"Floor of the Forest". Photo: Winarsh-Documenta 2007.

For whatever reason, the Los Angeles art community has dance on the brain. It may or may not have started with artist and choreographer Simone Forti’s inclusion as one of the “Made in L.A.” finalists (the Hammer Museum’s mega-group exhibition-cum-contest from last summer), but the upcoming “Dancing with the Art World” conference (again at the Hammer) clinches the deal—two days of lectures and events with luminaries like Forti and Yvonne Rainier, as well as Douglas Crimp and Andrea Fraser. The conference’s raison d’être is to investigate a so-called “explosion of dance being presented in an art context” over the past five to ten years, although we all know that dance and art have been lovers for longer than that.

Over the past week, UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance restaged multiple pieces by Trisha Brown, whose work over the last four decades has pushed the definition of dance and encouraged its viewers to reconsider what could be achieved under the rules of gravity. Originally from Washington, Brown found her way to New York, where she helped to found the Judson Dance Company with Twyla Tharp and Steve Paxton, among others. The Trisha Brown retrospective offered samples from all stages of Brown’s career, including three of her earliest works: Floor of the Forest (1970), Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970), and Roof Piece (1971).

Dance Troupe Performs On New York City's High Line Park, 2011. Mario Tama/Getty Images North America.

Even if these works hadn’t been separated out from the rest of the line-up by being performed at museums (the Hammer and the Getty), they are different in that, on the surface, they barely appear to be dance: Man Walking Down the Side of a Building was originally performed by Brown’s husband, who walked straight down the side of a New York apartment building, belayed by rope. Roof Piece involved a group of individual dancers on separate New York rooftops who tried to transmit their movements to the other dancers. And Floor of the Forest is based on the movements of several dancers trying on clothing strung on a grid of ropes, meaning that the dancers dangle from the ropes, along with the clothing.

Are these works performance art or dance? It’s unclear whether anyone’s attempting to demarcate one from the other—one gets the sense that Vito Acconci’s Following Piece (1969) could be called a dance just as much as Simone Forti’s Accompaniment for La Monte’s ‘2 sounds’ (1961) could be called performance art. It all seems to fall so neatly under the umbrella of social sculpture (or relational aesthetics), why bother raising one’s voice?

Trisha Brown Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, 80 Wooster Street, New York, 1970 © Carol Goodden.

Time will tell, but in the meantime, what’s on display (other than a question about the nature of art) is the same upside-down object lesson that Brown’s original pieces bestowed: men and women use props and behaviors from their ordinary lives to mimic these experiences and transform them into extraordinary ones.

George W. Bush, self-portrait, date unknown.

Four days ago, a hacker named Guccifer broke into former President George W. Bush’s email account, letting loose upon the world three stolen photographs of Bush’s newest hobby, painting. Besides gravitating toward more standard fare, such as landscapes, Bush seems to have surprised art critics with two self-portraits that, in the words of Hrag Vartanian at Hyperallergic, “demonstrate to us a more inward looking Bush, a man who is exploring his emotional life through paint.”

The first painting is of a bathtub, in a yellow room with dark wainscotting. As viewers, we look from the perspective of the bather, whose knobby knees poke out of the gray-green bathwater, along with the tops of a pair of feet at the end of the tub. A towel hangs from the wall in the distance; water streams from the faucet and ends in a gentle splash between the bather’s feet.

The second, which one Twitter follower called “Las Meninas of the Technology Era,” shows Bush in the shower, with his back turned toward the viewer. The rectangular, beige shower tiles dwarf the ex-president, even as he makes eye contact with us through his reflection in a circular mirror. Water rushes from the showerhead, falling to the floor without being used.

George W. Bush, self-portrait, date unknown.

The paintings have been reviewed from every conceivable angle, including a Freudian interpretation. For the most part, the consensus is that they are “dull” and “simplistic,” and suffer from bad perspective. Certain writers and critics allude to the fact that the paintings may contain genuinely contemplative subject matter, but whether it’s Bush’s intent, or just to experiment with his technique for painting water, we’ll never know.

In the end, it’s the timing of the hack and the subsequent leak that seem the most fortuitous. Bush and his policies are unclaimable in today’s politics, even by his own party. Six months ago, Slate and The Huffington Post ran stories titled “Where is George W. Bush?” and “George W. Bush: The President Who Must Not Be Named At Republican Convention.” These paintings give us a blank slate to project whatever it is we most need from him now that his term in office is through, whether that’s an apology, an admission of inadequacy, or a vindication.

Soon after the paintings went viral, Ryder Ripps created an overlay with which you can snap a shot of yourself peering into Bush’s bathtub—in some ways the perfect visual representation of our varied intellectual and emotional responses to the paintings. Some participants shoot looks of anger, while others just goof around. It’s a reminder that whatever we see in the art, it’s always just ourselves reflected back.

Ryder Ripps, George W. Bush overlay, 2013.

Exterior view of "Fast Service While You Wait" at Venice 6114. Image copyright Venice 6114.

‘From work to event. We are the mould, it’s up to you to breathe substance into it’

I’ll admit it, I’ve been bored when it comes to art lately. Too many shows with too much text (either on the labels, in the press release, or as part of the artist’s statment)—and I’m too aware of the narrative, too aware of climax and dénouement for the opening lines of the first paragraph to do their job and draw me in.

While I’ve seen a few good shows, I’ve seen a greater number of indistinguishable ones. My current viewing routine has calcified to the point that I’m usually in and out of a medium-sized gallery in under five minutes, and sometimes even under one. I’m not bragging. I am full of reticence and pain from past shows that led me on, suspicious as to art’s motives.

Last night, however, the first big night back for Los Angeles after the holidays, the New Year, and the winter blahs, I found new hope. It started with Judith Bernstein, Carolee Schneemann, and Barbara Smith, all speakers on a panel about painting at the Box Gallery in downtown Los Angeles. Each woman told the story of her entrance into the field, and for each woman, the lack of female colleagues and a excessively (if not repressively) masculine mise en scène featured heavily. I know things are far from perfect when it comes to gender equality in the arts circa 2013, but I believe that when female artists from today sit on tomorrow’s panels, issues of gender will not automatically be the first thing to emanate from each and every set of lips.

Tyler Calkin, Sarah Petersen, and Adam Peña, "Fast Service While You Wait," 2013.

Mixed in with Bernstein, Schneemann, and Smith were a few of their male counterparts, including Paul McCarthy, who raised my spirits for a different reason. As he describe moving from burning early works to painting with his body, he made it clear that his choices weren’t “from an understanding of historical continuation,” but from the kind of thoughts that come when one is invested in a medium, like “well, what next…should I use my shit to paint?” McCarthy’s candid and humor-laden discussion of the role of instinct and materiality in an artist’s decision process caught me off guard and gave me great satisfaction.

McCarthy’s comments about burning his paintings to find true black also set up my drive west along the 10 freeway, where the bulk of the evening’s openings were. In the sky was the smallest crescent of a silver moon, but the rest of the moon was there, too, a perfect, light black circle against the deeper, velvet black of the rest of the night sky. The moon stayed with me until Culver City, where I lost my ability to stargaze due to the press of bodies demanding my attention on the ground.

Tyler Calkin, Sarah Petersen, and Adam Peña, "Fast Service While You Wait," 2013.

The shows this month offer a little bit of everything, from painting and sculpture to photography. I stuck to my one- to five-minute routine, for the most part, stopping longer in some spaces, like Kim Fisher’s show at International Art Objects and Bernard Piffaretti at Cherry + Martin, and mentally marking others for return. But instead of feeling let down and disappointed, I was beginning to feel invested again.

The last stop was Venice 6114, a former auto repair shop turned into a gallery/project space, organized by artist Sergio Bromberg. The large door to the main part of the old shop was missing; anyone who walked by could see inside. The phrase “Feel the vibrations while you wait” was painted in huge blue letters against a bright yellow wall. An area was set aside for cars, and artist Tyler Calkin (who co-created the piece with Sarah Petersen and Adam Peña) explained to me that the project’s main point was to offer a very personalized form of tire inflation: Calkin et al had equipped a slew of orange construction hats with plastic tubing, with each hat able to connect to the others. When a car came in, the hats went on, and the person nearest the wall connected the entire chain to the facility’s compressor.

Called “Fast Service While You Wait,” the inflation wasn’t particularly fast, or even one hundred percent effective. Rather, it was a way of grouping strangers, connecting them with what Lygia Clark once called “relational objects,” asking them to investigate the areas where we all overlap and “meet in the world.” It was clunky, but well-intended, and in the end it helped me (in combination with the panel discussion earlier) to re-engage with buried thoughts on art and the arts community. Definitely imperfect, oft times disappointing, but when you know where to look, so earnestly invested in challenging and inspiring that I keep coming back to it.

In 2006, the Musée des Beaux-Arts held a Lygia Clark exhibit entitled “From work to event. We are the mould, it’s up to you to breathe substance into it.” Sometimes things are plotted and reasoned, other times accidental, but regardless, it’s the job of the arts writer, of the artist, of the viewer and participant, to breathe that substance into whatever we identify “it” to be. With passion, people.

Gustaf Mantel

Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year is finally here: GIF. Not the noun, but the verb. In fact, the noun is boring, old hat. The first GIF (the first file ever formatted as a graphic interchange format, with lossless compression) dates back to the mid-‘80s; the first GIF posted to the Internet is now twenty years old. And contrary to what you think you know, GIFs don’t have to be animated. That first picture, for instance, featuring girlfriends and friends of a bunch of CERN scientists (yes, the Higgs Boson CERN), isn’t.

But “to GIF” is something different: not just to create a GIF file (as Oxford defines it), but to animate – to appropriate – cultural detritus in a unique fashion. And, like any medium, some artists are better at working with it than others, using it as a tool to challenge their audience to think in new ways. In reality, the GIF is just another part of a long lineage, from the collage to the ready-made, on through the Pictures generation and toward the mashup. If Cindy Sherman, Sherry Levine, Richard Prince and Jack Goldstein had been born millenials, their medium (or action) of choice may well have been the GIF.

It’s eerie how closely Goldstein’s looped films resemble GIFs, especially “MGM,” which features the MGM lion roaring over and over against a red background, or the illustrated birds in “Bone China,” which come alive and ceaselessly circle a dinner plate. Like many popular GIFs, the constant repetition of Goldstein’s films makes the normal abnormal and the bizarre laughable.

In my opinion, however, the most effective GIFs (beyond those that embrace a slapstick humor) offer an antidote or counterpoint to Goldstein. Take the work of Gustaf Mantel, for example, whose Tumblr, If we don’t, remember me, features animated gifs paired with quotes, snipped from films as diverse as The Conversation (1974), Suspira (1977), Ghost World (2001), and Sedmikrásky (1966). The most successful and haunting are those with only a whisper of movement, which somehow evoke the mood of the film without completely reanimating it.[1] Slowly but surely, Mantel and others seem to be playing with the form’s potential for something I can only call “suspended animation”: inviting us, as viewers, to occupy a single frame,[2] yet maintain an awareness of the image’s motion, and of passing time.

Screenshot taken from an attack ad against Congresswoman Janice Hahn, 2011.

If you’re young and female, I hope you’re introduced to a positive mentor early enough to build a strong sense of self-worth, because in 2012, American society still refuses to make it easy for you to maintain one. Looking at the last few months, women’s rights seem to be in retrograde, with the obvious example being the tone of the Republican campaign. But if you need more proof: so far this decade we have seen Hillary Clinton and a female aide photoshopped out of situation room documentation of the moment Osama Bin Laden’s death was announced, Fox News’ Greta van Susteren’s decision to ask Sarah Palin on-air whether she’d gotten breast implants, and an attack ad against Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Hahn comparing – even conflating – Hahn with a pole dancer.

And then last week there was that little Rush Limbaugh thing. You know, where he repeatedly attacked, on air, a woman that he first identified as “Susan Fluke.” Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown law student, had argued in front of Congress that private health insurers such as her own should be required to make birth control available at affordable rates. Fluke collected the stories of friends and fellow students, ultimately testifying that women rely on birth control not just for contraception, but in their treatment of other health issues, like ovarian cysts. For her trouble, Limbaugh called Fluke a slut and a prostitute, demanded that she put her sex videos online, and even suggested that by forcing insurers to provide this option, the taxpayer would take on the role of pimp.

Screenshot of Sandra Fluke speaking on "The View," March 5, 2012.

Unfortunately for Limbaugh, Fluke turned out to be nothing like his stereotypes – he had her pegged as a ditzy undergraduate, not the articulate and thoughtful speaker that she is. Fluke met Limbaugh’s comments with a press tour of her own, putting her remarks (and his) into context and reshaping the narrative that Limbaugh had twisted, so much so that Limbaugh eventually offered a limp apology.

Despite this apology and reports of sponsors fleeing Limbaugh’s franchise, however, when it comes to talking about women and sex, the reality is that American society remains in a rut – a rut reflected not just by Limbaugh but men like Foster Friess, or even Bill Maher, whose “whoops, there’s a dick in me” segment about Bristol Palin might just be the most hateful of the three. And most women aren’t helping – take Sarah Palin’s goofy-grin-cum-struggle-to-maintain-composure after Greta dropped her implant bomb. Why not have a conversation right then and there about the inappropriate nature of the question, instead of replying, “Greta, we love you for not being afraid of asking the question,” which is the course that Palin chose. More extreme would be Whitney Houston’s flabbergasted, speechless, but round-mouthed response to Serge Gainsbourg’s explicitly statement that he wanted to f@#% her on a French morning show.

Screenshot of Sarah Palin's reaction after Greta van Susteren of Fox News asks her about rumors of breast implants, 2010.

Screenshot of Whitney Houston and Serge Gainsbourg from the French television show, "Champs élysées,'" 1986.

What is disheartening is that we – women, feminists, whatever we call ourselves – have already fought this fight. To take our cue from art history, we spent centuries moving beyond being the coy and quiet female Venuses of Titian and Giorgione, and now we’re back in 1865, the year Édouard Manet showed one of the most controversial paintings of the 19th-century: Olympia.

Based on Titian’s Venus of Urbino, itself thought to be based on the Sleeping Venus of Giorgione, the painting shows a nude woman, reclining yet still upright, her left leg crossed over her right, the palm of her left hand placed firmly across her genitalia so her fingers rest against her right upper thigh. She looks toward the viewer of the painting, perhaps a little downward, but only a little. Her backless, heeled slippers are sumptuous, and her gold bracelet weighty. Around her neck is a dainty black ribbon, tied in a bow, the line of which is echoed by the heavily-shadowed outer contour of the left side of her body, the darkness of which is picked up again by the skin tones of a maid (who brings a suitor or client’s flowers) and a black cat, both of which fade into the shadows of the rooms behind them.

Titian, "Venus of Urbino," 1538. Oil on canvas. Collection of Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

Édouard Manet, "Olympia," 1863. Oil on canvas. 51 x 71.8 in. Collection of Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

Titian had also shocked his audiences with his painting, which, although it did tell the story of a goddess, did so in uncharacteristically sensual terms for the period. This Venus also met her viewer’s gaze head on, rather than playing at ignorance and coyness – perhaps this is what attracted Manet in the first place. Olympia shocked not for its nudity, but for its crudeness: Manet had painted a courtesan or prostitute, and not a goddess; he stepped away from finished allegories rendered in exquisite detail and allowed three nameless figures the center stage; he dared to give his Olympia a look and posture that did not invite, one in which she guards her sex instead of ambiguously fondling it for a voyeur; and, lastly, Manet had left his own hand visible, with brush strokes that (in places) fell apart under the lightest of scrutiny.

Recognizing the irony of what I’m about to say, there is a piece of Olympia, Manet’s courtesan, in Sandra Fluke. Both figures emit strength and the determination to meet detractors head on, as well as a refusal to let those detractors drive the narrative. But there is something missing, in art and in our cultural discourse on being woman and the balance of sexual power between men and women. I believe we saw it last in the 60s and the 70s with women like Angela Davis, as well as artists like Lynn Hershman Leeson and Lynda Benglis. Whatever it is, I hope we find it again fast.

Artist Jack Goldstein and his dog, 1986. Image copyright Peter Bellamy.

“Jack Goldstein is currently at work on a new film called “The Jump.” It is to be nineteen seconds long and will show a diver performing a somersault from a high board. But the high board and the water into which he plunges will be absent from the finished film…Goldstein is performing a set of operations that isolate, distill, alter, and augment the filmed recording of an actual event. He does this in order to impose a distance between the event and its viewers because, according to Goldstein, it is only through a distance that we can understand the world. Which is to say that we only experience reality through the pictures we make of it.”[1]

So begins Douglas Crimp’s famous 1977 “Pictures” essay, which introduced not just a show, but a movement of young artists determined to draw attention to and capitalize on the way images mediated the late 20th-century experience. Fittingly, “Jack Goldstein x 10,000,” at the Orange Country Museum of Art, also opens with the now-iconic film, which features the glowing red figure of a diver against an all black background. The diver bounces on the invisible board, twists, and disappears smoothly in the nothingness of the erased water. The motion feels effortless and also exhausting.

“Jack Goldstein x 10,000” consists of thirty-plus years of work. The early films that put Goldstein on the map as a member of the Pictures group are there (including “The Jump,” 1978, and “MGM,” 1975), as are several immersive sculptures, text works, and records—not to mention the enormous, black-and-white paintings of the ‘80s and the paintings that followed.

The main draw continues to be the films, perpetually repeating and acting as counterpoints to each other. “A Nail,” 1971, “A Glass of Milk,” 1971, and “A Spotlight,” 1972, play opposite “Jack,” 1973, (amongst others); we see the artist agonizingly and slowly pull a nail out of a piece of wood with his teeth, empty a glass of milk by pounding his fist on a table, and try to run away from a spotlight. In the same moment, we watch a cameraman slowly back away from Goldstein, step by step, until the artist is engulfed entirely by the landscape.

In the next room, Goldstein’s edits keep the famous MGM lion repeating its roar, and in the room beyond a foot in a ballet shoe collapses when the ankle ribbons are untied (“Ballet Shoe,” 1975); a china pattern of birds comes to life and circles a dinner plate, trapped (“Bone China,” 1976); a dog barks and barks and barks (“Shane,” 1975); a knife fills with reflected color, empties, and fills again (“The Knife,” 1975). As mundane and tedious as all these actions are, the tension is captivating.

Much has been made of the fact that Goldstein used outside labor for his work, hiring animators for his films and using illustrators to complete the series of paintings that followed—wall-sized, black-and-white images of aerial raids, or the spectacular effect of lightning over Western skies. The technique allowed Goldstein’s conversation with his Pictures colleagues to continue; aesthetizing images of damaging events such as the 1941 bombing of the Kremlin. As Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight puts it, “It’s as if Goldstein’s photo-based works chronicle the upheaval caused by mesmerizing mass media, the daily blitz of modern life.” All with the hand of the artist removed.

From "Jack Goldstein X 10,000, "Untitled," 1981, acrylic on canvas. (Brian Forrest, Orange County Museum of ARt / July 12, 2012)

The exhibit wraps up with several abstract paintings that resemble thermal maps with the mapped object long gone, a more recent film in which Goldstein cuts between various sea creatures at the moment they pause in motion, and “Aphorisms,” written fragments presented as highly-designed images as well as less polished chunks of text that vary in between upper- and lower-case, bold and regular face.

On the whole, the exhibit is complicated and almost amorphous. Unlike his peer, Cindy Sherman, whose retrospective is currently on view at SFMOMA, Goldstein did not maintain one specific and particular focus or style. One can certainly map an obsessive fixation on time and nature, something obvious enough to be commented on but downgraded as a priority in the various conversations on Goldstein’s work. The exhibition pamphlet points out that much of the focus on Goldstein continues to be on his relationship to images and the idea of the spectacle, themes leftover from his association with Crimp and subsequent writing on the Pictures group. Honestly, what I see in “Jack Goldstein x 10,000” is an artist questing for his voice again after tiring of being stuck in the same loop. Unfortunately, we lost Jack Goldstein in 2003, but curator Philipp Kaiser provides a nuanced overview of his peaks and valleys.

Cai Guo-Qiang's "Mystery Circle" on the wall of the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Credit: Zen Sekizawa.

Gopnick argues “that museums should make [great] art available—to the absolutely largest number of people who are looking for that kind of thing, and not for something else.” And while Gopnick’s thinking has issues of its own (elevating some forms of art and artists over others), I agree with his overall point. Showcasing great artwork should be an art museum’s first goal, even if it draws fewer numbers and leaves the institution open to a charge of ‘insularity.’

I don’t think it’s the art institutions that are manifesting signs of insularity, however. Oh, sure, I understand and even agree with the logic behind wanting to make MOCA more “populist,” which for Broad apparently means accessible, but the adjective “insular” is misapplied. The word, from the late Latin insula, or ‘island,’ means “uninterested,” at least in cultures or ideas outside of one’s own experience. If anything, it is the population that MOCA hopes to attract which time and again proves itself insular, only interested in the most spectacular art exhibits, or exhibits immediately reflective of its own experience, instead of those that attempt to open a window into a different (and perhaps more challenging) way of thinking about the world and its surroundings.

Cai Guo-Qiang's exploding artwork, Mystery Circle: Explosion Event for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photos by Gary Leonard.

Curators like Paul Schimmel are the middle ground, not a force for insularity. In fact, the saga of Schimmel and MOCA reminds me of another curatorial conflict from the early twentieth century, that between art historian Aby Warburg and his librarian and assistant, Fritz Saxl. The eldest son of three, Warburg was born into a well-to-do Jewish banking family in mid-19th century Hamburg. As such, his role should have been to take over the family business for his father, but on his thirteenth birthday, Warburg offered this position to his youngest brother, Max, in exchange for the promise that “Max would buy him all the books he ever wanted.”[1] Max kept his promise; by 1914, Warburg had amassed somewhere in the vicinity of 15,000 volumes, most of which were related to history, art, psychology, and religion. These volumes became the Kunstwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg – a research institute located in Hamburg that attracted scholars from all over Europe and America – and, eventually, the Warburg Institute, one of the more important art-historical think tanks of the last century.

Before Saxl stepped in, however, Warburg’s project was just too messy, too overwhelming – an unfiltered investigation of “the role of the coining of images as a process of civilization,” with no order outside of Warburg’s own “law of the good neighbor,”[2] which he used to organize the thousands of texts in his library. “Although grouped under such general rubrics as anthropology and art history, both the various sections and the books within them were arranged according to their ability to engage with the books on either side of them.  A line of speculation opening in one volume was attested to or attacked, continued or contradicted, refined or refuted in its neighbor.  Each book was to answer or ask a question of the one next to it.”[3]  Warburg’s system — though inspired — was a nightmare to negotiate, and alienated many of his visitors until Saxl imposed a cataloging system of his own.

Cai Guo-Qiang's "Mystery Circle" on the wall of the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Credit: Zen Sekizawa.

A romantic might read the tale above and extrapolate that I mean Warburg to stand in for Schimmel, but in reality, Schimmel has more in common with Saxl: known for shows that offered “critical, scholarly investigation[s] of contempoary art,” Schimmel helped provide context to contemporary art, arguing for its relevancy and providing the inroads that allowed visitors to make intellectual (and emotional) connections to the artwork on display. In these ways, curators like Schimmel are the true antidotes to the stubborn insularity of American popular culture. While I agree with Eli Broad’s desire to see a financially stable MOCA, he should be just as concerned with the museum’s potential to churn out less challenging exhibitions based solely on spectacle or supposed confluence with mainstream culture — while it might draw higher numbers at first, this kind of curatorial plan could also backfire, leaving the public even more disinterested in contemporary art than they are already.  We haven’t run the piece on what museums are for yet, but based on past experience, I predict the sound of crickets from our phones.

"Levitated Mass," installation shot. Photo © Will Brown Hernández, 2012.

This past Sunday, under the beating hot Los Angeles sun, LACMA finally held its inauguration ceremony for “Levitated Mass,” the 340-ton piece of California granite which traveled for 11 days at 8 miles an hour through Southern California, eventually to be placed across a 456-foot long trench in the northwest quadrant of LACMA’s campus.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was there (his speech was mediocre). County supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky was there (his speech was better).  Michael Govan, the museum director, was there (“silver-tongued” is the adjective that comes to mind).  Michael Heizer was also there (he did not give a speech, although he made himself available for questions after the ceremony ended).

Artist Michael Heizer at the opening of his work, "Levitated Mass." Photo © Will Brown Hernández, 2012.

The ceremony marked the climax of a decades-long process, the last six to eight months of which having been picked over by journalists, critics, and the general public — most especially Angelenos, from whom the most common outcry was, “$10 million for a rock?’

As William Poundstone writes for Artinfo, “The reactions to Levitated Mass (of Internet posters who haven’t seen it) might be worth a future doctoral thesis. Initially it was political. Conservatives were itching to condemn it as a waste of taxpayer money, only to be flummoxed by the awkward fact that the money was 100 percent private sector. Liberals faulted it for privileging the dominion of “man” over nature (though having seen it, I tend to read it the opposite way. Who’s on top, humans or rock?) In the past few days, the main thesis of commenters has been that it’s not “levitating,” ergo contemporary art is a con game (“What FREAKING waste of time and money. … Thats’ not Art, It’s STUPID! DUMB!”).”

Security guard at the opening of Michael Heizer's "Levitated Mass." Photo © Will Brown Hernández, 2012.

So now that the rock is in place, and all of the museum’s cards are on the table, what is to be made of the finished product? Was it worth it?

Here are a few complaints: the slot is a little too wide for the mass to feel like it’s levitating. Straddling might be a more appropriate verb. For all the fanfare made over moving such a large mass, it still seems smaller than expected, especially when compared to the trench and the rest of LACMA’s buildings. And the choice to leave the surrounding area bare gives one a curious feeling of emptiness, rather than overwhelming mass and power.

Rock as background. Photo © Will Brown Hernández, 2012.

I brought these complaints up the next day in conversation with an artist friend, who looked at me and said, “Yes, but that’s Heizer, isn’t it? The dramatically anti-dramatic.” This sentiment, along with another from William Poundstone (he quotes Ed Ruscha’s axiom that “good art should provoke a response of ‘Huh? Wow!’ rather than ‘Wow! Huh?'”) struck a chord.

In many ways, Michael Govan and Michael Heizer have achieved the impossible, making a spectacle out of the ordinary.  The rock is a rock. I spoke with Govan about the choice to leave the area surrounding the trench bare, which he emphatically and adamantly argued was a necessity, meant to function as a desert void in a city without enough emptiness of its own, and perhaps he’s right. Amidst its bare surroundings, “Levitated Mass” transcends being mere plop art and invites earnest contemplation, if you allow it.

The crowd under "Levitated Mass" on opening day. Photo © Will Brown Hernández, 2012.

Los Angeles is a city of illusions. Over at MOCA, Jeffrey Deitch seems to have embraced this approach, offering flashy, staged shows that pack in crowds and falter in their substance after multiple viewings (James Franco’s “Rebel” and Cai Guo-Qiang’s “Sky Ladder” come to mind). If that’s what it takes to secure the funding for less popular exhibits, so be it. But congratulations to LACMA for finding a way to wrap it all into one, 340-ton bundle.

An artwork featuring live bees, created by French artist Pierre Huyghe. Her "head writhes with bees, like thoughts buzzing," writes Adrian Searle Photograph: Barbara Sax/AFP/Getty Images.

In 2010, David Shields gave us ‘Reality Hunger’ — a mashup of over 600 stolen quotes, arranged into a manifesto. ‘Reality Hunger’ was Shields’ attempt at an ars poetica for what he referred to as ‘a burgeoning group of interrelated (but unconnected) artists […] who are breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work.’ This week, curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev gives us her version for the art world: dOCUMENTA(13), which opened  June 9 in Kassel, Germany. In honor of a certain symmetry between the two projects, #hashtags attempts a Shields-like text in search of the nature of contemporary art, all drawn from writings on dOCUMENTA.

Dear reader, I hope these lines find you well, wherever you are right now. I have decided to address you through an archive of other voices postcards, as to remain on Documenta 13’s wavelength.[1]

dOCUMENTA (13) is located in an apparent simultaneity of places and times, and it is articulated through four main positions corresponding to conditions in which people, in particular artists and thinkers, find themselves acting in the present.[2]

It is devised with our young generation in mind…the artists, poets and thinkers they follow, so that they may recognize what foundations have been laid for them, what inheritance they must nurture and what inheritance must be overcome.[3]

— On stage. I am playing a role, I am a subject in the act of re-performing.

— Under siege. I am encircled by the other, besieged by others.

— In a state of hope, or optimism. I dream, I am the dreaming subject of anticipation.

— On retreat. I am withdrawn, I choose to leave the others, I sleep.[4]

Now, here in Kassel, the total bareness of the first rooms of the canonical core, the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, is broken by the display of Kai Althoff’s letter to Christov-Bakargiev explaining his decision not to take part in the exhibition (“life” was more important)—although a work of Althoff’s is, despite this, still featured in the Rotunda.[5]

Andrea Büttner, "Moss," dimensions variable, ongoing.

By the entrance stands a plastic dinosaur that I think is a work by Jimmie Durham. There is so much empty space and outdoor movement between venues that you notice the extraneous or realize, belatedly, that what you had looked at was art. Outside the press conference, young people wore sandwich boards with slogans like WHAT ARE BLUE BALLS? THEY’RE LOVELY and EVERYONE IS EATING HUMAN FLESH. Despite its absurdity, I automatically associated the action with the Kassel art student protests of 2007. Only when I saw the same boards in Ida Applebroog’s installation in the Museum Fridericianum did I know that they belonged to it.[6]

Another viewer saw Zeilinger’s badge and asked if he was one of the artists. The brusque reply: “I am not an artist.” Everyone here is a “participant.”[7]

Ida Applebroog at dOCUMENTA(13), photo courtesy Flickr/Creative Commons. June 6, 2012.

“Is that art?” The question comes up repeatedly while navigating Kassel.[8] I believe that art is a form of research, that it has a big relationship with society.[9]

These are terrains where politics are inseparable from a sensual, energetic, and worldly alliance between current research in various scientific and artistic fields and other knowledges, both ancient and contemporary.[10]

dOCUMENTA (13) takes a spatial or, rather, “locational” turn, highlighting the significance of a physical place, but at the same time aiming for dislocation and for the creation of different and partial perspectives—an exploration of micro-histories on varying scales that link the local history and reality of a place with the world, and the worldly.[11]

Installation view of Wafaa Yasin's 'Aesh (Livelihood),' 2008.

DS: You’ve been writing about the relationship between politics and art for a little while, not just at Art Practical, but in other publications. How did you come to the topic?

Matthew Harrison Tedford: Originally, I studied political philosophy, so I’m indebted to that discourse. Personally, however, I became disillusioned because I felt the conversation was disconnected from reality. So I began to look at art through this lens. It’s not that art is really any more concrete, but there’s something about it that’s helped me to clarify my questions about politics. There are other avenues for this: becoming an activist, becoming a politician, for example. But, for someone interested in the arts, like myself, looking at political art is a way to engage as an activist or a politician might, without having to martyr yourself to a profession you might not be interested in.

DS: Were you an activist? Or an artist?

MHT: I tried to get involved with campus politics, but I found it frustrating. There was this mentality where if you raised a legitimate question, you were attacked for somehow being counter-revolutionary. It seemed very superficial and reactionary. So in that proto-radical, post-adolescent scene, I became withdrawn, but this wasn’t something I was happy about. I was left with a question about how to be involved with politics, given the unappealing experiences I’d had. Which is not to say that all political groups are like this, or that even most political groups are like this! I just didn’t want to be part of a group that wasn’t open to being questioned.

DS: Do you feel like there’s a lack of conversation about the relationship between art and politics?

MHT: No. Certainly not. My personal interest is to clarify this relationship, to make it more concrete. I think sometimes works are seen as political just because they have political content. For instance, just because it’s a painting of George Bush, it’s seen as political. For me, I need the definition to be more meaningful. My goal has been to really define what makes a work of art political, or when does art function as a political phenomenon versus just an artwork?

MIchael Heizer's 'Levitated Mass' on the move, 2012. Photo by Will Brown Hernandez.

DS: What conclusions have you drawn? What makes a work political?

MHT: Answering for myself — as there are a lot of different approaches — I had to say forget art, what’s politics? I was looking at [philosophers] Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière, and for them, something is political if it involves a plurality of members of a given society. If it engages a large group, people of different perspectives, and not a homogenous mass. Secondly, if it’s doing so in a way that creates debate or dialogue among these people with regard to the structure or function of their society. For me, something’s not just political if it creates a debate alone — we can debate about whether a table is hard or soft — but really, it becomes political when the debate is about the way in which we live and structure our society.

DS: Would you consider Piss Christ (a photograph of a crucifix in the artist’s urine, a copy of which was recently smashed in a London Museum) a political work?

MHT: This recent attack was interesting. I don’t know if this is too cynical, but you could choose to look at the fact that it was smashed as ‘debate.’ On the other hand, you could say that it was just smashing an artwork. I don’t know, but I have a sweet spot for iconoclasm.

DS: But when it’s just one individual, that doesn’t constitute a plurality, does it?

MHT: No, but the fact that this work and works like it are so often attacked — not just physically, but via funding or visibility — indicates that there is a larger debate happening. So yes, you could say that this is acting as a political work of art. The unfortunate result is whether or not this means a work of art is more political if it has more celebrity? I don’t want that to be the case, but then again, if I have this brilliant work of political art, but it never leaves my studio…

Andreas Serrano's 'Piss Christ,' 1987, after being smashed with a hammer at the Lamber Collection Contemporary Art Museum in France.

DS: How much is artist intention involved?

MHT: Well, even if the work has no political intent, if it raises the kind of debate I’ve mentioned, I would consider it political. To do this accidentally — it’s complicated. So much is contingent on what happens. Really, any artwork has the potential to be political, depending how it enters into the public arena.

DS: Besides creating debate, does a work need to be effective in a particular way?

MHT: No, I don’t think it does. An artist creating a political work probably wants it to be effective, but it doesn’t need to be. Take voting, for example. It’s a political act, but even if you vote for someone who loses, you’re still engaging in politics. So, no, I don’t think the efficacy of something is tied up in whether it’s political.

Rigo 23. Autonomous InterGalactic Planetarium, 2009-12; installation view, REDCAT, Los Angeles, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco; Pedro Pica Piedra, Beto, Santiago Marcial, Monserrat Blanco, Gabriela, Marcos Sanchez, Domingo Santiz Ruiz, Mia Rollow, Paulina, Adrian Quiroz, Manuel Hidalgo, Ivan Pablo Soria, Pablo Milan, Miguel Hidalgo, Caleb Duarte, Jacobo Lagos, Erwin, Salvador. Photo: Scott Groller.

The Portuguese artist Ricardo Gouveia, or Rigo 23, might be best known for his series of larger-than-life, one-way-sign-inspired murals, painted on buildings across San Francisco, where the artist has lived since the 1980s. For the better part of the last decade, however, Rigo 23 has produced a series of projects with underserved and underrepresented communities. The latest of these, Programa Espacial Autónomo InterGalactico (Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program), has just docked at REDCAT, CalArt’s theater and gallery space in downtown Los Angeles.

The culmination of more than three years of coordination and labor by Rigo 23 and artisans from Chiapas, Mexico, as well as members of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), Programa Espacial represents a convergence of multiple worlds.¹ When Rigo 23 met with the members of the Good Government Junta of Morelia, Chiapas, to propose a collaborative art project between himself and artists from the region, he asked, “What would happen if they got an invitation to attend an intergalactic meeting somewhere other than the Milky Way; how would they travel?”² The junta members accepted this proposal but made it clear that the project was not a priority and would only be accomplished if he won the support of a local artist.

Because Programa Espacial is a collaborative project between an artist and various indigenous communities, and because those communities are under the jurisdiction of the EZLN, the exhibit brings up questions of commodification and appropriation, but these questions seem to have been of lesser interest to Rigo 23 than the question of positionality. The spiraling path a viewer takes through the exhibit evokes (within the limits of California’s fire code) the curve of a snail’s shell, creating interplay between a viewer’s sense of being sympathetically “inside” the EZLN looking out, or an outsider looking in.³

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40,000 bottle rockets make for a lot of noise and a lot of glare. Especially when they come hurtling toward your face. On April 7, 2012, artist Cai Guo-Qiang — known for his gunpowder drawings and performative “explosion events” — opened Sky Ladder at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary location with just such an experience. Called Mystery Circle, the event was pure spectacle. Over a thousand people showed up to watch Guo-Qiang use the rockets to burn images of crop circles and a Byzantine alien onto MOCA’s side.

Danielle Sommer: This is your first West Coast exhibition?

Cai Guo-Qiang: The first solo exhibition on the West Coast.

DS: Did that influence how you conceived the work? Is there anything specific about Los Angeles or the Western U.S. involved?

CGT: So back in the mid-nineties, when I was about to move from Japan to the U.S., I had a friend who was the editor of a major art magazine who told me that the West Coast is the closest place to the universe in the world. There’s a lot of hi-tech development, and also the aerospace industry is here.

DS: You’ve said that the role of art is to provide a distance for people to see certain issues and certain events – and that that distance is necessary to find the meaning below the surface. What it is about art that creates that distance? What is the meaning below the surface of this work?

Crop Circles, computer rendering for the exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang: Sky Ladder, 2012, courtesy Cai Studio.

CGT: Because the exhibition is titled Sky Ladder, there is a sense of distance between humans on Earth, and the universe and outer space. It’s also a pictorial review of my art career and the past works and projects I’ve done through the years.  With the crop circle installation, it’s a reversal of the normal perspective, where we humans are looking from outer space onto Earth.

DS: You talked about your first rocket painting being a tiny canvas in your studio. Do you still have a studio practice? Do you do things that are just for your own eyes?

CGT: I still have a studio, but when I mentioned that I was working with that canvas thirty years ago, it was in my hometown in China. Of course, now my studio is located in New York, but it’s where I conceive ideas or make sketches. When it comes to using gunpowder, because you need a permit for that, we go out to Brookhaven and Long Island.

"Desire for Zero Gravity," 2012, gunpowder on canvas, 340.36 x 1066.8 cm (134 x 420 in.), commissioned by The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, photo by Joshua White, courtesy The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

DS: Jeffery Dietch said that he considers your work both spectacular and intimate.  How do you feel when you’re experiencing it?

CGT: A lot of times very anxious — very excited in anticipating the event. When that happens, I feel at one with the audience.

DS: We all jumped back together.

CGT: I got hit by a few rockets!

DS: I saw that!

CGT: You saw that?

DS: I did.

Sky Ladder is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, through July 30, 2012.

Depiction of the Haymarket Riot, 1886. Chicago Historical Society.

International Workers’ Day, as you may or may not know, commemorates the 1886 Haymarket Riot in Chicago, which began with a peaceful protest for the right to an 8-hour workday. At some point during the protest, someone threw dynamite at the police, who then began to fire indiscriminately into the crowd. In the end, over ten protestors and police officers were dead. A few years later, the first congress of France’s Second International, an organization of socialist and labor parties, called for international demonstrations to celebrate the riot’s anniversary, and the modern incarnation of International Workers’ Day (May Day) was born—i.e., celebrated as a holiday by nearly 80 countries outside the United States, but not the U.S. itself.

Occupy Banner, May Day 2012, Vancouver, Canada.

Will May 1st, 2012, be any different? The Occupy movement has called for a general strike in cities across the U.S., including Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York. Actions were originally planned to shut down the Golden Gate Bridge in support of the Golden Gate Bridge Labor Coalition’s plan to strike; the GGBLC has gone on record to ask their supporters to keep the bridge open. Late last night, protesters gathered in Dolores Park, San Francisco (the heart of the Mission district) and marched down the streets, breaking car and shop windows along the way.

"May Day in Los Angeles, 1980," Mark Vallen, 1980. Print from 35mm Diapositive. 6.5 x 9.75 inches. This photograph was taken in L.A.'s MacArthur Park just moments before the Los Angeles Police Department attacked a large crowd celebrating International Workers' Day. The rally had been the first significant May Day demonstration to take place in L.A. since the 1960s. Recently on view at the Morono Kiang Gallery's "Faraway, So Close" exhibit, Los Angeles.

In honor of International Worker’s Day, a holiday meant to champion not just the achievements of workers but the potential of mass protest to transcend vandalism, especially against unfair and inhumane treatment by employers, #hashtags is asking you to submit your favorite piece of labor-related art to hashtags@dailyserving.com. We’ll add as many images as we can throughout the day (permissions willing).

Happy May Day, everyone.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, "Washing/Tracks/Maintenance," 1973. Mierle's 1969 "Manifesto for Maintenance Art" decried what she called the "death instinct" of the avant-garde, and focused instead on the "life instinct." Her projects were mostly performative in nature, including "Washing/Tracks/Maintenance," in which she cleaned the public steps of a museum.

Fred Wilson, "Guarded View," 1991. Four mannequins with museum guard uniforms; mannequins 75 x 48 x 166 in.; collection, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; photo: Dan Meyers.

Okay Mountain, "Torture Gym," 2011. Mixed media.

Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On," 1971.

Gordon Parks, "American Gothic, Washington D. C.", 1942.

Reception 7, 2011. Digital c-print. Edition of 3 + 2 AP. 8 x 12 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

What makes a tale “twice told”? For Nathaniel Hawthorne, who published a collection called Twice Told Tales, these were stories that had already lived one life by having been previously printed.  And for William Shakespeare, who coined the phrase, a “twice-told tale” was the most tedious tale of the lot, borrowed and uninspired. Shakespeare, however, had not met Stephanie Washburn.

Reception 2, 2011. Digital c-print. Edition of 3 + 2 AP. 30 x 40 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

In the case of Washburn’s “Twice Told,” on view at the Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles, the tales that repeat belong to the endless stream of images and narratives available through the television set.  Washburn, a painter, breaks the fourth wall by reacting to this stream, turning the television on and smearing her screen with not just paint, but everyday household items like butter, tape, bread, and potatoes. She then sets up a Hasselblad digital camera, and snaps a picture.

Reception 10, 2011. Digital c-print. Edition of 3 + 2 AP. 15 x 15 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

The resulting images, which Washburn calls “television drawings,” don’t look much like drawings; nor is the television screen easy to spot. From a distance, many look like abstract expressionist paintings. The spaghetti strewn across the screen in Reception 2, 2011, and Reception 9, 2011, initially calls to mind the gestures of Jackson Pollock, although thoughts of the fleshy materiality and subversive humor of many 1970s feminist artists follow quickly.

Reception 3, 2011. Digital c-print. Edition of 3 + 2 AP. 30 x 40 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

For many of the images, including Reception 4, 5, and 13 (all 2011), it’s almost impossible to make out any specific background image beyond a field of color. The television’s tell, of course, is its glow, and that glow permeates Washburn’s images: warm in some and cool in others, at times penetrating swathes of paint and at other times merely strengthening the shadows of dimensional objects.

Reception 12, 2011. Digital c-print. Edition of 3 + 2 AP. 12 x 18 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

This interplay of the television image and Washburn’s interventions occurs not just formally (in terms of light and shadow, or scale), but figuratively. In Reception 1, 2011, a rubber-gloved hand creeps onto the scene from the bottom left of the image; blending almost perfectly with a group of three hands in the background, except for the fact that the intervening hand (the gloved hand) has a deep shadow to emphasize its physicality.

Reception 1, 2011. Digital c-print. Edition of 3 + 2 AP. 15 x 15 inches. Image couresy of the artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

The beauty and power of Washburn’s work comes from how effortlessly the images marry both formal and conceptual references to a variety of traditionally “opposed” relationships: digital and physical, visceral and cerebral, touch and sight. It’s no wonder that the series is called “Reception” – Washburn’s photographs don’t just rework old narratives and images into new forms, but challenge us to consider our role as media consumers in the 21st century.

“Twice Told” is on view at the Mark Moore Gallery in Culver City, Los Angeles, through May 19, 2012.