Mountains of My Mind

There was something familiar about these paintings and it wasn't that I'd seen Griff Williams work before. Nor was it the overlaid stencils, that technique of adding patterns onto narrative paintings to give the requisite look of deconstruction. (Yes there is an academe and they're all producing stencils.) No, it was the paint-by-numbers segmentation. I could almost smell the paints, in their little numbered quarter-sized pots. Very familiar this.

But wow. My paintings were never like this. These landscapes soar.



The show is Nothing Exists in Itself, paintings by Griff Williams at Stephen Wirtz Gallery, one of my top-five galleries in SF.

Like David Maxim, Griff Williams works with magnificent mountain landscape—the image of which has so been worked from Bierstadt to Adams, and then commodified with every picture postcard sold in every National Park to every travel brochure to become our image of "nature." Williams works in a very sophisticated way with this loaded landscape and manages to retain the whiff of mountain air.

The paintings are complex. First there's the mountain image which he splits and butterflies—bifurcates—so there's a Rorschach Inkblot effect. Hmmm, what does this remind you of? The inkblot mountain should take you somewhere. The image is broken down into areas of color and painted with his own paint-by-numbers paints, specially mixed to replicate the ones in the boxed sets of the 50s. Then there's the stenciled images: plants, insects, shapes and filigree—taken from various sources like the sketchbooks of Charles Darwin, for instance—these float on the surface and into the image. Layers of paint, resin, paint create an image that is at once flat, slick, graphic and deep, moving, luminescent.



They're really quite extraordinary, masterful and engaging. I used the word soaring. That's the effect of the stencils—as well as the size: 48" x 80", 57" x 57" —large. Williams comes from Big Sky Country. I have a feeling he's got a love of the land and an appreciation for how the image of it, The Land, The West, is just that, an image, managed, manufactured, kept in the consumer's fantasy to keep 'em coming back for more. The title of the one painting is apt: To Perceive the Object it Must be Frozen, in the mind's eye for, as the title of the show says, Nothing Exists in Itself.

But wait.

There's more.

In the side gallery, Stephen Wirtz is showing another artist upgrading childhood arts & craft. Remember sprinkling sparkles on Elmer's glue? Maybe from grade school? Laurie Reid uses this technique—to great effect I might add—to create whimsical gestural drawings of glass. The sparkly stuff she applies is crushed mirrored glass, gritty yet glimmering, shimmering diamond-like.



Sweet.

Outlaw Kisses

As if right on cue, after I write about the Berlin Memorial to the Homosexual Victims of the Nazi Era, the news has it that lesbian kissing is unacceptable in Seattle sports arenas. So there you have it—homophobia rears its ugly family-friendly head (just one of this many-headed monster's lip-smacking, fire-breathing faces) and screams: "Oooo, girl-kissing is icky!"



Right on. You know the drill. It's time to KISS OUT LOUD!



So maybe, after all, the dead, who cannot speak, might say, "Remember me." And then again, maybe they might say, "Kiss for me, my lips are cold."


**
Seattle Pride kiss from Lindes.
Chilean group kiss by Santiago Llanquin from Daily Life.
Tienanmen Square kiss courtesy of BoingBoing.

The Dead Can't Kiss

In 2003 the German Parliament (finally) approved the motion to build a monument in Berlin to memorialize the homosexual victims of the Third Reich; Michael Elmgreen and Imgar Dragset won the design competition which was unveiled May 27. Their design lifts an element from the vast, solemn, monumental Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe created by Peter Eisenmann. It is one massive block (there are 2,711 in the larger memorial) and made specific by the inclusion of a video loop showing two men kissing.

[Because there were complaints that homosexual victims of the Nazi era included more than just men, the video (directed by Thomas Vinterberg) will alternate on odd years with films of other queer intimate encounters.]



I'm sort of reeling from the idea of the video monitor set into the concrete block.

There's something so ... crass about it. In your face. Posturing. Political statement. Wait, isn't that what this is -?

... no ... this is a memorial.



I know Elmgreen & Dragset for their Powerless Structures, a series of replica galleries set sinking into the ground or cut in half or floating suspended from large inflated balloons. These white cubes questioned the mechanism that makes institutionalized, white-washed, art containers work. What does the whiteness of the space say? Who controls what is visible in the cube? Is it objective space? etc. In 2005 E&G created a (circa 1980s vintage) subway platform downstairs at the Bohen Foundation, NYC complete with tracks, tilework, graffiti, and Tab cans; and a Prada store free-standing in the desert in Marfa, TX. Most of the time their work is site-specific: the subway unearthed the history of the neighborhood; Prada points to high-end consumption on the art-tour-trail.



Talking about the subway piece in an interview with greg.org E & D say:

Well, like a lot of our previous projects this installation is also about public space and how public space is laid out and in what ways we as citizens interact with it - how its design reflects certain power structures which influence our behavioral patterns. We don't do the same things in public as we do in private - or at least most of us don't.

We were once taking the subway towards downtown and got rather surprised (as the uptight Northern Europeans we are) by a female passenger suddenly starting to cut her toe nails inside the train car - something you would never experience in a German U-bahn.

Their internalized conventions were jangled by the "private" act in the "public" car. This made me think about kissing, and the uptight constraints in "polite" society against public displays of affection. PDAs are upsetting for some—especially when it's boys kissing boys. So we march in the street, hold hands in public, wear our skirts up high—whatever to break the rules—We're Here, We're Queer, Get Over It!

But... on a memorial?

In an article about the unveiling in Der Spiegel I read that just building a monument was controversial all along. The Nazi laws prosecuting homosexuality weren't taken off the German books until 1969. German queer acceptance has a long way to go.

Dragset and Elmgreen told Zitty that Neumann, the federal commissioner for culture, refused to allow an image from the video of the two men kissing to be put on the official invitation to the monument's opening. "(The decision) not to print the kiss shows that we still have a problem," Dragset said. "As long as people feel repulsed when they see homosexuals kissing, then something is missing," added Elmgreen, who called the kiss "the basis of the monument."

Gay PDAs are still dangerous, can land you in jail in some parts of the world. Something is still missing from human conscience.

But... this is a memorial.

It is a great art piece. It is provocative. Makes the private public. Addresses the issue. Reflects off other works. etc. etc. But what about the 50,000 tagged—the men and women and transgendered who wore the pink triangle? What about the 15,000 gassed?

This piece says, Never again. Turning away=silence=death. Never again. Not then, not now.

But there is something missing. There is somehow, with the inclusion of animated, live, contemporary persons kissing a loss of the presence of the lost ones, the dead ones, the murdered and de-famed ones.

Well, it is a small complaint. Better an imperfect memorial than nothing. Berlin is a city of memorials, some more effective than others. At the unveiling, commissioner Neumann said, "The experience of war and Holocaust, state terror and tyranny, puts on us Germans a special responsibility to protect freedom and human rights.

"We stand stunned before the brutality with which the Nazis threatened, persecuted and destroyed all those who did not correspond to their inhuman ideology."


Stunned.


Silent.



*E&D installation photos courtesy of Nicolai Wallner Gallery.
E&D memorial photos courtesy of Der Spiegel.
The not-so-great pics of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe are mine.

A Private Act of Protest

Patrick Ireland is dead! Long live Brian O'Doherty!

Pic courtesy of the NYTimes.

Promises, Promises

May 15, 1948: the state of Israel is established, a home for the displaced. May 15, 2008 makes 60 years of Nakba, catastrophe: the displacement of Palestinians to accommodate homeless Jews of Europe. The Chosen People were chosen to occupy the land making refugees of thousands.

How appropriate then a show of photographs of the tormented ground called Broken Promised Land at Robert Koch Gallery, SF. Shai Kremer is an Israeli photographer who has for seven years been documenting, what he calls the "infected landscape." Infected by violence, opposition, notions of control and righteousness.



Kramer's large eerie photographs reflect the still, vast expanse of desert land, but like the images of nuclear test wasteland in Richard Misrach's Desert Cantos series, the living landscape is made to feel vacant by the presence of military detritus, the leftovers of violent scenes. Everything is riddled with bullet holes—how many rounds? How much practice? 60 years worth.



Reading into the images presented you get the layered picture. A burned olive orchard is the result of the recent conflict with Lebanon. The Skyhawk bomber is an object for target practice on the Big Rivers Nature Preserve. The mock village used for urban warfare training is an Arab style village. The huge storage buildings of ammunition and equipment are US built.

In this land, the seeds of conflict are continually planted. The promise of return, for Arab refugee and Jewish refugee alike; the promise of dominion; the promise of peace—all these shared expectations, yet nowhere is the impulse to share. This is the crux of the matter and on this point all fails, save conflict. When will the professed love of the land allow it to exist as a sanctuary, a true nature preserve for all god's creatures?

Cake n Beans

Sometimes it seems like Mike Brodie takes all his photos at the golden hour when everything is enhanced by the reddish light of the setting sun. How else could the most mundane, the most gritty, be so luscious, so attractive? Why else would I too want to be there, on the edge of the—what is it?—boxcar?—perched on the iron ledge just a few feet from the gravel and rails. It's that, the golden rays of the sun, or else his gaze which does it. His photos are so intimate, close in, right in there, one with the scene played out. The communal sharing—one can of beans (it must be beans, right?) between them all—is at the heart of his work. The camera does not get between him and the others, so the frankness of his picture-taking is not on the sly, nor "objective," but friendly-like, welcomed. Look at this girl, her poise. And he's going to get right down there with her, you know it.



And then there's the detail of the grime, the naked feet, her feet, the other foot, the torn mattress on a pile of rebar in the bed of a metal box car, the softness of her flesh, the golden skin—this feral child, wild and beautiful.



When he was younger (you know, like a baby) he started taking photos with a Polaroid camera. (The recent work is 35 mm.) Polaroids are just beautiful in and of themselves: the size, the coloration, the filminess. It was a perfect immediate, tactile, almost ephemeral medium for his milieu—on the road, ridin' rails, living in the woods. Hawk and Sumac were shot in a shantytown in Maine. They are part of a wonderful small photo book put out by These Birds Walk art books in Oakland CA.



Brodie is in love with his golden world, his train-hoppin' hobo friends, and that's what works. In every flock of wild child-s there's at least one who makes good, who, come Fall, let alone Winter, won't be caught seeking shelter under a bridge. Golden and free, and movin' on.

Mike Brodie won the 2008 Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers. Selected out of a running of 50 young photographers, Brodie shows some of his photos from Boys and Girls of Modern Days Railways at SF Camerawork in his award exhibition. The award says it: this boy's good. He takes the cake. Yeah.

Pics courtesy of SF Camerawork and one of my all-time favorite galleries in LA which introduced me to Brodie's work in 2005—right on—M+B Gallery.

Shadow City

More on cities. Once I'd written about Hickok and Wang and their cityscapes, it came to my attention that there was another city installation worthy of note.



Save Manhatten 03 by Mounir Fatmi was presented at the Venice Biennial 2007. It is the third in a series. Save Manhatten 01 was a cityscape constructed of books, all of which were written on the events of 9/11, except two copies of the Koran. Stacked on a table in such a way that when bright light was shown on them, a shadow portrait of the city was projected on the far wall. The two books of the Koran created the shadow image of the Twin Towers.

Save Manhatten 02, created in 2005, consisted of VHS tapes stacked to mimic the pre-9/11 Manhatten skyline. This installation did not include light and shadow—the white and black domino of the tape boxes carried this motif in addition to standing for the oft-repeated images of the tragedy on TVs all across the world, video being the medium of witness and testimony.

The third installment of this series is subtitled Sound Architecture. The cityscape is created with speakers of various sizes which emit a wall of sounds—traffic sounds taped in the street and subway, as well as fictional sounds lifted from blockbuster movies, crashes, explosions, the sounds of catastrophe. This speaker-city is lit in such a way that both its shadow as well as the shadows of viewers are projected on the wall.

I like this series. The building blocks of each cityscape conveys a perspective through which we understand this image: Manhatten, the pre-9/11 city, now an emblem of a global antagonism. All that has been read about it, written about it, spoken and presented about it; all the mythical, fictional, factual things congesting into an unintelligible cacophony of information and image—but the image is a shadow, a phantom. The blood and guts are the people killed, the people oppressed, the people in uniforms and in hiding.

I like that this artist is from Tunesia, lives in Paris, gives us a perspective from outside, yet inside, for the image cast from 9/11 is long as it is complicated.

Pic courtesy of Universes in Universe, visual arts from Africa, Asia, the Americas in the international art context.