Conversations

Artists in conversation. Video to video. Picture to picture.

At Queen's Nails Projects, SF—an off-site extension of the California Biennial 2008 this year curated by LAXART—Kelly Barrie's video Astral Fields faced Mary Kelly's Antepartum.



Antepartum is a Super 8 film, 1:30 minutes long, made in 1973 of Kelly Barrie in utro-in the belly-moving hidden in the full-term pregnant belly of his mother, Mary Kelly.

Astral Fields is a digital video, 1:30 minutes long, made by subject-turned-artist, Kelly Barrie in 2008. Animating a series of photographs of himself in a spray of flour and light, he mimics the gesture of the earlier piece. In both films, Barrie is the subject—floating in uterine space, or in a semblance of astral space. A turn within a turn, worlds within worlds. Mother and child, child to mother. A slight gesture, almost a wave, between artwork and artwork.


Still images into. . .


moving, twirling film.

Mary Kelly's work ponders the question of identity. I suggest above that Barrie is the subject of the film. But the film is also a self-portrait of the artist. Barrie's responding-corresponding film seems to suggest his work/identity lies within his mother's sphere. Here is generational history, artistic legacy, looping forever belly to belly, face to face. Just how it is: the nature of the cosmos is interrelated, self-reflective, integral.

Vegas Video

Another video conversation is happening over at SFMOMA. Double Down:Two Visions of Las Vegas pairs video projects by Olivo Barbieri and Stephen Dean. I'm not really sure why Las Vegas, other than the coincidence that these two recently made works exist. Las Vegas is so strange it is always a good subject and of course artists will approach the same subject differently.

Barbieri was "tired of the idea of photography allowing you to see everything" so took to taking arial photographs with a tilt-focus lens. The tilt allows him to choose what is in focus in a sort of plane of clarity, the rest rendered blurred. The result is a strange distortion of wide swaths of land, cities rendered into tiny toy landscapes. It is very odd. The world becomes a model world. The photographer on high, the world below strangely miniature, plastic, silly. It is certainly god's point of view—the view from eternity—humanity's hubris diminished.


The effect is clearly seen here in a photo of the Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA.

In a series called Site Specific he's been to Rome, Amman, LA, and Shanghai to make photographs and films using the tilt focus lens.



Site Specific_LAS VEGAS 05 is single channel video with audio, 13 minutes long. Sweeping across the desert and up and around the parking lots and fantasy buildings of Las Vegas is like a tour of a train set—tiny buildings, even tinier people and cars. The weird focus makes the ride a bit nauseating and it is with some relief it ends and the screen goes blank.



One film ends and the other begins. You swirl around on the bench [yay! a bench! What is it with video installations with no seating?] and the opposite wall fills with colored squares.



Stephen Dean closes in on his subject and picks up on patterns. In Las Vegas he focused on neon, those huge banks of lights and panels blinking, changing colors. Soon silhouettes appear: men on cranes come to fix the lights. The film is nearly an abstraction of shapes and colors accompanied by the cacophony of electronic slot machines, bells, talking, clanging—the ubiquitous, omnipresent noise of the casino. Barbieri takes you up and above; Dean takes you close in. Why is it called No More Bets? That's the call before the wheel spins or the dice is thrown. The high stakes moment. Win or lose. Hold your breath, this is what gambling is all about, that moment, the chance moment. And these are the lights and sounds that frame that moment like all the drums and horns, flames and firecrackers that accompany divinations and trance.



Unlike Barrie and Kelly, Barbieri and Dean's films complement each other, but don't really converse. Their pairing was a curatorial coupling augmented by screenings of Viva Las Vegas and Showgirls.

And Yet Another Conversation


Conversation 1. Mr. Davis said, "I'm feeling really weird," recalled his wife, Pebbles. The two lay down for a nap and when she woke up, her husband was dead.

To tie all themes together: Conversations happens to be the title of a series I've done in collaboration with Alanna Simone. . . my daughter. We mingled and paired photographs creating diptychs, double visions sometimes, or complementary. Then, using a chance technique, we titled them with fragments of news. The whole process a mingling of memories, responses, and by creating one work, a merging of identity—which you kind of can't get around when you're family. Next stop, curiously enough, is Las Vegas.


Conversation 3. Grandpa always wanted to visit the Soviet Union.


Barbieri's Long Beach photo courtesy of Metropolis Magazine.

Conscious Yet Slight

I passed a chunk of concrete on the sidewalk. It was a chunk of concrete. I remembered how in the gallery, inside the two plastic pots was a chunk of concrete. This was an artwork.
Don't you love art?!
It is a beautiful thing.

I saw this artwork by Bill Jenkins at Jancar Jones Gallery (SF), a special set-aside place for having special art moments. You don't need a password to enter the gallery, but you do have to wait at the gate of the building to be let in. The reward is at the end of the meandering hall and up the stairs in a small—no, tiny is the word—space the size of my bathroom. Yes, tiny is the word. But once there, in this demure space, there is work that gives you pause, the way only minimal art can.

A plastic refrigerator jug one third filled with—what are they? pebbles? (paper maché)
A slab, a slab, two plastic pots, and a chunk of concrete.
And hung on the wall, a coated-wire frame with painted styrofoam bricks.

The plastic jug sat on the floor. I bent over to peer in it.



The slab stack was on the floor too, but somehow it seemed less humble, more reverential. I am reminded of Wolfgang Laib, only not the exquisite intensity of pollen or the purity of milk. Here the dusty cast-off stacked just so created the resonant effect.



Making something out of nothing much.

And the gallery, making space. From the website: "The gallery was opened in February 2008, by Eric Renehan Jones and Ava Jancar. The aim was to create a space in which the gestures of the conscious yet slight could be appreciated." Gestures of the conscious yet slight—lovely phrase, that.

I love minimal art. It gets me every time. Especially minimal art made of humble materials. Like a good koan, it takes you out of yourself and the hoo-ha of purposefulness and busyness and pops you right back directly into wonder, where all good things are.

Today, online, searching for Catherine Yass (and her video of the Wall), I came across these:


1970.


1982

Ceramic pieces by Hannah Wilkes. Ceramics is a medium that takes the gestural and freezes it—well, fires it, like taking a photograph of a wave. These are so wonderful, I just had to throw them into the mix.

Over at Haines Gallery I had another zen/art moment. Bill Fontana who works in the visually minimal, invisible medium of sound showed a new work, Silent Echoes, which includes video—albeit a moving picture without movement. Here's the thing: Fontana works with sound, like the Sound Landscape he made with speakers buried in a park in Vienna or Sound Sculptures Through the Golden Gate, a live duet of sounds from the Farallon Islands and the Golden Gate Bridge that was transmitted to the façade of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He finds sound, takes it and relocates it.

At Haines, he brought in the sounds he found resonating within massive bells hanging at various Buddhist temples in Japan.


This is the bell of Chionin, Kyoto.


And Ohara, Kyoto.

The bells reverberate with sound even when not struck. With accelerometers attached to the metal and acoustic microphones suspended in the interior he was able to capture reverberations of the seemingly silent bells. He also filmed them, recording the seemingly still, motionless bells. They appear to be not moving, not responding, and yet they are, and the sonorous waves of reverberation fill and hum around the room. It is the sound of bells breathing. A conscious yet slight meditative work. Graciously the gallery provided a bench to better sit with the experience of it.


Hannah Wilkes photos courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery, London.

Please Read This

The Fan: Damien Hirst on Francis Bacon

I think Bacon is one of the greatest painters of all time. He's up there with Goya, Soutine and Van Gogh: dirty painters who wrestle with the dark stuff. He's complicated. It's not essentially about formal skill or technique or dexterity. It's about belief. I believe! And the struggle, the sense that you somehow grunt your way though it by sheer will. That's what's inspiring to me, alongside the sheer bravery of confronting the dark side, the shadows, the full force of the human psyche.

If you compare him to Lucien Freud, say, it's obvious that Freud is the more technically accomplished painter. He can read what he sees, and render it. Bacon couldn't do that. If you look at the feet in his paintings, they're bloody awful. He can't do boots. [Laughs] But it's so bloody powerful. His work always veers into the imagination. There's always this raw, dark power, this visceral energy that is compelling. The paint is alive.

Great art comes from nowhere. In a way, I think Bacon said "fuck off" to what went before. He didn't go the traditional route that the great painters went. He didn't have the patience to be like Velasquez or Ingres or whoever. He used to look to these guys, but he just didn't have the patience to be like them and do what they did. He painted from photographs, he stuck bits of corduroy in there, bits of glass, whatever it took to get there.

He talked about the brutality of fact. It's incredibly brave to take that on, to face up to the horror and stare it down. Over and over. I mean, I've made maybe four good pieces and the rest are, you know, sort of happy. He wasn't like that. He was his own worst and best critic. He pushed himself to the edge every time. They give you the shivers, his best paintings. He looks into the room that no one wants to look in. He looks in the mirror and he sees meat. He shuns tenderness. He wants to sleep on a hard bed. I think he saw the brutality early on and he decided to take it on.

I saw him a few times in the Colony but I avoided him, because he was my hero. And I saw him be cruel and abusive to people around him. He was a bad drunk. He was wrestling with the darkness all the time. The idea of putting yourself into your art is a weird one. It makes for a hard life. The fears, the dread, the hopes even; you have to stand naked. I once made this work called Standing Alone on the Precipice and Overlooking the Arctic Wastelands of Pure Terror. It's from a book I read. I actually think Bacon lived like that. There's a nasty, angsty, brutish edge to his work that is somehow about the nasty comedown side of things, the horrific hangover, the psychic fallout of the heavy drinking, the shadowy things you glimpse at the edge of your vision, the existential terror. It's like you can surround yourself with things that give you comfort or you can live an animalistic life. He chose the latter, leaving his animal tracks in the snow.

I went around to his studio one night when I was on the charlie [cocaine]. John Edwards took me around. John was really upset about his death and we were all off our heads, but you could feel this huge presence. And this huge absence. It was palpable.

I was obsessed with him as a young painter. I was into punk and I was into Bacon. He was out there on his own. You had the Surrealists, the Impressionists, the Pointillists and all the other ists, and you had Bacon. I gave up painting at 15 because of him. I was just doing bad Bacons. I saw his work and I stopped wanting to be a painter. I stepped aside into sculpture. I've gone back lately, though. For the last two years I've been in the shed slapping paint on canvas. Big and small paintings. Skulls, crows, tryptichs. Dark blue. Baconesque. He's a supreme colourist. Beautiful colours. He seduces you with colour.

I have five Bacons now. They'll end up in the Manor [Hirst's country estate in Toddington]. I have one on the wall by the TV. I watch it more than I watch the TV. You can't not look at it. It demands your attention, pulls you in. It's just unbelievable to me that I own them.

He popped into the Saatchi once to look at my work. They called me and said, 'Bacon's been in, he was here for about an hour.' I didn't really believe them but then here's this letter he wrote to Louis Le Brocquy, the Irish painter, where he says, 'I saw this Hirst fly piece and it really worked.' I still can't quite believe it.

From an interview by Sean O'Hagan
The Guardian Observer, Sunday August 10 2008
guardian.co.uk

Francis Bacon Retrospective at Tate Britain until January 4, 2009. (It goes to Madrid's Prado from February 3 to April 19, 2009 and then to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 18-August 16, 2009. The question is, Where will I see it?

Waste Not, Want Not

This, that, and the other led to the an online encounter with my new fav-o-rite photographer, Chris Jordan.

My discovery coincided with the announcement of the winner of the Prix Pictet, a new global prize celebrating the work of both professional and amateur photographers. Awarded last week in Paris, the Prix Pictet is the first competition of its type to focus on the global issue of sustainability—this year in particular, on water. The winner of 100,000 Swiss francs ($86,000) is the Canadian photographer Benoit Aquim whose photos of the desertification of China are truly disturbing.





Strange other-worldly landscape reflecting the dryness of spirit at the core of China...

But this entry is about Chris Jordan, an American photographer whose series of photos of post-Katrina waste were also entered into the competition. He was on the short list along with 16 others, but there was only one prize. He calls his series, Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster and his artist's statement reads like an indictment.

There is evidence to suggest that Katrina was not an entirely natural event like an earthquake or tsunami. The 2005 hurricane season’s extraordinary severity can be linked to global warming, which America contributes to in disproportionate measure through our extravagant consumer and industrial practices.



Never before have the cumulative effects of our consumerism become so powerfully focused into a visible form, like the sun’s rays narrowed through a magnifying glass. Almost 300,000 Americans lost everything they owned in the Katrina disaster. The question in my mind is whether we are all responsible in some degree. The hurricane’s damage has been further amplified by other human causes, including failures of preparedness and response on many levels; existing poverty conditions; levee problems that were mired in political maneuverings; poor environmental and wetlands practices that left some areas more vulnerable; and the conspicuous absence of federal resources that were already being used in the Bush Administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Isn't this an incredibly sad, poignant photo? Like someone strung up.

Waste

Waste has been his main theme and he finds it everywhere.


Mixed Recycling, Seattle.

In 2003 he started taking pictures around shipyards and waste stations drawn in by the scale and strange beauty of the collected detritus of our voracious consumer society. "The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful." What he says is true. The piles of sorted waste—cell phones, bottles, canisters, cars—make puzzling viewing.


Circuit Boards, Atlanta.

The series, 2003-2005, is called Intolerable Beauty.

"Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits."

And so his work becomes a cause, a moral undertaking; his photos a revelation. What we toss comes back to haunt us—on the gulf stream, on the tide. There's no getting away from the vast emptiness we try to fill—admonished by our president even to buy more, drill more, manufacture more. It is painful to see, astonishing, and certainly intolerable.


E Waste, New Orleans

But here's what's hopeful: the waste, our waste (own it!), is sorted, organized, contained. That's partly what is astonishing—and charming, in a twisted way— in these pictures, the arrangements are aesthetic. And isn't creating order out of chaos the first step towards knowing what to do with it? I'm going to believe in the reality of these pictures, the excess, and in the possibility of reduction as well as transformation—and I don't mean turning trash into art. I'm going to continue to believe in the power of art to reveal and to make connections. Buy first, pay later. It's time. It is very obviously time to pay up.


Crushed Cars, Tacoma.

Chris Jordan didn't win the prize, but he takes the cake.


Container Yard #1, Seattle

Heartland/Wasteland

The Dutch have been thinking about the Midwest. The US Midwest. In collaboration with the Smart Museum of the University of Chicago, the Van Abbemuseum (in Eindhoven, Netherlands) has created an introduction to the art of "an unknown part of a well-known country." Heartland features works by artists and institutions of the region either side of the Mississippi River.



I love the idea of tapping into what's happening in the middle—for there surely must be art happening in places between the coasts—but isn't it interesting that from the get-go we're seeing from the outside in? I mean, only an outsider would consider the length of the Mississippi a region to itself. An American looking at the map instinctively knows Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, that's the South. Culture doesn't really follow the river, but the flow of history.



The midwest map of the US Census Bureau shows the demarcation lines fall more horizontally: the heartland is wide. The South is the nether land, and it ain't Dutch.

Am I quibbiling? Just a little. It seems good though to remember the framework a story is told through. Let's not forget the impact the Dutch had in helping define the mercantile character of this country.

But hey, speaking of the story, one of the projects presented fits right in on the trip down the mighty Mississippi. Miss Rockaway Armada is an ongoing collaborative art project involving handmade rafts and boats carrying artists and performers from Minneapolis to New Orleans.



Floating down the Mississippi River on a boat we built from trash.



It's sort of Black Rock City on water, bringing utopian wackiness to the staid residents of the midwest. Sort of like feeding the masses... The missionary aspect of the project disturbs me a little, but the boats are so wonderful. And everybody seems to be having a right good time.



On the other end of the spectrum, Heartlands introduced me to the work of Scott Hocking— incredible photos of the decay of Detroit and beautiful installations, a ziggurat of bricks in an abandoned factory, a midden of rusty trash. This is melancholic work, dealing with cultural and material detritus, echoing the scale and weight of Anselm Keifer.





Also new to me is Dutch-American video artist Julika Rudelius. Her staged short films have people from various socio-economic strata talking, musing on values and mores. This still is from Forever, 16 minutes, a 2 track film of upscale women talking about happiness. Priceless. In other films, ordinary people talk about wealth (and poverty), race, relationship—all the essential things.



Deb Sokolow, an artist from Chicago, likewise does wry portrayals of people and their wiley ways. She portrays them in drawings with narrative text, drawings that are sometimes installations lining the walls (or drawn on the walls) of a space. The reader follows the story around the room, labyrinth-like, sometimes following a dotted line down one way or another. In Eindhoven, her installation, Dear Trusted Associate, is nearly 50 feet long. She says, "Generally speaking, the piece involves a story about the CIA, petroleum, an email spammer from Nigeria, and the Chicago 'organization'."



Jaimie Warren, from Kansas City, is a young photographer of the docu-everything-especially-the-mundane-and-personal variety. I'm not complaining. There's just so many parties you can go to, that's all. But still, there is a necessary and valuable place for her kind of documentation of the everyday, especially the everyday of a place I may not ever go to but where people live and breed and vote.

So I go all the (virtual) way to the Netherlands to get a glimpse of the mid-lands. And this is one of the things I see there.




Miss Rockaway Armada pics courtesy of their blog. Many more pictures on their Flicker album.

At the de Young

Dropping in at the de Young to see prints by Martin Puryear...

I came across an early assemblage by Mark di Suvero. So here's another of his works to add to the list.



Oh my. The room seemed barely wide enough for this piece, I couldn't back up far enough to get the whole thing in the picture. It's a baby sculpture compared to his later works, but still big—a conglomerate of tree trunk, phone pole, 2x4, and tire. The space certainly couldn't contain the energetics of this unwieldy, yet strangely balanced almost anthropomorphic work. It needs far more space around it and nothing—no Sam Francis nor Diebenkorn—on the walls. And yet, despite the cramped quarters, or maybe even because of them, the parts seemed especially heavy and the the magic of the work even more mysterious. How does it hold up? I mean the tree trunk is massive.

One of the parts I loved best was the 2x4 joined to the telephone pole with steel plate and rivets.



About those rivets...

What is so stark about the piece is that there is all of the work that happened with riveting—that was a special way of joining steel before welding was invented. People built beautiful things then that mostly ended up in the scrap pile. Riveting was a way of handling the hot iron, the rivets themselves, and I find the pieces beautiful because of that. Those forms are part of an industrial landscape that had been dismissed.

He's talking about another work, Yes! For Lady Day, which is all steel, but the rivets are the same.

Di Suvero elsewhere talks about wood joints.

...I started using the wood that they tore out of these hundred-year-old buildings and they made giant fires out of them down on Water Street. I could see the skyscrapers dancing through the fire. I used the wood because I knew how to join it together. All of those structures in the first show I did in less than six months, and then my back got broken because I was doing a job that paid the rent. The real part of the work is the joinery, which is invisible, and a lot of that hasn’t survived because they’ve been taken apart and put together too often, and they weren’t made for that. Since then I’ve developed a more complicated kind of joinery, which allows for many parts coming together and yet looks very simple. But part of the beauty of learning and loving the technique is that you make something very difficult look easy, like Bach. (Laughs)

.


Well, this work does not look simple to me. How the parts balance is very strange—like a hidden power is streaming in the steel—an animal power, brute strength. I think of the Hulk. I'm waiting for the parts to be flung through the air.



What I love about di Suvero is his engagement with the materials and tools—the craftsmanship of working with iron, steel, wood. And he is hands-on, especially with his early works like this one at the de Young. You can imagine him constructing the base and then hoisting the wood, cranking it up by hand even.

You know, if you stop being explorative, you may as well stop making art altogether. I had to change from working in wood, where you need your body to work through, to steel where there is equipment. By moving into that, the constructive part of my work became much more dominate. I ended up learning how to run a crane, and buying one with a grant that the National Humanities for the Arts gave me. Manuel [Neri] bought a church, I bought a dead crane, and learned how to fix cranes. But then you change, you change once you have a different set of tools, and the tools really determine how far you can go.

How far, how big, how grand. Yes.

Another unexpected sighting at the de Young was a sculpture by Bruce Conner which I wrote about in my remembrance of him in July. Encased in a pristine vitrine is Snore, his homage to the dump truck made of wood boards and cloth remnants wrapped in nylons and hung with testicular bags of cotton stuffing. It was great to see it in the flesh, as it were. It is fleshy. Fleshy and soft, and how like all things fleshy and soft (except for art encased in museum glass cases) eventually ending up on the dump heap. Not melancholic, nor morbid, I think Connor was truly honoring the ending-up of things. So there it is, the end-up, an icon in the church of art. How right. Just so.





And then, after all, there were the etchings by Martin Puryear.





I look at Puryear's sculptural forms—dark shapes or these see-through vessels—and I think of Richard Serra's massive slab prints. I'm not sure why, but sculptural ideas seem to translate more readily into prints than painting or drawing. Perhaps it is the machine intermediary. These prints are sculptures on paper.

These two, Untitled, State I, State II are 35 x 28 inches large. Not only do they resemble alchemical vessels, but the act of producing them is alchemical. Besides the chemicals and tar, there are the calculated steps to the procedure leading to stages of transformation, states of being. Spare and mysterious, they are forms which point to something else unnamed, hermetic yet resonant. Really beautiful.


First quote from interview with Jan Garden Castro inSculpture Magazine.
Other quotes from interview with John Yau of the Brooklyn Rail.
Puryear pics courtesy of Barbara Krakow Gallery.

Postscript Opie

In April I wrote a piece that included some ruminations about Catherine Opie's new portraits of football players showing at Regen Projects, LA. I wasn't completely enthralled by them, felt something missing.

Recently I read this bit of explanation in a NY Times review by Hilarie M. Sheets of Opie's mid-career survey taking place now at the Guggenheim Museum.

Another current project is photographing high-school football players around the country. Rather than snapping the perfect catch or play, she chooses moments in between the action on the field, capturing the American cultural landscape from a different angle. “I’m very empathic to the construction of masculinity within our culture and how we build these identities up,” Ms. Opie said. She pointed out that [her son] Oliver’s father, Mr. Hill, had been the 6-foot-4-inch teenage gay boy with the football coach father. The political and personal are inextricably linked for Ms. Opie.

“At first I had the little boy who wanted to wear the pink tutu and dress up,” she said. “Because he’s not in a traditional household with a football coach dad, he was never ashamed. Now I have a 6-year-old who only wants to play Pokémon and kill aliens on the Xbox.”

She hasn’t decided which she likes better. “He’s now very aware of the social structure of masculinity,” she said. “He’s trying it on and seeing what it feels like.”

I still feel the football series is weak, distant, but I applaud the effort to capture the build-up, like clay on an armature, of the "social structure of masculinity." It is an elusive thing, to catch its effect on consciousness—an imprint on flesh, as it were, the buckling on of body armor: knee pads, face guards, or lipstick on little girls. Perhaps because personal social construct is hard to define, let alone pin down, it demands intimacy. And, I suppose, persistence. It won't be long, Oliver will be in High School.


Photo of Oliver in tutu courtesy of Regen Projects.