New (Out)Look

Welcome to the new Pleased to Present blog. I’ve given it a new spiffy look and a renewed mission. This used to be a blog where I’d only post text from published reviews and info about my own exhibitions. But since there’s so much great, and not so great, art out there, I thought I would open my format up to less formal postings. So check back often for frequent posts about art in LA., stuff I think needs further thought, and info about events I find worthwhile or interesting.

Oh, and since people always ask about these things, the header bar image right now is by Bari Ziperstein. Its an excerpt of her Backroom installation at the Pacific Design Center. It’s an amazing show and I just finished reviewing it for the January issue of ART LIES. I’ll change the header image from time to time, but for now Bari’s piece makes me happy.

Remember to twitter this blog, share it on facebook, bookmark it, and do whatever else you need to do to share it with your friends.

Thanks. -Tucker

Yo Fukui at David Salow Gallery

By Tucker Neel

Originally published in ART LIES Magazine, Issue No. 64, Winter 2009

Sometimes objects are so strange, so obsessively constructed, and unabashedly beautiful that, like a good intoxicant, they leave you mumbling and incoherent, unable to vocalize what they are doing to you. Yo Fukui’s LA debut solo show, Future Imperfect, at David Salow gallery comes satisfyingly close to accomplishing this sense of bewilderment. While it does fail to impress at times, the show is quite literally a spectacular start to this artist’s career.

"Space colony” 2008, Felt, paper, hexagonal wire netting, found object, 73”x42”x40”

Fukui’s stock and trade is his signature felt appliqué technique, where countless rectangle color swatches accumulate to form fantastic patterns and sensuous surfaces.  Five large sculptural works showcase his crafty obsessiveness, usually with an amorphous felt-covered form hovering above or around brightly painted paper mache’ bases reminiscent of Franz West’s sculptures. The almost compulsive constructions are startlingly, but none is more stunning than I Love You No Matter If The Earth is Destroyed. Here Fukui deploys his additive method atop a tie-dyed sheet, creating a zigzag pattern resembling a knitting project executed under heavy psychedelics. The entire form resembles a colossal hummingbird, complete with an erect metal proboscis. At night it glows, speckled with luminescent nipple-like orbs filled with sparkling Christmas lights. The buckling and bulging mass hovers on an unassuming steel armature as its long metal pole prods the unfinished skeleton of a corrugated plastic and metal shed. Work like this is frankly difficult to describe because it’s so insistently phantasmagorical, inspiring hyphen-heavy allegorical interpretations that always seem to miss the mark. And this is where Fukui’s work succeeds, when it generates a kind of ocular overload that renders all description inept.

"I Love You No Matter If The Earth is Destroyed" 5x11x14 ft., mixed media, 2007

The most incongruous and unsuccessful piece in the show is a painting of sorts titled Rain, consisting of countless drippy grey and black diagonal sumi ink brush strokes on over thirteen dozen rolls of toilet paper stacked on towel racks against the gallery wall. A few calculated drips on the wall itself convey that the piece was made in situ. The use of stacked toilet paper as large canvas is a novel move, but the piece is essentially a quick play on materials, marrying bodily functions with abstract painting. We’ve seen plenty of these kinds of jokes before and because of this the piece is forgettable.

"Rain", 72 x47 x 47 in., mixed media, 2009

Perhaps Fukui’s greatest challenge is that there’s so much other work out there employing techniques and materials similar to his – to varying degrees of success. It’s hard to imagine the works in this show going toe-to-toe with the likes of Yayoi Kusama, or even Mindy Shapero, because Fukui simply hasn’t figured out how to push his obsessive material concerns to their most extreme limits. However, his work certainly holds its own among so many of the junk-as-new millennium-totem works that seem to have colonized certain sectors of the art world for the last decade. Fukui’s work will have no trouble surviving this trendy epoch if he can make his next works ones that embrace even more risk while still residing at the fringes of pleasure.

Share The Light

Come check out my work as part of this day-long event

WHERE: The entire length of Washington Blvd., from Whittier to Venice Beach
WHEN: October 11, 2009 12PM-6PM

“A Day in L.A.” shows work from over sixty Los Angeles artists and non-artists in unused public outdoor spaces along the entire length of Washington Boulevard’s 27 miles, from Whittier to Venice Beach. For one day artists will perform works, create installations, facilitate happenings, and make music in unexpected spaces, such as on the sidewalk, between dumpsters, along railroad tracks, as well as inside the audience’s cars as they traverse one of LA’s most iconic boulevards. An official map of the day’s events along with schedules and other downloadable information will be available to the public starting on October 4 on the event website (www.washblvd.tk).

And here is my submission:

Tucker Neel kindly asks that you share the sunset with the Thomas Kinkade Company. Please dial 1 (800) 366-3733, and when prompted, dial extension 5191. Please leave a message describing the sunset in as much detail as possible for Kathleen Moon, Senior Executive Assistant to Craig Fleming, the President and CEO of the company.

ART WITH SOME MEAT TO IT: Fallen Fruit’s Daily Servings

FALLEN Fruit wants you to eat your neighborhood. It wants you to pound the pavement and pluck the ripe fruit hanging above your head. It wants you to imagine what your city can be, and works to make this dream a reality. With their first solo shows, “United Fruit” at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and “Fresh ‘n Easy” at Another Year in LA, running simultaneously, this quintessentially LA collective truly reps their hood and proves they are out to change the world one bite at a time.

While they have countless comrades and collaborators, the official Fallen Fruit collective is composed of David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young. The three joined forces in 2004 in response to The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest’s call for work proposing real world solutions to pressing social and political problems. The trio looked at the sprawling LA landscape and stumbled upon an elegant solution to car-cocoon alienation, malnutrition and the wasted fruit littering public land. They decided to map the locations of publicly accessible fruit in their immediate Silver Lake neighborhood because, according to helpful attorneys, collecting fruit on LA public land is technically “not illegal.”

As the collective’s mission statement points out, this public fruit is “blessed by neglect,” pesticide-free, making it organic. Picking it also circumvents the need for petroleum packaging and transportation, and performs a civic duty by preemptively eliminating fruit waste underfoot. Their maps, now charting areas far beyond Silver Lake and into other states and countries, actively encourage you to get out of your car, explore where you live and talk to strangers.

Inspired to put theory into action, Fallen Fruit got their hands dirty. Decked out in custom-made uniforms, they led groups on “Nocturnal Fruit Forages,” picking produce along the way. They teamed up with Islands of LA to plant tomatoes on traffic islands, and held an unforgettable salsa party at the Center for Land Use Interpretation. And they created intoxicating “Neighborhood Infusions,” blending local fruit with liquor. To this day they periodically hold “Public Fruit Jams” with Machine Projects, where people bring in found fruit to make delicious preserves.

Earlier this year the collective participated in a residency in Ciénega, Columbia in South America. In 1928, workers at banana plantations all over Columbia owned by United Fruit (now Chiquita Banana) went on strike demanding contracts and better working conditions. During a peaceful gathering in Ciénega, hundreds of men, women and children were massacred by army machine-gun fire as military troops, requested by United Fruit, attempted to violently put down the strike. Against this backdrop, in this site of past massacre, and with bananas on the brain, Fallen Fruit decided to make work for the LACE show, addressing the personal and political history of a fruit too often taken for granted.

In the main gallery at LACE viewers are confronted with a humongous photomural of an iconic peeled banana juxtaposed across from a larger-than-life banana plantation worker brandishing a worn rifle. A suite of nine hefty photo portraits of banana workers contrasts with un-idealized images of banana fields. In the back room video interviews with Columbian locals seek to personalize the individual’s connection with the banana as a social and historical phenomena. And in the video projection, The Banana Machine, adolescents peel and eat bananas in Warholian screen-test silence. Another projection across the room, Los Bananeros, shows workers processing bananas in a factory. The videos invite viewers to contemplate both their personal relation to the yellow fruit, as well as think about the labor that occurs between when a banana is planted, and when it is consumed.

For Another Year In LA gallery, the group carried over the visual feel of The Banana Machine, exhibiting a wall of photos depicting adolescent youth bearing a variety of fruit in deadpan Caravaggio-like compositions. Additionally, in the commercial gallery, Fallen Fruit literally opens shop, making customized household objects, all associated with food, available for public consumption at affordable prices. With echoes of Jenny Holzer’s early truism paraphernalia, each item is emblazoned with a striking phrase. A cutting board reads, “wut a fag.” A spoon states, “these guys are obviously anarchists.” A knife is etched with the words “fucking hippies.” And in keeping with their old school roots, Fallen Fruit has also provided fruit for visitors to take away in exchange for fruit they bring in themselves.

Over the course of a few e-mail exchanges, I asked Matias Viegener how he sees Fallen Fruit’s recent LA shows as venues for building on their work practice:

TN: Your work to date has incorporated a lot of “relational esthetics,” person-to-person exchange and community building. Yet the shows at LACE and Another Year in LA don’t necessarily embody this kind of relational art approach. In the gallery no one is really there to interact with viewers. I know you have done shows in gallery spaces before, but how did you approach this new situation?

MV: We try to balance the participatory work with what for now I’ll call the more traditional work: images, videos, installations, etc. At first the visual work (which we love doing as well) was primarily to attract and engage participants, to get people to come to the fruit jam, mappings, fruit forages, etc. A bit of it was documentation, but that was secondary until spring 2008. At that point footage of ours got edited by KCET and placed on YouTube, which for one or two days made it their “featured” front page video — where it received some scathing commentary. We felt a little like we had lost control of the work (both its participatory nature and its representation) and we realized that it would “enter representation” whether we wanted it or not.

We ended up loving the nasty commentary and also realized that while we had been working with one definition of public and private space, there was another fascinating one out there (seen in YouTube): the anonymity of the Internet which is public and private at the same time. And even more interesting was that we saw a kind of participatory aspect to what might initially seem like a traditional one-way representation.

TN: Was it a challenge making saleable objects for Another Year In LA, and stepping outside of your traditional practice?

MV: It felt very natural. We’re at a point with the collaboration that it takes more time than anything else any of us do. It’s always operated in the red, and we accepted that it now had to bring in money one way or another. The core of the Another Year show were the “everyday objects,” which are of course consumer objects (practical ones, unlike luxuries such as art). Pulling the text from the Double Standard video felt just right: it’s a form of recycling, but also harvesting what we find, which was essential to Fallen Fruit from the start.

Maybe another way to engage your question would be to say that the world demands of artists that we produce primarily two-dimensional portable commodities that hold value. Rather than reject that demand (which plays into the necessity of earning a living), we embraced it. Pricing was a big question for us. Are these just nice domestic objects or limited production art commodities? We chose the former. The prices reflect the cost of materials and production, but the “mark-up” is small — far less than any small-scale economy of production would allow.

EVEN with two shows up simultaneously, the collective isn’t slowing down, so the need for working funds is understandable. Their ongoing “Colonial History of Fruit” project has Fallen Fruit traveling to New Zealand to wrestle with kiwis, and to Norway to tackle arctic berries. With global ambitions like this, Fallen Fruit seems destined to turn the dream of a sustainable, fruit-conscious world into a delicious reality, ripe for the picking.

See “United Fruit” at LACE thru Sept. 27. For more info on Fallen Fruit visit fallenfruit.org. ■

by Tucker Neel

tuckerneel.com

tuckerneel.wordpress.com

Matthew Picton at SolwayJones

Matthew Picton at SolwayJones

by Tucker Neel

Originally published in Artillery Magazine  jul/aug 2009 vol. 3

 

Cities are living creatures, shifting and growing, contracting with time, but fragile too, subject to the forces of historical change and destructive powers both internal and external. This fact is no more evident than in Matthew Picton’s recent exhibition “Postwar Landscapes” at SolwayJones. Here, Picton presents five works that deploy the formal tropes of mapping to speak to memories of space and time.

In one of the most alluring works, Moscow 1808, 1905, 2007, 2008, Picton traces Moscow city maps from these four years in white-painted Duralar and pins them, like preserved scientific specimens, atop each other against a black background. The ghostly sinewy lines of rambling city streets attest to a place that congeals and expands its borders and features. It is up to the viewer to give the work’s four dates and the years in between a historical relevancy.

 

Matthew Picton, Hiroshima, 1930, 2008, paper sculpture on lightbox,192 x 120 x 48 inches

 

Hiroshima, 1930 consists of a massive 16×10ft. light box holding a 3D paper map of that city’s buildings and streets, 15 years before they were devastated by the Little Boy nuclear bomb. The installation brings to mind the modular and rectilinear sculptures of LeWitt or Smithson, but it is more reminiscent of a war room, a literal stage where buildings and the humans they house are envisioned as targets for future destruction. Even with this theatrical set up, the work comes across as surprisingly restrained, and instead of banging the viewer over the head with a moralizing tale of war and death, the piece calmly acts as a jumping-off point for a discussion of Hiroshima, before and after World War II, as an important historical site.

Matthew Picton, Washington, DC, 2009, burnt archival paper, 41-1/2 x 55-1/2 x 2-1/2 inches

In another more startling work, Washington DC, Picton uses the same folded paper technique on a smaller scale, blocking out sections of The Capitol Mall and surrounding environs in a way that makes the layout unmistakable to anyone who has ever lived in, or visited, the city. This approximately 4×3 ft. work hangs in a white frame on the wall and is pockmarked with hundreds of seemingly random brown and black miniature explosions, places where the artist burned holes into the white paper. During the war of 1812 the British did in fact burn the White House and parts of the Mall, and riots have certainly set sections of the city ablaze in the past. But this diorama reads as a quick model for a Hollywood set explosion, a view of DC ravaged by aerial bombardment. While the work causes an immediate reaction regarding the possibility of DC in ashes, its spectacle nature and lack of historical grounding set it apart from other works in the show. While the work could be interpreted as an imagined future, juvenile wishful thinking, or misplaced Cassandra-like prognosticating, it seems more than anything to address our familiarity with seeing famous cities reduced to ashes in mass media.

With this we see the strength of Picton’s overarching project and the curious way he is able to incite viewers to plumb the feelings and associations that come with looking at a map, be it of the past or the possible future.

Penelope Gottlieb at Kim Light

Originally published in Artillery Magazine May/Jun 2009 vol 3 issue 5

Penelope Gottlieb Installation

In NO $ DOWN, Penelope Gottlieb presents visitors with dozens of modestly sized, colored pencil and watercolor, drawings of “homes,” each rendered in a monochrome color, and each inside its own matching brick-a-brac frame. The work is arranged salon-style around a roaring, but completely fake, fireplace, a replica of the hearth from TV’s Leave It To Beaver. The installation is intoxicating, and one can’t help but scan the exquisitely crafted drawings and pick a favorite. In one piece titled Find Your Nest, a pitiful stucco duplex, in purple, is photographed from the street and conspicuously obscured by two parked cars. An acid-yellow tract home, surrounded by fledgling Cyprus trees, is titled Better Than New! Gottlieb’s selection of quintessentially heterogeneous Californian dwellings: craftsman bungalows, mid-century split-levels, Tuscan-style McMansions, and dingbat boxes, feels familiar. So it’s no surprise to find that the images, and their concomitant titles, come directly from real estate ads the artist mined over the past ten years from The LA Times.

Gottlieb's Spanish Doll House

In sourcing her images from The LA Times, and not, say, creating them as a plein-air painter, and packaging her appropriated images in a candy colored “pick your favorite” display, around a wholly decorative fireplace, Gottlieb creates a situation that questions not just “The American Dream” of home ownership and its bastardized nightmarish present, but also proposes a larger critique of how that very dream (or business proposition, investment, or gamble) is sold, pictured, and packaged to our consumer society. This critique doubles back on itself when one considers how strange the situation becomes when Gottlieb’s work actually sells, when someone buys her work and hangs it on their wall, putting a picture of someone else’s house, an anonymous house, in their own home. When activated as part of this exchange, the work is not about the physical veracity of a specific house, or even style of house, but about the mystique surrounding the image’s source, its point of origin, where the image, and the work of art, came from, and the conditions that facilitated its creation.

Alongside her many homes, Gottlieb also includes a handful of drawings of shopping carts overflowing with collected ephemera, as well as an image of a decorated school bus. Unlike the house drawings, these works are left Untilted, without accompanying witty real estate ad quotes. While these works attempt to expand the idea of a “home,” they come off as heavy handed, and end up to confusing the show’s larger critique. When Gottlieb’s shopping carts and buses leave the gallery and adorn other walls, they simply remain illustrative jokes at best. At worst they embody a kind of liberal guilt that distracts itself with pretty images of the sign of economic disparity, instead of focusing on the conditions that make these realities possible.

Penelope Gottlieb's Handyman's Heaven!

Despite this unfortunate inclusion, the show remains rewarding. Gottlieb has created a meditative tableau, fireplace and all, which allows viewers to contemplate the unseen forces that shape their desires and predilections, a place to reflect on the barbiturates that seek to keep America dreaming.

-Tucker Neel

Wake-Up Call: Machine Project’s Field Guide To LACMA

By Tucker Neel and Molly S. Rodgveller

all photos by Molly S. Rodgveller

It’s generally understood that encyclopedic museums are conservative by nature, demanding hands-to-yourself politeness from their visitors. Like an unmanageable grandparent shuffled off to a nursing home, once-shocking works of art are cloistered away in these institutions, protected by well-meaning, but overly cautious, curatorial wards.

LA non-profit, Machine Projects, under the direction of the fearless Mark Allen, attempted to relieve this malady, if only temporarily, on  November 15, 2008 with their Field Guide to the LA County Museum of Art. Like an L-Dopa freebase trip, Machine Project’s daylong takeover of the largest museum West of the Mississip effectively awakened LACMA’s most predictably dry galleries from their catatonic slumber.

We were a little wary of this ambitious project when we picked up the printed program for the day. This guide, intended to help viewers find each project, was an object lesson in frustrating design. After standing where four projects were supposed to be, without successfully finding any of them, we threw a foot-stomping tantrum and abandoned the confounding field guide, choosing unassisted perambulation instead.

Once inside the museum, boredom was a physiological impossibility. After arbitrarily choosing the third floor of the Ahmanson building, we found ourselves in front of Holly Vesecky and Josh Beckman’s immense reproduction of Sam Francis’ painting “Towards Disappearance,” remade entirely of fresh cut flowers, which perfumed four galleries like some sort of Cleopatrean dream.

We were awoken by chicken coop chatter, which we followed into the next gallery.  There, under some of the finest examples Pollock penis Ab-Ex splatters, was a menagerie of hatted middle-agers from the Institute for Figuring. They were at work, teaching visitors how to crochet hyperbolic planes out of used plastic bags. In the corner of the same room, a pair of Siamese minstrel twins from the future, known only as ing, dressed in holographic cowls, quietly fingered diminutive keyboards and other mellifluous accouterments, which dangled from their glimmering utility aprons.  Their infectious weirdness resurrected nearby art from the dead and thus John Chamberlain’s forty-six year-old mangled car shards became part of the alien terrain.

We were quickly lured, like Odysseus to the Sirens, into a room covered in Christ containing a barefoot folk singing duo. Emily Lacy and Daniel Brummel swayed as they sang in front of Gerrit Van Honthorst’s 1617 painting of potato-faced nonbelievers crowning Jesus with a thorn halo. The lyrics: “I’m alone in this world.  I have no father in this world.” teased out meanings dormant for far too long.
The Doppleresque thump-atump-um-tump of a pounding drum kit in the elevator was inescapable.  We took this hardcore people mover downstairs and when the doors opened we nearly fell headfirst into an apparition. We watched, slack jawed, as a Bulgarian vocal trio, punctuated by a woman of Amazonian proportions dressed in white, ululated some cousin of a yodel, while a banjo played beside her. The sounds echoed endlessly in the building’s cavernous main hall.

It was time for some fresh air.

We strolled under the Broad Contemporary Art building (which was surprisingly lacking in Machine Project interventions), and found ourselves surrounded by visitor-made papier mâché vitrines. Liz Glynn, along with some volunteers, were transforming LACMA’s paper garbage, including some old budgets, into replicas of the museum’s Greco-roman vases. Opting to keep our hands clean, we dodged several visitor-made robots on our way to a small hand written cardboard sign, reading “TOUR.”

“So I guess this is all of us,” chirped Annie O’Malley as she began to guide our group of three on a tour titled “LACMA During the Pleistocene Epoch.” Annie described the landscape as it might have looked over 11,000 years ago, complete with mammoths and tar pits, and brought us up to date on the museum’s battles over land ownership and artifact provenance. We returned to Machine’s Mission Control center at the British Petroleum Grand Entrance, with fossil fuel on our minds.

Suddenly, all heads tilted towards the museum roof as either Mark Richards or Alexy Yeghikian (it was hard to tell which one) stood nonchalant under a replica of a gothic arch surrounded in machine-made fog. Then, like a banshee scream, the guitarist totally ripped the skyline a new one. It was an elating, head banging, sign-of-the-Devil experience. After one minute, it was over. This happened every-hour-on the hour, all day long.

And that’s the way it went. Surprises announced themselves at every turn. The helmet-clad folks from Fallen Fruit led tours of the citrus flora hidden in the museum’s collections, Adam Overton dispensed massages with musical accompaniment, and hairstylists, aided by ambient music, cut hair for free. The lesson learned from the day’s events was clear:  As we charge headlong into increasingly difficult times, events like this one, that promote curiosity in the face of uncertainty and cultivate creativity from meager means, are more critically necessary than ever. We left LACMA exclaiming aloud to the art gods, “Give Mark Allen the MacArthur Genius Prize Already!”

Surface Sounding at Seeline Gallery

Surface Sounding at Seeline Gallery
By Tucker Neel

Published in ART LIES Magazine Issue No. 60 Winter 2008

To create Seeline’s Surface Sounding exhibition, the gallery’s director, Janet Levy, invited ten curators, artists and writers from Southern California to chose one artist each whose work addresses the concept of surface, a convenient theme broad enough to encompass any number of aesthetic propositions. With ten artists present and ten curators looming in the wings, it would seem impossible for Seeline, a relatively small gallery, to accommodate so much work and so many personalities without the show becoming an incomprehensible mish-mash. Thankfully, what could be a “too many cooks in the kitchen” scenario is in fact more like a jubilant pot-luck dinner party, with each curator bringing an artist as both date and dish.

John Bucklin's Remote Control Covered Wagon, 2008

For her selection, the curator and arts writer, Emma Gray, includes John Bucklin’s Remote Control Covered Wagon, a rickety, cobbled-together pioneer wagon with lopsided hand-crafted wheels, indented with marks from the artist’s fingers. For most of the show the pathetic-looking contraption, complete with antenna and remote control, is encased in a plexiglass vitrine on a humble plywood pedestal. But during the opening, the artist took it out for a spin, making it limp feebly along, like an injured insect, at a hobbled pace. In presenting this shoddy pioneer wagon, injected with the entertaining trappings of control, Bucklin actively proposes a witty and critical take on the legacy of manifest destiny and how such an ideology of conquest is suffused into common children’s toys, the didactic play-time tools that teach us about American history.

Michael Dee’s Negative Star (purple), 2008

Injecting a welcome breath of serious ocular pleasure into the show, art critic, curator and author Shana Nys Dambrot presents viewers with three of Michael Dee’s Negative Star photographs, puzzling images of gelatinous black, purple and pink globules congealing together in richly hued constellations. The work looks almost Photoshopped, like digital pictures of glass dildos adorned with a neon glow filter. Yet to make these works, Dee bypassed the computer and instead went old-school, tweaking the Rayograph process, making images by capturing directly onto a negative, the light that passes through his signature phallic sculptures, made of iridescently hued melted whiskey tumblers. Like the objects they are made from, these sculptures, and their indexical photographs, hold an intoxicating potentiality; they are unabashedly drunk on their own beauty.

Xana Kudrjavcev-DeMilner’s Standing, 2005

Curated by LA artist Alexandra Grant, Xana Kudrjavcev-DeMilner’s work may not be wholly radical or new, but there is something aggressively ambiguous and a little annoying in her collages. The first time I saw Kudrjavcev-DeMilner’s collages of nature photographs mixed with silhouettes of stately interiors and pictures of fabric from old fashion magazines, I admit I was overly skeptical of their message, their critical import. I thought, “Do we really need more pretty pictures made from the visual detritus of a consumer-obsessed society? What is important in this work?”  There are so many other artists out there doing this kind of thing (and with greater effect) that these works, at first, seem redundant. Yet weeks later these simple collages were able to worm their way into my memory. In Standing, a stumpy surrealist figure swathed in fuchsia and bubblegum pink tweed, promenades past picturesque crashing waves on a rocky beach. The image is irksome, teetering on the brink of abstraction and filled with incongruous and peculiar elements. After trying to pick it apart for some semblance of meaning, one is left with the feeling that they have seen this all before. Upon second-glance, it becomes evident that this collage and Kudrjavcev-DeMilner’s other works in the show coyly investigate how printing techniques and photographic reproduction can stimulate memories of the past. Since her images are made entirely from magazine clippings from the 1960s and 1970s, they inspire a sort of Kodachrome nostalgia, a rumination on a color-saturated past and the shifting sign value of increasingly outdated technologies.

Bill Kleiman A Brief History of the World, 2003

Lisa Melandri, a curator always willing to embrace the absurd and irrational, chose to exhibit A Brief History of the World, a creepy and entertaining work by Bill Kleiman. The piece consists of a hand-made white-on-yellow star-burst tessellation embedded with resin and cat hair, ripped open to reveal red-hot neon camouflage that oozes out a sludgy green hand with elongated fingers, that masquerade as paint drips. This hand plops lumpy rubbery blobs into a complementary outstretched appendage atop a pile of tiny black and white felt clippings, arranged on a puddle-shaped mirrored shelf. Like any hyphen and comma-laden description of it, A Brief History of the World, is absolutely ludicrous and over-the-top, a creepy crafty meditation on absurdity. Maybe it’s that the piece is from 2003 when the US began its illegal war in Iraq, but Kleiman’s conglomeration of loaded signifiers: fiery camo print, Islamic tessellations, zombie hands and reflective surfaces, all lean towards a possible critique of current events, war, and what happens when one’s creations get out of control.

When one or two curators select dozens of works for a group show it’s easy to overlook unfortunate choices and confusing conceptual pairings. But in a show like Surface Sounding there’s really no room for error. Here the act of curatorial choice is put under a microscope for close examination. Each work on display is intimately tied not just to its creator, but also to the curator who, with a Midas-like touch, chose it for exhibition. In a situation like this, the relationship between curator and artist (and gallery for that matter) is revealed as intimate, almost symbiotic. And while that revelation may not be a new one, it’s at least refreshing to see this intimacy play out in the open for all who care to see.

Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement

Originally Published in Art Lies Magazine, Issue No. 59 Fall 2008

Asco, Spray Paint LACMA, 1972 (printed 2007); digital print of color photograph by Harry Gamboa Jr.; 30 x 40 inches; courtesy Harry Gamboa Jr.; © Asco; photo © Harry Gamboa Jr.; photo courtesy UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Archive

“Chicanos don’t make art, they make graffiti.” This is what an unnamed Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator told Harry Gamboa Jr. in 1972. In response, Gamboa, along with other members of the art collective Asco, defiantly spray painted their names on one of the museum’s outer walls. In signing their names to it, they recreated the museum as a piece of conceptual art. Seeing Asco’s photo documentation of this event, Spray Paint LACMA, at the entrance to Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement made this writer’s idealist heart pump just a little bit faster. This is the kind of radical gesture that gives one hope that art can actually do something, inspire a generation and raise important questions, as well as give the middle finger to people in power unwilling to see what’s right in front of their faces.

Selecting art by a younger generation of artists working after the ostensible end of the Chicano Movement, curators Howard Fox, Rita Gonzalez and Chon Noriega use this exhibition to highlight a turn away from “realist” practices saturated with overt symbolism and indebted to the didactic murals typical of 1960s radical art. Instead, they select work by artists laboring not under the Chicano label but alongside it, using the term as a conceptual springboard rather than an institutionalized straightjacket. As an exhibition built on investigating Chicano art today—a concept the curators self-consciously admit is problematic—Phantom Sightings is comfortable in its willingness to embrace the notion that there is no monolithic Chicano identity or characteristic kind of “Chicano” art.

The exhibition fills the LACMA galleries to capacity with over 100 artworks by 31 artists, from Whitney Biennial art stars to relative newcomers. The walls look as if they are literally bursting at the seams thanks to this unfortunate curatorial gesture; likewise, architectural flourishes resemble shantytown housing. LACMA is known for going over the top with its exhibition design (bowler hats for guards in a recent Magritte show, for instance), but here—in a show addressing issues of race, class and the border—the cobbled together entrance signage and overhangs just look forced, distracting and offensive. Fortunately, the work in this exhibition remains largely unscathed by this poor decision.

Works that stand out harness the momentum of Asco’s conceptual slingshot, using the conceptual power of humor, a keen understanding of institutionalized racism and a fluid understanding of identity. A prime example is Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynching series in which the artist erases hanging bodies and ropes from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spectacle lynching postcards; what’s left is a ghostly illuminated crowd staring into a void. The simple gesture of removal refocuses the viewer’s gaze and calls attention to the important role spectatorship plays in gruesome events. A visit to the artist’s website informs us that more Latinos were lynched in California than persons of any other race or ethnicity. Looking at Gonzales-Day’s work demands a sobering reflection not just on the past but on racist violence today, which, in light of the perennial police riots and crackdowns and state-sponsored executions inflicted on people of color, has a disturbingly resilient presence

Sandra de la Loza, working under the name The Pocho Research Society, also takes history to task with Fort Moore: Living Monument, a multimedia installation deconstructing the latent meanings behind the Fort Moore Pioneer Memorial, a huge bas-relief monument in downtown Los Angeles celebrating the city’s independence from Mexico in 1847 during the Mexican-American War. In her multimedia installation of videos, objects in vitrines and explanatory wall texts, the artist charts moments of conflict near the memorial: a newspaper article from 1859 describes the lynching of a man named Juan Flores on top of Fort Moore Hill. A photo with accompanying text explains how students marched in front of the memorial during walkouts in 2006 to protest anti-illegal immigrant legislation. In her video, the artist uses subtle animation techniques to alter the existing memorial, making flags fall to the ground, walls crumble and words change. Taken as a whole, the installation poetically asks questions about what sorts of histories get overlooked in the process of constructing nationalist memory.

Taking another route, Alejandro Diaz embraces humor as a conceptual foil to frustrate expectations of Chicano identity. His Sayings are hilarious cardboard signs with hand-drawn one-liners like “Make Tacos Not War” and “This product was made with the use of inner-child labor.” As art objects hung salon-style on gallery walls, these modest rib-ticklers echo David Shrigley’s signature deadpan phrases in their brevity and wit. But Diaz’ overarching politics are unavoidable, especially when one learns that the artist is known to hawk these signs outside the Plaza Hotel in New York while wearing a mariachi outfit—an action poking fun at both his perceived ethnicity as well as the socioeconomic power relations associated with his immediate environment. Fulfilling their intended purpose, Diaz’ Sayings tease laughter from countless English-speaking viewers (there are no Spanish translations available). But there is also a problematic space in the silence between these chuckles where one is left to wonder if the viewer is laughing with or at the racist stereotypes and economic realities that make these jokes possible—and so poignant.

Like most large group exhibitions interrogating hotly contested subjects, Phantom Sightings has its regrettable features: overcrowding and ill-conceived exhibition design aside, there was the inevitable brouhaha over who was not included (or refused to participate). But, as is the mark of any well-curated show, the exhibition is sustained by the artworks it showcases. If successful, the show will inspire more venues to revisit the identity-politics debates of yesteryear, but this time with voices that use the ambiguity, uneasiness and playfulness of identity as a tool to address pressing contemporary issues and lingering historical concerns.

Tucker Neel is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles.

Dancing Daze: Bodycity

Originally printed in Artillery Magazine, sep/oct 2008 vol 3 issue 1

bodycity

After being thoroughly hijacked by fundamentalists, and injected into bombs and body bags in distant lands, the term “democracy” has sustained a thorough linguistic beating over the years. Despite the grim state of things today, there is hope for those who seek avenues for true emancipatory group participation. For these people it’s refreshing to see artists, especially collectives, reclaiming democracy as a working practice, a way to describe how they make their art. One such group is a hometown dance collective called bodycity.

A self-proclaimed “dance democracy”, bodycity, previously known as collective static, has performed in both public and private spaces in and around Los Angeles for the past three years. Composed almost entirely of women, the group’s numbers have swelled to over a dozen and waned to just five as members have come and gone. Only a few ever took classical ballet or modern dance and most get their prior training from rocking out alone at home. Collectively their dance philosophy eschews any conservative ideology demanding choreographic or physical perfection.  Instead, their practice bristles with a do-it-yourself spirit based in accepting imperfections, embracing mistakes as opportunities, assets that heighten the possibility of democratic inclusiveness.

The troupe’s aesthetic is part Barbara Mettler, with her totally improvisational dance philosophy (which got rid of the stage, and the audience, all together), and part Judson Dance Theater, which revolutionized the professional dance world by creating performances emphasizing chance and repetitive movement. In line with this tradition, bodycity’s choreography is full of awkward repetitive actions, developed through a process of improvisation, individual and group research, and collective decision-making. Yet while they acknowledge that dance has a living history, they get more inspiration from 80’s workout videos, urban vistas, Youtube and dressage than from their modernist predecessors.

Often sewing their own costumes or enlisting friends’ creative skills, they have danced as birds to lead flocks of people along the Santa Clara River in Valencia, donned utility gloves to dance/scale the steepest street in California, performed with cacti and bamboo in the Huntington Gardens, and initiated impromptu performances in Echo Park. In costumes or not, Bodycity’s work is at its best when employing considered site specificity to bring out unexpected meaning in curious locations.

bodycity LadyStranger dance promo shot

Earlier this year the dancers began collaborating with the musical group Glasser (which sounds like the Kate Bush and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ irrepressible lovechild) to create Lady Stranger. Performed at Mr. T’s Bowl, a hipster/hobo watering hole in Highland Park, Lady Stranger seized the venue as the perfect site to excavate latent sexual innuendo. At the start of the dance the performers, decked out in pencil skirts, tight shirts and old-fashioned lace dickies shimmy on top of booths and do-wop next to the juke box, their actions conjuring “loose women” archetypes from the 40’s and 50’s. Later the troupe erupts into fist-pounding stomps, guttural grunts, and arrow-hurling warrior poses executed with hair-raising synchronicity. These sex pot / Amazonian juxtapositions, slyly communicate how barroom interactions are themselves coded dances walking the line between fighting and fornication.

Wikidance

For Wikidance, created in 2007, the group capitalized on our web 2.0 obsessed culture and used the internet as a democratizing tool and a site unto itself. To initiate the piece, bodycity posted a video on vimeo.com as part of Ultimate Blogger 3, an internet blogging  contest (which they almost won), asking viewers to record any movement or small dance and submit it to be incorporated as part of a final piece uniting all the submissions into one performance. The almost two-dozen submissions ranged from the bootyshakin’ to the absurdly minimalist: a man slowly leans a against a pole, a girl gyrates a’la The Village People, a couple awkwardly mock an embrace, a mother and son lock hands and gesture tai-chi-style to the camera. Yet despite the unpredictability of the submissions and the systematic structure required to put the entire piece together, the resulting performance isn’t overly cerebral or confusing; like the best user-generated internet content, it’s perfectly imperfect, addictive, inspiring, and fun to watch.

Wikidance

When viewed in its intended environment – on the internet – the final Wikidance is as a moving collage; the dancers promenade, pose, vogue, spin and wave, duplicating the movements in the submission videos to Yeah by LCD Soundsystem. In a brief segment two dancers, outstretched arms scissor-like, embrace one another, mimicking a particular submission video. A second later actual scissors enter the camera frame, like an animator’s eraser in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, to slice out each dancer from the video one-by-one. In de-centering choreographer’s stereotypically dictatorial position and turning the building blocks of the performance over to the very audience the dance addresses, Wikkidance proves itself quite liberating and inspiring. And that’s the key to bodycity’s allure.

Their democratic idealism requires that they practice what they preach and work with conceptual and physical exertion bordering on exaltation to bring the viewer into their dances as much as possible. When successful, their work breaks down the boundaries between dancer and audience, choreographer and company, public and private to sincerely state that dance is everywhere and that it can happen with and to anyone at any time.

Bodycity is currently: Madeline Baugh, Betsy Hume, Jennifer Lehman, Cristina Paul, Molly Rodgveller, Lake Sharp and Meagan Yellott

-Tucker Neel