Rise of Rebellion: DailyServing’s latest week-long series

I recently worked on a photo shoot with arguably America’s most prominent metal band. During the fourteen hour work day, I had the privilege of witnessing these icons in action amidst thousands of objects, instruments, images and banners that celebrate the band’s nearly three decades of prominence. As the day progressed, I watched as a band member lovingly called his mom to tell her what the day holds. I saw the wife of the aging guitar player tenderly paint the balding head of her husband black in a vain attempt to preserve the appearance of youth and vitality. What was instantly apparent was the first-hand deterioration of the aggressive spirit of rebellion as it aged over decades. No one can deny the use of masquerade and theatrics in heavy metal culture, but what is rarely seen is the softer side of this unruly behavior, which was something that I was privy to that day. When thinking about this softer side of metal and its rebellious association, it occurred to me that rebellion is an act best suited in short bursts, rather than sustained in perpetuity. I recently sat down with Ben Venom, an artist fascinated with the rebellious nature of metal, black metal, the occult and southern identity, to talk about his work. Venom employs many of the symbols and images associated with these defying subcultures, and by creating handmade quilts, pillows, flags and banners, the artist is able to celebrate and mock these cultures simultaneously.

Seth Curcio: Ben Venom seems like an all too convenient name for an artist with rebellious southern identity and slant towards black metal. Is this your real name?

Ben Venom: No..Venom has been my nickname since I was a teenager. I grew up going to a lot of punk rock and metal shows in Atlanta, GA, and it came about from hanging around the that scene. Everyone had some obscure nickname, mine just stuck and never left.

Later, I started to incorporate my nickname into my artwork more and more while I was at the San Francisco Art Institute pursuing my masters degree. I was tired of having my last name misspelled (Baumgartner) in exhibition catalogs or postcards for art exhibitions. Plus, so many people already knew me as Ben Venom, it seemed like a natural progression and of course a much easier name to spell!

SC: Much of your new work uses imagery and materials that are related to black metal as the aggressive epitome of an already masculine sub culture. You physically unite imagery from this movement by sewing it together into quilts, flags and banners. Where do you derive the source material?

BV: The source material is collected from attending concerts, reading, and researching certain aspects of metal culture. For instance, Sam Dunn, Canadian anthropologist and heavy metal fan, has produced two documentaries that explore the origins of heavy metal music from early bands such as Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath, to current bands like Slayer & Mastadon. I recently read Lords of Chaos and just bought Only Death Is Real (An Illustrated History of Hellhammer and early Celtic Frost). These books offer an inside look into what goes on behind the scenes or after the music dies, literally, HA! More specifically, a few pieces are directly inspired by bands that use corpse paint. Influenced by the likes of Alice Cooper, KISS, and the Misfits many black metal bands paint their faces with black and white shapes to mimic inhumanity or death. I re-design these shapes into forms that mimic faces or objects associated with metal or the occult. I was initially inspired to start quilting after seeing the Gees Bend traveling exhibition, which showcases handmade quilts from a very rural region in Alabama. I had a lot of old Heavy Metal t-shirts hanging in my closet and thought it would be interesting to make a metal themed quilt from them. The result was a 6′ x 9′ quilt constructed with over 35 vintage heavy metal t-shirts from my own collection and a few purchased on Ebay. The quilting pattern (Red Stitching) forms a Pentagram shape when viewed from a distance. The quilt is entirely hand-made using a basic sewing machine and took roughly 3 months to complete.

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During an admittingly rushed Friday evening in 2008, I attended the Whitney Museum during a pay-what-you-wish night. It was during the Biennial and every floor of the museum was packed with an abundance of people and art. As I made it through each floor, digesting as much art as possible in 3 hours, one artist and artwork stayed on my mind: Mika Rottenberg’s video installation, Cheese. Since that evening, I have followed her beautifully complex projects, faithfully reading about her recent exhibitions at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery and Mary Boone Gallery. So it was no surprise that when I first heard that her new video, Squeeze, was to debut at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, I made it a point to stop by immediately and see what the artist has been up to over the past two years.

Mika Rottenberg, Squeeze (still), 2010; Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery/Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery; photo: Henry Prince

In this new video, Rottenberg continues her investigation into social and labor-based inequalities through a fragmented narrative. The grotesquely seductive video equally binds and separates the concept of labor with gender, class, and race, seamlessly merging the real with the hyper-fictional. Interlocking environments slide in and out of place. Exaggerated sounds of cutting, slicing and crunching divide and define the separate worlds, and rich, fleshy color pull them all back together. Similar to her past work, Squeeze maintains an all woman cast of characters played by non-actors, where the physical characteristics of Rottenberg’s women parallel their occupation within the awkwardly constructed environment. Women working in a rubber plant in India, mining the trees for raw substance, interact with an all female work force at a lettuce farm in Arizona. These two real worlds collide with the fictional factory constructed in the artist’s studio, serving as the main link between all of the spaces in constant flux. Walls move, floors drop, and characters blindly connect to the factory to create a new hybrid consumer product turned art-object, which is composed of blush that is squeezed from the skin of a woman in the factory, rubber, and decomposing lettuce.

Through a beautifully non-linear story, Rottenberg’s use of the absurd confronts the seriousness of her content, mesmerizing the viewer by slowly releasing a delicate flow of information through color, sound and rhythm. Each element quietly underscores the disconnect between the consumer and the production process innate to mass commerce. What results is a world which mirrors her role as a woman creating an art object, and our daily lives of utilizing a variety of products, many of which are produced through the work of people who are socially, politically, and racially removed from the consumer. Yet, while the work is far from generous, the artist subtly reminds us that we can never really separate ourselves from the lives of others no matter how distant or disconnected we would like for them to be.

On the north-west corner of Trafalger Square in London lies a structure simply coined the Fourth Plinth. Originally designed in 1841 by Sir Charles Barry, the massive pedestal was intended to display an equestrian statue, but the sculpture was never finished due to a lack of funds. Since the late nineties, the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts has commissioned several sculptural works for the Fourth Plinth including works from Marc Quinn to Rachel Whiteread.

Last summer, British artist Antony Gormley was also invited to complete a project utilizing the Fourth Plinth. Instead of creating a static sculptural form to sit elevated on a pedestal before the city, the artist took a risky move to randomly invite 2,400 people to occupy the structure for a period of one hour, twenty four hours a day for a total of 100 days. Titled One & Other, the pieced allowed each person that inhabited the plinth to become the work of art,  leveling any hierarchy that defines who should be represented in a work of art. Each attendee occupied the structure alone, but was allowed to do anything they like for the hour, providing that it is legal in the UK.

For a brief period, participants could address the world at large and speak to any issue that is of concern to them.  Certainly a momentary equality of voice doesn’t exactly elicit the illusions of grandeur that are usually associated with political or societal utopias, but the ability to speak openly to an audience about an idea or issue that you are invested in without consequence is certainly the first step to identifying a common ideal. To further extend the impact and reach of each participants voice, every minute of the 100 day project was streamed live over the internet and then archived for indefinite public access.

However, Gormley’s work isn’t just interested in the idea of or struggle for utopia in relation to society, politics or even a specific place. Most often the work quietly references the notion of balance and harmony as a state of being. Gormley’s training in archaeology, anthropology and art history at Cambridge University, mixed with years of practice with Buddhist meditation in India and Sri Lanka has positioned him in a unique place to express the experience of inner balance to a greater audience though the language of visual art. When describing the material usage for the majority of his figurative sculptures, the artist will state air as a fundamental material. This is because Gormley is as interested in the inner ’space’ of his forms as he is the ‘outer space’ that the form itself occupies.

For his first US public art project, the artist is presenting Event Horizon, a current project that includes 31 life-sized figures cast in iron and bronze modeled form the artist’s own body and now populate Madison Square Park and rooftops throughout New York’s Flatiron District. In an area that is vibrant, hectic and anything but still and quiet, these forms serve as a reminder of the balance and utopia that can be obtained inwardly even in the most chaotic of locations. However, this reminder often happens in an abrupt and oddly irritating way. In a recent interview with the New York Times, the artist addressed this notion stating, “You could almost say the insertion of the sculpture is like the insertion of acupuncture needles within a collective body. And seeing how the body as a whole reacts to the presence of this irritation is very much the point.”

In an age of twenty-four hour a day news networks that constantly reflect  that we are in the midst of a major environmental disaster, multiple ongoing wars, and the worst economic crisis of our time, it is hard not to become a little paranoid or to begin thinking that the end of the world near. With this in mind it is no wonder that artists have begun to address these issues in increasingly direct ways.

Artist Chad Person is presenting an exhibition titled, Surviving the End of Your World, currently on view at Mark Moore Gallery in Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station. For the exhibition, the artist is presenting works from his RECESS series (Resource.Exhaustion.Crisis.Evacuation.Safety.Shelter), which is essentially the remodeling of the artist’s home into conceptually sound environment that revolves entirely around survival.  Items in RECESS include a converted pool that now acts an operating bunker, a makeshift Double Barrel Shotgun, Modular Rain Barrels, Recycled Solar Oven, Golf Ball Cannon, and Signal Flags among several other objects. Within the context of the gallery these items become art objects loaded with cultural meaning.

The artist has also completed a series of collages which feature war related objects used by the US military, such as planes, helicopters, tanks and ships. These flat works are created through the meticulous deconstruction of US currency. Person actually deducts the money used to create the works from his taxes, potentially refusing to contribute to the war efforts through paying additional taxes. This is a logic that is essentially flawed, but which does make a potent statement.

In the main section of the gallery, the artist presents two large inflatables, which dominate the space. Upon entering the gallery, the viewer comes across a large inflatable of the Mobil Oil Pegasus, lying on its side in a shallow pool of oil. This creature is followed by another large inflatable sculpture, this time of the McDonald’s character Mayor McCheese, who has lost his political stature and is now slumped into a corner. The figure dissolves into a metaphor for all political leaders who have failed in their vain attempt to better the world.

Chad Person lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The artist is a graduate of the University of New Mexico and has exhibited extensively in Southwest. Surviving the End of Your World marks his first solo exhibition with Mark Moore Gallery, and will be on view through August 14th, 2010.

Using Pablo Picasso’s famed 1938 painting titled Portrait de femme (Dora Maar), 1938, as a framework for a new series for formal paintings, both large and small, Los Angeles-based abstract painter John Millei embarked on a series of paintings titled Woman In A Chair. The exhibition, which is on view through July 2010 at Ace Gallery in Beverly Hills, featured a room full of towering paintings, each reaching over eight feet tall, tightly packed along the gallery walls. While the paintings borrow the form of Picasso’s famed painting, they are not specifically concerned with either the subject of Dora Maar, nor Picasso himself. Instead, the image of the woman in a chair serves as a simple armature for the artist to revisit certain stylistic periods of his own career.  As the paintings align the wall in close proximity, the viewer can easily compare the seemingly endless variations of a single subject. Lush and voluminous bands of paint sit next to flat graphic spans of color on certain paintings, while others contain tightly woven bands that are placed beside areas of raw canvas. The handling of the paint seems effortless and almost instantaneous, however it is evident that every mark and color combination is careful considered. While the paintings obviously explore Millei’s art historical predecessor in repetition, the work remains playful while carrying the weight of this lineage.

On view concurrent with Woman In A Chair at Ace Gallery’s Wilshire gallery is another major exhibition of paintings by the artist titled, Maritime. Millei has an extensive resume of international exhibitions dating back to 1981, and has produced eight solo exhibitions with Ace Gallery over the past 10 years. Reviews and overviews Woman In A Chair have appeared in the LA Weekly, Beautiful/Decay, and countless online publications such as ArtDaily.

This week, the Christian Marclay: Festival will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. The exhibition celebrates many of the artist’s graphic scores for performance and will take the form of multiple daily performances by individual musicians and vocalists. The Whitney has pulled together some of country’s finest Avant-garde musicians to play more than a dozen of Marclay’s scores dated from 1985 to 2010. Some of the works to be performed include, ChalkBoard (2010), Covers (2007-10) and Screen Play (2005). Many of the pieces take the form of a physical art object produced from videos, photographs, found images, and readymade objects which are intended to elicit a musical response from the performers.

Christian Marclay, Screen Play, 2005. Courtesy the artist. © Christian Marclay

Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay is internationally known for his innovative artworks that explore the intersection of image and sound. Over the past several decades, the artist has combined performance, collage, sculpture, installation, photography and video to create unique work that provides commentary on many aspects of contemporary culture, while continuing to push the boundaries of visual art and music. Marclay is often recognized as an early pioneer of turntablism, as he first began to use turntables and physically altered records as instruments for performances in the late 1970’s.

Festival begins this Thursday, July 1st with two pieces performed by Min Xiao-Fen and Elliot Sharp at 1pm and Ulrich Kieger at 2:30pm. The exhibition will continue through September 26, 2010.

Jordan Kantor Installation View, 2010 Ratio 3, San Francisco

The press release for Jordan Kantor’s self titled exhibition, currently on view at Ratio 3 in San Francisco, provides readers with little more than a physical account of what the exhibition includes: “several paintings on canvas, some in oil, others in enamel, two looping slide projections,” etc. This type of opacity in the actual content of the show seemed frustrating at first, but after a few moments that frustration quickly dissolved into intrigue. Upon viewing the exhibition my emotional response was not unlike that of reading the press release, confused as to the artist’s intent, but soon a flood of connections between the exhibited works began to develop. The correlation between the press release’s purpose to outline the physicality of the show as opposed to the content and the show’s attempt to underscore the building blocks of painting without indulging the content of any said painting became strikingly apparent. And, while this exhibition seems to indulge a post-medium practice, as opposed to Kantor’s previous exhibitions which often consist exclusively of paintings, this collection of works may actually be more about painting than any other.

Jordan Kantor Untitled (studio shots, 2010), Sixty-nine 35mm slides, carousel slide projector

The press release states “Though comprised of individual pieces, this exhibition is conceived as a constellation of works to be seen together in the space in which they are shown,” and this certainly holds true. Each piece is strategically placed to complement or finish other works in proximity. Together these works culminate to provide an intimate, yet removed understanding of all that lies on the periphery of a painting.

Jordan Kantor Untitled (Lens Flare palette), 2008-2009 Oil on wax paper mounted on canvas 12 x 16 inches

Included in the exhibition are many pieces that serve as evidence of works past, such as three of the artist’s palettes that were used to construct works from a previous exhibition at Ratio 3, and two slide projectors which provide an intimate look into the materials of the artist’s studio. Kantor also displays an X ray of a painting that reveals the physical structure of the painting without revealing the content of the painting, a metaphor that continues to play out through the exhibition.

Jordan Kantor Untitled (x-ray photograph), 2009 Chromogenic color print, mounted on gatorboard 40.75 x 55.75 inches

The bulk of the works that actually contain pigment on canvas capture film leaders, which are used to lead into or trail out of films. These paintings, like many of the other works in the show, show a tool needed to aid in the display of an image without revealing exactly what that image is. The only work that bears a direct resemblance to Kantor’s previous body of paintings is Untitled (builder), an image of a brick layer building the foundation for a wall. This work acts as yet another layer in Kantor’s construction of an image.

This collection of work illustrates artist’s ability to distance himself from the very act of creating an image-based painting in order to obtain a more thorough investigation of his own role with the medium. The exhibition functions like a puzzle, where each piece is less than the sum of the whole.

Jordan Kantor Untitled (builder), 2006 Oil on canvas 28 x 40 inches

Jordan Kantor currently lives in San Francisco and is an associate professor of art practice and theory at California College of the Arts. In late 2008 and early 2009, his work was featured in the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, and he received the SECA Art Award Exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA). Kantor received an AB from Stanford University and his PhD from Harvard University.