To Different Purpose

Today I learned the derivation of the name Buffalo chicken wings. I had always imagined buffalo, as in bison, but no, it is Buffalo, as in upstate New York, place of the original stingy hot sauce with blue cheese dressing on the side.

Buffalo is in the Rust Belt which means as a city, it has been in decline along with other massive-industry centers like Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and Detroit, steel and coal and cars all going the way of dinosaurs.

Buffalo (Bison bison), on the other hand, are not on the endangered species list even though the Great Bison Belt which sustained them is long gone. They are, however, "near threatened" which is bad enough. What bison and Buffalo have in common is hard living in the snow. What Buffalo and Detroit have in common is living on the cheap. Poorest city in America: Detroit. Next poorest: Buffalo.

Photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have been spending time in the ruins of Detroit, skulking around giant hulking buildings still showing the bones of great design despite wreck and rust like after a great calamity.





Theirs is not the only series on the subject I've seen. (Scott Hocking, for instance, lives in Detroit. I wrote about his work here.)

But what really caught my eye in Marchand & Meffre's portfolio of ruin is this:


A water tower in former East Germany. Looks like, but is so unlike the work of Bernd & Hilla Becher. Comparisons are odious (they say) and yet comparisons are illuminating.


Becher's water tower in Crailsheim, Germany.

Fraenkel Gallery, SF is just closing a survey show of their work, 1972 to 2006, the year of Bernd's death. When talking of the work, work being timeless, it is always in the present (tense) even if the subject of the work is things slipping into the past, out of production, into a stylistic oblivion.



The Bechers' work is so rigorous. Their delimiting technique (nicely explained here in an essay by Lynne Cooke for DIA) results in documentations that, as a body, create a survey of form. It is as if the subject (e.g. water tower) and object (photo of said tower) share an architecture—form, design, structure.



Their display grid (a framework) holds the images which are created within a framework that allows difference in structure to become apparent. Even though they document buildings and mechanisms in decline or near extinction, and collect evidence of a lost vital world, the work itself is devoid of sentiment. Their love is the love of form. Nostalgia or grief, social commentary of any kind, is extrinsic to their vision. The essence of their opus—which you really get when it is seen in contrast to another's—is form: shape, type, pattern, presentation.

The hand of the artist is very much at work here, and yet, conversely, in the work itself the artist is not at all present. Because the point of view doesn't change, you don't get a point of view. There's not a whiff of narrative, even though, in the end, the collection of images is a didactic display, a veritable textbook, anthology, typology. Like any work of strong character—Pinter, say, or Beckett—so much is said in the not-saying.

So different than the arresting, astonishing photos the other pair (Marchand & Meffre) capture. Here there's so much that's evocative: loss, decay, retribution—or whatever else one might associate with the rotten cavity of an abandoned dentist's chair.



How I went from Buffalo wings to dental decay—well, one thing leads to another. For sure.

Outside In

This is one way to picture a mighty, massive California oak tree. It's an impression.

Another way is to take multiple scans using some sort of mapping software, then process the data in Dreamworks to create a light display, like a sprinkling of luminescence, tracing the tree's contours, turning and spinning, creating an animated picture that is at one and the same time on the surface and on the inside.



In Between the Outside-In is the title of Pae White's show at New Langton Arts, SF. The work was created during a residency in the California foothills sponsored by For-Site a foundation dedicated to encouraging new art about place. Pae White's installations typically engage in an architectural, design-based kind of way with the site of exhibition.


Like this, Morceau Accrochant, thread and paper, 2004. Gentle, colorful suspensions, grid-like and light-weight.


Similarly this, Suncloud, 2008, described as “a waterfall on pause." hmmm...


This earlier work, (2003) chandeliers in terra cotta, called foggy, sespe, chamois, lowered down and claimed space in the center of the place.

The show in New Langton included three pieces. Two were self-contained enclosures, rectangular glass and metal rooms upon which her Dreamworks animations were projected, reflected, refracted—swirling in and upon themselves.


The looping tree animation begins and ends with a topographical impression of the immense oak made from points of yellowish light. Your gaze travels in, in between the sight lines. At the same time, the form, contained in chains of light, moves over. In and around, while over and around—a morphing, swirling circuit—at once a fly-over and a deep dive. It is quite extraordinary going into the space of the tree, density of wood and bark transparent and the movement exhilarating. This is quantum physics made live.

Scintillation of light is how astrophysicists describe the tremulous motion that makes the twinkling of stars. This from the Latin, scintillea, sparks of light, which have been understood, well, from way back, in Jewish mysticism and Manichean Gnosticism, as soul sparks. "Fiery sparks of the soul of this world," the alchemist Khunrath describes them. "The light of nature sprinkled in and throughout the structures of the great world into all the fruits of the elements everywhere." mmm... oh yes. The digital revolution is making plain what sages have known intuitively and scientists theoretically. Everything is light.


Following on the tree, White took another scan, this of a wild raspberry bush, and similarly manipulated the data to produce a different effect—the image begins coalesced and then its bits expand out into an array of particle light, a dissipation, and then the sparks return back into form.

Behind the structural aspect of her work—whether establishing space with chandeliers or creating relational space with bits of color, or projecting form and space with light, image, reflection—is a concept of space that folds in on itself. "A world can be as small as your fingertip and can be endless..." she says in an interview about her work in the 2009 Venice Biennale. In Venice she manipulates the space of the site; in these animations, she manipulates the impression of a living form and the space it takes up.

The last piece in the show came out of an encounter with another being living in the Sierra foothills, collector Joseph Meade. White replicates the landscape of his home with pieces of his extensive collection of ceramic ware: hills and valleys formed from vases and pots, pools and meadows in low, flat bowls. It describes place and relationship, but is maybe not more than a curiosity. This thing of making a maguette out of non-ordinary materials has some kind of attraction. In any case, it's been done here, and before. In this case, I'd rather be in the place than the sculptural description of it.

The free-standing animation-rooms I could hang out in forever. Trance-inducing light-movies take my cake and bake it.

images courtesy of
Las Pilitas Nursery
Re-Title.com
Tate Museum
Francesca Kaufmann Gallery, Milan
Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels
Gravel & Gold blog.

Feminist/Complaint

Okay. Stop the Music. I know that this blog is in a sorry state. The hits are way down because we are not posting very often. I have looked at this blog, and have not felt like writing anything about art recently. This world totally, totally, totally fucking sucks and I am very disheartened. Why do I want to even talk about art when George Bush and his fascist minions are turning our country into an armed camp of shit bozos? (10.26.07)

I picked this quote up off a wonderfully cantankerous blog that has sadly run out of juice. Anonymous Female Artist (A.K.A. Militant Art Bitch)'s last post was on 11.3.08... which is all too bad because wild n wooly acerbic opinion that wends its way in and around the male-dominated (art) world is always a pick-me-up, or kick-in-the-nuts, depending.

Any way. She was tired of what she was seeing then, and I'm tired now.

In fact, the month of May, I saw nothing I wanted to write home about.

Now it could be me. I may be suffering a little burn out. Perhaps I need a vacation.

Or it may be the culture. After the election, which was just a relief, there's been this pervasive feeling of exhaustion. Understandable, what with the collapse of the economic system and pending doom of the waters, air, fish, wildlife... that there'd be a breakdown in mood.

Perhaps it is just time for everyone to take a break, lean on our collective shovels and brooms, take a breather. Recess is indicated by the recession after all.

Recession, depression. Gotta go down before you can go up.

Strike Out

Evidently there is a movement on for a(nother) three-year Art Strike. Originally the brainstorm of Auto-Destructive artist, Gustav Metzger, the idea is to bring down the system by giving it nothing on which to feed. There was not much effect in 1974, and I'm not sure anyone will get on board now—except out of the moral fatigue that plagues us all. And then there is John Perraeult's question: How much fresh air can the art world stand?

Well, we all know fresh air is good for you. Hence the need for recess in school. And the Clean Air Act. What I'm hoping is that the galleries and art institutes are stretching their legs, running around the courtyard, smoking behind the dumpster, and generally shaking the tension out of their little art systems, because clearly we need some change.

Sigh.

Well, I did see something interesting yesterday. A screening of Susan Mogul's Driving Men, a film in which she interviews significant men in her life while they drive her around.


Driving man.

Mogul came into her own in LA in the 70s, a feminist performance artist working out issues of identity, community, sexuality and romance, often in front of the camera, always with a wry wit. In fact, one of her men (in the film) says she was a different kind of feminist because she can laugh.

In 1973 she made Dressing Up a short video where she disrobes and redresses while talking about shopping with her mother all the while chewing CornNuts. It was included in the Getty's outstanding show of California Video Art last year, all grainy and crackling and crunchy.



In her very subjective, very intimate work, stand-up comedy and art marry and live happily ever after.



1985-87 Mogul performed News From Home in which she dressed like her mother, read letters from her mother, did what seems inevitable, became her mother.



This still is from Take Off, 1974, a film about getting off.



In Driving Men Mogul is mostly off camera, behind the camera. The persons of the film however are reflecting impressions of her, so it is still all about her, this woman, woman with a camera, woman investigating larger issues of culture through the particularity of herself. In Driving Men she reveals herself through these men—lovers, brothers, her father, her friends—building her life story through these relational signposts, like bumpers in a pin ball game.





Driving Men leans a little more towards documentary, you know, film film, complete with scripted narration, as opposed to art film. Many of her more recent films are like this, 1st person documentary. And it is a kind of un-aesthetic, utilitarian style of filmmaking that progressed out of video as documentation of performance work. A style that appears to be video documenting life unvarnished, in the moment. It's a look. Of course these works are varnished, massaged, edited. This is not complaint, just description, a way of placing it within a field of overlapping borders. I was glad to see it. Always glad to see a smart, feisty woman, unabashed, unashamed, sensitive and aware. And funny to boot.


Video clips stream on her website.
The screening was courtesy of Jewish Film Festival at Yerba Buena.

Double Dot

Art in America Magazine, April 2009 edition.

Yayoi Kusama courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.
Elad Lassry courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery.

LA LA LA

The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, is showing Nine Lives (Visionary Artists from) LA. I want to write about three out of the nine, one third, except, I've already written about Victoria Reynolds here and I don't have much else to say, so it is two out of nine, which is... what's the word for two-ninths?

To keep with the tabulation, this is the fifth Hammer biennial exhibition of LA artists. Nine artists this time, spanning four generations, showing 125 works. So much for numbers. I wasn't really counting except to say, in an oblique way, that two (or three) out of nine is not such a good score. If we're scoring, which I'm not. Really. But really, out of all the artists in such a vast arena as greater Los Angeles, these nine are pulled together into a show... It might have been better to do it by lottery.

I want to write about the two that stood up, shook my hand, said Howdy, but I am wasting precious breath talking about the show as a whole because it irritated me. It's something about the subtitle, Visionary Artists from LA which on the brochure is not only a subtitle, but subscript which is subliminally saying this is a footnote or afterthought or maybe we don't really want to label them this, because it won't stick or we couldn't otherwise explain what thread runs through this group.

What does it mean to be a visionary artist? In the past this was code for a member of the fringe element, a wacko, on the edge, a dreamer. Remember when we used to say "outsider" and mean nut-job?

It's a suspect term and out of date it seems to me, unless there are visions or utopias involved. In the diversified culture of contemporary Artopia, all are welcome: no mainstream, no outsiders. Even the bad or boring—we just won't talk about them.

So. What's the good word?

Leading the exhibition, is the weighty (like an anchor, ballast, diving bell) Llyn Foulkes. As you enter, in the first alcove, roped off, at a distance (for perspective sake) a painting he's been working on for years, The Lost Frontier, 1997-2005.



At nearly seven feet square and eight inches deep, it's a massive wooden relief, with Pioneer Ma Mickey looking out on the LA basin. But better than my take, watch these highly entertaining excerpts from the documentary to be, But I Thought Art Was Special wherein Foulkes explains himself. Listening to Foulkes rail about the direction we are taking the world, you'll understand why I say his work has gravitas. Mickey Mouse represents the innocent face on American greed and corruption; no wonder he shoots him dead. Despite what Foulkes might say, despairingly, we know Art Saves (the day).


Deliverance, 2007. The artist, gun in hand.

I would love to see Foulkes' work in the vicinity of Enrique Chagoya. Now wouldn't that be a great show? How they differently use similar iconography to press social and political dissent. Between them we'd see the world as we know it undone, rewritten, transformed.

What is great about seeing Foulkes' work in person is to see the depth of perception—literally because he often works in relief. His portraits are tactilely painful. The gaping maw really is a burned out hole in wood, and the teeth are real.


Dali and Me, 2006

In close range, the materiality of his works is disturbing. I am repelled and in awe of his powerfully perfect expression of the bodily experience of say, being blinded and impaled by religious doctrine.


Crucifixion, 1985.

The man has vision, and it is decidedly dark, but he's not hallucinating.

Great stuff. And he's a musician too, with a one-man band. Now that's wacky.

The Other

From the guy who created the creepy, but certainly effective sad-sack, socially-challenged man-child puppet Joshua...


Cocktail Party, 2001 from the series Understanding Joshua.

... and who extended his exploration of social anxiety by probing teenage presentation...



film still from American Minor, 2008, 35 mm/blu-ray, 7:44 min.

... comes a new body of work, about the indeterminate body, the body in between: Teen and Transgender Comparative Study.



While studying teens, how they present and under what influences, Charlie White began exploring how this related to the development of culturally-recognizable, gender-specific presentation for male-to-female transfolk. Pre-op transgendered women are teenagers in their own hormonally changing bodies, learning gesture and style to present as womanly. Over the course of a year White discovered a handful of models whose striking resemblance drives home this point. The comparisons are uncanny.



The grid backdrop lends the work the air of scientific study, which I'll accept as meaning normative presentation is under the microscope. Let's hope that's his intention. Otherwise we're on the same suspect ground as using visionary, which is to say, segregating and categorizing in a pseudo-anthropological, at-arms-length way. His photo sets generally have a cool and sterile air to them, but this goes further, extending the objectification. That his gaze is on teenage girls is one thing, that it also lands on the transgendered, a hugely marginalized group, is edgier. Perhaps it is a safeguard to appear clinical rather than lurid. In any case, it is revelatory—which is, now that I think of it, a better term altogether than visionary, and works for one and all.



Because the pairs look like kin, one the older version of the other, sisters, I am reminded of the video by Charles Atlas of Antony + the Johnsons' You Are My Sister, which you can see here. The perfect compliment, from a more internalized and subjective, if sentimental, point of view.

And Then In the Video Lounge

The Hammer has a video viewing room and a stack of art-video this big. I only had time to see one. I chose El Gringo by Francis Alÿs. Only 4:12 minutes long, but a ... revelation! The camera travels along on a dirt road in a Mexican town into a pack of snarling, snapping dogs. This is what it feels like to be an outsider.





Grrrrr... it's so great! So simple, so effective. The icing on the cake. You can see it online here.

Sound and Furry

I was so looking forward to this show. Nick Cave' Sound Suits at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF. When I saw press photos of his sparkling beaded costumes I thought, The Fishgod has returned!



This dancing man knows fabric, texture and design, costume and theatricality—and he has a penchant for amassing, archiving, and recreating the sequined detritus of last year's party and your great grandma's china closet.



The list of the materials used in his constructions speaks to the fantastic tactile details of his work: beads, buttons, baubles, sequins, bottle caps, yarn, wire, raffia, rusted iron, sticks, twigs, leaves and hair. Fake fur, crocheted doillies, knitted hats, bird figurines, plastic bags, tin tops. When worn, the suits go shhhhh, shhhhh, clatter clatter, swish, whusssh, crick crick crick, click, shhhhusssh. This is the ordinary stuff of life re-animated, brought mythically alive.



America needs this. Rio may not. Nor Chiapas or Sri Lanka. But America, corporatized, Ford-driving, Calvin Klien wearing, Calvinist America needs this. And that may be the reason YBCA had the largest crowd ever to welcome this infusion of color, movement and swishy sound. And I am fully aware of what that phrase implies: somnambulate white America does need injections of gay culture of color. It needs it, it craves it.

Our society is nearly devoid of this kind of masquerade, but the tradition Cave taps is ancient, deep and long. The show is called Meet Me in the Center of the Earth—that's where Enki, god of the deep dwells, Enki of the fish head attended by Sumerians in swishing layered reed gowns. Cave works out of the dream-realm, the deep undersea cavern of creative memory. He is shining shimmering Phanes at once lion, snake, and fish. Then he's in procession wearing a Yoruba beaded crown. Dagon was a Phoenician fish-god and the Dogon of Mali wear incredibly tall masks and fringy skirts. It all fits together. So too, his dreams turn to the attic where bird cages and nostalgia rest. It's all knitted together... somehow.



In his on-stage interview, Cave said he'd found his raison d'être. He was going to start bringing color and movement to the masses. He wants to be in residence in various cities. He has a mission. You know, sound-suit healing. Now that's American. Because, you know, America is always on about functionality, purposefulness, improvement. We've got to make a program out of everything. For the betterment of society. Building community. Gag. I know it is the easiest way to get funding, but oh, don't go that route. It waters down the mystical factor, that mysterious power inherent in art to effect without being didactic, programatic, or therapeutic. Art will cure your ills, but it isn't a medicine that you can bottle.

This is a white dream: to capitalize on the next new thing. Beware of One-Size-Fits-All. Art Saves, but it isn't an off-the-rack fashion statement.

These suits are wonderful as is. Extensions of Nick Cave's personal embodiment. They are wonder-full. Magical. Impressive and transporting. They need no other reason for being except that they are extraordinary. Other-worldly. They take you there. Nick Cave takes the cake.


Images courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery.

In Uniform

"You got it," Steven Wirtz said to me. "I'm so glad you got it!"
Oh yeah. I got it.
And the poster. I want to tape it to my wall.
Like I said to the gallerist who said encouragingly, "We have payment plans..."—"Free. Right now, free works for me."

Steven Wirtz (he's so nice) is showing new work by Melanie Pullen. Remember how she created crimes scenes, down to the last gritty detail in the dark back alley, trashy and smelly? That's how good they were—you could smell the sour fetid garbage. And then the victim, strangely well-dressed. High Fashion crime scenes. Un-nerving to snicker at the hanging corpse.

For the last couple of years she's been at work on the details of a very different scene. Studying and recreating historic depictions of battle, Pullen's been sussing out the high fashion sensibility of war.



First there is the glamour of the heroic pose. She's created these magnificent life-size portraits of soldiers. In period uniforms, models stand as in the original paintings. She had to recruit fashion models, because friends just could not carry the command of the gaze. It makes complete sense. The image of heroism is one of grace and strength, composure and a sort of humble assurance. The hero must be beautiful. The heroic transcends the ordinary. It is something to be admired and aspired to. A model or actor, trained to project, can fill those boots to affect the look. Achilles was always described as beautiful, he was the son of a nymph after all.

Man in a uniform
(hut)
That's what I am
Man in a uniform, uh,
That's what I am
(Prince)

In 1918 when General George Patton was getting into the swing of things, he wrote his wife: "I often think with regret of how badly I used to dress... Now I am a regular Beau Brummel. I wear silk khaki shirts made to order, khaki socks also made to order. I change my boots at least once during the day and my belts are wonders to see they are so shiney and polished. I have the leather on my knees blancoed every time I ride and my spurs polished with silver polish. In fact I am a wonder to behold.... Tomorrow I'll have my new battle jacket. If I'm to fight I like to be well-dressed."



There is charismatic power in a suit—business suit, suit of armor, well-fitted uniform. The uniform makes uniform the ranks, but makes the person a soldier with all the strength, will, and containment that word implies. A soldierly demeanor is formed with discipline and righteousness. This is the very thing the old painters tried to convey and Pullen has distilled in these portraits. Out of the mists, back-lit the soldierly appearance, the embodiment of calm before the storm of battle.

I love a man in a uniform
I love a man in a uniform

The girls they love to see you shoot
(bang bang you're dead)
I love a man in a uniform
(they love a... they love a... they love a... bang bang)
(they love to see you shoot)
(Gang of Four)

In the second series, Pullen recreated scenes of battle on the streets of LA and in a Hollywood studio. The twenty realized scenes re-enact historic photos, in a sense replicating the iconic imagery which we understand as scenes of war. Depictions of depictions, as it were. This is a distancing from the mortality of engagement (with it's grit and grime and blood and guts) and yet at the same time an investigation of the very nature of creating an archetypal image—one that provokes a whole range of response. That is what is so interesting about her work. She is pin-pointing the image of war. And for there to be an idea of war there must be an attending image. Homer provided it. Capa. Pullen.



This is not "realism," not documentary photography. Not like the photos of combat by Eddie Adams or of wounded veterans by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. But this is also real, this examination of the creation of an idea. For our experience of the world is through our idea of it. So how does one create the image of history? Just so. And does this force the question of our belief in the depiction of history? I think so.

The show is called Violent Times and since the uniforms date back to the Revolutionary War, we're talking a long time. But I don't think Pullen is merely, ironically, critiquing the war effort. There is no getting around the fact that her portraits of these soldiers and the details of their familiar uniforms elicits a pleasing response. They are beautiful to look at. And the battle scenes thrilling. What do we make of that? How do we digest that appeal? Can we enlarge our purview to say, War is brutal: war is beautiful. -? I think we must, otherwise we will be at cross-purposes to our goal of living in harmony with ourselves. As Pogo said, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."