David Kasprzak, "10-22-38 Astoria," 2011. Mixed media. Image courtesy MacArthur B Arthur.

Anyone who’s ever temped in an office or published a zine knows the marvelous idiosyncrasies of the Xerox machine: the sliding, illuminated beam that scans the images; the warm stacks of copies identical enough to be called “exact” yet often full of bleeding letters; shiny black-hole shadows and flecks of who-knows-what from the machine itself.  In Run Off, now on view at MacArthur B Arthur in Oakland, curators Aaron Harbour, Jackie Im and Brandon Drew Holmes set out to investigate the nature of the “take away” art object, selecting artists to work with multiples and produce pieces for viewers to handle and take home.  These artists get us to step back from the ever-present glow of intangible images on our phone and computer screens and into something slower and stranger: the scanning light of the photocopier.

Jon Kuzmich’s work Ethos, 2011, exploits the individual fingerprint of one copy machine, re-Xeroxing a page of text until the successive generations of copies warp and twist into a black Milky Way. Kuzmich displays not only the reams of paper he went through, but an animation of each copy scanned.  The image melts frame by frame, from one sheet to the next, invoking the photocopier as a source of light and heat, or a tactile, irregular experience.

Cybele Lyle, "Untitled (De/Construction)," 2011. Mixed media. Image courtesy of MacArthur B Arthur.

Cybele Lyle’s Untitled (De/Construction), 2011, presents a series of small, photographed architectural quotes tenuously assembled as a chaotic card house.  Lyle lights the structure with a projected view of a white room. Visitors can take away panels, altering the sculpture and the play of light. At the opening exhibition, viewers took panels and also protectively reconstructed the teetering structure.  Hunter Longe, working with large-scale photocopies in Reproduction Destruction Connection, 2011, offers viewers two poster-sized copies of a fuzzy, bar-shaped shadow.  In the piece on view, two sheets are layered together, the top sheet rubbed translucent with olive oil to produce a ghostly, X-shape.  Clean and minimalistic Longe’s piece speaks quietly to the power of customizing and altering mass-produced items.

Hunter Loge, "Reproduction Destruction Connection," 2011. Mixed media. Image courtesy of MacArthur B Arthur.

What might be the strongest work in the show is perversely missing: David Kasprzak’s 10-22-38 Astoria, 2011, a copy of the first photocopy, was produced for the show in an edition of one.  Snagged by a lucky visitor before most of the opening crowd arrived, its absence is a convincing argument for the power of the singular object, if not in the world, at least in our minds.

Also on view are works by Marcella Faustini and Rueben Lorch-Miller.  Run Off is on view at MacArthur B Arthur until October 30^th, open Sundays 1–5pm and by appointment.

Betye Saar, "Red Time," 2011. Installation view. Image courtesy of Roberts and Tilton Gallery.

For the moment, the beating heart of Los Angeles’s Pacific Standard Time is Betye Saar’s installation Red Time, 2011, at Roberts and Tilton.  Saar has transformed the middle room of the gallery into a shrine for past, present, and future, painting Roberts and Tilton’s interior room a bright red and allowing a variety of her customary assemblage works to act as friends and neighbors to each other, despite where they were collected from or when they were made.  In fact, one of the most striking things about Red Time is the position it takes on memory and history.  While Saar has divided Red Time into three separate sections–”In the Beginning,” “Migration and Transformation,” and “Beyond Memory”–she has also unified them through her use of a singular, strong background color and their enclosure in one small room.

Betye Saar, "There Will Be Blood," 2011. Mixed media assemblage. 22.25 x 22.25 in (56.5 x 56.5 cm). Image courtesy of Roberts and Tilton Gallery.

Betye Saar, "Red Time," 2011. Installation View. Image courtesy of Roberts and Tilton Gallery.

Saar first rose to prominence in the 1960s as a Joseph Cornell-inspired assemblage artist who insistently tackled issues of race and history, and these issues remain central, both figuratively and literally.  Many of the pieces that make up the “Migration and Transformation” section of Red Time, which occupies the wall opposite the room’s entrance, are radical détournements of Aunt Jemimah and Uncle Tom figures, a technique that Saar may have been the first to utilize and perfect.  In fact, it is the juxtaposition of the pleasing formal rhythms, the coziness of the physical space, and the chilling historical narratives referenced by pieces such as There Will Be Blood, 2011, To the Manor Born, 2011, and Is Jim Crow Really Dead, 1972, that drives the work.

Betye Saar, "To the Manor Born," 2011. Mixed media assemblage. 11.5 x 20.5 x 2.25 in (29.2 x 52.1 x 5.7 cm). Image courtesy of Roberts and Tilton Gallery.

Betye Saar, "Red Time," 2011. Installation View. Image courtesy of Roberts and Tilton Gallery.

Among the works that Saar felt absolutely needed to be present in the installation is Red Ascension, 2011, a wooden ladder hung toward the top of the wall in “Beyond Memory.”  Nestled amongst the rungs are wooden sculptures that tell a familiar story:  an African mask, several wooden ships, chains, and a crescent moon and star.  The ladder points viewers to the wall that is both the first and last in the exhibit, the wall to which their backs are turned for the majority of time they are in the room.  It is the wall with the entry and exit door, on which a series of masks hang, looking back at the viewers with all manners of expression.  Red Time is not solely a time of despair or anger.  It is also a time of rebirth and open-ended questioning.

At this point, everyone knows that street artists leave completely unexpected artworks that don’t last long but that are often more absorbing than the works we usually get to see in museums. Because of the ambitious and courageous nature of illegally staking your claim to expression, translating the fresh thoughts and passion of street art into the sedate world of the white cube has always been near impossible.

Swoon, Anthropocene Extinction (detail), 2011, Courtesy of the artist, Photo: John Kennard

To me, Swoon has always been aware of this. She stands out as having an inherent understanding that “street art” in the modern art market involves that translation. She has unabashedly kept her work from being simple objects; slick, archival consumables that works within the limits set forth by collectors and institutions. To use an analogy, she wants to produce the symbolic rawness of the Andre the Giant sticker, not the corporate efficiency of the Obey brand.

Swoon has been commissioned to create “Anthropocene Extinction” for the Boston ICA‘s fifth installation of the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall (on view through Dec 30, 2011). Her work is a sermon built from international symbols of humanity’s relationship to planet Earth. It’s an alluring mural of cut paper and relief prints with an umbilical cord of cut paper party-streamers running to a bamboo sculpture that lives next to the museum’s giant glass elevator. It enlivens the space like no other Fineberg Art Wall installation. The work shows off her skills with lines and drawing, her ability to control color, and the quality of her printing techniques.

Swoon, Anthropocene Extinction, 2011. Photo: Geoff Hargadon for Brooklyn Street Art.

The rhythm and composition of the individual prints/paper cuts is exceedingly regular and controlled. The mural is a hodgepodge of stuff with no given proportion. It’s a scalable image capable of being resized for almost any application. The bamboo sculpture takes after Asian scaffolding. It seems like a pagoda, but has what looks like wedding cakes on it and a beehive surrounded by butterflies at the top. No matter how attractive it is, I’m not sure what it’s supposed to represent or how it relates to the mural.

Swoon’s message relies on the myth of the noble savage. Ms. Bennett, the last living nomad personifies a blameless innocent, a buddha sitting on top of a string of Tibetan deity masks, surrounded by animal totems that represent the extinction in the work’s title. Why Ms. Bennett is 20 times larger than the animals, I’m not sure. It certainly encourages the reading that the animals are less significant than the human. It also seems very Victorian to send out an artists to bring back the last living nomad to a museum setting.

Swoon, Anthropocene Extinction, 2011. Photo: Black Rainbow Extraordinaire Magazine.

Not that it makes it less of a work, but this installation has nothing to do with street art. It uses wheatpaste, but is that all it takes to be a street artist? The work as exhibited is a printstallation; a hybrid format (of installation made from or about prints) that has been a part of the print community for years. Do street artists get shipping budgets and 9 days with a crew of 5 plus an equal amount of student assistants to put up their work? To insist that this is a street art piece implies that her work is so unexplainable and independent from the norm of contemporary art that she’s some kind of freak outsider. She is an artist. An artist who still leaves jewels for people to find on the street, but an artwork in a museum does not parallel the relationship between artwork and street.

George Condo, "Untitled #12, More Sketches Of Spain For Miltes Davis," 1991, Etching and Aquatint, 33 1/2 x 46 1/2 inches (plate), 38 x 52 inches (sheet), Edition of 40. Courtesy Jack Rutberg Gallery.

Miles Davis wasn’t interested in Flamenco dancers or their music. Maybe it was too frilly, too foreign, too feminine to enter his orbit. Whatever the reason, Frances Taylor, the first Mrs. Miles Davis, set out to change his mind. She’d been to Barcelona and fallen for the sexy Spanish sounds and wanted Miles to fall too. Finally, around 1958, she coerced him into seeing the Roberto Iglesias company in New York. Immediately after, he dashed to the Colony Record store and bought up every Flamenco album they had. The next day, he called his longtime right hand, Gil Evans, and the two started in on what would become Sketches of Spain, an album some lambasted as light fare and others swooned over.

Painter George Condo must have swooned. He came of age alongside Basquiat and Keith Haring and recently designed the risque, quaintly crude covers for Kanye West’s album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,  but it’s Davis he listened to growing up. His first big-deal painting, exhibited at the 1987 Whitney Biennial and later bought by Eli Broad, was a colorful opus called Dancing to Miles. In 1991, he created a series of etchings in response to Sketches of Spain. Through September 3^rd, you can see them at Jack Rutberg Gallery in mid-city L.A.

George Condo, "Dancing to Miles," 1985-86, oil on canvas, 110¼ by 137¾ inches. The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica, CA.

In Condo’s Sketches of Spain, the unfettered id of neo-expressionism merges with an early Cubist angularity. Freedom joins the fantastic, and the etchings delight in eccentric mark-making. Their marks often converge to form feminine figures, as in Untitled #7, an image as frenetically daunting as any of de Kooning’s women. Other times, the marks create illustrative caricatures—in Untitled #2, a curly haired, nude floozy holds her nose and pinches her nipple while an prim bystander looks on. At first glance, the etchings are funny, slightly schizo Picasso wannabes. “It’s about coexistence with the artist’s you respect,” Condo has said; he just wants to fit in. But that name, Miles Davis, appears on the wall labels and image lists, and the persona of the cool, dark trailblazer who never quite did fit in pulls the etchings out of dreamy nostalgia and into a specific historical trajectory. Suddenly, Condo’s blond-ish, flat female figures become grating. They feel frustratingly disconnected from the relational complexity surrounding Sketches of Spain and Davis’ other mid-career masterpieces.

Miles Davis' second wife, Betty Davis, on the cover of "Nasty Gal," an album recorded in 1975.

There’s a story about Davis, recently divorced, seeing Frances at an art opening and pretending she was still his wife. That way, he could comment on her ass without sounding as brutish. Still, despite all the chauvinistic mythology surrounding the jazz great, his women were strong and savvy. There were the type to trick him into falling for Flamenco or finding funk.

I suspect one of Davis’ wives would have liked Condo’s paintings immensely. She gravitated toward primitive sexiness, and had penchant for making whimsy guttural. Twenty years Miles’ junior, Betty Mabry’s marriage to him lasted only a year and in the decade following their divorce, she would produce heated, breathily aggressive singles like the Anti-Love Song and Nasty Girl. If she poured some of her energy into Condo’s Miles homages, the result would be as unfettered and emotive as the images already are, but the women would be a little fuller, a little smarter and take a lot more ownership over the sleek musical landscape that resulted when Davis let Flamenco into his heart.

Stephanie Syjuco, Raiders: International Booty, Bountiful Harvest (Selections from the A____ A__ M______) (2011). Archival Epson photo prints mounted on laser-cut wood, hardware, platforms, and crates. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy Catharine Clark Gallery.

Over a lifetime of visiting museums, you learn that all souvenirs have a price point, from the dollar-fifty commemorative postcard to the pieces in the collection itself.  These prized mementos, selected, brought home, catalogued and displayed, represent the collector’s forays to classical or far-flung sites. My favorite disruption to this cycle is a hall of life-sized plaster casts of classical Greek and Roman architecture at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, which allows visitors to tour bits and pieces of many separate sites simultaneously, leaving the original buildings intact. Stephanie Syjuco’s solo exhibition, RAIDERS, at Catherine Clark Gallery, offers the same historical jumble, along with questions about access, reproduction and the institutional stewardship of cultural objects.

Stephanie Syjuco, Phantoms (FREE TEXT: You Say Illegal, I Say Legitimate) (2011). Large-format black and white xerox poster. 48 x 36 inches. Image courtesy Catharine Clark Gallery.

Syjuco’s recent ShadowShop (2010) project at SFMOMA invited artists to set up shop in the exhibition galleries, bypassing traditional routes to a museum show and earning 100% of the sales. With RAIDERS, Syjuco looks to objects already ensconced in historical canons: traditional Asian ceramics and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.  While her subjects represent ways that Western culture has viewed other societies as dark territory to be explored or invaded, this is the most obvious and least interesting part of the show, or would be without the noise of commerce surrounding the work. Syjuco’s reaction to this post-colonial booty: conduct a counter-invasion of her own that points to contemporary economic models tied to museums, shopping, illegal downloads, and copyright.

Stephanie Syjuco, Phantoms (h__rt _f d__kn_ss) (2011). Mixed media installation. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy Catharine Clark Gallery.

For the show’s titular piece, Raiders: International Booty, Bountiful Harvest (2011), Syjuco has downloaded, printed, and mounted life-size images of Asian vessels from public art databases onto wood backings, like an army of paper dolls.  Placing them on wooden crates and shelves, Syjuco sometimes sorts the vessels by shape, sometimes by color.  The photographic perspective varies from piece to piece, some veering off at a steep angle and others pixilated from enlargement. These quirks become important if you view artwork with an eye to what is unique, but unlike the original vessels, these sculptures are copies, in editions of three.  Also unlike the originals, they are for sale.

Stephanie Syjuco, Raiders (2011). Installation view. Mixed media. Image courtesy Catharine Clark Gallery.

For those who want a souvenir they don’t have to pay for, Syjuco has printed large posters in the style of street flyers.  Visitors ripped away most of the tabs during the opening, but the posters are an unlimited edition and their collector may reproduce them ad infinitum.  These posters, each announcing the URL of a source for a free download of a text, introduce Phantoms (2011), an array of downloaded and bound copies of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Stephanie Syjuco, Phantom (Vase with Hundred Flowers) (2011). From RAIDERS, Souvenir Postcard Set (2011). Image courtesy Catharine Clark Gallery.

With Raiders, Syjuco highlights the silent authority of the museum collection, pointing to the forces that enshrine these vessels as a particular type of cultural heritage.  In conjunction with Phantoms, however, Syjuco turns the question of acquisitiveness back on her audience.  By offering freely-accessed items for sale, Syjuco’s project asks us to decide what we’d like to do: buy a souvenir or pirate one.

Stephanie Syjuco’s RAIDERS is at Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco through July 16, 2011.

Maleonn, King of the Ridiculous, archival pigment print

As Susan Sontag observed, “the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads”. Pure Satire by Maleonn at the 2902 Gallery in Singapore encapsulates this visual aesthetic, creating an open set of performative statements within a symbol-laden, dreamlike universe that amalgamates historical and contemporary trends, wherein protagonists are children with runaway imaginations at heart. In the intense, nostalgic amber-toned hues of Maleonn’s photographic universe, androgynous figures dress like superman and ridiculous tomato-heads clad in traditional Chinese costumes of bygone eras chide us for our laughter.

Maleonn, Leaves of Grass, 2006, ultra giclee print on d-bond, 108x90cm.

Maleonn, Superman, Book of taboo, 2006, lambda, C-print.

At the crux of Pure Satire is Maleonn’s championing of the ridiculous. The hallmark of childhood – the unfettered imagination that is oft inclined to wander off into magical spheres – is captured on print by digital colourising and careful staging to depict an untouchable realm surrounded by elements of the physical world that are both familiar and unfamiliar. Maleonn’s world of the child-like mind bears some similarity to the landscape we know, but is ultimately upheld with laws that reject normality: men nonchalantly carry a giant peach out of the door and postmen ride through brick walls to deliver their letters.

Maleonn, Postman, 2008.

Images of China’s modern generation are presented (sometimes comically) as an archetype in fables, remodelled as twenty-first century moral anecdotes that highlight numerous human foibles. In The King of the Ridiculous (2010) series, a figure dressed in a sumptuous Chinese Operatic costume poses with pretentious fervour against well-known architectural backdrops lamenting– just the speaker of Ecclesiastes did with aplomb – the absurdity of life and art. The Little Flagman (2008) series features a solitary figure clad in military uniform caught in a plethora of movements: dancing in a cage to mourning fully holding flags lost in a desolate landscape.

Maleonn, Little Flagman, 2008.

While juxtaposing the bourgeoning cultural freedom accompanying China’s frenetic capitalism with the apparent erosion of historical – or even mythological – grounding in modern Chinese society however, Maleonn deflects his judgement by unleashing the mental workings of an inner child. Created with a carnivalistic sense of chaos, the photographic triptych Journey to the West (2008) is a beautifully coloured mess of traditional and Western images, perhaps obliquely suggesting China’s increasing identification with Western influences and not-too-subtle shift in sensibilities while simultaneously drawing a parallel with its namesake: a seventeenth-century epic Ming text chronicling a perilous journey to India for spiritual enlightenment. But unlike Lewis Carroll’s Alice who peers (and eventually enters) through a looking glass into an alternative world, we as viewers – perhaps typified by the human face peeking in the left corner – visually consume but can’t quite hope to enter.

Maleonn, Journey to the West, Digital photography from assemblage, 2008.

Born in 1972, Maleonn resides and works in Shanghai. After graduating from the Fine Arts College of Shanghai University in 1995, he went on to become a director of short films including television advertisements. Pure Satire will be on show at the 2902 Gallery until 7 May 2011.

Untitled (Montanas), Gabriel Kuri (2011).

Armory Arts Week has become an annual event held March 3rd through 6th, centered on The Armory Show.  Competing venues have multiplied throughout the city of New York, including The Art Show, Pulse, Scope, Independent, Verge (Art Brooklyn), Moving Image, Red Dot and Fountain.  Headlining these fairs, The Armory Show 2011 continued its dual focus on both modern and contemporary art with Pier 92 focusing on the 20th century and Pier 94 accommodating nearly two hundred contemporary art exhibitors.  The fair’s limited program included Armory Focus:  Latin America, comprised of eighteen galleries highlighting Latin America’s contribution to contemporary visual art.  The Armory’s annual commission to create a visual identity for the fair went to Mexican-born conceptual artist Gabriel Kuri.  Also associated with the fair were Art Projx Cinema and Volta NY, a fair which presents solo artist booths in a smaller format.

DailyServing brings its readers highlights from The Armory Show and Volta NY.

Subway (2010), © Leandro Erlich, Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, NY

The Armory Show: Sean Kelly Gallery

Sean Kelly Gallery in New York presented Leandro Erlich‘s Subway (2010), which placed a sterilized version of New York’s urban transit reality within The Armory Show.  It struck an apt contextual note – much like his piece, The Boat, did during Art Basel Miami Beach 2010.  Both works form part of Erlich’s video window series and consist of an architectural element combined with video.

For Subway, Erlich sets a life-sized stainless steel door within a wall and positions video as window into a subway car.  The video becomes a realistic extension of the architecture and evokes great depth to create the illusion of looking ‘through’ it extending into the distance.  Three passengers sit in the immediate car, avoiding eye contact and lost in their own thoughts.  The figures are quiet and self-contained much like the video throughout its brief (1 min. 30 sec.) loop.  The light changes as the subway bumps and shakes along its track. Renaissance paintings offered a window into another world; in a similar way, Erlich uses the moving image to depict an imagined, realistic 21st century environment.

Last Meal on Death Row 'William Joseph Kitchens' (2010), Courtesy the artist and Blaine|Southern Gallery, London.

The Armory Show: Blain|Southern Gallery

Blain|Southern Gallery in London filled their booth with a selection of work, including Mat Collishaw‘s series of C-prints, Last Meal on Deathrow.  In this haunting fact-based series, Collishaw depicts the last meals requested by recently executed American death row inmates.  Drawing largely from the state of Texas and Jacquelyn Black’s documentation in Last Meal, Collishaw examines the ritual of eating before execution in a quiet, somber way.

Content is secondary upon first viewing one of these prints.  One is initially drawn in by an aesthetically pleasing arrangement of food, silver and glass – all of which was cooked and prepared by the artist.  The viewer is lulled by an apparently reticent image before reading the caption and learning of the context.  Collishaw’s series is visually inspired by Flemish Baroque still lifes.  Such a visual influence is evident in the dark backgrounds and supporting surfaces, which provide contrast for illuminated objects.  Just as layered meaning exists within the Baroque still life, the seemingly innocuous prepared food serves to reveal deeper meaning about the societies and individuals they reference.

Trees of 40 Fruit (2009-2011), Sam Van Aken, Photo: Bill Orcutt, Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NY.

The Armory Show: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts

Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NY exhibited a solo installation by artist Sam Van Aken featuring his ongoing New Eden project, which filled the booth with vegetation. New Eden features a genetically altered orchard of trees or natural ‘sculptures’ that have been manipulated by the artist and painstakingly grafted to bear peach, plum, nectarine and apricot fruits.  Branches of blossoms on each tree indicate the presence of these disparate elements.  Part of the installation were synthetic mutations of grafted fruits and a display stand with hybrid vegetable seed starters.  Along the walls, prints of mixed seed packets and seed packet collages completed the booth.

While the installation initially seems to emphasize the unexpected aesthetic pleasure of genetic modification, its presence within the gallery space is intended to raise the profile of increasing scientific infringement on the natural world.  Van Aken starts a critical dialogue about genetic modification, which he views as futile.  As the artist told Art Newspaper ‘any change that you make is temporary’.  Mother nature proves stronger in the end and ultimately rejects human interference.

Cartografia Interior # 35, Courtesy the artist and Espaivisor-Visor Gallery.

Volta NY: Espaivisor-Visor Gallery
Espaivisor-Visor Gallery in Valencia, Spain exhibited new and recent work from the series Cartografia Interior by artist Tatiana Parcero.  In this series, Parcero redirects the contemporary trend of imagined geographic mapping onto the body in order to position it ‘in relation to time and place, science and thought’ further indicating that the body is ‘the container that holds everything’ including history, culture, and geography.

The ancient images appear like tattoos at first glance, which underscores Parcero’s view that the historical thoughts contained in the images are indelibly linked to the body.  The tattoo-like writings and drawings are taken from extensive research.  The artist has collected and photographed documents including pre-Columbian codices, ancient maps, cosmological charts, and anatomical engravings.  Parcero then printed her findings onto transparent acetate and layered them over intimate, corresponding photographic images of her body.  The ancient world and the artist’s own flesh visually bind and are re-imagined as one.

Winter Dreams - Table, courtesy the artist and MA2 Gallery.

Volta NY:  MA2 Gallery

MA2 Gallery displayed new and recent work by Ken Matsubara, which was recently part of Winter Dreams, a February solo show at the Tokyo gallery.  Matsubara’s Winter Dreams series is defined by his continued exploration of memory as both a collective and personal phenomenon.

MA2 Gallery’s booth was filled with small-scale mixed media works that invited intimate viewing.  At first glance, many of the objects could be readily encountered in the everyday world.  Purposefully weathered, framed shadow boxes and mirror boxes mysteriously presented moving images of simple motifs.  In Winter Dreams – Table, a ghostly, empty table covered by a white table cloth stands alone and spins.  Likewise, Winter Dreams – Cloud reveals an emanating cloud of smoke beneath a faded, silvered surface.  The artist’s emphasis on mirrors, in the form of aged, reflective surfaces points to the essence of memory as it is formed by the often hazy impression of experiences and dreams on our consciousness.  The open-ended nature of the images allowed them to be experienced by many viewers.  Finally, in Bottom of Buddha’s Hands, two shiny hands holding a crystal ball connect the concept of memory to humanity’s beginnings.

For this edition of Fan Mail, Sydney-based emerging artist Dara Gill has been chosen from a group of worthy submissions.  Just back from a project in the New South Wales bush, Gill took the time to discuss his passion for ideas, his creative process and to share his thoughts on anxiety – that omnipresent 21st century condition.

Untitled (Rubber Band Portraits), 2010. Courtesy the artist.

Kelly Nosari:  Your practice is so diverse.  You work in video, performance, sculpture, painting, sound and installation.  Where does your creative process begin?

Dara Gill:  My creative process starts first and foremost with research.  In this stage a formalisation of the research made is complied into a fluid ‘definition’ of the topic as I see it.  This normally includes the ideas of others coupled with my own ideas and this definition then informs the artworks themselves.

KN:  Anxiety is an overarching theme in your art practice.  How do you creatively engage an experience that is both personal and collective?   What is it that interests you most about this universal human condition?

DG:  Anxiety tends to sit at the top of the human emotional hierarchy, thus most emotions stem from anxiety.  It is the ubiquitous nature of the emotion that drew me towards it and its ramifications for daily life.  My yearning to understand the emotion stems from both wanting to know myself and my fellow man a little better, objectifying what is in essence subjective.  Initially my interest tended to sit with the neurotic forms of the condition, that is phobia driven anxiety, but as I discovered more about the emotion its daily ramifications became much more powerful and interesting.

Creatively engaging with anxiety, or any emotion in fact is often the hardest part, because for each it is truly personal.  Therefore the challenge of creating works that do not involve personal motifs or stories, but rather commonly shared experiences, is the trust of this creative engagement.  I always aim to communicate without relying on the texts created from my research or any over explanation of the meaning behind a work, but rather letting the work communicate through is imagery and processes.

Sisyphus Triptych #2 from Dara Gill on Vimeo.

KN:  The influence of the Greek myth of Sisyphus is evident in video works like Untitled (Sisyphus Triptych #2) or To Roll, in which you attempt a tedious or impossible task.  Please talk more about this myth and its influence on your work.

DG:  For me Sisyphus is a parable for anxiety.  Very briefly, anxiety stems partly from a foreboding sense that something is ‘not quite right’ – a negative reflection on ones current place in the world.  Anxiety is a general ambiguous feeling that something is missing or looming (Lack), and a wish (Desire) to rid one of this feeling.  The desire to change transforms into a desire to work or maintain a sense of busy-ness in order to quell anxiety.  This characteristic produces mundane work, work towards a perpetually unfulfilled and ill-defined end result.

My first point of interest within the myth Sisyphus is the mental state of Sisyphus as he completes each cycle of his task; his naive and instinctual habitual compulsion to push the rock up the hill, thinking that his toil will end once the rock reaches the summit, the horror as he watches it roll back down, and the amnesia he suffers each time the cycle continues.  Sisyphus is to constantly work towards a goal that has no foreseeable end to it, born out of a compulsion from nothing.

KN:  In much of your work, you aim not to reconcile or to perform anxiety, but to rather mischievously induce it in others.  Whether aiming rubber bands at peoples’ faces as in Untitled (Rubber Band Portraits) or surprising them with bright lights as in Untitled (Blinding Light Box) you create a very physical stress experience for the participant.  Talk more about this process.

DG:  Often the work that involves the use of people is born out of the research into the topic.  I often think that the best way to explain anxiety is to induce it in others.  For instance, in Untitled (Rubber Band Portraits) and Untitled (Blinding Light Box) I utilised one my observations of anxiety as being both a simultaneous Fight and Flight response, the effect of this causing a paralysing stillness or as Kierkegaard describes a ‘shuddering before nothingness’.  I drew a parallel with this ‘Deer in the headlights’ type moment, where the Deer is both mesmerised by the cars headlights but also fearful of its demise, both culminating again in a paralysing internal dizziness.  This motif was then manipulated into the bright lights in Blinding Light Box and the rubber bands in Rubber Band Portraits.

Untitled (To Roll) from Dara Gill on Vimeo.

KN:  You have described your work as ‘situational based research’.  I see that some pieces mimic psychological experimentation by facilitating discomfort and documenting it.  In Horror Vaccui Experiment (2009), for example, you record an unwitting subject as they wait alone in an empty room.  How do you go about this process?  What is the Knowledge Barter Experiment?

DG:  A key methodology within in my developing practice is the survey, that is, an attempt to engage with the public in situational based research where a subject responds to stimulus or a constructed environment, often with a visual outcome.  These works are performative in nature and documented through video, text, photography, and sound.  Through this process documentation becomes art object.  The tenor of these works is that of objective scientific research, but the parameters of the interaction are poetically manipulated in order for the outcome to become expressive of visual art.  The use of the survey has played a pivotal role in my investigation of anxiety, and is the tool that is used by the sciences to gain useful information on anxiety.  I wish to employ the survey in an almost playful sense, as pseudo-scientific investigation.  This methodology was used during the initial stage of my research and its findings inform more formal aspects of my artistic practise.

The Knowledge Barter Experiment was a fun side project that I always wanted to do but its connection to anxiety is very direct.  It forces a participant to actively reflect and comprehend ones own abilities and weaknesses, what they know and what they want to know.  Here they must define with some confidence their ability on a chosen topic.  This is not easy, as one attaches a value to what they know and thought they knew, and compares this to already existing teachings.  Secondary to this process is the defining of what one wants to learn.  This involves again identifying what one perceives they have little knowledge of and what they feel is valuable to know.

KN:  What are you working on now?

DG:  Right now I’m working on my next few solos that branch out into the topic of Hope and its connection to anxiety.  Hope for the most part sits in direct opposition to anxiety.  For Ernest Bloch, anxiety stems from a feeling of “something lacking and [the] want to stop it… [the] dreams of a better life”.  This hunger never ceases, “we never tire of wanting things to improve.  We are never free of wishes…”.  Friedrich Nietzsche opines that hope is ‘the worst of evils for it prolongs the torment of man’.  It is the space between such varied opinions that interests me, and the space in which I would like the work to exist.

KN:  Can you offer one piece of advice for emerging artists?

DG:  Document everything.

Lothar Baumgarten, 'Unsettled Objects, 1968-69. Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford' 1968-69, Slide projector, 80 slides. Copyright the artist, courtesy Glasgow Life (Museums)

Unsettled Objects at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Glasgow, reflects on how artists have examined the social and political. The exhibition takes its name from Lothar Baumgarten’s (b. 1944) installation Unsettled Objects, 1968-9. Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford which probes the status of the object as it journeys into the museum, and uses the language of the museum to call attention to the ideologies of the institution the objects are placed within. Influenced by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, Unsettled Objects was the outcome of Baumgarten’s image documentation and intervention through language, of the ethnographic collection and display at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Each slide visually depicting display cases and object arrangements features a word, ranging from “rationalized”, “narrated”, “valued” to “typified” that captures the museum’s attempt towards accessibility and rational classification. Unsettled Objects formed one of his studies of how several European ethnographic museums display objects and frame perceptions, and the ways objects have been uprooted from their original contexts and remain unsettled against western discourses.

Graham Fagen, 'Bell' 2006, Silk screen print. Copyright the artist, courtesy Glasgow Life (Museums)

Graham Fagen and Emily Jacir’s works also revolve around journeys, their distinct approaches disclosing the complex historical and social issues intertwined with these journeys. Graham Fagen (b. 1966) grew up in Irvine, the hometown of eighteenth century Scottish poet Robert Burns, yet found himself drawn more to reggae than the poetry of Burns. Fagen’s Bell (2006), is one of three screenprints, each depicting the ships, Nancy, Bell and Roselle that Burns had booked successive passages on, to travel to Jamaica to work as a bookkeeper on a slave plantation. Each passage was eventually not realised, as emerging reception to his poems led him to remain in Scotland. The image of the ship, with facts of its passage, open up associations between maritime journeys, trade and slavery of the eighteenth century. The prints form one part of Fagen’s body of work which converges the life history and poetry of Robert Burns with reggae music from the West Indies, treading on the relationships between Scotland and Jamaica through the journeys (and non-journeys) of people and their legacies.

Emily Jacir, 'From Texas With Love' (2002), video, monitor, text. Copyright the artist, courtesy Glasgow Life (Museums)

From responses to the question “If you had the freedom to get in a car and drive for one hour without being stopped (imagine that there is no Israeli military occupation, no Israeli soldiers, no Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks, no ‘bypass’ road) what song would you listen to?”, Emily Jacir (b. 1970) compiled an hour-long soundtrack of 51 songs selected by Palestinians living in Palestine. From Texas with Love (2002) was filmed through the rear windscreen of Jacir’s car, as she undertook an uninterrupted journey across the Texan highway, listening to the soundtrack comprising international pop songs to the Palestinian national anthem. Jacir often performs actions on behalf of those whose rights are curtailed, in this case, mobility without harassment. Visitors are able to select the track to be played, vicariously undertaking a journey which drives across the message that the basic freedom of mobility and choice while easily enjoyed in one country, is denied in another.

Unsettled Objects speaks to the potentials of politics within art, but also ponders its limits housed within an institution. The exhibition runs from December 2009  to March 2011, and other presented artists include Ian Hamilton Finlay, Jenny Holzer and Jo Spence.

cover image: Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos

Having spent the last 5 months in Brazil as a outsider peering in, I’ve tried to pull back the curtain to discover what is essentially Brazilian about artistic modes of production. It eludes me. The constant state of flux it impossible to pause and properly articulate. Much like the boom of the Brazilian economy, the art fervor here can be hard to grasp. From this touristic snapshot view, it appears that the infamous notion of antropofagia, or cannibalism – Brazil’s successful incorporation and reinvention of external influences (a notion popularized by the Tropicália movement in the late 1960s) – has been corroded from the inside out. Artistic practices in Brazil seem to be more concerned with a dissection and alteration of systems that involve the relationships between Brazil and other countries (specifically Latin American) and a reciprocation of influence. What I can see from this viewpoint is a particularly strong process of working through.

Newton Goto (from Recibo07+9)

The shape-shifting, nomadic quality of Brazilian artistic research is exemplified in projects like Recibo, a free artist-run publication focusing on the circulation of visual art actions and theoretical/political discourse. The idea-heavy publication is decidedly un-slick and has an interventionist function in the art world, with an emphasis on articles that give the reader a glimpse into critical research that provides the skeleton for artistic production (which doesn’t often share space with the end-result art).

Originally conceived by artist Traplev (Roberto Moreira Junior), Recibo takes on a curatorial function and is always a collaboration between the artist and a co-editor, often looking beyond Brazil’s borders. Editions have explored the relationships between Brazil and Buenos Aires, Berlin, and Colombia in Portuguese, Spanish, and a smattering of English.

Jarbas Lopes, Cicloviaérea (from Recibo010)

The 3rd edition, Recibo010, edited with Nara Milioli, Paisagem portátil (Portable Landscapes), looked at the geography of urbanism and mobility. The focus on portability conceptually doubles-over the circulation of theoretical exploration and artistic practices that experimental publications like Recibo provide within the artistic landscape.

Recibo057, Malambo, is the 5th edition created as the result of a residency in Cali, Colombia and co-edited with Yolanda Chois. Through critical reflection, points of contact and overlap between the two countries are highlighted. As a consequence of the bilingual text, readers of both languages are implored to read it’s latin counterpart, opening up possibilities of new interpretations by way of imperfect translation.

Suwon Lee, el muerto no tiene dolientes, 2009 (from Recibo088)

The upcoming Recibo88, Sobre a noção de despesa (On the notion of expenditure), is co-edited with Teresa Riccardi. 10,000 copies will be released in February with the support of Brazil’s Ministry of Culture. A challenging undertaking to probe and poke the economic matrix, this edition takes it’s name and concept from a segment of French writer Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share. Bataille presents an economic theory that looks at excessive and constantly outputting solar energy; the sun never receives energy in return and the end result of this surplus is in fact loss. Value, time, material, the art market, are all in a constant state of discursive questioning. Articles like Cuauhtémoc Medina and Mariana Botey’s In Defense of the Fetish (which examines the narrative of fetish worship from primitivist fetishes to sexual fetish to Western commodity fetishism) are juxtaposed with artistic projects like Cadu’s Doze meses. Over the course of a year, Cadu diligently and dramatically adjusted his energy consumption in his home, the end result of this consuming project is a simple, small arching design on his utility bill visually graphing his efforts.

Deyson Gilbert, da série Black Indexation, 2010 (from Recibo088)

If antropofagia came to prominence with Tropicália, perhaps the process now can be described as metabolizing or working through, an exercise of addressing the social, political, economic, and artistic foodstuffs that we consume everyday. Recibo takes the task of working through seriously, contributing to the dispersion of critical ideas while, importantly, acknowledging their inherent mutability.

I recently had drinks with a friend who’d just relocated from the Bay Area to New York City. We discussed the phenomena of connection and connectivity, anonymity and intimacy, as they relate to living in a massive city like New York, and the comparatively small-town San Francisco. Years ago, when I lived in New York, my daily struggles with this spectrum of fleeting intimacy often struck me with the feeling that we are all alone together. Today, in San Francisco, Emily McVarish’s new body of work at 871 Fine Arts Gallery and Book Store, a subterranean space directly downstairs from Crown Point Press, brings these thoughts rushing back to me. A Thousand Several examines a contradiction in terms, investigating themes of disconnected, anxious, and individualized communities in the format of a book and its eponymous exhibition.

For the last two decades, McVarish has focused on making finely written, designed, die-cut, handset, printed, and bound books. While this was the first exhibition of hers that I’ve seen, A Thousand Several convinced me that her books are her most successful work. Through her medium, McVarish asserts the importance of the book format, and strikingly so in the face of such modern subject matter: information containment, conversation avoidance, and distraction to the highest degree. The exhibition consists of McVarish’s book and prints that hang on the gallery walls. A glass case holds books, and I was permitted to look more closely at A Thousand Several, which is in itself the book form of the exhibition: a compilation of the works on the wall. The contents of the book—unbound and disconnected—create a new code of severance that doesn’t quite translate. This book, much more than the exhibition and works on the wall, captures a real failure of the will to experience the world around us—and McVarish depicts it with great poetics.

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Wade Guyton, Untitled (2008). Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen, 84 x 69 inches.

The untitled canvas above is an excellent example of how Guyton manipulates a well-known set of cultural markers. Materially, it is composed of linen stretched over supports in a rectangular shape; therefore, it participates in a system of objects commonly classified as painting. There are thin lines on this canvas, some overlapping and creating a black mass on the right, and some thinned out, creating grayer areas on the left. There is no representational subject matter—it is an abstract composition—so we could say that this work is expressionistic and builds on the history and conventions of mid-century American modernist painting. But look at the caption: this work is not created by an “original” vision, or a brush in the hand of an Author, but instead printed on an ink-jet printer. Gray areas are created where the printer is running out of ink, the blacker areas exist where the old print cartridge is exchanged for a fresh one. The white line in the center? That’s where Guyton folded the cloth in half because it’s too wide for the Epson 9600 to print in a single pass. Guyton rejects aesthetic decision-making in favor of the vagaries of mechanical reproduction and the limitations of technology. Further, I find it intriguing that he uses only black ink. Unlike color printing, black is associated with a specific mode of ink-jet printing: the publication of information and text. The side-by-side rectangles echo columns of print.

What are we to make of this? Is it a parody of modernism, with its tradition of “great-man” authors creating heroic (even macho) works? Does Guyton thumb his nose at our expectations for a painting to be the cumulative effect of a series of decisions about color, line, shape, and even texture? What does the work tell us about aura, or digital reproduction, or the presentation of information? And what does it tell us about the culture we live in now? Guyton himself gives few answers.

Installation view, Friedrich Petzel Gallery 2007.

There’s a great line by art historian Benjamin Buchloh: “Appropriation of historical models may be motivated by a desire to establish continuity and tradition and a fiction of identity.” Guyton simultaneously follows and breaks a lineage, participating in a system in order to disrupt it. He appropriates the symbolic form of modernist painting and restages it in a new digital context. Creating the work by mechanized means provides a kind of counterargument to the original claims of modernism and contributes an example of what art critic Jan Verwoert has called, “art production as the gradual reshuffling of a basic set of cultural terms through…strategic reuse and eventual transformation.” Like other kinds of appropriation, Guyton’s work borrows the history and symbolism of the form to which it refers, making another link in a chain of associations and producing a new document that interacts with the system that it both inherits and succeeds.

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Guyton’s work is currently on view at Malmö Konsthall (November 11 – December 12), Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris (October 21 – November 20), westlondonprojects, London (October 15 – December 11); and will be exhibited at Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach (November 26, 2010 – January 8, 2011).

One of Us, Installation, 2010. Photo courtesy John Pyper.

The installation is centered around a pattern inspired by non-latin alphabet calligraphy, printed in edition of 650, and pasted onto the walls and floors of the space. When viewed with 3-d glasses, the high-contrast patterns starts moving and space opens up. The floor you are standing on gets deeper and you are not sure where the floor begins and ends.

One of Us, detail of calligraphy, 2010. Photo courtesy of John Pyper.

It would not be hard to read psychedelia into this installation. The odd floor layout with six foot cartoon characters interrupting your movement, the intense pattern covering every surface, and the high contrast colors unrelentingly poke at your eyes and brain. I agree with the gallery handout that his work offers a “contrast to the sixties retro work,” but rather than referencing older and culturally loaded psychedelia (Like Justin Lowe’s Matrix 159 at Wadsworth Athenaeum) Wei Lin instead creates an attack on our contemporary senses. The references to arabic and hebrew text shift our paranoid minds to the middle-east. The oversized cartoons bloom into fearful exaggerations, impacting how large we feel. These nervous images command the space, leaving very little to consider beyond it.

One of Us, Detail of mural, 2010. Photo courtesy of John Pyper.

The dense patterns, expert color separations, and skillful overlays matched with the playful depth created by the installation and the 3-d glasses form a riot of information to untangle. If letting the images just wash over your eyes and wander freely is too much, you can always rest your eyes on the relatively peaceful hand-painted mural of calligraphic lines surrounding a circle. But even this mural is surrounded by hand-painted line work, that in a faulty mind (altered somehow) could find their vital motion alarming.

Isaac Tin Wei Lin’s One of Us will be on view at the Print Center through November 20th.

Included in the exhibition are a series of paintings, photographs and collages that use the crystalline abstract structures of rocks and minerals to create visual relationships between seemingly disparate forms. The title of the exhibition, The Great Blue Mountain Range, in relation to these small studies of stones, alludes to yet another comparison of difference – scale.

In two vitrines, painted bright yellow, this method is continued using found photographs alluding to the landscape photography of guidebooks and amateur naturalist snapshots. As the press release states, these works are “symbolic of the artist’s longing to travel to other places.” As a result, Van Beek uses collage to combine the two poles of this longing, here and there, creating new interstitial places that are her own.

An explorer’s longing to approach the unknown, the use of a control group in scientific method, and the formalist use of relational color or tone are all based on  comparisons. Following this, a slide show is included in the show projecting images that Van Beek has gathered from various sources including gold nuggets, baseball sized hail, ice crystals, diamonds, and meteors to create an almost rhizomatic network of associations that are at once visual, scientific and vaguely metaphysical.

This kind of alchemy, transforming images of mere matter into the stuff of speculation reveals the gallery to be a cabinet of curiosity. The artist here serves as both maker and curator, always aware that appropriation and the archive are creative sites themselves.

Ruth van Beek (1977) lives and works in Koog aan de Zaan, The Netherlands. She graduated in 2002 at Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam receiving a Masters in Photography. In 2008 she had a solo exhibition at Foam-3h, the Amsterdam Photography museum, In 2009 she did research at the Spaarnestad Photoarchives, resulting in new work and a solo exhibition at Galerie37 Spaarnestad in Harlem, this exhibition was also shown at the Use me Abuse me show at the New York Photofestival, curated by Erik Kessels. Her work regularly appears in various books and magazines.