Matt Ashjian, "Then, They Told Me That The Most Current Theory is About a Rejection of Theory. . .," studio debris.

A grad school classmate of mine, one of the more resourceful people I’ve met, had a studio that looked like a carpenter’s shop. Though not clean per se, it was functional and organized, with shelving units and a storage loft above a small couch. When he got stuck or couldn’t decide why he’d gone to art school or wondered whether there was any use in having a “critical discourse” around his work, he’d build something useful: a surf board, a book shelf, a cabinet.

One late evening, I walked past his studio, and from a distance, it looked like everything was gone. Then from the doorway, I could see that he’d piled it all — his old paintings, the surf board he’d crafted, his metal shelving unit, wood, his office chair — up against the back wall.  I sort of loved it. It seemed more like piled up frustration then outright anger, and the pile itself spoke the language of the art world it reacted against: two painted rectangles on the floor and the small, perspective-driven paintings at the base led into a towering triangle of stuff, all the trappings of a studio breakdown built up into a handsome structure.

Math Bass, "Body No Body Body," 2011. Courtesy Overduin and Kite.

It was a not-quite-rejection, a sculpture made by someone who really just wants to make stuff, but can’t quite get out of the realm of art-as-idea even if it frustrates him (“Then, They Told Me That The Most Current Theory is About a Rejection of Theory. . .” is what he titled the pile, once he’d decided it warranted a title). The New Museum’s Unmonumental show in 2008 grappled, I think, with a similar problem: can you be unheroic, unambitious and still genuinely thoughtful?

Not-quite-rejection art has popped up from time to time these past few years but, right now, it seems suddenly rampant in this city. For Overduin and Kite’s current exhibition, Il Regalo, the artist Math Bass made a series of overturned and sideways wood frames that look like easels, chairs or sawhorses and covered them in canvas, painted with picnic-umbrella-worthy stripes. “Body No Body Body” these sculpture/paintings are called. In Brian O’Connell’s exhibition Ways and Means, on view at Redling Fine Art, the artist combined balsa wood and cement in oak frames, and the balsa and concrete butt up and over the edges like they’re uncomfortable in their allotted space. At Carter and Citizen in Culver City, David McDonald’s Self-Portraits are all strangely structural hodge-podge combines of netting, cement, re bar, paint, Palm Tree wood.

Brian O'Connell, "Concrete Painting no. 17," 2011. Courtesy Redling Fine Art.

There’s an essay by jack-of-all-trades feminist Katie Roiphe that appeared in the Sunday Review of Books the first week of 2010. Roiphe was writing about how the male novelists of today (David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers) have given up on that charged, power hungry sexuality of the male writers of previous generations (Roth, Updike, Mailer, etc.), and I think of her argument in relation to art surprisingly often (certainly, art’s got its own great army of former chauvinist kings). If you take out the words “male” and “sex,” you’re left with something pretty generalizable. “Even the mildest display of . . . aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically un­toward. For a character to feel himself, even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé,” she writes. To her this should be taken negatively, as evidence that we’ve lost real resolve and desire has been replaced by  perpetually replenishing ambivalence. But I guess I think being a conquering hero is passé, and I’d rather look at art that’s trying to find a new model even if that means swimming around in ambivalence a little longer.

Olaf Brzeski, Hunter's Fiancee, 2006. Ceramics, wood, spray enamel

Bean Gilsdorf: You work with a lot of ethereal, evocative forms: smoke, destroyed objects, things that seem uncanny…

Olaf Brzeski: Uncanny is a good word, yeah.

BG: Tell me about that. What are your feelings toward these objects?

OB: To explain how I feel you need to know that I was born in the south of Poland, in Wroclaw. This city has a complicated history because it’s very near the border and it changed owners: Czech, Polish, then German, now it’s Polish again. Before the war it was a German city, and after WWII the borders were changed and [Poland] got it. The atmosphere there, the architecture of bunkers and tunnels, there’s a constant presence of the fear of war, even in dreams. In my childhood it was so present—my grandparents’ stories, on the television, in propaganda—I didn’t just put that away. So now I use it. Some of my work comes from this kind of sinister premonition of what might happen.

BG: Like the video installed at the Casino [one venue of the exhibition Tarnow: 1000 years of modernity].

OB: Yes, In Memory of Major Josef Moneta.

Olaf Brzeski, In Memory of Major Josef Moneta, 2008. Installation with video and plaque

BG: That work also has an anxiety to it. The visuals are sinister, as you say, and the sound heightens that. How did you come to make this work?

OB: This piece functions as a discovery. There’s the movie, which I made to look like found footage, and there’s a marble plaque attached to the wall with a porcelain medallion, it’s a piece of gravestone. So these two pieces are really like discoveries.

BG: And what is the video about?

OB: The whole situation is taking place in a partisan’s camp in December 1939, just after the war began. And this small group of soldiers is hiding and their leader, Major Josef Moneta, he’s kind of a myth, a legendary person. His face is deformed; he’s monstrous, but he’s also a kind of superhero. In America you have your superheroes and we here in Poland are watching and copying that. And I wanted to create our own Polish superhero, but acting on the border of good and evil. On one side he’s this leader, an officer, but he is scary. His acts are scary, but definitely he is a force, and in bad times his strength will come and save us. He is a savior, but it’s not clear.

BG: It’s a borderline, an ambiguity.

OB: Exactly.

BG: In Memory is not site specific, but a lot of your work is, yes?

OB: Yes, I prefer to work that way. But I like to work site specifically in a way that it looks like it’s real, like it was there for years, that it’s supposed to be there. I really like to work with museums and places with history and a context. The Casino is also quite good for that. I don’t like white cube space.

Olaf Brzeski, A Crash on the Museum Stairs, 2009. Mixed media installation

BG: So you build on the history that’s already there, accentuate it or bring it forward in some way?

OB:  I don’t want the work to be rootless. I make up stories, fictions, and these are the roots of the work. It’s like gossip, you say the words to others and the story begins.

BG: Your work is like science fiction, surreal, a parallel reality.

OB: Yes, I think about making a gap, searching for a gap that you can’t pass over, or name, or categorize. Maybe surreal is an overused term.

BG: Making a gap or finding a gap? Because they are different.

OB: In my case, making a gap. Finding a gap…it sounds more real, because reality is full of gaps. But I don’t find them, I make them, and then I name them. I make stories, to attach roots to the artwork, but I don’t want it to be part of reality. It’s a stretched possibility.

BG: Do you feel that you are a Polish artist specifically? Would you put yourself in a geographical category?

OB: I don’t ever think about it.

BG: But if I asked you…

OB: I don’t know. There is something Polish in this kind of thinking. For example, the uniforms in the movie, or just the atmosphere, but…I don’t know. I went to an exhibition and all the journalists were asking about Communism, that’s what they were interested in, like: How do you feel now, how do you work as an artist? You had this Communist past, are you released from it or does it still have an impact on you?

Olaf Brzeski, Dream - Spontaneous Combustion, 2008. Resin and soot installation

BG: And what was your answer?

OB: No, completely not, I don’t care about that! It doesn’t have any influence on me. I was born in ’75 and my consciousness was forming at the end of Communism, and apart from a couple of details I don’t give a damn about it. Completely. War is more present, more specific. Especially when you grow up in an old German city with this sinister atmosphere. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced anything like that…

BG: Well, I’ve been to Berlin and seen the old buildings with bullet holes, pockmarked from shelling…

OB: Yes, Wroclaw is full of these remains. But I mean this whole empire, this architecture: that simple, strong, monumental style of that time. Nazi style. There’s a lot of it and it creates this atmosphere of fear. So Wroclaw doesn’t feel like home. I was born there but it doesn’t feel like home. My friends and I admire the city, it’s well planned and green, it’s very easy to live there. But it doesn’t feel like home.

Friendship of Nations: Polish-Shi’ite Showbiz by Slavs and Tatars presents a re-imagination of an Iranian Polish Solidarity. Even to an eye unfamiliar with Iranian and Polish traditions, the strong reference to craft is apparent. On entering the dome-shaped gallery, the works appear to be part of a commemoration, with large and colorful handcrafted banners and woven objects.

Installation with banners by Slavs and Tatars, 'Friendship of Nations: polish shi'ite showbiz'. Courtesy the artists, Kraupa-Tuskany, Berlin. © Yana Foque

‘Pajaks’, crafted according to local customs and hang from the ceiling, are part of an annual Polish harvest celebration. In context of local customs, several of these ‘pajaks’ are made with Christmas lights, yarn, glass balls and even a Christmas tree.

Slavs and Tatars, 'Resist resisting god', 2010. Courtesy the artists, Kraupa-Tuskany, Berlin. © Yana Foque

Mirrored mosaics were invented by the Persians in the 7^th century to distinguish themselves from Arab neighbours. They are today exported by the Iranian republic as a symbol of its ideology. These are reconstructed in a recognisable form of a painting and when viewed from an angle, reveal the words “Resist Resisting God”.

Installation by Slavs and Tatars, 'Wheat Mollah', 2011. Courtesy the artists, Kraupa-Tuskany, Berlin. © Yana Foque

Copies of a newspaper, 79.89.09, are displayed in a reading area with woven carpets and cushions. 79.89.09 points to three historical dates – the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the 1989 Fall of Communism and 2009 Financial Crisis – as points to understand our world today. While drawing out influences and coincidences between Iran and Poland, 79.89.09 also sheds light on the use of crafts. Slavs and Tatars explore the values evoked through crafts as revolutionary potential, from the mysticism conveyed by the 1979 Iranian Revolution to the steady and painstaking efforts of Solidarność, the Polish movement that peacefully brought down the Communist regime.

By fusing crafts with contemporary materials such as Christmas decorations and forms of display including encasements and wall installations, the exhibition situates this revolutionary potential amidst recent and ongoing protests, provoking questions on how one could engage in movements for change.

Installation view van Brummelen & de Haan, 'Subi dura a rudibus', 2010. Courtesy the artists, Motive Gallery, Amsterdam. © Yana Foque

Located next to Friendship of Nations: Polish-Shi’ite Showbiz is Subi dura a rudibus, a film by Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan that similarly plays on interactions from representations of history. A diptych from sequential representations of the 1535 conquest of Tunis by emperor Charles V, it pairs together images of paintings by Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen who accompanied Charles V and depicted the conquest for tapestry weavers, with images of the eventual tapestries. The pairing throws into relief divergent representations, questioning if representation can be accepted as objective truth, particularly as Vermeyen himself is part of the battle scene.

Lonnie Van Brummelen & Siebren De Haan, 'Subi dura a rudibus', film still, 2010. Courtesy the artists, Motive Gallery, Amsterdam. © Yana Foque

While Subi dura a rudibus questions the prospect and possibility of truth in the wake of interpretations, Friendship of Nations: Polish-Shi’ite Showbiz harnesses the potential of imaginative interpretations to reinstate values embodied within craft and folklore, invigorating dialogue on how we can respond to present-day tensions.

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“Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and of making it obsolete.” – Susan Sontag

In her 1977 essay, “The Image-World,” Susan Sontag wrote that the practice of photography – and the overabundance of images that come along with it – leave us desensitized to the “real” world. Despite the fact that photographs are considered traces of their subject, we typically see photographs as independent, material objects – separate from their original subjects and somehow more palatable. They even occupy a specific moment of time, different from our own, turning the present into the past and the past into the present.

But Sontag was writing about the role of the photograph as she knew it, which never included sculpture, or photographs functioning not just as traces of objects but as actual simulations, or three-dimensional copies.  The last year has seen a rise in artists working with photography in sculpture, with more than a few of these artists choosing to juxtapose “real” objects with their 2- or 3-dimensional, photographic copies. Is there a difference between images functioning like this in the world and “the image-world” that Sontag describes? Or are they one and the same?

Jerry McMillan, "Wrinkle Bag," 1965. Black and white photographic bag construction with shelf and Plexiglas cover. 12.75 x 11.75 x 7 inches.

Ironically, even as Sontag was puzzling over “The Image-World” and the rest of the essays that would become On Photography, searching to delineate a niche in the fine art world for photography, curator Peter Bunnell took an even larger step. In 1970, Bunnell launched “Photography into Sculpture” at the Museum of Modern Art, “the first comprehensive survey of photographically formed images used in a sculptural or fully dimensional manner.”

The show included a work by Jerry McMillan called “Wrinkle Bag” (1965) – perhaps one of the first of its kind. “Wrinkle Bag” was not merely a photograph, but a high-quality, black-and-white reproduction of the texture of crumpled paper, cut into the shape of a brown paper lunch sack. In its recent re-manifestation at Los Angeles’ Cherry and Martin Gallery, “Wrinkle Bag” looked eerily contemporary, perhaps because this type of photographic reproduction has resurfaced recently in the works of contemporary artists, like Urs Fischer, amongst others.

Installation view of "Who's Afraid of Jasper Jonnson," Tony Shafrazi Gallery, 2008.

In 2008, Fischer collaborated with Gavin Brown on the exhibition “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?”, at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. Fischer and Brown hired a photographer to document the gallery’s previous show – “Four Friends”, which included work by Donald Baechler, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf – and then wallpapered the gallery with the images, printed in a 1:1 scale.  The results were chaotic, with the photographed work punctuating, even interrupting, the current exhibit.  There were even moments where a photographed object was juxtaposed against the original, as in the case of the security guard.

Fischer repeated this technique last year for his solo exhibition at the New Museum, taking photographs of the entire third floor, including the ceiling, and then re-papering those same walls at a 1:1 ratio. 2-d images of the side of the exit sign line up with the exit sign itself; the ceiling is covered with a huge photograph that includes two-dimensional images of flickering flourescent lights, right next to the lights themselves.

Urs Fischer, "Marguerite de Ponty," 2010. Installation view. Mixed Media.

By all reports, this was a challenging room to walk through, although reactions varied – many went through to quickly and missed the minor details. Conversely, the reward for those who took their time was an unsettled feeling brought on by the proximity of “real” and “unreal” copies of the same object. There is a visceral difference between experiencing a photographic image on its own and as an image returned to its original context, or placed back in the image world as an object.

Perhaps the most intriguing of these artists is Miriam Bohm, who has completed multiple series – Inventory and Areal, for example – in which she photographs objects such as packages, arranges those photographs in ways that echo the original arrangement, and then rephotographs them. The result is a complex layer of images, leaving you, as the viewer, with nothing concrete save the object of the photograph itself. In the words of Brendan Fay, writing for Artforum, “In Bohm’s hands, it is the photograph’s presence as an object that provides the most immediate basis for apprehending the image it contains.”

Miriam Böhm, "Inventory XII," 2010. Chromogenic color print. 23.6 x 17.7 inches. Edition of 2 with 2 APs.

“Our unlimited use of photographic images not only reflects but gives shape to this society, one unified by the denial of conflict.”

Sontag was curious about the image-world she described, including whether it was the only variety possible. She even proposed an ecology of images, or a mitigating of sorts. In reality, we’ve gone the opposite direction – more images surround us than ever – but when artists insist on re-inserting an image back into its original context, or even threaten to use it to replace an object, it’s hard not to believe there’s a shift afoot.

The Ozymandias Parade, 1985, Kienholz: The Signs of the Times Exhibition view. © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Photography: Norbert Miguletz

When Edward Kienholz died of a heart attack aged 65 in 1996, his burial arrangement could have been one of his own installations: his embalmed body was stuck into the front seat of an old brown Packard coupe; he drove off into the good night with a dollar and a deck of cards in his pocket, accompanied by the ashes of his dog in the back and a vintage bottle of Chianti beside him. If the stance of aggressive defiance followed him to the grave; such must have been the confrontational quality and persistent rebelliousness of Kienholz’s oeuvre when he lived and worked that his accusatory cries of a reality gone sour are still heard far, loud and wide nearly 2 decades after his death.

Kienholz: The Signs of the Times is an extensive survey of Edward Kienholz’s and Nancy Reddin Kienholz’s collaborative works spanning three-dimensional smaller objects to the conceptual room-filling tableaux in their horrifying, squalid glory at the Schirn Kunsthalle. While not quite a retrospective, it is a show that captures the antagonistic spirit (in variations of form, material and structure) of rebellion (buoyed by the angry years of the 1960s and 70s) that Kienholz is best remembered for, broadcasting generally, a similar theme of humanity’s fallen state.

Edward Kienholz, The State Hospital, 1966, Inside view. Plaster casts, fiberglass, hospital beds, bedpan, hospital table, goldfish bowls, black fish, lighted neon tubing, steel hardware, wood, paint 245 x 360 x 295 cm. Moderna Museet, Stockholm © Kienholz. Photography: Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Above all, there is a visceral, scabrous rage that palpably underpins this exhibition which reads like an extended exercise in the finer points of accusation. Here, subtlety, as it seems, holds no place of honour in art that has been created for the purpose of indictment. The installations rail against the perennial injustices Kienholz thought assailed and fractured American society at that time: ethnic conflicts, the Vietnam war, the sexual exploitation and commodification of women, the manipulation of the unsuspecting middle-class through by media conglomerates, and the treatment of those who lived on the margins of “acceptable society”. The State Hospital (1964-6) presents a constructed cell of a psychiatric ward, drawn from Kienholz’s own memory of his work as an orderly, in which a naked mental patient with a fishbowl for a head lies strapped to his bed. In the bunk above, an identical figure lies in a similar state of dismal existence, a reinforced symbol of an already broken institution.

Edward Kienholz & Nancy Reddin Kienholz, The Pool Hall, 1993. Plaster casts, wigs, clothing, antlers, photographs, pool table, queues, lamp, light box 245 x 250 x 138 cm. Collection of the artist, Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA © Kienholz Photography: © Kienholz, Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

In Rhinestone Beaver Peep Show (1980) triptych, the plaster cast of a pliant woman yields before the voyeuristic viewer, while in The Pool Hall (1993), a headless woman with splayed legs straddles a corner of a pool table surrounded by men with antlers and a mask taking shots around her vagina: an exploration of the brutal masculine gaze that positions the woman as an anonymous object of consumption. The Jesus Corner (1982-3) plays host to misfits who live on the margins; while it is a reference to the motley band of anti-establishment crew who live as outcasts like Christ and his disciples, it is ultimately, an ironic declaration of institutionalised religion’s divisive power.

Edward Kienholz & Nancy Reddin Kienholz, The Jesus Corner, 1982/83, Installation view Wood, glass, hangers, curtains, cans, leaves, textiles, lighting, photographs, framed print, cardboard, books, pegboard, candles, paint, polyester resin, devotional Jesus objects, 252 x 453 x 152 cm. Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture/Eastern Washington State Historical Society, Spokane, Washington, Museum Purchase and gift of the artists © Kienholz. Photography: © Kienholz, Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA.

Giving material expression to Kienholz’s uncompromising vision is the sheer number of found objects scavenged from junkyards and flea markets used to assemble his installations, a concept that was unthinkable in his day and age. It was a novel but viable method of sourcing: exponentially increasing consumption made for interesting trash; the more junk material there was to sift through and acquire, the more complex his assemblages also became. Discarded scraps that were symbolic of Western consumer culture – car parts, pieces of furniture, toy soldiers, cigarettes, signs and flags – inevitably found their way into his creations surrounded by other castaways, lending their protesting voices which, combined, produce a chorus of acrimony and pleading. The allegorical Ozymandias Parade (1985) could very well encapsulate this creative process and its subsequent scale of production; it is a sprawling tableau that swiftly strips Shelley’s evocative tale of an ancient statue languishing in the sands by presenting the subjugating tyranny of latter-day rulers in the form of the president who dangles from his white horse, surrounded by an impotent army of fools and helpless tax-payers who have been fleeced of their last cent.

But unlike Marcel Duchamp’s readymades that assaulted notions of art’s traditional modes of production, Kienholz made no attempt to disguise the object’s original incarnations and their purposes. Where the Duchampian dialogue on signification and object displacement begins, there ends Kienholz’s vision; instead, implicit in the insistence on a creative practice drawn from disused matter is perhaps, the hope that out of the detritus of decay and disillusioned humanity, seedlings of social awareness (that would eventually galvanise some sort of action) would have sprouted. This creative bent was balanced with unusual business sense; Kienholz typed details of works he had intended to create, each already containing a title that would be made should a buyer decide to fork out the money for it. Yet in utilising language as an initial, but necessary apparatus for ascribing meaning and perceptual experience to object that were not yet made, Kienholz’s pieces were also to become prototypes for later conceptual practices that would carry a heavier ontological focus by engaging vigorously with language as a framing device while confronting the limitations of the art object.

Edward Kienholz & Nancy Reddin Kienholz, 1993-4. 76 J.C.s Led the Big Charade. Mixed media: 76 wall-mounted pieces, dimensions variable, installation view, Schirn Kunsthalle.

It seems appropriate that these three-dimensional, sculptural assemblages were labelled by Kienholz himself as “tableau[x]” – a term appropriated from the design of theatre sets – in order to emphasise the experiential potential of his pieces while defying the late Modernist style of pictorial flatness and the conventional passivity of art viewing. As with sculpture’s tendency to reinforce interest in context by sanctioning the viewer’s presence in its ambience or physical area of influence, the volumetric intensity of Kienholz’s installations similarly locates the audience inside the work rather than outside of it. Packed to the brim with junkyard assemblies and hemmed in by the gallery walls, his cluttered tableaux are an oppressive plague on the senses, offering no recourse to those who want to look away.

***

Edward Kienholz was born in Fairfield, Washington on October 23, 1927 and died in Hope, Idaho in 1994. Nancy Reddin Kienholz survives her husband, and lives and works in Hope, Idaho, Houston, Texas and Berlin, Germany. Kienholz: The Signs of the Times is at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt until January 29, 2012. From February 22 to May 13, 2012, the show will also be on display at the Museum Tinguely in Basel.

Whitney Lynn, Death Parties (2011) Plastic, glass, alcohol, chrome-laminated birch shelf, 21 x 36 x 6 in.

Bean Gilsdorf: How did this new body of work begin?

Whitney Lynn: It started with Southern Exposure in 2009, they had a show called “Bellwether” and they were asking artists to predict or envision the future. I was looking at the way in which do-it-yourself and sustainability movements overlap with survivalism. I started picking up these images about how to trap your own food, skin your own squirrels, eat your own rats, and those sorts of things. Then when I was doing a later project I was also thinking about containment, and I started thinking about trapping systems. I was not quite sure what I was going to do with all of it, and then there was the realization, oh, there’s a project here.

BG: Do you think of your work as post-apocalyptic? Has anyone ever framed your work that way?

WL: Maybe a little, with the survivalist stuff. I think there’s something kind of sinister about a lot of the pieces, but I think they’re funny.

BG: What are the general trends of your interests?

WL: The earlier works that were dealing with military were very autobiographical, and I was navigating my own personal history. Then things shifted, and I was thinking about how these intersections of politics or military are really interconnected into all kinds of aspects of life. That changed my focus, to see where those messy intersections or boundaries existed. For this particular show I was thinking about metaphors of traps and their relationship to sculpture.

Whitney Lynn, Prepared Position with Disturbance Ventilation and Luminous Signal (2010) Mixed media (furniture, cement, tv, fan) 7 x 8 x 4 feet

BG: Do you feel like that’s freeing, to get away from making autobiographical work?

WL: Well, it’s always connected. For me, it’s impossible to get away from some sort of personal thread. It’s extending from a different kind of autobiography. These traps are placed in a setting where there’s the possibility of a different kind of question: what’s the prey and what’s the bait, the lure? Part of the work is about futility—nothing’s ever going to be trapped with these. And that’s where I see some of the humor, too. It relates back to some of my earlier work…I made a bug-out location that would never actually survive anything. It was made for one person and had food supplies, but they were capers, so it was this empty gesture of preparation. And there were all these weapons that would never actually hurt you. It was all pretty pathetic. It was part of the question, “How can you prepare for the ultimate disaster when you don’t know what that is?”

Whitney Lynn, BOL (Bug-Out-Location) (2009) Mixed media installation with performance elements

BG: What’s next for you?

WL: One project that I’ve been doing on the side and that will probably come to the fore is street performance. I think that’s really a place of intersections and boundaries. My interest is in that area where street performance is performance art. I’ve been really obsessed with the Bush Man in Fisherman’s Wharf for along time, so I shot a video with him recently. I’m sure there will be a development that leads me back to the traps project.

BG: I can see the borders and boundaries that you’re flirting with in your work…some are more literal and explicit, like with the sculptures, and some are more subtle, just the feeling is there, but on the whole it creates a thread through the work.

WL: There’s something exciting about allowing that thread through the work, but to let it play itself out naturally. There can be these connections, but they don’t have to be calculated. For years I was like, “I make work that’s about intersections with military and political cultures,” and it was almost like I had written an artist statement and I didn’t want to write it again, and I’d better make things that fit into that. There was pressure to define myself, to say okay so I this is what I do, but I got tired of making fifteen different kinds of bunkers, that’s not all I think about. I was eliminating possibilities because I was stuck in the idea that my work needed to be concise.

Whitney Lynn, Trap no. 001 (2011) Acrylic, polished tree branch, 21 x 17 x 16 in.

BG: When you’re making the work, you’re so close to it. What feels like an enormous left-hand turn to you is, in reality, a slight detour to others. But you wonder how you’ll explain your decisions to the world.

WL: Right, yeah, and I think there’s something important about separating the making from the talking about it. I feel sometimes I have to justify what I’m doing before I even finish making and that can be disruptive. I try not to worry in advance how to articulate the work…it’s a matter of knowing that there’s a difference between the process and its final articulation.

BG: Sometimes you can frame the work loosely by saying that, for example, it’s about control: attempting to control the situation of a disaster, or the actions of another person or animal, or even the definition of an action on the street, where you decide if it’s performance art or not. And then in each new iteration of your work, you decide how it fits in—or not—to that broad category.

WL: I think a lot of the work is this attempt at control that is usurped, the rug gets pulled, in the face of all these systems, these attempts to corral, contain, or understand something. Where I find it interesting is where that’s not possible.

Whitney Lynn, Silver Equivalent (2011) Clay bricks, silver-plated steel nail, 7 x 14.5 x 23 in.

BG: Why did you title the show Sculptures Involontaires?

WL: The legend goes that Brassaï was hanging out with Dali at a café, and Dali pulled a rolled-up ticket stub out of his pocket. A conversation ensued about how you could photograph anything and it becomes sculpture: ticket stubs, and chewing gum, and debris…photographed, they look like landscapes or unknown objects. Through the photograph anything can become unfamiliar and strange. I love that idea. I was looking at traps and seeing how traps are sculptures just by themselves. I started buying traps—someone tracking my Amazon purchases would be really scared of me!—I was getting them and seeing how they function, admiring the beautiful ingenuity of them, all this creative thought that is put into something so sinister. So there’s this involuntary way in which they are already sculptures. My work here functions as traps and as sculptures. I’m loosely pulling from that idea of context, that by changing the context you can re-look at the form.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Comprising only a large installation at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir’s Crepusculum – Latin for “twilight” or “dusk” – is a mixed-media, polyphonic, physical exploration of metaphysical structures that govern the human psyche, and speculates that an enigmatic and irrational system of signs, meanings and forms counterbalances the deceptively ordered exteriors of our existence.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Above all, it is an experiential and tactile show that prioritises evoking a multitude of emotions over engaging the intellect. A large, white spherical entity around which alchemic instruments are scattered sits on a pile of sand; music seems to leak out from all sides of the wall, surrounded by glass-protected ancient Icelandic calfskin parchments that record supernatural accounts of a medieval Scandinavian world inhabited by witches, trolls and dragons. The installation is populated with elemental components of the earth such as dust, dough, fire, blood, burlap and fur, but also overlaid with textures that are fur- or hair-roughened. An accompanying video bolsters the already-surreal installation as a narrator weaves a showy mythological universe with his droning words: a man guts slimy fish, a figure lithely unfolds itself out of clay “legs” and “helmet”, a figure wrapped in tattered cloths hikes laboriously across a sandy wasteland with another strapped to his back towards the self-same spherical entity.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Crepusculum’s allusive and mystical atmosphere appears to be as much a personal aesthetic journey as it is a collective memory of Iceland’s histories. Materially, the exhibition is about Friðriksdóttir’s continued creative experimentation with diverse materials and media that has been in part influenced by the breadth of Swiss/German Dieter Roth’s artistic processes and vocabulary. Friðriksdóttir’s starting point for Crepusculum is rooted in her own dreams – intangible tendrils of thoughts that bleed into each other are first allowed to drift unassisted into esoteric realms and subsequently thematically developed through a combination of simple sketches, sculpture and film. The overall effect is an imagistic universe comprising a choir of overlapping voices, an aggregate of signs and diverse earthy components, but it is hard to see beyond Crepusculum as an oracular endeavour to present nebulous connections to sexual psychology and pop culture while casting light on deconstructing traditional patterns of narratives located within Norse mythology .

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

But Crepusculum is also Friðriksdóttir’s personal re-imagination of a time in Iceland when folklore, gods and magic were fundamental tenets of existence, and where elaborate stories of creation were punctuated by moments of horror, melancholy and unquestioning didacticism. Augmenting her exhibition are twelfth century manuscripts and almanacs loaned from the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík for the first time; such is the reinforcement of the historical investment in Iceland’s national cultural heritage and the revelation of the intense grip that these traditions and mythology still have on twenty-first century Icelandic culture. Perhaps then, for Friðriksdóttir, this is simultaneously a profound ambassadorial undertaking on behalf of the Icelandic people, a cultural burden so complex that it could only be presented in ambivalent spaces as metaphysical considerations.

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Gabríela Friðriksdóttir: Crepusculum will be on show at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt until January 8, 2012.

THE RE-ENACTMENT

One of the most compelling pieces in the exhibition is Mexican artist Yoshua Okón’s Octopus (2011). Created during a residency at the Hammer Museum, the 4-channel video piece grapples with what is both humanizing and alienating. Day laborers re-enact the civil war in Guatemala, wearing in black or white clothing, depending on which side they had fought for. On the set of a Home Depot parking lot, the laborers replay scenes from their country’s history, but now the opposing sides point invisible weapons at an invisible enemy, not at their historical foes. “Octopus” is Guatemalan slang for the United Fruit Company, alluding to the company’s ambiguous role in Guatemalan politics and complicating the narrative further.

THE ARCHIVE

The pliableness of the document becomes evident through Zoe Leonard & Cheryl Dunye’s The Fae Richards Photo Archive (1993-1996). A fictional African American performer is created through an archive of snap shots, film stills, and head-shots. Photography’s role in the construction of history becomes clear as we are left to conjecture about the possibilities of this figure.

While The Fae Richards Photo Archive plays with the divide between fact and fiction, Mike Tribe’s The Dystopian Files (2009-present) solemnly takes on the task of chronicling history. An archive of clips from footage of protest and the policing of these actions is gathered together as something that Tribe refers to as “ritualized conflicts”. The single channel video is disrupted by omnipresent black bars slowly creeping across the screen as eerie, unidentifiable tones collectively moan, the audio’s consistency giving a sense of a cohesive moment from the catalogue of moments.

THE PERSONA

Eric Garduño & Matthew Rana, “People v. Bruce (Parrhesia)”, cardboard, comedy club lights, and audio track, 2011

A cardboard fabrication of a courtroom witness stand and judges bench illuminated with the theatrics of comedy lights and the occasional laugh track enact notions of truth in The People v. Bruce (Parrhesia) (2011). The term “parrhesia” loosely translates to free speech with an obligatory edge. In this installation, collaborators Eric Garduño & Matthew Rana engage with the trial and conviction of obscenity against comedian Lenny Bruce as a way to address the fluidity of truth and free speech amidst the conflicting territories of where one can expect to hear truth spoken – the comedy stage and the courtroom.

In the series The First and Last of the Modernists: (Charles and Michael), Lorraine O’Grady links the public personas’s of poet Charles Baudelaire and performer Michael Jackson through the language of conceptual photography, implying modernism’s hand in the cult and commodification of celebrity.

THE INTERVENTION

Perhaps the least convincing of containers is The Intervention, in which “works recall charged events in history that register cautions about the future”. Maybe it’s a matter of semantics, but I don’t equate “registering cautions” to “intervention”, which for me has a very active implication. At any rate, Geof Oppenheimer’s Mason Dixon Lines, Raised and Lowered (2007-11) is a “two-unit” piece that encapsulates a formal tightness with a conceptual looseness. A neon portrait of Alan Greenspan leans against a wall, somehow in dialogue with a distant placed steel geometric form wrapped in red bandana material perched askew on an unfinished pedestal. There is something about systems and structures here, but ambivalence reins.

Geof Oppenheimer, Mason Dixon Lines, Raised and Lowered (2007-11)

If you are after the redemptive, look elsewhere; what this exhibition offers are objects of discontent, agitation. In the context of our current political climate, we encounter the spiral of history in these works, rather than it’s unfolding.

Agitated Histories will run through January 15, 2012 at SITE Santa Fe, in New Mexico. It was presented earlier in 2011 at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore.

In a recent BBC documentary on J Dilla, the deceased beatmaker’s family and fellow industry folk recount the seminal producer’s style, marked most notably by a counter-quantizing of his drum machine: a drunken mechanization, a meeting point of analog practices (the mythic process of searching through crates of records) and digitization that concurrently sounded ill-programmed (off-beat), yet intentional and on-point. This is man-made modernism, in contrast to the conventional image of crisp lines and sharp edges. So what would J Dilla’s sound look like? Jack White’s Neo-Totems, on display at the African American Art and Culture Center, come to mind.

White is a native of rural North Carolina and has taught in art programs in the American South and Northeast. He describes his work as “Abstract Impressionism”; still, much like underground or “backpack” hip hop, White’s sculptures imagine a future as much as they point to a past. In Neo Totem #11 (2009), discarded and weathered lumber lies next to mass-produced combs, nails and objects: an over four-foot piece of found wood, dusty and handled pieces of metal peeping through stains, and a not immediately visible hair pick. The objects come together, but they are slightly off, or not perfectly symmetrical. Although it might be predictable to state as much about such work, White’s sculptures are soulful.

In Neo Totem #11, the pick comb–traditionally used for black hairstyles, most notably the Afro–at once alludes to the past (the 1970s) while also making manifest the prognostic cultural phenomena of Afrocentricity and Afrofuturism. Although ancestral, the “neo” (or newness) of these sculpture are different, imagined futures. They are objects that long for an additional function, point to places outside the gallery, and make sound.

White’s drawings and sketches allude to such narratives. Framed and tucked away, Totem study I (2009) and Totem study II (2009) are the last thing one notices in the gallery space, they are so unassuming. Still, Totem study I speaks to process, chronology and place. The ink drawing includes White’s notes: “part of an old chair, found in 2008” and “from shield from Kenya.” Spiral binding ridges remain, and a sketch of a work to come. Much like his musical grandchildren, White’s Neo-Totems sample, cut, and connect.

Jack White: Neo-Totems and Other Works of Art–a Continuum is on display in the Sargent Johnson Gallery at the African American Art and Culture Center, in San Francisco, through January 12, 2012.

Monika Fryčová, Perpetuum Mobile, 2011. Image: Kling og Bang gallery.

Monika Fryčová’s show Perpetuum Mobile at the Kling og Bang Gallery propositions that the relationship between the visible and invisible is constantly in motion and ephemeral.

Locked behind the socialist borders in then-Czechoslovakia, stories of local culture were the only narratives that Fryčová heard. Like many artists who were restless for new physical activity and renewed visions after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Fryčová became in her own words, a traveller who charted her own routes and made her own narratives without maps or guides. Consequentially, Fryčová’s works are highly improvised, and dependent on the indeterminacy and spontaneity of human interactions.

Monika Fryčová, Monika & Trabi in train station, Prostejov, 2005. Image: Monikafryčová.net

A red automobile-turned-limousine was an early, physical manifestation of Fryčová’s desire for mobility, which she drove to school in 2005 and finally made it to Berlin some years later where she was arrested by the traffic police for the car’s non-regulated standards. Intended as “moving sculpture” and created for the purpose of performance, the red Trabi is Fryčová’s assertion of artistic and political freedom beyond the spectre of the Iron Curtain, but also the artistic vindication of the dynamic flux and non-linear processes that characterise aspects of human nature.

Monika Fryčová, Open Springs no. 2, 2009, ongoing project. Image: Monikafryčová.net

Having investigated the artistic gestures that were given freer reign after a period of enforced socio-political isolation, her research now speculates upon the less charted regions of human existence: principles of chaos, intuition, perceptions and mythology. At the Kling og Bang Gallery, Fryčová’s framed photographs of herself shot in various positions and in diverse locations are perched on a peculiar machine acting like a turnstile that expends energy into rotating endlessly. Perpetually in motion, her static photographs disallow the viewer any prolonged contemplation; instead, we are forced into forming fleeting impressions of ambivalent spaces where specifics are really inconsequential. As long as Fryčová’s works situated themselves in that strange gap between motion and stillness – with a distorted sense of space and time embedded within -,  any attempt at linearity or continuity can only remain illusory.

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Monika Fryčová was born in Prostejov, Czech Republic. She lives and works in both the Czech Republic and Iceland. Perpetuum Mobile runs until 18th December at the Kling og Bang Gallery in Reykjavik.

You walk in to a darkish room where ever-changing shapes move like a school of fish across the walls. After your eyes adjust, you find that the there are two benches sitting among six sculptures that are producing the schools of fish and that the fish are made out of nothing but light beams. These sculptures are metal. Simple geometry (sphere, cube, etc). The room is quiet and calming. Everyone who has been here talks about the unexpected smiles that slip onto their cynical faces, and it happens to you too.

Installation view Otto Piene: Lichtballett. Photo: Gunter Thorn. All photos courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center

To understand what is going on here, you have to look back to the 1960′s, which may have been the high point of art at MIT. During the sixties, arts funding was partially used as a counterbalance to the political consequences from the institute’s complicated and financially fertile military industrial connections. The Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) was founded in 1967 by Gyorgy Kepes and immediately went about funding exhibitions and visits for some very interesting artists. With the available capital, an unavoidable optimism of postwar boom, and a complete lack of habits (good or bad) Kepes attempted to foster “media geared to all sensory modalities; incorporation of natural processes, such as cloud play, water flow, and the cyclical variations of light and weather; [and] acceptance of the participation of ‘spectators’ in such a way that art becomes a confluence.” (pdf)

Two of the first artists who were invited to visit MIT were Otto Piene and Hans Haacke (as well as Stan VanDerBeek). Piene was in the first round of fellows (meaning he was in residency for a year), and would succeed Kepes as director in 1968. Haacke was invited for a solo show at MIT in 1967. The body of work both presented consisted of systems, those very cloud/water/lights that Kepes hoped to present as art media.

Installation view: Hans Haacke, 1967.

This fall, Haacke’s solo-show has been reproduced at the MIT List Visual Art Center (LVAC). VanDerBeek and Haacke were both deeply influenced by the ideas of cybernetics. Haacke felt that controlling the storm, moving the meteorological indoors, skipped a layer of abstraction and released the artist from reproducing essential features of the world; immediacy was the only type of innovative art left to pursue. Unlike VanDerBeek’s social videos, Haacke created kinetic art systems, objects that set in motion an action that had no end point.

The approachable physicality and comic impossibility of watching a ball float on a jet of air, or seeing a refrigerator coil (covered in frozen ambient humidity) as a sculpture reminds us just how useless art can be; how archaic and aimless we could make our art. These works are unlike our current trends: useful and solemn responses to the internet, the economy, or the social conditions in relation to capitalism. These are objects that bewilder and add to our aesthetic understanding by wonder and query. The closest these sculptures get to being explicit is to make visible the relationship between the whole and the part, between the center and the exterior. 1967 was a very delicate moment in American history: the Vietnam war raging as were race riots, but it was still before the chaos of 1968. Instead of making politics explicit, for which Haacke is usually applauded, these sculptures sing wordless songs about the 1960′s societal changes. These examinations into natural systems granted him tools that he later used to investigate social systems, like the gallery and politics of Germany, but were timely investigations that presage his later work.

Otto Piene: Electric Rose, 1965. Polished aluminum globe with 160 timed neon lamps. Photo: Gunter Thorn

On the other side of the LVAC, Piene’s light sculptures from the 1960 and 1970′s have been painstakingly restored and presented (some for the first time in decades). Despite the opportunity of seeing some vintage Piene sculptures in perfect condition, the two new sculptures, One Cubic Meter of Black Light and Lichtballet steal the show. Both project light through perforations in their skin. Lichtballet is a wall of rotating lights hidden away from sight, the circular pattern of holes in the wall filters the light, manipulating the light into physical motion in the surrounding room. There is almost no reason to look at the objects that Piene has created, instead, you should be looking at their effects on your environment.

The sensations we see flowing around the room are light, directly and with no symbol. Instead of seeing how light lands on a sculptural object, the sculpture provides its own light, and uses the light as a physical material. It may be a sculptural analogy for Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Has Piene released light from being a shadow on the wall? It’s hard to tell, as every time you step into the room, you are enthralled by the light show’s charms. You immediately forget any theory laden narratives you may have about the work, and instead experience the motion and change for what it is, a grand environment that undercuts words and explanations. It’s a direct experience. It’s that visceral art that we’ve left behind. It’s an example of Kepes hope to present the art object as a confluence, a meeting of viewer and natural process.

Otto Piene: Lichtballett and Hans Haacke: 1967 are on view at the List Visual Arts Center through Dec 31, 2011.

Image credit: The Modern Institute via Studi0 International

The prestigious Turner Prize has just been awarded to Martin Boyce at the BALTIC gallery in Gateshead, and this is the “a quietly atmospheric, lyrically autumnal installation” that won it. The 43-year-old can now proudly strut around as the hottest British artist under 50. Not so lucky: his fellow nominees George Shaw, Karla Black, and Hilary Lloyd.

The Glasgow-based artist’s award winning exhibition at Gateshead has drawn more than 100,000 visitors since October. What do you think of these nature-inspired forms, beloved by the judges? Are you moved by his “modernist garden” with triangle leaves and “sparse, intelligent sculptures”? Does it inspire “a new sense of poetry” in you? Check out everyone’s work after the jump, and let us know who you think should have won in the comments.

Aside from kudos, Boyce has won 25,000 pounds ($39,220) and bragging rights along such prior Turner prize winner celebrities as Damien Hirst (1995), Steve McQueen (1999), and Antony Gormley (1994).

Click here to read more.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art defies the normal boundary between landing and gallery at the entrance to the fourth floor space that houses Sharon Lockhart’s "Lunch Break," 2008. Photo: Saul Rosenfield, ©2011, with permission of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The stairway to the fourth floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art leads me directly toward a long, narrow, darkened space, at the end of which is the image of another, much longer, passageway. In that image, a concrete floor below and light fixtures above trace a trajectory toward infinity punctuated by pipes, wires, hoses, storage boxes, tools, and lockers. The scene is not monochrome—red, blue, yellow, orange, and green are common—nor is it dark, but the fluorescent lights, the faded floor, the absent windows, and the constrained path—no more than five feet wide—suggest that this as a place to travel through, not a place in which to settle.

This sensation is amplified by the fact that the image, I slowly realize, is moving. Inch-by-inch down the corridor, the slow-motion journey of what turns out to be Sharon Lockhart’s film, Lunch Break (2008), might be confused with a series of stills.

Still image from Sharon Lockhart, “Lunch Break (Assembly Hall, Bath Iron Works, November 5, 2007, Bath, Maine),” 2008; 35mm film transferred to HD, 80 min.; courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; © Sharon Lockhart.

Lockhart, who says she is interested in “duration,” describes her method of filmmaking as “photographic.”[1] Despite appearances, the film is not typical slow-motion; Lockhart has digitally inserted eight repetitions of each frame, ballooning a 10-minute, 1,200-foot traverse into an 80-minute encounter. It is a film engaged in repeating moments, in suspending, not slowing, time. It asks me, in effect, to witness the moment once, and then again, and then again. It proposes that I might answer the question “What do you see?” only by pondering yet another, “Do you see what you see?”

All of a sudden, a person moves, and I recognize the objects dangling off a storage bin down the corridor as human legs. In this otherworldly place, everything that seems obvious at conventional speed becomes a mystery, a puzzle to be solved only by the closest attention. A young man with short blond hair in a white jumpsuit raises his hand to his forehead, or more precisely, raises———–his———-hand———-to———-his———–forehead, where the hand rests for two minutes of my time, or only about 10 seconds of his time. His hand settles back in his lap, and he looks down. Is this a moment of despair? As the blond man turns toward me, I recognize a gently waving hand below him. The hand is speaking, and it is attached to the green hoodie of another man. I assume the co-workers are friends; I want them to be friends. There is something emphatic in the gesture of the green-shirted man, something that could be advice or reprimand. The blond man’s lips part briefly. Then he turns away and looks down for what seems to be an eternity. Is he pensive or despondent? His hand returns to his forehead. The camera inches onward, never turning. There in front of me, two distinctive characters in a distinct place have enacted a story with no ending, one of some two dozen the procession reveals. Were the men talking about a spouse, a boss, a co-worker, a sports team, or the union? Were they complaining or sharing a story? Was the hand to the head about despair, exhaustion, a thought, or an itch?

Installation View of Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, October 15,2011—January 16, 2012, showing entrance to the film screening gallery (left), the neighboring gallery with a series of lunch-related photographs, and a pile of Lunch Break Times—Bay Area Edition, the 24-page tabloid newspaper Lockhart produced in San Francisco for this show. Photo: Johnna Arnold Photography.

It turns out that although this place looks like a passageway, it functions as a destination, a place for moving in rather than moving through. The film documents shipbuilders at the Bath Iron Works in Maine during the moments when they are not building ships. The procession down the hallway reveals one “all of a sudden” after another, its repeating moments of apparent stillness both facilitating contemplation and kindling suspense. I cannot make out the messages of these subdued bodies: body language needs the fluidity of its natural pace to achieve clarity. Further, the slow-motion procession foils the normal capacity to anticipate a movement the moment before it happens. I cannot join the rhythm of life in the corridor, and everything—a woman biting a sandwich, a man microwaving popcorn, a hand brushing a knee—becomes a riddle. While ordinarily I might compensate for these limitations through closer inspection, I cannot manage this: the procession, while inching, is inexorable, and the camera’s wide-angle frontward gaze, while inclusive, is unyielding.

The beauty of Lunch Break is that its attenuated moments make it difficult to lock onto a single interpretation: the slow shifting disturbs the storyline, twists it into another shape. I cannot resolve what has happened between the two men, but the film incubates a dozen possible answers, confounding the normal snap of my judgments. I have witnessed not simply the recorded event, but also the event of my own wondering, the activity of my imagination, which is often unconscious, extending over time. Lockhart has found a way to viscerally demonstrate the elasticity of the temporal-spatial experience. The event of the two men has taken only five minutes of my time, the camera traversing only 50 feet of corridor. Yet, within these repeated moments and movements, Lockhart has packed the narrative of a short story, one of many in the bursting anthology that comprises Lunch Break.

Still image from Sharon Lockhart, “Lunch Break (Assembly Hall, Bath Iron Works, November 5, 2007, Bath, Maine),” 2008; 35mm film transferred to HD, 80 min.; courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; © Sharon Lockhart.

The word “duration” refers to the period of time it takes for an event to occur, but I cannot sever its kinship to “endurance.” Both words stem from durus, Latin for “hard.” As I sat down to watch Lunch Break, I intended to stay, to endure, but I anticipated that the 80-minute experience would demand a sacrifice that would exceed my capacities. SFMoMA Curator of Media Arts, Rudolf Frieling, says of the experience, “The viewer’s attention and perception are constantly at work,”[1] meaning that Lockhart’s film forces the viewer not only to attend to things that he or she might normally overlook, but also to attend to attention, to perceive perception happening. There were moments when this was exhausting. In fact, the film asks me to perform the very labor the workers will soon resume: a repetitive effort. It was, however, never boring.

Lockhart gets to the crux of the activity common to both workers and viewers: the skill, ingenuity, and variation at the core of undertakings usually dismissed as trivial or onerous simply because they are repetitive. I cannot claim that my attention never wavered, only that Lunch Break inevitably rewarded the patient process of discovery. If speed seems to be the bugaboo of our age, critiqued for its narcotic-like capacity to gratify a sensation-seeking society’s desire for stimulation, then slowness, particularly as it unfolds here, offers another avenue toward the great rumbling revelation of experience: an opening—one story after another—into the expansive world of the imagination.

Sharon Lockhart, “Dirty Don’s Delicious Dogs,” 2008; chromogenic print; 41 1/16 x 51 1/16 in. (left), and “Gary Gilpatrick, Insulator,” 2008; chromogenic print; 24 3/4 x 30 3/4 in. (right), both courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, Gladstone Gallery, New York, and neugerriemschneider, Berlin; © Sharon Lockhart

It seems accurate to say, as one description does, that “Lunch Break’s gradual passage through the aged factory offers a meditative and melancholic reflection on the architectural, social and phenomenological space of a notably anachronistic mode of industrialized labor.”[2] And I might easily reflect—as Lockhart did during her gallery talk—upon the bookends that coincidentally bracket Lunch Break’s making and showing: the real estate bubble’s pop in 2007, and the union rupture in Wisconsin and the Occupy movement, both in 2011. But what is it about the film itself—rather than my projections about its subject—that evokes melancholy? It is true that the corridor is filled neither with laughter nor even many smiles. One man stretches, perhaps relieving an ache; a woman stares, perhaps fatigued; many read silently, as unanimated as the figures in the Duane Hanson sculpture that initially inspired Lockhart.[3] It may well be that melancholy unavoidably surfaces in this claustrophobic underground world, but it may also be that the restraint and deliberation of Lockhart’s procession forces me to consider not only the practices of perception and attention, but also those of reflection and judgment. Although the film inevitably raises associations to the conditions of factory labor, I found myself suspending—far more often than reaching—easy conclusions.[4]

Lunch break, indeed.

[2]Harvard Film Archive “Timestage. The Cinema of Sharon Lockhart,” 2009 [accessed October 19, 2011]. ”Anachronistic” may reflect both an actual trend toward automation and, particularly in industries like shipbuilding, a fantasy of completely automated processes that discounts the persistence of human labor.

[3]Lockhart’s triptych, Lunch Break Installation, “Duane Hanson: Sculptures of Life,” 14, December – 23 February 2003, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (2003), documented the installation of Hanson’s Lunch Break (Three Workers with Scaffold) (1989). Lockhart’s photographs of live workers installing fiberglass ones marked the beginning of the project that resulted in Lunch Break, the film.

[4]Among these associations are: contemporary globalization and the offshoring of manufacturing jobs; 19^th-century industrialization, the conditions of factory work, and, ironically, the increasing automation of manufacturing; and the work ethic itself.

Constantin Brancusi, "View of the Artist's Studio," 1918, Gouache and pencil on board, 13 x 16 1/4". The Joan and Lester Avnet Collection, © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Understandably, I have always associated Constantin Brancusi with pure lines and modernism of an overly spiritual kind, the kind someone who wants to “fill the vault of the sky,” as Brancusi once said he did, would gravitate toward. However, I saw his drawings for the first time last week. Two hang in the High Museum in Atlanta, as part of the Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters exhibition. Both are studies, and neither have pure lines. View of the Artist’s Studio, a small painting in gouache and pencil, shows one of the artist’s favorite subjects: his own sculptures. They are arranged haphazardly and painted so that they look like little amorphous creatures. The palette is neutral, made up of browns, grays and ochre. The composition has the quirky quaintness of some of Louise Bourgeois’ drawings of anthropomorphized objects.

A view of Brancusi's studio today

Winifred Nicholson, a painter married to Ben Nicholson, recalled that you always took flowers when you visited Brancusi’s studio, because “he loved them and kept them forever, dead and dry as beautiful as when they were in bloom.” You always took flowers when you visited Louise Bourgeois’ salons, too, or at least you did if you wanted her to pay attention to you. The drawings at the High look like they were made by a man who loved flowers. In other words, they have none of the ascetic austerity that Brancusi’s bronze Bird in Space evokes whenever I see it at the Los Angeles County Museum. Having seen Brancusi’s unpretentious drawings, I am much happier that it’s the Romanian-born Parisian transplant who proved to U.S. courts that abstraction is art.

Constantin Brancusi, "Bird in Space," 1926, bronze.

When, in 1927, photographer and curator Edward Steichen took one of Brancusi’s bronze Birds in Space through customs in the United States, the U.S. deemed the object a “utensil” and taxed him $600. Usually, tax could be waived for works of art, but the long, golden object did not look like art to customs officials. Steichen sued and the trial that followed resembled the one in Miracle on 34^th Street — it’s as if the defendant is simply trying to show that magic does not exist.

Artist Jacob Epstein took the stand as a witness at one point, and the cross examination proceeded as follows:
Cross-examiner: Do you make painting your profession?

Epstein: No, sculpture is my profession.

Do you have anything to do with making sculpture similar to Exhibit One?

Well, all sculptures are different.

I asked you if you made anything like Exhibit One?

I may not have the desire to make it.

I did not ask you that.

Justice Waite:  Answer the question. Did you make anything like that exhibit?

No.

In all your thirty years?

No, I have not made anything like that.

Do you consider from the training you have had and based on your experience you had in these different schools and galleries—do you consider that a work of art?

I certainly do.

When you say you consider that a work of art, will you kindly tell me why?

Well, it pleases my sense of beauty, gives me a feeling of pleasure. Made by a sculptor, it has to me a great many elements, but consists in itself as a beautiful object. To me it is a work of art.

So, if we had a brass rail, highly polished, curved in a more or less symmetrical and harmonious circle, it would be a work of art?

It might become a work of art.

Whether it is made by a sculptor or made by a mechanic?

A mechanic cannot make beautiful work.

Do you mean to tell us that Exhibit One, if formed up by a mechanic—that is, a first class mechanic with a file and polishing tools—could not polish that article up?

He can polish it up, but he cannot conceive of the object. That is the whole point. He cannot conceive those particular lines which give it its individual beauty. That is the difference between a mechanic and an artist; he (the mechanic) cannot conceive as an artist.

Justice Waite did eventually agree that Brancusi’s object could be deemed art: “It is beautiful and symmetrical in outline, and while some difficulty might be encountered in associating it with a bird, it is nevertheless pleasing to look at.”