January 28 – May 6, 2018
2814 Wilshire Boulevard, between Stanley and Curson Avenues
Los Angeles, cafam.org

That old dog, clay, seems to be pulling off an impressive array of surprising new tricks. While ceramics remains among the most venerable – and stubbornly tactile – of mediums, that doesn’t mean that it has been resistant to the conceptual upheavals within the ceramics world of recent decades. If anything, this ambitious survey exhibition suggests, the current moment seems to be a highly fruitful one for practitioners pushing the medium in all sorts of new directions, through promiscuous hybrid forms involving installation, mixed media, technology, and even time-based performance.

Intended as the first iteration of a ceramic biennial, ”Melting Point” is at its best in examining the overlap between the medium’s allegorical impulses and its roots in functional form. Featuring 22 artists from around the country, ranging from established figures to recent graduates, the show sprawls insouciantly across the museum’s three levels, flaunting a panoply of stances, scales and sensibilities, from the ragged to the glazed, the distilled to the distressed, to whatever unlikely unions of the above.

The interrogative tone for the show was set at the opening, with a performance work by 28-year-old Armando Cortes, who laboriously dragged his own weight in raw clay several long blocks from the sidewalk in front of LACMA, finally hauling it up the museum’s stairs as it scuffed the floor: literally lugging the burden of the medium’s complex legacy. Titled El Peso de La Tierra (2017-18), the work melds references to Chris Burden’s infamous ordeal-performances of the 1970s and the medium’s proletarian roots, through the muscular immediacy of manual labor. The show’s curators identified a trio of themes that link the works: “Anti-Disciplinary Approaches,” “Ephemerality,” and “New Sociopolitical Interpretations.” But these groups were considered loosely and many works, like Cortes’s performance, embraced more than one category.

Stanton Hunter’s works overtly invite audience participation. In his series Untitled Unvesseled II (2018), he asks viewers to drip water onto vessels of unfired clay, allowing them to crumple over time. Wayne Perry courts viewer reaction through placement; setting out sagging clumps and clusters of small pots along the museum’s staircase, and other peripheral spaces, interspersing white and black vessels among groups of terra cotta, he employs his notably imperfect vessels as a loose form of social allegory. The dramatic works of Cheryl Ann Thomas also revel in their formal imperfection; made by firing large, thin columns of clay to the point of collapse, and evoking giant swathes of gauze, they derive poignant form and purpose from their surrender to gravity.

Emphatically allowing his process to mold his forms, Walter McConnell, a professor at Alfred University and one of the show’s elder statesmen, presented a quixotic meditation on nature and culture. Set off by the plastic curtain enclosing it, his pillar of flowery forms, called A Florid Heap (2018), remains perpetually moist and unfinished, in a self-contained terrarium of sorts. To anyone still expecting ceramics to be prim and neatly allusive, McConnell offers a sharp theatrical rebuke. The show does include its share of LA-based ceramic hotshots. Among them: Matt Wedel, with his monumental rocklike desert blooms; Julia Haft-Candell, whose twisty infinity forms interweave references to sketches, knots and bows; and Kristen Morgin, whose remarkable trompe l’oeil tableaux of paint cans and ragged toys and tattered old paperbacks and record albums conjure the detritus of family attics or basements, the flotsam and jetsam of childhood memory.

Patsy Cox, who also curated this year’s Scripps Ceramic Annual, merges technological and formal innovation. Her concoctions of tiny top-like shapes, multiplied via 3-D printing, suggest at once loopy baskets of plastic toy flowers, blow-ups of cellular organisms, and fractal abstractions. In terms of sheer diversity of surface and technique, the show offers a startling range, from the giddily baroque fixtures of Anthony Sonnenberg to the vividly colorful, oozily distressed cups of Brian Rochefort. Despite their roots in traditional functional forms, the subversive intent of these works is intoxicating–though you surely wouldn’t want to drink from them.

The more banal implications of ceramic as a vehicle for mass-market serving ware or tchotchkes are addressed adroitly through the works of Jonathan Mess, who offered cross-sections of found ceramics, like geological samples; and Emily Sudd, whose bisected vases were stuffed with diverse ceramic gleanings and then fired to their melting points. Adding hints of narrative to the mix, Susannah Biondo-Gemmell’s halved porcelain figures in chunks of lava, laid carefully on their sides, oscillated between blobby hollow abstractions and elegiac reliquaries.

Ling Chun abstractly invokes the subject of gender in teasingly organic wall reliefs cheerfully adorned with spattered pastel colors, enigmatic orifices and plaits of colored hair. The diminutive works of Jennifer Ling Datchuk, meanwhile, from her Making Women series, wryly incorporate tiny wigs of real human hair in varied hues into dainty porcelain discs suggesting hand-wrought make-up brushes, cookies, wafers or nipples–willfully feminine confections for consumption.

Jami Porter Lara’s stately, black-glazed jugs of pit-fired foraged clay are particularly notable in the way they conjure a spectrum of unexpected references, from a uterus to a pair of fists clutching a pipe, to, what exactly: an alien vacuum cleaner? Claiming a space between the sacred and the mundane, she melds the banality of soda bottles with the solemnity of funeral urns, all the while flaunting prominent screwhead nozzles. Her works project sculptural stature without ever minimizing their identity as vessels.

The allegorical possibilities of ceramic were perhaps most potently interpreted by Saint Louis-based artist Kahlil Robert Irving, whose installation, titled Protest: 1883 / United States vs. Harris (Part of the series Undocumented) (2018), formed the centerpiece of the museum’s third floor. At once so subtle it could be breezed over, and physically expansive, at five by five by 12 feet, the work offered an array of hundreds of black glazed stoneware vessels of diverse shapes, set out on a raised wooden platform at roughly eye level where they can’t all be taken in at once. (The scaffold brings its own allusions, from viewing platform to gallows). I took the work to be a prose poem to blackness and a striking allegory of individuality and collectivity. Unpretentious in its language and almost hiding in plain sight, Irving’s silent, querying multitude proves haunting. At once traditional and provocative, nuanced and declarative, it attests to the durability of ceramics as a vehicle for contemporary sociopolitical commentary, even while parading its all-too eloquent fragility.

The post From the Ragged to the Glazed, the Distilled to the Distressed: A Survey of Ceramics in LA appeared first on artcritical.

May 21 to August 12, 2016
300 South Mission Road (at East 3rd Street)
Los Angeles, 323 406 2587

300 South Mission Road in Los Angeles seems a bit of an unlikely setting for Maccarone’s LA gallery. With graffiti-scarred warehouses and chain-link fence, long dusty blocks of faceless industrial buildings, and wildflower and weeds struggling at the edge of the pavement, the area seems a curious locus to find Paul Lee’s coolly introspective painted constructions.

A few short years ago there was not even the idea of having a gallery down here, much less the western outpost of an established New York dealer. Now there are several, and before you can say “demographic-shift” there will likely be dozens.

No surprise, then, when Lee presented a body of work radically different from what viewers have known, in his solo show “Layers For A Brain Corner.” The works in the show divide into two groups: four large wall drawings/sculptures, and constructions with painted tambourines affixed to shaped canvases, with their interplay of round and straight edges creating an optically vivid whole. These tambourine pieces may arguably reference the body, albeit obliquely.

In works such as Mind Mountain and Washcloth Weight (all works 2016) Lee uses a motif common to his oeuvre: bath towels, here purposed as drawing elements. Lee has excised everything but the towels’ edges, dyed them with black ink, and employed them as lines for his huge wall drawings, which he calls “negatives.” Terming these giant wall pieces “sculptures” is a stretch, though they do protrude from the wall at a towel’s thickness. Lee’s message from what he calls these “spills” and “tumbles” is clear: life is precarious, fault lines are everywhere, the center rarely holds.

Although Lee’s use of towels has previously been described as signifiers of queer culture by critics such as Holland Cotter and Robert Hobbs, the new work lives at the brink of pure abstraction. All that remains of what Cotter terms “the mechanisms of gay coding” is color; indeed, Lee’s palette is a key to his meanings, especially the wan lavenders, the cornflower yellows, the paler shades of white, off-white, dreary gray, deathly black. Lavender in particular has a long association with gay pride, one hypothesis being that it begins with masculine blue, to which is added some feminine pink. As for the evocation of corporeality, Lee told me, “The ‘skin’ of the canvas places them in a technological cultural context that is not immediately obvious. It’s a stand-in for the skin and the body. Sometimes skin is exposed, sometimes it’s hidden in color.”

In “Layers For A Brain Corner,” Lee is edging further away from the sculptural combines for which he is best known — works with bent soda cans, some imprinted with a photograph of a young man’s face, light bulbs, and string. He is moving in the direction of painting. “I was trying to narrow my parameters, so I can learn more,” he says.

“This was going to be a paintings show,” he continues, “but I wanted there to be a dialogue between these two bodies of work. I call these ‘touch paintings’ because tambourines are activated by touch. The first tambourines I made had rectangles on them, and I thought of them as being like touch screens. The touch screen is part of our daily life, you can touch an image and it can lead you to another. The image becomes a path. It’s a visual space that becomes active in a new way. I think it is a new space for painting to happen.”

The specter of the late Ellsworth Kelly hangs heavily over the work, especially in formal terms, though Lee also cites Kelly’s impact on culture. As one enters the gallery, the shaped pieces first seen seem to summon Kelly. “The things I get most from Kelly are that he took the landscape, reconfigured it, abstracted it, and made his own version of it; he made his own space,” Lee says. “I like that shadows are a source for some of his works, how he took something slight and made something glorious and celebratory of it. And I really enjoy that he was a gay artist, that his work speaks of liberation through abstraction.”

Asked about the meanings of the works’ titles, Lee admits to a somewhat random method: “I didn’t want to call them ‘Untitled’ anymore, because I didn’t want people to think they are just designs. So I’d look hard at them, and just put down whatever came into my head.” Sometimes the title lends a poetic flavor to the work, as in Very Slightly; in other cases he veers toward the literal. For example, a piece with a tambourine painted half black and half white, suggestive of a half-moon, is called Either Side Of The Night.

If Lee’s new work has roots in Kelly and in Josef Albers, its seed was planted by his mentor, Jack Pierson, and result from his encouragement. Pierson, like Kelly, has made a career of “taking something slight and making something glorious of it,” and the lesson has not been lost on Lee. Luck, and talent, and associations with influential and generous friends — having these elements is certainly as vital to an artist’s progress as their ability to draw and paint. But knowing when to shed the obvious reference points of his forbears, that is the trajectory point, the crucial moment, that not all artists attain.

The post Making Glorious Something Slight: Paul Lee at Maccarone, Los Angeles appeared first on artcritical.

March 12 to April 16, 2016
3006 W. 7th Street, Suite 220 (at S. Westmoreland Avenue)
Los Angeles, 213 703 9077

A Los Angeles sunset filled the nearly empty main gallery of Commonwealth and Council where Alice Könitz’s tree house-sized structure, supported by PVC pipe legs, stands backlit. Made of stained plywood trapezoids, circles, and rectangles with multiple face-sized openings, Kiosk (2016) feels like a prototype information booth for a Soviet Constructivist theme park that never was. On the wall behind it hang two do-it-yourself souvenirs. Made of bamboo and aluminum tape, these small tinsely sculptures are playfully titled Urform I and Urform II (2010). Perhaps the forms belong to a universal, plural U or maybe a “you,” a stand-in for all public visitors to Kiosk. Their casual construction, in the style of summer camp God’s eyes and dreamcatchers, suggests a preference for the act of making over a finished product: “Keep Ur hands busy and U’ll stay out of trouble.”

Theme parks, playgrounds, summer camps, yoga vacations, eco-toursim, corporate trust retreats, utopian communities, communes — optimism through socially orchestrated space is presented throughout Könitz’s first solo exhibition with the artist-run gallery. Three smaller adjacent galleries contain large but spartan interactive structures, all made with economical quirkiness. Untitled (2016) consists of three colorful hammocks stretched taut through a small room, surrounding a suspended cup-holding table. Pantry (2016) is a Tinkertoy-like food storage structure offering nuts and pickled treats. Periscope (2016) is a black pillar of foam core board wedged between a skylight and a small table; it offers a view of a neighboring building, some palm trees, and the sky. An artifact of childhood role-playing games, the periscope might also be a mark of anxiety: keep watch, look out, protect the compound. With sustenance, a place to rest, and a couple of activities, Commonwealth and Council becomes Könitz’s fantasy domain with ease. In the loneliness of regular gallery hours this pseudo-commune proposed live-work space feels futile when not in use, perhaps even cynical. Does the “Commonwealth” offer enough to sustain its public?

The press release describes Könitz’s works as “social sculptures,” which purportedly exist “in pursuit of our common well-being.” This cheeky text, written in the first person plural voice that matches Commonwealth and Council’s mission statement, states that Könitz has chosen to respond to the gallery’s role as “a communal space, supported by a community of artists.” Primarily run by LA-based artist and organizer Young Chung, who has been known to discuss his space using the pronoun “we,” Commonwealth and Council is concerned with “how generosity and hospitality can sustain our co-existence.” Könitz is the proposed architect of happiness, working to realize this pre-existing community’s goals.

Könitz’s own artist-run space, the Los Angeles Museum of Art (LAMOA) describes itself as a “platform for an organic institution that lives through participation.” After years of making quirky interactive objects using the hopeful visual vernacular of Modernism and corporate sculpture, Könitz built LAMOA in 2012. The original museum, which has moved several times and morphs occasionally, resembles a tool shed or tea ceremony platform with removable walls. LAMOA has a strong visual presence, but the solo projects placed within it respond with a confident simplicity. Each project is usually one big gesture that embraces Könitz’s framework. LAMOA is the idea of a museum as social sculpture: Könitz built a space and socially orchestrates it. While “Commonwealth” is not LAMOA (or vice-versa), both her exhibition and her gallery feature Könitz as artist-director.

The most intriguing part of “Commonwealth” is the co-existence of Könitz and Chung’s methodologies. There are a number of idiosyncratic artist-run spaces in LA operated by one person with a periscope-like vision. These spaces are run by individuals who contemplate emotional labor and the cultivation of community; they want their subjectivities (and their artwork) to merge with others’, and they might be constantly performing. It’s rare for two of these forces to combine and support each other.

“Commonwealth” is elegant and fitting for a space with so much physical character. The gallery looks perpetually under construction with partially stripped walls and floorboards, exposed ceiling beams, and paint chips from site-specific installations. Chung’s “communal space” retains the history of past projects, though in contrast Könitz’s sculptures seem a bit underused. Social media from the opening reception show visitors eating pickles, ducking inside Kiosk, and lounging in hammocks, but more recently these objects have fallen out of use. Without utility, they become imagined propositions for directing movement through space, contextualized by both Könitz’s and Chung’s accumulated art actions. Sleep, eat, observe, craft a small object — the “Commonwealth” suggested daily routine is not dissimilar to that of an artist.

Exhibition-making can be a powerful tool to display the political nature of relationships because they can provide context. Exhibitions, according to artist Céline Conderelli, in her book The Company She Keeps (2014), can act as “temporary utopias in the present” that can function as tools to imagine “the world and the future that you’d like to live in.” Könitz and Chung overlap their visions to create a structure, but leave room for the community to propose their own desires. The importance of human interaction, perhaps discourse, in the Kiosk, while snacking, or in a hammock seems to intentionally outweigh any of the physical (Ur)forms.

The post The Common Methods of Commonwealths: An Exhibition by Alice Könitz appeared first on artcritical.

The Broad is a commanding addition to Los Angeles’ downtown cultural artery along Grand Avenue, situated beside the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall, and across from the Museum of Contemporary Art (LA MOCA). The Broad, nearly 10 years in the making, opened its doors to the public last month, presenting Edith and Eli’s massive collection of blue-chip artworks free of charge. Preceding the construction of their name-sake, the Broads had established historical ties to every major Los Angeles museum, including LA MOCA, the Hammer, and more recently the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) — a sizable gallery built on-site at the Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA) in 2008. The permanent collection exhibited at Grand Avenue will be familiar to Angelenos from earlier presentations at LACMA’s Renzo Piano-designed BCAM wing.

In terms of the building itself, architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro refer to the Broad’s unique design as a “veil-and-vault” structure, consisting of a fiber-reinforced concrete façade, or veil, that allows for controlled, natural light to permeate the gallery spaces surrounding the “vault” — a state of the art climate-controlled storage unit at the building’s core.

For the inaugural exhibition, Joanne Heyler, a 20-year Broad Foundation veteran and director of the nascent museum, has selected more than 250 works by some 60 artists in what she refers to as “a sweeping, chronological journey.” This presentation is indeed a journey, one that communicates the history of the international art market of the past 30 years, reified by these artists’ positions within such an axiomatically authoritative institution as the Broad. Heyler’s insistence on a chronological presentation further reinforces this point.

Ed Ruscha’s companion pieces, Old Tech Chem Building (2003) and Blue Collar Tech Chem (1992), open an exhibition of recently acquired works on the museum’s first floor. The works depict the 11-year transformation of a fictional “Tech Chem” facility into a space newly named “Fat Boy.” The 1992 work depicts a grey night sky, which in 2003 bleeds red. The phrase “Fat Boy” recalls the atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 — nicknamed “Fat Man” and “Little Boy,” respectively. These paintings serve as an intense opening to the show: while the present is foreboding, the future perhaps radioactive, Ruscha instructs us not to be nostalgic for the past. Tech Chem limns our present experience as a product of our dark origins.

Following Ruscha’s powerful introduction, I was disappointed that the curators failed to draw any relationship between Mark Grotjahn’s poignant formal studies and the more explicitly political works on display. Grotjahn’s 2007 Untitled (Dancing Black Butterflies) consists of a series of rotating mathematical grids — vertical lines become horizontal and vantage points slant and skew. The artist’s black geometric shapes flutter to life along the length of the series, creating optical impressions that change as the viewer moves in the space. The wall text reads that these shifting vantage points provide “room for many perceptions of and points of entry into the work.” It is precisely this awareness of the capacity of artworks to read multiply, for meaning to bend and shift, which could have successfully brought historically disparate works in dialogue with one another.

The museum’s main gallery upstairs opens with Jeff Koons’ monumental Tulips (1995-2004), surrounded on all sides by Christopher Wool’s Untitled (1990), a nine-panel installation in which the words “Run Dog Run” are stenciled in repetition using black enamel on aluminum. Wool breaks apart the words themselves, the R and U placed above the N, the D and O placed above the G. With the dismemberment of these three-letter words, Wool highlights their semiotic function, encouraging the viewer to understand them as formal signifiers divorced from their meaning within the phrase.

This relationship between signifiers and concepts was explored by American artist Jasper Johns 30 years prior with his masterpiece, Watchman. This 1964 assemblage highlights the artist’s radical refusal of any single identification: how exactly is his composition ordered? Which paints are laid down first? Which are stripped away? Do his colors prefigure their descriptions? Johns’ Watchman mirrors the scale of the human form — reinforced by the cast of a human leg in the upper register — and, as such, demands to be understood as contingent upon the viewer’s own physicality, identity and experience.

Glenn Ligon also works at this intersection of language and identity, as evidenced by his series Runaways from 1993. For these works, Ligon asked friends to draft descriptions of him as though they were reporting a missing person to the police, and was shocked to find that they recalled the 19^th-century runaway-slave ads he had researched for the series. The descriptions vary widely from piece to piece — different features are highlighted, others glossed over. While the exhibition privileges formal and historical relationships over conceptual ones, it would have been inspiring to examine Wool, Johns and Ligon’s work side-by-side, as a means of highlighting the discursive production of meaning in all three. Instead, Ligon’s installation is predictably flattened, reduced to what the curators call “the parallel senses of insider and outsider in us all.”

Mysteriously, the late activist-artist David Wojnarowicz shares one of the final galleries with art star Julian Schnabel, an odd juxtaposition that the wall text fails to engage with or defend. The Wojnarowicz works are striking and impassioned, in particular The Newspaper as National Voodoo: A Brief History of The U.S.A., from 1986. Here, a crucified figure is undergirded by layers of painted-over newsprint with the phrases “10 years,” “life and death,” “in the womb” and “foul” left bare. Veins extend from the voodoo figure and wrap around images of mosquitos, cowboys, blood red steak and a hand literally covered in a blood. This is a work about AIDS, homophobia, fear of infection and government inaction resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands.

Like other works in the exhibition, Wojnarowicz’ pulsing political message is tamped down by Heyler’s insistence on a chronological presentation that resists social-historical examination. The Broad falls victim to a universalizing narrative that presupposes that the meaning attached to these artworks is fixed, conveyed to a disembodied spectator that approaches the work in isolation, divorced from her own social experience. Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s “veil-and-vault” concept then serves as a poignant lens through which to understand The Broad’s political stakes. It’s all right there in the architecture — the museum’s surface appears porous, penetrable and malleable. However, this veil is merely a symbol of access that instead serves to reinforce the institutionally fixed, guarded and rich marrow within.

The post The Veil and Vault: The Broad Museum in Los Angeles appeared first on artcritical.

Guerrilla Girls: Art in Action at Pomona College Museum of Art
January 20 to May 17, 2015
333 N College Way
Claremont, CA, 909 621 8283

Alien She at the Orange County Museum of Art
February 15 to May 24, 2015
850 San Clemente Dr
Newport Beach, CA, 949 759 1122
traveling to the Pacific Northwest College of Art and Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland

SOGTFO at François Ghebaly
February 28 to April 4, 2015
2245 E Washington Blvd
Los Angeles, CA, 323 282 5187

What is the value of a woman’s work?

I find myself contemplating this question after spending a total of four unpaid hours learning to edit Wikipedia in the service of helping resolve its gender imbalance.

Only 13% of Wikipedia editors are women, according to a 2011 census, a statistic that prompted the Art+Feminism group to spearhead and sponsor worldwide “edit-a-thons” to encourage the creation and expansion of Wikipedia content related to women and feminism in the arts. I took part in a local chapter at Whittier College where I and a handful of students and faculty members learned best practices, notability guidelines, and how to create, edit, and cite on the world’s most-used reference website.

In four hours I managed to add one little paragraph of text to Hannah Höch’s Wikipedia page. Accounting for the learning curve and the chatter in the room, this isn’t really as inefficient as it sounds, but it did prompt me to question the value of my time and work — as a woman, and as a writer.

Not that I would have been doing anything different. Were it not for the edit-a-thon I would have devoted that time to writing this article for artcritical, an article that I’d promised my editor would survey a number of exhibitions featuring women artists in the greater Los Angeles area. There’s an exhibition of Guerrilla Girls ephemera at the Pomona College Museum of Art, a survey of the influence of the Riot Grrl movement on visual arts at the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) in Newport Beach, as well as a recent exhibition of female sculptors at François Ghebaly Gallery in Downtown L.A. What unites these exhibitions is not only the gender of their participants, but the insistence on gender as a uniting principle.

A month ago, in Pomona, two black-clad, gorilla-masked activists greeted an auditorium with armfuls of bananas, tossing them out to the crowd before mounting the stage and presenting a lecture/performance/artist talk on the Guerrilla Girls’ objectives and activities. One of them, using the pseudonym Käthe Kollwitz, a founding member, has devoted a career to anonymously fighting for equal representation of art by women and people of color. The anonymity here serves to “keep the focus on the issues” rather than on the personalities of those who bring the issues to the table. But, I wonder, who is it behind the mask, who has toiled for 30 years with no credit, no personal recognition for such incremental concessions to the overall state of the arts? What is the value of this work, this lifetime of work? Certainly there are speaker’s fees, which are how the Guerrilla Girls fund their activism, but meager remuneration isn’t what gives value to this work, it is simply what enables it. The value of her work, rather, could be seen in the faces of the hundreds of young women in the audience — young artists and curators, ready to embark on their careers in an environment that is steadily getting better, more inclusive, but not perfect yet. The value is in the transmission of the message, in the hopes that more people will help carry the torch, keep the tallies, and expose disparity.

The message can be transmitted in other ways, in the case of Riot Grrl through music and mail order. The walls are lined with zines at the beginning of the fascinating and engrossing “Alien She” exhibition at OCMA: cheaply photocopied-and-stapled rants, poems, and comics, on topics from punk rock, to coming out, to resisting rape. Like pre-Internet proto-Tumblrs, zines were distributed through independent channels just like underground music, via independent record labels, in small bookstores, record stores, by direct mail, and at punk shows. Miranda July’s Big Miss Moviola project (1995-2003, later known as Joanie 4 Jackie) connected female filmmakers through a “video chainletter” distributing each work, each artist to one another. Born out of the frustration July experienced trying to get her work into male-dominated film festivals, Moviola cost only $5 to participate, was advertised in teen magazines like Sassy and Seventeen, and completely circumvented all the usual channels of distribution, production, and display, sidestepping “mainstream” audiences, and building instead a small community comprised only of likeminded female filmmakers. The value of this work is in the network, and in the recognition that you can create it yourself. Who cares what the boys think?

The exhibition “SOGTFO” (“Sculpture Or Get The Fuck Out”) at François Ghebaly, a grouping of five early- to mid-career female sculptors — Amanda Ross-Ho, Andrea Zittel, Kelly Akashi, Kathleen Ryan, and Nevine Mahmoud — paradoxically makes a bid to “undo the gendered vernacular” while using gender as a lens through which to observe sculpture and culture in practice. (The title is a play on the phrase, commonly found on male-dominated web forums, “TOGTFO”: [show photos of your] Tits Or Get The Fuck Out [of the discussion].) The young artists Akashi, Ryan, and Mahmoud are absolute revelations in this show: their forms, both light and heavy at the same time, slump, drip, curl, perch, and sway in the space. The show opens ideas and concerns beyond gender. Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer’s essay in the accompanying single-sheet catalogue, “Sculpture…,” perfectly encapsulates the condition of constant questioning that comes with the desire to see beyond gender while recognizing the effects of the gender gap: “Being sick of crude binaries, false oppositions, extrinsic responsibilities and coerced competition,” she writes, “She wants a break from options phrased as this ‘or’ that.” Most pointedly she writes, “…or bypass phallogocentrism altogether! I’m so over it. SCUM says, ‘What will liberate women, therefore, from male control is the total elimination of the money-work system, not the attainment of economic equality with men within it.’” Amen.

The sculptures, on their part, seem unbounded by such questions, despite the sad fact that, in all likelihood, given the art market’s enduring skew, these works will ultimately hold less value at auction than works by male sculptors (not to mention less attention in the press, in galleries, in museums, and in all the other parts of the arts apparatus). What is their value then? What is value, in monetary terms at least, if it’s so arbitrarily granted to some works and not to others? Certainly it’s not inherent in the work itself, so how do you measure it, and, more importantly, who gets to do so?

Like women’s work and artists’ work, art writing involves the transmission of a message, is likely to be viewed only by a small network of devotees, and is of questionable value. Composing tweets for a corporation or public figure pays better than writing art reviews, but writing for bigger audiences often pays nothing at all.

In the end, I suppose I should find a way to tell you that no matter the value, it’s somehow all worth it. I’m not sure exactly why or how, but I can confirm that by adding one paragraph to Wikipedia about Hannah Höch’s relationship with the insidiously abusive Raoul Hausmann, I was offered some slight feeling of catharsis (and a rather startling and grand experience writing for the mass audience of Wikipedia). Perhaps it’s a similar feeling to what Höch must have felt when she published, in 1920, shortly before leaving Hausmann, a biting short story parodying her lover and his hypocritical stance on “women’s emancipation.” Publishing it probably didn’t pay all that much, but no doubt she received tenfold dividends in satisfaction alone.

The post Women’s Work: Considering Feminist Art Through Three Recent Shows appeared first on artcritical.

John Currin at Gagosian Beverly Hills

February 19 to April 11, 2015
456 North Camden Drive (between S. Santa Monica Boulevard and Brighton Way)
Beverly Hills, 310 271 9400

John Currin’s current solo show at Gagosian Beverly Hills will not disappoint devotees of his signature style. The artist’s sensuous play between lush fabrics, fruit and the female form — while exceedingly literal — is nonetheless striking and seductive. Culling inspiration from Italian Mannerism and the art of the Northern Renaissance, Currin recasts the classical image of the female nude, limning and embracing its current cultural significance in tandem with its historical precedent. Gender and sexuality become the subjects of Currin’s paintings, and while his relationship to art of the 15^th century has been discussed at length, rarely is his work regarded in politically salient terms.

With the exception of three paintings executed in 2013, each work in the exhibition was painted within the last three months. The luscious 2015 work Maenads depicts an alabaster-skinned, auburn-haired sitter in Currin’s Mannerist style. A pink gossamer top traces her breasts and a silk scarf is draped listlessly over her lap. Two ripe apples placed at eye-level mirror her rounded breasts and belly, further emphasizing the figure’s sensuous form. In the background lie two additional women with similar coloring, one with legs splayed open and the other reaching over to touch her. However any contact between the two is obscured by the foreground sitter’s raised knee. The show’s earlier works exhibit slightly more explicit instances of sexuality, integrating what appears to be ‘70s-era pornography as background imagery. However, it serves to mention that the naughtiest bits are always concealed: no genitals and certainly no penetrative sex. So why, after having depicted explicit sex acts for years, does John Currin offer us these references to sexuality without the titillation?

The Storm (2013) similarly alludes to what appears to be an explicit sex act between a man and two women, but Currin’s languid golden-haired nude obscured our view. In this image, like the others in the show, paint is applied thinly and sparingly, the texture of the canvas visible behind his rendered satins and furs. Bust in a Convex Mirror and Nude in a Convex Mirror, both from 2015, present a refracted view of Currin’s female forms, allowing for the delectation of his figures’ breasts and buttocks without interference.

Lemons and Lace (2015) remained with me long after leaving the exhibition. A vaguely historical pastiche, the female figure bares a striking resemblance to Currin’s wife and frequent sitter, Rachel Feinstein. Posed as an odalisque, his subject is dressed in lingerie that refers in equal parts 17^th century vestments and to 1970s adult films, all the way down to her thigh-high stockings and shimmering gold mules. In the background, a snuffed-out candelabra and pieces of fruit beg to be analyzed in art-historical terms — do these props allude to fertility? Integrity? Death? Plays with translucence and opacity abound, a useful metaphor in understanding these new works.

The thread unifying these paintings is a deliberate attention to what’s exposed and what is concealed. The images are PG-13 alternatives to the artist’s previous X-rated works, and by adhering to socially prescribed limits of probity, Currin further demarcates those boundaries, naturalized for centuries via the art-historical canon.

I want to make very clear what I understand as a distinction between the operations of Currin’s nudes and those of other contemporary artists. Now perhaps cliché, Classical and Modern artists have portrayed the pliant and available female body for centuries. Understanding this cultural and historical signification as implicit in any image of a white female nude, artists of Currin’s epoch have subverted the classic trope as a means of illustrating the restrictive politics of gender and visuality. Take for instance the arresting and corpulent nude portraits of Jenny Saville, tellingly referred to as “grotesque” by art critics and historians. Or perhaps Rineke Dijkstra’s nude mothers, photographed shortly after giving birth, stretchmarks and bloated bellies proudly on display. Even pornography, as employed by Ghada Amer, serves to represent the female body as imbued with agency, deliberate and purposeful. Currin’s return to classical tropes then brings ideological markers of taste and class into sharp relief, naturalized for centuries and only very recently challenged by postmodern theory and feminist politics. And, as in the classical tradition, the sensuousness of Currin’s forms is heightened by their relative modesty.

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Farrah Karapetian: Stagecraft at Von Lintel Gallery

2685 S La Cienega Blvd (between Alivar and Cullen streets)
January 17 to February 28, 2015
Los Angeles, 310 559 5700

When I was a child my father would delight me by playing Ken Nordine’s word jazz. We’d listen and laugh along with the absurdist poetry delivered in Nordine’s mellifluous baritone accompanied by bebop improvisations, breathy flute trills, the swish of a brush across a snare drum. I’d close my eyes and stare with my ears at the scenes Nordine sketched with words — short, jokey stories brimming with onomatopoeic ornamentation and witty little rhymes. His 1966 album, Colors, is a collection of 34 roughly one-and-a-half-minute vignettes, each characterizing a color with anthropomorphic anecdotes: ecru is a critic, for instance; burgundy is bulging and fat; lavender is an old, old, old, old, old lady.

I thought briefly of Ken Nordine after seeing Farrah Karapetian’s exhibition of new photograms and sculpture, “Stagecraft,” at Von Lintel Gallery. The comparison is perhaps a bit corny, I admit, but there is some correspondence to be found between Nordine’s evocation of colors through words and music, and Karapetian’s evocation of music through shape and color. There are shared elements of playfulness, improvisation and mood; with both, our mind fills in what the eyes do not see. While earlier works alluded to subjects with political weight (portraying riot police, protestors, guns and contraband), this series uses the accoutrements of music and performance as a vehicle to investigate the mutability of perception and the rhythmic possibilities of light, color, and space.

Karapetian began with bronzes and blues — the colors one feels listening to jazz, according to what Karapetian’s father revealed to her about his own sensations when listening to music. In Got to the Mystic (all works 2014), we see her father as a ghostly figure playing a skeleton of a drum kit, his face obscured by the hi-hat; the drum stands and rims and closures and cymbals register a stark white against the ruddy ground of the photogram.

Karapetian’s painstakingly crafted replica of her father’s drum kit — minus the skins and shells, leaving just the armature, the metal lugs, rods and stands — sits in an adjoining room. The cymbals are formed from glass, allowing light to pass through. A spotlight positioned on the floor of the gallery illuminates the sculpture from below, casting its shadow against the wall, and revealing the apparatus at play in Karapetian’s photograms. Many artists go to lengths to conceal their processes, but Karapetian, in the service of transparency, divulges her sources, shows us the “negative.”

The viewer, however, does not get the full experience, rather just a glimpse of how things work. In Three Muses one can clearly see the three bodies in space, but one can only imagine the haptic experience of three people trying to position themselves in a completely dark room, waiting for the flash of light that would inscribe their shadows on the paper. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. Pause. Flash.

Karapetian spoke to me about the primacy of physical interaction in her work, from situating her subjects in the darkened space to the handling of the paper and processing. The viewer sees only the final result, limited to the perspective of the paper itself. We see only what the paper sees, as it mutely records the impression of shadow and light across its surface. It bears other marks, too, though. Around the edges, little fingerprints are indelibly smudged, and the pricks of the push pins that held the paper in place are visible. The prints hold a remarkable texture, impossible to capture in the jpegs you’d see online.

There are bronzes and blues — but also crimsons and yellows and indigos and deep, resonant greens. Yes, resonance: the colors here have it, just like sounds do. Light waves that linger. My memory of the electric greens and cyans of Kräftig — the color is so pure, so saturated and intense — challenges the colors I now see in the digital reproduction of the piece on my laptop and in the exhibition catalogue. Strange, how variable color is in real life and in reproduction. Stranger still, to think of these vibrant greens and blues produced by red and magenta lights. In the darkroom, the gap between perceived and resultant color becomes a playground of improvisation and experimentation, “a very present tense experience,” as Karapetian put it. Like a jazz musician mounting the stage, she may already know the riff, but where the song goes from there will always be a surprise.

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The installation of “Mike Kelley” at LA MoCA is more comprehensive than any of its previous three presentations, at MoMA PS1, the Centre Pompidou, or the Stedelijk Museum, where former Stedelijk director (and former LA MoCA curator) Ann Goldstein first organized the show in 2012 in consultation with the Mike Kelley Foundation. The exhibition at MoCA was organized by Bennett Simpson and held in the Museum’s Geffen Contemporary, a former warehouse in Little Tokyo with 40,000 square feet of exhibition space. The Geffen’s open floor plan (with small galleries at the periphery) makes for a very different show than the most recent iteration, at New York’s PS1, which was broken up into smaller groupings due to the Museum’s diminutive galleries appropriated from former classrooms. The LA show puts particular focus on Kelley’s evocative, ritualistic and often hallucinatory video installations, which, shown simultaneously, take center stage in the Geffen’s enormous space. Here, sounds ricochet, lights flash and music drones, contributing to a feeling of sensory overload frequently attributed to the artist’s later works.

Kelley’s appropriation of kitschy stuffed animals and puppets, naughty cartoons and images from high school yearbooks have placed him in line historically with a “postmodern” rubric of production popularized by his Metro Pictures peers in the 1980s. However, rather than open-ended rejections of authenticity or originality (à la Richard Prince or Louise Lawler), Kelley’s work resonates with recurrent references to his own biography as expressed through his deep social and political investments. Be it via inquiries into the controversial subject of “memory repression” with his Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions (2000- 2006); the politics of labor with From My Institution to Yours (1987/2003); or the sanctity of art with his massive (and now iconic) More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987), the artist’s work is imbued with the vulnerable politics of our discursive and manifold selves.

Day is Done (2005-2006), an epic multimedia installation composed of Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions #2-32, opens the show and serves as an important barometer for Kelley’s ongoing artistic concerns. Central to the project is the experience of viewing each narrative from different angles and perspectives, a metaphor that aids the viewer in considering the artworks that follow. Day is Done was inaugurated by Kelley’s 30-minute video Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene), which is on view on a small monitor near the exhibition’s entrance. All of Kelley’s EAPRs were staged and scripted around images from high school plays found in yearbooks. Latching onto a new cultural investment in the study of repressed memory therapy, which rose in popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s due to a moral panic over alleged satanic abuse rituals, Kelley uses these installations to examine the multiple layers of signification in American folk rituals. Understanding the slippages between personal and collective memory, Kelley crafts a series centered on “socially acceptable” forms of performance, such as school plays, Halloween, and corporate “dress-up days.” In one scene, a cherubic middle schooler wanders out alone for a haircut and finds himself at the mercy of an obnoxious, sweaty barber who morphs into a vile, red-faced devil as standup comedian. In another, the same child is chased around a creaky attic by a ghoulish Virgin Mary, while he screams “I want to wake up!” Originally designed as a live 24-hour installation, Kelley hoped to eventually film 365 tapes, a monumental unrealized undertaking.

An entire gallery is devoted to From My Institution to Yours (1987/2003), an installation that incorporates the artist’s Loading Dock Drawings from 1984. For the work, Kelley reproduced flyers that feature naughty cartoons or institutional gripes circulated among administrators at CalArts via fax. The wall facing the drawings features a stenciled fist in representation of workers’ solidarity, while a carrot dangles from the ceiling as the clichéd symbol of futile incentive. The relationship of the fist to the goofy cartoons speaks to the potential of these administrators to organize, even if only through shared grievances and blue humor. Originally, red tape was intended to connect the installation to the administrative offices of the institution in which it was presented. At MoCA, a door which reads “employees only” has been built alongside, a testament (albeit less impactful something the artist might have come up with) to Kelley’s original ideological intent.

A number of Kelley’s installation-cum-shrines are featured prominently, composed of plush toys, felt and afghan rugs which reinforce the artist’s complicated investment in childhood, memory and spirituality. Also on view is a selection of ephemera from early collaborative performance works — tape recorders, megaphones and whoopee cushions — which feel a bit precious in their given context. Perhaps the most compelling installation in the show is made up of Kelley’s monumental Kandors series of (1999 – 2007, 2009, and 2011), which taps a quality of failure that pervades the whole exhibition — not of pessimism so much as a sense of sympathy for inadequacy, the underdog, or the misunderstood. Kandors reproduces Superman’s fictional home planet of Krypton, shrunken by his arch nemesis Brainiac, in a series of hyperbaric bell jars that sputter, smoke, and glow neon. Each is reproduced according to the graphic history of the comic at different historical moments as closely as possible. Again, the complicated relationship of Superman to his home, the nostalgia for childhood and an attempt to fill gaps in memory left blank are central components to the piece. In the wake of Kelley’s untimely death, his monumental retrospective encourages us to come to terms with the complicated experience of childhood, imparting a sense of trepidation, wonderment and hopefulness.

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October 18 to December 1, 2013

Lesley Heller Workspace
54 Orchard Street
New York City, 212-410-6120

A New Yorker who relocated a decade ago to the Los Angeles area, Fran Siegel has a longstanding interest in the growth and form of urban centers. In the eight drawings in Plans and Interruptions, Siegel’s current exhibition at Lesley Heller Workspace, the artist reflects on how the history of population movements in and around a particular city determines its manifestation in geographical space and, in turn, the myriad ways that that predominantly horizontal spatial manifestation might lend itself to pictorial representation.In her drawings, Siegel works with familiar materials: pen, pencil, colored pencil, paint and pigment on paper and mylar. Her procedure involves a tremendous amount of collage, so that cut edges and the gaps between them—where the wall often is visible—are crucial compositional devices. In fact, it is useful to consider this work drawing as composition, since the way the pieces are knit together is fundamental to their significance.

Siegel has recently begun to use the cyanotype process, the distinctive blue of which, in a wide range of values, pervades the exhibition. The densest concentration of it is in the commanding Overland 16 (2013), which is 96 by 140 inches, one of an ongoing series of large drawings derived from aerial photographs of LA’s amorphous sprawl. Like its ostensible subject (and in keeping with the other drawings in this remarkable series), Overland 16 is an aggregation of bits and pieces, a collection of discrete parts that are stitched, stapled, glued and laced together, tab-and-slot fashion, to form a provisional, inarguable whole. There are glimpses of anonymous buildings, vacant lots, parking lots and, inevitably, the distant mountains. In the midst of this complex visual texture, a serpentine curve—representing a freeway, one supposes—makes its way from the bottom edge through the middle ground, fragmenting and disappearing as if into a hazy distance among the drawing’s many component shards and facets.

The press release declares that other drawings relate to the cities of Siena, Havana, Manta and Genoa; I surmise that the last is embodied in Navigation (2010-11) 116 x 116 x 4 inches. At the bottom center—like the trunk of a family tree—is a rendering of a Renaissance sailing ship under oar power, as it would be when leaving or entering a port. Elsewhere in Navigation, the graphical vocabulary alludes to diagrams, maps, flow charts and the like; but the informational value of such documents is subsumed in a whirl of overlaps, shadows, incomplete tracings, graftings, and translucent overlays.

 The viewer’s compulsion to decipher such clues is rewarded by Siegel’s assiduous encoding of them. A tangle of tendrils, possibly route maps or boundary markers, appears near the top of the cruciform Tre (2012), 132 x 132 inches; variations on a roughly circular shape (dome? amphitheater? caldera?) appear below, along with hundreds of other notations of equally elusive significance. What comes across beyond any doubt, however, is an idea—and a feeling—about the city as an organism made of interpenetrating systems of which the design, placement, function, and development continually, inexorably change. Siegel tells me that every graphical feature of these elaborate drawings, and the way those details are assembled, is informed by her research into the location. That is easy to believe, as the specifics feel textual—not whistled up out of thin air, not improvised, but rooted in history and arranged according to some kind of plan—more-or-less rational, always evolving, endlessly interrupted.

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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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