Greg Wilken’s Terra Incognita at the CUE Art Foundation

Greg Wilken’s Terra Incognita

By Tucker Neel

Catalog essay for “The Road of a Thousand Wonders” by Greg Wilken at the CUE Art Foundation. Jan. 26 – Mar. 10, 2012.

This catalog essay was written for The CUE Art Foundation as part of their Young Critic Mentoring Program. A very special thanks to my mentor, Richard Vine.

To understand this exhibition it’s beneficial to have an idea of how Greg Wilken makes his work. He often arrives at his final images through a process akin to a fact-finding mission. In these expeditions the artist is activated by the discovery of a significant historical event, which results in research, field explorations, documentation gathering, and the presentation of evidence, usually in the form of framed photographs, films, and custom-made artist books. The actual taking of photographs, or making of books results from actions, which are set into motion by initial ideas. Taken at face value, it’s a fairly simple set of events, a way of getting from A to Z, but the resulting art is anything but easy, demanding a cognitive shift in the viewer’s understanding of what they are looking at.

 

To understand this, let’s look back at an earlier work, Wilken’s On the Natural History of Juan Fernandez, from 2006. This project was initiated by an interest in the story of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who survived for four years (1703-09) marooned on Juan Fernandez Island just off the coast of Chile. The tiny island has since been renamed Robinson Crusoe Island after the famous Defoe novel inspired by Selkirk’s tale. After conducting research, visiting the island, and taking photographs, Wilken printed two large-format photographs: one of non-native species being removed from the land and one of native species being grown in a greenhouse. He also created a film of plants arranged in a garden, and multiple photos of singular books floating in black expanses. In contrast to the implied didacticism of its title, this body of work obliquely constructs the history of a place with seemingly unrelated images, creating a grouping of propositions about the land as mythic non-site. In this project, much like in the exhibition being created for the CUE Foundation at the time of this writing (which the author of this essay has yet to see actualized in any finalized form), Wilken gives his audience the narrowest bit of visual information, with little attendant text. The underlying message of such a destabilized historical narrative is that the past is not fixed and knowable, but instead the fleeting coagulation of reminiscences, everyday images, and second-hand stories we tell each other.

Wilken’s process often involves library research, no doubt inspiring projects directly imaging printed matter. For example, Literary Encounters from 2010 is a series of silver gelatin prints of found hairs in books, a poetic collection of human indices in contrast to the stark sterility of printed text. In another series, one of the artists’ few hand-made projects, he meticulously renders the frontispieces of books where the past owner left their mark via handwriting, inscription, or ex-libris, again re-presenting the comingling of a human mark with the mechanically printed word, this time to address our relationship to ownership and knowledge.

This interest in the possibilities of bibliographic inspiration translates most obviously in the artist’s own hand-made books, art objects that perform the process of discovery and dispersed comprehension his projects seek to explore. In his books, Wilken often isolates a typology of images and contrasts these with other, seemingly unrelated pictures. This technique is evident in Castaic, a 2010 project investigating the 1928 St Francis dam disaster outside of Los Angeles, the second most deadly disaster in California’s recorded history. Castaic, the book, presents its reader with images from the rather mundane, pasture-like, dam site as it exists today. These images of overgrown golden grass are juxtaposed with cold documentation of broken celluloid, remnants from a 16mm film, also contained in the book. The implication of violence, the latent trauma that permeates sites of overlooked disaster, is present in this book, a realization arrived at through association rather than didactic narrative.

For the new body of work on view in the CUE’s galleries, Wilken took inspiration from The Southern Pacific Railroad company’s early 20^th century photographic survey, “The Road of a Thousand Wonders.” This promotional title was used by the railroad to describe the locomotive’s journey from Los Angeles, California to Portland, Oregon. To promote this travel line, the railroad commissioned photographic surveys to capture the vistas and attractions along the route, producing numerous postcards, posters, and prints from this photographic archive. For Wilken, this historical record was enough of a starting point to allow him to travel the same route, creating his own image archive. For the artist, this road is both a physical journey and a metaphor for how we create meaning out of the unknown, how we solidify our understanding of the past. The original early 20^th century archival project acts as historical anchor, providing the artist with a road to travel, a space to contemplate, and the license to make images along the way.

Walter Benjamin, inspired by Baudelaire, characterized the urban flâneur’s

derive as a paradigm of perambulation for the Modern man, the perfect way to experience, and critique, the charge of bourgeois capitalism. Given that consumer-friendly structures in the American West were, and still are, build around automotive transportation, perhaps we can take Wilken’s latitudinal journey along the coast as a kind of American post-industrial derive, albeit across greater distances, and in solitude, a perfect reflection of an alienated country “on the road.” In Wilken’s work we can see the abandoned main streets of drive-by towns, rusting industrial architecture along highways, mall parking lots, and cookie-cutter weigh-stations, as our own contemporary arcades, artifacts from our own “primordial landscape of consumption.[i]” Taking the Benjaminian derive as a model for production, Wilken takes to the road, allowing himself to wander consciously, paying close attention to the particulars of the topography that immerses and frames him, taking note of the tangential and yet relevant ideas that spaces, places, and people inspire.

During a recent studio visit with the artist, I find myself pouring over dozens of 4×5 transparencies, freshly developed from Wilken’s most recent journey up the coast. These are a fraction of the total number gleaned from his travels. The images are of lonely gas stations, desolate highways, a Valero service station abutting a humble cemetery, overgrown wooded brush lining an old road turnaround, and other banal scenes reminiscent of passing glances or snapshots. While they may look less idealized, like their Pacific-Railroad-commissioned postcard antecedents, these images speak the language of everydayness that typifies the “feel” of passing through.

We turn to a box of 4×5 transparencies labeled “California Color Theory” holding what appears to be simple color tests depicting fruits against complimentary backgrounds: limes against a cadmium field, oranges on a cerulean background, etc. Another box holds shots of “California Skies,” images of wispy clouds, cumulous thunderheads, and azure expanses. Yet another box is labeled “California Interiors,” holding pictures of kitchens and living rooms, each with their own decorative touches, lace curtains, brass lighting fixtures, gaudy wallpaper, un-remodeled cabinets. Whether these iconographic taxonomies will make their way into the final exhibition or not has yet to be determined. But nevertheless, their presence in Wilken’s studio furthers this notion of a dispersed portrait compiled from disparate, seemingly unrelated parts.

According to Wilken, his recent work takes great conceptual and formal inspiration from artists coming out of the New Topographic Movement, inaugurated by a 1975 exhibition of work by photographers like Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert Adams, and Stephen Schor. These artists’ photographs dispense with the artiness associated with Modern landscape photography, like Edward Weston or Ansel Adams, whose picturesque views beatify terrain with majestic lighting and dramatic composition. Instead, the New Topographic photographers favor images of the banal, mundane, and ordinary as exemplary views of the contemporary landscape. It’s easy to read Wilken’s work in dialog within this art historical trajectory, seeing as his views of deserted streets and empty parking lots bear striking resemblance to, say, Stephen Shore’s color photograph of an uninhabited thoroughfare in Kalispell Montana, the two bearing the same signs of boredom, stagnancy, and weathered obsolescence. Yet, while glancing through Wilken’s transparencies a distant, more removed precedent comes to mind, something perhaps more closely related to the specific archival impulse underpinning his recent collection of images.

While pouring over Wilken’s 4x5s and 8x10s I am reminded of the late 19^th century US geological survey expeditions that attempted to capture the West under the guise of American Manifest Destiny. While Wilken’s work freezes moments along interstates and highways, which follow in the wake of a path carved out by the railroads before them, these 19^th century American photographic surveys are the conceptual precedent for the western survey itself, laying the ground for the Pacific Railroad photographic surveys to follow. In many ways, the 19^th century US-government sponsored expeditions gave “uninhabited” places, future places of “wonder,” an evidence of existence, rendering the previously unknown “real.” As historian Alan Trachtenberg notes when discussing these early photographic expeditions, “…a photographic view attaches a posessable image to a place name”[ii].

In his essay Naming The View, Trachtenberg discusses the way photographic surveys in the late 19^th century set out to document the West, both as a component of mapping, and as a constituent element of westward US expansion. In discussing a 1868-69 series of photographs by T.H. O’Sullivan and explanatory text by the geologist Clarence King, as part of a geological survey commissioned by the US Dept. of War, Trachtenberg notes how one particular grouping of images discards the strict chronological and typological rigidity typical of a government survey in favor of non-linear image diversity. He notes how this book of images brings together views ranging from a mining camp shot from different perspectives, to images of waterfalls, to workers illuminated by flares, to larger panoramic landscapes, all designed to give US war officials, and their capitalist industrial backers, a better understanding of future entrepreneurial endeavors. Trachtenberg writes, “By their diversity, which calls attention to our dependency for what we see upon the photographer’s choices and the camera’s position, the pictures raise a question about cognition, the relation between seeing, investigating, and knowing – the question which lies at the base of the survey as a whole”[iii]. The question becomes how best to capture the essence of conquest, the possibility of fortune, the grandeur of nature in conflict with, and under the new control of, “enlightened” exploratory power? Amidst the seemingly disconnected imagery, in the cognitive interstices between images, we find the spirit of the western project; a bubbling mixture of hard work, reverence for natural wonder, and good-ol’ industrial know-how.  While Wilken’s work operates under far less regimented strictures, and outside the purview of governmental oversight, his work too presents a problem of cognition, how we understand and “know” vast expanses of land.

Wilken’s diversity of views, all circulate around, but never quite anchor, the subject at hand: the vast expanse of terrain along America’s West Coast. Back in the 1860s Clarence King characterized such a land as “terra incognita,” unknown land,  “a labyrinth of intricate changes”[iv].  Wilken’s transparencies, some of which no doubt have found their way to the walls of these galleries in printed form, make visible the conundrum of this terra incognita. In his images we apprehend, if only momentarily, something all too familiar, yet still unknown. In presenting us with these disparate images, Wilken also problemetizes the very notion of a photographic record, giving rise to dispersed and transitory knowledge about history and the past’s relationship to the present.

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[i] Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (1972; reprint, Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 827.

[ii] Alan Trachtenberg, “Naming The View,” from Reading American Photographs: Images As History, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989) 125.

[iii] Trachtenberg 134.

[iv] Trachtenberg 133.

Catalog essay for Nancy Baker Cahill’s fascinomas

 

Catalog essay for Nancy Baker Cahill’s fascinomas

Pasadena Museum of California Art

Jan 21 – May 20, 2012

 

 

Nancy Baker Cahill’s recent paintings and videos of undulating, evocative, and sinewy forms against velvety expanses, compel one to ask, “Just what am I looking at?” A telescopic photo of a distant planet’s surface? Electron microscope renderings of epidermal abrasions enlarged to human-size? An ultrasound populated with disembodied bones and organs? While these Rorschach-like viewing experiences provide unbounded free associations, it’s their eerie familiarity that unravels, and complicates, how we see, and what we know. Cahill’s work explores how we are constituted by representations, how exploratory technologies, like microscopes, telescopes, and ultrasounds, inform understandings of ourselves, and the inner and outer worlds we inhabit.

 

 

The peculiar title of this exhibition, fascinomas, a medical term meaning an unusual case or diagnosis, addresses a problem of not knowing. Elusive and undefined, set outside of normal and knowable phenomena, the “unusual” maintains a proximal relationship to the unknown. Additionally, fascinoma springs from the etymological mixture of the prefix fascination, and suffix oma, a pathological reference to both morbidity and the growth of multiple tumors. This title, and its attendant allusions to an alien growth inhabiting, and perhaps killing, its host, places Cahill’s work in quite an unsettling position, something akin to the first explorations into the unseen depths of the human body.

 

 

 

While discussing early microscopic studies from the eighteenth century, art historian and artist Barbara Stafford notes that this new technology profoundly changed western perceptions of embodied existence: “Under the remorseless lens, a well-behaved anthropomorphic unity was pulverized into tiny and teeming minima. Not only were individuals overwhelmed by their corpuscles, but animals seemed to dissolve into the strangeness and indescribability of irregular polyps and multitentacled hydras”. Innovations in seeing, from the electron microscope to the Hubble Telescope, change human subjectivity, and in doing so shift previously coherent bodies into particles of an expanding infinite. This observation, and Stafford’s description of what it must have been like to look into a new interior world for the first time, a world brimming with fantastically descriptive language, intersects with Cahill’s arresting compositions.

 

 

Cahill’s conglomerations of attenuated cuts of and folds created by dense and light veils of pigment, are undeniably sumptuous and abject at the same time. We are drawn in by their subtle gradients, reminiscent of fabric or classical chiaroscuro. Yet buried within the forms is an analogous relation to eviscerated bodies and ghost-like fragments that haunt our own sense of mortality. This evidence of a presence marked by its absence is a direct result of the artist’s process.

 

 

Cahill creates her paintings with an airbrush, spraying layers of pigment over disparate objects, ranging from wires to dried kelp. She then removes these objects, leaving only the trace of their presence. This process charts its antecedence back to prehistoric instances of self-representation, the Upper Paleolithic cave paintings of France and Spain, with their walls of hands silhouetted by earthen pigments. One can only infer that such early paintings were meant to assert physical presence in the face of a precarious and perilous existence defined by danger and confusion. With their ghostly references, Cahill’s fascinomas signify a similar register of presence within absence. In her work we see a reflection of ourselves, how we wrestle with unsettling, unstable bodies within a world of endless unknowns.

 

 

 

-Tucker Neel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

California Design: Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Originally published  “California Design: Los Angeles County Museum of Art,” … might be good, issue #179, http://www.fluentcollab.org/mbg/index.php/reviews/review/179/396.

 

Wallace M. Byam’s iconic silver Clipper Airstream trailer from 1936 greets visitors to LACMA’s exhibition California Design, 1930-1965: “Living in a Modern Way,” the first major museum exhibition dedicated to investigating the importance of California midcentury modern design. While the gleaming road zeppelin is an alluring opener, the best way to enter LACMA’s show is through the museum’s gift shop just around the corner. Normally, exhibition gift shops touting reproductions of paintings on posters and umbrellas render “fine art” kitsch, but in the context of this exhibition, the gift shop is an appropriate place to orient oneself.

The objects on display in both wings of the show are designed for mass reproduction, defying the aura of “art” in favor of egalitarian consumption. In the gift shop, visitors can peruse and purchase chairs, pottery, dolls, prints and many other objects that have their antecedence in displays in the main exhibit. In fact, the gift shop’s DCW (Dining Chair Wood) by Charles and Ray Eames is almost in the sight line of the “original” on display. The only things separating the two are time and provenance. While the LACMA gift shop’s $170 Canister Set with Stand may not be exactly the same as Louis Ipsen’s original design from 1932, the product retains near verisimilitude, the only visible difference being that one bears an inconspicuously stamped LACMA insignia. In seeing these gift shop objects first, one can better understand the ideology that motivated the principles of modern design, a philosophy best summed up by the Eames in their desire to design “the best for the least for the most.”

For a first of its kind to exhibition, California Design looks quite familiar. This is due in large part to the relationships we already have with some of the objects on display, which are so commonplace in our daily existence as to be banal. A perfect example of this is the work of Henry Keck, whose aerodynamic glass and chromed metal sugar, salt and pepper shakers are as much a fixture of short-order dining as burgers and fries. Additionally, the inclusion of his Covered Roadside Barricade Light (1963) further draws our attention to the ubiquity of designed objects that we might not consider worthy of appreciation, were they not highlighted as objects justifying singular contemplation. What makes their inclusion revelatory is that they are truly the same as any of their companions out in the “real world.”

California Design takes on an air of familiarity due to the exhibition design itself, created by Los Angeles architectural firm Hodgetts+Fung. Their sprawling curvilinear floor plan and wave-like metal armatures give the space a kind of gimmicky Jetson’s feel, something redolent of an airport lobby or Expo hall. Though their design creates poorly lit vignettes, especially in a portion of the space dedicated to showcasing the early work of RM Schindler, the overall exhibition layout does encourage non-hierarchical perambulation amongst thematic displays centering on four main themes: “Shaping,” “Making,” “Living” and “Selling.” Each section contextualizes different factors that shaped modern California design, charting this history from the population boom during and after WWII with all of its effects on production, reproduction and domestication.

 

The exhibition’s most engaging section is “Living,” which highlights what makes California a particularly fertile place for modern design—a climate that allows for an indoor/ outdoor lifestyle. This sentiment is made clear in a collection of curving alcoves holding furniture, objects and garments. A white-rock covered island in the middle of the exhibition floor holds Walter Lamb’s turquoise Chaise (1954), an object familiar to anyone who’s ever spent time sunning by a swimming pool. Nearby, Mary Ann DeWeese’s iconic lobster-print swimwear further speaks to the importance and playfulness of SoCal beach culture, a point accentuated by the presence of a neighboring surfboard from 1961 by Hobart “Hobbie” Alter, detailed with pin-striping inspired by supersonic aircraft.

 

There is no doubt that these objects, and the more than 350 on display, are fascinating because they signify the innovative spirit that inspired their creation. However, seen in a contemporary light–against the realities of how modern design is packaged, sold and consumed today the exhibition becomes more problematic. Unfortunately, California Design repeatedly falls into the trap of re-authenticating the aura of the original, re-situating modernist design practices as rarified and elite. The most startling example of this is the museum’s full-scale transplantation of Charles and Ray Eames’ living room from their Case Study House #8, complete with knick knacks and fake houseplants (the museum asks visitors not to take photos of this life-size diorama). There is an overarching nostalgia at play here, a desire to literally re-create the past according to the ideological and institutional demands of today. The institutional promotion of this artifact threatens to shift the focus from the democratic motivations that formed the foundation of the Eames’ practice to something more in line with the promotional techniques of companies like Design Within Reach, which sells the Eames’ reproductions for many thousands of dollars, or publications like Dwell magazine, who, along with their advertisers, promote modern design as a signifier of class and as an aspirational means to wealth and higher social standing. At its best, California Design sheds light on what is plainly visible yet overlooked, focusing on how this peculiar land of sunshine and abundance contributed to the modern world we inhabit today. At its worst, the exhibition re-plays well-worn nostalgic longings for modern design without focusing a critical lens on its effects—how the sign of “the modern” has shifted to a different register, one far removed from its origins.

Unfinished Paintings at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions

Originally published  “Unfinished Paintings at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions,” ARTPULSE Magazine, Fall 2011. 69.

 

For Phillip Guston a painting was always more “abandoned” than finished. For Robert Motherwell a painting was finished when it no longer needed the artist. According to Andy Warhol’s diaries, when he filmed an episode of the Love Boat, the actor Raymond St. Jacques (speaking for Warhol no doubt) replied to the question, “How do you know when a painting is finished?” with the answer, “When the check clears.” Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions’ Unfinished Paintings takes this question of incompleteness to task, exhibiting thirty-eight admittedly unfinished works by thirty-eight artists. Curated by artists Kristin Calabrese and Joshua Aster, the gutsy exhibition breaks a hallowed rule of curatorial practice, “Thou shalt not present unfinished work in an exhibition,” and generously provides the audience with insight into what shapes an artist’s painting practice.

One curious facet of this exhibition is that many of its works look quite complete. For instance, Mari Eastman’s whimsical painting of posing cats sprinkled with glitter and short text, fits perfectly within the artist’s de-skilled highly personalized style. Yet it’s this understanding of style that causes one to realize which works are undoubtedly unfinished. For example, bulbous neon smiley-faced swirls in one work are recognizable as signature Kenny Scharf forms, and the fact that they don’t take over the entire piece, and instead sit on a mass of unpainted ground, immediately registers the work as incomplete, given Scharf’s reputation for producing work that relies on an overwhelming experience, necessitating a fully-covered canvas.

A few paintings bear signs of unfinished labor, like Delia Brown’s canvas, with its edges wrapped in blue painter’s tape. But a work by Salomon Huerta is unfinished in a wholly different way, with a note written directly on his blank canvas reading, “I’m still looking for a black model to fit this pose” above an arrow pointing to a taped-on picture of a reclining woman. It’s a kind of casting call, an especially poignant gesture in a town filled with headshot-toting future-stars.

Unfinished Paintings is also bolstered by an audio tour offered for free to LACE guests featuring many of the artists ruminating on the show’s subject and addressing their own contributions. Some artists expand the notion of unfinishedness; James Hayward talks about how he submitted a damaged work, Caitlin Lonegan describes her work as “unresolvable,” Don Sugg’s discusses what separates a “study” from an “actual painting.”

 

In a truly Duchampian “the audience completes the work” turn, this exhibition implores visitors to imagine the works on display in their future complete state. Such a suspended state of contemplation is no doubt liberating for the work in the gallery, freeing it from any solidified notions of quality or value. After all, chastising an unfinished painting is akin to teasing an ugly infant. It’s not the painting or the baby’s fault they have yet to reach a state of self-reliance. This postponed judgment truly makes Unfinished Paintings a success, allowing for room to contemplate not just individual rarefied paintings, but painting as part of a larger dedicated practice.

 

Tucker Neel is an artist, writer, and curator in Los Angeles. He is also the director of 323 Projects, a telephone-based gallery that can be reached anytime by calling (323) 843-4652.

 

 

Yoshua Okón: Octopus at The Hammer Museum

Originally published  “Yoshua Okón: Octopus at The Hammer Museum,” ARTPULSE Magazine, Fall 2011. 70.

 

Yoshua Okón

Octopus

The Hammer Museum

To make Octopus, Yoshua Okón hired Guatemalan day laborers who once fought against each other, some as paid mercenaries, in that country’s thirty-six-year civil war. He then filmed these men performing pantomimed battle scenes in a Los Angeles Home Depot parking lot. The resulting videos speak to issues of war, labor, and the histories of violence that inform our everyday experiences.

The exhibition provides a necessary history lesson in the form of a brief introductory essay by John C. Welchman, informing visitors that Guatemala’s 1960-1996 civil war was instigated by the U.S. CIA as a way to remove a popular leftist president and install a string of puppet dictators more favorable to the United Fruit Company. The title of Okón’s work, “Octopus,” is an unaffectionate moniker Guatemalans have assigned to the United Fruit Company, a massive multi-national corporation with a violent and sorted history in Latin America. A sign bearing the name “Octopus,” painted in Home Depot font with signature orange tinting, welcomes viewers to the installation. In this way the artist works to implicate Home Depot as a particular inheritor of legacy of American capitalist imperialism, a new manifestation like United Fruit.

 

Octopus consists of four video projections at different heights and sizes, one on each wall of the gallery. Viewers are provided bean-bag chairs to sit in as they watch the synced videos switch in and out. The looping video installation follows Okón’s day laborers clothed in opposing black and white t-shirts as they enact a series of short scenes: a group of four men aim their invisible weapons from atop a flatbed cart as they are pushed slowly through the parking lot, men crawl on their stomachs over grass and hot asphalt, one man scans his surroundings with imaginary binoculars while pushed inside a shopping cart. The absurdity of this scenario is highlighted when the camera captures Home Depot employees and customers laughing and pointing their cell-phone cameras at the performers.

Later we see bits of body parts: arms, a head, legs, cut off by the frame, as if they came from fallen victims in this staged battle. As the sporadic narrative progresses we see two figures outside of a Home Depot shed. One is sprawled motionless on the ground as if dead, and another crawls to him as if with a wounded leg. During all this no one, Home Depot workers nor shoppers, does more than give them a passing glance.

 

We are familiar with people “playing war,” from childhood games to full-scale American Civil War re-enactments, but when the action is overlaid on a big-box store parking lot, the actions unfolding speak volumes to the strangeness of the site. Filmed against these actions, images of the American Flag, Home Depot signs, prefab tool sheds, and bumper stickers reading “Vote For a New Foreign Policy,” resonate with meanings that stretch across time, implicating the present and the past as part of a long legacy of nefarious actions designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

 

It could be said that Okón’s work exploits the histories and economic situations of his actors for his own artistic gain. After piecing together the puzzle of his work, one cannot help but wonder what his actors get from their participation, how much they are paid, and whether the artist will stay in touch with them after the show has concluded. I would like to hope the artist’s work does more than simply “raise consciousnesses” about the legacies of war, but such a response would no doubt be difficult, if not impossible to judge.

 

Tucker Neel is an artist, writer, and curator in Los Angeles. He is also the director of 323 Projects, a telephone-based gallery that can be reached anytime by calling (323) 843-4652.

 

Miranda July at The Pacific Design Center

Originally published

“Miranda July at The Pacific Design Center,” Artillery Magazine, Nov./Dec. 2011. Vol. 6 Issue 2. 65-66.

 

We call bad public art “plop art” for a reason. Like giant metal turds, or hulking bronze zits dotting urban vistas, bad public art often takes the form of pompous engorged renditions of famous artists’ work, or worse, fiberglass renditions of city mascots, or bronze memorial statues of dead white dudes. In each case, the public often engages these monstrosities by making fun of them, photographing friends picking bronze noses, or applying makeup a’ la Dazed and Confused. And, of course, ask any child or bored adolescent and they will tell you, public art sporting DO NOT TOUCH signs should be outlawed, melted-down, and turned into swing-sets. Miranda July’s Eleven Heavy Things, a collection of sculptures outside the Pacific Design Center, takes public art behemoths to task, closing the distance between the viewer and the artwork, while leaving room for the multiple forms of communication that may exist in between.

July’s most successful works on the PDC lawn employ text as a way to direct viewers towards certain actions. One simple white pillar, approx. 8 ft. tall, with a small hole in its center surrounded by hand-drawn black text, reads, “This is not the first hole my finger has been in; nor will it be the last.” As a work that specifically calls attention to the not-so-hidden sexual undertones of any upright phallus, and the previously mentioned naughty gestures apropos to adolescent interactions with public sculpture, this particular work resonates as both hilarious and subversive. If only this monument to peculiar orifices was translated into more languages, and installed near the Washington Monument, or a sculpture of, say, Dick Nixon, July’s implicit critique of poking through symbolic power would be made even more manifest.

These text-employing works find their formal counterparts in cloud-like headpieces designed to frame visitors’ own heads. While such formal peculiarities work like predictable public art – providing colorful shapes to be seen from a distance, when experienced in person, they perform differently than the other text-laden works, providing costuming instead of a prompt. Of all July’s cloud-like forms, one patterned in faux Burberry plaid makes a funny reference to the work’s posh surroundings, as if telling us what is really on the minds of the elite consumers who frequent the PDC.

What makes July’s eleven awkward sculptures particularly enjoyable is that they are each designed to be part of a photo op, implicitly requiring both an actor and a spectator in order to achieve a desired effect. One views the work twice: once in person, and then again on the internet, a viewing experience perfectly suited for the Facebook generation, where every action must be photographed and made public in order to be remembered, and concretized as real.

In not taking its role as public art too seriously, July’s work is able to make a very serious proposition about how we might conceive public art as something that must take its audience’s body and photographic agency into account. Her work may not be the weightiest of propositions, but it certainly creates a lasting and multivalent impact. Just Google the work to see what I mean.

LA Women: Doin It In Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building

Doin It In Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building is not a typical art exhibition which limits itself to presenting rarified and canonized art objects for public contemplation. No, this show transforms the gallery into a museum, packed to the brim with hundreds of archival documents, video footage, photographs, and other historical ephemera generated from one of the most important, yet conspicuously least-talked-about institutions in Los Angeles art history: The Woman’s Building (WB).

 

Displayed in dozens of plexi-glass-covered vitrines, these archival documents chart the history of the Woman’s Building from it’s precedents in the 1893 Columbian exhibition in Chicago, to its founding in downtown LA in 1973, to eventual closure in 1991. In the midst of this survey, the exhibition highlights the importance of the WB founders: artist Judy Chicago, designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, and art historian Arlene Raven, and highlights educational, activist, and exhibition programs undertaken by the hundreds of women who worked together under the WB program.  Additionally, about one-third of the cavernous gallery is devoted to installations created by artist collectives who came out of the WB, like the Sisters of Survival and The Feminist Art Workers. The Waitresses, a group formed to address the exploitation of working women, presents an installation consisting of a short-order diner table with a juke box playing narratives from women about what it’s like to work in the food service business. Visitors are invited to listen to these audio tracks while enjoying placemats emblazoned with games about famous women throughout history.

 

I had the pleasure of touring this epic exhibition with its curators, Meg Linton and Sue Maberry, who have spent the better part of the last four years, in conjunction with a selection of distinguished scholars, working to make all this temporary museological undertaking a reality. While walking through the exhibition I remark that, while many Pacific Standard Time exhibitions no doubt highlight the contributions of certain individual artists or curators, this show, while certainly positioning certain stand-outs (the founders of the WB and Suzanne Lacy are reoccurring figures throughout), is much more concerned with presenting the WB as a collective endeavor. “The woman’s building had art stars and famous artists involved, but it was a movement, a center where different people could flow in and out,” Maberry points out. Looking around at all the work unattributable to a singular creator, from documentary photographs to clandestine flyers alerting people to an unannounced protest, it becomes evident that the exhibition is more about the collective over the individual. “One of our challenges was how to present an entire building, all the activities, and the sense of an era,” Linton points out.

 

When I ask the curators to show me some of the surprises they encountered during their extensive research, Maberry, herself a veteran of the Woman’s Building, mentions that one of their most significant experiences was going through letters written to the WB from women who passed through its program, people like Adrian Rich and Margaret Atwood. “We poured through all the letters at the Smithsonian, and they are all signed ‘In Sisterhood … In Sisterhood … In Sisterhood,” Maberry recollects. The impact of this reoccurring salutation articulates a kind of emphatic solidarity, a positioning of one’s struggle as intrinsically linked to another’s.

We walk to a display case near the exhibition entrance holding a bronze workboot atop a small wooden stand with a plaque reading, “ Through the Soles: My Struggles as a Woman Artist” With love, Ten years later, Faith and Suzanne, October 16, 1980.” While discussing this odd readymade object, something straddling the line between art and the everyday, Maberry informs me that when Chicago taught the Feminist Art Program at Fresno State, she looked around the room at her students, all women dressed in sandals, and assigned them go out and buy work boots. The message was, clear: if women were going to make a space for themselves in the patriarchal art world, they would have to actually build it themselves – by hand, together. Like a gilded children’s bootie saved by nostalgic parents, this bronze clodhopper is omething that resonates as a preserved reminder of a body in a developmental stage, a memento of potentiality. At the same time, as a working-class accoutrement providing both strength and protection to its user, the heavy boot stands as an apt metaphorical entry point to the exhibition, a silent testament to a story of women building a physical, social, and psychological space of force and support.

 

As we move through the show one grouping of documents highlights the Women’s Graphic Center (WGC), which housed the WB printing and design facilities. Headed by de Bretteville, the WGC gave women the tools to design their messages and get them out to the public at a time when the means to do so were limited and expensive. “Shelia designed a lot of the work for the WB. A lot if this was her aesthetic,” Maberry points out. Looking at de Bretteville’s iconic WB poster from   depicting her signature bolt and I-screw female icons receding infinitely into the distance on a gridded plane, one can see just how prescient and enduring her design practice was, and is.

 

Poster for Women in Design, conference, designed by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, 1975.

Linton notes that while the show is filled with printed ephemera like posters and postcards, these documents are artworks in themselves. In support, she references the Private Conversations Public Announcements project, a workshop taught by de Bretteville that inspired women to create printed material about topics they were exploring during consciousness-raising sessions at the WB.  “They are posters, developed out of their consciousness raising, but then they are put into public places where they wanted their message to be seen,” Linton says, pointing out how all this printed matter pushes the boundaries of what exactly defines “art.” One work on display from this project is The Chinese Woman by Helene Ly from 1981, a diazo print of white text on a red background, with the “W” and “A” in the word “WOMAN” replaced with the Chinese character for woman. The artist glued this print in public places around Chinatown in LA, rewriting the urban landscape while commenting on nationality and hidden female identity, for example, changing a sign reading “Grand Opening” into “Grand Woman.”

 

Another section holds documents from GALAS, the Great American Lesbian Art Show, one of the first exhibitions to showcase work by lesbian artists and highlight lesbian identity as a subject appropriate for contemporary art. Maberry points out the collective spirit underpinning this show: “They actually put a packet together letting people know how to put on the exhibition, so instead of doing just one exhibition at the WB, they wanted shows to happen all over the country, so that lesbian art shows happened all over the country at the same time… There hadn’t been anything like that before.” This kind of empowerment permeates the entire exhibition; the whole point being that if a space doesn’t exist for a certain kind of artwork – or artist – the only thing to do is to pick up the tools you’ve got and get to work constructing it.

 

“I think it’s cycling back around and I think more and more people are wanting these kind of experiences,” Linton states as we discuss the legacy of the WB, how there really aren’t many similar spaces like it left in America.  In light of the recent Occupy Wall Street protests, which once again have people working together to build solutions from the rubble of failed policy, against a backdrop of rampant inequality, this show about the community generated by the WB seems quite timely. In this way the exhibition is not simply nostalgic, but instructional, providing the opportunity to engage distant or lost methodologies for demanding and creating change, a blueprint for how to carve out a space for divergent opinions and ways of working through problems the dominant culture ignores or simply refuses to really address.