17 words

TED, the wonderful Technology, Entertainment, Design conference people hosted Daniel Libeskind in February. His talk, online here, is a lot like his designs, exploding with enthusiasms, stretching sometimes to keep with the theme.



So although I might quibble with his list of 17 words which inspire his architectural dreams, I came away, yet again appreciating the expression of his vision.



Expression is one of his favorite words. Risky, political, pointed and unexpected are some of the others that match the look of his work.



He tries to offer alternative experiences of space. Yes, does that.

He wants to be more memorable than forgettable. Okay.

"Cantilevered like its never been done before." Yep.

Communicative with what's present or past. Communicating like an argument, for sure.



But more raw than refined? Real not simulated? He says he tries to design from the heart more than the head, and values his hand more than his computer. I would have never said that. His towers look pretty heady to me. Rough, textured, tactile—? I wouldn't have used those terms, not for his buildings, all slick and shiny, glass and titanium. So maybe it's a matter of language. Maybe he's not a writer.
Visionary. Check.
Architect. Yes.

TED's slogan is Ideas Worth Sharing. So I'm sharing. Watch this talk. Be inspired.


Images of Royal Ontario Museum, Denver Museum, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, and the Brescia Tower, Italy, courtesy of Libeskind website.
More on the CJM here.

Second Life

Dry Thirst of Honor is one of the photos in a show that has surprised me with its staying power, some two weeks after I saw it. The work is by Chris Gentile. The show is at Gregory Lind Gallery, SF, and the title is Reincarnation Blues.



This is St John. I'm not sure if the image here conveys the photograph there, but that, curiously enough, is part of what the work is about.

Start at the beginning. These photos are of sculptural/installation works created in the studio/lab, but the photo is the finished presentation piece, it is the documentation from which you experience the work.
Thus the image here online is a picture of the work which is the photo, which itself is once-removed.
Hence the title—Reincarnation: re-invention, re-birth, return to life—a second life as a photograph.

Now about the work. The Work. It is an opus, for sure, and his studio an alchemical laboratory where pieces are worked up to create a semblance from which you, the viewer, might glimpse a greater truth—or feel the stirring of a feeling, or some such other movement of soul.

Saint John, I have to assume it is the head of John the Baptist for it looks like the shaggy severed head of the Forerunner. Or it could be John of the Cross, Saint of the Dark Night of the Soul, otherwise known as Despair & Depression. Or, it might be my projection upon the black mass, the massa confusa signifying the start of the Great Work of integrating the opposites represented by the alchemists as the white of spirit and the red of body.



Here in Saint John: Tide of Regret you see the black mass hung on the wall and then, by degrees, slide, fall, coagulate on the blood red floor.

Now we get to the other half of the title, Reincarnation Blues. The blues: in a black mood, down in the dumps, feeling low. Melancholy. After-the-party let-down, heavy and sad, blues.

Red, red, red river, bloody ocean of sorrowful memories/ Carry me to the deep blue sea, I hear you calling me.
Who will lift the fog of bitterness, pull aside the tide of regret?/ Who will avoid the undertow of sentimental drift?

Ocean Life by John Cale & Bob Neuwirth



This is Human Nature. It's my favorite. Gentile constructed a nearly nine foot tall conical white structure covered in hooks upon which he impaled, straight from the vat, Maraschino cherries, their syrup dripping to a pool on the floor. Photo one, the Red. Photo two, the White, skeletal, stripped bare of the fleshy sweet fruit.

Why is it my favorite? Besides for the wonderful allegorical display, this work shows precisely the magic power of image. The abstractness of the image as metaphorical concept unfolds intellectually. And, something else happens—imagination takes hold and the thing is experienced in the round, so to speak, in its wholeness. You imagine it in the room: nine feet of cherries, sticky, dripping, the smell of it. Such is the power of suggestion.


First Edition, 1964.

This reminds me of Yoko Ono's Instructional Pieces published in Grapefruit.

LIGHTING PIECE
Light a match and watch till it goes out.

y.o. 1955 autumn

PAINTING TO BE CONSTRUCTED IN YOUR HEAD
Go on transforming a square canvas
in your head until it becomes a circle.
Pick out any shape in the
process and pin up or place on the
canvas an object, a smell, a sound
or a colour that came to your mind
in association with the shape.

y.o. 1962 Spring

PAINTING TO SEE THE SKIES
Drill two holes into a canvas.
Hang it where you can see the sky.

(Change the place of hanging.
Try both the front and rear
windows, to see if the skies are
different.)

y.o. 1961 summer

The reader can make or not make the works.
Gentile makes the work, but you don't see it. You see the representation and re-imagine it.
Integrating and re-animating the image—that's the essential alchemical task and its accomplishment is powerful, transformative magic. The artist and viewer share the real and literal power to create. Great stuff. Great work.


Grapefruit image courtesy of Wikipedia and ©Yoko Ono

To Different Purpose

Today I learned the derivation of the name Buffalo chicken wings. I had always imagined buffalo, as in bison, but no, it is Buffalo, as in upstate New York, place of the original stingy hot sauce with blue cheese dressing on the side.

Buffalo is in the Rust Belt which means as a city, it has been in decline along with other massive-industry centers like Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and Detroit, steel and coal and cars all going the way of dinosaurs.

Buffalo (Bison bison), on the other hand, are not on the endangered species list even though the Great Bison Belt which sustained them is long gone. They are, however, "near threatened" which is bad enough. What bison and Buffalo have in common is hard living in the snow. What Buffalo and Detroit have in common is living on the cheap. Poorest city in America: Detroit. Next poorest: Buffalo.

Photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have been spending time in the ruins of Detroit, skulking around giant hulking buildings still showing the bones of great design despite wreck and rust like after a great calamity.





Theirs is not the only series on the subject I've seen. (Scott Hocking, for instance, lives in Detroit. I wrote about his work here.)

But what really caught my eye in Marchand & Meffre's portfolio of ruin is this:


A water tower in former East Germany. Looks like, but is so unlike the work of Bernd & Hilla Becher. Comparisons are odious (they say) and yet comparisons are illuminating.


Becher's water tower in Crailsheim, Germany.

Fraenkel Gallery, SF is just closing a survey show of their work, 1972 to 2006, the year of Bernd's death. When talking of the work, work being timeless, it is always in the present (tense) even if the subject of the work is things slipping into the past, out of production, into a stylistic oblivion.



The Bechers' work is so rigorous. Their delimiting technique (nicely explained here in an essay by Lynne Cooke for DIA) results in documentations that, as a body, create a survey of form. It is as if the subject (e.g. water tower) and object (photo of said tower) share an architecture—form, design, structure.



Their display grid (a framework) holds the images which are created within a framework that allows difference in structure to become apparent. Even though they document buildings and mechanisms in decline or near extinction, and collect evidence of a lost vital world, the work itself is devoid of sentiment. Their love is the love of form. Nostalgia or grief, social commentary of any kind, is extrinsic to their vision. The essence of their opus—which you really get when it is seen in contrast to another's—is form: shape, type, pattern, presentation.

The hand of the artist is very much at work here, and yet, conversely, in the work itself the artist is not at all present. Because the point of view doesn't change, you don't get a point of view. There's not a whiff of narrative, even though, in the end, the collection of images is a didactic display, a veritable textbook, anthology, typology. Like any work of strong character—Pinter, say, or Beckett—so much is said in the not-saying.

So different than the arresting, astonishing photos the other pair (Marchand & Meffre) capture. Here there's so much that's evocative: loss, decay, retribution—or whatever else one might associate with the rotten cavity of an abandoned dentist's chair.



How I went from Buffalo wings to dental decay—well, one thing leads to another. For sure.

Outside In

This is one way to picture a mighty, massive California oak tree. It's an impression.

Another way is to take multiple scans using some sort of mapping software, then process the data in Dreamworks to create a light display, like a sprinkling of luminescence, tracing the tree's contours, turning and spinning, creating an animated picture that is at one and the same time on the surface and on the inside.



In Between the Outside-In is the title of Pae White's show at New Langton Arts, SF. The work was created during a residency in the California foothills sponsored by For-Site a foundation dedicated to encouraging new art about place. Pae White's installations typically engage in an architectural, design-based kind of way with the site of exhibition.


Like this, Morceau Accrochant, thread and paper, 2004. Gentle, colorful suspensions, grid-like and light-weight.


Similarly this, Suncloud, 2008, described as “a waterfall on pause." hmmm...


This earlier work, (2003) chandeliers in terra cotta, called foggy, sespe, chamois, lowered down and claimed space in the center of the place.

The show in New Langton included three pieces. Two were self-contained enclosures, rectangular glass and metal rooms upon which her Dreamworks animations were projected, reflected, refracted—swirling in and upon themselves.


The looping tree animation begins and ends with a topographical impression of the immense oak made from points of yellowish light. Your gaze travels in, in between the sight lines. At the same time, the form, contained in chains of light, moves over. In and around, while over and around—a morphing, swirling circuit—at once a fly-over and a deep dive. It is quite extraordinary going into the space of the tree, density of wood and bark transparent and the movement exhilarating. This is quantum physics made live.

Scintillation of light is how astrophysicists describe the tremulous motion that makes the twinkling of stars. This from the Latin, scintillea, sparks of light, which have been understood, well, from way back, in Jewish mysticism and Manichean Gnosticism, as soul sparks. "Fiery sparks of the soul of this world," the alchemist Khunrath describes them. "The light of nature sprinkled in and throughout the structures of the great world into all the fruits of the elements everywhere." mmm... oh yes. The digital revolution is making plain what sages have known intuitively and scientists theoretically. Everything is light.


Following on the tree, White took another scan, this of a wild raspberry bush, and similarly manipulated the data to produce a different effect—the image begins coalesced and then its bits expand out into an array of particle light, a dissipation, and then the sparks return back into form.

Behind the structural aspect of her work—whether establishing space with chandeliers or creating relational space with bits of color, or projecting form and space with light, image, reflection—is a concept of space that folds in on itself. "A world can be as small as your fingertip and can be endless..." she says in an interview about her work in the 2009 Venice Biennale. In Venice she manipulates the space of the site; in these animations, she manipulates the impression of a living form and the space it takes up.

The last piece in the show came out of an encounter with another being living in the Sierra foothills, collector Joseph Meade. White replicates the landscape of his home with pieces of his extensive collection of ceramic ware: hills and valleys formed from vases and pots, pools and meadows in low, flat bowls. It describes place and relationship, but is maybe not more than a curiosity. This thing of making a maguette out of non-ordinary materials has some kind of attraction. In any case, it's been done here, and before. In this case, I'd rather be in the place than the sculptural description of it.

The free-standing animation-rooms I could hang out in forever. Trance-inducing light-movies take my cake and bake it.

images courtesy of
Las Pilitas Nursery
Re-Title.com
Tate Museum
Francesca Kaufmann Gallery, Milan
Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels
Gravel & Gold blog.

Feminist/Complaint

Okay. Stop the Music. I know that this blog is in a sorry state. The hits are way down because we are not posting very often. I have looked at this blog, and have not felt like writing anything about art recently. This world totally, totally, totally fucking sucks and I am very disheartened. Why do I want to even talk about art when George Bush and his fascist minions are turning our country into an armed camp of shit bozos? (10.26.07)

I picked this quote up off a wonderfully cantankerous blog that has sadly run out of juice. Anonymous Female Artist (A.K.A. Militant Art Bitch)'s last post was on 11.3.08... which is all too bad because wild n wooly acerbic opinion that wends its way in and around the male-dominated (art) world is always a pick-me-up, or kick-in-the-nuts, depending.

Any way. She was tired of what she was seeing then, and I'm tired now.

In fact, the month of May, I saw nothing I wanted to write home about.

Now it could be me. I may be suffering a little burn out. Perhaps I need a vacation.

Or it may be the culture. After the election, which was just a relief, there's been this pervasive feeling of exhaustion. Understandable, what with the collapse of the economic system and pending doom of the waters, air, fish, wildlife... that there'd be a breakdown in mood.

Perhaps it is just time for everyone to take a break, lean on our collective shovels and brooms, take a breather. Recess is indicated by the recession after all.

Recession, depression. Gotta go down before you can go up.

Strike Out

Evidently there is a movement on for a(nother) three-year Art Strike. Originally the brainstorm of Auto-Destructive artist, Gustav Metzger, the idea is to bring down the system by giving it nothing on which to feed. There was not much effect in 1974, and I'm not sure anyone will get on board now—except out of the moral fatigue that plagues us all. And then there is John Perraeult's question: How much fresh air can the art world stand?

Well, we all know fresh air is good for you. Hence the need for recess in school. And the Clean Air Act. What I'm hoping is that the galleries and art institutes are stretching their legs, running around the courtyard, smoking behind the dumpster, and generally shaking the tension out of their little art systems, because clearly we need some change.

Sigh.

Well, I did see something interesting yesterday. A screening of Susan Mogul's Driving Men, a film in which she interviews significant men in her life while they drive her around.


Driving man.

Mogul came into her own in LA in the 70s, a feminist performance artist working out issues of identity, community, sexuality and romance, often in front of the camera, always with a wry wit. In fact, one of her men (in the film) says she was a different kind of feminist because she can laugh.

In 1973 she made Dressing Up a short video where she disrobes and redresses while talking about shopping with her mother all the while chewing CornNuts. It was included in the Getty's outstanding show of California Video Art last year, all grainy and crackling and crunchy.



In her very subjective, very intimate work, stand-up comedy and art marry and live happily ever after.



1985-87 Mogul performed News From Home in which she dressed like her mother, read letters from her mother, did what seems inevitable, became her mother.



This still is from Take Off, 1974, a film about getting off.



In Driving Men Mogul is mostly off camera, behind the camera. The persons of the film however are reflecting impressions of her, so it is still all about her, this woman, woman with a camera, woman investigating larger issues of culture through the particularity of herself. In Driving Men she reveals herself through these men—lovers, brothers, her father, her friends—building her life story through these relational signposts, like bumpers in a pin ball game.





Driving Men leans a little more towards documentary, you know, film film, complete with scripted narration, as opposed to art film. Many of her more recent films are like this, 1st person documentary. And it is a kind of un-aesthetic, utilitarian style of filmmaking that progressed out of video as documentation of performance work. A style that appears to be video documenting life unvarnished, in the moment. It's a look. Of course these works are varnished, massaged, edited. This is not complaint, just description, a way of placing it within a field of overlapping borders. I was glad to see it. Always glad to see a smart, feisty woman, unabashed, unashamed, sensitive and aware. And funny to boot.


Video clips stream on her website.
The screening was courtesy of Jewish Film Festival at Yerba Buena.

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.