As part of our ongoing relationship with the Boston-based Big Red & Shiny, today we bring you a review of Mark Cooper’s work at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Cooper was one of four artists of “exceptional promise” shortlisted for the Foster Prize (along with Sarah Bapst, Katarina Burin, and Luther Price), and all four of the nominees had their ICA exhibitions reviewed on Big Red & Shiny’s blog Our Daily Red. This review was written by Stephanie Cardon and originally published on June 5, 2013.

Mark Cooper. yu yu tangerine, 2013; wood, aluminum brackets, screws, ceramics, fiberglass, silkscreen on muslin, acrylic, watercolor, marker, rice paper monoprints, digital photographs; dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist. Photo: John Kennard.

It is curious that Mark Cooper’s work, which is the most visually and spatially boisterous, the most materially lustful (though not the most fetishistic) of the four finalists’, is that which directly references Buddhist cultures, concepts and practices of meditation, contemplation, immateriality and emptiness. The jovial mess named yu yu tangerine isn’t the cast-off of a frenzied unburdening. It is the offspring of a creative process that harnesses visual language from a multiplicity of sources, pulling a commotion of color, line, shape, texture, form into a single space, and leaving it there like some gargantuan feast for our eyes. It feels compulsive and libidinous—devoid of restraint.

Cooper’s exuberant installation More is More colonized Samsøn in 2011 with greater elegance and aplomb than yu yu tangerine. Given that the assembled parts and the context of both presentations are roughly similar, one wonders what lacks in this iteration of the installation. The answer might be: more. Something closer to a cave, a womb, or a fortress of solitude—an accumulation of obstacles that forces the body into a particular navigation of space. But the answer could just as easily be: less. The argument for this approach would be that the individual parts that make up yu yu tangerine are, by and large, stronger than the whole. Because of a lack of visual hierarchy (resulting primarily from a similarity in scale and shape) no part can claim precedence, and therefore each appears to be a translation of the same concept through a succession different materials and forms: a photograph of a hillside paddy equals line drawings on rice paper equals the tiered, meandering sculptures.

Read the full article here.

On June 4, I was reminded of a critical moment in history when the eyes of the world were turned towards Poland and the Eastern Bloc. This date marks the anniversary of the first democratic election in Poland; and with its celebration, a cautious optimism pervades the formerly communist country as various events—such as the premiere of the documentary film Eastern Europe Strives for Freedom—take a critical look back at the predicaments of the past. In an effort to remember the lessons of history, some events point towards the unacknowledged vestiges of the former communist state that remain within the Polish government and beyond.

Chto Delat. Chto Delat of the Spirits, 2013; mural; originally installed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2010. Photo: BWA Wrocław

The radical questioning of both the past and present is felt especially within the Chto Delat: To Negate Negation exhibition at BWA Wrocław’s Awangarda Gallery, on view until June 16. As a survey of the Chto Delat collective’s activities over the last decade, it presents a critical reflection of historicized content within an economic and political context that was—and still is—fraught with contradictions.

Chto Delat. Negating Negation, 2013; installation view, BWA Wrocław, Wrocław, Poland. Photo: BWA Wrocław

Taking its name from Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s (1828-1889) novel Chto Delat, meaning “what is to be done,” the collective re-deploys Leftist ideology through its associated artists, philosophers, writers, and activists. Via a collection of posters displayed throughout the Awangarda Gallery, Chto Delat uses the interchangeable languages of advertisement and propaganda to subvert historical narratives and offer a timeline as radical alterity. These didactic presentations (with a constructivist flair) are only partially accessible to non-Russian-speaking viewers, yet they still manage to convey a spirit of resistance particularly in the context of the exhibition’s entirety.

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Intersections, Claudia Joskowicz’s two-channel video installation and accompanying photographic series at LMAKprojects, is a straightforward display of her newest video piece, Every Building on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte – After Ruscha. The insular gallery space of LMAKprojects has been transformed into a kind of dark pathway. The spectator enters and is sandwiched between two opposing, life-size projections of two sides of the same street: Avenida Alfonso Ugarte in El Alto, Bolivia. El Alto is one of the fastest growing urban centers in the artist’s home country of Bolivia. During the 2003 Bolivian gas crisis, the city became an epicenter of violent mass protest as the Bolivian working class and the country’s armed forces clashed over the government’s ongoing exploitation of the nation’s natural gas resources. The conflict left sixty protestors, soldiers and policemen dead and signified an excessive use of state force reminiscent of the brutal, terrorizing tactics of Bolivia’s previous dictatorship governments.

Claudia Joskowicz. Every Building on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte - After Ruscha, 2011 (video still); digital HD; 26:00. Courtesy of LMAKprojects and the artist.

Both projections feature twenty-six minute long tracking shots of the Avenida. Joskowicz slightly slows her footage down so that it feels almost—but not quite—engrossingly real. We are able to momentarily linger on her subjects, but are never able to look backwards. The best place to view the installation is from the very back of the corridor created by the projection images; as the two screens move steadily forward, we can hypnotize ourselves into the illusion that we are riding in a vehicle down this street and can see clearly out of both windows.

The video chronicles urban life along the avenue. Shots of rubble, storefronts, and everyday activity lead us to a single instance of staged police presence amidst an otherwise quietly bustling scene. We come upon this image from behind: Bolivian soldiers standing still as statues in 3-D formation, with rifles cocked. Ever unflinching, the camera moves past this intervention to feature (in a separate, almost unrelated shot) a sparse band of protestors amidst burning tires. These two jarring images are quickly lost amidst the rolling footage of quotidian life upon the street. A single police official, leaning casually under a storefront awning, is the only other allusion that the El Alto street scene that Joskowicz documents is not as benign as it might seem. The pervasive police presence captured in Joskowicz’s steady panning indicates a casual yet constant official surveillance that underlies the day-to-day operations of the developing city.

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Code-switching is the linguist’s term for substituting one language for another in the course of a single conversation. “Oye, Teacher Bean,” a student once told me, “I couldn’t do mi tarea because mi tia was late and I had to watch mi sobrino hasta medianoche.” Notice that even though the sentence ping-pongs between Spanish and English, it’s still grammatically correct. To code switch, you need to have an intuition for how each language works and how they might work together.

Using languages and symbols, Enrique Chagoya is a master code-switcher. His drawings, etchings, and lithographs now on view in Freedom of Expression at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California conjure a universe that is at once familiar and alien, like a vivid dream. The phrases and images he appropriates from history and popular culture are things that a viewer has seen before, but never in quite this combination. Cartoon characters pick their way through landscapes populated by skeletons, gun-toting soldiers, and tidal waves; and yet the most dangerous part of each composition is not a corporeal threat but the minefield of cultural disorder.

Enrique Chagoya. Escape from Fantasylandia: An Illegal Alien's Survival Guide, 2011; color lithograph on papel de amate. Courtesy of the artist and Shark's Ink. Photo: Kala Art Institute.

One of the most fascinating components of the work is Chagoya’s attention to detail at every level. Escape from Fantasylandia: An Illegal Alien’s Survivial Guide (2011) is a perfect example: before one even considers the imagery on the surface, the material and technical components (lithography on amate paper) prepare the viewer for a clash. A German author invented the lithograph in 1796, and papel de amate is a pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican paper; thus, in advance of any other consideration, a pastiche already exists.

Enrique Chagoya. Escape from Fantasylandia: An Illegal Alien's Survival Guide (detail), 2011; color lithograph on papel de amate. Courtesy of the artist and Shark's Ink. Photo: Kala Art Institute.

Going further into Escape from Fantasylandia, the images are combined in such a way as to imply an internal logic, and yet they also exist in a cultural, geographic, and even temporal chaos. In one panel, a conventionally pretty Caucasian woman from a mid-century comic book is dressed in archaic peasant garb. She restrains a child-size skeleton by the upper arm and asks, “¿Debo entender que no te simpatizo para tu amiga?” (roughly translated as, “Am I to understand that you don’t want me for your friend?”). Given her posture and the circumstance, her sweet face looks malevolent; in consideration of her rough grip, her beauty turns out to be a Trojan horse, and the gaunt little skeleton is wise to lean away from the rod she carries in her other hand. From the grim faces of the smaller skeletons that march along at the bottom of the panel, we can guess what happens next; but they are concerned only with following a floating trail of five-dollar bills, and cannot help.

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Elizabeth Zvonar, Cummy Loubous, 2013. Porcelain. Courtesy of Daniel Faria Gallery

A distressed pair of white porcelain shoes with red soles and a cast golden index finger seductively beckon you upon first entering Elizabeth Zvonar’s exhibition Banal Baroque at Daniel Faria Gallery in Toronto. The heels of the shoes are warped, the feet inside almost brainy in texture. Sawed off abruptly at the base of the ankle, the feet, shoes, and the vibrant red soles are covered in glossy dribbles and splatters, alluding to the title of the piece, Cummy Loubous. Despite the obvious connotations inherent in the title, the piece acts as a clever reference to the intellectual undercurrents of the exhibition. One of the most familiar phrases that features the Latin word cum, cum laude, connotes distinction, just as the red sole of a Louboutin heel serves as a mark of distinction, stressing the status of the owner as well as the brand. Used conjunctively cum can refer to a person or thing with dual roles or natures, an idea Zvonar toys with throughout the exhibition, particularly in reference to gender performativity.

Elizabeth Zvonar, Harry Elephant, 2013; Sunset, 2013. Photo paper mounted on dibond and framed. Courtesy of Daniel Faria Gallery

In her first solo show in Toronto, Vancouver-based artist Elizabeth Zvonar presents a complex, seductive, tongue-in-cheek exploration of the performative nature of the feminine persona. Her work mines both societal and self-imposed constructs of femininity, while also delving into broader conversations about metaphysics, consumption and identity. Zvonar’s hand-cut collages use images appropriated from the 1970s Parisian luxury goods magazine Connaissance des Arts, and have been digitally manipulated and reprinted on photographic paper in order to introduce a sense of scale. They are presented alongside sculptural casts of various components of the female form, such as elbows and feet in high heel shoes, as well as index fingers and hands—forms that are often repeated in her other bodies of work due to their communicative abilities and their iconographic ties to art historical works.

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Help Desk is an arts-advice column that demystifies practices for artists, writers, curators, collectors, patrons, and the general public. Submit your questions anonymously here. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. Help Desk is cosponsored by KQED.org.

I’m an artist and art writer and would like to complete the trifecta by seriously trying to curate. However, since I’ve only been on the curated side of the table I know embarrassingly little about the nitty-gritty of it. For example, when I have a proposal ready, do I inform the proposed artists of my intentions before or after I submit the proposal? Who arranges and pays for shipping work? I only know how I’ve personally been treated and not what is typical. I’m too afraid of looking like a fool to give it a shot.

Last things first: if you’re an artist and a writer, you must be used to sticking your neck out by now—at least a little—so I don’t believe that part about looking like a fool. You already know that the best way to learn is by doing, so stop worrying what other people think and get to work.

If you want to curate, you’ll need an idea or curatorial premise, some artists and artworks, and a space to exhibit the show. The process of putting together those items will often provide answers to many of the other questions, such as who pays for shipping. If the space you’re working with does not, you’ll have to pay for it yourself, or split the costs with the artists, or only work with local artists, or get a grant. You have lots of options for workarounds, and you’ll find that many of the smaller details will fall into place once you account for the fundamental parts of the exhibition.

VALIE EXPORT. Die un-endliche/ -ähnliche Melodie der Stränge (The un-ending/ -ique melody of cords), 1998; video installation on 10 monitors; installation view, Bilder der Berührung (Images of Contingence), 2013. Photo by Eric Tschernow.

A proposal is important, and you should talk to the artists. I forwarded your question to curator Dena Beard and she noted, “It is exceedingly important that your curatorial proposal conveys to the artist both your intentions for the exhibition and that, in requesting their participation, you will be taking responsibility for their artwork, conceptually, logistically, financially, and physically. The latter bit is often overlooked, but it is absolutely the backbone of the curator/artist relationship.”

Ms. Beard was kind enough to give you some real insight into her process: “I generally start out with a couple of paragraphs detailing the exhibition and explaining why I consider their art to be an invaluable part of the project. How will their work translate in the context of the exhibition space and, if applicable, in relation to the other artists included? How will the exhibition create a new dialogue or audience for their work? [You can] follow those paragraphs with a formal request to borrow the work (list title, date, medium) and state that, in close consultation with the artist, you will be covering the costs of safe transportation of the work to and from the exhibition space, insurance, installation, and deinstallation.”

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Today From the DS Archives we bring you a piece written by Catherine Wagley from her L.A. Expanded column, which was published between 2010-2012. Like many great pieces suitable for a Sunday read (and like most all from her column) Fandom collages recognizable subjects, like the relationship between Tennessee Williams and Elizabeth Taylor, with new artists, like Justin Lowe. This article was originally published on July 6, 2012 by Catherine Wagley. 

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Elizabeth Taylor and Noel Coward, still from "Boom!," 1968, dir. Joseph Losey, screenplay by Tennessee Williams.

It makes a weird kind of sense that Elizabeth Taylor, who managed to move from sweetheart to sexpot to scandal then back to sweetheart more gracefully than any actress on record, would die the week of Tennessee Williams’ centennial. The playwright, not unlike the actress, had a remarkable knack for being glamorous and tawdry, Pulitzer-worthy and tabloid-ready at the same time. The two even followed one another’s trajectories—or, more likely, helped shape one another’s trajectories.

Williams would complete Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1954, debut it on Broadway in 1955 and win his second Pulitzer for it just as Taylor was preparing for Giant, her first truly memorable film as a grown-up. Then, in 1957, Taylor would sign on to star in the film version of Cat and, in ’58, snag an Academy Award nomination for her beautifully bitchy turn as Maggie. A year later, she’d receive another nomination for another Williams’ role: as the more tender Catherine who’s trying her darndest not to be lobotomized in Suddenly, Last Summer, the screen adaptation of which (Gore Vidal helped write it) cloaked all reference to homosexuality in an eerie haze.

If they flourished together, Williams and Taylor floundered together too. A decade after Suddenly, Taylor, addicted to pain killers and prone to illness, had lost five husbands and was four years into her first of two taboo-soaked marriages to Richard Burton; Williams was five years into a dark depression. The two teamed up again, but this time for a project critics savaged. In Boom!, Taylor plays an ailing husband killer who lives on her very own island, while Burton acts a stranded mystery man and Noel Coward appears as the psychic “Witch of Capri.” The footage feels like something out of a dystopian romance novel and John Waters called it “one of the most gloriously failed art films ever.” In 1989, five years after Williams’ too-early death and the same year Taylor checked out of the Betty Ford Clinic for the second time, the actress played a sinking screen siren in a made-for-TV rendition of Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth.

“She’s the opposite of her public image,” Williams said of Taylor two years before his death. “She’s not a bitch, even though her life has been a very hell. . . . Pain and pain. She’s so delicate, fragile really.”

“I adored Tennessee,” Taylor said of Williams. “He was hopelessly naive, however.”

Justin Lowe, Untitled, 2011, collage, 10 x 8 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Pepin Moore, Los Angeles.

The Tennessee whose bust was on a chocolate cake at Skylight Books in Los Feliz last Sunday did not look naïve. He looked dapper and slyly omniscient. In celebration of what would have been the playwright’s 100th birthday, Skylight staged an afternoon of readings that ended with  playwright Chris Phillips’ tribute, Garden District, set to debut at Celebration Theater in May. Like the best of devoted, obsessive fans, Phillips has trolled through Williams and unpacked the stories behind the stories, fixating on the three gay men whose deaths spur the plots of Williams’ most iconic plays: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly, Last Summer and Streetcar Named Desire. The scene read on Sunday was between Maggie—Taylor’s role, here played by redhead Karah Donovan with an inebriating Southern drawl—and Skipper, the best friend of Maggie’s husband Brick; Maggie eggs Skipper into admitting he’s been in love with Brick.

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