All things considered Work of Art: The Next Great Artist was not nearly as bad as it could have been. In fact, the descriptor benign springs to my mind. I’m not going to lie, though – it was touch and go at the beginning. The first time I heard that a reality television show along the lines of “America’s Next Top Artist” was in the works, my stomach clenched a little. Of course the art world is predominantly a fickle, market-driven star system – but a reality television show? Will we so easily surrender all semblance of substance? Should we not maintain at least the veneer of scruples? I quickly dismissed the whole thing but several months later, I received an email from a curator friend announcing the premier of the show. In the subject heading she had typed simply, “It’s here.”

After watching all the episodes, however, I can honestly say I cringed not once. Not unlike Sarah Jessica Parker’s other little project you may have heard of, the most interesting aspect of the whole situation has been the fervor of criticism surrounding it. Regarding the critical hysteria surrounding Sex and the City 2, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian noted, “a new army of bloggers has challenged and reinvigorated movie writing.” Similarly, the weekly examinations of Work of Art featured on various Web sites, including those of the participants themselves, and the ensuing conversations that have played out in the comment sections have been far more interesting that the actual show.

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One of the worst things about summer is also one of the best: it’s transitory.  Like an awkward first love affair, that fact that it’s all over so fast is exactly what makes summer such a mythologized season.  In the art world, summer is the spiritual home to the group show, a time to test out new ideas or bring together artists still in an experimental phase of their own.  Summer Show 2010 at Fourteen30 Contemporary takes the ubiquitous August group exhibition and gives it a raison d’etre by actually being about summer, proving once again that the simplest premise is often the best.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Psychedelia is a state of mind. It is a particular mode of perception that upends our assumptions about the way that the world works. It is about heightened color, glimmering patterns, and swirling constellations of form that challenge gravity and the very boundaries between discrete objects.

Al Held, Eagle Rock III, 2000

The exhibition Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art Since the 1960’s at the San Antonio Museum of Art takes these ideas as a net to gather a wide range of artists. The 1960’s, as the well-worn story of post war America goes, was a moment of civil unrest driven by a youth culture that was suspect of authority and newly intoxicated by sex, drugs and rock and roll. It also was a time when artists were riffing on the newly invented methods of image making that Surrealism and hard edged abstraction introduced. As a result, artists such as Richard Anuszkiewicz and other Op Art innovators explored pattern and abstraction to create hallucinatory visual paintings.

Philip Taaffe’s Trinity (1985) extends these ideas from Op Art, creating an image with silkscreen and collage that makes one’s eyes buzz. The image makes us feel like we are falling into it and at the same time repelled by its churning space. Taaffe uses a color spectrum and concentric arrows of modulating scale to create a sense of movement that picks us up off our feet and drives us through the picture plane.

Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1987

Jack Goldstein - an artist who emerged in the 1980’s, disappeared from the art world in the 1990’s and then surfaced again to public acclaim in 2000 until his suicide in 2003– made images that used filmic and photographic sources for his paintings. Included in the exhibition is Untitled (1987), which uses a photograph of a spectacular moment in natural phenomena. Taken in space, the source image for this painting could be abstract but either way, the radiating degrees of hot pink that emanate from an electric blue ground construct a visual field that is arresting.

Fred Tomaselli, Ripple Trees, 1994

Another part of psychedelia that the exhibition’s curator David S Rubin seeks to distance himself from is drugs. But the exhibition does include Fred Tomaselli’s Ripple Trees (1994) combining pills and hemp leaves with paint and resin to construct an image of a landscape at dusk. This magical time of day – when trees and mountains are reduced to mere shadows against the soft glowing light on the horizon – is heightened by a web of luminous orbs that radiate pixilated color.

Jeremy Blake, Reading Ossie Clark, 2003

Shifting away from two dimensions, Jeremy Blake’s Reading Ossie Clark (2003) uses montage to combine short, barely legible clips of shot footage with highly saturated digital color. Each clip morphs into the next creating a dreamlike state of ecstasy. Using sculptural installation and an actual light show, Richie Budd’s Bon Voyage Somnabulating De Pileon (2010) builds on the psychedelic impulse to overwhelm the senses with a fog machine and an array of household items and gadgets. It also includes a sound piece that incorporates Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), a communication model applied in psychotherapy that studies the structure of subjective experience.

Richi Budd, Bon Voyage Somnambulating De Pileon, 2007

Taken together, an exhibition about psychedelic experience in art is in many ways the most extreme exploration of radical forms of perception – something which is at the core of what Marcel Duchamp called “retinal art.” The best work in this show transcends the quaint utopianism of 1960’s psychedelics, choosing to change the way we see instead of changing the whole world.

Today’s article is from our dear friends at Art Practical, where Jessica Brier discusses the new work by On Kawara at the San Francisco Art Institute’s Walter and McBean Galleries.

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

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

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

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

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Annelle's Cornbread (Marks, Mississippi), 2006. Courtesy the artist and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

I’m a sucker for a storyline involving a protagonist’s search for identity across generations and distant lands. More often than not this fascination is satisfied by reading a novel or watching a film, maybe listening to a three-verse country song. It’s not often that such a sprawling narrative emerges from within a work of art, but such is the case with the series of photographs by San Francisco-based artist Danielle Nelson Mourning in her debut solo exhibition at Taylor De Cordoba Gallery in Culver City.

Homecoming presents large-scale ink jet prints of the artist’s pilgrimage across the country and the Atlantic to understand herself and her ancestry. This is no documentary, though; Mourning has visited old family homes in Marks, Mississippi and Niagara Falls, New York to make self-portraits in which the self is more fictional than real. She assumes the dress and style of domestic women from decades past, recalling in part Cindy Sherman’s Complete Untitled Film Stills, though in a decidedly less aggressive way. Mourning goes to Ireland as well to recreate haunting scenes of life during the potato famine of 1845. The work is endearing in its earnest investigation of family history and self, and in its multidimensional presentation of women of certain eras and of domestic life. It seems to be an intensely personal practice, as if the project would mean as much to the artist regardless of whether it had an audience. Sometimes work comes across as so prepared for an audience that there is a paucity of the artist’s own identity, but there’s none of that here.

Rhubarb (Cavan County, Ireland), 2006. Courtesy the artist and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

The most affecting work in the show is the 8mm film, Memories from a Pleasant Visit, which mimics vintage 8mm home movies authentically with its camera shake, jumpy scene cuts and film noise. In it, the characters from Mourning’s Mississippi and Niagara Falls photo narratives are brought to life, though there is still a sense of disconnect between the intent of the characters as they move about, and any narrative that the viewer should draw from the quick scenes. Perhaps the film is the least narrative piece in the show because its presentation of ideas is so hectic, like scraps from the reel of life lying in disjointed piles on the cutting room floor of one’s mind. I actually wonder if I’ve ever been more taken with a work of video art, however. Maybe I relate to each of these divergent female characters, respond to grandma’s chatter as she flips through old photo albums, and possibly—most of all—enjoy the private thrill of being frightened by the subtle Hitchcockian tones of the film. The dull tapping of ivory keys, the lone voice of a choir girl singing, the black-and-white footage capturing the manic twirling of a woman in a gown—it’s chilling. But more so, it’s entrancing.

Paten Circle II (Marks, Mississippi), 2006. Courtesy the artist and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

Danielle Nelson Mourning lives in San Francisco, CA. She earned her MFA at Royal College of Art, London. Her work has been included in several group exhibitions, including at Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito; Hoopers Gallery, London; and the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Prague. Homecoming closes today, June 26. The film Memories from a Pleasant Visit can also be viewed at this link.

If the come hither of May’s New York Gallery Week annoyed the crap out of you, then maybe KRATOS — ABOUT (IL)LEGITIMATE(D) POWER at Team Gallery has just the gravitas you’ve been seeking. Monochrome in execution and serious in tone, this Debbie Downer of a show stands in stark contrast to the group hugs that typically fill galleries’ summer schedules.

The show is dominated by the stultifying audio in Maja Bajević’s video which repeats the phrase, “How do you want to be governed” in deadpan monotone while a woman is mildly accosted by an unseen interrogator. The audio drove me crazy, but this show is about power and control so I suppose at some level annoyance is the point.  That being said, the works in KRATOS treat this subject matter rather flatly. For instance, I’d be much more interested in an extrapolation of what it is to identify with one’s captor rather than the less complex ideas of resistance and endurance that are on display in Bajević’s piece. Likewise, Gianni Motti’s I’m not on Facebook would be more interesting if perhaps he were. He might in fact want to socialize a bit.

Artur Żmijewski, Patricia, Yolanda, 2006 single channel video 16:50 color sound

Artur Żmijewski’s companion videos, Yolanda and Patricia, attempt to break down class structures by presenting the lives of two women on opposite ends of the social scale in a pared-down documentary style — a.k.a. it’s a snoozefest. Teresa Margolles’ work takes an even more blunt look at the intersection of class and fate. While working at a Mexico City morgue, she pulled shards of glass from the bodies of anonymous murder victims and inlayed them into pseudo-fancy jewelry. Her CSI approach to art making extended to last year’s Venice Biennale, where she hung blood stained tarps on the facade of the U.S Pavilion.  There, it might have been a poignant statement on the effect of U.S imperialist policies on developing nations, but here at Team, represented merely in photograph, the work lacks resonance. Furthermore, it hangs for sale in the same capitalist system it portends to critique.

Maria Eichhorn, Prohibited Imports, 2003/2008, black and white photography, 14 parts, 20 x 27.5 inches

A more effective conceptual hook is employed in Maria Eichhorn’s Prohibited Imports, in which she re-photographed pages from a Robert Mapplethorpe catalogue seized from her luggage by Japanese customs officials. Rather than confiscating the entire book, the officials inexplicably scratched out all the depictions of male genitalia, of which there were many. They were careful to stay within the outlines of the form and the effect is bewilderingly perverse. Maybe they should have just used fig leaves, because the ghost dicks they created are just as penile, if not more so, than the original images. The visual experience of Eichhorn’s work is at least as engaging as the idea behind it, which can’t be said for the rest of the work in this show. No matter how shocking or subversive an artist’s idea may be, it’s tough to move beyond a boring video or annoying sound byte.

If summer fun is what you’re looking for, stay away from KRATOS. But, If you’ve spent the past month bitching online about the superficiality of Bravo’s “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist”, this show might be your soul mate.

Ghada Amer is known for appropriating images of women taken from pornography, so it’s not unusual to encounter the stylistic conventions of x-rated material in her work.  At her recent solo exhibition at Cheim & Read, big-breasted women display spread legs and vulvas; two women clutch each other passionately as one penetrates the other with a dildo; a single woman is seen from behind in the typical gesture of submission: butt out, back arched, looking coyly over one shoulder.  Amer embroiders these images (which look like line drawings) onto canvas that has been stretched as if for a traditional painting.  She leaves the ends of the threads untrimmed so that loops and tangles are left on the surface to interfere with the image and create a colored mess.  This is often reported to merely be Amer’s connection to abstraction and expressionism, but the colorful turmoil serves to obscure the imagery and requires the viewer to exert effort to see the content of the image itself.  This act of focused looking creates a heightened sense of voyeurism.

Ghada Amer, The Fortune Teller (2008). Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas, 50 x 60 inches.

In “Color Misbehavior” three large canvases dominate the front room and the entire exhibition.  The Fortune Teller (2008) is sewn with overlapping images of naked women in various poses.  The tangled web of red, orange, blue, and purple threads partially conceal the representational forms; since all the lines of stitched thread are the same thickness, the layered images appear and then vanish as the eye passes over the canvas.  But one image comes into focus and stays: in orange, Disney’s Little Mermaid, a clothed and serene counterpoint to the naked women around her, but no less compliant.

Ghada Amer, The Egyptian Lover (2008). Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas, 62 x 78 inches.

The Egyptian Lover (2008) is similar in its layered images and consistent line weights, but in this case the embroidery is done over primed canvas painted with beige, lilac, yellow, and blue.  The drips of thin acrylic paint mingle with the “drips” formed by the long tangles of threads, blending the materials nicely.  As with The Fortune Teller, a Disney character joins the orgy of naked limbs, this time in the form of Snow White.  Her kittenish glance is directed over her shoulder. These two canvases portray transparent layers of fantasy women, conflating the myth of the vulnerable, forever-sexually-available woman with the delusion of the innocent and submissive girl.  Combined, they create a madonna-whore tension.  An obvious move?  Maybe—but it is effective.

The title of Who Killed “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon?” (2010) points to Picasso’s well-known painting of distinctly unrefined prostitutes standing in unsubmissive, even aggressive poses.  But in Amer’s work the woman depicted is hyper-groomed with perfect eyebrows, Chola-style eye makeup, and ironed hair.  Drips of paint behind the stitching run like tears from her eyes.   Amer answers the question posed in the title of who killed the sexually adept, self-possessed women and replaced them with the vulnerable and passive displays with which we are now familiar.  Picasso’s women were nude, but Amer’s are naked.

The other work in the exhibition continues this theme.  The next room contains canvases stitched with repeats of a single image, often almost completely concealed by masses of threads, and smaller embroidered-paper works that each show a single women in a pose that is sexual but not erotic.  Amer uses these images to form a critique of woman-as-idealized-object, and tension resides in this shifting cultural no man’s land between acceptable fare and profanity.   The work is dynamic and the content and materials present opposing notions of femininity.  Combined, they create a mix of allure and repulsion.