A.R.T.I.S.T. S.T.A.T.E.M.E.N.T., 2011

Being a fan of Tim and Eric, and ridiculous and annoying stuff in general, when I found Dave Greber’s The Eleuthromaniacs, I was thrilled. Dave was surprised when I inquired about it, describing the series as “universally disliked by everyone who ever saw it” and told me that it was rejected by almost every film festival except Indie Grits in Columbia, South Carolina. “It’s failures were the reason I became a visual artist.” In 2009, Dave shifted his focus away from the festival scene and commercial viability. He began seeking out spaces to exhibit his work as video installations.

Idea, 2010

I’m excited, 2010 was his first installation which he describes as “a reality show purgatory.” It’s looping and repetitious dialogue inspired more loops, presenting absurd philosophy as collaged ads in his Primer, a 3-channel installation. One of two installations this year, Interior Deterious, a collaboration with Andrea Ferguson, was written about by Doug MacCash of the Times-Picyune who saw the exhibit as part of our 21st century challenge to “reconcile our craving for digital magic and our nostalgia for old- fashioned tactile hand craft.” May’s Art Forum presents a review of Spaces at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, featuring the work of rising artist collectives in the St. Claude Avenue area, and includes Greber’s parody of his own collective, The Front: on Display, 2012.

Dave Greber, Rise From Your Grave, Interior Deterious, 2012

Is it a contradiction to poke fun at the art world, you know, being an artist?

No, I don’t think it is a contradiction, rather a responsibility of the artist to critique the art-world, as it is an extension of our corrupt societal and institutional structures in general. But, I actually feel extremely grateful that there is still a “vocation” (contemporary artist) in our society where it is acceptable to channel wild spirits and are encouraged think as free as possible, albeit, as long as you can keep your shit together enough to act like an intellectual some of the time.

What is your relationship to the commercial world? Is it okay to love tv?

I worked as a freelance video producer and made local commercials for advertising agencies for a few years after college. That world was so dark. I think when you are in advertising, [you] embrace hatred. Freelancers in advertising are like atheist mercenaries fighting psychic wars in the name of gods they don’t believe in, against unarmed civilians who don’t even know there is a war going on. I felt so much guilt when I made commercials. I had to totally change my paradigm of what I imagined life was about in order cope with my actions day-to-day. Needless to say, “it’s not for me.”

It’s okay to love TV as long as you can also love yourself, your neighbors, and [the] source which gives us life.

You are a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, and you were selected for the Oxford American’s 100 under 100 superstars of southern art in their latest issue. Could you tell me what it is to be a southerner, or to make southern art?

I didn’t start making art until I lived in the South. I felt entitled to start making and showing my work because there was a really cool visual arts scene already happening here in New Orleans. I joined The Front, my art collective, through an open call, which opened up my first opportunity to exhibit my own work in a gallery. From my shows at The Front I was invited to be in Prospect 1.5 New Orleans and high-end commercial galleries like Arthur Roger Gallery, all in the course of a few years. I have always been supported by the community here. I guess I’ll never know for sure, but I don’t feel like it couldn’t have happened anywhere else.

Stilllives, 2011

Rigo 23. Autonomous InterGalactic Planetarium, 2009-12; installation view, REDCAT, Los Angeles, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco; Pedro Pica Piedra, Beto, Santiago Marcial, Monserrat Blanco, Gabriela, Marcos Sanchez, Domingo Santiz Ruiz, Mia Rollow, Paulina, Adrian Quiroz, Manuel Hidalgo, Ivan Pablo Soria, Pablo Milan, Miguel Hidalgo, Caleb Duarte, Jacobo Lagos, Erwin, Salvador. Photo: Scott Groller.

The Portuguese artist Ricardo Gouveia, or Rigo 23, might be best known for his series of larger-than-life, one-way-sign-inspired murals, painted on buildings across San Francisco, where the artist has lived since the 1980s. For the better part of the last decade, however, Rigo 23 has produced a series of projects with underserved and underrepresented communities. The latest of these, Programa Espacial Autónomo InterGalactico (Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program), has just docked at REDCAT, CalArt’s theater and gallery space in downtown Los Angeles.

The culmination of more than three years of coordination and labor by Rigo 23 and artisans from Chiapas, Mexico, as well as members of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), Programa Espacial represents a convergence of multiple worlds.¹ When Rigo 23 met with the members of the Good Government Junta of Morelia, Chiapas, to propose a collaborative art project between himself and artists from the region, he asked, “What would happen if they got an invitation to attend an intergalactic meeting somewhere other than the Milky Way; how would they travel?”² The junta members accepted this proposal but made it clear that the project was not a priority and would only be accomplished if he won the support of a local artist.

Because Programa Espacial is a collaborative project between an artist and various indigenous communities, and because those communities are under the jurisdiction of the EZLN, the exhibit brings up questions of commodification and appropriation, but these questions seem to have been of lesser interest to Rigo 23 than the question of positionality. The spiraling path a viewer takes through the exhibit evokes (within the limits of California’s fire code) the curve of a snail’s shell, creating interplay between a viewer’s sense of being sympathetically “inside” the EZLN looking out, or an outsider looking in.³

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Phyllida Barlow, untitled: 21 arches, 2012, Polystyrene, cement, scrim, paint & varnish, variable dimensions, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

The majority of her sculptures are towering structures that dwarf the spectator as if one were standing in a forest. Barlow dilutes the nature of her mundane media by her exquisite use of color, whether included by virtue of fabric, electrical tape or spray paint. For siege, Barlow exhibits her characteristically massive structures as similar to pieces I have seen previously, such as untitled: 21 arches (2012) and untitled: crushed boxes (2012). In pieces such as untitled: balcony (2012) and untitled: broken stage (2012) however, she adds more of a tangible architectural thread that differ slightly from her conceptual-based sculptures. Her work mimics the urban environment in both materiality and the nature of the imposing structures that swallow – or impede upon – the viewer.

Phyllida Barlow, untitled: crushed boxes, 2012, Polystyrene, cement, scrim, paint & varnish, variable dimensions, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

With pieces such as untitled: crushed boxes (2012) Barlow depicts weight through the manner in which her boxes pile upon a fabric cushion, thin or bulging in parts, depicting the sensation of being crushed. Her work maneuvers within a certain corporeal consciousness similar to the work of Eva Hesse or Robert Morris in which the weight – or the interior – of the body is made manifest through the use of material. With aspects of both Arte Povera and Minimalism, Barlow’s work is sensational in its rawness, and though I rather missed the space at Hauser & Wirth London that added an irreplaceable dimension to her work, Barlow’s structures are not to be missed in the immense setting of the New Museum’s spaces.

On the third floor, Tacita Dean’s (b. 1965, England) exhibition entitled Five Americans explores the theme of preservation and memoriam through filmmaking as it intersects with various artistic mediums such as painting, writing and dance. By way of 16mm films, Dean features five influential American artists spanning several generations: Julie Mehretu, Cy Twombly, Leo Steinberg, Claes Oldenburg and Merce Cunningham. Works such as Edwin Parker (2011) and Manhattan Mouse Museum (2011) follow artists Cy Twombly and Claes Oldenburg respectively in their studios, spaces that despite the aura attached to these renowned artists by name are places of quotidian banality of comings and goings.

Tacita Dean, Manhattan Mouse Museum, 2011, 16mm film, color, optical sound, 16 min, Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London

There is an aspect of prescience in Dean’s works, as each are bound by a common thematic thread that deals with the notion of expiration. For instance in The Line of Fate (2011), Dean sits with art historian Leo Steinberg as he finishes his last book about Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo before his death months later, a fact unknown at the time when making the film. This is a similar case with Edwin Parker in which Dean films Cy Twombly in his studio amongst what would be his final artworks during his last months alive. Even in her other works albeit more subtle, the theme of preservation becomes contingent upon the cognitive artistic process that she poignantly captures.

The Parade presented by Nathalie Djurberg (b. 1978, Sweden) with music by Hans Berg (b. 1978, Sweden) is found in the museum’s next-door space ‘Studio 231’. In an eccentric field of dazzling puppetry, a parade it is. A snaking trail made up of hundreds of exotic and fictitious birds scatter the floor under spotlights, frozen in mid-preen and warble. Each bird installation – whether sparrow or human-sized – has the craftsmanship of a Julie Taymor theater prop, with each muslin feather painted in an ombré of fanciful hues. Alongside her puppets, five animations are projected on the walls playing to the discordant melodies of Hans Berg’s compositions.

The Parade: Nathalie Djurberg with Music by Hans Berg, 2012, exhibition view: New Museum

Immediately upon entering the space, the menagerie comes alive with the eerie tinkering of chimes, a soundtrack that gives life to the nightmarish aspect of Djurberg’s mad animals and sinister animations. Her animation videos typically depict women as the central character in an anti-heroic role, often times as victims of absurd cruelty flecked with sexual overtones. Her videos feature handmade puppets both animals and humans, crudely rendered from clay, fabric, string and dolls hair, with lumps, bumps, spidery limbs and clownish faces. The Parade as a body of work exists in a similar abject vein as her various other works, yet in this exhibition she focuses on the avian rituals of flocking, mating and pageantry. Her videos portray explicit aspects of cruelty, betrayal and greed, in which her characters – both animal and human – play out instances of physical and psychological savagery.

The Parade: Nathalie Djurberg with Music by Hans Berg, 2012, exhibition view: New Museum

Djurberg’s work is brilliant in its manner of transparency. I am taken with the way in which she casts a light on the undesirable or abject aspects of human and animal behavior as the cynosure of her métier. And as usual, Berg’s musical compositions coupled with Djurberg’s claymation videos and theatrical installations presents a captivating mastery that dutifully emanates from their projects time and time again.

Phyllida Barlow’s siege runs through June 24^th, Tacita Dean’s Five Americans runs through July 1^st and The Parade by Nathalie Djurberg with Hans Berg runs through August 26^th. For more information visit the New Museum’s site.

Tatsuyo Miyajima, 'Death Clock' (detail) 500 black and white framed photographs, 3 LCD screens, 3 programmed Mac minis Image courtesy the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia © the artist

The revamped Museum of Contemporary Art Australia opened its doors with Marking Time, an exhibition exploring time, duration and mortality.

Jim Campbell’s ‘Last Day in the Beginning of March 2003’, a reimagining of the last 24 hours in his brother’s life, is a transfixing experience. One enters the dark space into the sound of rain.  Pools of flickering light illuminate wall texts identifying single moments such as the slamming of a car door, windshield wipers, the sound of a car radio, the lighting of a cigarette. Apparently random, banal – even meaningless, until they are connected by other texts identifying moments of nausea, anxiety, and the monitoring of medication levels to become a compelling, mysterious narrative. Lights rhythmically dim and brighten, suggesting the ways that memories of traumatic events blur over time, becoming disconnected and fragmentary.

Tatsuo Miyajima’s ‘Death Clock’ is chilling. 10,000 participants entered personal information in a ‘contract’ with the artist, nominating a time to die which activated their own ‘death clock’, an online countdown of their remaining seconds. 500 still images and 3 screens show the inexorable progression of each human life towards the inevitable. Like a 17^th century Vanitas, this work forces each viewer to confront their own mortality.

Tatsuyo Miyajima, 'Death Clock' (detail) 2011 - 2012, 500 black and white framed photographs, 3 LCD screens, 3 programmed Mac minis Image courtesy the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia © the artist

Katie Paterson worked with Osram to develop a unique bulb that emits light identical to a full moon. Consisting of 288 halogen lightbulbs with frosted, coloured shells, simulating the colour of the moon’s glow, and a single hanging lit bulb, ‘Light Bulb to Simulate the Moonlight’ is evocative rather than confrontational. If each bulb burned out one by one they would last for 66 years, the average human lifespan when Paterson made the work in 2008. Daniel Crook’s ‘time-slice’ video work ‘Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement)’ starts with an elderly man performing morning Tai Chi in a Shanghai park, and develops into an alternate reality where physical matter dissolves into a viscous digital abstraction. Time is stretched like toffee and the laws of physics appear entirely mutable.

Lindy Lee’s ‘weather drawings’ are suspended scrolls which have been exposed to fire and water. Works such as ‘Conflagrations from the End of Time’ reference the teachings of Buddhist masters who likened the universe to an infinite net. In some works intricate patterns are created by holes burned in the paper with a soldering iron, casting lacy shadows on the wall behind them. They are suggestive of the movement of constellations across night skies and the passage of rain and wind. Burnt and stained surfaces reveal the processes of their creation – Lee leaves her scrolls of paper outside in the rain and the sun allowing time and natural phenomena to make their marks.

Lindy Lee, 'Conflagrations from the End of Time', 2011, paper, fire, Chinese ink, image reproduced courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

In similar vein, Rivane Neuenschwander‘s ‘Continente – Nueven – Continent – Cloud’ consists of a false ceiling, lit from above, containing small fans and thousands of tiny white Styrofoam balls. Activated by timers, the fans blow the balls around the ceiling in great drifting clouds.  Audiences are invited to lie on the floor watching the slow movement which at times evokes ink dissolving into watercolour paper, or the movement of leaves or grasses in the wind,  suggesting the ephemerality and fragility of both the world we inhabit and ourselves.

Lindy Lee, 'Conflagrations from the End of Time' (detail) 2011, paper, fire, image reproduced courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Kristi McGuire is an artist, writer, and editor living in Chicago, Illinois. She is coeditor of The Contemporary Visual Studies Reader, forthcoming from Routledge this fall. She can be reached at postmenlikedoctors [at] gmail.com. 

Stock image photograph produced by Google image-search for “stock photography.”

I once thought that I could summon the ambient act of reading on the Internet as part of a singular project of prognostication: using those noisy images (stock photographs, Google image-searches, self-portraits uploaded to social networks) and polyvocal chatter as the agents and conduit of a new kind of meaning-making within language. Cassandra the soothsayer, her ear turned to the imaginary cracklings of Alexander Graham Bell’s phonautograph[1]—and why not? Cassandra is long dead and unreal herself, and now, many epochs after her myth rose to prominence, the metaphorical snakes are no longer licking anyone’s ears clean.

But truth be told, or soothsaid: the ambient isn’t a space that exists in the realm of the falsely prophetic or within other concurrent delays with real time (nostalgia, the future imperfect and conditional tenses). Instead, conveniently in line with its etymological origins (ambient, adj. “turning round, resolving”), the ambient works quite literally with units of time as we’ve come to experience them in the twenty-first century—minutes, seconds, the fraction of a fraction-of-a-moment it takes to follow a plot line on the flickering screen: we’re barely able to enunciate the word “Drake” before we’ve seen Twitter feed Drizzy saturated with the banal and disembodied static of the everyday (what Ben Lerner appropriates from John Ashbery in Leaving the Atocha Station as “life’s white machine”):

Screengrab of Aubrey Drake Graham's (aka Drake's) Twitter feed, March 26, 2012.

For writer Tan Lin, boredom is the threshold of the ambient, the place where a work is “born out of our mutual dis-interest”[2] and where “anyone who has ever read a painting will tell you [like Ed Ruscha], paintings, like poems, are most beautiful [and least egotistical] . . . at the exact moment in which they are forgotten, like disco.”[3]

Ed Ruscha, "Pay Nothing Until April," 2003, acrylic on canvas, 1527 x 1525 x 40 mm. Collection of the Tate, Britain .

For the critic and translator Jennifer Scappettone, in her essay on Tan Lin’s ambient poetics, “Versus Seamlessness,”[4] the turn to late capitalism’s panache for the stupefied landscape supersedes what Rem Koolhaas terms Junkspace and what other theorists, designers and cultural critics—from Venturi, Scott Brown to Frederic Jameson to Ernest Mandel—have mined in the hopes of locating modernism’s flawed moment alongside the disjointed landscape remaindered by modernization. What’s missing here? We’ve left Las Vegas and Learned from It—it’s not that kind of spectacle. In fact, it’s not spectacle at all. We’re so saturated by the multiplicities and disjointments of this remaindered landscape in which we dwell—where James Cameron plummets in a yellow submarine to document “IMAGES UNEXPERIENCED” while we read reviews of Mad Men episodes, interchanging accordion-playing Joan with Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as a Lute Player—that we can’t pause to separate a reading on slow death and self-sovereignty from a back-issue of Critical Inquiry from the animated GIF of a deceased professional wrestler on our screen. Or can we? Would we want to?

L: Screengrab of Christina Hendricks as Joan Holloway in the Mad Men episode "My Old Kentucky Home," 2009. R: Artemisia Gentileschi, "Self-Portrait as Lute Player," 1615-17, oil on canvas, 30 x 28. Collection of the Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

II

“Autopsychography” is a poem by the Portuguese poet/critic/madman Fernando Pessoa (1888−1935). I think my intention is to continually refer to it but never offer it up. It’s quite short—4 stanzas, 16 lines total—and its message is especially direct: the loss involved in performing one’s identity soon becomes its greatest measure of success. Its repeated line? “The poet is a faker.”

Fernando Pessoa, date and photographer unknown.

Pessoa was someone who, in his own lifetime, created over eighty alter-egos—including, of course, “Fernando Pessoa”—while leaving behind an archive of 27,000+ “items,” ranging in form from prose to poems to letters. Each of Pessoa’s heteronyms – especially the five most favored by the author (Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, Bernando Soares—with whom he self-identified—and Fernando Pessoa) had complex writing styles, visions, life philosophies, and temperaments. Beyond the textbook tenets of polyvocality (or varied interpretations of multiple personality disorder) here, Pessoa pursued in these personas an interest in acts of forgery and theories of materialism. Pessoa the flâneur; Pessoa the mystic nationalist; Pessoa, the student of Hawthorne, Whitman, and Poe, all coincided in Pessoa—these writer(s) of [Pessoa's] lifetime. The poet is a faker.

Pessoa read Arthur Schopenhauer, Henri Bergson, and Nicolas Malebranche, ultimately arriving at a place he called “the terminal system”—the limit and summit of metaphysics, a system the author was interested in contradicting. Pessoa tried to find the ‘thing’ that could encompass everything and—despite this encompassing—somehow exceed or transcend the very notion of wholeness. He saw excess as a peculiar kind of preservation. His cultural paradigm? Systems theory. How objects and ideas related to each other and formed (with as much noise as possible) a cohered experience was, for Pessoa, an oddly embodied science-fair project: his ultimate construction of time passing.

III

I try to understand the spam feed that litters my blog:

Screengrab of pending comments for a WordPress blog, March 26, 2012.

I read articles about the cyber-robots and scanning machines that now compose more than 51 percent of the Internet. I recognize in my desire to extract meaning from a spammer’s quick gloss of the lines I write a flickering glimmer of a modernist credo. I think of what it will mean when the Internet has exhausted itself—when a closed system collapses, when the entropy that marks the novels of William Gaddis inflects Ashbery’s “white machine” and even all the Pessoas can’t serve as a kind of embodiment for the rounds of Tweets and comment threads performed by indistinguishably distinguished cyber-specters. Will I still read another art review on the computer? By then, I will have become a cyber-spectator of a different kind. I’ll no longer be overwhelmed by the ambient fireworks of relationality—high and low, all forms, all kinds—but instead find myself disfigured by nameless, faceless “sentiment-aggregators” that perform the experience formerly known as my own. When their dancing Randy Savage glares over the margins of that Lauren Berlant PDF two tabs over and they perfectly execute the banal sense of quotidian displacement this triggers, I’ll be hidden away somewhere with a copy of Joan Jonas’s Double Lunar Dogs, preparing to paint their portrait.

Joan Jonas, stills from Double Lunar Dogs (based on a 1941 Robert Heinlin short story), 1984. Video (color, sound), 24 min. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

#Hashtags provides a platform for longer reconsiderations of artworks and art practices outside of the review format and in new contexts. Please send queries to hashtags [at] dailyserving.com.

Sophie T. Lvoff & Nathan T. Martin, "Untitled (Primary)", 2012. Archival pigment print on newsprint. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Sophie T. Lvoff.

One of the most informative moments in SPACES, the latest exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, is a timeline of the birth of the St. Claude art scene handwritten in black charcoal pencil on the wall.

Born out of the reinvigoration of community action in post-Katrina New Orleans, bolstered by the adrenaline shot of Prospect.1, hard working artist collectives popped up across the city in 2008, including Press Street’s Antenna Gallery, Good Children, and The Front, which aggressively show many artists from the St. Claude District. While worlds of change have occurred in the microcosm of New Orleans in the last half-decade, the genuine and honest dedication to making and showing art by these three cooperatives has remained the same.  That is why SPACES, an exhibition bringing the work of these three collectives together under one roof, is disappointing; not for the art but for the lack of curatorial inspiration that should have highlighted this positivity.

SPACES showing Dave Greber "The Front on Display", 2012; Chris Saucedo "Pencil King", 1996 and Lala Raščić in cooperation with Sophie T. Lvoff "Posing Process", 2012. Courtesy the Contemporary Arts Center, Photo: Angela Berry.

While there is a boot-strap spirit to each of these organizations, they operate with very distinct tones. This highlights the first part of the problem with this exhibition: there is no clarity of form within the show.  Artists from each organization are scattered around the room, lacking a clear tone to unite the work. The exhibition brings together disparate conversations that are often at odds with each other.  For example, Sophie Lvoff and Nate T. Martin’s Untitled (Primary) is a lush archival pigment print of a purple tavern at dusk. Sophie Lvoff’s photograph speaks to the vibrancy of early American color photography through lens of New Orleans surfaces. Writer Nate T. Martin adds a short vignette that sketches a child’s perception of driving in a rental car with her father and waiting outside a bar. The combination of text and image paints a visceral picture of innocence and vulnerability in a mundane world. Lvoff and Nathan’s work is located next to Ryan Watkins-Hughes cynical installation See St. Claude. Audiences of the show are prompted to step up to the photo, snap a shot of themselves photo booth style and email the photo to see-stclaude.tumblr.com.  At this site the artist writes: “The See St. Claude photo booth allows gallery visitors to see the St. Claude arts District from the comforts and safety of the CAC.”  This satirical approach to bringing art lovers to St. Claude directly references the insulation of certain neighborhoods in the city. The combination of the work of Watkins-Hughes and Lvoff and Nathan is certainly thought provoking, but leaves the viewer in the uncertain position of attempting to connect these two very disparate attitudes.

SPACES, showing Generic Art Solutions (G.A.S.), "Monopoly (St. Claude Ave.)", 2012. Courtesy the Artist and Jonathan Ferrara Gallery. Photo: Angela Berry.

Using a 1969 exhibition curated by Jennifer Licht at the Museum of Modern Art as the model for this exhibition, the space is developed around innovative approaches to interacting with museum space. Licht described this show as “an exhibition in which the installation becomes the actual realization of the work of art and rooms must be planned and built according to the artists’ needs, challenging the usual role of the museum.” This may be the stated intention of SPACES, however, many of the works are plopped into the CAC’s space, rather than the gallery being formatted to fit the work. Case in point, only three of the over forty artists were asked to actually make site-specific installations; Rachel Avena Brown, Bob Snead, and Jonathan Traviesa. Brown’s installation is a collaboration with Antenna Gallery artist James Goedert.  D-Cern Space brings together stop motion animation and knitted yarn.  On a large tv monitor an animation of the floor plans of each participating gallery are brought together and torn apart. Knit green squares form patterns around the tv monitor, insinuating the shape of the Large Hadron Collider.  Brown and Goedert seek to define a new space, one in which these galleries work more closely in tandem. D-Cern Space suggests what this exhibition could have been if each artist included in this show had the opportunity to install a thoughtfully prepared work.

Rachel Avena Brown & James W. Goedert "D-CERN space", 2012. Acrylic house paint, copper wire, digital stop motion, yarn. Courtesy the Artists. Photo: Angela Berry

Dave Greber’s three channel video installation The Front on Display is a wiseass satire on the perception of the artist as a rock star. All the members of The Front trade quips on this video reel of a photo shoot. Teenage boy-bandesque statements are made such as, “that’s when people are really at their best- when they are making posters” and “I’ve got some stuff to say, and it’s really important.” The sarcasm drips from the tv screen onto the floor, unfortunately drowning out other works.  Any other surrounding pieces that aren’t 100% aggressive, such as Jerald L. White’s photographs, are easily overlooked.

The cultural history of New Orleans is by nature a collective one. The galleries represented in this show come out of the tradition of working within neighborhoods to achieve goals that bureaucratic inadequacies are unable to accomplish. Antenna Gallery, The Front, and Good Children Gallery have all leveraged the resources of their members in order to build a community around visual art. CAC’s curatorial job does this achievement a disservice by creating discordant tones. I trust though that these spaces will continue to do what they do best–make visually interesting and thought provoking works.

Steve Lambert, Capitalism Works For Me! True/False, 2011. Aluminum and electronics. 9 x 20 x 7 feet. (Electronics by Alexander Reben) courtesy of the artist and SPACES, Cleveland, OH

In terms of quality, the show runs the range: from phoned-in works that are indistinguishable from the artist’s earlier works to delightfully new works that show expanded range.

The show opens with Steve Lambert‘s Capitalism Works for Me! True/False a giant sign that tallies the audience’s answers to the title. I thought I knew what this politically loaded word meant, but Lambert made me reconsider that. Which capitalism? Am I being asked about the late stages of capitalism (making lots of money without any hindrance from regulations, too big to fail, global motion of capital, etc) or the older, more basic form where private ownership of the means of production is distinguished from state ownership? I have a love/hate relationship with the globalism version. Every artist (or writer for that matter) bases their self-employment on the latter definition. If I say False, I deny my and Lambert’s self-employment, but if I say True, do I align myself with the 1%? The more I considered Lambert’s question, the more I wanted to answer him both ways. I feel like a weasel that can’t commit to one of today’s central wedge issues.

Close reading of Ann Pibal‘s paintings will be rewarded. They are broken linear depictions of space that include balanced formal relationships that mask what feel like unbalanced emotional events. These lines replace what feel like haptic, concrete locations with painted incomplete drawings. This lack of closure forces you to see the relationships in the paintings for what they are. The viewer is asked to reassemble the discontinuities as they see them. What makes these powerful, are not the techniques used (like all abstract art, someone will dismiss it as “my kid can do that” art) but the logic behind why she does what she does. Space turns, curves, and slips along sequential fault lines. What at first appears to be linear regularity is denied the more you consider the relationships hidden in these paintings.

Chris Taylor, Untitled, 2004-2010. Glass, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

Chris Taylor‘s glass works are smart, formal proxies that deny their own optics. He explores many angles of craft in his work. His stand-outs are concealed blown glass, simulating something you can get for free at a gas station: styrofoam cups. Taylor does not just reproduce commodity objects though, there are also replicas of famous luxury crafted objects that Taylor used to fool the original makers into refunding his purchase price, claiming his errors were their own. Their substitute status, like Allen MCollum’s surrogates or Jasper John’s sculptures from 1960, are more than just formal tricks and are not just sculptural trompe l’oeil. They are also a witty mocking of tradition that rouses the work into a living relationship with our surrounding culture. Can factory made luxury goods be deluxe if the factory that made them can’t verify that the objects are their own work? You should also not miss his video, Small Craft Advisory, which is hanging in the staircase behind his work.

Installation shot of Mary Lum's work. Photography by Clements Photography & Design, Boston, MA

Mary Lum‘s hybrid photograph-wall-paintings of odd spaces compelled me to spend a lot of time with them. The gestural perspectives of her work are altered, reality becomes unbound, when these works are shown so close to each other. Her close observations of both empty space and objects are absorbing. The masterful flattening and distortions found in her work makes an effortless documentary photo of a street into an inventive composition. A photo of something real is affected by the impossible drawing next to it, while the drawing seems more real with the fake-looking real-thing in tight progression. Each work infects the others and the presentation makes them come alive as an interrelated subject that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Matthew Gamber, Munsell Color Tree (from the series Any Color You Like), 2010. Digital gelatin silver print. 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy of Gallery Kayafas, Boston, MA.

Matthew Gamber‘s photographs are nerdy, historically and formally. They rely on such a simple conceit: removing color from objects that are defined by their colors. The things in his images need color, relying on it for their function. Making a color wheel monochrome still leaves it looking interesting enough, but a monochrome color blindness test is effectively useless as the data that makes this arrangement of dots into a test is undone, leaving the answer available to the color blind. This project summons a thread of early humanism described in great detail by Simon Schaffer in the BBC documentary Light Fantastic. Light and color are bigger than their physical truths, they affect and define the world we think we know. When photography expands upon the limits of our perceptive abilities, we get in touch with a foundational fear for humanity: that our mastery of knowledge is limited and that what we think is expertise is really just juvenile hubris.

Mazu, Silence (Ten Thousand Waves), 2010. Courtesy of the artist, Metro Pictures, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London.

Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves is a nine-screen video installation interweaving three seemingly discrete narratives that explore the migratory journeys of people whose impetus for movement converges on the sole need to fulfil utopian desires for a better life. Set against the contrasting backgrounds of the blustery northwest coast of England, the rush hour in Shanghai and the misty bamboo forests and mountains of the Guangxi province, Ten Thousand Waves’s motivating incident and first filmic narrative is the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004, in which 23 Chinese migrant workers drowned while picking cockles at the seashore in England while Wang Ping’s poem, specially commissioned for this work, is intoned over Julien’s images. In the second filmic narrative, Julien re-interprets the classic silent movie The Goddess (1934) – a euphemism for a streetwalker – whose protagonist (played by actress Zhao Tao) struggles with her chosen occupation in order to support herself and her son. In the third story, an ancient sea goddess Mazu (played by actress Maggie Cheung) believed to be the saviour and protector of fishermen and sailors in the Southern Chinese provinces, soars above the mountainous Chinese landscape.

Blue Goddess (Ten Thousand Waves), 2010. Courtesy of the artist, Metro Pictures, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London

Ten Thousand Waves, 2010, Installation view, Bass Museum of Art, Miami. Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London. Photo by Peter Haroldt.

But if the 55-minute film tests the endurance of any gallery visitor, its heavily down-sized counterpart, shown simultaneously at the Valentine Willie Fine Art Gallery (VWFA) white-cube space as photographs/stills from the film, neglects the fundamentals of this monumental work: the labyrinthine, imagistic spaces of nine, double-sided screens positioned strategically to “frustrate the ontological gaze of the spectator” (in Julien’s own words), within which the viewer experiences the truncation of traditional, linear cinematic narratives. In fact, the freedom of audience movement between screens subverts any attempt to establish a coherent narrative and sets up instead, a poetic interplay of images competing for visual dominance that tell of the migratory experience across the installation space.

Yishan Island, Dreaming (Ten Thousand Waves), 2010. Courtesy of the artist, Metro Pictures, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London.

Unhinged by the lack of context and the significant immersive engagement provided by the film, there’s the hazy sense that VWFA’s wall installation’s inevitable emphasis could only be photography’s proclivity for the duplicitous. In the film, Julien readily draws attention to the level of artifice that is merely hinted at in the photographs in VWFA. If it seems as though Ten Thousand Waves ostensibly indulges in rehashing Sino stereotypes  (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s cinematography for western spectatorship comes to mind here), it is just as quickly dispelled by footage of the production process that Julien weaves into the show. Against a green screen, Cheung dangles on wires in a film studio in front of a green screen while her long dark hair blows around her with the help of a wind machine. But while the dissolution of the mythical fantasy of Mazu serves as an ironic allusion to the oblivious Western articulations about non-Eurocentric Others, Mazu admittedly remains, in this globalised era of transnational capitalism where film grounds much of popular culture, a reminder of the highly marketable paradigm of Asian self-representation.

Green Screen Goddess (Ten Thousand Waves), 2010. Courtesy of the artist, Metro Pictures, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London

***

Isaac Julien (b. 1960) is a British filmmaker whose work incorporates different artistic disciplines in audiovisual film installations. Ten Thousand Waves: Photographs by Isaac Julien will be on show at the Valentine Willie Fine Art Gallery in collaboration with the Victoria Miro Gallery until 26 Feb 2012. The film is presently showing at the ICA Boston until 4 March 2012.

Show card for "Hybrid Narrative" at Mac Arthur B Arthur, in Oakland, CA, 2012.

Sight, acknowledgment, and shared experience all figure prominently in Hybrid Narrative: Video Mediations of Self and the Imagined Self, currently at Mac Arthur B Arthur in Oakland, CA. Artists Liz Rosenfeld, Chris E. Vargas, Sofia Cordova and Shana Moulton make themselves “seen” though video, film transfer, installation and performance.

Liz Rosenfeld, Untitled (Dyketactics Revisited), 2005.

Rosenfeld’s Untitled (Dyketactics Revisited), a 16mm film transfer to video, brings us to another time both via its material, and the performers themselves . A near-direct reenactment of filmmaker Barbara Hammer’s Dyketactics (1974), Rosenfeld’s work is non-narrative and lyrical. A small group paints their faces, necks and arms, and bind themselves with tape in what appears to be abandoned urban and industrial spaces. The short film is an analgesic; these desirable and compellingly filthy bodies lull and please, but also unabashedly idealize. Untitled recalls the ‘70s not just in its aesthetic but also in its evocation of community – Hammer’s original film sought to make visible the 1970s lesbian-feminist art coalescence. Rosenfeld’s work is decidedly queer and pictures a similar community present at the margins of the larger contemporary art market.

Chris Vargas, Have You Ever Seen A Transsexual Before?, 2010. Video still.

Chris Vargas uses his body comically in Have You Ever Seen A Transsexual Before? (2010). The artist visits several photo-worthy locales, each with particular artistic or pop-culture significance: the LDS headquarters in Salt Lake City, the Las Vegas strip, the salt flats of Utah, a windmill noted as “Americana,” and – most notably – Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1976). In each location, he asks the uninhabited space “have you ever seen a transsexual before?” – pulling up his shirt and exposing his chest. Vargas grows increasingly frustrated with the lack of response, dramatically flopping on a hotel bed or scurrying out of frame. Have You Ever Seen A Transsexual Before? takes an unanticipated turn via the artist’s frequently used low-fi green screen technology, transporting Vargas to other, faraway locales as he searches out and finds a Painted Bunting, a bird native to the American Southeast. The brightly colored bird is, in this writer’s humble opinion, pretty gay.  They are also easily misread as exotic or distant by the untested eye, although they remain ubiquitous throughout much of North America – perhaps an interesting parallel for one’s sexual or gender orientation.

Whispering Pines 10 – Trailer from Shana Moulton on Vimeo.

Time and place are also critical to the show’s other two works, Sofia Cordova’s installation and video, Fiebre Fanta [Fanta Fever] (2011), and Shana Mouton’s series Whispering Pines (2004- 2011). Cordova’s installation includes black-and-white prints (including what might be a picture of the artist as a toddler), a video projection with stuttering images, an electric palm tree, and the sound of storms, running water, and club music. The jumble of media brings to mind how identity traverses time and place: the artist, as a baby, particularly butch in a white A-shirt, and then again, recognizable as her “self” in the ostensible present.  Moulton also splices time and fantasy with the early ‘90s splatter paint, faux marble madness that is Whispering Pines. The TBN-worthy soundtrack and ample use of clip art both critique and revel in technology, not to mention self-help literature from the recent past and notions of beauty.

Do you remember your first time you saw dry ice? Mine was in a punch bowl as part of a Halloween school dance. There was something inherently magical about the material; when I first encountered it I kept blinking, waiting for what looked like an illusion to reveal itself. Watching Judy Chicago’s revival of ‘Disappearing Environments as Sublime Environment’ revives that initial excitement and gives it poetic understanding. Chicago teamed up with Materials & Applications to revive her 1968 ‘Disappearing Environments as Sublime Environment’ performance, originally by Chicago, Lloyd Hamrol, and Eric Orr. The piece consisted of 25 tons of dry ice into pyramid formations that shrouded the surrounding environment in a hazy fog. At sunset, the installation was incited with road flares and left to disintegrate over the following four days until it disappeared.

Chicago described the medium of dry ice as “a metaphor for the preciousness of life.” The performance piece alters the landscape of the Santa Monica Barker Hanger, turning an airport structure into an outdoor dream laboratory in which an experiment had gone awry. The dry ice creations are a combination of architectural pyramids and apocalyptic wedding cakes. Continuing in Chicago’s language of confusing typically masculine and feminine fields, traditionally male pyrotechnic flares gave way to a pinkish rolling fog that softened and feminized the landscape. The piece was a stunning addition to the Art Los Angeles Contemporary art fair, and can be seen in all its glory in the video below:

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Comprising only a large installation at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir’s Crepusculum – Latin for “twilight” or “dusk” – is a mixed-media, polyphonic, physical exploration of metaphysical structures that govern the human psyche, and speculates that an enigmatic and irrational system of signs, meanings and forms counterbalances the deceptively ordered exteriors of our existence.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Above all, it is an experiential and tactile show that prioritises evoking a multitude of emotions over engaging the intellect. A large, white spherical entity around which alchemic instruments are scattered sits on a pile of sand; music seems to leak out from all sides of the wall, surrounded by glass-protected ancient Icelandic calfskin parchments that record supernatural accounts of a medieval Scandinavian world inhabited by witches, trolls and dragons. The installation is populated with elemental components of the earth such as dust, dough, fire, blood, burlap and fur, but also overlaid with textures that are fur- or hair-roughened. An accompanying video bolsters the already-surreal installation as a narrator weaves a showy mythological universe with his droning words: a man guts slimy fish, a figure lithely unfolds itself out of clay “legs” and “helmet”, a figure wrapped in tattered cloths hikes laboriously across a sandy wasteland with another strapped to his back towards the self-same spherical entity.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Crepusculum’s allusive and mystical atmosphere appears to be as much a personal aesthetic journey as it is a collective memory of Iceland’s histories. Materially, the exhibition is about Friðriksdóttir’s continued creative experimentation with diverse materials and media that has been in part influenced by the breadth of Swiss/German Dieter Roth’s artistic processes and vocabulary. Friðriksdóttir’s starting point for Crepusculum is rooted in her own dreams – intangible tendrils of thoughts that bleed into each other are first allowed to drift unassisted into esoteric realms and subsequently thematically developed through a combination of simple sketches, sculpture and film. The overall effect is an imagistic universe comprising a choir of overlapping voices, an aggregate of signs and diverse earthy components, but it is hard to see beyond Crepusculum as an oracular endeavour to present nebulous connections to sexual psychology and pop culture while casting light on deconstructing traditional patterns of narratives located within Norse mythology .

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

But Crepusculum is also Friðriksdóttir’s personal re-imagination of a time in Iceland when folklore, gods and magic were fundamental tenets of existence, and where elaborate stories of creation were punctuated by moments of horror, melancholy and unquestioning didacticism. Augmenting her exhibition are twelfth century manuscripts and almanacs loaned from the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík for the first time; such is the reinforcement of the historical investment in Iceland’s national cultural heritage and the revelation of the intense grip that these traditions and mythology still have on twenty-first century Icelandic culture. Perhaps then, for Friðriksdóttir, this is simultaneously a profound ambassadorial undertaking on behalf of the Icelandic people, a cultural burden so complex that it could only be presented in ambivalent spaces as metaphysical considerations.

***

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir: Crepusculum will be on show at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt until January 8, 2012.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art defies the normal boundary between landing and gallery at the entrance to the fourth floor space that houses Sharon Lockhart’s "Lunch Break," 2008. Photo: Saul Rosenfield, ©2011, with permission of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The stairway to the fourth floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art leads me directly toward a long, narrow, darkened space, at the end of which is the image of another, much longer, passageway. In that image, a concrete floor below and light fixtures above trace a trajectory toward infinity punctuated by pipes, wires, hoses, storage boxes, tools, and lockers. The scene is not monochrome—red, blue, yellow, orange, and green are common—nor is it dark, but the fluorescent lights, the faded floor, the absent windows, and the constrained path—no more than five feet wide—suggest that this as a place to travel through, not a place in which to settle.

This sensation is amplified by the fact that the image, I slowly realize, is moving. Inch-by-inch down the corridor, the slow-motion journey of what turns out to be Sharon Lockhart’s film, Lunch Break (2008), might be confused with a series of stills.

Still image from Sharon Lockhart, “Lunch Break (Assembly Hall, Bath Iron Works, November 5, 2007, Bath, Maine),” 2008; 35mm film transferred to HD, 80 min.; courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; © Sharon Lockhart.

Lockhart, who says she is interested in “duration,” describes her method of filmmaking as “photographic.”[1] Despite appearances, the film is not typical slow-motion; Lockhart has digitally inserted eight repetitions of each frame, ballooning a 10-minute, 1,200-foot traverse into an 80-minute encounter. It is a film engaged in repeating moments, in suspending, not slowing, time. It asks me, in effect, to witness the moment once, and then again, and then again. It proposes that I might answer the question “What do you see?” only by pondering yet another, “Do you see what you see?”

All of a sudden, a person moves, and I recognize the objects dangling off a storage bin down the corridor as human legs. In this otherworldly place, everything that seems obvious at conventional speed becomes a mystery, a puzzle to be solved only by the closest attention. A young man with short blond hair in a white jumpsuit raises his hand to his forehead, or more precisely, raises———–his———-hand———-to———-his———–forehead, where the hand rests for two minutes of my time, or only about 10 seconds of his time. His hand settles back in his lap, and he looks down. Is this a moment of despair? As the blond man turns toward me, I recognize a gently waving hand below him. The hand is speaking, and it is attached to the green hoodie of another man. I assume the co-workers are friends; I want them to be friends. There is something emphatic in the gesture of the green-shirted man, something that could be advice or reprimand. The blond man’s lips part briefly. Then he turns away and looks down for what seems to be an eternity. Is he pensive or despondent? His hand returns to his forehead. The camera inches onward, never turning. There in front of me, two distinctive characters in a distinct place have enacted a story with no ending, one of some two dozen the procession reveals. Were the men talking about a spouse, a boss, a co-worker, a sports team, or the union? Were they complaining or sharing a story? Was the hand to the head about despair, exhaustion, a thought, or an itch?

Installation View of Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, October 15,2011—January 16, 2012, showing entrance to the film screening gallery (left), the neighboring gallery with a series of lunch-related photographs, and a pile of Lunch Break Times—Bay Area Edition, the 24-page tabloid newspaper Lockhart produced in San Francisco for this show. Photo: Johnna Arnold Photography.

It turns out that although this place looks like a passageway, it functions as a destination, a place for moving in rather than moving through. The film documents shipbuilders at the Bath Iron Works in Maine during the moments when they are not building ships. The procession down the hallway reveals one “all of a sudden” after another, its repeating moments of apparent stillness both facilitating contemplation and kindling suspense. I cannot make out the messages of these subdued bodies: body language needs the fluidity of its natural pace to achieve clarity. Further, the slow-motion procession foils the normal capacity to anticipate a movement the moment before it happens. I cannot join the rhythm of life in the corridor, and everything—a woman biting a sandwich, a man microwaving popcorn, a hand brushing a knee—becomes a riddle. While ordinarily I might compensate for these limitations through closer inspection, I cannot manage this: the procession, while inching, is inexorable, and the camera’s wide-angle frontward gaze, while inclusive, is unyielding.

The beauty of Lunch Break is that its attenuated moments make it difficult to lock onto a single interpretation: the slow shifting disturbs the storyline, twists it into another shape. I cannot resolve what has happened between the two men, but the film incubates a dozen possible answers, confounding the normal snap of my judgments. I have witnessed not simply the recorded event, but also the event of my own wondering, the activity of my imagination, which is often unconscious, extending over time. Lockhart has found a way to viscerally demonstrate the elasticity of the temporal-spatial experience. The event of the two men has taken only five minutes of my time, the camera traversing only 50 feet of corridor. Yet, within these repeated moments and movements, Lockhart has packed the narrative of a short story, one of many in the bursting anthology that comprises Lunch Break.

Still image from Sharon Lockhart, “Lunch Break (Assembly Hall, Bath Iron Works, November 5, 2007, Bath, Maine),” 2008; 35mm film transferred to HD, 80 min.; courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; © Sharon Lockhart.

The word “duration” refers to the period of time it takes for an event to occur, but I cannot sever its kinship to “endurance.” Both words stem from durus, Latin for “hard.” As I sat down to watch Lunch Break, I intended to stay, to endure, but I anticipated that the 80-minute experience would demand a sacrifice that would exceed my capacities. SFMoMA Curator of Media Arts, Rudolf Frieling, says of the experience, “The viewer’s attention and perception are constantly at work,”[1] meaning that Lockhart’s film forces the viewer not only to attend to things that he or she might normally overlook, but also to attend to attention, to perceive perception happening. There were moments when this was exhausting. In fact, the film asks me to perform the very labor the workers will soon resume: a repetitive effort. It was, however, never boring.

Lockhart gets to the crux of the activity common to both workers and viewers: the skill, ingenuity, and variation at the core of undertakings usually dismissed as trivial or onerous simply because they are repetitive. I cannot claim that my attention never wavered, only that Lunch Break inevitably rewarded the patient process of discovery. If speed seems to be the bugaboo of our age, critiqued for its narcotic-like capacity to gratify a sensation-seeking society’s desire for stimulation, then slowness, particularly as it unfolds here, offers another avenue toward the great rumbling revelation of experience: an opening—one story after another—into the expansive world of the imagination.

Sharon Lockhart, “Dirty Don’s Delicious Dogs,” 2008; chromogenic print; 41 1/16 x 51 1/16 in. (left), and “Gary Gilpatrick, Insulator,” 2008; chromogenic print; 24 3/4 x 30 3/4 in. (right), both courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, Gladstone Gallery, New York, and neugerriemschneider, Berlin; © Sharon Lockhart

It seems accurate to say, as one description does, that “Lunch Break’s gradual passage through the aged factory offers a meditative and melancholic reflection on the architectural, social and phenomenological space of a notably anachronistic mode of industrialized labor.”[2] And I might easily reflect—as Lockhart did during her gallery talk—upon the bookends that coincidentally bracket Lunch Break’s making and showing: the real estate bubble’s pop in 2007, and the union rupture in Wisconsin and the Occupy movement, both in 2011. But what is it about the film itself—rather than my projections about its subject—that evokes melancholy? It is true that the corridor is filled neither with laughter nor even many smiles. One man stretches, perhaps relieving an ache; a woman stares, perhaps fatigued; many read silently, as unanimated as the figures in the Duane Hanson sculpture that initially inspired Lockhart.[3] It may well be that melancholy unavoidably surfaces in this claustrophobic underground world, but it may also be that the restraint and deliberation of Lockhart’s procession forces me to consider not only the practices of perception and attention, but also those of reflection and judgment. Although the film inevitably raises associations to the conditions of factory labor, I found myself suspending—far more often than reaching—easy conclusions.[4]

Lunch break, indeed.

[2]Harvard Film Archive “Timestage. The Cinema of Sharon Lockhart,” 2009 [accessed October 19, 2011]. ”Anachronistic” may reflect both an actual trend toward automation and, particularly in industries like shipbuilding, a fantasy of completely automated processes that discounts the persistence of human labor.

[3]Lockhart’s triptych, Lunch Break Installation, “Duane Hanson: Sculptures of Life,” 14, December – 23 February 2003, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (2003), documented the installation of Hanson’s Lunch Break (Three Workers with Scaffold) (1989). Lockhart’s photographs of live workers installing fiberglass ones marked the beginning of the project that resulted in Lunch Break, the film.

[4]Among these associations are: contemporary globalization and the offshoring of manufacturing jobs; 19^th-century industrialization, the conditions of factory work, and, ironically, the increasing automation of manufacturing; and the work ethic itself.

John Smith, The Girl Chewing Gum, 1976, video still. Courtesy of the artist.

The East London artist and filmmaker has developed quite a following – one of his earliest works, The Girl Chewing Gum (1976), is a simple, yet brilliant narrative film that has spawned a host of online imitations and tributes. Smith’s version shows a street corner in Dalston, where an omnipresent voice directs the characters on camera – however it very quickly becomes apparent that the voice-over is postscripted, thereby disrupting the chain of cause and effect, and conflating fact and fiction. Laced with his notorious dry wit and anecdotal eccentricities, Smith destabilises the documentary form through his narration, driving our perception of the events through language, and exposing the conditions which determine how we read an image. The humour implicit in Smith’s films is derived from the unapologetic juxtaposition of what we know, and what he tells us – the pronounced gaps between the two rendered as sarcasm.

The assortment of homages and bootlegged versions of The Girl Chewing Gum which Smith has compiled over the years are included here within the exhibition, and inspired the artist to revisit the video himself – if everyone else could remake the video, why shouldn’t Smith do the same? Returning to the same street corner he filmed 35 years earlier, Smith traced his earlier movements to create The Man Phoning Mum (1976/2011). Layering the new footage directly on top of the original, Smith blurs the past and present creating a jarring vision of how drastically things have changed, and yet, how some things still remain the same.

John Smith, The Man Phoning Mum, 1976/2011, video still. Courtesy of the artist and PEER, London. Photo: Chris Dorley-Brown.

These individuals featured in Smith’s films – the girl with her gum, the man on the phone – become unsuspecting subjects in the narrative construction, much like the recent object of Smith’s fascination…

John Smith, unusual Red cardigan, lightbox text. Courtesy of the artist and PEER, London.

Smith’s Sherlockian investigation began by trying to piece together digital clues and culminated in bidding, winning and receiving various items from serenporfor’s eBay collection. Now in the gallery,  juxtaposed with the girl chewing gum, they are relics of an individual unaware that their discarded possessions have been recuperated as art. What can they tell us about serenpofor? What can we learn about an individual through that which they toss away? I do believe that Smith’s investigation into this particular case is far from over…

John Smith, unusual Red cardigan, installation view at PEER, London, 2011. Photo: Chris Dorley-Brown.

However, let this be a lesson leaned – when you enter the digital world, you forfeit a certain level of control. The amount of information that can be gleaned online is alarming. But then again, your image can be co-opted simply when walking down the street. Quite literally, there is nowhere to hide. I wonder what serenpofor would think if she googled herself?

Geof Oppenheimer, "Social Failure and Black Signs," 2010. Pigment print 34 x 24.8 inches; edition of 3. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

Recently in the San Francisco Bay Area it has been impossible to walk down a street without running into (or trying to avoid) someone protesting something. The messages range from concise to ironic, sardonic to flat-out fed up. In the undulating sea of abridged manifestos, there is the rare message so poignant that it demands the sign-bearer’s cause receives deeper consideration. Geoff Oppenheimer’s current exhibit at Ratio 3 Gallery, Inside Us All There is a Part That Would Like to Burn Down Our Own House, presents a reductive, politically-driven narrative filled with violence, chaos, nationalism, pageantry, existentialism and self-reflection. The title may be a mouthful, but it creates an interesting opposite to Oppenheimer’s expertly edited works, and sets the tone for the show as a whole.

Installation View, Geoff Oppenheimer, "Inside us all there is a part that would like to burn down our own house," 2011. Courtesy of Ratio 3 gallery.

Depending on when you enter the gallery, your initial sensory experience will most likely be one of two things: visual or auditory. For some, a minimalist installation of sculptures and photographs will greet them. Others will not be able to ignore the deafening cacophony of marching-band instruments streaming from an invisible source. But we’ll get to that later.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Anthems," 2011. High definition video; TRT 0:04:40; Edition 1 of 3 with 2 APs. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

The two bodies of work in the main gallery, Social Failure and Black Signs and Modern Ensembles, act as examples of how conceptual art can effectively function. The images in the series Social Failure and Black Signs are almost identical—black-and-white studio scenes of a hand holding a black sign with bold, white text. At face value, each piece holds an intriguing, reductive beauty. After learning the origins of each work, a satisfying sense of quiet epiphany develops. Each sign has a different fragmented statement that Oppenheimer chose from interviews with political figures such as Regan, McNamara and Castro, in which each man discusses the failures of his ideology. Devoid of any of the expected contextual information associated with protest signage, the images transition to an interior plane—a subconscious battlefield on which each person struggles with the contradictions of his actions and beliefs.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Modern Ensembles," 2010–2011. Gunpowder, blackpowder, smoke dyes, ballistic plex, and aluminum; 20 x 23.25 x 23.25 inches. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

In dimensional and aesthetic contrast are the rectangular sculptures of Modern Ensembles. Oppenheimer made each piece by detonating various custom charges of explosive chemicals inside ballistic Plexiglas. The resulting cuboids are three-dimensional cross sections of a distinct explosion. By containing the blast, Oppenheimer makes us witnesses to a frozen moment of violence. Additionally, the time it takes to view the pieces’ six sides allows for the consideration of the relationship between space and time—an explosion takes place in an instant, yet with each ensemble, we are able to stop time and find the curious beauty in the chaos.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Social Failure and Black Signs," 2010. Pigment print 34 x 24.8 inches; Edition of 3. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

After or during your time in the main gallery, you will undoubtedly start hearing the sounds of Oppenheimer’s video piece, Anthem. Tucked into the side gallery, the projection features a marching band playing four different national anthems. Instead of hearing them in succession, Oppenheimer layers each anthem so they play simultaneously. The resulting meta-anthem and/or non-anthem is an assault on the senses. In the video, figures fade in and out of opacity, overlapping into an accumulation of tan and brass. Each anthem, recited with pride, becomes a futile attempt at nationalism—not one can be distinguished from the others. The longer you watch, the louder it gets, as if each anthem is competing to be heard. The notes crescendo to an unintelligible roar, and then, as if overwhelmed with sound and light, break into white silence.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Modern Ensembles," 2010–2011. Gunpowder, blackpowder, smoke dyes, ballistic plex, and aluminum; 20 x 23.25 x 23.25 inches. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

Oppenheimer’s work truly benefits from deeper consideration. While each piece stands on its own, the combination of the three series, plus the title, opens an investigation into a part of all of us that maybe we are not very proud of: the part that never lets us forget we did something wrong, the part that would like to burn down our own house.