Installation view, "Evil Dead 2," 2012, courtesy Horton Gallery

Horton Gallery, with its evocatively titled two-person show Evil Dead 2, pays homage to Romero’s glorious second stab by exploring expansive and ever-mutable revision.  The setup seems sitcom-like; two artists and friends from Brooklyn display their process-heavy paintings shoulder to shoulder in a kind of Oscar/Felix cohabitation.  Matt Jones is deep and celestial (the messy one), while gallery-mate Kadar Brock aims towards a final inanimate cleanliness (Felix).

Kadar Brock, "deredemitsdi," oil, acrylic, flashe, house paint & spray-paint on canvas, 2009-2012, courtesy Horton Gallery

Brock’s canvases are the result of violently scouring and gouging older works to reveal a brittle, bone-colored surface pitted with holes.  Not strictly subtractive, Brock adds synthetic neon sheens reminiscent of mini golf courses, Myrtle Beach and the mottled underside of skateboards.  These nostalgic associations, aimed so heart-wrenchingly at the 90’s shaped hole in my heart, are belied by the obsessive and superficially embarrassed gesture of Brock erasing his past.  The older work (colorful patterned paintings with compositions derived from Dungeons and Dragons) is literally expunged or “whitewashed” from his youthful oeuvre.  Brock’s paintings are in a constant state of flux, and this latest iteration seems like the fragile and abused last stop.  But maybe it’s not.  The cheery anchor to Brock’s practice is that his constantly shifting system of reuse avoids preciousness, entropy and stagnation.  Which is not completely unlike Romero’s lingering, pervasive spirit world.

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

Dana Verkouteren's rendering of Gregory G. Katsas speaking in front of the Supreme Court Justices in Washington, March 26, 2012.

Driving home on March 28, the last day of the SCOTUS affordable health care hearings, I had the radio on and heard interviews with two or three female picketers who had set up outside the Supreme Court. I haven’t been able  to find the transcript of what I heard, but I remember it as one of those “can you tell who’s on what side” stories — like the one NPR did months ago, comparing the fiscally-obsessed language of a Tea Partier with that of a Wall Street Occupier. The similarity that struck me most between these SCOTUS picketers was the use of “I” and “my”: “my Constitutional right,” “my health,” “I have the freedom.” In an Associated Press piece I read later, a woman said of the health care act, “It is the epitome of being in my face and telling me what I can and can’t do for the rest of my life.”

The “I” and the “my” feel embarrassing: people speaking about what they want, and what they feel they deserve, but doing so in language that aligns them to “a side.” On both sides, the “I” and “my” seem in service to bigger red vs. blue, conservative vs. liberal interests, and, at least in sound bites, the speakers don’t seem aware of how unspecific their “I” sounds.

Leigh Ledare, who became notorious on a very small scale (he’s only had a few solo shows, some of them outside of the U.S., none in L.A. until now) for using his over-intimate relationship with his exceptionally uninhibited mother as his subject, has work at The Box gallery in L.A. right now. And though everything in his fairly extensive exhibition is in some way or another “confessional,” all you understand about the artist’s wants or likes has to do with his voracious interest in other people — he wants, or likes, to know about those who are or have been close to him.

Leigh Ledare, still from The Gift, 2008.

The Gift, fragments of a softcore film Ledare’s former-dancer mother made with friends, plays in a side room at The Box. Ledare’s mother sent him this  footage, apparently “as a gift,” and Ledare pared it down so that no story, only strange encounters between actors and director are left. In the main gallery space, a room-inside-a-room has been built to hold Double Bind, a wide-ranging series of photographs of Meghan Ledare Fedderly, formerly married to Ledare, interspersed with imagery from vintage magazines, postcards, and other such sources. According to an explanation hung near the entrance to the room that holds Double Bind, Ledare invited his ex-wife on a weekend in upstate New York, intending to photograph her. She agreed, but had remarried by the scheduled vacation came around. Ledare and she took the trip, but she and her new husband took the same trip, at Ledare’s request, soon after. Both ex-husband and new husband took the photos that Ledare assembled to make his “artwork,” and the images aren’t that different.

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He Xiangyu Artist beside his work Skeleton (2010) Courtesy of Pearl Lam Gallery, Shanghai Photography: Garry Trinh

There are numerous contemporary works in which the artists’ choice of physical ‘matter’ contains within it their intended meaning. Xu Bing’s poignant ‘Where the Dust Itself Collects’ made from dust collected in the streets of Manhattan after the destruction of the twin towers falls into this category, as does Marc Quinn’s self-portrait made of 9 pints of the artist’s own frozen blood. Sydney artist Shoufay Derz used silkworms and indigo in her elegiac work ‘Depart Without Return’. And from Warhol and Wang Guangyi to the urns inscribed with the Coca Cola logo by Ai Weiwei, artists have used iconic commercial ‘brands’ as signifiers, making works intended as a critique or sometimes a celebration of western popular culture.

He Xiangyu’s ‘Cola Project’, showing at Gallery 4A in Sydney’s Chinatown, takes these elements of contemporary practice into new territory. His project does not use the iconic imagery of the brand, so representative of America in all its 20^th century wealth and power, but rather takes the product itself, its physical matter. He ‘cooks’ the cola in an industrial process, boiling enormous quantities of Coca Cola down into a black crystalline solid. This coal-like substance is piled in a heap on the floor of the gallery, smelling faintly toxic and looking dangerous. Gao Minglu, in his catalogue essay, ‘Cola Project as Anthropology’, comments on the paradox of this transformation of a product of consumer desire into something disgusting and disturbing: a reminder that the fast pace of urbanisation and technological change may come at the cost of our consumption and destruction of nature. The artist admits that he himself drinks cola every day, and has grown up knowing nothing other than the globalised, materialist, fast paced ‘new China’. He represents the ‘consumption culture’ which now pervades almost every corner of the globe in both a physical and a metaphysical manner.

Installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art Courtesy of the artist and White Space Beijing Photography: Zan Wimberley

Other elements of the installation support this interpretation. Lying in a museum style vitrine, faintly glowing in the darkened space, is a jade skeleton. This very beautiful object has been partially corroded and destroyed by being boiled in Coca Cola.  What at first appear to be traditional ink paintings of misty mountainous landscapes on the walls of the gallery have actually been painted with ink made with Coca Cola: representations of China’s ancient culture literally painted with the global brand. In another glass case lie the tools, discarded gloves and protective clothing used by the artist and his assistants in the process, all covered with a viscous tar-like coating. Photographs of the industrial ‘cooking down’ process are reminiscent of Cultural Revolution images of heroic workers engaged in steel production – but they are actually engaged in this somewhat pointless act.

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The Pace Gallery and Pace/MacGill Gallery debut Paul Graham: The Present with a striking selection of sixteen diptychs and two triptychs. This series concludes a trilogy with the series a shimmer of possibility (2004–2006) and American Night (1998–2002), both of which showed in numerous institutions and galleries internationally. Alongside the exhibition of The Present, Graham has published a 114-page monograph with London-based MACK, which will present the series in its entirety.

Paul Graham, 53rd Street & 6th Avenue, 6th May 2011, 2.41.26 pm (2011), pigment print mounted on Dibond, 56" x 74 1/4" (diptych), © Paul Graham 2012

Filling the spacious Chelsea Pace Gallery, Paul Graham: The Present displays vignettes that reflect quotidian ritual in New York City. Graham’s large-scale photographs hang at street level and mimic his theme of pedestrian rhythm. Smaller photographs, likewise in an array of diptychs and triptychs, are hung at eye level and also play a role in highlighting the voyeuristic perspective of the viewer, who is both the artist and the gallery audience. Rather than capturing a sea-like crowd of public, each photograph presents a focal character or characters that stands out from the monotony of the masses. Graham contextualizes each vignette by the specific location in which he becomes the ultimate voyeur.  By virtue of his photographs – as they are hung in solitary groupings rather than a vast assembly – Graham elucidates the manner in which a narrative is subject to alteration by the subtlest instances of movement, whether it is light or physical movement of a subject. An anonymous passerby becomes the subject of the frame only then to be replaced by his doppelganger in what seems to be the blink of an eye, for instance in works such as 8^th Avenue & 42^nd Street, 17^th August 2010, 11.23.03 am (2010).

Paul Graham, 8th Ave & 42nd Street, 17th August 2010, 11.23.03 am (2010), pigment print mounted on Dibond, 28" x 37 1/2" (diptych), © Paul Graham 2012

As Shakespeare astutely put it: “all the world’s a stage […]” and Graham’s photographs testify to this very notion. Both the manner of characterizing the unknown and the capturing of natural light lend to an exquisitely theatrical cadre. As similar to the old masters of photography like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, Graham emphasizes the lyrical nature of light just as much as he accentuates his subjects, as seen in works such as Fulton Street, 11^th November 2009, 11.29.10 am (2009) and E53^rd Street, 12^th April 2010, 9.45.55 am (2010). Due to light, the theatrical aspect of Graham’s photographs serves as a mechanism for spotlighting not only his characters within the frame but also the interplay of details that structure the composition.

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A solo exhibition of works by Anna Barriball (1972, Plymouth) from the past decade is on show at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh till 9 April 2012. The exhibition presents selected works  developed from a practice centered on repeated engagements with and between the languages of drawing and sculpture.

Anna Barriball, installation view, The Fruitmarket Gallery, 2012; Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London; Photo: Ruth Clark. Left to right: Copper pipes, 2011; Mirror Window Wall I, II, III, IV, 2008; Untitled, 2008

Copper pipes is an example of the way that Barriball uses materials that she works with on paper, from paint, ink and pencil, to create drawings or paintings that embody a three-dimensional quality from the texture or sheen, amplified by its mode of display. Sheets of paper that are rolled and inclined against the wall appear as copper pipes, with a density and lustre anchored by the coats of copper-tinted acrylic paint. In Mirror Window Wall I, II, III, IV, strongly marked paper rubbings of a wall result in a series of drawings that are titled in recognition of its framing – installed behind glass that one can peer through as a window into a wall, or as a reflective mirror. The works speak to a preoccupation not only with acquiring transfers to capture the imprints and textures of surfaces, but also a deep interest in the way that surfaces are inhibiting and constrain, yet can be imbued to evoke an expansion of space beyond the architectural confines of interior and exterior.

Anna Barriball, Draw (fireplace), 2005; DVD Video projection; edition of three; Duration 10 min. 30 sec.; Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

From walls to doors and fireplaces, these surfaces that wrap around or border zones of habitation are treated as animate. Draw (fireplace) is a video installation in a darkened end of a room, of a sheet of tracing paper that is placed over the fireplace. From gentle movements of the tracing paper to intervals when it is adhered against the grate, the chimney as a passage through which air flows becomes personified as a person drawing in breath.

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I once thought that I could summon the ambient act of reading on the Internet as part of a singular project of prognostication: using those noisy images (stock photographs, Google image-searches, self-portraits uploaded to social networks) and polyvocal chatter as the agents and conduit of a new kind of meaning-making within language. Cassandra the soothsayer, her ear turned to the imaginary cracklings of Alexander Graham Bell’s phonautograph[1]—and why not? Cassandra is long dead and unreal herself, and now, many epochs after her myth rose to prominence, the metaphorical snakes are no longer licking anyone’s ears clean.

But truth be told, or soothsaid: the ambient isn’t a space that exists in the realm of the falsely prophetic or within other concurrent delays with real time (nostalgia, the future imperfect and conditional tenses). Instead, conveniently in line with its etymological origins (ambient, adj. “turning round, resolving”), the ambient works quite literally with units of time as we’ve come to experience them in the twenty-first century—minutes, seconds, the fraction of a fraction-of-a-moment it takes to follow a plot line on the flickering screen: we’re barely able to enunciate the word “Drake” before we’ve seen Twitter feed Drizzy saturated with the banal and disembodied static of the everyday (what Ben Lerner appropriates from John Ashbery in Leaving the Atocha Station as “life’s white machine”):

Screengrab of Aubrey Drake Graham's (aka Drake's) Twitter feed, March 26, 2012.

For writer Tan Lin, boredom is the threshold of the ambient, the place where a work is “born out of our mutual dis-interest”[2] and where “anyone who has ever read a painting will tell you [like Ed Ruscha], paintings, like poems, are most beautiful [and least egotistical] . . . at the exact moment in which they are forgotten, like disco.”[3]

Ed Ruscha, "Pay Nothing Until April," 2003, acrylic on canvas, 1527 x 1525 x 40 mm. Collection of the Tate, Britain .

For the critic and translator Jennifer Scappettone, in her essay on Tan Lin’s ambient poetics, “Versus Seamlessness,”[4] the turn to late capitalism’s panache for the stupefied landscape supersedes what Rem Koolhaas terms Junkspace and what other theorists, designers and cultural critics—from Venturi, Scott Brown to Frederic Jameson to Ernest Mandel—have mined in the hopes of locating modernism’s flawed moment alongside the disjointed landscape remaindered by modernization. What’s missing here? We’ve left Las Vegas and Learned from It—it’s not that kind of spectacle. In fact, it’s not spectacle at all. We’re so saturated by the multiplicities and disjointments of this remaindered landscape in which we dwell—where James Cameron plummets in a yellow submarine to document “IMAGES UNEXPERIENCED” while we read reviews of Mad Men episodes, interchanging accordion-playing Joan with Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as a Lute Player—that we can’t pause to separate a reading on slow death and self-sovereignty from a back-issue of Critical Inquiry from the animated GIF of a deceased professional wrestler on our screen. Or can we? Would we want to?

L: Screengrab of Christina Hendricks as Joan Holloway in the Mad Men episode "My Old Kentucky Home," 2009. R: Artemisia Gentileschi, "Self-Portrait as Lute Player," 1615-17, oil on canvas, 30 x 28. Collection of the Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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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.

Your counselor, hard at work.

What is the proper payment scheme for commissioned art? Also, what is the proper way to formalize the deal on payment? Finally what’s the allowable time table for the artist to finish the art? Is it proper to follow up? I had a great deal from my favorite artist last February, after he agreed to make a piece for me at a price that I can afford. We agreed to meet up and discuss the subject, but now he’s not contacting me.

Have I ever told you how much I love written contracts? No? Well, let’s sit down and talk about it now.

Here are two things I believe: 1.) a good contract protects both parties equally; 2.) the written contract is your friend. From the limited information in your query, it’s hard for me to know if you’ve already given this artist money or not, but it sounds like maybe you have. If that’s the case, and you can’t get a hold of this person over email or Facebook or telephone, it seems like you have two options: walk away or sue to get your money back. But since I’m not a lawyer, I’m going to go back to my real job of answering your more direct questions so that you can avoid disappointment in the future. So, from the top:

John Callcott Horsley, The Banker’s Private Room Negotiating a Loan, 1870 (image: www.oceansbridge.com/paintings/artists)

What is the proper payment scheme for commissioned art? The proper payment scheme is the one that you and the artist decide on together. Some artists need the money to buy supplies, others want payment on delivery just like a regular sale. Still others will prefer a deposit and payments along the way. It depends on your budget, the artist’s fiscal needs, and the comfort levels of both parties.

What is the proper way to formalize the deal on payment? What’s the allowable time table for the artist to finish the art? Both parties sign a written contract that states the preferences decided on above, with an additional timeline scheduling payments and delivery dates.

Is it proper to follow up? Did you give this person money? Then hell, yes, it’s proper to follow up! The contract that you wrote will have email addresses, physical addresses, and telephone numbers on it, so following up will be easy. Of course, you’ll want to be diplomatic about any lapses (that is to say, “Just checking in…” instead of “Where’s my damn painting?”—you never know when someone may have tripped over the cat and sprained a wrist), but in the end you’ll have a contract to use as a negotiating tool if things go awry.

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