Archive | February, 2012

Walker Evans @ Cantor Arts Center

Walker Evans @ Cantor Arts Center

Posted on 27 February 2012

"Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife (Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama)", 1936
It’s been more than a decade since the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opened a massive exhibition of the work of American photographer Walker Evans. It was a terrific, career-defining show, mounted at the right moment to transform Evans from Depression Era photographer to one of our seminal artists. Originally mounted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which had acquired Evans’ personal archive in the ‘90s, it seemed a show no one else would ever duplicate for breadth and quality.
 
 Until now.   With the opening this month of Walker Evans at the Cantor Arts Center on the Stanford University campus, the full range of Evans’ influential and elegantly understated work is on view through April 8.
Like its predecessor, the Cantor show is curated by Met Curator of Photographs Jeff Rosenheim. But this time the photographs are drawn entirely from the collection of Elizabeth and Robert J. Fisher, a Stanford business school graduate and the son of the recently deceased GAP founder Don Fisher, who was arguably San Francisco’s premier collector of modern and contemporary art. (It’s his collection that SFMOMA is now building a new wing to house.)
 
It’s clear the son and daughter-in-law have cultivated the knack. The Cantor show is a précis of SFMOMA’s, with fewer images, but they are all smartly selected vintage prints from every part of Evans’ career. It’s a career that was far more varied than the Depression-era photographs that he made for the federal Farm Security Administration for which he is best known. What makes this show so engaging is to see it in the context of the contemporary art world. For one who once considered himself a ”failed artist,” Evans’ embrace of commercial and vernacular American culture, and later abandonment of some control of the photographic image, anticipated Pop and Conceptual art and much more. You might even say that the embrace of the road as a transformative American experience had its roots in Evans. 
 
"Corner of State and Randolph Streets", Chicago, 1946
Within the world of photography, whose full admission to the art world did not really come until near the end of his career, Evans was known as a pivotal figure in the development of documentary photography as an art form. It’s hard to imagine the work of street photographers Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand — all of whom Evans knew and helped — without the example of his seemingly artless and direct approach.
 
Evans was born in St. Louis, the son of a wealthy advertising executive, and raised in the Chicago suburbs and Toledo, Ohio. He drifted through two private boys’ schools and dropped out of Williams College after one year to move to Paris, where he hoped to emulate the writers he idolized — Flaubert, Joyce, Eliot and Hemingway. It soon became clear that his idolatry of the great writers would prevent him from ever becoming one. But when he picked up a camera, an avocation since his youth, it was different matter. The shy and self-conscious Evans felt an ease and spontaneity he never knew when writing. With the encouragement of writer Hart Crane and other friends, he quickly became obsessed with the medium’s potential.
 
The first room of the Cantor retrospective, which is chronologically organized, shows a naturally gifted photographer experimenting his way toward his own style. There are a few tiny self-portraits that he took while still in Paris, and they echo European modernism, with its evident formalism and emphasis on odd angles and dynamic structure. But Evans quickly found his footing in what might be called a style of no style. Not surprisingly for the prickly and iconoclastic Evans, he was quick to define himself in opposition to the leading photographers of the day: Alfred Steiglitz, whom he saw as pretentiously arty, and Edward Steichen, whom he dismissed as commercial. What he embraced was seemingly unmediated realism that focused on ordinary objects, commercial and urban imagery, often shot from a simple, symmetrical frontal view that belied the artistry that lay behind it.
 
"Truck and Sign", 1930
His fascination with commercial signage, which would continue to the end of his career, already is evident in the 1930 “Truck and Sign,” a slightly surreal image of workmen unloading an enormous sign that consisted simply of the word, “Damaged,” an image that foreshadowed work Ed Ruscha would create decades later.
 
The second room of the show has the only body of work in which the Fisher collection doesn’t equal the best of Evans’ work seen in the SFMOMA show. In 1933 a publisher invited Evans to join leftist writer Carleton Beals on trip to Cuba to make pictures for a book Beals was writing entitled, “The Crime of Cuba,” critiquing the régime of dictator Gerado Machao y Morales. Typically, Evans never read the text. His photographs reflect little of the nature of the dictatorship, but are some of the most powerful and accomplished portraits of his career. The Fisher collection has exactly one of those unforgettable images, “Citizen in Downtown Havana, 1933.” The rest are decidedly second-tier. Others, of a candy vendor, workers on the Havana coal dock, and more are absent.  In a career that did not contain many strong portraits, this is a significant omission.
 
The rest of the room features a generous sampling of the imagery for which Evans is best known: the Depression era Farm Security Administration images of the poor and displaced, and, more centrally, the cityscapes, buildings and interiors they inhabited. It’s been said that Evans had an uncanny ability to see the present as if it were already the past, and it’s true. He unerringly photographed things that were idiosyncratic to the time and fast fading from view. Evans was largely apolitical and that apparent neutrality has allowed virtually all of this work to withstand the vicissitudes of time, while the work of his peers now feels sentimental.
 
"Negro Barbershop Interior, Atlanta", 1936
The photographer’s engagement with southern poverty reached its most brilliant apogee the following decade in his collaboration with the writer James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The portfolio of photographs of three tenant-farm families that accompany Agee’s obsessively detailed text was originally commissioned by Fortune magazine but rejected there. The portraits are as intimate and intense as they are dispassionate, preserving their subject’s dignity while searing the viewer with the facts of their lives. It’s interesting to note that Evans photographs, which convey an enormous dignity in the face of privation, seem to undermine Agee’s lyrical arguments about the debasement of poverty.
 
At least two bodies of work in the show, it must be said, are of interest primarily to offer a full rendering of Evan’s life rather than for their visual rewards.  The first is a series of photographs of African carving commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The second he did during his years as a staffer for Fortune Magazine, which are wisely represented here by the original magazine spreads rather than the original photographs. Both, finally, are unremarkable. It’s as though he was plying his day job while awaiting further inspiration.
 
It came in two other bodies of work. The first, a series of candid photographs taken on the New York City subway, was later gathered in a book entitled, “Many Are Called.” Evans secreted a camera inside his coat and made portraits of his fellow riders without looking through the viewfinder. Made in the 1940s, the photographs seem to capture a different collective consciousness of his countrymen and women from the Depression years. Instead of determination and grit, here the people seem lost in ennui and existential musing. 
 
 
"Subway Passengers, New York", 1941
 
 The other came near the end of Evans’ life in the 1970s, when the Polaroid Corporation gave him an SX-70 instant camera and an unlimited supply of color film. The camera delighted Evans, who reveled in its speed and ease of use. The fourteen unique Polaroid images in the Cantor show find Evans plying his career-long preoccupation with signage and quotidian objects with new eyes and enthusiasm. It’s as though the new medium gave Evans a new way to imbue ordinary objects with hidden meaning and mystery.
 
 
 
“Stare,” Evans famously said. “It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
 
In a career of nearly 50 years, the photographer did just that and came away with a visual knowledge few have equaled. The Cantor show may be your last chance for a long time to see a full range of what it was he finally knew.
–JACK FISCHER
“Walker Evans” @ Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, through April 8, 2012.

About the Author:
Jack Fischer is the former art critic for the San Jose Mercury News.  Over a 30-year career writing for major metropolitan newspapers across the country, he as won awards for his investigative, feature and artist writing, and was part of the staff that won the Pulitzer Prize at the Mercury News for its coverage of the 19898 Loma Prieta earthquake.  He lives in San Jose. 
 

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Sarah Walker @ Gregory Lind

Sarah Walker @ Gregory Lind

Posted on 25 February 2012

"Mount Meru", 2012, acrylic on panel, 28 x 26”
Sarah Walker, at first glance, appears to be part of a historical lineage of formal, process-oriented abstract painting. She builds her works layer-by-layer, mixing pigments with polymer media so that the strata have the transparency of a watercolor wash. Sometimes her surfaces also have the frosting-like quality of encaustic.  But where her most obvious forebears – Brice Marden and Terry Winters — engage in psychological attempts to limn the intangible through symbols and gestures, Walker’s paintings came of age in a world that is faster, busier, and less contemplative.  Instead of projecting the world of the subconscious onto canvas, the structures and forms in Walker’s pictures are informed by the contemporary deluge of information, visual and otherwise.  
 
Her "objects of meditation," as the gallery press release describes them, strive to make sense of these images, facts, and figures by fixing their aggregate as if it were a tissue specimen on a microscope slide.  They evoke micro and macro worlds that only recently became visible to us through technological advances, yet they remain fundamentally alien.
 
Walker’s paint handling reflects this dichotomy. If one layer is organic and loose, kin to the sweeping branch gestures of Marden, the next is a fractured Terry Winters grid, with bold lines angling outward, providing a pictorial armature and the suggestion of traditional perspective.  Importantly, the paintings’ subsequent layers never completely obscure what came before, so the viewer can infer each painting’s construction through careful examination of the surface stratification.
 
"Spiderpool 9", 2011, acrylic on Fabriano paper, 22 x 23"
While a pseudo-scientific reading of Walker’s imagery is tempting, it is by no means exclusive.  Her crowded paintings vacillate between interpretations. Unnamed Meteor, for example, might be a cross-section of an infected plant chloroplast or a space-time schism or an exuberant subway tag — or all of these at once.  The press release speaks of the paintings’ mutability: They “serve by turns as objects, territories, and screens for projection.  Here at this perspectival point, we are invited to contemplate objects as portals to multi-dimensional perception."  In this respect, Walker’s pictures are little different from Winter’s or, for that matter, from Jackson Pollock’s, Mark Rothko’s or Cy Twombly’s.  All of these painters recognized beauty as fundamentally irrational and changeable, a fleeting perception of the real rather than a Platonic ideal.
 
Of the paintings, Mount Meru stands out.  The work’s central form – a warped grid whose interstices are filled with biomorphic shapes  – is monumental, yet playful, and reminiscent of Carroll Dunham’s cartoon exuberance. The form’s interior and surroundings bubble and buzz with activity that calls to mind scientific illustrations of chemical cocktails or atomic intercourse. The title of the painting nods to the contemplative aspect of Walker’s work alluded to in the press release.  In Buddhist, Hindu and Jain cosmologies, Mount Meru is the sacred mountain at the center of the universe — the heart, if you will, of the meditative enterprise. But Meru is also manifest in a more terrestrial guise, as an active volcano in what is today Tanzania.  Dynamic tension, in this case between the metaphysical and the worldly, but also between high and low art influences, and realms of knowledge, is characteristic of Walker’s strongest works.
 
"Arteries", 2012, acrylic on Fabriano paper, 58 x 55"
Walker includes six of her densely packed, all-over panel paintings in EYEFINGER, as well as six works on paper which use the same acrylic media and techniques. The configurations in the latter are no less vivid or graphic than those in the paintings.  They could be isolated passages from the panel works and, like those, they remain in flux, despite being framed by the edges of the paper.  The forms are mineral changelings, alchemical.  In Spiderpool 8, a melting, crystalline form projects outward toward the viewer.  Then, the shape recedes, transforming into a portal, an opening into some new dimension, before it flattens into two tiers.  The most compelling works on paper are Arteries and Spiderpool 3.  In the latter work, especially, one sees evidence of the influence of graffiti and microscopy, but the curves of pink and red and the broken, cellular grid seem like nascent characters, suggestive of some new alphabet already finding form in our mind.  
 
What prospects are spelled out?  What prophecies are voiced?  Walker provides the raw materials, but leaves the prognostication up to us.
–CHRISTOPHER REIGER
 
Sarah Walker: “EYEFINGER” @ Gregory Lind through March 10, 2012.
 
About the Author:

Christopher Reiger is a writer, artist, and curator living and working in San Francisco. Artwork can be seen at his website, and essays on art, natural history, and miscellany can be read at his long-running blog Hungry Hyaena. 

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Brian Dettmer @ Toomey Tourell

Brian Dettmer @ Toomey Tourell

Posted on 25 February 2012

"McMillan", 2011, altered book, 11 1/8 x 9 1/2 x 2 1/8"
Exhibitions of artists’ books are, more often than not, a bit like menu staples; they appear regularly, and when they do we pretty much know what to expect.  Brian Dettmer upends any such expectations. If you’re not a student of antiquarian book making practices, chances are you’ve never seen anything like what he has on view on in Textonomy.   
 
Drawing from bookmaking traditions that pre-date even print culture (like 13th century volvelles which contained revolving disks) on through “movable”, “peep show” and “pop-up” books, Dettmer takes a radical approach to this age-old art form: he turns old books into intricate relief sculptures by surgically carving out their insides. The photos, illustrations and text snippets that remain seem to float in mid-air like frozen animations or disjointed pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The books, which for the most part, are bundled together in large groups, have the look of exquisitely detailed dioramas.  Imagine reading a book with selective x-ray vision or, viewing an archeological dig where every stage of the excavation process is preserved in visible layers and you get some idea of the effect. If this sounds impossibly complex, well, it is. I was told that the artist seals each book and then slices out the interiors with a knife.   It’s hard to imagine how.
 
This mind-bending aspect is clearly a part of Dettmer’s appeal. More tantalizing, still, are the literary, social, ethical and philosophical implications of what it means to so thoroughly re-present the pieces of a book.  Are they counter arguments to the original texts?  Assertions of the superiority of pictures over words? Obituaries for the impending death of print media?   Or, simply, clever exercises in visual monkey wrenching?  It could be all or none of the above. Dettmer, it’s safe to say, is acutely aware of the issues raised, but he avoids facing them head-on, preferring instead to leave open to interpretation the meaning of his surgical interventions into old encyclopedias, textbooks, history books and travelogues and the like.  While open-endedness in these ideologically fractious times can be a virtue, it would be far more bracing had the artist used his virtuosity to stake out a more pointed position – a la, say, Kara Walker, Barbara Kruger or Jenny Holzer — on the subjects his repurposed books purport to re-illustrate and/or deconstruct.
 
"Lands and Peoples" (detail), hardcover books, acrylic, 29 1/2 x 29 1/2 x 2
In a several notable instances he comes close.  There’s nothing to Fear But has FDR’s words “carved” onto a row of wall-mounted books that are fused together and sealed; the shaved-down exterior of this sleek object is impenetrable, save for small incisions that expose single words.  To me, it reads like a manifesto aimed at the plague of book censorship currently sweeping conservative school districts.   I also find it significant that several of Dettmer’s book assemblages are shaped like altarpieces. Lands and Peoples, to take one example, extracts clichéd images from travelogues and concentrates them claustrophobically, suggesting Americans’ fears of “otherness” in far-off places like Africa and the Middle East.  Universal Standard, a cylindrically shaped piece made to look like a movable postcard rack, reverses the proposition by showing equally clichéd views of mid-century American pop culture – all from books that conceivably might have been read by people in other cultures.  
 
"Prose and Poetry Adventures",  8 1/2 x 7 1/2 x 1 3/4"
Prose and Poetry Adventures, an altogether different sort of work, presents the subjects two ways: first as a word sculpture in book form and, second, as a piece of concrete poetry, whose excised verbiage appears in a separate frame, bringing to mind both ransom notes and the cut-and-paste technique Allan Ginsberg used to assemble the final manuscript of William Burroughs’ masterwork, Naked Lunch. Then there is the sculptural wonder that is World Books. It consists of 19 encyclopedias opened out accordion-style in the shape of a caterpillar. 
  
Not everything fares as well. Aching Days of England, while visually dazzling, does little beyond eliciting a time travelers’ backward gaze at the vehicles, architecture and fashions of the Victorian Era.  Likewise, McMillian, so named for the reference book it savages, feels less like like a comment on its contents than a brilliant piece of Constructivist-influenced geometric abstraction. 
 
Dettmer’s shortcomings as a polemicist in the end are not a make-or-break proposition; in fact they’re nearly overshadowed by his achievements as a sculptor who mines art history, literature, language and the history of bookmaking.  But, if he were to establish a sharper editorial focus he’d have something more powerful still.
–DAVID M. ROTH
 

Brian Dettmer: “Textonomy” @ Toomey Tourell through March 31, 2012. 

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Mary Hull Webster @ b. sakata garo

Mary Hull Webster @ b. sakata garo

Posted on 22 February 2012

"Lucia Revealed", pigment print in light box
The strangest most beguiling show on view this month comes from Mary Hull Webster. A former critic well known to Bay Area readers, Webster is a multi-media artist whose application of hermetic practices to contemporary art making has percolated just beneath the radar of wide public notice. Her inner-directed, alchemy-influenced work includes one of the trippiest, most complex Internet art projects you’re likely to see, Looking for Lucia: A Book of Night and Day. Its dominant theme, "the global light-dark imbalance," extends to the photos, books, paintings, sculptures on view here.  Made over a ten-year period, they focus on the spiritual journey of two fictional characters, Lucia and Hugo, who, judging from the text of an accompanying artist’s book, may well be stand-ins for the alter egos of Webster herself.   
 
In that book, time, narrative viewpoints, and chronology shift so rapidly, the only persistent “fact” is the fluid nature of the artist’s self-inventions.  Fittingly, the centerpiece of this show is the appropriated image of Hugo Ball, which Webster repeats across a series of altered photos that portray the Hugo/Lucia character androgynously and in conventional gender roles.  For a shape-shifting artist like Webster, the character of Ball must have been irresistible.   
 
In 1916, he launched the Dada movement in Zurich, and though his involvement lasted a mere two years, his influence continues to resonate, particularly at cultural moments when things stop making sense. That same year, he co-founded Cabaret Voltaire where, dressed in outlandish costumes, he performed “sound poetry” comprised of guttural noises and nonsense phrases designed to capture the insanity of the times.  Audiences, expecting song and dance routines, were rudely awakened.
 
"Hugo Revealed", pigment print in light box
Webster first began working with Hugo/Lucia images in 2001, when she came up with the idea of using Lucia as an antidote to violence and war.  “When I thought about the incoherence of it all, the only thing that came to mind was the absurdity of Dada,” she told me.  By that, the artist doesn’t mean that conditions in post-9/11 America in any way rival the devastation seen in Europe after WW I – only that irrationality persists on a global scale.  
 
In Webster’s re-casting of the performer’s image, he appears clad in his freakiest, most provocative outfit: a cubist-inspired cardboard suit, a cone-shaped hat and gloves that make his fingers look like reptilian claws. The image calls to mind hooded inquisitors, wizards, magicians, clerics, Klansmen and 16th century pilgrims.  As Hugo’s partner, the Lucia character appears in and out of costume, clothed and naked and occasionally, with her face obliterated, looking as if her entire being had been atomized.  The most riveting of these male/female juxtapositions appear side-by-side, in two life-sized light boxes that give the twin visages the ghostly presence of 19th century “spirit photographs”.
 
Elsewhere in the show, there are illuminated boxes on the floor covered with mystical symbols and rocks; a quartet of small abstract paintings; stacks of wrapped boxes; solarized landscape photos; books created by Webster and three other artists (Mary Mountcastle Eubank, Louise Pryor, Zea Morvitz); object-filled boxes (from the Portable Stories series) whose titles and contents make sharp political statements; and two wall-mounted sculptures, one of which suggests an electrocardiogram made of indecipherable hieroglyphic inscriptions.  
 
What all this means is impossible to say.  Ball himself sought nothing less than to create a language unheard of, and maybe that’s the point. As the Cabaret Voltaire co-founder wrote: "I don’t want words that other people have invented… I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own. If this pulsation is seven yards long, I want words that are seven yards long." Webster, in this exhibit, provides plenty of visual equivalents. 
–DAVID M. ROTH
 
Mary Hull Webster @ b. sakata garo through March 3, 2012.
Learn more about Mary Hull Webster. 
 

 

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Patrick Graham @ Meridian

Patrick Graham @ Meridian

Posted on 14 February 2012

“The Artist, The Woman”, 1983-84, oil on canvas, 72 ½ x 72 ½”
For over three decades, Dublin-based Patrick Graham has been making grave and complex paintings that may be hard to like, but are absolutely impossible to disrespect. His work bespeaks the same weight of heavy cultural burden as does that of Anselm Kiefer, another artist who (along with the recently passed Antonio Tapies and Cy Twombly) gives the viewer special purchase on the heavy side of sophisticated artistic emotion. Indeed, Graham is one of those artists who has always “found it in the paint,” and the thing that he has found is a raw, archaic urgency that is always resolved by the actual act of painting on the surface of the work, something very different than a physical afterthought connected to the shenanigans that can be enacted on a computer screen.  In other words, his is a truly improvisational practice, and as devil-may-care as many of Graham’s work may seem, it is something very different in spirit than the current vogue for so-called “provisional painting,” which in the end is more an art of strategy and annotation than of pictorial self-invention. To put it plainly, Graham’s work is the real deal.
 
A pair of French words came to mind while I was looking at the Meridian Gallery’s 30-year survey of 33 of Graham’s paintings and drawings curated by Peter Selz. The first of those words is ecriture, which very loosely translates as “inscription” in a way that signifies designation taking precedence over description. The second of those words is blague, which in simple translation means joke, but more subtly means elaborate hoax, as in the question of “are you kidding?”  Clearly, Graham’s work is not kidding, but the undeniable gravitas of his work is nonetheless spiced by a plucky and somewhat absurd buoyancy that separates it from any Germanic sturm and drang, meaning that any given painting or work on paper might be seen as pivoting from grim fatalism to a stubbornly optimistic gallows humor that might obliquely connect it to the late work of Philip Guston. 
 
“Dead Swan/Captain’s Hill”, 1998-99, oil and mixed media on canvas diptych, 72 x 132”
 
The earliest works in this exhibition hail from the early-middle 1980s, and feature abbreviated figures that seem to almost have been carved out of thick layers of oil paint. A large, two-figure composition titled, The Artist, The Woman from (1984) seems remarkable in this context. It features two elongated nude figures, one female and the other male, both awkwardly perched upon an isolated landscape in a way that relates them to some of the strangely self-deluded characters in Samuel Beckett’s plays.  Clearly, it reflects the widespread vogue for neo-expressionist painting that was still visible in George Orwell’s fateful year. But it also reflects the idea that a figure can be painted in such a way so as to be more inscribed (rather than described) in a picture surface. Other paintings from this period also tend to feature figures, and they all seem more carved from painterly substance rather than modeled from the capture of light.
 
Perhaps the single most impressive work in the exhibition is the large diptych titled Dead Swan/ Captain’s Hill from 1999.  In essence, the work is a panoramic battle scene that portrays a devastated landscape undergoing aerial attack from a fleet of crudely drawn warplanes, its human population primarily registered by a vast sea of grave markers.  Although the work is not specific about any particular battle, it convincingly allegorizes the hell of war in multiple slatherings of thick, frothing paint festooned with a written inscription set on a canvas banner that is affixed to the painting’s surface near the bottom-right of the composition.
 
“Seeing Ingres: Odalisque Series”, 2001, mixed media on board, 32 x 44”
One of the real treats of this exhibition lies in its featuring of a large selection of Graham’s consistently stunning works on paper, most of which are modestly sized and feature a surprisingly rich mixture of artistic media, oftentimes including fabric and collage elements.  Oftentimes, we see a deft use of ink and/or diluted paint working in various wet-into-wet techniques, as seen in figural fragments that seem like self-portraits in positions of absurd isolation.  In some cases, such as Deposition: Study 6 (2009), these figures are paired with loosely gridded forms that seem to have snagged a small array of obscure pictographic treasures.  In others such as Seeing Ingres: The Odalisque Series (2001), we see a female figure floating as if in a redemptive dream.  But as is the case with all dream figures, they lie just beyond the grasp of the visible male protagonist pictured in the work, offering a reminder that art often achieves in fantasy what can never happen in reality.
–MARK VAN PROYEN 
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Patrick Graham: Thirty Years “The Silence Becomes the Painting” @ Meridian Gallery through April 14, 2012. 
 
About the Author:

Mark Van Proyen is an Associate Professor at the San Francisco Art Institute. He is a corresponding editor for Art in America, and his critical writings have appeared in many publications, including Art Criticism, Artweek and Art Issues. He is currently working on a novel titled Theda’s Island, the story of which is set in the art world. 

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Robin Kandel @ Andrea Schwartz

Robin Kandel @ Andrea Schwartz

Posted on 09 February 2012

"lakewater 2-6", 2012, acrylic on panel 51 x 48"
Since 2009, Robin Kandel has been making paintings about water, specifically about the play of light and wind across shifting surfaces. Having grown up near the Great Lakes, this is a subject she knows intimately. For some people, this kind of acute observation is akin to watching paint dry. For others it’s visual catnip. If you are among the latter group, Kandel’s latest series, lakewater, will be of intense interest.  
 
In her attempt to concretize something so ephemeral, Kandel takes an eminently reasonable approach. She makes field paintings which typically show a microcosm to reveal the essential quality of something bigger.   In the case of reflections on water, it doesn’t matter how long or how hard you look, they are not phenomena that can be easily captured. This presents a tough problem for any artist, particularly a painter. Kandel, who’s previously worked with sculpture, video and installation, solves it by making paintings that appear to move. They do so anamorphically, via moiré patterns that change according to where you stand.  Side-to-side movements unfold dynamically in fresh views, each shifting and shimmering the way water does when struck by light and wind.  Up-close, the pictures set off a peripheral-vision buzz, like what we see when looking at classic examples of Op Art, only not nearly as jarring. 
 
Irregular, brushed-against-straight-edge lines and the extreme distillation of visual information in these paintings suggest the respective influences of geometric abstraction and photography.  You can also see in Kandel’s transmutation of light into pattern, a connection to Native American textiles, although that is probably an unintended byproduct. (The 11 acrylic-on-panel works in this show range in size from 48” x 36” to 72” x 60”.) The artist constructs them from slender, broken-up horizontal bands rendered in tinted monotones — all carefully modulated in length, color and width — to create the illusion of deep shadows and glaring highlights. The vantage points are completely ambiguous.
 
While there are strong similarities among the works, no two are alike. In fact, the longer you look, the more the individual differences become apparent. Just as wind churns areas of a lake at different “speeds”, so, too, do the variations in line within each of these pictures.  While the illusions are engaging, their most remarkable feature may be how they reverse the natural order of things. Where outdoors, the effect of weather on water is a force beyond our control, Kandel’s soft-core Op paintings hand control back to you. You can change their behavior by simply circumnavigating them. While Kandel hasn’t introduced the idea of interactivity into painting – the original Op and Light and Space artists did that — she’s clearly extending those traditions.
–DAVID M. ROTH
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Robin Kandel, “lakewater” @ Andrea Schwartz Gallery through February 24, 2012.

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Katherine Westerhout @ Electric Works

Katherine Westerhout @ Electric Works

Posted on 07 February 2012

"Grossinger’s Pool, Catskills I", 2011, archival pigment print
 
Katherine Westerhout, a connoisseur of urban decay, excels at documenting interiors of defunct factories, theaters, resorts, hotels, train stations, churches and other emblems of the so-called American Century. She frames her pictures so precisely and in such exquisite light, it’s sometimes difficult to contemplate the underlying tragedy behind the crumbling relics.  It’s there, certainly, but it’s not the only thing there. The quality that overwhelms in her photos is that of great beauty.
 
Westerhout’s pictures tell stories in graphic terms with an aesthetic force that drives straight past political rhetoric and any guilt we might feel from taking pleasure from images derived from the misfortunes of others. They fall into no convenient category.  They evade journalism on the one hand, typological studies on the other and the banality of conceptual photos that lean too heavily on texts to illustrate theory.  The only textual information Westerhout supplies are the names of buildings and their locations.  The pictures tell us everything else we need to know.
 
"Yonkers Power Station I", 2011, archival pigment print
Two on view here, both of Grossinger’s, the famed Catskills resort, sum up her working method.  One shows an empty, graffiti-scarred indoor pool, where lawn chairs float in fetid rainwater. They’re in a section marked “Deep End”.  (The stenciled words, conspicuously visible, bring up present-day associations to “under-water” real estate deals — something Grossinger’s clientele, in the resort’s heydays, probably couldn’t have imagined.)  Another view of the scene shows poolside chairs surrounded by ferns growing out of dense black mud, yet another sign of disrepair. The incoming light, streaming through floor-to-ceiling windows, gives the plants an almost unearthly glow. The room is obviously vacant, yet it feels eerily inhabited, as if a crowd of vacationers had recently been evacuated.  If you look up from the graffiti in the first picture, you’ll see thick redwood-colored beams and an imposing Modernist chandelier perfectly preserved, openly defying neglect and time. It’s this extinct-yet-alive quality and the positioning of squalor next to grandeur that give Westerhout’s pictures their unique charge. 
 
 
Architecture has always been an irresistible subject for photographers.  But when it comes to interiors, Westerhout’s only peer is Candida Höfer, a German artist specializing in large-format pictures of palatial rooms in Europe. Both give us head-on views of immense, overbearing structures. But differences outweigh similarities.  Where Höfer’s sanitized, gilded interiors seem devoid of human presence, Westerhout’s overflow with it. One reason is that Westerhout’s “ruins” fell into decrepitude only in the past generation, so it’s easy to imagine yourself or your parents working, worshipping or playing in them; whereas with Höfer’s you cannot, and the difference isn’t just about Europe vs. America. It has to do with artistic intentions.  Höfer deals with empty opulence (or, perhaps, more accurately, opulence emptied out). Westerhout is all about presence that lingers. 
 
"Palace Theater, Gary", 2009, archival pigment print
 
Like many fine-art photographers working today, Westerhout relies on old-school methods: a large-format film camera that she shoots only in available light. Her large-scale prints, which are actually quite modest by Chelsea standards, have the quality of wet paint, such that you can practically smell the grime and the mold and the rusting machinery and the oily stink of cesspools. But more than anything, it’s the quality of light that defines her art. Westerhout spends a lot of time on location waiting for it to ripen, and the impact of light captured in those split-second decisions is something you can feel bodily.
 
Consider Westerhout’s picture of the Palace Theater in Gary, Indiana. The place looks bomb-struck; the floor is rubble. But the Venetian scene that serves as backdrop remains intact. The decimated ceiling resembles a Ravenna mosaic that had been subjected to the pouring and scraping techniques of an abstract painter. The scene is radiant.  A preternatural luminescence also permeates Westerhout’s picture of an abandoned hangar-like building in the once-thriving Hunters Point district of San Francisco.  The vanishing-point perspective draws us in, but reflections in water are what propel the image into memory. A puddle at the center of the frame mirroring the building’s steel girders practically opens up a third dimension.
 
"Hunters Point, San Francisco", 2011, archival pigment print
Not all of the pictures in this show work so well.  A few are lackluster. One, of a broken-down sofa inside a glass-littered hotel room in Detroit, caught my eye because it appears to be a composite of different exposures. It’s a common method used to equalize shadows and highlights in extreme high-contrast situations. Problem is, it looks contrived.  More so in Westerhout’s hands because of the “straight photo” compact she’s made with herself and with her viewers. One wonders what it was about the nondescript scene outside the windows that made Westerhout want to give that portion of the image equal weight.  
 
Overall, in the context of an otherwise strong show, these are peccadillos.
 
Pictures like Westerhout’s force us to rethink the history and value of seemingly quotidian structures – and, a way of life that’s lost as these buildings slip into obsolescence.  The images don’t agitate for historic preservation, a revitalized manufacturing base or anything else. They simply give us the ability to bear witness to what may well be an irreversible process. 
–DAVID M. ROTH
 
Katherine Westerhout: “At Long Last” @ Electric Works through February 18, 2012.
 
About the author:
David M. Roth is the editor and publisher of Squarecylinder.

  

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Christopher Taggart @ CCAS

Christopher Taggart @ CCAS

Posted on 02 February 2012

"Ta Ta", 2006 – 2011, UV-Laminated photographs, polyester, resin, fiberglass, wood pole

If you were looking for an artist who takes to heart Jasper Johns’ advice – “Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that” — Christopher Taggart would be your man. (Yes, I realize I’m recycling this quote from a recent review, but in Taggart’s case it truly applies.) Straight out of art school, Taggart achieved the art world equivalent of a moon shot by landing representation at Ace Gallery. The nine-year relationship dissolved in 2009, but the innovations that brought him there continue –a fact recognized by San Francisco dealer Eli Ridgway and by Renny Pritikin, the curator of this show, Time Fugitives. It’s a tidy but representative sampling of the Berkeley artist’s achievements to date.

Taggart makes photo collages that resemble mosaics that have been shattered and painstakingly reassembled. His sculptures, built of photographic prints, physically replicate and sometimes exaggerate – in three dimensions — the same objects he photographs. Video projections, which work hand-in-glove with wall installations, hover between surveillance and portraiture, while his photo-derived portraits on paper appear as ghosts of a sort you would not want haunting your dreams. Taggart also makes etchings on aluminum whose lines dance in mid-air, like some sort of electric filament spun into webs by a hyperkinetic insect. (This fall, a 50-foot tall example of the latter will go up at the new School of Veterinary Medicine building on the UC Davis campus.)

Taggart earned his undergraduate degree in physics, and it shows. When he started etching aluminum by hand, he realized he could automate some of the labor. He attached a compass to an electric drill. Then, to further speed the process, he wrote a computer algorithm to control the action of homemade etching device.  For the ghost series Taggart drew concentric circles whose density was determined by the tonal values found in images he downloaded from the Internet. (The darker the tonal values, the more closely packed the circles.) How Taggart determined this technique would produce images that read as human faces is as much a mystery as how he transforms physical objects into photos and then back into objects. Taggart explains it all matter-of-factly in audio blurbs you can hear in the gallery – none of which will enable you to envision yourself actually doing what he does.  
 
"Portrait of a Photographer" (with a dozen of her portraits), 2011, hand-cut UV-laminated photographs glued to board
 
Merging applied science with art, Taggart has proven himself adept at turning one thing into another. The most notable examples on view here are his photo-based sculptures. He begins by drawing triangles on objects to grid them off into sections. He photographs them over and over, progressively magnifying (or reducing) the size of the images. Arrayed over delicate armatures, the assembled images can mimic the source object as in Pigberry for Sizemore, an inflated football made of photos printed on fabric. Or, they can morph unpredictably, as in Ta-Ta, an enormous nautilus-shaped form that originated from close-up pictures of a plastic dental model. 
 
“The forms,” Taggart explains, “are a result of the photo process — the pushing and pulling that happens as the photos create their own spatial change of form.”  An even more radical example is a sculpture made with a 3-D printer, which turns scanned objects (in this case the component pieces of an old pay phone) into plastic replicas of themselves. Taggart, by progressively reducing the physical size of the output, is able to assemble from the miniaturized pieces, a sculpture shaped like a Bonzai shrub.  He likens such forms to “3-D fractals. The final shape of the piece is not determined by my decisions, but by the angles defined originally by the system itself.” Hence, the title, Filling out Forms.
 
"Kudu (in the International Style)", 2011, scribed and engraved anodized, aluminum panel
That his methods seem to be imitating biology isn’t lost on the artist. Of Pigberry, the football piece, he says: “there’s a kind of relationship to natural growth… all the little bumps and little nodules or cells seem more animal” than in the original. Through the photo/sculpture process, he observes, “pigskin becomes more animalistic when the images “stack up.” But the realization of it, “that whole chain happens after the fact. “
 
Taggart’s photo collages follow a similarly unpredictable path. The largest and most dramatic of the three on view, People Looking at People, was built from 100 photos taken from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Taggart sliced up them up into thousands of thumbnail images and reassembled them, rotating each 45 degrees. What we see is a wall-sized blizzard of visual information that resembles a TV screen after the cable connection goes haywire.  Yet out of the pieces – fragments of heads, telescopes, guardrails, water, buildings and sky – we almost instantly assemble a coherent picture.  it’s a demonstration of how the human brain creates meaning out of chaos.  
 
Visual monkey wrenching of this sort is not a new thing. David Hockney’s photo collages injected a similar style of image confusion into the public consciousness in the 1980s, giving a filmic twist to ideas Cubism introduced in the early part of the last century, although it must be said that Taggart introduces far greater dislocations than Hockey.  Likewise, historical and contemporary analogies exist for almost everything else Taggart does – none of which detract from the quirky originality of his vision.
 
The point behind Taggart’s work, I think, is that technology, whether harnessed to art or to commercial products, will continue to erode whatever boundaries we think exist between things. Like the elements, which change from solid to liquid to gas, Taggart’s work shows that boundaries, real and imagined, will continue to remain fluid.   
–DAVID M. ROTH
 
Christopher Taggart: "Time Fugitives” @ Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento, through February 12, 2012.  Taggart will speak about his work @ CCAS on Feb. 11 @ 3 p.m.  

 

About the author:

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

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