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.

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.

***

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

Lisa Bristow and Christian Lloyd, Destination Goods; Courtesy of Black Dogs

An exploration of the issue of value through artistic practice in the United Kingdom simmers against surrounding concerns regarding budget cuts in education and culture, with pressing questions raised on the way artistic production and education has become an inextricable part of the demands of a market-driven economic system. On an individual level, artists whose works are produced to circulate outside of the art market face continual questions on allocation of their time and labor based on conflicting criteria of what constitutes value.  Next to Nothing reflects these concerns, with several works pushing to the fore the manner that methods of artistic production and circulation work with, re-shape or present alternatives to economic and social structures.

Mick Welbourn, Text; Courtesy of Black Dogs

Luke Drozd’s Odyssey and Yvonne Carmichael’s Visual Merchandising address ideas of exchange and consumption within a retail environment, drawing on recognizable consumables and advertising to create sculptural forms that could exist comfortably in both art and retail spaces, raising the parallels in ideologies of consumption and transaction that underpin these similar modes of display.

Luke Drozd, Odyssey; Courtesy of Black Dogs

Odyssey comprises two stacks of catalogues from Argos, a large retailer of home products in the United Kingdom whose tome-sized catalogues have become ubiquitous features in many households. The grecian origins of Argos and the title of the work, Odyssey create mythic associations, provoking one to think of the way this form of economic transaction through mass production, storage, and third-party distribution has created its own distinctive set of totems that circulate in contemporary culture.

Yvonne Carmichael, Visual Merchandising; Courtesy of Black Dogs

Carmichael uses the rules acquired during a course on visual merchandising to create display units from a selection of supermarket housebrand products, accompanied by a checklist drawn from these visual merchandising rules with pointers from using a pyramid shape, having no more than three colors, to ensuring that products are “shoppable” from all sides. The act of making explicit these rules that exist in a retail environment, and bringing them into a gallery context, compels one to question presentation modes of artworks, and the way art experiences are created to induce a sense of desire or consumer satisfaction.

Charlotte A. Morgan, (L) Not Only the City #4, billboard support structures; (R) Not Only the City #3, Structure for vacant retail unit, The Light, Leeds; Courtesy of Black Dogs

The relationship between the strategies of art and display is also brought out in Charlotte A. Morgan’s works, in the context of physical structures and social processes that evolve over time. In particular, Not only the city #4, billboard support structures, a photograph that depicts blank billboards next to a railway track, considers what a space represents when its function ceases. While the works were intended to create resonances with the first exhibition site in Leeds, the display of this work at SWG3 and the considerations of time and location take on new meaning. Similar to the photograph, SWG3 sits next to a railway track and uses an old customs warehouse for artist studios and the gallery. In light of an ongoing effort to redevelop the area, one is reminded of the way cultural production restructures spaces, while becoming a tool for larger societal and economic processes that emerge through concepts of decay and regeneration.

Harriet Bevan, Book; Courtesy of Black Dogs

The notion of time within the context of knowledge acquisition and value is the subject of Harriet Bevan’s laborious effort to burn holes in each character of Harmsworth History of the World, a hardcover book published at the turn of the 20^th century with beautiful illustrations and images to accompany descriptive historical accounts of geographical regions. The work seems to present a paradox, of seeking to undermine the value of the book as a means for knowledge acquisition. Yet, in the process, across the duration and painstaking labor of boring holes, what emerges is a compelling sense of dedication and commitment in the task at hand – values that have been submerged in a digital economy where knowledge can be easily searched for and rapidly consumed yet without a seeming end.

Bevan’s work is one which strives not just towards a critique of the complicit relationship between art and the economy, but also suggests how the qualities of art as a process and practice, is by itself an alternative to considering what value is and could function, outside a capitalistic order.

Alice Bradshaw, University of Incidental Knowledge; Courtesy of Black Dogs

Another alternative is also envisioned in Alice Bradshaw’s University of Incidental Knowledge, a project devised to encourage learning through unexpected occurrences, accidents and improvisations. Though structured in the guise of a standard educational format with entry requirements and an application process for programs from a BA (Hons) in Cut ‘n’ Paste to an MPhil Mistakes, the project reveals the ironies present within education systems that seek to cultivate ingenuity and creativity yet create a regularized way of considering what art is and ways of producing art.

In 2004, indigenous Australian Cameron Doomadgee was brutally murdered at the hands of a white officer while in police custody, sparking riots on Palm Island in North Queensland. Doomadgee was first arrested for public drunkenness and reported dead an hour later, having suffered from four broken ribs which had ruptured his liver and spleen. His death was recorded as “an accidental fall” in the coroner’s report and all charges on the officer were later dropped in 2007.

“Tall Man”, Four-channel video installation, 2010. Image courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

In his four-channel video installation, Tall Man (a reference to Aboriginal Shire Councillor Lex Wotton’s commitment to the rights of Palm Islanders), Ah Kee appropriates footages from mobile phones and camcorders, edited together with archival news footages to reconstruct the unfolding of events – footages that were ironically used in court as evidence to convict Wotton of inciting the Palm Island riot. But in the hands of Ah Kee, they tell a different story of the injustices faced by the Aboriginal community in Australia. In contrast to the video installation where Wotton is seen enraged and devastated in public, Ah Kee depicts Wotton with subtle and gentle lines – a non-threatening, calm and warm-hearted figure.

"Tall Man”, Charcoal, crayon and acrylic on linen, 2011. Image courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

The final component of the exhibition is a large text-based work that fills the entire front display windows of Gertrude Contemporary. Appropriated from Shakespeare’s Macbeth and reproduced as a run-on sentence, Ah Kee situates the relevance of the seventeenth-century allegory of man’s endless cruelty to man in the brutality faced by Aboriginal people on Australian soil.

“Fill Me”, Vinyl lettering, 2009. Image courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

As a whole, the exhibition exposes the superficial attitudes toward multiculturalism and the constructed representations of Australian history. If it is commonly accepted that history has only ever been written by the victors, why have we still stuck to this story? How is the Aboriginal community to exercise their freewill when they are ceaselessly prevented from demonstrating such rights? Just when it seems that Australia has been making some progress, this illusion is shattered once again with the recent major policy shift by the Baillieu government to dump the compulsory protocol of acknowledging the traditional Aboriginal landowners for being too politically correct. The resurfacing narrative of the Palm Island riot is an important reminder of the continuing lack of respect of indigenous culture.

Deb Sokolow, Chapter 5. They meant for it to fail., 2011, graphite and acrylic on paper mounted to panel, 30x22", courtesy of Western Exhibitions

“People don’t like to read art.” It’s the sort of self-deprecating, tongue in cheek, slightly hipster-ish title you’d expect from a show featuring just such a group of young artists. “We acknowledge not everyone will enjoy this text+art stuff. And we don’t care, because we say it’s important.” But taken a bit less literally, as I had initially interpreted the title, it gets at the idea that people don’t like to derive meaning, to decipher, art. So in this way, perhaps the language in these text-based pieces helps us derive meaning more concretely; the verbage helps us “read” the works more deeply.

Kirsten Stoltmann, You Will Never Be Punk, 2011, oil paint Sharpie on magazine pages, 10x8", courtesy of Western Exhibitions

The offering in Western Exhibition’s group show sweeps the spectrum in terms of media—collage, drawing, sculpture, video, artist books. And in terms of voice as well. The labored, meditative collages of Meg Hitchcock, each one fashioned from thousands of tiny cut-out squares of individual type are juxtaposed against Kirsten Stoltmann’s loud, sharply funny, colorful sharpie drawings on pages from fashion magazines. One of her models declares, “To fart or not to fart.,” as she looks oh so forlorn with her hand to her cheek. Cat Glennon’s “Fuck This” spelled out with cigarette butts and her “You Don’t Need to Read It” in which the words “you don’t need to read into it, you just need to read it” overlaid with a check from a greasy spoon, dead matches, and playing cards, speak of grungy coffee shop angst.

Meg Hitchcock, detail of In the Day of My Trouble (Psalm 86), 2009, letters cut from the Chandogya Upanishad, 12x8", courtesy of Western Exhibitions

Simon Evans’s pyramid-shaped sculpture, “Monument for Sun Related Events,” is one of the most startlingly intimate pieces in the exhibit. Lined, yellow legal paper covers the pyramid, affixed to which are snippets of hand-written text. An inner world emerges in sentence fragments. Somehow these thoughts, memories really, are a stream-of-consciousness confessional, and at the same time, they’re so familiar you can almost recall, from your own past, the moments he spins forth. It was such a guilty pleasure to read, as if peeking into someone’s diary.

Simon Evans, Monument for Sun Related Events, 2008, pyramidal sculpture covered in lined yellow legal paper with blue and red ball point pen, 28x20x20", courtesy of Western Exhibitions

Whatever an art lover’s appetite for “reading,” whether compelled by a quick glance that packs a punch aesthetically or by more of an in-depth verbal communion with the pieces, from bubble gum beach fiction to heavy tomes of autobiography, the work in this show provides for all preferences, except of course for those people who really don’t like to read art.

“People don’t like to read art” is on view at Western Exhibitions in Chicago through August 13.

Installation view of Create, curated by Lawrence Rinder with Matthew Higgs. Photo: Sibila Savage.

The growing spotlight on artists with developmental disabilities simultaneously questions ethics, challenges definitions in Art and inspires viewers. The current exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Create, features the works of 20 artists from three pioneering Bay Area centers for arts and disability – Creativity Explored, Creative Growth Art Center and the National Institute of Art and Disabilities.

Once in the museum, I found myself at an ethical crossroads. The only information provided was a brief introductory wall text at the beginning of the first gallery, and a slightly longer anecdote in the take-away, written by the co-curators Larry Rinder and Matthew Higgs, respectively. Both texts note that the artists included all have a developmental disability of some kind, but little else about their process, experience or intent. Except, of course, to clarify that the artists are not performing art therapy in a drab gray room with bars on the windows. The paradox for me remains in determining for whose benefit exactly, is the mention of the artists’ conditions made? In the introduction, Rinder mentions that the artists’ “status as outsiders is rapidly shifting to that of insiders.” This can be taken in a few ways: for my Mom, and others like her, who insist they were among the first to discover the phenomenon of outsider art, they may be greatly bereaved to hear that outsider art has hit the mainstream, and now even their t-shirts are $60 a pop. For others it can be seen as an advancement that has been a long time coming. The artists featured in Create all possess the level of talent, individual voice and depth to be expected of the those supported by the Berkeley Art Museum and other major institutions. This issue elicits a nagging feeling that questions the motivation of listing the artists as developmentally disabled. I cannot help but wonder how I would have viewed the art if I had not known this facet of the exhibition.

Michael Bernard Loggins, 'Fears of Your Life' Installation View. Photo: Sibila Savage

Trying to look at the artwork as untainted by the knowledge of the artists’ conditions, I saw three galleries filled with pieces so creative and uninhibited, my eyes hungrily devoured the unique detail in each piece. Four examples of Attilo Crescenti’s sprawling, surreal and abstract figure drawings demonstrate the potential of an unrestricted vision of the human form. Written in huge, black scratchy handwriting on the entire back wall of the first gallery, is Michael Bernard Loggins’ text piece “Fears of Your Life.” Loggins included all fears in his list, both the profound and the mundane:

13. Fear of being lost.

21. Fear of spiders and roaches.

And mouse raccoons and rats too.

52. Fear of rolling down a hill backwards.

82. Fear that if you are bad or naughty noone’s isn’t going to love you anymore.

Carl Hendrickson and Jeremy Burleson both created sculptures that blur the line between practical application and surreal artistic liberty. Hendrickson’s wood sculptures resemble recognizable structures at first glance, yet further inspection reveals that their construction negates their utilitarian function. Burleson’s sculptures of medical equipment made from tape, plastic and paper, maintain an amazing amount of detail and accuracy, yet cannot be forgotten as non-functional art objects.

Carl Hendrickson. Image courtesy of Creative Growth

Create brings up several important questions that remain unanswered, and perhaps will not be answered for some time. How are these artists different or the same as others featured in major institutions? How does an artist’s past or present condition affect the reception of their work? Is the image of ‘outsider’ art exploited by the mainstream in the same way as other minorities, subcultures or fringe societies? The success and importance of the exhibition is in its posing of these questions, and the opening of a dialog that may be continued by the art world, both inside and out.

Create was curated by Larry Rinder, the director of BAM/PFA and Matthew Higgs, the director of White Columns. On view from May 11, 2011 – September 25, 2011.

Marianne Mueller, FreePort No. 002 (Any House Is a Home, 2011). Mixed media installation. Image courtesy of PEM.

One way of considering the meaning hidden in a collection is to open it to an artist. Of course, by allowing these creators access to your stacks, you allow them to consider your museum’s position within the community of museums. The latent desires of the past reveal themselves as current realities. Like mirrors, a museum’s various collections reflect our personal and social spirit. It’s a brave decision to reverse the reflecting surface inward, showing what the museum has become and what it has accumulated over time.

Following this logic, The Peabody Essex Museum commissioned the FreePort series, an ongoing exhibition series installed within the museum’s permanent displays. In October of 2010, Charles Sandison‘s projected installation, FreePort [No.001] or Figurehead, launched the series. Sandison began by studying the PEM library’s collection of captain’s logs, and produced a lengthy, computer-based text that was projected in the East India Marine Hall (one of the oldest parts of the museum).  Sandison’s projected text circulated around the room, moving in computer-controlled flows that forced viewers to try to find sense in an immersive environment of words.  Even though Sandison didn’t express any value judgements, the piece was a chaotic report on what texts the museum finds most important.

Charles Sandison, FreePort No. 001 (Figurehead, 2010). Mixed media installation. Image courtesy of PEM.

This past March, Marianne Mueller, a Swiss artist known for her formal photographic explorations, installed the second FreePort work: FreePort [No. 002], or Any House Is a Home. Her vigorous engagement with PEM’s collection resulted in a installation of forty-one of Mueller’s photos, three new video portraits, very specific paint colors in blocks on the wall, and over 150 objects and images from PEM. An exacting installation layered with possible meanings, opposition is the first theme that jumps out. Objects are placed in relation to each other, forcing comparisons to be made between them. Even the painted walls are alive with polarities: sometimes the paint color matches the art work, while at other times the color opposes the chosen object.

Mueller hopes that these relationships are formally exciting, instead of connotative and bound with personal narrative. One of the more successful moments is a pair of especially rare elastic chairs by the eighteenth-century furniture maker Samuel Gragg, placed back to back in a display case from the early 1900s. Their formal qualities, including the curved motion of their backs, are enhanced by this display. The display case surrounds them and becomes a likeness of the museum that holds and collects. The case, purchased for the protection of the chairs, is presented as a piece in the museum’s collection.  The protection becomes as much the subject as the object on display.

Mueller has added a personal theme that connects to her own career by creating an extensive photographic archive. The home and house, an emotional connection to a space, comes from a shared history with a space as much as anything else. Mueller’s intention to create an “open-ended associative field rather than a narrative” fights against this notion. Her intention to “liberate objects from history” and bring them into the present questions the authority of the museum to map and define the objects in their care via a historical timeline or a specifically defined function. This is as true for the museum as it is for Mueller’s personal archive of photographs; her artistic home. Her years of engaging with her own personal archive allows her intense insights into the museum’s archive that may be overlooked by other artists who are invited to respond to the museum’s collection.

Marianne Mueller, FreePort No. 002 (Any House Is a Home, 2011). Mixed media installation. Image courtesy of PEM.

Also currently on display is FreePort [No.003], a sound piece and installation from Susan Philipsz. Philipsz chose to sing a ballad from a book of English and Scottish ballads in the PEM collection. “The House Carpenter’s Wife (The Daemon Lover),” tells the story of a man who returns home from the sea after a long absence to find his former lover with a husband and a child. The eight parts of this installation riff off of the figureheads and portraits of old captains in the East India Marine Hall, bringing the objects’ hidden narratives to the fore.

Freeport [No. 002], by Marianne Mueller, is on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, through December 31, 2011.  Freeport [No. 003], by Susan Philipsz, is on view through November 1, 2011.  Freeport [No. 004], by Peter Hutton, will be on view from September 1, 2011, through December 31, 2011.

Getting to the Heart, 2010, acrylic paint and embroidery on cotton canvas, 227 x 158 cm. Image courtesy of Yavuz Fine Art.

A shrine, or a tribute to abstract expressionism, or so I thought, as Saskia Pintelon’s more-image-than-text paintings came into view. Like Mark Rothko’s soft-edged, colored-rectangles that often alluded to metaphysical concerns that extended beyond the material boundaries of his canvas, Pintelon’s palette of muddy earth-tones that bleed black, greys and reds seems to suggest that the contemporary creative process remains primeval and transcendental but inescapably hybrid.

But the similarity ceases here. The canvasses in the Pintelon’s exhibition entitled Getting to the Heart, are not large (comparatively speaking) and neither is the presented work preoccupied with viewing distance, as was Rothko’s obsession. While Rothko’s colossal canvasses express basic human emotions and like altar pieces, compel their viewers to step past the boundaries of materiality and into what Robert Rosenblum calls “a quasi-religious state of awe”, Pintelon invests heavily in the power of language which contrasts, or reinforces the inner-worldly and the imagination.

Walk the Extra Mile, 2010, acrylic paint and embroidery on cotton canvas, 158 x 143 cm. Image courtesy of Yavuz Fine Art.

Pintelon’s approach to pictorial space is one that focuses on the primacy of color rather than on painterliness. Set against the abstracted and distilled backgrounds, Walk the Extra Mile‘s embroidered white text in various sizes appropriated from trite statements, song lyrics and casual questions speak of the preternatural. “The Beginning of the End” reads the white lettering from one canvas, while another urges, “Walk the extra mile,”and on another, “To Reality.” The collection of news headlines reiterates the gloom of spiraling violence and the cheapening of human existence in contemporary society,  deconstructing the varied impressions, views, pathos and emotions of an artist who has been a long-time resident in a foreign land far from her native Belgium.

As a discrete whole, Pintelon’s canvases cumulatively read as a playful (and sometimes contemplative) blend of gibberish. Like graffiti scrawls, her fragmented texts also seem to justify the need for and the relevance of platitudes, especially if they emanate from a personal vision or from issues that hit home too closely.

To Reality, 2010, acrylic paint and embroidery on cotton canvas, 140 x 134 cm. Image Courtesy of Yavuz Fine Art.

Saskia Pintelon is a Flemish Belgian artist who has been residing in Sri Lanka for 30 years. She has exhibited in Belgium, France, Germany, India, Sri Lanka and Bulgaria. Presented by Yavuz Fine Art, Getting to the Heart is her first solo exhibition in Singapore, and will be on show until 9 January 2011.

Posted Projects, 67 Wilton Way, Hackney, London

Hidden within an abandoned Post Office in London’s East End of Hackney we stumble upon Posted – a temporary exhibition space that explores the intersection of art and the post and examines the ‘dying art of correspondence through letters.’ The current exhibition by director and curator Julia Royse, Please Write, fights against this, refusing to give up on the post, by gathering together artists whose work compiles a compelling case for the post and strives to remind us of the power of these handwritten messages.

Jane Simpson, Loving Letters, 2010. Installation with objects and letters. Courtesy of Posted Projects.

The most gripping work in the exhibition is Jane Simpson’s Loving Letters, an installation comprised of the old writing desk of the artist’s mother overflowing with letters Simpson has received from her. The letters she has received from her ailing mother do not always paint a pretty picture, so Simpson has taken them, torn them apart and attempted to reconstruct them to read what she wishes they would say. Her struggle, and failure, to reconstruct memory and reality is discernible; the letters now contain pleasant sentiments, but the distinguishing scars of the process shroud their surfaces. It is not as easy to cut and paste paper as we have become accustomed to doing in a Word Document, and the residual jagged edges resemble something closer to a pre-digital age ransom demand, than a letter from a loving mother.

Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Comparing Mothers, 2010. Letters from our mothers, ink on paper. Courtesy of Posted Projects.

Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s work, Comparing Mothers continues to explore the maternal relationship. The artists construct what functions as a family portrait by juxtaposing the letters each artist has received from their mother. The emotional, passionate, artistic side of Noble’s mother comes through as she writes madly all over the page, regaling in detail, how she inadvertently killed a hedgehog while mowing the lawn – and the emotional and psychological impacts of doing so. The letter from Webster’s mother is far more removed, constructing an emotionally an clinical letter of pure facts and forced sentiments. The letters seem to provide us with some insight into the relationship each artist must have with his or her mother, and we grasp onto every word, hoping to extract something about the artists from them.

Jessica Piddock & Izzy McEvoy, Still, my murder will appease them, 2010. Ink, woven paper, coat hanger, glue. Courtesy of Posted Projects.

Jessica Piddock & Izzy McCoy’s work hanging in the front window, Still, my murder will appease them, reminds us that not everyone is privy to the digital technology we take for granted. Here, they have written letters to prisoners on death row, those individuals for whom the post is one of their only methods of communication with the world at large. The artists have taken their letters they have received in response and woven them into what resembles a prison uniform. These letters, now unreadable, contain the thoughts of the condemned; letters we both desire to read, yet both fear and are unable to do so.

The art of the letter may be dying, but it is not yet dead. The rarity of letters gives them a certain aura; there is a personal, romantic, nostalgic sense that surrounds them. There is something about holding a handwritten letter – the beauty of the paper, the smell of the ink,  the sharp creases in the paper – that a blog, tweet or email can never quite capture…

I do assure you that the irony of writing about this online has not escaped me.

The title of Raymond Pettibon’s current show at David Zwirner, Hard in the Paint, riffs on basketball, art making, the Southern hip-hopper Waka Flocka Flame and maybe even the YouTube parody Baraka Flocka Flame. By signing the gallery wall “Rajon Flocka James,” Pettibon, whose given name is Raymond Ginn and is no stranger to cultivating an artistic persona, is partaking in a little fun. He seems to have relaxed—a tiny bit—from his mad-as-hell 2007 show, Here’s Your Irony Back (The Big Picture), which was the penultimate Fuck Bush show of the ‘00s.

Hard in the Paint mines the American subconscious by mixing political content with Pettibon’s trademark surfing, baseball, and locomotive imagery. The result is a more nuanced critique of nationalism than straight-ahead rage. For instance, a large wall text combines the words “Obama nig,” a phrase based on the famous right-winger Norman Podhoretz, and a personalized take on Regeanomics that reads “rõad ragenomicstrap.” Rather than flirting with a Dr. Laura moment, Pettibon captures all of the undercurrents in the current American scene: the Tea Party’s screams of socialism, the role of religion, free speech and race.

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (No Primer No Bondo...) 2010. 56 x 76 inches

Pettibon is no leftist cheerleader however—he distrusts the whole system. The disastrous greed of Imperialism is reflected in works that combine post-WWII iconography with the grim reality of failure. Pettibon’s ball players, trains and Cadillacs call to mind the obsolescence of America’s golden era—his baseball pitchers always seem to screw up a perfect game in the 9^th, trains aren’t nearly as prominent as they once were, and cars just don’t look very forceful anymore. In the same way that the television show M*A*S*H was set in the Korean War but was really meant to portray Vietnam, Pettibon’s fixation on mid-20^th century America translates just as easily to now.

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Where's the green...) 2010. 30 x 22 1/8 inches

Global annihilation by threat of the atomic bomb also seems to have a special place in Pettibon’s heart.  Mushroom cloud scenes like No Title (Where’s the Green…) depict a coming-of-age and sexual awakening in the shadow of the bomb. Many of his explosions are seen from cinematic angles—he understands how deeply ingrained the Hollywood version of America, the one where we’re all extras and stunt men in some sort of spectacularly exploding drama, really is. Although he deals in the guilt-ridden imagery of those schlocky booklets that crazy religious people hand to you on the street, Pettibon’s scenes are so convincing that you just can’t turn away. No one combines war, surrealism, and the sublime better.

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (That obliging schoolgirl...) 2010. 30 3/4 x 41 7/8 inches

All nostalgia aside, Pettibon’s greatest asset might be his wide-ranging intellectual curiosity.  Works about the fast food industry, advertising, philosophy, history, fashion and pop culture offer up just a few of the things that are on his mind in this ambitious show. Where hardcore punks are supposed to be screw-ups, and comic books were originally thought to be for dummies, Pettibon emerges as the hardest working smart guy in the room. Unlike rappers like Waka Flocka, Pettibon never brags about money, even though he’s got plenty. Unlike classic rock bands when they hit the ‘80s, Pettibon never went synth. Even though his biography gets overplayed, the secret to his success might be that success seemingly never went to his head. Sure, his work often relies on conspiracy theories and an easy sense of pathos, but he always gives his subjects a gravity that makes them seem alive. He doesn’t care about lame art school issues of composition or whatever—he just wants the train to feel like it’s crushing off the paper through bullets of dripping rain.

Images by Ruth Clark, courtesy of CCA Press

Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan are Glasgow-based artists who have been working collaboratively for fifteen years. Direct serious action is therefore necessary which runs from 2 October to 13 November 2010 was commissioned in response to the function, history and architecture of the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), Glasgow. The choreography of individual pieces – from text to objects – circulated before and during the exhibition comprise the artwork, rather than the individual pieces themselves. Tatham and O’Sullivan draw from local histories to create works on rituals within art making and viewing, to question the parameters of contemporary art. Taking cue from Joseph Kosuth on his idea that art is a kind of proposition commenting on art, one is confronted with propositions related to site and structure, through their work.

The notion of a site, as both imaginary and physical locations are probed into, as the works take reference from or call attention to the mythical site of Scotland’s Loch Ness monster and the immediate context of CCA as historical architecture and exhibition site. As a creature whose physical absence creates an enduring mythic quality, imaginations surrounding the Loch Ness monster take on monumental stature, through large totemic structural pieces winding their way from the entrance through the cafe into the galleries. They draw attention to the architecture of CCA, where refurbishment in the 1990s revealed core sections of the Victorian-era Greek-styled building. Placed both outside and inside the galleries, the juxtaposition questions the function of spaces in relation to art. While in the cafe, they appear as architectural features for visitors to circulate around. When placed in the conventions of a white-walled gallery, they align themselves to our expectations as works of art to be observed.

Image by Alan Dimmick, courtesy of CCA Press

Direct serious action is therefore necessary disrupts structures and the sets of established relationships within a work of art and its presentation, through investigating the role of text and rituals. In contrast to the didactic role of language within exhibitions, the written language in this case appears as a work of art in itself. A folded yellow handout with an image of a man on a horse is circulated prior to the exhibition, and is paired with text containing a first-person tirade in Glaswegian street language, of the blind eye cast by politicians  to the situation of the working class. The title and language of the narration evokes an attitude, and seems dislocated thematically from the exhibition, playing against norms regarding how text serves as a filter for art. Individual labels for the individual pieces are absent in the galleries, and labels for the black and white photographs of Glasgow scenes, are visible only in the handout circulated before the exhibition and are placed in a way to describe the image of the man on the horse. In doing so, it questions the extent to which text produces art and the point at which a work is regarded as art when it enters a gallery space. The use of repetition – through a repeated phrase in the text, geometric patterns on the sculptural pieces, and repeated prints in the black and white photographs – serve more as connotative than aesthetic devices, in revealing the nature of their work in expressing systems in art.

MDF, timber, paint. Seventeen black and white photographs in hand-made plywood frames. [Untitled (Westburn Bar); Untitled (Kelvinside Terrace); Untitled (Airlink); Untitled (Jewsons); Untitled (Notre Dame); Untitled (Lanark Street); Untitled (Tramway); Untitled (Cranhill land); Untitled (The Castle); Untitled (Forth and Clyde); Untitled (Financial Services Office); Untitled (Westburn Bar); Untitled (Hunterian Gallery); Untitled (Cawder Cuilt); Untitled ; Untitled (Financial Services Office); Untitled (Horselethill Road); Untitled (Notre Dame)

I'm Dying Up Here, #6 (wood suit). Color photograph, 2010. Courtesy of Silverman Gallery.

In her most recent photographic series, I’m Dying Up Here, Carland’s isolated figures live in an unsettled state, seemingly caught mid-act. The figures rest between being obscured and exposed by the heavy dark cloaking of the background. Each background is both visible and invisible, with subtle texture only coming into focus as one approaches the photograph. Even when there is no figure present, the environments in each image lie in waiting for something, giving one the sensation of anticipation, fear and self-doubt that accompany the act of performing.

For an exhibition revolving around comedians, humor takes a surprising, and unexpected, backseat role. In so many ways, humor can be one of the best ways to protect one’s self, but in Tammy Rae Carland’s case, humor only presents itself alongside humiliation and exposure, acting as a tool to show how one is both hidden and revealed, guarded and defenseless.

Punch Line, Ink and paper, 10 × 13 Inches each, 2010. Courtesy of Silverman Gallery.

In some of the most uniquely satisfying work in the gallery, a series of ink and paper text works, entitled Punch Line, mask transcripts of famous comedians’ acts, only leaving the punch line revealed. This disguise leads the viewer to search, to postulate, and to wonder about that which is missing, only providing the feeling of being utterly incomplete, and unfulfilled. What results is a context that is lost or mistranslated, mirroring the vulnerability embedded in the I’m Dying Up Here series.

Funny Face, I love You. Various sizes. Ceramic cast and hand built objects. Courtesy of Silverman Gallery.

And, as a perfect way to complete this well articulated thought, the fragility and subtle habitation of the ceramic sculpture, Funny Face, I Love You, reveals the balance of presence and absence in all of the work in the show. As it sits in the window space of the gallery storefront, the sculpture lives both inside and outside of the space. The ethereal nature of the white ceramic simultaneously exists as the omission of a figure and as the immaterial quality of the prop to the act of performing. All of these elements combined in Carland’s well choreographed narrative leaves a place for the viewer to explore vulnerability and fear in relation to the body and mind united in the performative act.

Funny Face, I Love You will be on view at Silverman Gallery through October 23rd, 2010.

William Powhida infiltrated the art industry with his unapologetic attitude, insightful drawings, lists of enemies, letters to collectors and curators, and other written and visual material that prey upon the “catastrofuck” of the art world. Merging his background in art criticism with his visual art practice, Powhida graphically dissects the complex capitalistic structure of New York art using graphite, gouache, watercolor, colored pencil, and incisive text. The artist has garnered much attention for his controversial cultural products.

How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality, seen above, depicts floating heads of several members and affiliates of the New Museum, suspended in the composition and surrounded by sharp and satirical handwritten text questioning the institution’s alliances and decisions. The drawing, which the artist describes as “a modest drawing about the New Museum‘s terrible decision to show a trustee’s private collection,” appeared on one third of the covers for Brooklyn Rail‘s November 2009 issue, fueling an ongoing debate about institutional ethics. Powhida was a regular contributor for the Brooklyn Rail for three years before he “decided he could no longer keep helping other artists develop careers,” and began concentrating on his own artistic inspirations.

The artist completed his M.F.A. in painting at New York’s Hunter College in 2002 and is represented by Schroeder Romero in New York and Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles. Powhida co-organized the group show Magicality, currently on view at Platform Gallery in Seattle until August 5th, with Eric Trosko. Magicality investigates the parallels between the disciplines of art and magic and includes Powhida’s series of thirteen prints, which double as talismans and hexes, entitled Ars Magica Portfolio.

Anthony Discenza, Teaser #1 (2009)

Opening Thursday, May 13th and running through Saturday the 15th is a flash project at Catherine Clark Gallery‘s New York space, the 14th Street Studio. The show, entitled Everything Will Probably Work Out OK, will feature recent work by Oakland, CA-based Anthony Discenza. Discenza’s text-based work is both literary-minded and low-brow laugh-inducing, and references the artist’s interest in what he calls an “internal viewing experience,” which is born of the freedom offered when one steps back from the constant heckling of image-based culture. His aluminum “street signs” offer the sort of one-liners that the Age of Twitter has become known for, though their enigmatic sentiments require a deeper dive into the murky waters of the wasted adult imagination than most 140 character witticisms.

When I spoke recently with gallery Owner/Director, Catherine Clark, she responded to Discenza’s new work—his so-called “non-visual source material”—by noting that “the new body of text-based projects, while in some ways a media or stylistic departure from his videos, remains consistent with his interests in appropriation and re-contextualizing cultural information.”

Everything Will Probably Work Out OK is the second pop-up exhibition being held at the 14th Street Studio—which is not so much a gallery in the classic sense (there is no “Catherine Clark Gallery, New York”), as an experiment into the way collectors and the public commingle with work. The first show at the space opened in March of this year—during the swarming of Manhattan that is New York art fair week—inspired by the idea that this season the gallery would like to present work in a more personalized setting in lieu of doing a fair.

The Discenza exhibition is a similar, though slightly altered, East Coast incarnation of an eponymously titled show at the Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco in January/February 2010. According to Clark, while many of the pieces from the original exhibit will be re-presented in the new space, “there are some significant additions and changes,” including the addition of a large digital photo-based work featuring the Olsen Twins. Additionally, she notes that “some of the text-based signs and works on paper are either newer pieces or feel more appropriate in relationship to the space and the other works selected for the exhibition.” While Everything Will Probably Work Out OK is only on view for three days this weekend, including during several cocktail receptions, the body of work will be up through the beginning of September and can be arranged for viewing by appointment.

Anthony Discenza, ELECTIVE PROCEDURE (2009) and LOW-KEY BASICS (2009)

Anthony Discenza earned his BA from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT and his MFA in Film and Video from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA. His work has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Australian Center for the Moving Image, the Getty Center, the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive and at the 2000 Whitney Biennial at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.