aligns ideas with one another, and tries not to break new ground.

Similitude is a good alternative for someone conflicted about essence. It allows you to traverse history and make connections without saying or doing anything dangerously new. Los Angeles based artist Ryan Taber explored similititude for his 2006 exhibition, “A Rhetoric of Ills,” at Mark Moore Gallery. He worked through a series of 19th and early 20th century references that included Frank Lloyd Wright’s windows. Taber’s Wright rephrasals are delicately transfixing in their own right. Their long, headily verbose titles read like captions in dated textbooks: “Light Screens: breaking and entering ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny,” they begin. The window from Wright’s Frederick C. Robie House warps just slightly in Taber’s precise drawing, weighted down by a lyrical, aqueous jellyfish—a rendering of the Discomedusae that late-Victorian biologist Ernst Haeckel classified—which hangs in the window’s central pane. Some of the panes have cracked and these thin fissures have a subtle poeticism, suggesting that history, like any man-made structure, is ephemeral.

History’s ephemerality elicited Elizabeth Costello’s first literary success. She borrowed from James Joyce’s epic Ulysses, extracting a female perspective from the gender-obsessed narrative. It was an intricate exercise in similitude, but it didn’t make any difference. She still let the genie out of the bottle, giving her readers a narrative hook that told them, somewhat didactically, how to reinterpret literary history. In retrospect, this sort of narrative ploy makes her uneasy and she spends the duration of Coetzee’s novel grappling with her ambivalence.

Taber is retrospectively uneasy about his narratives too. His Frank Lloyd Wright windows may not have been didactic—at least, not exactly—but they framed history a little too nicely, giving viewers a prepackaged glimpse of how nature, modernist structure, and contemporary art can interact. What he and the fictional Costello both want to do is leave all the doors open, to keep their own conflicted positions as artists from defining the way viewers or readers see their work. Maybe similitude doesn’t keep the genie in check after all. Maybe how you make art matters more than what you make.

“In working with the environment we are protecting it; we’re reinforcing it. And we have to do that in order to survive as human beings,” says Eric Lloyd Wright. It’s the sort of statement that makes artists like Taber and Costello twitch. Certainly, the fireproof, concrete masterpiece that Wright is building in the Santa Monica mountains will benefit him, giving him a safe, impenetrable homestead, but what good will it ultimately do the environment?

Concrete house or not, Eric Lloyd Wright has developed a methodology, a way of working, that he can stand by. “I feel that everything is important in your way of life,” he says. “When you talk about organic architecture, you try to work in an organic environment as well as live in it.”

Ryan Taber, "Pompey's Folly," 2008, Concrete, construction debris, steel and urethane, 14 x 7 x 12 feet

By the end of Coetzee’s novel, Costello, despite her extreme dislike of words like “essence” and “belief,” realizes that her stories are her beliefs and that she has lived by moving through them, letting one story transition into another and then into another. An organic methodology of story connecting has defined her career and her life.

“Making decisions about making work is like making decisions about eating and sleeping,” says Taber, who has become principally interested in the way his methodology as an artist relates to the way he lives. Lately, he’s been exploring the materiality of rock, a massive resource he describes as “a cold, inorganic giant object.” Photographing geological nuances, he is building a growing archive of images. He hasn’t obliterated the narrative hook, but his current narrative does not purport to be anything other than a record of one artist’s thought process.

Figuring out how to put objects and stories out into the world without imposing yourself on your audience is a perpetual problem artists will indefinitely grapple with. But having a methodology, like a having a diet and a bedtime, allows you to keep making work as you keep living, in spite of the unanswered questions. It’s an old trick, using method to combat uncertainty—in fact, it’s probably what led Frank Lloyd Wright to organic architecture. Still, it’s the most stalwart, honest failsafe, and it doesn’t stifle the questioning; it just keeps the work coming.

Constantin Brancusi, "View of the Artist's Studio," 1918, Gouache and pencil on board, 13 x 16 1/4". The Joan and Lester Avnet Collection, © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Understandably, I have always associated Constantin Brancusi with pure lines and modernism of an overly spiritual kind, the kind someone who wants to “fill the vault of the sky,” as Brancusi once said he did, would gravitate toward. However, I saw his drawings for the first time last week. Two hang in the High Museum in Atlanta, as part of the Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters exhibition. Both are studies, and neither have pure lines. View of the Artist’s Studio, a small painting in gouache and pencil, shows one of the artist’s favorite subjects: his own sculptures. They are arranged haphazardly and painted so that they look like little amorphous creatures. The palette is neutral, made up of browns, grays and ochre. The composition has the quirky quaintness of some of Louise Bourgeois’ drawings of anthropomorphized objects.

A view of Brancusi's studio today

Winifred Nicholson, a painter married to Ben Nicholson, recalled that you always took flowers when you visited Brancusi’s studio, because “he loved them and kept them forever, dead and dry as beautiful as when they were in bloom.” You always took flowers when you visited Louise Bourgeois’ salons, too, or at least you did if you wanted her to pay attention to you. The drawings at the High look like they were made by a man who loved flowers. In other words, they have none of the ascetic austerity that Brancusi’s bronze Bird in Space evokes whenever I see it at the Los Angeles County Museum. Having seen Brancusi’s unpretentious drawings, I am much happier that it’s the Romanian-born Parisian transplant who proved to U.S. courts that abstraction is art.

Constantin Brancusi, "Bird in Space," 1926, bronze.

When, in 1927, photographer and curator Edward Steichen took one of Brancusi’s bronze Birds in Space through customs in the United States, the U.S. deemed the object a “utensil” and taxed him $600. Usually, tax could be waived for works of art, but the long, golden object did not look like art to customs officials. Steichen sued and the trial that followed resembled the one in Miracle on 34^th Street — it’s as if the defendant is simply trying to show that magic does not exist.

Artist Jacob Epstein took the stand as a witness at one point, and the cross examination proceeded as follows:
Cross-examiner: Do you make painting your profession?

Epstein: No, sculpture is my profession.

Do you have anything to do with making sculpture similar to Exhibit One?

Well, all sculptures are different.

I asked you if you made anything like Exhibit One?

I may not have the desire to make it.

I did not ask you that.

Justice Waite:  Answer the question. Did you make anything like that exhibit?

No.

In all your thirty years?

No, I have not made anything like that.

Do you consider from the training you have had and based on your experience you had in these different schools and galleries—do you consider that a work of art?

I certainly do.

When you say you consider that a work of art, will you kindly tell me why?

Well, it pleases my sense of beauty, gives me a feeling of pleasure. Made by a sculptor, it has to me a great many elements, but consists in itself as a beautiful object. To me it is a work of art.

So, if we had a brass rail, highly polished, curved in a more or less symmetrical and harmonious circle, it would be a work of art?

It might become a work of art.

Whether it is made by a sculptor or made by a mechanic?

A mechanic cannot make beautiful work.

Do you mean to tell us that Exhibit One, if formed up by a mechanic—that is, a first class mechanic with a file and polishing tools—could not polish that article up?

He can polish it up, but he cannot conceive of the object. That is the whole point. He cannot conceive those particular lines which give it its individual beauty. That is the difference between a mechanic and an artist; he (the mechanic) cannot conceive as an artist.

Justice Waite did eventually agree that Brancusi’s object could be deemed art: “It is beautiful and symmetrical in outline, and while some difficulty might be encountered in associating it with a bird, it is nevertheless pleasing to look at.”

Feodor Voronov, "Insurgent", 2011, 48 X 48", Acrylic, marker and ball-point pen on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Mark Moore gallery.

Catherine Wagley: This morning, a friend and I were talking about abstraction that’s transcendent, but transcendentally funny, like kick-ass stand-up. I thought of you, and pulled up your “Pellucid” painting on Google as an example. It’s seriously crafted, seriously systematic, but doesn’t take itself that seriously. How’d you start working with words?

Feodor Voronov: I started working with words about one year after graduate school. I most of all wanted to step away from grad school work, which started to feel dated, short sighted and just way too safe. I initially was attracted to just the raw physical power of text, and I attempted a few pieces where I would build these circular patterns by first translating words into ancient runes and then using the result to begin the process of building a composition. Pretty soon, I realized this was all too cautious and gimmicky. So I decided to see what would happen if I just put an English word in the middle of the canvas and forced myself to deal with it being there. It seemed too simple and really goofy, but, for me, this move began a project that is now going on its third year.

CW: You told me about finding and printing out that huge list of 1000+ words–what was it called again? Something along the lines of “words that will make you sound smart but not pretentious.” That’s still your source, right?

FV: Yes, this list is my source for the current word paintings. It is a list that is supposed to enable you to write with greater accuracy and not sound too wordy. I don’t think it is really important what the list is. It’s just there and I choose from it. I scan the list and grab words that look good at the moment. I do not consider the meaning or sound when doing this, in fact, I don’t even know many of the words but I do look them up in the dictionary for my own self betterment. My interest lies primarily in their shape, look and compositional capabilities. (The meaning is something I can’t truly control and my relationship to it is pretty much on the same level as the viewers’).

CW: Yeah, I think that’s what I was digging for: “compositional capability.” It reminds me of the other term you use from John Rajchman’s book, “operative formalism.” You’re honing in on units you can work with, that can work for you. In fact, I have a really hard time picturing you tossing something out or giving up on it because it failed–do you ever do that?

FV: No, nothing is lost, ever. I just keep going until a certain point of compromise is reached. You can always bring something back to life even if you have to bury it first. I’ve got nothing to hide so restarting something is kind of pointless. I’d rather make work directly over the so-called failure, even if it is just for a point of comparison.

CW: That’s what I like about the painting of yours in my living room: the underpainting and over painting that looks more like competent problem solving then inspiration. Are you still working on raw canvas?

FV: Yes, I work on raw canvas all the time. I do not like the idea of priming a surface and getting it all ready for the act of painting. I prefer to treat it sort of like paper, where you just take it and begin working on and with it right away. Why negate the possibility of the surface by covering it in white? The act of priming is incorporated into the actual process of painting and becomes about the culmination of the marks working together to transform a given surface. Maybe I’m over thinking it; basically, priming is part of the work and gessoing a canvas to me is unnecessary.

Feodor Voronov, "Ironic", 2011, 26 X 36", Acrylic, marker, spray-paint and ball-point pen on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Mark Moore gallery.

CW: Do you like Kenneth Noland? He was a raw canvas guy.

FV: I admire his work, but he’s not someone I look at regularly.

CW: I remember, in this interview with Diane Waldman from ’77, he said he and Morris Lewis really tried to learn from Pollock but Pollock was too emotional for them, and when Frankenthaler (another raw canvas fan) came along, that was a relief. She made painting about material. Then, talking about why he initially painted his Chevron circles on mostly 6 foot squares, he said, “It turns out certain picture shapes don’t allow you to use different kinds of quantity distributions of color for different expressions.”

Maybe that’s obvious–that the shapes you choose to paint limit other choices you can make if you’re going to compose a painting effectively–but his worked looked the way it did because he really thought about stuff like that. Do words with certain shapes, maybe something with lots of round vowels in it, pose problems for you?

FV: Sure, each word is a new problem in itself. I don’t tailor the surface dimension to a particular word simply because words can be broken apart and rearranged to fit different compositional situations, which basically means there is more than one solution and that is both very exciting and challenging. But that is a big part of what the work is about: problems and solutions. I welcome problems because you cannot have solutions without them. I don’t play favorites and will not disregard a word because it has too many a’s in it, for example. I just deal with it.

CW: I like that — “I do not play favorites.” How many works have you done on paper, using Raymond Carver text? I imagine, like, “Where I’m Calling From”, being more angular than, say, “Cathedral.” Can you even sum it up like that: rounder, more angular?

FW: Well, I actually haven’t worked from those. I have done several pieces from “Will you please be quiet, please?”, both on canvas and paper. The results all looked fairly different. The pieces were really based on the rhythmic flow of words and how that can be physically restructured into a different visual situations or arrangements. But this is still just a side project at the moment.

Feodor Voronov, "Stupor", 48 X 48", Acrylic, marker and ball-point pen on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore gallery.

CW: The truth is, I’d probably rather no one know where the text comes from in your work, which means that question may’ve been counterproductive. I just like that you read Carver.

FV: Yeah that was a sticky one. It’s like a side conversation that wants to wander off into other worlds, so may be a scratch…

CW: You said earlier you wanted a project that wasn’t short-sighted, was more sustainable, but wasn’t safe. I want to understand that better. Sustainability and long-sightedness seems safe to me; still, I don’t feel your paintings are safe.

Or maybe this is what I mean: there are artists who do “projects”– Steven Bankhead did that painting show informed by Malcolm McLaren, or Whitney Bedford’s new paintings are all expressly about the moment a storm gathers. Then there are artists — Rebecca Morris, Peter Voulkos, Jasper Johns (though he’s gotten drier over the years) and you, I guess — looking for something to keep them going for a long time. Where does that urge come from?

FV: “Inner necessity” according to Wassilly Kandinsky. No, really, we have to make work and fit our lives in or around it, and that’s it.

Weegee, "Self-Portrait with Marlene Dietrich," ca. 1940s

My favorite photograph in MOCA Los Angeles’ newly opened Weegee show is the one of the crime photographer turned expert ogler with Marlene Dietrich’s legs. It’s a riff off another Weegee image, “Self-portrait with Marlene Dietrich,” in which the photographer leans in, smiling in a pandering sort of way at the actress, who’s wearing a leotard and cape and clearly saying something. Weegee then took that image and distorted it, superimposing her legs over her torso, so that Marlene is only legs, and it’s those legs he’s leaning in on and smiling at.

Marlene Dietrich, photographed by Richard Avedon for the Blackglama ad campaign, 1969

Other photographers of the era were much more delicate about their fixation with the Dietrich legs, famously insured by Paramount. Richard Avedon, for instance, had the actress in against a dark background with cloak pulled back to expose her long white limbs. Milton Greene showed her, again wearing black and against a black backdrop, sitting bent over so that her torso is barely visible–it’s just blond hair leading down to long white legs. Milton makes her all legs too; there’s just a sculptural elegance that allows the image to ingratiate itself as an aesthetic experience.

Marlene Dietrich, photographed by Milton Greene, 1952

Weegee’s take, on the other hand, is blatant and unapologetically so, clearly not at all worried about offending the star. But it’s not critical in the way Perez Hilton might be or exploitative in the same way a lot of paparazzi photos are. Weegee has been called the first ambulance chaser, and maybe, for some reasons, that’s the right title–after all, he did photograph unappreciative people being carted off in paddy wagons, capture topless women sleeping and snap what must have been an unsanctioned photo of Jane Russell’s behind. Here, however, it feels like he’s on the side of us, the viewers, not manipulating us with beauty in the way Avedon and Greene do, but poking fun at a cultural obsession he’s participating in and inviting us to join him.

Sam Falls, Untitled (West Hollywood, CA. Green), 2011, Hand-dyed green cotton and metal grommets, 10 x 85 feet. Courtesy M+B

That week Pacific Standard Time, SoCal’s Getty-funded, 60-plus institution push to excavate its own post-WWII art history, officially opened, I popped into a gallery showing a great selection of new work by an older artist. Is this an official Pacific Standard Time show, I wanted to know. “I don’t really know what that means,” the director said. ”We never signed any paperwork or anything, but we’re showing an old school artist and putting the PST logo on all our press releases.”  At least his show made sense historically–the artist had been around and working during that 1945-1980 period PST focuses on. But the PST logo is so widespread right now that not all shows labeled “participants” are immediately understandable in relation to SoCal history. It’s become something of a game, trying to guess how and why certain shows might be PST-appropriate.

I wrote about young-ish artist Joel Kyack’s PST -participating show, a spoof on reverence for history, a while back, and another just opened exhibition of new work in West Hollywood uses the “PST” logo to justify an examination of time.

The first work you see in Time and Material at M+B gallery is a big green cotton cloak hanging down from the top left corner above the door. It feels like a mix between a discarded fashion week runway and a construction site. It also makes the door slightly intimidating to walk through, since you’ve got step on and then over the artwork to get into the gallery. This particular work reminds me of Miles Coolidge’s photograph, Hedge, an image of shrubbery that’s overgrown a fence in a neighborhood that otherwise looks flawlessly controlled–it’s ever so slightly uncomfortable.

Miles Coolidge, "Hedge," 2009, Pigment inkjet print, 45 x 60 inches

Past Falls drapery and into the gallery, there’s a collection of small enamel-topped, steel-legged tables by Kyle Thurman, sand bags by Jacob Kassay, and  a worn folded paper by N. Dash. All this seems a bit too intentionally underwhelming, too aware of its own ordinariness, but not so the video by Joe Zorilla in the back room.

Joe Zorrilla, The Cake, 2011, Single channel video projection, 11 minutes 28 seconds edition of 3

In it, Zorrilla cuts a cake that’s sitting out on plywood, removes a piece and then begins to move the remaining pieces, taking them out then replacing them, so that the cake is always a round thing made up of pieces, but it’s being reconfigured again and again. As a metaphor for time, it’s a down to earth one: time keeps cycling through, mussing itself up, reorganizing, and it’ll be doing that for as long as we can imagine.

Larry Sultan, "Boxers, Mission Hills," 2000, from the series The Valley, chromogenic print. Courtesy Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, © Larry Sultan

When photographer Larry Sultan was growing up, his mother hired a decorator to “cozy up” their new San Fernando Valley home with its marble floors and 12-foot fireplace. The decorator had red hair, tight pants and lipstick that always spread beyond the limits of her lips. She brought in shag carpets, candelabras, lots of gold leaf. So Sultan remembered when writing about the houses he saw in the 1990s while working on The Valley, a series of photographs tracking San Fernando’s biggest business.

The porn industry gravitates, it seems, toward the sort of homes with candelabras and fake chandeliers, like the “real mansion with an incredible view” a production assistant told Sultan he’d just love.  “It’s been customized with dark wood paneling, overbearing stonework, marble counters and other features that give it the appearance of the ‘good life,’” Sultan wrote. “Wandering from room to room, I get the feeling that something went wrong, that the owners have left suddenly in the middle of the night.”

Kaari Upson, "Untitled," 2011, smoke on aluminum panel. Courtesy Overduin and Kite.

Kaari Upson grew up in San Bernardino not San Fernando; still, it’s the world of Sultan’s un-embarrassedly glitzy, vaguely smutty photographs I think of when walking through Upson’s exhibition at Overduin and Kite in Hollywood. The whole self-titled show is pink and black, made mostly of smoke, charcoal, latex and wax. The black is aggressive and self-effacing, like on the smoke-darkened aluminum panels that hang in the back of the second gallery. They’re smeary and angsty and look like what could’ve resulted if a chain-smoking diva set her house on fire with a wayward cigarette, then wandered through the rubble, trying helplessly to rub away the grime now coating her many mirrors. The pink is fleshy but industrial. Upson’s long latex fence poles and chandeliers drooping from the gallery ceiling, all painted in that fleshy hue, could have come from the same house, damaged in the fire then left to melt in hot summer sun.

An installation view of Kaari Upson's exhibition. Courtesy Overduin and Kite.

Yet in this show, there’s an elegance and tastefulness to the presentation that contradicts the ruined kitsch of Upson’s objects. No red-headed decorator in overzealous lipstick would space sculptures so evenly or think to juxtapose the stocky wall-hanging black rectangles, each shaped by impressions of the artist’s body (“Fisting and Knees,” “Head and Knees” are subtitles), with melting pink that loops down from above.

What role does such tastefulness play? Does it give Upson and us a safety net, assuring us that it’s art we’re looking at? “Ambiguity is a luxury,” said artist Collier Schorr a few years back, and Upson indulges in that luxury, staying in an in-between state, referencing a world of faux-finery and emotional roller-coasters while still falling back on the confident, visual restraint of a minimalist. But that’s an observation, not really a criticism–ambiguity is something art makes space for.

Richard Kraft, installation view from "Something with Birds in It" at Charlie James Gallery. Courtesy Charlie James and the artist.

I am in Wisconsin this week. My uncle picked me up at the airport Monday, and, within minutes, had reminded me that Madison was filled with nothing more than zombies and liberals—I’d come in to the Madison airport, but he and my grandmother live an hour’s drive out—and had asked me if I’d become a Valley Girl yet. “It’s just a matter of time,” he said.

He couldn’t remember what I did in California, so I told him. Had I ever seen a real Van Gogh, he wanted to know, or something Gaugin made before getting all wrapped up in that Tahitian business? And had I heard of Owen Gromme, who was one of those naturalist right up there with Remington? I hadn’t heard of Gromme, but I was in luck, my uncle told me: my grandmother’s independent living home is full of them.  Apparently, a local priest, the priest who said my grandfather’s funeral, had owned and donated a gaping number of Gromme prints to the Oak Park Senior Home, and now they hang across from the elevator, next to the stairs, on the walls of the TV room. “Before I even let you see your grandma, I’m giving you an education,” my uncle said. “The way he painted shadows, you can tell what time of day it was.”

Owen Gromme, "Goshawk attacking Mink"

The Grommes are quite good, and sometime violent, which is my favorite kind of nature painting—the painstaking, lush rendering of a hawk swooping down after it’s prey, or those majestically detailed scenes with snow on the ground mired by a mound of gore or blood. Gromme, as I’ve just learned, was the son of a Wisconsin outdoorsmen who took a job as a taxidermist at the Field Museum of Chicago at the age of 21, around 1917 or so. He then did the same thing at the Milwaukee Public Museum, where he’d spend all of his career, eventually becoming head of the birds and mammals department. All the while, he was painting anatomically precise birds, and pretty much only birds.

Richard Kraft, installation view from "Something with Birds in It" at Charlie James Gallery. Courtesy Charlie James and the artist.

Being here among the Grommes has reminded me of Richard Kraft’s show, set to close this weekend, at Charlie James Gallery in Chinatown in L.A., initially just because of its title: Something with Birds in It. There are not that many birds in Kraft’s work, and those that are there are either simplified and loose, not anatomical, or pared down and precise classroom illustrations.  If it’s installation weren’t so carefully controlled, the show could even pass as a group show, since Kraft takes on so many different styles, from Walker Evans’ inspired photographs to drawings suited to children’s books. This show, according to Kraft, is all about polarities and frictions and fluidity.

The artist set out to show how different kinds of expression and reflection can coexist, how preciousness, violence and nostalgia can visually come together. Which, if you pull back and really look, might not be so different from what Gromme was doing. So why am I more likely to think about Something with Birds in It then nature-praising renderings by a Wisconsin taxidermist-turned-curator? Could it just be that Kraft steps outside himself and lets you know that he knows he’s maneuvering between complicated ideas about how the world works? Probably, and that’s why many of us end up in the contemporary art world; we want to foreground ourselves and acknowledge the problematics of perception. If you look at Kraft’s images, you can’t tell what time of day it is at all.