Women of a Certain Age

Lest we forget.

Reading a review by Richard Kalina in the September Art in America, I come across this passage:

In 1946 an unnamed male critic (not Greenberg or Rosenberg) reviewing Louise Nevelson's first major exhibition writes, "We learned that the artist was a woman, in time to check our enthusiasm. Had it been otherwise, we might have hailed these sculptural expressions as by surely a great figure among the moderns." And Lee Krasner speaking of Hans Hoffman, the leading teacher of his day, said, "I can remember very clearly his criticism one day when he came in and said about (my) painting, 'this is so good you would not believe it was done by a woman.'"

Ouch.

Nevelson also studied with Hoffman, in the early 30s, when his school was in Munich and before he emigrated to NY. She's known to have said, "I wouldn't marry God if he asked me." Krasner married Pollock which might have been like acquiescing to marrying god, a god, and see where that got her. She lived and worked 30 years after him, yet is mostly remembered as his wife.



Jackson Pollock with Lee Krasner in the background, in 1955.



This is a mid-career Krasner, Thaw, post-Pollock, 1957.



Nevelson in signature fur in a portrait by Cecil Beaton.

Nevelson had a good self-image. "I always thought, bluntly, that I was a glamorous, goddamn exciting woman," she said. "I wanted to have a ball on earth." And she did.



Nevelson postage stamps.

Knocked Out

Most women aren't so lucky and get knocked around—still, into this century—by the prevailing misogyny. It must be bred in the bone, so deeply it is rooted. Only a few lucky ones escape deprecation by self or others. Age by age, it's the same old story.

In AiA there's also a piece on May Wilson who, in 1966, at the age of 61, moved to NYC to become an artist (like you do). Her husband trading her in for younger women was the kick in the pants she needed to launch herself onto the NY scene. She held salons at the Chelsea Hotel, hung out at the Factory, made art. Like Nevelson, she assembled, only her works were much more Pop: spray-painted platform-shoes with baby-doll heads, Pop. She also made collage. When her husband was cheating on her, she took to cutting up Playboy centerfolds. She made them into snowflakes or "doillies" as she called them. Pasted together, image overlay image. Must have been therapeutic.



This is one of a series of collages she made inserting her clowning mug shot into unlikely places. I suppose she was being a good sport about her old face. That's what they say, anyway, she was a card.

Invisible







These three are by Charlotte Niel. She's saying something different than Wilson with these bits of model beauty superimposed upon her own body. Something about illusion, maintaining it, playing with it, and questioning what's real. At what age do we start doing drag? Female impersonators. Gender impressionists.

These are part of a traveling exhibition of photos, self-portraits by women of a certain age—50 to 65—the Invisible Age, the title of the show. Curated by Jan Potts and Beth Kientzle who, in their statement, explain,

The timing is not precise. Women at around age 50 notice that something has changed. It happens slowly, almost imperceptibly. Heads no longer turn as we walk down the street, older or younger women are served first, the boss calls on others in meetings, few models in magazines or actresses in movies represent women our age. We have reached the invisible age. It lasts a decade or more, and around age 65, it changes again—we’ve moved into another stage of life where the fruits of our longevity are valued, and society can see us again.

The show, seen in Washington DC and Newton NJ, is now at Rayko Photo Center, SF. Most of the works explore the experience of being invisible or marginal and so are vague, obscure, remote. It is rather painful, this sinking from view—or as the subtitle of this photo suggests, Crawling Out.


Perseverance: Crawling Out, by Mary Ramain.

And then some are strikingly defiant in the face of all odds.



Amazon by Niki Berg.

Odds are, we're all going to die, men, women, animals alike. In the meantime though, to be seen is the thing, in our own light and worth. The blatant dismissal of women in the 30s (40s, 50s, 60s...) is an unspoken assumption today. The false premise still plagues us. I want to root it out. In myself and in the culture.

Question assumptions. Defy categorizations. Expand limitations. Good slogans. Add to the list. To Do.


Nevelson quotes from Louise Nevelson Foundation.
Pollock photo courtesy of Smithsonian Institute Archives of American Art.
Beaton photo courtesy of New York Times.
Wilson work on ArtNet.

Koons King

If you haven't seen this article, in today's NYTimes, you must! Jeff Koons in the palace of the Sun King! How fitting!


Perfect!


Divinely inspired, I'm sure!

He says that the placement of his white marble rococo Self-Portrait in the same room as portraits of Louis XIV and Louis XVI was not a gesture of arrogance, “It didn’t have to do with my own ego, but it did have to do with the playfulness and a contemporary monumentality." Absolutely. Koons thinks big and in the Realm of Possibilities just like the sumptuous, over-blown halls and gardens, operas and costumes of King Louis. Koons' works are inflated, larger-than-life, and manufactured to perfection with a mirror sheen just like... the comparisons are endless.

What is it to have the world in your hands? This artist says Anything is Possible, and it is. Monumental. Glorious. Grand!


Article by Elaine Sciolino and photos by Ed Alcock.

Hoch und Baltz

Rena Bransten Gallery, SF is showing recent photos by Matthias Hoch. They are beautiful and cold.
An essay by curator Aimée Reed points out a tension in his pictures—a tension between an ideal and a lack—a lack of humanity.



Hoch's new photographs (and video) concern Almere. Almere is a designed town in the Netherlands, a model modern village established in the late 70s with the express mission of providing housing and employment relief for Amsterdam under a plan that emphasized ethical design with a stress on functionality and equality. The end result of such factors is that the streets are easy to clean and the buildings look much like the architects designed them, even twenty years later.



What I noted in my first look at the work is the beautiful composition of his images. These are documents of buildings and interiors but not as straight documentary for they are highly composed shots that focus on pattern and often create an agreeable abstract display. The photos place a stress on design over content.



This, for instance, is a children's playground with faux rock and turf.

In the very act of composition, Hoch manages to echo the subject he is focused on. There is nothing overtly disagreeable about his images—the buildings are portrayed as beautiful or fanciful as they are. The cold light is the cold light of day. There is no movement here—no life, but there is design, and color, and it is pleasing.



This image, Almere #7 recalls the videos he also made of Almere. The first is a series of drive-by shots of these cool, clean-lined buildings. The smooth tracking and even light on mid-range shots of orange doors, lime green trash containers, then copper siding and windows, extends his aesthetic into a longer view. The experience is of stillness and finish—an exploration of buildings at their best, early morning perhaps, when no one is around. Who hasn't taken travel photos of piazzas just after dawn, before crowds, to get the best of the place?

I use that word on purpose. For the building is a container of place; liveliness makes a place a Place (to go to, be in, to be seen). Evidently the piazzas, town squares of this newly built city center are mostly empty. New shops, new bars, the cinema even, all in cool new buildings, don't have the draw that the old city streets of Amsterdam which is where the locals go. Almere is a model town, which is to say modeled on a real town, but it hasn't found it's center yet. People who live and work here, they go out of town.



This image from 2002 could be quite depressing had it been framed differently. But that is Hoch's approach: to present the thing, however banal or troublesome (such as faux grass in a children's park) in such a way as to be compositionally beautiful.


Or arresting, as is this simple shot of blue wall and gray floor.

This show reminded me of one I'd seen this summer in Santa Monica, Lewis Baltz: Sites of Technology at Gallery Luisotti.
Lewis Baltz, after working many years in black and white turned to color. Known for incredible work of the desert landscape, in the late 80s, he explored the strange landscape of institutes of high technology.



This is Cray Supercomputer, CERN, Geneva...



and this Unoccupied Office, Mitsubishi, Vitre (FR), both from 1989-91.

Baltz is working with a very different aesthetic intent than Hoch, though in a sense they are both concerned with the same subject, the human/inhuman environment. In Geneva, for instance, instead of pulling in close to the supercomputer, taking a shot of the blue and yellow, at the corner for instance, Blatz steps back from the scene and allows in the consoles to the side, the empty chair and blank walls. There's no mistaking the strange inhumanity of the place, nor the vacuousness of the unoccupied office space.

It is a painful place, this empty space which is a place people occupy, daily. Baltz's photos convey pathos and this emotional content is what is missing in Hoch's work—yet his are beautiful. It's an interesting dilemma. I am delighted by beauty and moved by feeling. Not either, but both. Cakes and Ale.


Hoch's photos courtesy of Galerie Akinci, Amsterdam and Dogenhaus Galerie, Leipzig.

Ah My Pretty Poppet

First there's the egg.



Then there's the sperm.



The first spermatozoa that buggers its way into the egg, crosses a translucent membrane—the zona pellucida— that surrounds the ovum, and bzzzssstst!, there's fusion and a chain reaction which transforms the zona from penetrable to impenetrable. It lets one in, and then becomes a repulsing barrier.



hmmmm, biology, so interesting.

That mysterious membrane, zona pellucida, inspired the title of a multivalent performance by a Canadian team of artists, 2boys.tv. 2boys, Stephen Lawson and Aaron Pollard, played the New Conservatory Theatre Center, SF, the month of August. So rich, so layered, I wish I'd seen it more than once.
I'll tell you what I did see.



Yeowza honey! I can see your tonsils from here!

Yes, that's Stephen Lawson, lip-synch, drag performer extraordinaire lolling about in nurse's uniform, garters and hose while video plays upon her body and beyond. Lawson performs, mimes, moves; Aaron Pollard directs the audio and video which overlay and underplay, seamlessly weaving in and out of the live and cut-n-spliced performances of Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Bette Davis...



Here are men working with iconic women who performed characters written and directed by men, characters of women breaking up, breaking down, snapping and cracking, under pressure, under strain, twisted and tweaked. Lawson in perfect rhythm and syncopation, mouths the terrible lines, confusion and sorrow, with vintage gestures, shoes and clothes. Her nightmare phantom is man in drag too—zoömorphic drag: naked man with bear's head menacing in video. In a stunning bit of shadow play, Lawson interacts with the bear-man/bare-man video projection, her shadow another phantom figure on a flowing translucent veil.

It's all about the veil—the thin layer between what's real, imagined, projected, introjected—the thin layer that holds one together or is torn and everything comes tumbling out.

Screams, for instance. The same scream sequence played over and over. Over and over. And just when you think it's over, over again. It's over the top but not just camp, this is when it works, when it goes over the line and into that zone where it isn't sketch comedy, but the taut point where you finally see the thing, and it hurts. The agony in the ecstasy. Munch's Scream. You've seen it before. Then you see it.



I loved this performance, the intersections of methods of delivery: audio-visual, live-recorded, using the vernacular of drag, silent film, melodrama—and puppets. A choice portion was originally a shorter piece called Nanny (see it on the website.) Lawson, in a school-marmish black outfit, opens the curtains on a miniature puppet stage as simultaneously a video of the stage is projected on the curtains. Inside the video stage is a miniature Lawson who sings and dances while live Lawson takes another part, interacting with her. Split screen, split personality, the double, the twin, party girl and sister wound a little too tight. Mind you, this is all spliced audio and perfectly lip synched. It was seamless and riveting.





There's always been something wrong. Always, just as long as I can remember.



I'm guilty.
I'm guilty.
I'm guilty.



So does it all come down to biology? At least as metaphor. The male penetrates the female. Crossing the barrier, into that mysterious permeable zone, fusing and transforming, such is drag. Where does the man start and the woman (manufactured) begin? The heroines and victims of Tennessee Williams and Joseph Mankiewicz, mainstay fantasy images of what it is to be feminine: emotionally responsive, malleable, confused, expressive. Mainstay for a reason. Nothing better displays the torment of gender identity under conventional constraints. High heels and girdles. Nor the torment of love. That's timeless, the feeling of being under a spell, caught, no will of your own. A fool for love, heart on a string....I'm your puppet.

The Puppet Show

This reminds me that last month I was in LA and saw The Puppet Show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

"In a time when communication seems increasingly mediated and individual agency diminished, puppets abstract the dramas, mysteries, anxieties, and personas we might all project onto a shared stage," says the gallery notes. Yes. As a culture we are feeling jerked around and helpless.

27 artists showing—what I liked best were the video booths.

The twisted video tales by Nathalie Djurberg of Sweden, for instance. Madeline the Brave, a plasticine puppet princess on a garden swing, sweet with rabbits and squirrels, until you notice her rabid teeth.

And Doug Skinner and Michael Smith doing Doug and Mike's Adult Entertainment—no Saturday morning kiddie show this, just using the props and tropes of such to twisted devices. Doggie Do in the Vegetable Crisper. That's all that needs saying.



And Paul McCarthy as big-nosed clown painter bumbling around a claustrophobic set hauling massive paint tubes and then ... omg ... smashing his big bulbous thumb, over and over, with a meat cleaver—as only Paul McCarthy can do. Did I mention the tubes of paint are labeled "Flesh," "Shit," and "Black?" Black, of course.

Guy Ben-Ner made his penis into puppet singing karaoke to "Lipstick on Your Collar." Penis drag.

The video of Survival Research Lab's 2004 performance in LA of shock and awe destruction in some warehouse lot involving flame throwers, projectiles, animal-machine robots, fork lifts and smoke, sparks and noise, set my teeth on edge for the raging, screeching noise searing my ears through head phones. Awesome.

And Bruce Nauman's simple looped sequence of a man and woman assaulting one another. A Violent Incident happens around the dinner table. It's a knock out.

There were sculptures too. Louise Bourgeois'— a hanging piece made with fabrics and stuffing—was disturbing as old, memory-laden materials can be, especially when stuffed and shaped like penile appendages. And Kiki Smith's Nuit: cast arms and legs hung suspended just inches from the floor as though to touch it, somehow sadly. These I liked very much. But video was the thing—the puppet theme almost a strained excuse to showcase a wonderfully diverse array of video works showing mostly twisted scenes.

Video takes the cake.

But then... there was the Puppet Storage Room, an antechamber filled with marionettes, Balinese shadow puppets, hand puppets, dummies, etc., all behind chicken wire, all mute, 'cept Pee Wee Herman—well, not his puppet likeness but the real thing (the real persona thing, if you know what I mean) on a small screen cavorting in his playhouse! Pee Wee, the ultimate human puppet.




Biology pics courtesy of Wikipedia

Cast Off

When I went to see Bruce Conner's film, Easter Morning at the San Francisco Film Festival in early May, I didn't know he was ill. It was his producer who let on after the screening. This news gave further resonance to the film which is a reconstruction of an earlier effort—a resuscitation, like the title says, Easter Morning: new day, new life, resurrection. Shot in 1966, rediscovered, re-imagined, revived in 2008, it is a beautiful collage with light flickerings and shadows. Conner died July 7th.



This isn't the first time he's died. In 1959, only two years since arriving in San Francisco, he held a show by "the late Bruce Conner." The "stuffed lumps of cloth, the nylon and wax" (how he described his sculptures) were inert and dead to him. He needed to move on.

He also hated to be pinned down. So when he received yet another request for biographical information from Who's Who in America he wrote back that Bruce Conner had died, and sure enough, for the 1973 edition of the book, the editors added deceased to his entry.

Easter Morning was his 27th film. He was known best for his films, but he never claimed to be a filmmaker. But there is something about his films, because they opened doors for him, gave him a name.

I got a Ford Foundation grant for filmmaking. I got an application blank which I tore up and threw away because I decided it was a waste of time. That was '63. I talked to somebody else later who said, "Why don't you do it. I work at the Ford Foundation. Why don't you fill the thing out because it's sort of like a game." I decided I would play it as a game. I would play it like a dialogue between me and an invisible audience. I'm exposing myself telling them all of my history. My vaccinations. Explaining my whole theory of art and life and what I intend to do in the future. How I'm to use whatever alms they will give me. I started drawing parallels of this kind of activity with religious rituals. Confessionals, and ringing of bells, and doing penance in the streets. Fantasies of movies that I would make. It offered me a chance to fantasize. It was my opportunity to write in an entirely different context. I've never been able to write in the context of publication. I knew all the crap that you have to go through. You write it. You type it out. You make a bunch of copies. You send them out to all the magazines. Over the next two years you'll get the copies back. It's most disastrous. I've never been able to do that. This was a way for me to have an audience. I would write letters. Well they loved it. Somebody loved it. They gave me a film grant and all I had made was sixteen minutes of movies. And I didn't expect to get it because there were a lot of other filmmakers who were more qualified and should have gotten it. Like Stan Brakhage was the man who had most to do with me getting into filmmaking, and he didn't get one. He really should have.

With the Ford Foundation grant all of a sudden instead of being an artist that had made a couple of short films, I became a filmmaker who dabbled in the arts.

Nonetheless, he was an artist and what he was doing with film was what he did with anything: he rescued, recycled, reused, remade whatever he found. He collaged with images, collaged with film, collaged with stuff, detris, cast offs.

In San Francisco the trash was picked up by an organization called the Scavengers Protective Association. They went around the city with big trucks, gathering the trash by emptying the trash cans onto big flat burlap sheets. They would gather it up on their backs and dump it into the truck. Or, when the truck was full, they would hang them on the sides like big lumpy testicles. So they were using all the remnants, refuse, and outcasts of our society. The people themselves who were doing this were considered the lowest people employed in society... I decided, we'll have the RAT-BASTARD PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION: people who were making things with the detritus of society, who themselves were ostracized or alienated from full involvement with society.

Christ Casting Out the Legions of Devils, 1989.

This was in the 50s, early 60s when men still wore ties and women wore gloves. Conner was what you'd call unconventional.

Artists were using oil paint which I felt was a pretty limited medium for spontaneity; for using what was around for you. We figured you could use anything you wanted to. The main thing was to make it, to make the image. To make the thing that you were trying to do, and whether it fell apart or not was of secondary importance. In fact, for me it became of primary importance. It became a dialog of how you relate to objects. You have a choice of how you want to relate. If you want to, you can take assemblage or collage and seal it in a solid block of plastic. Or you don't. Time is working on it. Manuel Neri would make his sculptures of plaster on cardboard, corrugated cardboard. The first time they were shown at the San Francisco Museum a couple or three years later, they had to sweep up the floor underneath every day because the plaster would keep popping off.

Metronome (1961, reworked 1995) wrapped in nylons.

Nylons figure a lot in his assemblages. And the atomic bomb in his films...


A Movie, 1958, found footage.

... until he became known for these elements in his works. When he was identified with nylon stockings, assemblage, short films with historic footage... he'd quit. He stopped making assemblages in 1964, and film—he came back to film when he could come at it another way.

"How you relate to objects," is the nugget behind his work. I understand this. It is how I operate—responding, engaging, being in conversation with the things I come across. Like this—this trio of frames from Mea Culpa, one of the films he did in the 80s with David Byrne and Brian Eno. Here, these spot shots are recast in a different role.





Mea Culpa from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, 1981. There's also America is Waiting online.

You know there's more. This is just a taste. Luckily there are some films online and books now, retrospectives having been done. But this is the end frame. All good things must come to an end. Or do they? That's just a line. Conner knew that. All things can be reborn.





Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Interview with Bruce Conner by Paul Cummings in NYC 4/16/7.

Sculptures and collage at Paule Anglim Gallery, SF.

The Lotus Series: The Final Series

I feel as though the world is a friendly boy walking along in the sun. —Robert Rauschenberg

Less than two months before he died, Robert Rauschenberg's last series of prints were completed. They are the Lotus Series, a remembrance of and response to China, on view this summer at Greenfield Sacks Gallery, Santa Monica.

These very beautiful, light and bright prints are composed of photos Rauschenberg took on two extended stays in China in the 80s, first when he worked in the ancient Xuan Paper Mill, then later when he returned to Beijing to mount a ROCI exhibition.

ROCI is the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, a worldwide project Rauschenberg launched in 1984 in an effort to promote global peace and harmony. He believed that art can circumvent disparate political differences and function as a conduit of cultural understanding, nation to nation, artist to artist, person to person. Over the course of six years, ROCI mounted exhibitions of his and others' works, some of them collaborations, in eleven countries (many with political agendas at odds with those of the US) including Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, China, Japan, Cuba, the former USSR, former East Germany, Malaysia. During these continuing evolving exhibitions, Rauschenberg would submerge himself in the host country's culture.



Twenty years later, ill and nearing the end of his life, Rauschenberg reworked his photos of China into 12 inkjet photogravure prints. They are spare, simple affairs, mostly just four images juxtaposed with a recurring imprinted lotus blossom. In his usual work, his combines and prints, there is lots of overlapping simultaneous imagery—here there is less and white space—also the floating lotus. Hovering over and under images of street life: doors, billboards, banners, and bicycles; and cultural artifacts of another time: sculptures, the zodiac, temple tops—hovering around the 10,000 things of ordinary and perpetual life, is the lotus, throne of the Buddha, pure mind, bodhi.



It seems significant to me that in his last days, taking stock of a host of images of a country he was getting to know, looking over sights and signifiers of culture, of life, he'd work up this conversation between teeming activity and philosophical contemplation. At last it comes down to this: there is life, and out of life grows understanding; without life, no enlightenment. These are sweet and wise works of an extraordinary and generous man who loved life and was friendly to all its forms. Om Mani Padme Hum, a prayer for Robert Rauschenberg, RIP.



***
In a related way, I was reading an interview with Ai WeiWei in this month's Art in America in which he describes the underground nature of contemporary art in China in the 80s and 90s. China was only then being introduced, in a controlled way, to Western ideas, philosophies, and artistic concepts. This was the time when Rauschenberg held the ROCI exhibition in Beijing, 1985. What was inspired and exchanged in 85 was swiftly suppressed in 1989—the year the exhibit, China/Avant-Garde, in the National Gallery was shut down and when students were crushed in Tiananmen Square. It is easy to forget, at a distance, just what conditions were (and are currently) like under Communist control. It is difficult to comprehend the deep societal and cultural attenuation that results after an sustained era of oppression. Change, WeiWei says, comes slowly.

It's a very complicated issue because China is a nation that needs change. The change is inevitable, given that the old part is really rotten and cannot meet contemporary standards of usage or practice. The question is how to change things and to what degree and, after the change, who reaps the benefits? What is going to be damaged in the process?

This from the artist who drops a Han Dynasty vase. He knows something about holding on and letting go relics.



Like Rauschenberg, WeiWei believes in first-hand contact and exchange. As his contribution to Documenta 2007, he brought 1,001 Chinese people to the exhibition in Kassel.

My intention was to use art to directly affect people and groups who are not generally associated with art. I'm fascinated with individual consciousness, awareness, a new sense among the participants that possibilities exist in the spaces between different cultures. We essentially created a big space of freedom there. The work itself had no other formal determinants or goals. The whole purpose was to encourage people to use their imagination to act on their own. The "visitors" ranged in age from 2 and a half to 70 years old. Many of these people would never ordinarily have a chance to go outside China or even leave their province. There were many farmers, people from almost every profession, and from 20 or more different provinces. Their experience of Kassel and of this contemporary art event affected their lives deeply. They often write to me saying it has marked their whole life. Now they will look at the world and understand the world very differently; the visit continues to shape them.

So there you have it: Overseas Cultural Interchange = Art Saves. It's true.

A nicely informative page about Ai WeiWei can be found at Artsy.

Pic of Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn courtesy of Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art