Steve Kaltenbach is one of the most intriguing figures in conceptual art. Best known for his anonymous ads in Artforum that encouraged readers to “Build a Reputation” and “Perpetuate a Hoax” — and for his cryptic Time Capsules whose inscriptions mixed self-deprecating humor with egocentric boasts — Kaltenbach was among the figureheads of the New York avant-garde in the late ‘60s. He mixed Duchampian absurdism with text-based object making to lampoon practically every myth the art world was manufacturing and refining. From the inflated notions of celebrity that took hold in Warhol’s heyday to the superheated art valuations that recently fell to Earth, Kaltenbach skewered them all without sparing himself.
At the height of his renown in 1970, Kaltenbach disappeared from the scene after accepting a teaching position at Sac State. But as “Nuclear Projects and Other Works” powerfully attests, he hasn’t stopped innovating. In this four-decade survey, Kaltenbach showed that the strategies he employed then are equally valid now.
His undated Time Capsules, which he’s built continuously since 1967, were the exhibition’s focal point. Made of various metals and fashioned into cylinders, disks, canisters and boxes, their content remains a mystery. It could be enriched uranium, the artist’s navel lint or nothing at all. Kaltenbach has never said, and it’s safe to assume no curator will ever wield a blowtorch to find out. With their epitaph-like inscriptions (“Bury with the Artist,” “Nothing of Great Value,” “Open Before My Retrospective at the Tate in London”), they operate in much the same way that Barbara Kruger’s and Jenny Holzer’s aphorisms did in subsequent decades: they force viewers to question their perceptions and values.
“Bad Ideas” (2002-08), a series of works on paper, appear to assault the hubris of the Bush era. They suggest various ways the world’s arsenal of ICBM’s could be deployed to blast holes in the cosmos for entertainment and sport. Also on display was a replica of an atom bomb, replete with a low, rumbling soundtrack, and a “Black Hole,” a velvet-lined room whose aperture seemed to pull in viewers with palpable force. Elsewhere, in a wall text called “The Divine Atom,” the artist uses the idea of transubstantiation to spin a post-9/11 tale of microbiology-assisted redemption, suggesting that faith and reason might not be as incompatible as we think.
That both systems of thought operate with equal force inside this highly respected artist gives viewers yet another conundrum to ponder.
In “Black” Cathy Stone extends and refines her longstanding practice of conjoining opposites in sculptures and in large-scale drawings that feature prominent sculptural elements. She pits black against white, gravity against buoyancy and spontaneity against calculation in works that simultaneously display grace and pugnacity.
Her paper pieces recall the minimalist shapes seen in Richard Serra’s drawings, while her sculptures nod to Eva Hesse.
Like Hesse, Stone is acutely aware of the body and its limitations, and she often uses the reach of her own arms to determine the dimensions of shapes she commits to paper. Here, the reoccurring theme is a boulder-shaped blob painted in glossy tar-like acrylic on large (9’ x 8’) sheets of mulberry paper. The painted shapes, which incorporate cheesecloth as textural and compositional elements, create a looming iconic presence which is intensified by pendulous, cloth-wrapped objects that dangle from the paper like testicles or breasts. The aesthetic is primordial, the result decidedly non-minimalist.
Stone’s sculptures employ a similar dynamic. The biggest, which stretches from the gallery floor to a height of 12 feet, consists of foam blocks wrapped in cheesecloth that are held aloft by wire. They resemble the preserved innards of a beast dragged from a tar pit. The artifice is obvious, but the feeling is visceral; like seeing the mummified remains of something that was once alive.
Indeed, mortality looms throughout the show. In “Bridge/From Here to There,” a tribute to the late Bay Area artist Irene Pijoan, Stone stretches pigment-covered strands of wire between two walls. These suspend small globular shapes and swatches of curled cheesecloth that have a dried-out, shot-through texture, like the veins of a skeletonized leaf. You can view it from afar or you can walk the length of it. Either way, the installation signals a poignant reminder that life has a beginning, middle and an end — an inescapable fact that Stone’s work continues to grapple with successfully.
Many artists try to capture the shape and feel of human consciousness; but painter David Wetzl attempts something even more ambitious: the depiction of human existence as a tug-of-war between all of the isms that have ever existed. Never mind the so-called zeitgeist. Wetzl wants to show how every belief system in human history continues to shape our experience.
The result in “Morphing Mind Tiers,” a seven-year survey, is a chaotic cocktail of representation and abstraction rendered in a slew of art historical styles that show reason, faith, genetic memory and biological imperatives colliding in a sea of pop cultural and technological effluvia. The work is complicated and seductive and, at times, overwhelmingly so.
Geometric patterns, bright colors and repeated motifs predominate in nearly all of the 19 works on display. The largest and most ambitious consist of acrylic-on-shaped-wood panels set against blob-shaped “backdrops” painted across large swaths of wall. There are also smaller stand-alone panels, a wall-sized 3-D installation and a quartet of vinyl panels set against a backdrop measuring 30 feet long and 11 feet high.
In most of his works, Wetzl uses grids as a general organizing principal to represent networks, both human and digital, as well as landscape. Over these he lays tribal masks, bridges, broadcast towers, figures, color fields, landmark buildings, highways, cities, circuit boards and animals. If you feel a sense of vertigo there’s a good reason: Each panel is the product of hundreds of hours of labor in which multiple layers of imagery have been laid down, sanded and varnished to create a transparent, labyrinthine effect reminiscent of “Brazil,” the Terry Gilliam film that portrayed the world as a bureaucratic maze of endless ductwork.
“Evolution of S.C.I.P.: From Youthful Feline Shaman to TAICOOco. C.E.O.” — a saturated smashup of cubist illusionism and surrealist fantasy — is a leading case in point. Its interlocking cascade of geometric blocks plunges viewers into unfathomably deep pictorial space while challenging the imagination with the visage of a flower-sprouting animal skeleton with nine eyes alongside a cat dressed in geometric shapes and polka dots. It’s a diptych of sorts. The other half contains a fish-eye-lens view of what might be a third world (think: Sao Paulo) apartment block. The fittingly obscure title refers to Wetzl’s alter ego, SCIP, self-invented muse who leads a fictional “wisdom-based” corporation that, according to the artist’s tongue-in-cheek mythology, rescued him from “wallowing in an elevated pool of postmodern pleasantries and slowly succumbing to its nihilistic, narcissistic tendencies.” Indeed, where some postmodernists delight in emptying their art of content, Wetzl piles it on, and he does so with all of the sly, ironic, hermetic references we expect in work of this sort, but without the numbing cynicism of, say, David Salle — an influence that Wetzl keeps on the same short leash as he does other obvious mentors like Lari Pitman, Sigmar Polke, Miro, Klee and Kandinsky.
Wetzl calls himself “a positive cynic” and his work largely supports that assertion. “After Tiepolo: The Triumph of Virtue and Nobility over Ignorance” is essentially an environmental treatise, signified by the words “Carbon” and “Silicon,” the universal recycling symbol, loads of flora and an agricultural landscape whose aerial perspective is achieved with an overlay of rectangular paint swatches, sanded to create a scrim that looks like cloud cover. It’s a cheery outlook, aided and abetted by technology, represented here by a slender piece of circuitry that ties the pieces of the picture together.
Wetzl’s most ambitious work, the above-referenced four-panel “S.C.I.P. Train Propels Shaman Birth/Maturation beyond White Cube Death,” puts evolution under the painterly equivalent of a microscope. Dominant images include a purple-and-yellow Rorschach spatter representing the “brain scan of a Christian speaking in tongues”; a “postmodern soldier” firing at a white cube representing minimalists (“who wants to reduce everything to purity”) and conceptualists (“who want to reduce everything to ideas”); and a shaman with a cubed-shaped head, open at the top to indicate a receptiveness to ideas that defy reason and logic. All of this appears inside the confines of a painted backdrop in the shape of a train whose exterior edge outlines the map of an imaginary continent into which are cut a truncated crucifix, an airplane wing, the grid of a printed circuit board and a series of udders. The embedded message seems to be that spiritual evolution chugs along as an inevitable force, embracing the positivist ethos while transcending its limitations.
Not all of Wetzl’s work is overtly optimistic; in fact much of it details conflict and competing world views played out in epic battles — psychic, intellectual and bloody-real. A favorite subject is the collision between modernist and postmodern values and what, if anything, comes next. “The Jaded Third Eye Reveals Itself at Pomo Hills C.C.” is typical of the sprawling world views Wetzl packs into a frame. In this one, industry (oil and media), global capitalism (Dubai’s landmark Burj Al-Arab hotel), militarism (fighter jets) and the eclipse of high modernism (a darkened Wayne Thiebaud confectionary painting) are linked by a network of Miro-like eyes.
Wetzl’s hardly the first painter to make sweeping historical and philosophical statements; but he’s certainly among the few to portray the impact of computer technology on the human condition. As far back as the early ‘90s, images of microchips, circuit boards and on-screen computer “windows” figured prominently in his paintings, and in the years since, his vision of a wired world in which humans have the capacity to experience multiple realities in real time has, for better or worse, become an undeniable fact of life. Which for Wetzl is not a bad thing — he sees technology and spirituality as inextricably bound.
What’s refreshing in all of this is that Wetzl doesn’t take himself too seriously. He’ll toss off narrative possibilities in a self-deprecating manner and just as quickly inject other, equally plausible, scenarios. He also speaks at length about the influence of pop philosopher Ken Wilber and even confesses to illustrating Wilber’s color-coded ideas about evolutionary psychology. However, in looking at his work, you never get the sense that he is illustrating theory; the work is too playful, too irreverent and too preoccupied with material innovations to be truly didactic.
Wetzl’s struggle is that of an artist in love with art history, an artist trying to forge a path in an environment in which the simultaneous existence of all possibilities has turned the pursuit of meaning into a Herculean task. It’s the ultimate postmodern conundrum, of course, but Wetzl is determined to create a new synthesis, and if that means making pictures of boggling complexity so be it.
It’s hard not to admire Todd Hido. Unlike so many contemporary photographers who conflate size with substance and monumental banality with high concept, Hido, takes a decidedly contrarian approach: His blurry, modestly scaled pictures of rural roads to nowhere shot from behind the wheel of his car place Pictorialism into a postmodern context and put a new spin on the all-American themes of rootlessness and alienation. Psychically, geographically and artistically, the Ohio-born, Bay Area-based photographer has covered a lot of ground over the past decade. He’s made forlorn portraits of provocatively posed women in cheap motel rooms; eerie, voyeuristic night shots of suburban houses; and landscapes defined by "bad" light, bare trees, rutted roads and receding telephone poles. Sixteen of the latter, which appeared in "A Road Divided," cement Hido’s reputation for wresting beauty from "ugliness" and for using weather patterns to describe states of mind. Admittedly, such transformations aren’t unique to contemporary photography; roadside lens work has been a mainstay of the medium at least since the 1950s. But Hido’s method of shooting through a wet, dirty windshield produces unexpected painterly results. These C-prints, created on film and in color with long, hand-held exposures, feel almost monochromatic even when they’re not thanks to his recording of diffused light through glass and grime. This method softens the focus of everything before Hido’s lens and imparts painterly qualities to what might otherwise be unremarkable images. "Untitled 5348," an image of a ragged cyclone fence climbing a hill, looks more like a chalk pastel drawing than a photograph. Every element in it – the dull light, the sagging fence, the rain-slicked asphalt and the broken sidewalk – speaks of decrepitude. Yet it radiates an alluring, abject beauty. In "Untitled 5462," one of the few images in which no road is present, dim light plays upon a field in a way that suggests an unlikely conjoining of aquatic plant life to a rare (at least in the Hido canon) swatch of blue sky. "Untitled 6242," a convergence of two muddy tracks, becomes further muddled by shadowy rivulets that crisscross the frame. They’re nothing but water on a windshield, but the distortion they produce creates a dissonance between what we see and what we feel. Meaning, the picture generates more psychic tension than any physical sensation of dampness or cold. That quality applies to most of the work in this cycle. The fact that everything in this exhibit is twice-mediated certainly helps. But there are other, less obvious, forces at work. One is the repetition of similar-looking scenes that can’t be traced to a specific locale; another is the reoccurrence of roads that start nowhere and lead to implied (and sometimes literal) dead ends. Equally important is the one factor we can’t see: the photographer’s working method. Unlike artists who produce bodies of work serially, Hido pursues his interests in portraiture and landscape simultaneously, and he occasionally presents a full array of his output. For example, in "Between the Two," which appeared both as an exhibit and a book (Nazraeli Press, 2007), he combined, on alternating pages, sleazy nudes, dwellings emptied by foreclosures, barren landscapes and glowing nocturnal interiors that could have been backdrops for Gregory Crewdson setups. Thus, if you take "A Road Divided" as it’s intended, as one part of a multi-faceted oeuvre, it represents a gritty vision of American life – one that transcends Pictorialism and New Topographics, the two obvious categories to which Hido has been linked. Hido, as it turns out, operates in a different realm, one I’ll call, for lack of a better term, psychographics. It’s a territory covered by many photographers, but most significantly by his former mentor, Larry Sultan, whose 2004 series, "The Valley," about the SoCal porno industry, explored a similar sense of anomie. Within that context, Hido is lot closer in spirit to the film director David Lynch than he is to, say, Alfred Stieglitz. Let’s just hope he doesn’t pick up a bottle of Windex and a squeegee the next time he’s scouring America’s outback.
–DAVID M. ROTH
Todd Hido’s "A Road Divided" closed at Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, Dec. 20, 2008.
You can take issue with Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacra – the idea that contemporary life simulates “authentic” experience – but simulations, as any moviegoer will attest, are often highly engaging. That’s definitely the case with “Tickling Thicket,” a provocative exhibit by Katy Stone and Yvette Molina, two painters with very different ideas about representing nature.
Stone brushes and pours acrylic paint on to clear sheets of Duralar which she cuts and reassembles into structures that recall terrestrial and aquatic plant life seen through a scrim of mutating cells. These works appear in two formats: framed behind glass, like taxidermied specimens, and in complex, multi-layered installations that flow across walls in amoeba-like shapes over which floral forms are superimposed – a kind of sculptural version of cell animation minus the storyline.
Stone, who lives and works in Seattle, doesn’t spend much time in nature. But she almost certainly fantasizes about it. She works quickly and spontaneously, painting hundreds of forms a day in a monochromatic palette of white, amber and black. These she assembles in improvised installations, creating the convincing illusion that they somehow sprouted organically. “Little Universe (Terra),” an L-shaped installation, spans 21 linear feet with starburst forms pinned to the wall at a various angles to cast shadows through transparent media. It’s a macroscopic view of a microscopic phenomenon. ”Untitled (Thicket Heap)” is the exact opposite: a floor-to-ceiling construction in a tiny room that delivers what feels like an ocean-floor view of a kelp bed – a head-spinning tangle of limbs, vines, roots, stalks and tendrils interspersed with flora of indeterminate species. The range of associative possibilities seems almost endless.
Yvette Molina: Lichen Whorl
In contrast, Molina’s oil-on-aluminum paintings are cool, Asian-influenced landscapes whose loose lines and Symbolist lighting effects bypass the obvious clichés of the genre while simultaneously appearing to engage them. While the Oakland painter’s large-scale panels are eye-grabbing, they ultimately resist intimacy; whereas her six paintings on 7-inch, convex aluminum disks exert a gyroscopic pull, providing a portal into a watery universe that seems, in pieces like “Lichen Whorl” and “Trembling Rot,” to expand, fractal-like, before your eyes.
It’s doubtful that either artist is flashing any irony here. Yet the concept of the simulacra seems to be embedded, if only because the obvious artifice of their materials contrasts so sharply with the authenticity of the response they elicit. In other words, they become credible destinations, places where you’d want to spend time.
Hip deep in the appropriationist methods that took hold in the 1980s and that continue to fuel low-brow production as it inches toward highbrow respectability, John Yoyogi Fortes stands out for his ability to seamlessly integrate many different styles. His canvases, which roam from large to monumental, begin with an under girding of marks and color swatches and then build out into quasi-expressionist statements that hint at oblique political and personal conundrums.
In league with current trends in street art, Fortes practices a loose method of icon and symbol deployment that keeps viewers intrigued and suitably off-balance. His thinly painted characters, pulled from American and Asian comics and from ’50s clip art, are united pictorially by brushed, spray-painted and stenciled graphic shapes that when combined, allude to narratives that may or may not exist. It’s a trickster’s game, and a good one at that.
To wit: It’s easy to be amused by the telepathic “communion” between Superman and Jesus (”Exercise in Mindfulness”); the vaporization of ’50s television characters (”Christonite/Unsuspecting Impure Halo”); and the apparent satirization of the Chinese pharmaceutical industry (”Gift/Immaculate Misconception”). Still, for all the fun, Fortes knows how to sling a broadside. His largest (120 x 96″) canvas, “Immaculate Rendition,” shows an Asian cartoon character bound in chains whose face appears to be that of Little Black Sambo. Outlined by a white shape that is equal parts Swastika and human figure, the picture makes a searing and unambiguous statement about American foreign policy.
Linda Raynsford: Connected
Sculptor Linda Raynsford seems like an odd partner in this context; but she activates the room’s considerable space with works that challenge conventional notions of how steel should behave. I’m thinking in particular of “Connected,” a piece derived from metal doors that were cut up and “woven” into forms that dangle like seed pods from the ceiling, and of “Swollen,” a similarly crafted pedestal piece that looks like a big, gleaming donut. ”I Left My Wife,” a large, floor-mounted stainless steel disk pounded into irregular surface shapes and inscribed with text, also confounds perception: the bottom is flat, like a deflated tire.
In art and life, things are rarely what they seem, and in this show, which is essentially a conjuring act, both artists succeed at upending expectations.
When it comes to integrating art and human rights, Berkeley-based printmaker/installation artist Claudia Bernardi has few peers. Tall, lean and striking, Bernardi, 52, speaks poetically and forcefully about how art functions as “an antidote to brutality” and how her art is shaped more by carefully tended process accidents than by conscious intentions. Segura Publishing, the Mesa, Ariz., printmaking facility known for its collaborations with a wide array of blue-chip artists, has represented her since 1995; and this fall, 40 Acres Art Gallery is honoring her with a mid-career retrospective, bringing to Sacramento a body of work that’s been shown widely in one-person exhibits throughout the U.S. and around the world.
Born in Buenos Aires, Bernardi immigrated to the U.S. in 1979 to avoid becoming another “disappeared” intellectual, and after earning MA and MFA degrees at U.C. Berkeley she joined her sister as a member of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Unit. During the early and mid-‘90s, the team exhumed the remains of noncombatant civilians who were murdered during the civil wars that tore apart El Salvador and Guatemala. One of their grisly discoveries in El Salvador was a mass grave containing the bodies of 136 children. It inspired Bernardi’s epic installation Murmullos/Whispers, now on view at 40 Acres.
Contrary to expectations, Bernardi does not depict the physical pain of death in the point-blank manner of, say, Leon Golub or Nancy Spero—two contemporary chroniclers of war and political oppression. Instead, she emphasizes the persistence of hope among the survivors. Her multilayered monoprints reveal bright, luminous landscapes whose super-saturated colors pull viewers into emotional and psychological states that are more about transcendence than violence. That impression is reinforced by the vitality of the spectral, subterranean figures and objects that populate her pictures at varying depths. Bernardi scratches these elements onto surfaces dominated by searing reds and deep cobalt blues, a mixture that calls up an imaginary collaboration between Mark Rothko and Paul Klee—two artists she cites as influences.
Bernardi’s approach is intuitive and labor-intensive: she applies 50 to 70 layers of pure pigment to wet paper to achieve prints that glow like backlit transparencies. She calls them “frescoes on paper.” “The coloration,” she points out, “oftentimes is a process of subtraction, a scraping away of the layers so that what shows through translucently is in fact the actual mixing of color as the eye perceives it. Sometimes the pigments are hostile and repel each other,” she notes, which occasionally makes it “difficult to work with an idea or subject matter.”
As a result, each print “goes through an incredible transition” in which Bernardi functions more like an attentive observer than an all-powerful auteur. “I am only one part of the process,” she maintains. “The papers have a voice and the pigments have a strong voice, and we work as a team,” she says, likening her role to “a diplomatic act. I cannot take ownership. If the work is good, I am happy, and if it is bad, I am sorry. It’s like a baby; it’s born that way.”
Invariably, Bernardi’s prints do reflect her sentiments about specific events—namely, the last three years she spent teaching art in El Salvador just a few kilometers from where her forensics team exhumed the children’s bodies. Where Bernardi previously thought of art as an interior experience—“a safe place to think about what I cannot think rationally”—she now sees her work in much broader terms, representing “the sense of deep dignity that people can sustain even in times of deep crisis.”
–DAVID M. ROTH
“Claudia Bernardi: Silence Was Hostile and Almost Perfect” closed at 40 Acres Art Galleryin Sacramento Dec. 30, 2007. Claudia Bernardi is represented by Segura Publishing Company, Mesa, Ariz.; (480) 894-0551 or www.segura.com
In “Horizons,” an exposition of nine acrylic paintings, Linda Day has taken the basic tenets of hard-edge, geometric abstraction and turned them upside down. Where in the recent past she employed the orthodoxies of the genre — precise lines, bold colors and repetitive shapes — to create an optical buzz, her paintings now reveal something entirely different: references to landscape that inject moodiness into what has historically been an icy, formalist province.
Unlike Kenneth Noland and others of his ilk who formulated this style in the early 1960s, Day embraces beauty and the sheer tactile joy of manipulating pigment. In horizontally stacked layers of mostly muted colors laid down in wavy and sometimes jagged lines that spill out over the edge of the frame, Day’s new paintings display a visible, archeological record of their creation.
Pulse Beyond Between # 8
You may think you’re looking at conventional stripe paintings, but such thoughts dissolve quickly. How, exactly, this happens is unclear. But there are clues. One is that Day’s lines are never straight. They roll and slope and pile up like towering confections in a plethora of close-hued colors whose glossy textures recall pulled taffy. (From “Pulse: Between/Beyond # 8,” a painting looks good enough to eat, I recorded more than a dozen shades before exhausting my color vocabulary.) Another clue is that these colors are achieved by an improvisational process of layering which yields unintentional Rorschach-like artifacts that linger amorphously below the surface.
Bands of colors define themes and counter themes. Gently loping lines tap out rhythms and polyrhythms, and subsurface shadow blots add accents. If it’s true, as Josef Albers said, that “the origin of art is the discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect” then “Pulse: Between/Beyond # 8″ qualifies as Exhibit A. It’s an orchestra for the eye.
The same holds for the other major work in this show, “Pulse: Between/Beyond # 10.” A large-scale (3 x 11′) mash-up of forest and sea rendered in blue/green shades, it evokes a never-ending horizon – something that hard-edge abstraction (or color field painting as it was also known) claimed to do but rarely achieved. Day’s ambiguous lines and interleaved colors produce a hypnotic, transporting effect.
Chime # 3
It’s instructive to note what preceded the current Pulse series. “Chime #3″, from a body of work made in 2006, features short vertical bands organized in a grid that start out pale at the edges and build to a searing orange crescendo at the center. Combined, they form multiple perspectives of what looks like a constructivist cityscape bisected vertically by a superhighway — an update of Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings in which opposing color swatches stand-in for ones and zeros to represent an information-saturated universe. The contrast between the two bodies of work couldn’t be sharper; it demonstrates the distance she’s traveled in a short time.
Stuart Allen’s sculptures, which reference light, space and flight with kites and other forms made from sail cloth, were an interesting counterpoint. Five were on view here in “Measured.”
Stuart Allen: Air Water Kites
One, a box kite, hung from the gallery’s clerestory ceiling; the other four were wall-mounted and used repetition as a key ingredient. “One consists of seven sail-shapes affixed to a wall with turnbuckles; another featured 60 small box kites deployed perpendicularly around a corner, a possible reference to molecular geometry. While Allen’s work deals with environmental factors, it typically appears indoors, which means it can sometimes feel a bit constrained when not arrayed across big spaces as it was in 2007 at the San Antonio Museum of Art.
Yet the opposite can also be true. “A Kite for Flying in the Air” and “A Kite for Flying in Water” – two well-paired departures from Allen’s ultra-minimalist aesthetic – resemble battle shields garnished with braided rope. That uncharacteristic piece of ornamentation thrust the work into a different realm, bringing to mind the kinkier aspects of Mathew Barney’s work, which in this context was not a bad thing.
Both Day and Allen seem to have inched out of their comfort zones. Day simplified, Allen complicated, and in so doing they created a symbiosis of compatible opposites – one that points toward fresh and exciting directions for both.
”Horizons” by Linda Day and “Measured” by Stuart Allen closed at JayJay October 25, 2008.
With the humblest of materials and a truly cosmic vision of how they can be deployed in endless mutations, Emeryville sculptor Robert Ortbal has created a phantasmagorical universe of objects that play on familiar associations while at same time handily defying comparisons to any actual terrestrial, oceanic, microscopic and cosmic life forms you may have known.
The first time I saw Ortbal’s work in mid-2007 I felt like I’d walked into an octopus’ garden. Snake-like forms made from styrofoam-covered chicken wire writhed on the walls. Plastic flowers attached to pink foam tubes mimicked bioluminescent creatures, while a series of wire-mounted Spaldeens seemed to satirize the very act of depicting aquatic plants swaying in the tide. There were also objects that looked like they’d been cast from endoscopic views of the human body.
Cartographer's Dilemma: Charting a Sneeze (Detail)
In the intervening year, Ortbal’s practice of transforming everyday industrial materials into otherworldly forms has expanded into even more rarified zones, yielding shapes, textures, structures and associations that stretched even the elastic category of biomorphism.
While Ortbal, 46, readily acknowledges the influence of a long-ago trip to the Great Barrier Reef, he eschews the organic label viewers tend to apply. “When you’re making hybrid forms it almost always speaks of things from the sea, because when you’re looking at, say, coral, it’s an animal that looks like a plant. It automatically has that ability to cross over and be slippery in its classification,” Ortbal explains in his sun-drenched studio. In fact, Ortbal dislikes even calling what he does object building, preferring instead to see his output as “related to a system, part of something much larger.
Mistletoe
”I’m after essences,” he continues. “I try to understand patterns in nature and how they combine and interact with human nature. I’m trying to uncode how those things operate.”
Ortbal traces the origins of his method to an NEA-funded research project he conducted in Europe in 2001 prior to building an “animated chandelier” that the UC Berkeley Art Museum exhibited in 2004. In Europe he reexamined Rococo and Art Nouveau and came up with the idea of combining those motifs with “the essences of three distinct kingdoms: animal, vegetable and mineral to fuse this new type of work.” But an even bigger breakthrough, he maintains, was “three dimensional patterning”- learning to break apart those 2-D motifs and reconstruct them in three dimensions to achieve a “twisting of space.”
Robert Ortbal in the Studio, Emeryville 2008. Photo: David M. Roth
At his most recent solo show (”Neverland”), which closed in October at Traywick Contemporary in Berkeley, Ortbal demonstrated that skill, adding to an already prodigious vocabulary. Included were mirrored mylar sculptures that used reflected and refracted light as key compositional elements; a diorama-like polar landscape built from carved styrofoam that dangled from the ceiling; and several pieces that activated 3-D space in ways I’d not seen previously. The most provocative examples came from his “Architecture of a Scent” series – wall-mounted sculptures that attempt to visualize the state of sensory confusion known as synesthesia.
In these pieces, Ortbal employs what he calls “asymmetrical radial bursts” – flock-sprayed strands of wire that resemble Pick Up Sticks, which contrast hard-edge geometric lines with looping strands of colored wire that take viewers on a ride through multi-planar space.
Of his attempt to give form to things that can’t be seen, Ortbal says: “It’s interesting to think of making work that is beyond our physical perception. It frees me up and allows me to push on to a place that’s unfamiliar.”
Growing up in the art-poor San Jose suburb of Campbell, Ortbal did exactly that. “Becoming an artist wasn’t even in the realm of possibility,” he recalls. But while studying at SF State, he was smitten by the ceramic sculpture of Pete Voulkos, Ortbal saw a career path and went on to earn an MFA at UC Davis. After a decade of scuffling he landed a full-time teaching position at Sac State three years ago, and has since been rewarded with numerous solo and group shows, a large commission at the Oakland Airport and a Eureka Fellowship.
”What I place paramount is my intuition,” Ortbal says. That modus operandi seems to be serving him well.
At the heart of documentary photography lies an epistemological conundrum: What do we know and how do we know it? As anyone who has ever snapped a succession of portraits understands, the camera – even in the space of a few seconds – tells such wildly divergent stories that our ability to ascribe truth to any image (or selection of images) is highly fraught. Yet at the same time, we also believe that the camera tells the truth, even when we know it can be infinitely manipulated.
It was with these issues in mind that I approached Kent Lacin’s documentary series on teen homelessness, “Children of the Wind,” wondering what new truths might be gleaned and, more pointedly, how such an exhibition might negotiate the obvious clichés: the sullen faces, the chain-link fences, the filth, the bedrolls and the “Hungry, Please Help…God Bless” signs?
As it turns out, there’s not much that is conventional in this show of 53 color and B&W prints and digitally created collages. Lacin, a commercial photographer by day and an artist by night, is not an activist by trade. The idea for this series came to him while shooting a Sacramento Bee ad for a local homeless charity. During the job he connected with his subjects so powerfully that he decided to launch a pictorial crusade on behalf of the Wind Youth Center, a nonprofit that provides down-and-out kids with food, shelter, clothing and support. Over a three-year period, Wind introduced Lacin to dozens of other “clients,” and in short increments stolen from his day job, he photographed them in their camps, hangouts and hideaways – most of which are on the river near downtown Sacramento. The results are wide-ranging in tone, treatment, attitude and historical reference. They roam from straight photojournalism and fine art portraiture to hybrids that, in the case of Lacin’s collages, so thoroughly blur the line between painting and photography as to feel groundbreaking.
For inspiration, Lacin looked to August Sander (1876-1964) whose encyclopedic documentation of German society in the early the 20th century set a high water mark for incisive portraiture. Lacin makes no claim to all-inclusiveness. But he does manage to capture certain reoccurring teen archetypes, most of whom seem to be walking life’s tightrope. Squalor, while only occasionally pictured, is largely absent, or if it’s there, it’s shown uninhabited, as an environmental portrait. Lacin also sidesteps easy sensationalism; he doesn’t show anybody shooting up or having sex.
In fact, the most striking thing about this exhibit is how remarkably normal these kids look, despite the fact that many are addicts, prostitutes or have families they’re trying to raise on the streets. Yet even without the luxury of working as an “embedded” documentarian, Lacin captures their psychic turmoil with frontal images in which most of his subjects look directly into the camera. This time-honored method works well because it produces a consequence-free exchange in which viewers think they’re seeing the inner life of the subject.
But are they? Lacin makes you wonder. For example, is the cold, affectless stare in a blunt picture like “Ziggy,” which could easily be viewed as that of a case-hardened gangbanger, really be as murderous as it seems, or has the photographer simply captured a dull gaze? Would successive frames have revealed different information?
In the end we have to trust the artist; and if we take Lacin’s photos at face value, we’re struck by a plethora of telling details – details that not only slice through the often opaque photographer-subject dynamic, but also unearth the very sorts of ironies that form the backbone of 20th century documentary photography, from Walker Evans to Mary Ellen Mark.
“Carrie and Jeremy behind Bat Cave” appears on the surface to be a tender portrait, but it’s not. While Jeremy lays his head lovingly on Carrie’s shoulder and embraces her with one arm, her eyes plead for help. It’s a wrenching image. In “Cathy and Joshua” we see a similar dynamic: he flashes a toothy grin; she stares at the camera with a look of abject sadness. Each seems unaware of the other’s emotions, like two disparate pictures conjoined – except they’re not.
Throughout, Lacin displays a keen skill for capturing these kinds of details. “Barry & Ziggurat,” shows a boy below a riverbank levee with one of Sacramento’s landmark structures, the pyramid-shaped Ziggurat Building, in the background. Long-time Sacramentans remember this as the headquarters of the Money Store, a sub-prime lender that closed here years before such enterprises devoured Wall St. This, of course, isn’t the subject of the picture, but as an insinuating artifact it recalls, in its irony, the New Topographics of the 1970s and 1980s.
“Cherokee with Ice Cream Cone,” a brutally frank, low-angle portrait of a large woman dressed in a billowing yellow T-shirt, turns on another subtle detail: a pink Playboy cap in one hand that matches the color of an ice cream cone in the other. “Jason Behind Fence,” uses a bent link in cyclone fence to frame – and magnify – one of the boy’s eyes. That simple compositional device transforms a staid image into something chilling.
The only problem with this show is that there too many pictures. Sharper editing would have increased the show’s impact.
As it is, there are plenty of strong images, particularly those that reference WPA-style documentation and mid-century street photography. “Jodie and Baby Johnny,” a young mother and her smudge-faced child, and “Justin and Katie,” a weather-beaten couple, both look like they wandered in from “Tobacco Road.” Each could have been made in the Great Depression. “12th & G,” a fugitive image of a boy on a skateboard tearing down a rain-slicked alley, feels like Cartier-Bresson “grab shot.”
Throughout the show ambivalence abounds. “Enrique,” a model-handsome boy, whose face and body are perfectly framed by blackberry brambles, looks like the picture of serenity and health – except that he’s seriously strung out, a fact I learned only later from the artist. Which brings me back to my original point about how pictures can lie and tell the truth simultaneously.
Lacin understands this intuitively. In three large-scale collages, he rips apart the raw material of his “straight” pictures and reassembles them in Photoshop to create photographic “action” paintings, replete with sweeping gestures and distressed surfaces that at a distance appear to have the texture of pigment, but up close flatten out like a photograph.
Treading a fine line between abstraction and representation, they portray the complexities of street life by reconstituting the elements of homeless camps – faces, furniture, clothing, newsprint, bedding, garbage and foliage – as if they were struck by a tornado. They depict, in an almost cinematic fashion, the torment of living en marge by thoroughly blending painterly tropes and photographic effluvia. We’ve heard about the so-called convergence of painting and photography for years, but most of what we’ve seen has been kitschy graphics. In Lacin’s collages we have a real hybrid: pictures that can’t quite be taken for paintings and photographs whose origins are as blurry and fluid as the subjects they portray.
It’s a rare documentary series that critiques its own methods; but in this wide ranging exhibit that draws from so many historical styles, commentary and self-criticism come in the same package. Lacin may have started this project with an activist agenda, but behind the camera (and in front of the computer) it was the artist who prevailed.
–DAVID M. ROTH
Kent Lacin’s “Children of the Wind” closed October 4, 2008 at the CSUS Library Gallery.
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Many artists try to capture the shape and feel of human consciousness; but painter David Wetzl attempts something even more ambitious: the depiction of human existence as a tug-of-war between all of the isms that have ever existed. Never mind the so-called zeitgeist. Wetzl wants to show how every belief system in human history continues to shape our experience.
In most of his works, Wetzl uses grids as a general organizing principal to represent networks, both human and digital, as well as landscape. Over these he lays tribal masks, bridges, broadcast towers, figures, color fields, landmark buildings, highways, cities, circuit boards and animals. If you feel a sense of vertigo there’s a good reason: Each panel is the product of hundreds of hours of labor in which multiple layers of imagery have been laid down, sanded and varnished to create a transparent, labyrinthine effect reminiscent of “Brazil,” the Terry Gilliam film that portrayed the world as a bureaucratic maze of endless ductwork.
“Cherokee with Ice Cream Cone,” a brutally frank, low-angle portrait of a large woman dressed in a billowing yellow T-shirt, turns on another subtle detail: a pink Playboy cap in one hand that matches the color of an ice cream cone in the other. “Jason Behind Fence,” uses a bent link in cyclone fence to frame – and magnify – one of the boy’s eyes. That simple compositional device transforms a staid image into something chilling.
