Kiki: The Proof Is In The Pudding

Lutz Bacher's 1993 aptly named Butt Photo--for that is what it is, an oversized black-and-white image of two clenched and dimpled cheeks--has pride of place in Kiki: The Proof is in the Pudding, on view at Ratio 3 through August 2nd. Placed well above eye level on the far wall of the gallery's main room, it sets the proper tone for the show: a sort of insouciant provocation. Catherine Opie's portraits of the performer Justin Bond and the artist Jerome Caja (also from 1993) most effectively convey this sensibility. The latter does an aggressive number on the viewer/object relationship. Caja's poorly applied makeup and ill-fitting dress set against a bright green background offer sufficient reasons to stare, but after a moment that reasoning seems a flimsy excuse in comparison to the withering gaze he volleys with, an expression that demands to know what it is I am looking at. It is the first time I have nearly apologized to a work of art.

Organized by writer Kevin Killian and artist Colter Jacobsen, Kiki includes a broad sampling of artworks originally shown at the Kiki gallery during the mid-nineties. Located in a tiny space on 14th Street in the Mission, not far from where Ratio 3 stands now, the gallery presented an array of art that is, by turns, irreverent, brash, poignant, or solipsistic. The space was founded and run by Rick Jacobsen, a charismatic and consummate performer who was also--according to his obituary--an "activist, theatrical producer, substance-abuse counselor, bookseller, and certified massage therapist." Jacobsen ran the space for eighteen months, until his illness--AIDS-related lymphoma--forced its closure in 1995.

Perhaps the most telling aspects of the gallery were the exhibition titles. Caca @ Kiki was the name of the inaugural show, followed by others, including The Bong Show, Fanta, Sick Joke: Bitterness, Sarcasm & Irony in the Second AIDS Decade, and the final show, Piece: Nine Artists Consider Yoko Ono, a tribute to the artist/musician/cultural icon. (She makes a stealth appearance in Kiki: The Proof is in the Pudding, in the form of a voice message to the gallery from 1995: "This is her. Yoko! The proof is in the pudding!" It emanates every five minutes from a speaker mounted in the corner of the back room). There is no mistaking Jacobsen's agenda for the gallery was foreground on defiance wrapped up in acerbic humor.

Assembled here and now because of their common provenance, the works on view do much to suggest that resistance, loss, giddiness, and self-preservation were the prevailing sensibilities of San Francisco a decade into the AIDS crisis. There is the inevitability that the further one moves away from an event or period of time, the less visceral it becomes, and the more willing one is to rely on a collective narrative for recollection. Even in moments of crisis or trauma, there exists both the deep and personal defensive of what one knows to have happened, and the relief of releasing it to the past, where it can be stacked up against events of greater or lesser degree to ascertain its significance.

Which is where art intervenes. It somehow ensures that what one intimately feels will be visible or accessible in the story everyone tells. Inadvertently then the included artists, in the process of creating art that challenged ideas of gender and sexuality also preserved an alternative history. Since so much of the work utilizes the body as a public declaration of self, it inevitably speaks to the limitations placed on a body in a particular time and place. For example, the innate perversion of childhood fairy tales are fully unleashed in Keith Mayerson's drawings from the 1993 suite Pinocchio the Big Fag, which turns the Pygmalion myth into a coming out tale. Lampwick & Pinocchio (Keanu & River) depicts the title characters locked in an embrace, albeit with long nose and the ears of a jackass, intimating that while the prohibitions on pleasure may have been fully thwarted, a price has been extracted.

With the inclusion of Mayerson alongside early drawings by Chris Johanson the exhibition could fit neatly into an art historical narrative that places the gallery at a crossroads between identity politics and the nascent Mission School. However, it also succeeds in pulling the work out of that context and returning to it a present tense of urgency and protest. Somehow, this is most aptly reflected in Nayland Blake's video Negative Bunny (1993), which cajoles the viewer in a squawking, falsetto voice, demanding credibility and attention for its negative status. "It's really a power trip and you should examine your motives" and "You couldn't be more negative than me," he chides. Both Blake and Opie refused to allow the motives that relegated queer identities to the margins to go unexamined, and demanded a conversation around who sets the terms of representation. "You're not giving me anything," the bunny implores, and its strained voice is impatient with waiting for acknowledgement.

Other works lose their significance in formal gesture, such as Rex Ray's drawing Untitled (Yoko LPs), which offers little in the way of tribute to Ono. Conversely, Dodie Bellamy's description of Cliff Hengst's 1995 emulative performance included in the 'zine KIKI RICK YOKO CACA produced for the exhibition wonderfully evokes the haphazardness and potential energy that surrounded the gallery and drew so many people to it.

But as someone who arrived in San Francisco ten years after the gallery's closing, I also experienced a feeling of bewilderment at the exhibition opening. How did I not know that Nayland Blake has spent so much time here? My own laziness, perhaps. But that question is simply part of a larger one about the currency of memory, and why some things hold on long past their expiration date while others get clamped down on too quickly. If it was good to shut the door on this frenzied moment for a while, perhaps Kiki: The Proof is in the Pudding, was a necessary reminder of a history waiting for acknowledgement.

An Archive of Feelings: Tammy Rae Carland

"Things belong to those who need them", my grandmother used to say, meaning you would hardly ever find clothes or appliances lying around her house indolently collecting dust. Life had taught her about precariousness and she had learned to share and give away things that somebody, anybody, else might need. Just as clothes and school books went from older to younger to youngest daughter, a worn chair or a chipped pot quickly found a new home when they were replaced by newer items, their life span extended well beyond their average life.

Still, she held on to a few things until her last day: a wooden trunk, a hand knit bedspread, a clear acrylic cube holding 5 pictures on each of its exposed sides. These three items probably witnessed a lot more than could have ever been observed by any of her daughters or grandchildren. After she passed away, my mother kept the wooden trunk and to this day it is inevitable--Spielbergish corny as it sounds--to be immediately transported to the endless afternoons I or any of my cousins spent sitting on top of it or to the evenings when we stared at the small color TV on top of it watching whatever soap opera was in fashion.

All this textual foreplay is, hopefully, an introduction to Tammy Rae Carland's austere and magnificent photography exhibition An Archive of Feelings on view until July 26th at Silverman Gallery in downtown San Francisco.

Carland has steered away from photographing herself and her surroundings to focus on a series of objects that, engulfed in a sea of white as we see them in the show, form a very intimate cabinet of personal curiosities, the items both offering sufficient information and barely hinting at the anecdotes and stories behind and around them.
A literal installation of all these carefully conserved items would not be as beautifully effective as their current presentation, like immobile prehistoric remains captured in amber, their sentimental value exponentially augmented by the pristine conservation of their meaningful patina. While keeping some of these mementos' tactile qualities, the photographs create the necessary distance for the viewer to wonder and wander in what we can only speculate are Tammy Rae's archived feelings.

The larger pieces on display in the gallery may be more effective in threading what seems like clear, almost explicit narratives; but the smaller, single or double item photographs are none less persuasive in transporting us to the time(s) and place(s) when they started to become important for the artist, slowly and serenely accumulating a history that is now made tangible by the wear and tear they proudly flaunt, almost infinite memories gradually seeping into each and every corner of these vessels of affection.

I've read that the show's title has been borrowed from a book I am not familiar with so instead of futilely trying to figure out the intellectual aspect of Tammy Rae Carland's project, I will just relate it to my own experiences, even at the risk of cornering it in the niche of subtly female artwork rooted in the domestic universe. I just can't think of any male artist caring as much to keep vestiges like these (my limited art history knowledge only brings up Felix Gonzalez-Torres') and enshrining them to such delicate and potent effect.

Carland's achievement lies in both referencing and transcending a sort of housekeeping aesthetic by elevating the immaterial qualities of apparently banal items to convey the resonance of relationships past.

Improbable/Unlikely

David Stein's solo exhibition at Eleanor Harwood Gallery, Improbable/Unlikely, is made up of two independent projects, Semesterville and The Unlikely Library. Each is a conceptual take on education and its attendant systems, in which facts and impressions become commingled in an absurd utopia.

Semesterville is a large cardboard sculpture made up of small architectural models, the remains of undergraduate projects assigned in the Architecture department at California College of the Arts (from which David, gallerist Eleanor Harwood and this reviewer all graduated). Some are elegant, others ramshackle. Together they form a miniature city that is at once ambitious and abject. This landscape represents renewed life for these discarded objects, preserving that joyous moment before the post-academic hangover, when graduates begin to trade in dreams for jobs, sets in. The suspended mass of cardboard becomes a doll house where the idealism of college life lives on.

The Unlikely Library is a reading room filled with books that may not exist. Dust jackets created by the artist grace books drawn from library sales and used book drops. The titles reflect literary and academic clichés, such as exceptionally narrow areas of debate (Phillips Head vs. Flat Head), the current scholarly obsession with inane popular culture (Federline on Federline), inscrutable theory (Modernist Unicorn), and comforting if meaningless self-help platitudes (Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Tow-Away Zone). Especially appealing titles include Rappers Discuss Andy Goldsworthy and Men's Guide to Women who Believe that Astrology Bullshit. The texts within occasionally correlate to the jackets, as Stein has found and interspersed some genuine titles with his creations. Usually the texts are unrelated, although equally as obscure or simply incomprehensible as the made-up titles they bear. The comedy of Stein's installation gives way to a frustration that is all too familiar to the overeducated and overstimulated graduate.

Perhaps the timing of this exhibition at the end of the spring semester contributes to the overall feeling of a jailbreak from academic confines. Maybe the fact that the artist shares his name with a famous forger of Picassos explains the intellectual trompe l'oeil at work here. Or, possibly, we simply work too hard and think too much and never ask why, or to what end. Stein's installation prompts that reflection, reminding us that we can never take for granted the truth of what we see or hear.