Black Factory - William Pope L.

During the YBCA exhibition of "Black Factory" by William Pope L. which involved contributions from gallery visitors, we (your SR editors) decided to parallel this model via experimentally opening-up the review process by setting up a computer station overlooking the exhibition. This resulted in 27 short responses included here.

Lori:
I have always appericaed art that lets me make my own conclusions. "Black Factory" is that type of Art. You are made aware of what the artist is attempting, but not led to that conclusion.

Many people have complained about the randomness of the items. But to me that is the beauty of it all. Life is seldom packaged in neat little bundles, and it is only our ability to "connect the dots" that gives it any true meaning. So it is with the exhibit. As a white person I will see different things that a black may not, and visa versa.

Blobbo:
I was having a fairly intrested day .
Thanks to mr. Pope .
I personally prefer Alexander Pope . He at least originated Hip Hop and made Rhyming couplets that reveal most so called Rap artist as Morons and that was when? 1760?
This Pope is petty d good. Perhaps somwedat he will become a BRAND like Andy Frigging Warhol.
Sad to say I cmme with an Angry young woman .She is so cool and hip . Too bad all that anger is boring .
Maybe she can someday become a drug addict and really have some thing to whine about .

Mike:
What an empty exercise. This guy has no talent or vision at all. If he weren't playing the race card, we'd have no problem calling this the tired, dated, artless , irrelevant junk shop it is.

MegatronInTheTrunk:
The jury is still out!
The Black Factory holds a collection of seemingly random objects linked by someones ability to see the blackness within the object. More commentary on select items would have done wonders for the exhibit. The installation certainly has sparked my interest in getting more information on Pope's purpose of BF.

Ed:
Not very effective in conveying your message. Not accessible enough for the non-art person (unlike myself). Honorable and a good step in the right direction of breaking boundaries. Stereotypes will always exist either because different ethnicities don't live in close proximity, or actually do...

Mad Chalet:
A collection of objects whose relevance regarding Black culture is in question. One looks, wonders, visually sifts through the detitus in an attempt to relate the objects to place and meaning. In some cases the connection to Blackness is obvious, possibly simplistic, in other cases the relevance is difficult to discern. Looking over the collection, I'm reminded a bit of Fluxus and their archiving of the everyday object, but this installation isn't so much about elevating the everyday, it is commentary on white culture's attempt to undermine the African American. I'm not satisfied by the installation, some of being closed off doesn't help. I am missing the performative aspects - the video helps, but it's not a subsitute.

Calvin:
Hmmm...the promised ideas/themes of identity,purity,contamination, refuse etc.. were intruiging. However I, like most other critics, found the project to be disorganized and meaningless.
I fear that this "project" was funded because of it's racial themes. As a black art fan, I find this patronizing. There are too many great black contemporary artist who's art is currently underexposed to justify such a travisty.

Chris:
Inspring - new models for society and culture are much needed. i work in the non-profit and education sector and have been searching for new ways to accomplish charitable work. thank you . . .

Cinner:
What does it mean to be Black?
It's a pretty interesting questiom.

I like the sign that says, "I only talk about orange things with orange people.?"
Also I wonder...is Yoda Black?
Good show.

Anil:
It's OK. I read in the intro that he's really more into performance art so maybe that's why I found some of the static works to be indecipherable. Personally, I just don't really get it on either an aesthetic or conceptual level.

Anonymous:
For unfortunately an uncountable time in a row, YBCA showed its vulnerability in its mission, to put it politely. To put it impolitely, this is just another exhibit that comes across as completely unclear, unartful, and obnoxious -- I haven't seen something that's proven otherwise in about 3 years here.

It seems that others below hinted that for them, Black Factory is inaccessible because it is esoteric. There's no need to insult oneself -- this project is inaccessible because it is a collection of pretty much random objects and words so filtered through attempts at rhetoric that I can't understand a single sentence. I would say that this group has been poisoned by too much art school, in the way that a literary theorist can say absolutely nothing about a written piece because it's all "theory" and no direct connection to the work, but I don't know if this is the case. I'm tempted to think this entire exhibit is a farce to see if a completely asinine, meaningless connection can pass under a curator's nose if it's enclosed in a pretentious enough package.

The explanations next to each pile of objects do not match up.

Nevermind, at this point, I'm at a complete loss of words, and similar to the exhibition, have said just about nothing tangible using a few hundred of them.

Anonymous:
Soooo conceptual. Seems the idea is cooler to the artists involved than offering something cool to the viewers....Yes we are all to participate, but I'd agree the show is too self absorbed for much fun.

Anonymous:
It's a tad self indulgent. Maybe keeps your interest for 5 minutes or so, but after that, its the same things over and over

Dylan:
I am a child and we have ''Iet's talk about race'' days at my school. This show reminds me of our celebrations and discussions at school about race.

Dylan
2nd grade
Live Oak School

Lily:
"What is my culture? What is my community? I just moved here, and this exhibit has made me wonder about a few things. I live in the Tenderloin, and a man died on the sidewalk yesterday. His body is still lying there. He was a member of my comminity. He was a member of my neighborhood. He is gone now, and no one cares, maybe somewhere some one does...someone far away in an other community or neighborhood. How can I identify with my community w/o drowning in it? Drowning in the Tenderloin, or drowning in the comercial over load that is Union Square. What makes me American (North American)? What do I let define my culture, my community?

Ron:
I try to stay open to most artistic conceptions but this exhibit just didn't do it for me. Pretty boring and self absorbed.

Faith:
I found out that black people have the same rights as white and that white has no authority to be mean to black. Also, sometimes art is sometimes creepy and weird.

James:
I found it intriguing that there were books and pamphlets, but you weren't allowed to touch them. It sort of violated the standard conventions one would expect when this sort of object is on a table.

Charlie:
I still need time to absorb the jumble of objects and images. Intense regardless.

Starfish:
Would love to see a Yellow Factory. Asian-Americans are streotyped as the "emmersed" ethnic group. A Yellow Factory would reveal a much more isolated group than the Black Factory. This basically reinforces what we already know. Push the envelope. Do a Yellow Factory.

Lili:
I think that this a little too "high concept" and self indulgent at times. The interactive and contributory attributes of the show provide some momentum to carry people through it but after about 10 minutes of it, the show becomes tiresome and stops presenting anything new or contributing any new ideas other than "some people are still racist" and "some people are not".

Sambo:
a one schtick wonder, a little tired
in danger of making the tropes of reacial stereotypes into cliché - would

P:
I really enjoyed the blak factory. It made me think. I like art that makes me think. I like art that relates to everyday issues. The blak factory is a great concept.

Latina:
I opened my mind to see what I saw... stuff.
I looked in my purse to find a "black" object... spectrum.
I guess I am not hung up on the racial thing. I'm just fine with life.

Jen:
I did not go to school for this, but rather for the writing. However, I like tables and things and tables full of things. So this is OK by me, even if I did not go to school for it and don't necessarily get it. I would like a wall full of things in my house. Also, some tables.

Bryan:
glad to have a conversation on race in an art museum. its wonderful to find real people to discuss art and its role in our society in this space

Joe:
um
well
that is to say
i uh
ehem....
well if you have to ask,
i would say its like most "concept art"
self indulgent, and self important
thats all

Bay Area Currents 2007

At the Oakland Art Gallery, nestled between office buildings on a pedestrian walkway off the Frank H. Ogawa plaza in downtown Oakland, nine artists— some very recent and some semi-recent MFA graduates—are placed together under the visiting curatorial eye of Aimee Chang, of the Orange County Museum of Art, to showcase the pulse of artwork and art-making of the Bay Area.

Bay Area Currents 2007, a juried exhibition, shows a fair range of media: sculpture, painting, video and conceptual art. What is initially striking about the chosen artwork overall is the lack of “the figure” as either subject or object. Granted, this is my traditional take on the whole matter of figuration, and I’m sure arguments could be made that many of the artworks included in this exhibition could stand-in for a metaphysical body of sorts. However, I’m going to stick to my initial reaction that the curator, Ms. Chang, has a preference for the non-objective, the minimal and the abstract and this exhibition is a reflection of that specific interest. In addition, it is apparent that the curatorial decision to include such an overwhelming amount of sculpture in this exhibition shows Ms. Chang’s other preference, namely one of the three-dimensional object over the two-dimensional image. And, it is with this particular focus on sculpture, especially when compared to the few examples of painting included in the exhibition, that a challenge is initiated between the object versus the image, possibly in general in the perception of the curator, but most definitely noticeable within this particular group exhibition.

In the exhibit, there are a number of free-standing sculptural pieces, such as the all-white carved pillars in resin by Xuchi Naungayan reminiscent of totems or possibly busts of found geological specimens, or the all-black, burnt looking and un-soft arm chair by Terry M. Mason that speak to weight, material and an idea of the object found by the artist versus the object formed by the artist’s hand. And then there are the neon-incorporated brick-and-mortar and metal sculptures of David O. Johnson, where I am pleasantly reminded again that simple basic and structural forms are simply beautiful…and especially so when they are glowing from within and hold a much darker/dangerous message (although the glowing neon aspect to these works would be better suited to a much darker gallery space).

While free-standing sculpture “stands out” in this exhibition, the real meat on which to chew presented itself when I started to take a look at the wall-based sculpture in direct relation to the paintings on display, and a perception of a biased challenge of the object vs. the image became undeniably present.

On the side of painting in this exhibition is the artwork by Mel Prest, drawn lines of color in loosely methodical arrangements, and the color-bomb, drippy abstract landscapes of Jessalyn Haggenjos. Figurative reference is absent in both of the artists’ work: the paintings do not speak on the issue of presence of physical form within the image, something impossible to ignore when considering the sculptural works arranged throughout the exhibition space. And, because both examples of painting bring the focus of the viewer to the surface of the canvas—a possible reference to the painting as being an object in itself—this leaves no example of one of painting’s few unique characteristics: depth and perspective within the image. Both painters are boldly using color to elicit a response that is a rewarding characteristic not readily available in the sculptures by the other artists; color is the strength that these artists wield.

Now, it might read like I’m giving these two examples of painting a hard time, and that just isn’t true. In and of themselves, both Prest and Haggenjos are exploring their own sense of image building, and it is commendable to see such strong, direct and positive investigation—maybe this “image building” idea is what Ms. Chang presents as the relation between the paintings and the sculptures of the exhibition. What I am concerned with, however, is the competition between Prest and Haggenjos’s artwork and the wall-based sculptures of Xuchi Naungayan, Monica Martinez and Zachary Royer Scholz, and how the latter’s artwork speaks more broadly to Painting as a concept albeit while being wall-sculpture, than the curator’s choice of painters. Naungayan’s work Polyhedron Drip is a collection of what look like sharpened charcoal sticks on metal rods that bend off the wall, reminding me exactly what makes a good drawing a good drawing, when it assaults your eyes and “pops” off from the two-dimensional page. Martinez’ sculptural construction called Trapitos al Sol shows me how parts within a composition can have weight, movement, texture and reflection, as well as the strength of the abstracted image that plays a tension between the composition after nature and the autonomous structure as you walk around the artwork. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go look up Cezanne. Zachary Royer Scholz, in his artworks titled Objects XXXXXXX plays out how the perverted simple material and form can still show the sublime equation, and one artwork directly points out the “window onto the world” concept developed and tossed around by painting for the last couple hundred years. I love it when basic artistic statements can so succinctly address the wealth of history.

Not to forget, there is also the video de-constructivist work of Toban Nichols and the direct-as-life public project of Packard Jennings. Ms. Chang must have felt that time-based artwork and society-affecting artwork needed some voice in this survey exhibition, and she choose well, if even so little was included. Nichols’ video artwork did not get a fair physical placement in the exhibition, and honestly, in this instance it doesn’t hold its own against the other artwork on display. The same can be said for Jennings fabricated newspaper stories/collaboration project. Jennings, in the past, has proven to be a saboteur with wit, and the project selected for Bay Area Currents 2007 should have been placed dead center in the gallery, so that more attention could be garnered.

So where does this exhibition stand, what “current” flows in the Bay Area if considering this survey as any indication of the future-now of the Bay Area arts? I’m either brave or stupid enough to ask a question like this, and I’ll go even farther and answer it as well: Bay Area Currents 2007, while itself a professional collection of artists—both the not-so-recent MFA graduates dedicated to the Bay Area and some very fresh graduates who are just jumping into the local game—and a show that presents quality in material, product as well as quality in presentation of ideas (although heavy on minimalism to be fair…), overall it displays a much too heavy curatorial subjective view on the current of Bay Area minimalism and sculpture-based art to feel inclusive of what actually goes on in the Bay Area, which is a much wider range of media and vision. However, it is always my preference to see a curator take a stand on an issue or a medium or a genre and promote the hell out of it, and surely Aimee Chang does it here with aplomb. It is just too bad the show couldn’t have been re-titled and re-focused to something like: Bay Area Modern Abstractness: Still Kicking Ass in 2007 as Exemplified by Local Emerging Artists.

-S.R. Kucharski
srk@tomorrowism.org

Bay Area Currents 2007
May. 17, 2007 - Jun. 29, 2007

Bay Area Currents is our annual juried exhibition showcasing the work of Bay Area artists. The 2007 juror for Bay Area Currents is Aimee Chang.

Reception: Thurs., May 17, 5-8 pm
Curator/Artists Talk: Thurs., June 21, 6-8 pm

Exhibiting artists: Jessalyn Haggenjos, Packard Jennings, David o. Johnson, Monica Martinez, Terry M. Mason, Xuchi Naungayan, Toban Nichols, Mel Prest, Zachary Royer Scholz.

http://www.oaklandartgallery.org

Orly Cogan, "The Wonder of You"

Cogan starts with vintage linens decorated with brightly colored embroidered motifs ranging from geometric designs to frolicking kitties and barnyard animals. To these, she adds her own confidently simple, embroidered drawings. The handiwork of stitching, culturally associated with women practitioners and decorating the home, becomes the vehicle for imagery that is run through by the erotic and the intimate.

Her work hosts a cast of characters, starring Cogan, a female protagonist; her male consort; and a sprinkling of supporting roles including Disney-esque fairy tale princesses and Alice in Wonderland. Our heroine, among other female figures, appears in various states of undress – bras and kneesocks are recurring garments – in limbo between public and private. She gazes up at us from under the vintage motifs, mostly on tablecloths, stretched like canvases and hung on the wall. With a deft lightness, these sewn/drawn images posit a fantasy world, yet one rooted in domestic moments and intimate scenes before or after sex, and, at times, druggy or sugar-sleepy.

Green Haze, Hand-stitched embroidery and paint on vintage linen. 50 x 43 in.

Green Haze is a chaotic jumble that starts with an every-which-way tablecloth design dotted by springtime clichés. Birdies, strawberry baskets and strutting roosters emerge from the swirl of embroidery. Cogan weds these with intersecting figurative drawings of reclining nudes who spread out in all directions, mandala-like. The artist dyes small areas of the fabric green, or tan, which helps orient the viewer. Apples become breasts, a star marks a woman’s bare ass. This is voyeurism that uses the language of children’s book illustration to render an intimate portrait that puts us in the position of looking with a lover’s eye. Each stitch points to the next in slow and lingering lines that ask us, too, to take our time looking.

The Wonder of You features a central figure, again the artist, gazing, this time, rapt with attention at a frog held in her hand. Corgan’s fairy tale heroine inhabits a domestic space of agency, while clad in a bra and jeans, inviting our gaze. The Wonder of You tells a tale of the voyeuristic pleasure of perception; the work becomes a crafty take on Carolee Schneeman’s notion of the “eye body”, that which simultaneously acts as subject and object. Nearby, our two main characters hover, engaged with lines of cocaine. Alice in Wonderland borders these scenes, reaching towards a pink cake with a knife stuck in it; a woman caresses a man’s face; a cartoon princess hovers. This is the pleasure principle, all right. The actors are present in the way a child perceives the world: wholehearted, engaged, uninhibited, and reliant on the senses.

The round robin of smaller figures encircling the protagonist seems to belong to the domestic realm of daytime loving. There is the same cast to many works: the adults seem to be lovers; yet they appear separately, for the most part, sleepy or alert, looking directly at us as if we’re their honey wielding the camera.

Alice In Blunderland, Hand-stitched embroidery and paint on vintage tablecloth. 37 x 35 in.

Sex-positive feminist imagery runs rampant in Alice in Blunderland, where polar bears pleasure women and small naked ladies frolic in nature, using outsized penises as plaything or adornment. Sure, it’s porn, but it looks all the world like a children’s book centerfold. The central figure is the artist, smoking, while the girl child Alice strains to see over a tabletop precipice separating her from adult pleasures.

The drawings snap to 2D from a certain distance, but, upon closer examination, one begins to see wrinkles and thread textures. In Eclipse, a peeking nipple doubles as a raised stitched pink star. The move to 3D is carried further in the wall installations, choppily drawn using thread looped around straight pins to form small groupings of familiar characters, one of whom offers up bunches of thread pulled from her very outline in a gesture of creation and elision, becoming a stand-in for the artist at work.

The Wonder of You: Orly Cogan will be on view at Steven Wolf Fine Arts from May 3 - June 23, 2007

This House is Not a Home

This House is Not a Home is a highly formal show about being alienated from form and from architecture. This was among the most carefully considered and sparely curated group shows I’ve seen in Oakland. Artists James Gouldthorpe, Alexander Cheves and Moira Murdock seem to be reflecting on home as a commodity or as a fabrication, in which one might live out a facsimile of life. Closed, monolithic and silent, these structures offer no comfort. They are beautiful and cold, desirable and yet foreboding.

Alexander Cheves’ sculptures resemble toys – blown-up Monopoly mansions, or farmhouses that would dot an Astroturf hill alongside a model train track. They are blanks that stand in for houses, and they infuse the gallery floor on which they’re placed with the suggestion of landscape. His large skyscraper is taller than a person and stands precariously balanced, which adds to the rather pleasing Godzilla effect. The concrete plain recalls the open expanses of the Central Valley, a landscape that inspires much of Cheves’ work.

James Gouldthorpe’s graceful drawings of Modernist houses remind us that architecture is rarely about the comfort of living. These beautiful, angular structures with their manicured lawns, steeply peaked roofs and glass façades don’t look the least bit comfortable. Still, they are inviting in the glamorous way of advertising, invoking the familial myths of the early 1960s heartland. Discomfort as a means to preserve the social order. The images were drawn from the pages of discarded architectural magazines and books found during Gouldthorpe’s SF Dump residency in late 2005-early 2006. The lines of scratched-in text that edge the drawings preserve the images’ commercial origins, while the title of the installation, “Vacation Homes,” continues the narrative of distant family memories and unattainable domiciles.

Moira Murdock’s wall-mounted sculptures, called “Housebergs,” make the sense of life in a chilly Midwestern glass box literal. These houses are frozen into masses of ice, and emerge from the gallery’s walls like tumors. A cancer of architecture, infesting the white cube with lumpen growths. They have neither doors nor windows, and when there is a pair, they face away from each other like estranged lovers. On a large wooden table, a sequence of identical white houses hang from a wire armature, circling outward like a featureless suburban neighborhood with no clear entry or exit.

The show brought to my mind Edith Farnsworth’s famous quip about Mies van der Rohe after she discovered that the house he had built for her outside of Chicago was neither warm in the winter nor cool in the summer, and the architect refused to compromise his design to make the house habitable. “We know that less is not more,” she supposedly said, “it is simply less.” We value architecture as fashion and product, and as such Modernist houses are a bit like stiletto heels. Life inside a geometric ideal isn’t for everyone – the uniform can be constricting. Still, there’s some comfort in regularity, and the clean lines and open planes of this show were a refreshing change from the clutter of daily living.

SL Morse at Neighborhood Public Radio

Broadcast Translation:
SL Morse - at (npr) Neighborhood Public Radio’s “Day of Deceit” - at Southern Exposure - at 25th and Mission Streets, San Francisco. (4/14/07)

Instead of a ‘day of deceit,’ I tuned in for just one show. Tuned in, in person. Inside, the audience has a seat of four chairs and possibly a low window ledge in front of monitors. Outside the audience includes whom-so-ever passes by and stops to get past the reflection in the storefront windows and suddenly see the setup of radio gear and musical instruments that is behind the crackling sound emanating from the doorway. The sound cast out onto the sidewalk competes today with both a fierce wind that undercuts the sunny strolling on Mission Street, and the braking clatter of the very frequent buses stopping on the corner. Altogether, outside, the sounds are an unintelligible mash of rushes and pops that inside the gallery are a vivid percussion event.

Blocks away from Southern Exposure / the temporary Neighborhood Public Radio headquarters, I turned on my radio and waved it around in the air as I walked towards the venue. When would the station come in? Or rather, where? The audience for a radio broadcast is wherever the radio frequency and the radio receiver meet up. My radio, I learned to my dismay had a really bad tuner. I couldn’t find the station even while standing in front of the doorway. Whereas later, traveling around in the sanctity bubble of the car – hills away even in Noe Valley, I picked up the monotone reflections of a German immigrant to the Mission on a very clear npr.

A little research via npr’s own website reveals that the roving low power radio station that intermittently inhabits 88.9 started broadcasting in 2006 at 21 Grand in Oakland. This year, npr has been radio mapping the Mission District through their residency at Southern Exposure, whose new digs took over an old flower shop on 25th and Mission. Part opportunistic local event journalism, part local event maker, npr’s on-going actions use the radio waves to explore combinations of public dialog, everyday intervention, and the potential of non-physical community space made by layers of technology in tangible space. The link between the radio frequency broadcast and the internet broadcast isn’t articulated and although expands the potential listener base, dilutes the potential impact of the exploration in technology/range/and community.

The concert for the radio at 4 p.m. was ‘SL Morse’ as performed by Sarah Lockhart and Suki O’Kane. The program notes advise that Lockhart has developed a music notation relationship between percussion and morse code. This a very deceitful ring of communication indeed. Code for language trans-‘literated’ into musical notation and re-broadcast as language disguised as music. The two percussionists tap and slam out truncated beats and cymbal washes. The distinction between translation and interpretation is unclear. There is a third unnamed/unacknowledged player that represents this free-jazz as text through the proto electronic voice (recognizable as the type that announces weather disasters over government channels). The ‘voice’ is translating both codes into the English language intelligible. Because of the percussion delay with the text, the ‘voice’ only surfaces at droning intervals. Together, the repetitive percussion and the voice notes are an incomplete story in competition. The mixed intentions of scavenging notation sources for unheard of ways of communicating music, and the political nature of the text source are valiant but at odds. Through all of the interferences, however, the convergence of SL Morse’s notation translation project and npr’s broadcast project make a provocative entry in questioning the sound of textual communication through the overlay of multiple mediums.