On stage during most of the performance we see three children, three teenagers and three elderly, all representing the same three people at different stages of their lives. The characters at staggered by age, wearing similar attire and the projection screen behind them is filled with home videos throughout the play. Different variations of the same simple gestures occur both on live on stage and on the screen. Repetition confuses the past with the present with the future.

The interactivity between the real-life actors on stage and their video selves on screen hold equal weight; dialogue plays little to no importance. It seems that the actors were less interested in presenting themselves to the audience as they are in interacting with each other (before an audience) in their past, present, and future forms.

The old couple slowly motions for the children to watch the teenage replicas on the screen.  The teenagers would enter the stage, all mimicking their own moves on the screen precisely.  Passing the cigarette from the old man to the teenager, the boy motions as if he were smoking a cigarette as well. The audience smiles. The projection on the screen zooms out from the scene, taking the same images further back, repeating until what seems like forever.

A frame within a frame within a frame takes us backwards through the past to the present, were I now sit. I remember just how strange it felt, to be a member of the audience feeling like merely another layer in the frame beyond the one we see.

Yo En El Futuro (Me in the Future) lies somewhere between a performance and a play, and leaves the audience caught in that space. The simple plot addresses complex concepts such as what it means to grow old, be bound to the past, and how this affects the present, and how we remember, modify, and forget.

The performance will continue playing at El Camarin de Las Musas Theatre in Buenos Aires until December 12, 2010.  It toured extensively in Europe, but has not yet made its debut in the US.  Director Federico León has also directed films such as Estrellas (Stars) in 2007, and Todo Juntos (All Together) in 2002.

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.

Documentation of R.I.T.E.S. #7 performance at The Substation, Singapore. 2010. Courtesy of Jason Lee.

In this talk, Josef shared that his appearance in Singapore was purely accidental. Having made plans to swing by Southeast Asia, he contacted Lee Wen, a Singaporean performance artist whom he had met in an international conference. At that time Lee Wenwas involved with an emerging new platform for experimental and improvisational musicians called Rooted In The Ephemeral Speak (R.I.T.E.S). It was a match waiting to happen, and Josef was invited to perform at the next R.I.T.E.S presentation.

Josef performed with a suitcase and a typewriter which were nostalgic elements rarely seen in today’s times. In this performance, he went on the mundane and monotonous task of typing words. He also integrated spoken word into the performance via a speaker that was drumming out muffled recordings of an unknown person reading letters of the alphabet which Josef proceeded to type out. He asked the audience to read from books he had laid out on chairs in the performance space at The Substation Theatre. The audience members read these books aloud and Josef kept typing. When they were done, Josef ended the performance with a lighted tea candle placed next to these typewritten sheets laid out on the floor. But this was not the end of the show — Josef retreated to the back of the wall where there was a board and using some chalks he wrote, “Terrorists destroy buildings. Tourists destroy places. Artists destroy both.” Josef was not done. He used a rubber stamp with the words ‘The Lazy Anarchists’ and stamped them on the papers he’s laid out near the tea candles in a public display of criticism against how young artists do not lay claim to anarchism as a critical response to the status quo anymore. Josef, who confessed to being a university lecturer weary of the institutionalized way of teaching art, was sending a non-verbal message about the monotonous and droning style of academia, education and learning in today’s contemporary times.

Documentation of R.I.T.E.S. #7 performance at The Substation, Singapore. 2010. Courtesy of Jason Lee.

In his artist talk, Josef admits that academic discourse does not satisfy him. He finds the arguments and discussions to be contradictory between those who practice art and others who interpret art. He went searching for alternative ways of expressing himself by dabbling into installation works in the past. When asked to explain the reference to the Greek god Hermes, Josef shared that it was a topic for his thesis which was devoted to mythology. He connected with Hermes, known as an ancient God who takes care of all travelers and thieves, as he was an unconventional God known to deconstruct the norm.  The other known phenomenon about Hermes was the winged shoes he wore to travel between the mortal and immortal world. It was Hermes who had influenced the use of ‘hermeneutics’ in language which translates to the study of interpretation. Cseres’ deeper desire to look for different interpretations of music and art is not a new finding amongst artists whose visions are far more stretched and far-sighted. There was little show of works from the museum aside from Jon Rose’s albums but a book documenting some images of violins were passed around to the audience as a sample of what the museum does.

Rooted In The Ephemeral Speak (R.I.T.E.S) is an artists-initiative organized as a platform for new ideas and artists in sonic art, time-based and performance art-related practices.

Lee Gainer, "Cassandra" from Workin' Hard

Lee Gainer utilizes the time-honored representation of the dedicated employee, phone-to-ear, as the basis of her new collection. Backgrounds vary, depending on the nature of the organization and the duties of the associate. This snapshot, ubiquitous to the point of being absurd, suggests that a corporation places high value on customer service, and provides access to courteous, efficient employees with pleasant speaking voices and problem solving skills. This image abounded in nearly every industry during the second half of the twentieth century, and has become endearingly archaic. (Note: Coiled phone cord of land line.)

For her most recent body of work, Workin’ Hard, Lee Gainer culls photographs from various business websites and literature, printing the selected imagery with her HP Z2100 printer on 8″ x 10″ satin paper. She then alters the appropriated image with gesso and several layers of acrylic, carefully isolating the hand of the subject that holds the receiver. The artist’s modification of the casual office portrait draws attention to the prolific over-use of this image, challenging its validity as a marker of the white-collar system. Gainer’s socio-cultural observations “invite the viewer to consider the cultural expectations of social status, gender roles, age, race, morality, tradition, and sexuality,” as stated on her website. Each portrait in Workin’ Hard is given a first name as a title, subtly undermining the corporate pretense of “personal” service. The faces of the subjects are obscured.

Lee Gainer, "Jr." from Workin' Hard

Gainer’s past projects include Two Month’s Salary, a series which addresses the widely held wedding industry belief that a woman’s engagement ring should be worth approximately two months of the purchaser’s salary. Using this industry equation and the most recent salary data gathered from the U.S. Department of Labor and Payscale.com, Gainer presents twenty prints, each print representing a specific occupation (i.e. Radiation Therapist, Funeral Director, Patrol Officer) and some suitable ring choices. The occupation titles are listed in elegant script below nine engagement rings. View the series here.

Gainer’s work, simple in aesthetic and execution, prompts the viewer to decode visual data and reassess promotional images encountered in everyday life. The artist lives and works in Washington, DC and is currently a resident artist at the Arlington Arts Center in Arlington, VA. Her work has been featured in The American Prospect, The New York Times, and The Exposure Project.

On our last day of our latest week-long series Rise of Rebellion, we revisit the work of Matias Faldbakken as a quintessential example of unruly and subcultural aggression – vandalism, graffiti and destruction – in a body of work that makes you reconsider the role of social and political uprising in our culture, and subsequently, the world of Contemporary Art.

This article was originally published on December 13, 2009 by Seth Curcio.

Norwegian visual artist and writer Matias Faldbakken is currently exhibiting a new series of works titled Shocked into Abstraction at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, UK. This presentation marks the artist’s first major UK exhibition, and continues his interest into subcultures, vandalism, destruction and abstraction. Working through a variety of media including film, sculpture, installation, photography and wall painting, Faldbakken deliberately transforms acts of destruction into abstract and aesthetic forms. Within these works, acts of social and political aggression are nullified by manipulating the potent gestures into works of art.

The exhibition contains illegibly sprayed block letters in silver spray paint directly on the gallery walls. The letters have no defining edges and thus bleed together to form an reductive abstract painting. The gallery also contains a stack of Marshall amps which are sold as empty functionless shells. The amps are mere stand-ins for their would-be powerful counter parts. Through this piece the artist highlights the use of sound as an act of aggression by subcultures, while also casting light on the deafening silence of the piece as a minimalist form.

Shocked into Abstraction will remain on view at Ikon Gallery through January 24, 2010. The gallery produced a video with the artist that further explains many of the works on view.

I recently worked on a photo shoot with arguably America’s most prominent metal band. During the fourteen hour work day, I had the privilege of witnessing these icons in action amidst thousands of objects, instruments, images and banners that celebrate the band’s nearly three decades of prominence. As the day progressed, I watched as a band member lovingly called his mom to tell her what the day holds. I saw the wife of the aging guitar player tenderly paint the balding head of her husband black in a vain attempt to preserve the appearance of youth and vitality. What was instantly apparent was the first-hand deterioration of the aggressive spirit of rebellion as it aged over decades. No one can deny the use of masquerade and theatrics in heavy metal culture, but what is rarely seen is the softer side of this unruly behavior, which was something that I was privy to that day. When thinking about this softer side of metal and its rebellious association, it occurred to me that rebellion is an act best suited in short bursts, rather than sustained in perpetuity. I recently sat down with Ben Venom, an artist fascinated with the rebellious nature of metal, black metal, the occult and southern identity, to talk about his work. Venom employs many of the symbols and images associated with these defying subcultures, and by creating handmade quilts, pillows, flags and banners, the artist is able to celebrate and mock these cultures simultaneously.

Seth Curcio: Ben Venom seems like an all too convenient name for an artist with rebellious southern identity and slant towards black metal. Is this your real name?

Ben Venom: No..Venom has been my nickname since I was a teenager. I grew up going to a lot of punk rock and metal shows in Atlanta, GA, and it came about from hanging around the that scene. Everyone had some obscure nickname, mine just stuck and never left.

Later, I started to incorporate my nickname into my artwork more and more while I was at the San Francisco Art Institute pursuing my masters degree. I was tired of having my last name misspelled (Baumgartner) in exhibition catalogs or postcards for art exhibitions. Plus, so many people already knew me as Ben Venom, it seemed like a natural progression and of course a much easier name to spell!

SC: Much of your new work uses imagery and materials that are related to black metal as the aggressive epitome of an already masculine sub culture. You physically unite imagery from this movement by sewing it together into quilts, flags and banners. Where do you derive the source material?

BV: The source material is collected from attending concerts, reading, and researching certain aspects of metal culture. For instance, Sam Dunn, Canadian anthropologist and heavy metal fan, has produced two documentaries that explore the origins of heavy metal music from early bands such as Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath, to current bands like Slayer & Mastadon. I recently read Lords of Chaos and just bought Only Death Is Real (An Illustrated History of Hellhammer and early Celtic Frost). These books offer an inside look into what goes on behind the scenes or after the music dies, literally, HA! More specifically, a few pieces are directly inspired by bands that use corpse paint. Influenced by the likes of Alice Cooper, KISS, and the Misfits many black metal bands paint their faces with black and white shapes to mimic inhumanity or death. I re-design these shapes into forms that mimic faces or objects associated with metal or the occult. I was initially inspired to start quilting after seeing the Gees Bend traveling exhibition, which showcases handmade quilts from a very rural region in Alabama. I had a lot of old Heavy Metal t-shirts hanging in my closet and thought it would be interesting to make a metal themed quilt from them. The result was a 6′ x 9′ quilt constructed with over 35 vintage heavy metal t-shirts from my own collection and a few purchased on Ebay. The quilting pattern (Red Stitching) forms a Pentagram shape when viewed from a distance. The quilt is entirely hand-made using a basic sewing machine and took roughly 3 months to complete.

SC: What do you feel happens when you merge largely rebellious imagery from metal culture with the often-associated domestic quality of sewing?

BV: I see it as a high speed collision of polar opposites much like Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. When these 2 opposing forces meet the result can be catastrophic or something entirely new. Plus, there has always been an aspect of the punk rock and metal culture that includes hand sewing patches, pins, or metal spikes onto clothing. My work just goes a little further by merging the ideas and aesthetic of punk and metal culture with domestic craft, i.e. pillows, quilts, and embroidery. I am certainly not attempting to organize the choas or energy of metal culture into some form of conservative product. Rather, I re-interpret it in a different medium.

SC: How does quilting alter or enhance the unruly nature of metal?

BV: It draws attention to the more ridiculous antics of the movement. I compare my work to the over the top stage sets, costumes, and over all debauchery associated with the bands and audience. I have always had an interest in sub-culutres that go just a little to far into the extreme. These people are able to the push the boundaries of society past its limits and towards something completely new. In the end even Anton Lavey needed and a warm blanket to sleep with when it was cold outside!

SC: Also, it occurred to me that quilt making is often used as a commemorative or memorial act. I know that it is also very common to see fans use hand made banners to celebrate and show loyalty to their favorite band. Do you feel that the act of quilting and the product that results celebratory in nature? Are these objects a tribute to the rebellious culture that they reference?

BV: The work is simultaneously a tribute and a form of mockery at the unbelievable antics employed by some of these bands. For instance, Ozzy biting the head off of a bat onstage or snorting a line of ants while on tour with Motely Crue.  Blackie Lawless of W.A.S.P used to shoot fireworks from his crotch, of course this back fired one night and blew his balls up! The work takes on this rebellious mentality by utilizing the darker aspects of the culture with a medium that is the complete polar opposite and very un-metal, craft. My work exists within these opposing forces, a sort of negation from negation to the extreme.

SC: You have explained to me that you are able to create very subtle references to the history of metal in some of your larger works. Can you give me an example of how you embed certain messages or connections in the work that only ‘insiders’ of the metal culture would understand?

Ben Venom: Listen to Heavy Metal While You Sleep! has a few hidden secrets only someone familiar with the bands would notice. The 4 corners of the inverted cross has Ozzy on the top with Dio opposite (Dio and Ozzy used to sing for Black Sabbath and Ozzy was not a big fan of Dio when he first joined Black Sabbath) and Megadeath on one side with Metallica on the other (Dave Mustaine was kicked out of Metallica and formed Megadeath as a result). In addition, the band Pentagram is placed  on the forehead of the skull as a reference to Charles Manson and his swatiska tattoo. Iron Fist was inspired by fans that carve SLAYER into their arms as a form of scarification. The Lucifer Pillow Collection is comprised of hand shaped pillows with screen-printed images of goat heads, lighting bolts, and prison style tattoos. They represent metal cultures interest in black magic, paganism, and satanism akin to the pentagram drawn onto the palm of Richard Ramirez’s left hand.

SC: So given that you focus much of your artistic attention on rebellious subcultures, how does the act of rebellion play out in your personal life? Any interesting stories or debaucheries to tell?

BV:Ha! In an attempt to not incriminate myself, I will just say I’m on good behavior… ’nuff said!

SC: Tell me a little about your upcoming projects, both exhibitions and unrealized artworks?

BV: I will be showing at Guerrrero Gallery here in San Francisco, CA this November. I also just exhibited work at The Lab, in SF this past month. I’m  in contact with an organization called Home of Metal in England and may be showing some work over there in 2011. Currently, I am working on a commission quilt for Pirate Press Records that will incorporate a lot of t-shirts from bands they work with into a whiskey bottle shaped design with a pirate ship as the quilting pattern. Unrealized artworks include some embroidery with Flying V guitars, more hand shaped pillows, and large mixed media screenprints. Live fast…diaherra!

Rise of Rebellion: DailyServing’s latest week-long series

We continue our week long series, Rise of Rebellion, by taking a look at how resistance and rebellion overlap.

Brian Bress, Masked images. Courtesy LACE.

On the back left wall of Pepin Moore’s gallery space–the same endearingly domestic space that, just a few months ago, belonged to China Art Objects–there’s a noirish print by Brian Bress. It’s hanging in Second Story, a low-key exhibition that features a sampling of the artist’s multiples that will be shown in the upstairs loft once the  gallery’s official season begins. It depicts a bust that,  I think, once belonged to Natalie Wood. But the face has been obscured by torn strips of  paper and it’s the obscuring that matters most. The print recalls Irving Penn’s Saul Steinberg in Nose Mask (1966) or Marcello Nizzoli’s Portrait of a Woman (1936), a photograph in which a smiling female face is half covered by white paper and colored with green and red crayon. It resists beauty, but it’s still elegant.

This particular print feels like a distilled version of Bress’s more unruly installation and video work, and the crinkles in the brownish and purple paper that cover the face particularly resonate with the surfaces of Disaster Family, a limbless fantasia of felt figures that Bress included in LACE’s 2008 exhibition, Against the Grain. There’s something violent about Bress’s refusal to give figures flesh or features–it obscures individuality while internalizing intimacy and resisting the outside world.

Brian Bress, "Disaster Family," from Against the Grain, 2008. Courtesy LACE.

Resistance was more or less the point of Against the Grain; it aimed to subvert a stiff political aesthetic in favor of something more sensuously contentious. It responded to Against Nature, a 1988 exhibition  curated by Dennis Cooper and Richard Hawkins, and both shows took their titles from different translations of A Rebours, a melancholic French novel by J.K. Huysmans about a sickly nobleman who withdraws from society to live alone with his own exquisite sense of decorum. But only a few pieces in Against the Grain–Bress’s was one, along with Julian Hoeber’s series of glitzy bronze heads–came close to the seductive recalcitrance of Against Nature, which confronted the problem AIDS posed for artists who wanted to be provocative without being polemical.

By 1988, the clean-edged, unambiguous Silence=Death icon, designed by AIDS activists in New York, was already circulating. The back cover of Against Nature’s catalog echoed the slogan but did so by superimposing a seraph script over an  image of an apothecary dressed in a black-beaked, plague-resistant gown (he could have easily figured into Bress’s Disaster Family). Against Nature didn’t reject the political dimensions of sickness in general or AIDS in particular, but it did favor ornamental musings on beauty, bodies and illness and its fidelity to taste seemed strangely aggressive.

"Against Nature" catalog, back cover, 1988. Courtesy LACE.

In his catalog essay for Against Nature, which reads like fiction, Dennis Cooper navigates his desire for a man named Pierre, who is purportedly trying to help Cooper out by writing about the exhibition. The two men move back and forth in cagey,  often tangential dialogue. In the end, Pierre makes it clear that he’d rather not get too close to Cooper; it’s not because he’s afraid of AIDS but more because he just doesn’t know what to be afraid of or what to want in general. When Cooper reads what Pierre has written, he realizes it’s unusable:

(It’s a description of Pierre in very hackneyed, glowing terms . . . it doesn’t have anything to do with this show, [and there’s no way I’m going to print it] as beautiful as Pierre looks today, even upset. But he’s my friend so I’ll tell him he’s perfect.)

The essay, like Pierre, is evasive and uncertain. It resists pontification, though written in a moment that seemed (and was) politically dire, and it resists indulgently.

Indulging in ambiguity can be dangerous–you risk being misunderstood–but it’s indulgence that made Against Nature so timely and rebellious.

Today, Bean Gilsdorf looks at some of the artists that have broken the art world’s mold in her latest article Rebellion, Four Ways, as a continuation of our week-long series Rise of Rebellion.

Not long ago I had a conversation with a fellow artist.  “I’m thirty years old,” she said, “and I’ve never really rebelled.”  We talked about what rebellion means; it turns out that while I was imagining the traditional route of sex/drugs/rock-n-roll, she had something tamer in mind: “I was thinking about not bathing for a while.”  I admit that I laughed out loud.

She and I were both thinking about social nonconformity in general, yet there are forms of revolt more specific to art and its milieu.  True rebellion is a personal action, a stance to take against the machination of a system whether overt or hidden.  When people talk about “the art world” they refer specifically to the capitalist market-driven system of exchange that takes place in the slim area of overlap between makers, dealers, and buyers.  It’s a system of production and consumption like many others that relies on indoctrination, social pressure, and buy-in to a set of assumptions.  In order to succeed in this world artists must play the game and follow the rules—all very insidious in a field that is purported to be about freedom and expression.  Winners learn to play well and are rewarded for running within the confines of the maze and pressing the lever at the end. But the “art world” is not art, and never should the two be confused.  Below are some of the tacit rules of the art world and the iconoclasts who break them.  Consider this food for thought.

Paul Chan, The laws are my whores (2009). Suite of nine drawings, charcoal on paper, 39.5 x 27.5 inches each.

Paul Chan, Oh why so serious? (2008). Plastic and electronics, computer keyboard, 3.25 x 18.5 x 8 inches.

Paul Chan, Waiting for Godot (2007). Performance view, South Ward, New Orleans.

1.) Make all your work recognizable.  A body of work is consistent and easily identified.

You’re a brand, and if you want to sell you need to make your brand instantly recognizable—just like a Louis Vuitton handbag or an Apple computer.  Tell that to Paul Chan, the 37 year-old auteur of videos, sculpture, drawings, paintings, light projections, computer fonts, and the co-stager of five site-specific performances of “Waiting for Godot” in post-Katrina New Orleans.  There is no “recognizable” here, no direct sense of continuity from show to show or even piece to piece; if you didn’t read the wall label you might not know who made the work.  There is only a joy of making; freedom of expression, indeed.

Cady Noland, SLA #4 (1990). Silkscreen on aluminum, edition 4/4, 78 3/8 x 60 5/8 x 3/8 inches.

2.) Promote your brand incessantly: lectures, residencies, studio visits, and visiting-professor gigs will help you advance.

It’s true that for most artists there is a social context to the work: after all, if no one knows what you make, how will they know if they like it or not?  But is it true that one must exploit every connection, every opportunity, every possible avenue for social growth to create a career in the arts?  Ask Cady Noland…oh, but you can’t.  The reclusive artist won’t answer your email and won’t work with you if you she doesn’t trust you. Despite her many successes, Noland dropped out of the art world; self-promotion is not a game that she plays.  In a 1994 review of Noland’s work, critic David Bussel wrote with keen prescience, “Anyone can be made into a hero or villain because minor celebrity is just another disposable object of mass consumption.”  Despite Noland’s reticence to engage with the public, her work continues to be in demand.

Dana Schutz, Blind Foot Massage (2009). Oil and acrylic on canvas, 36.25 x 34 inches.

3.) Hit the big time: get rich, develop a waiting list, and hire a cadre of laborers to keep up with the demand.

(Bonus points if your laborers live in “developing” countries and you make this part of your schtick.)  This is the model proposed by Andy Warhol and adopted by Jeff Koons.  Some, like Kehinde Wiley and Takeshi Murakami, even make it an overt part of their practice to manage a hive of workers.  In the overheated atmosphere of the art world, it’s easy to think that the artist who doesn’t meet the production quota dictated by collectors is a species of failure.  It is said that Dana Schutz makes all her own paintings (unconfirmed by her gallery at the time of this publication), waiting list be damned.  For an artist of her stature to do so is a very passionate and hopeful gesture, proof that rebellion isn’t always some kind of adolescent sneer: sometimes it’s just sticking to one’s principles.

Marina Abramović, The Artist is Present, (2010). Performance at MOMA, New York.

4.) Be famous, get old, drop out.

You’ve got enough money, and maybe university tenure.  This is the time to take it easy: make work that just repeats your best years ad nauseum, or even stop working altogether.  Disproving this are John Baldessari and Marina Abramović, who continue to work hard and push beyond previous limits.  Baldessari is 79 years old; in the last five years he designed the exhibition Magritte and Contemporary Art, had strong new work at his show at Sprüth Magers (Berlin) earlier this year, and currently has a long-overdue retrospective, Pure Beauty, at LACMA.  Abramović, now 64, describes herself as “the grandmother of performance art.”  Performing The Artist is Present this past spring at MOMA, she asserted the right and privilege of the artist to continue to explore her own work, to mine it and delve ever-deeper into unknown territory.  This is the benefit of utilizing a lifetime of knowledge, growth, and experience to make innovative art.  May we all be so blessed.

As we continue our week long series Rise of Rebellion, we take a look at the cyclical nature of conflict and growth through the work of Philip Guston and the wisdom of Peter Clemenza in our latest article by Andrew Tosiello.

Philip Guston. "Oasis", 1957. Oil on Canvas. 61.5 x 68 in.

To be perfectly honest, I’m probably the last person who should be writing about rebellion. Not only am I beginning to comfortably occupy a full-time job and its attendant material security, but it has been a long time (if ever) since I’ve really stuck it to the man. More importantly and the main reason that this essay begins as quasi-apology (to the reader and the editors) is that, truth be told, I’m not fully convinced by rebellion as an effective strategy for wholesale change. (Sorry Daily Serving. I hope this won’t negatively impact future writing opportunities!)

It’s not that I don’t want to believe in rebellion, believe me. I do. In my heart I long for uprising and the final, decisive casting off of oppression after intense struggle —I’m a romantic. Unfortunately, that desire just doesn’t seem to be sustainable when I really consider it.

Rebellion, to me, suggests a fight against an existing system with the goal of toppling it and replacing it for good. It’s a dialectical process with teleological implications. Revolutions aren’t aiming for half-measures, they’re not seeking compromises and they certainly don’t anticipate their own downfall at the hands of future insurgents. Rebellion’s appeal lies in its all-in quality. It provides a sense of security about one’s (hell, the world’s) destiny being within one’s power and that it will be that way forever.

I want to make it clear that I don’t think that standing up for what’s right isn’t necessary or justified. It is. I do want to draw a distinction, though between protest and rebellion. In many ways, they’re similar, but they’re not the same. Where protest seeks to modify a system, rebellion seeks to overthrow one; consign it to the dustbin of history. Protest stands a chance of working (and has worked) and of producing lasting change. Rebellion, well, you know where I stand.

Philip Guston. "Daydreams", 1970. Oil on Linen. 180.0 x 203.5 cm

In 1970, Philip Guston debuted his now famous figurative paintings at the Marlborough Gallery. It was a shocking turn from pure abstraction by one of its most respected practitioners. It was enough of a rebellion for Hilton Kramer to title his review of the show “A Mandarin Pretending To Be A Stumblebum,” and for Marlborough to drop him from its roster. Yet, Guston described the change in his work as resulting from a sense of moral duty to directly engage with the world and its politics.

It would be foolish to try and cast Guston in the role of a revolutionary leader striking a blow for figuration and then to discredit him by pointing to the failure of Neo-Expressionism as a lasting movement. Guston’s rebellion was purely a personal one, it would seem and he can’t be blamed for those he inspired. Of course, this myth of the rebel Guston can be deflated when the fact that those late paintings were a return to his earliest themes and had developed out of his experience making his lyrical abstractions. Additionally, his late paintings did not render hollow his previous work, but rather strengthened it by suggesting the existence of those same themes, only submerged or sublimated in paint. Guston was not a rebel, but someone committed to growth, no matter what the cost. This growth, of course, was achieved only through struggle, but not one which was aimed at toppling or overthrowing, but building and enriching.

This is one view of a productive, if not rebellious, engagement with struggle against established modes. As the two sons of Vito Corleone plan the first salvo in an inevitable mob war in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, the fat caporegime Peter Clemenza tells them, “These things have to happen once every ten years or so. It gets rid of the bad blood.” This sentiment not only proves Clemenza’s veteran status, having endured previous conflagrations, but presents an anti-romantic view of such struggles, assigning them no more purpose than to relieve building tensions. It is an odd sentiment in a book that valorizes violence and decisive action as means to achieving one’s destiny.

Clemenza’s comment demonstrates an understanding of this war not as a part of a teleological process, leading to a final, lasting resolution, but an unending, though productive, cycle of strife and peace. In contrast to the sons who see war as fated and fraught with unalterable consequence, Clemenza views it as an almost neutral occurrence with little lasting effect.

Rather than seeing art through the eyes of Clement Greenberg who saw a history of rebellions leading to a final purity, one can imagine a series of struggles which purge bad blood, produce new alliances, allow for new ideas and subtle change. It seems to be both realistic and hopeful, but it isn’t rebellion.

Today on DS, we look at the desire and longing for rebellion embedded in the work of Nan Goldin, Larry Clark, Dash Snow and Ryan McGinley. Check out how the acts captured in these artists’ work become an icon for a generation desperate for a more rebellious lifestyle.

Nan Goldin. Joana with Valerie and Reine in the Mirror, L'Hotel des Beaux Arts, Paris, 1999.

Thinking back to the days of being a rebellious teenager make me want to run the other direction. There is nothing worse than revisiting the angst and discomfort of adolescence – my mild rebellious behavior and general dislike of the world around me. Rebellious acts always seem mediocre and immature to me these days, despite living a very 20-something lifestyle. But there have always been those artists that so tactfully ride the line between a perfectly composed yet rebellious life that I inherently envy. I find it fascinating to watch the career of artists who successfully make work that is both personal and universal, unruly and conforming, attractive and disgusting – who document their own outsider world and show our distance to it.

Dash Snow. "TBT", 2008. Photograph - Digital C Print 40 x 60 inches (101.6 x 151.8 cm) + frame Edition of 3 + 2AP. Courtesy of Peres Projects.

This rebel has long been the muse of the artist. And when I consider the muse, Nan Goldin and Larry Clark’s use and abuse of the rebellious lifestyle become both personal document and cultural reality, while assuming the roll of Art Historical mainstay in the category of the documentary photograph. But Dash Snow, a true example of both insider and outsider, straddled this relationship and found a way to make the chaos of his life appear both seductive and desirable. A hero of punk culture, Snow’s rebellious history and lifestyle was the subject and an embodiment of his work – both personal anthem and documentation. Snow sold his own context, using his life as a guarantee of credibility and reality to the outside world, by choosing to participate in the contemporary art system, yet his product was a life through the photographic document.

Both “genius” and tortured soul, Snow’s lifestyle was muse and product- and ultimately it was his rebellious lifestyle that brought him to an early death. Ryan McGinley equally rides this ambiguous line, to the point that I can’t decide if his work is rebellious or utopian. There is something about the idealized reality in his work that harks back to the personal documentation of Clark and Goldin, but successfully sells his own contemporary youthful lifestyle.

Ryan McGinley, Coley (Injured), 2007

The act of rebellion doesn’t always lead you in the opposing path of the system or lifestyles that it moves against. And, often the very thought or association of rebellion becomes so desirable to the masses because it appears to be simply out of their grasp. All of these artists have successfully depicted their own rebellious lifestyle and have offered this spirit back to a complacent public that longs for the moment to  give up the boredom that fills their normal lives and grab onto the freedom that is falsely associated with rebellion.

On the heels of our week-long themed series 7 Days of Myth and Summer of Utopia, DailyServing is proud to bring you a collection of writings that explore the use of rebellion in contemporary art in this week’s series Rise of Rebellion. In this latest week-long series, our writers will explore the ways in which contemporary artists are using rebellion as a central concept in their artwork through exclusive interviews, articles, essays and daily features. Check in each day to examine the rebel that lives in all of us.

Today we begin our investigation into rebellion with Jobs Suck and Art Rules: Today I Made Nothing at Elizabeth Dee by Michael Tomeo.

Today I Made Nothing, Organized by Tim Saltarelli, Elizabeth Dee, New York, NY, July 27 – September 18, 2010, Installation view Courtesy Elizabeth Dee, New York

I’m so over jobs right now. Sure, we need them, we’re thankful for the paycheck and it’s fun to hang out with coworkers (sometimes), but let’s face it, jobs blow.  While the total freedom associated with making art seems antithetical to the 9 to 5 slog, there are definite correlations between art and work and they are given form in the impeccably timed Today I Made Nothing at Elizabeth Dee Gallery.

Virginia Overton, Untitled (chairs with lights), 2009, chairs, light fixture, ratchet strap, Dimensions variable, Courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York

There are two types of workplace rebellion on view here. In one, the artist is an outsider, fighting for equal rights and clashing against the system. Works like Alejandro Cesarco’s Why Work?, Duncan Campbell’s Factories Act 1961, and Jonathan Monk’s The Sound of Music (A Record With the Sound Of Its Own Making), each use techniques and ideas from the 1960s and ‘70s such as appropriation and institutional critique. Vaguely recalling the efforts of the late-60s collectives such as the Art Workers Coalition, these works feel a bit dated, but they lend the show a historic scope.

Joseph Strau, title forthcoming, 2010, mixed media installation with floor lamp and two paintings, dimensions variable, Courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York

Another group of artists is more successfully subversive. Mika Tajima, Renée Green, Joseph Strau and Virginia Overton each use the visual vocabulary of today’s corporate world as if they are involved in a diabolical inside job. Overton’s Untitled (chairs with lights) reconfigures mordant institutional design to create what is ostensibly a badass floor lamp/sculpture.  Joseph Strau’s title forthcoming, presents two dainty abstractions with a lamp in front of them, as if Franz West were the display manager at IKEA. Mika Tajima’s A Facility Based on Change, an impenetrable work cubicle, updates the underlying claustrophobia in minimal sculpture for the middle management set. Renée Green’s banners take on the look of corporate brainstorming lists in what she calls Space Poems. They’re funny, off-putting and deceptively smart. In a room full of works attempting to challenge the boundaries of what art is, these might take the cake.

Renée Green, United Space of Conditioned Becoming: Space Poem #1, From My Institution Corporation Factory Blackberry Cellphone Mouth To Yours, 2007, double-sided color banner 42 x 32 inches (106.7 x 81.3 cm), Courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York

It’s a sign of progress that, in a show about working, women have the strongest presence.  However, other forms of advancement prove more difficult to measure. In the ‘60s, artists protested museums at a level unheard of today. As rebellious as this show portends to be, many of the artists on view are up and coming museum stars in their own right. Museums have begun to absorb rebellion as part of their aesthetic and they increasingly embrace and reward all forms of institutional critique and artist manipulation.  By welcoming more acts of critique into their halls, they glean the benefit of appearing like nurturing patrons, but they also anesthetize any sense of real rebellion. We still have a long way to go, but Today I Made Nothing is an excellent place to start the conversation.

Drew Heiztler, "for Sailors, Mermaids, Mystics. for Kustomizers, Grinders, Fender-men. for Fools, Addicts, Woodworkers and Hustlers." Installation View. Courtesy Blum & Poe.

Drew Heitzler rephrases history in ways that seem both furtive and strangely revealing. In his most recent work, he culls characters, settings, and plots from the visual history of the still-young Los Angeles. Rearranging and re-imagining three films from the early 1960s, all of them productions in which the rebel spirit of Easy Rider seems to be slowly eating into the stylized melodrama of noir, and also gathering an expansive archive of still images from Hollywood of yesteryear, he’s created a narrative that confuses the past in order, paradoxically, to clarify the hidden truths about desire and culture that lurk beneath it.

Heitzler, who participated in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, recently exhibited at LAX Art and Angstrom Gallery among, other venues. for Sailors, Mermaids, Mystics. for Kustomizers, Grinders, Fender-men. for Fools, Addicts, Woodworkers and Hustlers, his current exhibition at Blum & Poe Gallery, closes January 30th.

CW: Your current exhibition makes me think of remixes and mash-ups—art forms that are about rearranging someone else’s cultural product and telling a different story. What prompted you to re-edit historical film and images?

DH: Subway Sessions and TSOYW are two previous films I made and actually shot. The first on super-8, the second on 16mm (TSOYW was a collaboration with Amy Granat and was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial). In both cases I relied heavily on the tropes of specific film genres. Subway Sessions used the aesthetics of 70’s surf films to tell the story of a certain time and place, specifically, Rockaway Beach New York just prior to September 11, 2001. TSOYW looked like a 70’s biker film and relied heavily on the tropes of that genre. So it wasn’t a big step to go from using the look of earlier film genres to actually using earlier films themselves. Also, I had read a book on documentary film making by Erik Barnouw that my wife Flora found for me in a thrift store. In the book, the Soviet cine-clubs were discussed. It seems that after the revolution it was impossible for Russian film makers to get film stock due to western boycotts. What they had in abundance were western news reel and even films that were being smuggled into Russia in effort to undermine the Revolution. The cine-clubs would re-edit these films and news reels in order to create new narratives that supported their cause. I liked this idea of re-ordering an existing cultural image to better fit your own perception of the world. It’s collage.

CW: How important is story-telling to you?

DH: Story telling is what I am interested in. I love those French paintings like The Oath of the Horatii or The Raft of the Medusa. They operate like movies. They tell stories which can exist at different allegorical levels.

CW: Each of the three films that make up for Sailors, Mermaids, Mystics. for Kustomizers, Grinders, Fender-men. for Fools, Addicts, Woodworkers and Hustlers. (Doubled ) were originally presented on their own, right? Why combine them?

DH: The combining of the films came out of a problem of exhibition. This show was originally scheduled to open at MOCA in May, 2009. Then it was postponed to September of that year and then postponed again to January of 2010 before it was eventually canceled all together. The result was that I had a long time to think about how these three films would be presented. I had always intended for them to come together as a trilogy, but as I kept messing around with ideas of how they would actually be presented in the gallery, they morphed into a triptych, becoming a whole new piece. What I discovered and enjoyed was that once the three individual narratives were doubled and superimposed over one another, they operated in a much more complex way. The individual narratives were still visible, but complicated by their interaction with one another. In other words, the lines of thought were confused, which seems to me much closer to the way we go through life. At least that seems to hold for me.

Drew Heitzler. Installation View. Courtesy Blum & Poe.

CW: The other day, you used the words “sticky stuff,” referring to the way the oil industry lurks underneath L.A. culture. I love those words and they’re definitely relevant to your work. How do you relate the historical, anthropological side of your project to its sticky, psychological underbelly?

DH: I think it has something to do with the problem of truth, or more accurately its impossibility. I came to Los Angeles with an idea of what I would find when I got here. It was the idea that had been presented to me, sold to me in a way. What I found was something completely different. History and anthropology work the same way. They present themselves as framing a truth while they are only presenting a perception (I was assistant to Fred Wilson for several years and I learned from him how important this idea is). However, the idea of truth is absolutely vital to our ability to exist as a society, this is common sense. Likewise, sublimation is absolutely necessary for the ego to exist within a society. There are rules to follow. Once again, the only way this sublimation works is to accept certain ideas, certain perceptions as true. But just like the oil that bubbles up into the sunny Los Angeles landscape, the sticky stuff that we sublimate, keep subterranean, or relegate to the subconscious can’t be kept at bay. It always bubbles up.

Drew Heitzler, "Untitled (Ladera Heights)," 2007. Installation View. Courtesy Blum & Poe.

CW: While the story you’re telling is ostensibly about the past, it seems really timely. As you developed this work, were you thinking of anything happening on today’s cultural landscape?

DH: Once again, I’m going to bring up The Oath of the Horatii (god, I love that painting). The painting is a depiction of a moment of Roman lore but this is not what the painting is about. It is a call to arms for a new Republic in France. This is the subtext. So while the historical anthropology that I am engaged in is ostensibly about historical power structures in Los Angeles, I believe that when the work is looked at closely, the relationships to our current cultural moment are clear.

CW: On a related note, I was reading Camille De Toledo’s Coming of Age at the End of History the other day. This passage, about a new breed of romanticism, reminded me of you: “We kept alive the idea that man was capable of acting upon History, but we abandoned the . . . heroism of the avante-gardes that imagined they could overturn it.” Thoughts?

DH: This goes back to the idea of truth that I addressed in a previous question. I feel that as we have observed how the successive avant-gardes were absorbed into the monolith of capital it became more difficult to take the idea of revolution seriously. One truth gets replaced by another truth to then be absorbed by the previous truth and none of them are true anyway.  I am quite certain that it is useless to try and overturn the dominant discourse as the result is merely a different dominant discourse. But what remains is agency. I feel that it is important as an artist to act upon the dominant discourse not with the intent of overturning it, but with the intent of revealing its contradictions; confusing it and so bringing it closer to a universal idea, which is as close to an idea of truth that I am willing to entertain.

Drew Heitzler. Installation View. Blum & Poe.

]]> http://dailyserving.com/2010/08/from-the-ds-archives-interview-with-drew-heitzler/feed/ 0 http://dailyserving.com/2010/08/liberated-women/ http://dailyserving.com/2010/08/liberated-women/#comments Fri, 20 Aug 2010 14:03:46 +0000 Catherine Wagley http://dailyserving.com/?p=8438 L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Helio Oiticica & Neville D'Almeida, "Cosmococa 5: Hendrix - War CC5-11," 1973 / 2003 C-print mounted on aluminum. Courtesy Michael Benevento, Galerie Lelong, NY and Joshua White Photography.

A friend of mine, a sculptor with immense brown eyes and a long figure that that always looks both cautious and comfortable with itself, was standing next to her brother’s Ford Explorer outside an Illinois gas station. They’d just been to see their grandfather in a rest home and it was the morning of Louise Bourgeois’s death, so my friend felt reasonably subdued. A man in a black sedan with windows down drove by and slowed to a crawl. “Do you have any idea how sexy you are?” he said to her, sort of jauntily. She dropped her eyes, turned and rammed her head up against the Explorer’s doorframe, keeping it there until the sedan drove off. She has no idea why she did this, and I’ve made her describe it to me, blow-by-blow, three times at least. Her behavior feels vulnerable, resistant, violent and yet weirdly liberated. It’s a reaction against sexy—or at least the breed of sexy the man in the sedan felt he could access. But it’s also sexy itself, the spontaneous assertion of an inexplicable instinct.

Spartacus Chetwynd, "Hermito’s Children," Video (color, sound), 2008. Courtesy Michael Benevento and Joshua White Photography.

Everlasting Gobstopper at Michael Benevento, an exhibition that’s more reflective than its title suggests, is sexy expressly because of the sexinesses it rejects. The show has a grittily commemorative mood, like the setting for a party that’s bound to be oddly romantic, Disco-indebted, yet still somber. The entry way walls are painted black—it takes a moment for your eyes to adjust—and a dark purple poster of a howling wolf, painstakingly drawn by Eva Rothschild before she moved on to Cold Corners and other wonky minimalist projects, hangs opposite the door. Next comes a posse of paintings from Spartacus Chetwynd’s Bat Opera series; Rothschild’s triangular black Perspex tower; counterculture queen Lil Picard’s terrifyingly delicate burnt polka-dot bow-tie; Michael E. Smith’s dry black paintings and crusty floor pieces; and Cindy Sherman’s piquantly pink autumnal death scene. But all these mostly serve as the supporting cast for Chetwynd’s Hermito’s Children, a three part video installation that plays out on 14 stacked monitors at the back of the main gallery space.

Like a filmic novella spawned by a Truman Capote – Jack Smith marriage, Hermito’s Children presents characters who are obsessive, articulate, eccentricity prone, and vested in one another’s sexuality, though only vaguely interested in sex. Watery graphics dance across the screen to the sound of portentous woodwinds as act one, The Case of the Poisonous Dildo, commences. Less mystery than cameo, The Case features a matronly protagonist who wears a zig-zagged muumuu and sounds like Edgar Oliver with a lisp. She tells viewers not to be frightened as she introduces her unconventional, androgynous family: an ex-husband who runs a raucously happy Jewish restaurant, an absent daughter, and a deep-voiced assistant with a hog’s nose. In act two, an innocent girl in a body suit listens to a worldly “puppet master” who tells her “a dancer who relies on the doubtful prospect of human love will never be great.”

Halfway through act three,called Helmut Newton Ladies Night, the muumuu-wearing matron reappears and refers to a tomboyishly debonair troupe of women. “You are seduced by these women,” she says. “[But] what they’re doing is not that dangerous. Your imagination exaggerates it.” Then “these women” ritualistically dance to experimental metal, spoofing on Helmut Newton’s iconic 1981 image, “They’re Coming,” in which four svelte figures advanced toward the camera.

"Everlasting Gobstopper," Installation View, 2010. Courtesy Michael Benevento and Joshua White Photography.

Newton once said he couldn’t work pornographically because he didn’t do rough: “Rough stuff is real; it’s not posed. The trouble with my pornography, it’s too chic.” The bodies in Hermito’s Children aren’t posed or chic, but they’re not rough either. They’re somewhere in between. One of my favorite moments comes near the end. A group of nude women form a  sculptural rectangle. It’s stoic, formal and literally objectifying. But then a face breaks from the group and erupts in an inaudible, punkish yell. I like the idea that incongruous, fiercely independent bursts of emotion could be a way to claim sexiness as your own.

Babak Golkar is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice, at its fundamental roots, takes aim to deconstruct, recontextualize and rearrange our perceptions of the world around us. Like Zen koans, Golkar’s work seems to arrive at new understandings by setting up impossible questions. At it’s core is a spirit of unbridled philosophical investigation; one that exhibits a Duchampian twist on the visual pun mixed with a Gestalt sense of multistability and reification. Golkar’s work understands both the destructive and regenerative aspects of perspective and shifting visions; and fundamentally contests the fixity of subject and object and space. And, like his work, Golkar’s visual language maneuvers between seemingly oppositional realms–East and West, politics and revolution, Modernity and antiquity, Minimalism and ornament—ultimately exposing not the dialectical relationship between polarities, but rather the poeticism in the world around us.

Sasha M. Lee: I wanted to begin with your series “Negotiating Space,” in which you use Nomadic Persian Carpets as a kind of architectural support, transforming its geometric twists and turns into rough blueprints for gleaming, white, three-dimensional models, rising from the woven geometric patterns. I thought the title and the conceptual framework of the work, for me, was actually a poetic way to summarize many of the themes that run through your work. Can you talk about how these forms interact, and why you chose to juxtapose these particular forms in this manner?

Babak Golkar: I’m interested in the alchemy of the art practice…arriving at gold, metaphorically of course, some sort of proposal for new understandings, the creation of new meaning. I like the idea of a particular piece transforming from two dimensions to three dimensions; something non-existent becoming a possible structure, and the subsequent interaction between the two. I like to talk about my work in terms of “becoming,” of interdependency between these two forms. In the case of the series “Negotiating Space” I don’t like to look at the nomadic Persian carpet as the origin of the whole thing per say…but rather one visual form constantly becoming the other and vise versa.

Hence the title—I like to use titles as materials in and of themselves– it is carefully chosen to hint at a state of uncertainty, a fluid or malleable state of existence. Really, I call the works “proposals,” rather than installations or sculptures.

Even though the carpet is technically the blueprint for the architectural scale-models, the structure adds a vertical dimension, which, as you move above the piece it collapses back to carpet once again. I like to talk about this idea of 2D to 3D, and its reversal; in particular the Duchampian aspect of playing with space. I’m inspired by Duchamp’s alchemical approaches to art making. In some ways I make a reference to Duchamp, in particular his piece, 3 Standard Stoppages. Do you know that piece?

SML: I think so, it’s the piece where he sort of makes a conceptual joke out on the meter?

BG: Yes. Duchamp takes three threads, each one meter long, and drops them onto a stretched canvas. The random shapes the threads created were fashioned into new sculptures that preserved the shape of how they fell. It takes your pre-existing notions…like what is a standard meter? And transforms it to a whole new understanding, one that undermines your rational perceptions. To me, that’s alchemy.

SML: So in many ways you are using both Eastern and Western ideologies equally, but by using these seemingly oppositional ideas in congruency with another, you are able to effectively speak to both, and critique both. In setting up these proposals though for imagined spaces, that seem to confound and complicate more than rationalize and resolve, there seems to be an underlying sense of humor that evolves out of them?

BG: Yes, a sense of humor is important in looking at my works. I find it sort of culturally specific…but also, a reaction towards the rationalism of the West. I personally find rationalism boring, I much prefer poeticism.

SML: I like the idea that humor draws the viewer in. One of my favorite interviews with Chris Ofili was describing this trick as the great seduction, using beauty as a sort of tool to draw the viewer in, put them at ease, allow the mind to unlock, and then allow them to come to the more politically & culturally charged meaning and metaphors sort of organically.

BG: Yes, exactly. It sounds like something I always say, which is that many things in art can be used as a “hook,” whether it’s humor, beauty, spectacle… these hook you right off the bat, allowing for multiple levels of engagement. I think laughter is the best, as viewers are literally opening their mouth, and bodies to the work. But above all, it does put the audience at ease and welcomes them.

SML: One piece I found had a very interesting effect on spatial understanding, or this epistemological context was in the piece “From God to Malevich.” As the title suggests, you riff off Malevich’s spiritual/Suprematist ideology surrounding the cube, in particular his own iconic “Black Square;” it seems almost a play on his temporal philosophies, in particular the weightless and relative “fourth dimension,” posited in opposition to the fixity of Renaissance perspective. And of course there’s a kind of humor that emerges, a kind of Duchampian joke of being able to visually travel “around the entire cube” by way of optical illusion, while physically travelling in a straight line from left to right.

BG: There is the idea of ghost image at play with the piece “From God to Malevich,” in which case the literal and conceptual space of the piece are determined by the notion of sight and vision. As you move in a linear direction from left to right of the diptych images, which are side by side, the lenticular black polygon changes shape, creating the illusion that a black cube is moving right in front of you, hence, the viewer moving around an imaginary cube. Beyond its “visuality,” this piece has to do with Malevich’s proposal of “art for art’s sake”…. considering the idea of ridding an object of art from any external meaning. I find this quite funny to be honest, especially for such a spiritual artist as Malevich! It sort of contradicts him. So in that light, I wanted to put the most significant external meaning to this piece, God. And of course by using the image of a black cube, I am referencing the Ka’aba, the most minimalist piece of architecture in Islam, credited to Abraham for building it as a house of God. If you buy it, you can have his house in your house!

SML: So you’ve created a kind of ironic interpretation of the black cube, religion, etc through the visual trope of the parallax. I absolutely love that the philosophical implications of parallax here. The textbook definition of parallax is the apparent displacement of an object, or a way to describe how objects can appear differently when viewed from different points of vision or lines of site. But I love the concept of parallax to sort of poetically describe your practice, the whole notion of shifting visions, playing within an ocular culture, and understanding that calculating is a fluid process, often containing many shifts. You are literally avoiding a fixity of perspective with this shifting painting.

BG: This makes sense in the idea of the overlapping and the overlaying, of understanding originating and moving between multiple realms.

I’m interested in layering iconographies. I’m hoping that what this piece does is push the viewer to realize that it’s nothing, that they’re basically tricked, or at least have experienced a shift in understanding.

SML: Hegel has said that “subject and object are inherently mediated so that an epistemological shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an ontological shift in the object itself.” In some ways you’ve elegantly “shifted” both the conceptual framework and perspective (again, literal and metaphorical of the cube. On this subject Lacan has also said, “the subject’s gaze is always-already inscribed into the perceived object itself, in the guise of its ‘blind spot,’ that which is ‘in the object more than object itself’, the point from which the object itself returns the gaze. Sure the picture is in my eye, but I am also in the picture.”

BG: Right now the black cube is a void: metaphorically, physically, literally, by way of the illusion that’s transposed. The idea of Ka’aba; it’s a cube and physically it’s empty, it’s nothing. And yet for these reasons it works immensely as a symbol. In that sense, this piece hopes to re-enact that, and parallel the concept that art for art’s sake in and of itself can also be nothing.

I think for me the relationship between subject and object is the driving force behind the works, it’s all about what these works are doing to the audience. I often get asked what my art means. But I’m actually interested less in my own positing of meaning into the works, but rather the moment of alchemy that occurs when somebody views the works.

Going back to the idea of parallax, by collapsing all these metaphors together, I am trying to construct a parallel between different systems of belief. Art can be a system of belief as we’ve seen; the object functions as a relic, and you fetishize it the same way you fetishize a religious relic. There is that parallel. All obsessions can be illusionary.

SML: It’s such an elegant solution to a seemingly impossible question; how do you condense multiple viewpoints into one, while at the same time exposing the shifting nature of the gaze in and of itself…how do you travel 360 degrees while only walking a straight line. What you have done crosses from the absurd to the rational, scientific and spiritual….I guess I’m curious how you came up with not just the solution to this…but also the question?

BG: Well, my first approach to the work was actually in a completely different format, though rooted in the same conceptual framework. At first, I was going to make a black cube from charcoal, by grinding charcoal down to a powder and re-casting into a mold of the cube. Then, I was going to use that as a material for drawing a cube from multiple perspectives. Then I would create a room that you entered, with all these frozen moments, and in the center of the room I would display the charcoal that was used to create the drawings.

This seemed somewhat complicated, and then I discovered the lenticular frames; it’s actually used predominantly in advertising. But it had all the elements that interest me within my work, the idea of shift, of 2D/3D, the gaze, the idea of alchemy and illusion. And so I thought fantastic, I can take 9 unique points of view and condense them into two simple paintings.

SML: In some ways, a good term may be visual puns. Or, the kind of philosophical practice of the Zen koan, in that they focus on the nature of truth, and a truth unobstructed by the oppositions or differentiations of language or view- so to come to an understanding by letting go of conceptual approaches, logic, rationality, so that new insight arises naturally.

BG:Yes- I think the idea of this visual pun is quite relevant, one that pokes at the deeper nature of things. But I always get accused of being ambitious! And I say accused, because people see these queries as something I can’t acheive or shouldn’t touch.

SML: There’s definitely something meditative, spiritually probing- it’s almost a humanist practice, in a sense, and concerned with kind of the historical, fundamental question that thinkers have tackled across the board—and that’s kind of, what’s the meaning of life or an individual in society…

BG: Yes, there’s the idea of what’s the role of us? Its a privileged situation to be conceptualizing culture, to be involved with culture on this level. I think Julian calls it a “zone of freedom.” We have this element of freedom and creative expression, but in exchange for what? What do we do with this free zone?

SML: I wanted to ask you about your work conceptualizing Western colonialist practice of representation of the East; specifically with regard to historical intermediacy in context of Said’s seminal text “Orientalism.” In particular, I’m thinking about his text on coevality, in which Eastern cultural production was placed in a non-synchronous “past,” and thus carrying a pejorative implication that Eastern artists work was submissive to a form of “critical” or conceptual prescription and thus unoriginal or decidedly non-Modern.

BG: The idea of coevality is very significant. I must say that some of my works have been looked at in that light. I have had conversations with some very well informed people in terms of contemporary art, and they have talked about my work as the kind of art that deals with “decorative” and the “ornate”, or some put it more politely and use the word “design”! This is a significant take on my work. I think it goes back to the idea of “make it exotic, or get rid of it” type of attitude. I mean, it doesn’t change anything for me or the way my work is done, but it shows that old systems are not so old after all. Imperialism and colonialism are very relevant to our time; they have just changed their form.

SML:In some ways it amazes me though, that this sort of dialectical relationship that posits the West as the center of rational thought and contemporary, relevant cultural production, and East as being firmly rooted in a mystical, decorative, irrational past, is still being furthered, even after Said sort of called attention to this problematic Euro-centric dichotomy here. As you show in the works, actually both encompass each other and are quite literally on top of each other as far as temporality, conceptually. I mean the Nomadic Persian Carpet is a symbol of cultural production, ingenuity and artistic practice that has survived long before the Renaissance and into today- it’s an icon really.

BG: I’m particularly influenced by them [the Nomadic Persian Carpet makers]…they are hugely modern, displaying an early reductivism and abstraction. These concepts have been there for centuries, and Modernists, not only have they looked at these cultures, but they have also heavily borrowed from them. Bauhaus artists and architects alike had looked at them. There are records of Gropius and Breuer, doing projects in Iran for example, Le Corbusier designing the Olympique Stadium in Baghdad. They must have looked at the context very carefully and studied the Eastern cultures. More importantly, I think, the works of the textile artists at the Bauhaus, like Anni Albers, Alma Buscher and Gunta Stölzl, not only were quiet directly linked to the patterns of the nomadic rugs, but also very significant in the development of the Bauhaus and the forms that came out of it. But as usual, you never hear about the women of the Bauhaus! What a surprise! I wonder if Said’s coevality concept is relevant to this situation too, women making textile!

Bauhaus aside, there’s a real story of ingenuity with the patterns in the nomadic carpets. It’s a fact that they developed the geometric patterns this way because they couldn’t compete with the more established carpet makers, the floral Kashan, Tabriz or Esfahan carpets, and they didn’t have the luxury of time and space to develop those things in months. The nomads had to move really quickly, and so they came up with their own expression, with the geometric shapes; floral patterns reduced to geometric shapes, to their “essence.” That’s exactly what Modernists did! They had to part away with the pre-existing accepted traditions, so economically they had to part away, and logically this was the step that they took.

SML:This is the ultimate irony; that many Modernist expressions that were being touted as novel, innovative, avant-garde and fundamentally Modern, where actually concepts that had been in movement and in use in other cultures before. So not only did they steal the forms, somehow they managed to deny ever borrowing from these outside sources, and then on top of it all, construct a philosophy that essentially framed their cultural production as being archaic, irrational, of the past and essentially not relevant. It’s interesting how they sort of got away with it. How is an African mask, with all its symbolism and geometric abstraction, use of pattern, shape and reductivism an anonymous relic that belongs in a natural history museum, while that same mask, painted and reappropriated by Picasso, becomes an icon of Modernist expression, the author and artist is firmly acknowledged, and it’s placed in the trope of the museum to reinforce the hierarchy.

BG: They don’t get treated the same way, and this really needs to be looked at institutionally and looked at critically. This was my line of thinking with the series “Impositions,” where I literally bleach and paint over a Persian Carpet with pure white paint, then frame it and hang it on the wall. I figure, if they don’t deserve to be looked at institutionally okay fine, I’ll paint them over. Fuck it! If they’re not worth looking at it, then let’s give them something that they think is worth looking at: a Monochrome. In the end though, the pattern still peeks through the paint.

SML:The process you underwent in this piece though, poetically, seems like it became an integral part of the final work’s meaning; I personally can’t help but imagine it as a kind of furious battle between polarized visual languages- minimalism and the decorative arts, etc. What’s nice is the final outcome encompasses both a kind of reductive and constructive aesthetic; a work of wavering Minimalism that could almost become a Rauschenberg, a Rothko, or even the infamous Ad Reinhardt black painting, forged from the ashes of the carpet. Of course the irony is that your piece is almost a comical expose on the limitations of removing all external reference from a work. “Impositions” seems to make the point of the sheer impossibility to obliterate context. It’s almost like Duchamp’s mustache on the Mona Lisa piece, a work that slyly questions the canon that came before.

BG: I was quite conscious of what I was doing. This piece is in line with those types of works, of Duchamp’s defacing of Mona Lisa and Rauschenberg erasing the drawing by de Kooning. It’s all vulgar gestures. But, for me it goes beyond the gesture, it’s more about the culture that here is being used as a material. In a way, “Impositions” operate exactly in reversal of those works. It just uses the same language.

SML:It’s quite a transgressive act, really- but I like to think the carpet had the last laugh as no matter how hard you tried, you really couldn’t remove all traces of its existence.

BG: Yes, the carpet had the last laugh, though it’s sort of a too little too late kind of thing. Funny thing; once it is defaced and enters the realm of contemporary art, the value of the carpet is multiplied in fact by being ruined.

SML: There’s something really backwards about that.

BG: Yes it’s sort of sickening, but this is something that I am working on, as far as expanding the understanding of both the work and the issues at hand.

You have to hear this story about a city called Baghdad in Northern California. A friend of mine was researching satellite cities, I believe, and got a permission to go and visit this site. Baghdad, CA is a massive piece of land restricted to a section of the US army, but I believe a private security firm runs it. The idea came from a private contractor- who was a Hollywood producer and now the director of the site. The army used to train soldiers through simulations similar to video games; remote offense. But when they began to face the insurgents, they found that when they took a step back, really in situ one-on-one negotiation, and simulacra such as these to train personnel worked best. Basically, the California site is a reconstruction of parts of Baghdad and is built as a training camp for one-on-one situations to train the army personnel. The funny thing is, they have Iraqi people there, imported from Iraq straight to this camp. They speak Arabic and interact as if they are back home. It’s fucked up. That’s besides my point, the point I was going to make is that when my friend went to clear everything at the office of the director of the camp, there was this Iraqi military outfit hanging on his wall. When the director walked in he proudly said that the outfit was Saddam’s personal uniform. He said his buddy brought it back as a gift when they first invaded Bagdad and raided Saddam’s palace. Isn’t that fucked up? So, not much has changed…

SML:Wow, that’s insane…but in some ways this ties into the layers of meaning; I mean this site-specific simulacra, of imposing one structure, one culture on the land of another ties into your idea of reverse recontextualization, right? Or this bizarre kind of cultural schizophrenia. I mean the premise that you can cut and paste a culture is kind of absurdist.

BG: Exactly, I consider my work “performative” and what I often perform through the works is what I like to call: “performing systems.” Sort of reconstructing what already exists, but by recontextualizing it in the realm of art, there is a chance for rethinking it. This one instance with the story is not unique. Is there much difference between Baghdad, CA and the city of Dubai? In the sense of imposition? Cultural and political impositions happen constantly, but the question is, are there any opportunities for negotiation?

SML:That’s interesting, it’s such a nice metaphor for the kind of physical disruptions you create, the notion of the trophy, cultural impositions, in particular with the aforementioned use of the carpets. There’s something undeniably bizarre ….

BG: And uncanny, I believe. With these works there is a sense of familiarity because of the objects I use, yet there are put together in a way, which creates estrangement. I think that shift is important…

SML:Within your works, it seems that there is a kind of tentative equal reverence…and irreverence towards the idioms, the ocular culture of the West, Modernism…all these expressions you approach with a kind of schizophrenic adulation and adversity?

BG: I do want to say yes… when was the last time anything like that was publically disclosed or even practiced? We’ve become so cynical and so rejective of anything that is considered an inspiration like Modernism. You have to kind of keep a distance….even if you are infatuated by the ideas. I’ve never admitted that, but I think there is truth to that. Becoming an institution is next to impossible though Beuys and Duchamp, figures like them did it. There are potentials and possibilities. For Beuys, also the idea of reconciliation is huge, the idea of healing as opposed to dealing…approaching real issues…through art. I guess there could be a slight sense of purity to it. But, that can come across as a naïve thing to say.

SML:Your work still, at a deeper level create physical disruptions to both the Modernism and perceptions of the East. By straddling the middle and using these tropes you sort of use one to call the other into question, and vice versa. It’s a beautiful kind of jiu jitsu really, to pair the two to complicate understandings of both.

BG: I think one of the very few talents that I have is the ability to compare and contrast things, putting things against one another to examine their relationship. Not only do I enjoy the process, but also I firmly believe that there is a potential in it for creating art, and subsequently new meaning.