A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s

I have to add to the Berkeley Museum Nauman article clutter. This show is stuck in my mind. Heavy and immobile like the space under the chair in which I type, as my arms are bound they increase in length at 10 inch intervals, with my knees imbedded in wax as all of it is recorded on video and relayed into a corridor.

2 Words ring for me. Studio Practice. Studio Practice is one thing that I have seen SUFFER in this turn of the 21st century Art market boom.
Where can you be Free to:
GET PISSED GET STUPID BE STUPID BE DUMB FUMBLE HAVE FUN

Nauman Gets TOTALLY STUPID. He gets REAL DUMB.
FUCKING FUNNY FUCKING GREAT

Flour Arranging - Pun Fun totally dumb Great. There is enough of his early work to see the thought process / studio practice of trying to understand contemporary art. List any seminal Nauman work from this time period and it is in the show. From Hand to Mouth, the early neon pieces, drawings, the Wax Knees of 5 Famous Artists, a range of sculpture installations, and all the early films and videos Wow. The film Span, a real gem amongst others, a step-by-step construction of a framed structure with a black sheet of plastic over a stream. Funny Smart all at once. The Slant Step is here, but I think even Nauman turned a step that is supposed to be horizontal vertically. Strange.

How do I, Bruce, make contemporary art? Where do I begin? He dives in and the theory-based works of the mid sixties are deconstructed, decoded and reconstructed using himself to make sense of it. Nauman grabs Flavin's fluorescent tube off the wall and puts it between his legs. Nauman's own body, his wife's body become references for understanding and how to engage us, I, and the object in space and time.

This show is charged. Walk up to the second floor photos, drawings and neon works line the walls and projections of Nauman enacting all of his studio actions are all running at once. Walking around the perimeter of a square, violins playing, bouncing balls, putting on make up. I am in Nauman's studio I am in his space. I am not cornfused as a former fellow Midwesterner Hoosier would say, I am thoroughly engaged in a physical and mental space of Nauman's thinking and actions.

It is good to see this show at an educational institution, and sad to see it not going to the Whitney, MOMA, MOCA or any other big institutional space that glorifies things. That is why it won't fit there, this show is about experiments, failure, being stupid, challenging the notions of art, and taking risks in and around a Studio Practice. Not making work for commodity, but contributing. Here at the Berkeley Museum Nauman’s studio is revealed, open, exposed, and as strong as ever.

Seeing this show was like coming home. Coming back to an artist that has a huge influence on my work and process. What this show did for me was reinvigorate my energy to be stupid, be free, fuck with things more, and put my practice first.

Thank you for putting this show together.

There Ain’t No Party Like a Holy Ghost Party

Pete Nelson’s recent exhibition at Blankspace Gallery/Oakland titled ain’t no party like a holy ghost party is an installation for occupying a sculpto-virtual headspace, leftover by the artist in the gallery and open to interpretation on the meaning between boozing it up fountain-style, sound-byte holy-roller shock attack, and close-ups of sexy lips, i.e. yours, mine, his or hers (well, to be determined, I guess…). I’m immediately reminded of the film Being John Malkovich…so, have I found myself partaking in the art-vessel of Being Pete Nelson?

Occupying the entire main gallery of Blankspace, Nelson has laid out three objects relating to the senses: a mounted video screen in place of vision, a semi-hidden speaker in a free-standing platform in place of hearing, and a two-part elevated bathtub and moonshine jug-holding second platform that connects to a freestanding mechanized water fountain in place of taste. Smell is left to the imagination, I guess. Well, it’s close enough to being inside another’s head. Furthermore, the multi-sensual experience is controlled: there is a separation of experience where only one sense can be experienced at one time (while drinking, you cannot see the video, as your back is to it, and the audio section of the installation, plays split-seconds after you finish your drink, but plays for barely long enough to realize what is actually heard). This installation doesn’t invite to be looked at, it invites participation, and that participation not only activates the work, it also completes the piece…one can’t expect a visit from the holy ghost if there ain’t willing receivers!

There is a conundrum here. And maybe that momentary puzzle experience is the point, as described in the show’s statement: “a space where thoughts of faith and addiction can simultaneously exist…two contriving terrains describe a dependency not on the other but rather on the polarity of their existence.” So to be puzzled is good, because artwork isn’t always “better” by providing answers, like when a puzzle can directly inspire the activity of debating solutions—a dialogue. That being said, what definitely occurs is I get to know a little more about Nelson’s subject matter, maybe even some knowledge about the artist’s personal struggles (addiction?) and/or exorcised demons (faith?). And, as a reaction to Nelson directly, I think an addiction to faith—whether in spiritual ecstasy or to earthly vice—is the real terrain being presented for consumption within this installation.

There Ain’t No Party Like a Holy Ghost Party

“One object in particular creates a situation that hands are laid on you—not literally but figuratively…I’m hoping it’ll be a transcendental moment,” Peter Nelson was quoted as saying in an SF Chronicle review of his recent installation at Blankspace gallery in Oakland. Later in the review he’s attributed with: “I’m hoping that a connection is created so that the situation is similar to the revival.” Artists are often filled with such hopes for their work. This seems perfectly natural, especially if one views their work as a medium for communication—an attempt to articulate things that cannot simply be spoken or shown but must be felt.

Installation art seems to literalize this desire, often creating multi-sensory environments meant to provide viewers with an immersive experience. Nelson’s There Ain’t No Party Like a Holy Ghost Party was no exception, notably engaging one’s sense of taste and sensitivity to alcohol, and setting the stage as it were for the “situation” to which he so cagily refered.

I hadn’t yet read the Chronicle review when I visited Blankspace and found myself in that situation. I must admit I was initially drawn to There Ain’t No Party Like a Holy Ghost Party for the title. I wasn’t expecting an actual party or a moment of revelation but perhaps a manifestation of the ineffable—an answer to ‘how does one make belief visible?’ Instead the Holy Ghost party in question felt a bit like what I imagine it would feel like to be a contestant on The Price Is Right—only without the audience, lights, camera crew, and Bob Barker.

Peter Nelson, There Ain’t No Party Like a Holy Ghost Party, 2007. Mixed media installation

Nelson’s stage consisted of two roughly made platforms. On the left one, two large speakers were stacked such that they faced each other. On the right, a de-clawed claw foot tub was laid on its side. A tube connected a small cask inside the tub to a freestanding drinking fountain. There was a projection of a live video feed from the vantage point of the fountain (a close-up of the point at which water and lips meet). There were two awkwardly placed wooden benches between the projection screen and the tub. Amens and praise the lords came in seemingly random bursts from the speakers.

It took me awhile to figure out that the peice was interactive. In fact the gallerist who’d come out to fiddle with the computer prompted me. He told me the drinking fountain was filled with whiskey (supplied by the cask, I thought). Without much hesitation I stooped to drink and sure enough the clear liquid that trickled up from the fountain tasted sweet and burned. Willie Nelson’s Whiskey River ran through my mind. Again I heard the passionate encouragement of a preacher and his parishioners and understood that drinking from the fountain triggered those shouting zealots. This is as close as I would get to a “transcendental moment.”

At first I thought all the clumsy lead-up to the moment when alcohol and religious fervor collided had ruined the experience for me, but even if my confusion were replaced with a seamless surprise I doubt it would have been transcendent. In the end I found the situation too forced, too diagrammatic, and too mediated. A problem with me, a problem with interactive artwork, a problem with the gallery context, or quite likely all of these—creating a connection to people through artwork is an immanently challenging task. The cynical among us might even argue, wrong-headed. And yet this is what many artists strive for. I know it is what I’m looking for.

In light of the …Holy Ghost Party I found myself thinking about the relationship between the faith in God held by true believers and the hope that artist have for their work to be revelatory and to be shared (and inversely, the hope art goers have for being touched by art). Though art and religion have been largely separated into mutually exclusive spheres there is some lingering overlap in the hope—the belief really—that the transcendent moment is not only real but accessible either through devotion and practice or because we are particularly receptive. That Nelson’s installation failed to reach me only underscored the hopefulness of the endeavor. For me it was a generative failure. And to be fair, perhaps I needed to spend a little more time at the drinking fountain.

There Ain’t No Party Like a Holy Ghost Party was on view from March 30th to April 24th, 2007. Information about future events and exhibitions at Blankspace can be had by visiting the Blankspace web site.

Corporate Art Expo '07

The reductive cleanliness of a logo, stacks of business cards and stickers, meetings with potential investors, the yearly annual report, employee self-evaluations, products named using acronyms, consumer surveys. This list belongs to a language spoken primarily in skyscrapers and office parks yet is also familiar outside these ghettos of big business. Since the Fifties and Pop Art, these signifiers have been borrowed and often mangled by artists in wildly divergent ways. As suggestive of a general strategy, they have been used to both package artist projects and practices within a market friendly domain as much as they have been used to critique and expose the corruption and profit hungry opportunism that are more likely than not a part of the root problem with this country. The Lab's most recent exhibition "Corporate Art Expo '07" curated by Bay Area artist Shane Montgomery 1, encapsulates business minded projects on both sides of this political divide and several who seem to ignore the polemics all together.

At first impression, the exhibition reads like a trade-show for scrappy start-ups doing their best to shine on a tight budget. After wading through the literature, it's an even stranger array of distopian fantasies, placebo products, kitchy gangs, and living-room bureaucracies. Because of the general cacophony of the installation (both in terms of actual sound-bleed and the more expected in-your-face boldness of each installation) nothing stands out immediately. However, the thirteen installations are surprisingly well organized into the 2100 square foot main gallery space at the Lab, and as Montgomery's first curatorial endeavor, it's a laudable effort (perhaps no surprise to those familiar with his smart work as the master of install over at YBCA).

The best moments of the show are with the Anti-Advertising Agency, Death & Taxes, Slop Art, Old Glory Condom Co., and Training & Development most of which employ some form of satire. AAA involves a series of collaborative projects with Steve Lambert (who in the interest of full disclosure is a friend and collaborator on the Collective Foundation exhibition) and various Bay Area artists. Despite the troublesome but ultimately tacit contradictions in the name and practices of the Agency, it's a rich and humorous project that suffers only from a somewhat slapdash physical presentation. Death and Taxes, if you can get past the clichéd title, is something like a torture campaign to test the limits of familial love. 2 This uncomfortable project prods our latent fear that corporations will, in the not too distant future, own everything–even our personal and private freedoms. Slop Art, another annoying moniker, has made a surprisingly successful imitation newspaper insert and art-crap catalogue. Old Glory Condom Co., is an AIDS awareness project from the late 80s. As an artwork it's a bit tired, but it adds to the exhibition by introducing an historical point of reference complete with an early 90s episode of Law & Order that references the project.

Death & Taxes Installation

The use of packaging and extended duration in project-work by artists (as appropriated strategies of organizations, institutions or businesses) is notably common in the Bay Area and is therefore ripe for the close attention invited by an exhibition. However, the corporate language here is sad, alienating and often dry. This sense of dehumanizing weariness might, somewhat tenuously, be understood as a general critique of corporations. As industrial sized bureaucracies, corporations do their best to be abstract and therefore resistant to criticism, and in this show the act of critique, with few exceptions, lacks the incisive clarity necessary to take on Goliath.

Notes:

World Factory

In recent years, San Francisco has experienced an influx of internationally-respected curators, whose work here challenges the often-criticized provincialism of our city. Most palpably, the healthy rivalry between SFAI and CCA to bring in top names in the field has had a galvanizing effect on the Bay Area scene, as newcomers and locals alike compete to heighten our awareness of global issues and artists. Hou Hanru—famous for exhibitions such as Z.O.U.—Zone of Urgency at the 2003 Venice Biennale and the touring exhibition Cities on the Move, and now SFAI’s Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs—launched an ante-upping volley this spring with his epic three-part exhibition World Factory.

World Factory was a kind of trial run for the 2007 Istanbul Biennial, for which Hou is also Artistic Director. The title tells you everything about the show’s content and presentation—loud, complex, intense, full of industrial imagery and class critique. The curatorial approach was equal parts textbook and night bazaar. Operatic in scope, each installment of the show wrestled with its ambitious ideas in a different way. Part Two, Resistance and Dreams, had the most emotional resonance, while part Three, Making our Places, was the easiest to digest. Part One, Active Witness, was unrelentingly dense, setting up the grand themes to be revisited in each successive installment. All three shows benefited from repeat visits, and so were ideally suited to a school environment where students and faculty could return to individual works again and again. Repeated visits were not so easy for a non-student, and so this review will address only a few works from each iteration of the show.

Tackling global concerns about immigration, labor rights, mass production, economic inequality and environmental devastation is a tall order, and Active Witness (January 26-February 27) had moments suggesting a runaway steam engine packed with angry Marxists. Upon entering, several videos by Map Office (Laurent Gutierrez & Valérie Portefaix), Raqs Media Collective (Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Monica Narula & Jeebesh Bagchi) and Sergio de la Torre & Vicky Funari competed for attention. Played on televisions strewn across the floor, they were interspersed with benches whose printed cushions bore definitions of critical terms in socioeconomic discourse—a literal way of making us comfortable with these ideas.

The plenitude of videos, both on monitors and projected on every wall, was overwhelming to absorb in a single visit, but Murat and Ismail (2005) stood apart. This touching work by Mario Rizzi examined intergenerational conflict in a family-owned business. The contention between the Turkish father and son is based in the younger man’s desire for the material comforts he sees afforded to others, while his father articulates what we in the United States would call a “Depression mentality,” fearful that his son will put trust in fickle promises of wealth rather than build a solid foundation of hard work. We viewers have an up-close view of this family, and can see our own relationships reflected in theirs despite the differences in language and economic circumstance.

Mario Rizzi, Murat and Ismail, 2005. DVCAM film, Dolby stereo sound

In The Three Failures (2006), Michael Blum’s large projection installed above the stairs to the mezzanine, the artist walked through streets in Riga, Latvia (formerly communist), Malmö, Sweden (currently socialist) and New York, New York (thoroughly capitalist), reciting an absurdist riff on the genesis and ramifications of Karl Marx’s thinking in settings that gave form to his critique. A dummy dressed in the artist’s white parka and orange pants took shelter below. Upstairs, the throbbing soundtrack and pulsing colors of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ So, So Soulful (2006) lent the show a welcome lightness. Funny and hip, its deceptively simple story of the salaryman who envies his friend’s penchant for adventure and craves authenticity articulated its socioeconomic points as adeptly and elegantly as any work here.

Happily, Resistance and Dreams (March 1-27) continued in the direction of mixing critique with humor. Tadej Pogačar’s installation CODE:RED Brasil, Daspu (2005) chronicled the empowerment of Brazilian sex workers through job training, as they created and marketed a line of clothing for their own economic betterment with both support and resistance from the São Paulo fashion industry. The stories of their hardships were heart-rending, but the centerpiece, a bridal gown constructed from grimy sex hotel bedsheets complete with a veil of condoms, elicited genuine laughter.

Tadej Pogačar, CODE:RED Brasil, Daspu, 2005. Video, t-shirts, and bridal gown made from sheets and cloth from “love hotels” in Rio de Janeiro

A merchant’s tent, where one might buy candy or cigarettes in the bazaars of any Asian city, dominated the main gallery. It reiterated that while Part Two would directly engage with the marketplace, there would be some pleasures amidst the criticism. Among them, Drifting Producers (2006), composite photographs by flyingCity (Yong-Seok Jeon and Jang-Jong Kwan), traced the psychological and geographic impacts of global manufacturing on Seoul and foregrounded the unexpected beauty of that city’s more barren industrialized areas. Cao Fei’s installation What Are You Doing Here? (2006) looked at outsourced Chinese labor as both a global commodity and, perhaps, a creative enterprise imbued with joy.

Julien Prévieux contributed Lettres de non-motivation (ongoing project), a series of applications he wrote in response to employment ads in his native France and in San Francisco, in which he expressed his apologies for rejecting each potential job in advance because he doesn’t like to travel crosstown, he isn’t legal to work or he just can’t get up that early. Even better were the canned rejection letters he received, in which each employer cited his obvious qualifications along with his or her regrets. Filling the main gallery’s back wall was The Illustrated Capital (1998-2003), 40 of a series of 48 photographs by Jean-Baptiste Ganne that he likened to the 48 chapters of Marx’s Das Kapital. The political intent of the chosen images was not clear, resulting in a critique of meaning and certainty that foregrounded aesthetics over rhetoric. This was one of a handful of works which remained on view from Active Witness.

Making our Place (March 28-April 21) made its first impression with a large-scale mural by Julio César Morales from his series Informal Economy Vendors (2007). Like his adjacent animated video Tactics of Reassembly (2004-07), the mural visually took apart and rebuilt the apparatus of the black and gray markets that thrive on the fringes of “first world” economies. San Francisco-based Morales hails from Tijuana, and observes how the detritus of San Diego’s neverending newness is recycled as the building blocks of Mexican small businesses. Morales also teaches at SFAI, and worked with student assistants to realize the mural.

The Sugarland Effect (2007) by Lordy Rodriguez made the interdependencies of “developed” and “developing” world apparent in a different way. The United States’ history of conquest in Latin America has resulted in a global sugar trade that keeps some participants destitute and others obese. Rodriguez mapped the key sites of this trade and abstracted them into paintings, again underscoring the pleasure principle that drives some of globalism’s worst excesses.

The prominences of these two Bay Area artists in Part Three of World Factory brings us right back home to the point that while San Francisco is one of the most globally engaged, socially and economically conscious parts of the United States, our local art community has in recent years seemed isolated and stifled. We can only hope that this series of exhibitions marks the beginning of a trend, and that our regional artists will be considered as equal participants in a global dialogue that becomes more streamlined, coherent and productive as time goes on. We are again a city to be reckoned with, our local politicians promoting environmentalism and diplomacy on the national and international stages. So should we encourage a global conversation in art, which neither prioritizes nor excludes our own.

Image on homepage: Cao Fei, What Are You Doing Here?, 2006. Multimedia installation

Three Artists: Adam Longatti, Nadol Pak and Ryan Pierce

Lisa Dent Gallery has a three person show of paintings and drawings by Adam Longatti, Nadol Pak and Ryan Pierce. Two are recent graduates of local art schools and the third, Longatti, finished his education in ‘02 from Cal State Fresno.

Longatti’s handsome, smallish paintings depict California Central Valley agricultural scenes in transition with commercial and residential development intruding upon the bucolic scenes. Pak’s crisp drawings look like molecular abstractions at first but closer inspection reveals images of devastated land seen from the air. Pierce’s big, juicy paintings narrate Lord of the Flies-like stories of post-apocalyptic scenes and societies. As a whole, the show has a nice range of visual styles and hangs together loosely around the issue of landscape and trauma.

Ryan Pierce, Shooting at Satellites, 2007. Acrylic on panel, 3’ x 7’

After visiting Lisa’s gallery, I stopped by Haines Gallery to see the recent work by David Simpson. Simpson’s work is a continuation of his exploration of iridescent paints. The paintings’ reflectivity takes on the changing light conditions of the gallery and turns the gallery into an installation environment that implicates the physical and atmospheric space outside the boundaries of the picture plane. I consider Simpson to be the most under-recognized great painter in America and this work did not change my opinion of him one bit.

David Simpson, Light Wells (detail), 1991. Acrylic on canvas

It may be unfair to compare the three young artists in Lisa Dent’s show to David Simpson who has added sophistication and refinement to his work for years. Unfair to be sure but in reality, artists (young, old and in between) are unavoidably looked at in context to whatever happens to be in the memory or immediate experience of the viewer. I liked Longatti, Pak and Pierce’s works at first but after seeing Simpson’s mastery, I now feel that the fresh spark of Dent’s emerging artists pales in comparison to seeing what a spark can do to set the whole damn place on fire as Simpson vividly shows.

ArtEsteem Super Heroes

“Real Art/Real World, Making Art for a Better Community”

“My super hero builds homes for low income families, poor people who live in violent neighborhoods, where there are liquor stores and low-performing schools,” writes Elijah Dunn, 14, a student artist featured in the City of Oakland Craft & Cultural Arts Gallery’s presentation of ArtEsteem Super Heroes. The exhibition of paintings and mixed media works created by students at Frick Middle School during the spring of 2006 explores such issues as poverty, drug abuse, gun violence, homelessness, education, and the environment. The student-artists have all produced works of art that reflect upon the current problems in their communities and the world. As a result the artworks in this exhibition are extremely personal and shockingly real. The students all recognize the need for positive change in their communities and these works of art offer up solutions for that change.

How exactly is change to occur? If only super heroes were real then we would have “Waterman,” created by Mashebu Barrow and Nicholas Wright, who provides everyone with enough clean water to drink. We would also have “Flame Man,” by Francisco Garcia, who protects people from violence with a force field and provides warmth for the homeless. Garcia created “Flame Man” to address some of the problems occurring in the violence stricken neighborhood of West Oakland. Then there is Marquis Halloway’s “Super Vest,” “a regular guy,” as Halloway explains, “that helps the world by keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and prevents shootings.” Well, if “Super Vest” is a regular guy, then perhaps we all are super heroes and have the ability to inflict positive change in our communities and the world not only for our benefit but for future generations as well.

As Shaniqua Johnson explains in “Lovely Angels,” with a magic pen and wand her super hero has powers to change the world and can create whatever she imagines. Johnson imagines a world where the environment and the animals are protected, while other students in the exhibition hope for a better, safer community. These artworks are visual statements by students no longer willing to live in a world that endangers their livelihood and the environment that they live in. As Divante Smith writes in “The Circle,” this super hero “helps the homeless, sick, hungry, and poor when the government can’t or won’t. “The Circle” fills the gaps for people who do not have access to the basic necessities of life, thereby creating a circle of life.” How ironic then that this presentation of overtly social and political artwork be exhibited within the atrium of the State of California Office building in downtown Oakland. With the raising of a hand and the flick of a pen, the government could easily pass legislation to prevent communities and the environment from falling to the wayside as seen in the students’ works of art. We wouldn’t need super heroes to protect us from the dangers lurking in the streets at night. All we would really need is each other.

ArtEsteem Super Heroes
March 12 – April 27, 2007
City of Oakland Craft & Cultural Arts Gallery
1515 Clay Street
Oakland, CA 94612
http://www.oaklandculturalarts.org

Erlea Maneros

Until the recent rise of the nexus of gallery/art fair, the museum has been the single most undeniable fact of the art delivery system. As an arbiter of meaning, as architecture, as embodiment of social architecture, as art history manufacturer, as biographical Madeleine, ad inf ad nauseum it is one of the juiciest of all the subjects currently of interest to artists and curators. In her recent exhibition at Queen’s Nail Annex artist Erlea Maneros, of Los Angeles, and originally form Basque Country in Spain (read: Bilbao and the Guggenheim Bilbao) used photography, paper objects drenched in ink (as opposed to drawings), and a wall painting to take her whacks at this formidable Sequoia of the art world. The San Francisco art historian Julian Myers organized the exhibition.

Erlea Maneros, The Artist In His Museum, 1822, apprx. 14"x20", india ink on paper, 2007.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, founded and operated by the MacArthur-winning artist David Wilson, owes its entire existence to a parallel investigation: the deconstruction of museum authority. Wilson pushes his museum’s exhibits to the edge of believability and beyond in order to find that exact moment when the visitor will exclaim, “Wait a minute, what’s going on here?” Maneros, like Wilson (it is one of his museum’s logos and the image that she painted on her gallery wall), begins with the Peale Museum, America’s first, in 18th century Philadelphia. Like Wilson’s Jurassic, Peale’s Museum was heavy on animal displays, notably the the first mastodon skeleton discovered in America. Maneros may be implying that the museum as institution is a dinosaur of another age, but her photographs of museums from all over the world betray a certain ironic fondness for them as well. These images are taken online with the least possible attention paid to the fineness of the resulting image. In fact, it appears that the dust on the computer screen is highlighted more than the occasionally difficult-to-read representation. Again, it is easy to infer a certain “dust to dust” disdain for the institutions depicted. The heavy mediation of the pictures, however, defers such one-to-one meaning and launches the photographs, and the exhibition, into more ephemeral emotional waters, a certain nostalgia for the corniness of cabinets of curiosity and the pure fun of speculative fiction.

As part of a curatorial assignment this writer recently selected a series of figure studies based entirely on images trolled off of flickr.com. All the images were based on 50s science fiction films. It’s amazing how rich a source, how evocative and suggestive, that silly genre can be in our collective psyche. Maneros’s images of the exterior of a dozen or so museums certainly suggest both that architects have been dipping into the same dream pool of images as the filmmakers of half a century ago, and that these buildings (and thus the goings-on inside) are as strange and alien a group of invaders from another world as could be imagined.

Tony Oursler and Nayland Blake

I selected my Graduate School for a number of reasons, but mostly because Tony Oursler was a faculty member. I knew that Tony and I would become fast friends and cohorts. I had a number of fantasies of our meeting and how he would influence my education: Tony as the nurturing yet rigorous advisor, Tony and I contemplating the art world over a cup of coffee, Tony and I knocking back a whiskey at an Irish Pub after a particularly lively student critique, Tony hooking me up with his New York Gallery, and so on.

Imagine my disappointment when I arrived to Boston and found that Tony had left his teaching position to follow his extremely hot art career. The salt in the wound, of course, was the number of instructors who pointed out how Tony would have liked me and took me under his wing. * Sigh *

So it is with much excitement, eagerness and regret that I visit a Tony Oursler exhibition. As it so happens, both he and Nayland Blake are exhibiting at Gallery Paule Anglim through May 5, 2007.

Tony Oursler, Purple Resonant Dust, 2006
fiberglas sculpture, projector, dvd plaver
Courtesy Paule Anglim Gallery

The largest and most foreboding Tony Oursler artwork is “Purple Resonant Dust” a large 50-inch spherical lumpy ball of painted fiberglass. Projected onto this suspended sculptural canvas is a churning array of smoke, eyes, lips, feet and hands. Body parts emerge from the darkness like a crystal ball, moving from foreground to background and disappearing silently. Words spoken from periodic projected lips are amplified on two small speakers mounted on either side of the piece. The vision itself is part celestial nebula or part science fiction horror film. I immediately envisioned a talking evil brain or the 1950s film “The Blob”, where space age goo dissolves everyone in its path, leaving small body parts floating in its jelly-like core.

Installed in a circle around “Purple Resonant Dust” are five satellite sculptures that reminisce planets or worms. Not only are the fiberglass shapes more sophisticated than earlier works, but the videos are as well. “Untethered Worms” features talking mouths, blinking eyes and swirling water. The constant drone of audio from all pieces is both ominous and humorous. Sometimes the audio will ebb and flows, making one sculpture’s volume overpower the others.

To really hear the sound for individual artworks, visitors have to get close to the speakers. I heard a few words, including “dark matter,” “electrons”, “I love you”, “accelerator”, “DNA”, “atom-smasher”, “alcoholic disaster”, “radioactive isotope”, “words that you said can’t get out of my head”. In some ways it was like a spoken word performance spliced together from a high school science textbook and angst teenage poetry. In either case the pieces and the audio are the perfect Frankenstein fusion between the human and planetary body.

I entered another room to view an exhibition of seven pieces by Nayland Blake aptly titled “Three photographs, three mirrors, a sculpture and a sign”. I immediately fell in love with “Mirror 1” and “Mirror 2”. Both are made from colored plexi glass, plexi mirror and a metal frame. The plexi glass is scratched in various ways, creating an opaque screen to the mirror behind it. Both layers have small holes drilled into their surface, creating another opportunity for transparency and reflection. I was extremely taken with both the simplicity and complexity of their aesthetics, as well as the opportunity for self-examination and narcissism.

My favorite, though, was “Bad Sign”. A wooden sign hangs from metal hardware from the wall as if advertising the door of a store. Painted on one side is “On” and “No”. On the other “Just”, “RETURN” and “OK?”. From the sign hangs a yellow ribbon and a chain. Attached to the ribbon is a piece of cardboard with a charcoal drawing of a sawed off tree trunk with a small sign in it’s base that reads “Pip Squeak” (or was it “Pip Squek”?) and two banners over the trunk in which the letters spell out “OW”. Attached to the chain is a small log, with the word FLOAT burned into its base. The symbolism of the objects and how they are connected together bring forth a number of interpretations on relationships, dependency, dominance and violence. Much like a Rorschach text, how the pieces are linked may say just as much about the viewer as the artist.

While Tony Oursler is able to grab one immediately with his signature video and sound, I believe it is Nayland Blake’s mix of materials and subtle coding to personal relationships that will keep me pondering for some time. I believe Nayland and I should meet up for a cup of coffee sometime and hash it out.

A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s

bbbrrruuuuccccceeee ARRANGES FLOUR

I caught the bruce Nauman show a bit late,
so this is more an afterthought than a review.
What was most striking to me,
meandering through these streams of images,
is their clarity.

A page of the zen calendar that I keep around tells us :
"Night comes so people can sleep
like fish in black water.
Then day.
Some people pick up their tools.
Other become the making itself.”

If we follow the word poetic back to it’s greek origin
it leads to “making”.

So what is bbbrrruuuccceee making?
or, does it matter, besides the occasional pun ?
Bouncing a ball, arranging flour, building a ”span”
whatever it is, he makes it clear
clearly seen.

In this way it lingers long after we leave the museum,
it begins to infect the way we walk, cross the street
and rejoin the day.
The tool we might hold in our hand momentarily loses it’s function
and starts rolling on itself, making itself seen
making a scene….
clearly making, making faces, making up,
making sense, right here, as seen from the moon.

R. Crumb's Underground

Robert Crumb’s work makes a slightly uncomfortable fit with a gallery space, which has more to do with the personality of the artist than with the format of his work. It doesn’t seem odd at this point to have pages originally published as underground comics carefully curated and nicely framed – the loop of culture is as permeable as it’s ever been. But while Crumb is a genuinely towering presence in the comics world, he became that crowning figure in part through the practice of self-mockery. The confessional, warts-and-all approach to the contents of his head made him revolutionary – that, and to a lesser degree, his willingness to deprive that self-exposure a heroic dimension.

It’s the combination of abasement and elevation that makes for the discomfort. There’s a whiff of domestication to the show, but the tensions of high and low, street and gallery, are foregrounded in Crumb’s own love for blues music: he’s well aware of his sincere and ridiculous role as white connoisseur. So here we are with him at the YBCA: faintly ridiculous appreciators of the sublime.

The exhibit spans the length of his career. After some examples of his juvenilia, there is the eruption of his 60s work, a combination of observational sketchbook pages and comics. The style here is appealingly loose, pliable – with Peter Max and Victor Moscoso, he shared a tendency to melt everything. Even tall brick buildings look like they’re made out of rubber, or pillows. Reflecting a 60s stylistic tic, it still feels unique and off-kilter the way Crumb handles it. With Max and Moscoso, there’s something decorative and pretty in the flowing forms, a sense of decadent and loose abundance: art nouveau filigrees slicked up into chrome and neon. With Crumb, the soft declension of the world seems more genuinely organic – perhaps the forms sag because there’s a bit of rot underneath. The doughiness of the people and the buildings is slightly rancid; it’s a woozy world.

Crumb would use the visual flotsam of his times in his own way. Though he helped define the style of the 60s, he’s one of those exemplars of an age who turn out, in retrospect, to be one of the age’s chief skeptics. There’s a freewheeling sense to the 60s strips collected in the exhibit, but it’s remarkable how little fun seems to be had in them – or at least how much of the fun is sadistic. People get dosed, deflowered, swindled, stabbed, busted, and it seems all in a day’s work.

While the 60s strips are full of frenetic activity, the activity seems to go nowhere; characters don’t move forward, they make hamster wheels of their ruts (and their rutting). There’s a lot of talk in the word balloons, but it’s all pretty gassy stuff, full of hipster slang – “It’s a trip, man.” – “Solid!” – “Drop Out!” – that seems to have already made the transition from empty argot to empty advertising slogan, leaping down the chain of language via echolalia. The phrases chase each other off the cliff of meaning like lemmings. It’s exhausting to read, though in one signature strip, Meatball, the centerless buzz is propped up as a winking metaphysical principle.

The excesses on display – sexual, transcendental, pharmacological – perhaps inevitably overlap with excesses of imagery. There’s the notorious “Angelfood McSpade,” a blubber-lipped, mostly-naked jigaboo caricature. She’s entirely offensive as a character, and she’s meant to be – she exists not to denigrate blacks, but to rub white noses in the manure of their own culture. Harder to take as satire, because the stereotypes are more bound up with the artist’s deepest desires and beliefs, are the repetitive scenes of sexually abused and pliant women. Sometimes he draws about his “troubles with women” with a bracing self-awareness; at other times he just lets his id off its leash. Part of the problem is that the entwined desire and contempt for women in the pages really isn’t really at odds with the dominant cultural stream – it’s just a more hysterical form of it.

Perhaps the strongest story on the wall is “Patton,” a short biography of blues musician Charley Patton, dating from Crumb’s 80s run in Weirdo magazine. To my mind, the 80s were Crumb’s period of most sustained accomplishment, and “Patton” is representative of the maturation of his style in that decade. The forms are still organic, but more solidly put together, with the foursquare substantiality of good carpentry. He’s still dealing with stereotypes to a degree, but they’re fused to folk imagery, and a real sense of character. The stereotypes operate as containers that real human beings are clapped up in, the orbit of their experience banging up against what’s allowed and expected of them. The sometimes sordid details of Patton’s life are made into iconic dioramas, a poor man’s stations of the cross.

There’s something almost stupidly blunt about the way Crumb presents the scenes, like the lyrics of a blues song: there may be flickers of poetry, but they float through a telling that’s plain and straightforward. It’s built out of matter-of-fact details that escape cliché by virtue of the weight of feeling rolled up behind them. In working this out, Crumb is perhaps also working out a model for himself as an artist: how to be both abject and legendary at the same time.

Aline in Stella McCartney (New York Times Series), 2005
Ink on paper

Robert Hughes has compared Crumb to Brueghel; I was reminded even more strongly of two other inveterate cross-hatchers, the English satirists James Gillray and George Cruikshank. They all share a gleefully savage exuberance to their contempt – a pleasure in ridicule, not just because it provides an opportunity to smear idols with shit, but because through the venting of outrage it provides an excuse for contact with shit. They express a belief that the real purpose of shit, sputum, and blood isn't biological, it's psychological (for the inventory of this palette, Crumb's only innovation has been the fountains of jism).

Beyond this, Gillray and Cruikshank were brought to mind as hermetically weird expressions of their age. Their images were built on the kind of ideogrammatic shorthand that allows us to see a donkey and elephant fighting, and understand it as a commentary on the Democratic and Republican parties. Turns of phrase are literalized into imagery. But the language and the politics – the inundating context, the sea in which their prints were suspended – have both drifted, drawn back, leaving the drained reefs of drawings as promontories, with their utterly strange topographies exposed and naked. The chatter of the age has been fossilized into a graphic surrealism.

As someone who didn't actually live through the 60s, whose main contact with the decade is through imagery, much of it restaged, recycled, or debased by commercial nostalgia, I find Crumb’s 60s comics both raw and distant. He had an avid desire to take what was floating in the air at the time – the gestures, the rhetoric, the symbols seen on billboards and in the corner of the eye – and assemble it into a self-sufficient visual world. There’s an element of the work that’s almost reportage, but through it I can catch a glimpse of the 60s standing as remote and foreign as the monarchist England of King George III.