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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An image Miranda Grosvenor sent to a beau

In one of the snapshots Miranda Grosvenor sent to her famous beaus, she appears blurry and blond, sitting in a convertible parked with its front end in the street and back end on the grass of somebody’s manicured lawn. In this and other photos, she is always alone, and always suspiciously attractive, naïf-like as a young Nastassja Kinski in a two-piece bathing suit or full-bodied as Marilyn Monroe. None of these actually were her; she clipped the photos from magazines or catalogs. Her name did not officially belong to her either. In addition to Miranda, she went by Ariana, Briana and, on rare occasion, her real name, Whitney.

She would call up famous men and, in her “mellifluous, accentless voice,” seduce them within 20 minutes, according to Bryan Burroughs who wrote about mythic Miranda for Vanity Fair in 1999. Buck Henry, who co-wrote The Graduate and now makes guest appearances on 30 Rock, first heard from her in 1980 or ‘81, when she called him long distance in the middle of the night, name-dropping and charming him with her exquisitely vast knowledge of his career and of that of many other men in his bracket. She knew where Henry ate lunch and with whom, and, sometimes, when Henry was on calls with her, Senator Ted Kennedy or some other impressive personality would beep in.

Pipilotti Rist, "Ever is Over All," 1997

Henry became mildly, understandably obsessed, determined to find out who this woman really was. “I have a book’s worth of material on her,” he told Burroughs. “I couldn’t begin to tell you the whole story.” Or all the stories, because there are many, all vague, rarely with Miranda making an actual appearance. “I kept seeing this image of a . . . girl, sitting in a room somewhere,” said Cynthia O’Neal of Miranda, whom her husband, Patrick O’Neal, fell for in the decade before his death. Cynthia turned out to be right more or less — Miranda, or Whitney, was just a girl alone in a room somewhere in Baton Rouge, an isolated dilettante with a collection of names to fall back on and no one, tangible identity, who eventually, once found out grew old still alone. Or so the story she’s been straddled with by Brian Burroughs goes. Her story, told by herself, never came out in full, even though, once discovered by Burroughs, she purportedly made a book deal with Harper Collins.

Andrea Fraser, "Little Frank and His Carp," 2001.

I first read Burroughs’ story the year it was written, when I was in high school. The idea that you could so effectively create a persona that was arresting but vaguely so — in Miranda’s case, her persona was largely faceless –, and that you could use that persona to seduce in a matter of moments was as haunting as it was compelling.

The same idea of the vague persona and instant seduction recurs in the work of the photographers and performers I’ve since come to respect: Pipilotti Rist, particularly in her video Ever is Over All, where she moves through smashing car windows with a rose, is a vague seductress. Collier Schorr’s Jens photographs, where she poses a young man in the positions Andrew Wyeth put his muse Helga in, have that instant appeal.

But it is Andrea Fraser, who, rather than seduce, often falls victim to seduction in her work, that I have been thinking of most, largely because, on January 23, she will debut a new performance, one in which she plays the parts of four different men. At the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown L.A., she’ll reenact a conversation that aired on the radio station KPFK forty years ago, where four men talked about feminism, their allegiance to it, and their fears and hopes for it.

In 2001, Fraser wandered around the Guggenheim Balboa, listening to the audio tour and gradually becoming more and more excited, more and more “seduced.” The same year, she performed at a private party, stripping down to a Gucci thong and declaring, “I am not a person today. I’m an object in an artwork.” Which is how Miranda seemed and still seems in her story: not a whole person, a figure in a narrative, even though it was she who allowed, created and perpetuated that narrative.

Feodor Voronov, "Insurgent", 2011, 48 X 48", Acrylic, marker and ball-point pen on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Mark Moore gallery.

Catherine Wagley: This morning, a friend and I were talking about abstraction that’s transcendent, but transcendentally funny, like kick-ass stand-up. I thought of you, and pulled up your “Pellucid” painting on Google as an example. It’s seriously crafted, seriously systematic, but doesn’t take itself that seriously. How’d you start working with words?

Feodor Voronov: I started working with words about one year after graduate school. I most of all wanted to step away from grad school work, which started to feel dated, short sighted and just way too safe. I initially was attracted to just the raw physical power of text, and I attempted a few pieces where I would build these circular patterns by first translating words into ancient runes and then using the result to begin the process of building a composition. Pretty soon, I realized this was all too cautious and gimmicky. So I decided to see what would happen if I just put an English word in the middle of the canvas and forced myself to deal with it being there. It seemed too simple and really goofy, but, for me, this move began a project that is now going on its third year.

CW: You told me about finding and printing out that huge list of 1000+ words–what was it called again? Something along the lines of “words that will make you sound smart but not pretentious.” That’s still your source, right?

FV: Yes, this list is my source for the current word paintings. It is a list that is supposed to enable you to write with greater accuracy and not sound too wordy. I don’t think it is really important what the list is. It’s just there and I choose from it. I scan the list and grab words that look good at the moment. I do not consider the meaning or sound when doing this, in fact, I don’t even know many of the words but I do look them up in the dictionary for my own self betterment. My interest lies primarily in their shape, look and compositional capabilities. (The meaning is something I can’t truly control and my relationship to it is pretty much on the same level as the viewers’).

CW: Yeah, I think that’s what I was digging for: “compositional capability.” It reminds me of the other term you use from John Rajchman’s book, “operative formalism.” You’re honing in on units you can work with, that can work for you. In fact, I have a really hard time picturing you tossing something out or giving up on it because it failed–do you ever do that?

FV: No, nothing is lost, ever. I just keep going until a certain point of compromise is reached. You can always bring something back to life even if you have to bury it first. I’ve got nothing to hide so restarting something is kind of pointless. I’d rather make work directly over the so-called failure, even if it is just for a point of comparison.

CW: That’s what I like about the painting of yours in my living room: the underpainting and over painting that looks more like competent problem solving then inspiration. Are you still working on raw canvas?

FV: Yes, I work on raw canvas all the time. I do not like the idea of priming a surface and getting it all ready for the act of painting. I prefer to treat it sort of like paper, where you just take it and begin working on and with it right away. Why negate the possibility of the surface by covering it in white? The act of priming is incorporated into the actual process of painting and becomes about the culmination of the marks working together to transform a given surface. Maybe I’m over thinking it; basically, priming is part of the work and gessoing a canvas to me is unnecessary.

Feodor Voronov, "Ironic", 2011, 26 X 36", Acrylic, marker, spray-paint and ball-point pen on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Mark Moore gallery.

CW: Do you like Kenneth Noland? He was a raw canvas guy.

FV: I admire his work, but he’s not someone I look at regularly.

CW: I remember, in this interview with Diane Waldman from ’77, he said he and Morris Lewis really tried to learn from Pollock but Pollock was too emotional for them, and when Frankenthaler (another raw canvas fan) came along, that was a relief. She made painting about material. Then, talking about why he initially painted his Chevron circles on mostly 6 foot squares, he said, “It turns out certain picture shapes don’t allow you to use different kinds of quantity distributions of color for different expressions.”

Maybe that’s obvious–that the shapes you choose to paint limit other choices you can make if you’re going to compose a painting effectively–but his worked looked the way it did because he really thought about stuff like that. Do words with certain shapes, maybe something with lots of round vowels in it, pose problems for you?

FV: Sure, each word is a new problem in itself. I don’t tailor the surface dimension to a particular word simply because words can be broken apart and rearranged to fit different compositional situations, which basically means there is more than one solution and that is both very exciting and challenging. But that is a big part of what the work is about: problems and solutions. I welcome problems because you cannot have solutions without them. I don’t play favorites and will not disregard a word because it has too many a’s in it, for example. I just deal with it.

CW: I like that — “I do not play favorites.” How many works have you done on paper, using Raymond Carver text? I imagine, like, “Where I’m Calling From”, being more angular than, say, “Cathedral.” Can you even sum it up like that: rounder, more angular?

FW: Well, I actually haven’t worked from those. I have done several pieces from “Will you please be quiet, please?”, both on canvas and paper. The results all looked fairly different. The pieces were really based on the rhythmic flow of words and how that can be physically restructured into a different visual situations or arrangements. But this is still just a side project at the moment.

Feodor Voronov, "Stupor", 48 X 48", Acrylic, marker and ball-point pen on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore gallery.

CW: The truth is, I’d probably rather no one know where the text comes from in your work, which means that question may’ve been counterproductive. I just like that you read Carver.

FV: Yeah that was a sticky one. It’s like a side conversation that wants to wander off into other worlds, so may be a scratch…

CW: You said earlier you wanted a project that wasn’t short-sighted, was more sustainable, but wasn’t safe. I want to understand that better. Sustainability and long-sightedness seems safe to me; still, I don’t feel your paintings are safe.

Or maybe this is what I mean: there are artists who do “projects”– Steven Bankhead did that painting show informed by Malcolm McLaren, or Whitney Bedford’s new paintings are all expressly about the moment a storm gathers. Then there are artists — Rebecca Morris, Peter Voulkos, Jasper Johns (though he’s gotten drier over the years) and you, I guess — looking for something to keep them going for a long time. Where does that urge come from?

FV: “Inner necessity” according to Wassilly Kandinsky. No, really, we have to make work and fit our lives in or around it, and that’s it.

Installation view, courtesy of Ambach & Rice.

Catlin Moore: Let’s start with the book, Modernity in Very General Terms. This piece spans the course of ten years’ worth of writing and research for you, and also serves as a tutorial for your  exhibition currently on view at Ambach & Rice in Los Angeles, Conclusion to the Big Ideas. For those unfamiliar with your work, how are the concepts in the book incarnated in the exhibition, or are they? Is this a relationship you have forged in previous bodies of work?

Alon Levin: I wouldn’t really call the book a tutorial, it is more of a collection of notes to myself. I made the book before I made the work for the show, and I included the book to serve similarly in the context of the exhibition: as a companion piece that is on the one hand a work in and of itself, but that at the same time provides a kind of background to the rest of the exhibition.

CM: Some sections of the book are more minimal than others. For example, “An Introduction to Europolis” consists of incredible detail, empirical evidence and formulas, while “The Object As Never Seen Before” is more allusive.  Why the variation in presentation, and how does that manifest in the tangible artwork?

AL: All the texts and works within the book were originally made with different intentions. Some segments were written to myself, some to friends, some for publication, and still others as works [of art] in and of themselves. “An Introduction to Europolis” was a work that was published in dot dot dot in 2004, while “The Object As Never Seen Before” was part of a reader that accompanied an installation in 2010. Since the book was not written at once or in any linear way, it is as fragmented and seemingly under construction as the rest of the work in the exhibition. Both the written and the physical work range from the severely abstract to the absolutely concrete, while dealing all the while with whatever issues are of interest to me. In that sense, they don’t seem so at odds with one another to me. They are two poles of a language that sometimes clash and sometimes merge.

Book view, courtesy of the artist.

CM: The book explores the experience of finding patterns and relationships within power structures and modern realities. Did you unearth data or information that caused you to view your practice differently? What is alluring about parameters, rules, taxonomy and thematic patterns in modern culture to you?

AL: Maybe it is my background—between countries, cultures, schooling systems, and nationalities—that drew me toward the subject of power structures. I had many run-ins with bureaucracy, and never did well with authority.  I went to six high schools in three different countries.  At a young age I had already decided that power was assumed through symbols and costume and was not to be trusted. I suppose my strong distaste for hierarchy is the reason for my obsession with it. I can’t locate any ideological shift as of yet, but the constant confrontation with ‘modern reality’ in its many incarnations of administration has undoubtedly informed my practice.

CM: Do you find yourself employing irony or humor as a means of illustrating these points?

AL: I don’t see my work as being nearly as serious as its subject supposes it is.  Maybe because power and its structures are so severe, I try to approach the work with a kind of humor. I don’t mean to illustrate some joke or have a punch line, but I do think it is important that people recognize the irony and can see the subject with some distance. I think the subject (and my practice) can use a little mockery.

Installation view, courtesy of Ambach & Rice

CM: Some of the text is purposefully nonsensical in its evaluation of social patterns and successes.  Why is this an important attribute to highlight?

AL: I seem to make things just as nonsensical as the quest for a social pattern.

CM: Can you explain the notion of “objects attempting to understand themselves?” Is this an intended parallel to the human condition?

AL: It’s a little hard to give an explanation about that. I was meaning this more as an intuitive thought rather than a scientific analysis.  Obviously, things do not become aware of themselves. So let me give you another somewhat cryptic anthropomorphic thought: I am thinking of an elephant trying to hide behind a skinny tree, not being aware of its own dimensions.

CM: “Quarter Report 1 / Men With Ties” is perhaps my favorite section of the book. What was your goal here, and how did the concept manifest itself in the exhibition?

AL: “Quarter Report 1 / Men With Ties” is a series of collages from images published in an entire quarter of the New York Times. It is a somewhat absurd reorganization of all these images by theme or subject. I started collecting the images without a clear idea of what I was going to do with them with the intention of somehow making sense of it all in the end.  When I started sorting everything, some groupings that emerged were very concrete: such as “International protests” and “American protests.” Others, on the other hand, were simply collections of recurrent gestures and tendencies. Examples of these are “Men with one hand I and II,” “Men with two hands I and II,” “Three men,”" Men with ties I, II, III” or “Verticals.”

In some ways the current show is like a quarter report, though one that spans a longer period of time and is not particularly methodical. Some things have been omitted, while many new things have been added. The show is a kind of rearrangement and reinterpretation of thoughts, ideas and actual physical works. This is particularly clear in the work Untitled, ‘The Everything of an Almost Future I – V,’ 2011. This tower-like structure houses a collection of sketches I made for a series of painting cut-outs that were based on Malevich’s work. These sketches were used in preparation for an installation I made last year and now are restructured as an exaggerated archival shelving unit.

CM: Focusing on the art itself, much of your earlier work included color, both as an organizational illustration of your practice and an aesthetic choice. This show is quite minimal and stark.  How does that choice function for you?

AL: Though the show may give a first impression of being minimal, beyond perhaps the aesthetic relation to minimalism, I think the work is anything but. The objects in the show have an overload of layers, both in the physical sense and conceptually. Rather than ideas being reduced, they are in fact expanded and all layers of the process are kept transparent. Be it the stacks that hold the piles of frames so that they can be painted, the earlier paint job still shown on the edge of an object, or simply the expanded history of modernity in the two-volume, custom-made, print-on-demand Wikipedia-book, Modernity in Very General Terms, 2011, that serves as a balancing foot to the object in Prospects of Validation IV, 2011.

Installation view, courtesy of Ambach & Rice

CM: Many of the works feel deconstructed. In your evaluation of constructed societal practices, was this a tongue-in-cheek decision, or purely compositional?

AL: Definitely not purely compositional.  The deconstructing starts in my initial dealing with a subject matter; this is later translated into the process and thus is still evident in the resulting physical structure. Deconstruction (and my general demeanor, I’m afraid) is usually perceived as a rather serious matter, so I am glad you asked.  And yes, I mostly mean it to be tongue-in-cheek!

CM: Despite exploring the very notions of genre and boundary, your work defies common art historical references. There is no nod to abstraction, realism or the like, but it does remains conceptual. Was this an organic development in your work?

AL: Well, just as I have a resistance to power, absolutes, and definitions in the real world, I suppose I avoid it within the realm of art. Any one genre with its doctrines or manifestos is fun to investigate, but mostly to then push off of, not to adopt or join. I don’t want my work to belong to something that is already defined, or to be read from any singular perspective.

CM: You’ve referred to your works as a stage.  How does that hold true?

AL: I guess I say “stage,” because the work often functions as a model for something else: something bigger, or something real. In the meantime, the work itself is more of a prop, part of a somewhat theatrical version of societal operations.

Levin’s current exhibition is on view at Ambach & Rice through October 8, 2011.

Betye Saar, "Red Time," 2011. Installation view. Image courtesy of Roberts and Tilton Gallery.

For the moment, the beating heart of Los Angeles’s Pacific Standard Time is Betye Saar’s installation Red Time, 2011, at Roberts and Tilton.  Saar has transformed the middle room of the gallery into a shrine for past, present, and future, painting Roberts and Tilton’s interior room a bright red and allowing a variety of her customary assemblage works to act as friends and neighbors to each other, despite where they were collected from or when they were made.  In fact, one of the most striking things about Red Time is the position it takes on memory and history.  While Saar has divided Red Time into three separate sections–”In the Beginning,” “Migration and Transformation,” and “Beyond Memory”–she has also unified them through her use of a singular, strong background color and their enclosure in one small room.

Betye Saar, "There Will Be Blood," 2011. Mixed media assemblage. 22.25 x 22.25 in (56.5 x 56.5 cm). Image courtesy of Roberts and Tilton Gallery.

Betye Saar, "Red Time," 2011. Installation View. Image courtesy of Roberts and Tilton Gallery.

Saar first rose to prominence in the 1960s as a Joseph Cornell-inspired assemblage artist who insistently tackled issues of race and history, and these issues remain central, both figuratively and literally.  Many of the pieces that make up the “Migration and Transformation” section of Red Time, which occupies the wall opposite the room’s entrance, are radical détournements of Aunt Jemimah and Uncle Tom figures, a technique that Saar may have been the first to utilize and perfect.  In fact, it is the juxtaposition of the pleasing formal rhythms, the coziness of the physical space, and the chilling historical narratives referenced by pieces such as There Will Be Blood, 2011, To the Manor Born, 2011, and Is Jim Crow Really Dead, 1972, that drives the work.

Betye Saar, "To the Manor Born," 2011. Mixed media assemblage. 11.5 x 20.5 x 2.25 in (29.2 x 52.1 x 5.7 cm). Image courtesy of Roberts and Tilton Gallery.

Betye Saar, "Red Time," 2011. Installation View. Image courtesy of Roberts and Tilton Gallery.

Among the works that Saar felt absolutely needed to be present in the installation is Red Ascension, 2011, a wooden ladder hung toward the top of the wall in “Beyond Memory.”  Nestled amongst the rungs are wooden sculptures that tell a familiar story:  an African mask, several wooden ships, chains, and a crescent moon and star.  The ladder points viewers to the wall that is both the first and last in the exhibit, the wall to which their backs are turned for the majority of time they are in the room.  It is the wall with the entry and exit door, on which a series of masks hang, looking back at the viewers with all manners of expression.  Red Time is not solely a time of despair or anger.  It is also a time of rebirth and open-ended questioning.

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Ryan McGinley, "Tom (Golden Tunnel)," 2010, C-Print, 72 x 110 inches. Courtesy Team Gallery.

Ten years ago today, on September 11, 2001, at 5:46 am Pacific Standard Time, I was asleep in the semi-darkness of an Oregon dawn.  I was still asleep at 6:03 am.  By 6:37 am, however, I had been jolted awake by the ringing sound of a telephone in another room of the house, and then by the sound of footsteps coming towards my door, and—eventually—by the information that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.  For better or worse, I missed the initial confusion, the questions about irregular flight patterns and problems with air traffic control.  By the time I got to the television set, Bush had held his moment of silence, there were reports of a fire at the Pentagon, and it was clear that this was a planned attack.

I watched as President George W. Bush sent our troops into Afghanistan, eventually dragging the rest of the world—in the form of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force —behind him.  In March of 2003, I finally saw the negative space punched out of the Manhattan skyline with my own eyes.  Coincidentally, it was the same week that Bush dropped thinly veiled threats via his press secretary that if the United Nations did not take action against Iraq, other “international bodies” would.  And we did, despite the fact that the motives given were dubious and lacked hard evidence.

I was twenty-five in 2001.  I was not a child, or a teenager whose nightmare became the bogeyman in the form of Osama bin Laden.  My nightmare, post-9/11, has been many the frequent and many betrayals of the citizens of the United States by its government at the levels of accountability and policy.  Watching President Barack Obama announce the death of Osama bin Laden, I felt no relief.  The War in Afghanistan is listed as ongoing (2001-present).  Our engagement with Iraq is ongoing.

It has been a decade, long enough to have begun to talk about post-9/11 trends in art and literature, long enough for those artists and writers whose practices weren’t quite set on September 11, 2011, to have grown up and to have incorporated their own personal nightmares into their production.  Earlier this summer, OHWOW Gallery in Los Angeles staged “Post-9/11,”  with work by New-York-based-artists Ryan McGinley and his circle.  The keystone piece, McGinley’s Tom (Golden Tunnel), 2010, features a naked man walking toward a golden light at the end of a stone or concrete tunnel with his hand guarding his eyes.  The light washes everything in the photo.

The exhibition title itself was merely meant to be provocative, as well as to encapsulate McGinley and his milieu.  This was not a grand curatorial retrospective of Post-9/11 art.  But I have gone back to McGinley’s photo multiple times, made a little nauseous by the combination of the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel metaphor, McGinley’s capital-R Romanticism, and the double-entendre of the show title.  Are we post-9/11?  Have we survived and come through to the other side?  If we have, we are irrevocably changed.  The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.

Mother Trust Superet Church's Prayer Garden

A mile and a half from where I live, close to downtown, there’s a strange treasure: a traditional white church with a tall steeple and prayer garden complete with a Jesus sculpture right next door. It looks like a place Anne of Green Gables might have gone to pray, except that the protestant Avonlea-worthy quaintness is turned upside down by a whole lot of neon. There’s a pink and purple neon sign above the church itself and a shooting neon rainbow above the Jesus in the garden. It would be gaudy it weren’t so grippingly uncanny, especially at night.

The Mother Trust Superet Church was founded in 1926 and purportedly combines a scientific study of light with Bible study. “Jesus’ Words were shining with and in a brilliancy of golden and purple Light,” reads the church’s website, which also alludes to the church’s belief in auras and reincarnation.

Asco, First Supper (After a Major Riot), 1974

I thought of Mother Trust and its weird spiritual whimsy Wednesday, when strolling through ASCO, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s soon-to-open exhibition of work by an under-exposed Chicano collective consisting of Gronk, Willie Herron, Harry Gamboa and Patssi Valdez. Active in L.A. in the 1970s and ‘80s and named after the Spanish word for nausea – as the story goes, one member of the group said “This gives me ASCO” after seeing a grating exhibition, and an idea for a new kind of art was born – the group had a lot to be nauseous about, including the war in Vietnam, which had killed a seemingly disproportionate number of young Chicano men.

The show largely includes video and photographic documentations of performances, one of which was the Stations of the Cross, performed in 1971 along Whittier Boulevard in L.A. A procession and a protest, the artists wore outlandish costumes (Gamboa was Pontius Pilate in a clown suit) and headed, with a large cross and skeleton in tow, toward the Marine Recruiting Station, where they would deliver the skeleton. Later, they interrupted a mass in Evergreen Cemetery and staged First Supper (After a Riot), dining on an island in the middle of a street  during rush hour. In these performances, they wore make-up and outlandish costumes—platform boots, or  home-made masks.

Asco, Asco Goes to the Universe, 1975

Always, ASCO looked reverently serious, no matter how riotous or disruptive they were being. Like the Superet church with its kitschy and over-the-top neon, their disruptions and eccentricities, even when motivated by disgust at the world around them, were full of conviction.

WEIRD WALKS INTO A ROOM (COMMA), Exhibition poster, Sara Conaway and Lisa Williamson, June 4-July 9, 2011

“It’s best to turn people on. The hippies were always talking about being turned on,” said artist Dan Graham, speaking on a panel at the Museum of Contemporary Art two years ago. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, his co-panelists, had been his downstairs neighbors before they became Sonic Youth. They’d introduced him to fanzines and musicology while he immersed them in the sounds of The Feelies and the alt art scene. “It’s hard to define community because it doesn’t really have to do with location. It has to do with people turning people on to things,” added Gordon as the three embarked on a meandering conversation about Patti Smith, punk, tract homes, and ocean breeze.

Weird Walks into the Room (Comma), Lisa Williamson and Sarah Conaway’s current exhibition at The Box L.A. is a turn-on. It makes you want smart friends, the kind that clue you into things you didn’t know you couldn’t live without. The exhibition itself is lighthearted, but in an unencumbered rather than whimsical way. It’s a community of images and objects agreeably yet fastidiously conversant with each other.

Left: Lisa Williamson, "Club Foot and The Towel," 2011, Wood, canvas, acrylic and latex paint, 52 1/2 h x 16 w x 67 d; Right: Sarah Conaway, III, 2011, C-print, 17 x 22 inches.

The show’s press release, one of the least pretentious I’ve read, cites the artists’ shared “reverence for the amazing-ness of art.” This reverence manifests in a series of sleek, calculatedly quirky photographs by Sarah Conaway, which hang above, behind and around Lisa Williamson’s serendipitous sculptures. The photos are titled with Roman Numerals and spaced more or less in order, which means they sound the way they feel—“I,” “II,” “III”, “IV”, “V”—, like rhythmic flashes punctuating Williamson’s 3-D inventions, which include wooden polka dot pants, long yellow “stilts” and a pepto-pink “club footed” towel rack.

Though it’s hard to pinpoint what the sculptures and images are talking about, it’s not hard to tell they’re terribly engaged in talking. Sometimes, they converse with art’s history. There are prints that recall Eva Hesse’s stringy studies, and sculptures that have Ree Morton’s sauciness coupled with Sol Lewitt-worthy systematics. Other times, they fixate on the world’s weirdness. There are painted ladders and doorknobs, and photos of crumpled paper. Some moments feel nostalgic, others flippant. But it all somehow comes together tightly in a way that feels intuitively right.

With the exception, perhaps, of the show’s poster, a black and white photo of a vintage living room with an octopus-covered vase suspended supernaturally in the foreground, few of the individual works qualify as distinctly memorable. Conaway and Williams have created a vibe more than anything, one that manages to be compelling without being particularly momentous.

Sarah Conaway, "VIII," 2011, C-print, 30 x 40 inches.

About fifteen minutes in to the MoCA panel, Dan Graham, who’s exhibited at The Whitney, The Walker and four times at Documenta, described himself as a fan: “I have a passionate love for art now . . . and I just go around the world going to art museums and I buy architecture books and art books. Art is pretty interesting, isn’t it?”

That’s the question Williamson and Conaway volley around. And the answer is yes, art’s pretty interesting. It gives you leave to live in the space of turn-ons and combine all the little strings and moments and topics that shouldn’t make sense together but somehow do.

Study for Spiral Block #2, 2010 Acrylic 5.75 x 6 x 6 inches Photo: Richard Nicol

There is a well-worn narrative of twentieth century painting that goes like this: From Cezanne to Picasso to Pollock, the illusionistic space of painting flattened more and more until the picture plane and the surface created by the paint itself became the primary subject matter, eliminating images altogether in favor of abstraction. While this teleology has some merit, the purity of the story is incomplete. When Linda Benglis began pouring polyurethane on her studio floor, creating a sculptural object, paint itself began to function as a readymade. Linda Besemer then recognized abstraction as a metaphor, working with it in terms of its figure/ground relationships. The figure of paint, once removed from the ground of the canvas used the world – including the architecture and institution of the museum as well as the social relations of its public –as its ground.

Study for Waferboard, trimmed, 2010 Acrylic 8 x 8 x 0.75 inches Photo: Richard Nicol

Margie Livingston’s work participates directly in this narrative, creating hybrid objects that shift back and forth between sculpture and painting as well as abstraction and representation. After making paintings on canvas for many years, Livingston began pouring paint, layering it, then cutting it and breaking it apart in order to construct objects that are images of their own making. But while these works are abstract, they begin to resemble other objects like wooden blocks, stone, or waferboard. In this sense she breaks two cardinal rules of modernist painting by making works that are images of other things while at the same time telling a story. But the images depict raw materials that have the potential for making other artworks and the story that she tells is modern art history itself. So these works become objects that at once enact pious devotion and heretical rebellion – rooted in both process and conceptual reference.

Study for 2x4, 2010, Acrylic 1 1/8 x 2.75 x 24.75 inches Photo: Richard Nicol

Her logs of paint begin with about a dozen sheets, each one made with two gallons of paint. They are laminated together then milled and cut into 2 x 4 pieces of lumber, much in the same way that wooden beams are made.  This gesture marks an apparent turn away from a sublime notion of nature, replacing it with artifice. By making a plank of wood out of plastic paint, Livingston also points to the role of mechanized production in the timber industry. In this sense, she participates in a contemporary sublime of plastic beauty, leaving behind the Romantic attachment to nature’s mythic truths. Our conception of the natural and a truth of origin is just as much of a cultural construction as a milled log made of plastic paint. Maybe these faux natural objects remind us of the environmental threats of our time. But that does not preclude them from being objects of wonder and beauty.

Waferboard, 2010, Acrylic 30 x 22 inches Photo: Richard Nicol

Seattle-based artist Margie Livingston is represented by Greg Kucera Gallery. She has exhibited her work at Luis De Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles, Richard Levy Gallery in Santa Fe and will be included in an upcoming exhibition at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions).

Installation View, Greater LA.

Is this a throwdown? It’s tempting to think so, since the title, Greater LA, is obviously a riff on the seminal P.S.1 survey Greater New York, and is installed in the same type of beat-up SoHo loft where major New York art history went down in the 1960s and ‘70s. But don’t get too excited. Any sense of bi-coastal competition erodes  quickly when you realize that many of the artists on view are already well-represented and accepted commodities here in New York.  Also, unlike Greater New York, which was a wild, not-for-profit showcase of up-and-comers, Greater LA is a commercial show and there really isn’t too much here that can’t be seen during a typical afternoon in Chelsea or the Lower East Side. So stop frontin’, y’all.

Alex Israel, Property, 2011.

If it were a throwdown, however, Sterling Ruby would be in the heavyweight class. With a group of stacked rectilinear forms, he adds color, a sense of the handmade, and illusion to minimalism’s airtight vocabulary.  Lofts like these have always been the perfect setting for minimal forms, and Ruby’s piece dominates a show that suffers from too many freestanding walls and too large a roster of artists. Token appearances by highly saleable artists (Mark Grotjahn works on paper, anyone?) give the show an art fair vibe that renders the whole “snapshot of exciting new LA art right now” thing nearly laughable.  A handful of great pieces amidst acres of empty loft space would have been way more effective.

Installation View, Greater LA.

Alex Israel’s Property, however, provides a sophisticated moment. A Grecian figure stands in front of a group of lockers, as if you had accidently stumbled into the employee lounge at the Getty. This pairs well with Jonas Wood’s chunky paintings of Grecian urns.  Wood, who lives in Los Angeles but grew up in Boston, went to school in St. Louis, and already has a strong presence in New York, also seems out of place here. He represents the sort of omni-local artist who pervades today’s scene, the type that makes it hard to discern any real conceptual or aesthetic differences between Los Angeles and New York.

Personally, I would have loved to see more space devoted to artists who are not represented by New York galleries, to get at what, if anything, really distinguishes the two cities’ art ideologies. But I suppose you can’t blame the curators for playing it a little safe and including their bankable stars. Their kitchen sink approach and all-over-the-place-career-wise roster seems to say that no matter where you set up your studio, every artist stills wants and needs to show in New York. We throw down harder, and Los Angeles knows it. Otherwise, they would have just had the show there.

This Sunday From the DS Archives invites you to revisit the work of California artist, Julian Hoeber. You can see Hoeber’s current self-titled exhibition through March 12th at Blum and Poe in Los Angeles. Today’s DS Archive pick is from the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

This article was originally written by Catherine Wagley on October 9th, 2008.

Julian Hoeber’s third solo show at Blum and Poe Gallery, titled All That is Solid Melts into Air, explores aged forms, bronze busts and op-art in particular, and emphasizes the way old recycled ideas shape “new” people and objects. In an insightfully written artist’s statement, Hoeber describes himself as a tube, listing the span of influences that have cycled through his system. What comes out is a digested, sometimes decaying conglomeration of forms.

Hoeber’s show includes two bodies of work – one a set of fifteen works on paper that toy with viewers’ perception; the other a series of bronze heads that have been shot, bit, and beaten up. The heads sit on reflective pedestals just high enough to emphasize their human scale.

Hoeber earned his MFA from Art Center. He also studied at Karel deGrote Hogeschool in Belgium and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He recently participated in the group exhibition Against the Grain at LACE. All That is Solid Melts into thin Air will be on view through October 2008.

Dorit Cypis, "The Nervous System: Mother and Child," 1987. Courtesy Jancar Gallery.

When Workspace, a Lincoln Heights storefront with a gallery the size of a living room, hosted a reading last Sunday, only one of the four featured artists actually read, and he read the work of someone else. It was Tyler Coburn, who sat at the front of the room in bow-tie and jacket, looking very readerly and comfortable in the way a teacher does when sharing something he believes in with students who believe in him.

The someone else he chose to read, Sam D’Allesandro (who changed his name from run-of-the-mill Richard Anderson in order to pose as son to fringe superstar Joe D’Allesandro), had a neutrally inquisitive voice, somehow self-involved without being solipsistic; in a review, Joanna Petrone called it “calm and heatless.” In reading D’Allesandro’s Electrical Type of Thing and Jimmy, Colburn had some of that heatless calm. The first, a story about wanting what doesn’t want you—at least not in the same way—and being wanted by what you don’t necessarily want, wonders whether people could really want wrongly. The story’s explicit sexiness, while tangled up in what the protagonist does and doesn’t desire, seems so subsumed by that question of the rightness or wrongness of wanting that the it loosens itself from its own perversity.

Angela Ellsworth, "Untitled," 2011.

It’s difficult for perversity to hold its own when the parameters that define what’s expected or proscribed are undercut (could “proscribed” and “perverse” be antonyms?)—“Perversions are often phantasms spun by jurisprudence,” wrote Wayne Koestenbaum, in the same essay in which he posited perversities as “a continuum of harmless grays.” There are a good number of grays in D’Allesandro’s stories and even more in Jancar Gallery’s current exhibition, Narratives of the Perverse – II (I occurred in 2008), a show that’s intergenerational and amorphous. Despite its title, Narratives functions more as a list than as a story, an enumeration of perversions, some political, pornographic, decorative, exploitative, explicit, and all somehow tied to how you assert or lose yourself while trying to connect with others. With thirty-eight artists and work hung upstairs, downstairs, in the alcove between desk and wall and in the stairwell, it’s a promiscuous exhibition. But it doesn’t feel overfull.

In Dorit Cypis’ 1987 photograph The Nervous System: Mother and Child, a pink, frilly, sinister image, a toddler holds her dress over her mother’s face in a way that connotes either precocious murder, or a forced pedophilia. In Angela Ellsworth’s Untitled, two girls with heavy braids, who could’ve come from Yearning for Zion Ranch, are about to gently kiss, putting the conservative, repressed wholesomeness of their appearance into intimate contact with the liberation tied up in girl-on-girl loving. There’s no shame in Ellsworth’s image, but there is in Elana Mann’s 2009 video Ass on the Street, where the artist wears an ass’s head and feels her way down a South L.A. street. Her body’s timidity and the simplicity of her black outfit makes the expression of perversity (she’s openly being an ass) seem wrong, like a Scarlett letter, and, as moving through the world with an ass head makes it difficult to see where you’re going but easy for everyone else to tell, Mann places herself at the mercy of others even though she can’t really engage them at all.

Elana Mann, "Ass on the Street," video still, 2009.

Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens can and do engage one another in their collaborative Ecosexual, a kitschy, defiant image of Sprinkle with legs spread and Stephens standing above. The couple has now been married six times and hosted six different weddings in the past six years, ever since their planned legal one was denied. This print corresponds with the most recent. It’s a performance of promiscuous commitment–wanting the right kind of togetherness but wanting it wrongly.

“I did not want comfort,” wrote Sam D’Allesandro, not in the story Coburn read but in another, titled Nothing Ever Just Disappears. “I did not want to be comfortable with not seeking comfort or predictability . . . I wanted to be challenged, but not in pain.” The most heartening trait of Narratives of the Perverse II‘s is its ability, as an unweildy collective, to be comfortable with the discomfort of wanting and not wanting in ways that aren’t sanctioned, destabilizing perversity as taboo while still allowing for the confusion of a series of “harmless grays.”

Victor Boullet/The Institute of Social Hypocrisy, 2011. Photo: 2nd Cannons Publications.

On January 5^th, 2^nd Cannons Publications, artist Brian Kennon’s publishing venture, sent out a press release. It announced “the last exhibition in our Chinatown project space/vitrine,” a small closet-sized enclave at 510 Bernard St. with a glass sliding door. 2^nd Cannons has been hosting miniature shows there for the past 3 years. The release continued, “We will not be moving to Culver City (if we were moving we would move to Hollywood),” an obvious jab at the recent exodus of galleries to Culver, the industrial turned industry neighborhood, that, over the past few years, has become home to a growing “main drag” of commercial galleries.

The final 2^nd Cannons exhibition is a haphazard eruption of an installation: a large gray poster that’s been scrawled on, a cagey, psychologically manipulative letter that creates a web of desire around identity (reads one line, “Edvard Munch told me that Dr Jacobsen told you that Francis Bacon once told David Sylvester by being homosexual he was relieved of the heterosexual commitments in life, and by that he meant he could work more”), and a bubbling, spilling beer-can filled fountain. All this has been assembled on behalf of The Institute for Social Hypocrisy, the front for Paris-based artist Victor Boullet’s publications and collaborations. The installation has an angsty, irresponsible rebelliousness to it, and feels like the work of someone who’s been wronged.

Still from Culver City promotional video by Agents in Action! real estate consultants.

It was that feeling, coupled with the line from the press release–we won’t be moving to Culver–that led me to, at first, assume the closing of 2^nd Cannons’ vitrine, and even the nature of its final exhibition, must somehow be in reaction to galleries leaving Chinatown. I had some small basis for this assumption; other spaces, like the white cube  occupied by alternative arts org Human Resources L.A. (which will likely reopen in Chinatown, or nearby) had been indirect victims of larger galleries leaving. But 2^nd Cannons is just closing its vitrine (it’s primarily a press, after all), and its last exhibition is just that: an exhibition of art by an artist who manufactured the eruption and grouped together its unapologetically discordant references.

I have it in my head that Culver City should be resented, and I know I’m not being fair—it’s that liberally educated, young person instinct to hate change when it moves toward something more “established” but to love it when it breaks things apart. It’s also a bit of nostalgia. Some of the first, most exciting art encounters I had in L.A. were in Chinatown—at China Art Objects, Peres Projects, and David Kordansky Gallery in particular. All of these spaces subsequently moved to Culver; Kordansky first, Peres second, and then, just this fall, China Art Objects. And while Chi-town galleries have been heading west—collectors are reportedly reluctant to venture all the way Eastside–Santa Monica spaces have been moving East. Angles Gallery, which used to be right off the ocean, is now on La Cienega, while Mark Moore, which spent fifteen years at Bergamont Station, is now on Washington Boulevard, across the street from Roberts & Tilton, its former Santa Monica neighbor (besides the company they’d be keeping, what pulled Mark Moore to Culver was the opportunity to own and design a space of their own–a perfectly worthy desire).

Drew Heitzler, "La Brea Tar Pits (Mexican Fan Palm)," Mexican fan palm tree and Performix plastidip, installation view, 2008. Redling Fine Art at Art Positions, Art Basel Miami Beach. Courtesy Blum & Poe.

China Art Objects’ newly renovated space is perhaps better suited to their changing needs than their charming former Chung King Road location (now home to Pepin Moore, a gallery with an impressive roster all its own), and, while Francois Ghebaly‘s narrow new garage-like space is a lot stranger than either his Chung King Road or Bernard Street locations, it does feel like it’s right where the action is, tucked into that busy intersection of Venice and La Cienega.

When painter David Hockney moved to Los Angeles in the 60s, all the galleries were on one strip in Hollywood–”They were run by young people and they showed young artists,” he  recalls. “On a Monday evening people parked their cars, and walked up the street and looked in. It was very pleasant.” And it was a way for Hockney to meet artists, and art fans. Where the galleries were is among one of the least compelling of all Hockney’s recollections of early Los Angeles days, however. It’s more interesting to hear about how he visited Physique Pictorial in a “very seedy area of downtown” and met a “complete madman” with a “tacky swimming pool surrounded by Hollywood Greek plastic ceramics,” or about how he found cheap studio space with an ocean view in Venice.

It’s the traversing of space that’s always been most interesting about the way art in L.A. works–the ability to move in an out of the art world or “to work off the grid” (as artist Katie Grinnan discussed two Sundays ago, during a panel at Art Los Angeles Contemporary). And even if one neighborhood, like Culver, becomes more of a “center” than any other, it’s hard to imagine that the city’s penchant for flux would be tamped completely. (Recently,  I spoke with gallerist Tom Solomon, whose space remains in Chinatown for the time being, and he hesitated when I suggested he’d moved often–he’s had, more or less, four L.A. spaces in roughly two neighborhoods, and also ran White Columns in New York. Talk to Michael Kohn, he suggested, or others who have been far more nomadic.) Moving is a deep-seeded part of  life in any creative scene where sensibilities and finances change in an instant, but even more so here.  “You hear about the landscape of galleries, even in the ’80s, that are now closed,” said Grinnan the Sunday before last. “That feeling that L.A. is in constant flux does make you feel like there’s all this territory to do things. It has a sense of invisibility also, where you can find these pockets where nobody is watching. It’s easy to find those pockets.”