The Unique Spectacle That Is The Contemporary Art Fair

By Tucker Neel

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

Installation at Gavin Brown Projects

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Curator’ Statement:

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

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

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

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

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

ARTFORUM.COM review of the show:

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

—Christopher Bedford

Nancy Chunn the Otis College Ben Maltz Gallery

By Tucker Neel

Originally published in ISM Magazine March, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William Pope L. at the Santa Monica Museum of Art

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

Still from Pope L.'s PHOV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tucker Neel

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

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

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

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

Burmester's Man With Book

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.