. Today we bring you an emotional response to the tragic Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland on December 2, 2016, “All Is Fair in Dreams” by Bay Area collaborative duo XUXA SANTAMARIA. The publication of this essay and sound file marked the four-month commemoration of the incident that left an entire region—and beyond—heartbroken. As conversations continue regarding initiatives to help protect artists in the Bay Area, this song is a tribute to the lives and practices of the artists we lost. 

Russell tweeted when the fire started. We were already in bed after dropping Ben off at Eli’s and deciding not to go. We went to sleep worried about Russell’s gear, never imagining what lay on the other side of morning. When we woke up we checked in; from bed I pulled up the Google doc with all those names. I called, I texted, “Are you okay?/Have you heard from so and so?” Trying so hard to tick someone as “Alive.” Brandon said Kate was with him till late. The rest of the day moved slow like goo. Waiting for news, praying to something, something I never pray to, that somehow they would all walk around the building and be fine, just fine. We’d sigh a collective sigh and then cry and then laugh an uncertain laugh. But the day dragged on and on and denied us of any of that. What the day did bring, on top of the film of horror now covering every part of life, was a broadcast barrage of misinformation, a maligning of their names, a tarnishing of their spirit and their intent and their lives. It became a gruesome duality, indescribable pain and uncertainty burning in our insides and anger and fever burning on our outsides. We barely spoke to one another. Almost too shy to take up room, to say, “Hey, I’m feeling torn up inside, like, really torn up, like I might not be okay, all of us might not be okay.”

Read more and listen to the audio here.

, a podcast hosted by Weston Teruya that launched in January 2017. His conversation with Postcommodity presents an opportunity to hear three artist collaborators discuss some recent projects that are situated in socially engaged and research-based approaches. The podcast was originally published on March 31, 2017.

In this episode, we talk with Postcommodity (Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, and Kade L. Twist) about creating narratives that foster indigenous self-determination, refiguring ceremony, and preparing for indigenous futures. We also discuss the impact of their 2015 project, Repellent Fence / Valla Repelente, and get insight into their new projects launching at Documenta 14 and this year’s Whitney Biennial.

Postcommodity challenges global capitalism and continuously evolving forms of colonialism through site-specific, temporary public projects and immersive sound and media installations that assert indigenous self-determination. They have received awards from the American Composers Forum, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Art Matters, Creative Capital, Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation.

Listen to the podcast here.

Laura Hyunjhee Kim. LOVE NETWORKS LOVE, 2017; video and variable objects; 02:32. Photo: Qian Wang.

As the exhibition weaves its way through the space, a new installation is revealed at every turn; with the exception of Córdova’s work, the music that accompanies each installation can be heard through headphones. The rocket-like installation Your Body Your Ship (2017) by the artist Jeepneys (Anna Luisa Petrisko) is painted with bright geometric shapes that reference precolonial tattoo designs associated with Pacific Islander nations. In the accompanying video, three performers wear bodysuits with the same geometrical patterns. The campy video meanders along time and narrative, displaying shots of performers who ride bikes and perform smiley, energetic group stretches to prepare for time travel, interspersed with circle dissolves, color overlays, and vintage footage of planets. The overall style suggests a liberated manner of thinking about time, space, and the body. By engaging with historical symbols, the performers consider their postcolonial identities in the present and commune with ancient energies and rituals for their unfathomable journey into the future.

Jeepneys. Your Body Your Ship, 2017; video and installation; 03:41; installation view. Photo: Qian Wang.

The works by Keith Lafuente and the artist collective INVASORIX deconstruct gender binaries and privileged voices in art, music, and fashion. In Lafuente’s black-and-white video, Spring/Summer 17: Motherland (2016), the artist films models who gambol about on the beach. The filming style and the clothing worn by the models reference conventional scenes from the American fashion industry, and also negotiate traditional gender-specific styles associated with Filipino clothing. No dialog is present—instead, a sorrowful Filipino song by Asin is used to comment on a bygone era of the Philippines. INVASORIX’s video Macho Intelectual (2015) satirizes historically male-dominated artistic groups like Die Brücke and Bauhaus, which established “norms” for conceptual movements and cultural trends. Paired with rhythmic cumbia music, the video flashes vintage portraits of these artist groups, which dissolve into images of INVASORIX in paper mustaches and drag, standing in poses similar to the old photographs. Both Lafuente and INVASORIX utilize tropes in visual culture to expose deeply rooted biases, dampening the reverence traditionally held for esteemed cultural benefactors. Yet, as heard in the lyrics of INVASORIX’s second video, Nadie Aquí Es Ilegal (2014), there is “a vocabulary yet to be invented” to initiate a necessary dialog for the future, when identity and culture can originate from hybrid forms of acknowledgement and exchange. It is important to note that these installations utilize comedy and playful music to consider the future, yet they are dampened by the sound of Córdova’s installation, which pervades the exhibition space and establishes a foreboding feeling.

INVASORIX. Macho Intelectual, 2015; music video; 03:06. Photo: Diana María González.

Laura Hyunjhee Kim’s video, LOVE NETWORKS LOVE (2017), considers the future from a technological standpoint. A performer digitally illustrates an image of a rose on her phone and types the phrase “a digital rose has no scent” while singing a sensual song that contains the same phrase. Kim considers the role that passion will play in the future as technology infiltrates connection and communication. The work leaves the audience with questions rather than answers: Who authors romance and connection—the technologists or the people who use the products?

Jenifer Wofford. No Scrubs, 2017; installation of materials from performance. Photo: Qian Wang.

A desire to prepare for the future through actions in the present intensifies as one moves through the exhibition space. The exhibition ends with Jenifer Wofford’s installation, No Scrubs (2017). In a corner, bright pink walls highlight protest signs and photographic documentation of a performance led by Wofford during the Women’s March in Oakland. The bold text on the signs features lyrics from songs like TLC’s “No Scrubs” and Yo-Yo’s “You Can’t Play with My Yo-Yo.” For Wofford, marching seemed an incredibly formalized and retrograde call to action, so she asked people to hold these signs and engage with music to redefine methods of protest. The photographs depict strangers who held space and shared energy for a moment, and sure, there is nothing new here—dance and music have long-standing associations with forms of protest—but among the thousands of people who marched in Oakland, it is notable that a nuanced form of collective passion occurred within Wofford’s performance.

Sonic Futures; installation view, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. Photo: Qian Wang.

Sonic Futures reckons with current issues and considers the work yet to be done—culturally, environmentally, and politically. It’s a tall order, and any thoughtful reflection is accompanied by the inauspicious sounds of Sofía Córdova’s installation nearby. Indeed, the future does seem dire. Yet with Wofford’s work as the finale, viewers can take solace in the momentous actions that are presently bringing people together to hear each other.

Sonic Futures is on view at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art through June 11, 2017.

[1] From Patricia Cariño’s curatorial statement.

Harumi Yukutake. Paracosmos, 2016; glass mirrors; site-specific installation. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

The biennale’s apt but campy title, An Atlas of Mirrors, is an illustration of the many artworks’ disappointingly myopic and literal takes on the exhibition’s moniker—the core theme of which is art’s capability to reflect, inflect, refract, magnify, and project alternative viewpoints onto what is current, traditional, and expected.[1] Through the sheer repetition of motifs, it is impossible to miss the extent to which the curators wish their audiences to be cognizant of the fact that there exists a lexical map of gateways, mirrors, and journeys, on both physical and socioeconomic levels, that needs to be constantly (re)examined, more so now than ever.

Yet An Atlas of Mirrors is also a title that speaks of broad, interlinking possibilities that do not point us in any particularly original direction. If this theme of embracing contemporary realities and mirroring them might appear so extensive as to be confounding, it is only because of the broad structuring of the show into nine conceptual zones—space, time, memory, nature, boundaries, agency, identity, displacement, and absence (each under a curatorial director with overlapping ideas)—that results in a more mystifying than elucidatory experience.

Qui Zhijie. One Has to Wander Through All the Outer Worlds to Reach the Innermost Shrine at the End; 2016; ink on paper, glass, and stone. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

Solidarity, interdependency, and ties are forged by a sense of history that can be reclaimed—this much is evident. It is the rhetoric constantly reiterated in this region that has as much a political sheen as it is an aesthetic to which the governmental institutions certainly subscribe. For instance, Fyerool Darma’s The Most Mild Mannered Men (2016) questions the writing of Singapore’s early modern history with sculptures of two key figures, while Nobuaki Takekawa’s playful installation of maps, tables, and board games underscores the societal issues that contemporary Japan still faces for its inability to confront its part in the second World War. As both Darma’s and Takekawa’s works suggest, the burdensome sense of history cannot—or should not—be shrugged away easily; instead, it has to be internalized, ruminated upon, then reproduced.

Titarubi. History Repeats Itself, 2016; gold-plated nutmeg, copper-plated wood, nickel-plated wood, burnt wood, sampan, wood, aluminum, copper, soil, light and nutmeg perfume. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

The ships and ominously preaching missionaries in Titarubi’s History Repeats Itself (2016) are perhaps the Biennale’s most visceral representation of the legacy of conquest in this region. The specters of the past in gold-plated nutmeg robes recall the lucrative spice trade that European powers had sought to control. Constructed out of jackfruit wood with woodworking craftsmanship, Bui Cong Khanh’s Dislocate (2016) contains all the elements of a traditional Vietnamese home, yet its central sculpture contains carvings of a Vietnamese military jacket, American G.I. helmets, and missiles. At best, both Bui’s and Titarubi’s works intimate that history’s indelible stains are part of the quotidian, participating in part of a larger discourse that has to do with the currency of collective memory.

Pola Pothupitiye. Other Map Series, 2016; archival digital print, acrylic, ink, pencil on paper and canvas. Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

An Atlas of Mirrors is a show that attempts to find new ways of telling the same broad story that resonates in Asian contemporary art: a continual engagement with the international art world, but never without a foot firmly planted in the geopolitical structures of a region that cannot—or would not—quite step away from shrugging off its colonially inflected narratives. This is the sort of contemporary reality that’s continually espoused in contemporary Asian art. If this biennale is any indication, it’s also a didactic trend that, despite the tendency for it to get repetitive, will continue for the foreseeable future.

In the exhibition’s catalog, mirrors are positioned as the standpoint, or a “counteraction on the position that [we] occupy,” as “spaces of other spaces,”[2] as allegorical validation of how sites, context, and histories are connected to each other. They offer complex levels of representation that emerge out of reciprocal visibility, explore the notion of the roving, unstable gaze, and exhibit plurality in powerful ways, but they also have the tendency to lead us back full circle to the primary image. Yet it’s a framework of interpretation that leaves questions unanswered: Should we see ourselves or the Other (or both, for that matter)? What can they possibly reflect that could ignite a debate that has not yet already encompassed rehashed ideas of identity, shared histories, and co-dependency? Ultimately, the mirrors, both physical and metaphorical, behave like passive objects, defused of their power because of their inability to engage.

An Atlas of Mirrors: Singapore Biennale 2016 is on view at several museums in the Civic District, Singapore, through February 26, 2017.

[1] Susie Lingham, Our Fractal Realities, in An Atlas of Mirrors, Singapore Biennale catalog, p. 17.

[2] Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias (1967). The section on heterotopias is also referred to briefly in the catalogue, p. 114. I refer to Foucault’s postmodern analysis of Las Meninas (1656) in The Order of Things (1966), where complex levels of representation and the gaze are highlighted.

Tsubaki Noburu. Daisy Bell, 2014; polyester cloth; 700 x 600 x 800 cm. Courtesy of the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts.

Tsubaki Noboru’s 2014 Daisy Bell (curator Kenichiro Mogi) dominates the entrance to the gallery. An artist who has continually reinvented himself since his involvement in the Japanese “mono-ha” painting movement, Noboru’s work references popular culture, myth, and Japanese tradition. Daisy Bell is a giant inflatable creature that looms over the spectator, at once cute and monstrous. This ambiguous, almost entirely featureless hybrid love-child of Jeff Koons’ Puppy and a creature from the imaginary world of a medieval bestiary insists, as soon as the visitor enters the exhibition, that monsters are already among us.

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran. Pewter Dickhead 3, 2016; earthenware, glaze, gold lustre, platinum lustre, porcelain, twine, and human hair; 127 x 47 x 30 cm. Courtesy of the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts. Photo: Simon Hewson.

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran worked with curator Glenn Barkley to develop his characteristic totemic sculptures (currently showing in the Australian National Gallery, Canberra) into works on a monumental scale for the biennale, drawing on Hindu and Christian devotional iconography mashed up with pop culture references to superheroes and pornography. Nithiyendran’s “deities” exude raw sexual power, leavened by ironic humor and a playfully irreverent sensibility. Pewter Dickhead 3 (2016) is made of unfired earthenware—the artist wants these works to return to the earth after the exhibition closes, presumably leaving behind the remains of their adornments of gold and platinum lustre, porcelain, twine, and human hair. Like a voodoo doll or shamanic fetish, this creature with its gold claws and sharp pointy teeth is both charismatic and alarming.

Zhang-Xu Zhan. Inferiority Bat (Hsin Hsin Joss Paper Store Series–Room 003), 2014-2015; 6-channel video animation installation; 5 min. Courtesy of the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts.

Taiwan’s thousands of temples are filled with the statues of innumerable gods. A drive through the verdant landscapes of southern Taiwan is punctuated by brilliantly painted tiny shrines and temples containing the figures of numerous gods, many of whom once walked the earth in human form. On the corners of the back streets in old towns, brightly colored puppet theaters perform, not for human children, but for an audience of the gods residing in the temple. Zhang-Xu Zhan (curator Gong Jow-Jiun) presents an innovative work steeped in this Taiwanese folk culture: Inferiority Bat (Hsin Hsin Joss Paper store series–Room 003) (2014-2015) is a 6-channel video installation that begins with the humble vernacular material of papier mâché. Generations of Zhan’s family specialized in the craft of making paper offerings and effigies for religious rituals and funerals, and he marries this tradition with video and new media, creating entirely contemporary works. With paper puppets brought to life by stop-motion animation techniques Zhan creates a fecund universe: plant forms hang on separate screens like creepers in a jungle, swaying gently, rising and falling, and seemingly moving in response to the hypnotic sound track. His tiny puppet theater teems with frantic activity, like battles between gods and demons. Beneath the eccentric charm of his work there is a palpable sense of loss; like so many other ancient traditions, Taiwanese paper crafts are in danger of becoming obsolete in a modern culture of mass production and the seduction of global brands.

Zhang Pei-Li. A standard, uplifting, and distinctive circle along with its sound system, 2015; electric motor and metal rotating device, 25 Watt cylindrical horn speaker, old style “Made-in-China” transistor radios; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts.

Chinese new media pioneer Zhang Pei-Li (curator Lu Ming-Jun) is represented here by A standard, uplifting, and distinctive circle along with its sound system (2015). A circle of old-school Chinese transistor radios suggests a gathering, or a conversation round a table. A microphone on a long arm sweeps around the inside of the circle and picks up the individual sound of each transistor in turn. The suggestion of the long arm of the state apparatus of censorship and control is inescapable, representing a much more sinister kind of monster than the pixilated three-eyed creature in the biennale’s publicity material: this cute pop monster references the unsophisticated video games of the 1980s and 1990s rather than a dark creature of the fearful imagination. However, each artist in this biennale has recognized something elemental in the human spirit. Beneath the playfulness of many works, and beneath the everyday, lies a fear of the encompassing darkness, the monster lurking behind the curtains of the conscious mind. The pressing question posed by the Kuandu Biennale is whether art has a role to play in slaying the “monsters” of the modern world, whatever shape they may take.

Slaying Monsters, the Kuandu Biennale 2016, will be on view through December 11, 2016 at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei.

Simone Leigh. Althea, 2016; terra-cotta, india ink, porcelain, cobalt, epoxy. Courtesy of the Artist and Hammer Museum. Photo: Brian Forrest.

Simone Leigh uses sculpture to tell stories that transcend time and space. In her first solo West Coast exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Leigh draws on Africa’s colonial past while remaining rooted in the present, incorporating political resistance and performance to craft a decidedly modern aesthetic.

The exhibition features five onyx-colored sculptural busts adorned with raffia skirts, beads and headdresses made from small porcelain roses in shades of indigo, gray, white, and gilded 14-karat gold. Distinct facial expressions and gestures distinguish each bust from the others. None of the sculptures, however, have eyes. If eyes are the windows to the soul, their absence creates a façade; their obfuscation may be a protective emotional shield. One sculpture stands apart from the rest. A black hole in the center of the bust surrounded by black flowers in india ink replaces the details of her face. With her identity unknown, the piece becomes a mirror for the viewer to project their own narrative onto the work. When looking at her, I couldn’t help but think of Nina Simone’s powerfully emotive song “Four Women.” The song invites us into the lives of her subjects, engaging us in simple, vivid stories of pain, history, and perception. Viewing Simone Leigh’s work through this lyrical storytelling lens, I saw these sculptures as an abstract adaptation of the song. The artist extends the narrative by including the faceless woman whose story is unknown.

In Leigh’s exhibition, music strategically fills the void left from the absence of the spoken word. A work that sits across from the five busts in the gallery deploys music in this way. In a large-scale piece called Cupboard V, Leigh incorporates dance, improvisation, and music into her sculptural practice. A large, raffia-covered hut kisses the gallery’s ceiling, taking up three-quarters of the space in the small room. Its entrance is obscured from the front of the gallery. Music plays within the hut, beckoning the viewer toward the entrance at the back of the gallery. Inside, the video installation Aluminum plays. This piece features performance artist Rashida Bumbray dancing in a studio, her ankle shakers rhythmically accentuating her moves in harmony with the piano accompaniment.

A key to this exhibition lies in the many possible ways viewers can interpret how the two sets of works connect. The combined works in the exhibit represent a multigenerational and trans-Atlantic exploration into the origins of African and African American storytelling traditions that resonate throughout the diaspora.

Simone Leigh is curated by the ICA’s Jamilla James and is on view at the Hammer through January 8, 2017.

Colony Little is a Los Angeles–based writer and founder of Culture Shock Art. As a Bay Area native and long-term Southern California resident, Colony covers emerging contemporary art in California, the aesthetic of urban culture, and is a champion of African American art and media.

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The artists Zahra Jewanjee and Simon Coates.

There’s a continuous, all-pervading hum in Dubai. It’s a complex sound made up of industrial chundering, motor engines, water-pumps, and electric crackle. Dubai sounds restless, kind of like an unsleeping giant dogged by insomnia. On top of that, layer sporadic jangles of Hindi and Arabic pop, guffaws, and calls to prayer from minarets. Add engine-revving and mall muzak. Fireworks fizz. This is the sound of Ted Hughes’s Iron Man in a Lamborghini baseball cap, wearing a dishdasha, eyelids heavy, BlackBerry nearby. It’s under this mantle that Zahra Jewanjee and I made our first sound art piece, Vipralambha (Union Through Separation). Vipralambha is a soothing Sanskrit word (uncovered by Zahra) that conveys the sense of unrequited longing that is an exquisite pain. Zahra and I are artists living and working in Dubai. Zahra is from Lahore, I’m from London. Made from a collection of field sound recordings, Vipralambha is our antidote.

While in Lahore, Zahra had made some recordings at the tomb of Sufi Saint Baba Shah Jamal where, once a week, crowds come to watch devotees dance and drum themselves into trance-like states. She had also recorded a Lahore transvestite named Madam singing a popular song called “Shamma Pay Gaiya.” In its original form, “Shamma Pay Gaiya” is mere corny pop. However Madam’s own a capella version imbues the Punjabi lyrics with a true sense of the longing that is central toVipralambha. For myself, I had spent some time in Kerala in South India, returning to Dubai with recordings of the announcer at the Alappuzha railway station, the Kathakali dance school in Fort Kochi, and crows during the monsoon in Kovalam, among others.

Read the full article here.

Fred Wilson. Guarded View, 1991; sculpture; dimensions variable.

“When you’re a guard, you are, kind of, on display like everything else. You’re standing there, you’re silent, people walk by you, but unlike the artwork, you are invisible. And that tension between the two is what really intrigued me and really made me want to make the work. On top of that, this work was really about having been to museums, going to museums for years, and noting that besides myself and the guards, and perhaps, the people in the food service or the maintenance, you know, we were the only African Americans or people of color in the museum. And no one in the professional staff, who decides what gets put on display, how those things get described and discussed, what’s acquired by the museum—to me that was also very much a part of why I did this piece. I’ve had museum guards tell me that the people in the professional staff who worked side-by-side with them for thirty years, would walk in the in morning and not even say hello. And so, this piece was not only to make them visible for the visiting public, but also for the museum professionals as well.”

Listen to the complete audio here.

Bill Hayden and Sam Pulitzer. Yet to Be Titled, 2016; adhesive vinyl; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artists. Photo: Evan La Londe/WORKSIGHTED.

It’s simpler to recall the exhibition in detail by distinguishing its structure. Akin to a physical manifestation of a memory palace, The Lasting Concept is installed with a subtly repetitive air. The works comprise serial representations of poetry, sculpture, and environmental interventions that extend into PICA’s office. Twenty-four artists created twice as many works, some riffing off of their previous iterations in other spatial compartments of the gallery.

Bill Hayden and Sam Pulitzer’s site intervention, Yet to Be Titled (2016), occupies the width of PICA’s third-story windows. The adhesive vinyl lettering simultaneously greets and heckles viewers passing from the street, reading, “What’s Up, Civilians?” The piece appears to question the mental state and intentions of the non-militarized masses—those who are not a member of America’s institutionalized protective forces. It’s difficult to assess whether the tone is accusatory. After all, these forces (though often steeped in controversy and antagonism) are extensions of the society that we, as civilians, have excused. The answer to Hayden and Pulitzer’s question isn’t reflexive—it’s meditative, as is the intention of The Lasting Concept as a whole.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty. Testing VIII, 2016 (detail); microphone stand and asparagus; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Evan La Londe/WORKSIGHTED.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty’s Testing IV (2016) is tucked away in an accessible closet. An amusingly placed microphone stand clutches a wilted portion of red chard. The mic stand is a reference to the tools of stand-up comics, a frequent theme in Rafferty’s practice. The work exists in three distinct iterations throughout the exhibition. Testing VII and Testing VIII (2016) mirror the gesture with a spicy green pepper and a bundle of asparagus, respectively. The series recalls a career comedian’s tendency toward running gags. The 1980s prop comic Gallagher made his name by repeatedly making a mess of whole watermelons. Over the decades he introduced new, increasingly maniacal methods for committing the simple act of smashing them—always with the same result, but with varied ways of getting there. Rafferty’s discussion of this kind of comedy, along with the comedy of art-making and experimental redundancy in the studio, is beautifully aligned with the theme of lasting concepts. Some jokes are so good you have to tell them twice.

Gaylen Gerber’s Backdrop/The Lasting Concept (2016) monopolizes multiple, separate gallery walls in what is perhaps the exhibition’s subtlest intervention. Hinged by aluminum pins, gray background paper engrosses the gallery’s walls of varying sizes to create fuzzy obtrusions to the otherwise uniform hanging space. The seemingly simple intervention interrupts the lasting concept that the appropriate space for art presentation is antiseptic—whitewashed, unwrinkled, and unrevealing of what holds it together.

Gareth James. (Deodand No. 7/12) Monument of a Park for Dysmorphophobes, For Jeff Nelson, 2016; hollow core interior door, bicycle inner tubes, bicycle floor pump, black bamboo, headset ball bearings; 36 x 80 x 30 in. Courtesy of PICA. Photo: Evan La Londe/WORKSIGHTED.

Gareth James’s (Deodand No. 6/12) Monument of a Park for Apotemnophobes, For Jeff Nelson and (Deodand No. 7/12) Monument of a Park for Dysmorphophobes, For Jeff Nelson (2016) are sculptures that memorialize dead objects. Amputated parts of bicycles, housing materials, and ball bearings combine to form mazelike constructions of a purposefully mapped land, becoming graveyards for recreation. The works’ individual parts were discarded, despite their functional use, due to irrational fears or compulsions that are difficult to explain. Phobias, by definition, are endlessly nagging ruminations.

The exhibition ends (or begins, depending on your independence from the offered installation map) with Stefan Tcherepnin’s Void (Daniel Brown) and Absentee Ballad (2016). An MP3 player holds these two audio tracks of ambient compositions that lull their listeners into a sense of meaningful anxiety. The transient, tempered beats are occasionally rattled by the unexpected thump or chime. Despite the lack of repetitive hooks or melodic bridges, both works have the uncanny ability to remain in your head long afterward. Tcherepnin also contributes Gallery Bells (2016), a diagonally oriented string of paper cups, lids, straws, and excess packaging that dangle from the gallery ceiling like a primitive alarm system. One instantly recalls the jingle of the front door at any small commercial enterprise, alerting the proprietor of a patron’s entrance. The sound is a universally ubiquitous experience that spans the spectrum from art galleries to bodegas. Gallery Bells, however, is an ironic twist. Sourced from Popeyes Chicken containers, the work’s materials are primarily paper and incompetent where noise-making is concerned. The sounds are therefore imagined, which is no difficult task considering the lasting impression of these informal greetings.

The Lasting Concept, 2016; installation view, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Courtesy of the Artists and PICA. Photo: Evan La Londe/WORKSIGHTED.

The artists in The Lasting Concept all manifest considerations of what it is to be relentlessly pursued by a fledgling notion. As an incubator, PICA is intensely dedicated to exploring this continual process through its relationship not only to the exhibition format, but publications like the one for which the show is named. These reflections on memory and the practice of refinement are poetic for both the known and the probationary.

The Lasting Concept is on view at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) in Portland, Oregon through April 1, 2016.

Phyllis Baldino. The Unknown Series, 1994–96 (detail); mixed media. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Matt Grubb.

In the exhibition’s newsprint handout, Franklin Street Works’s creative director Terri C. Smith writes about two divergent connotations of the term cut-up: it implies both works of art made by extracting and reconfiguring source materials to produce something new as well as a mischievous prankster that disrupts order, promoting confusion by upsetting social hierarchies. While each of the works on view exhibits these qualities to varying degrees, the Brooklyn-based artist Phyllis Baldino is a cut-up par excellence. In her video piece, The Unknown Series (1994–96), Baldino implicates a medley of mundane objects in a wry investigation of their possible uses and uselessness. “Americans will sell you anything, even if they do not know what it is,” explains Baldino of the thrift-store trinkets she bought and then redefined through her interventions.[1] The Unknown Series features thirty objects, each filmed for no more than sixty seconds, during which time Baldino de- and re-constructs each with the utmost intentionality. The resulting objects, given descriptive titles such as Shaving Cream Thing, Straw Thing, Mayo Thing, and Green Velour Pads Thing, embody puckish mutations of their original functions.

Lorraine O’Grady. Cutting Out the New York Times, Just the Two of Us, 1977/2010; Toner ink on adhesive paper; Courtesy of the Artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York. Photo: Matt Grubb.

What Baldino does with found objects, the British artist Vicki Bennett does with sound. Under the moniker People Like Us, Bennett overlays countless sound clips from experimental and popular music, film, and radio, conflating multiple bits of audio into condensed compositions such as Welcome Abroad (2011) and Don’t Think Right, It’s All Twice (2006–13). In addition to producing a schizophrenic amalgamation of sonic culture from the past half-century, the sound works demonstrate the human mind’s remarkable ability to find order in pandemonium. Bennett’s expertly edited mash-ups never become indiscernible to the point of being pure noise. Instead, they prompt an aural gestalt that is both familiar and uncanny. Working in the inverse of Bennett’s cultural consolidation, the New York–based Lorraine O’Grady’s textual collages reveal the artist’s perspective through redaction. For Cutting Out The New York Times (1977/2015), O’Grady reticulates snippets of the newspaper into Dadaist poems. The portion of the series exhibited at Franklin Street Works features text from twenty-six consecutive Sunday papers in 1977; O’Grady would “smoosh the cut scraps around on the floor until a poem appeared.”[2] From news headlines and advertising slogans, O’Grady constructs narratives that fluctuate between effervescent lyricism and ominous cultural insights. Take, for example, the excerpts, “Just the two of us./Then There Were Two./A Rich and Happy Life/The Endless Movie Film,” and “Finding the one you love…is finding yourself/Come out, come out, wherever you are.” For O’Grady, randomness was a way to extricate herself from the “irrational Western culture [she] felt inundated by.”[3]

Cut-Up, 2016; installation view, Franklin Street Works, Stamford. CT. Courtesy of Franklin Street Works. Photo: Matt Grubb.

In a world of seemingly endless irrational phenomena, to respond negatively—to say no—can seem like second nature. Many contemporary art institutions seem burdened by a need to define what things are or are not instead of what they could be. The survey show remains a popular solution for pursuing diversity—or at least the appearance of it. Beyond the all-star roster in Cut-Up, one of the exhibition’s greatest achievements is presenting a survey that evades the failures of most institutional overviews, such as wall text that expects brain-dead viewers who need overbearing guidance through the works, or sloppy curatorial decisions that produce more incongruities than enlightening insights. Instead, Cut-Up succeeds by demonstrating the thorough consideration of each element—such as the integration of the People Like Us sound pieces at tables within the adjacent café, or the impressive installation of many audio and video works that avoids sonic conflicts—and the care enacted by the curator and gallery. Furthermore, by viewing complex social issues with humor and gaiety, the show provides a refreshing reprieve from the often heavy-handed messages propagated by art-world institutions. With well-crafted, affirmative gestures, each artwork in Cut-Up proclaims a much needed yes.

Cut-Up: Contemporary Collage and Cut-Up Histories through a Feminist Lens is on view at Franklin Street Works, Stamford, CT, through April 3, 2016.

[1] Phyllis Baldino quoted in Katie Vida, “Cut-Up: Contemporary Collage and Cut-Up Histories Through a Feminist Lens,” gallery handout, Franklin Street Works, https://franklinstreetworksdocuments.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/cut-up_newsprint_to-print_v2.pdf.

[2] “About the Exhibition, Lorraine O’Grady, May 28–June 27, 2015,” Alexander Gray Associates, http://www.alexandergray.com/exhibitions/2015-05-28_lorraine-oand39grady/.

[3] Ibid.

James Hoff: B=R=I=C=K=I=N=G, 2015; installation view, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. Image © Traviesa Studio.

Bricking is a term that describes the overload of an operating system when infected by malware, a process that renders the system useless, or at least unable to work for its original purpose. Hoff infects JPEGs, PNGs, and TIFFs with specific forms of malware such as Skywiper and Stuxnet—viruses that have become synonymous with international cyberterrorism[1]—and then digitally converts them into image files that can be transferred to canvas or aluminum. The political weight of these viruses rubs against the formally expressive character of the final works, which seem to engage more with the history of abstraction and the cool, detached vocabulary of formalism than the language of computer code. Thin, horizontal striations of vibrant neon colors seem to liquefy and drip, creating an unusual grainy texture across the surface of the aluminum paintings, whose markings bear a kinship to rough textiles such as coarse, unprimed canvas. The cosmic forms, pulsating colors, and abrupt shifts in tone call up the rich history of pure abstraction, from the cosmic utopian canvases of Wassily Kandinsky to the colored depth of a Mark Rothko.

James Hoff. Skywiper No. 50, 2015; Chromaluxe transfer on aluminum; 60 x 40 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Callicoon Fine Arts, New York.

Despite the hostile process that Hoff uses to compose these works, each painting seems to domesticate the digital attack within the bounds of the frame, turning Hoff’s disruptive gestures into something lyrical. Skywiper No. 50 (2015) is a bacterial force field of battered digital saturations, where mysterious forms seem to bleed into each other, recalling biological arrangements or CGI environments. And yet these works stop short of creating the emotional pitch that abstract art seems to still depend on. The soft pastel colors and delicate fragility of line in a work like Skywiper No. 57 (2015) seem to run uncomfortably close to abstract kitsch, asking viewers to regard the difficult question that surrounds abstract painting today: Has it become a placeholder (or stock image) for pure presence, instead of a politically charged genre that worked to resist materialism? One is left with a disconcerting feeling that Hoff’s paintings are efforts to visualize the mundane, banal, and detached forms of political investment the West seems to depend upon as bombs from unmanned aerial vehicles continue to fall across the world.

James Hoff. Skywiper No. 57, 2015; Chromaluxe transfer on aluminum; 30 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Callicoon Fine Arts, New York.

An installation of Hoff’s sound work electrifies the gallery and expands Hoff’s serial corruptions in painting to another sensory mode, drawing the visitor’s attention to the relationships between the visual, the spatial, and the auditory. The lazy echoes and deep thumping cuts warm the environment for the works and the listener, as the sounds resounding through the gallery recall the empty, repetitive lulls of easy listening music or the earworms attributed to pop or house dance beats. Gently wooed by the audible materializations of these invasive mutations, one might leave the gallery disturbed and estranged from the works on display, pondering the dazzling efficiency of our digitally resplendent 21st-century society.

James Hoff: B=R=I=C=K=I=N=G is on view at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans through February 28, 2016.

[1] These malicious computer viruses are self-destructing worms believed to be jointly built by the American and Israeli governments in order to carry out undetectable attacks against Middle Eastern countries, and in particular Iran’s nuclear program by compromising Iranian nuclear centrifuges and other industrial electromechanical systems to shut down nuclear facilities and conduct espionage from 2005 to 2010. While there are many sources that prove Stuxnet to be the cause of the many breakdowns across Iran’s major nuclear facilities, security expert Bruce Schneier’s “Another Piece of the Stuxnet Puzzle,” published on February 23, 2012, is the most comprehensive. The article can be accessed at https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/10/stuxnet.html. The Guardian reports that Stuxnet was used as early as President George W. Bush’s second term under the administration of security company Symantec. See Charles Arthur’s “Symantex Discovers 2005 U.S. Computer Virus Attack on Iran nuclear plants,” published online February 23, 2013. Accessed at http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/feb/26/symantec-us-computer-virus-iran-nuclear. A report by Reuters has alleged that the NSA launched Stuxnet to sabotage North Korea’s nuclear program in tandem with the targeted Iranian centrifuges. See Joseph Menn’s “Exclusive: U.S. Tried Stuxnet-Style Campaign Against North Korea But Failed—Sources,” Reuters, May 29, 2015. Accessed at: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-northkorea-stuxnet-idUSKBN0OE2DM20150529.

Marina Rosenfeld and Ben Vida. New Ear Festival, 2016 (performance still); sound performance. Courtesy of Fridman Gallery.

Forgoing any sensational visual effects, Rosenfeld and Vida stood behind two industrial tables, equipped with a modest array of electronic devices and illuminated by comfortably dim lighting. Despite their similarly minimalist setups, each performer interacted with her or his materials with distinctly different approaches. Rosenfeld, who used a pair of turntables, a mixer, and a stack of vinyl records, danced around like Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer’s apprentice in Fantasia. Her movements evoked the cartoon mouse’s theatrical gesturing and delight at realizing he could make the objects and elements do his bidding—though she didn’t meet a disastrous end. Vida, meanwhile, bent with concentration over his mixer and modular synthesizer as he adjusted knobs amid an eruption of wires.

Most people take for granted the complex processes that allow for human sensory perception—at least until we encounter something out of the norm. The reason stems from the extreme impracticality of, for example, performing a step-by-step analysis of what it means to hear something, every time a sound is heard. But it can be equally detrimental to ignore the complex series of biological events that must occur for a human to function. When we take for granted our bodies, we take for granted our humanity. Unlike sight, which is active only during waking and open-eyed states, we cannot shut our ears.[1] Indeed, even in a space devoid of sound, we still hear ourselves. The artist and composer John Cage demonstrated this in the 1940s with his infamous visit to an anechoic chamber—a room designed to completely absorb any sounds—in which he heard two tones: the hums of his circulatory system and nervous system. Because vision is typically considered the dominant sense, hearing continues to be greatly misunderstood. In an essay on hearing, the theorist Jonathan Sterne summarizes: “The simple act of hearing implies a medium for sound, a body with ears to hear, a frame of mind to do the same, and a dynamic relation between hearer and heard that allows for the possibility of mutual effects.”[2]

Marina Rosenfeld and Ben Vida. New Ear Festival, 2016 (performance still); sound performance. Courtesy of Fridman Gallery.

During Rosenfeld and Vida’s sonorous interaction, I sat and wondered about my relationship with them and their performance. The sounds they created ranged from the organic and intelligible—bits of human speech and instrumental music—to the otherworldly yet oddly familiar. Rosenfeld produced sounds that mimicked the comforting crackle of a low-burning fire by amplifying the sound of the records’ scratched and dusty surfaces. By manipulating one record, she generated a low, oscillating croak, like that of a laughing toad. Even if they began as recognizable, each sonic progression would disintegrate into abstraction, eliminating any illusion that the sounds originated from anything but the performers. When I closed my eyes, I was not transported to another site, world, or time. Instead, I was firmly rooted in the present. The experience was similar to that of listening to and watching someone do a celebrity impression. For example, no matter how expertly an impressionist presents the voice of Katharine Hepburn, I will never be fooled into thinking that she has suddenly turned into the late actress. And yet I recognize the voice, which makes Hepburn seem present, provoking a rupture between reality and my expectations. Unlike a celebrity impressionist, Rosenfeld and Vida created impressions of originary phenomena; both esoteric and mundane, the sounds fluctuated between representation and negation of the known. Through this uncertainty, the performers asked the audience to consider what it means to sit in a room and listen to strange sounds—eliciting a consideration of a component of what it means to be human.

Marina Rosenfeld and Ben Vida performed at Fridman Gallery on January 6, 2016.

[1] For the purposes of this review, I am considering the part of the human population with functioning auditory and visual perception.

[2] Jonathan Sterne, “Hearing,” Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Duke University, 2015), 65.

Janet Cardiff. The Forty Part Motet, 2001; installation view, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, gallery 308, San Francisco, 2015. Courtesy of Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Photo: JKA Photography.

Spem in alium nunquam habui 
Praeter in te, Dues Israel

I have never put my hope in any other
But in You, O God of Israel.

On paper, the first two lines of Thomas Tallis’s motet, composed in 1573, pack no special punch. Yet the effect of the words is rather different when the musical composition is played through forty speakers in Janet Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet (2001), now at the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. The speakers are set in the form of an oval with two benches at the center, where Tallis’s motet, as recorded by the Salisbury Cathedral Choir, plays on a fourteen-minute loop.

Most listeners followed one of two paths: starting in the center and spiraling out, or beginning next to one speaker and slowly spiraling their way in. The audience is allowed the opportunity to hear forty voices in unison, then they can walk a bit closer and listen to just twenty, then ten, then just five, until finally they usually end up in front of one speaker. I, too, often found myself chasing one particular voice, as if beckoned by a siren’s song. Yet seldom did I find the voice before the part was over.

The alternating voices give the piece a sense of movement and life, though the only movement is that of the spectators. Indeed, that’s one of the goals of the piece; Cardiff’s work allows viewers (or listeners? or audience members?) to go inside the motet and interact with it. Glancing at fellow listeners, at least half have closed their eyes. Some transformation has occurred, as many appear mesmerized, or in an ecstatic state.

Cardiff’s work allows for the contemporary reexamination of the Renaissance’s motet, but it is the location that makes the work even more poignant. The scenic view out of the window looks toward the East Harbor and, further out, the Golden Gate Bridge. For at least fourteen minutes, one’s ears and eyes are so thoroughly occupied that it is difficult to think of anything else but the music and the view. Audience members can discover the power of an impeccably composed piece of religious choral music in a modern, secular context, one that is as close to transcendental as any in San Francisco.

Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet is on view at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture through January 18, 2016. 

________

Henry Rittenberg is a recent graduate of Hamilton College, where he studied art history. He is now studying photography in New York.

Artist Angelica Mesiti.

I stood watching Australian artist Angelica Mesiti’s Nakh Removed (2015) at Carriageworks, Sydney, in the middle of winter. A silent single-channel video installation, the film is made up of nine looping minutes in which four Parisian women of Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian heritage perform the nakh, a “hair dance” originating from the Algerian-Tunisian border. Traditionally danced by women at weddings and during periods of fertility, it consists of a kind of swaying movement, the women flicking their hair up and over their heads, back and forth, again and again.

Mesiti presented Nakh Removed on an imposingly large screen. She chose to show the dance in slow motion, which meant that my attention was drawn to every soft, arching coil and tendril of hair. It’s said that the performers of the nakh enter into a trance-like state through the rhythm of the movement, which seems to transport them elsewhere. Mesiti has often spoken about the hypnotic pull of bodily motion, and it became hard to watch the work without swaying in time. But beyond the transcendent allure of the performance, Mesiti is interested in the ways in which tradition and the present overlap but also remain separate. The film is indeed of a dance removed, highlighting the somewhat jarring contrast between a historical-cultural gesture and modern women dancing in plain black clothes in a Parisian studio.

Read the full article here.