Eleanor Antin as Eleanora Antinova in Before the Revolution at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1979.

“At this moment, my iPad is totally f–ing me up,” said Eleanor Antin last Sunday at the Hammer Museum, in Act V of Before the Revolution, a remaking of her one-woman ballet. Act V was actually called “The Interruption,” because the performers were slated to stop performing and the artist to come up on stage and muse about meaning and ownership. The iPad f-up was not scripted, however; the machine really was interrupting the planned interruption. “There’s something here that says ‘undo or cancel,’” she announced. “I don’t want to do either.” She could’ve played it off and attempted to finish her monologue without the script, but, instead she waited until a technician and, I think, her son had made her screen functional again. Then she continued.

Before the Revolution was first performed in 1979, and Antin played all the roles–12 in total–with the help of life-size, two-dimensional Masonite dolls. It told of an imaginary black ballerina (Eleanora Antinova) dancing in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and evoked the great hope that modern art could break down walls that, of course, never quite fell. Antinova, the talented black ballerina hopes to play the real, iconic roles, but is instead offered primitive ones (“For you we will re-stage Pocahontas,” Diaghilev says). Antin has always been interested in the self being more than just one thing, so, in 1974 when the modernist idea of the single identity still festered, impersonating a fictive character that couldn’t have existed felt radical.

Eleanor Antin as Eleanora Antinova in Before the Revolution at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1979.

Reactions to the original performance were apparently mixed.”I guess [people] wanted actors who were smooth and effortless, seamless, what they called professional,” Antin wrote in the program notes for the new Before the Revolution. This one, co-directed by Alexandro Segade of the collective My Barbarian, was, in some ways, seamless. It included a “professional” cast. Daniele Watts, who played Eleanor Antinova beautifully, has guested on network television. Matthew Henerson, who played Diaghilev, appeared in A Christmas Carol. They traveled across the stage and interacted with trained, practiced intentionality that isn’t often found in performances by artist who took “Theory and Practice” rather than, say, “Advanced Movement.”

Rehearsal for Eleanor Antin's Before the Revolution in 2012. Courtesy The Getty Research Institute.

But still, the whole program played out like an interruption, of history, of professionalism, of artistry, of expectations. It started out with Antinova learning to curtsey, to defer to her audience while still upholding her veneer, then follows the black dancer as she tries to wrangles for real, “white” roles (but “we love you because you are black,” Diaghilev protests), then as she impersonates Marie Antoinette and tries to rewrite the history of another woman trapped in misunderstanding and circumstances beyond her control. It was the tone of the performance, though, that made all the difference. Antinova, who remains optimistic though less and less naive, never lets go of the idea that her enthusiasm could change the system (of the Ballets Russes). And Antin, who during her “Interruption” said that she was going to make this ballet about the ever-misunderstood Marie Antoinette “her ballet, my ballet and fill the stage with credit, my credit,” never let go of the idea that a self could become a multitude that together takes back history.

Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011, from Gagosian Gallery website, 28 January 2012. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

First things first – I despise the premise of the show. But I do respect the audacity it takes to try and pull something like this off. This was never the show intended to ignite respect and admiration for Hirst – that show is slated to open at Tate Modern this spring. The Complete Spot Paintings instead feels more like a scientific experiment, one of Hirst’s macabre vitrine works spun out into real-life testing grounds, intended to divide the camps into those who follow and those who resist.

For a few moments, let’s try and separate the works from the madness that surrounds them.

Damien Hirst, Levorphanol, 1995, household gloss on canvas. © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2012, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates.

I am willing to admit that I have always had a soft spot for these paintings. As a wide-eyed student, before learning about Hirst and his tyrannical rule over British contemporary art, I found myself lusting after a candy-coloured work in New York, instantly hooked by its simplicity and destabilising aesthetics. On a canvas of undulating colour with nowhere for the eyes to rest, I found the spots both agitating and enlivening. Dabbling in pharmacology at the time, I was determined to make sense of the work by doing what humans do best – comparing it to that which I already knew well. My inherent drive to find meaning in chaos lost out in the end – in this case, the art didn’t have anything groundbreaking to say about science, nor science about the art. The relationship between the colours, the arrangement and the title was simply one of randomness and chance. It was a matter of order being imposed upon disorder – a fundamental truism of both science and art.

The spot paintings are nothing more than colour, calculations, sheer surface and mass production – Hirst’s dissociative attempt at being more like a scientist, in the way that Andy Warhol wanted to be more like a machine. The paintings stand alone as visually intriguing and brutally honest – they do not purport to have any answers or be something they are not. Hirst is not trying to save contemporary art any more than the pharmaceutical companies are trying to cure cancer – it doesn’t suit either of their ends.

The Compete Spot Paintings, as a public spectacle, is positively cringe-worthy. I believe, however, that the paintings, as paintings, are quite good. Yes, perhaps it is a bit of nostalgia that kicks in, but there is something about sitting in front of the work that I still find invigorating.

I, for one, am quite happy to be seeing spots.

Do you remember your first time you saw dry ice? Mine was in a punch bowl as part of a Halloween school dance. There was something inherently magical about the material; when I first encountered it I kept blinking, waiting for what looked like an illusion to reveal itself. Watching Judy Chicago’s revival of ‘Disappearing Environments as Sublime Environment’ revives that initial excitement and gives it poetic understanding. Chicago teamed up with Materials & Applications to revive her 1968 ‘Disappearing Environments as Sublime Environment’ performance, originally by Chicago, Lloyd Hamrol, and Eric Orr. The piece consisted of 25 tons of dry ice into pyramid formations that shrouded the surrounding environment in a hazy fog. At sunset, the installation was incited with road flares and left to disintegrate over the following four days until it disappeared.

Chicago described the medium of dry ice as “a metaphor for the preciousness of life.” The performance piece alters the landscape of the Santa Monica Barker Hanger, turning an airport structure into an outdoor dream laboratory in which an experiment had gone awry. The dry ice creations are a combination of architectural pyramids and apocalyptic wedding cakes. Continuing in Chicago’s language of confusing typically masculine and feminine fields, traditionally male pyrotechnic flares gave way to a pinkish rolling fog that softened and feminized the landscape. The piece was a stunning addition to the Art Los Angeles Contemporary art fair, and can be seen in all its glory in the video below:

Installation view, a LAND Exhibition: "Perpetual Conceptual: Echoes of Eugenia Butler." Photograph courtesy of Danielle Sommer.

Thanks to the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), the Getty Center, and Pacific Standard Time, for the next three months, Butler’s influence will be on display in three West Hollywood exhibition spaces, at 8126 – 8132 Santa Monica Boulevard, just about a mile from the Eugenia Butler Gallery’s original location, 615 La Cienaga. Titled Perpetual Conceptual: Echoes of Eugenia Butler, the show is both a primer — with works from Paul Cotton, Lawrence Weiner, Ed Keinholz, et al — and an homage, with curatorial stylings that recall many of the makeshift exhibition spaces of EBG’s era. In short, LAND, “a public art initiative committed to curating site- and situation-specific contemporary art projects,” chooses exhibition locations based on specific projects rather than maintaining a single venue. Perpetual Conceptual‘s three venues are located one right after another on the edge of WeHo, in a small, unassuming strip mall, right next to a donut shop.

Joseph Kosuth, "Nothing," 1967, photostat. Estate of Eugenia P. Butler. A LAND Exhibition: "Perpetual Conceptual: Echoes of Eugenia Butler." Photo courtesy of Danielle Sommer.

The bulk of the exhibition comes from Butler’s personal collection, now in the hands of her granddaughter. Joseph Kosuth’s photostat Nothing, 1967, is perhaps the most immediately familiar work: a deep-black square, in the center of which is written the definition of “nothing” in cream-colored font. There are also several pieces of typewritten and hand-drawn ephemera by Lawrence Weiner containing instructions for creating specific artworks, such as “One standard air force dye marker thrown into the sea.” There’s quite a bit of work on display, including both primary and secondary artifacts. William Wiley’s Movement to Black Ball Violence, 1968, a ball of black friction tape made in response to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death, remains poignant forty-four years later, even more so due to the letter of instruction Wiley typed to go along with the piece, which asks that anyone who wishes to blackball violence add 150 feet of tape to the ball.

William T. Wiley, "Movement to Black Ball Violence, 1968-9," friction tape and wood; linoleum on metal. Collection of the artist. A LAND Exhibition: "Perpetual Conceptual: Echoes of Eugenia Butler." Photo courtesy of Danielle Sommer.

Though this particular piece is “closed” (Wiley called an end to it in 1969), the genius of LAND’s exhibition strategy is that many pieces and artists will be reactivated or looked at in depth using the two other exhibition rooms that adjoin the group space. Currently, Eugenia P. Butler’s work is on display in the concept space, and there will be restagings of Dieter Roth’s Steeple Cheese, 1970 — Roth’s first exhibition in the United States in which he packed 37 suitcases full of cheese to rot, with one to be opened each day — and Ed Keinholz’s Watercolors, 1968, a bartering project. Keinholz painted a group of watercolor paper with “prices” (such as “Timex Electric Watch”) and invited people to trade him the object for the watercolor. This past weekend also saw the restaging of Eric Orr’s Wall Shadow, 1970, in the back parking lot, a performance piece in which Orr took a palette of cinderblock, built a wall, traced and painted its shadow with gray paint, and then dissassembled everything so that only the painted shadow was left. Like Wall Shadow and the Eugenia Butler Gallery itself, my bet is that Perpetual Conceptual will be brief in its physical existence but long in influence.

This week, let’s email helpdesk@dailyserving.com with your questions (you can use a free anonymizer like Anonymouse.org if you want) and save the comments section for continuing the conversation on the topic at hand.  All submissions will be treated as anonymous and become the property of Daily Serving.

Your counselor, hard at work.

I am a curator and was recently contacted by an artist whom I have never met, who was recommended to me by a mutual acquaintance (another artist). The artist is inviting me to do a studio visit, but after looking at the artist’s website, I know that I am completely uninterested in seeing the work in person. I would like to decline the request in a way that is honest but kind, without necessarily making an explicit value judgment about the work. (I realize that expressing an opinion from my position holds a specific kind of weight.) I want to avoid wasting anyone’s time by doing a studio visit that will not yield anything for either of us. From an artist’s perspective, how can a curator best handle this situation?

This is a great question, one that many of us on the receiving end have thought about long and hard. Personally, I take my rejections straight up (with an escapist murder-mystery chaser), because the perennially used and ever-ambiguous “I’m very busy right now,” leaves me wondering, Do I ask again later? How much later? Or should I understand somehow that “busy” actually means “go away forever”? One might spend days second-guessing the intention of such messages and ultimately end up more depressed than if there had simply been a polite “No, thank you.”

As always, I thought I’d better ask around in case my preferences aren’t the norm. Surprisingly, everyone I asked said you should be candid, but in varying degrees. The artists I queried are all in various stages of their careers, from fresh out of school to seasoned professionals with gallery representation and long CVs. Despite the differences in experience, the sentiment was the same: don’t beat around the bush. Some had great suggestions for how they’d like their “no” served: hot, room-temperature, and/or with a side of kindness.

One artist told me, “I’d say give it to them straight. It was the artist that did the contacting and so they should be ready to be rejected, it’s already happened to them many times if they’ve been an artist for long. Maybe something along the lines of, ‘Thanks for your kind invitation. I enjoyed looking at the work on your website but it is not a great match for my curatorial direction. I don’t believe that a studio visit from me would prove to be of any benefit to you or your work so in order not to waste any of your time I must decline. I wish you the best and thank you again for the offer.’”

Yes, it's a negative.

Another suggested, “I think if the curator wrote the artist an email saying, ‘I looked at your work on the website and while it is interesting (add whatever adjective to soften the blow), I’m not sure that its a great fit for the work that I generally show,’ I think the artist would find a way to understand.’”

If you’d prefer to keep your rejection more open-ended, you could try, “Thank you for contacting me regarding a potential studio visit. At this time, I am not involved in any projects that would be suitable for your work and I prefer to make studio visits with a specific goal/endpoint/situation/exhibition in mind. I do encourage you to keep me updated on new bodies of work.”

An additional idea that almost everyone mentioned was your ability as a curator to point the artist in the right direction by supplying the names of other curators who might be interested. Obviously this is not always possible (for example, if the work is of a quality that you would be embarrassed to recommend); but barring the truly awful, if you can help the artist create a relationship that would be mutually beneficial, then you will have done two people (the artist and the other curator) a great service. One respondent to my query suggested, “I’m not the best person to review your work but perhaps ping these people [insert name here].”

Another artist would like to remind you that looking at work on a website isn’t the same as seeing it in person, and that sometimes there is more to a studio visit than finding a perfect aesthetic match. This person commented, “Above all, I would like for someone to come do a quick visit. You could say, ‘I have about 15 minutes to stop by,’ if the concern is wasting time. Talking with someone is never a waste of time in my opinion no matter how busy you are, and who knows what kind of relationship will develop—even if you still don’t like the work. There may be something about the work that is never seen in image form or that person may be able to contribute in some other way beyond the typical curator-artist relationship.”  Another artist, thinking about this issue more long-term, added, “I would always consider if there is anything I could stand to benefit from a studio visit or meeting. If time is really of the essence, I would tell them that I have limited time for studio visits, but I would be interested in seeing what the work looks like in, say, a year, if time permits. If the artist is dedicated enough to follow up in a year, I would genuinely reevaluate the offer and take a look at the work again.”

To steal a line from one response, “Artists know that rejection is part and parcel of the field we have chosen.” It’s better for everyone involved in the arts—artists and curators alike—if we spend our time and energy with people who can support our endeavors.

How would you advise a young artist to stay mentally healthy in his/her studio? Dealing with extended solitary time and rejection can be tough. Tips?

I gave some ideas about creating a peer group in this column a few weeks ago, to which I would add that you should be getting regular feedback on your work if you want to avoid that “toiling in Siberia” feeling. One way to get feedback is to contact local curators in your area and ask them for studio visits that focus on a “cold read” of your work. You might want to hunt down some similarly-young curators for this, so that you can all essentially practice on each other. They’ll be flattered to be asked and you might make some new friends.

Dealing with rejection is going to depend a bit on your personality and circumstances, but the one thing that you must learn to do is not internalize the negativity such that it affects your practice. Historically (and in Hollywood films), our models of oft-rejected artists have been bitter egotists, weepy depressives, and the drug-addicted. May I suggest that you sidestep these choices?  Aside from being unhealthy and hard on your immediate circle of friends, they’re all quite clichéd and boring.

Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts, 1955. Encaustic and collage on canvas with objects, 51 x 44 in

But how to avoid getting to that dark place? Life as an artist is full of rejection, so it’s best to learn how to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune early on. One method that seems to work quite well is to apply for everything. It is time consuming, but can be quite effective. Using this strategy, when you get the next letter that begins with “Dear Artist” and ends with “…but we wish you good luck in the future” you can safely move your thoughts to the next possibility and not dwell on that particular unfavorable answer. Move forward, and concentrate on opportunities.

A little commiseration can help you lick your wounds, too. If you’ve got a peer network that you trust, have a rejection dinner party where everyone brings their form letters and reads aloud (I’m certain there’s a drinking game to be invented from this). It helps so much to know that you’re not alone, and this applies to everyone from a freshman performance artist to the wretched three people who did not win the Turner Prize last year. Their work hangs in the Tate and I’m still pretty sure that they all went home on award night and got out the gin and the telephone.

I think it was the writer Natalie Goldberg who suggested that all rejections should be countenanced with the mantra, “So what, so what, so what?” but if this seems too insouciant for the novice, I suggest the more earnest, “Next time, next time, next time.” Don’t let a negative reply take the joie from your vivre. And if nothing else works, try to remember that “no” is an extremely small word: only two letters, a single syllable, and utterly forgettable.

Anthony Discenza, The Way It Is, 2009. Digital print, 24 x 18 inches

HELP DESK is sponsored in part by the generosity of KQED arts in San Francisco.

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.”

Image: Scott Thorpe (left) and Brett MacFadden at the wrapping party for THE THING Quarterly, Issue 15: MacFadden and Thorpe.

A central tenet to emerge from Conceptual art in the 1960s was the perception of language as an object: a visual form of signification that requires us to negotiate its materiality in order to locate its meaning. In this process of negotiation, language was no different than any other artistic medium. The tactile quality of a page and typographical arrangement of text were recognized to be as active in creating meaning as the words printed on them. If reading was a set of physical gestures that unfolds linearly—left to right, top to bottom, from one page to the next—the interruption or reordering of any of these gestures led to a reconsideration and new consciousness of the act. In other words, language was set in motion, built, excavated, or incanted instead of written, and to read these texts was to experience them spatially.¹ The inheritance we’ve received from these investigations into language as object is an inherent understanding of the performative nature of reading and, concurrently, of a reader’s role as co-conspirator in creating meaning.

As art historian Gwen Allen notes in the introduction to her book Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art, beginning in the 1960s, art magazines went beyond their documentary purpose to become alternative sites that presented works of art. They placed the materiality of art and the materiality of language into congruous relationships and transformed those relationships into performative experiences. For example, 0 to 9, a mimeographed poetry magazine published by poet and performance artist Vito Acconci and poet Bernadette Mayer between 1967 and 1969, aspired to explore language as a visual, phonetic, and kinetic form and featured contributions from both poets and conceptual artists. The magazine’s issues featured pages densely covered in text or left nearly blank, typesetting that suggested motion across the page, and even, for the cover of Issue 5, a sheet of paper crumpled and then flattened again. Preceding his transition from poet to performer, Acconci made experiments with typography and layout, motivated by what he described as a restlessness with the page that compelled him into a state of action. (“I couldn’t be on the page any more. Language took me out onto the street. I was moving on the page, now I wanted to move on the sidewalk, on the street. I was more thinking of the street as a field of activity rather than the page.”²)

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Pipilotti Rist, Pour Your Body Out, 2009, installed at MoMA.

“A kiss puts form into slow and stretchy motion,” writes Sylvia Lavin. A kiss “renders geometry fluid.” Our relationship to buildings can be like that too — slow, stretchy, fluid. So Lavin suggests in Kissing Architecture, her new book with a bright pink cover and a delightfully sensual take on architectural criticism.

Lavin is interested in that problem that plagues design disciplines “as a net result of convergent histories of capital and culture”: should contemporary architecture establish itself as autonomous or work to engage its public, and which aim is nobler?

Kissing Architecture begins with a description of Pipilotti Rist’s Pour Your Body Out, an embracing 2008-2009 installation in MoMA’s atrium, where a fleshy, floral, 25 foot high video projection played out. Visitors could sit on pillows on the ground or on a round seating “island” the artist designed. The installation occupied space designed by architect Yoshio Taniguchi as an addition to MoMA in the late 1990s, which is, argues Lavin, decidedly banal and meant to push people through (the “peripatetic visitor” becomes almost an obstacle). Pour Your Body Out didn’t subvert Taniguchi’s banally tall white walls, though; it just offered a “vivid moment,” a “pulsating pink swerve.”

William Leavitt, California Patio, 1972. Mixed media construction. Dimensions variable. Collection of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Courtesy of William Leavitt.

L.A. artist William Leavitt, whose 2011 MOCA retrospective made a good number of year-end “best of” lists, has since the 1960s devised space for such vivid moments. He’s more interested in the vocabulary of interior and furniture design than architecture, and his “Theater Objects,” sets and curtains and props, tend to be conventionally modern but set up in such a way that they’re also all about the gap between “modern,” “progressive” taste and real people’s real lives.

Leavitt, though much better known in the visual art world than theater, has long written plays that take place inside his sets. One of them, The Particles (of White Naugahyde), played last night in Margo Leavin Gallery’s Annex and will play again tonight and next weekend. Though Leavitt wrote the play in 1979, it hasn’t been performed before and the set is newly built and characteristically minimalist chic — rock wall, glass table, slick white couch — and the plot retro.  A family is stuck in a desert colony, auditioning to be among those sent by NASA to live in outer space. There’s nothing pretentious about the story or the script; none of the dialogue attempts to be needlessly profound and the absurdity is more Modern Family than Harold Pinter (at one point the characters try to scientifically bond with each other by making arm gestures and saying “hydrogen,” “copper,” “aluminum,” etc.).

William Leavitt, set design for The Particles (of White Naugahyde. 2012. Courtesy Margo Leavin Gallery.

But the living room set is a little pretentious, as the family’s neighbors point out during the play, and all throughout the three acts, that slick white couch keeps making characters uncomfortable. They find it sticky, slippery, cold. Then in the last scene, a mohair blanket arrives (the circumstances behind its arrival are a little bit complicated) and is draped over the couch. It’s this lumpy furriness that finally allows the characters to relax. I love that idea: a bit of tactile, sensual material can be redemptive, at least for a moment or two.

Friendship of Nations: Polish-Shi’ite Showbiz by Slavs and Tatars presents a re-imagination of an Iranian Polish Solidarity. Even to an eye unfamiliar with Iranian and Polish traditions, the strong reference to craft is apparent. On entering the dome-shaped gallery, the works appear to be part of a commemoration, with large and colorful handcrafted banners and woven objects.

Installation with banners by Slavs and Tatars, 'Friendship of Nations: polish shi'ite showbiz'. Courtesy the artists, Kraupa-Tuskany, Berlin. © Yana Foque

‘Pajaks’, crafted according to local customs and hang from the ceiling, are part of an annual Polish harvest celebration. In context of local customs, several of these ‘pajaks’ are made with Christmas lights, yarn, glass balls and even a Christmas tree.

Slavs and Tatars, 'Resist resisting god', 2010. Courtesy the artists, Kraupa-Tuskany, Berlin. © Yana Foque

Mirrored mosaics were invented by the Persians in the 7^th century to distinguish themselves from Arab neighbours. They are today exported by the Iranian republic as a symbol of its ideology. These are reconstructed in a recognisable form of a painting and when viewed from an angle, reveal the words “Resist Resisting God”.

Installation by Slavs and Tatars, 'Wheat Mollah', 2011. Courtesy the artists, Kraupa-Tuskany, Berlin. © Yana Foque

Copies of a newspaper, 79.89.09, are displayed in a reading area with woven carpets and cushions. 79.89.09 points to three historical dates – the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the 1989 Fall of Communism and 2009 Financial Crisis – as points to understand our world today. While drawing out influences and coincidences between Iran and Poland, 79.89.09 also sheds light on the use of crafts. Slavs and Tatars explore the values evoked through crafts as revolutionary potential, from the mysticism conveyed by the 1979 Iranian Revolution to the steady and painstaking efforts of Solidarność, the Polish movement that peacefully brought down the Communist regime.

By fusing crafts with contemporary materials such as Christmas decorations and forms of display including encasements and wall installations, the exhibition situates this revolutionary potential amidst recent and ongoing protests, provoking questions on how one could engage in movements for change.

Installation view van Brummelen & de Haan, 'Subi dura a rudibus', 2010. Courtesy the artists, Motive Gallery, Amsterdam. © Yana Foque

Located next to Friendship of Nations: Polish-Shi’ite Showbiz is Subi dura a rudibus, a film by Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan that similarly plays on interactions from representations of history. A diptych from sequential representations of the 1535 conquest of Tunis by emperor Charles V, it pairs together images of paintings by Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen who accompanied Charles V and depicted the conquest for tapestry weavers, with images of the eventual tapestries. The pairing throws into relief divergent representations, questioning if representation can be accepted as objective truth, particularly as Vermeyen himself is part of the battle scene.

Lonnie Van Brummelen & Siebren De Haan, 'Subi dura a rudibus', film still, 2010. Courtesy the artists, Motive Gallery, Amsterdam. © Yana Foque

While Subi dura a rudibus questions the prospect and possibility of truth in the wake of interpretations, Friendship of Nations: Polish-Shi’ite Showbiz harnesses the potential of imaginative interpretations to reinstate values embodied within craft and folklore, invigorating dialogue on how we can respond to present-day tensions.

Stan Douglas, Flame, 1947, 2010. Digital silver print mounted on Dibond aluminum. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

To make the images for Midcentury Studio, a selection of which are at The Power Plant in Toronto until 4 March, Stan Douglas not only constructed a working period studio stocked with authentic equipment from the post-war North America that these images ‘document’, he also invented an impressively resourceful fictional character, a working photojournalist of the time, to make them. Douglas cast himself in the role, and in an extended interview with David Balzer, he talks about the photographer of these pictures in the third person, discussing the work with a distance that is disorienting and fascinating.

Installation of Stan Douglas: Entertainment at The Power Plant, Toronto, 10 December, 2011 - 4 March, 2012. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.

With characteristically intensive research and attention to detail, Midcentury Studio looks at the years just after the war, 1945-51, a time still twinged with darkness and desperation, but one looking forward to the optimism of 1950s  America, when a working hack with a camera might just as easily shoot a murder victim  or a brawl to sell to the papers as he might a cricket match or a magician to run in a magazine feature or as a print advertisement. Vancouver stands in, as it does so well, as anytown, its Hollywood North reputation perfectly matched for this exercise in projection and role-play.

Stan Douglas, Cricket Pitch, 1951, 2010. Digital silver print mounted on Dibond aluminum. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

In the curated selection at The Power Plant, the emphasis is on entertainment, as depicted by pleasures and distractions like magic tricks, carnival acts, sporting events, dancers, and the staff of a nightclub – a striking wall installation of noir-ish types with uncomfortably steady gazes. The project was in part inspired by Douglas’s engagement with images from the Black Star Collection, now housed at Ryerson University, and some of them will also be on view when the much-anticipated new Ryerson Image Centre opens next fall.

Installation of Malabar People, 1951, in Stan Douglas: Entertainment at The Power Plant, Toronto, 10 December, 2011 - 4 March, 2012. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.

While there’s often only a hazy sense of the narrative contexts in which these pictures would have come to be made and helped to illustrate, there is also an incisive relationship to a longer history of photography as document – not only to the press photography of Weegee, clearly an influence, but also subtler nods to the motion studies of Edweard Muybridge, the typologies of August Sander, and even a kind of retrospective foreshadowing of the kind of images of that could have inspired Diane Arbus.

Stan Douglas, Dancer II, 1950, 2010. Digital silver print mounted on Dibond aluminum. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York.

The series seems, significantly,  to be about this trajectory, suggesting the slow slide of the documentary picture. Douglas casts us back to this era of a nobler photojournalism, a stark contrast to the ubiquity and the quick and cheerful aesthetic of images on facebook and flickr. But many of the works here also suggest the duplicitous, or at least enterprising, nature of the documentary photographer, and the ease with which the captured subject can  move toward the constructed object. Like a slight of hand, unbelievable and undeniable all at once.

Stan Douglas, Rings, 1947, 2010. Digital silver print mounted on Dibond aluminum. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York.

#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.

“Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and of making it obsolete.” – Susan Sontag

In her 1977 essay, “The Image-World,” Susan Sontag wrote that the practice of photography – and the overabundance of images that come along with it – leave us desensitized to the “real” world. Despite the fact that photographs are considered traces of their subject, we typically see photographs as independent, material objects – separate from their original subjects and somehow more palatable. They even occupy a specific moment of time, different from our own, turning the present into the past and the past into the present.

But Sontag was writing about the role of the photograph as she knew it, which never included sculpture, or photographs functioning not just as traces of objects but as actual simulations, or three-dimensional copies.  The last year has seen a rise in artists working with photography in sculpture, with more than a few of these artists choosing to juxtapose “real” objects with their 2- or 3-dimensional, photographic copies. Is there a difference between images functioning like this in the world and “the image-world” that Sontag describes? Or are they one and the same?

Jerry McMillan, "Wrinkle Bag," 1965. Black and white photographic bag construction with shelf and Plexiglas cover. 12.75 x 11.75 x 7 inches.

Ironically, even as Sontag was puzzling over “The Image-World” and the rest of the essays that would become On Photography, searching to delineate a niche in the fine art world for photography, curator Peter Bunnell took an even larger step. In 1970, Bunnell launched “Photography into Sculpture” at the Museum of Modern Art, “the first comprehensive survey of photographically formed images used in a sculptural or fully dimensional manner.”

The show included a work by Jerry McMillan called “Wrinkle Bag” (1965) – perhaps one of the first of its kind. “Wrinkle Bag” was not merely a photograph, but a high-quality, black-and-white reproduction of the texture of crumpled paper, cut into the shape of a brown paper lunch sack. In its recent re-manifestation at Los Angeles’ Cherry and Martin Gallery, “Wrinkle Bag” looked eerily contemporary, perhaps because this type of photographic reproduction has resurfaced recently in the works of contemporary artists, like Urs Fischer, amongst others.

Installation view of "Who's Afraid of Jasper Jonnson," Tony Shafrazi Gallery, 2008.

In 2008, Fischer collaborated with Gavin Brown on the exhibition “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?”, at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. Fischer and Brown hired a photographer to document the gallery’s previous show – “Four Friends”, which included work by Donald Baechler, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf – and then wallpapered the gallery with the images, printed in a 1:1 scale.  The results were chaotic, with the photographed work punctuating, even interrupting, the current exhibit.  There were even moments where a photographed object was juxtaposed against the original, as in the case of the security guard.

Fischer repeated this technique last year for his solo exhibition at the New Museum, taking photographs of the entire third floor, including the ceiling, and then re-papering those same walls at a 1:1 ratio. 2-d images of the side of the exit sign line up with the exit sign itself; the ceiling is covered with a huge photograph that includes two-dimensional images of flickering flourescent lights, right next to the lights themselves.

Urs Fischer, "Marguerite de Ponty," 2010. Installation view. Mixed Media.

By all reports, this was a challenging room to walk through, although reactions varied – many went through to quickly and missed the minor details. Conversely, the reward for those who took their time was an unsettled feeling brought on by the proximity of “real” and “unreal” copies of the same object. There is a visceral difference between experiencing a photographic image on its own and as an image returned to its original context, or placed back in the image world as an object.

Perhaps the most intriguing of these artists is Miriam Bohm, who has completed multiple series – Inventory and Areal, for example – in which she photographs objects such as packages, arranges those photographs in ways that echo the original arrangement, and then rephotographs them. The result is a complex layer of images, leaving you, as the viewer, with nothing concrete save the object of the photograph itself. In the words of Brendan Fay, writing for Artforum, “In Bohm’s hands, it is the photograph’s presence as an object that provides the most immediate basis for apprehending the image it contains.”

Miriam Böhm, "Inventory XII," 2010. Chromogenic color print. 23.6 x 17.7 inches. Edition of 2 with 2 APs.

“Our unlimited use of photographic images not only reflects but gives shape to this society, one unified by the denial of conflict.”

Sontag was curious about the image-world she described, including whether it was the only variety possible. She even proposed an ecology of images, or a mitigating of sorts. In reality, we’ve gone the opposite direction – more images surround us than ever – but when artists insist on re-inserting an image back into its original context, or even threaten to use it to replace an object, it’s hard not to believe there’s a shift afoot.

Your counselor, hard at work.

Some galleries provide artists with information on who is purchasing their artwork…others do not. What’s up with that? I feel like smaller galleries are super paranoid of artists selling out from under them while bigger more stable galleries offer full contact information to artists.

I’m not a gallerist, so I asked around to see if anyone could help me shed a little light on this subject. Catharine Clark, of Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, generously provided this information for me to share:

“We disclose the name of a collector to an artist when a sale is made. Often collectors and artists enjoy meeting one another, and we help to facilitate that when it’s possible. We disclose additional contact information when artists are in the process of determining what work can be available for a museum exhibit, for example, or if they ask for it because they want to write a thank you note or correspond in some way with the collector. Some collectors are very private, and the information about them is proprietary, so we evaluate each request as it is made and determine whether the use of the information will be respectful. We have had the unfortunate experience of the information being inappropriately shared and the collectors have then felt betrayed. Since we work on loan agreements with the museum registrars, collectors, and artists, usually it is at that point that all contact information becomes most transparent. We also maintain relationships with the collectors so that we are able to follow the whereabouts of work as people move or re-sell their collections.”

Nathan Lynch, Alternative Therapies, 2010. Found object, reclaimed fir

Of course, Catharine Clark Gallery is an established and highly professional operation. You might find a different set of standards at work with another, smaller or newer gallery. While I can’t speak to the “paranoia” of a gallery, I can offer some advice to artists just starting out: ask for a contract that specifically states that you need to be given collector information when a sale is made. I do believe that you have a right to know where your work is going.

I also want to stress that you don’t want to use collector information in an improper way. It would be indecorous and short-sighted to pester your collector, or to try to make a direct-from-studio sale next time and skip the gallery’s commission. If you’re represented, don’t ever ever do this; and if you’re not represented and the buyer connected with you through a gallery, then you owe the gallery a percentage of the sale anyway—unless you like bad blood and never want to show there again. But it’s not a bad idea to have at least basic collector information so that you can keep a spreadsheet on the whereabouts of your work. That way when PS1 offers you a retrospective and then makes you track down and then pick up all your own work—like they did to a certain unnamed young female artist recently—you can find it all. I also refer readers to Chapter 13, “Gallery Representation” of the excellent Art/Work by Heather Darcy Bhandari and Jonathan Melber, which goes into more detail about the ins and outs of working with galleries.

Kenneth Noland, Untitled (Target), 1963. Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

I have large breasts. I recognize that this affords me some extra opportunities, considering most of the dealers I have worked with are straight men. I should add that I think my work is strong. Should I feel guilty about the advantages my sex appeal might grant me?

At first glance, your question seems rather straightforward: Can I use my boobs to get ahead? And the answer, of course, is yes, you can. But I worry about you, buxom lass, because I wonder what “extra opportunities” you’re talking about. Is this a euphemism for being shtupped on the casting couch or just an invitation to show at an art fair? If it’s the former, please do be careful, I’d hate to read a follow-up letter about a chesty misunderstanding. If it’s the latter, I’m not entirely convinced. Your assumption that large tatas give you an edge is a smidge dubious; how do you know it’s not just the power of your “strong” work? Because believe it or not, there are a lot of men out there for whom a pair of big knockers is a non-issue. It’s been forty years since Dow Corning first introduced breast implants to the market, so it’s not as if large breasts are hard to find these days, even in the art world.

Marina Abramovic, Balkan Erotic Epic, 2005. Still from video

Remember that a condition that is emphasized in the mind may not be such a big deal in reality. Consider this: you probably use your smile often. Your happy grin might possibly contribute to your sex appeal. When you smile at your dealers, do you consider the advantages of your teeth, which I’m guessing are clean(ish) and all still in your mouth? Do you feel guilty about using your lips and teeth? Probably not, but you have to admit that they are a physical advantage that others may not have. As ridiculous as that sounds, I want you to consider your breasts as just one more attribute, like shiny white teeth or your height or red hair, that may or may not have a bearing on your relative position in the world. Otherwise, I fear you run the risk of overestimating the advantage of your chest and underestimating the energy of your work.

Sophia Loren and Jayne Mansfield

My final answer is this: you’re not going to feel guilty, Miss Balcony, because you’re going to continue to make good art and get it in front of the people who need to see it. If your breasts provide a pleasing place for a dealer’s eye to occasionally rest when taking a breather from goggling at your incredible work, so be it, as long as you’re comfortable with that. You may use this if you like, but I beg you not to believe, not for one minute, that this is the source of your power. You are an artist, not a stripper, and may you never mistake one profession for the other.

HELP DESK is sponsored in part by the generosity of KQED arts in San Francisco.

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.

Bibiana Suárez, Aves raras (mexicanos) no. 1 / Strange Birds (Mexicans) no. 1, 2005-2011, archival inkjet print on aluminum panel (map courtesy of the University of Chicago’s Special Collections), 24 x 24" & Bibiana Suárez, Aves raras (mexicanos) no. 2 / Strange Birds (Mexicans) no. 2, 2005-2011, archival inkjet print (map courtesy of the University of Chicago’s Special Collections), 24 x 24"

2012 has arrived and it can mean only one thing: the apocalypse. Will the End Times be ushered in by the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar reaching its end date? We can’t be sure until late December! What has become painfully certain, however, is that we are in an election year. And, while the economy looms large on the minds of most Americans, immigration is not far behind. Will America eventually choose a candidate who would grant “amnesty” (read: anything resembling legal status or *gasp citizenship!) to the millions of undocumented people living and working in this country, ushering in the likely demise of the U.S.? Or, will we the people elect a man patriotic enough to send all the illegal Cuban, Chinese, Honduran, and Southeast Asian immigrants back to where they came from; namely Mexico? The fate of the country and the soul of freedom hang in the balance!

At least that would seem to be the choice as presented by the Republican candidates during the never-ending cycle of G.O.P. primary debates. The language surrounding immigration, espoused by the candidates as well as other jingoist hardliners, has become so vitriolic and so reduced that hyperbole strategically crowds out any sober dialogue that addresses the complexity of the issue or pathos for the individuals most effected by immigration enforcement.

Bibiana Suárez’s exhibition entitled Memoria (Memory) at the Hyde Park Art Center attempts to catalyze that discussion through playful moderation. Tracing the influence of Latino culture in America, Suárez expresses hope and frustration while eluding anything that would resemble rhetorical bombast. The show is such a disarmingly tempered analysis of themes of Pop culture representations, identity, labor, and the dynamics of integration that it takes all the steam out of this hot button issue.

Bibiana Suárez, Ai pledch aliyens no. 1, 2005-2011, acrylic paint and digital transfer on aluminum panel, 24 x 24 inches

In order to create her large-scale installation of mixed media paintings and ink-jet prints, Suárez borrows the format of the game “Memory” in which players selectively turn over cards placed face down in order to find pairs of matching cards. The gallery walls are filled with one hundred and eight “playing cards” sized 23.5 inches by 23.5 inches with images depicting maps, body parts, historical images, or various phrases in English, Spanish, and Spanglish. Text boxes featuring an assortment of inclusive and derogatory names for the Latino Diaspora are meant to depict the “backs” of the playing cards. The game aspect of the installation invites viewers to seek connections within the available images. It also serves as a metaphor for the ever-shifting boundaries of integration within American culture as well as the gamesmanship of the national debate.

Bibiana Suárez, Mariel 1980, 2005-2011, acrylic paint on aluminum panel, 24 x 24 inches

Certain matches, such as two images titled Yo quiero no. 1/ I Want no. 1 and Yo quiero no. 2/ I Want no. 2 depicting the Chihuahua from mid-90’s Taco Bell ads, have already been made on the north and south facing walls. Not all of these combinations are identical matches, however. Conceptual matches add nuance to the artist’s themes. For example, Negrita tejaricana/ Black Texarican, an image of a brown faced, dark haired girl is matched with Blanquita tejaricana /White Texarican, the same girl with blonde hair and pink skin. Through these types of expanded connections, Suárez is able to shape a broader conversation about innocence and identity.

The exhibition does a good job of cataloging the checkered history of Latino representation throughout American popular culture, from Desi Arnaz and West Side Story to Speedy Gonzales and the Frito Bandito. These elements are presented dispassionately, as things that exist for better or worse. Their influence on how America understands Latino culture, and the message that is being reverberated back to that culture is left up to the viewer to decide. The more urgent aspects of Latino identity are treated in a similar manner. Two black and white images titled Campamento de trabajadores emigrantes después del fuego no. 1/ Migrant Labor Camp After Fire no. 1 and Campamento de trabajadores emigrantes después del fuego no. 2/ Migrant Labor Camp After Fire no. 2 depict burned bodies lying in the remains of a makeshift labor camp. Suárez acknowledges tragedy and suffering as part of the experience of Latinos without expressing any grand political statements about labor, poverty, or social justice. The artist walks a fine line between making political art and utilizing more conceptual archiving strategies adept at bypassing authoritative editorializing.

Bibiana Suárez, Pulmones / Lungs, 2005-2011, acrylic paint on aluminum panel, 24 x 24 inches

And maybe in the end that is the best course for creating a quiet space for contemplation about a decidedly loaded topic. Rather than strive to assemble an artistic broadside capable of matching the grandiosity of the apocalyptic language that surrounds the immigration debate, Suárez offers viewers a place to reassess and possibly heal. Memoria (Memory) may be a sober show, but it is also hopeful. The match for a piece titled Corazón herido/ Wounded Heart is a panel called Corazón cosido/ Sewn Heart.

Memoria (Memory) will be on view at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, IL through March 25.