June 3 to September 2, 2018
10899 Wilshire Blvd., between Westwood Blvd. and Glendon Avenue
Los Angeles, hammer.ucla.edu

Summer in Los Angeles almost inevitably means three things: brutal fires, the Dodgers raising our blood pressure, and – this being an even-numbered year – another iteration of Made in L.A., the Hammer Museum’s buzz-attracting biennial. This year’s, officially the fourth, encompasses 33 artists. Curated by Hammer Senior Curator Anne Ellegood and Erin Christovale, this provocative exhibition is notable for its demographic inclusiveness, with 23 female or non-gender-conforming artists and 21 artists of color. As the curators didn’t nominate a unifying concept, the biennial, spread out across the entire museum, thus seems even more sprawling than usual, leaving the viewer to take each installation on its own terms. Surprises abound. Even so, unlikely dialogues spark. Issues of identity and community weave in and out, along with numerous references to the human body. That confluence of sociological critique and bodily engagement provides the closest thing to a central theme, and gives the exhibition the feeling of a quirky, consciously “woke” travelogue of sorts.

Setting the tone for the show is 97-year old Luchita Hurtado, the latest under-recognized artist to be rediscovered in a “Made in L.A.” biennial, a welcome hallmark of the series. Born in Caracas, and associated with the Dynaton Group in Northern California in the 1940s, Hurtado is represented by a set of compelling, surrealist-inflected paintings from the ‘70s that playfully manipulate perspective, employing parts of her own body – feet, belly, breasts – as elements of landscape. Mysterious, self-affirming, and oddly timeless, the work is a revelation. Although the show is at pains to blur the boundaries of old-fashioned media, two younger painters also memorably twist figuration to their own ends: Christina Quarles, whose looping, semi-abstract protagonists blithely overflow their domestic props, geometric confines, and peeling patterned backdrops; and Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, whose figures navigate their own subjective relationship to both narrative painterly traditions and scenes of traditional Americana. Durham, August 14, 2017, 2017, her image of an overturned, contorted Confederate monument amidst diverse viewers’ legs, is the show’s most telling take on the current political moment. Diedrick Brackens’ striking textile works look to revive and interweave threads of lesser-known African-American history with unsettling glimpses of narrative, while Aaron Fowler’s playful scrap-filled wall reliefs juxtapose automobile fragments of an El Camino, with mirrors, neons, and piñata-like Minion characters, to reflect his own take on American iconography. Inhabiting an altogether more pensive space, Rosha Yoghmai’s folding screen layered with talismans, glass objects, and light projections, meld allusions to the artist’s own Iranian family background and Southern Californian light and space and assemblage art, to quietly haunting effect.

The show invites, and rewards, ambitious visions: Eamon Ore-Giron’s mesmerizing geometric lobby mural, which draws from such disparate sources as Russian Suprematism, Latin American abstraction, musical scores, textiles, and indigenous mythology, rocked its space, distilling its diverse sources into a dynamic formal machinery. While Charles Long’s giddily nightmarish installation conjured art historical specters such as Guston’s smoking klansmen and Munch’s The Scream, conflating tree trunks with phalluses, through a forest of cartoony faces made from giant cross-sections of penises. The image is both goofy and disturbing. A scathing critique of patriarchy’s effect on the environment or a dark joke, once experienced you can’t unsee it. Formally innovative and often pushing limits, Long is the sort of figure you love to see given free rein in a show like this. He’s also currently the subject of his first L.A. solo show in years in the inaugural exhibition of Tanya Bonakdar’s new Los Angeles gallery. Yet it is to the curators’ credit that more intimate visions also had room to shine. One highlight is the work of Linda Stark, whose formally graphic, densely built up oil paintings conjure personal and feminine topographies, with striking technique and an appealing sincerity. At times her work is startling in its vulnerability, as in her emerald green rendering of a woman’s sex and ovaries, with ocean waves for pubic hair, and her witty/loving portraits of cats she has known. Self Portrait With Ray, 2017, an example of the latter, shows a tabby gazing back at the viewer from a circle inset like a third eye in a tearful woman’s forehead. To anyone who’s ever lost a beloved animal friend, or just anyone searching for some actual human feeling in contemporary art, Stark’s precise but soulful canvases resonate powerfully. It’s nice to be touched and dazzled by work, not just dutifully impressed or pleasantly intrigued. Reveling in its diversity of visions, this “Made in L.A.” is an eclectic survey that delivers on all counts.

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June 20 to September 13, 2015
10899 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, 310 443 7000

“Perfect Likeness,” organized by veteran curator Russell Ferguson, is an intentioned and poignant show, with moments of profound tenderness. It was without question the best exhibition I’ve seen this year. It charts a renewed interest in photographic composition beginning in the 1970s, focusing in particular on the prolific photographers of Europe, Canada and the US working between the 1990s and 2000s. The works flow beautifully without the conventional curatorial buttresses of chronology or conspicuous thematic groupings. Ferguson’s deft arrangement sparkles with the subtle lyricism of a photographer’s series, allowing for moments of affection, irony, and fascination to unfold in front of the viewer.

Ferguson’s introductory wall text presses upon our current condition of image saturation, a point which interested me less than the mid-century break he posits between pictorialism and more candid, even journalistic, photography. The return to the “inauthentic” or arranged image is where “Perfect Likeness” finds its genesis. A gorgeous Robert Mapplethorpe work, Orchid (1982), could have opened the exhibition — it nearly perfectly characterizes the pictorial shift for which Ferguson argues. It was in 1982 that Mapplethorpe found his muse in female body builder Lisa Lyon, and his evocative image of a drooping orchid is anthropomorphized on film, displaying the same elegance, grace and emotion as his expertly staged corporeal forms. While Ferguson could have just as easily chosen a nude to mark Mapplethorpe’s predilection for choreographed imagery, I appreciate the fact that the flower, itself a site of sexual reproduction, was chosen. Roe Ethridge’s work Peas and Pickles (2014) shares a wall with the Mapplethorpe, and serves as both a formal counterpart and self-aware double entendre.

Christopher Williams’ Department of Water and Power General Office Building (Dedicated on June 1, 1965), from 1994, consists of two images taken at slightly different angles in the morning and evening. The subtle change produces vastly different effects: in the first, the building’s vertical lines are emphasized, while in the second it appears wider and more horizontal. One of the aims of “Perfect Likeness” seems to be the unification of painterly technique with that of photography. In Department, Williams draws upon the tradition of Monet, who depicted Rouen Cathedral dozens of times as a means of indicating the subtle distinctions in perception caused by shifting light and shadows.

This understanding of the photographic subject as malleable speaks to the issue of authenticity, a question which photographer Jeff Wall has spent a career examining (and debunking). Wall’s 2011 work, Boxing, features two white teenage boys sparring in what appears to be their childhood home — an elegant high-rise apartment with a Joseph Albers painting hung in the background. The art historian Michael Fried has made much of the quality of absorption present in Wall’s subjects; many times they perform a task or mundane action that suggests they are oblivious to the fact that they are being photographed. This absorptive quality squares with Wall’s pictorial aims: to create an image that appears candid but is in fact painstakingly composed. While two of Wall’s major large-format works are featured in the exhibition, it was his more diminutive 1993 piece Diagonal Composition that was the standout. The quotidian image of a kitchen sink glows with the help of a light box and was so perfect, so complete, and so personal, that I was nearly moved to tears.

Lucas Blalock’s Broken Composition, from 2011, consists of a double image of a broken light bulb. The wall text equates Blalock’s visible method of technical composition to the painter’s brushstroke. Here, both the picture and its subject are broken, adding another layer of ambiguity between the photo’s “truth” and inauthenticity. Stan Douglas’ Hastings Park was another standout in the show, a composite of a photo taken in 1955 and edited using Photoshop in 2008. For the photo, Douglas restages the 1955 scene at a Vancouver horse track using models in period clothing, creating an image composed of 30 separate snapshots.

Sharon Lockhart’s evocative 1997 series The Goshogaoka Girls Basketball Team makes manifest a century-long photographic cliché: with her carefully arranged images Lockhart raises a mundane scene to the level of magnificence. By omitting the ball from the frame, the players appear to gaze up hopefully towards a higher power above. Thomas Ruff’s glossy portraits from the 1980s take up an equal amount of the exhibition’s real estate, though they’re nowhere near as compelling as Lockahart’s scenes. Ruff’s sitters look directly at the camera blankly, as though posing for an identification card. While the enormous format of these images is in itself seductive, they lose their visual punch when displayed in a series. In contrast, Elad Lassry’s Chocolate bars, Eggs, Milk (2013) is deliberately diminutive; apparently his subject of glossy chocolate and smooth eggs is plenty seductive, even at such a small scale.

The poignancy of the images on display is what left me thinking about “Perfect Likeness” weeks later. Catherine Opie’s 2012 portrait of the artist Lawrence Weiner raises him to the level of an old master, equal parts Rembrandt and Hans Holbein. However, Weiner’s soft body and gentle face lay bare a degree of tenderness on Opie’s part — she doesn’t revere Weiner, but cares for him. Equally affectionate were Gillian Wearing’s self portraits dressed as her mother and father from 2003. In these blown-up images, Wearing’s wig, glue, and mask are made visible, though not pronounced. This evidence of the characters’ construction points to the mother and father themselves as constructed figures, reproduced and reimagined in our own memories, often tainted with shades of nostalgia. Rather than recognizing “Perfect Likeness” on a register as broad as the shared human condition (as the wall text suggests), I understand it as a touching time capsule — one that, in my opinion, will mark the set of issues facing photographers today.

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Queer artists in the late 1980s such as David Wojnarowicz, Gregg Bordowitz and members of the collective Gran Fury employed directive text and images as a means of addressing AIDS, its representation, and the concomitant cultural crisis in the United States. The work of artist Jim Hodges, in contrast, limns the line between the evocative and the sublime, employing minimalist forms in line with what has been recently referred to as “queer formalism:” work that turns away from aesthetics typically associated with “activist” art in favor of coded political motivations as a means of resisting censorship. Hodges’s palpable earnestness is reinforced by the lack of didactic wall texts at his ambitious retrospective, currently on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The original iteration of “Give More Than You Take” was co-organized by Olga Viso, from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Jeffrey Grove, from the Dallas Museum of Art. Hammer Museum director Connie Butler organized the show’s third stop in LA, alongside curator Aram Moshaedi. Artists Julie Ault and Martin Beck were brought on as consultants to aid in the show’s reconceptualization at the Hammer, for an exhibition featuring 75 pieces realized between 1987 to present. Notably, the curators in LA reserve ample space between artworks, allowing the viewer to experience each installation individually, and draw connections between the evocative pieces and their own experiences. This notion of correspondence — either between individuals, politics or objects — is central to Hodges’s work, for which he employs delicate silk flowers, gold leaf, broken mirrors and tenuous chains, to speak to issues as varied as mortality, artifice, and the interrelation of our myriad selves.

In circles attuned to queer art and politics, Hodges is often referred to alongside the late Cuban-American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres as employing the language of queer formalism. Hodges was close friends with Gonzalez-Torres, and, according to Walker director Olga Viso, produced a number of works in his memory on the day of the artist’s death from AIDS in 1996. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Hammer Museum will screen a number of Hodges’s films, including Untitled (2011), produced with collaborators Carlos Marques da Cruz and Encke King. The 60-minute film, made in honor of Gonzalez-Torres, uses archival material to showcase injustices throughout history. While the film pays special attention to the politics and activism surrounding AIDS in the 1980s, it goes as far back as WWII to point to ideological abuses of power in the face of cultural crises. Hodges writes of the film:

We have people in power who are disrespectful, who are prejudiced, who don’t see, who refuse to acknowledge an aspect of the society at large because of their ideological position. They won’t allow themselves to see the humanness that’s there. This is the problem that I see: this continuation — and the continuum — where the powers deny the humanness of the other.

This focus on “humanness” is central to Hodges’s delicate artworks at the Hammer, which emphasize the phenomenological effects of our own physicality. Hodges presses upon the experience of interacting with other (often anonymous) bodies in space as a means of gesturing towards a shift in the cultural understanding of the body after AIDS. His 1997 work You features thousands of silk and polyester flowers, petals and leaves stitched together to form a 30-foot-tall curtain. The installation is designed to be exhibited in the center of the gallery so as to allow viewers to walk around it on all sides, letting them catch short glimpses of one another — fluttering fingers, a tuft of hair, a flash of skin — through the work’s small interstices. Later that year Hodges produced Changing Things, which deconstructs the curtain of flora found in You as a means of recognizing each one of its disparate parts, pinning each silk flower, petal and leaf, like specimens for study. Here, the viewer experiences Hodges’ materials in the visual language of taxonomy, laying bare the slipperiness between notions of the authentic versus the fabricated, the natural versus the constructed.

Hodges is deeply interested in the effects of layering and fragmenting, and the relationship between exposing and concealing. Often described as “poetic,” it serves to mention that much of his work is markedly feminine, itself a queer aesthetic device when recognized in tandem with the works’ seriousness. For Landscape (1998), the artist places 15 boys’ and men’s shirts in successive sizes, one inside the other, to create a series of concentric collars in different colors and patterns. The outermost shirt is a buttoned-up white oxford, alluding to the disparity between our innermost and outermost selves. Hodges’s ambitious installation And Still This (2005-08) takes on similar themes of transformation over time. The work consists of a series of 10 body-sized gessoed canvases overlaid with gold leaf and arranged upright in a circle. The viewer steps into the installation via a small opening between two canvases, forcing her to confront the rarely-seen wooden stretchers as she makes her way inside the configuration of paintings. Once inside, the viewer encounters a carefully designed modern day creation myth in an abstract narrative designed to be read from left to right. This relation between interior and exterior highlights the artist’s own experience during the AIDS crisis, when revealing details about one’s self — whether one’s HIV status or sexuality — was highly politicized.

Chain-link spider webs are a recurrent theme in the artist’s 25-year oeuvre, beginning in 1991 with Untitled (Gate), a human-scale installation made of steel, copper, aluminum and brass chain. From a distance the work connotes both neglect and interdiction, though closer inspection reveals that the innermost chains are constructed of delicate girls’ charm bracelets. For What’s Left (1992) the artist has constructed a still life of rumpled jeans, a t-shirt, belt and tennis shoes overlaid with a sparking chain-link web. The installation alludes to clothes left on the bed or bathroom floor, perhaps belonging to a lover whose body has since disappeared. Hodges produced this work in New York City at the height of AIDS, again, shying away from the overtly political works that were rallied against, or worse, censored by the religious right and conservative museum structures.

Perhaps the most arresting piece in “Give More Than You Take” is Hodges’s 2008 work The Dark Gate. The viewer is invited to enter a small wooden chamber nestled in the pitch-black gallery through a pair of swinging doors. Inside, the artist has created an oculus lined in razor spikes, or, perhaps, an image of a sunburst left in reserve. The bright spot in the center again reinforces the artist’s inquiry into relativity: is the darkness encroaching or receding? The fragrance of Hodges’s mother’s favorite perfume, Shalimar, permeates the chamber, which also contains notes of the cologne Hodges himself wore at the time of her passing. In this evocative installation Hodges references danger, hope, violence, death and birth. The small dwelling is deeply personal but utterly social, a successful metaphor for his prolific 25-year career.

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Primetime commercials, glossy print promotions: both flourish through their deployment of the coincidental and the strangely juxtaposed. While satellite up-links long ago collapsed broadcast time, allowing the world to be witnessed in all of its multifarious beauty 24 hours a day, this never-ending present comes with a price. We accept that the voice of a media outlet is so often colored by its corporate owners, but it is the often more-collusive presence of advertising that slips under the radar. Whether it is a preponderance of sponsored editorial content, or a simple overt endorsement, something is presumably being sold to us in some form or another.

Over the course of his long working and teaching life, Robert Heinecken attempted to expose the intrinsic hypocrisies of thinly veiled sexuality that forms so much advertising, while disassembling the latent commerce of images. Heinecken, through an extraordinary array of materials and processes, explored the physical and conceptual limits of photography, often describing himself as a “para-photographer,” as his work typically eluded traditional definitions of the medium. Though a decades-long examination into the foundations of commercial images, Heinecken proved himself to be more attuned to the swiftly shifting slipstream of visual media than many of his arguably better-known contemporaries. Through exceptional manipulation of appropriated photographs and video footage, Heinecken was able to pinpoint the locus of image-mediated attention, while taking aim at our more corrosive manifestations of culture and its pernicious repercussions, felt every time we tune in to our favorite shows.

“Robert Heinecken: Object Matter” is the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist since his death in 2006, allowing for work scarcely seen before to be placed within a career that spanned decades and mediums. The exhibition recently closed at the Museum of Modern Art and has now traveled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Eva Respini, MoMA’s Chief Curator of Photography, assembled examples from Heinecken’s multiple intersecting bodies of work, allowing the full scope of his evolution as an artist to be seen, and demonstrating the surprising vitality still present in his output, which the passing years have scarcely dulled. The images Heinecken produced have an uncanny prescience, often appearing as examinations of the effects of our present world of multimedia, years before such a notion was conceived of.

Although the products and celebrities featured in Heinecken’s work indelibly link it to the age that bore them, the fickleness of fashion hasn’t voided the assessments they offer. More often than not, the focus of Heinecken’s early work is the media-driven distortions wrought upon women’s bodies. As seen through these appropriated images, women are contorted, reformed and altered again for mass-market consumption. Heinecken followed this universal, ravenous appetite for flesh over the course of his working life, closely following its chic permutations, while always torquing the popular for critical ends.

“Are You Rea” (1964-68), Heinecken’s series of black-and-white photograms, while iconic, still serves to provide a thorough introduction to his mode and method of working. The relatively simple construction of each print yields unusually complex images; unlike the early photograms of Man Ray and other Modernist photographers, Heinecken dispensed with three-dimensional objects and instead used the pages of popular magazines, contact-printing them directly on photographic paper. The thin paper allowed for both sides of each page to be seen at once, creating layers of images out of each ad layout and collapsing photographic space, melding the models and products into a seamless amalgam of commerce. “Are You Rea” is a title that both questions and begs for resolution. “Real” or “Ready,” each applies as the ideal woman stands, frozen in the midst of undressing. The positive and negative exist at once in these images, the standard tonality and formula of advertising, image and copy, broken and reformed into something entirely unimagined. With the commercial signifiers removed, the languid gaze and blithe sensuality so woven into the performance of retail becomes the product itself: sex selling sex.

Much of Heinecken’s early work consists of photographic objects, images incorporated into sculptural forms with varying degrees of success. Several sculptural works, many presented for the first time in this retrospective, are interactive, such as Transitional Figure Sculpture (1965), a tower of stacked sections of photographs, each able to be spun independently, but only ever partially resolving themselves into images of solarized nudes. These works are unique for their often-complex geometric formalism, as well as their participatory aspect. “Are You Rea” marked a distinct shift into the full appropriation of images; Heinecken’s later bodies of work would rarely include original photography.

Concurrent with “Are You Rea,” Heinecken began an extensive series of manipulated (he dubbed them “compromised”) magazines — cutting, overprinting, and recombining issues of various publications, both destroying the original while tearing apart the inherent fictions of advertising. In these new magazines, fresh narratives are built out of old ones, with many, many familiar characters inserted into unfamiliar roles. Periodical #5 (1971), made from clippings taken from an issue of Living Now, is unaltered save for the addition of a beaming Cambodian solider posing with two severed heads. Taken from an infamous photograph published in Time Magazine, the solider is overprinted on the pages in varying intensities throughout the issue, fading in and out of the original compositions and juxtaposed with pairs of beautiful girls, air conditioner ads, and interior decorating articles. A version of this approach, 150 Years of Photojournalism (1989-90), an altered issue of Time, is a standout; a special edition commemorating the titular milestone, this issue was sponsored solely by Kodak, which is, consequently, the only advertiser featured. The singular, cheery, deep yellow of the Kodak logo bleeds through the pages, further highlighted by Heinecken’s excisions, blending in, merging with the images, endowing the triumphs and tragedies of the century with corporate sponsorship.

Around 1980, Heinecken began working with video, specifically by photographing television screens and manipulating the results. Begun at a time when images were starting the transition away from materiality and into the subspaces of the screen (particularly in the realm of news, with the concurrent launch of CNN), Heinecken’s television-derived work seized upon this moment, transmuting the moving image to print. These works magnify, distort, and above all, play with our relationship to television, mocking and examining celebrity culture while quite seriously investigating the nature of our collective fascination with the medium.

In his early video-centric series, “Inaugural Excerpt Videograms” (1981), Heinecken captured stills from Ronald Reagan’s inauguration speech, writing below each resulting image randomly chosen fragments of either the speech itself or the selected commentary of pundits. To create the photographs, Heinecken utilized the now discontinued Cibachrome positive printing process to print directly off of the CRT screen, holding each sheet of paper onto the glass to expose it, yielding a videogram. The videogram is perhaps the perfect fusion of photography and video, reflecting the dense mediation of not only broadcast television, but also contemporary politics. Heinecken abstracted the production of the work, employing an assistant to make the actual videograms, directing the process over the telephone. This abstraction of production hints at the larger televised theater of the inauguration itself, from the speechwriters and aides engaged to craft the tone of the event, to the carefully orchestrated direction of broadcast. The images that emerge in the videograms are televisual ghosts, seeming to materialize from a fog that, while an artifact of the printing process, upends the careful production, rendering such familiar figures nearly unrecognizable.

While the “Inaugural” videograms highlight the innate complications of televised representation, much of Heinecken’s later video works consider the uniquely contrived nature of the medium itself. Surrealism on TV (1986) consists of three slide projectors, each randomly filled with images directly photographed from the TV screen, divided into rough categories: explosions, aerobic exercises, animals, newscasters, and evangelists. The work is sequenced, one projector advancing at a time, and each presentation is unique, resulting in a classically formulated surrealist narrative. At times, the projected images form strange visual equations, in one iteration, news anchors, always smiling and impeccably coiffed, are paired with a violent static-streaked explosion; later, aerobics demonstrations might bookend a dog, grabbed from a pet food commercial, caught in mid-bark. While the title of the piece makes the broadcast origins of the images clear, its construction — from the durational viewing it demands to the subtle reflections from the glass of the TV screen often captured — serves as a reminder to more cautiously consider the implications of our own passive viewing of television.

To those unfamiliar with Heinecken’s body of work, the most immediate reaction might be to its thoroughly analog nature. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Heinecken never embraced the more-computerized aspects of the media revolution he was simultaneously documenting and critiquing. At the time that he turned his attention to video as the source for his work, many other artists were seeking to reconcile past formulations of photography and image making with the increasingly pervasive role that mass media takes in our day-to-day life. Drawing upon similar concerns, Gretchen Bender created complexly staged video performance pieces that appropriated the visual vocabulary of commercial television production, and Jack Goldstein painted algorithmically determined views from radio telescopes, taking the very conception of photography to its perceptible limits. The liminal state that photography existed in towards the end of Heinecken’s life did not seem to necessarily hold his interest, but in reviewing his work, it is tempting to ask what he might have made of the never-ending stream of images and videos now uploaded every day to Tumblr and YouTube. This is a conspicuous oversight in an otherwise thorough survey, however when considering work that, despite having little in it to visually connect with the world that we now inhabit, has retained a remarkable currency, the lack of such speculation is more forgivable. There is, at the core of Heinecken’s work, a desire to expand the limits of the image, and to question the relevance of traditional boundaries imposed upon photography. Now as never before, we produce photographs and videos: the micro and macro, the bite-sized and feature length, an endless document that shadows each of our lives. When reflecting upon our world, so enamored with its own representations, we might ask as Heinecken did, Where do our images go?

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