The following interview was originally posted by Michelle Schultz on November 3, 2011:

The work of Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg is defined by duality. A partnership between artist and musician, their stop-motion animation videos and haunting audio tracks precariously balance horror and humour, immersing child-like puppets in a world where perversion, violence, aggression, and power dominate. In their latest exhibition in London, the artists explore the medium of glass and its materiality – fragility becomes threatening and desires are laid bare, exposing the traits that both define us and may lead to our demise. On the occasion of A World of Glass at Camden Arts Centre, Nathalie Djurberg, Hans Berg, and Michelle Schultz sit down to discuss puppets and process – and the relationship between art and music.

Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg, A World of Glass, film still, 2011. Courtesy of the artists, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Galleria Gio Marconi, Milan.

Michelle Schultz: Most of the materials you use – clay, fabrics, even the music – have a strong sense of malleability and fluidity to them, but in A World of Glass, the focus is on a very unyielding material that is both fragile and, I find to be, quite threatening – could you speak a bit about the significance of the glass for you?

Nathalie Djurberg: What this entire project is about is fragility – and transparency – and while it can be perceived as threatening in the way that it stands on the table, for me, it is almost like a shipwreck that has been washed up on a beach and reassembled again. It is almost apocalyptic. That is also how I made them, taking things that I could find – glasses, plates, and bowls – assembled them, worked on them with clay, and then had them moulded and casted.

Hans Berg: There were all these ugly parts – some things were just a pile of clay, made with the hands, and then you stuck glass on it, but then, through casting, it is turned into this crystal clear, fragile figure. I think that’s where you will find a connection between the frightening and hard stuff, and how fragile everything looks – when it is transformed.

I think that glass has so many different layers – it is about, like the title suggests, how the world is really fragile, but then the films are also about the fragility of the mind, or the transparency of the mind. At the same time that it is fragile, the large amount of glass almost makes it baroque as well.

Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg, A World of Glass, installation view, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Camden Arts Centre. Photograph by Andy Peake.

MS: Much more of your recent work is immersive installations, as opposed to singular videos that stand on their own – was this a purposeful decision that was made?

ND: Yes, I had the idea about three years ago, about the same time as I started working on the piece we showed in Venice at the Biennale, the Experiment (2009). However since it has taken such a long time to realise it, the outcome is very different from the original idea. But we’re planning on making something small and singular after this.

MS: An animation?

ND: Well you have to go where the ideas take you – if I get really excited, and have an urge to see it, it means that I have to make it. What we are going to work on after this is something different – I am making visuals for Hans’ music, which is a mix of club music and the music he makes for my animations. I am excited about that, since it can be shown in a context where there is not just people who are used to looking at art, but also people who don’t usually look at art.

MS: It will be very interesting to see how these videos differ, as right now the visuals comes first and the audio is composed afterwards – but now it will be the music that initiates the work.

ND: It will be possible to work in a different way as well – in a more abstract way, and to really explore that.

HB: I always thought that art and music were really more connected, but they are not. And this is a very unusual occasion I think – that we have a show with Haroon Mirza at the same time at Camden Art Centre, who also works in music that is more towards the pop side, like mine. Usually, no one in the music world knows anything about art, and no one in the art world knows anything about music, so it is nice to try and bridge that gap.

Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg, A World of Glass, film still, 2011. Courtesy of the artists, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Galleria Gio Marconi, Milan.

Also, the music that I do for the installations and the films, it’s not difficult, it’s not sound art, and I think that’s pretty unusual as well. The sound or music for video art, is often very strange, people make it extra strange, so it’s extra ‘arty’, and I don’t really do that so much.

MS: For this exhibition, did you find it difficult to make one piece of music that fit with all four videos simultaneously?

HB: In the beginning, yes. At first I thought I would make four different tracks – one for each film – that would fit together. But then I started, and I was thinking, and I locked myself in the closet. We both work at home – Nathalie has one and a half rooms for her studio, and I have a corner in the second room. So I locked myself in the closet, with glasses, vases and water, and recorded all the samples for the music.

The music turned out so minimalistic, and when I looked at all four films, it turned out that it fit, so I choose to use it for all four – because, in the end, four different soundtracks would go against the whole idea for the whole installation, which is very minimal itself.

ND: What the music also does is bring the concept of the glass out everywhere. You can stand in the corner and still hear the glass clinging.

MS: It really does serve to immerse you in glass.

Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg, A World of Glass, film still, 2011. Courtesy of the artists, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Galleria Gio Marconi, Milan.

MS: Now, in your videos, often the distinctions between humans and animals are blurred – I have seen a man turn into a dog, a woman takes a tiger as a lover and a bear become the captor of a child. And in these new videos, the divisions between humans and animals are quite inconsequential as well.

ND: I think we are more similar than we like to think, at least at some level. But using animals is mainly a way to express something – sometimes it is easier to work with a metaphor than to work with an actual person – and sometimes that’s stronger. If you use a puppet that is a human being, there is so much baggage that comes with how it looks and the clothing.

MS: But the animals always have their own traits that accompany them as well.

HB: Yes, if you use a wolf, you get a certain set of ideas coming with that animal.

ND: But it is almost the same as the way that you use clothes on a puppet – if you choose not to clothe a puppet but you use it naked, then you can’t determine what part of society it comes from, or even the country. But with every layer of clothing you put on, you determine how it is seen. So using no clothing on a puppet makes it more open to interpretation. With animals it becomes more of the idea of the trait than the actual trait – if you use an animal, it is more of a symbol.

MS: With your videos, I have always found myself highly attracted to them and disturbed at the same time – and I think what is really engaging, and intriguing, about your work, is that there is a very precarious balance between horror and humour – one never dominates over the other, at least for long.

ND: [laughs] It’s a balance.

It’s also the medium of animation that really invites you to ridicule something. Sometimes that can be scary when I am in the studio – I have to forget that there will be an audience, otherwise I might be too shy to do something that I really want to do. And sometimes I wonder if I am allowed to turn this into humour? But it is almost impossible not to, it is really just there. And I think it is comical – you have to look at things with comical eyes. It’s about making it bearable.

And it’s not always that intentional – it’s where the puppets take you as well. I work with these heavy subjects, but then it is still these tiny little figures, which become caricature as you enhance some things, and disenhance other things. Just in doing that it becomes much more comical.

The good thing that animation can do is it can make you stay – even when you otherwise would have walked away. And it might approach you from a different angle as well.

Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg, A World of Glass, film still, 2011. Courtesy of the artists, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Galleria Gio Marconi, Milan.

MS: When you are making your films and you are looking at the characters, do you create entire lives for them? I know when I watch the films, such as We Are Not Two, We Are One, with the fusion of the boy and wolf, or in this exhibition with the bull in the shop of glass, I am always curious about how they got there and construct stories in my head about what happened before – do you ever think about this?

ND: [laugh] No, but I like that you think about it.

Sometimes, when I really enjoy working on a film, I think a lot about the persona, but more how it exists right now, and in comparison to myself. One really old film that I made is a charcoal animation of a wolf – in the beginning he is just standing there on the white paper but the more I work on him the more particular he becomes, and I give him more and more personality. While I was making this, during the night when I would go to sleep, I would think a lot about him, and eventually during that animation I started making him talk about me.

MS: Do you think you will ever return to making charcoal animations?

ND: Yes, that is kind of what I am going to do with the videos for Hans. It is going to be in colour, with crayons and paint, but it is still going to be two-dimensional. When I do have an idea that does not fit with clay, an idea that fits only in two dimension, then I make a charcoal animation. But that urge and those ideas do not come so often – there is a bigger urge to do three-dimensional things.

The following article was originally published on September 3, 2008 by Seth Curcio:

Opening next week at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art will be works by artist David Shrigley in his latest self titled exhibition. Shrigley is best known for his dead pan humor and intuitive drawings that illustrate simple yet absurd situations. The exhibition will also feature the artists object-based sculpture, which often plays with scale and have included items such as stuffed animals, doors, ladders, tents and sleeping bags. The artists has exhibited internationally and gained much popularity through a series of weekly illustrative contributions to The Guardian, since 2005. Shrigley has exhibitions this year with BQ in Cologne, Anton Kern Gallery in NYC and CASM in Barcelona, and a forthcoming exhibition at Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris next year.

Want even more David Shrigley? Check out the more recent coverage of his work in the group show, ‘The Curtain Call’ at the Roundhouse. The article below was originally published on August 18, 2011 by Michelle Schultz:

Summer tends to be a time of spectacle in London – massive installations, blockbuster shows, international festivals and grand theatrical events. With smaller galleries closed and many leaving for a break from the claustrophobic city and intellectual rigour, the spectacle is relied upon to attract the attention of the audience who remain.

Israeli designer Ron Arad’s massive undertaking at the Roundhouse, aptly titled Curtain Call, is at the height of the spectacular – a three-storey high circular curtain comprised of glowing amoeba-like silicon tubing which serves as fluid canvas for artists to work with. With a transparent sheath, the 360 degree screen, onto which videos are looped, can be viewed from the outside – but most do choose to push aside the swaying curtain and experience the work from within.

Ron Arad, Curtain Call, 2011. Installation at the Roundhouse. Credit Stephen White.

It is a stunning architectural structure – technologically magnificent and psychologically affective due to its vast size – but it is void of any prolonged engagement. However, it is interesting to see how artists have used this unique backdrop and translated their work through it. Shape and scale take front row here – the directionless circular structure of the screen requires a rethinking of the linear quality of video, and the enormous size forces the viewer into a land of giants.

Mat Collishaw, still image from Sordid Earth, 2011. Image courtesy of the Artist.

Mat Collishaw’s video Sordid Earth immerses you in an apocalyptic world of desire and decay. A digitally rendered vision of a dystopic future where decrepit, insect-ridden flowers blossom and dissolve amongst violent storms and unstoppable waterfalls. Collishaw’s world imperceptibly rotates around you, in a continuous cycle of life and death without a trace of human presence, making our microscopic existence disappear into nothingness.

David Shrigley, still image from Walker, 2011. Image courtesy of the Artist.

In David Shrigley’s animation Walker, a blank-eyed, hairy patched man wearing nothing but a pair of heavy boots stomps slowly around the circle with great effort, pausing only to grunt and groan. Translating Shrigley’s caustic depictions of flat, trivial characters onto a larger than life screen serves to intensify the acidic humour ever present in his works and give Shrigley’s ‘outsider art’ further dimension.

Christian Marclay, Pianorama in Ron Arad, Curtain Call, 2011. Image credit Stephen White.

The golden boy of Venice, Christian Marclay, has joined forced with experimental jazz pianist and often-collaborative partner, Steve Beresford to create Pianorama – an surround sound piano which Beresford appears to play from all angles. Marclay’s interest in music and splicing of video fragments are extended here into an endless instrument, surrealistically played by a multitude of giant hands reaching around you.

Ori Gersht, still from Offering, 2011. Image courtesy of the Artist.

In Ori Gersht’s Offering, the structure is exploited not only for its formal qualities, but is used as an integral part of the thematic approach of the work. A man begins to dress in a room, but it only slowly becomes clear what he is preparing for. His audience emerges on the opposite site, waiting in anticipation. We have entered a bullring, exposed to the intimate, individualistic side, removed from the bloodshed and controversy – instead looking at the delicate preparations and directly into the eyes of the supporters who solemnly wait.

Ori Gersht, still from Offering, 2011. Image courtesy of the Artist.

How do you break down the linear structure of video and work with a screen that has no beginning and no end? With light, sound and video, these artists have used a giant canvas to explore and extend facets of their work – the dark, the humourous, the surrealist and the controversial – all within a great spectacle.

Want more post-communist artistic expression? This year’s FotoFest in Houston, TX  ’explores  modern and contemporary Russian photographic history over the last five decades from the post-Stalinist period of the 1950s to the present day’.

The following article was originally published by Bean Gilsdorf on September 17, 2011:

Dwarves, videos, homemade t-shirts and cardboard tanks: this is what you’ll find in Happenings Against Communism by the Orange Alternative at the Galeria Miedzynarodowego Centrum Kultury in Krakow.  It’s a multi-roomed tour of Polish protest in the 1980s, the retrospective of a social practice movement that swept an entire country.  Although the tone of the exhibition is playfully iconoclastic—that’s the whole point—I often found myself moved nearly to tears by the many video works scattered throughout the space.  It’s not often that art changes the world, but when it does it is extremely poignant and inspiring.

An uncredited photograph from the exhibition Pomaranczowa Alternatywa Happeningiem w Komunizm (Happening Against Communism by the Orange Alternative) at the Galeria Miedzynarodowego Centrum Kultury.

Some background: various political and economic factors plunged Poland into a period of deep decline around 1980, and on December 12, 1980 martial law was declared.  Both an immense buildup of Soviet military at the borders and the arrest of union members and intellectuals precipitated an economic sanction by the US and other nations.  Rapidly, Poland became a nation of fear and scarcity.  Working with the influences of the Surrealist and Dada movements, “Major” Waldemar Fydrych decided to take matters into his own hands.  As a former art history student at the University of Wroclaw, Fydrych had co-organized the Independent Students Union and a massive peace march as well as cooperatively publishing a student newspaper called Orange Alternative, so he was no stranger to both art and politics.  When he saw all the patches of white paint the government was using to cover anti-regime graffiti, he had an idea that eventually shaped itself into a revolution.  His goal was to protest the brutality and militarism of the regime without replacing one dogma for another by shouting political slogans or creating formal hierarchical structures.  From the moment he picked up a brush, Poland became a site for the absurd pushing against the militaristic.  Enter the dwarf.

An installation view of one room from the exhibition. The television in the corner plays a looped excerpt from Maria Zmara-Koczanowicz's "Majer or the Revolution of Dwarves." Photo: Bean Gilsdorf

The exhibition is dense with information, but it is presented in a charming and accessible fashion.  Most rooms include recreated ephemera from the many happenings, including flyers, t-shirts, banners, and costumes.  However, the videos are often the most engrossing because they include first-hand accounts and original films that documented the era.  Majer or the Revolution of Dwarves, directed by Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz in 1989, includes interviews and police/journalist footage of some of the key players and happenings across Poland.

Another room of the exhibition. Photo: Bean Gilsdorf

The absurdity and low comedy of the events and actions shines brightly across the decades, even in subtitled translation.  One video excerpt recounts a happening entitled Who’s Afraid of Toilet Paper? A man describes the action of giving away (extremely scarce) free toilet paper on the street, gleefully telling passersby to take two rolls, and he reenacts the recipients’ stunned and joyful surprise.  At another happening, protesters lampooned the military by dressing as soldiers and marching in the streets while carrying paper rifles or riding “tanks” made of bicycles and cardboard.  They chanted, “Nothing gives you fun like a machine gun!” and “Less condoms, more military exercises!”  It was silly, a caricature that turned a funhouse mirror to the brutally stark life lived under constant military and police presence.

A DIY dwarf photobooth with side-panel instructions from the exhibition. Photo: Bean Gilsdorf

The most affecting moments occur when the camera catches more than tomfoolery, when the frightening reality of 1980s Poland is glimpsed.  One video shows an apartment full of young people dressing in costumes in preparation for a protest.  A sunny young man adjusts his straw halo for the camera and says, “Wouldn’t it be a pity if they pulled us all in?” and the camera cuts to a view through the apartment window where a military vehicle sits waiting at the curb. Despite his broad smile, the flash of fear in the man’s eyes tells everything: what he risks, and how he feels about it.  Everything is at stake, he could lose it all in the time it takes to be put into the back of a van.  The tension is palpable, his bravery immense. It is precisely this sense of courage and conviction—and of the menace shimmering darkly just beneath the surface of ridiculous hijinks—that gives this exhibition its profundity and force.  One of the leaflets I read before exiting the gallery contained a final thought connecting this historical overview to our present situation: “Is the Orange Alternative spent after 30 years?  In the late 1980s Major Fydrych declared: the Orange Alternative will cease to exist when people no longer need it. So far it does still exist.”

New Frontier 2012 will be on view from January 20, 2012  January 28 and at the Salt Lake City Art Center through May 19.

The following article was originally published by Catherine Wagley on January 22, 2010:

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

Stan VanDerBeek with his Movie-Drome, Stony Point, NY. Courtesy Yale School of Architecture

Making films is not easy. Most people know this and almost as many find the difficulties of movie-making enthralling, which explains the proliferation of articles, TV interviews, and radio specials on the subject. Just last week, I nearly pulled off the freeway to better concentrate on radio host Elvis Mitchell’s interview with Oren Moverman, the directed of The Messenger (who, apparently, had 3 different directors, including Sydney Pollack, walk away from the picture before he took the helm himself), and I don’t think I’ll ever tire of Quentin Tarantino’s story (told most recently on Tuesday’s Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien) about how his hands, and not the hands of Nazi Colonel Hans Landa, came to strangle Diana Kruger’s character in Inglourious Basterds.

This fascination with filmmaking has something, if not everything, to do with the fact that, while the production process may be a tangled mess of misplaced funding and last-minute game-changes, the watching process often feels effortless. Well-made mainstream features are meant to pull you through a seamlessly self-contained fiction that twists and turns, periodically threatening to derail but never actually doing so. They’re meant to leave you strangely satiated, even if you just witnessed an apocalyptic blood bath. Video art and art films, on the other hand, tend to be neither seamless nor satiating; and sometimes, watching them feels like it must be at least as difficult as making them.

On Tuesday night, in a crowded basement auditorium at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I listened as Tate Modern curator Stuart Comer talked about, among other things, organizing experimental film events at a museum that has practically obliterated its film budget. Snaring potential backers can be difficult, since Comer’s programming has a reputation for being “aggressively avant-garde”—which is another way of saying films at the Tate require a bit too much of their viewers.

Stan VanDerBeek, March 22, 1969. Inside the Movie-Drome. Courtesy Black Mountain College Museum.

Before Comer took the podium, art historian Gloria Sutton spoke at length about Stan VanDerBeek, a graduate of 1950s Black Mountain College who built the infamous Movie-Drome, a grain silo turned multimedia screening room, in his Stony Point, NY, backyard. He filled his Movie-Drome with an assortment of projectors, so that multiple still and moving images could occupy the curved ceiling at once. VanDerBeek’s films, which resemble fugitively animated Wallace Berman collage, champion what he called the “aesthetics of anticipation.” They ask their audience to stay alert, trace connections between fragments and look for meaning that they will never quite be able to find. They’re demanding and rigorous, but, really, once you’ve decided to submit yourself to them, they’re mostly exhilarating.

In one of VanDerBeek’s best, Poemfield No. 2, a series of pixelated words punctuate the screen then disintegrate into blurs of light and specks of neon color.  At first, you try to read the words for meaning, then the film starts to resemble a sort of absurdest nightmare in which the text becomes unreadable before it’s even materialized. Yet the constantly foiled desire to decipher still propels you through, and you’re always anticipating the moment at which the flickering screen will become legible again–it’s more suspenseful than anything Hitchcock ever made, because the suspense lasts indefinitely.

Note: LACMA will host two more panels on experimental film, one in March and one in May. The dates should be finalized and posted to LACMA’s website in the near future.

Banks Violette, "Untitled (Church)," 2005

I have a checkered brown and white shirt with sleeves and a collar that looks like something Ashton Kutcher would have worn in That ’70s Show. I still wear it, though I bought it at a thrift store when I was in high school. I had written a play about U.S. college students trying to find their true selves in the years right after the Vietnam War and devoted weeks to finding vintage or faux-vintage, orange, green, brown and denim clothing. I also found a vintage record player, which was playing The Beatles’ “Golden Slumber,” from Abbey Road, when the protagonist offed herself at the end of Act I (Act II was all about her friends coming to terms with her death, and, of course, about finding faith in the face of despair and other such sublime ideas).

Friends and I staged the play in a sanctuary because my father was a minister and the church was the closest thing to a theater we had at our disposal. The suicide took place at the altar. We’d covered a pew with cushions and blankets to make it look like a couch, and that’s where the poor actress was, spread out with hand hanging limply toward the floor, when her roommates emerged from the sacristy to find her dead. It didn’t seem sacrilegious at all, suicide and The Beatles on the altar, since, really, the whole play was about hope, despair, belief, disbelief — all concerns that are supposed to get hashed out at altars, right?

A new exhibition of Banks Violette’s opened at Blum & Poe gallery in Culver City last week, which, like his past shows, grapples with over-belief and explores the place where reverence and sacrilege meet. Violette’s exhibition features big black steel speedway railings and the number 88 sculpted and drawn, after race car driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. who drives the No. 88 car, whose father died in a Daytona 500 accident 11 years ago, and who has been voted “Most Popular Driver” for 9 years now.  The sculptures have the same minimalist stoicism of the sculpture he installed at the Whitney seven years ago, a salt-covered, burn-wood and polyurethane skeleton of a  traditional church. “It’s almost the platonic representation of burnt church,” said Violette, whose piece was informed by a series of church arsons perpetrated by heavy metal fans who took the Satanic musings in their music as clarion calls.

Nikki Pressley, The Messiah is Forthcoming, 2011, mixed media, dimensions variable

Even though it depicted the ruins of a sacrilegious crime, Violette’s burnt church felt nearly reverent. It acknowledged that religion, like music (and art) had power over us and it set up religion, pop, and fine art to interact on the same level. Another piece that I saw this week, by Nikki Pressley in the group show “Go Tell it On the Mountain” at Charlie James Gallery, has a similar effect. It’s an installation of six narrow communion railings  with cushions for kneeling set up around a platform that says “The Messiah Is Forthcoming,” and laid in front of the railings are theoretical books. Among them are writings by Frantz Fanon, the incisively combative post-colonialist, who ended his book Black Skin, White Masks with this exquisitely reverent, hopeful line that’s more or less the message of Pressley’s sculpture: “My final prayer: O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”

]]> http://dailyserving.com/2012/01/burnt-church-and-other-sacrilege/feed/ 0 http://dailyserving.com/2012/01/from-the-ds-archives-recent-histories-continuing-in-a-variety-of-ways/ http://dailyserving.com/2012/01/from-the-ds-archives-recent-histories-continuing-in-a-variety-of-ways/#comments Sun, 15 Jan 2012 18:13:58 +0000 admin http://dailyserving.com/?p=22469 So, normally the weekly look back into the DS articles delves deeper into archives…today could more aptly be described as ‘From a Few Weeks Ago.’ The article chosen is Agitated Histories, and was originally published on December 20, 2011 by Rebecca Najdowski. The exhibit Agitated Histories closes today, and acts as a fortuitous introduction to the upcoming exhibit The Forgetting of Proper Names at Calvert 22 in London. The exhibition, opening on January 25th,  ”explores the artists’ varied approaches to re-imagining historical events. Here investigations into the relationships between live events and objects, the use of the body as subject in performance, and the use of sound as a narrative tool form recurring threads.” (e-flux)

If you’re lucky enough to have been in New Mexico last month while planning to be in London next month, maybe you’ll see both exhibits. If not, take another look Nadjowski’s article and keep an eye out for The Forgetting of Proper Names.

Agitated Histories:

Grasping the nebulous zone of art and politics can be arduous at best. The curatorial project of Agitated Histories attempts to do just that by compartmentalizing the political narrative. The Re-enactment, The Archive, The Persona, and The Intervention give some scaffolding from which the viewer can approach the work. The artists in this exhibition engage with the political, the social, and the personal through formal concerns and artistic research. We are looking at history (recent) here, through a distinctly political lens.

THE RE-ENACTMENT

Yoshua Okón,

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

THE ARCHIVE

Sam Durant,

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

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

THE PERSONA

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

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

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

THE INTERVENTION

Deborah Grant, “Suicide Notes to the Self”, 2008 / Geof Oppenheimer,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BG: What are the general trends of your interests?

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

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

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

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

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

BG: What’s next for you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BG: Why did you title the show Sculptures Involontaires?

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

#Hashtags provides a platform for longer reconsiderations of artworks and art practices outside of the review format and in new contexts. Please send queries and/or ideas for future to hashtags@dailyserving.com.

A corner of a long-ago building, the wall borders the edge of the Ecotrust Building parking lot, located in one of the most renovated and redeveloped commercial sections of Portland, OR.  It should do what all walls do:  create a boundary, or support a series of hidden, internal structures of unknown weight and gravity.  Perhaps, and I know I’m getting radical here, perhaps keep some things out and let others in?

Yet everything this wall has to offer flies in the face of such simple aspirations, and for that reason alone, I love it.  Structurally, the wall is useless.  It supports nothing, contains nothing. It simply stands, a ruined fragment with several sets of windows, all empty of glass, their rusted-red shutters thrown open.  The door to an old loading bay gapes like an open mouth. Aesthetically and metaphorically, however, the wall transcends its structural ineffectiveness, making it—to my mind—a metaphor for the best of all art.

The wall of the Ecotrust Building in Portland OR. Photograph by Rosa Say, courtesy of Flickr.

When you stand outside a building and peek in the window, you expect an inside view, a chance to be a voyeur to something at once internal and intimate.  Instead, the architects responsible for letting this ruined wall stand (Holst Architecture PC) create an entirely different kind of experience.  The interior has gone missing, replaced by a row of cherry trees planted on the other side. The psychological experience vacillates between feeling like you’re looking into the eyes of a soul mate and a pair of mirrored sunglasses that reflect only yourself back.

I was reminded of this wall a few days ago, when a friend sent me a link to an article by Randy Kennedy in the New York Times—“Serendipity as Urban Curator”—in which Mr. Kennedy narrates his decision to look at New York as a readymade, ready to be selected and framed, starting with the view out the window of the N train into Manhattan as the train ascends the Brooklyn Bridge.

Subway window, New York City. Photograph by Mindsay Mohan, courtesy of Flickr.

As a writer immersed in the art industry, I understand the tendency to start to see one’s surroundings as one evolving and connected art piece, or to literally have doubts about whether what one experiences is “art” or “life.” A few years ago, on the streets of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, a man matched my stride for a block or two and I could not help but feel like I was being engaged in a private performance piece.

The part of Mr. Kennedy’s article I found most compelling, however, was the implicit suggestion that art does not just happen, but is made—by the window frame of the subway train, the hands shaping it, the mind of the person experiencing it, or the culture surrounding it. For the first time in a long while, I thought of the Ecotrust wall—a favorite Portland landmark of mine—and all the characteristics it seems to share with capital-A “Art”: the combination of purposelessness and craft, accident and design, self-absorption and curiosity.

Ryan McGinley, "Tom (Golden Tunnel)," 2010, C-Print, 72 x 110 inches. Courtesy Team Gallery.

I believe that the best art writing should bring one’s awareness to the frame—to the walls, or the subway windows—without forgetting to bring the reader into the experience. I also believe in laying bare the fact that writing itself is a frame, and using this function of language to bring together aspects of visual culture that otherwise might go unmentioned.  Last year #Hashtags brought you articles on graffiti in relation to the Arab Spring and narcotrafficking websites in relation to Aztec ritual, plus artists working with Occupy and meditations on art after 9/11. Looking towards 2012, we promise it will only get better.

The following article was originally published by Rebekah Drysdale on August 3, 2009:

OKOK Gallery’s current exhibition, TEXT/URAL, presents the work of seven national and international artists whose text-based works illustrate the expressive potential of language. The infinite mutability of letters, words, and their meanings allow these artists to explore, both formally and conceptually, the role of language in art. The exhibition features works by Michael Waugh, Kay Rosen, Kim Rugg, Will Yackulic, Ewoud Van Rijn, Annie Bradley, and Grant Barnhart.

Michael Waugh’s labor intensive drawings are executed in ink lines of tiny handwritten script. Waugh selects his text from dozens of Presidential inaugural addresses, commission reports, and speeches to Congress. Thousands of words are written out by the artist, and the text becomes large images, as seen above in one of two works on display in TEXT/URAL. The images created from the sprawling text are often loaded with religious and political allegory.

Kay Rosen has been working with language since 1969. Her wall painting, HALFULL, will be on display at OKOK Gallery. She articulates the meaning of this work in her essay, The Center is A Concept, where she states “referencing the proverbial glass, HALFULL offers a verbal shortcut for viewing the world in two ways, positively or negatively, through a simple linguistic choice involving the letter F”. Rosen uses the predictable palette of 1 Shot brand of sign-painters lettering enamel, an arbitrary system with an infinite combination, similar to the alphabet.

Kim Rugg renders our print and media culture unintelligible by meticulously dissecting pages of newspaper with an X-ACTO knife. She cuts out every letter and alphabetizes them on the page, all while preserving the dignity in presentation and formality of the newspaper format. She cuts the pictures into small equal sized pieces,and arranges them by color into what resembles television static. Three works will be included in this exhibition utilizing the front pages of the New York, Seattle, and L.A. Times. Rugg was recently reviewed by the L.A. Times and described as “a vandal of the highest order, a tamperer, an interventionist.”

Will Yackulic’s works on paper combine text with obsessively rendered micro-landscapes that recall rudimentary digital imagery. His work was featured in 2007 on DailyServing. Ewoud van Rijn’s epic drawing, Reality, will be included in the show as well. The image, whose gushing lettering suggests both water and sperm, contains a bold statement “reality has no mistress it has a master me.” New Zealand-based artist Annie Bradley is presenting her audio video animation, Sodding G. Monolith, in the project room. This work is inspired by the names spammers use to circumvent e-mail filters and comments on the incessant flow of information. Grant Barnhart, another previous DS feature (and was interviewed by DS in 2007), is presenting work that combines text with adolescent ephemera, such as Playboys adorned with forged Babe Ruth signatures. He is also displaying the sleeping bag in which he received his first kiss, creating an awkward homage to innocence lost.

TEXT/URAL will be on display at OKOK Gallery in Seattle until September 7, 2008.

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The work of Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg is defined by duality. A partnership between artist and musician, their stop-motion animation videos and haunting audio tracks precariously balance horror and humour, immersing child-like puppets in a world where perversion, violence, aggression, and power dominate. In their latest exhibition in London, the artists explore the medium of glass and its materiality – fragility becomes threatening and desires are laid bare, exposing the traits that both define us and may lead to our demise. On the occasion of A World of Glass at Camden Arts Centre, Nathalie Djurberg, Hans Berg, and Michelle Schultz sit down to discuss puppets and process – and the relationship between art and music.

Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg, A World of Glass, film still, 2011. Courtesy of the artists, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Galleria Gio Marconi, Milan.

Michelle Schultz: Most of the materials you use – clay, fabrics, even the music – have a strong sense of malleability and fluidity to them, but in A World of Glass, the focus is on a very unyielding material that is both fragile and, I find to be, quite threatening – could you speak a bit about the significance of the glass for you?

Nathalie Djurberg: What this entire project is about is fragility – and transparency – and while it can be perceived as threatening in the way that it stands on the table, for me, it is almost like a shipwreck that has been washed up on a beach and reassembled again. It is almost apocalyptic. That is also how I made them, taking things that I could find – glasses, plates, and bowls – assembled them, worked on them with clay, and then had them moulded and casted.

Hans Berg: There were all these ugly parts – some things were just a pile of clay, made with the hands, and then you stuck glass on it, but then, through casting, it is turned into this crystal clear, fragile figure. I think that’s where you will find a connection between the frightening and hard stuff, and how fragile everything looks – when it is transformed.

I think that glass has so many different layers – it is about, like the title suggests, how the world is really fragile, but then the films are also about the fragility of the mind, or the transparency of the mind. At the same time that it is fragile, the large amount of glass almost makes it baroque as well.

Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg, A World of Glass, installation view, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Camden Arts Centre. Photograph by Andy Peake.

MS: Much more of your recent work is immersive installations, as opposed to singular videos that stand on their own – was this a purposeful decision that was made?

ND: Yes, I had the idea about three years ago, about the same time as I started working on the piece we showed in Venice at the Biennale, the Experiment (2009). However since it has taken such a long time to realise it, the outcome is very different from the original idea. But we’re planning on making something small and singular after this.

MS: An animation?

ND: Well you have to go where the ideas take you – if I get really excited, and have an urge to see it, it means that I have to make it. What we are going to work on after this is something different – I am making visuals for Hans’ music, which is a mix of club music and the music he makes for my animations. I am excited about that, since it can be shown in a context where there is not just people who are used to looking at art, but also people who don’t usually look at art.

MS: It will be very interesting to see how these videos differ, as right now the visuals comes first and the audio is composed afterwards – but now it will be the music that initiates the work.

ND: It will be possible to work in a different way as well – in a more abstract way, and to really explore that.

HB: I always thought that art and music were really more connected, but they are not. And this is a very unusual occasion I think – that we have a show with Haroon Mirza at the same time at Camden Art Centre, who also works in music that is more towards the pop side, like mine. Usually, no one in the music world knows anything about art, and no one in the art world knows anything about music, so it is nice to try and bridge that gap.

Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg, A World of Glass, film still, 2011. Courtesy of the artists, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Galleria Gio Marconi, Milan.

Also, the music that I do for the installations and the films, it’s not difficult, it’s not sound art, and I think that’s pretty unusual as well. The sound or music for video art, is often very strange, people make it extra strange, so it’s extra ‘arty’, and I don’t really do that so much.

MS: For this exhibition, did you find it difficult to make one piece of music that fit with all four videos simultaneously?

HB: In the beginning, yes. At first I thought I would make four different tracks – one for each film – that would fit together. But then I started, and I was thinking, and I locked myself in the closet. We both work at home – Nathalie has one and a half rooms for her studio, and I have a corner in the second room. So I locked myself in the closet, with glasses, vases and water, and recorded all the samples for the music.

The music turned out so minimalistic, and when I looked at all four films, it turned out that it fit, so I choose to use it for all four – because, in the end, four different soundtracks would go against the whole idea for the whole installation, which is very minimal itself.

ND: What the music also does is bring the concept of the glass out everywhere. You can stand in the corner and still hear the glass clinging.

MS: It really does serve to immerse you in glass.

Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg, A World of Glass, film still, 2011. Courtesy of the artists, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Galleria Gio Marconi, Milan.

MS: Now, in your videos, often the distinctions between humans and animals are blurred – I have seen a man turn into a dog, a woman takes a tiger as a lover and a bear become the captor of a child. And in these new videos, the divisions between humans and animals are quite inconsequential as well.

ND: I think we are more similar than we like to think, at least at some level. But using animals is mainly a way to express something – sometimes it is easier to work with a metaphor than to work with an actual person – and sometimes that’s stronger. If you use a puppet that is a human being, there is so much baggage that comes with how it looks and the clothing.

MS: But the animals always have their own traits that accompany them as well.

HB: Yes, if you use a wolf, you get a certain set of ideas coming with that animal.

ND: But it is almost the same as the way that you use clothes on a puppet – if you choose not to clothe a puppet but you use it naked, then you can’t determine what part of society it comes from, or even the country. But with every layer of clothing you put on, you determine how it is seen. So using no clothing on a puppet makes it more open to interpretation. With animals it becomes more of the idea of the trait than the actual trait – if you use an animal, it is more of a symbol.

MS: With your videos, I have always found myself highly attracted to them and disturbed at the same time – and I think what is really engaging, and intriguing, about your work, is that there is a very precarious balance between horror and humour – one never dominates over the other, at least for long.

ND: [laughs] It’s a balance.

It’s also the medium of animation that really invites you to ridicule something. Sometimes that can be scary when I am in the studio – I have to forget that there will be an audience, otherwise I might be too shy to do something that I really want to do. And sometimes I wonder if I am allowed to turn this into humour? But it is almost impossible not to, it is really just there. And I think it is comical – you have to look at things with comical eyes. It’s about making it bearable.

And it’s not always that intentional – it’s where the puppets take you as well. I work with these heavy subjects, but then it is still these tiny little figures, which become caricature as you enhance some things, and disenhance other things. Just in doing that it becomes much more comical.

The good thing that animation can do is it can make you stay – even when you otherwise would have walked away. And it might approach you from a different angle as well.

Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg, A World of Glass, film still, 2011. Courtesy of the artists, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Galleria Gio Marconi, Milan.

MS: When you are making your films and you are looking at the characters, do you create entire lives for them? I know when I watch the films, such as We Are Not Two, We Are One, with the fusion of the boy and wolf, or in this exhibition with the bull in the shop of glass, I am always curious about how they got there and construct stories in my head about what happened before – do you ever think about this?

ND: [laugh] No, but I like that you think about it.

Sometimes, when I really enjoy working on a film, I think a lot about the persona, but more how it exists right now, and in comparison to myself. One really old film that I made is a charcoal animation of a wolf – in the beginning he is just standing there on the white paper but the more I work on him the more particular he becomes, and I give him more and more personality. While I was making this, during the night when I would go to sleep, I would think a lot about him, and eventually during that animation I started making him talk about me.

MS: Do you think you will ever return to making charcoal animations?

ND: Yes, that is kind of what I am going to do with the videos for Hans. It is going to be in colour, with crayons and paint, but it is still going to be two-dimensional. When I do have an idea that does not fit with clay, an idea that fits only in two dimension, then I make a charcoal animation. But that urge and those ideas do not come so often – there is a bigger urge to do three-dimensional things.

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

Richard Kraft, installation view from "Something with Birds in It" at Charlie James Gallery. Courtesy Charlie James and the artist.

I am in Wisconsin this week. My uncle picked me up at the airport Monday, and, within minutes, had reminded me that Madison was filled with nothing more than zombies and liberals—I’d come in to the Madison airport, but he and my grandmother live an hour’s drive out—and had asked me if I’d become a Valley Girl yet. “It’s just a matter of time,” he said.

He couldn’t remember what I did in California, so I told him. Had I ever seen a real Van Gogh, he wanted to know, or something Gaugin made before getting all wrapped up in that Tahitian business? And had I heard of Owen Gromme, who was one of those naturalist right up there with Remington? I hadn’t heard of Gromme, but I was in luck, my uncle told me: my grandmother’s independent living home is full of them.  Apparently, a local priest, the priest who said my grandfather’s funeral, had owned and donated a gaping number of Gromme prints to the Oak Park Senior Home, and now they hang across from the elevator, next to the stairs, on the walls of the TV room. “Before I even let you see your grandma, I’m giving you an education,” my uncle said. “The way he painted shadows, you can tell what time of day it was.”

Owen Gromme, "Goshawk attacking Mink"

The Grommes are quite good, and sometime violent, which is my favorite kind of nature painting—the painstaking, lush rendering of a hawk swooping down after it’s prey, or those majestically detailed scenes with snow on the ground mired by a mound of gore or blood. Gromme, as I’ve just learned, was the son of a Wisconsin outdoorsmen who took a job as a taxidermist at the Field Museum of Chicago at the age of 21, around 1917 or so. He then did the same thing at the Milwaukee Public Museum, where he’d spend all of his career, eventually becoming head of the birds and mammals department. All the while, he was painting anatomically precise birds, and pretty much only birds.

Richard Kraft, installation view from "Something with Birds in It" at Charlie James Gallery. Courtesy Charlie James and the artist.

Being here among the Grommes has reminded me of Richard Kraft’s show, set to close this weekend, at Charlie James Gallery in Chinatown in L.A., initially just because of its title: Something with Birds in It. There are not that many birds in Kraft’s work, and those that are there are either simplified and loose, not anatomical, or pared down and precise classroom illustrations.  If it’s installation weren’t so carefully controlled, the show could even pass as a group show, since Kraft takes on so many different styles, from Walker Evans’ inspired photographs to drawings suited to children’s books. This show, according to Kraft, is all about polarities and frictions and fluidity.

The artist set out to show how different kinds of expression and reflection can coexist, how preciousness, violence and nostalgia can visually come together. Which, if you pull back and really look, might not be so different from what Gromme was doing. So why am I more likely to think about Something with Birds in It then nature-praising renderings by a Wisconsin taxidermist-turned-curator? Could it just be that Kraft steps outside himself and lets you know that he knows he’s maneuvering between complicated ideas about how the world works? Probably, and that’s why many of us end up in the contemporary art world; we want to foreground ourselves and acknowledge the problematics of perception. If you look at Kraft’s images, you can’t tell what time of day it is at all.

Eleanor Antin, “100 Boots,” 1971-73.

Alright, I’ll say it. A show that features conceptual art circa 1970 threatens to be dry. At the outset, you know you’ll be getting mostly documentation: photographic, video, film, and paper. Beyond the ordinary wall text, there will probably be artists’ statements explaining what was done while you weren’t looking. The typewriter, the mimeograph, and the camera will act as not-so-silent partners to the artists’ projects. “State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970” at the Orange County Museum of Art doesn’t escape these confines, but ends up offering you just a little bit more.

Bruce Nauman, “Studies for Holograms (Pinched Lips; Pulled Lower Lip; Pulled Neck; Pulled Cheeks; and Squeezed Lips),” 1970.

The show is divided into categories like “Mapping the Land,” “Politics,” “Public and Private Space,” and “Language and Wordplay.” As with previous shows I’ve seen at OCMA, these divisions hinder the overall experience. I found myself wishing that the curators had stuck to working chronologically or geographically, simply because most of the works are more interesting when viewed across categories, instead of in isolation. Bruce Nauman and Bonnie Sherk, for instance, would have made interesting counterpoints to each other; “State of Mind” includes Nauman’s Thighing (1967), Studies for Holograms (Pinched Lips; Pulled Lower Lip; Pulled Neck; Pulled Cheeks; and Squeezed Lips) (1970), and Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (1967-68), to name a few, which pair nicely with Sherk’s Sitting Still series, where the artist photographs herself sitting in public locations usually used for passing through, like the Golden Gate Bridge or the corner of Mission and 20^th in San Francisco.

Bonnie Sherk, “Sitting Still II, Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco,” from the “Sitting Still Series,” 1971.

“State of Mind” will appeal to those in the know before it appeals to the general public—Tom Marioni’s Process Print (1969) failed to capture the attention of the dozens of school kids running around the day I visited, as did Chris Burden’s video piece, Documentation of Selected Works (1971-74), in which Burden talks about most of his iconic performance pieces (Bed, Shoot).  It’s one of the gems of the show, as are most of John Baldessari’s pieces, which show themselves to be not just humorous and playful, but—by the time you get to Voluble Luminist Painting for Max Kozloff (1966-68)—downright contrarian.

John Baldessari, “Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-six Attempts),” 1973.

There is something for everyone, however; these same kids took delight in the hippie-looking, cut-out dudes featured in Allen Ruppersberg’s Al’s Grand Hotel (1971) and the animal intestines in Suzanne Lacy’s pieces. Also popular amongst the ten-year old crowd: sculptural works like Nauman’s Yellow Room (Triangular) (1973), Stephen Kalthenbach’s Raised Floor (1967/2011) and Robert Kinmont’s 8 Handstands (1969/2009)—one of which he performs at the edge of a cliff.

Robert Kinmont, “8 Natural Handstands,” 1969.

Kinmont’s piece touched me, too. The legacy left by conceptualism, California-based or otherwise, is pervasive, demanding and often unpleasurable.  Despite this, contemporary work that picks up conceptualism’s language is usually diluted and easy to overlook.  Concepts and actions that were once novel—if not out of bounds—are now familiar and trite. Walking into the main room of “State of Mind”—full of back-to-back projections, televisions, photographs, prints and paintings—after looking at Kinmont balancing at the edge of a cliff, offers just the faintest whiff of the energy of the moment.

“State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970” is on view at the Orange County Museum of Art through January 22, 2012 as part of Pacific Standard Time.

Dwarves, videos, homemade t-shirts and cardboard tanks: this is what you’ll find in Happenings Against Communism by the Orange Alternative at the Galeria Miedzynarodowego Centrum Kultury in Krakow.  It’s a multi-roomed tour of Polish protest in the 1980s, the retrospective of a social practice movement that swept an entire country.  Although the tone of the exhibition is playfully iconoclastic—that’s the whole point—I often found myself moved nearly to tears by the many video works scattered throughout the space.  It’s not often that art changes the world, but when it does it is extremely poignant and inspiring.

An uncredited photograph from the exhibition Pomaranczowa Alternatywa Happeningiem w Komunizm (Happening Against Communism by the Orange Alternative) at the Galeria Miedzynarodowego Centrum Kultury.

Some background: various political and economic factors plunged Poland into a period of deep decline around 1980, and on December 12, 1980 martial law was declared.  Both an immense buildup of Soviet military at the borders and the arrest of union members and intellectuals precipitated an economic sanction by the US and other nations.  Rapidly, Poland became a nation of fear and scarcity.  Working with the influences of the Surrealist and Dada movements, “Major” Waldemar Fydrych decided to take matters into his own hands.  As a former art history student at the University of Wroclaw, Fydrych had co-organized the Independent Students Union and a massive peace march as well as cooperatively publishing a student newspaper called Orange Alternative, so he was no stranger to both art and politics.  When he saw all the patches of white paint the government was using to cover anti-regime graffiti, he had an idea that eventually shaped itself into a revolution.  His goal was to protest the brutality and militarism of the regime without replacing one dogma for another by shouting political slogans or creating formal hierarchical structures.  From the moment he picked up a brush, Poland became a site for the absurd pushing against the militaristic.  Enter the dwarf.

An installation view of one room from the exhibition. The television in the corner plays a looped excerpt from Maria Zmara-Koczanowicz's "Majer or the Revolution of Dwarves." Photo: Bean Gilsdorf

The exhibition is dense with information, but it is presented in a charming and accessible fashion.  Most rooms include recreated ephemera from the many happenings, including flyers, t-shirts, banners, and costumes.  However, the videos are often the most engrossing because they include first-hand accounts and original films that documented the era.  Majer or the Revolution of Dwarves, directed by Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz in 1989, includes interviews and police/journalist footage of some of the key players and happenings across Poland.

Another room of the exhibition. Photo: Bean Gilsdorf

The absurdity and low comedy of the events and actions shines brightly across the decades, even in subtitled translation.  One video excerpt recounts a happening entitled Who’s Afraid of Toilet Paper? A man describes the action of giving away (extremely scarce) free toilet paper on the street, gleefully telling passersby to take two rolls, and he reenacts the recipients’ stunned and joyful surprise.  At another happening, protesters lampooned the military by dressing as soldiers and marching in the streets while carrying paper rifles or riding “tanks” made of bicycles and cardboard.  They chanted, “Nothing gives you fun like a machine gun!” and “Less condoms, more military exercises!”  It was silly, a caricature that turned a funhouse mirror to the brutally stark life lived under constant military and police presence.

A DIY dwarf photobooth with side-panel instructions from the exhibition. Photo: Bean Gilsdorf

The most affecting moments occur when the camera catches more than tomfoolery, when the frightening reality of 1980s Poland is glimpsed.  One video shows an apartment full of young people dressing in costumes in preparation for a protest.  A sunny young man adjusts his straw halo for the camera and says, “Wouldn’t it be a pity if they pulled us all in?” and the camera cuts to a view through the apartment window where a military vehicle sits waiting at the curb. Despite his broad smile, the flash of fear in the man’s eyes tells everything: what he risks, and how he feels about it.  Everything is at stake, he could lose it all in the time it takes to be put into the back of a van.  The tension is palpable, his bravery immense. It is precisely this sense of courage and conviction—and of the menace shimmering darkly just beneath the surface of ridiculous hijinks—that gives this exhibition its profundity and force.  One of the leaflets I read before exiting the gallery contained a final thought connecting this historical overview to our present situation: “Is the Orange Alternative spent after 30 years?  In the late 1980s Major Fydrych declared: the Orange Alternative will cease to exist when people no longer need it. So far it does still exist.”

FOLKERT DE JONG The Balance: Trader's Deal 9, (detail) 2010 Styrofoam, pigmented polyurethane foam Photo: Jason Mandella Copyright the artist Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai

The figures in Dutch artist Folkert de Jong’s work are both historical totems and cautionary tales. Suggesting that our darkest impulses are unavoidably cyclical in nature, he evades didactics through a combination of period details and contemporary imagery. de Jong seems to understand that every nationalistic conquest brings with it trumpet bleats, shiny shoes and other supposed finery—things that, while often treated as symbols of greatness, are often nothing more than cover ups. His current show, Operation Harmony, at James Cohan Gallery is up through May 7^th. I had a chance to catch up with him over email this past week.

Michael Tomeo: I’m really into the Trader’s Deal pieces. From the moment we learn about it in grade school, Americans laugh at how foolish native people were to sell the island of Manhattan for a bunch of beads. You make the pitch made to the native people seem goofily transparent and demeaning, like some sort of song and dance. But there’s also an oddly hypnotic quality in the stares of the offerers. It’s like they’re half street hustler, half visionary. Could you elaborate on these?

Folkert de Jong: The Trader’s Deal pieces are about unfair deals, profiteering, colonialism and imperialism. I based the character on the monument for Peter de Minuit, the Dutchman who purchased Manhattan for beads and mirrors. The figures in the artwork are all copies from one character…a 16th/17th century trader, that I created out of many figures from history: The painting “The Nightwatch” by the Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn, and characters such as Pedro de Alvarado, Peter de Minuit and Hernan Cortes. All the figures in the artwork are copies made from one mould, from one single character. The clones are trading with themselves, their own kind, ripping off each other and facing their destiny; self-destruction.

FOLKERT DE JONG: Operation Harmony, James Cohan Gallery, 2011 (exhibition view) Photo: Jason Mandella Copyright the artist Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai

MT: Coming from the Netherlands, were you taught a different view on the di Minuit transaction than children in the U.S. are?

FdJ: Well, if you look at the propaganda machine that promoted the 400 years Dutch-New York connection, I would say that still not much has changed. The Dutch seem to be very proud of their historical conquests. For me as a kid growing up here, they are like adventurous stories, with costumed characters as in Hook and Peter Pan. What disturbs me most is the interference of governments and the Royal Families in the manipulation of the historical myths. But I guess that is what happens with all nations, if you can change the cause of history into your own advantage, it simply becomes more profitable.

MT: What’s the symbolism behind the cubes and other polygons in your work? The people in the Trader’s Deal pieces offer strings of them and the half figure in Hail the One is sort of crushed by one.

FdJ: The shapes are references to dices, or mathematical forms. I am interested in the element of chance. How science has been always trying to simplify natural processes, and how uncontrollable nature actually can be.

FOLKERT DE JONG: Operation Harmony, James Cohan Gallery, 2011 (exhibition view) Photo: Jason Mandella Copyright the artist Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai

MT: You often mix colonial imagery with contemporary objects and you combine traditional sculptural techniques with industrial materials. Is there a “those who don’t learn from history are destined to repeat it” sense of moralism at play here?

FdJ: In a way, yes. I believe that there are timeless natural cycles. The costumes and setting looks different every time, but the people and their behavior remains the same.

FOLKERT DE JONG Operation Harmony, 2008 Styrofoam, pigmented polyurethane foam, pearls 340 X 700 X 230 cm Photo: Jason Mandella Copyright the artist Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai

MT: What inspired Operation Harmony? In part, I’m getting a Goya’s Los Caprichos for the 21st century vibe…

FdJ: Yes, I am fascinated about the role of Goya as an artist reflecting upon his own time. There is a timelessness in his work that reflects upon the fear, and fascination for human nature at work.

MT: I love the works on paper in this show. Often incorporating text, they have more of an unburdened sense of humor than the sculptures. How does your mindset change when making the drawings?

FdJ: Thank you. The drawings are coming more out of an uncontrolled stream of thoughts, flowing out on the paper, telling thing about my fascinations…more uncut maybe?

FOLKERT DE JONG The DeWitt Bodies, 2007 Marker on paper 16 1/2 X 23 1/2 inches Photo: Jason Mandella Copyright the artist Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai

MT: Do you see your sculptures as monuments of sorts?

FdJ: Not deliberately, but there is a strong reference to the powerful meaning and function of monuments in my work for sure. Maybe they’re monuments for the moral subjects that are unspoken around the glory and heroic and fame of our history and time?

Folkert de Jong’s work can also be seen in Cryptic: The Use of Allegory in Contemporary Art with a Master Class from Goya, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, from May 20^th to August 14^th, and Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture, The Saatchi Gallery, London from May 27^th to October 16^th.