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.

Eric Holubow "Downstaging Uptown"; 2009; Uptown Theater; Chicago, IL; 33 in. x 60 in. Courtesy of Chicago Cultural Center.

Walking through Chicago Cultural Center – past the Doric columns of the Grand Entrance, beneath the 38-foot wide Tiffany Dome, and beside the ornate marble of Preston Bradley Hall – to the gallery featuring Eric Holubow’s photographs is like a visual confrontation of the before and after effects of society’s collapse. Displayed within the vast Neo-Classical halls of the Cultural Center, Holubow’s highly aestheticized images of crumbling opulence are a weary reminder that America’s hard times are far from over.

The show, titled “In Decay – Stitching America’s Ruins,” contains images of grand architectural interiors; cavernous theaters, expansive churches and synagogues, and cathedral-like auto factories scattered throughout the mid-west and rust belt, all captured in late moments of decrepitude. Holubow’s images are strikingly beautiful; full of luminous colors, dynamic compositions, and extraordinary details that highlight the breadth and magnificence of these ambitiously crafted spaces as well as the monumentality of their decline. Wide-angle shots and large-scale prints encapsulate the magnitude of his subjects; structures that once served the cultural and spiritual wishes or economic needs of the communities for which they were built. Ultimately, these buildings are corpses and the photographer’s work is a record of their deaths.

St. Stephen’s Great Hall (2008) shows a hollowed shell of a cathedral. The stone grey interior is gutted of its pews, leaving behind an empty portico. The expansive drum, dome, and oculus over the nave harken back to the Pantheon, though the century old Chicago church looks far more decrepit than the Roman temple built two thousand year ago. Modeled after the idealized architecture of an ancient empire, St. Stephen’s represents the defunct historical aspirations of American society at the turn of the 20th Century.

"Hollowed Ark" 2011; Agudas Achim Synagogue; Chicago, IL; 16 in. x 24 in. Courtesy of Chicago Cultural Center.

Wall texts displayed beside each picture relay the histories of the structures depicted, from glorious, innovative, or utopic origins to disrepair and abandonment, revealing the migration of communities and economies that happened along the way. Chicago’s Agudas Achim Synagogue, photographed in Hallowed Arc (2011), for instance, was once a lavish place of worship for the Jewish residents of Uptown, a neighborhood in the northern part of the city. As those families moved to suburban villages like Skokie and Rogers Park, the synagogue’s rainbow colored Byzantine arc, stained glass windows, and gold mosaics fell into decay. The image itself is of a lofty vertical interior that was clearly gorgeous in its heyday, though now the space is a ruinous mess littered with debris.

With an emphasis on crumbling buildings that were designed in the styles of various imperial aesthetics like the Byzantine and the Roman, the exhibition reflects the hubristic self-image of the “American Century.” Clearly these buildings were created to reflect principles of prosperity and stability by mimicking the grand styles of past empires. This impulse becomes uniquely American when high concept design trickled down to Roaring 20’s movie theaters, such as the palatial Uptown Theater shown in Downstaging Uptown (2009). Like a Parisian opera house from the days of Marie Antoinette, the Baroque-inspired theater is dripping with lavish ornamentation. Shot from the vantage point of the stage, the slight lens distortion depicts a panorama of vacant seats bulging at the center.

"Room with a View" 2008; Packard Auto Plant; Detroit, MI; 16 in. x 24 in. Courtesy of Chicago Cultural Center.

Images such as Room with a View (2008) and Engine Room of Bethlehem Steel (2009) – respectively showing the decomposing, overgrown, and exposed factory floor of a Detroit Packard Auto Plant, and the silent rusted engine room of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation – are reminders of the now defunct industrial giants that powered the post-WWII and Gilded Age boom eras. Hartsville Nuclear Power Plant (2010), a picture of a half-finished cylinder made of concrete and rebar sitting in a pool of filmy water, is like an oversize postcard from an industrial future that was gone before it happened. Holubow’s photographs are documents of these places and serve as reminders that powerful institutions rise and fall, even when they are housed in buildings designed to stand the test of time.

“In Decay – Stitching America’s Ruins” will be on view at Chicago Cultural Center in Chicago, IL through July 8, 2012.

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.

Spread from Paul Thek notebook #63, 1974; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph © Estate of George Paul Thek; Photograph Jörg Lohse

As part of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, approaches to translate the subjective experience into the artistic process were explored in In the Shadow of the Hand and Back to the Things Themselves. Questions were raised on the nuances and distinctions between notions of the subjective, personal and self-indulgent. These borders disintegrate in the exhibition Paul Thek – ‘If you don’t like this book you don’t like me.’, on show at The Modern Institute till 2 June 2012, where fragments of the life of an artist, as narrated through pages of notebooks, become a part of the works on display.

Paul Thek; Untitled (cityscape with twin towers), 1972; Acrylic on canvas; 241.5 x 165 cm; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph Ruth Clark

In the past two decades, there has been an explosion of exhibitions and publications on Paul Thek, perhaps as part of an effort to re-insert him into the history of art. Though well-received in Europe during the 1970s, he died in relative obscurity in 1988 after his return to the United States. Thek’s name is often cited in relation to the Technological Reliquaries or “meat pieces”, a series of works made in the 1960s where body parts appearing as chunks of flesh were presented in geometric vitrines, a revelry of one’s fleshly mortality within the confines of the composed exterior of minimalism. While these sculptures were solid and dense, he also made works from ephemeral materials with collaborators, creating immersive environments that lasted for the duration of the exhibition. While little documentation remains of these installations, about 80 of Thek’s notebooks were retrieved and carefully preserved after his passing.

Paul Thek - If you don’t like this book you don’t like me. Installation view, The Modern Institute, Glasgow; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph Ruth Clark

The Technological Reliquaries are materially absent in the show. Knowledge of it is acquired through the supplementary reading materials provided. The artist’s notebooks, usually occupying this secondary position for signposts to an artist’s intentions, instead forms the core of the show, presented in the main artery of the gallery space alongside several of his paintings, and photographs by Peter Hujar in the gallery’s upper level.

Bust of Tomb Figure (Paul Thek) 1967/2010; Pigmented ink print; Sheet 51 x 40.6 cm, image 47 x 32 cm; Photograph Peter Hujar; Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York

His notebooks reveal repeated scribbles of self-motivational phrases to meticulous lists and copying of religious texts.  Illustrations, drawings and watercolor works suggest a mind filled with both doubt and idealism, on the possibility of fulfillment within one’s earthly existence and a continual search for a higher spiritual being. Enclosed in vitrines, most of the notebooks are spread open to specific pages. Several remain shut. While the open pages disclose paradoxes, exuberance and anxieties that intimate the intentions behind the hybrid approach to the form and style of his works, it is the pages withheld from view that provokes one to consider the subjective voice of the hand behind how one is to like the book, and Paul Thek.

Cover of Paul Thek Notebook #68, 1978; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph © Estate of George Paul Thek; Photograph Jörg Lohse

Installation view of Back to the Things Themselves (Lesley Punton & Judy Spark). Image courtesy of Lesley Punton.

Back to the Things Themselves, on show at The Briggait, presents artworks by Lesley Punton (LP) and Judy Spark (JS) who both explore possibilities and limits of translating one’s lived experience of the environment, and the potential for connections between a subjective experience with universal ways of knowing the world.

Magdalen Chua (MC) had a conversation with Punton and Spark, as a second part of a feature on exhibitions presented during the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art that place emphasis on the process of collaboration and the subjective experience within artistic practice.

Judy Spark, Like punctuation (symphoricarphos), Graphite on paper, 2012, (with Lesley Punton White out receding – Carn Dearg to right). Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

MC: Shall we start off by talking about your individual practices?

LP: My work has always been concerned with landscape issues. In recent years, through the process of walking, it has become more explicit in relation to my lived experience of places that are usually wild and rarely urban. In the exhibition, I have tried to create a diverse conversation between different pieces of work, exploring the limits of experience; and polarities – of night and day, light and dark, and time and duration.

Lesley Punton, Schiehallion, silver gelatin 5 x 4 contact print made after placing a pinhole camera in the summit cairn, pointing South, whilst bivying on the summit of Schiehallion to record the duration of the hours of darkness of midsummer night ’09, 2009-12, with Jim Hamlyn. Image courtesy of artist.

In the past, a lot of the lived experience of my work resulted in long and complicated processes of making. There are works that are directly durational in their actual making, such as Flurry, which marks time. A participatory work is Schiehallion where Jim Hamlyn and I made a pinhole photograph that recorded the duration of midsummer’s night that year at the summit of the mountain. These have a very direct relationship to experiences whilst actually in land. Recent works respond more to reflection and recollections of those experiences. Some have literary connections. Gravesend is the place where the narration of ‘Heart of Darkness’ starts, with Marlowe sitting and recounting the tale of his experience with Kurtz up the Congo.

Lesley Punton, Gravesend, graphite on paper, 2010. Image courtesy of artist.

MC: Could you talk about the Duration pieces? They make me think of a journey, where the days refer to the duration, or the process of making the work.

LP: The duration refers to polar night and polar day and the idea of time as something that is not quite fixed. I’ve always been interested in aspects of time – deep time and geological time – probably from the experience of spending a lot of time in hills.

Lesley Punton, Duration 2, oil & gesso on board, 2010-12 (photo credit L Punton). Image courtesy of artist.

MC: When did you start looking at the idea of the lived experience and venturing into remote places?

LP: I’ve always believed that you would make something that has some relationship to how you connect with the world. The intensity of the experience of walking and climbing mountains was something important and I became a bit obsessed with it. It felt unnatural not to do something with it.

Judy Spark, The things themselves, Two FM radios / transmitters with digital soundtracks, 2012. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

JS: My route to making work about lived experience was through a concern with mechanisms like environmentalism that are established to get people to recognize the value of their surroundings. Environmentalism of any kind – whether related to ecology, renewable energies etc., – depends upon the scientific mechanisms that have created the problems that we’re facing in the first place. In the last 5 or 6 years, I’ve begun trying to find ways to think about how people engage with their surroundings. Conversely to Lesley, my landscapes might be right under my feet. It tends to be urban because that’s the environment I’m treading on all the time, and that’s how things come to consciousness.

MC: Could you explain the basis of your philosophical approach. It seems to be about being within a certain environment, perceiving what is around you, and letting these surface.

Judy Spark, Instructions for creating a gap, Printed text, 2011 – 12. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

JS: A big influence was a Master’s in Environmental Philosophy in 2006 which broadened my thinking. There doesn’t seem to be much between the poles of not really caring about the place that you inhabit, and having a code of rules that are scientifically directed on how you should behave. We’re not used to working out anything in-between that is more personal. Trying to find a subjective response to things might actually turn out to have wider relevance than “just my own personal subjective response”. I became interested in the phenomenology movement and the idea of trying to describe actions or processes in a way that allows people to find something more direct and new. I think there are parallels with more indigenous or Buddhist experiences of the world which I can’t be a part of. I’d love to be, but I would only be putting my own Western perception onto them.

Judy Spark, Listening in the gap, Bound, printed text. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

MC: I had a conversation with Sarah Forrest and Virginia Hutchison, and we spoke about the subjective experience and values. When there is an objective framework such as environmentalism, it is easy to subscribe to it because it is clear what kind of values there are. When we move to the subjective, it opens the question of whether there are still values within this realm.

LP: As much as I might prioritise a lived experience and the subjective, my relationship with the audience is more objective. I’m always looking for a distancing mechanism. The act of translation in the artwork gives the potential for objectivity or a poetics of space, which the viewer could enter into with their own subjective experience. If I thought for one second that what I was making was self-indulgent work, I would run for the hills, literally. At the same time I have no interest in creating distanced work. While my work might be incredibly minimal, I hope that there is a poetic layer that subverts that sparseness.

JS: The notion of value is an interesting one because of the distancing that you talk about. I know that I have a bit of a drum to bang in some way, but I can’t use my artwork for that and I wouldn’t want to try. It really is about putting something out there and if it allows viewers to think about their own response to things, then great.

Lesley Punton, Flurry, silverpoint & gesso on paper, 2008. Image courtesy of artist.

MC: How did you meet and what led you to decide to collaborate on this exhibition.

LP: A mutual friend was planning on hillwalking in 2004 and we started regular weekend walks.

JS: We did talk about the possibility of showing work together for years and have had many conversations. When we secured the show, I became very busy. Lesley has a young son and we both work. The collaborative aspect probably starts now in the debriefing of what we’ve done.

LP: As we have individual practices, it was probably important that we had our time to make our own work.

JS: Now that we have put our work in proximity like this, maybe this is the beginning of the next stage

LP: Walking is a very interesting way to collaborate and to build friendships. There are extended periods of silence and these are different from the conversations you have when you meet somebody in the pub. You actively experience something together. I have made some works where I have collaborated with Jim Hamlyn, my partner. The notion of collaboration is still quite new for me in the actual making of artworks together. Up until very recently I’ve not formally collaborated.

Judy Spark, Orrery (gallium aparine), Graphite on paper, 2012. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

JS: I’m usually a very isolated practitioner. I teach in an art school and that’s maybe where I get a lot of my energy. Collaboration is something I haven’t made a decision not to do. It seems to be closely connected to that thing of value. Maybe if I meet another artist whose work or practice, or something they say to me about my work or practice, chimes in a way. Maybe it’s to do with being a friend first.

LP:  I think collaborations grow organically. I don’t think you can just put two people together and say collaborate, do it now. It doesn’t work that way.

MC: Perhaps you need a lot of trust. It starts off from conversations and knowing that those conversations can take place even without the art.

LP: …and equality as well. If there’s an imbalance there, I don’t think you can collaborate, and that’s where your idea of trust comes in.

Reception 7, 2011. Digital c-print. Edition of 3 + 2 AP. 8 x 12 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

What makes a tale “twice told”? For Nathaniel Hawthorne, who published a collection called Twice Told Tales, these were stories that had already lived one life by having been previously printed.  And for William Shakespeare, who coined the phrase, a “twice-told tale” was the most tedious tale of the lot, borrowed and uninspired. Shakespeare, however, had not met Stephanie Washburn.

Reception 2, 2011. Digital c-print. Edition of 3 + 2 AP. 30 x 40 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

In the case of Washburn’s “Twice Told,” on view at the Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles, the tales that repeat belong to the endless stream of images and narratives available through the television set.  Washburn, a painter, breaks the fourth wall by reacting to this stream, turning the television on and smearing her screen with not just paint, but everyday household items like butter, tape, bread, and potatoes. She then sets up a Hasselblad digital camera, and snaps a picture.

Reception 10, 2011. Digital c-print. Edition of 3 + 2 AP. 15 x 15 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

The resulting images, which Washburn calls “television drawings,” don’t look much like drawings; nor is the television screen easy to spot. From a distance, many look like abstract expressionist paintings. The spaghetti strewn across the screen in Reception 2, 2011, and Reception 9, 2011, initially calls to mind the gestures of Jackson Pollock, although thoughts of the fleshy materiality and subversive humor of many 1970s feminist artists follow quickly.

Reception 3, 2011. Digital c-print. Edition of 3 + 2 AP. 30 x 40 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

For many of the images, including Reception 4, 5, and 13 (all 2011), it’s almost impossible to make out any specific background image beyond a field of color. The television’s tell, of course, is its glow, and that glow permeates Washburn’s images: warm in some and cool in others, at times penetrating swathes of paint and at other times merely strengthening the shadows of dimensional objects.

Reception 12, 2011. Digital c-print. Edition of 3 + 2 AP. 12 x 18 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

This interplay of the television image and Washburn’s interventions occurs not just formally (in terms of light and shadow, or scale), but figuratively. In Reception 1, 2011, a rubber-gloved hand creeps onto the scene from the bottom left of the image; blending almost perfectly with a group of three hands in the background, except for the fact that the intervening hand (the gloved hand) has a deep shadow to emphasize its physicality.

Reception 1, 2011. Digital c-print. Edition of 3 + 2 AP. 15 x 15 inches. Image couresy of the artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

The beauty and power of Washburn’s work comes from how effortlessly the images marry both formal and conceptual references to a variety of traditionally “opposed” relationships: digital and physical, visceral and cerebral, touch and sight. It’s no wonder that the series is called “Reception” – Washburn’s photographs don’t just rework old narratives and images into new forms, but challenge us to consider our role as media consumers in the 21st century.

“Twice Told” is on view at the Mark Moore Gallery in Culver City, Los Angeles, through May 19, 2012.

Nina Katchadourian, "Lavatory Self-Portrait in the Flemish Style #18-19," 2011. C-print. Edition of 8. Diptych: 7.157 x 6 inches each.

The thing about traveling on an airplane is that we take for granted how phenomenally absurd it is. There we sit, unfazed, hurdling through space at 500 miles per hour, 30,000 feet above the ground in a metal tube, surrounded by complete strangers whom in all likelihood we will never see again. There is also the unspoken airplane etiquette that we all hope the stranger sitting next to us will follow: please don’t talk, don’t move, don’t get up…basically please do everything you can to appear as though you don’t exist. With these restrictions, an airplane in flight is a very difficult place to do anything more than sleep, read, stare out the window or watch movies with only the most watered-down content. Unless you are Nina Katchadourian.

For Seat Assignment, her fifth solo show at Catherine Clark Gallery, Katchadourian culled from a body of work made on more than seventy flights over the past two years. Now, artists reading this might be terrified by having their workspace confined to the miniscule square-footage of an airline seat and the plane’s lavatory. For Katchadourian, it is a pragmatic opportunity to bring her “studio” with her. Using only her camera phone and the materials at hand, she creates everything from improvised classical Flemish self-portraits to miniature composed landscapes and worlds.

Nina Katchadourian. Excerpt from the Extreme Sports series, 2010. From the Seat Assignment series.

As its title suggests, the series Lavatory Self-Portrait in the Flemish Style uses objects such as inflatable neck pillows, napkins, bits of plastic and whatever else Katchadourian has on hand to make self-portraits in the style of classical Flemish paintings. Window Seat Suprematism references the fundamental geometric forms of the early 20th-century Russian movement. The images in the series, taken of the planes’ wings through the window, create compelling minimalist, geometric compositions that even Malevich could approve of.

Nina Katchadourian, "Meteor," from the Disasters series, 2010. From the Seat Assignment series.

In-flight magazines supply some of the most fruitful material. One work from Landscapes uses black sweater lint to turn a snow-covered mountain into a smoldering volcano. In Disasters, pretzel crumbs become a devastating landslide off mountain road. Black lint makes another appearance, with the addition of other various detritus, in Birds of New Zealand, adorning the heads and bodies of exotic birds and giving them an even more elaborate flare. The strangest thing about these images is how believable the compositions are. While it may be obvious that the pretzels on the road are indeed pretzels and not rocks, or that a bird does not have a cashew shaped appendage on its head in real life, the objects give a genuine moment of pause, plus the feeling that while absurd, it could be real.

Nina Katchadourian, "Wigeon" from the Birds of New Zealand series, 2011. From the Seat Assignment series.

Katchadourian views a situation that most of us find claustrophobic, boring and tedious as a challenge to highlight both the fantastic and mundane aspects of air travel. The sense of humor and improvisational genius that make up Seat Assignment exemplify an artist setting certain parameters for herself and successfully working within them to create work that is both complex and light hearted.

Seat Assignment will be on view at Catherine Clark Gallery until May 26, 2012.

Wearing has been very attracted to the lives of others and seems interested in breaking down the common, frosty perception of strangers in the public realm. Prelude (2000) shows video footage of a vagabond who Wearing had filmed just before her death. The audio narrative, touchingly told by the deceased’s twin sister, tells of her struggles with the bereavement while images of her sister smiling and flirting with the camera play on. Much of the artist’s work contravenes against everyday apathy with the telling of such personal stories. The artist put out a local ad in Confess All On Video. Don’t Worry, You Will Be In Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian…(1994) and a series of videos is its result. Admittedly, some confessions are less inviting and a bit uninspiring. The work’s purpose ends at the relief or amusement of the confessor, and they were clearly chosen only for their racy content. Yet, others draw you in.  One of the most poignant confessions comes from a man in a scraggly black wig and heavy red lipstick who reveals heavy-heartedly his enjoyment in wearing women’s clothing and the pain it causes his loved ones.

Gillian Wearing, Dancing in Peckham, 1994, Colour video with sound, 25 min. Courtesy of the Artist; Maureen Paley, London.

How are we expected to act in public? Everyday public interaction is certainly a collection of learned behaviors based on expectation. Wearing’s Dancing in Peckham (1994), pokes fun at such conformist social expectations. In the video-performance Wearing famously dances in public (vigorously) to a beat that exists solely in her head. The iconic image may be familiar, but one might be surprised to learn that the work was not as much a social experiment, but rather, a re-enactment, inspired by an actual woman whom the artist witnessed in a similar unstaged performance.

Probably the most haunting and beautiful series is the array of massive family portraits lining the walls of the upper gallery. They seem both sentimental and idealistic on the surface, yet are completely unsettling. We see an uncle, a father, a daughter, a mother – the portraits of anyone’s family, scrounged like forgotten ghosts from a dusty, abandoned shoe box. Generational features appear, revealing that these are the faces of the artist’s family…right? The doll-like faces bear unnaturally smooth swathes of skin, and imperfectly aligned eyeholes a divulge grotesque, silicon artificiality. Beneath the mask, a repeated flicker of life peaks through: the gold brown eyes of Gillian Wearing. The Album series are really self-portraits, the artist exploring her own identity by familial impersonation with the aid of realistic masks.

Gillian Wearing, Self Portrait as My Mother Jean Gregory, 2003, framed black and white print. Courtesy the artist.

Wearing’s personal display is also universal, effectively evoking thoughts of one’s own aesthetic ancestry. In browsing through ancient family photographs, who of us has not had the uncanny shock of seeing one’s own face staring back? Feeling both violated and enchanted, we realize that the time and place captured in film belongs to strange doppelganger we have never met. This person is connected to you, looks like you, but is not you.

Gillian Wearing, Self Portrait of Me Now In Mask, 2011, framed c-type print. Courtesy the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Maureen Paley, London.

Wearing also wears masks of her own face, masquerading as herself in her past lives – or current ones. Self Portrait at 17 Years Old (2003) and Self Portrait at Three Years Old (2004) reveal a second leaf to theses universal inquiries about identity. If we are as different as we are similar to those families from which we descend, it is certain that we are also different people at different ages. The impossibility of meeting oneself as a three-year-old thirty years on is as impossible as knowing oneself as a three-year-old thirty years on. Most interestingly, Wearing also chose to pose as her contemporaneous self: Self Portrait of Me Now in Mask (2011) a gesture as simple as it is complex, (upon which a psychoanalyst could write the most tiring of books.) But perhaps Gillian Wearing wearing a mask of Gillian Wearing doesn’t seem as satirical and ironic as before, we are all strangers to our outer selves, the masks we wear everyday might be as strangely unfamiliar as those uncanny blood relatives who somehow cloned us before we even existed.

David Hockney, "A Bigger Splash," 1967. Acrylic on canvas. Collection of the Tate Museum, London.

The New York City Department of Education drew all kinds of mockery last week after someone leaked a list of 50-plus banned words off of one of its Request for Proposals (RFP).[1] In this case, the RFP had been sent to a variety of publishers the city hoped might revamp its standardized English and math tests.

The banned words were meant to spare New York students from topics “controversial among the adult population, [...] overused in standardized tests or textbooks, [or...] biased against (or toward) some group of people,” but the NYC D o’ E found itself widely criticized for being overly ‘politically correct.’[2] Perhaps the most damning accusations were those that insisted that such tests would remove a child’s ability to think critically when pushed outside his or her comfort zone. The Department of Education’s statement indicated that it feared these words might “distract” students.

List of subjects to be banned on standardized tests in the city of New York, issued by the New York City Department of Education, March 31, 2012.

We here at #hashtags whole-heartedly agree. Who needs the distraction of a phrase like “homes with swimming pools” when you’ve been raised without one? One need only look at the work of David Hockney for an example of the dangers of this kind of confrontation. After over twenty years in England, Hockney visited California in the mid-‘60s and was so struck by the plethora of pools that the object became a regular feature in his work, from its first appearance in the corner of California Art Collector, 1964 to its presence in composite Polaroids like Brian Los Angeles Sunday 21st March 1982, 1982.

And the story deteriorates from there – instead of sticking to images of unattainable, unpopulated swimming pools amidst modern architectural surroundings, Hockney also found himself “distracted” by the eroticism of the bodies that moved in and out of the water – in his case, male bodies.

David Hockney, "Brian Los Angeles Sunday 21st March 1982," 1982. Composite Polaroid.

Yes, when it comes to depicting the limpid and chlorinated pools of the Southern Californian upper-crust, Hockney’s body of work remains proof that still waters run deep. God forbid that any child with a New York public-school education be forced to meditate on the socio-economic differences between homes with private swimming pools and homes without, the relationship between the swimming pool and the history of integration and race relations, or the swimming pool as a site of sexuality and eroticism. You never know when that child might end up embracing his or her new relationship to such an object and re-shaping its cultural narrative. [3]

Jennifer Loeber. From the series "Cruel Story of Youth." Courtesy of the artist.

For me, Jennifer Loeber’s new body of work – Cruel Story of Youth – nods conceptually to both Jim Goldberg’s iconic Raised by Wolves and Joel Sternfeld’s Sweet Earth – Experimental Utopias in America. Loeber’s pictures document the environs and teenagers of Rowe Camp, an institution tucked away in the mountains of Massachusetts that has hosted summer camps for teens aged 15 to 18 for over eighty years. The stereotypical power play between campers and counselors – a seemingly favored premise for cheesy movies – stands in stark contrast to Rowe Camp, where the program is self-governed by its teenage participants. While both Goldberg and Sternfeld chronicle communities as, more or less, outsiders, Loeber was herself a camper at Rowe years ago, a perspective that sheds an interesting light on both the impetus for this project and the resulting pictures.

Documenting subcultures and fringe societies is nothing new for Loeber, who began exploring these communities during her undergraduate studies. In 2007, her fascination with this subject matter manifest in both a film documentary – Fish Kill Flea – and series of pictures, in which she examines the eccentric culture of a flea-market community based in the Dutchess Mall, a ramshackle shopping center in upstate New York. Her intimate encounter with this unconventional community prompted Loeber to reflect on her time at Rowe Camp. She explains, “[t]he intensity of that communal experience was unmatched by any other in my life, even milestones like dorm living and my first apartment with friends. Being allowed such unparalleled freedoms at an impressionable age, and feeling such a palpable sense of belonging, made an indelible impact.”

Jennifer Loeber. From the series "Cruel Story of Youth." Courtesy of the artist.

Loeber’s status as both alumnus and outsider – and the interplay of these divergent positions – is revealed in these photographs. Many of the pictures document the typical scenes of summer camp; friends lounging, various projects in progress and memorable sites. These images conjure up our own moments of summer adventure and that first glimpse of independence. Those pictures where Loeber’s own longing and identification with her subjects abut her acknowledgement as other resonate most strongly with me. The head-on portrait of a young woman captures the impenetrable, almost defiant gaze characteristic of teenage girls; we are now the recipients of an expression we were once all too familiar with giving ourselves. Her almost furtive picture of a ritualistic gathering, shot through the brush, further demonstrates her status as visitor, reliving experiences and moments that were once her own from afar.

You can stay apprised of Loeber’s projects through her website.

Saul Leiter, Red Umbrella, c. 1958, Chromogenic Print, 14 x 11 inches, © Saul Leiter Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

‘It’s just too much, don’t you think?’ asks Saul Leiter as he walks around his own exhibition, on view until April 15th at Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen. The video documenting Leiter’s reaction accompanies over 400 photographs and paintings that fill the soaring spaces of this re-purposed industrial complex, now a centre for contemporary art and photography. With room after room after room of images that riff on favoured themes and compositions, it’s a serious question. But it’s also part of Leiter’s characteristic modesty. After a lifetime in relative obscurity, his recent fame—following a series of shows at Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, from which almost all the works come, and the Steidl publication Saul Leiter: Early Color—must be overwhelming, or at least a little bewildering.

Saul Leiter, Snow, 1960 © Saul Leiter Courtesy: Saul Leiter, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter, Straw Hat, ca. 1955. © Saul Leiter, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

Leiter was born in Pittsburgh in 1923, and came to New York on a midnight bus at the age of 23. The city offered a new start, removed from his Jewish orthodox upbringing, and, it would seem, a lifetime of visual inspiration. Largely self-taught, his first love was painting, and his affinity not only to the movements that defined the era, abstract expressionism and colour field painting, but also to Picasso, Mondrian and Vuillard is evident in both paintings and photographs. Though the paintings are interesting in relation to the photographs, the blocks of vivid colour and flattened, geometric compositions take on a different dynamism when cropped from New York streets.

Saul Leiter, Mondrian Worker, 1954 © Saul Leiter Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter, Through Boards, ca. 1957 © Saul Leiter Courtesy: Saul Leiter, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Leiter’s photographs speak not only to the dominant aesthetic concerns of the time, but also, and with arresting elegance and agility, to the newfound capacity of colour photography to depict everyday life. For Leiter, these are often literally reflections, found in urban mirrors and windows, and punctuated by recurring motifs: hats, umbrellas, shoes. These stylish accessories, which bely the rise of consumer culture, extend into Leiter’s formal work as a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, and more personal images of his long-time partner and once-model Soames Bantry.

Saul Leiter, Shopping, ca. 1953 © Saul Leiter Courtesy: Saul Leiter, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter, Soames Bantry, Nova, 1960 © Saul Leiter. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

While Lieter has continued make pictures, he’s resisted the trend for large scale work, and  a gallery of recent prints is only vaguely discernable as contemporary—more so by a perceptible lack of the period style that graces the earlier work. Like the photographs recently unearthed by Vivian Maier, Leiter’s work, particularly his color images from the 1950s and ‘60s, has set curators and photo-historians clambering to show his pictures and adjust the canon to accommodate his achievements. But Leiter, of course, is very much alive and involved in this process, and his humorously misanthropic personality undercuts the institutional efforts to claim him as living legend:  ‘Maybe I’ll go back to being a failure,’ he quips in one interview, ‘it was a nice time.’

Dana Verkouteren's rendering of Gregory G. Katsas speaking in front of the Supreme Court Justices in Washington, March 26, 2012.

Driving home on March 28, the last day of the SCOTUS affordable health care hearings, I had the radio on and heard interviews with two or three female picketers who had set up outside the Supreme Court. I haven’t been able  to find the transcript of what I heard, but I remember it as one of those “can you tell who’s on what side” stories — like the one NPR did months ago, comparing the fiscally-obsessed language of a Tea Partier with that of a Wall Street Occupier. The similarity that struck me most between these SCOTUS picketers was the use of “I” and “my”: “my Constitutional right,” “my health,” “I have the freedom.” In an Associated Press piece I read later, a woman said of the health care act, “It is the epitome of being in my face and telling me what I can and can’t do for the rest of my life.”

The “I” and the “my” feel embarrassing: people speaking about what they want, and what they feel they deserve, but doing so in language that aligns them to “a side.” On both sides, the “I” and “my” seem in service to bigger red vs. blue, conservative vs. liberal interests, and, at least in sound bites, the speakers don’t seem aware of how unspecific their “I” sounds.

Leigh Ledare, who became notorious on a very small scale (he’s only had a few solo shows, some of them outside of the U.S., none in L.A. until now) for using his over-intimate relationship with his exceptionally uninhibited mother as his subject, has work at The Box gallery in L.A. right now. And though everything in his fairly extensive exhibition is in some way or another “confessional,” all you understand about the artist’s wants or likes has to do with his voracious interest in other people — he wants, or likes, to know about those who are or have been close to him.

Leigh Ledare, still from The Gift, 2008.

The Gift, fragments of a softcore film Ledare’s former-dancer mother made with friends, plays in a side room at The Box. Ledare’s mother sent him this  footage, apparently “as a gift,” and Ledare pared it down so that no story, only strange encounters between actors and director are left. In the main gallery space, a room-inside-a-room has been built to hold Double Bind, a wide-ranging series of photographs of Meghan Ledare Fedderly, formerly married to Ledare, interspersed with imagery from vintage magazines, postcards, and other such sources. According to an explanation hung near the entrance to the room that holds Double Bind, Ledare invited his ex-wife on a weekend in upstate New York, intending to photograph her. She agreed, but had remarried by the scheduled vacation came around. Ledare and she took the trip, but she and her new husband took the same trip, at Ledare’s request, soon after. Both ex-husband and new husband took the photos that Ledare assembled to make his “artwork,” and the images aren’t that different.

Leigh Ledare, from Double Bind, 2009.

Around the periphery of the makeshift room for Double Bind there are color photographs from Ledare’s Personal Commission series. In each, Ledare poses in costumes, often on or near beds. Women the artist found via personal ads, who had interests and desires that reminded him of his mother’s, have posed him and taken the pictures. Again, he asserts only his appetite for closeness to desires of others. Somehow, this makes him, an artist always putting himself in situations others would run from, seem cautious. Self-assertion, the kind those picketers outside the court plunged into, can make you look naive and exposed, and Ledare sidesteps that potential. It’s why his work fascinates and resonates, but also frustrates.

Paul Graham, 53rd Street & 6th Avenue, 6th May 2011, 2.41.26 pm (2011), pigment print mounted on Dibond, 56" x 74 1/4" (diptych), © Paul Graham 2012

Filling the spacious Chelsea Pace Gallery, Paul Graham: The Present displays vignettes that reflect quotidian ritual in New York City. Graham’s large-scale photographs hang at street level and mimic his theme of pedestrian rhythm. Smaller photographs, likewise in an array of diptychs and triptychs, are hung at eye level and also play a role in highlighting the voyeuristic perspective of the viewer, who is both the artist and the gallery audience. Rather than capturing a sea-like crowd of public, each photograph presents a focal character or characters that stands out from the monotony of the masses. Graham contextualizes each vignette by the specific location in which he becomes the ultimate voyeur.  By virtue of his photographs – as they are hung in solitary groupings rather than a vast assembly – Graham elucidates the manner in which a narrative is subject to alteration by the subtlest instances of movement, whether it is light or physical movement of a subject. An anonymous passerby becomes the subject of the frame only then to be replaced by his doppelganger in what seems to be the blink of an eye, for instance in works such as 8^th Avenue & 42^nd Street, 17^th August 2010, 11.23.03 am (2010).

Paul Graham, 8th Ave & 42nd Street, 17th August 2010, 11.23.03 am (2010), pigment print mounted on Dibond, 28" x 37 1/2" (diptych), © Paul Graham 2012

As Shakespeare astutely put it: “all the world’s a stage […]” and Graham’s photographs testify to this very notion. Both the manner of characterizing the unknown and the capturing of natural light lend to an exquisitely theatrical cadre. As similar to the old masters of photography like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, Graham emphasizes the lyrical nature of light just as much as he accentuates his subjects, as seen in works such as Fulton Street, 11^th November 2009, 11.29.10 am (2009) and E53^rd Street, 12^th April 2010, 9.45.55 am (2010). Due to light, the theatrical aspect of Graham’s photographs serves as a mechanism for spotlighting not only his characters within the frame but also the interplay of details that structure the composition.

Paul Graham, Fulton Street, 11th November 2009, 11.29.10 am (2009), pigment print mounted on Dibond, 56" x 74 1/4" (diptych), © Paul Graham 2012

In what seems to be a subtextual homage to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment”, in works such as Fulton Street, 11^th November 2009, 11.29.10 am Graham elucidates the intuitive moment of capturing an instant when life lends itself to a compelling composition. In this particular diptych, we watch a girl go from strolling to sprawled out onto the street. The audience is privy to the cause of this girl’s accident, though it is clear that in that brief moment she was not. In many of his other prints, Graham renders a two or three framed story in which the audience is granted the time to comprehend the various details – many of which are speckled with both the mundane and frivolity – that occur in one second in a city. Paul Graham: The Present will show through April 21^st at Pace Gallery 545 West 22^nd Street, New York and is accompanied by a hardcover monograph published by MACK. Graham won the 2012 Hasselblad award in early March.

The Present, Installation view, courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery

Anna Barriball, installation view, The Fruitmarket Gallery, 2012; Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London; Photo: Ruth Clark. Left to right: Copper pipes, 2011; Mirror Window Wall I, II, III, IV, 2008; Untitled, 2008

Copper pipes is an example of the way that Barriball uses materials that she works with on paper, from paint, ink and pencil, to create drawings or paintings that embody a three-dimensional quality from the texture or sheen, amplified by its mode of display. Sheets of paper that are rolled and inclined against the wall appear as copper pipes, with a density and lustre anchored by the coats of copper-tinted acrylic paint. In Mirror Window Wall I, II, III, IV, strongly marked paper rubbings of a wall result in a series of drawings that are titled in recognition of its framing – installed behind glass that one can peer through as a window into a wall, or as a reflective mirror. The works speak to a preoccupation not only with acquiring transfers to capture the imprints and textures of surfaces, but also a deep interest in the way that surfaces are inhibiting and constrain, yet can be imbued to evoke an expansion of space beyond the architectural confines of interior and exterior.

Anna Barriball, Draw (fireplace), 2005; DVD Video projection; edition of three; Duration 10 min. 30 sec.; Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

From walls to doors and fireplaces, these surfaces that wrap around or border zones of habitation are treated as animate. Draw (fireplace) is a video installation in a darkened end of a room, of a sheet of tracing paper that is placed over the fireplace. From gentle movements of the tracing paper to intervals when it is adhered against the grate, the chimney as a passage through which air flows becomes personified as a person drawing in breath.

Draw (fireplace) is one of several works in the exhibition that seem to veer away from the technique of drawing. Yet, in this sculptural intervention re-presented as a video projection, the search for the life beneath with an undercurrent of seeking to attribute presence to the invisible, is a thread that runs through Barriball’s works. Perhaps, as aptly titled, one draws not just to form marks and lines, but as an expression of breath and life. As a way to enter Barriball’s works, this idea opens a view to seeing her works as explorations of air in motion – within and through objects and spaces, as breath and wind, and as passages between the animate and inanimate, life and death.

Anna Barriball, 36 Breaths, 2002; Ink on found photographs; 45.6 x 45.6 cm; Collection of Octavius and Joanne Black

This idea takes form in 36 Breaths, composed from the blowing of a drop of black ink placed right in the centre of each of 36 photographs arranged into a grid, creating a symphony of splatters. As black and white found photographs of people from a previous generation, there is a sense that these are images of people perhaps no longer existing. The drawing and releasing of one’s breath becomes an unsettling gesture, as if wanting to breathe life into these unknown individuals, to reawaken them, whilst at the same time, with an exhalation creating a blotch that physically blackens and erases them from history.