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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ghada Amer is known for appropriating images of women taken from pornography, so it’s not unusual to encounter the stylistic conventions of x-rated material in her work.  At her recent solo exhibition at Cheim & Read, big-breasted women display spread legs and vulvas; two women clutch each other passionately as one penetrates the other with a dildo; a single woman is seen from behind in the typical gesture of submission: butt out, back arched, looking coyly over one shoulder.  Amer embroiders these images (which look like line drawings) onto canvas that has been stretched as if for a traditional painting.  She leaves the ends of the threads untrimmed so that loops and tangles are left on the surface to interfere with the image and create a colored mess.  This is often reported to merely be Amer’s connection to abstraction and expressionism, but the colorful turmoil serves to obscure the imagery and requires the viewer to exert effort to see the content of the image itself.  This act of focused looking creates a heightened sense of voyeurism.

Ghada Amer, The Fortune Teller (2008). Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas, 50 x 60 inches.

In “Color Misbehavior” three large canvases dominate the front room and the entire exhibition.  The Fortune Teller (2008) is sewn with overlapping images of naked women in various poses.  The tangled web of red, orange, blue, and purple threads partially conceal the representational forms; since all the lines of stitched thread are the same thickness, the layered images appear and then vanish as the eye passes over the canvas.  But one image comes into focus and stays: in orange, Disney’s Little Mermaid, a clothed and serene counterpoint to the naked women around her, but no less compliant.

Ghada Amer, The Egyptian Lover (2008). Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas, 62 x 78 inches.

The Egyptian Lover (2008) is similar in its layered images and consistent line weights, but in this case the embroidery is done over primed canvas painted with beige, lilac, yellow, and blue.  The drips of thin acrylic paint mingle with the “drips” formed by the long tangles of threads, blending the materials nicely.  As with The Fortune Teller, a Disney character joins the orgy of naked limbs, this time in the form of Snow White.  Her kittenish glance is directed over her shoulder. These two canvases portray transparent layers of fantasy women, conflating the myth of the vulnerable, forever-sexually-available woman with the delusion of the innocent and submissive girl.  Combined, they create a madonna-whore tension.  An obvious move?  Maybe—but it is effective.

The title of Who Killed “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon?” (2010) points to Picasso’s well-known painting of distinctly unrefined prostitutes standing in unsubmissive, even aggressive poses.  But in Amer’s work the woman depicted is hyper-groomed with perfect eyebrows, Chola-style eye makeup, and ironed hair.  Drips of paint behind the stitching run like tears from her eyes.   Amer answers the question posed in the title of who killed the sexually adept, self-possessed women and replaced them with the vulnerable and passive displays with which we are now familiar.  Picasso’s women were nude, but Amer’s are naked.

The other work in the exhibition continues this theme.  The next room contains canvases stitched with repeats of a single image, often almost completely concealed by masses of threads, and smaller embroidered-paper works that each show a single women in a pose that is sexual but not erotic.  Amer uses these images to form a critique of woman-as-idealized-object, and tension resides in this shifting cultural no man’s land between acceptable fare and profanity.   The work is dynamic and the content and materials present opposing notions of femininity.  Combined, they create a mix of allure and repulsion.

Flip through any Mike Kelley catalog and you’re likely to find a plethora of images that show the artist to be a maker of videos, installations, and objects that betray what critic Jerry Saltz once described as “clusterfuck aesthetics“.  So it may be a surprise to view the relatively straightforward Arenas at Skarstedt Gallery, comprised of seven out of the eleven works from the original series exhibited at Metro Pictures Gallery twenty years ago.

Arena #10 (Dogs) (1990) Stuffed animals on afghan, 11.5 x 123 x 32 inches.

These seven works, all created in 1990, puncture the mythic preciousness for which stuffed animals and handmade baby blankets are renown.  Generally, cloth is used by artists for its connection to the body and domesticity, and Kelley manages to bring these associations along while still creating a colder, more antagonistic ambiance.  In addition, Kelley also manages, despite the suave white cube setting, to deflate the illusion that art need be urbane or polished.

Arena #10 (Dogs) is one of the most playful and visually-pleasing compositions in the show.  On a bright red, orange, and brown striped afghan sit eight stuffed animals that seem to be engaged in a tug of war to divide the centermost animal, a two-headed dog.  Most of the other animals are also dogs, but some are silly, ambiguous hybrids like the snake/dachshund/duck concoction or the cheerfully anthropomorphic tomato.  Arena #10 is just fun-n-games; yet look at the display for perhaps too long, and you’ll see that some of the dogs’ expressions are not quite right.

Arena #7 (Bears) (1990) Stuffed animals on blanket, 11.5 x 53 x 49 inches.

In Arena #7 (Bears) five stuffed animals are poised at the perimeter of a satin-edged receiving blanket on the floor: two monkeys, one taupe bear, and twinned golden bears that could be the uglier younger brothers of Pooh. The colors of the animals harmonize with the cream-colored blanket.  The animals sit at the edge of the square as though playing Monopoly, or waiting for a referee’s whistle to blow and a game to begin.  It is one of the sweeter, more innocuous pieces in the show, but even so, the second-hand blanket is on the floor and the bears and monkeys are bedraggled, adulterating the potential innocence of the scene.

Arena #9 (Blue Bunny) (1990) Stuffed animal on blanket, 7 x 60 x 74 inches.

In contrast to #10 and #7, Arena #9 (Blue Bunny) feels stark.  A lone light-blue knitted rabbit sits in the center of a grubby light-blue blanket, smiling somewhat sheepishly with arms raised.  The ambiguity of the gesture—is this an expression of the victor alone at last on the playing field, or a sign of mommy-pick-me-up dependence?—gives the piece a heightened emotional force.

Arena #5 (E.T's) (1990) Stuffed animals on blanket, 7 x 97 x 87 inches.

Arena 5 (E.T’s) is, no pun intended, the most alien.  Here, the field is a large goldenrod-colored blanket.  At one corner sits a lone alien, facing toward the other actors but solemnly looking down.  In the diagonally opposite corner, two cloth E.T. dolls inspect a prone pink humanoid dispassionately.  The attitude and position of the dolls and the emptiness of the territory turns a pilled old throw and some fabric toys into a diorama with all the warmth of an operating theater.

It’s a mild case of what anthropologist Mary Douglas called “pollution behavior”: activities likely to cross closely-held boundaries or repudiate cherished designations, like putting boots on the kitchen table or eating spaghetti in bed.  In this case, and especially in the context of an urbane Upper East Side gallery, it’s the contact with the floor that evokes pollution.  Not just by using obviously worn and recycled objects, but by literally reducing art objects to the level of the floor, Kelley manages to interrogate assumptions about art and also the viewer’s feeling for handmade and beloved objects.  Kelley melds the personal, cherished nature of stuffed animals and security blankets and the costly, refined nature of blue-chip art to show us how flimsy the narrative of sacred objects can be.

Installation View, Halsey Institute, photographs by Rick Rhodes

Call and Response: Africa to America / The Art of Nick Cave and Phyllis Galembo recently opened at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina. The exhibition brings together the work of two American artists intrigued by the formation of cultural identity and individual experience within a society. Drawing inspiration from the rich ceremonial traditions and elaborate guises of African nations, Nick Cave and Phyllis Galembo create objects that are visually captivating and conceptually charged. Cave’s imaginative Soundsuits and Galembo’s photographic portraits of West African masqueraders prompt the viewer to regard the world in terms of connection and community.

Installation View, Halsey Institute, photographs by Rick Rhodes

Upon entering the Halsey, one is struck by the mystical presence of Cave’s Soundsuits. Cave, a former dancer and current Chair of the Fashion Design Department at the School of the Art institute of Chicago, combines his experience in modern dance with his expertise in fiber textiles to create his Soundsuits. The first soundsuit was constructed entirely of gathered twigs, resulting in a subtle rustling sound when worn; thus, the name. The kaleidoscopic costumes reference the ritualistic garments worn by Galembo’s subjects, the people of Africa whom she has spent decades photographing. Cave’s sculptures, anthropomorphic assemblages of materials such as dyed human hair, plastic buttons, beads, sisal, sequins, fabrics, feathers, and other natural ephemera, are layered with personal and cultural associations. The disparate materials are masterfully woven together by the artist, ornamental embellishments create undeniable tactile and visual appeal for the viewer; the soundsuits incite a collective sense of awe.

In the adjacent gallery, Phyllis Galembo’s photographic portraits chronicle masqueraders from various West African countries, including Benin, Nigeria, and Burkina Faso. The masquerade is a meaningful mode of cultural expression for several African groups, and Galembo presents a straightforward observation of individuals within particular cultures. Galembo’s work is a field study on these regions, a modern documentation of their ancient ceremonial traditions. Disguised as animals, spirits, or ancestors, her subjects enact ancient legends and stories, but the artist captures them in stasis. Galembo, described as a “photographic hunter-gatherer” by writer Emma Reeves, incorporates her subjects’ natural surroundings in detailed compositions that highlight the garments, the accoutrements (i.e. a staff to connote authority), and the occasional glimpse of a bare, or sneakered, foot of a masquerader. Galembo elegantly achieves a personal encounter with a masked individual, and successfully conveys this engagement to the remote viewer.

Courtesy of Phyllis Galembo and Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Call and Response: Africa to America will remain on view at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art until June 26th. The exhibition is taking place during Spoleto Festival USA, an annual performing arts event held in Charleston, SC every spring. The Halsey’s sincere presentation of Cave’s soundsuits and Galembo’s photographs offer an exciting visual arts alternative to the citywide performing arts festival.

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

"Searching for my Prince," 2006 Hand-stitched embroidery, applique and paint on vintage print table linen , 70 x 60 inch. Courtesy Charlie James Gallery.

Orly Cogan is searching for the feminist beauty queen. Her strategy involves backtracking, returning to the same matronly craftiness embraced by members of Womanhouse a quarter of a century ago. That’s only sensible. Beauty queens and “the cutting-edge” do not go hand-in-hand. Case in point: this year’s freshly crowned Miss USA may have been the first Arab-American to take the title and the first to unwittingly promote birth control for all, but she still won viewers’ affection with a by-the-bootstraps story—she sold her car to pay for her dream—and still looked like a small-town prom queen in her strapless, wedding-white evening gown. Cogan’s work, in which figures rarely wear gowns if they wear anything at all, does not have the Horatio-Alger-style gumption of Miss USA but it has a homegrown wholesomeness that even its narrative deviance can’t suppress. Its crafty, colorful stitching seems better suited to a 4-H booth at the county fair than a white-walled art space.

At Charlie James Gallery, Cogan’s tapestries and hand-stitched pillows flank a potluck-style table loaded with crocheted cakes and doily cupcakes. A white shelving unit to the table’s left holds pillows that sport messages like “It’s not me, it’s you” and “You’re not really what we’re looking for” stitched in a childlike hand. While endearing in the same way Miranda July’s idiosyncratically confessional titles are endearing, the pillows’ self-consciousness contradicts the rest of the exhibition’s guilelessness.

"East of Eden," 2008, Hand-stitched embroidery and paint on vintage linen, 24 x 80 inches. Courtesy Charlie James Gallery.

Searching for My Prince, a symmetrical scene embroidered on vintage table linen (Cogan often reworks old materials), would still pass for a table cloth if not for the naked and near-naked pair of figures leaning into the blue oval at the image’s center. The blond women, who, like many of the figures in Cogan’s work are Doppelgangers for Cogan herself, pucker up to kiss a small green frog, while a spattering of additional frogs strain to watch. It’s fairyland meets Hicksville, since the slightly used, wrinkled surface of the linen and the womanly bodies, one clad in a loose-fitted pink bikini, make the frog-kissing seem tawdry. (Magic never seems as magical when it hasn’t been air-brushed.)

In East of Eden, fairy characters reappear, this time accompanied by figures with Biblical portentousness and about as much inhibition as the locals of a nudist colony. There are abandoned tires, pregnant women and a disproportionate number of frogs, though Steinbeck did mention toads early on in his version of East of Eden. Steinbeck also said that “it would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable,” but that actually, routine time flies, as it does in Cogan’s yellowed, panoramic tapestry. Figures lounge in yards, touch themselves, cuddle, bicker and just exist. Whole generations seem to grow up inside their languor. Figures begin to overlap one another, and houses grow in on each other. Picket fences impinge on log cabins.

"The Affair," 2004, Hand-stitched embroidery and paint on vintage print table linen, 68 x 51 inch. Courtesy Charlie James Gallery.

More Henry Darger than Tracy Emin, and more Miriam Schapiro than Ghada Amer, Cogan’s work is less concerned with bucking the art world than sidestepping technology. Her linens and embroidery suggest that material progress doesn’t necessarily equal human progress. That same logic informed the Pattern and Decoration movement that emerged in the 1970s. Minimalism had been materially sophisticated, employing Anodised aluminium, painted steel or zinc plates. But it had omitted a whole range of textural, sentimental experiences that artists like Schapiro and Joyce Kozloff re-embraced. Holland Cotter noted, reviewing Hudson River Museum’s Pattern and Decoration: An Ideal Vision in American Art in 2008, “most P&D art isn’t beautiful and never was, not in any classical way. . . . And not-quite-beauty is exactly what saved it, what gave it weight.”

Not-quite-beauty, at least the way it manifests in Cogan’s work, still has some edge to it. It’s awkward, dated, homely and possibly oblivious to a few generations of institutional critique and art-about-art that preceded it. But the beauty queen Cogan is looking for isn’t ambitious or sleekly intellectual; she’s more of a potpourri, pulling from everything hearty, domestic, raunchy and defiant.

Kara Walker: A Warm Summer Evening in 1863 (2008), courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, Banners of Persuasion and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Currently on view at James Cohan Gallery in New York City is the exhibition Demons, Yarns & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists, which runs through February 13, 2010. The show features hand-woven tapestries created by thirteen international artists, most of whom are widely known for their work in other media. Included among the artists whose work is on view are: Kara Walker, Grayson Perry, Shahzia Sikander, Jaime Gili and Peter Blake. The artists were commissioned by the London-based art organization, Banners of Persuasion, to create the tapestries specifically because the medium is so far removed from their usual practices. In the catalog that accompanies the exhibition–which includes an essay written by Sarah Kent–each artist discusses their unique approach to the unfamiliar medium in an interview.

Shahzia Sikander: Pathology of Suspension (2008), courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, Banners of Persuasion and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

The subjects explored in the tapestries on view range from American race relations, such as is seen in Kara Walker’s A Warm Summer Evening in 1863, to an investigation into the tradition of so-called “craft” or “decorative arts,” as seen in the imagery in Shahzia Sikander’s Pathology of Suspension. Demons, Yarns & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists at James Cohan marks the exhibition’s first showing in New York; it was previously on view at The Dairy in London and at Design Miami.

Private Life by Li Dian

The Fifth Dimension – Art of Fiber and Space (October 18 – December 4, 2009) at MOCA Shanghai presented the works of 24 teachers and students of the Fiber and Space Art Studio from the Fifth Studio of the Sculpture Department of China Academy of Arts.

Titled to convey the interests of the Fiber and Space Art Studio in examining the world from a fifth dimension, the exhibition presents reconstructured realities from a virtual dimension imagined by the artists. Tracing the sensibilities and evolution of contemporary art practice by Chinese artists working with fibrous materials since the 1980s, the exhibition unveils the shifts in uses of and perspectives on aesthetic expression which integrates fiber with painting, sculpture and installation.

During the 1980s, members of the Fiber and Space Art Studio, such as Shi Hui, participating artist and one of the exhibition’s three curators, experimented with structures and space through materials such as bamboo and paper, in addition to the traditional materials of wool, linen and cotton.

Today’s experimentation takes the form of incorporating materials such as plastic, polyurethane and other industrial materials to create soft sculptures which reflect also, on the fast-changing Chinese society and the impact of consumerism on people’s daily lives. In his work, Nightmare, Zhan Jun uses iron and aluminium wires to fabricate an exhaust pipe forming the trunk of a bare and forlorn tree with extended roots of metal, to express his reflections on the relationship between industrialization and the environment.

Nightmare by Zhan Jun

The exhibition pays tribute to the vision and work of Professor Maryn Varbanov (1932-1989), a Bulgarian artist who started the Varbanov Tapestry Research Center in the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in 1986, the first contemporary fiber art research center in China, which later led to the founding of the Fiber and Space Art Studio.

Participating artists: Shi Hui, Shan Zeng, Huang Yan, Liang Shaoji, Chen Wei, Fu Yan, He Shanshan, Huang Zhe, Li Dian, Li Wei, Lin Changwen, Lin Jia, Song Chunyang, Wang Hei, Wang Jinglei, Wang Zhenghong, Wang Zhijian, Wu Jiazhen, Xu  Jia, Ying Nihui, Ying Xinxun, Zhan Jun, Zhang Hui, and Zhou Hui.