Archive | Reviews

RSS feed for this section
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. 

Posted in ReviewsComments (0)

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. 
 

 

Posted in ReviewsComments (0)

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 
# # #
 
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. 

Posted in ReviewsComments (0)

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
# # #
 
Robin Kandel, “lakewater” @ Andrea Schwartz Gallery through February 24, 2012.

Posted in ReviewsComments (1)

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.

  

Posted in ReviewsComments (1)

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.

Posted in ReviewsComments (0)

Larry Bell @ Toomey Tourell

Larry Bell @ Toomey Tourell

Posted on 22 January 2012

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

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

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

Posted in ReviewsComments (0)

Annabeth Rosen @ Paule Anglim

Annabeth Rosen @ Paule Anglim

Posted on 20 January 2012

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

Posted in ReviewsComments (0)

One Thing Leads to Another @ ICA

One Thing Leads to Another @ ICA

Posted on 17 January 2012

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in ReviewsComments (1)

Soil to Site @ Montalvo

Soil to Site @ Montalvo

Posted on 05 January 2012

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in ReviewsComments (0)

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

  •     

Openings - See all photos