Sasha Dela at the Kenmore at Darke Gallery, 6 pm on Friday, August 31. OK, this is complicated. During the slow period in August, Darke Gallery offers a residency to an artist. This summer the artist has been Emily Sloan. Several years ago, Emily Sloan designated her refrigerator an art space called The Kenmore. So during her residency at Darke Gallery, Sloan offered a residency at The Kenmore to Sasha Dela. The results of this matroyoshka of residencies will be on view Friday.
Dog Park at G Gallery, 6 pm, on Saturday, September 1. You can't go wrong with dog art (unless you are Tom Otterness): G Gallery has dog art out the wazoo, but I can't find a list of artists (including for the piece above--did you paint this green dog? If so, let us know so we can properly credit you!). You can even adopt a dog at the opening.
With Friends like Eli Broad, Who Needs Enemies? The firing of Paul Schimmel from LA MOCA raised a ruckus, so damage control was called for. But an editorial by Eli Broad, a "life trustee" of the museum, has poured gasoline on the fire. He says things like:
Over the years, MOCA has mounted many great exhibitions. However, the museum has also curated a number of exhibitions that were costly and poorly attended, often exceeding $100 per visitor. In today's economic environment, museums must be fiscally prudent and creative in presenting cost-effective, visually stimulating exhibitions that attract a broad audience. ["MOCA's Past and Future," Eli Broad, July 8, 2012, Los Angeles Times]
Which leads to responses like this:
• “Home of the D-Cup: The Topless Girl in 20th-Century Culture.”
• “You Love Their Songs, Now See Their Paintings: The Art of Ringo Starr, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan.”
• “Collaboration and Conflict: Great Football Plays and Their Players.”
We laugh, but since Jeffrey Deitch arrived at MOCA, there has been a trend towards celebrity fluff exhibits. Christopher Knight, the Los Angeles Times art critic (how nice that the Los Angeles Times has an art critic, don't you think?) put it very bluntly:
If you're confused by the convulsive goings-on at the internationally admired Museum of Contemporary Art, which culminated in the June 25 firing of the illustrious chief curator instrumental in putting the museum on the map, don't be. It's not that complicated.
In fact it's quite simple — as easy as one, two, three:
1. In 2008, MOCA was operating a stellar art program on a dysfunctional business plan. When the U.S. economy tanked, the museum careened into a ditch.
2. In 2010, MOCA announced the unprecedented decision to put an accomplished businessman, one who built his career in art, in the director's chair, charged with fixing the broken business side. The reins were handed to a successful New York gallery owner with virtually no experience running a large nonprofit.
3. By 2012, the new director had made little progress in repairing the museum's dysfunctional business plan, but he was far along in dismantling the once-stellar art program. Dumping the chief curator ignited an explosion.
He goes on for quite a bit laying out his case, but this is the essence. Essentially, the trustees of MOCA have decided to "save" the museum by turning it into a clown show.
The thing is, museums have been doing crowd-pleasing, money-spinning shows for decades. So-called blockbuster shows where there are lines around the block. (I remember as a kid waiting in a line that snaked through a public park for hours to see the big King Tut exhibit in New Orleans.) So is what is happening at MOCA (in terms of exhibits, etc.) any different? Why not let James Franco or Mike D curate some shows? Or let some bank curate an exhibit? (I heard the Mike D show was good, after all.)
The problem is that when you start using the metrics Broad uses (cost per visitor), you crowd out other criteria, such as scholarship and taste. Sure, costs have to be contained, and support must be adequate. Maybe you need the occasional blockbuster to keep membership levels high. But you also need to serve art through exhibits that may not create around-the-block lines but instead feature challenging or uncompromising work and serious scholarship. Some sort of balance must be struck.
Earth Humpers. And now for something completely different. Actually, when I saw this video, The Humping Pact by Diego Agulló and Dmitry Paranyushkin, it reminded me of a piece of art I had seen at LA MOCA, The Garden by Paul McCarthy. (The video above appears to be a mere excerpt of the movie as a whole.) It also made me think of the scene in the novel Friday by Michel Tournier in which Robinson Crusoe in an act of supreme horniness has sex with the soil. And that in turn made me think of the great Milton Nascimento song, "O Cio da Terra" ("The Earth in Heat"). And what does it say to me that when I see this video, I can instantly think of several other artworks, in various media, dealing with a similar sexy subject? Excuse me while I go take a cold shower. ["The Humping Pact," Pas un Autre, July 10, 2012]
Don't Fuck With Chuck Close. That's the lesson Scott Blake learned when he got an all-caps email from Chuck Close in regard to his website freechuckcloseart.com. Chuck Close wrote Blake the following in 2010:
YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO USE MY WORK WHICH IS COPYRIGHTED. NOR DO WISH TO BE ASSOCIATED WITH YOUR PROJECT. YOU MUST SHUT DOWN YOUR WEBSITE IMMEDIATELY OR I WILL BE FORCED TO TAKE LEGAL ACTION.
This was followed by a very level-headed email exchange where Close calmed down a bit, but was still insistent. Close made the following argument:
I must fight you because if I know of your project, and do nothing to exercise my legal rights, that will put me in a position where I can’t fight the next, even more egregious usage of my copyrighted image and use of my name.
And this is semi-true. It was one of the weird facets of copyright law that if you allow some people to use your copyrighted material without your permission, you give up the right to disallow others from using it. You in effect allow it to become public domain. That's how Robert Crumb lost his comic page "Keep on Truckin'". After this image became ubiquitous in early 70s hippie America, his lawyer stared sending out cease-and-desist letters. But it ended up in court and there were enough instances where Crumb had ket it slide for friends that the images were declared to be in public domain. (That's the story I've read, anyway.) However, this weakness in copyright law should be moot now that the U.S. is a signatory to the Berne Copyright Convention. (It goes without saying, I am no lawyer or any kind of expert on copyright law.)
The article Blake writes is quite interesting--he describes how his own Close-like computer images came into being, and he traces the history of computer-pixelated photography to a few years before Close started painting his photo-real images. I don't think there is a clear villain here--Close, for the reason outlined above, feels he has to protect his copyright vigorously. One would hope, however, that there would be a way for Blake and Close to cooperate--for instance, some kind of legal licensing agreement. ["My Chuck Close Problem," Scott Blake, Hyperallergic, July 9, 2012]
Everyone has been raving about the newSicardi Gallery on Alabama. But despite its big new building, it is at heart the same gallery specializing in cutting edge Latin American art. And the work with which they chose to inaugurate this new building is spectacular.
Oscar Muñoz is a Colombian artist. This is his third exhibit at Sicardi. Because the new building is so much roomier than the old one, they are able to show work by Muñoz that requires substantial space. Paístiempo is such a work.
Oscar Muñoz, Paístiempo, 2007, mixed media
Paístiempo consists of several burnt tabloid-style papers on custom-made tables (each table has indented areas for the tabloids). When I write "tabloid," I'm not referring to the sensationalist journalistic style, but to the physical format of the paper. This is a newspaper with just one fold which opens like a magazine to be read. Muñoz has taken the front pages of actual newspapers and duplicated the front pages by literally burning them into the paper. What happened when he did this is that the burn goes through several layers of paper. Each layer is less burnt than the one above it. The way the pages are set up on the table, you can flip through the tabloids and see the gradual lightening of the pages.
Oscar Muñoz, Paístiempo (detail), 2007, mixed media
Through the magic of gifs, I can replicate the experience of paging through the tabloid. El País and El Tiempo are big newspapers in Colombia. The work suggests the transitory nature of "news." It could be seen as speaking about censorship or about institutional amnesia, the way certain things get swept under the rug. But these are interpretations coming from outside a Colombian viewpoint. I don't know, for example, what El País and El Tiempo mean to a Colombian. Is one conservative and one liberal? Do they represent different interests and powers? What is the history of the press in Colombia, and its current reality? If this piece featured the New York Times and the New York Post, I would have a very specific interpretation. But when I look at Paístiempo, as impressive and provocative as it is, I know I am only getting part of the story.
Oscar Muñoz, Editor solitario, 2011, HD video projection on a table, 20 minutes
Oscar Muñoz, Editor solitario (still), 2011, HD video projection on a table, 20 minutes
Editor solitario continues the journalistic theme of Paístiempo. We seem to be looking down at a table on which a photo editor, perhaps for a newspaper, is making choices. The images, all faces, range from painted portraits (a Modigliani in the center left is recognizable) to wanted poster images to mug shots to journalist images, including a famous image of a terrified burned Vietnamese child, Phan Thị Kim Phúc. Assuming that this is a photo editor at work, we can interpret this as how what becomes news--and thus becomes history--is decided behind the scenes, in darkened rooms. And we can wonder what is getting left out and what is being included and why?
Oscar Muñoz, Ciclope, video projection
This idea of erasing history is present in Ciclope. In 1984, Winston Smith's job is to cut away the portions of books and magazines that no longer conform with the ruling party's wishes. The words and images go into a hole in his desk--the "memory hole" (one of the many sinister phrases in 1984 that mean the opposite of what they are called). Milan Kundera approaches the same subject The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, describing how a photo of several communist officials is airbrushed to remove Vladimir Clementis, a communist politician who was purged and executed in 1952. Kundera describes with black humor how Clementis' hat accidentally remained in the photo. In Ciclope, photos of people are erased in a swirling bath of chemicals. Orwell called erased people "unpersons"; not only had they been killed, but the records of their existence were removed.
Oscar Muñoz, Re/trato, 2008, 12 digital prints, Edition of 5, 2 A/P, 24 3/8" x 16 1/2" each
I believe that the images in Re/trato are stills from a video. Each image shows Muñoz in the process of drawing a self-portrait with water on hot pavement. The image evaporates as he paints it. A similar work involved him painting portraits taken from the obituaries in the Cali newspapers. Forgetting is again the theme, but here it seems less political in the previous works. These works can make one think of los desaparacidos in many Latin American countries and the many kidnappings in Colombia during the long struggles between the government and guerrilla groups. But I am reluctant to assume that the works refer to those things. Sure, I've read the Memory of Fire trilogy by Eduardo Galeano and A Miracle, a Universe by Lawrence Weschler and other books on modern Latin American politics, but I feel like if I assign a political meaning to the work I close off other ways of seeing it. Muñoz lives in a Colombian environment that I can't pretend to understand in any but the most superficial way, and perhaps more important, brings other meaning to the work. An evaporating self-portrait must have some personal meaning.
But even if I can't grasp the totality of meanings here, the work is nonetheless unnerving and powerful. The theme of forgetting snakes through all these pieces, whether forgetting is personal or institutional or historical. And the work is, ironically, unforgettable.
Having already looked at selected works in Part 1 of my report on Perspectives 178: CINEPLEX at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, I want to discuss the exhibition's layout and presentation. Sounds exciting, right? The truth is, I can't remember seeing a show that left me pondering the presentation of the work as much as CINEPLEX. It's a video show, but it's unlike any video show I can recall. This is my attempt in understanding its unique setup.
Typically, video pieces require more from their presentation than other kinds of art. They change over time and aften make noise. To adequately present such works while being respectful to the works around them, they are usually isolated in some fashion. They may be placed in a separate room, for example, or tucked away in a darkened corner, or (shudder) presented with accompanying headphones to muzzle the audio component from the rest of the gallery.
CINEPLEX shows signs of this traditional approach by placing the four works in the common space on separate walls and the fifth piece in a custom-built, 46-seat theater.
Installation view of Martin Arnold's Passage à l´acte, 1993, 16mm film, at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, from the exhibition Perspectives 178: CINEPLEX, 2012. Photo: Rick Gardner. (The theater is very cool.)
However, CINEPLEX also flies in the face of that tradition by making Les LeVeque's stroboscopic white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston – the most difficult piece to actually look at – the largest in the exhibition and placing it directly opposite the gallery's entrance. It is a bold, aggressive act by curator Peter Lucas that clearly signals a departure from the norm.
Installation view of Perspectives 178: CINEPLEX at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2012. Photo: Rick Gardner. (Left: Fittingly, the show's title and statement are projected onto the wall as opposed to printed. Right: Les LeVeque's white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston.)
As described in Part 1, LeVeque's work is constructed from a sequence using two frames from a Charlton Heston movie followed immediately by two frames of white, and so on. For reference, you can see a clip of the film here. Being as large as it is in the space, the strobing light emitted from the work reflects on pretty much everything, including the walls displaying works by Gustaf Mantel, Frederick Brodbeck, and Christian Marclay. The piece also has an audio component. So even when you're not looking at white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston, its presence is seen and heard while viewing the other works. I asked a gallery attendant if there was a break between cycles of the 15-minute piece (perhaps hoping for some familiar stillness), but there was no such reprieve.
A few days after my second visit to the gallery, I emailed the CAMH asking for images to use in these posts. I also sent along a question about white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston for CINEPLEX curator Peter Lucas. I was now very curious about the scale and placement of the work. I mentioned that I, personally, found it hard to "escape" the strobe effect when viewing the other pieces on display outside the theater. Was this an intentional effect, and if so, why?
Mr. Lucas kindly responded the very next day:
"Les LeVeque’s video was intentionally placed and sized to be prominent upon entering because its rapid collage of multiple movie frames and white frames immediately says something about the nature of cinema and our perception.
It was my intention for the main gallery space to include a variety of approaches to movie manipulation; for the quartet of works in that space to contrast, overlap, and interact; and for the experience of the gallery space to be strikingly different than inside the central cinema space. The gallery is meant as a more aggressive, flickering, kinetic, and de-centered environment, while the theater space has the comforts of traditional cinema presentation environment (black curtains, seats, soft or no light, and one central screen)."
I appreciate having an understanding of the story or design decisions behind an exhibition, particularly when the exhibition concept is as challenging as this. Wanting to have the works in CINEPLEX's common area interact and overlap is a very meta approach to an exhibition about repurposing, manipulating, and remixing. It's a bold idea, but the execution is holding back.
For starters, LeVeque's work owns the space. While its reflected strobing light and audio score interact with the other three works, none of them can really reciprocate. Brodbeck's Cinemetrics and Mantel's animated movie GIFs are less than 1/4 the size of white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston, and neither has its own audio component. LeVeque's score steps in, however, providing an unofficial audio track while viewing these smaller pieces. While it sort of works with Brodbeck's pulsating cinemetric, I don't find it to enhance the quiet nature of Mantel's pieces in any way.
Marclay's Telephones is the smallest piece in the set, presented cleverly inside an old Trinitron television. It does have audio (mostly talking and telephone ringing) which occasionally cuts through the LeVeque score. When it does, this is probably the best moment for pieces in the common area to truly interact on level footing. Yet LeVeque's and Marclay's pieces are on opposite walls and pushed down from one another (as you can see in the photo below), making it impossible to view the pieces simultaneously.
Installation view of Perspectives 178: CINEPLEX at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2012. Photo: Rick Gardner. (From left to right, works by Les LeVeque, Frederick Brodbeck, Christian Marclay, and Gustaf Mantel.)
CINEPLEX seems to be trying to walk a fine line between creating a larger multimedia environment made from a collection of disparate works and showing the four works as individual pieces. It's a difficult task. LeVeque's wall sized work is the independent variable here, as removing it (as a conceptual exercise) would immediately break this tension and create a more traditional video exhibition. Conversely, another large piece could help balance out white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston and keep it from overpowering the other works. (Easier said than done, of course.)
Mr. Lucas's response to my question also made me think about artist Rafaël Rozendaal's BYOB series. The last "B" is for beamers, as in projectors. These one-day only events either feature a curated collection of artists or an open call, and participating artists are responsible for bringing their own video or animated works – and their own gear – to the space.
I have never been to a BYOB event, but I imagine them to be very much like the new cinema space Mr. Lucas describes: aggressive, flickering, kinetic, and de-centered, full of contrast, overlap, and interaction. If the CAMH ever wants to up the ante set forth by this exhibition, I can't imagine a better venue for Houston's first BYOB event. Perhaps hosting one in between shows in the large space? They've already had one at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA Los Angeles:
One of my favorite aspects of the CAMH is that it often takes risks with its programming, and I find that to be the case with the unusual presentation of CINEPLEX. It's a great show, worthy of repeat visits. (I've been four times now.) Clearly, it's prompted a lot of thought from me on the work and how such work could be displayed. I don't think there's anything more that one can ask for from an exhibition.
Is it possible to be shocked or scandalized anymore? If so, Chinaman's Suitcase on view now at Box 13 might be the show to do it. On one hand, we live in a society where sex is pervasive. Nowadays, TV shows will have characters explain what is going on while having sex--a device called sexposition. As I was driving home from work, I noticed a grand new building being constructed on the side of a freeway--a strip club to be called "Lust." Lust will be the 26th strip club in Houston (by my count).
But Chinaman's Suitcase included a concept so amusingly perverse that I had never even considered it before. Artist Miao Jiaxin calls them "ass prints," but that phrase seems rather tame. Ass prints are what are left on the windows of Fondren Library when the Baker 13 make their monthly streak across the campus of Rice University, wearing only shaving cream. It would be more accurate to call what Jiaxin has produced "asshole prints."
Miao Jiaxin and Eijane Janet Lin, Collaboration No. IV (Assprints), 2011, archival inkjet print
Jiaxin's collaborator on Assprints is Eijane Janet Lin, who like Jiaxin got an MFA from the School of the Art Institute in 2011. (Interestingly enough, she is also a graduate of Houstons's High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.) The photo depicts Jiaxin about to apply lipstick to Lin asshole. The pair are surrounded by hundreds of prints that seem to be lipstick on tissue, presumably from her asshole. These prints look similar to those made when women "blot" freshly applied lipstick with a napkin. As Jiaxin performs this procedure, Lin--dressed in sexy stockings and a bra-- is using a small computer with a coffee cup handy. It's as if the whole process is boring and she needs something to do while Jiaxin makes his prints.
But in fact, she was actually online (her image being streamed) as this was happening, as this video from Lin's website shows.
Lin was on a sex cam site called Cam 4, showing the ass prints as they got made. Simultaneously on the site was a wide-angle view from the side showing the action basically from the same angle as the image in above. So this was a performance recorded for the art gallery crowd, but performed live for the sex cam crowd. There is an implicit challenge here--to create art what will appeal equally to both audiences. They both have highly different expectations and criteria. And both audiences are somewhat outside of the mainstream, but in very different ways.
Miao Jiaxin, Happy Together (detail), 2010, two archival inkjet prints
What does Jiaxin do with these asshole prints? Happy Together suggests that he scans them, colors them, and creates collages from them that resemble bouquets of flowers. There is irony in using assholes to depict a bouquet of flowers. Maybe Jiaxin is challenging our idea of beauty. Or maybe he is challenging himself to make something beautiful out of such unpromising raw material. (Artists who work with garbage, refuse and debris do something similar.) Maybe he's just fond of assholes.
Miao Jiaxin and Eijane Janet Lin, Collaboration No. V (Stripper), 2011, archival inkjet print
Collaboration No. V (Stripper) is another audacious, funny image. Jiaxin and Lin are in a nondescript room. Jiaxin has the clothes and props to signal decadence--slacks, dress-shirt and loose tie, sunglasses indoors, wine glass and big cigar, stripper giving him a lapdance and perhaps weirdest of all, a revolver. The revolver gives him kind of a gangster look, like a character from a John Woo Hong Kong action film. The fact that he has the gun aimed at his own head (but without his finger on the trigger) implies that he is a self-aware gangster--a live-fast-and-die-young sort. If that's who you are, best to maximize your pleasure today--Jiaxin is living life to the hilt in this photo.
But the really weird part is Lin, the stripper covered with money. Stripping is all about money--the stripper extracting as much money as quickly as possible from the client. And part of this is accomplished by tease--get the client excited enough to keep buying dances, without ever actually fulfilling him. But the problem in this piece is that for this transaction to occur, the client needs to take the money off Lin. For her to become progressively more exposed, she has to lose her money. The money would therefore flow in the wrong direction, from stripper to client. The circumstance portrayed here is a topsy-turvy version of the real thing.
Chinaman's Suitcase consisted of videos of performances, video stills of performances, and a performance, I Have a Dream. In I Have a Dream, Jiaxin slept through the entire performance. While he slept, a video camera put his image up on the social media site Chatroulette.
Miao Jiaxin, I Have a Dream, 2012, live performance and live-feed broadcast
The Chatroulette screen was projected on the wall. Chatroulette is a camera feed and instant messager application. What made it different from Yahoo or MSN messager was that your chat partner is randomly chosen. If you aren't interested in that partner, you can instantly change to the next randomly chosen partner. There are two things about this. First, if you go on Chatroulette, you will likely not see anyone for very long. If you aren't instantly what your randomly chosen chat partners wants to see, he (and it's 99%+ male) will quickly move on to the next partner. Second, you will see lots of random dudes masturbating.
Miao Jiaxin, I Have a Dream (screen detail), 2012, live performance and live-feed broadcast
This was a fairly tame Chatroulette chatter (his penis was inside his pants instead of out). This exhibit had more dicks than any I've ever seen. If you look at the image above, you will see that the chat partner is visible in the top panel while Jiaxin is visible in the bottom. But also visible are two people watching the performance. So all those masturbating chatters suddenly saw a bunch of people in a room standing around a guy asleep on a comically small bed. I wonder what they made of it. Were they even curious? Apparently not for most of them. They moved on after a few seconds, never pausing in their desultory wanking.
Miao Jiaxin, Money Laundering (still), 2011, video documentation of a performance piece
Not all of the pieces in this show involve dicks, assholes, and/or strippers, but the hint of the illegal pervades much of the work. For instance, Money Laundering was a performance of a very literal interpretation of the metaphorical act. (Money laundering involves taking money earned illegally and disguising its origin so that it seems like legal earnings.)
Miao Jiaxin, Chinaman's Suitcase (still), 2012, video
Two of the pieces have specifically Chinese content. Chinaman's Chance showed Miao Jiaxin carefully spraypainting the carcasses of several ducks. (I couldn't tell whether they were real ducks or not.) He then put them in a suitcase and carried them through the streets to a food store, where they were hung up in the window. The video concludes with people reacting to the colorful ducks.
The names uses a somewhat derogatory term for a person of Chinese descent that dates from the 19th century wave of Chinese immigration. And the image of ducks hanging in a store window is a stereotypical image of those urban neighborhoods that often end up with the name "Chinatown." That Jiaxin is playing around with stereotypes is obvious, but I don't quite get the colors. They're funny--they turn this food item into something obviously inedible.
Miao Jiaxin, Mom's Suitcase (still), 2012, video
A suitcase is the primary prop in another video, Mom's Suitcase. The repeated use of the suitcase in his videos reminds one of of his multinational existence as an overseas Chinese man. In Mom's Suitcase, he crawls into a large suitcase wearing a suit. His mother then cuts all his clothes from his body with scissors. Then we see his mom dragging the suitcase with Jiaxin through the streets of Shanghai. It's a heavy case and you can see her struggling with it. Mama Jiaxan is definitely a trouper! This piece has a hint of the idea of smuggling in it--human smuggling. (Money Laundering also refers to smuggling, but indirectly. Much money laundering involved smuggling ill-gotten cash into countries with very secretive banking laws and then depositing the money in one of those banks.)
I don't want to say I understand what Jiaxin is trying to express in these works. Certainly has has something to say about sex and social media, about the condition of being an overseas Chinese person and about crime. But what precisely is not obvious. But so what? This work was immensely amusing and thought-provoking. Any artist who can sleep through a performance and still keep his audience entertained is some kind of wizard.
The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston currently has two offerings in its galleries: It Is What It Is. Or Is It? (with some works discussed here by Virginia Billeaud Anderson) and Perspectives 178: CINEPLEX. There's an interesting contrast between the concepts of the two shows, which both involve the use of found materials. Upstairs (It Is What It Is) deals with the readymade, while downstairs (CINEPLEX) ventures strongly into manipulation. The latter is a captivating and sometimes challenging exhibition of video work, to be precise, and I have been thinking about it for a couple of weeks now.
Installation view of Perspectives 178: CINEPLEX at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2012. Photo: Rick Gardner
After I decided to write about it, I realized there are two aspects of the show I wanted to discuss: the work, and the overall presentation of the exhibition. So in true cinema fashion, this post will have a sequel. First up: the work.
As you start down the stairway from the CAMH entrance, you begin seeing a flickering of light splashing across the downstairs space. It's an unexpected greeting to the exhibition, and I jokingly wondered if I was walking into a slasher flick. Indeed, cutting through the darkened gallery is a continuous and inescapable strobing light pattern, courtesy of Les LeVeque's white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston, which is projected floor-to-ceiling along the back wall.
Still from white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston, Les LeVeque, USA, video. Image courtesy of the artist.
The image above, however, hardly does the work any justice. (This is the case with most promotional stills form a video, of course, but it's even more applicable here.) The time you've spent glancing at that image as you jumped from the previous paragraph to this one is longer than the time you would have seen it in the actual video. You see, white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston is an experimental stroboscopic video work in which there are two frames of imagery followed by two frames of white. For this piece, LeVeque has reduced 15 different Charlton Heston movies down to thirty seconds each, and then spliced them together chronologically, adding the aforementioned white frames after every two frames of Heston film stills. To get a proper sense of the work, go here and watch a 30 second clip.
I'll wait. Make it full screen.
Now, imagine that continuously looping floor-to-ceiling on a wall in the gallery. I was a bit scared to even look at it at first. I asked a CAMH gallery attendant what he thought of the piece, and he replied that he "[doesn't] look at it."
CINEPLEX's presentation of white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston is a bold punch in the gut, er ... eyes. It announces very loudly that this isn't your daddy's video exhibition. (Note: I will be to writing about the overall presentation of the works in CINEPLEX and curator Peter Lucas's reasoning in featuring a large stroboscopic piece in Part 2 of my report.)
For those looking to avert their eyes away from LeVeque's work, there was Gustaf Mantel's IWDRM (If We Don't, Remember Me) projected on a wall near the stairwell. While I didn't recognize his name, I instantly recognized the series from the Internet, which made me feel hip. Mantel takes very short sequences from popular films and presents them as looping animated GIFs.
“Because I want to fit in.”, from IWDRM (If We Don't, Remember Me), Gustaf Mantel, Germany, animated GIF.
You can view all of his "living movie stills" on his Tumblr dedicated to the series. It was interesting seeing work inherently created for the Internet presented away from its natural environment. Then again, Mantel's GIFs come from video, so it's no surprise they function well as video once again.
When I first saw Frederick Brodbeck's circular visualization of a movie (during my visits, it was of The Birds), I immediately thought of Jason Salavon's Emblem works from 2004. Both series present abstract representations of entire movies in a circular motif. Having bonded with Salavon's visualization work while in grad school, I wanted to dismiss this as a variation of Salavon's concept from 8 years prior. Additionally, I've seen a few other visual ideas passed around the Internet lately that Salavon himself worked through 5-10 years ago, so I'm a bit leery of seeing work that so immediately makes me think of his. That attitude is unjustified and unfair to Brodbeck of course, but that's the baggage I brought to the party.
Still from Cinemetrics, Frederick Brodbeck, The Netherlands, 2012, video. Image courtesy of the artist.
Working past the Salavon comparison, however, it's clear to see these visualizations are more complex. Most noticeably, Brodbeck's movie "fingerprint" (his term) is moving, unlike any of Salavon's static Emblem prints. I could make pretty solid guesses at to the purpose of the colors and segments resulting from the film's deconstruction, but the moving components were a new addition for me. What could have been left as a static image was now a pulsating mandala, (floating atop a white void, nonetheless, thanks to a soft drop shadow). The varying speeds at which some slices moved back and forth had me stumped. Enter Google.
Turns out, Brodbeck has an amazing website dedicated to this project. There's an animated cinemetric at the top, which would give you a better sense of what's on display at the CMAH. The site is really worth a look, as are the two videos embedded there. He explains his objectives with the Cinemetrics series and all the variables through which he can filter a film's data. Having seen the website and explanatory videos, I wonder if the CMAH gave thought to presenting multiple cinemetrics simultaneously, as opposed to only one at a time. I find that seeing two or three side-by-side (as in the videos) really drives home what you're actually looking at. Against the other pieces in CINEPLEX – which are all narrative-based – I wonder how much of an audience the lone cinemetric can capture.
(As critical as that all may sound, I find myself wanting to see a cinemetric of my own favorite movie. Brodbeck even takes requests on his website!)
Opposite the cinemetric was a video encapsulated in a television atop a pedestal. The video was comprised of several cuts of people from films interacting with telephones. The piece was by Christian Marclay, the only artist in the exhibition that I knew by name. He somewhat dominated national art headlines for a while last summer thanks to his epic 24-hour long piece, The Clock. His piece in CINEPLEX, appropriately titled Telephones, is cited as his first movie collage and dates back to 1995(!). That number is a bit surprising to me, because I was a wee sophomore in college that year, learning about the Internet and email and wondering if Laserdisc was the heir apparent to VHS. I can only imagine the effort put forth by Marclay to collect and compile 7 minutes of footage in the earliest days of digital editing. (Note: While this was the oldest piece I saw on my visits, it was not the oldest in the exhibition; there were some Bruce Connor works previously displayed that dated to the late 70's/early 80's.)
I've embedded Telephones in its entirety below, but it's a nice experience – and nod to its own place in time – seeing it on the Sony Trinitron at the CAMH.
Telephones, Christian Marclay, 1995, video.
While these four works were on display in various regions of the common space, there was also an entirely separate theater constructed for CINEPLEX. It has the charms of a traditional movie theater: a dark space, larger screen, and elevated rows of cushioned chairs (46, to be exact). It was built to hold special Thursday night screenings of additional works, by filmmakers such as Thom Anderson, Sophie Fiennes, and Craig Baldwin. I enjoyed this space because, quite honestly, (1) I was able to sit down, and (2) my eyes could relax. That is, I could watch the work on display without the strobing light from white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston creeping into my field of vision as it does outside the theater.
During my first two visits, the theater hosted the deconstructed animations of Austrian artist Martin Arnold, and these works became my favorite of the entire exhibition. Simply put, they were unlike anything I had ever seen.
Still from Shadow Cuts, Martin Arnold, Austria, 2010, video. Image courtesy of Stadkino Filmverleih.
Martin's three works – Soft Palate, Haunted House, and Shadow Cuts – featured clips from cartoons that had been deconstructed and spliced back together into new narratives. For instance, Haunted House features what I believe is a cat running out and screaming onto a porch. The original animated sequence is probably only a few seconds, but here Arnold has broken apart visual fragments from within those few seconds and stitched them back together into a four-minute sequence. When I say fragments, think of eyes, ears, tongue, skin, wood boards, window frames, etc. all appearing and disappearing independently atop a black background in a highly choreographed presentation.
I was transfixed. It became a game of waiting to see how the image would reveal itself next. Moreover, it was interesting to see just how Arnold would use the various image fragments, and how the addition of new components would greatly affect the perceived narrative. Unlike the other two pieces, which presented mostly figurative elements, Haunted House used fragments from both the figure (the cat) as well as the background setting to great effect.
(Thinking back, it's probably a good thing Martin's pieces were isolated from LeVeque's outside the theater, There is quite a bit of flashing and flickering in these works too, and presenting them in the same space could create a stroboscopic apocalypse only ravers could enjoy.)
The sad news is that Martin's works have now been rotated out of the exhibition. Moreover, they're not readily accessible on the Internet (as crazy as that is.) So it pains me to tell you about something I find incredibly awesome but you can't readily see, and for that I am sorry. But they are really awesome.
I've been to see CINEPLEX three times already and am planning on returning at least once more before the show wraps up July 8th. I have found it to be a really engaging survey of recent and current approaches to video manipulation, and I fell it's worth your time to check out in person. It's also presented in a manner unlike any video exhibition I have ever seen, and I will dive into that in Part 2 next week.
DISCLAIMER: Before you read this review, there is something that you should know. I sleep with the artist that I'm about to review, Sasha Dela. Not every night and not always at the same time, but I rent a room at Skydive and she rents a room at Skydive, and we sleep. If either of us make hundreds of millions of dollars directly or indirectly off either the exhibit or this review, I'll feel bad. But not too bad. I'll cash the check. I can't speak for Sasha. (She's tied up at the moment.) Enough said.
When I was in elementary school, I read the book I am the Cheese by Robert Cormier. It's basically a story about a boy whose parents, and thus his life, are not what they seem. The novel is his discovery of the deception. At the time, I was young enough and ignorant enough to not really know what my parents really did for a living. Plus, like most kids my age, I thought my parents were nerdy and clueless. I fantasized that I was adopted and that my real parents were the Vanderbilts or the Rockefellers. It had a profound effect on me...although I was not really sure what it was until I saw Sasha Dela's Emotional Life of a Spy at the Art League.
The exhibit is an installation, which comprises two videos, a couple of sculptures, and several photos and paintings. The primary video is Dela's interpretation\recreation of Alfred Hitchcock's 39 Steps, but with the artist's own personal associations and observations weaved into the narrative. So much so that it plays out like a melodramatic (emo if I'm going to be current) version of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Both are postmodern appropriations. MST3k uses the original unadulterated movie and adulterates everything. Dela appropriates scenes of Hitchcock's movie and represents them through the prism of her interpretation.
Through Dela's prism of personal experience, we learn that the photo of Mrs. Smith looks like her Grandma.
She refers to the protagonist, Hannay, as a Hitchcockian icon.
Then Dela goes beyond the meta-descriptions to intertwine her own narrative. At one point she claims to "...(feel) more lost than ever". We learn of Dela, "Not that I am innocent nor on the run." A phone rings and goes unanswered and she states "Love is always calling and loss never leaves." Even later in the film, she pronounces "We are always running, mostly in circles."
The rest of the installation serves as the supporting cast.
In the retelling, Dela uses mandala's in transitioning between some of the scenes. These mandala's are reproduced on canvas.
She also uses a ready made sculpture of phones and two candles with a shared wick to underscore the sense of connected-ness that permeates both her retelling and Hitchcock's original.
Dela's phone motif is interesting. In this day of connected-ness, she associates it with "love always calling" and loss "never leaving". It made me think of a recent study conducted by TeleNav, which revealed that "One-Third of Americans Would Choose Cellphones over Sex" for a week. It could be the techno-sexology of the Apps, but I suspect that it's the immediacy and intimacy that cell phones afford us, which is more enduring (24x7) and more dependable than sex.
The sense of mystery and things not being what they seem is reinforced by another sculpture which consists of a standard bedroom bureau with a large screen playing an abstract video secreted away in the bottom drawer.
What the installation achieves is a gestalt of mystery. It is not one of sleuths and spies, but of emotional ambiguity in which one is not necessarily innocent, in which one runs, in which one doesn't dare answer the phone. And of course, one has no idea what's going on and yet knows exactly what's happening. The antiquated objects: the rotary phone, the candles, the mandala, the 60's bureau, the Hitchcock film would give the piece a dated or passe feel. However, the explicit theme of an emotional life and the supporting sub themes of searching (every mystery is a search), love, loss, connectedness place it in the present. Together the two imbue the work with a timeless quality because these themes are "always calling...never leaving."
Experiencing the installation, I had done nothing and yet I was guilty in that I had assumed the retelling's emotional burden. It felt like a secular original sin. Of course, I'm waiting for my redemption, which means either that I'll satisfy the sub themes in my life or simply settle for a Rockefeller to text me about my one truth birth right and my inheritance.
I might even give up sex for a week for that kind of validation. Too bad there's not an App for that.
Box 13 is doing its part for FotoFest with four lens-based shows. The one that hit me the hardest was Identified and Objectified: A Study of the Ephemeral, featuring work by Shannon Duncan, Brittney Connelly and Bryan Forrester. Of these three artist, the one whose work I found least interesting was Brittney Connelly. Her video of her stuff being tossed onto her prone body struck me as an obvious metaphor (our stuff, our accumulative natures, weighing us down). I see this as relating to a certain romantic notion that if we could just free ourselves of material concerns, we'd be free! Perhaps I'm misinterpreting her work, but what I saw didn't impress me.
Shannon Duncan's take on a similar subject, Eu-phemera, was far better. She had friends pose with things (including clothes) that were meaningful to them. They are posed against a blank white background. Their faces are always covered. I interpret this as Duncan taking identity away from the face--the way we recognize people and consequently the primary source of their visual identity--and placing identity in the stuff itself.
With her miniskirt and boots, she seems like she stepped out of the 60s, a perception that is reinforced with the cheap portable record player and knit rug. On the other hand, the Pink Floyd record and predominance of orange and brown say "70s." But oddest is the raccoon skin on her face. On of the pleasures of these photos is that they invite you to try to "figure out" the subject. Does all this stuff actually add up to one real person, after all?
But sometimes the interpretation of the stuff is delightfully easy. This boy in his Darth Vader mask may serve to remind us how early our life-long relationship with stuff begins, but it's also funny and delightful. I thought this group of photos communicated pleasure--these things that people were posed with were important because they loved them. Their pleasure comes through. It's infectious.
It's nice that Shannon Duncan was able to make me smile, because Bryan Forrester's installation, Every Woman Is My Mother, was not such a happy story. The piece consists of photos and paper ephemera. I noticed the photos first, which I think was Forrester's intent. They were photos of different women (different ages, races, and body types) all dressed alike.
Bryan Forrester, from Every Woman Is My Mother
Bryan Forrester, from Every Woman Is My Mother
I am assuming that the wig and outfit come from some memory or photograph of Forrester's mother. By themselves, they are an unsettling series of images--the emotional content of the photos seems progressively more powerful and fraught. Then when we get to the back wall, where the ephemera is pinned up, the viewer gets a second punch in the gut.
Bryan Forrester, from Every Woman Is My Mother
Bryan Forrester, from Every Woman Is My Mother
(The images above have been color-corrected to make them more readable.)
Forrester's mother, a nurse, had a mental illness that caused him to become estranged from her. I assume her early death is related to this illness. This installation, which includes both his imaginings of Mary Ellen along with Mary Ellen's own notes and writing appears to be an attempt to reconnect with her posthumously. The pink tank top and jeans must be for Forrester important memory objects--perhaps this exhibit is an attempt to connect the woman in these disjointed, disturbing writings with his own memories. Possibly the jeans and tank top represent a good memory for Forrester that he is trying to latch onto. But as viewers, we can't be sure.
Every Woman Is My Mother is powerful. It made me angry at Forrester for allowing himself to become estranged from his mother, a person who obviously needed help and looking after. I realize this is unfair--but it's a response made possible by the photos and objects that Forrester puts out for us to see. The work exudes guilt and sadness. We see that Mary Ellen, whatever her problems, had goals and a desire to express herself. She is someone we can feel sympathy for--Forrester wants us to feel sympathy. The choice of documents seems to have been made in part with this goal.
A lot of art I see is dry, clever, intellectual, beautiful to look at--and I value all those things. But it's rare these days to see art that has this kind of emotional power. I still don't know what I think--feel--about it. Sadness, anger, pity. Head out to the East End and spend some time with this exceptional work.
The Kenmore is Emily Sloan's micro-artspace--a tiny dorm refrigerator which has, by now, hosted any number of art projects in various media. But none of the artists have transformed the fridge as much as David McClain. For his untitled video installation, he drilled a hole in the front of the the refrigerator and painted the exterior matt black. The intent was to make it look a little like a peep show. (But just a little--the velvet ropes add a different dimension to it). To see the video, the viewer had to walk up, bend over, and peer through the hole.
David McClain, untitled, refrigerator, paint, video, velvet ropes, 2012
The piece was set up at Skydive for their latest opening. It was tough to see the video inside, which amusingly shared space with typical refrigerator items, like a can of beer. The video itself consisted of three pieces--apparently real vintage porn starring Sylvester Stallone and (allegedly) Marilyn Monroe, and a recreation of the infamous video of ESPN sportscaster Erin Andrews naked in her hotel room. (Andrews was videotaped through a hotel peephole by stalker Michael David Barrett in 2008. The video was posted online and went viral. I suppose I could look online and find a copy of this video, but, y'know, yuck.) The recreation of the Andrews video was performed by an acquaintance of McClain's. It's not actually all that erotic--10 minutes of "Andrews" checking out her butt. I'm told it is an accurate recreation of the actual video. One could conclude from it that Andrews, a preternaturally beautiful woman like so many women newscasters, is extremely concerned about locating any possible flaw to her looks, which could be key to her success on television. It's unlike the other videos in the sense that whatever eroticism it comes from its perverse origin. But the recreated video is not like that--as a recreation, it has a deliberate erotic intent.
My problem with this is that I didn't recognize any of the videos being shown. They seemed like generic (if old) porno. So the issues of celebrity and voyeurism were lost on me. Instead, I saw it as an amusing combining of two animal instincts--food (the refrigerator and its contents) and sex. On that level, it was quite interesting.
Also interesting was the way it transformed a private, possibly shameful act--watching pornography--into a public act. In order to view the art, the viewer had to walk between two velvet ropes and bend down in front of the TV. There was no hiding what you were doing. You yourself became the object of other people's looks. You viewed the video and became the spectacle. In this way, it is a bit like Emily Moran Barwick's piece, Philanthropic Performance, which I wrote about last year.
I don't know when or where this piece will be set up again. Maybe it was a one-night only event. But it was so amusing that I hope it gets a second life.
Sometimes I have an urge to make a video instead of writing a review. It's not that it's easier than writing (in fact, editing on CyberLink PowerDirector is pretty difficult, especially for a novice like me). It's just that there are some shows that don't make sense unless you walk through them, and that's what a video can do better than writing.
Also, I was a little reluctant to write a review of this show by Linda Post and Jim Nolan. The thing is--and this has to be admitted to right up front--I own pieces by both of these artists. So anything I would write is inherently suspect. That's the problem with being a collector/critic.
That said, here's what I saw when I saw Low Impact (Resistance to Flow / ThisIsBobDylantoMe) Subject to Change (whew) by Linda Post and Jim Nolan at Lawndale Art Center.
(By the way, I'd like to apologize to Mr. Vito Acconci for mispronouncing his name)
GGallery had an opening last night that dealt with the imitation and reality. The show, One Big Mistunderstanding, by Otis Ike and Ivete Lucas, was all about the subculture of Vietnam War reenactments. Like its better-known counterpart of Civil War reenactments, the Vietnam reenactors stage battles and skirmishes as realistically as they can, short of actually killing people. A chance encounter with a reenactor at a flea market led Ike and Lucas into the subculture. Ike and Lucas have documented subcultures before, so this would seem to fit in with their previous practices. The installation was very well made, which I have to credit to new GGallery codirectors, Diane Barber and Bradford Moody. (Indeed, the gallery in general looks a lot better and less cluttered now.)
One Big Misunderstanding installation view
One Big Misunderstanding installation view
Otis Ike, 1966 Moynihan's Men, photograph
The majority of the show consists of photos like this, some in color and some in black and white. The wall text suggests that the black-and-white photos are supposed to be more ambiguous--are you looking at a reenactment or the real thing?
Lucas and Ike's documentation of the scene wasn't limited to photographs. They documented the online presence of the reenactors, including their obsession with Star Wars.
(This painting of Chewbacca riding a squirrel and fighting Nazis is by an artist named Tyler Edlin who, as far as I know, has nothing to do with the Vietnam reenactor community, beyond having a few of them as fans.)
One side of the gallery was occupied by this bamboo hut, where performers dressed as Viet Cong entered, exited, and busied themselves looking like they belonged there. In the hut, a video played which combined footage shot of the reenactments, footage from the Vietnam war, and what appeared to be a first-person Vietnam combat video game. They were clearly playing with what was real and what was a representation. This tension underlay the whole enterprise.
For instance, this guy manning the table with two machine guns on it. Was he a vet? Were the guns real or replicas?
There were numerous performers, in essence playing the part of reenactors who themselves play the part of actual soldiers. (The performers may have included actual reenactors, but I don't think all of them were reenactors.)
urban guerrilla
Viet Cong in stripper boots
At 7 pm a performance was to begin. The Viet Cong were gathered around their hut while the American soldiers crept up, snaking through the crowd of viewers.
Now all through the show, there was one viewer who had been loudly proclaiming her disapproval of this whole thing. This show and Vietnam reenactments in general were "bullshit." I don't want to put words in her mouth, but she seemed to be saying that there was something wrong if not obscene with playacting this horrible war. She was steamed. But no one expected her to attack the performance.
She is the blue-grey blur in the pile of bodies in this photo. She literally hurled herself into the middle of the battle reenactment with fists swinging. She's a small woman, but she managed to bring down these performers into a pile. The viewers were confused. I was confused. Was she deliberately joining in with the performance as a spontaneous provocative act? Or was she, in fact, physically attacking the performance.
It was the latter. This group of performers pretending to fight in Vietnam were quite unexpectedly attacked for real. The ambiguity between reality and representation could hardly be better demonstrated than by what happened.
But the performers were troopers. After their attacker had been dragged away, they stayed in character (playing corpses).
Then surreally, a guy dressed in 60s pop-star drag came out and sang "These Boots Were Made For Walking."
This seemed calculated to remind the viewer of one of the most surreal scenes in Apocalypse Now, the Playboy Bunny performance at the jungle base. By this time, the attacker had been hustled out the door, and was looking worse for the wear--swollen lips, two chipped teeth, and blood in her mouth. Her attack had been fueled by plenty of alcohol, and she was still mad as shit. But her friends managed to move her away from GGallery and ultimately to her home.
When Le Sacre du printemps premiered at Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1913, the audience rioted. But this kind of reaction to a performance is rare. Even the most "transgressive" performances are viewed by polite, respectful audiences. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but it was thrilling to see this melée. It was refreshing to see someone who felt so passionately that she physically tried to interrupt it. Afterwards, I recalled Mario Savio's words: "There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop." But my pleasure at witnessing it was not so high-minded. I was pleased to see a polite little performance turn into something that seemed so real.
This unplanned bit of craziness and violence reiterated one of the themes of the exhibit better the show itself ever could. That tension between reality and representation was brutally brought home by this unplanned act. This small woman tackling several grown men was--unlike every other thing in the show--real. But as you watched it, you didn't know. You kept asking yourself, is this part of the act? Is this really happening? Like David after the dentist, this was a performance where you had to ask yourself, "Is this real life?" And as it recedes in time and becomes a part of memory, I am still asking myself that question.
Update: Over at Glasstire, one of the performers, Manik Nakra, has a first person account of the attack/intervention. Also, I'm told by Otis Ike that the Nancy Sinatra performer is Paul Soileau, aka Christeene.
