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!”

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.

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.

Dan Flavin at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art

By Tucker Neel

Originally published in Artillery Magazine Vol.2 No. 1, Sept. 2007

Dan Flavin's monument 4 for those who have been killed in ambush (to P.K. who reminded me about death), 1966

One of the grandfathers of Minimalism and a forerunner of “installation art,” Dan Flavin’s ambitious environments were often very site-specific, designed to activate the experience of a certain place. In 2005 I had the pleasure of seeing his traveling retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Taken together in the context of a retrospective in the museum, Flavin’s work seems a little amputated, purely historical, pointing to an earlier place and time. Yet in DC, one piece, untitled (to you, Heiner, with admiration and affection) from 1973, stood out among the rest as a testament to Flavin’s lasting influence as an artist.

A long, four-foot-tall barricade made of rectangles of green fluorescent lights, the piece commanded a space near an expansive window on the second floor of I.M. Pei’s architectural masterpiece. While outside of the museum I was captivated by the work’s radioactive glow, it was positively the strangest thing I had ever seen in this rather conservative institution. Once I was inside, Flavin’s work dominated the museum, bathing everything with the slightest tinge of emerald green. When I got close to the sculpture it burned its chroma into my eyes, and when I looked away, I was surprised to find that the intense light shifted my vision. A pink haze suddenly coated everything in sight from Tony Smith’s Die sculpture, to Gerhard Richter’s nearby abstract squeegee painting. I was “looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses.” While the rest of the works in the exhibition testified to Flavin’s dogged pursuit of the formal and conceptual possibilities of fluorescent light, his medium of choice, nothing really seemed to measure up to the phenomenological intensity of that first green installation, its ability to completely change its surrounding’s visual and metaphorical meanings.

At the L.A.C.M.A. Flavin’s retrospective feels cool, calculated and better organized. Perhaps this is because L.A. is the last stop for the show, and the curators have worked out the kinks. While the DC show felt like a mortuary, the museum’s dark carpeting dulled his light and muffled the sound in each space, at LACMA Flavin’s light reflects off the gallery’s wooden floors and radiates across the walls. And thankfully at the L.A.C.M.A. his work is positioned perfectly so that light from one piece doesn’t spill into the space of another, a problem that was evident in the DC show where the work seemed cramped in the museum’s small galleries.

In both venues the retrospective begins with Flavin’s icons, his first works incorporating store-bought lights. The most formative of these is icon IV (the pure land) (to David John Flavin [1933-1962]) dated from 1962-1969. Here Flavin created a memorial to his dead twin brother out of a simple painted white box topped with a single modest florescent white light. With the icons, Flavin not only pioneered his use of titles to suggest something just outside of the self-referential fluorescent tube, he also began to explore the seemingly infinite formal possibilities inherit in the simple geometry of a glowing line.

With monument 4 for those who have been killed in ambush (to P.K. who reminded me about death) from 1966, Flavin employed this technique with phenomenal results. Consisting of a triangular construction of eight-foot-long lights positioned in the corner of a darkened room, the piece glows a deep impenetrable red and hangs ominously in the air like a flying bird, a stealth bomber, or a blast of light aimed right at the viewer’s retinas. The effect is undeniable. In its imposing and frankly disturbing light, one cannot help but project feelings of dread, loss, and fear onto the piece. Made in 1966, the piece is rooted in an scathing analysis of the Vietnam War yet, unsurprisingly, its deftly assertive title maintains its import today and will no doubt remain timely as long as the original conditions that gave it resonance remain in place.

In what is undoubtedly the most theatrical room in the show, the LACMA recreated three adjacent corridors Flavin designed for the E.F. Hauserman Co. showroom at the Pacific Design Center in 1982. The central passageway, untitled (to my dear bitch, Airily), is a 52 foot long corridor lined with dozens of equidistant eight-foot-long blue fluorescents positioned at tilted angles highlighting an altered perspectival view of the installation. Walking through this tunnel is like entering a fun-house; the experience is a little over the top, the sheer spectacle overwhelming, diminishing the subtle play of light and title so masterfully deployed in Flavin’s earlier works.

Bars of lights placed back to back against each other block two hallways on either side of this long blue corridor. One hallway houses pink and yellow lights, the other pink and green. Once inside the corridor one is bathed in light with a view of the other chamber and the other people in it. Depending on which side of the corridor one is standin.g, this installation causes the viewer’s appearance to change dramatically. While bathed in yellow, my pasty skin appeared jaundiced and sickly, but the pink light produced a flattering healthy glow. The sensation of watching others through the bars of light, and consequently being watched, was discomforting and no doubt a critical aspect of the work.

Maybe it’s just inevitable with a blockbuster retrospective like this but seeing all of Flavin’s works together makes them appear more like a shtick when originally they were well thought-out artistic interventions into specific architectural environments. I admire Flavin for being so dedicated to his medium and pushing the boundaries of what exactly could be called art during his lifetime. Any artist working today can learn a lot from him about how to activate space with the most economical of means. But I left both versions of his retrospective wishing I had been lucky enough to see the original installations back in the day instead of in their current reworked state.

Andrea Zittel at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

By Tucker Neel
Originally published in Artillery Magazine Vol. 1 No. 6, May, 2007, 35-36.

Installation photo

Equal parts life-coach, interior designer, and architect, Andrea Zittel wears many hats- and uniforms. While proclaiming the transformative power of a simple life free of clutter and distraction, she positions herself precariously in the role of a multitasking C.E.O., head of A–Z Administrative Services, a bi-coastal corporation that caters to an elite clientele of art collectors and design aficionados. In the past, A-Z Administrative Services sent out newsletters profiling Zittel’s endeavors and spotlighting the lives of her devoted fans. Like any great interior design house, A-Z works directly with clients to customize their products, making sure that each purchase says something poignant about it’s owner. And in true corporate form, Zittel brands each of her works with her signature A-Z logo.

Zittel is most effective when her work pushes corporate branding strategies and the marketing of consumer fantasies to absurd extremes. For example, her Deserted Islands, solitary white shiny miniature ice flows, with folding white chairs perched in the center of each, seem to poke fun at romantic notions of escape and tourism. In what could be a comedic comment on global warming, each private iceberg is branded with the A-Z logo next to a silhouette of a palm tree. Here humor is deployed to effective ends, the butt of the joke being the person who would actually buy such an object on which to live out any sort of escapist fantasy.

Equally engaging is the A-Z Breeding Unit for Averaging Eight Breeds, an inverted triangle of empty cubicle breeding units, originally designed to cross-breed Bantam chickens, show birds prized for their decorative features, to create, not prettier poultry, but instead a more “original” or average chicken. This is not only a wonderful comment on the legacy of modernist notions of purity (read minimalism) and notions of progress in general, but also a calculated use of the mechanics of science in an art context, a shift of one academic field into the sphere of another. Unfortunately, most of the other works in the show are reiterations of an understood and worn-out design fantasy that has trouble coexisting with Zittel’s corporate model.

When, in the early 1950’s, the designer Ken Isaacs created his 8’ square Living Structure, a cube made with thin wooden beams and large decorated panels designating sleeping, eating, and reading areas, he did so out of a need to live with his wife in their cramped studio apartment. His personal domestic quarters, as well as his other innovative ideas like “micro houses,” small portable living units that one could purchase and assemble at little cost, were featured in two issues of Life Magazine and are currently revisited in this year’s April edition of Dwell magazine. Like Buckminster Fuller, Isaacs was socially engaged to the point of evangelism, making it his life’s mission to spread the gospel of “Nomadic Living,” an eco-friendly existence, utilizing transportable and inexpensive housing. After seeing her retrospective, it seems that Zittel not only was inspired by Isaacs, but decided to borrow his designs as well.

The formal and conceptual similarities between Isaacs’ structures and many of Zittel’s living units are undeniable. For example, her A-Z Management and Maintenance Unit Model 003 from 1992, a compact living space made with blonde wood and metal beams separating kitchen, dining, and sleeping areas, looks stunningly similar to both Isaac’s 6’ and 3’ x 6.5’ Living Structures. Both artists’ designs have the same basic structural layout (but Isaac’s work is much more colorful). Now there’s no problem with appropriating and repositioning others’ works in order to create a critical intervention, but when Zittel remakes works of the past without updating the ideas and motivations that underpin these works, one is left to question what her work is really about.

I would argue that the “critical space” in Zittel’s art exists not in the work itself, or in its placement in the gallery, but in how her structures are activated as art objects once they are marketed, sold, and placed in collector’s homes. If they can resist and recontextualize the modernist ideals that underpin their forms, then perhaps Zittel’s works retain a critical value and open a space for thinking differently. Otherwise, her well-crafted and well-intentioned living units simply become interior design objects masquerading as critical interventions.

The Things He Loves: A very thorough stroll through David Hockney’s Portraits

By Tucker Neel

Originally publihed in The L.A. Alternative Press, Vol. 5, September 4, 2006, 6.

Hockney’s Divine

While previewing L.A.C.M.A.’s David Hockney Portraits, the first museum exhibition dedicated solely to this artist’s investigation into portraiture, I was struck by the feeling that I’d seen this before, a feeling I get whenever I look at Hockney’s work. I don’t mean this in the pejorative sense at all. I only mean to say that his work contains a seemingly endless stream of art historical references and that, when confronted with any number of his paintings, I feel like I’m flipping through the pages of a survey book on Modern Art. His influence is widespread and his importance as a major artist of both the 20th and now 21st Century is undeniable.

Born in Yorkshire, England in 1937, Hockney began his art career at a young age. By the time he was in his mid-20s he already had gallery representation, was winning prestigious awards and producing sold-out solo shows. After moving to Los Angeles in the mid-’60s he began depicting the subjects he has become famous for, like swimming pools, modernist architecture and wealthy, tanned art collectors all unapologetically painted in the crisp clear light typical of Southern California. His work also unabashedly champions a loving, observant and celebratory homosexual gaze. After moving to L.A., he created his famous paintings of young bronzed naked men diving into and emerging from crystal clear blue swimming pools, including the now iconographic Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool, which is prominently featured in the LACMA show. His artistic career has been punctuated by startling twists and turns in artistic techniques, media, and subject matter. He has painted everything from rich Beverly Hills housewives to gay lovers, abstract geometric forms to monumental canvases of the Grand Canyon and Mullholland Drive. He has designed stage sets for operas and has embarked on innovative photographic projects designed to mimic the sporadic movement of the human eye, calling attention to cubist picture planes and collage techniques. Yet despite his varying styles and subjects, each of his prolific bodies of work remains fresh and personal.

Hockney’s work resonates because it samples from different art historical epochs while at the same time maintaining a contemporary statement imbued with his own world view, grounded a in specific time and place.

For example, Hockney’s small drawing of Celia in A Black Dress with White Flowers from 1972 looks like it could have been drawn by any number of turn-of-the-century French masters, namely the Lilliputian Toulouse Lautrec, famous for his depictions of angular female bodies decked out in high shouldered cabaret dresses in the Moulin Rouge. Spend awhile perusing Hockney’s many sketchbooks, which have also been digitized and appear on a computer touch-screen (a fantastic idea on the part of the museum), and it becomes apparent that he really hasn’t shackled himself to any specific style. The sketchbooks testify to the fact that a great artist doesn’t have to keep painting the same thing over and over again. In fact, Hockney’s wandering eye and almost schizophrenic hand are some of his best assets.

A few of Hockney’s Twelve Portraits After Ingres

In a completely separate room, his Twelve Portraits After Ingres in a Uniform Style directly acknowledges his indebtedness to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the great 19th century French Neoclassical portraitist and his use of the camera lucida, a device that allows for an artist to trace a projection of and object with stunning accuracy, sort of like your great great great grandpa’s version of an overhead projector. Despite being a rather antiquated device by today’s standards, Hockney used the camera lucida to create the portraits for the series. In a noticeable departure from his portraits of upper-class members of the art and business world, the Twelve Portraits punctuate the show with carefully drawn, almost reverent depictions of museum guards, people whose jobs often are overlooked and undervalued by the art world. It is also interesting to note that this series includes some of the few portraits Hockney has painted of sitters whom he doesn’t know on an intimate level, as either long-term friends, lovers, business associates, or family members.

Van Gough’s La Mousme

Hockney’s iconic portrait of Divine, the multi-talented drag queen of John Waters’ movie fame, stands out in as a marvel of artistic sampling. Here Divine sits sans gaudy wig, makeup and dress, with his bald head turned towards the viewer, one pronounced eyebrow raised in a knowing and almost enlightened regard. The chalky cerulean blue and washed out pink in Divine’s robe looks as though they could have been lifted directly from the verticle stripes in the background of Matisse’s painting of The Artist’s Studio. Additionally, the ebullient wallpaper consisting of radiating diagonal brushstrokes directly behind Divine conjures up the contrasting ultramarine blue and cadmium red colors appropriated, perhaps, from a billowing polka dot dress in Van Gough’s La Mousme. This assimilation of decorative elements with the subject matter of the painting, a portrait of a larger-than-life drag queen who himself dared to push boundaries while celebrating desire and a revolutionary playfulness, resonates today as a magnificent example of “queer” portraiture.

For “chromophobes,” afraid of color, Hockney’s portraiture may seem a bit garish at its best, threatening at its worst. Overwhelming color and decorative patterning in painting and film have historically threatened the heterosexist art world establishment. These persons can’t stand the idea of the feminine “infecting” traditional masculine aesthetics. I think it gives them hives and makes them long for the good-ol-days when “men were men and women were just the nude models.” Thus, richly patterned quilts and tapestries, hand made crafts, the results of “women’s work,” as well as the pattern and decoration of so-called “primitive” societies, have been, until very recently, relegated to the family wardrobe and the anthropology department respectively. This resistance to a feminine “contamination” underlies a homophobic distain for overtly colorful persons who themselves blur traditional gender roles.

Take a trashy drag queen best known for eating dog shit and immortalize him in rich vibrant color, surround his portrait with a gold frame and you bet that hardly anyone is going to want to hang it alongside a presidential portrait. After all, this painting of Divine, while not being overtly confrontational, certainly commands the attention of the viewer and threatens to shock the calm whiteness of any solemn interior, be it a modernist home or a museum.

Quite possibly the most important aspect of Hockney’s portraits is that they exist as an expression of the human desire to arrest time, cheat death, and preserve the subject for eternity. I, for one, am exceedingly happy that Divine’s likeness will remain intact and preserved for the entire world to see, should they want to enter the museum. The painting keeps the man alive, if only as a fleeting glance. And the other portraits in the show attempt to create this timelessness as well, some more successfully than others. While some of the paintings are dated by their subject matter– the inclusion of a shag carpet, bellbottom pants, or a particular hairstyle– some paintings, like a portrait of Charles Falco from 2005, purposefully attempt to avoid being emblematic of a specific time period.

Charles Falco is a physicist who specializes in quantum optics. As Hockney’s scientific collaborator, he has been helping the artist investigate the use of the camera lucida throughout the history of painting. In his portrait we see the scientist in a Spartan interior seated in a crimson chair, his leather bag on the floor to his left, a waist-high gray table to his right. On top of the table rests a puzzling set of conjoined white quadrilaterals outlined in murky green brushstrokes. These odd shapes seem to suggest the outline of a laptop computer. I asked Falco, who, along with many of Hockney’s other portrait subjects was present for the exhibition preview, what exactly these shapes were meant to represent. He confirmed my suspicions about the laptop, adding that his computer is an integral part of his relationship with the artist, so it made sense to include it in the painting. As to why the computer wasn’t rendered in full, Falco said, “He (Hockney) just didn’t finish the painting.” After further discussion he changed his answer slightly, noting that by not painting the laptop, Hockney allowed the painting to resist being pinned down to a specific time period. According to Falco, “Painting the laptop would have been like painting a cell phone in the eighties.” Perhaps this gesture implies that Hockney wants his paintings to remain timeless, that he wants them to live alongside the many works by artists he himself admires and borrows from so liberally.

Usually when I look at a painting and see signs of another artist’s work, sampled techniques and borrowed palettes, I tend to lose interest. Sometimes it’s better just to go back to the original. However, with Hockney’s work this sampling keeps my eyes and mind alive. As an artist who has spent his life depicting the people places, and things that mean a great deal to him, Hockney has certainly come to know the meaning of intimate observation. He has represented what he loves in countless ways by embracing a variety of contemporary subjects while at the same time drawing from multiple art historic sources, creating timeless images whose fluidity and engagement will undoubtedly continue to influence the work of future artists.

Curious Collections and Cosmonaut Canines: A pilgrimage to the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

By Tucker Neel

Originally published in The L.A. Alternative Press, Vol. 5, March 31, 2006, 8.

If I told you that the Museum of Jurassic Technology’s new show consists of painted portraits of dogs, images of cigar-puffing Dobermans huddled around green poker tables probably come to mind. Thankfully, this is not the case at the MJT. In fact, The Lives of Perfect Creatures: Dogs of the Soviet Space Program intriguingly refigures the rich tradition of royal and state portraiture, effectively painting Man’s Best Friend in a very unexpected and refreshing light. And besides, do you really need an excuse to go the Museum of Jurassic Technology?

Although the museum should be a rite of passage for any true Angeleno, for the uninitiated the MJT is part cabinet of curiosities, part magical shrine, part secret wardrobe, and part miniature Noah’s Ark, with a heavy smattering of intense postmodern critique thrown in for good measure. In effect, the MJT showcases the kind of magical, transcendental, mysterious, and truly innovative objects, phenomena, discoveries, and ideas that otherwise go overlooked in contemporary museums and archives throughout the world.

By exhibiting “fact” and highlighting “fiction,” the museum’s innovative exhibition strategy reorients the otherwise complacent viewer’s understanding and acceptance of what we see, what we believe is true. This institution prompts us to question how and why a museum functions and presents an alternative to the dry, pedantic model present in nearly every existing archive of human and natural history.

But it’s not just that the museum contains the strange and unusual. What is important is how each item in the institution’s collection is earnestly displayed in an engaging, thought-provoking context. For example, a haunting portion of the museum connects the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1929 to a rich tradition of folk remedies. One display tells of how good luck can be obtained by the matriarch of a family sprinkling her loved ones with spittle and urine on New Years’ Day. The museum carefully displays this presentation not as a freaky anomaly, but as a contextualized artifact, evidence of a fascinating, complex and indeterminate world.

Athanasius Kircher: The World Is Bound With Secret Knots video

After perusing the museum’s first floor collection of installations, documents and dioramas, and spending a satisfying amount of time in my favorite section- “Athanasius Kircher: The World Is Bound With Secret Knots,” where Kircher’s hypnotizing bell wheel investigates how the structure of the human soul is mirrored by harmonious musical compositions-I ascended the carpeted steps to the museum’s second floor.

A hallway crammed with delicate glass display cases holding what appear to be celestial maps and astrological dioramas led me toward an open room with marble floors and stately windows that let in crystal-clear light, making silhouettes of dynamic flower arrangements perched on each windowsill. This tea room is a relatively new addition to the museum and is a welcome, relaxing contrast to the dark rooms below. I sipped a piping hot cup of tea offered to me by a friendly dreadlocked museum staffer and moved into a parlor just around the corner, lured by the sound of reverent music and a glimpse of…a dog?

After reading the wall text I learned that each of the five portraits in the room depicts a single dog catapulted out of Earth’s atmosphere as part of the nascent 1960s Russian space program. Interestingly enough, the Russians only used female mutts gleaned from the streets of Moscow; these weren’t decadent Purina purists, but dogs appropriated directly from the urban proletarian landscape.

Immediately, my eye was drawn to a painting of Laika, perhaps one of history’s most famous dogs who, as the wall text so eloquently exclaims, was “the first ever Earth-born creature to leave our planet and enter into the cosmic vacuum.” Isolated on its own wall, Laika’s portrait commands the room. Rendered in a painting style reminiscent of portraits of Dutch and Flemish nobility (with a little hint of Renoir thrown in), Laika gazes out of the painting to a distant point just over my left shoulder, at an implied horizon. It’s almost as if she knows what she must do, that her mission is to leave the confines of the painting and of this world, and ascend toward the stars.

Each portrait is surrounded by a thick, dark wooden frame with a small brass plaque displaying the dog’s name in Russian above a date which, one assumes, denotes the day they embarked on their cosmic voyage. But this date also acts as a birthday of sorts, marking the time when these creatures ceased being just street dogs and became national heroes. For example, a wall text informs me that Strelka-whose portrait is particularly adorable despite being incongruously dark in comparison to the others-was quite an eminence. She returned to Russia after orbiting the Earth 17 times, gave birth to puppies, and one of her offspring was presented to Caroline Kennedy by Nikita Khrushchev as a gift of goodwill-perhaps also to rub the success of Russian space exploration in the face of the bourgeois American capitalists.

Almost every dog embodies a heroic pose reminiscent of famous state portraits throughout art history. I can easily compare and contrast, say, Belka’s portrait, with her hair slightly ruffled by an unseen wind, eyes fixed assuredly into the distance, to a portrait of Alexander Hamilton by the late 18th Century American painter John Trumbull. Both paintings present the viewer with idealized visionary images of people-or in this case animals-in control of their inner and outermost worlds. How curious, then, that this style of painting is transferred from human to canine, a transgressive move perhaps meant to critique the very notion of state portraiture. Or could this just be a reaffirmation of the “cult of the hero”?

Perhaps one answer to this question lies in my fascination with a painting of Ugolyok (a Chow/Husky mix?), who seems to resist the heroic spotlight. She recoils slightly, drawing away from the right side of the canvas, hesitant and apprehensive, almost as if she is stuck with having to choose between two basic instincts, fight or (literally) take flight. Ripe with psychological drama, Ugolyok’s portrait bears testimony to the undeniable fear and trauma caused by the uncertainty that these dogs, and perhaps any being destined to leave the Earth’s gravitational and atmospheric security, must face when presented with such an astronomical task as space travel.

I realize that in this instance it’s not fair for me to ask, “Why, in 2006, would anyone paint this sort of portrait of a dog?” because I really don’t know who painted these works or when they were created. Like everything else at the MJT, the information that is left out of this exhibit is just as important, conspicuous and beguiling as the information that’s included. It’s completely possible that these paintings originated in the former Soviet Union, but they could also have been painted in the mobile home behind the museum. I have no clue and there is nary a wall text or an all-knowing docent to whisk away my ignorance. After insistently questioning a museum staff member as to the author of these paintings, I received a very ambiguous answer: “The artist would like to remain anonymous and there is no date attached to the paintings.”

If I were visiting any other museum I might take this stonewalling as an insult. But at the MJT, I find the omission to be a challenge. I place it within the context of a presentation strategy that exists as a welcome change, an invitation to intellectual engagement and unbridled thought. Whereas nearly all natural and national history museums in America attempt to tell you what to think, with overly edifying texts and “authoritative” displays, the MJT exists as a refreshing contrast, a museum that simply asks you to just think for yourself, and in so doing, provides a fresh and insightful model for looking at the world.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is located at 9341 Venice Blvd. in Culver City, and online at www.mjt.org

Sex, Satyrs and Scandal: An Afternoon at the Getty Villa

By Tucker Neel

First published in The L.A. Alternative Press, Vol. 5, March 03, 2006, 8

photo by Tucker Neel

I’m a sucker for classical Greco-Roman art. Who doesn’t love ogling naked youth, elegantly preserved in stone, clay, metal and glass? Add in some good old-fashioned drama and you’ve got me hooked. Such is the sexy and sordid state of affairs at the newly renovated Getty Villa in Malibu.

photo by Tucker Neel

Former Getty curator Marion True is currently awaiting trial in Italy on allegations that she knowingly procured looted Italian artifacts from unsavory dealers. She denies these allegations, but the museum has handed over the disputed artifacts to the Italian government for further investigation. Notable scholars, governmental authorities, and the Getty’s own director Michael Brand have called into question the authenticity and provenance of more than 50 of the over 40,000 artifacts in the Getty’s antiquities collection. What’s more, Barbara Fleischman, wife of deceased antiquities collector Lawrence Fleischman, recently removed herself from the Getty’s board of directors amid controversy over her financial relationship with True and allegations that she and her husband donated and sold plundered artifacts to the Getty.

The museum itself is a marvel, however, despite these scandalous circumstances. Maybe it was the perfect weather, my willingness to hop on the Villa’s “Pirates of the Mediterranean” ride, or simply my fondness for depictions of sensuous muscles and sleeping satyrs, but I found the newly renovated museum endearing as well as visually and mentally stimulating.

To actually get to the Villa one must endure a few Sisyphean challenges. First of all, reservations are required and tickets are booked until July. So either plan to call the Getty to see if same day tickets are available, or, if you want to play dirty, simply find a “friend” who has made reservations, steal his or her identity, and head on out to Malibu. But be prepared to shell out seven bucks in cash for parking. Consider this a trifle because the museum itself is free.

Once inside, you are faced with the results of a nine-year, $275 million facelift. Machado and Silvetti Associates and SPF:architects have reconfigured and refurbished J. Paul Getty’s old Villa, which itself sought to imitate the Villa dei Papiri, an ancient Roman home in Pompeii. The current renovation upgrades the entire space to more accurately reflect the “original” Roman estate. The architects have overhauled security features, reoriented the gardens, redesigned the tile work (a particularly awe-inspiring element), and added a cafe, gift shop, offices, learning and research spaces, an outdoor theater and many other improvements.

While I usually don’t go for museum tours as they tend to make one feel more bovine than human, I did enjoy the Getty orientation tour and I recommend it to anyone interested in the museum’s architecture. If you are as fortunate as I was, you will stumble upon a guide who has taken a personal tour of the Villa with the architects themselves. Asked which part of the renovation he likes best, my tour guide, Patrick, told me he appreciates the addition of the outdoor Grecian style theater. “Its perfect for L.A. This city is all about entertainment,” he says with a triumphant smile. The Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater (yep, the same Fleischmans mentioned above), faces the Museum and puts it on stage, making it both actor and backdrop for the Getty’s series of outdoor performances.

photo by Tucker Neel

Upon entering the Atrium, the first room in the Villa, I was struck by the compluvium, a skylight opening to the crystal clear heavens above. It’s closed when it rains which is a shame because I’m sure it would be quite a sight to see the raindrops falling into the impluvium, a small basin in the floor below. The Inner Peristyle, an open courtyard in the center of the museum, contains an enchanting fountain orbited by reproductions of five female statues originally found in the Villa dei Papiri. One statue is missing because, according to Patrick, “They can’t find it. But they’re having it remade”-an apt decision for this, a museum remade to look like a re-imagined Roman home. Continuing into the East Garden at the back of the house, my jaw dropped at the sight of a polychromatic mosaic fountain which itself was worth the trip to Malibu.

After perusing the reproductions of gorgeous nude athletes, Gods, and satyrs in the Outer Peristyle gardens, I surreptitiously ran my fingers over the exquisite trompe l’oeil paintings ringing the walls of the portico. These luscious, almost ostentatious, walls need some dirtying up. Seriously, the cleanliness and newness of the entire Villa is eerie. So much so that any intrusion of the “present day,” like a plastic yellow cone warning a careless visitor not to slip and fall (and sue), jolts one back into the 21st Century, the equivalent of art-historical whiplash.

photo by Tucker Neel

It takes more than two hours to really see the entire collection of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan artifacts housed in the museum. While I might debate the curatorial decision to divide the museum up into theme rooms, each containing didactic displays about various aspects of ancient life, it’s nevertheless heartening that the overall cohesiveness of the collection has been brought into the light with more windows, better display features and accessible and informative texts.

photo by Tucker Neel

During your visit make sure to glance behind every terracotta vessel, because this is where they hide the naughty stuff. I spent many painful minutes standing on my tiptoes, pressing my face into a 90-degree angle of glass and wall with hopes of glimpsing hidden fornication. Why they don’t just put mirrors in these display cases is beyond me. I guess when Aunt Mabel jaunts up to the Villa on a Sunday after church the last thing she wants to see is her own reflection as she stares at a chorus line of erect penises. Well, for those of us who revel in the libidinal, here are a few places to look.

In the “Men in Antiquity Room” hop on someone’s shoulders to see the back of the “Wine Cup Fragment With a Drunk Man” and in the “Athletes and Competition” room allow your face to become intimate with the wall and look behind the bowls and cups in the “Athletes Cleansing” display case. Trust me, it’s worth the effort.

For those of you burdened with children, take them to the “Family Forum” room where they can draw cute pictures on vases and perform for you with swords, shields and helmets in a somewhat disturbing shadow theater. They’ll love it and when they’ve puttered out you can head to the “Luxury Vessels” room, a temple to opulence, with diverse collections of marble from around the world and Tiffany-like display cases containing ornately decorated silver. Also, the current exhibition, “Molten Color: Glassmaking in Antiquity,” delivers breathtaking rainbow-patterned perfume bottles, and is a must-see for those interested in the decorative arts-or anyone who loves the ceiling of the Bellagio hotel in Vegas. I particularly enjoyed the “Prehistoric and Bronze Age Arts” room, whose collection of Minoan statuary is a refreshing contrast to the idealized classical figures, battle scenes, and “in situ” installations prevalent throughout the museum.

Just before the Villa closed and the guards kicked me out, I took a second to inhale the picture perfect view of the Pacific Ocean from the top floor overlooking the Outer Peristyle gardens. I found myself caught in a moment of total enchantment.

What happened here? Had I been duped? Was I going to totally ignore the constructed nature of this Villa in Malibu, the questionable artifacts, and the alleged curatorial improprieties? Certainly not. These problems still persist. But I did smile, reassured that this, the only museum dedicated to Roman, Greek, and Etruscan art in America, is, after nearly a decade, open to the public once again. Despite all the scandal it will surely please countless visitors who yearn for an escape from the traffic and daily grind of Los Angeles, providing the constant simulacra and suspended disbelief that we Angelenos hold so dear.