“Mockup is a storage room, a stage set, a mausoleum, a trade show, a diagram, a game board, a studio, a retail store, a pictograph, a classroom, a museum display, an architectural model, and a sign-makers workshop. Like composite wood — the material from which the artworks are made — each object is at once real and solid, and simultaneously a mere semblance or substitute.”

The following article was originally published by Seth Curcio on October 13, 2007:

The following article was originally published by Rob Marks on December 5, 2011: 

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art defies the normal boundary between landing and gallery at the entrance to the fourth floor space that houses Sharon Lockhart’s "Lunch Break," 2008. Photo: Saul Rosenfield, ©2011, with permission of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The stairway to the fourth floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art leads me directly toward a long, narrow, darkened space, at the end of which is the image of another, much longer, passageway. In that image, a concrete floor below and light fixtures above trace a trajectory toward infinity punctuated by pipes, wires, hoses, storage boxes, tools, and lockers. The scene is not monochrome—red, blue, yellow, orange, and green are common—nor is it dark, but the fluorescent lights, the faded floor, the absent windows, and the constrained path—no more than five feet wide—suggest that this as a place to travel through, not a place in which to settle.

This sensation is amplified by the fact that the image, I slowly realize, is moving. Inch-by-inch down the corridor, the slow-motion journey of what turns out to be Sharon Lockhart’s film, Lunch Break (2008), might be confused with a series of stills.

Still image from Sharon Lockhart, “Lunch Break (Assembly Hall, Bath Iron Works, November 5, 2007, Bath, Maine),” 2008; 35mm film transferred to HD, 80 min.; courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; © Sharon Lockhart.

Lockhart, who says she is interested in “duration,” describes her method of filmmaking as “photographic.”[1] Despite appearances, the film is not typical slow-motion; Lockhart has digitally inserted eight repetitions of each frame, ballooning a 10-minute, 1,200-foot traverse into an 80-minute encounter. It is a film engaged in repeating moments, in suspending, not slowing, time. It asks me, in effect, to witness the moment once, and then again, and then again. It proposes that I might answer the question “What do you see?” only by pondering yet another, “Do you see what you see?”

All of a sudden, a person moves, and I recognize the objects dangling off a storage bin down the corridor as human legs. In this otherworldly place, everything that seems obvious at conventional speed becomes a mystery, a puzzle to be solved only by the closest attention. A young man with short blond hair in a white jumpsuit raises his hand to his forehead, or more precisely, raises———–his———-hand———-to———-his———–forehead, where the hand rests for two minutes of my time, or only about 10 seconds of his time. His hand settles back in his lap, and he looks down. Is this a moment of despair? As the blond man turns toward me, I recognize a gently waving hand below him. The hand is speaking, and it is attached to the green hoodie of another man. I assume the co-workers are friends; I want them to be friends. There is something emphatic in the gesture of the green-shirted man, something that could be advice or reprimand. The blond man’s lips part briefly. Then he turns away and looks down for what seems to be an eternity. Is he pensive or despondent? His hand returns to his forehead. The camera inches onward, never turning. There in front of me, two distinctive characters in a distinct place have enacted a story with no ending, one of some two dozen the procession reveals. Were the men talking about a spouse, a boss, a co-worker, a sports team, or the union? Were they complaining or sharing a story? Was the hand to the head about despair, exhaustion, a thought, or an itch?

Installation View of Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, October 15,2011—January 16, 2012, showing entrance to the film screening gallery (left), the neighboring gallery with a series of lunch-related photographs, and a pile of Lunch Break Times—Bay Area Edition, the 24-page tabloid newspaper Lockhart produced in San Francisco for this show. Photo: Johnna Arnold Photography.

It turns out that although this place looks like a passageway, it functions as a destination, a place for moving in rather than moving through. The film documents shipbuilders at the Bath Iron Works in Maine during the moments when they are not building ships. The procession down the hallway reveals one “all of a sudden” after another, its repeating moments of apparent stillness both facilitating contemplation and kindling suspense. I cannot make out the messages of these subdued bodies: body language needs the fluidity of its natural pace to achieve clarity. Further, the slow-motion procession foils the normal capacity to anticipate a movement the moment before it happens. I cannot join the rhythm of life in the corridor, and everything—a woman biting a sandwich, a man microwaving popcorn, a hand brushing a knee—becomes a riddle. While ordinarily I might compensate for these limitations through closer inspection, I cannot manage this: the procession, while inching, is inexorable, and the camera’s wide-angle frontward gaze, while inclusive, is unyielding.

The beauty of Lunch Break is that its attenuated moments make it difficult to lock onto a single interpretation: the slow shifting disturbs the storyline, twists it into another shape. I cannot resolve what has happened between the two men, but the film incubates a dozen possible answers, confounding the normal snap of my judgments. I have witnessed not simply the recorded event, but also the event of my own wondering, the activity of my imagination, which is often unconscious, extending over time. Lockhart has found a way to viscerally demonstrate the elasticity of the temporal-spatial experience. The event of the two men has taken only five minutes of my time, the camera traversing only 50 feet of corridor. Yet, within these repeated moments and movements, Lockhart has packed the narrative of a short story, one of many in the bursting anthology that comprises Lunch Break.

Still image from Sharon Lockhart, “Lunch Break (Assembly Hall, Bath Iron Works, November 5, 2007, Bath, Maine),” 2008; 35mm film transferred to HD, 80 min.; courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; © Sharon Lockhart.

The word “duration” refers to the period of time it takes for an event to occur, but I cannot sever its kinship to “endurance.” Both words stem from durus, Latin for “hard.” As I sat down to watch Lunch Break, I intended to stay, to endure, but I anticipated that the 80-minute experience would demand a sacrifice that would exceed my capacities. SFMoMA Curator of Media Arts, Rudolf Frieling, says of the experience, “The viewer’s attention and perception are constantly at work,”[1] meaning that Lockhart’s film forces the viewer not only to attend to things that he or she might normally overlook, but also to attend to attention, to perceive perception happening. There were moments when this was exhausting. In fact, the film asks me to perform the very labor the workers will soon resume: a repetitive effort. It was, however, never boring.

Lockhart gets to the crux of the activity common to both workers and viewers: the skill, ingenuity, and variation at the core of undertakings usually dismissed as trivial or onerous simply because they are repetitive. I cannot claim that my attention never wavered, only that Lunch Break inevitably rewarded the patient process of discovery. If speed seems to be the bugaboo of our age, critiqued for its narcotic-like capacity to gratify a sensation-seeking society’s desire for stimulation, then slowness, particularly as it unfolds here, offers another avenue toward the great rumbling revelation of experience: an opening—one story after another—into the expansive world of the imagination.

Sharon Lockhart, “Dirty Don’s Delicious Dogs,” 2008; chromogenic print; 41 1/16 x 51 1/16 in. (left), and “Gary Gilpatrick, Insulator,” 2008; chromogenic print; 24 3/4 x 30 3/4 in. (right), both courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, Gladstone Gallery, New York, and neugerriemschneider, Berlin; © Sharon Lockhart

It seems accurate to say, as one description does, that “Lunch Break’s gradual passage through the aged factory offers a meditative and melancholic reflection on the architectural, social and phenomenological space of a notably anachronistic mode of industrialized labor.”[2] And I might easily reflect—as Lockhart did during her gallery talk—upon the bookends that coincidentally bracket Lunch Break’s making and showing: the real estate bubble’s pop in 2007, and the union rupture in Wisconsin and the Occupy movement, both in 2011. But what is it about the film itself—rather than my projections about its subject—that evokes melancholy? It is true that the corridor is filled neither with laughter nor even many smiles. One man stretches, perhaps relieving an ache; a woman stares, perhaps fatigued; many read silently, as unanimated as the figures in the Duane Hanson sculpture that initially inspired Lockhart.[3] It may well be that melancholy unavoidably surfaces in this claustrophobic underground world, but it may also be that the restraint and deliberation of Lockhart’s procession forces me to consider not only the practices of perception and attention, but also those of reflection and judgment. Although the film inevitably raises associations to the conditions of factory labor, I found myself suspending—far more often than reaching—easy conclusions.[4]

Lunch break, indeed.

[1]Exhibition press release, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, August 30, 2011.

[2]Harvard Film Archive “Timestage. The Cinema of Sharon Lockhart,” 2009 [accessed October 19, 2011]. ”Anachronistic” may reflect both an actual trend toward automation and, particularly in industries like shipbuilding, a fantasy of completely automated processes that discounts the persistence of human labor.

[3]Lockhart’s triptych, Lunch Break Installation, “Duane Hanson: Sculptures of Life,” 14, December – 23 February 2003, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (2003), documented the installation of Hanson’s Lunch Break (Three Workers with Scaffold) (1989). Lockhart’s photographs of live workers installing fiberglass ones marked the beginning of the project that resulted in Lunch Break, the film.

[4]Among these associations are: contemporary globalization and the offshoring of manufacturing jobs; 19^th-century industrialization, the conditions of factory work, and, ironically, the increasing automation of manufacturing; and the work ethic itself.

It is what it is. Or is it? will be on view May 12 – July 29, 2012.

The following article was originally published by Michael Tomeo on July 15, 2010:

If the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh keeps putting on shows like Twisted Pair: Marcel Duchamp/Andy Warhol then maybe the ol’ Burgh deserves a place on the official Dia art pilgrimage map, along with James Turrell’s Roden Crater in Arizona and Walter De Maria’s New Mexican Lightning Field.  Curated by longtime Warhol archivist Matt Wrbican, Twisted Pair is smart, funny and long overdue. Where many curators employ obscure art theory in attempts to somehow prove that what they are doing is true, Wrbican actually uses the archive. This makes for a much more grounded take on these artists, which is exactly what they need after decades of art world deification.

This show reminds us that before all of the flashbulbs, fame and auction numbers, Andy Warhol was just another young New York artist, albeit a very promising one. It also accurately depicts Duchamp as being fairly aware of what young artists were up to, despite his status as art world legend. He was more accessible as a chess playing jokester than a solitary genius.

Andy Warhol, Oxidation, 1978. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917/1964.

There are some terrific pairings in this show, like Warhol’s Oxidation paintings next to Duchamp’s Urinal. There are also a few rare finds like Warhol’s The Lord Gave Me My Face But I Can Pick My Own Nose, 1948 and Duchamp’s Door at 11 Rue Larrey Photographic Enlargement, 1964. But some of the best stuff on view are the letters and archival material that might truly feel sacred to fans of either artist. Usually ephemera bores me to tears but here I was fascinated to see a butcher-paper test print for one of Warhol’s Shadows hanging above a case full of Duchamp’s optical illusion machines.

Among the qualities that Warhol and Duchamp share are a desire to shock, a taste for celebrity, a belief in the everyday object, a penchant for drag, and a strong voyeuristic impulse.  Duchamp’s groundbreaking idea of the readymade looms larger than any other in the 20^th century and no one did more with it than Warhol.  Warhol understood that advertisements, consumer objects, newspaper photos, the Empire State Building, and people themselves were all up for grabs as objects d’art. If Duchamp’s Bottle Rack looks rather pedestrian next to Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, it’s because Warhol never fully committed to the anti-retinal to the same degree that Duchamp did.

Andy Warhol, The Lord Gave Me My Face But I Can Pick My Own Nose, 1948, Collection Paul Warhola Family.

This show is so effective in pointing out connections between these two artists that it is tempting to see them as the same creative force formed by two separate eras. However, their differences are just as striking as their similarities. Duchamp embodied an authentic lackadaisical attitude that Warhol could only feign. With a work ethic that would make his Pittsburghian forebears proud, Warhol called his studio the Factory and constantly cranked out product.  Duchamp let large amounts of time, not to mention dust, seep into his works before finishing them. Warhol was a worldwide sensation while Duchamp only appealed to art-nerds. These days it is impossible to imagine any appropriation art, assemblage, or hip art collective like the Paris-based Claire Fontaine without these two artists – they are so influential that we are almost tired of them.

My friends in Pittsburgh roll their eyes when I over-praise their city’s magnificent bridges, or go on about how the PPG Building is like the best Banks Violette sculpture ever. And yes, I’ve been caught on Greenpoint Avenue in Brooklyn wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball hat.  But hometown bias aside, this show is worth traveling for.

On the other hand, Twisted Pair is so essentially New York that its next destination really should be the Whitney, but I doubt this will happen.  If a real sense of what these artists were like intrigues you, and the thought of seeing relics pertaining to their lives and work gets you all fluttery, then a trip to Pittsburgh is a must. After the show, indulge yourself with a little urban exploration. Vacant, post-industrial downtown Pittsburgh might be the closest thing to 60s SoHo to be found.

The following article was originally published by Kelly Nosari on September 1, 2010:

Each year, from mid-summer to early fall, the arts converge in Scotland’s capital city.  The Edinburgh International Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe are well-known venues for the performing arts.  The Edinburgh Festivals have expanded to include art forms such as film, jazz and blues, storytelling, and books.  The visual arts is no exception in having its own festival platform.  Taking place throughout August and the first week of September, the Edinburgh Art Festival is Scotland’s largest annual festival of visual art.  Daily Serving brings our readers some of its highlights.

The Edinburgh Art Festival annually commissions new works of art and partners with the local art community to provide a strong exhibitions program throughout the city.  The 2010 EAF presents commissions of new work by artists Martin Creed, Richard Wright and collaborative partners Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth.  Coleman and Hogarth’s Staged, which concluded August 15th, was produced by the Collective Gallery and situated at the City Observatory on Carlton Hill.  The artists turned the space into a multi-channel video installation described by the EAF Guide as both a ‘digital camera obscura’ and ‘a mise-en-scène’ for the city.  Capitalizing upon the theatrical emphasis of the Edinburgh Festivals, the artists included visitors in their work by projecting live CCTV footage along with pre-recorded filmic images of Edinburgh.

The 2010 EAF also commissioned intervention and performance works to take place throughout its run.  Among them is Ross Christie’s Mobile Art Market.  His environmentally friendly cycle-powered market stall travels around Edinburgh, offering up affordable prints, multiples, books and fanzines created by local artists.

Martin Creed: Down Over Up

The Fruitmarket Gallery presents new and recent work by 2001 Turner Prize winning British artist Martin Creed in Down Over Up.  Down Over Up – an evocative title – is inspired by the artist’s commission to refurbish the Scotsman Steps.  Creed notes the strong use of repetition in his work, which is for him a comfortable means of approaching our chaotic world and creating some semblance of regularity.  The exhibition’s strong thematic emphasis upon repetitive, incremental changes allows one to see differences where things might have otherwise appeared to be the same.

Down Over Up is centered upon the concept of ‘stacking and progression in size, height and tone’.  The exhibition features work where Creed has stacked or piled planks, chairs, tables, boxes, or legos.  The artist also uses paint and ink to explore the theme.  Creed’s new commission within the gallery transforms the central staircase into a synthesizer and is one of the conceptual highlights of the exhibition.  Ascending and descending the staircase causes notes on a scale to sound – making visitors’ movements through the gallery take on heightened participatory purpose as they both enact and complete the work

The Scotsman Steps Commission. Artist's impression of EAF commission for the Scotsman Steps, curated by the Fruitmarket Gallery and supported by the Scottish Government's Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund. Photo: Courtesy the Artist.

Down Over Up aptly references Creed’s permanent public work commission to refurbish Edinburgh’s Scotsman Steps.  The Steps, which take their name from the newspaper whose headquarters they were built to serve in 1904, are located by the Fruitmarket Gallery, connecting East Market Street and North Bridge in Edinburgh’s uniquely elevated Old Town.  The city seeks to give the Steps new life through the commission, as they have fallen out of favor due to disrepair and association with crime.  While the work has not been completed, Creed plans to resurface each step with contrasting marbles sourced from around the world.  The materials will not only infuse the Scotsman Steps with visual interest and a sense of permanence, but will also inject it with global character.

Martin Creed: Down Over Up will be on view at the Fruitmarket Gallery through 31 October 2010.

Richard Wright: The Stairwell Project

Richard Wright, The Stairwells Project, An EAF Commission in the Dean Gallery, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Supported by the Scottish Government's Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund. Photo: Angela Catlin.

2009 Turner Prize winner Richard Wright presents Stairwell Project, a new permanent work at the Dean Gallery.  The Dean Gallery, a part of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art since the 1990s, was designed by Thomas Hamilton as the Dean Orphan Hospital in 1831.  The Gallery’s staircases are among the building’s most prominent features and provide an expansive, architecturally unique background for Wright’s work.  Known for his ephemeral, wall-based painting, Wright brings this character to the Dean Gallery’s western staircase – placing the tradition of stairwell painting within the modern art gallery and presenting it in a new way.

Wright hand-painted The Stairwell Project in a physically and mentally demanding process that took four weeks to complete.  Inspired by the honeysuckle design of the original ceiling moldings in the stairwell, Wright designed an organic, abstracted flower shape.  He chose to paint solely in black – a color which points to the building’s melancholic history.  The flower motif is repeated in varying ways several thousand times throughout the stairwell.  The organic nature of the shape notably has the effect of introducing curved lines to a space that is solidly geometric.  Yet, the shape’s simplicity and its neutral color do not overpower.  Instead, the carefully varied size, orientation and placement of each flower subtly emphasizes the stairwell’s architecture and the abundance of light let in by the large windows.

Hito Steyerl:  In Free Fall

Hito Steyerl, still from In Free Fall. Photo: Courtesy the Artist.

The Collective Gallery presents In Free Fall, featuring new and recent work by artist and theorist Hito Steyerl.  Berlin-based Steyerl works in visual essay or film essay similar to artists such as Ursula Biemann.  This nascent documentary-influenced approach features a montage of appropriated and new footage, interviews and voice-over narrative.  Unlike traditional media, film essays facilitate the analysis of global complexities.  Through the shared language of images and information, Steyerl closely examines the economic networks which define our existence.

In Free Fall – Steyerl’s first solo exhibition in Scotland – presents Journal No. 1 in addition to three related works that include After the Crash, Before the Crash and Crash (a new commission).   The Crash works address the global economic downturn by focusing on an airplane junkyard located in the visually bare California desert - revealing cycles of capitalism as seen through the evolution of commodity.  The airplane, which facilitates global mobility, is a recognizable symbol of globalization and reveals a larger story.  As the Collective asserts, these works present ‘an anatomy of crashes both fictional and real’, revealing ‘unexpected connections between economy, violence and spectacle’.

In Free Fall concludes at the Collective Gallery on 19 September.

Julie Roberts: Child

Julie Roberts, Staying Together (2010), oil on linen. Collection of Mr. Pontus Bonnier, Sweden. Courtesy of Andrehn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm.

University of Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery presents Julie Roberts: Child – featuring new work by the artist.  Julie Roberts, a painter based in England, is concerned with the means through which ‘our social experience is given shape’.  In the past, Roberts has often chosen to paint the overtly sinister, drawing her to crime scenes and medical instruments.  Child – a thematic departure – focuses on gender roles, domestic environments, familial portraiture, school rooms and domestic labor situated in mid-twentieth century Britain.  As with past work, her new subject matter is underpinned by extensive research.  This allows Roberts to accurately present an entirely different, decidedly austere approach to childhood in a time period complicated by a great displacement of children into orphanages and foster homes.

While Roberts focuses on historic approaches to childhood and the family network, there is no sentimentality involved.  In works such as Staying Together or Meat and Two Veg, Roberts makes once familiar family scenes and portraiture both strange and unrecognizable.  Carefully constructed, unnatural stiffness is tempered by realism.  At the same time, historic subject matter is stylized and set against characteristic patterned backgrounds and wallpaper.  Roberts’ both stylized and informed approach to her subject matter combine to highlight ways in which society has changed over time.

Julie Roberts: Child remains at the Talbot Rice Gallery through 25 September.

life.turns.

life.turns. Uploaded submission.

life.turns. a film made by thousands of people, one frame at a time, is part of the 2010 Edinburgh Art Festival.  Blipfoto, an online photo journal and social networking community, was commissioned by New Media Scotland‘s Alt-w Fund to create an animated film using thousands of photos uploaded by participants. People were invited to submit photographs posed in any of 8 specified stances that represent the progressive movements of walking.  Blipfoto then presented these still images in a rapid succession giving the illusion of thousands of people walking – working together to complete one another’s gait.  The resulting animated film revives the Victorian zoetrope in a new way for the digital world and presents a celebration of everyday life in all its diversity.

life.turns. was completed and presented at Inspace in Edinburgh on 26 August.  The film can be viewed online at Blipfoto.

The following article was originally published by Michelle Scultz on February 3, 2011:

What would you do if you were one of the most iconic artists in the world, having forged a name for yourself with unmistakably recognizable work? What do you do to move forward? You can reject all that has made you famous, continue to churn out the tried and true, take a page from Duchamp’s book and take up chess or try and build upon your former practice to create something relevant and new…

In her latest solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers in London, Cindy Sherman seems to be attempting the latter.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2010. Installation view, Sprüth Magers London, January 2011. Photograph: Stephen White. Image courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London.

While Sherman is still photographing herself in a range of various guises, she has decidedly broken free of the frames that constrict her former work and has blown up photographs of an eclectic cast of characters to create a larger than life sized tableaux that extends throughout the two spaces of the gallery.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2010. Installation view, Sprüth Magers London, January 2011. Photograph: Stephen White. Image courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London.

The murals plaster the rooms like wallpaper, an effect furthered by the illustrative black and white backdrop, reminiscent of a Victorian woodlands as interpreted through home decor. And inhabiting the space is a strange and unnerving troupe that are very difficult to define…

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2010. Pigment print on Phototex adhesive fabric. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Sprüth Magers Berlin London.

Sherman’s work often depicts recognizable stereotypes: the stars of her famous ‘Untitled Film Stills,’ the Renaissance figures and clowns that followed and most recently in her 2008 series, the aging American socialite. However, we have also witnessed disconcerting and gruesome images, particularly in the Fairy Tales and Disasters series of the 1980s.

The figures we see at Sprüth Magers are neither familiar nor horrific; they are simply bizarre. Banished to a colorless forest, these poorly-dressed characters from folklore, fairytales and literature, appear as a cast of rejects. Too strange to be of use. Or perhaps, not strange enough.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2010. Pigment print on Phototex adhesive fabric. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Sprüth Magers Berlin London.

On one wall there is the woman in a peasant-like floral dress, covered in a sheer boudoir wrap with a visible broken foot. An amalgamation of styles that makes you unable to place her in any particular time and place. Next to her stands a figure in an slumpy naked suit, feet in wool socks and brandishing a plastic sword. In the next room a knight in a tunic too big, paired with metallic zebra print trousers and a circus juggler in a dated costume and decidedly twenty-first century sneakers.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2010. Pigment print on Phototex adhesive fabric. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Sprüth Magers Berlin London.

The figures do not sit in their setting, but are rather float on top of it, as if cut and pasted into this strange place. Perhaps it is this quality, this sense of flatness and dislocation, that recalls a favorite Sherman work, the 1975 animation Doll Clothes. However instead of a miniature Cindy we have giant figures, far too big for the space, that stare directly out over us, expressionless.

The heavy makeup that characterizes Sherman’s transformation of herself is gone – replaced instead with subtle digital manipulations used to contort her face. Topical alterations are replaced with structural ones – in the way that plastic surgery has become the preferred method over cosmetics to achieving the desired ‘natural‘ look.

Sherman’s work is undeniably iconic. As one of the most successful artists of the past decades there is an immense amount of pressure to continually produce something new. As these figures break out of their frames inhabiting the entire space and spilling out into the street through the Sprüth Magers window, Sherman attempts to break down her own formula – or at least bend it ever so slightly. For not abiding by the tried and true, Cindy – I applaud you, even if it is not my favorite work – I think I prefer vomit and vacuousness over vagueness.

Bean Gilsdorf published this interview with Sandra Phillips, Senior Curator of Photography at SF MoMA on December 2, 2010:

With a broad mix of photographs from both unknown shutterbugs and internationally recognized artists, Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870 at SFMOMA examines the images of a culture existing in an uneasy relationship to the camera. The exhibition probes our social connection to surveillance, pornography, and physical and emotional violence. Last week, Daily Serving’s Bean Gilsdorf sat down with Senior Curator of Photography Sandra Phillips, who talked about her ideas for the exhibition and her connection to some of the photographs.*

Nan Goldin, Nan and Brian in bed, New York City, 1983; detail from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency; 1979-1996; nine-carousel projection with approximately 700 slides, soundtrack, and titles; dimensions variable; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; © Nan Goldin; image: courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

Bean Gilsdorf: Exposed was ten years in the making. How and why did it begin?

Sandra Phillips: I did a show called Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence about twelve years ago because I was very interested in the fact that we ascribe a certain amount of authority to photographs as impartial truth-telling documents. But they can be extremely ambiguous. And it occurred to me that there was another aspect that was about making pictures without people knowing that they were being photographed. There are, in fact, some spy pictures in this show. So that’s how I started.

BG: Did your organization of this show start with any particular pieces? Or was it just a general concept?

SP: It started as an idea, and the beginning of it was looking at the work of Edgar Degas, believe it or not! He was very interested in photography and he made a lot of photographs. He made pictures of his models that he arranged, but they were presented as though they were spied on. I thought that was completely fascinating—why would someone as important as he be interested in the use of photography as a spying medium? It had to do with his own personal aesthetic, but once you get started in that, then you realize how amazingly broad this topic is.

Garry Winogrand, New York, 1969; gelatin silver print; 11 x 14 in. (27.94 x 35.56 cm); Collection SFMOMA, fractional and promised gift of Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein; © Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

SP: I also looked at the work of Helen Levitt, and she was interested in making pictures of people who didn’t realize that they were being photographed. So all of a sudden, this idea expanded: how do you explain street photography without actually dealing with the surveillance aspect of it? And then it became a very big subject: it wasn’t only street photography, it’s the ways we look at sex, the ways we understand important people, and then this weird territory where people like celebrities are being aggressively looked at. What does that mean to us as a culture? Where does this come from? Examining the interest that we have in violence is a necessary part of modern life. And the contemporary photographs are all about surveillance, obviously.

BG: Do you think there’s any correspondence between the gesture of taking a photograph of someone who is not looking, and staging a photograph to appear as though someone is not looking?

SP: …Oh, yeah…

BG: I’m thinking of all the Facebook photos—those self-portraits—where people specifically look away from the camera as though they had been caught unawares. What do you think is behind that?

SP: It’s an affect, that we want to be photographed as though it’s real, but it’s actually not real. I think this is the big issue now in photography, whether it’s staged or isn’t staged. It comes back to the idea of photography being a medium of truth telling. It’s a very interesting medium; it seems absolutely clear and yet is so mysterious.

BG: I find it interesting that this exhibition came from England, where surveillance culture is just outrageous. Do you know what the reaction was, over there?

SP: It was tremendously interesting to the English for that very reason. The Tate is a much more public institution than almost any other institution in the world, it has millions of visitors a year. And I can’t remember how many millions of people came to see the show, but it was huge, there was a lot of discussion about it. There was another show about surveillance [Rhetorics of Surveillance: from Bentham to Big Brother at ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe] about ten years ago in Germany and it was very theoretical. But in England they have the whole craze, really, for outfitting public spaces with surveillance cameras. There was a child in Scotland who was abducted and killed by two older kids, and that’s what started it all. It was before the al Qaida bombings, it was before all of that. It wasn’t political; the idea was purely to save children’s lives, that’s where it started.

Tazio Secchiaroli, Anita Ekberg and Husband Anthony Steel, Vecchia Roma, 1958; gelatin silver print; 11 11/16 x 14 5/8 in. (29.69 x 37.15 cm); Collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase; © Tazio Secchiaroli / David Secchiaroli.

BG: Which is different from what’s happening right now. On one hand we want to have our personal privacy—when we dictate it!—but on the other hand we want to look as though we’ve been caught on camera in some “real” moment. How do you tease those apart? It’s so complicated, this relationship that we have to an image of ourselves.

SP: Yes, it’s extremely strange.

BG: Are there any pieces in the exhibition that embody what you want people to take away from this?

SP: The Degas picture. And, obviously people like Weegee play an enormous role here. And there are certainly pictures that mean a lot to me. The early photograph by Paul Strand of the man who’s sitting on the sidewalk, a poor man, on the street in New York. He’s revealing his inner dislocation or inner anxiety…it’s a picture of someone’s raw psychological anxiety. It’s a very moving picture, done by a guy who was trying to learn about Cubism and elevate photography to a formalist practice. And, at the same time he’s making these pictures of very poor people on the streets without their knowledge of it. That, I would say, is a touchstone.

* * *

*Exposed was conceived by Sandra Phillips and co-curated with Tate curator of photography Simon Baker.

If You Weren’t So Gorgeous was originally posted by Catherine Wagley on February 17, 2012:

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

Whitney Houston, center, with her mother, Cissy Houston; father, John Houston, second from right; brother, Michael Houston, left; and half-brother, Gary Garland in Newark. Circa 1979.

“She could have been signed on the basis of her pedigree alone,” said columnist Stephen Metcalf, talking about Whitney Houston on Slate’s culture podcast Tuesday, four days after the singer’s death. “Her godmother was Aretha Franklin. Her mother was an accomplished gospel singer. Her cousins were Deedee and Dionne Warwick. She could have been signed based on her looks alone”–she’d modeled and appeared on the cover of Seventeen before she’d sold records–“and she could have been signed on the basis of her voice alone.” Metcalf concluded, “To have any one of those things could make you an enormous star. The fact that she had all three. . .”

“Just in technical terms, I don’t think I’ve heard a better instrument in my lifetime, even from singers I prefer, who are better. . . in terms of expressiveness or just the vibe,” added Slate music critic Jody Rosen. Her performance at the 1991 Super Bowl, just after the Gulf War, showed that instrument’s full force; it also again showed Houston had it all. Said Rosen,

You can really really hear the extraordinary range and nuance in her voice. She’s just technically out of this world, and, also, it tells you something about the stature of Whitney Houston: here was this black women who was quote-unquote America’s sweetheart–she was called that many times–and at this moment of National crisis or of fervent jingoism, she was called upon to play the Kate Smith or Bing Crosby role . . . as F-16s roared overhead.

The “whole package”– sweetheart, stunner, virtuoso–is something you can only be if your body, your image, is put out into the world along with your talent and brain. So it’s pop stars who deal with the pressure to be/have everything far more often than other artists.

Hannah Wilke, "S.O.S. Starification Object Series," 1974-82. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art.

In the visual arts, in fact, being/having the whole package is sometimes suspect. When, in the 1970s, Hannah Wilke made small vulvar, fleshy forms out of latex, ceramics or bubble gum, attached these to her body,  and posed topless for pin-up posters, critics accused her of flaunting her beauty. Amelia Jones, in her essay “Everybody dies. . . even the gorgeous,” quotes Wilke: “People give me this bullshit of, ‘What would you have done if you weren’t so gorgeous?’ What difference does it make?. . . Gorgeous people die as do the stereotypical ‘ugly.’” Looks didn’t give her an advantage, she implied.

But Wilke’s looks and attitude were special. Her dark-haired, svelte form; her flawless skin speckled by those unsettling orifices and folds of flesh; and how she looked at the camera in that disaffected, disinterested way Linda Evangelista would later adopt — all this emblazoned itself into your memory in a way the vulvar sculptures on their own would not have. She became the perfect conduit for her art and, attached to her physical, visible self, her sculptures showed even a conventionally “gorgeous” body to be cavernous and complicated.

Narcissister, Still from "Every Woman," 2010.

“I had started developing performance work where I used the orifices of my body, and for me it was about achieving my own grander virtuosity,” said the artist Narcissister, whose short film Every Woman (2010) screened in L.A. on Valentines day, as part of Dirty Looks: Long Distance Love Affairs at the Hammer Museum. At the start of Every Woman, Narcisster, whose entree into performance was as a dancer in the Alvin Ailey company, appears nude except for the  plastic barbie doll mask she always wears and her red, long-fingered monster gloves. Chaka Khan’s singing “I’m every woman, it’s all in me/Anything you want done, baby/I’ll do it naturally” as Narcissister’s performing a reverse strip tease. She’s pulling her clothing out of first her mouth, then her vagina, then her hair, until she’s dressed in tube top, earrings, tight striped skirt, panty hose and heels, with purse and sunglasses to complete the picture. Chaka Khan’s refrain (“I’m every woman, I’m every woman,” again and again) plays on as Narcissister runs her gloved hands up and down her flashily, unnaturally, clothed body until the curtain closes and the video ends.

There is something virtuosic about her; she’s striking, composed, clearly a skilled performer.  But she’s stuck inside the “whole package.” And if she weren’t so gorgeous, it wouldn’t be so obvious that having it all doesn’t ultimately help.

The following article was originally published by Seth Curcio on August 4, 2010: 

During an admittingly rushed Friday evening in 2008, I attended the Whitney Museum during a pay-what-you-wish night. It was during the Biennial and every floor of the museum was packed with an abundance of people and art. As I made it through each floor, digesting as much art as possible in 3 hours, one artist and artwork stayed on my mind: Mika Rottenberg’s video installation, Cheese. Since that evening, I have followed her beautifully complex projects, faithfully reading about her recent exhibitions at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery and Mary Boone Gallery. So it was no surprise that when I first heard that her new video, Squeeze, was to debut at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, I made it a point to stop by immediately and see what the artist has been up to over the past two years.

Mika Rottenberg, Squeeze (still), 2010; Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery/Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery; photo: Henry Prince

In this new video, Rottenberg continues her investigation into social and labor-based inequalities through a fragmented narrative. The grotesquely seductive video equally binds and separates the concept of labor with gender, class, and race, seamlessly merging the real with the hyper-fictional. Interlocking environments slide in and out of place. Exaggerated sounds of cutting, slicing and crunching divide and define the separate worlds, and rich, fleshy color pull them all back together. Similar to her past work, Squeeze maintains an all woman cast of characters played by non-actors, where the physical characteristics of Rottenberg’s women parallel their occupation within the awkwardly constructed environment. Women working in a rubber plant in India, mining the trees for raw substance, interact with an all female work force at a lettuce farm in Arizona. These two real worlds collide with the fictional factory constructed in the artist’s studio, serving as the main link between all of the spaces in constant flux. Walls move, floors drop, and characters blindly connect to the factory to create a new hybrid consumer product turned art-object, which is composed of blush that is squeezed from the skin of a woman in the factory, rubber, and decomposing lettuce.

Through a beautifully non-linear story, Rottenberg’s use of the absurd confronts the seriousness of her content, mesmerizing the viewer by slowly releasing a delicate flow of information through color, sound and rhythm. Each element quietly underscores the disconnect between the consumer and the production process innate to mass commerce. What results is a world which mirrors her role as a woman creating an art object, and our daily lives of utilizing a variety of products, many of which are produced through the work of people who are socially, politically, and racially removed from the consumer. Yet, while the work is far from generous, the artist subtly reminds us that we can never really separate ourselves from the lives of others no matter how distant or disconnected we would like for them to be.

If you can’t make it, check out the article and video posted by Catherine Wagley on July 17, 2008:

The duo has had solo shows at major museums before, including the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Shanghai Art Museum, and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and they were shortlisted for the first Turner Prize in 1984. But, despite their already glowing past career, this current exhibition, organized by the Tate Modern, shows how relevant their work still is to contemporary art. Their bold graphics and iconic culture references, mixed with intimate personal nuances, dynamically interact with the art-technology-mainstream-personal-politic discussions that define the current climate.

Perhaps their relevance continues simply because their work is driven by a respect for contemporary culture. “We’re great believers in the force of culture,” Gilbert says in the above clip. “There is a gap inside of everyone which can only be filled by reading, listening to music, writing poetry, making art, looking at art. We are not just bones and flesh and skin; we are cultured people.”

The following article was originally posted by Allison Gibson on May 5, 2009:

Kehinde Wiley is back in his hometown of Los Angeles, and the city is welcoming him with open arms. As an artist whose name evokes recognition, and even conversation, beyond the periphery of the contemporary art world, the Brooklyn based artist draws a crowd of eager devotees (the author not excluded) to any venue at which his work is being exhibited or discussed. With a recent lecture at the Getty Museum, and a new exhibition on view at Roberts & Tilton, Wiley is introducing the public to Brazil, the latest series within his larger body of work, The World Stage. Continue reading below for a full review of Brazil by DailyServing’s Allison Gibson.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

With The World Stage, Wiley moves away from using models sourced from the streets of Brooklyn and Los Angeles to pose for his majestic paintings, which emulate the portraiture of Western European noblemen and kings. Instead, he has embarked on a select world tour in this body of work, wherein he chooses models native to the country that he is working in, expanding his ideas beyond the basis of traditional European portraiture to create a more global dialog. He now refers to the artistic and historical traditions specific to those cultures which continue to be marginalized or ignored by the art world. Bringing these developing countries into the forefront of the discussion, Wiley begins a dialog about identity and power that isn’t dominated for once by the ideas of the West.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

The previous installments of the World Stage were China and Africa, Lagos-Dakar. For the Brazil series, Wiley continued his pattern of working in which he sought out a very specific type of model to be photographed. He was very clear that he was looking for young men from their teens to early thirties, who come from poor neighborhoods and who carry certain physical traits similar to the art works he is attempting to emulate. Wiley even mentioned in his lecture at the Getty that when word began to leak about what type of models he was looking for on the streets of Rio, hoards of young men showed up doing their best impressions of what they heard he was interested in.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

The larger than life canvases in ornate wooden frames on display at Roberts & Tilton introduce confident, yet accessible young men posed amidst fluorescent backdrops of explosive pattern. The young men from the “favelas” of the so-called Marvelous City, in their contemporary Brazilian style, appear at once completely unrelated to their staged circumstances — the old-world postures, the props that they hold, and the floral backdrops that intertwine with their bodies — and at the same time seem to embrace the roles that their director has asked them to undertake.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

In Rio de Janeiro, Wiley’s inspirations did not rest in old master paintings hanging on the walls of powerful institutions, but allowed the work to be impacted by the iconic nationalistic sculptures found around the city, which he might argue are the cultural equivalent to the David or Velasquez paintings referenced in his earlier work. The earnest looks in the painted mens’ eyes seem to be pleading with us to accept them and the orchestrated scenes into which they are set. The sheer size of the paintings and the nearly unmatched skill in rendering human elements, down to the soft skin and muscular arms, command the viewer to linger in front of the colossal works much longer than the pieces might merit if executed in a smaller scale. The backgrounds, which are inspired by ethnic tapestries discovered by the artist, hypnotize the viewer as their eyes attempt to make sense of it all.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

In discussing his oeuvre, Wiley admits to having a great affection for, interest in, and knowledge of the scope of Western painting from which he draws inspiration for his modern day recreations. So it has become clear to the viewer over the past few years that his attitude isn’t necessarily one of criticism of these works which have undoubtedly dominated the canon of art history for centuries. Rather, by bringing the element of the young, modern black man into the picture, he is creating a conversation about power, which is much more interesting and effective than satire in this dialog. However, since his completion of the MFA at Yale and his residency at the Studio Museum Harlem more than half a decade ago, Wiley has been, essentially, exhibiting the same work — albeit cleverly and progressively investigating the broader themes of art history, power, war or the fallen with each new series. While most of his audience remains basically enraptured by the work — because of its size, because of its photo realist qualities, because of its social implications, because of the way it relates to modernity overtly or through undertones, or because of its bright colors and patterns — one wonders if it is still challenging us in the way it had when the first series was shown.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

The World Stage is moving beyond the comfort zone of the Western context of power, and into a world still largely unexplored by American artists, and through this, Wiley has added another dimension to the discourse. The conversation now reaches beyond the obvious juxtapositions of social prestige and into ideas about the American fetishization of the exotic and especially the less-than, as he discussed at his lecture at the Getty. It’s one thing to paint images of “the other”, and it’s another to paint scenes that refer to art history, but when the two are combined, the viewer is forced to contemplate each piece on several levels. It begins to be more difficult to deduce from each painting the same one-liner about contemporary culture versus historical ideals of power and pomp. Introducing the Brazilian men and the many contexts from which they come, into the pieces, American viewers now find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of being faced with something we may not fully understand, and that means the work is asking us to spend more time with it, thinking, talking, and even struggling with our own preconceived notions.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

The World Stage: Brazilis on view at Roberts & Tilton through May 30, 2009 and is accompanied by a 64-page hardcover book of the exhibition.

Kehinde Wiley is based in Brooklyn, New York. He received his MFA from the Yale University School of Art and his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. His work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, The Columbus Museum of Art, The Denver Art Museum, The UCLA Hammer Museum and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. He has shown in solo exhibitions internationally, including at Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

The following article was originally posted by Marilyn Goh on December 15, 2011: 

Monika Fryčová, Perpetuum Mobile, 2011. Image: Kling og Bang gallery.

Monika Fryčová’s show Perpetuum Mobile at the Kling og Bang Gallery propositions that the relationship between the visible and invisible is constantly in motion and ephemeral.

Locked behind the socialist borders in then-Czechoslovakia, stories of local culture were the only narratives that Fryčová heard. Like many artists who were restless for new physical activity and renewed visions after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Fryčová became in her own words, a traveller who charted her own routes and made her own narratives without maps or guides. Consequentially, Fryčová’s works are highly improvised, and dependent on the indeterminacy and spontaneity of human interactions.

Monika Fryčová, Monika & Trabi in train station, Prostejov, 2005. Image: Monikafryčová.net

A red automobile-turned-limousine was an early, physical manifestation of Fryčová’s desire for mobility, which she drove to school in 2005 and finally made it to Berlin some years later where she was arrested by the traffic police for the car’s non-regulated standards. Intended as “moving sculpture” and created for the purpose of performance, the red Trabi is Fryčová’s assertion of artistic and political freedom beyond the spectre of the Iron Curtain, but also the artistic vindication of the dynamic flux and non-linear processes that characterise aspects of human nature.

Monika Fryčová, Open Springs no. 2, 2009, ongoing project. Image: Monikafryčová.net

Having investigated the artistic gestures that were given freer reign after a period of enforced socio-political isolation, her research now speculates upon the less charted regions of human existence: principles of chaos, intuition, perceptions and mythology. At the Kling og Bang Gallery, Fryčová’s framed photographs of herself shot in various positions and in diverse locations are perched on a peculiar machine acting like a turnstile that expends energy into rotating endlessly. Perpetually in motion, her static photographs disallow the viewer any prolonged contemplation; instead, we are forced into forming fleeting impressions of ambivalent spaces where specifics are really inconsequential. As long as Fryčová’s works situated themselves in that strange gap between motion and stillness – with a distorted sense of space and time embedded within -,  any attempt at linearity or continuity can only remain illusory.

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Monika Fryčová was born in Prostejov, Czech Republic. She lives and works in both the Czech Republic and Iceland. Perpetuum Mobile runs until 18th December at the Kling og Bang Gallery in Reykjavik.

The following article was published by Seth Curcio on March 14, 2007:

In a piece titled “Art & Life (In My Part of the World),” Nedko Solakov created a piece in a vacant and dilapidated apartment to illustrate a narrative about the distraught life of a piece of art. She, the work of art, felt neglected in this house and thus moved itself into the most well-lit room and on top of several tables. The entire apartment contains text that lets the viewer in on contextual clues that inform of past events. Solakov was born in Bulgaria in 1957 and studied at Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp. While able to take on multiple media, the artist’s work is always centered on a conceptual humor and often stems directly from text. In 2005, Solakov participated in a group show titled “OK:Okay” at the Grey Art Gallery, where the artist used works of de Kooning and Warhol from the Gallery’s collection to create the fictitious hut of an African native who collects Western art. Solakov has received funding from numerous foundations, including the International Studio Program in Sweden (IASPIS), KulturKontakt and the Philip Morris Foundation. Last year, he exhibited with Galerie Arndt & Partner in Berlin and the Museum of Contemporary Art / MNAC in Bucharest.

Today’s article was originally published by Marilyn Goh on June 29, 2011:

Bruce Nauman, Going Around the Corner Piece, 1970, © Coll. Centre Pompidou. Photo: Georges Meguerditchian

In the self-explanatory show entitled Video, an Art, a History 1965 – 2010, the history and evolution of the video art genre are recounted through 50 video works and installations, drawn from the collections of both the Singapore Art Museum and Centre Pompidou. Having developed in tandem with the apparatus of television and the analogue and then digital video cameras, video art’s reconfiguration of the politics of image-making and its ability to place the spectator as an indispensable agent in a work’s existence are significant tenets on which the exhibition is established. The infinitely widening scope and scale for the production and interpretation of (moving) images, the mode of their dissemination, and the documentation of performances (technical or otherwise), pose several key but general questions around which the works are grouped.

The pertinence of such questions however, falters in the collaborative effort that has shown up more differences than similarities. Reconciling the inventory of the Singapore Art Museum with the Centre Pompidou’s reveals the tentative forays into the processes of historicisation that are only beginning to develop in Southeast Asia and the inevitable rift in the standpoints of Western art and Southeast Asian art history. The Pompidou’s international collection stretches back 4 decades to the genesis of video art; the Singapore Art Museum’s inventory spans approximately a decade that really began with the Asian Financial Crisis (1997-8) and is focused on works produced in the surrounding geographical region. The wider ramifications of this collaboration go beyond an overwhelming inventory imbalance and the expanded visual vocabulary that video technology provides; indeed the emerging ideological differences become apparent when speculative comparison – the attempt at a comparative video-art history, should it even exist – inevitably sets in.

Pipilotti Rist, A la belle étoile (Under the Sky), 2007, © Coll. Centre Pompidou. Photo: Georges Meguerditchian.

The seeming futile effort of historicising video art in this instance, is thus mitigated by several thematic (and loosely chronological) focuses that ground the show: television critique, the representations of self, the documentation of performance, installation in space, landscape as metaphor, video-as fiction and the deconstruction of narratives.

If early efforts by video pioneers such as Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman and David Hall took the definition of an art object beyond its conventional parameters as a static entity produced for visual consumption, perhaps the greatest strength of video art triumphed in this show is the unprecedented potential of experiential interactivity between artist, installation and spectator. Peter Campus’ Interface (1972) invites the viewer to superimpose their reflection onto their projected image after which they simultaneously face 2 images of themselves – one of the video image and their reflection on the glass screen. The inherent sense of ego coupled with a measure of curiosity is a potent brew, particularly when facets of the multi-layered self are revealed in art. Like the literary Doppelgänger (the ghostly and sinister double), artists’ early efforts recognised the potential of video art in exploring the loss of existential reference in which the traditionally held view of the consecrated sense of self is destabilised. In Bruce Nauman’s Going around the Corner Piece (1972), the surveillance set-up is symmetrical and simple: perched in the corners in a white square-room are closed-circuit cameras and small TV monitors that capture visitor movements going around the corner of the enclosed space. The spectator’s image disappears from view as he/she rounds a corner; speeding up in an attempt to play catch-up with one’s image results in a unsuccessful tail-chasing endeavour – which is probably the glorious core and yet most vexing part of this work.

Peter Campus, Interface, 1972.

Departing from the investigative preoccupation with the apparatus and the monolithic hold that television had, video art had, by the 1980s, begun deconstructive strategies of memory and narratives, debunking on its way, stereotypes of sexuality, ethnicity and gender perpetuated by the very same mode. Nam June Paik’s semi-documentary Guadalcanal Requiem (1979) explores the subjectivity of memory through the deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction of narratives, in a film that coalesces history, time, cultural memory and mythology on the site of one of World War II’s most devastating battles in the Solomon Islands. Surrealistic images of archival footage, interviews, Charlotte Moorman’s fragmented cello performances come together like a scratchy Hitchcock–Buñuel/Dali crossover. The haunting collage is often fraught with poignant tension and a sense of the macabre: interviewees with singular (or paltry) memories picking up where some have left off; Moorman playing a cello with a long palm leaf against a thunderous horizon, and at another time, performs concealed in a body bag.

Guadalcanal Requiem, Nam June Paik, 1979, © Nam June Paik Estate video still Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EIA) New York

A deconstructive approach to the moving image seemed to be video art’s trajectory from the 1990s into the early 21^st century, incorporating new developments of photo processing, digital editing and image layering in contemporary visual culture. Swiss conceptual artist Pipilotti Rist’s A la belle étoile (2007) moves between micro- and macrocosms on horizontal and vertical surfaces. As suggested by curator Christine Van Assche, such works operate on removing depth of field, redefining in the process, the spectator’s own rapport with space.

Despite the influence of the commercial mainstream, video art has nevertheless, retained its earlier forms: the performance documentary, mixed-media texts, or even the visual portrait. Such forms seem conceivably better suited to the preoccupation with art’s social purpose and its context of production that remain dominant traits in Asian-produced videos; perhaps most similar to the historical Western notions where art was produced within corresponding socio-political backgrounds. Just as Gustav Courbet’s post-romanticism was a rejection of academic and bourgeois juste milieu, much of Southeast Asian works are filled with the rhetoric of social change in which media artists show no desire to be unbound from their local cultural matrices. By continuing to invoke ties to tradition, incredibly varied configurations (or even fragments) of history that appear in Asian works at best, seem to read as disjointed narratives to the viewer unschooled in the intricacies of China’s tumultuous last few decades.

Yang Fudong, Backyard - Hey! Sun is rising, 2001.

Yang Fudong’s Backyard – Hey! Sun is Rising (2001) follows the Keatonesque slapstick antics of four young men enacting military rituals and traipsing around with swords, questioning the meaning of rituals in the wake of social changes. A richer meaning however, could be gleaned from Yang’s work if considered in the light of the communism’s wane, as well as in the historical traditions of Zen, martial arts and the aesthetic disciplines of poetry, painting and calligraphy – all of which are mirrored in aesthetic form and content in his videos. Like Yang’s disoriented characters who seem to seek penance in an environment marked by repression, The Propeller Group’s Uh… (2007) confronts Vietnam’s youth culture’s adaptations to the changing socio-cultural and political landscape through the symbolic use of graffiti, and the disorder and spontaneity it represents – the antithesis of Vietnam’s ordered socialist state.

Uh..., The Propeller Group, 2007, Singapore Art Museum Collection

Manet's Luncheon on the Grass and the Thai farmers, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Two Planets series, 2008, Singapore Art Museum collection

While Western artists like Pierre Huyghe and Issac Julien integrated mixed media installations with the spectacular and immersive experience of cinema, Asian filmmakers also tended to persist with the use of narrative (and at times, the meta-narrative) as a didactic strategy. In Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s The Two Planets Series (2008), Thai farmers – groups of people blithely oblivious to the cultural or economic baggage associated with canonical works of Western art history – talk about several cornerstones of modern European painting. Their discussions of Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass (1863), van Gogh’s The Siesta (1889-90) and Millet’s The Gleaners (1857) are artlessly literal, context-less and extremely humourous, with the constant comical tendency to drift towards off-topic situations. Straddling the diverse worlds of rural farming and art history, Rasdjarmrearnsook raises questions of socio-cultural context, the parameters of interpretation and appreciation, but stops short of suggesting that our efforts in basting together a coherent narrative and interpretation of art are vain but significant detractors from the lost pleasure of looking.

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Video, an Art, a History 1965 – 2010 is presented by the Singapore Art Museum and the Centre Pompidou, and runs through 18 September 2011.

"No Olvidado - Not Forgotten", 2010. 23 graphite on paper drawings. Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo credit Robert Wedemeyer.

There are very few artists today who willingly take a direct political position in their work. Often artists neglect how powerful artwork can be as an instigator for social and political change. In many ways art and politics, or art and activism, have gone hand in hand throughout history, helping to over come social injustice. But, just as often, artwork has acted as a tool to help further social and economic inequalities by declaring ownership and possession.

As an artist that has committed her work to implementing social activism through art making, Andrea Bowers’ drawings and video eloquently document the lives of those who directly interact with the political system, through such issues as illegal immigration and land ownership. Her methods of representation help to humanize and quantify abstract concepts, such as the number of deaths caused by border crossing, through subtle interactions and involvement with her documented subjects. When modern media often explores these issues in a removed and politicized manner, Bower’s work reminds us of the individual. The simple act of documentation gives a face to those who are otherwise overshadowed by the dominating political sphere.

After viewing her recent exhibition at Susanne Veilmetter Los Angeles Projects, which closed last week, I had the privilege of meeting with the artist to discuss the roles of artists and activists, the function of memorials, and personal commitment to public issues.

"No Olvidado - Not Forgotten", 2010. 23 graphite on paper drawings. Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo credit Robert Wedemeyer.

Julie Henson: To start with, could you tell me a little bit about your show, The Political Landscape, at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects?

Andrea Bowers: The Political Landscape continues my recent exploration of contemporary issues associated with the genre of landscape.  It focuses on contentious locations where countries and corporations are willing to cause environmental degradation or human rights violations for the purpose of attaining or maintaining power.  One of the earliest functions of the landscape picture has been to provide evidence of ownership; in this project I aim to reveal the abuse of ownership. For the exhibition, I have made two different projects that focus on two different sites in the American West: public land in the state of Utah and the Mexican/American border.

JH: I find it interesting that you choose to use drawing as a method to interact with those that are on the forefront of the current immigration debate. It seems to me that the act of creating a photorealistic drawing becomes documentation of the individual’s personal narrative. How do you relate to the individuals that you portray? How does visually capturing the individual relate to the dialogue around the social issue that affects them?

AB: First of all I should explain that one strategy that I use in my work is photorealist drawing. In the current exhibition at Vielmetter, I made a series of black and white pencil drawings of protesters at the recent Mayday March here in Los Angeles. Each drawing contains a protester holding a sign or wearing a slogan somewhere on their clothing. I am focusing on their political position at that particular moment. I’m choosing to honor these individuals in my drawings because I agree with the political ideologies they’re promoting and I think that these political subjects should be apart of historical discourse as well as art discourse.

"Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (We voted for a change We are waiting for it)", 2010. Graphite on paper. Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo credit Robert Wedemeyer.

JH: It seems to me that one consistent element of the show at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is this idea of honoring those who are otherwise forgotten in the mainstream media and current political sphere. The large drawings clearly have a strong relationship to many large public memorials, like Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. How does the memorial function for you and in what ways does it change once presented in the gallery versus the public realm?

AB: No Olvidado (Not Forgotten) is the largest drawing project I have yet made.  It is comprised of 23 graphite drawings, 50” x 120” each. The piece acts as a memorial honoring those who have died crossing the Mexican/American border.  Unlike most memorials, this is an incomplete list and will always remain that way no matter how many names are added or collected.  So many people that have died migrating to the U.S. from Mexico over the years will never be identified.  The list of immigrant deaths comes from the organization Border Angels, whose mission is to stop unnecessary deaths of individuals traveling through the Imperial Valley desert region and the mountains surrounding San Diego County, as well as the area located around the Mexican/American border. A high percentage of these unnecessary deaths have been the result of extreme weather conditions, while some have, sadly, been the results of racial discrimination crimes. The Vietnam Memorial is government sanctioned and paid for—I wanted to make this memorial because I don’t believe the government would ever sanction and pay for a memorial like this.

JH: I also find it very intriguing that the drawings are more delicate and fragile than the traditional memorial and the list of names visually represents something seemingly abstract. There is something very precious about how seemingly impermanent the drawings are. What are your thoughts on the repetitious act of drawing and listing a record of an almost indefinite number of lives?

AB: I think the impermanence of graphite and paper versus a more traditional material for monuments, like stone or bronze relates to not only the fragility of the situation at the border but also, again, the lack of  U.S. government sanctioned support for people migrating to this county. The issues have only been abstracted by the American corporate media and most of our government officials. I don’t think there is anything abstract about thousands of people dying in the desert who are simply trying to make a better life for themselves and their families. The act of drawing or mark making reveals my personal involvement with the subject matter.

JH: I completely agree that the nature of the border situation is a product of our political system. One thing that I really love about No Olvidado (Not Forgotten) is that it initially comes across as a finite recording of lives lost, and the more time you look at the drawing, the more you realize the innumerable nature of it. And the shear time invested in the act of drawing so many names gives you a place to recognize and humanize the political questions around the border. It seems to me that you assume a different position in The United States v. Tim DeChristopher than you do in No Olvidado (Not Forgotten). Somehow, you smoothly transition from what seems to me as a recording of a story to physically intersecting and numbering the seemingly boundless environment that Tim DeChristopher saved. What happens when you inject yourself into the video?

"The United States v. Tim DeChristopher", 2010. Single Channel HD video (color with sound). Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo credit Robert Wedemeyer.

AB: I don’t see them as all that different. The action of drawing is somehow in line or is similar to walking through the landscape. I have spent a great deal of time studying and teaching the history of gestural mark making in both painting and performance.  Paul Schimmel’s exhibition, “Out of Actions” had big impact on me when I was a young artist.  Some of the mark making in No Olividado was made by using a really big brush coated in powdered graphite.  Walking through the landscapes and brushing the negative space of the drawings are both forms of gesture for me.  Both reveal my personal commitment to the issues. This is where my subjectivity enters the work. As an artist, attempting to be neutral or appearing to not have a position only serves the powers that be.

JH: Well, there are definite similarities in your approach. The difference to me is that there is a visual representation of your presence in The United States v. Tim DeChristopher that I read as more involved, or at least more active, than in the drawings. To place yourself within the landscape rather than just documenting through drawing makes me more aware of your presence and your position within the work. It enforces the idea that you are standing in solidarity with the issues at hand, as opposed to simply documenting someone else’s point of view. It allows the work to be more subjective in nature and instills it with a sense of personal passion and investment that is evident to the viewer. This leads me to one thing I find really interesting, which is how your work relates to role of the artist and the role of the activist. Can you talk a little about these two roles and how you think they work together?

AB: Art and activism have always been intricately tied throughout history. It’s just the market of commodification that encourages us to believe they are at odds. I’m always looking for the commonalities between art and activism, as well as thinking through how each might serve the other.  My work is always very opinionated in its political stance.

The exhibition, The Political Landscape, corresponded with multiple events at the gallery, including a fundraiser and information session with Tim DeChristopher, an afternoon of talks, music and conversation toward humane migration reform and a performance by artist Cindy Short in response to the exhibition. Andrea Bowers upcoming projects include “Collection: MOCA’s First Thirty Years (1980 – Now),” The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, and  “Stowaways”, The Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Araba, Spain, among others.