Two very young painters have a show together at a gathering of the
tribes. Both took their MFA’s in 2009 from the New York Academy of Art
in TriBeCa, where the emphasis is on training students to paint, draw
& sculpt figuratively, just like the Old Masters (and like the Royal
Academy & French Salon painters of the 19th century, and the academic
branch of surrealism in France in the 1930s). Both these young
painters appear to have learned their lessons, as can be seen in
“Philip J. Hardy/Michael Gibson: Language Paintings” (through January
29). Gibson is still struggling to find himself, although some of his
pictures display sound academic technique, among them “Enter the Red
Shirt” and “They’re Year Five Thousand.” Hardy has not only mastered
academic technique, but is beginning to have ideas about how to employ
it, utilizing a blond palette & fanciful themes that resemble an
ultra-contemporary version of say, Rene Magritte. In only one instance
(among the nine paintings on view) would I say that Hardy’s technique
is inadequate to convey his ideas, but many of his images are
haunting, including “Transcendent Cars,” in which small automobile
float amid clouds, “Flying Pig,” a porker with wings, and “Pigggy,”
which shows another pig, this one under a bridge, with a wheelbarrow &
foliage. Most impressive is “Toad Lover,” a symphony in greys and
browns. It depicts a monstrously large greige toad in a greige
landscape with a smaller greige toad on his shoulders, while strapped
to the head of the smaller toad is a little house with light shining
out of its windows.

Roni Horn aka Roni Horn

Whitney Museum of American Art

The welcome mat laid out by Roni Horn and the Whitney, a collection of ninety-six color photographed portraits of the artist’s niece (This is Me, This is You 1998-2000) wastes no time with gentle introductions to the show’s primary theme. It would be difficult not to ask: “Who is that?” We are thinking about identity already. But this is too simplistic. Even for the conceptual cynics.

For Horn, it seems it is not enough to ask the intuitive questions about identity. It is about seeing beyond the constricted sightlines from which we have been conditioned to perceive of identity; that it is a constant distinction between people, things, places and ideas. To go beyond this Horn thoughtfully yet subtly asks us to consider the element of time as a factor within the identity equation.

In the work titled a.k.a. (2008-2009) fifteen pairs of photographs line the walls of one gallery. Each pair consists of a portrait of Horn, one of her in her youth while its mate depicts Horn as she approaches maturity. Carefully chosen, the body language in each image echoes the other, whether it be a slight head tilt, a cocked shoulder or a glint in the eyes, almost as a signal to the viewer that it is still her throughout, as the hairstyles change, as the face weathers, the overall appearance becomes more masculine. Through these images Horn has invited us to witness the fluidity of her own identity as she ages.

Presenting the often-overlooked element of time, and not pushing it on the viewer is a cheeky tactic. One that, for me at least, once figured out was quite rewarding. All of a sudden “I got it.” Or so I thought.

Figuring out the time component wasn’t enough. I was still searching for something within the identity equation. Finally, I had to let it go for a while. As I meandered through the second floor, passing the ninety-six portraits resting eagerly on the entry wall, I encountered selections from Bird. Six pairs of medium-size photographs taken of the rear heads of taxidermied owls, mallards and other fowl. In this gallery, as with a.k.a. it’s almost instinctive to read the collection by registering each pair as single elements that form a sort of narrative when (and if) pieced together. I hesitate to say that they form a story of sorts, but it’s difficult to deny that Horn is aware of our conditioned response to put together a story when presented with fragments. We make connections. It’s what we do.

And no sooner was I thinking this than the words serendipitously flowed from the mouth of a gallery guide to my ears: “when you see different kinds of work in a room, she is asking us to make the connection. That is really thoughtful of her.” Well, yes. It is thoughtful of her. Horn’s solicitation reminds us that seeing and looking are not mutually inclusive.

Take the great echoing expanse of the main gallery on the fourth floor. It’s almost too easy to miss White Dickinson (2006), six aluminum cast rods leaning tenderly against white walls. The white rubber text inserted into the broadsides quietly delivering opening lines from Emily Dickinson poems. Solemn lines express thoughts on perception, on being: “Nature is so sudden she makes us all antique”; “News of dying goes no further than the breeze, the ear is the last face.”

Because of the positioning, in order to fully view with the piece, you have to engage with it; to not let it’s statements end the conversation, but be the openers. Start a conversation.

Accompanying White Dickinson in the gallery is Pink Tons (2008), a 4’ x 4’ x 4’ sculpture of solid cast pink glass. In this room, where I felt to get swallowed by the coolness and calmness of my sparse surroundings there was no doubt a lot of room to think.

While Roberta Smith assigned the pairing of these two pieces as the embodiment of Horn’s “penchant for hushed preciousness”, I don’t think the undertone here can be so easily summarized. It’s difficult to pin it down, but in the end, does it really need to be pinned down? It’s a process of looking with your mind and feeling through the ideas by connecting elements with which you have very little acquaintance. You are now a participant in the conversation.

The intersections of time, connection, and the exploratory process of reevaluating our concepts of identity seem to be at the crux of Horn’s retrospective. It certainly is a lot to think about, and it definitely is not easy.

However excited I am for the reminder and the challenge Horn has presented, I cannot escape the feeling that this overall message can be lost in the directives coming from Horn: “see those, read this, move your body through this space.” But maybe we need a little push, hushed coaxing to wake up our sensibilities. Or maybe it’s too much to take in at once. Connections surely will be missed. I am certainly still considering the relationships. Still contemplating the possibility that identity is not a constant fixture.

As an experience, I would liken the show to a personal ad. File it under missed connections:

You: the prominent retrospective of a living artist; works spanning 30+ years; garnered the love and adoration of curators and theory-phile intellectuals.

Me: but a humble neophyte to the realm of late-minimalism; perhaps a fan of large exhibitions that get a lot of press; maybe I’m the kind of audience member you love most: the true blood art lover – passionate and postulating wild sometimes fantastical explanations for why this and that are laying near each other, but ever careful not to overstep my boundaries for I know that you have intentions. You have created this experience for me. And so I digress. Can we meet up for a sip? Perhaps near the River Thames. Or perhaps, I don’t try too hard to see beyond what’s placed in front of me. I think that art is a tool for the practice of looking; you know using your eyes beyond just seeing? Making the connection between visual, mental and sometimes if I’m lucky, emotional pleasure or (also if I’m lucky) disdain. But in this narrative, I cannot reveal the truth. Because, in all honesty, I don’t know. At any given moment I occupy all or none of these identities.

The barrier of self-consciousness wasn’t quite breached the first time, but you’ve left me thinking and wanting more, so let’s give it another go.

Roni Horn a.k.a. Roni Horn
Whitney Museum of American Art
On view November 6 2009 – January 24 2120

San Francisco painter

by Neila Mezynski

I first saw Barbara Vos’s work in 1992 in a show entitled “Absence of Proof” at Somar Art Gallery in San Francisco, Ca., recently renamed Somarts. The exhibit also included Gustavo Rivera and David Miller’s work. I was immediately struck by the energy and boldness in Vos’s work. One painting in particular grabbed my attention:  a huge acrylic paper painting entitled, “Maiden Voyage” with ‘faster than a speeding bullet’ strokes of reds and blacks, dark forest and pure kelly greens and freedom, lots and lots of freedom.

Barbara Vos hadn’t been exploring abstract painting for long and one could sense the excitement of new in the huge paintings. The excitement was contagious as Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote a glowing review followed by Union Square gallerist Brian Gross offering Vos gallery representation, from 1992 – 2004, I might add. Local girl made real good.

Barbara Vos grew up in the Brooklyn /New York City area. She didn’t have a chance of not being a painter or of at least exploring it, as she came from a long line of painters: both parents, great aunts and uncles, painters all. Vos spent her early years hanging out in museums where she was affected by notables such as John Marin, Kandinsky early Guston , Van Gogh, Cezanne. Of Marin’s work Vos states,” I recognized how I felt seeing a so small and beautifully, delicately described watercolor.” Vos was hooked.

  She started painting figuratively, (life drawing) at 12 years old and fondly remembers enjoying working with glazes in her teens. Two years later Barbara Vos attended The New York Art Students League from 1966-1970 followed by the Minneapolis School of Art in 1971. Abstraction amid the influence of skyscrapers, massive networking of streets and so many people, didn’t come until much later. Vos, in hot pursuit, went on to graduate from the University of Connecticut in 1975. In the late 80’s Vos discovered abstraction on paper was the vehicle with which she could best peel back the layers and expose the underbelly of her city and youth.  “Figurative is prose while abstraction is musical”. She found her  ‘singing voice’ with which to express: “The long view across the East river to the Statue of Liberty and beyond, the tall buildings going into the sky and the tight network of streets and the people packed into them- elevators going down down into the underground veins, the trains packed with people and more people.” 

Less interested in a single idea and more with interpreting a collection of thoughts and  moods, abstraction lends a song without words for Barbara Vos. Perhaps this is what sets her apart from other abstractionists, her pure painting wordlessness. While many painters have resorted to ‘bells and whistles’ in post modernism’s abstracted ‘decorative’ period to find footing in a bruised art form of the 1980’s and 90’s, Vos has never deviated from her need to express herself sincerely in a straightforward manner through paint. Not looking for style and finish in her work, just a statement. An intuitive painter, Vos says,  “Impulse and chance needs to be in the movement of the body, not filtered through the mind, a separate channel.” Perhaps that’s why Vos prefers working very large, to allow the body’s full expression when painting. Mark Rothko said ‘an intimacy’. 

Residing in San Francisco, Ca. since the 1980’s, in 1993, Barbara Vos was awarded a residency with the coveted Djerassi Artist-In-Resident program in Woodside, Ca. ; a month’s long hiatus for the artist to work in a different environment in the production of new work. During that period one of the more successful paintings Vos produced was “Red Spirit” an acrylic painting on paper with a web of Vos’s best edgy strokes, forest greens set against an all white background with a lone red spiral placed center low with red strokes escaping upward.

Vos is back at her easel after a few years hiatus. She says she is now only working with acrylics and is learning to use them differently. Vos offers,” When I use oils I am building, when I paint with acrylic I am free.” A challenge to incorporate both but one I’m sure Vos is up to. Her paintings resist simple definition and as is nature’s wont, they refuse to be contained.  Kansas City will be the recipients of Barbara Vos’s new paintings, her first solo exhibit in 6 years, at the Cara and Cabezas Contemporary in Kansas City, Mo. Her one woman show will include six large paintings, all on paper, acrylic her medium:

“Gardenesque (June)”, 2009, (one of six Gardenesques): a sunny exquisite profusion of yellows, smatterings of pearl grey, touches of red, in a luscious spring bouquet, much too dense to walk through though.

“Spring Fed” (2008), a very large delicate, threadbare treatment of paint with jabs and strokes of ocher against sky blue and pearl gray background with feathery dark green vines set into a gray blue mist; reminiscent of Joan Mitchell.

“Rythms” from 2008, a sunny yellow and forest green tangled web of color.

“Bridge # 1” and “Bridge# 2”, both from ’09 and both densely layered. One could almost experience vertigo viewing each. Bridge #1 hovers over shimmering blue water with fog rolling in; loosely set in tones of blue with flickering pinky peach a sunset might produce; perhaps Vos had the Golden Gate Bridge in mind.

Bridge #2 is more densely built, packed in yellows and gray browns almost as if the viewer were atop the bridge looking down upon an industrial area and/or a city population.  Both paintings exude a sense of the bridges’ immense size and weight but the fact that Vos has successfully captured their suspension, the rolling feeling of fog or mist gives them an other worldly quality and no apparent footing to hold down their eerie lightness. 

Barbara Vos was the recipient of the Merceldes Eicholz Fellowship in 1994 and the Nea/WESTAF Regional Fellowship in 1996.

Vos’s work is in the Morgan Flagg Collection shown at the De Young Museum of Art in San Francisco, Ca; Bay Area Art from the Morgan Flagg colletion; also the di Rosa Preserve permanent collection in Sonoma, Ca.

Selected exhibits: the Palace of fine arts in San Francisco, Ca; Mills College in Oakland, Ca.;  Sonoma State University, Ca. and Palo Alto Cultural Center, Palo Alto Ca.

“Painting with respect for impulse, chance and choice allows a being to be, and to be interested in being.”  _ barbara vos

Barbara Vos: Rhythm Vision

Sept 10 – Oct 31, 2009

Cara and Cabezas Contemporary

218 Delaware , Suite#208, Kansas City, Mo. 64105

816-332-6239

Recently, while visiting the Los Gatos Museum of Art, I came across the work of Latino Torelli, an Italian painter now residing in Oakland, Ca.. The museum in association with the Los Gatos Art Association produces the Annual Open Juried Show, an organization comprised of bay area artists, Torelli’s painting, “Alley by the Portal, Oakland”, caught my eye, tucked neatly as you please, in a downstairs corner of the museum’s gallery; not a large painting , 24” by 24” , but one reminiscent of De Kooning’s work with its loose abstract qualities, buttery soft pinks and beigey palette . In following up my intense interest of this relatively unknown painter’s work, I contacted Torelli to arrange a meeting. He was very accommodating and personable with a slight no nonsense edge. Not suffering fools easily, Torelli grilled me to see what I was about and then we got down to business. 
Born in 1939 in Tuscany, Italy, Latino Torelli started painting in his teens. Influenced by his country’s rich heritage, Giotto, the 15^th century painters and his aunt’s urging, at age 13 he tried his hand. Suggestable and not too involved with painting in his youth he went on to study geology and hydrology earning a PH.D from the University of Illinois in 1973. After working for a water resources company in Italy, Torelli did some sheep farming in Umbria, 20 years to be exact. Torelli resumed painting in 2002 after the death of his first wife, his daughter’s urging and a relocation to the US.

Latino Torelli received an award for “The Columbia River At the Bridge of I-97” in 2007 from LGAA and when interviewed by newsletter editor, Kevin Kasik, Torelli  answered with  “how do I respond to the juror’s (Marian Parmenter) calling me a serious painter? – I guess that’s the best part of it. I just think of myself as a guy who paints, not a painter. After this prize maybe they can call me a painter.”  Torelli, no different than any painter worth their weight in paint, states: “The only thing is it must be coherent, always coherent.” Torelli, an interesting combination of philosopher and scientist spouts Spinoza’s theory of intuitive knowledge: to see things sub specie aeternitatis. Torelli also likens painting to transubstantiation: “In painting, space, light and time are the holy trinity. In a given painting we can only address a particular configuration of this truth. But if we do it right we hint to its essence, Eternity.” 

Torelli tells me he paints quickly as he says he can only paint for 2 hours at a time; the tension is too much for him.   “When I’m done with that one, I never put my brush on it again. Never on a dry surface; only in the moment, wet into wet.” “I try to be as free of  intentions as I can in order to make a good painting. When your intent is to make a good painting you never do.”  Torelli uses a light effortless coat of paint, not much struggle.  At first glance the paintings appear to be thick, dense but on a closer look they have an almost transparent quality, veils. Torelli exhibits some of Matisse’s qualities of an unbroken line of ease especially in his rare figurative piece such as, “Soon’s Garden” from 2004. A charming painting of a friend with his signature creams, beiges and peachy pinks as in her jacket with black hair and pants for contrast. The whitish yellow surface where Soon sits in her little garden chair bring to mind Van Gogh’s lively brushstrokes. Torelli paints on masonite, all 24 “ by 24” for the no nonsense reason that that is the size of the masonite sheets when divided into 8 squares. Torelli states that in Italy the sheets are a little larger so his paintings are 28 “ by 28” there, but of course! He states that the square gives him the right ratio between height and depth. “I mostly paint from the tip of my feet”, he quips and  “rectangular paintings are rare, only for self portraits”. Torelli works out of his apartment in Oakland , Ca in a cramped space but then for an artist space is a state of mind. I witnessed his new body of work, which is an extreme departure from the landscapes. But Torelli informs me it is all of the same thing to him and done simultaneously in his search for unity, unity coming in different colors and styles. The new work being of a flat coverage of one color each with a small tilted square strategically placed. For Torelli this tiny square afloat on a bed of color represents mankind’s struggle with dualism and perhaps his own, linking his disparate styles and ideas or subject/object together and presenting them as one. Torelli has an ongoing wrestling match or should I say fascination with dualism. Sounds pretty Human, All Too Human, to me. Torelli suffers the pangs of guilt over yearning to show the body of his work in a retrospective and then he says he will ‘hang it up’; I hope he quashes those demons.

Torelli tells me he paints only on the spot and “Red 23^rd” from 2003  “spoke to him of mortality”. A dilapidated piece of land between Potrero Hill and the S.F. bay; a whitish gray street atop an undercoat of pink, an oft used starting point for so many of Torelli’s paintings; stark whitish grey posts standing firmly atop the pink . The painting has a filled up luscious quality in spite of its bleak subject matter. 

Notable for me ,“Pine Trees at Albinia”, also from 2003; a forest of windblown trees with delicate bluish grey sky and one large pine tree in the foreground sitting atop a bank of creamy tan with dark brown overlaid every which way giving an energy to the scene; askew posts alongside  keeping the picture upright. Torelli adds a clear green to his beige palette in this one. 
   “ Painting is just being there. When you’re somewhere painting, what you see makes you live and you make live what you see. “   Latino Torelli

Neila Mezynski

by Robert C. Morgan

A Gathering of The Tribes: January 10 – February 1, 2009 

Portrait of the artist, Grace Rim. Courtesy of the artist.

After six years of an escalating art market following the invasion of Iraq, where prices for mediocre spectacles rose beyond the fringes of obscenity, artists and their investors find themselves in a different state of mind. Then, a new paradigm was introduced into the revisionist world order by the previous administration—a government without governance—translated by the art market as investment folly based on name-droppings that turn a fortune. But now, alas, these fortunes appear to have gone amiss. We are circling—or perhaps spiraling—backwards or downwards or both. At any rate, Baudelaire’s scene and Baudrillard’s “screen” are both changing registers on a routine basis. The kinds of socially devout promotional images that once tied art objects to the market no longer appear credible. Auction mania has (temporally) left the sacred chancel of divine speculation. The ecstatic chorus that chanted audaciously as millions of dollars were exchanged for phantasmagorical trivia has finally come to rest. Artists too are resting at the water’s edge, leaving the reflections of Narcissus and Echo behind them. The art world is no longer a real world. Rather it has become a maelstrom of imitations and a haunting scenario of affectation. This is the demise of all that at one time appeared the right stuff. I mentioned this to reassure some of readers that we must differentiate—as I insisted more than a decade ago in The End of the Art World—that there are two distinct issues at stake in today’s global transcultural environment: there is art and there is the art world. And while there may appear to be an intersection or introjection between the two, they are finally quite different from one another, depending on the time of day or the season. For now, the season is changing faster than many investors would have dreamed six months ago. We are finally seeing that false financial marketing in the cause of art cannot persist as it once did. Those days are over and so is the spendthrift mentality that accompanied them. Now is the time to regenerate one’s sources and to look again at the aesthetic structure of art—not in terms of Koonsian economics—but closer to the point of transmission where art enters into our history as a syntagmatic signifier offering, instead of investment anxiety, a kind of solace where the syntactical transformation of material, wrought by hand, eye, and mind, again becomes a significant force in balancing the virtual chaos of the present.

For years I have considered the possibility that significant art is less driven by the market than by those on the fringes who move beyond the reach of what is actually known to us—beyond mindless excess and beyond any form of calculation or accountability. In this context, Grace Rim’s remarkable body of work is a clear example. Over the decades since Rim’s arrival in New York, she has produced a series of small drawings, torn and sewn paintings, and wall installations that include rugged calligraphic marks accompanied by written Hangul (Korean language), veils, and other pieces of cloth. The work appears to some as naïve, or even eccentric, which I would argue in positive terms. In her recent exhibition, shown at Steve Cannon’s neo-Bohemian East Village gallery known as the Tribes (a shortened version of what was originally A Gathering of the Tribes), Rim installed a modest but exemplary exhibition of paintings and drawings titled “Yes Love, Yes Life.” The centerpiece is a painting, simply titled “Love,” in which a dominant abstract shape resembling a twisted heart, saturated in deep fingernail-polish-red acrylic, is sewn onto a white field. While the sewing took hours to complete, the directness of this gesture is unmistakable, and the result has the character of a rough-hewn log bench carved by Brancusi with a hand-axe. The embedding of this dominant shape has an unexpected, vibrant, and pulsating effect—an absoluteness that defies any challenge. The shapes signify a commitment to love and to the energy of life—the desire to be happy and fulfilled. Another work, called “Wings of Love III,” includes “Acrylic, Thread, Pencil, Egg Yoke [sic], and a Bridal Veil on Canvas.” The appearance of a sexualized, horned figure covered with a veil suggests the shamanistic tradition of ancient Korean culture and a mysterious aura where forces are unaccountable, yet nevertheless present.

During the Biennale di Venezia in 2003, I remember visiting the Italian Pavilion with Rim (in the interests of full disclosure, we had a personal relationship at this time, which ended in 2005) and seeing the work of a lesser-known, elderly Italian woman, Carol Rama, who had just received the Golden Lion (Leone d’oro) award. I was struck by Rama’s eccentric style and variations on a theme, using personal objects within the context of assemblage. Rim was completely taken by this work as she recognized in Rama a sensory force and embedded pleasure that held some kind of special transmission—a force that was undeniable. How glorious it was that the jury of the Biennale had elected to give Rama this special award, and how unlikely it would be that an American jury would see the value of such work without the pressure of a major gallery behind it.

At that moment, I felt Rim understood that to be a good artist functioning outside the mainstream would be an uphill battle, yet one that she would continue to confront. Although the Tribes exhibition was a relatively humble presentation, the personal content of the work implied an emancipation from the false expectations proscribed by the New York art world and the kind of surrogate marketing this world chose to pursue. At any rate, the challenge to such a Behemoth is in the particulars, which often hold romance at the core. Finally, it is difficult to deny that the point of view evident in the art of Grace Rim has a special place in the conversation about art today: a tactile sensation through material, an antidote to the self-conscious neo-conceptualism produced in so many post-MFA studios from the onset the Iraqi War through the recent collapse of all those discretionary funds—many of which were based on pure speculation.

This essay was originally written in 2001-2003, and distributed in an unpublished format to various friends and curators interested in the affinities between Eastern thought and contemporary art. It was partially revised in 2008 for publication coincident with the current Guggenheim exhibition, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989.

by: Neila Mezynski

Six Sculptors From Humboldt State University

Piante Gallery is the perfect place to house six contemporary sculptors’ work, with its high ceilings and old world charm, the nouveau elegance and provocative nature of their efforts is beautifully displayed. All 6 sculptors are professors on the faculty of Humboldt State University, each with a slightly different “story” to tell, but with a commonality that is apparent when under one high ceilinged roof.

Once a month, Arts Alive draws huge crowds in Eureka, Ca. but the congestion in the front room of the gallery with so many milling around, carefully so carefully, didn’t detract from the whimsical elegance of Jim Crawford’s pristine all white pieces or Louis Marak’s endangered species teapot sculptures. Crawford’s “Untitled Large Vase” is a huggable piece of work, suggesting an upside down Buddha with patchwork- like quilt indentations and his “Untitled Large Bowl”, dressed in white brocade, clay, that is, etched and diamond polished porcelain.

Louis Marak’s fired clay teapot sculptures are of a chilling nature. The teapots pour out double- edged stories of endangered species and human entanglement. “The Handled Bird Teapot”, is a merging of bird, tree, hands; the hands veering into tentacled root/ talons, a vice-like grip of steel surround the bird tree; interchangeable beak and leaves. A variation is “Worm with three hands”, a taunting hand with an out of reach worm, a disconnected bird eye at bottom of tree, watching. The heartbreaking “Water Bird Bowls” ,one frantic eye and beak are all that escape.

The next gallery is a lighter offering but not necessarily letting us off the hook. A Luscious polymer wall hanging of Shannon Sullivan: watery marine blue raindrops/tears dripping from unknown pink and red button clusters, ”Bucket” an off the wall mother nature motif: “Plot With Fertile Slope”, a grassy green patch of land with Easter candy pink and beige nubby protruberances of polymer fired clay and “Plot With Garden Ridge”, a variation.

In the same gallery, Nancy Frazier has shoes aplenty : spiky red mottled grey shoes entitled “Armorwear”; pinky beige nippled shoes with an apt title of “Sucklewear”; forest green matching king and queen shoes in bears paw cradle, ”Check/Mate”; red birds nesting in red shoes, ”Shelter”. Frazier runs the gammit with whimsy and meaning.

Kit Davenport provides the amorphous “Green Bunny” for all this nature business, with a smug green ceramic rabbit with one large white brocaded ear lopped over its bunny head and more breast-like knobs upon a white tree painted on its bunny side. Sharing the space is “Bones Bunny”, perhaps as much deer as rabbit; hanging antler mobile bunny with spine parts separate. Only one eerie rabbit eye is the tell-tale sign of its true rabbity self. Davenport also has the morphing “Diver”, a fish-like sculpture with one defined royal blue fin and a gaping aorta, also a little tree or lung in there. Perhaps not so far fetched if we don’t heed the environmental warning signs.

Sharing the 3^rd gallery with Davenport is the moving work of Keith Schneider; his sculptures speak to the human (or dog) condition, posing the question of who’s in control here, man or beast? Schneider states, “ I like using the idea of the figure as a point of departure because it allows a broad range of interpretation. My characters seem anxious and overwhelmed some worried and perplexed, some quizzical and amused”; while working, Schneider says they speak to him about himself. Made of cloth, wood, wheels and clay, “Jocko and Edward” and “Sherman and Pete” are pieces done in 2009. Especially intriguing is the dog in both sculptures: he seems anxious, yearning, even though his wheel legs allow him to speed along at a fair clip, feel the wind whipping; in both pieces he wears a tattered jacket and scarf held together with twine and stitches while a nonchalant passenger in prison garb of black and white horizontal bars is being taken for a ride, his hands intriguingly covered in red and white horizontal bars. Both rider and carrier are wearing beanies adding a new leg or wheel to both stories or is it the same story but different names? which one is the prisoner? so many social implications . Also notable is Keith Schneider’s “Oscar”, a seated dog in tattered jacket, beanie and direct gaze with stick legs. Lots of room for interpretation and Schneider likes it like that.

The six sculptors are on the faculty of Humboldt State University and College of the Redwoods in Eureka, Ca.

Ceramics 2009 Invitational ended March 4^th at Piante Gallery in Eureka, Ca

Sue Natzler is director of Piante and curator of the exhibit.

BROADTHINKING: Unnatural Acts and Other Illicit Thoughts about Nature

at Broadway Gallery

reviewed by Susan L. Yung

An art exhibit curated by Chris Twomey at Broadway Gallery in Soho is a compilation of installations of eleven individual artists metamorphing natural or waste products into creating (infusing) another form of existence or new life in the materials As artists, they are able to manipulate, control, recycle materials and mediums into other products that will motivate the viewer’s conscience to their own wasteful environments that we inhabit. For example, this gallery is one of the last bastions for art and artists in the neighborhood that in turn had gentrified the area from empty warehouses and presently is transformed into a shopper’s/consumer’s haven going to the department brand stores and boutiques.

Each artist had tackled the problem in his or her own way. Miwa Koizumi’s “Pet Project” had successfully made floating jellyfishes from water bottles, dancing transparently with its shadows; Joel Simpson’s “Photonic Structural Movement” video depict 2 dancers undulating with a fabric screen while black and white photos of natural pattern and forms objects i.e. rocks, water pipes, liquids, architectural details, wood, and ice are projected on this moving screen; Peggy Ciphers’ “Channeling” had laid out many drug paraphernalia (pills, tea bags, joints, colored liquorices, cigs, tobacco, coke lines, etc) on the floor in a yen-yang wave but using a rectangle instead of a circle shape where a chair is placed as well as a music stand with classical music sheets that focus on a highly abstract textured painting hanging on the wall, suggesting the co-dependencies for the final painted product; Chris Twomey’s “Tsunami 3000” uses crumpled tin foil with images of man copulating with various animals and a video loop of a coyote man with dolphin referencing to scientists who do DNA research to redefine a better improved generation for the year 3000; Gulsen Calik’s “Dystopia” is a metallic rusty Tonka truck (unavailable) covered in grey green “fungus” growths where everyone says to be lint contrary to her nude painting “ Everyone’s Muse” that has a triangular-shape moss growth in the woman’s pubic area and “Mesopotamia”, a shelf of encased cultural growths that are metastasized in encased objects ie toy horse, illustrating “Dystrophy”; Alyssa Fanning’s “Flux: Printed and Drawn Matter” meticulous detailed linoleum prints with graphite pencil and Bristol paper of New Jersey’s Van Buskirk Island, an outdated water purification plant are torn, re-collaged, glued and curled, suggesting deconstruction and reconstruction waste; Kim Holleman’s “Model of Future Utopian Garden, Blue & Tan” creates 2 encased, miniature paradise islands elevated in a sea of liquid waste and a miniature architectural flocking covered “Green House” furnished with glass shards, computer fan and light fixture; Pale Infinity and Flash Light (see www.pale Infinity.com) are in cyberspace on the internet as Second Life via Multi-User-Simulated-Environment (MUSE) developing their own fantasy homes and environment; Liz N Val is a couple whose tongue-in-cheek art  “World on the Tip of my Finger” and “How to Rape” demonstrate their illicit/unnatural juxtapositions; Elizabeth Riley’s “Luncheon on the Grass” cloudlike overhanging of conduit pipes encasing plastic pink drop cloths with projected green light set’s the gallery’s mood of “detritus” as well as Kathleen Vance’s “Infused” of a branch sprouting wires and attached to electrical fixtures, also, suspended from the ceiling emulates a “Frankenstein-ish” effect from inanimate to animate life.

Overall, in this show, the women outnumber the men where they culminate in making social commentaries of their urban unnatural environments in a patriarchic society keeping intact their broad thinkings that encompasses everything. Thus, I find women as nurturers, natural creators and protectors, miniaturising everything and attempting to neutralize in order to forestall destructive elements.

 (Pat Steir images courtesy of CHEIM & READ)

Contemplation by which we know and love the creator, apprehending it in a deep and vital experience which is beyond the reach of any natural understanding is the reason for our creation.  Thomas Merton

            New paradigm blues are what happens in between changes. Changes are what nobody  wants because while they are happening there is massive disorientation. New paradigm euphoria is what happens with the sort of hope generated election night. This sort of hope engenders possibilities for change. This writing is about my hopes for art’s possibilities in the coming times.

            Who would argue that it is  a lack of balance that is the  largest and most disruptive beast in the jungle of contemporary life? Balance is not as important as we would like it to be, we have not lost enough, we are not close enough to extinction, leave the contemplation and prayers to the monks and artists. It seems there may be those invested in keeping their numbers small so that nothing changes? The supremacy of the lockjaw logic of royal and paternalistic order continues on. Truly it is not the one with the most toys that wins, rather it is the ones that point the way to hopes far less dense than the one we now inhabit using healing as a model rather than unlimited growth and acquisition, which is tranformed into destructive maelevolence  for life by its overvaluation and lack of consideration for the spirit. This imbalance is the core issue facing the planetary community now.

            Thomas Merton, the 20th century writer and Cistercian monk quoted above was articulate in championing contemplation. Friend of Ad Rienhardt the painter, who was referred to as the black monk of abstract expressionism, they were close friends for years. Merton practiced painting and poetry at the Gethsemone abbey where he lived. His practice and knowledge of art, in addition to his in depth correspondence with other spiritual traditions, most notably Buddhists, gave depth to his numerous writings on contemplative states.

            Contrary to what current market practice dictates,  art is not a product, but a bridge from material to spirit. Some of the finest practitioners of our times have and do practice contemplation in their makings  in dialectics of the most simply complex of dances, between this and that, surface and vision, nothing and something, history and now, work and play, solitude and everybody and light and shadow; which serve as connections to unity, being as balanced as things may be before unity is experienced, which may be as good as it gets for most of us for the time being.

            Artists as well as many others in the boomer generation were attracted to the geometry and balance depicted in the ICHING as the hexagrams Creative (yang) and  Receptive (yin). One must be balanced by the other in taoist alchemy to achieve union and harmony. These ideas are also useful in explaining any number of current imbalances based on the denigration of the female or yin spirit by the giantism and predominance of the yang functions at the present time. It is the yang bang culture of speed and projection that is overgrown out of balance, while the interior contemplative aspects of yin are practiced rarely and most usually by monks and artists. It is imperative to all of our spiritual and emotional health  that these practices be not only  made available to the public at large, but that they be sanctioned. Art may indeed be a part of saving the world, just not in the way we thought.

            There are a couple reasons modern and contemporary artists have been drawn to taoist ideas and practice, among them the late Agnes Martin, who really became an art nun of sorts, practicing an extremely monastic art & life in solitude and solidarity with the simplicities of the two dimensional grid. Her works are studies in taoist number structures, repetition and contemplation. In taoism, it is the life force itself that is seen as the divine. Contact of brush to surface is experienced as contact with the divine. When Agnes Martin spoke of her self as small and humble, she also spoke of the objects she made that were fetishized, making it possible for her to live a sanctified life. Full time artists are fortunate to live a life more balanced and in tune with spirit than the rest of us. It may yet be artists that show the way to a new way of living, more as a model of living than by  the fetishsized objects they make, no matter how masterfully they are executed.

            Pat Steir and the late Bruce Conner also illustrate connections and concepts to contemplative traditions in noteworthy ways and both have also experimented with taoist practice and ideas.

(Pat Steir images courtesy of CHEIM & READ)

            Pat Steir (an admirer of Martin’s), exemplifies the practice of yin taoism and balance in her paintings. One review of her work in Art in America a few years ago was titled the Watercourse Way, after a book by the Taoist philosopher Alan Watts. Steir spends extensive periods of contemplation before approaching the painting surface, which is interacted with by  combinations of pouring and throwing, which were techniques she studied in depth from works of ancient taoist painting masters. She recently taught a class, which I hope to have another chance to attend, through the auspices of the Zen Center of New York City. The course describes elements observable in the work such as the “study of chaos and control, chance and pattern”. Her early work plays with grid structures and other art historical references before arriving at the practice structure she presently inhabits. These paintings are strong talismans of the balance between yin and yang reflecting ideals beyond duality, inspired by the mysteries of nature utilizing elemental processes, in these instances, water. Steir has described the first and most time intensive element of her process as contemplation.

(Bruce Conner images Courtesy of GALLERY PAULE ANGLIM)

            The late Bruce Conner worked with both Christian and Taoist images and processes. The tantra mandelas done in ink on paper find correlation with the illuminations of Keltic scribes as well as Buddhist sand paintings. The rorschach inks on paper (some of which have been compared to the shroud of Turin) echo the obsessions with balance by this artist, also manifest  in works of black and white such as the collages, films and photograms. Many of his etching/collages are inhabited by catholic/christian imagery and in one of several political pranks he impersonates Christ. In a press release put out when he ran for city council in San Francisco, he riffs on Jesus’s admonition to see through one eye, in another, a call to mercy and compassion are pronounced. The early “funk” works, which among other things personified artists in solidarity with garbage collectors as members of something called the “rat bastard protective society”, this was perhaps the most slapstick of his numerous exercises in persona as medium. Most of his oeuvre was occupied with concerns of  balance and the interaction of opposites,  most notably the use of black and white predominate. Less purely meditative in the eastern sense of the word than Steir, he was also among the first to use personification and identity as media in the 60’s. One of the things that make the mandela pieces noteworthy is the departure from the operatic large scale aggressive yang painting statements of the ab exers and the neo expressionists prominent at that time. In touch with taoist practice and taking those aspects to to a yin scale modest and detailed results in trance like practice and trancelike states, for viewers with the “luxury” of contemplative time. Sanctification of this kind of time is as important to the spirit as sunshine and fresh air are to the body.

(Bruce Conner images Courtesy of GALLERY PAULE ANGLIM)

            Aside from these works and some others similarly inspired,  the function of visual art  as a contemplative aid is lost to most of us, and it is lost partly because of a vision that is exclusive rather than inclusive. The reasons for art’s loss of identity as a contemplative aid in the so called west are the exclusivity of the vision as one religion, its confinement to a few monastics and most recently, its use in art as an idol and icon symbolizing power and wealth, enshrined in amber and paralyzed by its incasement in  the gold of consumer culture.

            In the last two thousand years arts functions have been monastic and educational,  serving  the spirit in monasteries and serving institutions outside of them.  The monastic and contemplative values of art are discarded and mentioned minimally, which is strange, because it is this element of contemplation that is the largest missing element  for most of us  in our day to day living. But then this is not so strange when observing the uses art is presently engaged in.

            Healing is in too much the minority of positive events happening on this planet at this time and art is hence infused with multiple meanings and references which may in a best case scenario infuse it with the life spirit; if only for the practitioner, which is one of a very few anecdotes to living in a culture that worships the material.  Partly because these practices lead to an interior freedom that is the antithesis of being a good little soldier or going “to work” everyday, “art” is not encouraged as a function of individuation or a way of infusing personal lives with spiritual meaning, but rather utilized to generate and support bureaucracy,signify obscene wealth and irresponsible power and the least wretched of this group, as decoration.. Decoration is actually a good thing. We just want more from art. We have gone more in the direction of “more” of everything except what art is a its fundamental core, which is spiritual.

            The elements of stillness, consideration and contemplation suffer a lack of value in our lives, making them illusive to connect with. This is symptomatic of how yang, or male energy supplants and over takes the values and attributes of yin in our culture, where action, power and materialism are valued as prize attributes of functionality rather than the enslaving life destroying things that they are when overgrown as they are now. The yin attributes of contemplation, receptiveness and open spirit essential to balanced life are denigrated as the antithesis of a productive “work ethic” centered way of life.

            The histories of art and theology, so intertwined, may illuminate new ways of living and being, theology by  reintegrating contemplative values into spiritual practice and the emancipation of art practice by making contemplation accessible to the layperson through the practice of art.

            The work of art as history is only done in the most recent sense of the word. The lessons are there in the works completed. All that remains to be done that has any real value is the facilitation of freedom for more of us to participate in our own growing and becoming through practices giving equal time and value to the yin and perhaps for a time not so much to the yang; at least until sanity prevails in the rhythms and movements of our awakening.

Virginia Bryant

january  2009 usa

Catherine Opie: American Historian

By Rebecca Lossin

Catherine Opie: American Photographer, a mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, is a deceitfully simple title. The historical project that so successfully binds images as disparate as black and white cityscapes and larger than life tattooed bodies, is perfectly encapsulated in a label whose meaning is at once obvious and inscrutable.

Best known for a series of formal portraits taken in the early 90’s and easily figured in terms of the controversy-ready content of the queer communities they document, the name Catherine Opie does not evoke the traditionally de-politicized landscape.  But a large part of the exhibition is taken up by this genre and its counterpart, the cityscape.  The painstakingly formal, 40” x 50” chromogenic prints of ice fishing huts on the frozen white lakes of Minnesota reminded me of the sparse winter landscapes of Andrew Wyeth and the broadness of the title, American Photographer, began to make sense to me.

“ I prefer winter and fall,” said Wyeth, “when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.” 

Opie’s work  does not seek to explain these itinerant communities. Nor is her stance that of objective documentarian and its attendant cultural privilege. Fully aware that no one experience is inclusive, Opie’s position on the periphery of Surfers/Ice Huts underscores the limitations of a single observer. But its emphasis on the structural components of a community, re-asserts this position’s relationship to a larger structure, rescuing the individual gaze from social and historical obscurity.  

Wyeth’s sense of loneliness in the bone structure of the landscape was not revelatory; its obscurity was integral to his experience of it.  Opie posits a similar relationship to the [itinerant] communities that she photographed in Surfers/Ice Huts.  These lines of red huts dwarfed by the expanse of white frozen lakes, and grey bodies of surfers subsumed by grey waves, indicate the existence of something unknowable waiting beneath.

While Opie’s relationship to the queer community is certainly not one of excluded observer, her inclusion in it presupposes an outsider position similar to the one she assumed in Surfers/Ice Huts. And the refusal to speak for the subject of the photograph that this relationship implies is an act that is arguably more pertinent to her portraits- the depiction of a bodies that are too often spoken for even if they are rarely spoken of.

Opie has positioned herself as an historical actor- product and producer of culture and it is the photographer’s participation in an historical process that binds these anti-climactic images of surfers waiting for waves- their bodies so small in relation to the gray scale ocean making an argument for the label anti-portraiture- to her large formal portraits of de-formalized gender.  

The intersection of the subject and history is re-articulated in the formal references to historic paintings and rules of portraiture so carefully observed in pieces such as Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994). Opie has photographed herself seated in front of heavy drapery, whose pattern has been carved into her chest as a decorative flourish below the word “pervert” in large gothic letters. Her arms are punctured by tidy rows of needles; her face is covered in a black leather mask; her hands are folded neatly in front of her.  Opie refers to this as her “Henry VIII” portrait.  In yet another formulation of historical relationships, the scarred ‘pervert’ remains legible in Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004), an image of  Opie breast-feeding her daughter in a pose evocative of the Virgin Mary.  The inscription’s permanence, no longer bloody but linguistically in tact, does not speak to its lasting and painful stigma as much as the reformulation of its meaning when written on the subject of its history.   Not only does the word take on significance in terms of the virgin birth, but in terms of ten years on a living moving body- the intersection of the unifying, transcendent narrative  of History and its individual and finite performance. 

In addition to reflecting Opie’s historical project, the curators’ choice to present Opie as iconic at a particularly conservative and reactionary moment in American History, is an important political act in itself.   More than a series of events leading to the present, “history is the creation of values and meaning by a signifying practice that requires the subjection of the body. Solidly situating Opie at the center of this historical narrative recognizes the violence inherent in the formation of the word American. But it is also an optimistic gesture, an act of posterity that envisions a future American; one slightly more liberated from the cultural morass of conservatism and marginalizing gender politics, from which Catherine Opie so unexpectedly emerged

Prospect 1 Log # 3: Shirin Neshat at the Newcomb Gallery, Tulane University, 11.20.08

By: Brian Boyles

We do a Country radio show every Sunday up at Tulane.  Yeah, that’s right, DJ Toney Blare and his Queen Dru-Nancee, they’re doing a Country show.   I know. 
See, I haven’t really paid my (figurative) dues at the station since I exercised my alumni rights and re-joined two years ago.  I admit that.  So when they stick me with the Country show, I get it.  I’m not mad.  But we do get bored.  I mean, you can’t exactly kill ‘em with that format, you know?  We have a broad enough knowledge and some basic views on the genre, definite respect, by all means, but Country just isn’t where we’re at.  There’s a limitation to it, a certain ceiling you hit, and the cracks we make are sporadic and short.  We love Hank Williams and Merle Haggard and the outlaw fringe, and we try not to slip into corny in the remaining 2 hours.

I bring this up because we ducked into the Newcomb Art Gallery a few weeks ago before our show to see Women Without Men, the collection of films by Shirin Neshat on display as part of Prospect 1.  This was on the first weekend of the biennial, and Neshat was surely on my list of artists to see.  But that visit was rushed and we watched about 3 minutes of “Zarin,” which I think I saw in Hiroshima a few years ago.  Better come back when we have time, I thought. 

So when I heard that there would be a reception for the show this week, I figured I’d make the trip up there after work and watch the other films, see how they felt in a crowd. 
My initial thought from the earlier visit—that the sound overlap between the different galleries was unfortunate and detrimental—disappeared with the presence of so many people, a good thing.  However, the night outside was crisp and I was feeling a little impatient and a little like stomping around the stomping grounds with a coffee, so I settled on seeing one piece. 
Because I figure you should be able to do that, regardless if the film is part of a series, a retrospective, a group show, whatever.  Sit down and take in the work by itself, without relying on continuity or the curator’s notes to guide you.  I know Neshat’s career fairly well, so I chose to see one of the newest films to find out where she was at. 

Munis was made in 2008 and takes place during the 1953 coup that installed the Shah.  People are in the streets and a young woman is in a room, listening to a radio (the broadcast is subtitled, the ensuing dialogue is not).  A man enters the room and yells at here, finally unplugging the radio violently.  Outside, people march in a black and white dream tempo, demanding that Yankee Go Home and that Dr. Mosaddegh’s government be reinstated.  Next, back in full color, the young woman is seen on a rooftop.  She hears the chants, then closer footsteps and the crack of a rifle.  She peers over the edge and watches a man writhe in the courtyard.  He looks up at her and she jumps.  For a moment she seems to fly and then she falls, landing on her back next to the man. 

“How did you get here?”  she asks.  They discuss memory and she says she is numb.  He says there is only distance here.

Again in black in white, the woman is in the street, joining a mostly male crowd to face the Shah’s soldiers.  The movement of the protesters and the soldiers alike feels like modern dance, not fully engaged, bloodless, a drama of masks and close-up.   There is a massacre.

Back in the courtyard, the two bodies lie together and continue their stilted dialogue (which feels a little like spoken dialogue that sometimes happens in modern dance, actually).  It ends with her promising him a place “where no one dared call you a traitor.”  Then she (or her spirit) gets up and dashes.
I watched the film twice, and then read the handout, which told me that this was part of a continuing series of films based on the novel Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur.  The woman in the film lives in the home of an ultra-religious brother, and the man in the courtyard was a journalist. 
You know what?  That gave me some clues, but it didn’t widen the meaning a damn.  For real, I hope this goes somewhere for Neshat, and I respect her decision to focus on a longer narrative and to include spoken words (many of her films are heavy on gazes and the movement of groups), but this film barely went anywhere from the opening to the ending.  At some point, I wonder if the same could be said of the artist’s work to date.
The oppressiveness of Iranian society, particularly its brutal treatment of woman; the rituals that alternately enslave and liberate them; unrequited magnetism between oppressed individuals; intersections with the outside world; these are the themes Neshat has drawn from for quite awhile, and they are certainly fertile, worthy, and important.  They do not, however, constitute works by simply showing up.  Instead, they can devolve into gestures, shortcuts that benefit from the political sympathies of the Western liberal, but ALSO the Western Establishment which relishes the graceful demonization of an Axis member.  Nowhere is this clearer than in the treatment of that moment when democracy first fell in Iran.  We get a two-dimensional character sketch that shows us what we already know about that moment, with no complication beyond a boilerplate post-colonial narrative and some obtuse psychological dance-speak.  And the whole thing is buried in a reference to a novel, which gives it an escape hatch from meaning.  Dig this official handout/interpretation/guidebook passage: 
“(Munis) realizes that [only?] in death is it possible for her to gather courage, determination and strength to break out of the traditional woman’s role and come close to the political struggle marking the country.”  In death?  That’s where she’ll get courage?  That’s where she can break from tradition and join the struggle? 

Like doing the Country show, the film left me pretty blank.  There was that well-worn melody/landscape, but nothing lurked, nothing threatened, nothing came into focus or took me somewhere else.  Do I believe those days in 1953 were devastating, consequential, tragic?  Yes.  Did I believe that on the way in?  Pretty much.  Will I always associate the girl Munis with that time?  Not really.  She and the film of the same name played out like a brief encyclopedia entry, a standard verse-chorus-vers-chorus ditty from Nashville.  Point being, I shouldn’t have to say, I like that song because it evolved from Appalachia, Africa, Hollywood, and thus carries a weight.  Or, I like it because that guy is a real outlaw, alright.  When I like the song, it is because it breaks my heart or carries me through or makes me laugh, whatever the name on the album cover.  What Neshat does here (and I glanced at the other films, I admit) is retread under the guise of Grand History.  The result saps the meaning out of that moment, flattening it out into the obvious, same ol’ song. 

That is a bad thing to say about important shit like revolution and music.  Probably won’t do that radio show much longer, I know that. 

Prospect 1 Log #1: 11.8.08 & 11.9.08

By Brian Boyles

The Old US Mint, Esplanade Avenue

Fred Tomaselli & El Anatusi

The works of these two artists hang in adjoining galleries in the Mint.  While they fit quite naturally next to each other, I think the contrast in their official interpretation is instructive as to the difficulties in pulling this Prospect 1 thing off. 

From what I’ve heard, in biennial organizer Dan Cameron’s description and in other reviews, much of the art in this city-wide exhibition will have New Orleans as its subject.  This is quite a difference from other biennials, which are often just a collection of the last 2-4 years of Chelsea hits from disparate sources.  Instead, this exhibit will feature work made specifically for this site, unveiling the interpretations and reflections on New Orleans of the international contemporary artist.   We in the audience will see what they have to say about the place and events surrounding their art. 

How weird.  And how wrought with danger and hope.   Danger, because an artist is as apt as anyone to misread history or politics, but is talented in ways that can manifest and overstate that misreading.  Hope, because the artist may bring to light the meanings and details that others miss, illuminating and recharging the atmosphere with new colors and angles. 

From what I can tell, most New Orleanians have learned to err on the side of caution, i.e. to look for the danger.  Almost to a fault, they don’t want to be told, they want to tell.  And they’ll fight like a motherfucker over issues of authenticity and the ownership of this recent narrative.  Whoever the artist is, he/she better know the facts and be original with the fantasy.

Prospect 1, however, has chosen to wade right into town and take the place on as the collective subject.  Some have questioned the value of this enterprise to New Orleans and its residents, other than the hotels and restaurants.  Personally, I look at Prospect 1 as a gift, both to your average interested citizen and to the artists who live here.  For a little over 2 months, we can travel through our city and see what International Contemporary Art has to say about us, and then we can either heartily shake International Contemporary Art’s hand or we can spit in its eye.   If she puts herself in the right position, the local artist can make and sell work and tap into new channels and connections, broadening the reach of her artistic voice while ingesting the forms that descend on us from the world’s creative class.  What’s not to like? 

So what does this have to do with an artist from Nigeria and an artist from San Jose, CA?  I believe they tell us of the trepidation that the organizers are conscious of and will struggle to get past.  The tapestries by El Anatusi needed no placard phrase to explain their connections to our location, to the historic and cultural body of New Orleans.  Those connections were in relief, they popped out with meaning.  Next door, Tomaselli’s collages were dope, vaguely African, delicate but sharp.  They did not require nor deserve, however, the explanation:

“The three painting on view were all made after Hurricane Katrina, and represent a form of composite rendering of how the artist imagines disaster, with nature itself as the starting point.”

Uh, that Katrina shadow may or may not be in the mind of the artist, but not a thing suggests it in the work.  By contrast, Anatusi’s tapestries speak to our long rusting, liquor-littered  visual field—the majesty of a closed brewery or the blown out wall of an old apartment building on Earhart Blvd., or the new savannahs of the disappeared housing projects.  Paint chips and untamed banana trees and abandoned cathedrals, the strange confluence of decay and classicism, these are all New Orleans kin to Anatusi’s work.  His labels and bottle tops could’ve been harvested from any corner here, and he made something rich and transcendent from them—a process close to the New Orleans soul.  Transformation, not clarification, gives hope. 

If the connection is not there, I’m saying, just allow the art to be.  The forcing of the issue is what hurts us when we talk to outsiders.  The interruption before we can explain ourselves.  We don’t want to talk about Katrina and the government all day.  We also don’t want to be told about them, either. 

Sanford Biggers

Plunked from within, the keys of the piano played “Strange Fruit” with no hands.  The brown baby grand was wrapped around a tree, the trunk shooting right through the body of the baby grand.  The sculpture stood on the landing of the second floor in the Mint.  Now, minus the song playing—the dream-like quality of a player piano—many of us saw scenes like that, an instrument or a washing machine or countless cars wedged into trees.  Crazier, more violent physical facts.  To give this thing a song, and that song—redundant.    Most of all, this is a small scale case of another issue: this landscape, what happened here, the course we navigate on a daily basis, all of it is full of accidental works of sculpture that blow the mind and defy ownership.  Mirrors, no matter their craftsmanship, are not enough. 

Favorite fact:  The man who wrote “Strange Fruit” adopted the Rosenberg children after the parents were executed.  Recently, those children came to the conclusion that, yes, their parents were spies. 

Also, speaking of trees: I wonder if there’ll be any Jena 8 in our biennial? 

Stephen G. Rhodes

In the gallery off the landing where the piano tree stood, was the video installation of Stephen Rhodes.  Part of this installation was a crashing soundtrack, coming from different sources.  This sound bled fully and unfortunately onto the landing, so that even with the “Strange Fruit playing,” it was in mix of that soundtrack…

…The soundtrack of that wreck of an installation.  This is the first piece I’ve seen in P1 to address the Administration and patriotism, and I’m sure it won’t be my last.  But that Administration is over.  And so here we have the first “test of time” for the last 8 years of political contemporary art from the US. 

It is a vital coincidence, the election.  Here we have a collection of the last few years of international art, and for the first time, that era—our era—is seen in light of the election.  P1 launched at the climax of the campaign and will run through the inaugural.  That will be quite the lighting for an exhibit. 

Works of art will stand up against that most recent history.  Our outrage doesn’t end and the conditions on the ground are the same, so work made prior to this event oughta stand up fine.  I guess we’ll see.

Or else change our definition of “stand up.”  This hall of balloons and briefcases, bent flagpoles and discarded ballots looks a bit like a hotel suite after an election party.  On the walls hang large portraits with the subjects blurred out like Hiroshima ghosts in the concrete.  Pennies and dimes and political theory books lay on the red carpet.  Overstuffed chairs and globes stand on a riser that takes up one corner and the projectors all sit obtrusively on what look to be classroom desks.  The films show a man, I think maybe the artist, ripping up photos of presidents, and of the same man—I think—in presidential costumes.  The scores sound like a casino or a violent video game.  It is all angry and campy. 

And not very critical.  I mean, the whole hall is a kind of tantrum, a rash little exercise in iconoclasm, not unfamiliar in the galleries of the Bush Era.  We suffered through many an artist’s misstatement in that era, when not a few galleries hosted what amounted to therapy for pent-up “I Hate My Daaaaad” wails by artists who hadn’t given much thought to politics before 9/11.  Those insta-protests may finally come to an end.  This particular installation would’ve been questionable a year ago; today, it is happily out of date. 

Srdjan Loncar

I dig the US Mint.  It is an old warhorse of a museum.  Our last visit was for the Napoleon exhibit.  I love me some Napoleon, to a benign fault, I’d say.  They had his coat, his maps, his hats, the little bee pendants he was so fond of.  Perfect fit for the building. 

The first floor of the mint holds a collection of odd machinery for money printing from the 19^th century.  Levers and buttons and cranks.  Truly a rich backdrop for an installation of art from today’s international avant-garde. 

From the Esplanade Avenue entrance, you come into a hall at the end of which sits the reception desk.  On either side of this hall are small rooms with stone floors, cave-like in their curves and lighting.  For P1, New Orleans-based artist Srdjan Loncar has installed a pallet of “counterfeit” cash in the left room, stacks of bills in a neat square.  In the room to the right, a pallet of gold spray-painted briefcases. 

Tell me: if you were told, “Sir/Madam, you will have the two entrance positions in the US Mint for this big art show thing we’re putting together, please have at it,” would this be the best you could come up with?  Doesn’t this seem like the knee-jerk thought, the starting point, only the most literal output?  That’s the challenge today and for this whole enterprise: merely connecting the dots in this landscape gives you more than enough to work with.  Meaning and symbolism aren’t hard to come by.  Getting beyond and through that, there’s the work New Orleans (and everywhere always) needs.  In a way, this production of counterfeit is just that—an exact copy of value, done with relative exactitude, speaking of and to nothing besides its exact referent. 

Oh, and the trick is supposed to be that you can buy the cases and the “money.”  Yeah. 

11/9/08: The New Orleans African-American Museum

The New Orleans African American Museum resides in a planter’s mansion in the Treme, the oldest African-American neighborhood in the nation.  The main house sits on a corner lot, with grand galley porch and a rear yard with several shotgun houses for slave quarters, all of the structures raised up from the ground.  Today a second line parade for the Sudan social club is about to begin as we make our way to the museum.  Treme is one of the nexuses of black culture in the city and parades still roll on weekends or whenever, especially in the Fall, regardless of occasional harassments and the increasing gentrification.  Little boys in sky blue Sunday shirts and navy blue hats are followed by older men in similar dress and then come a group of ladies in lemon suits, another club, each collection separated by a different brass band and flanked by onlookers and second-liners. 

Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry: Evidence of Things Not Seen

Inside the main house of the museum, the walls are lined with portraits of civil rights activists.  In fact the portraits are mugshots, and the ID numbers given to each subject by the Birmingham police are superimposed on the photos by way of a thin silk screen.  The layering blurs the photos and gives them a ghostly quality, as if the memory of each face threatens to fade before our eyes, with only that number left to scar them.   The blurred overlays are the Establishment’s ordering of violence.

Finding Martin Luther King, Jr. in one room, I think about the effect of Obama on this story.  The tragedy of that struggle will never fade, and yet today we have a new resolution, a different story.  As if it all worked out in the end, which we know isn’t the case, and yet…. 

The music builds outside and we walk back onto the porch and down the stairs and stand on the corner in the sun for awhile, as this manifestation of that story marches proudly and routinely through the battered old neighborhood with its colonial curves and ancient shade.  There’s Bennie Pete, the giant tuba player of the Hot 8 Brass Band, thumping his way through the noon.  Whatever this ritual carries, it carries it a little lighter right now.

Rico Gaston

In the backyard, we enter the first long shotgun.  The house is divided into two sections.  In each, two screens hang from the ceiling.  On one side, the soundtrack is gospel, on the other, a delta blues with bottleneck guitar, the sounds clashing in the long room, salvation vs. sin.  In each room is a kaleidoscopic looping of a scene from Gimme Shelter, the film about the Rolling Stones’ Altamont concert.   In the room we enter, the image is just before the riot, when the camera focuses on the young black man in the lime jacket who sticks out in the crowd of white acidheads.  Again and again, he sticks out, as if we are the eyes of the coming terror.

In the other room, we watch the attack scene when the paid-in-beer Hells Angels security force descends on the man, Meredith Hunter, who pulled a pistol and was stabbed and kicked to death.  It is that moment, some old heads will say, when the Woodstock dream died.

Well, it was a naïve fucking dream, I say, and let it be a warning to us, just as it was a wake-up to the Stones.  If you watch the actual movie Gimme Shelter, there’s a scene after the concert where the Stones gather in a dressing room and listen to the radio as Angels leader Sonny Barger blasts Jagger and the rest for putting the gang in this situation.  The faces of the young Brits are seriously worried, as if Barger might jump through the radio and whip their limey asses.  One of them, I think Charlie Watts, says in bewilderment, “Seemed like a perfectly nice fellow.”   No, he was a Hells Angel, part of a gang of meth freaks who were in no way bent on a brighter future.  Let us not be as foolish as those blues loving Brits; posturing is a dangerous substitute for a real understanding of America’s racial history.  Ramos sticks us in one of those fateful, wrought moments, and the setting is a slave’s house. 

William Kentridge

For a good decade now, I’ve been fascinated with Kentridge’s work.  I believe he has done more to obliterate the form/content divide than anyone in recent history.  Centered on memory and the pathos of apartheid, his animated films are endlessly provocative, both visually and in the ongoing narrative that connects them.  All that being said, his piece in the second shotgun surprised me.

The room is entirely dark but for a round table in the center, on the other side of a partition from the door to the quarters. Upon the table is a swirling image projected from directly above.  In the center of the table is a glass cylinder and in that cylinder, the image on the table is refracted into clarity.  We watch a movie play out in that small crucible, a story coming together from the blurred lines that surround it.  This is memory as a vessel for the distortions of reality, the tracks of time.  The fevered carnival within features bombing and landscape, a gas mask hot air balloon, tanks that turn into birds into the rhinos that inhabit other Kentridge films.  The story is more abstract than other works, perhaps even darker (in content, not coloring), and the technique of pencil and eraser continues to work as both medium and metaphor.  Martial music alternates with Ethiopian and Eritrean folk songs as we watch this séance play out.   What a weird machine, this sleek embodiment of the mind.

To be continued….

Is a Ph.D. in fine art a pre-requisite for the production of sexually offensive, hyper-color, infantile comic book styled corporate clutter? If your name is Takashi Murakami than the answer is, “yes”. The self-proclaimed creator of a new art movement entitled Superflat, which refers to what Murakami has defined as the lack of distinction in Japan between high and low art, as the flat space in between. A trend he points to in traditional as well as contemporary Japanese art. According to the artist, “Japanese don’t like serious art. But if I can transform cute characters into serious art, they will love my piece.”

Murakami maintains that his goal is to question the Japanese obsession with western art and immature consumerism, by blurring the lines between art and commerce. However, rather than critiquing this shift, his work further intensifies the magnetism. Murakami describes postwar Japanese impotence as a void, popularly obscured by Hello Kitty dolls that the artist has stepped in to fill with ultra commercial merchandise as art. A man who can sell paintings for 1.3 million and toy figures for 50 bucks a pop has demonstrated his capabilities as a marketing genius. Perhaps his designation as the new Andy Warhol and best contemporary Japanese pop artist is just another example of his promotional mastery.

Born in Tokyo in 1962 from working class parents, Murakami earned a BA, MFA, and Ph.D. in traditional Nihonga painting from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. Growing up, he was a member of the Otaku geek subculture, which centers around anime (cartoons) and manga (comic books) that often depict the explosion of the atomic bomb and gritty realities in post-war Japan. They also sometimes serve as outlets for repressed sexual fantasies. Otaku are mainly young Japanese men, who like American trekies or renaissance fair enthusiasts, collect figurines, and go to trade shows, except in this case the figures are often sparsely glad young girls called, bishojo.

As otaku relates to Murakami’s art it is a borrowing from cartoons and animations with the sexual or grotesque element almost made palatable by containing a somewhat child-friendly veneer. The latter is the imposition of an element called kawaii, or cuteness. This presence is found increasingly in his more recent work. Paintings such as Tan Tan Bo capture a combination of otaku and kawaii, which culminate in the figure of a bloodthirsty, yet colorful, cheery caricature. It is this very reference to morbid isolationism, augmented with hyper-color joy, which has rocketed Murakami into the mainstream. Millions of dollars later, he is still known to sleep many nights alone in a sleeping bag in a small building attached to his Japanese factory.

Murakami’s ‘factory’, not ‘studio’, employs over 100 people in locations in Tokyo and New York. The artisans and animators keep production consistent on his large-scale pieces and smaller items for the masses, such as mouse pads, t-shirts, cartoons and stuffed animals. In fact, according to the New York Times, “He no longer applies his hand to his own work. He is a conceptual artist. Yet even though the painting is performed by studio assistants, Murakami exerts tight quality control.”[i]

I stepped into the Brooklyn Museum on a peaceful Sunday afternoon, expecting to be enlightened by its fine collection of high art including the special exhibition, ©Murakami .The Sackler Center for Feminist Art impressed me accordingly, I enjoyed Ghada Amer’s exhibition and was stirred by Judy Chigago’s historically significant Dinner Party. Then journeying upstairs, I found myself on Planet Murakami and I was not quite sure if I liked the alien creatures that I met there. The only familiar icons that I was able to recognize were the Louis Vuitton symbol, lovingly encased in glass, and the familiar sounds of Kanye West emanating from a dark room.

When I regained my bearings, I realized that it was not love that had placed Vuitton behind the glass, no not irony either, it was pure commerce. These items were on sale! The handbags were protected from thieves and curious reviewers like myself, by young women clad in sleek white suits. I enquired as to what the prices were and was told that most bags were around $1,500. However, when I asked the ladies how many purses they sold per day on average, they told me that they could not disclose that information. The custodians of Planet Murakami are indeed secretive. I managed to deduce after repeated questioning that they sold around 100 bags daily, but $150,000 per diem is small potatoes for Murakami, who has said that he likes to keep his artwork accessible to those who cannot afford the million-dollar purchase price on select original pieces.

The Kanye music video and animations featuring Kiki and Kakai, two of Murakami’s cute little monster-creatures are shown in the small black box cinema. One of them has three blinking eyes, is he meant to frighten or comfort little children? Positive affects seem to be working on the large collection of young children who populate this dark room on the day of my visit. They sit utterly absorbed in the more than slightly perverse animations. Perhaps, the corruption of young minds is a small price to pay for selling merchandise.

The cartoon room at the start of the exhibition, the gift shop at the end and the Louis Vuitton boutique in the middle are exerting a force on me, which makes it hard to focus in and find the “art”, but I am determined so I hold steady. I am greeted by two life sized, although anatomically incorrect installations. The first Hiropon, is a rendering of a blue haired woman, with a barbiesque omission of her lower private parts, and a playboy style enlargement of her upper private parts. From these breasts, which are larger than her head, she squirts a semi-circle of white milk, which serves as her jump rope. Hiropon shares her name with a drug that was in use in post-war Japan. The male figure opposite her entitled My Lonesome Cowboy, assumingly her partner on this alien planet, has an oversized private part, from which he also shoots out white milk like substance in the shape of a lasso. Remembering the Sackler Center, it is hard to understand how blatantly sexist work can share space with feminist expressions. ‘Art is dialogue,’ I reassure myself.

Murakami is not new to controversy, if the mid-exhibition bag boutique isn’t enough to make museum goers, question whether they are on Park avenue or Eastern parkway, we should be thankful that we are not elite enough to have been invited to the opening night party. If we had been there, we would have wondered for a third time, where exactly we were as we stumbled upon a fake Chinatown in the Museum’s courtyard. Actors, who looked strikingly like recent African immigrants were on hand to man floor cloths, lined with pseudo-fake Louis Vuitton luggage. Actually, the bags were the only real part of the scene, which was designed to simulate the illegal knock-off handbag trade. Fake African street hawkers? Cultural insensitivity seems not to much worry Murakami, neither does environmental destruction. In fact, the Vuitton’s are not the first bags that Murakami has made. In 1991, while Japan was under pressure to agree to a ban on killing endangered whales, Murakami’s decided to make randoseru, school children’s backpacks, out of whale skin.

Still on Planet Murakami and determined to find the high art, I pass by a Takashi brand poster, another Vuitton tribute and textile-like painting, Eye Love SUPERFLAT, Murakami flower decal wallpaper, a virtual reality female airplane installation, Second Mission Project ko2 and more renditions of Kiki and Kakai along with a few of Murakami’s other cartoon characters. This feels like an advertising conference, but I have faith. Downstairs I eventually find two moving paintings, each of Daruma, the Indian monk who brought Zen Buddhism to China and Japan, accompanied by an ancient koan. “I open wide my eyes, but see no scenery. I fix my gaze upon my heart.” The koan reflects my emotion and I resolve to voice honestly my critique of this exhibition: Murakami’s brilliant explanations about the purpose behind his art, only occasionally translate into the work itself. On planet Murakami, he is the new King of Pop, art that is, but outside in Brooklyn, art invested in meaning, which respects people, holds more cultural capital.