Annette Kelm, Untitled, 2012. Courtesy Marc Foxx and the artist.

We had just left Marc Foxx gallery, where Annette Kelm’s delicate C-prints look like illustrations from the most deadpan Children’s book ever, as if everything but tufts of grass had been excised from, say, Make Way For Ducklings. We were still in the little enclave of galleries off Wilshire Boulevard when a woman confronted us in something of a panic. She wore heavy, layered, unwashed clothes and a ribbed pink hat. She had lost her carpet, she said. “It’s blue and has four threads missing,” she said. “It was just here. Please help.” She sounded like someone who’s discovered the kid she’s been charged with wandered away. But everything about her suggested she was unhinged, and we couldn’t engage. “We’re sorry,” we said, in a concerned, confused way, then slipped into ACME gallery.

Lutz Braun, "Akira," acrylic on carpet and wood, 2012. Courtesy ACME.

“This would be a bad place for her to come,” said my friend, when we saw we were in a room full of carpets, some placed on thigh-high wood boxes, one hanging low enough on the wall so it trailed on the floor. Berlin-based Lutz Braun had painted on these with acrylic. The one he calls “Murdering the Season” was grayish with a fire-ravaged forest depicted on it. The one called “Bludgeon” was a white carpet with a watery landscape crossed out in the middle and an abstract triangle on the right. They were expressive in that the marks were loose in an expressionist style, and they had “visceral” iconography like skeletons and burnt trees. It’s also sort of gross to put paint, a gooey liquid until it dries, on carpet. But despite all this, Braun’s paintings managed to feel aloof and disengaged. Each shape, mark and figure — even garish, skeletal ones — seemed to have been rendered with restraint.

We left ACME and walked through the parking lot, where the woman had retreated to a little corner by the parking attendant’s booth, where some of her belongings were spread out. She came out to talk to us, her hat off, her hair somehow better kept than it had been before. “She found it,” she said to us, very seriously and eagerly. “But she really did need help. She’s not well. I helped her.” It took us a moment to realize “she” was the woman we’d talked to earlier, the same woman we were talking to now, only she seemed to have split into a different personality. We told her we were happy she’d helped and walked away — I was thinking that the blue carpet with four missing threads, something I hadn’t actually seen, would stick with me longer than anything I had seen so far that night.

Alex Israel's set for "As it Lays"

Later, we ended up at the Jim Henson Soundstage, where artist Alex Israel was debuting his series of celebrity interview videos at an event presented by MOCA. He calls the series As It Lays after Joan Didion’s iconic Play it As It Lays, a novel about Hollywood, depression and driving, and he’s talked to people like Vidal Sassoon, Jamie Lee Curtis and Larry Flynt. Israel asks deadpan, generic questions, wears sunglasses and doesn’t crack smiles. This night, he did a few live interviews. I missed his talk with surfer Laird Hamilton, but heard him with actresses Molly Ringwald and Melanie Griffith. While Ringwald played along, Griffith kept trying to crack Israel from the start. She wouldn’t answer questions sometimes (like when he asked her what she orders at Inn-and-Out and she instead told him about how she went there just the night before and why, and who she went with), and would interject, “You’re so cute, Alex,” and comments of that kind. It didn’t work — Israel didn’t crack — but it made Griffith likable, because she wanted a human interaction that wasn’t posed and restrained, that had room for slip-ups, detours and cracked smiles.

A.R.T.I.S.T. S.T.A.T.E.M.E.N.T., 2011

Being a fan of Tim and Eric, and ridiculous and annoying stuff in general, when I found Dave Greber’s The Eleuthromaniacs, I was thrilled. Dave was surprised when I inquired about it, describing the series as “universally disliked by everyone who ever saw it” and told me that it was rejected by almost every film festival except Indie Grits in Columbia, South Carolina. “It’s failures were the reason I became a visual artist.” In 2009, Dave shifted his focus away from the festival scene and commercial viability. He began seeking out spaces to exhibit his work as video installations.

Idea, 2010

I’m excited, 2010 was his first installation which he describes as “a reality show purgatory.” It’s looping and repetitious dialogue inspired more loops, presenting absurd philosophy as collaged ads in his Primer, a 3-channel installation. One of two installations this year, Interior Deterious, a collaboration with Andrea Ferguson, was written about by Doug MacCash of the Times-Picyune who saw the exhibit as part of our 21st century challenge to “reconcile our craving for digital magic and our nostalgia for old- fashioned tactile hand craft.” May’s Art Forum presents a review of Spaces at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, featuring the work of rising artist collectives in the St. Claude Avenue area, and includes Greber’s parody of his own collective, The Front: on Display, 2012.

Dave Greber, Rise From Your Grave, Interior Deterious, 2012

Is it a contradiction to poke fun at the art world, you know, being an artist?

No, I don’t think it is a contradiction, rather a responsibility of the artist to critique the art-world, as it is an extension of our corrupt societal and institutional structures in general. But, I actually feel extremely grateful that there is still a “vocation” (contemporary artist) in our society where it is acceptable to channel wild spirits and are encouraged think as free as possible, albeit, as long as you can keep your shit together enough to act like an intellectual some of the time.

What is your relationship to the commercial world? Is it okay to love tv?

I worked as a freelance video producer and made local commercials for advertising agencies for a few years after college. That world was so dark. I think when you are in advertising, [you] embrace hatred. Freelancers in advertising are like atheist mercenaries fighting psychic wars in the name of gods they don’t believe in, against unarmed civilians who don’t even know there is a war going on. I felt so much guilt when I made commercials. I had to totally change my paradigm of what I imagined life was about in order cope with my actions day-to-day. Needless to say, “it’s not for me.”

It’s okay to love TV as long as you can also love yourself, your neighbors, and [the] source which gives us life.

You are a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, and you were selected for the Oxford American’s 100 under 100 superstars of southern art in their latest issue. Could you tell me what it is to be a southerner, or to make southern art?

I didn’t start making art until I lived in the South. I felt entitled to start making and showing my work because there was a really cool visual arts scene already happening here in New Orleans. I joined The Front, my art collective, through an open call, which opened up my first opportunity to exhibit my own work in a gallery. From my shows at The Front I was invited to be in Prospect 1.5 New Orleans and high-end commercial galleries like Arthur Roger Gallery, all in the course of a few years. I have always been supported by the community here. I guess I’ll never know for sure, but I don’t feel like it couldn’t have happened anywhere else.

Stilllives, 2011

Phyllida Barlow, untitled: 21 arches, 2012, Polystyrene, cement, scrim, paint & varnish, variable dimensions, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

The majority of her sculptures are towering structures that dwarf the spectator as if one were standing in a forest. Barlow dilutes the nature of her mundane media by her exquisite use of color, whether included by virtue of fabric, electrical tape or spray paint. For siege, Barlow exhibits her characteristically massive structures as similar to pieces I have seen previously, such as untitled: 21 arches (2012) and untitled: crushed boxes (2012). In pieces such as untitled: balcony (2012) and untitled: broken stage (2012) however, she adds more of a tangible architectural thread that differ slightly from her conceptual-based sculptures. Her work mimics the urban environment in both materiality and the nature of the imposing structures that swallow – or impede upon – the viewer.

Phyllida Barlow, untitled: crushed boxes, 2012, Polystyrene, cement, scrim, paint & varnish, variable dimensions, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

With pieces such as untitled: crushed boxes (2012) Barlow depicts weight through the manner in which her boxes pile upon a fabric cushion, thin or bulging in parts, depicting the sensation of being crushed. Her work maneuvers within a certain corporeal consciousness similar to the work of Eva Hesse or Robert Morris in which the weight – or the interior – of the body is made manifest through the use of material. With aspects of both Arte Povera and Minimalism, Barlow’s work is sensational in its rawness, and though I rather missed the space at Hauser & Wirth London that added an irreplaceable dimension to her work, Barlow’s structures are not to be missed in the immense setting of the New Museum’s spaces.

On the third floor, Tacita Dean’s (b. 1965, England) exhibition entitled Five Americans explores the theme of preservation and memoriam through filmmaking as it intersects with various artistic mediums such as painting, writing and dance. By way of 16mm films, Dean features five influential American artists spanning several generations: Julie Mehretu, Cy Twombly, Leo Steinberg, Claes Oldenburg and Merce Cunningham. Works such as Edwin Parker (2011) and Manhattan Mouse Museum (2011) follow artists Cy Twombly and Claes Oldenburg respectively in their studios, spaces that despite the aura attached to these renowned artists by name are places of quotidian banality of comings and goings.

Tacita Dean, Manhattan Mouse Museum, 2011, 16mm film, color, optical sound, 16 min, Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London

There is an aspect of prescience in Dean’s works, as each are bound by a common thematic thread that deals with the notion of expiration. For instance in The Line of Fate (2011), Dean sits with art historian Leo Steinberg as he finishes his last book about Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo before his death months later, a fact unknown at the time when making the film. This is a similar case with Edwin Parker in which Dean films Cy Twombly in his studio amongst what would be his final artworks during his last months alive. Even in her other works albeit more subtle, the theme of preservation becomes contingent upon the cognitive artistic process that she poignantly captures.

The Parade presented by Nathalie Djurberg (b. 1978, Sweden) with music by Hans Berg (b. 1978, Sweden) is found in the museum’s next-door space ‘Studio 231’. In an eccentric field of dazzling puppetry, a parade it is. A snaking trail made up of hundreds of exotic and fictitious birds scatter the floor under spotlights, frozen in mid-preen and warble. Each bird installation – whether sparrow or human-sized – has the craftsmanship of a Julie Taymor theater prop, with each muslin feather painted in an ombré of fanciful hues. Alongside her puppets, five animations are projected on the walls playing to the discordant melodies of Hans Berg’s compositions.

The Parade: Nathalie Djurberg with Music by Hans Berg, 2012, exhibition view: New Museum

Immediately upon entering the space, the menagerie comes alive with the eerie tinkering of chimes, a soundtrack that gives life to the nightmarish aspect of Djurberg’s mad animals and sinister animations. Her animation videos typically depict women as the central character in an anti-heroic role, often times as victims of absurd cruelty flecked with sexual overtones. Her videos feature handmade puppets both animals and humans, crudely rendered from clay, fabric, string and dolls hair, with lumps, bumps, spidery limbs and clownish faces. The Parade as a body of work exists in a similar abject vein as her various other works, yet in this exhibition she focuses on the avian rituals of flocking, mating and pageantry. Her videos portray explicit aspects of cruelty, betrayal and greed, in which her characters – both animal and human – play out instances of physical and psychological savagery.

The Parade: Nathalie Djurberg with Music by Hans Berg, 2012, exhibition view: New Museum

Djurberg’s work is brilliant in its manner of transparency. I am taken with the way in which she casts a light on the undesirable or abject aspects of human and animal behavior as the cynosure of her métier. And as usual, Berg’s musical compositions coupled with Djurberg’s claymation videos and theatrical installations presents a captivating mastery that dutifully emanates from their projects time and time again.

Phyllida Barlow’s siege runs through June 24^th, Tacita Dean’s Five Americans runs through July 1^st and The Parade by Nathalie Djurberg with Hans Berg runs through August 26^th. For more information visit the New Museum’s site.

Hunter S Thompson and George McGovern during the 1972 Presidential Campaign. Photo: CSU Archive.

Writer David Shields tells a story about being a kid and liking Hunter S. Thompson’s obnoxious gonzo journalism way better than Steinbeck and other more classic fiction writers. With Thompson, you were never sure how fictional a story was going to get and it was always possible the craziest stuff was real. The young Shields believed, I think, that Thompson was telling the truth about having had a conversation with the Richard Nixon while at an adjoining urinal, but Shields’ sister thought the story was bull. The siblings wrote to Thompson, who responded, saying the sister was right and Shields was “a pencil-necked geek.”

Mercedes emblem hanging outside MOCA's Geffen Contemporary during Transmission L.A.

“But still,” write Shields, “it was liberating to read a work open-ended enough that the thought could occur to you that some of this stuff had to be made up or, even better, you couldn’t quite tell.”

When, at MOCA’s 19-day Transmisision L.A.: AV Club festival, curated by Beastie Boy Mike D., I pulled back a black curtain and accidentally walked into a storage closet, I felt similarly liberated. I had just been in the flashy gallery where Mercedes Benz, which backed and co-organized the festival, had its new luxury coupe on display under flashing lights, and so the closet, which I thought for a moment was an art installation, felt refreshing. It didn’t matter that “exposing-the-hidden-infrastructure art” had been done before. It just mattered that the flashiness of the Mercedes was being contrasted by something more “real,” with ladders, and boxes, and little to no lighting. Then I saw the security guard shaking his head and walking toward me, and I knew what I had entered was not part of the art at all.

There’s a photograph at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art right now, on the third floor of the Japanese Pavilion. The image shows a sleek photograph of a white woman’s perfectly made-up, fashion-ad ready face hanging on a red rack outside concrete buildings near an overgrown alley. It’s not of a closet, but I imagine photographer Daido Moriyama felt the way I did when he stumbled upon the scene in Tokyo last year: captivated by the co-mingling of what’s posed and polished –what’s clearly “art”– and what’s not.

Tatsuyo Miyajima, 'Death Clock' (detail) 500 black and white framed photographs, 3 LCD screens, 3 programmed Mac minis Image courtesy the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia © the artist

The revamped Museum of Contemporary Art Australia opened its doors with Marking Time, an exhibition exploring time, duration and mortality.

Jim Campbell’s ‘Last Day in the Beginning of March 2003’, a reimagining of the last 24 hours in his brother’s life, is a transfixing experience. One enters the dark space into the sound of rain.  Pools of flickering light illuminate wall texts identifying single moments such as the slamming of a car door, windshield wipers, the sound of a car radio, the lighting of a cigarette. Apparently random, banal – even meaningless, until they are connected by other texts identifying moments of nausea, anxiety, and the monitoring of medication levels to become a compelling, mysterious narrative. Lights rhythmically dim and brighten, suggesting the ways that memories of traumatic events blur over time, becoming disconnected and fragmentary.

Tatsuo Miyajima’s ‘Death Clock’ is chilling. 10,000 participants entered personal information in a ‘contract’ with the artist, nominating a time to die which activated their own ‘death clock’, an online countdown of their remaining seconds. 500 still images and 3 screens show the inexorable progression of each human life towards the inevitable. Like a 17^th century Vanitas, this work forces each viewer to confront their own mortality.

Tatsuyo Miyajima, 'Death Clock' (detail) 2011 - 2012, 500 black and white framed photographs, 3 LCD screens, 3 programmed Mac minis Image courtesy the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia © the artist

Katie Paterson worked with Osram to develop a unique bulb that emits light identical to a full moon. Consisting of 288 halogen lightbulbs with frosted, coloured shells, simulating the colour of the moon’s glow, and a single hanging lit bulb, ‘Light Bulb to Simulate the Moonlight’ is evocative rather than confrontational. If each bulb burned out one by one they would last for 66 years, the average human lifespan when Paterson made the work in 2008. Daniel Crook’s ‘time-slice’ video work ‘Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement)’ starts with an elderly man performing morning Tai Chi in a Shanghai park, and develops into an alternate reality where physical matter dissolves into a viscous digital abstraction. Time is stretched like toffee and the laws of physics appear entirely mutable.

Lindy Lee’s ‘weather drawings’ are suspended scrolls which have been exposed to fire and water. Works such as ‘Conflagrations from the End of Time’ reference the teachings of Buddhist masters who likened the universe to an infinite net. In some works intricate patterns are created by holes burned in the paper with a soldering iron, casting lacy shadows on the wall behind them. They are suggestive of the movement of constellations across night skies and the passage of rain and wind. Burnt and stained surfaces reveal the processes of their creation – Lee leaves her scrolls of paper outside in the rain and the sun allowing time and natural phenomena to make their marks.

Lindy Lee, 'Conflagrations from the End of Time', 2011, paper, fire, Chinese ink, image reproduced courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

In similar vein, Rivane Neuenschwander‘s ‘Continente – Nueven – Continent – Cloud’ consists of a false ceiling, lit from above, containing small fans and thousands of tiny white Styrofoam balls. Activated by timers, the fans blow the balls around the ceiling in great drifting clouds.  Audiences are invited to lie on the floor watching the slow movement which at times evokes ink dissolving into watercolour paper, or the movement of leaves or grasses in the wind,  suggesting the ephemerality and fragility of both the world we inhabit and ourselves.

Lindy Lee, 'Conflagrations from the End of Time' (detail) 2011, paper, fire, image reproduced courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Mad Men Season 5 Billboard in West Hollywood. Courtesy DailyBillboard.blogspot

“It was mainly about trying to escape my own good taste, or good taste in general,” said John Baldessari, when asked why, in the 1970s, he first took his own photographs, then had someone take photos of him, then started using photos he’d found. Fashion matriarch Miuccia Prada has said the same thing, more or less: she’s always battling her own tastefulness to come up with something different, and new.

The fifth season of Mad Men, a show that’s tastefulness has won it accolades for art direction and design, premiers on Sunday. This means everywhere in this city and others, there are pictures of Don Draper staring at two mannequins in a window display. The girl mannequin is naked; the guy wears a robe and slippers. A married couple? A man and mistress? Don’s back is to us, but we can see his face reflected in the glass. As usual, he looks cool, untouchable, though slightly dubious. “This is a dreamlike image,” Matt Weiner, who conceived the show and designed the poster, apparently said. He thought it looked sort of like a De Chirico painting, and I suppose he was thinking of the Italian artist’s renderings of sculpted, bald, faceless figures that loom on pedestals. “By the end of the season… I guarantee you’ll know what it is about.” Weiner and AMC clearly trust theirs viewers to want to know. It’s such a vague and high-handed teaser, so full of  “significance”: Don, the ad man, looking at an ad, a fantasy version of the coupledom that keeps eluding him, while his reflection stares back at him. It feels kind of like a soap, which means it’s let its tastefulness slide. But not in a provocative way.

Still from 'The Good Wife' on CBS

Sometimes, tastefulness shouldn’t be “escaped.” Right now, I am particularly fond of  The Good Wife, a CBS show where everyone is a little bit prettier than anyone in real life.  Julianna Margulies plays a lawyer married to a politician. She always has a cagey facial expression and hardly ever says anything about herself.  But unlike in Mad Men, where unpacking Don Draper’s tight-lipped demeanor is part of the schtick, the maintenance of Margulies’ control is key to keeping up the show’s appearance. This actually makes The Good Wife seem self-aware: instead of delving into flimsy personal side plots, like so many so-so law dramas do, the characters’ resistance to such detours defines the show. In a recent episode, a lawyer from a rival firm, played by Michael J. Fox, tries to woo Marguiles’ character to his firm. She wants the extra money, but not to leave her current firm. So uses his offer to leverage a fairly significant raise. All this happens without no exposition. She never tells anyone how she feels, just acts smoothly. Her overly big eyes make you think she’s flinching a little inside. But you’ll never know for sure, because the plot is too doggedly tasteful to go there.

Mark Bradford, "Smite," 2007, mixed media collage on canvas. Hammer Museum, Promised gift of Susan and Larry Marx. © Mark Bradford. Image courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Collectors Susan and Larry Marx have good taste. Because they have pledged their art to the UCLA Hammer Museum, the museum stated the exhibition Intimate Immensities, to show off their collection. None of the work is very big, and all of it is concisely composed. Even the Joan Mitchell painting, only 27 x 26 in. and with all its drama pulling your eye to the middle, feels particularly efficient. The Ed Ruscha topography pieces, the Cy Twombly drawings, and the Mark Bradford collage look more modest and “aesthetically appealing” in this show than they usually do.  Wrote William Poundstone on ArtInfo, “[E]very artist and work is a smart, relevant choice. (There aren’t many single-collection shows for which you can make those two claims.)”

If collecting is itself a medium of expression — and, of course, it is –, then the Marx’s are aware of and comfortable with  the medium’s limitations. By not trying to stretch themselves beyond their own, consistent taste, they’re actually exposing more about the partial, confining nature of human desire and perception than they would otherwise.

Werner Herzog, Hearsay of the Soul, 2012. Installation: four channel digital projection of twenty etchings by Hercules Segers; music by Ernst Reijseger. Image courtesy of the Whitney Museum.

This year, the Biennial acts as a platform – or even a forum if you will – for comprehending the expanded fields of contemporary art in relation to performance, film, literary, multi-media and curatorial praxis. Whereas the Biennial in 2010 acted as an acknowledgment of a benchmark – that being the year 2010 – taking its thesis from the roots of retrospection. It looked towards the history of the Whitney Biennial since its inception in 1932, in honoring the structure and legacy of the Biennial, while also commenting on the political and social structures of rehabilitation that were propagated from certain instances such as the presidential election of Barack Obama. Unfortunately – and probably at the fault of an overly expansive thesis – the 2010 Biennial fell flat, quite simply, and was remarkably unmemorable for me. However, the 2012 Biennial this year not only commands more cohesiveness in both content and intention, but its presentation of works from fifty-one artists – a list edited more so than any Biennial to date – granted a substantial significance to the curation as a whole production.

The 2012 Biennial, poignantly dedicated to the late Mike Kelley who passed away earlier this year, presents artists at all points in their careers, in a vast array of media from painting, sculpture, photography, installation, music, theater, film and dance. Not only did curators Sussman and Sanders instigate the notion of the “expanded field of the arts”, but they very much emphasized the connective points between one practice to another, or similarly one profession to another. As quoted in the 2012 Biennial press release, both Sussman and Sanders remarks that, “[…] a number of artists are functioning as researchers and curators, drawing on the histories of art, design, dance, music and technology. Artists are bringing other artists into their work – a form of free collage or reinvention that borrows from the culture at large as a way of rewriting the standard narratives and exposing more relevant hybrids”.

Dawn Kasper, THIS COULD BE SOMETHING IF I LET IT, 2012 (from the series Nomadic Studio Practice Experiment, 2009– ). Three-month durational performance and multimedia installation. Dimensions variable. Collection of the artist. Image courtesy of the Whitney Museum.

One of the most noteworthy aspects of the 2012 Biennial is the 6,000-square foot performance arena designed on the fourth floor. Complete with viewing bleachers, this space is dedicated to musical, dance, theatrical (et al.) performances through the end of the Biennial. Performances directed by choreographers such as Michael Clark and Sarah Michelson, as well as various musical acts such as the experimental rock band The Red Krayola and soprano singer Alicia Hall Moran, turn the fourth floor space into a theater of expansive talent, blurring the boundaries between context and vocation.

In relation to the subject of context, Dawn Kasper will transform a back gallery on the third floor into her personal studio and living space, entitled THIS COULD BE SOMETHING IF I LET IT (2012). Reminiscent of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Bed-Ins during the Vietnam War era, albeit not necessarily in activist intent, Kasper speaks about the dichotomy present relating to the immediacy of human connection in an otherwise very intimate space, such as a bedroom or artist’s studio space.

The unparalleled presence of film and thus the artistic dialogue centered within filmic studies is a noteworthy supplement to this year’s Biennial. The film program, co-curated by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, strives to point out the significant advances in film and video within the past decade in conjunction to those in contemporary art. From short, experimental video pieces such as Hearsay of the Soul (2012) by Werner Herzog and selected works from George Kuchar’s Weather Diaries (1977–2011) series, to lengthier features such as The Oath (2010) by Laura Poitras (who was nominated for an Emmy, an Academy Award and an Independent Spirit Award for her post-9/11 film My Country, My Country (2006)), exemplify the vast conglomeration of video art and film. And what is a Biennial dedicated to Mike Kelley without a substantial serving of Mike Kelley? Three of his films from the series Mobile Homestead (2010–11) present a vignette of Detroit’s civil history as the narrative to his public art project in his hometown. With the film and performance programs initiated this way, viewers can return several times to attend the array of performance acts, which insures an extended interaction with the public, a relationship to whom an institution is always beholden.

SamLewitt, Fluid Employment, 2012. Ferromagnetic liquid poured bi-weekly over plastic, magnetic elements and fans. Dimensions variable. Collection of the artist.

Some of my personal favorites were photographs by LaToya Ruby Frazier in her Homebody series (2010) in which she dons her deceased grandfather and grandmother’s personal (and intimate) items, such as pajamas or blankets, in their abandoned apartment as an act of lamentation. Sam Lewitt’s installation entitled Fluid Employment (2012) made from poured ferromagnetic liquid elucidates the medium’s immaculate traits in its imminent usage in electronic devices such as hard drives. The peripheral retrospective curated by artist Robert Gober on Forest Bess (1911–1977) – which, in the very act of his curation, acted as a perfect extension to Gober’s own practice – was astounding in content. Exposing the enigmatic and mentally unstable modern artist Forest Bess, Gober paints a character sketch of Bess by virtue of paintings, extensive wall texts, archival letters (exchanges between his New York dealer Betty Parsons) and photographs. If a large painting of a unicorn didn’t attract me enough, it was certainly the psychosis that manifested itself in hermaphroditic self-mutilations that sealed the deal for me. Installations by Lutz Bacher, Cameron Crawford and Luther Price’s handmade and manipulated film slides are not to be missed either.

Forest Bess (1911-1977), The Noble Carbunkle, 1960. Oil on canvas. 30 x 49 1/2 inches (76.2 x 125.7 cm). Private collection; courtesy of Amy Wolf Fine Art, New York.

Conclusively, the 2012 Whitney Biennial was a concisely edited and masterfully conceptualized project. A well-grounded understanding and use of the various spaces within and around the museum give Sussman and Sanders a virtuosic credit. I am relieved to see that a spotlight has finally been shown on both performance and filmic arts, in all of their realms and sub-categories, especially in a biennial setting. Several members of the Whitney staff exclaim the serendipitous team that Sussman and Sanders made in numerous paragraphs in the press literature and it is clear when experiencing the materialization of their collaboration. This is a biennial that has me delighted in saying that I will return several times. The Whitney Biennial will run from March 1^st through May 27^th. Live  performances, public programs and film screenings will run through the end of May. Refer to whitney.org for more information on events and tickets.

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.