BLOGGING STEVEN BILLER

BLAST FROM THE PAST at Palm Springs Art Museum

2011-11-05T16:18:00.000-07:00

John McLaughlin, Untitled (1963), lithograph, Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles, collection of Palm Springs Art Museum, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin B. Smith / Courtesy Palm Springs Art Museum

Simple shapes, optical illusions and the bright, colorful legacy of modernism — that is, geometric abstraction — look as fresh as ever in an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and prints at Palm Springs Art Museum.

Drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, the works in Blast From the Past: 60s and 70s Geometric Abstractions span several movements, including Minimalism, Op art, and Hardedge, as well as geographical boundaries beyond the United States, particularly Europe and Latin America.

Often influenced by Cubist collages by Picasso and Braque, and largely reacting to emotionally charged Abstract Expressionism, artists working in a geometric vocabulary sought the essences of materials and forms in an effort to reveal universal truths. The works have definite structure, built with color and reflecting precision in organization and execution. They were interested in space and order.

Some works, such as the Ellsworth Kelly lithograph Green/Black (1972) and the Piero Dorazio oil Colorando (1967), take a relatively lyrical approach to forms and colors, while others, such Jesus Rafael Soto’s 1969 wood-and-metal wall relief Cuatro Modulaciones (Four Modulations) and graphics by a range of artists from Josef Albers and to Omar Rayo, prove more faithful to the grid.

Lorser Feitelson, Untitled (1964), gloss and matte enamel on canvas,

collection of Palm Springs Art Museum.

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Lorser Feitelson Courtesy Palm Springs Art Museum

Soto, a Venezuelan, was among the most influential figures in Programmed art, better known as Op art, represented in this exhibition by Victor Vasarely, Yaacov Agam, Arthur Secunda, and others. Op art, which plays in the sphere of perception, shimmers with the optical effects of patterns and adjacent colors. They appear to float off the surface.

California Hardedge and Minimalism are represented by a classic stripe painting by Karl Benjamin and the sublime, untitled lithograph by John McLaughlin.

Benjamin, McLaughlin, Lorser Feitelson (also in the exhibition), and Frederick Hammersley pioneered Hardedge painting, a term coined in 1959 by the art historian and critic Jules Langsner, who brought the artists together for the seminal LACMA exhibition Four Abstract Classicists. An example of Feitelson’s work appears in Blast From the Past, as does a work by his wife Helen Lundeberg, whose geometry took its cues from the landscape.

Ultimately, viewers will marvel at how artists from disparate parts of the world — most of whom were unaware of the others — propelled geometric abstraction to great heights. Exhibitions like Blast From the Past ensure the exploration continues with contemporary artists, such as Tim Bavington and Patrick Wilson.

Blast From the Past: 60s and 70s Geometric Abstractions continues through Dec. 23, 2011. Visit www.psmuseum.org.

MICHAEL ASCHENBRENNER at SAC Arts Gallery

2011-10-04T00:19:00.000-07:00

Palm Springs Art Museum recently acquired
a work from Michael Aschenbrenner's Damaged
Bones series for its permanent collection.

The role of the artist in times of war, historian Howard Zinn wrote, “is to transcend conventional wisdom, to transcend the word of the establishment, to transcend the orthodoxy, to go beyond and escape what is handed down by the government or what is said in the media.”

Even Picasso said, “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.”

None of this crossed Michael Aschenbrenner’s mind as he lay in a San Francisco orthopedic ward for 11 months, recuperating from surgery to his knee. A paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Division on a reconnaissance mission in Vietnam, he fell down a mountain and tangled and twisted the knee in some vines. He walked on it for two days before being airlifted to Japan for the first surgery and then to the United States.

Aschenbrenner knows war is hell. And so is making Damaged Bones, the series he started (and stopped and revisited) seven years after returning from Vietnam. Ten years had passed before he confronted the source of his subject. “I saw a lot of people die,” he says. He also saw a lot of amputees. “It was haunting me in dreams.”

The sculptor’s process is a metaphor for his war experience. Rather than blowing glass, he expresses himself physically and emotionally by stretching and pulling it. “Pulling makes for pieces that are substantial,” Aschenbrenner says. “They’re solid and heavy.”

Working from a puddle of molten glass, he must act fast and make quick decisions, which now seem intuitive. “Making art depends upon noticing things — things about yourself, your methods, your subject matter. [In my process] there’s a fluid movement, like a dance — through the hands, the tools, and into the piece. I learned how to control the material. I learned that I was doing this dance.”

He bandages each limb with cheesecloth, surfaced with wax, which he sometimes colors with powder. He also affixes splints with “field-expedient” twine and rope.

Aschenbrenner’s 25-piece Damaged Bones installation appeared in Glass: Material Matters at LACMA in 2006. Earlier this year, Palm Springs Art Museum added a large work from this series to its permanent collection.

Damaged Bones will be exhibited through Nov. 5 in the SAC Arts Gallery group show of Los Angeles and Orange County artists, including Hilary Baker, Stephen Callis and Linda King. SAC Arts Gallery at the Santora Building is located at 207 N. Broadway, Suite Q, Santa Ana, CA 92701. Call 714-564-5615. Gallery hours: Thursday-Saturday, noon-4 p.m.

DONALD WEXLER at Palm Springs Art Museum

2011-05-17T20:48:00.000-07:00

Leff Residence (1957), Palm Springs, CA, Wexler and Harrison. Photo: Julius Shulman and Juergen Nogai, 2005
© Juergen Nogai, Courtesy Palm Springs Art Museum

Donald Wexler / Courtesy Palm Springs Art Museum

I wrote this article for the May/June 2011 issue of art ltd.

One of the first structures — in fact, one of the first signs of life — you encounter after exiting Interstate 10 at Highway 111 and winding around the north face of Mt. San Jacinto toward Palm Springs is pointedly modern. The "flying wedge" canopy on Swiss architect Albert Frey's 1965 Tramway Gas Station is as angular as it is iconic. Now the resort town's official visitor center, the restored structure's geometry offers a hard-edged juxtaposition to the natural shapes of its mountain backdrop. And like the monolith in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the conspicuous little gem signals something special ahead.

Midcentury modern architecture permeates Palm Springs and shapes its retro-party vibe. It's the architecture of optimism — low slung and wide open to let the sun shine in. Here, a fanatical community of aficionados, enthusiasts and preservationists prepare all year for Modernism Week, which draws tens of thousands of architecture buffs from around the world each February. Next to the Palm Springs International Film Festival a month earlier, Modernism Week has become the town's most important annual cultural event.

Much of the week's program unfolds at Palm Springs Art Museum, which in recent years has mounted various architecture-oriented exhibitions in its main galleries, including Julius Shulman: Palm Springs in 2008 and Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner in 2010. This year, Steel and Shade: The Architecture of Donald Wexler (on view through May 29) celebrates yet another slice of Desert Modernism.

You enter the exhibition by walking under a full-scale sectional replica of a signature Wexler "folded" metal roof, toward a large-scale Juergen Nogai photograph of the 1962 Wexler and Rick Harrison Steel House (2010) in the north part of town. Drawn largely from the Donald Wexler Collection in the ENV Archives-Special Collections at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, the exhibition includes original working and presentation drawings, photographs (including several by Shulman), models and a new, slickly produced video.

Now 85 and in delicate health, Wexler was one of the movers and shapers of Desert Modernism, practicing in what he calls the "golden age" of California architecture from the immediate post-war years through the 1970s. Wexler graduated from University of Minnesota and moved in 1950 to Los Angeles to work for Richard Neutra. He occasionally visited Palm Springs and, in 1953, took a position here with William Cody. Inevitably, Wexler started his own firm and worked almost exclusively in and around Palm Springs. He designed schools, commercial buildings and dozens of houses, most notably his late-'50s prefabricated Steel Homes, Palm Springs International Airport (1965), Maurice and Dinah (Shore) Smith Residence (1964), Wexler Residence (1955), Royal Hawaiian Estates (1960) and Larson Justice Center (1996).

Keenly aware of the extreme landscape and climate, Wexler tailored energy-efficient designs for the harsh desert. He used mostly steel, glass and concrete — inorganic materials that hold up in the blast-furnace summers and require little maintenance compared to natural materials. Like other modern architects working in the desert, Wexler favored deep eaves and overhangs to protect his structures and their inhabitants from the unforgiving sun. Likewise, shaded walkways lead to many of his commercial buildings — most notably the dramatic arched concrete canopy jutting from downtown's Spa Resort Hotel, which he designed with Harrison, Cody and Philip Koenig.

Wexler's prevailing style was minimal, functional and innovative. He introduced prefab steel construction almost a generation before the rest of the country caught on and solar collectors before President Carter installed panels on the White House (President Reagan removed them). The Steel Homes propelled Wexler to national acclaim as a pioneer in his collaboration with U.S. Steel Corp., Alexander Construction Co. and structural engineer Bernard Perlin, who held the patent for the all-steel modular system. Until recently, architects including Ana Escalante and Lance O'Donnell would consult with Wexler on restorations and additions to his buildings. He also influenced L.A. architects Linda Taalman and Alan Koch, who designed the prefab steel and glass iT House in the High Desert, near Joshua Tree National Park.

In the sprawling landscape of desert architecture, Wexler's work still stands out. His design and aesthetic pass the test of time, and a few of his structures have become iconic. For generations to come, architects will refer to his no-nonsense minimalism, functionality and efficiency. Wexler, after all, was a pioneer in the movement toward simple and sustainable living — the holy grail of new architecture.

NORMAN ZAMMITT at Michael H. Lord Gallery

2011-03-19T23:40:00.001-07:00

My article/review appears

in the March/April 2011 issue of art ltd.

DAVID EINSTEIN at Michael H. Lord Gallery

2011-03-01T23:00:00.000-08:00

Light Echo Green (1979), acrylic on canvas, 70x50 inches

It would be simple to partition 40 years of David Einstein’s art into three symphonic movements — veils, marks, and gestures — but in the bridges between them, dynamic and curious ideas prevail. In these transitions, experimentation energizes, inspires, and presses the artist beyond the boundaries of his previous exploration.

Over the course of a career, a language surfaced in Einstein’s paintings — a loose, intuitive vocabulary that evokes a feeling and advances the artist’s narrative. Whether working on handmade paper, canvas, or even fired-and-glazed clay, his paintings almost always reference nature and exude a Zen quality.   

His early 1970s Color Veil paintings — placid, translucent, and rich in color — appeared in New York at the same time the Light and Space Movement emerged in Southern California, the same way Pop Art and geometric abstraction seemed to come of age simultaneously on both coasts by artists who had never heard of their counterparts on the opposite coast, much less seen their work. Hardly uncanny, the only coincidence is that Einstein has been living and working in Palm Springs for 20 years. If only he had kept more than a few of his favorite examples from the series, an installation would demonstrate the Color Veil and Light Echo paintings’ mystical quality and an undeniable, yet unintentional (or inconceivable) kinship to the West Coast movement and aesthetic.   

Light Echo (1997), oil stick on paper, 18x23 inches

Neither series was lost in time, however. In 1996, Georgetown University lecturer Ori Z. Soltes, curator of an exhibition at B’nai Brith Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., selected Einstein’s early work, which also appeared in Soltes’ book Fixing the World: Jewish American Painters in the Twentieth Century (University Press of New England, 2003). Einstein’s 1975 Light Echo (60x48, acrylic on canvas) sweeps a full page, as Soltes proposes a connection between the artist’s heritage and artwork, pointing to Exodus’ reference to the parokhet (curtain or veil) “that separates the Holy of Holies wherein the Tablets of the Law reside, from the outer regions of the Tabernacle, which is the tangible intermediary between the intangible God and the Israelites.” 

 Einstein is first and foremost a colorist, and the paintings explored color theory without religious pretense. (ARTnews book reviewer Stephen May noted that Soltes “has an enviable ability to uncover Jewish dimensions not readily apparent.”)

More impressively, Einstein’s Light Echo appears in the book alongside excellent examples by Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, and Philip Guston.   

Infinity (2000),
acrylic on canvas,
54x27 inches

The enduring quality of Einstein’s paintings lies in the distinctive translucency — or, as he describes, “piercing the veil and going to a higher level through use of color and inner illumination. … I’m creating a consciousness of how I interpret the world around me. I’m at complete peace with these paintings.”   

In the 1980s, Einstein began working with textured surfaces and mixed media, producing paintings and collages on canvas and paper. He used Roplex (a raw acrylic resin) and other industrial materials as metaphors for clouds, mountains, and Earth. The colorist in him was exacting about mixing the colors and values he saw in nature. What endured most from this period was his passion for making marks, which punctuate his paintings from the 1990s until today. First there were expansive acrylic color fields with bold marks in oil stick. Then came the Earth-and-sky paintings in the Rincon Point series, named for the surfing destination off Highway 101 between La Conchita and Carpinteria, near Santa Barbara.   

Again, light and space (lowercase) consumed his eye and manifested in his paintings, leading to the Infinity series, between 2000 and 2005. Swaths of blue in fluctuating values mimic the undulating water. They hark to the translucent Light Echo paintings’ layers of color and inner luminosity. But these paintings have small, sparse but boldly colored marks on them, conveying a dimensional illusion.   

Wabi Sabi #17 (2007), sumi-e ink on paper, 25x38 inches

Einstein then turned from canvases to handmade paper, enjoying the intimacy of scale and the challenge of surface. A Zen, wabi sabi spirit permeates this series, Aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The series traces to his late-1960s studies, particularly a brush with sumi-e painting at a Zen monastery in Kyoto, Japan, where calligraphy influenced his earliest marks. “I went there to understand the spiritual way of dealing with nature, universe, and family,” Einstein says. “It was exciting to go to Japan as a Westerner, because [the traditions] went back hundreds of years. And I have always had an affinity for paper. I love the surface, the texture. Making the paper is a meditative experience.”   

The name of the Aleph series is more symbolic than religious. “Paper has been around for thousands of years, since the beginning,” he says. “Aleph represents the beginning; from darkness comes the light. The marks are the evolution. They’re done directly, spontaneously, and intuitively.”   

The marks sometimes have a figurative quality that creates dialogs when viewing the paintings in pairs or groupings. The intimacy of the scale and surface and the sensuality of the finished pictures call for a philosophical interpretation — one concerned with peace and understanding.   

Einstein’s gesture is free and easy, his composition mindful of space, light, and shadows cast in watercolor along the edges of certain marks. His enduring connection to nature reveals itself in blues, yellows, greens, and browns that refer to the landscape. At one point, in 2009, the gestures took the shape of hearts, hence the Heart Rings series.   

His most recent canvases — with their marks and painterly drips and splatters — venture into traditional figure/ground relationships, as well as the surface texture. “The process allows me to resolve a lot of conflicts,” Einstein says. “Surface issues, figure/ground relationships — they’re compositionally challenging.”   

Light, color, and nature offer endless exploration for this artist. “I’m a process painter,” Einstein says. “It’s a growing process. It gets down to understanding and resolving these compositional issues and dealing with the surface.” 

 Einstein carries the advice of his 1960s mentor, Brice Marden, who imparted the uncompromising philosophy of sticking to your guns. “[Josef] Albers did squares for 40 years and I give him a lot of credit for exploring shape and color,” Einstein says. “I still get as excited in the studio now as I did 40 years ago.”   

What comes next is a matter of conjecture; however, if he truly sticks to his guns, Einstein will produce work rich in light, color, and dimensionality. These qualities define the artist.

SHOOTING THE LIFE FANTASTIC at Heather James Fine Art

2011-01-23T17:15:00.000-08:00

Carlos Betancourt, Re-Collections X, Xray (2010), c-print mounted on Plexiglas, 1/1 ed.

Three of the most exciting and important photographers working today explore the elaborately staged, exaggerated, and fantastic to reveal their vision in lush, all-consuming images. Shooting the Life Fantastic, which I co-curated with Chip Tom, examines highly choreographed photographs and photo-based constructions, or collages, created by Carlos Betancourt, Martin Denker, and David LaChapelle. Their images, epic and intimate, push the boundaries of realism, wear artificiality on their surface, and blur the line between cinema and photography, reality and fantasy, and what has happened and what is to come.

Carlos Betancourt, Of Crowns and Journeys II (2010),
42x42 inches, edition of 5

Betancourt, a Puerto Rican artist born to Cuban parents who lives and works in Miami, uses every ounce of his multicultural heritage to infuse his work with memories and artifacts that pay homage to his roots while also exerting a wildly contemporary, and conceptual, aesthetic. His photo-based art reflects his personal flair, love of life, and rich appreciation for the intimate parts that make up his bright, dynamic sum. We can identify most objects in Betancourt’s Re-Collections images, and we can sometimes deduct their meaning. However, only the artist — and those closest to him — knows the deeply personal experience that inspired each object’s thoughtful placement. The final pictures are photo-collages of hundreds of images — seashells, jewels, flowers, people, and kitschy objects — that Betancourt culls from a bank of his own photographs. He balances humor and glamour, representation and abstraction, spontaneity and discipline, past and present — all with unmistakable passion and signature bravado.

Martin Denker, CandylandTV (2008), c-print on Diasec
in artist's frame, 72x96 inches, edition of 6

Denker creates colorful photo-based collages that burst with countless images he gleans from a variety of media — slick graphics, advertising photography, video games, graffiti, even art history. His shiny, large-scale pictures become fantastical, surreal, and wonderfully abstract. Denker, a German artist, studied under Thomas Ruff at the Art Academy of Dusseldorf and worked as an assistant to Andreas Gursky before fully asserting his own dynamic vision and aesthetic to appreciable acclaim.

David LaChapelle, Amanda Lepore-Addicted to Diamonds (1997), c-print mounted on dibond, 39 5/8 x 28 3/4 inches, 13/17 ed.

LaChapelle, whose first professional job was shooting for Andy Warhol at Interview magazine, is a rock star among celebrity photographers. Like Warhol, he uses beauty to attract people. He has photographed the A-list — from Leonardo DiCaprio to Marilyn Manson, Cameron Diaz to Hillary Clinton. His painstaking process and distinctive style power his longevity. And his work is as daring and controversial as it is iconic. LaChapelle boldly confronts society’s overindulgences in images such as Amanda Lepore – Addicted to Diamonds, which finds the bare-breasted bombshell, her eyes rolled backward, appearing to be tasting a diamond from one of five lines of the gems situated on a circular mirror with a rolled up $500 bill at the ready. LaChapelle’s photographs offer a visceral thrill and a full-body rush.

Shooting the Life Fantastic continues through March 30 at Heather James Fine Art, 45188 Portola Ave., Palm Desert, CA 92260. 1-760-346-8926.

BACKYARD OASIS SYMPOSIUM (Day 2) at Ace Hotel & Swim Club

2010-11-26T16:50:00.000-08:00

Edris House, designed by E. Stewart Williams. Photograph by Julius Shulman (Getty Images)

If day one of the Backyard Oasis Symposium revealed how film, television, and shelter magazines seduced middle-class white families away from cities and into modest, largely modernist, houses with swimming pools and walls of privacy, then day two was about how they settled in.

Flickers of ’60s rebellion permeated Robert Atkins’ presentation — perfect for the retro-hip Ace Hotel & Swim Club, which hosted in an all-glass space with a classic midcentury pool in close view. Atkins, an art historian and culture critic with a UC Berkeley pedigree, grew up in a California ranch-style house (emphasis on “style” because he was disappointed that he didn’t get a horse), but rattled off a long list of beach bands, from the Beach Boys to obscure short-lived groups. Atkins conceded he quit swimming “only because it interfered with surfing.” The lure of the ocean triggered his resonating question: Do we think of the pool as an extension of the ocean? And, hypothetically, did William Randolph Hearst, whose San Simeon castle is a state historical monument, think of the Pacific Ocean as his backyard oasis?

Clearly not a church crowd, symposium participants sat up when Tyler Stallings flashed beefcake images from old Physique Pictorial magazines. It was hardly for shock value. Stallings, director of UC Riverside’s Sweeny Art Gallery at the Culver Center of the Arts, juxtaposed 1940s-’60s beefcake and 1970s skatecake, the abandoned backyard pool domain of the Z-Boys skate invaders. Bob Mizer’s homoerotic beefcake images held a pretense that the buff, one-cloth-from naked men were posed to promote health and fitness. “His approach was to create a better body consciousness,” Stallings said, noting the shifting view of masculinity as he segued to Craig Stecyk’s photographs of Santa Monica’s Dogtown, the pool-scouting Z-Boys, and a network of pool surfers who cast a dystopian perception of the abandoned pool. “His depictions of communal masculinity were a challenge to family unit,” Stallings said.

Using many images drawn from Palm Springs Art Museum’s collections of Bill Anderson photographs, the host institution’s deputy director for art and senior curator, Daniell Cornell, projected the pool as an element of Palm Springs living: golf courses and the mountain range were extension of the leisure ideal. Cornell zeroed in on the ubiquitous pool float, calling it an underappreciated prop on the set — probably because the pool is where bodies, not floats, were on display. He said that the Anderson images — many shot (looking like candid snapshots) at the Racquet Club — were “spectacles for physique and health, staged to entice people to come to Palm Springs — selling the glamorous experience of the stars.“

The final panel, “Modern Design for Living,” turned to more practical considerations of the “backyard oasis.” Wendy Kaplan, department head and curator of decorative arts and design at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, focused on indoor-outdoor furniture, pointing to a 1952 article in House Beautiful that prescribed designs — largely by Architectural Pottery and Van Keppel-Green — that look as good from the inside as they do outside. Incidentally, Kaplan is co-curator of California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way, a LACMA exhibition scheduled to open in October 2011.

Fallingwater, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

Alice Friedman, who titled her presentation “Water,” demonstrated how Julius Shulman used water to glamorize his images — including the Richard Neutra-designed Kaufmann House in Palm Springs and the Kaufmanns’ Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Fallingwater property in western Pennsylvania. She proposed this was a compelling effect as early as Louis XIV at Versailles to Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, and that Shulman used it while shooting other properties by Albert Frey, John Lautner and E. Stewart Williams.

Backyard Oasis project coordinator Robert Stearns focused squarely on the evolution of post-war swimming pool design. In a presentation called “From Blow-up Toys to Refined Design: Imaging the Southern California Swimming Pool,” Stearns — a board member of Palm Springs Art Museum’s Architecture and Design Council and president of ArtsOasis, dedicated to growing the desert’s creative economy — conflated the new architecturally designed pools with population growth and sprawl and advances in technology.

The symposium helped shaped the ideas that Cornell will consider when selecting images for the March 2012 exhibition Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography from 1945-1980. The exhibition will present vintage and contemporary photographs, fine and commercial, chronologically (rather than by topics presented in the symposium), and the accompanying book will provide a deeper examination through use of advertisements in shelter and lifestyle magazines and other media.

The event ended with a tour of six Palm Springs houses with pools that reflect the ideas shared over the two days:

Loretta Young House

• Loretta Young in the Deepwell community

• Twin Palms house, designed by Palmer and Krisel

• Marjorie and Bill Edris House, designed by E. Stewart Williams

• Raymond Loewy House, designed with Albert Frey

• Kaufmann House, designed by Richard Neutra

• Levitt House in Las Palmas

At the final toast around the pool at the Tennis Club, Bill Butler told the history of the property.

For more information about Backyard Oasis, contact Brooke Devenney at 760-322-4818.

BACKYARD OASIS SYMPOSIUM (Day 1) at Palm Springs Art Museum

2010-11-23T23:50:00.000-08:00

David Hockney painted A Bigger Splash in Califomia in the early summer of 1967.

In Palm Springs, the last thing you want to do by the swimming pool is to sit around and intellectualize it. But that’s precisely what about 50 of us did last weekend — academics, museum curators, photography and architecture enthusiasts, artists and writers.

As part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time initiative — consisting of about 60 Los Angeles-area cultural institutions — Palm Springs Art Museum organized the Backyard Oasis Symposium as a springboard to its 2012 exhibition, Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography from 1945-1980.

On day one of the symposium, we were content in the museum’s Annenberg Theater, while very un-Palm Springs weather shuttered the town with rain, cold, and 40 mph gusts. From our bright orange seats, we listened to panelists present their research into social and artistic cultures in post-World War II Southern California — particularly how the image of water, idealized in the backyard swimming pool, created a regional identity that Hollywood and mass media sold as a modernist utopia.

The phenomenon began in the 1940s and ’50s rush into suburban family life, where wholesome values, leisure, and privacy prevailed. The feeling of openness and freedom (from urban confines and the atomic threat) had political undertones; overwhelmingly white, middle-class families populated the modest houses with the modest pools, and they represented an emerging consumer market, said Elaine Tyler May, professor of American studies and history at University of Minnesota who earned her Ph.D. in U.S. history from UCLA.

Jennifer Watts, curator of photographs at the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, looked to shelter magazines — particularly House Beautiful and House and Garden — to demonstrate how media celebrated this modern lifestyle, characterized by indoor-outdoor living. The backyard swimming pool was an aesthetic environment, a backdrop for all other activity. “Swimming was almost besides the point,” she said.

Watts projected the cover image of a September 1956 issue of Look magazine, calling attention to issue theme, “The West,” and the standard-issue blond bombshell reclined by the pool in front of a classic Cliff May ranch house. Magazines “planted the seed of desire to which people responded,” she said.

At the time, no one capitalized more than Paddock Swimming Pool Company, which put “the ultimate luxury” within reach of the middle class. Paddock and other companies delivered on the promise of a carefree lifestyle. California felt most of the pool-building boom of the 1950s and ’60s. By 1959, Watts said, about half of all pools built were in the Golden State. And for good reason: Private pools freed spirits. “Walls allowed people to not be on their best behavior,” Watts said. “It was unbridled pleasure, hedonism ...”

But there was more at play. Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne referred to the leisurely way of life — no longer strictly the domain of the elite — in the context of U.S. exceptionalism. In Los Angeles, your modestly sized modern house could have the sheen and glamour that Hawthorne poignantly represented in a slide showing the minimalist paradise of David Hockney’s iconic painting The Splash.

In successive presentations, Jeff Wiltse, associate professor of history at University of Montana, suggested the suburban walls actually imprisoned families in their homes and affected the diminishing role of public swimming pools — which meant, in a time of desegregation, that black families living in urban areas would have less or no access. Local politicians had to slip swimming pools into ballot measures that emphasized playgrounds, zoos, golf courses, and senior centers.

Photographer and filmmaker Allan Sekula introduced a psychosexual dimension to the conversation, noting associations between the female body and the sea and that “the one sport where women excel above men is long-distance swimming.”

Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, an independent art writer and curator in Los Angeles, referenced Deep End, a summer 2009 group show at The Company, a Los Angeles gallery, that focused on personal childhood, joining fear and fun, and the pool as a transcendent, spiritual escape.

Julius Shulman's iconic photograph
of the Kaufmann House on the
May 2009 cover of Palm Springs Life

Dick Hebdige cast a darker cloud, suggesting, “The swimming pool hasn’t been a happy place.” Hebdige — who teaches art, film, and media studies at UC Santa Barbara, where he also oversees the Desert Studies program — poetically described the nefarious swimming pool as “a trap, murk, sink, hole in waiting, a deathtrap even.” For all the shiny happy activity around the pool, he said, there’s sleaze, promiscuity, murder, suicide — “a body in the pool.” He even took a shot at the “uninhabitable bliss” of the Richard Neutra-designed Kaufmann House in Palm Springs before he concluded, “The backyard oasis in 2010 is beleaguered, needed like a hole in the head.”

The symposium’s keynote speaker, Donald Albrecht, conflated Hollywood with the evolution of pool culture through its representation in film. Curator of architecture and design at the Museum of the City of New York, Albrecht put the first day’s addresses into cinematic perspective, asserting filmmakers have long drawn on water to express love, sex, and death. And he wasted no time getting to the elaborate advertising campaigns and marketing tie-ins that merge fantasy and reality.

“L.A. is the place where pools began to change shape, with the introduction of gunite,” he said, referring to the mixture of cement and sand sprayed onto contoured surfaces. “Hollywood took advantage of this. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks created the curvilinear Pickfair pool at their Beverly Hills home.” Albrecht projected an image of the couple fully and formally clothed in a canoe in the pool — “a demure, innocent Mary.”

Albrecht proceeded into a whirlwind through early films, some silent, that rely on water in their plots — from Tarzan films where the title character lures a women into his den (some kind of pool of water) to aqua-musicals such as Million Dollar Mermaid, a biography about a swimmer, Annette Kellerman, played by Esther Williams.

Ads parlayed the fantastic story into commercial products, including one featuring Williams in Cole of California swimwear. Studios, clothing and product manufacturers, and department stores collaborated to facilitate life’s imitation of art.

Coming on day two: Public and Private Spaces, Modern Design for Living, and a tour of six Palm Springs pools (including the “uninhabitable” Kaufmann House, made famous by the Julius Shulman photograph).

Palm Springs Life ART+CULTURE releases digital edition

2010-11-18T23:45:00.000-08:00

If I've been slow to post recently, it's at least partly because I've been working on the new issue of Palm Springs Life ART+CULTURE, which reaches Palm Springs Life subscribers later this month and newsstands in the first week of December.

The Winter/Spring 2011 edition of Palm Springs Life ART+CULTURE includes:

• features on John Baldessari (cover), collectors of installation art, and early desert painters
• profiles of local artists Cristopher Cichocki and Carlo D'Alessio
• a comprehensive exhibition schedule and gallery and museum directory
• and much more

Click here to download the FREE digital edition. Or pick up the print edition at galleries and newsstands throughout the Coachella Valley, as well as at Palm Springs Art Museum, Los Angeles Art Show (January) and other locations and events.

If you want more, pick up Palm Springs Life every month (each issue includes Desert Guide). In the January issue, art writer Carol Cheh takes you inside the Masters of Impressionism and Modern Art exhibition at Heather James Fine Art in Palm Desert. Don't miss the magazine's annual Modernism Issue in February. And, in March, New York-based art writer Tim Kane gives you the inside story of The Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection that once hung at their Sunnylands estate in Rancho Mirage and now belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

To subscribe, call 1-760-325-2333 or visit www.palmspringslife.com.

BACKYARD OASIS at Palm Springs Art Museum

2010-11-10T20:49:00.000-08:00

The Hockney Swimmer (1978) by Michael Childers

Glamour and leisure, sex and voyeurism, consumerism and status, and fun and family: This is swimming pool culture in Southern California. And it’s the subject of an unprecedented collaboration of curators, historians, academics, critics, and artists, who converge on Palm Springs on Nov. 20-21 for symposium called Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography, 1945-1980.

In February 2012, Palm Springs Art Museum will mount an exhibition with the same title.

Meanwhile, this brain trust will examine the impact of the swimming pool on post-World War II social and artistic cultures in Southern California. “It explores how the image of water, exemplified by the backyard pool, created a regional identity, embraced by its inhabitants, and promoted to the world at large,” according to the event’s organizers.

Raymond Loewy House, Palm Springs, California (c. 1950)
by Bill Anderson. Courtesy Palm Springs Art Museum

Backyard Oasis is part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, a $10 million Getty Foundation initiative that assembles more than 60 regional cultural institutions to tell the story of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene. The programs continue through April 2012.

“What began as an effort to document the milestones in this region’s artistic history has expanded to become a great creative landmark in itself,” says Deborah Marrow, interim president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust. “In fact, the story of Pacific Standard Time is so big, it needs this region-wide collaboration to tell it.”

Other institutions participating in Pacific Standard Time include LACMA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Hammer Museum, the Getty Museum, more than half a dozen university museums and programs in Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County, and Santa Barbara.

The Backyard Oasis symposium unfolds at Palm Springs Art Museum, with three addresses and panel discussions: “Suburbia and the Cold War,” “Changing Perceptions: Selling the Backyard Oasis,” “What Happened to Suburbia: A View from the Artist’s Studio,” and Donald Albrecht’s keynote address, “Hollywood Aquacade.”

It continues the following morning at the Ace Hotel & Swim Club in Palm Springs with a program including two more panels — “Public and Private Space” and “Modern Design for Living” — followed by a pool tour sponsored by the museum’s Architecture and Design Council.

INFORMATION: Contact Brooke Devenney at 760-322-4818
RESERVATIONS: Call the museum box office at 1-760-325-4490

A virtual hub for Pacific Standard Time, www.pacificstandardtime.org, offers an informational and experiential portal for the project. Visitors can design their own tours of the exhibitions and programs, download them to handheld devices, and carry the information along on their route.

OUTSIDE THE LINES at Royale Projects

2010-11-02T22:32:00.000-07:00

A group show of drawings — colorful, disarming, sophisticated — punctuates a bright season opener for the Indian Wells gallery Royale Projects. The show, Outside the Lines: The Drawing in Contemporary Art, has audacity (Dennis Oppenheim), mind-numbing attention to detail (Debra Scacco), transcendent color (Dennis Koch), structural precision (Tony DeLap), and star power, albeit subtle (Sol LeWitt).

Koch’s untitled 58x40-inch pencil crayon drawing immediately wins attention. Known for his psychedelic “owl eye” paintings, the Los Angeles-based artist is a pure colorist whose works “vibrate” and somehow seem to be watching you. It alerts you to the possibility that someone could be observing you right now. It’s as unsettling as it is beautiful.

Two drawings by the Minimalist DeLap flank Koch to the right. Asserting deft construction and collage work, they’re fine examples of the artist’s works on paper.

Two Oppenheim drawings, studies for monumental sculpture installations, prove as wildly imaginative as the three-dimensional works, notably the Study for Device to Root Out Evil (for the iconic 40-foot upended and translucent church he built for a 1997 project in Venice, Italy). The more recent Study for Still Dancing Project for Toronto offers equal theater, laying out a 38-foot chimney-like structure atop a chamber of arcs that elevate the sculpture so that people can pass under it. A massive stainless steel spiral encloses an 18-foot frozen teardrop — representing a liquid formation from the historic distillery district where the sculpture was installed.

Another compelling artist, Alejandro Diaz, serves up three word drawings — Meow, Does this Sign Make Me Look Fat? and Happiness is Expensive — presumably studies for neon installations that toy with high and low culture and social status.

Scacco also uses words in her drawings — microscopically. The London artist repeats one line — in this example, “You are never close enough to me” — to form complex patterns, some decorative, others representational (such as an angelic wing or a butterfly).

Three small drawings by David Allen Peters also offers a measure intimacy the same dynamic as his sculptures and acrylic works on panel, with layers upon layers of bright color beneath their shiny pale outfield.

LeWitt’s 1972 pen and yellow ink drawing, the 14x14-inch Straight Parallel Lines of Random Lengths Not Touching the Sides (Yellow) hardly resembles the artist’s most popular works, but it draws you in and keeps you trying to follow the horizontal yellow lines over white.

Drawings by Kenneth Capps from the late 1970s and a small acrylic and ink work by Ken Price — Space Visitation (2002) — round out the exhibition.

Outside the Lines continues through November at Royale Projects, 75270 Highway 111, Suite 205, Indian Wells; 1-760-742-5182, www.royaleprojects.com

IMAGES (from top): Dennis Oppenheim, Dennis Koch, Tony DeLap, Dennis Oppenheim. Courtesy Royale Projects.

JOHN DIVOLA at LA >< ART

2010-07-28T22:33:00.000-07:00

Since the early 1970s, John Divola has interacted with and photographed Southern California landscapes and environments — or, more precisely, documented our intrusion on them. From his early Vandalism series to the recent Collapsed Structures and Dark Star series, Divola has continued a dialog with a consistent vision and an engaging vocabulary.

In his latest series, The Green of this Notebook, Divola’s environments appear as literal juxtapositions of visual metaphors from the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s seminal 1943 text Being and Nothingness. Sartre illustrated the abstract nature of being with experiential examples. Divola highlighted one on each page and paired them with a photograph that translates the metaphors in exacting fashion.

Ultimately, Divola created his own book, a limited edition bearing the same title as the series, with Sartre’s text appearing on lefthand pages and his own photographs on righthand pages. In one example, Divola highlighted, “‘I see yellow’ because I have jaundice or because I am wearing yellow glasses.” On the facing page, he placed a photograph of a gold-tinted road cutting through an endless desert landscape.

Pairings of these abstract and specific representations permeate the series, demonstrating that written language and experiential phenomena both can be rendered photographically.

Like the book layout, LAXART exhibits Divola’s photographs alongside highlighted pages of Sartre’s text.

Click here to flip through The Green of this Notebook. To buy a copy, contact LAXART or Nazraeli Press.

The Green of this Notebook continues through Aug. 21 at LAXART, 2640 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90034. Call 310-559-0166 or visit www.laxart.org.

ANDREA BOWERS at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

2010-07-27T22:21:00.000-07:00

The Political Landscape — Andrea Bowers’ poignant exhibition exploring power, human rights, and contentious territories — closes this weekend with an event (July 31 at 6 p.m.) feting the artist and raising funds for the legal defense of Tim DeChristopher, the subject of Bowers’ 16-minute, single-channel video installation.

In a December 2008 act of civil disobedience, DeChristopher, a University of Utah student and an environmental activist, disrupted a government auction by bidding on, and winning, 14 parcels (22,000 acres) of wilderness near Arches National Park and Labyrinth Canyon worth $1.8 million. He then declared that he had neither the intention nor the money to pay for them. His action caused many of the leases, which would have permitted oil and gas drilling on the pristine land, to be canceled. DeChristopher faces up to 10 years in prison and fines of $750,000. His trial is set for Sept. 13.

The United States v. Tim DeChristopher includes an interview with DeChristopher and footage of the artist walking through the parcels of land that the activist won in the auction. He will speak and answer questions at the exhibition’s closing party.

The event will unfold in the gallery’s main exhibition space, where Bowers covered the walls in a mural — No Olvidado (Not Forgotten), constructed of 23 graphite drawings, 50x120 inches each — that creates a perimeter of chain-linked fence topped with razor wire. Behind the fence appears a seemingly endless list of names: men, women, and children who have died crossing the U.S./Mexico border.

Bowers also serves up a series of figurative drawings based on photographs from an immigration protest in downtown Los Angeles in May. Each piece singles out a figure holding a placard (or wearing a T-shirt) bearing a sharp political message: “We voted for change. We’re waiting for it,” “My parents are not criminals,” and similar sentiments.

The Political Landscape closes July 31 at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 6006 Washington Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232. Call 310-837-2117 or visit www.vielmetter.com.

ALESSANDRO PAPETTI at Buschlen Mowatt

2010-05-30T17:11:00.000-07:00

Paris-Metropolitana di Passy No. 3 (2006), oil on linen, 59x81 inches

If you have ever watched an old film as it entangled in its projector, as one flickering frame tried hopelessly to advance to the next, you can begin to understand the perspective from which Alessandro Papetti captures his subjects. While artists typically strive to freeze a moment, or the essence or reduction of one, Papetti aims for that elusive space between frames — a millisecond he parlays into an awkward suspension of motion.

His paintings eschew or, more accurately, transcend the still-life perspective. Whether painting figures in water, abandoned interiors, docked ships, industrial sites, or perplexing portraits, his frenetic brushwork almost always ends in an almost-existentialist picture. He coaxes us to interpret — “Is that young boy laughing or screaming?” — but leaves us to conclude. “I try not to tell a story when painting,” he says. “It is normal for the spectator to see what he wants, or is able, to see. We love what is already ours. Sometimes art merely underscores this fact of belonging. However, I believe that in most cases, the less we know about something, the more we perceive it for what it really is.”

Born in 1958 and raised in a typical middle-class family in Milan, where he continues to live and work, Papetti work is decidedly autobiographical. “The fact that [Milan] is not among Italy’s most beautiful art cities can be an advantage,” he intones. “There are traces of a cultural and artistic past, but not all that many, or at least not so concentrated as to make you lose a conscious relationship with the contemporary scene.”

Papetti’s Acqua paintings, especially the nocturnal examples, tap a childhood memory: “We went to bathe by night in summer,” he says. “The sea was black. Swimming under water, in silence and total darkness, was as exciting as it was frightening. I always expected to encounter a deep-sea monster with shiny eyes.”

Inspiring other Acqua paintings were Rembrandt’s Bathing Woman for its relationship between water, female figure, and fluidity, and Krzysrtof Kieslowsky’s Film Blue. “For four or five years, I had an intuition about paintings of water that I did not yet know how to concretize,” he says. “Seeking Film Blue once more unblocked the situation. Kieslowsky used the scenes where Binoche swims in a pool by night as moments of suspension with respect to the narration ... a suspension like the black strip between frames in a movie reel.”

In his Reperti (Findings) series, Papetti’s precision detail punctuates intense analytical study of interiors of ateliers and factories; yet instinct and emotion rule his execution of the pictures. After the Reperti paintings, he shifted to industrial themes, paintings he exhibited in a solo show at Musei Civici di Villa Manzoni in Lecco in 1996.

Regardless of subject, all of his paintings allow time to inch forward through a whirlpool of energy and shimmering light. “It’s like the movie reel — a sequence of frames, of movements, and an illusion that everything flows.”

Indeed, Papetti, inside 20 years of painting, has developed a wildly distinct style that gained him selection to the “Italian Factory” group show at the 2003 Venice Biennale. The exhibition placed him in the company of other artists who, according to curator Alessandro Riva, work with “an approach whose epicenter … is primarily the re-appropriation of profoundly and radically Italian techniques, outlooks and materials.”

Critics sometimes compare him to Alberto Giacometti (existentialism) and Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto (violent energy), but Papetti gives nary a thought to such reappropriation. However, he calls Giacometti “a great father.” He practically stalked Giacometti biographer James Lord in an effort to photograph him for a portrait. Papetti showed the oil on canvas, Ritratto di James Lord (190cm x 200cm), in a 1997 solo exhibition at Galleria Comunale d’Arte in Cesena.

Lord, in turn, published an anecdote about the experience in his book Plausible Portraits of James Lord (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). A photograph of the portrait hardly prepared Lord to confront the lifesized painting. “The initial reaction was shock,” Lord wrote. “Quite simply I felt overwhelmed by the mercurial bravura of the brushwork, which seemed an inextricable turmoil of disorder, the artist himself alien to the violence of his creativity. … Alarm appears to have seized my features, because the phenomenon before me had become the ghost of a model made believable by the frenzy of the artist, and the hand upon the thigh but a specimen floating in the dubious preservative of paint. In all, it’s not a picture that’s easy to turn away from.”

Critical evaluation of Papetti’s oil paintings calls for consideration of the existentialism that permeates his work. “The present is elusive,” he says. “As soon as it’s here, it’s already in the past.” He and Giacometti evidently share a world view or — as Paul Nizon described in Diskurs in der Enge (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1990) — a metaphor for the human individual as “a scrap of humanity struggling for life in the tide of time.”

Since 1985, Papetti has frequently painted from a high-angle perspective, as if looking down on his human subjects — a wonderfully vertiginous and dramatic effect — because “everything is part of everything,” he says. “There is no portrait of someone specific, and that’s all there is to it. There is the person in a given space in that moment.”

Emotion saturates all of his paintings, even pictures of inanimate subjects. Papetti’s ships, for example, might be his most striking and imposing works. “The strength, the fragility, and their illusory lightness” affect his perspective.

Papetti takes numerous pictures of all his subjects and works with models when painting nudes. “Photography is a means to create a bond between the motif and myself, and I am fascinated by the way it almost always succeeds in amazing me,” he says. “What I paint, on the basis of these pictures, is yet another matter.”

New Paintings by Alessandro Papetti runs June 14-July 17 at Buschlen Mowatt Galleries, 1445 W. Georgia St., Vancouver, BC, Canada V6G 2T3 Web: www.buschlenmowatt.com

Above image: Acqua — Il Ragazzo Della Notte (2003), oil on canvas, 30x30 inches

Text adapted from my exhibition catalog essay in Alessandro Papetti: Blue (Silvana Editoriale, Milan, 2004), available here.

ROWAN WOOD at Steve Turner Contemporary

2010-05-09T15:21:00.000-07:00

In his solo debut, recent UCLA grad Rowan Wood exhibited paintings from two series at Steve Turner Contemporary — each simple in concept and textbook in execution.

This was my third encounter with Wood’s Copy series; Turner exhibited from this body of work at Art Los Angeles Contemporary in January, and showed me wider grouping when I visited his Wilshire Boulevard gallery for the Ilan Lieberman exhibition. The name of this series refers to the drawing from which he bases the paintings. Four Copy paintings communicate in raw systems of daddy long-leg lines, dots, concentric circles, and geometric shapes that hint to the more-polished, geometrically based language of the second series.

Six Bubble Solution paintings, installed in their numerically named progression, occupy the gallery’s main exhibition space and communicate a single visual message. The first three embody a system of white and solid-colored circles and ovals over solid grounds, each one related to the geometric abstraction before it. The last three paintings substitute the rounded shapes with pictographic bones and abstract scribbles until, in the last painting, the shapes become organic in form. Clean, formal, and wrapped up as neatly as a 30-minute TV show, Bubble Solution 06 to Bubble Solution 12 progress easily, but hardly engage the viewer as intimately as the Copy series or his 2008 Cage paintings, which might be his best yet.

You have to root for Wood, who’s based in Los Angeles. He has a vision, and he’s true to it. It hardly surprises that he has landed with dealer Steve Turner, whose sharp eye has turned up several rising stars. Wood — who was selected earlier this year by curators Kris Kuramitsu and Christopher Miles to be included in Panorama Los Angeles at ARCO in Madrid — could become another L.A. success story.

Rowan Wood: For the Benefit of Humanity continues through May 22 at Steve Turner Contemporary, 6026 Wilshire Blvd., 323-931-3721, www.steveturnercontemporary.com

IMAGES:

From top: Installation view, Rowan Wood: For the Benefit of Humanity; Copy 12, (2009), oil on linen, 42x42 in.; Bubble Solution 08 (2010), oil on linen, 36x36 in.; Cage (2008), oil on canvas, 72x72 in. Courtesy Steve Turner Contemporary

COCKTAILS, ART AND SURVEILLANCE at SITE Santa Fe

2010-03-23T00:48:00.000-07:00

Hasan Elahi, Tracking Transience (installation view)

Photo: Eric Swanson/Courtesy SITE Santa Fe
(Click images to enlarge)

When Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage,” he could have never imagined One on One, the intensely psychological SITE Santa Fe exhibition of art about being watched.

Provocative, unsettling and sometimes infuriating, the works by the five artists selected for this exhibition — artist/playwright/musician Terry Allen; Hasan Elahi; the mixed-race husband-and-wife team McCallum and Tarry; and Kaari Upson — each examine the life a single person. The artists became voyeurs. As viewers, we do, too. And then you wonder: Who’s watching you right now?

For more information about the exhibition, which continues through May 9, click here: www.sitesantafe.org/exhibitions/exhibitfr.html

I stopped by SITE on March 16 for its second Contemporary Cocktail — social events with lectures that explain contemporary art in historical contexts. After a half-hour of mingling and looking at the One on One installations, Janet Dees, SITE’s Thaw curatorial fellow, began her talk, “An Investigation Into the Nature of Obsession,” an hour-long sobriety check for those who spent more time at the bar than in the galleries. (At the first Contemporary Cocktail on March 9, SITE education manager Joanne Lefrak discussed obsession as a theme in Upson’s work through three generations of artists.)

Dees placed the work of Elahi, another of the exhibition’s artists, into a larger framework of surveillance as art. She showed how Elahi, a Bangladeshi born and naturalized U.S. citizen (with a passport), was wrongfully accused him of being involved in the Sept. 11 plot. Elahi became the target of an invasive, six-month investigation that revealed every detail of his life. In the process, he hatched the idea of self-surveillance and began recording random and mundane details of his everyday life. The process questions the demarcation of pubic and private places, how behavior is deemed normal versus suspicious, and how we behave knowing that someone else is watching.

Back to the art historical context: Dees pointed out that although many artists explored surveillance after Sept. 11, 2001, low-tech approaches date back 60 years — from photography to video to closed circuit television. She discussed works by five notable artists:

“For one month, Vito Acconci would walk out of his Christopher Street apartment and follow someone at random,” Dees said as she began to talk about Following Piece (1969). “The pursuit ended when the subject entered a private space.” Text documentation, which is part of Acconci’s work, details every time, action, and address. “This piece introduces the idea of random selection,” Dees said, explaining how it also establishes rules of engagement (based on the artist’s means to watch) and the matter-of-fact (“Just the facts, ma’am”) text. “Acconci is the receiver, the audience, of actions, yet interested in his own positions,” evident by another photographers images of Acconci in action.

Sophie Calle obsessively followed people to learn about the city of Paris and its people’s behavior. In The Shadow (1981), she turned the lens on herself by hiring a private detective, who did not know Calle was the person who hired him. Like Acconci, she wrote text, but Calle’s was self-aware and self-conscious; she had modified her behavior, hoping to elicit some kind of response from the private detective.

Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider’s Wipe Cycle (1969) consisted of nine monitors showing three types of imagery: broadcast television, recorded footage of the piece’s installation, and real-time video of people experiencing the exhibition. “Immediacy of playback were still very new,” Dees said. And, unlike photography, “the subject can be almost anyplace.”

During her slide presentation, Dees showed Julia Scher’s Don’t Worry (1994), a series of monitors that repeat the name of the piece. Dees’ next slide, Security by Julia IX (1990/1991), a still view of closed-circuit surveillance, made the audience think twice about the previous image.

Dees astutely mentioned the 1969 exhibition TV as Creative Medium at Howard Wise Gallery in New York — a pioneering event for electronic media art, as well as the 2006 “Who’s Watching?” video camera surveillance project report by the New York Civil Liberties Union (www.nyclu.org/pdfs/surveillance_cams_report_121306.pdf).

Which returns us to the present — specifically to Elahi, whose detainment by the FBI in Detroit provoked his One on One installation: Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project. The installation consists of a gallery of curiously placed monitors streaming any of 40,000 self-surveillance images the artist has recorded and entered into a database. They included images snapped with his cell phone from locations around the work, as well as wonderfully mundane groupings, such as all of the toilets he used during the project period. Credit card purchases also reveal where he was at certain times; the records appeared among the information overload. “Awareness of surveillance allows you to craft perception,” Dees said. (Read more about Elahi’s ordeal with the FBI at www.adobeairstream.com/component/zine/article/331-hasan-elahi-at-site-santa-fe.html)

Another piece by Elahi consisted of multichannel video on several screens and set on the floor. From a distance, it looked like a horizontal half of a globe. Up close, Flow Wet Feet (Dry Feet) (1999-2006) projects images of an unfortunate incident in which the Coast Guard had to intercept would-be Cuban immigrants.

Dees balanced the discussion of public surveillance by pointing out we all follow similar patterns, according to a study of human traffic patterns by the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University. Dees referenced the study to demonstrate at least to positive byproducts of tracking people and analyzing general trajectories: smarter urban planning and traffic forecasting.

One on One continues through May 9 at SITE Santa Fe, 1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, N.M. Call 505-989-1199 or visit www.sitesantafe.org

Photography Credits:

Vito Acconci, Following Piece (c) Vito Acconci 2008

Julia Scher, Don't Worry, Koelnischer Kunstverien, Caecillienstrasse, Cologne

Julia Scher, Securite Par Julia IX, Le Consortium, Espace Frac, rue de Longvic, Dijone

Hasan Elahi, Tracking Transience project (installation view), Eric Swanson/Courtesy SITE Santa Fe

DRY IMMERSION 3: DESERT PROJECTS at Wonder Valley and Palm Desert

2010-03-11T22:46:00.000-08:00

(Photography by David Poller / Click images to enlarge)

Dry Immersion 3: Desert Projects — an art-centric exploration of the natural and social desert ecologies — unfolded March 6 as a one-day, multisite installation of sculpture, video, photography, film, sound, and the detritus of Wonder Valley, followed the next day by a group exhibition of paintings, photographs, and photo-based art at the UC Riverside Palm Desert Graduate Center.

If it sounds like a mouthful, it was even tougher to digest in such a short time — but only because the 24 artists (from seven UC campuses) who mined the Southern California desert for inspiration responded with nine thoughtful, site-specific installations, each revealing an idiosyncratic slice of this complex land.

The most dramatic was the performance, video and sound installation by UC San Diego artists Claire Zitzow, Elizabeth Chaney and Ash Eliza Smith. The Deuce-Nine is a ghetto… focused on the people in the High Desert, particularly 16-year-old Chris Nelson, a tall, lanky outcast who wears earrings and lives on the marine base in nearby Twentynine Palms. He figured prominently in the video, which played on laptop computers in one of countless dilapidated homesteader shacks — identifiable only by a red sash blowing in the wind from a corner of the roof. Part documentary, part fantasy, the video also featured skate-park kids, some of them Nelson’s cousins. Seizing the rare opportunity to express themselves — and without any directing — they draped themselves in those red sashes and became ninjas. They wore masks and made up a chant for a death-and-resurrection scene. And they commandeered an abandoned wooden boat. “A lot of us have little opportunity to imagine the place where we live,” Chaney said. “That’s what we wanted to provide — a space for people here to take time for critical reflection.” Inside the shack, the artists created an installation using the improvised costumes and props from the video, including a large salt crystal, and framed photographs capturing the freedom these youths found in the wide-open yet equally confining desert.

The significance of the salt crystallized in Tamarisk Field by David Wicks (UCLA) — an indictment of the nefarious plant species that usurps water and spills its salt-rich foliage onto the soil, eventually killing the life around it. He laser cut small, white trees with sinuous branching structures and placed them on a concrete slab with surface cracks based on images of fault lines. Wicks situated the slab on a foundation that, presumably, was once enclosed by four walls and a roof.

Fault lines also appeared in Wicks’ collaboration with UCLA artists Pete Hawkes and Elaine Hu. Trace: Resonance Field, a sound installation, was based on seismic data from mountain collection sites. Earth-toned, abstractly shaped ceramic plates were baked and beautiful subterfuge for conspicuous, square wood frames that contained a device that received seismic data and responded with pings of varying and unsettling intensity.

Nearby, at the site of another collapsed structure, a crisp, bright American flag snapped curiously in the wind. Off to the side, behind a makeshift juice stand, Joshua Tree Fruit artist Masha Lifshin (UC Santa Barbara) told passersby about the land hucksters in the 1950s who tied fruit to Joshua trees for pictures they used to sell the homestead properties.

The Orange Pataphors Nomadic Ziggurat, the installation by Elcin Joyner (UCSB) consisting of cinderblocks stacked as a pyramid, was positioned so that the viewer in front of it could see its relationship to the distant mountains. Past civilizations built structures like pyramids to get closer to their gods. This piece — with four wheels drilled to the four bottom corners of each block — suggests that was foolish logic.

The Desert Die — a collaboration of Jared Stanley (UC Merced), Matthew Hebert (San Diego State), and Gabie Strong (UC Irvine) — is a twist on a visitor experience at so many national parks. When “rolling,” or turning, the 1-foot-square die, a recorded voice waxed poetically on militarism, the treachery of water, the vortices of mirages, and other “interpretive” episodes. The Mesa-tan powder-coated die — set atop a base that mimicked a park trashcan — embodied the aesthetic that institutionalizes our experience in nature. See a video of this installation at http://vimeo.com/10056996.

Overwhelmed by the expansive desert and its uncertain borders, Nikki Leone (UCSB) cast a collection of faceted rocks in bright-white FGR — a strong, fast-setting product used for exterior statuary — and stacked them like barbecue coals on the raw sand. Conceding that the installation, Facets, looked more significant in her studio, Leone said her work was “swallowed by the vastness of the landscape.” She resolved the containment issues by drawing a circle in the sand around the cast rocks.

Stephanie Washburn and Karen Spector (both UCSB) collaborated on Horizontal Bypass the mirrored pedestal topped with precious figurines looking in the direction of the marine base. Behind the piece, leaning on the fence in the back yard of an inhabited house, was Spector’s Raytheon series of framed graphite drawings of missiles.

UR Rituals — a sound, landscape, and film installation by Gabie Strong (UC Irvine) — closed the site-specific portion of Dry Immersion 3: Desert Projects. Ten artists and musicians improvised sounds that could be a metaphor for the naturally occurring destruction of the modernist utopian future.

The artists, curator Dick Hebdige (UCSB art professor and Desert Studies Project director at the UC Institute for Research in the Arts) and Desert Projects co-organizer Tyler Stallings (UC Riverside Sweeney Art Gallery director) converged on The Palms Bar & Restaurant for live music, video screenings, and conversation with the locals.

They reconvened the next day for a reception and group exhibition at UCR Palm Desert Graduate Center.

Flora Kao (Otis College of Art and Design) showed a series of 30x30 canvases, each surface a rubbing — a California Fan Palm tree trunk, a shipping container from the marine base, asphalt and even sewage ponds. With acrylic marks, she maps the buildings and land tracts, reflecting the sparse High Desert and the dense lower desert communities.

Daniela Campins (UCSB) installed two 64x52-inch acrylic paintings on paper that explored the tension between organic and created environments. The stronger piece, Bombay’s Trace, has a more finished quality. It references the way water enters and slowly consumes a structure. Translucency allows viewers to see layers of time — what was there and what’s left.

While walking the trajectory of the High Desert immersion site, Desiree D’Alessandro (UCSB) picked up stray pages from books, religious texts, a furniture ad and countless other pieces of paper caught by the ecology and cooking in the sun. A serial walker and fervent preservationist of found data and artifacts, the artist archived the pieces to again be accessible. Her installation consisted of digital prints on premium luster paper that had the feel of the Dead Sea Scrolls — a testament from the dry mouth of Wonder Valley.

Ken Ehrlich, a lecturer at UCR, presented diagrams of his Desert Mobile Arts Research Initiative — prototype vehicles that riff on preconceptions about people in the desert. They include an escapist vehicle, military assault vehicle and a midcentury modern fantasy vehicle. The diagrams represent the first phase of purchasing and modifying vehicles for other artists to use them.

Postmodern Mojave Viper, a series of five photographs by Christopher Woodcock (UC Davis), showed the shipping-container architecture of the Iraq/Afghanistan training facility at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms. Postmodern in its aesthetic, the images offered a filmic narrative void of people.

Finally, Woodcock and Jared Stanley (The Desert Die) collaborated on a series of 12 unattributed postcards called Other Desert Cities and Other Stories — named for the sign on Interstate 10 that reads “Indio and Other Desert Cities.” They use poetry and photographs to tell the story of the fake cities of the upper Mohave and lower Colorado deserts.

All the work was born last October at the Dry Immersion 2: Roving Symposium project, which included tours of significant ecological sites and the Iraq/Afghanistan Training Installations at the Marine Corp Air Ground Combat Center.

That “immersion” traces to the seminal discussions and workshops with the eco-arts collective Luminous Green and a cross-section of artists, researchers, academics and others concerned with the desert ecology. The gathering at UCR Palm Desert Graduate Center and Boyd Deep Canyon Desert Research Center instilled a foundational appreciation of future desert ecologies, native knowledge systems, soundscapes, navigation, sustainable design strategies for a waterless environment, desert food and waste cycles and the new desert social order.

Dry Immersion 3: Desert Projects was only the latest of an ongoing dialog between artists and the people of the Southern California desert.

Visit http://sweeney.ucr.edu/exhibitions/mappingthedesert/

PAUL SOLDNER at Armstrong’s

2010-03-09T00:36:00.000-08:00

Nearly six years have passed since David Armstrong, founder and president of the American Museum of Ceramic Art, mounted the institution’s 2004 retrospective of sculptures by Paul Soldner.

Through April 30, Armstrong’s namesake gallery in Pomona offers a fresh look at work that Soldner, 89, produced largely over the past 10 years.

Ceramic art was hardly new when Soldner burst onto the scene in the mid-1950s. But he was a revolutionary. His genre-busting constructions popped the lid on the West Coast Clay Movement. His cutting-edge sculpture was a quantum leap from the functional preoccupation of the craft world.

Soldner was the first and most influential student of the iconic ceramicist Peter Voulkos (at Los Angeles County Art Institute, now Otis College of Art and Design). He worked with Funk artist Robert Arneson and taught generations of successful ceramicists, including Jun Kaneko. Most of all, Soldner is revered for transforming 16th century Japanese raku by breaking the rules of form and surface design, using unorthodox methods of firing and post firing, and embracing mistakes and unexpected results.

Armstrong’s will host two receptions — 6-9 p.m. March 13 and April 10 — at 150 E. Third St., Pomona. For more information, call 1-909-623-6464 or visit www.armstronggallery.net.

SHOWN: Untitled (2006), stoneware/high temperature wood fire, 18x10x24 inches (width, depth, height)

DENNIS OPPENHEIM at Royale Projects

2010-03-04T00:49:00.000-08:00

Like his poignant Device to Root Out Evil (a transparent, upended church) and scorching critique of corporatism, Burning Contract (a building set ablaze based on rolled paper), Dennis Oppenheim’s new Splash Buildings communicate a simple, albeit less socially charged, idea with great form, color, and imagination.

The three models — and the selection of drawings — at Royale Projects hark to the artist’s youth in Berkeley and his drives into San Francisco. “On the freeway in Emeryville, there was a Sherwin-Williams paint billboard that had paint going down a globe in neon,” Oppenheim says. “That was a treat as a young person. That’s what I was thinking about [when working on Splash Buildings]. It’s a roadside attraction. Instead of neon, I’m using LED lights.”  

Part art, part architecture, Splash Buildings capture the moment when a drop of water hits a surface and causes an upheaval of material, which forms the exterior of these optimistic structures. Oppenheim calls them “event sculptures,” because they reflect the result of an event: the downward motion of the drop with the upward action of color.

Although the artist executes the splash gestures in abstraction — constructed of galvanized steel, cast Fiberglas, acrylic, and curiously suspended globes — viewers will recognize the dynamic action.

Oppenheim recently gained a commission of three 65-foot cylindrical splashes at Houston’s George Bush InterContinental Airport. “It will be a phenomenal visual treat as people exit the airport,” he says. “Part of the splash arches over the expressway, and it’s totally animated with LED lights 24 hours a day.”

Oppenheim did not illuminate the sculptures at Royale Projects; after all, they are models — even if one soars 15 feet high. Yet each one bursts with the artist’s signature qualities. In time, Splash Buildings will prove an important series for Oppenheim, and this show will prove equally important for this year-old gallery.

See Dennis Oppenheim’s Splash Buildings at Royale Projects, 75270 Highway 111, Indian Wells (www.royaleprojects.com). Information: 1-760-742-5182

Advice to Artists Seeking Representation

2010-03-03T23:21:00.000-08:00

The blog ART-STUFF interviewed me for a March 2 entry about my consulting work with artists and galleries. Read the Q&A at http://artstuff.net.au/?p=679

JULIAN HOEBER at Blum & Poe

2010-03-01T18:25:00.000-08:00

A day at Art Los Angeles Contemporary — the more cutting-edge of two January fairs and a refreshing change of scenery following the Palm Springs International Film Festival — turned up a few surprises and many more re-examinations of artists represented by cherry-picked galleries from (mostly) Los Angeles and Europe, with a dash of Miami.

The installation of L.A. artist Julian Hoeber’s untitled cast heads — each shot, stabbed, and otherwise pummeled during clandestine trips to the High Desert, near Joshua Tree — renewed the spirit of this body of work exhibited by the Culver City gallery Blum & Poe.

Hoeber has something of a horror-show dark side (the mutilated heads have unaffected facial expressions, and hark to the artist’s 2001 video Killing Friends, which follows a young man’s serial seductions and dispassionate murders). The artist takes great interest in the culture’s fascination with film and video game violence, while it has little stomach for the real thing.

Mirrored pedestals prop these products of violent and grotesque acts to shiny Beverly Hills chic. You want to respond with horror, but the restful expressions on the sculptures’ faces (casts of his own) and the fine quality and integrity of the finished pieces carry as much weight in this story as do the actions that disfigured the heads before their bronzing.

“You see one thing, but it’s actually something else,” Hoeber says. “The mirrored pedestals give them levity, a sheen, or a sparkle — like Baccarat in a window on Rodeo Drive. It encourages a different response. ‘Heads with bullet holes in them of that quality?’ It’s a complicated psychological proposition, the idea of making something awful to look pretty and have them exist simultaneously. The human experience demands analysis, a reckoning with contradictory ideas.”

The High Desert offered the perfect setting for Hoeber to pump his work full of lead. “You can’t fire a gun in the city, and no firing ranges will let you bring in a wax head,” says the artist, who does not own a gun.

“I got into a conversation with a friend, a gun enthusiast, who lives off Highway 62,” Hoeber continues. “He said, ‘Out here, it’s common for people to shoot.’ I love going out there. I like the big horizon. There’s no compression, no crowding. It’s depressurizing. You have conversations you couldn’t have in the city.”

See Julian Hoeber’s work at Blum & Poe, 2727 S. La Cienega Blvd. in Los Angeles (www.blumandpoe.com).

Photos:

Julian Hoeber, top, takes aim near Joshua Tree (courtesy Julian Hoeber). Below, Untitled (2008), polished bronze with stainless steel posts, MDF, wood, acrylic mirror, and spray enamel, 8x7x13 inches, Pedestal: 42 x 13 1/4 x 13 1/4 inches. (Josh White/Courtesy Julian Hoeber and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles).