Zackary Drucker at Steve Turner Contemporary Art

Installation Shot of Zackary Drucker's
The Inability to be Looked At and the Horror of Nothing to See
at Steve Turner Contemporary Art

Performed, videotaped, and projected in the same space at Turner Contemporary, we are left with evidence--both cinematic and in the from of props--of Zachary Drucker's performance, The Inability to be Looked At and the Horror of Nothing to See. By the reflected, flickering light of the screen we can make out the body-sized stainless steel table, with an oily imprint of the artist's back. Surrounding this print of emollients-on-steel are scattered the tweezers used for the performance, evoking thoughts of Drucker as the love child of Yves Klein and Matthew Barney.

Installation Shot

The video begins with the artist's voice. Spoken in a new-age breathy monotone, Drucker intones, "Cosmic energy flows through you and the body." On one hand, the large ball bearing in the artist's mouth reminds one of a suckling pig, but the pervasiveness of the inorganic stainless steel--the table, the tweezers, the ball gag--also brings to mind some horrific medical procedure. The tension of some impending Chris Burden weirdness is diffused with Drucker's calming words. We are told to breath deeply, and in the video, those closest to the body are instructed to touch it. Eventually the participants are asked to pick up the tweezers and depilate the body in front of them. The folks in the room readily pick up the tweezers, but there is a hesitation to pluck. Here it becomes evident that the artist has created some empathy for the body placed before them. We all know what it feels like to have one's hairs pulled out one at a time.

After a pause, the artist's prerecorded voice encourages, "Don't be afraid, the bitch can take it." There are some who pluck with gusto and skill; it's obvious that they've tended the edges of an arched eyebrow or plucked the aberrant hair.

Installation Shot

The artist's voice continues with a litany of the body's faults and imperfections; the androgynous fat distribution, the freckles and moles. "You will never be a woman," speaks of inner turmoil and desire. The act of tweezing presents a dichotomy that is both helpful--bringing the body closer to the androgyny it seeks--and causing pain. The action manifests the conflicting attraction and revulsion that the androgynous body often encounters. In the end, the live audience is instructed to, "Step away from the body; turn around." The screen fades and the cycle repeats.

The Horror of Nothing to See

Earlier this year the Hammer Biennial presented Charlie White's antiseptic Teen and Transgender Study #1 - 4. Apart from the work being made by a non-female, non-teen, and non-transgender, White's photographs had all the pathologizing effect of a mug shot with all the empathy that can be garnered from reading a stranger's lab results. With TITBLAATHONTS, the viewer becomes the uncomfortable other in Drucker's depilatory salon, and in the end, the artist offers a way out through empathy.

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Underwear in the Hood

Postcard picked up at my neighborhood liquor store

I needed to break a 20 to do laundry yesterday; I went across the street to the liquor store, got a soda, and found a stack of these postcards (pictured above) by the register. In case you don't understand the purpose of the undergarment, they're designed to take advantage of the fact that cops patting you down for drugs usually avoid touching your penis. The picture below from Safetyz website shows the pocket in action.

Stash pocket (with plastic zipper) in action

From the war on drugs to the war on terror, these briefs are the tactical equivalent of those fabled stories of Saddam Hussein stashing WMDs in elementary schools, purportedly to save them from the destruction of U.S. bombing runs. If your enemy is more powerful than you, take advantage of his cultural taboos--whether they be against killing children or touching another man's penis. For those who don't use drugs, the 4x7 inch pocket would be useful for smuggling larger bottles of shampoo through airport security.

The last time I got roughed up and patted down by the police was while I was chatting up a hustler in a bad part of Caracas. The police were pretty thorough, emptying out all my pockets, taking off my belt; my shoes and socks came off, insoles taken out of my shoes, and plenty of squeezing and patting around my crotch (but not directly on it). They still got me hard though. It's an ingenious product--but not foolproof--as the video above shows.

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Your Bright Future, Your Historical Past

Yong Soon Min's 2009 Springtimes of Castro and Kim 2009

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is now showing Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea through September 20, 2009. At the press opening I commented to one of LACMA's staffers that it was an interesting coincidence that the previous show on BCAM's second floor, Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures also focused on a politically divided country. I wondered if (like Two Germanys was preceded by previous surveys of German art) Your Bright Future would one day be followed up by a show of the art of the two Koreas? "Not a chance; it'll never happen," was the reply. Yet even in the weeks leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the concept of a united Germany had yet to enter the realm of possibility.

Choi Jeong-Hwa's Welcome 2009

And similar to Stephanie Barron's precursor show, Exiles and Émigrés, Your Bright Future also captures a mixed bag of the Korean diaspora. The work in the show is visually impactful, be it the 99 Cent Store plastics that Choi Jeong-Hwa wraps and hangs on LACMA's exterior, Bahc Yiso's bright lights, or the bowl-you-over detail in Do Ho Suh's architectural constructions. There's a current of civic boosterism that was totally absent in Barron's show; YBF shares more of an affinity with YBAs or the supposedly CIA-funded Ab-Ex shows that toured Europe as an counterpunch to the social realism of the Soviet Bloc. Thanks to the triumph of capitalism, YBF is not brought to you by some secret ministry of propaganda, but by a facilitator of our trade imbalance, Hanjin Shipping.

Detail of Choi Jeong-Hwa's HappyHappy!! (sic) 2009

A short drive away, Kaucyila Brooke has organized Re-figurative Ordering, which features a group of western artists and their investigations into various histories. While visiting a small collection of Asian art on her visit to Cuba, Yong Soon Min came across the painting, a gift from North Korea to Cuba, pictured at the top of this post. She has reproduced it Felix Gonzalez-Torres-style, for gallery visitors to take. In one way Min's work alludes to a gaping hole in YBF: for a show of artists from a country whose existence is a product of two cold war adversaries, the work is largely ahistorical. In contrast, Min's piece provides an instance of the far-flung reach of cold war propaganda's tentacles.

Richard Hawkins' Urbis Paganus IV, 7 2008

We also get to see images Catherine Lord took on a visit to the state archives in Dominica that records the slaves brought to the island nation in the early part of the 19th century. The work is part of an on-going series, The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men.

Do Ho Suh's Fallen Star 1/5, 2008

Besides Lord's work in Re-figurative Ordering, which pushes her investigations in the direction of sociology, other artists in the show (like the artists in YBF) are more likely to implicate their personal experiences. An example by Richard Hawkins is of one of his neoclassical-cum-porn collages, Urbis Paganus IV, 7, which reminds me of the days when we hung out in his dorm room at CalArts, reading theory, and pausing the VCR during Tom Cruise movies so we could take a Polaroid of the one frame that showed his penis.

Bahc Yiso's Your Bright Future, 2002, 09

Dee Williams also finds her sources closer to home, investigating the archives of Chaffey College where she's adjunct faculty. Williams' Untitled Video reviews the archives of what was originally an aggie school and one of the first community colleges in California. Depicting holiday parties (with plastic Christmas trees) and forestry classes (with living ones), Willams' video resonates with the dissonance between the optimism of mid-century exurban California while it exposes the sexism of the era's curricula.

Kim Beom's An Iron in the Form of a Radio, a Kettle in the Form of an Iron, and a Radio in the Form of a Kettle, 2002

The best work in YBF are videos that resonate with a similar dissonance. Minouk Lim's two-channel video Wrong Question captures the misunderstandings of race and politics, and Jooyeon Park's video MONOLOGUE monologue shows an image of a white ESL teacher recalling memories of his home, voiced over by a Korean second-language-speaker.

Still from Dee Williams' Untitled Video, 2007

Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea is on the second floor of BCAM at LACMA , and runs through September 20, 2009. The show then travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and runs November 22 through Valentine's Day, 2010.

Re-figurative Ordering is at dnj Gallery through August 29th, 2009.

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Cast in Bronze: French Sculpture at the Getty

Jean Goujon's Tomb Effigy of André Blondel de Rocquencourt, 1560
(for some reason, the Getty chose to hang this work on the wall)

There are some art exhibitions that I could easily miss. I think my tastes in art are fairly wide ranging, but French bronze sculpture from the renaissance to the French revolution doesn’t fall particularly high on my list. In this summer’s Artforum, Robert Pincus-Witten’s review of Cast in Bronze gave the show high marks for the skill and virtuosity of the artists included, giving the art-world equivalent of a thumbs-up. So when I received an invitation to the press opening at the Getty, I thought, “Pourquois pas?”

I try my best to own up to my own baggage that I bring to art. In the realms of politics and religion, there were those eras when rulers held their position—or moral codes were espoused—from a position that ultimately argued, “Because I said so." From the enlightenment on, the lodestar of civic pursuits has been parsed from logic and argumentation (at least we hope). So when looking at art, I need to take a “leap of reason” to get past the flagrant proselytizing and appreciate the core humanity (or virtuosity) of a work of art.

Barthélemy Prieur's Funerary Geniuses (from the tomb of Christophe de Thou) 1583-5

In the first gallery at the Getty Center, The Tomb Effigy of Andre Blondel de Rocquencort is expert in its bas-relief figuration that alludes to elements of neoclassic and medieval styles. Across from this work are a pair of Funerary Geniuses that obviously are inspired by Michelangelo’s tomb for Lorenzo de' Medici. In the next gallery a handsome Young Captive in Chains sits next to an older chained cousin.

Pierre de Francqueville's Young Captive in Chains, 1618

Keeping up the pretense of appreciation solely based on formal criteria and artistic virtuosity was too much to bear. Eventually, the naked, fit, and secular bodies give way the rotund Kings Louis XIII and XIV, and little bronze tchotchke casts for the nouveau haute bourgeoisie. In Cast in Bronze’s iteration at the Metropolitian Museum of Art, the NY Times’ Ken Johnson describes the sculptures as showing:

“…a cold impersonality, cramped imagination and slavish obeisance to the official culture of their times. This is not art discovering new possibilities of romantic individualism but a conservative, backward-looking genre that affirms and celebrates imperial power and order.”

History tells us that many of the bronzes of the era were melted down in the French revolution. The fourth gallery shows us small-scale reproductions, engravings, and other ephemera of the humongous Louis XIV on Horseback that joined the fate of bronzes of Joseph Stalin and Saddam Hussein—torn down, trampled and melted; what always happens when politics shift while a leader is still fresh in the people memory (as opposed to those leaders who slowly transform over time into cloudy historical metaphors). It would seem that in the continuum from political to aesthetic appreciation (or disgust), politics trumps beauty, if the viewership becomes sufficiently pissed off. The centerpiece of the gallery is the extant left foot of le Roi Soleil. If only we had bronze monument of Dick Cheney we could pummel with the Louvre’s left shoe. Or instead of the ancillary exhibition, Foundry to Finish: the Making of a Bronze Sculpture, the Getty could have provided reproductions of bronze dictators that visitors could topple and then trample.

François Girardon's Louis XIV's Left Foot, 1692-4
(photo by Diane Calder)

Perhaps it’s OK to be put off by these objects that attempt to garner prestige by association. On the press kit that holds the handouts is printed:

SEEN AT
THE LOUVRE
OCTOBER 24, 2008-JANUARY 19, 2009
THE MET
FEBRUARY 24-MAY 24, 2009

NOW AT
THE GETTY CENTER
JUNE 30-SEPTEMBER 27, 2009

implying that I should be impressed by the institutional prestige, if not by the rigor of the scholarship. Is it any wonder that the vast majority of tram riders to the travertine acropolis in Brentwood never venture inside the building?

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30 Second Review: Chinatown Art Night

Chinatown Gallery Reception Desk Image Courtesy Diane Calder

Earlier this year, the art galleries of Chinatown have started an art walk; last night I attended my first.

There's a large subset of art world patrons, who, when asked to draw a map of Los Angeles, would (like the rest of us) draw the Pacific Ocean as the city's western edge. But the north, east, and south edges would probably reach as far as Mulholland Drive, Hancock Park, and Culver City, respectively. In an effort to expand these patrons' Saul Steinbergian view of the city, and to coax their still-functioning checkbooks to the city's nether regions, the galleries of Chinatown have instituted quarterly art nights.

In the past, the spaces of Chung King Road served as quasi storage facilities in between art fairs; in fact Peres Projects had turned his old space into just that. It was not uncommon to make a weekday trip to Chinatown and see art hung and lit, and the front doors locked. But the art world is a different place in 2009. Some galleries have closed while others are bunking down together.

I couldn't help but notice a change in the crowds. There seemed to be more of the middle class tattooed rock and rollers that prowl the downtown banking district. Chinatown also has some new retail spaces that appeal to their tastes; there are new home furnishings and clothing stores, along with the old souvenir shops that have been there since the days of the Last Emperor.

Still, there are worthwhile galleries to visit. Most of them have gravitated away from the pedestrian/tourist area, and are clustered along Hill Street and in the mixed residential neighborhood to the northeast. Current group shows at Solway Jones, Sam Lee, Tomas Solomon Gallery (in Acuna Hansen's old space on Bernard St.) and Cottage Home Gallery (a collaboration between Tom Solomon, China Art Objects, and Sister) all show promise. Or if you live west of La Brea, you can wait until December and fly to Miami.

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Pae White's Smoke Knows at 1301PE

Pae White's Smoke Sequence #3, 2009 (detail)

On the day President Obama signed the tobacco bill, I visited Pae White’s Smoke Knows at 1301PE on Wilshire Blvd. The memory of Roosevelt, cigarette holder clenched between his teeth, and the continuity of democracy that has brought the current smoker-in-chief to the same desk comes to mind, but so does the image of the President signing the bill in the fresh air of the Rose Garden, adjacent to the portico where he steals away to smoke. I choose not to see this as incongruity, but as a sign of the maturation of the American polis that prefers to elect effective legislators rather than exemplary role models. Give me a hard drinkin' Lincoln over a teetotaling Bush any day.

Pae White's Smoke Sequence #3, 2009

At 1301PE it’s easy to become lost in a reverie of smoke; the smoke-dulled tapestries from Belgium, Beauvais, and Bayeux; things (like autumn leaves) that go up in smoke; and the translucent grey sworls that waft and curl from the ashen end of Obama’s Camel Wide. But White is not dealing in metaphor--so much as she inverts metonymy. Unlike the metonymic example of say, carbon emissions, which has a congruent and causal relationship to climate change, smoke is a congruent effect in both senses of the word: causal and theatrical.

Pae White's Smoke Sequence #6, 2009

In several of White’s tapestries, the image is rotated 90 degrees, often the first manipulation of a jpeg with photographic software. The combination of horizontal smoke and photography conjures thoughts of wind tunnels and the scientific. But White's smoke doesn't whizz by, it lazily swirls, inviting the viewer to slow down and contemplate. Closer inspection of the tapestries reveals a multitude of whites, grays, and blacks, and the mechanical translation of pixels into warp and weft. But White’s art, which signs for work made in the age of mechanical and digital reproduction, is still able to foreground formal concerns that representative artists of the past millennia have struggled with when attempting to depict light.

Pae White's Smoke Sequence #1, 2009 (detail)

Like sfumato and Renaissance depictions of atmospheric haze, smoke gives presence to the intangibility of air. Smoke becomes a placeholder for the invisible atmosphere we swim in. At the same time smoke obscures, it focuses our attention to the thing behind it; as it occludes, it reveals. Like a president with anti-tobacco legislation in one hand and a cigarette in the other, smoke holds two seemingly contradictory positions at once.

Pae White's Smoke Knows, 2009

White’s show Smoke Knows presents three bodies of work with three modes of production. Upstairs, small sheets of pigment-coated paper are laser-etched to reveal the white substrate. What appear to be monochrome drawings of smoke are actually produced with a method similar to the way Michael Jackson’s dermatologist produced his white wrinkle-free skin.

Pae White's Paper Carving #6, 2009

Both upstairs and downstairs are scatterings of hand-made leaves that White refers to as Gutter Leaves. According to White, these pieces draw on her memories of leaves cleaned from the gutters of her childhood home in Pasadena. The installation also reveals the fireplace in the entry gallery; an existing architectural element from the era when 1301PE was a showroom for Lanz of Salzburg, a woman’s sleepwear retailer. This conflation of the personal and historical (White wore Lantz nightgowns as a child) creates another causal inversion, one where the viewer is forced to decipher the past from White’s artistic production. Like reading tealeaves to foresee the future, meaning that is projected is not understanding, but a chance for us to confabulate from what is essentially smoke and mirrors.

Pae White's November Gutter Leaves, Pasadena, 2009

Posts on Leap Into the Void are a labor of love. If you enjoy reading my musings or would like me to post more frequently, comments, clarifications, critiques, or even salutations offer encouragement.

Thanks for reading!

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