Hundt: "Presidential Family Portrait"

Who’s in control? The question has always roiled our best minds.  Marx claimed it was economic systems.  Freud said it was repressed sexual desire.  Jung said it was primordial archetypes. 

After WWI, when it became apparent that neither God nor reason could stop us from self-destruction, Freud’s notion of mysterious subconscious forces provided a plausible explanation for events that made no sense.  Today, as man-made and natural disasters spin the world out of control, we may well be at a similar juncture. 

In this moment, where no unifying theory of anything exists, two Dada-influenced artists, John Hundt and Camilla Newhagen, illuminate the extant power of the irrational.  Hundt’s collages, which lean hard on beat-era figures like Bruce Conner, Wallace Berman and Jess Collins, seamlessly integrate imagery from old books, girlie magazines, photos, illustrations, engravings and other found materials.  They address history, myth and gender relations.  Newhagen, with truncated torsos fashioned out of stuffed clothing and other body-based works, investigates power relationships and the tenuous nature of human corporeality.  Together, in a show titled Couplings, their works make for a visual feast. 

Hundt, "Centaur", 2009

Hundt’s life-sized collage of a garter-belted torso, Legs, greets visitors from the hallway; plastered with stock quotes torn from newspapers, this ticker-tape burlesque mixes eroticism with high finance.  Legs 2, a rear-view version of the same figure — provocatively bent over — is inscribed with the faces of FDR, Shakespeare and other famous men. Elsewhere, In an untitled work, a smaller version of that same figure is fed to a meat grinder.  In the late ’50s and early ’60s pictures such as these were seen as boundary-pushing sexual provocations.  Today they run the risk of being interpreted as unwitting sexist blunders or, more charitably, feminist messages encoded in the visual language of Margaret Harrison.  They walk a shaky and dangerous line.  In matters of gender identity, Hundt is equally ambiguous; like the Greeks, he opts for a mix-and-match approach.  His figures unite not only sexual opposites but birds, fish and reptiles.  In Centaur, for example, the face of a fashion model wedded to a horse’s body stands atop an astrological chart, hinting, perhaps, that the ancients understood man’s beastly nature as well as Freud did.

Hundt has a particularly canny way with history. George Washington, in Presidential Family Portrait, suffers a dazzling hallucination: of a naked woman with a winged blossom for a head.  Battle II, another colonial era-tableaux, has a swordsman facing off against modernity, the future symbolized by a wrecked machine whose vintage and complexity clearly postdate that of the protagonist.  Octopi are a reoccurring visual element.  They sprout from or adorn faces, male and female.  Such images would be comical or even ludicrous if they didn’t feel like credible lucid dreams.

Part of Hundt’s effectiveness lies in his ability to conceal his painstaking handiwork.  The component parts of his outlandish, fantastical collages come from many sources, but there’s scant evidence of his having physically assembled them.  The pictures appear to have been photographically transported from the artist’s imagination to paper.  

Copenhagen-born, Bay Area sculptor Camilla Newhagen offers a darker vision.  It was inspired by growing up in “a socialist enclave of academic intellectuals where being aware of injustice and human rights was as common as playing on the play ground.”  Her father, she added, “was a professor of history and political science, and I don’t remember a weekend going by without political or historical conversation…He grew up in the southern part of Denmark, neighboring Germany and was very affected by WWII.”

Newhagen, "Suit Sediments", 2011, suits, socks, lining and foam board, 65 x 40 x 40"

Newhagen, born in 1970, apparently was, too.  Her bound-up “figures” – built from clothing scraps that are stuffed and tightly sewn or strapped together – speak of psychic and bodily trauma.  Hans Bellmer’s dolls immediately spring to mind, even though, as the artist points out, her figures are neither dolls nor female.  Even so, they evince a penchant for the grotesque, as well as the Dadaist’s disdain of violence.  The felt suits Joseph Beuys made about his wartime experience also appear to be important touchstone for Newhagen, since the garments she uses are reversed to reveal their felt-like backing.  The amputated features of her sculptures, the artist says, express “the ruins of the man and his power structure; the man turned inside out, the bad posture and heavy load of responsibility…”

Newhagen deflates the emblems of power just as skillfully as she animates the wounded who wield it.  Anyone who’s ever worn a suit or been bullied by one will relate to Suit Sediments, a stack of male garments that sit, one atop the other, in roughly the shape of a chair.  Looking at it makes you feel crushed.  Pin Point Oxford, a dress shirt with a large chunk missing will likely activate the carnivorous impulses of those who feel less-than-charitable toward corporate elites.

Newhagen, “Weight”, 2010, reclaimed suits, thread and polyester stuffing, 43 x 23" 26"

Says Newhagen: “I think the respect for that sort of power is crumbling, and I think the man behind that sort of power is growing tired and disoriented.”  Elsewhere, the artist proffers a gnarly shape composed of black bras (Dominatrix ) and a stop-motion video animation titled Decomposing Dress Shirt .  It features a shirt and a small quantity of black thread which is drawn to the shirt like iron filings to a magnet and then repelled.  Within the context of the Newhagen’s other works, the piece functions as a momento mori for corporate power. 

Reading the headlines, I see no evidence of the man in power stepping down (at least not willingly), nor do I see him tiring, much as I have grown tired of him and his abuses.  Still, I salute Newhagen’s efforts to "stick it to the man."

It’s nice to see the form and fighting spirit of Dada alive and well.  I, for one, could stand to see more of it. 

–DAVID M. ROTH

John Hundt and Camilla Newhagen: “Couplings” @ Jack Fischer Gallery through May 7, 2011.

Cover image: John Hundt: "Three Eminent Scientists"

Fast Tube by Casper

"Call of the Wild", 2002, Museum of Glass, Tacoma, Washington

Doughtery’s installation at Palo Alto Art Center, on view through Jan. 30, 2012

"Sortie de Cave", 2008, Chateaubourg, France

Far left: “First Collapsible Construction “,1965, suitcase, wood, cloth and plastic 30 x 16 x 6 inches; far right: Tony May and Lonny Tomono, “T. Tree House”, 1999-2009 wood, nylon screen and metal hardware, 6 x 9 x 9 feet

In the late 19^th century, when Impressionism first rocked Europe, it did so, in part by inaugurating the widespread use of vernacular subject matter.  It gave artists permission to paint common people, as opposed to royalty or religious subjects.  Pop, which emerged almost a century later, extended the practice by permitting the depiction of banality in the form of consumer goods and comics.  More recently, with banal images of every sort permeating theory-driven conceptual art, a realm where ideas routinely trump material invention, one can’t help but wonder: can visual art survive on a starvation diet, of theory alone?  More to the point: should it?

Over the past few years, Cathy Kimball, director and chief curator of the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, has mounted a series of contrarian exhibitions that would appear to answer both questions with a resounding no.  The ICA has presented one show after another of conceptualists who also happen to be master craftsman: that is, artists who are as adept at generating provocative ideas as they are at building objects that embody them.  Chief among these practitioners is Tony May, whose highly anticipated 45-year retrospective, Tony May: Old Technology, runs through February 26.   If you haven’t heard of Tony May, there’s a reason.  From 1969 to 2005 he taught at San Jose State, and his career as an instructor largely overshadowed his prolific and variegated output as a painter, sculptor and maker of suitcase-based contraptions and room-sized architectural fantasies. 

"Home Improvement" series.

Born in 1942 on a Wisconsin farm, May represents a certain quintessential Midwestern type: the backyard tinkerer.  But instead of applying those skills to the family business, he went to art school.  There, he appears to have fallen under the influence of Duchamp, the Dadists, Warhol, and Bruce Nauman, a classmate with whom he shared a house in Madison.  

May’s art echoes those influences, but his unique, sublime-absurd sensibility sets him apart from his predecessors and his contemporaries.  It shines through strongest in the acrylic-oil-on-panel mockumentary paintings he calls Home Improvements.  These small-scale autobiographical works – about 50 in all, mostly from the early 1980s into the 1990s– meticulously replicate the illustrational style of ‘50s-era instruction manuals, right down to flattened perspectives and the sickly color of poorly reproduced Kodachrome photos. May paints deadpan captions on to each picture that simultaneously acknowledge the banality of his domestic chores and the deep significance they hold for him.  Whether the activity pictured involves plugging a leak, cleaning a kitchen or clearing backyard rubble – each painting seems to argue for the “examined life”.

“Drawing Drawing Machine”, 1970, wood, steel, lead, glass, cotton cord, copper and salt, 54 x 44 x 44 inches

At one level, the pictures declare such activities unworthy of artistic attention, yet they also assert, without irony, the value of such seemingly mundane pursuits.  It’s a Warholian conundrum.  The difference, of course, is that where Warhol attempted to elevate industrially produced consumer goods to icon status, May’s paintings valorize his own estimable handiwork.  In addition to being clever and functional, the home repairs depicted in these paintings are also very hip-looking thanks to his carpentry and design skills.  Combined, they hit something of an apotheosis in T. House, 1999-2009, a room-sized, two-story structure whose joinery and finish rival in quality and attention to detail anything you’re likely to see from any source, save perhaps David Ireland’s pioneering (and as yet unrivaled ) installation, Mission District home at 500 Capp St.

In 2007 May was invited to exhibit in Bangkok.  After learning that shipping would be too costly, he devised a fiendishly elegant solution: a collapsible sculpture that sprung from a suitcase. The result, Thai-Inspired Portable Art Display Unit, 2007, which he lugged to the show, enables a three-foot-tall tent house to unfold from a frame that carries, on its canvas walls, four of his small paintings.  Each contains captions that show May laughing at his self-made predicament.  In this  Duchampian (Box-in-a-Valise) mode, the artist, in the mid-1960s, built a number of similar structures. The cleverest among those on view are “Collapsible Construction (small case)” (1965), which opens to reveal a swatch of blank canvas – an obvious jibe at minimalist painting; and First Collapsible Construction (1965) which looks like a folk artist’s rendition of an alien spacecraft.  Remarkably, despite the passage of decades, these works feel fresh.

Other examples: Drawing, Drawing Machine (1970), May’s rope-and-pulley operated re-make of the Etch A Sketch toy, allows visitors to move a lead weight across a shallow salt-filled platform to make line drawings.  An inveterate scavenger, May seems able to create art from almost any object that falls into his grip.  In his restoration of a sailboat, Robinson Crusoe 1975, May pasted the entire text of Daniel Defoe’s novel to the interior and exterior of the craft with layers of resin; it hangs upside down from the ceiling, suspended by ropes a few feet above the floor, a monument to perseverance.

“Robinson Crusoe”, 1975, wood and mixed media, 8 x 3.5 x 4 feet

Antique Tool Rack (2010), a framed hammer and sickle, appears, at first, to be a paean to Communism, but is really about the disappearance of trustworthy hand tools and, by extension, a way of life: the artist’s.

May’s low-tech, DIY ethos isn’t so much a protest as it is a plea for reverence — for things that are either extinct or are well on their way to becoming so.  Books, for example, May hollows out and repurposes as lamps to illuminate several paintings, bringing to mind words a schoolmarm might have used to chastise a dimwitted student: "Turn on the lights!"  My Darned Sweater, a garment preserved under glass (and redolent of mothballs), carries a note stating that its previous owners – the artist’s mother and grandmother – “would have continued to repair it indefinitely had their deaths not prevented it.”  It’s an heirloom repackaged as inherited wisdom.  Taking this home-spun, waste-not, want-not, philosophy further, May recycles his cat’s whiskers, fashioning them into an Ikebana-style “floral” arrangement, which he places in a mirrored plexiglass box, a nod to Sol Lewitt, Lucas Samaras and Joseph Cornell.  To Duchamp, May offers up a readymade of his own, a vintage ironing board, Refurbished Antique Foldable Device (Reversing Duchamp), 2009.  And in homage to his former roommate, Nauman, who in the 1960s, built legendary text sculptures out of neon lighting (e.g. The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, 1967), May delivers a characteristic low-voltage riposte: a length of rope attached to the base of a window blind that spells out the last three words of the work’s title, Drawing to a Close (1967).  Pun or apocalyptic prediction?  It could be either or both.  

“Miracle of the Fishes (remnants)”, 1978, ceramic, wood and glass, dimensions variable

Nostalgia and fantasy figure in, too.  May’s model for the public art piece, Remembering Agriculture, 1994. which occupies a median strip in downtown San Jose, points both to his Wisconsin roots and to a time when orchards, not concrete-tilt-ups, lined Hwy 101.  The most humorous piece in the show, Miracle of the Fishes, is a maquette for a public art project that was shown briefly in 1978.  It depicts the audience of fish summoned by St. Anthony to convert heretics.  Operating at a similarly fantastic level is Two Unretouched Photos, c. 1860 & 1987, 1987.  One is a portrait of Central Park architect Frederick Law Olmstead taken in 1860.  The other is of May in 1987.  The men look like identical twins, separated by a century. 

Whether May and others of his ilk who’ve been featured at recent shows at ICA constitute an actual “antiquarian avant garde” remains to be seen.  But in light of the materially impoverished state of much conceptual art these days, the prospect of such a movement — where craft counts and where meaning is embedded, not obscured by arcane jargon — is a tantalizing prospect.

–DAVID M. ROTH 

Tony May: Old Technology, through Feb. 26, 2011 @ San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art.  Note: portions of this show close Feb. 12.

Watch a video of Tony May.

Photos: David Pace

At CSUS Annex Gallery with "Ace", 2007, ceramic 15" x 32" x 9.5". Photo: David M. Roth

For the past 35 years Peter VandenBerge has been creating outsized ceramic busts whose hand-worked features are as mesmerizing as they are confounding. The mystery of these elongated, primitive faces resides primarily in the slit eyes and oblong noses; but their whimsical ornamentation and outlandish headgear – a distinct brand of ‘60s-era, Duchamp-influenced absurdism – seems to mock their otherwise inward-looking demeanor. This month, seven of his busts will be on display at the Solomon Dubnick Gallery, along with works by his daughter, Camille, 40. An equal number of pieces from the elder VandenBerge, now 74, are also on display in a group show, “Three Friends: Fifty Years”, at the CSUS Annex Gallery through Nov. 13.

"Amsterdame", 2009, ceramic, 43" x 12" x 19"

"Two for the Road", 2009, ceramic, 30" x 16" x 12"

Part of the legendary UC Davis TB-9 crew (L to R): Steve Kaltenbach, Ruth Rippon, Robert Arneson, Peter VandenBerge, Gerald Walburg in Sacramento, 1987.  Photo: Tony Novelozo

"Vrouw", 1984, ceramic, 15" x 40" x 19"