Archive | January, 2012

Larry Bell @ Toomey Tourell

Larry Bell @ Toomey Tourell

Posted on 22 January 2012

"7.24.11", 2011, mixed media on black Arches paper, 36 x 24"

With so much renewed interest focused on Larry Bell’s glass boxes in Phenomenal, the Light-Space show at the San Diego Museum of Art, it’s easy to forget that Bell began his career as an abstract painter. Here, he reminds us of that fact with a series of perception-bending works that ask the same question he’s asked all along: what do we know and how do we know it?    

Using a Finish Fetish technique he invented years ago and continues to refine, Bell, in six “small figure collages” (2008 to 2011), reframes the age-old epistemological question. He builds multi-layered compositions from metal-coated paper and plastics which he heats in a vacuum press – a method that vaporizes the metals and preserves the compositions but eradicates evidence of their construction, like visible seams, original surface textures and the like.
 
The pictures invoke a big swath of collage and photo history, from Duchamp and Man Ray to Romare Beardon.   They prominently feature torsos, buttocks and thighs in bold juxtapositions, pitting positive and negative shapes against each other in rainbow-tinted shades of black and silver, with occasional bits of strong color. They don’t pretend to be erotic or narrative-figurative in any meaningful sense. The real subject, as it always is with Bell, is the play of light on surface. When those vaporized metals re-solidify they retain a crystalline structure that refracts light prismatically. Colors change, as do our perceptions of spatial depth. Iridescence, the one "constant", gives way to shifting hues of gold, green, red, blue and silver with the slightest change in viewing position.  What looks static at first is, in fact, completely fluid.  
 
With these pictures, Bell negates Frank Stella’s proto-Minimalist dictum (“What you see is what you see”) and  affirms Duchamp who said, “The viewer completes the work of art”.  But even that — the idea of completion — is up for grabs with Bell. As Peter Frank noted: “What you see is never only what you see.” In fact, it “may not be what you see from one moment to the next, and may not even be what is actually there.” Bell’s visual sleights of hand demonstrate how elusive and slippery our perception really is.
–DAVID M. ROTH
 
Larry Bell @ Toomey Tourell through January 31, 2012.
 
About the author:
David M. Roth is the editor and publisher of Squarecylinder.
 

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Annabeth Rosen @ Paule Anglim

Annabeth Rosen @ Paule Anglim

Posted on 20 January 2012

"Bunny", 2011, fired and glazed ceramic, steel stands, casters, baling wire, 46 x 32 x 24"
Building on the exuberant biomorphicism that catapulted her into the front rank of ceramic sculpture nearly two decades ago, Annabeth Rosen continues to expand the material and conceptual possibilities of clay. Her work, which tends to elicit strong reactions, consists of writhing, bulbous, serpentine shapes that are lashed to each other with baling wire and mounted on rolling steel chassis. Aquatic plant life and buoys and terrestrial shapes like gourds and viscera, are just a few of the associations called up by these ungainly accretions. Think of what Jules Verne might have created had he been a ceramic sculptor and you can easily picture what’s on view here; the difference being that in nature, plant and animal life this densely clustered are almost never seen except under a microscope. Rosen, a 2011 Joan Mitchell Foundation grant recipient, calls it “weaving with clay.” This quality of layering, folding, uplifting and compaction probably has more in common with geological processes than with anything biological. Rosen’s brilliance lies in her ability to fuse the two. It’s a trait that has held steady across her career, encompassing a cast of mutant (and ever-mutating) forms which she fabricates serially by hand.
 
 
What’s new, at least to my eye, is the increasingly anthropomorphic twist her works have taken.  Rosen achieves this quality by first, mounting the component parts on metal dollies so that they stand upright; and second, by attaching elongated gourd-like forms and buoy-shaped wire nets stuffed with clay scraps. The latter protrude outward, like errant “limbs” or malignancies. Adding to the figurative allusions are painted patterns that resemble bodily decorations, African-influenced textile and vessel patterning and outsized forms that replicate internal organs — like the enormous green “heart” that rests atop Bunny, its severed “tubing” bringing to mind Aztec sacrificial rites. 
 
"Talley", 2011, fired and glazed ceramic, steel stands and 2" casters and steel baling wire, 45 x 25 x 24"
If all this sounds violent, well, it is. David Cohen, writing in Artcritical, attributed this to Rosen’s history of watching television cartoons as a child, and later living in rough neighborhoods as a young artist in New York and Philadelphia. Rosen acknowledges as much, but says her current work is more rooted in the move she made in 1997 to accept the Robert Arneson Endowed Chair at UC Davis. (She’s since been included in practically every major museum survey on the topic you can think of, including Overthrown, boundary-stretching exhibit last year at the Denver Art Museum.) About Davis, Rosen is fond of saying: “I spent more time outdoors in my first year there than I did in my entire life before that.” Gardening became an obsession, plant life a key theme.  When the Twin Towers fell, New York, her native city, reasserted its grip. Rosen’s color palette literally turned ashen, evidence of which can still be seen in Bollo, a waist-high assemblage topped by grayish vessel-shaped forms that spill out from the wheeled support structure. Strangely, this anomalous mechanical feature of her work injects levity: simple shifts in the orientation of the wheels seem to effect “personality” or “mood” changes in the pieces themselves.
 
That we can attribute such qualities to inanimate objects seems crazy until you consider the medium itself: mud. Unlike paint, which, for a spell, was emptied of its tactile qualities by theorists who exerted undue influence, clay has resisted all such efforts.  It remains what it’s always been: a maximally expressive material. Rosen remains at the forefront of artists who are enlarging its emotive possibilities.  Her new work feels totemic and talismanic.
–DAVID M. ROTH
 
Annabeth Rosen: “New Work” @ Gallery Paule Anglim through January 28, 2012.
 
About the author:
David M. Roth is the editor and publisher of Squarecylinder.  

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One Thing Leads to Another @ ICA

One Thing Leads to Another @ ICA

Posted on 17 January 2012

Christel Dillbohner (detail), "Polar Journeys", monoprints, each 15 x 15" 
 
Jasper Johns’ famous quip, “Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that” wasn’t just a personal credo; it was a valid observation about how large chunks of 20th century art – from Dada and Fluxus to Pop and Minimalism – were made by following self-invented rules and rituals. They are the basis of One Thing Leads to Another, a show of 13 artists who devise unique, repetitive methods to create works on paper that address themes of nature, spirituality, memory, chance, endurance and the absurd.
 
While some works in this conceptually driven show feel like simple process experiments (and, in one instance, a precisely controlled science project), it’s displays of genuine material invention that register the strongest.  Chief among the latter is Polar Journeys, Christel Dillbohner’s series of 28 monoprints, made while she was an artist-in-residence at the ICA Print Center. It shows how repetition, when applied with diligence, craft and imagination, can yield work that goes beyond anything you might associate with a rote mechanical exercise. Dillbohner prints three different photographic images (of a sailboat, a mountain, and a tower-mounted industrial tank) on five different paper stocks with two printmaking techniques.  The result is a giant dreamscape.  The images alternate between representation and abstraction, romancing antiquity with surface textures that recall early 19th century photo processes.
 
Robin Kandel (detail) "The 24-Hour Drawing Project"
Fanny Retsek, who directs the ICA’s printmaking facility, foregoes mechanical reproduction in Troops on the Ground. It’s a dyptich that looks like scarified skin, the result of burning the paper 150,000 times with a soldering iron; each tiny incision represents an American soldier sent to Iraq.  It’s not a memorial, exactly, but it feels like one.  Robin Kandel’s The 24-hour Drawing Project is also something of an endurance test.  Her self-issued challenge was to rotate a ruler in a circular pattern and draw a pencil line every sixteenth of an inch. The leaf shapes she drew on card stock every 10 to 15 minutes are arrayed on a long table.  They appear remarkably consistent, defying the expectation that the lines get sloppier as the artist gets sleepier.  
 
Op, a movement that peaked in the mid-‘60s, relied heavily on serial methods, is well represented here. Amy Ellingson, well known for injecting fresh life into Op through hand-worked computer designs, asks us to detect subtle changes in a group of arch-shaped motifs that repeat throughout a cycle of drawings called 50 Variations.  In it, she trades her color-saturated palette for a silvery monochrome, a subtraction that makes this series particularly enignmatic. Anthony Ryan goes all-out for color by weaving together in tight grids, strips of thinly cut paper culled from cast-off product packages. The colors are identical to the test patterns seen on printers’ proofs, and with them Ryan delivers a full-on sensory assault. His interlocking patterns plunge us into a frenetic search for visual stability that the pictures deny, mirroring the neural agitation that comes from too much time spent staring at electronic devices. Linn Myers, with virtually no color, sows another kind visual confusion, one with spiritual overtones. Her drawings consist of mandala-like shapes which, when passed through a press, take on even greater complexity; they resemble organic-looking versions of Victor Vasarely’s spherical grid paintings.  Theodora Varnay Jones, a minimalist with a history of serial expression, steps out of character by giving herself the task of transforming a crumpled sheet of paper.  She does it by superimposing line drawings over a shadowy photo of the object.  The effect is almost holographic.
 
 
Amy Ellingson (detail), "50 Variations", gouache on paper

 

Brad Brown plays with chance.  He defaces his drawings in every conceivable way, and then rolls dice to decide how he’ll treat the printing plates. These he slices up and instructs press operators to arrange however they like.  The results are surprisingly consistent – and funny, like what Philip Guston might have come up with had he drawn abstract cartoon panels. Sculptor Mari Andrews makes casual drawings at the end of each workday. From this habit of improvising around nature-based themes, she selected 55 pieces and arranged them in a large grid.  None are particularly remarkable, nor are they intended to be; but in series, they unfold slowly and cinematically, like giant flip cards, encouraging meditation on the natural cycles that are her subject. 

Fanny Retsek, (Detail) "Troops on the Ground"

Things to Say to Dinner Guests, Kim Rugg’s serial “white-out” of every letter in the alphabet – executed A-through-Z across 23 copies of a single edition The New York Times – is an engaging spoof. It looks like a ransom note or, alternately, a bizarre exercise in linguistic analysis, but it is neither.  It reminds me of Joseph Heller’s send up of wartime censorship in Catch-22 where soldiers get letters from home that begin with “Dear” and end in “Love” — with nothing in between.

With nearly a century of history behind it, you’d think process art of this sort would be exhausted.   But that would be like saying that art itself is exhausted. Fact is, serial actions underpin some of the most important art of the past century, from Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone music to Andy Warhol’s silk-screened multiples.  The reason, I suspect, is that rule-based art making embodies and reconciles our contradictory desire for freedom and structure.   One Thing Leads to Another doesn’t reframe or reinterpret that legacy. It simply reaffirms seriality’s vitality as a guiding principle.
 
–DAVID M. ROTH
 
“One Thing Leads to Another” @ the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art through Feb. 25, 2012.
 
Photos: David Pace
 
About the author:

David M. Roth is the editor and publisher of Squarecylinder.  

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Soil to Site @ Montalvo

Soil to Site @ Montalvo

Posted on 05 January 2012

Sean McFarland: "Untitled (grove)", 2011, C-print, 40 x 80"

 

Given the insults we’ve inflicted on the planet, is it any wonder we have difficulty re-creating a Walden-like experience? Soil to Site, the final installment in an 18-month cycle of events titled Natural and Creative Capitol, examines the always-fraught relationship between man and nature. It features three Bay Area artists who lean toward the Edenic, but who also openly acknowledge the challenges facing anyone who seeks to establish a deep relationship with what today passes for wilderness. 

If there’s a through-line running through the exhibit it’s that wilderness exists purely at our pleasure, and it does so only through acts of human beneficence, not acts of God.  Sean McFarland, a highly skilled simulation artist, has a strategy for negotiating this skewed state of affairs. His collaged photos, based on images that he collects and digitally reconstructs, are designed to operate like dioramas, re-creating “facts” of natural history by fictionalizing them. Crepuscular and hermetic and alternating between medium-sized C-Prints and tiny (3/1/2 x 4/14”) Polaroids, they make the familiar seem strange and the strange seem familiar. The five prints on view here come from two series, Dark Pictures (2011) and Pictures of the Earth (2009-11). 

McFarland: "Lightning", 2010, Polaroid, 3 1/4 x 4 1/4

They make you feel as if you’re staring through a keyhole into art history. Impenetrably dark foliage, broad vistas, pristine waterfalls, lightening and other primordial aspects of the Earth recall photo-graphy’s 19th century beginnings and its ongoing dialog with American and European Romantic painting of the same period. McFarland integrates these elements into fakes that are wholly plausible, but not so perfect as to make you think you’re looking at a “straight” photograph. 

As such, they’re apt metaphors for his belief that our perception of the Earth is altered by everything we’ve done to it (and everything we haven’t.) If that comes off sounding too much like the postmodern cliché about the relativity of everything, so be it. The longer you look at these pictures the more apparent it becomes that they are not just simple exercises in visual destabilization but, rather, subtle pleas for the exercise of consciousness.

So, too, is Mari Andrews’ installation of dirt-filled lead pouches, Collected Topography. Spread across a wall, the individual pouches appear as mundane objects – until you look inside them and see that the soil, harvested from 29 locations across the West, is incredibly diverse in color and texture. 
 
Mari Andrews: "Collected Topography", 2011, lead, soil, wire
Dirt, no matter how rich or how finely tilled, never triggers anything approaching an epiphany in me, but it does here. Andrews succeeds by doing the opposite of what she does normally, which is to create sculptures built of poetic materials (twigs, branches, seed pods and lichen) that, once installed in galleries, feel drained of whatever poetry their raw materials may have once had. In contrast, dirt, which has zero aesthetic value, overflows with it when presented out of context. It doesn’t hurt, either, that Andrews uses lead, a toxic material, as a container for her excavations; it gives the installation a critical edge, highlighting the contradiction between our professed reverence for the natural world and our continued abuse of it.
 
In Hierarchy of Relevance, a 7-minute video, the Britain-born San Francisco artist Richard T. Walker films himself serenading inanimate objects (shrubs, rocks and mountains and trees) against a series of stunning desert backdrops. In a voiceover that precedes his performance on various instruments, Walker delivers a monologue that describes his existential dilemma. “He looked again at the immediate surroundings in the hope that he would no longer see them with such excessive clarity. But he couldn’t escape their individual wonder. He desperately needed a distraction. His thoughts began to meander, confused and agitated, unsure where to land. But slowly they started to calm, eventually culminating and floating into a short melody that glossed over the moment.”   Unable to meet his self-imposed challenge, he does what he can: he sings, strums a guitar and beats a drum. Ultimately, as he explains in the video, it was the song that “briefly set him free.” 
 
Richard T. Walker, "The Hierarchy of Relevance", 2010, still from 8-min video
 
Like the British writer John Berger, who walked across Europe wondering what horrors the land beneath his feet may have witnessed, Walker, with self-deprecating good humor, wanders the wilderness trying to rise to the task of comprehending the grandeur before him. That he’ll fail is a foregone conclusion; whatever state of grace he needs simply cannot be mustered. But its unavailability, the Soil to Site artists seem to be saying, doesn’t matter. The important thing that we keep trying. How?  The show offers no quick fixes, no redemptive path.  You can sing to rocks, as Walker does. Or, you can do what I do: take a good long walk in the woods that lay just beyond the gallery walls – on the 175-acre parcel  of land deeded to the public trust in 1930 by California’s first popularly elected U.S. Senator, James Phelan (1861-1930), a philanthropically minded politician who understood the soul-enriching properties of open space.   
–DAVID M. ROTH
"Soil to Site" @ Montalvo Arts Center through January 15, 2011.
 
About the Author:
David M. Roth is the editor and publisher of Squarecylinder. 

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