Beryl Korot. "Video — Text/Weave/Line," 2011. Photo courtesy the artist and Jaffe-Friede Gallery.

In this week’s roundup Beryl Korot prints and weaves video, Jenny Holzer is honored, artists explore being American, several others celebrate creating art in Los Angeles, and more.

• Beryl Korot‘s exhibition, Video — Text/Weave/Line, is on view at Jaffe-Friede Gallery in the Hopkins Center for the Arts (Hanover, NH).  Video, print and weaving are all connected through the fundamental unit of the line, and it is this theme that resonates throughout her works at the gallery.  Korot’s use of various mediums also marks the passage of time, from the days of traditional weaving to our current of use modern visual technology.  This exhibition closes December 4.

• Mark Bradford, Carrie Mae Weems, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Rashid Johnson, Kalup Linzy, and others have work on display in 30 Americans that recently opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.  More than 70 paintings, sculptures, videos, photographs, and drawings comprise the exhibition, which is on view until February 12, 2012.

• James Turrell unveiled a new landmark for the Bay Adelaide Centre in Toronto.  At the top of the building an extension of the glass skin beyond the rooftop becomes a series of “sails” that gives the building profile a distinctive identity. The lobby features a chapel of art inside its front lobby by Turrell.  Tall glass pieces display shifting tapestries of light–polyphonic compositions of color and movement.

• Jenny Holzer is one of three honorees slated to receive a National Arts Award.  Americans for the Arts will present the awards October 17 at a gala dinner in New York City.  Holzer will be honored for outstanding contributions to the arts.

• Julie Mehretu‘s latest work is at The Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University as part of the traveling exhibition Excavations: The Prints of Julie Mehretu.  This is the first comprehensive exhibition of prints produced by the artist thus far in her career. Accompanying the show is a 44-page color catalog with plates of the prints and an essay by Siri Engberg, curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.  The work is on view until December 11.

• Allan McCollum, Bruce Nauman, Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari, Vija Celmins, and several other artists are in Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980 which officially launched at The Getty Center in Los Angeles.  The opening party at MOCA LA featured a wall of Black Flag concert flyers, drawn by Raymond Pettibon.  Multiple exhibitions document the emergence of Los Angeles as an international nexus of contemporary art after World War II. It culminates in a series of over forty concurrent exhibitions across Southern California.

Chris E. Vargas. Still from the three-channel, 16 minute video "Liberación," 2011.

Chris E. Vargas and I went to high school together at Grover Cleveland High, a public school in Reseda, in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles. The tattooed 818 on his arm is an area code in the Valley. My own area code was 213–I lived in Hollywood–and when LA changed to the 323 area code it felt like a huge betrayal. So I can relate to his connection to those three numbers. Our paths on opposite coasts haven’t crossed, but we’ve stayed in touch the old-fashioned way, through email and letters. Chris is an incredible letter-writer. One of my favorites was the announcement of his graduation from UC Santa Cruz. What was profound about it was to see his name printed so officially, because Chris used to be Christina and this beautifully embossed card announced his decision, and I felt proud of him.

Over the years Chris has amassed a huge number of videos and online followers. We haven’t seen each other in person in probably 10 years. An enormous sense of humor pervades everything he does. That’s how its been since high school–he helped make it tolerable for me. Here’s an excerpt from one of our recent online conversations.

Chris Vargas: I miss L.A. and the San Fernando Valley. Don’t you? I love my life in the Bay Area but I miss the people in LA. I know there’s a firmly-grounded stereotype that runs contrary to this, but I’ll say it anyway: people are so nice there! It must be the sunshine. I’m also jealous that there’s so much good art there, and I’m not around to appreciate it.

Rachel Mason: YES!!! L.A. gets such a bad rap. Most L.A. natives that I know are also the most grounded, almost midwesternly… definitely contrary to the stereotype….Their public transit system does suck, but it’s a great place to ride a motorcycle.

CV: Thanks, Rachelssance. Are you going to tell your readers that that was your highschool nickname? Because you looked like a Renaissance painting, specifically, the Mona Lisa.

RM: Sure! I loved the spinoffs and variations…. Rachelssance is my fave.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m doing what I always imagined I would be doing when I was a kid. When I think back, I do kind of think that I am doing pretty much what I expected. Do you feel like you’re doing what you’d always imagined or hoped you’d be doing? If not, what was the other thing you thought about doing? And is this different?

CV: I don’t remember what I imagined my life would look like when I was a kid. I didn’t ever think I was particularly talented at “art” so I’m quite sure I never imagined that at age 30-ish I’d call myself an “artist.” Actually, come to think of it, the first occupation I said I wanted to be was a cartoonist. Then I think I wanted to be a dancer. Both kinda make sense now as I perform in roles and make videos that are sometimes comic.
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Taryn Simon. "Chapter VII, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters," 2008-2011. © Taryn Simon.

Taryn Simon‘s solo-exhibition, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters (2008-2011) at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin is an imposing and exhaustive investigation of eighteen diverse bloodlines and their related stories. On the surface, each chapter presents a group of stark, straightforward portraits in a seemingly confusing yet linear framework, based mostly on the bloodlines of those included (or not, for various reasons) in the Chapters, as they are called (I – XVIII).

Visually, A Living Man Declared Dead is a departure from other recent works like An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, 2007, in which Simon assumed the “the dual role of shrewd informant and collector of curiosities, compiling an inventory of what lies hidden and out-of-view within the borders of the United States,” by presenting numerous, exquisite photographs of locations or items that are generally considered off-limits, or Contraband, 2009, where Simon, who described the project as both a “performance” and “exercise in exhaustion” spent five days and nights at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Federal Inspection Site and the U.S. Postal Service International Mail Facility at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, systematically arranging and photographing each item seized from passengers or mail entering the U.S. from abroad. The 1,075 resulting photographs comprise a visual encyclopedia of what cannot enter the United States.

Taryn Simon. "Bird corpse, labeled as home décor, Indonesia to Miami, Florida (prohibited); Plastic pitcher of salami, Eastern Europe (9CFR.94) (prohibited)," from the series "Contraband," 2009.

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MPA. "Initiation," 2011. Performance at Leo Koenig, Inc. From the exhibition "Directing Light Onto Fist of Father." Photo courtesy Leo Koenig, Inc.

A few weeks ago I went to Chelsea to see Robert Melee’s show at Andrew Kreps Gallery. As I was enjoying the way the gallery space seemed to unexpectedly take a turn, shifting me into a room with what looked like the back side of stadium seats, I spotted a woman who captivated me.

Sometimes I just want to stare at a person for no particular reason. It may be because there’s something fascinating about the way they look; she was one of those people. As I went to sign the guest book, I noticed three letters: MPA. Someone had mentioned that name to me before… I thought…I couldn’t remember…I was sure of it though….

As I walked out of the gallery, she was standing out on the street. It was cloudy, and it seemed like she was staring out at the sky, and I got really nervous suddenly but then I just blurted out, “Are you MPA?” and she said, “yes.” I introduced myself, and said that she had been mentioned to me by someone but I couldn’t remember how at the moment and after that initial awkwardness, she told me she had a show right around the corner at Leo Koenig and told me that it was organized by Alhena Katsof and Dean Daderko. Dean!

(I have my own great experience with Dean. In 2004 he was doing Parlour Projects, a powerful little gallery right from his living room in Brooklyn, and he included my sculpture Kissing President Bush in a show called Republican Like Me. The show also included Sharon Hayes, William Pope L., Cary Moyer and a whole bunch of other great artists whose company I was amazed to be included among, having just graduated from school a month earlier. On the subway, a day after the show opened, I saw someone reading the New York Times. Blown-up on the front cover of the Arts section was a picture of a sculpture that looked exactly like mine. I got so depressed that someone had made the exact same piece as I did, that when I got off the subway, I almost didn’t answer my phone when I heard it ringing….but when I did answer it, it was Dean saying, “Rachel get the paper, your sculpture is on the cover of the Arts Section!”).

So after I went to MPA’s show at Leo Koenig I realized that she was staring at the sky. She was trying to decide whether or not there was enough sun for her to do her performance, which involved directing light with a mirror onto a plaster cast of her father’s fist. This is the ongoing portion of her show: MPA goes to the gallery on sunny days, and directs the light onto the fist.

Here’s some of what MPA wrote in an email to me about her experience during the opening performance:

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Bryan Crockett. "Gluttony," 2002. Cultured marble, 12 1/2 x 14 1/2 inches. Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery and Julian LaVerdiere.

Halfway through Night Scented Stock, an exhibition currently on view at Marianne Boesky Gallery’s uptown space in New York City, I found myself standing before an oversized, hairless (save for a few scraggly whiskers), baby pink mouse, whose fleshy body is covered almost entirely in large folds of fat. There is an unexpected pathos to this rotund little oddity nestled on its plinth with its legs tucked beneath its corpulent body and its eyes half opened.  While appearing to be some grotesque mutant from science fiction, Bryan Crockett’s indolent creature is in fact rooted in scientific reality, a representation in cultured marble of a genetically engineered laboratory mouse that has been fitted with an obesity gene for medical research purposes.

Crockett’s quirky sculpture is titled Gluttony, and is part of a series in which the artist transposes the seven deadly sins into the realm of biotechnology, using representations of genetically engineered mice to personify the seven sins—a centuries-old set of moral standards and proscriptions against the instincts and urges of our psychical and physical selves.  Although alluding to the moral fortifications erected by society against primal behavior and modern science’s extreme efforts to overcome the corporal realities and imperfections of the human body, Crockett’s mouse paradoxically remains corporeal, crude and excessive, and thus seems a fitting introduction to the themes and concerns underpinning Night Scented Stock.  This is a show that foregrounds a range of artistic responses to the boundaries of aesthetic and social convention, and focuses on a number of artists who have articulated—or at least gesture to—a space outside established norms and limits by seeking out the fantastical, untidy and dream-like aspects in both the natural world and our inner selves.

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Jenny Saville: Continuum, installation view at Gagosian Gallery

Last week, I had the displeasure of experiencing exhibition whiplash at Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue. On one side of the building, “Continuum”- an exquisite show by Jenny Saville and her first New York exhibit in eight years. On the other, “The Asia Series” by….. Bob Dylan. While I admire Bob Dylan in many ways, his work with a brush is not one of them. The fact that throngs of people kept asking where the Bob Dylan show was, while I stood with just a few others in the spectacle that was Jenny Saville’s exhibition really, well, annoyed me.

Few painters today deal with the human form, or flesh, like Jenny Saville. She zooms in on the mass that is the human body vs. focusing on how bodies engage with space in a given environment. There are tremendous figurative painters out there including Phillip Pearlstein and Marlene Dumas, but the flesh belongs to Jenny Saville, especially after the recent loss of Lucian Freud. Educators who spend time working from the figure with their students can benefit from considering Saville’s work. Between the way she implies form and utilizes color, especially a range of reds, viewers at Gagosian could almost be seen shaking off sucker punches. I know I was. Each of the huge paintings is like a concentrated storm in your line of vision.

Upon entering the gallery, I was confronted with one of Saville’s recent works inspired by Renaissance nativity portraits. Study for Pentimenti IV features a pregnant woman and a young child, repeating the two forms to create a rhythm that leads the eye quickly around and through the work. Perhaps one of my favorite pieces in the show, another large painting titled The Mothers, pictures a pregnant woman literally trying to hold two young children simultaneously- one is cradled close and another is literally slipping from her grasp. I kept returning to this work thinking about how many people must identify with this particular mother and the feeling of being completely overwhelmed.

Jenny Saville’s beautiful and straightforward exhibition is absolutely worth a visit for anyone even remotely interested in figurative painting through October 22^nd. While you’re there you may be tempted, as I was, to explore the Bob Dylan show hoping that his work as a painter may come close to his dominance as a songwriter. But you’ll be left disappointed and probably mumbling to yourself, I warn you. If caught in this particular situation you can remedy the whiplash by retracing your steps and simply going back into the Saville show.

Artists in Residence at FIAR.

I want to devote this entry to Chris Bogia who envisioned and created (along with co/founder, curator, and writer Evan Garza) the Fire Island Island Artist Residency (FIAR).

About a year ago at Chris’s house, he told me about his idea of creating a queer emerging artist residency program. I thought it sounded like a great thing to do, and was a little surprised that there really wasn’t anything like it already out there. Last summer, having lost touch with Chris for a few months, I heard through the grapevine about the Fire Island Artist Residency because a friend of mine was applying! Immediately I text messaged Chris: “WTF ? You Did it?” He texted back: “Yes!!!!!”

I ran into Chris yesterday at the new building where I just moved studios; he has a space there as well. We sat down and he told me all about the Residency. I was so excited to hear about it, and am so proud of him, that I wanted to reproduce our conversation here.

Rachel Mason: So how did you get the idea in the first place?

Chris Bogia: I’ll start by saying I lived in New York for eleven years before even setting foot on Fire Island. I had a pre-conceived notion that it was for party boys, Chelsea gym types, and wealthy gays only. About four years ago my friend George had a summer share in Cherry Grove, one of the two LGBT communities on the island. He asked me to come stay for a weekend – he was cute – I decided to take a chance and go.

As I got off the ferry I had a very immediate sense that I had been completely wrong about Fire Island. Cherry Grove was funky. The dock was full of one of the most diverse tribes of queers I’d ever seen: old-timers on electric scooters, kids, bears, drag queens, hippies. Every gender variation, and all colors (and their pets) milled from the boat towards the tiny village center and its branching wooden plank “walks” that led through dunes to charming cottages, nude beaches, aggressive deer, and mysterious sunken forests (I would later learn that much of what I had originally feared about Fire Island resided in the Pines, the OTHER gay community on Fire Island–no hate).

The Walk.

The Grove was magical. I could really go on and on and on, but I will just say that I was instantly hooked. Nude beaches, hippy freaks, radical fairies doing hula hoop in saris on the beach…it was my kind of town. I wanted to live there. I wanted to make art there. I was walking my dog the very first morning I woke up in Cherry Grove and I started thinking about how there should be some kind of juried residency for emerging queer artists (and any artist working with themes of queerness). Doubts regarding the modest state of my own art career prevented me from believing I could have the pull to execute what I was fantasizing about, so I put my neat-o, clothing optional queer artist super-residency in the “dream drawer” for safe-keeping, and the next summer I got a vacation share of my own so I could be out there more.

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Daniel Ostroff inspects the underside of a customized Eames compact sofa at the Miller House and Garden. Photo by Tricia Gilson.

Yesterday, in collaboration with Tricia Gilson, I presented Part I of an interview with Eames expert and film producer, Daniel Ostroff.  He is a Los Angeles-based film producer, researcher, curator, and collector. He is also the producer and editor of EamesDesigns.com, a consultant for Herman Miller, and has been sitting on an Equa Chair behind an Action Office System desk for the past 10 years.

This week, the exhibition he curated, Collecting Eames: The JF Chen Collection, opens at JF Chen in Los Angeles.  The exhibition is part of the Getty’s massive Pacific Standard Time  project and consists of 450 pieces, with a corresponding 135 page catalog with a preface by Eames Demetrios and an essay by Dan (available soon on Amazon, or by e-mail here).

RM & TG: When you visited the IMA’s Miller House & Garden this year, we looked at all of the Eames furniture in the house.  Of particular note is that you described the Eames PSC-1 in a girl’s bedroom as a “marriage of chairs,” a “historic Eames chair;” “like a Japanese ceramic with staples in it.” Is this a common practice, for owners to marry different Eames chair components together?

PSC-1 Chair at the Miller House and Gardens (MH2010.41.1). The chair consists of a later base added to an earlier shell. Photo by Tricia Gilson, Copyright Eames Office and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

DO: I can’t say whether or not it is a common practice, but I am delighted when I see pieces that show signs of attention from their original owners.  It means that someone valued this piece enough to modify it to suit their needs.

Now, an important distinction should be made between this practice, what the original owners did, and what some dealers do.  I think when an antique dealer makes such changes in order to enhance the value of a piece, he is rendering it valueless.

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Philippe Petit, a French high wire artist, walks across a tightrope suspended between the World Trade Center's Twin Towers. New York, Aug. 7, 1974. AP Photo by Alan Welner.

When I was a kid my grandmother took me to visit her hundred-year-old aunt in a nursing home in Phoenix, Arizona. I was hopelessly bored for several days. Wandering around the facilities, I kept seeing a jacuzzi I wasn’t supposed to go into. (It was calling my name). Finally, overwhelmed by the boredom, I got the idea…wouldn’t it be funny to pretend to be dead at the bottom of the jacuzzi?

My grandmother was nearby when I quietly crept into the super hot water and sprawled out on the bottom of the jacuzzi. I timed my fake death perfectly because the next thing I saw from underwater was my grandmother leaning over the edge, and when I couldn’t hold my breathe anymore I shot out laughing….

I felt bad later.

The first time I saw Dawn Kasper playing dead it brought me back to that memory. Dawn was a scarecrow on the ground with a pitchfork sticking straight out of her chest. It was scary and hilarious. For years, Dawn could be spotted, dead, at art events all over Los Angeles, in the tradition of Harold and Maude, sprawled out in an elaborate shrine to some horrific accident. Holding court in death while all the socializing and partying swirled around her.

Dawn Kasper. "Murder At The Schindler House," 2003. Photograph of performance by Karl Haendel.

When I think about what I did to my grandmother (an act for which I’m still not forgiven), and what Dawn continues to do, I’m aware of the primal impulse to try something out and see what happens, to see what it might be like if someone thinks I’m dead or am about to die. There’s really nothing more exciting than to go right up to the precipice and look over. In that territory, however, we move away from the world of pure performance and into a territory which is complicated and challenged by the idea of a “prank.”

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I always wonder what to say when people ask me about the Circus of Books. My brothers and I enjoy sending each other Yelp reviews of my parents’ business. Like this one, for the store in West Hollywood:

“Okay, i will totally agree with Cee on the dirtaaay factor here, but I still have to give it 4 strong stars for the fact that this was the ONLY PLACE IN LA that carried Runaway Midget! It’s true, who knew such a title was SOOOO popular. I mean, I knew it kicked the ass, but wow, talk about hard to find!

I looked everywhere for this thing; Hustler, Pleasure Chest, Le Sex Shoppe, NADA! But yes, oh yes, after almost giving up I thought I would try this stank ass store and low and (I do mean low) and behold, tah dah, there it was.

So thank you Circus of Books. You made my twisted friend oh so very happy on his birthday!! Woot ”

The first in a long scroll of reviews (5 stars) came from none other than my dad :

“This store has been around since 1960. It has a wonderful selection of magazines, adult DVDs, toys, pipes, books, lubes & condoms and much more. It’s clean and well lit. Very pleasant to shop there.”

My parents own two stores in L.A. called Circus of Books,  one is in West Hollywood, the second, in Silverlake. They are similar in what they carry. Both stores have an Over 18 Section. The adult section in one store is separated by a beaded curtain and saloon doors at the other. When we were kids, my brothers and I enjoyed sneaking under the saloon doors in the West Hollywood store and running into the section with all the naked people. I always thought that every store had an Over 18 section.

The store in West Hollywood is where it all began.

My brothers and I were told never to mention the name of the store to anyone at school. Whenever teachers asked what my parents did, we told them “they own a bookstore.” “Which one?” “I don’t know….” Eventually, when we were too old to get away with being that ignorant, we were told to say “my parents are in real estate.” Or (my mother’s favorite): “my parents are CEOs.” The truth is that my parents own one of the oldest gay porn video distribution companies in the country, and a legendary bookstore that thrived during the heyday of gay 80′s and 90′s nightlife in West Hollywood. I’ve been told that their store was the epicenter of West Hollywood before West Hollywood was officially the boystown of L.A. The store’s parking lot was even called “Vaseline Alley;” eventually, my parents had to close the store during the hours of 2-4am because of all the “incidents.”

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