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.