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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why Not Judy Chicago?” at CAPC/Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (March 10 through September 4, 2016)

Most people, when they see smoke, run in the opposite direction. Not so Judy Chicago. This Olympian of feminist art sprints toward fire–that is if she didn’t ignite it herself (literally, in her pyrotechnic works). With hair the color of smoldering embers and a razor-sharp wit, Judy Chicago is entering her 77th year with as much determination to combat prejudice and redress the deficit of women’s work in the art world as when she appeared in boxing drag in a Los Angeles gym. That was back in 1970, when women were still barred by law from the ring.

“Why Not Judy Chicago?” at CAPC in Bordeaux, France examines the artist’s career from her graduate student years in California in the mid-1960s, through her Resolutions series of early 2000. Organized in collaboration with Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao and curated by Xabier Arakistain, the exhibition traces her multifaceted contributions as an artist, teacher, writer and activist. Arakistain, a longtime advocate for gender parity within museums and cultural institutions, has foregrounded two lines of Chicago’s work: her creation of a feminist iconography that denounces the oppression of women, and her efforts to invest the teaching of art and history with their contributions. It is particularly instructive to see this exhibition in France where the seeds of feminism were sown nearly two hundred years earlier than in the United States.

Presented in the Entrepôt Lainé, a vast warehouse built in 1824 for colonial goods (a story of dominance in itself), the exhibition unfolds through a sequence of arches and stone passageways. The diverse media and historic themes of Chicago’s oeuvre are well served by this cloistering, resonant architecture.

Mother Superette (1963), a work on paper made when Chicago was a graduate student, contains abstract figures that could be Cycladic female bench-pressers, but they also resemble Byzantine patterns from The Grammar of Ornament, Owen Jones’s monumental survey of international decorative design, published in England in 1856. Though situated securely within a tradition of architectural and design history, her work was criticized by male professors at UCLA for imagery that was “too-feminine.” Conflicted by her desire for acceptance while repeatedly being told that “you couldn’t be a woman and an artist too,” she switched gears and began to employ abstraction in a more subversive way. Her goal was to use color, surface texture, and form to develop a vocabulary of embedded meanings relating to women’s knowledge, sexual independence, and agency. She had by then changed her name (matching the city she grew up in) and enrolled in an auto body painting class — the only woman out of 250 students. There, she mastered lacquer and spray-painting techniques — de rigueur in LA’s car and surfboard culture — that became an aesthetic foundation for her work for the next several decades.

Pasadena Life Savers Yellow Series #2 (1969-70), rendered in airbrushed mists of blue/green, yellow, and violet on reflective acrylic panels, represents a crucial turn in Chicago’s investigation of the perceptual and emotional impact of color, geometric diagrams, and spatial systems. But these are not just intellectual Op-Art exercises. The iconography of the Life Savers paintings is a visual code that plays out on all quadrants of a complicated field. Circles and hexagons stood for the cunt in both word and image, challenging its socially constructed, demeaning connotation. At the same time, Chicago employed her brand of abstraction in the macho arena of Finish Fetish, the West Coast version of Minimalism. Finish Fetish artists were inspired by California’s surf culture, light, air, and smog, making slickly perfect sculpture in glass, polished metal, plastic, and resin. Chicago’s art reflected these prevailing ideas yet denounced the phallocentrism of a culture in which women artists were essentially absent from major gallery exhibitions, museum collections, and university professorships. Only recently have the women who worked in this milieu, such as Helen Pashgian and Mary Corse, been “rediscovered” in important museum exhibitions.

Chicago’s pyrotechnic works addressed another set of concerns about war, the environment, and women’s rituals. In Immolation IV (1971) Faith Wilding is engulfed by orange smoke from burning flares that encircle her grey-tinted seated figure. This was one of Chicago’s Atmospheres (Duration Performances with Fireworks) of 1968-74, staged throughout California, sometimes with her students as participants. Utilizing colored smoke to soften and feminize the landscape, these ephemeral performances also called attention to the bombing campaigns in Vietnam, and the self-immolation of monks in protest of the war. Haunting documentary footage of the Atmospheres (accompanied by the music of Miriam Cutler) combines Impressionist fascination with the obscuring effects of smoke and fog and a contemporary artist’s outcry against violence in its many forms.

The revolutionary, pedagogical experiment of the Feminist Art Program at Cal Arts is displayed in a series of documents from Womanhouse (1972) and never-before exhibited works by students of Chicago and co-founder Miriam Schapiro. Their inclusion in the exhibition is important in signaling the impact of the other women students who were part of the program. Collaborators Dori Atlantis, Nancy Youdelman and Karen LeCocq, for instance, were staging cheeky photographs that skewered gender stereotypes several years before Cindy Sherman began making photographs of constructed feminine identities in her Untitled Film Stills.

Rarely seen test plates portraying the physician Elizabeth Blackwell and the astronomer Caroline Herschel represent Chicago’s best known work, The Dinner Party (1974-79), her epic tribute to 1038 women who shaped the history of Western civilization. Vintage exhibition posters tell the story of the artwork’s international impact, the hundreds of volunteers and skilled artisans who contributed to its production, and its reverberating power as a cultural monument, now permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum.

But beyond The Dinner Party, Chicago has yet to be fully assessed in relation to the socio-political history of narrative and mural painting in America. In Cartoon for the Fall (1987) images of labor, violence, and religion are delineated in the model for a monumental tapestry (woven by Audrey Cowan) for The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light (1985-93). The project was the outcome of extensive research into Chicago’s Jewish heritage and created in collaboration with her husband, the photographer Donald Woodman, together with skilled artisans. I see the Cartoon as philosophically and visually linked to Thomas Hart Benton’s mural America Today (1930-31), and Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series (1940-41). Benton’s mural represents the utopian dream of a new society but it also warns of the dangers of overconsumption. Lawrence’s narrative cycle (although more intimate in scale) confronts the harrowing journey of African Americans seeking economic and social equality during the interwar years.

The 18th-century French playwright Olympia de Gouze was a self-educated butcher’s daughter who in 1791 wrote The Declaration of the Rights of Women. “The purpose of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of woman and man,” she argued. “These rights are liberty, property, security, and especially resistance to oppression.” Judy Chicago, the daughter of a medical secretary and post office employee who embraced civil rights, still runs with a torch that illuminates the achievements of women, and resists oppression in all its forms. If only there were a way to bring this exhibition to America.

The post The Boxer: Judy Chicago Retrospective in Bordeaux, France appeared first on artcritical.

National Academy: February 4 to May 8, 2016
1083 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street
New York City,  (212) 369-4880

Firestone: February 4 to March 6, 2016
4 Great Jones Street, between Broadway and Lafayette Street
New York City, (917) 324-3386

In 1972, the year that Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago were creating Womanhouse with their students at Cal Arts, my older cousin Annie taught me a game called Masculine/Feminine. Two players would alternate, pointing to an object and asking, “Masculine, or feminine?” Telephone, driveway, rec-room: masculine. Paint brush, river, rhinestone: feminine. This game was a lot of fun, but it was also strange, because, as a ten-year-old kid, I couldn’t understand why things would have a gender. Two concurrent exhibitions of the work of Miriam Schapiro (1923–2015) in New York have me playing this game all over again. As I stand in front of her iconic Dollhouse (1972), on view at the National Academy Museum, I think about the broader impact of Schapiro’s legacy, as well as the new knowledge that we can acquire by focusing on a distinct period in the work of this luminary of feminist art.

Miriam Schapiro: The California Years, 1967-1975 inaugurates the Eric Firestone Loft at 4 Great Jones Street, a fourth-floor walk-up that is redolent with the histories of artists including Walter De Maria, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring, who once had studios nearby. Firestone now handles the Schapiro estate, and his commitment to scholarly research is commendable. Installed within a long, whitewashed space flooded with winter light, this tightly curated exhibition provides a view onto a lesser-known body of Schapiro’s work, created during an eight-year period when the artist was living on the West Coast. The Firestone show establishes a connective thread from Schapiro’s Abstract Expressionist works, to the “shrines” of the early 1960s, to the geometric abstractions, to the femmage works that are on view uptown, in a concentrated if modest survey curated by Maura Reilly at the National Academy Museum.

By the time Schapiro arrived in California in 1967 with her husband, the painter Paul Brach, she was already a successful New York artist. She had attended meetings at the Eighth Street Club (where, like the other few women in attendance, she never spoke up) and was friends with artists such as Jack Tworkov, Joan Mitchell, Jane Wilson, and John Gruen. During the 1950s she exhibited at the Tanager and Stable Galleries before joining André Emmerich, one of the rare serious galleries to include women in his stable, where she showed regularly from 1958 to 1976.

The heroic scale and gestural reach of her paintings in the 1950s demonstrate Schapiro’s ambition to be reckoned with alongside the Ab-Ex big boys. Two works in the National Academy exhibition, Fanfare (1958) and Façade (1959), exemplify Schapiro’s engagement with the ideas of her generation and antecedents (Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky, Mitchell). However technically accomplished, these paintings feel derivative; they demonstrate what Paul Brach (including his own work) meant when he wrote “Perhaps our generation was starting to realize that we had inherited a successful revolution,” and that “Our gestural abstractions came too easily. They needed some resistance. In Mimi’s case it was geometry.” In 1962, Schapiro began a series of “shrine” paintings with stacked compartments that contained icons of the studio and femininity (paint tubes: masculine, egg: feminine). The shrines remind me of Medieval altarpieces with their classical arches and precious metals, just as they reference the artist’s painful quest for a unified identity, and self-acceptance as a woman and an artist. The cool purity of Silver Windows (1967), with its mitered grid lays down the rules of the game for the geometric works to follow.

In 1967 Mimi and Paul moved to California where he became chair of the art department at the University of California San Diego. When they arrived, the man who had promised a position for Mimi told him that there was none. Paul threatened to break his contract, and a lecturer position was found for Mimi. Working with David Nabilof, a young physicist at the university, Schapiro was able to manipulate and transform her geometric drawings. She harnessed the new technology to try new compositional variations after painting Big Ox (1967) on view at the National Academy.

Composed of four enormous truss-like “limbs” intersecting a central, open octagon, Big Ox, and its companion painting Side Ox (at Firestone) are realized in electric hues of cadmium orange, silver, and pink acrylic paint so saturated that these paintings have an almost sonic impact, like a jackhammer pulverizing concrete. Schapiro’s radical pinks— from the rosy hues of Giovanni Sassetta’s altarpieces to the intestinal color of Pepto Bismol—were all about secrets and private places. This work also looks like a direct response to Ronald Bladen’s X, (1967), a monumental aluminum sculpture that had been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery that year.

The Ox paintings became icons of female power, eventually claimed by Schapiro and Judy Chicago (her partner in founding the Feminist Art Program at Cal Arts) as the first example of “central core imagery.” While in 1968 she explained that Big Ox was inspired “by the thought of a large, imposing sense of landscape coming toward the viewer and inviting him to become part of it, Schapiro later described it as her “explicit cunt painting (that) was a real cry in the darkness…for something besides the symbol of the phallus.” Indeed, for many early feminist artists geometric abstraction was a formal device for encoding the ideas of a female aesthetic domain that would eventually challenge the hegemony of a male-dominated art world.

In California, the slick surfaces associated with industrial fabrication, spray painting techniques, automotive lacquers, and plastics were very much in vogue among the artists associated with Finish-Fetish and Light and Space who placed a West Coast stamp on East Coast minimalism. But Schapiro, who could see the Pacific Ocean from her rented La Jolla house, was inspired by the light and water of her adopted environment. Keyhole, whose monumental, synthetic “body” projects like an industrial piston into the viewer’s space, also floats on a vapor-sprayed ground that could equally be a sky from Tiepolo or Venice Beach.

By 1972, when she created Dollhouse (installed within Womanhouse) in collaboration with artist Sherry Brody, Schapiro had redefined collage as femmage, establishing a continuity between high art collage and works made by anonymous women using traditional craft materials. In their playfully illustrated essay “Waste Not, Want Not: An Inquiry into What Women Saved and Assembled,” a classic feminist text that was first published in the magazine Heresies, Schapiro and artist Melissa Meyer laid out historic precedents and criteria for femmage. As Meyer remembers it, during a meeting at Joyce Kozloff’s loft, Mimi had a phone call with the art critic Grace Glueck and together they coined the term “femmage.”

Reflecting this deepening interest in domestic materials, Flying Carpet (1972), at Eric Firestone, reveals the fragment of a staircase seen through a tear in a tilted rectangle (carpet). This transitional work includes bits and pieces of Japanese paper and calico-patterned wallpapers and fabrics that break through the painting’s interior boundaries. With its allusion to Middle-Eastern textiles and myth, Schapiro must have been charged up about the fact that she was finding a way to move beyond the pure, hard-edged abstractions by way of materials that were cut, torn, frayed and literally pliable.

From the mid to late 1970s, Schapiro was a leader of Pattern and Decoration movement. Coming to a variety of conclusions in their own work, these artists were nevertheless unified by the consciousness-raising dialogues of the Women’s Movement as well as a shared interest in the ornament and decorative arts traditions (especially ceramics, textiles, and gardens, and architecture) from around the world.

Schapiro’s dedication to forging an artistic language that would recast women’s work, along with the varied phases of her production, has yielded a rich inheritance. Look at Carrie Moyer’s poured and stenciled paintings, the arena for what she describes an “erotics of craft,” or Mickalene Thomas’s explorations of female erotic power and mind-bending domestic interiors that incorporate (gender-indeterminate) rhinestones, copper pots, animal prints, and fake wood paneling. Consciously or not, these artists channel Schapiro who can be thought of as their enabling Athena.

The post Icons of Female Power: Early Works of Miriam Schapiro appeared first on artcritical.

In 1977 Nina Yankowitz suggested I attend a meeting at Joyce Kozloff’s loft for a preliminary discussion about the fourth issue of the Heresies Collective entitled Heresies: Women’s Traditional Arts: The Politics of Aesthetics. We sat around in a circle and each of us was asked to speak about what she was interested in. When it came time for me to speak, I said nervously with my little, low voice, “I’m interested in why so many women made collages.” At the end of the meeting Miriam Schapiro came up to me and said, “I want to work with you on that.” I thought, “Oh my God she is going to swallow me up — this strong, forceful woman!” But actually at some later point in our collaboration, she said to me “Melissa, do you think you could keep quiet for a minute so I could get a word in?” During one of our meetings, Mimi had a phone call with Grace Glueck and they came up with the name, “Femmage.”

I feel lucky to have met Mimi. At the time, collaborating with an older artist was important for me, while she also appreciated and benefitted from my perspective. We had a lot of fun as we worked on our research and writing, and her energy and committed work ethic was contagious. It was a wonderful moment for both of us, personally and professionally. I am happy that I could participate in conceptualizing and developing ideas that would remain valuable to Mimi and to myself. That “Femmage” has been anthologized and is still relevant to students and artists is a testimony and lasting memory to the art and character of Miriam Schapiro, as it is to the groundbreaking and exciting context in which we wrote it.  MELISSA MEYER

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