I Am Not Neda
AFP/Getty Image.
I drove into a Westwood parking garage late on Monday and saw that the attendant had been crying. After an uneasy moment–I wasn’t sure where compassion and polite distance met in a situation like this–I asked, “Are you okay?” It’s such a disingenuous question but it seems to work when you want to say, “I give a damn.” The attendant half-smiled and averted her eyes in a way that made me think she wouldn’t answer. When she handed me my change, however, she said, “My mother died.” I don’t know what I expected, but that wasn’t it. “No!” I exclaimed. “You shouldn’t even be here.” I wish I hadn’t said that. How do I know where she should or shouldn’t have been? I don’t know anything about her or her pain. All I know is that, in general, death hurts.
Tuesday night, an event at UCLA’s Hammer Museum dealt with death in a way that was less discriminating than I would have liked. The Museum joined forces with PEN USA to present a reading titled, “I Am Neda.” The event promised to bring together dissident poets and to celebrate freedom fighters in Iran. I went because, like so many others, I found the video of Neda Agha-Soltan, the unknown makers of which just received a George Polk Award for Videography, emotionally searing. I also went because the Neda phenomenon seems so heavily visual that I wanted to see how poetry could claim her image.
The Neda video that went viral on June 20, 2009, showed a young woman, shot through the chest during a protest, dying with renegade grace. When she fell, her legs bent and flopped tom-boyishly, seemingly disregarding the mores of a propriety-obsessed society, and her loosely-fisted hands slowly collapsed to frame her blood streaked face. All of this made her an easy symbol for freedom. She was also young and attractive, so her photograph translated well to signs and posters that started appearing in the days following her death. International correspondents began calling her “the face of a revolution” and the “voice of freedom.” She was an icon before anyone actually knew who she was or what she had been doing on the day she died.
The Puppy Wars
Jeff Koons, "Girl with Dolphin and Monkey" (The Whitney Museum of American Art 75th Anniversary Photography Portfolio), 2006. Courtesy Whitney Museum
The eerily small, closely watched world of New York art criticism experienced some infighting earlier this month, following the publication of February’s The Brooklyn Rail. “I think that there are some things you shouldn’t do, and promoting Jeff Koons is one of them,” wrote Rail editor John Yau, picking a fight with critic Jerry Saltz, who had championed Koons (featured in Season Five of Art:21) as “the emblematic artist of the decade” in New York Magazine’s end-of-the-00s issue. Saltz had also declared Koons’s work emblematic of America—it’s “crowd-pleasing, heat-seeking, impeccably produced, polished, popular, expensive, and extroverted—while also being abrasive, creepily sexualized…” It’s this last part that Yau resented; he titled his editorial The Difference Between Saltz’s America and Mine. “In Saltz’s America,” he quipped, “Puppy is great public art and Tom Cruise is the good, handsome German with an eye patch, trying to save the world from Hitler.” Saltz retaliated via his Facebook page, calling Yau “dickish,” “incoherent,” “self-satisfied,” and “irrelevant.” It wasn’t a pretty moment for art writing.
Jerry Saltz. Courtesy Kevin Wick/Longview Photography.
John Yau, taken during the video taping of Add-Verse, 2003. Photo: Gloria Graham.
I care about what Yau and Saltz say — partly because I’m a writer, and knowing what other, more visible writers write is part of my job — but also because both of them have influenced me. Yau’s Corpse and Mirror gave me new entry into abstraction, while Saltz taught me that Charles Ray can be likable and that lush adjectives can join with austere conceptualism. A lot of other writers and artists care too. So much so that I’m noticeably late to comment on the Saltz-Yau tiff. Art21 contributor Hrag Vartanian “broke” the story; Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes spoke up for Yau; artist William Powhida invited the critics to debate at #class; C-Monster, art blogging’s straightest shooter, kept tabs on the squabble; poet Michael Leong wrote that Saltz hadn’t found “enough critical distance to say anything productive” (and received a retaliatory comment from Saltz). Some — Vartanian, Leong and Green in particular — did justice to the ethical problem Yau had with Saltz. But there’s another more frustrating ethical problem integral to all of this. This problem has little to do with either critic’s ultimate point. Those were actually reasonable: Saltz said that Koons embodied an era in American culture; Yau said Koons didn’t, and that saying so evidenced tunnel-vision. The problem has to do with how they went about arguing. Continue reading »
Hollis Frampton Revival
Hollis Frampton, "Nostalgia," 1973. Film still.
Last November, I attended a panel discussion, held at LACMA, on photographs of man-altered landscape. The images in question—coolly composed prints by Stephen Shore, Lewis Baltz, and Robert Adams, among others—all hailed from the 1970s. Of all the panelists, only Douglas Crimp had been a full-fledged adult when the images first debuted. The others, including MOCA curator Philipp Kaiser and LACMA’s Britt Salvesen, had still been in the thick of growing up.
The ages of the panelists didn’t seem to matter much until, during the Q&A, a poised student who introduced himself as “born in 1990” commented that, while the photographs appealed to him because of their obvious skillfulness, he wanted to know what someone his age was supposed to take from work created years before his birth. The panelists understandably stumbled—how do you convince someone to value a history he didn’t experience?
Hollis Frampton on "Screening Room with Robert Gardner," 1977.
A new screening series featuring the work of experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton brings this weird tension between the oldness and edginess of “historical” work into exciting focus. Frampton, who began his art-making career as a photographer, made most of his films in the 1960s and 1970s, toying with the physical medium of film as much as with its narrative potential (in Frampton’s Critical Mass, screened last Sunday, a couple quarrels continuously and the breaks, repetitions, and strange overlaps in the frames make human behavior seem absurdly circular–the medium and story are indistinguishable). He also gave incisively smart interviews, and wrote about the practices and ideas behind film-making in a voice that managed to be both theoretically acute and imaginatively candid.
A recent book of Frampton’s writings, collected and edited by Bruce Jenkins, has contributed to an upswing in Frampton enthusiasm over the past two years. During the same time, Los Angeles gallerist Leila Khastoo began considering a potential exhibition of Frampton’s photographs, many of which have never been seen. This proved more difficult than anticipated, since the photographs belonged to public institutions and acquiring them would require a fair amount of finagling. But the process brought Khastoo in contact with Adam Hyman, Executive Director of the Los Angeles Filmforum. Hyman had also been interested in Frampton for some time (Filmforum screened Frampton’s Magellan series ten years ago, but most of Frampton’s work has not been screened in L.A.) and the two decided to collaborate.
Looking At Los Angeles: Against The Deluge
Jeff Koons, "Puppy," June 6 - September 5, 2000, steel, soil, plants, Rockefeller Center
Looking back before moving forward is such an endearing habit—like brushing your teeth before breakfast—that it’s hard to resent the sweeping, often grandiloquent judgments that accompany the end of each year (last year, when Daniel Birnbaum called a documentary by Alexander Kluge “a labyrinth as absorbing as any great cultural work of the past century,” I was more than willing to embrace the hyperbolic praise as truth). But now, at the close of a decade in which art often moonlighted as a history project and calculated reticence often seemed more provocative than raw expression, looking back seems especially difficult because looking back is what much of the decade’s art tried to do.
Charged with the thorny task of reviewing ten years’ worth of art, critic Jerry Saltz came up with a strange combination of showmanship and doom. Writing in New York Magazine, he pinpointed Jeff Koons’s towering, endearingly overstuffed Puppy (the version that debuted at Rockefeller Center in June 2000) as the decade’s turning point, “an artifact from the last days of ‘the end of history.’” Appearing a year before 9/11, Koons’s sculpture was an over-ambitious attempt to make guilelessness monumental. It embodied a lighthearted moment of spectacle that would begin to lose its footing (even though as it continued to hold its own in art markets). Puppy, according to Saltz, “laid a beautiful, ghastly laurel wreath at our doorstep. If it could speak, it would say, ‘After me, the deluge.’”
But if Koons’s flower-coated monster represented the end of a certain kind of spectacle (and I think Saltz is right in suggesting that it did, though misguided, perhaps, in the esteem he awards it), then it’s the art that came after Puppy that deserves attention. The decade should belong to artists who saw the supposed deluge as a reason to stop trying to make history and start rephrasing, breaking apart, and rearranging their cultural heritage, freeing repressed fragments of meaning in hopes of informing an unknown future.
Collier Schorr, "Jens F.," 2005
Collier Schorr’s Jens F. project still stands out to me as an eloquent example of this sort of rephrasing. Schorr (Season 2) restaged Andrew Wyeth’s portraits of his muse Helga, placing an adolescent boy in feminine poses, subtly turning his body in ways that seemed difficult and unnatural. She treated appropriation, not as something transgressive, but as something tenderly introspective and revealing. Another example, Elad Lassry’s self-described post-picture generation work, is fugitive in that it liberally borrows from commercial iconography. But it’s professional in its sleek, minimal distillation of the ideologies latent in each image. For Lassry and for Schorr, wading through our lineage of cultural imagery isn’t just a prerequisite to moving forward; it’s actually a way of interacting with present and future.
Kristen Morgin, "Cello #3" (detail), unfired clay, wood, wire, 2001. Courtesy Marc Selwyn Fine Art.
Fittingly enough, Los Angeles has ended the decade with its galleries and museums brimming with art that looks back. At LACMA, a whole exhibition of landscape photography from 1975—New Topographics—has been rephrased. The motivation: simply acknowledging art’s “ongoing concern for man’s use of the land.” On the second floor of Steve Turner Contemporary, Amir Zaki collected antique images, spanning from 1870-1950, of Southern California’s evolution, curating a mini-visual history. At Blum & Poe, Drew Heitzler has remixed films from the ‘60s, removing the narrative arc in order to emphasize strange movements and interactions that plot once repressed.
When Nature Takes Over
William Christenberry, "Kudzu with Storm Cloud, near Akron, Alabama," 1981.
“It is the common mission of the entire mankind to curb global warming and save our planet.” So said China’s Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, addressing the Copenhagen Summit on December 18. Statements like these have become standard fare. Much of the talk about climate change and green living focuses on common missions and shared responsibility to nature. But, of course, what concerns us most is not preserving nature; it’s preserving ourselves. At times, all the biodegradable cups, energy saving strategies, and carbon emission mandates seem like sacrifices (sensible, worthwhile sacrifices, but sacrifices nonetheless) to the cosmos—a mysterious entity destined to outlast us, in one way or another, even if it changes beyond all recognition.
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, detail, "Atomic Age," 1955. Oil on board. Courtesy Kinz, Tillou + Feigen, New York. Quote from Reverend Howard Finster's sermon cards.
Last year, the New Museum hosted a timely and much-hyped exhibition called After Nature. Presented as “a feverish examination of an extinct world that strangely resembles our own,” the exhibition was a melancholic attempt to face the fear that nature will eventually take over everything we create. A disillusioned romanticism characterized many of the show’s landscapes: Eugene Von Bruenchenhein’s Atomic Age depicted an ornate, reptilian volcano; Berlinde De Bruyckere’s Robin V depicted a frail body merging with brush. Peter Schjeldahl saw After Nature’s disillusionment as self-suffocating, writing in the New Yorker, “Desperate to eschew narcissisms of money and fame, along with academically entrenched ideology, the artists operate at psychological depths at which social attitudes can’t coalesce.”
At least one artist in After Nature managed to sidestep the malaise, however. William Christenberry, a veteran landscape photographer who grew up in pre-Civil Rights Alabama, leveled more common-sense observations at the crisis of nature in art. One of Christenberry’s contributions to the exhibit portrays an old building completely reclaimed by its surroundings. Christenberry has been visiting this building for years, and each photograph he makes of it has the same title: Building with False Brick Siding, Warsaw, Alabama. In the first photograph, taken in 1974, the false brick is fully visible, though the house certainly doesn’t look lived in and the siding has begun to peel off up near the roof. The vines growing up the right corner of the house seem almost tasteful, like green accents.
William Christenberry, "Building with False Brick Siding, Warsaw, Alabama (1974)."
William Christenberry, "Building with False Brick Siding, Warsaw, Alabama (1982)."
Guts Get Out of Hand
Tareq and Michaele Salahi with Joe Biden.
On 7 AM on Thanksgiving morning, I was sitting on my aunt’s couch in Atlanta, watching news coverage about the “uninvited, well dressed Virginia couple” that had crashed Obama’s dinner party the night before. I was thinking about how gutsy you have to be to think you can outsmart the Secret Service—or maybe it’s not guts at all, just senselessness. The funny thing is that it’s often almost impossible to tell the difference between what’s gutsy and what’s senseless.
Act Up, "Silence=Death," 1986. Silence=Death Project, Copy of original from the collection of the New Museum, New York. Photo: Katya Kallsen.
Before going to Atlanta for the holiday, I visited friends in Cambridge, MA, and went to see ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993, curated by Harvard’s Helen Molesworth and graduate student Claire Grace. The exhibit chronicles key years of AIDS activism through posters, footage, and hours worth of video interviews (the transcripts of which can be read here). When I first walked into the Carpenter Center gallery, clowns with garish makeup were projected on the wall closest to the door. They were prancing around on urban streets and, not long into the video, filmed by Diva TV correspondents, a police van rolled in. Officers started to arrest the less-than-congenial clowns, another instance in which guts could have been confused with craziness. I knew, because of the context, that the clowns had an important cause behind their behavior—a cause so dire that their outlandishness seemed completely proportionate–and so it was the police that struck me as excessive. But, to someone unaware of the circumstances, the clown’s obstinacy must have seemed over-the-top.
2 weeks ago, while still in Los Angeles, I attended a Sunday afternoon walk-through of LACE’s I Feel Different, an exhibition full of gutsy work that makes sense on an emotional level but often seems rationally absurd, even tasteless. Early on in the tour, curator Jennifer Doyle explained the origins of the exhibition title: Doyle had been visiting her sister when her petite niece had an unmatchable tantrum and let loose cries of agony and anger that didn’t seem like they possibly could have come from such a small body. When Doyle’s sister put the little girl to bed, the girl held a blanket up to her chin and said, “I feel different.” That sentence seemed perfect.
Landscape Revisited
Bernd and Hilla Becher. "Harry E. Colliery Coal Breaker, Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania," 1974. 8 Gelatin Silver Prints, 16 x 12 in. each. Courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
“Life is boring,” said Matthew Coolidge, talking about how most of us live in the uneventful “periods between the monuments.” Coolidge, the director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, an institute that explores often-overlooked landscapes, has made a career out of documenting everything “boring” and in-between—helipads, hidden oil wells, mile markers. He spoke at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Saturday as part of a day-long symposium. Called “What’s at Stake? New Topographics and the Man-Altered Landscape,” the symposium accompanied LACMA’s current exhibition of neutral, mostly black-and-white landscape photographs (though every landscape is marked by man-made structures) from the 1970s. These photographs render the boring parts of the US topography in a way that seems to presciently foreshadow today’s general wariness toward monumentality and obsession with sustainability.
Joe Deal, "Untitled View (Albuquerque)," Gelatin Silver Print, 1974. Courtesy George Eastman House.
LACMA’s New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape is actually the restaging of an earlier exhibition by the same name. The first New Topographics appeared at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, in 1975. Like its restaging, it included images by Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr. None of these photographers aggrandized their geographical subjects. Instead, their intentionally composed photographs were coolly barren in ways that almost seemed radical.
Continue reading »
Public Art, Private Viewing
Marilyn Minter, "Green Pink Caviar," 2009.
When I heard that Marilyn Minter’s video, Green Pink Caviar, would be showing on the Mezzanine of The Standard Hotel, I imagined something exquisite: maybe the projection would appear on a balcony that curved around the hotel’s lounge, visible to those below and above it. Mezzanine is, after all, the French rendition of something Italian, a word that slides romantically off the tongue and conjures images of wrap-around railings. I was sure seeing Minter on the Mezzanine would be a singular experience. And it was, just not the kind I expected.
Apparently, when The Standard says “Mezzanine,” it more or less means “hallway.” Projected on a back wall, a few yards away from two gold-doored elevators hotel guests seem to use sparingly, Minter’s video played at a slight angle and the hotel’s mood music drowned its soft soundtrack. Usually, Minter’s work makes glamor visceral and slightly repulsive, but in a subliminal way. In this dark hallway, glamor became visceral in the grainy, horror movie sense. The long-tongued model in the video–who, filmed from below a glass surface, licks up colorful syrups–looked like an over-sexed alien, the type David Lynch might think up.
But what bothered me most was that I was supposed to be experiencing a public art project. While I stood there watching, no public joined me and the few people who passed—mainly men in their early 30s, one of them wearing the an L.A. Lakers shirt with silver embossing—didn’t even seemed to notice the video.
Los Angeles, like many other cities, has welcomed an influx of public video and billboard art over the last few years. Many of us within the art community have celebrated this influx as noble, as if art is fighting back against the commercial videos and digital billboards that saturate urban neighborhoods. Lately, however, I’ve found myself questioning that nobility.
Looking at Los Angeles: Berlin Wall Falls in L.A.
Days before the Berlin Wall is torn down, Germans gather at it, 1989. Photographer unknown.
Tuesday night, former U.S. Ambassador Richard Barkley called East Berlin a “profoundly boring place,” drab and depressing compared to other places he’d been. His callous observation loosely framed a panel discussion at UCLA’s Hammer Museum, in which Barkley, German diplomat Michael Ott, and dramaturge Uta Schorlemmer remembered the fall of the Berlin Wall. All three of them had lived in Berlin (Ott in the West, Barkley and Schorlemmer in the East), and all three had felt the exuberance that swelled in the autumn of 1989.
To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall, the Wende Museum has arranged to rebuild the wall in Los Angeles. Called “The Wall Across Wilshire,” the new structure loosely separates East and West L.A., though it’s too far from the city’s actual cultural battle lines to make anything more than a symbolic statement. It goes up in the evening of November 8 and ceremonially falls at midnight on November 9 (with such quick turnaround, the obstruction of Wilshire, a Los Angeles thoroughfare, won’t cause much frustration). A second structure, “The Wall Along Wilshire,” which includes a Border Tower from the original Berlin Wall, will run alongside the street from October 17 - November 14.
The Wende Museum organized Tuesday’s panel at the Hammer as a nuanced, interactive introduction to the Berlin Wall’s history. And what the three panelists told us, albeit indirectly, was indeed nuanced: they fleshed out a legacy more visual than political, a story full of unresolved colors and symbols.
Professionalized Fantasy
Florian Maier-Aichen, "Above June Lake," 2005, C-print
If I were to name art’s King and Queen of sleek professionalism, Florian Maier-Aichen and Marilyn Minter would take the crowns. They compliment each other, Maier-Aichen bringing out Minter’s reliance on textured terrain and Minter reminding us that Maier-Aichen works within a bodily lexicon. But the artists belong together because they both obfuscate fact expertly. They produce such seductive pictures of the world (tongues swooshing amidst jewels, landscapes crusted in blood-red soil) that my first reaction is to guilelessly fall into the illusion they’ve fashioned. Yet the illusion is so shallow—really, Maier-Aichen and Minter work only with surfaces—that I can’t fall far. It’s a funny paradox: fantasies have to be carefully manufactured and refined before they become fantastic. Then once presented, glossily produced spin-offs on human desire supposedly let us access our raw, innermost selves, as if looking into what we want leads us to who we are.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t usually work that way. Fantasy is notoriously disinterested in authenticity, which is precisely why I find the story behind Marilyn Minter’s Green Pink Caviar captivating. Apparently (I didn’t hear this account first-hand, but I’ve heard it often enough to embrace it), Minter had been thinking about painting with her tongue when she called up Ford Modeling Agency—who else would you call?—and asked for a long-tongued, full-lipped model. Ford sent Louisa Taadou, a slender girl from Marseilles whose lips are the heaviest feature on her otherwise wispy face. Louisa used her tongue, framed by carefully painted lips, to lick colorful pastries off of a glass surface while a camera watched from below.
Marilyn Minter, "Green Pink Caviar," 2009
This whole sequence of events evidences capitalism at its most abstract. Minter has an idea, she decides to execute it, and she calls an associate to request the services she needs. Her associate sends over the proper material—a girl who, upon understanding the task at hand, skillfully wills her anatomy to perform. No one questions the props, in this case the meringue and crumbs, lipstick and glass surface; all parties simply do their job. The resulting video and images, called Green Pink Caviar (a title that reveals little about Minter), do the professionalism that enabled them proud. The self-contained works of art co-opt the culturally determined standards of desirability on which they rely (fashion, confections, cosmetics). Cheeks and chins, flattened against glass, play into the rhythm of the crumbs and filling that move across the frame, looking too primordial to be edible. The lips, less hungry than obedient, do their job with requisite relish. Minter gets so close to her subject that it loses its identity and retains only sensuousness.
Marilyn Minter, "Green Pink Caviar," 2009
Here, it would be easy to turn to a conversation about feminism and objectification (a conversation certainly worth having in relation to Minter), but I’m more interested in what it means to fabricate fantasy through expertly co-opting particularities, which is where Florian Maier-Aichen comes in.
