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.

The Unique Spectacle That Is The Contemporary Art Fair

By Tucker Neel

Originally published in  Fine Art Magazine, Vol. 33 No 1, Spring 2008, 67.

Installation at Gavin Brown Projects

Art Basel is like watching your parents have sex, or so says one of my favorite graduate school professors. While the gallery/collector public displays of affection and private backroom deals may seem to spoil the mood, the roaring art market wouldn’t be able to survive in its current state without Basel.

For many galleries Miami in December is the time and place to unload inventories and increase reserves for the coming year. This sobering reality doesn’t diminish the queasiness that comes with seeing work you adore hanging clustered like so much meat in a butcher’s window. Hearing dealers and collectors talk in frank, Warholian terms about how much is it now and how much it will be worth in a year seems to take the fun out of looking at the work in the first place. And watching works sell to earnest collectors and hotel chains alike, and knowing that in a few months the entire cycle will start again can put a damper on any sort of art-school-fueled idealism.

Yet if one can overlook its artistic and creative constraints, Basel can become a welcome opportunity for artists. Where else can one interact with so many intelligent, influential (an often inebriated) artists, writers, curators, and cultural mavens from all over the world? If anything, the multiple fairs allow for thousands of artists to contrast practices and compare conceptual interests.

Once inside the fairs the repetition of materials and methods was at times overwhelming. Every-day objects cast in metal, taxidermied animals, reconstituted designer goods, Photoshopped history paintings masquerading as photographs, utilitarian tools covered in sparkles, crystals and glitter, adolescent flat watercolors, oversized celebrity-themed photographs and paintings, abject libidinal cartoons, finish-fetish metals, neon, glitter, cardboard, and used and unused bottles of alcohol – all cropped up again and again in countless booths.

This is not to say that any of the works employing these techniques were inherently derivative. In fact, an outstanding work at Art Basel employed more than one of these material concerns. Oliver Payne and Nick Relph’s installation at Gavin Brown Projects allowed visitors to peruse the duo’s stylish retro sneakers stuffed with expensive bottles of Chateau Latour, strategically placed alongside antiquated technology like a tan Macintosh Classic computer or an old Tamagotchi keychain. Displayed on well-lit platforms a’ la Prada or the MOMA’s design wing, the work embodied a kind of dandy decorative sensibility, updating Haim Steinbach’s 80’s consumer fetish wall displays for a new nostalgic millennium.

Another work, also reminiscent of Jason Rhodes’ plastic phantasmagoria, was Franco Mondini-Ruiz’s Infinito Botanica at Frederieke Taylor’s booth at the Pulse art fair. Here the artist arranged a crowded table of religious idols draped in fake foods, pizza, Corona beer bottles, ceramic tzotchkes and pop art piñatas. The booth’s walls were crammed with clichéd paintings of whimsical white dresses, lonesome suited figures, and brooding faces, all of which looked like they came straight from a local mall’s Fine Art emporium. The overall effect was not only humorous, but also keenly critical of the art fair’s tendency to value commerce over kunst, likening the entire experience to a carnival of conspicuous consumption.

However not all standouts employed an over-the-top aesthetic. Jay Johnson’s Some Kind of Meal in Quint Contemporary Art’s booth at Art Miami sparsely speckled an unremarkable wall with minuscule bronze objects: a bottle, a pill, a funnel–each referencing human relationships to food, eating, digestion, and sustenance. The work insisted on placing the viewer in a self-reflexive position, highlighting one’s own bigness next to the work’s conspicuous smallness. This physical sensation no doubt heightened by the work’s close proximity to nearby bombastic and self-consciously BIG painting and photography.

Unfortunately some artists and galleries can take reductive tendencies too far. Take Wilfredo Prieto’s El Tiempo es Oro / Time is Gold installation in Martin Von Zomeren’s booth at NADA for example. The entire booth was painted machine-gun blue, empty, save for a single gold pocket watch dangling from the ceiling. With this didactic polemic deployed in such a privileged space, the piece clumsily strives to addresses the economies of space and time associated with paying for and showing in an expensive fair. But the piece does little more than scream its castigations in a familiar tone at an uninterested and unreceptive audience. While Prieto has made his name practicing similar flat-footed institutional critiques (some of them at times quite acerbic and poignant), he, and many other artists with similar goals, could learn a thing or two from Yves Klein.

While admittedly operating under less anti-capitalist pretenses, Klein spoke to Prieto’s current concerns with Le Vide, his now legendary performance from 1956. For this work the artist provided blue cocktails to guests attending his opening in a gallery that featured nothing displayed on its blank white walls. Upon returning home after the show and retiring to the water closet, the patrons found that their urine had turned a patented Yves Klein Blue. He had effectively used the tools of the trade (booze and a party) to highlight the merger of the gallery/patron relationship, making the remnant of such public interaction visible in the most private of places.

Maybe the art world is too jaded to take note of pranks like this. Maybe we’ve seen it all before. However, Cut out ‘however’ one can only hope that more artists could channel Klein’s strategic humor within the primed setting Basel provides. Such an informed, simple, and hilarious intervention would no doubt usher in new ways of seeing and participating in the unique spectacle that is the contemporary art fair.

Tucker Neel’s Perspectives in the Crowd at The Bolsky Gallery

Curator’ Statement:

Perspectives in the Crowd
Bolsky Gallery
Otis College of Art and Design
June 20-August 29, 2007

The universal gesture of the upraised arm holding a lighter at a live concert has received an upgrade. Instead of lighters, outstretched limbs hold aloft, like triumphant torches, countless digital cameras and cell phones to document the here and now to be saved and shared, seemingly forever, on the internet.

The videos in Perspectives in the Crowd are all documents of the same event: a live performance by the band Daft Punk at the 2006 Coachella Music Festival in Indio, California. They were gathered by contacting people who posted their personal footage on YouTube. I asked each person if they would give me permission to compile their raw data of the concert onto one DVD. Hailing from various parts of the U.S. and the world, these DIY documentarians came together for one night at Coachella, and they are reunited here via their shared recorded memory to present a night of their impressions.

The videos represent both a personal and collective experience, a position of subjectivity within a crowd while simultaneously presenting an objective, often unedited, view of the crowd and band. When compiled on one DVD and projected in succession in a public space, layers of experience are being added at every remove from the original site and experience—from a tent to a digital camera to the internet to a gallery. This contemporary transformation in how, we as viewers, process experience as both participant and recorder is changing our relationship to the present. As we transfer our memories to prosthetic devices and download them to a public forum it raises dozens of questions.

What does it mean to have so many people documenting the same event with different types of cameras from so many perspectives? How have technologies like digital cameras, cell phones, and sites like YouTube changed the way we individually and collectively experience the world around us? Does this way of documenting our own experiences help us to remember or does it usher in a new way to forget the moments between recorded images? Does it mean we capture and convey the ‘real’ experience or are we generating an entirely new reality?

ARTFORUM.COM review of the show:

“Perspectives in the Crowd” is a large-scale video projection comprising over fifty DIY audiovisual accounts of Daft Punk’s raucous 2006 performance at the Coachella Music Festival, all gathered from YouTube and spliced together by artist Tucker Neel. The effect of this unlikely project is mesmerizing and variously suggestive. Like much of the best performance documentation—think of Chris Burden’s early performance photographs or the Viennese Actionists’ fastidiously composed performance stills—this video compilation immediately establishes itself as ontologically distinct from the live source event. It is true that each digital video captures the same musical performance, but the resultant work is of an entirely different order; ultimately, Neel’s canny project is an autonomous aesthetic gesture only tenuously related to the spectacle that is its source. Agitated camera movement and digital pixelation conspire to render the stage a throbbing mass of light, screens, and speakers. The pounding of electronic beats cuts in and out, and only occasionally does the amateur camera operator succeed in training his or her lens on the two space-age druids elevated in the center of the stage, fiddling feverishly with a concealed control panel, their efforts generating a state of near hysteria in the audience. Neel’s work has a presentness entirely absent from most performance documentation. This presentness derives chiefly from that fact that Neel accepts the formal limitations of the medium he is working with, as well as the serendipities of novice camerawork, and exploits those characteristics to create a shimmering, largely abstract audiovisual spectacle that offers the viewer an entirely self-contained, entirely gripping experience.

—Christopher Bedford

Nancy Chunn the Otis College Ben Maltz Gallery

By Tucker Neel

Originally published in ISM Magazine March, 2008

Installation shot of Chunn's Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear

Nancy Chunn is a self-described political junkie. Her most recent show, Media Madness, at Otis College of Art and Design, attests to her addiction to the news, an addiction that seems to suit her well. While she doesn’t take revenge on the news media per se, Chunn acts more like a sieve, distilling current events into a personal lexicon of images, signs and symbols to make maps, diagrams, and hieroglyphs that express her fears, frustrations, humor and anxieties.

Chunn is best known for Front Pages, a body of work from January 1- December 31, 1997. During this year she drew on the front page of each day’s New York Times newspaper with bright pastels, adding her own images over photographs, obscuring headlines and sometimes entire stories with expanses of color and carefully chosen texts. Media Madness presents the viewer with two months, June and July, arranged as if they were days on a calendar displaced onto the gallery wall.

Chunn’s interventions champion her own subjectivity with quips and witticisms and comic-book-like images that bring out the humor, sadness, or ambivalence she feels in relation to the stories in the paper. So a story on, say, an I.R.A. bombing in a British city, condenses into “UP TO THEIR OLD TRICKS” (written in green of course) above two explosions. By whittling the daily news into one-liners, easily digestible combinations of images and text, she replicates the corporate media’s habit of substituting surface for substance, producing sound bites instead of informed analysis, talking points enslaved to the constraints of a scrolling news ticker.

Whether the viewer agrees with Chunn’s summation of the daily news is beside the point. The work is wholly about one woman’s act of reading and reflecting over the course of a year. The artist is the sole locus for the work so impartiality flies out the window. Here we see how the news acts on and through a person. In this way her work performs entirely differently from conventional news media, which relies on the myth of objectivity to maintain credibility.

In addition to revisiting Chunn’s seminal work, Media Madness also includes Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear. Consisting of a suite of four different installations of dozens of small and large canvases arranged on the gallery wall in an expansive salon style, the work tells the story of Chicken Little, a worrisome fowl beset by seemingly endless obstacles and hazards, from falling televisions to homicidal tractors, bimbos in Broncos, and invasive CIA agents. While the work turns many current political, environmental and social issues into a fable with no resolution, Chunn has said that when she completes the last group of paintings she’ll eventually have Chicken Little working for Fox News, a fitting end to a story about fear mongering in the new millennium.

The images of burning forests, toxic waste, genetically modified food and over-consumption in Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear may just be fleeting glimpses of a world temporarily out of balance, or images of an entrenched uber-capitalism that generates countless injustices and neglected catastrophes. Perhaps the saddest thing of all, and what gives Chunn’s work legs, is that the symbols and icons imbedded in her work will outlive the immediacy, the context, of their creation.

This observation came to the fore in her Four Seasons painting series. Utilizing Chunn’s familiar stock of symbols first developed in the Front Pages series, the paintings depict major news stories that occurred during each of the four seasons in 1999. But if it weren’t for the didactic wall text explaining the subjects of each work, one could easily see these paintings as contemporaneous with today’s breaking news. In this way they are history paintings, their subjects specific, yet enduring.

In Spring Cleaning (Spring 1999) the flat, angular images of fallen bodies, fighter jets, armed soldiers, and explosions meant to reference the violence of the Columbine school shootings and the war in Kosovo immediately bring to mind the dead bodies and battle fields associated with the seemingly endless wars America fights either directly or by proxy all over the world today. The message in the work may be rooted in a specific time and place, but the larger polemic is not necessarily historically constitutive. As long as war and violence are part of our everyday life, these pictographs of crumbling buildings, troop formations, bombs, funerals, guns and dollar signs will have lasting resonance.

Looking at Scandal (Winter 1998-99), emblazoned with Day-Glo images of sperm, moist red lips, a giant unzipping zipper and a garbage can stuffed with money and a copy of the Star Report, one cannot help but think of the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinski muckraking that inspired this flamboyant painting. Yet the toilet at the center, the accusing fingers, computer, and the bald headed man exclaiming”Oops,” also immediately calls to mind the many right wing politicos recently outed for their less-than-hetero behavior. While the story in the painting is from a bygone era, its sentiment is symbolically perennial: We seem to be more interested in who politicians fuck than who they fuck over.

Perhaps this is the larger message imbedded in Chunn’s work, that we should use the news as a vehicle for developing our own symbolic, and perhaps radical responses. Registering dissatisfaction is a first step but we need to go beyond critiquing the news to actually making the news. Now that the time for action has come the pressing question is how do we, as cultural producers, change the game, rewrite the rules and shift the power structure in such a way that the images displayed in Chunn’s work are no longer up-to-date, but instead vestiges of an embarrassing yet distant past?

William Pope L. at the Santa Monica Museum of Art

By Tucker Neel
Originally published in  Artillery Magazine. January 2008, vol.2 no.3, p. 40

Still from Pope L.'s PHOV

With Art After White People: Time, Trees, & Celluloid, Willliam Pope L. transforms The Santa Monica Museum of Art into a cavernous three-part journey bubbling over with theatricality and artifice. The Grove, the first section of the show, lures the viewer in with an ominous configuration of potted palm trees and piles of enshrouded debris dispersed in the darkened space. The scene is apocalyptic. The trees, painted white, decay and die throughout the run of the exhibition. A palm frond dangles from the ceiling as if to signal a world turned on its head. Faced with this dystopia, one cannot help but think of environmental disasters, Katrina being the first (but probably not the last).

Several hatches with small bulbous windows ringing the installation allow a glimpse into what looks like a horror-movie set. Archival boxes, stacked floor to ceiling, line narrow passageways awash with pools of fake blood. Pope L. has obscured the labels on each box, but the inference is clear – this is a claustrophobic, dangerous place, where information is meant to stay hidden.

Further into the exhibition comfy chairs and a large circular rug invite the viewer to sit and watch a projected movie. Opposite the screen and just behind the viewer a pile of household furnishings teeters in a corner, its interior contents illuminated by a television awash with static snow. The setting provides a fitting ominous mood for Pope L.’s newest video, PHOV, which stands for A Personal History of Videography.

The video consists of a solitary figure in a Donald Rumsfeld mask, his hand painted black, save one white finger, playing deliberately and slowly with a small ship in a glittery ocean diorama. As the camera pans and he looks at the archival boxes that surround him, holes just below each eye in his mask emit fake blood, which drips onto his shirt and into the diorama. With it’s cobbled together look, the piece seems to question the machinations that underpin commercial media, how this war (any war) is staged, as if to say that it’s not really Donald Rumsfeld the man that matters, but the contrived stage setting that gives him power.

Finishing off the show in a room separated from the rest of the exhibition by a wall of plastic sheeting are The Semen Pictures, light-box photographs of collaged body parts cut out of magazines, pasted together with blood, semen, pubic hair, and coffee grounds. Even though the original collages literally drip with abject traces of the artist’s production, the works appear beautiful, highly reductive and even conventional, especially when compared with other works in the show.

Does Pope L.’s work do anything more than point a finger at our naked emperors and their minions? It’s hard to say without the benefit of hindsight, but one would hope that such an ambitious project sticks in the viewer’s mind, a reminder to keep your eyes open to the backdrop, the mask, the decorations that support the smooth functioning of power.

Kathrin Burmester’s Peoplescapes at Lora Schlesinger Fine Art, Santa Monica

By Tucker Neel

Originally published in Artillery Magazine Vol. 2 No. 2, Oct. 2007, 40-41.

In the early 1920’s August Sander set off to photograph an astonishing cross-section of the German people, from farmers to soldiers to all sorts of notable, loveable, and felonious people in-between. His pictures are haunting and empathetic, almost nostalgic, immersed in a dry encyclopedic interest to capture everyone in front of a camera. In his photos each subject faces the camera in a direct, often frontal pose dressed in their professional garb, commonly pantomiming their daily activities. A café waitress holds a teacup; a laboratory assistant pours a mixture into a beaker. His subjects’ professions and consequential social standing are further elucidated by simple and straightforward titles. Master upholsterer, Elementary School Mistresses, Member of Parliament, Unemployed, Hawker, Beggar, Gypsy, Painter’s Wife, Member of the Hitler Youth, are at the same time Sander’s titles and the titles, the professions, of his subjects. His photos encapsulate a country on the edge of both war and a new century, a culture defined by what it does for a living, its relation to production, labor, and industry. Today, in the age of constant surveillance, where public and private, corporate and governmental cameras watch for potential criminals, terrorists, customers, or just out of sheer voyeuristic fascination, we are all photographed, videotaped, and classified in ways that would probably flabbergast Sander. What, if anything would a Sanderesque survey of our contemporary 21st Century “Western world” look like?

One possible example of such an overview comes in Kathrin Burmester’s photographic series, Peoplescapes. The work consists of seventeen 7 x 10” color photographs of slightly blurry, pixilated, anonymous walking figures shot from above. Divorced from their surroundings, isolated against a neutral grey background, they are oblivious to the camera’s gaze. Burmester achieved this effect by subtracting figures from footage she herself shot with a digital video camera.

The grey background in each image unifies the work, and is perhaps a comment on the idea of a “grey zone,” a place of indefinable orientation, a place where people are separated and cut-off from each other. This neutral grey also calls to mind the somewhat antiquated “grey card,” a photographic tool designed to calibrate the “perfect” lighting for photographic shoots. Hung together, the uniformity of the works and the vulnerability of Burmester’s subjects makes for a muted but disturbing experience.

Burmester's Man With Book

Like Sander, Burmester deploys effective titling, opening her works to a politicized discussion of what it means to surreptitiously take pictures, watch others without their knowing. She allows the distance between herself and her subjects to guide her titling. Man with Book, Woman with Red Bag, Woman with Shopping Bag, Woman in Green, Old Man, these people are classified not by what they do, or even who they “are,” in a personalized sense, their identity is dependent upon the limited amount of information that the artist herself can deduce from her position behind the camera. What is most telling in these works is how the subjects are identified in their relation to consumption. Many of Burmester’s subjects carry around their possessions in shopping bags, evidence that they are actively participating in commerce. Today we are not what we do but what we buy.

Sander had a lofty goal: to photograph every type of person he came into contact with, to capture humanity so that we may come to better know and understand our fellow worker, our comrade, or just our coincidental neighbor. Burmester updates this practice, evacuating its idealism for the new millennium. If she mirrors the oppressive eye of the camera it is not because she imbues her work with an alienated pathos, it is because this is the world we live in and it is up to us, not her to change it.

These are some comments on this posting when it was originally up on my old blog:

Damian Hopper said…
Her titles speak to our current culture in a similar way Sanders’ speak to his. In his time, both inward and outward identity were based in large part on what someone did. And while that’s still mostly the case today, outward identity is also based in large part on what we own and where we got it for a lot of people. “Man with book” makes a statement just because so many people don’t read books anymore (or so I’ve been told).
OCTOBER 20, 2007 8:54 PM
alex said…
i think a more haunting account of the postmodern peoplescape is that anonymity, which in this case is deftly exemplified by consumption, is mirrored by surveillance as security. Sanders’ subjects face their captor, ready and willing to display their defined (and perhaps unwilling) status as citizens of their conception of a new world order. Burmester’s subjects’ security is in the obscured eye of the market-state; their anonymity, not just their compulsion to buy, is their succor and their self. the 21st century persona would rather be captured immortal from without; without any will to promote their being. __bummer.
NOVEMBER 26, 2007 9:23 PM