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

Walter De Maria, "Lightning Field"

In 1964 and 1965, Walter De Maria was the drummer for a band called the Primitives. Lou Reed, Tony Conrad and John Cale played in the band too, and the group would eventually morph into the Velvet Underground, after shedding and gaining key members and wholeheartedly embracing an addictive breed of nihilism. An artist known for his imposingly sleek, carefully calculated minimalism, De Maria did not sound sleek or calculated when he played with the Primitives, especially not on the campy track Sneaky Pete, which begins, “I got played traveling ‘round the world/I got played for a pretty girl.” De Maria did, however, sound insistent and fun.

A few years before De Maria tried his hand as a pre-punk drummer, he wrote about meaninglessness. A precursor to his 1961 project, Boxes of Meaningless Work, his essay explained that

Meaningless work is potentially the most abstract, concrete, individual, foolish, indeterminate, exactly determined, varied, important art-action-experience one can undertake today. This concept is not a joke.

Much of De Maria’s work would, unsurprisingly, go on to be abstract, concrete, individual, and foolish (though foolish only if you believe that art should be efficacious and un-indulgent). And with the exception of Sneaky Pete, most of it would also be exact:  Lightning Field, Museum Piece and The Broken Kilometer are all telling examples.

Walter De Maria, "The Broken Kilometer" at the Dia Foundation

Last Thursday, June 17th, the Los Angeles County Museum “tested” its soon to open Resnick Pavilion with a gargantuan installation by De Maria. Director Michael Govan explained that the sculpture would measure the building’s  “capacity to deal with large-scale work in the context of its architecture.” Called 2000 Sculpture, it consisted of 2000 low-to-the ground white rods. It was clean, quiet, minimal, massive and intimidating. It was also needlessly exact and viewable to the public only for a single day. It made De Maria seem quite indulgent–he was being dramatically expansive for no truly good reason.

Walter De Maria, "13, 14, 15 Meter Rows," 1985

Back in 1960, De Maria concluded, “Whether the meaningless work, as an art form, is meaningless, in the ordinary sense of that term, is of course up to the individual.” For Govan, meaningless work has a purpose; 2000 Sculpture tested LACMA’s newest venue. But maybe that means Govan feels a need for too much practical meaning in his life; what if he’d outright said, “the De Maria installation will not accomplish a conventional purpose”? If he had, I doubt many of us would have been able to hear him say it without trying to understand what he really meant. And would any of us have been able to view the installation without assigning it a purpose of some sort, conventional or not? For those who want to feel as though minimalism really does strip art down to its fundamentals, 2000 Sculpture would probably seem like meaning for meaning’s sake, in the same way some dogged lovers of modernism insist on believing in art for art’s sake. For those who believe minimal installations like De Maria’s transcend the strictures of conventional spaces and make a room like the Resnick feel more open than it otherwise would, then the sculpture’s meaning lies in its effect.

“Meaningless work,” wrote De Maria, “is the new way to tell who is square.” And I suspect we’re all a little bit square.

Dirty Hands; Mella Jaarsma; 2010; Chains, lamps; Installation size variable; Photo: Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay

Recalling the stateliness and beauty of warriors, the delicate chainmail in Mella Jaarsma’s latest work, Dirty Hands, is only interrupted through the visitor’s intervention in the form of light projections of 17th century Dutch prints picturing early colonial confrontations in Indonesia. While on one hand, the interactivity provides a recreation of these historical tensions, the intervention subtly implicates the viewer in their role as teller of incidents which fade into the shadows of history. Of Dutch origin, Jaarsma travelled to Jakarta, Indonesia in the early 1980s to study art, and has since been based in Yogyakarta. The use of shadows has been a fascination throughout her artistic practice, inspired by wayang (shadow puppet theatre) performances and reflections of visitors’ shadows by traditional wall lamps on roadside stalls. In Jaarsma’s body of work, one will find that her shadows have been employed as a representative of the human body and its position in relation to these cultural, social and religious surroundings.

Hi Inlander; 1998/99; frog legs; Image from artist

Jaarsma’s garments also indicate our membership to specific groups by posing as a second skin.  Hi Inlander is Jaarsma’s first in a series of works invoking cloaks and shelters, as symbols of human habitats in physical and cultural forms. Each garment employs a sensation of taboo, through sensitive or contentious materials to provoke dialogue and diverse interpretations of these materials across cultures. The first cloak of Hi Inlander exhibited comprised frog leg skins processed into leather and has been worn by a man at exhibitions in Indonesia, referencing the racial riots against the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia in 1998 which made apparent the fractious relations in the multi-ethnic society. The deliberate choice of frogs was used to carry across the different perceptions of animals and their roles in human culture and in this specific case, how Chinese consider frog legs a delicacy which Muslims consider unclean, yet when presented in Australia, it took on another cultural context.  Jaarsma included cloaks from chicken feet, kangaroo skins and fish skins, and the wearing of the animal cloaks coincided with an event offering the meat of these four animals with a variety of spices to an international group of visitors, bringing about communal eating to open up communication and cultural insight into viewing animals and food. Chinese and French members began preparing frog legs which were eaten by other visitors for the first time and likewise, Australians did the same with kangaroo meat.

The Follower; 2002; embroidered emblems; photo by Mie Cornoedus; image from artist

Another work based on a tumultuous historical milestone is The Follower, which was conceived of immediately after the  Bali bombing in 2002 and the ensuing representation of Indonesia as a country fueling terrorism by the international media. Jaarsma carefully selected embroidered badges from a range of social organizations in Indonesia, from sports clubs, social clubs and political parties to religious communities, and sewed these emblems together – some adjacent to each other, and some on top of the other – to create a cloak which illustrates the moderate, hybrid and diverse cultural landscape of Indonesia.

Jaarsma’s work, Dirty Hands, is currently on view at The Esplanade in Singapore is a group show entitled  Making History: How Southeast Asian Art Reconquers the Past to Conjure the Future. Jaarsma was born in the Netherlands in 1960, and studied visual art at Minerva Academy, Groningen, the Art Institute of Jakarta and the Indonesia Institute of the Arts. In 1988, together with her partner Nindityo Adipurnomo she founded the Cemeti Gallery in Yogyakarta (now known as Cemeti Art House) organizing exhibitions, projects and residencies. Both Jaarsma and Adipurnomo were awarded the John D. Rockefeller 3rd Prize for their significant contribution to art in Asia.

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

Mickalene Thomas, "You're Gonna Give Me the Love I Need", 2010. Rhinestones, acrylic and enamel on wood panel 96" x 144". Courtesy Susanne Vielmetter Gallery.

A group called R.A.I.D. (Random Acts of Irreverent Dance) regularly performs at the Echoplex in Echo Park. They appeared at Bootie L.A., a monthly mash-up party, this past Saturday, wearing shimmering orange body-suits and making awkward movements that somehow still seemed organic. R.A.I.D. practitioners have all different sorts of bodies—beer bellies, jutting hip bones, love handles—and they’re not necessarily good dancers. “No formal dance training required, in fact, having two left feet might be a plus,” reads their recruitment blurb on tribe.net. Sometimes they look like Isabella Rossellini did dressed as a snail for her Green Porno video: confident, cartoon-like and uncomfortably seductive. In costume and on stage, the dancers have a not-quite-human, object-like aura that makes them seem empowered, though it’s difficult to tell exactly what they are empowered to do.

I first saw R.A.I.D. the same night I saw Mickalene Thomas’s second solo exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter Projects. The bodies in Thomas’s garnished paintings also exude an object-like prowess and, like watching R.A.I.D., looking at Thomas’s work makes object, objectification, and objection all slide into each other. The bodies Thomas depicts become part of the fragmented, textured décor around them. And becoming décor, it turns out, can be as much a crutch as an asset.

Mickalene Thomas, "Put A Little Sugar In My Bowl", Installation view, Solo Exhibition Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 2010.

Called Put Some Sugar in My Bowl, the exhibition includes ten glossy enamel paintings on panel, each embedded with rhinestones, Thomas’s favorite accoutrement. The exhibition’s title approximates the refrain of I Need Some Sugar in My Bowl, a saucily unhurried Bessie Smith song that later mellowed into a Nina Simone ballad. The exhibition, like the song, exudes a grown-up sense of longing that manifests through stuff—for Bessie and Nina, the stuff consisted of bowls, foodstuff and a little steamed-up clothing; Thomas’s stuff tends to be drapery, paneling and bling. But while the song has loose riffs and paced pauses between stanzas, Thomas’ paintings have jutting fragments of pattern and flourishes that collide with one another.

In Love’s Been Good #3, a black woman with daunting blue eye shadow and audacious red lipstick that makes her look like she could be in drag, sits in front of a sofa made up of so many collaged patterns it becomes difficult to identify. Her sarong falls open and drapes down onto the floor, leaving her legs exposed. Her feet—she wears purple, rhinestone-bejeweled heels—can’t seem to find a comfortable place to rest.

"Love's Been Good To Me #3", 2010. Rhinestones, acrylic and enamel on wood panel 96" x 72". Courtesy Susanne Vielmetter Projects.

Thomas’s work is often discussed in relation Ingres’s and Matisse’s Odalisques. This makes sense. Thomas plays with art historical poses, her figures lounging across the picture plane, and odalisques tend to look slightly uncomfortable in their painted poses—sometimes because, as in the case of Ingres’s 1814 The Grand Odalisque, they have a few too many vertebrae, or, as with Matisse’s 1921 Odalisque, they seem about to tumble off a sofa. In Thomas’s repertoire, the women haven’t been made uncomfortable as much as they’ve made themselves that way–the way the figure in Give Me the Love I Need stacks her legs on top of each other would require steady muscle power to maintain, but she seems to know that. “Uncomfortable” becomes a self-protective strategy augmented by the patterned stuff that populates each painting and competes with the figures for attention.

Odalisques are property, concubines that belong to someone. Thomas’s women have property, want property, embody property. “I feel like the rhinestones in my paintings are like the really glossy lipstick that women wear,” Thomas said in an interview with Nylon Magazine. “It’s another layer of masking.” Kara Walker wrote about Thomas for Bomb Magazine a year ago: “Thomas’s Soul Sisters gaze out from between contrasting arrays of color and pattern. In her hands, the Black woman is both a bright and polished Ebony ideal and a picture of womanist yearning.”

Making yourself an object is a way of objecting to being made into anything by anyone else, and such an objection suggests the desire for something more than the Ebony ideal or a lipstick-inspired layer of masking. But while yearning can certainly be expressed by bright, polished, posed, rhinestoned masks, can it be met? My favorite line in Bessie Smith’s song is “Maybe I can fix things up, so they’ll go.” Thomas’s figures are always fixed up but intentionally stationary. They’re captive to their personae, but that’s why you create a persona in the first place: so that you can stay inside of it.

Now on view at SOFA gallery, a DIY space in the living room of an Austin apartment, is the work of Jeff DeGolier. This pairing is fitting since both the artist and gallery make due with what is on hand. DeGolier, who is based in Brooklyn, came to Austin for a week and harvested bric-a-brac from trash piles and swap meets. Day by day, he assembled a sculpture at the center of the room that runs from floor to ceiling. Hung on the walls are a few digital prints based on similar assemblage sculptures.

The sculpture starts with the ceiling fan that becomes a source of electricity for a faux hearth made of a painted tire and an illuminated white plastic bag as well as some small fans with flashing blue lights, typically used to trick out computers like low riders. Pompoms, plastic hangers and a mop head are also carefully assembled in a way that approaches a kind of ritualized fetish object for our American consumerist wasteland.

This space of assemblage, in which objects hang, pivot and tilt, is flattened and framed in the prints. Color is heightened and patterns emerge to quote the psychedelic without falling into the traps of its potential sentimentality. What holds this work in check is the intensity of its realism and directness combined with a quirky specificity of craft. Like many of the artists in the New Museum’s 2008 exhibition Unmonumental DeGolier dispenses with slick expensive production in favor of the quotidian, making this living room both extraordinary and accessible.

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

Mika Rottenberg, "Mary's Cherries," 2004.

Mika Rottenberg’s balmy, bizarre video, Mary’s Cherries, moves at such a comfortable pace that it almost convinces you of its normalcy. The three immensely able-bodied women in the video, dressed in Easter colors and stuck in homely cubicles, are completely unruffled as they transform manicured pink fingernails into equally manicured red maraschino cherries.

Rottenberg’s film, with its slightly off-color title and cast of female fantasy wrestlers, has been in circulation since 2003 and has shown at The Tate and MoMA, but I didn’t see it in full until 7:00 a.m. on Thursday morning, in the lobby of Hollywood’s The Standard Hotel. What brought me to The Standard was the cozy idea of video art over breakfast (I also briefly considered video art near midnight, but that seemed too flashy, and required staying awake). I made a pot of coffee and grabbed a bagel before leaving my mid-city apartment, imagining that my Rottenberg viewing would be something like Holly Golightly’s mornings in front of Tiffany’s. The fact that I didn’t have a flawless French twist, black gloves and Audrey Hepburn sunglasses, added to the fact that I left my coffee in the car, dampened the glamour, however.

Marilyn Minter, "Green Pink Caviar," 2009.

In the five blocks between my parking spot and The Standard’s front door, I saw four transients, two parking attendants, and three joggers. But within a minute of entering The Standard, I’d seen twice that many people—people waiting for the shuttle, people ordering from the bar of the 24/7 café, two receptionist behind the big desk who were spaced exactly as they are in the image on the hotel’s website.

Upon entering the lobby, visitors will see Mika Rottenberg’s film directly to their right, at the end of the corridor that joins the faux-70s décor to the first hallway of rooms. The walls are pastel purple, and the projection fits snuggly between an exit with a neon green sign and heavy door that says “Fire Sprinkler Riser Inside.” Currently, those who check in to the hotel can, instead of viewing new releases, or pay-per-view porn, view curated in-room video art courtesy of Creative Time. The StandArt series includes work by Bruce High Quality Foundation, Lee Walton, Martha Colburn, Marco Brambilla, and Marilyn Minter, all relatively new but “known” artists.

The videos The Standard chooses to show always seems uncannily appropriate to its milieu, often calling attention to the prepackaged, visibly expensive and slightly absurd nature of privilege. Minter’s Green Pink Caviar screened at The Standard’s four locations before Rottenberg began; I saw Green Pink Caviar on the mezzanine of the downtown Standard, completely alone except for a few people getting on and off the elevator nearby. I was essentially alone on Thursday too. Rottenberg, like a painting on the wall, is part of the decor, which is by no means bad. I imagine a Joan Didion transplanted from 1968, pulling up, having her yellow Corvette valeted, walking through The Standard’s doors after visiting some political miscreant at the state penitentiary, looking at the Rottenberg and quoting herself with snarky precision: “Most of us live less theatrically but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time.”

Mika Rottenberg, "Mary's Cherries," 2004.

In Mary’s Cherries, the full-bodied main players wear nonsensically demure house-maid dresses and work in bright but cramped cubicles that have been stacked on top of each other; they communicate through holes sawed into the floor. Mary, the woman on top, grows her finger nails under a purple UV bulb powered by stationary, fugitively constructed bicycles that the women ride.  The nails grow pre-painted and perfect, ready to be snipped off one at a time and sent down to Barbara, who works them into a pulp before sending them down to Rose, who shapes each nail pulp into a maraschino cherry and drops it into a clear container. Projected at the end of a purple hallway next to a “Fire Sprinkler Riser,” the absurdity of Rottenberg’s work feels unquestionably natural. It’s the manifestation of a particular sort of manufactured privilege that doesn’t really make sense but still feels weirdly necessary, like it comes from a deep cultural need to perform “being human.”

The self-proclaimed “most important survey of contemporary art in the world ever” opened this week in at 350 West Broadway in SoHo, New York.  The Brucennial 2010 edition, titled “Miseducation,” is presented in a 5,000 square foot space temporarily donated by the real-estate mogul and art collector Aby Rosen and supposedly “brings together 420 artists from 911 countries working in 666 discrete disciplines.”  But who’s counting?  The creative art collective behind what is seen as a parody version of the Whitney Biennial is made up of five mysterious guys known as the Bruce High Quality Foundation.  Although the Foundation participated in the recent “1969″ exhibit at P.S.1, Brucennial remains the collective’s signature celebrated program since the founding of the event in 2008.

Focused on reshaping the art world via a more democratic and DIY approach, the Foundation places some of its more visible functions, like PR and the organization of exhibtions, into the artists hands.  Perhaps the result can best be described as a visual cacaphony.  The Brucennial’s rather lax entry standards (an email asked prospective participants to “either dredge something up or create something new…As fast and as loose as you like”) is a refreshing juxtaposition to the supposed stringent selection criteria of the Whiteny’s Biennial.  With a “sharing is caring” attitude and limited wall space artists move their pieces around in order to make room for new arrivals.  Neither first-come basis nor celebrity secures an artist a better spot, and emerging artists as well as blue chip artists (like Julian Schnabel) display their pieces side by side.  The title “Miseducation” and its press release offer insight into the Foundation’s desire to question the politics and institutional protectionism that seem to run the art world. However, one has to wonder how “lax”  and rebellious the event can remain with heavy-hitter curators Francesco Bonami and Vito Schnabel involved with curating the event.

The Brucenial 2010: Miseducation runs through April 4 at 350 West Broadway, SoHo, with projects also on view at Recess at 41 Grand Street.  The event also includes performances and a literary supplement.

With the title “Size Does Matter”  for his debut show as a curator, one has to wonder if Shaquille O’Neal is talking about the size of one’s wallet, connections, ego, or one’s preference to bra size.   With the opening of the show at Chelsea’s FLAG Art Foundation the famous basketball player, actor, and rapper can now add “art curator” to his ever-expanding resume of accomplishments.   The exhibition includes work by 39 different artists, or “artstars” to be more accurate, whose works explore the myriad ways that scale affects the perception of contemporary art.  The scale theme is extremely fitting: weighing 320 pounds and standing 7′1 atop his size 22 shoes, Shaquille O’Neal has described his own size as “monumental” and he has the ability to dwarf just about everyone in his presence.

O’Neal made sixty-six selections for the show, which features works ranging from the ginormous billboard-sized Andreas Gursky’s photograph Madonna I to the microscopic work of Willard Wigan.  It is rumored that the works were chosen from over 200 images that FLAG founder Glenn Fuhrman and director Stephanie Roach showed him over dinner after a game.  O’Neal has also admitted that he is a great friend of Donald Trump who has four or five Picassos on his plane that O’Neal likes to look at when flying with him.  And with that, viola, a curator is born.  Describing the process of picking the works to include in the show, O’Neal explains, “Art is a process of delivering or arranging elements that appeal to the emotions of a person looking at it.  It’s what you feel.  I picked those things because they were beautiful.”  With this criteria in mind it is not surprising that another theme of the show could be “half-naked women,” or “ginormous breasts,”  as pieces by Richard Patterson, Dr. Lakra, and Lisa Yuskavage graphically illustrate.  O’Neil also plays the role of the muse for the show inspiring works like Willard Wigan’s  Micro Shaq,  Mark Wagner’s Shaq by Marq and Peter Max’s Portrait of Shaquille O’ Neal. These pieces embrace the famous basketball player’s happy-go lucky attitude, goofy grin, and larger than life attitude.

“Size Does Matter” is on display from February 19, 2010-May 27, 2010 at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea. Shaquille O’Neil is best known as a center for the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Cleveland’s controversial best-selling author James Fray, who has written extensively on art, has an accompanying book for O’Neal’s art show that features installation images and an essay.