Masaaki Noda: The Spirit of Hermes                                                                                                                   (Catalogue Essay – Marathon, Greece)

By Annie Wharton, Los Angeles, California, 2010

 “All of Noda’s works in fact involve purposive design and free flow, fused to suggest heroic determination and the timeless Tao.” – Donald Kuspit

The resolute determination Kuspit refers to is reflected in The Spirit of Hermes, a monumental gift Masaaki Noda has given to the city of Marathon, Greece. Via passion and feeling in his work, the artist seems to quote the raw emotion of Abstract Expressionist icons like Wassily Kandinsky or Jackson Pollock, while there also exists in his creative output a sensibility similar to mid-century Lyrical Abstractionists.  Upon closer look, however, highly polished surfaces and stylized, precisely machined lines reveal a delicate contradiction by use of a streamlined, Modernist approach to methodology. Each work is meticulously crafted and each sculptural component purposefully positioned, thereby rendering emotionality almost irrelevant.

Born in the aftermath of nuclear destruction in Hiroshima, Japan in 1949, Noda as a young artist moved to New York in 1977. He has since produced important works and exhibitions throughout the world and developed a sensitive East/West dialectic along the way. His bird-like sculptural flames reach high into the atmosphere, bringing to mind a variety of references -- the contemplative sculptures of Brancusi, Los Angeles low-rider automobiles painted with airbrushed flaming iconography, and Tang dynasty-era Chinese ribbon dancing. This fluid commingling of divergent artistic styles and materials reveal Noda’s dichotomous approach to working with extremely heavy materials like steel or marble with the thoughtful sensitivity of a Japanese Sumi painter. Losing their excessive weight via careful choreography, hard and heavy media become airy and light as his forms dance and emanate the infinite gesture of time.

The Spirit of Hermes, his newest public art piece, installed at the starting point for the Olympic marathon, succinctly brings Noda’s stylistic production to contemporary society. Hermes (also referred to by the Romans as “Mercury”), in addition to being Zeus’ herald and the patron of Greek gymnastic games, was the multi-talented god of animal husbandry, roads, travel, hospitality, heralds, diplomacy, trade, thievery, language, writing, persuasion, cunning wiles, astronomy, and astrology. He wore winged boots and sometimes a winged cap that he used to fly between the mortal and immortal worlds, and Noda alludes to this flight with arching spontaneity and grace that traces the ludic gestural prehension of infinity.

In ancient Greece, boundary marking stones called “Hermai” were square pillars carved with ithyphallic images of Hermes and served as rural markers erected at crossroads and in gymnasia as apotropes for good luck. The speed and virility of Hermes’ legend is reified through Noda’s sleek and sexy modalities, and the sculpture particularly resonates by virtue of its placement where many athletes begin their heroic 42.195 kilometer journey.

Noda’s formalist approach shows the artist as a maker of objects whose aspirations supersede the thing as end in its self. Rather, Noda engages a reunification of techne and poiesis—the art and craft of bringing forth....

In Noda's Formalism one is reminded of Plato, who posed “eidos” as the “theory of forms,” a theory to resist the natural cycle of decay. Plato's resolve was to counter the notion amongst his contemporaries concerning the perceived problems with material flux and the affection of ideas, and posited that ideas exist apart from the material world and within the continuous unbroken line of inherited knowledge, thereby causing ideas to become durable—simply put, physical objects decay where as ideas endure. However, as much as western civilization has traditionally desired the sustainable, we can also view this wanton superiority of the head over the hand with a grain of salt. For as much as this sort of philosophical tradition might seem anachronistic, we have come to view the necessity of the artist hand to remind us of changing minds.

In viewing The Spirit of Hermes, one also encounters Heidegger’s concept that the fundamental temporalizing structures of human experience [relational totality] are not staid idealized forms, but in a state of constant historical flux (and are thus not fixed and universal).

The reflective attributes in Noda's work makes the viewer an intrinsic component to the overall visual experience; the mirror-like stainless steel adds the observer to the equation and gives greater dimensionality and depth. The act of seeing the sculpture outdoors in Marathon changes infinitely—weather conditions, time of day or night, angle or distance from the artwork, even the height of the person looking, have the potential to change the meaning and perception of the piece. This myriad of ways to see a work of art ultimately creates a unique encounter for each viewer/participant in Masaaki’s interactive endeavor.

Video Dada @ UCI

Shana Moulton, Whispering Pines 8, 2008

Since the arrival of the Sony CV-2000 camera/recorder unit in 1965 (weighing in at a trim 66 pounds), artists have been able to use cameras as an extension of their bodies to create video artworks. The “Video Dada” exhibition at UC Irvine’s University Gallery doesn’t include all of the works committed to tape, disc and memory card since then—it only feels like it does.

Seriously, is curator/UC Irvine faculty member Martha Gever trying to short-circuit our collective minds? The sheer multitude of works on display—more than 300 videos—is daunting to say the least. Culled from Gever’s own research, YouTube searches and the recommendations of other artists, the show “surveys the Internet’s amalgamation of popular culture and art, calling into question the difference between the two,“ Gever states in her brochure for the exhibition.

And the show is as stylistically and thematically diverse as it is sprawling, exploring such varied topics as sexuality, politics, drama, feminism, pop culture, animation, multiculturalism and comic relief—the sheer size of the exhibition speaks to the diversity of the medium.

The term “Dada” originated in Zurich in 1916, and the artists in the European movement eschewed the quotidian and capitalist for the nonsensical and thought-provoking. Combining an irreverent disdain for bourgeoisie lifestyle, idiosyncratic art practices and the ability to piss people off, Dada helped to turn art of its era on its head. While Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray were the most-recognized figures in Dada, the best-known woman in the movement was Berlin-based Hannah Höch, whose meticulous, amusing collages combined faceless women and machine parts to create a proto-feminist precursor to our current third wave. From abstract stratification to cut-and-paste iMovie or Final Cut editing, the Höch-inspired methodology of collage is ubiquitous in “Video Dada.”

One post-structuralist working in collage is Shana Moulton, whose surreal Whispering Pines 8  sees the protagonist—Cynthia, a reclusive hypochondriac who searches for solace via New Age self-help devices—making sand mandalas and arranging crystals on a journey into her subconscious. The mannered, droll piece deftly melds a campy combination of form and idea while establishing Moulton’s humorous and sensitive relationship to her craft.

New York magazine called Kalup Linzy a “key figure in a new generation of queer video artists.” Linzy’s videos find the artist in various states of drag in a series of soap opera-inspired pieces called Conversations Wit de Churen, where the artist plays most of the characters and does voice-overs for the others. “Video Dada” features eight of his works, each one trumping the next with elaborate sound-editing technique, maudlin affectation and self-satirical paradigm.

Commissioned by the Long Beach Museum in 1979, Nancy Buchanan’s vintage work These Creatures captures a sequence of sexually stereotyped vignettes. Using saccharine iconography and a didactic male voice-over, this second-wave feminist created the video as “an anti-ad for patriarchal attitudes,” according to a recent REDCAT catalog text, and the age at which the original videotape was transferred to digital media has added a beautiful blue tinge to the witty and political piece.

Two contributions critique the very conduit for many of the videos in the show, the Internet, and delve into issues of piracy and copyright. The band Negativland have been sued twice for copyright infringement, most notoriously for sampling U2, and founding member Mark Hosler will address these issues in a performance at the UCI campus on Feb. 4 (see the Calendar section of this issue). Annika Larsson’s video Pirate shows a gorgeous, slow-motion capture of a protest against a ban on downloading music and videos by the Swedish political Pirate Party, who have since been able to garner two seats in the European parliament.

Other show highlights include LA-based artists Miranda July and Marc Horowitz, and Israeli artists Keren Cytter and Guy Ben-Ner, but not every video in the exhibition warrants the valuable real estate of a place on the wall. Some of the video game-inspired works seem pedestrian and others in the program appear hurriedly made. Still, with a tiny budget, Gever does provide a democratic platform for the display of work. She enlisted fellow UCI professor Yvonne Rainer and some graduate students to reformat the “white cube” aesthetic of the gallery using scholarly texts handwritten in markers on the wall. The scrawled quotes of thinkers like Walter Benjamin and Andrea Fraser create a cohesive milieu for the time-based mash-ups playing on eight screens and four smaller monitors in the room.

Southern California has seen several important group video exhibitions within the last couple years, including “California Video”at the Getty, “Video Journeys” at Cottage Home and “The Best of Loop: Remote Viewing,” currently on view at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. This university show doesn’t attempt to surpass these exhibitions, but somehow its quirky mélange of hundreds of time-based works and smart exhibition essay does lift it into their realm.

“Video Dada” At UC Irvine’s University Art Gallery, 712 Arts Plaza, Irvine, (949) 824-9854; www.ucigallery.com. Tues.-Sat., noon-5 p.m. .

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aaron GM @ ltd

ARTLURKER

A MIAMI BASED CONTEMPORARY ART NEWSLETTER / BLOG

 

Jet Set Saturdays: aaron GM at ltd

By Annie Wharton

Close-up capezio index. Image courtesy of the artist and ltd.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. – Emily Dickinson

In a perfect world, everything would be white and blue and we would speak with native fluency a previously unlearned language. The blue would be Royal Blue, like the paint slathered on Yves Klein models just before they writhe around his canvases; the white a bright white like Miami cocaine or the fluorescent lights of a Berlin kunsthalle; and describing the faultless simplicity of this Santorini-esque environ, words that previously we either feared to utter or never knew existed would miraculously find their intelligible forms in our throats and mouths. At ltd with his exhibition entitled capezio, aaron GM (née Aaron Garber-Maikovska) has created a perfect world.

A plethora of wheat flour and performance-based methodology in the exhibit immediately bring to mind Vito Acconci’s 1970 Flour/Breath Piece film, where the artist was shown attempting to blow a thin layer of flour off his own nude body. capezio’s lo-fi videos find GM reiterating the vernacular of 60’s and 70’s video artists who recorded their own banal acts and gave otherwise inconsequential physical motions importance via the then nascent time-based art medium. Utilizing minimal editing techniques, repetition, and corporal action to engage the observer, GM uses his body, voice, minimal studio props, and a single lens to create a whimsical and compelling oeuvre. Summoning the pace of the 1971 I Will Not Make Any Boring Art video that sees John Baldessari repeatedly writing these lines on a chalkboard, or the 1972 Baldessari Sings Lewitt where one artist actually sings the other’s conceptual statements, the videos in this show are not tautological. More like watching the making of Tibetan sand mandalas, GM forces the viewer to decelerate and observe his capricious, soothing, and obliquely mannered technique.

The installation is comprised of quotidian components: Royal blue painter’s tape and cotton fabric, white sacks of bleached flour and bright lighting, and walls lacking any sort of color-based adornment save the geometric forms and “words” made by the tape. GM creates a character in his video works whose age (with vocal intonations redolent of both a pre-schooler and an old man) is irrelevant and intelligence is nebulous. 2 computers, 2 projections, a video monitor, and 6 soundtracks on headphones that house the moving image and sound elements of the show juxtapose a ladder wrapped in blue tape and propped against the wall. The music (including the cheesy Sail Away by Enya and Telling Stories by Tracy Chapman) versus the objects in the show protracts the artist’s interest in divergent formal, sonic, and material textures. The bread scattered about capezio – signifying both the folding of dough and the kneading of meaning and language back into itself – becomes a baroque metaphor.

GM’s language-based explorations are silly and poignant, with tape on the walls simultaneously employed both to designate space and spell out quirky acronym titles like A.Q.E.D (Always Quoting Emily Dickinson), and J.A.T.D. (Japanamation Across the Dashboard). And the collision/collusion of the low (tape and flour) and the cerebral (temporal manifestations and linguistic exercises) posture the works in a realm difficult to categorize.

donkey (2009) 00:01:44, video still. Image courtesy of the artist and ltd.

In the video called “donkey” GM does a disco-dance of sorts – choreographing his opposing hands to rub the blue ladder rungs in a somewhat masturbatory fashion while finding an off-kilter, sing-song rhythmic repetition of the words “driving a truck, feeding a donkey, playing with my soup…”– and the piece ends with the character redemptively “drinking some soup.”

JATD (2009) 00:01:01, video still. Image courtesy of the artist and ltd.

Via formalist and performative maneuvers, GM’s capezio leads the viewer with elf-like nimbleness into a blue and white dreamland for a bit and then releases them — feeling a bit lighter and slightly confused — back into reality…where, in an unwelcome Los Angeles torrential downpour, the Dickinsonian quote, “The rain is wider than the sky” aptly makes the world seem a tad more perfect[.]

For more information please visit: www.ltdlosangeles.com For the videos detailed above please visit: www.aarongm.com This post was contributed by Annie Wharton.

 

Ry Rocklen @ Parker Jones

RY ROCKLEN at Parker Jones (Los Angeles)

Annie Wharton

RY ROCKLEN, House of Return, 2009. Installation view at Parker

Jones, Los Angeles. Courtesy Parker Jones, Los Angeles.

Mixing Dadaist playfulness with multi-denominational spiritualism, “House of Return” finds Ry Rocklen turning the quotidian into objects of reverence. Each of the works in the exhibition combines banal second-hand household objects with a pious work ethic, where found objects like a mattress, curtain, carpet remnants or rubber ball are given an aggrandized mummification. Tilting a nod to Arte Povera artist Giovanni Anselmo or ’60s sculpture by Robert Morris, Rocklen also utilizes acts of devotion and repetition to create a divine effect with the detritus from which his pieces are crafted.

Open Window, a sculpture made from a decomposing curtain emblazoned with the repeated word “Medium” has a strong yet ghostly presence, as if the cloth over a carcass-like armature attempts to channel the spirit world. Turtle Soup is formed from a deflated four-square ball and rocks, where concrete poured into the concave void left by a lack of air becomes a Star of David. The least transcendent piece, Light Health Medallion 2, is a rope hung exactly eight feet high with a meticulously painted disc, where the artist’s self-made mythology surrounding the amulet, amalgamated with the Thai Buddhist tradition of tying a string around structures, feels gimmicky.

However, with Rise, Rocklen redeems himself with a castaway mattress that recalls a slumping figure. Coated with a fastidious tile treatment similar to that of Byzantine smalti artists, the sheer physicality of the work covering the bed with blue, gray and white glass tiles is either a meditative exercise or a masochistic display of painstaking labor. The colored tiles create an obsessive simulacrum of the original pattern on the mattress that covers the whole structure, but for an edge of garish gold piping. Sending signals to the unearthly, Rocklen’s numinous journey dexterously resolves tensions between concepts of recycling, nostalgia and mysticism with a notable combination of muscle and grace.

-- Annie Wharton

Ice Cube @ the Grove

Ice Cube On Being the Architect of Gangsta Rap

By ANNIE WHARTON 

Axe to grind

Rapper. Actor. Architect? Most people don’t know Ice Cube earned a certificate in architecture from the Phoenix Institute of Technology. Y’know, just in case the genre-creating music thing didn’t work out. Those classes he took in 1987 taught Cube you need a detailed plan to build anything—be it a skyscraper or a gangsta-rap anthem like “Straight Outta Compton.”

“You can’t show up to a construction site without any plans,” he said. “I realized then that you have to calculate your moves and not just be willy-nilly about how you approach anything.”

Born O’Shea Jackson in 1969, Ice Cube derived his moniker from the pimp-turned-author Iceberg Slim. Characters such as Slim were common in the treacherous South-Central hood Cube once called home.

“It is the same story that most youngsters have growing up in a bad situation,” the rap icon expresses. “The people who make it are the ones who have hope in a situation that looks hopeless. And that is the key to getting out and being successful.

“You can’t let the surroundings beat you down and erode your character and spirit,” Cube continues. “You know, I might be living in the mud, but I refuse to get dirty. It’s about using your brain and not your back.”

A dismal economy, racial-profiling police and feuding inner-city youths made the late 1980s unruly times in Los Angeles. Cube was one of the pioneers of gangsta rap, chronicling the corruption and chaos he witnessed first-hand. This gritty, graphic, West Coast style of hip-hop proved more violent and explicit than anything previously heard in popular music.

Cube joined Arabian Prince, DJ Yella, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E and MC Ren to form the Compton-based N.W.A (Niggaz With Attitude) in 1986. Evoking the crime-infested streets of his upbringing, a menacing young Cube spit rhymes more imposing than anything issued by the rap godfathers who birthed the genre in the Bronx. The infamous N.W.A title “Fuck Tha Police” sums up their view of lawmen. On other numbers, the rappers glorify drug dealing, gunplay and misogyny, creating the template for a genre carried on today most famously by 50 Cent.

N.W.A’s most celebrated rhyme-writer left the group to release the potent solo CDs AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (1990) and Death Certificate (’92), cementing Cube’s place as one of rap’s most socially aware and confrontational artists. LA’s notorious 1992 riots prompted further division between Cube and the cops.

“The riots were a buildup of the things going wrong with the policies of the LAPD and the rest of the Southern California law enforcement,” he says. “Before [‘Fuck Tha Police’], the police really could do no wrong. The exclamation point here is that there was a lot of injustice going on, and black people got fed up and decided to aim that injustice back at the police.”

After casting himself as a cop-hating, indo-smoking thug, Cube has built a second career as an actor (who has starred in kid-friendly flicks such as 2005’s Are We There Yet?), screenwriter and record producer.

The 40-year-old multihyphenate also controls the business aspects of his music. When he got frustrated with the major-label system, he started distributing his own records. He maintains that company executives don’t understand “street marketing and how to get [my] records down into the neighborhoods.”

“So I got tired of it and decided to put my money where my mouth was,” he says. “Now I can drop records when I want to. I have taken matters back into my own hands.”

Those hands are still making hard-hitting music with minimalist beats, body-dropping hooks and witty lyrics. Cube, who cites George Clinton, Bob Marley, Curtis Mayfield andChuck D. as influences, crafted a heavy dose of thoughtful darkness on his most recent record, Raw Footage. On the lead single, “Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It”—hailed by MTV as “the first great rap song of 2008”—he backhandedly dissed those who blame gangsta rap for tragic world events. When asked about the thought process behind the single, Cube says, “I’ve always wondered how you can expect to get the Crips and Bloods to stop fighting when you can’t get the Jews and Palestinians to quit fighting."

“People can hate each other over gangsta rap or religion,” he continues. “There’s really very little difference. I wanted to do a record that people can feel and not just hear, one that talks about solutions, not just problems.”

The veteran’s desire for said solutions is apparent on Raw Footage’s soulful, Mayfield-inspired “Stand Tall.” The track finds Cube encouraging listeners to hold onto their dreams. With more than 15 million records sold to date, Ice Cube has realized his own dreams by engineering a multifaceted empire that’s still standing strong.

Ice Cube at the Grove of Anaheim, 2200 E. Katella Ave., Anaheim

Dan Finsel @ Parker Jones

ARTLURKER

A MIAMI BASED CONTEMPORARY ART NEWSLETTER / BLOG

 

Jet Set Saturdays: Dan Finsel at Parker Jones

In 1976, there came an idolatrous poster. Not just any idol, but the one many a young man would intently observe when his parents went out for dinner. With blond tresses, white perfect teeth, and nipples erect, the Farrah Fawcett red swimsuit poster became the image of choice for teenage predecessors to Generation X. Dan Finsel’s détournement, a new installment to his video series I Would Love Farrah, Farrah, Farrah…that he’s entitled I Could Be Anybody. I Could Be Somebody re-packages the poster, conversations Ms. Fawcett had on her deathbed, and an episode of Beverly Hills 90210 where Brenda Walsh thinks she might have cancer. The 20 minute video, shot in the artist’s Chinatown studio, finds the artist in seemingly uncomfortable outfits – a red one-piece swimsuit, a too large white oxford, a blond wig and tennis dress, and red Vuarnet-style glasses chipped and scratched from years of use. Throughout the piece, where Finsel is seen a front of green screen, one can detect the reflection of a Dan Flavin-esque sculpture in his glasses. The installation at Parker Jones that closes tomorrow (hurry, hurry!) also has a 54 x 96 inch fluorescent light sculpture called Untitled (To Farrah), where the artist riffs on the title Flavin himself would have given the piece had he made it for theCharlie’s Angels star, reifying the works of the Minimalist icon while referring to filmic vernacular via the 16:9 ratio of its proportions.

Dan Finsel, I Would Love Farrah, Farrah, Farrah (I), 2009 [still], HD video, 20:24, Ed. 3 + 1 AP

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Gallery says: “The totality of Dan Finsel’s work is driven by a central character; one that he constructed in the Fall of 2008, and one in which he continues to embody through performance, video, and various paraphernalia. This personality is an amalgamation of various mediaconstructed subjectivities, specifically those from popular film and television. Finsel adopts these roles and their associated narratives through the character of a schizophrenic and self-obsessed man-child. Emotionally and ethically educated through the chronicles of coming-of-age teenage melodramas, “Finsel” exists within a conflation between the logic of a Peewee Herman’s Playhouse and Andy Kaufman, reality TV and filmed studio performance art…

Dan Finsel, I Would Love Farrah, Farrah, Farrah (I), 2009 [still], HD video, 20:24, Ed. 3 + 1 AP

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Shiny white patent vinyl flooring is installed in the gallery — the kind of substructure employed for sexy rap music videos and glam-y fashion spreads — and the theatricality of the floor and fluorescent lighting juxtaposed by the quirky, ironic video is unnerving. Using Stanislavsky acting techniques, “Finsel” repeats lines over and over and over into his iPhone: “If I keep talking I’ll cry,” and “I’m a private person, I’m shy about people knowing things…” The repetition creates an awkward, almost cloying presence, one that drags the viewer in and then keeps her there through angst-riddled reiteration. The cyclical nature and cadence of the piece allows one to see Finsel’s progression/regression of emotions, a process where the subject re-structuralizes television as he morphs into different incarnations of the character and his psychology. Beads of sweat on the artist’s forehead mark his torment, and the video ends with him giddily taking off the white dress to reveal that iconic red tank suit. Genitals slightly exposed, wig askew, and posed like Farrah did back in the day, Dan Finsel’s dérive unsettles the viewer just enough to elicit a similar sort of teenage anxiety as one might feel if left alone in a room with a certain poster for an extremely long time.

Dan Finsel, Untitled (To Farrah), 2009. Single tube fluorescent lights, 54 x 96 inches.

Parker Jones is located at 510 Bernard Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012. 

For more information please visit www.parkerjonesgallery.com

This post was contributed by Annie Wharton.