Women Who Fly: Paintings by Andrea Arroyo

Contemporary art until fairly recently had a strongly male vibe. The aggressive macho physicality of Picasso and some of the American Abstract Expressionists was balanced by the ironic, detached, quasi-scientific intellectuality of Duchamp and various conceptualists and postmodernists. With the coming of feminism in the 1970s, and Pattern and Decoration in the 1980s, art of a more lyrical sensibility —more in tune with Matisse’s idea of art as refuge from the daily grind, the famous armchair for the tired businessman— began to receive attention and respect.

Andrea Arroyo’s mythological paintings embody this feminine esthetic of physicality, color and movement — without Picassean misogyny or Duchampian alienation. A dancer of Mexican ancestry who began her thriving painting career almost by accident only a few years ago, Arroyo expresses an almost physical sense of harmony and well-being in her colorful, simplified depictions of goddesses and their occasional male consorts as embodiments of nature, growth and universal life force. These figures dream, awaken, dance and soar in a limitless eternal life, perfect in their unselfconscious and somewhat floral curvilinear beauty. Whether you interpret them as the Golden Age of Greek mythology or the Judaeo-Christian Paradise before the Fall, or some Garden-of-Earthly-Delights fantasy of harmony with nature that still eludes us (Baudelaire’s luxe, calme et volupté), these paintings breathe life into ancient and universal archetypes and yearnings. Even tired, overstressed urban businessmen and businesswomen can contemplate them for refreshment and inspiration.

Xochiquetzal, acrylic on canvas

Arthaus

Crazy Train to the Land of Pure Imagination

For his latest installment of the long-running Grey Invaders series, John Colle Rogers transformed Blankspace Gallery into a war zone. In this room-sized diorama, titled Crazy Train to the Land of Pure Imagination, the Grey Invaders battle the Green Defenders on a post-modern battlefield writ large in model-railroad scale. Armed with caches of simulacra and fueled by thematic revulsion, the combatants in Rogers’ phantasmagorical campaign are icons stolen with equal abandon from pop culture and military history.

The Defenders (comprised of U.S. Marines, Civil War cavalry, knights in armor and a few ghosts thrown in for good measure) wage a war for internal order against the Invaders (Celtic and Zulu warriors, World War II German soldiers and radioactive cows). Though each motley team is united by uniform color, there are defectors. The Native American troops swing both ways and adding to the confusion, rogue skate zombies, whose glow-in-the-dark bodies defy both reason and gravity, ollie through the slippage like Ronin- master less and unallied.

Set on a plain of brown desert sand, the battlefield hosts the multiple fronts of what Rogers describes as the “war to end all wars.” A model train, serving as the theater’s central nervous system, runs circles around the periphery, skirting sidetracks to nowhere that peter out into sandy wastelands and dead-end into walls. It shoots through Devil’s Tower that looms above the fray like a panoptic command central. The tower, referencing both the Wyoming geological formation sacred to Native Americans as well as Spielberg’s mashed potato/UFO version of it in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, exemplifies the contested sites over which the Grey Invaders and the Green Defenders fight. Top it with a replica of 17th century Osaka Castle hammered from sheet metal using ancient armor-making techniques, and you get a sense of the kinds of battles going on in this fracas between sign and meaning.

Everywhere, touches of day glow detail, activated by backlight cast from a flying-V spaceship-guitar mounted on the ceiling, reveal that nothing is as it seems: the cows fornicating in a bucolic field have only three legs; horsemen ride backward into battle; steamships fortified with missiles serve as amphibious landing vehicles and headless skaters navigate the walls of graffiti-tagged grain silos. The warring soundtrack that pervades the space (a generic heavy metal dirge pitted against a trip-hop version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Pure Imagination themesong) slays any dichotomous urges you may still have. As commander-in-chief of this miniature world, Rogers reveals himself to be a master strategist, pitting sign and meaning against one another in what might be called the Milieu Massacre.

Not only does Crazy Train represent the hundreds of eye-straining hours Rogers has poured into its excruciating detail, it showcases the artist’s biography- one shaped by the twin influences of art and war. His father, Colonel John H. Rogers, also a sculptor, headed the Marine combat art program during Vietnam. Much like today’s embedded reporters, combat artists were deployed to document the theater of war from the front lines. Though his documents are drawn from the battle lines of a satirical front of his own devising Rogers is, like his father, a combat artist. The liberal amounts of absurdist humor he deploys possibly belie the earnestness of his visual badinage, but Rogers’ puns are all intentional and the result is serious fun.

blankspace gallery
June 29-August 6, 2007

Opening reception: Saturday, June 30th 6-9pm

6608 San Pablo Avenue
Oakland 510-547-6608
www.blankspacegallery.com
Hours: Friday 4-8pm; Saturday-Monday 12-5pm and by appointment

Balancing Acts: Paintings by John Dobbs

This diversion [dancing on the tightrope] is only practised by those people who are candidates for great employments, and high favour, at court… When a great office is vacant either by death or disgrace (Which often happens), five or six of those candidates petition the emperor to entertain his Majesty and the court with a dance on the rope, and whoever jumps the highest without falling, succeeds in the office. Very often the chief ministers themselves are commanded to show their skill, and to convince the emperor that they have not lost their faculty. Flimnap, the treasurer, is allowed to cut a caper on the strait rope, at least an inch higher than any other Lord in the whole Empire.
—Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

The funambuliist (rope-walking) hiring process of the Lilliputians would fit perfectly into the world John Dobbs depicts in “Balancing Acts,” a series of paintings commenting on the current tenuous state of our union, in which inept appointees are awarded medals and plaudits; crony-friendly legislation is disguised with Orwellian euphemism; and a hypocritical leadership clutches at rhetorical straws as its grasp on power weakens daily.

Dobbs was provoked beyond his usual subjective interpretations of the urban scene into satire and provocation, the territory of Swift and, more directly, Goya, whose drawings inspire several of these paintings (Break Up, Look At It This Way, Hand Stand); we seem to have advanced less than we thought. Dobbs sees the circus performer —who inspired in earlier painters either romance, heroic athleticism, or the pathos of the alienated artist— as an apt symbol of our current plight: “Life out of whack. Askew. Distorted.” The irrationality and absurdity of the world is a theme of continuing relevance, as many of the German artists that Dobbs admires —from Durer to Beckmann— attest.

Dobbs’ funambulists, contortionists, wrestlers, and daredevils are, like Swift’s politicians, both timely and eternal archetypes, simultaneously American and universal. They go through their paces in anonymous nakedness, dusted with flour like butoh actors; or, more contemporary, they’re costumed in star-spangled tights like the frantic Uncle Sam/Evel Knievel of He Appears to Have Lost His Balance, or, fitting our current political stalemate, in adversarial red or blue (Is It Worth It?). In several works we leave the circus to examine the racial divide between black and white: in Is It Worth It?two naked warriors on stilts duel with cudgels (a clear borrowing from Goya’s late “black paintings”) while flames lick their feet; At It Again likens the racial rivalry to Cain’s primal fratricide, with a black Abel as victim; Three-Legged Race suggests that if the two racers cooperated instead of ignoring each other they might make escape the sharpshooter’s cross-hairs through which we view them.

John Dobbs, He Appears To Have Lost His Balance, 2004, oil on linen, 20 x 18 in.

Despite their desperate conditions, however, these performers remain symbolic figures or puppets, as unreal as the floppy mannequin in Tossing the Strawman (After Goya). These figures sometimes appear undifferentiated and anonymous, even phantasmal, like bad dreams fading at sunrise.

Dobbs finds more interest in the individual figures in the crowd, who have assembled spontaneously, than in the performers who efface themselves in their professional roles. The crowds retain their specificity and quirky humanity, unlike the robotic entertainers (Spectacle), even while awaiting some mysterious portentous event (Spectators), and even while attacked by a runaway cartoon-character blimp (Mickey’s Mishap) — oh, the humanity! A dog chases its tail; a policeman talks on the phone; figures gesticulate, fidget, bicker and wave.

In Goya the crowds are subhuman mobs; art historian Fred Licht enumerates the “total suspension of plausible activity, blank faces that bespeak mass anonymity, and [the] distinct sense of the irrelevance and meaninglessness of all human relationships.” When Goya’s Spain was restored to Bourbon control after the brutalities of the Napoleonic invasion, many patriotic traditionalists, welcoming back the old tyrants, shouted, “Vivan las cadenas!” Long live our chains! In Dobbs, individuality reposes in the people. We have only to remember how much we have changed since Swift’s and Goya’s times, thanks to the awakening of reason, and demand more than Flimnappian rope-dancing and its modern equivalents.

John Dobbs: Balancing Acts was on view at George Krevsky Gallery May 3rd through June 16th, 2007.

Por Fuera: Paintings by Leonardo Pineda

Leonardo Pineda is a young Colombian artist whose vibrant color and vigorous rendering attract immediate attention. “Por Fuera,” from outside, or from abroad, aptly describes Pineda’s painterly interpretation of contemporary life in Bogota—which may strike US viewers as not so different from the North American urban landscape.

The increasing pace of urban life with its concomitant exciting (but sometimes overwhelming) rush of images has been one of the motive factors behind modern art. Picasso spoke of having to paint out the green in his system after walking in the woods, while others have described art as the pearl laboriously secreted around the irritating grain of sand. The welter of stimuli of modern life is thus ’processed’ through the various conceptual filters we call styles, from impressionism through expressionism, cubism, surrealism, abstraction, and so on. The heady flow of sights and sounds is psychologically integrated, yielding new artistic realities.

Avant-garde theory used to assert that stylistic change was historically mandated, each revolutionary change in consciousness superseding its predecessor before being eclipsed by its successor.. Nowadays, however, that determinist view (memorably satirized in a Saul Steinberg cartoon of a bearded beatnik army on the march) no longer prevails. Art history, like every other living tradition, engages in a dialogue with the living past, each generation making its contributions. Artists today, freed from historicist dogma, are free to choose from a number of approaches, or to combine them to form their own unique fusions.

Pineda’s work exemplifies contemporary eclecticism, combining elements of styles not normally considered esthetic bedfellows: the casual doodling and skewed perspectives of the untrained child or outsider artist; the everyday subject matter of Ashcan realism, cubism and Pop Art; the vigorous brushwork and ambiguous 2D/3D space of Abstract Expressionism; the use of photographic projection and silkscreen from photorealism and Pop, respectively; and the use of painted words (trafico, martini, botella, zoom, Metro, caminando sola) and arrows to form concrete visual/verbal poems; line and color, word and image come together to create new poetic entities. These visually rich mixed-media (acrylic, paint marker, oil pastel, collage) pieces are thematically and stylistically charged as well, hinting at influences as disparate as Warhol, Johns, Dubuffet, Twombly, and Basquiat.

Leonardo Pineda, Bicicleta, 2006, mixed media on canvas, 55 x 55 in.

What emerges from Pineda’s cityscapes, florals, and apotheoses of bicycles, cars, cocktail glasses and wine bottles —all iconic vehicles of transportation and emotional transport— is a naïve yet sophisticated celebration of modern life in all its dynamism and excitement: sensory overload as ecstasy and exaltation. Pineda’s cityscapes have the innocence of children’s visions, with simplified buildings and cars, and maplike aerial perspectives.

Urban life can be claustrophobic also, however, as art critic Natalia Vega has pointed out: “Pineda’s paintings present a narrative ambiguity …[between the] celebratory… [and the] disturbing.” (It is telling that artist, an urban stroller and connoisseurial observer, is also an aficionado of the outdoors and an avid bicyclist.) Pineda’s street-level paintings dissolve the unitary city into an abstraction of buzzing neon sign images, reflections in plate glass, and incomplete or repeated or backwards-reading messages which we interpret as satirical or witty internal monologue; space is intangible except as a brightly colored atmosphere proffering tantalizing objects of desire.

This love-hate relationship with modernity is neither specifically Colombian nor American, of course; as the world shrinks, with globalism spreading, for better or worse, a consumerist monoculture often at odds with local tradition and history, jumbling past, present and future, it is universal.

Leonardo Pineda: Por Fuera will be on view at Gallery 415 May 19th through June 30th, 2007.

Breaking Ground, Ground Breaking

Situated round the corner from SFMOMA and down the block from the St. Regis Hotel is the unveiling of the newly re-located Catharine Clark Gallery with its opening show entitled “Breaking Ground, Ground Breaking”. Free from the confines of 49 Geary, Catharine Clark ambitiously stakes her claim as a forward thinking gallerist, albeit using carefully pre-conceived identifiers of contemporary gallery hotness. With its concrete floors, white painted walls and industrial vents, windowed garage door front and perfectly hip street nestled in the shadow of SFMOMA and Yerba Buena, one might think they’ve stumbled upon a missing block in that larger shadow of Manhattan’s Chelsea district. This is not an easy tightrope to walk when one accounts for the fickleness of a city that often lambastes more financially stable galleries with accusations of corporatocracy while simultaneously lauding smaller alternative spaces with little financial security.

That being said, Catharine Clark continues in her tradition of employing a more thoughtful installation and strives to present itself firmly on a line vacillating between the expected and unexpected far beyond many of her peers. Immediately upon approaching the space, Walter Robinson’s installation “Context” splashes boldly thru the slick garaged front, confronting the viewer with the vernacular often used in the context of art discussion. Ranging in size from 11- 24 inches in diameter, the glossy candy-colored circles appropriate the tactility of buttons or the slickness of pills, each with a different word sometimes repeated but in varying shades of colors, both in font and background. Although the installation is acutely installed, it is curious that we should be made self-conscious about the context of our surroundings under the rubric of anything “Ground Breaking”. Hardly anyone is unaware of the less palatable aspects of the art market, which often reduces a work to a sexy catchphrase. Nonetheless, the sculptures work as a visual feast buoyed by a somewhat neutral point of view.

Once entered, one encounters Ray Beldner’s “Ground Breaking of In Advance of the Broken Shovel”, a nod to Marcel Duchamp, which cleverly works its way throughout the exhibition space and fortunately is a one-liner which never feels stale or overworked. Its sculptural simplicity is employed with just the right dose of irony and earnestness, leaving one to wish that the entire exhibit were full of these gems. Indeed, what is particularly amusing is that this not so subtle gesture best fulfills the notion of “Breaking Ground” in part because it assumes the challenge so transparently while not overworking it’s subject and taking itself too serious.

On a somewhat opposite end of this spectrum is a painting by Julie Heffernan, which continues her affectations for combining mysticism and femininity in a somewhat neo-decadent pastiche of Rococo and Flemish styled mannerisms. Loaded with her usual 17th and 18th century inspired accoutrements, “Self-Portrait as Moth to Flame” interestingly invites the viewer to peer into a dramatic play underway but falls shy of inciting anything which might feel new or hence “Ground Breaking”.

Around the corner, however, is a full sized film/video space, clearly upping the ante in comparison to other local galleries, (which for too long have ignored this already accepted medium into their current dialogue). Be careful not to miss Reuben Lorch-Miller’s watercolor text “Lights Out” or “Move In Special”, which read like action directives without compromising it’s inherent ambiguity.

Moving into the video space are two pieces by Anthony Discenza. The first one is a 4-minute small digital video entitled “Dream Home” that features facades of wealthy homes broken into grids whose parts randomly interchange. The specific styles become irrelevant while the commonality is further enhanced by the consistent presence of a manicured green lawn and bright blue sky. The wealth necessitated to attain these homes isn’t of particular interest here, but rather the singularity of aesthetic for which our culture seems destined for.

The issues of conformity take center stage with the larger video projection “Drift”, an amalgamation of over 100 pixilated images of a suburban viewscape taken from above. The images appear blown up, muting any precise detail, and whether intentional or not, reference the detached almost clinical perspective of a google street map search. In a culture where anyone can view small and large towns alike by the simple click of a mouse, the blurry and anonymous cropping of rooftops, electrical poles, driveways, etc. constantly rearranged with a cubist’s eye for flatness and overlaid with an almost suffocating audio, offers up a dystopia where one soon realizes they have been ensconced in a mesmerizing trap.

Working within similar mediums is Lincoln Schatz’s “Cluster”, an interactive video software piece that records gallery visitors and displays them at various times causing the time between the recordings to become irrelevant, creating a unified but constantly evolving digital portrait. As savvy as the technology is for this piece, it’s surprising to see within another room Schatz’s “End of Boom”, a more mature video which greatly benefits from restraining its technical prowess and allowing the simple overlay of video shots taken from above an active construction site to realize its own narrative. Never before has the process of major construction seemed so tender and inherently fragile.

Along the same note is Inez Storer’s “Patriotism (#1-6)", a mixed media college of old photographs and wartime letters which almost overwhelms itself with their quietly nostalgic narratives of America during past war times.

Ultimately, though, it is unclear where anything appears to break ground or as the accompanying gallery pamphlet states “falls out of lock step with preconceived norms and breaks away from an established order”. However, the successes here certainly provides hope for a gallery itself which in its 12th year might signal a shift in the homogenous rhetoric often plaguing lesser risk taking San Francisco institutions. Looked thru this lens, perhaps the relocation is less of a “Breaking Ground, Ground Breaking” venture and more of a much-needed jolt to the often too comfortable status quo. In a city famous for its jolts, it remains to be seen whether this one will be a foreshock or a slight shake. Fortunately or not, one will just have to wait and see.

Breakthrough: An Amateur Photography Revolution

I became aware of SFAC Gallery's most recent show, Breakthrough: An Amateur Photography Revolution, via email one Thursday morning. My interests piqued by the show's description, I surfed onto their website where I found images of the exhibition, JPGs representing the curator-chosen photos(that were themselves once JPGs) in the gallery and a couple of installation shots with people mulling around the gallery space. My interest was sustained online and I ended up visiting the exhibition a handful of times, this essay being the result of those excursions. However, the events that led up to me landing foot in the gallery have specific gravity given this particular exhibition's inquiry, in that, these days exhibitions are for many at first an online experience. I see digital paintings in my email inbox, downloading the ones I find particularly striking. I bookmark the websites of galleries, artists, and museums; I subscribe to museum podcasts and the RSS feeds of art collector blogs in the states and beyond. My experience of surfing banks of JPGs detailing work from various exhibitions that dot the globe is collaged together with all that entertainment, that pop detritus that has historically been art's antithesis but now being all online, is now its prime interlocutor. For the past few weeks this has meant, videos of Juke dancing on YouTube, machinima snapshots on Flickr, and articles from the AvaStar, SecondLife's version of US Weekly mingle casually with posts from jameswagner.com and the recent podcasts put forth by Heather Marx Gallery.

It's in online space that both entertainment and contemporary art are undergoing a massive shift; without doubt, the deck is being reshuffled. Entertainment that was once broadcast out from mass-media channels is becoming more populist through sites whose basis is the social bond, although online access is still the gatekeeper, a broader range of social and political imaginations has emerged through this change. As a form of culture that has been relentlessly critical of entertainment, contemporary art is faltering in its efforts to develop a forum where just as many antagonisms can be voiced. The highly creative media made by users of these sites have underlined the field of contemporary art's elitism, leaving it looking relatively conservative. Arts professionals have readdressed their practice accordingly and many local art spaces have also taken note. Breakthrough being the most recent salient example was able to show the discord between the gallery and online networks. There have surely been others in the past, perhaps readers remember Clark Buckner's show A Vlog is a Vlog at Mission 17 this past fall.

In any regard, SFAC Gallery took on the immense task of translating the social economies and collective intelligence of participatory media sites into a gallery space, a task that would certainly challenge any curator. The exhibition structured the gallery space into two sections, JPG: Community and Opportunity and Takes on Flickr. In the former, JPG Magazine, a local organization that publishes a magazine of images that have been uploaded to its social networking site, presented an exhibition that according to the far-too-utopic description, “celebrates global participation and exposes the editorial process.” The work presented was comprised of a photomosaic made from 3288 thumbnail prints, each image submitted under the “breakthrough” theme. From this lot of 3288 images, a DVD was created which ran 500 of these files as a slideshow; it played on a pedestaled monitor. However, the primary focus of the first section were the 20 files that had been chosen by SFAC Gallery Director Meg Shiffler and artist Noah Lang. Printed and arranged on the room's longest wall in a sparse salon style they showed subjects like brilliantly colored landscapes and smiling kids, images that I imagine most regular gallerygoers find familiar. A handful of photos were passionate and others were studied, all together they were visually engaging and technically aware.

In the latter portion of the exhibition, six Bay Area curators picked clumps of images from the massive photo sharing site, Flickr. Each curator worked from their own criteria. The chosen works were printed and taped to the wall, small bits of text nearby noted the title of the work, name of the user, and how the selection had been curated. In addition, each curator wrote a bit of text, some were casual, some were turgid, explaining how they went about their selections. In one group, Renny Pritiken chose files that were, “studies of the human figure in juxtapositions to built space.” Heather Champ, a Flickr community manager, chose a half dozen photos that appeared to be taken with a pinhole camera, while Joseph Del Pesco sought and found photos whose subject was built on the bare bones self-reflexivity of people taking photos of other people.

The exhibition made awkwardly apparent that a digital image is not just a photograph waiting to be printed. And that, when having named a show for photography, the JPG may not be the best place to begin. In a sense, at the core every printed and taped photo illustrated that the experience of viewing these once-digital-files in a white cube was radically different than flipping through them online. Given this, the exhibition was one of the largest photo selections I've ever seen in a gallery, let alone a space of SFAC's modest size. However, recalling who participates in Flickr, the selections appeared overly tailored to contemporary art's aesthetics. This left the more popular aesthetic criteria without acknowledgement, despite having an overwhelming presence on Flickr, uses of the JPG that were not based art-historically were not selected. Both sections of the exhibition identified recurring art historical tropes in the community, conventionally landscapes and portraits were dominant. From the millions of photos on Flickr, the chosen curators were unabashed about searching for what they already know, the aesthetic formats that have precedence and are pre-qualified to appear in a gallery. Renny Pritiken's two selections that included stills from mid-20th-century sci-fi films showed that these categories allowed for some leakage within the horizontality provided by Flickr, but not much. Largely, the lot of files was curated into and from the canon of art photography, works were chosen on their ability to mirror with clarity the last century of photography in art.

Each section of the exhibition also worked at returning to the category of art and the outmoded distinction between amateur and professional. It's a duality that sites like Flickr rarely make effort to recognize, but allows galleries to maintain the image of cultural authority. This was writ large in the exhibition's title, Breakthrough: An Amateur Photography Revolution. It's a revolution for these photographers, but they're still amateurs. In this exhibition, I'm unsure as to whether a traditional gallery exhibition can critically frame the social economies of participatory sites and identify the collective intelligence they gather, let alone participate in this online culture in a way that isn't overbearing and brimming with hubris. These new media sharing sites, these forums of online culture, are an arena where the aesthetics of contemporary art can only have a proportional stake. When curators engage with online culture, they should do so with a certain criticality, an understanding that in these forums, their values are far from the presiding ones. Curating through the scope of contemporary art will only be effective in finding what is already known, it will most likely not yield an exhibition that is representative of the context from which it was built.

El Corazon de la Mission: a guided tour of San Francisco’s Mission district aboard the Mexican bus

When I called Circuit Networks to reserve seats on Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Mexican bus tour of San Francisco’s Mission district, the voice at the other end of the line told me I was in for a very special treat- Guillermo himself would be guiding what is normally an 80-minute audio tour. That in mind, I opted for the $25 “wet” ticket, which included tequila shots and headed for Galeria de la Raza on 24th Street, the designated pick-up spot where fifty or so “tourists” milled about the gallery. The invitation promised a celebration of “the ever-evolving social, cultural and political sensibilities” of the Mission district, but as soon as Gómez-Peña and his collaborator, Violeta Luna, appeared, it was clear we had signed up for more than just a tour. Luna’s Kahlo-esque leg brace and painted monobrow, along with Gómez-Peña’s gender-bending rainbow serape, heavy black eyeliner, open leather vest and walking cane suggested we were in for an odyssey through a swamp of cultural and symbolic mash-ups.

Seated across from one another at opposite ends of the gallery, the pair engaged in a Surrealist pas de deux worthy of a Jordorowsky film. Gómez-Peña, manning a boom box, gave an impassioned speech about the Mission’s cultural and historical significance and paced the room in restless arcs while Luna plucked sharp implements from an electrical tape sheath under her skirt and poked them in her eyes and cheeks. The audience’s implicit participation in the tour was made explicit when Luna handed the free end of a leash tied around her neck to an unsuspecting tourist and began a choking dance at the other end, straining against the cultural symbols that bound each to the other. Introductions over, we boarded the brightly colored, shrine-encrusted bus that would, in the hands of our coyotes, shuttle us across the border of cultural schisms that is San Francisco’s Mission district. It seemed somehow fitting that my view on the scene was filtered through the visage of the grinning, sombrero-wearing skeleton tattooed on my window. Instructed to “fasten your conceptual seatbelts and grab your neighbor’s crotch,” we pulled away from the gallery, unsure exactly where we were headed.

A steady tri-lingual stream of Gómez-Peña’s trademark biting commentary flowed pre-recorded from the boom box in Spanish, English and Spanglish, punctuated regularly with live interjections and songs. For her part, Luna assumed the role of excoriating trickster, prancing up and down the aisles of the moving bus entertaining riders with no less than ten costume and character changes that grew in complexity and bizarreness as the trip went on. (My favorite sported a leering Ronald Regan Halloween mask and sucked oxygen from a bag emblazoned with an American flag that he/she/it clutched with a pair of furry wolf hands).

At Clarion Alley, which is located, according to Gómez-Peña “where Agitprop meets public art on the corner of Western civilization and Hell,” we paused while Luna swept the alley’s entrance with a straw broom in preparation for our walking tour of this “tabula rasa en extremis.” Here, crack and heroine meet art in a place where some of the city’s most celebrated murals serve as wallpaper for one of its most notorious shooting galleries. Like an enthusiastic art director, Gómez-Peña cajoled tourists to participate in artistic “interventions” by posing with Luna in various absurdist tableaux against the murals. One enthusiastic passerby stripped down to his underwear and joined the image. I couldn’t help but wonder how he would recount the event later to his friends.

Outside Mission Dolores, Luna again disembarked and mounted the steps. Much to the consternation of Saturday afternoon pedestrains, she flogged herself with a braided leather strop that she eventually wrapped tightly around her face while uttering silent incantations with the aid of a Santeria candle. Little wonder that the chapel had been locked to the tour after its first blasphemous visit there a few days earlier. Our next stop was a crowded neighborhood bar frequented largely by locals, who were both confused and amused by the sudden invasion of non-natives armed with cameras. The invaders were equally unsure of themselves- an example, perhaps, of what Gómez-Peña described as “the first world wrestling with the third and trying to make sense out of the sweaty proximity,” an exchange he encouraged by challenging tourists to dance with locals.

The prescience of Gómez-Peña’s running commentary was uncanny. While guiding us across the “border conflict between the locals and the so-called art hipsters” (gross generalizations, he conceded, because “the locals aren’t that local and the hipsters aren’t that hip”) a well-known gallery owner jaywalked in front of the bus as if on cue. Gómez-Peña evenly doled responsibility for this “vicarious experience in cultural otherness” amongst the various multi-ethnic tribes, socio-economic clans and cultural groups we encountered through the windows of our 80-minute tour. “We are,” as he said, “all authors within this intercultural poltergeist.” The bus, it should be pointed out, served a major role in blurring these lines of distinction by making it unclear just who was looking at whom; those on the street returned our safety-glass gazes with equal curiosity.

Even the most casual of observers can find culture clashes in the Mission, but to tour such a place with Gómez-Peña is to go on safari with one of the world’s foremost subversive ethnographers. Absurd as his and Luna’s performance may seem at times, it forces participants to acknowledge the complex cultural boundaries written and rewritten daily in the Mission. If they could find a way to entice more locals to join the hipsters on the tour bus, then perhaps Gómez-Peña could answer the unresolved question he posed to us at the tour’s end: “Am I a hipster or a local? Can I be both, please? “

If Gómez-Peña is able to successfully secure long-term funding for this project, as he hopes to do, the only shortfall for this potentially major cultural attraction will be that there aren’t enough Gómez-Peñas and Lunas to ferry each and every tour across the cultural divide personally; without the animated guidance of our coyotes, the translation would be much less colorful.

For more information on future tours, see La Pocha Nostra's website: 
http://www.pochanostra.com


Excavations

When I first saw Johansson Projects’ inaugural press release for Excavations, I thought the title might prove most valuable not as a one off event, but as an annual exhibit. In constant return, tilling and re-tilling the soil each time our articulations become too content, too static or cocksure. Especially as Oakland presses forward in its Brooklyn-brother way, and not as the younger sibling to New York, but to the often marginalized provincialism and politic of the San Francisco art scene.

But even at the doors, over the clamoring talk and leaning to see through the shoulders of the crowd for work, some even growing from the walls, I realized this was an independent and exciting night, not to be repeated.

Johansson Projects had exploded the Murmur.

And with what? A landscape show, as Johansson originally—and that is to say long ago, several artists prior to opening night—envisioned it—the dynamic contemporary handling of that old fashioned form. But three artists became six, and six, eight. The very rupture of Excavations itself. And as product, a kinship of previously unrelated local artists such as Jana Flynn and veteran earthworks artist John Roloff, who’s renowned kiln works were being produced at the same time as Flynn herself. A vivid coupling no doubt. But like any assemblage, one in turn elevated and plagued by its company.

From the lush introduction of Inaoka’s aviary through Scott Oliver’s and Britton’s dreamt narratives, to the final fragmenting of Desotto’s audio nonsense, Excavations is visually explosive. The Show hangs in shrapneled beauty. But nothing new seemed to reveal itself on this my second visit, and actually the holdings together seemed a bit strained without the crowded support.

I recall the answer a lector once gave in a stiflingly overheated Chicago auditorium when asked from the echoing and distant audience microphone – How do you judge Good and Bad in contemporary art? Well, each person does, came the response, but me – I think when I see decent contemporary art I think: ‘Wow…hm.’ But when I see a really lasting piece, I think: ‘Hmmm…Wow!’

I believe in this.

John Rolof, Landscape Projection (for an Unknown Window), No. 2, 1998, 12 ft. x 8 ft.

John Rolof’s morose photo work, Landscape Projection (for an Unknown Window), demands this response in its inside- out dialogue between generic window space and an abstract interior ‘earth-work’. And Val Britton’s walls. Her large-scale maps of her deceased father’s truck routes are, in the end, anything but mournful. Breaking from the traditional dependence on topographical ring work to provide movement, she’s able to elicit a deeply believable and somehow constant chaotic throbbing by way of slashes and physical overlay. They may have arisen from the static Rand McNally, but these beautified renderings of that lonesome profession seem less like maps than stories from daughter to absent father. While successfully holding entire rooms captive, it is in the lure of their three-dimensional detail that they are able to seduce the audience into their both bold and intricate narratives, marked by monumental lines and frail continents.

Val Britton, Where could you have been, or where could I?,2005.

But enjoyable as they are, Yvette Molina’s incredible mark making and Misako Inaoka’s three latest birds are hindered by the addition of earlier and less mature decorative work. For Molina it seems to be a market issue: that the immense success of her previous work - as hungry as the public has proven to be for her saturated naturalist scapes – seems to have made it harder to cut the remaining butterflies from otherwise rigorous aluminum meditations. In the case of Inaoka, the division among her birds seems more an issue of discrepancy. When an artist turns a corner in their work – in this case her sculptural birds reaching a point where they shed their kitsch wardrobing, for a wondrous morphological evolution – it is the responsibility, both of the artist and curator, to recognize this shift and act upon it without mercy. And Andrew Benson’s landscapes, which are, in his own words, derived from “an artistic methodology that draws upon practices as diverse as landscape painting, computer science, electronic engineering, cartography, systems theory, signal processing, and architectural design” – which sounds like gorgeous sport to me - unfortunately read like 120 mph Rorschach tests, minus the rich psychological and historical context.

But it was no doubt, an event. Raucous, the curator herself having to shoulder the door shut an hour past closing time against the protests of her public. And a buying public – so much so that pieces were added post-event (a habit Ms. Johansson must train herself out of having come from the retailist buffet of the Union Square district). And why, because no matter what the gripes, Excavations proved a high-impact groundbreaking, and one that makes me look forward to the finer tuning of future projects.

Joe Goode's Humansville

Seeing Joe Goode’s new work Humansville at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is like wandering through a psychiatric ward and medically observing individuals who are severely self-involved, experiencing physical pain due to psychological damage, or have an intense anxiety to take action. You can watch two scantily clad men convulsing in identical sterile chambers, a woman in hysterics, or two poor souls so timid they cannot even leave their chairs.

Humansville is divided into two parts, the first being an installation and the second a multimedia performance. In the first half, viewers have the opportunity to interact with the performers, choosing how close to get and how long to linger, while navigating their way through an installation composed of four chambers. However, few brave souls take the opportunity to get up close and personal, and instead there is a strict line that divides the audience from the performers. Humansville appears to be expressing the importance of connection between individuals and whether outward connections necessarily lead to inward ones. However, although Goode tries to connect audience and performer, through the projection of unsuspecting viewers on a wall of the installation and the gift of giving viewers free range to explore and choose their own viewing paths, Humansville is too over-saturated with material and disjointed to truly connect viewer to performer. Which raises the question of whether the audience can connect with Goode’s message at all if we are unable to break the barrier and meld with the performers, thus becoming performers ourselves.

Individually the separate parts of Humansville are gems. There is something for everyone. You have:

A quirky 1950s high school girl flashing her underwear and rambling about the history of Virginia (check)
An interactive and polite touch-screen video (check)
Two hot men tormented in cells (check)
Fabulous live cello music by Joan Jeanrenaud (check)
Fuzzy walls that you can rub and leave your mark on (check)
Stunning choreography (check)
And a hilarious monologue about a guy being spied on by two old gay men (check)

But when you combine all these elements together you end up confused and wondering what the hell Pocahontas has anything to do with a guy dressed in only a little pink terry-cloth towel.

Still, Goode is able to shed some insight on human connection despite the perplexing amalgamation of so much disparate material. In the second seated-half of the performance, Felipe Barrueto-Cabello and Marit Brook-Kothlow’s duet is a beautifully honest representation of the difficulty to connect with someone. Brook-Kothlow’s desperate rubbing of the back of her head on Barrueto-Cabello, searching for her fit in his body, was the most moving part of the night, particularly due to the juxtaposition with the contrast of their melded silhouettes projected on the wall behind them. Although their combined silhouette appears so easily united, the actual movement of their bodies before the audience portrays the harsh truth that the appearance of connection can deceive, and that real human connection is a struggle. Here, the dance speaks for itself and there is no unnecessary text to hinder the communication and expression through movement. And here is where Goode as a creator shines most, offering a sincere moment that is oh so human.

Joe Goode’s Humansville is running June 7-9 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

On the Collective Foundation

The Collective Foundation is currently on exhibit at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. As a gallery guide, I had the opportunity to lead a group of teenagers and their mentors on a tour of the installation one Saturday in May.

At the beginning of the tour I asked the group, "What is a collective?"
A few replied, “A collective is something you collect.”
I then asked, “And what are you doing when you collect something?”
One of the boys replied, “You’re gathering a bunch of things.”
I then asked the group, what does the color red mean or express to you?
They responded, “Anger.” “Love.” “Communism.”

In How Do We See Red? Count the Ways, (New York Times, Tuesday, February 6, 2007) Natalie Angier writes, “exquisite ambassador for love…the color of the blood that flushes the face and swells the pelvis…In red we see shades of life, death, fury, shame, courage, anguish, pride…” Angier continues, red is also “the color of revolution, of throwing the established order.”

Russian Communist propaganda was created in red, black, and white. Constructivist artists such as Rodchenko and Lissensky worked with this color palette to create visual stimulation and products for the state. In China, Cuba, and Mexico artists did the same, creating socialist propaganda in red to imply intensity, power, and revolution.

In How Do we See Red?..., Angier quotes Dr. Nicholas Humphrey, Philosopher at the London school of Economics and author of, Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness, “If you want to make a point, make it in red.” Humphrey claims, “red is without exception the first color word to enter the vocabulary….some languages it’s the only color word apart from black and white.”

A study conducted on the use of red in individual fighting sports, found that the athletes who wore red, won “significantly more often than would be expected by chance alone.” However, they are still struggling with the question: Do the athletes who wear the color get a “subconscious boost” from the attire or do their opponents feel threatened by the color red and thus back down?

Throughout the Collective Foundation installation, the color red is cleverly displayed, presenting slight flux in color and psyche. The Collective’s use of this color was brought up in discussion at gallery meeting, and a call was made to a member of CF to ask about the foundation’s intensions. We were told that the color, in relation to the collective, signified an association with corporate logos/icons i.e. Coca-Cola, in addition to the color’s political association with socialism. The variation of red from scarlet to burgundy represented the “unification and differences” experienced within a collective while further referencing the “pixilated” effects of color in which postmodernism has become affiliated with via digital/analog processing.

View of Collective Foundation entry.

When one enters the gallery they are met with a wallpapered wall of a red and white design. In front of the wall is a red, wood screen, cut with the same pattern as the wallpaper. Using a networking symbol influenced by a children’s game, the wallpaper pattern/design signifies a visual map of a collective/networking system. The design is a culmination of individual pictograms in which each pictogram represents a “set” which is “open” to linking to other sets/pictograms. Each of the pictograms is capable of joining with multiple sets, which are capable of linking to multiple sets, which are capable of linking to multiple sets, and so on. This accumulation of a red and white design exhibits how collectives/networking systems work and why they are an infinite process.

“The screens are cut with a patterned latticework that offers views through their wooden membranes. The pattern is a stylized reference to the networking system of a childhood toy and is echoed in reverse, on the light fixture that hangs above the conference table, as well as the wallpaper covering the gallery’s outer walls.” (Statement: Furnishing the Collective Foundation, Rene de Guzman.) Each pictogram represents a subject and the subject’s relations. Once placed in a mass formation (i.e. total design) the icon presents linking connections to other subjects and sources.

View of Collective Foundation "conference table."

The main room is a dimly lit red space. The red folding screens are arranged in the center of the room, creating an inner rectangle of a transparent semi-enclosed area. “Transparency, which is both a mode of communication and a code of working that the CF abides by, is literally manifest in the custom built screens.” (Statement: Furnishing the Collective Foundation, Berin Golonu.) Comparable to an office cubicle and boardroom meeting area, there is an arrangement of adjoining tables set in the middle of the space. Chairs surround the table, and computers sit on the surface of the table arrangement. Visitors may sit down and view the Collective Foundation website to research information about the foundation and link to the foundation’s various recourses.

Circling the red transparent rectangle are two red walls and two white walls. The first white wall contains small individually framed images of furniture. The Collective Furniture Project was conceived and created by members of the collective who wanted a “material presence” for the Collective Foundation while exhibited at YBCA. Various pieces of furniture were donated to the project (on loan). Each piece of furniture was permanently modified so that the object linked aesthetically to the other pieces of furniture. At the end of the exhibition, the furniture will be returned to its rightful owner. A wall text located next to the grid of framed photos explains the project’s concept to the viewer.

Across the space, on the other white wall, hang photographs, which present examples of various forms of body collectives. Each photo is nicely framed and hung wide enough apart. They ask for the gallery visitor to come up-close-and-personal or walk by and ignore the image. Between transparent screens and a white wall, the viewer’s spatial experience—viewing these photos—is similar to that of a passing hallway gallery.

View of Collective Foundation "reading room."

Exiting the red boardroom, the gallery visitor may take a breath of air and relax in a more comfortable and lighter area. Unlike the dimly lit, dark, red enclosure, the “reading room” is airy and sweet and nearly lovable. The room is more white than red, thus lacking the bombardment of red’s aggressive power. It is wallpapered (on one wall) with the “collective” design, and furniture is arranged to invite the participant to sit down, read, and/or converse with another. There is even a buffet offering tea for the visitor’s pleasure.

The Artist's Product is Always Incomplete: Reflections On an Installation by Yaffa Gilbet

In February of 2007, Yaffa Gilbet installed Incomplete: What I did during my winter break, at the Swell Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute. Incomplete was a bi-wall map created by an arrangement of made and collected items (including maps, plastic bags containing artifacts, and a massive newspaper/calendar) which represented specific linking events attributed to the artist’s experience of travel from California to Colorado (via Nevada, Utah, Wyoming) and Colorado to California (via New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada).

Having remained for a month in Colorado, the artist created a newspaper calendar, which signified the time in which her travel occurred. Gilbet chose to use the front and last pages of the local newspaper, The Summit Daily News, perceiving the front page as proof of “events of importance” within this particular “small town” community. And the last page, used for crossword and astrology, signified the hidden or unknown events of the community, thus becoming ignored or non-existent.

The maps are left over from the road atlas the artist used during her trip. As they are in various conditions, the maps are sandwiched between a folded sheet of tracing paper. Gilbet drew a black line, on the tracing paper, memorializing the road she traveled. Within the arrangement of the wall-map, the plastic bags are placed in consecutive order. Each bag contains artifacts, which the artist collected during her trip. The artifacts vary from found objects, gifts, receipts, propaganda, maps, notes, condom wrappers, etc. She identifies with these materials as “proof of experience” and the visual documentation of events.

Gilbet links the events/artifacts with black thread. The scale of the installation is large enough that the thread is nearly impossible to see until perhaps too late. Extending off the corner of the gallery, the wall-map becomes three dimensional through the linking of events. The viewer can easily walk into the thread while dazed by the multitude of visual content. The web creates a barrier in which the viewer is unable to get close to the contents of the piece.

In his Manifesto of Affirmationism, Alain Badiou states, “one can call “post-modern” whatever displays a capricious and unlimited ascendancy of particularities: the communitarian, ethnic, linguistic, religious, sexual, and any other particularity. And the biographical particularity, the “me”, as one imagines it can and should be “expressed.” He claims that the postmodern artists exhibits, “a Didactic-Romantic schema”. Quoting himself from, Petit manuel d’inesthetique, “They (the artists) were Didactic, through their desire to put an end to art, through their denunciation of its inauthentic and alienated character. And also Romantic, through their conviction that art should be reborn immediately as absolutist, as integrally conscious of its own operation, as truth immediately capable of reading itself.” Badiou defines “Didactic”, as submitting “artistic activity to the external imperative of the Idea.” And “Romantic” as seeing “in art the only free form of decent of the infinite Idea into the sensory…”

According to Badiou, is Incomplete an example of a “Didactic-Romantic" artistic product?

The “product”, installation, is an accumulation of materials over a length of time. Not really a “narrative”, the project is a “map” of the artist’s own experience. The materials do not exhibit an exploration of the artist’s own identity or community. Rather, the artist is a traveler viewing the community from the outside, documenting her experience of the other’s space.

At the same time, the wall-map does exhibit the use of text, and thus the viewer assumes that the artist is seeking to communicate something to them, the introduction of thread poses two issues. 1. Why is the thread there? And 2. Thread acting as barrier to the visual information. The thread exists within the piece solely for the purpose of the artist to experiment with her Idea of linking and crossing events. The artist is possessed to seek a “truth”, thus using exhibited materials to do so. She is less concerned about “communicating” anything to the viewer.

The artist did not intend to be “didactic” in the terms of “intending to instruct”, but she does exhibit a search of a specific truth, which was initiated in response to a “power” associated with a specific Idea. Her content is rather dry, and might belong in the field of science rather than art. But to Gilbet the Idea is most important and remains infinite through the process. In her work, the artist’s Idea creates the process, which results in the product. In Incomplete, the artist’s “product” is not actually complete, nor is her Idea totally resolved. Her use of this title, Incomplete, exhibits the fact that the artist is more concerned about proving her Idea, than she is about the completed aesthetic product.