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.

Because NEA funding cuts recently prompted Art21.org to stage a telethon, because this is fundraising season (a number of non-profits, included Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, had their annual auctions, galas or other fundraisers this month), and because I’m preoccupied with MOCA’s recent Transmission L.A. festival — which I mentioned in last week’s column –, I wrote the below. It originally appeared on Art21′s blog.

Screen shot of Debo Eilers and crew performing "My Little Sunshine" during the Art21 Telethon.

When I tuned into the Art21 Telethon this past Sunday, the 8-hour performance-filled fundraising marathon had been live-streaming for just over 3 hours and brought in just under $4,000. Curator and co-host Miriam Katz, wearing a great silky floral top, was saying, “Our next act was going to be an animal act but I think there was an issue with insurance.” Instead, artist Debo Eilers’ crew was setting up nearby amidst microphones and floor mats. They were wearing white tunics like hospital gowns and red animal masks that made some look like turkeys and others like floppy-eared dogs.

“You can [perform] however long, but right now longer might be better,” said artist Ronnie Bass, the “official” host, who had conceived the telethon along with Katz and Art21 artist Tommy Hartung, after NEA budget cuts left PBS programming financially crippled.

“And since the act that didn’t come was supposed to be an animal act, if you want to put in an animal theme, that could be helpful,” Katz added.

Then everyone seemed confused for a while, and Katz accidentally blocked the camera as the group slowly began singing “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine” in childlike voices. It took a while before they were in unison. One of the performers beat the wall with a strap and held a strobe light, and continued to do this after the song ended, until Ronnie said “Thank you” and re-explained to viewers how to donate.

The artists featured in Transmission L.A. posing outside MOCA

I tuned into the telethon right after leaving the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary, where the 19-day Transmission L.A.: AV Club, a festival funded by Mercedes Benz and curated by Beastie Boy Mike D., was on its last legs. It actually, weirdly, had a vibe similar to the telethon, a mix of confusion and free-for-all comfortability.

The festival was free, so people wandered in and out of MOCA at will. Artist Tom Sachs had designed a DJ booth that was out front, and galleries were full of video and light work (hip stuff — like Cory Arcangel and Takeshi Murata, who made even filmmaker Mike Mills, with his montage of appropriated pop images, seem like the fogey), and a black box theater in the back, where Lauren Mackler of the alt space Public Fiction had staged a series of performances. When I arrived, artists Ali Prosch and Meghann McCrory were “setting up” for their performance No Signal in Mackler’s black box. At least, I thought they were setting up — the set up turned into the performance so seamlessly that I didn’t notice at first. The artists wore all black and slowly moved scrims in front of lights, turned on projectors, and started up a fan that would rotate and cause fluttering, glittery light to move around the room.

Ben Jones video installation at Transmission L.A.

It was a durational, always-in-progress light show that ended with disco balls and tap dancing, and people felt free to walk into and leave whenever. (A little girl gasped when one rotating black box was disassembled to reveal a disco ball, but the same little girl lost interest and was ushered away by her mother about three minutes later.)

A lot of people wandered into the performance from next door, where the new Mercedes-Benz Concept Style Coupé was on display. The Coupé had debuted the festival’s opening night, and it now sat under lights that flashed on and off to the cues of specially composed music you could listen to by putting on headphones suspended under spotlights. You could also, apparently, touch the car — I watched a young-ish blond guy in board shorts spent about five minutes trying to close the back door he’d opened while three security guards stood on with arms crossed, not helping.

Because of these cars, the strobe lights, the Beastie Boy curator, an L.A. Times article and rumors I’d heard, I was sure Transmission L.A. was a durational fundraiser, what Art21’s telethon might have been if corporately sponsored and planned by a rapper. Why else would a museum debut a luxury car in its galleries? I put this fundraiser theory in print before I realized I was wrong.

Transmission wasn’t a fundraiser. MOCA would not benefit financially (at least, not significantly). The luxury cars weren’t a sponsor’s self-promotional push, I was told. They were there to be experienced like everything else in the galleries.

“LA is all about car culture. The tricky thing is to get people out of their homes,” says Mike D. in the Transmission A.V. leaflet. “[W]e’re trying to create this all encompassing sensory-rich environment.”

It was sensory-rich, and people did come out. And it was fun to travel through the mish-mash of cultural strata and sensibilities (luxury car, DJ, performance artist) and try to understand how they related to each other. But I didn’t know who had the power (MOCA, Mercedes, Mike D., the artists?), which is why, when I went home to live-stream the telethon for the evening, I felt less antsy. There, people who cared had the power: artist were raising funds for arts programming and mostly soliciting pre-exisiting art fans to do so.  Who knew a fundraiser could be a relief?

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.

Michel Auder, Cat Stranglers, 2009. Courtesy Kayne Griffin Corcoran.

I had a lazy Monday afternoon two weeks ago. A friend defended her dissertation and then we all migrated from the Inland Empire to my place, where I tried to show video art to one friend while another, the dissertation defender, slept. The internet connection was slow, and so we never finished watching any one work, but the sleeping friend woke and wandered into the living room while Kenneth Tam’s I no longer worry about shoes being worn inside the house was faltering along. “We’re watching two men do invented yoga-like moves,” I said. “But they didn’t know each other — they met on Craig’s List.”

“If they knew each other, it wouldn’t be video art,” she said. “It would be friends doing Yoga.” This was a joke, but one I thought about, because, off the cuff, I couldn’t name any art I’d seen and liked recently that dealt comfortably and explicitly with the familiar. In most new art that compels me, artist hurl themselves into the unfamiliar.

There’s Leigh Ledare and Michel Auder, whose recent, respective exhibitions at The Box L.A. and Kayne Griffin Corcoran mined the eccentricities of their own biographies. But those exhibitions confront you with an idea of intimacy that’s unsettling because of how confessional it is, and how near it veers toward psychological fiction. In some of Auder’s films, he uses hired actors; for some of Ledare’s photographs, he asked women he found through personal ads to pose and dress him so that he embodies their desires.

Robert Smithson, Ithaca Mirror Trail, 1969.

Then there’s Elizabeth Peyton exhibition at Regen Projects, which is delightful and refreshing, as her work always is, because it’s not at all high concept. Peyton’s portraits, of friends and pop culture icons, are just of people she likes. In her work at Regen, she depicts painter Alex Katz sitting with crossed arms on a couch, and a watery-eyed David Bowie staring  from a 14-inch tall panel. You leave thinking about people’s interior lives, of Peyton’s perception of herself and of others. Does Alex Katz really look as stoic and controlled as figures in his own paintings, or has the artist projected a bit? This question isn’t uninteresting, but it’s not an ambitious one either.

James Lee Byars, The Angel, 1989, 125 glass spheres. Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery.

Could art about the familiar ever be really daring?

I came across a description of a work James Lee Byars did in tribute to Robert Smithson recently. The two artists, contemporaries in the New York of the 1960s, would have crossed paths and, I imagine, liked each other, but I don’t know how well they personally knew each other. In 1978, five years after Smithson tragic death in a Texas plane crash, James Lee Byars added up the dimensions of all the mirror Robert Smithson used during his career — Smithson used mirrors a lot, lining them up in the landscape to “displace” the earth perceptually or using them in gallery installation. The sum of all Smithson’s mirrors measure 1000 feet by 1360 feet. Byars then took the giant mirror to Smithson’s gravestone, and took a picture of the stone seen through the mirror. This would be “a mirror displacement of Robert Smithson’s soul.” Then Byars purportedly transported the mirror to the Utah desert — I do not know how, or whether any documents exist to prove this actually happened — and used a crane to shatter it across the desert floor. He collected the shards of mirror, packed them in a box embellished with gold leaf, and sent the box to Nancy Holt, who had been Smithson’s wife, as a token of his sympathy. Perhaps this is the ultimate example of the familiar taken to an extreme. Everything about Byars’ tribute speaks to how well he knew and loved Smithson’s art, yet the project is gapingly ambitious.

David Shrigley, How are you feeling today? (2012), billboard, 25 x 75 feet, courtesy of Anton Kern Gallery

Running alongside Tenth Avenue for approximately twenty blocks in Chelsea, The High Line has become a household term amongst Manhattanites since 2009 when it first became accessible as a public park. Since then – and especially within the last year – The High Line has ignited widespread murmur relating to its breathtaking architecture, imaginative urban integration and more recently its emergence as the local gallery district’s – if not New York’s – most imaginative sites for exhibiting contemporary art.  Opening April 19^th was The High Line’s first ever group exhibition entitled Lilliput which included the works of Oliver Laric, Alessandro Pessoli, Tomoaki Suzuki, Francis Upritchard, Erika Verzutti and Allyson Vieira. Alongside this exhibition, Uri Aran’s sound installation opened on the same day only then to be followed by Alison Knowles’ public performance Make a Salad on the 22^nd. David Shrigley’s How are you feeling? (2012), presented as a giant billboard over West 18^th Street, and Sturtevant’s Warhol Empire State (2012), a video projection that starts at dusk of Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) video, debuted earlier in the month to launch the Friends of the High Line’s 2012 Spring Art Program and High Line Commissions program for public art. The openings this month, surpassing the previous years in numbers of art pieces alone, has proven that this year’s arts program is making a vigorous effort to present art to the public with a bang.

Sturtevant, Warhol Empire State (2012), video projection, image courtesy of the artist

The High Line as we know it today exists upon the skeleton of a freight line that once was the manifestation of a public-private project called the West Side Improvement during the 1930s. However, that was the date that the freight lines were lofted 30 feet above street level after having existed as street-level railroad tracks some odd eighty years prior. During this time, The City and State of New York agreed to take on this massive industrial project due to the fact that Tenth Avenue became known as Death Avenue, a nickname indicative of the innumerable deaths caused between street traffic and the railroad. This was no small project, not least of all financially as it was quoted to be a $150 million dollar expenditure then, and that’s more than $2 billion dollars today.

Building the high line, November 20th 1932. Image courtesy of www.thehighline.org

Trains of food freight and both manufactured and raw goods ran until 1980 at which point the ensuing minimization of the railroad became obsolete due to redundancy and the upsurge of trucking transport. In the face of threatening demolition, Friends of the High Line was established in 1999 as a non-profit by Joshua David and Robert Hammond to preserve the historical lineage and neighborhood aura that the High Line had solidified. An all-star architectural and landscape design team made up of James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro (along with a large selection of horticulturists, gardeners, etc) was chosen in 2004 and by June 9^th 2009 the first section (Gansevoort Street to West 20^th Street) of The High Line as a public park opens, with the second section (West 20^th Street to West 30^th Street) to follow in 2011.

Allyson Vieira, Construction (Rampart) (2010), Bronze, 14 x 14 x 18.5 inches, courtesy of Laurel Gitlen Gallery, New York

Since 2009, The High Line has become known as a trendy jaunt-spot in Chelsea where the ultimate people-watching activities and pleasure strolling can be had. This year the public will see the launch of a program called High Line Commissions with the opening of the first ever group exhibition Lilliput to be held on The High Line. This exhibition will present the works of six artists working internationally with, as the title would suggest, small sculptures placed along The High Line’s pathway. This title is taken from Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels in which the imaginary country of Lilliput is home to gnome-sized people no bigger than six inches. The various diminutive sculptures are set within the various niches of landscape along the park walk and offer a sort of Easter-egg hunt of sorts, inviting the public to uncover the various works of art.

Pieces such as Allyson Vieira’s Construction (Rampart) (2012) respond to the local vegetation and ecology of the area with her pyramid of bronze cast paper cups that fill with rain or fallen leaves from the garden bed above. Other works such as The Seduction (2012) by Francis Upritchard are less so adapted for the localized flora but speak to the Lilliputian theme of fairyland idols with two miniature-sized apes frozen in an explorative embrace. Also apart of this spring’s High Line Commissions is Uri Aran’s sound installation Untitled (Good & Bad) (2012) provides a spoken list of arbitrarily categorized animals into “good” or “bad” that billows from gardens below. Coming in May, a much anticipated installation of Thomas Houseago’s sculpture Lying Figure will be on view under The Standard.

Francis Upritchard, The Seduction (2012), Bronze, 18 x 9 x 8 inches, Courtesy of Kate MacGarry, London

Friends of the High Line have initiated other programs such as the High Line Performances, High Line Billboard and High Line Channel that serve as varying avenues whereby art mediums can be exhibited. Opening on April 5^th, David Shrigley’s 25-by-75 foot billboard How are you feeling? presents a short dialogue in black and white speech bubbles, hovering over a parking lot at West 18^th Street. Shrigley’s dry and melancholy humor severs the socially fabricated fluff in monotonous conversation and pinpoints exactly what we all may be feeling but are too nervous to say: “I’m feeling very unstable and insecure […] I am in a bit of a rut creatively as well”.

This year’s itinerary for the High Line Performances will include performances by three female artists (Alison Knowles, Channa Horwitz and Simone Forti) on and around the High Line, the first of which was preformed last Sunday April 22^nd by Alison Knowles’ Fluxus score Make a Salad. Originally performed in Baltimore, Maryland in 1962 has been performed several times around the world and includes the preparation of a salad for a large group of people. Launching the High Line Performances program, Knowles’ piece included the preparation of locally sourced salad ingredients tossed from the upper level to the lower level of the walkway and then served to the public. Though it was a rather cold and rainy day, otherwise unpleasant to be frolicking out of doors to eat a salad, the performance was lively and ignited a grouping of people of all ages in an appropriately themed Earth Day get-together.

Alison Knowles, Make a Salad (1962–present), Image: Tate Modern, London (2008)

I have to applaud the work and organizational efforts of the Friends of the High Line for their inception of the public art programs, and not to mention their unmentioned but as equally remarkable endeavors in the realms of music and food. The High Line as a public park has provided the support for not only a exceptional pleasure destination, but also a cutting-edge platform for contemporary art. I am always fascinated with the seemingly pervasive dialogue relating to the inaccessibility of contemporary art and thus I have always been an advocate for the commissioning of public art. Public art, as inconspicuous or ostentatious it may be, has the power to engage a public (a cross section in a vast demographic) who may not otherwise seek out an interactive relationship with art. Pieces such as the ones mentioned above all own that quality of engagement: the characteristic of calling forth a questioning, a reflection or even a happenstance double take, and sometimes that’s all an art piece needs to fulfill its role in the social sphere.

Please visit  www.thehighline.org/art for a schedule of past, current and upcoming exhibitions and performances on The High Line and additional information on artists. Please visit the site for further information regarding The High Line’s events, public programs, memberships and history.

James Lee Byars, "La figura de la pregunta," 1986.

Unless you really take Lent seriously, and I don’t know many Protestants who do, Easter is a quick event. It’s especially so if you consider all it encompasses: betrayal on Thursday, death on Friday, mourning on Saturday, new life on Sunday. To condense all this into one weekend feels very Christian. We’re fixated on efficiency and the finite. The world is 6,000 years old and the rapture will probably come soon.

The Easter service I attended this April started at 6:30, but should have started earlier. “Pretend it’s still dark out,” said the pastor before asking the music leader to light the logs in the fire pit. “Someone more coordinated should do this,” said the music minister, passing the matches on to a young man in a windbreaker. It was an outdoor service, held in the backyard of a Presbyterian cathedral on Wilshire Boulevard, and they must have known not many would come out so early, because the nomadic, participatory itinerary would have been unwieldy with many more. We’d progress from one station to another, starting at a fire pit like the one the disciple Peter must have sat at when he infamously denied the newly condemned Christ: “I don’t know him.” In Andrew Lloyd Weber’s version, Mary Magdalene, the prostitute Jesus mentored, calls him out: “Peter, don’t you see what you have done, you’ve gone and cut him dead?” “I had to do it, don’t you see,” Peter replies, his singing voice whiny and fearful, “or else they’d come for me.”

Our fire pit must have already burned out all traces of denial, because we used it to light the big Paschal candle (“So much wax,” said the girl next to me), a stand-in for Christ as light of the world. Then, from the Paschal candle, we lit little candles for each of us to hold. We proceeded over to a wooden cross leaning against the easternmost fence. Someone had thought to wrap fishing wire around this cross, and we took turns sticking lilies through the wire after the gospel reading. Some of us tried to slide flowers through with candles still in hand, and hot wax dripped on our fingers.

We moved finally to the baptismal station, where more gospel was read and the Paschal candle officially baptized, bottom down so as not to put out the light of the world. Then we all baptized our small candles in the same manner, and put holy water on each other’s foreheads, saying “may you have new life” while making the sign of the cross with our fingers. A few of these rituals had roots in something traditional; others were likely invented that morning.

James Lee Byars taking questions on TV in Brussells, 1969.

The James Lee Byars exhibition at Overduin and Kite in Hollywood opened on Easter, which seems appropriate. Byars, a nomadic artist who lived in L.A., Germany, Japan, Egypt, and elsewhere understood sacredness as powerful. During Lent in1995, two years before his death, he installed The White Mass in the Church of St. Peter in Cologne. It consisted of a white ring right in the middle of the altar and then four marble pillars with signs inscribed on them: Q.R., I.P., O.Q., Q.D. Each set of letters stood in for a tenet of Byars’ Philosophy of Questioning, a belief system that really did just center on the conviction that questions — not answers — were all we humans had to push us onward. Q.R. meant “The Figure of the Question is in the Room” while O.Q. referred to “The Figure of the One Question.” No one could enter the installation unless they were participating in the mass.

James Lee Byars, "The Chair for the Philosophy of Question," 1996. Courtesy Overduin and Kite.

At Overduin and Kite, a collection of marble “books” shaped like sun and stars and encased in glass are like relics from some tasteful, medieval cult. In the adjoining room, a gold nail hammered into the wall recalls the crucifixion, and the Chair of the Philosophy of Questioning is installed inside a red silk tent. It’s not clear what one would do if sitting in that ornate chair; I suppose one would preside over the question-asking of anyone who ventured into the tent. “Basically I try to solve essential questions with questions,” Byars once said. But that makes his questioning feel particularly ritualistic; he’s living out his religion by refusing to ever answer.

Katie Paterson, 100 Billion Suns (Riva degli Schiavoni), 2011. Photo © Katie Paterson, 2011.

Surrounded by 100 billion suns, it is nearly impossibility to not let feelings of insignificance take over – simply a minute speck standing within a vast universe. The macrocosmic nature of Scottish artist Katie Paterson’s work cultivates these diminutive impressions – whether we are listening to the sounds of silence reflected off the moon, or looking far back into the universe to a place where the earth doesn’t exist, Paterson’s work constantly reminds us that we, as human beings on this particular planet, are an inconsequential part of a much larger whole.

The relatively small body of work that Paterson has made to date focuses on momentous themes of astronomy, geology, space and time. Blending artistic conceptualism with cold, hard scientific facts, Paterson makes the incomprehensible universe a bit more exoteric, whilst being engagingly poetic and austerely minimal.

Katie Paterson, 100 Billion Suns, 2011, confetti cannon, 3261 pieces of paper. Photo © Katie Paterson, 2011.

Paterson’s latest exhibition at Haunch of Venison in London serves as a mini-retrospective of the artist’s projects to date, and the element of performance permeates all of her works – whether it be on an astronomical or human scale. In 100 Billion Suns, a project first developed and executed at the Venice Biennale, a confetti canon is discharged daily within the gallery space. The canon contains 3261 pieces of paper, each one carefully colour-matched to a corresponding gamma ray burst, the brightest of all galactic explosions, burning at the luminosity of 100 billion suns. Here, the artist turns this rarely occurring, and even more rarely seen, event into a daily ritual, peppered with celebratory and nostalgic allusions.

Katie Paterson, The Dying Star Letters, 2010, letters written on different stationary. Photo: Peter Mallet. © Katie Paterson.

As we know, and as the artist continually reminds us, nothing is static and the universe is constantly in flux. With the ongoing project, The Dying Star Letters, Paterson draws upon the equally dying art of the post to build a sentimental archive that records and laments the death of each star in the universe. Informed by electronic telegram when a star has met its demise, Paterson sits down, wherever she may be in the world, and writes a letter, informing its recipient of the tragic loss and humanising the immaterial.

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Katie Paterson, Black Firework, 2010, firework remains in a wooden display box. Photo: Peter Mallet. © Katie Paterson.

While much of Paterson’s work functions to make material the otherwise inaccessible, one project in particular relies solely on the imaginary. Like the oft-quoted adage, ‘If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?’, Paterson’s Black Firework begs the questions of what happens to a black firework set off in the darkest of night with no one around to see it. Specially manufactured, and lit under a cloak of secrecy, the black firework has no audience, no reference point, and no documentation, other than the residual relic that lies in a coffin in the gallery. However, it does ignite the active imagination as one tries to envision just what a black firework might look like, and how it might sound.

Katie Paterson, As the World Turns, 2011, adapted record player, motor, pre-amp, amp, headphones, plinth, vinyl record of Vivaldi’s four seasons. © Katie Paterson. Photo: Peter Mallet. Courtesy Haunch of Venison

Converting human time into a planetary scale, As the World Turns, slows down a record player to match the rotational rate of the earth on its axis. Both the movement of the record and the sound of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons become virtually imperceptible, as is the movement of the planet that we inhabit. Instead of converting the astronomical into tangible form, here the artist takes the familiar and stretches it to a cosmic scale, as it loses its recognisable meaning it the process.

Katie Paterson’s combination of the empirical and the imaginary makes us acutely aware of the rules of space and time that govern this universe. Familiar objects are made galactic in reference, and the astronomical is brought back down to earth. Whilst grounded in the conceptual and minimalist aesthetic, the work in this exhibition ignites our imaginations, and translates between the incomprehensible and that which we see, hear and feel.

Sophie T. Lvoff & Nathan T. Martin, "Untitled (Primary)", 2012. Archival pigment print on newsprint. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Sophie T. Lvoff.

One of the most informative moments in SPACES, the latest exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, is a timeline of the birth of the St. Claude art scene handwritten in black charcoal pencil on the wall.

Born out of the reinvigoration of community action in post-Katrina New Orleans, bolstered by the adrenaline shot of Prospect.1, hard working artist collectives popped up across the city in 2008, including Press Street’s Antenna Gallery, Good Children, and The Front, which aggressively show many artists from the St. Claude District. While worlds of change have occurred in the microcosm of New Orleans in the last half-decade, the genuine and honest dedication to making and showing art by these three cooperatives has remained the same.  That is why SPACES, an exhibition bringing the work of these three collectives together under one roof, is disappointing; not for the art but for the lack of curatorial inspiration that should have highlighted this positivity.

SPACES showing Dave Greber "The Front on Display", 2012; Chris Saucedo "Pencil King", 1996 and Lala Raščić in cooperation with Sophie T. Lvoff "Posing Process", 2012. Courtesy the Contemporary Arts Center, Photo: Angela Berry.

While there is a boot-strap spirit to each of these organizations, they operate with very distinct tones. This highlights the first part of the problem with this exhibition: there is no clarity of form within the show.  Artists from each organization are scattered around the room, lacking a clear tone to unite the work. The exhibition brings together disparate conversations that are often at odds with each other.  For example, Sophie Lvoff and Nate T. Martin’s Untitled (Primary) is a lush archival pigment print of a purple tavern at dusk. Sophie Lvoff’s photograph speaks to the vibrancy of early American color photography through lens of New Orleans surfaces. Writer Nate T. Martin adds a short vignette that sketches a child’s perception of driving in a rental car with her father and waiting outside a bar. The combination of text and image paints a visceral picture of innocence and vulnerability in a mundane world. Lvoff and Nathan’s work is located next to Ryan Watkins-Hughes cynical installation See St. Claude. Audiences of the show are prompted to step up to the photo, snap a shot of themselves photo booth style and email the photo to see-stclaude.tumblr.com.  At this site the artist writes: “The See St. Claude photo booth allows gallery visitors to see the St. Claude arts District from the comforts and safety of the CAC.”  This satirical approach to bringing art lovers to St. Claude directly references the insulation of certain neighborhoods in the city. The combination of the work of Watkins-Hughes and Lvoff and Nathan is certainly thought provoking, but leaves the viewer in the uncertain position of attempting to connect these two very disparate attitudes.

SPACES, showing Generic Art Solutions (G.A.S.), "Monopoly (St. Claude Ave.)", 2012. Courtesy the Artist and Jonathan Ferrara Gallery. Photo: Angela Berry.

Using a 1969 exhibition curated by Jennifer Licht at the Museum of Modern Art as the model for this exhibition, the space is developed around innovative approaches to interacting with museum space. Licht described this show as “an exhibition in which the installation becomes the actual realization of the work of art and rooms must be planned and built according to the artists’ needs, challenging the usual role of the museum.” This may be the stated intention of SPACES, however, many of the works are plopped into the CAC’s space, rather than the gallery being formatted to fit the work. Case in point, only three of the over forty artists were asked to actually make site-specific installations; Rachel Avena Brown, Bob Snead, and Jonathan Traviesa. Brown’s installation is a collaboration with Antenna Gallery artist James Goedert.  D-Cern Space brings together stop motion animation and knitted yarn.  On a large tv monitor an animation of the floor plans of each participating gallery are brought together and torn apart. Knit green squares form patterns around the tv monitor, insinuating the shape of the Large Hadron Collider.  Brown and Goedert seek to define a new space, one in which these galleries work more closely in tandem. D-Cern Space suggests what this exhibition could have been if each artist included in this show had the opportunity to install a thoughtfully prepared work.

Rachel Avena Brown & James W. Goedert "D-CERN space", 2012. Acrylic house paint, copper wire, digital stop motion, yarn. Courtesy the Artists. Photo: Angela Berry

Dave Greber’s three channel video installation The Front on Display is a wiseass satire on the perception of the artist as a rock star. All the members of The Front trade quips on this video reel of a photo shoot. Teenage boy-bandesque statements are made such as, “that’s when people are really at their best- when they are making posters” and “I’ve got some stuff to say, and it’s really important.” The sarcasm drips from the tv screen onto the floor, unfortunately drowning out other works.  Any other surrounding pieces that aren’t 100% aggressive, such as Jerald L. White’s photographs, are easily overlooked.

The cultural history of New Orleans is by nature a collective one. The galleries represented in this show come out of the tradition of working within neighborhoods to achieve goals that bureaucratic inadequacies are unable to accomplish. Antenna Gallery, The Front, and Good Children Gallery have all leveraged the resources of their members in order to build a community around visual art. CAC’s curatorial job does this achievement a disservice by creating discordant tones. I trust though that these spaces will continue to do what they do best–make visually interesting and thought provoking works.

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.

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

John Galliano, 2009.

John Galliano has a lavish-sounding last name (he shares it with an Italian liqueur), and lavish taste (“He knows, and we know, that no one would ever wear a 12-foot-wide crinoline over a baggy pair of printed drawers with, perhaps, a pair of plastic carrier bags on the feet,” wrote Sarah Mower for Style.com). That he would also take a lavish approach to outbursts, uttering a line of anti-Semitic epitaphs instead of just one or two, isn’t that surprising. So when, days before Paris Fashion week began, Galliano, the first Brit to head a French couture house, let his God-complex spin out and became, at least according to certain headlines, a dissolute failure, his fall seemed more irksome than surprising.

What’s happened since has been predictable; it’s exactly what happens when someone who’s found a certain niche of notoriety takes an egregious misstep and everyone sees. Dior let Galliano go; Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss urged him into rehab; then pregnant, pixie star, Natalie Portman, the antithesis of the punk designer in deportment and pedigree, became unwitting spokesperson against anti-Semitism in general and drunken fashion gurus in particular, refusing to stay on as face of Dior fragrance if Galliano stayed on, too. (In an effort to defend Portman’s spokeswoman clout, articles keep noting that her great-grandparents died at Auschwitz, a serious fact that this fiasco almost trivializes.)

It had been rumored, probably baselessly, that Portman would wear Galliano to the Oscars two weeks ago. Instead she wore simple plum Rodarte. Which is more or less where this string of who-did-whats has been heading: the work of the Rodarte sisters, whose somber idiosyncrasy recalls the Brontës, is the subject of a current exhibition at MOCA’s Pacific Design Center. Presented by Swarovski (yes, of the crystals) and curated by Rebecca Morse, Rodarte: States of Matter features a selection of dresses from the designers’ recent Fall and Spring collections and a few costumes designed for the Darren Aronofsky film Black Swan.

MOCA PDC fares much better when it remembers that it is the satellite of an experimental contemporary arts institution and not a history of design museum. It rarely does, however, and it’s installations too often stray toward the pedantic. But Rodarte: States of Matter tries too hard to push the other way, going to great lengths to present the gowns as sculptural experiences and thus making it a battle to appreciate them as design at all.

Vito Acconci, still from "Claim Excerpts," 1971.

Downstairs, Rodarte’s Black Collection is darkly lit and hung in the center of a black painted room. You have to get close to see the the raw alpaca wool that climbs up a mannequin’s chest toward the shoulder and the tulle that twists in on itself like nautical netting after a storm. Upstairs, the lighting is at first severe and all-exposing, but then it flashes black and the dresses from the White Collection glow like they would in a bowling alley. This theatricality doesn’t give the clothes the credit they deserve–after all, they’re gorgeously crafted objects, with a pre-Raphaelite gentility that butts up against a DIY scavengery—or doesn’t credit viewers with the ability to understand Rodarte’s drama without the help of special effects.

But as with Galliano, the MOCA exhibition fails only in stark contrast to success–it fails because it could have succeeded. That’s the most common, prominent kind of failure. It’s also the dullest, the kind that can be explained away and potentially remedied.

The last time I was in a room as dark as the one that now holds Rodarte’s Black Collection, I was at Emma Gray Headquarters, a tiny, narrow, bird’s nest of a space perched above the corner of La Cienega and Venice. Performance artist and photographer Dawn Kasper was re-inhabiting Vito Acconci’s 1971 workClaim, wearing a black hoodie, wielding a pipe and sitting blindfolded in a candle-encircled corner.

During the original Claim, Acconci, also blindfolded, sat at the bottom of a stairwell in the basement of a New York gallery with a crowbar, two pipes and and relentless tongue at his disposal, “claiming the space.” Any time steps approached, he’d swing his pipe, and threaten to kill. “I’ll stop anybody from coming down here in the basement with me,” he’d say, his outburst far less viscous but more ominous than any iteration of Galliano’s. “This space is mine.”

Kasper sat at the same level as her audience, not below. And her piece, more about wondering what could have compelled or propelled a performer like Acconci, lasted an hour to Acconci’s three. Carol Cheh of Another Righteous Transfer recorded pieces of Kasper’s intermittent monologue:

I want to be aggressive, I want to be convincing, I want to claim this space . . . I am alone in this space . . . but I don’t really want this space . . . I don’t want to be him, I am a woman, I am claiming my own space, my own honesty.

“My work was about getting to a place that you couldn’t get to,” Acconci said recently, looking back on earlier performances. In that sense, Kasper’s Claim succeeded by failing–failing to get somewhere she never could have gotten anyway.

Whitney Houston, center, with her mother, Cissy Houston; father, John Houston, second from right; brother, Michael Houston, left; and half-brother, Gary Garland in Newark. Circa 1979.

“She could have been signed on the basis of her pedigree alone,” said columnist Stephen Metcalf, talking about Whitney Houston on Slate’s culture podcast Tuesday, four days after the singer’s death. “Her godmother was Aretha Franklin. Her mother was an accomplished gospel singer. Her cousins were Deedee and Dionne Warwick. She could have been signed based on her looks alone”–she’d modeled and appeared on the cover of Seventeen before she’d sold records–“and she could have been signed on the basis of her voice alone.” Metcalf concluded, “To have any one of those things could make you an enormous star. The fact that she had all three. . .”

“Just in technical terms, I don’t think I’ve heard a better instrument in my lifetime, even from singers I prefer, who are better. . . in terms of expressiveness or just the vibe,” added Slate music critic Jody Rosen. Her performance at the 1991 Super Bowl, just after the Gulf War, showed that instrument’s full force; it also again showed Houston had it all. Said Rosen,

You can really really hear the extraordinary range and nuance in her voice. She’s just technically out of this world, and, also, it tells you something about the stature of Whitney Houston: here was this black women who was quote-unquote America’s sweetheart–she was called that many times–and at this moment of National crisis or of fervent jingoism, she was called upon to play the Kate Smith or Bing Crosby role . . . as F-16s roared overhead.

The “whole package”– sweetheart, stunner, virtuoso–is something you can only be if your body, your image, is put out into the world along with your talent and brain. So it’s pop stars who deal with the pressure to be/have everything far more often than other artists.

Hannah Wilke, "S.O.S. Starification Object Series," 1974-82. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art.

In the visual arts, in fact, being/having the whole package is sometimes suspect. When, in the 1970s, Hannah Wilke made small vulvar, fleshy forms out of latex, ceramics or bubble gum, attached these to her body,  and posed topless for pin-up posters, critics accused her of flaunting her beauty. Amelia Jones, in her essay “Everybody dies. . . even the gorgeous,” quotes Wilke: “People give me this bullshit of, ‘What would you have done if you weren’t so gorgeous?’ What difference does it make?. . . Gorgeous people die as do the stereotypical ‘ugly.’” Looks didn’t give her an advantage, she implied.

But Wilke’s looks and attitude were special. Her dark-haired, svelte form; her flawless skin speckled by those unsettling orifices and folds of flesh; and how she looked at the camera in that disaffected, disinterested way Linda Evangelista would later adopt — all this emblazoned itself into your memory in a way the vulvar sculptures on their own would not have. She became the perfect conduit for her art and, attached to her physical, visible self, her sculptures showed even a conventionally “gorgeous” body to be cavernous and complicated.

Narcissister, Still from "Every Woman," 2010.

“I had started developing performance work where I used the orifices of my body, and for me it was about achieving my own grander virtuosity,” said the artist Narcissister, whose short film Every Woman (2010) screened in L.A. on Valentines day, as part of Dirty Looks: Long Distance Love Affairs at the Hammer Museum. At the start of Every Woman, Narcisster, whose entree into performance was as a dancer in the Alvin Ailey company, appears nude except for the  plastic barbie doll mask she always wears and her red, long-fingered monster gloves. Chaka Khan’s singing “I’m every woman, it’s all in me/Anything you want done, baby/I’ll do it naturally” as Narcissister’s performing a reverse strip tease. She’s pulling her clothing out of first her mouth, then her vagina, then her hair, until she’s dressed in tube top, earrings, tight striped skirt, panty hose and heels, with purse and sunglasses to complete the picture. Chaka Khan’s refrain (“I’m every woman, I’m every woman,” again and again) plays on as Narcissister runs her gloved hands up and down her flashily, unnaturally, clothed body until the curtain closes and the video ends.

There is something virtuosic about her; she’s striking, composed, clearly a skilled performer.  But she’s stuck inside the “whole package.” And if she weren’t so gorgeous, it wouldn’t be so obvious that having it all doesn’t ultimately help.

Steve Lambert, Capitalism Works For Me! True/False, 2011. Aluminum and electronics. 9 x 20 x 7 feet. (Electronics by Alexander Reben) courtesy of the artist and SPACES, Cleveland, OH

In terms of quality, the show runs the range: from phoned-in works that are indistinguishable from the artist’s earlier works to delightfully new works that show expanded range.

The show opens with Steve Lambert‘s Capitalism Works for Me! True/False a giant sign that tallies the audience’s answers to the title. I thought I knew what this politically loaded word meant, but Lambert made me reconsider that. Which capitalism? Am I being asked about the late stages of capitalism (making lots of money without any hindrance from regulations, too big to fail, global motion of capital, etc) or the older, more basic form where private ownership of the means of production is distinguished from state ownership? I have a love/hate relationship with the globalism version. Every artist (or writer for that matter) bases their self-employment on the latter definition. If I say False, I deny my and Lambert’s self-employment, but if I say True, do I align myself with the 1%? The more I considered Lambert’s question, the more I wanted to answer him both ways. I feel like a weasel that can’t commit to one of today’s central wedge issues.

Close reading of Ann Pibal‘s paintings will be rewarded. They are broken linear depictions of space that include balanced formal relationships that mask what feel like unbalanced emotional events. These lines replace what feel like haptic, concrete locations with painted incomplete drawings. This lack of closure forces you to see the relationships in the paintings for what they are. The viewer is asked to reassemble the discontinuities as they see them. What makes these powerful, are not the techniques used (like all abstract art, someone will dismiss it as “my kid can do that” art) but the logic behind why she does what she does. Space turns, curves, and slips along sequential fault lines. What at first appears to be linear regularity is denied the more you consider the relationships hidden in these paintings.

Chris Taylor, Untitled, 2004-2010. Glass, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

Chris Taylor‘s glass works are smart, formal proxies that deny their own optics. He explores many angles of craft in his work. His stand-outs are concealed blown glass, simulating something you can get for free at a gas station: styrofoam cups. Taylor does not just reproduce commodity objects though, there are also replicas of famous luxury crafted objects that Taylor used to fool the original makers into refunding his purchase price, claiming his errors were their own. Their substitute status, like Allen MCollum’s surrogates or Jasper John’s sculptures from 1960, are more than just formal tricks and are not just sculptural trompe l’oeil. They are also a witty mocking of tradition that rouses the work into a living relationship with our surrounding culture. Can factory made luxury goods be deluxe if the factory that made them can’t verify that the objects are their own work? You should also not miss his video, Small Craft Advisory, which is hanging in the staircase behind his work.

Installation shot of Mary Lum's work. Photography by Clements Photography & Design, Boston, MA

Mary Lum‘s hybrid photograph-wall-paintings of odd spaces compelled me to spend a lot of time with them. The gestural perspectives of her work are altered, reality becomes unbound, when these works are shown so close to each other. Her close observations of both empty space and objects are absorbing. The masterful flattening and distortions found in her work makes an effortless documentary photo of a street into an inventive composition. A photo of something real is affected by the impossible drawing next to it, while the drawing seems more real with the fake-looking real-thing in tight progression. Each work infects the others and the presentation makes them come alive as an interrelated subject that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Matthew Gamber, Munsell Color Tree (from the series Any Color You Like), 2010. Digital gelatin silver print. 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy of Gallery Kayafas, Boston, MA.

Matthew Gamber‘s photographs are nerdy, historically and formally. They rely on such a simple conceit: removing color from objects that are defined by their colors. The things in his images need color, relying on it for their function. Making a color wheel monochrome still leaves it looking interesting enough, but a monochrome color blindness test is effectively useless as the data that makes this arrangement of dots into a test is undone, leaving the answer available to the color blind. This project summons a thread of early humanism described in great detail by Simon Schaffer in the BBC documentary Light Fantastic. Light and color are bigger than their physical truths, they affect and define the world we think we know. When photography expands upon the limits of our perceptive abilities, we get in touch with a foundational fear for humanity: that our mastery of knowledge is limited and that what we think is expertise is really just juvenile hubris.

Eleanor Antin as Eleanora Antinova in Before the Revolution at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1979.

“At this moment, my iPad is totally f–ing me up,” said Eleanor Antin last Sunday at the Hammer Museum, in Act V of Before the Revolution, a remaking of her originally one-woman ballet. Act V was actually called “The Interruption,” because the performers were slated to stop performing and the artist to come up on stage and muse about meaning and ownership. The iPad f-up was not scripted, however; the machine really was interrupting the planned interruption. “There’s something here that says ‘undo or cancel,’” she announced. “I don’t want to do either.” She could’ve played it off and attempted to finish her monologue without the script, but, instead she waited until a technician and, I think, her son had made her screen functional again. Then she continued.

Before the Revolution was first performed in 1979, and Antin played all the roles–12 in total–with the help of life-size, two-dimensional Masonite dolls. It told of an imaginary black ballerina (Eleanora Antinova) dancing in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and evoked the great hope that modern art could break down walls that, of course, never quite fell. Antinova, the talented black ballerina hopes to play the real, iconic roles, but is instead offered primitive ones (“For you we will re-stage Pocahontas,” Diaghilev says). Antin has always been interested in the self being more than just one thing, so, in 1974 when the modernist idea of the single identity still festered, impersonating a fictive character that couldn’t have existed felt radical.

Eleanor Antin as Eleanora Antinova in Before the Revolution at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1979.

Reactions to the original performance were apparently mixed.”I guess [people] wanted actors who were smooth and effortless, seamless, what they called professional,” Antin wrote in the program notes for the new Before the Revolution. This one, co-directed by Alexandro Segade of the collective My Barbarian, was, in some ways, seamless. It included a “professional” cast. Daniele Watts, who played Eleanor Antinova beautifully, has guested on network television. Matthew Henerson, who played Diaghilev, appeared in A Christmas Carol. They traveled across the stage and interacted with trained, practiced intentionality that isn’t often found in performances by artists who took “Theory and Practice” rather than, say, “Advanced Movement.”

Rehearsal for Eleanor Antin's Before the Revolution in 2012. Courtesy The Getty Research Institute.

But still, the whole program played out like an interruption, of history, of professionalism, of artistry, of expectations. It starts out with Antinova learning to curtsey, to defer to her audience while still upholding her veneer, then follows her as she tries to wrangles for real, “white” roles (but “we love you because you are black,” Diaghilev protests) and as she impersonates Marie Antoinette and tries to rewrite the history of another woman trapped in misunderstandings and circumstances beyond her control. It was the tone of the performance, though, that made all the difference. Antinova, who remains optimistic though less and less naive, never lets go of the idea that her enthusiasm could change the system (of the Ballets Russes). And Antin, who during her “Interruption” said that she was going to make this ballet, the one about the ever-misunderstood Marie Antoinette, “her ballet, my ballet and fill the stage with credit, my credit,” never lets go of the idea that a self could become a multitude that together takes back history.

Image: Scott Thorpe (left) and Brett MacFadden at the wrapping party for THE THING Quarterly, Issue 15: MacFadden and Thorpe.

A central tenet to emerge from Conceptual art in the 1960s was the perception of language as an object: a visual form of signification that requires us to negotiate its materiality in order to locate its meaning. In this process of negotiation, language was no different than any other artistic medium. The tactile quality of a page and typographical arrangement of text were recognized to be as active in creating meaning as the words printed on them. If reading was a set of physical gestures that unfolds linearly—left to right, top to bottom, from one page to the next—the interruption or reordering of any of these gestures led to a reconsideration and new consciousness of the act. In other words, language was set in motion, built, excavated, or incanted instead of written, and to read these texts was to experience them spatially.¹ The inheritance we’ve received from these investigations into language as object is an inherent understanding of the performative nature of reading and, concurrently, of a reader’s role as co-conspirator in creating meaning.

As art historian Gwen Allen notes in the introduction to her book Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art, beginning in the 1960s, art magazines went beyond their documentary purpose to become alternative sites that presented works of art. They placed the materiality of art and the materiality of language into congruous relationships and transformed those relationships into performative experiences. For example, 0 to 9, a mimeographed poetry magazine published by poet and performance artist Vito Acconci and poet Bernadette Mayer between 1967 and 1969, aspired to explore language as a visual, phonetic, and kinetic form and featured contributions from both poets and conceptual artists. The magazine’s issues featured pages densely covered in text or left nearly blank, typesetting that suggested motion across the page, and even, for the cover of Issue 5, a sheet of paper crumpled and then flattened again. Preceding his transition from poet to performer, Acconci made experiments with typography and layout, motivated by what he described as a restlessness with the page that compelled him into a state of action. (“I couldn’t be on the page any more. Language took me out onto the street. I was moving on the page, now I wanted to move on the sidewalk, on the street. I was more thinking of the street as a field of activity rather than the page.”²)

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