THE RE-ENACTMENT

One of the most compelling pieces in the exhibition is Mexican artist Yoshua Okón’s Octopus (2011). Created during a residency at the Hammer Museum, the 4-channel video piece grapples with what is both humanizing and alienating. Day laborers re-enact the civil war in Guatemala, wearing in black or white clothing, depending on which side they had fought for. On the set of a Home Depot parking lot, the laborers replay scenes from their country’s history, but now the opposing sides point invisible weapons at an invisible enemy, not at their historical foes. “Octopus” is Guatemalan slang for the United Fruit Company, alluding to the company’s ambiguous role in Guatemalan politics and complicating the narrative further.

THE ARCHIVE

The pliableness of the document becomes evident through Zoe Leonard & Cheryl Dunye’s The Fae Richards Photo Archive (1993-1996). A fictional African American performer is created through an archive of snap shots, film stills, and head-shots. Photography’s role in the construction of history becomes clear as we are left to conjecture about the possibilities of this figure.

While The Fae Richards Photo Archive plays with the divide between fact and fiction, Mike Tribe’s The Dystopian Files (2009-present) solemnly takes on the task of chronicling history. An archive of clips from footage of protest and the policing of these actions is gathered together as something that Tribe refers to as “ritualized conflicts”. The single channel video is disrupted by omnipresent black bars slowly creeping across the screen as eerie, unidentifiable tones collectively moan, the audio’s consistency giving a sense of a cohesive moment from the catalogue of moments.

THE PERSONA

Eric Garduño & Matthew Rana, “People v. Bruce (Parrhesia)”, cardboard, comedy club lights, and audio track, 2011

A cardboard fabrication of a courtroom witness stand and judges bench illuminated with the theatrics of comedy lights and the occasional laugh track enact notions of truth in The People v. Bruce (Parrhesia) (2011). The term “parrhesia” loosely translates to free speech with an obligatory edge. In this installation, collaborators Eric Garduño & Matthew Rana engage with the trial and conviction of obscenity against comedian Lenny Bruce as a way to address the fluidity of truth and free speech amidst the conflicting territories of where one can expect to hear truth spoken – the comedy stage and the courtroom.

In the series The First and Last of the Modernists: (Charles and Michael), Lorraine O’Grady links the public personas’s of poet Charles Baudelaire and performer Michael Jackson through the language of conceptual photography, implying modernism’s hand in the cult and commodification of celebrity.

THE INTERVENTION

Perhaps the least convincing of containers is The Intervention, in which “works recall charged events in history that register cautions about the future”. Maybe it’s a matter of semantics, but I don’t equate “registering cautions” to “intervention”, which for me has a very active implication. At any rate, Geof Oppenheimer’s Mason Dixon Lines, Raised and Lowered (2007-11) is a “two-unit” piece that encapsulates a formal tightness with a conceptual looseness. A neon portrait of Alan Greenspan leans against a wall, somehow in dialogue with a distant placed steel geometric form wrapped in red bandana material perched askew on an unfinished pedestal. There is something about systems and structures here, but ambivalence reins.

Geof Oppenheimer, Mason Dixon Lines, Raised and Lowered (2007-11)

If you are after the redemptive, look elsewhere; what this exhibition offers are objects of discontent, agitation. In the context of our current political climate, we encounter the spiral of history in these works, rather than it’s unfolding.

Agitated Histories will run through January 15, 2012 at SITE Santa Fe, in New Mexico. It was presented earlier in 2011 at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore.

You walk in to a darkish room where ever-changing shapes move like a school of fish across the walls. After your eyes adjust, you find that the there are two benches sitting among six sculptures that are producing the schools of fish and that the fish are made out of nothing but light beams. These sculptures are metal. Simple geometry (sphere, cube, etc). The room is quiet and calming. Everyone who has been here talks about the unexpected smiles that slip onto their cynical faces, and it happens to you too.

Installation view Otto Piene: Lichtballett. Photo: Gunter Thorn. All photos courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center

To understand what is going on here, you have to look back to the 1960′s, which may have been the high point of art at MIT. During the sixties, arts funding was partially used as a counterbalance to the political consequences from the institute’s complicated and financially fertile military industrial connections. The Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) was founded in 1967 by Gyorgy Kepes and immediately went about funding exhibitions and visits for some very interesting artists. With the available capital, an unavoidable optimism of postwar boom, and a complete lack of habits (good or bad) Kepes attempted to foster “media geared to all sensory modalities; incorporation of natural processes, such as cloud play, water flow, and the cyclical variations of light and weather; [and] acceptance of the participation of ‘spectators’ in such a way that art becomes a confluence.” (pdf)

Two of the first artists who were invited to visit MIT were Otto Piene and Hans Haacke (as well as Stan VanDerBeek). Piene was in the first round of fellows (meaning he was in residency for a year), and would succeed Kepes as director in 1968. Haacke was invited for a solo show at MIT in 1967. The body of work both presented consisted of systems, those very cloud/water/lights that Kepes hoped to present as art media.

Installation view: Hans Haacke, 1967.

This fall, Haacke’s solo-show has been reproduced at the MIT List Visual Art Center (LVAC). VanDerBeek and Haacke were both deeply influenced by the ideas of cybernetics. Haacke felt that controlling the storm, moving the meteorological indoors, skipped a layer of abstraction and released the artist from reproducing essential features of the world; immediacy was the only type of innovative art left to pursue. Unlike VanDerBeek’s social videos, Haacke created kinetic art systems, objects that set in motion an action that had no end point.

The approachable physicality and comic impossibility of watching a ball float on a jet of air, or seeing a refrigerator coil (covered in frozen ambient humidity) as a sculpture reminds us just how useless art can be; how archaic and aimless we could make our art. These works are unlike our current trends: useful and solemn responses to the internet, the economy, or the social conditions in relation to capitalism. These are objects that bewilder and add to our aesthetic understanding by wonder and query. The closest these sculptures get to being explicit is to make visible the relationship between the whole and the part, between the center and the exterior. 1967 was a very delicate moment in American history: the Vietnam war raging as were race riots, but it was still before the chaos of 1968. Instead of making politics explicit, for which Haacke is usually applauded, these sculptures sing wordless songs about the 1960′s societal changes. These examinations into natural systems granted him tools that he later used to investigate social systems, like the gallery and politics of Germany, but were timely investigations that presage his later work.

Otto Piene: Electric Rose, 1965. Polished aluminum globe with 160 timed neon lamps. Photo: Gunter Thorn

On the other side of the LVAC, Piene’s light sculptures from the 1960 and 1970′s have been painstakingly restored and presented (some for the first time in decades). Despite the opportunity of seeing some vintage Piene sculptures in perfect condition, the two new sculptures, One Cubic Meter of Black Light and Lichtballet steal the show. Both project light through perforations in their skin. Lichtballet is a wall of rotating lights hidden away from sight, the circular pattern of holes in the wall filters the light, manipulating the light into physical motion in the surrounding room. There is almost no reason to look at the objects that Piene has created, instead, you should be looking at their effects on your environment.

The sensations we see flowing around the room are light, directly and with no symbol. Instead of seeing how light lands on a sculptural object, the sculpture provides its own light, and uses the light as a physical material. It may be a sculptural analogy for Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Has Piene released light from being a shadow on the wall? It’s hard to tell, as every time you step into the room, you are enthralled by the light show’s charms. You immediately forget any theory laden narratives you may have about the work, and instead experience the motion and change for what it is, a grand environment that undercuts words and explanations. It’s a direct experience. It’s that visceral art that we’ve left behind. It’s an example of Kepes hope to present the art object as a confluence, a meeting of viewer and natural process.

Otto Piene: Lichtballett and Hans Haacke: 1967 are on view at the List Visual Arts Center through Dec 31, 2011.

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.

Carmen Papalia, "Blind Field Shuttle--Mildred's Lane," 2011. Digital Print, 11" X 17." Photo by Kristin Rochelle Lanz.

Some philosophy holds that the fundamental role of human beings is to be “world disclosers.”  Medusa’s Mirror: Fears, Spells, and Other Transfixed Positions, a small yet conceptually powerful show at Oakland’s Pro Arts Gallery, demonstrates this principle via the visual arts.  The exhibit, curated by Amanda Cachia, is expansive in at least two important ways. First, the objects on view include both traditional and new media.  Even fashion, often omitted, is interestingly addressed.  The second inclusion is the more significant one: the makers of the work are all disabled people who have made disability their subject.

Some of you, I know, have just gone on to read another review.  Haven’t we had thirty years of identity politics?  Yes, indeed we have.  And some of it, as the critic Robert Hughes loved to point out, was narrow and preachy.  But hold on a minute.  The voices of “Medusa” are not “victimized voices.”  You’ll find enough canon-stretching and humor here to make a trip (or this article) worth your time.

True, this work is not heavy on visual appeal.  During my two-plus hours in the gallery, several visitors came and went rapidly, neglecting even the wall text.  But unlike the norm over the past three decades, there are sufficient enough making skills and aesthetic value present to capture the interest of a beholder longer than the standard, three-second gallery goer’s glance.  Slow and patient viewing is rewarded by encounters that permit seeing disabled people, our shared social world, and even ourselves differently.

Laura Swanson, "Peggy Lee," 2008. Inkjet Print, 20" X 30".

Some favorites include the inkjet prints of Laura Swanson.  Swanson has four punchy self-portraits exhibited that, at the very least, challenge the widespread narcissism rampant in contemporary Western society.  In them, the subject teases and frustrates our gaze.  Pillow depicts the artist, a little person, seated on a king-sized bed virtually hidden behind a red-and-beige checkered pillow with only her child-sized feet and hands visible.  Shower also nearly eliminates the portrait subject, who is engaged in the private act of washing behind a bunched-up veil of a translucent shower curtain.  Here the disabled body is blurred and hard to grasp.  Point made–in a teasing and sophisticated way–and well taken.

One of the images I would purchase, if not for my part-time teacher’s salary, is Swanson’s Peggy Lee.  At the center of the image, set in an interior, Swanson stands dwarfed by the stereo speakers of her own sound system; her entire wee form revealed in a blazing red t-shirt reading “West Coast” and hippy-flowered, dark pants.  Her face, traditionally the most revealing portion of a portrait, is substituted by an album cover featuring that of the comely 40s starlet, Peggy Lee.  While us able-bodied folks might try to avert our gaze from the sight of a little person out of politeness (“It’s not nice to stare at others”) or disgust at difference, or a complex mixture, Swanson beats us to the punch, reminding us that somebody at the other end of the viewing transaction also has mixed feelings, which we able-bodied can only imagine.

Joseph Grigely, "Songs Without Words (Eartha Kitt)," 2009. Pigment Print, 18" X 14". Ed. of 12.

A similar point about empathic imagination is made in Songs without Words, a pigment print by a deaf artist, Joseph Grigely, who employs the image of a yet another recording diva to convey his ideas.  Grigely has used an image appropriated from the New York Times obituary of Eartha Kitt, the Cherokee-African American actress and singer known for her distinctive sound.  This memorializing image, meant initially to do the work of evoking collective memories of the talents of the performer, is used here to evoke the private memories of the artist, and, subsequently, to pry open his audience’s minds.  When Grigely was ten he lost his hearing.  One wonders if he ever actually heard Kitt, but whether he did or not is moot.  His appropriation of the legend as the epitome of unique and individual sound is a telling metaphor of the death of his ability to enjoy the sensuous pleasure that many of us take for granted.  The ability to hear the ordinary rumblings of daily life is not the issue here; rather hearing is proposed as art.

Sunaura Taylor, "No Arms! (Self-Portrait)," 2010. Oil Paint on Print on Raw Canvas, 72" X 48".

Sunaura Taylor pulls off a similar coup in at least one work, as well.  Taylor deploys a compelling, intermedia blend of oil paint on printed paper (or canvas).  Her No Arms! (Self Portrait), a Photoshopped reworking of an old-timey photograph of a sideshow “freak,” communicates a sincere sense of just how a physical deformity (in this case, a congenital disability) might distort the self-image of the owner of that body.  If we can be coaxed to reflect on the effects of social judgements–such as calling someone “freak”– we then open to the possibility of altering our received notions of others.  And not just of the disabled, but of all other sorts of categorical name-calling.  At their most powerful, the works in “Medusa” engage viewers in a consideration of complex psycho-social interrelations and projections that are often denied.

A word must be added about the step this show takes toward disability fashion: a step which I hope combines with sustain-ability fashion.  Sandie Yi contributes photo-chromogenic prints of her wearable art, as well as some of the artifacts themselves.  The wall text explains that for generations, Yi’s family members have been born unpredictably variable numbers of toes and fingers.  Yi uses what some might view as a handicap to dream up self-defined standards of attractiveness, and–perhaps even more essential in wearables–of physical comfort.  Yi’s most alluring objects are delicate cuffs, constructed of translucent white fabric and white plastic molded into the shape of wrists, hand-embroidered with an inventive design of pink and beige floss that evokes the beauty of health and aliveness.  Arguing effectively against the look of conventional prosthetics and orthotics, Yi encourages a kind of innovation that links her work with DIY-art, theory, and aesthetics.  If this mode of thinking/making doesn’t sufficiently challenge our smug definitions of who is capable and who is not, what could?

Chun-Shan (Sandie) Yi, "Em-brace," 2011. Plastic, Fabric & Embroidery Floss. Set of 2 Chromogenic Prints, 20" X 30".

I continue to be intrigued by Carmen Papalia’s Blind Field Shuttle, which stretches the definition of art furthest here.  Unfortunately, like most other viewers of this exhibit, I was unable to experience the work firsthand.  What is on offer at Pro Arts is documentation of Papalia’s participatory performances, in which the artist, who is not fully blind but has impaired vision, leads a shut-eyed human train over urban and rural terrain in acts of compassionate trust.  Three digital prints and repeating slideshow images portray able-bodied folks lined up behind Papalia, linked to one another by an extended right arm to the right shoulder of the person just ahead: a fleshy corpus of coordinated cooperation.

Although unrepresented in the show, a rendition of Shuttle was conducted in downtown Oakland on Wednesday, September 21, 2011, when to my chagrin I was already booked to lecture in a classroom.  Since I was not able to have this experience firsthand, I can only speculate.  But I am willing to wager that participants in this experience came away with an expanded sense of what it means to be impaired; and that, on reflection, they discovered something about their habitual way of being in the world by having “tried on the mode” of another.  If identity-politics in the visual arts have brought us anything lasting, it is the accumulation of just such significant moments of what Heidegger and his contemporary followers call “world disclosure.”

Carmen Papalia, "Blind Field Shuttle--Open Engagement Conference, Portland State University," 2011. Digital Print, 11" X 17". Photo by Heather Zinger.

For an earlier American educator and critic of the arts, John Dewey (who wrote during a period of economic Depression like that of our contemporary one), to produce, to trigger or to memorialize an experience that was distingushable from the habitrail of our everyday lives was the fundamental characteristic of an art work.  At its best this kind of art can enable us all to imagine and articulate alternatives to current social and even political conditions.  It can disclose possibilities previously untried or suppressed, or refocus our attention in ways that clarifies things previously unclear.  This kind of art could begin to regenerate the sense of hope that has been strip-mined from all but the most fortunate few in our society and thrust into the light of public discussion new ways to go forward, but differently.

“Medusa’s Mirror: Fears, Spells, and Other Transfixed Positions,” is on view at Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland through October 20, 2011.

James Gauvreau, Really Long Lake (installation view), wood and video, courtesy 99 Gallery, photo: Jesse Milne

Though the show consciously avoids a thematic framework, the individual works (by a dozen Ontarians), gain a certain coherence here—not only in relation to each other, but to the relatively majestic space they occupy—it would be possible, you feel, wandering through the gallery, to make a bicycle tour of the exhibition itself, and the breathing room is crucial to the larger energy fields many of the pieces project.

Gareth Lichty, Enclosure, construction fencing, courtesy 99 Gallery, Photo: Jesse Milne

But it’s the relationship to the neighbourhood that’s most compelling, to me at least, as raw, industrial materials, some of which seem like they could have been scavenged from nearby construction zones, are here creatively re-purposed inside the gallery.

The room is anchored by James Gauvreau’s Really Long Lake, which narrows to the top of the 17-foot ceiling and incorporates a projection and a mirrored floor—a kind of meditative, rustic, fun-house.

James Gauvreau, Really Long Lake (interior), wood and video, courtesy 99 Gallery

It’s flanked by new work by Gareth Lichty, who turns vibrant orange construction fencing into minimalist vessels, and by Hamilton collective TH&B’s Transmission, an industrial radio tower topped by quietly sonic satellite dishes overgrown, seemingly organically, by a hive of burrs—a worthy follow-up to 2008’s Swarm, which generates a similar sense of electric energy and an underlying, pervasive anxiety.

TH&B, Transmission, burrs, radio tower, cable, satellite dishes, found objects, courtesy 99 Gallery, Photo: Jesse Milne

Surrounding wall-mounted works reinforce the sense of intensive craftsmanship and renewed interest in the art object’s meticulous construction. On the far wall, Markus Heckmann’s Reg Ex flashes neon lines that evoke the light works of Dan Flavin, but are here formed by whitewashed 2x4s mounted in vertical lines and generative animation, displacing the source of light as an external projection.

Vanessa Maltese, Wall Grid No. 2 (Studio Sculptures), wood and acrylic paint, courtesy 99 Gallery, Photo: Jesse Milne

On the other side of the room, the tiny, perfectly formed pieces of sculpted wood that make up Vanessa Maltese’s Wall Grid No.2 (Studio Sculptures) are a geometric counterbalance, revisiting modernist forms in the gem-like, obsessive shape of miniatures. With a similarly pared down aesthetic, Sarah Elizabeth McCaw’s suite of works pair texts like “I am not 100 percent sure we can do this” and “Everything is going to be all right” with wooden models reminiscent of broken wall clocks, with simple moving parts: completely mesmerizing exercises in futility.

Sarah Elizabeth McCaw, I Am Not 100 Percent Sure We Can Do This, wood, acrylic and motor, courtesy 99 Gallery, Photo: Jesse Milne

The first and last piece you see in the space is a panoramic painting by Toronto-based Gillian Iles, Eden is Tempting but Not to be Trusted, a vibrant canvas that foretells and reflects the restless imagination and sense of absurdity in the room.

It’s worth a spin.

Gillian Iles, Eden is Tempting but Not to be Trusted, oil, acrylic and pastel on canvas, courtesy 99 Gallery, Photo: Jesse Milne

With additional work by Wrik Mead, Keith Bently, Tom Ngo and Scott Eunson. Art Spin’s Second Annual Exhibition at 99 Gallery is on view Tuesday to Saturday, noon to five, until September 24^th.

CO-LAB (Chris Coleman & Laleh Mehran). Installation view of "W3FI" at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Interactive Installation.

I remember arriving at college as a bright-eyed freshman and recognizing familiar faces within moments. It was not because I went to a small school or because I had met these classmates at orientation events in my hometown, but rather that I had done my due diligence on Facebook. Today, not a week goes by that I don’t find myself googling unfamiliar names or wishing a friend Happy Birthday by e-card – or dare I admit it, text – rather than by phone or hallmark card. And yet none of this feels strange.

It is this unprecedented interconnectedness fostered by the digital world that CO-LAB founders Laleh Mehran and Chris Coleman take as a point of departure for their most recent project entitled W3FI. An unmistakable play on words, W3FI is a combination of WiFi, the word “we” and the slang use of the number 3 in place of the letter “e” as a nod to the digital parts of our lives. The W3FI project encourages people to consider their online identities – referred to as S3LF – and how we can use technology to interact with one another in positive ways. The artists explain, “[t]he W3FI project is much more than an awareness campaign, it is a movement in social activism to ask a new set of questions for each of us every time we click, text, or share a photo.”

In its manifestation at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, W3FI is an interactive installation in every sense of the word. The project’s central tenants are presented on the gallery walls as a series of moving texts and symbols alongside dynamic statistics about national and international use of the internet, cell phones and social networks. Broad statistics – usually difficult to grasp in real terms – are made more tangible through their juxtaposition with data that relate directly to the Boulder area. A topographic map of the region is overlaid by animated visualizations of internet use and signal data. Live tweets from local residents utilizing the words “I” or “we” punctuate the gallery walls as well. Museum visitors can become a part of the W3FI network by having images of their faces taken and integrated into an ever-growing forest of interconnected trees projected along the gallery walls. While many museum galleries offer limited seating – encouraging visitors to rapidly proceed through the galleries – seats are deliberately interspersed throughout the W3FI project space in order to facilitate discussion, learning, reading and quiet contemplation.

CO-LAB (Chris Coleman & Laleh Mehran). Installation view of "W3FI" at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Interactive Installation.

CO-LAB does not merely demonstrate a philosophy and data with W3FI. They bring this concept to bear by relying on Open Source software and hardware in designing the installation. Open Source encourages the sharing of knowledge and work by having contributors make all the files they have developed available online for others to copy, supplement and improve. Generating the terrain of Boulder for the map, controlling the glowing seats and the forest of faces on the “W3FI tree” were all made possible through various Open Source programs and hardware.

While the project unfortunately closes tomorrow, never fear – W3FI will live beyond this singular venue. CO-LAB’s goal is to continue promoting the W3FI presence in both real and digital space; online it will be represented by websites, pages and social networking media. And in the “real world,” Mehran and Coleman will continue to organize traveling exhibitions.

Chris E. Vargas, Video still from Liberaceón, 2011. 16 minutes, three channel video installation looped color (DV).

History, like most things, is subjective. What is culled from individual accounts is accepted as fact and eventually translates into some kind of truth. But truth can be different at any moment—past, present, and future. The events in London were either riots or long overdue, civil unrest.  Depending on whom you ask, in 2005 the people of New Orleans were either looting or just surviving. This parsing of history renders “truth” and “fact” malleable, constituent materials for narrative and artistic practice. In his video work Liberaceón (2011), Bay Area artist Chris E. Vargas makes histories, meshing the life of the pianist Liberace, late-80s direct actions to end the AIDS crisis, and a nonapologetic use of green screening.

Vargas is best known for his collaborative, narrative videos and films.  In Falling in Love…with Chris and Greg (2008–ongoing), we watch the dark satire of Vargas and his artistic/romantic partner Greg Younmans’s relationship.  Through the structural lens of traditional sitcom, the couple questions notions of monogamy, marriage, and gender, while consistently establishing their own, not always hyper-radical or “appropriate,” notions of companionship.

Not unlike Falling in Love, in Liberaceón, Vargas inserts radical, queer rhetoric into the arguably apolitical, high zest that was Liberace. Liberaceón includes footage of the showman’s TV specials, Liberace’s nightly news obituary, and various ActUp protests beside Vargas’s molty wigs, camp, and classical, non-method forms of acting. True to Liberace’s mid-1980s opulence and Vegas styling, the video begins with Vargas-as-Liberace’s grand entrance, which includes a balloon ride over “the Strip,” a reclaimed parking lot with a sequined American flag and a Rolls Royce. The film quickly cuts to Liberace and lover Cary James’s visit to a doctor (Younmans), who has an unfortunate bedside manner and gives a dreadful—but at the time, not uncommon—diagnosis.

Inspired to make James feel better, Liberace takes to preparing some chicken soup (again, epic use of chroma key by Vargas). While watching the news in his decadent kitchen, Liberace becomes frustrated by the many AIDS-related deaths, President Regan’s continued silence and the US Congress’s conservative funding of AIDS research. The performer decides to take direct action by constructing a gift with his “special ingredient…to scare ole Ronnie.” What follows is the most compelling and sensual use of a double boiler, all in an attempt to make a Liberace-laced, bloodied chocolate piano.

Chris E. Vargas, video still from Liberaceón, 2011. 16 minutes, three channel video installation looped color (DV).

The glittering stone on this work’s bejeweled finger is the deathbed scene between Liberace and James. Vargas’s slow collapse, full of gasping and eye-flickering, is at once hilarious and disquieting. One knows that Liberace’s many requests not to be memorialized with sap, nor to reduce his or others’ experiences to melodrama, but to honor the experience of any person with AIDS, including himself, have gone largely unanswered. Yet, as the work closes with Liberace’s rendition of “I’ll Be Seeing You” over the tense excitement of ActUp action footage—which includes his own disrupted, TV news obituary—one understands that these histories are strangely enmeshed, joined at the site of their presumed queerness or temporality by Vargas, where they transform one another.  In Vargas’ telling, the closet Liberace comes out of is that of radical queerness. Although he calls himself “just an old queen,” Liberace’s anger speaks to the continued complexity of our histories and picturing of self.

Liberaceón (2011) was on exhibition most recently in San Francisco as part of ProArts Gallery’s Bay Area Currents 2011, curated by Julio César Morales. You can also find Vargas’s work at www.chrisevargas.com.

Desirée Holman, video still composite from Heterotopias, 2011, courtesy of the artist and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

Along with nine, hand-selected participants, artist Desirée Holman has spent the last two years developing a series of avatars. The resulting project, Heterotopias, 2011, a video and supporting drawings on view now at the Berkeley Art Museum, refers to corporeal reality’s relationship to virtual reality, the physical process by which the digitally rendered avatar is formed, and the ironic stasis of the body whilst the imagined self is set free.  Unfortunately, Holman only refers to these ideas.  While aesthetically engaging and fun to watch, Heterotopias fails to delve beyond the surface of her topic.

Shot as a sort of music video, the participants sit before laptops in similar, homey interiors.  They dance, are transformed into both live-action and digitally animated superhero-like characters, and engage in battle with long staffs. Considering the care taken in creating the colorful and fanciful costumes and scenery, as well as the richness of the concept, a viewer expects much more from these characters than what is delivered.

Desirée Holman, Mask of Agamemnon (Diffuse Map), 2011, courtesy of the artist and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

One cannot help but wonder: is sitting in front of a computer the extent of the lives of these individuals?  Even Superman’s Clark Kent has distinguishing characteristics, personal dramas and quirks.  If these avatars are an opportunity to exist in a space untethered by the bounds of the real, why do the avatars perform feats no more complex than hitting one another with sticks?

Not one of the actors or avatars has any true individuation, despite the potential offered by their appearances. The elaborately developed avatars are little more than costumes: digital exoskeletons worn by the subjects.  Holman and her participants supposedly spent a great deal of time and effort in the development of these fictions: why is the audience not granted access to this aspect of the project? We have all played video games, seen superhero fiction, or engaged in social networking sites as digitally warped versions of ourselves.  In each of these scenarios, the stories generated by fictional or semi-fantastic characters are engaging and multi-dimensional: both morally and socially complex.  We should be granted similar complexity from these characters.

Desirée Holman, Dancers Dancing in Their Own Digital Ectoplasmic Cocoons 1, 2010, courtesy of the artist and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

The show’s accompanying drawings are an interesting addition. Pieces such as Dancers Dancing in their Own Digital Ectoplasmic Cocoons are beautifully executed and freeze time in a manner that allows us to attempt a more in-depth connection with these individuals.  The “ectoplasmic cocoons,” incidentally, work better in the drawings than in the videos; in the latter, the pink lining on the characters as they jump between fantasy worlds seems to be a result of poor color-keying. Though not all of the works are as successful, one drawing of a costumed face alludes to information promised but never quite delivered: a man stares ahead, awkwardly, wearing a humorous headpiece.  His eyes indicate that he is unsure of the world in which he belongs, torn between his virtual self and actual self.  He is self-conscious, but nonetheless set free by his ridiculous garb.  Is this a drawing of the man, or of his digital armature?  Where in this spectrum does the drawing, and in fact, all art—itself a virtual rendition of reality—fall?

Alex McLeod. "Jungle," 2011. C-print. 36 × 36 inches. Courtesy of the Artist.

My first look at Alex McLeod’s work immediately reminds me of the photographs of James Casebere and Thomas Demand. Like these contemporaries, I assumed McLeod created these elaborate environments in his studio and photographed the resulting dioramas. Yet, there are textures, forms and lighting in these landscapes that defy the logistics of this approach. In Jungle, bulbous, glassy objects appear to float throughout the scene, reflecting light from far more sources than seems possible. Concentric circles pattern innumerable surfaces with detail beyond the scope of any human hand. It was a small flock of birds in the upper left corner, though, that finally led me to investigate the specifics of McLeod’s process in creating these whimsical environs.

McLeod uses various 3D modeling programs to construct computer-generated imagery, sometimes using appropriated models from online sources. Of his approach, the artist explains, “I wanted to negotiate a space between complexity for details sake, and simplicity for aesthetics sake, like baroque meets cartoon.” While he exploits technology to achieve hyperreal detail and attention to lighting, viable representations of familiar materials like wood and water render a more accessible reality. Moderating the dichotomy between real world and fantasy, McLeod seamlessly integrates moments of commonplace and virtual realities. While some of these environments exude lightheartedness – epitomized by bright, candy-like colors and playful forms reminiscent of scenes from the 1971 Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory – others nod to more ominous circumstances.

Alex McLeod. "Copper Cavern," 2011. C-print, 36 x 36 inches. Courtesy of the Artist.

McLeod exhibits these imagined landscapes as large-scale digital C prints; his smallest works are 32 x 48 inches. The physical size of his work facilitates the viewer’s transition into an alternate reality, by forcing engagement with unfamiliar details in the context of a somewhat recognizable world.

Alex McLeod: Distant Secrets opens at Angell Gallery in Toronto, Canada on August 25^th.

But we are no longer in the seventies.  What are women artists doing now? Seeing Hershman’s new work, shown at Gallery Paule Anglim alongside her earlier pieces, is an interesting exercise in seeing where we came from, who we are (even if the answer is multiple identities), and where we might be going.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, "Home Front," 1993-2011. 2-channel synchronized installation inside a dollhouse. Image courtesy of the Gallery Paule Anglim.

Hershman’s newer work is just that: new. Techie-new. Considering the intrusion of technology into the body and body politics, this techno-feminism makes some sense. However, like much interactive and innovative media, her work sometimes trips on itself.

Is Home Front, 1993–2011, a dollhouse containing a small TV screen on which a couple engages in a marital argument, supposed to be physically difficult to watch?  True, the struggle to peer through the too-low windows does make one all the more aware of one’s own voyeurism (and the desire to see the argument escalate to violence), but it is nonetheless a potentially insurmountable obstacle to engaging with the work.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, "Anti Surveillance Suit Project, Sketch Part II," 2010. Digital pigment print. Image courtesy of the Gallery Paule Anglim.

Alchemist Rod For The 21^st Century, 2010, a broom that detects traces of alcohol in the air, is certainly cool, but does its value as an art object transcend the “cool?” The installation of RAW/WAR, 2011, featuring user-submitted videos, screens in a wooden miniature theater navigable through sensor-equipped flashlights. This is actually an elaborate and clumsy way of showing a simple website that is far more interesting and engaging when viewed from one’s home computer.

The most successful pieces that incorporate interactive response are the creepy wigged masks that giggle or breathe when a sensor is triggered.  Ironically, these pieces are less recent, but are still potent in their commentary on the malleability of identity and the absence of a woman’s voice.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, "Giggling Machine 1," 1966, reconfigured in 2011. Image courtesy of the Gallery Paule Anglim.

These works share gallery space with Hershman’s drawings, which whimsically outline her ideas with a humor not present in the pieces that make it to their aesthetically austere execution. Anti-Surveillance Suit, 2010, a sketch originally drawn decades ago, is updated, and is more pertinent than ever.

Perhaps her sketches are so enticing because they imagine the seemingly impossible, as opposed to that which is limited by the technology that is available. And if Hershman’s work is about technology, it is ironic that materials so humble as pen and paper better articulate the confines of the body and the ability of the imagination to free it from politics, the gaze, and social and biological boundaries.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, "Kicking Time On Your Own," 2009. Pen, ink, and watercolor. Image courtesy of the Gallery Paule Anglim.

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work will be on display at Gallery Paule Anglim through August 20, 2011, along with work by Benji Whalen.  Hershman’s film !Women Art Revolution will play in at the Lumiere and Shattuck Theaters in the Bay Area from August 26 through September 1st, 2011.  Check the !W.A.R. website for details.

Bruce Nauman, Going Around the Corner Piece, 1970, © Coll. Centre Pompidou. Photo: Georges Meguerditchian

In the self-explanatory show entitled Video, an Art, a History 1965 – 2010, the history and evolution of the video art genre are recounted through 50 video works and installations, drawn from the collections of both the Singapore Art Museum and Centre Pompidou. Having developed in tandem with the apparatus of television and the analogue and then digital video cameras, video art’s reconfiguration of the politics of image-making and its ability to place the spectator as an indispensable agent in a work’s existence are significant tenets on which the exhibition is established. The infinitely widening scope and scale for the production and interpretation of (moving) images, the mode of their dissemination, and the documentation of performances (technical or otherwise), pose several key but general questions around which the works are grouped.

The pertinence of such questions however, falters in the collaborative effort that has shown up more differences than similarities. Reconciling the inventory of the Singapore Art Museum with the Centre Pompidou’s reveals the tentative forays into the processes of historicisation that are only beginning to develop in Southeast Asia and the inevitable rift in the standpoints of Western art and Southeast Asian art history. The Pompidou’s international collection stretches back 4 decades to the genesis of video art; the Singapore Art Museum’s inventory spans approximately a decade that really began with the Asian Financial Crisis (1997-8) and is focused on works produced in the surrounding geographical region. The wider ramifications of this collaboration go beyond an overwhelming inventory imbalance and the expanded visual vocabulary that video technology provides; indeed the emerging ideological differences become apparent when speculative comparison – the attempt at a comparative video-art history, should it even exist – inevitably sets in.

Pipilotti Rist, A la belle étoile (Under the Sky), 2007, © Coll. Centre Pompidou. Photo: Georges Meguerditchian.

The seeming futile effort of historicising video art in this instance, is thus mitigated by several thematic (and loosely chronological) focuses that ground the show: television critique, the representations of self, the documentation of performance, installation in space, landscape as metaphor, video-as fiction and the deconstruction of narratives.

If early efforts by video pioneers such as Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman and David Hall took the definition of an art object beyond its conventional parameters as a static entity produced for visual consumption, perhaps the greatest strength of video art triumphed in this show is the unprecedented potential of experiential interactivity between artist, installation and spectator. Peter Campus’ Interface (1972) invites the viewer to superimpose their reflection onto their projected image after which they simultaneously face 2 images of themselves – one of the video image and their reflection on the glass screen. The inherent sense of ego coupled with a measure of curiosity is a potent brew, particularly when facets of the multi-layered self are revealed in art. Like the literary Doppelgänger (the ghostly and sinister double), artists’ early efforts recognised the potential of video art in exploring the loss of existential reference in which the traditionally held view of the consecrated sense of self is destabilised. In Bruce Nauman’s Going around the Corner Piece (1972), the surveillance set-up is symmetrical and simple: perched in the corners in a white square-room are closed-circuit cameras and small TV monitors that capture visitor movements going around the corner of the enclosed space. The spectator’s image disappears from view as he/she rounds a corner; speeding up in an attempt to play catch-up with one’s image results in a unsuccessful tail-chasing endeavour – which is probably the glorious core and yet most vexing part of this work.

Peter Campus, Interface, 1972.

Departing from the investigative preoccupation with the apparatus and the monolithic hold that television had, video art had, by the 1980s, begun deconstructive strategies of memory and narratives, debunking on its way, stereotypes of sexuality, ethnicity and gender perpetuated by the very same mode. Nam June Paik’s semi-documentary Guadalcanal Requiem (1979) explores the subjectivity of memory through the deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction of narratives, in a film that coalesces history, time, cultural memory and mythology on the site of one of World War II’s most devastating battles in the Solomon Islands. Surrealistic images of archival footage, interviews, Charlotte Moorman’s fragmented cello performances come together like a scratchy Hitchcock–Buñuel/Dali crossover. The haunting collage is often fraught with poignant tension and a sense of the macabre: interviewees with singular (or paltry) memories picking up where some have left off; Moorman playing a cello with a long palm leaf against a thunderous horizon, and at another time, performs concealed in a body bag.

Guadalcanal Requiem, Nam June Paik, 1979, © Nam June Paik Estate video still Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EIA) New York

A deconstructive approach to the moving image seemed to be video art’s trajectory from the 1990s into the early 21^st century, incorporating new developments of photo processing, digital editing and image layering in contemporary visual culture. Swiss conceptual artist Pipilotti Rist’s A la belle étoile (2007) moves between micro- and macrocosms on horizontal and vertical surfaces. As suggested by curator Christine Van Assche, such works operate on removing depth of field, redefining in the process, the spectator’s own rapport with space.

Despite the influence of the commercial mainstream, video art has nevertheless, retained its earlier forms: the performance documentary, mixed-media texts, or even the visual portrait. Such forms seem conceivably better suited to the preoccupation with art’s social purpose and its context of production that remain dominant traits in Asian-produced videos; perhaps most similar to the historical Western notions where art was produced within corresponding socio-political backgrounds. Just as Gustav Courbet’s post-romanticism was a rejection of academic and bourgeois juste milieu, much of Southeast Asian works are filled with the rhetoric of social change in which media artists show no desire to be unbound from their local cultural matrices. By continuing to invoke ties to tradition, incredibly varied configurations (or even fragments) of history that appear in Asian works at best, seem to read as disjointed narratives to the viewer unschooled in the intricacies of China’s tumultuous last few decades.

Yang Fudong, Backyard - Hey! Sun is rising, 2001.

Yang Fudong’s Backyard – Hey! Sun is Rising (2001) follows the Keatonesque slapstick antics of four young men enacting military rituals and traipsing around with swords, questioning the meaning of rituals in the wake of social changes. A richer meaning however, could be gleaned from Yang’s work if considered in the light of the communism’s wane, as well as in the historical traditions of Zen, martial arts and the aesthetic disciplines of poetry, painting and calligraphy – all of which are mirrored in aesthetic form and content in his videos. Like Yang’s disoriented characters who seem to seek penance in an environment marked by repression, The Propeller Group’s Uh… (2007) confronts Vietnam’s youth culture’s adaptations to the changing socio-cultural and political landscape through the symbolic use of graffiti, and the disorder and spontaneity it represents – the antithesis of Vietnam’s ordered socialist state.

Uh..., The Propeller Group, 2007, Singapore Art Museum Collection

Manet's Luncheon on the Grass and the Thai farmers, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Two Planets series, 2008, Singapore Art Museum collection

While Western artists like Pierre Huyghe and Issac Julien integrated mixed media installations with the spectacular and immersive experience of cinema, Asian filmmakers also tended to persist with the use of narrative (and at times, the meta-narrative) as a didactic strategy. In Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s The Two Planets Series (2008), Thai farmers – groups of people blithely oblivious to the cultural or economic baggage associated with canonical works of Western art history – talk about several cornerstones of modern European painting. Their discussions of Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass (1863), van Gogh’s The Siesta (1889-90) and Millet’s The Gleaners (1857) are artlessly literal, context-less and extremely humourous, with the constant comical tendency to drift towards off-topic situations. Straddling the diverse worlds of rural farming and art history, Rasdjarmrearnsook raises questions of socio-cultural context, the parameters of interpretation and appreciation, but stops short of suggesting that our efforts in basting together a coherent narrative and interpretation of art are vain but significant detractors from the lost pleasure of looking.

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Video, an Art, a History 1965 – 2010 is presented by the Singapore Art Museum and the Centre Pompidou, and runs through 18 September 2011.

Oliver Laric, CEO (Installation shot), 2011, Courtesy of Based in Berlin

The international image of Berlin is nowhere more visible than in the city’s restaurant industry. Eat-in restaurants commonly seem to lack a speciality in-lieu of offering upwards of 200 items  from around the globe; Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, American and of course traditional German all in one spot. Supply constraints, because of kitchen economics and Berlin’s geographic location limit ingredient availability and often result in diluted and deluded versions of what should be. Because they try to replicate several foreign cultures all at once, these restaurants produce nothing authentically. It’s as if they have all the recipes, but substitute readily available ingredients for the harder to find items.

Is that what Berlin culture at-large has become: other cultures with Germany filling in the blanks when necessary? Surely one should be able to look to the community’s art to be at least representative of the culture, if not be the culture. Berlin’s reputation for art itself has led to this continual migration of artists searching for something in the city to aid in their process (whether it’s cheap rent, inspiration, connections, etc.). The result may mean learning from mentors that were new immigrants themselves no more than five years ago. Looking at the biographies of the artists presented here, most are foreign born, few are from Germany, and fewer still call Berlin their hometown. It’s as if there was a big empty space where all of the artists just decided to meet up, and in some utopian fantasy dreamed up the Berlin art scene… almost. Without responding to the city itself, artists are left trying to find their identity through something that can’t be defined. The focus here seems to be not on embedding oneself in a culture, but instead being one who helps define it.

Erik Bünger, The Allens, 2004, Video installation, Courtesy the artist, Photo: Erik Bünger

Pieces like Erik Bünger’s The Allens, 2004, illustrate this image of Berlin. Putting on the headphones and listening to Woody Allen give a monologue, every next word translated into another language, is much like navigating the city. It’s impossible to follow all of the conversations, but hearing the variety of languages is inescapable. All of these cultures are being filtered through one figurehead, one of the most imitated and parodied celebrities in Western culture. Allen iconic voice and way of talking is stripped away as the words are spit out inorganically to reassemble the original text, leaving only glimmers of the original English speech.

Because, by and large, the artists are at least somewhat outsiders, is this show just a coincidental collection of work that could have just as easily been ‘The Studio Complex Group Show’ on 123 Fake St. in Anytown, Earth? The pitfall with defining one’s own culture in a white cube called Berlin, is that it makes culture, by negating Berlin’s entire history, irrelevant, and thus makes any attempts at cultural creation also irrelevant. When there is no real focus on preservation of local culture in the contemporary art of a place with hundreds of years of internationally impacting history, artists create their own problems instead of dealing with the problems already present in society. Moving to Berlin changes to moving to any foreign land and dealing with a new life situation. Understanding one’s existence in Berlin, with reference to the historical boundaries, navigational limits and cultural differences between adjacent neighbourhoods becomes understanding one’s existence in either a global sense, or a completely personal sense. It makes me wonder to what extent the art community in Berlin speaks to the multi-generational locals, or if there are two co-existent but mutually exclusive culture systems in Berlin.

Matthias Fritsch, Replace:Technoviking, 2011, Video still, Copyleft by, Courtesy of the artist

Matthias Fritsch’s We, Technoviking, 2011, a video that is situated partly at Berlin’s Fuckparade, manages to drift between the local and the global. The original footage named Kneecam No.1, a popular internet meme, is both silly and startling; the technoviking is serious about fun, and protection. Social order is maintained by this super hero-type figure in what one would expect to be a festival that seems almost created to get out of hand. We, Technoviking compiles Youtube posted response videos inspired by the technoviking video and blurs the line between what is unique to Berlin and what is common around the world. The incredible international popularity of the footage has inspired an archive and exhibition that decentralizes the original event and relocates it in college dormitories, parks, and anywhere else. The nature of this video questions the authenticity of the event itself; no longer a unique experience in time and place. Everything is everywhere, there is no here.

Critiquing consumption may have been one of the bigger trends at Based in Berlin this year. Certainly, it’s something that most of us in industrialized society have conflicting feelings about. While I guess it’s nice to know that artists here are thinking about it, pieces like Rocco Berger’s Oil Painting, 2010, would have read the same in any Western star city and doesn’t benefit from being placed in a show that presumably wants to link the artists and city through the cultural production of art.

Rocco Berger, Wir müssen ins Detail gehen, 2009, Motoren, Holz ,Förderband (recycled), Galerie Alte Schule

It’s hard, as an outsider without local knowledge, to comment on Berlin’s body social with any sort of reference for local culture in Berlin. Instead it’s the popular culture that provides a skimming/surveying of what Berlin is with information that is at this point cliche (namely regarding Nazism and The Wall). Only the simplified, tourist-version to what are extremely complicated issues is accessible and therefore may get overlooked in-lieu of pursuing more self-centered subject matter. At its worst, it’s taking what the artist inherently has as the base of the meal, shaking in a few splashes of Wurze, and calling it Berliner art, and may be rightly feared by the immigrant artist. But this ignorance of the local is what is continually obfuscating the culture further and pushing it evermore so out of reach. As artists continue to produce with focus on the personal and the global, lack of identity becomes identity. Berlin may not be the only city faced with this issue, but it seems to be a brilliant example of the results of urban gentrification.

This discussion exists for me in Oliver Laric’s installation, CEO, 2011. One must climb up a temporary structure to view three SUVs sitting on a constructed roof with a vantage of some of the most iconic buildings of Berlin. At once it discusses global concerns of corporatism, consumption, waste and the environment, and contextualizes it amongst the history of the city. It addresses the disconnect between our daily lives and feeling any sort of connection to the locale beyond the personal. While the focus on multiculturalism and globalization may be positive directives at times, local culture and values still exist in large cities and continue to inform the cultural production of places like Berlin. By art culture diverging from Berlin’s local culture, two separate cities will form within one space, and art will further obscure itself from general society. Without local knowledge, opinion and input, any attempt at producing an authentic culture will come off tasting like a kidney bean burrito.

Ranu Mukherjee, Auspicious Picture, Multiple Sources of Power (2011). Hybrid film, 2 minutes 51 seconds. Edition of 5. Image courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern.

What happens at the moment when energy becomes material, and how can we even dream of documenting it? The question has wide-ranging implications, from the memories stored in everyday objects to the effects of prayer. Ranu Mukherjee’s solo exhibition at Frey Norris Contemporary and Modern, Absorption Into the Nomadic and Luminous, takes up these issues. A former painter who now works mostly with photography and animation, the question has particular potency for Mukherjee, as it references the creation cycle of a painting (from pigment to paint to image), the balance between the intangible and tangible found in digital video, and perhaps the link between.

Ranu Mukherjee, Rajasthani Gypsy Shoes, Dr. Gabrielle Francis (2011). Ink on colored paper. 19 5/8 x 19 5/8 in. Image courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern.

Nomadic and Luminous consists of a series of square paintings and a suite of hybrid films (so-called due to their combination of animation, photography, and video). In the first film, Auspicious Picture, Multiple Sources of Power (2011), an animated emanation, or halo, glows above a live action shot of ocean waves at night.  As the emanation fades and disappears, different articles of clothing and tapestry appear and disappear in the foreground, almost dancing, and we are left to contemplate each object—ocean, emanation, and clothing—as a source of power in its own right.

Ranu Mukherjee, Between the no longer and the not yet (2011). Ink on colored paper. 19 5/8 x 19 5/8 in. Image courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern.

The second film, Abundance Picture, As Told By the Element Itself (2011), opens with the image of a checkered-cloth bundle making its way across a crocodile-filled river, with children’s silhouettes in the background. After a while the silhouettes fade, and the next image features bright clothing hung from tree roots, juxtaposed against a hand-painted landscape as yet another shadowy silhouette moves in and out of the frame, eventually revealing itself to be pile of gold.  The final film, Ecstatic Picture, Spilled Milk (2011), shows the infiltration and spread of a pitcher of spilled milk amongst a constant rain of flowers, Indian clothing and jewelry, and other objects. The empty silhouette of what could be a deity, or perhaps a mother and child, occupies the center of the screen. Eventually, a mass of cell phones appear and pour forth the rainbow equivalent of spilled milk, which mingles with rest of the animations and references the boon that cell phone technology has brought to India.

Ranu Mukherjee, Ecstatic Picture, Spilled Milk (2011). Hybrid Film, 5 minutes 4 seconds. Edition of 5. Image courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern.

Taken together, the films provide a meditation on tangibility and intangibility; landscape, negative space, and sacred space; void, object, memory, and isolation.  And while Mukherjee describes the accompanying paintings as merely “note taking,” they should not be undervalued—particularly because they provide us with Mukherjee’s lexicon. The same pair of gold Rajasthani gypsy shoes, with their curled toes and red interiors, for instance, appears in both Rajasthani Gypsy Shoes, Dr. Gabrielle Francis (2011), and Auspicious Picture (2011). Similarly, landscape fragments based on lithographs of Indian deities, with the deities cut out, show up in multiple paintings, as well as both Auspicious and Ecstatic Pictures.

Ranu Mukherjee, Abundance picture, as told by the element itself (2011). Hybrid Film. 3 minutes 32 seconds. Edition of 5. Image courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern.

To Mukherjee’s credit, the work never becomes ponderous, but remains uniquely well-thought out and mesmerizing. On a more personal note, the objects in the paintings also reference Mukherjee’s Indian heritage—just one more way long-stored energy materializes or becomes current.

Absorption Into the Nomadic and Luminous is on view at Frey Norris in San Francisco through July 30, 2011.

Takeshi Murata, Golden Banana (2011). Pigment print. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

With Get Your Ass To Mars (2010-2011), a set of nine, exquisitely-rendered still lives, Murata references the 16th-century tradition of vanitas painting, a type of 16th-century still life that features skulls, fruit, dead animals, and other perishable or ephemeral items that evoke death, or the fleeting experience of life. The name itself means “emptiness,” implying that all earthly experience is empty compared to what lies beyond. The paintings were also an excuse for the artist to test his or her skill, and the objects depicted were often overripe, or had a perfection of form rarely found in the items they were modeled on.

Takeshi Murata, Art and the Future (2011). Pigment print. Image courtesty of Ratio 3.

Murata’s pieces continue these themes, evincing a too-perfect-to-be-in-the-world lushness. More importantly, they evoke the tension of a three-dimensional space that reveals itself over and over to be a void.  Despite their photorealistic appearance, the works were made in Cinema 4D. Murata isn’t trying to deceive his viewers into believing the objects in these still lives actually exist. Rather, even as he shows off his technique, he is careful to include less precise—even crude—details. In Golden Banana (2011), for example, the texture of the skull’s horns is unreal on close examination, and the flaccid trombone in Gumbone and Coke (2011) has the opposite problem: it’s velvety, fleshy texture is hyper-real, and thus equally unbelievable. Murata also plays with the vanitas formula by using not only skulls, fruit, eggs, and instruments, but also bronzed fruit, coffee cups, books, videotapes and other pop culture paraphernalia.

Takeshi Murata, Gumbone and Coke (2011). Pigment print. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

As complicated, coded and beautiful as the images of Get Your Ass To Mars are, they are one-liners compared to Murata’s video, I, Popeye (2010), which was first displayed in New York at the New Museum in 2010. Times are rough for our spinach-guzzling friend. He is not the Bluto-bashing cartoon hero of our childhood, or that of our parents’. Somehow—like his audience and the animation techniques with which he’s rendered—he’s matured. This Popeye is emotionally grizzled, like an addict who’s been sober for years but fails to see the point in the emptiness that surrounds him.

Takeshi Murata, installation view of I, Popeye (2010). Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

Everything in the film starts out gray:  the landscape, the spinach factory where Popeye works, the smoke billowing from the smokestacks, and even the sky. A bleary-eyed Popeye stands at a gray conveyor belt, pushing a green rectangular button. With every push, a stream of spinach squirts into a gray can, and a mechanical arm stamps a lid down. He falls asleep at the conveyor belt and wakes up from a brightly-colored, hallucinatory dream in an overflow of metal cans and a shower of sparks. He gets sacked, of course; walks out of the factory; arrives home; and heaves himself on the couch, only to be served an eviction notice by Wimpy.  Finally, after one last spinach-fueled rampage, Popeye commits suicide and drives off into his video game inspired afterlife in a shiny Model T, to the tune of Rush’s Tom Sawyer (“a modern-day warrior, mean mean stride”).

Takeshi Murata, video still from I, Popeye (2010). Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

Aside from this afterlife, which involves fluorescent green smoke, the film is spare.  Similar shapes show up throughout—the doorknob in his apartment and the tombstones in the town cemetery are all polygonal, for instance. Popeye’s bulging forearms never wobble and his jaw is the squarest and firmest I’ve ever seen it.  He’s even wearing a t-shirt with his caricature on it, featuring an airbrushed and winking Popeye, the cocky scrapper we’re all used to.

Takeshi Murata, video still from I, Popeye (2010). Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

Murata’s genius is that he manages to keep the video’s trajectory both poignant and humorous.  He portrays Popeye as a much more nuanced character than we’ve ever seen. For example, Popeye meets Wimpy’s eyes for a long time after the eviction notice is handed over. The staring contest ends when Wimpy gives up, tips his hat to Popeye, and scuttles off, after which Popeye makes two final trips: one to a graveyard where he lays daisies on the graves of Olive Oyl and Swee’pea, and the other to visit Bluto in a hospital, where he’s lying comatose.  The only sound is a respirator. Popeye sits with Bluto for a while.  For a split second, he even turns to Bluto like he has something to say, but then turns away again.

Takeshi Murata, video still from I, Popeye (2010). Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

Get Your Ass To Mars and I, Popeye challenge us to reconsider how two-dimensional objects and characters, or even such ephemeralities as memory and life itself, can be “rendered,” or made three-dimensional. As long as psychology is involved, this transformation will always be about more than trompe l’oeil effects.

Get Your Ass To Mars is on view at Ratio 3 in San Francisco through June 11, 2011.