Pina Bausch. 1940 - 2009

I've had the opportunity to see several of Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal pieces performed, Nelken, Nur Du, and most recently, Ten Chi. There's also a bit of Café Müller used for good effect in Pedro Almodóvar's Habla con Ella, with the opportunity to see Bausch herself dance. Her later works focused on geographies; Nur Du (Only You) glossed over the clichés of Hollywood and the American West, while Ten Chi did the same to Japan. Still these pieces had their transcendent moments. I remember a sequence from Only You, danced to a Fado, where a woman cooked over one of those little apartment ranges and her partner came up and held her from behind. They moved around a little, but the vignette's actions centered around them sharing a cigarette. It was these poignant moments of affection--or even the impossibility of the same--that I'll remember best.

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Jean Lowe at Rosamund Felsen

Jean Lowe's Bookcases

With titles like Tough Love for your Elderly Parents, What Would Satan Eat?, The Mystery of the Missing Condom, Contemporary Genocide in Perspective, Conservation and Habitation of the Body, They Joy of Pickling, and Regulating Empathy, Jean Lowe's cardboard-and-tempera-paint sculpture offers a send up of the ever expanding and increasingly vacuous world of publishing. I'm reminded of a comment by Henry David Thoreau on the laying of the first trans-oceanic telegraph cable. He acknowledged the possibility for the exponential growth of information that could now travel between America and the European Continent, but added the caveat that all the substantive remarks that cross the pond every year would probably fit in a wheelbarrow. 

Jean Lowe's Love For Sale

In addition to the bookcases and photo collages that seem to operate as working sketches, the show was mostly made of large-scale paintings. In all cases, the upper portion of the canvases depict Baroque Bavarian palaces, and the lower portions render familiar (at least to me) lower and middle class commodity barns like the Goodwill Store, Pep Boys, WalMart, and Big Lots!.

I couldn't help but be reminded of the recent Arnold Mesches show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Not only was that scale similar--as well as the juicy application of paint--but both artists seemed intent on portraying a fictional dichotomized space. Both artists critique capitalism's disparities, and offer us the pleasure of looking at some clever and well-executed work. 

The last few sentences seem to be leading up to a "but," but perhaps any qualifications would be better directed at Marx's (or Hegel's) theory of the dialectic. Sometimes when a thesis confronts its antithesis, we don't arrive at sublation--or synthesis for that matter. Using the hoary example of capitalism vs. communism, the real world gives us examples of sublation in places like Vietnam or China, but in Latin America we have we examples like Cuba where multiple attempts at confrontation have failed, or Central America, where multiple attempts at regime change have met with temporary successes, or have resulted in dictatorships antithetical to both the local population and the U.S. Government. 

This slide into theory might seem to drift away form the art at hand, but painting is a prime example of unbridled capitalism where the commodities themselves can proffer a critique of the very system they thrive in. There are plenty of artists who shop at low-end retailers, because that's what they can afford. Meanwhile, their art hangs in the contemporary equivalent of a Baroque Palace. The sixty-four thousand dollar question is one of the artist's intent. Does she want us to throw up our collective arms at the wacky incongruity of it all, or is there a shrouded critique that manages to slip past the collector?

I personally pine for the latter. But I think that only for those of us who have been to a thrift store can Lowe's images evoke the collective B.O. smell that infuses a Goodwill experience, and pungently remind the shopper that they're not at a Nordstrom. For everyone else, there's MasterCard. 

Jean Lowe at Rosamund Felsen, Bergamot Station ran from mid-April to mid-May, 2009.

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One Week Only

Up through Saturday is the 2009 iteration of the CalArts MFA Grad Show, Why Theory? The show is at the Spring Arts Tower, 453 Spring Street in downtown L.A. There will be a closing reception on June 27 from 7 to 10 pm, and video screenings at REDCAT on June 29.

If you happen to be in San Francisco, I have work in a group show at SoMArts up through Friday.

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Gay Life at the Baths: Pompeii and After

Frontispiece From a Undated 19th Century Edition

Ten to thirty-five brothels and four or five baths have been unearthed in Pompeii, though one wouldn't know it from Pompeii and the Roman Villa at LACMA. Call it historical revisionism or a reframing of the past to suit our current moral boundaries, the Roman Villa show gives us a narrow Architectural Digest slice of Roman life, purged of much of Pompeian prurient interests. Most of the erotic art unearthed in the 19th and 20th centuries remained under lock and key until an exhibition in Naples in 2000. The Naples exhibition included a marble sculpture of Pan fucking a goat. According to the BBC, a local priest condemned the representation as a temptation that could "corrupt the morals of the chastest." Not being chaste, the work doesn't seduce me to the merits of bestiality, though I do admire the virtuosity of the carver. 

Book I, Chapter VII, The Last Days of Pompeii

In Lytton's day, the Victorian Era offered up its own romantic wash of Pompeii, including The Gay Life of the Pompeian Lounger--A Miniature Likeness of the Roman Baths. Having frequented the contemporary Caracalla of Wilmington, Club 1350, I wonder about the current state of homo-social spaces like the baths, and their relationship to similar spaces in antiquity. 

Midtowne Spa Ad c. 1975

I have a memory of seeing the above ad, probably from a mid-70's issue of the Advocate, which was then a gay newspaper. The roof deck and private cubicles are fairly consistent with their current arrangement, as is the second floor TV lounge (seen in the cutaway view). The "gym" area and room with the pool table now host a dark room and video porn room respectively. The lockers have been moved to the rear of the second floor, and that area now is closed off and used for offices. The basement area is another dark room, and if one gropes their way to the back, they'll discover a mirrored wall--all that remains of the dance floor.

Midtowne Spa Today

The unreinforced masonry façade has been spruced up, but there are more fundamental changes inside. My sense is that all the social spaces--the non-sexual rooms--have been replaced by areas for non-conversational sex. The sex has has become more hygienic--sheathed in latex like a medical procedure--and more impersonal. Though not the intention of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, their interventions have probably led to a decrease in the empathy and affection that was a more common artifact of sex in the 70's. It's rare to find an individual who will kiss in places like these. I think there's a kind of parallel in the transformation of of homosexual subcultures from Greece to Rome: From my trip to the Getty Villa earlier this year it was possible to see Greek representations of homosexual courting and affection (though those depictions were often hidden from plain view, turned to the wall). Perhaps a reader of this blog can disabuse me of this notion, but depictions of homosexual affection (things like kissing--not penetration) aren't represented in Roman Antiquity. 

(more after the quotes)

Tepidarium, Forum Baths, Pompeii

The Pompeians, as all the Southern Italians, were fond of banishing the light of their sultry skies, and combined in their voluptuous associations the idea of luxury with darkness.

- The Last Days of Pompeii

The Baths as Depicted in The Last Days of Pompeii

"A poor place is this, compared with the Roman Thermae!" said Lepidus, disdainfully.

-The Last Days of Pompeii

Midtowne Spa's Tepidarium

The gong that announced the opening of the public baths each day was a sweeter sound, than the voices of the philosophers in their school. 

-Cicero

Fresco From the Pompeii Baths

Graffito uncovered in Pompeii shows acts that are considered more feminine (like being penetrated) are used as slurs. And so was engaging in oral sex. Perhaps the mouth as a representation of the (feminine) sexual body is a pejorative that carries through to this day. When Brokeback Mountain aired on Italian television, the kissing scenes were cut as well as the sex scenes. In the Washington Post, Hank Stuever refers to the contemporary squeamishness with men kissing as, "post-homophobic homophobia."

Dean Sameshima's In Between Days (Without You) 1998 (Midtowne Spa)

With all this writing about the baths, the 70's vs. the 00's, and the loss of intimacy, it's probably expected that I should be typing something here about AIDS and gay men retreating into some psychic seclusion, thus making intimacy fall by the wayside. But I think that a larger influence on our supposedly accepting, post-gay world has been the gay movement's own de-sexualizing and de-feminizing of gay representations. 

Recent events like gay activists advocating for gays in the military point to the promotion of the hyper-masculine--the gay man as soldier. In "No On 8" advertising, gay men were either not represented, with a majority of ads depicting political advocates, actors, or relatives of gay couples. In the rare cases where gay couples are depicted, they're shown playing the role of domestic partners rather than of lovers. I'm not arguing for or against "Don't ask, don't tell," gay unions, or the merits of particular strategies.  I only wish to point out the collateral damage; the banishment of what might be termed in the gay vernacular as the "swish," or the "limp-wristed queen." By severing the tails of its own bell curve, the gay community ostracises its own for the feeble goal of heteronormavitity.

Pompeii Wall Carving: Hic Habitat Felicitas (Happiness Resides Here)

Of course the sexualized body has always existed. Like a half-filled balloon, societies suppress a little phallic happiness in one place, only to have it pop out in another. It is a shame the the more benign expressions of affection and empathy become collateral casualties in the continual war of sexual norms.

Dean Sameshima's Untitled (Tea-Room Drawings), 1995-97
Dean Sameshima: hysteric Seven (no. 7), Limited Edition

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2009 CalArts MFA Grad Show

Ian James' Walter Benjamin from the International Discourse Coloring Contest, 2009

MFA graduates from CalArts will hold their culminating exhibition, Why Theory at the Spring Arts Tower in downtown Los Angeles.

The exhibition runs from Saturday, June 20 through Saturday, June 27, 2009. Gallery

hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, June 20 from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Additionally, a screening of video work will take place at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) on Monday, June 29 at 8 p.m. Admission to all events is free.

Rita Gonzalez and Anat Ebgi will co-curate the show. Gonzalez is assistant curator of Contemporary Art at LACMA and co-curator of last year’s Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement; Ebgi, a recent Master's graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, co-founded Chinatown-based gallery The Company.

A student-organized publication, also titled Why Theory, will be released in conjunction with the exhibition. The primarily text-based catalog intends to capture formative conversations about the CalArts experience, and serve as an indexical resource with a life greater than a traditional record of the show. Each graduate student contributed a page of material, with content ranging from text-based drawings to email conversations and catalog-specific works. The publication includes contributions from faculty members Ellen Birrell, Sande Cohen, Leslie Dick and Charles Gaines (in conversation), Anoka Faruqee, Michael Ned Holte, Ashley Hunt and Michelle Dizon (in conversation) and CalArts School of Art Dean, Thomas Lawson.



Participants include Alison J Carr, Megan Cotts, Chanel Eddines, Dan Finsel, Robert Frashure, Alexa Gerrity, Alvaro Guillen, Monica Hicks, Ian James, Laura Kim, Calvin Lee, Nery Gabriel Lemus, Lakshmi Luthra, Meghann McCrory, Suzanne Mejean, Ignacio Perez Meruane, Lisa Miller, Joanne Mitchell, Christina Ondrus, Gala Porras-Kim, Ali Prosch, Maria Schriber, Elleni Sclavenitis, Brianna Sendziak, Matthew Siegle, Clarissa Tossin, April Totten, Biddy Tran, Ingrid von Sydow, Lorrie Waldie, Brica Wilcox, Michiko Yao and Nate Young.

The Spring Arts Tower is located at 453 South Spring Street, Los Angeles, 90013. The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) is located at 631 West 2nd Street, Los Angeles,

90012.

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Julius Shulman at the Fullerton Museum

Forever Fullerton: Julius Shulman is on display at the City of Fullerton Museum through July 19. Please excuse the poor quality of the images.


By taking a short ride down to Fullerton, one can see the original Shulman photographs of the Forever Fullerton housing development and Nicholas Jr. High (at the museum) then take a short drive a few blocks away to see the same homes and schools today.


One of my favorite Shulman tropes: by clamping a piece of wood to the top of a step ladder, he could then clamp some foliage (in the case of the image above, a citrus branch) so it would hang into the top of the image, helping to break up a broad expanse of sky, or in some cases, hide TV antennas or some other unaesthetic distraction.


After viewing the show, I drove out to the tract to take the color pictures of the houses today. The homes I photographed were near the intersection of Maplewood Avenue and Woods Avenue in Fullerton, CA.


Notice the slumpstone wall to the right in the picture above. It matches the house two pictures up. The support posts may have been removed to accommodate the larger cars of today in the narrow carport/entrance space. At the gallery, one can make out 701 in the fascia pictured above. The home I photographed is at 701 Maplewood Avenue.


You can use the Google Maps street view feature to see some of the homes I photographed along Maplewood. The house above is here.


The Forever Fullerton tract--which used some of the same architects as the Eichler Homes--is located in Fullerton between Valencia and Rosslynn, West of Richman Avenue in Fullerton, CA 92832.


Model homes for the tract were on Ash. Because the neighborhood was originally a citrus grove, most lots featured fully grown orange trees.


The homes were originally between 1,000 and 1,200 square feet, and sold for around $14,000 in the mid-fifties when they were new.


Nicholas Junior High School is a few blocks away.


Multiculturalism has tarted up the austere blues and grays. On one wall was a mural in the style of Keith Haring. I also saw some motivational aphorisms like, "Go (mascot name)s!!!" Then again, perhaps it said war is peace, slavery is freedom, of ignorance is strength.


Living in the Obama present, it becomes possible once again to hold aspirations filled with idealism while living in the problematic present.


What threatens the kids at Nicholas is not the red menace of the Soviet Union, but the dire economic reality imposed by corporate imperialism.


Walking around the campus, it still wonderfully open, unlike the fenced-in gulags of LAUSD.


School was out when I was there, but a few kids wandered through, using the play fields and adjacent park.


It's interesting to note the contrast between the aspirations of modernism evident in the original school buildings: lots of glass, open space, overhangs for shaded play--and to allow for open windows and fresh air. As the school added more space for classrooms and storage, we have a collection of used shipping containers, with their corrugated surface evoking the tin shanty towns of third-world slums, and portable buildings that trigger thoughts of FEMA trailers rather than the ideals of high modernism. But I guess when the top marginal tax rate was 90% (as it was in the mid-50's for anyone making over 400K a year) the government can afford a bit of idealism.

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My Andy Goldsworthy attempt at the CMG

Labor Day Weekend I attended my fifth California Men's Gathering. Unfortunately I had to leave early because of a recurrence of staph. For those who have never been, the CMG is not an easy thing to describe. It involves spending a three-day weekend in a summer camp environment with mostly gay men. There are gatherings where everyone in the camp comes together, workshops, and quiet time. Think of it like Burning Man without fire, women, or drugs; or like the land that time forgot, a hidden canyon in Malibu where hippies, fairies, and the spirit of Allen Ginsberg lives on.

Looking over the list of workshops can give some idea of what goes on, but the weekend will be whatever you make of it. For some folks it means nothing more that laying out by the pool and working on a perfect tan. I tend to gravitate towards the more physical activities, like a wildflower identification hike, the ropes course, or the sweat lodge.

This year I attended a workshop on making art in (and out of) nature. Coming from an art world (and schooling) that heavily engages in the critique, it was both disorienting and liberating to make art without dire ramifications. 

My particular micro experience can be seen as a synecdoche of one CMG philosophy: being in the moment, and unburdened play. This isn't as easy as it sounds, which is where the CMG's mission statement comes in. The idea of men mentoring men to be men to be men alludes to the potential help form your fellow CMGers at freeing one's grip on one's baggage.

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The Huntington's New Galleries of American Art

The Newly Expanded Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art

A couple of weeks ago I attended the opening of the new American galleries at the Huntington. The gallery space was created to house the contents of the Mansion while under renovation. Now the space has been re-purposed to house a recent focus of the Huntington's collections, American art. Various doors and windows have been punched into the facade, in an attempt to entice garden perambulators to spend sometime looking at art, as well as offering outside views and natural light into the space. If one enters through the older part of the building, it's possible to follow a fairly conventional historical timeline. Alternately, by entering the more modern looking glass wall entrance, it's possible to pick up the story closer to the first scratchings of early Modernism.

Cassatt Sandwich: Mary Cassatt's Breakfast in Bed (middle)

The Huntington joins some other recent sprucing up of American collections. In the case of the Huntington, this has more to do with the addition of Virginia Scott Foundation's collection, but I also wonder if something else is going on here. In the conventions of the past (aka, the domino theory of art history) Greek, begat Roman, begat Early Christian, begat Medieval, begat Renaissance, begat Baroque, begat Modernism, until you get American Abstract Expressionism.

Like the Cool School of Southern California in the 60's, the story paints a picture of a regional New York scene that emerges fully formed, like Minerva from Zeus' head. In the case of Los Angeles, the story ignores the WPA-era and G.I. Bill-educated artists that made art and taught at places like Chinouard, Otis, and Art Center, creating a milieu where the proto-cool could flourish (while still in school).

Harriet Hosmer's Queen Zenobia in Chains

By linking American-style Modernism with earlier American artists (and their work) it becomes easier to recognise interpersonal influences as well as art historical ones. In addition, linking newer and older American work gives museums an additional place to hang older work that gets squeezed out of space set aside for contemporary art (and may have been displayed as contemporary art when first purchased).

Boy-Girl-Boy-Girl: Nevelson, Ruscha, Frankenthaler, Diebenkorn

Admittedly, the Huntington's collection of American art is a newer endeavour and spotty in places. In the LA Times, Christopher Knight thinks that their collection doesn't warrant all that room. To the museum's credit, gaps in the narrative are filled in with loans, including the brilliant Frankenthaler and Diebenkorn pictured above, pulled from the Norton Simon's storage cupboard. One wonders what other treasures moulder at the Norton Simon, art tucked away from its days as the Pasadena Museum of Art.

In his review, Christopher Knight offers up a suggestion:

Rather than another cartoon-like Thomas Hart Benton from the 1920s, which the Huntington recently acquired, it would be great to see a Henrietta Shore floral, a Modernist pastoral landscape by Charles Reiffel and transcendental abstractions by Raymond Jonson and Agnes Pelton from the same period. These are painters not always encountered in the mainstream storyline. But their best works are better than the routine Ashcan School and Social Realist works found here. The Huntington needs to shake things up.

Perhaps the Huntington could take Knight's idea one step further. In addition to Henrietta Shore, how about a Sarah Peale still life or Edmonia Lewis marble? In addition to an Agnes Pelton abstraction, what about a Lee Bontecou or Eva Hesse? The Huntington already has some strong works by women artists. Why not continue down that rarely traveled path?

One of over a hundred extant portraits of G. Washington painted by Gilbert Stuart (r)

The Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art are located at the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens. The galleries are free on the first Thursday of the month; weekend admission is twenty bucks; the weekday price is five dollars less. Summer hours at the Huntington are 10:30 to 4:30; closed on Tuesday.

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Threads at SOMArts

Michael Buitron's MMPI Pillowcases, 2006

I've been arrears in my posting schedule, which should improve in the coming weeks.

The Queer Cultural Center in San Francisco is staging the 12th Annual National Queer Arts Festival, nearly two months long, and featuring 70+ performances and exhibitions. 

The opening reception for Threads is on Saturday, June 7 at 3 pm, which includes my pillowcases, pictured above. The show is at SOMArts, at Brannan and 8th Streets. Here's their blurb:

Join Qcc and an amazing international group of talented visual/media artists for the opening of our art exhibition, Threads.

Threads is not just about fabric and costume but also how queerness weaves the threads of our physical, social and moral existence together into a multi-dimensional fabric of community and our selves. What are the threads that bind, mend and sometimes unravel this spectacular fabric? How do we fashion, perform, subvert or display queerness in our art and lives?

So fashion yourself high or low and don your hottest threads for the opening! There will be a photo booth and photographers roaming about capturing the fabulousness of it all with music and performance in the galleries—not to mention, food and drink. All for free and fun.

More information about the various festival events here (and more pictures of the work at the bottom of the page).

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