Yvonne Rainer, Pico Blvd, west of Fairfax Ave. Photo by Gerard Smulevich. Courtesy MAK Center.

Billboards promoting HBO’s How To Make It In America began appearing in Los Angeles in January, or at least that’s when I began noticing them. They didn’t make sense because they weren’t any of the things billboards often are: explicitly sexy, youth-worshiping, polarizing, lush for no reason, symmetrical, centered, excessively air-brushed, heavy-handed, copy-desk clever or instantly legible. Instead they were ambiguous and blurry.

The How to Make It ads featured an out-of-focus, slightly claustrophobic photograph of genuinely pretty people occupying fore-shortened space. The relationships betweens these people were ambiguous at best. The typical white guy in the foreground, who had a wary, doe-eyed face and unusually large ears, was definitely aware of the camera, but the laughing girl with her hand on his chest seems to be aware of a whole different sort of reality–she looked like she was performing happiness at a well-populated party. In the background (which, because of the weirdly collapsed space, isn’t too far from being the foreground), an African-American man with a self-conscious smirk apparently listened to the advice, or the comedy, of the Latino man leaning into him. At first I thought “making it” must be a commentary on the sexual landscape of America today—maybe the show would deal with the ambiguity of same-sex versus hetero relationships, in a landscape in which race occupied an especially undefined space and technology mediated love—but neither of the “couples” in the image actually acted like couples. So maybe “making it” was economic, about social climbing. When I googled the show and found it followed two 20-somethings bent on breaking into the designer jeans business, the haze didn’t exactly lift.

Kerry Tribe, La Brea Ave, north of Venice Blvd. Photo by Gerard Smulevich. Courtesy MAK Center.

When billboards are interesting in this way, I get suspicious, because I assume someone, somewhere, is trying to pull one over on me. When art is interesting in this way, however, I get excited.

The MAK Center for Art and Architecture launched a public art exhibition on L.A. billboards last month. Curator Kimberli Meyer and her team secured the donated commercial space with the help of MacDonald Media, and commissioned well-established conceptual artists like Yvonne Rainer and Kenneth Anger, along with newer names like Kerry Tribe and Brandon Lattu to design images. The “Art In Stead” billboards pop up in Glendale, Hollywood, Culver City, Beverly Hills, Pico and the Mid-City Area. They’re supposed to “exhibit” for a month, but they occasionally disappear and reappear unannounced, proof, perhaps, that “donated” means “at the mercy of Clear Channel.”

Christina Frenandez, Hollywood Blvd, west of Bronson. Photo by Patricia Parinejad. Courtesy MAK Center.

Interviewed by Francis Anderton in February, Meyer said,

“The idea is to look at the landscape of Los Angeles, which is dominated by billboards, and think about what it would be like if artists were making some of the images that we were seeing these signs.”

What it would be like, apparently, doesn’t differ too much from what it’s like already—some billboards would be visually arresting, some would be genuinely confusing, some would make you think and some would fleeting pound you with a too-easy-to-dismiss message. But what this exhibition does extraordinarily well, better than any museum-bound institutional critique in recent memory has: it shows how subservient the display of art is to capitalist power structures. And it shows art can potentially subvert that subservience, though only a little.

The exhibition took years of negotiation and, according to LA Weekly’s Erica Zora Wrightson, the artists’ proposals were all screened by the donating companies. As a result, the most provocative work indulges in ambiguity, like Christina Frenandez’s meditation on the literal landscape of economic devastation, or, my favorite, Yvonne Rainer’s Marlene Dietrich quote, written in black letters on white, and hanging above a fish and chips sign: “I look good/I know/I can’t hear/I can’t see/but I look good.” It’s a deceptively tame cry for attention that protests the way the sleek culture of advertising erases the space between voice, person-hood and  image.

you will never feel the same again, is the title of a new exhibition of paintings by artist Ricky Allman. Opening Saturday night at Galerie Anais in Los Angleles’ Bergamot Station, the new series of works continues to explore the artist’s interest in futuristic landscapes, which act as a metaphor for the tension between science and religion, and the possible apocalyptic future that is proposed by both institutions. The ‘visual drama’ captured in the paintings, as the artist puts it, features geometric patterns along side the organic, simultaneously stimulating a dialogue that is centered on formal ideals set forth by modernism and minimalism as well as addressing many of the cultural and societal issues of our day.

Allman is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, completeing his degree with Honors in 2007. This artist is currently an Assistant Proessor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and has a forthcoming show this summer at David B Smith Gallery in Denver.

you will never feel the same again will be on view March 20th through April 14, 2010.

Rachel Zoe, 32" x 24" , oil on linen. Courtesy Kimberly Brooks and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

The art world. It’s way more serious and important than every other industry! This thinking at least seems to persist even though the field of contemporary art has maintained an open flirtation with its sassy sister, the fashion industry, since long before even Andy Warhol trotted his wacky wigs around Studio 54 with the likes of Diane von Fürstenberg. There is a mutual fascination between the two fields, and yet it seems that the art world would prefer to keep its consorting with the fashion industry confined strictly to social events, rather than consider fashion (so low-brow!) as a worthy subject matter for actual works of art.

Los Angeles-based artist, Kimberly Brooks‘, current solo show at Taylor De Cordoba gallery in Culver City breaks with this norm to explore the intrigue of the fashion industry’s most iconic stylemakers—without the precept of farce or condemnation. The Stylist Project (on view through April 3rd) presents Brooks’ latest body of work—a series of oil painted portraits of fashion industry insiders, including stylist to the starts and Bravo TV fixture, Rachel Zoe, and award winning costume designer and Madonnaʼs personal stylist Arianne Phillips, among others.

The work on view blends the fields of art and fashion astutely, presenting the fashionable set as they have styled themselves, while at the same time drawing upon the ages-old artistic tradition of portraiture. The regal positions of some of the sitters recall Renaissance royals, and the sprawled poses of others touch on the early Modern depiction of courtesans, such as Edouard Manet’s Olympia.

Arianne Phillips, 30" x 24", oil on linen. Courtesy Kimberly Brooks and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

The Stylist Project is the third solo show for Brooks at Taylor De Cordoba. The first two, Mom’s Friends (2007) and Technicolor Summer (2008), explored much more personal subject matter than the present show. Brooks’ outward shift to now document the fashion industry with this latest series has garnered a lot of attention from media and publications that wouldn’t normally publish gushing articles about fine artists. At the Taylor De Cordoba gallery, they’ve laid out a stack of glossies with Brooks’ name inked onto them. When I asked Heather Taylor, Director of Taylor De Cordoba, to discuss the widespread reception that this exhibition has received, she told me, “The bottom line is that people are hungry for this dialogue and Kimberly is pulling the curtain back on the fashion world, which up until the past year—with the popularity of [the film] ‘The September Issue’ and [the TV show] ‘The Rachel Zoe Project’—had been fairly mysterious.”

New York born, Los Angeles based, Kimberly Brooks maintains her studio in Venice, CA. She earned her BA from UC Berkeley and trained in fine arts at Otis College of Art and Design and UCLA. Her work has been included in numerous juried exhibitions, including at Pleiades Gallery of Contemporary Art, New York; Risk Press Gallery, Los Angeles; and Phillips de Pury Auction House, Los Angeles.

The whole set is programmed for a unique experience for each viewer—a lighting display that doesn’t repeat for 18 days, a delay between the live feed and playback, a robotic camera that responds to motion, and sound feedback that swells, but never explodes.  A “finished” or composite image runs at the back of the exhibition.  This view allows spectators to see who enters the gallery and how others interact with the work.

The use of lights is at least a pragmatic choice, a basic component in office buildings and modern living.  Their stark whiteness casts no “cinematic” shadow on its subjects, and in video perfection, imperfections of the subject are clearly and initially displayed.  Through layering “real” images, subjects become formal elements of flat light. The macroscopic view of this work is what is observable to the human eye, and as the title suggests, this view is fleeting. As the art progresses, it periodically interrupts what has been displayed to return to “zero.”  The art is the mechanical and sensory performance, rather than what is recorded.

Rice also presents four video portraits that act as sketches or versions of the installation.  A face is seen in each one that the viewer continues to look for and find through swirling frames of mutation.  A final piece, the smallest in the exhibit, is a CRT monitor taken out of television presenting a static image of the artist.  For the amount of time in its title Self Portrait (3 days, 2 months, 10 days), an image of the artist’s face was lit on a small monitor.  The result is a “pixel burn,” an image made by exploiting the weakness of the display.  As it stays lit all over to show its ghost, it is undergoing its own decay as long as it is displayed.

Exerpt from 3 Studies for a Portrait of Bronwyn Lewis, 2010

Tivon Rice lives and works in Seattle, WA where is pursuing a doctoral degree at University of Washington’s Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS).  He obtained his master’s degree from UW in 2006 and has been a Graduate Instructor there since 2007.  For his bachelor’s studies, he attended University of Colorado, graduating in 2000 with two degrees in Electronic Media and Sculpture.  He has had numerous solo exhibitions at galleries in the Pacific Northwest. His work is in private collections and his collaborative video of abstracted shaving cream with Jeffry Mitchell entitled Panda was acquired by the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle.  He has been in group exhibitions across the nation including the CUE Art Foundation in New York, and the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa.  His work was included in 1000 Days at the Scion Installation Space in Los Angeles, curated by DailyServing.

Adam McEwen’s project, I Am Curious Yellow, radiated from Nicole Klagsbrun’s booth due to the artist’s boundless, but contemplative, use of the color yellow. McEwen chose to work with yellow because of the color’s ability to be vile and unpleasant, but also soothing and cheerful. His solo installation at Armory consisted of carefully selected objects placed alongside loaded imagery; jerry cans, a large yellow swastika, and several over-sized obituaries beneath glass, written for world champion runner Caster Semenya, were on display. Everything, even the carpet in the booth, was saturated in lemon yellow, with some white areas, and beaming in the bright lights of the fair.

McEwen has written pre-need obituaries for living celebrities before, employing traditional newspaper format with impressive impact (the artist used to write actual obituaries for London’s Daily Telegraph). Other past projects include his pencil on graph paper text message series. For these pieces, he copied the content and screen appearance of texts from his Nokia phone onto paper and presented the paper replicas of the digital missives in graphite frames.

Also in New York, The New Museum opened an exhibition curated by Jeff Koons on March 3rd, Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection, which will remain on view until June 6, 2010. The New Museum, and others, offered discounts to visitors during Armory Arts Week.

Among several concurrent art fairs taking place throughout the city last week, Independent generated a great amount of intrigue. Founded by New York gallerist Elizabeth Dee and Dareen Flook of Hotel in London, and held at X Initiative in Chelsea, Independent presented 40 galleries and was less regimented than the Armory Show.  Independent’s website declares “Hybrid Forum Comes to New York for Art Fair Week.”

Artists Space (New York), Michael Werner Gallery (Berlin | New York), and mitterrand+sanz (Zurich), were among the participants whose collaboration and presence were requested via personal invitation from the founders. This not only differed from the exhibitor application process at the Armory Show, it suggested a re-evaluation of the art fair mode. Elizabeth Dee also had a booth at Armory for her gallery.

Originally Published: June 10th 2009

Image courtesy of the artist and Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, NY

Rosemarie Fiore is drawing with fireworks, low explosive pyrotechnic devices such as color smoke bombs, jumping jacks, monster balls, and ground blooms, to name a few. The artist recently exhibited several of these large scale works on paper in a solo show at Priska C. Juschka Fine Art in New York. The artist’s incendiary process of exploding and containing live fireworks over paper reveals her remarkable aesthetic control over the combustible material. Photographs of this process recall Hans Namuth’s photographs of Jackson Pollock slinging industrial paint onto canvas and the indelible images of Richard Serra hurling molten lead against the walls of his studio.

Image courtesy of the artist and Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, NY

Fiore ignites her chosen explosive inside a bucket or other container, which is inverted on the paper. The explosions create strokes and sunbursts of vibrant pigments, including magenta, ochre, rust, and copper, all varying in saturation and intensity. Gunpowder marks and sooty burnt surfaces provide visible traces of the detonation. Fiore overlaps and collages the best effects on large sheets of the same paper, repeating these actions a number of times. The final works are heavy and contain multiple layers of collaged explosions, resulting in abstract compositions and fields of color described by Robert Schuster of the Village Voice as “op art visions of the cosmos.”

Fiore has often worked out of action, considering each process a performance and documenting it by video and photograph. She has used repurposed machines and has previously painted and drawn with a modified floor polisher, a windshield wiper, and a Scrambler (the multi-armed amusement park ride). She received her B.A. from the University of Virginia in 1994 and her M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999 and has also shown at the Gallery Bar and the Winkleman Gallery in New York.

Six pieces from the Prototype for New Understanding series greet viewers entering the exhibit.  While these pieces appear to be authentic tribal headdresses displayed under glass vitrines, it is soon revealed that they are in fact made of Nike Air Jordans.  Because of this material transformation, the sculptures are in a state of constant becoming—at once creatures, masks, animals, shoes, and fantastical hybrids.  There is a confusion of body parts as plushy shoe openings become eyes, rubber-tipped toes become mouths, and thick fabric tongues become beaks.  The reassigning of parts designed for the anatomy of a foot to fit the anatomy of a face is as grotesque as it is wonderful.

Jungen ironically critiques the way marginalized cultures have been pillaged for their goods by Western colonialists.  He attacks commodity by making a triple-commodity—tribal relic, Nike shoes, and marketable art object. Jungen brings us further into his natural history museum of commodities with Shapeshifter, a huge whale skeleton made of white plastic chairs.

Side by side, the chairs become the sleek vertebrae and ribs of this immense animal.  Suspended several feet above its platform, the whale’s shadows are haunting and give it the believability of an extinct, magnificent sea creature.  Its empty body and ghostly shadows play foil to the recognizable lawn chairs that are its bones, for as much as we believe that this creature was once living in a faraway time, we know that it is part of our vernacular existence. 

Questioning our own knowledge, we wonder if this whale could have really existed, or is it a made up version of Western history?

The context of the NMAI lends another layer to Jungen’s work.  We are invited to view his sculptures as more than art.  In this context, they become American Indian artifacts.  By marrying seeming opposites, consumer and tribal cultures, Jungen proves that the treasures that fill the NMAI are not merely relics of a faraway past—they are the thoughtful products of a people that are part of contemporary society.  This assimilation into mainstream commodity culture, for better or worse, perhaps provides a “strange comfort,” for both seekers of these treasures, and also the people to whom they belong.

Brian Jungen’s Strange Comfort is on view October 16, 2009–August 8, 2010 at the NMAI on the National Mall, Washington, DC.

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

Jasper Johns, “Between the Clock and the Bed” (1982-83), encaustic on canvas. Courtesy Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York

There’s a sweetly prophetic story about Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in Calvin Tomkins’ iconic art-crowd chronicle, Off The Wall. The story, which makes the gap between innovation and belonging look extremely narrow, goes like this: it was the summer of ’55 and Johns and Rauschenberg lived symbiotically, popping in on each other at least daily and swapping ideas with so much success that they even tried making one another’s work. By this point, Johns had begun his flags—a new direction that “came to him in a dream”—and Rauschenberg found Johns’ encaustic process seductive. “It smelled so delicious, and it looked so good,” said Rauschenberg, quoted by Tomkins, “all those aromatic bubbling waxes.” After some begging, Johns let Rauschenberg add a stripe to a flag, but Rauschenberg, too infatuated by wax to pay attention to composition, dragged a heavy red stripe right across an already-painted white one, ruining his chances of ever touching Johns’ work again.

Around the same time,  Johns tried his hand at some Rauschenberg works. “I thought I understood,” said Johns. “But mine weren’t convincing at all.” A few years later, and the two artists barely spoke.

This hexed collaboration gets at something predictably true about art-making in general—it’s not vision that pulls most into the business of making, at least not at first. It’s wanting to be part of a vision you’d observed from the outside, or a world you saw other artists building. But entering someone else’s vision, it turns out, can be excruciatingly difficult, maybe even impossible. It’s sometimes easier to find a vision of your own.

Mark Grotjahn, "Untitled (Face for Greece 843)," 2009, Oil on cardboard mounted on linen. Courtesy Blum & Poe Gallery.

Mark Grotjahn’s current exhibition at Blum & Poe intermittently innovates and belongs.  Called Seven Faces, it’s full of lanky yet dense almost-abstractions, paintings with as much primitive gusto as de Kooning’s Woman and as much flat, psychedelic guile as Fred Tomaselli’s Geode. Surprisingly economical—oil has been layered on top of cardboard which has been stapled to stretched linen, and the cavities and protrusions represent come from cardboard that has been layered or cut into, not paint that has been lathered—each work consists of scraggly calculated stripes that all seem to radiate from an imaginary point or boundary line. Tucked in among these stripes, eyes, the kind that exist only for looking out and don’t claim to be windows into anything, glare into the space right in front of them. Sometimes, toothy monster mouths break through the stripes, too.

Mark Grotjahn Untitled (Black Over Red Orange "Mean as a Snake" Face 842), 2009, Oil on cardboard mounted on linen. Courtesy Blum & Poe Gallery.

Grotjahn’s work announces itself as smart. Whether his sleek, perspectival hipster abstractions, or these rougher, stranger faces, a Grotjahn painting exudes self-knowledge. It knows that it fits into a legacy, and embraces every nuance of that legacy from Picasso, whose distorted figures had similar, overly-wide petal-shaped eyes, to Johns, who was pioneered painterly but cooly controlled line-making; it knows that it’s derivative, but it also knows that it isn’t redundant and that it doesn’t seamlessly belong to any pre-existing category. This sort of uber-awareness doesn’t feel contrived, however; it feels like a personality trait.

I would recognize Grotjahn’s work anywhere because of its quirks, including an obsession with perspective and symmetry that may not be original but has never quite looked the way Grotjahn makes it look–slightly cagey precision that paradoxically coexists with liberal painterliness. I like to think of Grotjahn as a big fan who found a signature not because he was a visionary with something cataclysmic to say but because he still wanted to talk about how perspective skews perception and paint adheres to surface. To have a conversation, you need a voice. But you don’t need an aggressive, groundbreaking one to keep the talking going.

Sanford Biggers, Seen, 2009, Video still, Digital C-print, 30 x 40 in. Courtesy the Artist and Michael Klein Arts, New York

Currently on view at Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum is a solo presentation of new work by internationally renowned, New York-based artist, Sanford Biggers. The work on view in the exhibition, entitled Moon Medicine, encompasses the breadth of Biggers’ practice. As he tells the SBCAF, “It is a thematic, multi-disciplinary exploration of past themes and new themes meant to broaden and complicate our read on American history.” In a recent video-recorded conversation between Biggers and CAF executive director, Miki Garcia, Biggers discusses his avoidance of artistic labels, such as “post black.” These labels are not rejected by the artist for the sake of radicalism but, rather, because he says that no matter how you mean it to sound, a label is always “predicated on there being an other.” Biggers further explains that he rejects labels even in his discussion of artistic medium, saying he’s “not interested in being a sculptor [or] a performance artist…I just make things.” Of his process, he says, “The more confused I am while making a piece now, the more successful it is to me regardless of what it ends up looking like.”

The recurring imagery of mandalas in Biggers’ work reflects a strong interest in Buddhism, the exploration of which is found in his past and current work. Biggers gained interest in the Buddhist tradition while living in Japan and traveling all over Asia years ago. Of the work he made upon returning to the US from Asia, Biggers says it became autobiographical in part—in the sense that he “fused some of what [he] had been studying and researching in terms of Buddhism, but also bringing in some things from my childhood, growing up in Los Angeles, and being a B-boy.”

Sanford Biggers, Constellation, 2009, Steel, Plexiglas, LED’s, Zoopoxy, cotton quilt, original printed cotton tile. Dimensions variable, Installation at Harvard University. Courtesy the Artist and Michael Klein Arts, New York, NY.

Biggers is a master of alluding labels, as we’ve learned, and the “elliptical” nature of his work (as Garcia refers to it), creates an open-ended dialog that spans a range of subjects from religious practices, to themes of racial tensions in the American South, to pop culture iconography. Moon Medicine will be on view through May 2, 2010.

Sanford Biggers lives and works in new York. He earned his BA at Morehouse College, Atlanta, GA and his MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL. He has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, including at Mary Goldman Gallery, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; Okinawa Museum, Okinawa, Japan; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

In it’s last week on view at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids is a solo exhibition of work by Chad Curtis entitled: DIGITAL IN NATURE.  The work included in the exhibition investigates the relationship of organic, living beings to the complex, nuanced environment and digital landscape. Each piece utilizes, to some degree, a crude, home brewed fabrication-and-drawing machine that relies on digital design tools, and computer numeric control.

Curtis often deals with simulation and refinement, utilizing highly processed materials removed from the context of their origin, to create a synthetic experience.  While the sculpture aims to potentially simulate an environment, the drawings serve as illustrations, of a lost world that happens to look a lot like the world we live in.

In a broader context, the work explores the line between the biological and mechanical, using popular, iconographic references. The idea of a distinction between the biological and the industrial, or the human and the digital, and the blurring of that distinction, is explored both as subject matter in the work and also in the production.

Chad Curtis currently serves as an Assistant Professor at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art. Trained in Ceramics and Printmaking, Curtis earned his BFA from Minnesota State University and his MFA from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University.

Edouard Duval-Carrié, Le monde actuel, ou Erzulie interceptée (The World at Present, or Ezili Intercepted), 1996, Bass Museum of Art

With the recent events developing in Haiti, the complicated history between the country and the United States has quickly surfaced. A group of American Baptists attempted to transport Haitian children out off the country without proper documentation causing an international media storm and a recent article from UK Guardian journalist Seumas Milne’s which questioned the U.S. Military’s motivation in “[commandeering] Port-au-Prince’s airport…[turning] away flights bringing medical equipment and emergency supplies from organizations…in order to give priority to landing troops.” This latent disregard seems to also be seeping into the discussion of the country’s history of art as well. In the earthquake’s aftermath, it is difficult to argue the importance of salvaging this artistic history while the reality of the devastation and number of lives lost continues to reveal itself. Yet, the recent foray of two U.S. media publications into this realm, and the aforementioned events, has led me to believe that the need for this discussion has come to us sooner rather than later.  It is the apparent unfamiliarity with Haitian culture, in this case, its art, that is most problematic and results in its artists and history to undergo further marginalization. By using its artistic history as a window into its national identity, hopefully, Haiti can be defined as more than one of the world’s poorest countries.

On January 24^th, the Los Angeles Times reported the destruction of the Centre d’Art, a historical art center founded in Port-au-Prince in 1944, which helped to launch Haitian artists onto the international art scene. There are two major problems with the article that need to be discussed further. The first is the usage of the term “primitive.” This label was used to define Haitian artists by the founders of the Centre d’Art (two Americans and a Frenchman) as a way to market said artists within the international scene. The trend in the art world during this time was to find the next great “primitive” artist, an influence of Dada and Surrealist artistic movements that sought to reclaim an innocence felt to have been lost with the industrialization of Europe. Haitian artists who were willing to be perceived through this European/American hegemonic gaze could find a place within the international art market.

Centre d'Art damage (Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times / January 23, 2009)

However, there is a long tradition of Haiti’s creolized academic tradition of which a formal, figurative style in Haitian painting can be traced back to. Philomé Obin (1892 – 1986) had been painting thirty years before the center opened and is still considered one of the most influential artists on Haitian art today. His work stands as an example of the school of memorializing well-known events within Haiti’s revolutionary history, frequently referencing Haitian heroes such as Toussaint L’Ouverture and Charlemagne Péralte. Obin championed the school of nationalist art in Haiti and his influence can still be seen today in works by internationally known artists such as Edouard Duval-Carrié. To continue to refer to these artists and their works as “primitive” in this day and age without any context, as did the Los Angeles Times journalist Tracy Wilkinson, is, well, just plain lazy.

The second problematic area of the Los Angeles Times article, and in which we can also refer to the New Yorker’s January 25^th cover, is the continued use of the world “voodoo” when referring to the Haitian religion of vodou (also known as vaudou). The cover featured the painting The Resurrection of the Dead from contemporary Haitian artist Frantz Zephirin (a grand-nephew of Obin). The painting depicts imagery of vodou guide (“gods”), as they guard the passage between life and death. Both publications use the term “voodoo”, a Western construct laden with racial prejudice, with no further explanation of its immense role within Haitian art history or the formation of its national identity. Vodou is a combination of West African and Roman Catholic religions, comprised of deities, or lwas, which through worship, help practitioners get closer to the supreme god, Bondeyé. In her article Vodou, Nationalism, and Performance: The Staging of Folklore in Mid-Twentieth Century Haiti, Kate Ramsey discusses the role of the religion in the formation of the indigènisme movement, a conceptual rallying point for revolution against the U.S. occupation of 1915, rooted in ethnic and cultural identity. The religion was criminalized and those who observed its ceremonies were persecuted, forcing vodou to go underground and evolve into a locale of resistance for Haitians. During this time, vodou would become exoticized by American/European artists searching to connect to the “other”, such as choreographer Katherine Dunham and avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, best known for Divine Horseman: the Living Gods of Haiti, a film documenting vodou ceremonial rituals and practitioners.

Frantz Zephirin, The Resurrection of the Dead (2007), On the cover of the January 25, 2010 of "New Yorker" magazine

Once vodou became legal in 1946, the Centre d’Art encouraged its artists to incorporate religious imagery within their artwork, as it was perceived as purely authentic (read “primitive”). Haitian artists who made the conscientious decision to allow themselves to be labeled as “other,” were able to achieve success within the international market. A prime example is the artist Hector Hyppolite (1894-1948), who through acceptance of the role projected onto him, exhibited in Paris and New York frequently and could claim patrons such as André Breton (father of the Surrealist movement) and American author Truman Capote. In his 2000 lecture, Voodoo Terror: (mis)representations of voodoo and western cultural anxieties, presented at the October Gallery in London, John Cussans discusses the “voodoo construct” and its four different distinctions: the voodoo doll; the zombie; the voodoo witch doctor; and voodoo possession. Through these continued representations, Cussans argues, vodou has been continually objectified and suppressed by U.S./European culture and its continued need to ethnographically “authenticate,” (or define through a Western gaze), what they don’t understand. Cussans concluded, “It is this tendency to return voodoo to vodou that must be reversed if we are to resist the compassionate continuation of vodou’s suppression effected by the misguided will to authenticity.” In other words, any concept of voodoo must be abandoned when approaching the Haitian religion; otherwise, we are doing nothing more than participating in the continued misrepresentation. This is the problem with the U.S. media publications. So ingrained in the American psyche has this misrepresentation become, these journalists didn’t even think to research the religion.

Hector Hypplite (1894-1948), La dauration l'amour (The Adoration of Love), 1946-48, in the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum

The Centre d’Art and local galleries have reported the loss of many artworks contained in their collective walls, not to mention a number of represented artists. The recent tragedy has made Haiti the world’s disaster darling and it has been tremendous how people from all over the world have responded to the country’s need for help. Yet, we need to take a collective breath and become aware that we are treading on complicated ground.  The lack of reference to any real historical, artistic or political context from both publications highlights the challenging areas that arise whenever a Western power has offered aid to Haiti. We cannot sustain meaning as a global community if we keep repeating the historic mistakes of colonization. As we go forward, we need to raise our awareness to include the entire story, not fixing Haitians and their history in a marginalized space, putting aside our preconceived notions in order to truly help Haiti. If not, I guarantee, we will have another revolution on our hands.

Originally Published on February 27, 2009

Artist Profile: Robbie Conal from By Osmosis TV on Vimeo.

Los Angeles-based artist Robbie Conal has made a name for himself over the past several decades for his poignantly irreverent and ultra-humorous political posters featuring unforgettable one-liner jokes. The artist wittingly simplifies issues that surround political figures and delivers the work to a mass audience by creating reproductions of his painting, pasting the posters in cities throughout the country. His clever insight can be seen over countless paintings such as a rendering of Dick Cheney with bunny ears bearing the simple phrase ‘Enronergizer Bunny’ over a hot pink ground.

In his current series of work, the artist has begun to move away from his well-known political poster portraits and has been investigating other, equally clever, connections between popular culture and politics.

The artist recently exhibited a new painting in the retrospective exhibition Beautiful/Decay: A to Z, which opened at the Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles last weekend. In addition, Conal recently teamed up with By Osmosis TV and Beautiful/Decay magazine to produce a short interview video that features the artist at work in his studio.

"We Live in Public," Film Still, 2008.

Josh Harris welcomed the new millennium from the basement of a New York bunker. He was surrounded by a posse of jumpsuit-clad creatives, and, at one point, all of them watched as a naked man whipped a barely dressed woman around underneath a running shower head. The scene made about as much physical sense as Bernini’s The Rape of Prosperina—the bodies twisted perpetually but never quite met in the way you’d expect them to. Harris and his companions watched the crude assault as though it were on television.

One of the first entrepreneurs to channel the potential of internet TV, Harris used a significant portion of his dot-com  fortune to build the bunker, which he called Capsule Hotel and filled with over 100 mini living pods, a shooting gallery, interrogation room, banquet hall, bar, and obscene number of cameras and video monitors. By the time New Years’ Eve arrived, 150 people had lived in the Hotel for nearly a month.

Residents (including Alanna Heiss, P.S.1’s haughtily fearless matron) submitted to constant surveillance and interrogation in exchange for admittance. Not only were members of the panoptical community watched, but they could watch one another by tuning in to any channel on any of the readily-available monitors.

"We Live in Public," Film Still, 2008.

“Everything is free except the video we capture of you. That, we own,” says Harris in We Live in Public, an unpretentiously efficient documentary released on DVD this week. It’s a telling quote because it suggests that the opposite of free is not costliness but being owned, and it pushes Harris’ experiment out of the realm of asset-swapping and into soul-selling.

Directed by Ondi Timoner, We Live in Public follows Harris through the birth of his dot-com fortune and his subsequent series of ahead-of-their-time media experiments. Harris plays villain and hero, acting as a self-appointed artist-prophet who exploits people’s penchant for attention and thus exposes a future in which “we’re going to increasingly have our lives exposed in very personal and intimate ways and we’ll want it to happen.” Chuck Klosterman would almost certainly call Harris “advanced.”

Not long after Quiet, the 24/7 bunker surveillance venture, was shut down by the NYPD  in early January, 2000, Harris invited his girlfriend Tanya to move in with him. Together, they went public. They installed nearly thirty web cameras in their home, including one in the toilet, and streamed their whole life onto the web. When they fought, they would run immediately to their computers, to see which of them had the allegiance of chat room regulars.

It ended badly, of course. After the dot-com crash, in which Harris’ fortune all but disappeared, Harris ended his relationship with Tanya (later he would call her a “pseudo-girlfriend,” though she claims they loved each other) and pulled the plug on public living.

As the rest of the world caught on to online chatting and video streams, Harris pulled away, initially living on a rural apple farm and later disappearing to Ethiopia to evade creditors.

Gustavo Artigas, "Vote for Demolition," 2009. Courtesy LAX Art.

Exposure doesn’t mean what it used to mean. Now the well-trafficked terrain of mainstream websites and reality TV, it often seems contrived and redundant when it appears in art. Many of the best artist-driven social experiments I’ve encountered this year refuse to invaded peoples’ privacy and, as a result, they seem perfunctory, even impersonal.

In Vote for Demolition, artist Gustavo Artigas invited people to vote for which over-priced, over-sized Los Angeles’ building most deserved the wrecking ball. The voting booths at LAX Art were perfectly spaced, giving voters plenty of room to deliberate, and Artigas asked for no personal information. The “surveillance” in John Baldessari’s recent exhibition is carefully unobtrusive–a camera watches you watching art, and, while art-viewing may be a genuinely intimate experience, it’s one that tends to play out in public anyway. Baldessari’s experiment feels more like documentation than invasion. Its aloofness makes the loneliness of experience painfully evident; no live streams or chat rooms can combat the fact that, most of the time, we navigate the world alone with our bodies. But maybe that’s okay.

When Harris moved to his apple farm, an interviewer asked him, “Are you a lonely man?”

He responded, “The implication when you say ‘am I a lonely man,’ is that it’s worse than being together. It’s just a different state of being, and one I’m quite comfortable with.”