Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains

Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains, 2010
A pricey vacuum cleaner store in a pricey Pasadena neighborhood.

Back when I attended Michael Asher's Post Studio Art class in the mid-eighties, a transfer student from Berlin presented slides of her work. From what I remember, her practice was a kind of public art Raku, where she would take local clay, build a quasi architectural form, burry it in a pile of scrap lumber, then set it on fire. The finished piece would exhibit various degrees of hardness and coloring, but because of the imperfect technique and impurities in the local dirt the works would eventually succumb to the elements and decompose into soil. The work she showed us from Berlin was sponsored by a local redevelopment organization. Artists were commissioned to install temporary work in areas of urban blight: abandoned apartment blocks and empty lots occupied by squatters and refuse. The neighborhoods where cleaned up, the art was put on display, then afterwards the buildings were gutted prostitutes and drug addicts were pushed out, and new developments were put in their place.

Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains, 2010
Grommets are an artist's best friend.

Over the course of the critique––which went on well past midnight––the point was made that by participating in the temporary art program, the artist essentially functioned as a pawn in a process designed to surreptitiously evict an already disenfranchised group of individuals, create profit for rich developers, and gentrify a neighborhood at the expense of the weak and the poor. Her praxis functioned as the inverse of the institutional critique: she was the institutional stooge.

Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains, 2010
Pay no attention to the space behind the curtain.

A critique of the public/private art enterprise was made by Andreas Siekmann's Trickle Down at the most recent Sculpture Project in Muenster. Siekmann's trash compactor fuses together the fiberglass shards of those urban mascots (here in Los Angeles it was in the form of an angel), given to artists to decorate shopping districts. In Trickle Down, wheat-pasted posters occupying the same courtyard as the compacted sculpture tells the story of how public space becomes privatized, allowing business districts to employ private police (deemed safety patrols) to push the riffraff off public property. In Andre Rottman's review of Seikmann's work, he asks the question,

What does it mean today to create public works when the site of their display--whether we understand it, according to the typology developed by Miwon Kwon, phenomenologically, institutionally, or discursively--has become the object of market forces and public-management policies? This is the fundamental, unsettling question posed in Trickle Down. If the "lure of the local," as outlined by critic Lucy R. Lippard, was once able to account for site-specific art's attempts to counter the increasing homogenization of public space, Siekmann here suggests that even this dynamic is now part and parcel of the commodified urban landscape.

Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains, 2010
Or the slap-dash hem job.

Ironically, September 2010 Artforum's 1000 Words that gave voice to Siekmann's project was followed this month by Jennifer Bolande and her Plywood Curtains, introduced by Sharon Lockhart. Briefly, Bolande (as part of West of Rome's Women in the City series) has silkscreened an over-saturated color image of a sheet of plywood on a poplin fabric and had it hung behind the glass façades of empty commercial storefronts. In Artforum, the spread is accompanied by Photoshopped proposal images along with  actual pictures of the curtains in situ; this flattening of difference between the proposed and the actual underscores the fact that one need only understand the components of the project, and imagine it in an empty storefront in one's own neighborhood to get close to the full effect of actually seeing the work in real life. As Christopher Knight said in the LA Times, "…in person there's just not much to look at."

Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains, 2010
Sounding like a realtor, Sharon Lockhart calls this, "...a beautiful but decrepit example of midcentury Moderne (sic) architecture." 

If however, one does look closely it's easy to see that the piece of wood that modeled for Bolande's photograph was of a high quality; there is nary a knothole, split, or eye-shaped plug to be seen. This is not an image of the cheap exterior-grade wood that boards up broken windows or construction sites. This is the stuff of custom gallery office shelves or trendy-industrial restaurant table tops. It is a veneer that is well suited to the upscale Lake Avenue in Pasadena, or a newly remodeled commercial space on Hill Street in the arty part of Chinatown. Oddly though, the Hill Street location was partially occupied even though the curtains covered all the street-facing windows. This necessitated the cumbersome parting-of-the-curtains for the leasers, reminding me of Mies' Lakeshore Apartments in Chicago, where the architect designed the curtains in a way where they could only be left fully open or fully closed, putting aesthetic consistency above the needs of the individual.

Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains, 2010
Through the taggers art, Bolande's. 

Unfortunately, in the real world of economic downturn, the complexity of the real-estate market isn't as simple as a duality of occupied or empty. Landlords, in an attempt to keep rental prices high, will rent to "pop-up" enterprises to keep a commercial district's space seemingly full, and thereby eliminating the leverage a longer term tenant may have in negotiating a lower price (aka fair market value in an economic recession). As you drive around town, notice the Halloween or Christmas decor stores. Another practice is to buy a truckload of furniture floor samples and pay someone minimum wage to "sit" in the space. A couple of sofas sold a month can be enough to pay wages and keep the lights on, an affordable strategy when one considers that the same landlord may have another tenant next door paying dollars per the square foot. These spaces occupied by nameless furniture stores and animatronic reindeer from China fill the the liminal space between the full-price tenant and the "Space Available" sign.

Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains, 2010
Lockhart continues, almost wistfully, "Here, too, I peered behind the curtain; this time, I saw an American flag, unmoored from its stand, propped up alone in a corner. I found myself looking at the rest of the neighborhood from a different perspective."

It is in those low income neighborhoods where the better part of the block sits empty, signifying that the charade of the faux and transient business falls apart. Here in the Long Beach ghetto, the city's practice for empty storefronts is to deluge the owner with petty building code violations, pushing the owner to either rent at a reduced cost (thus creating the appearance of economic vitality) or condemning the structure and razing it. Boarding up (except as a temporary measure) is not allowed. Thus the empty boarded-up storefront has become a trope that has disappeared along with the sub-prime loan.

To see Bolande's Plywood Curtains as anything other than an aesthetic instrument in the service of landlords who conspire to artificially inflate the cost of commercial space, place her at poles opposite from the intentions of artists like Siekmann and Hans Haacke's indictment of New York City slumlords-cum-Guggenheim trustees.

Not Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains, 2010
Next to the installation on Lake Avenue, not a boarded up store, but a space being remodeled for a new tenant.  Here, one can see the traditional CDX plywood used for boarding up storefronts.

Sadly too, the comparison of the September/November 1000 Words exposes the vacuity of that contemporary art journal of record. In a nutshell, the magazine sees art as fungible (every art praxis is worth 1,000 words), and the position or view of the artist––the things that individuate art objects––become interchangeable in the grand scheme of the art market. It's no wonder we haven't seen anything that approximates an art movement in twenty years! Artforum becomes a compass held at the magnetic pole, spinning wildly, pointing in all directions at once.

Underscoring this turning away from an artist's intent is the format of 1000 Words. The actual text (which is considerably less than a thousand words) is conducted in the form of an interview, with the relevant questions removed. It's as if an artist can't be trusted to articulate their position, and have fewer words to squeeze out of their tiny brains than a critic, curator, or historian. Artistic intent becomes a tertiary mumble and primary meaning only comes from the skilled typing of the writer/editor.

Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains, 2010
On the corner of Bernard and Hill Streets, newly remodeled gallery/studio space available. 

But back to Asher's critique. The artist didn't internalize fourteen hours of post-Marxist critique, and went on the create a teepee-shaped structure on a corner of the CalArts lawn that overlooks Interstate 5. I can't imagine something like that being allowed today, with the fire marshall and the physical plant nipping it in the bud (in the name of safety).

When I returned for my MFA twenty years later, the location of the structure was now an overflow parking lot for the five hundred additional students now packed into the CalArts campus. As Siekmann has shown, economic power trumps artistic intent.

Jennifer Bolande's Plywood Curtains, 2010
Pay no attention to the tenant behind the curtain.

And as Julian Stallabrass noted in Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction,

... the most celebrated contemporary art is that which serves to further the interests of the neoliberal economy, in breaking down barriers to trade, local solidarities, and cultural attachments in a continual process of hybridization. This should hardly be a cause for surprise but there is a large mismatch between the contemporary art world’s own view of itself and its actual function.

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