Chris McCaw, "Sunburned GSP #400 (Pacific Ocean)", 2009, unique gelatin silver paper negatives, 10 x 24 inches

It’s easy, given our climatically troublous times, to discern global warming as the subtext of this fortuitous pairing of Chris McCaw’s luminous Sunburned solar photographs and Mario Giacomelli’s Paesaggi studies of the furrowed, seemingly scorched Italian landscape; it’s also erroneous (at least in Giacomelli’s case) since, in 1992, when this 37-year series concluded, almost no one but veep-elect Gore was awake to the onrushing inconvenience to consumers. (One source says the series ended even earlier, in 1980.) The contemporary trend of interpreting artwork through sociopolitical lenses is certainly beneficial in many respects — why can’t art be relevant and do some work in the world? If it sometimes leads us esthetically astray, well, accidents and errors can be useful in art viewing just as they are in art creation, and we deserve a bit of retroactive anxiety, anyway: atonement for having so long dodged the burning issue of the day.

Chris McCaw, "Sunburned GSP #323 (Pacific Ocean)", 2009, unique silver gelatin paper negative, 20 x 24 inches

Accident and error played a role in creating McCaw’s Sunburned series of eerily calm, otherworldly depictions of the sun’s passage through the sky over vast watery expanses or empty western landscapes. In 2003, McCaw was shooting starry skies while camping. He overslept one night (aided by whiskey and friends), and found the next morning that the overexposed film in his eastward-pointing camera had melted along the focused trajectory of the rising sun. “The sun rose into the lens, physically changing the film inside the camera in a violent way, and also changing the way I think of photography. After a few years of pondering… in late 2006 I began to really investigate the implications of that event.” He now loads vintage black-and-white photo enlarging paper (still somewhat accessible, though rare) into custom-made large-format (4×5 to 30×40) view cameras outfitted with gigantic military-reconnaissance lenses weighing up to six pounds and spanning nearly nine inches (as large as a giant squid’s eye, that is). The sun’s heat energy is focused onto the paper, scorching the gelatin, and, due to the quirks of photo chemistry, a positive image of the scene is captured.

Mario Giacomelli, "Paesaggio (Landscape), No. 18", 1970, gelatin silver print, 15 1/2 x 11 9/16 inches

McCaw’s unique prints thus come into the world through negative-less parthenogenesis; they’re solar (and stellar) images, merging science photography, land art and conceptual art. The thirteen works on view here are visually as well as thematically rich: the slashed surfaces recall Lucio Fontana’s canvases of the 1960s, while the burning/cauterizing recalls Jay McCafferty’s Solar Burns grid abstractions of the 1970s.  The crepuscular silvery-gray tonalities, long-exposures, and vignetting suggest scientific/astronomic expedition reports from some alternate Edwardian Age.  The diagonal streaks in the sky may be familiar to astronomical photographers, but, scorched by the sun, and smoldering in-camera during exposure, they conjure more threatening celestial bodies like falling meteors, or missiles; the glowing orbs and luminous auras suggest the spiritualized landscapes of Friedrich and Rothko, as well as paranormal realms.

Spiritualized landscapes are the subject, too, of Giacomelli’s landscapes, or paesaggi, of his native Senigallia nelle Marche, on the Adriatic coast, where he spent his career in self-taught obscurity until his discovery the 1960s (he died in his seventies a decade ago). Senigallia, built by the Romans, but later destroyed by Pompey, fortified by the Byzantines and razed by Goths and Lombards and the Guelph-Ghibelline conflicts of the Renaissance, became the very symbol of a ruined city in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Italy’s ancient past emanates from these works (despite their superficial resemblance to Wayne Thiebaud’s semi-abstract California landscapes).

Mario Giacomelli, "Paesaggio (Landscape), No. 17", 1956, gelatin silver print, 11 15/16 x 15 3/4 inches

We are used to thinking about the historically burnished scenic perfection of Italy, but the eighteen photos of this series, eleven of which are shown here, depict, whatever the touristic reality may be, a rather severe landscape rendered in 1960s high-contrast back and white, with a high horizon line, plowed and furrowed, worked and reworked.  The land is depicted here, in very contemporary terms, as an abstraction created by unwitting groundling artists, a palimpsestic tableau of gestures and messages partially effaced or overwritten by time and human activity. Giacomelli’s use of double exposure, while subtle, enhances the historical aspect of his subjective, imaginative version of neorealism.

–DEWITT CHENG

Chris McCaw Sunburned and Mario Giacomelli Paesaggi @ Stephen Wirtz Gallery through March 27, 2010

Naomi Fisher, "Light of Coral Reef Slapping My Cheetah Face", 2009, 49 1/8" x 60", c-print

Romantic art in the 18^th century conveyed a certain sense of exultation. It pictured untamed landscapes, strong emotions, youth and visions of escape from the drudgeries of an increasingly material and mechanical culture.  Haute Romantics, a show of 13 young, mostly downtown New York artists sponsored by Art Fag City editor Paddy Johnson, attempts to capture the current incarnation of that spirit.  What it does, mostly, is filter the subject through a lens of other less-exalted isms: narcissism, voyeurism, consumerism and careerism.  Laced with strains of witty conceptualism, this photo-heavy show, which also includes painting, sculpture and video, doesn’t take its premise too literally, although sex and death do figure in.  Alternately introspective and exhibitionist, it seems, more than anything, to want to have fun – or at least pretend to be doing so.

Fashion is a pervasive, if not dominant influence.  Katherine Bernhardt’s four Swatch paintings –large canvases that occupy an entire wall – don’t criticize or analyze; they simply translate the visual language of magazine advertising into loopy, acrylic-and-spray painted works that feel like pop-graffiti product pitches. Naomi Fisher employs a punk/grunge/B-movie aesthetic in large-scale, glossy photos that conjure a universe of tropical zombie sex kittens – a haunted effect that is echoed in her mixed-media paintings.  These combine the schematic style of fashion illustration with abstract, gestural brushstrokes, creating a Munch-like angst that rubs up hard against the faux innocence conveyed by the works’ illustrational aspects.  Sarah Venderbeek’s black-and-white photo collages recall Man Ray’s fashion plates of the ‘20s and ‘30s.  They’re gorgeous and technically brilliant, but in the end, impossible to disassociate from what Ray did with photograms, multiple images, solarization, and the placement of models in statuesque poses with otherworldly lighting.

Sarah VenderBeek, "Untitled", 2007, 14" x 11", c-print

Five short videos directed by Lena Dunham, The Delusional Downtown Divas, zoom in on the antics and obsessions of a group of trust fund brats trying to claw their way to the top. These segments mimic reality TV, but are, in fact, scripted to make the characters seem both plausible (“I can’t be honest with you unless I’m lying.”) and ridiculous (“I think fashion should be incredibly painful – like the choker I’m wearing.”).  This conceit, which at first seems silly, pins its subject to the wall by showing how both characteristics co-exist shamelessly.  Whether agonizing over accessories, scheming to crash members-only events or sucking up to each other (or to dealers who are themselves engaged in a parody of Tino Sehgal), the divas in Divas skewer the downtown milieu the way Tama Janowitz did a generation ago in Slaves of New York.  Their parade of romantic and career longings overflows with sturm and drang, but it elicits no sympathy.

Like the characters in Divas, K8 Hardy (a self-described “video artist, stylist and queer activist” who recently launched a clothing line) demonstrates that she, too, will do whatever it takes to win our affections.  Show extreme close-ups of women in menstrual blood-stained panties.  Pose a model splay-legged, with an apple in her mouth.  Feign sex with a camera tripod.  Hardy does this (and a whole lot more) in the pages of four large-format photo books, each of which is littered with semi-coherent pieces of text that masquerade as diary entries.  Youth and fecklessness may be qualities of Romanticism; but like a lot of fashion photography, this is just soft porn.

Asher Penn’s Kate Moss Rorschach Series — nine 8×10-inch black and white photos of the actress overlaid with lipstick-red Rorschach blots – is an exercise in serial re-framing that identifies, amplifies and focuses desire.  Some pictures hone in on Ms. Moss’ face. Others show only portions of her body.  Taken as a group, they function as keyholes to the psyche, and are as revelatory as they are manipulative.

Paul Gabrielli, "Alex Imagining his Own Body", 2009, 14" x 27" 13", looped video, mixed-media; Maximillian Schubert, "Untitled (tire with fruit)", 2010, paraffin and soy way, oil paint

 Paul Gabrielli’s work leans toward nihilism.  In his video loop, Alex Imagining his Own Body, a man’s tightly cropped face stares blankly at the camera and appears trapped inside the monitor.  This unaffected visage does what Andy Warhol’s 8-hour snooze-a-thon, Sleep, once did: it turns us into listless voyeurs.  More compelling are his two wall-mounted installations: Untitled (Handrail) and Untitled (Scale), both of which render each object unusable; the first by blocking the handrail with an artificial tree limb, the second by cordoning off the scale with a length of string.  They’re cold, clever and effective, but have no apparent relationship to the subject.

Closer to the mark are two documentary-style photos from Peter Sutherland that capture decisive moments. Look Me Directly in the Eye shows a herd of deer caught in the headlights of a car, a sea of disembodied, glowing eyes.  Dog Says Take a Vacation presents a tense stand-off between a man and an angry dog separated by a chain-link fence.  For this artist, man and nature are clearly not on speaking terms.

Asher Penn, "Kate Moss Rorschach (Series #1-3)", 2008, 8 1/2" x 11", paint on laserprint

Several artists do address historic notions of Romanticism directly. Maximillian Schubert casts two sculptures in wax that when lit as candles self destruct.  One is a car tire littered with fruit rinds; the other consists of cinderblocks. Cast realistically, they recall the abject character of Robert Rauschenberg’s combines as well as the spontaneous altars that sprung up all over Manhattan after 9/11.  As objects whose form and potential value decline with each passing second, they are the ultimate memento mori.

Kristen Jensen and Cian McConn approach the subject with a series of conceptual self-portraits in which they pose, variously, as corpses in Battery Park (with the Statute of Liberty in the background), in a cemetery saluting a monumental gravestone, and staring, like Narcissus, into pond.  Sebastian Mlynarski provides the show’s purest take on Romanticism with photos of pink-tinged forest scenes, the most evocative of which have the ghost of a nymph emerging from a pond, as if in a visitation dream, and another showing what could be a landslide or an explosion in a similar setting – a picture that is intended to mirror the type of reverence for nature once elicited by a legion of painters, ranging from J.M.W. Turner in Europe to the stateside Hudson River School painters.

With its conflicting allegiances –to both bling and to sturm and drang — Haute Romantics seems to want to walk in both worlds; but it does so haltingly, like a woman negotiating cobblestones in high heels.

–DAVID M. ROTH

Haute Romantics @ Verge Gallery through March 20, 2010.

"Cover" image: Katherine Bernhardt, installation view (l to r): Waipitu, Pinstripe, Pink Flamingo, Flack; all acrylic and spray paint on canvas.

"Good Enough to Eat (2)", 1971, watercolor, gouache, and graphite on board, 20.75 x 25 inches

Art that engages with the politics of gendered subjectivity frequently references the body.  As Margaret Harrison understands fully, there are reasons for the prevalence of this thematic emphasis.  First, the body, we are conditioned to believe, is the place where sexual and gendered subjectivity reside.  In the late 1960s, the representation of female bodies in a range of media and genres achieved prominence in art produced by feminist activists.  Women launching careers in the arts at this time adopted a range of positions vis-à-vis the representation of gendered subjectivity.  Harmony Hammond, Howardena Pindell, Lynda Benglis, and Louise Fishman, among others, embraced abstraction in part because of its resistance to body-centered essentialism.  At the same time, performance artists such as Hannah Wilke, Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Eleanor Antin, and VALIE EXPORT variously dramatized the status of the female body as a site of subjugation.  Judy Chicago, with her collectively produced monument The Dinner Party (1974-79), and Tee A. Corinne, with The Cunt Coloring Book (1975), also deployed essentialism strategically, mobilizing  in-your-face vaginal forms to both provoke and counteract phobic patterns of response to the female body and its parts.  Path-breaking feminist artists from Barbara Kruger to Nicole Eisenman focused on the ways that visual culture mediates gendered power relations.  Harrison’s early work played similarly with the gender codes of popular culture and the sexual politics of consumerism.

"Heroes (1): What’s That Long Red Limp Wrinkly Thing You’re Putting On", 2009, water color, colored pencil, and graphite on board, 24 x 19 inches

In 1970 she participated in the formation of the London Women’s Liberation Art Group. The next year, the London police shut down Harrison’s first solo show the day after it opened at Motif Editions Gallery due to the controversial character of works with titles such as Ejaculor.  This swift act of suppression turned Harrison’s gallery debut into an inadvertent performance piece, demonstrating the brutality of the value system critiqued by these censored works: pin-ups pushed to the extremes of their objectifying logic and gender-bending perversions of comic-book heroism.  The works were stored away and not exhibited again for decades. Key works–Captain America, for one–were lost.

Harrison subsequently switched her representational tactics. Still thinking through how the gender system polices its interests and imposes its constraints visually, she began to explore subtler ways to engage viewers–by using mixed-media collage and the representation of emblematic objects, for instance.  Her 2004 show at Intersection for the Arts, Beautiful Ugly Violence, featured a series of exemplary still life paintings focused on small household objects and appliances: a pair of scissors, an electric tea pot, a telephone, a set of kitchen knives. These fixtures of domestic life, pictured from awkward angles at uncomfortably close removes, take on disturbing qualities generally cloaked in typical portrayals of domestic bliss.  The outsized scale of the paintings contributes to an effect of disorientation.  The only still life that appears overtly violent, a handgun resting on the folds of a satin bed sheet, is rendered oddly banal within the context of this series, just as the violence of innocuous household objects is proportionately heightened by the presence of this weapon.

"Captain America (2)", 1997, watercolor and graphite on paper, 26 x 18.25 inches

Never abandoning her feminist commitments, Harrison has, since the 1970s, continuously explored the politics of domesticity, addressing issues that range from domestic labor to sex trafficking to genital mutilation and domestic abuse. Her work tracks the relationship of gender oppression in the domestic arena to global economic and political systems. Bodies Are Back, at San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts, features some of the paintings and drawings for which Harrison achieved notoriety in 1971. These include a re-creation of her lost piece Captain America.  This portrays the American comic book icon in dominatrix drag, with projectile breasts, black stockings, and stiletto heels. The show juxtaposes vintage pieces (and reproductions of vintage pieces) along with new works created expressly for this occasion. As the title of the show discloses, the artist again adopts the human figure as the site of sexual subjection and consumption.  Many of these works are rendered in watercolor, a medium long associated with women and amateurs.  The new works, in dialog with the originals, open additional registers of visual culture to feminist critique, using high-art icons.  Harrison confronts pop heroes from Dolly Parton to Batman with canonical works of art—Diego Velázquez’s Infanta, Edouard Manet’s Olympia, Willem de Kooning’s Woman, and Allen Jones’ Table—in which the objectified/commodified female body plays a starring role.

Has Harrison’s early work retained its power to disturb?  Pieces from the 1970s such as Good Enough to Eat, and Mrs. Softie, where bustier-clad seductresses serve as sandwich meat or ice-cream toppings, seem almost quaint in today’s media-jaded and putatively “post-feminist” era.

"Mrs. Softie No. 2", 1970, watercolor and graphite on paper, 30 x 22.5 inches

Incursions into the high-art arena by artists from the Guerilla Girls, with their billboard critiques of Met acquisition policies, to Yasumasa Morimura, with his queer re-performances of masterworks, such as Velázquez Infanta and Manet’s Olympia (both also cited by Harrison), locate Harrison’s most recent works within a long history of critical interventions into visual art canons.

While the show might leave some habitués of feminist art with a sense of déjà-trop-vu, the work has important lessons to impart to a new generation of viewers. Intersection for the Arts should be applauded not only for supporting a historically important feminist artist, but also for seizing this opportunity to create an innovative forum of intergenerational dialog.  In anticipation of Harrison’s show, Intersection partnered with LYRIC (Lavender Youth Recreation & Information Center) to host a series of workshops focused on gender-based oppression and modes of print-culture activism.  Framed in this way, The Bodies Are Back, in addition to its visual pleasures and piquant wit, transmits historical wisdom about gender oppression and its mechanisms while demonstrating the stamina of the feminist art resistance.

–TIRZA TRUE LATIMER

Margaret Harrison: The Bodies are Back @ Intersection for the Arts, through March 27, 2010.

Tirza True Latimer is Chair of Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts.

“Cover” image: Allen Jones & The P.T.A. (Dolly Parton/Allen Jones “Table” sculpture), 2010, watercolor, and graphite on paper, 11 x 15 inches.

Dave Trautrimas, "Storm Crown Mechanism", archival digital print, 30 x 40 inches

Industrial artifacts are ostensibly products of rationality (remember the modernist mantra “form follows function”?) yet they’re also windblown by the imperatives of fashion and design. Two artists who accept this world of manufactured readymades, yet move beyond the polemics of a century ago to transform them into esthetic objects, are Torontonian David Trautrimas and San Franciscan Kristina Lewis, who prove, in a joint show, Article X, that there is life after simulacra.  Article X, which has nothing do to any constitutionally protected right, might be interpreted as an artist’s declaration of freedom; or perhaps it refers to sci-fi horror movies, like X: The Creeping Unknown, X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes or X-Men.

The objects in Article X, according to a gallery news release, “are removed from their usual contexts and placed in zones of ambiguity, absurdity, and anxiety.” What the show really feels like is a fantasy from the 1950s.  Trautrimas makes prints of imaginary defense installations, digitally assembled from fragments of vintage consumerist goods.  Lewis gives us dissected spike-heeled shoes, based on those painfully glamorous, fetishistic foot bindings adopted by American women of the Mad Men era whose “bombshell” nose cones echoed across a spectrum of products: cars, jets and push-up bras.

Dave Trautrimas, "Micro Re-Instigator", archival digital print, 30 x 40 inches

Trautrimas grew up as the Cold War was ending, but whose NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) facilities, like the Royal Canadian Air Force’s North Bay base, the command centers for early warning and response to a Russian missile attack, endure in landscape and memory. His new series of nine images, Spyfrost, focuses on the link between capitalism’s postwar materialist culture of good ‘n’ plenty and the Military-Industrial Complex that developed in parallel and were the subject two films about nuclear apocalypse, the tragic Fail Safe and the comic Dr. Strangelove.

Trautrimas collects the appliances of yesteryear from garage sales, bargain stores, and the Internet; he disassembles the pieces, photographs them, and laboriously assembles monumental, monstrous and sometimes comic industrial buildings, which he embellishes with images of cars, trees and landscapes that he has collected on bike rides. The images, with their hints of Red-Scare era fridges, freezers, waffle irons, electric razors, coffee pots, vacuum cleaners, and the like, are rich in suggestiveness.  They conjure Oldenburg’s cheerfully absurd pop monuments of clothespins, toilet floats, and lipstick, as well as cinematic visions of advanced technology (2001 and Close Encounters) and the dystopias (Metropolis, Blade Runner, and Star Wars, the latter of which was neatly parodied in Ernie Fosselius’ short film, Hardware Wars, with its flying toasters!)

Dave Trautrimas, "The Brilliant Device", archival digital print, 20 x 30 inches

The Brilliant Device presents a wintry northern landscape dominated by what appears an igloo made from corroded metal, topped by a pair of gigantic brass periscopes, fashioned from parts of a floor polisher. The Radiant Proliferator, a kind of mechanical sun that seems to be giving a Nazi salute, is made from components that Trautrimas purchased at a Toronto lighting-supply store.  Storm Crown Mechanism depicts a pair of colossal metal-disked structures, suggesting H.G Wells’ Martian heat-ray tripods, but are really made from refrigerator parts purchased off Craigslitst.  Mnemonic Doppelganger was made from—what else?—parts of old movie cameras. While the sociopolitical aspect of this body of work is fascinating, and its mad-scientist method is entertaining and hilarious, these looming, intimidating mechanisms possess an undeniable visual authority.  They’re as powerful and seductive as the ideology du jour (remember the Global War on Terror?), which, perhaps, they symbolize, colossi for a technological age run amok.

Kristina Lewis, "It Leaves a Shining Wake", zippers, thread, cotton piping, dimensions variable

Kristina Lewis continues her exuberant and inventive exploration of commercially available materials.  In the past she has torn apart and reconstructed clothing, packaging tape, and umbrellas, and some of that work is on view here.  It Leaves a Shining Wake, probably named after a cryptozoological sighting, resembles a marine reptile made of zippers embedded in thin strips of fabric.  Boundary and Air Duct with their three-inch cardboard tape rolls surrounded by coils of tape, suggest microscopic cells; while the umbrella ribs of Spinner, stripped of fabric, become aggregated: a schematic origami crane chained to a heavy-looking pyramid of black nylon.  Lewis also displays three sculptures (Revolt, A Neutral Charge, Ground Surge) based on electrical conduit boxes whose askew “live” wires read like explosions of frozen pyrotechnics.

The new body of work on display consists of ten spike-heeled women’s shoes, flayed and splayed like weird birds or insects from, say, Pan’s Labyrinth.  Common Chafe resembles an inverted, decapitated frog or chicken.  The heels become drumsticks; the black leather uppers, a duplicate set of webbed feet, and the perforated insoles plucked skin.  Lawn Dig suggests a mournful-faced insect either praying or shrugging.  Black Ache resembles an amphibian or reptile skull or mask that has begun to develop small wings.

Kristina Lewis, (L to R): "Common Chafe", used high-heeled footwear, epoxy putty, acrylic, adhesive, 10 x  5x 11 inches; "Lawn Dig", used high-heeled footwear, epoxy putty, acrylic, adhesive, 11 x 7 x 4 inches 

Culture is now the new nature in hybrid, multimedia postmodernism.  Based on Trautrimas and Lewis’ imaginative use of industrial artifacts, however, the withdrawal of the natural world from so much contemporary art, like shrinking glaciers, seems almost imperceptible.  What they seem to be saying is that human artifacts, for better or worse, are a part of nature, too.

–DEWITT CHENG

David Trautrimas & Kristina Lewis @ Johansson Projects, through March 20, 2010.

“Cover” image:  David Trautrimas: Storm Crown Mechanism, Archival digital print
30 x 40 inches.

Mari Andrews: "Frill ", 2010, lichen, wood, paint, 25 x 54 x 1 inches

The mystical temperament is not one that finds much encouragement in contemporary art discourse, which tends toward the materialist, rational and quantifiable, even if artistic creation is usually based on intuition.  Writers still have to explain and make a case for art, after all.  There are, of course, minimalist sculptures, monochrome paintings and light installations that demand prolonged observation and a meditative state of mind to deliver messages and feelings that transcend verbalization.  Perhaps we need a better vocabulary to discuss the meaning of materially rooted works whose immaterial qualities are visible only to initiates or spiritual adepts.

The sculptures and drawings of Mari Andrews and Sheila Ghidini in A Thousand Ways to Kiss the Ground, bridge this pictorial-linguistic gap.  Their works, which have similarities to process art, land art and conceptualism, aim at what Suzi Gablik called a “resacralization” of the world: a reclamation of what has been lost on our beleaguered planet.  The title is derived from the mystical Persian poet Rumi (1207-1273), who advised: “Let the beauty of what you love / Be what you do / There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

Mari Andrews: "Aperture 2", 2005-9, wire, pipe cleaners, 28 x 19 x 1 inches

Heeding those words, Mari Andrews creates “paperless drawings” – wall-mounted sculptures fashioned from leaves, moss, lichen, grass, acorns, pods, rose hips and pasta, along with more traditional materials, like wood, wire, steel, lead, thread, paper, foam, plastic and porcelain.  While these poetic works have affinities to various art-historical styles, their construction seems to follow to the dictates of the materials that catch Andrews’ eye.  The work is lyrical, witty and complex.  The lichen-covered comma-shaped seed forms in Frill seem to be reflections or twins sprouting from their juncture.  Plumb, with its pineapple shape and stem, hangs suspended, a moss-filled wire bundle of negligible weight.  The balloon form in Helium lofts a similarly insubstantial gondola of tree moss, but the wire frame contains no buoyant gas: it hovers like a soap bubble or airborne dandelion puff.  Counting covers a magnolia leaf with alphabet-soup letters, wittily hinting at the forest, while the five spindly grass fingers of Fan seem incapable of moving air unless activated by magic.  That piece, like 30 others here, has an anthropological or ritual air that makes utility beside the point.  While the pieces are conceived as separate artworks, mounted on the wall together, they cohere into a silent theater. (Andrews has another exhibit, Effloresce, at Brian Gross Fine Art, in the lobby of 1 Post Street, SF, through March 26.)

Sheila Ghidini proffers a mixed-media investigation of birds and birds’ nests with six philosophical pieces that play with real and virtual space.  Four pieces pair graphite wall drawings of birds with adjacent objects.  The empty chair in A Conversation with a Crow invites the viewer to sit and talk with its avian protagonist.  Real branches provide perches for an owl (A Theory of Knowing) and a hummingbird returning to its nest (Away from Home).

Sheila Ghidini: "A Guiding Principle", 2009, graphite drawing with colored pencil on wall with found object–tricycle with branch as handlebars, 34 x 29 x 29 inches

More puzzling is a tricycle sprouting a tree branch (on which a bird perches) instead of handlebars (A Guiding Principle). A drawing, Nest with Blue Ribbons, and an installation, Another Center of Gravity, depict birds’ nests as psychically charged, the latter with a plumb bob hanging from a ceiling-mounted branch down to a vortex-like nest drawn on a square panel.

The works in this show require viewers to slow down and look; mindfulness seems an appropriate term for the requisite approach. Viewers able to turn off their mental engines and observe ruminatively will find the rest stop worth the ostensibly lost productivity.

–DEWITT CHENG

A Thousand Ways To Kiss The Ground: Mari Andrews and Sheila Ghidini @ Chandra Cerrito Contemporary through March 20, 2010

Effloresce: Mari Andrews at Brian Gross Fine Art, lobby of 1 Post Street, SF, through March 26.

“The Secretary of State”, 2005, oil on canvas, 18” x 24 ¼ inches

Belgian painter Luc Tuymans has breathed new energy into painting by pretending to drain the life out of it.  His paintings, which are short on information, long on implication, parade their emptiness.  But they also pack a punch.  Like a postmodern Marlow, Tuymans plies the river of civilization’s discontents.  He’s armed with a paintbrush, but not much hope for humanity.

Tuymans, whose retrospective opened last week at SF MOMA, is a history painter.  His paintings of the Holocaust, Flemish nationalism, Belgian colonialism and post-9/11 America are based on photography, television, cinema, and to a lesser extent, on art history.  But unlike the artist to which he is most often compared – Gerhard Richter — Tuymans filters his synthesis of art history through his experience making movies.  In the 1980s he quit painting for five years and made experimental films that allowed him to find a meaningful way back into his chosen medium.  He did this by looking closely at his films’ components parts, reveling in individual frames and barely recognizable artifacts.

“Gas Chamber”, 1986, oil on canvas, 24 x 32 inches

That investigation deeply influenced all of his subsequent work, particularly his series about perception, At Random.  He has also worked with a Polaroid camera to document his surroundings, relying on the gel of the developing image to inspire paintings that read like murky pools inhabited by ghosts.  Equally influential are the photographs he takes of magazines and television images, which he often re-photographs to give himself a working model of how media images remain in memory.

If you feel an icy remove while looking at Tuymans’ paintings, it’s because the subjects themselves are often wrenched out of context.  Tuymans’ specialty is the incoherent fragment — a closely cropped image rendered in pale and sometimes putrid color, made indecipherable through a diminished or total absence of almost all of the elements that define a picture.

“Himmler”, 1998, oil on canvas, 53 x 40 1/8 inches

“This device,” writes co-curator Helen Molesworth, “lends a sick, chemically saturated quality to the palette.”  His omission of gloss from his oils further flattens his spatially starved paintings.  The result is a confusing, yet oddly compelling mix of painterly clumsiness and pictorial elegance.

Thus, we enter Tuymans’ works through their titles and wall texts, and because those documents often reference horrific events, it is impossible not to look.  Once you do you’re caught in a visual-linguistic crossfire — between titles that jolt and paintings that speak in a whisper, and sometimes not even that.  (“My paintings are silent,” the artist told a museum lecture audience.) Crudely affixed to their supports and painted quickly and casually, his pictures appear — even when richly hued — to be monochromatic, as if dipped in fog.  They are ostensibly representational; yet most of the “facts” — people, buildings, furnishings, and landscapes – are abstract and out-of-focus, like “a videotape paused on a primitive VCR,” Peter Schjeldahl wrote in a New Yorker review of the show after its U.S. tour began last fall at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus.  The banal results of this willful obfuscation might lead you to conclude that Tuymans’ paintings are inconsequential.  But they are not.  Like malicious computer worms, his pictures, once lodged, have a way of invading your brain.

“Peter”, 1994, oil on canvas, 21 ½ x 29 ½ inches

His most controversial and easily most difficult painting, Gas Chamber, is unrecognizable as such.  It’s a room with a drain in the center, its fake showerheads represented by inchoate marks.  The horror of it doesn’t lie in what actually happened; it’s that such horrors can be depicted so plainly.  The Architect, a picture of Albert Speer on skis, is even more anonymous; the face is obliterated, blinded to the havoc wreaked by its owner and, by extension, the Nazi war machine.  Similarly, in Reparations, two montages – one of eyes, one of limbs – it’s a wall text that informs us that they are derived from photographs of medical experiments.  To look is to assume, in a detached sense, the position of Josef Mengele: that atrocities qualify as medical research.

“Mwana Kitodo”, 2000, oil on canvas, 81 ¾ x 35 3/8 inches

Our New Quarters is a crude painting of an actual Nazi-era postcard that had those words superimposed on a picture of the Theresienstadt death camp.  It was given to prisoners to send home.  This re-presented document, likening a concentration camp to a family vacation, sums up as well as anything the sadistic pathology of genocide.  

Some observers, including Schjeldahl, have alleged that his choice of subject matter is a ploy to get people to look at his paintings.  That may be true in some measure; but it’s no shtick.  His family divided over the war: his father’s brothers, one of whom Tuymans is named after, fought with the Nazis and were disowned by the artist’s paternal grandmother after they fled the German army.   His wife’s family fought in the resistance and hid Jews. When things got tense around the Tuymans household, the past reared its ugly head. 

In person, Tuymans, 51, is a passionate, animated, voluble and physically imposing man.  When he speaks about the abuse of power, whether perpetrated by nations, religious authorities, individuals or corporations, he does so with a visceral antipathy. These emotions translate to canvas in several ways.  Faces of the vilest men are obscured by heavy shadows (Himmler); blotted out entirely (The Architect); or partially erased, as with Mwana Kitodo, a riveting portrait of the Belgian king of Congo whose nickname means “beautiful white boy.”  Elsewhere, Condoleezza Rice (The Secretary of State) and Klansman Joseph Milteer (The Heritage VI) are depicted chillingly, in a painterly, near-photorealistic manner; while the kitchen of a serial killer (Peter), from a forensic photograph, mimes the gestures, spatial sense and lighting of Cezanne.  

“Our New Quarters”, 1986, 31 ½ x 47 ¼ inches

“In the enigmatic reworking of this banal domestic scene,” writes historian Lanka Tattersall of Peter, “Tuymans ominously undercuts the distinction between generic everyday life and the disquiet of a crime scene.”

That disconnect, between appearance and reality, is, I believe, the true center of Tuymans’ oeuvre.  Whether sneering at bourgeoisie social conventions or savaging institutional powers that feed on human suffering, Tuymans is all about exposing horrors that carefully crafted appearances are designed to bury. 

Tuymans may be a difficult painter to like.  But he is even more difficult to ignore. 

–DAVID M. ROTH

 Luc Tuymans @ SFMOMA through May 2, 2010.

Ian Harvey and Koo Kyung Sook, Figure 4, 2008, enamel and shellac on paper mounted on paper panels, 70 x 72 inches

For Ian Harvey and his wife Koo Kyung Sook, collaboration is about wresting order out of manufactured chaos.  Harvey specializes in process-oriented abstract paintings that look like time-lapse images of geological events; Koo creates imprints of her body on emulsion-coated photo paper, along with sculptures made of organic matter that address gender issues specific to Korea, her birthplace.  In their collaborative works, the artists fuse both sensibilities in wall-sized montages that are as much about virtuoso paint handling as they are about the human condition.

The artists’ largest collaborative works consist of more than 2,000 individual paintings executed on card stock, each unit the size of a standard business card.  The cards are dipped, poured and sprayed with combinations of shellac, enamel, polyurethane, graphite, and various synthetic and organic pigments which are then allowed to interact and recombine according to their relative weights and viscosities. The resulting forms mimic cosmic, seismic and meteorological events: floods, volcanic eruptions, starbursts, firestorms and the like.

Ian Harvey and Koo Kyung Sook, Figure 4, (detail)

The first things you notice about these works are their colors.  They include every neutral shade you can think of, along with reds, yellows, blues and pinks in hues so saturated they border on psychedelic.  Textures roam from porous and ashen to high-gloss, and recall in their palest, roughest, most caustic spots, the shapes and surfaces of Jean Dubuffet’s Corps de Dame.

This is full-throttle painting at its maximally expressive.  Harvey and Koo hold back nothing; they give full vent to the intrinsic properties of their materials and allow them to flow and congeal as they please.  The artists regard the individual cards as brushstrokes, each akin to the pictorial elements in Chuck Close’s portraits.  But where Close paints small, abstract “cells” to realistically simulate the tonal values of photographs, Harvey and Koo compose by arranging and rearranging the individual cards in what amounts to a carefully calibrated tug-o-war between extremes of value and texture.  “More often than not,” the artists state, “it is in the uncomfortable moments when it is not possible to control the materials that we discover unexpected expressive possibilities and new layers of content.”

Ian Harvey and Koo Kyung Sook, Figure 6, 2008-09, enamel, polyurethane, shellac, graphite, synthetic gold and silver pigment on paper panels, 89 x 47.5 inches

Each picture in these montages features a single, centrally located figure.  Ragged, off-balance and shot-through, it appears to be fleeing (or engulfed) in some fiery, cataclysmic event. While not physically imprinted, the outlines of the human forms invoke the recent history of body art, from Carolee Schneemann to Tracy Emin; but unlike so much of that legacy (including Koo’s own works which echo the “anthropometries” of Yves Kline), these pictures aren’t about gender roles or sex; they are about everything else — things that are both smaller and larger.  In Figure 4, for example, the yolk-like orbs and ovoid shapes that surround the subject reference the movement and dissolution of body fluids, as well as all microscopic things, like the division of cells.

Harvey and Koo, I believe, have crossed into the same territory that Anselm Kiefer staked out in his scorched Earth paintings of the mid and late 1980s, the ones in which charred fields and Nazi ruins stand in for all that went wrong in the last century (and may well go wrong again if dire predictions come to pass.)  How else can we view pictures like Figure 5 and Figure 6?   With their green-black cast, frenzied lines sliced into cubist rectangles and fugitive, blackened shadow-figures, they seem to be the very picture of human calamity.  

The only thing that might undercut this interpretation is the artists’ occasional slip into over-the-top coloration.  In Figure 7, for example, where Harvey and Koo use a swath of hot pink to define the figure, the result is borderline kitsch.  Still, such missteps can be instructive: they give us an inside look into the high-wire act that makes this kind of painting so risky — and so powerful when it succeeds, which, it mostly does in the seven collaborative works on view here.

 The balance of the show includes solo works.  Koo’s life-sized photogram, Markings No. 7-6 (2007), along with two recent smaller works, Markings 9-1 and Markings 9-2 (both 2009), are knock-outs.  Frenzied, fierce, monochromatic and densely packed with organic imagery (leaves, twigs, branches and brambles that appear wind-lashed and waterlogged), they carry the force of nature, as do two pieces from the earlier Secret Garden (2002) series which mix the feel of Asian brushwork and photography, whispering their erotic intentions.

Ian Harvey: “Nos. 137 & 139”, 2009, acrylic, enamel, oil, powdered pigment, shellac and oil pastel on panel, both 24 x 32 inches

Harvey’s recent paintings on wood panels show an expanded vocabulary.  Where he previously leaned almost exclusively on paint pouring to give us hyper-stylized visions of geological processes operating within imaginary landscapes, he’s now tossed a monkey wrench into the formula by inserting into his pictures L-shaped geometric forms that feel like excerpts from Mondrian’s grids.  This device anchors the amorphous, liquid quality of the work and helps make room for the superimposition of multiple perspectives including objective features, like the cherry blossoms that swoon across the surface of No. 138 and the swimming sperm that hover, parachute-like, above the landscape in No. 139.

Koo Kyung Sook, (L to R): “Markings No. 9-1”, 2009, digital print on mulberry paper, 56 x 30 inches; “Secret Garden No. 1”, 2002, digital print on mulberry paper, 52 x 38 inches; “Markings No. 9-2”, 2009, digital print on mulberry paper, 56 x 30 inches

Together + Alone demonstrates a substantial leap forward for both artists, both of whom exhibited their collaborative and solo work in 2007 at Sac State.  If, per chance, you wondered if that show was a one-hit wonder, lay those doubts to rest.  Koo and Harvey, together and alone, are making monumentally important, materially inventive work that will soon, I predict, reach the large audience they so richly deserve. 

–DAVID M. ROTH

 Ian Harvey and Koo Kyung Sook, Together + Alone @ JAYJAY through February 20, 2010.

Cover image: Ian Harvey and Koo Kyung Sook, Figure # 2 (studio), 2006-07, enamel and shellac on paper  mounted on paper panels, each panel 22 x 28 inches.

“Boundaries, Edges, Parallels Series # 6137”, 2007-8, 15 x 15 inches (framed size), Watercolor, Wax, and Waxed Paper

Eleanor Wood has skirted the periphery of Minimalism for her entire career, fine-tuning her obsessive, hypersensitive and exquisite miniature technique.  In 2002 she moved from her native England to California, and the displacement served as a catalyst for a body of work that demonstrates a departure from her previous practice and a rift with Minimalist orthodoxy.

The works in the current exhibit, Working from Both Sides, divide sharply between those on paper and those on linen.  The fragility and apparent age of the former series (Boundaries, Edges, Parallels) tempers their insistent sense of order — order that we feel rests on implicit but radical contradictions.  There is a consistent undermining of the relationship of the image to the paper’s edges that cultivates deliberate uncertainty about what constitutes the image. This results in an unexpected union of Abstract Expressionism’s negation of geometric hierarchy and Minimalism’s emphasis on precision and compactness. 

The dominant grid format employed by Wood, albeit subtly subverted on occasion, might be expected to brace itself against the edges of the support to assert its completeness and finality.  However her work defies this expectation, establishing the colored rectangles in singles or couples far enough from the paper’s edge, suggesting that any proportion, other than the insistent but nuanced proportion contained in the grid, is secondary.  Each work embraces a sense of infinitely plotted spatial extension, while at the same time instantiating a finite, intricate, insistent, rigidly contained, eye-catching, hypnotic singularity.

The most significant proportion might be the relative thickness of the image, which is built out in multiple layers to the scale of its dimensions. Thus, if these images measured 8.5 x 8.5 feet instead of inches, the colored rectangle would be at least two inches thick to retain this proportion!

“Limits and Crossings Series #27”, 2008-9, 8 x 8 Inches, Oil-Based Media and Wax on Belgian Linen

“Limits and Crossings Series #26,” 2008-9, 8 x 8 inches, Oil-Based Media and Wax on Belgian Linen

This sense of proportion is further exaggerated in the recent pictures on Belgian linen (Limits and Crossings), painted as a single group of 24 eight-inch squares.  Here the stretchers themselves are deep in comparison to the size of the format, and the materials now project even more from the support, an assertion of physicality that seemed on the point of dissolving in the works on paper.  The imagery (usually horizontal bands or lines) no longer floats but tends to grip the support with concentrated tenacity, often wrapping around one or both sides, which are now an active part of the image itself. 

This might seem rather quotidian and materialistic after the ethereal whisperings of the earlier work, but her new-found muscularity is quickly subverted when these objects are viewed at close range.  What had, at a distance, beguiled with implications of weaving, tapestry and knitting, with the linen openly confessing its textile-ness, now brings us up short as we realize that, despite these expectations, most of the raised edges are not woven or knitted but drawn in some way.  Wood says many of these horizontal bars are created by applying multiple layers of colored wax (or oil bar), by masking off bare strips of canvas or by applying color through very narrow gaps.

The result of this tension between the unabashed physicality of the linen and its support on the one hand and the elusiveness of the surface treatments on the other is a kind of playful but committed unraveling of expectations, leading us to subtly doubt what we’re seeing.

"Boundaries, Edges, Parallels Series # 6146”, 2007-8, 25 x 25 inches (framed size), Watercolor, Wax, and Waxed Paper

This, I would suggest, is an unexpected inflection of the orthodox Minimalist lexicon, an inflection which is further enriched by the arrangement of the squares in larger collective grids that, through the connections and repetitions established, suggests nothing less than an alphabet, akin to the trigrams of the I Ching or Saussure’s chain of signifiers in which each link (each canvas in this case) gains meaning from its relationship to the others, while simultaneously abdicating autonomous significance.  Thus, the central achievement of Wood’s recent work is exactly this uncompromisingly pictorial engagement with some of the key issues that vitiate Minimalist discourse, particularly the relationship of Minimalism to meaning and signification.

–DAVID OLIVANT

 David Olivant is an artist and writer who teaches at California State University, Stanislaus.

 Eleanor Wood: Working from Both Sides, through February 27, 2010 @ Don Soker Contemporary.

“Christ in a lobby, N.Y.C.”, 1964 © 1990 The Estate of Diane Arbus LLC

Diane Arbus—the photographer of freaks (whom she considered spiritual aristocrats) in a brutally and imperfectly concise description—has become one of those artists who transcend the art world. After the exhaustively hagiographical 2003 retrospective, Revelation, at SFMOMA, what more can there be to say or look at? Well, plenty, it turns out, as this show of around 30 early works and outtakes, selected by sculptor Robert Gober, proves.

 Arbus may have honed her chops as a professional fashion photographer (with her husband, Allan Arbus, between 1946 and 1959), but she came to balk at the falsity of that world—just as she rebelled earlier against Diane Nemerov’s life of privilege (thanks to her family’s prosperous department store at Central Park West and Park Avenue.) “It was like being a princess in some loathsome movie,” she later said.

 In a perceptive New York Times Magazine article (Arbus Reconsidered; September 14, 2003) published prior to the SFMOMA show, Arthur Lubow defended Arbus’s photo forays into the realms of the abnormal (how quaint it sounds today!) against critics who accused her of exploitation.  Susan Sontag, for example, normally astute, opined that the photos were voyeuristic and classist, presenting “people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive” in order to inspire in the safe, scrutinizing viewer a detached feeling of superiority based on esthetic distance and social privilege.”

 That may be how less-than-spiritual aristocrats and commoners see the work today, but Arbus’s intentions were, to quote the German photographer August Sander, whose works share an unblinking inclusiveness, “to see things as they are and not as they should or might be.” Arbus once wrote: “Everyone today looked remarkable just like out of August Sander pictures, so absolute and immutable down to the last button, feather, tassel or stripe. All odd and splendid as freaks and nobody able to see himself, all of us victims of the especial shape we come in.”

So compelling is Arbus’s vision that, forty years after her work burst upon public consciousness, freaks and geeks of all body types, now freed from the norms of the early media age, will see themselves without special difficulty. (I left the 2003 SFMOMA show seeing Arbuses everywhere.)

“Girl emerging from the ocean in curlers”, Coney Island, N.Y., 1963, © 1980 The Estate of Diane Arbus LLC

In some cases the titles alone conjure the bleak and unsentimental compassion expressed in earlier, well-known works: Blonde girl with a hot dog in the park, NYC (1971); Two girls in curlers, NYC (1963); Teenager with a baseball bat, NYC (1962); Baby in a lacy bonnet, NYC (1968); Adolescent girl in a nudist camp, New Jersey (1963); Man in hat, trunks, socks and shoes, Coney Island, NJ (1960); Woman alone in the woods at a nudist camp, New Jersey (1963); Person unknown, City Morgue, NYC (1961); Boy in a hat and sneakers at a nudist camp, Pennsylvania (1965); Sophia Loren look-alike on bed with a stuffed poodle, London England (1969); and Circus fat lady with her dog, Troubles, Maryland (1964).

Others contain visual jokes that require elucidation.  Bishop at the altar, Santa Barbara CA (1964) depicts a woman in embroidered silk vestments, her eyes upraised like a moist-eyed saint in a baroque painting.  Officiating in a chapel draped with embossed satin blankets, amid paintings with ruffled cloth frames (including one of Jesus with oversized head and hands), she looks like a waxwork in a diorama.  Playing with reality and illusion in a similar manner is Couple dancing in front of curtains, NYC (1958-62), an image of self-possessed performers and their curtained backdrop flanked by an empty banquet hall.  Muscle builder at a health club, NYC (1968) shows a posing, oiled mesomorph, surrounded by lounge furniture, dumbbells and castoff flip flops looking up at ceiling-mounted floodlights.  Woman with white gloves and a fancy hat, NYC (1963) portrays its subject attired in a grotesque floral hat, black-rimmed glasses and glossy vinyl purse, scowling, but actually lost in thought.  Campers as trees, Dutchess County, NY (1968), depicts three girls behind sprays of maple leaves — in shorts, pedal-pushers and slacks, respectively –standing on what looks like a photoflash-lit tennis court at night, their eyes just visible through their foliage masks.

More darkly mordant are Wax museum axe murderer, Coney Island, NYC, an image of Pasquale d’ Onofrio, “a small-time crook and house painter” (a sign informs us) who packed his murdered mistress into two suitcases which he left at the Brooklyn railroad station.  In David Nemerov on his deathbed, NYC (1963), the artist’s ravaged father, lies mouth agape, eyes glittering but unfocused, freshly or imminently deceased.
 
In a recent New Yorker article on Van Gogh and Gauguin (Van Gogh’s Ear; January 4, 2010), Adam Gopnik discusses what he calls “moral luck,” the making of work “that no one wants in the belief that someone someday will.”  In today’s resolutely careerist art world the idea that one’s audience may come only after one’s death, and be dispersed in time and space, is an alien one, but perhaps one that bears reviving. “We gawk and stare as the painters slice off their ears and down the booze or act like clowns.  But we rely on them to make up for our own timidity, on their courage to dignify our caution.  We are spectators in the casinos, placing bets…and we can sometimes convince ourselves that having looked is the same as having made, and that the stakes are the same for the ironic spectator and the would-be saint.  But they’re not…the artist does more. He bets his life.”

“Moral courage” might be a better term than “moral luck.”

Who is the real aristocrat?

–DEWITT CHENG

 Diane Arbus: “Christ in a lobby and other known or almost known works” @ Fraenkel Gallery, SF, through March 6, 2010.

Theredlovethatmademe, 2009, epoxy resin and pigment on wood, 48 x 72" 

Marcel Duchamp once famously predicted that “retinal art” would vanish, and that ideas, stripped of sensuality, would someday rule.  His prognostication certainly came true in conceptual art. But for rest of the world, including that of the German-born, Brooklyn-based artist Markus Linnenbrink, the notion doesn’t hold sway. For Linnenbrink, color isn’t just a means; it’s a riotous end that will likely transfix anyone whose taste runs toward finish fetish and abstraction.  For out-and-out material inventiveness, I can’t think of a show I’ve seen in the past year that I have enjoyed as much as this.  

Everywhereallthetimeeverything, 2009, Epoxy resin and pigment, 20 x 84 x 36"

Nobodywinswhofightsalone, 2009, epoxy resin and pigment on wood, 48 x 84"

In Nobodywhowinsfightalone, one of the most arresting pieces on view, hues that appear saturated up-close turn iridescent when viewed from across a room, like an anamorphic object that can only be seen from one angle. While the tonality of these works varies from pale to searing, our physical engagement with them remains constant. Throughout, the artist sidesteps logic, hierarchy or any sort of ordering when it comes to composition.  Thus, viewers are challenged to create their own coherence, which is sometimes easy, sometimes hard, depending on which portion of Linnenbrink’s oeuvre you’re looking at. 

Bushwicksuperinnuithothouse, 2008, epoxy resin and pigment, 15 x 14 x 11"

A stripe painting like Blanquitos, which consists of wavy vertical lines ending in frozen drips, recalls the experience of trying to identify passengers in a limousine. The picture’s glossy, glitter-speckled colors seduce, but its reflective surface reveals only the faintest glimmer of the shadow-forms that lie below. It’s an optical treadmill.