Installation view, a LAND Exhibition: "Perpetual Conceptual: Echoes of Eugenia Butler." Photograph courtesy of Danielle Sommer.

Thanks to the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), the Getty Center, and Pacific Standard Time, for the next three months, Butler’s influence will be on display in three West Hollywood exhibition spaces, at 8126 – 8132 Santa Monica Boulevard, just about a mile from the Eugenia Butler Gallery’s original location, 615 La Cienaga. Titled Perpetual Conceptual: Echoes of Eugenia Butler, the show is both a primer — with works from Paul Cotton, Lawrence Weiner, Ed Keinholz, et al — and an homage, with curatorial stylings that recall many of the makeshift exhibition spaces of EBG’s era. In short, LAND, “a public art initiative committed to curating site- and situation-specific contemporary art projects,” chooses exhibition locations based on specific projects rather than maintaining a single venue. Perpetual Conceptual‘s three venues are located one right after another on the edge of WeHo, in a small, unassuming strip mall, right next to a donut shop.

Joseph Kosuth, "Nothing," 1967, photostat. Estate of Eugenia P. Butler. A LAND Exhibition: "Perpetual Conceptual: Echoes of Eugenia Butler." Photo courtesy of Danielle Sommer.

The bulk of the exhibition comes from Butler’s personal collection, now in the hands of her granddaughter. Joseph Kosuth’s photostat Nothing, 1967, is perhaps the most immediately familiar work: a deep-black square, in the center of which is written the definition of “nothing” in cream-colored font. There are also several pieces of typewritten and hand-drawn ephemera by Lawrence Weiner containing instructions for creating specific artworks, such as “One standard air force dye marker thrown into the sea.” There’s quite a bit of work on display, including both primary and secondary artifacts. William Wiley’s Movement to Black Ball Violence, 1968, a ball of black friction tape made in response to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death, remains poignant forty-four years later, even more so due to the letter of instruction Wiley typed to go along with the piece, which asks that anyone who wishes to blackball violence add 150 feet of tape to the ball.

William T. Wiley, "Movement to Black Ball Violence, 1968-9," friction tape and wood; linoleum on metal. Collection of the artist. A LAND Exhibition: "Perpetual Conceptual: Echoes of Eugenia Butler." Photo courtesy of Danielle Sommer.

Though this particular piece is “closed” (Wiley called an end to it in 1969), the genius of LAND’s exhibition strategy is that many pieces and artists will be reactivated or looked at in depth using the two other exhibition rooms that adjoin the group space. Currently, Eugenia P. Butler’s work is on display in the concept space, and there will be restagings of Dieter Roth’s Steeple Cheese, 1970 — Roth’s first exhibition in the United States in which he packed 37 suitcases full of cheese to rot, with one to be opened each day — and Ed Keinholz’s Watercolors, 1968, a bartering project. Keinholz painted a group of watercolor paper with “prices” (such as “Timex Electric Watch”) and invited people to trade him the object for the watercolor. This past weekend also saw the restaging of Eric Orr’s Wall Shadow, 1970, in the back parking lot, a performance piece in which Orr took a palette of cinderblock, built a wall, traced and painted its shadow with gray paint, and then dissassembled everything so that only the painted shadow was left. Like Wall Shadow and the Eugenia Butler Gallery itself, my bet is that Perpetual Conceptual will be brief in its physical existence but long in influence.

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“Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and of making it obsolete.” – Susan Sontag

In her 1977 essay, “The Image-World,” Susan Sontag wrote that the practice of photography – and the overabundance of images that come along with it – leave us desensitized to the “real” world. Despite the fact that photographs are considered traces of their subject, we typically see photographs as independent, material objects – separate from their original subjects and somehow more palatable. They even occupy a specific moment of time, different from our own, turning the present into the past and the past into the present.

But Sontag was writing about the role of the photograph as she knew it, which never included sculpture, or photographs functioning not just as traces of objects but as actual simulations, or three-dimensional copies.  The last year has seen a rise in artists working with photography in sculpture, with more than a few of these artists choosing to juxtapose “real” objects with their 2- or 3-dimensional, photographic copies. Is there a difference between images functioning like this in the world and “the image-world” that Sontag describes? Or are they one and the same?

Jerry McMillan, "Wrinkle Bag," 1965. Black and white photographic bag construction with shelf and Plexiglas cover. 12.75 x 11.75 x 7 inches.

Ironically, even as Sontag was puzzling over “The Image-World” and the rest of the essays that would become On Photography, searching to delineate a niche in the fine art world for photography, curator Peter Bunnell took an even larger step. In 1970, Bunnell launched “Photography into Sculpture” at the Museum of Modern Art, “the first comprehensive survey of photographically formed images used in a sculptural or fully dimensional manner.”

The show included a work by Jerry McMillan called “Wrinkle Bag” (1965) – perhaps one of the first of its kind. “Wrinkle Bag” was not merely a photograph, but a high-quality, black-and-white reproduction of the texture of crumpled paper, cut into the shape of a brown paper lunch sack. In its recent re-manifestation at Los Angeles’ Cherry and Martin Gallery, “Wrinkle Bag” looked eerily contemporary, perhaps because this type of photographic reproduction has resurfaced recently in the works of contemporary artists, like Urs Fischer, amongst others.

Installation view of "Who's Afraid of Jasper Jonnson," Tony Shafrazi Gallery, 2008.

In 2008, Fischer collaborated with Gavin Brown on the exhibition “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?”, at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. Fischer and Brown hired a photographer to document the gallery’s previous show – “Four Friends”, which included work by Donald Baechler, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf – and then wallpapered the gallery with the images, printed in a 1:1 scale.  The results were chaotic, with the photographed work punctuating, even interrupting, the current exhibit.  There were even moments where a photographed object was juxtaposed against the original, as in the case of the security guard.

Fischer repeated this technique last year for his solo exhibition at the New Museum, taking photographs of the entire third floor, including the ceiling, and then re-papering those same walls at a 1:1 ratio. 2-d images of the side of the exit sign line up with the exit sign itself; the ceiling is covered with a huge photograph that includes two-dimensional images of flickering flourescent lights, right next to the lights themselves.

Urs Fischer, "Marguerite de Ponty," 2010. Installation view. Mixed Media.

By all reports, this was a challenging room to walk through, although reactions varied – many went through to quickly and missed the minor details. Conversely, the reward for those who took their time was an unsettled feeling brought on by the proximity of “real” and “unreal” copies of the same object. There is a visceral difference between experiencing a photographic image on its own and as an image returned to its original context, or placed back in the image world as an object.

Perhaps the most intriguing of these artists is Miriam Bohm, who has completed multiple series – Inventory and Areal, for example – in which she photographs objects such as packages, arranges those photographs in ways that echo the original arrangement, and then rephotographs them. The result is a complex layer of images, leaving you, as the viewer, with nothing concrete save the object of the photograph itself. In the words of Brendan Fay, writing for Artforum, “In Bohm’s hands, it is the photograph’s presence as an object that provides the most immediate basis for apprehending the image it contains.”

Miriam Böhm, "Inventory XII," 2010. Chromogenic color print. 23.6 x 17.7 inches. Edition of 2 with 2 APs.

“Our unlimited use of photographic images not only reflects but gives shape to this society, one unified by the denial of conflict.”

Sontag was curious about the image-world she described, including whether it was the only variety possible. She even proposed an ecology of images, or a mitigating of sorts. In reality, we’ve gone the opposite direction – more images surround us than ever – but when artists insist on re-inserting an image back into its original context, or even threaten to use it to replace an object, it’s hard not to believe there’s a shift afoot.

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.

Fore’ n’ Aft Souvenir Book, May 21, 1943. Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum. Image courtesy of the Museum of the African Diaspora.

More a thoroughfare between the institutional offices and educational spaces than destinations, the second and third floor galleries at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) can be, at times, unforgiving display spaces. Nevertheless, as an institution, MoAD consistently presents exhibitions that expand one’s notions of race and identity. One need only to look at last year’s “African Continuum: Sacred Ceremonies and Rituals,” which contrasts with a more recent Richard Mayhew monograph: two exhibitions tenuously and productively held under the cultural umbrella of African Diaspora—or more pointedly, black visuality.

Langston Hughes, "The Weary Blues," 1926. Illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias. From the Collection of Alden and Mary Kimbrough. Image courtesy of the Museum of the African Diaspora.

In promotional material, MoAD is described as “presenting the rich cultural products of the people of Africa and of African descendant cultures across the globe.”  To be clear, this includes all Lucy’s progeny. To drive this point home, guests are asked both in a digital tour and in the writing on the walls, “When did you discover you are African?” “Collected: Stories of Acquisition and Reclamation,” MoAD’s current exhibition, includes selections from three collections: the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum, the Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art and the Collection of Alden and Mary Kimbrough. Although each of these collections are distinct, much of what is displayed is Black Americana from the 19th and 20^th centuries, including movie posters, paintings, signed first editions, an antebellum estate mortgage and ragtime sheet music. A really exceptional Charles White drawing, The Open Gate (1948), depicts a young black man standing before an open-metal gate; true to White’s practice, the figure and entrance allude to America’s postwar atmosphere—longed for opportunity at the cusp of change. In the second floor gallery are several film posters from both lesser-known independent cinema—1948’s Miracle in Harlem—and the classics, such as Carmen Jones (1954) and St. Louis Blues (1958). Here, Nat King Cole and Eartha Kitt hum, projected on a wall for a room of empty office chairs.

Charles Borel-Clerc, French (1879–1959). "Zambesi Dance," 1912. Arr. by Carl F. Williams. From the Collection of Alden and Mary Kimbrough. Photo by Myles L. Collins, courtesy of the Museum of the African Diaspora.

“Collected” is an exceptional accumulation of objects, but the mandate to “better understand the cultural impact of these objects,” may have been missed. Curatorial consultant Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins based selections on the professed social or cultural significance of said objects without complicating questions of why, for whom, and what they might mean in contemporary communities—questions that are critical in a contemporary exhibition on collecting. Further, both what is seen as significant, and the collectors that shape the narratives around the objects in “Collected” smack a bit of dated class privilege (a nod to W.E.B. Du Bois, whose writings are included in the exhibition), which unfortunately goes unaddressed. Still, go see “Collected.”  The value of seeing a work by Bob Thompson, or the palpable excitement one feels finding Phyllis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral, signed by the author nearly 240 years ago, are undeniable and well worth the visit—however uncomplicated.

Phillis Wheatley, "Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral," 1773. From the collection of the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum. Image courtesy of the Museum of the African Diaspora.

Atelier Bow-Wow, "Small Case Study House" (BBQ house), 2009. Installation view, REDCAT, Los Angeles, courtesy the artists and REDCAT. Photo: Steve Gunther.

Over the last eight years, Kim has focused on contemporary art from Pacific Rim countries, with exhibitions like Small Case House Study, 2009, a three-month residency and project by the Japanese micro-architecture firm, Atelier Bow Wow, and Animalia, by the Korean artist Kim Beom, which contained—amongst other works—Spectacle, 2010, a twist on the typical predator/prey video.

Kim Beom, "Spectacle," 2010. Video still.

It seems fitting that Kim’s culminating project—a forum on alternative art spaces—was also global in its reach and impact.  State of Independence: A Global Forum on Alternative Practice, took place over the course of two days: July 23 and 24, 2011.  It featured artists, writers, archivists and curators from Mexico, Jakarta, Columbia, China, and Los Angeles, amongst other places.  One of the standouts was Janet Chan of Asia Art Archive, a Hong Kong-based group which has taken on the Sisyphean task of creating an as-comprehensive-as-possible archive of documents relating to the last twenty-five years of contemporary art in Asia, at least a portion of which is available online.

ruangrupa, Jakarta, Indonesia, 2011. Image courtesy of REDCAT.

The forum was the result of six months of field research on alternative art spaces around the world: their effect on their communities, their relationship to the Internet and digital technologies, their financial architecture, and how they function in relation to the larger, often state-sponsored, art institutions in their countries.  As Thomas Lawson of East of Borneo—an online publication based in LA—put it, there’s a shift in how you think about the struggle of an independent art space (or program) when you realize that part of that struggle is against a government that trends toward totalitarianism.

Borges Libreria, Guangzhou, China, 2011. Image courtesy of REDCAT.

The last panel of the weekend asked whether alternative spaces could become new models for future institutions; we here at DailyServing Los Angeles would like to take a moment to recognize Ms. Kim for her work at REDCAT and point out that regardless of whether an institution is “alternative,” it will only ever be as good as the people it is made up of, and we’re sorry to see her go.

Four video installations comprise Architecture of Narrative, the exhibition of work by Belgian artist David Claerbout, currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition’s title underscores the presiding concerns in Claerbout’s study of cinema; he strips his videos of conventions such as plot, character development, and in some cases, action and instead places emphasis on light, sound, and setting. He juxtaposes chronological time against cinematic time, freezing and repeating a single moment so that a scene progresses through a series of vantage points but never forward. In three of the videos, individuals are arrested in position and held captive in a Sisyphean interlude, while space, sound, and time slip past them. More significant than the dissection of cinematic conventions, however, are the negotiations with power that Claerbout creates for viewers.

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Installation View, Greater LA.

Is this a throwdown? It’s tempting to think so, since the title, Greater LA, is obviously a riff on the seminal P.S.1 survey Greater New York, and is installed in the same type of beat-up SoHo loft where major New York art history went down in the 1960s and ‘70s. But don’t get too excited. Any sense of bi-coastal competition erodes  quickly when you realize that many of the artists on view are already well-represented and accepted commodities here in New York.  Also, unlike Greater New York, which was a wild, not-for-profit showcase of up-and-comers, Greater LA is a commercial show and there really isn’t too much here that can’t be seen during a typical afternoon in Chelsea or the Lower East Side. So stop frontin’, y’all.

Alex Israel, Property, 2011.

If it were a throwdown, however, Sterling Ruby would be in the heavyweight class. With a group of stacked rectilinear forms, he adds color, a sense of the handmade, and illusion to minimalism’s airtight vocabulary.  Lofts like these have always been the perfect setting for minimal forms, and Ruby’s piece dominates a show that suffers from too many freestanding walls and too large a roster of artists. Token appearances by highly saleable artists (Mark Grotjahn works on paper, anyone?) give the show an art fair vibe that renders the whole “snapshot of exciting new LA art right now” thing nearly laughable.  A handful of great pieces amidst acres of empty loft space would have been way more effective.

Installation View, Greater LA.

Alex Israel’s Property, however, provides a sophisticated moment. A Grecian figure stands in front of a group of lockers, as if you had accidently stumbled into the employee lounge at the Getty. This pairs well with Jonas Wood’s chunky paintings of Grecian urns.  Wood, who lives in Los Angeles but grew up in Boston, went to school in St. Louis, and already has a strong presence in New York, also seems out of place here. He represents the sort of omni-local artist who pervades today’s scene, the type that makes it hard to discern any real conceptual or aesthetic differences between Los Angeles and New York.

Personally, I would have loved to see more space devoted to artists who are not represented by New York galleries, to get at what, if anything, really distinguishes the two cities’ art ideologies. But I suppose you can’t blame the curators for playing it a little safe and including their bankable stars. Their kitchen sink approach and all-over-the-place-career-wise roster seems to say that no matter where you set up your studio, every artist stills wants and needs to show in New York. We throw down harder, and Los Angeles knows it. Otherwise, they would have just had the show there.

Fritz Haeg lecture, photo by John Muse

Last week the Open Engagement Conference gathered artists, critics, curators and one museum director to discuss an emergent field, Art and Social Practice. It was organized by Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice faculty Jen Delos Reyes and Harrell Fletcher along with their MFA students. This is the third iteration of the conference and it featured Julie Ault, Fritz Haeg, and Pablo Helguera – all of whom work across platforms such as art, architecture, education, curatorial practice and publication.

The structure of the conference included lectures by these artists as well as panels that addressed the relationships between Social Practice projects and museums and educational institutions with social practice programs such as CCA, PSU, OTIS, MICA, and UCSC. There were also a number of breakout sessions, performances and exhibitions.

Elyse Mallouk presentation on "Landfill" photo by John Muse

One early breakout session was a presentation by Elyse Mallouk, a CCA visual and critical studies MA student, on Landfill – a new project designed to archive the ephemeral detritus of Social Practice projects. The website emphasizes posters, pamphlets, maps and objects that were used in projects by artists such as Jeremy Deller, Santiago Sierra, and Superflex. One issue brought up in the discussion about this project was how to address the tension between fetishizing objects around ephemeral projects and treating ephemera in terms of their materiality and aesthetics. Another was about PLAND (Practice Art Through Necessary Dislocation). This project, run by three women who have worked as curators, artists and writers, is an off-the-grid residency program in Taos, NM. Their mission is to produce “open-ended experimental projects that facilitate sustainability, collaboration, and hyper-local engagement.”

Open Engagement, Photo by Jason Sturgill

The Museum summit included discussions about Social Practice projects at the Walker Art Center, the Hammer Museum, The National Gallery of Victoria, the Portland Art Museum and the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Larry Rinder, the director of the Berkeley Art Museum, noted that he wished that more museum directors were there to discuss the issues around Social Practice. One reason for the importance of this was drawn out in the discussion, where there was often a clear tension between curatorial and education departments when it comes to projects that don’t focus on objects. One potential problematic was the tendency for Social Practice projects to serve as merely peripheral or interpretive events that exist in a decorative manner, around what is perceived to be the primary programs of the museum.

Rick Lowe, Fritz Haeg, Harrel Fletcher, Julie Ault, photo by John Muse

The artists’ lectures and their final panel discussion revealed some lingering questions that were only touched upon by the conference. What is the relationship between Social Practice and other art practices that have long historical and theoretical trajectories such as conceptualism, performance, institutional critique and the wide range of artistic engagements with art and politics? What is the relationship between the mostly American examples presented and other global models of socially motivated art practices? And finally, is there an aesthetic to Social Practice projects that involves groups of people gathering around and doing something?  As one community organizer from the Queens Museum of Art pointed out – maybe these will serve as the basis for next year’s conference.

"TELLUSTools", 2001, Double-LP, The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. Gift of Harvestworks. Cover Art by Christian Marclay. Produced by Carol Parkinson, Harvestworks. Image courtesy Kanji Ishii

Where were you when the Music Television Channel was first introduced in 1981? I was seven years old and had a babysitter who, in her early twenties, was the coolest person I had ever met. I would follow her around just in the hopes that this perceived “coolness” would somehow rub off on me. It was through her that I was exposed, for the first time, to the brand-new phenomenon of the music video. Her family had just gotten cable and we would sit around and watch this small American network running loops of film shorts that visually illustrated the concepts and narratives of song by popular musical bands at the time. What we didn’t realize at the time, was that visual and popular culture as we knew it was changed forever.

Looking at Music 3.0., now at the Museum of Modern Art, New York through June 6, 2011, is an in-depth look at this moment in time and its effect on our cultural history. The third in a series of exhibitions exploring the influence of music on contemporary art practices, Looking at Music 3.0, focuses on New York in the 1980s and 1990s and the birth of the “remix culture.” The exhibition features 70 works from a wide range of artists and musicians: Beastie Boys, Kathleen Hanna and Le Tigre, Keith Haring, David Byrne, Miranda July, Christian Marclay, Sonic Youth and Run DMC.

Spike Jonze, Sabotage, 1994, Music by Beastie Boys. The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of the artist. © Capitol Records, Inc.

The exhibition begins with the German band Kraftwerk, positing that with tracks such as Trans-Europe Express, 1977, they had a large influence on the decades of music to come with their pioneering usage synthesizers and computer-speech software. It then expands into a wide array of issues and movements that were occurring during this time:  the birth of hip-hop and its growing strength in voicing the ongoing discrimination against the black community; activist movements seeking to counteract the AIDS epidemic and the increasing drug usage that was threatening New York; the introduction of art theory to new music as well as the rise of the digital domain; and the growing voice of artists commenting on the complicated relationship between commercial entities and its control of mass communication and the shaping of modern culture.

Le Tigre, "From the Desk of Mr. Lady," 2000, CD. Cover Art by Kathleen Hanna and Johanna Fateman. Image courtesy Le Tigre Records

A highlight of Looking at Music 3.0 is the in-depth look into the wave of Feminism that was grounded in the riot grrrl capital, Portland Oregon, in the 1990s. On display are photocopied zines and posters by artists Miranda July and Johanna Fateman, as well as audio tracks from the band Le Tigre. These recordings serve as examples of the impromptu punk bands that were forming all over and the band’s usage of humorous lyrics and electronic dance music to confront a myriad of social ills that existed in New York.

Anyone interested in the history of music and visual culture will enjoy this exhibition. But for those of us who remember where we were when the music video was first introduced, you will walk out asking yourself, “What happened to the revolution?”

The Curators Battle, A Choreographed Coincidence. Installation Image. © Laura Gianetti

In both shows, however, I felt that the curators’ hands were so significantly foregrounded that the artists and artworks became ancillary figures. In both Stronger Magic and A Choreographed Coincidence (the two shows presented), the art was overshadowed by how the spaces were organized. The first actually overlapped wall space for works; one drawing was partially lit by a piece involving an intermittent, direct light. The second seems to  purposefully break most gallery conventions (eg. hanging artworks too high or too low, displaying framed drawings leaning against a pedestal, occasionally using non-traditional lighting). The tactics felt arbitrary, as if any piece could stand in the place of any other in a multitude of combinations.

The Curators Battle, Stronger Magic Installation Image. © Laura Gianetti

The non-hierarchical structure of the internet and other systems of organization are cited directly and indirectly in curatorial statements and the work itself, throwing the notion of context into question. The curators treated themselves as assemblage artists, and the art as found objects. Particularly in Stronger Magic, a show that was mainly lit by just one art piece that turned on and off, each individual work became one genericized element in a large installation. The content of the individual works was presented as being barely important, as detailed pieces were only given seconds of decent lighting with which to view them.

The Curators Battle, Stronger Magic. Installation Image. © Laura Gianetti

My concern as an artist, is that the intentions of the artist and the context for understanding their work may have been overlooked in lieu of treating the work as innocuous content for the curators to control and manipulate as justification for their central theses. Something about this felt like misquoting in the way a sound bite from a politician may be extracted without necessary context to influence the speech’s meaning. Viewing images of the event’s photostream, where works were photographed individually, offers each piece it’s own space to establish context within it’s own content. That necessary space was missing live in this ‘Curate-Off’.

As a final note I’ll mention Constant Dullaart, one of the stand-outs in both shows. Check out Poser, a video-based sculpture currently in A Choreographed Coincidence.

Ridykeulous, The Advantages of Being a Woman Lesbian Artist, 2007. Photo courtesy of INVISIBLE-EXPORTS.

It’s par for the course for blue-chip galleries to mount so-called “museum quality” exhibitions, and hardly a surprise when they coincide with auctions and estate holdings. Readykeulous: The Hurtful Healer: The Correspondance Issue at INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is just as historically potent without being market driven. Founded in 2005 by artists Nicole Eisenman and A. L. Steiner, Ridykeulous has gained consistent momentum, and this is their strongest show yet. Part community action center, part archive, part open can of whoop ass, the show includes about forty artists and runs roughshod past The Venus of Willendorf, David Wojnarowicz and the Guerrilla Girls before landing squarely in the present.

Readykeulous, The Hurtful Healer: The Correspondence Issue. Installation view. Photo courtesy of INVISIBLE-EXPORTS.

Even though the show comprises mostly written correspondence, those accustomed to the visual swagger of a typical Ridykeulous affair will not be disappointed. By including work from the 70s forward, it’s almost as if Ridykeulous is upping the ante on a previous generation’s discontent. A rather calm and verbose letter by David Wojnarowicz floridly articulates his disappointment with not getting public funding. A Carolee Schneemann letter from 1978 bluntly asks a foundation to pay her $25 to donate her archive, but she writes in a fairly civil tone. In contrast, Crystal Catastrophe, 2011, a letter/image by Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue begins, “DEAR ASSHOLE”.  Eisenman and Steiner pull a bit of one upwomanship on the famed Guerrilla Girls in The Advantages of Being a Woman Lesbian Artist, 2007, which hilariously updates and defaces the Guerrilla Girls’ The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist from 1989. Compared to the self-assured irreverence of many of the artists in this show, Guerrilla Girls, once formidable, now seem kind of cartoonish and tame.

Zoe Leonard, I Want a President (detail), 1992. Photo courtesy of INVISIBLE-EXPORTS.

But there’s a lot more to this exhibition than in-your-face rage. Many of the letters on view are potential paradigm shifters. Zoe Leonard’s I Want a President, 1992, in which she hopes for more humane criteria for presidential candidacy is both heartbreaking and poignant. Kara Walker’s writing stares into the core of her artistic intentions without the visual drama of her trademark silhouettes. Nicola Tyson transforms a letter to a male harasser into sculpture by hanging it on a noose. When a passive aggressive audience member writes to Nao Bustamante, feigning concern for a participant in one of her performances, the artist wryly replies, “This is like emailing a magician after an illusion and seeing if the girl died from being sawed in half.”

Kathe Burkhart, Suck My Dick: from the Liz Taylor Series (Candid shot), 2004. Photo courtesy of INVISIBLE-EXPORTS.

Admit it—when artists write about their work, its often pretentious, boring and has little to do with the actual art. Thankfully, in this show, the artists’ candid thoughts and impassioned rebuttals are the art. And no one’s trying to hide or act nice for the art market. As K8 Hardy says in Dear Reena Spaulings, “I don’t care if my shit is unprofessional or tacky. My work does not come from a fucking wallet.” Nothing is more direct than Kathe Burkhart’s Suck My Dick: from the Liz Taylor series (candid shot), 2004. Big black dildo protrusion aside, the work is composed of a lifetime’s-worth of partially burned rejection letters, some of which get fairly mean. One from Metro Pictures simply reads, “not our cup of tea.”

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Eva Adolf Braun Hitler, 2002.

Despite the high volume of malcontent on display, the real power behind this show is humor. The exhibition is essentially positive and inclusive, and it maintains a visually dynamic installation amidst all the reading and display cases. Wall scrawls, collages, and tacked-up photocopies create a swift pace that counters the slowed-down experience of reading. Cut outs of ancient goddess figures help punch up a case full of letters. A frieze of book covers from Valerie Solanas’ Scum Manifesto guards the entrance to the video corridor, where a folder labeled “Man Art” (samples include dinosaurs, a Lisa Yuskavage ad, and other offenders) lies on top of a searing video by Genesis Breyer P. Orridge. In the back gallery, a wall case has been punked out with flyers and drawings, like the coolest public library display ever. The gallery is smallish in size, yet this installation manages to pull off a balance of slapdash improv and thoughtful placement.

Ridykeulous Archives 2005 - 2011. Photo courtesy of INVISIBLE-EXPORTS.

A lot of shows tiptoe around ideas of protest, but they tend to feature artists who rarely get into the trenches. These days it can even seem like making political art is a mannerism—an excuse to make cool posters and use typography that rarely sacrifices marketability. Ridykeulous doesn’t pull punches. They understand that if you don’t like the art world you’ve been given, you’ve got to make your own. And they don’t fucking apologize for it afterward.

My Barbarian, "The Night Epi$ode Two: Yoga Matt / Veronika Phoenix," video still, 2009. Courtesy the artists.

“There are no easy happy endings anymore,” said writer David Levithan when interviewed about The Lover’s Dictionary, a novel told entirely through “definitions” of words like “aberrant” and “quixotic.” But there are no easy sad endings anymore, either–even though the romance the book dissects is doomed from the start, Levithan indulges in moments of hopefulness, cleverness, sometimes even barely-tainted glee. The eras in which Jacques-Louise David’s epic executions and Tolstoy’s train trampled heroines came off as poignant are over, as is the far-more recent era of cut pieces and under-floorboard masturbation; blatant tragedy and brazen exposure just don’t seem that compelling right now. Which is why, Wednesday night, when members of the performance trio My Barbarian all ended up dead, sprawled across a conference table on the stage of the Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theater, it looked like they might have tamped what, up to that point, had been a weird, spilling-over of sincere elitism and campy farce.

Luckily, the melodramatic death scene was only a teaser–a more luxurious, less legible ending was still on the way.

May Barbarian, "Death Panel Discussion." Courtesy Hammer Museum.

My Barbarian, primarily made up of L.A. artists Alex Segade, Malik Gaines and Jade Gordon (they often collaborate with others), has been together since 2000, and the group works more in the realm of institutional confusion than institutional critique. Their first solo museum show, The Night Epi$ode (2010), is currently on view in the Hammer Museum‘s video lounge and it includes a series of absurd but timely videos (there’s quite a bit about health care and economics woven into commentaries on curatorial practice, witchcraft and eccentric artistry). My Barbarian’s Wednesday night performance, titled Death Panel Discussion, was certainly the show’s centerpiece.

The “Death Panel” part of the title doesn’t explicitly refer to healthcare bill fears, but the three artists each played curators whose liberal privilege fits the exact profile of those supposed socialist-sympathizers who wouldn’t have batted an eye at a universal plan. And, as each had an express interest in the spirit world,  death, who deserves to die, and whether anything of worth art can come from beyond the grave were all topics of discussion. Death was treated as an abstract idea, one the curators–all of whom work in the realm of abstraction to begin with–find particularly, morbidly fascinating.

The self-importance, air of elitism and exaggerated accents of the performers became stifling (they were supposed to) as the night progressed. So when the curators all dropped dead after drinking from a poisoned water bottle to quench the thirst their monologues had left them with, it felt like good riddance. But it was also way too smooth–death doesn’t work that way, stomping out what should be gone anyway, so why should performance art enjoy that kind of easy end?

My Barbarian, "Death Panel Discussion," at Participant Inc., 2009. Photo: Rosalie Knox. Via MyBarbarian.com.

When the dead reawakened, changed into Obama-care pajamas and performed a pro-socialism dance number with an African folk music troupe, the performance transitioned from bitingly exhausting to pitch-perfect. My Barbarian infected their audience with the sort of full-on theatrical high that makes you feel thrills even if the subject matter (socialism? death? culture wars? art worlds?) is largely depressing.

Whether or not there are, or should be, any easy happy endings, My Barbarian sang and danced their way out of dead-end despair for theirs, and it felt well-earned.

Artur Żmijewski, Repetition, 2005, video, 75 min., video still, collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (photo: Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw)

This ideology has informed his practice which, from the 1990s, has been characterized by a process of staging experiments as a means of inquiry into social mechanisms of power and control. Repetition (2005), produced for Poland’s Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005 is an often-cited example of a work exemplifying the form and themes of his practice. Żmijewski re-enacts the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo in 1971 to explore the psychological effects of imprisonment. Though this experiment was cut short and regulations prevented its recurrence in the scientific field, Zimbardo’s claim of man’s desire to dominate has been frequently referenced in academic and cultural realms. Through the re-enactment, Żmijewski asserts art’s ability to remove the experiment from its scientific context and constraints to explore universal human issues stemming from reality.

Democracies ( 2009 ongoing); multi channel video; courtesy the artist and Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw

Democracies (2007 – ongoing) represents a shift from Żmijewski’s focus in constructing situations, while maintaining its stance on interrogating social norms. The work comprises his documentation over three years of public and collective expressions of protest, celebration and grief, from a demonstration by supporters of Polish anti-abortion laws to the live broadcast of Germany versus Turkey in the semi-final of the 2008 European Football championships. Recently presented at Tramway, Glasgow from 29 October to 12 December 2010, with sixteen screens on all four sides of the room, the viewer, when positioned in the middle was subjected to a cacophony of noises which drowned out the subtleties of the individual films, an experience which parallels the heady effects of collective demonstrations and ceremonies and their impact on individual reflection and thinking. Through his work, Żmijewski puts forth the question of whether mass expressions are indicative of democracy and at a more fundamental level, the validity of democracy as practised and fought for today.

Democracies ( 2009 ongoing); multi channel video; courtesy the artist and Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw

Żmijewski will be curator of the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art in 2012. He has initiated a call-for-proposals, requesting that artists provide their political inclination together with their submission before January 15, 2011. Though the norms within art dictate that an artist’s political position remains at a distance from the content of their work, Żmijewski asserts that politics structure our collective needs and hence, all works are political. In deliberately going against a artistic methodology of ascribing a political position to an artwork through this role as curator, there is much to anticipate in how his curatorial decisions contribute to a radically different methodology of exhibition-making.

Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1966, Żmijewski studied sculpture at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts under Grzegorz Kowalski who encouraged students to alter the works of their classmates, as a way to open dialogue on the production of meaning. He is a recipient of the Ordway Prize and has had solo exhibitions in MOMA, New York; Kunsthalle Basel; and BAK, Utrecht. Żmijewski is also arts editor of Krytyka Polityczna (“Political Critique” in Polish) a journal aimed at creating  an intellectual base for alternative movements and to introduce new critical discourses in Polish public debate.

Nan Goldin, Nan and Brian in bed, New York City, 1983; detail from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency; 1979-1996; nine-carousel projection with approximately 700 slides, soundtrack, and titles; dimensions variable; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; © Nan Goldin; image: courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

Bean Gilsdorf: Exposed was ten years in the making. How and why did it begin?

Sandra Phillips: I did a show called Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence about twelve years ago because I was very interested in the fact that we ascribe a certain amount of authority to photographs as impartial truth-telling documents. But they can be extremely ambiguous. And it occurred to me that there was another aspect that was about making pictures without people knowing that they were being photographed. There are, in fact, some spy pictures in this show. So that’s how I started.

BG: Did your organization of this show start with any particular pieces? Or was it just a general concept?

SP: It started as an idea, and the beginning of it was looking at the work of Edgar Degas, believe it or not! He was very interested in photography and he made a lot of photographs. He made pictures of his models that he arranged, but they were presented as though they were spied on. I thought that was completely fascinating—why would someone as important as he be interested in the use of photography as a spying medium? It had to do with his own personal aesthetic, but once you get started in that, then you realize how amazingly broad this topic is.

Garry Winogrand, New York, 1969; gelatin silver print; 11 x 14 in. (27.94 x 35.56 cm); Collection SFMOMA, fractional and promised gift of Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein; © Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

SP: I also looked at the work of Helen Levitt, and she was interested in making pictures of people who didn’t realize that they were being photographed. So all of a sudden, this idea expanded: how do you explain street photography without actually dealing with the surveillance aspect of it? And then it became a very big subject: it wasn’t only street photography, it’s the ways we look at sex, the ways we understand important people, and then this weird territory where people like celebrities are being aggressively looked at. What does that mean to us as a culture? Where does this come from? Examining the interest that we have in violence is a necessary part of modern life. And the contemporary photographs are all about surveillance, obviously.

BG: Do you think there’s any correspondence between the gesture of taking a photograph of someone who is not looking, and staging a photograph to appear as though someone is not looking?

SP: …Oh, yeah…

BG: I’m thinking of all the Facebook photos—those self-portraits—where people specifically look away from the camera as though they had been caught unawares. What do you think is behind that?

SP: It’s an affect, that we want to be photographed as though it’s real, but it’s actually not real. I think this is the big issue now in photography, whether it’s staged or isn’t staged. It comes back to the idea of photography being a medium of truth telling. It’s a very interesting medium; it seems absolutely clear and yet is so mysterious.

BG: I find it interesting that this exhibition came from England, where surveillance culture is just outrageous. Do you know what the reaction was, over there?

SP: It was tremendously interesting to the English for that very reason. The Tate is a much more public institution than almost any other institution in the world, it has millions of visitors a year. And I can’t remember how many millions of people came to see the show, but it was huge, there was a lot of discussion about it. There was another show about surveillance [Rhetorics of Surveillance: from Bentham to Big Brother at ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe] about ten years ago in Germany and it was very theoretical. But in England they have the whole craze, really, for outfitting public spaces with surveillance cameras. There was a child in Scotland who was abducted and killed by two older kids, and that’s what started it all. It was before the al Qaida bombings, it was before all of that. It wasn’t political; the idea was purely to save children’s lives, that’s where it started.

Tazio Secchiaroli, Anita Ekberg and Husband Anthony Steel, Vecchia Roma, 1958; gelatin silver print; 11 11/16 x 14 5/8 in. (29.69 x 37.15 cm); Collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase; © Tazio Secchiaroli / David Secchiaroli.

BG: Which is different from what’s happening right now. On one hand we want to have our personal privacy—when we dictate it!—but on the other hand we want to look as though we’ve been caught on camera in some “real” moment. How do you tease those apart? It’s so complicated, this relationship that we have to an image of ourselves.

SP: Yes, it’s extremely strange.

BG: Are there any pieces in the exhibition that embody what you want people to take away from this?

SP: The Degas picture. And, obviously people like Weegee play an enormous role here. And there are certainly pictures that mean a lot to me. The early photograph by Paul Strand of the man who’s sitting on the sidewalk, a poor man, on the street in New York. He’s revealing his inner dislocation or inner anxiety…it’s a picture of someone’s raw psychological anxiety. It’s a very moving picture, done by a guy who was trying to learn about Cubism and elevate photography to a formalist practice. And, at the same time he’s making these pictures of very poor people on the streets without their knowledge of it. That, I would say, is a touchstone.

* * *

*Exposed was conceived by Sandra Phillips and co-curated with Tate curator of photography Simon Baker.