Scratching The Surface: Christopher Russell

“Scratching The Surface: Christopher Russell,” Artillery Magazine, June/July. Vol. 6 Issue 5.

by Tucker Neel

 

I’VE FOLLOWED CHRISTOPHER RUSSELL’S work for some time now. Like his polymorphous art practice, which pushes the boundaries of photography, drawing, text, performance, sound and installation, Russell is filled with many pleasing contradictions. As a person, he’s disarmingly polite, has a piercing wit and an unabashedly dirty mind. One of the first works of his I remember seeing was “Landscape,” a 1996 series of black-and-white images captured using a hidden camera, of men having anonymous sex in brambly cruising spots. The photos are spectral and voyeuristic, addressing bodies engaged in intimate contact on the periphery between public and private. Another project, Russell’s Bedwetter zine from the early 2000s—filled with libidinous text that had to be destroyed and ripped apart in order to be read—heightened the feeling that one must always accept lost purity in exchange for desired experience. While his newer work has avoided the intensity of earlier abjection and sexual explicitness, to an extent these devices always linger close to the subject at hand.

Many of Russell’s images grow out of his written texts, which engage themes ranging from psychosexual experiences, the romantic, politics, violence, to sites of deterioration and innocence in revolt. Alongside these narratives, which often take the form of books (but have also manifested as wallpaper and audio tracks), Russell creates photographs that speak to the story’s setting, the characters involved and mental and physical states at play. In many pieces he uses a knife to scar the printed surface, or etches-in intricate images that contradict their surroundings: a grand sailboat over a deteriorating abandoned living-room wall; a flowery pattern veiling a yellowed photo of a young man. The work is at the same time both devastating and seductive, referencing imaginative decadent aesthetics and escape in the midst of impending ruin.

When I recently asked Russell what he’s interested in now he responded by discussing a new text he’s writing, informed by how insane the current political landscape has become.

“The text works through a number of political ideas such as free will and opportunity, forces operating upon one’s identity that are beyond one’s own control. But I get there in circuitous ways, using the 19th-century mystic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, while thinking about Alan Sekula’s photo theory, end of an era paranoia courtesy of the McMartin preschool. [trial] The book ends with a satanic prayer to ward off the Tea Party.

I’m drawing, by scratching into photos, pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge in varying degrees of ruin, coupled with crumbling bits of deco architectural design. I just want to see the exuberant promise of industry, the role of the corporation in the promise of America, reduced to rubble; overcome by forces outside its control. It’s less politics and more like revenge.”

Considering the poignant intimacy and haunting depths of his previous works, Russell seems aptly suited to poetically reframe dominant narratives of American exceptionalism. He will no doubt do this by unraveling truths we hold dear, revealing the contradictions that lurk on the fringes, outside and beyond the conventional frame.

History of Bruce: Stephen Cohen Gallery, Los Angeles

“History of Bruce: Stephen Cohen Gallery, Los Angeles,” … might be good, issue #185, http://www.fluentcollab.org/mbg/index.php/reviews/review/185/416.

by Tucker Neel

You are impacted by Bruce of L.A.’s work and you might not even know it. You can see his influence in magazines like Men’s Health; you are surrounded by his aesthetic progeny at Abercrombie & Fitch; and you sense his taste in commercials for everything from Old Spice to Cool Water Cologne. If you look closely, his stylized images of male “perfection” echo in photographs of muscled celebs today; from Chris Evans to Zac Efron , in TV shows like True Blood, and movies like 300. Photographers like Bruce of L.A. helped shape paradigms of desirable manliness, and thankfully we have exhibitions like Stephen Cohen’s The Extraordinary Life & Times of Bruce of L.A., 1948-1974 to help us unearth and understand some of the events, people and conflicting imagery that circulate around these ideals.

Bruce of L.A. is the artistic moniker of Bruce Bellas, a Nebraskan chemistry teacher who in 1947, at the age of thirty-eight, moved to Los Angeles to photograph bodybuilders competing on the sands of the then newly-christened Muscle Beach in Venice, CA. Bellas’ photos capture the birth of American bodybuilding culture, when this sort of masculine ideal first griped the popular imagination with characters like Charles Atlas—encouraging young men to pump iron and bulk up. Bellas soon set up his own studio photographing these muscular young men and eventually launched Male Figure in 1956, one of many pioneering physique magazines of its time. The impact of magazines like Male Figure is immeasurable. Thousands of men who subscribed to these publications saw their own sexual desires, for the first time, reflected in print. Born in an age long before the internet, these were not just jerk off materials, but conduits for a sense of belonging, both sexually and socially; a reminder that one was not alone. And of course we need only look to the work of more recent photographers like Bruce Weber, Herb Ritz, Robert Mapplethorpe and David LaChapelle, to see just how lasting Bellas’ impact has truly been.

If you’re familiar with the Beefcake aesthetic characterized by Bellas’ work, as well as photos by his more famous colleague Bob Mizer, the ubiquitous whiteness and overt masculinity of the models in this genre comes as no surprise. Most of the exhibition is populated by these familiar Anglo “types,” like a photo of the model Vern Bickel from 1960, with a tanned young man posed in subtle contrapposto holding a sword, his body lit with dramatic lighting so as to highlight every muscle. However, one of the strengths of this exhibition is that it broadens our understanding of Bellas’ oeuvre by including images of people of color, older drag queens and effeminate boys. Perhaps this diversity of images is due to the fact that the work on display comes from the collection of L.A. painter John Sonsini, who himself has made a career out of lovingly depicting Latino day laborers in heavy impasto portraits.

In one particularly unexpected image from Bellas’ Marti Gras Series, an older man poses in drag while holding a champagne glass, his earrings and necklace sparkling and his hairy chest peeking through an arabesque-embellished silk top. His slightly overweight frame, delicate gesture and feminine accoutrements stand in direct contrast to the burly masses surrounding the gallery, yet his pose is unabashedly confident. Such an image injects a decidedly queer tone into this otherwise “butch” exhibition.

The gallery has also filled large vitrines with stacks of photos, documents and magazines from Bellas’ archive. These displays also hold the occasional posing strap, a whisper of fabric used to cover a model’s genitals to avoid breaking mid-century censorship laws. Brief slivers of didactic text are interspersed amongst these ephemera, and while they do provide notable context to Bellas’ story, I wish they encompassed a more thorough discussion of why this work is so important, including a richer analysis of the turbulent times framing these images. Nevertheless, the overwhelming number of photos scattered about in these cases testifies to Bellas’ prolific career and to the need for a more comprehensive exhibition of his work, and other work by pioneering artists like him, in a larger venue in the future.

Takin It To The Streets: An Interview With Susan Silton

“Takin It To The Streets: An Interview With Susan Silton,” ARTPULSE Magazine, Vol. 3 No. 4, Spring 2012.

http://artpulsemagazine.com/takin-it-to-the-streets-an-interview-with-susan-silton

 

Susan Silton’s art sneaks up on you where you least expect it, often in public, on power boxes, billboards and fumigation tents, in postcards and posters, in whistling crowds and on Facebook. Silton’s work is all about communication (and lack thereof) and power (and lack thereof). Silton has cultivated a thriving practice with her multimedia works interrogating the history of stripes as signs for social deviance, her postcards re-situating the language of wartime propaganda leaflet drops, and a recent project citing quotes about free speech in public spaces. She was happy to share her thoughts in this interview, in which we discuss her ongoing projects, the Occupy Wall Street movement, art, politics and the power of words.

By Tucker Neel

Tucker Neel – Your work often resides in public places or is framed by a public experience. What is it about public space that interests you? What sort of considerations do you make when negotiating work for a public space?

Susan Silton - I’m especially interested in the accessibility of public space-how it can expand the audience for a given work and provides a viable art platform beyond the commodity-based value structure of the institutional white cube. Last year, for example, I participated in an event called Trespass Parade, which was a celebration of free speech mounted by Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization West of Rome. As part of the parade, I passed out a series of postcards I produced in conjunction with a concurrent public project of mine about free speech calledUtility, which is installed on five utility boxes in neighboring Pasadena. It’s incredibly gratifying to extend a work’s sphere of influence beyond the gallery or museum. If one person who never sets foot in a traditional art space posts one of my postcards on her/his refrigerator, the work, to my mind, has achieved great success. And this is in sharp contrast to how success is defined by the institutional art world. In addition to the accessibility of public space, I’m drawn to the relationship between public space and media proliferation; public space is where and how media of every conceivable nature goes viral. As such, it’s propaganda’s chief venue. So I regard the public realm as a rich site for subversive intervention.

 

 

Inside Out, 2007, site-specific installation at Pasadena Museum of California Art, vinyl tarps, sandbags, pony clips. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

 

T.N. – You make a lot of work that takes ‘political issues’ as its subject. I‘m thinking here of your recent work in Pasadena addressing censorship or your propaganda postcards. How do you see your art practice in relation to politics, specifically activism? I mention activism because your work often uses direct texts to communicate specific messages to the viewer, perhaps to inspire some sort of action?

S.S. - I don’t regard any of my artistic output as being an overt call to action, but of course it’s politically infused. Art production is the form of activism I most comfortably inhabit. Neither of the projects you mentioned are intended to inspire action so much as to engage reflection about its broader context and meaning, calling to mind the famous Hannah Arendt quote about storytelling revealing  ”meaning without committing the error of defining it.” Reflection itself, on the part of the spectator, is extremely active. If I’m lucky, this is what my work will provoke.

 

 

JAMES, from the series BY THE CROWD THEY HAVE BEEN BROKEN; BY THE CROWD THEY SHALL BE HEALED, 2009. Animated video.

 

As you note, language is often incorporated into my practice, sometimes in more literal ways, as in the Pasadena utility box project, but most often in more coded ways, as with the propaganda postcards. Language is equally as pervasive as image, and just as weighted, if not more so, with signification. So I’m most interested in interrupting the channels through which language, and its concomitant spin, is conveyed, and received.

T.N. – On a similar note as the previous question, what role do you see art, particularly your art, playing with regards to political change. I ask this because a few months ago we discussed the Occupy Wall Street movement and our shared desire to do something. Have the grassroots movements of OWS inspired you to make new work?

S.S. - At the inception of OWS and throughout its many occupations, I was energized by the activity I witnessed (and continue to observe in reverberative actions), but for me this hasn’t yet translated into work directly related to the movement. Many of us as you know saw work being generated site specifically by friends, including actions, performances, discussions. Artists have always been on the front lines of political change, but this movement is still in its nascency, as are the creative works emerging from it. I’m following the discourse on a regular basis, but I’m not in the thick of it as other artist friends are. When I went down to Occupy L.A., though, I was so struck by the vibration of the place; there was an overwhelming sense of shared hope even amidst the crankiness that comes from recognizing and resisting difference. I’m currently working on projects that are still in process or were put on hold last year for health reasons. These include a book/exhibition project that originally was an intervention in a John Baldessari public piece; a new whistling project in the Canary Islands for which I was recently awarded funds by Art Matters Foundation and Center for Cultural Innovation to help realize; and a new project that I’m conceiving about my recently scarred body.

T.N. – Your work, BY THE CROWD THEY HAVE BEEN BROKEN; BY THE CROWD THEY SHALL BE HEALED <http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=130960708760&ref=ts&gt; (2009) involved digital avatars of publicly disgraced men, like Mel Gibson or Bill Clinton, performing an apology, but with your voice substituted for theirs. The entire work was ‘exhibited’ on Facebook, a very public virtual space. I‘m wondering what your thoughts are about social networks, specifically Facebook and its perennial problems with privacy issues, since you made this project?

S.S. - I conceived the work for Facebook because of my ambivalence about social networking and the strange hybridity between public and private space that is now the new normal. The public apology for private indiscretions has also become a normalized form of discourse, so I felt it was the perfect content for the Facebook platform. As for privacy issues, I think it’s naive to have thought from the moment Facebook and other social networks originated that there wouldn’t be privacy issues. Facebook is a corporation, and as users each one of us is one of its consumers, consuming each other. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Facebook as a platform for collective protest, information sharing and even art production; this is when it feels the most authentic and transformative.

 

 

Utility, 2011, vinyl wraps, five utility boxes. Public art commission by Pasadena Playhouse District, Pasadena, CA.

 

T.N. – You had installed fumigation tarps (that might refer to Daniel Buren or Christo) covering art institutions such as the Pasadena Museum of California Art. Are these tents a critique of art institutions? Are they a comment that something might be rotten inside art institutions, the art market, the art system?

S.S. - Yes, absolutely, that’s an unequivocal and intentional reading of the work. But the museum wrap at PMCA is part of an ongoing, more extensive investigation of the stripe. I had been commissioned in 2004 to produce a billboard to coincide with the election of that year. We had just invaded Iraq the year before, and George Bush and company were at the height of egregious policy making. I used an image I’d taken some years prior of a fumigated house covered in red, white and blue stripes, which became a trenchant metaphor for the diseased country. This led to a deeper inquiry into the stripe; beyond its more obvious associations with modernism, the stripe has a compelling history as a signifier for otherness, as put forward by social historian Michel Pastoureau in his book The Devil‘s Cloth: A History of Stripes. Pastoureau traces the stripe, in clothing, to the Middle Ages, when it was being worn by society’s outcasts in one form or another. So this historical framing of the stripe as abject added a new dimension to present-day fumigation tents. There is an insistence of content in the stripes wrapping the PMCA, which is how it distinguishes itself from, say, Buren’s use of the stripe, or Christo’s wraps.

 

 

Utility, 2011, vinyl wraps, five utility boxes. Public art commission by Pasadena Playhouse District, Pasadena, CA.

 

T.N. – I‘ve been thinking recently about all the handmade protest signs that came out of the Occupy Wall Street protests. I‘m just wondering if there are any specific signs that caught your attention?

S.S. - So many I can’t cite them all here! The pervasiveness and immediacy of media has much to do, I’m sure, with how prevalent the protest signage became. Plus it’s such a succinct populist expression of the individual and collective voice. But I think the astute wordplay in many of those that circulated reveals just how strong a role language has increasingly played in the production and dissemination of spin by both corporate and government entities and how this is now being reflected back in various ways in protest signage. It seems like an interesting kind of acculturation.

The sign held by Cornel West that went viral will likely persist as an iconic image of OWS: ‘IF ONLY THE WAR ON POVERTY WAS A REAL WAR THEN WE WOULD ACTUALLY BE PUTTING MONEY INTO IT.’ But there were other brilliant combinations of wordplay and seriousness, like ‘ONE DAY THE POOR WILL HAVE NOTHING LEFT TO EAT BUT THE RICH.’  Another iconic sign, for obvious reasons, came from an American soldier: ‘2ND TIME I’VE FOUGHT FOR MY COUNTRY 1ST TIME I’VE KNOWN MY ENEMY.’ As an aside, I read some months ago that the Smithsonian had made a concerted effort to collect protest signs, including those from Tea Party protests, for its collection. Let’s see what happens if and when they show up on the walls of that institution.

Under The Big Black Sun: California Art 1975-1981

“Under the Big Black Sun at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,” ARTPULSE Magazine, Vol. 3 No. 4, Spring 2012.

Tucker Neel

MOCA’s Under The Big Black Sun: California Art 1975-1981 features works by legendary artists like John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Judy Chicago, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon, Martha Rosler, and Bette Saar. These artists are well represented in this show, as well as in orbiting Pacific Standard Time extravaganzas. But I’m not going to talk about them. I’m going to talk about art spaces I didn’t know much about before visiting MOCA’s show. With little irony, the greatest asset of MOCA’s ambitious and considered show, something only a huge museum could execute, is that it provides a few choice models of smaller, artist-run, artist-supported, and artist-centered alternatives to the old-model, board-driven, conservative museum institution. This is especially beneficial to people, like myself, who weren’t alive, or conscious, of these inspirational models of working when they first entered the cultural landscape. Exploring the exhibition, I couldn’t help but see connections between the past and the present.

Carl Cheng’s Natural Museum of Modern Art, which transformed a vacant building on the Santa Monica Pier from 1979-80 into a venue for a large-scale sand-sculpting machine that drew abstractions of curious terrarium-like dioramas, seems both foreign and familiar today. Even with explanatory wall labels the work appears inaccessible, like a broken-down theme-park ride one was too late to experience. Generated by a DIY spirit and an interest in promoting the strange and unusual, Cheng’s installation and accompanying photo documentation reminds me of the still-extant Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, which was founded, perhaps not coincidentally, a few years after The Naturual Museum of Modern Art closed shop.

Carl Cheng, Natural Museum of Modern Art, 1979–80, Public art project installed at the Santa Monica Pier, Santa Monica, California, 1979

On a similar note, Lynn Hershman’s The Floating Museum operated from 1975-78 as a kind of nomadic artist-run exhibition service, helping artists secure venues outside the confines of the white cube and execute one-night or short-term exhibitions in the San Francisco area, and later in venues abroad. Hershman’s solo media projects addressing feminist art practices are well known, but the impact of this short but influential organization deserves a second look, especially considering it facilitated projects by a slew of important contemporary artists, from Michael Asher to Eleanor Antin. This resourceful approach to assisting artists resonates today in like-minded organizations like Artist Curated Projects, West of Rome, Summercamp, and basically all the groups that participated in last year’s Los Angeles Collective Show, an event showcasing the efforts of artist-run venues who do fantastic things, both inside and outside “art spaces,” on shoestring budgets.

Lynn Hershman, Business card for the Floating Museum, 1975–78

More alternative exhibition models abound in MOCA’s show. David Ireland’s 1976 renovation of his San Francisco Victorian house blurs the boundaries between art and life, with carefully arranged and altered domestic objects like chairs, lamps, and brooms, all which perhaps provided inspiration Jorge Pardo’s similar MOCA-sponsored house-as-art exhibition twenty years later. While no one is trying to claim the mantle of true originality here, especially since many of these works find their predecessors in the likes of Duchamp, and roots in O.G. resistance to the Salon de Paris, it’s nice to see an exhibition, especially in a place like MOCA (LA’s “artist museum”), highlighting new ways of contextualizing and exhibiting art that will hopefully inspire today’s generation of artists, as well as many more in the future.

David Ireland, Interior of 500 Capp Street, San Francisco, 1976

NO SAFE ZONE: Dino Dinco

“NO SAFE ZONE: Dino Dinco,” Artillery Magazine, April/May 2012. Vol. 6 Issue 2.

by Tucker Neel

When it comes to understanding the LA performance art scene, there are few people more knowledgeable than Dino Dinco. As someone who grew up seeing legends like Ron Athey and Vaginal Davis perform at LACE, and seeking out impromptu and illegal performance spaces in downtown LA back in the ’80s, Dinco’s roots run deep. Recently, Dinco’s interest came full circle when he made his way back to LACE as the venerable art institution’s Performance Art Curator in Residence. I was able to catch up with him recently over a pot of tea, and talk with him about this residency, and what he thinks about performance art today.

 

One of the highlights of Dinco’s residency was his “3x6x3” series, which allowed for groups of six viewers to experience three works by three performance artists in each of LACE’s cavernous rooms. Skeptical of the spectacle that comes with mass viewership, Dinco describes this series as, “an experiment in spectatorship, changing the way people experience performance. I wanted to prevent the opportunity for someone to feel safe or anonymous in a big crowd.” So, when an artist like Samuel White rides a mechanical bull while reminiscing about anonymous sexual encounters with men vomits, then gets back on the bull— the audience is right there; it’s hard to maintain a distance.  Dinco observes, “One of the things that attracts me to performance is how the corporeal bodily component shifts how we feel about ourselves when we watch it.”

Performance art lends itself to collaboration, something Dinco encourages in his curatorial endeavors. One of these, A Composite Field, paired up the installation and sound artist Yann Novak and dancer/performance artist Taisha Paggett to create a site-specific installation in a modernist box atop the Mackey Apartments’ garage. After nearly a year of conceptualization, the resulting performances feature Paggett employing impenetrably slow butoh-like movements that break down and build up her body. Novak’s improvised acoustic soundscape, created from recordings made in situ, accompanies Paggett with textural renderings that are imperceptible, yet, once heard, unavoidable. A solid chromatic projection illuminates the ceiling, changing glacially over time, casting a glow on everyone in the room. This paring was meditative, almost transcendent, and when it was over I couldn’t tell if 10 minutes or an hour had passed. The experience made me aware of my living body in time and space.

This, in the end, may be the heart of performance art, no matter its actors or venue: to rejoin you with yourself and make you aware of the bodies around you, to remind you of life with all its pains and pleasures, boredoms and excitements. But none of this matters if you’re not there in the first place. Fortunately, L.A. has people like Dino Dinco to help make experiences like this possible.

 

“Los Angeles Goes Live at LACE” Artillery Magazine

“Los Angeles Goes Live at LACE,” Artillery Magazine, April/May 2012. Vol. 6 Issue 2.

Tucker Neel

I haven’t worn heels so high in years. The men’s size 11 red leather pumps I exchanged my high-tops for after entering Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions produce a sensation like a tiny saguaro growing rapidly between my toes. I’m in pain and I’m willing experiencing Cheri Gaulke‘s Peep Totter Fly, a performance work, installation, and video on display as part of LACE’s ambitious Los Angeles Goes Live: Performance Art in Southern California 1970-1983, a series of exhibitions and performances, itself a component of the Getty-sponsored Pacific Standard Time leviathan that has consumed the Southland’s art institutions (and perhaps worn out its welcome). While PST may have become PTSD for Angeleno artists weary of ubiquitous nostalgia, LACE’s performance art extravaganza doesn’t linger on the past too long, and instead frames the present as a proving ground, providing a fertile space for new work to flourish.

 

But back to the shoes. I’m a good four inches taller but it may as well be a foot and a half. A handful of Japanese tourists wander into the gallery and giggle at the bearded dude taking notes in fuckmepumps. Gaulke’s work has its intended effects; I am extremely self-conscious. The work activates the phrase “walking in another’s shoes,” but rescues it from clichéd expectations by investigating preconceptions of gender and performance not with some sort of PSA, but in the real experience of the visitor/performer, and in the their proximal audience as well. I am as much part of the work as those tourists. While the artist’s video accompanying the piece, shots of the shoes traipsing around urban and rural environments, provides enigmatic, perhaps predictable, context to the proposition that high heels come with their own gendered baggage, you truly have to wear the shoes to get the work. This is one of the deeply debated paradoxes of performance-based work: documentation, artifacts, and narratives never really measure up to experiencing things first-hand. Thankfully, this is one of the problems embraced and excavated with Recollecting Performance, an exhibition of artists’ costumes and props, curated by Ellina Kevorkian, part of the LA Goes Live initiative.

 

Recollecting Performance is a room of ghosts, empty outfits standing motionless, artifacts from performances bearing witness to the presence of absent human bodies. A costume by Johanna Went stands like a scarecrow, a garish holly-hobby conglomeration containing a knit sweater, a floral skirt, Tide box, and two small plastic great white sharks devouring a decaying mannequin head. Without the back-story behind this outfit, and the others in the room, the work remains relatively impenetrable. Thankfully the exhibition provides a phone number visitors can call to hear the artists discuss their work, an empowering gesture returning the power of analysis, allowing these artists to speak, with some hindsight, to the work they made decades ago.

 

It’s only been ten minutes and the pain from these heels demands I sit down in one of LACE’s cavernous galleries and watch projected stills and videos cycle on the wall. Some performance documentation is familiar, like an image of Suzanne Lacy in front of her 1976 RAPE Map from Three Weeks In May. But other images are from works completely foreign to me, like Carole Caroompas’ Five Fables from 1978. I am much more familiar with Caroompas’ kick-ass paintings than her performance past, so seeing a photo still from this performance, with blindfolded women seated flipping through books in a stark environment, certainly makes me realize I’ve got some research to do. While this slideshow and sporadic videos do inspire a desire to know more, I wish they were more in-depth, shown in full, and perhaps accompanied by more explanatory text.

 

Perhaps LA Goes Live’s greatest asset is the performance series generated over the course of its nearly half-year run. For this endeavor LACE commissioned performance artists, some of them younger artists with no first-hand experience with work created between 1970-1983, to create new works relating to performances form the past. One of the most impressive of these cross-generational reinterpretations is Heather Cassils’ Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture. For this work Cassilis re-interpreted Eleanor Antin’s influential feminist performance work, Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, but instead of documenting weight loss, as Antin’s work did, Cassils packed on muscle by pumping iron, eating tons of protein, and taking a steroid regiment to produce a muscular “masculine” body-type. The installation includes video documentation of Cassils’ workout regiment, and the protein powders, eggs, and other food the artists ate to transform into an androgo-Atlas. The results are astonishing as evidenced in Advertisement (Homage to Benglis), a photograph of Cassils, in heavy makeup, flexing while topless in men’s underwear. The artist placed this image in magazines targeted at a queer audience as a nod to Linda Benglis’ famous Artforum ad, which featured the physically fit, nude, oiled-up Benglis holding a humongous dildo inserted in, and emanating from, her crotch. Cassils’ work avoids derivative undertones by refocusing Benglis’ commentary on masculine body stereotypes, asking who gets to possess the phallus (both real and symbolic) and the muscles (actual and imagined) that supposedly come with it.

 

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, the telephone-based gallery I run, 323 Projects, co-sponsored OJO’s Cave Out (In Three Parts, All At Once), one of the new artworks created as part of LACE’s PST program.  For OJO’s project the members of this art and music collective asked participants to call a phone number leave a message, recording the audio resulting from a set of actions focused on wishes and movement. The group then assembled the collected audio into a 7” 45RPM record available on the night of their performance at LACE. And what a performance it was, with looping sounds from the group’s earlier solo concerts in historically charged public sites around LA, accompanied by audience finger snapping, and the destruction of an acoustic guitar/contact-mic drum.  OJO played so intensely that blood was shed, adding a fitting addition to the uproarious, almost devotional nature of the event. Truly performance at its finest.

 

 

Tilt-Shift LA: New Queer Perspectives On The Western Edge at Luis De Jesus

Tilt-Shift LA: New Queer Perspectives On The Western Edge at Luis De Jesus posits queerness as an identity and an artistic goal, with curator Darin Klein assembling works by fifteen artists of varying backgrounds and respective practices. While sometimes heavy-handed, the result is no doubt an impressive and important exhibition. The most successful works here perform a surprising kind of queerness that excavates history while plumbing the depths of subjective experience.

 

For example, Danny Jauregui’s two paintings of delicately rendered grids of squares disarm with an unexpected confluence of form and content. At first glance, these works resemble angular modernist grids, bringing to mind Agnes Martin’s paintings. Yet Jauregui’s are not just picture problems, but representations of tiled walls in shuttered gay bath houses, highly-charged libidinous spaces from days gone by. Jauregui’s work succeeds tremendously in the context of this exhibition because these abstractions don’t appear queer at first. Yet once they reveal themselves for what they are, the paintings forever stay in your mind, rupturing banality and contaminating both their modernist precedents, and possibly injecting representations of unexpected spaces into external, “neutral” interiors. I do so wish some daring CEO would buy them for the cold lobby of some corporate office.

 

Additionally, a complex installation of cryptic photographs and a limited edition book by Christopher Russell and Halle Tate explores the personal photographic document’s contingent nature, how memory defies solidification as possibly the queerest element of human existence. Tate’s images resemble snapshot souvenirs of youthful trysts, or adolescent self-portraiture, with images of the back of a braided head of hair, and naked limbs in bed sheets. Russell’s photographic constructions consist of the same cut-out image of a one-armed young man dressed in clothes from the early 20^th century against a stark black background bearing what appears to be a signature and some sort of letter written in faint script. The work resembles pages from a scrapbook; one thinks of the inscriptions on the backs of vintage home-photos, and the fragility and trauma that often haunts our recollection of past events. Russell’s photos are transitory views of the past, an examination of how one image can bring about varying reminiscences, here conveyed through alterations by the artist: scarred paper, dried flowers, violent cuts, colorful decoration, and imaginative drawings. While Russell and Tate’s work problematizes concepts of memory and representation, it’s the professional and personal relationship between the two artists that injects an air of inappropriateness into the show. Russell is Tate’s teacher and the younger photographer is still in school. Their collaboration questions the relationship of mentors to students, asking who influences whom.

 

In contrast to these more understated works, prvtdncr & BODEGA VENDETTA’s collaborative installation of glittery day-glow insouciant drawings scream for attention with shady and bitchy sayings and crude collages against large altered photos of female icons like Lucille Ball decorated like rhinestoned drag-queens. While this installation is a little too eager to please, it does include some gems, like a pair of high-top platforms formed from a stack of shoe soles, a DIY couture testament to a sidewalk runway life. Equally impressive is a totemic assemblage of ribbons and streamers containing incongruous objects: a Tetris block, a cock ring, dream-catchers, chess pieces, and a few incomprehensible doo-dads. These works seem more apropos, given that they use adornment and repurposing to make us see the everyday in a new and unexpected way. This is what truly queer works of art can do: awaken one to the possibility that with alterations or additions, our concepts of normalcy (which always forms from a system of binaries and stringent beliefs) can come undone.

 

-Tucker Neel