COURTNEYMALICK

July 2016

The Politics of Portraiture

Kenneth Bergfeld, Cecile B. Evans, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Jamian Jullian-Villani, Josh Kline, Lynn Hershman Leeson

Jessica Silverman Gallery
488 Ellis Street, San Francisco
June 24 - August 27, 2016

Portraiture, of the self or otherwise, could ostensibly be considered the underlying, inherent objective of all art. The artist’s work, regardless of the form it takes, ultimately signals a snapshot of sorts, of them and their relationship or understanding of their surroundings. This is of course a much blown out interpretation of the form of portraiture, which, as we all well know, comes from a very long and sordid historical imperative. However, with this in mind, it is a particularly apt moment—one in which portraiture is making probably its biggest comeback ever via social media and its contention with the ominous threat of constant image-capturing surveillance—for an exhibition such as The Politics of Portraiture to take place.

Today’s incessant online version of portraiture in some ways thwarts the basis on which the practice of the form was initially conceived. Long ago, one’s portrait was a commemorative and stoic object to behold. It stated resolutely and objectively the stature and character of those depicted within its frame, and its existence was meant to represent the memory of the sitter’s name and family as such. Today, insta-portraiture, as we might refer to it, seems to generally fulfill the opposite purpose. Rather than standing as an everlasting symbol of one’s image and being, a selfie, snap, or friend pic is only a singular, finite, and fleeting, example of one’s personality and life. Such disposable images are meant to be scrolled through within seconds after which another image of something entirely different will undoubtedly appear in one’s feed, and the thought of one’s image of themselves will soon be forgotten.

But insomuch as each post that is uploaded to the virtual worlds wherein many of us now spend significant time “socializing,” is merely a miniscule fragment shared to update friends and random followers, we may find that the ongoing practice of such constant media engagement in the form of small, incremental contributions is actually a new mode of long-term self portraiture in and of itself. This nods again to the looming fear of the overseeing Panopticon; the brave new world in which everyone is a spy of sorts and everyone’s personal life and information is available for all to access.

These dystopian fears or premonitions can be seen bubbling under the surfaces of works within The Politics of Portraiture, such as the newest editions to Josh Kline’s series of cast hands holding various communication and recording devices, RAID Drives and Facial Incarceration Software(both 2015-16). The same sinister but alluring attitude can be found in the swaying motion of the digitally rendered, feminine arms and hands that create a mandala-like circular form in Cecile B. Evans’s holographic sculpture, Handy if you’re learning to fly IV (2016). Both of these works, and the overall practices of each of the artists, point at once to details of the current world in which most of us still operate and yet signal ways that the importance of individual identity is gradually melding more and more with the robotic, the mechanic, the faceless.

Works such as Detroit-based Matthew Angelo-Harrison’s self-built, 3D-printer, The Consequence of Platforms (2016)—which meanders in an unpredictable formation, pushing a thin tube of grey clay out onto a low-level flat surface into the shape of an unknowable male face—echoes the kind of liminal confusion produced by both Kline and Evans. Here, on one hand, the reflective nature of portraiture is addressed, by way of the printer’s ability to produce endless, seemingly identical copies without any sense of an original, yet with minor differentiation inflections like a Warhol screen print. On the other, reproduction and the parturition therein, is called into vital question once one considers the full extent of the advent of the DIY 3D printer, and its ability, among so many other things, to print another replica of itself.

With the inclusion of Lynn Hershman Leeson, The Politics of Portraiture seems to come full circle. Hershman Leeson has been fucking with the crumbling stability of the long-upheld aim to prove the permanence of the notion of identity itself since the early 1970s. Like other artists to follow, later in the ‘80s and ‘90s when identity politics became much more of a hotbed of theoretical discourse, Hershman Leeson understood and demonstrated early on the referential, collaged, easily established, and then re-established ways in which identities form and dissipate again and again. She proved this easily enough by creating an entirely other identity (Roberta Breitmore 1973-79) that included bank accounts, a drivers’ license and a personalized set of preferred beauty products.

In this way she has gotten it right all along, as our new, supposedly more social yet narcissistic forms of interactive online media reveal: the construct of one’s identity is not at all accessible by way of an image taken of their likeness, it is instead the larger picture one pieces together through fragments. And therein lays the frustrating conundrum.

April 2016

Timur Si-Qin

A Place Like This
Team Bungalow
306 Winward Avenue, Venice, CA
March 13 – May 8, 2016

For most, up until very recently, Team Gallery has meant something somewhat distinctly “New York.” Its exhibitions tend to present young to mid-career artists whose work looks, feels, and behaves accordingly, utilizing bright colors, “cutting edge” technology and software, and contemporary vernaculars and senses of humor that can appeal to the youngest of art enthusiasts. Team Bungalow, on the other hand, can be found in the relatively laid back and funky town of Venice, CA. There, Team takes up shop not in a streamlined white cube like their sister gallery in Soho but instead in a domestic space just blocks from the beach, where bikes, rollerblades, hula-hoops and jam sessions are still the most prominent of daily actives.

The gallery is very small, with an arched roof and a wide side entrance. Inside, works are arranged in relation to a now unused fireplace and mantle; there are windows on all sides, adorned with quaint curtains, comfy designer chairs for chilling out, and a hotel lobby-esque bouquet of flowers atop an end table.

This intimate setting allows for a truly composed exhibition that functions as one comprehensive installation with a whole set of interlocking pieces. Furthermore, this cozy atmosphere becomes the perfect foil for the cult-like vibe of Berlin-based Si-Qin’s solo exhibition, A Place Like This, which hinges on new work that extends his ongoing ‘brand-as-project,’ PEACE, into New Peace—a simulated “spiritual institution.” PEACE debuted in 2014 and consists of a series of Abercrombie-inspired photos with a clear advertising-centric agenda. These images feature the adorable antics of three well built, white young men and one angelic, small-breasted white young woman who appear in various, idyllic outdoor settings. They relax in a lake near a perfectly rugged-looking wooden dock or in a manicured, empty field. In these images, the models tend to wear little to nothing—sometimes a pair of wet, white underwear for the men and a sheer white tank top with matching underwear for the woman. Conversely, New Peace includes no hot young things in any of its imagery. It is instead focused on the inherent natural beauty of plants, rivers, mountains, waterfalls, sunsets, and vast horizons. This is a noteworthy shift in that, while previously Si-Qin’sPEACE images pretended to sell a lifestyle made tangible by the generically attractive substrata of millennials, here, with New Peace, we see land, water trees, and rocks themselves all glossed up and ready to be marketed as consumable goods.

Upon entering Team Bungalow, the flattened out and over-glossed LED screens, presenting this lush imagery of nature, recall the “Euthanasia Poetic Scene” from the sci-fi classic,Soylent Green (1973), in which people volunteer to be humanely killed by the government in exchange for one chance to see, in an epic, surround screen video, scenes from the apocalyptic world’s long lost nature in all its god-like glory. The whole manner in which the scene for A Place Like This is set—with the puffy, tan leather chairs for relaxing placed next to the welcoming fresh flowers, brochures strategically placed nearby, and te fireplace full of white candles of varying heights—undoubtedly promises to exude tranquility, making it clear that you are entering a zone in which you are being sold something. The irony that all of the imagery is of natural wonders is what makes it so sad.

The tone of “the cult,” (particularly apropos for an exhibition in L.A. and even more so in the notoriously hippied-out area of Venice), is palpably intentional. Si-Qin perpetuates this with the undeniable beauty of the works on view, such as the very large scale LED screens conjoined at one corner of the space. One is titled, Visit Mirrorscape 2016: A Land Reflected (2016), which plays a snowy mountain scene littered with majestic green treetops, and the other, On the Path to Mirrorscape (A Place Like This) (2016), shows the continuation of the panoramic view with a denser bird’s-eye perspective of the forest and an adjacent ravine. The second of Si-Qin’s double-pronged approach comes with the over-propagandized façade that the show evokes, particularly with the central sculptural piece, Mirrorscape Effigy 1(2016), made with powder-coated aluminum, steel, electronics, plaster, sand, plastic botanicals, and vinyl, but which also appears like a miniature microcosmic model mirrored inwards onto itself into infinity.

It is precisely this unholy type of blending of the magnificence of nature with the pathetic yet often effective marketing strategies of neatly, individually packaged little stand-ins of something ultimately intangible, which allow for immediate, if not altogether authentic gratification, that is so much at the crux of American culture today, and therefore so clearly at the butt of Si-Qin’s highly stylized joke. Even the diorama-like flimsy-ness of Mirror Effigy 1, along with the “New Peace” logo prominently featured on its frame, speaks to the base level of shoddy production that so many companies that are ultimately in the comfort or beauty business, are all too well known for. The question posed by Si-Qin seems to be, how easily digestible is this scheme for you? How willing are you to allow yourself to be enveloped by the intoxication of these images of natural wonders, which we know could have been fully generated by image rendering software?

At the same time, with the notion of the cult, the spiritual, the all-encompassing organization that New Peace represents, the exhibition also proposes that perhaps the overall feeling that this type of imagery is, and has always been, meant to convey is enough at this point in time: that entire belief systems followed by the many can in fact be founded entirely on the illusion of an image. Ultimately then, if New Peace proves this type of marketing and eliciting of one’s faith to be effective, we can only imagine that the sky is the limit for what future organizations might be able to sell us.

December 2015

From the Singular to the Indexical in Contemporary Portraiture:

Paul Sepuya in Conversation with Courtney Malick

For the past 14 years Paul Mpagi Sepuya has lived in New York and worked as a photographer whose focus was pinned tightly on portraiture. Not only did Sepuya think of his photos as portraits, he was, in the beginning, serious about shooting “straightforward” portraiture, as in taking a singular image of a person as a way of, at least within that moment, fully capturing their exterior and even their identity. However, unlike other portraitists, Sepuya found himself returning over and over again to the same subjects at different points in their lives. Not only that, but his process seemed as much based on happenstance as it did on investigation. He would rarely organize a shoot or a sitting within a particular place, but instead would randomly run into people he hadn’t seen in a while and arrange for a shoot on the spot. In this way, a fluidity that is not very characteristic of much portraiture seeped more and more into Sepuya’s practice, until it eventually became clear that to take one picture of one person and present it as conclusive was not only false but futile.

It proved far more intriguing and generative to begin to cultivate an ongoing lexicon or index of sorts through which many lingering stories and personal narratives might or might not reveal themselves over time. His practice, at least conceptually, drastically shifted from singular images to an ever-developing, meandering string of recurrent faces, interiors and objects that one, if they paid close enough attention, could read like a novel.

Another, more recent shift, has been Sepuya’s move from New York to Los Angeles in 2014 to begin graduate school at UCLA, where he currently lives and works. As school often does, this time (and the critiquing eyes and viewpoints of his fellow classmates) has allowed Sepuya to look at the massive body of work that he has produced over the past decade from a newly macro perspective. This, he says, has allowed him to see, and begin to respond to, the varying degrees of legibility that run throughout his work as it spans many of the layers of subtext, which have either purposely or inadvertently been inserted into his photographic archive of people and places as their image recurs over time. It has also taken much of the daily bumping-into-a-subject type of process out of his current ways of working, as L.A. unlike New York, rarely yields these kinds of coincidences. Instead, Sepuya has found a renewed significance for the studio space, where he returns to older material and configures new images from fragments, some of which have formed the works that are now on view at DOCUMENT gallery in Chicago in his most recent solo exhibition, aptly titled,Figures/Grounds/Studies.

Courtney Malick: We spoke a lot about the different/overlapping trajectories and narratives that you continue to follow as you photograph and re-photograph many of your subjects over long periods of time. Can you say a bit more about the organizational process that goes into this on the studio and shooting side and conversely on the editing and exhibition side?

Paul M. Sepuya: When it comes to organizing the narratives and pictures, there are both concurrent and overlapping streams. First, there are the ongoing photographs and related material that I’m making and accumulating within a personally driven portrait practice that follow my friendships and relationships, and then there are the more contained projects like STUDIO WORK, SOME RECENT PICTURES / a journal., or the recent Figures / Grounds / Studies that develop within their own timeline and get “pinched off” so-to-speak from the larger stream.

CM: So you don’t often think in terms of separate bodies of work. Would you say that your work is in some ways one continuous project?

PS: That is true to an extent. Specific projects tend to be defined and framed by exhibition opportunities more than anything else. The underlying content does not change, so many subjects repeat in multiple or reiterated instances that produce different outcomes in different but related projects. My day jobs have always been in arts administration and I love organization, so my source (RAW) files and my negatives are filed by year and then by subject or location. In the physical space of my studio, everything is allowed to wander. I love creative ah-ha moments when things accidentally find themselves in conjunction and conversation.

CM: I see! With organization in mind, I am curious to know if you can explain the ways that various literary works have influenced your imbricated form of portraiture?

PS: Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet is probably the best example of that influence in terms of structure, due to his shifting subjective point-perspective across the four novels of that set. I’m interested in the ideas of genre, what each needs from the author and what each asks of the reader in contextualizing content. Journals, letters, memoirs, autobiography and poetry—Durrell plays with these translations of one genre into another to organize the narrative of his main character and that character’s relationship to the beloved who haunts him. I also think of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Christopher Isherwood and Truman Capote, Patti Smith, and Patricia Morrisroe.

CM: Wow! That is an amazing connection to make. With narrative in mind, can you tell me if there are any particular stories that are unfolding within the works on view at Document?

PS: I am aware of making works where the sum total of content lies outside of the conversation about art. It’s better served by gossip and friendship, and that’s a productive and dynamic place for me to be.

 CM: So then how close to life, do such installations as what’s on view at Document, for example, come?

PS: On the record, I don’t think I’ve ever described a work as illustrating a specific personal narrative of mine, but if you know me there’s a lot you can pick up.

CM: Would you say that this kind of “story” or portrait of a story, is one with layers that allow for differing vantage points based on one’s familiarity with your practice overall?

PS: I think that’s pretty spot-on, thinking about different vantage points based on one’s familiarity with my practice, but also with the day-to-day that falls outside of “art.”  

CM: At first glance, these works seem to be documents, in that they are happenstance shots capturing real people that are a part of your life, photographed within their natural environments, or within a natural relationship to one another. However, I am wondering if it’s possible to read these images of faces, personal items, interiors, etc. as stand-ins or representations of a different, symbolic set of characters or actants that convey a broader meaning?

PS: I do think of the images as constituting figures. These figures can be understood as fragments of the subjects that they are inspired by, but still appear bigger than those subjects. The figures are never disconnected from me or from their subjects, but they do become representations of my desire, which is constructed around the subject. And this relational dynamic, in turn, creates in itself a new character.

CM: Hmm… Can you explain this with regard to a particular piece?

PS: For example, Theodore and the representation of my desire for Theodore are two different things. The representation of fragments is organized and held together momentarily for the resulting photograph, constructed within the “real” space of my studio. The absent character in the studio, with a literal stand-in of the repeated lens, is myself.

CM: Well certainly there are many layers within that configuration—it’s really fascinating to think that continuing to follow your practice over the course of time, one may likely find out new things about works from years ago!

In conclusion, how do you see your work developing as you continue within this framework and also as you complete your graduate studies?

PS: This is a tough one! I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s necessary to depict in the pictures I’m presenting: How much of the investment in portraiture is in the conditions for the making of the picture vs. the content depicted? I’m beginning to physically cut out the subjects, leaving only the margins. In a studio visit with a friend a few days ago we talked about the difference between a picture depicting a performative gesture or arrangement versus an object that performs that same gesture with the viewer, over and over again. The work I’m focusing on developing towards my thesis is keeping this in mind.

October 2015

Matthew Barney

River of Fundament
Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA)
250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles

September 13, 2015 – January 18, 2016

Much has been made of the meaninglessness and conjoining over-extravagance of Matthew Barney’s newest film and sculpture exhibition, River of Fundament, now on view at MOCA in Los Angeles, the only U.S. iteration of the traveling exhibition. Where his acclaimed video opus, The Cremaster Cycle, was released in stages over the course of several years and included differing locales and odd turns on in-depth, abstruse plot twists,River of Fundament is presented all in one gluttonous gulp of a sitting: a six-hour film with two brief intermissions. Not only does the film’s duration alone make it overwhelming to digest, but furthermore, the term digest has perhaps rarely been so apropos, as the film’s endpoint of fecal matter is at the crux not only of its conceptual framework but more viscerally, its visual referents. With all this buzz of the film’s unnecessary grotesquery, it is easy to approach the first of many hours of sitting in the black box at MOCA with a somewhat indifferent attitude, expecting shock value to rule and actual meaning to stagger meekly behind, trying to catch up. This is not entirely untrue, but regardless, it is nonetheless refreshing to see captivating imagery toppled upon itself so densely, even if much of one’s eye-widening is only due to the subject matter’s obvious depravity and spectacle therein.

Within the first minutes of the film, Barney’s character emerges from the shit-filled “river” (which looks much more like just a dank, still, underground puddle of clay-water, which it in fact was), grabs a log of poo out of a toilet with his bare hands and covers it in gold leaf, and then proceeds to turn away from an older, equally filthy man whose penis and the gold-covered turd suddenly appear to be one and the same, in order to let him penetrate him. On the one hand it is annoying that anal sex between two men should be considered such a shocker within contemporary video art, but, on the other hand, it is still certainly more scintillating to look at, much less intellectually or emotionally consider, than, let’s say, a putty-colored abstract painting, the type of which still dominates many a vast white cube. This is not to dispel the ‘trumors’ that Barney’s signature tropes of grandiosity persist throughout Fundament, because they are undeniably there and they are often just as infuriating in their pseudo-intellectual tone as ever. However, as one has always been able to find buried deep within Barney’s amass of seemingly non-sequitur symbols and unusually manifested characters, there are clearly important nods and dissections of moments in history and literature that at times come to the film’s fuzzy fore. Not only that, but Fundament feels far less like a sculpture in video form, as Barney has in the past described his work on screen, and much more like a proper cinematic endeavor, with dialog (of sorts), formal readings and less formal liftings of seminal texts by renowned American authors including Hemingway, Burroughs and Whitman, and cameo performances by major actors, musicians and other artists including Paul Giamatti, Maggie Gyllenhaal, the late Elaine Stritch, Fran Lebowitz, Debbie Harry and Lawrence Weiner, to name just a few.

Most crucial to the entire movie is of course one of literature’s most celebrated, mysterious and self-aggrandizing figures, Norman Mailer, whom Barney cast as Harry Houdini (whose historical resonance has continued to arise throughout Barney’s work and again in later segments of Fundament), in Cremaster 2, which is loosely based on Mailer’s 1979 novel, The Executioner’s Song. The two had since continued an interesting friendship and discussed a potential collaboration that began when Mailer suggested that Barney read Ancient Evenings, a proposition he at first declined. The dialog connecting both of their symbolically shrouded practices was however cut short due to the infamous author’s death in 2007. In Fundament, Mailer’s belated absence leads to several other characters taking on various roles that represent him and his enduring spirit, including his son, John Buffalo Mailer, jazz percussionist, Milford Graves, and a hammered-down carcass of a 1967 Chrysler Imperial, which somehow magically inseminates a woman who later gives birth to a bird (one cannot help but see the through-line here as Barney continues to abstractly parse the demise of the American auto industry, which is also a strong theme throughout The Cremaster Cycle). The invisible character in the movie that runs throughout its strange and often disgusting permutations is Mailer’s highly criticized 1983 novel, Ancient Evenings. Though most of the interactions between the actors take place within a fabricated replica of Mailer’s oft-photographed Brooklyn Heights home in which they congregate to commemorate the writer’s colorful yet secretive life and career, the overall form that the film takes is one that mimics, congratulates, and reconfigures the misunderstood chronicles of Ancient Evenings, which is centered on various Egyptian myths of iconic gods such as Osiris and Isis, and processes of reincarnation, not the least of which is a scatological understanding of waste turned fertilizer.

As for the exhibition outside the black box, perhaps in relation to the film, it makes sense on some level, but the large, obtrusive works fall rather flat. While best known for his plastic, silicone and other synthetic, cream-like, oozing forms, the sculpture at MOCA, cast in rather uncommon materials for Barney, such as iron, bronze, sulfur, salt, zinc, lead, copper and of all things—wood, which he has in the past proclaimed never to work with, feel rather dormant and dull. Even visiting them during intermission and knowing that these are the very objects upon which certain characters pissed, causing the hallowing of the top surfaces of some of the large cube-shaped works, they somehow lack a tangible sense of activation. The lighting in the galleries seems far too stark, bright and frankly clinical to be presenting objects that audiences are all too well aware have been utilized in the telling of a story about death, decay, human excrement, rotting animals, anal sex, and machine on machine demolition. They don’t add to any desperately needed understanding of the overall meaning of the film, though they are large and commanding to look at from a distance.

With this massive undertaking, Barney has proven if nothing else, that he has his own identifiable way of making sense of history, even if that sense is made by merely putrefying and reconstructing various elements that seem not to fit together at the onset. He has created a film that could continue to be analyzed for years to come, and while that does not, in and of itself, make for a good work of art, it is difficult not to see its complexity as a valiant effort at producing and promoting work that does much more than please the eye (or in fact quite to the contrary in this case). River of Fundament may not be his finest work, but it is important to celebrate the fact that it is work of a certain caliber and at the same time incorporates historical, literary, musical, sexual and religious references, builds off of a set of interlocking narratives, uses sculptural sensibilities to create elaborate sets, costumes and make-up, and in the end demands not only the longstanding attention of its viewer, but moreover their will to make a concerted effort to connect its many confounding, distorted, and encoded dots.

September 2015

Math Bass in Conversation with Courtney Malick

Los Angeles-based artist Math Bass, whose current solo showOff the Clock at MoMA PS1 runs through August 31st, 2015, has been carving out a dynamic practice that freely shifts from performance to sculpture to painting to installation, taking up all of the images and objects therein in the same way that one might think of a rotating cast of actors whose appearances stay the same while their characters continue to change from project to project. In other words, outwardly, the works themselves often stay relatively the same, but their behaviors and relationships towards one another continually get redirected and configured. Similarly, Bass’s work traverses one-off and collaborative performances (in which audience members sometimes participate) that involve sculptural sets and props, singular sculptures, interactive architectural installations, and graphic paintings that incorporate her own lexicon of symbols and signs.

While Bass’s practice continues to evolve, it’s an evolution that occurs through conscious recycling and clever interchangeability rather than constantly seeking out the next new thing or drastic change of direction. In this way, previous performances and videos can inform and triangulate a current sculpture or installation, as is the case in Off the Clock, which brings together an array of works formed over the past three years that speak to each other through their shared histories. Each work has stemmed from past performances or previous sculptural projects and now finds themselves repositioned in time and space as well as within the roles that they play in juxtaposition to one another.Off the Clock marks an important and rare example of an exhibition that at the surface seems purely abstract but gradually reveals itself to stand for and interrogate larger questions about perception, language, interchangeability, and perhaps most centrally, where and how the body of the viewer is configured within a given space—not just the space within this show, but space on a much broader and ultimately more intimate level.

Courtney Malick: To begin, I wanted to talk about the connection between your current work, which is geared towards the creation of environments as exhibitions, and the strong performative impulse that I imagine is still present in your work but was perhaps more at the forefront a few years ago. Do you feel as though performance continues to be a through-line of your practice even if in a more abstracted sense than in the past?

Math Bass: Yeah, that’s true. It’s hard for me to always verbally explain the ways that my work has functioned or changed over time.

CM: I know, I realize this is the case for lots of artists as they choose not to express their ideas in a purely verbal way. But with that in mind, it’s kind of funny because there is also an integration of vocabularies and linguistic symbols that runs throughout your work, particularly in your paintings.

MB: Yes, that is there. I am really interested in language as a structural and psychic tool. It is a physical thing and yet at the same time it is also so ephemeral and in that way it opens up these psychic spaces. I like to find ways that a single sentence or the coupling of a few sentences can pull in two different directions simultaneously, which creates this tension in between those polarities. It is between those two poles that I find that a space can be activated and where the performativity of language occurs. In that sense, the way that both language and performativity gets carried out in my work is that I continue to return to those kinds of tensions.

CM: Is that something that you plan out ahead of time? Sometimes your work appears as if a specific frame or set of borders have been preconceived and then set into motion through other paintings, sculptures, and objects within the exhibition. Is that the case?

MB: I don’t usually approach things from a very premeditated position. I’m never saying to myself beforehand, “If I do this I will achieve this effect.”

CM: That’s interesting because something that I noticed from Off the Clock, and also at your show Lies Inside at Overduin & Co. last year, is that the positioning of the viewer seems as though it is a central concern in the way that both shows were put together. I guess that is not actually how your process unfolds?

MB: I am interested in the way that the position of the body opens up a frame and that depending on where you are in relationship to an object or an image within that space you are opening up different frames while also becoming part of them.

So that definitely also has to do with performativity in regards to these installations, though I really don’t even want to call them installations, particularly the work in Off the Clock. 
 

CM: Oh really, why is that?

MB: Well I don’t really feel like it is an installation because everything in it is discrete. I feel like every object or image can function on its own. But maybe I can let go of that idea, maybe the term “installation” doesn’t have to mean that everything has to be supported by each other and therefore always stay together.

CM: I think it is kind of important to make that distinction actually. It seems like people say “installation” to refer to anything that is not a singular work, but technically an installation would mean a set of objects that are meant to be exhibited together in the same or relatively similar configuration.

That also leads into something else that I wanted to ask you about Off the Clock. Can it be seen as a documentary project since a lot of the work has been exhibited previously but in different formats and contexts? Because now there is this culmination of, as you say, “discrete works” that have been shown in the past in fragments and are now all coming together at the same time.

MB: Yes, for this show I pulled from a few different bodies of work. It was a combination of making new work and revisiting older works and remaking them. It ended up being really important to me that I remake certain pieces and sort of go back into them, rather than show the originals. Even though I thought to myself, “Why am I doing this?! I have already made this!” In some instances it was useful for me to return to them and think through them again, and in other cases it was necessary because the originals had been made quickly and were not in the best condition.

CM: So all of the older works at PS1 are actually new versions of their originals?

MB: Not all of them, but some. Others did not need to be remade and some of them had in the past not been used as sculptures but more as performance props or as parts of sets. I am interested in recirculating these works and thinking of them like characters. I have returned to the same sentences that I have used in songs that appear in multiple projects in different ways—they have been in performances, PowerPoints, texts . . . it’s the same idea with the objects that are currently at PS1. For example the cast concrete pants have been used as part of a set that I made for a performance at the Hammer and now they are functioning as singular sculptures in Off the Clock. It’s interesting for me to see how these characters continue to shift and expand in relation to one another as they progress through different formats.

CM: I am wondering if, after selecting certain older works to include in the show and others to recreate, you began making the new works with the intention of responding to your previous works?

MB: I don’t know if I was fully responding to my previous work or more just expanding off of it. For example I made a new piece that looks kind of like two hard-edged dog figures that are connected, which comes from a similar piece that had been two separate dogs. There is also a new version of a piece calledSlingbed, which looks like something in between a gurney and a lounge chair that had been used in a performance in the past. I also made new paintings that directly relate to those that were in  Lies Inside. With every project it seems like a mad dash and a huge overhaul, and then after the show opens, and I can finally decompress. Afterward, it is hard for me to find an access point into the work. So Off the Clock allowed me to re-enter into a lot of previous work that I felt sort of detached from, which was really nice. 

CM: That makes sense. Maybe it was less of a responsive or reflexive approach but more just meditative. Did you make all the new work in New York?

MB: No, most of them I made in my LA studio and shipped to PS1, but I did pour the concrete pants at the museum.

CM: And altogether Off the Clock represents at least three or four years of work, right?

MB: Yes, about three and a half years of my work in different capacities.

CM: Wow! They have functioned in different ways throughout various types of projects over that time and now have finally all been exhibited alongside one another. Does it feel as though they have come to some state of completion or will they continue to be reworked into future projects?

MB: I really like the idea of being able to continue to reconfigure works, though some of course get phased out and then maybe reappear much later and by then have become something totally different but have still stemmed from the same sort of visual or conceptual root of one initial, discrete element.

CM: I am interested in work that is able to function in that way as well, particularly because it can manifest in different ways but continue to ultimately convey the same message. I am still wondering how you see all of these pieces, or characters as you referred to them, now that they have all been shown together. Does that somehow change their meaning for you? Would you be able to do another show like this or is this sort of an end point for their ability to work with one another?

MB: No, I don’t think I would do another show like this. For me this show is this show, and I don’t know what my next will be like. But with this one, it felt sort of like an opening up of everything I’d done over the past few years, and then a closing in a way. Of course, I don’t want to be too definitive about that because I am not totally sure what will happen in the future.

CM: Right. Does it ever gets confusing for you working in this recycling mode? Do you ever start to question the meaning of a particular piece when you are now inserting it into a context that is so different from the one in which it was initially created? Do you ever worry about its legibility as it flows through these various contexts?

MB: You mean is there an aspect of something that becomes almost autoerotic going on?

CM: Yeah, in a way . . . I guess that can be good or bad depending on how you utilize it.

MB: There is definitely that sort of line that you realize exists when you are essentially creating your own language, and that at some point you can potentially go so deep into it that then you start to think, “Wait, this may be illegible to anyone else.”

CM: Is that a concern for you when you think of the viewer?

MB: No, not really.

CM: There is symbology inserted into your work—mainly the paintings—that you must realize viewers are going to make direct references to, like the cigarette, for example, or abstracted letters, steps, or clouds.

MB: Well, some of those symbols that occur within the paintings are more recognizable. I’ve always called that particular image “the cigarette” when thinking about it, even though I wasn’t really trying to depict the actual pictorial representation of a real cigarette. Although, when I first started that series the images were cruder, and the cigarette was much more of a real-looking cigarette. Over time it’s become more formalized and it looks like a shape with a gradient and a plume of smoke. So yes, you can still make the reference to a cigarette, but at other times throughout the series it reads as a column, or a matchstick, or sometimes it becomes more abstract and just looks like any other formal or architectural shape. And in that way it gets used as something that breaks up a plane or gets laid on top of another image in order to disrupt its continuity.

Sometimes everything looks as though it is all on one axis and is contained within a grid and then there is this cigarette or other object that comes into that space that tilts and disrupts the flatness. I did always call that particular image a cigarette, but I have names like that for all of the images or symbols that come into my work.

CM: Really? Even for the things that are much more abstract?

MB: Yes. For example, I had made this amorphous green, tarped object and I always called it “the hedge.”

CM: So do you mainly give those kinds of names just for yourself in order to keep track of them, or do they end up becoming the titles of the works, too?

MB: Sometimes they do. I find titling works to be difficult. Sometimes I just can’t think of anything and don’t want to spend hours trying to come up with something clever. But, at the same time, I do think that titles can be a really effective tool for understanding a work, so I do like coming up with them even though at times it can be agonizing.

CM: I often get a lot out of the title of an artwork. Sometimes I may not have known the name of a work and then when I find out it can really add to or shift my understanding of it. Because of that I am always interested to learn about different artists’ titling processes. Do you usually come up with yours after having made something or can they be a guiding force at the onset?

MB: It depends. Sometimes it can be helpful to start off with one. For example, I did a two-person show with Leidy Churchman at Human Resources in LA in 2013 titled Monte Cristo. It was collaborative in that we were making our own works at the same time and were in constant conversation with each other about them and the show. We had come up with that title at the very beginning, even before either of us had any idea what the work would be. In that instance, as we were making work we were thinking about Monte Christo, and . . .

CM: He seeped in?

MB: Yeah, somehow Monte Cristo came through in both of our works. We each evoked this kind of island that you could really feel within the exhibition. But it doesn’t always work like that. Other times I will have already made something and then all of the sudden the title will pop into my head. 

CM: As I am looking at your paintings I see a very formal and even palette-based connection to Fernand Léger. Is that someone that you have considered as a reference? His works are mainly figurative, but I am wondering when it was that you first made this transition from more ephemeral, performance-based work to these very formal, starkly color-contrasted paintings that you have been showing recently?

MB: I’d have to look at his work to see the connection, but generally I’ve  incorporated drawing and other 2D work into my practice so it wasn’t really a total shift, although earlier on I did tend to use paint more as a prop. I did a lot of these large text-based paintings on raw canvas. They weren’t stretched so they were more like banners than paintings. They had phrases painted on them like, “Who says you have to be a dead dog?” or, “Who says you have to be an historical dog?” At that time I was working with raw canvas and gesso and using this font that was really just basic shapes that sort of represented letters.

CM: Did those older works on raw canvas also have the same kind of graphic quality as your current paintings?

MB: The graphic, hard-edged aesthetic I use has been pretty continuous, even with my video work. I have been thinking recently about what a symbol is and the way that it can be understood as the ultimate flattening of a referent or signifier, and that through creating a symbol we can flatten and then easily identify and understand something. So I am generally interested in pictorial flattening.

CM: I realized when working with artworks that comment on the Internet, that when information, even if it is not imagery, is flattened or condensed is when it is easiest to manipulate. Even when just writing an email you realize that you need to structure your ideas a certain way, give the overall message certain contours, in order to make it easily digestible for the person receiving it. And we of course see this even more with text messages or tweets. It kind of gets back to our discussion about legibility.

MB: It’s true, I do think a lot about physically compressing in order to expand conceptually or intellectually, and in a lot of ways that is what we are doing all the time with information.

CM: Is condensing an expansive means to an end for you?

MB: I think that using the minimal amount of information necessary in order to convey something is beneficial. Maybe it sounds cheesy but ultimately that is poetry.

CM: Is it a practice that relates to minimalism for you?

MB: I don’t think about it in that way. I just think about it in terms of what the fewest number of elements are that can still activate this work as far as it can go. It’s also important to know when to cut something—when to realize that something just isn’t working and that you need to move on to the next idea or piece. I generally don’t like to have a lot of stuff in my life. I don’t really own a lot of stuff. For a long time I lived in my studio and there was almost nothing in it.

CM: Right, I read about how the wall pieces that create these thresholds or divisions within Off the Clock were directly implanted from the studio to the museum.

MB: Yes, that’s Lauren Davis Fisher’s sculpture. She measured out this nook in my studio and then cut out this shape that is where the staircase goes to the second floor of the building and made the wall-sculpture based on those dimensions. In a way she took this articulated negative space from one site (my studio) and transposed it into the walls of PS1. There is also a video in the show in which you can see the nook with the cutout and the wall that she made in its image, so you can really get a sense of the relationship there. That sculpture fleshed out a space that doesn’t actually exist, so it reads as exposing the interior of this wall from my studio and superimposing one space onto another. That was our collaborative gesture. In one room it is flush with the wall of the museum and in the other room it is pivoted so it is kind of like, as a viewer, you are re-experiencing an environment you just left.

CM: Is this idea of the mirror image or symmetry something that was important for you to run throughout the show?

MB: I do like symmetry but I am mostly interested in the places where something symmetrical suddenly becomes unbalanced. But yes, there are also some paintings in Off the Clock that I think are intentionally mirroring that kind of shift that the wall piece really activates. In some of the paintings one image will repeat and then the whole set will shift and continue on with the same elements.

CM: I think it gives the show a great sense of continuity. I guess my last question is, what you are working on for the future and will it include any of these same themes?

MB: I am working right now on a performance-based piece that will be part of Performa in New York in November, and it will continue to generally take up some of the same issues that I have been addressing in other recent shows.

March 2015

Nicolas Lobo in Conversation with Courtney Malick

Nicholas Lobo is a Miami-based sculptor and installation artist who has been working on conceptual, sometimes site-specific projects since 2006. Recently however, he has been taking his sensory-imbued practice to new depths by creating work that not only engages in a conversation with itself through its construction, but also relates directly to industries and economies parallel to art discourse that rarely enter into it so distinctly.  In his two week solo exhibition at Gallery Diet in Miami in March 2014, Bad Soda / Soft Drunk, Lobo juxtaposed a grouping of what one might at first glance consider to be relatively formal, even classically contemporary, bulbous, sculptures that evoke the tradition of Chinese scholar stones, with a precarious floor installation that literally created an entirely new “floor” for the space.  Installation shots of the show hardly begin to convey the story, of sorts, that is being told within it.  The lumpy, dimply sculptures that awkwardly rest atop subtly patterned square columns are in fact created through the process of making napalm – obviously a loaded signifier in and of itself. Perhaps even more alarming is the relatively simple process through which such a devastating material is conjured, by pouring gasoline over blocks of polystyrene, a common plastic used for mass product packaging. To further complicate things, these forms that result in essentially the burning away of the plastic, are then set with one of the most innocent of children’s delights, Play-doh, a staple in family homes since the 1950s whose popularity still endures today.  The contradictions set into motion by the marriage of these products, repurposed as artistic materials, really brings back those unforgettable words of McLuhan. It seems as though whether or not the medium here truly is the message, or is at least one of several messages, regardless it is impossible not to consider it as both the forefront and the backbone of such a seemingly unthreatening sculpture.

The newly fabricated floor of the gallery likewise brings ingestible and common, yet chemically-based products into question – or perhaps an odd celebration. From wall to wall the floor of the gallery was filled with unopened, plastic-wrapped, dead-stock 24-packs of a little-known Swedish energy drink called Nexcite that boasts the bonus property of also being an aphrodisiac for women in particular.  It is also notable that Nexcite was originally named Niagara, to rhyme with Viagra, which later lead to a lawsuit. Nexcite’s notably “Windex” blue coloring warns that there is obviously no telling what has been put into the drink to make you not only energized but exceptionally horny!  Visitors had to walk on top of this “flooring” to get from sculpture to sculpture while in an adjoining, minimal room a video titled, Niagara (2014) of Nexcite being poured on the sculptures, coloring them that bright, artificial blue hue, plays. The absurdity and happenstance that Lobo had even found such a large quantity of Nexcite sitting in a warehouse in an industrial area of Miami is prologue enough to begin the complex and literally infectious ways that this set of works come together to create this particular, and aptly short-lived installation. 

Courtney Malick: Your recent work that has utilized materials like cough syrup, perfume, self-made napalm, a now outdated Swedish energy/aphrodisiac drink, and playdough, all seem to point to an overarching interest in the sensorial – products of various kinds that are made to be ingested or directly engage with in tactile ways.  Do you feel that an investigation of such matter is an underlying aspect of your practice overall or is it something you are just currently interested in?

Nicholas Lobo: My interest in those materials has been ongoing, in the last few years I started to think more exclusively about the economies radiating from the human body. Seeing the body as the fundamental unit of currency, with all other human economies derived from that.  I think making an object can bring radical awareness of the body. Working through the very old idea that sculpture provides a kind of uncanny physical experience, as opposed to painting for example, where you might create an opportunity to reflect on the way images are constructed.

CM: Yes, I have also often used the form and reality of the human body as a productive foil for larger systems at play. Lately I have been noticing more and more contemporary art that takes up materials related to these kinds of sentient ideas in similar ways, particularly food related products and imagery, is this something that you have also detected as becoming more prevalent in art and discourse, and can you discuss your own reasons for beginning this pursuit, or why you feel it is becoming more of a “hot topic” so to speak?

NL: Maybe it has to do with the rapid transmission of complex physical qualities. Zoloft and antifreeze: an emotional panacea, Neutrogena brand skin cream and generic nutritional supplement powder: a body image crisis, etc. Although materials like these are having a moment I think they really have a lineage that supports their use in a long-term tradition. I’m thinking of Sigmar Polke, Dieter Roth and Paul Mccarthy for example. When I look at it historically, this idea of an apocryphal material as a conceptual container is more and more present in culture as a whole. Maybe this works in counterpoint to the virtual, post-internet idea that has also been circulating recently. A vague notion caused by viral brand awareness, industrial agriculture, pharmaceutical marketing and so on that the non-virtual is still here but it’s getting kind of complicated. 

CM: Right, and seemingly that complication is at least in part because they are somehow blending, or the differentiation between the non-virtual and the virtual is narrowing significantly. With Bad Soda / Soft Drunk, you filled a Miami gallery with thousands of old, dead stock bottles of Nexcite and created a sculptural “floor” upon which viewers had to carefully walk.  You also included sculptures created by making your own DIY napalm, some of which were then colored with the blue fluid of the Nexcite.  I am wondering if this process in and of itself was meant in some way to serve as a kind of narrative that the show as a whole projects?

NL: Process as narrative is something that I’m ok with, there are so many phases to any presentation it would be a shame to underplay the importance of the process.  In fact, I’m working on an upcoming project in which the process is even more foregrounded.  More and more I think in terms of exhibitions as temporary breaks in ongoing activities.

When I was making the Bad Soda / Soft Drunk show I was seeing the elements as temporary states, agglomerations of products designed for the skin, tools for tactile contemplation, extreme physical violence and sensual awareness.  When combined they inform each other but also call attention to the idea that they are made of other products which are in turn made from other products. Napalm is gasoline and Polystyrene, gasoline is refined petroleum and Polystyrene is a collection of various engineered molecules in the styrene family. As you start to look further down the chain these things start to change shape pretty aggressively.  I’m thinking of the human body as a kind of hub through which these various commodities pass before moving on to other forms, states and effects. 

CM: Yes, certainly it is clear that a lineage of some kind is being either formed or followed, or in some way is doing both at once.  Since there is a drastic dichotomy at the crux of this body of work that simultaneously produces playful, colorful sculptures that are however made up of toxic, chemically modified products that are manufactured for less than playful, innocent purposes (with the exception of the Playdough that covers the exterior of the sculptures) I am curious as to what – if any – story of sorts the marriage of these two extremes may tell?

NL: When I choose to use Napalm I am interested in it because most people know what it is but very few have experienced it first hand. It’s a mythologized material, designed for the skin but also representing certain political agendas.  The failed Swedish aphrodisiac drink has some opposing qualities, its essentially sugar water, a placebo but it has a very specific mythology ascribed to it in which physiological changes are supposed to take place.

Setting up a dichotomy is very useful since it creates a third field that holds the part I think of as the artwork.  I’m very interested in finding ways to move outside of language, I try to think in terms of creating displays that elicit non-verbal responses. The blind finger poke texture and absurdity of the forms perched on small concrete plinths come from a place of hyper-dumbness that hopefully leads to a state for which language has to be invented rather than chosen.

CM: Yes, I definitely like the idea of artwork that demands a new kind of language in order to accurately or appropriately discuss it, rather than sort of mad-libbing of concepts that have already been applied to other types of work.  Yet, nonetheless, many of these kinds of ingestible materials that we are discussing, as you said, already have a whole mythology, and therefore history embedded into them, particularly the politics of napalm or something like an advertised aphrodisiac.  With that in mind, how do you approach the challenge of utilizing such products to say something else? 

NL: That's a good point, It’s rare to get outside of existing ideas and meanings. Especially in a knowledge-economy where everything is named, categorized and photographed.  What do you think about gravitating towards liminal materials? When I say liminal materials I mean things that are on the fringes of collective knowledge, exotic things like obscure aphrodisiac drinks, Napalm, etc. By starting towards the edge is it more possible to slip over from time?

While the liminal materials I like to use do have meanings and associations they are more tenuously attached as opposed to Coca-Cola or Vaseline for example. It’s always a game of trial and error right?

CM: Yes, I would think so… I also liked what you said about the third, lovechild-like field of thought and representation that comes out of a framework rooted in a blatant dichotomy and I sense that that may very well be where this new mode of language that you mentioned is generated…?

NL: Yes, the third place could be some kind of temporary truth state where one’s interpretations are not distorted by the inexactitude of language. The two opposing perceptions wrapped in language are set into motion and with some luck they arrive at a momentary state of perceptual “truth” in which there is no linguistic buffer to cloud the experience.  I like the term “lovechild-like field of thought,” being that you work with language often, is this an idea you have encountered in the past?

CM: Not exactly, I don’t think I have ever phrased it quite like that, but so many of the most intriguing concepts and works of art represent an inherent kind of hybridity, so I guess that quality is lovechild-esque.

NL: I think of the particle accelerators.  Giant, highway sized circular pathways in which existing elements are smashed together at great speed to occasionally produce exotic new ones for fractions of a second. Of course the new elements are impractical because of their extremely short duration.  Similar to when something completely unfamiliar is apprehended, language rushes up to envelop it and fill the void.  It’s a funny thing, by trying to escape language we are generating it.

CM: That is certainly true. This attempt to move away from verbal responses or configure new ways of using language to discuss the meaning of a work of art also makes me think of something you said in an interview in Blouin from Dec. 2011, which was, “I think obsolescence is the format of progress.”  I would often tend to agree, but I am curious if you can expand upon how the idea of the obsolete actually begins to generate what we would consider to be hopefully new ideas or at least contexts in which to discuss contemporary art.  It reminds me of another quote by Yohji Yamamoto that I recently read that said, “To be modern is to tear the soul out of everything” – does that resonate with you on a similar level?

NL: It’s interesting that you bring up fashion where the “New” is so highly codified through a seasonal mechanism. I was not aware of those words from Mr. Yamamoto but I would not disagree with him. I cannot say that I know what it means to be modern as I am from a different generation. I don't even think I know much about being post-modern. I hesitate to identify something as new or original.  I think its one of the central contradictions of this thing we are participating in -- this tradition.  One idea does stick with me and it is that what we do must be disruptive, not only outwardly but inwardly as well.  The work I admire and am interested in doing is always designed for its own eventual failure.

January 2015

Gillian Wearing

everyone

Regen Projects

6750 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles

December 13, 2014 – January 24, 2014

Known for her uncanny masked portraiture in both photography and video, British artist Gillian Wearing’s solo exhibition of new work at Regen Projects is decidedly psychological as opposed to simply emotional. Rather than considering and reconstituting personal issues, here Wearing brings the role of the patient, the victim, the abused, and the weight and entanglement of memory and identity to the fore. Two new videos ground the exhibition, each delving deep into the buried psyches and repressed memories of, in one instance, real people, and in the other, imagined characters speaking from the dead. For Fear and Loathing (2014), Wearing found her subjects by placing an ad that called for individuals willing to recount either an intense and long-lasting fear or to divulge an ongoing, emblazoned loathing, or even hatred. Each subject remains anonymous by way of Wearing’s signature masks. In this case, however, rather than fashioning custom masks to mirror her subjects’ faces, Wearing uses pre-fabricated, less realistic masks in order for her subjects to tell their stories without revealing even abstracted identities. Nonetheless, the subjects’ eyes and mouths protrude through the thick, cheap fleshy rubber of the masks and their revelations are all of an incredibly personal, often disturbing nature. Their heavy breathing and resistance to being completely forthcoming is deeply felt in each account.

It is a shocking and provocative work for one to approach within the plush, black box set in the middle of the main gallery, one that is surrounded by more light-hearted works like photos of flower arrangements, an oversized silver and gold necklace with a face-shaped pendant, and a row of four small vitrines each containing a lifelike cast of one of Wearing’s hands with extensive writing in primary colors of ink running across each of their distinct creases and lines. The enclosed, darkened environment that houses Fear and Loathing lends itself to the feeling that one is actually sitting directly across from these people, even if only to access their image and their pain through some kind of removed lens or screen. As each person begins their stories ranging from troubled childhoods that include tales of sexual abuse or inexplicable, debilitating phobias, the video continues to invokes a deepening feeling of discomfort that one must confront and endure as horrific story after horrific story drones on, switching from one side of the screen dealing with fear, to the other that takes on loathing.

Gillian’s second new video, We Are Here (2014) takes up an entire wall of the large back gallery.  It was shot in Wearing’s hometown of Sandwell in the West Midlands of the English countryside. There, desolate sites near rivers and abandoned industrial buildings serve as the backdrop for local senior citizens who, one by one, recite memories and stories from their younger years. These testimonials are punctuated by strange and trance-inducing scenes of various other characters all standing in a line together recalling some kind of cult-like, community center meeting.  As shots of the group widen, we see them looking out onto the vast forest ahead of them as they slowly, hypnotically chant the title of the work, “we are here, we are here…”

These video works together with Wearing’s photos and installation pieces in everyone, complicate and question the ways that memories are formed and mutate over time, and how they then shape our relationships to one another and to ourselves. There is something distinctly haunting and pernicious about this environment that Wearing has calculatedly created, as we sense that so many of our unexpressed anxieties and pent up energies persist, even take on physical forms and are thus transferrable, transitional, transmutable. 

December 2014

NADA, Miami

Like every year in Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach, the heat is on and the hotels are buzzing with activity.  This year’s NADA art fair was as conventionally structured, booth-wise, as ever, but among the many, colorful, purely abstract works that seem to blend together after a certain point, there were also a grouping on intriguing highlights, many of which seem somehow food-oriented, the concept even extending outward to domestic and familial themes more generally, (think ceramics everywhere, furniture-based sculpture and woven wall pieces).

Bonchet’s large C-print of an up close and too personal greasy cheese burger with the messy works stands right at the entrance to the fair and there is no way not to notice it, partially because like most everyone, viewers are starving and nursing their hangovers from last night’s parties, but more importantly because its realness is captivating, like the unglamorous actual photo used in Burger King ads without all the Photoshop that makes their fast food products look almost edible.

Not too far down the corridor are some shelf-friendly works by Thompson that seem to solidify books in glass, turning them into fanciful, conversation-starting coffee table like décor, the context of the living room, where you might enjoy a burger or other lazy meals certainly continues to linger.

Moving from the living room notion on to the fireplace is a flattened, un-cozy, digitized depiction of a fake flaming log, somewhat lazily installed on an angle on the ground, an accompanying firey image similarly haphazardly laying flat on the floor and a third component teeters on top of the frame of the fireplace image, a small photo of a large white-blue ice cap, directly contrasting the orange and red embers seen below.  To the right a 2D 80’s inspired Dad-like dark red office chair has also had its dimensions inverted and is propped up by the base of an actual chair on wheels, staples of home life continue to be reconfigured.

Weaving and femininity are front and center with lulling, hanging woven wall works in muted, earthy colors.

At Grand Century’s booth however, we seem as far from the idea of “home” as any work at the fair gets. Budor’s geometric, sci-fi like sculpture and digital print seem to nod towards an Apocalypse Now aesthetic.

The gooey, voluptuousness of things we eat comes back again with a large glossy print by Simmons, which appears to be something like fairytale lady half dancing legs, half melting pink frosting cake.

Sadly hardly any video seems ever to make its way into NADA, but one small video projection of a pair of male, swathed fists punching at a large tropical hanging fruit like a boxing training session gone wild hovers just above the ground in a corner at Guatemala City’s Proyectos Ultravioleta booth.

Houseplants intertwined with the everyday basketball.

Foodie items come back into play at Sculpture Center’s booth with custom-made table cloths no less! Reminiscent of so many “curated” dinner parties native to ABMB.

November 2014

Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin

Regan Projects

6750 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles

October 22 - November 26, 2014

We have by now come to expect a certain kind of frenetic environment upon entering en exhibition by Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch. Their first solo show with Regen Projects is however, surprisingly concentrated. Rather than transforming the gallery into a multifarious conference room, public park or other such generic space as we have seen in the past, the main attraction is set within one, very large interior.  In the main gallery a sprawling camping tent stands, inside of which five large screens play five intersecting videos.  They are placed in a rotunda-like configuration with a sixth screen situated above audiences’ heads. Scenes and actions slip from the edges of one screen to the next, reminiscent of one’s disappearing and reappearing mouse when working on multiple computer screens and seeing your cursor jump seamlessly from one to the other. Though the tone of the installation still evokes Trecartin’s quintessentially complex, kaleidoscopic, telescopic lens into some alternate version of the future, the energy is noticeably more focused this time around.  Voices are less manipulated and dialog and action continue without consistently interjecting content. In fact, dialog in general takes somewhat a back seat, while clusters of actors roam through the dusty, make-shift sets, appearing more like moving props than fully developed characters. 

The transitions between scenes or segments are notably more serene as well.  Though a funky electronic musical riff that features various vocals scores all of the visual content, the inclusion of large words and voice-overs have been replaced with longer and rather elegant animated scenes of forests and natural elements. The way the videos have been set up, one’s experience is entirely dependent on where they have place themselves.  Sitting in an ideal spot, viewers are able to see to one side a picturesque, if highly exaggerated, meadow with Technicolor leaves falling to its plushy ground, while to their other side, the cast, often clad in bright shirts with targets on their backs, wander through fog, broken glass and dim hallways while randomly discussing Coke machines and college parties.  

Within these juxtaposed worlds of digitally rendered foliage and the interior of an old, decrepit and seemingly “spooky” building in which Trecartin’s characters venture, many cultural and pop-cultural issues and iconographies such as pets, companions, forts and adventures are raised often through the visual cues of branding symbols like Coca Cola, NASA, Jurrasic Park, the American Flag, Corona beer, the Wildcats sports team and the conceptual fashion designer, TELFAR.  There is also an enhanced sense of transparency at play in terms of the “meta” seeping in, as Trecartin himself takes on the character of a guide or director of sorts, at times supposedly breaking character to ask questions to other members of the cast and crew and speaking directly to the camera. 

Again, physicality rather than character development, such as destruction and stunts, like throwing large tires over theater balconies or riding a motorcycle that hangs on a zip-line through the air – while drones fly around in all directions -- are at the fore of these complexly overlapping stories.  It is this kind of action that pushes the disjointed story of a group of adventure seekers along, as opposed to the kind of incessant, vo-coded chatter and mind-boggling editing that drives many of Trecartin’s previous videos. Through the chaos, the shifting cast take up the hokey tropes of spooky reality shows like “Ghost Hunters” as they explore a large, outdated building with faded carpets and broken bathrooms, in search of “something scary.” 

October 2014

Print issue no. 17

San Art, Vietnam

When one thinks of the buzzing interest of Asian contemporary art hot spots, Ho Chi Minh City is rarely at the top of the list.  Though Vietnam in general is today being discussed by some as a direct reflection of what the Chinese contemporary art scene looked and felt like just ten years ago, the differences in fact stagger on most every level.  Nonetheless, it is true that the Vietnamese Cultural Ministry still controls all cultural content for public events and publications within the country, as is also still the case, for the most part, throughout China.  It is undeniable, however, that just a bit over five years ago a rumble of modest sorts – by no means the kind of boom made by Chinese contemporary art in the relatively recent past – began to awaken art enthusiasts from various parts of the world to the newly growing commercial gallery-laden areas within Hanoi.  It is only far more recently, within just the past few years, that within Ho Chi Minh City and other smaller towns in the center and southern parts of the country newly initiated artist-run project spaces have sprung up.  With their birth, the richness of contemporary art and cultural discourse within the country has drastically increased and continues to shape itself in ways that in the following years may prove to have distinct effects on the rest of the Asian contemporary art world and market, not to mention the presence of Vietnamese artists within Western realms.  Despite this, visiting Vietnam for contemporary art of all things is still a rather under the radar trend. 

Regardless of its current place on the Asian art totem pole, young artists and curators in Vietnam continue to unabashedly endure a barrage of obstacles set in place by an apathetic government that has not made investments in cultural institutions such as museums or libraries since 1954.  This is due in large part to the aftermath of the Vietnam War in 1975, which saw the establishment of the Communist Government in Vietnam. Not only that, but the entire educational system throughout the country follows a French model that was created in 1924, and as far as the arts are concerned, that means a strict focus on plastic arts, such as painting, silk-screening and drawing, thus disregarding more current methodologies like performance, video, installation, new media and interdisciplinary practices.  Such resistance clearly challenges the paths that young artists and cultural producers are forging toward an open and artistically educated community in Vietnam.  One of the most ingenuous and clever attempts to thwart the Vietnamese government’s lack of support for artistic culture and communication therein, is the amazing, non-profit exhibition space and reading room that is Sàn Art. 

Sàn Art, (which roughly translates to ‘platform’), was formed in 2007 by four Vietnamese artists, Dinh Q Le, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Phu Nam Thuc Ha and Tiffany Chung.  It is important to note that for many Vietnamese unaware of the intricacies of art it is perhaps difficult to understand what Sàn Art does, as there is no term in the Vietnamese language for the term, ‘non-profit,’ and there is no public cultural institution in the country that collects contemporary Vietnamese art.  In response to this, Sàn Art not only engages local artists from Ho Chi Minh City, but it also allows artists and thinkers from outside the city’s capital, where networking and discourse is all the more sparse, to engage with its dynamic workshops, reading room, lecture series and exhibition programs.  Additionally, with curator, Zoe Butt at the organization’s helm, serving as both curator and Director, Sàn Art has been able to host many of the global art world’s most exciting and brilliant cultural producers and academics, broadening both their understanding of the direction that young Vietnamese artists’ roots are taking in the contemporary terrain and bringing insight to the expansive scope of contemporary art that is often out of reach for artists and students within Vietnam.  

Not only does Sàn Art provide a rare space within Ho Chi Minh City for artists and other creative people to see work that relates directly to topical issues that resonate both within Vietnam and also more broadly throughout contemporary art, but it has also created several specific programs therein that act as pedagogical structures through which young artists can have their work discussed by their peers and gain a better understanding of the ways in which their work connects to a larger discourse of not just contemporary art, but culture, theory, politics and various social issues that inform the work of curators, writers, gallerists and even audiences at large.  One such program is the Sàn Art Laboratory, which was initiated just two years ago.  Functioning as both a studio and residency program that spans six-month periods, Sàn Art invites three artists per session to live and work in the Binh Thanh District, near Sàn Art, and also awards them $1,000.00 to use toward the production of new work and living expenses.  One of the main tenants of this program is that each artist works closely with a ‘talking partner,’ thus emphasizing the importance of communication, language and discourse that prevails over all contemporary art and connects artists from all over the world and even through various time periods and movements.  Furthering the importance of such constant engagement in discourse Sàn Art also began a two-pronged, three-year long project called Conscious Realities that encapsulates both public lectures and closed workshops that accompany their exhibition program. 

Conscious Realities is particularly important because, whereas in some ways Sàn Art can be utilized by young artists as a way to reach beyond the confines of the limited access to information about contemporary art and discourse that most other organizations within Vietnam provide, the ideas and issues that are probed within the workshops and lectures that Conscious Realities produces continue to examine the specific region of the Global South and, as they describe it, “imagines the primacy of lateral dialogues between South East Asia, South Asia, Latin America and Africa.”  This allows participants of Sàn Art to learn more about not only contemporary art as it exists within Vietnam and around the rest of the world, but also to form the necessary historical groundings that inform where we are in theoretical and philosophical narratives today.  Such information and education is seriously lacking all throughout Vietnam, and Sàn Art aims to address this by inviting scholars, writers, curators and cultural thinkers in a way that mimics the kinds of educational systems to which so many professional contemporary artists today have immediate access. 

The upcoming exhibition, curated by Zoe Butt, Conjuring Capital, which opens at Sàn Art in early August, serves as the fifth installment of Conscious Realities, and presents the work of six artists, only one of whom is Vietnamese.  The others are from various countries including, Spain, U.S. India and Cambodia.  This show aptly questions not only the impact, but also the awareness of our collective consumption, themes that seem to be recurrent in the work that Sàn Art exhibits.  This issue rings particularly true within Vietnam, as well as in other Asian countries, where the government promotes the work of certain artists for tourism purposes.  However, these artists are only those whom have been sanctioned, so to speak, through their complicity with the educational systems available to them within the universities that are supported by the Vietnam Fine Art Association, which mandates a specific, non-contemporary curriculum.  

Each of the six artists in Conjuring Capital, Adriana Bustos, Christopher Myers, Hand Killis Thomas, Ngoc Nau, Sudarshan Shetty and Than Sok, take up the visuality of everyday commodities and its relationship to currency in colorful and fluid ways.  Together it is clear that Sàn Art is forging both aesthetic and conceptual relationships not only between their practices, but also the regions within which they are currently working, and the ways complicated ways that our collective and cultural value systems are manipulated and dictated based on visual culture, media expansions, advertising, and the psychology of consumerism that draws us to certain objects and allows us to imbue them with non-material qualities such as love and intimacy.  It is necessary for both artists and audiences within Vietnam to have spaces such as San Art where these kinds of social tensions and realities can be played out and discussed in honest, if abstracted, form and forums.  This is true in part because the outlet helps generate knowledge and conversation about important issues, but also because organizations such as Sàn Art, that are able to be so closely tuned in to the needs of the artists’ whose practices they nurture, understand the complex tightrope that some Asian artists walk.  As we see the increasing interest outside of Asia in Asian contemporary art continue to grow, so too does the work being produced often feel as though the artists’ producing it are working out of a sense of obligation to be overtly documentary, reporting in one way or another on the social and political statuses of their countries of origin.  While at times this may be the true crux of some of these artists’ practices, just as often we find that their interests may lay elsewhere, but through what Butt refers to as, “a great exotification of censorship,” they turn their work towards explicitly political issues that they feel are necessary to raise within the context of their position in contemporary art and its current fascination with Asia. 

While Sàn Art certainly has important aims that it sets as a contemporary exhibition space that is not just arbitrarily operating within Ho Chi Minh City, it is also a place where artists, regardless of their particular interests, can come to learn about art and engage with others.  It is not necessarily a space where art made within Asia is being analyzed as such in a way that has to be considered as somehow separate from what happens throughout other pockets of the global art world.  For this, it is clear that many emerging artists are able to work in a productive and supportive environment that provides tools and discussion that is able to at once establish itself as rooted in its own distinct, Vietnamese history, while also remaining neutral to the many directions and shifts that the broad scope of contemporary art as a practice, not only allows for but in fact more often than not, encourages.  

Courtney Malick in Conversation with Tim Blum

At this point in time most people familiar with commercial galleries in the U.S. know all about Blum & Poe.  The gallery began in Los Angeles in 1994 with a small stable of artists, whom, at the time were not so well known, and whom, as we now know, are among some of the most successful contemporary artists working in Los Angeles and internationally.  Not only were Tim Blum and Jeff Poe in tune enough with the directions that some of the artists they represented at the gallery’s inception heading, such as Takashi Murakami, Mark Grotjahn, Sam, but they also, thanks in large part to Blum’s extensive work in Tokyo beginning in the 1980s, began to situate themselves as an authority on many Japanese artists, both emerging, like Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara, and others who began their practices in the 1950s, 60s and 70s alongside movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Arte Povera.  We certainly have Blum & Poe to thank for bringing many such Japanese artists, whose work had rarely been exhibited in the U.S. during the time in which it was being produced abroad, including many that were originally part of the then little known group, Mono-ha. 

Even then in the mid 1990s, it took the gallery nearly a decade to move form their small space in Santa Monica to the now gallery-jammed area of Culver City, where in 2003 they took over a large, pristine new space, and then, six years later, finally moved to their current sprawling location just across the street.  That was 2009, and three years later they were finally able to install the exhibition that they had been preparing for and thinking about for years, Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-Ha.  The important historical exhibition marked the beginning of American museum’s interest with the art of many of the Mono-Ha artists as well as marking an important partnership for Blum & Poe with Barbara Gladstone, the New York venue that the show traveled to later in 2012, an highly unusual, museum-like transition that is almost never seen from on unaffiliated commercial gallery to another.  Today the impact that the Mono-Ha exhibition has had on Blum & Poe and the direction that the gallery is currently taking, opening new spaces in both New York and Tokyo this year, is clearly felt both in the ways that U.S. audiences see and understand both historical and contemporary Asian art, and the links therein, as well as the ways that the gallery continues to bridge gaps between the U.S. art market and Asia, Tokyo in particular, which, as I found out from Blum, has a surprising history of being a non-collecting culture.  

Courtney Malick: Tell me about your initial move to Tokyo and how it later informed the beginning of Blum & Poe.

Tim Blum:  Well, I moved from Los Angeles to Tokyo in the 1980s where I started out working at galleries.  My intention from the very beginning was to learn as much as I could, including the language, and also to make connections with artists there that I could eventually help to introduce to American audiences.  Not only did I learn about Japanese art and culture while living there, but I was also able to bring works of certain American artists to Japanese audiences that they were relatively unfamiliar with at the time, so the exchange definitely went both ways.  

CM: Do you feel that your work in Tokyo changed or shaped your perspective on the new work that you found interesting and artists that you wanted to represent when you came back to L.A. and opened the gallery?

TB: Oh yes, moving to Tokyo certainly opened up my entire world view.  It also helped me to see the connections between what was happening in Japan and the work of artists like Agnes Martin, Bryce Marden and Richard Tuttle, who, by the way, went to live in japan when he was in his late 20s, and you can see that the exposure to that culture clearly influenced him and his work.

CM: Do you think that the fact that Japanese artists have more access and knowledge of well established artists in the U.S. today effects the kind of work that is being made, exhibited or collected there?

TB: I can’t say for sure really.  Japan has always had an extensive knowledge of other countries and the artistic work that has come out of them.  But for them back in the 1050s and 60s their connections were more with Italy and Arte Povera than they were with the U.S. so I suppose that has changed to some extent today.

CM: Obviously compared to even just ten years ago, today the art world is much more global and is especially broadening well into all parts of Asia.  I am curious as to whether or not you have detected a difference in the reception, (by collectors, critics, audiences, etc.) of any of the Asian artists that you represent, depending on whether they have a show in their home country, other parts of Asia, or in Europe and the U.S.?

TB: I can’t speak to artists other than those that I have worked with personally, but in my experience, it has depended on the show and the artist.  Like I said, at the time that I was first living in Japan, a lot of the artists that I began working with were just starting out, including Murakami.  So it definitely took a while for people to catch up and begin to understand what Blum & Poe was doing when we first opened in 1994 and started showing the work of someone like him, along with other people that audiences were unfamiliar with. That, especially in juxtaposition to the other artists whose work we were exhibiting at the time, did not necessarily make perfect sense to others, but for me, I just always followed my own interests, and now years later, I think they have gelled together.  I can also say that in terms of reception from collectors here in the U.S. clearly the interest in Japanese artists and artists from other parts of Asia has increased a lot in the last decade, and that has to do with the kinds of shows that have just recently been coming to fruition, such as the Mono-ha show, the Gutai shows, all of that work was almost entirely uncelebrated in the 1960s and 70s, so there is definitely a resurgence happening right now.

CM: Yes, that is for sure.  But it is not just work that did not gain wide reception back then that is being re-celebrated today.  We are seeing so many exhibitions that are recalling work of both high profile and lesser-known American artists from that time period popping up in institutions all over the place. 

TB:  Yes, true.

CM: Do you think that that has to do with social and political issues that are perhaps again feeling resonant in ways that relate to that time in American history, or is it maybe just a kind of cyclical trend that people, ideas, works often go through?

TB:  Probably both to some extent.  But yes, I see it as a trend for the most part.

CM: Right.  With the rising interest in this kind of work from the 1960s, perhaps you can tell me a bit about your two new gallery spaces in New York and Tokyo, and how they will continue to expand upon the work in these areas that the L.A. gallery has already established?

TB: Well, the L.A. gallery will continue to be our main hub, and the New York and Tokyo spaces will act sort of like the two arms of that main body, so all three will work together.  But, in Tokyo the space will operate as an office and archive that will help us to consolidate all of the historical work and research that Blum & Poe has continues to do.

CM: And what will the exhibition programming there be like?  Will it be very similar to that of the gallery in L.A.?

TB: Not quite.  In Tokyo the exhibition program will also include artists that are not represented by the gallery.  It will be very diverse.  We are really kind of making a statement by taking our business there and establishing a permanent space because today the Asian art market is heavily based in Hong Kong, and very little collecting happens in Japan.

CM: Why is that do you think?

TB: Well the Japanese have really never been a collecting culture actually.

CM: Really?

TB: Yes, they, like many of the concepts that are central to Mono-Ha, are a more ephemeral, meditative kind of culture, and they many people there also simply do not have the space to invest in large collections like they do in other countries.

CM: Why is it that you feel that right now, in 2014, is nonetheless a good moment to make this move to doing business in Tokyo in such a concentrated way then?

TB: I have seen through so many years of working in Japen that people in Tokyo are hungry for more energy there in terms of commercial galleries, exhibition programming and also collecting.

September 2014

Korakrit Arunanondchai (in collaboration with Boychild)

Letters to Chantri #1: The lady at the door/The gift that keeps on giving

The Mistake Room

1811 East 20th Street, Los Angeles

July 18 – September 13, 2014

Korakrit Arunanondchai is fast becoming one of the most widely talked about young artists in New York.  Maybe this is in part because much of his source material comes from his perhaps slightly off-kilter perspective of American culture that results from his upbringing in Buddhist-centric Thailand.  Though off-kilter, with its over-celebratory swirls of paint-covered bodies and denim-covered canvases complete with rock music and head-banging, Korakrit’s is also a clear vision of the ways that his native Thailand and the dominant American, youth-obsessed culture that is pouring out of New York and Los Angeles via every imaginable social media network, overlap and confuse one another. 

His recent exhibition, Letters to Chantri #1: The lady at the door/the gift that keeps on giving, is on view at the newly renovated Mistake Room in Los Angeles through September 13th.  It functions more like a guided tour through a Disney-inspired mini-theme park than an exhibition of sculpture and video.  For this, the first of an ongoing project that will continue to be played out in exhibitions around the world, he collaborated with L.A.-based performance artist, Boychild.  Boychild plays the main character in the first of many segments of video that will eventually be spliced together to create one feature length film that tells an over-arching story through the use of character’s flashbacks.  Throughout our conversation this August in Krit’s Brooklyn studio he repeatedly revealed to me the ways in which his work is enacted by way of various overlaps and collisions of, on the one hand large corporate and religious entities, and on the other hand, the minute ways in which such forces effect daily life and slowly, gradually morph them from one thing that we think we understand and recognize into another, less familiar thing that is consistently reshaped by way of its juxtapositions and contexts.

Courtney Malick: I see that you have a lot of new work that is being sent to London for a show that will open September 16th at Carlos/Ishikawa right now.  Is this upcoming show the next part of the exhibition series that kicked off with your current show at The Mistake Room in Los Angeles?

Korakrit Arunanondchai: Well, chronologically this body of work for the show in London came before the show at the Mistake Room.  I think its actually cooler that way, that the show in LA opened first even though I made this work for the London show prior to that opening, because now, weirdly, even though they’re not exactly connected to each other, its almost like I already have the documentation of what I have done in LA and I am able to collapse a future project into one that has already taken place, or has at least begun. 

CM: So how does this body of work that will be going to London, titled, 2557 (Painting with history in a room filled with men with funny names 2) differ from the show at The Mistake Room, even though it was somehow formative for you to have had the opportunity to install the L.A. show first and work off of the documentation that has accumulated from it since the opening on the show at Carlos/Ishikawa?

KA: Well for the London show there will be three videos that create a trilogy, but the next step is that I just want to make one feature length movie.  Basically its structure will be based on the TV show Lost, where there are a bunch of characters and they all come together within one storyline, but each character has their own segment that is a flashback.  So from now on I will focus each project that I do on one character within that storyline.  The first character that was the central figure of the show at the Mistake Room was the one that Boychild played. 

CM: And is that character the protagonist of the whole story overall?

KA: No.  It is one of the main characters, but there will probably be about seven altogether.  The main character is this girl named Chantri, so that is why in the show at Mistake Room the title is Letters to Chantri #1.  It is about her journey to America to find this guy that she met on the Internet.  It is also based loosely on this lecture that this very famous temple in Thailand came up with that says that when Steve Jobs died he actually joined their religion.  So the movie, and the character of Chantri is based loosely on the reality of that possibility – even though it is not really about that at all in the storyline – but it pulls elements out of that whole idea.

CM:  I see.  How does this upcoming show in London compare to the show in LA in terms of the multi-disciplinarity and experientialism that is imbued into the Mistake Room project?  In the press release for that show it explicitly states that it is an important turning point in your practice in that it is the first time that you have been able to show many different kinds of work all together within one exhibition, (including paintings, sculpture, video, performance, etc…).

KA: Yes, that is important to me.  In this show in London there will be paintings, three videos, a book that you can read and bean bags and massage chairs where people can spend time and relax, so the idea is that it will not just be a place that you go to stand and walk around and look at art but also a place that you can go to have other kinds of experiences as well.  But in London I will not be doing a performance at the gallery.  Instead I will do one at ICA that will still be connected to the 2557 show.

I’m really into the idea of imagining what if my exhibitions were kind of a cross-over between different kinds of experiences, like if they could embody almost like a lifestyle branding mentality.  It has this kind of cloud structure where no one thing, or piece, is a specific product or brand, but its more like one seamless filter that everything that is perceived goes through so that it appears in a certain, recognizable way. 

I think that a lot of references that I have pooled for this show in London have to do with a semi-superficial layer of how tourism is constructed and functions within Thailand, so that’s where things like soft-pillow seating and massage chairs get integrated into the installations.  Everything within the tourism schema in Thailand has to fit into this specific framework of “good hospitality.”

CM:  I see what you mean.  I am wondering if a part of the tourism economy there also has to do with trying to over-exotify the country?

KA:  Hmm.. I don’t think that they over-exotify it, but they definitely push the hospitality thing really hard.

CM:  Oh.  So maybe actually that is their way of trying to employ an opposing strategy where as a tourist they try to make people feel so comfortable – just like they are at home… ?

KA:  Right, and they are always trying to give you way too many options and trying to give people a million activities to do at all times, like, ‘you can eat your seafood and then get a massage – and then have a beer – while you get your massage!’ Its very maximalist and very much trying to present you with all of the options of experiences that are potentially available to you and then making you feel as though they are all accessible immediately all at once.  But in a way that flattens any experience that you might potentially have as a visitor in a strange place.  They make it seems as though you can do all of those different things but they are all part of once larger experience that they are selling to you.  Everything is a package deal, so it seems like it is harder to be a tourist there than it may be in other countries because everything is so streamlined. 

CM:  So in that sense they are really charicaturizing the version or perspective that outsiders can see or retain of what life is like there?

KA:  Yes. 

CM:  Interesting.  However, in the press release for the show at the Mistake Room it describes a project that is less interested in the idea of tourism and more on how the country’s history is today being negotiated, not that the two are totally separate from one another, since many people probably visit Thailand because of its rich history. 

KA: Yeah, the show there is basically a combination of on the one hand what I learned from going to this one temple known as the ‘White Temple’ or ‘Heaven on Earth’ and really studying its strategies for PR and recruitment and the ways that it brands itself.  I think that the strategies that they are using are somewhat similar to the ways that we see contemporary art installations behaving or attracting visitors, and then also at the same time the temple has their own very specific methods for how they set everything up, like the ways that they arrange their meditation rooms, for example.

CM:  Interesting…

KA: At the same time there is this idea of Apple as a company and lifestyle.  So the show at Mistake Room loosely borrows from the ways that things function and become presentations in each of these three environments; the art world, the massive Buddhist temple and Apple. I think that the show successfully became a combination of these things.  Its hard to get a full sense of it just from watching the video, but when you visit the space and go through the exhibition the whole thing is so structured that it is really akin to something like going to Disneyland.  You wait in one room and then you watch a sort of promotional video and then you are ushered into another room, and you have a guide the whole time.

CM: Oh wow, I did not realize that there was a guide and everything. 

KA: Yeah, I really wanted it to feel like an informational kind of tour.  The first video that you see when you go into the space actually functions more like an infomercial, where I introduce myself as a “real life” person whose life is so amazing now that I have been introduced to this certain product, which is this bar of soap that is the centerpiece of the fountain sculpture in the middle of the exhibition.

CM: Yes, I wanted to get to the soap at some point and ask how you came to choose that specific item…?

KA: Ok, well, then when you move on into the rest of the show you see another video that is like a fictional version of the story that I just told in the infomercial of how I became introduced to the product, the soap.  

CM: I see, so, why soap?

KA: Well there are many reasons really, but I wanted to present the concept for this show as a mock collaboration between me, “the artist” and this company.  And I kind of wanted the collaboration to seem as though the company was exploiting me, the artist, kind of like how companies like Absolut Vodka or something sponsors an artist’s show or project or something and then they have to design a bottle for them or then they have a concept store together or something.  So, since I had this denim body-painting project that was kind of messy and artsy, I wanted to come up with an idea for a company that represented the opposite of that.  So the idea of a soap company is meant to kind of call out the practice of painting as being really messy and dirty and associating that dirtiness with pain.  That somehow painting represents all of the emotions and difficulties that one goes through in daily life and that painting and being messy is a way of expelling those kinds of toxins from one’s mind.  And then the soap company relates to the ways that the temple in Thailand was used as a model of sorts for this show in that it represents meditation and a cleansing of the mind. It is a way to empty out and rid oneself of all of that filth that is accumulated through the act of painting.  That is why I refer to the soap as The gift that keeps on giving, even though actually it is the gift that keep on taking.

CM: Well, I can see how you can think of it as being an entity that is taking something, since often emotion and pain is what impels creativity and productivity, but at the same time I also see it as propelling that productivity because it one doesn’t sort of cleanse or slough off some of that messy emotional baggage it is difficult to move forward and continue to produce… Do you see it that way at all?

KA: Yes that is true too.  For me it is kind of like the idea of simulacra that functions as reality, so it works, technically, but nonetheless it is fake.  This whole show is very fake, even though I think that it has been successful in allowing viewers to have some sort of feeling of being cleansed.

CM: So, what is this particular bar of soap?

KA: I really wanted to find one that was very clear and didn’t have any kind of branding or color or anything on it, because it is meant to represent something very serene.  And there are two women that trade off days being in the space and they act as docents, or hosts.  One of them is actually the woman who is in the video, so when she is there you as a viewer are really being immersed into the whole installation because at the end of the “tour” of the show that she guides you through then she hands each viewer a bar of the same soap that she gives to Boychild in the video and that is also used in the sculpture.

CM: Oh wow – that is amazing!

KA: Yeah its cool because it creates a very specific sort of path that people have to move within in the space, so the viewers are really not totally free to just roam around and do whatever they want, like the tourists that get taken on a certain ride that comes with some package that they buy, you are really seeing the show from a specific perspective that is pre-determined for you. 

CM: I understand now so much more clearly what the press release is referring to when it says that this show is a departure in terms of the immersive and experiential, kind of all-encompassing way that you have put all for the individual works together.  Here they are really all working toward one common goal.  I mean this is obviously very different from doing a performance once at some point during the duration of an exhibition, this is an exhibition that is entirely contingent upon a constant performance, around which everything else sort of hinges.

KA: Yes, I feel like I had to go through all of the things in my own life that lead up to this show at Mistake Room in order for it to be able to have been made, so it is sort of like a show of documentation of other things in my life in a way. 

CM: Wow, is that also how you envision your upcoming projects as you go forward with the ongoing series that began with the Mistake Room show?

KA: No, not necessarily.  Now I have a plan, with this structure that will resemble Lost, so each installation will follow the context for each one of the characters that I am focusing on. In this first one, Boychild plays an agent who works for a company and the video is her flashback that shows how she first joined the company, so in that context it makes sense that her story would fit into the format of a commercial.  But they may not all end up taking that format depending on the stories that each video tells. 

CM: Oh, ok.  But it continues to be important to you that the project maintains this sort of episodic or chapter by chapter structure?

KA: I guess so.  These structures that I am describing are always pretty loose, but in general I like works that function in ways that appear to be very close to how life really is, or how life really plays out. 

CM: So the in this case, the way that life is is that most of us are often watching TV and TV often has a seriality that keeps the story going and going…?

KA: Yes that;s true.  One thing that I feel is really important about my work is that for me, process-wise, it, as a work in and of itself, ages and also accumulates relationships. Time is involved in all of my work and becomes a key factor to the way that the work functions.  Time is a material that I use, it is sort of similar to that movie “Boyhood” in a way I guess.  So the way that I am making this trilogy is actually like a parallel to my real life.  It took three years, and so it really is a document of the last three years of my life.  In the same way, by the time I finish this upcoming feature film I will also have aged as a director along with my cast and all of the things that will then be included into the installations that come from that work will be like flashbacks or remnants. 

Another important aspect to the work I am making right now is that I have a feeling that Apple is on a decline and that at the same time, and in a related way, that Buddhism, at least in Thailand, due to the advances in technology and trying to keep up with the times, is facing some kind of a shift.  For a long time, at least within Thailand, where I am from, Buddhism really represented the way that people make meaning of the world around them and it has always been a very central, guiding force.  But now, with the world changing so rapidly, that concept and reality of the role that Buddhism played for people is in a state of flux.  So in sort of similar ways both Apple and Buddhism act as staples of certain kinds of lifestyle brands, one for America and the other for Thailand.  My work is observing these two converging or overlapping entities as they – don’t necessarily disintegrate -- but definitely as they go through some kind of shift.  So that ongoing issue also factors into the use of time in my work.  

CM: Yes, that makes sense.  I am curious as a Thailand native, if for you you sense that the way that the world is moving, and its rapid pace, its reliance on technology, etc. is it all becoming too antithetical to the essential principles of Buddhism and a meditative, Zen way of life, for the religion to ultimately survive?

KA: Maybe.  Probably fundamentally no, it will not go extinct, so to speak, but in a more everyday way, I think it will be difficult for it to be sustained.

CM: Right.  But also, even though it is maybe controversial to equate Apple to a religion, I think we cannot deny that Apple, over the past ten years or so, has been aiming for something that is somehow akin to the kind of simplicity, elegance and intuitiveness that is often also associated to Buddhism as a “fashionable” religion.  A kind of religion that becomes more of a lifestyle than it is a deep rooted belief system like Christianity, for example.  So I think that the connections between the agendas of these two entities have probably been there for a long time now, would you agree?

KA: Yes totally. I have been looking at this one temple in Thailand and they have continued to be very successful at getting new members and followers in a way that is very similar to the increasing popularity of Apple and all its products.  Part of the reason that this temple has been so successful is because they have very effective PR.  Part of their strategy is about simplifying things.  It is a large entity that has a very simplified version of, for example, what happens in the afterlife. Instead of allowing those kinds of large questions about life and death to remain abstract and vague, they have really boiled them down into simple language and a pictorial sort of guide so that people can easily understand things that are in fact very complex and indefinite.

CM: Yes, I think your right, in a lot of ways that is also what Apple has done.  But what is the reason that this one temple has this stronghold?  Is there a lot of competition between temples in Thailand?  Are they all so aggressive about their recruitment tactics?

KA:  No, its not really a competition between them, its just the idea that they always want to be getting bigger and expanding more and more, that that qualifies their success for them even if it is just to themselves. 

CM: I see.  Did you or your family go there a lot when you were growing up?

KA: No, I had always heard about it though.  But I was never that interested in it until this lecture that had to do with Steve Jobs happened there.  I feel like a lot of my work comes out of something that I maybe knew about, but it doesn’t become interesting or worth investigating until you find a new context for it and something that makes sense to juxtapose it with that changes the way that it can be seen.

CM: Yes, certainly the Western art world in one context in which your work gains not only attention for the way that it is formulated but also in part due to audience’s fascination with its subject matter, mainly of life and traditions in Thailand, which we are not very familiar with.  But have you shown any of this work in Thailand?  And if so, do audience’s reactions there differ from those in the West?

KA: I haven’t really shown much work there yet. I have been really trying to save up a lot of my work so that I can show it all at once because I think it makes more sense when it is shown that way, and these kinds of issues are a lot more sensitive there.  

CM: Yes, I can imagine that that would require some very specific negotiations.  What about working in Los Angeles and producing the video there? 

KA: I really loved it, I felt very connected to L.A.  I don’t think that I could have made that work anywhere else, especially because the plot of the video is about this girl, Chantri, who comes to America and weaves through different cities and landscapes, so it felt like L.A. was the perfect place to start that journey in terms of a quintessentially American landscape.  Also, the video is a commercial, so that whole industry comes out of L.A.

CM: Yes, it has been really exciting for me to be living there and see more and more artists whose work I am interested in that are working through those kinds of commercial or stereotypical movie-making methodologies either moving to L.A. or coming out there in order to make work on that scale and with that kind of production value.  I think that right now performance art is moving into a particularly strange and kind of grotesque, but generative, space where it is really mimicking acting and “the movies” and television in ways that necessitate specific terms of production.  To me it seems like there is a body-double-ish interest that is prevalent in performance and video art that L.A. more than any other city, at least within America, lends itself to.  Did you find that to be true during this shoot?

KA:  Yeah definitely.  And not just the shoot but the whole show, the installations and the performance, all of it would not have been possible to do in New York. 

CM:  Yes, its nice that, though in LA you really kind of have to make a plan to go to see a show, instead of just popping in to see it on your way to something else, as is often the case in New York, in LA, then once you get there you are more prone to stay and take your time and this show in particular definitely demands your time in very specific ways. 

KA: Yeah, the Mistake Room is kind of really out of the way in this desolate area in downtown LA, but I like that when you get there you feel kind of displaced, I think that, at least for this show, it adds to the mystery of it all and the idea of the space being this free-floating kind of thing that you enter into and have a very singular experience within.  Maybe it seems more that way for me, coming from New York where everything feels so physically and geographically connected to everything, whereas in LA everything feels very separated and you have to map out a route to get somewhere in your car and then you to go to that place and then that’s it, you get back in your car and you leave.  It is a totally different way of interacting with art and with people, but I think that that is what makes its so interesting and definitely what has m made the show at the Mistake Room work so well. 

August 2014

Forrest Bess

Seeing Things Invisible

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

2626 Bancroft Way

Berkeley, CA

June 11 – September 14, 2014

The little known, self-described, “abstract primitive painter-fisherman,” Forrest Bess, is an intriguing character in the history of painting, but it is perhaps even more interesting to re-conjure his brief moments of notoriety today in 2014.  Bess (1911-77), lived most of his life in an extremely isolated, small fishing village east of Houston, Texas, where he worked as a fisherman.  He had been painting since childhood, but in the early 1950s after a traumatic stint in the military, in which he never saw combat, but nonetheless was beaten for exposing his homosexual inclinations, his paintings began to take a noticeably symbolic turn.  It was then that he began to connect his paintings with the “visions” (not to be confused with the “hallucinations” that he also experienced), that he often saw during the blurred state between consciousness and unconsciousness just before sleep.  These visions often referenced specific symbols that he realized related directly to ancient mythology, and as he continued to try to decipher them, Bess began to find that an attempt to balance the male and female counterparts within the human body in order to unveil ancient truths was at their crux.

At this same time he made a rare trip to New York where he met with Betty Parsons who had recently opened her New York gallery in which she had begun to show the work of then up and coming prominent Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock and Rothko among others.  She was immediately interested in his work, as it seemed to meld together her interest in abstraction and that of primitive African art, which she also continued to exhibit at her gallery until it closed in the mid 1980s.  During their productive working relationship Bess had six solo exhibitions at the gallery and kept in close correspondence with Parsons, as he also did with several other influential figures in his life, including the then widely celebrated critic, Meyer Schapiro.  Through his letters Bess’ friends and colleagues began to understand that his fixation with the hermaphroditic state had taken over his interest in painting, and he revealed to them that he eventually went so far as to perform several surgeries on his own penis in attempts to become, what he called a “pseudo-hermaphrodite.”

The tension that Bess must have felt in his desire to transform his physical body can be seen in many of the configurations of his canvases that juxtapose severe opposites in color, shape, direction and texture.  They are all approximately the same size, around 6 inches tall and 8 inches wide, reminiscent of the size of a box or window one would put their head through. Though when seen together in this retrospective a cohesive language of sorts can begin to be put together through the visual connections from one painting to another, in the 1950s Parsons urged him to try to develop more of a signature style like so many of the other painters that she represented.  But Bess felt compelled only to record what he saw in his mind, which resulted in a chronic variety in the body of his work.  This exhibition, which has travelled from The Menil Collection in Houston, also includes many biographical artifacts from Bess’ life, such as letters to Parsons, Schapiro and also Dr. Money, a then prominent physician in the field of gender reassignment, with whom Bess was in contact several times about follow-up surgeries to extend the manipulations that he had already made on his own genitals.  His end goal was for the orifice he had created in the underside of his penis to be made large enough so as to be penetrated by another penis, thus inciting the mythical urethral orgasm through which Bess believed he would attain a state of physical rejuvenation and the cure to aging through the retention of semen.  This was a theory that had been widely discussed and experimented with in the 1920s and 30s, particularly with studies conducted by Dr. Steinach, who first tied the vas deferens in old rats who showed great signs of health improvement afterwards.  Later the experiment continued with Chinese convicts, of which there are several photos of men in their sixties whom, after undergoing the surgery, looked and felt thirty years younger.  This procedure was later translated into today’s vasectomy.  

It was only in 1981 when the Whitney Museum of American Art held the first comprehensive retrospective of Bess’ work that the strange story of his life and his thesis on hermaphroditism were exhibited alongside one another, as had been Bess’ wish for most of his life.  However, after that point his work seemed to recede back into the shadows, and now again in 2014 comes to the fore with the help of artist and curator, Robert Gober.  Gober, who has said he along with many of his contemporaries have been continually influenced by Bess’ work, first organized a small version of this retrospective in a gallery at the Whitney for the 2012 Biennale, after which the Menil approached him to expand the show into a larger museum exhibition and catalog.  Today, with the resurrection of abstract, “back to basics” contemporary painting, along with an ever-shifting and complicating of the formation of even the notion of gender and personal identity, these works seem to have a new life and meaning that is perhaps better suited for current audiences than they were for those of the 1950s and 60s.  However, it is difficult to know what one would take from these paintings were they not at this point so closely tied to Bess’ personal theories on the body, gender and sexuality.  Nonetheless, his story continues to be told, and with it a broader understanding of the connections between his two bodes of work, that in painting and that in physical transformation and experimentation.  It is within this intersection that his body of work also continues to resonate with younger artists today whose work often explores similar identity-based issues.  

June 2014

Courtney Malick in Conversation with Daniel Turner

Daniel Turner is a conceptual and installation-inclined artist, originally from Virginia, who has been living and working in New York since 2009.  Since then he has embarked on an ongoing body of work that has moved away from the large, sometimes three-dimensional paintings that he had previously experimented with as a student at the San Francisco Art Institute.  These days Turner is focused on letting objects be themselves, though he is careful to skew them in odd and provocative ways.  With a slew of solo and group exhibitions and features in international art fairs, 2014 has already been a busy year for Thurner, whose solo show, PM, just closed at team inc. gallery in New York while another, Daniel Turner, just recently opened at And Now gallery in Dallas, Texas.  Both shows present work that has become signature to Turner’s reserved but bold aesthetic that utilizes and subverts ordinary, industrial and somewhat stereotypically dull objects and materials. 

PM, at team, consists of three pale yellow countertops, two of which are identical and installed side by side, and the third that is a bit smaller and stands perpendicularly.  They simultaneously evoke something clinical, administratively dull and yet familiarly domestic, for lack of a better word.  Inside each counter is a metal basin stained with a strange residue that, as it turns out is from Turner having poured water that he had been collecting from Newton Creek, which was contaminated during Hurricane Sandy, into the sink-like (minus the drains) basins. 

Where PM is made up of rather large, blandly pale colored, perfectly executed objects with sharp straight edges positioned with an acute precision, conversely Daniel Turner at And Now leaves the gallery sparce and the installation of a selection of refrigerator handles that Turner has been collecting scattered with an heir of happenstance.  In the first room a particularly minimal installation is comprised of just three of the metal handles resting atop one another to create a lanky, awkward form laying on the grey floor.  In the adjoining room darker and more desultory installation of pieces and parts that seem as though they just might have made up a whole long ago, are placed seemingly at random.  Throughout both exhibitions there seems to exist a strange quality that oscillates between a neutral and disconnected zone and an extremely specific and meticulously composed tone.  

Courtney Malick: There has been a fair amount of discussion already about the neutrality that permeates your recent sculpture/installation exhibitions, both at team in New York and also at AND NOW in Dallas.  Is this how you see your imagery?  Is there an impulse to produce work that somehow defies any particular sense of extremity?  Or are you more focused on the formal elements of your production?

Daniel Turner: I would prefer if the works remained "neutral," although I'm aware that's something that's not completely possible. Like everyone else I also work within a community and a framework.   It's a mere melding of the two: A fine line between any particular sense of extremity while remaining ambiguous yet formal. 

CM: While they may evoke a sort of limbo-esque zone, these installations are also clearly industrial and in PM at team, there is also something that seems especially clinical at play.  Are there any specific buildings, environments, professions, etc. that were in the back of your mind when planning for these exhibitions?

DT: I think a lot about open fields, the DMV, and the Board of Elections. 

CM: I am also curious about the title of the show, do you feel this work somehow relates to nighttime?

DT: Yes

CM: How would you describe the evolution of your work over the past five years or so?  Having been aware of your work since 2010 I can say that while there have certainly been nuances and shifts, I can also see a common thread in terms of tone and materiality, would you agree?  And if so, what is it that has drawn you back to these ideas and visual language again and again?

DT: The essence of my work has changed very little over the past decade. However, overtime I've found more challenging ways to say similar things. 

I'm fairly one track minded so I think wanting to communicate a sense of clarity has surely informed my work again and again.

CM: So then, how do you reconcile an attempt on your part to both communicate a sense of clarity and yet still maintain a certain sense of ambiguity?  Is the tension between those two agendas in some ways the context for your work?

 DT: Exactly.

CM: It is interesting to me that you are based in New York, because for some reason, your work seems as though it parses the blankness or dullness of something very un-metropolitan, very simple and sort of flat in a sense, do you feel that having lived in New York for quite a while now has had any influence on the kind of work that you are motivated to make?  Do you see these qualities in your work as being somehow reactionary to the business and flashy aspects of life in NYC?

DT: Formally speaking It's cleaned up my work quit a bit. The city has made me pay more attention to architectural nuances, the way the body navigates an object or an environment. 

It's made me think a great deal about the psychology of space, particularly office or institutional space. This sort of environment was something that I was rather unfamiliar with prior to moving to New York. 

CM: I see, that makes sense.  In a lot of ways it is a rather rigid city, do you feel as though there is a rigid quality to your work, particularly as it is often so minimal and industrial?

DT: Rigid only to a small degree.  I find much much of my work to be operating as a controlled collapse, which I suppose runs parallel with the city.

CM: Yes, New York is certainly an overlapping kind of an environment.  I also wanted to ask you about your collaborative projects.  I know that at one point your work spread out into collaborations that involved video and performance, though at the moment your practice seems very sculpture and object-oreinted.  Do you still work collaboratively at times?  Any plans for upcoming videos, performances, etc?

DT: Yes I've continued to collaborate with Colin Snapp under the name Jules Marquis as it's been a highly constructive way to critique even my own personal work. 

At the moment there are a few exhibitions planned for late 2014 and into 2015 which will exist solely in the realm of performance and video. 

CM: I like the idea that through a different, collaborative approach to artmaking you are able to see your own individual practice in a perhaps more objective perspective.  Do you find that there are certain things that you wan to say, or comment on, that are better suited to the kind of work that you make as the Jules Marquis duo?  And if so, can you say a bit about what kinds of territory it has allowed you to pursue in the past?

DT: Absolutely, the name Jules Marquis alone evades any sense of gender.  For example in 2009 I ahd the idea to take a flight from John F. Kennedy airport to La Guardia airport.  So for the $493.47 I flew the Director of Jericho Ditch [a non-profit exhibition space in Turner’s native South East Virgina, http://www.jerichoditch.com/] from one airport to the other.  The collaborative work has enabled me to realize projects that more than likely I would have failed to realize on my own.  

Print issue no. 16, Srping 2014

Courtney Malick in Conversation with Petra Cortright

Petra Cortright on Painting, Defaults and the Affect of Light…

Petra Cortright, born in 1986, is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work initially became popular on the Internet a few years ago when she began interacting with audiences/users through her performative YouTube, webcam videos.  In these solos, which, perhaps unconsciously double as self-portraits, Cortright who often sports sunglasses and bright lipstick, uses her movements to convey a vibe of sorts.  Without any dialog, but often incorporating electronic tracks laid over the video, she addresses her audience by looking directly into the camera, while at other times wanders seemingly aimlessly as if deep in thought and unaware of her self-documenting process.  Humor also often comes into play as Cortright uses programs such as Photoshop, Photo Booth, Magic Camera, Flash, After Effects and Maya to manipulate and skew her own image. 

Over the past few years, as her work has gradually transitioned more and more into the three-dimensional, real space of the white cube with group and solo exhibitions of her video along with other works like a series of flags and “paintings” on aluminum, Cortright has also continued to become more and more infamous within Internet communities of artists and other visually-minded, new media thinkers who are utilizing the unique terrain of the Internet to modify how art can be made, disseminated and even bought and sold.  The melding of the online and in person quality of her work proves that regardless of the realm in which she experiments, her gestures and the tones that she subtly yet specifically sets through her body language and digital morphing resonate with an emerging group of artists who work fluidly between media and presentation platforms.

Courtney Malick: In an interview with Jeppe Ugelvig for Dis Magazine, you mentioned that you didn’t fully understand the discussions and debates about selling digital art even though you are certainly a part of it and have even produced work that directly references the issue, (with Video Catalog).  I have to say that I am kind of in the same boat, for me digital art seems just like another way of making art.  In that sense, it is also confusing that artists such as yourself are usually noted as “digital” or “Internet” artists – though we don’t always specify ‘this person is a painter, a sculptor, etc…’ probably because more and more often people are working in all different ways that defy categorization.  You mentioned that your video work is in a sense an interactive, social media project in that viewers leave comments and the videos can be easily shared, while at the same time they are also documentation of performances.  With all this in mind, I suppose that my question is simply, do you think of yourself as a digital artist or as an artist who utilizes digital tools in order to produce a desired effect?

Petra Cortright: if anything I’m actually starting to think of myself as a painter really.  Even the videos that I make come from an obsession with composition, color, lines, movement – a very simple idea of beauty.  I’m interested in very classical subjects like landscapes, portraits, still life.  These interests apply to all my work and the work happens to be digital.  I grew up around computers, so what working with them is what is most natural to me.

It seems obvious to me that the definition of nature is what you know and you can’t change that.  Growing up my Dad had [one of the] first Macs, not the Apple 2, but one of the pretty early versions.  I remember a time before Internet but that was when I was like 10 years old.  My dad was an artist master print maker and sculptor and my Mom has a Masters in painting from Berkeley.  They did everything with their hands, that is what was natural for them at that time.

I asked my Mom once if she could give me oil paining lessons but she said I’d hate it.  So I got all the materials myself and tried to learn and I only lasted like an hour.  It was very difficult to not be able to copy and paste or to be able to change and delete things.  People our age get very impatient, everything has to be instant gratification.  For example now, with everyone using Instagram so much, you just post 1 photo at a time, as opposed to when Facebook was more popular and it was all about waiting until you had a set of photos and then posting a whole album at a time.

CM: I certainly see something that could be interpreted as painterly in the way that movement and the subtlety of affect or tone that is achieved therein, plays into your videos.  Can you tell me how you approach the relationship (or discord) between the bodily movements that you conjure in your webcam performance-videos and the technical implementations that are then added in with other programs?  Does the movement in fact come first and set the tone or is it a bit more arbitrary?

 PC: I’m a bad liar so the tone is very real in all the work, and I think that’s the start of it every video.  if I’m feeling blue that is going to show through in what I make.  I don’t try to fight against that because that seems counter intuitive - why fight reality? The tone dictates everything.

CM: I like that you are an emerging artist based in LA and that that environment tends to come through in the tone of your work.  However, I imagine you also spend a lot of time online as well, can you tell me about your online environment?  Sites that you enjoy visiting, certain networks that have been resourceful or inspiring…?

PC: I get really jacked up on Pinterest before I paint.  I used to do that with Google images but now I’m more into Pinterest because the images are really curated.  It’s really generic dreamy, like dream house boards, flowers people would like to have at their wedding, exotic travel landscapes and cityscapes. The format of the site is great because it’s just a sea of images. I also like the mood it puts me in, its very tranquil.

With a site like Pinterest I will see something like someone’s dream house board and I’ll [bring that into whatever I am working] on and sample a certain color. 

That’s just the reality of how I can work and what’s possible when you are able to use the Internet as a resource.  I mean, there is no reason that I wouldn’t do that.  It reminds me of something that Jeanette Hayes said, I think it was in her TMI video for VFiles.  She said, “if u put something online, its mine” I really love that quote.  It just sums up that the Internet is forever, you don’t know who saved what, when, it’s kind of this communal thing.  Of course there’s a fine line between stealing and re-using, but that can get pretty blurry.

CM: Yes, the Internet is clearly the most obvious and available resource for everyone.  Whether you identify as a “digital artist” or not, I think it would be difficult to find any artist who is not utilizing it in ways that are fundamental to their research and even processes of production in many cases.  You are now working both online and off, can you tell me about any differences or surprising similarities/parallels, that you have encountered while exhibiting in these two different modes and types of spaces?

PC:  I want to start posting more files of the paintings before they are printed because they look very different online vs. in print.   But in general there haven’t really been a lot of surprises.  i think the difference are in the communities.  When you make things that hang on walls its a different community.  Probably those people don’t know how to use computers.  Just kidding, of course they do, but still, it seems like the differences are the usual suspects.  It’s kind of a question that confuses me when I think about it.  Or maybe it feels taboo to talk about in a way. Like I don’t want outright say some of the things that i want to say...  

The online environment is more democratic, whereas the gallery system not so much.  For someone like me who is so used to doing everything on my own because it was just more convenient, having to give control over to this other system that seems a little outdated is weird.  I’m really not advocating against galleries but I think artists really needed them before the Internet, but I’ve come so far on my own even though there is a whole other system to navigate, but the Internet is just as much involved with gallerists and curators and all those people and those traditional systems.

I think they need to use the Internet more effectively.  I think the gallery system could get its shit together a little more and start being smarter about the Internet. I’m used to making every thought into a tweet.  It’s even more than that – I mean, ever since Twitter came out I think my thoughts have become shaped into 140 characters.  So I’m from this generation that just adapts by default and everything is out in the open.  So its weird to come into this system that isn’t used to operating like that.  If anything I sometimes feel slowed down by it.  But there is something so beautiful about having an event in a certain space and time.  It’s classic. LOL

The biggest difference is the hush hush attitude that seems so traditional and kind of…slow?  Like holding off on posting a picture of the show at least until the opening -- I think most galleries would prefer that, but I feel like its a little strange that they don’t want people to see the rawness of the install.  it just kind of slows me down mentally, because I’m from a generation that makes every thought known to the world, a few seconds after it occurs. 

CM: Yes, it definitely comes through that that continues to be important to you.  I think that the Video Catalog shows your commitment to a free and open source online environment.

PC: Yes, with the Video Catalog I didn’t really plan it beforehand as an aspect of my work, but it was my first two-person show, my first non-group show and the gallerist was asking me about how I wanted to price my videos and the whole question of it made me uncomfortable, I had no reference for what a webcam video should cost so I just jokingly suggested that we just charge 10 cents per Youtube view so we wouldn’t have to think about it. And he was like, “Wow, good idea, lets do that!”

Artists aren’t really in charge of the monetary value of their work so I don’t even want to pretend that I am, but the art world doesn’t really decide either, so this way, it depends solely on how many people are looking at the work, which hopefully reflects something about their interest in it as well. When coming up with this catalog system, I took into account in the rare case that a video would go viral, and end up getting millions of views, then it would the price would actually start to go down instead of continuing to go up.  I think that is also important because obviously you can buy views and there is a lot of trolling and stuff like that.  So that is a rule that I use for all my videos now.  I find it demotivating to think too much about systems overall or working within them, I do well within certain sets of circumstances, but it is more about comfort than pressure for me.

CM: This kind of reminds me of a curatorial way of working, in that, for example, when I curate a show I want the curatorial structure that I employ to emulate as closely as possible the modes through which the artists produce their work, so, with Video Catalog, you have made the structure or the sort of “rule that your work follows,” reflect the ways that your primary audience (Youtube) functions.  Do you think of it that way at all?

PC: Well, I can see that in a sense.  I think that things are very fragmented and I don’t like making precious things or the idea or myth of an artist making this golden, secret shining thing… That is why I like to make things available to as many people as possible.

People, audiences, expect to be part of the process now. I feel weird if I don’t post anything online during the process of making a new video or body or work. Now I am always engaged on some level even before a show opens or a new video is up online… because that is the way that living online is, it is constant.

CM: I think this also relates to your choice to often use default settings when manipulating or enhancing your images.  Can you tell me about your interest in default settings, especially as they seem to be evolving more and more often these days?  Does default connote familiarity to you, or is it something else?

PC: Its a structure that is nice to work within.  At some point you have to set up some rules or structure so that you can have creative freedom.  I find that having infinite options is oppressive.  At some point you have to start making decisions and I love trying to push tools that other people have already created and used.

When I was 10 I was really into Sim City.  Before you play u can add what you want to the city and that was my favorite part.  I really liked creating environments because I knew I wouldn’t be able to draw that. That definitely has to do with my interest in default].  I feel most creative when there are some limitations and the answers get real oppressive, customizing things can be really tiring. For example, I was talking to my hair dresser, because I’m engaged, so we were talking about dresses and I realized that I don’t want to find “the perfect dress.” That’s how you get caught up in the idea of perfection and everything being specifically customized to you, and the truth is that it will never really be exactly the way you see it in your head.  This mentality relates to my work and especially the way that it is displayed, like how they are so different depending on whether they are digital vs. printed, and they are both nice.

CM: It seems to make sense that working with pre-fixed settings would be particularly appealing to someone who works through the internet because even just the idea of a computer screen as a space to occupy and work from is nothing like a blank canvas in that there are already pre-imposed limits that exist.  Again, in that sense, I feel like there is something a bit curatorial about your mode of working with defaults and trying to make something out of something that is already available. 

PC: Yeah, I hate when people say “you can do whatever!”  On Instagram there are a set number of filters, so I know I have these certain options.  Similarly, when I start working with software like Photo Both, Magic Campera, Maya… I usually gravitate towards the shittiest, most notoriously ugly settings and filters.

Then you have a structure within the parameters of which you can be creative. That’s why I like defaults so much.  Also I would never come up with those filters in a million years, so its nice to open yourself up to other options that you wouldn’t think of on your own.  It’s like how if you don’t already know something you cant search for it.

CM: That makes me think of a parasitic, or perhaps referential is a better word, way of working, that is dependent on other systems or structures that are already in place within a certain cultural context.  Does that relate to the way that you approach a new project?

PC: Yes, in that the structure of my work is resting on this foundation of other things that already exist.  It makes me think of genetics and the fact that genes are stronger when they are not inbred. 

CM: Right, I suppose having a setting of sorts already in place allows you to fit yourself into it and focus more on yourself…?

PC: Yes.  I hate to see people watching me but it has to be me in videos. I’m alone making videos and I can see myself so if I start overthinking things I can see it right away in what I am doing.

CM: But since it is you, they do take on the self-portrait, did u think of that at the onset?

PC: No, I just kind of realized that recently.  I think actually I am interested in the most traditional aspects of art, like landscape and portraiture – the basics.  People have always found these things to be beautiful.  They are not broken so, as an artist, you don’t need to fix them.

CM: Since you are the performer and the director, in a sense, would you say that there is an element of ‘the rehearsal’ in these videos? 

PC: Yeah.  I also realized that the webcam videos never have my voice in them,

It’s not about talking or dialog, it’s really visual.  [Staying silent] helps to remove me from it, I don’t want to give my image and my voice.

CM: Even though there is no dialog do you feel as though there is a language that gets built through your movements?

PC: I think that a lot of the movements that I do I do because they are the best way to enhance the effects that I use [in post].  I use my hands and my hair a lot because you can get a lot of movement out of them.

CM: So hands and gestures act sort of like prompts or an impetus for the tools and effects that you choose to use?

PC: In a way.  I have this respect for them because they give me the structure I need to feel the freedom to be creative and make work.

CM: Are you physically reacting to and interacting with these effects as opposed to the ways that they are most often used, which is utilitarian?

 PC: Yeah definitely.  I observe the effects and then my physical movements are a reaction to what I’m seeing.  It’s not thought out, the more I think the less and I move -- the goal is not to think. 

It brings to mind this series I did with melting things using a basic smudge tool in Photoshop.  More so than the effects, the light really changes the way that the movements seem to naturally happen.  For example, there is a difference between the light in Berlin, which is kind of blue, as opposed to the light in L.A. where it’s very orange and beautiful, It really looks like a movie.

CM: is it important for you that your works are beautiful?

PC: Yes, I mean I don’t’ care about making things beautiful for everyone, but I make things that I think are beautiful.  I definitely just want to be an artist, I don’t want to be a curator or a writer or a gallerist – if I can be a good artist and make beautiful work that is all that I want.

CM: I know that you are preparing for a new show in Europe, [without giving it all away], can you tell me something about what you have been working on?  Any new terrain, new challenges, discoveries?

PC: I’m making some huge aluminums for the show in Stockholm at Carl Kostyal.  I’ve never made work on that scale before so I’m really excited. That is another great thing about digital work is that the size is a variable and it’s really fun to be able to really fill a space.  For the show at Mama the gallery in Rotterdam we’re building these colored structures for viewing the videos. I think its’ very Dutch, this idea of a bright colored structure, and its’ a perfect accent to the video work which is very playful and colorful.  The show at Mama opens on the 28th of March and the show at Carl Kostyal opens April 10th

2nd Life: Cao Fei and Miri Segal

SECOND LIFE>  REAL LIFE>  SECOND LIFE

Discussing digital art and culture seems to be predominantly a relevant distinction to make because, though our lives are deeply intertwined with the Internet, we still maintain [lives] outside of its ever expanding, but nonetheless, inherent frame.  However, digital has a much more innate meaning to a certain community, so much so that no division between “real life” where inter-personal relationships are nurtured and “going online” need exist.  This is Second Life, where daily activities from eating, to group meetings and lectures, concerts, personal grooming, travel and sex, all occur digitally.  Since its inception in 2003, Second Life has become, neither the first nor the largest of such virtual communities, but by far the most popular.  For many its existence [informs/intimates] a totally separated way of living for gamers and programmers and other individuals that seem to prefer to spend their time in a fantastical environment rather than within day to day “reality.”  What may be surprising to learn, however, is for the past few years real life has continued to merge with Second Life for the express betterment of institutions, colleges, universities and other pedagogically minded groups and clubs.  

Today there are ten countries with official Embassies in Second Life, including, The Maldives, Sweden and Israel, among others.  There are also close to one hundred higher education institutions, including Harvard, that have virtual campuses within the sprawling 29,000 regions that make up the Main Grid (Agni) area of Second Life, with each region approximating 256 meters squared.  There students are able to congregate, create forums and socialize in ways that are quite the same as those that take place on an actual campus, but that allow for international students and any number of guests who are unable to travel great distances to participate in discussions that they otherwise would not.  Furthermore, classes are both extended into Second Life and issues raised by its rules and unique abilities are introduced into classes on real campuses.  In a study conducted in 2007 at University of Maryland University College (UMUC) by Joanna Zhang, an Instructional Support Specialist, findings showed that not only is the practice of integrating college courses and Second Life growing, but that more and more educators are finding successful results from experimenting with teaching and learning activities within Second Life.  Still other pioneers are developing interactive learning materials by taking advantage of the building, programming and scripting features that the game of Second Life supports.  

Since so many educational models seem to be thriving within Second Life, and for many art is yet another, if less conventional, educational tool, if is no surprise that contemporary artists are attracted to the kinds of characters and worlds available for manipulation within its realm.  Does creating an art project within Second Life necessarily qualify one as a digital artist?  Perhaps this is a question best put to Chinese artist Cao Fei, creator of an art-focused destination in Second Life called RMB City.  However, prior to RMB City, which began in 2008 and was publicly launched in Second Life in 2009, Cao had worked mainly with photography, video, performance and installation and would therefore have not been considered by most to be a digital or new media artist.  Though RMB City, as an ongoing art project, exists exclusively in Second Life, one could argue that it is more a geographical and cultural project about China than it is one that investigates the world of digital media.  The city, which is actually an island unto itself, consists of a people’s factory, a new village and a slum building.  It was designed specifically to incorporate many of the most iconic architectural characteristics of various cities within China, including, Beijing’s Monument to the Peoples Heroes (atop which rotates a large a ferris wheel), the Three Gorges reservoir from Tiananmen Square, the Grand National Theater, the now rusted Herzog & De Meuron Bird’s Nest from the Olympic Stadium, Rem Koolhaus’ CCTV headquarters building, Shanghai’s new Oriental Pearl TV Tower and the Fillal Piety Temple of Guangzhou. RMB City functions simultaneously as a destination for the more than 20 million registered Second Life gamers or residents as they are often referred to, but also as a hub for research and artistic production where Cao, whose avatar’s name is China Tracy, organizes events such as mayoral speeches, interviews and Naked Idol, which is a popular body contest for avatars. 

While RMB City’s is first a site of production and interaction for gamers, because Cao works as an exhibiting artist in institutions around the world, it has also become a satellite that bridges those communities and individuals with others from various galleries and museums, such as the live interviews that she has conducted with Hans Ulrich Obrist and other curators at the Serpentine in London in which both online and real life viewers could participate.  In this way, the project is digital in its framework and modus operandi, but so far, the most exciting meaning that has come from a close look at RMB City is the ways that it parses, through a certain level of abstracted mimicry, the deeply felt isolation that has resulted from the vast urban development that has continued to spread across China in the last twenty years and the fragility and instability of the environment today.  In this way Cao comments more on China and its rapidly changing landscape and culture than she does on Second Life, which instead acts as a stage upon which she invites participants to engage.

Another artist who has utilized Second Life as setting, so to speak, though not for the purposes of site production but rather for pure exploration, is Israeli artist, Miri Segal.  In her 2007 video, BRB, Segal and her assistant create avatars and enter into Second Life for the first time.  Unlike Cao, here viewers are able to relate more to Segal as she seems as new to the alternate world as most people.  There Segal, whose avatar is named Muzza and whose face is covered with a Google search screen-skin, wanders through all kinds of strange and over-stimulating environments with glowing colorful skies.  She and her assistant, whose avatar’s name is Roga, pass by other residents, many of whom are half human, half animal and dressed in extreme costumes while others look relatively like they might in real life.  Interestingly, when people speak their words appear on the screen like sub-titles and their hands simulate a typing motion.  Conversations between Muzza and some of the eye-catching characters that she encounters near a random campfire diverge from the philosophical to the practical.  At one point a resident named Bonnie even begins to discuss her feelings about “SL” (Second Life), in contrast to “RL” (real life), and her discontent at times with its “fakeness.”  Another replies that despite having the ability to choose one’s own skin, “people are who they are” regardless of which version of life they are interacting within.  To that, someone named Sensei adds, “Second Life is one more screen upon which we cast the shadow of our self.”  Questions about whether people are afforded a certain freedom to be more true, more themselves, or less so, continue for some time.  Then, as Segal explains in her account of the experience, by using Second Life’s search engine and typing in “Love” she and Roga are suddenly transported to a sex park with flowering trees and large close-up photos of women in an ecstatic state of pleasure plastered on white marble walls. Roga awkwardly and somewhat abruptly begins a flirtation with a horse-man that quickly turns into the kind of soft-core cyber sex many of us probably remember having in early, obscure chat rooms in the mid 1990s as tweens.  

Suddenly Roga’s lover disappears and she and Muzza move on to a beautiful and desolate location to visit an art gallery in the form of a translucent oblong bubble where virtual iterations of Segal’s photos and installation work is on view in a group show. Muzza’s camera captures two artists discussing the question of individuality and their sensation of its lacking during moments of “true creativity.”  One of them interestingly notes, “So, as artists, we succumb to our multiplicity.”  Other works in the virtual exhibition compliment the particular context of Second Life in which they find themselves, including a rope noose hanging from the ceiling, a swarm of bees, a large, porous, mesh wall piece that spells out TIME, and an oversized, dirty esc (escape) button built into the wall.  Aside from Segal’s photos and the noose, none of this work could possibly exist in a real gallery and it is easy to see how such an immersive space so quickly becomes truly representational and theatrical, even more so than sites for exhibition and spectacle that exist in real life. 

It is not difficult to understand why Second Life would be a fruitful and compelling place for experimental artists, whether they identify with categorizations such as digital or new media or not.  There is an open-ness and an ultra public way of interacting that residents have created to liberate themselves from conventions of daily life that allows artists to interject art and discourse into common encounters in ways that do not often happen in most people’s daily life.  Interestingly, its imbrications with the real world seem to be endlessly multiplying, which may perhaps be normalizing its ulteriority, eventually forcing residents who use Second Life as an escape from regularity to find new ways and go deeper “underground” so to speak within the grid.  To those of us who do not identify as gamers such a world already seems like it is populated and perpetuated by “outsiders,” people who would prefer not to socialize within what is considered to be “normal” public zones.  While projects such as Cao’s and Segal’s seem to prove this to be true to some extent in that both engage in or encourage somewhat unconventional behavior, they also show ways that gaps between real life and Second Life continue to be both pronounced and yet  bridged.  With that in mind, seeing as though institutions such as universities and embassies continue to impose themselves into Second Life, it seems just as likely that some of its liberating modes of excess and identity transformation may spill over into real life. 

May 2014

Mike Kelley (retrospective)

Museum of Contemporary Art, The Geffen Contemporary

152 North Central Avenue, Los Angeles

March 31 – July 28, 2014

That the most extensive retrospective exhibition of the work of Mike Kelley has finally reached its last and most poignant iteration at L.A’s MOCA is indeed a momentous occasion.  While Kelley’s work continues to resonate with audiences all over the world, it is nonetheless undeniable that both his work and the aura of the man himself have particularly strong ties to L.A.  The city’s artists and counter-cultures, its notoriety as the generator for celebrity and mass media, its saccharine colors, its laid back lifestyle, its seedy underbelly and even its geography and topology have all played significant parts in the complex, colorful and extreme world that Kelley crafted through his drawings, performances, music, videos, installations, paintings and sculpture.  Though throughout his prolific career Kelley referenced his hometown of Detroit, Michigan and the deterioration of the all American suburban home and family unit, his move to Southern California in 1976 to attend graduate school at the California Institute for the Arts seems to have been not only fortuitous but perhaps written in the stars, as it was there, at the early age of 24 that his gripping and provocative practice began to really take form.

This highly anticipated and deeply emotional exhibition began at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in December of 2012, just eleven months after the artist committed suicide in January of the same year.  Mike Kelley was originally organized by Stedelijk Director, Ann Goldstein, who was a curator at MOCA from 1983-2009 where she often worked closely with Kelley.  Goldstein was one of the first curators to highlight the unique importance of Kelley’s work in contrast to much discourse at the time that referred to it as “low,” “abject” and “de-skilled.”  However, MOCA’s finalé version of Mike Kelley is not only close to the hearts of many L.A. visitors for their personal affinities with Kelley as a central figure in both the history and the currently expanding influence of contemporary art in L.A., but furthermore the sprawling show also celebrates the city in certain ways with the inclusion of several seminal installations that did not travel with the rest of the exhibition tour, which, after Amsterdam, traveled to Long Island City’s MoMA PS1 and the Pompidou in Paris before returning to Kelley’s home of Los Angeles. 

Even so, knowing the sad ending to Kelley’s story and that he touched the lives of so many peopl in L.A., there is a shadowed tone that hangs over the exhibition while at the same time it manages to be as enticing and comical as any one might expect from the always witty Kelley.  MOCA curator, Bennett Simpson, who tailored the show to The Geffen and organized the addition of important works such as Framed and Frame (Miniature Reproduction “Chnatown Wishing Well” Build by Mike Kelley after “Miniature Reproduction ‘Seven Star Cavern’ Built by Prof. H.K. Lu”) (1999), aptly notes that there is “a lot of emotional baggage” for many viewers.  it is an intense show and the work itself is very intense.  Even if it may not be Mike Kelley’s personal pain that comes across, there is a lot of pain in the show, the work deals with a lot of difficult issues.  I think for people that knew Mike it is painful to see.  At the same time, it is also such a huge celebration of his work that it is bittersweet for some people.”Museum of Contemporary Art, The Geffen Contemporary

That kind of hard to swallow bitter-sweetness is not only a symptom of our knowledge of Kelley’s tragic and sudden passing, but seems in fact to have been there, imbued in most of his work all along, particularly the many pieces that he made at various points in his career that are directly related to his own childhood such as Educational Complex (1995) and his many works incorporating stuffed animals, like the sewn together wall piece, More Love Hours That Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin (1987) and the banner image for the exhibition, most widely known as the album art accompanying Sonic Youth’s 1992 album, “Dirty,” Ahh…Youth! (1991), photographic portraits of ratty old, handmade stuffed animals with Kelley’s own picture slipped in amongst them.  Despite the contentious issues Kelley raises about the idealism of domestic life, Simpson also concludes that, “Homesickness is all over his work.  Even in the very first works that he made at CalArts he was making birdhouses – so he was making homes.  They were homes for kind of alienated birds.”  

One of the most immediate senses that is heightened while finding one’s way through this labyrinthine exhibition is the large role that sound plays in many of Kelley’s works.  While standing gazing down at a floor installation of a configuration of stuffed animals and objects listlessly propped up, the sounds of several video works clashing into one another waft through the air and act like strings tying one work to another despite the discrepancies in their form, content and the time period in which they were made.  Perhaps in part these audial collisions are mere happenstance, since the Geffen was the only MOCA venue large enough to accommodate the entirety of this impressively comprehensive show, but at the same time the bleeding of the sound of one project into another speaks directly to the ways in which one can see something signature at work throughout all of Kelley’s work.  As Simpson says, “One of the things about Mike Kelley, which I think the MOCA version of the show really carries out, is that he was an incredibly consistent artist. The ideas, motifs, imagery and all of the major themes that he was dealing with in his art, even from the very beginning, are visible all the way through.  You can look at work from 1978 next to work from 2005 and even though in terms of scale and production it may look like two different artists, conceptually and thematically it is definitely all Mike Kelley.  So, at the Geffen, through those relationships you get the sense of the big picture of his practice, like one total artwork.”  

The gravity of a show such as Mike Kelley that delves so deeply into not only the succession of works by the artist but the poigniant and nuanced ways in which he so thoughtfully wove the fragility of childhood, the plasticity of the façade of mass culture and the dark and secretive sides of life that in fact exist in plain sight, into his bright, sardonic and playful compositions is undeniably felt on a number of levels.  There is even in fact an underlying dialog between Kelley and his subject matter that seems to suggestively become more and more pronounced as we see him pick up imbricated sets of social issues and aesthetic ideals over and over again in unusual and engaging ways.  After taking in all of the work on view at MOCA one will certainly have plenty to think about and a reel of powerful images that may be recalled by the oddest of daily interactions and media. 

March 2014

Dora Budor

Action Paintings

247365

131 Huntington St., Brooklyn

February 14 - March 9, 2014

Croatian artist Dora Budor’s most recent solo exhibition “Action Paintings” took the form of a three-channel video installation that also included three monitor-sized canvases and an elaborate floor piece made of “dirt makeup.” Budor’s three videos each subtly take on the combinational emotional tone, blocking, and energy of some of the most internationally popular action movies: “The Hunger Games,” “The Matrix,” “Mission Impossible,” and The Bourne Supremacy. While the mood of each video relates to these films, the role of the protagonist is played by professional German stunt double Helga Wretman in all three of Budor’s videos. These basic qualities of tone, movement, and narrative tension become distinctive to each video as they have been specifically “scripted” by Budor, who gave a different treatment to the film crew and individualized scripts that focused on emotion and facial expressions; for Wretman, a kind of acting she rarely employs as a body double. By utilizing the singular painting as a substitutive object in her video narratives, with Action Paintings, Budor has at least temporarily remedied the oft confronted impasse of many video artists’ with regards to editions and the medium’s endless multiplicity, while at the same time dissecting and magnifying some of America’s most common action movie tropes. 

The implications of doubling continue to permeate through “Action Paintings” as Budor, whose blonde hair, height, and body build closely matches Wretman’s, also appears in the videos at certain points during high tension chase scenes in which distinctions between the “good guy,” or in this case woman, and bad woman, become blurred. Even in Budor's installation an inescapable duality is reinforced, as each monitor is connected by its frame and hinges to a tarnished, beat up white canvas, which, during filming, was used by Wretman as yet another stand-in for various shields, weapons, and gear used to protect oneself and engage in physical battle. 

By attaching the corresponding canvases to each video (a clear, metaphoric superimposition), the videos become dependent upon the paintings’ singular physicality, somewhat ironically rendering both the videos and the entire installation impossible to remake or duplicate. Each video, complete with a generic, suspense-driven original score that loops and loops, conjures the sensation of waking up to the DVD menu playing the same excerpt of a theme song on repeat.  Through this looping effect, viewers watch the fearless Wretman, the illusive Budor in the background, and the canvases as proxy -- now imbued with the precious status of paintings within the white cube – courageously journey through forests, shadowy parking lots and other stereotypical settings for "high voltage ACTION."  During these battles, conquests and defeats we see each canvas endure a new scar as they are torched, slashed, ripped and bent, all of which is then present within the work in front of us.  Here, the symbiotic, inherent relationship between video and canvas becomes seamless. 

Budor’s transformation of the gallery floor gels these three video-paintings into one complete installation that cannot be broken up into individual works. Under sheets of clear plastic is a layer of brown, caked material that appears to be simply a sampling of dirt, but is in fact a special kind of makeup made to look like dirt or soot that is used on movie sets. Budor combined two hues of this makeup and applied it liberally to the gallery floor. Then, sealing it over with plastic, she created a new, flat surface that mimics the façade of the face of the actor.

Altogether, the three videos, three paintings, and the applied flooring combine to produce a strange effect that is both familiar and yet vastly eschewed from our normal experience of movie watching. In this way Budor highlights aspects of such box-office shattering, blockbuster films that get utilized over and over again in order to produce sensationalized effects that over time become dulled like a pleasure center in the brain that gets overwrought with stimulants and malfunctions. The “Action Paintings” videos, in their striking similarity, begin to reveal an unspoken language within which audiences can identify the kinds of default dichotomies that most often structure such movies. This repetition creates cues for viewers’ standard emotional highs and lows through such binaries as heroes and villains, danger and complacency, victory and doom

The Whitney Biennial 2014

Curated by Michelle Grabner, Anthony Elms and Stuart Comer

Whitney Museum of American Art

945 Madison Ave., New York

March 7 - May 25, 2014

It is often considered the most easily unlikable show to come along every other year.  In part this is due to its wildly over-reaching aim at “what is American art at this very moment?” -- as if a singular moment in which a word as meaningless as “American” could even theoretically exist.  Nonetheless, the Whitney Biennial has again come about and has at least attempted in putting forth a prismatic view of the most popular, if not compelling, directions in visual culture.  Before delving into the artists and the work on view, it is important to note the three curators who together though separately, (perhaps such an arrangement itself a reflection of today’s modus operandi worth considering more closely), built the frameworks within which one museum became three parallel takes on contemporary art, situated literally one atop the other.   

Beginning at the top, as it seems most viewers do, and then working their way down, is first Michelle Grabner’s presentation.  Grabner, who has been working predominantly in Chicago as an artist, curator, critic and professor at the Chicago Institute since the 1990s, certainly fits the multi-tasking mold of what anyone working in contemporary art most often – or dare I say – ought look like.  In that sense, she wears many hats but contrary to the “old days” (presumably when that saying began), now we wear all our hats at the same time.  Grabner’s investment in criticality and pedagogy is prevalent in her curatorial statement, (also important to note that there is no over-arching concept or text of any kind for this, the 77th Whitney Biennial, but instead three, separate brief curatorial statements).  Yet on the fourth floor, where the artists’ selected by Grabner, whose names are for the most part not so unfamiliar and thereby not unexpectedly included in such a definitively canonizing exhibition, criticality seems sorely missing.  To most criticality might connote a sense of editing – a slimming down not necessarily to the mere essentials, but to points along a line that relate to one another and take a viewer from one place to another without a myriad of detours along the way.  There are certainly a number of strong works in Grabner’s compilation, most notably Jennifer Bornstein’s Untitled video from 2014 of two naked women on a beach taking various stances and poses based on anthropological findings of dances related to schizophrenia, postmodern dance techniques, and soft-core porn imagery of the 1970s, Ken Lum’s, Midway Shopping Plaza (2014), an oversized 3D collage of replicas of typical signage from a Vietnamese strip malls that emphasizes consumerism, bright colors and multiculturalism in ways that are so easily felt they need not be described, and, amidst a slew of too familiarly clunky, draping, textured sculptures and installations such as works from Sterling Ruby’sceramic series, Basin Theology (2013), Sheila Hicks’ Pillar of Inquiry/Supple Column (2013-14), and an installation by Joel Otterson that included a tee-pee-esque tent in front of a wide sheet of hanging strands of beads,  is the refreshingly dry and minimalist installation by David Robbins, Bookcase of Concrete Comedy; An Alternative History of Twentieth-Century Comedy (2013) in which eight books of the same title are wedged together into a square hole cut out of a large, wooden bookcase.

However, altogether, Grabner’s exhibition renders contemporary art and more significantly, culture et al, as one that continues to be submerged in abstract, oversized forms that rely more heavily on their physicality than the depths of their intellectual value.  Curatorially, not a single one of these works, with perhaps the exception of Zoe Leonard’s gigantic camera obscura, 945 Madison Avenue (2014),  which fills up its own large room, has a single inch of room within which to breath, much less afford the viewer the same luxury.  However, it ought to be noted that in fact Leonard’s work was curated into the fourth floor by second floor curator, Anthony Elms.  As a result, videos, sculptures, paintings and installations alike get jammed up against one another, doing nothing to help Grabner clarify what it is she is trying to say about contemporary art in 2014 other than perhaps that it is messy, and often full of misnomers, crossed lines, grandiosities and plain, flat paint.  Surely this assessment is not entirely untrue, but unfortunately it is perhaps one of the least exciting aspects of what it means to make or care about art today, not to mention that it makes for a jumbled and cramped viewing experience. 

Though its unclear that in fact the stairway installation that runs all the way from Grabner’s fourth floor down to Anthony Elms’ second, is actually also curated into the museum by Elms, it is a very pleasant surprise after the conglomerate affront that must be tackled on the fourth floor.  Charlemagne Palestine’s sound installation, whose poetic title harks back to the visuality of e.e. cumming’s use of the page, not only echoes out a haunting, ambient sound, but also includes stuffed animals that, though they possess an air of creepiness akin to Mike Kelley, appear to be from the 1930s or ‘40s (even creepier actually!).  

n to the third, much talked about, “queer” floor curated by Stuart Comer, Chief Curator of Media and Performance at MoMA, which does in fact deliver, on many fronts.  First and foremost is the by now infamously raunchy installation room by Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard, confined to its own area with colorful curtains at its entrance that act as a censor that warns: illicit content ahead.  Illicit indeed, but more importantly, Melgaard’s microcosm of rubber sex dolls perched seductively (often spread eagle) on colorful, Jim Drain-esque sculptural furniture and rugs with videos and sound interspersed throughout, is perhaps the first time thus far through the biennial that the work on view and its curatorial agenda feel true to the “moment” as it were, in an attempt to be captured.  It does this, at least in part precisely because of its fleeting and patchworked quality.  No sooner are overtly sexual, gay and animalistic acts engaged in on screen than they disappear and are replaced by another flash of Dionysian excess. 

All the while viewers must navigate their inherently precarious place within this crowded scene, as others wander in and out, some too uncomfortable to stay for more than a minute while others, perhaps knowingly or not, take part in Travis Jeppesen’s sound-based installation within Melgaard’s, sitting in chairs placed against one of the rooms’ walls where blackout glasses and headphones are made available on hooks next to vinyl records of various artists.   

Just outside of Melgaard’s mania of body parts and raw, gay sex are other bright, fast paced works such as Ken Okiishi’s complexly layered and slippery four paint and video hybrid flat screens, each titled, gesture/data (2013), that welcome viewers as they step off the elevator to the third floor of the museum, Jacolby Satterwhite’s single-channel, 3D, HD video, Reifying Desire 6 – Island of Treasure (2014), that similarly works on Melgaard’s homosexual and pornographic edge, but catapulting such subjects literally into outer space where they exist even more esoterically within the metaphoric depths of the internet, (aka the “inner web” where Melgaard claims to have found much of his visual material), and the large, personal and alluring collage-like installation of forty-six photos by Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernest, titled, Relationship (2008-13), that, self-explanitorily follows the couple through each artists ’gendertransition, Drucker’s from male to female and Ernest’s from female to male.

signature, overly nostalgic ink drawings by Paul P., and a seemingly popular, somewhat garish, installation of aluminum and silver wall sculptures by Terry Adkins.  There are however, also moments of intrigue in Elms’ show that, though not all that shockingly, speak to the connective and referential methodologies of contemporary art, theory and thought in general, that continue to work as powerful, even pedagogical tools.  The inclusion of the Chicago-based collective Public Collectors mixed-media installation on the life of audio recording enthusiast and activist, Malachi Rischer seems an unusual choice that brings up not only questions of activism and suicide, (as Rischer notoriously killed himself by setting himself on fire in public back in 2002), but also the continued prominence and relevance on anonymity.  

Another work in Elms’ purview that sadly fell flat was that that was installed in the antecedent space of the lobby gallery where My Barbarian will perform, The Mother and Other Plays (2014) throughout the month of March, and where papier-mâché masks and similarly drab colored, poster-like drawings appear as a static installation.  As the first work that welcomes visitors to the biennial, this installation says perhaps a good deal about what is in store throughout one’s journey into the museum. 

While there are moments of insight when encountering specific works within the biennial, overall, these three curators, with perhaps the exception of Comer, do little to change or even exaggerate the conversations that are occurring and laying one atop the other throughout various discourse-driven platforms that fuel the so-believed validity of contemporary art altogether.  At its best, contemporary art today at once crystallizes and confuses what it means to be living, working and perhaps resisting humanity through out world’s many interfaces, which includes an endless number of oscillating screens and devices.  To neglect this reality within the very framework for a curatorial presentation of American art today feels not only somewhat irresponsible but more importantly just a hugely missed opportunity to re-imagine and expand upon the idea of the museum as a place to both forge and tread alternative paths to consciousness and thought. 

The Armory Show

Piers 92 and 94, New York

March 6-9, 2014

Not unsurprisingly, this year’s Armory Show, like so many other art fairs of its scale and caliber, felt a lot like a shopping mall fueled by large crowds of people hoping to look important while shuffling through the tents from booth to booth in a frenzy to see it all.  Despite the madness, however, was a backbone of programming and a focus on China as a (not so new), major force within the art world, let alone commerce on a general, global scale.  In fact, a whole section of the fair was dedicated to Chinese gallerists and exhibition groups, as well as several days of talks in the media lounge where experts and professionals who are bridging the large gap between China and the U.S. discussed any number of economic, logistical and cultural shifts.  This serious tone, not often spot-lighted within fairs that are – lets face it – mainly to cater to the highest echelon of private collectors, while perhaps only fully engaged in by a small number of patrons and guests to the fair, nonetheless shows that the Armory, though its ultimate aim will remain on sales, as it is a fair after all, is also an important place and moment within each year, for interested parties to learn and contribute to discourse surrounding the market as it effects the rest of the world outside of these four specific days in March.  

Not only was China as a buzzword the star of the show, but there were also a number of interesting installations, particularly from some of the international galleries, which, while still veering on the side of buyable, accessible art in the forms of painting and sculpture, did push the conceptual envelope, so to speak.  There was the much talked about, oversized, slutty, almost alien women rendered in white plaster at Swedish gallery Andrehn-Schiptjenko by sculptor Cajsa von Zeipel, the unforgettable “wedding cake” sculpture by Tim Noble and Sue Webster at Berlin’s Blain Southern Gallery that seemed more a comment on the perverse or inverted nature of ceramics in art today than to do with marriage…  

Another sexually charged, phallic work by commissioned Armory Chinese artist, Xu Zhen, who had other works throughout the fair, Play-expectation (2013), grabbed attention with its S&M dungeoneous, chamber feel.

The notion of ‘play’ seemed to permeate much of the fair, as another work by Zheng, Art of Change (2014), which involved participants hidden inside of a large white, convertible cube throwing stuffed animals up into the air so visitors could see only their toss as it rose above the cube’s walls, continued to surprise and confuse viewers throughout the weekend. 

Colorful, movement-based and, again playful works continued to be found at Parisian, Galerie Daniel Templor with Ivan Navarro’s depth-defying neons, and at Reykjavik’s i8 gallery where fashion entered into the equation with Kjartan Sveinsson and Egill Saebjornsson’s mixed-media, wall-based installation, Original Handbags (2008). 

Also on view at i8 were visually and physically compelling, delicate framed pieces by Ragna Robertsdottir, made with black salt on glass.

Also utilizing glass was the intriguing as always sculpture, The Cloud – Rabbit (2013) by Leandro Erlich at New York’s Sean Kelly Gallery,  and the complex “lamp” by Tony Oursler, titled Persona Non Grata (orbital) (2014) at Helsinki’s Galerie Forsblom.

There was also some work on view that was less head-scratching and instead was simply pleasing to look at, which after all is much of the reason why visitors, even though with no intent to buy, come to fairs such as the Armory in the first place.  One such gem was the rustic, hanging, printed cloths evoking the likes of Robert Morris’ felt drapings, by  Elena Del Rivielo at Madrid’s Galerie Elvila Gonzalez

All in all it feels as though, while the Armory will remain an institution catered towards collectors, and sadly, thus resisting content-driven and conceptually challenging work, (let alone the continued lack of video, complex installation and performance that plagues practically all art fairs), this years efforts proved a vast improvement from years past when anyone without checkbook in hand may have felt totally out of place.  2014’s Armory Show proved that it is still an important and relevant place to look at art, even if the act of plain looking takes precedence over that of connection-making, criticality and discourse.  

January 2014

Working Through Performance: Casey Jane Ellison, Ed Fornieles and Yemenwed

Since we are now forty-something years into the history of performance art it is rather obvious to discuss the medium as body-centric, time elapsing, spatially oriented and generally speaking, for the “here and now.”  And while there are still performance artists whose work fits this description in ways that continue to be thought provoking, like most things “contemporary” there has also begun within the last ten years or so, an evident split in the road of performance.  This split has of course taken many forms that have lead artists to consider performance as an essential and integral element that is incorporated into their practices, but often in ways that have nothing to do with the body in terms of corporeality, nothing to do with real time or real space, and even less to do with an audience that must necessarily be present in the moment.  In that sense, such artists are working through the craft of performance, thus taking the tangibility that performance art initially clung to as a way to thwart the art market, and replacing it with something altogether unfixed, interchangeable and malleable.  This is significant because today what is unfixed is in fact often more relevant to ways in which audiences relate to art than trying to pin a singular performance to a specific time, place and set of actions. 

Such artists, not surprisingly, often use their laptops, iPads and iPhones like studios.  And since it is action, characters and dialogue that they take as raw materials, this kind of integrated performance art is wrought through technological systems of modification and communication rather than the performance of the 1970s and ‘80s that was dependent upon site specificity.  From sociology, behavioral studies and the like, we know that performance art is inherently linked to human behavior, as everyone performs to some extent in their daily lives.  Therefore, now that so much of our lives are lived virtually, these new directions in performance art are enhanced by and embedded into digital and social circuits such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, Photoshop, etc.  Furthermore, such work often emulates or projects the ways in which these kinds of systems (that we by this point take for granted), have reconfigured how we see, communicate, and piece together information within a sped up and ever-shifting set of layered screens at our fingertips. 

While many artists in the past may have considered themselves to be installation, new media, video artists or photographers, we continue to see that much of their work shares a backbone of performance that is more about acting and directing than it is about emotion or self expression.  Acting is often key, and furthermore, such innovative performance-based artists also adapt the formats of their work to mimic those that are traditionally designated for actors, such as movies, webisodes, soap operas, reality TV, musicals, crime dramas – and even stand up comedy.  Such work relies entirely on directors and performers, and their ability to shape-shift.  However, it is important to note that through this way of working its performative crux is often manipulated over and over again to produce various iterations that at times look and function differently from one another while remaining the same in tone and content, creating a conceptual constellation rather than a singular work of art.

Three of such exciting young artists are Casey Jane Ellison, Ed Formieles (both based in Los Angeles), and the New York based collective Yemenwed.  While these three artists’ work are clearly distinguishable, they nonetheless speak to one another in a language that has abandoned the visceral root of early performance art in favor of performative and theatircal work that usually involves an initial, somewhat narrative, live action, with or without an audience, that functions more like a rehearsal than a true ‘performance,’ coupled with any number of video, installation, still image, collage or animated versions, additions or addendums.

Casey Jane Ellison

Ellison is originally from Los Angeles, and after spending some time in New York following art school at the Art Institute of Chicago, she has recently returned to L.A.  Over the past few years her work has progressed into the development of an iconic persona through a variety of media that includes stand up comedy, 3D animation, holographic photography and robotic representations of herself.  Though Ellison has been working in video and animation longer than she has been doing stand up, she has surprisingly and rather successfully begun to fuse the two, allowing one to inform the other in a loop that allows her practice to take on both live and digital forms.  At times the two modes literally overlap, creating a confusing and unusual doubling effect. This occurred during her live stand up act at MOCA in December 2012, when Ellison, mic in hand, performed the routine she had previously recorded as the audio track that accompanied her video, It’s So Important to Seem Wonderful (2012), which was screened directly following her performance.  It’s So Important… features an animated, bald, mechanical looking avatar of the artist doing her act with the void of the Internet as her audience.

Like many comedians, Ellison’s humor often stems from the kinds of dark and self loathing corners of collective consciousness that cause most people to develop weird ticks, habits or addictions.  In It’s So Important… Ellison’s robotic (and admittedly tipsy) avatar uses her complaints about her own body and image as the butt of her jokes.  She then immediately deflects them off, making her (at times) virtual audience feel as awkward as the scenarios she recounts.  In one such anecdote the robot poses a scenario to the audience, wondering if they can relate as she describes, “hating your body so much that you rip framed pictures off the wall and smash them onto the ground, and then take the shattered glass and start stabbing the air.” 

Like many artists working in this vein, character formation and documentation are fundamental to the development of Ellison’s persona.  Self-documentation is central to many artists’ who utilize either their own or a cast of performers’ acting as the base for a project and then work off of that footage in various ways.  In this sense, documentation becomes a medium in and of itself to a certain extent, and serves as both a major constituent to a work as well as its own referent retrospectively.  It is also this initial documentation that allows for so much more experimentation and manipulation of performances through post-production, which is where much of the aesthetic of this kind of performance artist’ work is developed.   For Ellison, a project like It’s So Important… includes an animated video, a recording of one of presumably many takes of that particular stand up routine, and the script for the routine itself, which is also porous in its ability to be re-worked.  In this way the confluence of each of these elements is again, unfixed, and allows for further iterations and interventions. 

Ed Fornieles

Born and educated in London, Ed Fornieles recently moved to Los Angeles where he has continued his category-defying practice of fast-paced young things acting out all kinds of antics and inner-office politics with that all too familiar brand of true-yet-vapid reality TV drama.   Fornieles, is clearly is fucking with ways that the Internet can disseminate, highlight and perpetuate a particular kind of cloying performativity.  Playing out a sitcom via a cast of constructed profiles or “bots” Fornieles’ collaborative Internet-performance project with Lucy Chinen, Maybe New Friends (2013), was presented in conjunction with American Medium, a “multimedia exhibition platform,” and is just one of the many tricks up his sleeve.  Fornieles uses such interventions to present the idea of acting out an alternate sense of reality in ways that cleverly slip directly into the lives of those of us communicating and working on approximately 5-10 intersecting digital platforms or networks at any given moment on a minimum of 2 screens/devices simultaneously.  

Maybe New Friends is undeniably a heavily orchestrated performance, yet it takes place exclusively on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Viddy.  His character’s “bot” “aggregates hundreds of accounts that fit a character profile.”  Each character is comprised of a mixture of tweets taken from real Twitter accounts that are then coded, aggregated and filtered to create a unified voice.  Such ensemble projects that involve casting, scripts, character development, costumes, etc. also contribute to this more theatrical form of performance art that does not distinguish between performance and acting in the clear cut ways that were important at the medium’s inception.  Instead, projects like Maybe New Friends are useful precisely because they confuse such borders. 

In Fornieles’ most recent video-performance, Pool Party (2013), another cast of young, L.A. twenty-somethings come together for the main character, Courtney’s, birthday, graduation… its not quite clear.  In any case she is outspoken about her own celebration of herself and the quintessential bitchiness ensues.  Pool Party is a twenty-four minute video that is the result of over eight hours of taping that Fornieles directed and shot with three camera crews, which are visible in the background of some of the scenes -- only adding to its low-budget, reality TV tone, despite the grainy 8mm, Instagram-inspired film quality filters that were added in post-production.  During the party, which is clearly supposed to be fun but is looming with bad vibes from the very beginning, lovers kiss and quarrel, women insult each other and laugh it off, drinks are poured, consumed and re-mixed, and Courtney’s oddly young looking, “old Hollywood” attired parents arrive.  Soon Courtney’s “real Mom,” as she is repeatedly referred to, is sneaking to the bathroom to inject her lips and crow’s feet with a syringe, a sequence of outfit changes and drug-taking occurs, and eventually an innocent enough girl is ganged upon and slathered in blood.  In the end the video, whose title implies a good ol’ time, leaves viewers with a sick feeling, like an overdose of narcissism combined with the disturbing long-term effects of reality TV and incessant selfie-taking.  

Yemenwed

Yemenwed, which includes six core members but can ep[and anywhere to ten or more collaborators, depending on the project, first formed in 2006.  In 2008 they produced their first video, Episode 3, whose premise is based on one character’s journey through the digitized and enlarged surfaces of one of former founding member, Gloria Maximo’s paintings.  Yemenwed, more so than Ellison or Fornieles, fully embodies the kind of theatricality with which much recent performance art has been imbued.  Through their collectivity, they are able to create entire environments, both actualized and virtual, that incorporate costumes, functioning sets/installations, original scores, lighting, interactive video projections and intricate choreography.  While each of their elaborate projects take on different social issues in strikingly abstracted ways, they continue to mirror the complex interconnectivity of social media and technology by weaving live performance documentation with post-production manipulations, that are then re-projected in tandem with later iterations of the same performance.  In this way, like so many artists working through performance, Yemenwed’s end product is often a shifting of contexts with a constant motion and structure set in place by its signature choreography and impeccably designed sets and sculptures.  

Yemenwed’s ability to stitch together so many interlocking constituents also leaves a great deal of room within their work for the kind of interchangeability that makes these new, unfixed forms of performance art that we are seeing today so intriguing.  Through these methods they delve into social issues such as, insiders vs. outsiders in metropolitan cities with their first live performance project, Bedroom w TV and Woman Lays with Aide (2009), which takes a sculptural version of the large housing projects in lower Manhattan as its setting.  In their next performance, Woman Merges w Car (2010), they explore gender roles and a mechanized, futuristic view of femininity.  Through their use of post-production manipulations, one of the three videos that represents Woman Merges w Car, Yemenwed presents a minimalist, vehicular bathroom and bodily movements that combine grooming and personal hygiene with repetitive, impersonal office duties, through which the three women performers transform from human women into one conglomerate, automated force.  

Yemenwed’s most recent video, which has not yet been performed live, is titled, The Source (2012).  Here they hark back to a theatrical shtick that they used in their 2011 performance No Image, (which includes versions 1,2 and 3), in which a block of ice, (then a real melting mess, this time a virtually rendered, glimmering cube), is cast as the narrator.  In The Source, the ice cube jokingly tells his woes of being replaced in other artistic projects by crystals or glaciers.  Ice’s character’s voice is strangely similar to that of the Chef on South Park, and his tidbits of advice to young artists hoping to “break on through” are about as stereotypical.  Interestingly, the video, like much of Yemenwed’s work, becomes advertently self-reflexive when Ice begins to talk about his previous experiences collaborating with the collective.  In some ways this focus on dialog is a departure for Yemenwed, whose signature early performances were expressed purely by intensely rehearsed and perfectly timed choreography that was created specifically for their commissioned musical scores.  The Source, does however also include a fanciful solo dance sequence at both its beginning and end, which is meant to signal the turning on and off of Ice’s moment in the spotlight.  As always Yemenwed continues to produce real costumes that incorporate unusual items and virtual sets and objects that create an other worldly environment within which their characters thrive.