No cross-dressing acrobatics and water-heaving neighbours to be found this year however – not a bell or whistle or horn or cowbell in sight. Dare I say the Museum of Everything may have grown up and settled down?

Judith Scott, installation view at Exhibition #4, The Museum of Everything, 2011. Image courtesy of the Museum of Everything. Photograph by the author.

This year, the self-proclaimed space for ‘the untrained, unknown and unintentional creators of our modern world’ (the term ‘Outsider Art’ is the one thing that has not found a welcome home here) presented a quiet, emotive show featuring the extraordinary work of Judith Scott, impeccably installed and stunningly lit in the empty warehouse space above the luxurious Selfridges, graduating from an exploding cabinet of curiosities to a museum quality show worthy of the name.

Judith Scott, installation view at Exhibition #4, The Museum of Everything, 2011. Image courtesy of the Museum of Everything. Photograph by the author.

Scott’s obsessively constructed fibre and cloth works hang in the space like abandoned bodies. Exposed, their insides are turned out, with hundreds of metres of yarn and fabric wrapped, tied and consumed. Hours of labour and pain emanate from them.

While there is always a certain danger in relying too heavily on biography – a constraint many women artists have felt over the years – Scott’s work is enriched by contextualisation, or at least better understood. Scott was uneducated, misunderstood and segregated for most of her life, confined by institutionalisation until the age of thirty-five when her twin sister fought to release her. She was deaf, mute and born with Down’s syndrome. She began making sculpture in her 40s.

Judith Scott, installation view at Exhibition #4, The Museum of Everything, 2011. Image courtesy of the Museum of Everything. Photograph by the author.

One one hand, her works are highly vulnerable without a shell to keep them warm, but it feels as though that is the risk that must be taken so that the inside can be kept safe. Swaddled in layers of fabric, something has been protected here – what it is that is inside, we can only guess by the vague outline of its shape. Mummified and preserved, they have been removed from the world and encased for their own protection from a harsh and unforgiving reality.

Judith Scott, installation view at Exhibition #4, The Museum of Everything, 2011. Image courtesy of the Museum of Everything. Photograph by the author.

Perhaps the sculptures are an attempt at protection – offering inanimate objects something she never had. They may also be read as a reflection of the layers of separation imposed between herself and the world around – or the walls that were erected over the years. It is an extraordinary body of sensitive, poetic and emotive work, that leaves no question as to why the name Louise Bourgeois is often uttered in the same breath as Judith Scott… And to the reasons why the Museum of Everything may have considered growing up.

DS: So!  Since I haven’t seen you in a while, are you closest to Man, Woman, or Child?

CS: Closest to Child!  But since I’m doing these hair events, I’ve been growing the beard back.  It’s just not very long.  I have scruff, but it’s not a “beard” beard.

Chris Sollars, "Man Woman Child," 2011. 3 Framed C-prints, 20" x 26" each.

DS: I have to ask, which came first, the beard or the art?

CS: Well, even before the beard, I’ve always known that I wanted to make a wig of my long hair, which I’ve had since high school, and wear it at a later date. That’s why the title is Hair and the subtitle is When I’m 64.  I like the collision of those two moments of time—wearing hair from when I was thirty-four when I’m sixty-four.  So I think that piece came first.  As for the beard, I started growing it, and it just turned into its own thing.  My girlfriend took a long trip and by the time she got back, I already had a bunch of things I wanted to do with it.  Before I cut it, I wanted to let it grow a little longer and let it live on its own, and it inspired a series of works.  I’d done a performance in 1998 at Skowhegan where I went to a tool shop in Maine with a lot of old tools and was drawn toward this long handled axe… I personally tried to sharpen it and make a video of me shaving with it.  Of course, I didn’t have much hair back then, because I was 22, and I didn’t have the capacity to grow hair like I do now.  Anyway, I decided that with this new beard I wanted to do it again, with an axe.  Working with my wigmaker, however, I had to grow the beard as long as possible, and if I was going to shave it off with an axe, it wouldn’t work as a wig.  It’s a really a rare thing, to make a wig out of someone’s own beard hair, because you’re hand-knotting, and working with different clumps of hair—looping it like a rug—and it’s a difficult thing, even if your beard is really long, because it’s still so short.

Chris Sollars, "Hair: When I'm 64," 2011-2040. Hand-knotted wig made of human hair. Image courtesy of the artist.

Chris Sollars, "Beard," 2011. Hand-knotted facial hair. Image courtesy of the artist.

DS: It’s probably pretty brittle, too.

CS: Yeah. So I decided to do the beard wig first, and then grow back a beard that was substantial enough to shave off with an axe.  So that was the process.  And in between, before I cut off all the hair, I wanted to do a series of related videos.

DS: Were you intentionally trying to touch on issues of gender and masculinity?

CS: Well, yeah.  I named the triptych (the photographs of myself) Man Woman Child (2011) on purpose, because… Well, a child would never have a beard like that and a woman would never have a beard to that extent.  I’ve always had fine hair, and I’ve always been in between being kind of “girlie” and, well, not.

Chris Sollars, "Shave," 2011. Video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

DS: Shaving your beard with an axe is such an over the top gesture!  And you’re wearing this plaid flannel.  But I noticed that as you started to talk about your work, you weren’t talking about gender as much as you were talking about intersecting moments in time, or an interest in working with certain tools.

CS: Well, [the interest in the axe] led to that.  It led to the absurdity of knowing that I could cut down trees, but that I could also cut my face with the thing!  There’s a moment in the videos where there’s a cut or change or rupture that happens.  I’m thinking of the video edit like I am cutting hair, so there’s a real switch that happens, a change of one’s look, or the change that can happen with a cut when you juxtapose one image with the next.  Leading up to the show, in fact, and even currently, I’ve been hiding out a little bit, just until people have seen that work [and realize that Sollars is now totally clean-shaven]. It’s kind of a strange performance that’s still going on.  I was even wearing costumes to change my identity around town. I didn’t want to reveal that I’d cut my hair until the show had opened.  I realized as soon as I cut my long hair that that pieces like mine and like Chris Burden’s I Became A Secret Hippy (1971) don’t exist as just performances, but as pieces of our identity from that point forward.

Chris Sollars, "Hair Lay," 2011. Video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

Chris Sollars, "Hair Ball," 2011. Video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

Chris Sollars, "Beard Rub," 2011. Video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

DS: What about race? Does that play in at all?  I might be reading more into the project than what you intend, but I read an article in the New York Times about Matta Clark’s Clock Shower (1973), and writer’s spin was about how it was this glorious time in New York when this guy could walk to the top of the Clocktower building and cover himself in shaving cream and then diddle with the clock.  And my thought was yeah, if he’s white, he can do this.  Going from that thought, and looking at your work, which includes this golden ball of hair surveying a forest and the golden blonde Hair Lays and the Beard Rubs, which seem to be about marking or claiming in certain ways, I’m just curious if there are any thoughts about…

CS: …about identity in relation to race?  Well, I think that perception of where I exist culturally, or politically or socially, changes with the haircut.  Going back to Burden’s Secret Hippy, you might be a countercultural person, but you’re wiped of that in terms of your identity.  I guess that’s why I also looked at Ana Mendieta’s piece with the transplanting of the man’s beard onto her face, taking on that masculinity.  Or Adrian Piper’s Mythic Being.  So I’m aware of these female performances and cross cultural performances with hair and identity, and I was thinking, okay, so if there’s this white man art with these things opposed to it or juxtaposed against it, what is white male identity art?  Or what is it specifically to me?  I guess that’s why I focus so much on the hair as a material, like with close-ups of the hair grain, which I think of as wood grain.  Kind of just investigating what is it that my being is made up of.  You know, the scraggly curly beard hair, the long fine hair… What happens when I change?  When I’m separated from it?  How does it exist on its own as an abstraction, like with the Hair Lays, or the beard itself rubbing on things?  I think the masculine action of shaving with an axe kind of completes the picture of that identity of that person.  And I’ve been so influenced by a lot of that ‘70s work that I was curious about performing that investigation on myself.

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.

Jean Paul Goude. Maternity dress for Grace Jones, 1979.

My interest in Glenn Adamson’s work began in 2006 with his essay “Handy-Crafts: A Doctrine,” which is included in the anthology What Makes a Great Exhibition? In this essay, Adamson posed a question that was to become an encapsulation of his practice as a historian and curator: “When the climate is so militantly hostile to an intelligent handling of craft, how is a curator who is interested in craft to navigate the shoals?” His answer is disarmingly simple: “treat craft as a subject, not a category.”¹

Over the past decade, Adamson has been one of the few to investigate and re-envision craft from this wholly new position. He followed “Handy-Crafts” with the 2007 Thinking Through Craft, which argues that the supplementary status of craft is its very strength and that its position in the margin of art allows it space from which to provide a critique. Recognizing the absence of any standard for basic craft education, Adamson edited The Craft Reader in 2010, providing a foundational-level education in materiality, objecthood, and labor through the inclusion of essays by Karl Marx, William Morris, Annie Albers, and Lucy Lippard. I sat down with Adamson on April 1, 2011, just before he gave the keynote speech at the “Craft Forward” symposium hosted by the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Jayme Odgers and April Greiman. Cover, Wet Magazine (the Magazine for Gourmet Bathers), 1979.

Bean Gilsdorf: You’re putting together a show at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London on postmodernism, and I wonder if you could start by defining that term, because it’s so contentious.²

Glenn Adamson: The definition that we’ve been using—or the application of the term that we’ve been using—is that postmodernism is the proliferation of responses to the collapse of the modernist project. Rather than defining it positively, we’ve defined it as a phase of thinking and practice that occurs because the sometimes utopian or progressive practices and certainty of modernism—best known in architecture, but known in the other arts as well—collapses and you have something in its wake. That’s postmodernism. It’s very much a relational term, and it’s essentially based on the idea of freedom and difference. Modernism is like a transparent window, and it pretends to show you the world clearly, and postmodernism is like a shattered mirror, so it reflects yourself at yourself, but in fragments. It doesn’t necessarily pretend to truly show you anything; it’s simply a reflection of your own situation. That’s the long version; the short version is that postmodernism is what happens after modernism dies. What’s interesting, of course, is that modernism was revived in the 1990s. To some extent, it didn’t ever go away, because you always had modernist holdouts, but modernism again became the dominant style, and then you arguably have a kind of hybridization of various modernist and postmodernist motifs and approaches. But in any case, we’re thinking about postmodernism in the ’70s and ’80s, in that reactive, destructive way.

BG: In your previous craft projects and in your interest in craft, I am interested in your application of the term friction—where you identify a sense of working against something. Is that how you came to the idea of doing this project on postmodernism?

GA: The museum leadership pitched the idea to my cocurator Jane Pavitt and me, but it immediately appealed for exactly the reason you’re saying. I help edit The Journal of Modern Craft, which places modernism and craft in opposition. I’ve always thought of craft as something that is both produced by modernity and contests it. Postmodernism is the same thing, except with a very different structure.

Martine Bedin. Super Lamp, 1981. Photo: Christie's Images, Ltd.

BG: Do you tend to think in poles of opposition?

GA: Dialectically. It’s always about exposing a false opposition, or seeing how an opposition works, sometimes to create a synthesis and sometimes, possibly, to create further fragmentation as well. Marx thought that a real dialectic was one that was resolved. So he would say that if there was no possibility of resolution, you weren’t looking at a dialectic. But I think of opposition in postmodern terms, as leading to further fragmentation, or a rhizomatic, infinite cascade.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Three display cases contain objects from Needle Work, a series in which Smith recreates European and American cloth gas masks from World War I and World War II. Aestheticized in museum vitrines, it is hard to imagine that such tenderly handmade items were once used to protect when our soldiers are now clad in Kevlar.

Needle Work (Wartime Textiles), 2010. Fabricated display cases containing sewn reproductions of wartime textiles, with identification tags and research images.

A central work in the exhibition, Fancy Work (Braided Rug), is a large rug begun by the artist, but carried on by visitors who are encouraged to continue its braiding in the museum gallery. While its sheer beauty and intricacy is enough to stop anyone in his or her tracks, Smith forces visitors to linger with the piece and its conceptual content by implicating them in the work’s very fabrication. Together with books addressing the tactics and varying histories of war scattered across the rug’s surface, the work creates a space in which participation and discussion foreground an engagement with history and personal experience of war. The slow, arduous completion of this handmade rug is a fitting metaphor for the protracted duration of contemporary war.

Fancy Work (Braided Rug), 2010-2011. Screen-printed linen.

In keeping with this spirit of collaboration, Smith organized several events during the exhibition that engaged both the local arts community and the general public by inviting them to create works in the museum. For example, Smith hosted “Sheep-to-Shawl,” a daylong event in which visitors collaborated to shear a sheep, spin the resulting fleece into wool and ultimately weave a shawl; the day was punctuated by speakers addressing the history of craft and fiber arts. By hosting a program rooted in collaborative craft-based work within the museum environment, Smith encourages the arts community and public to widen the scope of creative practices and interactions deemed relevant to the growing discourse on contemporary art.

Allison Smith: Piece Work runs through May 29^th at the MCA Denver.

Cosima von Bonin and Moritz von Oswald, The Juxtaposition of Nothings, Installation View.

This show reminds me of the time I danced for hours at a club in Cologne, caught part of an arthouse film next door, and then somehow ended up at a bar where a bunch of people I didn’t know were drinking like it was the end of the earth. Ok, so that never happened. But I feel like Cosima von Bonin’s current show, The Juxtaposition of Nothings at Friedrich Petzel is a close approximation of that experience.

Cosima von Bonin and Moritz von Oswald, The Juxtaposition of Nothings, Installation View.

Von Bonin has always balanced her killer soft sculptures and fabric wall pieces with a deep investment in context and place-making. At Petzel, in collaboration with musician Moritz von Oswald, the focus is less on individual works and more on a sort of behind the stage/back alley voyeuristic adventure where the spectators are exhausted and drunk with cultural consumption. A puppy lies limp, arms laid out flat, staring at a video on loop. A floppy eared pimp-like bunny character with an eye patch appears to have found a friend in a bright red dog.  Even the light post is out for a smoke, as this show is at once chuckle-worthy and noir.

Cosima von Bonin and Moritz von Oswald, The Juxtaposition of Nothings, Installation View.

Viewers accustomed to the almost clinical reimagining of minimalist form in Von Bonin’s previous work might be put off by the glut of audio and video equipment on display here. But the sound is sharp and deployed with precision.  Each tightly contained audio zone adds a different layer to the show as pulsating dance beats blend into more spaced out jams. Moving around the gallery, you become part of the orchestration, as most of the animal sculptures are either on a sound stage, absorbing a video, or emitting a sound track of their own.

Cosima von Bonin and Moritz von Oswald, The Juxtaposition of Nothings, Installation View.

The back room seems to unwind from the activity of the main gallery like a club that lets out into the street at the end of the night. Sophisticated cardboard sculptures of a mailbox, café signage and a street lamp hang on the wall. A slumped over bloodied bird sits alone on a bleacher—here, the alienation of today’s technological self-absorption sets in.  While this theme isn’t terribly new (think Kraftwerk, Radiohead, or Kanye), von Bonin and von Oswald play the space between the handmade and the machined perfectly. While a lot of technological collaborations seem to blast off with an über-corny futuristic vision, the artists here spare us the space travel allusions.  The characters in this little drama are too busy livin’ to know that they don’t have a future anyway.

Elaine Reichek, "Paint Me a Cavernous Waste Shore," 2009-2010, Tapestry, 118" x 107". Courtesy of the artist and Shoshana Wayne Gallery.

When Richard Strauss’ indulgent opera Ariadne Auf Naxos had its U.S. premiere at the Met in 1962, critic Everett Helm was more than underwhelmed; he was exasperated. The whole show, he wrote, “makes dupes of the audience, being all form but having no real content.” It was “theatrically flabby,” “silly and contrived.” He criticized most of the cast, too (their English diction “ranged from about vague to intelligible”). But weirdly enough, he praised the lead, Leonie Rysanek, an inexhaustible diva who sang the part of the mythological mortal-turned-goddess whose love and loyalty leave her jilted. Rysanek “turned in a fine performance,” “her warm, appealing voice . . . remarkable for its flexibility” and “effortless dynamic range.”

Perhaps the reason Ariadne could be well played and appealing in an opera otherwise deemed egregious has to with the fact that she has always been beside the point. Both in the original tale and in the swaths of art and literature it has generated in the centuries since Greek mythology’s heyday, Ariadne, the woman who makes her lover a hero only to be abandoned and then forced to wed for all eternity, acts as a symbolic proxy, never quite allowed to be her own person.  De Chirico’s Ariadne is a prop, Chekhov’s incapable of really loving, and Sondheim’s an idealized memory.

Elaine Reichek, "Ariadne in Crete," 2009-10, Hand embroidery on linen 38 1/2" x 28 3/4". Courtesy of the artist and Shoshana Wayne Gallery.

Elaine Reichek’s current exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica gives Ariadne her due. Reichek, an artist whose tapestries and stitchings are historical mash-ups that have much more to do with the legacy of virtuosic craftsmanship—and of virtuosic borrowing—than of woman’s work, has culled together an army of literary and visual references to Ariadne. T.S. Eliot, Picasso, Nietzsche, Ovid, John Currin, Borges, Titian: almost any creative force you can think of is present and most are male. She’s unraveled their Ariadne-inspired work, and then stitched it back together so that, rather than a put-upon figure, whose thread has been pulled willy-nilly through history, Ariadne seems to take control of her historical trajectory with savvy, sinewy resolve.

In the best known version of the myth, Ariadne is daughter of the king of Crete. The king, who has it out for Athens, sacrifices seven young Athenian men and women to a Minotaur every nine years. When studly Theseus, an Athenian sick of all the death, decides to go into the Minotaur’s labyrinthine cave and put an end to the creature, lovestruck Ariadne helps him out, giving him a thread to unwind as he goes, so that he’ll be able to find his way out. In return, Theseus marries her but quickly loses interest, famously deserting her while she sleeps on a rock.

Elaine Reichek, "The Pigeons Sang," 2010, Inkjet printer on paper with digital applique and digital embroidery on linen, 51 3/4" x 46 1/2", Edition of 3. Courtesy the artist and Shoshana Wayne Gallery.

“No daughter of minds has ever got off lightly in love,” wrote Seneca, and Reichek has stitched this line into an eye-popping portrait of Ariadne as John Currin interpreted her: whimsically inquisitive, with big yearning eyes. In another portrait, appropriated from Edward Burne-Jones, Ariadne stands looking forlornly down at a loose ball of reddish string. But the laborious, precise pairing of imagery and text—the artist has hand stitched some of the embroideries, used a digitally programmed sewing machine for others and commissioned one tapestry—in Reichek’s work, makes Ariadne’s perceived vulnerability seem all wrong. She may not have got off easy, or ever been fully recognized for her smarts, but she was able to insinuate herself into the psyches of centuries’ worth of creatives, and thus become immortal.

Linnea Glatt installation view, courtesy of Barry Whistler Gallery

Labor used to be a word that could be tied to abstraction. It was in the early twentieth century when abstraction was invented that the very notion of the artist/worker also rose to prominence. This came to a head with Abstract Expressionist artists who treated the studio as a workshop, wearing coveralls and diligently embracing the status of the proletariat. In the 1970s feminist artists expanded the notion of labor to encompass domestic work. Today, with Takashi Murakami, Demian Hirst or Jeff Koons as examples of artists functioning more like venture capitalists, those days seem long gone. But even the reference to a piece of art as a “work” harkens back to the days when labor was part of a belief system.

Linnea Glatt Installation view 2, Courtesy of Barry Whistler Gallery

Made with a sewing machine and thread on mulberry paper, many of these “works” use the grid as a starting point. But like Agnes Martin or Eva Hesse, the grid allows a structure for indeterminacy to chart its meandering path around a clear trajectory. As a result, analog machinery and the hand collaborate to make something that is deeply felt.

Linnea Glatt Installation View 3, Courtesy of Barry Whistler Gallery

Glatt uses seriality in a way that suggests time with progressive iterations of a visual trope. For instance, one series of drawings involves two circles. In each one the circles come closer and closer until they overlap, pass through one another and switch places, suggesting anything from a lunar eclipse to a Venn diagram. This was a common strategy for Minimalist artists and like Sol Lewitt’s cubes, the circle becomes a site for endless exploration.

We continue this week’s coverage with Benjamin Bellas’ review of some of the works on view in Aqua Art Miami.

Megan Whitmarsh. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Concurrent with Art Basel Miami Beach and located nearby the main fair was the Aqua Art Miami contemporary art fair. This year the fair returned to its original location at the Aqua Hotel where its first incarnation was presented in 2005.  Situated firmly in the realm of the “hotel room as gallery” model,  Aqua’s organizers have stated their mission is “to promote innovative programming from the west coast as well as the greater USA and abroad, with a particular interest in young dealers and galleries with strong emerging artist programs.”  This year’s rendition was no different with a heavy emphasis on west coast galleries with a sampling of east cost and Canadian spaces.  As with anything that embraces the terminology “innovative programming” the results of this conglomeration of galleries in this context were mostly uneven.

Among the more accomplished work on view was Megan Whitmarsh’s showing at the San Francisco gallery Michael Rosenthal’s space.  In this assortment of pieces, Whitmarsh is working primarily with embroidery thread and spraypaint on fabric.  In them, Whitmarsh co-mingles large abstractions with small figurative elements to create her colorful and textured canvases.  House plants, bipedal primates, robots, and various individuals dressed ready for the clubs find themselves dwarfed by the geometric abstractions that serve as their stage set.  Whitmarsh focuses her wide net of playful figuration and abstraction by stating:

Lauren DiCioccio, 17JAN10 (reggie bush), 2010. Photo courtesy of the artist.

“I am a child of the 70s whose sense of futurism is informed by Star Wars (fucked-up dusty robots) instead of Tomorrow Land. A future with entropy and drug use and weeds growing in the cracks between the scratched plexiglass windows of the geodesic domes. Bits of yarn and dusty houseplants. If this sounds bleak, I don’t mean for it to. Perhaps the healthiest kind of futurism is one that admits entropy and flux. Perfection is suspicious; worn and dusty can mean well-loved, too.”

Another bright spot happened to be the work by Lauren DiCioccio in the space occupied by Jack Fischer Gallery.  Here DiCioccio embroidered over various pages from the New York Times.  The various colors of threads are left loosely flowing from the imagery that has been stitched over, while showing through the vast empty space of the cotton is the rest of the newspaper page’s original elements.  DiCioccio’s interest in these works of the physical/tangible beauty of commonplace mass-produced media-objects is reinforced to good effect both through her methodology and subject.  Although DiCioccio’s use of  embroidery differs from Whitmarsh’s in approach and effect, the result is no less satisfying.

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.

SC: What do you feel happens when you merge largely rebellious imagery from metal culture with the often-associated domestic quality of sewing?

BV: I see it as a high speed collision of polar opposites much like Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. When these 2 opposing forces meet the result can be catastrophic or something entirely new. Plus, there has always been an aspect of the punk rock and metal culture that includes hand sewing patches, pins, or metal spikes onto clothing. My work just goes a little further by merging the ideas and aesthetic of punk and metal culture with domestic craft, i.e. pillows, quilts, and embroidery. I am certainly not attempting to organize the choas or energy of metal culture into some form of conservative product. Rather, I re-interpret it in a different medium.

SC: How does quilting alter or enhance the unruly nature of metal?

BV: It draws attention to the more ridiculous antics of the movement. I compare my work to the over the top stage sets, costumes, and over all debauchery associated with the bands and audience. I have always had an interest in sub-culutres that go just a little to far into the extreme. These people are able to the push the boundaries of society past its limits and towards something completely new. In the end even Anton Lavey needed and a warm blanket to sleep with when it was cold outside!

SC: Also, it occurred to me that quilt making is often used as a commemorative or memorial act. I know that it is also very common to see fans use hand made banners to celebrate and show loyalty to their favorite band. Do you feel that the act of quilting and the product that results celebratory in nature? Are these objects a tribute to the rebellious culture that they reference?

BV: The work is simultaneously a tribute and a form of mockery at the unbelievable antics employed by some of these bands. For instance, Ozzy biting the head off of a bat onstage or snorting a line of ants while on tour with Motely Crue.  Blackie Lawless of W.A.S.P used to shoot fireworks from his crotch, of course this back fired one night and blew his balls up! The work takes on this rebellious mentality by utilizing the darker aspects of the culture with a medium that is the complete polar opposite and very un-metal, craft. My work exists within these opposing forces, a sort of negation from negation to the extreme.

SC: You have explained to me that you are able to create very subtle references to the history of metal in some of your larger works. Can you give me an example of how you embed certain messages or connections in the work that only ‘insiders’ of the metal culture would understand?

Ben Venom: Listen to Heavy Metal While You Sleep! has a few hidden secrets only someone familiar with the bands would notice. The 4 corners of the inverted cross has Ozzy on the top with Dio opposite (Dio and Ozzy used to sing for Black Sabbath and Ozzy was not a big fan of Dio when he first joined Black Sabbath) and Megadeath on one side with Metallica on the other (Dave Mustaine was kicked out of Metallica and formed Megadeath as a result). In addition, the band Pentagram is placed  on the forehead of the skull as a reference to Charles Manson and his swatiska tattoo. Iron Fist was inspired by fans that carve SLAYER into their arms as a form of scarification. The Lucifer Pillow Collection is comprised of hand shaped pillows with screen-printed images of goat heads, lighting bolts, and prison style tattoos. They represent metal cultures interest in black magic, paganism, and satanism akin to the pentagram drawn onto the palm of Richard Ramirez‘s left hand.

SC: So given that you focus much of your artistic attention on rebellious subcultures, how does the act of rebellion play out in your personal life? Any interesting stories or debaucheries to tell?

BV:Ha! In an attempt to not incriminate myself, I will just say I’m on good behavior… ’nuff said!

SC: Tell me a little about your upcoming projects, both exhibitions and unrealized artworks?

BV: I will be showing at Guerrrero Gallery here in San Francisco, CA this November. I also just exhibited work at The Lab, in SF this past month. I’m  in contact with an organization called Home of Metal in England and may be showing some work over there in 2011. Currently, I am working on a commission quilt for Pirate Press Records that will incorporate a lot of t-shirts from bands they work with into a whiskey bottle shaped design with a pirate ship as the quilting pattern. Unrealized artworks include some embroidery with Flying V guitars, more hand shaped pillows, and large mixed media screenprints. Live fast…diaherra!

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.

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.

"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.