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.

Fire has always mesmerized me; as a child, I was frequently chastised for playing with matches and open flames. Until last winter, when I came upon a burning apartment building, my experience was limited to these tame interactions. Within moments, the flames engulfed the structure, sending giant plumes of orange and yellow and black smoke into the night sky. The scene led me to pause with a combination of horror and awe.

Over the past two years Lee Yujin has produced sumptuous drawings that examine the tension between the beauty and violence of smoke. In Cloud Series – the first body of work to investigate this subject matter – she isolates found images of bombs and explosions, divorcing these potent indicators of turmoil and violence from their original contexts. While these works in pencil present smoke as a static phenomenon, the dynamism of Lee’s meticulous mark-making breathes energy into these forms.

Lee Yujin. “Volcano Eruption 2." Pencil on Paper. 110 x 218 cm. 2010. Courtesy of the Artist.

Lee Yujin. Detail from “Volcano Eruption 2." Pencil on Paper. 110 x 218 cm. 2010. Courtesy of the Artist.

When viewed from the perspective of form and shape, these drawings reveal themselves as arresting abstractions. I was immediately reminded of Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents, a series of small-scale, black and white photographs of cloud-filled skies. Stieglitz viewed these photographs as “vision[s] of life,” a visual “equivalent” for human experience. Lee views smoke in much the same way. She explains, “there is something beautiful about smoke because it is something we cannot take control over. It is intangible and ephemeral. Its shape is unexpected and transformable. In this sense, ‘smoke clouds’ can be an allegory for life…”

Lee Yujin. "I am a Telescopic Viewer, You are a Telescopic Viewer, We are Telescopic Viewers (Telescope Series)." A series of 100 drawings; each drawing with frame 43 x 43 cm. Charcoal and conte on paper. 2011. Courtesy of the Artist.

While these pencil drawings are particularly notable for their incredible precision, her most recent series, I am a Telescopic Viewer, You are a Telescopic Viewer, We are Telescopic Viewers, approaches the subject with a more fluid gesture, using charcoal and conte to produce drawings that introduce color. The quietude of her earlier drawings is in stark contrast to these new works which, when exhibited en masse, allude far more evidently to the violence underlying these images.

Lee was included in several solo and group exhibitions in Berlin in 2011, including “One Night Stand” at Kims Bar, “Benumbed” at Takt Kunstprojektraum, and “We Can Start a Process” at Kreuzberg Pavilion. You can stay apprised of her upcoming projects through her website.

Monika Fryčová, Perpetuum Mobile, 2011. Image: Kling og Bang gallery.

Monika Fryčová’s show Perpetuum Mobile at the Kling og Bang Gallery propositions that the relationship between the visible and invisible is constantly in motion and ephemeral.

Locked behind the socialist borders in then-Czechoslovakia, stories of local culture were the only narratives that Fryčová heard. Like many artists who were restless for new physical activity and renewed visions after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Fryčová became in her own words, a traveller who charted her own routes and made her own narratives without maps or guides. Consequentially, Fryčová’s works are highly improvised, and dependent on the indeterminacy and spontaneity of human interactions.

Monika Fryčová, Monika & Trabi in train station, Prostejov, 2005. Image: Monikafryčová.net

A red automobile-turned-limousine was an early, physical manifestation of Fryčová’s desire for mobility, which she drove to school in 2005 and finally made it to Berlin some years later where she was arrested by the traffic police for the car’s non-regulated standards. Intended as “moving sculpture” and created for the purpose of performance, the red Trabi is Fryčová’s assertion of artistic and political freedom beyond the spectre of the Iron Curtain, but also the artistic vindication of the dynamic flux and non-linear processes that characterise aspects of human nature.

Monika Fryčová, Open Springs no. 2, 2009, ongoing project. Image: Monikafryčová.net

Having investigated the artistic gestures that were given freer reign after a period of enforced socio-political isolation, her research now speculates upon the less charted regions of human existence: principles of chaos, intuition, perceptions and mythology. At the Kling og Bang Gallery, Fryčová’s framed photographs of herself shot in various positions and in diverse locations are perched on a peculiar machine acting like a turnstile that expends energy into rotating endlessly. Perpetually in motion, her static photographs disallow the viewer any prolonged contemplation; instead, we are forced into forming fleeting impressions of ambivalent spaces where specifics are really inconsequential. As long as Fryčová’s works situated themselves in that strange gap between motion and stillness – with a distorted sense of space and time embedded within -,  any attempt at linearity or continuity can only remain illusory.

****

Monika Fryčová was born in Prostejov, Czech Republic. She lives and works in both the Czech Republic and Iceland. Perpetuum Mobile runs until 18th December at the Kling og Bang Gallery in Reykjavik.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 2004, indigenous Australian Cameron Doomadgee was brutally murdered at the hands of a white officer while in police custody, sparking riots on Palm Island in North Queensland. Doomadgee was first arrested for public drunkenness and reported dead an hour later, having suffered from four broken ribs which had ruptured his liver and spleen. His death was recorded as “an accidental fall” in the coroner’s report and all charges on the officer were later dropped in 2007.

“Tall Man”, Four-channel video installation, 2010. Image courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

In his four-channel video installation, Tall Man (a reference to Aboriginal Shire Councillor Lex Wotton’s commitment to the rights of Palm Islanders), Ah Kee appropriates footages from mobile phones and camcorders, edited together with archival news footages to reconstruct the unfolding of events – footages that were ironically used in court as evidence to convict Wotton of inciting the Palm Island riot. But in the hands of Ah Kee, they tell a different story of the injustices faced by the Aboriginal community in Australia. In contrast to the video installation where Wotton is seen enraged and devastated in public, Ah Kee depicts Wotton with subtle and gentle lines – a non-threatening, calm and warm-hearted figure.

"Tall Man”, Charcoal, crayon and acrylic on linen, 2011. Image courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

The final component of the exhibition is a large text-based work that fills the entire front display windows of Gertrude Contemporary. Appropriated from Shakespeare’s Macbeth and reproduced as a run-on sentence, Ah Kee situates the relevance of the seventeenth-century allegory of man’s endless cruelty to man in the brutality faced by Aboriginal people on Australian soil.

“Fill Me”, Vinyl lettering, 2009. Image courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

As a whole, the exhibition exposes the superficial attitudes toward multiculturalism and the constructed representations of Australian history. If it is commonly accepted that history has only ever been written by the victors, why have we still stuck to this story? How is the Aboriginal community to exercise their freewill when they are ceaselessly prevented from demonstrating such rights? Just when it seems that Australia has been making some progress, this illusion is shattered once again with the recent major policy shift by the Baillieu government to dump the compulsory protocol of acknowledging the traditional Aboriginal landowners for being too politically correct. The resurfacing narrative of the Palm Island riot is an important reminder of the continuing lack of respect of indigenous culture.

Matthew Woodward. "Western Avenue," 2011. Graphite on paper. 80 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the Artist.

“Architecture in the United States” was one of the most memorable courses I took as an undergraduate. It was not only because I adored the professor and his incredible passion for the subject; it fundamentally changed the way I interact with and respond to the urban landscape. While I can no longer recite the date Mies van der Rohe designed the Seagram Building or the ways John Ruskin left his mark on American architecture, I do find myself inclined to inspect the intricacies of my environment, caught adrift as people dash by without a glance.

It is clear that Matthew Woodward is similarly taken with the intricacies of structure and place. In his most recent body of work, he creates alluring large-scale drawings of architectural ornaments he has spotted wandering through various cities, isolating them from the buildings they previously punctuated.

Matthew Woodward. "Milwaukee Avenue II Series," 2011. Graphite and adhesive on paper. 25 x 9 feet. Courtesy of the Artist.

Woodward describes his process as a variation on classical reductive drawing. In essence, he covers the paper’s surface with graphite powder and then produces the desired imagery – a precise and unedited representation resulting from innumerable photographs and careful measurement – through meticulous erasure. His articulation of this approach sounds sculptural, mimicking the fabrication of the adornments he represents. Woodward explains, “most of the time what will happen is that the graphite will get in [the paper] and it doesn’t want to come off again. I have to tear it and sand it and rip the paper in order to carve it back out.” As the paper faithfully records every action taken, documenting every deconstruction and reconstruction of the surface, it evokes both the three-dimensional qualities of its referent object and traces its own history as a two-dimensional representation.

By isolating these architectural embellishments from their previous context – and presenting them in a size that physically confronts the body – Woodward forces the viewer to call upon on his or her own associations with these forms. These seemingly hollow ciphers elicit distinctly different responses depending on one’s relationship to place, space and time.  Looking at these drawings, I am overcome by reverence, nostalgia and loss. I view these objects as emblems of an era and sensibility long past, as tangible evidence of obsolescence. Through its ability to conjure such emotions and considerations, the work transcends representation alone, engaging perennial issues such as the role of memory, history and place in shaping experience.

Matthew Woodward. "Medill Street," 2011. Graphite and adhesive on paper. 66 x 88 inches. Courtesy of the Artist.

Woodward’s drawings are currently featured in two exhibitions. ”Matt Woodward: The Tremendous Alone” is on view now at the Elmhurst Art Museum in Elmherst, Illinois through December 30th. His work is also included in the group exhibition “Ways of Making: Work on Paper” at Governors State University’s Visual Arts Gallery in University Park, Illinois through November 11th.

]]> http://dailyserving.com/2011/11/fan-mail-matthew-woodward/feed/ 0 http://dailyserving.com/2011/10/the-famous-one-from-lucas-1/ http://dailyserving.com/2011/10/the-famous-one-from-lucas-1/#comments Sat, 29 Oct 2011 07:00:08 +0000 Marilyn Goh http://dailyserving.com/?p=20621

Christine Ay Tjoe, The Famous One from Lucas, 2011, Installation view. Photo: Edward Hendricks.

A biblical parable tells of a wayward son who leaves home for a distant land after demanding his inheritance from his father. Squandering his riches quickly, he repentantly returns to his father’s house hoping to be hired as one of his father’s servants but find instead, his father’s unexpected kindness and forgiveness. Christine Ay Tjoe’s current site-specific show The Famous One from Lucas # I at the Hermès Art Space references this well-known narrative of prodigality, articulating the interdependency of loss/gain and despair/hope through soft-fabric sculptures constructed out of goose-feathers, tulle fabric, stockings and industrial felt.

Christine Ay Tjoe, 24 of Us 65, 2006, Mixed Media and Glass Box, 65.5 x 50 x 6 cm.

Attempting to sublimate the profound personal workings of hope and despair into rituals of healing and rebirth has been a recurrent theme in Tjoe’s artistic practices. Unlike what we’ve come to expect from many contemporary Asian artists who respond to political or social change, Tjoe’s sensibility veered off this course early on. In 2003, her installation Santa/Satan at the CP Open Biennale was an acerbic critique of government authorities encumbered by bureaucracy and its trappings. But at some stage, her artistic gaze had turned inward, probing out suitable platforms on which questions of the transcendental could be raised. “I’m interested in the relationships between theology and humanity, which give rise to perceptions on the range of human emotions, motivations and experience,” she writes in an email interview, when asked if there were indeed, fundamental questions about art and religion that she had always sought to answer. “It relates to universal human experiences and emotions such as joy and grief and human expressions in extreme situations – this is something I’ve been curious about and continually investigate in my works.”

Christine Ay Tjoe, Santa/Satan, 2003, Installation, mixed media, 80 x 52 x 37 cm.

Steered by spiritualistic meditations and cosmological perspectives, her works are unsurprisingly attuned to the allegorical and the symbolic, utilising ephemeral spaces and fragmentary images that comment on the irreducible essence of flawed human nature. Lama Sabakhtani Club (2010) compares the tragic scale of loneliness and anguish to Christ’s ordeal on the cross in a series of installations assembled by strings, nails and fabrics. In Interiority of Hope (2008), Tjoe’s imagines the psychological state of the criminal Barabbas – the man Pilate released instead of Christ at the demand of the people – as one caught between the joy of his release and the unrelenting guilt of the crimes that he committed. In both shows, the forms of her work often appear as impressionistic renderings of complex lines or as misshapened entities whose purpose remain ambivalent. They share an allusive and elusive quality that often suggests that materials from without exist only to reveal the malleability and flux found within, elucidating an artistic vision that treads dangerously close to rehashing Renaissance humanist patterns of self-knowledge and its limitations.

Christine Ay Tjoe, Barabas Lights no. 07, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 170 x 135 cm.

The Famous One from Lucas # I continues Tjoe’s exploration of materiality as metaphor for the esoteric nature of the human condition. Textiles are primarily transformed into both familiar and non-familiar objects – a worn-out sofa and a teddy bear being the more recognisable ones –, their surface textures and form adding, according to Tjoe, an interesting dimension of sensation especially for the object art she creates. But like wanderers in a labyrinthine environment, it is hard to tell where The Famous One from Lucas # I starts and ends, despite Tjoe’s assertion we are walking through memory markers (displayed as physically undefined objects along cocooned walls) that express the journey of one’s life. We know the show’s conceptual starting points: the sheer greyness of the human psyche dictates that hope and despair are faces of the same coin, defined by their relation to one another. Yet the lack of linearity in its atmospheric spaces, soft curved walls and winding pathways seems to scope out a more cosmic intersection of nature and nurture; it introduces into the visitor experience a hint of the tenuous boundaries separating the cerebral and the emotional, the past and the present, the spiritual and the carnal.

Christine Ay Tjoe, The Famous One from Lucas, 2011. Photo: Edward Hendricks.

The physicality of the work reflects its metaphorical framing; we inexplicably find ourselves wandering in its pathways numerous times, beginning where we end, ending so that we could start once more. In this visual text, we can participate in the shameful indulgence and repeated transgressions of prodigality while simultaneously walking the passage of redemption and liberation.

***

The Famous One from Lucas #I was on show at the Hermès Art Space until November 27; this article could not have been completed without the contribution of Christine Ay Tjoe herself in an email interview and the support of Hermès Art Space and the Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

sspspss…UM biddle BOP, 1997; enamel paint on trace Mylar; 7.5 x 6 m (24 x 20 ft); Private Collection, Topanga, California

At the entrance to the gallery’s first level of Ingrid Calame‘s solo exhibition at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, the pale green enamel of sspspss…UM biddle BOP appear like forceful strokes and splatters that drip down the wall, unfolding across the ground. Though emerging as paintings with energetic and abstract shapes, Calame’s works evolve from a painstaking process that originates from the representation of cracks and stains of the physical environment.

Calame first began tracing blobs in her studio in 1996, before venturing into the streets to trace the shapes, textures and stains on pavements, cultural and industrial sites. Driven by a desire to understand the world through acts of reconstruction, particularly from places that have been overlooked or disregarded, these tracings are then redrawn, layered to form a constellation of interlocking shapes, with enamel filled in within the lines.

Vu-eyp? Vu-eyp? Vueyp? Vu-eyp?, 2002; enamel paint on aluminium; 61 x 61 cm (24 x 24 in); Courtesy the artist

The array of colors across the drawings and paintings appear to compensate for the neglected histories of the sites that inform Calame’s works. From the pastel hues of tracing lines across drawings, to rich shades of green against deep red and purple in Vu-eyp? Vu-eyp? Vueyp? Vu-eyp?, the tenor of the exhibition is upbeat, and appears to convey a sense of discovery from the act of recreation. This quality emanates also from several onomatopoeic titles whose meanings are indecipherable yet express an aural experience of the shapes and paints.

#334 Drawing (Tracings from the L.A. River and ArcelorMittal Steel), 2011; coloured pencil on trace Mylar; 285 x 183 cm (112 x 72 in); Courtesy the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

#334 and #346 are recent drawings that reveal part of Calame’s intensive working process. Backed by a team while working on sites, Calame obtained tracings from the dried-out concrete riverbed of the L.A. River, hand-stencilled numbers on the factory floors of the ArcelorMittal Steel factor floors and the cracks in an abandoned wading pool at the Perry Street Projects in Buffalo, New York. These tracings each bearing their unique marks, were assembled, retraced using coloured pencil, to form paths of new meanings derived from the residues of time. The second floor of the gallery also features a large wall drawing from the L.A. River, created in-situ.

#346 Drawing (Tracing from the Perry Street Projects Wading Pool, Buffalo, NY), 2011; coloured pencil on trace Mylar; 183 x 285 cm (72 x 112 in); Courtesy the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

Calame (b. 1965, Bronx, New York) currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. The exhibition featuring drawings and paintings from 1997 to 2011 runs till 9 October 2011, and forms a part of the Edinburgh Art Festival.

David Hockney, Untitled 26 December 2010, iPad Drawing. Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

David Hockney included himself among the iPad’s expectant lovers. Since 2008 he’s used the application Brushes to draw on his iPhone—but what he can do with the app on the oversized model, oh. He can draw with multiple fingers and recently a stylus.

His show Me Draw on iPad is exhibiting until August 28th at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, outside of Copenhagen, Denmark. 20 iPod touches, 20 iPads and a triptych slide loop through several hundred still lifes, landscapes, portraits and self-portraits looking, I think, especially Matisse. On display the bright screens color in the dark galleries like panes of stained glass, what else. They light like the screens we hood our hands over in movie theaters. And, how weird—to come to a museum to stare into a face probably like the one stifled on your person.

Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Photo credit: Brøndum / Poul Buchard.

One iPad drawing reads,

made for

the screen

totally on

the screen

it’s not an

illusion

I am able to watch these works come into being thanks to an animation playback feature—the ghost in the machine going through the motions again, his intense lines. Someone at my shoulder remarks, “Det godt.” It’s good.

There is no saying what the implications of this new form are for making. The form is easy-to-access and convenient-to-create. Apps aren’t messy, no. Witness this playback of Hockey’s flora, watch how it blooms to life something like child’s play. Then consider the immediacy of the process. How there is no consequence because you can choose not to “Save” and take it out of the world lickety-split.

The thing no one’s saying about this show is that it’s all more or less politeness. When art is an omnipresent file on a portable showcase, do we need to get hung up on museum walls? Obviously this is not “street”; it’s something else. Hockney likes to send his flowers and sunsets to the inboxes of friends. In fact, he has, over the course of this Louisiana show, continuously emailed new drawings to the exhibition. Unless you count yourself as an intimate of Hockney’s the museum seems like your window in. But theoretically, that won’t prove true. Maybe Hockney’s “iPad period” is not a phase.

Hockney has always had a big pocket put into his tailor-made suits, ad hoc for sketchbooks—but now that pocket is reserved for his iPad. As technology advances, I wonder if maybe what is next is subscription services. Art with a capital “a,” delivered like RSS feeds or Netflix—like milk in the old days—right to you. Pay-per-view? (Holograms?) I do not know that we can only interrogate in hallowed white spaces. It was said that no one would shop online. That the Video Home System would flop because we want to be swallowed by the cavernous theater. It wasn’t the same. And no, it isn’t the same. And yet. We can get the soul of a book without the spine. And I’m looking at a Hockney drawn on an iPad.

Deb Sokolow, Chapter 5. They meant for it to fail., 2011, graphite and acrylic on paper mounted to panel, 30x22", courtesy of Western Exhibitions

“People don’t like to read art.” It’s the sort of self-deprecating, tongue in cheek, slightly hipster-ish title you’d expect from a show featuring just such a group of young artists. “We acknowledge not everyone will enjoy this text+art stuff. And we don’t care, because we say it’s important.” But taken a bit less literally, as I had initially interpreted the title, it gets at the idea that people don’t like to derive meaning, to decipher, art. So in this way, perhaps the language in these text-based pieces helps us derive meaning more concretely; the verbage helps us “read” the works more deeply.

Kirsten Stoltmann, You Will Never Be Punk, 2011, oil paint Sharpie on magazine pages, 10x8", courtesy of Western Exhibitions

The offering in Western Exhibition’s group show sweeps the spectrum in terms of media—collage, drawing, sculpture, video, artist books. And in terms of voice as well. The labored, meditative collages of Meg Hitchcock, each one fashioned from thousands of tiny cut-out squares of individual type are juxtaposed against Kirsten Stoltmann’s loud, sharply funny, colorful sharpie drawings on pages from fashion magazines. One of her models declares, “To fart or not to fart.,” as she looks oh so forlorn with her hand to her cheek. Cat Glennon’s “Fuck This” spelled out with cigarette butts and her “You Don’t Need to Read It” in which the words “you don’t need to read into it, you just need to read it” overlaid with a check from a greasy spoon, dead matches, and playing cards, speak of grungy coffee shop angst.

Meg Hitchcock, detail of In the Day of My Trouble (Psalm 86), 2009, letters cut from the Chandogya Upanishad, 12x8", courtesy of Western Exhibitions

Simon Evans’s pyramid-shaped sculpture, “Monument for Sun Related Events,” is one of the most startlingly intimate pieces in the exhibit. Lined, yellow legal paper covers the pyramid, affixed to which are snippets of hand-written text. An inner world emerges in sentence fragments. Somehow these thoughts, memories really, are a stream-of-consciousness confessional, and at the same time, they’re so familiar you can almost recall, from your own past, the moments he spins forth. It was such a guilty pleasure to read, as if peeking into someone’s diary.

Simon Evans, Monument for Sun Related Events, 2008, pyramidal sculpture covered in lined yellow legal paper with blue and red ball point pen, 28x20x20", courtesy of Western Exhibitions

Whatever an art lover’s appetite for “reading,” whether compelled by a quick glance that packs a punch aesthetically or by more of an in-depth verbal communion with the pieces, from bubble gum beach fiction to heavy tomes of autobiography, the work in this show provides for all preferences, except of course for those people who really don’t like to read art.

“People don’t like to read art” is on view at Western Exhibitions in Chicago through August 13.

Installation view of Create, curated by Lawrence Rinder with Matthew Higgs. Photo: Sibila Savage.

The growing spotlight on artists with developmental disabilities simultaneously questions ethics, challenges definitions in Art and inspires viewers. The current exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Create, features the works of 20 artists from three pioneering Bay Area centers for arts and disability – Creativity Explored, Creative Growth Art Center and the National Institute of Art and Disabilities.

Once in the museum, I found myself at an ethical crossroads. The only information provided was a brief introductory wall text at the beginning of the first gallery, and a slightly longer anecdote in the take-away, written by the co-curators Larry Rinder and Matthew Higgs, respectively. Both texts note that the artists included all have a developmental disability of some kind, but little else about their process, experience or intent. Except, of course, to clarify that the artists are not performing art therapy in a drab gray room with bars on the windows. The paradox for me remains in determining for whose benefit exactly, is the mention of the artists’ conditions made? In the introduction, Rinder mentions that the artists’ “status as outsiders is rapidly shifting to that of insiders.” This can be taken in a few ways: for my Mom, and others like her, who insist they were among the first to discover the phenomenon of outsider art, they may be greatly bereaved to hear that outsider art has hit the mainstream, and now even their t-shirts are $60 a pop. For others it can be seen as an advancement that has been a long time coming. The artists featured in Create all possess the level of talent, individual voice and depth to be expected of the those supported by the Berkeley Art Museum and other major institutions. This issue elicits a nagging feeling that questions the motivation of listing the artists as developmentally disabled. I cannot help but wonder how I would have viewed the art if I had not known this facet of the exhibition.

Michael Bernard Loggins, 'Fears of Your Life' Installation View. Photo: Sibila Savage

Trying to look at the artwork as untainted by the knowledge of the artists’ conditions, I saw three galleries filled with pieces so creative and uninhibited, my eyes hungrily devoured the unique detail in each piece. Four examples of Attilo Crescenti’s sprawling, surreal and abstract figure drawings demonstrate the potential of an unrestricted vision of the human form. Written in huge, black scratchy handwriting on the entire back wall of the first gallery, is Michael Bernard Loggins’ text piece “Fears of Your Life.” Loggins included all fears in his list, both the profound and the mundane:

13. Fear of being lost.

21. Fear of spiders and roaches.

And mouse raccoons and rats too.

52. Fear of rolling down a hill backwards.

82. Fear that if you are bad or naughty noone’s isn’t going to love you anymore.

Carl Hendrickson and Jeremy Burleson both created sculptures that blur the line between practical application and surreal artistic liberty. Hendrickson’s wood sculptures resemble recognizable structures at first glance, yet further inspection reveals that their construction negates their utilitarian function. Burleson’s sculptures of medical equipment made from tape, plastic and paper, maintain an amazing amount of detail and accuracy, yet cannot be forgotten as non-functional art objects.

Carl Hendrickson. Image courtesy of Creative Growth

Create brings up several important questions that remain unanswered, and perhaps will not be answered for some time. How are these artists different or the same as others featured in major institutions? How does an artist’s past or present condition affect the reception of their work? Is the image of ‘outsider’ art exploited by the mainstream in the same way as other minorities, subcultures or fringe societies? The success and importance of the exhibition is in its posing of these questions, and the opening of a dialog that may be continued by the art world, both inside and out.

Create was curated by Larry Rinder, the director of BAM/PFA and Matthew Higgs, the director of White Columns. On view from May 11, 2011 – September 25, 2011.

Left: Spin (C-818), 2008. Chromgenic paper, exposed/embossed/abraded. 10 13/16 x 8 1/2 inches. Center: Untitled (Study for Tremors), 2000. Silver gelatin paper, burned. 18 x 14 inches. Right: Untitled (E-30), 2005. Cyanotype on Fabriano paper, exposed. 13 1/16 x 9 3/4 inches. All images © Marco Breuer and courtesy of Von Lintel Gallery, New York.

As part of our ongoing partnership with Art Practical, Daily Serving is republishing Brian Andrews‘ article Marco Breuer: Line of Sight, featuring work on view now at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Installation of Marco Breuer: Line of Sight from FAMSF on Vimeo.

In 2005 when the de Young museum opened their new Herzog & de Meuron‑designed facility in Golden Gate Park, the museum endeavored to update their engagement with contemporary art practices. Most visibly, five large-scale works were commissioned from blue chip artists to be featured at the building’s opening celebration, including an immense print by Gerhard Richter, a meditation stupa by James Turrell, a glass installation by Kiki Smith, an outdoor sculpture and crack in the landscaping by Andy Goldsworthy, and a series of paintings by Ed Ruscha. Less sensational but potentially more impactful, the de Young also initiated their Collection Connections program with a series of work by local photographer Catherine Wagner. The program debuted with the objective of integrating contemporary practices with the de Young’s eclectic general collection holdings by asking artists to create a body of work both inspired by and displayed with objects from the de Young’s permanent collection. Marco Breuer: Line of Sight is the latest installment in this program.

Read the full article at Art Practical.

Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 10 (1973). Black-and-white photograph and letterpress text panel. Image courtesy Roberts & Tilton Gallery.

In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, scholar Elaine Scarry describes the inability of language to interpret and express physical pain: “By its very nature, pain resists, even destroys the language that grapples with it.” But what of the capacity of visual art to interpret and translate this bodily experience? “For a Long Time”, on view now at Roberts & Tilton in Culver City, attempts to answer this question by showcasing visual work that grapples with physical endurance and its effects. The result, though ambitious in scope, is a little too conventional.

For A Long Time, installation view. Image courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery.

“For A Long Time” takes its cues from a long lineage: in 1974, an assistant nailed Chris Burden to a Volkswagen Beetle for his performance piece Trans-fixed; in 1989, Matthew Barney jumped for hours on a small trampoline in Drawing Restraint 6; and, in 1997, Francis Alÿs pushed a solid block of ice through the streets of Mexico City for seven hours until it melted in The Paradox of Praxis I. Several among the show’s artists—Marina Abramović, Vito Acconci, and Hamish Fulton—have made a lifelong practice of using their own bodies as raw material. Abramović’s Rhythm 10 (1973), for example, depicts the artist kneeling piously before a series of neatly arranged knives; in a smaller, neighboring frame, a descriptive text written by Abramović reveals that her performance will consist of cutting herself with each knife. In A Machine For Living (1981),Vito Acconci, the self-described “godfather of transgression and pioneer of performance art,” pairs charcoal drawings and photo-documentation of himself swinging his body around a hulking, nonfunctional sculpture. The work is strong but predictable, and the show benefits from the presence of a few younger artists, such as Whitney Hubbs and Erica Love, who diversify the group.

Erica Love, Remote Control (2009). Video still. Image courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery.

“For A Long Time” is at its best not when it considers pain and physical endurance at large, but rather when its artists seize upon the moment of breakdown, the threshold between having control and becoming unhinged. In their respective video pieces, Smile (2001) and Remote Control (2009), Kehinde Wiley and Erica Love achieve this unnerving quality. Wiley, famous for his heroic, realist paintings of Titian-esque, young African-American men, has made a multi-channel video picturing four African-American men, each attempting to hold a smile while facing the camera. As time wears on, their smiles turn to strange grimaces, their cheek muscles twitching in discomfort. In her single channel video, Love holds Barbara Kruger’s book, Remote Control (1993), her hand in the same pinched position as the appropriated image on the cover.  Love holds this positions until she can no longer bear it, and, after thirty-seven minutes and twenty-six seconds, drops her unsteady hand.

Kehinde Wiley, Smile (2001). Installation view of video. Image courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery.

The show’s intentions are worthy, but the work and its curation is too tidy, failing to push into new territory or offer anything unexpected. The human body is still as enduring and even dangerous an agent as it was forty years ago. Yet after an era of art practices that bravely tested its limits and terms, we need new propositions.

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.