Over the course of its three-day installation in July 2011, Richard Serra’s “Sequence,” on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, both reveals itself and conceals the expansive space it inhabits. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is engaged in a dangerous experiment, and it is not the levitation of a twenty-ton piece of Richard Serra’s steel sculpture, Sequence, 2006, thirty feet into the air. Nor is it the gyration of a 200-foot tall crane lifting the first of twelve panels—each almost thirteen-feet high and between thirty- and forty-feet long—from a flatbed trailer onto a concrete slab three-quarters the size of a baseball diamond. The ironworkers from the Hauppauge, New York, rigging company, Budco Enterprises, have handled all of Serra’s North American installations for the past 20 years. The dangerous experiment is, instead, the transplantation of the sixty-five by forty-foot labyrinthine sculpture into a site that the artist did not specify when he first created the piece.

Two 20-ton plates from Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, swing into place. Video: Rob Marks, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Serra is famous for his site-specific sculptures. Of Tilted Arc, 1981, the 200-foot long grandparent to arced works like Sequence, Serra proclaimed, during a U.S. General Services Administration hearing to determine the disposition of the piece, “To remove the work is to destroy the work.” Commissioned and approved by the Carter administration, and constructed in lower Manhattan’s Federal Plaza, Tilted Arc was eventually decommissioned, forsworn, and bundled into storage by the Reagan administration. We can never know whether the Tilted Arc controversy—the first salvo of the 1980s culture wars—would have subsided had the surrounding political context not pre-empted the community’s process of coming to know the sculpture. Many of Serra’s public works, however, are now valued by the communities that first rejected them.

Other Serra pieces, including Clara-Clara, 1983, and Torqued Spiral (Closed Open Closed Open Closed), 2003, have, with Serra’s participation, found second homes. Sequence, however, may evolve into the most itinerant of Serra’s behemoths. Conceived for a gallery at the New York Museum of Modern Art and installed there in 2007 for Serrra’s 40-year retrospective, the sculpture traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008. This year, Sequence, now owned by the Fisher Art Foundation, traveled from LACMA to the Cantor Arts Center, where it is currently on loan from the foundation and where it will reside until in 2016. Then it will move, perhaps finally, 35 miles northwest to a new wing of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Left: Trailer as it prepares to move a plate from storage lot to installation site. Riggers remove the chains holding a plate to its trailer. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Can Sequence, removed from its place of origin, sustain its prodigious capacity to shape space and lead us to the conscious and embodied experience of what we often take for granted? Will it still unmoor space and time from the feet and inches, seconds and minutes that define them in everyday life and provoke the reorientation of thinking and the individual psychological experience that Serra seeks for participants who engage the sculpture? In 2007, Serra told PBS’s Charlie Rose, “I think these pieces really need the definition of architecture,” referring to Sequence and its two gallery siblings. “They need a flat floor. They need a certain contained volume. I think these pieces might be able to be in a courtyard, but if you put these pieces outside, say in a big field, they’re going to get lost.”

Left: Master Rigger Joe Vilardi (center, in black shirt), and riggers John Barbieri, Joe Berlese, and Bill Maroney, survey the concrete slab. Right: Master Rigger Joe Vilardi (right) and rigger John Barbieri (left) plot reference points that will guide the installation of Richard Serra’s “Sequence” (on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation). Photo: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

The gallery at New York MoMA, an awkward H-shaped space with a low ceiling, seemed barely able to contain the three pieces. For some, this was the exhibit’s flaw: the sculptures had no room to breathe. We are used to viewing sculpture from the outside, framed by an expanse of space. For Serra, who seeks always to confound the viewer’s desire to see the entire sculpture at once, the cramped MoMA quarters may, in fact, have been preferable. Indeed, the frustration some visitors felt may have stemmed from the sculptures’ ability to stymie the creation of a purely visual experience separate from the body’s active engagement with them. In New York, Serra had produced new space in a place where visual inspection suggested there was little to spare. Within each sculpture’s orbit, the participant’s perception of space expands and contracts, independent of the gallery’s concrete dimensions. In this context, Sequence seemed akin to a magician’s hat from which emerges far more matter than could be contained by the dimensions of the magician’s head.

How then can such a piece successfully reconform itself—and the experiences of its participants—to an exterior space 3,000 miles away? How can the activity of getting lost in what Serra describes as “a seemingly endless path between two leaning walls” about which “you cannot recollect or reconstruct a definite memory” be preserved in a courtyard where landmarks—a roof, a terrace, a tree, even a hanging cloud—continually orient the participant?

Left photos: Lost inside Richard Serra’s Sequence (on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation). Right: Parapets of the museum’s old wing peek above the sculpture. Photo: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

On Monday, July 18, the bare concrete pad seems to provide some reassurance. Two- to three-feet thick and doubly reinforced with rebar, according to Cantor Operations Manager, Steve Green, the pad should satisfy Serra’s desire for a flat floor. More than this, however, nestling the bulk of the sculpture into the cul-de-sac formed by the Cantor’s original building, its octagonal extension, and its new wing, seems to realize the “definition of architecture” Serra had specified for Sequence and its siblings. Further, Museum Director Tom Seligman said that the Cantor Center had been in close contact with Serra, and the artist approved of the site.

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#Hashtags: Viral Thoughts on Politics, Arts, and Culture

#Hashtags provides a platform for longer reconsiderations of artworks and art practices outside of the review format and in new contexts.  Please send queries and/or ideas for future to hashtags@dailyserving.com.

Ryan McGinley, "Tom (Golden Tunnel)," 2010, C-Print, 72 x 110 inches. Courtesy Team Gallery.

Ten years ago today, on September 11, 2001, at 5:46 am Pacific Standard Time, I was asleep in the semi-darkness of an Oregon dawn.  I was still asleep at 6:03 am.  By 6:37 am, however, I had been jolted awake by the ringing sound of a telephone in another room of the house, and then by the sound of footsteps coming towards my door, and—eventually—by the information that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.  For better or worse, I missed the initial confusion, the questions about irregular flight patterns and problems with air traffic control.  By the time I got to the television set, Bush had held his moment of silence, there were reports of a fire at the Pentagon, and it was clear that this was a planned attack.

I watched as President George W. Bush sent our troops into Afghanistan, eventually dragging the rest of the world—in the form of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force —behind him.  In March of 2003, I finally saw the negative space punched out of the Manhattan skyline with my own eyes.  Coincidentally, it was the same week that Bush dropped thinly veiled threats via his press secretary that if the United Nations did not take action against Iraq, other “international bodies” would.  And we did, despite the fact that the motives given were dubious and lacked hard evidence.

I was twenty-five in 2001.  I was not a child, or a teenager whose nightmare became the bogeyman in the form of Osama bin Laden.  My nightmare, post-9/11, has been many the frequent and many betrayals of the citizens of the United States by its government at the levels of accountability and policy.  Watching President Barack Obama announce the death of Osama bin Laden, I felt no relief.  The War in Afghanistan is listed as ongoing (2001-present).  Our engagement with Iraq is ongoing.

It has been a decade, long enough to have begun to talk about post-9/11 trends in art and literature, long enough for those artists and writers whose practices weren’t quite set on September 11, 2011, to have grown up and to have incorporated their own personal nightmares into their production.  Earlier this summer, OHWOW Gallery in Los Angeles staged “Post-9/11,”  with work by New-York-based-artists Ryan McGinley and his circle.  The keystone piece, McGinley’s Tom (Golden Tunnel), 2010, features a naked man walking toward a golden light at the end of a stone or concrete tunnel with his hand guarding his eyes.  The light washes everything in the photo.

The exhibition title itself was merely meant to be provocative, as well as to encapsulate McGinley and his milieu.  This was not a grand curatorial retrospective of Post-9/11 art.  But I have gone back to McGinley’s photo multiple times, made a little nauseous by the combination of the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel metaphor, McGinley’s capital-R Romanticism, and the double-entendre of the show title.  Are we post-9/11?  Have we survived and come through to the other side?  If we have, we are irrevocably changed.  The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.

For this edition of Fan Mail, Denver based CO-LAB has been selected from a group of worthy submissions. If you would like to be considered, please submit to info@dailyserving.com a link to your website with ‘Fan Mail’ in the subject line. Two artists are featured each month—the next one could be you!

CO-LAB (Chris Coleman & Laleh Mehran). Installation view of "W3FI" at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Interactive Installation.

I remember arriving at college as a bright-eyed freshman and recognizing familiar faces within moments. It was not because I went to a small school or because I had met these classmates at orientation events in my hometown, but rather that I had done my due diligence on Facebook. Today, not a week goes by that I don’t find myself googling unfamiliar names or wishing a friend Happy Birthday by e-card – or dare I admit it, text – rather than by phone or hallmark card. And yet none of this feels strange.

It is this unprecedented interconnectedness fostered by the digital world that CO-LAB founders Laleh Mehran and Chris Coleman take as a point of departure for their most recent project entitled W3FI. An unmistakable play on words, W3FI is a combination of WiFi, the word “we” and the slang use of the number 3 in place of the letter “e” as a nod to the digital parts of our lives. The W3FI project encourages people to consider their online identities – referred to as S3LF – and how we can use technology to interact with one another in positive ways. The artists explain, “[t]he W3FI project is much more than an awareness campaign, it is a movement in social activism to ask a new set of questions for each of us every time we click, text, or share a photo.”

In its manifestation at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, W3FI is an interactive installation in every sense of the word. The project’s central tenants are presented on the gallery walls as a series of moving texts and symbols alongside dynamic statistics about national and international use of the internet, cell phones and social networks. Broad statistics – usually difficult to grasp in real terms – are made more tangible through their juxtaposition with data that relate directly to the Boulder area. A topographic map of the region is overlaid by animated visualizations of internet use and signal data. Live tweets from local residents utilizing the words “I” or “we” punctuate the gallery walls as well. Museum visitors can become a part of the W3FI network by having images of their faces taken and integrated into an ever-growing forest of interconnected trees projected along the gallery walls. While many museum galleries offer limited seating – encouraging visitors to rapidly proceed through the galleries – seats are deliberately interspersed throughout the W3FI project space in order to facilitate discussion, learning, reading and quiet contemplation.

CO-LAB (Chris Coleman & Laleh Mehran). Installation view of "W3FI" at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Interactive Installation.

CO-LAB does not merely demonstrate a philosophy and data with W3FI. They bring this concept to bear by relying on Open Source software and hardware in designing the installation. Open Source encourages the sharing of knowledge and work by having contributors make all the files they have developed available online for others to copy, supplement and improve. Generating the terrain of Boulder for the map, controlling the glowing seats and the forest of faces on the “W3FI tree” were all made possible through various Open Source programs and hardware.

While the project unfortunately closes tomorrow, never fear – W3FI will live beyond this singular venue. CO-LAB’s goal is to continue promoting the W3FI presence in both real and digital space; online it will be represented by websites, pages and social networking media. And in the “real world,” Mehran and Coleman will continue to organize traveling exhibitions.

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

Judy Chicago, "Car Hood," Sprayed acrylic lacquer on Corvair car hood. 42 15/16 x 49 3/16 x 4 5/16 in. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © Judy Chicago. Photo: Donald Woodman

Pacific Standard Time, a nearly year-long paean to SoCal art history, has barely begun and, already, I’m experiencing PST fatigue. Funded by the Getty Institute and the result of at least a decade’s worth of scholarship by the Getty researchers and others, PST will include 60 or so exhibitions and more artists than you can count, all of whom were working between 1945-1980. Over 60 institutions are “partnering” with the Getty, which means SoCal galleries and museums will be ablaze in the glory of their own history for much of the foreseeable future. Shows have titles like Greetings from L.A.: Artists and Publics 1950–1980 or Best Kept Secret: UC Irvine and the Development of Contemporary Art, 1964-1971, mouthfuls that would be at home on textbook covers. The draw of the PST initiative is, of course, that some of the work on display will have barely been seen since it was made, and uncovering overlooked gems makes a canonized period of L.A. history feel open and alive again. However, even this draw exacerbates the fatigue. Obscure, surprising gems from the 1950, ‘60s or ‘70s will undoubtedly send you reeling back through history; you’ll want to learn more about the work’s making and reconsider its makers. And how will you ever get through 60-plus exhibitions that way?

One particular work that’s not obscure per se – it’s been reproduced in biographies and other SoCal histories –sent me back through archives and biographies. It’s Judy Chicago’s Car Hood, made in 1964 and scheduled to be on view at the Getty Center. You wouldn’t necessarily recognize it as hers at first. It acrylic lacquer on the hood of an actual Chevy and it looks more like something Billy Al Bengston or Craig Kauffman might have come up with: minimal, flat, metal, bold. But upon closer look, the feminist matron’s characteristically bodily—yes, vaginal—imagery presents itself in the form of a red and pink curve that drips downward. It’s car culture meets mother earth, and it’s also festive, far more folksy than anything Bengston might have done during that period.

Judy Chicago, "The Dinner Party," 1979. Installation.

Chicago, who still went by “Judy Gerowitz” at that point (she was “the first of several women to adopt pseudo-geographical surnames as Feminist gestures,” quipped critic Peter Plagens), made Car Hood around the time she participated in a show of hard-edge abstraction at L.A.’s Rolf Nelson gallery. Earlier the same year, she had enrolled in auto-body school. According to biographer Gail Levin, who also notes the car-painting instructor drove a lavender and candy-apple colored convertible, Chicago was the only women out of 250 students. She learned the craft, though, and after 8 weeks she could manipulate lacquer and spray paint on metal, which meant she too could achieve that “finish fetish” aesthetic the boys in SoCal were becoming known for. Her dabble into this traditionally male world would, seemingly came to an abrupt end when she moved to Fresno in 1970 to start the first Feminist Art Program, dropping all the masculine pretenses she’d adopted to get ahead in the ‘60s art world. After spearheading a number of other feminist ventures — most notably Womanhouse, the month long women-only, live-in  performance piece, and the Woman’s Building, an abandoned art school in downtown L.A. turned into space for women artists — she would begin The Dinner Party, the work for which she’s still most famous.

The team of assistants behind Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party"

Never before had I considered the slick, overly perfect glazed plates from The Dinner Party an offshoot of car culture. That they might be makes them even more compelling. A massive installation comprised of a triangular dinner table set for an entourage of female ground-breakers all downplayed by history’s canon, The Dinner Party has an explicit theatricality. Each plate is clearly inspired by female anatomy, and this can be overwhelming, even hard-hitting. But see it in light of the unapologetic kitsch of California custom cars and the absurd obsessiveness of the fetish finish aesthetic, and suddenly Chicago’s feminist opus becomes sunnier, a masterful mash-up that’s formal flair should celebrated as much as its message. Screw the institution; women can have fun too, it suggests. After all, the piece is supposed to be a party.

Today’s article is brought to us from our friends at Flavorwire, where Marina Galperina discusses California-based photographer Mike Brodie and his images of youth on the rails of America.

At eighteen, self-taught photographer Mike Brodie rode the rails of America, shooting fellow box car hoppers and traveling youths with a Polaroid SX-70. Nicknamed “The Polaroid Kidd,” over the course of three years, the accidental photojournalist captured a segment of American population that lives on the fringes of society whose only necessary comforts are a bonfire, a knife to defend against vermin, and no homestead anchors, save for the occasional communal squat. Not just an artifact of a particular kind of freedom, it’s a document of human bonds, movement itself, and the places you go when you let go.

“Photography has made me what I am. It pulls me in all directions. It gives and takes friends, and pushes me to move miles and miles,” the photographer explains. “My desire to photograph these people in the beginning is what led me to develop such great relationships with them; some being relationships that will last clear on ’til the day I die. I’m really lucky ’cause I never used to be this social.” Get voyeuristic with our slide show of our favorite Polaroid Kidd shots.

Chris Bloor, :Hypercolon : invitation,2011. Courtesy of gallery.

Nathaniel Mellors and Chris Bloor’s current show :Hypercolon : at SMART Project Space in Amsterdam, is a labyrinth of humorous narratives with a penchant for satire and the grotesque. Mellors and Bloor cleverly incorporate the SMART project Space’s historical function as a morgue, as a starting point to create a narrative framework that pushes and manipulates the relationship between artwork and audience. Each exhibition space is mapped to a specific body part from the right eye down to the colon. The brain being a key element to the exhibition, where it features the new film commission Ourhouse Episode 3 ‘The Cure of Folly’ written and directed by Mellors and co-produced by SMART project space.

Nathaniel Mellors, Still from Ourhouse Episode 3 ‘The Cure of Folly’ (2011), courtesy of artist and gallery.

For this viewer the most alluring draw of : Hypercolon : is the dialogue between the many artists,

A substantial portion of the exhibition is devoted to the diverse and dynamic exchange that Mellors shares with artistic contemporaries such as Vito Acconci, Brian Catling, Chris Bloor, Mick Peter and Erkka Nissinen, as well as with younger generation of artists including Tala Madani, Linda Quinlan and Timmy Van Zoelen – all of whom, like Mellors, developed deliberately coarse styles and make liberal use of satire and caricatural line.

Entering the exhibition through the right eye, you are greeted with the video work Face-Off (1972), by Vito Acconci where he divulges and then censors his self-revelations. Acconci looms over the audience as they wander around a monochrome and minimal space filled with a fascinating collection of surrealist inspired photographs from the Harry Price Archive. Further into the exhibitions maze, another (sound) work by Acconci is conveniently located in the toilet or genitals/ear, which comes as a welcome surprise when passing from one body part to another.

Chris Bloor, Failures of the Avant Garde, image courtesy of the artist and gallery.

The left ear exhibition space acts in opposition to the right ear in its consideration of color, imagination and technology. Folk art inspired paintings and drawings by British artists Bob Parks, Brian Catling, Chris Bloor and Mick Peter hang on the walls next to popular cultural works such as Robert Abel’s show reel of adverts from the 1970’s and the demented comic strip, the Brain Bats of Venus by Basil Wolverton. Although disparate in origin, the works in the left ear sits at ease with one another, all equally contributing to the seductive and unconventional orientation of the exhibition.

Linda Quinlan, Mroouctkh, still image from video, courtesy of artist and gallery.

The audience then guides their way through the spaces of the Mouth, Foot, and Stomach, finally ending up in the Colon with video and sound works by Nathaniel Mellors and Timmy van Zoelen. Both artists use Pier Pailo Pasolini’s film Salo as a reference point, yet create greatly contrasting responses. Mellors continues to use his hyper grotesque aesthetic for the video work Giantbum, where as van Zoelen creates the sublime and hypnotic video, Furious Suns. Using lens flare to identify sunlit moments throughout the film, van Zoelen removes pasolini’s original material leaving glistening flares of light that draw the viewer in, and moves the audience out of the sunless dark intestine of the exhibition.

Timmy van Zoelen, Furious Suns, still image from video, courtesy of artist and gallery.

Mellor’s and Bloor have cleverly constructed a remarkably dense exhibition where the shifting relationship between space and artwork takes the audience on an imaginative excursion through the absurd and peculiar.

: Hypercolon : was conceived by Nathaniel Mellors and Chris Bloor and features Robert Abel, Vito Acconci, Chris Bloor, Paul Lafolley, Pieter van der Heyden, Tala Madani, Nathaniel Mellors, Erkka Nissinen, Bob Parks, Mick Peter, Linda Quinlan, Basil Wolverton, Timmy van Zoelen, works from the Harry Price collection. Throughout the course of the exhibition : Hypercolon : Mellors programmes a series of events and screenings and presents a new performance commission by Brian Catling for Museum Night (5 November). : Hypercolon : will be on view from  3 September until 13 November 2011.

Chris E. Vargas, Video still from Liberaceón, 2011. 16 minutes, three channel video installation looped color (DV).

History, like most things, is subjective. What is culled from individual accounts is accepted as fact and eventually translates into some kind of truth. But truth can be different at any moment—past, present, and future. The events in London were either riots or long overdue, civil unrest.  Depending on whom you ask, in 2005 the people of New Orleans were either looting or just surviving. This parsing of history renders “truth” and “fact” malleable, constituent materials for narrative and artistic practice. In his video work Liberaceón (2011), Bay Area artist Chris E. Vargas makes histories, meshing the life of the pianist Liberace, late-80s direct actions to end the AIDS crisis, and a nonapologetic use of green screening.

Vargas is best known for his collaborative, narrative videos and films.  In Falling in Love…with Chris and Greg (2008–ongoing), we watch the dark satire of Vargas and his artistic/romantic partner Greg Younmans’s relationship.  Through the structural lens of traditional sitcom, the couple questions notions of monogamy, marriage, and gender, while consistently establishing their own, not always hyper-radical or “appropriate,” notions of companionship.

Not unlike Falling in Love, in Liberaceón, Vargas inserts radical, queer rhetoric into the arguably apolitical, high zest that was Liberace. Liberaceón includes footage of the showman’s TV specials, Liberace’s nightly news obituary, and various ActUp protests beside Vargas’s molty wigs, camp, and classical, non-method forms of acting. True to Liberace’s mid-1980s opulence and Vegas styling, the video begins with Vargas-as-Liberace’s grand entrance, which includes a balloon ride over “the Strip,” a reclaimed parking lot with a sequined American flag and a Rolls Royce. The film quickly cuts to Liberace and lover Cary James’s visit to a doctor (Younmans), who has an unfortunate bedside manner and gives a dreadful—but at the time, not uncommon—diagnosis.

Inspired to make James feel better, Liberace takes to preparing some chicken soup (again, epic use of chroma key by Vargas). While watching the news in his decadent kitchen, Liberace becomes frustrated by the many AIDS-related deaths, President Regan’s continued silence and the US Congress’s conservative funding of AIDS research. The performer decides to take direct action by constructing a gift with his “special ingredient…to scare ole Ronnie.” What follows is the most compelling and sensual use of a double boiler, all in an attempt to make a Liberace-laced, bloodied chocolate piano.

Chris E. Vargas, video still from Liberaceón, 2011. 16 minutes, three channel video installation looped color (DV).

The glittering stone on this work’s bejeweled finger is the deathbed scene between Liberace and James. Vargas’s slow collapse, full of gasping and eye-flickering, is at once hilarious and disquieting. One knows that Liberace’s many requests not to be memorialized with sap, nor to reduce his or others’ experiences to melodrama, but to honor the experience of any person with AIDS, including himself, have gone largely unanswered. Yet, as the work closes with Liberace’s rendition of “I’ll Be Seeing You” over the tense excitement of ActUp action footage—which includes his own disrupted, TV news obituary—one understands that these histories are strangely enmeshed, joined at the site of their presumed queerness or temporality by Vargas, where they transform one another.  In Vargas’ telling, the closet Liberace comes out of is that of radical queerness. Although he calls himself “just an old queen,” Liberace’s anger speaks to the continued complexity of our histories and picturing of self.

Liberaceón (2011) was on exhibition most recently in San Francisco as part of ProArts Gallery’s Bay Area Currents 2011, curated by Julio César Morales. You can also find Vargas’s work at www.chrisevargas.com.