The question of work becomes complex when one asks who is doing it, and for whom. The precarious labor of domestic chores gone unfairly compensated, the frequently banal performance of activism and demonstration, sex work—these labors remain concerns in our current social and economic spheres, and reflect a problematic, historical trajectory that often fails to incorporate and value unseen, marginalized work and workers.[1] In Pictures of Women Working, on view at the project space Skibum MacArthur in Los Angeles, the artist and writer Carmen Winant presents collages that use photographs and other documents of women during the heyday of second-wave feminism—which was also the heyday of arts activism. Pictures of Women Working questions the limits of representation through Winant’s mediated imagery and her personal vantage point as a “straight white American woman.”[2] As intersectionality—the acknowledgment of how multiple strains of discrimination and power simultaneously overlap—becomes a term frequently touted, how does the appearance of contemporary feminism echo or differ from the images Winant strings together?

Carmen Winant. Pictures of Women Working, 2016; installation view. Courtesy of Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles. Photo: Brica Wilcox.

One continuous collage panel runs along the wall of the main exhibition hall at eye level, and another strip is installed in the smaller gallery entrance, their paper layers protected and secured by Plexiglas. Photographs of picketers, lesbian erotica, head shots of famous artists (Agnes Martin is spotted), and feminist celebrities (a glamorous Gloria Steinem is shown famously perching on a chair in the offices of Ms. magazine) are among the images of women taken from books, periodicals, editorial spreads from bygone weeklies, and advertisements of a certain era, as the narrative of second-wave feminism was being palatably congealed for public consumption. A girls’ football league. A woman nursing her child. A secretary at her keyboard. Dancers. Vietnam War protesters. Nuns entering a church. The women are engaged in all types of activities—the titular “work.” These archival cutouts are layered over recent newspaper clippings from the last few months, including quite a few episodes from the intensely scrutinized 2016 U.S. election cycle in which the first woman ever nominated to be president faces off against a raging misogynist.

Read More »

What does it mean to transcribe a work from one medium to another? Is the result a kind of translation, a form of documentation, a new piece of art, or all three? In a fascinating range of media—painting, video, found objects, weaving, and sound—Manila-based artist Gerardo Tan investigates these questions through three different projects presented in his solo exhibition Hablon Redux and Other Transcriptions at Random Parts.

Gerardo Tan. Turntable Paintings, 2016; vinyl, acrylic; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Random Parts. Photo: Maria Porges.

The idea of Tan’s work as transcription is elucidated by art historian Lisa Ito in her essay “Rewriting Materiality” that accompanies the exhibition. Sadly, Ito’s solemn text fails to communicate the irresistible low-tech madcap charm that pervades the artist’s objects and ideas, such as his Turntable Paintings. To make them, Tan puts an LP record (from the labels, they are clearly thrift store finds) on a modest record player, setting its needle into the disc’s groove to play. A paintbrush attached to the playing arm lightly touches the black surface, dragging through the drips and narrow pools of liquid acrylic that the artist then squeezes onto the moving record, in various vivid hues. Astonishingly, as the needle passes through these gaudy wet circles of pink or blue, the music continues—though it is, as Tan admits, the last time that the record will be playable. The wall of paint-altered records displayed in the gallery suggests both a new version of their lost sounds and a MacGyver-esque reconfiguration of the ways that so-called spin art has been made intermittently since the 1960s.

Read More »

#museums #race #representation #institutional critique

The recent controversy over Kelley Walker’s exhibition Direct Drive at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and the departure of that exhibition’s curator, Jeffrey Uslip, was another reminder that museums are not built and programmed for all audiences alike. As this column has taken up questions of race in the museum on numerous occasions (and class in the museum, and gender in the museum), a comment on the St. Louis situation seems warranted. Public protests were mounted after audiences discovered that Walker’s artwork consisted of enlarged, appropriated photos of African Americans, smeared with toothpaste. Against the backdrop of outcries precipitated by the killing of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson, the decision to feature a White, New York–based artist whose work takes up race in a manner that is provocative but not analytical seems almost comically ham-fisted. Still, both Uslip and CAM’s director, Lisa Melandri, have steadfastly defended the artist and the exhibition despite what appears to be a failure on the artist’s part to articulate any coherent justification or motivation for his work. Some observers are scratching their heads, wondering how this public-relations train-wreck could have been avoided. Others contend that racially insensitive missteps such as these are inevitable when the leadership of art museums across the country remains largely a hermetically sealed echo chamber of apologetic, but unshakeable, whiteness.

Hammer Projects: Simone Leigh, September 17, 2016–January 8, 2017; installation view. Courtesy of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Forrest.

Simone Leigh’s installation in the Hammer Museum’s Hammer Projects series proposes an alternative to the typically White, upper-middle-class hegemony of the contemporary art gallery or museum. The central structure within her exhibition, Cupboard IV (2016) is a round hut made of raffia and stoneware that references the forms and materials of sub-Saharan architectures built predominantly by women. The hut is an early indicator that Leigh’s exhibition is shifting our notions of the “default” contemporary art viewer. Within the structure, a video plays of independent curator and choreographer Rashida Bumbray, dressed to the nines in a floor-length gold lamé gown, dancing furiously with bells around her ankles. The elegance, power, and grace of her body contrast with a mounting sense of exhaustion and futility as the performance goes on.

Read More »

From our friends at Guernica, today we bring you A Changeless Place: Jill J. Tan interviews Jave Yoshimoto. Tan speaks with Yoshimoto, a trained art therapist and practicing artist, about his intricate and brightly rendered gouache depictions of tragedy and disaster. Yoshimoto says, “The news cycle moves so quickly; even if we read about tragedy today, we may forget about it tomorrow. I hope my work is a reminder to pay attention.” This article was originally published June 15, 2016.

Jave Yoshimoto. Numinous Lethologica, 2015; gouache on paper; 30 x 44 in.

Man, animal, and the elements: None are spared in artist Jave Yoshimoto’s scenes of technicolor wreckage. Outsized wildlife hint at a surreal eschatology, but a second look confirms that this is indubitably the present we inhabit, and, as disasters proliferate, increasingly our future. In the piece Evanescent Encounter, a man cleans pools of oil from the shore, under a bright red sky, as Godzilla watches haplessly from the water. An oil rig aflame in the ocean emits plumes of smoke that envelop a textual call and response: “Where would you possibly go? I am seeking a changeless place.” But no such place exists in Yoshimoto’s paper tableaux.

Yoshimoto captures cities in the aftermath of natural and manmade disasters using scale and a flat graphic style, which he characterizes as easily digestible, the better to rouse viewers to action. He bridles against a flavor-of-the-moment approach to catastrophe and disaster relief, and seeks to create an awareness of the destruction that persists in locales ranging from Fukushima to New Orleans. These are works—some small, and others monumental, as in the thirty-foot painting that captures Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami—of struggle and also of survival. Yoshimoto, a trained art therapist, means to create links of empathy—between audiences and the subjects of his pieces, and between the world and himself.

Read the full article here.

As the artist’s first comprehensive retrospective moves from coast to coast, we’ve got Bruce Conner on our minds. Bruce Conner: It’s All True opened first at the Museum of Modern Art (and closed in early October) and now travels back to Conner’s old stomping grounds in the Bay Area to open on October 29 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Ashley Stull Meyers’ 2014 review of Conner’s work at the Ulrich Museum of Art provides an excellent framing of his practice, whether you’ve recently discovered the artist or have admired his work for years. This article was originally published on October 7, 2014.

Bruce Conner. Bombhead, 2002; pigmented inkjet print on paper; 32 x 25 in. Courtesy of Magnolia Editions, Oakland, CA. © 2014 Conner Family Trust, San Francisco/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Sympathetic magic—the use of a surrogate object to magically influence the person or circumstance it represents—has long been one of my favorite subjects. The Ulrich Museum of Art’s current exhibition, Bruce Conner: Somebody Else’s Prints, is an impressive collection of prints, etchings, and lithographs, a number of which Conner attributed to pseudonyms. The show inventively chronicles the artist’s use of surrogate figures for a variety of political and conceptual gains. In the exhibition are works produced during his brief time as a student at Wichita State University[1], and also during his initial years in the Bay Area at Magnolia Editions, Kaiser Graphics, and Collectors Press. The result is a mix of fine art and commercially printed work that cheekily micromanages art-historical expectation.

Read More »

True to its name, the BRAID/WORK series by Sarah Beth Woods operates within layers of social and material meaning, revealing a deconstructionist character even as it replicates the physical act of weaving. In the creation of these pieces, Woods pulls apart the concepts that make them legible. BRAID/WORK includes a 2016 performance and collaboration between Woods and the Malian-American professional hair braider, teacher, and entrepreneur Fatima Traore. The pieces that make up the BRAID/WORK project are both sculptures and the ephemera of performing femininity and Blackness.

Sarah Beth Woods. She Bun, 2016; hair weave, chain, door-knocker earrings; 13 x 4 x 9 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

The BRAID/WORK series primarily consists of hair weaves and jewelry coiffed and pinned to foam forms. In She Bun (2016), two perfect chignons seem to float on the wall, with gold “door knocker” earrings woven into the black hair, connected by a thin gold chain. She Bun is almost minimalist in its presentation; like minimalism, it redirects one’s fascination with its precision to its constituent forms. Seeing the abstracted artificial hair and jewelry, a viewer is prompted to read the work’s material—one that, for all its artificiality, distinctly conveys race and gender.

Read More »

May 1, 1931—Thousands of people gather in the forest of Vincennes in the eastern outskirts of Paris to stroll around newly built re-creations of pagodas, palaces, and huts while observing the forest’s temporary tenants: whole tribes and families brought in from the French colonies in Africa and Asia. Meanwhile in Paris, the Surrealists are at work staging a counter-exhibition and publishing “The Truth About the Colonies,” which denounces the state’s efforts to validate its crimes, while unsuccessfully urging the public not to attend the colonial exhibition.

Exhibition view with documents of the Singapore Art Archive Project, circa 1960; facsimiles, black-and-white photographs, ephemera; variable dimensions. Courtesy of Koh Nguang How. Photo: Aurélien Mole.

Here in the present, a facsimile of “The Truth About the Colonies” sets the tone for Anywhere But Here, a group exhibition at Bétonsalon Center for Art and Research in Paris, in which contemporary artists explore the ongoing effects of colonial rule in Southeast Asia. The exhibition places a strong spotlight on Cambodia, where the French Protectorate was active from 1866 though 1953, and interlaces histories of colonialism with anecdotes and personal experiences using various forms of media. The exhibition reflects upon the high stakes at play for those who are forced to, in the words of Surrealist André Breton, “leave everything.”

Read More »