April 8 to April 23, 2016
Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street (at 24th Street)
San Francisco, 415 243 0825

For three weeks this April, CAPITAL, the San Francisco gallery co-run by Bob Linder and Jonathan Runcio, is flying its banner at Minnesota Street Project (a brand new art venue in the City’s Dogpatch neighborhood) with the group show “BLACK STANDARD.”

Three artists are featured in this pop-up exhibition: Davina Semo, a New York artist who showed at CAPITAL in September and October of 2015; Phil Wagner, based in Los Angeles; and the Bay Area’s Survival Research Laboratories (SRL), which was founded by Mark Pauline in 1978 and has been labeled a “robot art collective.” The exhibition — which encompasses a large gallery, an adjacent screening room, and part of the atrium — resembles an architectural construction site.

Two hulking SRL devices, Pitching Machine (1999) and Inchworm (1987), are currently parked in the Minnesota Street Project atrium. They’re gargantuan (each larger than a car) and capable of strange feats; Pitching Machine can launch two-by-fours at immense velocity, like a nail gun, while Inchworm’s stack of metal pincers can hoist, mash, and tear apart large objects. The machines are remarkable for their exposed components: gears, chains, wires, rivets, batteries and tanks are all discernible.

Running Machine (1992) stands in the main exhibition space, its lanky arm piercing the air above with a terminal knife-like appendage. Smaller wiry “props” dot the gallery floor, appearing like hazard beacons, all called Prop (Offspring) and made in 2015. The gadgets are exhibited in a quiescent state, but the unmistakable acrid odor of burnt fuel is a reminder that these are functioning contraptions. A raucous din emanates from the adjoining screening room in which footage from prior live performances depicts the machines in action. They tug, heave, crush objects and each other, spew fire and blast sound waves, enacting processes similar to demolition and gutting.

The walls in the main area are hung with four sizable paintings by Wagner and mixed media works by Semo. Two of Wagner’s untitled canvases, densely layered with the names of materials used in some of the art on view, offer an inventory of sorts: BRONZE, CANVAS, CLAY, FOAM, GLASS, INK, OIL, RUBBER, STEEL, VINYL, WAX, and WOOD. Lists and plans are alluded to with another pair of works featuring the word “AGENDA” painted repeatedly in vertical columns. Semo’s larger contribution, WE DON’T WIN ANYMORE (2016), is a giant “XX” rendered in black, powder-coated steel chain; it stands sentinel, like a safety barricade. Smaller square-shaped pieces — concrete slabs cast with steel, leather, glass, or other elements — utilize industrial materials in unexpected ways. For example, SHE HID HER FACE IN MY ARMS AND THE WATER STREAMING OVER HER HEAD MINGLED WITH HER TEARS (2016) is comprised of a concrete square layered with striated, woven carbon fiber-copper fabric, its face bisected by an embedded horizontal glass rod.

This show is especially appurtenant considering Minnesota Street Project was itself a place of construction merely a month ago. It also acknowledges the Bay Area’s current art moment. In addition to the debut of Minnesota Street Project, the home of conceptual artist David Ireland, at 500 Capp Street, was transformed into a museum; the new Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed BAMPFA opened its doors; and SFMOMA, currently undergoing a major expansion, is set to reopen in May.

In this context, the show’s title holds special relevance. The term refers to a black flag, which historically has been associated with revolutionary groups, symbolizing an ethos of “No Surrender.” “BLACK STANDARD” salutes the resilience of the local art community which, despite the “tech invasion,” gentrification and soaring rents, continues to lay exciting new foundations.

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November 6 to December 19, 2015
530 West 21st Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 206 7606

Standing in Gladstone’s 21^st Street gallery, Jean Tinguely’s sculptures might run the risk of appearing jokey and dumb. Some do, but being jokey and dumb doesn’t preclude being serious and intellectually engaging, which Tinguely’s work is. Negotiating presumed contradictions is usually difficult, but they’re often not true binaries, and those qualities that are considered dichotomous turn out to have a complicated relationship. Dumb and smart, at least in some art, in Tinguely’s work, are interdependent.

In a 1975 review of Brice Marden’s work, Mel Ramsden wrote that he didn’t think it’s stupid, but that it’s dumb. There’s a big difference. In some ways, this is studio shorthand: as Ramsden notes, Marden himself, that same year, said, “A painter’s just this odd weird person who has to do this dumb thing called painting.”[1] One important distinction is that while “stupid” implies a moral judgment, “dumb” typically doesn’t. It’s not pejorative. Dumb is big, blunt, crude, juvenile, corporeal, synonymous with mute. As an aesthetic strategy, dumb can smuggle a lot of complex information. Tinguely’s dada lineage is visible in the absurdity of his artworks, but there’s something more in being dumb. Beyond an artwork addressing the viewer as an invitation to play, it invites the viewer to grapple. One might consider the work of Richard Serra, Roxy Paine, Tim Hawkinson, or John O’Connor.[2] The same goes for other media — dumb video, dumb performance, dumb sculpture, etc. It needn’t be confined to kinetic art or sculpture.

The Tinguely exhibition features work made between 1954 and 1991, and its dumb may be harder to detect now. Some of this invisibility can be accounted in time and canonization, the hermetic seal of their historicity. Art is often expected to be erudite and sophisticated, savvy even in irreverence. Tinguely opens his hands and offers: Here is a thing made of garbage and it might disintegrate. In addition to the multicolored lights and spinning feathers, twirling poodles, that adorn his sculptures, Gladstone underscores the comic tone with large red buttons, which viewers step on to activate their kinetic features.[3]

The onanistic and spasmodic pieces rumble and screech and shake, powered by old motors. They smell, look, and sound decrepit. Trüffelsau (1984) sharpens the metaphor, with a boar’s skull blindly chewing air, foraging nothing. Its jaw is forced open by a rotating, motorized piece of driftwood attached at the left side, connected to the mandible by a jerking, twisted metal armature. Another, Untitled (1990), mounts an antelope skull on a rocking pendulum, powered by a motor and a rotted tire. A slat of sheet metal appears to have been torqued and worn into a wavering ribbon by the repetitive motion of being mindlessly rammed by the mechanical pendulum. In many pieces it’s unclear what purpose certain parts serve, or if they do at all.

A recent book by designer, artist, and amateur ethnographer Ernesto Oroza, entitled Rikimbili (2008), depicts constructions reminiscent of Tinguely, found in Cuba and made by common people trying to create machines to fill technological gaps with handmade antennae, repurposed motors, improvised battery chargers, motor bikes, and other devices. As Oroza explains, gadgets often come with a set of manufacturer-proscribed allusions that limit their possible uses, whereas these backyard inventors “liberate” objects from such strictures, repurposing and re-organizing components into novel, unsophisticated tools — a discipline he calls “technological disobedience.” They highlight the dysfunction of centrally planned consumer goods, assist in black market trade, and also serve as a model contrary to capitalist production. Like Tinguely’s assemblages, they strip existing information from devices (brands, patents, target markets, functionality, the timeline of planned obsolescence, international supply chains) and make curious, unexpected mutants.

And, similarly, Tinguely’s rude robot functionaries can be read against capitalist labor relations just as easily and effectively as they could be used to flog any of its historical alternatives — the headlessness of Marxism’s obsession with production, class, and technological development. Tinguely’s dumb can be critical, as in Oroza’s technological disobedience, and so, too, in its refusal of articulation. It pushes viewers in broad directions, but needs them to close finer hermeneutic gaps.

Tinguely’s work has been analogized with Rube Goldberg contraptions,[4] whose complex mechanisms achieve small tasks. But that’s wrong since, even less than Goldberg, his machines actually do nothing. They shudder and groan, perform spastic fits. Raichle Nr. 1 (1974) presents ski boots holding up large shears with a rusty armature. Press the button and the blades begin cutting, with blind and fearsome violence. The mechanical age is supposed to be surpassed by the digital, the information. The motorized, headless relics here are fun and frightening.

[1] Emphasis added

[2] It’s unclear whether or not this is largely a male phenomenon.

[3] This is, apparently, SOP for contemporary curations of Tinguely’s work.

[4] As by Alfred Barr in a press release for Tinguely’s 1960 Homage to New York performance at the Museum of Modern Art.

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Michael Landy: Saints Alive 

May 23 to November 24, 2013
The National Gallery, London
Trafalgar Square, WC2N 5DN
London, United Kingdom, +44 20 7747 2885

The Associate Artist program at The National Gallery gives a distinguished artist a studio in the museum and asks him or her to produce an exhibition responding to the collection. Paula Rego and Ken Kiff were obvious choices for this program, for their art builds on the visual concerns of the museum’s old master collection. Michael Landy, appointed eighth Associate Artist in 2010, was a more surprising choice, for this Young British Artist, who came of age in the late 1980s had never done figurative painting or sculpture. Indeed when he was an art student in London, he never even visited the National Gallery. Inspired by Jean Tinguely’s kinetic sculptures, reading stories about saints and, of course, by the Gallery’s collection which has many images of saints, Landy has created a marvelous array of saint-machines for his exhibition Saints Alive. Step on the petal and Saint Jerome (2012) smites his chest with a rock. Put your foot on its petal and Doubting Thomas (2013) bangs his hand on his torso. Put some money in Donation Box  (2013) and Saint Francis beats his head with a crucifix. In the three-meter diameter Spin the Saint Catherine Wheel and Win the Crown of Martyrdom (2013),  spinning the wheel of fortune reveals your fate. And Landy has made exquisite photographic-and-paint images on paper of his machines, “kinetic Renaissance sculpture” as he nicely describes them.

Not surprisingly, Saints Alive was very popular with children, who loved setting these noisy machines in motion. Me, I am in awe of Landy’s imaginative response to the Gallery’s art, which effectively brings the suffering saints into our contemporary world. I admired his show both for its own sake and for what it taught about the collection. Too often we take an aesthetic distance from old master paintings, seeing beautiful scenes of martyrs without engaging our emotions. (In a related project called “Acts of Kindness” (2010-2011), Landy asked people to recount their stories of acts of random kindness witnessed on the London Underground; see http://art.tfl.gov.uk/actsofkindness). Not much contemporary art deals with humor — and few artists deal seriously with Christianity. To deal sensitively and originally with these two subjects is a feat in itself. Landy has said, “I don’t quite know what to do with humor because I always kind of think if it’s humorous it means it’s insignificant, so it’s a difficult line to treat. But I am going for the populist vote.” He certainly won my vote with his hybrid sculpture-machines that one might expect to find in an old fashioned amusement park arcade. With this work Landy, not himself a believer, makes a funny but  also deadly serious statement about art and religion.

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