Lee Gainer, "Cassandra" from Workin' Hard

Lee Gainer utilizes the time-honored representation of the dedicated employee, phone-to-ear, as the basis of her new collection. Backgrounds vary, depending on the nature of the organization and the duties of the associate. This snapshot, ubiquitous to the point of being absurd, suggests that a corporation places high value on customer service, and provides access to courteous, efficient employees with pleasant speaking voices and problem solving skills. This image abounded in nearly every industry during the second half of the twentieth century, and has become endearingly archaic. (Note: Coiled phone cord of land line.)

For her most recent body of work, Workin’ Hard, Lee Gainer culls photographs from various business websites and literature, printing the selected imagery with her HP Z2100 printer on 8″ x 10″ satin paper. She then alters the appropriated image with gesso and several layers of acrylic, carefully isolating the hand of the subject that holds the receiver. The artist’s modification of the casual office portrait draws attention to the prolific over-use of this image, challenging its validity as a marker of the white-collar system. Gainer’s socio-cultural observations “invite the viewer to consider the cultural expectations of social status, gender roles, age, race, morality, tradition, and sexuality,” as stated on her website. Each portrait in Workin’ Hard is given a first name as a title, subtly undermining the corporate pretense of “personal” service. The faces of the subjects are obscured.

Lee Gainer, "Jr." from Workin' Hard

Gainer’s past projects include Two Month’s Salary, a series which addresses the widely held wedding industry belief that a woman’s engagement ring should be worth approximately two months of the purchaser’s salary. Using this industry equation and the most recent salary data gathered from the U.S. Department of Labor and Payscale.com, Gainer presents twenty prints, each print representing a specific occupation (i.e. Radiation Therapist, Funeral Director, Patrol Officer) and some suitable ring choices. The occupation titles are listed in elegant script below nine engagement rings. View the series here.

Gainer’s work, simple in aesthetic and execution, prompts the viewer to decode visual data and reassess promotional images encountered in everyday life. The artist lives and works in Washington, DC and is currently a resident artist at the Arlington Arts Center in Arlington, VA. Her work has been featured in The American Prospect, The New York Times, and The Exposure Project.

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

We continue our week long series, Rise of Rebellion, by taking a look at how resistance and rebellion overlap.

Brian Bress, Masked images. Courtesy LACE.

On the back left wall of Pepin Moore’s gallery space–the same endearingly domestic space that, just a few months ago, belonged to China Art Objects–there’s a noirish print by Brian Bress. It’s hanging in Second Story, a low-key exhibition that features a sampling of the artist’s multiples that will be shown in the upstairs loft once the  gallery’s official season begins. It depicts a bust that,  I think, once belonged to Natalie Wood. But the face has been obscured by torn strips of  paper and it’s the obscuring that matters most. The print recalls Irving Penn’s Saul Steinberg in Nose Mask (1966) or Marcello Nizzoli’s Portrait of a Woman (1936), a photograph in which a smiling female face is half covered by white paper and colored with green and red crayon. It resists beauty, but it’s still elegant.

This particular print feels like a distilled version of Bress’s more unruly installation and video work, and the crinkles in the brownish and purple paper that cover the face particularly resonate with the surfaces of Disaster Family, a limbless fantasia of felt figures that Bress included in LACE’s 2008 exhibition, Against the Grain. There’s something violent about Bress’s refusal to give figures flesh or features–it obscures individuality while internalizing intimacy and resisting the outside world.

Brian Bress, "Disaster Family," from Against the Grain, 2008. Courtesy LACE.

Resistance was more or less the point of Against the Grain; it aimed to subvert a stiff political aesthetic in favor of something more sensuously contentious. It responded to Against Nature, a 1988 exhibition  curated by Dennis Cooper and Richard Hawkins, and both shows took their titles from different translations of A Rebours, a melancholic French novel by J.K. Huysmans about a sickly nobleman who withdraws from society to live alone with his own exquisite sense of decorum. But only a few pieces in Against the Grain–Bress’s was one, along with Julian Hoeber’s series of glitzy bronze heads–came close to the seductive recalcitrance of Against Nature, which confronted the problem AIDS posed for artists who wanted to be provocative without being polemical.

By 1988, the clean-edged, unambiguous Silence=Death icon, designed by AIDS activists in New York, was already circulating. The back cover of Against Nature’s catalog echoed the slogan but did so by superimposing a seraph script over an  image of an apothecary dressed in a black-beaked, plague-resistant gown (he could have easily figured into Bress’s Disaster Family). Against Nature didn’t reject the political dimensions of sickness in general or AIDS in particular, but it did favor ornamental musings on beauty, bodies and illness and its fidelity to taste seemed strangely aggressive.

"Against Nature" catalog, back cover, 1988. Courtesy LACE.

In his catalog essay for Against Nature, which reads like fiction, Dennis Cooper navigates his desire for a man named Pierre, who is purportedly trying to help Cooper out by writing about the exhibition. The two men move back and forth in cagey,  often tangential dialogue. In the end, Pierre makes it clear that he’d rather not get too close to Cooper; it’s not because he’s afraid of AIDS but more because he just doesn’t know what to be afraid of or what to want in general. When Cooper reads what Pierre has written, he realizes it’s unusable:

(It’s a description of Pierre in very hackneyed, glowing terms . . . it doesn’t have anything to do with this show, [and there’s no way I’m going to print it] as beautiful as Pierre looks today, even upset. But he’s my friend so I’ll tell him he’s perfect.)

The essay, like Pierre, is evasive and uncertain. It resists pontification, though written in a moment that seemed (and was) politically dire, and it resists indulgently.

Indulging in ambiguity can be dangerous–you risk being misunderstood–but it’s indulgence that made Against Nature so timely and rebellious.

Today on DS, we look at the desire and longing for rebellion embedded in the work of Nan Goldin, Larry Clark, Dash Snow and Ryan McGinley. Check out how the acts captured in these artists’ work become an icon for a generation desperate for a more rebellious lifestyle.

Nan Goldin. Joana with Valerie and Reine in the Mirror, L'Hotel des Beaux Arts, Paris, 1999.

Thinking back to the days of being a rebellious teenager make me want to run the other direction. There is nothing worse than revisiting the angst and discomfort of adolescence – my mild rebellious behavior and general dislike of the world around me. Rebellious acts always seem mediocre and immature to me these days, despite living a very 20-something lifestyle. But there have always been those artists that so tactfully ride the line between a perfectly composed yet rebellious life that I inherently envy. I find it fascinating to watch the career of artists who successfully make work that is both personal and universal, unruly and conforming, attractive and disgusting – who document their own outsider world and show our distance to it.

Dash Snow. "TBT", 2008. Photograph - Digital C Print 40 x 60 inches (101.6 x 151.8 cm) + frame Edition of 3 + 2AP. Courtesy of Peres Projects.

This rebel has long been the muse of the artist. And when I consider the muse, Nan Goldin and Larry Clark’s use and abuse of the rebellious lifestyle become both personal document and cultural reality, while assuming the roll of Art Historical mainstay in the category of the documentary photograph. But Dash Snow, a true example of both insider and outsider, straddled this relationship and found a way to make the chaos of his life appear both seductive and desirable. A hero of punk culture, Snow’s rebellious history and lifestyle was the subject and an embodiment of his work – both personal anthem and documentation. Snow sold his own context, using his life as a guarantee of credibility and reality to the outside world, by choosing to participate in the contemporary art system, yet his product was a life through the photographic document.

Both “genius” and tortured soul, Snow’s lifestyle was muse and product- and ultimately it was his rebellious lifestyle that brought him to an early death. Ryan McGinley equally rides this ambiguous line, to the point that I can’t decide if his work is rebellious or utopian. There is something about the idealized reality in his work that harks back to the personal documentation of Clark and Goldin, but successfully sells his own contemporary youthful lifestyle.

Ryan McGinley, Coley (Injured), 2007

The act of rebellion doesn’t always lead you in the opposing path of the system or lifestyles that it moves against. And, often the very thought or association of rebellion becomes so desirable to the masses because it appears to be simply out of their grasp. All of these artists have successfully depicted their own rebellious lifestyle and have offered this spirit back to a complacent public that longs for the moment to  give up the boredom that fills their normal lives and grab onto the freedom that is falsely associated with rebellion.

Helio Oiticica & Neville D'Almeida, "Cosmococa 5: Hendrix - War CC5-11," 1973 / 2003 C-print mounted on aluminum. Courtesy Michael Benevento, Galerie Lelong, NY and Joshua White Photography.

A friend of mine, a sculptor with immense brown eyes and a long figure that that always looks both cautious and comfortable with itself, was standing next to her brother’s Ford Explorer outside an Illinois gas station. They’d just been to see their grandfather in a rest home and it was the morning of Louise Bourgeois’s death, so my friend felt reasonably subdued. A man in a black sedan with windows down drove by and slowed to a crawl. “Do you have any idea how sexy you are?” he said to her, sort of jauntily. She dropped her eyes, turned and rammed her head up against the Explorer’s doorframe, keeping it there until the sedan drove off. She has no idea why she did this, and I’ve made her describe it to me, blow-by-blow, three times at least. Her behavior feels vulnerable, resistant, violent and yet weirdly liberated. It’s a reaction against sexy—or at least the breed of sexy the man in the sedan felt he could access. But it’s also sexy itself, the spontaneous assertion of an inexplicable instinct.

Spartacus Chetwynd, "Hermito’s Children," Video (color, sound), 2008. Courtesy Michael Benevento and Joshua White Photography.

Everlasting Gobstopper at Michael Benevento, an exhibition that’s more reflective than its title suggests, is sexy expressly because of the sexinesses it rejects. The show has a grittily commemorative mood, like the setting for a party that’s bound to be oddly romantic, Disco-indebted, yet still somber. The entry way walls are painted black—it takes a moment for your eyes to adjust—and a dark purple poster of a howling wolf, painstakingly drawn by Eva Rothschild before she moved on to Cold Corners and other wonky minimalist projects, hangs opposite the door. Next comes a posse of paintings from Spartacus Chetwynd’s Bat Opera series; Rothschild’s triangular black Perspex tower; counterculture queen Lil Picard’s terrifyingly delicate burnt polka-dot bow-tie; Michael E. Smith’s dry black paintings and crusty floor pieces; and Cindy Sherman’s piquantly pink autumnal death scene. But all these mostly serve as the supporting cast for Chetwynd’s Hermito’s Children, a three part video installation that plays out on 14 stacked monitors at the back of the main gallery space.

Like a filmic novella spawned by a Truman Capote – Jack Smith marriage, Hermito’s Children presents characters who are obsessive, articulate, eccentricity prone, and vested in one another’s sexuality, though only vaguely interested in sex. Watery graphics dance across the screen to the sound of portentous woodwinds as act one, The Case of the Poisonous Dildo, commences. Less mystery than cameo, The Case features a matronly protagonist who wears a zig-zagged muumuu and sounds like Edgar Oliver with a lisp. She tells viewers not to be frightened as she introduces her unconventional, androgynous family: an ex-husband who runs a raucously happy Jewish restaurant, an absent daughter, and a deep-voiced assistant with a hog’s nose. In act two, an innocent girl in a body suit listens to a worldly “puppet master” who tells her “a dancer who relies on the doubtful prospect of human love will never be great.”

Halfway through act three,called Helmut Newton Ladies Night, the muumuu-wearing matron reappears and refers to a tomboyishly debonair troupe of women. “You are seduced by these women,” she says. “[But] what they’re doing is not that dangerous. Your imagination exaggerates it.” Then “these women” ritualistically dance to experimental metal, spoofing on Helmut Newton’s iconic 1981 image, “They’re Coming,” in which four svelte figures advanced toward the camera.

"Everlasting Gobstopper," Installation View, 2010. Courtesy Michael Benevento and Joshua White Photography.

Newton once said he couldn’t work pornographically because he didn’t do rough: “Rough stuff is real; it’s not posed. The trouble with my pornography, it’s too chic.” The bodies in Hermito’s Children aren’t posed or chic, but they’re not rough either. They’re somewhere in between. One of my favorite moments comes near the end. A group of nude women form a  sculptural rectangle. It’s stoic, formal and literally objectifying. But then a face breaks from the group and erupts in an inaudible, punkish yell. I like the idea that incongruous, fiercely independent bursts of emotion could be a way to claim sexiness as your own.

A Story of Deception is the title of Francis Alÿs‘ current retrospective on view at the Tate Modern. The title of the exhibition, which spans the artist’s two-decade long career is borrowed from a work of the same name, and appropriately provides the exhibition’s subtitle and introduces the gallery visitor to Alÿs’ work.   The 16 mm film, A Story of Deception, captures a mesmerizing and unobtainable mirage on the horizon.  The camera centers itself on a road, halved by a dotted white line and follows it across an arid Patagonian landscape.  The film’s imagery and intent are oblique and deceptively simple – allowing a variety of creative, metaphorical interpretations.  The road can be read as representative of a border and the unobtainable mirage as the often out-of-reach goal of border crossing.

Francis Alÿs, Ambulantes (Pushing and Pulling), Mexico City, 1992-present Slide projection. Courtesy of Francis Alÿs and David Zwirner, New York. Image by Francis Alÿs © Francis Alÿs.

While Alÿs is most readily associated with the film or video documentation of his actions, this retrospective takes care to illustrate the multi-media nature of the artist’s practice and is curated thematically.  Film and video work is presented with related photographs, paintings, drawings or other ephemera.  In one particularly successful example, Paradox of Praxis I or Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing (1997) is shown near photographs taken in Mexico City dating as early as 1992.  These projected photographic images from the series Ambulantes (Pushing and Pulling) feature street vendors and workers bearing loads in the streets.  The connection is evident between these photographs and Paradox of Praxis, in which Alÿs pushes a block of melting ice through the city’s streets.  Both point to the often comical futility of contemporary labor.

The artist typically begins his work with an action, allowing other media to play a supporting or planning role, but that is not always the case.  The artist works in a variety of media, including photography, sculpture, animation, drawing and painting.  Paintings such as Le Temps du Sommeil (2003-present) and Silenco (2003-present) illustrate that Alÿs is influenced by urban advertising.  They also reference the precedent – intentionally or not – of past artists like Magritte.

Film or video documentation of Alÿs’ carefully planned actions remain the most compelling and most capable of conveying both subtle and overt political messages.  In Re-enactments (2000), Alÿs references the gun violence of his adopted Mexican homeland.  When Faith Moves Mountains:  A Project for Geological Displacement (2002) is one of Alÿs’ most well known works for its sheer monumentality.  In it, the artist directs 500 volunteers to form a line and physically move a sand dune located outside of Lima, Peru.  Armed solely with shovels and the spirit of collective effort, these volunteers complete a task whose apparent futility belies its profound metaphorical statement.  This great effort of ‘geological displacement’ points to the immense shared burden of geo-political displacement.

The contemporary nation-state border, as a contradictory line that is both increasingly restricted and crossed, is an important theme in Alÿs’ art practice. The artist addresses the hypocrisy of the border in works such as The Green Line or Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic (2005) in which the artist walks the 1948 armistice border line between Israel and Palestine.  Trailing a leaking can of green paint behind him as he walks a now defunct border, he quietly and profoundly points to the idiocy of human suffering caused by an arbitrary line of division.  Loop (2007) chronicles the artist’s purposefully ludicrous route across the US – Mexico border as he travels from Tijuana to Australia, up the Pacific Rim to Alaska, and then finally to California.  The epic route of travel taken in lieu of the actual distance between Tijuana and San Diego highlights the difficulty of this border crossing for illegal economic migrants.  Also referring to the theme of border crossing, The Rehearsal (1999-2004) features a red Volkswagen Beetle that continually tries and fails to reach the top of a dirt road.

The exhibition makes a strong conclusion with the premiere of Tornado (2000-2010).  This newly completed, 55 minute video documentation from hand-held camera footage was ten years in the making.  It captures the artist as he places himself in the path of high-altitude tornadoes in Mexico – enduring severe winds and no visibility brown-outs in attempts penetrate the tornado’s central vortex where the air becomes eerily still.   Alÿs places himself in peril – throwing himself blindly into chaos in hopes for resolution through the extraction of meaning.  Or, as curator Mark Godfrey argues Tornado is again concerned with the border crossing and the immense difficulty of entering and leaving geo-political zones in our increasingly mobile world.

Francis Alÿs Tornado Milpa Alta, 2000-10 Video documentation of an action and related ephemera 55 minutes Courtesy of Francis Alÿs and David Zwirner, New York Image: Video Still © Francis Alÿs

Francis Alÿs:  A Story of Deception remains at the Tate Modern until 5 September.  The show’s next stop is Alÿs’ home country where it will be presented at Wiels in Brussels (9 October – 30 Janurary).  The exhibition comes state-side next year to New York’s MoMA (8 May – 1 August 2011).

Francis Alÿs is represented by David Zwirner in New York and Galerie Peter Kilchmann in Zurich.

Andy Warhol, Dennis Hopper, Screen Tests Reel #4, 1964-65.

I spent Sunday looking at boys. It began at LACMA, where I saw Catherine Opie’s quarterbacks, linebackers and surfers  followed by Thomas Eakins’s rowers, wrestlers and athletic but stationary nudes. It continued at the Egyptian Theater, with ten of Andy Warhol’s four-minute screen tests: Buffy Phelps with delicate, defiant eyes and blondish curls; John Giorno of Sleep, darker and rougher than Buffy; Kip “Bima” Stagg, equally dark but not as rough; Dennis Hopper, twenty-eight but looking younger; Hopper again, still near twenty-eight, but suit-clad and looking older; Gregory Battock with Clark Gable jauntiness; Richard Schmidt and Paul Winterbottom; Kenneth King and Richard Markowitz, who, along with Giorno and Hopper, would appear in the compilation The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys.

Because Warhol’s tests are meditative and slow, I lost myself in their static silence, and didn’t think about gender until the reel played out. “They were all men, weren’t they?” I said to the friend sitting next to me. He’d noticed before I had.

Collier Schorr, "Jens F.," 2005.

Three weeks ago, when Catherine Opie’s unprovocatively titled Figure and Landscape opened, Opie talked about her work in LACMA’s Bing Theater. She mentioned comparisons often made between her sports photographs and the work of Collier Schorr, which depicts, among other things, young male bodies posing and sparring. “Collier wants to be her boys,” said Opie. “I don’t . . . I’m not interested in seeing my butch body through them.” What she’s interested in is bearing witness, and she’s been witnessing a precariously in-between generation, some of which has gone to Iraq, some of which has died.

Being versus bearing is not so simple a distinction, of course–Opie’s boys, as poet-critic Eileen Myles has pointed out, tend to adopt the Opie expression, which resembles a “scary duh.” Even so, it’s possible Schorr wants to be her boys while Opie wants to be aware of her boys; certainly, Eakins wanted to be with his boys while Warhol wanted to collect them.

Thomas Eakins,"The Champion Single Sculls," 1871. Courtesy LACMA.

It’s Warhol and Schorr who most prominently prefer male subjects. Warhol’s Screen Test Reel #5 includes only two women and, like Reel #4, Reel #6 is an exclusive boy’s club. Schorr, when asked why she doesn’t photograph girls, has said she does; she just uses boys to do it. But the strange, sports-focused mannishness of the paired Opie-Eakins exhibitions is even stranger in light of both artists’ genuine interest in women. Opie’s girl-only Girlfriends series showed at Gladstone Gallery in New York last year, and Eakins consistently included women in his work, and even in his controversies. It was his uninhibited disrobing in front of female students and his insistence on the removal of a male model’s “loin cloth” during a drawing session women attended, not his obsession with his “beloved” (as one wall label reads) young men, that forced him to resign from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1886.

Catherine Opie, "Untitled #10 (Surfers)," 2003. Courtesy Regen Projects.

In Manly Pursuits and Figure and Landscape, Eakins and Opie, both realists, show themselves to be exquisite technicians with a virtuosic, if predictable, eye for poetic composition. In Eakins’s The Champion Single Sculls, a burnt sienna scull cuts smoothly across royal blue water and its inhabitant looks elegantly, if illogically, casual as he turns to look back. In Opie’s portraits, skin, eyes, pose, gaze, the position of the football helmet, have all been carefully considered; royal blue makes frequent appearances in her work as well. But both artists render the trappings of a conventional masculinity and gender-play to which neither quite belong–to which no one quite belongs–and it’s the work that revels in inaction that seems most gaping and honest.

A room at the back of Figure and Landscape features only surfing images, and, though Opie has made striking portraits of surfers she’s shadowed, none of those portraits are included here. Instead, there’s just expansive gray rectangles in which far-off bodies float, largely unmoving, waiting for a chance to resume their sport. They’re certainly skilled surfers; everyone Opie photographs seems to be good at what they do. They’re also like little pawns or bobbing black buoys. They don’t look volitional but they do look comfortable; like the artist who made them, they’re virtuosic and yet awkward precisely because they’re virtuosic.

John Sisley, Ice and Polaroid 1 (2010). Archival inkjet print, 11 x 15 inches. Edition of 3, AP I/II.

John Sisley, Ice and Polaroid 12 (2010). Archival inkjet print, 11 x 15 inches. Edition of 5, AP I/II.

The front and back rooms of the gallery are hung mostly with paintings and photography.  In the front, John Sisley’s two pieces Ice and Polaroid 1 and Ice and Polaroid 12 (both 2010) are small black-and-white inkjet prints.  1 shows a set of ice cubes sitting beside an undeveloped Polaroid photograph; 12 shows the now-developed Polaroid (a shot of the original set of ice cubes) next to a puddle of water.  The clean, evidence-based approach to depicting a process—here is the start, here is the finish—gives the pieces a quiet gravity and the photograph-in-a-photograph plays with ideas of representation, duplication, and the passage of time.  On an adjacent wall, Devon Oder’s Bleed (Tree Cave) (2009) provides a counterpoint to Sisley’s stark vision.  The enlarged vintage photograph depicts a sunbleached view of a cave of overgrown brambles and twigs hunkered at the edge of a forest, and it’s unclear whether it’s a natural formation or man-made and abandoned.  No matter, it’s an eleven-year-old’s summer reverie, the mysterious thing that she hopes to stumble on during long unsupervised hours.  Fingerprints and age spots mar the edge of the photo, attesting to its beloved status: this photograph has been looked at many times, and the smudges make for a wistful feel, conjuring that back-to-school pang of impending bus rides, structured days, and having to wear clean clothes.

Devon Oder, Bleed (Tree Cave) (2009). Lightjet print, 35 x 35 inches.

In the next room is Jesse Sugarmann’s I’m on Fire (2010), a deliciously masculine two-channel paean to frustrated love.  The left screen depicts, in succession, a Lincoln Town Car parked in a field, then backing forcefully into reflective mylar; or a man in a grey suit, sunglasses, and white shoes (presumably the artist) playing an amateurish version of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” on an electric guitar.  On the right screen, the same car does hydraulic tricks and falls off cinderblocks; or has the front end propped crazily on (and then falls off) a tall four-by-four; or churns out clouds of smoke that billow over bright green grass and into the hot sky.  In the middle of all this, the arms of a forklift bang an old electric keyboard clumsily; later, the forklift lowers the entire car so that one tire mashes the keyboard, honking out a cacophonic accompaniment to the guitar solo on the adjacent screen.  Somewhere in all of this is a yearning that manifests itself as a pyrrhic desire to destroy things just to get a little fire going in the middle of a dry month.  Whether inspired by real or fictional unrequited love, Sugarmann’s video is pitch-perfect, a charming mix of boyish cool, summer heat, longing, frustration, and semi-dangerous stunts.  I left the gallery with Springsteen’s lyrics in my head-

Jesse Sugarmann, I'm on Fire (2010). Dual channel video, sound: 8:53 minutes. Edition of 5, AP I/II.

Sometimes it’s like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull
and cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my soul

At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet
And a freight train running through the middle of my head
Only you can cool my desire
oh, oh, oh, I’m on fire

"It's My World", installation view of downstairs gallery at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions; image courtesy of BRX Exhibitions

It’s My World, a current group show at Baer Ridgeway Exhibitions in San Francisco, is compelling in its approach to a somewhat dated subject matter: the landscape. The show successfully combines the apparent solid thesis of the exhibition: “a strong emphasis on the use of unexpected materials, abstracted forms and the examination of time” in a bid to approach issues raised by humans’ complicated relationship with the ever changing environment. The group exhibition is comprised of ten artists working in a variety of mediums: painting, video, drawing, photography and sculpture and the cohesiveness that permeates from each artist’s contribution is fantastic.

Claude Zervas, "Skagit," 2005, Green CCFL lamps, wire, inverters, steel, Wall: 70 x 50 x 1 inches; Floor: 37 x 65 x 60 inches; image courtesy of BRX Exhibitions

Claude Zervas’ Skagit, 2005, a vibrant installation of Green CCFL lamps, wire, and inverters that is modeled after the Northwest’s Skagit River, and protrudes out of the wall alive and active. Zervas’ arranges the inverter cords to simulate the river’s many tributaries, allowing the installation to course through the gallery space.  Christopher Taggart’s But Now You Know You’ve Seen the Worst, 2010, changes the term “process” to an entirely new level. The image is of a car’s driver side mirror that has been recreated, and pixilated, by small cut outs of UV laminated photographs glued to a board. To call this work a collage doesn’t seem to do it justice. The precision in which Taggart is able to assemble these small, seemingly picayune pieces while at the same time inferring the motion of a driver’s view of the landscape passing him by, is impressive.

Christopher Taggart, "But Now You Know You've Seen the Worst," 2010, UV laminated photographs glued to board with pigmented archival adhesive, 32 x 40 inches; image courtesy of BRX Exhibitions

If these eye- catching works draw you in, it is the more subtle pieces that will make you stay. David Wilson’s charcoal on paper drawings of public spaces serve as illustrations to his larger performance works of reinvigorating public spaces. Wilson arranges public events, or “gatherings”, within these depicted landscapes, as a way to serve as a conduit for others who have yet to figure out how to get back to nature. Sean McFarland’s series of Polaroid photographs, though small in size, are breathtaking. McFarland collages together a variety of mixed media – paint, image cutouts, etc., and then re-photographs these elements to create an entirely new image of an otherworldly landscape. These images are ethereal, elusive and affecting. Even if the image doesn’t stay with you for very long afterward, the mystical feeling it invokes within you of a lost world will.

Sean McFarland, "Plane and Land," 2008, Polaroid, 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 inches, edition of 3; image courtesy of BRX Exhibitions

In my opinion, to be an artist in these contemporary times is no small feat. At this point, it would seem that there is no topic that hasn’t been broached, no genre that hasn’t been explored, and no medium that hasn’t had its limits pushed. This is the second reason why It’s My World succeeds—the ability of the selected artists to take a theme that is almost as old as art history itself and to continue to innovate upon it.  Here’s hoping that other artists heed their call.

Bryan Graf, Lake Accumulation 2010, c-print, 13 x 19 inches- Curator, Kate Greenberg & Hilary Schaffner

I love how far the term “curate” has fallen. Once particular to egg-headed museum types who cared for collections of rarities, now curating, at least in marketing terms, means nothing more than making a kind of fancy or personalized choice. Instead of plain old dinner and a movie, you can now curate the best locavorian burger and artisanal fries while selecting a companion film from your finely tuned Netflix queue.

In the art world, strains of this populist streak were found in Roberta Smith’s recent assail against New York museums’ predilection toward chilly post-minimalism. Coining the term “curator’s art,” Smith called into question the blitz of retrospectives of artists like Roni Horn, Robert Smithson, and Gabriel Orozco that as she put it, “share a visual austerity and coolness of temperature that are dispiritingly one-note.” She added that while she liked these shows, she also wants to see shows by artists whose work belies an intense personal necessity. I took this to mean that she wants to see the same level of passion on museum walls that some employ in everyday decisions such as where to eat.

With this criteria in mind, I judged Young Curators, New Ideas III to mostly be heading in the right direction. Each curator or curatorial team was given their own section of the gallery that they treated like an individual show.  The overall result looks like your average M.F.A. Thesis exhibition, but there were a couple of standouts.

Bryan Graf, An Encyclopedia of Gardening, 1969 2010, two panels of hardcover book covers, 24 x 32 inches each - Curator, Kate Greenberg & Hilary Schaffner

Broken Lattice, featuring the work of Bryan Graf, curated by Kate Greenberg and Hilary Schaffner, feels both cohesive and well varied. Graf uses a multitude of photographic techniques to convey a distant sense of place and memory.  He borrows heavily from the James Welling playbook, but it’s OK, as his intention feels pure and the curators seem humble. The works are given just enough space to breathe easily and the relaxed pace of the installation is completely in sync with the laid-back vibe of Graf’s photography. You can get lost in a floor piece, peer into a smaller work, and lean over a table of seemingly found snapshots—in total, a satisfying experience.

Jan Tichy, Installation No. 5 (Threshold) 2008, three-channel digital video projection, one hundred 250g white paper objects, variable dimensions- Curator, Gabriella Hiatt

Another respite from the competing voices in this show was Jan Tichy’s Installation No. 5 (Threshold), curated by Gabriella Hiatt. Here, four walls of a darkened gallery are adorned with common cardboard tubes and cylindrical lids. After languishing in the dark for a while, the walls are blasted with rectangles of projected white light that transforms the tubes into what looks like the austere post-minimal abstraction of, say, Gabriel Orozco.  Then a layer of black lines snake onto these objects and transforms them once again. Although it’s a bit theatrical, I like how the references in this work slip between DIY craft, high abstraction, mapping, and biological systems.

The rest of Young Curators/ New Ideas III feels a bit scattered. Some of the work that I liked, such as Victor Vaughn’s digital prints, suffered from bad placement and odd context.  Too much of the other work on view bears the heavy influence of grad school obsessions like Marcel Broodthaers, Felix Gonzáles-Torres and Christian Marclay. While it is difficult to know whom to blame for the less successful parts of the show, the artist or the curator, in the best installations it feels as if the curator simply placed the work into a complimentary context and then got out of the way.

Maybe all of the hardworking museum curators out there are over-thinking it. For instance, we shouldn’t need to read a laborious wall label to experience great art. Although Young Curators, New Ideas III misses in parts, it spares us from heady essays and shows how selection, placement, and juxtaposition can go a long way.

Untitled (Iraq Book Project) 2008-2010. Installation view, Hauser & Wirth London, 2010. © Rachel Khedoori. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Peter Mallet.

Khedoori experiments with ambiguous spaces through a diverse practice that includes installation, sculpture and film.  The artist’s current solo exhibition of new and recent work at Hauser & Wirth in London is remarkable for the artist’s foray into documentation.  The Iraq Book Project, an ongoing documentary piece, was first shown at The Box in Los Angeles in 2009.  It is comprised of online news articles dating to the start of the Iraq War – 18 March 2003.  Sourced from around the world, the articles are retrieved using the search terms ‘Iraq’, ‘Iraqi’ or ‘Baghdad’.  They are then translated into English, compiled and presented in a series of large books arranged chronologically.  The articles are printed in a uniform, seamless manner and each is demarcated by title, date and source.  These large books are arranged in the main gallery space at Hauser & Wirth on tables along with stools for gallery visitors to interact with the work.  Khedoori’s Iraq Book Project is an on-going effort that is updated continuously.  Its conclusion will depend upon the length of the war.

Khedoori is certainly not alone in responding to the Iraq War, but has typically eschewed such content in her work. While The Iraq Book Project is somewhat of a departure, it can also be viewed as a repositioning of Khedoori’s engagement with space.  In this work, Khedoori locates information within the digital realm and extracts it.  This process allows viewers to explore the changing face of and attitudes towards the war.  It also stores information as a part of our collective memory that would otherwise be dispersed and largely be forgotten.  Khedoori preserves war coverage and places it within the physical world.  She chooses book form, which is a lasting and traditional mode of recording and passing on knowledge.

Untitled (Iraq Book Project) 2008-2010. Installation view, Hauser & Wirth London, 2010. © Rachel Khedoori. Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Peter Mallet.

A film installation and a photographic series are found upstairs in the American Room of the gallery.  Film is an important medium for the artist, who has returned to it throughout her career.  The photographic series is set in a natural Australian landscape at 5.00 am, while the film is set 12 hours later at 5.00 pm.  For the film installation, Khedoori returns to the device of the mirror to manipulate the moving image.  The film is projected onto a screen that meets a mirror at a 90 degree angle – causing the looped footage to appear to continually separate from itself as it plays.  The Hauser & Wirth gallery points out that the affect is much like a Rorschach ink blot test.  Yet, in this instance it is set in landscape and in motion.  This work allows the gallery visitor to encounter ambiguous, psychologically-tinged space.

Rachel Khedoori’s work has shown internationally since the mid-1990s.  In 2001, the artist’s high-profile solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland brought her work increased international attention.  Subsequently, Khedoori has taken part in several noteworthy group exhibitions.  In 2008, the artist was included in the traveling exhibition Visual Tactics or how pictures emerge, which opened at Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Seigen, Germany.  Khedoori’s work received a lot of attention in 2009 when she took part in the Venice Biennale’s Fare Mondi/Making Worlds exhibition and Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life: Part 2 at the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco.

Born in Sydney, Australia, Rachel Khedoori is the identical twin sister of fellow artist Toba Khedoori.  She currently lives and works in Los Angeles CA and is represented by Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner in New York.  Khedoori received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1988 and her MFA from the University of California in Los Angeles in 1994.

Untitled, 2010 (Film, 3:33 minutes). Installation view, Hauser & Wirth London, 2010.© Rachel Khedoori. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Peter Mallet.

Rachel Khedoori concludes at Hauser & Wirth in London on 31 July.  It marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK’s capital city.

M. Blash, Reel Image, "Go Forth" Commercial for Levi's, 2009.

In the spot filmmaker M. Blash created for Levi’s Jeans in 2009, Walt Whitman’s voice is like the Pied Piper’s pipe. “Come my tan-faced children, Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,” recites Whitman, played by an actor (an earlier Levi’s spot purportedly featured an actual recording of the poet). As he says this, the faces of slim, young, beautiful people turn or lean forward like they’ve been summoned; one woman with windswept blond hair and rosy cheeks looks as though she’s bracing herself for a fight. He continues:

Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger.

The young people begin to move, running through fields, scaling rocks and weaving through forests. Dusk approaches, and the “youthful sinewy races” converge, their silhouettes gliding across the screen in front of a still-blue sky. “So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,” says Whitman. “Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost.” There are fire works and shirtless dancing as it darkens, and the young bodies come together like the members of a euphoric hippie commune. “Have the elder races halted?” Whitman asks. “Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? All the past we leave behind.”

Ryan McGinley, known for his wispily androgynous photographs of young creatives, shot the accompanying Levi’s print campaign. I see one particular image, a black and white photograph of two twenty-something boys embracing a horse, each time I walk to the bakery in my largely Salvadoran neighborhood. It hangs on the inside wall of a mini bus shelter and, often, aging men and women who speak to each other only in Spanish sit in front of it.  Other times, my favorite panhandler, a tall, disheveled man who tells me baked goods are bad for me in hopes that I will give my money to him instead, lurks around McGinley’s sign. I don’t know what marketing strategy or loophole led this image  to this particular street, but the eerie, utopic youth culture that McGinley presents hangs right in the midst of the very people it excludes.

Ryan McGinley, "Tracy (Dripping)," 2009.

Anything utopic needs exclusivity, since creating an ideal community means shedding what doesn’t fit the ideal. Utopic ideals also need to be slippery; they can be imagined and represented but never attained, and that’s what makes them attractive.

Ryan McGinley understands utopia better than most. He’s a 21st Century artist who still has muses, and he’s mused these muses into scenarios and settings in which they withdraw from the world and exclusively invest in each other. In 2002, when he became the youngest artist to have a museum show at the Whitney, his photographs purportedly depicted an edgy, brash youth underground in New York but they did so in a way that was so romanticized and ephemeral that they felt like they’d flown in from an alternate universe. His images of Dash Snow the tagger-turned-art-star are especially compelling. Dash lived hard, fast and grittily, which made him muse-worthy but it’s not necessarily the hardness and grit that McGinley chose to present. “I love the idea of graffiti,” he told Ana Finel Honigman in 2003. “But I am not really excited by its esthetics. . . . I love the idea of a kid writing his name hundreds of thousands of times, over and over and over because he feels he needs to.” The Dash that McGinley presented over and over again had an immense, unbridled need for community. He existed above the surface of himself, drawing people to him with his hovering openness. “So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship.”

Ryan McGinley, photograph of Dash Snow

When journalist Ariel Levy shadowed McGinley and Dash Snow in 2007, she described the intimacy of their clique: “There is a physicality between these guys, in their photos and in life, that you usually only see among little kids.” Like most utopic fantasies McGinley creates, including those for Levi’s, adult inhibitions totally dissipate in his portrayals of Dash. All that matters is to constantly stay in motion and to move toward a collective future, bringing along the people who are young and beautiful. It’s never clear where that future is or what it represents.

“Pioneers! O pioneers!” wrote Walt Whitman in 1855. “Fresh and strong the world we seize.”

“Heroin, oh heroin, oh heroin,”  wrote McGinley for Vice Magazine in 2009, the year Dash died. “Taken the lives of so many great artists. Taken so many of my friends’ lives.” McGinley continued, remembering Dash’s “unconscious moving hand. He would be sitting there smoking cigarettes, writing his tag in the air.” It’s this weird collision of hopefulness, tragedy, beauty and listlessness that I think of now when I walk past the bus stop and see the two boys with their horse in the Levi’s “Go Forth!” ad that hangs where it doesn’t belong.

It’s pretty safe to say that Conceptual Art’s moment has come and gone. Now that we are living in a period in which virtually all art is expected to be “conceptual” in some way or another, it’s refreshing to look back at the origins of Conceptual practice. On Kawara is one of the leading figures of this movement; he is particularly known for his ongoing Today series―iconic canvases painted black, each bearing the date of its own particular creation in bold white block letters. In 1997, Kawara recontextualized seven of these austere works by placing them in kindergarten classrooms across the globe, a social project he titled Pure Consciousness. Since this project existed strictly as a social experiment, the current exhibition in the small overlook gallery of San Francisco Art Institute’s Walter and McBean Galleries modestly showcases the project’s associated ephemera, including a collection of booklets created to document it and the seven paintings themselves.

Pure Consciousness booklet image of kindergarteners in Bethlehem, Palestine, with seven Kawara date paintings from the Today series in background, laid over other booklets. Image courtesy of Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute.

Kawara is largely known for his sweeping but understated gestures that mark the passage of time. Sometimes these marks are diaristic, other times matter-of-fact. The Today paintings strike me as both―they are personal, in the sense that each is reminiscent of the artist’s hand and reflective of the way he spent a particular day of his life (following his own self-imposed requirement that each one be finished on that given day). But they are also universal, in the sense that anyone can imbue them with his or her own personal associations with that particular date. Aesthetically, they are stark and exact, appearing more like prints than paintings. In this way, Kawara flirts with Minimialism, as well as with the basic principles of graphic design.

Pure Consciousness borrows its title from a quote by Leo Tolstoy; it refers to the stillness of one’s sense of self in relation to the constant passage of time. It’s a Zen-like idea that advocates for paying attention to something as basic as time passing. The title also refers to the notion that children possess a “pure consciousness,” and are more open to absorbing the ideas and images they learn, hear, and observe. This, of course, is the beauty of the kindergarten classroom, the setting for this conceptual project.

The booklets included in the show document the bustling kindergarten classrooms, the seven paintings hung above the children’s heads like a row of clocks or single-day calendars. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of these photos is the similarity among these groups of five-year-olds, across the world. Their commonalities emphasize the universal ways we, as humans, measure the passage of time, as well as the international standardization of pedagogy.

The paintings depict January 1 to 7, 1997, and thus could be used to learn to count from one to seven, to learn the days of the week, to learn that January is the first month of the year, etc. Kawara has cleverly translated his signature obsession with the methodical recognition of time passing into a tool that could be—and probably was—used by these students and the teachers who shaped them.

This project also makes an unstated connection between the standardization of education and that of art practice. Thumbing through the booklets, the Bauhaus immediately came to my mind—specifically the idea that design, art, and architecture all have important functions in society. Modernism, on a larger scale, championed a particular aesthetic as the most sophisticated and evolved. We are now able to look back on the rise and fall of that movement and see it as a specific perspective. Yet there was a time when Modernism was the final word in art. This observation, I hope, might challenge us to see education as an ever-evolving system and experiment, much the same way that art has always been.

Because the nature of this project is so purely conceptual, I am moved to wonder why it would be shown in a gallery context. As an exhibition, “On Kawara: Pure Consciousness at 19 Kindergartens” does not lend much new meaning to the work itself, except perhaps to bring Kawara’s gesture full circle. It began in an art context (his studio), moved out into the world (the global kindergarten classrooms), and is now back in the realm of art (the gallery). Seeing the paintings hung in a row in the gallery, as they were in the classrooms, is a poetic reminder that this gallery also exists in a school―SFAI. I wonder if Kawara would appreciate the implication that art school, too, is a system always worth re-imagining.

Robert Heinecken, "Time (1st Group)," 1969. Courtesy Cherry and Martin.

Hugh W. Diamond, a 19th century English psychiatrist, began using photography as a therapeutic strategy nearly as soon as photography existed. Diamond would photograph the mentally ill patients he worked with and then confront them with the resulting likenesses, confident that the radical power of reality would jar them into recognizing their own delusions. He once wrote of a patient he called A.D., who believed herself to be royalty:

Her subsequent amusement in seeing the portraits [of herself in various stages of her illness] and her frequent conversation about them was the first decided step  in her gradual improvement.

Diamond believed his strategy worked—no one can argue with a picture.

But argue with pictures is practically all artists have done over the past 60 years, ever since pop cut into the ego of abstract expressionism and advertisements became as visually adventurous as art. They Have Not the Art to Argue with Pictures, the current exhibition at Cherry and Martin Gallery, takes as its premise the immense distrust that 20th and 21st century artists have for the photographic image. It also probes the indulgent fascination that always seems to accompany that distrust.  They Have Not the Art primarily mines the work of Robert Heinecken, the late California artist whose gritty, un-apologetically risque reinterpretations of magazine imagery exposed but also seemed in awe of pop culture’s sexiness.

Robert Heinecken, "Revised Magazine: Jungle Prints / Cuts / Porno," 1993. Courtesy Cherry and Martin.

In Revised Magazine: Jungle Prints / Cuts / Porno (1993), Heinecken juxtaposes images from mainstream ads–a black and white one that says “Be what you want, but always be you” and another of a model in a tiger print top–with blatantly erotic images of women painted with tiger stripes or clad in jungle print jump suits. The resulting tangle of bodies is crass and even cheap; there’s nothing lyrical about the way Heinecken cuts into and overlays images. In another collage, Hite/Hustler Fashion Beaver Hunt #1 (1981), a stately woman holds a blue fan and stands between two plush arm chairs. She would have been wearing a white sheath if Heinecken hadn’t replaced it with the cut out of a tan, nude female torso haphazardly wrapped in black and white rope. Instead, she wears a naked body.

Heinecken’s images feel dirty, not because they’re in poor taste or needlessly provocative, but because they literally do “dirty up” the sleek surface of ads in a way that doesn’t invalidate the sensuality of glossy imagery but rather follows that sensuality through to its natural conclusions. If Heinecken aimed to combat the packaged, deceptively complete aura of 20th century advertisements, he did so by exposing and then re-complicating their subtext.

Robert Heinecken, "Revised Magazine: Maidenform," 1993. Courtesy Cherry and Martin.

Subtext literacy is what the exhibition’s ungainly title,  They Have Not the Art to Argue with Pictures, refers to. It’s a phrase from Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book, Understanding Media, written after Heinecken had already begun his long career as an art-maker. McLuhan suggests that pictures can’t be understood in the sequential way most have been taught to read text and that those who have the tools to argue with contemporary imagery are those who understand that media collapses sequences into each other and presents a thrust of emotional energy meant to manipulate.

Heinecken had the tools he needed to argue, but not to conquer. The exciting and frightening aspect of his work is that it’s endlessly caught in the web of its source material. Even though Heinecken breaks into imagery, superimposing pin-up girls over domesticated car ads and cutting body parts out of magazine spreads, he never breaks out of it. But breaking out isn’t the point; needing to argue is.

They Have Not the Art to Argue with Pictures, which closes on July 17th, also traces Heinecken’s legacy through the work of a number of younger artists, including Erik Frydenborg, Nicolás Guagnini, Wade Guyton, Leigh Ledare, Amanda Ross-Ho and Collier Schorr.

This week, the Christian Marclay: Festival will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. The exhibition celebrates many of the artist’s graphic scores for performance and will take the form of multiple daily performances by individual musicians and vocalists. The Whitney has pulled together some of country’s finest Avant-garde musicians to play more than a dozen of Marclay’s scores dated from 1985 to 2010. Some of the works to be performed include, ChalkBoard (2010), Covers (2007-10) and Screen Play (2005). Many of the pieces take the form of a physical art object produced from videos, photographs, found images, and readymade objects which are intended to elicit a musical response from the performers.

Christian Marclay, Screen Play, 2005. Courtesy the artist. © Christian Marclay

Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay is internationally known for his innovative artworks that explore the intersection of image and sound. Over the past several decades, the artist has combined performance, collage, sculpture, installation, photography and video to create unique work that provides commentary on many aspects of contemporary culture, while continuing to push the boundaries of visual art and music. Marclay is often recognized as an early pioneer of turntablism, as he first began to use turntables and physically altered records as instruments for performances in the late 1970’s.

Festival begins this Thursday, July 1st with two pieces performed by Min Xiao-Fen and Elliot Sharp at 1pm and Ulrich Kieger at 2:30pm. The exhibition will continue through September 26, 2010.