Today from the DS archives we dig deep to bring you an early article written about Daniel Lefcourt. His current show, Mockup, is on view at White Flag Projects until June 23, don’t miss it!

“Mockup is a storage room, a stage set, a mausoleum, a trade show, a diagram, a game board, a studio, a retail store, a pictograph, a classroom, a museum display, an architectural model, and a sign-makers workshop. Like composite wood — the material from which the artworks are made — each object is at once real and solid, and simultaneously a mere semblance or substitute.”

The following article was originally published by Seth Curcio on October 13, 2007:

Eric Holubow "Downstaging Uptown"; 2009; Uptown Theater; Chicago, IL; 33 in. x 60 in. Courtesy of Chicago Cultural Center.

Walking through Chicago Cultural Center – past the Doric columns of the Grand Entrance, beneath the 38-foot wide Tiffany Dome, and beside the ornate marble of Preston Bradley Hall – to the gallery featuring Eric Holubow’s photographs is like a visual confrontation of the before and after effects of society’s collapse. Displayed within the vast Neo-Classical halls of the Cultural Center, Holubow’s highly aestheticized images of crumbling opulence are a weary reminder that America’s hard times are far from over.

The show, titled “In Decay – Stitching America’s Ruins,” contains images of grand architectural interiors; cavernous theaters, expansive churches and synagogues, and cathedral-like auto factories scattered throughout the mid-west and rust belt, all captured in late moments of decrepitude. Holubow’s images are strikingly beautiful; full of luminous colors, dynamic compositions, and extraordinary details that highlight the breadth and magnificence of these ambitiously crafted spaces as well as the monumentality of their decline. Wide-angle shots and large-scale prints encapsulate the magnitude of his subjects; structures that once served the cultural and spiritual wishes or economic needs of the communities for which they were built. Ultimately, these buildings are corpses and the photographer’s work is a record of their deaths.

St. Stephen’s Great Hall (2008) shows a hollowed shell of a cathedral. The stone grey interior is gutted of its pews, leaving behind an empty portico. The expansive drum, dome, and oculus over the nave harken back to the Pantheon, though the century old Chicago church looks far more decrepit than the Roman temple built two thousand year ago. Modeled after the idealized architecture of an ancient empire, St. Stephen’s represents the defunct historical aspirations of American society at the turn of the 20th Century.

"Hollowed Ark" 2011; Agudas Achim Synagogue; Chicago, IL; 16 in. x 24 in. Courtesy of Chicago Cultural Center.

Wall texts displayed beside each picture relay the histories of the structures depicted, from glorious, innovative, or utopic origins to disrepair and abandonment, revealing the migration of communities and economies that happened along the way. Chicago’s Agudas Achim Synagogue, photographed in Hallowed Arc (2011), for instance, was once a lavish place of worship for the Jewish residents of Uptown, a neighborhood in the northern part of the city. As those families moved to suburban villages like Skokie and Rogers Park, the synagogue’s rainbow colored Byzantine arc, stained glass windows, and gold mosaics fell into decay. The image itself is of a lofty vertical interior that was clearly gorgeous in its heyday, though now the space is a ruinous mess littered with debris.

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

Because NEA funding cuts recently prompted Art21.org to stage a telethon, because this is fundraising season (a number of non-profits, included Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, had their annual auctions, galas or other fundraisers this month), and because I’m preoccupied with MOCA’s recent Transmission L.A. festival — which I mentioned in last week’s column –, I wrote the below. It originally appeared on Art21’s blog.

Screen shot of Debo Eilers and crew performing "My Little Sunshine" during the Art21 Telethon.

When I tuned into the Art21 Telethon this past Sunday, the 8-hour performance-filled fundraising marathon had been live-streaming for just over 3 hours and brought in just under $4,000. Curator and co-host Miriam Katz, wearing a great silky floral top, was saying, “Our next act was going to be an animal act but I think there was an issue with insurance.” Instead, artist Debo Eilers’ crew was setting up nearby amidst microphones and floor mats. They were wearing white tunics like hospital gowns and red animal masks that made some look like turkeys and others like floppy-eared dogs.

“You can [perform] however long, but right now longer might be better,” said artist Ronnie Bass, the “official” host, who had conceived the telethon along with Katz and Art21 artist Tommy Hartung, after NEA budget cuts left PBS programming financially crippled.

“And since the act that didn’t come was supposed to be an animal act, if you want to put in an animal theme, that could be helpful,” Katz added.

Then everyone seemed confused for a while, and Katz accidentally blocked the camera as the group slowly began singing “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine” in childlike voices. It took a while before they were in unison. One of the performers beat the wall with a strap and held a strobe light, and continued to do this after the song ended, until Ronnie said “Thank you” and re-explained to viewers how to donate.

The artists featured in Transmission L.A. posing outside MOCA

I tuned into the telethon right after leaving the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary, where the 19-day Transmission L.A.: AV Club, a festival funded by Mercedes Benz and curated by Beastie Boy Mike D., was on its last legs. It actually, weirdly, had a vibe similar to the telethon, a mix of confusion and free-for-all comfortability.

The festival was free, so people wandered in and out of MOCA at will. Artist Tom Sachs had designed a DJ booth that was out front, and galleries were full of video and light work (hip stuff — like Cory Arcangel and Takeshi Murata, who made even filmmaker Mike Mills, with his montage of appropriated pop images, seem like the fogey), and a black box theater in the back, where Lauren Mackler of the alt space Public Fiction had staged a series of performances. When I arrived, artists Ali Prosch and Meghann McCrory were “setting up” for their performance No Signal in Mackler’s black box. At least, I thought they were setting up — the set up turned into the performance so seamlessly that I didn’t notice at first. The artists wore all black and slowly moved scrims in front of lights, turned on projectors, and started up a fan that would rotate and cause fluttering, glittery light to move around the room.

Ben Jones video installation at Transmission L.A.

It was a durational, always-in-progress light show that ended with disco balls and tap dancing, and people felt free to walk into and leave whenever. (A little girl gasped when one rotating black box was disassembled to reveal a disco ball, but the same little girl lost interest and was ushered away by her mother about three minutes later.)

A lot of people wandered into the performance from next door, where the new Mercedes-Benz Concept Style Coupé was on display. The Coupé had debuted the festival’s opening night, and it now sat under lights that flashed on and off to the cues of specially composed music you could listen to by putting on headphones suspended under spotlights. You could also, apparently, touch the car — I watched a young-ish blond guy in board shorts spent about five minutes trying to close the back door he’d opened while three security guards stood on with arms crossed, not helping.

Because of these cars, the strobe lights, the Beastie Boy curator, an L.A. Times article and rumors I’d heard, I was sure Transmission L.A. was a durational fundraiser, what Art21’s telethon might have been if corporately sponsored and planned by a rapper. Why else would a museum debut a luxury car in its galleries? I put this fundraiser theory in print before I realized I was wrong.

Transmission wasn’t a fundraiser. MOCA would not benefit financially (at least, not significantly). The luxury cars weren’t a sponsor’s self-promotional push, I was told. They were there to be experienced like everything else in the galleries.

“LA is all about car culture. The tricky thing is to get people out of their homes,” says Mike D. in the Transmission A.V. leaflet. “[W]e’re trying to create this all encompassing sensory-rich environment.”

It was sensory-rich, and people did come out. And it was fun to travel through the mish-mash of cultural strata and sensibilities (luxury car, DJ, performance artist) and try to understand how they related to each other. But I didn’t know who had the power (MOCA, Mercedes, Mike D., the artists?), which is why, when I went home to live-stream the telethon for the evening, I felt less antsy. There, people who cared had the power: artist were raising funds for arts programming and mostly soliciting pre-exisiting art fans to do so.  Who knew a fundraiser could be a relief?

Leaving the crowds behind after the frenzied week of Frieze, I headed down to the New Museum after waiting for a month in anticipation to see some of my favorite artists show under one roof. Though there are numerous shows currently at the New Museum, I was there to see Phyllida Barlow, Tacita Dean and Nathalie Djurberg, all artists with whom I have had minimal exposure in a public setting but know from what I have seen that I have a profound interest in exploring further. Making my way to the fourth floor, I stepped out into a field of monumental sculptures by Phyllida Barlow (b. 1944, England) for her exhibition entitled siege. My first and only time seeing Barlow’s work was at Hauser & Wirth London in their Piccadilly gallery, where her work stood immense and impeccably wedged within the space’s existing architecture (the site is converted from an old bank). For the ambitious solo exhibition in London entitled RIG and likewise with siege, Barlow exhibited some of her most accomplished pieces all of which were made from mundane, utilitarian construction materials such as timber, cement, polystyrene, chicken wire, cardboard and roughly cut fabric.

Phyllida Barlow, untitled: 21 arches, 2012, Polystyrene, cement, scrim, paint & varnish, variable dimensions, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

The majority of her sculptures are towering structures that dwarf the spectator as if one were standing in a forest. Barlow dilutes the nature of her mundane media by her exquisite use of color, whether included by virtue of fabric, electrical tape or spray paint. For siege, Barlow exhibits her characteristically massive structures as similar to pieces I have seen previously, such as untitled: 21 arches (2012) and untitled: crushed boxes (2012). In pieces such as untitled: balcony (2012) and untitled: broken stage (2012) however, she adds more of a tangible architectural thread that differ slightly from her conceptual-based sculptures. Her work mimics the urban environment in both materiality and the nature of the imposing structures that swallow – or impede upon – the viewer.

Phyllida Barlow, untitled: crushed boxes, 2012, Polystyrene, cement, scrim, paint & varnish, variable dimensions, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

With pieces such as untitled: crushed boxes (2012) Barlow depicts weight through the manner in which her boxes pile upon a fabric cushion, thin or bulging in parts, depicting the sensation of being crushed. Her work maneuvers within a certain corporeal consciousness similar to the work of Eva Hesse or Robert Morris in which the weight – or the interior – of the body is made manifest through the use of material. With aspects of both Arte Povera and Minimalism, Barlow’s work is sensational in its rawness, and though I rather missed the space at Hauser & Wirth London that added an irreplaceable dimension to her work, Barlow’s structures are not to be missed in the immense setting of the New Museum’s spaces.

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Spread from Paul Thek notebook #63, 1974; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph © Estate of George Paul Thek; Photograph Jörg Lohse

As part of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, approaches to translate the subjective experience into the artistic process were explored in In the Shadow of the Hand and Back to the Things Themselves. Questions were raised on the nuances and distinctions between notions of the subjective, personal and self-indulgent. These borders disintegrate in the exhibition Paul Thek – ‘If you don’t like this book you don’t like me.’, on show at The Modern Institute till 2 June 2012, where fragments of the life of an artist, as narrated through pages of notebooks, become a part of the works on display.

Paul Thek; Untitled (cityscape with twin towers), 1972; Acrylic on canvas; 241.5 x 165 cm; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph Ruth Clark

In the past two decades, there has been an explosion of exhibitions and publications on Paul Thek, perhaps as part of an effort to re-insert him into the history of art. Though well-received in Europe during the 1970s, he died in relative obscurity in 1988 after his return to the United States. Thek’s name is often cited in relation to the Technological Reliquaries or “meat pieces”, a series of works made in the 1960s where body parts appearing as chunks of flesh were presented in geometric vitrines, a revelry of one’s fleshly mortality within the confines of the composed exterior of minimalism. While these sculptures were solid and dense, he also made works from ephemeral materials with collaborators, creating immersive environments that lasted for the duration of the exhibition. While little documentation remains of these installations, about 80 of Thek’s notebooks were retrieved and carefully preserved after his passing.

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Last year, #Hashtags featured an essay by the Mexican-American artist and writer Robert Gomez on the relationship between online images of drug cartel violence and Aztec rituals, which we rerun today in light of the recent escalation in Mexican cartel violence. The discovery Sunday of 49 mutilated bodies on a highway near Monterrey, Mexico, brings this month’s total to almost a hundred.  Analysts speculate that the ramp up has to do with turf wars between the Zeta and Sinaloa cartels, and that the victims were probably not affiliated with either gang, but chosen at random, perhaps even from migrant populations. Critics call the violences “irrational” and “mindless,” but we found ourselves convinced by Gomez’s argument that such violent public spectacles have a much longer lineage.

Please be aware that this article contains graphic representations of violence.  The author and the editors of the site would like to make clear that we are not interested in exploiting the sensational qualities of these images, but rather in their complex social roles.

"Two Flayed Men Appear in Tepic," a screen shot from Blog del Narco, 2011. Website and Digital Video. Image Slightly Blurred by Author.

As Mexican-American, I am awed by Mexico’s cartel warfare, and by the seeming American ambivalence towards it.  My first experience with Narco-violence started where you are now: at the computer, as I read through online articles about drug trafficking. Eventually, I came to El Blog del Narco. Hosted by an anonymous college student, El Blog del Narco claims to democratically post videos, pictures, and stories from anyone with information on the drug war. The moment remains vivid to me—it was a Tuesday afternoon, and the San Francisco fog was just beginning to roll across the sky. I clicked upon an article.  At first, I didn’t quite understand what I was seeing. It looked like two bodies piled on top of each other, except the skulls were the color of pus. I scrolled down, and saw what looked like a flattened mask of a face. I realized the image was of two flayed men, one with his heart removed. I felt sick. This was real. There were no movie crews creating this image—no costume designers, no makeup. It was achingly raw.  And yet in the same moment, I realized that I had seen this before, not in life, but in images of sixteenth-century Aztec ritual sacrifice.

"Sacrifice by Heart Excision" from the Codex Magliabechiano, c. 1540. Ink on parchment. Collection of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze.

In pre-Columbian Aztec society, ritual human sacrifice saturated all social functions. Five hundred years later, Mexico is in the midst of yet another wave of theatrical human violence. Digitally propagated Narco-execution videos have become a tool for warfare, assuming the role of systematic violence once reserved for elaborate rituals and architecture. New media facilitates a new experience of the spectacle of torture, and Mexico’s drug cartels are developing a theater for their executions comprised of computer-interfaced viewers and digital cameras.  In doing so, they have also shifted traditional power relationships between image, warfare, and violence.

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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 co-sponsored by KQED.org.

This week’s column is accompanied by images from Wynne Greenwood‘s recent show “Peace In” at Lawrimore Project in Seattle.

Your counselor, hard at work.

Do you think that learning the technique of mediums before using them (instead of just doing something arbitrary with the medium) is stifling to creativity?

No, I don’t. Creativity isn’t arbitrary, it is direct imaginative action oriented toward a medium. The more you know, the more calculating and precise you can be (all while making it seem effortless). What is stifling to creativity is when the urge to create is stymied by a lack of knowledge. Stop complaining about your color theory homework—I promise it will stand you in good stead some day.

Wynne Greenwood, “Peace In” installation view

I have Asperger’s Syndrome. I’ve known this since I was very young, and was fortunate enough to have parents who helped me sort through it in the right way. It is very mild, and I don’t even really think much of it, however I’ve noticed that my behavior tends to color people’s opinion of my artwork. Sometimes I get the impression that they think I am some narrowly-focused-boy-wonder-type. I can’t say that this impression has hurt me – in fact, I believe it amplifies any interest in my work – however I’m not sure how I feel about being contextualized this way. Should I fight against this reputation I seem to be inadvertently building?

I wonder what you could possibly do to combat the impression you believe you are making. After all, you don’t know what conclusions people are actually coming to when you interact with them. You’re just guessing. But if you want to try to fight this assumption (yours and, potentially, your studio visitor’s) you’ll have to beat them to the punch. Maybe you could make a t-shirt that says, “I think that you think that I’m some kind of boy wonder, but I want to preemptively let you know that I’m not.” For brevity’s sake, on the back it could just say ASPERGER’S–you know, like a team jersey.

Wynne Greenwood, Head #2 with Pillar, 2012. Painted ceramic, dyed fabric, thread and foam, 48 x 24 x 24 inches

However, fashion’s not really my thing (see column lead picture, above) so in place of sartorial advice let’s get to the heart of this matter: the problem of how an artist controls her public image. Obviously, it’s necessary for the professional artist to have some information about herself out in the world (name, birthplace, education, and exhibitions are all basic resume items and statements often mention inspirations, etc.), but it’s funny how quickly this can get distorted or mischaracterized. Sometimes it seems that fact checking is passé: if someone gets a notion about who you are, and especially if it enlivens a story, there’s not much you can do. It’s no easy task to fight the rising tide of misinformation that gets circulated, especially when we live in a culture that fetishizes artists even as it undervalues them.

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