From our partners at Art Practical, today we bring you Erica C. Gomez‘s essay on the “readership” and active interpretation of film. She notes, “Reading film is an action that extends outward, producing new lines of movement through publics and counterpublics.” This article was originally published on December 4, 2013.

Tee Pee Video Space Troupe. A video totem showing self-portrait of the photographer, 1973; black-and-white. Photo Credit: Peter Angelo Simon.

Ever since the Lumière brothers’ 1895 public film screening, rapid changes have marked the film exhibition and distribution industries. Cinema continues to provide sites for public gathering, even though the experience of film viewing has undergone a significant transformation over the course of more than a century. In order to develop a more nuanced understanding of the changing landscape of film—and a vocabulary capable of expressing multiple perspectives, experiences, and contexts that relate to it—it is necessary to distinguish between the terms viewership and readership.

Given the common understanding of a film’s viewership as including the particular accumulated public, or fan base, of a filmmaker or actor, as well as a larger, more diverse audience united by a film’s genre or intersecting themes, one might easily conclude that a film’s readership refers to its literary content. Yet, perhaps the most widely accepted notion of film readership is one that has been institutionalized within the sphere of academia. Targeting a specific audience, and perhaps excluding many more with its jargon-laden rhetoric, academic film theory dominates one end of the readership spectrum while film criticism maintains an equally strong position on the opposite end. Given the generally limited understanding of what readership can entail, and the few forums in which the term is used with regard to film, it is necessary to work backward and begin with a closer examination of the reader before one can consider the broader application of film readership.

Read the full article here.

From our friends at the Boston-based Big Red & Shiny, today we bring you Angelina Zhou‘s assessment of the most recent iteration of the Carnegie International, which is on view in Pittsburgh through March 16. Zhou notes that, “beyond the accessibility of certain works and themes… viewers find moments of dissonance that are truly quite dark, critical, and political—without being overly self-important.” This article was originally published on January 30, 2014.

Sarah Lucas. Installation view at the 2013 Carnegie International, with works by Henry Taylor in the background. Courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Greenhouse Media.

The 2013 Carnegie International is neither humble nor shy. The exhibition, hosted at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, is a sharp and deliberate display of critical perspective featuring 35 artists and collectives from 19 countries. The selection is tight and deeply self-aware, the works self-involved yet hyper-conscious of their situation in an expanded context of discovery and art making.

Established in 1896, the Carnegie International is the oldest North American survey of contemporary art from around the globe, and the second oldest of its kind in the world, preceded only by the Venice Biennale of 1895. This latest International marks a pivotal moment in the exhibition’s history. Globalization has renewed a conversation around national identity and birthed an art world more saturated than ever with art fairs, festivals, and the pressure to develop a world picture of contemporary art.

“This is an anti- art fair in many ways,” explains the International’s co-curator Dan Byers. There are certainly big brand-name artists in the show, those who have drawn international attention and whose works have sold for incredible prices. But the show itself is intentionally and inherently very human. Roberta Smith in a New York Times review refers to the International as “a welcome shock to the system of one of the art world’s more entrenched rituals”—festivalism. GalleristNY deems the show “a quiet triumph.” Yet, there is nothing quiet about the International. In an ambitious act of defiance, the three co-curators, Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers, and Tina Kukielski, abandon the grandeur and excess of the festival. Instead, the curators weave a lean narrative of multiplicity and dissonance that sweeps through the latter half of the 20th century to present day.

Read the full article here.

Upon entering CalArts’ REDCAT Gallery (which is in reality a large room off the foyer of the REDCAT theater), I see nine pieces of comically oversized Neoclassic furniture. Two armoires, two chairs, two dressers, a huge central cabinet, an obelisk, and what appears to be an urn face each other on pedestals. Their construction is at a level I would describe as “professional shoddy,” with a faux-aged red finish and various hinges, hooks, and handles holding the seams of the furniture together. Their quality is familiar: I spent years of my own life dancing in overblown productions of The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and other classical ballets—these are very clearly built as props.

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.

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The preserved crocodile carcass, pinned against a ratty tarp to form the centerpiece of a work called On Your Way Up, is as good a place as any to begin a review of Radcliffe Bailey’s exhibition Maroons at Jack Shainman gallery. Though purportedly on the ascent, this climber has clearly seen better days; its exposed finger bones, protruding between disintegrated flesh, seem unlikely to carry it very far. The gesture exudes a Dadaist absurdity that unites many of the works in this show. It may also present a whiff of home for the Atlanta-based artist, whose practice routinely confronts the heritage of the American South in both its revolting (e.g., slavery) and enlivening (e.g., jazz) aspects. All of the above draw a viewer further and further into the work, right up until the point at which its metaphor-in-waiting, vague but palpably present, becomes impossible to avoid—then, how quickly the work deflates.

Radcliffe Bailey. On Your Way Up, 2013; tarp, crocodile, and steel; 120 x 106 x 10 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Most of the works in Maroons share the seemingly scavenged, pawnshop constitution of On Your Way Up. Not always is the approach fruitful. A piece consisting of a chunk of white coral mounted on a plane of black sand, in which appear the outlines of a dagger, ship, and ladder, abides the poetry of a light-dark contrast and seemingly little else. Several works, however, are startlingly charged—if, like the croc, only temporarily so. Wicker baskets brimming with shards of glass surround a model 19th-century cargo ship in Vessel; a wooden door, gold-leafed by the artist, bears an inordinately massive, medieval-looking lock in Fourth Ward; Congo suggests an ashen version of the Democratic Republic’s flag: five-point stars strewn irregularly across a blackened tarp, before which hangs a trio of disembodied wooden limbs. One hardly needs to spell out the gruesome resonances underlying these images. They prove the potential for a powerful symbology to be found in the odds and ends at Bailey’s disposal, even if they threaten to bottom out in allegories that fly too easily into the viewer’s grasp.

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Ramiro Gomez’s show at Charlie James Gallery has been gaining a lot of attention for his topical use of visual politics to introduce labor and immigration issues into the art discourse. Most notably, Gomez appropriates the image of David Hockney’s iconic painting A Bigger Splash (1967) and a group of smaller Hockneys from the same period in his own paintings. The jubilant splash of Hockney’s homage to revelers in carefree 1960s California is absent in Gomez’s version. Instead, a Latino employee gently rakes the pool’s placid surface.

Ramiro Gomez. No Splash (after David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash, 1967), 2013; acrylic on canvas; 96 x 96 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Osceola Refetoff.

Gomez foregrounds what Mierle Laderman Ukeles referred to as “maintenance labor” in her foundational performance action Hartford Wash (1973). Ukeles performed and foregrounded the invisible labor of the maintenance class in the museum, using her position as a featured artist to introduce these issues. Gomez’s interventions have so far been more anonymous. He has inserted the silhouettes of house cleaners, gardeners, nannies, and pool attendants into public spaces as a form of political protest. Like Ukeles, he tends to limit the laborer’s presence to that of a simulacrum, more symbolic than substantive. At Charlie James Gallery, Gomez moves beyond politicized representations into identification with his subjects as individuals. By giving his caregivers and landscapers names and fragments of backstory, he attempts to differentiate them from others who share their experiences. Read More »

Help Desk is where I answer your queries about making, exhibiting, finding, marketing, buying, selling–or any other activity related to contemporary art. Submit your questions anonymously here: http://bit.ly/132VchD. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. Help Desk is co-sponsored by KQED Arts.

I am not trained as a visual artist—I hold my graduate degree in dance choreography, and before grad school I worked primarily in live theatrical concert dance. However, in grad school my focus shifted, and I started developing work in performance that should live in a gallery space. Now that I am out of school, I have a great new project in the works, but I have no idea how to make it happen! To get shows produced in dance is a complicated and nuanced procedure, but I at least understand the steps. I am totally at a loss on how to enter into the art world and negotiate a show. I’m not interested in getting the work into the “market” per se, so a for-profit gallery is probably not my best bet. Can you let me know some of the unspoken rules for approaching art spaces/museums with performance work? I want to make sure that I don’t seem tone deaf to the conventions of the form. If it were a concert show in a traditional theater, here’s how I’d approach it: I would narrow down a couple of producers, send them a press packet, invite them to rehearsals and in-progress showings to develop a relationship, and then finally just ask for a show. For people I already knew, I might do an exploratory email pitch: “I have this cool idea in development, would you be interested in talking?”

Sylvia Palacios Whitman. Passing Through, 1977; performance at Sonnabend Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Babette Mangolte. 

Good question! You’re obviously motivated and organized, and also sensitive to understand that changing your approach and observing the rules of contemporary art spaces will serve your goals better than charging ahead with the protocols for pitching to traditional theaters. I sent your question to Katya Min, Curator of Public Programs at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and she had a lot of good advice for you. To begin with, she says, “Whether or not you’re an established or an emerging artist, navigating the turbulent waters of the art world can be a taxing and largely intimidating process. Before elaborating on the areas that I would be conscious of, coming from a curator’s perspective, I will offer this relatively common-sense advice: There are really no right or wrong approaches. Each curator is different, thus each will have a different method of seeking artists or projects. The approach I would recommend is actually not dissimilar from the approach you described for traditional theater, but with that said, I hope these tips will help guide you on your way.”

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Do you ever wonder where you were exactly a year or two ago? What you were doing, or who you were talking to—or about? Today we take a little trip down memory lane to this very date two years ago, to reassess Damien Hirst’s oeuvre and the art-market chatter around exhibiting his spot paintings at all eleven Gagosian galleries around the world. Now that the art community is having a very different conversation—around labor, wages, class, and education, among other topics—the hoopla around Hirst seems very 2012.

Damien Hirst. The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011, from Gagosian Gallery website, 28 January 2012. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

From the very beginning, Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011, was always going to be the target of much contempt. An embodiment of savvy self-promotion, Damien Hirst has become the world’s richest living artist, and with that, a scapegoat for the pompous market and inflated celebrity status representing all that is wrong with contemporary art today. This latest publicity stunt—a gargantuan worldwide retrospective of spot paintings—is an exhibition founded in pure megalomania: big gallery, big artist, and even bigger personalities. As with the ostentatious two-day auction held at Sotheby’s in 2008 at the height of the economic crisis, Hirst simply doesn’t do modest. And with eleven galleries worldwide, neither does Gagosian. A few weeks ago, Daily Serving writer Danielle Sommer offered up two challenges: the first to find something new to say about the work, and the second, to pick a side. I love a good challenge.

First things first: I despise the premise of the show. But I do respect the audacity it takes to try to pull something like this off. This was never the show intended to ignite respect and admiration for Hirst—that show is slated to open at Tate Modern this spring. The Complete Spot Paintings instead feels more like a scientific experiment, one of Hirst’s macabre vitrine works spun out into real-life testing grounds, intended to divide the camps into those who follow and those who resist.

For a few moments, let’s try and separate the works from the madness that surrounds them.

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