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

Mika Rottenberg, "Mary's Cherries," 2004.

Mika Rottenberg’s balmy, bizarre video, Mary’s Cherries, moves at such a comfortable pace that it almost convinces you of its normalcy. The three immensely able-bodied women in the video, dressed in Easter colors and stuck in homely cubicles, are completely unruffled as they transform manicured pink fingernails into equally manicured red maraschino cherries.

Rottenberg’s film, with its slightly off-color title and cast of female fantasy wrestlers, has been in circulation since 2003 and has shown at The Tate and MoMA, but I didn’t see it in full until 7:00 a.m. on Thursday morning, in the lobby of Hollywood’s The Standard Hotel. What brought me to The Standard was the cozy idea of video art over breakfast (I also briefly considered video art near midnight, but that seemed too flashy, and required staying awake). I made a pot of coffee and grabbed a bagel before leaving my mid-city apartment, imagining that my Rottenberg viewing would be something like Holly Golightly’s mornings in front of Tiffany’s. The fact that I didn’t have a flawless French twist, black gloves and Audrey Hepburn sunglasses, added to the fact that I left my coffee in the car, dampened the glamour, however.

Marilyn Minter, "Green Pink Caviar," 2009.

In the five blocks between my parking spot and The Standard’s front door, I saw four transients, two parking attendants, and three joggers. But within a minute of entering The Standard, I’d seen twice that many people—people waiting for the shuttle, people ordering from the bar of the 24/7 café, two receptionist behind the big desk who were spaced exactly as they are in the image on the hotel’s website.

Upon entering the lobby, visitors will see Mika Rottenberg’s film directly to their right, at the end of the corridor that joins the faux-70s décor to the first hallway of rooms. The walls are pastel purple, and the projection fits snuggly between an exit with a neon green sign and heavy door that says “Fire Sprinkler Riser Inside.” Currently, those who check in to the hotel can, instead of viewing new releases, or pay-per-view porn, view curated in-room video art courtesy of Creative Time. The StandArt series includes work by Bruce High Quality Foundation, Lee Walton, Martha Colburn, Marco Brambilla, and Marilyn Minter, all relatively new but “known” artists.

The videos The Standard chooses to show always seems uncannily appropriate to its milieu, often calling attention to the prepackaged, visibly expensive and slightly absurd nature of privilege. Minter’s Green Pink Caviar screened at The Standard’s four locations before Rottenberg began; I saw Green Pink Caviar on the mezzanine of the downtown Standard, completely alone except for a few people getting on and off the elevator nearby. I was essentially alone on Thursday too. Rottenberg, like a painting on the wall, is part of the decor, which is by no means bad. I imagine a Joan Didion transplanted from 1968, pulling up, having her yellow Corvette valeted, walking through The Standard’s doors after visiting some political miscreant at the state penitentiary, looking at the Rottenberg and quoting herself with snarky precision: “Most of us live less theatrically but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time.”

Mika Rottenberg, "Mary's Cherries," 2004.

In Mary’s Cherries, the full-bodied main players wear nonsensically demure house-maid dresses and work in bright but cramped cubicles that have been stacked on top of each other; they communicate through holes sawed into the floor. Mary, the woman on top, grows her finger nails under a purple UV bulb powered by stationary, fugitively constructed bicycles that the women ride.  The nails grow pre-painted and perfect, ready to be snipped off one at a time and sent down to Barbara, who works them into a pulp before sending them down to Rose, who shapes each nail pulp into a maraschino cherry and drops it into a clear container. Projected at the end of a purple hallway next to a “Fire Sprinkler Riser,” the absurdity of Rottenberg’s work feels unquestionably natural. It’s the manifestation of a particular sort of manufactured privilege that doesn’t really make sense but still feels weirdly necessary, like it comes from a deep cultural need to perform “being human.”

Marilyn Minter, Crystal Swallow (2006), Promised gift of Jeanne and Michael Klein to The Blanton Museum at the University of Texas at Austin

Now showing through April 25^th at The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin is the group exhibition Desire. Curated by Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, Blanton curator of American and contemporary art and director of curatorial affairs, Desire features fifty works from an international grouping of contemporary artists working in a variety of media. The concept of the exhibition is to present the many ways artists have explored the notion of desire and its many facets within their work. The thought of this concept being visually displayed is tantalizing, yet, it is only with the multiple video works that the exhibition’s guard comes down. Isaac Julien’s Long Road to Mazatlán (1999), a video collaboration with the choreographer Javier de Frutos, is a stunning visualization of the yearning of two cowboys “dancing” around their mutual attraction and the stigma that often comes along with it.  Cauleen Smith’s Elsewhere, is a sensual film of a woman standing absolutely still while another person slowly unravels her sweater by a single thread.

Amy Globus, Electric Sheep (2001 - 2002), Blanton Museum of Art, Purchase through the generosity of the 2004 Blanton Contemporary Circle

However, it is Amy Globus’s video installation Electric Sheep (2001-2002) that will make the viewer blush. Set to Emmy Lou Harris’ rendition of Neil Young’s, Wrecking Ball, a large octopus is filmed in slow motion as it makes its way from one confined space to another. While watching the piece the viewer is likely to feel all the accoutrements of desire simultaneously: longing, lust, sensuality, fantasy, rejection, sexual identity, passion, intimacy etc. Also not to be missed is Mads Lynnerup’s Untying a Shoe with an Erection (2003), a tongue-in-cheek performance of presumably a man untying his shoe with his penis. The exhibition is able to transcend being merely an exercise of artists implementing the theme of desire, perhaps a bit unwittingly, with the dominance of these video works. The question that lingers long after leaving the museum is exactly how much of a continued role visual media plays in defining our collective idea of desire.

The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin, housed in a recently completed two building complex, is one of the foremost university art museums in the country. The museum’s collection is the largest and most comprehensive in Central Texas and comprises more than 18,000 works. It is recognized for its European paintings, modern and contemporary American and Latin American art, and an encyclopedic collection of prints and drawings.

Marilyn Minter

In Cheim & Reid’s current exhibition, women portray the bodies of other women in ways that are both historically grounded and forward thinking. Called The Female Gaze, the exhibition acts as a survey of sorts, presenting a wide range of approaches, some morally ambiguous and others socially incisive. The intergenerational, international span of artists includes Berenice Abbott, Marina Abramovic, Vanessa Beecroft, Louise Bourgeois, Julia Margaret Cameron, Victoria Civera, Rineke Dijkstra, Marlene Dumas, Anh Duong, Ellen Gallagher, Nan Goldin, Katy Grannan, Roni Horn, Deborah Kass, Maria Lassnig, Zoe Leonard, Sally Mann, Marilyn Minter, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, Shirin Neshat, Collier Schorr, Joan Semmel, Cindy Sherman, Mickalene Thomas, Hannah van Bart, Hellen van Meene, and Kara Walker, among others.

Cheim & Reid’s press release quotes from Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”: “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” When women are both the looker and the looked at, the exhibition suggests, the distance between voyeur and the object is conflated and “to-be-looked-at-ness” may simply become “to-be-ness.” The exhibition continues through September 19, 2009.

On view at Salon 94 Freemans until June 13 is Marilyn Minter’s exhibition entitled, Green Pink Caviar. Minter is known for her interest in exploring the boundaries between high and low art. Not only does the work itself express this dichotomy, so does her method of exhibition, choosing to display her photographs on billboards and commercials, as well as in the gallery. Evident through her extensive use of erogenous zones as subject matter, Minter considers the body to be steeped in yearning and desire. Green Pink Caviar is a collection of photorealistic paintings and graphic photographs. Salon 94 describes the process, in which “[Minter] directed her models to lick brightly colored candy on a sheet of glass and then photographed them from the other side.”The glass sheet can be compared to a canvas, the candy as paint, and the body as brush.

Minter was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. She received her BFA from University of Florida and MFA from Syracuse University. Recently, her work has been exhibited at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She has upcoming shows at the Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, Regen Projects, Santa Monica, and La Conservera, Spain.

The seductive paintings and photographs of Marilyn Minter border both photorealism and abstraction. Her work pieces together commercial depictions of femininity which juxtapose glamour and nausea. The enamel on metal paintings and large format c-prints include references from many major movements both artistically and socially, like early Surrealist photography, post-Warhol pop, advertising and pornography. Minter currently has a solo show at Salon 94 in New York. Her exhibitions include a solo exhibition at SF MOMA in 2005 (which was reviewed by SF Station), a large scale billboard installation in NYC. She was also featured this year in the 2006 Whitney Biennial.