Race: Unpacking the Invisible Portfolio

Jeff Koon's Michael Jackson and Bubbles

A Coda

Posting my review of 9 Lives has given me an opportunity to reread my thoughts amid our nation's ongoing conversation about race. While it's important and good to critique the curatorial enterprise, it is also necessary to discuss the cultural system that allows a biennial survey of Los Angeles artists to exclusively exhibit white artists and not have a single critic or reviewer mention the fact. Individual actions (or inaction)--be they by artists, curators, or critics--are symptoms of systemic forces. As responsible viewers and thinkers about art, we need to critique the players and critique the game.

The economic expansions and contractions or the art market not withstanding, the art world functions like a zero-sum game; for every artist included in a museum biennial or a gallery's stable, there are many more artists who are not. If "winning" exhibition space and column inches were solely based on talent and creativity, then the proportion of black or women artists showing work would be closer to their proportions in the population at large, and there would be less need for compensations like the Studio Museum in Harlem or the Women's Building. Recent shows like Your Bright Future, Phantom Sightings, and WACK! tacitly affirm the privilege of white artists and male artists as they attempt to ameliorate them.

Glenn Ligon's Malcom X

When we were in the editing process for the previously posted review of 9 Lives, one of the editors highlighted the word "overtly" next to "racist" and asked, "Isn't racism by definition overt?" My sense is that like most things, racism occurs on a continuum, from tying a rope around the neck of a black person and lynching them, to curating or collecting art predominantly made by white artists. The thread that weaves together both actions is the entitled sense that no explanation or reason need be given. I haven't talked to curators or collectors like Ali Subotnick or Eli Broad, but I expect that they would say that their choices were based on personal taste or some other factor, and the race or gender of the artist was not part of their selection criteria. I would not disagree, but add that their choices are symptomatic of an unquestioned position of privilege. In the long art historical view, their selections will seem as myopic as 19th century supporters of French academic painting.

Ken Gonzales-Day's Erased Lynching

Los Angeles is now a white minority city. For 9 Lives to reflect the ethnicities of the environment where the Hammer Museum is located (and still include Subotnick's personal choices), she would also need to include ten more artists that were Asian, Black, and Latino. As I said above, the exhibition of art is a zero-sum game. For the cake that is the limited amount of wall space available over a given period of time, it becomes necessary to slice off smaller pieces--or not serve--some white artists so as to avoid ghetto shows that attempt to compensate for the egregious inequality.

Byron Kim's Threshold

Issues around race and art are not always black and white, and will become more complex as time marches on. Like the president of the United States, my mother is white. From my graduating class at CalArts, one in five of us were born to parents of different ethnicities. Hispanic surnames not withstanding, most of us are light-skinned, acculturated, and we enjoy access to supposedly racially neutral group shows, while at the same time being aware of the privilege of whiteness that compounds the privilege of obtaining a well-regarded MFA.

Kip Fulbeck's Part Asian, 100% Hapa

Reading over Peggy McIntosh's White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack made me wonder if her list could be remade to expose some of the invisible systems of the art world:

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank checks.

Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in women's studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, "having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?"

With that in mind, I've attempted to remake McIntosh's metaphorical knapsack into an art world portfolio.

Gilbert Buitron (My Father) Performing

The Effects of White and/or Male Privilege in the Art World

1. I can if I wish, arrange to be in the company of white artists, curators, and collectors most of the time.
2. I can avoid spending time with people who wish to discuss my artwork in terms of race, gender, political, or economic issues, when I don’t see those as subjects that pertain to my work.
3. If I should need to move to another large city, I can be pretty sure of finding another art community made up of people like me.
4. I can be pretty sure that people I ask to visit my studio will be neutral or pleasant to me.
5. I can go to an art opening in a sketchy neighborhood, pretty well assured that there will be a critical mass of other people like me to make me feel safer.
6. I can turn through pages of art magazine or read reviews in the paper and expect to see artists of my race and gender widely represented.
7. When I study art history, I am shown that people of my color and gender made it what it is.
8. I can be pretty sure of having my race and gender represented in a group show.
9. I can be casual about art made by a woman or person of color that uses gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity as a subject matter, dismissing it as overly political or didactic.
10. I can go into an encyclopedic art museum and count on finding the art of my race and gender well represented, along with smaller galleries that separate our art from more “exotic” crafts.
11. I can expect to find straightforward depictions of my race and gender in portrait galleries, made by artists that share the sitter’s race, and portrayed in a sympathetic way.
12. If I’m the only male or white artist in a group exhibition, I can assume my inclusion is based on the merits of my work, and not as a ploy to be “politically correct”.
13. When meeting with a collector or curator for the first time, I seldom think about their expectations about my race or gender.
14. I can act out in socially inappropriate ways and have others attribute it to my “artistic temperament” rather than my race or gender.
15. I can speak to audiences about my art and not be asked questions that begin, “As a white artist... ?”
16. I am not referred to as a white artist, or a male artist.
    
17. I am never asked to speak on behalf of all the artists of my racial group or to speak for all men.
18. I can be pretty sure that if I’m introduced to a collector, I will be facing a person of my race or gender.
19. If I make artwork that is critical, it is not seen as being motivated by my race or gender.
20. I can choose to ignore shows at museums or exhibition spaces that exclusively feature the work of women, African-American, Latino, or Asian artists or I can disparage them, or learn from them, but in any case, I can find ways to be more or less protected from negative consequences of any of these choices.
21. I can worry about racism or sexism without being seen as self-interested.
22. I can create artwork that focuses on many topics, without wondering whether my art will be seen as a product of my race or gender.
23. If I am not successful as an artist I can be sure that my race or gender is not the problem.
24. I can imagine my art as a continuation of the historical timeline that stretches back to European cave paintings.
25. Photographic film and lighting equipment are manufactured to best register light skin tones, so I needn’t make any special adjustments or color corrections to photograph other people of my race.

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Nine Lives at the Hammer: Whiteness and Nostalgia

Yesterday: Charlie White

Video Still from White's American Minor

In the darkened but incongruously white room showing White’s video American Minor (2008), I began to suspect a “white” subtext in Nine Lives. In one scene, semen-white drops of milk glisten on the girl’s puerile lips. Later on, the Caucasian protagonist seems to transform into a glossy white fiberglass sculpture.

Doubling back through the exhibition, I realized that the only prominent depiction of a person of color by the nine white artists was a photograph of the King of Tonga posing with Jeffrey Vallance. For Vallance, a visit to Polynesia grew from nostalgia for the tiki décor in his parent’s home.

“In a sense, I’d gone full circle: My ancestors came to Southern California from northern Norway and decorated their home with Polynesian pop, which aroused my curiosity and inspired me to travel to Polynesia, which in turn inspired me to return to my ancestral Nordic Homeland*.”

Ironically, the appearance of the King of Tonga is just a detour on a nostalgic journey that ultimately ends in snow-white Scandinavia.

Vallance's King of Tonga

The white subtext I was sensing was not an overtly racist one, but white in the many senses of the word. In Hollywood, the white Stetson was a cipher for good. Subotnick portrays Foulkes as the hero or the Hollywood good guy. White can also be seen as the absence of color or the absence of meaning. Like the white screen in a darkened theater, Upson’s grotto offers up a void where the artist can project her imagined space of the Playboy mansion. Vallance’s work reverses the path of white colonialists from far-flung exotic locales back to Europe, conjuring up the white of old-fashioned imperialism. And there is also a virginal white, as represented by White’s teenage girls.

But in the multicultural (minority-majority) present, a white Los Angeles can only exist in the movies, as a historic (and nostalgic) memory, or in an group exhibition of exclusively white artists. One wonders how many visionary artists Subotnick would have to include before she found art made by a person of color to her liking. For both Subotnick and Faulkner, Los Angeles’s civic boosterism and filmic depictions preceded the employment opportunities that drew them west. In both Golden Land and Nine Lives, there's a longing for, and an attempt to represent a mediated Los Angeles that doesn't exist.

Video Still from Playboy After Dark

An intriguing clue can be found in the reprint of William Faulkner’s short story “Golden Land” (1935) that appears in the exhibition catalog. Faulkner’s protagonist Ira longs for his whiter home, in all connotations of the word—clean, homogeneous, and pure—in contrast to his sexually precocious daughter and effeminate son, who do not share their father’s history or connections outside Los Angeles. For transplants to the city, Los Angeles can be disorienting, with its heterogeneous population and a civic life that connects less with a (white) European history than does the East Coast, but instead orients towards Latin America and the Pacific Rim.

In the vestibule that leads to the Hammer’s vault gallery, an iPod offers up a selection of Llyn Foulkes’s jazzy laments on Los Angeles. “What did they do to ol’ L.A.?” he asks on one track. Like Ira in Faulkner’s short story (which provides a similar coda to the catalog) Subotnick sees a dystopic city, which must compete with nostalgia for a better time or place.

One need only compare a real hospital's staff to a televised hospital drama, or go to Grauman’s Chinese theater to catch glimpses of disappointment on the tourists’ faces as they step off the bus and confront the reality of Hollywood, discovering that they’ve spent too much time staring at flickering images in a darkened room.

Chinese Theater, Hollywood, CA

*Subotnick, 103-4.

Monday: A Coda

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Nine Lives: Charlie White at the Hammer

Yesterday: Jeffrey Vallance

Charlie White's Teen and Transgender Comparative Study #1

Less compelling in Nine Lives were work by artists who chose to represent subcultures outside their own, but perhaps there are no Sámi painters of reindeer viscera or transgender photographers of note living in Los Angeles.

Charlie White’s photographic series Teen and Transgender Comparative Study #1 through #4 (2008) harkens to the gridded backgrounds of 19th century pseudoscientific photography of Eadweard Muybridge. The side-by-side, typological portrayals encourage the viewer to compare and contrast a teenage girl and transgender adult. In Teen and Transgender Comparative Study #3, is it possible to decipher the scar from a tracheal shave, an operation designed to reduce the prominence of the male Adam’s apple? White’s specimen-like depiction, which foregrounds his subjects’ pathologies, separates us from their humanity.

Significant differences exists between the life of a white, male photographer and university professor in his mid-30s and the experiences of his teen and transgender models. For one, both his subjects’ identities—teen and transgender—occupy a liminal space between child and adult, or between male and female. The burden of understanding White’s subjects is left to the limited cultural identifiers within the frame. But even a reading of those identifiers is thwarted. We may infer that a teen girl and a transgender woman are both attempting to advance to their own ideals of femininity, but what we see are the efforts of an unseen hairstylist, make-up artist, and photographer who work in concert to reinforce similarities and eliminate individual identity and difference.

In The Cyrilla Strothers Project (2004-6) (an earlier work not in the show), White presented an archive of 11,000 photographs created when he gave cameras to friends and family of the titular teenaged subject. The pretext and form of The Cyrilla Strothers Project more ably diffuses at least some of the objectification and layers of removal that distance the viewer (or the artist) from the teens depicted in White’s video and photographs in Nine Lives.

Video Still from Charlie White's American Minor

Tomorrow: Whiteness and Nostalgia

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Nine Lives: Jeffrey Vallance at the Hammer

Yesterday: Kaari Upson

Jeffrey Vallance's Brown Wall at Home

As with Foulkes, Jeffrey Vallance’s best work emerges when his personal life bumps up against the social and political, as it does when faux naïve correspondence and elaborate plans bring him face-to-face with various heads of state. But you need to read the back-story for his work to have full effect.

Vallance’s installation at the Hammer, a re-creation of The Brown Wall (2008) from his home, is most interesting when we know of the high jinks and adventures necessary to obtain the bric-a-brac. For viewers familiar with Blinky—the chicken he bought at the grocery store, had interred at a pet cemetery, then had dug up years later and autopsied—a chicken bone may carry more meaning than meets the eye. Unfortunately, the collection of artifacts on Vallance’s brown wall substitutes quantity for the contextualization that makes his work funny and engaging. In a way it is like viewing vacation slides without the narration.

Relics and Reliquaries by Jeffery Vallance

Tomorrow: Charlie White

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Nine Lives: Kaari Upson at the Hammer

Yesterday's Post: Llyn Foulkes

Video Still from Kaari Upson's Grotto

While Foulkes rails against the projections of one corporate empire, Kaari Upson offers a parody of another. More so than many other media conglomerates, Playboy projects a very specific lifestyle—the prototypical Playboy bachelor who is something of an atavist, more at home in the ‘50s, as depicted in the AMC cable series Mad Men.

With The Grotto (2008-09), Upson subverts the psychological process of projection by projecting her own creative output—not onto the actual grotto at the Playboy mansion—but rather onto the fantasy advertised by Playboy’s media empire and imagined in the artist’s head. As befitting our hyper-mediated world, a quintet of video projectors literally project over and across each other, then onto Upson’s parataxic distortion of Hugh Heffner’s fake grotto. With the artist in the role of the videos’ protagonist, Upson plays out her sexualized soft-core scenarios.

By peering through the chinks in The Grotto, we are given the opportunity to crawl outside of Plato’s metaphorical cave, and view Upson’s videos that show the artist setting up a scene as well as playing it out. In several projections, the artist’s fake latex breasts are made obvious, in contrast to the subcutaneous silicon implants in real Playboy Bunnies that inhabit Heffner’s space. Through the artist’s use of borderline gruesome art direction and the counterforce of female agency, Upson undermines the male heterosexual nostalgia championed by Playboy.

Kaari Upson's Grotto at the Hammer

Tomorrow: Jeffrey Vallance

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Nine Lives: Llyn Foulkes at the Hammer

Yesterday: Part 1 of 6: Past Hammer Biennials

Llyn Foulkes’s The Lost Frontier

Llyn Foulkes’s The Lost Frontier (1997-2005) is the first work encountered in Nine Lives. The bas-relief diorama presents what could be both an antediluvian and post-apocalyptic vision of a drive up the Hollywood Freeway to the San Fernando Valley, as seen in the distance. In the lower foreground, the back of the artist is depicted, while at the center a gun-toting Mickey Mouse in drag guards Cahuenga Pass. As dramatically lit as any tableau vivant at Laguna Beach’s Pageant of the Masters, this artwork is cordoned off at the back of a darkened vestibule like a pre-Second Vatican Council tabernacle.

This and other works by Foulkes are featured prominently on the catalog cover, street banners, print ads, and in the Hammer’s storefront window facing Wilshire Boulevard. Commenting on Helter Skelter, Peter Kosenko and Peter Plagens similarly label Foulkes’s Pop (1985-90) as the “theme piece” and “lone adult soliloquy” of the exhibition*. For Nine Lives, Subotnick identifies Foulkes as the supreme iconoclast, the “hero liberating us from the tyranny of big corporations” (aka Walt Disney Corporation)**.

By mythologizing the artist as hero (an old-fashioned cliché of Modernism), Subotnick subverts the possibility of Foulkes articulating a critical position in relation to the corporate world. Further, by using the scenographic and illusionistic tropes of Hollywood, Foulkes undermines his own critical position. He can run Mickey Mouse through the ringer time and again, but the corporate mouse pops back good as new, ready for his next drubbing.

Disney animator Ward Kimball (Foulkes' father-in-law) gave the artist the page from the Mickey Mouse Club handbook that appears in Made in Hollywood (1983) and also inspired the Llyn Foulkes’ Rubber Band via Kimball’s Firehouse Five Plus Two. Both of these musical groups are in turn influenced by the cartoony musical arrangements of Spike Jones***.

Llyn Foulkes' In Memory of St. Vincent School

*Peter Kosenko and Peter Plagens, cited by Howard Singerman, “Howard Singerman on Pop Noir,” Artforum 43 (October 2004), p. 126.
**Subotnick, 15.
***Llyn Foulkes and Paul J. Karlstrom, Oral history interview with Llyn Foulkes, 1997 June. 25-1998 Dec.2, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/oralhistory/foulke97.htm.

Tomorrow: Kaari Upson

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Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A. at the Hammer

This past spring I worked on a long article (much longer than what I'd normally post here) about the last Hammer Invitational. In the end, X-TRA magazine chose not to publish the piece. I thought the article brought up some issues that weren't covered in other reviews of the show, and in light of this, I thought it would be beneficial for historical record to post it on line, in multiple parts. The first segment below reviews some of the historical context; subsequent posts will cover some of the artists in the exhibition, with a final post to tie together some of my threads. I felt the editorial process pulled the writing in different directions, so I'm posting an earlier version that is a little less polished, but closer to my original intent. Still, I would like to thank the editors at X-TRA for their suggestions, questions, and comments, which helped me to better articulate my thoughts. I'd also like to thank the staff at the Hammer and the artists in the show for their contributions to the process.

Installation Shot of Lisa Anne Auerbach's Sweaters

Cumbersome comets of the art world, biennials swoop in every few years to dazzle us with their show. More recent iterations of the biennial have become the antithesis of civic pride, the most acute representation of this being perhaps Peter Friedl’s “readymade” for Documenta 12, The Zoo Story (2007). His piece was a taxidermied giraffe from the zoo in Palestine's West Bank, killed by an Israeli bombing raid. Crudely sutured and forlorn, Friedl transforms what is normally a sign of civic pride—the city zoo's contents—into a representation of pathos.

In Los Angeles, the pride/pathos dichotomy becomes sunshine and noir, and exhibitions that showcase the city’s artistic production are often viewed through the lens of filmic re-presentation. Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A. is the first of five Hammer exhibitions to acknowledge its biennial heritage, retroactively calling its predecessors “Hammer Invitationals.” This recognition of history can be both a source of nostalgia and a burden to the curatorial enterprise. The first invitational, Snapshot: New Art from Los Angeles (2001), showcased 25 mostly underrepresented and early career artists and also functioned as a survey of the four curators’ individual enthusiasms. International Paper (2003) shifted the focus from region to medium, inserting a handful of Los Angeles-based artists into a global dialogue with other artists working on or with paper. Thing (2005) exemplified the art-market gravy days, with artists plucked directly from grad studios, artworks that could be crated and shipped to art fairs, and nary a whiff of installation art. Eden’s Edge: Fifteen L.A. Artists (2007) was the most structured and thematically cohesive, with artists arranged in a roughly chronological order, from the suggestively erotic sculptures of Ken Price, to the queer sensibilities of Lari Pittman, to the polymorphous perversity of Monica Majoli, to the prurient sensibilities of Jason Rhoades.

For curator Ali Subotnick’s turn at the helm, her selections for Nine Lives propose not a cross-sectional survey of a particular medium or sensibility, but a cluster of “idiosyncratic” artists who make work in Los Angeles*. By labeling the artists as individuated and unique—like snowflakes—Subotnick absolves herself from having to stake out a curatorial premise. One of the few commonalities shared by the artists (besides their white race) is something that resembles nostalgia for another time or place, either real or imagined. In past surveys of Los Angeles art, from MOCA’s Helter Skelter (1992) to the Hammer’s own Eden’s Edge, the view of the City is tinged with noir. For Nine Lives, the presentation is more a realization of sunshine lost.

*Ali Subotnick, Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A. (Los Angeles: The Hammer Museum, 2009), p. 10. The modifier “idiosyncratic” was also used in the press release and by Ann Philbin in the catalog’s foreword.

Tomorrow: Llyn Foulkes
Part Three: Kaari Upson
Part Four: Jeffrey Vallance
Part Five: Charlie White
Part Six: Conclusion
Coda: Race

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The Outsiders at Irvine Museum

Pushing at the edges of its history of exhibiting California Plein Air Painting, The Outsiders at the Irvine Museum depicts the first influences of European art on California’s art scene. Here are examples of the west coast’s nascent modernists, showing the influences of cubism in Frank Meyers’ depiction of the scrimmage line (above), and surrealism in Rex Brandt’s vision of a railroad water station on a windy day.

Having been fed the myth of Ed Ruscha (and others) rolling in from the Midwest to capture a piece of the California Dream (while giving LA a slice of Modernism it could call its own), I've grown more interested in the Cool School precursors--those artists who taught, painted, and begat California's its nascent art scene.

The work on display at the Irvine Museum doesn't show formal connections to the Light and Space or Finnish Fetish art to come, but I expect much in the way of dedication to one's artistic and political ideals--while putting food on the table and canvas on the stretcher bars--was passed along. Later works in the exhibition were made in the days of the Works Progress Administration, and fittingly depict petroleum works, San Pedro’s fishing fleet, and the urban streetscapes of Los Angeles. In the middle years of the 20th century, art making was a legitimate form of labor--along with teaching, painting and illustrating for the movie studios, and decorating public buildings with government-subsidized murals.

Stepping outside the museum will remind viewers that in addition to modernism’s displacement of the landscape tradition, we also have office towers replacing the frolicking horses and rolling brown hills of Orange County, and stucco McMansions in place of working class faux cottages in the Hollywood foothills. While Los Angeles has had a storied history of generating myth, for the artists included in The Outsiders, it didn't include being picked up by a major gallery straight out of art school, or becoming an art star via reality TV programming.

The Outsiders, Modernism in California 1920 - 1940 is on view at the Irvine Museum through September 26, 2009. Admission and parking are free.

Hamilton Wolf's Halos

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A Visit to Niels Kantor's Collection

Niels Kantor with Mom and Dad

I got an email from my nephew Ben; he's been working as a handyman slash preparator for Niels Kantor, and invited me to his "work" to have a look at the art. Niels lives in his father's house, across the street from the infamous George Michael public restroom in Beverly Hills. Niels' father, Paul Kantor, was part of the early (1960's) Los Angeles contemporary art scene. His son has continued in the family business, dealing in contemporary art.

Same Room as Above, Kaz Oshiro (l) Allen Ruppersberg (r) 2009 Photo

It's quite a different experience looking at art in a private home than on a visit to a gallery or museum. The associations that come to mind flavor the work differently, and as a service to myself and my fellow object makers, I thought I'd post my unedited and random thoughts. The house has a 1950's modern feel to it, made from cast concrete, and reminded me of a Shindler. The walls had narrow slit windows between the concrete, reminiscent of Shindler's home on King's Road. No one who worked there knew who the original architect was.

Allan McCollum's Surrogates

Since there are no wall labels in a private collection, it becomes sort of a guessing game. At one point we were looking at a hard edge abstract painting that looked to be from the 1960's. I asked Ben, and he didn't know who the artist was, so we pulled it off the wall to read the signature on the back. Often the work triggered the name of the gallery that represents the artist, so I'd be walking around thinking, a Rosamund Felsen, a Margo Leavin, a Gagosian, a Blum and Poe. When I was having my MMPI work fabricated, I was using the same silk screening company where Allen Ruppersberg's projection screens were being made. My nephew talked about the difficulty of hanging Allan McCollum's Surrogates in a straight line, since the hanging wires were randomly stuck in the back of the wet Hydrocal. I remembered McCollum showing slides (yes, slides) of his fabrication process when he visited CalArts in the 80's, so I was familiar with how they looked from the back.

A Kenny Scharf

A psychologist colleague of mine, Bob Chernoff, used to ride to school with Kenny Scharf in grade school, so I can't look at a Kenny Scharf without thinking nice middle class Jewish boy from the San Fernando Valley.

A Dave Muller

I liked the placement of Dave Muller's album edge drawing next to the bookcase. The placement created a nice symmetry between my memories of Three-Day Weekend, with art hanging next to Muller's record collection and books. This piece held its conceptual ground better than anything else I saw in the house.

A Damian Hirst

I couldn't help but think of Hirst's direct-to-auction sales just as the economy started to crumble. Hirst's practice has always been overshadowed by money, so I wondered if this was picked up at auction. One of the economic pillars for many galleries is the buying and selling of art through the secondary market. Auction houses help create liquidity, and all things being equal, the sales price of a work at auction can be half or less of a similar work's retail price. Size-wise, the Hirst was probably the biggest thing on display, and it stood out for it's incongruity. Since Kantor functions as both a dealer and collector, it made me wonder about the varying levels of emotional attachment he had for different works hanging on his walls. Were some more available than others? The Hirst seemed cold; those dots could have easily been dollar signs.

Andy Warhol

Moving from the more public to the private parts of the house, the collection seemed to grow more personal. The original images for the Warhol pictured above were taken in a photo booth, an example of which is in the Getty's photo collection. There were quite a few Warhols in the house, and there seemed to be a preference for Pop-influenced work (or as some have called it, Capitalist Realism). In this kind of context, the preponderance of Pop works to round off some the the hard conceptual edges of other work in the collection.

An Early Warhol Drawing

My favorite wall in the home was a hallway that connected to the bedrooms. Hung salon-style, floor-to-ceiling, it was covered mostly with small drawings--from the early Warhol pictured above to one of Dave Muller's hand-drawn gallery invitations. The work here seemed to have more personal resonance, and perhaps due to the small scale or the visibility of the hand of the artist, the noise of the art market didn't intrude as severely on the work.

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Nery Gabriel Lemus at Steve Turner Contemporary

Nery Lemus' work at Steve Turner is evocative in many personal ways. At inSITE2000, artist Mark Dion created Blind/Hide. a camouflaged hut where one could bird watch along the Tijuana River estuary. As part of the scavenger hunt that is inSITE, Diane Calder and I had a picnic lunch inside the artwork, donning the coats and pith helmets, and bird watching with the provided binoculars.

A few years before that I was on the roof of the parking structure for the Tijuana airport, coordinating a plan to bring a friend across the border. The fence that separated the United States and Mexico was an imperfect thing at the time, and in places the barrier had to allow for the arroyos and rivers that crisscross the political boundary. At the appointed time, my friend would sneak along the dry wash that passed under the fence as I drove over the dirt road that ran parallel to the border. If la migra were not in sight, I would slow, he would hop in, and we would then head north. From my high vantage point, I couldn't help but notice the birds that crossed the barrier with impunity. In a way, it seemed sort of arbitrary that the political powers would control the movement of one particular species, but not another.

The quality of execution of Lemus' drawings leans more towards the OCD pencil work of his CalArts faculty than the Iza Genzkin vomit that's often popular among the Younger Than Jesus crowd. Some of the images are familiar to regular readers of Los Angeles' dead tree publication. In fact, I may have clipped the image of undocumented immigrants using trash bags as flotation devices as they swam in the sewage and insecticide runoff that is the Colorado River as it crosses the border. The toxic river provided safe passage past the septic-phobic border patrol agents, unwilling to muddy their boots. Taken in toto, Lemus' images provide a complex story of migration, surveillance, and death along the political divide.

Still, I'm left with one of those basic but uncomfortable questions that plagued older generations of CalArtians. I have to blame John Mandel for this, from my year as an impressionable first year student. I remember someone showing a painting in class, and John asking the student what he'd like (ideally) to become of the object that he made. Shown in a gallery? In a museum? Have it bought by a collector? The student was seemed to be happy with any of these prospects. So would it matter who bought it? The student didn't really care. In typical Mandel hyperbole he (rhetorically) asked, "So if Adolf Hitler wanted to buy your painting and hang it over his sofa, you'd be fine with that?"

Unlike, say, Sam Durant's banners outside the OCMA California Biennial spray painted (in Spanish) "We are workers, not criminals," (which wave like red capes to the torros in condos across the street) Lemus' aesthetic commodities fit over a sofa, and are for sale. The problem with such poetic diptychs is that the meaning is flexible to the politics of the owner, which is probably not the artist's intent.

Nery Gabriel Lemus' Friction of Distance was at Steve Turner Contemporary Art from July 18 to August 15, 2009.

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Surveillance and Pushing Against "The New Normal"

Freiheit statt Angst (Freedom Not Fear) Action in Berlin, September 12, 2009

As a follow-up to my previous post on The New Normal, I thought I'd post some links to yesterday's demonstration in Berlin, which isn't getting much media coverage in the United States, though there are images on line.

Lisa Kereszi's Camera on City, Castle Williams, Governors Island, NY Via NewsGrist

Interestingly, Kereszi's series of photographs of the closed Coast Guard base reminds one that a primary duty of the Coast Guard is surveillance. Since so much of the work in The New Normal represents the ways we've become inured to invasions of privacy, it's hopeful to see folks pushing back.

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The New Partisan Art

Still Image From Thomson and Craighead's Beacon

When the Hollywood liberal elite began to publicly question the White House’s post 9-11 war mongering and warrantless wiretapping policies, conservative talking heads admonished them to, “Get out of politics and stick to what they knew best—acting.” Ironically, these were probably the same white men who voted for Ronald Regan and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy's Vice Presidential Downtime Requirements

In a similar way, those who controlled the velvet ropes that gave artists access to cultural cachet of museum and commercial gallery shows, magazine articles, catalog essays, and prestigious private collections exhibited what might be called curatorial (or critical) tokenism. One prime example would be the Hammer Museum, which we expect to present the important work of the present moment. But looking back at their artists and exhibits, it would be difficult to decipher that the United States and its allies have been the victim of terrorist attacks and engaged in a couple of really big wars. This is not to say the Hammer has buried its head in the sand. The Hammer’s Conversations and panel discussions have often focused on the diminishment of our constitutional rights, neo-liberal economic policy, and our wars of aggression. The problem is that the topics and subjects of artistic production are not allowed to participate in these adult conversations.

Still From Sharif Waked's Video Chic Point

I expect that some of the recalcitrance on the part of public institutions stems from Jesse Helm’s napalm attack on the NEA, and the fear that exhibiting art that has a political opinion could threaten the severely depleted cash flow—and serve as a big steaming plate of wedge issue for some Republican running for reelection.

Annetta Kapon's Untitled Cameras

But there are signs of hope. Earlier this summer the Hammer presented Jeremy Deller’s It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq. And now, two concurrent shows offer a critique of the policies and procedures that have affected us since the attacks of September 11th, eight years ago today. Now three concurrent shows, Secrets in a Democracy at Scripps College Gallery through October 10, 2009, The New Normal on view at the Pomona College Museum of Art through October 18, 2009, and Welcome to Fake Iraq at Angels Gate in San Pedro through October 25, 2009 unfetters art that dares to have a political opinion.

Trevor Paglen's CIA Agents' Fake Passports

The work in these three shows didn’t emerge fully formed from Zeus’ head, but was being made and discussed in the shadows of the lucrative art market that had been grabbing everyone’s attention. Now that the market for paintings has shriveled, and advocates of beauty have dried up and blown away, there seems to be more visibility for art that stakes a partisan political position.

Jason Kunke's Model 1:3 Scale Nike

My point is not to dis’ painting or things of beauty, but to point out that everything from the Winged Victory of Samothrace to Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece to Picasso's Guernica was championing some particular political agenda. The recent Art of Two Germanys at LACMA showed us that even the post-war abstract art coming out of West Germany was making a point about Fascism and political oppression in the East. The whole raison d'être for pre-Guttenberg visual art was propaganda of one sort or another. Unfortunately, when the word “art” was sutured to the word “market,” fine art was redacted of its potentially offensive content until the kind of stuff seen at art fairs became as innocuous (and as vapidly entertaining) as cable television.

Detail From Matthew Siegle's Hooah Installation

Many of the artists in The New Normal purloin their raw materials from the Interweb; Beacon, by Thompson and Craighead, projects a program that presents real-time search queries that conflate the ridiculous and pornographic, revealing the banality of our zeitgeist. Speaking of banal, Vice Presidential Downtime Requirements offers up a mock hotel room arranged to match the much-reported hotel room requirements of Vice President Dick Cheney. One would have to read the photocopied memo on the nightstand to pick out the particulars regaled in the blog-O-sphere; for the most part, it looks like any other mid-level hotel room. A great metaphor for the echo-chamber feedback-loop that is our current conglomeration of volunteer, for-profit, and publicly funded media can be found in Annetta Kapon's Untitled Cameras in the adjacent show of work from the museum's permanent collection. The more powerful work in the show comes from the artists who pushed away from their keyboards and glowing screens. Sharif Waked creates a faux haute couture runway show with bizarrely bared midriffs. Only at the end of the video do we see that the inspiration came from Israeli checkpoints along the Palestinian border, where travelers are forced under gunpoint to prove that their midsections are not wrapped with sticks of dynamite.

From Maria Schriber's Series A Fake So Real

At the other end of LA County, Angels Gate presents a show organized by Nicholas Grider that came from his experience role playing an embedded reporter at Ft. Irwin's National Training Center. The 1000 square mile army base has a fake Iraqi village where soldiers train before shipping out to Iraq and Afganistan. Grider invited other artists to "embed" at Ft. Irwin, and the art that resulted from their experiences is now on display in San Pedro.

Chris Revelle's The Spread of Democracy

In the case of Jason Kunke and Matthew Siegle, complex work arises from the conflict between their political opposition to the war and their participation in a real slice of the military industrial complex that produced the invasion and occupation. Siegle's re-drawings of the exploded views from the assembly instructions for the model Hummer displayed on his work desk bring together the continuum of models, from those made for children, to model cities made for slightly older boys and girls as they prepare for an environment filled with IEDs--where exploded views become views of real life explosions.

Nicholas Grider's Unfinished "Iraqi" Village, Joint Readiness Training Center, Fort Polk, Louisiana

Unfortunately, some of the work feels phoned in. I thought that Chris Revelle's performance and installation of a military recruitment office did a much more powerful job of evoking the creepy enticements of recruiters, while playing it straight for his audience. In Welcome to Fake Iraq, we are only presented with the ephemera of the earlier event, and the irony of the work may be lost for the casual viewer. Much better were the pairings of newer and older work by photographers Grider and Maria Schriber. The short depth of field in Schriber's earlier photographs creates a toy-like quality, while her newer portraits of some of the Forward Operating Base's actors are quite beautiful while calling into question the veracity of photography itself. Grider, who has been the most embedded of the artists in the exhibition, also presents newer photographs taken at the Joint Readiness Training Center in Louisiana. Perhaps as a sign of things to come, the unfinished and unused city is shown deserted. Situated adjacent to a wilderness area, wild horses-evidenced by their droppings--roam the ghost town, which functions as both a folly and monument to one nation's nation building hubris.

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A Season in Hell

Vito Acconci's Claim

In his 1970 performance piece, Blindfolded Catching, Vito Acconci did just that. A year later with Claim, Acconci placed himself in the basement of a gallery armed with a lead pipe. A video monitor upstairs forewarned art patrons of the situation. A blindfolded Acconci would swing the pipe while issuing threatening statements when he heard footsteps approaching. In speaking about his work in relation to the arts, Acconci said,

"Visual art, architectural models, (concert) music, books . . . all those situations where there’s a viewer, an audience, where there’s a separation between person and thing: something perfect can happen only where there’s visual distance. Which is why I resent the visual: the visual means you don’t touch it, the visual means somebody owns it and that somebody isn’t you."

We live in interesting times, when guards get fired for interacting with interactive work. Before I had any intention of becoming an artist--or writing about art--I heard a lecture given by Vito Acconci at UCSB (in 1982) as part of their visiting artist program. My impression is that Acconci's performative work has been about personal space, and ways it can be impinged upon, threatened, or violated.

In my art, writing, and personal life, I've been fascinated by the ways folks encapsulate themselves in protective spheres, be they gated communities, automobiles, or conventional thinking shared by like-minded groups--be they religious, political, academic, or one of the many cliques of artistic identity.

In some ways my artistic path has followed the reverse of Acconci, moving from objects to gestures to writing. At the same time, I'd like to think I share an affinity, donning my blindfold, while swinging my metaphorical lead pipe, estranging myself from some in the process. My desire here has been to contradict claims of authority and ownership, violate the sacrosanct space between art, it's announced intentions, and the viewer. I also wanted to create a space to recreate and continue the best part of obtaining a degree in art--those conversations that take place outside and between classes.

Since my graduation, the number of visitors to this blog have grown to over five thousand a month. Close to two hundred folks (that I'm aware of) subscribe to posts though services like Google Reader or Networked Blogs on Facebook. I've come to realize that my readership will never reach those levels attained by folks who re-post tidbits of controversy, obits, and conventional opinions, but it was my hope that original content and the ability to leave comments would find a few appreciative readers. Having LITV acknowledged by LA Times art critic Christopher Knight, and reading your posted comments and emails have made LITV a worthwhile and rewarding endeavor.

Unfortunately, none of this helps to pay off those student loans or provide health care. Not only do social network sites, blogging services, and video and image-posting sites receive lots of original content (and therefore traffic) for free, but so do some print publications, by not paying their writers. The opportunities to make a living wage by typing about art are becoming extinct. This month I'll begin working full time in research psychology, and my posts will become more infrequent.

Vito Acconci's Blindfolded Catching

As a coda to this transition, I leave you with un peu Rimbaud:

One night I sat Beauty on my lap. And I found she was bitter, and I called her names.
I found weapons to use against justice.
I ran away. Poverty, hate, you witches, my treasure was left in your care.
I managed to wither all human hope inside me. I attacked like a wild animal, and strangled every joy.
I called for executioners, I wanted to die chewing on their gun butts. I called for diseases, so I could suffocate in sand, in blood.
Unhappiness was my god. I lay down in the mud, and dried off in the crime-infested air. I played the fool until I was really crazy.
And by spring I had the scary laugh of an idiot.
Now a while ago, when I was about to go Argh! for the last time, I thought I'd try to find the key to that lost celebration where -- maybe -- I could recover my appetite.
That key is Selfless Love. ( -- which goes to show you I was dreaming.)

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Anti-Capitalist Iconography in the Public Sphere

In Irving Goffman's book Interaction Ritual, he describes one scene that played out in a mental hospital while he was conducting his own personal blend of psychology and sociology. One patient grew tired of the restrictions placed on his personal actions by a member of the nursing staff. When he could no longer tolerate the boundaries forced upon him, and as the nurse walked away after some recrimination, he pulled down his pants with a flourish, defecated on the waxed linoleum floor, scooped up a handful of his own excrement, and in the style of a great Yankee pitcher, wound up his arm and gave a great heave-ho, spraying the back of the white uniform with his feces. Goffman describes the gesture as having all the eloquence (though exactly the opposite effect) of an Elizabethan courtier tossing his velvet cape over a puddle as a lady steps from the curb, so as to prevent her slipper from being sullied by the mud.

Speaking of mud, while scrounging around in the overgrown wetlands of Harbor Regional Park, I came across the poster shown in the top image, and in detail in the images below. Away from the hiking trails are small clearings in the bush, accessible only by scampering over and under the horizontal beams of Cottonwood that choke out the indigenous growth. Mixed in with the mud and detritus that floats in in the rainy season, are condom wrappers and fast food napkins left behind by the men who meet for sexual encounters. Also brought into the mix are items of soiled clothing, and a selection pornographic printed material, there to signify that the visitor has entered a sexual zone (and to eroticize the social space). Considering the paraphilias and fetishes of men who frequent the park, the above poster was not incongruous for its urinating hippie or its capitalist pig, but it was obvious from the poster's age, frame, and iconography that (like the Sears catalog of old) its original function was not to titillate.

Like Katherine and her wheel, or Saint Sebastian and his arrows, the details in the image sign for a capitalist antidisestablishmentarianism; the stone columns and the brass bank signage for the now defunct Security Pacific Bank, the newspaper rack with the Christian Science Monitor, and the cigar-chomping suit with the Wall Street Journal all sign for the capitalist institutions of the late '60's. In the forty or so years from the invention of the Monopoly board to the collage of this photographic image, the cartoon of the banker hasn't changed much at all! Compared to today, this sort of iconography seems as dated as a Medieval painting of a Florentine banker. Imagine the world when this poster was made, and banks were regulated and the rich had to pay 75% of their income in taxes.

In contrast to the bloated lumbering banker, we have the fit and smiling youth, using his body fluids for an institutional critique. In the era this image was made I remember being told that in Communist countries, children were indoctrinated in the schools, and brainwashed to turn in their own parents when they violated the restrictions of the communist state. Though the communists may have lost the cold war, indoctrination has carried the day, and anti-drug use programs teach children to turn in their parents if they find a joint in Dad's sock drawer. Back then, cops were pigs; now the policeman is your friend and your family is suspect.

We convince ourselves that we are a more tolerant and humane society, but in the forty years since this poster was made, we've thrown the mentally ill out of institutions and onto the streets, caged our food animals in tiny pens, knee deep in their own feces, we spend less per capita on higher education, public schools are more segregated, we have stopped protesting wars of choice that kill inordinate numbers of civilians, and we send many more people to prison--not for rehabilitation--but for retribution. Some would argue that we're more tolerant of sexual difference, but I suspect that if sex wasn't such an effective engine of consumer spending, we'd still have sodomy laws on the books.

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