Eric Yahnker. Angel in the Outfield, 2015; colored pencil on paper. Courtesy of the Artist and Zevitas Marcus.

Through the exhibition’s title, Noah’s Yacht, Yahnker reimagines Noah’s Ark as a “smaller, ritzier, and more exclusive one, in which the ticket to ride—or ultimately survive—is privilege and wealth.” The first piece in the show, Angel in the Outfield (2015), is a nine-foot-tall drawing of Christ in midair with a catcher’s mitt, about to catch a pop fly. The history of the Christian god is intrinsically tied to the history of white male privilege, spanning from the crusades through colonialism and post-colonialism. Yahnker is, himself, a white American male, and much of this show is his coming to terms with his own privilege and what it means in this vibrant and pivotal political climate.

Caged Birds (2016) is a sculpture made of handcuffs, leg shackles, jewelry, and marijuana pipes.  Hanging from the ceiling, the piece unmistakably alludes to the American justice system and the “War on Drugs” as both inherently broken and racist. It is placed in front of a powerful diptych, Abe Lincorn and Pierced Piety (2015). Abe Lincorn references Rachel Dolezal’s performed blackness, while in Pierced Piety, Donald Trump wears Christianity (and racism) as a style. Both pieces speak to power and privilege in the appropriation of culture for political gain. Together, they serve as brilliant bookends of the Republican Party, which will either implode or explode after this coming election.

Eric Yahnker. Abe Lincorn, 2015; colored pencil on paper. Pierced Piety, 2015, colored pencil on paper. Shell Game, 2015 (detail); 314 Purell hand sanitizer bottles, spire seashells. Courtesy of the Artist and Zevitas Marcus.

Southern Burn (2015) features a 1950s-style pinup girl looking at her sunburn in her vanity mirror. The sunburn on her back is in the shape of the Confederate flag. She looks like the Coppertone girl all grown up—an uncomfortably oversexualized corporate image of the toddler wearing the same facial expression of coyness, surprise, and allure. In context with the rest of the works in the show, Southern Burn does the work of establishing the deep racist roots of this nation’s history and the Republican party in particular. On another level, it considers the racial privilege inherent in tanning culture itself—to be able to darken your skin for cosmetic reasons without the social, personal, and economic consequences of actually being a person born with naturally dark skin.

Eric Yahnker. Southern Burn, 2015; colored pencil on paper. Courtesy of the Artist and Zevitas Marcus.

Shell Game (2015) is made of hundreds of hand-sanitizer bottles with a single shell placed inside each of them. The piece is displayed as a grid on the wall, surrounding the large-scale drawings like wallpaper. A shell game is the cup-and-balls trick: a gambling game that is usually, if not always, a con performed on the streets. The hand sanitizers suggest a fear of the other—the fear that the last person who used your shopping cart had some horrible germs that could infect you or your family. The current hysterical fear of terrorists or illegal immigrants is not a far leap to make. With just a few clever words and carefully picked objects, Yahnker uses his sleight of hand to imply that someone is making a profit from all this fear—that it is all a shell game.

Eric Yahnker. Erasing Time, 2006; completely erased Time Magazine. Courtesy of the Artist and Zevitas Marcus.

In the center of the room is Erasing Time (2006), in which the artist spent two and a half months erasing all the contents of an entire issue of Time magazine. The fact that Yahnker found this ten-year-old piece important enough to show for the first time is evidence of how crucial the piece is. Erasing Time implies that American history has regressed, folded in on itself, and is constantly erased so that we end up making the same mistakes over and over again. The piece further implies that history is written only by those who are in power, and that even having a recorded history is in itself a form of privilege. As Shell Game indicates, American media and politics is sanitized to such an extent that the truth is lost—the narrative bought, sold, and manipulated by those in power to insure that they keep it.

Eric Yahnker: Noah’s Yacht is on view at Zevitas Marcus in Los Angeles through April 30, 2016.

John Outterbridge. Case in Point, c. 1970 (from the Rag Man Series); mixed media; 12 x 12 x 24 in. Collection of the Hammer Museum. Photo: Andrew Zermeño.

Currently on view at Art + Practice, Rag Man features the work of veteran artist John Outterbridge (b. 1933, Greenville, NC). Outterbridge is no stranger to this kind of community activism through art, having been the director of the Watts Towers Art Center from 1975 to 1992. He is also no stranger to the oft-ignored art scene located “south of the 10” (or south of Interstate 10, as non-Angelenos would say). In fact, the Brockman Gallery, which housed the Black Artists Association and represented artists such as Betye Saar, Noah Purifoy, Kerry James Marshall, David Hammons, and Outterbridge himself, once sat in the same square in Leimert Park. Started by Alonzo and Dale Davis in the 1960s, the gallery sought to showcase underrepresented artists of color, who were otherwise disregarded.

When LA Times art critic William Wilson said that he had not attended the Brockman Gallery because he was not interested in writing about group shows (a statement easily refuted), John Outterbridge responded by saying, “Mr. Wilson, why don’t you honestly tell everyone that you have not come to Brockman Gallery simply because you don’t come on that side of town? … The people that you write about are the people that you drink wine with, and we’re not those people. So just be honest and say that you have not come to the gallery because you are uncomfortable in coming into the realm of what the gallery represents.”[1]

John Outterbridge. Remnants of an Apron, Lost, 2002; mixed media. Courtesy of Tilton Gallery, NY. Photo: Lenae Day.

Rag Man consists mostly of Outterbridge’s newer work from the past eight years, with a few older pieces scattered throughout. The first wall features fourteen mixed-media sculptures from 2000–12. With titles like Dreads, Hooked, and Caged, the range of materials includes wood, metal, bone, horn, ripped fabric, hair, paint, and found objects. In Remnants of an Apron, Lost (2002), the head of an African Ashanti doll becomes a wide platter with dreads growing out of a dome-like head. Dreads seem to be growing out of many of these talismanic, toy-like works, anthropomorphizing them into the bodies of black Americans. I Mus Speak (2008) is a mallet-shaped form with a ponytail of dreads and rags. The mallet, which resembles a wooden horse or mule, is a symbol that Outterbridge draws on throughout much of his work to talk about the history of American capitalism being built on the backs of slaves. For Outterbridge, the mule is a “symbol of the black body, courageously searching for absolute freedom.”[2]

John Outterbridge. Jive Ass Bird, 1971; mixed media. Courtesy of Tilton Gallery, NY. Photo: Lenae Day.

The exhibition also includes two pieces from Outterbridge’s original soft-sculpture Rag Man series of the 1970s: Jive Ass Bird (1970) and Case in Point (1970). Case in Point appears to be a large duffel bag made out of smaller, sausage-like bags that could alternatively be interpreted as artillery shells. Underneath a military brown wash, an underpainting of neon colors practically screams to be let out. A Greyhound bus tag reads: “People travel like packages,” suggesting that human beings are nothing more than baggage. As a war veteran, Outterbridge knew many men who died abroad, only to be shipped back home. The piece also indicates the transportation of slaves, brought to the U.S. as the property of other men—or in other words, as packages.

Across the back wall, Outterbridge’s new Rag and Bag Idiom (2012) series calls back to the original soft sculptures. These pieces are bright, as though the neon rainbow underpainting of Case in Point were finally free to express itself. In this new series, there is a sincere feeling of optimism and youthful energy to be found in the works’ playful shapes, bright colors, and formal arrangement.

John Outterbridge. Rag and Bag Idiom I, 2012; mixed media. Courtesy of Tilton Gallery, NY.

At age 83, it is only in the past five years that Outterbridge has received the kind of recognition and praise he deserves as the influential and talented artist he is. With recent exhibitions in New York and LA, Outterbridge also participated in the Venice Biennale and received a lifetime achievement award from the California African American Museum. John Outterbridge was on the front line of activism in art in the 1960s and ’70s, and it is only fitting that he be back there now during the inaugural year of this vibrant community art space.

John Outterbridge: Rag Man is on view at Art + Practice in Los Angeles through February 27, 2016.

[1] African-American Artists of Los Angeles: John W. Outterbridge. Interviewed by Richard Candida Smith; 1989–90. Online Archive of California. Department of Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles, 2009. Accessed February 13, 2016, http://www.oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb229006xm;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00020&toc.id=0&brand=oac4

[2] John Outterbridge: Rag Man. Curators Anne Ellegood and Jamillah James (Los Angeles: Art + Practice Foundation, December 2015), exhibition catalog.

Picture it: golf courses, lawn furniture, sprinklers, empty pools, groceries, plush carpets you can almost feel under your feet, sunglasses, bulky watches, a Dodger’s game droning on TV, frosted glass, floor-to-ceiling curtains, a pink terry-cloth tracksuit, patterned linoleum, and green—the pervasive chartreuse of freshly cut grass or new growth is evident in almost every single image in Larry Sultan’s series Pictures from Home (1983–1992). This body of work is a personal reflection on the aftermath of the postwar American dream in suburbia. In it, Sultan documented his own parents in their home in the San Fernando Valley outside of Los Angeles, and this is the central body of work in Here and Home, the vast and stunning retrospective of Sultan’s work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which is also the first retrospective of the artist’s work since his death in 2009 at the age of 63.

Larry Sultan. Discussion, Kitchen Table, from the series Pictures from Home, 1985; chromogenic print; 30 x 40 in. Courtesy of the Estate of Larry Sultan.

“In 1972, my own escape from the suburbs of my youth was fresh enough to count, in my mind, as an act of rebellion.” — Larry Sultan

Sultan was an influential teacher and artist in the San Francisco Bay area for forty years. Beginning in 1973, he collaborated with fellow artist Mike Mandel on a series of absurd billboards placed in various locations around California. Featuring images of oranges burning in a man’s hands (Oranges on Fire, 1975), or a handful of ties being tossed at the viewer (Ties, 1978), these images were meant to subvert the medium and disrupt the subliminal messages inherent to advertising. In the introduction of the exhibition catalogue, Philip Gefter calls Sultan and Mandel “the Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray of the Pictures Generation.” Their playful ideas about recontextualization led to their collaborative masterpiece, Evidence (1975–77), in which they culled and curated images from the archives of government agencies, public utilities, university laboratories, and private corporations. The images were removed from context and printed in a book without captions, thus heightening their already surreal nature.

Larry Sultan, Mike Mandel. Oranges on Fire, 1975; photo mural; 10 x 22 ft. Photo courtesy of the Estate of Larry Sultan.

“Coming from L.A., where most of the culture is automotive, and most of the images are things you don’t choose to see, billboards are a powerful context for imagery. In fact, growing up in L.A., you’d drive down Sunset Strip and look at the billboards instead of going to art galleries. It’s an awful thing to admit, but the advertisers were the visionaries of our time. They gave us notions of who we should become. Our myths of heaven and hell.” — Larry Sultan

In the late 1970s, Sultan withdrew from his collaboration with Mandel and the Picture Generation’s postmodern ideals and returned to pure photography, which resulted in his ethereal underwater images of people taking swimming lessons at a public pool (Swimmers, 1978–1982). Sultan worried that these images were too painterly, beautiful, self-indulgent, and irrelevant to the art making of the time, but they clearly show an unselfconscious dive into the subconscious and emotion, and serve as a bridge from his earlier postmodern collaborations to his later, much more serious bodies of work.

Larry Sultan. Thanksgiving, from the series Pictures from Home, 1985; chromogenic print; 20 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Estate of Larry Sultan.

”I remember arguing with my father over fifteen years ago about a photograph I made of my mother. It was a very simple and direct picture of her standing in front of a sliding glass door holding a cooked turkey on a silver platter. He accused me of creating an image that had less to do with her than with my own stereotypes of how people age. I argued that our conflicting notions about who mom is and how she should be represented are based on our different relationships to her. She is my mother but his wife. I pointed out that in almost every picture of her that he has taken she is posed like a model selling one thing or another.” — Larry Sultan

Sultan’s cinematic Pictures from Home (1983–92) considers the fallout of the postwar American Dream. Here his parents represent the diaspora of middle-class white people moving from the East Coast to greener pastures out West. Thanksgiving (1985) is at once so disgustingly grotesque and so recognizable in our cultural psyche as part of “what a mother does” that it is heartbreaking to see. When he decided to stage and photograph his parents in their own home in the late 1980s, Sultan was drawing on his various instincts; he turned the imagination and subliminal messaging of advertising into an investigation of the subconscious digestion of thousands of images and myths of the American home and dream. The investigative aspect of Evidence was fulfilled by documenting his parent’s lives before their deaths. Sultan said his impulse was to “take photography literally. To stop time. I want my parents to live forever.” The dreamlike allure of Swimmers is recalled in the incredible beauty of these images—the depth of light, color, and texture is unique to Sultan—and they give the odd feeling that the lens is never completely forgotten.

Larry Sultan. Woman in Curlers, from the series The Valley, 2002; chromogenic print; 60 x 50 in. Courtesy of the Estate of Larry Sultan.

In a later series, The Valley (1997–2003), Sultan photographed the porn industry, which largely operates in the same area he grew up in. In the San Fernando Valley, porn companies rent middle-class suburban mansions, much like the house in which Sultan was raised, to stage carnal scenes in these domestic spaces. Sultan chooses to focus on the more mundane aspects of a porn shoot as an extension of his exploration of the myth of the American Dream. Woman in Curlers (2002) is tragic. The subject is overly done up, with a deep sadness in her eyes. Viewers know that the context is the porn industry, but she could just as well be his overly made-up mother preparing the Thanksgiving turkey.

Larry Sultan: Here and Home is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through March 22, 2015.

Jo Ann Callis. Salt, Pepper, Fire, 1980; dye transfer print; 22 ½ x 17 ½ in. Courtesy of the Artist and Rose Gallery.

Jo Ann Callis’ work is both silent and violent. She sets a calm scene in a domestic space and upsets it with dramatic lighting or a blur of motion. In one alarming image, Hands on Ankles (1796–77), a woman stands on a dining-room chair in designer pumps—we can see her only from the knee down—as a man’s hands grab her ankles through the chair back, from behind. This may be the most literal of her photographs, a rare interaction between two figures depicting the power struggle inherent in domestic life and the complicated relationships between men and women. Salt, Pepper, Fire (1980) is an odd table setting with salt, pepper, black coffee, and a flaming plate. The salt and pepper shakers are our protagonists, lit to be the bystanders witnessing this inexplicable fire; the smoke rising from the fire resembles a bird in flight. Callis is a master of manipulating light for dramatic effect; her photographs use light so skillfully and unnaturally that they could be paintings.

Ellen Brooks. Balancer, 1982; cibachrome print; 24 x 52 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Ellen Brooks contrives various tableaux, often of theatrically staged sculptural figures or dolls. Sometimes the figures are in domestic settings, but often they are on an actual stage, as in the aforementioned Trophy (1984), where two women pull each other’s hair and wrestle over a trophy on what appears to be a stage. Brooks highlights issues of female competition, suggesting that the diminutive prize is all these women are offered, and still they fight instead of working together to build a better prize. In Balancer (1982), a woman is balancing on one hand on a makeshift block tower in front of a blue curtain, and in her other hand is a tiny model of a domestic scene: a kitchen in which a woman is performing a striptease for a man. The balancer’s back is to the viewer, and she is in a silver lamé showgirl costume; the scene reveals just how difficult it is for a woman to maintain a career (city towers), a desirable body (revealing costume), and a man or home (domestic scene). This is a diptych, however, and the photograph on the right is of the same curtain, but with a ladder placed in the middle; it leads me to wonder if she is indeed balancing, or if she is falling from a great height.

Eileen Cowin. Untitled from One Night Stand (3), 1977-78; digital light jet print; 20 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Eileen Cowin’s work also delves into psychological territory. In I’ll Give You Something to Cry About (1998), she mixes stills of her mother taken from home movies with staged photographs of injuries—a prick from a rose or a raw blister on a hand—implying the emotional and physical pain often caused by familial relationships. Her triptych One Night Stand (1977–78) offers almost forensic documentation of the setting of the titular event. It is also a double entendre, referring to the nightstand featured in the photographs as well as the sexual act. Detail shots of the bed and nightstand are seen in daylight, and each has a different Polaroid, showing the undressing of a man and a woman, placed in the scene. The natural lighting offers a different way of thinking about space and intimacy outside of the passion and dramatic lighting of the night.

It is fitting that this show is on view at the same time as the Robert Heinecken retrospective, Object Matter, organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and on view at the Hammer Museum, since all three women emerged from his circle, either as students or colleagues. You can see how his work influenced their multi-medium approach to photography at the same time as you can see how theirs differ from his. Heinecken uses the mediated female form unabashedly—and often offensively—as a muse; it is something he can tear apart and reassemble, as though he has an innate right to it. These three artists are working with both female and male forms, but their work lends respect to all figures, instead choosing to delve into more abstract, direct, and emotional qualities of form.

Burning Down the House is on view at Pasadena Museum of California Art through January 11, 2015.

Jennifer Juniper Stratford. Program Vista, 2014 (still); video projection. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo by the author.

Allison Schulnik’s EAGER is a jumble of grotesque and beautiful scenes that begins with a dance of skeletal female figures who communicate with their long, stringy hair, since their faces are absent. They come in contact with a gauzy, blue-stained witch and a comically sad clown–horse with an erect, red, swinging dick. Then one woman unzips the others’ stomachs to wear them like backpacks through a wild and carnivorous forest of flowers and trees reminiscent of the garden of live flowers from Alice in Wonderland. The influence of choreographer Pina Bausch is apparent, but so too the terrifying early psychedelic cartoons of the 1930s. What this lavish animation encompasses makes words feel ineffective, but any attempt would have to include life, death, rebirth, sex, competition, nature, self-expression, female empowerment, and reproductive power—thanks to all of the rotting, deformed, and beautifully hand-sculpted figures. Schulnik even places herself in the work in a photographic stop-motion sequence, wearing a costume that resembles the blue clay witch. This is the first animation for which the artist has commissioned accompanying music; in the past, she used existing music from artists. Schulnik says that working with Olson was her first collaboration, and the creative agency this allowed is evident in the film.

Allison Schulnik. EAGER, 2014 (video still); stop-motion animation with sound; 8:30. Courtesy of the Artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

The paintings from Los Angeles-based Jake Longstreth’s series Particulate Matter (2013–2014) are meditations on mark making and form. Using the hills surrounding Los Angeles as subject matter, Longstreth makes small, precise brush strokes to create the depth of the topography while leaving the sky a perfectly smooth gradient. Los Angeles is a city of sunlight, but if you live here, the quality of the light becomes one of the only indications of a passage of time—the color of the sky and the light reflecting off of the surrounding hills is powerful—and indicative of the season, levels of pollution, cloud cover, and moisture. Longstreth somehow, almost magically, manages to capture not only the varying qualities of light on the hills, but the feelings they invoke as you see them change daily from your house or the freeway.

Jake Longstreth. Particulate Matter #3, 2014; oil on canvas; 17 x 13 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Peter Scherrer’s expressionistic oil paintings of the California desert are rich tapestries with layers of symbols built into the landscape. Craggy mountainsides become human characters, trees turn into snakes, cacti resemble testicles—there are a lot of possible and probable hidden reproductive organs—as well as a dagger perched precariously at the edge of one painting. This landscape is a purely subconscious one, where each element has a personality and life of its own, but none of it feels sinister. Scherrer’s landscapes feel like old friends making themselves known.

Peter Scherrer. Red Hill, 2014; oil on linen on panel; 16 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Jesse Wiedel’s strange, somewhat crude paintings of low-life characters in small California towns are the only pieces that directly deal with civilization in the show, although the civilization depicted is a surreal fiction. In The Tropics (2014), a woman dances for a man with his pants down around his ankles outside of a motel called The Tropics while a sleepy-looking alien lumbers behind her. In The Incinerator (2013), a pair of terrifying meth-head men walk both toward and away from the viewer, carrying a red cooler under a tie-dye sky, as though they were stuck circling the sawdust incinerator in their small town for eternity. These paintings display the depression, helplessness, and total disconnect from the land that happens in small towns (note the “Tropics” motel, which is anywhere but), even though these places are often more remote and therefore enveloped in the landscape.

Jesse Wiedel. The Tropics, 2013; oil on wood; 16 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

The links between the pieces in Landscape City are tonal more than anything else. The feelings evoked by Aaron Olson’s score for EAGER are echoed again and again in the pieces throughout the show—a calm navigation of our place in the vastness of our physical world.

Landscape City is on view at Eagle Rock Center for the Arts through December 11, 2014.

Yvonne Rainer. Rehearsal for Parts of Some Sextets, 1965; gelatin silver print; 23.5 x 20.5 cm. The Getty Research Institute. Photo: Al Giese.

Rainer studied under Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham before creating her own choreography, and was a founding member of the experimental and influential Judson Dance Theater in New York in the early 1960s. The show begins with a 1966 article on Rainer from the New York Post titled “Rebellion in the Arts,” published after her Parts of Some Sextets (1965), a performance that involved ten dancers and mattresses and a lot of “pedestrian” movements, or movements that come very naturally to a human being: running, jumping, falling, and walking. The Getty presents photographs of rehearsals and the performance, as well as Rainer’s own writings on the piece that include complicated lists and movement diagrams. The dancers did not have music to guide their rhythms, and learning the dance was incredibly difficult—Rainer wrote that some dancers “ended up memorizing [the steps] by rote, like multiplication tables or dates in history.” Of the piece, she said she “wanted it to remain undynamic movement, no rhythm, no emphasis, no tension, no relaxation. You just do it, with the coordination of a pro and the non-definition of an amateur.” She was trying to remove all personal affectation or theatricality from the work and let the human body move on its own. The next year she created her most famous work, Trio A (The Mind Is a Muscle, Part II) (1966), of which there is a looped video of Rainer performing the entire piece, one steady flow of movements.

Yvonne Rainer. Score for “Trio B: Running” from The Mind Is a Muscle, 1966-68; graphite and ink on paper; 21.1 x 18.5 cm. The Getty Research Institute. © Yvonne Rainer.

Also in this room is a display case full of journals and sketchpads from the late 1940s through the 1980s. For each journal, there is a pair of headphones with which to listen to a contemporary Rainer; she reads a selection of her old thoughts and then reflects on them at the end. I was so engrossed with these auditory pieces that I spent a full hour listening to them all the way through. It is fascinating to hear the artist’s thoughts shift and change; to learn her processes, depressions, and struggles; and even to see her handwriting go from a tight and perfect script at age 15 to a loose scrawl in her 50s. The physical properties of her handwriting mirror the looseness with which she tied concepts together as she aged, or perhaps belied her confidence in the “radical juxtapositions” of ideas she was using in her work. One entry, from her 1951–1952 journal, reads: “I was a plagiarist. Yvonne Rainer is a fake. I long ago lost what self I was born with—I can only steal from others. I try to make the motley assortment me through appropriation.”

Yvonne Rainer. Yvonne Rainer and John Erdman in This Is The Story of a Woman Who… performed at Theater for the New City, New York, 1973; gelatin silver print; 20.2 x 25.2 cm. The Getty Research Institute. Photo: Babette Mangolte.

In the next room, there are more photographs and paper ephemera from her time with the Judson Dance Theater and the experimental dance group Grand Union. At this time, Rainer was beginning more narrative work, such as This Is a Story of a Woman Who… (1973). Eventually she quit dance altogether to become an experimental filmmaker, but in 2000 she returned to choreography. A collection of excerpts from her performance works from 1961 to 2012 plays on an hour-and-a-half loop.

The piece that brought Rainer back to dance is After Many a Summer Dies a Swan (2000), in which Mikhail Baryshnikov reprises “Valda’s Solo” from Lives of Performers, originally produced in 1972. In the first iteration, which is loosely based on Nazimova’s Dance of the Seven Veils, Valda dances sensually with a ball and eventually holds it—mesmerizingly—in the crook of her neck. In After Many a Summer, Baryshnikov wears a costume similar to Valda’s: Her strapless evening gown is harnessed to the front half of his body, with khaki pants underneath, to provide an examination of gender politics. It seems that Rainer came back to choreography with a much stronger sense of humor.

Another piece worth mentioning is AG Indexical with a Little Help from H.M. (2006), in which Rainer reimagines George Balanchine’s famous pas de deux, but replaces the male dancer in the couple with three female modern dancers; the piece clearly reveals the mechanics involved in such difficult choreography, as well as the inherent sexualizing of the female dancer. Spiraling Down (2008) is her most recent work, and it is full of quotes from sources as varied as Steve Martin, soccer legend Pelé, Fred Astaire, and Facebook, and physical juxtapositions of face and body, as the four dancers eventually wind down to Ravel’s incessant and haunting Bolero. The performance videos are so hypnotic, I watched them fully twice through. Realizing that the four hours I had to spend in the gallery were nearly up, I barely had time to look into the video gallery where Rainer’s avant-garde films are on a constant rotation. This is a vast retrospective contained in a very little space, but with the proper amount of time, it is an incredibly fulfilling experience.

In a contemporary art world where one-liners, memes, and easily digestible ideas are granted more resonance than they deserve—due to the technology with which we view art and the amount of time we are able to invest—Rainer’s works are slow and defiant. She trades ego for emotional resonance, and because of that, her works are ultimately more rewarding. Fifty years later, her works feel just as rebellious.

Yvonne Rainer: Dances and Films is on view at the Research Institute Galleries at the Getty Center through October 12, 2014.

Eric Yahnker. Daddy Issues, 2014, wooden cobra on pedestal, 25 x 14 x 7 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Space Jam (2014) is an almost eight-foot-tall colored-pencil drawing that features Michael Jordan slam-dunking into a basketball net whose backboard is the scandalous 1866 painting by Gustave Courbet, L’Origine du Monde (Origin of the World). It is well rendered and beautifully composed—from the swish of the basketball net to the gilt gold frame, from the brick wall behind Jordan to the wrinkle of his sweatshirt; of course, the copy of the famous painting itself is a feat of impressive draftsmanship. Space Jam pokes fun at the male-centric sports lingo for sexual intercourse and even compares the worship of a sports star with the worship of a woman as a sex object. But this piece also attempts to bridge the gap between Yahnker’s own hyperrealistic and pop-culture-based artwork and the work of the great European masters. It grapples with the idea that the United States’ chief export is culture—even and especially to its ancestral countries—and that particular culture is no longer the fine culture of high art, drama, and architecture (although given the pornographic nature of the Courbet he chose to reproduce, maybe it never was), and is instead  a vapid consumer pop culture. This entire show grapples with and pokes fun at the pop culture the United States exports (which is both consumed and berated), and also the way that current events are understood outside of our own country.

Eric Yahnker. Space Jam, 2014, colored pencil on paper, 94 x 72 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Yahnker sees himself as a comedian, a political cartoonist, and the “crazy uncle of the art world,” a space that is rife with complications as to whether his work is art or is merely going for the joke. There are times when the show feels too topical. For example, Soon-Yi (2014)—a text-based work in which the O’s in “Soon-Yi” are portraits of Woody Allen’s face—alludes to the recent media circus surrounding Dylan Farrow’s (re-)accusations of Allen’s sexual assault. In the somewhat obvious and also hilarious Crimea River (2014), Vladimir Putin cries a tear in the shape of Crimea. There are also pieces that feel behind the times, like Don’t Mesh with Texas (2014), a sculpture of several cutting boards in the shape of Texas, where the pointed end of the state is fitted into red, white, and blue cock-n-ball thongs—a joke that feels like a hangover of the anti-Bush years. This is the perfect example of the one-linerism Yahnker is often accused of, and I found myself wondering how this art will be viewed in twenty years.

Eric Yahnker. Crimea River, 2014, charcoal, graphite and ink on paper, 40 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Yahnker’s jokes function in a world where Miley Cyrus’ over-sexualized coming-of-age antics get far more clicks than anything pertaining to the U.S. government’s use of drone strikes or surveillance. These jokes are deadly serious and speak to the tragedy of the world’s infatuation with pop culture and the contextual difficulties of having all of these ideas—pop-cultural and political—exist in the same flattened and mediated world inside of our minds.

Sticks and Drones is on view at Paradise Row Gallery through Saturday, June 28, 2014.

As you round the corner of the entryway at Diane Rosenstein where this phrase is visible, the first works on view in Eleanor Antin’s Passengers are two massive photographs from her 2004 series Roman Allegories. Going Home is almost 9 feet wide and 4 feet tall. It depicts a very blonde girl seated on a suitcase plastered with travel stickers, looking off to the right of the camera, smiling in a forced, staged manner. She sits as though posing for a children’s clothing catalogue, but is dressed in Hellenic Roman garb and is surrounded by vague Roman detritus (pieces of columns, an urn, vague statues), a crow, and five adult figures all dressed similarly with their backs to the camera, facing the ocean. All of the characters hold umbrellas as if waiting for a deluge while already knowing their fate.

Eleanor Antin. Going Home from Roman Allegories, 2004; chromogenic print; edition of 4; 47 ¾ x 102 ¼ in. ©Eleanor Antin, courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Art.

This piece works as a kind of beginning and ending, encapsulating the feeling inherent in Passengers—an existential question about life, death, culture. and the point of it all—with a humorous spin. Passengers is a retrospective of Antin’s work, but not in a way that I expected at all. Anyone familiar with Antin’s oeuvre knows that she was a pioneer of early conceptual and performance art. She created and developed characters—Nurse Eleanor, the black ballerina Eleanora Antinova, and the King of Solano Beach—but very few references to her work with the self exist in this show. In a separate small room toward the entrance of the gallery, all fifty-one photographs from her 100 Boots series are on display. This is the piece that made her famous in her 1973 MOMA show and it is one of the earliest examples of narrative conceptual art. Antin photographed 100 boots in various locations and mailed them to 1,000 people and institutions over two years. She conceived of this project as a sort of “pictorial novel” in which you can see the boots on a long journey. They begin at the sea (100 Boots Facing the Sea), do some mundane chores (100 Boots at the Bank; 100 Boots in the Market), commit their first crime (100 Boots Trespass), go to work (100 Boots on the Job), head east to New York, and eventually end up at the museum. In my favorite, 100 Boots on the Porch, Antin’s playful humor is evident: Some are lazing, some are daredevils perched on a ledge, while others are casually standing, facing each other—one can almost hear them talking to each other about the day’s events. This is a classic piece, one that is great to see in person and within the conceptual framework of this show.

Eleanor Antin. 100 Boots on the Porch from 100 Boots; 1971-73/2005; series of 51 archival digital prints; edition of 10; 8 x 10 in. each. ©Eleanor Antin, courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Art.

In the main gallery are some rarely seen (and some previously unshown) drawings. The playful series Dance of Death (1974–75) consists of pastel sketches featuring a jolly skeletal figure of death, dancing with maidens or smoking with soldiers. There are also beautiful costume and stage-set drawings from her 1979 play Before the Revolution—one reads “Simplicity is an infinite cost,” perhaps referring to the lavish Baroque world in which the play exists, but which I read as a philosophical declaration on the part of the artist to remain grounded in complicated visual and human narratives.

Eleanor Antin. Costume Drawings from Before the Revolution (Double Marie); 1975-76; watercolor, pen, and ink on paper; 14 x 11 in. ©Eleanor Antin, courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Art.

Eleanor Antin. Classical Frieze; 2008; video; 21:33. ©Eleanor Antin, courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Art. Photo: Lenae Day.

My favorite piece is at the very end of the show. Classical Frieze (2008) is a twenty-one-minute film directed and produced by Antin that explores the process behind her classical pieces. In it, she says, “with photography you can invent any time period you want.” And she does just that in her beautiful monumental Historical Takes series (from 2001 to 2007) that photographically  re-create classical Greek and Roman scenes in the style of 19th-century salon-style painting. Five of these pieces are on view in the exhibit, but watching Antin’s own telling of their creation is the most fascinating and hilarious. The video shows her subjects getting ready for the shoots: It shows them putting makeup on, taking selfies in costume, gorging themselves in a suburban kitchen, naked men’s butts getting hair applied to them so they can be satyrs, young girls sheepishly viewing the goods on men in tight bikinis, awkward conversations, and the miscommunications that occur with a cast of twenty people. It shows the collaboration inherent in works as grand as this, as well as the joy and warmth she exudes as she makes her work. At the very end, it shows Antin, a tiny 70-year-old Jewish woman, lugging urns to their places on the beach—the same detritus in that entry photograph Going Home. The young girl is in curlers sitting on suitcases while some men are planting the columns along the beach as a resident fishes in the background. When the shot is finally set up and all actors are in their places, Antin yells “action” before a jogger runs from right to left—through the frozen Classical scene. Eleanor Antin has a way of bringing the past to the present in a way that allows for warmth, insight, and humor: the three pillars of great art.

Eleanor Antin: Passengers is on view at Diane Rosenstein Fine Art through May 31, 2014.

Pablo Bronstein. Enlightenment Discourse on the Origins of Architecture, 2014; Performance at REDCAT, Los Angeles. Photo: Scott Groller.

Indeed they are. As I walk through the space (and yes, you can walk through this show, touching and interacting with the furniture), I notice the performer, who is clearly defined by black tights, black leather dance shoes, and a billowy white blouse. She (or he, depending on who is performing at the moment—there are two professional dancers sharing the same role) moves about the space, interacting with the furniture by unlocking and opening them up to reveal a completely different incarnation of form and space. The chairs’ legs shriek as they are dragged across the concrete floor. The two dressers are moved on their casters, positioned back-to-back, and then locked together by two tiny hooks. The tops open outward, creating a space within the two dressers about the size, depth, and volume of a hot tub. A large, red, utilitarian boom box is brought out and a harpsichord melody plays—reminiscent of music that might have been heard in a king’s court. The dancer climbs up on the dressers and begins to move in slow, preening motions. As the music builds in speed and intensity, so do the strange birdlike arm movements of the dancer as she moves around the rim of this box. The dancer makes it back to her original location, adopts a fifth position (imagine holding a beach ball above your head), and flops to the side in a false and histrionic death. The dancer then gets up as though nothing had happened, turns the boom box off, and returns the room to its original arrangement, never once acknowledging the audience.

Pablo Bronstein. Enlightenment Discourse on the Origins of Architecture, 2014; Performance at REDCAT, Los Angeles. Photo: Scott Groller.

London-based artist Pablo Bronstein’s newly commissioned project for REDCAT is a “staged essay,” where the artist plays the role of choreographer and architect, constructing a space that is constantly in flux. The placement of the furniture and a series of architectural drawings on the wall at first mimic the layout of a traditional 18th-century room, and then, through the use of choreography, these pieces are moved and reconfigured to represent an idealized configuration of a city in traditional Renaissance painting. The drawings, entitled Primitive Façade Variations, are meticulous ink-and-watercolor works that depict fictional facades where the architecture is hyperbolically out of scale with human proportion. The drawings on the wall serve to emphasize the scale of the performer to the oversized, anthropomorphic furniture. The dancers appear to be kids opening cabinets, which serves to both cement and satirize the Enlightenment’s ideas of archeological permanence—the Neoclassical’s solid and historically dominant presence in art history.

Pablo Bronstein. Enlightenment Discourse on the Origins of Architecture, 2014; Performance at REDCAT, Los Angeles. Photo: Scott Groller.

The space is perfect in that it only has three walls; the fictional “fourth wall” (the imagined wall at the front of the stage that allows the audience to see the action) is emphasized because the audience is at the same level and often only a few feet away from the performer. This “fourth wall” is further broken down by the audience’s ability to move freely throughout the space and view the performance from many vantage points. Baroque theater mimicked daily life. Life in court was not much different than what was depicted on stage. The dancers are illustrating this performance of daily life. At first, the contemporary realities of the boom box and the frosted tips of the dancer’s hair bothered me, but I quickly realized that they, too, were part of this set. Bronstein has created a play very specifically set in the time of the Enlightenment, but through misrepresentation and exaggeration of that time, we can see that it is really about our own. The  “performances” of architecture, art history, and daily life can be seen as just that: choreography laid down by someone before our time as we continue to churn through the motions.

Pablo Bronstein. Primitive Facade Variations, 2014; ink and watercolor on paper, 6 parts; each part: 45.2 x 78.7 (unframed). Courtesy of Herald St, London and Franco Noero, Turin.

REDCAT is a gallery where most of the audience comes for theater and dance. According to curator Ruth Estevez, the interest for the gallery is in performative art. This performance art recognizes and embraces its own history in relation to the theater, which is a breath of fresh air. It is also unique among performance art in that it is being performed daily—it is a living and breathing exhibition. It is an exciting space to be a part of, and I recommend getting out to see it.

Enlightenment Discourse on the Origins of Architecture is on view at REDCAT Gallery through March 15, 2014.

Mickalene Thomas. Le dejeuner sur l’herbe: trois femmes noires, 2010; C-print; artist proof 2/2; 48 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the Artist, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Lehmann Maupin, NY and Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

In GLYPHS: Acts of Inscription, there are several different ways that the artists interact with the concept of the African Diaspora. Working in photography or video, the artists use images as “acts of inscription,” real or imagined, to change, re-imagine, or fill in the gaps of the “visual archives that constitute history, popular iconographies, and artistic canons.”[1]

The first approach is documentary, to give visibility to a group that isn’t adequately represented in popular culture or art historical canons. An anchoring piece in the show is W.E.B. Du Bois’ original counter archive: The Paris Albums 1900, a series of portraits commissioned for his award-winning American Negro Exhibit in the 1900 Paris World Exposition. This was groundbreaking; first and foremost, it was the first time Black Americans were allowed to represent themselves at a world’s fair. A mere generation after emancipation, Du Bois presented graphs, data, and maps showing the history and changes in education, literacy, and patent- and land-ownership along with some 500 photographs depicting the lives and communities of African Americans at the turn of the century. These images were transgressive because they presented a positive image of an emerging black middle class—doctors, lawyers, teachers, and students—images that Du Bois said, “hardly square with conventional American ideas.”[2]

Zanele Muholi, Mbali Zulu, Kwatherna, Springs, Johannesburg, 2010 or Amanda Mapurna, Vredehoek, Cape town from Faces and Phases, 2011; silver gelatin print; 20 x 30 inches. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa.

Du Bois believed in the power of photography as a political tool to institute change. Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases series (2006-present) uses photography in a way similar to Du Bois’ Paris Albums; that is, to create a counter-archive that presents a marginalized group in a new and positive light. Dubbing herself a “Visual Activist,” she presents a series of black-and-white portraits of black lesbians in South Africa, highlighting each woman’s unique individuality and humanity in order to bring visibility to her community and to help end the violent discrimination directed towards this group in South Africa.

Cheryl Dunye, Introducing Fae Richards: Excerpts from The Watermelon Woman, 2013 (film still photograph by Zoe Leonard); video; color; sound; 6:20. Courtesy of the Artist.

A different approach is to use complete fiction in order to create an alternate and more ideal history. The best example of this is Cheryl Dunye’s video: Introducing Fae Richards: Excerpts from The Watermelon Woman (2013). In her debut feature film, Dunye created a fake documentary about a beautiful black lesbian 1930s film actress, Fae Richards, credited only as “The Watermelon Woman.” Originally made in 1997, Dunye produced a directorial recut focusing on the Fae Richards archive for this exhibition. While the concept is strong and the images are believable as a historical archive (they were commissioned from and created by photographer Zoe Leonard), the narration and plot feel dated, while other pieces in the show from before the year 2000 remain fresh.

John Akomfrah, Peripeteia, 2012 (film still); HD video; color; sound; 18:12. Courtesy of Carroll/Fletcher and Smoking Dogs Films, London.

British director and artist John Akomfrah also uses fiction, but instead of creating an alternate history, he attempts to fill in the gaps of what we already know. The video Peripeteia (2012) begins with two drawings by the sixteenth century German artist Albrecht Dürer, Head of a Negro Man (1508) and Portrait of the Moorish Woman Katharina (1521), two of the earliest representations of black people in Western art. Everything about these individuals’ lives is lost except for these portraits. In Peripeteia, Akomfrah imagines their lives outside of Dürer’s drawings. One of the most visually stunning works of the show, the characters wander through the misty countryside alone among the ruins. Symbolically, this isolated environment enhances the sense that these people have been lost to European history.

Carrie Mae Weems, Not Manet’s Type, 2010 (detail); series of 5 digital prints; edition of 5, with 2 artist proofs; 40 x 20 inches each. Courtesy of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

Carrie Mae Weems’ five-part series examines her own identity and physicality as a black woman in the context of art history, taking a similar substantive approach as Mickalene Thomas, although an extremely different visual approach. Her series is comprised of five nude or semi-nude self-portraits in a bedroom with text that comments on the absence or objectification of black women’s bodies in the history of modern art. In her words, “It was clear, I was not Manet’s type, Picasso—who had a way with women—only used me, and Duchamp never even considered me.”

GLYPHS allows an underrepresented group in the arts to represent themselves. Each of the artists deals with identity by focusing on the complexities of individuality, which ultimately has a humanizing effect and which emphasizes the dangers of assigning individuals to any one category. In “an art season that could make you think that the feminist movement never happened because we’re looking at almost entirely [white] male monographic shows,” GLYPHS is a breath of fresh air.[3]

GLYPHS: Acts of Inscription is on view at the Pitzer College Art Galleries through December 5, 2013 and is curated by Ruti Talmor and Renée Mussai.

[1]From the GLYPHS show description: http://www.pitzer.edu/galleries/

[2] W.E.B. Du Bois quote from The American Negro at Paris: http://www.webdubois.org/dbANParis.html

[3] Deborah Solomon, interview on WNYC 93.9 FM radio, September 12, 2013: http://www.wnyc.org/story/317373-art-talk-whats-hot-fall-art-season-white-men/

Feodor Voronov. All the Right Moves, 2013; acrylic, marker, ballpoint pen and spray paint on canvas; 62 x 96 in. Courtesy the Artist and Mark Moore Gallery

Relics is Feodor Voronov’s first large-scale solo show. When I had earlier avoided the front desk, what I was really avoiding was the temptation to grab a list of works and read the titles, which have everything—and nothing—to do with the pieces themselves. I knew that this show was a variation of his trademark Word Paintings, which the artist made by choosing a word almost randomly (by intuition and shape and not meaning or sound) from an online list (“words that will make you sound smart and not pretentious”) and beginning with the word as a formal “armature” onto which he builds the rest of the painting. In Relics, Voronov plays with combinations of words overheard or found in his daily life.

Feodor Voronov. All the Right Moves Detail, 2013; acrylic, marker, ballpoint pen and spray paint on canvas; 62 x 96 in. Courtesy the Artist and Mark Moore Gallery

Walking around the show, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of joy, which is totally cheesy, but also true. The mixture of chaos and order, geometric and organic shapes and materials as well as the bright colors resonated with something deep inside of me.

And then I realized why these paintings were so cheerily familiar: they reminded me of what it feels like to live in Los Angeles—they are stressful and chaotic and visually stunning. The separate, distinctly defined neighborhoods all reachable (or avoidable) by highway, which Voronov gives us through patterns that snake through each piece, sometimes interacting with and at other times going right over the top of other elements, creating movement. One need only drive down Sunset from Dodger Stadium to the fairy-tale hills of Hollywood to the building-size billboards of West Hollywood to the perfectly manicured city of Beverly Hills all the way out to the temporary rectangular structures they call homes in Malibu to see how separate these “neighborhoods” really are. Los Angeles is not a single city but fifty cities smashed together, each with their own distinct architecture, design, landscape, and purpose for existing.

Feodor Voronov. Leaving the List, 2013; acrylic, marker, ballpoint pen and spray paint on canvas; 62 x 48 in. Courtesy the Artist and Mark Moore Gallery

Going back to the expressly formal elements of this work, these paintings were most successful when the words and letters were obscured. I noticed I was repelled from pieces with easily recognizable forms. And when I finally did get a copy of the titles, I found myself trying to tie the title to the piece in some semantic way and then also found myself wondering if the artist really was so wholly divorced from the meanings of the words or whether their meaning actually did end up informing the shape of the final painting. In the end, the word(s) in the word paintings mean nothing outside of their formal quality and so become distracting if too prominent. I wish I had not even seen the titles. If this work was about the interplay between visual signifier and the meaning it signifies as separate entities, that would be different, but as it is, these paintings are much more about painting than anything else and the use of words a means to an end. As if to prove my point, in attempting to make sense of the show’s title, Relics (because the work itself does not imply historical artifact or remains), I discovered that the title piece was tucked away, out of the public’s view, and inside of the gallery director’s office, further underscoring the disparity between title and object.

Feodor Voronov. Double Fold, 2013; acrylic, marker, ballpoint pen and spray paint on canvas; 41 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

All semantic and formal discord aside, it is a show of beautiful and evocative work by a master craftsman in the genre of abstract paintings.

Relics is on view at Mark Moore Gallery, in Los Angeles, through October 12, 2013.