According to an article this year, Amercians’ top fears include: terrorism, flying and heights. All of these, we can assume, stem from an ultimate fear of physical pain or death. However, there are those whose life experiences include certain hardships or burdens that would cause them to fear something such as abandonment above even the most horrific physical harm. Wisconsin-based artist Kitty Huffman has explored such ides through her video piece, Self Portrait, which is currently on view in the Wisconsin Triennial at Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.

Huffman, who was born and raised in Communist Romania to Hungarian parents, is interested in experiencing and documenting risks of abandonment, as well as humans’ interactions with the natural world. In her performance piece/video, Self Portrait, Kitty has presented herself in a most vulnerable state—naked in the snow amongst a herd of wild deer. The slow-moving video looks almost like a landscape painting, and rightly so—it was inspired by a Hungarian folk tale that takes place in such a setting. After an anxious few moments of eying Huffman horizontal on the cold earth, we see deer begin to wander into the frame. Eventually, an entire herd makes its way into the scene, vaguely aware of the artist’s presence. It is a tense yet distanced interaction in which you get the feeling that Huffman both longs for and fears that the wild animals will approach her. And then something scares the deer off—maybe a sound, or the presence of a person or vehicle out of frame. They spring off and leave Huffman alone once again, left to deal with both the joy of safety and the sadness of abandonment.

Kitty Huffman is a current MFA candidate at School of the Art Institute, Chicago. She earned her BA at University of Wisconsin-Madison and previously studied drama at Babes Bolyai University, Romania before moving to the U.S. Her work has been included in the 4th International Short Film Festival in Germany.

Francis Alÿs in collaboration with Olivier Debroise and Rafael Ortega.  A Story of Deception, Patagonia, 2006 still from 16mm film (4:20). Courtesy of Francis Alÿs and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich © Francis Alÿs.

A Story of Deception is the title of Francis Alÿs‘ current retrospective on view at the Tate Modern. The title of the exhibition, which spans the artist’s two-decade long career is borrowed from a work of the same name, and appropriately provides the exhibition’s subtitle and introduces the gallery visitor to Alÿs’ work.   The 16 mm film, A Story of Deception, captures a mesmerizing and unobtainable mirage on the horizon.  The camera centers itself on a road, halved by a dotted white line and follows it across an arid Patagonian landscape.  The film’s imagery and intent are oblique and deceptively simple – allowing a variety of creative, metaphorical interpretations.  The road can be read as representative of a border and the unobtainable mirage as the often out-of-reach goal of border crossing.

Francis Alÿs, Ambulantes (Pushing and Pulling), Mexico City, 1992-present Slide projection. Courtesy of Francis Alÿs and David Zwirner, New York. Image by Francis Alÿs © Francis Alÿs.

While Alÿs is most readily associated with the film or video documentation of his actions, this retrospective takes care to illustrate the multi-media nature of the artist’s practice and is curated thematically.  Film and video work is presented with related photographs, paintings, drawings or other ephemera.  In one particularly successful example, Paradox of Praxis I or Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing (1997) is shown near photographs taken in Mexico City dating as early as 1992.  These projected photographic images from the series Ambulantes (Pushing and Pulling) feature street vendors and workers bearing loads in the streets.  The connection is evident between these photographs and Paradox of Praxis, in which Alÿs pushes a block of melting ice through the city’s streets.  Both point to the often comical futility of contemporary labor.

The artist typically begins his work with an action, allowing other media to play a supporting or planning role, but that is not always the case.  The artist works in a variety of media, including photography, sculpture, animation, drawing and painting.  Paintings such as Le Temps du Sommeil (2003-present) and Silenco (2003-present) illustrate that Alÿs is influenced by urban advertising.  They also reference the precedent – intentionally or not – of past artists like Magritte.

Film or video documentation of Alÿs’ carefully planned actions remain the most compelling and most capable of conveying both subtle and overt political messages.  In Re-enactments (2000), Alÿs references the gun violence of his adopted Mexican homeland.  When Faith Moves Mountains:  A Project for Geological Displacement (2002) is one of Alÿs’ most well known works for its sheer monumentality.  In it, the artist directs 500 volunteers to form a line and physically move a sand dune located outside of Lima, Peru.  Armed solely with shovels and the spirit of collective effort, these volunteers complete a task whose apparent futility belies its profound metaphorical statement.  This great effort of ‘geological displacement’ points to the immense shared burden of geo-political displacement.

The contemporary nation-state border, as a contradictory line that is both increasingly restricted and crossed, is an important theme in Alÿs’ art practice. The artist addresses the hypocrisy of the border in works such as The Green Line or Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic (2005) in which the artist walks the 1948 armistice border line between Israel and Palestine.  Trailing a leaking can of green paint behind him as he walks a now defunct border, he quietly and profoundly points to the idiocy of human suffering caused by an arbitrary line of division.  Loop (2007) chronicles the artist’s purposefully ludicrous route across the US – Mexico border as he travels from Tijuana to Australia, up the Pacific Rim to Alaska, and then finally to California.  The epic route of travel taken in lieu of the actual distance between Tijuana and San Diego highlights the difficulty of this border crossing for illegal economic migrants.  Also referring to the theme of border crossing, The Rehearsal (1999-2004) features a red Volkswagen Beetle that continually tries and fails to reach the top of a dirt road.

The exhibition makes a strong conclusion with the premiere of Tornado (2000-2010).  This newly completed, 55 minute video documentation from hand-held camera footage was ten years in the making.  It captures the artist as he places himself in the path of high-altitude tornadoes in Mexico – enduring severe winds and no visibility brown-outs in attempts penetrate the tornado’s central vortex where the air becomes eerily still.   Alÿs places himself in peril – throwing himself blindly into chaos in hopes for resolution through the extraction of meaning.  Or, as curator Mark Godfrey argues Tornado is again concerned with the border crossing and the immense difficulty of entering and leaving geo-political zones in our increasingly mobile world.

Francis Alÿs Tornado Milpa Alta, 2000-10 Video documentation of an action and related ephemera 55 minutes Courtesy of Francis Alÿs and David Zwirner, New York Image: Video Still © Francis Alÿs

Francis Alÿs:  A Story of Deception remains at the Tate Modern until 5 September.  The show’s next stop is Alÿs’ home country where it will be presented at Wiels in Brussels (9 October – 30 Janurary).  The exhibition comes state-side next year to New York’s MoMA (8 May – 1 August 2011).

Francis Alÿs is represented by David Zwirner in New York and Galerie Peter Kilchmann in Zurich.

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

Kalup Linzy, Conversations wit de Churen III: Da Young and Da Mess, 2005. Performance documentation. Courtesy the artist and Taxter and Spengemann, New York.

Because I don’t believe that big and bright equals beautiful, I am not a fan of West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center. A mammoth, reflective blue box that towers over the otherwise low-to-the-ground Melrose Avenue architecture, the PDC has more than its share of empty retail space. Inside, it often feels like a manicured ghost town. I voted for its simulated destruction last fall when artist Gustavo Artigas staged his Vote for Demolition project, which asked Angelinos to select the city’s least attractive building. Artigas virtually razed the winner, which turned out to be the Kodak Theater because, apparently, not everyone sees the world the way I do.

Despite my PDC resentment, I am fond of MoCA’s mini Pacific Design Center, a quiet beige cube that stands in the shadow of its big blue neighbor. It seems like an almost-joke—a Mecca of materialism’s carefully sized nod to the arts. Usually, design-related exhibitions that run in this MoCA satellite, like Las Vegas Studio and Folly–The View from Nowhere, cater to the curious without undermining the over-fabricated sterility of the whole PDC complex. But this past month, the MoCA mini-me has suddenly become a theater for outlandish projects that turn “over-fabricated” into a race toward synthetic delirium.

On June 24, during the invitation-only event Soap at MoCA, General Hospital filmed an episode starring James Franco. Franco played a demented artist, MoCA played the site of his opening, and artist Kalup Linzy performed in drag. Wearing a wig with bangs and a red and black floral print dress, Linzy recited the lyrics to Mad World while Franco yelled, “Don’t kill me! I know where the baby is!”, and then fell from a balcony to his fictional death. Linzy, accustomed to the drama of soap, wasn’t phased.

Ryan Trecartin, "Sibling Topics (Section A)," Video Still, 2009.

In his own soap, All My Churun (2003), a distraught, big-haired, striped-skirted woman (most women in Linzy’s films aren’t actually women) talks about the memorial service she’s planning for a murdered love named “Jo-Jo.” “Girl, you need to stop,” says her sister over the phone. “She needs to stop,” says her brother over the phone. Her mother and grandmother, also talking over the phone, act as if a memorial service for a dead man is the most flamboyantly frivolous thing a person could have.

Video artist Ryan Trecartin uses phones as liberally as Linzy, though his rarely have cords and sometimes they’re just pinkies and thumbs extended in the “call me” gesture. Phones turn life into a series of affected soliloquies and now that Trecartin has commandeered MoCA for Any Ever, a show that opened two weeks after the museum performed for General Hospital, soliloquies have become lurid and omnipresent. “You won’t recognize the PDC once you enter,” Trecartin’s New York gallerist Elizabeth Dee told the LA Times.

The downstairs bookstore has become a dark gallery. Cluttered with brand new benches, space heaters and superfluous metal chains, it looks like a graveyard for un-bought patio furniture. Trecartin’s Trill-ogy Comp (2009)—note the “trill”—screens on the wall opposite the entrance.  Comp consists of three videos, all of them loosely related. K-CorealInc.K (section a) follows a group of all-blond white collar workers called the “Koreas”; Sibling Topics (section a) follows four quadruplet sisters, all played by Trecartin. P.opular Sky (section ish) is a bit of everything. Upstairs, in a bedroom, office space, faux-stadium and family room–each with nick-free Ikea-style furniture–four videos from the R’Search Wait’S series play out. But following storylines is precarious. As Trecartin pointed out in a recent lecture, “Consequence can just pop out of nowhere and cause can have no effect.”

Ryan Trecartin, "P.opular S.ky (section ish)," 2009.

Everyone wears some form of garish make-up, women play men acting like women, or men play women posing as men dressed as women. The physical gets slippery. With rare exception, characters use winy, effeminate teenage voices and speak confrontationally. No one is melancholic, though plenty are restless. All wear brightly colored clothes that match their bronzed, painted faces and, since Trecartin is an obsessive editor, the brash, sashaying footage has no non-orchestrated lulls. Soliloquies–there’s never really dialogue, even when characters purport to address each other–use language in a way that feels almost-but-not-quite familiar:

“She hates diversity and women. She’d probably shoot me if she saw my very extreme breast reduction that I love.” “Put your breasts back on.” “I never had any.”

“How will I make drive to find you when I’m in automation?”

“Cut my hair shorter. I like that kind of person.”

“Put on your comfort pants and say things in nice voice because.”

“I can go on and on but I won’t. I can go on and on but I won’t. I can go on and on but I won’t.”

About thirty minutes in, Any Ever begins to feel like a dream that’s apolotical, political, apathetic, aggressive and increasingly fluorescent. It becomes exhausting and disorienting, enough so to make me want to hate it. And this means it’s perfect.

Note: Critic Jennifer Doyle recently wrote more extensively about James Franco and Kalup Linzy for Frieze Magazine. Read her essay here.

Resistance, 2006; Courtesy the artist; Courtesy gb agency, Paris; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; Johnen Galerie, Berlin

The work of Slovakian artist Roman Ondák has been referred to as “intervention,” a label which makes reference to the way a piece confronts the viewer with an unexpected experience. Ondák, who is currently participating in the Berlin Biennale through August 8, 2010, creates work that is at once mischievous, hilarious and stone serious. He deals with social issues of both the grand and trivial scales and swaddles participants—whether knowingly or not—inside the folds of each performance. In the manner of a social scientist, he is wont to stage “temporary situations and imaginative sitespecific constructions that predict various communication patterns in behavior and in the perception of things.” (source) In his 2009 presentation of Measuring the Universe (2007) at Museum of Modern Art in New York, Ondák urged museum visitors to mark their height and first name on a white wall—the same way a child might over the years in a hallway at home—until the thousands of black ink markings became as visually dense as they were socially significant.

In Loop, his installation for the Slovakian Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale, he brought the lush grounds of the Giardini Publici into the interior pavilion, causing guests to take pause before realizing that the artist’s installation was in fact the well-ordered plant-life which surrounded them. His 2006 video Resistance, originally staged during an opening at Viennese Museum of Modern Art, plays with ideas of social status by following the feet of a group of guests with untied shoelaces. As reported by Kontakt, the Art Collection of Erste Group (whose artists were being presented in the exhibition during which Resistance was staged), “Fellow visitors were puzzled by this intervention, since there was no direct clue as to why certain people were posing this way. Thus Ondák queries the bondage, not necessarily visible, of certain peer groups, in this case through the need of people working in the field of art to proclaim otherness as a means counterbalancing social standardization.” (source)

Loop, 2009; Courtesy the artist; Courtesy gb agency, Paris; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; Johnen Galerie, Berlin

Roman Ondák was born in 1966 in Zilina, Slovakia and now lives in Bratislava. He was recently included in I’m Not Here. An Exhibition Without Francis Alÿs at De Appel, Amsterdam—a “solo exhibition that takes the form of a group exhibition in which works by the contributing artists evoke the atmosphere of the work of an absent Francis Alÿs.” He has been included in numerous solo presentations internationally, including at MoMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; 2009 Venice Biennale; and 2008 Shanghai Biennale.

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

Jaco Bouwer, "I Love You Jet Li," Film Still.

On Jekyll Island, the beaches are nearly rock-free and, at this time of year, ocean swimming feels like bathing in a warm tub during an understated earthquake; the waves roll gently but unpredictably. I spent the third week of June on Jekyll, a resort destination located on the North Atlantic, halfway between Savannah and Jackson. I was vacationing with my aunt and grandmother—the same grandmother who called Terry Southern a brooder and often says she could have married Jasper Johns if only he’d preferred women. The second night of our trip, a small storm broke out. We had seen white chairs and reception tents set up on the beach in anticipation of two weekend weddings and, as the three of us sat on our balcony watching the rain pass and drinking the heavy-handed martinis my grandmother prepared, we wondered if either bride had cried when she saw the clouds move in.

Brides and tears naturally led to the topic of heartbreak, and we took tallies. My aunt’s heart has broken three times. To date, mine has broken only once and my grandmother admits to only one break as well, though my aunt and I suspect her of fibbing (she argues that, if both parties agree that a relationship is doomed from the start, the hurt it causes doesn’t count; we find that logic dubious).

Jaco Bouwer, "I Love You Jet Li," Film Still.

My grandmother’s single countable heartbreak involved a married captain named Brooks. He was stationed at the army base at which she worked as an activities coordinator. He practically ordered her to date him, charmed her into loving him and then sent for his family. When my grandmother found out that his wife and children were on their way, she stopped taking his calls, and so Brooks tried to seduce her friendly Methodist roommate instead. “You must never compare the other men you meet to me,” he once told her. This sounded narcissistic and patronizing to me. “But it turned out to be good advice,” my grandmother said.

On June 26^th, Freewaves, L.A.’s longstanding new media organization, celebrated its 20th anniversary with a video extravaganza at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Monitors were arranged in the shape of an oval and heartbreak, or the precariousness of being breakable, recurred as a theme. Jaco Bouwer’s I Love You Jet Li, the only video I watched three times, begins with this monologue: “I’m born with a septal defect. A hole in the heart. . . . Because of the hole, I’m defective when it comes to love.”

In I Love You Jet Li, the female narrator has a melancholic lilt to her voice. As she speaks, murky, slow-moving footage of figures waiting in an airport plays out on the screen. She first discovers the extent of her heart defect in high school, when her crush on a rebel vanishes as soon as he tells her she’s beautiful. She can love, but she can’t receive love. Later, her flirtation with a college English tutor ends after a graduation day hug: “He holds me a moment longer than appropriate. That’s the end of my crush.”

As the narrator speaks of falling for a married man, a young brunette woman wearing a tie-dye t-shirt with a heart in its center rubs her right arm and stares into space. Then, as the narrator speaks of the man who split her lip open and wore Def Leopard t-shirts  that she routinely ironed, a middle-aged woman in a pastel sweat-suit wanders through the airport, sometimes barefoot. At one point, this woman quietly cries.

Jaco Bouwer, "I Love You Jet Li," Film Still.

The narrator visits a therapist who tells her she’s confusing love with fear. She falls for this therapist who then dismisses her feelings. Her final crush, however, is the least attainable. She becomes enamored with martial arts film star Jet Li, learning about his hobbies and eating habits and masturbating to his fight sequences. She plans to visit to China to see him and emails asking him to meet her at the airport. “I don’t know martial arts,” she writes, “but my love is pure and true.”

Years after my grandmother ended her romance with Brooks, she randomly encountered him on a beach in the Philippines. It was a Sunday and she was heading to mass. He accompanied her and spent the rest of day trying to rekindle their flame, an effort she deflected, though doing so was hard. She knew he would hurt her, but part of her wanted that hurt.

I've Been Shot, installation view, courtesy XPACE Cultural Centre

In the 1988 action film, Die Hard, John McClane (played by Bruce Willis) hustles around a Los Angeles skyscraper—sweat-soaked and shirtless—in an effort to save his wife and other hostages from a ruthless terrorist group. At various points throughout the film, McClane (an NYPD officer) survives a partial jump from an exploding building and smashes through a plate glass window. Basically, he is injured to the extent that he arguably would not be able to still perform such heroics as he does (saving everyone in the end) if this were real life. But this is not real life, it’s Hollywood. And so the hero always perseveres.

The themes of personal danger, machismo and pain have been explored by artists in the past, namely Southern California performance artist Chris Burden. Burden is perhaps best known for his 1971 piece, Shoot, in which he had a friend shoot him in the left arm from a distance of about fifteen feet. Shoot, and the many other performances by Burden throughout that era (during which he crawled over broken glass, spent weeks on a high-up gallery platform with almost no food and no human interaction, and was nailed through the hands to a Volkswagen) prompted serious discussion around the subjects of fear, war (Vietnam), consumerism and the role of art in society. While there is no shortage of people who considered Burden insane at the time, many continue to consider his work monumental. (Incidentally, if you’re interested in reading more about Burden’s work, I recommend this particularly well-rounded New Yorker essay by Peter Schjeldahl.) What if, however, an artist were to take a more humorous–and admittedly less painful—approach to the same overall theme? Enter Toronto-based artist, Robert Lendrum.

I've Been Shot, installation view, courtesy XPACE Cultural Centre

Lendrum’s I’ve Been Shot consists of a looping video in which a man grasps his bloody chest and crawls in pain toward a red phone to call help after having been shot. Just as he reaches his goal and goes to lift the phone, the video loops back to the beginning where he enters the frame, grasps his chest, exclaims that he’s been shot, and drags his body toward the phone. And it goes on and on. In his statement about the piece, the artist says, “This humorous re-articulation of the Sisyphean myth…satirizes machismo in both the art world and Hollywood films.” I’ve Been Shot does well to continue the dialog that Burden once started, and at the same time consider the extremism of Burden’s approach, but it can easily be argued that the younger artist’s work is just as reactionary and extreme (albeit in a different way) than that of his predecessor.

Robert Lendrum is currently included in the group exhibition, THIS IS UNCOMFORTABLE, at Gallery TPW in Toronto, Ontario. He earned his BFA in Visual Arts and English at University of Western Ontario; his MA in Media Studies at Concordia University, Montreal; and his MFA in Documentary Media at Ryerson University, Toronto. He has been included in solo and group exhibitions all over Canada and in the U.S., including at: Xpace Cultural Centre, Toronto, ON; University of Colorado New Visual Arts Complex, Boulder, CO; and Spark Contemporary Art Space, Syracuse, NY.

Annelle's Cornbread (Marks, Mississippi), 2006. Courtesy the artist and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

I’m a sucker for a storyline involving a protagonist’s search for identity across generations and distant lands. More often than not this fascination is satisfied by reading a novel or watching a film, maybe listening to a three-verse country song. It’s not often that such a sprawling narrative emerges from within a work of art, but such is the case with the series of photographs by San Francisco-based artist Danielle Nelson Mourning in her debut solo exhibition at Taylor De Cordoba Gallery in Culver City.

Homecoming presents large-scale ink jet prints of the artist’s pilgrimage across the country and the Atlantic to understand herself and her ancestry. This is no documentary, though; Mourning has visited old family homes in Marks, Mississippi and Niagara Falls, New York to make self-portraits in which the self is more fictional than real. She assumes the dress and style of domestic women from decades past, recalling in part Cindy Sherman’s Complete Untitled Film Stills, though in a decidedly less aggressive way. Mourning goes to Ireland as well to recreate haunting scenes of life during the potato famine of 1845. The work is endearing in its earnest investigation of family history and self, and in its multidimensional presentation of women of certain eras and of domestic life. It seems to be an intensely personal practice, as if the project would mean as much to the artist regardless of whether it had an audience. Sometimes work comes across as so prepared for an audience that there is a paucity of the artist’s own identity, but there’s none of that here.

Rhubarb (Cavan County, Ireland), 2006. Courtesy the artist and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

The most affecting work in the show is the 8mm film, Memories from a Pleasant Visit, which mimics vintage 8mm home movies authentically with its camera shake, jumpy scene cuts and film noise. In it, the characters from Mourning’s Mississippi and Niagara Falls photo narratives are brought to life, though there is still a sense of disconnect between the intent of the characters as they move about, and any narrative that the viewer should draw from the quick scenes. Perhaps the film is the least narrative piece in the show because its presentation of ideas is so hectic, like scraps from the reel of life lying in disjointed piles on the cutting room floor of one’s mind. I actually wonder if I’ve ever been more taken with a work of video art, however. Maybe I relate to each of these divergent female characters, respond to grandma’s chatter as she flips through old photo albums, and possibly—most of all—enjoy the private thrill of being frightened by the subtle Hitchcockian tones of the film. The dull tapping of ivory keys, the lone voice of a choir girl singing, the black-and-white footage capturing the manic twirling of a woman in a gown—it’s chilling. But more so, it’s entrancing.

Paten Circle II (Marks, Mississippi), 2006. Courtesy the artist and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

Danielle Nelson Mourning lives in San Francisco, CA. She earned her MFA at Royal College of Art, London. Her work has been included in several group exhibitions, including at Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito; Hoopers Gallery, London; and the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Prague. Homecoming closes today, June 26. The film Memories from a Pleasant Visit can also be viewed at this link.