I was immediately taken with Irina Rozovsky’s current body of work, In Plain Air, a series of photographs taken in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. There is something quietly transcendent about these vignettes – a tranquility rarely evident in public space. I was so pleased to have the chance to ask Rozovsky about these recent photographs and how they relate to her consideration of place.

Irina Rozovsky. From "In Plain Air." Courtesy of the Artist.

How do you feel In Plain Air relates to your previous bodies of work? Does it represent a continuation of certain concerns that are central to your practice?

It’s a new way of working for me—I am slowing down, returning again and again to the same location, balancing the vague images I have in mind and the elements of chance encounters.  Previously, I was a shoot-on-the-go photographer, akin to a version of Eggleston’s democratic camera.  But while what I am looking at and the way I go about it has changed, there is a continuation of interests here.  When I was photographing in Israel, I started to think about history and the essence of time that’s encoded in a landscape and permeates the people of the day.  I think land has age-long, entrenched rules and its contemporary inhabitants subconsciously follow these rules, entering a cannon of history.  In a way, nothing in Israel has changed since it’s beginning. And the park, constructed in the 1860s during the artistic movements of Realism and the visions of democracy, is still running on the same agenda.  It’s simple but profound stuff.  I think it was Gerry Badger that stated by clearly photographing the present, you can access a larger human realm of time.

Irina Rozovsky. From "In Plain Air." Courtesy of the Artist.

I was hoping you could speak a bit about your relationship to your subjects in these photographs.  Are these candid moments or are people aware of your presence?

The subjects in my series In Plain Air are strangers I encounter visiting the park.  We have not met before and typically do not see each other again, but the photograph coalesces in a kind of shared moment—for a split instant, I am let in on a private reverie.  I am drawn to situations where people have carved out a solitary spot in the park to be alone or alone with someone, so very often there is an awkwardness in approaching this intimate space, like coming up to knock on someone’s front door. The pictures are usually made quietly. I don’t tend to say a lot and people seem to accept implicity. It is, after all, a public space, so the rules seem to be the same as on the street. They are not staged, but there is a type of posing that’s going on, since people kind of open themselves for the camera, without breaking from their flow.I usually don’t linger after the photo is made, so as not to impose on or puncture the daydream.

What is the importance of place in your work?

A few years ago, my photography was placeless or worked to undo a solid connection to any specific place. I was traveling a lot and shooting endlessly, but the images never revealed their locations. Instead, they acted as a group alluding to a general pilgrimage, a movement rather than a destination.  With One to Nothing and In Plain Air, the photographs are really playing with a sense of place, but still the connection is amorphous.  For instance, it’s very important that the pictures are made in this particular park and that viewers understand it is a real park and I would not include photos made elsewhere.  Nevertheless, the pictures are not exactly about the park; it’s used as a stage, as a backdrop, as a stand in for a larger human space—the Garden of Eden, America, a mini world.  And many times, it looks to me like the photographs were taken in different places—the south, the bayou, a fictional place.  So it’s interesting to stretch this idea of place.  The photos from Israel work the same way—I’d like the experience of looking at One to Nothing to feel closer to what you already know and feel even if you have never been to Israel.  I hope the places in my pictures have this shifting, virtual nature.

Irina Rozovksy. From "In Plain Air." Courtesy of the Artist.

In discussing In Plain Air, you have asserted, “the park is seen as a kind of gritty paradise that wraps its everyday patrons in a sublime, redeeming, equalizing light.” How do you feel the quality of this place serves as an equalizing force?  Is that part of what drew you to this location?

Yes! I was drawn to this place because it felt like a gritty, imperfect paradise outside of time where most traces of modernity are erased and people are returned to themselves.  In the summer, when I started this project, there was bliss in the air, it felt like a sacred place, almost a virtual release from an oppressive life beyond the gates.  Outside on the streets, these same people would have seemed intimidating or unapproachable, but within the park, guards are down and everyone seems to be at their very purest and best. A strange perception of reality sets in and it hardly seems credible that so many different races and backgrounds are all in the same place, all around the same lake, lounging on the same grass.  Fredrick Olmstead designed this park to be shared by all, as a democratic, common land. To see that goal materialized, and hold true today, in some form, a realized vision, it’s uncanny.  Of course, this is idealistic, and ideals are unattainable, but that’s the power of this place; its illusion is that at moments, it seems to come close.

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In November 2011, Kehrer Verlag published Rozovsky’s One to Nothing, which was included on Alec Soth’s Top 20 Photobooks of 2011. Selections from In Plain Air will be in the group exhibition “Everything That Rises Must Converge” from March 2 through March 18 at The Current Space in Baltimore, Maryland.

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“Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and of making it obsolete.” – Susan Sontag

In her 1977 essay, “The Image-World,” Susan Sontag wrote that the practice of photography – and the overabundance of images that come along with it – leave us desensitized to the “real” world. Despite the fact that photographs are considered traces of their subject, we typically see photographs as independent, material objects – separate from their original subjects and somehow more palatable. They even occupy a specific moment of time, different from our own, turning the present into the past and the past into the present.

But Sontag was writing about the role of the photograph as she knew it, which never included sculpture, or photographs functioning not just as traces of objects but as actual simulations, or three-dimensional copies.  The last year has seen a rise in artists working with photography in sculpture, with more than a few of these artists choosing to juxtapose “real” objects with their 2- or 3-dimensional, photographic copies. Is there a difference between images functioning like this in the world and “the image-world” that Sontag describes? Or are they one and the same?

Jerry McMillan, "Wrinkle Bag," 1965. Black and white photographic bag construction with shelf and Plexiglas cover. 12.75 x 11.75 x 7 inches.

Ironically, even as Sontag was puzzling over “The Image-World” and the rest of the essays that would become On Photography, searching to delineate a niche in the fine art world for photography, curator Peter Bunnell took an even larger step. In 1970, Bunnell launched “Photography into Sculpture” at the Museum of Modern Art, “the first comprehensive survey of photographically formed images used in a sculptural or fully dimensional manner.”

The show included a work by Jerry McMillan called “Wrinkle Bag” (1965) – perhaps one of the first of its kind. “Wrinkle Bag” was not merely a photograph, but a high-quality, black-and-white reproduction of the texture of crumpled paper, cut into the shape of a brown paper lunch sack. In its recent re-manifestation at Los Angeles’ Cherry and Martin Gallery, “Wrinkle Bag” looked eerily contemporary, perhaps because this type of photographic reproduction has resurfaced recently in the works of contemporary artists, like Urs Fischer, amongst others.

Installation view of "Who's Afraid of Jasper Jonnson," Tony Shafrazi Gallery, 2008.

In 2008, Fischer collaborated with Gavin Brown on the exhibition “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?”, at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. Fischer and Brown hired a photographer to document the gallery’s previous show – “Four Friends”, which included work by Donald Baechler, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf – and then wallpapered the gallery with the images, printed in a 1:1 scale.  The results were chaotic, with the photographed work punctuating, even interrupting, the current exhibit.  There were even moments where a photographed object was juxtaposed against the original, as in the case of the security guard.

Fischer repeated this technique last year for his solo exhibition at the New Museum, taking photographs of the entire third floor, including the ceiling, and then re-papering those same walls at a 1:1 ratio. 2-d images of the side of the exit sign line up with the exit sign itself; the ceiling is covered with a huge photograph that includes two-dimensional images of flickering flourescent lights, right next to the lights themselves.

Urs Fischer, "Marguerite de Ponty," 2010. Installation view. Mixed Media.

By all reports, this was a challenging room to walk through, although reactions varied – many went through to quickly and missed the minor details. Conversely, the reward for those who took their time was an unsettled feeling brought on by the proximity of “real” and “unreal” copies of the same object. There is a visceral difference between experiencing a photographic image on its own and as an image returned to its original context, or placed back in the image world as an object.

Perhaps the most intriguing of these artists is Miriam Bohm, who has completed multiple series – Inventory and Areal, for example – in which she photographs objects such as packages, arranges those photographs in ways that echo the original arrangement, and then rephotographs them. The result is a complex layer of images, leaving you, as the viewer, with nothing concrete save the object of the photograph itself. In the words of Brendan Fay, writing for Artforum, “In Bohm’s hands, it is the photograph’s presence as an object that provides the most immediate basis for apprehending the image it contains.”

Miriam Böhm, "Inventory XII," 2010. Chromogenic color print. 23.6 x 17.7 inches. Edition of 2 with 2 APs.

“Our unlimited use of photographic images not only reflects but gives shape to this society, one unified by the denial of conflict.”

Sontag was curious about the image-world she described, including whether it was the only variety possible. She even proposed an ecology of images, or a mitigating of sorts. In reality, we’ve gone the opposite direction – more images surround us than ever – but when artists insist on re-inserting an image back into its original context, or even threaten to use it to replace an object, it’s hard not to believe there’s a shift afoot.

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.

Woodman most often acted as her own model, and the small black-and-white compositions, usually nudes, are visually straightforward but conceptually complex.  What complicates the work is the knowledge that Woodman is not just the vulnerable nude, but also the architect of that condition.  In many photos Woodman’s gaze is directed at the viewer; and yet knowing she was also the photographer mediates that directness, because ultimately what her model-self was looking at was her photographer-self, backwards through the lens of the camera, posing for her own view.  In this way, she was able to explore her femininity as a construct of at least partially her own making, bringing a feminist awareness to her investigations.

Francesca Woodman, Polka Dots, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. Gelatin silver print, 5 1/4 in. x 5 1/4 in. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman

Take, for example, Polka Dots (1976).  Wearing a spotted dress, Woodman crouches against a decaying, dilapidated wall.  Over her head there is a fist-sized hole punched through the plaster and lath.   Similarly, her dress is unzipped at the side, revealing part of her torso and the curve of her left breast.  Splayed fingers hide her mouth, heightening the vulnerability of her posture and semi-nakedness, and her messy hair corresponds to the ruined nature of the room.  Her awkward, submissive pose and undone dress belong to a madwoman—but her eyes are not crazy, they are guiltily sexual.  They dare the viewer to compare the hole in her garment to the hole in the wall and to see how they might be similar.  And yet the title is neutral, focusing coyly on the pattern of the dress and the concurrent black spots on the wall, redirecting the viewer to the composition as a whole and reflecting the conceptual slyness of the work.  Contradictions and ambiguity create depth as Woodman refuses to provide an easy summary of femininity or desire.

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, New York, 1979-1980. Gelatin silver print, 3 7/8 in. x 3 7/8 in. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman

Woodman’s understanding of formal compositions was truly remarkable for someone so young.  Consider Untitled, New York (1979-1980), in which a nude body reclines on a striped mattress.  Echoing ancient Roman and Greek statues, the head is missing, cut off by the camera’s framing. The clean, bold stripes of the sheet direct the eye across the width of the photo, providing a strong horizontal pattern that is softened by the zigzagging line of the torso and knees.  Gentle folds in the flesh at the waist echo the soft ripples in the fabric.  An open barrette scattered on the sheet implies the sensuality of unbound hair that the viewer can’t see, yet the idea of that looseness is physically present in the undone fabric billowing from under the bed’s front edge. Two mysterious black disks lie near the ribcage, like pupils, alluding to sight. The configuration of elements appears intuitive, but the many correspondences indicate that it was very carefully composed.

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. Gelatin silver print, 5 1/4 in. x 5 5/16 in. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman

Identity is the main issue that arises repeatedly in Woodman’s work.  If she is located in front of and behind the camera simultaneously, then her sense of self is similarly flexible.  Nowhere is this idea more apparent than in Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island (1976) in which three naked women stand in a row in a dilapidated room. Each woman holds a photograph of Woodman’s face in front of her own visage.  The posture of the two women on the left indicates that their hidden faces are turned to each other behind the photographic facades.  The third woman, however, faces the camera.  Comparing this woman’s body to the other photographs in the exhibition, the viewer can deduce that this is Woodman herself, cheekily replacing her own face with a representation that claims to be her.  This tableau is further complicated by a fourth photo of Woodman’s face tacked to the wall, and by the paint that divides the wall horizontally making the row of women into an ersatz police lineup.  There are four Francescas in the room: which one is the criminal, which the innocent, or even the “real”?  Further, each woman is naked, but her face—the principle social marker of her individuality—is concealed, questioning what constitutes feminine identification.  Woodman’s own pose, leaning toward the viewer in knee socks and Mary Janes, seems to say you can see me naked, but I am unrevealed; exposed, I am protected.

Woodman committed suicide at the age of 22, and it would be easy to let this cast a pall over her work, robbing it of its sly humor and replacing its youthful sincerity with something darker. Knowing this fact, her nude body can suddenly look isolated, her propositions for selfhood change from playfully unfixed to confused, her blacks even more opaque than before.  But subjecting her oeuvre to armchair psychology is the wrong strategy: it’s too convenient to attribute her imaginative choices to the facile cliché of the tortured artist.  Although her photographs expose her physical body and her thoughts to a public audience, it is in the privacy of the darkroom that I imagine her: coaxing an image from light and shadows, sliding paper into chemical trays, bringing an ever-changing idea of herself to life, over and over again.

Colorado-based artist Mike Womack’s show Spectres, Phantoms, and Poltergeists opened at the Chelsea gallery ZieherSmith on September 15.  DailyServing’s Carmen Winant had a chance to catch up with him this weekend to chat about his practice and the new work.

Mike Womack, "Spectres (Asteroid Ida)," 2011 c-print, 20 X 30 inches. Photo courtesy ZieherSmith.

Carmen Winant: What is your background in fine arts? Are you trained in sculpture and is that how you would define your practice?

Mike Womack: I’m trained as a painter. In fact, I didn’t start making objects until after graduate school at Pratt. And I currently teach at the University of Colorado in the painting and drawing department. So, I would say: using the vernacular of painting, I make sculpture, installation art, and work within digital media. Above all, I am interested in creating the circumstances and contexts to look at images.

CW: The work seems to engage a certain tenderness, or even magic, with the modern machine and its capabilities.  I think the darkness of the gallery and the sound of the motor add to this romance. Can you speak a little bit about your interest in using motorized systems in your work, or I should say, as the subject of your work?

MW: My interests in creating mechanized imagery are definitely sentimental. I have been accused of being a willful romantic, and I must admit, that is really dead on. I’m fascinated with how technology constitutes imagery. I am idealistic – I want to fall for ideas, to be romanced by them in spite of knowing better. But there is a unavoidable complication within the interplay of technology and phenomenology of media; I am at once in awe of technology, and at the same time made to feel curious and suspicious of it. In this way, I am of two minds: I look at my iPhone and think it’s a miracle. But in the same moment, I want to take it apart, interrogate and look at it from multiple perspectives – to understand, technologically and philosophically, just how we have evolved to this point.

Mike Womack, "Spectres (Muybridge 1)," 2011 c-print, 17 X 28 inches. Photo courtesy of ZieherSmith.

Another example of this divide can also be found in the exploded diagram of how to construct an IKEA couch. You don’t need to know much to understand its mechanics. But suddenly there is a shift into a vastly different kind of technology that surrounds us, like, for instance, electrons moving though silicon products (like a vacuum tube), which rapidly becomes harder to grasp.  There is a kind of slippage between the late industrial revolution’s innovations and forms in building to the digital age. The space between the two is my interest; I usually have one foot in the mechanized world – making things with prescribed naivety – and one foot in trying to tackle more complex things and how they function.

CW: The ways that your work often makes kinetic energy visible through light strikes me as really photographic – which is partially why I asked you about your training and background. Your choice to use Eadweard Muybridge images in the Spectre series also made me more curious about your interest in referencing photography.

MW: I am less interested in the history of photography and more interested in the where the camera aligns and misaligns itself with how we see. I don’t take photographs for my work, but I will often look through the camera lens to see how the values will translate, and how the camera unravels light and creates aberrations.

For the Spectre series, I used black and white moving images to make them into the opposite: color stills. This was really the reason I went back to the very first “moving” image (which never had color to begin with) to attempt to reconstitute the image by applying contemporary filters to it, to both unravel and enhance it. I was also drawn to the early Muybridge images as they were taken with late industrial era technologies, which I keep returning to, and which reference a certain nostalgia.

Installation Shot from Mike Womack's Spectres, Phantoms and Poltergeists. Photo courtesy of ZieherSmith.

CW: Have you read John Keats‘ assertion that Isaac Newton was ‘unweaving the rainbow’ in his studies to understand light? In Lamia, Keats wrote, “Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings.” Your own work literally unravels the RGB matrix.  Do you relate to Keats’ idea? A fundamental conflict between art and science in experiencing the world?

MW: The final stanza in Walt Whitman’s volume Leaves of Grass speaks to this polemic: “The spectacle of looking at a morning glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.” I’m interested in Whitman for this reason, and have investigated him in this show. I’m fascinated by these conflictual approaches in seeing; of course, there is beauty in knowledge, but must we unravel every natural mystery, and do we dilute them in the process?

To return to Whitman: my piece Threshold at the front of the show is very much about this considered, complicated act of looking. Whitman was a humanist, an advocate for tearing down intellectualism in the arts in favor of a phenomenological experience of the nature world.  Looking, for Whitman, was chief over ideas. The piece is comprised of a bluestone taken from the stoop in front of Whitman’s former Brooklyn home displayed simply on a low, wooden table; it has been transformed into a piece of art by its displacement. In becoming conceptual art, Threshold questions and undermines Whitman’s very principles, demonstrative of a kind of contained, internal conflict that runs throughout the show.

The blue screen piece is a good example of this, too. It is meant to emulate the blue screen of a television set that isn’t getting reception (static no longer exists, as there is now no transmission). In addition to creating a surface of both transmitted and reflected light, I also wanted to reference monochromatic painting. I made the piece on aluminum and then coated the paint with industrial grade reflective beads, used on top of the painted road dividers to cause a reflection when hit with head beams. The result is a halo-inducing color field stuck somewhere between Yves Klein blue and Derek Jarman’s 1993 monochromatic film “Blue”.  In making this giant, undulating sculpture, I am caught in this struggle between the experience of looking – both suspicious of, and appreciative toward, its potential.

This is the hardest I’ve ever made my viewers look at my work, the nearest to abstraction, the least demonstrative. Ultimately, everything in that show is about the act of looking.

Spectres, Phantoms, and Poltergeists is on display at ZieherSmith from September 15 through October 15.

Carl Cheng, "U.N. of C.," 1967, Film, molded plastic, Styrofoam and Plexiglas, 15 x 20.75 x 9 in

Artist Craig Kauffman had been living in Europe and was on his way home to L.A. in the early 1960s when he stopped in New York and saw the work of former friend and neighbor, Billy Al Bengston, on view at Martha Jackson Gallery. Bengston, one of L.A. cool motorcycle-savvy surfer artists had been an abstract painter at the end of the 1950s, as had Kauffman. But now, his canvases were lacquered, spray-painted and shining. That’s what I need to be doing, Kauffman decided, and, when he returned to the Sunshine state, Bengston helped him out, teaching him to spray paint on glass and plastic.[1] It was when Kauffman discovered vacuum-formed plastic, however, that his work really hit its stride. He started using the same technologies the aerospace industry used to make its curved plastic plane windows, creating sleek, clean plastic wall reliefs that he called plastic “erotics.” They had the newness of industry innovations and the lightheartedness of pop.

Craig Kauffman, "Untitled," 1968.

Because, for me, vacuum forms have more or less become synonymous with Kauffman and cleanness, I was thrilled to discover a different take on molded plastic at Cherry and Martin gallery in Culver City last weekend. Cherry and Martin’s current exhibition, Photography into Sculpture, restages a seminal exhibition that initially occurred in 1970 at MoMA, then traveled across the country. Curated by photo historian Peter Bunnell, the original show put its finger on the pulse of a trend: 3-D photography. Bringing L.A.-based artists and photo-conceptualists together with Vancouver-based photographers, Bunnell showed images that had been re-embodied, so that the flat, condensed space of the picture plane  no longer “depicted” but became multi-sided, dense and object-like.

Carl Cheng, "Sculpture for Stereo Viewers," 1968, Film, molded plastic, wood and Plexiglas, 16.5 x 18 x 8 in

Photographers, it turns out, were tuned into plastics, too. But their take didn’t optimistically celebrate the finish fetish of industrial production. Instead, by using molded plastic to “inflate” formerly flat camera imagery, artists like Carl Cheng and Michael Stone made photographs feel overstuffed in a sort of messy way. In U.N. of C., Cheng’s humping  yellow bears and top-heavy waving U.S. and California state flags are visual comedy: regionalism is blown-up like a flimsy toy, and the vacuum-forms that looked so imperturbable when Kauffman used them, here look like cartoons. That the L.A. Look–which critic Peter Plagens defined in terms of “permanence,” “technical expertise,” and “preciousness (when polished)”–had a more complicated, less polished underside isn’t news, but it’s great to see in the flesh nonetheless, because it drives home the point that no aesthetic trend, not even one toward pristine plastic, is incorruptible.

[1] Hunter Drohojowska-Philp gives this account in her new book Rebels in Paradise.

Lale Tara, Innocent Surrogates, 2010. Medium : c-print Size : 90 x 120 cm, 127 x 190 cm. Photo: Yavuz Fine Art Gallery.

It is often that the photographic lens exemplifies the artistic genius behind the camera as much as the subject that it photographs. That’s not to say that this process is inapplicable to any other form of art production. But if it is only for the pictorial expression of eternal spiritual truths that justifies the existence of icons (and idols), the photography of belief systems – because of its capability to record time and place yet simulate the real – inches towards the profane. Treading this fine line is Idols and Icons: New photography from Asia & the Middle East, a photography exhibition that examines tropes of faith, ideology and theology by producing what is presumed to be too sacred for reproduction.

Manit Sriwanichpoom, Masters, 2009. Gelatin silver print. Installation View, Yavuz Fine Art Gallery.

With Masters (2009), Manit Sriwanichpoom of the Pink Man fame returns with a photo series of cross-legged monks in meditation, modelled after those who situate themselves in Thai temples receiving alms from the Buddhist faithful. However, Sriwanichpoom’s lens deceives; the blurred life-sized portraits are amulet-type mass-produced objects readily sold in shops, akin to mass-marketed paraphernalia typically associated with cult celebrity behaviour. Masters unapologetically continues Sriwanichpoom’s acerbic photographic critiques of Thai contemporary consumerism, and suggests that the fetishisation of these idols – a non-existent tenet of Buddhism – pushes commonly held religious beliefs into a new, corrupted reality.

Ampannee Satoh, Burqa, 2010. Medium : pigment print on paper Size : 120 x 120 cm, 150 x 200 cm, 120 x 180 cm, 150 x 300 cm. Photo: Yavuz Fine Art Gallery.

Issues of ethnicity and gender are equally prominent grounding anchors in the show. Ampannee Satoh’s Burqa series (2010) visually reduces the conflict to 2 symbols of opposing ideologies: burqa-clad women who stand against Parisian monuments endowed with an idealised republican rhetoric that finds itself reiterated these days (particularly because of the Islamic dress – a clichéd but key signifier of a clash of civilisations that separates public and private boundaries), in the French parliament. Shadi Ghadirian’s Miss Butterfly (2011) is a series of photographs in which a solitary woman weaves a web across several domestic settings, reclaiming the female agency’s dominance in the household while simultaneously suggesting its relentless and inescapable grip.

Shadi Ghadirian, Miss Butterfly, 2011. Medium : c-print Size : 70 x 105 cm, 100 x 150 cm. Photo: Yavuz Fine Art Gallery.

While commonly employed as a discursive indicator of power relations, the feminine figure’s iconic status is far from formulaic. Outside the virtuous woman’s conventional role as the domestic exempla, Lale Tara’s Innocent Surrogates’s (2010) human-sized female doll-subjects inhabit the main frame of the photograph, located – not unlike a medieval tapestry or a painting – within a border of votive reverence. Almost sacramental, suitably dramatic with some measure of artifice, Tara’s dolls occupy, in good unheimlich fashion, conflicted and malaised positions of transgression that cathartically play out our own repressed enjoyments.

Idols and Icons will be on view at the Yavuz Fine Art Gallery until 27 August 2011.

Carmen Winant: Hi Zoe! Thanks for agreeing to talk with us.  In your latest series, LA-Like: Transgressing the Pacific, you photograph real and fictional sites of disappearances into the Pacific Ocean. With descriptive titles like Where Natalie Wood Disappeared off Catalina Island, there is no distinction made between historical figures and invented ones. For instance, you document the Marina Del Rey site where the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson really died in 1983, alongside the location where John Voight’s character drowns himself in the 1978 film Coming Home. Can you address the choice to include real and unreal figures in the series?

Zoe Crosher: Yes. My practice deals with photograph as a tool of fiction of documentary. I have long been interested in thinking through the ways that memory operates through photographs on the basis of the stories that we ourselves write. Also, Los Angeles has a unique and specific relationship to fiction—truth and imagination are easily conflated here—so I am particularly interested how I can use documentary photography to the same end. Ultimately, no matter how adept we have become in reading photographs, there is still the traditional assumption of an overarching “truth” in our approach to documentary work, which I hope to complicate.

CW: I’m drawn to this notion of departures, of heading west to find one’s destiny—and when that cannot hold, even further west—into the ocean’s depths, as the case may be. There is something so tragic and poetic about the idea that the border of the coast cannot hold you. I saw that you wrote about the conundrum of Manifest Destiny: “the endless promise for once you reach that unreachable place, and then you have arrived, there is no where to go anymore.” There is something so fundamentally lonely about that. Can you address this idea of containment, of reaching forever farther, even if it means one’s own demise?

ZC: All my work certainly has a darker backdrop, a kind of impossibility of knowing, but I never look at the work as being lonely. It has cathartic potential, perhaps. And it certainly is concerned with trauma. Joan Didion addresses this sense of Manifest Destiny so well in her books and essays, as a schism between a promise of something and what it actually may turn out to be.

The lore of moving west—what happens when you hit the border or reach the shore, when you can’t push any further—this is a very loaded threshold. Even Lewis and Clark couldn’t believe it when they hit the Pacific, as if the continent should in fact be never-ending, endlessly unfolding. If you live in LA, a frequent question is, “Where are you from?” It implies, of course, that no one is really from here, that the city holds those that sought it out.

CW: You use a medium format camera, which I tend to think of as a nostalgic and self-contained format.

ZC: I’ve always shot with a square format. The square complicates presumed ways of looking. When I started photography seriously in college, I was immediately trying to interrupt what was presumed “real.” For this project I used a Bronica camera, and a tripod and a flash when shooting at night. I only shot film. The final photos are printed on Fujiflex paper, which has a very glossy, reflective surface. In the gallery they are hung fairly low, creating a sense of falling into the water.

CW: How much research went into uncovering the spots where these people disappeared? Or are these locations their own fictions?

ZC: The research took many forms. I had a great intern working with me—Jason Underhill—and together we did newspaper research, looked at police reports, and watched the movies over and over. We found three different articles about Natalie Wood’s death in the Pacific in 1981, but only one mentioned that she was wearing a red down jacket. These selective details are exactly what I am interested in, how we choose to selectively document the past. Some of these places no longer exist; Aimee Semple McPherson faked her own disappearance at the Ocean Park pier, which was halfway between Venice and Santa Monica, and is no longer standing. The final scene for the film Coming Home was in Manhattan Beach, but it was a fantastic goose chase to find the spot, which I originally believed to be in San Diego. There were other issues: The Long Goodbye was shot on Robert Altman’s private property at Malibu Colony, and so on.

Ultimately, this is the point. It was a project that relied on and tested the mimicry of my own memory. History is all estimations, which is effectively a major component of my work.

CW: My next question is about the paradox of marking the SPOT of a disappearance. It strikes me that the idea of being “disappeared” implies that the person vanishes without a trace…do you feel that in some way marking the location lends a certain gravity, much like a gravestone might, to an otherwise mythical action?

ZC: I don’t think it detracts from the disappearances themselves, which, as I mentioned, are still very much my interpretation. I am inspired by crime scene photography, but I can only photograph the moment of crossing, not its finality.

There is something to be said for marking that which refuses be marked. I have been trying to figure out a way to photograph the Santa Ana winds. This idea is so interesting to me—not the expectation of failure, but the expectation of impossibility.

The truth is that everything—every body and every event—is located in space. This process of insisting on a moment that did happen and has a physical reality, the insistence of being a witness, is very important to my practice.

CW: I am interested in discussing this series in light of some of your other LA-Like series, specifically, LA-Like: The Pools I Shot Series and the Michelle duBois project. They both seem tied to place and perception, and the qualities of surface. Can you discuss the relationship between them, perhaps beginning with your interest in water? And, in regards to the duBois series, a kind of desperation to document oneself for consumption by others, and in doing so, creating a kind of vacuum of self?

ZC: Again, all of the work is concerned with testing the limits and constructs of the documentary. The Michelle duBois project is ultimately about the possibility of not knowing oneself—she pretends to be so many versions of herself, taking thousands of photos, all in which she emulates a different persona. She is creating her own kind of destiny in a way, a life constructed on impossible fantasy.

LA-Like: The Pools I Shot is a kind of mapping; LA is, of course, tied up with the history of water. I wanted to merge the poetics and the medium. I took pictures of the sun reflecting in pools, and slightly burned the photographic paper in the printing process.

CW: I noticed that the press release for your show includes a quote from Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. This struck me as a really apt literary source for your work, as Didion so persuasively investigated the profound emptiness and power of celebrity. I was also reminded of her looking at your swimming pool series, specifically her line from The White Album: “A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye”. And beyond that, Didion’s interest in probing the qualities of mourning, or grappling with disappearance. Have you read much by her? Cinema has obviously influenced your work, but does literature do the same?

ZC: I have read almost every book Joan Didion has every written, and I consider her a great influence on my work. Didion did for writing what I am interested in doing for photography. She collapsed fiction and documentary, confusing the terms of reception and context to great effect. She was a journalist who questioned the very structure of journalism, which ultimately was inextricable for her own reportage. I am working on a book of the entire LA-Like series, and I would love for her to write the introduction.

Didion also encapsulates a version of 1960s California. She’s about my dad’s age, and they both attended Berkeley. So, her work also resonates personally with me; it feels familiar. Didion describes a California that I remember as a child but that no longer exists. Or at least, I think it existed.

Roe Ethridge, "Butts," 2010 Chromogenic print 3 parts: 51 3/8 x 34 7/8 inches each (130.5 x 88.6 cm) Ed. of 5. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Rarely do I smell cigarettes in public these days. If they smoke at all, people close to me tend to bring out lighters only on occasions involving heavy drinking.  This shift is a surprising testament to common sense.  Occasionally, it seems, we can do what’s best for us.

Of course, that common sense has yet to spread to all nooks and crannies. Twice last week, for instance, I was asked, “do you mind if I smoke?” I hardly ever mind. I’m young enough that the cultural mystique of smoking never overpowered the glare of the Surgeon General’s warnings, but cigarettes still smell like a social life to me. Growing up, I equated their scent with a world beyond the one I shared with my parents, also both non-smokers. My grandparents all smoked, as did an aunt, an uncle and a great aunt, who kept at it well past 90. Imprinted in my memory are the first strong women I admired, all with cigarettes in hand: Virginia Woolf, contemplative and cavalier with her long-stemmed cigarette holder, looked fragile otherwise, and Katharine Hepburn, smoking while dangling her legs over an armchair, was cool and in charge.

That heedless smoking hearkens back to a golden, mid-century moment (Mad Men, anyone?) has been said before.  And I’m not interested in that breed of nostalgia. What I am interested in is why cigarettes, whether in human hands or not, remain such a constant subject for contemporary photographers.

Paul Graham, from "New Europe," 1986-92.

Photographer Roe Ethridge’s current exhibition, Le Luxe BHGG, at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills includes a triptych of cigarette butts all jumbled together in a pile of ashes on stone slabs. Le Luxe features the artist’s characteristic pairings of like and unlike imagery—essayist Eileen Myles might call it “browser art”, a simple recording of “stuff a hand or an eye might alight on.” A tall, porcelain-skinned blond stands in a sunset-colored, one-piece swimsuit, and a battered concrete pourer fills a whole frame; Abercrombie and Fitch-style sexiness meets the sensuality of weathered industrialism. This show is more a record of seductive moods and styles than anything else.

Then there are the cigarette photos. At first, the butts look discarded, but Ethridge has arranged them specifically, placing the stone slabs on strangely delicate black grates. The photographs pay tribute to nostalgia and leisure but approach tribute-making flippantly enough to keep their cool.

Within the first few decades of the 20th century, cigarettes had established a constant, casual presence in photographs. In shots by Brassai or Lee Friedlander, you see them hanging loosely between someone’s fingers. Or, sometimes, they’d add flair, like when Noel Coward wore a suit, stood in the desert and regally wielded a cigarette for Loomis Dean’s iconic 1955 shot. Through the 1960s and ‘70s, cigarettes remained a vice present in photojournalism and fine art alike, shared by hippies, soldiers and grandfathers.

In the late 1970s and ‘80s, following the slew of public health campaigns and Nixon’s banning of cigarette ads on TV, cigarettes in photographs began to look more indulgent, more punk. Shirtless boys lit them in bed for Nan Goldin and, later, Wolfgang Tillmans. Finally, in the 1990s, we saw cigarettes sitting all by themselves, laid out in installations by artist Jack Pierson, or abandoned in a public restroom in a photograph by Paul Graham.

Roe Ethridge, "Apple and cigarettes," 2004/2006, Chromogenic prin,t 41 x 32-3/4 inches. Ed. of 5. Courtesy Gagosian.

These shifts in art weren’t a direct reaction to tobacco’s growing menace, of course. They had more to do with a growing aversion to presenting “a whole story.” Better to pick apart the image and zoom in on its elements than to act like a camera gives you privileged insight into the human condition. When I was in high school, I painted a portrait of my grandfather based on a photo. He sat in a pink-winged armchair, wearing plaid and holding a cigarette. He died only weeks after I finished it, of complications from emphysema, and I brought the painting when we drove cross-country to his funeral. No one wanted it around; the cigarette jumped out at my grandmother, aunts and uncles right away, though I had simply painted him that way because that’s how he was. Omitting the cigarette seemed dishonest.

Images like those by Roe Ethridge, that let burnt butts stand alone, don’t feel honest or dishonest. Symbols of cultural indulgence, they’ve abstracted themselves from imminent consequences and turned the trappings of human behavior into pure style.  This makes them more disarming and unnerving than any photo of Katharine Hepburn or Noel Coward blowing smoke rings could ever be.

Gina Glover, Dallachy, Scotland WW1 Control Tower. Image copyright of Gina Glover.

Playgrounds of War is an exhibition of photographs by Gina Glover on the memories and detritus of military bases, on view at Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow till 7 August 2011.

Gina Glover, Harrington, Jessica's Playground. Image copyright of Gina Glover.

Since the early 1980s, Glover has travelled in search of abandoned military bases. Glover developed the Playgrounds of War series from photographs of Harrington, a former World War II airbase in England, which was later allocated to the United States Air Forces. Harrington resides in Glover’s personal history as a place where she had picnics as a child in the 1950s, and was then oblivious to its military associations. Jessica’s Playground, taken in the 1980s, revives this moment of innocence amidst a site constructed for acts of destruction, with Glover’s daughter photographed playing amidst the concrete structures left standing as memorials to its history.

Gina Glover, France, Drop Zone. Image copyright of Gina Glover.

Harrington becomes a metaphorical base for Glover’s own physical and photographic exploration of the aesthetics of past wars, and a point to revisit the shifting zones of confrontation and alliances. During World War II, Harrington was the base for the delivery of supplies to resistance forces in enemy-occupied territories. France, Drop Zone marks a point in the south of France that received supplies from Harrington. With her first series of Harrington photographed in black and white, Glover has since chosen to shoot in colour using a pinhole camera without a viewfinder. With the subjection to long exposures and layering of light, the eventual photographs capture a field of depth and concentration of light that speak to the effects of the natural elements on these sites.

Gina Glover, Estonia, Soviet nuclear submarine training centre Paldiski. Image copyright of Gina Glover.

In the late 1950s, Harrington resumed its military function, where Thor missiles were placed and pointed at the Soviet states during the Cold War. Glover ventures into a former Soviet submarine nuclear training facility to explore the conflict from the other side. In contrast to the other photographs, this is a scene from within, where the fading of the light green wall, peeling paint and broken fixtures are left as debris of the hive of activity that could have occurred at this center of command. While the individual photographs possess a melancholy and muteness in the eroded, uninhabited and derelict sites, the exhibition’s spatial display of the photographs according to the geographical zones of military activity recall the set of confrontations that embed these sites.

A co-founder and director of the Photofusion Photography Centre, London, Glover’s recent exhibitions include Liminal World at Hooper’s Gallery, London in 2010, and was an artist-in-residence at Guy’s Hospital and Northwick Park Hospital in 2008. Her work on the Baltics will be on view at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels later this year.

Diane Arbus, "Woman with Veil on Fifth Avenue, N.Y.C," 1968. © The Estate of Diane Arbus.

“Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child,” Norman Mailer infamously remarked in 1971, less than one year before Arbus died and over nine years after she snapped a photo of a scrawny blond boy who actually did have grenade in hand. Whether Mailer, cavalier to a fault, meant to or not, his quip infantilized Arbus’ savvy, as has much of the opining and homage surrounding her photographic oeuvre in year past. On the cover of the catalogue for her recent retrospective, titled Revelations, you see her face, a hazy and grainy dark-eyed phantom, lurking behind two of her more stoic photographs. In Fur, the “imaginary” movie portrait by Steven Shainberg, you see Arbus, played by Nicole Kidman, as a weak-willed dreamy creative easily seduced by the world’s eccentrics.

Over the three decades since her painstaking suicide (barbiturates and wrist slitting), too much mystique has grown up around the obsessive strangeness of Arbus’s work and she has become, in some ways, as a dark an artist-figure as Sylvia Plath—a tortured soul, claimed Patricia Bosworth’s unauthorized 1984 biography. But  unlike Plath, who wrote of feeling terrified of herself and “incapable of more knowledge,” Arbus would throw herself fully into what scared her. “What’s important to know is that you never know; you’re always sort of feeling your way,” she said, and felt her way deftly.

"Diane Arbus: People and Other Singularities," 2011, Installation View, Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills. Photograph: the Douglas M. Parker Studio.

You won’t find much that’s new or unexpected in People and Other Singularities, the current exhibition of Arbus’ work on view at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills gallery. The show more or less functions like a retrospective, featuring the iconic photos of aging divas, eccentrics and freaks of nature, among them the famous image of the Jewish giant or the nudist colonies. But from the moment you walk in, you’ll be on an adventure that has less to do with soul-probing and more to do with pushing open the bubble of person-hood. “Do other people exist in the same way I do?” Arbus seems to ask over and over again. “It’s so hard to believe that’s true.”1

The first image you see when you enter the gallery—that mawkishly endearing shot of a grinning,, double-chinned lady in tulle hat and black netted veil—confronts you, aggressively, with its bodiliness. Yet it also has an infectious, quixotic tenderness. Often, that’s what Arbus provides: a body with physical quirks and features so overt they can’t be overlooked, yet a quiet relatability courses through underneath. It’s there in her portrait of the Roselle twins, the debutante Brenda Diana Duff Frazier, or the not quite Barbie-like women trying for the title of Miss Venice Beach. Arbus could climb into a community completely without faking belonging; always, she was looking in on something that wasn’t her.

Diane Arbus, "A young man and his pregnant wife in Washington Square Park, NY," 1965. © The Estate of Diane Arbus.

One summer, she spent her time working in Washington Square Park:

And there were these territories staked out. There were young hippie junkies down one row, lesbians down another—really tough, amazingly hardcore lesbians—and in the middle were winos. They were like the first echelon, and the girls who came from the Bronx to become hippies would have to sleep with the winos to get to sit on the other part with the junkie hippies. It was really remarkable and I found it very scary. I mean, I could become a million things, but I could never become that.

“[When I see] great art,” said novelist Zadie Smith, “when I read a great piece of fiction, what I’m being confronted with is exactly what is radically not me, a consciousness of the world that is so far from my own, it’s a shock.” Arbus shocked in that way, and, right now, in an era where obsession with identity politics, self-discovery and radical self-assertion (Cosey Fanni Tutti’s vagina photographs or Vito Acconci’s masturbation under the stairs play up the “I” of experience in a way that seems far less potent right now, in the era of youtube, file-sharing and self-exposure opportunities galore) has begun to seem stale, her work feels more poignantly, exquisitely relevant than ever. Whatever her personal demons, Arbus understood that other people were the whole point.

1. The above quote–”Do other people exist the way I do?”–also comes from Zadie Smith’s 2006 interview with Michael Silverblatt.

Maleonn, King of the Ridiculous, archival pigment print

As Susan Sontag observed, “the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads”. Pure Satire by Maleonn at the 2902 Gallery in Singapore encapsulates this visual aesthetic, creating an open set of performative statements within a symbol-laden, dreamlike universe that amalgamates historical and contemporary trends, wherein protagonists are children with runaway imaginations at heart. In the intense, nostalgic amber-toned hues of Maleonn’s photographic universe, androgynous figures dress like superman and ridiculous tomato-heads clad in traditional Chinese costumes of bygone eras chide us for our laughter.

Maleonn, Leaves of Grass, 2006, ultra giclee print on d-bond, 108x90cm.

Maleonn, Superman, Book of taboo, 2006, lambda, C-print.

At the crux of Pure Satire is Maleonn’s championing of the ridiculous. The hallmark of childhood – the unfettered imagination that is oft inclined to wander off into magical spheres – is captured on print by digital colourising and careful staging to depict an untouchable realm surrounded by elements of the physical world that are both familiar and unfamiliar. Maleonn’s world of the child-like mind bears some similarity to the landscape we know, but is ultimately upheld with laws that reject normality: men nonchalantly carry a giant peach out of the door and postmen ride through brick walls to deliver their letters.

Maleonn, Postman, 2008.

Images of China’s modern generation are presented (sometimes comically) as an archetype in fables, remodelled as twenty-first century moral anecdotes that highlight numerous human foibles. In The King of the Ridiculous (2010) series, a figure dressed in a sumptuous Chinese Operatic costume poses with pretentious fervour against well-known architectural backdrops lamenting– just the speaker of Ecclesiastes did with aplomb – the absurdity of life and art. The Little Flagman (2008) series features a solitary figure clad in military uniform caught in a plethora of movements: dancing in a cage to mourning fully holding flags lost in a desolate landscape.

Maleonn, Little Flagman, 2008.

While juxtaposing the bourgeoning cultural freedom accompanying China’s frenetic capitalism with the apparent erosion of historical – or even mythological – grounding in modern Chinese society however, Maleonn deflects his judgement by unleashing the mental workings of an inner child. Created with a carnivalistic sense of chaos, the photographic triptych Journey to the West (2008) is a beautifully coloured mess of traditional and Western images, perhaps obliquely suggesting China’s increasing identification with Western influences and not-too-subtle shift in sensibilities while simultaneously drawing a parallel with its namesake: a seventeenth-century epic Ming text chronicling a perilous journey to India for spiritual enlightenment. But unlike Lewis Carroll’s Alice who peers (and eventually enters) through a looking glass into an alternative world, we as viewers – perhaps typified by the human face peeking in the left corner – visually consume but can’t quite hope to enter.

Maleonn, Journey to the West, Digital photography from assemblage, 2008.

Born in 1972, Maleonn resides and works in Shanghai. After graduating from the Fine Arts College of Shanghai University in 1995, he went on to become a director of short films including television advertisements. Pure Satire will be on show at the 2902 Gallery until 7 May 2011.

Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photo credit: Brian Forrest

In a former life, Walead Beshty may have rubbed elbows with Patti Smith. Flaunting her contemptuous disregard for the cautionary advice of her peers, Smith famously denounced words as mere “rules and regulations” in her rendition of Van Morrison’s “Gloria.” In one unruly, titillating performance, Smith flipped the good ol’ boys’ fraternity of rock and roll on its ear by lampooning the muffled sexism of the music industry, exposing the frivolous laws that command its economy. In other words, let’s not shy away from the fact that sex sells in this game, kiddo.  Similarly, the art world has its own rulebook.  And Beshty has a shredder.

The first rule of art market is you do not talk about art market. The vernacular of commodity is strictly verboten, seductive aesthetics are ill-advised, and materiality is secondary to concept. The clandestine, operational logistics of the art world are something of an urban legend—on which Beshty shines an astute light. In a 2009 interview with BOMB Magazine, the artist acknowledged this hush-hush stigma, stating: “Any art effect people don’t like, or find alienating, is ascribed to the market. In this, and in all other aspects of art making, I think transparency is the only way to destabilize the mythologies of the art market, and of art in general.” In his current exhibition at Regen Projects (Los Angeles, CA), PROCESSCOLORFIELD, Beshty takes a wily swipe at the absurdity of the art world’s covertness with more than twenty-five new works, ranging from photograms to readymades to the mulched remains of works “unfit for exhibition.” He deftly navigates the precinct between improvisation and calculation, as well as object and material, while subverting the rules that govern each model.

With a discerning hand, Beshty manipulates the analog qualities of film in his “Black Curl” photogram series. Perhaps a tangential nod to his 2006 “Picture Made by My Hand with the Assistance of Light” works, which were the result of a roll of film’s unintentional exposure to an airport X-ray machine, Beshty’s most recent photograms hypostatize fluke relationships between photo paper and color structures into electrified bands of twilight hues.  Austere blocks of black and white border sherbet-colored ribbons of pink and orange, as if we were peeking at the garish Los Angeles sunset through a haphazard set of blinds.

Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photo credit: Brian Forrest

Reflecting the vibrant patterning of the photograms are Beshty’s “Copper Surrogates,” whose polished surfaces are tarnished with alarmingly prevalent fingerprints, smears and coffee mug rings. To the seasoned gallery-goer, the constellation of blemishes on the works’ surface is cause for stifled panic, as art-viewing policy is built upon a longstanding empire of “Don’t Touch.” This is Beshty’s guerrilla erosion of one of art’s most fortified rules.  Literally used as workspace for the duration of a prior exhibition, the sullied copper counters display traces of conversations past, meetings adjourned and infrastructures built—empirical evidence that alludes to the presence of the industry, the gallerist and the collector.

Finally, in a tongue-in-cheek intimation of the sway of institutions, Beshty’s “Selected Works” reframe the notion of artistic failure, unearthing the unseen practice behind the tradition of curating and contextualization. Shredding his self-declared “unsuccessful works,” Beshty turned the refused scraps and slivers of photos and paintings into reconstituted mulch, displaying the literal and conceptual debris of exploratory authorship in an unconventionally candid manifestation. In his forthright acknowledgement of the tensions between the material and the visual, as well as between posturing and actuality, Beshty bends the rules with dexterous maneuvering and a covert smidge of sensory seduction. The art market never saw it coming.

PROCESSCOLORFIELD is on view through May 14, 2011.

Charles Brittin, "Shirley Berman at the Ocean Park Pier," 1956.

Last night, at a bar beneath a Motel 8 on Sunset and Western, a friend and I got sucked into a great, mammoth of a Jukebox that’s quirky selection reminded us of a history short enough that our lives had overlapped with much of it, but long enough that many of the bands and artists on its sometimes hand-written leafs had receded so far back into memory we had to dig to pull them out—the Violent Femmes, for instance. Was that really the name of the band that gave Clare Danes’ precious “I’m free” moment in My So Called Life its infectious tempo?

Two Jukebox-like exhibitions are open in L.A. right now—one by a late artist who quietly lived through Venice Beach’s era of Beats, and another by an artist who’s lost himself in punk’s knotty trajectory by channeling a man whose whole life was colorful and loud, whether he meant it to be or not. Both are rich with real and fantastic historical gems, some as thrilling to [re]experience as the Violent Femmes and others a bit more ominous.

Charles Brittin (1928 – 2011) came to L.A. from Iowa at the end of the 1940s. Brittin fell in with Wallace Berman, the pensive artist who shunned the gallery world after an anonymous tip prompted police to raid his first-ever exhibition in search of pornography, and his crew of meditative, anti-establishment friends. The pictures Britton took of this group are among the best in West & South at Michael Kohn Gallery, a show that’s more encyclopedic than thematic, pairing Britton’s images of the California scene with his iconic photographs of the Civil Rights movement. The Venice pics are good because, unlike the gripping, clearly weighty photos of protests and demonstrations, they get at the quirky moments that make history seem like the pastiche of idiosyncrasies that it really is. A portrait of Wallace Berman’s wispy wife Shirley hangs right by the gallery’s front entrance and also graces the cover of the exhibition catalog. Shirley’s upturned hands glow in the Venice Beach sun, her eyes cross slightly, and she looks like an unsuspecting Joan of Arc who’s just been possessed by the spirit, her unruly hair flying up toward heaven.

Steven Bankhead, “Sex: A Monument to Malcolm McLaren,” 2011. Courtesy Emma Gray Headquarters, Los Angeles.

If unruly hair indicates inspiration, it would explain the success of Malcolm McLaren—manager to the Sex Pistols, among other sundry trades—and his complicated on-and-off partner, Vivienne Westwood. Both had short, curly locks that seemed to take on a life of their own, regardless of how carefully curated the rest of their physiques may have been. Artist Steven Bankhead has tackled the McLaren mystique in his current exhibition at Emma Gray Headquarters in Culver City. And the result is strangely subtle. Even the big, pink “SEX” sign—the gallery had to remove it from its exterior wall due to a neighborhood complaint—that echoes signage McLaren hung outside his London shop feels more adorable than aggressive. Bankhead has covered the walls of Emma Gray’s main space with large print-outs of a London cityscape that depict industrial mayhem in such a perfectly controlled, choreagraphed manner that they feel like what might have resulted if Fellini had rewritten 8 1/2 and set  it during Britain’s Industrial Revolution.

In the gallery’s office, Bankhead has installed a few balloon-ish pop paintings, much lighter in palette than the  black-and-white paper walls, but equally controlled. The paintings mimic those McLaren when still a young aspiring artist, before he’d become entwined with the Sex Pistols and early punk. They’re pink, yellow, orange and blue clouds against flat white or black backgrounds, Warholian and tenderly optimistic.

Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm Mclaren sitting in the Sex Shop, 1976.

Three years before McLaren died ( in 2010, a year ago almost exactly), he gave an interview to the Telegraph in which he described how he felt after becoming a teenage father in the early 70s to Westwood’s baby (she’d apparently spent the money he gave her for an abortion on a cashmere twinset). “I went into depression for a while, then decided to make myself a blue lamé suit, copying Elvis,” he explained, and he got Vivienne to help him. “That was the big change. I realised she was a gifted seamstress,” McLaren added, as if it was then, over the blue lamé meant to free him from his own version of post-partum despondency, that he discovered the fashion icon Vivienne would become.

Steven Bankhead’s light, pop paintings feel like that blue lamé, fun shapes that, if read into, tell a rich, weird story about how culture gets made.