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

Tucker Neel in Looky See at the Ben Maltz Gallery

The Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design is pleased to present the group exhibition:

LOOKY SEE: A Summer Show
July 26-September 13, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 26, 6-8pm with solar-powered music by SYCONS Closing Reception: Saturday, September 13, 3-5pm

Looky See: A Summer Show opens Saturday, July 26, 6-8pm at the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design located at 9045 Lincoln Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90045 and is on view through September 13, 2008. This large group show features inspired work by 28 artists who draw, cut, film, pin, perforate, perform, and journal. This exhibition is organized by Meg Linton, Director of the Ben Maltz Gallery and Public Programs, and Curatorial Intern Nina Laurinolli, and is a selection of work made from dozens of studio and gallery visits and lengthy reviews of artists’ materials over a one-year period. The exhibition offers a mixture of representational and abstract work by a multi-generational group of dynamic artists.

Artists in the exhibition: Emily de Araújo, Eric Beltz, Barbara Berk, Joe Biel, Sandow Birk, Ann Diener, Roy Dowell, Erin Dunn, Erica Eyres, Iva Gueorguieva, Penelope Gottlieb, Richard Keely and Anna O’Cain, Takehito Koganezawa, Tucker Neel, Claudia Nieto, Aaron Noble, Chris Oatey, Ruby Osorio, Ebony G. Patterson, Ron Santos, Mindy Shapero, Fran Siegel, Coleen Sterritt, Fred Stonehouse, Randal Thurston, Elizabeth Turk, Xawery Wolski.

Location: Otis College of Art and Design, 9045 Lincoln Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90045

Parking & Admission: Free. Visitor parking in structure on La Tijera.

Hours: Tue-Sat 10am-5pm / Thu 10am-7pm. Closed major holidays (August 30-Sept 1)
Gallery Tours: 310.665.6909 to schedule tours for school, museum or other groups
Gallery Info: 310.665.6905, galleryinfo@otis.edu, www.otis.edu/benmaltzgallery

Coachella: Hold The Art

By Tucker Neel and Molly Rodgveller

Originally published in Artillery Magazine, Vol. 2, Issue 6 July/Aug. 2008, p. 38-39

A view from the Steampunk treehouse

Honestly, who goes to Coachella, in Indio?!?,  and shells out hundreds of bucks and a tank of gas to see the art? With music gods serenading hot sweaty sun kissed mobs of luscious six-pack sexpots the art mainly exists to create a mood and provide a shady place to find lost friends, procure drugs and escape the melee.  At times the work may be essentially superfluous but, like streamers at a party, it creates atmosphere.

Big Rig Jig

We loved Mike Ross’ Big Rig Jig despite its unfortunate title. The monumental sculpture was comprised of two semis hauling long aluminum tanks precariously balanced on top of each other in an unreal S-shape. It was like two metal monsters in a taffy pull, graceful and sweet.  It must have taken a Triceratops worth of fossil fuel to get it to the site, yet the piece held an obviously political subtext pointing out our absurd obsession with oil. Essentially a grand realization of a simple idea, the piece stood apart from the rest of the art in the festival.  It was a nice change from the other works, which seemed forced and alienated from their more understandable homeland: the Burning Man festival, held every year in the hotter-than-hell Nevada desert. While estranged from this annual bacchanal, these pieces still exhibited a well-worn “Burner” aesthetic steeped in a reliance on complicated tech gimmicks to make up for flash-in-the-pan concepts.

It doesn’t take much imagination to transform the statement, “it’s like flowers that shoot fire,” into art. Unfortunately, Michael Christian’s Beyond the Garden, took that unneeded step. The piece consisted of a cluster of larger-than-life black metal flowers aflame in the manner of gas lampposts. These scrawny flowers depended too heavily on derivative Tim Burton inspired design and pyrotechnics at the expense of concept and entertainment. Come on, fire-breathing flowers and it’s boring?

Thank goodness for Mark Lottor’s Quad Cubatron (again with the titles), a crystal lattice of suspended ping-pong balls filled with programmed LED lights. During the day it was a delicate piece, lovely and ripe with potential. At night it became an otherworldly show; the balls lit up in a traffic-stopping psychedelic kaleidoscope of Q-Bert like architectural designs. Think Erwin Redl’s signature light rooms, but with a techier, DIY aesthetic, something animated, ebullient and addictive.  Some treated it like a rock-star or the last unicorn in a traveling circus of ethereal beasts.  It claimed its space and seduced its audience.

If this spectacle worked because of its generosity, accessibility, and its socially lubricated audience, then The Steampunk Treehouse (ugh these titles!) by Sean Orlando had the opposite effect. Consisting of a towering conglomeration of rusted metal fashioned as both tree and house, the installation was off limits to all but a select few. A padlocked elfin door bolted several times with creaking hinges kept out the masses. Faced with this barrier, the piece had a corrupting quality giving us a sinful desire to rise above the crowd and see the headlining bands through VIP eyes.

After being handed a key like a family-sized chocolate bar from our enthusiastic guide, we removed the padlock. The climb to the top was treacherous, law-suit-laden, and explained why this piece was so inaccessible. Once inside the luxurious canopy we were treated to a Jules Verne inspired den with dark wood, cubbies, peeling wallpaper, and dainty collages, and a bucket to haul up beers. A telescope pointed at the main stage.  Unfortunately, this contradictory space provided an escape but forced its select visitors into a privileged position, a non-egalitarian art experience. By its nature a tree house creates hierarchies, but is that really what art at a music festival should do?

Fortunately, other works succeeded in putting art on the same playing field as music.  Pieces like The Parabola, a metal web of interactive drums, tubes, and piano carcasses by the Corndog (we’re serious) demanded active participation from the audience.  The result was a cacophonous blur of bangs clangs gonks and thumps. While lacking innovation, the piece’s musical bent was completely appropriate for Coachella. Sonic Forrest by Christopher Janney also took music to task. With its sixteen 8-foot motion sensitive columns emitting forest sounds, the piece was so alluring that security guards practically had to pry participants away as the night came to a close.

The art at Coachella is an experiment in trying to please everyone some of the time, an admirable if not self-defeating undertaking. Few people saw both Bonde Do Role and Dwight Yoakam but everyone had to navigate The Do Lab (!!!!!!!), a techno rave vaudeville waterpark. The problem is that the art at Coachella is already in an uncomfortable situation. Like a break-dancing mime in a European plaza, it’s not the main attraction, not what you came to see, but it still might surprise you, if your into that kinda thing.

Tucker Neel in Party Favors at Bonelli Contemporary, Los Angeles

Party Favors is an exhibition exploring the party—as a subject, an idea, a state of mind, and a model of artistic practice. Bringing together a diverse assortment of works and events exploring social dynamics, play, food, performance, games, pleasure, decadence, and excess, it aims to explore the widespread tendency among young artists and art spaces in LA today toward a renewed interrogation of community, collaboration, and social interaction—as well giving the art community something to do in the often sleepy month of July.

The exhibition has two parts: a group show in the gallery, consisting of sculpture, painting, video, photography, and an installation of “art that you can drink,” to be served exclusively at the opening; and a spectacular series of events, each organized by a different artist or group. The events will be held at the gallery and in other sympathetic venues in and around Chinatown. Most are free of charge. A full and regularly updated schedule will be available on the gallery’s website at www.bonellicontemporary.com

The show kicks off the night before the opening with late night séance marking the birthday of artist Miguel Nelson, complete with banana daiquiris. The following night we’ll be pouring of Fallen Fruit’s new line of neighborhood-inspired vodkas. Other events include a wine tasting with Echo impresario Julian Davies; a fried chicken social at High Energy Constructs; the eighth incarnation of the Fucked Up Drawing Party; a record listening party with Tao Urban; a game day with Elizabeth Hamilton and Jon Zerolnick; a Mystery Cafe with Tamala Poljak, Anna Oxygen, and Paloma Parfrey; and performances by Frohawk Two Feathers and the Forces of Nature, Nuttaphol Ma, Maxi Kim, and Christine Wertheim, among others. Artists for the exhibition include Brian Bress, Martin Durazo, Fallen Fruit, Fucked Up Drawing Party, Samantha Magowan, Michael Barton Miller, Chris Natrop, Tucker Neel, Miguel Nelson, and Tao Urban.

California Video at The Getty Museum

By Tucker Neel

Originally published in ART LIES magazine No. 58, Summer 2008, p. 98-99.

When Sony released its first portable video camera in 1967 artists on both American coasts latched onto it as a tool providing immediate visual fidelity and freedom from the hassle of celluloid film. However, the new medium was not without complications. Editing required costly machinery and no one knew if video would meet archival standards. On the West Coast, the Long Beach Museum of Art recognized video art’s growing importance and in 1976 it created a video archive and editing facility allowing for hundreds of artists to make and preserve their groundbreaking works.

The Getty Research Institute acquired the archive in 2006, providing the sometimes bawdy, oftentimes political, and always experimental videos with an oddly conservative and incongruous home. The museum’s recent California Video exhibition celebrates this new acquisition with an expansive showcase of over fifty sprawling single channel monitors and fifteen installations of modest to spectacular scale by fifty-eight artists and collectives who made these works while residing in California. More than half of the works in the exhibition are from the Long Beach archive, the rest gleaned from other sources or made specifically for the Getty. An ambitious undertaking by Getty curator Phillips, the show is daunting, a little sloppy, but ultimately inspiring, providing an opportunity to chart video’s rather nascent history and explore what exactly makes California video intrinsically Californian.

As the first video one encounters in the exhibition, John Baldessari’s I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art from 1971 acts as a sounding board for the rest of the works in the show. Displayed on a chipped wood-paneled Sony TV, the video captures the artist writing “I will not make any more boring art” on a sheet of paper for an excruciating thirty-two minutes an twenty-one seconds. In exploiting the very essence of video, its ability to capture an action and play it back in real time, Baldessari uses self-reflexive humor and an innate understanding of the viewer’s role as spectator to make a poignant joke about art and entertainment. The most resonant works that follow incorporate this kind of sensibility, freely blurring the boundaries between art and entertainment, humor and critique, boredom and engagement.

From Baldessari’s intro, the exhibition continues along a relatively chronological path, with works loosely grouped according to formal and conceptual concerns. Late 1960’s black and white videos incorporating rudimentary psychedelic special effects by Skip Sweeney and Joanne Kyger are positioned near one another. These early experiments find their legacy in more colorful, almost formalist videos, from the 1970’s by Stephen Beck. His trippy chromophilic patterns line the same hallway as Erika Suderburg frenzied 2006 video abstractions, which are actually close ups of Linda Besemer’s paintings.

Elanor Antin’s ballet performance video, Susan Mongul’s ruminations on women’s clothes, and Martha Rosler’s layered exposé on anorexia nervosa, all groundbreaking works stemming from a commitment to feminist practices, are in close proximity to one another. While these works are well contextualized with explanatory texts, their conspicuous grouping borders on ghettoization.

Kipper Kids

And, in what can be taken as a dumb curatorial joke, some of the most interesting body art in the show is crammed together into one cramped room so that one has to literally crawl over other visitors to see amazing videos by Skip Arnold, Bruce Nauman, the Kipper Kids and Ulysses Jenkins, among others. Thankfully other larger installations throughout the show don’t suffer the same fate.

T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm's The Eternal Frame

In The Eternal Frame from 1975-76, recreated specifically for the exhibition, San Francisco Bay area artists T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm situate their video in a 1960s American living room diorama adorned with knick-knacks memorializing the Kennedy presidency. Sitting on comfy couches, visitors watch the artists’ 22-minute color and black and white video on a vintage TV. The hilarious documentary follows the artists’ hyperbolic restaging of Zapruder’s famous JFK assassination film. In one scene, actors playing John and Jackie rehearse the assassination on a rickety set, Jackie winking to the camera as she rushes to hold her co-star’s head together. By using decoration, artifice and spectacle to create meaning both in and around the TV screen, the artists explore video’s ability to entertain while manipulating events and shaping national debate. This kind of preference for a simulated environment ripe with contradictions and righteous irreverence seems to be very Californian, a reflection of a culture actively in the business of turning media-fabricated dreams into reality.

Stanya Kahn and Harry Dodge’s Whacker

Projected on a wall in another gallery, Stanya Kahn and Harry Dodge’s Whacker takes a more recent view of the Hollywood dream machine. Shot with the low-tech DIY aesthetic of a Youtube video, the piece has Dodge behind the camera following Kahn as she uses a buzzing weedwacker in a Sysiphisian attempt to clear dry, golden grass from a Los Angeles hillside lot on a sunny afternoon. Chewing gum while decked out in aviator sunglasses, a flower print halter-top and heels, Kahn looks more bored than exhausted with her repetitive work. When she stops to survey her progress and gaze out at the palm trees silhouetted in the hazy sky, she is the picture-perfect embodiment of disengaged LA nonchalance. The sun never sets as the seven-minute video loops and Kahn’s work continues indefinitely. This unremitting cycle makes her contrived disinterest more and more intoxicating and comic. The video seems to exclaim that, contrary to popular belief, Angelinos do work hard, they just don’t like to show it.

A show about contemporary video art wouldn’t be complete without a nod to Youtube and in keeping with the times the Getty hosts little snippets of work from the show on their website. These excerpts act as teasers designed to bring in patrons. Perhaps more telling though is videorevolutionaries.com, a site actively promoted in connection with the California Video exhibition. Here users can submit their own videos and vote on which submissions will screen at a special Getty event. As a rather transparent move to bring a young, hip audience to the museum, the site reflects this demographic with videos featuring predictably cool special-effects, club music, pretty faces, fondled breasts, blog-like confessionals and shameless self promotions. While these works may never show alongside a Nauman, the ambition behind their creation admirable, a testament to enduring experimentation and a willingness to put it all out in the open which, in the end, may be the most Californian trait of all.

Confabulations: Drawings by Tucker Neel at Commissary Arts

Confabulations: Drawings by Tucker Neel
Commissary Arts
68 North Venice Boulevard
Venice, CA 90291
United States

Dates: January 19, 2008 to March 1, 2008
Artist Reception: Saturday, January 19, 2008, 5-8pm
Gallery hours are Thursday & Friday 12-5pm, Saturday 12-6pm, and by appointment.
For additional information or to request visual material,
please contact the gallery at (310) 990-9914, or email
info@commissaryarts.com.
To view works in the show visit tuckerneel.com

The future will be fabulous

Press Release: Commissary Arts is pleased to announce
Confabulations, a solo show by Los Angeles based
artist Tucker Neel. Fascinated by the ways people
attempt to capture memory in a material form, Neel
uses his polymorphous practice to investigate
overlooked and unintentional monuments and memorials
to better understand how people mark and archive both
personal and collective experience. For this
exhibition, Neel presents hundreds of subjective
drawings executed in the past year. At first created
inadvertently as a way to pass time, the work reflects
the transitory, imperfect and befuddling nature of
personal memory.

Each 8 ½ x 5 ½ inch drawing contains an image and a
text that relate to each other if only tenuously.
Populated by bandaged aristocrats, frustrated
debutantes, overdressed crocodiles, and a steady
stream of countless unexpected figures, Neel’s
drawings appear fresh, playful and spontaneous. When
accompanied by humorous, prescient, bawdy and
sometimes downright disturbing texts, his drawings
take on new meaning, become stories, placards, and
signposts for passing thoughts, observations or
quotations. At times, the resulting compositions are
direct and easy to understand and sometimes they are
quizzical, even impenetrable.

With each passing day the exhibition will change as
the works shuffle and move around the gallery;
drawings leave the walls upon purchase only to be
replaced by a seemingly endless stream of even more
works. Viewing and re-encountering these drawings
throughout the run of the exhibition is sure to
delight, amuse and captivate each visitor. For more
information and to see more works by the artist please
visit tuckerneel.com.

The exhibition runs from January 19, 2008 to March 1,
2008. There will be a reception for the artist on
Saturday, January 19, 2008 from 5 to 8pm. Commissary
Arts is a new gallery space in Venice presenting work
by emerging and mid-career contemporary artists based
in Southern California through a mix of solo and group
exhibitions.

The gallery is located at 68 N. Venice Boulevard,
Venice, CA 90291. Gallery hours are Thursday & Friday
12-5pm, Saturday 12-6pm, and by appointment. For
additional information or to request visual material,
please contact the gallery at (310) 990-9914, or email
info@commissaryarts.com.

Catalog essay by Allison Schifani.

Words are tricky things. If you can call them things. We tend to experience them, read them, think them, not in their ‘thingness’, not in themselves, but always as something else. They refer, describe, title or they fail to do so. And even as words fail, they hint at their impossible references, descriptions, titles. They invite those viewers to whom they are offered, those listeners who are able to hear them, to remake them, re-imagine them, and thus to produce them.

The collection of Tucker Neel’s works presented here get at the slippery non-thingness of language and at its effects on us. His works here offer us text paired with images to which we might suitably assume that text refers. But it is in the jarring gap between the two–the image and the text–that these artworks expose their own power.

We, as viewers, are left grasping at the text and the picture, trying to decipher, trying impossibly to force the text to make sense of the image or the image to make sense of the text. It is in this gap, revealed so cleverly, so sincerely (or perhaps so sarcastically?) by these works that we begin crack open the broader trouble at hand: the subjective experience and the voice of the subject. How precariously these two facets of the social world are linked and how ephemeral, how threatening, how bizarre and uncanny is our experience of this tenuous link.

The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure filled pages of his works (posthumously collected and formed by his students in a Course in General Linguistics) with diagrams–with pictures, trying to show a line between the sound-image (a word, spoken or written) and the concept (the thing itself, supposedly outside of language but to which it refers) to which this sound-image was to get at. What he missed, and what many thinkers have worked to explore, is that the lines he drew and redrew between a word and the concept to which it was connected was just what Neel’s works seem to get at–its not such an easy line to draw. It’s not a line at all. What lies between signifier and signified is lived experience–bodies, spaces, memories. To get from one side of the diagram to the other is to produce language, a language that communicates something, surely, but invariably something altered by its hearer, by its reader. In getting from the voice to the thing it speaks there are, it turns out, a multiplicity of voices, an infinitude of things.

Images, too, are tricky things. If you can call them things. They, too, are experienced, they are read. And they are always complicated by text. In a country where only the gravest of afflictions and deepest of pains seem immune to ironic mime and sarcasm, it is difficult to tell when–if this was ever possible–someone is saying what they mean. Neel’s works seem to hint at this trouble too because, in the end, we’re not sure we should take him seriously. By pairing the text with the image, playful, sometimes downright goofy images, we are not left just to wonder at the meaning secured somewhere, unreachably, behind the text, behind the images, but also at ourselves, our own skills at reading.

The first work I saw of this collection was given to me at an informal and somewhat raucous art opening in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles. The image was a bookshelf, floating out of context on the white page, atop it a row of books without visible titles–a human skull set up at one side as a book end and at the other, five shooting stars leapt inexplicably up from the books and into space. Below was the inscription, “We really do want to change the world.” I wondered, at first, if I had missed the joke. If that ‘really’ mocked idealism or if that skull exposed the consequences of its inevitable failure.

That piece has been moved about my house for over two months now and, because it’s mine, there is no longer a joke to get. I did the job that text requires. I produced my meaning which shifts and stirs and won’t sit still. But the eyes of that little skull, the illegible spines of those books, constantly remind me that meanings, like memories, like living, won’t sit still either. They have to be made and remade.

Finally, I think, there is the tricky thing (if you can call it a thing) that is joy. Neel’s works are jostling, confounding even, but they are always also about a certain amount of play–with language, with image, with the wide open space between the viewer and the work viewed. And this means that these works have a certain political potency. There is always subversive power in play, in pleasure, and in joy. Long histories of political art and activism make that more than clear. If nothing else, Neel gives us a little space to play in. That is no small offering.