This Magic Moment: Diana Thater, Jeffrey Wells at the Santa Monica Museum of Art
Diana Thater, "Los Angeles Theatre Marquee," 35mm production still from "Between Science and Magic," 2010. Courtesy the artist.
The Oscars, aka prom night for Hollywood, are just around the corner! Who does The Academy love more: the noble savage, the noble soldier, or the noble soldier-turned-savage? Are you on the edge of your seat or what?
If you answered “or what” to that question, you might prefer to spend this Sunday at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, whose current exhibitions offer an excellent antidote to “movie magic.” Disassembling that particular phrase is the crux of preeminent video/film/installation artist Diana Thater’s newest work, Between Science and Magic. Thater’s installation (also on view across the country at David Zwirner Gallery until March 13) features a film of a magician repeatedly performing the iconic rabbit-in-a-hat trick, while Jeffrey Wells’s concurrent exhibition, Seeing While Seeing, represents a clever manifestation of Wells’s own distinctive approach to deconstructing parallel themes of illusion, trickery, and suspension of disbelief.
Jeffrey Wells, "Seeing While Seeing," installation view, 2010. Courtesy Santa Monica Museum of Art.
The low-tech trompe l’oeil animations in Wells’s installation are just as psychedelic and phantasmagoric as the high-end CGI phosphorescent forests in Avatar, and are far more lively and dimensional. As you enter the museum’s project room, the walls begin to dissolve before your eyes. With a series of subtle projections, Wells deftly liquifies two corners of the room into wiggly lines, while strange after-image-like rectangles appear and disappear around the two pictures that hang on adjacent walls. Even as you attempt to anchor yourself by reading the exhibition’s wall text, the letters begin to dance off the page, glowing and pulsating. The exit sign suspended at the top of the doorway echoes itself onto the nearby ceiling and opposite wall, as though reflecting itself onto a watery surface. The effect of the work is simultaneously disquieting and invigorating. Suddenly, the world around you feels malleable, porous, and oddly comical. The projectors are revealed, but it’s not entirely possible to determine exactly how Wells produces these strange effects – and you kind of don’t want to know. Wells, like a magician, has performed a trick that leaves his audience buoyant with pleasant bewilderment and inquisitiveness.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Wells’s mutating wall, Diana Thater addresses both the intersection and divergence of art and magic in her installation commissioned by the SMMoA. I must say that I find it a bit of a stretch to describe this particular work as an installation, although Thater herself would probably argue that projecting her film on the wall of the Santa Monica Museum constitutes it as such. I would disagree entirely with this classification were it not for the two speakers that amplify the mechanical whirring of her two film projectors. This effect ultimately allows the work to fill the vast space of SMMoA’s main gallery, rather than simply existing on a single plane. In addition, the piece is comprised of two separate films, though the projectors align to produce a symmetrically balanced split-screen effect.
If You Can Remember the ’60s, You Weren’t There
Ed Ruscha, "The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire," 1968, oil on canvas. Courtesy edruscha.com.
When I moved from Berkeley to Los Angeles five years ago, I thought I was done living in a town that was devoted to perpetually remembering the ’60s. But I soon discovered that Los Angeles also carries a mega-torch for that transformative decade. It’s easy to see why that era is appealing and continually inspiring these California cultural centers, respectively—it was during the 1960s that Berkeley distinguished itself as a hub of counter-cultural development and progressive action; meanwhile Los Angeles finally began to transcend its reputation as a vapid entertainment factory and, peeking out from under New York’s shadow, started to develop into prominent epicenter of contemporary art.
In her latest post, my co-columnist Catherine Wagley recounted how, during a recent panel discussion at LACMA, a young man asked what he should “take from” from art produced before his time. It just so happens that LACMA has good news for those of us who agree with Catherine’s conclusion that younger generations should make the most of things and “take as much as [they] possibly can” from the art of previous generations. This week, the 1960s art world became even easier to remember for those of us who weren’t really there (and even those of us who were). Two days before Steve Jobs introduced Apple’s slick Kindle rival, LACMA announced the creation of an online Reading Room–a virtual space in which the museum will present digital versions of LACMA’s publications. While the virtual Reading Room will eventually include more current books, their inaugural collection is exclusively comprised of out-of-print publications that focus on the Los Angeles art scene during the late 1960s (and late 1950s). Now, the iPad Generation can virtually experience catalogues from ten seminal exhibitions including Six Painters and the Object, Six More, Art in Los Angeles: Seventeen Artists in the Sixties, and Late Fifties at the Ferus.
Ed Moses, John Altoon, Billy Al Bengston, and Irving Blum, 1959. Claxton Photo, courtesy ferusgallery.com.
Speaking of which, the Ferus Gallery, which exhibited almost all of the artists currently featured in LACMA’s Reading Room, has been enjoying a major revival. Last weekend, in conjunction with Art Los Angeles Contemporary (yet another new LA Art Fair, this time held at the Pacific Design Center), New York dealers Tim Nye and Franklin Parrasch mounted an exhibition entitled Ferus Gallery: Greatest Hits Volume I, at the exact site of the original Ferus storefront gallery space at 736-A North La Cienega Boulevard, which has served as a tailor shop in the intervening decades. The exhibition featured Ferus veterans John Altoon, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Jay DeFeo, Llyn Foulkes, Craig Kauffman, Ed Kienholz, Roy Lictenstein, Ed Moses, Ken Price, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol. Word on the street is that Nye and Parrasch may take the show on the road, reprising it at The Armory Show this Spring.
Looking at Los Angeles: Pass the Deitch-ie
Mr. Deitch's Summery Treat 2006, Courtesy Saatchi Online Daily Magazine; LA's Museum of Contemporary Art, Courtesy Monica Almeida/The New York Times.
If you’re like me, you’ve already been inundated with a whole range of opinions on MOCA’s announcement this week, and it’s only Thursday. Whether they are ultimately booing or cheering, everyone and their mother seems to be up in arms about the board’s unanimous decision to hire Jeffrey Deitch as the new director of Los Angeles’s foremost contemporary art institution.
Deitch’s reputation as both a savvy business man and over-the-top sensationalist precede him. In various rhetorical feats, these two aspects of Deitch’s notorious career are being claimed by both sides of the argument, simultaneously leveraged as selling points by supporters while being cited by naysayers as evidence that MOCA will find itself hurtling, once again, toward catastrophe. Deitch himself told The New Yorker in 2007, “‘I helped create this whole thing of a professional art-advisory service, and also this fusion of art and entertainment…I’m not sure which one the old school despises more.’”
Deitch floating up and away from NYC, 2007. Courtesy The New Yorker.
It’s been nearly five years since I looked straight into the bespectacled eyes of Deitch. Against my better judgment, I was auditioning for his reality TV show ArtStar, amidst warnings from my New York friends that Deitch was a “polarizing figure.” As it turned out, my audition was unsuccessful and ultimately, so was the TV series. But even if nobody watched it, the show was encircled by countless heated debates, and the move was indeed polarizing. The main concern, of course, was if a reality TV show about art would further erode the problematically shrinking gap between intellectual innovation and populist entertainment.
This week, Bravo announced the details of a copycat art reality TV show, entitled Work of Art: The Next Great Artist (for which I may or may not have also auditioned). News that the show will feature art world heavyweights Simon de Pury, Jerry Saltz, and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn has surely dominated the art blogosphere this week. However, Deitch’s appointment by MOCA, coincidentally announced less than 24 hours later, has eclipsed a revival of the debate first sparked by ArtStar. While the Merchant of MOCA controversy traverses essentially the same territory as the reality art TV conundrum—i.e. the complicated intersection of creativity and commercialism—the stakes are much higher in the case of the former.
Top 10 of 2009: Entertainers Who Moonlight as Artists
Singer and sometime-painter Beyoncé, with husband Jay-Z, at Art Basel Miami. Courtesy BeyonceWorld.net
In the spirit of my Los Angeles beat, I present to you the most exciting art world interlopers to come out of Hollywood in 2009:
10. Sylvester Stallone is making a comeback, and I’m not talking about Rocky XIV. The media has been all over “Sly” since he presented a group of paintings at Art Basel Miami earlier this month. Though he has been painting for over 30 years, the show mounted by Gmurzynska Gallery marked first public exhibition of Stallone’s art, and his squiggle-encrusted canvases were snapped up to the tune of $50,000. Though he paints in his garage, the action star is no hobbyist. He told the Daily Mail, “‘I’m not just painting for painting’s sake. I want to be truthful.”
Sylvester Stallone poses with one of his paintings at Miami Basel, Dec. 2, 2009. Courtesy BigPicturesPhoto.com
9. Jane Seymour’s frontier-exploring days did not end when Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman went off the air back in 1998. Her pioneering has continued, as she has taken on writing, jewelry design, skin care, and most notably, painting. I always thought Dr. Quinn was kind of a rebel, and I wish that Seymour would channel that maverick spirit to bring some more edge to her Mary Cassatt knockoffs.
Jane Seymour at her easel, 2009. Courtesy LehighValleyLive.com
8. Starlet Kat Dennings has gained a following in the blogosphere, with her revealing, quirky musings on katdennings.com. Sharing personal thoughts publicly is not so unusual for her ilk of young actresses – the Mileys and Britneys all seem to embrace zany candor via Twitter and personal websites. But Dennings, unlike the others, also uses her blog as a platform to present drawings and collages crafted on MS Paint. While the images are a bit too charming for their own good, it’s difficult to resist the gravitational pull of Space Grits.
7. “When Art Imitates Life” is a new company whose business model is based completely on the phenomenon that art made by mainstream celebrities sells, and their mission is to help famous hip-hop artists create visual art. For its maiden voyage, W.A.I.L. has worked throughout 2009 with Wu Tang’s RZA to create a “massive” painting that commemorates the rapper’s 20 year music career. But RZA believes the painting’s message reaches much further, stating that, “It didn’t begin 20 years ago…more like 200 years ago…We’re about to rewrite and change history.” On January 1, 2010, the painting Victory or Death, will be “released,” and 360 prints will be made available to the public.
Looking at Los Angeles: Squeak Carnwath’s Unique Lexicon Channels the Universal
Squeak Carnwath, "Invisible," 2009. Oil and alkyd on canvas, 12" x 12". Courtesy Peter Mendenhall Gallery.
“Most of life is invisible to the naked eye,” proclaims Invisible, a painting in Squeak Carnwath’s new exhibition at Peter Mendenhall Gallery in Los Angeles. At first glance, it appears that the statement is scrawled in pencil onto notebook paper, but upon closer inspection, we see that Carnwath has formed the picture with only oil paint. As with all trompe l’oeil painting, upon discovering that we have been tricked by a pictorial sleight of hand, we find ourselves seduced into carefully examining its mechanics. In doing so, we may discover that–as with life itself–most of the happenings within Carnwath’s paintings are invisible to our naked eye. And–apologies readers– almost all of its happenings are invisible to the camera lens.
Squeak Carnwath, "New Research," 2009. Oil and alkyd on canvas over panel, 70" x 70". Courtesy Peter Mendenhall Gallery.
Ghostly marks hover beneath the filmy surface of each canvas, suspended at varying depths within countless luminous semi-transparent layers of paint. Observing the work becomes a process of active excavation, rather than passive looking. Even though more discernible words and images float to the glowing surface, they do not congeal into a single pictorial narrative, but force the viewer to assemble, bit by bit, his or her own meaning. Perhaps this demand for subjective interpretation accounts for why, according to curator Karen Tsujimoto, “the critical establishment has largely been occupied with the formalist and painterly aspects of [Carnwath’s] work, ignoring its iconographic features…”
Virginia Woolf, whom Carnwath identifies as a major influence, writes, in To the Lighthouse, “What is the meaning of life?…The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark…” During my days as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, I studied with Squeak Carnwath. In the same way that Carnwath’s paintings offer up discrete images and statements that are simultaneously obtuse and resonant, her teaching style is characterized by the offering of koan-like anecdotes and assertions about the nature of painting, and the role of the artist in contemporary society.
Looking at Los Angeles: The Public School
The Public School, 2009. Courtesy Telic Arts Exchange.
Gold Leafing. Sadism & Masochism. Practical Electro-Mechanisms. The Coming Insurrection. What do these topics have in common? Perhaps with some head-scratching we could ferret out a few threads, but here’s the one I’m going to address: they are all examples of courses offered by The Public School in Los Angeles. Not to be confused with Los Angeles’ public school system, The Public School operates under the auspices of Telic Arts Exchange, a nonprofit organization nestled in amongst a stretch of contemporary commercial galleries in LA’s Chinatown. The notions of public and private have been a hot topic in our Looking at Los Angeles posts, perhaps because there is more of the latter than the former, and the arenas that are demarcated as public often fail to deliver.
The Public School, however, is true to its name and functions as a site of porous, transmutable, open and democratic educational exchanges. Anybody can propose a class. Anybody can express interest in that class. Once a critical mass of people express interest, anybody can offer to teach the class. A small committee moderates the final steps of the process, including finding an instructor and scheduling the course. However, committee members typically step down after several months, making room for new committee members to join and keeping the system as open to transformation as possible. The result, as you can see from the extensive list of courses offered, is an incredibly varied selection of subjects, ranging from pragmatic to esoteric, concrete to abstract. Yet all classes share a collaborative spirit, owing, most likely, to the democratic method employed in actualizing each course.
Developed in early 2008 as an arena for discourse related to Telic’s exhibitions, The Public School began to grow immediately. Within months, Telic co-directors Sean Dockray and Fiona Whitton decided to discontinue Telic’s long-running program of exhibitions, performances, lectures, happenings, etc. and concentrate on The Public School. Since that time, affiliate public schools have been initiated in five other cities. Dockray answered my questions via email from Brussels, where the newest arm of The Public School opened last week.
Looking at Los Angeles: Westward Expansion
Florian Maier-Aichen, "Untitled (Dewatered)," 2009. C-print, 71 3/4 x 94 inches (182 x 239 cm framed). Courtesy the Artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, 303 Gallery, New York and Gagosian Gallery, London
In the previous Looking at Los Angeles post, Catherine Wagley explored the still-healing schism of East and West Germany through an Angelino lens. Meanwhile, the premiere last night of Season 5’s Fantasy episode offered us a glimpse of Los Angeles through the eyes of German-born artist Florian Maier-Aichen. Maier-Aichen explains that for him, the landscape of Los Angeles “has a great meaning [because] it’s the end of American pioneerism, it’s the end of the American West.”
Indeed, one could argue that Los Angeles has been an epicenter of creativity, fantasy, and innovation partly because it feels like a perpetual final frontier of the Wild West—the apex of lawless expansion, openness, and freedom. We may be short on some resources, but we’ve got space and we’re not afraid to use it. For a prime example, look to the gallery that discovered Maier-Aichen while he was still an MFA student at UCLA: Blum & Poe.
While galleries around the globe are shuttering or shrinking, native Angelinos Tim Blum and Jeff Poe just moved into a new 21,000-square foot venue–four times the size of their previous space. While they could have opted to open an outpost in another art world hotspot, the gallery decided to focus on expanding within their hometown. In fact, they ended up staying in their home neighborhood and found an ideal property directly across the street from their previous space in Culver City. Blum & Poe is known for being one of the first galleries to set up shop in the since-revitalized Culver City Arts District, which the New York Times backhandedly praised as a “nascent Chelsea” in 2005. When I asked Tim Blum what he liked about Culver City, he highlighted the same feeling of openness and expansiveness that Maier-Aichen alluded to in last night’s Art21 segment, referring to the area as appealingly “airy, flat, and fluid – just the opposite of congested.”
The Last Days of Pompeii in LA
Eleanor Antin, "The Death of Petronius" from "The Last Days of Pompeii," 2001. Chromogenic print, 46 5/8 x 94 5/8 inches. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.
The Los Angeles art world still has a lot of the laissez-faire approachability that endeared it back in the ’60s, which is why so many artists migrate to L.A. and never leave. Lily Simonson and Catherine Wagley, who both came to the West Coast as art students, have made the city home. Looking at Los Angeles is their new bi-weekly dispatch about art in the city they love. — Ed.
For our first dispatch from the LA art world, we visited the exhibition Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples, on view at LACMA until October 4. The show features sculptures, paintings, and tapestries that adorned the private villas of the Roman elite, and is accompanied by Eleanor Antin’s The Last Days of Pompeii (Season 2), a project that brings ancient decadence to SoCal. Thoughts about aged culture, contemporary art and the City of Angels prompted the following conversation:
Catherine Wagley: Here in LA, even authentic antiquity feels like faux antiquity. That’s why I avoid shows like Pompeii. I feel so limited as a viewer–I have no concept of Pompeii as a place that occupied a past era; instead, when I look at the artifacts on exhibit, I start thinking about decorations on the Getty’s fountains. But I actually enjoyed the LACMA show because it addresses this very conundrum.
Lily Simonson: Yes, there is virtually no history embodied anywhere in Los Angeles, and that is very unsettling. My neighborhood in Hollywood is overrun by European tourists taking pictures of the Walk of Fame and trying to get to the Hollywood Sign. Is that our Eiffel Tower? Yikes! Our history is all about cultural production and artifice, so everything begins to seem inauthentic or reproducible.
Anyway, I agree that LACMA gracefully embraced the incongruity of a show like this in Los Angeles, especially by juxtaposing the exhibition with Antin’s Pompeii series. In fact, the Antin piece at once underscored this cultural “mismatch” while highlighting the parallels between the opulent Hollywood Empire and the dangerously extravagant Romans. I’ve been thinking about the inclusion of the Art21-like video that documented Antin’s process making the Pompeii photographs. It made the work feel like a Hollywood production.
CW: Do you mean the video made Antin’s work seem like a Hollywood production? Or that it made those grand ancient sculptures look like they jumped off a Hollywood set? I was entranced by the latter possibility. What’s great about Antin’s Pompeii photos is that her production value is so high, yet the scenes are flawed. Actors seem bored, bodies have blemishes, the theatricality is transparent. And it’s the same with the sculptures on exhibit. They’re crafted with such gravitas and yet time has damaged them in a way that makes their theatricality seem naked.
Wodiczko Perforates Polish Pavilion with “Guests”
Krzysztof Wodiczko, "Goście / Guests," 2008-2009, video projection, project visualization. Photos courtesy of the Artist and Zachęta National Gallery of Art.
Entitled Goście / Guests, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s exhibition greets visitors to the Venice Biennale’s Polish Pavilion with the words of political theorist Hannah Arendt: “Refugees driven from country to country represent the avant-garde of their people.” Obviously, Arendt is not referring to “avant-garde” in the artspeak sense that you and I may be accustomed to. Rather, she suggests that the state of displacement is one that will be experienced by entire populations, rather than small persecuted groups. The proclamation comes from Arendt’s 1943 article, “We Refugees,” which calls for a resistance to assimilation and predicts the gradual dissolving of European borders and segregated nation-states. In the context of the Biennale, whose very structure upholds the model of the nation-state, the invocation of Arendt is bold, if not contentious.
Stepping inside of the Polish Pavilion, we can see Arendt’s views embodied, as the solid stone building is suddenly rendered porous and thin by Wodiczko’s trompe l’oeil installation. Projections create the illusion of frosted glass floor-to-ceiling windows on every wall. At first, it seems that you can observe goings-on outside the pavilion through these translucent windows. Within each arched “pane” you can see silhouettes of bodies engaged in various activities—speaking on cell phones, vacuuming, resting on suitcases. Voices, which reveal casual conversations that are all related to issues of immigration (i.e. unemployment, legalization documents, etc.), stir your analytical mind and the sensory illusion dissolves—but not completely. Your mind remains unsettled by mirage of surrounding humans.
While it would be easy to say that the characters in these tableaus—clearly immigrants—are guests, your own status as such is also underscored. As the viewer, you are most likely a guest of Venice, and certainly a guest of this space. In Wodiczo’s Art:21 segment, he describes engaging with memorials as “a vehicle through which the past and the future converge.” Though the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale functions much differently than a memorial, I believe that in quoting Hannah Arendt, Wodiczko ties the perpetual flux of today’s “stateless” immigrants to the mass displacement of Jews and other Europeans in WWII, and ultimately implicates the viewer in this ongoing lineage.
Biennale Breaks New Ground: Inaugurating the Internet Pavilion
AIDS-3D and Helga Wretman, "Spread Love," performance still from June 3 2009. Courtesy AIDS-3D.
There is no question that the Internet is transforming the way we experience art. A few weeks ago, Art21 tweeted that data released by the NEA indicates that visits to museums and galleries are declining, while more and more people are experiencing art through electronic media. Though the World Wide Web has the potential to bring art to larger and broader audiences, encountering an artwork virtually is significantly different than viewing the “original” in person. But what about work that is made specifically for the Internet?
This year marked the birth of the first Internet Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Conceived by Greek-born artist Miltos Manetas, it is the only pavilion in the 53rd International Art Exhibition that can be directly experienced by any reader of this blog, or almost any individual with online access. Generally classified as “Internet art,” the artworks featured in the Internet Pavilion engage with the World Wide Web in various ways, approaching it as a medium, an exhibition space, and a subject.
Oliver Laric, "Versions," still from digital video, 2009. Courtesy the Artist.
Although the Internet Pavilion has a “physical outlet” in Venice, this real world exhibition space seems to function for the Pavilion in the same way that a portfolio website might function for an artist working in more traditional media. During the Biennale’s opening week, the space (located at S.A.L.E, Magazzini del Sale, Zattere) housed a powerful performance by AIDS-3D and Helga Wretman, as well as various subversive happenings by filesharing pioneers/outlaws/activists The Pirate Bay. However, the works that are still on display—a new work by Aleksandra Domanović, a sculpture by architect Christian Wassman, and projected videos from the New Wave online exhibition–feel like shadows of their online selves. Rather than an autonomous exhibition, the embodiment of the Internet Pavilion in Venice serves as a signpost, directing attendees of the Biennale to…well, the Internet part of the Internet Pavilion.
Moreover, national pavilions in the Biennale do not simply exhibit works of art. Rather, each artist also serves a symbolic function, with the goal of embodying, in some way, his or her respective country as a whole. Likewise, Manetas chose the components of the Internet Pavilion as a vehicle to represent the Internet as an entity, a space, a reality. He expanded on this idea, and his overall vision for the Internet Pavilion, in an interview following the Biennale’s opening events in Venice.
Lily Simonson: In its present incarnation, the Internet Pavilion has many participants/ingredients: New Wave show, the Pirate Bay, AIDS-3D, Wikipedia Art Embassy, and more. How did you select the participating artists?
Miltos Manetas: I was thinking of the Chorus in the Greek Tragedy, the power of Chorus, the dynamics of its eventual complaints or its approval. Finally, I choose to let on stage—as the only actor—the Internet itself. In this sense, the Internet Pavilion is a monologue in front of a Chorus, the fragmented talk of the Internets while the artists, the architect, the composers, the designers, and the activists I invited are making noise in the background.
LS: Some of the rhetoric surrounding the Internet Pavilion likens the Internet to a country. Also in your essay, “Websites Are the Art of Our Times,” you write that the Internet is “a ’space,’ similar to the American Continent immediately after it was discovered…” Now in 2009, are we still just explorers of the Internet, or do you think that it is possible to be from the Internet, the way you can be from Greece or from the United States?
MM: Yes, now we can be “from the Internets”—that’s the point of the project. It was President Bush who coined that term: in his…imagination, the Internet multiplied exactly like the bread and the wine produced by Jesus in the desert. President Bush gave us a hint: we know now that the “Internets” are what these people fear. Sooner or later, their Cyclopic hate will break upon us; there will be laws and tech that will aim to censure the Net.
