Shotgun Reviewtag:,2009:/12009-07-04T00:05:02ZContemporary Art Reviews in the San Francisco Bay AreaMovable Type Pro 4.23-enThe Man Behind the Curtaintag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4132009-07-03T21:31:50Z2009-07-04T00:05:02ZIn a lecture delivered last year at UC Berkeley entitled "The Misadventures of Critical Thinking," philosopher Jacques Rancière proclaimed that there is nothing to be seen behind the curtain of appearances; there is no truth that will be revealed through the process of critique. Instead, there is only what we see and the logic that governs its visibility.Matthew Rana
- Gavin MacFadyen, Director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, from Goldin+Senneby's documentary Looking for Headless
In a lecture delivered last year at UC Berkeley entitled "The Misadventures of Critical Thinking," philosopher Jacques Rancière proclaimed that there is nothing to be seen behind the curtain of appearances; there is no truth that will be revealed through the process of critique. Instead, there is only what we see and the logic that governs its visibility. Using Martha Rosler's photomontage Cleaning the Drapes, from her series Bringing the War Home (1967-72) as his primary visual aid, Rancière stated the failure of the critical tradition is its assumption of the public's general incapacity to make sense of what they see, and by extension, the narratives that are being played out in front of them on the 'stage of appearances.' In other words, the failure lies in the notion that a hidden truth exists behind the reality that we are responsible for, but which we fail to see.
The Man Behind the Curtain, the current exhibition at Mission 17, aptly suggests that we know full well that there's someone pulling the strings. To reveal the secret of who or what that is, is--in some sense--beside the point. Indeed, the three projects assembled by Assistant Director/Curator Laura Mott, ask the more pressing questions of "How were the strings pulled?" and perhaps most importantly, "How are we to interpret what happens once it's done?"
In the main gallery, the Swedish collaborative Goldin+Senneby present a multi-faceted work investigating an offshore company in the Bahamas named Headless Ltd. Like the purported company it scrutinizes, the project resists transparency. It's unclear whether Headless Ltd. even exists. Instead, Goldin+Senneby present viewers with a complex and densely packed narrative.
Goldin+Senneby with Kate Cooper and Richard John Jones (filmmakers). Looking for Headless, 2007-ongoing; three-part documentary commissioned by IASPIS and The Power Plant, video still.
For example, much of the work has been delegated--or perhaps more appropriately, outsourced--to a host of authors, economists and journalists that are both fictional and real. This aspect is thrown into stark relief via the three-part documentary Looking for Headless by filmmakers Kate Cooper and Richard John Jones. (Screened in sequential installments, installment two is on view through July 4 and installment three from July 5 to 18.) While the documentary focuses on many of the project's key players as part of an inquiry in to the legal structure of Headless, Ltd. and the world of "offshore," it also self-reflexively navigates the discursive scaffolding that the artists have built around the project. Further complicating the documentary is a novel bearing the same name by author "K.D." Featuring many of the same players seen in the documentary, the novel links the company with a secret society founded in the late 1930s by Georges Bataille known as Acéphale, from the Greek a-cephalus, meaning "headless." Part travelogue and part academic paper, Looking for Headless features a story within the story by the writer John Barlow, who, along with Headless Ltd., is the subject of the novel.
Seth Lower. Mimesis is Not Adaptive Behavior; installation view of documentation and car parts from crash site.
Sharing the main gallery with Goldin+Senneby--and literally installed behind a large black curtain dividing the space--is San Francisco-based artist Seth Lower's commissioned installation and video. Mimesis is Not Adaptive Behavior (2009) revolves around the staged death of a Texas man named Clayton "Clay" Wayne Daniels, a.k.a. Jake Gregg. Through a combination of photographs, found documents, and artifacts ostensibly gathered during Lower's independent investigation of the incident, the artist narrates a story of a man trying to escape his past. For all its gruesome details, in which exhumed bodies, decapitation, statutory rape, incest, plastic surgery, forged documents, and--on a more mundane level--Lynard Skynard's Free Bird all play a role, Daniels's botched plan to reinvent himself becomes strangely poignant when paired alongside the Lazarus myth and a love letter written from prison.
Société Réaliste. The San Francisco EU Green Card Lottery Registration Office, 2006; site-specific installation view; www.green-card-lottery-eu.org.
In the office of Mission17, the Paris-based collective Société Réaliste has installed The San Francisco EU Green Card Lottery Registration Office (2006). Through a website full of dubious census data and immigration statistics, visitors are encouraged to register to enter a lottery to obtain citizenship to the EU country of their choice (http://www.green-card-lottery-eu.org/). The interface mimics sites that con migrant workers who are registering to enter the U.S. Green Card Lottery into paying a service fee. (A free and open program offered by the U.S. government, the Lottery annually offers 55,000 visas to people from countries with low rates of immigration.) While Société Réaliste provides the registration service free of charge, the work reflects on a micro-scale the broader narrative of an economy based on the foundational promise of a better life, particularly when considered in relation to the sites on which it is based.
The three projects in The Man Behind the Curtain transform the structuring logics of finance, forensic evidence, and immigration into sites of play in which the imagination can take hold. Destabilizing and reassembling narratives of identity, economy and trust, each project functions like a kind of challenge, or, more appropriately, an elaborate charade, requiring a good deal of time, effort and reflection. Yet the cumulative effect is far from tiresome. In fact, it is quite the opposite, as viewers are presented with a pared-down space in which to consider a reinvigorated critical art that is every bit as lively as it is captivating.
The Man Behind the Curtain is on view at Mission17 through July 18, 2009
Thumbnail image: Goldin+Senneby. Headless logo. Designed by Johan Hjerpe.
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Intricacies of Phantom Contenttag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4122009-07-03T21:01:09Z2009-07-03T22:49:50ZPecis constructs collages of seemingly perilous imaginary landscapes, with layers of diamonds, towers of beads, lipstick tubes as buildings, and bright ribbons fluttering in and out of the scenes. Hers are post-apocalyptic vistas: fantastical, colorful, seductive, and yet suggestive of our culture's problem with over-consumption.Rachel Adams
Triple Base Gallery.
Untitled (Spring Series #4), 2009; ink, collage and acrylic on panel; 11 x 14 in.
Pecis constructs collages of seemingly perilous imaginary landscapes, with layers of diamonds, towers of beads, lipstick tubes as buildings, and bright ribbons fluttering in and out of the scenes. Hers are post-apocalyptic vistas: fantastical, colorful, seductive, and yet suggestive of our culture's problem with over-consumption. Working with found images, Pecis forms scenes in which the evidence of overabundance is magnified and regurgitated. Not only do these landscapes involve the remnants of our post-modern self, but also the replication is sited as exponential growth without control. As others have done, Pecis points to the burden we are putting upon our planet and upon ourselves. Some of the works reference outer space, as if the detritus of our planet has piled up beyond the atmosphere and is floating uncontrollably into the next realm.
Untitled (Spring Series #6), 2009; acrylic on panel; 24 x 24 in.
Three paintings of diamonds are installed in a seemingly haphazard fashion. Untitled (Spring Series #5), is mounted to the underside of the gallery's slanted roof--painted bright pink for the exhibition--while another is placed on the inside of the storefront window. Untitled (Spring Series #6)--placed high above the rest of the work-- nevertheless stands out formally and compositionally. Although simply constructed, the palette and pattern conjure the feeling of staring into a beautiful diamond. I was intrigued by these pieces and their unorthodox installation, curious to know if they were studies or a new direction for the artist. Unfortunately, because of their placement, the collaged landscapes overpower the paintings.
Intricacies of Phantom Content, 2009; installation view.
Pecis sites influences such as Jim Drain and Bjorn Copeland, as their aesthetic sensibilites of repeating forms and intense color schemes are very similar to her own. With this in mind, I left the exhibition yearning for something more than just two-dimensional images on the walls. I wanted Pecis to venture into the actual construction of these landscapes, perhaps as a somewhat messier version of Jim Drain's sculptures. If Pecis wants to invoke the feeling of these landscapes, I implore her to build them. Perhaps the actual construction of these landscapes would push these ideas further, letting the viewer step into her imagined reality rather than view it from the outside.
Continuing through the exhibition is almost like foraying into uncharted territory. Climbing down a ladder labeled "enter at your own risk" one descends into a dingy basement where projections of falling diamonds surround the viewer. Elise Mallouk uses this repeated projection to connect ideas of desire, value, and art. A takeaway edition is placed in the center of the room, reiterating the idea of the falling diamond. With each takeaway, the diamond moves further down the paper. Although a beautiful illustration, the entire installation seems dramatic. Although edging towards the spectacular, in the end, it falls a bit short and does not critically address the ideas of desire, value, and art.
Although Pecis and Mallouk comment on the diamond's prevalence and desirability, I was not convinced that they have broken new ground, and left wanting more from their investigations. The diamond is an endlessly reinvented symbol, not only in our age of consumption, and I wanted their work to move past what we already know.
Intricacies of Phantom Content is on view at Triple Base Gallery through July 26, 2009.]]>
Bob Matthews: Garden Ruintag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4072009-06-14T06:00:25Z2009-06-15T04:55:11ZMatthews' adventuresome aptitude across different media suggests a restless fascination with the encounters between artistic materials and content: how they conflict and alter our understanding of one or the other. This exploration, in fact, seems to be the core of the show. Jake Longstrethhttp://www.jakelongstreth.com/
Garden Ruin--the third exhibition at Gregory Lind Gallery for London-based artist Bob Matthews--reflects his continued exploration of the natural world, civilization and technology. In his previous two shows, Matthews presented pictures in the form of "digital drawings" and "digital Cibachromes." Those glossy, computer-generated images revealed an assured, aseptic approach to landscape, complicating their depiction of natural, lived-in spaces.
In Garden Ruin, he has taken a decidedly more organic and abstracted approach in presenting four oil and acrylic paintings on panel, three ink jet prints, and one lithograph. Matthews' adventuresome aptitude across different media suggests a restless fascination with the encounters between artistic materials and content: how they conflict and alter our understanding of one or the other. This exploration, in fact, seems to be the core of the show.
Hanging Object (Vision), 2008; oil, acrylic, and varnish on wood; 36 x 23 in.
His paintings in oil and acrylic make the most of the inherent qualities of each medium. In works such as Historical Elements (2007) and Hanging Object (Vision) (2008), thick dabs of old-looking oil paint are applied in a scattershot manner. Nearby, hard-edged, flat acrylic paint is used to describe more definitive forms: discs, orbs, wires, and wind chimes. An engaging tension is found between the atmospheric, hand-made effect of the oil paint and the hard-edged exactitude of the bright and opaque acrylic forms. Through exploring the essences and historical resonances of different media--in pitting them against each other on the same panel--one begins to see the wood grain and oil paints as stand-ins for the organic, natural world while the plasticity of hard-edged acrylics becomes symptomatic of our technologically inundated social condition. I didn't take the works to be necessarily "about" humankind vs. the natural landscape. Indeed, very little of this content is directly addressed. Rather, the works seem concerned with the potential for imbuing different artistic media with specified, metaphorical meanings around this conflict.
Historical Elements, 2007; oil, acrylic, and varnish on wood; 36.25 x 23.25 in.
At times, Matthews seemed burdened by an excess of content. One senses a struggle to communicate a coherent thesis that extends past the parameters of these oblique, abstract works. The various garden signifiers scattered throughout--most notably images of wind chimes--tend to function as obligatory signposts, reminders that we are to keep the garden space in mind. Consequently, these elements feel superimposed and slightly illustrational. The strong aspects of Matthews' work seem to address far more indefinite, broad historical themes than the hermeneutic of this project allows. Contemplative and imbued with a dour beauty, Matthews' work remains anchored within its own confines, but with an eye out there, on a larger world.
Bob Matthews: Garden Ruin is on view at Gregory Lind Gallery through June 27, 2009.
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Full Disclosure: The author has also exhibited at Gregory Lind Gallery, most recently the solo exhibition All It Is in December 2008.]]>
Letter to the Editortag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4102009-06-12T23:19:15Z2009-06-12T23:36:24ZAn exhibition review can be a potent tool, as it helps shape impressions of the works on view for a broader audience. That said, viewing art is a highly subjective experience, and misunderstandings occur as often as moments of great insight. With that in mind, Shotgun Review strives to frame its reviews as simply the opening statement in a dialogue, rather than the final word. Editor
review of Wunderflater by Anuradha Vikram posted on June 10th. In it, Michael Arcega, one of the participating artists, clarifies misattributions in the original post, and Vikram responds with further consideration of the exhibition. On behalf of SR, my apologies to the artists of Wunderflater for the inaccuracies, and my appreciation to both Mike and Anu for reminding us of the potential for fruitful exchange that is inherent in criticism.
- Patricia Maloney, Managing Editor
Michael Arcega wrote:Thank you for reviewing the Wünderflater. I really liked the turducken metaphor... hilarious!!
Aside from the thanks, I wanted to clarify a couple of things. The second and third paragraphs contain some misattributions. There are no individual projects at all. We collectively worked on every part of the exhibit. There are areas that were "led" by one with special skills--or, as we like to call them "super powers"--but even those areas were designed by the group. The point of this project was to create a work that was completely collaborative. For instance, Kazumi did not make the inflatable; Reed did not make the structure. In fact, Reed was lead on the inflatable, I was lead on the structure, Jina was lead on the Wunderkammer, and so on. Each of us would deny ownership of any individual part of the project. I know this kills the turducken metaphor, but maybe it works as a conceptual turducken.
The only attributable things would be the objects within the Wunderkammer. The objects inside the Wunderkammer or mini-gallery are not artworks. They are objects that have inspired our individual practices. They are things that we keep in our studios for a various reasons, inspiration, sentiment, examples of failure, or success. Those objects are a way to understand our artwork, much like the traditional Wunderkammer was a way for the collector to understand the world.
I hope that these authorship misattributions can be corrected on behalf of all the artists involved in the project. - MAAnuradha Vikram's response:I do apologize for the error. I think what this makes clear is how challenging a semi-anonymous collaboration like this can be to process in an MFA exhibition context. As a viewer, I wanted to know something concrete about each of the artists involved. Without that, I was frustrated. I would have liked to know what each artist brought to the communal exercise.
I still like the layering aspect and I think it works formally whether or not there's distinct attribution for any of the structures. I appreciate the collaborative effort more knowing that it was so comprehensive. It does subvert the purpose of the MFA show pretty thoroughly, which raises interesting questions. - AV]]>
Wunderflater: 2009 Stanford MFA Exhibitiontag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4042009-06-10T09:50:42Z2009-06-10T21:49:48ZTypically these days, an MFA thesis show is less exhibition than art-fair, with each newly minted graduate almost climbing over one another in order to attract more attention than his or her peers. These shows are crowded and incoherent, and difficult places to connect meaningfully with art. Rejecting all this, Stanford's 2009 MFA graduates opted instead for an experimental and collaborative model that strives for something different. Anuradha Vikramhttp://www.curativeprojects.blogspot.com/Wunderflater, 2009; installation view, Thomas Welton Stanford Gallery.
The five graduating artists--Michael Arcega, Reed Anderson, Cobi van Tonder, Kazumi Shiho and Jina Valentine--could not take more different approaches in their practices. Arcega is best known for finely crafted, quirky sculptures that comically address the colonial history of the Philippines, his ancestral home. Anderson creates cut-paper structures and architectures. Van Tonder creates interactive works triggered by sound and movement, Shiho uses fabric and other ephemeral materials to build atmospheric spatial enclosures, and Valentine collects and makes images inspired by folk art motifs as well as an Art Brut sensibility.
For Wunderflater, they have allowed their personal interests to take a backseat, contributing instead to a group project that contains elements of each artist's approach. The exhibition includes an installation inside a scaled-down replica of the Thomas Welton Stanford Gallery, which is itself enclosed inside a soft, white inflatable structure. Each artist has created a layer within or outside of a layer created by another collaborator. The result is a museum-as-turducken: as a chicken might be stuffed inside a duck inside a turkey, Arcega's and Valentine's work is found inside of Anderson's, which is in turn encompassed by Shiho's.
Van Tonder's work suffers the most from this unconventional presentation, as it was practically imperceptible during the show's opening. Arcega's distinctive visual style comes across strongly, despite his efforts to sublimate his aesthetic to the group. Valentine's obsessive archiving and cataloguing project is hard to fully appreciate in the dim light of the double-enclosure. Anderson's replica of the gallery--though well constructed--is nonetheless difficult to view clearly from inside Shiho's giant inflatable. However, the structure's gentle movement and diffusion of light and sound succeeds in lending the installation an inviting and soothing air.
Ultimately, Wunderflater sacrifices appreciation of the individual artists' works in favor of a grand, unevenly realized experiment in cooperation. The show offers a less articulate alternative to the tired art fair model for MFA shows than could be desired. Even so, the group's risk-taking spirit is to be commended, despite that the result feels a bit confused.
Wunderflater is on view at the Thomas Welton Stanford Gallery at Stanford University through June 14, 2009. ]]>
Veronica De Jesus: Do the Waivetag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4062009-06-10T09:50:27Z2009-06-17T17:19:02Z1950s sociologists and novelists such as Vance Packard and Philip Wylie may have censoriously labeled Americans as status-seeking conformists. In De Jesus's overtly humorous drawings, they become masses of overlapping outlined figures engaged in obsessive or irrational behaviorsDeWitt ChengBasic Details, 2009; pen and ink on paper; 8.5 x 11 in.
Veronica De Jesus, an Oakland artist concerned with conservation, ecology, and "class systems and money distribution," incorporates these social issues into her slyly subversive works, but with a light touch.[1] 1950s sociologists and novelists such as Vance Packard and Philip Wylie may have censoriously labeled Americans as status-seeking conformists. In De Jesus's overtly humorous drawings, they become masses of overlapping outlined figures engaged in obsessive or irrational behaviors: Léger's heavy, noble, and simplified communitarian workers reconfigured by graffiti artist Keith Haring into consumer bots. Her drawings are part diaristic notes to self and part semi-covert social exhortations, a tonal mixture sometimes seen in folk or outsider art.
Exxon Loves Fools, 2009; pen and ink on paper; 8.5 x 11 in.
The artist's social activism cohabits with delight in the silly stuff of pop culture. As Patricia Maloney noted, of de Jesus's 2007 exhibition, "transience seems to pervade... as she fastens her attention on everything from sports figures to 1970s-era plastic Coca-Cola Cups."[2] The tripedal football player in Bread Winner seems equally derived from Dubuffet's outsider art tradition as from the cool satire of Richard Lindner. The stuttering, repeated oil-company logos in Shell and Exxon Loves Fools remind us of their omnipresence on our highways (especially when the dash light starts blinking ominously). In All Business, a nude figure stands amid other corporate insignia: Fortune, HDTV and Business Week. In Basic Details, two heads in profile spew caption balloons at each other like bullets, each bearing the imperative "TALK." In Active Minds, six people stand together, their heads bearing huge circular holes or lobotomies.
The painter Squeak Carnwath describes De Jesus as a "handed-down artist," someone who recycles and reuses the stuff of the "handed-down world (to quote Wittgenstein)."[3] Such artists demonstrate that a world we only inherited is not one that we need to accept uncritically.
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[1] http://www.sprayblog.net/spraygraphic-interview-with-artist-veronica-de-jesus/
[2] Access and Excess: Veronica De Jesus. San Francisco: Eleanor Harwood Gallery, Sept. 2007.
[3]The Handed-Down Artist. http://www.cueartfoundation.org/veronica-de-jesus.html
Veronica De Jesus: Do the Waive is on view at Michael Rosenthal Gallery through June 16, 2009. ]]>
Pae Whitetag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4002009-06-08T04:06:03Z2009-06-09T20:48:46ZIn Between the Outside-In presents a series of conceptual opposites demarcating the perceptual thresholds--or limina--between space and place. Qualities such as scale, presence, and permanence are parlayed into ephemeral representations in White's renditions of an 800-year-old oak tree and a humble, wild raspberry shrub, both native to the Sierra Nevadas. Franz Schnaashttp://franzschnaas.comIn Between the Outside-In, 2009; video still; courtesy of New Langton Arts, San Francisco.
Locality is a central theme in Pae White's exhibition In Between the Outside-In, harking back to Robert Smithson's own earthworks of the 1970's, with their intrinsic tenets of place and permanence. During her recent FOR-SITE Foundation residency, at the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, White was struck by the historic uses of the landscape as a gathering and food preparation site from about 4000 BCE until the gold rush era in the mid-nineteenth century
As a result, a re-rendered sense of place--or platzgeist1 -- surfaces from In Between the Outside-In, not only in the context of time but also without the confines of space. Platzgeist is a long-forsaken notion in which place can only be perceived at the crosshairs of meaning and representation. As its Latin translation--genio-locci -- further suggests, it is the lingering spirit (genio/geist) of a locality, the memory of a place.
In Between the Outside-In presents a series of conceptual opposites demarcating the perceptual thresholds--or limina2--between space and place. Qualities such as scale, presence, and permanence are parlayed into ephemeral representations in White's renditions of an 800-year-old oak tree and a humble, wild raspberry shrub, both native to the Sierra Nevadas.
The oak tree and the raspberry shrub are both projections of visually rendered 3-D data, collected in-situ with a non-invasive three-dimensional scanner. The digital mass of topographic information was then animated in collaboration with an expert from Pixar. The resulting visual oscillations are viewed opposite each other in the gallery.
In Between the Outside-In, 2009; installation view; courtesy of New Langton Arts, San Francisco.
The large oak animation is projected and reflected inside a kaleidoscope-like structure that situates the viewer within the expansive and continuously morphing innards of the 800-year-old tree. To be 'in' the tree, or of-the-tree itself seemed to be White's proposition. However, I inevitably viewed these contiguous reflections as alluding to what Henry Bergson terms diachronic--or simultaneous--multiplicities. Here, events or moments are refracted, but don't progress. They exist as a 'cloud' of fractions with no discernible sequence, even though they originate from a chronological -- or synchronic--sequential formation: the animation. For Bergson duration in synchronic multiplicities such as White's video installation becomes the essence of memory and re-collection, a linear sequence of events. By refracting this moving image, White brings us into the diachronic cloud of moments, multiplied as non-sequential, simultaneous space, in effect being in the tree, or the spirit of the tree.
In Between the Outside-In, 2009; installation view; courtesy of New Langton Arts, San Francisco.
Opposites are also alluded to from the perspective of process. Adjacent to the animation is a massive array of assorted pottery borrowed from the private collection of Joe Meade, an artist and art collector White met during her residency at FOR-SITE, Collecting is a staple theme throughout White's work, but Meade is not a ceramist, making the find an improbable one. Its significance for White lay in the tactility and hands-on-clay reality from which each ceramic artifact sprung, as well as their actual, physical presence, as a 'collected' whole.
Conversing with Mr. Meade at the opening also revealed the hidden spirit in the vast knowledge terrain those pottery objects covered. There was a story for each and every object. Meade's keen taxonomic approach revealed sub-groups--clouds--defined only by indiscernible knowledge or subjective traits such as potters, provenance, lineages, cracks, glazes, and their origins in what he termed 'studio' production, as opposed to serial or mass production. Without this diffracting, taxonomic knowledge it was difficult to enter their diachronic existence.
The materiality implicit in the pottery contrasts with the ephemeral nature of the rendered animations, which are simply raw abstractions in the form of data representations and cybernetic manipulations. They are mere re-collections of living organisms that are at once intimately known and yet untouchable. Let's call them the 'spirit-form' representations of the original object, the gheist, the gennio. The intangible data we do not see, but assume in its digital representation. Or what we know about the subject, and sense as it is multiplied in its refraction.
In yet another opposition to the animations' cinematic fluidity, and inspired by Meade's collection, White crafted a series of conic-shaped pots by press-molding the clay into the orifices found in five boulders scattered across the Sierra foothills. Known as grinding rocks, they were used for centuries by the Maidu as places to grind acorns for food. This inherently tactile imprinting of the form and surface of the rocks' cavities becomes recorded memory right on the clay's surface, and then solidified in the kiln for static perpetuity.
White's manipulation of time and permanence by looping and reflecting the animations or by fixing form on to clay, reference original locality. Her demarcation of space within the gallery, suggests that there is an intrinsic connection between matter and memory, between sense and place. She suggests that the objects we behold, simultaneously contain us within them, and yet, still exist in some other place outside, without and despite our consciousness.
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1. platzgeist: neologism (1993, Fz. Schnaas) derived from zeitgeist, a term to signify genio-locci, or sense of place.
2. limina (plural): a threshold below which a stimulus is not perceived or is not distinguished from another.
In Between the Outside-In, by Pae White, runs at New Langton Arts through July 18, 2009.
Franz Schnaas is an inter-notional artist, writer, and photographer living in SOMA, SF.
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2009 CCA MFA Exhibitiontag:www.shotgun-review.com,2009://1.4012009-05-26T03:41:34Z2009-06-10T06:30:12ZThe 2009 California College Of the Arts' MFA exhibition was both optimistic and sober. In a post-9/11 world wracked by war and ecological disaster, increasingly depersonalized by state surveillance and the pervasive influence of the Internet, making art becomes a way to both confirm one's humanity and to make sense of it.Lani Asher
"Do you think," said Candide, ''that men have always massacred each other, as they do today? Have they always been liars, cheats, traitors, brigands, weak, flighty, cowardly, envious, gluttonous, drunken, grasping, and vicious, bloody, backbiting, debauched, fanatical, hypocritical, and silly?"
- from Candide, ou l'Optimisme (1759) by Voltaire
The 2009 California College Of the Arts' MFA exhibition was both optimistic and sober. In a post-9/11 world wracked by war and ecological disaster, increasingly depersonalized by state surveillance and the pervasive influence of the Internet, making art becomes a way to both confirm one's humanity and to make sense of it. Navigating the path between artistic expression and the institutionalized art school experience can be disorienting or even treacherous, but there is always the joy of meeting like-minded people to share the journey. Walking through the exhibition--one culmination of that process--I felt rewarded by the physicality of the paintings, drawings, prints and installations in the show and by the Fluxist flavor of the work.
The Fluxus movement of the 1960's arose from an international network of artists, composers, and designers blending different artistic media and disciplines. Fluxus was an attitude more than a movement or style, the playful outcome when different media intersected. Not unrelated, John Locke, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), refers to a neurologically based phenomenon--synaesthesia--in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. (One example is a blind man who claimed to experience the color scarlet whenever he heard the sound of a trumpet.)
Evocative of both Fluxus and synaesthetic events is Brindalyn Webster's collaboration with musician Alexander Chen, in which they created 46 two-minute songs for each of the graduating artists as a soundtrack for the MFA show. The songs were available on iPods and headsets during the exhibition, as well as the website www.studiomasters.us for downloading. Alexander Chen told me he did not necessarily see the work of the individual artists beforehand. Instead, he worked from a set of notes and a short score that Webster developed after she interviewed each artist. The final musical outcome was collaboration between all the MFA artists, Webster, and Chen.
Alicia Escott. Installation view, 2009 CCA MFA exhibition. Photo: Lani Asher.
Artists Julia Goodman and Alicia Escott created work using recycled consumer waste. In Certain is Nothing New, Goodman enlisted her friends and family to collect recycled blue junk mail that she subsequently formed into dynamic concentric paper rings. They hung from the ceiling in the shape of a cornucopia, the mythological "Horn of Plenty" that magically supplies its owners with endless food and drink. Pulping all this wasted paper seemed like a good-humored jab at advertising and its corresponding offers of abundance. Escott painted images of animals on biodegradable and non-biodegradable plastic. She said that she was "interested in how the materials I use move through the consumer economy and how words and concepts like 'sustainability', 'ecological', 'recyclable' and 'nature' move through the information economy." I would not be surprised if her paintings--including of the California brown pelican and large-scale brown bears--ended up as window displays or on environmentally friendly biodegradable shopping bags at Barney's.
Anna Adair. Installation view, 2009 CCA MFA exhibition. Photo: Lani Asher.
Matthew B. Crawford wrote in the recent New York Times Magazine article "The Case for Working With Your Hands:"
"...confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar. Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day?"1
When Anna Adair found an unfinished sewing project in a box in her apartment building, she began a series of investigations. Her background as a metalsmith, led her to wonder about things that are handmade, as well as the time and personal investment needed to complete them. Adair's installation explored the contents of the found box, asking why the coat was being made, why it was left unfinished, and if it should it remain so. She didn't complete the project. Instead, she created a kind of natural history museum display from the box's contents, transforming it into several works, including a pleasing and tender display of small handmade buttons, and a mural-sized photograph of the pattern pieces.
Patrick Gillespie. Installation view, 2009 CCA MFA exhibition. Photo: Lani Asher.
The installation by Patrick Gillespie included a convincing-looking pipe bomb--accurate except for the absence of incendiary materials inside--and lead-covered books that elude x-ray screening. I liked the pieces as sculptures and wondered if Patrick Gillespie was not an artist he might be a secret agent. In his accompanying performance-based work, he packed these objects in hand-luggage and twice passed through San Francisco airport security--once with long hair and another time with a shaved head--to test the potential for profiling by TSA agents. He also performed in a cozy sheepskin suit, in which his ability to see or hear is dramatically reduced. He said "I develop prosthetics and 'second skins' to augment the translation of the senses to my body...that greatly affects my ability to navigate public space." The installation provoked questions around the reasons why a young artist would deliberately put himself in harm's way by trying to pass through airport security with a simulated pipe bomb. Was his purpose to push boundaries and to test the security of the state? Or was making absurdist propositions one way of dealing with despair?
I was intrigued by the small paintings/objects/altars by Brandon Olsen placed on found objects behind a curtain. As he describes them,
"the small paintings are abstractions that have no outside references. The images are found through the process of making and canceling out physical actions or tasks. I think about them as a kind of game...The large curtain was made mostly to deal with the space in which the paintings were going to be placed...One could decide if they wanted to view the paintings better by crouching or pushing the curtain back."
Goldin+Senneby with Kate Cooper and Richard John Jones (filmmakers). Looking for Headless, 2007-ongoing; three-part documentary commissioned by IASPIS and The Power Plant, video still.
For example, much of the work has been delegated--or perhaps more appropriately, outsourced--to a host of authors, economists and journalists that are both fictional and real. This aspect is thrown into stark relief via the three-part documentary Looking for Headless by filmmakers Kate Cooper and Richard John Jones. (Screened in sequential installments, installment two is on view through July 4 and installment three from July 5 to 18.) While the documentary focuses on many of the project's key players as part of an inquiry in to the legal structure of Headless, Ltd. and the world of "offshore," it also self-reflexively navigates the discursive scaffolding that the artists have built around the project. Further complicating the documentary is a novel bearing the same name by author "K.D." Featuring many of the same players seen in the documentary, the novel links the company with a secret society founded in the late 1930s by Georges Bataille known as Acéphale, from the Greek a-cephalus, meaning "headless." Part travelogue and part academic paper, Looking for Headless features a story within the story by the writer John Barlow, who, along with Headless Ltd., is the subject of the novel.
Seth Lower. Mimesis is Not Adaptive Behavior; installation view of documentation and car parts from crash site.
Sharing the main gallery with Goldin+Senneby--and literally installed behind a large black curtain dividing the space--is San Francisco-based artist Seth Lower's commissioned installation and video. Mimesis is Not Adaptive Behavior (2009) revolves around the staged death of a Texas man named Clayton "Clay" Wayne Daniels, a.k.a. Jake Gregg. Through a combination of photographs, found documents, and artifacts ostensibly gathered during Lower's independent investigation of the incident, the artist narrates a story of a man trying to escape his past. For all its gruesome details, in which exhumed bodies, decapitation, statutory rape, incest, plastic surgery, forged documents, and--on a more mundane level--Lynard Skynard's Free Bird all play a role, Daniels's botched plan to reinvent himself becomes strangely poignant when paired alongside the Lazarus myth and a love letter written from prison.
Société Réaliste. The San Francisco EU Green Card Lottery Registration Office, 2006; site-specific installation view; www.green-card-lottery-eu.org.
In the office of Mission17, the Paris-based collective Société Réaliste has installed The San Francisco EU Green Card Lottery Registration Office (2006). Through a website full of dubious census data and immigration statistics, visitors are encouraged to register to enter a lottery to obtain citizenship to the EU country of their choice (http://www.green-card-lottery-eu.org/). The interface mimics sites that con migrant workers who are registering to enter the U.S. Green Card Lottery into paying a service fee. (A free and open program offered by the U.S. government, the Lottery annually offers 55,000 visas to people from countries with low rates of immigration.) While Société Réaliste provides the registration service free of charge, the work reflects on a micro-scale the broader narrative of an economy based on the foundational promise of a better life, particularly when considered in relation to the sites on which it is based.
The three projects in The Man Behind the Curtain transform the structuring logics of finance, forensic evidence, and immigration into sites of play in which the imagination can take hold. Destabilizing and reassembling narratives of identity, economy and trust, each project functions like a kind of challenge, or, more appropriately, an elaborate charade, requiring a good deal of time, effort and reflection. Yet the cumulative effect is far from tiresome. In fact, it is quite the opposite, as viewers are presented with a pared-down space in which to consider a reinvigorated critical art that is every bit as lively as it is captivating.
The Man Behind the Curtain is on view at Mission17 through July 18, 2009
Thumbnail image: Goldin+Senneby. Headless logo. Designed by Johan Hjerpe.
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Gage Boone, performance still from I am Kurious Orange. Photo:© 2009 F.Schnaas.
In a first installment of I Am Kurious Orange--a month-long rehearsal, residency, performance, and exhibition space curated by Anne Colvin--Marc Arthur's performance co-opted the pre-existing social frameworks of public space, assembling ephemeral stages and moving props out of the audience, while weaving them into his semantic fabric of characters and mythical symbolism.
I first experienced Arthur's intermittent segment-acts in late 2007 at the premiere of curator and producer Earl Dax's Tingle Tangle, a burlesque variety at The Bubble Lounge in North Beach, San Francisco, which followed the successful Weimar New York cabaret, part of the Live Art series at SFMOMA. While The Bubble Lounge offered unlikely GPS coordinates for Arthur's conceptually driven work, the rest of the performances at the variety/cabaret gave his act a perfectly contrasting context to unfurl what is now a performance mode all it's own.
Arthur's performance works spread like weeds and crab grass over space and time. At Tingle Tangle, Arthur's act was not 'scheduled' on stage like the rest of the performances, but it unfurled like disparate intermezzos, in spontaneous bursts, spreading amidst the crowd.
Similarly, a few months later in 2008, at another of Anne Colvin's art salon/bar happenings at New Langton Arts, Arthur's participation burst into a sudden start. There, an unannounced lights-out provided an imminent re-contextualization of the performance space, ripping the performers away from their casual mingling with the art crowd. In the next instant, narrative infiltrated amongst the inadvertent spectators. There was neither intent nor space to erect the proverbial barrier between act and audience. Arthur's troupe spontaneously and phenomenologically carved a performing space/stage, defined only by the human wall that conformed along each act, synchronous to the narrative's spontaneous development.
Thanks in part to the gallery setting of I am Kurious Orange's rehearsal/performance of April 30, 2009, a more contained and controlled environment for Arthur's work allowed for 'planted' symbols, adding cohesiveness to the multi-part narrative mode, revealing meaning and intentionality, and yielding more signal and less noise.
Part Satyricon (Fellini), part Prosperous Books (Greenaway), the quasi-epic progression of acts were afforded a more discernible script, a journey laden with object-signs and signifiers that further reveal the Arthur/Boon duo's influences. (Marc Arthur's posse varies in size and characters, but he seems consistent in his collaboration with Gage Boone, a fellow recent graduate from CCA.) They drew mannerisms from the Kuchar Brothers [1]--filmmakers with whom Arthur has recently collaborated-- as they assailed topics including friendship, love, and lust with undertones of reckless abandon. The end results verged on disturbing and often mystifying.
Édouard Vuillard. Mother and Sister of the Artist (Mère et soeur de l'artiste), 1893; oil on canvas, 18.25 x 22.25 in. (46.3 x 56.5 cm).
In the 1893 painting Mother and Sister of the Artist, by Édouard Vuilllard, a young female figure presses her hands and legs against the wall behind her and leans forward toward the center of the painting. The pattern of her dress blends with that of the wallpaper, and this partial dissolution between figure and ground-- this camouflaging--suggests either her desire to be swallowed up and disappear, or conversely, her attempt to escape the surroundings that threaten to engulf her. Vuillard, it seems, was not as concerned with painting a family portrait as with staging the domestic setting that both governed and embodied their familial life. He wrote in his journal of his effort to convey "how the self could merge conceptually and aesthetically with its surroundings yet still respond to the unforeseeable demands of emotion and incident."1
I immediately recalled Vuillard's painting upon entering Twice Upon a Time, a group exhibition on view at Silverman Gallery through April 11. The exhibition's title references the repeat occurrence of the show--at Silverman and Galerie Andreas Huber in Vienna-- as well as the title of historian E. W. Harries' book that explores the ways in which 17th century female writers subverted societal expectations and the domestic sphere through fairy tales. The unifying thread amongst the included artists--and the connecting interest between the two galleries--is engagement in conceptual and performance-based practices that disrupt and undermine conventional narratives of gender or identity.
But my first observation of the exhibition was that the work had been relegated to the perimeter of the room, while the center was left open. Although there are hardly alternatives to a wall for hanging two-dimensional art, the empty space of the gallery was conspicuous because the window installation, video, and slideshow pieces were located in the corners. The art registered its presence, but the exhibition's installation pushed it to the periphery of participation. As a result, I felt the work almost palpably leaning out into the space, each piece capable of occupying more that what it had been given.
However, simultaneously undermining and reinforcing the installation is the fact that boundaries recurrently emerged as narrative and visual constructs within the works themselves. Outlined texts and figures, geographic striations, versos of photographs, and the image of the back of a woman's head all reinforced the idea that the works of art themselves are the boundary lines between the interior life of their subjects and the exterior world. Through primarily text-based and photographic work, but also through performance, installation, drawing, and video, the artists have moved away from the domestic domain of Vuillard's painting, but continue to stage spaces whose meanings are indistinguishable from the lives unfolding or performed within them.
Untitled (Dark Forest), 2008. Oil on canvas,
57 x 57 inches.
James Chronister's solo debut at Eleanor Harwood is a collection of seven monochromatic paintings. Five are depictions of dense forest interiors, two are pictures of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. To call these paintings landscapes or portraits would be misleading. These works are mediated, pictures-of-pictures that complicate the question of subject matter. Using source photographs found in nature calendars, photo books and the 1972 Rolling Stones, An Unauthorized Biography, Chronister works within the tradition of artists utilizing the visual detritus of popular culture to fashion his paintings. Though reminiscent of such postmodern masters as Gerhard Richter and Luc Tuymans, Chronister has devised a painterly language much his own. Working with a tiny brush and one dark, neutral color on carefully hued, off-white canvases, Chronister achieves a startling range of tonality and depth. Viewed up-close, the paintings are constructed by a series of small, discrete marks: a binary system of data--like type on a page--that results in a surreal density of information. Step back, and the pictures cohere. The eye and mind struggle to reconcile the illusionism of these paintings with the narrow, restrained means of their technique.
Chronister's large paintings--the forest scenes--are his strongest. At 66 x 66 inches and 57 x 57 inches respectively, they give the viewer the best opportunity to experience the strange transformations that occur when viewing them at varying distances. The larger paintings also go the farthest in moving past their source photographs to infer the encompassing silence that one feels standing in an un-populated forest. To that end, each forest work has a unique sense of light and atmosphere, giving the series a complexity that prevents it from sliding into nature-calendar kitsch.
Correspondingly, it seems that Chronister is careful in selecting what vistas he paints. There are no images of mountains, lakes, valleys, vistas or even skies; all are dense, nondescript forest interiors. Not quite majestic, not quite banal. One forest painting depicts velvety ferns in a soft, slightly ochre tone. Another, Dark Forest, is done in high-contrast, with a cooler black, evoking bright sunlight penetrating a dense thicket of branches. Strangely, Chronister's paintings, in spite of their detached fascination with image-making and systematic, mechanized technique, seem to acknowledge the beauty of the world. They are not cynical works. However, they create a tension between depicting and not-really depicting that reveals the core of Chronister's practice.
