Scott Covert at Skidmore Contemporary Art

Scott Covert's 212

Scott Covert’s fascinating canvases span decades and continents. From a distance, they may bear a passing resemblance to Jasper Johns’ use of words, but on closer inspection, the variety of fonts and the familiar names accompanied by dates reveal their source material as the etched and embossed markers of the deceased. Covert’s mode of operation began in the mid-eighties when he forgot his camera on a visit to the Detroit cemetery where the grave of Florence Chapman, one of the Supremes, is located. By placing the canvas of his paintings on a tombstone, then rubbing the surface with chalk, oil stick, or charcoal, Covert taps into the Victorian-era craft of frottage and transforms it into an art that transcends time and layers vast distances.

Covert's Gray Painting #1 2006-2007

While the tradition of gravestone rubbings is a familiar one from elementary school field trips to colonial-era cemeteries and places like St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church in London (where you can buy metallic-colored wax and paper to make your own), Hollywood brings its own history of tragic stars and starlets. The artist’s interest also calls to mind Evelyn Waugh’s farce of the funeral business, “The Loved One.” Covert’s “Small Wizard of Oz #2” indeed reunites the stars of the MGM musical with L. Frank Baum, the original story’s author.

Detail of Covert's Small Wizard #2

Unlike studio-based painters, Covert functions more like a documentary photographer, fixing his images on location, then subtly adjusting the colors and composition back in his studio. Rich colors are scumbled into the surface, obscuring some names while drawing the eye to others. Covert may start a canvas with a theme or idea, but the process itself is organic and serendipitous; his paintings progress with a life of their own. A coveted name may not find its way to the intended canvas, like a plaque just out of reach on a mausoleum wall.

Detail of Covert's Dredd Scott

Nomadic by nature, Covert’s canvases have traveled from Texas to New York to Paris, taking up to twelve years to gather together their quorum of cultural icons from comedy (Lenny Bruce) to tragedy (JonBenét Ramsey). While some associations may not make sense at first glance, they mostly reference the odd collisions of popular culture, with the occasional personal friend of the artist thrown into the mix. Be they signs of the personal or public, the names connote associations from the ridiculous (five of the six Three Stooges) to the sublime (John Coltrane).

Scott Covert's Screaming with Laughter 1995-2006

Covert’s temporal practice has evolved over the years, with his more recent canvases featuring multiple iterations of a name (various dead Nancys), or a single name (Houdini) or epitaph (At Rest With God) repeated over the surface. Some of Covert’s canvases evoke America’s troubled past, reminding us of the students killed at Kent State, Malcolm X, and the Rosenbergs. Another canvas offers us hope: by pairing the grave marker for the Negro slave Dred Scott--whose unsuccessful case for freedom was heard before the Supreme Court--with a bumper sticker for Obama, Covert shows us how far we’ve come. Like the gravestone that reminds us, “Non Omnis Moriar,” Covert’s departed, like his richly layered canvases, will never completely leave us.

Scott Covert Paintings runs through July 3, 2009 at Skidmore Contemporary Art in Bergamot Station.

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Nature vs. Nurture in Artistic Development

Aurelie Collings' (aka A. K. Collings) recent post on Neurodevelopment of Drawing Ability in Children poses some interesting ideas about using children's' drawings as measure of frontal lobe development. I thought I'd post her examples and comments along with some images and thoughts of my own. Her images are courtesy of the Canadian Society for Education through Art. My images have been pulled from the Getty's website along with some other images from the Canadian web site.

Peter, age 6, 1976, British Columbia. (felt pen)

Peter's drawing is schematic and very verbal/analytic in nature. His drawing represents what he "knows", not what he "sees". Element by element, he documents what is important to him in the scene, as if following a list of key words or concepts. Drawing at this stage seems to be a very language-mediated activity. In the scene as he saw it, for instance, the electrical outlet would have been behind the presents and hence, not visible. But to Peter, it is a very important element, and so he includes it in his drawing.

Gentile da Fabriano 's Coronation of the Virgin, 1420

Similarly, images by adult artists of the Romanesque and Gothic periods (and Egyptian art, for that matter) show a similar schematic arrangement of figures. Patterning in fabric often parallels the picture plane, rather than following the contours of the folds of the cloth. Similar to the Christmas lights, the angels are stacked around the central figure, with no relation to the ground beneath them. Also, the proportions between the two types of figures is similar to the tree and presents.

My thought is that schematic representations make sense because (unlike the eye of the camera) the human eye is constantly shifting in relation to the objects it observes. Creating an image from memory or ideas will emphasize important elements, like the dangers of electrical outlets or the representation of divinity through a halo.

Ken Kranrod, age 8, 1977, Alberta (pencil)

Ken's drawing is very accomplished. The detail is fantastic, and each element in his drawing is a little masterpiece. However, he is not fully out of the schematic stage. While the detail is rich and far more developed than that of the 6 year old above, Ken has not quite crossed the threshold of drawing what he sees: rather, he is representing what he knows and what is important to him when he thinks about a circus. (I love the swishy action-marks he's put in to give a sense of motion to the bear's dumbells!) Perspective, size of the elements, depth of field: none of this is developed in the overall composition. In fact, the elephant appears to be standing on the bear's head. The elephant and the hippo are also drawn in a very different, cartoon-like style, and demonstrate foreshortening in a manner that is not evident elsewhere. I wonder if these were copied from one of those "how to draw animals" books that are so beloved by children at this age, as their desire to produce representational and realistic drawings for a time trumps their joy in unfettered self-expression. By way of anecdotal finding, most kids seem to go through such a stage, although I am not aware of research specific to this observation.

Giovanni di Ser Giovanni Guidi's Battle Scene, 1450 - 1475

The Getty's blurb:

These fighting knights carry the banners of ancient feuding empires--SPQR, the banner of ancient Rome, at the left and the dragon, that of Gaul, at the right--yet they wear contemporary gold and silver Florentine armor and joust like Florentine knights of the 1400s. The brilliant colors and simplified geometric shapes make the armored steeds look much like rocking-horses, creating a resplendent yet artificial, fairy-tale battle scene. Despite the flatness of the sumptuous painted fabrics and the mere outlines of the horses' bodies--aside from the elegantly foreshortened white horse at the right--their hooves appear to exist in three-dimensional space.

The idea of amalgamation--showing the banners of ancient Rome with the Florentine garb--probably came to Ken as well when he illustrated the lion and then covered with in bars. Though there are no great examples in the Getty collection, the art of the late Gothic and early Renaissance can be identified by the slightly cumbersome way they arrange their figures so all the faces show (Duccio, Cimabue, Giotto) or the even spacing of intricate detail over the surface of the picture plane (Botticelli, Bruegel, Bosch). I would also posit that Ken's drawing doesn't show perspective because it hasn't been taught to him yet.

I can remember a fingerpainting "assignment" in second grade where I was the only one in the class to make an abstract image. It was all one color, and my fingers swirled around the paper in a Jackson Pollock sort of way. Looking back, this could probably be attributed to my sister attending art school, and learning about abstract art, rather than any creative breakthrough on my part. We paint what we want until we paint what we learn.

A. Wallace, age 12, (Year?) New Brunswick ("paint")

Rather than continue with this back and forth, I thought I'd point out that the last two images at Neurartic were copied from some other source; the picture above was labeled "Trident Advertisement" at the web site. Like the image below (and most others between the 16th and the early part of the 19th century) show that artists were aware of or using optical devices to create their images. This helped with problems around foreshortening (like trying to represent an arm when it's pointing at the viewer). Copying provides several useful learning experiences. It obviates the need to resolve issues around representing in two dimensions a three-dimensional world. It improves hand-eye coordination, small motor development, facility with a particular medium, and passes along ideas around composition, color, and design as resolved by the original image maker.

Joseph Ducreux's Self-Portrait, Yawning, 1783

Looking at other images at the Canadian website, it's obvious that the students were getting lessons in 2-d design. Because the Western eye is so saturated with optical images--photographs, movies, video--it becomes believable that the representation of someone's hands could be bigger than their head. Through years of exposure and learning, optical representations have become infused in our visual language, just as much as our fluency in Swahili or English is a product of our particular environment.

Sheilah Herron, age 18, Line Analysis

Finally, I leave you with the example below, which I believe is a much better representation of how the brain integrates auditory learning, a culture of visual depictions, motor skills, and the development of a skill set that translates our natural environment into representations that can be understood by others. These depictions are not only a representation of what we see, but also evidence of the visual tropes of our time and place.

Vicki Hoffort's still life 1950

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Mike Kelley at Patrick Painter

A Selection of Mike Kelley's Photo Editions at Patrick Painter

As de Kooning said, “You make a painting about a crazy world, and they say it was made by a crazy artist.” This prescient statement could easily apply to the work of Mike Kelley.

When his collages of stuffed animals were interpreted as evidence of childhood abuse and repressed memory syndrome, Kelley took the ball and ran with it, going so far as to equate his memory of CalArts’ basement level with the imagined tunnels beneath the McMartin Preschool. In a selection of photo editions at Patrick Painter, Kelly ups the ante with a tour of the monuments of the Detroit neighborhood of his youth, transforming the ramshackle interior of an abandoned house or a burnt out homeless encampment into evidence of something more sinister.

Today, competing schools of psychologists debate the merits (or existence) of Repressed Memory Syndrome vs. False Memory Syndrome. Still, when one sees Kelley's photograph of Edison's Last Breath (captured in a glass vial, and on display at Detroit's Henry Ford Museum) one can't help but imagine the impact of the uncanny on Kelley's impressionable youth.

Detail from Mike Kelley's Photo Show Portrays the Familiar, 2001
One of 26 gelatin silver prints 16x20

In another series, thirty-four cave formations are given names that evoke the real world—turning stalactites into a frozen waterfall—Kelly cautions us of our ability to contrive things that aren’t really there.

The third series on display provides a variation on the themes covered in his extravaganza, Day is Done. Kelley's videographic inventions (shot in the locations of his own educational experience) are based on found high school yearbook photographs. These were then combined with museum-sized installations. This more diminutive version cobbles together the found photos with mastheads of newspapers from the various towns Kelley has lived in. The text in this series seems to come from either Kelly's repressed (and wonderfully perverse) id, or a local newspaper's restaurant reviews. Perhaps the incongruity of the two types of text is meant to point out the chasm between what the artist creates and what the reviewer experiences and writes about.

Point taken. I'll shut up now.

The Bashful Elephant
Detail from Mike Kelley's The Poetry of Form: Part of an Ongoing Attempt to Develop an Auteur Theory of Naming, 1985/96
One of 34 gelatin silver prints with mat 16x12

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Zadok Ben David at Shoshana Wayne Gallery

Detail of Zadok Ben David's Blackfield, 2008

There are a number of worthwhile shows up at Bergamot Station at the moment, but none pack the visceral wallop of Zadok Ben David's Blackfield. Appropriated from Victorian botanical illustrations, some thousands and thousands of black laser-cut steel silhouettes are evenly spaced over the gallery floor. The perfectly smooth thin layer of sand these plants "grow" from adds to the water-starved weedy lot effect. The large rectangular installation allows enough room to circumnavigate the display, and when one views the piece from the other side, Ben David provides us with another uncanny moment, as the obverse of the miniature sculptures are airbrushed with a rainbow of greens, blues, yellows, and reds. While the work exhibits both fragility and monumentality, randomness and precision, it also touches on man's pseudo-scientific attempts at making sense of the natural world.

Detail of Zadok Ben David's Blackfield, 2008

Ever since man threw the first virgin in a volcano to keep the magma at bay, there has been a less-than-accurate understanding of nature, including man's dominant and guiding role. From recapitulation theory to phrenology, the way things appear have been used to support the status quo, as colonial powers have collected and categorized everything from the Victoria Water Lily to the Hottentot Venus. Ben David presents us with a dichotomy: the monochromatic and the chromatic, science and art. In the end it is up to us to evaluate and interpret, making sense of the world presented before us.

Detail of Zadok Ben David's Blackfield, 2008

Zadok Ben David's Blackfield is on view at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Bergamot Station through May 16.

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The Intangibilities of Content

John Robert's The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade 2007

The Spring 2009 issue of Art Journal has a review of Robert's book by Howard Singerman. Rather than review a review, allow me to riff off some of the ideas expressed.

It seems that Roberts is arguing his version of the Labor Theory of Value. The first time this was explained to me was in Sande Cohen's Form and Signification in Modernism class, using the classic example of a shovel. You have the costs of the raw materials and the cost of the labor. Metal plus wood plus the value of the labor equals the cost of the shovel. According to Roberts, "It is only waged labour exchanged for capital that produces commodities. It is therefore only waged labour exchanged for capital that constitutes productive labour." In the case of Marcel Duchamp's shovel, In Advance of a Broken Arm, pictured below, the labor of production gets contracted out and the artistic labor is in the act of choosing. Roberts goes on, "What separates artistic labour from productive labour is its access to the subjective transformation of materials..."

I would argue that the transformation of art practices over the past few centuries has also seen a slide along the continuum between material and mental labor. The transformative ideas in a work of art create value as much or more so than the skill of execution of the labor of the artist's hand. Even in the historic past, artists who ground their own pigments used the productive labor of the weaver for canvas and the miner who extracted the minerals from the earth. Over time paint came premixed in tubes and fabricators have been used by artists from Donald Judd to ©Murakami to Sam Durant. Singerman points out that contemporary artists take on the affectations of the managerial class (by contracting out) like AbEx painters affect a proletarian style (by representing labour through gesture).

Marcel Duchamp's In Advance of a Broken Arm 1915 (1964 replica)

The problem with hands-on skills that are traditionally taught in art departments broken down by media, is that they place technique ahead of the idea. It's almost like having a creative writing department that first teaches students the zeros and ones that underpin their word processing software.

I expect this difficult conundrum will become more prevalent as new technologies make their way into art practices. Imagine a university photo department replacing a retiring professor. Do they hire a replacement that can operate and train students to work in what is essentially a 19th century wet lab (aka darkroom)? Do they hire someone who can train students to use software that didn't exist twenty years ago (and may be replaced by something completely different in another ten years)? Technique brevis ars longa.

If Marx says that the division of labor can only occur with the division of material and mental labor, I would argue that the transformation and progress of artistic practices can only occur with the division of form and content. Marx goes on to say that the moment that consciousness becomes more that an awareness of existing practices, it can represent something that that doesn't yet exist; from that point consciousness can emancipate itself from the world. Perhaps the creative act, unfettered from traditional beaux-arts skill sets can emancipate art.

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Guest Post: More Art and Gardens from Points East

I received the following from Diane Calder as a follow-up to yesterday's post on Pompeii at LACMA and the Getty Villa, and since photos can't be posted in the comments section, I'm putting it up as a guest post.

Huntington Gardens, photo by Diane Calder

Turn towards the east from LACMA and the Getty Villa for another view of the melding of two dimensional depictions of historical gardens with their three dimensional counterparts. The placement of paintings and drawings from the Weng Collection in the gallery at the Huntington immediately adjacent to their recently installed Ming garden, presents a unique opportunity for visitors to compare their stroll through that botanical haven with the experience of contemplating 12th to 17th century examples of painted depictions of Chinese landscapes.

Viewing platforms in classic Ming gardens were frequently designed and positioned to focus on man-made interpretations of natural sites, familiar to viewers in literature or paintings. Three renown Chinese hermits, metaphorically represented on a 15th century scroll by chrysanthemum, narcissus and plum branches, are subtly cool in comparison with the reclining heavenly bodies depicted in the Garden Scene, House of the Golden Bracelet, Pompeii. And the placid stream in the Huntington Chinese garden seems to reflect a fabricated dream of tranquility negated by the highlights of the Yangzi River coursing between its Tibetan plateau and the East China Sea portrayed on a 53 foot long Qing dynasty scroll featured in the exhibition.

Xiang Yuanbian, Ming dynasty, “Landscape after a Poem by Ji Kang”
Hanging scroll

Chinese Painting and Calligraphy from the Weng Collection at the Huntington Library through July 13.

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Mt. Vesuvius at the Tar Pits: Garden Gnome Edition

unk. Garden Scene, House of the Golden Bracelet, Pompeii, c. 1st cent. BCE-1st cent. CE (fresco)
unk. Basin and Stand (foreground), c. 1st cent. CE (marble)

A large part of Pompeii and the Roman Villa is set aside for objects that were found outside the homes: the illusionistic garden frescoes found in the inner courtyards, the bronze waterspouts, and collections of garden ornaments. In some ways the middle rooms at LACMA can be seen as being torn from the pages (papyrus?) of an ancient Sunset magazine. Of course, after Mount Vesuvius rained down fire and brimstone in 79 CE, any Adirondack chairs or similar combustible patio furnishings have been lost to the ages. Left behind for LACMA to display are the more sturdy frescoed walls, bronzes, and marble sculptures. The 12-foot long fresco above gives us some sense of what the gardens looked like, before they too went up in smoke.

unk. Satyr and Hermaphrodite, c. 1st cent. BCE-1st cent. CE (white marble)

Part of the design of gardens (both ancient and contemporary) is the sequential presentation of outdoor rooms and vistas. The door in a peristyle wall may at first draw one's attention to the outside view, and later, one's body will follow to discover the subsequent space. This process of physically moving through space followed by surprise is also contained in the sculpture pictured above and below. What at first appears to be a nymph of some sort fighting off the sexual advances of a satyr, reveals from the other side that the nymph is actually a hermaphrodite. Finding that the girl isn't a girl gives the garden wanderer a Crying Game moment. But unlike the prudish shock of contemporary filmgoers, finding both breasts and a penis on an attractive figure would have been a pleasant surprise--and an added treat--for the Roman observer.

Satyr and Hermaphrodite (money shot)

My first take on LACMA's Pompeii show is here.

unk. Fountain Figure Silenos Riding a Wineskin, c. 1st cent. BCE-1st cent. CE (bronze)

A couple of the bronzes (above and below) were excavated from the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum. The foundations of the house were used as a model for the layout of the Getty Villa. Save your LACMA Pompeii tickets and use them to gain a reservation-free entry to the Getty Villa in Malibu. There you can find reproductions of these sculptures in the peristyle gardens, and gain a sense of how they looked in their original setting.

unk. Girl Adjusting her Peplos (Peplophoros), c. 1st cent. BCE-1st cent. CE (bronze)

Though it's a crappy image, I had to include this picture of a boar being held at bay by two dogs. The rendering of stiff boar bristles along the spine and the pig's shaggy coat evoke a strong tactile urge--a compliment to its creator. But since oily fingers and antiquities don't mix, I'll have to settle for some prosciutto on crusty bread for any porcine sensual experience.

unk. Dog-Boar-Dog, c. 1st cent. BCE-1st cent. CE (bronze)

Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples is on view at LACMA May 3, 2009 through October 4, 2009. Advance reservations are required.

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Callis, Outerbridge, and Decorative Art and Design at the Getty

Johann Paul Schor (called Giovanni Paolo Tedesco), Detail of a Side Table (or carriage end ornament) c. 1670 (gessoed and gilt poplar) See the Eagle?
From the exhibition Taking Shape: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts March 31 - July 5, 2009 at the Getty Center.

Last month I attended the opening for an odd conglomeration of shows at the Getty. The crowd on hand was broken into fourths, and quickly squired through one of the four small exhibitions by their respective curator, before being passed along to the next. The mood--dour and pensive--was a far cry from past openings at the Getty, as if some decorative sword of Damocles has loosened itself from an earthquake-proof mounting, and was swinging precariously overhead. The recent layoff of nearly a hundred Getty staff can explain the vibe, though I can expect that not knowing where or how deep the cuts would be made the mood more pervasive. From the look on the Getty staff blog, emotions have swung from anxious to depressed.

Jean-Louis Prieur's Drawing for a Wall Light, c. 1775
From the exhibition Made for Manufacture: Drawings for Sculpture and the Decorative Arts March 31 - July 5, 2009 at the Getty Center.

Though some sort of superficial home furnishing or decoration connection could be made between a few of the pieces in each of the shows, the incongruity between a small selection of drawings, over-the-top guilt furniture, mid-century commercial photography and a mini mid-career retrospective--made for some strange mental gear shifting between the rooms. Like strawberries and mustard, each was tasty in its own way, but not very complementary of the other.

Paul Outerbridge's The Potting Shed (March 1937 Cover of House Beautiful), 1937 (cabro print)
From the exhibition Paul Outerbridge: Command Performance March 31 - August 9, 2009 at the Getty Center.

When Judy Keller, curator of the Callis show introduced the artist, she made note of 20+ years of instructing at CalArts. A related event will be a conversation between Cathie Opie, one of Callis' former students at 7:00pm on May 21 in the Harold Williams Auditorium.

The mention of artist-as-instructor made me realize the theme common to all the shows. For fine artists of the past five hundred years, it took more than making fine art to pay one's bills. Bernini and other artists of the era made drawings for metal workers, tapestry makers, stained glass window guilds, furniture makers, and more. Outerbridge found a steady income as a commercial photographer, and Callis augments sales of her work by teaching.

Several months back Ed Winkleman said artists are not taken as seriously if they held a job apart from their art making. These four show at the Getty show that there's an ample history of artists doing more than one thing, and doing several things well.

Jo Ann Callis' Untitled (Poles and Spheres) from Decor Series, 2005
From the exhibition Jo Ann Callis: Woman Twirling March 31 - August 9, 2009 at the Getty Center.

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