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It's a suspect term and out of date it seems to me, unless there are visions or utopias involved.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."

Strange Light

This is Steven Cohen, performance artist.

Not just your usual gender-bending monster-mime drag queen clown.

No. Nor your ordinary homo-probe, eros-busting, crazy-assed Jewish shaman-priest. With a prosthetic leg. Or horn feet even.

No. This is Steven Cohen, performance artist, out of South Africa.
Didn't expect that, huh? I didn't either which says something about my own assumptions about what comes out of Africa. The fiercely bent alphabet and ferociously queer vocabulary that might peg him as Californian, say, still makes perfectly good sense for a white gay Jewish South African artist with drama queen pretensions. This is the ground he dances on; this the culturally complicated, politically implicated land he grew out of and belongs to. Denying history and denying the present to say his too isn't the face, a face of South Africa.

So. I went to see Test Patterns: Recent Video from South Africa at SF Camerawork. Steven Cohen's video, Chandelier, stood out—got me by the balls as it were—and not just because I like men in hose. No, this film, this performance, goes beyond the personal into the politically powerful and ricochets.

Seems to me, performance art is made with a certain amount—or a lot—of personal courage. Especially if the artist is doing particularly intimate material. And more so if the material is outrageous, which by definition is contrary and provocative and inspires outrage—then you never know what's going to happen. That's where Cohen likes to go. Ratcheting it up a notch, he goes off-stage, outside the gallery, into "art-unlikely" spaces, as he calls them.

In his list of past performances there are these which speak for themselves.

Jew at the Mall - Rosebank Mall and Mutual Square, Johannesburg
Ugly Girl at Rugby - SA vs Wales, Loftus Versveld, Pretoria
Crawling to register - Independent Electoral Commission, Johannesburg
Limping into the African Renaissance - public road, Sigangeni, Swaziland

And then in 2001 he did Chandelier - intervention at demolition of squatter camp, Newtown.



About these interventions into everyday surroundings Cohen says, "People of the outside step right into the work. They can change the choreography (deny access or 'come this way') and they can change the plot (yell and shout, hit, call the police)." This is in South Africa, mind you, where everyday surroundings include areas of abject poverty—just outside your studio door.

The story goes, Cohen had been working for some time on refashioning a wrought iron chandelier into a wearable tutu. When the piece was compete he decided to premier it in the neighborhood of his studio. So costumed in chandelier and hose, made up and twinkling with lights, he walked out on stacked platform heels down the underpass squatter lanes, camera trailing. As chance would have it, his inaugural presentation coincided with a government action—crews had been sent out to evict the residents and demolish their board and tarp homes.

Chandelier documents this most extraordinary collision, a synchronistic convergence of histories and meanings. The humble people of the squatter camp seem bemused and befuddled by the pale stranger, a statuesque apparition for sure, come turning, teetering, and gingerly stepping through the mud and debris. A woman steps up and curtsies; another holds back an agitated angry man wielding a fighting club. In his re-constituted emblem of higher living—the crystal chandelier—and his very skin, white, which together speak of colonialism and rank he towers over the field of residents, and yet he walks on fetish platforms in near nakedness, completely upending his gender position. One man, tweaked by this specific aspect, pushes forward. He's got Hustler magazine in hand. He gestures animatedly, "Same, same!" Cohen wearily sits down. The man flips excitedly through the pages, he opens the centerfold, waves it around, shows the camera, smiling. It's got to be one of the weirdest, most uncomfortable art-meets-real life encounters I've seen. Little black man grinning, he's got the white pussy shot and the girl-boy right there in the flesh, right there in the mud and mess of a sanitation-less encampment of apartheid refugees.

When the orange-clad workers enter the scene demolishing the ramshackle dwellings with crowbars, the performance turns from bizarre to deeply disturbing. Even as Cohen raises his arms in some fashion of supplication, there is nothing really but dull dejection in the act. People sit in the rubble waiting out the destruction. Ruination is everywhere. The chandelier is a light in the descending dusk. But there's one more thing. I haven't mentioned the Star of David painted on his head. There's plenty of time, as Cohen steps and stumbles through the wreckage, to consider the implications, to allow the host of associations to come to mind—the pillage and devastation the star has seen. History repeats itself.

It is difficult for me to dare to speak but even harder to keep quiet. And making these secrets public is to enter in a very dangerous relationship of confidence. Dancing up to our own limits, in the heart of contradictory forces, memory and imagination, the personal and the public mingle. I evoke our pride and shame about who we are, genocide and hope, fascination and reality, the macabre and the everyday. I am a Jew and an anti-Zionist. My works deals with the pain of being human and the joy of living and, as our lives are, this work is a complete and incomplete experimentation.

Powerful work. I love it. Steven Cohen does the dance and takes the cake.


Chandelier photos by John Hogg from Paris Autumn Festival and NYTimes.

Seeing is Believing

Just as painters from the 16th century onward (Titian, Rembrandt, Fragonard, Turner, Cézanne, and de Kooning, to name a few) began to foreground their medium and make it almost as much a subject of their pictures as what the painting nominally represented, photographers, over the course of the last 50 years [—] have been doing the same.

Reading this in an article by Peter Plagens in Art in America (Feb. 09) about the Met's exhibition Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography, made me think immediately of things said last night by Nathaniel Dorsky about his films screened at SFMoMA.


Still from Sarabande, 2008, 16mm, silent, 15 min.

Dorsky creates gem-like short, silent films of collaged takes of iridescent flickerings, shadows, and light. In his films, he says, the screen is a leading character. He emphasizes his preferred stock—16mm Kodachrome, and specifically its lower register of color. He says he's not interested in still photography—even if many of his sequences would be stunning still photos. He likens his work with film to painting.

He is dogmatic about his approach—in the old sense of the word dogma, a symbol of truth. His assertion seems to bristle people in the audience, but it is a positive affirmation of himself, the truth of himself. That he stands behind himself and the unique output that is a result of his own eye, hand, effort must seem an affront to those less self-contained... I don't know. It only bothers me when he suggests to do otherwise is to make rot. I think the word he used was poison. One man's poison is another man's drink. And as for the rest of us...


also from Sarabande

The photos in the Met's show are concerned with another truth. The exhibit tracks the evaporation of the belief in photography's ability to represent reality through the work of 17 photographers who mess with our assumptions. At issue here is Is it real?


This is from Hilter Moves East (1975, Gelatin silver print) by David Levinthal. These are little toy Nazis, but the effect is real. We know the long-standing discontent about Robert Capa's photo of the soldier shot in the Spanish Civil War. This step further into verisimilitude turns the question upside down.

Dorsky says he isn't a great thinker. His films don't come from ideas; are not about film as an idea, but film as an experience.

The rule was that photographs possess enough veracity to, upon occasion, help find people criminally guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and send them to prison. The 'truth' that a photograph represents (i.e., re-presents, presents again), its direct physical relationship to something that actually existed, can still make me weak in the knees. I tear up at certain 19th century photographs. My god, I think, those people picnicking at that lake, looking like living, breathing souls, walked the earth a century and a half ago. And then, today, there are photographs of ice on Mars, I get breathless looking at them.—Peter Plagens

Weak at the knees, breathless, that's the experience of watching a Dorsky film. What surprises me is that no one in the crowd gasps out loud, no one sighs in wonder. It may be a cultural thing, but here in a packed theater in California, everyone participates in the silence that holds the light. For 20 some minutes everyone interacts with the screen, taking in its truth, glorying in its veracity.

Dorsky's films are saving grace. See them when you can.


Levinthal photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Stills from Sarabande courtesy of The Auteurs recent interview with Dorsky and from Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Solo, So Very Fine

I ducked in out of the rain and into the Jonathan Solo show at Catharine Clark Gallery, SF.

Like walking into a white cloud, not exactly diversity-heaven, but diversity dream, an alternate dream world where anything is possible.



I say white cloud because these precious, precise, hand-drawn images are placed in vast vacant spaces of cream paper—a lot of light and space around these extraordinary drawings, even more so hanging in this white and bright gallery space. With the background context blanked out, there's nothing to do but contemplate the particulars carried on the face, on the body of the subject. A picture says a thousand words goes the adage. This is just how it feels when you are a man in a dress. "All anybody notices is my nails," says my tranny friend.



I say extraordinary drawings because Solo's subjects are more-than-ordinary, meaning not-commonplace as well as extra special. That they are sometimes (always?) composite portraits first composed of diverse elements on the computer before rendered in fine-line pencil is just part of the story. The other part is the singular, unconventional, gender-variant embodiment and presentation that certain individuals carry—sometimes secretly, sometimes out loud.

Solo's portraits point to the tension inherent in being out of the ordinary. This is What's Your Secret?, 2008, graphite & cut paper. Perhaps if you look closely you'll see the string which ties these genitals to the ring.



And then, like this, he points, reflexively, to the mixed reception cross or mixed gender presentation can get. This is stoggaF, 2008, graphite & cut paper.



Like the title of the boy-in-dress drawing above, I Keep Trying, Solo keeps trying to put the pieces together, like a puzzle, working out the equation to explain himself/herself/the self that is sometimes disjointed by one person's definition, but is always unique and deserving of a place in the universe.

In the alternate reality of his universe, there's a lot of mixing and matching, but unlike your usual cut and paste collage, in these drawings, it is hard to determine where one thing begins and another leaves off. The result, though, is quietly disarming. The subjects, composite or not, are exposed in an intimacy so rarely seen—and as you take in these signifiers of precarious difference, you notice, they stare, blankly, back at you. What are you going to make of it? Very powerful, very fine work.