“Mockup is a storage room, a stage set, a mausoleum, a trade show, a diagram, a game board, a studio, a retail store, a pictograph, a classroom, a museum display, an architectural model, and a sign-makers workshop. Like composite wood — the material from which the artworks are made — each object is at once real and solid, and simultaneously a mere semblance or substitute.”

The following article was originally published by Seth Curcio on October 13, 2007:

The following article was originally published by Rob Marks on December 5, 2011: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lunch break, indeed.

[1]Exhibition press release, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, August 30, 2011.

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

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

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

40,000 bottle rockets make for a lot of noise and a lot of glare. Especially when they come hurtling toward your face. On April 7, 2012, artist Cai Guo-Qiang — known for his gunpowder drawings and performative “explosion events” — opened Sky Ladder at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary location with just such an experience. Called Mystery Circle, the event was pure spectacle. Over a thousand people showed up to watch Guo-Qiang use the rockets to burn images of crop circles and a Byzantine alien onto MOCA’s side.

Danielle Sommer: This is your first West Coast exhibition?

Cai Guo-Qiang: The first solo exhibition on the West Coast.

DS: Did that influence how you conceived the work? Is there anything specific about Los Angeles or the Western U.S. involved?

CGT: So back in the mid-nineties, when I was about to move from Japan to the U.S., I had a friend who was the editor of a major art magazine who told me that the West Coast is the closest place to the universe in the world. There’s a lot of hi-tech development, and also the aerospace industry is here.

DS: You’ve said that the role of art is to provide a distance for people to see certain issues and certain events – and that that distance is necessary to find the meaning below the surface. What it is about art that creates that distance? What is the meaning below the surface of this work?

Crop Circles, computer rendering for the exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang: Sky Ladder, 2012, courtesy Cai Studio.

CGT: Because the exhibition is titled Sky Ladder, there is a sense of distance between humans on Earth, and the universe and outer space. It’s also a pictorial review of my art career and the past works and projects I’ve done through the years.  With the crop circle installation, it’s a reversal of the normal perspective, where we humans are looking from outer space onto Earth.

DS: You talked about your first rocket painting being a tiny canvas in your studio. Do you still have a studio practice? Do you do things that are just for your own eyes?

CGT: I still have a studio, but when I mentioned that I was working with that canvas thirty years ago, it was in my hometown in China. Of course, now my studio is located in New York, but it’s where I conceive ideas or make sketches. When it comes to using gunpowder, because you need a permit for that, we go out to Brookhaven and Long Island.

"Desire for Zero Gravity," 2012, gunpowder on canvas, 340.36 x 1066.8 cm (134 x 420 in.), commissioned by The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, photo by Joshua White, courtesy The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

DS: Jeffery Dietch said that he considers your work both spectacular and intimate.  How do you feel when you’re experiencing it?

CGT: A lot of times very anxious — very excited in anticipating the event. When that happens, I feel at one with the audience.

DS: We all jumped back together.

CGT: I got hit by a few rockets!

DS: I saw that!

CGT: You saw that?

DS: I did.

Sky Ladder is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, through July 30, 2012.

It is what it is. Or is it? will be on view May 12 – July 29, 2012.

The following article was originally published by Michael Tomeo on July 15, 2010:

If the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh keeps putting on shows like Twisted Pair: Marcel Duchamp/Andy Warhol then maybe the ol’ Burgh deserves a place on the official Dia art pilgrimage map, along with James Turrell’s Roden Crater in Arizona and Walter De Maria’s New Mexican Lightning Field.  Curated by longtime Warhol archivist Matt Wrbican, Twisted Pair is smart, funny and long overdue. Where many curators employ obscure art theory in attempts to somehow prove that what they are doing is true, Wrbican actually uses the archive. This makes for a much more grounded take on these artists, which is exactly what they need after decades of art world deification.

This show reminds us that before all of the flashbulbs, fame and auction numbers, Andy Warhol was just another young New York artist, albeit a very promising one. It also accurately depicts Duchamp as being fairly aware of what young artists were up to, despite his status as art world legend. He was more accessible as a chess playing jokester than a solitary genius.

Andy Warhol, Oxidation, 1978. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917/1964.

There are some terrific pairings in this show, like Warhol’s Oxidation paintings next to Duchamp’s Urinal. There are also a few rare finds like Warhol’s The Lord Gave Me My Face But I Can Pick My Own Nose, 1948 and Duchamp’s Door at 11 Rue Larrey Photographic Enlargement, 1964. But some of the best stuff on view are the letters and archival material that might truly feel sacred to fans of either artist. Usually ephemera bores me to tears but here I was fascinated to see a butcher-paper test print for one of Warhol’s Shadows hanging above a case full of Duchamp’s optical illusion machines.

Among the qualities that Warhol and Duchamp share are a desire to shock, a taste for celebrity, a belief in the everyday object, a penchant for drag, and a strong voyeuristic impulse.  Duchamp’s groundbreaking idea of the readymade looms larger than any other in the 20^th century and no one did more with it than Warhol.  Warhol understood that advertisements, consumer objects, newspaper photos, the Empire State Building, and people themselves were all up for grabs as objects d’art. If Duchamp’s Bottle Rack looks rather pedestrian next to Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, it’s because Warhol never fully committed to the anti-retinal to the same degree that Duchamp did.

Andy Warhol, The Lord Gave Me My Face But I Can Pick My Own Nose, 1948, Collection Paul Warhola Family.

This show is so effective in pointing out connections between these two artists that it is tempting to see them as the same creative force formed by two separate eras. However, their differences are just as striking as their similarities. Duchamp embodied an authentic lackadaisical attitude that Warhol could only feign. With a work ethic that would make his Pittsburghian forebears proud, Warhol called his studio the Factory and constantly cranked out product.  Duchamp let large amounts of time, not to mention dust, seep into his works before finishing them. Warhol was a worldwide sensation while Duchamp only appealed to art-nerds. These days it is impossible to imagine any appropriation art, assemblage, or hip art collective like the Paris-based Claire Fontaine without these two artists – they are so influential that we are almost tired of them.

My friends in Pittsburgh roll their eyes when I over-praise their city’s magnificent bridges, or go on about how the PPG Building is like the best Banks Violette sculpture ever. And yes, I’ve been caught on Greenpoint Avenue in Brooklyn wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball hat.  But hometown bias aside, this show is worth traveling for.

On the other hand, Twisted Pair is so essentially New York that its next destination really should be the Whitney, but I doubt this will happen.  If a real sense of what these artists were like intrigues you, and the thought of seeing relics pertaining to their lives and work gets you all fluttery, then a trip to Pittsburgh is a must. After the show, indulge yourself with a little urban exploration. Vacant, post-industrial downtown Pittsburgh might be the closest thing to 60s SoHo to be found.

The following article was originally published by Kelly Nosari on September 1, 2010:

Each year, from mid-summer to early fall, the arts converge in Scotland’s capital city.  The Edinburgh International Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe are well-known venues for the performing arts.  The Edinburgh Festivals have expanded to include art forms such as film, jazz and blues, storytelling, and books.  The visual arts is no exception in having its own festival platform.  Taking place throughout August and the first week of September, the Edinburgh Art Festival is Scotland’s largest annual festival of visual art.  Daily Serving brings our readers some of its highlights.

The Edinburgh Art Festival annually commissions new works of art and partners with the local art community to provide a strong exhibitions program throughout the city.  The 2010 EAF presents commissions of new work by artists Martin Creed, Richard Wright and collaborative partners Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth.  Coleman and Hogarth’s Staged, which concluded August 15th, was produced by the Collective Gallery and situated at the City Observatory on Carlton Hill.  The artists turned the space into a multi-channel video installation described by the EAF Guide as both a ‘digital camera obscura’ and ‘a mise-en-scène’ for the city.  Capitalizing upon the theatrical emphasis of the Edinburgh Festivals, the artists included visitors in their work by projecting live CCTV footage along with pre-recorded filmic images of Edinburgh.

The 2010 EAF also commissioned intervention and performance works to take place throughout its run.  Among them is Ross Christie’s Mobile Art Market.  His environmentally friendly cycle-powered market stall travels around Edinburgh, offering up affordable prints, multiples, books and fanzines created by local artists.

Martin Creed: Down Over Up

The Fruitmarket Gallery presents new and recent work by 2001 Turner Prize winning British artist Martin Creed in Down Over Up.  Down Over Up – an evocative title – is inspired by the artist’s commission to refurbish the Scotsman Steps.  Creed notes the strong use of repetition in his work, which is for him a comfortable means of approaching our chaotic world and creating some semblance of regularity.  The exhibition’s strong thematic emphasis upon repetitive, incremental changes allows one to see differences where things might have otherwise appeared to be the same.

Down Over Up is centered upon the concept of ‘stacking and progression in size, height and tone’.  The exhibition features work where Creed has stacked or piled planks, chairs, tables, boxes, or legos.  The artist also uses paint and ink to explore the theme.  Creed’s new commission within the gallery transforms the central staircase into a synthesizer and is one of the conceptual highlights of the exhibition.  Ascending and descending the staircase causes notes on a scale to sound – making visitors’ movements through the gallery take on heightened participatory purpose as they both enact and complete the work

The Scotsman Steps Commission. Artist's impression of EAF commission for the Scotsman Steps, curated by the Fruitmarket Gallery and supported by the Scottish Government's Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund. Photo: Courtesy the Artist.

Down Over Up aptly references Creed’s permanent public work commission to refurbish Edinburgh’s Scotsman Steps.  The Steps, which take their name from the newspaper whose headquarters they were built to serve in 1904, are located by the Fruitmarket Gallery, connecting East Market Street and North Bridge in Edinburgh’s uniquely elevated Old Town.  The city seeks to give the Steps new life through the commission, as they have fallen out of favor due to disrepair and association with crime.  While the work has not been completed, Creed plans to resurface each step with contrasting marbles sourced from around the world.  The materials will not only infuse the Scotsman Steps with visual interest and a sense of permanence, but will also inject it with global character.

Martin Creed: Down Over Up will be on view at the Fruitmarket Gallery through 31 October 2010.

Richard Wright: The Stairwell Project

Richard Wright, The Stairwells Project, An EAF Commission in the Dean Gallery, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Supported by the Scottish Government's Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund. Photo: Angela Catlin.

2009 Turner Prize winner Richard Wright presents Stairwell Project, a new permanent work at the Dean Gallery.  The Dean Gallery, a part of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art since the 1990s, was designed by Thomas Hamilton as the Dean Orphan Hospital in 1831.  The Gallery’s staircases are among the building’s most prominent features and provide an expansive, architecturally unique background for Wright’s work.  Known for his ephemeral, wall-based painting, Wright brings this character to the Dean Gallery’s western staircase – placing the tradition of stairwell painting within the modern art gallery and presenting it in a new way.

Wright hand-painted The Stairwell Project in a physically and mentally demanding process that took four weeks to complete.  Inspired by the honeysuckle design of the original ceiling moldings in the stairwell, Wright designed an organic, abstracted flower shape.  He chose to paint solely in black – a color which points to the building’s melancholic history.  The flower motif is repeated in varying ways several thousand times throughout the stairwell.  The organic nature of the shape notably has the effect of introducing curved lines to a space that is solidly geometric.  Yet, the shape’s simplicity and its neutral color do not overpower.  Instead, the carefully varied size, orientation and placement of each flower subtly emphasizes the stairwell’s architecture and the abundance of light let in by the large windows.

Hito Steyerl:  In Free Fall

Hito Steyerl, still from In Free Fall. Photo: Courtesy the Artist.

The Collective Gallery presents In Free Fall, featuring new and recent work by artist and theorist Hito Steyerl.  Berlin-based Steyerl works in visual essay or film essay similar to artists such as Ursula Biemann.  This nascent documentary-influenced approach features a montage of appropriated and new footage, interviews and voice-over narrative.  Unlike traditional media, film essays facilitate the analysis of global complexities.  Through the shared language of images and information, Steyerl closely examines the economic networks which define our existence.

In Free Fall – Steyerl’s first solo exhibition in Scotland – presents Journal No. 1 in addition to three related works that include After the Crash, Before the Crash and Crash (a new commission).   The Crash works address the global economic downturn by focusing on an airplane junkyard located in the visually bare California desert - revealing cycles of capitalism as seen through the evolution of commodity.  The airplane, which facilitates global mobility, is a recognizable symbol of globalization and reveals a larger story.  As the Collective asserts, these works present ‘an anatomy of crashes both fictional and real’, revealing ‘unexpected connections between economy, violence and spectacle’.

In Free Fall concludes at the Collective Gallery on 19 September.

Julie Roberts: Child

Julie Roberts, Staying Together (2010), oil on linen. Collection of Mr. Pontus Bonnier, Sweden. Courtesy of Andrehn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm.

University of Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery presents Julie Roberts: Child – featuring new work by the artist.  Julie Roberts, a painter based in England, is concerned with the means through which ‘our social experience is given shape’.  In the past, Roberts has often chosen to paint the overtly sinister, drawing her to crime scenes and medical instruments.  Child – a thematic departure – focuses on gender roles, domestic environments, familial portraiture, school rooms and domestic labor situated in mid-twentieth century Britain.  As with past work, her new subject matter is underpinned by extensive research.  This allows Roberts to accurately present an entirely different, decidedly austere approach to childhood in a time period complicated by a great displacement of children into orphanages and foster homes.

While Roberts focuses on historic approaches to childhood and the family network, there is no sentimentality involved.  In works such as Staying Together or Meat and Two Veg, Roberts makes once familiar family scenes and portraiture both strange and unrecognizable.  Carefully constructed, unnatural stiffness is tempered by realism.  At the same time, historic subject matter is stylized and set against characteristic patterned backgrounds and wallpaper.  Roberts’ both stylized and informed approach to her subject matter combine to highlight ways in which society has changed over time.

Julie Roberts: Child remains at the Talbot Rice Gallery through 25 September.

life.turns.

life.turns. Uploaded submission.

life.turns. a film made by thousands of people, one frame at a time, is part of the 2010 Edinburgh Art Festival.  Blipfoto, an online photo journal and social networking community, was commissioned by New Media Scotland‘s Alt-w Fund to create an animated film using thousands of photos uploaded by participants. People were invited to submit photographs posed in any of 8 specified stances that represent the progressive movements of walking.  Blipfoto then presented these still images in a rapid succession giving the illusion of thousands of people walking – working together to complete one another’s gait.  The resulting animated film revives the Victorian zoetrope in a new way for the digital world and presents a celebration of everyday life in all its diversity.

life.turns. was completed and presented at Inspace in Edinburgh on 26 August.  The film can be viewed online at Blipfoto.

Dasha Shishkin, "S INT N HO," installation view, 2012. Courtesy Suanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Rain in Los Angeles is apparently bimodal — there are dry years followed by a few wet ones — which means the average precipitation is reached by factoring the wet and dry years together. We must be in a wetter year now, because there have been multiple rainy days just this week. Dasha Shishkin, who is not from Los Angeles (she hails from Moscow and lives in New York), makes rainy day drawings, drawings that feel like they are insular, cozy and social by necessity.  The figures are thrown together in tight quarters and going “outside” of the picture plane seems undesirable to them. They are thus prime subjects for staring at.

Shishkin has said she does not paint, per se, because she is not a participant. “I am thinking of Picasso’s quote about painting as an act of active participation and drawing as an act of voyeurism,” she told Modern Painters in 2010. “I like being a voyeur for now.” The world she gazes into, or creates for us to gaze into, in her new show at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is an eccentric fantasy inhabited exclusively by women, who occasionally appear in the nude for no apparent reason and have eyes in strange places, like on their abdomens or their behinds. Some have long Pinocchio noses.

Dasha Shishkin, ""I don't care if I can't understand you, but you can't sit in the gutter all day," 2012. Courtesy Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Two of her drawings at Vielmetter Projects strike me most, and both of these turn vulnerability into a kind of strength. One is called “What does it matter to her ever creating womb if today matter is flesh and tomorrow worms.” (“Titles are like a cherry on a cake,” said Shishkin in that same Modern Painters interview. “The cherry does not make a cake a cherry cake, but it is still there to attract or distract an eye.”) It shows ladies in black dresses at a party in a restaurant with a checkered floor. Two sit in chairs in the foreground, gazing in at the rest. They seem perfectly content in their lonesomeness and, as you follow their gaze, you see a lot of the other women aren’t actually interacting with anyone else either. It’s a party full of self-sufficient, non-participant partiers.

Eve Babitz and Marcel Duchamp play chess at Pasadena Museum of Art, 1963.

The second drawing I like is more relaxed. It’s called “I don’t care if I can’t understand you, but you can’t sit in the gutter all day,” and shows three women on crimson bedding, two of them bald, with eyes on their breasts and nipples that look like noses. The middle woman has a goofy infectious grin, and you wonder if she is on some sort of drug. She reminds me of an essay by Eve Babitz, the writer who knew L.A.  inside out and often longed for rain.

The essay, called “Rain,” comes from the book Slow Days, Fast Company, and has a passage on Quaaludes, which seems to describe Shiskin’s grinning woman perfectly: “When you get very languid and sexual and smile like Cleopatra being fanned as she floats down the Nile, other people catch the mood and find themselves straying from the straight and narrow too.” Rain has a similar effect as the drug, according to Babitz; rain in L.A. gives you an excuse to “catch a mood” and get comfortable. “[Rain is] freedom from smog and unbroken dreary hateful sameness,” writes Babitz. “It’s freedom to be cozy. Cozy! You can be cozy and not even have to go to San Francisco.”

The following article was originally published by Michelle Scultz on February 3, 2011:

What would you do if you were one of the most iconic artists in the world, having forged a name for yourself with unmistakably recognizable work? What do you do to move forward? You can reject all that has made you famous, continue to churn out the tried and true, take a page from Duchamp’s book and take up chess or try and build upon your former practice to create something relevant and new…

In her latest solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers in London, Cindy Sherman seems to be attempting the latter.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2010. Installation view, Sprüth Magers London, January 2011. Photograph: Stephen White. Image courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London.

While Sherman is still photographing herself in a range of various guises, she has decidedly broken free of the frames that constrict her former work and has blown up photographs of an eclectic cast of characters to create a larger than life sized tableaux that extends throughout the two spaces of the gallery.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2010. Installation view, Sprüth Magers London, January 2011. Photograph: Stephen White. Image courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London.

The murals plaster the rooms like wallpaper, an effect furthered by the illustrative black and white backdrop, reminiscent of a Victorian woodlands as interpreted through home decor. And inhabiting the space is a strange and unnerving troupe that are very difficult to define…

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2010. Pigment print on Phototex adhesive fabric. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Sprüth Magers Berlin London.

Sherman’s work often depicts recognizable stereotypes: the stars of her famous ‘Untitled Film Stills,’ the Renaissance figures and clowns that followed and most recently in her 2008 series, the aging American socialite. However, we have also witnessed disconcerting and gruesome images, particularly in the Fairy Tales and Disasters series of the 1980s.

The figures we see at Sprüth Magers are neither familiar nor horrific; they are simply bizarre. Banished to a colorless forest, these poorly-dressed characters from folklore, fairytales and literature, appear as a cast of rejects. Too strange to be of use. Or perhaps, not strange enough.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2010. Pigment print on Phototex adhesive fabric. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Sprüth Magers Berlin London.

On one wall there is the woman in a peasant-like floral dress, covered in a sheer boudoir wrap with a visible broken foot. An amalgamation of styles that makes you unable to place her in any particular time and place. Next to her stands a figure in an slumpy naked suit, feet in wool socks and brandishing a plastic sword. In the next room a knight in a tunic too big, paired with metallic zebra print trousers and a circus juggler in a dated costume and decidedly twenty-first century sneakers.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2010. Pigment print on Phototex adhesive fabric. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Sprüth Magers Berlin London.

The figures do not sit in their setting, but are rather float on top of it, as if cut and pasted into this strange place. Perhaps it is this quality, this sense of flatness and dislocation, that recalls a favorite Sherman work, the 1975 animation Doll Clothes. However instead of a miniature Cindy we have giant figures, far too big for the space, that stare directly out over us, expressionless.

The heavy makeup that characterizes Sherman’s transformation of herself is gone – replaced instead with subtle digital manipulations used to contort her face. Topical alterations are replaced with structural ones – in the way that plastic surgery has become the preferred method over cosmetics to achieving the desired ‘natural‘ look.

Sherman’s work is undeniably iconic. As one of the most successful artists of the past decades there is an immense amount of pressure to continually produce something new. As these figures break out of their frames inhabiting the entire space and spilling out into the street through the Sprüth Magers window, Sherman attempts to break down her own formula – or at least bend it ever so slightly. For not abiding by the tried and true, Cindy – I applaud you, even if it is not my favorite work – I think I prefer vomit and vacuousness over vagueness.

Bean Gilsdorf published this interview with Sandra Phillips, Senior Curator of Photography at SF MoMA on December 2, 2010:

With a broad mix of photographs from both unknown shutterbugs and internationally recognized artists, Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870 at SFMOMA examines the images of a culture existing in an uneasy relationship to the camera. The exhibition probes our social connection to surveillance, pornography, and physical and emotional violence. Last week, Daily Serving’s Bean Gilsdorf sat down with Senior Curator of Photography Sandra Phillips, who talked about her ideas for the exhibition and her connection to some of the photographs.*

Nan Goldin, Nan and Brian in bed, New York City, 1983; detail from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency; 1979-1996; nine-carousel projection with approximately 700 slides, soundtrack, and titles; dimensions variable; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; © Nan Goldin; image: courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

Bean Gilsdorf: Exposed was ten years in the making. How and why did it begin?

Sandra Phillips: I did a show called Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence about twelve years ago because I was very interested in the fact that we ascribe a certain amount of authority to photographs as impartial truth-telling documents. But they can be extremely ambiguous. And it occurred to me that there was another aspect that was about making pictures without people knowing that they were being photographed. There are, in fact, some spy pictures in this show. So that’s how I started.

BG: Did your organization of this show start with any particular pieces? Or was it just a general concept?

SP: It started as an idea, and the beginning of it was looking at the work of Edgar Degas, believe it or not! He was very interested in photography and he made a lot of photographs. He made pictures of his models that he arranged, but they were presented as though they were spied on. I thought that was completely fascinating—why would someone as important as he be interested in the use of photography as a spying medium? It had to do with his own personal aesthetic, but once you get started in that, then you realize how amazingly broad this topic is.

Garry Winogrand, New York, 1969; gelatin silver print; 11 x 14 in. (27.94 x 35.56 cm); Collection SFMOMA, fractional and promised gift of Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein; © Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

SP: I also looked at the work of Helen Levitt, and she was interested in making pictures of people who didn’t realize that they were being photographed. So all of a sudden, this idea expanded: how do you explain street photography without actually dealing with the surveillance aspect of it? And then it became a very big subject: it wasn’t only street photography, it’s the ways we look at sex, the ways we understand important people, and then this weird territory where people like celebrities are being aggressively looked at. What does that mean to us as a culture? Where does this come from? Examining the interest that we have in violence is a necessary part of modern life. And the contemporary photographs are all about surveillance, obviously.

BG: Do you think there’s any correspondence between the gesture of taking a photograph of someone who is not looking, and staging a photograph to appear as though someone is not looking?

SP: …Oh, yeah…

BG: I’m thinking of all the Facebook photos—those self-portraits—where people specifically look away from the camera as though they had been caught unawares. What do you think is behind that?

SP: It’s an affect, that we want to be photographed as though it’s real, but it’s actually not real. I think this is the big issue now in photography, whether it’s staged or isn’t staged. It comes back to the idea of photography being a medium of truth telling. It’s a very interesting medium; it seems absolutely clear and yet is so mysterious.

BG: I find it interesting that this exhibition came from England, where surveillance culture is just outrageous. Do you know what the reaction was, over there?

SP: It was tremendously interesting to the English for that very reason. The Tate is a much more public institution than almost any other institution in the world, it has millions of visitors a year. And I can’t remember how many millions of people came to see the show, but it was huge, there was a lot of discussion about it. There was another show about surveillance [Rhetorics of Surveillance: from Bentham to Big Brother at ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe] about ten years ago in Germany and it was very theoretical. But in England they have the whole craze, really, for outfitting public spaces with surveillance cameras. There was a child in Scotland who was abducted and killed by two older kids, and that’s what started it all. It was before the al Qaida bombings, it was before all of that. It wasn’t political; the idea was purely to save children’s lives, that’s where it started.

Tazio Secchiaroli, Anita Ekberg and Husband Anthony Steel, Vecchia Roma, 1958; gelatin silver print; 11 11/16 x 14 5/8 in. (29.69 x 37.15 cm); Collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase; © Tazio Secchiaroli / David Secchiaroli.

BG: Which is different from what’s happening right now. On one hand we want to have our personal privacy—when we dictate it!—but on the other hand we want to look as though we’ve been caught on camera in some “real” moment. How do you tease those apart? It’s so complicated, this relationship that we have to an image of ourselves.

SP: Yes, it’s extremely strange.

BG: Are there any pieces in the exhibition that embody what you want people to take away from this?

SP: The Degas picture. And, obviously people like Weegee play an enormous role here. And there are certainly pictures that mean a lot to me. The early photograph by Paul Strand of the man who’s sitting on the sidewalk, a poor man, on the street in New York. He’s revealing his inner dislocation or inner anxiety…it’s a picture of someone’s raw psychological anxiety. It’s a very moving picture, done by a guy who was trying to learn about Cubism and elevate photography to a formalist practice. And, at the same time he’s making these pictures of very poor people on the streets without their knowledge of it. That, I would say, is a touchstone.

* * *

*Exposed was conceived by Sandra Phillips and co-curated with Tate curator of photography Simon Baker.

If You Weren’t So Gorgeous was originally posted by Catherine Wagley on February 17, 2012:

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Whitney Houston, center, with her mother, Cissy Houston; father, John Houston, second from right; brother, Michael Houston, left; and half-brother, Gary Garland in Newark. Circa 1979.

“She could have been signed on the basis of her pedigree alone,” said columnist Stephen Metcalf, talking about Whitney Houston on Slate’s culture podcast Tuesday, four days after the singer’s death. “Her godmother was Aretha Franklin. Her mother was an accomplished gospel singer. Her cousins were Deedee and Dionne Warwick. She could have been signed based on her looks alone”–she’d modeled and appeared on the cover of Seventeen before she’d sold records–“and she could have been signed on the basis of her voice alone.” Metcalf concluded, “To have any one of those things could make you an enormous star. The fact that she had all three. . .”

“Just in technical terms, I don’t think I’ve heard a better instrument in my lifetime, even from singers I prefer, who are better. . . in terms of expressiveness or just the vibe,” added Slate music critic Jody Rosen. Her performance at the 1991 Super Bowl, just after the Gulf War, showed that instrument’s full force; it also again showed Houston had it all. Said Rosen,

You can really really hear the extraordinary range and nuance in her voice. She’s just technically out of this world, and, also, it tells you something about the stature of Whitney Houston: here was this black women who was quote-unquote America’s sweetheart–she was called that many times–and at this moment of National crisis or of fervent jingoism, she was called upon to play the Kate Smith or Bing Crosby role . . . as F-16s roared overhead.

The “whole package”– sweetheart, stunner, virtuoso–is something you can only be if your body, your image, is put out into the world along with your talent and brain. So it’s pop stars who deal with the pressure to be/have everything far more often than other artists.

Hannah Wilke, "S.O.S. Starification Object Series," 1974-82. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art.

In the visual arts, in fact, being/having the whole package is sometimes suspect. When, in the 1970s, Hannah Wilke made small vulvar, fleshy forms out of latex, ceramics or bubble gum, attached these to her body,  and posed topless for pin-up posters, critics accused her of flaunting her beauty. Amelia Jones, in her essay “Everybody dies. . . even the gorgeous,” quotes Wilke: “People give me this bullshit of, ‘What would you have done if you weren’t so gorgeous?’ What difference does it make?. . . Gorgeous people die as do the stereotypical ‘ugly.’” Looks didn’t give her an advantage, she implied.

But Wilke’s looks and attitude were special. Her dark-haired, svelte form; her flawless skin speckled by those unsettling orifices and folds of flesh; and how she looked at the camera in that disaffected, disinterested way Linda Evangelista would later adopt — all this emblazoned itself into your memory in a way the vulvar sculptures on their own would not have. She became the perfect conduit for her art and, attached to her physical, visible self, her sculptures showed even a conventionally “gorgeous” body to be cavernous and complicated.

Narcissister, Still from "Every Woman," 2010.

“I had started developing performance work where I used the orifices of my body, and for me it was about achieving my own grander virtuosity,” said the artist Narcissister, whose short film Every Woman (2010) screened in L.A. on Valentines day, as part of Dirty Looks: Long Distance Love Affairs at the Hammer Museum. At the start of Every Woman, Narcisster, whose entree into performance was as a dancer in the Alvin Ailey company, appears nude except for the  plastic barbie doll mask she always wears and her red, long-fingered monster gloves. Chaka Khan’s singing “I’m every woman, it’s all in me/Anything you want done, baby/I’ll do it naturally” as Narcissister’s performing a reverse strip tease. She’s pulling her clothing out of first her mouth, then her vagina, then her hair, until she’s dressed in tube top, earrings, tight striped skirt, panty hose and heels, with purse and sunglasses to complete the picture. Chaka Khan’s refrain (“I’m every woman, I’m every woman,” again and again) plays on as Narcissister runs her gloved hands up and down her flashily, unnaturally, clothed body until the curtain closes and the video ends.

There is something virtuosic about her; she’s striking, composed, clearly a skilled performer.  But she’s stuck inside the “whole package.” And if she weren’t so gorgeous, it wouldn’t be so obvious that having it all doesn’t ultimately help.

The following article was originally published by Seth Curcio on August 4, 2010: 

During an admittingly rushed Friday evening in 2008, I attended the Whitney Museum during a pay-what-you-wish night. It was during the Biennial and every floor of the museum was packed with an abundance of people and art. As I made it through each floor, digesting as much art as possible in 3 hours, one artist and artwork stayed on my mind: Mika Rottenberg’s video installation, Cheese. Since that evening, I have followed her beautifully complex projects, faithfully reading about her recent exhibitions at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery and Mary Boone Gallery. So it was no surprise that when I first heard that her new video, Squeeze, was to debut at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, I made it a point to stop by immediately and see what the artist has been up to over the past two years.

Mika Rottenberg, Squeeze (still), 2010; Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery/Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery; photo: Henry Prince

In this new video, Rottenberg continues her investigation into social and labor-based inequalities through a fragmented narrative. The grotesquely seductive video equally binds and separates the concept of labor with gender, class, and race, seamlessly merging the real with the hyper-fictional. Interlocking environments slide in and out of place. Exaggerated sounds of cutting, slicing and crunching divide and define the separate worlds, and rich, fleshy color pull them all back together. Similar to her past work, Squeeze maintains an all woman cast of characters played by non-actors, where the physical characteristics of Rottenberg’s women parallel their occupation within the awkwardly constructed environment. Women working in a rubber plant in India, mining the trees for raw substance, interact with an all female work force at a lettuce farm in Arizona. These two real worlds collide with the fictional factory constructed in the artist’s studio, serving as the main link between all of the spaces in constant flux. Walls move, floors drop, and characters blindly connect to the factory to create a new hybrid consumer product turned art-object, which is composed of blush that is squeezed from the skin of a woman in the factory, rubber, and decomposing lettuce.

Through a beautifully non-linear story, Rottenberg’s use of the absurd confronts the seriousness of her content, mesmerizing the viewer by slowly releasing a delicate flow of information through color, sound and rhythm. Each element quietly underscores the disconnect between the consumer and the production process innate to mass commerce. What results is a world which mirrors her role as a woman creating an art object, and our daily lives of utilizing a variety of products, many of which are produced through the work of people who are socially, politically, and racially removed from the consumer. Yet, while the work is far from generous, the artist subtly reminds us that we can never really separate ourselves from the lives of others no matter how distant or disconnected we would like for them to be.

If you can’t make it, check out the article and video posted by Catherine Wagley on July 17, 2008:

The duo has had solo shows at major museums before, including the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Shanghai Art Museum, and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and they were shortlisted for the first Turner Prize in 1984. But, despite their already glowing past career, this current exhibition, organized by the Tate Modern, shows how relevant their work still is to contemporary art. Their bold graphics and iconic culture references, mixed with intimate personal nuances, dynamically interact with the art-technology-mainstream-personal-politic discussions that define the current climate.

Perhaps their relevance continues simply because their work is driven by a respect for contemporary culture. “We’re great believers in the force of culture,” Gilbert says in the above clip. “There is a gap inside of everyone which can only be filled by reading, listening to music, writing poetry, making art, looking at art. We are not just bones and flesh and skin; we are cultured people.”

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.

Brian Gillis, “On Failure and A Prospect,” 2012. Inflatables, MDF, text, vinyl and found objects. Dimensions variable. To the left of the installation, on the wall, is Susan Seubert, “The Digital Divide,” 2012. Installation of QR codes.

The Northwest may be absent from the Whitney Biennial (as usual), but the region reconciles the blind spot with self-awareness. On display at the Tacoma Art Museum until May is the 10th Northwest Biennial, a survey that includes 11 Portland artists (nearly half of the show’s line-up). Even more massive is Portland2012, a sizable though scattered exhibition of 24 of the city’s artists. To give it the benefit of the doubt, let’s just say Portland2012 reflects the city’s ever-changing cultural landscape.

Daniel Duford, 2012. Image courtesy of Disjecta.

The work is spread across five venues and across three months, in part out of necessity (no venue is large enough), but also out of intention (with the hope that the work might reach a more varied audience). Prudence Roberts—a former curator at the Portland Art Museum—is this year’s guest curator, and her curatorial statement would seem to apply to any contemporary artist, e.g. “these artists evince an interest in aesthetics and in making sense of an increasingly incomprehensible world.”

Ben Rosenberg, “This Must Be the Place,” 2012. Foam core, cardboard, corrugated plastic, assorted papers, acrylics, inks and mixed media. 48x192x36 in. Image courtesy of Megan Radocha.

In place of thematics, the artists in the show stand as tokens for Portland’s perceived strengths: social practice, a deep-rooted design tradition, and a devotion to craftsmanship. Some work leaves a stronger impression than others. At the Art Gym, illustrator/fine artist Ben Rosenberg has made a model of what resembles a Portland neighborhood using scraps of cardboard, foam core, and other bits of paper waste. Northwest native Cynthia Lahti uses cast-offs in a similar way, though with more care and consideration, creating paper sculptures from the pages of vintage ‘50s magazines, crumpled into abstracted, elfin shapes. Their pedestals are ceramic and pearly white; like an Agnes Martin painting, they seem flawless, until you look closely, and see the slight bumps in the attempt at perfect geometry. By contrast, to the immediate right of Lahti is a brutish yet lavish and expensive-seeming sight: a piece from the collective Future Death Toll featuring a construction-colored orange target on the wall and a human cast from beeswax suspended above the floor, like ‘80s excess risen from the dead.

Cynthia Lahti, “Elf Trash,” part of Trash Paper Series, 2011. Paper, ceramic. 3x9 in. Image courtesy of Cynthia Lahti.

Up north, at Disjecta, the exhibition has more coherence. Mack McFarland’s video piece “A Composition for Your Peripheral Vision” consists of two monitors, positioned to the left and right of a viewer’s head when seated in a cubicle. Staring straight ahead at a black wall, geometric objects whiz by your periphery, with an animation inspired by the work of early 20^th century ethnographer Felix von Luscahn, and addresses questions of perception and the art of looking. In the same space, Arnold Kemp presents photographs-cum-drawings in a series called “WHO’S AFRAID OF SOMETHING REAL?” Minimalist, large-scale prints of wrinkled foil, there are three holes cut from the foil, making the loose suggestion of two eyes and a mouth. The prints’ formal relationship to an earlier work of Kemp’s exploring the formalism of the Ku Klux Klan hood adds gravitas to the already stunning images. Other works informed by conceptual and postmodern practices are the photos of Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen, as well as an overwhelmingly enormous sculpture/installation by Brian Gillis.

Future Death Toll, “BEEGAS,” 2012. Beeswax, nylon, video screens, vinyl and paper, dimensions variable.

One venue, the White Box, has yet to open as part of Portland2012. Still, to truly reflect the city’s scene, a few more inclusions would be necessary: namely more comic artists, and a nod to contemporary dance (tEEth, Linda Austin, or even NWDP would’ve been great additions). The range of work is already huge, however, and difficult enough to digest as a whole.

Akihiko Myoshi. “Artist’s Statement,” 2012. PDF. Image courtesy of http://people.reed.edu/~miyos/art.html

Despite being missing from a major survey like the Whitney Biennial, national awareness of Portland has picked up in recent years; Fox News ran a post March 19 titled “Ten Reasons to Fly to Portland, Oregon Right Now.” The New York Times’s love affair with Portland is extensive (look here, here, and here); last fall the Times ran a piece labeling Portland as the “capitol of West Coast urban cool.” This national coverage has surfaced primarily within the last few years, as the city has been deemed a hotspot for youths. Portland has changed unspeakably, largely due to a rapid influx in young creatives, and Portland2012 only serves as proof that the city’s pulse is a hard one to take.

The following article was originally posted by Allison Gibson on May 5, 2009:

Kehinde Wiley is back in his hometown of Los Angeles, and the city is welcoming him with open arms. As an artist whose name evokes recognition, and even conversation, beyond the periphery of the contemporary art world, the Brooklyn based artist draws a crowd of eager devotees (the author not excluded) to any venue at which his work is being exhibited or discussed. With a recent lecture at the Getty Museum, and a new exhibition on view at Roberts & Tilton, Wiley is introducing the public to Brazil, the latest series within his larger body of work, The World Stage. Continue reading below for a full review of Brazil by DailyServing’s Allison Gibson.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

With The World Stage, Wiley moves away from using models sourced from the streets of Brooklyn and Los Angeles to pose for his majestic paintings, which emulate the portraiture of Western European noblemen and kings. Instead, he has embarked on a select world tour in this body of work, wherein he chooses models native to the country that he is working in, expanding his ideas beyond the basis of traditional European portraiture to create a more global dialog. He now refers to the artistic and historical traditions specific to those cultures which continue to be marginalized or ignored by the art world. Bringing these developing countries into the forefront of the discussion, Wiley begins a dialog about identity and power that isn’t dominated for once by the ideas of the West.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

The previous installments of the World Stage were China and Africa, Lagos-Dakar. For the Brazil series, Wiley continued his pattern of working in which he sought out a very specific type of model to be photographed. He was very clear that he was looking for young men from their teens to early thirties, who come from poor neighborhoods and who carry certain physical traits similar to the art works he is attempting to emulate. Wiley even mentioned in his lecture at the Getty that when word began to leak about what type of models he was looking for on the streets of Rio, hoards of young men showed up doing their best impressions of what they heard he was interested in.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

The larger than life canvases in ornate wooden frames on display at Roberts & Tilton introduce confident, yet accessible young men posed amidst fluorescent backdrops of explosive pattern. The young men from the “favelas” of the so-called Marvelous City, in their contemporary Brazilian style, appear at once completely unrelated to their staged circumstances — the old-world postures, the props that they hold, and the floral backdrops that intertwine with their bodies — and at the same time seem to embrace the roles that their director has asked them to undertake.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

In Rio de Janeiro, Wiley’s inspirations did not rest in old master paintings hanging on the walls of powerful institutions, but allowed the work to be impacted by the iconic nationalistic sculptures found around the city, which he might argue are the cultural equivalent to the David or Velasquez paintings referenced in his earlier work. The earnest looks in the painted mens’ eyes seem to be pleading with us to accept them and the orchestrated scenes into which they are set. The sheer size of the paintings and the nearly unmatched skill in rendering human elements, down to the soft skin and muscular arms, command the viewer to linger in front of the colossal works much longer than the pieces might merit if executed in a smaller scale. The backgrounds, which are inspired by ethnic tapestries discovered by the artist, hypnotize the viewer as their eyes attempt to make sense of it all.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

In discussing his oeuvre, Wiley admits to having a great affection for, interest in, and knowledge of the scope of Western painting from which he draws inspiration for his modern day recreations. So it has become clear to the viewer over the past few years that his attitude isn’t necessarily one of criticism of these works which have undoubtedly dominated the canon of art history for centuries. Rather, by bringing the element of the young, modern black man into the picture, he is creating a conversation about power, which is much more interesting and effective than satire in this dialog. However, since his completion of the MFA at Yale and his residency at the Studio Museum Harlem more than half a decade ago, Wiley has been, essentially, exhibiting the same work — albeit cleverly and progressively investigating the broader themes of art history, power, war or the fallen with each new series. While most of his audience remains basically enraptured by the work — because of its size, because of its photo realist qualities, because of its social implications, because of the way it relates to modernity overtly or through undertones, or because of its bright colors and patterns — one wonders if it is still challenging us in the way it had when the first series was shown.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

The World Stage is moving beyond the comfort zone of the Western context of power, and into a world still largely unexplored by American artists, and through this, Wiley has added another dimension to the discourse. The conversation now reaches beyond the obvious juxtapositions of social prestige and into ideas about the American fetishization of the exotic and especially the less-than, as he discussed at his lecture at the Getty. It’s one thing to paint images of “the other”, and it’s another to paint scenes that refer to art history, but when the two are combined, the viewer is forced to contemplate each piece on several levels. It begins to be more difficult to deduce from each painting the same one-liner about contemporary culture versus historical ideals of power and pomp. Introducing the Brazilian men and the many contexts from which they come, into the pieces, American viewers now find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of being faced with something we may not fully understand, and that means the work is asking us to spend more time with it, thinking, talking, and even struggling with our own preconceived notions.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

The World Stage: Brazilis on view at Roberts & Tilton through May 30, 2009 and is accompanied by a 64-page hardcover book of the exhibition.

Kehinde Wiley is based in Brooklyn, New York. He received his MFA from the Yale University School of Art and his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. His work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, The Columbus Museum of Art, The Denver Art Museum, The UCLA Hammer Museum and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. He has shown in solo exhibitions internationally, including at Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA