Elizabeth Johnson

The Person You should Know So Well, But Don't Know At All
Oil on canvas, 2008, 42" X 60"

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor...It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself... he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

-Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

Elizabeth Johnson has a series of four large oil paintings at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's café. These paintings are energetic figurative works and made me think of the Bay Area Expressionist movement (1940's-1960's), and the crowded compositions of German artist Max Beckman. Applying Abstract Expressionist techniques to realistic subject matter, Johnson uses the human figure because she feels it is the best vehicle for human emotions.

In these paintings her figures are simultaneously pushing rocks, disappearing behind and under rocks, and even seem to become rocks. Johnson, like Camus, contemplates the duality of human existence: the absurdity of man's "hour of consciousness" where he knows that human activity is meaningless, and all happiness is fleeting. During his life, man labors ceaselessly on, and looking over the events of his life he knows he is ultimately master of his fate. Man has his rock and "If the descent is sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy...happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth."

Elizabeth Johnson's paintings will be on view at Caffe Museo though September 2.

Little Tree Gallery Social Club

Little Tree Gallery Social Club, a collaborative project by artist Andrew Tosiello and curator Clare Haggarty, is riddled with problems, poorly executed, and ultimately not very interesting.

For those who don't know Tosiello's work, the recent MFA graduate has an obsession with Mafia culture, something that seems analogous to post-Coppola Mob fetishism. His previous works include quasi-Kienholz conceptual tableaus of artist/collector turned hitman/victim relations, and a remake of the legendary Vito Acconci Follow Piece into a fictitious FBI document. While Tosiello argues that these works are acts of appropriation, these works seem to be a fusion of undergraduate obsessions--Conceptualisim and Cosa Nostra culture--rather than a new voice based on discourses of the past. The Social Club is no different.

The project appears to model itself on Relational Aesthetics, a discourse that has varied from Rikrit Tiravanija's work from the late 90s to the more recent and local history of Tony Labatt's BULK. What could have been potentially an interesting project only seems yet again regurgatative and unoriginal. Why an art gallery was "transformed into a Mafia social club," to quote the artist, doesn't seem to make sense. Why not actually make a private social club in a setting more appropriate such as a blacked out store front, or back room? Why transform an already public and contextually defined arts space such as Little Tree gallery into a private social club, one that seemingly allows anyone within the Bay Area arts community in, while simultaneously keeping any potential "non-arts" community out? If these traits are in fact intentional then they are only an exaggeration of San Francisco's already perceived provincialism, and ultimately detrimental to the community. What is the function of playing a mobster other than pure narcissistic public theatrics? If Tossiello's interpretation of the role of the artist is analogous to being a mob boss then ultimately his role is an imitation of the corporate artist turned demigod (i.e. Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons).

As for the work--famous mob movie posters signed by the artists, and hand pressed business/lottery cards--it seems disingenuous and without conceptual rigor. The space is merely a card table with some poorly hung items on the walls; again a photo of the artist and the curator seems like pure self-absorption. There is no sense of an actual mob social club, just a small gallery with disinterested items. If the space is to be a theatrical one then it lacks all theatrical grandeur. Furthermore, the exhibition's public programming on appropriation and Lucy Lippard's dematerialization of the art object only seem to be a desperate attempt to place the project within the context of historically important projects.

Finally, it is unclear what the role of the curator is in this exhibition. Are we to imagine Haggarty as an accomplice? Her role seems opaque, and ultimately placating to the subservient role of the curator-as-lackey for Tosiello's fantasy.

This is just unnecessary public glorification and fetishism of the cinematic Mafia. Unfortunately it seems this project is met with blind support (see flavorpill's review). This is yet another example of the Bay Area arts community candy-coating arts production, rather than being critically productive.

Little Tree Gallery Social Club is at Little Tree Gallery through August 23, 2008.

The Way That We Rhyme: Women, Art & Politics

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in downtown San Francisco describes The Way That We Rhyme as a showcase of "the politically charged work of a new generation of women. Emphasizing performativity, collaboration and coalition building, the works are influenced by the feminist ideologies and activist movements of the past, while also speaking loudly and clearly to the issues facing women right now. Adhering to the notion that there is strength in numbers, the show culls together work from women of differing backgrounds and disciplines to highlight the common goals of their practices."

There is, unfortunately, no resemblance to this statement within what this show offers. With a few exceptions The Way That We Rhyme is marginal, disappointing and in the light of numerous recent shows dedicated to new strands in recent feminist art and retrospectives indicating its history, offers few new insights or challenges. It meets the expectations of the audience head on: there must be the porn room, there must be the anger room, there must be the craft room, there must be the archive, and there they are all laid out room after room.

A secondary general statement the show propels around is activism and action outside of the gallery: interventions, appropriations, devices to stall and engage, power zones and male uniforms (military, police, authority, media) punched through with a more feminine, enraged, defiant shade. Here they are presented merely as documents and become pale and meaningless (I don't figure that the gallery, this gallery is appropriate to present work that is happening outside, that has to happen outside of its privileged, vaulting spaces). The women here attack not only male-dominated media, but also other segregated, marginalised groups, principally gay male culture and also, in a whirlwind of internalised misogyny, other women: the artist Vanessa Beecroft comes in for a particular spiteful thrashing, because she has the audacity to present performances that feature naked women. The porn room and the Gloria Holes featurette is simply a direct attack on gay male culture. Dissatisfied with its languages, behaviours, forms and codes of presentation, the artists adopt roles they see within this culture and its fetishes, fantasies, and sexualized characteristics, like glory holes in restroom stalls and try to queer them with lesbian sensibilities, shaming lesbian identity as a second-rate inferior sexual characteristic; meanwhile the rage present in the mainly gay male porn room accuses gay men of abhorrent acts against women. Pictures of gay men getting it on isn't marginalising women, its just guys who like this stuff get off. (I think. Do women feel this is a real issue for them? Is there no room here for arguments about equal pay, glass ceilings, justice for rape, domestic abuse, pornography, access to rights, notions about representation and the beauty industry? Clearly not. Disregarding any of this we have, crocheted Chanel handbags and Gucci purses, underscoring again the potency of these symbols in informing women of their susceptibility to media, beauty, surface imagery, and their glamour gullibility--not a particularly empowering reflection on recent activities in contemporary female art and we only have to go to New Langton's recent show Small Things End, Great Things Endure to fulfill desires to engage with a more meaty take on this arena of work.)

There are utter gems in this exhibition though, principally in video, using the media to evoke and involve deliberate strategies of resistance, reinterpretation and transference. Aleksandra Mir's video The First Woman on the Moon, 1999, transforms a beach in Holland into a lunar landscape, the soundtrack is NASA noise, as a series of female artists/astronauts, Mir included, conquer this terrestrial/lunar space, with the heroism (heroine-ism?), patriotism, futurism of the original Armstrong adventure. Here she takes on the media's authority, its spectacle, its screen and playfully dismantles it, disintegrates it to articulate its voids, its absences of female contribution; its earth-bound kitchen-sink definition of women's participation.

Laurel Nakadate's Beg for Your Life, 2006, shows a series of vignette dramas, screening her engagements and relationships with older men, as they attempt to overpower her with innuendo and corruption all the while the camera becomes her weapon of visibility, her operation of evidence. Another interesting contribution comes from Nao Bustamante, who uses performance, decoration, disfigurement, media archetypes, full-on suffering and projections as experimental processes into and onto feminist art and its strategies; she starts from the bottom up, investigating its functions and attitude. Jessica Tully's video Our Allies are Everywhere, 2006, and its film about the Santa Cruz Cardinal Regiment, employs pageantry and pomp as devices for containment and liberation; Andrea Bower's 2004 double screen film about Non Violent Disobedience Training is an interesting vehicle about the gulf between power and dissent, taking the form of a lecture and physical gymnasia instructions, it speaks about learning how to first engage with politics and to participate in its interrogation and disparity.

The remainder of the works on show are mostly literal, obvious takes on restrictions, appropriations of male identities and art, actions on aggravation, disturbances, conquests to achieve representation and archives of invitation-only participation. Its final suggestion is its containment of these ideas; the walls, glass windows of the gallery fixing, gluing it entirely within: the possibility of association externally rendered as imprisoned as Suzanne Lacy's wall of archival material: made of inhospitable, closed, rigid boxes.

The Way That We Rhyme was on view at YBCA from March 29th through June 29th, 2008.