Rick Guidice, Space Colonization Modules, 1975.
(Photo courtesy of NASA.)

This scrappy, provocative group show requires some effort to parse its logic. The themes are ambitious—the ability (or inability) to effect change, the ways in which we engage our surroundings, the construction of realities of all stripes: temporal, spatial, scientific, fictitious, local, global, utopic, dystopic. Yet no curatorial statement accompanies the exhibition, which is to the detriment of the artists and audience alike. In its place is a brochure excerpting the Philip K. Dick essay from which the exhibition’s title is derived. Certainly Dick’s essay is illuminating, but it hardly serves as an adequate alternative to a cogent account of the project and the artists’ work included in it. The main gist of the essay is that individuals such as writers and artists and those in power (the media, government, corporations, and religion are some such entities cited by Dick) all build universes, or construct realities, and that there might be something to be gained, for Dick at least, in letting those universes fall apart in order to precipitate change. Who could argue with that? As a thesis, however, the Dick essay is broad to the point of being a blanket statement for most creative endeavors. Almost all artists build universes or critique those that exist, from Andy Warhol to Joseph Beuys, from Martha Rosler to Thomas Hirschhorn, from the Surrealists to the Constructivists, and so on, ad infinitum.

What, then, binds these artists together? Why this group as opposed to some other? The work included is wildly diverse and all over the map, in terms of quality, argument, and scope. The exhibition’s online press release provides a starting point: Projects by Bonnie Ora Sherk and Rick Guidice, along with the Dick essay, are the show’s foundational statements, all, significantly, originating in the 1970s—the show’s temporal touchstone, along with the future, perhaps. From 1974-80 Sherk was the driving force behind Community Crossroads (The Farm), a social and ecological alternative space underneath a San Francisco freeway interchange. A utopic vision made real, if only on seven acres and for just a few years, this experimental project included gardens, a theater, community programs, performances, and informal gatherings. Sherk’s wall of ephemera often appears in rounded wooden frames that give the sensation of being in the family den. It’s an uncanny and irreverent effect that speaks to the show’s clear and commendable mandate to capture in its sweep art and social practices not usually on the radar of the art world and its institutions.

Also in this category are Guidice’s drawings, made around the same time but for another purpose entirely: they illustrate various NASA design proposals, primarily authored by physicist Gerard K. O'Neill, for the United States colonization of space. This information, too, is nowhere to be found in the exhibition space; neither is mention made that Guidice currently lives in Los Gatos, California, and that the exhibition’s curator, Will Bradley, envisioned the show as an exploration of California’s utopia/dystopia paradox (on this see also, for example, Mike Davis’s City of Quartz) and had, in fact, mounted a version of this show a decade ago (this information was taken from the internet, so perhaps should also be taken with a grain of salt).

Despite their shared origination in the seventies it’s difficult to find two conceptual benchmarks as far apart as the undertakings by Sherk and Guidice. And yet they provoke a number of intriguing questions when set against one another (they physically bracket the show as well, with Sherk near the beginning and Guidice closer to the end). The massive shift of scale and feasibility in these visions of sustainability—from backyard to outer space—begs the question of where in this continuum artists and activists situate their efforts. The work in the show does indeed fall scattered all over this spectrum. One notable point of tension is a specificity of place, or lack thereof, as certain works are indelibly linked to sites to which the artists have clear commitments. Solmaz Shabazi’s film Tehran 1380 (2002) is one of the strongest of this group. The film focuses on the gargantuan and self-contained Ekbatan apartment complex in Tehran, built in the mid-seventies and now housing some 75,000 residents. Lurking behind comments to the camera praising the complex—with malls, gyms, and youth cafes, there is no reason to leave, one young resident claims—is the sense that this ultra-planned universe, a distention of modernism’s ideals akin to Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia, poignantly allegorizes the restrictions of contemporary life endemic to Iran.

Also committed to place are William Scott’s strange and yet entirely friendly urban planning proposals for his neighborhood of Hunter’s Point, a marginalized and primarily African-American area of the city now a prime location for city development and an attendant gentrification. His optimistic near-advertisements for a future San Francisco appear opposite a wall painting by Glaswegian artist Toby Paterson depicting an architectural schema of a “Fun Palace.” Against Scott and, just a few feet away, Sherk, the drawing feels oddly cold and rather out of place. The abstract, schematic, or fantastic universe often abuts work more concretely grounded in the sociability and politics of a given place. Guidice’s drawings are adjacent to Andreas Dalen’s psychedelic renderings of what might be the fantasy world of an adolescent boy of the Atari age. Gitte Villesen’s photo and text essay portraying a homeless man in Chicago intent on recycling and reusing small bits of wood is placed opposite Eileen Quinlan’s formal photographs of smoke and mirror tableaux. Smoke and mirrors, no doubt, point to something illusory, and perhaps therein lies the link to precarious universes, but the conceit is flimsy—not to mention old hat, as artists such as László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray were playing stunning formal tricks with photography decades ago.

The inclusion of two younger San Francisco-based artists, Shaun O’Dell and Nate Boyce, in this international group show extends a long-standing and critically important commitment of the Wattis to contextualize the work of local artists. O’Dell in particular is a revelation here. For several years now, he has honed a complex pictorial vocabulary aimed at an excavation of American myths and ideologies. Here he has broken new formal and conceptual ground, expanding his repertoire to include, for example, the fraught history of the atomic bomb. His tight grid of drawings and abstract works alike have a visceral tautness that speaks to the innumerable and yet fragile ties that bind any universe together, and which threaten to break at any moment.

November 28, 2006–March 24, 2007

This review also published in ArtWeek