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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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, 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.

China Adams, "Contract of Sale: Skull," 1994. X-Ray, Light Box, Ink on Paper.

When she gives artist’s lectures, sculptor China Adams often describes her work as a race against her own death. Her smooth plaster “chunks” of ensconced trash, her vampiric experiments with blood consumption and her glass Vitrines filled with mummified possessions all attempt to preserve what’s bound to decay. But, while her work has the same mortality obsession as Vanitas paintings by the likes of Pieter Claesz or Jacques de Gheyn, Adams steers away from iconic symbols—when skulls appear, it’s in the form of a clinical x-ray; when blood appears, it’s already been drained, drunk or cleaned up. Instead of representing it, Adams’ work acts out against death and this has always struck me as the smartest, most proactive strategy.

Cris Brodahl, "The Waiting Room," 2009. Oil on glued canvas, framed.

But Cris Brodahl’s current exhibition at Marc Foxx Gallery does not shy away from representing the race with death. In fact, it does so in a way that is both cliched and stunningly insidious. Called Waiting Room, the exhibition includes oil paintings, ceramic wall pieces, and mirrors, all of which depict or reflect fleshy skulls–though Brodahl’s approach to fleshiness has more in common with Ryan McGinley’s than Jenny Saville’s.

Waiting Room feels quietly controlled at first glance, though an Elizabeth Bishop poem of the same title speaks of “the sensation of falling off/the round, turning world.”  The color scheme is understated: sepias, grays, soft pinks. The canvases are framed with wood strips. The mirrors are perfectly clean and slightly tinted. The composition of each painting is sensible and unsurprising. The skull in Waiting Room, for instance, sits right at the center of the the sea of gray. The woman in The Clock, who wears a skull cloaked skirt, has the graceful, front-and-center gravitas of a Degas dancer.

"Wait," 2009. Oil on glued canvas, framed.

The predictability of  Brodahl’s images contradicts their eerie instability. Face, skin and skull have been pieced together in a way that makes bones seem like flesh and flesh seem like a pastiche of paper-smooth planes and curves. In Wait, a rosy image that features a hollow floating head, the skin of a peaceful face covers an empty cavity, not unlike the cavity inside an empty skull. In Next, a skull grows on the outside of an elegant woman’s face, obscuring her features with barnacle-like jaws and foreheads. Brodahl out-waits death by confusing flesh with bone and piecing together bodies that don’t quite make sense (the face in Wait has fingers for a forehead). If death doesn’t know what it looks like, than can it ever really appear?

]]> http://dailyserving.com/2010/06/waiting-room/feed/ 2 http://dailyserving.com/2010/06/haunted-contemporary-photographyvideoperformance/ http://dailyserving.com/2010/06/haunted-contemporary-photographyvideoperformance/#comments Tue, 15 Jun 2010 07:00:21 +0000 Bean Gilsdorf http://dailyserving.com/?p=5809 Nostalgia is a word that means “a wistful desire to return” or “a sentimental yearning,” but from these cloying definitions one would never guess that the word originally meant “homesickness”. At its heart, Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance at the Guggenheim Museum in New York is nostalgic, but it is also complex and engaging without a hint of the saccharine. Nostalgia as homesickness is the distant light that guides this excellent melancholic exhibition.

Sarah Charlesworth, "Herald Tribune, 1977" (1977). Twenty-six chromogenic prints, 59.7 x 41.9 cm each, edition 2/3.

Despite its subtitle, Haunted includes work in a wide variety of media, including painting and sculpture. Helpfully, the works are organized into thematic sections that guide the viewer through the winding gallery: Appropriation and the Archive; Documentation and Reiteration; Landscape, Architecture, and the Passage of Time; and Trauma and the Uncanny. These divisions assist the viewer in comprehending the modes in which current artists have reckoned with history and their art-historical antecedents. Insightful wall text accompanies the beginning of each new section.

Idris Khan, "Homage to Bernd Becher" (2007). Bromide print, 49.8 x 39.7 cm, edition 1/6.

Walking up the curving ramp, the viewer encounters Appropriation and the Archive first. This is the perfect introduction to the show for both uninitiated and seasoned viewers, featuring imagery “borrowed” from print media, movies, and other images taken from the public domain. The textbook-classics are here: Andy Warhol, Sherry Levine, Richard Prince, Sarah Charlesworth. For the experienced, it’s like greeting old friends; for the newcomer, it’s a well-rounded primer. Though it may be familiar, Charlesworth’s Herald Tribune, November 1977 (1977) is particularly gratifying to see in person. Idris Khan’s Homage to Bernd Becher (2007) is a diminutive powerhouse of layered emotive lines that conjure up the industrial structures documented by photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. The work in this section stands as a persuasive critique of the myth of artistic originality.

Spencer Finch, "42 Minutes (after Kawabata) (2005). Seven chromogenic prints, 15.2 x 15.2 cm each.

Continuing up and around, the Documentation and Reiteration portion displays the photographic evidence of performance work, citing notables such as Marina Abramovic, Tacita Dean, and Ana Mendieta. Though most of the works in this section stand on their own, they function primarily as reminiscent testimonials to events in the past. The performances that provide the basis for this section provoked conversations among fellow viewers: one well-dressed woman recounted her experience of seeing an Abramovic performance to her companion; an elderly couple argued about the processes likely used to make Markus Hansen’s Curtain (2004).  Landscape, Architecture, and the Passage of Time is modest, with many of the works being smaller than their counterparts in other sections of the exhibition; but it also contained some of the most evocative work. Spencer Finch’s 42 Minutes (after Kawabata) (2005) is a series of seven photographs that transform a snowy landscape into a picture of an interior door via a reflection on glass. The subtle shift from landscape to door, inside to outside, means that one image manifests itself in another, and no image in the series truly exists without its counterparts. This is a literal haunting, and it is eloquent.

Nate Lowman, "Loser" (2009). Alkyd on canvas, 101.6 x 76.2 cm.

Organized around a theory that originated with psychologist Sigmund Freud, Trauma and the Uncanny contains intriguing and provocative work, some by lesser-known artists. Nate Lowman breathes new life into the raster-dot image first promoted by pop artists like Sigmar Polke, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein. The Last Supper (2009) and Loser (2009) are compositions that manage to be smart, funny, and heart-rending all at once. Gillian Wearing’s Self-Portrait at Three Years Old (2004) provides a double-take experience: the artist took a sweet childhood portrait and cut out/replaced her three-year-old eyes with her own adult eyes. The new portrait could function as a mask, hiding the adult self behind a guise of innocence; or show the outward form of a child who understands more than she lets on. The effect is disturbing.

Gillian Wearing, "Self-Portrait at Three Years Old", (2004). Chromogenic print, 182 x 122 cm.

There is no doubt that the work in the exhibition is superlative, and the thematic arrangement makes it easy for the casual art viewer to understand the context—without seeming too obvious for the more sophisticated habitué. This is museum curation at its best: stimulating but accessible, informative without condescension. The nostalgia in evidence brings to mind a quote from the late cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard: “Simulation is master, and nostalgia, the phantasmal parodic rehabilitation of all lost referentials, alone remains.” The nostalgia demonstrated by the artists is wistful but not sentimental; and the history they mine tells us as much about the present as it does about our past.

Arena #10 (Dogs) (1990) Stuffed animals on afghan, 11.5 x 123 x 32 inches.

These seven works, all created in 1990, puncture the mythic preciousness for which stuffed animals and handmade baby blankets are renown.  Generally, cloth is used by artists for its connection to the body and domesticity, and Kelley manages to bring these associations along while still creating a colder, more antagonistic ambiance.  In addition, Kelley also manages, despite the suave white cube setting, to deflate the illusion that art need be urbane or polished.

Arena #10 (Dogs) is one of the most playful and visually-pleasing compositions in the show.  On a bright red, orange, and brown striped afghan sit eight stuffed animals that seem to be engaged in a tug of war to divide the centermost animal, a two-headed dog.  Most of the other animals are also dogs, but some are silly, ambiguous hybrids like the snake/dachshund/duck concoction or the cheerfully anthropomorphic tomato.  Arena #10 is just fun-n-games; yet look at the display for perhaps too long, and you’ll see that some of the dogs’ expressions are not quite right.

Arena #7 (Bears) (1990) Stuffed animals on blanket, 11.5 x 53 x 49 inches.

In Arena #7 (Bears) five stuffed animals are poised at the perimeter of a satin-edged receiving blanket on the floor: two monkeys, one taupe bear, and twinned golden bears that could be the uglier younger brothers of Pooh. The colors of the animals harmonize with the cream-colored blanket.  The animals sit at the edge of the square as though playing Monopoly, or waiting for a referee’s whistle to blow and a game to begin.  It is one of the sweeter, more innocuous pieces in the show, but even so, the second-hand blanket is on the floor and the bears and monkeys are bedraggled, adulterating the potential innocence of the scene.

Arena #9 (Blue Bunny) (1990) Stuffed animal on blanket, 7 x 60 x 74 inches.

In contrast to #10 and #7, Arena #9 (Blue Bunny) feels stark.  A lone light-blue knitted rabbit sits in the center of a grubby light-blue blanket, smiling somewhat sheepishly with arms raised.  The ambiguity of the gesture—is this an expression of the victor alone at last on the playing field, or a sign of mommy-pick-me-up dependence?—gives the piece a heightened emotional force.

Arena #5 (E.T's) (1990) Stuffed animals on blanket, 7 x 97 x 87 inches.

Arena 5 (E.T’s) is, no pun intended, the most alien.  Here, the field is a large goldenrod-colored blanket.  At one corner sits a lone alien, facing toward the other actors but solemnly looking down.  In the diagonally opposite corner, two cloth E.T. dolls inspect a prone pink humanoid dispassionately.  The attitude and position of the dolls and the emptiness of the territory turns a pilled old throw and some fabric toys into a diorama with all the warmth of an operating theater.

It’s a mild case of what anthropologist Mary Douglas called “pollution behavior”: activities likely to cross closely-held boundaries or repudiate cherished designations, like putting boots on the kitchen table or eating spaghetti in bed.  In this case, and especially in the context of an urbane Upper East Side gallery, it’s the contact with the floor that evokes pollution.  Not just by using obviously worn and recycled objects, but by literally reducing art objects to the level of the floor, Kelley manages to interrogate assumptions about art and also the viewer’s feeling for handmade and beloved objects.  Kelley melds the personal, cherished nature of stuffed animals and security blankets and the costly, refined nature of blue-chip art to show us how flimsy the narrative of sacred objects can be.

Andrew Lord: between my hands to water falling, selected works from 1990 to 2010 Installation, 2010. Courtesy Santa Monica Museum of Art. Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studio.

The poet Frederick Seidel once received a death threat. It came via answering machine, in the form of a message left by a young woman. In a breathy voice, the woman said, “Frederick Seidel . . . Frederick Seidel . . . you think you’re going to live. You think you’re going to live. But you’re not. You’re not going to live. You’re not going to live . . . .” It was repetitive and frightening, but it also seemed like the wrong kind of threat to give a poet like Siedel. Even if he didn’t want to die, he knew he would. Much of his poetry fixates on that very fact, though the way he writes about death and the life that leads up to it often unnerves readers. “Give me Everest or give me death,” he writes  in Climbing Everest. “A naked woman my age is a total nightmare /but right now one is coming through the door/. . . She kisses the train wreck in the tent and combs his white hair.”  Verses like these that marry unexpected privilege with bodily dilapidation and a flash of meanness are hard to forget.

If Siedel’s poems were made of clay, each would more or less resemble an Andrew Lord sculpture: the crevices, fluids and disruptions of the human body would be unapologetic, ungainly and honest. Yet they would maintain a strange veneer of sophistication. Lord knows how to turn a clay vessel into a receptacle for everything corporal.

"Andrew Lord: between my hands to water falling, selected works from 1990 to 2010," Installation, 2010. Courtesy Santa Monica Museum of Art. Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studio.

between my hands to water falling, the current exhibition at Santa Monica Museum of Art, catalogues the past 20 years of Lord’s career and highlights four distinct bodies of work. Despite his irreverence, Lord, a British artist who began making art in the 1970s, plays into the revered tradition of ceramic vessels. In fact, his work, which has the air of something old and privileged, recalls Cellini’s Saltcellar at the same time that it recalls the childish ceramic mounds made by Michael Reafsnyder. For breathing, biting, swallowing, tasting, smelling, listening, watching, a series that began in 1994, Lord used impressions from his own body to shape the clay—a crude way of translating physical sensation into art objects. He literally bit, pressed into and clawed at his forms. The results are craggy gray vessels displayed on white pedestals. Siedel might say they look as though they’re “wrinkles of the ocean on a ball of tar.”

In smelling, the vessels are thin and elongated. In breathing, they have unevenly swelling bases, like balloons inflated by someone who has to regroup between each blow.  In swallowing, the most visceral of the series, the vessels are lumpy as if full of food and other objects, choking hazards that got lodged in the throat and never slid down. Though flesh-like and vulnerable, the sculptures in breathing, biting, swallowing, tasting, smelling, listening, watching are also glazed and embellished with streaks of gold coloring. Corporeality doesn’t have to be all grit.

"Andrew Lord: between my hands to water falling, selected works from 1990 to 2010," Installation, 2010. Courtesy Santa Monica Museum of Art. Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studio.

The untitled series, begun in 2004, reimagines ceramic work by Post-Impressionist Paul Gaugin. Lord emphasizes Gaugin’s weirdness over his voyeuristic self-importance and Lord’s blackish vessels double as caricatures and exotic creatures. Grouped together, they become an army of knotty bodies, an unromantic interpretation of Gaugin’s dabbling in the prehistoric. (Siedel wrote about Gaugin too, talking about a nose that, “looks like Guagin’s/ His silent huge hooked hawk prow”–and while noses in Lord’s work aren’t too imposing, there are some “hooked hawk” elbows).

Lord’s exhibition also includes two Fontana-like wall works with fleshy bumps protruding from them and a seven minute video of water gushing down a stream, the stream  that inspired Lord’s recent river Spodden series. The inadvertent effect of these inclusions is to emphasize how much more evocative Lord is when he works in ceramics.

Ceramics are possibly the most bipolar of the art mediums. When polished and over-crafted, they silence, even deny, life’s rawer aspects. But when handled with the virtuosic impertinence of a sculptor like Lord, they become a fleshed-out battlefield that pits refinement against ruin. between my hands to water falling, a collaboration with the Milton Keynes Gallery, continues at the Santa Monica Museum of Art through August 21st. A sister exhibition will open in the UK in September.

]]> http://dailyserving.com/2010/06/andrew-lords-bodies/feed/ 0 http://dailyserving.com/2010/06/alison-elizabeth-taylor-foreclosed/ http://dailyserving.com/2010/06/alison-elizabeth-taylor-foreclosed/#comments Tue, 01 Jun 2010 07:00:33 +0000 Bean Gilsdorf http://dailyserving.com/?p=5126 Foreclosed is the kind of show that makes it seem advantageous for artists to also be craftsmen. In contrast to the parallel movements of “post-skill art” on one hand and “sloppy craft” on the other, Alison Elizabeth Taylor’s marquetry pieces at James Cohan Gallery are constructed with incredible skill. And—when materials connect meaningfully with imagery—they are outstanding examples of art that satisfyingly integrates workmanship and concept.

Wires Ripped (2009-10) Wood veneer, shellac. 61" x 29"

The unusual medium draws you in. A first glance might suggest that Taylor’s work is painted, but a closer look reveals that the compositions are actually blade-thin fragments of wood inlaid in panels. The pieces in the show are all crafted with pleasurable attention to detail: up-close viewing shows the joins to fit together perfectly without gaps, lumps, or smudges of glue. Taylor is self-taught, so her obvious facility with the fragile veneer is particularly impressive.

In Foreclosed, Taylor’s overarching concept was to respond to “the human impact of the short-sighted policies and greed that triggered millions of foreclosures.” The works in the exhibition can be divided into two categories: portraits of people, and portraits of destruction. Somewhat perversely, the work shines when it reveals the kicked walls, torn out electricals, or water-damaged ceilings of the vacant houses. These, such as the photorealistic Wires Ripped (2009-10), marry the materials and vision—wood veneer creating an image of ravaged drywall and wood studs—that moves the work beyond skill and into the realm of distinction. Taylor’s adept use of the medium is a reversal of the careless damage, creating a tense, almost anxious connection between the image and its flawless ground. Rendered in sumptuous detail, the ravaged drywall and cracked wood studs are a perfect stand-in for the economic and emotional destruction of domestic bliss laid to waste.

Squatter Doorway (2009) Wood veneer, shellac. 53" x 46 1/2"

Another example, the large Squatter Doorway (2009) is an interior view of a ragged hole in the exterior wall of a house, where wooden slats and scraps of decorative molding are nailed to make a sloppy latticework barricade against intruders. Beyond the slats are glimpses of the normally-invisible framing of the wall, and still further beyond, a peek into the yard and wooden siding of the house. What fascinates here, aside from the beauty and precision of the execution, is the conceptual dimensionality: wood is the structural material used to depict the material structure. There is a lucid circularity to it, a completeness that holds the subject matter to the physicality of the work. Another large piece, the installation Tap Left On (2009-10), portrays a water-damaged ceiling to the same brilliant effect.

Tap Left On (2009-10) Wood veneer, shellac. 71" x 75" x 48"

The portraits, unfortunately, don’t have the same conceptual texture. The Pyrographist (2009) is obviously executed with equal skill. A smiling bespectacled woman stands proudly in front of her creations, a series of wood-burned nature scenes on the paneled wall behind her. But without the ideological marriage of the subject to the medium, it falls flat.

The Pyrographist (2009) Wood veneer, pyrography, shellac. 46" x 40"

Interestingly, reviews of her work to date have not raised the issue of craft qua craft. Marquetry is a practice typically limited to popular subjects or patterning on functional objects like tables. Taylor’s work displays an unmistakable mastery of woodworking, unusual in the contemporary arts but vital to traditional craft. Instead of being a detractor, this association with folksiness seems to bolster the overall theme of the exhibition. By using an atypical yet unthreatening medium, Taylor reveals an accessible but still intriguing vision of loss and anger.

Brent Green, Leonard's House From Front, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. Mixed media, 2010.

Is it true belief’s unyielding determination that redeems and protects? This question lies at the heart of Brent Green’s solo exhibition Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then at Andrew Edlin Gallery. The issue of belief occupies both Green and the man whose work provided the inspiration for the project.

The story goes like this: a man named Leonard Wood once built a house entirely by hand in Kentucky—a chaotic house of multiple rooms with strange dimensions—believing it would save his wife Mary from dying of cancer. Green visited the house before it was torn down and acquired the hand-drawn plans. In examining the house and its meaning, Green was inspired to rebuild it on his own property in Pennsylvania, resurrecting a lost monument to love, devotion, hope, and delusion.

Brent Green, House Opened Up, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. Mixed media, 2009.

But Gravity is more than just a house. It is a multilayered project that is comprised of the house, its contents, sculptures, projections, and a feature-length stop-motion film. And the project is more than the story of a crazy man who thought he could heal his wife’s cancer with planks and nails: beyond the biography of Wood, it’s also the story of Green himself, as he explores his conviction and responsibility as an artist.

In the back room of the gallery, Green has installed the house in situ: bedroom, bathroom, sitting room with piano, kitchen; each element recreated with a palpable zeal. Avoiding the common pitfalls of outsider art created by an insider, there is nothing ironic, or cynical, or tongue-in-cheek here. The components are charming without being cloying or twee. Instead, one comes away with the feeling that Green is as much a true believer as Wood, though each in his own way. In the first iteration, the work of building the house was a testament to faith; in the second, it is a guileless exploration of belief itself, a willful belief in belief. The result reads as an authentic ode to desperate hope and an all-in commitment to hopeless causes.

Brent Green, Mary's First Memory, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. Video still, 2010.

A looped projection plays in the front of the gallery, showing Gravity Preview, the trailer for the film. Dark and dreamily restless in the way of all stop-motion, the fitful shots show Leonard and Mary in various scenes as Green’s voiceover narrates. The main characters build, plant flowers, and sleep in scenes of magical reality, stuttering and jerking in the frame while metal flowers grow and bloom, and galvanized nails roll into the gutters.

Toward the end of Gravity Preview, Green’s voiceover explains “…and so I decided to make this film about Leonard, and I rebuilt his house behind my barn in Pennsylvania, full-scale. And, you know, I’m making this film about him and just running everything down to zero to leave something wonderful behind, which is exactly what Leonard did.” In retracing Wood’s steps, Green presents a full-scale documentation of Wood’s doomed project, but what we also see is Green’s struggle to overcome his own skepticism and faithlessness.

"Permission to Fail," 2010, Mixed media, Dimensions variable: 90 x116 x 20 inches.

A show with as defeatist a title as Permission to Fail should be anything but healthy. Yet “healthy”  nicely describes Macha Suzuki’s unpretentious installation at Sam Lee Gallery. Stationed at the intersection between ambivalence and ambition, Permission to Fail rejects the fragmented nostalgia and aimless grandiosity that has infected too much recent art, opting instead for a quirky brand of pragmatism. Luckily, Suzuki’s pragmatism sidesteps tedium, and the exhibition functions as a psychological dream-scape in which even the well-adjusted must grapple with life’s weirdness.

All of the sculptures in the exhibition consist of typical craft-grade materials, the likes of which could be found at Michaels or Home Depot: MDF, t-shirts, pebbles, spray foam, cotton balls, yarn, and fake grass. While Suzuki doesn’t mask the normalcy of his oeuvre, he executes each work as if he were Charles Ray on a budget: clean edges, deliberate surfaces, precise proportions.

Two geometric birds hang above the gallery’s entrance, suspended from the ceiling. White with sleek surfaces, the birds have only one wing a piece and, at first glance, they look like the two severed halves of a single animal. Their co-dependence doesn’t seem to bother them in the least, however, and this is just one instance in which Suzuki turns failure into a fact of life that, while certainly more intriguing, isn’t much more debilitating than mismatched socks.

"Just a Tree," 2010, Mixed media, 91 x 24 x 35 inches.

Below the birds, a life-sized male figure in a striped sweatshirt, crisp new shoes, and the outline of a cell phone in his front right pocket holds an angular orb as if performing some hipster ritual. Suzuki’s doppelganger–the figure’s proportions mimic the artist’s exactly–and the exhibition’s protagonist, the man has a papier-mâché tree trunk  in place of a head. Like in a dream that only becomes a nightmare once you wake and untangle its strangeness, the tree trunk seems natural, even rational.

The figure of child in blue and red pajamas and a mask for a head perches on a shelf and another child figure, called The Rider, straddles a headless creature with a cotton-ball laden lamb’s body and wolf’s legs. The Rider’s geometric helmet head, which resembles the man’s orb,  has white antlers growing out of it. Each figure in the show dresses trendily, wearing the sort of clothes that announce their wearer is “with it” but don’t draw too much attention. No more or less innocent than the tree-headed man, the children, while the size of toddlers, channel the precocity of adolescents who genuinely believe themselves grown-up and capable. Their covered heads suggest that they’ve also encountered enough grown-up threats to make them wary, though not necessarily inhibited.

"Nice Try," 2010, Mixed media, 45 1/2 x 45 1/2 x 21 inches.

Two targets–one black with a green rim, one white with a blue rim–hang on walls that would be adjacent if not for the gallery entrance. Evenly spaced arrows that have all missed their goal puncture the targets’ peripheries. The whole show is full of near misses like these, yet none undermine the fact that Suzuki’s approach to disappointment feels more measured  than desperate.  The head coverings, rather than effacement or jaded attempts to escape identity, present as viable strategies for relating  to a prefabricated world. If you masquerade as material, the material environment will more likely embrace you, and you’ll be better able to protect what’s really yours–the body and face beneath that no one sees. And if you fail consistently, cleanly, and smoothly, sending the arrow into the target’s periphery every time, then the difference between failure and success gradually becomes null. Maybe this is still a nightmare in which the only way to beat the big, ungainly world is to wear a tree trunk on your head and fail expertly, but it’s a nightmare in which the main players refuse to sweat the small stuff and seem comfortable with themselves, even if they can’t be themselves without masking themselves.

Rachel Zoe, 32" x 24" , oil on linen. Courtesy Kimberly Brooks and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

The art world. It’s way more serious and important than every other industry! This thinking at least seems to persist even though the field of contemporary art has maintained an open flirtation with its sassy sister, the fashion industry, since long before even Andy Warhol trotted his wacky wigs around Studio 54 with the likes of Diane von Fürstenberg. There is a mutual fascination between the two fields, and yet it seems that the art world would prefer to keep its consorting with the fashion industry confined strictly to social events, rather than consider fashion (so low-brow!) as a worthy subject matter for actual works of art.

Los Angeles-based artist, Kimberly Brooks‘, current solo show at Taylor De Cordoba gallery in Culver City breaks with this norm to explore the intrigue of the fashion industry’s most iconic stylemakers—without the precept of farce or condemnation. The Stylist Project (on view through April 3rd) presents Brooks’ latest body of work—a series of oil painted portraits of fashion industry insiders, including stylist to the starts and Bravo TV fixture, Rachel Zoe, and award winning costume designer and Madonnaʼs personal stylist Arianne Phillips, among others.

The work on view blends the fields of art and fashion astutely, presenting the fashionable set as they have styled themselves, while at the same time drawing upon the ages-old artistic tradition of portraiture. The regal positions of some of the sitters recall Renaissance royals, and the sprawled poses of others touch on the early Modern depiction of courtesans, such as Edouard Manet’s Olympia.

Arianne Phillips, 30" x 24", oil on linen. Courtesy Kimberly Brooks and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

The Stylist Project is the third solo show for Brooks at Taylor De Cordoba. The first two, Mom’s Friends (2007) and Technicolor Summer (2008), explored much more personal subject matter than the present show. Brooks’ outward shift to now document the fashion industry with this latest series has garnered a lot of attention from media and publications that wouldn’t normally publish gushing articles about fine artists. At the Taylor De Cordoba gallery, they’ve laid out a stack of glossies with Brooks’ name inked onto them. When I asked Heather Taylor, Director of Taylor De Cordoba, to discuss the widespread reception that this exhibition has received, she told me, “The bottom line is that people are hungry for this dialogue and Kimberly is pulling the curtain back on the fashion world, which up until the past year—with the popularity of [the film] ‘The September Issue’ and [the TV show] ‘The Rachel Zoe Project’—had been fairly mysterious.”

New York born, Los Angeles based, Kimberly Brooks maintains her studio in Venice, CA. She earned her BA from UC Berkeley and trained in fine arts at Otis College of Art and Design and UCLA. Her work has been included in numerous juried exhibitions, including at Pleiades Gallery of Contemporary Art, New York; Risk Press Gallery, Los Angeles; and Phillips de Pury Auction House, Los Angeles.

Wind (Rom), 2009; plastic, poster, wallpaper, spray paint, loops, screws; 209 x 202 cm.

In William Gibson’s 1986 novel Count Zero, an abandoned but sentient AI robot composes art objects from detritus found in space.  Despite being built by a computer from discards and rubbish, these objects have a deeply human gravity—both a grace and a yearning for grace—and are highly prized.   It is precisely this evocative use of materials and imagery that Isa Genzken gives us in Wind, her response to the death of Michael Jackson.  This recent work, at Neugerriemschneider Gallery in Berlin, expertly conjures the agitation between glory and coarseness in celebrity culture.

Five monumental mixed-media works, all from 2009, are hung from the walls of the gallery.  The outlier of the group in materials and scale, Wind (Rom), is composed of pages torn from a floral wall calendar, plastic, satin ribbon, spray paint, and tape.  The other four works are larger and a more intriguing mix of temporary and durable materials: the weight and chill of large copper and aluminum plates clashes with flimsy photocopies provisionally clamped to their edges, and the glitz and promise of mirrored disco tiles is defeated by the crassness of cheap blue painter’s tape.  To say that the work is abject would be somewhat misleading; the scale and materials often point to permanence and beauty, even though it falls short of being fully realized.  In Wind, Genzken tells us that true beauty is not possible under current historical and cultural conditions.

Wind (Michael/David), 2009; plastic, poster, colour copies, mirrored foil, coloured paper, spray paint, tape; 200.5 x 276 cm.

The particular mix of images gives the work lyric force.  Wind (Michael/David)—made of plastic, poster, photocopies, mirrored foil, colored paper, spray paint, and tape—depicts Jackson in his prime: styled, dancing, iconic.  Gold spray paint adorns the cheap posters, giving Jackson a top hat or circling his exposed chest.  The composition is also inflected by a centrally-placed image of the famous marble statue; a small copy of Lochner’s Altar of the City Patrons; and multi-colored curving marks that look like an enlarged thumbprint.  In this way Genzken points the viewer to the distinction of Jackson’s oeuvre, inviting connections that signal individuality, singularity, and exceptionalism.   But on closer inspection she undercuts her own assertions: the posters of Jackson are printed with © Annie Liebowitz, the original author of the photo; ripped from a book, the tattered reproduction of Lochner’s altar has his name and information about the piece at the bottom.  It’s as if Genzken wants to build a new Oz, and then perversely delights in drawing back the curtain on her own construction: The gold? Cheap paint. The rainbow? A tacky photocopy. Our heroes? Well…

Wind (Michael), 2009; copper plate, aluminium plates, colour copies, tape, spray paint; 260.5 x 315.5 cm.

And yet, there is a scavenged poetry, too.  Wind (Michael) uses repetition to evoke a sense of loss.  Against a background of alternating copper and aluminum panels, the piece depicts Jackson in concert, leaping into the air in a dance routine.  The photos (more cheap photocopies) are attached to the first two of the three copper panels, establishing a visual rhythm that points to the blankness of the last panel.  Despite the heroic scale of the piece, the apparent permanence of the metal, and the brightly colored papers, the piece is cold and despairing.

The various compositions of the pieces are anarchic but not disorganized.  Materials, too, are severely contrasting but not completely unharmonious.   If the work is, as stated in the press release, “concerned with the depiction of this immaterial force of nature,” it seems that Genzken shows us a wind that can simultaneously elevate and sully.  In the end, the work feels less specifically about the adoration and dejection of Michael Jackson than about the society that produced him.

Jeff Koons, Couple (Dots) Landscape, 2009, Oil on canvas. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Jeff Koons, November 14-January 9th, Gagosian Gallery

“To live outside the law you must be honest,” sang Bob Dylan in 1966, in his brash classic Absolutely Sweet Marie. It’s a line Dylan presumably appropriated from Don Siegel’s dark 1958 noir, The Lineup, a fact Jonathan Lethem insightfully pointed out in his 2007 essay ‘The Ecstasy of Influence.‘  Siegel’s film used the more unwieldy “When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.” No matter which way it’s said, the sentiment rings true. It’s honesty that distinguishes the unlovable, often spineless villain from the law-breaker who nihilistically disregards conventional morality and candidly embraces his renegade status.

For two decades, Jeff Koons’ has been a lovable villain precisely because of his lawless honesty—a certain purity of motive has run through his otherwise amoral oeuvre. His art ads, made in the 1980s—in one, a bathrobe clad Koons surrounded himself with nearly nude models whose perfect skin compliments the brightly colored foliage—were insouciantly crass, so self-contained as to be unaware of the institution they were teasing. Later, the bust of his porn-star/diplomat wife and himself also seemed completely sincere as a floozy: as sultry as a romance novel and as pristine as any classical Greek statuette might have been in its hey-day. Then there were those oversized stainless steel keepsakes, like the Hanging Heart valued at $20 million, and the overstimulating collage-like paintings with surfaces as slick as Vogue’s ad-space.

Jeff Koons, Waterfall Couple (Dots) Blue Swish with Red Stroke, 2009, Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Gagosian.

At its best, Koons makes contrivance brazen; at its worst, he makes a world too carefully executed to question, something that, like a newly made car, is so familiar and commoditized that you feel (though perhaps wrongly) that you know it inside out after only a passing glance. But, up to now, his work has always been straightforward about its own empty audacity, and refreshingly so.

Strangely, Koons new show at Gagosian Gallery falls into neither the “brazenly contrived” nor the “too familiar” category. The ten large paintings maybe recognizable—they cull from a well-established vocabulary of layers and dots and ab-ex eruptions—but they veer out of Koons’ typical territory. Instead of being candidly, banally over-the-top, they indulge in faux complexity and instead of feeling newly minted like the BMWs in the dealer’s showroom, they feel old, as if they’re remakes of a previous model that never quite existed but easily could have.

Jeff Koons, Girl Woods (Dots), 2008, Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Gagosian.

Each of Koons new paintings uses a photorealistic image as its backdrop—sexy, fleshy poses that recall Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris. Over the bodies is a screen of Polke-inspired pixels. Koons calls them dots and they cover whole of each canvas, making the bodies beneath discernible only from certain angles. Next come the Twombly-inspired gestures that sometimes veer into riffs off of Christopher Wool’s characteristic swooshes and smears. Sometimes these swooshes and smears land in the middle of the picture plane, becoming sexualized orifices that could give Georgia O’Keefe, queen of the vaginal, a run for her money. In Girl Woods (Dots), an ovular bouquet of purple, yellow and blue crinkled marks hover over the womb of the pixelized girl who has curled up in a bed of green.  In Waterfall Couple (Dots, Blue Swish, Red Stroke), the images scrawls, blurs, and loops of unbridled paint take over so completely that the couple in the background disappears.

All of the “layers” in Koons’ new paintings are, in fact, not layered at all but flatly and perfectly painted on one continuous plane by the many highly skilled assistants that populate Koons’ studio. A man who employs a specialist in spray painting inflatables, Koons rarely touches his own painting these days. Instead, he digitally designs them and creates the systems for their execution and, even with multiple assistants working, one painting sometimes takes months to finish.

The craft of the work at Gagosian is impeccable. Each element of each image seems part of a calculated symbology, as if Koons said to himself, “A red line here will represent virility and the blue squiggle there will embody the freedom of the soul.” Yet, for an artist who has so long stayed away from such needlessly complex systems of meaning, this new venture into the over-wrought language of expressionistic omniscience seems at first naïve and then exasperatingly dishonest.

Jeff Koons, Waterfall Couple (Dots) Marker, Horizontal, 2009, Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Gagosian.

Koons has been called a charlatan before, usually unfairly, but that label finally fits. In this show, his sampling from his lineage—a little Courbet here, a little Twombly there, a little Polke, a little Oehlen and Wool—is too obvious and dastardly to be provocative. Nothing is wrong with sampling, of course; there are many things right with it. But Koons abandoned the minimalism of his usually overblown contrivance in an effort to borrow his way into the rawer, more emotive and sensual side of art (in his epithet to his press release, he says, romantically, “The gesture that you end up making in the world happens through instinct and all these desires for procreation”).

The need to swish and gesticulate and layer in order to get at instinct and primordial desire not only underestimates Koons’ own artistry—honest contrivance is a skill that Koons mastered so well it became emotionally provocative, repulsive and seductive at once. It also underestimates us, his viewers. We’re smart enough to know that vulnerable, evocative, gut-spilling art doesn’t have to arrive in a neo-expressionist package. And when it does, it feels like a cheap trick.