The World Gives Back

I saw this in Barnes And Noble today and had to take a picture. I won’t even try to elaborate on how perfect and amazing this is.

New (Out)Look

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

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

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

Thanks. -Tucker

Matthew Picton at SolwayJones

Matthew Picton at SolwayJones

by Tucker Neel

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

Surface Sounding at Seeline Gallery

Surface Sounding at Seeline Gallery
By Tucker Neel

Published in ART LIES Magazine Issue No. 60 Winter 2008

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

John Bucklin's Remote Control Covered Wagon, 2008

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

Michael Dee’s Negative Star (purple), 2008

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

Xana Kudrjavcev-DeMilner’s Standing, 2005

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

Bill Kleiman A Brief History of the World, 2003

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

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

Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dancing Daze: Bodycity

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

bodycity

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

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

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

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

bodycity LadyStranger dance promo shot

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

Wikidance

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

Wikidance

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

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

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

-Tucker Neel

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

By Tucker Neel

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

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

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

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

Burmester's Man With Book

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

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

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

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

Cindy Smith at the Ben Maltz Gallery Otis College of Art and Design

Installation image

By Tucker Neel
Originally published in Artillery Magazine. Vol. 1 No. 5, April, 2007, 34-35.

At first glance, New York based artist Cindy Smith’s Moral Museum: Selections from the Bick Archive installed at The Ben Maltz Gallery looks deceptively like a well-lit exhibition from the Museum of American History. However, after a closer look at the objects on display and the wall text provided, the exhibition reveals itself an imagined archive pulling at the loose-knit seams binding truth to objects and to history.

The Moral Museum charts a fictionalized history of Violet Bick, best known as the independent minded woman in Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life. The show posits that the It’s A Wonderful Life character was based on the ‘real’ Violet Bick – Smith’s own imagined Violet.

According to the exhibition’s wall texts, Violet was born in 1923 in Seneca Falls, New York, birthplace of the Women’s Rights movement. She grows up to become, amongst other things, an accomplished fashion designer, architect and feminist activist. Along the way she crosses paths with many important figures such as Gloria Grahame, Frank Capra, Marcel Duchamp, Meret Oppenheim, and Angela Davis. As a dedicated activist, Violet protests against the Vietnam War, joins with the Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice to protest nuclear weapons, and participates in Act-Up to raise awareness about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. The wall text also informs us that she died in 1989.

This personal history is juxtaposed with events such as the passage of the 19th Amendment, the stock market crash of 1929, and Malcolm X’s assassination. In this way Bick becomes a sort of historical conduit; events particular to radical politics, art, and design, flow through and around her.

Smith further enriches Violet’s life through objects in vitrines and on pedestals. Some are “authentic” historical artifacts, like a photograph of high school students from the 1930s to evidence Violet’s interest in shop class, or an antique sewing machine to underscore her forward-thinking fashion sense. Smith fabricates other objects to fit the archive, like Four Jills in a Jeep, a book Violet wrote about her time spent entertaining troops overseas during World War II. Smith also created glowing purple neon “V”s reminiscent of Violet’s logo when she was a top designer in New York City. Once in the archive, all of these objects serve to validate Violet’s existence, to make her more “real”.

This conflation of an imagined history, existing as text, with a real material history, tied up in objects brings up the questions: “Does historical truth or value reside in the objects themselves, the story surrounding them, or the person that owned them?” and, “Why create this Violet Bick?”

One could argue that Smith’s Moral Museum undermines the work of feminist historians. After all, there are real women with real archives whose stories have yet to be told. One could also say that by fictionalizing Violet Bick, Smith only replicates what museums have done for centuries: to select artifacts and position them so as to highlight certain histories to serve an ideological function.

On the other hand, the installation is powerful specifically because it confounds traditional essentialist exhibition tendencies. Because it’s a work of art it is given license to exist in a confounding and unsettling site where meaning and truth are not so easily understood. Smith embraces this idea, takes it to a place where events, both real and imagined, exist on a similar playing field and in doing so encourages her viewers to question the entire notion of an archive, not as a negative force, but as something that can be played with, teased out for connections and ideas that were otherwise impossible.

Jefferson Pinder at G Fine Art

By Tucker Neel

Originally published in Artillery Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 4, March, 2007, 40.

Jefferson Pinder's Juke (Installation image)

With his recent video installation entitled Juke at G Fine Art, Jefferson Pinder not only exhibits a penetrating knowledge of America’s schizophrenic fascination with race and identity, he proves himself to have an ear for music as well. The beauty of Pinder’s installation is that it utilizes a popular form of entertainment, the music video, in a poetically minimal way to address larger, more pressing issues of race, class, and power.

Upon entering his installation viewers are faced with ten monitors accompanied by headphones hung in a row at eye level spanning across two walls of the darkened gallery. Each monitor displays a looped video of an “Afro-American”(the term provided in the gallery’s literature) man or woman filmed head-on in white t-shirts, against a stark white background. While the videos appear silent at first, the surprise comes when viewers don headphones to discover that each subject is lip-syncing to popular contemporary American music by “white” musicians.

In Anna (Rock and Roll Nigger), a young woman emphatically lip-syncs to Patti Smith’s controversial anthem Rock and Roll Nigger. She really gets into the lyrics, emphasizing the word “nigger” as it repeats during the song’s crescendo. We know that Patti Smith, a white artist, is singing the song, but the shocking repetition of the “n word” is doubled when we see an “Afro-American” face mouthing it on screen. At this moment questions about authorship and identity come to the fore. Much like other videos in the installation, this work asks, “What does this song mean when sung by an ‘Afro-American’ person? Who gets to claim blackness and otherness? How black does one have to be in order to really be black?”

Move to Juliette (Big Yellow Taxi) on another monitor and you see and hear a slightly older woman grooving to Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi. At the end of the song the woman on the screen laughs along with Mitchell, only to have her smile fade into a grimace that lasts a fraction of a second, as if to say, “No, this really isn’t that funny.” This sudden mood change reinforces both Mitchell and Pinder’s critique of gentrification. Is it possible to read in her spontaneous scowl the frustration of the life-long Washingtonian residents of 14th street, just outside the gallery, who are being priced out of their homes by an endless stream of, in Mitchell’s words, “boutiques and swinging hot spots?”

Juke is more than a quick joke about racial stereotypes. In having black faces parody white music, Pinder replicates what white people have been doing for years. From Al Jolson to Vanilla Ice, white entertainers, and their economic backers, have used song and dance lifted from African-Americans to make a buck. By sampling everything from Mitchell’s ruminations about progress, to Johnny Cash’s Mercy Seat, about capital punishment, to Queen and David Bowie’s Under Pressure, about poverty and detachment, Pinder pushes us to question how this legacy of appropriation connects to other abuses of power which, in turn, lead to social alienation and greater injustices.

G-Rowing Downtown: Urban arts epicenter Gallery Row continues to blossom

By Tucker Neel

Originally published in The LA Alternative Press, Vol. 5, June 2, 2006, 6.

photo by Tucker Neel. Seen here: Kjell Hagen, Nic Cha Kim, Kimba Rogers, Cheyanne Sauter

Gallery Row, a section of downtown L.A. between 2nd and 9th and Main and Spring Streets, has matured from a curiously small group of galleries in 2003 to a fledgling Chelsea-of-the-West, encompassing more than twenty art spaces, each exhibiting vastly different bodies of work drawn from a diverse pool of both L.A.-based and international artists.

I won’t belabor the history of this development, as it has been chronicled in numerous publications, including the LA Alternative. For an excellent history of “the Row,” check out Lucinda Michelle Knapp’s LA Alternative January 20th, 2006 story- “Gallery Row, Under Arrest.” The article details how the city wants to erect what may very well be the most non-artistic, soul-crushing building one can think of-a Police Headquarters- next to City Hall, thus displacing small businesses and the MJ Higgins Gallery and speakeasy, the birthplace of the entire Gallery Row movement. There is still a slim chance of saving the gallery and turning the area into a multi-use park, but it will take some righteous community action and much-needed guilty consciences on behalf of city officials to do so. But, according to the members of Gallery Row’s non-profit, Kjell Hagen (who originally concocted the idea for Gallery Row), Nic Cha Kim, Kimba Rogers, and Cheyanne Sauter, the encroachment of the boys in black wont dampen their enthusiasm for bringing a creative culture to what should geographically and ideologically be the artistic heart and soul of Los Angeles.

In addition to their day jobs, the four G-Row founders often each work forty unpaid hours a week promoting Gallery Row. After meeting with them for only a short period of time, I began to realize how they managed to convince the powers-that-be to invest in a nascent downtown art scene. As a group, they are intoxicating, and individually they immediately put me at ease. Yet they are driven by a steadfast and contagious conviction that what they are doing is good, not just for the galleries on the Row, but for the larger Los Angeles area art scene as well.

When I asked them if they could describe the gestalt that sets the Gallery Row scene apart from other gallery hot spots like Bergamot station in Santa Monica, or the Culver City galleries, they responded with a chorus of laughter. Kimba Rogers describes what happened, “First of all, Bergamot Station sent their little girls (gallery reps.) down here to promote their shows. They were dressed all Burning-Man-ed out. I looked at them and asked, ‘Are you from Bergamot?’ and they said, ‘Oh, you should come down for this show.’ And I told them, ‘Honey, you’re in my district. Welcome! Now you gotta let me promote in your area.” So Kimba went to Bergamot for the first time ever, with flyers promoting the Downtown Art Walk. “It was the funniest thing,” she remembers, “how I feel in downtown compared to how I felt at Bergamot Station…. No offense to them, but we are so different. You pull into the parking lot there and it’s surrounded by these little buildings that have art in them. They have nothing to do with the rest of the neighborhood. They have nothing to do with the city. Nothing.” Cheyenne Sauter concurs, “We are a cultural aspect of downtown. We are rebuilding and revitalizing this area. We’re not just creating a little bubble….. We cater to people who wanna feel downtown.”

The best introduction to the galleries populating “the Row” comes every second Thursday of the month in the form of the Downtown Art Walk, where over twenty galleries, museums, and artists’ spaces open their doors to the public from noon ‘til 9pm. This month the Gallery Row non-profit is bringing in busloads of L.A. school kids to walk the Row. The experience will no doubt allow them to see the heart of the city within a cultural context and know that fine art is not necessarily only relegated to the sacred halls of the museum.

For those new collectors actually looking to buy art, the Art Walk is an appropriate place to start; the work is affordable and approachable. As Kjell Hagen says, “If you like it, buy it. A good way to support artists, galleries, and the whole scene is to simply buy art.” And honestly, work from an emerging artist beats a poster from Ikea any day.

The diversity of art and artists represented along the Row is characterized by the contrasting ambiance of two well-known and influential spaces. The first is Create:Fixate, a mostly one-night gig in a gargantuan office space on the second floor of the Spring Arts Tower at 453 S. Spring Street. The other is Bert Green Fine Art, a gallery with a more traditional exhibition style located at 102 West 5th Street.

The work at Create:Fixate ranges from the sublime to the grotesque, epitomized by D.I.Y. aesthetics (think hot glue and glitter) and edgycute iconography, Ganesh-like deities, Japanamation and corporate logos, intermingled in single pieces, or in close proximity to one another, in various works. The last time I was at Create:Fixate I was captivated by a larger-than-life serpent made entirely out of picture frames by Brian De Roo. I also wished I could have stepped into the dramatic landscapes in Drew Dunlap’s stained mahogany paintings. Unfortunately, Create:Fixate does have one drawback in that it frequently appears cluttered, with an overwhelming amount of work on the walls, which can dilute the impact of any one artists’ piece.

Bert Green in his Gallery
Bert Green Fine Art can be a welcome sanctuary to escape from the noise and crowds at Create:Fixate. Currently he’s showing some excellent paintings by Scott Siedman, Jeff Britton, and Jeff Gillette. Scott Siedman makes meticulous images full of contemporary political puns and religious symbolism. In depicting sexualized embraces, the ecstacy of pain and pleasure, most of his work carefully divulges the carnal desires embedded in the history of High Renaissance painting. Now, every time I see an ad for the DaVinci Code movie, I am reminded of Siedman’s The Well, a painting of a shrouded man’s head (Jesus? Brutus?) rimming a pert and receptive asexual backside. Jeff Gillette’s paintings of Southern California and outlying areas reduced to abandoned shantytowns, resonate both viscerally and cerebrally by, for example, making you first laugh at an image of Disneyland devastated by disaster and abject poverty. This laughter ceases when the images, replete with tormented shacks dominating a once sprawling suburban landscape, inspire you to think about the instability of our decadent, consumer-driven society. Jeff Britton also paints cities in the midst of disaster, rendering apocalyptic earthquakes, fires, and massive storms in brooding, almost impressionist, brushstrokes.

The thing about these two galleries is not just that they exhibit different kinds of works in counterbalanced environments, it’s that, because of their geographical proximity to one another, they attract the same diverse clientele. The diversity of this clientele makes it impossible to accurately characterize the people who frequent Gallery Row. Unlike other art enclaves populated almost exclusively by Hollywood hipsters, M.F.A. acolytes, interior designers, Sunday flower painters, or old-school millionaire collectors, Gallery Row attracts a disparate group that samples from all of these people and adds to the mix local graffiti artists, punk squatters, homeless preachers, and any number of persons otherwise alienated from the art “scene”.

The Gallery Row founders assure me that they have plans for this diversity to extend well into the future. They plan to keep bringing in the crowds with new spaces catering to theater, music, literature, and dance. “We don’t want to see Starbucks taking over,” Nic Cha Kim says, adding, “We want everything to be creative. We want a youth bookstore next to a martial arts studio next to a yoga studio. We want this to be an arts and cultural epicenter.” Judging from what they have accomplished so far, I wouldn’t be surprised if the G-Row members get all they want and more.