New Work by Cornelia Parker

The title of the exhibition belies it's true nature, the work by Cornelia Parker currently on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is not so much new as it is recent. In fact, the exhibition presents Mass (Colder, Darker Matter), an older work from 1997, contextualized by a new work created from nearly identical materials imbued with inversely significant social relevance. Yet again, perhaps the exhibition title is fitting. As with much of Parker's work, ambiguity is at the core of the experience.

Mass (Colder, Darker Matter) was created while the London-based artist was in residency at Artpace in San Antonio, Texas. It is composed from the charred remains of a white Baptist church, destroyed by lightening. Each of the blackened pieces are strung on fine wires and hung in a rectilinear constellation. As a whole the installation conveys a disconcerting combination of true annihilation and ethereal beauty. Common to Parker's work are explorations of destruction and recontextualized meanings, such as in the utilization of a church destroyed by an act of nature. Mass flows conceptually from an earlier work titled Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), in which Parker collaborated with the British Army to blow up a typical domestic storage shed and collect the exploded pieces for reassembly in an installation. Narrative themes arise from the artist's intellectual juxtaposition of ideas; previously explored in individual works, here the artist employs an exhibition to test dynamic tensions.

In the featured new work, Parker has retrieved the charred remains of a black Baptist church, destroyed by arson. Again the pieces are strung on wires and hung in a rectilinear arrangement. Unlike the older work, the shards are larger and convey more weight. The wires are less delicate and imply greater strength. Where the earlier work is assembled with minute pins, the newer work reveals the thick nails from the original structure. The two installations hang in the same large space, occupying diagonal corners in a room that feels crowded despite the airy compositions of the works. Their literal diagonal positions imply that they are diametrically opposed. Shared fate, I think to myself, also coincidentally the title from another of Parker's works in which a collection of items, a doll and necktie among them, are sliced in half by the same guillotine blade that beheaded Marie Antoinette. I circle the perimeters of each piece while my thoughts slide back and forth between them, mentally gathering their commonalities. Initially I am struck by the literal and metaphorical symmetry that has been created out of these products of 'complete' ruin. Each work hangs in a precise formation, effectively concealing the chaos that must have preceded their current state. Both buildings were churches destroyed by fire, albeit fires of intrinsically different origins. The tension surrounding issues of race and self-righteousness, as they might relate to the setting of the fires, hangs palpably in the room. Yet although the element of race may be more salient to one viewer, the religious overtones may ring more loudly to another. Possible variations of the artist's intent peel away in my mind like layers of an onion. The works, as they are side-by-side, offer several conceptual possibilities at once. As with her works individually, this presentation explores simultaneous themes of violence and calm, beauty and destruction--magnified, or tempered as the case may be, by the viewer's personal experiences of religion, racial strain, and or acts of nature and violence.

During a recent talk at CCA, Parker articulated that her intention is to create works that are sponge like in their ability to absorb various meanings, determined by the viewer. She does not attempt to rigidly define how her work should be understood, only to create situations in which all of the possible meanings have equal space for consideration. Meaning is of no greater importance than aesthetics and, circularly, aesthetics do not undermine the myriad associations that arise from Parker's pointed decisions. The construction of each work in this exhibition carefully replicates a sense of floating, even though the weightiest of associations are attached to the objects themselves. Intriguingly throughout Cornelia Parker's work meaning and intention are never as simple as black and white-even if, as with this work, that may be where the greatest tensions reside.

New Work by Cornelia Parker is on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts through March 5, 2006.

Summer of Love

Psychedelic art always had a strange presence in art history. Or rather, to some of us it seems strange that it was never included in any serious considerations of the art of the 1960s - because drug and protest art it may have been, but it did realise its vision with a disregard for genre and media principles only equalled by recent contemporary art. In true avant-garde fashion psychedelic art beamed its promise of social and scientific togetherness across all art forms; from music, film and graphic design to architecture, fashion and literature. And then, of course, a big part of the underground culture went and blew it all on mystical agendas and notions of harmony and oneness. And what was left was swept up by the advertising industry or driven away in the flower-power luxury cars of the pop stars. But still, how come the maximalized aesthetics of psychedelia remains so academically underrated in relation to the relatively more Protestant projects of minimalism and conceptual art?

For good reasons the summer of love, along with its images and after-images, is a perennial topic in San Francisco. This is also to say that when the Historical Society dedicates an exhibition to the poster work of Rick Griffin, Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse, Wes Wilson, and the photos of Gene Anthony, it is not necessarily to show a range of art objects: the works on display might as well function as cultural artefacts that document (local) history. As such, it was just a great show for a psychedelic art head like myself: I got to see many of the Bay Area prints of that mindblowing '66-'67 vintage - as well as some of the ones that were just too weird to even make it into obscure rock poster catalogues that typically are the available literature on the subject.

Beyond that, however, the euphoria promised by the exhibition's title is a trip of the kind that tends to run cold, as does any consideration of the counter-cultural revolution that follows this upbeat track: looking back on the Summer of Love from today's Winter of Money, it is easy to feel disappointed. Where did all the fun go? Where did all the politics go? From an (art) historical point of view, the problem with the summer of 1967 was that it is so redolent with revolutionary and narcotic myth that it easily collapses in historical anecdote ("We were this close to making it happen, dude"). Similarly, what typically becomes a problem with the art (or artefacts) of the psychedelic culture is that they are considered to translate directly as the visual face of the Summer of Love: 'look at this - this was just how good it felt like to be there'. So from our place in history, which on many counts is getting more and more distant from the vibes and agendas of 1967, it can be difficult to feel encouraged by photos of the turned on, the tuned in and the dropped out. In fact, the poster in the exhibition that gripped me the most was a small black and white flyer in a simple design, advertising the Trips festival in 1966. Without art nouveau lettering and technicolour halo, it didn't imply any great historical presence, but conveyed a sense of direct involvement, even danger or unlawfulness, in what was by then a new thing - before psychedelic art and culture had become a spectacle.

Interestingly, art museums too are getting hip to psychedelic art. Presently an exhibition takes place at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, also called Summer of Love. Here they aim for art historical vindication of psychedelic art but, again, don't get much deeper than its shimmering visuality and alluring promises. One can't help but think that there is a lot more to learn from this highly complex (counter-)culture which - in many cases against its own wishes - ended up informing a great part of the capitalist culture we know today. The first step will be to get the questions right, and figure out what we want to know from it.

http://www.californiahistoricalsociety.org/

40 Winks December 10th

Kevin Slagle, the proprietor of Oakland's Ego Park gallery, doesn't keep regular gallery hours. He has no curatorial assistants, no board of directors and no calendar beyond a couple months into the future. Kevin also likes to surf and play soccer - sometimes just as much or more than he likes putting on art shows. And sometimes he just plain doesn't have a good idea for anything to do at Ego Park, and there is a lapse in programming. But when Kevin is inspired with a good idea, Ego Park somehow manages to emerge from semi-obscurity to shine with surprising brilliance and present amazing shows and events. These moments have drawn large crowds, pleased art goers and earned Ego Park a place at the center of the East Bay art scene (Ego Park voted "Best in the Bay" in the SF Guardian, 2002).

It has been a while since Kevin has pulled out all the stops for an ambitious Ego Park show, but there have been the sound of elves tinkering during the night and the stars seem to be lining up for Ego Park's next show, opening Friday, December 10th to be a winner. The show, entitled "40 Winks / Mini-Theater" is a show of video work curated by San Francisco-based artist Sue Costabile. Sue is a musician and visual artist who is best known for her intricate and compelling video projections, which she usually shows live in collaboration with experimental electronic musicians. Having, as she says, "failed as a VJ", Sue uses a custom-made method of manipulating small objects on a light table, which is filmed from above with a firewire camera layered and composited live in software. Her exquisite visual manipulations have earned her invitations to perform all over the world at festivals such as Mutek, Sonar and Ars Electronica.

Kevin originally asked Sue to see some work for consideration for a show he was thinking about for Ego Park that involved constructing one-person viewing environments for videos. Sue handed Kevin a DVD she recently finished - "Mini Movies" a collaboration with the Berlin-based electronic musician AGF. Immediately recognizing the strength of the work, Kevin asked Sue for curatorial recommendations, and when those came in droves, he eventually just passed the curatorial decisions off to her, and focused his energy on building what he began calling "mini-theatres". "I know what I'm good at," Kevin says, "I wanted to put on a video show and make these little viewing environments, but I actually don't know a whole lot about video, and I realized that Sue had all these connections with these amazing artists, and I knew it would be so much better if I just passed it onto her."

Indeed, recognizing one's limitations and being able to spot talent is an asset to any curator. Kevin is wise to trust his artists. Realizing the power of networking, he gives them a lot of leeway to expand the network outwards as they see fit. The result is a chemistry that couldn't be achieved by one person. Many of the great shows that gained Ego Park attention in it's early days were collaborations with Aisha Burns, an artist, curator and graphic designer who seemed to be imbued with a superhuman amount of energy (and has since relocated to Brooklyn.) "Aisha had great ideas. And she knew all sorts of people. I used to call her "The Center of The Universe" because everybody seemed to revolve around her. I just kind of let her go. I made the shows possible, built stuff and enabled things." In the days of Aisha's involvement with Ego Park, there were indeed some great shows. Highlights have included a show of Canadian screen printers Seripop, Brian Janusiak's sweaters (knit in designs created by a custom-made keystroke tracking software), and performances by musicians such as Matmos, Experimental Dental School, and Cocorosie.

Kevin seems to have picked a star in Sue Costabile, who in turn invited fellow Bay Area video artist Scott Arford to co-curate show that includes work by the UK duo Semiconductor (currently in residence at the Space Sciences Lab at UC Berkeley), Josh Clayton, C.E.B. Reas, and Barney Haynes. Music at the opening will include sets by DJ's Sutekh, Safety Scissors & Kit Clayton, and a live performance from Eats Tapes. If it seems that music is taking center stage in this show, you are perhaps not far off the mark. Music and art have always had a close relationship. Fused most obviously at art openings, on record sleeves, at concerts and screenings, these two siblings of art forms often walk hand in hand together. I often find it odd that there still exist separations and distinctions that place boundaries around what is perceived of as "art world" and what is "music scene", as if these two art forms live parallel but separate lives. Perhaps they could be said to suffer from a sort of typecasting: Art as the more intellectual, heady, perhaps sometimes even "snooty"; and Music as less highbrow, more emotional, less involved in a critical discourse, and more what people do when they're drunk or on drugs. "40 Winks" is a show that seems to combine the art world and the music scene in an admirably organic way. With Sue Costabile and Scott Arford (both musicians and artists) at the center, it makes sense that these talents are reflected in their curatorial network. Some of the artists in the show are established gallery artists with long exhibition records, and some, although well known in the music scene, rarely show work in an art gallery setting.

If music and art are separate art forms, but as I propose, siblings, I see art and music as possessing a sort of Luke-and-Leah relationship: that of having been separated at birth, cultivating slightly different interests and skills, and finding themselves later in life hopelessly attracted to one another (and somewhat restrained by conventions) Perhaps to use a more traditional analogy: they are two sides of the same coin (the coin I suppose being whatever the fuck it is that we choose to do with our minds, hands and free time). In any case, it will be a joy to see a show that flips the coin so artfully.

Installation of Mini-Theatres for "40 Winks" at Ego Park