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

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

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

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

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

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

This week, From the DS Archives has chosen to reintroduce Catherine Wagley’s interview with artist Drew Heitzler.  Heitzler’s film installations are worth revisiting for the way they explore history and narrative through manipulated found footage as well as his own new work in film.  Notably inspired by the precedent of history paintings like The Oath of the Horatii, Heitzler presents us with filmic narratives of the past that provide new meaning in the present.

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

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

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

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

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

CW: How important is story-telling to you?

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

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

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

Drew Heitzler. Installation View. Courtesy Blum & Poe.

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

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

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This Sunday’s From the DS Archives unearths a feature on artist Kathy Grayson that presents a compelling example of contemporary painting.  While Grayson’s work is realized in paint, her process capitalizes on the technologies of globalization.  She appropriates You Tube footage and then uses computer programs to capture and abstract the transference of data, which facilitates digital broadcasting.  Grayson’s Bangalore series visualizes an otherwise invisible everyday process.

The translation of information from an original event to a digital screen takes many forms. While the process of transferring data from the camera to satellite to analogue broadcast to a digital screen device occurs countless times each day, we usually absorb this information with little to no awareness of the process. Fueled by this topic, painter Kathy Grayson is currently presenting a new body of work titled Bangalore on view at Kim Light Gallery in Los Angeles. The artist has taken televised sports footage of professional tennis matches for the subject of her new paintings. Utilizing YouTube footage of the matches, the artist examines the abstraction that occurs from the digital compression of data. Grayson runs footage through computer applications to distort and abstract the images, reconfiguring the digital remains to create what she calls a “stirring up of the video data to make interesting ruptures in figurative painting.”

Grayson is a graduate of Dartmouth College and currently lives and works in New York City. The artist serves as the director of Deitch Projects in NYC and works as an independent curator, essayist and book editor. Recent exhibitions include works at Park Life in San Francisco and D’Amelio Terras in NYC.

This week’s edition of From the DS Archives reintroduces a feature on artist Pablo Zuleta Zahr written by Allison Gibson.  Zahr’s ‘patterned panoramas’ offer an innovative study of contemporary mobility – finding beauty in the shared urgency of the urban commute.  Zahr’s observance of the everyday suggests that we should pause to appreciate the moment as we navigate our busy lives.

The subway in any major city is a conduit, where thousands of lives flow like water through pipes in the journey from past to future. The subway station, however, is like a purgatory—a present-tense place where the journey temporarily hangs in the balance as one waits on the platform, maybe reading a book or reading the looks on the faces of passersby. Some people are hardened by years of public transportation; they pay no mind to who or what is happening around them. Others can’t help but assume the posture of human curiosity in such spaces and find fascinating the fleeting masses of strangers. Chilean-born, Berlin-based artist, Pablo Zuleta Zahr, belongs to a third category altogether. He surpasses the instinct to merely “people watch” and goes beyond to create elaborately curated photo documentaries of people moving through a particular station. The footage that he captures is true—real people passing through a real subway station—but the art that he makes from the video footage turns into a sociological exercise wherein people are organized by gender, style, and color of clothing and then regrouped into “patterned panoramas,” as the gallery refers to them.

For his first show in the United States, entitled Event Horizon at Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque, NM, Zuleta Zahr presents work from his series’ Baquadano and Madrid, as well as the four panel video installation, BUTTERFLYJACKPOT. Baquadano consists of large format photographic grids comprised of stills from ten hours of video footage of Chilean metro passengers. The results of the artist’s meticulous reorganization of people are almost abstract; the visuals of color and pattern become as strange and alluring as the orchestrated grouping of originally disconnected individuals.

Pablo Zuleta Zahr lives and works in Berlin and holds an MFA from Düsseldorf Art Academy. His work has been exhibited widely outside of the U.S., including at MITTAGEISEN, Berlin, Germany; Museo de Artes Visuales, Santiago de Chile; Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, Spain; Studio la Città, Verona, Italy; Gallery Bendana-Pinel, Paris, France; and Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, UK, among elsewhere.

This Sunday, From the DS Archives presents Come Hither Noise.  We have chosen to reintroduce this previously published article for the way it gives singular attention to sound – an often overlooked element of contemporary visual art practice.  Come Hither Noise reminds us that sound can also stand alone as a compelling medium of exploration that is appropriately situated in the gallery space.

Come Hither Noise at Fremantle Art Centre in Perth, Australia is an exhibition of sound-based works, which aims to highlight connections between aural, spatial and visual perception. Curator Jasmin Stephens argues that media and even sensory distinctions are growing increasingly arbitrary in contemporary art. In this exhibition she presents a selection of works which are both noisy and resolutely visual, designed to heighten the audience’s experience of both senses. Come Hither Noise features visual artists working alongside composers, producing aural environments which encroach on the musical, but this is not easy listening.

Composer Thomas Meadowcroft’s Monaro Eden references two icons of Australian culture: the Holden Monaro, an engine-heavy muscle car that subjugated the roadways from 1969 to 1982, and twentieth century artist Rosalie Gascoigne, specifically her 1989 work Monaro. Meadowcroft’s installation alludes to Gascoigne’s process of assemblage by sampling the revving engine of a Monaro and layering it with Sine tones, producing a humming aural landscape which the audience can navigate, when seated, by pressing foot pedals which alter the volume of the tones. The artist likens this process to “a Sunday drive” there is no great logic to it: some key musical destinations are dictated by the arrangement of the engine sounds but otherwise listeners are free to hear their own ways through the installation.

Richard Crow’s Imaginary Hospital Radio plays upon the ostensibly therapeutic role of the hospital radio station by injecting bloodless muzak with a form of medical waste the incidental soundscape of the body subjected to surgical technology. The accompanying image is from the archives of the Moorfields Eye Hospital where Crow was treated as a child. Imaginary Hospital Radio was broadcast on ABC Classic FM’s New Music Up Late on Saturday 29 August.

The exhibition also includes Mark Brown (Aus), John Conomos (Aus), Ross Manning (Aus), (Aus/GER), Elvis Richardson (Aus), Sam Smith (Aus), Sriwhana Spong (NZ).

Come Hither Noise is presented as part of the 9th Totally Huge New Music Festival in association with Tura New Music, 10-20 September 2009.

This Sunday’s choice from the DS Archives is based on the reality that present curatorial practice is quite often guided by pedagogical concerns – making education programs increasingly important to exhibition-making.  In light of this trend, we bring our readers a previously published interview with Denise Gray of MOCA’s Education Department.

DailyServing’s Sasha Lee recently had the chance to sit down with Denise Gray of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Education department to discuss her role as an educator, both as an individual scholar in the field and also within the MOCA’s philosophy. Denise, along with others in her field, are extraordinary examples of a vibrant voice shaping how we understand contemporary art today. Whether organizing special events, or working with the fantastic MOCA apprentice program, Denise’s hard efforts are all conducted in the name of inspiring passion for art in others, and lending the public tools to appreciate art. Denise’s educational philosophy begins not with a lecture, but what the participants themselves know and have experienced. In light of the recent events surrounding MOCA–Denise’s interview reminds us the invaluable resource that the museum & educators such as Denise provide.

DailyServing: Can you talk a little bit about your position at the MOCA and the various projects you oversee, maybe your favorites?

From the DS Archives introduces this week’s series, Summer of Utopia, in which we investigate seven different artists who either employ or interrupt ideas of utopia. Today we are exploring utopia by returning to a past feature on artist Meeson Pae Yang.  Utopia – a broad conceptual imagining of a progressive and perfected society – has engaged many thinkers over the centuries since Sir Thomas More.  Situated in our own time, within the context of global warming and continued deforestation, Yang’s work can be viewed as an inspired aesthetic vision of an ecological utopia.  Recreating a seemingly natural environment within a sterile, urban setting, Yang’s idyllic snow-covered forest takes on the guise of a utopian vision.

Los Angeles-based artist Meeson Pae Yang creates intricate sculptures and installations that explore technology through the context of the body and the natural world. Developing systems that mimic both micro and macro environments, the artist often builds an entire ecosystem within a singular installation. Meeson Pae Yang’s most recent work, Traverse, takes place in a vacant storefront in California. The artist has built a replica forest-like landscape that is composed of translucent trees which spring from the hard concrete floor. The exhibition combines organic and synthetic material to create the illusion of a deep seated wintry forest.

The artist received her undergraduate degree from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and has completed recent projects with Lawerce Asher Gallery and JK Gallery, both in Los Angeles.  Traverse, from 2009, was commissioned by the Arts Council for Long Beach for a vacant storefront at 5661 Atlantic Ave in Long Beach, California.