Image: Scott Thorpe (left) and Brett MacFadden at the wrapping party for THE THING Quarterly, Issue 15: MacFadden and Thorpe.

A central tenet to emerge from Conceptual art in the 1960s was the perception of language as an object: a visual form of signification that requires us to negotiate its materiality in order to locate its meaning. In this process of negotiation, language was no different than any other artistic medium. The tactile quality of a page and typographical arrangement of text were recognized to be as active in creating meaning as the words printed on them. If reading was a set of physical gestures that unfolds linearly—left to right, top to bottom, from one page to the next—the interruption or reordering of any of these gestures led to a reconsideration and new consciousness of the act. In other words, language was set in motion, built, excavated, or incanted instead of written, and to read these texts was to experience them spatially.¹ The inheritance we’ve received from these investigations into language as object is an inherent understanding of the performative nature of reading and, concurrently, of a reader’s role as co-conspirator in creating meaning.

As art historian Gwen Allen notes in the introduction to her book Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art, beginning in the 1960s, art magazines went beyond their documentary purpose to become alternative sites that presented works of art. They placed the materiality of art and the materiality of language into congruous relationships and transformed those relationships into performative experiences. For example, 0 to 9, a mimeographed poetry magazine published by poet and performance artist Vito Acconci and poet Bernadette Mayer between 1967 and 1969, aspired to explore language as a visual, phonetic, and kinetic form and featured contributions from both poets and conceptual artists. The magazine’s issues featured pages densely covered in text or left nearly blank, typesetting that suggested motion across the page, and even, for the cover of Issue 5, a sheet of paper crumpled and then flattened again. Preceding his transition from poet to performer, Acconci made experiments with typography and layout, motivated by what he described as a restlessness with the page that compelled him into a state of action. (“I couldn’t be on the page any more. Language took me out onto the street. I was moving on the page, now I wanted to move on the sidewalk, on the street. I was more thinking of the street as a field of activity rather than the page.”²)

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Whitney Lynn, Death Parties (2011) Plastic, glass, alcohol, chrome-laminated birch shelf, 21 x 36 x 6 in.

Bean Gilsdorf: How did this new body of work begin?

Whitney Lynn: It started with Southern Exposure in 2009, they had a show called “Bellwether” and they were asking artists to predict or envision the future. I was looking at the way in which do-it-yourself and sustainability movements overlap with survivalism. I started picking up these images about how to trap your own food, skin your own squirrels, eat your own rats, and those sorts of things. Then when I was doing a later project I was also thinking about containment, and I started thinking about trapping systems. I was not quite sure what I was going to do with all of it, and then there was the realization, oh, there’s a project here.

BG: Do you think of your work as post-apocalyptic? Has anyone ever framed your work that way?

WL: Maybe a little, with the survivalist stuff. I think there’s something kind of sinister about a lot of the pieces, but I think they’re funny.

BG: What are the general trends of your interests?

WL: The earlier works that were dealing with military were very autobiographical, and I was navigating my own personal history. Then things shifted, and I was thinking about how these intersections of politics or military are really interconnected into all kinds of aspects of life. That changed my focus, to see where those messy intersections or boundaries existed. For this particular show I was thinking about metaphors of traps and their relationship to sculpture.

Whitney Lynn, Prepared Position with Disturbance Ventilation and Luminous Signal (2010) Mixed media (furniture, cement, tv, fan) 7 x 8 x 4 feet

BG: Do you feel like that’s freeing, to get away from making autobiographical work?

WL: Well, it’s always connected. For me, it’s impossible to get away from some sort of personal thread. It’s extending from a different kind of autobiography. These traps are placed in a setting where there’s the possibility of a different kind of question: what’s the prey and what’s the bait, the lure? Part of the work is about futility—nothing’s ever going to be trapped with these. And that’s where I see some of the humor, too. It relates back to some of my earlier work…I made a bug-out location that would never actually survive anything. It was made for one person and had food supplies, but they were capers, so it was this empty gesture of preparation. And there were all these weapons that would never actually hurt you. It was all pretty pathetic. It was part of the question, “How can you prepare for the ultimate disaster when you don’t know what that is?”

Whitney Lynn, BOL (Bug-Out-Location) (2009) Mixed media installation with performance elements

BG: What’s next for you?

WL: One project that I’ve been doing on the side and that will probably come to the fore is street performance. I think that’s really a place of intersections and boundaries. My interest is in that area where street performance is performance art. I’ve been really obsessed with the Bush Man in Fisherman’s Wharf for along time, so I shot a video with him recently. I’m sure there will be a development that leads me back to the traps project.

BG: I can see the borders and boundaries that you’re flirting with in your work…some are more literal and explicit, like with the sculptures, and some are more subtle, just the feeling is there, but on the whole it creates a thread through the work.

WL: There’s something exciting about allowing that thread through the work, but to let it play itself out naturally. There can be these connections, but they don’t have to be calculated. For years I was like, “I make work that’s about intersections with military and political cultures,” and it was almost like I had written an artist statement and I didn’t want to write it again, and I’d better make things that fit into that. There was pressure to define myself, to say okay so I this is what I do, but I got tired of making fifteen different kinds of bunkers, that’s not all I think about. I was eliminating possibilities because I was stuck in the idea that my work needed to be concise.

Whitney Lynn, Trap no. 001 (2011) Acrylic, polished tree branch, 21 x 17 x 16 in.

BG: When you’re making the work, you’re so close to it. What feels like an enormous left-hand turn to you is, in reality, a slight detour to others. But you wonder how you’ll explain your decisions to the world.

WL: Right, yeah, and I think there’s something important about separating the making from the talking about it. I feel sometimes I have to justify what I’m doing before I even finish making and that can be disruptive. I try not to worry in advance how to articulate the work…it’s a matter of knowing that there’s a difference between the process and its final articulation.

BG: Sometimes you can frame the work loosely by saying that, for example, it’s about control: attempting to control the situation of a disaster, or the actions of another person or animal, or even the definition of an action on the street, where you decide if it’s performance art or not. And then in each new iteration of your work, you decide how it fits in—or not—to that broad category.

WL: I think a lot of the work is this attempt at control that is usurped, the rug gets pulled, in the face of all these systems, these attempts to corral, contain, or understand something. Where I find it interesting is where that’s not possible.

Whitney Lynn, Silver Equivalent (2011) Clay bricks, silver-plated steel nail, 7 x 14.5 x 23 in.

BG: Why did you title the show Sculptures Involontaires?

WL: The legend goes that Brassaï was hanging out with Dali at a café, and Dali pulled a rolled-up ticket stub out of his pocket. A conversation ensued about how you could photograph anything and it becomes sculpture: ticket stubs, and chewing gum, and debris…photographed, they look like landscapes or unknown objects. Through the photograph anything can become unfamiliar and strange. I love that idea. I was looking at traps and seeing how traps are sculptures just by themselves. I started buying traps—someone tracking my Amazon purchases would be really scared of me!—I was getting them and seeing how they function, admiring the beautiful ingenuity of them, all this creative thought that is put into something so sinister. So there’s this involuntary way in which they are already sculptures. My work here functions as traps and as sculptures. I’m loosely pulling from that idea of context, that by changing the context you can re-look at the form.

In a recent BBC documentary on J Dilla, the deceased beatmaker’s family and fellow industry folk recount the seminal producer’s style, marked most notably by a counter-quantizing of his drum machine: a drunken mechanization, a meeting point of analog practices (the mythic process of searching through crates of records) and digitization that concurrently sounded ill-programmed (off-beat), yet intentional and on-point. This is man-made modernism, in contrast to the conventional image of crisp lines and sharp edges. So what would J Dilla’s sound look like? Jack White’s Neo-Totems, on display at the African American Art and Culture Center, come to mind.

White is a native of rural North Carolina and has taught in art programs in the American South and Northeast. He describes his work as “Abstract Impressionism”; still, much like underground or “backpack” hip hop, White’s sculptures imagine a future as much as they point to a past. In Neo Totem #11 (2009), discarded and weathered lumber lies next to mass-produced combs, nails and objects: an over four-foot piece of found wood, dusty and handled pieces of metal peeping through stains, and a not immediately visible hair pick. The objects come together, but they are slightly off, or not perfectly symmetrical. Although it might be predictable to state as much about such work, White’s sculptures are soulful.

In Neo Totem #11, the pick comb–traditionally used for black hairstyles, most notably the Afro–at once alludes to the past (the 1970s) while also making manifest the prognostic cultural phenomena of Afrocentricity and Afrofuturism. Although ancestral, the “neo” (or newness) of these sculpture are different, imagined futures. They are objects that long for an additional function, point to places outside the gallery, and make sound.

White’s drawings and sketches allude to such narratives. Framed and tucked away, Totem study I (2009) and Totem study II (2009) are the last thing one notices in the gallery space, they are so unassuming. Still, Totem study I speaks to process, chronology and place. The ink drawing includes White’s notes: “part of an old chair, found in 2008” and “from shield from Kenya.” Spiral binding ridges remain, and a sketch of a work to come. Much like his musical grandchildren, White’s Neo-Totems sample, cut, and connect.

Jack White: Neo-Totems and Other Works of Art–a Continuum is on display in the Sargent Johnson Gallery at the African American Art and Culture Center, in San Francisco, through January 12, 2012.

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.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Standing), 2010 | 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

Seth Curcio: So Matt, currently you have an exhibition on view at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco, titled HORIZON/S. The series pulls from cultural images that transcend time, location, and cultures. But, before we dive into these ideas, I’d like to learn some basics, like how these images are constructed. They seem so mysterious – can you walk me through the process of finding your source material and constructing the image?

Matt Lipps: Sure, this body of work, like the majority of my work since 2004, is an entirely analog process involving sculpture, collage, and theater staging on a small scale with a cast of paper dolls that I’ve cut out and propped up with supports so that they may stand on their own. For HORIZON/S I pulled from the first 10 years of Horizon Magazine, a bi-monthly hardback arts journal first published in September 1958. The magazine’s inaugural issue sets up a general invitation to the American people to join the editors of the magazine on a voyage towards an imagined “horizon” of high art and culture – examining art(ifacts), architecture, theater & film actors, and serving up what would be fine “taste” for those who weren’t in the know – a relatively antiquated way of thinking about art objects.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Form), 2010| C-print, 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: Your work is ultimately exhibited as photography. Yet, your process starts with an appropriated image, moves into sculpture, draws heavily on painting, and employs the tools of theater. Ultimately it arrives back at an image. What do you feel happens in this transformation of material?

ML: I’m not sure that I know, but the transformation is evident, and heartfelt for me, too – which is what keeps me engaged in making the work. For me it has something to do with an embodied, phenomenological experience of encountering an image in a dislocated context at an unexpected size. Certainly, the scale of the image is key to this transformation, and photography allows me to play with scale and depth in ways that traditional collage doesn’t. I’ve done several works that exist as sculpture, but it’s generally a frontal presentation that fails to some degree when attempted to view “in the round,” and, the work feels diminished somewhat as mere paperdolls of an expected size.

Re-photographing those images back into a photograph brings a certain amount of seamlessness to the foreground and background that, I hope, holds the viewer’s attention for slightly longer. This is especially tricky in HORIZON/S when you’re confronted with photographic reproductions of varying quality and scale, that depict stone sculptures, painting fragments, illusionistic spaces, portraits, landscapes, etc., and it’s all tied back together and hermetically sealed under the photographic picture plane.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Reach), 2010| C-print, 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: I like to consider how you categorize images and ideas in your practice and how this aligns and deviates from the basic cultural structuring – or lumping – that engages most museums. I know that HORIZON/S is also further divided in to two parts: Private and Public Collections. What are the main distinctions of these two collections?

ML: In assembling a cast of about 200 characters, obvious trends presented themselves – not only in my image selection process, but also in the kinds of images that were reproduced in the original magazine. This is highlighted when examining what size they were reproduced as, and whether or not they were printed in full color, black and white, or at times photogravure.

These decisions were made by the editors, thereby producing a secondary hierarchical structure. When all of the images are set to stand on their own, it’s clear to see what was deemed central to the idea of cultivating good taste, and what genres of art were seen as marginal or clearly dwarfed in comparison.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Women's Heads), 2010| C-print, 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

An example of Public Collections – the first photograph I made in the series – is Untitled (Women’s Heads). I pulled from the group every image I had cut out that was only of a female head and shoulders, to see what that image would look like. In the magazine, as in art history and by extension museums and archives, it’s necessary to organize objects by region, chronology, and/or genre so that they can be “knowable,” or classified into a system. My project aims to question the logic of that practice, and asks what else can be learned from a different system of objects if set free from the typical constraints of the archive and introduced to elements of chance, disorganization, and a personalized re-mixing of art and art historical objects.

But, there were other connections I was making with individual objects that had no logical connection, other than the fact I was compelled to make pictures incorporating them. From this started the parallel series I call Private Collections – the idea being, rather than making a photograph curated around a single homogeneous premise to communicate a single idea, I would make photographs of disparate objects culled together by an individual taste. This act allows for a more narrative story about the individual who may have collected them to emerge.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Marble), 2010| C-print, 40" x 33" | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: In this way, you are able to simultaneously mine images and objects that are collected and organized by institutions, and then by you as an artist. Obviously, the result speaks to your own taste, however someone else sets the parameters. This type of curating from existing structures references our remix culture. How do you feel the ubiquity of images and excelled sharing of cultural information affects our perception of the world? Especially since so much of this information is already organized or “curated” by others.

ML: Previously, I had always talked about my work in relationship to “desire,” rather than “taste.” But, with HORIZON/S – a broader examination of taste-refinement is brought to the fore.

To answer your question about the ubiquity of images and excelled sharing of information…I only feel safe answering how I feel it affects my perception of the world. It’s fantastic! It’s horrific! There are images I can never scrub out of my mind – that I wish I’d never laid eyes on…there are others I’ve had deep and meaningful relationships with/to (and, I mean this with much gravity). As an appropriation artist, I’m grateful to have these tools to employ, and I aim to do so with integrity and sincerity. If I were to offer a word of caution about the endless production and distribution of images, it’s that one might grow comfortably numb – that they’d lose their affect and ability to trigger outrage and mobilize change. Or, that people think they know the operation of any given image before taking the time to read it, because of some imaginary typological vault of pictures that contain finite and quantifiable data. That seems lazy to me, and, in part, with this project, I was trying in my own way to “re-mix” that.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (bar), 2008 | C-print on aluminum, 46" x 33" inches | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: That’s great insight on how you relate to imagery, both images selected by you and the endless barrage of images in the world. I’m also interested in how HORIZON/S remains so seemingly objective in nature, in contrast to the pictures in HOME SERIES. Was there a shift from your previous work that caused you to engage in a project that allows for your personal narrative to remain distant?

ML: There has been a shift, but for me, it’s been at a glacial pace starting from the first photograph I can remember cutting out when I was thirteen years old. The practice has always been about having a relationship with a person, place, or object – a photographic distance announced in the mediation of that object in its image-ness.

Early on in my work, this longing was explicit: my desire to be with a body pictured in a magazine to act as surrogate lover/boyfriend, resurrected from a late-1970’s pre-AIDS moment in time. It was a willful exertion of my desire for him to sit with me on our bed, and to take his portrait, thereby re-flattening him into a Barthesian photographic flat-death (again). For me, that work is about melancholia and loss in as much as it’s about a personalized, magical desire.

Coming to terms with my own sexuality and understanding the operation of these images in relationship to my desire, I was able to formalize a vocabulary around my work and turn it into a language that was legible across multiple genres of photography. This, in turn, allowed me to move past my immediate biography (though, never that far removed from it), and look at broader reaching themes in my work.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Satin), 2004| C-print on aluminum, 40" x 30" | Courtesy of the Artist

Fast-forward to the HOME series, I still incorporated ideas of desire (or, taste, or, selection) and loss in relationship to a personalized history of photography literally housed and cultivated within my childhood home. There, I’m compiling a cataclysmic dichotomy of “high vs. low” that examines the accrual of objects and memories in an intimate, domestic space in relationship to an unpacking of heroic baggage.

And, now with HORIZON/S, where it might appear as though I’ve stripped back all of the personal narrative found in earlier modules, I still employ my vocabulary of image-making, and its deeply concerned with ideas about photographic representation and the desire to understand its operation with respect to art history and the cultivation of taste. It still feels very me, even if I’m less apparent than before.

SC: Do you feel that you have reached a state of completion with HORIZON/S? Is there often a clear stopping point in your series, or do you feel that you can continue it indefinitely?

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Sculpture) 2010| C-print, 33" x 80" | Courtesy of the Artist

The impulse to “re-mix” HORIZON/S was endless – so, yes, it could have gone on indefinitely! In fact, I shot at least 50 images that I thought worked well – but it was ultimately edited down to about 22 photographs. Being a photographer and carrying the burden of seriality is always a delicate balance of editing, and having good friends and mentors helping you see your blind spots.

But, I ended up working on HORIZON/S for almost two years, mostly pre-production and making decisions about the look of the final image. Now, I’m feeling pretty done. Though, I will say that it was fascinating to watch people look at these images, and their need to know who each person/object was – a desire to unlock a deeper logic, or to give name to something that seems familiar but forgotten. I would be curious to push that notion further, partnered with my own fascination with how images traditionally operate, and how I might continue to confound that.

Fore’ n’ Aft Souvenir Book, May 21, 1943. Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum. Image courtesy of the Museum of the African Diaspora.

More a thoroughfare between the institutional offices and educational spaces than destinations, the second and third floor galleries at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) can be, at times, unforgiving display spaces. Nevertheless, as an institution, MoAD consistently presents exhibitions that expand one’s notions of race and identity. One need only to look at last year’s “African Continuum: Sacred Ceremonies and Rituals,” which contrasts with a more recent Richard Mayhew monograph: two exhibitions tenuously and productively held under the cultural umbrella of African Diaspora—or more pointedly, black visuality.

Langston Hughes, "The Weary Blues," 1926. Illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias. From the Collection of Alden and Mary Kimbrough. Image courtesy of the Museum of the African Diaspora.

In promotional material, MoAD is described as “presenting the rich cultural products of the people of Africa and of African descendant cultures across the globe.”  To be clear, this includes all Lucy’s progeny. To drive this point home, guests are asked both in a digital tour and in the writing on the walls, “When did you discover you are African?” “Collected: Stories of Acquisition and Reclamation,” MoAD’s current exhibition, includes selections from three collections: the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum, the Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art and the Collection of Alden and Mary Kimbrough. Although each of these collections are distinct, much of what is displayed is Black Americana from the 19th and 20^th centuries, including movie posters, paintings, signed first editions, an antebellum estate mortgage and ragtime sheet music. A really exceptional Charles White drawing, The Open Gate (1948), depicts a young black man standing before an open-metal gate; true to White’s practice, the figure and entrance allude to America’s postwar atmosphere—longed for opportunity at the cusp of change. In the second floor gallery are several film posters from both lesser-known independent cinema—1948’s Miracle in Harlem—and the classics, such as Carmen Jones (1954) and St. Louis Blues (1958). Here, Nat King Cole and Eartha Kitt hum, projected on a wall for a room of empty office chairs.

Charles Borel-Clerc, French (1879–1959). "Zambesi Dance," 1912. Arr. by Carl F. Williams. From the Collection of Alden and Mary Kimbrough. Photo by Myles L. Collins, courtesy of the Museum of the African Diaspora.

“Collected” is an exceptional accumulation of objects, but the mandate to “better understand the cultural impact of these objects,” may have been missed. Curatorial consultant Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins based selections on the professed social or cultural significance of said objects without complicating questions of why, for whom, and what they might mean in contemporary communities—questions that are critical in a contemporary exhibition on collecting. Further, both what is seen as significant, and the collectors that shape the narratives around the objects in “Collected” smack a bit of dated class privilege (a nod to W.E.B. Du Bois, whose writings are included in the exhibition), which unfortunately goes unaddressed. Still, go see “Collected.”  The value of seeing a work by Bob Thompson, or the palpable excitement one feels finding Phyllis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral, signed by the author nearly 240 years ago, are undeniable and well worth the visit—however uncomplicated.

Phillis Wheatley, "Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral," 1773. From the collection of the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum. Image courtesy of the Museum of the African Diaspora.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Social Failure and Black Signs," 2010. Pigment print 34 x 24.8 inches; edition of 3. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

Recently in the San Francisco Bay Area it has been impossible to walk down a street without running into (or trying to avoid) someone protesting something. The messages range from concise to ironic, sardonic to flat-out fed up. In the undulating sea of abridged manifestos, there is the rare message so poignant that it demands the sign-bearer’s cause receives deeper consideration. Geoff Oppenheimer’s current exhibit at Ratio 3 Gallery, Inside Us All There is a Part That Would Like to Burn Down Our Own House, presents a reductive, politically-driven narrative filled with violence, chaos, nationalism, pageantry, existentialism and self-reflection. The title may be a mouthful, but it creates an interesting opposite to Oppenheimer’s expertly edited works, and sets the tone for the show as a whole.

Installation View, Geoff Oppenheimer, "Inside us all there is a part that would like to burn down our own house," 2011. Courtesy of Ratio 3 gallery.

Depending on when you enter the gallery, your initial sensory experience will most likely be one of two things: visual or auditory. For some, a minimalist installation of sculptures and photographs will greet them. Others will not be able to ignore the deafening cacophony of marching-band instruments streaming from an invisible source. But we’ll get to that later.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Anthems," 2011. High definition video; TRT 0:04:40; Edition 1 of 3 with 2 APs. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

The two bodies of work in the main gallery, Social Failure and Black Signs and Modern Ensembles, act as examples of how conceptual art can effectively function. The images in the series Social Failure and Black Signs are almost identical—black-and-white studio scenes of a hand holding a black sign with bold, white text. At face value, each piece holds an intriguing, reductive beauty. After learning the origins of each work, a satisfying sense of quiet epiphany develops. Each sign has a different fragmented statement that Oppenheimer chose from interviews with political figures such as Regan, McNamara and Castro, in which each man discusses the failures of his ideology. Devoid of any of the expected contextual information associated with protest signage, the images transition to an interior plane—a subconscious battlefield on which each person struggles with the contradictions of his actions and beliefs.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Modern Ensembles," 2010–2011. Gunpowder, blackpowder, smoke dyes, ballistic plex, and aluminum; 20 x 23.25 x 23.25 inches. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

In dimensional and aesthetic contrast are the rectangular sculptures of Modern Ensembles. Oppenheimer made each piece by detonating various custom charges of explosive chemicals inside ballistic Plexiglas. The resulting cuboids are three-dimensional cross sections of a distinct explosion. By containing the blast, Oppenheimer makes us witnesses to a frozen moment of violence. Additionally, the time it takes to view the pieces’ six sides allows for the consideration of the relationship between space and time—an explosion takes place in an instant, yet with each ensemble, we are able to stop time and find the curious beauty in the chaos.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Social Failure and Black Signs," 2010. Pigment print 34 x 24.8 inches; Edition of 3. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

After or during your time in the main gallery, you will undoubtedly start hearing the sounds of Oppenheimer’s video piece, Anthem. Tucked into the side gallery, the projection features a marching band playing four different national anthems. Instead of hearing them in succession, Oppenheimer layers each anthem so they play simultaneously. The resulting meta-anthem and/or non-anthem is an assault on the senses. In the video, figures fade in and out of opacity, overlapping into an accumulation of tan and brass. Each anthem, recited with pride, becomes a futile attempt at nationalism—not one can be distinguished from the others. The longer you watch, the louder it gets, as if each anthem is competing to be heard. The notes crescendo to an unintelligible roar, and then, as if overwhelmed with sound and light, break into white silence.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Modern Ensembles," 2010–2011. Gunpowder, blackpowder, smoke dyes, ballistic plex, and aluminum; 20 x 23.25 x 23.25 inches. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

Oppenheimer’s work truly benefits from deeper consideration. While each piece stands on its own, the combination of the three series, plus the title, opens an investigation into a part of all of us that maybe we are not very proud of: the part that never lets us forget we did something wrong, the part that would like to burn down our own house.

Carleton E. Watkins. Mendocino River, From the Rancherie, Mendocino County, California, c. 1863/68. Albumen silver print from wet-collodion glass negative.

Standing on a hillside gazing into the Pacific Ocean, one can’t help but to be overwhelmed by the beauty and ruggedness of the landscape. Rolling hills, steep cliffs, and thick forests bring to mind epic stories of western expansion and the conquering spirit of those who have traveled here, a spirit currently under investigation at Eli Ridgway Gallery. Better a Live Ass than a Dead Lion brings together a group of San Francisco artists that restlessly explore our romance with both narrative and landscape alike, weaving together stories and dreams of uncharted lands and undiscovered peoples. The love for exploration needs no real truth here; each work presents a small part of a tale bound together by the love of the land.

Elisheva Biernoff. Inheritance, 2010. 80 slides of endangered wilderness areas projected onto mist from a humidifier housed in a plywood and fabric enclosure.

When entering the room that houses Elisheva Biernoff’s Inheritance, 2010, one’s eyes instantly begin to play tricks. Picturesque waterfalls and mountains go in and out of focus. Images dissolve and reconstruct themselves against a backdrop of fog, flashing in and out rhythmically with the subtle sound of a the slide projector. Just as 19th-century photographer Carlton Watkin’s images create mythic space, Inheritance reinterprets fabricated lands at the edge of our perception. Encased in fog, the images rest on the verge of becoming clear, allowing memory to fill in where our vision can’t.

In the adjacent room, Biernoff’s small, hand-painted postcard replicas maintain the same level of mystery, mimicking reality with a delicate hand. Just as Inheritance bends one’s perception of the landscapes presented, Biernoff’s small paintings create mystery and myth around the stories of the American West through simple gestures. The small paintings, quaint and distinctive, lovingly memorialize commonplace memories and remind us of the postcards still living in a shoebox from our childhood vacation.

Lindsey White. Observed in Salvation Mountain, Executed in New Haven, CT, 2011. Chromogenic Print.

Lindsey White‘s Observed in Salvation Mountain, Executed in New Haven, CT, 2011, a beautifully awkward and uncomfortable image that seems “real” upon first glance, presents us with a similar quandry. With more investigation, Observed in Salvation Mountain, Executed in New Haven, CT becomes more and more mysterious. The figure is harshly arrested by his own clothing, caught in a moment of uncertainty. The raking perspective instantly draws one’s attention to what lies just outside the frame, allowing one’s own imagination to construct this character’s identity.  Through the use of title, White playfully doubles the meaning of the word Execution—as it relates to both the subject’s narrative and to the creation of the image—while introducing an alternative meaning to the photograph: place. The mention of Salvation Mountain and New Haven, two fundamentally different Connecticut locales, turns this image away from the character pictured and towards the recollection of a location. The act of recreating a memory from Salvation Mountain also calls into question the authenticity of the moment, bringing one to imagine a new face just outside the frame.

Joshua Churchill. Trembling Void, 2011. Site-specific installation with light and sound.

The same mysterious discovery occurs with Joshua Churchill’s project, Trembling Void, 2011. The quiet sounds of equipment lies just outside of the room; a flickering light appears through a vent in the wall, which trembles and shakes. This simple and effective project reminds us how constructed the space of a gallery is. Churchill’s video project, Rise and Fall, 2011, provides the same realization. A video of what appears to be a heavy blizzard rolls over and over, blown out by a harsh light.  Given the mystery of Trembling Void, however, one can’t help but question the reality of the blizzard.

One of the most notable parts of this exhibition is sound. The quiet overwhelms the viewing experience, in the best possible sense, drawing attention to the subtle sounds of the work. Biernoff’s rhythmic slide projector hums quietly from the project space, and Churchill’s Trembling Void accentuates every other sound in the gallery. These projects ask each viewer to pay equal attention to the ambient sounds throughout the space.  Matt Kennedy‘s video It’s Come Down To This, 2011, provides a similar experience. A small box in the center of the upstairs gallery calls the viewer over with the sound of rocks being raked back and forth across the ground. Peering into the structure, a simple video presents a shuffling foot in the process of creating these sounds. Reminiscent of  a small child playing in the landscape, this approach to exploration returns the exhibition from lofty and Romantic back to exploration through repetitive and mundane experience.

Matthew Kennedy. It’s Come Down To This, 2011. Video, wood box. 36 x 30 x 30 inches.

Although the show is extremely satisfying overall, the mystery, romance, and exploration throughout the work is tame. The risk and reward that is referenced in such a poetic introduction is found in small, intimate doses throughout the space. There is no one who has “suffered, starved, and triumphed” because of the explorative, romantic spirit presented by the exhibition text. Exploration is a dirty sport, and the work presented in Better a Live Ass than a Dead Lion is successfully clean and romantic, and most notably–bound to image. More than anything, the photography in this exhibition seems to be the most one-note. The landscape photographs by Richard Misrach, Sean McFarland, and Dean Smith are even more romantic and picturesque in this context, which provides less depth compared to the other projects. One hopes that exploration has more worth than romance, and one thing that Better a Live Ass than a Dead Lion could benefit from is diversity in scale and experimentation. Most projects present a satisfying and bite-sized relationship to a romance with exploration rather than exploration itself.

"Shoemaker's Dialogues" at the Guggenheim, New York. 2011.

Allie Haeusslein: Perhaps the best way to contextualize the projects we will discuss is to talk a bit about the birth Futurefarmers. Can you identify some of the key issues or influences that sparked the creation of the collective?

Amy Franceschini: It wasn’t something that was created, which I think is important; it sort of became – and it is always becoming. But it really came out of a design studio in the 1990s, in which I was doing design work. At that time, I had to start collaborating with lots of different kinds of people – programmers, engineers, copywriters, photo editors, and researchers. So, the studio became filled with all of these different thinkers who were sharing the space. That ethos of collaboration was really exciting. And then, we started to get asked to do art projects by museums. I wanted to keep that multidisciplinary ethos going.

AH: The collaborative spirit you’ve described really seems evident in your project at the Guggenheim this past March. Can you describe the genesis of this project and how you feel it responds specifically to the New York City environment?

AF: The exhibition was part of a new series called Intervals, which is supposed to show artists who’ve never had a solo show in NYC. They ask artists to respond to the building in a way that it hasn’t been used before and for the exhibitions to be short.

When we went there, we were like “what do we do at the Frank Lloyd Wright museum in terms of speaking to the building? And what do we say in New York? What do we say on this stage that has such a spotlight on it?” What we felt in our several site visits was that Manhattan, specifically, has changed so much over the years. We felt like the soul of it had gone, like that thing of New York wasn’t as strong as it had been before. Maybe it’s out in the other boroughs, but Manhattan is starting to feel like a caricature of itself. How do we respond to that? That was part of the starting point.

Conceptual sketch for "Soil Kitchen." Drawing by Dan Allende.

We found this story about Socrates going to visit a shoemaker named Simon outside of the Agora. Socrates was involved in the politics of the Agora and was fed up with it and wanted to find people who were thinking in a way that wasn’t about power and control, but more about questions and wonder. We wanted to recreate the situation of Simon and Socrates meeting and it all just kind of fell into place. We had this idea of remaking a cobbler’s studio. There’s this curved bench in the bottom of the rotunda in the museum – its a place that is still free. Something that we always try to do is find a place where people don’t have to pay entry fee so that you get a diverse audience. We proposed to extend that bench and turn it into a cobbler’s bench and frame the sitting area on the bottom floor and turn it into a cobbler’s studio. That was our base for several excursions we did with different types of thinkers who we asked to respond to the story we found about Socrates and Simon. We met in 6 different places around the city. And then, we did a book called Soul/Sole Sermons that went along with the project that is printed in soot ink. Part of the project was to go on an excursion and collect soot from all these different boroughs in the New York area and make ink out if it. And we created a pair of shoes that had letters on them and printed texts commissioned by three writers in both the streets of New York and in a book.

AH: This idea of collecting earth or something of the place seems to be a recurrent theme in your work. I’m wondering if you can speak a bit about this idea and how it fits in with your recent project in Philadelphia, Soil Kitchen.

Select photographs from "This is Not a Trojan Horse," 2010.

AF: We all fetishize history, and maybe lost histories or unidentified histories. I think that the earth is the greatest archive. The landscape is an archive. With the case of Soil Kitchen and the soil sampling shoes and the soot collection in New York it’s about collecting this matter that has a lot of information in it that maybe we can’t see at first glance. But if you take it into a lab and get it tested or examined, there is quite a lot of information in there.

With Soil Kitchen, the specific context there was really exciting. The city of Philadelphia called and said “we want to be the greenest city by 2015 and we want to commission a work from you that happens during the Environmental Protection Agency Brownfield Conference.” We proposed to take over an abandoned building and open up a soup kitchen for the duration of the conference and ask people to bring in their soil samples in exchange for free soup. The Environmental Protection Agency had their labs there and did testing on the spot, which is really rare. The scientists tested it and then consulted with each person. That was the hi-tech soil science. Then, we had students from two different universities doing more of a nutritional test to see if there were contaminants in the soil; 80% of the soil was not contaminated. This secondary test was a really beautiful test where these scientists got people excited about soil. They did tests where they would put different volumes of water into soil and then the soil would separate into different substrates and you would realize “the soil I have has 8 different kinds of rock and silt and clay in it” and you could see it separate in front of your eyes.

AH: I think this connection to place also plays into This is Not a Trojan Horse, which considers the fate of traditional farming given the modernization of agriculture in the Abruzzo region of Italy. What drew you to this region in particular and to the “Trojan Horse” as a point of departure for this project?

AF: That project was inspired by Cooley Windsor’s story called “Epios, A Sculptor,” a story about the architect of the Trojan Horse and this imagining of what that sculptor thought when he was commissioned to make the Trojan Horse. Cooley’s story was always sitting in the back of our minds. We were asked to do a project in Italy as part of a residency program on a farm where the person who runs the residency, Gaetano, wants to revive his grandfather’s farm. He is bringing artists there to regenerate an excitement on the farm and in the region about farming because local youth are leaving in herds to go to the city.

Amy Franceschini, Michael Swaine & Ignacio Valero. Selected photograph from "A Variation on the Powers of Ten," February 17, 2011.

So we built this horse and went to 12 different villages and farms. We used the horse as a symbol of a time passed and a projection of the future. In this region 20 years ago, there were still wild horses running. So the horse is a very familiar icon. To scale it up and have it human powered was a spectacular invitation to engage with it. We just showed up in villages and didn’t know if it was going to work. At first, we’d sometimes go to a village with a maximum of 100 people and go in front of the church. And people would just look at us like we were freaks. But then the kids would come up and start engaging in the horse because you could run in it. That would invite the older population to come. It gave people a way to think about the future of that region and of farming. Many people kept saying, “this is a gift. We’ve actually stopped imagining what the future of farming is here because what we see is so dire.” So it gave people a platform. Inside the wheels of the horse was blackboard paint. We asked people to write down their ideas of the future of farming. And we interviewed different people about their memories of farming. As we would roll into the next village, those statements from the previous village would be presented to the next village. I think that that project was inspiring because it was outside of a museum context and it didn’t have the same pressure. We were fortunate that this man commissioned the project with such open-ended expectations.

AH: So what is next for Futurefarmers?

AF: One of our recent projects, A Variation on the Powers of Ten, is continuing on. It will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 2012 and in Sweden, at a museum called the Bildmuseet. And we’re working on a public art project in Norway that we’re still trying to figure out. It’s a really long public art project – four to six years long. So we have a lot to think about.

Over the course of its three-day installation in July 2011, Richard Serra’s "Sequence," on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, both reveals itself and conceals the expansive space it inhabits. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is engaged in a dangerous experiment, and it is not the levitation of a twenty-ton piece of Richard Serra’s steel sculpture, Sequence, 2006, thirty feet into the air. Nor is it the gyration of a 200-foot tall crane lifting the first of twelve panels—each almost thirteen-feet high and between thirty- and forty-feet long—from a flatbed trailer onto a concrete slab three-quarters the size of a baseball diamond. The ironworkers from the Hauppauge, New York, rigging company, Budco Enterprises, have handled all of Serra’s North American installations for the past 20 years. The dangerous experiment is, instead, the transplantation of the sixty-five by forty-foot labyrinthine sculpture into a site that the artist did not specify when he first created the piece.

Two 20-ton plates from Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, swing into place. Video: Rob Marks, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Serra is famous for his site-specific sculptures. Of Tilted Arc, 1981, the 200-foot long grandparent to arced works like Sequence, Serra proclaimed, during a U.S. General Services Administration hearing to determine the disposition of the piece, “To remove the work is to destroy the work.” Commissioned and approved by the Carter administration, and constructed in lower Manhattan’s Federal Plaza, Tilted Arc was eventually decommissioned, forsworn, and bundled into storage by the Reagan administration. We can never know whether the Tilted Arc controversy—the first salvo of the 1980s culture wars—would have subsided had the surrounding political context not pre-empted the community’s process of coming to know the sculpture. Many of Serra’s public works, however, are now valued by the communities that first rejected them.

Other Serra pieces, including Clara-Clara, 1983, and Torqued Spiral (Closed Open Closed Open Closed), 2003, have, with Serra’s participation, found second homes. Sequence, however, may evolve into the most itinerant of Serra’s behemoths. Conceived for a gallery at the New York Museum of Modern Art and installed there in 2007 for Serrra’s 40-year retrospective, the sculpture traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008. This year, Sequence, now owned by the Fisher Art Foundation, traveled from LACMA to the Cantor Arts Center, where it is currently on loan from the foundation and where it will reside until in 2016. Then it will move, perhaps finally, 35 miles northwest to a new wing of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Left: Trailer as it prepares to move a plate from storage lot to installation site. Riggers remove the chains holding a plate to its trailer. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Can Sequence, removed from its place of origin, sustain its prodigious capacity to shape space and lead us to the conscious and embodied experience of what we often take for granted? Will it still unmoor space and time from the feet and inches, seconds and minutes that define them in everyday life and provoke the reorientation of thinking and the individual psychological experience that Serra seeks for participants who engage the sculpture? In 2007, Serra told PBS’s Charlie Rose, “I think these pieces really need the definition of architecture,” referring to Sequence and its two gallery siblings. “They need a flat floor. They need a certain contained volume. I think these pieces might be able to be in a courtyard, but if you put these pieces outside, say in a big field, they’re going to get lost.”

Left: Master Rigger Joe Vilardi (center, in black shirt), and riggers John Barbieri, Joe Berlese, and Bill Maroney, survey the concrete slab. Right: Master Rigger Joe Vilardi (right) and rigger John Barbieri (left) plot reference points that will guide the installation of Richard Serra's "Sequence" (on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation). Photo: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

The gallery at New York MoMA, an awkward H-shaped space with a low ceiling, seemed barely able to contain the three pieces. For some, this was the exhibit’s flaw: the sculptures had no room to breathe. We are used to viewing sculpture from the outside, framed by an expanse of space. For Serra, who seeks always to confound the viewer’s desire to see the entire sculpture at once, the cramped MoMA quarters may, in fact, have been preferable. Indeed, the frustration some visitors felt may have stemmed from the sculptures’ ability to stymie the creation of a purely visual experience separate from the body’s active engagement with them. In New York, Serra had produced new space in a place where visual inspection suggested there was little to spare. Within each sculpture’s orbit, the participant’s perception of space expands and contracts, independent of the gallery’s concrete dimensions. In this context, Sequence seemed akin to a magician’s hat from which emerges far more matter than could be contained by the dimensions of the magician’s head.

How then can such a piece successfully reconform itself—and the experiences of its participants—to an exterior space 3,000 miles away? How can the activity of getting lost in what Serra describes as “a seemingly endless path between two leaning walls” about which “you cannot recollect or reconstruct a definite memory” be preserved in a courtyard where landmarks—a roof, a terrace, a tree, even a hanging cloud—continually orient the participant?

Left photos: Lost inside Richard Serra’s Sequence (on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation). Right: Parapets of the museum’s old wing peek above the sculpture. Photo: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

On Monday, July 18, the bare concrete pad seems to provide some reassurance. Two- to three-feet thick and doubly reinforced with rebar, according to Cantor Operations Manager, Steve Green, the pad should satisfy Serra’s desire for a flat floor. More than this, however, nestling the bulk of the sculpture into the cul-de-sac formed by the Cantor’s original building, its octagonal extension, and its new wing, seems to realize the “definition of architecture” Serra had specified for Sequence and its siblings. Further, Museum Director Tom Seligman said that the Cantor Center had been in close contact with Serra, and the artist approved of the site.

Half of Richard Serra’s "Sequence" (on loan by the Fisher Art Foundation) nestled in the cul-de-sac formed by the museum’s old and new wings. Photo: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

At 1:00 p.m., the pad is empty. Seen from the second-floor McMurtry Family Terrace of the new wing, the 200-ton crane that would lift each plate sat idly on the dirt to the left of the slab, the site of a past and future lawn. In the distance, each of the steel plates sat on its own flatbed trailer. The silence was barely disturbed by the arrival of Budco Master Rigger Joe Vilardi and his crew. Brandishing a floor plan, a T-square, two tape measures, a spool of hot pink twine, a roll of lime green masking tape, a hammer and stakes, the team carefully mapped out the reference points for each steel plate to guide the assembly of the sculpture.

Joe Berlese (left) and Domingo Tejada work with John Barbieri and Joe Vilardi (behind the plate in the left hand photo) to guide it into position. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. "Sequence" is on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation.

Over the course of the next three days, the assembly unfolded, at times like a dance, but one that never masked the painstaking process of hauling the trailers, attaching the plates to the crane, hoisting, swinging, lowering, and positioning the plates, and winching, clamping, hammering, grinding, and welding.

Riggers from Budco Enterprises undertake a variety of tasks to install Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation. Video: Rob Marks, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

The assembly mimicked the disorientation and confusion I felt when I first walked Sequence’s pathway—formed of two nesting S-curves—in 2007. The first plate, closest to where I stood, curved from the terrace, blocking the space beyond from my gaze. Each succeeding plate seemed not only to bare itself and define the growing form, but also to hide more of the concrete and abscond with the expanse—compressing the volume as if into the magician’s hat. I had not expected that this process, as beautiful as the evolving form was, would also entail a feeling of loss, a spurned desire to see.

Time-lapse video portrays the four-day installation of Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation. Video: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Serra describes the primary experience of Sequence as confusion: “After a point . . . you become confused about whether you’ve been in the same place before or whether you are turning back on yourself. And then you arrive at an exit and you think, ‘This isn’t where I thought I was going to be.’” Sequence is not only about this confusion of orientation, but also about the veiling of space, about the theft of the certainty of my bodily relationship to the space I inhabit. Experiencing a new perspective, I lose the old one. Retracing my steps, I fail to recover the space that was.

On the fourth day, I walk through the completed sculpture. My experience of Sequence matches both Serra’s description of confusion and my New York memories, at least until I look up. Hovering above the sculpture is a bit of parapet, the curved wall of the terrace, a tree top, the octagon’s wall, the building’s pediment—all landmarks that might orient the Sequence participant and fix reference points that establish what Serra calls “your body’s own axis.” Do these markers undermine Sequence’s ability to steal, along with everything else, a consistent sense of verticality by registering not only top and bottom, but also north, south, east, west?

Landmarks of the Cantor Arts Center do little to orient the participant walking through Richard Serra’s "Sequence," on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

To remove the work is to destroy the work? It is a mistake to assume that Serra hews to site specificity out of abstract and unyielding principle rather than out of practical necessity: to collaborate with a site is the unavoidable means he applies towards his goal of engaging space. A sculpture’s intended site is integral to this process of creation. That particular site, however, may not always be integral to the resulting sculpture’s capacity to achieve Serra’s goals for his participants. Tilted Arc could achieve Serra’s goals for it only in Federal Plaza. As Serra wrote in 1985, “Tilted Arc was constructed so as to engage the public in a dialogue that would enhance, both perceptually and conceptually, its relation to the entire plaza.” And, as art historian Douglas Crimp notes, “[Tilted Arc] imposed a construction of absolute difference within the conglomerate of civic architecture. It engaged the passerby in an entirely new kind of spatial experience that was counterposed against the bland efficiency established by the plaza’s architects.”

Can Sequence, born in the cramped MoMA gallery, achieve Serra’s goals for it in the expansive space of the Cantor courtyard? It remains, I suspect, that Sequence works best in the place where it originated. Sequence’s seeming expansion of the New York MoMA gallery space seemed magical in a way that Sequence, situated in the Cantor courtyard, cannot match. But Sequence’s capacity to reconceive space is far more potent than the mundane verticals of the courtyard’s architecture. And the sculpture’s capacity to confuse is far more significant than the landmarks that might otherwise orient me within the Google-mapped world of my mind.

Serra’s goal for Sequence was not to perform a political or social critique of the New York MoMA gallery’s space, as his goal for Tilted Arc had been to engage Federal Plaza. Instead, he sought to finesse the limitations of the gallery’s architecture toward the goal of engaging the participant in this disoriented experience of space and time.

Video of a walk through the interior passage of Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation. Video: Rob Marks, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Ultimately, Serra seeks this work to “be a catalyst for thought, [to] change how people think . . . and how they see.” In this sense, his work remains profoundly political. It is political, too, in its capacity to force the subject back and forth between the positions of outside observer and embodied participant, and to construct an environment in which the participant freely relinquishes, or at least shares, agency with the sculpture. Sequence, then—at Stanford as in New York—is not just movement and meter. It is an emergence from the safe cocoon of autonomous selfhood into the danger of an unpredictable dance, a negotiation with the sculpture, the space it reveals, and other visitors, as each participant navigates a self-contained—yet profoundly communal—encounter.

Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, is on view now at the Cantor Arts Center. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Chris E. Vargas, Video still from Liberaceón, 2011. 16 minutes, three channel video installation looped color (DV).

History, like most things, is subjective. What is culled from individual accounts is accepted as fact and eventually translates into some kind of truth. But truth can be different at any moment—past, present, and future. The events in London were either riots or long overdue, civil unrest.  Depending on whom you ask, in 2005 the people of New Orleans were either looting or just surviving. This parsing of history renders “truth” and “fact” malleable, constituent materials for narrative and artistic practice. In his video work Liberaceón (2011), Bay Area artist Chris E. Vargas makes histories, meshing the life of the pianist Liberace, late-80s direct actions to end the AIDS crisis, and a nonapologetic use of green screening.

Vargas is best known for his collaborative, narrative videos and films.  In Falling in Love…with Chris and Greg (2008–ongoing), we watch the dark satire of Vargas and his artistic/romantic partner Greg Younmans’s relationship.  Through the structural lens of traditional sitcom, the couple questions notions of monogamy, marriage, and gender, while consistently establishing their own, not always hyper-radical or “appropriate,” notions of companionship.

Not unlike Falling in Love, in Liberaceón, Vargas inserts radical, queer rhetoric into the arguably apolitical, high zest that was Liberace. Liberaceón includes footage of the showman’s TV specials, Liberace’s nightly news obituary, and various ActUp protests beside Vargas’s molty wigs, camp, and classical, non-method forms of acting. True to Liberace’s mid-1980s opulence and Vegas styling, the video begins with Vargas-as-Liberace’s grand entrance, which includes a balloon ride over “the Strip,” a reclaimed parking lot with a sequined American flag and a Rolls Royce. The film quickly cuts to Liberace and lover Cary James’s visit to a doctor (Younmans), who has an unfortunate bedside manner and gives a dreadful—but at the time, not uncommon—diagnosis.

Inspired to make James feel better, Liberace takes to preparing some chicken soup (again, epic use of chroma key by Vargas). While watching the news in his decadent kitchen, Liberace becomes frustrated by the many AIDS-related deaths, President Regan’s continued silence and the US Congress’s conservative funding of AIDS research. The performer decides to take direct action by constructing a gift with his “special ingredient…to scare ole Ronnie.” What follows is the most compelling and sensual use of a double boiler, all in an attempt to make a Liberace-laced, bloodied chocolate piano.

Chris E. Vargas, video still from Liberaceón, 2011. 16 minutes, three channel video installation looped color (DV).

The glittering stone on this work’s bejeweled finger is the deathbed scene between Liberace and James. Vargas’s slow collapse, full of gasping and eye-flickering, is at once hilarious and disquieting. One knows that Liberace’s many requests not to be memorialized with sap, nor to reduce his or others’ experiences to melodrama, but to honor the experience of any person with AIDS, including himself, have gone largely unanswered. Yet, as the work closes with Liberace’s rendition of “I’ll Be Seeing You” over the tense excitement of ActUp action footage—which includes his own disrupted, TV news obituary—one understands that these histories are strangely enmeshed, joined at the site of their presumed queerness or temporality by Vargas, where they transform one another.  In Vargas’ telling, the closet Liberace comes out of is that of radical queerness. Although he calls himself “just an old queen,” Liberace’s anger speaks to the continued complexity of our histories and picturing of self.

Liberaceón (2011) was on exhibition most recently in San Francisco as part of ProArts Gallery’s Bay Area Currents 2011, curated by Julio César Morales. You can also find Vargas’s work at www.chrisevargas.com.

Desirée Holman, video still composite from Heterotopias, 2011, courtesy of the artist and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

Along with nine, hand-selected participants, artist Desirée Holman has spent the last two years developing a series of avatars. The resulting project, Heterotopias, 2011, a video and supporting drawings on view now at the Berkeley Art Museum, refers to corporeal reality’s relationship to virtual reality, the physical process by which the digitally rendered avatar is formed, and the ironic stasis of the body whilst the imagined self is set free.  Unfortunately, Holman only refers to these ideas.  While aesthetically engaging and fun to watch, Heterotopias fails to delve beyond the surface of her topic.

Shot as a sort of music video, the participants sit before laptops in similar, homey interiors.  They dance, are transformed into both live-action and digitally animated superhero-like characters, and engage in battle with long staffs. Considering the care taken in creating the colorful and fanciful costumes and scenery, as well as the richness of the concept, a viewer expects much more from these characters than what is delivered.

Desirée Holman, Mask of Agamemnon (Diffuse Map), 2011, courtesy of the artist and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

One cannot help but wonder: is sitting in front of a computer the extent of the lives of these individuals?  Even Superman’s Clark Kent has distinguishing characteristics, personal dramas and quirks.  If these avatars are an opportunity to exist in a space untethered by the bounds of the real, why do the avatars perform feats no more complex than hitting one another with sticks?

Not one of the actors or avatars has any true individuation, despite the potential offered by their appearances. The elaborately developed avatars are little more than costumes: digital exoskeletons worn by the subjects.  Holman and her participants supposedly spent a great deal of time and effort in the development of these fictions: why is the audience not granted access to this aspect of the project? We have all played video games, seen superhero fiction, or engaged in social networking sites as digitally warped versions of ourselves.  In each of these scenarios, the stories generated by fictional or semi-fantastic characters are engaging and multi-dimensional: both morally and socially complex.  We should be granted similar complexity from these characters.

Desirée Holman, Dancers Dancing in Their Own Digital Ectoplasmic Cocoons 1, 2010, courtesy of the artist and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

The show’s accompanying drawings are an interesting addition. Pieces such as Dancers Dancing in their Own Digital Ectoplasmic Cocoons are beautifully executed and freeze time in a manner that allows us to attempt a more in-depth connection with these individuals.  The “ectoplasmic cocoons,” incidentally, work better in the drawings than in the videos; in the latter, the pink lining on the characters as they jump between fantasy worlds seems to be a result of poor color-keying. Though not all of the works are as successful, one drawing of a costumed face alludes to information promised but never quite delivered: a man stares ahead, awkwardly, wearing a humorous headpiece.  His eyes indicate that he is unsure of the world in which he belongs, torn between his virtual self and actual self.  He is self-conscious, but nonetheless set free by his ridiculous garb.  Is this a drawing of the man, or of his digital armature?  Where in this spectrum does the drawing, and in fact, all art—itself a virtual rendition of reality—fall?

Aideen Barry, Spray Grenade SG08/3#02, 2008; aluminum, brass, steel; 8.25 in x 3.25 in, edition of 5

Bean Gilsdorf: You often use the home as a site for your work.  What informs your sense of unstable domesticity?

Aideen Barry: I suppose there are two main parts that inform the work.  In 2006 I was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, which manifested out of living in “Celtic Tiger Suburbia,” these estates  of cookie cutter homes that grew up out of the [Irish] boom of the ’90s.  It’s a very un-Irish landscape—and unlike in the past when you knew your neighbors and cared for each other—suddenly you didn’t know who your neighbor was.  The domesticity that I’m interested in came out of this space.  I was living in one of these houses and all of the people in the estate were all obsessed with materiality and being perfect and clean.  And this is where my anxiety manifested itself; I would spend all my time cleaning my house in order to fit in with my neighbors.  I wasn’t sleeping, so then I was more anxious, and I would stay up late cleaning even more to alleviate the anxiety.  And I would look out the window and that was what all my neighbors were doing!  And I tried desperately to fit in.  That’s definitely what drives a lot of the work, this veneer of perfection—but underneath there are cracks, something that’s not right.  I’m really interested in Freud’s notion of the unheimliche, the uncanny, something that can be familiar and strange at the same time.  For Levitating I spent seven days jumping while [filming] cleaning, so as to create the illusion of levitation.  And the spray grenades were a way of merging advertising on “the new war” which is the war on germs.  I took the familiar grenade and also the familiar cleaning spray and bastardized them together to create this seductive object.

Aideen Barry, "Heteratopic Glitch," detail view, 2008. Image courtesy of Anne Ffrench/Aideen Barry

BG: Talking about fear and landscape makes me think about Heteratopic Glitch.  That work changed the landscape, and inside the plastic balls the women were in a potentially airless environment.  At first it seems beautiful and playful, but then you are afraid for these women.

AB: It is potent with anxiety, that space.  They can’t puncture the ball or they’ll sink.  No one really knows what might happen.  That’s something I’m really conscious of in the work, that there’s an expectation or anticipation, but the future is a bit ambiguous.  In those works that involve a landscape I like to push beyond the realms of possibility; you don’t expect ten women to be able to walk on water…

Aideen Barry, "Heteratopic Glitch," panoramic view, 2008. Image courtesy of Anne Ffrench/Aideen Barry

BG:…it’s a fantasy…

AB: That aesthetic is important to me, the phantasmagorical, where something can behave in the most absurd and sublime way. In the 1980s we had only two [Irish] TV channels, both run by the state which was effectively bankrupt at the time. As a cost-cutting measure they would buy eastern European animations from Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Ukraine, Lithuania, etc…films by Jan Lenica, Jan Svankmajer, Walerian Borowczyk, and others.  The Irish TV censor didn’t see them as anything but children’s cartoons, but in actuality they were extremely dark, politically-motivated visual protests. Some of the scenes are so violent, and yet they could be seen as only a chair and a table moving around in stop-motion. The aggression and anxiety in these films really informed my aesthetic and my motivation with material and technical application.

BG: That darkness is so customary in your work.  I’m thinking of your video Possession where scissors attached to locks of a woman’s hair cut the lawn, and a pile of food travels down the table into her mouth…it’s partly normal, and partly macabre.

AB: Yes, I’m definitely looking at the domestic object and turning it into something fantastical, turning the garage door into a bread cutter and so on, and looking at other anxieties like eating disorders.  That’s also informed by the gothic.  Ireland has so many gothic writers: Bram Stoker, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and they were informed by Irish mythology.  That’s rooted in my practice, too, playing with the familiar.  The housewife in Possession is familiar, but there is a slippage between what’s real and what’s perceived to be real, a kind of madness.

BG: The stop-motion also serves to reinforce the repetitive nature or drudgery of everyday existence, but elevates it into this level of fantasy.

AB:  And the stop-motion makes the body jerk in an unnatural way.  The familiar, the drudgery is there but it has a different pace.  It’s faster, like a Buster Keaton film.

BG: You’ve talked about the work coming from a place of anxiety.  When you finish a project, how does it feel to step away from it?

AB: I don’t think it’s cathartic.  I don’t think it relieves the anxiety, I think that’s always going to be there.  I had to acknowledge that a couple of years ago, I just recognize the signs and I know how to control it so that it doesn’t spiral completely out of control.  I think the best part is to acknowledge that it exists.  Mental illness is a taboo subject in Ireland.  I’m sure it is here, too…I’m sure you’re not supposed to have a breakdown, there’s something wrong with you and therefore you’re damaged!  But I acknowledge that I am damaged.  Every now and again I go off my track, and the best way to put myself back on track is to make a comment on what set me off in the first place.

BG: And in all of this, do you think if yourself as a feminist?

AB: Feminist theory is as important now as it’s ever been.  Remember that in Ireland, we didn’t have a sexual revolution the way you did here [in the US].  People forget, but birth control only became legal in Ireland in 1995, we only got divorce eleven years ago.  But it’s beyond Ireland, it’s global.  All the references that I had when making the animations, you can totally see them in Desperate Housewives, women who are married to their property and who play a role in a restrictive society.  Not much has changed in that regard, so a comment has to be made.  And as a woman working in the art world you can definitely say the glass ceiling remains, and you have to challenge all those conventions by making a comment about where we are now.  The feminist critique is very much prevalent in the work.

But we are no longer in the seventies.  What are women artists doing now? Seeing Hershman’s new work, shown at Gallery Paule Anglim alongside her earlier pieces, is an interesting exercise in seeing where we came from, who we are (even if the answer is multiple identities), and where we might be going.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, "Home Front," 1993-2011. 2-channel synchronized installation inside a dollhouse. Image courtesy of the Gallery Paule Anglim.

Hershman’s newer work is just that: new. Techie-new. Considering the intrusion of technology into the body and body politics, this techno-feminism makes some sense. However, like much interactive and innovative media, her work sometimes trips on itself.

Is Home Front, 1993–2011, a dollhouse containing a small TV screen on which a couple engages in a marital argument, supposed to be physically difficult to watch?  True, the struggle to peer through the too-low windows does make one all the more aware of one’s own voyeurism (and the desire to see the argument escalate to violence), but it is nonetheless a potentially insurmountable obstacle to engaging with the work.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, "Anti Surveillance Suit Project, Sketch Part II," 2010. Digital pigment print. Image courtesy of the Gallery Paule Anglim.

Alchemist Rod For The 21^st Century, 2010, a broom that detects traces of alcohol in the air, is certainly cool, but does its value as an art object transcend the “cool?” The installation of RAW/WAR, 2011, featuring user-submitted videos, screens in a wooden miniature theater navigable through sensor-equipped flashlights. This is actually an elaborate and clumsy way of showing a simple website that is far more interesting and engaging when viewed from one’s home computer.

The most successful pieces that incorporate interactive response are the creepy wigged masks that giggle or breathe when a sensor is triggered.  Ironically, these pieces are less recent, but are still potent in their commentary on the malleability of identity and the absence of a woman’s voice.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, "Giggling Machine 1," 1966, reconfigured in 2011. Image courtesy of the Gallery Paule Anglim.

These works share gallery space with Hershman’s drawings, which whimsically outline her ideas with a humor not present in the pieces that make it to their aesthetically austere execution. Anti-Surveillance Suit, 2010, a sketch originally drawn decades ago, is updated, and is more pertinent than ever.

Perhaps her sketches are so enticing because they imagine the seemingly impossible, as opposed to that which is limited by the technology that is available. And if Hershman’s work is about technology, it is ironic that materials so humble as pen and paper better articulate the confines of the body and the ability of the imagination to free it from politics, the gaze, and social and biological boundaries.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, "Kicking Time On Your Own," 2009. Pen, ink, and watercolor. Image courtesy of the Gallery Paule Anglim.

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work will be on display at Gallery Paule Anglim through August 20, 2011, along with work by Benji Whalen.  Hershman’s film !Women Art Revolution will play in at the Lumiere and Shattuck Theaters in the Bay Area from August 26 through September 1st, 2011.  Check the !W.A.R. website for details.