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

Phil Stern

(Fahey/Klein, West Hollywood) Phil Stern is now entering his mid-90s, with a career that stretches back to the Depression era. His initiation into professional photography was via the lurid Police Gazette, today largely remembered for its association with Weegee. After World War II broke out, he enlisted in the Army as a combat photographer, was shipped to Tunisia and Italy, wounded twice and awarded a Purple Heart. Back in the States, he went to work in Hollywood, where he gained access to movie sets and recording studios and hung out with the likes of the Rat Pack, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, and Gary Cooper. His photographs appeared in LIFE, Look, and Colliers but also on the covers of jazz albums by Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Art Tatum, Dizzy Gillespie and numerous others.

Stern’s career was built on access to showbiz big names, with all the opportunities and limitations that came with access. His specialty was what he called the “human element,” which translated into, as David Friend put it in a Vanity Fair article, images of “his subjects’ hat-cocked complicity in the act of posing off-guard or suave or downright down-home.” Readers of weeklies and glossies lapped it up, eager to discover in these portraits their imaginary alter egos, the stars who are “like us” and yet, for some ineffable reason, remain distantly elevated. This essentially narcissistic captivation can turn on a dime: adulation of the stars goes hand in hand with a lust for spectacles of their degradation. Well aware of this, today’s reality shows and gossip media have streamlined the process of catering to both inclinations simultaneously.

Stern’s photos harken back to a time when discretion left room for fantasy. To the extent that they inspire nostalgia, it’s not so much for the subjects around which this nostalgia condenses as for the reserve that used to nourish the viewer’s desire.

The pictures on display at Fahey/Klein are a group of 60-by-40-inch enlargements that go by the collective title of “Big Shots.” They include portraits of Sammy Davis Jr., James Dean, Frank Sinatra, John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Anita Ekberg, and others.

The announcement sent out by the gallery pairs two of the images on the basis of what I have to assume is the way they both capture a fleeting moment of illumination. One is of Sinatra offering a light to JFK at the latter’s inauguration party; the other is of Anita Ekberg extending her hand to shield her face from a bright light that the photographer at the right edge of the frame is adjusting. The contrasting gendered roles light plays in these two photographs is striking.

In the Sinatra/JFK pic, we have a semi-conspiratorial exchange of fire between two formally attired males, one of whom we know to have served as infatuated procurer to the other. For me, the strangest element in the composition is the print pattern (drawn from Northwest Coast aboriginal sources) on the curtain behind the two men.

In the Ekberg pic, she sits at a round table sectioned by the lower edge of the photograph while the standing man floods her diagonally with a spermatic effulgence issuing from an incandescent bulb. Strapless-gowned and looking at the camera, she extends her arm toward the light in a gesture of momentary annoyance that for the viewer serves to focus attention on the pendant heft of her breasts. One cannot help but recall here the endless delight taken by European art in the fetching poses struck by nude females who attracted the immodest attentions of the gods, one of whom, Danaë, was the recipient of a literal golden shower, a veritable money shot from no less a big shot than Zeus himself.

A picture of director Robert Aldrich on a ladder scanning a massive screen plastered with portfolio shots of young women eager to become pinups brings to mind the sunlit melancholy that pervades Nathaniel West’s account in Day of the Locust of the demonic lure of Hollywood fame.

The 1953 image of a doe-eyed Marilyn blooming like a night flower out of the darkness is arresting in part because her gaze seems directed at an impassive Jack Benny, graceful hand touching his face almost in self-caress, whose profile enters the frame from the right and who seems to affect an Olympian indifference to her presence. One is inclined to attribute morbid meaning to the conjunction, but that may very well be the product of hindsight. What is impeccable is the timing. Many of Stern’s pictures are a little too transparent in their collusion between photographer and subject to arouse more than admiration for their composition. This one, though no doubt as posed as any other, retains mystery.

Published: Artscene, February 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

Marco Brambillia

(SMMoA) Freud writes somewhere, apropos specifically of the case of a young gambler, that addictions are displaced forms of masturbation that combine mechanically repetitive rituals of stimulation with manual play, the latter evident in the shuffling of cards and the throwing of dice, and in the case of video games, which Freud did not live to see, carpal-tunnel-inducing bouts of joysticking. (Ah, what Freud would have made of joysticks!) The difference between video games and internet porn, both of which claim substantial and probably overlapping numbers of addicts, is that porn represents the same things over and over while video games promise with each new level intensifying degrees of scopophiliac ecstasy. What is symptomatic in both is the triumph of visuality over tactility.

Simply put, they are manifestations of a culture that has lost touch. Tactility depends on proximity. Visuality is mobilized by and interposes distance. The triumph of the gaze coincides with capital’s destruction of community and its production of a mass of atomized individuals all competing with each other for jobs and recognition in a world in which both are increasingly transient. With distance and anonymity come panoptical surveillance and industrialized voyeurism in the shape of porn and, coincidentally, the extinction of that quaint thing formerly called the soul, subsequently discovered to be a demographic. The video game returns tactility fused with visuality, a virtual tactility that touches nothing and no one but is enclosed and isolated in the phantasmagorical interactivity of the game machine.

Marco Brambillia’s video installation Half Life (2002), probably the most conceptually engaging of the works on display at this video wizard’s miniretrospective at SMMoA, achieves its poignancy by turning the video game screen into a two-way mirror through which Brambilla’s audience can gaze at the faces of gamers absorbed in the carnage of Counter-Strike. On separate walls, Brambilla juxtaposes projections of game-generated terrorists and terrorist-exterminating commandos that become the gamers’ alter egos for the length of the game and quite possibly beyond. (When shown at the New Museum in 2003, HalfLife included a re-enactment of a Counter-Strike player stabbing another outside a Garden Grove cyber-café.) In light of the recent media slavering over the dispatching by a video-linked SEAL Team Six of an unarmed Bin Laden (a phenomenon that Salon’s Justin Elliott dubbed SEALs porn), this installation affords the visitor an occasion to muse over the degree to which the country’s ruling class has devolved to the mental level of a testosterone-addled 14-year-old. Coinciding with the beginning of America’s potentially infinite war on terror, HalfLife holds up, via portraits of teenagers wide-eyed with game lust, a mirror that reflects the national appetite for destruction.

Other installations in this show adopt the aesthetics and ethics of the media spectacles that they parasitically feed on. In these, Brambilla shifts from confronting the morbidity of the scopophilia to pandering to it, employing his technical virtuosity to generate the video equivalent of baroque eye candy. In Cathedral (2008), Brambilla shot footage Christmas shoppers at Toronto’s Eaton Center, and then digitally diced and sliced it into a kaleidoscopic panorama faceted to resemble a stained-glass window. The conceit that malls are contemporary places of worship is not an original one but the idea is mere means to generating a dazzling spectacle enhanced by its installation in a mirrored box.

The mural-size video collages Civilization (Megaplex) (2008) and Evolution (2010) are presented in 3D. Woven from a vast archive of Hollywood movie clips, Civilization, set to Stravinski’s Rite of Spring, ascends from a ruddy hell up to a heaven bathed in blue light. That it was designed to be installed inside the elevators of the Standard Hotel in New York is telling. It stretches the concept of elevator music to include visual kitsch set to “serious” music. Evolution, even more grandiose and intricate, is set to Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.

Compare Civilization to Kanye West’s Power video, which Brambilla directed, and it becomes evident that Brambilla’s trippy borrowing from Bosch, Blake, Fuseli and assorted Romantic visionaries of both painting and cinema is more compelling when mated to a hip hop beat and the posturing of a performer whose ego can match the scope of Brambilla’s arty pretensions.

Published: An earlier version appeared in Artscene, June 2011

Margarita Cabrera

(UC Riverside Sweeney Art Gallery) Maquiladoras are assembly plants, typically but not exclusively sited across the border in Mexico by U.S. corporations, that take advantage of lax environmental controls and wages that may be one-sixth of what would be paid in the U.S. to produce clothing and appliances for export. The maquiladora workforce, which accounts for 17 percent of Mexico’s employed, consists largely of young, single women who work six-day weeks and must endure various levels of sexual harassment and intimidation in addition to generally poor working conditions.

These sweatshops produce close to half of Mexico’s total exports yet the bulk of the profits return to the U.S. as corporate earnings, a transnational circulation of capital that contrasts sharply with the restrictions placed on the cross-border circulation of humans. While American industry, with bipartisan blessing, has literally gone South (and East), taking with it countless manufacturing jobs, it is illegal immigration that has been demagogued as the leading threat to American jobs and prosperity. With the Arizona legislature—described by Ken Silverstein in a Harper’s article as “composed almost entirely of dimwits, racists, and cranks,” including a state senator who once denounced tress as a burden on the state’s water supply—leading the way, several states are devising new ways to harass undocumented workers and their children. The latest such development is a Republican-sponsored bill in Virginia that would ban the undocumented from attending public colleges and universities. At the same time, there has been an increased federal effort to militarize the border even as American agribusiness continues to rely on undocumented seasonal workers to keep costs down, the paradoxical effect of which has been to trap workers who would normally come and go with the harvests into staying put and becoming indigent.

It is against this background of the cynical disavowal of the structural dependence of the U.S. economy on disenfranchised labor that Margarita Cabrera’s first museum show on the West coast demands to be considered. The Mexican-born but now El Paso-based artist gained prominence around 2006 with a group of stitched-vinyl objects that referenced Oldenburg’s soft sculpture from the early ’60s but applied the technique to the remaking of consumer goods associated with the maquiladora economy and the cross-border human traffic. In addition to absurdly limp replicas of household appliances such coffeepots, toasters, blenders, vacuum cleaners, and slow cookers, Cabrera’s sewing machine also turned out versions of the backpacks and meager items carried by migrants on their clandestine crossings. As she gained confidence and grew more ambitious, she recreated a life-scale size VW Beetle and an H2 Hummer. The former, affectionately known as the vocho in Mexico, was over the course of a forty-year production run both a mainstay of the local auto industry and an affordable people’s car. The supermaxed Hummer, on the other hand, is a symbol of excess overlaid on top of an icon of imperial arrogance. In essence, Cabrera shifted the Pop object from a sign of the circulation of signs to a sign of the circulation of labor, capital, and power.

By the time she had made the Hummer, Cabrera had herself begun employing ex-maquiladora workers whose jobs had been shipped overseas to even lower-paid workers and in her later projects she continued the practice, thus in some ways becoming an enterprise that mirrored for critical purposes the maquiladora system of production. In 2007, with the help of a sewing workshop, she began producing potted cacti fabricated from border patrol uniforms for a project she titled Espacio entre Culturas (Space in Between). This was followed by the series Arbor de la Vida (Tree of Life), which, among other things recast a John Deere tractor as an oversized clay figurine encrusted with birds, flowers, and butterflies thus conflating the industrial with the folkloristic in a tribute to the disappearing artisanal methods displaced by Mexico’s belated industrialization. This ambivalently nostalgic, perhaps Benjaminian, gesture of leaping into the past to snatch a fading symbol and reinsert it into the present, continued over in The Craft of Resistance which consisted of a makeshift factory to produce in assembly-line production 2,500 copper monarch butterflies using traditional copper crafting techniques researched on a visit to Santa Clara del Cobre, in Michoacán.

The current exhibition at Sweeney includes selections from these projects, including a recreation of the Craft of Resistance assembly line and a swarm of 1,000 copper butterflies installed in the North Atrium Gallery, and two new works, Pulso y Martillo (Pulse and Hammer) and Florezca Board of Directors: Performance (Mesa directiva: performance). The former promises to be an extended performance/installation/sound piece featuring specially built wood platforms that will hold three-by-eight-foot, heavy gauge sheets of copper to be ritually beaten by performers during the opening reception on Saturday, February 5, 6-9 P.M., after which the beaten sheets will join the copper butterflies. The performance is meant to hammer home support for the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act (the DREAM Act) currently stalled in Congress. This bill would provide certain students who arrived in the U.S. illegally as minors a chance to obtain conditional permanent residency if they complete two years in the military or two years in college. The Florezca performance, which will take place on Saturday, March 5, is billed as the first meeting of the board of directors of Florezca, Inc. which Cabrera conceptualizes as a multinational corporation for undocumented people.

What seems to be emerging as Cabrera’s art progresses is greater openness to an idea of collective, performative production that plugs into the flow of communal energy that Chicano art has accessed and sustained as a source of both dignity and joy. It is a little fire against the chill of rather bleak times.

Published: Artscene, February 2011

David Alfaro Siqueiros

(Autry and MOLAA) Siqueiros’s anti-imperialist mural, América Tropical, spray-painted on the upper side-wall of Italian Hall and partially visible from Olvera Street was whitewashed shortly after it went up in 1932. But like the stain of a crime, the mural’s insurgent colors infiltrated through the overlying layer adding to its already burdened imagery a metaphor for cross-border seepage. Over the years, its botched defacement intensified rather than muted its accusatory power.

According to Judy Baca, the mural commissioned by the Plaza Art Center was supposed to depict a kitschy Mexican village scene and serve as a backdrop for a Bavarian beer garden owned by F. K. Ferenz, whom the Americanism Committee of the American Legion later identified as Nazi sympathizer. Instead, over a period of just under two months, Siqueiros and a team of assistants created an 80-foot-wide image which focused on a crucified figure. The mural depicts a scene set in a Central American jungle encroaching upon Mayan ruins. In the center, in front of a decaying temple, a figure depends from a cross under the wings of an American eagle. The image brings to mind Neruda’s lines from “The United Fruit Co.”

Indians fall over
buried in the morning mist:
a body rolls, a thing
without a name, a fallen number
a bunch of dead fruit
spills into the pile of rot.

Except that in América Tropical, the Indians don’t just quietly turn into compost and the Christian iconography of the crucifixion (with its implied promise of resurrection) is repurposed as a benediction of insurrection. Rather than the lachrymose figures that typically stand at the foot of the cross in conventional images of the crucifixion, Siqueiros painted armed guerillas emerging from the jungle and atop a platform that doubles as a preexisting doorway piercing the wall of the building.

The restoration of the mural by a team from the Getty Conservation Institute began in 1988 after decades of pressure from Chicano activists. Due to a bureaucratic tangle, the restoration project, which was to include the building of a shelter to prevent the mural’s further deterioration, a viewing platform to allow it’s full viewing (rather than the partial view from the street), and an interpretive center remains uncompleted. Finally, early this September, ground was actually broken and if all goes well the project will be completed by 2013, a quarter century after it was started.

Given the political regression this country has suffered since the beginning of this project, there is the likelihood that the project’s completion will prove more controversial than its initiation. Back in the day when President Clinton tested the boundaries of permissible political discourse by apologizing for slavery (only to be pounced on by the likes of Tom “The Exterminator” DeLay for the supposedly treasonous implications of such an apology), it may well have seemed that the restoration of América Tropical might allow its message and its censoring to be safely historicized as one of those events that can be regretted after sufficient time has passed to drain them of all significance save as markers of how far the country has come. Symbolic gestures of redress are cost effective. The Clinton administration specialized in them. It was the moment of cost-free diversity, when the massive reverse redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealth——begun under Reagan and continued under successive Republican and Democrat administrations—was covered up by effusive declarations of respect for other cultures. Meanwhile, the promise of eradicating poverty has been replaced, as Walter Benn Michaels has noted, by the transformation of poverty itself into another “culture” deserving of respect. (Let them eat reality shows!).

Post-9/11, and the license that event gave to every temporarily muzzled racist to exhale the fermented hate that had been building inside by redirecting it against Muslims and “Middle Easterners,” the ongoing atrocities of America’s potentially eternal war on terror have unintentionally restored to Siqueiros’s mural a charge and a topicality that may interfere with the work’s smooth insertion into the anodyne narrative of bad things that happened a long time ago. The crucified figure in the center of América Tropical (whose splayed arms and legs are a an “X marks the spot” that bludgeons home its centrality) may be an Amerindian but one can hardly overlook his resemblance to the tormented figures recorded for posterity by the phonecam-happy Abu Ghraib staff. The anonymous reader who responded to a recent Christopher Knight L.A. Times blog piece about the mural by complaining about the “$9 million to restore a mural depicting America as an ‘Evil Empire’” indicates the thrust of the conservative objections that will likely greet the unveiling of América Tropical, should it actually come to pass in our lifetime.

In the meantime, anyone who’s interested in Siqueiros’s activities during his all-too-brief but jam-packed stay in L.A. (the man was a dynamo), can absorb the information and artifacts from the period on view at the Autry National Center’s exhibition “Siqueiros in Los Angeles: Censorship Defied,” which runs through January 9, 2011 and is timed to coincide with official celebration of the bicentennial of Mexico’s independence and the centennial of the Mexican revolution. (Siqueiros, a lifelong Communist, would likely have scorned the current Mexican government’s expressed appreciation for his contribution to Mexican national identity: His outspoken criticism of various post-revolutionary Mexican administrations earned him several spells in prison and in 1932 was the cause for his brief exile to the U.S..) The exhibition brings together more than 100 paintings, drawings, mural sketches, and historical documents related to the three local murals (the only ones in the U.S.) that are the lasting traces of the artist’s visit, or at least the traces to which Siqueiros can be directly linked since his example was to inspire generations of Angeleno muralists long after he had gone back to Mexico.

While in L.A., Siqueiros executed three murals, only one of which, Portrait of Mexico Today 1932 survives and is accessible to the public (it was moved from the Pacific Palisades former home of Siqueiros friend and film director Dudley Murphy to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 2001). Like América Tropical, Portrait of Mexico is an uncompromisingly blunt denunciation of the distorting and corrupting influence American capital on Mexican politics. It portrays two desolate and destitute women sitting on the ground in the company of a half-naked child and flanked on one side by the bodies of shot workers and on the other by the figure of the Mussolini-like Plutarco Elías Calles, a once revolutionary general who had gradually transformed into a fascist strongman and whom Siqueiros pointedly depicted as being in the pay of financier J.P. Morgan.

The other two murals Siqueiros bequeathed to an ungrateful Los Angeles were América Tropical and Street Meeting (also known as Worker Meeting), which was undertaken as part of a mural painting class taught by Siqueiros at the Chouinard Art Institute. Street Meeting marked the first time an artist used a spray gun to create a mural directly on cement rather than as a fresco. It was also revolutionary in another way: it depicted a trade union militant in red shirt addressing an unmistakably multiracial audience, which at the time was as provocative as its proletarian advocacy. There are differing accounts of what happened to it, whether it suffered the same fate as América Tropical or simply fell prey to the elements and there have even been reports of traces of it being unearthed but nothing has come of them and it therefore counts as the one of the three murals that so far has proved completely irretrievable.

While Siqueiros is not an unknown, the Autry exhibition provides an opportunity in the context of both the renewal of overt American imperialism (begun under Bush but undiminished under Obama) and the domestic strain of this imperial burden at a time when vast numbers of Americans face the prospect of Depression-era immiseration, to rethink the connection between art and politics. The Greenbergian modernism that became canonical in postwar America dismissed all political art as kitsch and like Siqueiros’s deportation from America ejected entire strains of engaged modernist art from the permissible discourse. Postmodernist critical approaches, on the other hand, have been so preoccupied with the antiromantic and antihumanist deconstruction of symbolism that they have helped create a generation of media-savvy artists who have nothing of consequence to communicate except their savviness. In the current circumstances, this makes a great deal of the art one encounters in galleries and museums seem almost psychotically removed from reality.

To be sure, Siqueiros’s model of engaged art had its limitations. By turns a Stalinist and a self-aggrandizing visionary, incessantly and profligately productive, addicted to Baroque not to say Mannerist hypergesturalism, he was just as capable of producing pointed oppositional art as overwrought, self-indulgent theatrics and the kind of grandiose cubo-surrealist pastiche that would prompt even a non-Greenbergian to seek the cleansing solace of austere formalism. Precisely because the work he did in LA came close to guerilla art and had to be done quickly, with limited resources, and under the pressure of having to articulate a focused militant response to imperialism and racism, it constitutes some of his very best work. I’ll hazard that Siqueiros was at his best when he was crudest and subordinated his virtuosic inclinations to the discipline of producing legible propaganda.

The painterly indulgencies he could commit, on the other hand, are all too visible in the canvases concurrently on display at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) as part of the exhibition “Siqueiros Paisajista / Siqueiros: Landscape Painter.” The show is accompanied by a number of not-to-be-lightly dismissed scholarly appreciations of his landscape painting, but it seems to me crucial to recognize that the sacrifice of easel painting and the European preciousness attached to it under the compulsion of the collectivist Marxist stance Siqueiros adopted early on in his career, was what enabled him to rise to the heights he did as a mural painter. Pollock, who was briefly a student of Siqueiros when the latter gave a workshop in New York in 1936 had to make a similar sacrifice for different reasons. That Siqueiros continued to produce easel paintings alongside his mural production is not something to be held against him. He would not be the first artist to require a purgative outlet for habits and pleasures that had to be excluded from his more demanding and ambitious work. By the same token, I don’t think the MOLAA show makes a convincing visual argument for Siqueiros as a compelling landscape painter. But there are some oddities, and even outright gaucheries in these works that might be worth a look.

Published: An earlier version appeared in Artscene, October 2010

Walls of Algiers

(Getty Center) At the end of August 2003, four months after then-President Bush had made his infamous Mission Accomplished declaration aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, the Pentagon screened Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 classic Battle of Algiers, thus tacitly signaling that, if anything, the mission in Iraq was just beginning. Battle of Algiers chronicles the launching and eventual destruction of an Arab insurgency aimed at gaining Algerian independence from France. Having lost Vietnam in 1954, and granted independence to Morocco and Tunisia in 1956, the French were determined to hold on to Algeria at all costs. Using summary detention, systematic torture, and assassination, the French crushed the urban insurgency in the capital, Algiers, but in the process galvanized the Algerian population against French rule. Prefiguring what Americans would learn the hard way in Vietnam, the French won every battle of the Algerian war of independence but lost the war. By 1962, France had had enough and Algeria gained its independence. The French army withdrew and on its heels, more than a million Algerian French colonists (dubbed pieds-noirs) fled to France.

The idea that the U.S. could learn from “the challenges faced by the French” (as one Pentagon official was quoted saying at the time of the Battle of Algiers screening) was perhaps more revealing than intended. The challenges for the French in Algeria were the challenges of a colonial European power bent on subjugating North Africa. The conquest of Algeria started in 1830, was met by fierce resistance, and took all of 70 years to be completed, after one-third of the Algerian population had been wiped out. France then imported thousands of settlers (many of them from Spain, Italy, and Malta) into the newly conquered territory. These settlers received French citizenship and the right to vote and send representatives to France. By the time the Front de la Liberation Nationale (FLN) launched its terrorist campaign against French occupation in 1954, French citizens comprised a tenth of the Algerian population and Algeria was administered as if it was not merely a colony but an integral part of France. It was this particular fiction of a French Algeria, that is to say the fiction of Algeria as not merely a conquered territory but an assimilated one, that gave the struggle for independence its terrible existential ferocity. As Franz Fanon wrote at the time, “I owe it to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization.” For Fanon, who joined the FLN after as head of an Algerian psychiatric hospital he became aware of the mental toll torture exacted on both its victims and those who administered it, the uprising against the French was not simply a matter of national liberation but just as pressingly, a struggle to eject from the colonized psyche the self-hatred that 130 years of racial subjugation had engendered in it.

What is telling about the notion that “we” can learn from the “challenges” the French faced in Algeria is the admission implied by that notion that the American military’s mission in the “war on terror” is essentially a colonial one. Back in 2003, nobody in the mainstream media wanted to pick up on that, ie. to get beyond arguing about the proper tactics to use against the enemy and start questioning the axioms of the war itself. Perhaps we are beginning to see a shift? The Getty Research Institute’s mounting of “Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the City” might then be a sign of a dawning acknowledgment that an answer to that clumsily loaded question, “Why do they hate us?” may actually require some consideration of history before 9/11. And some appreciation of who the “they” are that gets past their reduction to pure demonic Others with whom no negotiation is possible.

One of the things that I think the Getty show does well is to consistently remind the viewer that the very existence of the images in the exhibition reflects the often unseen presence of the occupying power. In some cases, the subject itself (an equestrian monument of the Duc D’Orleans in front of an Ottoman building) discloses this occupation readily enough. In other instances, as in the case of Negresse Marchande du Pain which the curators decorously translated as Bread Seller the colonial gaze constructs an exotic object. One of the most confrontational images in the show is that of a woman with tattoos on chin and forehead, back against a wall, and gazing back directly at the photographer. The subject could easily pass as innocuous, until we read the caption, the photographer, Marc Garanger’s, explanation of how he took the photograph:

In 1960, I was doing my military service in Algeria. The French army had decided that the indigenous peoples were to have a French identity card. I was asked to photograph all the people in the surrounding villages. I took photographs of nearly two thousand persons, the majority of whom were women, at a rate of about two hundred a day. The faces of the women moved me greatly. They had no choice. They were required to unveil themselves and let themselves be photographed. They had to sit on a stool, outdoors, before a white wall. I was struck by their pointblank stares, first witness to their mute, violent protest.

While, inevitably, some of the photographs in this show tend to stand out, the exhibit’s overall design aims to weave images and texts from a multitude of sources (including postcards, lithographs, news photos and texts excerpted from novels, poems, scholarly journals, and government reports) into a complex picture of the changes wrought by the French presence on the physical structure of the city and the lives of its inhabitants. As the curators note, “From the French conquest in 1830 to its independence in 1962, Algiers served as an experimental site where intricate colonial strategies were rehearsed and tested.” Ultimately, those intricate colonial strategies came to nothing. Since then, colonialism has become the policy that dare not speak its name. That’s progress of a sort.

Published: Artscene, June 2009

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

Edward Dugmore

(Manny Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles) Edward Dugmore, who died in 1996, was briefly associated with the San Francisco school of Abstract Expressionism thanks to a postwar sojourn out west that led to the California School of Fine Arts and a formative encounter with Clifford Stills before Dugmore moved to New York in 1952. Although he was well-received there and had solo shows at the Stable Gallery, he never achieved star status. Nonetheless, for the next four decades he remained steadfast in his devotion to a style of abstraction that by the mid ’60s had been eclipsed by pop and minimalism.

The three paintings on display at Manny Silverman date from the period between the late ’50s and early ’60s. The largest of these paintings, 1961-D (1961), is over 12 feet across. The smallest, Untitled (1959), is still more than eight feet wide. Their composition is based on large interlocking areas of relatively flat color that evoke associations to peeling walls, maps, horse hides, geological strata, and polished sections of minerals. However, these associations remain incidental to a central concern with painterly accretion and erasure. As Nicholas Fox Weber remarked in a catalogue essay for a 1998 show at the Joseloff Gallery in Hartford, Connecticut, Dugmore’s home town, the geography of these paintings is ultimately “a territory established entirely by paint,” their evocativeness grounded in the materiality of the medium.

The monumentality of these canvases is counterbalanced by the seductive delicacy of Dugmore’s touch and his nuanced handling of color. Passages of “flat” color have the diaphanousness of veils enriched by suggestions of the painterly flesh underneath. Thus, the large dark masses that dominate all three paintings avoid becoming dead zones and instead hint at undisclosed depths. In the liveliest of the trio, “Untitled” (1959), the dark area easily occupies two-thirds of the surface, but the agitated variety of tones and values from which it has been built up prevents it from turning into a nasty oil spill. Instead, it reads as a space pregnant with possibilities, much as the ill-lit cave walls must have appeared to Paleolithic artists. Blue and red fissures that cut into it from the creamy light area above further establish its penetrability, or one might almost say, its insubstantiality. Thus, in this as in so many of his paintings, Dugmore reveals that color is at once a substance and a vibration, a body and a spirit.

The play on this duality compliments a tension between tendencies toward both reduction and representation. Particularly in his later paintings, Dugmore could on occasion come close to monochromatic minimalism, but those occasions are deceptive if one reads into them any kind of cerebral intent. His lifelong preoccupation was with the evocative possibilities of color and texture, and he used those means to capture moods ranging from serenity to erotic frenzy. What is “old-fashioned” about Dugmore’s style of abstraction is that it never took anything to its “logical” conclusion and so remained impervious to the hipster coolness and conceptualism that came to dominate American art at the very moment that he was enjoying his first success. For the rest of his life, he was in relation to the artworld that emerged around him a fish out of water, or at any rate, a fish swimming against the current.

One can imagine that having come to age as an expressionist during the tight-collared Eisenhower years, the postminimalist and post postpop disavowals of sensuality in favor of irony and theoretical rigor might have struck him as a reimposition of the restrictions that painting had enabled him to escape. Where others might have given way to bitterness and disillusioned paralysis, Dugmore continued to pour himself in his painting, enlarging on possibilities that were latent in his early work. When Manny Silverman went to see him in his New York studio at the end of the ’80s, he felt he had stepped back into 1955. In 1955, Dugmore, for his part, felt he was boldly stepping into the future. “You felt huge. You felt all-encompassing. Like the wrong end of a telescope.” The paintings in this show are the other end of that telescope, through which the artist invites us to meet him halfway.

Published: A version appeared in Artscene, December 2006

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

(Paul Kopeikin Gallery, West Hollywood) It is a cruel but fitting irony for a photographer as profoundly distrustful of appearances as Ralph Meatyard (1925-1972) was, that he should owe his posthumous recognition in part to being misunderstood as a precursor of art-school manufactured talents like Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince—whose success is testimony to little besides the profitability of indulging the undiminished need of an aging population of baby boomers to distance themselves from their ostensibly simple-minded, repressed parents.

The basis for this induction of Meatyard into the postmodernist pantheon is the blatant theatricality of his staged images, and his quite evident disdain for the objectivity of photography. That these qualities distinguish his work from that of his anti-pictorialist contemporaries (Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and other proponents of “pure” photography) is unquestionable. But there are other qualities (or lack of) In Meatyard’s work that make it equally resistant to postmodernist affiliation. For one thing, it is neither ideologically motivated nor self-consciously subversive. It is not constrained by the petty resentments of identity politics. It is free of both smarty pants irony and the cheap, cultivated anomie of the unattached (Meatyard was a family man). It is personal in the way personal used to mean before Americans started to flock to talk shows to compete at being freaks.

The images he is justly renowned for (among 25 on display) are the ones of children and adults wearing dime-store Halloween masks. The device is so transparent that part of the pictures’ intrigue is why they work at all. They do because of Meatyard’s eye for setting and pose, because of his ability to extract startling black-and-white contrasts from the silver-rich photographic paper he used (contrasts that create amorphous voids out of which the masked figures materialize like apparitions), but just as importantly because Meatyard never tried to disguise his artifice. Later on toward the premature end of his life when he shot the Lucybelle Crater series, he even dispensed with the murky backgrounds and relied entirely on the transgressive impact of his masked figures nonchalantly inhabiting the daylit world like regular folk-as if they belonged.

These grotesques (which were only a fraction of Meatyard’s output but which were the fruit of an obsession that endured throughout his life) are more closely allied to painterly antecedents than photographic ones. They recall the odd family portraits painted by the Douanier Rousseau. Ensor’s masked characters, and, more distantly, Goya’s caricatures. Their psychic source can easily be located in a sense of estrangement from the world that crosses over into depersonalization, except that Meatyard–who made his living as an optician, raised a family, and lived a settled life in Lexington, Kentucky–was not a withdrawn or morose individual. The singular oddness of his work intimates, rather, an appreciation of the more ubiquitous and easily overlooked oddness of individuality itself and of the dissociation inherent in the photographic process, whose arrest of time makes moments eternal at the price of removing them from our possession.

Published: Artscene, September 1999