Since “Pacific Standard Time,” the comprehensive survey of art in Southern California from 1945 to 1980, organized in 2011 at multiple venues, documentation of artists from that innovative and experimental period has been on reset. The early 1970s, in particular, were a watershed, as young artists emerging in the wake of the game-changing 1963 Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, turned to conceptual and performative practices the boundaries between them blurred. Some, like Ed Ruscha, extended the notion of object making into specific sites of investigation, the surreal nature of Southern California itself chief among them.

Raul Guerrero was born in 1945 in Brawley, California, and is currently living and working in San Diego. He was an active part of the groundbreaking scene of the early 1970s, and has continued in the decades since to contextualize the hybrid culture of Southern California.

In his second solo show in New York City, and his first at Ortuzar Projects, we’re introduced to over 20 years of Guerrero’s ongoing trajectory, from 1971 through 1993. That he began his career at a unique moment in Southern California isn’t lost on Guerrero—this is the time of Chris Burden’s most notorious performances, the 1972 Womanhouse of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, and the work of David Hammons, Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari (his first teacher) and Doug Wheeler. Al Ruppersberg, Jack Goldstein, Vija Celmins, William Leavitt, and James Welling were all Guerrero’s peers.

In conversation, Guerrero often uses the phrase, “by coincidence,” usually in appreciation of the fortuitous events that marked his journey and aesthetic.

“Since I was a child, every summer my family and I would travel north and work as migrant workers,” he says. “All the accoutrements we’d need for the summer, the pots and pans, everything, were loaded into the back of my father’s flatbed truck. As we’d go over the 101 Freeway, from the back of the truck I’d gaze out at the Capitol Building, and think, ‘Wow, this is Hollywood.’  We’d stop and cook our meals right by the side of the road, and join the encampments by the Merced River, and suddenly there’d be so many other people, Anglos, Oakies, African Americans, gypsies, Mexicans, and Mexicans from Texas. My aspiring family eventually became middle class, and at 16, I’m lying under a vineyard, wondering, what I’m going to do with my life? I hitchhike down to Mexico City and 4 years later I’m in Chouinard Art Institute. On the first day of class, I found myself sitting next to Jack Goldstein. Can you imagine? He looked just like Paul McCartney, and we became close friends.”

At the Chouinard, which later became part of CalArts, Guerrero understood Duchamp’s work instantly and found it liberating, the essential foundation of his aesthetic philosophy. Not only was he drawn to the concept of the assisted readymade, but also to the subliminal power of a single, iconic object or image. This, for Guerrero, resonated with another influence—Carl Jung’s theories of archetype and the collective unconscious.       

Among the 46 pieces in the exhibition, the earliest are Guerrero’s Moroccan watercolors from 1971, shown here for the first time. These come with the intriguing backstory that sparked their creation. At the suggestion of his friend and mentor Ed Kienholz, Guerrero sold all his belongings and headed to Europe. “By coincidence” (again) he managed to meet everyone right away: sitting next to Francis Bacon at dinner in London, he meets Lee Miller, (Man Ray’s model and muse), and meets his idol, Richard Hamilton, and this is just the first week. He ventures down to Morocco, and soon was living on a few dollars a day in El Ksar Seghir, a small village outside of Tangier. The series of watercolors are intimately sized, as they were created to be postcards for his girlfriend. He shares the dazzling ambiance in beautifully patterned, detailed, and hallucinogenic pieces in which teapots, tiles and other domestic objects with their exotic symbols and arabesques vibrate in talismanic bands of energy—reverberations from the local hashish.

After that summer, Guerrero returned to LA blazing. In just a few years he made significant bodies of work in photography, sculpture, performance, installation, and video. Each of these directions could have fuelled a lifetime of work. Guerrero is a gifted and emotional photographer, as evidenced by his California Sur Photographs from 1972. (He cites the Mexican movies of Luis Bunuel as a childhood passion.) These photos were his personal documentation of a two week road trip through Baja with artist friends. The compositions are effortless. Throughout his photographs, Guerrero’s utilization of light is mysterious, otherworldly, and exquisitely tender, as in the ethereal portrait, for example, of his elderly grandmother, who seems to hover between the tangible and spiritual realms.

Another standout in his multifaceted career is the assisted readymade: Rotating Yaqui Mask(1974) is a seminal, declarative work. Guerrero describes this piece as a formal exploration of, and direct response to, Duchamp’s “Rotating Glass Disc,” but the personal choice of the Yaqui mask can be unsettling. For me, the psychic energy released from the mechanized spinning of this ritual object multiplies seismically in a fearsome way, the context feeling both taboo and dangerously displaced. Similarly, in his movie “Primitive Act” of 1974, Guerrero is squatting and naked among rocks and shrubs, reenacting the primitive discovery of fire.

Seeking a more subjective, and pliable medium, since the 1980s Guerrero has focused on oil painting. Among those on view are four selections from his Oaxaca series from 1984 plus La Mujer of the Puerto from 1993. The Oaxaca series was done on location and, like the Moroccan watercolors, he entrenches himself in the history and culture of this particular place. Guerrero treats stylistic representation like a local language and adapts a flat colonialist style relevant to his theme. Like many of the painters he admires —Walter Robinson, Neil Jenney, Lisa Yuskavage and Alida Cervantes — Guerrero opens the door to Kitsch and pulp desire. As if he is writing a detective novel, heembeds layers and clues in his post-conceptual approach.

Much of Guerrero’s process involves honing his attention and allowing his emotional responses to connect him not only to his own history but to that of the culture at large.He interprets his painting Vista de Bonampak (1984) for me:  “I want to capture not only what represents the place for me, but also a critique of the culture, so after visiting the archeological ruins of  Bonampak, once a Mayan city near Chiapas, Mexico, I imagined a jaguar, coveted within Mayan culture for ferocity and strength, stumbling on the scene of the murals, depicting men dressed as jaguar knights, in jaguar skins, capturing enemies for sacrificial purposes who are also dressed in jaguar skins.  Although I might question who is the most vicious creature in the jungle, I also want to make paintings that are interesting and beautiful.

“There’s a lot that can be said about the brutality of the system, especially with our current president, but I prefer images that don’t delve into it overtly.”

After 40 years of structured study of North America, Guerrero has a new theory:  “Because we’re living on a continent that was occupied by indigenous people through millennia, and their voice has been suppressed, their culture, especially in the artworld, is changing things subliminally by gaining a voice though artists, one way or another. It’s a philosophical and cultural virus that’s spreading. For example, John Baldessari grew up in National City, like I did, ten miles from the border. Now, here’s a major artist, he goes to Mexico and is exposed to all this stuff that you see coming out of Mexico that’s really interesting, but in fact it’s all indigenous culture.

“If you dig tacos, you’re being affected by an indigenous culture. You’re consuming part of that philosophical virus. It’s full of indigenous material: tortilla, beans, corn, the way it’s prepared—it changes the way you see your reality. What that reality is I’m not sure, but somehow that essence, that philosophy, is expressing itself nonetheless into the culture unbeknownst to us.

“In this encounter between culture and things,” he says, “your sense of reality is shifted. Artists like Baldessari, who’s making art about culture on a large scale, has had his view shifted, and then he turned all these other guys on at CalArts. Bizarre, right?”

Guerrera is planning a trip to the Amazon sometime later this year.

The post A Multifaceted Career: Raul Guerrero talks with Mary Jones appeared first on artcritical.

Lee Mullican: The Fifties at Susan Inglett Gallery
April 28 to June 4, 2016
522 W. 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 647 9111

Undaunted by the challenge of the New York School, in the early 1950s on the West Coast there emerged an approach to abstract painting that did not participate in the conflicting vision of the Romantic (painterly) and Classicist (geometric) traditions. On the East Coast, this battle had led to the idea of an “abstract” art that was to represent nothing more than itself. The West Coast variant was instead rooted in a mystical tradition in which the task of the artist was to reveal the truth behind appearances. Using non-Western and Native American sources, Lee Mullican, and contemporaries such as Mark Tobey, was interested in the pictorial, and the imagistic power of abstraction, rather than the all-at-once-ness sought by their East Coast contemporaries. Two recent exhibitions of Mullican’s work, at Susan Inglett Gallery and James Cohan Gallery, show his development of abstraction on the West Coast. The Susan Inglett show deals with Mullican’s work of the 1950s, while James Cohan features work from the late ‘50s through the ‘60s.

Though there is a long history of transcendental abstract painting in the US, seldom is it as formally radical as Mullican’s. What differentiates his approach from that of his East Coast counterparts, such as Richard Pousette-Dart, is that Mullican, rather than trying to give representation to the non-objective realm, sought instead to stimulate the sensations of reality as perceived by the senses and the mind. To this end, Mullican employed the intense visual patterns associated with migraines, epilepsy, and altered states of consciousness — e.g. states that produce mind-numbing optical patterns and hallucinations.

Mullican didn’t differentiate between abstraction and figuration and as such was mainly an abstractionist who distorted the codes of representation for expressive ends. Though aware of the importance of form, he comes to the abstract via his ambition at producing visionary images through which one could aesthetically experience the power and force of the world of mind and energy. Mullican’s vision therefore, contrasted sharply with the existentialism of Barnett Newman, the Gothic vision of Clyfford Still, or the primordial imagery of Mark Rothko. All of these artists envisioned an external reality capable of overwhelming and dwarfing the viewer, an experience of the Sublime meant to remind viewers of the raw power of nature and human fragility. Mullican’s sublime is objectless: fields of color and sensation, and his paintings are therefore intended to deliver up a sensory overload that will induce in the viewer an awareness of still another realm.

In San Francisco, where he moved following World War II, Mullican met the British-born abstract-Surrealist painter Gordon Onslow Ford, who is credited with making some of the first poured paintings in the late 1930s. Austrian Surrealist Wolfgang Paalen also had a significant effect on Mullican during this period. Mullican came to share these artists’ interest in Eastern and Native American mysticism. Bound together by a desire to make works that would tap into altered consciousness that could serve as a doorway to infinite possibilities, they formed the short-lived Dynaton Group. Its name was derived from Paalen’s influential journal called Dyn, published in Mexico City between 1942 and 1944.

Mullican’s earliest works, shown at Susan Inglett Gallery, combine references to Aboriginal dream paintings, Native American iconography, and sci-fi-like cosmic explosions. Paintings such as The Age of the Desert (1957) are like colored drawings and consist of disjointed cosmic and landscape imagery, pictographs, as well as abstract patterns. Significantly, Mullican introduces into these works an aerial point of view, the source of which was his experience as a cartographer making maps from aerial photographs for the US military during World War II.

Formally more important than the ethnographic references, and the flattening effect of an aerial perspective, are the patterns of matchstick-like slivers of color Mullican began to use in the mid ‘50s. These short, raised lines of color — produced with the edge of the knife used by printers to ink rollers — were a distinctive feature of his work over the course of his career. Mullican distributed hundreds, if not thousands, of these colored striations across the surface of his paintings, forming a field of sensations that detached itself from the picture plane, creating a new dimension: an optical space that was divorced from the underlying imagery and abstract forms. At times, his striations lend themselves to creating tapestry-like effects that bring Gustav Klimt to mind. In works such as The Arrival of the Quetzalcoatl (1963), shown at James Cohan Gallery, Mullican shows one can be fearless when it comes to the decorative, in that it need not become a liability. In this work the tapestry effect and the multiple erratic zigzag patterns, intense colors produce a hallucinatory optical effect. An earlier artwork, Transfigured Night (1962), with its tonal sonorities, harmonic reds and oranges, and pattern of pictographs, is tasteful and hip to the point one can image it as album cover for the cool jazz of Dave Brubeck and Lee Konitz.

Only a handful of the works of the ‘60s and ‘70s are truly abstract and these, such as Mediation on the Vertical (1962), are predominantly monochromatic. Rather than creating spectral symbols or camouflaged figures, Mullican fills the plane with agitated and convoluted patterns, forming overall rhythmic fields of intense color and fluctuating densities. His signature matchsticks of color optically attach and detach themselves from the surface creating pathways, trajectories and patterns that float in the space between viewer and the painting’s surface. These works are no longer dependent on graphic imagery but on forms that are a result of color and the density of marks. The Arrival of the Quetzalcoatl, with its aggressive field of jostling patterns and forms, and its greater spontaneity, is one of Mullican’s most accomplished works. Though not included in these two exhibitions, Mullican’s paintings from the same period — in which stylized ethnographic imagery dominates, rather than painterly effects — appear to verge on kitsch. Yet I wonder if this preference is a consequence of my viewing them with prejudiced eyes, schooled in the style and history of the New York School. Despite these limitations, Mullican’s works still resonate, and demonstrate that during the ‘50s and early ‘60s, AbEx and New York were not the only game in play.

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Richard Diebenkorn at the Royal Academy of Arts

March 14 to June 7, 2015
Burlington House, Piccadilly
London, +44 20 7300 8000

The Royal Academy’s Richard Diebenkorn show operates on the basis that if he is known at all in Britain — and the publicity for and reviews of the show tended to assume that he isn’t — then it’s for his late Ocean Park series, named for the studio in which it was produced, as with all of his serial work. Accordingly, curator Sarah C. Bancroft sets out to challenge that narrow view by stressing the historical and geographic narrative. In three rooms, Diebenkorn’s work moves from an early abstract phase in room 1 (with paintings made in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Urbana, Illinois, between 1950 and ‘56), to a surprising figurative turn in room 2 (Berkeley, 1956-66), to the Ocean Park paintings in room 3 (Santa Monica, 1967-88). The show has 20, 25 and 15 works from those three periods, respectively, including drawings from each, and five of the 145 large Ocean Park paintings.

Ahead of the Royal Academy’s efforts, then, Diebenkorn’s British reputation lay mainly with painters rather than the general public, so it made sense to take six well-established painters to the show and seek their opinions on it. They split pretty much 50-50, with Michael Stubbs, DJ Simpson and Katrina Blannin persuaded of the importance of at least the Santa Monica years, but Claudia Carr, Christina Niederberger and Dolly Thompsett finding little to praise in Diebenkorn’s oeuvre.

There was some criticism of the show’s hanging. Simpson felt that the crowded early rooms left far too little space between paintings. Carr agreed, finding that the experience became “colorful, rather than about color” — as it wasn’t optically possible to isolate the color relationships within a given painting from those of its neighbouring paintings. The third room did give somewhat more space to the work, but the Sackler Rooms on the Royal Academy’s third floor have no natural light, and everyone felt that Ocean Park paintings would have benefited greatly from that.

Looking at the first room, Stubbs emphasised the historical context: the paintings were “typical of the early ‘50s in developing a Cubist space into more fluid forms which value spontaneous gestures, and which simultaneously construct and contradict the space.” Affinities were noted with English painters in the ’50s: Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon, and Ivon Hitchens. Niederberger, too, felt that that Diebenkorn’s paintings are very much of their time, making them harder to access today in a way she saw as problematic. A venerable question arose: how did Diebenkorn know that a work was finished? Stubbs felt little judgement was in evidence, suggesting he appeared to, “throw everything at the picture until he decided to throw in the towel as well.”

Simpson was more persuaded by Diebenkorn’s instincts. Quoting one-liner summaries of the instinctual decisions involved, he thought the artist had judged “when there’s enough push and not enough pull,” or when he’d achieved “the right kind of wrongness.” Simpson liked the oddity in Diebenkorn’s colors, and how certain areas – for example, the purple in Urbana #6 — take on the status of objects within the pictorial field. He also liked the variation between dry-looking and comparatively lush application of paint.

Diebenkorn never prepared the ground with sketches. ”A premeditated scheme or system is out of the question,” he said. Rather, all the action can be seen in the paintings. That means they are heavily layered — though the layers are thin. The artists agreed that many early works could be read as aerial landscapes — or sometimes interiors — even though their primary qualities are abstract. They also agreed that Diebenkorn appeared to operate by addition only, with some scratching into the surface, but no scraping off of layers. Indeed, one of Diebenkorn’s own rules (from his list of ten “Notes to myself on beginning a painting”) was that “Mistakes can’t be erased but they move you from your present position.”

I rather liked a group of charcoal life drawings, which Diebenkorn started to produce in the mid-‘50s at Wednesday evening sessions with his friends David Park and Elmer Bischoff, and which marked the beginning of his move towards explicit representation. True, the debts to Matisse are undeniable, but they have a relaxed intimacy, and integrate the figures convincingly into their architectural settings in a way which links to the frequent presence of windows in the figurative paintings, and to the architectonic character of the abstractions to come. Yet the artists were unimpressed, seeing them as routine implementation of commonly taught approaches, including the treatment of backgrounds.

In fact, none of the painters rated the middle period highly, but their reasons varied. The painters whose own practice is most abstract tended to be the most sympathetic. Simpson and Stubbs thought that some of the paintings succeeded, but that they were too imitative of Cezanne, Matisse and Bonnard. Thompsett felt the diaristic still lifes were less successful than similar painters, such as William Nicolson. The doubters complained that Diebenkorn failed to generate any psychological charge, and that, while there were abstract aspects present, they weren’t interesting in this period. Thompsett provided a partial exception: one mid-period painting, Seawall (1957), was the only one she really connected to in the whole survey. Here, Thompsett felt, “Diebenkorn had generated the language of sensation,” whereas elsewhere, she concluded, “he lacks a soul.” Seawall aside, she couldn’t grasp what he wanted to communicate, what drove him to make art.

Did Diebenkorn emerge as a strong colorist in the late work? Thompsett was unimpressed by their pastel tendencies, finding them “chalky” and too keen to be pretty. Seeing Diebenkorn’s “structure of horizontals and verticals with a relatively desaturated color palette,” Carr said she “couldn’t help wanting them to have the kind of rigorousness and sensitivity that Agnes Martin’s paintings do. She uses color in a very optically active way. His intention with color seems to be entirely descriptive of place or mood.“ Blannin, on the other hand, loved the way she could see that “saturated colors have been diluted by milky washes.” She emerged as the great enthusiast for the late work, admiring Diebenkorn’s ability to achieve his effects on the reduced scale of cigar box lids as well as in the seven-foot-high canvases — with which she said she’d be keen to live, perhaps the diagonal energies of Ocean Park #27 (1970) and the aqueous calm of #116 (1979) .

Diebenkorn denied any representational element, but the Ocean Park series does retain an aerial and window-like feel, which reads across from the earlier abstractions, consistent with their production in a studio overlooking the sea from a high vantage point. Continuity or not, Stubbs thought there was justice in the greater fame of the late work, in which he felt Diebenkorn was “more confident with the edges of forms and with variations between soft and hard edges.” If so, this may be what Diebenkorn got out of the move into and out of figuration: it gave him objects with which to establish his approach to color boundaries in a more natural way, which then carried over into his later abstract work.

I was reminded that Tom Wesselman explained his desire to paint figuratively against the background of Abstract Expressionism as a desire for “definite elements to manipulate in a very specific and literal framework.” That sentiment fits with Stubbs’s appreciation of the Ocean Park series: the geometry gave something for the gestural brushwork to play against,. In contrast, Carr found “his divisions, edges and pauses slack.” She liked Berkeley #57 (1955) for its “honesty and humility,” but was less attracted to the “confidence” Stubbs had identified in the later work. Niederberger was unenthusiastic about all phases, even though she said she’d been impressed by Diebenkorn when she was a student. Now she condemned the work as merely “nice to look at,” asserting that, while Diebenkorn operated well at the aesthetic level, he didn’t engage the brain. If Diebenkorn does engage the brain, I think it’s through the way he solves the formal problems that allow his work to appeal to the eye: we can follow him thinking his way through a composition, and see how he applies his Notes to myself, such as “attempt what is not certain” or “be careful only in a perverse way.”

That seemed to be at the core of Stubbs’s appreciation. He felt that the vehicle of the grid gave the later Diebenkorn “a way to contain his expressive gestures and the interesting and radical awkwardness of his colors successfully.” Blannin thought this “sophisticated,” even though you can see the signs of struggle. Simpson agreed, suggesting that Diebenkorn had found an approach which was quiet, not because he lacked energy or desire, but because he was “unegotistical.” “The coolness is not impersonal,” Simpson opined, “even though it avoids big, heavy, self-aggrandising gestures.” Stubbs agreed that Diebenkorn had desire, “even if it was very cool,” though he conceded that he was “more impressed than moved” by the results.

Maybe that absence of emotional impact relates to Diebenkorn’s contented and straightforward personal life, which provided him with none of the dark materials of such predecessors as Gorky, Rothko and Pollock. I liked a drawing from 1971, in which strategic pentimenti and the dialogue between ruled and freehand lines works well. Moreover, drawing directly onto the canvas with paint is fundamental to the Ocean Park series, and John Elderfield has suggested that Diebenkorn’s drawing is “what holds a structure together and keeps its firm.”

A gap emerged, then, between enthusiasts of the late work and those who thought it merely safe and tasteful, even if it embraced an artful messiness . Thompsett felt that Mondrian — an obvious influence behind the Ocean Park series — succeeded better because his approach was much tighter. Yet it was precisely the tension between tight and loose that appealed to the Ocean Park advocates. Moreover, as Blannin pointed out, Mondrian himself developed his frameworks instinctively, and up close his paintings are alive with brushwork that is far from neutral.

Do Diebenkorn’s paintings have “personality”? Perhaps of places rather than of people, was the view – even when he is depicting people, as they tend not to be individuated as characters. Indeed, one could argue that a small depiction of scissors is more of a portrait than the mid-period works featuring people, who seem present mainly for their abstract qualities. All the same, it was agreed, the personality of the painter comes through, even if it is through choice of color and structure, rather than gesture. The late work, I felt, is monumental yet intimate.

Overall, then, the mixed verdict showed at least that there’s enough variety and interest in Diebenkorn’s work to generate differing opinions. That itself suggests the work has virtues, even if they are hard to pin down given the somewhat subjective nature of the judgements involved — and all six artists said they’d enjoyed their visit, even if the substance beyond that enjoyment could be called into question.

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Julian Kreimer at the Lux Art Institute

January 24 to March 21, 2015
1550 S. El Camino Real
Encinitas, CA, 760 436 6611

I pulled onto a narrow dirt road in Encinitas, CA. This was not the entrance to the Lux Art Institute, and I was told later that it’s a common mistake. The wrong road took me to a private tennis court, surrounded by vintage cars and succulents. I turned around, trying to appear as if I wasn’t trespassing. A couple minutes later I parked on the neighboring hill. It was pretty suburban — not exactly what I picture when I hear the phrase “en plein air.”

Julian Kreimer paints outside and also in the studio. Some of these paintings are skillful observations of a tree or a building and some are abstract. Kreimer’s first West-Coast solo show, at Lux, is organized to articulate this. His vacillations between naturalism and abstraction present a dichotomy within painting that can sometimes sound dated, perhaps even comic to artists who don’t paint. While guiding me through the Lux grounds, Kreimer mentions that the abstractions developed within the context of technical color exercises. He likes to talk about exercises; his role as an educator of young painters sparks many tangential conversations and we talk about East- and West Coast art pedagogy.

Kreimer became an educator just after he had finished school himself. “A painting a day” is a common assignment. It’s a good exercise, he says. Students learn to observe and respond, to release overwrought thinking. They also learn, as if they need to be taught, about pleasure. There is the rush to replicate precarious color relationships as the light fades, as Kreimer also pursues in works such as South #1 (2015). Students learn the bliss of coercing suspended and mobilized pigments to resemble something in front of them; Kreimer’s satisfying single-stroke brambles in Turquoise Fence (2011) tackle this same problem. And of course they learn how the thrill of exhibitionist performance is fueled by a fear of getting caught. This is perfectly exemplified by the wobbly coral two-by-four ribcage of a school under construction depicted in Construction #4 (2015): yes, the artist was trespassing and yes, he did get caught.

But what if all this doesn’t add up to a good painting? Kreimer returns his unsuccessful surfaces to the studio and reworks them into abstractions. While searching for the remains of observations of a deciduous forest beneath scrapes, oversaturated pinks and yellows, and large imprecise swaths of studio-floor gray, I wonder again about the conceptual relationship between the two bodies of work. There is a marked difference in the paint handling; the landscapes have a viscous, sexy quality to them, speed to a climax, anxiety of completion. The abstractions embody a different kind of performance: time is embedded under scrubbing and methodical but casual horizontal brushstrokes. This group asks for patience and delivers the pleasure of excavating actions made in an indecipherable amount of time. Even the title of one of my favorites expresses this sentiment: Maybe Someday, Without Knowing It (2013), I continue the thought silently, “…you will find yourself committed to this painting.”

The gallery is dominated by mostly small paintings made on the grounds of the residency. Kreimer’s close-cropped images of prickly pear cactus piles steal the show, even among a salon-style wall arrangement of 20 or so gems. The green scraped cactus paddles are striking, with canvas tooth pricking through paint, and the gooey shadows surrounding them are just as good; my arms feel scratched up just looking at them. Kreimer shows me the cactus on the Lux grounds. It’s at the edge of the driveway, very unromantic. Each paddle eventually becomes hollow, brown webbing, the decayed matter providing the remaining cactus body some nourishment. I think about Kreimer’s dead, unsuccessful landscapes awaiting a palette knife in the studio.

Is routine exercise, such as making a painting each day, an attempt to escape narrative? By remaining in a state of constant practice, Kreimer draws out a narrative impulse within the viewer — what is he doing? In Our Claim to What Is (2013) a car in a forest could be an abandoned wreck or simply the artist’s transportation to a Thoreau-inspired walk. When given a little, it’s hard not to project. Perhaps it’s obvious to proclaim that each painting is a document of time and space within his experience, but these studious and delectable works seem to ask more from painting than they know how to communicate individually. Perhaps that is why they work so well compiled on one wall, like cactus paddles. Some artists find excuses to make paintings; Kreimer channels his questions through the medium.

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Mercedes Matter has long deserved the retrospective organized by art historian Ellen Landau, currently on view in the Weisman Gallery at Pepperdine University in Malibu. With more than fifty works, accompanied by documentary photographs and a comprehensive catalogue, this is an enlarged version of the show featured last fall at Baruch College in New York City.  It establishes Matter’s role in the development of the New York School and attests to the force of her artistic vision.

Exhibiting rarely during her lifetime, Matter, who died in 2001, became known as an educator through her leadership of the New York Studio School. To those of us who studied there, her personal associations with Hofmann, Gorky, Pollock and others remained mysterious, even though the force of her personality suggested that she was no mere hanger-on. In fact, as evidenced here, her paintings hold their own against those of her colleagues – smaller in scale, yet often richer and more eloquent in their grasp of essentials.

Through her father, the American modernist painter Arthur Carles, and her mother, a Spanish dancer and model, Matter was exposed in childhood to the artistic tradition and avant-garde milieu of Europe. She also underwent the religious discipline of Catholic girls’ schools. In a youthful letter she describes dancing alone on Good Friday while meditating on Christ’s suffering, testifying to a strong inner life, to a personal investment in rhythmic movement and light. The earliest works here –a teen-age self-portrait and two surprisingly mature paintings from age eight – use paint and color with expressive assurance and a suggestion of contained passion.

Her first mentor, Hans Hofmann, cultivated tensions between sensuality and self-discipline, between drawing and color, much as did her father. Both Carles and Hofmann painted cubist abstractions from subjects in the studio, while also endorsing, somewhat contradictorily, the primacy of color. But while Carles generally respected the planar architecture of cubism, Hofmann, whose color involved a more impulsive, expressionistic drive, prepared the way for Jackson Pollock’s all-over improvisations.

Here we can witness Hofmann’s concepts, which she later interpreted in her teaching, emerging within Matter’s own artistic practice and in dialogue with her peers. In early works she abstracts flower arrangements into rectangular planes of color, somewhat like early Mondrian, but these soon give way to more propulsive, looping forms, shaped by competing relations of figure and ground. Initially influenced by Gorky, these works culminate in the early 1950s in paintings like Tabletop Still Life (1952), which have the gritty incisiveness of de Kooning’s Attic, a painting she particularly admired.

Matter seems to thrive in relation to authority figures – to her father, her peers at the Club, or great artists of the past – but there’s always her own powerful persona, which survived the psychic stresses of abstract expressionism and the existential doubts of Cézanne and Giacometti. Her works maintain their own assertive vigor as she negotiates among these influences. There’s an internalized severity to her art; its fierce angularity suggests an appetite for sensual abandon constrained by geometry. Although close friends with Pollock, and an admirer of his work, Matter resisted his method, remarking in an interview, “What I like least … is the liberation.” Closest to Pollock’s gestural abstractions are some open, ethereal paintings that move freely into and around a still life yet maintain a geometric clarity. “Articulation” was a word Matter favored, “activating space”, and shaping the final inflection of every mark.

But after 1960 Matter’s work tends more towards density, towards the gradual accumulation of colored marks, as in Cézanne’s late paintings. As for him, direct visual experience, the process of observation, assumes primacy. Still life is no longer a step on the way to abstraction; painting doesn’t point beyond the objects, but hovers around their simple physical mass. Her high-keyed colors become more earthy and muted, and then disappear entirely in the large, powerful drawings, which appear through the 1980s and 90s and often include cows’ skulls collected near her home in Connecticut. Matter excavates the projections and voids of the skulls, as though to impart their airy hollowness to the entire arrangement; united in an overall mesh of marks, the objects seem to levitate from the table.

Giacometti becomes a dominant influence, but Matter doesn’t step back, as he often does, to take in the larger view of the studio; as in cubism, still life remains a close-up affair. Combining artifice and sheer physical presence, still life embodied for Matter the truth of visual experience. She claimed to work from still life for practical reasons, but it must have remained for her a site of origin, a source of fresh beginnings, shrouded in associations with her father’s studio and the art of the past. The objects in her paintings, steeped in emotion, fusing modernist ambition to European tradition, are eloquent in their muteness.

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The Berkeley Art Museum’s “Human/Nature” show offers the results of a UNESCO-funded project in which eight artists were matched with an imperiled region of their choice. Thus by design, the show is a revealing jumble, expressing something of what it has come to mean to respond to a place (or site, region, niche), and something of what it can no longer mean. Conspicuously absent are two of the great historical exemplars of response to place: that monument of the long labor of the locals, like Wordsworth’s Michael and his unfinished Sheep-fold; and the more recently prominent model of artistic self-effacement in ecological art, where place is all, and artists put themselves in the service of vivifying or restoring a site, while covering the traces of their own activity. Here most of the works are in the artists’ signature styles, conveying the sense that these are just the most recent products of long artistic mid-careers. The surprising commonality here is the prominence of pedagogy, the artists passing on the knowledge gained in their hithering and thithering from home to region to museum.

The work that initially seems closest to the Romantic evocation of place is that of Marcos Ramirez Erre, who has installed a version of a building, part home,  part shrine, from the Yunnan region of southwestern China. There are two video monitors on each long side of the building; one shows in real time the interior activities of cooking, playing, and eating, the other the construction of a building. An evocation of place? Well, yes, but the experience is aversive: the building seems crammed into its space, hunched just below the ceiling, its dark wood somehow foreboding in the underlit gallery. Its few decorative tiles, on the other hand, are seen as if from too close, which gives their floral patterns, which ought to be highlights, an apotropaic quality. This is a romanticism stripped of the fantasy that the representation of alien places is in the service of the viewer’s psychic integration. One is instead confronted with something unrecoverably alien, and that is unconcerned with what you think of it.

The unadorned pedagogical impulse is apparent in Mark Dion’s Mobile Ranger Library, a moveable kiosk displaying the books and maps you’ll need to make the most of your trip to Komodo National Park in Indonesia. Rigo 23’s works from the Atlantic Forest Southwest Reserve in Brazil are crowd-pleasers, and he recruited the labor of crowds of indigenous makers into them. The threats of habitat-loss and environmental destruction are seen through the now oddly atavistic metaphor of atomic weaponry. In Cry For Help, statuettes and maquettes seem to cascade from a large basket suspended over the gallery, or “Struggle For Life” to populate a nuclear submarine that has the low-tech appeal of a vacation cruise on a working trawler. Of the show’s works of pedagogical recruitment, Xu Bing’s is the nerviest and most unsettling: He taught an art class to children in Kenya and gave them the project of calligrammatic rendering the local trees with combined pictorial and linguistic devices. He then copied the results in Chinese ink-and-brush style into a single composition. Across the top, in half presented and half hidden in an English inscription in Xu’s invented quasi-ideogrammatic script, he proclaims that he has “copied the work of the children just as if I were copying from a book of old masters.” The children, he adds, are part of nature, like trees. “You must respect them.”

The two most artistically achieve works take something like Xu Bing’s achievement as given, and then take one more step. Ann Hamilton’s step is forwards: she evokes the symbiosis of humans and nature in the Galapagos through mixed sound recordings of birds cries and children’s chants..In her installation’s niche she circulates just below the ceiling images from a camera whose lens is centered on a water’s surface. The work regains something of the intensity of the Romantic evocation of place with its disillusioned inclusion of the artist’s movements and bare technological bits included among the constituents of place.

Diana Thater, forges another of her signature video installations from her trip to a South African wetlands preserve, probing animal consciousness in images presented across a skewed grid of monitors. The work earns its central placement in the show by recruiting the viewer’s movement down the museum’s central walkway into the piece.  The shifting viewing height and distance intensifies the splintered grid’s suggestion of the only ever partial and ephemeral glimpse we have of animals. But Thater’s step beyond Xu’s achievement is a step back: she renounces concern for a human/nature symbiosis, and instead launches herself with quixotic ferocity towards an unknowable other. Like the great autistic animal researcher Temple Grandin, she treats the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s answer to the question “What is it like to be a bat?”—Nagel thinks we cannot so much as imagine a coherent answer—as a provocation. One might expect that the project of an American artist evoking a bioregion in Africa would allude to Peter Kubelka’s heavily ironic and self-ironizing  experimental film classic “Unsere Afrikareise”, wherein German bwanas and their wives mingle with the natives and gun down a rhino or two; but Thater is post-irony. Her work perhaps best fulfills at least one hope motivating such a project, that the work will be a plunge into otherness, and one where the artist takes the viewer along.

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If Blum & Poe’s gallery one is thought of as the face of a clock, the first of Julian Hoeber’s nine acrylic varnish and sumi ink paintings, moving clockwise, would occur at 40 minutes past the hour. The final piece would be at 20 past. Cumulatively this suggests pictorial time that picks up near the middle and ends somewhat before the end, which thereby temporalizes our experience of the show as tenuous. Tenuous too is the Bridget Riley-like optical effect of each piece: a background of black concentric circles that at once float and hover both on the ground and above it.  The moment we enter the gallery, then, corralled by empty wall space at the beginning and the end of the four walls, we plop in amidst 20 minutes of unaccounted time.

Hoeber’s lost time recalls St. Augustine’s conflation of temporal and absolute time. Each piece (all 2008) puts you in mind of a CD designed by Roy Lichtenstein with its caricature sketchiness, its grooves, its implied and constant whirring (which echoes the drone of the overhead lights). Hoeber works with the perpetual and circular flow of time. His images refer to things that are ephemeral: the carnal, the banal, the witty.  He gives us a couple of Durer-esque nipples (Centered Tit, Toilet Breast); the physiognomy of a goofy, George Carlin-esque mug (Stupid Face); a kid’s drawing of a wedding; a reproduction of a Cézanne painting of two card players next to a sketch of the same piece which, when folded over, mirror each other (Cezanne Rorshach).  Bullet-shaped holes perforate the surface  ofFading Spiral with Holes), while a head centrifugally spins blood away from the center, to pool at the bottom  in Head with Drips.

The theme of absolute temporality resumes in gallery two, with 10 polished bronze skulls in various stages of utter destruction. One head looks as if it were blasted with a mortar shell (they’re all untitled), so the skull looks like a crenellated crown. One lacks the entire back of the head, the face pocked with shotgun pellets. With jaws, chins, bridges of noses, tops of heads, backs of heads, and eye sockets variously disfigured with gashes, entry and exit wounds  they look like soft boiled eggs, placed in a holder, covered with a cozy, and then mauled with a jackhammer. Intact (and intimate) neck folds constitute Bronze Age versions of the draped marble folds of the Winged Victory of Samothrace; negative space (of which there is much, including mouths and eye sockets) describes shadowed irregular shapes, the purity of the opposing white wall, the floor below.  The stainless steel pedestals reflect the viewer from the waist down as if to announce“You’re next!” as well as confirm the title of the show, “All that is solid melts into air.”

Collectively, these sculptures look like death masks cast from Aztec sacrifices. Each embodies the magical absurd-beyond-belief-because-it’s-so-true realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Along with the contents of the first gallery, they suggest a serially surreal Day of the Dead, laden with art historical references (Op Art, Pop Art, Cézanne, Abstract Expressionism).  They are a grand way to garner our attention to matters beyond our quotidian ken.

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October 29, 2007–February 11, 2008

The late 20th century art world had a bad conscience about high art which was vilified as serious, profound, mysterious, spiritual, elitist, pretentious, outmoded and labor-intensive. This led to infatuation with popular culture (silly, superficial, obvious, materialistic, egalitarian, simple, immediate and honest) which still predominates in the new century, and no one better exemplifies this infatuation than Takashi Murakami. His work is the subject of a recent retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA, soon to be seen In Brooklyn.

It is difficult to get past the hype that surrounds Murakami, much of it of his own making, and to separate it from the work itself. It may be that Murakami is trying to cancel such a separation and in so doing is questioning the relationship of art to hype and art to consumerism. The thrust of the erudite and entertaining essays in the lavish catalog that accompanies the show point us in that direction, but I feel that it is the least interesting aspect of Murakami’s work, despite what it might be convenient for him to believe in that it provides him with a dialectic that ultimately justifies his own single-minded money-making as part of a deeper strategy to expose ideological fissures in the art establishment. The Louis Vuitton collaboration in joint marketing is thus an integral part of the gallery space, not merely relegated to the gift store where it might more traditionally belong.

There are other, more interesting, less peripheral, issues with which Murakami’s work confronts the early 21st century viewer. The central issue is whether the traditional linguistic and iconographic resources of western art have exhausted themselves, as so many of its practitioners proclaim with something approaching clockwork regularity, and whether they can be revitalized by a shot in the arm from popular and non-western culture. Of course these situations have arisen before, most notably at the inception of Modernism with its appropriation of tribal, psychotic and children’s art.

What distinguishes Murakami from early modernists is that he originates from the other side of the divide, with his training in Nihonga (traditional Japanese painting) and his obsession with anime and manga. However he is much more of a hybrid than Picasso or Matisse because his own culture has been so deeply inflected by western influence already. Nihonga, in particular, was an attempt to meld Japanese aesthetics with western techniques and spatial structures.

Thus Murakami does not have to be self-conscious about his eclecticism and can quite happily superimpose characters cloned from Mickey Mouse, with the iconography of Buddhism, the stylistic devices of anime and the aesthetics of Muromachi screen painting. The burning question is what all of this adds up to apart from an exercise in fusion. Tan Tan Bo Puking-a,k.a. Gero Tan of 2002 would be my answer. The vast Mickey Mouse-like figure of Tan Tan Bo silhouetted against a flat cerulean sky stands to Murakami’s ego as Guston’s signature kidney-shaped heads do to his. Both artists share a similar fascination with flatness and scale and both extract their imagery from comic book sources. Guston uses Expressioinist bravura handling to immerse his images within a sea of art historical reference, guaranteeing a type of authenticity, whereas Murakami retains the flatness and blandness of his sources. Tan Tan Bo should not be seen in isolation as this character resurfaces in different guises in much of the artist’s work. His features surmount the vast factory built Oval Buddha of 2007, and they are dismembered and abstracted into the decorative dynamics of Edo screen-like canvases such as PO+KU Surrealism Mr DOB-Yellow, Pink, Blue, Purple, Green,1998.

In Tan Tan Bo Puking the narrative exposition explored in earlier canvases approaches something of a climax in the massive simultaneous eructation of multicolored streams of vomit from a face grimacing a mountainous range of black incisors. We might remember that women of the imperial Japanese court also dyed their teeth black. The sublimely childlike world of playful decorative swirls, joyful cumulus clouds, cobalt skies is cataclysmically aborted, giving way to disgust and despair, but not without a sense of tragic grandeur. For me it is almost as if the wonderfully puerile but illusory balloon of pre-adolescent reverie has been inflated to a bursting point, that will yield the dark night of the soul of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, directly referenced in other paintings of Murakami likeTime Bokan-black 2001. Innocence is under a threat that only the sustained opulence of the colors and the mechanically perfect outlines can pretend to withstand.  This is surely the most compelling meditation on adolescence since Munch’s Puberty. Here the crisis takes on cosmic proportions and new planetary systems seem to evolve from Tan Tan’s various appendages. The disaster is further compounded by the fact that this canvas is a visual inventory of Murakami’s signature icons, the Laura Ashley flowers, magic mushrooms, DOB heads, grotesque Pokemon eyes, Buddha smiles, decorative spirals, all of them breathing their last in an impending cosmic dissolution that might suggest a more compelling form of self-doubt than we normally associate with Murakami’s self-promotional verbal statements.

Murakami should be judged on works like Tan Tan Bo Puking, on whether it can sustain, the intensity and reach of the paintings with which it aligns itself, like the giant, cartoon-haunted, Crumbesque canvases of Philip Guston, the delicate surrealist cosmogonies of Joan Miro or the exploitation of emptiness in Japanese screen painting. It is Murakami’s surprisingly timeless achievement to have wrung from the unpromising and bland stylistic repertoire of anime and manga, executed by large teams of assistants, an original cosmogony sustained by an emotional intensity and conceptual sophistication that renders his flirtation with the world of consumerism at most a side-show and ultimately unnecessary. For me his artistic pedigree derives from Bosch, Guston, Miro and Jakuchi, not Warhol and Koons, as the essays in the catalog suggest.

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November 1 to December 14, 2006

Minimalism strikes me as being quaintly obsolete, deriving from a formalist aesthetic that indulges in endgame polemics, arrogantly defining itself as the logical terminus of all previous painting and as the ultimate position that painting can take. As an artist with reductionist inclinations how do you engage in this severe legacy other than by proving yourself as a yet further reduction of your predecessors?

Eleanor Wood whose work is on display at Don Soker Contemporary Art in San Francisco has skirted the periphery of Minimalism for her entire career, fine-tuning her obsessive, hypersensitive and exquisite miniature technique. In 2002 she moved from her native England to California, the displacement serving as catalyst for a body of work that demonstrates a departure from her previous practice, and rift with Minimalist orthodoxy.

Joinery, grid-work, weaving, sewing, scarification, and wound dressing are among the material associations the work evokes, a virtual compendium of fabrication techniques. The insistent reminder of age and wear, as if the images had somehow been allowed to mature and steep over lengthy periods, as if what we see were merely a vestige of the result of corrosion or patination (see no: 6), evokes a poignant sense of reflection, memory, and loss.

The fragility and apparent age of these images tempers their insistent sense of order, order that we sense rests on implicit but radical contradictions.  Take the  downplaying of the relationship of  image to the paper’s edges, or the deliberate uncertainty about what constitutes the image. This involves an unexpected union of the negation of geometric hierarchy common to Abstract Expressionism, with the precision, and compactness of Minimalism.  One might expect the pervasive grid format employed by Wood, albeit subtly subverted on occasion, to brace itself against the edges of the support, to assert its completeness and finality. However her work defies this expectation, placing the colored rectangles in singles or couples far enough from the paper’s edge as to suggest that any proportion, other than the insistent but nuanced proportion contained in the grid, is secondary. Each work embraces a sense of infinitely plotted spatial extension, while at the same time instantiating a finite, precise, insistent, rigidly contained, eye-catching, hypnotic singularity. Arguably the most significant proportion is the relative thickness of the image, built out of multiple layers, to the scale of its dimensions. If these measured 8.5 x 8.5 feet instead of inches the colored rectangle would be at least two inches thick to retain this proportion!

The intensely saturated rectangles that at once appear to hover above the surface, (notice the soft, shadows surrounding the rectangles in no: 13), while simultaneously appearing to be woven into it, (notice the grid-work of strips of wax punctuated with pinholes in 20) ultimately seem like manifestations of an infinite, slumbering latency. It is as if Wood is evoking a limitless spatial continuity, a type of invisible mathematical progression that becomes periodically visible through a temporary window-like opening.

The assertive color saturations are new to Wood’s previously monochrome repertoire. They are achieved through painting washes of watercolor onto the reverse side of absorbent paper. Waxed Japanese paper is then glued over the front surface as a barrier on top of which intricate layers of oil pastel are applied. The effect is one of finely calibrated pulsations of light and matter that mirror, on a microcosmic level, the tension between enbedment in and flotation above the paper support of the central colored rectangles.

Ultimately it is not the sense of contradiction that animates the work so much as an alternating visual current. This constantly switches between the centrifugal sense of expansiveness and indefiniteness inherent in the colored rectangles and their insistent symmetry and eye-catching centripetal focus. The work suggests that the universe, both internal and external, emerges and dissolves with respiratory regularity, and in this sense it is actually breathtaking.

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November 15, 2005 – April 30, 2006

Tom Otterness apparently heard that people like money in Beverly Hills. Indeed, his eight sculptures on display on the west lawn of Beverly Hills City Hall tell a story about entrepreneurship, American justice, and money.

Otterness makes celebratory, but “gently” critical visual statements, whose subversiveness lies in their uncanny references to 1950’s figurative cartoons and intricate narratives about family structures. Otterness’ populism makes his work palatable to a wide range of on-lookers. Though there is no “Goofy” or “Daffy” or “Minnie Mouse” to be found on the lawn, the works are as goofy, daffy, and mini (the smallest figures are three inches high) as their Disney counterparts. Indeed, seeing Otterness’ work in Los Angeles — the same geography that inspired the makers of Disney characters and animation — lends a special nostalgic hue to these glimmering, if not weathered, ocular treasures.

Formally, the work harmonizes with the trees and Mission-style architecture of City Hall. The work entertains us as much as it inspires contemplation.  Pieces are spread out spaciously on both flanks of the lawn, are centered on the cement path leading to the front entrance of City Hall, and run alongside Santa Monica Blvd and Crescent Drive.  The work can be accessed easily by walkers or drivers; many of the pieces reach 25’ high, and some are almost as wide.  Of course the best way to take in this outdoor exhibit is slowly, and the placard map (such as this one http://www.tomostudio.com/) is stationed appropriately slightly off-center.  The work is not abstract. Each Otterness piece seems to smile, both on the inside (conceptually) and on the outside (pictorally), with the exception of those figures whose faces have been covered with money bags, such as King and Queen (1997). And while the Tree of Knowledge (1997), stationed directly below the front cement stairs leading into City Hall, does provide a harsh critique (one figure holds a dagger), it seems that the dancing glee of Free Money (2001) really describes Otterness’ overall sentiment.

Otterness’ sculptures provide sartorial cues: aristocrats wear top hats, vested suits, long gowns, and beaded necklaces, for example.  Yet the subject of money, especially since Warhol’s silkscreens of money, holds a peculiar place in American art, even sculpture.  The bulbous money bags (which double as heads, and shadow the King and Queen with an uncanny image of harm) lend themselves perfectly to the material used.  It seems that any ironic critique of capitalism suggested by these groupings is outweighed by the jolly rotundity and pleasant plumpness of the figures.

In light of that, what I found most delightful about Otterness’ work is the commentary about labor in each piece.  The labor of the artist is clearly part of the celebration: each piece demonstrates mastery over the process, so much so that the green patina from its stay in LA poses no threat to the success of the work.  Likewise, Otterness’ Big Big Penny seems to replicate at 71 inches high (about 7’) the same financial statement that the US penny does in a ½ diameter.  His attention to the shallow depths and fine surface details, do not offset the fine balancing of this circular form.

But there is an even more interesting phenomena going on in Otterness’ installation with regards to gender, and possibly sexuality.  For who is driving the Large Covered Wagon but a pipe-smoking woman and her friendly, clothed ox?  What are the children in the back of the wagon doing but fighting in the rear orifice of the covered wagon, in thick fluid motions made of childhood trauma?  These details in the narratives of Tom Otterness’ sculpture tell the viewer a lot about the development of industry and greed, more than the panoramic eye can grasp.  Indeed, behind Big Big Penny one finds two small figures, men kissing.  And true to the form, the working class men are symbolized by hard-hats and given only the shirts on their backs, no pantaloons, exposing the remaining anatomy without fanfare.  Present in the smallest of details, there is subtle sensuality in Otterness work that complicates the normative family structures implied by the cartoon themes.

Tania Hammidi is a graduate student of Dance History and Theory at the University of California, Riverside. She works on contemporary visual art and movement, with particular attention to sculpture and language.

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