Westerhout: “Louisiana III”, 2005, archival pigment print, 39 x 52”

We’ve heard much about the “dialog” between painting and photography, and throughout history there have been many such “conversations”.  This show, at least from a distance, didn’t promise to be one of them.  Westerhout photographs the interiors of decayed buildings; Bolles makes color field paintings.  The success of this unlikely pairing shows how an inspired curatorial vision can bridge the arbitrary divide we sometimes erect between media.  

Both artists share an obsession with light.  It surfaces briefly and stunningly and then fades as the show serves up examples of each artist moving in directions that are, at least for Westerhout, more narrowly focused than what we’ve seen from her in the past, and for Bolles, a striking departure from the orthodox minimalism that has defined his career up until quite recently.

Westerhout makes super-saturated pictures that have the look of wet paint.  Many of the buildings she photographs are taken in regions that once sustained America’s blue-collar workforce, and for this reason she’s sometimes mistaken for a journalist; but her real interests lay elsewhere. Where her work sometimes seems too closely tethered to the conventions of architectural photography, the pictures in this show, while stolid and meticulously composed, seem less concerned with context than with demonstrating the infinite ways light can interact within a given environment.

Bolles: “Good Girl I”, 2011, inkjet print and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 68”

Thus, it’s tempting to think from these selections — which focus on more details rather than on whole environments — that Westerhout may be edging closer to abstraction.

Bolles, on the other hand, has spent the better part of two decades in that realm, making luminescent (and mostly monochromatic) paintings whose primary quality – a flickering, indeterminate depth – comes from stacking layers of color-laced clear acrylic polymer on canvas.  While his new work, which I’ll say more about shortly, moves in the opposite direction, toward abstract figuration and landscape, it’s his earlier (circa: 2007) paintings that connect most powerfully to Westerhout’s pictures. 

This occurs in the front room of the gallery where two of his untitled monochrome paintings, both rendered in shades of lime green, face off against three Westerhout pictures that employ similarly colored geometric forms that either project color outward or allow strongly tinted light to seep into darkened spaces.  Oftentimes these effects are amplified by reflections in pools of collected rainwater.  We see them in Kings Park Building 93-111 (2004), a former psychiatric hospital, and in Louisiana III (2005), a one-time cannery.  By contrast, Bolles’ small-scale minimalist works project light as halos emanating from the edges.  The effect is echoed perfectly in Westerhout’s image of an abandoned winery in Richmond, Calif., where light bleeds in from around the periphery of a sliding door, as if framed by neon tubes. 

Westerhout: “Kings Park Building 93-III”, 2004, archival pigment print, 30 x 40”

Bolles’ new works at first threaten to upset this dialog, but they actually enhance it.  They merge painting and photography into an inscrutable hybrid whose photographic origins are nearly obliterated.  He begins by digitally manipulating photos of Fischer Price dolls.  These he prints onto canvas and works manually, with a brush and a spray gun.  He then coats the painted photographs with layers of tinted acrylic to further distort the underlying images.  Alternately, in a series of small (16" x 16”) works, he affixes paper prints to Plexiglas panels which he paints with colored resin.  In both cases, the results are the same: vacant, twisted, blown-out faces set in overheated shades of yellow, red and orange that are bisected by horizontal bands of equally saturated color.  Beautiful and horrific, they feel like what we might see if Takashi Murakami attempted to channel Mark Rothko. 

Bolles uses the same technique to create several mysterious landscapes.  Two that stand out are Little Boy Blue (2011) and Wedgie (2011).  With their hanging cloud-like forms, they give off the feel of symbolist paintings.  Westerhout responds in kind with Vanity Ballroom (2009), a picture of an old dance hall whose ceiling looks like it was ripped open by artillery shells. Light streams in to illuminate the room, but it’s the texture of the holes that rivets our attention.  

Bolles: “Little Boy Blue”, 2011, inkjet print and acrylic on canvas, 52 x 52”

Such conjunctions provide a keen sense of just how painterly photography can be – and how paintings can function as photographic equivalents.  Yet for all the formal exchanges ignited by this presentation, topicality churns beneath the surface.  I don’t imagine unemployed workers taking a mystical view of Westerhout’s wrecked buildings.  Likewise, with Bolles, the Murakami connection bears exploration, since the faces embedded in his pictures bear a strong resemblance to those seen in Manga comics, where frozen expressions, it has been theorized, mirror the shell-shocked psyche of a nation twice-nuked.  Had Japan not recently suffered another nuclear disaster, I probably wouldn’t be thinking these thoughts.  But when I look at the screaming colors in Bolles’ paintings, I can’t help but wonder if his shift, from pure abstraction to hot-colored, tortured representation, wasn’t somehow prescient.

If so, it won’t be the first time an artistic impulse has unwittingly foreshadowed a historic event.  Nor will it be the first time civilization’s ruins trigger an intensely personal investigation as they do with Westerhout.  In this show, opposites don’t just attract; they combine to offer us a fresh vision.

–DAVID M. ROTH

Katherine Westerhout and Tom Bolles @ SFMOMA Artists Gallery through April 21, 2011. 

Learn more about  Tom Bolles and Katherine Westerhout.

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"

"Jordan", 2010, archival pigment print, 40 x 30 inches

Last year, on the eve of California’s historic (and unsuccessful) attempt to legalize pot, photographer Robyn Twomey created a documentary series on medical marijuana.  Her startlingly intimate portraits of patients are on view at Patricia Sweetow Gallery through April 2.  She spoke about the project with SC editor and publisher David M. Roth.

How did this project begin?

I was hired by Fortune in the fall of 2009 to photograph “Medical Marijuana’s High Society," a piece that focused on a few of the more prominent dispensaries and owners.  While I was at Harborside Healthcare Center in Oakland, I met 19-year- old Jordan who shared his story of leukemia and the benefits of cannabis. At the same time, the photo editor, Scott Thode, felt we needed some client perspective to round out the piece, and he encouraged me to do that even though it wasn’t part of the original assignment. At the time, I was just starting to flirt with video, so I asked Jordan if I could do a short interview and portrait session at his house and he agreed.

It was Jordan’s story of struggle and survival that broke my heart and inspired me to find more stories. It wasn’t the angle of the Fortune story, but I thought it could be a great personal series.  I wanted to share what I was learning about people who depend on

How did you persuade people to work with you? 

At first, I tried to talk to patients directly, but most were hesitant and didn’t want to be stereotyped or discriminated against because of the frail legality around cannabis.  So, I talked to a couple dispensaries and Harborside was the most supportive.  The clients trusted Harborside and the ones who signed on were people with an activist spirit, people tired of the cannabis backlash. They signed up, hoping their story would help educate and decriminalize cannabis.  I was doing a lot of the shooting in 2010 — before the vote on Prop 19, the initiative that would have legalized marijuana, and that propelled a lot of energy and excitement for the project.

"Lilly", 2010, archival pigment print, 40 x 30 inches

What were you feelings about medicinal marijuana prior to the assignment? 

I had a few friends who got cards to get in on high quality product, but I didn’t know anyone personally who was taking it for more than recreational use.  So, I suppose in that regard, I didn’t think about it. There was a dispensary on my block that was staked out and eventually raided and shut down by homeland security, and I always found it odd that homeland security funds were allocated to shutting down dispensaries.  But it just wasn’t personal enough for me to really even care about it.

When I began documenting people’s stories, I went from feeling indifferent to feeling passionately connected to each of my subjects and the injustice they felt that something that is helping them is constantly being threatened by the legal system. That stigma can really have a negative effect on people, causing some to feel unnecessary shame.  Ann, one of the subjects, told me a lot of older people who are suffering and taking heavy meds are afraid of cannabis because all the controversy surrounding it. 

What were some of the reoccurring themes that emerged in your conversations?

The most ubiquitous sentiment was the overall dissatisfaction with prescription drugs. People would complain about how ineffective prescription drugs are, or how overly sedated they make you feel. People were sometimes taking cannabis instead of prescription drugs, but were often taking cannabis to counteract specific side effects from prescription drugs. A lot of people also talked about cannabis relieving anxiety.  Sleep and appetite were other common themes.

It was quite eye opening to hear how many prescription drugs are pushed on people, and how negatively they affect them.  People using cannabis for medicine are prescribing the doses themselves and are tuning in to their bodies to figure out how much works for them. I can see why that is terrifying for the pharmaceutical business.

"Anne 3", 2010, archival pigment print, 30 x 40 inches

You mix environmental portraits and close-ups.  Most are extreme close-ups.  Why did you take that approach?

I’ve always been a big fan of the formal head shot. I thought it would be a great opportunity to take such a formal approach and subvert the formality with a currently perceived taboo.  It was also a great opportunity to use smoke as a spontaneous visual element. The formal head shot is the control and the smoke is the unpredictable element that transcends intention — the magic that cannot be directed. The smoke becomes a second character in the image, which can only be successfully translated in the close ups.

Several of the subjects seem to be consciously avoiding exposure to the camera; their eyes and faces are almost entirely concealed by smoke. 

"Giants", 2010, archival pigment print, 40 x 30 inches

For the most part, my direction was to not look at the camera, because I wanted the viewer to witness people in a moment of their own, rather than a moment for me or the public.  I asked them to try and forget that the camera was there, and to just focus on their breath. There is a psychological intensity in all of us that I’m constantly looking to document, and I’m sure that influenced my edit. One reviewer saw the look in their eyes as needing cannabis, as opposed to wanting it. And I think that is an interesting angle to consider. If and when I asked the subject to look at the lens, I asked them to just let go and just be as honest as possible.

Smoke is an irresistible and deliciously evocative visual motif which you’ve made the most of.  I can’t help think, when I look at these pictures, of Herman Leonard’s famous portrait of Dexter Gordon.

Before this series, I never wanted people to smoke in my images. I considered it so cliché. But since I was documenting, it didn’t feel like I was glorifying or idealizing smoke. It was purposeful. I even asked people to create more smoke if possible, to magnify the hazy exhale so I could use it as a main element. I never asked people to smoke more than they wanted to. In some cases, people only wanted to take a couple tokes, so I was only able to capture about 3 or 4 frames.

The Dexter Gordon image from Herman Leonard, and other smoky nostalgic images from that era, surely informed my decision on a subconscious level to document cannabis patients. But I was just as informed by the work of August Sander, Julia Margaret Cameron, and my mom, who I watched smoke (cigarettes) everyday growing up. 

All of the people in your pictures are smoking weed because they are ill.  Yet none of them look sick.  Most of them seem overwhelming melancholy.  This is not a trait we normally associate with getting high.  What’s going on here? 

Through my interviews, I learned that you don’t have to necessarily look ill to be in a lot of pain, or to be dealing with a lot of issues. There are people dealing with everything from leukemia to anxiety in this series.

"Robert" and "Karen", 2010, archival pigment print, 40 x 30 inches

The series is not without humor.  The elderly woman lighting up at the piano holding a cat certainly plays against stereotypes, while the guy with the full body tattoo plays directly into the popular image of stoners.  The two kind of balance each other out in that regard.  Did you learn anything about medical pot that really surprised you? 

The entire project was a great learning process into the unnecessary stigma associated with cannabis, the different strands of cannabis and how they uniquely affect people, the really crazy world of pharmaceuticals and most of all the politics. Ann (the lady with the cat) summed it up well when she said, "There’s something wrong in America with feeling good. I don’t know what it is. Yes, it relieves my pain. And yes, it makes me euphoric." 

Last question: Did your subjects offer to get you high as part of the exchange and if so, how did you handle it? 

Most people take their medicine very seriously, and it’s very expensive. Just a couple times people offered, but it wouldn’t be something I could handle while working.

After the very first shoot, my assistant and I were leaving Oakland and approached High Street. We had to pull over from laughing so hard at the street sign. That’s when I realized that having the subject blow smoke toward the lens was giving us quite a contact high. It was a definite perk that made continuing the project that much more enjoyable.

Robyn Twomey: “Medicine” @ Patricia Sweetow Gallery through April 2, 2011.

Learn more about Robyn Twomey.

“Epiphany I (Adoration of the Magi 2)”, 2010, mixed media, oil and acrylic on canvas, 93 1/2 x 134”

“It was hell recalls former child” reads the caption to a 1976 drawing by the cartoonist B. Kliban.  It’s one of those punch lines that works because it’s true, to some extent, for almost everyone.  Yet when the Vienna-born artist Gottfried Helnwein aired the same sentiment at the Crocker Art Museum on the occasion of his exhibition, Inferno of the Innocents, nobody laughed.  Vienna after WWII, he explained “was dark.  I remembered never seeing anyone smile.  I never heard a song. People were broken.

“Nothing,” he continued, “was mentioned in school; the war didn’t exist.  But I researched it on my own, I was obsessed.  It had to do, in a naive sense, with justice. When I found out all these gruesome details about concentration camps, everything stopped for me. I didn’t belong. I didn’t want to be a part of that society."

[Watch John Yoyogi Fortes' video of Gottfried Helnwein speaking about his work.]

Helnwein who today divides his time between LA and Ireland, has spent his adult life trying, through painting and photography, to understand the horrors that preceded his birth in 1948.  However, his investigations, which focus on the plight of children, far transcend what happened during the Nazi era.  His subject is the persistence of evil and the cruelties perpetrated by humans against each other.  That his work is disturbing and sometimes shocking comes as no surprise; but the truth is that you’ll see more violence in the trailers of adolescent-targeted action films at your local multiplex than you will at any Helnwein exhibit.  (The exceptions are the photographs where Helnwein shows himself and child models tortured by self-invented devices that contort faces into horrible grimaces that bring to mind Nazi medical experiments.  Such images are notably absent from the Crocker exhibit, though plenty appear in the show’s superb catalog.)

“The Golden Age I”, 2003, digital pigment print on vinyl, 118 x 76 ¾ and “Untitled (The Disasters of War 25)”, 2010, mixed media, oil and acrylic on canvas, 71 x 54”

In the main, Helnwein understands that shock isn’t a very effective way of changing hearts and minds.  So instead he creates simulations of violence and psychological pain that permit us to reflect rather than recoil.  He photographs pre-pubescent female models in his studio and dresses them with bandages and fake blood, allowing them to pose however they wish in bedroom settings cast in a raking film-noir-ish light.  He also digitally manipulates documentary and news photos, inserting into them Disney cartoon characters, gun-toting children and soldiers.  The large-scale mixed media paintings that result from this photo-sourced process vary considerably in their verisimilitude.  They range from the hyperreality of billboards and fashion spreads to the messy, face-obscuring smears used by artists like Francis Bacon and Luc Tuymans to the menacing lighting and compositional techniques seen in French New Wave and Italian Neo Realism films of the ‘40s and ‘50s.  Helnwein aims for the visceral impact of cinema and for the most part he achieves it through scale and clarity; but his paintings offer few tactile or physical pleasures beyond the rare gestural mark, the occasional build up of pigment or, even rarer, instances where he combines loose brushstrokes with airbrushing.  As such. Helnwein’s appeal lies in the moral force he brings to his confrontations with history and popular culture.

“Art in America”, 2000, mixed media on canvas, 198 cm x 274 cm

In Epiphany I (Adoration of the Magi 2) (2010), Helnwein savages the idea of a “master race” by combining a Madonna-Child portrait with a Nazi propaganda photograph.  The resulting mash-up shows SS officers admiring a naked toddler held upright by a suitably Aryan-looking mother.  The child bears an uncanny resemblance to Adolf Hitler.  Art in America (2000), done in the style of Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post illustrations, shows a period-attired blonde making an easel painting.  Her model is a Klansman in full regalia.  Equally forthright in its convictions is Silent Glow of the Avant-Garde II (2010), a triptych.  In it, a view of disintegrating ice bergs is flanked by two images of the artist, bloodied and bandaged with eyes covered by dark shades.  He appears to be witnessing an unstoppable catastrophe.  More gruesome still are Righteous Man II (1999) and Righteous Man III (1991), both of men who are horribly disfigured.  As if history and current headlines aren’t enough, these and other blunt instruments of outrage further remind us of how miserably humanity has failed in its attempt to wipe out genocide and other forms of state-sponsored violence.

“Righteous Man III”, 1991, mixed media, oil and acrylic on canvas

Helnwein’s portrayal of children — as either unsullied innocents or bleeding victims –feeds this strategy by giving viewers ample space to actually process this information.  His “innocents” are neutral.  They stare blankly at the ground or off into the distance, yet seem to be freighted by concerns well beyond their years.  Thus, it’s easy for “former children” to identify with such images, since the pictures are receptive foils onto which we can project almost any emotion.  As for the victims, their blood is so obviously fake that it’s impossible, unless you’re seriously phobic, to take them for anything other than the simulations they are, and it’s this distancing that allows us to process all of the other disturbing information.

Where things get really interesting is when Helnwein mixes violated or corrupted youth with cartoon characters.  Here it’s instructive to note that during Helnwein’s youth the only art he experienced was in churches and in comic books.  As he told Peter Frank: I “stared in awe and fascination for hours at all these tortured and blood-bathed saints that squirmed in ecstasy while their bodies were spiked with arrows or nailed against crosses; or the pale Madonnas with their cold and strange beauty, ripping their dresses open and revealing a big, floating heart pierced by tiny swords. These were the images that haunted me in the sleepless nights of my childhood.

“That all ended one day when I opened my first Donald Duck comic book. It was like seeing the daylight again for someone who had been trapped underground in a mine disaster for many days…I was now at home in a decent world where one could get flattened by steamrollers and perforated by bullets without serious harm, a world in which the people still looked decent…” When Helnwein decided to become an artist in his teens, he began by staging public performances reminiscent of the Viennese Aktionists in which he’d mutilate and bandage himself.  In the ensuring decades, the influences on his work have multiplied to include a great many historic and contemporary figures.  Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Bruegel, Goya and Bosch are among the former; Richter, Munch, Sherman, Witkin and Weegee rank high among the latter. 

“Murmur of the Innocents 1”, 2009, mixed media, oil and acrylic on canvas, 78 x 114”

Less obvious are the intentions behind the artist’s use of cartoon characters.  When asked about this by critic Mark Van Proyen during an interview at the Crocker, Helnwein ducked the question, saying he’d prefer to let viewers puzzle it out for themselves.  Here, unlike everywhere else in Helnwein’s oeuvre, relationships are intentionally ambivalent, though one thing seems clear: two of his characters – Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck – seem, in the context of certain paintings, to be up to no good.  Take, for example, the interaction between two strategically placed works: Annunciation (Mouse 12) 2010 and Murmur of the Innocents (16) (2010).  The first shows Mickey as a leering, snout-nosed rodent; the second is of a bleeding girl who is quite obviously dead.  The two pictures stand side by side.  On the wall immediately to the right hang twin portraits of Helnwein’s friend, the rock singer Marilyn Manson. In them he appears as his usual mock-demonic stage persona, in full face paint, crowned here, by Helnwein, in Mousketeer caps.  Around the corner is a picture of a young girl with a rifle in which, off to one side, stands America’s favorite cartoon mouse.  It watches with interest, but no readable expression.  On the opposing wall we see a vision of true mayhem, Untitled (The Disasters of War 22) (2008).  In it, a soldier carries a limp victim from burning ruins.  In the foreground sits one of those creepy Japanese manga dolls, inflated to life-size and looking characteristically dopey and dumbstruck.

“The Murmur of the Innocents 5”, 2009, mixed media, oil and acrylic on canvas, 74 3/4 x 116”

A few paces away Donald Duck, in In The Heat of the Night (2000), stands like a lone sentry on a deserted city street. Bathed in toxic blue light, the scene could have been ripped from the cover of a  pulp crime novel.  We stare intently because we just know something bad is about to happen.  The question that arises is whether these cartoon characters are provocateur/collaborators or silent witnesses to crimes in progress.  They may well be both.  Either way, such representations feel to me like indictments of a culture that leaves the most vulnerable among us (read:children) defenseless against real evils.  

To those who maintain that art has become toothless for not asking the big questions, Helnwein stands out for having credibly staked out the moral high ground.  

–DAVID M. ROTH

#  #  #

Gottfried Helnwein: “Inferno of the Innocents" @ the Crocker Art Museum through April 24, 2011. 

An exhibition catalog, with essays by Mark Van Proyen and Crocker Associate Curator Diana Daniels, is available through the museum.

View John Yoyogi Fortes’ video of Gottfried Helnwein speaking about his work.

Cover image: Murmur of the Innocents 17, 2010, mixed media and oil and acrylic on canvas, 70 x 103"

Gottfried Helnwein is represented in San Francisco by Modernism.

“Ray Ban”, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 66 x 96”

Alex Couwenberg’s visions of the Southern California landscape mix the spatial ambiguity of cyberspace with the disorienting angularity of Cubo Futurism; they create a perception-bending universe in which it is impossible to situate yourself physically.  Imagine a 2D version of, say, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s kinetic sculpture Light Space Modulator and you get some idea of how Couwenberg, using line and color to describe solid and transparent volumes, distorts our sense of balance and space.

The artist lives and works in Pomona, and like the region itself, he embraces its contradictions. The crazy-quilt of competing billboards, the clashing architectural motifs, the beauty and scale of the natural landscape and the blitheness with which Southern Californians accept its demise all converge in Couwenberg’s pictures to form a highly processed record of the artist’s perceptions.

Couwenberg, 43, has always attempted to include in his paintings, bits of every art-historical style he has ever admired.  That list, as evidenced by the 13 paintings on view, is a long one.  It includes Cubism, Constructivism, Surrealism, Minimalism, mid-century LA architecture, graphic design and Finish Fetish, a style whose hallmarks – reflective surfaces, pinstripes and candy colors — are as much a part of the LA aesthetic now as they were in the hotrod and surf-crazed ‘60s.

“Accelerator”, “Prink”, “Brodie”, all 2011, acrylic on canvas 22 x 16”

Judging from such titles as Poweflex, Joyride, Brodie, Accelerator and Ray Ban, it would be tempting to think that Couwenberg’s allegiances lay with the Finish Fetishists; but his paintings suggest closer affinities to early modernist styles and to the Hard Edge Los Angeles School painters Lorser Feitelson (1898 -1978) and Karl Benjamin, the latter of whom he studied with at Claremont Graduate University.

Couwenberg synthesizes these styles in exuberant, precisely organized canvases animated by bold oppositions.  Bulbous buoy-like forms painted in bright, closely hued colors are stacked, one atop the other in semi-translucent layers — layers whose interpenetrating geometries merge to suggest other shapes.  Out of them sprout curving antennae-like lines that are hard-edged and ragged, thick and thin, and have finishes that alternate between gloss and matte.  In and around these contours the artist places rectangular slabs of pigment that have been raked with a hand tool to look embossed, their “fins” echoing the air filter-like textures of so many iconic LA-area buildings.  All of this activity is set against large tracts of neutral color (olive drab, gun-metal gray, yellow ochre, taupe) that I can only assume are intended to reference the aerospace industry that dominated the local economy during the artist’s youth.  

“Devo”, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 48 x46”

At a distance, the paintings, which reproductions don’t even begin to describe, appear to be graphic patterns that give off a faint surrealist tinge.  Up close, they engulf you with their complex topographies.  In Ray Ban, the largest picture in the show, so many different surface textures come into play, you feel as if you’re looking at collage built entirely of paint.  Within it Couwenberg takes some fantastic liberties, like the splatter of pigment in the lower left-hand corner that looks like a smear of plum jelly and the amazing concatenations of thinly painted, interlocking shapes that float in a perfect state of equipoise. 

This pictorial strategy places Couwenberg squarely in the neo-modernist camp.  It’s a huge group that includes Linda Geary, Susan Frecon Xylor Jane, Ara Peterson, Alexander Kori Gerard, and Heather Gwen Martin to name but a few artists of diverse temperament who turn modernist mannerisms to their own ends. 

Couwenberg, for his part, translates the psychic impact of his environment into the realm of the tangible, using the most basic of means — line and color — to disrupt our equilibrium.  As such, his paintings aren’t just abstract representations of the landscape – they’re intimations of what it feels like to be fully inhabited by one’s surroundings. 

–DAVID M. ROTH

#  #  #

Alex Couwenberg @ Andrea Schwartz Gallery through March 11, 2011

Learn more about Alex Couwenberg.

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

Installation view of the LED light portion of "Transfiguration"

Action/reaction is the governing principle in this interactive light-and-sound installation, the latest in a series by the conceptual artist Chris Daubert. The show’s title, Transfiguration, intimates profound religious experience, but the pleasures it affords fall more credibly into the realm of the senses.  

Like Daubert’s previous installations, this one takes place in a darkened room. Walk past a wall of motion sensors hidden inside PVC tubes and another nearby wall — sheathed in glimmering shards of sheet metal – vibrates, in varying timbres, like an orchestra of muted xylophones.  (Even without human input, these snippets rustle silently with the air currents, like the swatches of a sequined billboard.)  Across the room, a curtain of plastic netting embedded with LED bulbs responds similarly; it lights up patterns that conjure night visions of an urban skyline, rendered red-against-black.  

LED lights mounted on a plastic curtain are motion-activated — Photo: Joan Moment

Installations of this sort have become widespread – particularly in public art — because they invite and reward audience participation.  In this hyper-wired, Cage-like exercise in human kinesiology, the audience willingly becomes instigator and spectator. The process is intuitive: Once you realize that the apparatus — which consists of thousands of solenoid-activated “resonators”, 150 miles of wire, 4,500 heat sensors and a great many lights — is triggered by your own movement, it’s impossible not to start improvising bodily gestures. However, to fully take in the complex range of tonal and percussive possibilities that can be wrung from this electro-kinetic “instrument” you need to stand close. 

The problem is: you can’t activate either the resonators or the LED lights and fully absorb their output because of the way the sensors are positioned in relation to their electronic destinations. While it’s easy to observe the visual and acoustic consequences of other people moving around the room, the installation would be stronger if the moving elements were positioned so that they could be plainly seen (and heard) while you are activating them.

Individually tuned pieces of stainless steel vibrate and shake in response to human-activated heat sensors –  Photo: Joan Moment

Daubert, who teaches the history of Meso-American art, maintains that the project was inspired by the shamanistic ritual of issuing divinations from the light patterns inside the ancient temple of Chalchihuites. While the artist has undoubtedly had some transporting experiences in northern Mexico, it’s difficult to see the evidence here. The force he attempts to channel, that of pre-Columbian mysticism, was far more apparent in the digital drawings that he displayed in a recent show at the b. sakata garo gallery. These renderings of crumbling stone walls gave off the aura of infra-red photographs and had a near-hallucinatory quality. They showcased Daubert’s talent for creating art that makes us question our senses. 

Prior examples of such installations include The Hidden (2008) and the truly mind-bending Travelers Amid Mountains and Streams (2005). Both used sensory deprivation to upset viewers’ sense of equilibrium.

Transfiguration, while not life-altering, is an engaging and highly musical installation that affirms Newton’s dictum, that for every action there will be an opposite and corresponding reaction. 

"Architecture of a Scent", 2010,

In an age when the virtual and the real are becoming increasingly intertwined, Robert Ortbal’s transformations of the everyday into the otherworldly seem like perfect evocations of this predicament. Crafted in a variety of media, the works range from gnarly and gangly to delicate and poetic.  In many cases, you will not know what they are made of without touching them or being told.  Thus, Styrofoam, Astroturf, steel, e-waste, wood and rubber pet toys become grist for objects that seem both strange and familiar.  Re-purposed with resin, paint and flocking, they mimic a variety of man-made and natural forms.

The allusions produced by these visual sleights of hand include microscopic views of chemical reactions, deep-sea organisms, exotic plants, constellations and hybrid mash-ups of concepts that exist only in the artist’s imagination.  That they call to mind things we know (or think we know) is merely a by-product of a working process that began some years back when the artist tried to envision what 2-D patterns might look like if they were translated to three dimensions.  That investigation quickly led to something bigger: a search for essences.  Not actual essences, as in molecular structures, but unfathomable things, like the physical structure of smells as they exist in psychological, emotional and sensory space.  

"Badlands", 2010, foam, resin, wood, silicon carbide, flock and paint

The most radical example in Ortbal’s oeuvre is his longstanding Architecture of a Scent series — sculptures that attempt to give form to the state of sensory confusion known as synesthesia.  The series began with spindly projections of wires festooned with Styrofoam balls, but has since evolved into objects of greater mass and proportion, such as Architecture of a Scent: Somewhere off the Coast of Davenport.  It contains no visible remnants of the coastal hamlet north of Santa Cruz.  What we get instead is an ungainly construction that looks like a series of exhaust pipes embedded in a coral reef.  Mounted to a pinkish slab of weighty material that’s stained to resemble faux marble, the whole assemblage, which is attached to a hinge, can be swung from side to side, like a gate with a malignant growth.

In Oz, to take another example, a plastic container assumes the guise of a granite vessel sprouting a piece of molded resin. It looks like tree fungus.  Arising from this protuberance is a miniature “broadcast tower” decorated with calculator keys.  The object’s cavity contains pieces of Styrofoam carved to look like railroad spikes.  Elsewhere in the show, which consists of eight sculptures and three intaglio prints, the artist uses Styrofoam and other synthetic materials to evoke jewel-encrusted treasures, aerial views of primordial landscapes, sea plants and floating cities.

While Ortbal, like many contemporary sculptors, uses everyday items and non-traditional art materials, his is a unique voice – one that’s pushing sculpture into the post-industrial future. While this work may at first register as a symptom of this confused, polymorphous state, the longer you look the more its insistent materiality begins to feels like the antidote to that condition – or, at the very least, a viable marker for what lies ahead.

–DAVID M. ROTH

Robert Ortbal: Different Parts of Remembering @ JAYJAY through Dec. 23, 2010.

 The Robert Ortbal Interview

Robert Ortbal

David M. Roth: When I look at your work, I always think that materials speak to you in the same way high-frequency sounds speak to animals: in them you “hear” things most of us can’t.  Do materials, by themselves, suggest forms?

Robert Ortbal: Thanks, I like that metaphor. These days I seem to be a true omnivore when it comes to materials. Back when I was an undergraduate I worked almost exclusively in clay; but by the time I was in graduate school I was exploring all different kinds of materials and processes. Once I finished school, large-scale installations using domestic or household materials became my focus.  To answer your question, sometimes materials suggest forms; but often they don’t.  I wouldn’t want to be classified as a found object artist. I have always wanted to have a lot of latitude when it comes to developing my work. I spend a lot of time in the studio, so I want to have as much fun as I can in while still approaching the work in a serious and provocative way. Typically, I develop imagery and then search out the right materials and processes to get at what I want to say.

DR: You use things like flocking and resin very skillfully – not just to conceal the identity of your materials but to make them closely resemble things they are not.  I’m thinking, specifically of Oz, where plastic hose has the color and texture of granite.  I realize that the gulf between appearance and reality has always been central your work, but now I’m feeling as if you’ve taken it to a higher level.

"Infinitesimal Star", 2009, foam, resin, wood, steel, flock and paint

RO: I have been interested, for a while now, in making work about things that are ineffable. I use a wide variety of materials and processes as a means to express things and spaces that are very difficult to talk about. In the past I have likened my materials to spores, which I can replicate and mutate into objects, inviting the audience to use their imagination: to see the Rococo as modern; packing foam as a petri-dish; rubber balls, wire and Styrofoam beads as a nervous system. Recently, I have started to juxtapose all of these domestic materials, gleaned from places like Dollar Store and Home Deport with organic materials and traditional sculpture supplies. When I bring them together, a new reality emerges and the sculptures begin singing their own shrill quirky songs. 

DR: You’ve stated that you strive to give form to essences.  But my sense is that for you, essence means something quite different from what it might mean for a scientist.  Essence for you seems to be more about the nature of how we perceive rather than the actual properties of the thing being perceived.  Care to comment?

"Oz", 2009, plastic garden valve cover, foam, resin, wire, dissected calculator numbers

RO: Yes, it is more like the way I imagine a poet trying to describe an object or a place. Although at times, since I am working with actual materials and the physical processes, there is a kinship with the scientists since we have to observe and pay close attention to what is really happening with the materials and objects and not get too lost in the theories and what I imagine the work is saying.

DR: Describe your working process.  

RO: Oh boy…that’s difficult! (Long pause.) Often, it begins as a very simple sketch or short phrase jotted down in one of the many notebooks I keep and develop over time. Depending on when the entry goes into the notebook and what I am working on at the time, its gestation period can vary dramatically — from hours to years. I often rework and scour my notebooks at the beginning of a new cycle or when I get stuck on a particular work during the fabrication process. I certainly revisit them whenever I am about to begin an installation and when I go about titling the work.  Next, depending on the idea entered into the notebook, I source the materials and begin fabrication. Occasionally, the process can be clean and neat and I proceed to the finish line in a timely manner. More likely, the piece evolves and at times even stalls only to later morph into something else. Sometimes I will recombine parts or materials from years past to make a work that gets at what I am searching for.

DR: Your work departs from any reality we know, yet it also seems well-grounded in things we do know – or things we think we know.  Is that your intention, to operate in this gap?

"Surrender", 2010, styrofoam cups, resin, wire, paint, metal flake, flock

RO:  I have always been interested in exploring what is seen and unseen.  A good example is my Architecture of a Scent series.  That gap in the work and the awkward reality it portrays stems from the source of their construction being rooted in imagery that is equal parts real and imagined. I use this strange combination of the natural and the artificial to express the tensions that exist between the past and the future, technology and the body, the rational and the mystical and the individual and society.

DR: You mentioned Architecture of a Scent, a concept that involves giving form to smell: something that has no inherent shape.   The title immediately calls to mind the sensory affliction known as synesthesia. How did you become interested in this?

RO: This is not something I believe I have or have ever studied. However, back in the ‘90s when I was making a lot of installation-based works, I was interested in making something that engaged more of the senses.  I used scent in installations many times for its olfactory responses because I liked the way it can trigger memory so much faster than purely visual works. I even liked what it did for the work when the scent was only implied, like using cut onions. They could suggest tears and crying even though, phenomenologically speaking, they had begun to whither and dry out and had long since lost their actual power. So I guess the intermingling of sensory information these days comes more from my imagination. Again, it’s closer to poets’ methods and motives than to scientists’.

detail: "Architecture of a Scent"

DR: People always liken your work to oceanic forms.  Given the way a lot of it looks it seems impossible not to.  Yet the association, at least from what you’ve said before, bothered you.  Why? 

RO: Well not always. I think it was more prevalent about five years ago when I was really interested in creating hybrids by crossing parts of the plant, animal, and mineral kingdoms with certain sensibilities from the Rococo and Art Nouveau periods. During that time, the work, I agree, really spoke of oceanic forms. The coral-like forms, in particular, spoke beautifully to the nature of hybridization.  Coral, which is really diverse order of the animal kingdom, is commonly mistaken for a plant, so when it came to creating hybrids, coral was an obvious choice. The oceanic association only bothered me when people stopped at this most obvious read of the work and didn’t take the time to see how it opened up into all the other associations I had built into the work.

DR: You’ve stated that you try to not create things from direct observation, but in this show there are at least two pieces that seem to have been directly inspired by observation.  I’m thinking of Sometime around Sunset which strongly recalls the spires of Bryce Canyon, and Badlands, which resembles a piece of the Earth’s crust viewed from a high elevation.  If so, does this represent a different working method?  The pieces are quite unlike what I’ve seen from you in the past. 

RO: The geography of Southern and Central Utah where Bryce Canyon is located has always had a very strong attraction for me. It is as if the flesh (i.e. the trees) has been scraped back to expose the bones of the place. Even the color of the rock has a way of changing my mood.

"Remembering", 2009, intaglio print

When I drive out into the red rock I get more and more excited the closer and closer I get to such places. So yes, the works are certainly inspired by these places; however they are not based on direct observation of a specific geographic location. Instead, it’s is more like a distillation all of the canyons I have visited.

Also, these works do represent a different method of working. They begin with subtraction, which is really a different sensibility from the collage and assemblage fabrication techniques I often use. I carved these forms from blocks of foam a year or two ago and then I put them away for awhile.  Then, I covered them with layers and layers of resin and finally I surfaced them this summer and fall in time for the show.

DR: You’ve spoken of translating decorative 2-D patterns into 3-D forms.  It feels like an impossible task. Clearly this is something you either have to imagine from scratch or else use some kind of computer-based imaging system to accomplish.  How do you accomplish it?

RO: Around 2000 I got the idea to make a large chandelier-like sculpture. I had always wanted to make one but could never really justify what seemed like too much of an indulgence. Then I came up with the idea of substituting song for light. This felt significant enough – it gave me the permission to begin. At the time I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into. Looking back, it turned into a very important work for me titled February’s Song (it ended up being exhibited as part of the Eureka fellowship show at the UC Berkeley Art Museum). I often think about my exhibitions as being similar to a collection of poems. With this piece I realized it was more like working on a novel. I began by making 12 motorized songbirds — 12 wind instruments that sang and pecked away up in the 6-foot branches of the chandelier. They were activated with a motion sensor and choreographed electronically.  When it came to the chandelier form, I wanted to make something grand, something in the tradition of the great European chandeliers.  Since I hadn’t actually been to I planned a trip and followed it up with a residency at Sculpture Space in upstate NY to fabricate the work since my studio in Emeryville wasn’t equipped with all of the metal working tools I needed to do the job.

During the residency, I began to realize I was at the beginning of a 5 to 10 year project. Up until then I had very little interest in all of that really decorative work I labeled the “Baroque”. Now I became obsessed. I started reading all about it, and ended up making another trip back to study, first hand, what I now realize is the Rococo.

While I was absorbing all of the decorative and applied arts of the 18th century, I began to notice that when all of these wonderful patterns were executed, they typically were carved relief or, when they did get three-dimensional, they only went as far as the planer. I couldn’t really find any examples of truly three-dimensional works that employed the more complex patterns that were present in so many of the period’s two-dimensional works.

Ultimately, I did end up making a few works that, I feel, use a more complex pattern than simply repeating a single motif to occupy three-dimensional space. However, what starts to happen is the pattern begins to get so complicated that it breaks down in a sense because it becomes too difficult to read and you lose the rhythm and lyrical qualities that where delivered two-dimensionally.

DR: What contemporary artists do you feel a close connection to? 

RO: There are many artists in the Bay Area and a handful in Sacramento who I greatly respect and feel a very close connection to in the sense of having a continued dialogue about our work. But after having gotten so obsessed Rococo and Art Nouveau, I seem to be more and more connected to works of the past. A good example is the Hauntology show the Berkeley Art Museum.  I thought it was a really great.  However, it was the Flowers of the Four Seasons show from the Clark collection that really resonated with me. Those screens of gold from the late Edo period that traditionally served as room dividers flicker beautifully between brilliantly decorated furnishing for the home and tender glimpses of the natural world. They are really engaging and affected my mood more than the works in Hauntology, which people might expect me to be more in sync with. I visited the shows with my wife and remember mentioning to her afterwards how great I felt having seen all of those works. 

DR: What do you hope people get from looking at your work?

I like to leave people with questions –questions about what it means to be human.

Learn more about Robert Ortbal.

Studio view  — Photo: Lee Fatheree

I had been looking at Bob Brady’s art for nearly 20 years, but it wasn’t until I saw an exhibit last spring of more than 50 sculptures and drawings at Oats Park Art Center in Fallon, Nevada that I really understood, in a very literal sense, where his work was coming from.  I knew a few things about the artist’s background: his hardscrabble upbringing in Reno, the illness that temporarily debilitated him as a teenager, and how he rejected Funk for a more lyrical mode of expression while earning his MFA degree at UC Davis.  But it wasn’t until I drove through the high desert – to Fallon – that I really “got” how the local environment shaped his art.

At the show’s opening I saw a lot of working people — salt-of-the-Earth types in coveralls, boots, cowboy hats and checked shirts, staring hard at the imaginary hand tools that Brady had fabricated out of wood.  They seemed to understand these objects intuitively, as if Brady’s well-crafted fictions (involving a spinning wheel, a sailor’s tool and other implements to which he attaches great spiritual significance) were, somehow, in their unnatural gallery setting, natural extensions of their everyday lives.  I also saw in Brady’s sculpture and drawings echoes of everything I had witnessed en route to Fallon: snow-capped peaks, roadside mills and mines, sagebrush-swept farms, warnings about secret military installations, trailer parks, and all the neon signs that light up Nevada’s main drags, advertising everything from casinos to beauty parlors.  I also sensed how the UFO lore that persists throughout this region helped spawn the cosmic elements that appear in many of his drawings and in more than a few of his 3-D works. 

"Natomas", 2009, mixed media, 75 x 17 x 13 inches

From the beginning of his 35-year career, Brady, 64, has had a knack for scavenging and creatively re-purposing objects, ideas and experiences.  Whether scouring the desert outside Reno for remnants of broken tools and fragments of glass, reading about tribal art, traveling to foreign countries or sifting through the detritus of his Berkeley studio, Brady has always employed an archeologist’s instinct to help guide his explorations.  He integrates his “finds” into sculptures and drawings that align with his ancient/tribal look — a singular and immediately identifiable aesthetic that has remained consistent over decades, yet pliable enough to absorb continuous embellishment and extrapolation.  This mutability within a signature style has allowed him to keep his work fresh without having to periodically reinvent himself.  

“The figure,” he states, “is the anchor, but I imagine many possibilities in regard to form. I am endlessly interested in the dynamics of line, mass, planes, distortion – setting up dialogues and battles within the piece.” What remains constant in Brady’s career is a relentless desire to expand the vocabulary of wood, his primary medium since 1989, the year he quit ceramic sculpture so that he could build large-scale forms more easily and more fluidly — without the stop-start cycles necessitated by clay and the defects that, through no fault of the artist, can occur in the firing process.

His best-known works, many of which were displayed here, are rough-hewn, long-limbed, figures that appear at life-size and in anatomically challenging poses.  Sitting, standing, kneeling, and sometimes folded into fetal positions, both freestanding and wall-mounted, his sculptures articulate a geometry text’s worth of angles, forms and negative spaces.  They mix delicateness and toughness in roughly equal measure, and employ surfaces that are gouged, abraded, painted and sanded.  Some are so lithe that air currents move limbs around the axis of the pins that hold them in place; while others, like Lepus, in which the star-painted carapace of a wooden fish draped atop a pole, feels epic, like a wedding of sea and sky.

"Patriarch", 1999, mixed media, 77 x 22 x 33 inches

Among the most memorable, if not the most mysterious pieces in this show, are the three, seven-foot-tall figures of the Natomas series.  They are so slight that they appear to be constructed of distressed pool cues; they stand in formation like a phalanx of mute soldiers, greeting visitors without exactly welcoming them.  Like the works of Stephen de Staebler and Alberto Giacometti, two key influences, Brady’s attenuated, mostly androgynous sculptures project the artist’s feelings about mortality through slouching postures and various shoe-gazing contortions.  However, within this realm there are huge variations.  His works are frequently appended with wings, architectural forms and other objects and, as such, they allow the artist to use the figure as a palimpsest of sorts to express his feelings about religion, history, science fiction, biology other topics.  In Confirmation, for example, where the shape of a gothic cathedral cloaks the head, the metaphor of religion on the brain is obvious; but you’d be hard-pressed to wrest a more specific meaning out of it.  Like the Cycladic figures that they recall, Brady’s forms, with their slit eyes, tiny heads and faces devoid of expression, are inscrutable — they mask all feeling and emotion; yet their brooding countenances point to momentous events that befell the artist.

At age 16 (and again when he was 32), he was immobilized by a form of arthritis that put him in the hospital during his senior year of high school.  It was a period of enforced contemplation, where, as Brady recalls it, “I was trapped in a place where I had a lot of time to think.”  Observers have speculated that the experience influenced the emaciated shape and the inward-looking character that is the reoccurring motif of his oeuvre.  Brady remains wary of such cause-and-effect equations, but agrees that the figures speak “of my own bodily experience and image of myself from a young age.  I can identify with being skinny – really skinny, and there was an aloneness that I felt.” 

All 4 drawings: "Untitled", 2009, mixed media on paper, 14 x 14 inches

The unforeseen upside to his illness was being able to substitute a crafts class for an algebra course he couldn’t complete in time for graduation.  “I was given an assignment to make a slab built ‘pitcher’ with no instruction or demonstration; I was only handed a bag of clay and a rolling pin.  Fifty minutes later I had it done and was absolutely in love with clay and the making process.  It spoke to me deeply…I had ability and a good design sense.  With that piece and others to follow I was keenly aware that I owned every part of it…It was mine like nothing had ever been, and it marked the first time I was really good at something.”

Detail: "Confirmation", 1998, mixed media, 87 x 10 x 11 inches

In point of fact, Brady had already proven himself to be adept at a lot of things, particularly earning money.  “The savings, he recalls, “began in kindergarten” with lawn mowing, paper routes and other kid jobs, which were then followed by gardening, painting, furniture moving, grocery checking and restaurant work – all of this before he finished high school.  While his peers were begging their parents to buy things like record players, motorcycles and cars, Brady was paying for them in cash. 

Much later, at Davis, Brady continued to forge his own path. During the mid-1970s when he was earning his MFA, Robert Arneson, the king of California Funk, reigned supreme, shaping a group of artists whose influence persists.  Brady never quite fit in.  “Everything I did harkened to another time, place or layer of history,” he recalls. “I was looking at Eva Hesse, Sol Lewitt and Arte Povera.”  In the studio, he found himself torn between figuration and abstraction, and after graduating he took a camping trip to Pyramid Lake in Nevada.  Out of that trip came a series of composite drawings that set him on his current path, first in clay, then later in wood.  “I seemed to find a way to express the figure in a way that had eluded me until then.  Death, isolation, emptiness, pared down and often attenuated, were the characteristics.  They were the characteristics I liked in the work of primitive cultures and in the art of the untrained, Art Brut.” 

Brady, however, claims no intimate knowledge of the ancient and tribal forms that seem to influence his output; nor does he agree with those who see otherworldly aspects in his work.  What he does acknowledge is that his work is becoming increasingly abstract.  A singular example is Area 51.

Foreground: "Area 51", 2010, mixed media, 113 x 31 x 31 inches

It’s an outsized piece named for the U.S. Air Force base in southern Nevada, long been rumored to be harboring the remains of space aliens and their starships.  With its rocket-shaped, nose-cone of a head set on a platform held aloft by four skinny legs, and with its oval-shaped feet adorned with painted-on polka-dot eyes, Area 51 gives palpable form to the rumors.  (It also brings to mind the illustration for the paperback edition of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” that so frightened me as a kid.)  

Brady’s drawings are equally revelatory.  Where his 3-D works have a formal weight and a finished presence, his drawings, though heavily worked, feel looser and more spontaneous – like direct pipelines to the artist’s subconscious.  From them, we can glean possible contexts for his solitary figures.  Rarely seen, they show him to be a masterful draftsman and a collagist of a high order.  In these small-scale works, which include hand stitching, Brady creates a colorful, graphic, universe populated by many of the same forms found in his sculptures: tribal masks, glyphs and extraterrestrials – all which, in the drawings, appear against starry desert skies. 

“I love signs, glyphs and symbols for their simplicity abstractness and mystery.  Connecting points in space or architecture has always sparked my interest.  Drawing constellations is a form of connecting points or dots.  I like the shapes and spatial implications that can occur.”  In one untitled drawing, Brady achieved this by tossing handfuls of rice onto a sheet of paper, spray painting it black and then removing the grains to reveal the negative spaces.  The marks that remain closely mimic a clear night sky; their random spacing feels correct, as if the artist had mapped and drawn to scale the distance separating these points of light. 

"Lepus", 2010, mixed media, 84 x 14 x 11 inches.  Photo: Lee Fatheree

Feeding off such experiments, Brady continues to push his three-dimensional works deeper into pure abstraction. In Kinderslam, a wall-mounted array of oval-shaped wooden discs, each element is painted with two black dots that read like dice “eyes”.  Taken as a whole, the piece alludes to cellular activity in a loopy, cartoonish manner, like something Fred Flintstone might have created had he been a biologically minded sculptor of wood rather than a brontosaurus crane operator.

“I don’t often develop an idea linearly,” says Brady.  “Instead, I move in a circle, picking up and discarding and eventually retracing the path of seeing and finding anew.   I am not interested in squeezing all I can from an idea.  I like variety and change.  I will knowingly and unknowingly borrow from any source, even my own history which informs even what may seem new.”  His practice, he maintains, is omnivorous: “I hover, glance and fly by not wanting to know or see too much.  I pluck the savory and put it in my bag, sometimes remembering and sometimes forgetting.” 

The result is that Brady’s art, through all its transmogrifications, remains firmly tied to the iconography he invented; yet at the same time, it is as extensible and as infinite in its potential as the desert itself.

–DAVID M. ROTH

Robert Brady: New Work @ Braunstein/Quay Gallery, December 16 to Jan. 22, 2011.
Reception: Saturday, December 18, 3:00 – 5:00 pm

Read the Robert Brady interview.

Photos: David M. Roth except where noted.

"Camouflage", 2010, oil on canvas, 90 x 80"

In the Bay Area, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more exuberant, more imaginative painter than Linda Geary. Using oil, watercolor and spray paint, Geary, over the past decade, has charted new frontiers in biomorphic abstraction. Her trademark has been boldly colored compositions built from looping, electrically charged lines set against pale washes festooned with confetti-and graffiti-like markings. At the root of her work is an obsession with collage, one of the compositional techniques on which Modernism was built, and whose persistence affirms the essential non-linear flow of human consciousness.  

"Adrenaline", 2010, oil on canvas, 60 x 48"

Collages #10, #45, #55, 2010, all 15 x 11"