Yo Fukui at David Salow Gallery

By Tucker Neel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Tucker Neel

tuckerneel.com

tuckerneel.wordpress.com

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

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

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.

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?