Botticelli, Titian, and Beyond: Masterpieces of Italian Painting From Glasgow Museums

(Santa Barbara Museum of Art) We can thank the quaint Victorian belief in the improving power of art for the astutely assembled collection of Italian, Dutch, and Flemish art that Archibald McLellan bequeathed to the city of Glasgow upon his death in 1854. The bequest of 510 paintings came with a price. McLellan, who had made his money as a coachbuilder and then extended his interest to real estate development, had died insolvent, and the city had to come up with the funds to pay off his debts before it could get a hold of the paintings. Some on the Town Council questioned whether this was worth it, one councilman going so far as to dismiss the collection as rubbish and another expressing reservations about the nude figures in some of the pictures. In the end, however, more discerning heads prevailed with the aid of testimony from expert evaluators. The city ponied up and the collection passed into its hands along with the buildings that McLellan had intended to house it. In the subsequent century, the McLellan collection became a nucleus that attracted other bequests and enabled Glasgow Museums to amass holdings that encompassed a broad range of European art.

“Botticelli, Titian, and Beyond,” which opens February 8 and runs through May 3, highlights the 500-year range and exquisite quality of the Museums’ Italian holdings, a sizeable proportion of were part of McLellan’s legacy.

Visitors are likely to congregate most heavily to the first of the centenary sections of this exhibition, the one devoted to late 15th-century works by High Renaissance masters such as Botticelli, Signorelli, Bellini, and others. They will not be disappointed. Almost every item in this section is a gem and one that has unlikely ever been seen outside Glasgow since it was acquired. The Botticelli Annunciation shows the angel Gabriel bursting into the picture from the left edge to deliver the news to Mary that she is to become the mother of the Savior. In Botticelli’s inspired composition, the figures of the angel and Mary are dwarfed by the architectural space that encloses them and lean toward each other at the opposite ends of an imaginary arc that simultaneously unites (overarches) the two arched lobes of the picture and counterpoints the polyphony of archways whose traversal by the angel and the golden rays that enter with him strongly suggest an evocation of divine insemination. The Signorelli Lamentation over the Dead Christ (one of several Lamentations painted by the artist) besides being chromatic tour de force manages to transform the frenzy of grief into a rhythmic tableau populated by elegant, richly dressed figures worthy of strutting a runway in Milan. In contrast, the Bellini Virgin and Child is a paragon of understated piety in which the care lavished on the subtle modelling of the figures (and their arrangement into a strict pyramidal composition that nonetheless remains perfectly natural) is re-enacted in the delicacy with which the Virgin’s hands prop up the standing baby.

Titian’s Christ and the Adultress, is the best-known work in the collection and reveals that at the age of 20 the Venetian master was already a virtuoso of color and the depiction of finery. Sometime after this painting was finished, it was was cropped and the figure of a standing man gazing back at the viewer was excised. Part of that figure turned up for sale in 1971 in the form of a picture titled Head of a Man, was purchased by Glasgow Museums, and is displayed alongside the canvas from which it was removed.

McLellan’s collecting did suffer from limitations. Although he made it a point to try and amass representative works from each succeeding school of Italian painting, the works of 17th-century stars like Guido Reni and Caravaggio were out of his financial reach. He did try to acquire “Caravaggesque” works, such as The Virgin and Child with St. Anne by Antiveduto Gramatica, who was briefly Caravaggio’s teacher but only adopted the his former pupil’s manner after Caravaggio’s premature death left an unsatisfied demand for his work that could be exploited by pastiches. The Gramatica, however, merely serves to illustrate that what makes Caravaggio’s paintings indelibly memorable is not reducible to the formal devices Caravaggio employed. The real standouts in the 17th-century section are, therefore, a pair of Salvator Rosa landscapes illustrating New Testament themes, St. John the Baptist Revealing Christ to the Disciples and St. John the Baptist Baptizing Christ in the Jordan. As Professor Peter Humfrey notes in the handsome catalogue that accompanies this exhibition, despite the religious titles of these works (which were added after McLellan’s bequest), it is the wild, somber landscapes with their jagged rocks, splintered tree trunks, and billowing luminous clouds set in velvety blue predawn skies that impress.

As the exhibition moves forward into the 18th- and 19th- centuries, the quality of the work becomes more uneven. By the time of the Rococo and the invention of the aptly named galant style in music, fashion, and the visual arts, Italian painting was entering its long eclipse by its French counterpart. And yet, as a gorgeous and unusually large View of San Giorgio Maggiore by Francesco Guardi demonstrates, Italy in the 18th-century could still produce painters offering fresh takes on established genres.

By the end of the century, however, Italian painting had become, in Prof. Humfrey’s words, “undeniably provincial.” He lays the blame on the disappearance of traditional sources of patronage (the church and the aristocracy) without the emergence of a wealthy mercantile middle class to pick up the slack.

What this exhibition as a whole offers is an opportunity to relish the fusion of formal and theatrical invention that for 500 years enabled Italian painting to breathe new life into the retelling of the well-worn narratives, religious and mythological, that in the pre-modern era assured Europeans of all ranks of a dwelling in a fixed order of things. And yet, it would be the impetuous and obstinate curiosity of another Italian, Galileo Galilei, which would shake the foundations of that fixed order and eventually cause it to fall.

Published: Artscene, February 2015

World War I: War of Images, Images of War

(Getty Center, Los Angeles) On the centennial of the Great War, the Getty Research Center is mounting an exhibition of images and artifacts that contrast the propaganda of the time with first-hand accounts and renderings of battlefield experiences. Drawn largely from the Center’s Special Collections but supplemented by loans, the exhibit is, perhaps, most notable for its inclusion of a good number of graphic and other works by artists who participated in or were close to the conflict. Contributions by George Grosz, Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fernand Leger, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Natalia Goncharova, Kasimir Malevich, Max Beckmann and others are included. Also on view are photographs, trench art made by soldiers, illustrations from satirical journals, and correspondence from the front. The never-before-displayed diary of Italian Futurist (and enthusiastic war supporter) Umberto Boccioni yields details of the Futurist artist’s introduction to combat in October 1915 as a volunteer in the short-lived Lombard Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists and Motorists, in which he served alongside Marinetti and other Futurists. Less than a year later, after being drafted into the regular army, Boccioni would die from a fall from a horse.

In all, 150 objects are displayed in the exhibit.

One of the declared premises of “World War I: War of Images, Images of War”  is that the European powers involved in the conflict took to representing their enemies as threats not merely to themselves but to European civilization in general. The suggestion seems to be that the war propaganda of the time aimed at displacing blame for the evils of a recently consolidated modernity–industrial regimentation, the breakdown of traditional social mores, the relentless drive to expand both markets and sources of cheap labor through imperial conquest–onto caricatures of the national character of enemy states. Thus a cover of the German weekly Simplicissimus from October 1914 depicted a pith-helmeted Englishman sliding off a globe awash in red. The visual pun on the color used by map makers to indicate areas under the control of the British Empire circumvents the fact that Germany was itself one of several European powers competing for colonial possessions.

This stratagem of transforming the enemy into a lightning rod for the free-floating anxieties of the moment remains an indispensable tool of contemporary propaganda.  It should, therefore, not be difficult for contemporary audiences to discover in some of the inflammatory images on view resonances with recent mass media campaigns to demonize foreign leaders targeted for regime change. In this area, as in so many others, the Great War, far from being “the war that will end war” as H.G. Wells forecast at its outbreak, provided a template for the conduct of succeeding conflicts.

The response of the artists of the time was far from uniform.

The inhuman beauty of the technologies of war mesmerized not only the Futurists but also the likes of Léger, whose glimpse of the breech of a 75 millimeter artillery piece glinting in the sunlight propelled him toward a style of figuration emphasizing the robotic mechanicity of the body engulfed in the geometric structures and spaces of modern cities.

For others–like Dix, Beckmann, Kirchner, and Grosz–the war was an apocalyptic event that demolished the façade of European civilization to reveal its barbarous underpinnings.

One ruefully turns away from the works of the latter with the thought that it was in the repetitive compulsion to imaginatively revisit the horrors of war that Freud located the death drive.

Published: Artscene, November 2014

Seismic Shift

(UCR/California Museum of Photography, Riverside) The full title of this exhibition, “Seismic Shift: Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal and California Landscape Photography, 1944-1984,” telegraphs the thesis that three catalog essays and the evidence supplied by 143 photographs by 43 photographers (including Ansel Adams, Weston père et fils, Minor White, Robert Adams, John Divola, Wynn Bullock, Catherine Wagner, Laurie Brown, William A. Garnett and others in addition to Baltz and Deal) flesh out.

It is the story of a break, at once geographical and paradigmatic, between two generations of California photographers. The older generation, based in Northern California and counting Ansel Adams and Edward Weston as its luminaries, had envisioned nature in terms deriving from a Romantic conception of nature as the embodiment of pristine authenticity that contrasted with the grubby shabbiness of the man-made world and the corrupting social rituals necessitated by commerce. In the wildernesses he photographed, Adams found intimations of the eternal. In LA’s urban sprawl, he saw only a “hell we are building here on earth.” Weston, for his part, shunned almost all social contact, preferring instead the solitude of Point Lobos. For Minor White, who revered Weston, the photography of nature and, specifically, the ocean, was a means toward finding visible form for internal states.

The younger artists did not so much go seeking for an alternative vision as were forced into it by their encounter with a landscape increasingly disrupted by suburban and industrial developments so vast as to rival the geologic events that had originally formed the landscape. Recollecting his experience of this postwar California setting, Baltz would remark

I was living in Monterey, a place where the classic photographers—the Westons, Wynn Bullock and Ansel Adams—came for a privileged view of nature. But my daily life very rarely took me to Point Lobos, or Yosemite; it took me to shopping centers, and gas stations and all the other unhealthy growth that flourished beside the highway. It was a landscape that no one else had much interest in looking at. Other than me.

In the late sixties, Baltz while enrolled in the MA program at Claremont began photographing tract houses. By 1971, John Divola was cataloging San Fernando Valley homes and their owners. As Susan Laxton notes in one of the exhibition’s catalog essays, the shift in photographic interest from sublime to degraded (or manufactured) nature coincided with the Land art movement and the dysphoric or deadpan documentation of urban sites and their infrastructure produced by Robert Smithson, Dan Graham, and Ed Ruscha.

Initially, however, the California photographers who in 1975 would be included in the group-defining exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York (where Deal met Baltz while the former was working there as a security guard) tended to think of their subject matter as architecture not landscape. This is perhaps indicative of the attachment to the transcendental that the notion of landscape still retained at that point thanks to the prestige of the older generation of photographers and the resistance against admitting into the landscape category the desublimated hybrid space of real estate.

The insight that finally forced the came to Deal while he was at the University of New Mexico doing working on his MA during the 1973-74 academic year.

Asked to contribute an image for a poster, he went looking for a rock in the desert and climbed a hillside overlooking Albuquerque.

… and it just startled me that here, spread before me, was what I’d been looking for in photographing suburbia: that it wasn’t just one house, and my interest wasn’t in architecture—that I had been going the wrong direction with it, trying to photograph the buildings. I wanted to photograph the landscape, and the buildings became part of the landscape.

To their depiction of this processed landscape, Deal and Baltz brought a radical, horizonless flatness that as exhibition organizer Colin Westerbeck notes made “the vast open, spaces of the Western landscape in earlier photography alarmingly claustrophobic. Their photography documented, truly, the closing of the frontier.”
Deal would later demurely state that he had had no intention of upending the hallowed legacy of the earlier landscapists. Baltz, on the other hand, would push his forensic examination of ecocidal land use to the point where the absenting of the transcendent generates something like a sublime void. In light of this, the question posed by Jason Weems in his catalog essay—“Is it not likely that these photographers’ goals in focusing on the everyday were not strident critique, but instead the development of an understanding, necessarily incomplete, of its possibilities?”—seems misplaced. The possibilities of the everyday disclosed in the work of the New Topographics seem to be entirely aesthetic possibilities un-affirmative of their referent. The everyday in the photographs of Deal, Baltz, Frank Gohlke, and John Schott is as notable for what it does not contain as for what it does. The general impression is of a construction site in perpetual flux where the instantaneity with which houses, offices, and malls appear suggests both the ephemerality of these structures and that of whatever social and familial connection they support.

Robert Adams got closer to the truth of the New Topographics when he noted why it was no longer possible to approach landscape as Ansel Adams had done:

Scenic grandeur is today sometimes painful. The beautiful places to which we journey for inspiration surprise us by the melancholy they can induce. . . . Unspoiled places sadden us because they are, in an important sense, no longer true.

It was less a question of uncovering new possibilities as it was of letting go of possibilities that no longer existed.

Published: Artscene, October 2011

MOCA’s First 30 Years

The sprawling two-part exhibition of MOCA’s permanent collection on view at MOCA Grand Avenue and The Geffen Contemporary is notable for the diversity of work it incorporates into one show—everything from a Mondrian to a paint turd left by Paul McCarthy. Of course, there are also plenty of omissions, but they don’t take away from the sheer breadth of the material on display. Whether such curatorial broad-mindedness can be sustained or whether it will narrow into mere Broad-mindedness now that Eli Broad’s millions are the only ladder out of the financial hole the institution dug for itself is a topic much speculated upon over the past year. It is not a discussion I want to add to. More interesting to me is how the pieces on display relate to others and how they function as cultural symptoms.

To be sure, the collection has gaps, omissions, and redundancies that reveal a combination of curatorial and regional biases and the limitations of the collectors who’ve donated to the collection. Everybody I know has a list of these things. Some of what’s missing pops in your head when you think about the historical lineage of what’s on display. If you’re looking at Zoe Leonard’s crotch shots from the early ‘90s displayed alongside a couple of Kippenberger’s portraits in a bad boy/bad girl pairing, you might wonder where the “cunt art” produced by Judy Chicago and other feminist art pioneers here in California disappeared to. And following that line of thought, you might also wonder why Mary Kelly (“cunt art’s” conceptual nemesis) is not in the show. Both Chicago and Kelly, incidentally, were in MOCA’s 2007 WACK show but that show did not depend exclusively on MOCA’s holdings. Consider that, and you begin to appreciate why a contemporary art museum cannot simply rotate its collection but has to have the financial and curatorial wherewithal to collaborate with other institutions and collectors to stage thematic and historical exhibitions whose scope exceeds the limitations of any one institution.

As far as omissions go, it’s important to keep in mind that even this “largest-ever installation of MOCA’s permanent collection” does not display everything the museum owns. Still, anyone with a reasonable acquaintance with what’s been going on in Los Angeles in the last couple of decades will notice one or several omissions. Off the top of my head, I can name several who are not exactly unknowns in this city: Manuel Ocampo, Liz Craft, John Knight, Kim Jones, Meg Cranston, Tom Lawson, Tony Oursler, Skip Arnold, Monica Prieto, Lita Albuquerque …

But let’s consider what’s there.

One of the nicer moments going through the MOCA Grand Avenue installation is catching a whiff of chocolate as you approach what you discover to be a re-creation of Ed Ruscha’s Chocolate Room (1970). The work debuted in the summer of 1970 at the 35th Venice Biennale in Italy, and originally consisted of 360 sheets of paper silk-screened with chocolate and applied to the interior walls of the gallery space. The story goes that the work attracted anti–Vietnam war protesters who etched anti-war slogans into the chocolate-covered surfaces of the prints so that the installation became a spontaneous anti-war monument. It turns out that MOCA’s ownership of the piece means that it reprints the paper panels lining the room every time the piece is exhibited. In theory, this means that the public could be encouraged or at least allowed to reenact the public intervention that with the artist’s blessing transformed the Biennale installation into collaboration between him and his audience. However, when I visited, which was the same week that President Obama was giving his war is peace Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, the room was pristine and there were security guards keeping a sharp eye on visitors. In 1970, I suspect that the presence of the guards would not have prevented a less docile public from leaving a comment or two linking Afghanistan with Vietnam. As it is, the room might as well be a chamber in a Pharaonic tomb: the price of preservation within a museum has been the work’s mummification. Its function has been reduced to a purely art historical one, grandfathering Kelly Walker’s use of silkscreened chocolate in his work.

Contextualization sometimes works backwards. For example, Richard Prince’s Untitled (White Car Hood) (1992), displayed at the Geffen gestures toward the car-culture machismo that informed the material practices of the “Ferus Studs” who defined the Finish Fetish evident in the work of Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, and John McCracken. Because of the chronological arrangement of the artworks on display, Irwin, Kauffman and McCracken are all at the Grand Street building. You have to make the connection in your head. Prince’s Marlboro Man in the meantime has come to seem prescient of the cowboy posturing that replaced American statesmanship after 9/11.

Against the backdrop of events since and specifically the invasion and occupation of two distant countries by a rampaging American military, Paul McCarthy’s performances now seem like attempts to alert an indifferent world to the savagery that hides under the Disneyfied façade of American culture. The Tokyo Santa from 1999 featured in the Geffen building installation is a cross between Pere Ubu and Freddie Kruger. The association of this figure with that of the hyperphallicized expressive artist gifting the world with his effusions suggests that artist bad boys invert rather than dismantle the authority of their fascist fathers. I don’t think McCarthy ever gets beyond that bind. And in a sense the art world has been complicit in making sure he doesn’t get beyond it, since McCarthy’s productivity as an artist is of a piece with his compulsion to repeat.

This imperative to ceaselessly produce stuff and fill the large empty spaces of institutions like MOCA is for me one of the most oppressive features of contemporary art. Jim Shaw, who is himself one of its victims (and who has a number of his drawings included in the show), once referred to it in an installation by the clinical phrase Horror Vacui, a fear of empty spaces.

I cannot help but think that this horror that drives artists to incessant production is the apprehension that the time of art is over. Duchamp announced as much with his ready-mades but we’ve pretended that those were just provocations. We’ve read Benjamin on the death of the aura and technology’s reduction of art to distraction. But the aura of the artwork , which was its connection to the sacred, couldn’t be allowed to evaporate because, strangely enough, art cannot be commodified without some remnant of the sacred remaining associated with it, the paradox being that we need art to have something like a “soul” in order to trade it at a price above what mere goods fetch.

The last purchase that art had on something resembling spirituality was through the much-abused notion of criticality. That too is now used up thanks to the postmodernist conflation of critique and complicity. And despite attempts to reinvent the idea of community through subcultural affiliation (see Catherine Opie’s Self Portrait (1993)), community would seem to require a foundation that exceeds the atomizing power of capital, which ceaselessly uproots and disperses people.

The signs are that MOCA’s financial difficulties can eventually be overcome. The larger question of what art’s purpose might be beyond amusing jaded rich people or contributing a veneer of sophistication to a city that has long billed itself as the entertainment capital of the world will remain. Bill Viola’s installation Room for St. John of the Cross (1983) at least has the temerity to suggest that in Bob Dylan’s words, even art “gotta serve somebody.”

Published: Artscene, January 2010

Lost and Found

He hated the new generation with all the energy in him. They were frightful clodhoppers who seemed to find it necessary to talk and laugh boisterously in restaurants and cafés. They jostled you on sidewalks without begging pardon. They pushed the wheels of their perambulators against your legs, without even apologizing.
—J.K. Huysmans, À rebours

Back-to-back visits to the Peter Saul retrospective at the Orange County Museum of Art and the Sterling Ruby show at MOCA at the Pacific Design Center got me wondering if grief might not be the real taboo in contemporary art. Transgression and irony are staples. But in a country where antidepressants are the most prescribed drugs, the representation of loss seems more problematic.

On the occasion of Saul’s inclusion in MOCA’s “Hand-Painted Pop,” back in 1993, Michael Duncan wrote of “wacky canvases like Bathroom Sex Murder (1961) [that] leap out of the Ab-Ex era with the taboo-toppling energy of contemporary bad-boy art.” The show at Orange County fleshes out that glimpse of Saul’s early work with a range of paintings from throughout his career, and reveals the sharp stylistic shift that took place in his work at the end of the ‘60s. If his early work was by the standards of the day, lurid and vulgar, it was, nonetheless, still rooted in the painterly language of Abstract Expressionism. Its real, poke-in-the-eye vulgarity emerged when Saul dispensed with the sensuality of the earlier paint handling in favor of a pitiless three-dimensional clarity. The results were sharply-delineated, acid-hued cartoons, the unpleasantness of whose subject matter is magnified by the unpleasantness of the facture, a precise, obsessive stipling derived from pulp illustration.

A few choice samples: Ethel Rosenberg in the Electric Chair (1987) depicts Rosenberg at the moment of electrocution with flames gushing out of her eyes. Subway 1 (1979) is a Rube Goldberg-like sequence of wounding and mutilation. The Execution of O.J. (1996) shows the sweating accused murderer strapped to a chair and being injected with battery acid as his heart leaps out of his chest in the form of an enormous, Johnny Cochcran–headed erection encased in a hot dog bun. A pair of breasts (Nicole’s?) depend from the underside of the bun as the famous missing knife, still in O.J.’s hand, gashes the cleavage. The more recent Bush at Abu Ghraib (2007) shows the grinning frat boy prez sticking his finger into a prisoner whose face has been literally rearranged into a mess of gristle and bullet-pierced flesh. The overall effect of these paintings recalls the Beat-inflected, jivey sadism of James Ellroy.

Young male artist friends who’ve seen the Saul show tend to affect the standard hipster response of cool bemusement. Christopher Knight professed to discover in the Abu Ghraib picture “a haunted meditation on the depths of human cruelty.” I beg to differ. Cruelty for Saul is merely the propulsive force of cartoon slapstick. It is a dehistoricized and depoliticized cruelty, the universal constant of mayhem. Judging from this show, history from the fall of Constantinople to Abu Ghraib is a marathon cartoon festival. Biff! Pow! Wham! Splat! Thud!

Despite the provocative nature of his subject matter, Saul is a resolutely antipolitical artist. And, I imagine, this is the source of his work’s hipster appeal: that implicit smirk behind every image of horror, that smirk that invites the viewer to enjoy the spectacle and smirk in return.

This is Saul’s shortcoming as an artist and it is a shortcoming that eclipses his considerable strength as a painter. A truly great artist like Goya could unflinchingly take in and record the spectacle of human ignorance and barbarism without condescension. Goya does not smirk. That is why when he does offer a smirk, on the banner that is held aloft in The Burial of the Sardine (1812-19) the effect is unsettling: because it is not the artist smirking, reassuring us that we are sharing a joke. It is the picture itself, a thing, that gazes back, petrifying the voyeurism aroused by the spectacle of debauchery, and through that immobilization, opening up a space for melancholy, which is the beginning of compassion. Goya, too, like Saul, eschews political moralizing and prescriptions. He believes in reason but he knows reason is weak when pitted against fear and the violence of demagogue-induced paranoia. But Goya registers loss. The perhaps sleeping figure in the famous etching from the Capricios, a self-portrait of the artist, is at the same time a credible representation of a man in grief. Goya’s integrity as an artist consisted in his willingness to own up to grief and to struggle to give it unsentimental representation.

Sterling Ruby’s show at MOCA at the PDC takes for its theme a subject that has preoccupied the artist for several years: the convergence of carceral architecture and what he calls Minimalism, which for him means the antisepticism and blankness of corporate architecture in general, in opposition to which Ruby has elaborated an aesthetic of amorphousness and defilement patterned after the territorial marking of taggers, gangs, and prisoners.

To that end, he filled the MOCA space with scuffed and inscribed formica-faced architectonic forms, wax-like “stalagmites” made by repeated pourings of hotly colored polyurethane, stuffed fabric teardrops hung from the corners of the skylights (explicitly anthropomorphized into prisoners’ eyes), grungy ceramics, and a variety of collages, marbled papers, and splashy or spray-painted abstract paintings and drawings plastered on the walls. The title of the show, “Supermax 2008,” refers to high-tech maximum security prisons like the notorious Pelican Bay facility. But one could also suppose that “Supermax” doubles as a moniker for Ruby’s appetite for sensory overload. To hammer home the Foucaldean underpinnings of his work, Ruby included a collage that drew an explicit comparison between the architecture of the Pacific Design Center and that of Pelican Bay.

This is all well and good but in taking in the objects that Ruby has stuffed into the MOCA space, you quickly realize that what you’re looking at is Abstract Expressionism repurposed as institutional critique. The drips, the organicism, the defilement of surfaces, the graffiti, the smearing, the constant invocation of the “primitive” (be it through references to cave painting or prison culture) in binary opposition to the sterile and the authoritarian—all these are tropes that go back to Ab Ex and, indeed, to an even older Romanticism.

The artist’s resourcefulness as regards sources and materials is admirable. Where others similarly drawn to gestural abstraction might settle for oil paint, Ruby will do Twomblyesque drawings with nail polish. He will use unrecognizable sections of images from slasher movies to make grid collages. He notices the readymade abstractions on the plywood barriers that paintball players use for cover. But in the end, this manic collecting and the equally manic intensity of production leave no opening for a deeper consideration of what all this activity covers up: the depression that anyone willing to acknowledge the hollowness of modernity must risk. T.J. Clarke has referred to the evacuation of meaning from the modern world as “the disenchantment of the world” and has nimbly mapped how modernism conflictedly responded to this desecration, either by withdrawal into aestheticism (art for art’s sake) or by the seemingly masochistic glorification of the machine (Futurism and Constructivism). In Clarke’s formulation, modernism is an attempted flight from the present (either into the primitive past or the utopian future) that results in an oscillation between expressionism and a disavowal of subjectivity, fascism and communism, organicism and geometry, none of which can extract their followers from the technocratic nightmare.

Ruby’s oppositional logic remains caught up the movement of this oscillatory modernism. The terms have been slightly altered: the enemy is Minimalism, the righteous primitives are criminals. But the product, shorn of its Foucauldean pretensions, is a return to an aesthetic that predates Minimalism, namely, gestural abstraction with hints of surrealism. The need to resort to the rhetoric of transgression to facilitate the making of the work and its positive reception and the foregrounding of sheer quantity as a defining aspect of Ruby’s practice suggest that the anxiety that underlies his work is the anxiety of coming up empty.

How might an artist confront this anxiety more directly? Perhaps, by turning to grief instead of running away from it, by acknowledging emptiness instead of trying to plug it up, by gnawing on the bitter sweetness of nostalgia without wallowing in it, by allowing loss, which is inseparable from the experience of time, to register.

The group show “Against the Grain” at LACE yielded some examples of what can be accomplished along these lines. Curated by Christopher Russell, the exhibition looks back at another exhibition from LACE’s history, “Against Nature: A Group Show of Work by Homosexual Men (1988)” that was curated by Dennis Cooper and Richard Hawkins. To quote from the press release:

Cooper and Hawkins’ original show looked at decadent seclusion and syphilitic deterioration as modes of social rebellion and was informed by J.K. Huysmans’ novel À Rebours. This exhibition exposed the margins of the already marginalized world of gay men. The curators translated Huysmans through the lens of AIDS in a politically and socially conservative era, and displayed rich, decadent and inherently morbid work. They reacted against aesthetics that seemed polemically overwrought, privileging activism over the individual.

Russell’s show is billed as an attempt to look beyond AIDS activism and engage the gothic and the decadent in contemporary art.

Wary of the half-baked esotericism that the term “gothic” often denotes, I was a little apprehensive of what I would run into at LACE. The ploddingly mannerist paintings in this show tended to justify my wariness. other works proved engaging. Bruce Kennon’s reproduction of an exquisite Bruce Hainley review of Richard Hawkins in Artforum was remarkable for the sheer economy with which it teased out, made use of, and multiplied the erotic implications of appropriation. Robert Fontenot yellow silk procession banner embroidered with the last words spoken by President Garfield’s killer could have come out straight from Des Esseintes’s collection of curiosities.

However, in light of the thoughts stirred up by Sterling Ruby’s work, it was John Knuth’s Building (2008) that left the deepest impression. The work is a collection of shabby weathered-and-warped cardboard skyscraper scale models set down in one corner of the room. Where the walls meet behind the cluster of pigeon-shit-stained doll-house sized buildings, a small pile of salt preserves the desiccated remains of several rats. Without any of the overblown rhetoric that accompanies the Ruby installation, Building deflates the hollow phallicism that props up the modern dream of hygiene and control and, conjuring up the ultimate flaccidity via the dead bodies of the rats, allows the melancholy beauty of the arrangement to suggest that it is not striving but letting be and letting go that yield the most meaningful gestures.

Published: Artscene, September 2008

YaYa Chou and Katy Bowen

(Gallery Revisited, Silver Lake) Kitsch is empty calories for the soul: the saccharine junk food capitalism sells you as a substitute for community. The prototypical example is Disneyland, at whose entrance you pass through a Norman Rockwell-fantasy of a small town that the homogenizing ethos of corporate behemoths like Disney long ago made obsolete. Not that Disney invented kitsch. More than a decade before Disneyland opened, Tod Hackett, the artist protagonist in Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust, walks the streets of Hollywood observing office workers dressed as tennis players and shabby apartments done up as mosques, and introduces the reader to a vision of Los Angeles as an infernal theme park. (In my movie version, the artist hero would be Llyn Foulkes.)

Since the advent of pop, the fashionable response to kitsch has been irony. To me irony is like that recently newsworthy python that burst open while trying to swallow an alligator. As a mode of cultural critique, irony has proved that there is no way to put quotation marks around an entire culture from within that culture. Kitsch is all around us and Pop irony is now no more (if it ever was more) than a digestive aid that enables the hip to consume the unhip.

So ubiquitous is kitsch that to exclude any association with it at this point is to remove oneself from practically all contact with anything resembling a shared culture. For an artist that can be fatal (in a literal sense if you’re Mark Rothko). Another option, of course, is to revel in the stuff. And this is precisely what a number of younger artists, whose cultural memories are unburdened by nostalgia for anything that predated music videos, have been doing. Welcome to bubblegum art.

Or in the case of YaYa Chou, who is part of a two-woman show at Gallery Revisited titled “Consumerism and Product #1,” to gummi bear art. Chou’s most noteworthy object to date has been a chandelier made entirely of gummi bears. The other works in the show are a great deal more traditional, to the point of almost being Victorian. They consist of various types of appliqué work on small canvases. A representative work, Rosie, is an 18-inch tondo painted tea rose pink and embellished with painted roses and flowers whose petals are false fingernails. In the center, there is a fabric appliqué of a baby bear examining its paws. The whole thing has the exquisiteness of a keepsake. If there’s irony intended, it is subtle to the point of invisibility.

Katy Bowen’s work, also in the show, bears a superficial resemblance to Chou’s insofar as Bowen, like Chou, also uses hobbyist craft materials which she introduces into her paint-by-numbers-like landscapes in the form of felt-lined pits and pompom-stuffed occlusions that are at once abstract and vaguely suggestive of lesions. These disruptions mirror the outlines of the dominant shapes in the paintings but this simple, not to say simple-minded, relationship only accentuates their foreignness. The overall effect is of paintings afflicted with pastel acne. The artist thus managers to achieve deliberately the dorky hideousness that hobbyists usually only perpetrate unwittingly. Is this yet another exercise in affirming that bad taste is the new good taste? In which case, Bowen would just be another hipster grooving on kitsch. I think there’s more to it than that. I think Bowen is constructing a fictional hobbyist persona that reveals kitsch as the end product of trying to own the sublime.

This becomes clearer when these paintings are viewed in the context of the artist’s Quonset Hut Visitors Center Gift Shop project, which consists of an entire line of merchandise themed to a fictional historic site. Since the time Claes Oldenburg opened up his “store” of refabricated everyday objects, the store/gallery analogy (the complement of the factory/studio analogy associated with Warhol) has served Pop artists as a means for reframing everyday objects as art and art itself as commodity. Bowen’s tourist-trap gift store sharpens the analogy, drawing a parallel between art dealing and tourism, both of which exploit the belief that the sublime is consumable and collectable. In that sense, Bowen reveals something about kitsch that is easy to overlook. Kitsch is not a type of object. It is not a Precious Moments figurine or a tole painting. It is the degradation that attends all commodification. The crafty (in both senses) hideousness of her work is a representation of this degradation, so “normal” in a world where everything and everyone is merchandise, that it takes a poke in the eye to draw attention to it. But let’s not forget that in the context of the art world, a poke in the eye is also effective marketing.

Published: Artscene, April 2006

NEURO

(Art Center College of Design, Pasadena) There is something blissfully innocent about an exhibition that sets out to explore the potential for cross-fertilization between art and science—and specifically the intersection between installation art and a frontier area of science dealing with machines that simulate the neurophysiology of living organisms as a first step in the development of artificial intelligence—but excludes consideration of the sinister possibilities of the technology on display. And yet, given the context of the invasive reality of what the government calls the War on Terror and what others are unfortunate enough to experience more directly as the terror of war, NEURO unwittingly provides metaphors for the post-9/11 emergence of the national security state.

Two instances in particular seem to stand out. A collaborative installation by Ken Goldberg, Pietro Perona, John Bender and others provocatively entitled Infiltrate (but which nonetheless remains mute about the longstanding association of infiltration with insurgency and counterinsurgency) consists of six koi (five gold, one black) swimming in a tank under constant surveillance by several tracking cameras. The cameras relay their data to a computer that generates a video projection of the five gold koi as ellipsoidal forms, the idea being that these forms represent the gold koi as seen by the black fish. The stated intention is to grant the viewer the simultaneous experiences of being “inside and outside Nature,” which to me, at least, seems like an extraordinarily simple-minded notion to wed to such sophisticated technology. Instead, the installation evokes the Orwellian connection between surveillance and control, and by extension, the fact that despite his highly evolved technical abilities, the human animal remains as instinctually primitive and obsessed with dominance as any of the “lower” life forms.

Christian Möller and Pietro Perona’s installation, titled Cheese, uses face recognition technology to rate smiles according to sincerity. This type of lie detection technology may soon become part of the standard equipment of security screening. (Remember the Voigt-Kampff test in Bladerunner?) At which point, your boss will be able to measure your real enthusiasm for your job and the government will be able to ferret out your true level of patriotism and civic compliance. This is the closest NEURO comes to an overt consideration of the social implications of smart technology.

Probably the best way to approach this exhibition is to think of it more in terms of science center display than art show. NEURO is in fact the product of collaboration between Art Center and Caltech and one of the installations, by Jennifer Steinkamp, is on view at Caltech’s Athenaeum lobby. The Caltech people involved in the project are attached to something called the Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering (CNSE), which does research on machines that will “interact with, learn from, and adapt to their environment with a flexibility equivalent to that of living creatures.” Inevitably, that brings to mind the fictional scientists in Terminator who created the sentient Skynet computer and unwittingly touched off the apocalypse. The question that this raises for me is: if Hollywood and the TV networks can come up with narratives (think X-Files) that imaginatively explore the implications of futuristic technology, why can’t artists? Maybe they can. Once they get beyond the awe of the technology at their disposal.

Published: An earlier version appeared in Artscene, April 2003

David Lloyd and Tony DeLap

(Peter Blake Gallery, Laguna Beach) As genres go, abstraction has had to struggle with a peculiar internal conflict in that it started life as part of a romantic, modernist project to eradicate the very idea of genre and ended up illustrating the transformation of modernism itself into a genre. With the fervor of people who’ve been released from a bad marriage and have discovered true love, the early abstractionists celebrated their emancipation from painting’s representational obligations by claiming to have discovered the El Dorado of the sublime. Later on the abstract expressionists injected some good old American manly vigor into what might otherwise have remained an effete European endeavor and turned the whole thing into a pissing contest.

By the time they ran dry, the expectation of heroic results had become such an engrained part of the meaning of abstraction that it was difficult to imagine abstraction continuing outside the heroic narrative. In the intervening period, the notion of abstraction as genre has elicited a variety of responses, ranging from outright denial to camp parody.

When, several years ago, I encountered David Lloyd’s work for the first time I was dazzled by its theatricality and baffled by what seemed like a combination of hyperdecorative excess and emotional vacancy. At that time, his paintings were aggressive, blobby, tutti-frutti constructions replete with frothy eruptions of polyurethane foam that took over the gallery space and turned it into a trippy, surrealist jungle. In retrospect, I recognize that what I perceived as an absence of affect in the work was actually the absence of the kind of ponderous existential drama that one has come to expect from anything even distantly related to abstract expressionism. Instead, having dispensed with the psychological baggage, Lloyd was gleefully exploring abstraction as sensory indulgence: painting as a rave drug.

Since then, having proved that he can pile on the thrills and spills with the dexterity of a painterly Spielberg, the artist has returned to something more closely resembling painting as we know it. For awhile he was doing paintings that hovered indecisively between straightforward biomorphism and surrealist cartooning.

The ten new paintings here seem tame in comparison to what Lloyd was doing a few years back. They’re also, for the most part rather small. One gets the sense that he’s playing out a dialectic between three-dimensional excess and flat simplicity to see what he can achieve in the way of presence when he deliberately limits himself to purely painterly means. The pictorial spaces in the new paintings are quite shallow. Everything seems to take place on the surface. A recurring motif that recalls Albers’s square-within-a-square paintings is played off in several of Lloyd’s smaller paintings against shapes that are occasionally suggestive of marine life and others that look like cloisonned tetrahedral truss frames. The largest, most pictorially ambitious, and successful painting, The Story Continues, has an ochre-ish, thinly pigmented, atmospheric background reminiscent of NASA photographs of the Sahara seen from space. This serves as a foil for flat fields of pink and red, and several patterned, candy-colored shapes strewn about the surface. The effect is of a collage rendered as a painting. As the most perverse and chromatically aggressive of the paintings in this show it is also the one painting that establishes the clearest link between the old and new body of work. The story does indeed continue.

Simultaneous with the Lloyd show, the gallery has on display a selection of new Tony DeLap paintings and mostly older drawings. The paintings are actually highly sophisticated constructions that manage to extract a wealth of subtle detail from beguilingly simple geometric shapes.

Published: Artscene, May 2000

New York/New York

(Apex Fine Art, West Hollywood) David Barenholtz, who opened Apex—L.A.’s latest gallery devoted to photography—last October, says the idea for New York, New York came after it struck him that the one thing most of the diverse photographs in his collection shared was an association with the city that for most of America’s history has defined the meaning of urban and urbane. The show comprises 40 black-and-white photographs of the city, or subjects related to it, snapped by a dozen artists of varied renown over the period from the ’30s to the present.

Of course, Barenholtz calling New York the city “you love or love to hate” betrays a New Yorker’s conceit. For a variety of reasons the subject of New York increasingly evokes indifference rather than passion. One reason is simply economic. In the post-industrial, information-driven scheme of things New York no longer looms as large as it did in the era of the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. Another is that New York’s cultural monopoly depended on a popular equation of sophistication with a patrician taste for literature and high art-and New York’s unchallenged status as the arbiter of such taste.

The contemporary obsession, however, is with celebrity rather than sophistication, and celebrity is a product manufactured by Hollywood (as the Economist noted last year in a feature that detailed the shift in cultural heft from east to west, every episode of Seinfeld, that most New Yorkian of TV sitcoms, was shot in a studio in Burbank).

Ironically, New York’s own contribution to its diminished cultural stature has been its unrelenting effort to mythify itself, an effort so successful at transforming the image of the city into a cliché that it has inspired the inevitable Vegas homage in the form of the New York-New York Hotel & Casino, which, among other things, promises the visitor “a classic Manhattan skyline with 12 New York-style skyscrapers, a Central Park-themed casino and a 150-foot replica of the Statue of Liberty.”

Many of the images on display in this show, particularly the vintage ones (by Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Andreas Feininger, and Don Hunstein can be seen as potent visual aids to this process of New York’s self-fictionalization. Feininger’s beautifully composed, almost pictorial studies of the city’s skyline are dazzling, Gershwinesque rhapsodies. A diagonally-composed Bourke-White, an aerial view of the city grid with a silvery DC-4 passing over the Chrysler building, is an image of New York as the epitome of graceful modernity. It takes Edward Clark’s picture of children skipping rope in Harlem and Carl Mydans’s view of a narrowly confined “sandhog” working on the Queens/Midtown tunnel to bring us back down to earth.

The more recent images don’t possess quite the same punch. Roger Corman’s picture of a buff Peter Boal frozen in a dancer’s leap in front of the Unisphere is also emotionally arrested, a tribute to narcissism and little else. Rivka Katvan’s backstage images (her photographs adorn the set of the current Broadway hit Closer) are more interesting but although they were shot in New York, their connection with the city is attenuated by the universality of their subject. That’s not a bad thing. It suggests that even New York can sometimes be just another city.

Published: ArtScene, May 1999

Amnesia

It’s unfortunate that this show comes packaged in the kind of liberal guilt-tripping rhetoric that demands attention and sympathy for work as a redress for its former real or alleged exclusion, a demand that in my case, at least, induces avoidance instead of interest.

Amnesia is built on the conceit that contemporary South American (as opposed to Latin American) art has been paid scant attention in the United States and that this amounts to a collective cultural denial resembling the psychically repressive act of forgetting. As conceits go, this one overreaches but it fits right in the sentimental liberal narrative that casts Latin America as the perpetually abused victim of a brutish Uncle Sam—a narrative that fails to note that the most lethal of Yankee cultural exports has been the liberal notion of individual rights and the disdain toward inherited cultural values that it engenders.

Fortunately “Amnesia”—which grouped together the works of 16 artists from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela—had more to offer than rhetoric. For one thing it fleshed out the cursory sampling of work by some of the artists in the current show that Christopher Grimes put together as part of last year’s L.A. International biennial. And it also offered some startling and beautifully conceived meditations on the themes of dissociation and loss.

Of these, the most immediate in its impact was the Brazilian Tunga’s photographic records of a 1987 seashore performance titled Seeding Mermaids, which focused on the artist’s use of a long-haired rubber cast of his own head. One image showed the severed head with its closed eyes and its seaweed-like mass of nylon hair partially submerged in a tide pool, evoking a state of amniotic bliss while simultaneously bringing to mind pre-Raphaelite images of the drowned Ophelia. Another photograph showed the artist twirling the head by its hair at the edge of the sea in preparation to casting it away—either as a means of eradicating the evidence of a homicide (the fate of many of the Argentinean “disappeared”) or as a more symbolic means of drowning a troublesome memory.

Creepier still were Alfredo Ramirez’s (Venezuela) objects, which evinced a level of dissociation suggestive of a complete withdrawal of affect. In the L.A. International show, Ramirez exhibited a bifurcated metal spine attached to an electrical power source that induced it to arc noisily at regular intervals. His contributions to Amnesia consisted of another metal spine, this time suspended from the ceiling and attached to a refrigeration unit, slowly accumulating a porcelain-like coating of ice; a pneumatically activated, sparking, kissing machine probably inspired by Magritte’s couple swathed in embrace; and a video of a kiss endoscopically shot from within the mouth of one of the participants.

The most delicate, nuanced work was contributed by Oscar Munoz (Colombia), whose distorted and distressed self-portraits seemed like exercises in photographic expressionism when exhibited in the L.A. International but which Amnesia reveals to be artifacts of a process-intensive meditation on the painful fragility and ephemerality of identity. It turns out that the images are what remain after the artist has dusted charcoal through a silkscreen onto the surface of water-filled glass trays and allowed the water to slowly evaporate. In another installation, titled Aliento (1996-7), Munoz paid homage to the Argentinean “disappeared” by silk-screening the surface of a dozen polished metal disks with the obituary-sized snapshots of the victims of the military junta’s terror. Because he used grease as his medium (a material with a gruesome association to the Holocaust) the images remained invisible until the viewer breathed on them, at which point the faces briefly came into view and quickly faded away. Like fingerprints, they remained on the surface of the steel as accusatory traces awaiting forensic disinterment.

While between them the works of these three artists gives some idea of the variety of approaches encapsulated by Amnesia, they also reveal the erasure of anything resembling a regional cultural identity—a brand of amnesia this show seemed reluctant to address. The one exception was Sergio Vega’s The Sermon of the Birds (1998), which featured a talking statue of St. Francis preaching in Spanish to a pair of stuffed parrots nailed to the branch of a fake tree. In this instance the English-speaking viewer was as uncomprehending as the dead birds.

Published: Art & Text, November 1998