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The Best of Loop: Remote Viewing @ Pacific Design Center

ARTLURKER

A MIAMI BASED CONTEMPORARY ART NEWSLETTER / BLOG

Jet Set Saturday’s: “The Best of Loop: Remote Viewing” at the Pacific Design Center

Screen cap from Secret Life by Reynold Reynolds from the exhibition The Best of Loop: Remote Viewing.

WeHo is back on Artlurker’s A-list for Art Loves Design at the Pacific Design Center. The initiative hosts a bevy of artist-driven and gallery-initiated projects within a floor of vacant design showrooms. From Carl Berg Gallery’s expansive show (see the cardboard tree constructions by Allen Tombello), to the brilliant “library” installation of painter Monique Van Genderen juxtaposed in a space by the physically daunting clay works of Roger Herman, to Bari Ziperstein’s assiduous ceramic/collage mélange at See Line Gallery’s space, the undertaking features oodles of alt-galleries with which to whet one’s whistle.

Some of the galleries and artists selected for the project leave the viewer wanting more, but the strongest show in West Hollywood’s PDC is easily found in The Best of Loop: Remote Viewing, curated by writer and video art scholar Paul Young. An elaborate exhibition featuring 39 videos from Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia, the show investigates a plethora of contemporary video art methodologies. Culled from multiple trips to the Loop video art fair in Barcelona, Young was originally asked to curate this show for LACMA just before the financial meltdown. But, as has been the case in multiple recent museum exhibitions, the host organization elected to drop the idea for financial reasons.

Paul Young

Says Young, author of Art Cinema (Taschen, November 2009): “I didn’t give up. I devoted an entire year towards finding the resources, money, venue and artists to participate. And in this financial climate, that’s pretty amazing, if I do say so myself. I’ve been talking to several museums recently about taking this show and everyone says, “Video? No way… too expensive.” Yet I managed to do it all by myself with VERY little help. If a freelance journalist can do it, anyone should be able to do it. If there are curators out there, or artists, who are frustrated by the paltry shows being presented at museums at the moment, I think they should go out there and put together a show of their own!”

This writer concurs. Despite its limited budget, Remote Viewing’s meticulous compendium of videos runs the gamut of work being made in the medium today. Shown in rotation throughout the day, with each work exploring a different concern, themes vary from the body-based to the political to the ridiculous, and Young’s thoughtful and exhaustive research is apparent. In addition to two black box spaces designed by architect Matthew Gilio-Tenan where single channel videos are projected, dozens of monitor and wall works are also included in the show. England’s Wood & Harrison create droll, physical situations that veer close to the conceptual practice of both John Baldessari and Fischli & Weiss, but possess a singular vision that makes their work unique. The Netherland’s Jacco Olivier paints colorful, layered animations depicting the banal on glass, where everyday occurrences, portraits and pastoral scenes distinctively comment on the practice of painting while observing the temporal nature of video. The hilarious is trotted out with the work of Israeli artist Nira Pereg, where dozens of flamingos in an encapsulated environment hear gunshots and “duck”…the choreography of the work couldn’t be better. But the shot-caller of the exhibition is undoubtedly the time-lapse video by Berlin’s Reynold Reynolds.  Plants grow quickly, clocks spin uncontrollably, and a woman’s corporal gesticulations played in reverse are absolutely unsettling. The stunning, nearly 15-minute work finds itself hovering between gorgeous and bewildering, with richness of intent and technological prowess shining throughout.

Screen cap from Secret Life by Reynold Reynolds from the exhibition The Best of Loop: Remote Viewing. 

“Most of the work comes from larger studio practices, and much of it is highly polished and often wildly entertaining. Yet at the same time, it’s also very expressive of the times we’re living in, and much of it conveys a distinctly different point of view,” states Young.

Pondering so many different points of view has the potential to be daunting, but Remote Viewing sturdily posits itself as the most inspiring video exhibition in California, if not the US, for 2009[.]

This post was contributed by Annie Wharton.

Susan Anderson @ Kopeikin Gallery

ARTLURKER

A MIAMI BASED CONTEMPORARY ART NEWSLETTER / BLOG

Jet Set Saturdays: Susan Anderson at Kopeikin Gallery

Susan Anderson, Mary Ashton (2009)

After getting our hair done at Cush Salon by the pixie-like Karina (who employs punk rock styling with a 90210 sensibility), we meandered over to West Hollywood’s Kopeikin Gallery for the first US solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based Susan Anderson. “High Glitz: The Extravagant World of Child Beauty Pageants” is a glitzy trip down Henry Giroux’s road of “public pedagogy” (a Situationist-like term he coined to describe the nature of the spectacle and new media).

Gallery says: “Children’s beauty pageants are a fascinating phenomenon with over-the-top aesthetics and billions in revenue. However, more than anything, they represent a strange microcosm of America itself and its values of beauty, success and glamor as reflected in the dreams of thousands of young girls. “High Glitz” elucidates the enthusiasm with which the children take part in these ritualized spectacles of crafted female beauty…”

Juxtaposing baby beauty queens with their baroque accoutrements, and finishing it all off with retouching techniques a la David LaChappelle, Anderson’s been documenting the Little Miss Sunshine phenomenon for the past three years. Traveling throughout the US to shoot her candy-coated series of disconcerting portraits on location, the new series of photographs look into the minds of the pre-pre-pubescent in an unsettling way. Setting up her studio amidst the dreams and aspirations of grandeur – or at least glimmers of hope for a sparkling crown – Anderson captures young girls made-up and glittery, ready to be judged. Along with the bambini bella in the exhibit, there are fetishistic objects and cherished components of the competitive world of glamor and façade – Cinderella-like slippers, 18 inch rhinestone tiaras and prized trophies, ribbons, and sashes – contest artifacts that delve beyond the surface and into the psychology of ritual, performance, and artifice. Under a bright and shiny veneer, while asking significant questions about exploitation and children’s roles, Anderson nimbly investigates complex, surreal representations of our youth-worshiping culture[.]

This post was contributed by Annie Wharton.

múm @ Yost Theater

Iceland's múm are at the Cutting Edge of Cool

By ANNIE WHARTON

From the Land of the Ice and Snow

With their dreamy-yet-unnerving sounds and surreal visuals, múm are at the cutting edge of Icelandic cool

James Kendall

Thinking warm thoughts

Múm’s quirky, artistic music videos are an integral part of their repertoire. The band have worked with a variety of video artists to create moving-image accompaniment to their elfin arrangements. Incorporating both Icelandic iconography and surreal fantasy tropes, they range widely in imagery from funhouse mirrors to goats to stop-motion graphic drawings.

Reached just before a sound check in Toronto last week, múm lead singer/guitarist Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason discussed how the varied video artists used for the band’s songs are selected. Conscious of the potential for syrupy arrangements, múm seem to make a concerted effort to incorporate a bit of the ugly and perplexing into their works.

“Since we come up with a theme and let the artist take off with it, it’s very important that there is a certain friction, to create nuances between the music and the videos,” Smárason said. “It can’t be too sweet, and there are actually a few múm videos that have never seen the light of day because the melding of music and visuals felt too saccharine.”

This not-too-sweet formula also pervades the music of múm (which, according to their publicist, “rhymes with ‘gloom’ and ‘doom’”). Two years after the release of their fourth album, the eccentric Scandinavian pop maestros are touring to support their new Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know. Quieter and a bit more morose than the band’s prior output, Sing Along’s songs fluidly sample, layer and re-configure sounds using a wealth of subtle methods and noisemaking techniques. From the complicated (computer sequencing, a full choir and studio mix tricks) to the quotidian (Smárason’s parents’ parakeet, a half-full pot of water and a xylophone), múm draw on many different sources for musical sounds and ideas.

“We don’t really dissect what influences what in our music,” Smárason states. “Nature and our surroundings have a lot to do with the sound, but that’s not the overarching theme of this record. And though there are some elements that are specifically Icelandic, like traditional folk and pop music from the ’50s and ’60s, we look to all kinds of music for inspiration.”

Fellow Icelanders Elly Vilhjálmsdóttir and Magnus Blondal Jóhannsson seem especially influential in múm’s songs, as do the Sugarcubes (of course) and the generation of similar artists popular in the late ’80s. Using a lot of piano, guitar, bass and drums, múm also deliver the kalimba, ukulele, marimba and vibraphone to their sonic tapestry. The current tour includes the two founding members, with Smárason on guitar and Gunnar Örn Tynes on bass, and the lineup is expanded to include friends Eiríkur Orri Ólafsson (trumpet/piano/keyboards), Hildur Guðnadóttir (cello/vocals), Sigurlaug Gísladóttir (vocals/ukulele/percussion), Róbert Reynisson (guitar/ukulele) and Samuli Kosminen (drums/percussion).

In the past, water has been a crucial component to múm’s music: Liquid noises show up frequently in recordings, the band staged the score for Sergei Eisenstein’s epic Battleship Potemkin at both the Brooklyn Lyceum and Spain’s Gijon Film Festival, and they also once performed at an Icelandic public pool and used underwater speakers so listeners had to be submerged to hear anything. This time around, múm’s members assert in their press kit that the new record is “an ode to the light in its different shapes . . . from a fading bulb to the blinding sun.”

These distinctive shades of light (and dark) are evident in the haunting melodies and mesmerizing rhythms of the new album, where those paying attention can deconstruct the complex layering of musical artistry . . . or simply enjoy a winding path paved in an assortment of intellectual fairy dust.

múm play with Sin Fang Bous at the Yost TheaterTh, 307 Spurgeon St., Santa Ana, (888) 862-9573.

Fernando Botero @ Bowers Museum

Girl on a Horse by Fernando Botero, 1961

By ANNIE WHARTON 

With shows such as Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model receiving unprecedented ratings, it’s small wonder that eating disorders continue to top the list of maladies for teenage girls. In 2007, Uruguayan fashion model Eliana Ramos died from self-starvation only six months after her sister collapsed on the runway and perished from a heart attack caused by malnutrition, causing the fashion industry to re-evaluate its idea of the waif and add a minimum body-mass-index requirement for catwalk-ers.

In the Bowers Museum’s “The Baroque World of Fernando Botero” exhibition, body dysmorphia is preponderant in a very different way. Rotundity, stigmatized in contemporary society, remains a historical symbol of wealth and fertility (consider the more than 24,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf, the famous Paleolithic sculpture with a tiny head, miniscule arms, and a large belly and breasts). This exhibit celebrates “extra” attributes while injecting a simultaneous sensitivity and brashness into many of the works.

Botero is known more for his commercialism and corpulent figures than his painterly brushstroke or psychological interpretations. The Colombian artist’s works have ostensibly occupied an anodyne place in contemporary art. While somewhat ironic and witty, they are usually safe and predictable: bucolic scenes of women more Rubenesque than even Rubens would have painted, still-lifes in which hyperbolic bananas resemble overstuffed sausages and banal bronze sculptures. Amassed from his own private collection, the first North American retrospective of his work since 1974 attempts to present an alternate perspective of the world’s most recognizable South American artist. Viewers with preconceived notions about the prosaic intent of the 77-year-old South American are deliberately challenged by a distinctive mélange of painting, sculpture and works on paper. Yes, everyone’s obese (and mostly in a beautiful way), but the exhibition of 100 pieces also brings forth works that are complex, sinister, dark and deep.

The first painting one encounters is an existential riff on the 17th-century Dutch masters. House of Marta Pintucco is an oil-on-canvas rendering of a whorehouse with conspicuous memento mori (“Remember that you will die”) undertones, a chaotic mess in which the painter has carefully imbued each of his subjects with a certain pathos. Two men sleep, one holds a whiskey and vies for action with an uninterested prostitute, while another lady struggles with her yellow brassiere. The floor is littered with a cross-eyed baby, snuffed cigarettes, a half-eaten meal and an empty liquor bottle. Marta Pintucco, the madam, clutches the doorframe with a gnarled hand, her nails painted siren-red.

Botero excels at drawing; he creates an ordered uneasiness, especially when he makes reference to the terror, violence and political instability of his country. A series of pencil, charcoal and sanguine works on paper featuring the downtrodden and destitute are particularly compelling. A Mother shows a woman holding her dying child, her head back and mouth open, tears streaming down her anguished face. And in Displaced Persons, a refugee sits on the ground among his belongings, holding his head in his hands as he wonders what has happened to his family, a little doll haphazardly placed atop the baskets, pans and bundles serving as the only reminder of his child.

The paintings and drawings produced in his signature fashion and based on masterworks by Delacroix, Ingres, Picasso and Van Gogh fall flat. Each is technically adroit and possesses a sort of whimsical humor, but they all exist as gimmicky copies of the originals. Similar are the paintings done in the style of the Spanish Colonial Baroque, in which extravagance, decoration and pious Catholicism are skillfully manifested, yet the feeling these works elicit is one of indifference. The 16 bronze sculptures in the exhibition seem a commerce-driven afterthought, though the sumptuous Italian-gray-marble Still Life takes a decent stab at redeeming the sculptor.

The show’s highlights are from the late ’50s and early ’60s, a series of paint-laden, loose and chunky constructions. Notable works from the period include The Boy From Vellacas, a haunting image of a dead dwarf, and Homage to Ramón Hoyos, in which a stylized battle is created using Fauve colors and painting techniques. The strongest of this era, Girl On a Horse, nods at Velásquez while maintaining a strong sense of self. A huge head formed by anxious, scratchy strokes takes up most of the image, while thick, Phillip Guston-like brushwork in pastel colors makes up the foreground to create a rich, dynamic tension.

Botero’s “Baroque World” is ultimately a successful foray into finding ways around the poster-print marketing for which he has become famous. And in the end, it is the fat lady who sings.

“The Baroque World of Fernando Botero” at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana,             (714) 550-0906      ; www.bowers.org. 

Maeghan Reid @ Chung King Projects

Taking iconography from a societal fringe and layering it with found materials, Maeghan Reid’s first solo exhibition of works on panel and paper is a smart investigation of the pastiche kind. With cues from Robert Rauschenberg and naturalist/California wilderness advocate/philosopher John Muir, Reid investigates nomadism with a fresh approach.

All but two of the 20 pieces in the exhibit are small in format. The sheer physicality of production in one of the larger works typifies the artist’s zealous method: Muir was crafted using many of the materials Reid lists in her artist statement (“vintage photographs from the mid-1800s, crushed velvet from Winnipeg, Turkish green satin, linoleum unearthed from a car factory in Detroit, or a stodgy piece of foam core from the alley”). Black silhouettes of eight crouching “Muir-like wanderers” surrounded by a forest of abstracted materials were compiled to create a meditative, slightly eerie piece.
But the strongest work in the show is an 8 x 10 inch, untitled, 3-dimensional construction of collaged photos on panel. The whimsy and arrangement of a colorful parasol and two crudely cut pieces of copper pasted onto a vintage print is a noteworthy plunge into the peripatetic.

Reid’s exhibition timing comes when galleries, art fairs, and museums are re-examining the old model – closing, coupling, disbanding, de-accessioning, streamlining, and morphing – whereby the references to a state of flux and nomadic life in the exhibition create a commentary on the wavering and unpredictable current state of the roving artworld. One is somehow reminded of a 1964 Twilight Zone episode, where actress Bonnie Beecher spine-chillingly crooned/seduced, “Come wander with me…”

(Published in The Magazine)

My new favorite rendition of Landslide by Fleetwood Mac

Cut @ Vincent Price Museum

We’ve all received the email footnote, “Please consider the environment before printing this” as a reminder to examine contemporary society’s excessive consumption of paper. Cut takes an opportune look at artists who snip, slash, and sliver different forms of the ubiquitous medium (one that has been used for art-making since second century China) as their mode of artistic production.

Using Chinese iconography in a very different way than they did back in the day, Pepe Mar fervently snipped photos from Asian travel magazines and incorporated “manipulated paint,” fashion photography, and artificial hair extensions to create colorful and whimsical collaged sculptures entitled Toro Cojo and Louder Than Words.

Obsession seemed a recurring theme in Cut. Detailed handiwork in Yuken Teruya’s Notice-Forest (www.grazo3.at) was juxtaposed by the artist’s comment on conservation and consumerism as he showed a painstakingly incised little tree, cut from a shopping bag and then housed inside it. And the elaborate nature of Theresa Redden’s Cone, Cube #3, and Cylinder #3 indicated infinite patience (or, conceivably, manic fixation) on the artist’s part via her tiny, beautiful objects made of meticulously symmetrical woven strands of white paper.

Shadow and absence were given import in several artists’ works, as in Leigh Salgado’s Mirror Mirror, where lingerie imagery made of ink, burned paper, and incisions alluringly conversed with the walls behind the work. Chris Naptrop’s Landing Nowhere Else was placed behind a corner wall, which seemed a technical or lighting choice, but somewhat limited the viewer’s ability to fully engage with the airy and sumptuous large-scale installation’s cast shadows and delicate drips created with sparkly paint and green tea.

Perhaps the most compelling works in the exhibit were Lecia Dole-Recio’s Untitled and Eva Struble’s Poble Nou wall, winter (vines), where both artists utilized complex collage and painting techniques. Dole-Recio’s subtle palette, versus Struble’s more vibrant one, anchored the show with their large and stunning works. Museum director Karen Rapp made judicious choices in organizing Cut, an engaging “slice” of work by seventeen diverse artists.

(Published in The Magazine, 2008)

California Video @ The Getty

The entryway to “California Video” initiated a discourse into the art form by posing John Baldessari’s post-modern challenge: "I Will Not Make Any Boring Art." The challenge was then repeated and heightened by a cavalcade of riches, hours upon hours of moving imagery made with PortaPaks, surveillance cameras, VHS, HD, and multimedia in several dimensions. Featuring the work of 58 artists and collaborative teams, “California Video” ran the gamut from monitors attached to headphones to projection screens to TV sets submerged in water. From introspective to in-your-face, from luscious to ludicrous, the intelligently installed exhibit cogently displayed one of today’s most underrepresented artistic modalities.

Several single channel videos shown on smaller monitors proved as attention-grabbing as anything more elaborate. In "Chicken on Foot" Nina Sobell investigated the ontological by smashing an egg on her knee to create a reflex-response reveal of her foot plunged into a wriggling, de-feathered hen. "In The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd," Arthur Ginsburg “mediated” the complex love story of a drug-addicted “occasional porn star” and her bisexual husband. And Paul McCarthy fashioned an hour-long gestalt by employing peculiar props and effects (a fish, a spool of celluloid, a broomstick, and his trademark insane squeals) in Stomach of the Squirrel.

Major highlights of the show included T. R. Uth Co./Ant Farm’s "The Eternal Frame," a meticulous re-make of their earlier JFK assassination détournement; Hilja Keading’s sumptuous multi-unit installation "Backdrop;" and Joe Rees’ brilliant "Target Video 77" series of punk rock antecedents to MTV. And "Marks" by Skip Arnold recorded the artist creating painterly scuffs with his own blood and boots as he propelled his body around a small white room until knocking himself unconscious.

“California Video” was unfortunately lacking in works by many of California’s younger video artists, but curator Glenn Phillips’ otherwise discerning survey was far from boring.

(Published in The Magazine. September, 2008)

hallo world...

This will be my writing blog. It'll usually be about art and music, but sometimes I'll confuse people by going off-topic. At least I hope I can confuse someone. I'll upload articles I've written...and I might write some things that will never be published (except for here). I will probably stick some music videos or performance art or video art on the blog as well. I welcome your critique, as this is a new forum for me and I'm still utilizing the training wheels on this cruiser. Love, Annie