Louise Bourgeois working on Sleep II in Italy, 1967. Photo: Studio Fotografico, Carrara. © The Easton Foundation.

In 2004, two boxes of what have been labelled Bourgeois’ ‘psychoanalytical writings’ were discovered by her assistant in her Chelsea home, and a further two in 2010. These thousands of loose-leaf sheets of paper recorded Bourgeois’ inner conflicts, dream recordings and self-probing analysis, commencing during the period when the artist began undergoing intense psychoanalysis at the hands of Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, a follower of Sigmund Freud.

Louise Bourgeois, loose sheet, 13 September 1957, 26.7 x 20.3 cm. LB-0219, Louise Bourgeois Archive, New York. © The Easton Foundation.

With these in hand, curator Phillip Laratt-Smith published a volume of Bourgeois’ writings, and conceived the exhibition, Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed. Currently tucked away in residential North London, the works could not have found a more suitable site than The Freud Museum – a home firmly entrenched in psychoanalytic history, where both its patriarchal namesake, and his daughter Anna, remained until their deaths.

With Bourgeois’ writings, drawings and sculptures housed throughout Freud’s former possessions and collections, a challenging and quite perilous dialogue is created, laying the groundwork for a very dangerous obsession that may inextricably fuse Bourgeois to Freud.

Louise Bourgeois's bronze Janus Fleuri, 1968, suspended over Freud's couch at The Freud Museum, London. Courtesy The Easton Foundation. Photo: Ollie Harrop. © Louise Bourgeois Trust.

Hanging above Freud’s psychoanalytic couch, the original brought with him from Vienna, is a work by Bourgeois often referred to as a self portrait of the artist. The bronze sculpture Janus Fleuri is a ambiguous form with connotations of sexuality, metamorphosis, and struggle. Swaying above the place where free association was born, Janus Fleuri looks both to the past and to the future, and as Laratt-Smith has argued, embodies the artist’s Oedipal deadlock -  an unresolvable struggle between Bourgeois, her father and her mother, stalemated by her mother’s death.

Louise Bourgeois, Cell XXIV (Portrait), 2001, steel, stainless steel, glass, wood and fabric, 177.8 x 106.7 x 106.7 cm. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth and Cheim & Read. Photo: Christopher Burke. © Louise Bourgeois Trust.

Bourgeois’ work functions as an expression of her psychic unconscious – a way of giving form to anxieties she could not articulate, which she then subsequently analysed in her writings. While Freud focused on ‘the word’ – translating thoughts and dreams into articulations – Bourgeois moved freely between the two. Her writings reveal struggles, at times debilitating, to define herself within the roles of mother, daughter, wife and artist. And works like Cell XXIV (Portrait), embody this struggle. With three heads and three mirrors, Cell XXIV presents a multiplious identity further broken down by its external reflections – the kind of fragmented view of the self that Bourgeois struggled with throughout her life.

But it is this struggle, and her torment, that fueled her work. This Bourgeois understood well. Speaking specifically about Freud, Bourgeois wrote:

‘The truth is that Freud did nothing for artists, or for the artist’s problem, the artist’s torment - to be an artist involves some suffering. That’s why artists repeat themselves – because they have no access to a cure … the need of artists remains unsatisfied, as does their torment.’

While Bourgeois embraced Freudian psychoanalysis, she was aware of its limitations for herself as an artist. Her writings were not an attempt to cure herself or ease her suffering, but were rather used as fuel for the fire. And it is here, with Freud and Bourgeois under the same roof, that we find ourselves immersed in the realm of a very dangerous obsession.

Sarah Forrest / Virginia Hutchison, In the Shadow of the Hand: cymbal (cast lead cymbal on stand). Image courtesy of artists.

These interviews will be published in two editions–check back in with us tomorrow for our interview with the artists from Back to the Things Themselves. This post features In the Shadow of the Hand which is on show at Market Gallery and presents new work by Sarah Forrest (SF) and Virginia Hutchison (VH). Reflecting on the process of evaluation and critique in the development of artistic practice, both artists create texts for each other that are cast in lead. The lead is then melted and recast into an object by each artist in response to the text, forming part of a series of exchanges exploring subjective responses to an objective call, and the relationship between object and text.

MC: Could you talk a bit about your individual practice? I saw Sarah’s work in the exhibition P is for Protagonist and couldn’t help but think of that exhibition when I entered gallery 1.

Virginia Hutchison, Excerpts from 7 sunsets (temporary intervention with gold leaf, IOTA public art projects, Inverness, 2010). Image courtesy of artist.

VH: A lot of my work is site or context-specific interventions in the public realm. Quite often it is objective or brief-led. Recent projects have required interaction between the work and people, and an exchange of skills. What has become more important for me has been the dialogue in the making of the work, for example with people installing the work and having conversations about the space and the work.  Through the conversations, I’ve become interested in the different roles, of whether I am the artist, or they are the artists because they help to make the work come to full cycle. That was what made us decide to collaborate. Both of us were dealing with relationships between viewer, artist, object, audience, and how all these roles shift. I was at the point when I was really quite keen to just reflect on all the work that I was doing.

SF: My practice is much more gallery-based and I do creative writing with texts published independently of the visual work. I was in an exhibition at Transmission Gallery and my starting point for my work was the voices of objects. In the run-up to the exhibition, I was undertaking a lot of research on the voices of objects and I became so lost in theory that I almost lost myself. The work I presented, Part 1: for the voice, was a white sculpture narrating with a pair of headphones. Everything had gone white, and it was about a voice that was missing. By that point, I had a desire to move away from intellectualizing, come back to a much more subjective space, and find different ways to talk about a creative practice. That was when we began speaking about evaluation and critique, in relation to the art object. I am interested in creative writing as a response to a visual experience and I think that’s when our conversation started.

Sarah Forrest, Part 1: for the voice, (2010), installation with a framed text, a monitor playing a video, a white sculpture made of plaster, paper, wire mesh and gloss paint which had headphones emitting a female voice attached to it. Duration 10.23 minutes. Exhibited in Days, a three-person show at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow. Image courtesy of artist.

VH: I haven’t done a lot of creative writing myself but what I like is how it made me think differently about the projects I was doing. I thought that it was important to find a way to present a narrative of the conversations I was having. When we started off, I thought it was going to be very linear, when we had text, object, text, object, and one would follow one from the other. In reality, when responding to Sarah’s text, I was thinking of my text, and I was also thinking of what object she might be making in response. So many things started to feed in, including our conversations.

SF: We started off with texts that each of us had written or appropriated that were cast into lead letters in Edinburgh. We would respond to each other’s text with an object.  The size and weight of the object was dictated by the size and weight of the texts. It was a really simple relationship between text and an object, and a playful way to work and structure a collaboration. There was a point when I was making a symbol that was in response to the the the and I was asking for advice. We spoke about ideas of repetition and rhythm, the the the being like a stutter almost, and talked about the idea of making an object like a stutter. We began to collaborate in the making of the object.

Sarah Forrest / Virginia Hutchison, In the Shadow of the Hand: the the the (typeset text on paper). Image courtesy of artists.

VH: Even in the making of the work, we had to share our skills quite a lot. What I found healthy yet scary was letting go of ownership of something, as well as authorship. Although I know what texts I wrote and what objects I made, because Sarah has a text that sits with my object  – is it mine or her’s? Is it somebody else’s?

MC: I was interested in the decisions that both of you had decided to take, in relation to what you considered physical and immaterial within the exhibition space. The materiality of the objects could be very seductive just by looking at it. Yet these vanish into a two-dimensional screen. I personally found the texts very three-dimensional. One of the texts had instructions for a person to inhale and exhale and it made me feel my own body.

VH: From the standpoint of public art that I work in, issues of permanence are things I am always considering. What is permanent or temporary? It could be a day or 20 years. I like the swopping round, of the text becoming the object, and the object becoming quite two-dimensional. Once an object disappears, it has a different narrative.

SF: What is it that sticks with you when you’ve left the exhibition? What is the echo of the object and how do you narrativize that memory of the object?

MC: I think that because I’m unable to move around an object, it changes how my narrative of an experience is made. When the object is presented on a screen, perhaps it changes the way you remember it?

VH: I think definitely. Although it is projected on a lead screen, almost as the last remaining object…

SF: … and the size of the screen relates to the weight of the object.

Sarah Forrest / Virginia Hutchison, In the Shadow of the Hand (gallery image). Image courtesy of artists.

MC: An objective framework has a determined set of values. In shifting from objective to subjective evaluation, are there still values? For example, when you were talking about the conversations that had occurred, are you suggesting that for any kind of critique, there has to be a relationship between two people, or an emotional involvement?

SF: I think it’s a part of communication. For something to have value, there has to be a sharing of what is important and some kind of agreement on what things are important, which is what has happened in this whole process.

VH: I think you’re always going to have a relationship with somebody whom you’re critiquing or evaluating a piece of work. If it’s a media-driven thing then there is definitely a separation. I think that’s the problem – there is a separation when you are not encountering somebody on a face-to-face, real time situation. When you think about the context of making work, it might reveal a lot about the people that create it and how they have conversation with folk. Are they dominant in a conversation and does it reflect in their work? Does their work allow people to put their own selves into it in some way?

SF: That was always a concern with the project because it’s a call-and-response between us. We had to think about how it is interesting to someone else and not just about our personal relationship. The installation became important as a space where you can read and you can sit. I was quite aware of not becoming quite closed and this feels like an experimental exhibition. It’s the first time I’ve collaborated on an exhibition and the work, when presented, still feels very active. As soon as you present something as an exhibition it takes on a position, as a thing in the world.

Luxury Logico Artist Collective (Taipei, Taiwan), ‘Solar’, 2010, lights, computer, sound, courtesy of White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney

Down the Rabbit Hole, the current exhibition in Sydney’s White Rabbit Gallery, explores familiar themes, such as the disjunction between appearance and reality, or between the real and the fake. Layers of the past and present, preoccupying so many artists, provide insights into the psychological whirlwind resulting from the pace of change in today’s China. Ideas about materialism, globalisation, wealth and power, corruption, and identity confusion are evident in many works.

Wang Luyan’s ‘Breathe Series – ATM’ appears to be a real cash dispenser, until you realise its soft silicone rubber surface moves gently as if breathing in and out. Wang’s earlier work, ‘Breathe – Manager Zhao’s Black Cab’ is a dusty battered van with one working headlight, its dented sides expanding with each breath. A homage to the entrepreneurial spirit of ordinary people making their way through the changed universe of post-Mao China? Or an ominous warning about the relationships between human and machine? His machines are not shiny high-tech objects, however, but imperfect, slightly flabby, soft and squishy, much like humans themselves.

Wang Luyan, ‘Breathe Series - ATM’ 2011, silicone, steel and motor, image courtesy of White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney

Taiwanese artists in this show include the tech-savvy members of the Luxury Logico collective, whose installation ‘Solar,’ created from old lamps, evokes a mood at once nostalgic and futuristic, reminding me irresistibly of ET phoning home. Tu Wei-Cheng’s ‘Bu Num Civilisation Revealed’ simulates the archaeological discovery of an ancient civilisation, a ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ style temple and its artefacts, whose elaborate ‘stone’ wall carvings turn out on closer inspection to be computer keyboards, iPhones and brand logos.

Wang Duo’s “Old Brands Made New’ features the artist as a 1930’s Shanghai seductress in ‘posters’ which initially appear to be traditional advertisements. Then we realise that the featured cigarettes are Marlboro, the beauty products are Chanel, and the handbags are Prada and Louis Vuitton. The advertisements themselves are video installations which make us question how we interpret what we see. Shanghai’s short lived early 20^th century modernity and sophistication are evoked in a way which queries the fate of today’s modernity, our reliance on technology and the obsessive quest after wealth and conspicuous consumption.

Wang Duo, ‘Old Brands Made New’ No 7, 2011, video installation, image courtesy of White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney

Fung Ming Chip reinvents traditions of calligraphy and ink-painting. His sand script is written with a brush dipped in water, and then filled with gusts of dried, powdered ink which adheres to some of the still-wet strokes of his brush. Like Xu Bing, he is interested in the connections between calligraphy, language and meaning, and like Xu Bing he challenges our assumptions about what we are seeing and ‘reading’. ‘Departure’ is a meditation on air travel, and references sacred sutra scrolls as well as the traditions of the literati. It reads ’36,000 feet up and 763 kilometres per hour’ – a ‘floating world’ indeed.

Down the Rabbit Hole presents a world much like Alice’s, where appearances can be deceiving and meaning is subject to change.

Gail Devers in Athens

Do you remember track star Gail Devers, with her absurdly long nails? I noticed her for the first time in Atlanta, on television during the 1996 Olympics, where she one her third gold. Then, her nails were painted gold to match the medal she had yet to win. Eight years later, in Athens, her nails were blue. That she had those nails at all made her seem smarter than her competitors, like she alone had figured out how to bend norms and regulations to make her body entirely her own. “I run with my feet,” she once said, meaning it didn’t matter what flourishes she had on her hands.

I thought of Devers when I read that Caster Semenya, the 2009 World Champion in the 800 meters race who was hindered from competing in 2010 when huge improvement in her time and her butch appearance made officials and others question her gender, has a new coach, a woman from Mozambique. She will no longer be working with the men who managed her as her career began, when she was often going off with other racers to prove to them her femaleness: ‘”They are doubting me,’ she would explain to her coaches, as she headed off the field toward the lavatory.”

Semenya has long nails, too, or at least she did when writer Ariel Levy tracked her down for a brief moment in 2009, not long after she had been subjected to a series of uncomfortable, publicly debated gender tests. “She wore sandals and track pants and kept her hood up,” said Levy. “She didn’t look like an eighteen-year-old girl, or an eighteen-year-old boy. She looked like something else, something magnificent.”

She looks magnificent in the photo artist Adam McEwan used in one of the fake obituaries he made in 2011, too: her face seems calm and unfazed but her right pointer finger is up, signalling, it seems, that she is number one. It’s perhaps the crudest of the obits by McEwan, who pieces together news articles about people who are actually still living but leads in to them with the words “has died,” then prints his “reports” on a large scale. He completed Semenya’s when the runner was barely 20 and controversy still surrounded her. The lead said, “World Champion middle distance runner whose gender came under intense public scrutiny” and descriptors throughout were painful: “even when young teachers sometimes thought she was a boy because of her liking sports and their company,” “she was considering boycotting the presentation of her metal to protest her treatment. She had to be persuaded…”, “It was unclear if she would have run professionally again.”

McEwan never specifies a cause of death, and it is impossible not to imagine that, had it been real, her death would have been somehow a result of the “intense public scrutiny” and the crassness of officials, especially as Semenya comes from a place where gender deviance is often seen as criminal.

When Levy tracked down Semenya that day in 2009, she told the runner she was writing about her. Semenya wanted to know why:

“Because you’re the champion,” I said.

She snorted and said, “You make me laugh.”

An exhibition in Chinatown right now captures this conflict between performance and personhood in a quiet, compelling way. You walk in to see images of women high jumpers mid-air, their backs arched and their knees parallel to or above their heads, which arch back toward the camera, so that the intense, sometimes pained focus of expressions is unmissable. The images hang on the wall, over string that’s threaded across the room, or suspended inside wooden hoops. Another series of images is domestic: a dog, a cityscape, a bedroom, a bowling alley, another bedroom. Text that accompanies the installation, a collaboration at Young Art between Cara Benedetto and Davida Nemeroff, refers to “a game that wont stop no matter how many tests are changed” and stats that “become important when we number pain.”

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.

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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.

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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.