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

Be All You Can Be

BCAM at LACMA (Broad Contemporary Art Museum at Los Angeles Country Museum of Art) was a great place to be on a hot-hot-hot, as in swelt-er-ing hot day. —Unseasonably hot? Depends on what season. We're in the season of climate melt-down and so, mid-April, it was hot hot hot in LA.

The Broad Museum is the newest addition to what they are now calling the LACMA complex. Like any complex, it is a messy conglomerate of seemingly unrelated constructions—but BCAM is beautiful. I like it. It takes the cake.



First, the building. Clean, yet textured, with a goofy flip of a roof line and a red exterior escalator that takes you to the third floor. Just like an IKEA building, you start your visit from the top. Architect Renzo Piano says "I love the idea of the escalator. It's part of the almost anthropological ritual of rising up slowly. You can just stand quietly. You have time to look around and to realize what you are doing, like levitaion." I'm not sure what he means by "anthropological ritual of rising up slowly." I'm afraid he means like evolution, walking on our knuckles, then standing up straight. I hope that's not what he means. But I do like the analogy of levitation. It does feel like that (like I know). No, I mean, it feels like a soft lift in mid-air because you are out in space as you rise slowly to the top level where the view is expansive: palm trees and hills in the distance, and behind you the big mother stone building with her embrace of creativity.

Ah yes. You enter and up there at the top are two flanking grand spaces—8,500 sq feet each—with glass ceilings, no columns. Wooosh, big airy space with floating walls. Oh yeah. The glass panelled ceiling lets in soft light bouncing off sun shades—those metal roof flips. The light is extraordinary.

There's a massive red metal and glass elevator between the two big rooms. Through the glass you see the 86 foot tall, red & black piece by Barbara Kruger, Shafted. Did I mention the exterior escalator is red? Red is the accent color, just the right red to go with the creamy stone walls. This is a good-looking building—and the art is good-looking in it.



Oh yeah, the art. There's been a lot of wanking in the press about the inaugural exhibition being just big-ticket heavy hitters, the "usual suspects." Well, ye-ah. The Broads are big-money collectors of big-price-tag art, so it seems to me, they built the space (which years down the line will have housed all sorts of interesting shows) so why not showcase their collection, or the best of their amazing, eye-popping collection of contemporary American art? I mean, really, get over yourself.

I for one was happy to sail around the commodious spaces, cooling off, and taking in the excellent works by Koons, Baldassari, Ruscha, Twombly, Kelly—no I'm not going to list them all. Let's say a museum's worth of sparkling works. But I did mention Kelly—the Ellsworth Kelly room was a revelation to me. I think it was about five works that only work in person. The effect was of such searing clarity and optical engagement the like of which I never expected. More than likely in another setting I passed his work on by. Here, the paintings fairly leapt off the wall—no, more that they bore colored space into them. Hard to explain. Had to be there. This is Blue Red from 1968.



I will mention the women artists in the exhibit, there being only four. There was a Jenny Holzer installation that involved quotations on stone slabs. I mentioned the Kruger in the elevator shaft. On the second floor there was a retrospective of Cindy Sherman, 49 pieces in all, looking very much the Victorian portrait gallery. And then there was one iconic, quietly beautiful painting by Susan Rothenberg, Blue Body.



Trivia: this Spring, Rothenberg is being recognized, with her husband (I didn't know they were married. What should I know who's married to whom, but it struck me, Wha-? Really?) Bruce Nauman, by the The Santa Fe Rotary Foundation For the Arts as Distinguished Artist of the Year 2008. It's an award that goes to local lights. I guess they live thereabouts. What you learn on the internet. Agnes Martin was one. She lived there. She was a Distinguished Artist for sure.

So BCAM. What else do I want to say? I want to say Damien Hirst. Damien Hirst, Damien Hirst. Damien Hirst's cold-blooded, sterilized, and cool—cool-cat cool—art ran to two rooms. Butterflies, pharmacology, botanics and Away From the Flock, the sheep in formaldehyde. I was cooling off; now I had the chills.



And Basquiat. I really liked seeing the choice selection of Basquiat—what I mean to say is, selection of choice Basquiat, including this skull which not only is in the color-scheme of this post, but could be considered his signature piece and here it is in the Broad Collection which exemplifies what a choice collection this is, but more, brings home the point that this collection is now public. The Broads gave $60 million to LACMA to build the museum along with an arrangement to show their incredible collection of works. Wow.

Outside the museum there were Robert Irwin's palm trees, Jeff Koons tulips, and Chris Burden's Urban Light, an installation of antique lamp posts he rescued and refurbished and set up in a grid, shoulder to shoulder like. As a work of public art it is a whimsical gift to the city—a memory, no, actual, literal pieces of her past retrofitted, reworked, reimagined as a focal point, an illumined gathering together of individual beacons of light to be a community of lights. It is a sweet and humble 21st Century, West Coast answer to the torch-bearing lady of the New York harbor.



What a gift. I say, Bravo all around.


*images, except the last, courtesy of LACMA and the The Broad Art Foundation.

Cake Walk 2007

Winners of this year's Art Show Cake Walk (a.k.a. my personal favorite art sightings of 2007)


More Barney! The Cremaster Cycle in it's entirety. Because you can never have enough Barney! (I know he believes this too, else his works wouldn't be so Big and Long, yah?) Since I hadn't ever seen them all, this was a real treat. (Thank you Red Vic Theatre.) Revisiting the endless car-crashing/smashing was good—like old friends so indelibly rubbed and rammed into my head (Cremaster 4.) But the motorcycle race (Cremaster 3) around the island, the yellow and blue, oh that was the best. Crawling up the entrails of the land. Oh he has tap danced his way deep into my heart.

An honorable mention goes to Matthew Barney: No Restraint the film by Alison Chernick that revealed just what was happening to Matthew and Bjork below the waist, below the surface, in his film Drawing Restraint. It was almost like being back there on the big whaling ship extending the Barney love-fest into a second year following on his residence at SFMoMA in 2006. We miss you Barney—oh 'tis true. A gold star for The Red Vic Theatre for showing great films.


Kate Garner show (at Varnish Gallery) of large loud photographs of UK club stars knocked me out. The portraits of Identitists (ID - identity artists) Leigh Bowery and Booby Tuesday (see pic) were super—superhuman—bigger than life, breathtaking. Besides for the bold makeup-mask-total body transformations, there was a cut up of bits and parts of the very image making the images dance on the page. What's real, what's not? I loved it.


A Rose Has No Teeth —Bruce Nauman's early work from the 60s at the Berkeley Art Museum was a great show. There was latex sculptures, neon, plates of steel, and video, such as Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square which was completely engaging. There was also his Performance Corridor a tight 20 inch wide, corridor constructed of plywood that you could walk down just like he did getting the experience of narrowness first not just second-hand.

And then, speaking of second-hand, there were old works reworked into new works: stills of his face-pulling videos now self-portraits, second-hand. (Infrared Outtakes: Neck Pull, Opened Eye, Cockeye Lips, Hands Only, (photographed by Jack Fulton), 1968/2006)
There's something so marvelous about these rough-and-ready works, so stripped down and direct. It's been how many years now, and still they leave bite marks.



Zidane: A Twentieth Century Portrait It was after the World Cup, so I actually knew who Zidane was before seeing this incredible film by Douglas Gorgon and Philippe Parreno made using multiple cameras located all around the field. I loved the slowed motion, the repetition, the use of film not as narration but revelation.




Speaking of revelation, getting to see a Marilyn Minter in person made me ecstatic. I missed her big show at SFMoMA in 2005 being out of the country (a good excuse if there is one), so I was happy to see the piece—Strut— the museum acquired. Her painting of a bejeweled high heeled slipper is just exquisite in a romantic Cinderella sort of way. This is the flipside of Zidane, painting that is sharp, cinematic and wryly narrative.




Berkeley Art Museum hosted new work by Abbas Kiarostami other than his incredible, moving, spare feature films. His still photos of trees and rain and hillsides are like the best of his filmmaking—the presence of the land, the elements, the living breathing non-human. Pacific Film Archive then took the cake by showing Five his sequence of five short films of a seaside: stationary camera, single shot, lean; a steady gaze on what happens in a space and within a time frame. There was nothing so thrilling as sitting in a theater watching a black screen listening to a frog sing. A black screen. Not for a few seconds, but for as long as it took. This man is a powerful visionary.

Best Of Lists are sort of boring mostly—things I've seen and liked, things you might not have seen, so what? But don't you like the way these pictures go together? The wild hair-headdress/face mutilation thing going on in the first two, the gritty men's faces, the leaning feet n trees, rain n mud-? I did it on purpose. Now it's not so boring.

Hands & Feet, Standing & Falling

In the installation by Douglas Gordon at SFMoMa, Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now. To be seen on monitors, some with headphones, others run silently, and all simultaneously, there is a video of a hand, palm forward, abruptly coming at the camera, again and again. There are a lot of hands in Gordon's works, but this one reminded me directly of Bruce Nauman's piece of himself bouncing into a corner. I saw that one installed in the basement of the Berlin contemporary art museum Hamburger Bahnhof as part of the Flick Collection. [see photos above] Nauman falls back into a corner and bounces back upright and then into the corner again; again and again. Gordon is obviously, probably, most likely—why not—influenced by Nauman's early work, straightforward videos documenting performance. Maybe it doesn't matter if he were influenced or not, but more to the point they are in the same conversation of repetitive movement, the body, the gesture, on film. They could be in the same room, falling and bouncing and turning and gesturing, simultaneously together as they are in my head.



In the Bahnhof basement there was also Nauman's video of himself slathering himself black. Remember Gordon's piece, The right hand doesn't care what the left hand isn't doing? His hands are lathered in shaving cream and one hand shaves the other.


Displayed side by side, Nauman's films showed the continuity of the artist's body as work in much the same way as this installation of some 50 of Gordon's works in one dark room wove together, reflected and conversed together, a new whole that is the artist's body of work, work using body, movement, expression. I wonder if he was surprised, looking over these individual pieces done over the last 15 years, to see how repetition in one reflected the same movement in another? How they danced so well together, the shell-shocked man falling, the elephant falling, the hands gesturing, the hands and eyes opening, closing? It was beautifully choreographed as though on purpose which just goes to show the purposefulness of a person's being, of an artist's perspective, that streams through her life-work, the hidden intention.