Alex Da Corte. A Season in He’ll; installation view. Courtesy of Art + Practice, Los Angeles. Photo by Joshua White.

Upon entering the gallery, it is clear that the viewer is not in a conventional white cube. Da Corte has created a phantasmagorical wonderland, transforming the space through tile flooring, painted walls, and colored lights, while also incorporating olfactory elements with rose, sage, and clove-scented misters. The exhibition takes its title from Arthur Rimbaud’s 1873 prose poem A Season in Hell, which describes the young author’s drug-fueled descent into madness after the dissolution of his tempestuous affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine. Rimbaud has provided inspiration to a long line of cultural and countercultural figures, from the Surrealists to the ’70s East Village punks like Patti Smith and Richard Hell (who took his stage name from the same Rimbaud poem). Da Corte is drawn to Rimbaud’s work, not only for the way it breaks with conventional reality, but also for its frank and uncompromising descriptions of queerness.

The first object encountered in the installation is a large black cone rising up from a flat circular disc: a witch’s hat blown up to the size of absurdity, referencing both lighthearted escapist fantasy as well as the historical trauma of persecution. A large vintage photograph mounted on the wall continues this sense of ambiguity, capturing a weeping young woman being consoled by a shaggy haired figure. What at first appears as the aftermath of a tragedy is actually a wedding photo—tears of joy rather than tears of pain. A neon sign spelling out “night” with twinkling stars hangs on the wall—a direct, if somewhat cryptic, quotation from Demons 2, where an identical version oddly graces the protagonists’ apartment wall. But viewers need not be familiar with the reference to get the allusion to “the witching hour,” the nocturnal period when occult and supernatural powers are at their peak.

Alex Da Corte. A Season in He’ll; installation view. Courtesy of Art + Practice, Los Angeles. Photo by Brian Forrest/Hammer Museum.

A trio of short films, each named after a different chapter of A Season in Hell, plays sequentially in the second part of the exhibition. An actor resembling the artist stands between a colored backdrop and a table covered in a set of odd, everyday objects: a watermelon, a candle, a soda bottle. In each video, he performs a single ritualistic action in slow-motion sequences set to a creepy synth score—a nod to Bava and his fellow Italian horror director Dario Argento. In one, he injects what appears to be soda into his arm with a syringe. In another, he sucks liquid through a tube, then removes a knife attached to a set of brass knuckles from a watermelon, punches himself in the face, and subsequently spits out the liquid as if it were blood. There is a brooding unease at work, resulting from the altered sense of time, spooky soundtrack, and transgressive acts being performed. In the end, however, these performances can be seen as DIY, slapstick one-liners in which the blood is fake and the drugs are no more harmful than sugar.

Behind a curtain that is printed with a scene from Disney’s Fantasia, a viewing room plays another slow-motion film, A Night in Hell, Part II (2014), in which a flaming man covered in mummy bandages falls before our eyes. As seen in his other films, there is again the mixture of violence and danger, tempered by benign artifice, though this time with a higher production value. The seating cushions in the room resemble hamburgers and help to take the edge off as well.

Alex Da Corte. A Season in He’ll; installation view. Courtesy of Art + Practice, Los Angeles. Photo by Brian Forrest/Hammer Museum.

A Season in He’ll should not be seen as a direct interpretation of Rimbaud’s poem so much as an exploration of the themes of otherness and alternate reality that it conjures up. The word “conjuring” is especially apt in Da Corte’s work, filled as it is with references to the occult, witchcraft, and mysterious ceremonies. Instead of presenting these supernatural tropes as arcane or impenetrable, Da Corte offers the possibility of transformation through everyday items and popular cinema. While his field of references is varied and not always easily discerned (the intersection of Disney viewers, Italo-horror fans, and lovers of symbolist poetry is presumably small), there is an open-ended approach to Da Corte’s constructions that allows viewers to find their own paths through his theatrical fantasy landscapes.

Alex Da Corte: A Season in He’ll will be on view at Art + Practice in Los Angeles, CA through September 17, 2016.

John Outterbridge. Case in Point, c. 1970 (from the Rag Man Series); mixed media; 12 x 12 x 24 in. Collection of the Hammer Museum. Photo: Andrew Zermeño.

Currently on view at Art + Practice, Rag Man features the work of veteran artist John Outterbridge (b. 1933, Greenville, NC). Outterbridge is no stranger to this kind of community activism through art, having been the director of the Watts Towers Art Center from 1975 to 1992. He is also no stranger to the oft-ignored art scene located “south of the 10” (or south of Interstate 10, as non-Angelenos would say). In fact, the Brockman Gallery, which housed the Black Artists Association and represented artists such as Betye Saar, Noah Purifoy, Kerry James Marshall, David Hammons, and Outterbridge himself, once sat in the same square in Leimert Park. Started by Alonzo and Dale Davis in the 1960s, the gallery sought to showcase underrepresented artists of color, who were otherwise disregarded.

When LA Times art critic William Wilson said that he had not attended the Brockman Gallery because he was not interested in writing about group shows (a statement easily refuted), John Outterbridge responded by saying, “Mr. Wilson, why don’t you honestly tell everyone that you have not come to Brockman Gallery simply because you don’t come on that side of town? … The people that you write about are the people that you drink wine with, and we’re not those people. So just be honest and say that you have not come to the gallery because you are uncomfortable in coming into the realm of what the gallery represents.”[1]

John Outterbridge. Remnants of an Apron, Lost, 2002; mixed media. Courtesy of Tilton Gallery, NY. Photo: Lenae Day.

Rag Man consists mostly of Outterbridge’s newer work from the past eight years, with a few older pieces scattered throughout. The first wall features fourteen mixed-media sculptures from 2000–12. With titles like Dreads, Hooked, and Caged, the range of materials includes wood, metal, bone, horn, ripped fabric, hair, paint, and found objects. In Remnants of an Apron, Lost (2002), the head of an African Ashanti doll becomes a wide platter with dreads growing out of a dome-like head. Dreads seem to be growing out of many of these talismanic, toy-like works, anthropomorphizing them into the bodies of black Americans. I Mus Speak (2008) is a mallet-shaped form with a ponytail of dreads and rags. The mallet, which resembles a wooden horse or mule, is a symbol that Outterbridge draws on throughout much of his work to talk about the history of American capitalism being built on the backs of slaves. For Outterbridge, the mule is a “symbol of the black body, courageously searching for absolute freedom.”[2]

John Outterbridge. Jive Ass Bird, 1971; mixed media. Courtesy of Tilton Gallery, NY. Photo: Lenae Day.

The exhibition also includes two pieces from Outterbridge’s original soft-sculpture Rag Man series of the 1970s: Jive Ass Bird (1970) and Case in Point (1970). Case in Point appears to be a large duffel bag made out of smaller, sausage-like bags that could alternatively be interpreted as artillery shells. Underneath a military brown wash, an underpainting of neon colors practically screams to be let out. A Greyhound bus tag reads: “People travel like packages,” suggesting that human beings are nothing more than baggage. As a war veteran, Outterbridge knew many men who died abroad, only to be shipped back home. The piece also indicates the transportation of slaves, brought to the U.S. as the property of other men—or in other words, as packages.

Across the back wall, Outterbridge’s new Rag and Bag Idiom (2012) series calls back to the original soft sculptures. These pieces are bright, as though the neon rainbow underpainting of Case in Point were finally free to express itself. In this new series, there is a sincere feeling of optimism and youthful energy to be found in the works’ playful shapes, bright colors, and formal arrangement.

John Outterbridge. Rag and Bag Idiom I, 2012; mixed media. Courtesy of Tilton Gallery, NY.

At age 83, it is only in the past five years that Outterbridge has received the kind of recognition and praise he deserves as the influential and talented artist he is. With recent exhibitions in New York and LA, Outterbridge also participated in the Venice Biennale and received a lifetime achievement award from the California African American Museum. John Outterbridge was on the front line of activism in art in the 1960s and ’70s, and it is only fitting that he be back there now during the inaugural year of this vibrant community art space.

John Outterbridge: Rag Man is on view at Art + Practice in Los Angeles through February 27, 2016.

[1] African-American Artists of Los Angeles: John W. Outterbridge. Interviewed by Richard Candida Smith; 1989–90. Online Archive of California. Department of Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles, 2009. Accessed February 13, 2016, http://www.oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb229006xm;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00020&toc.id=0&brand=oac4

[2] John Outterbridge: Rag Man. Curators Anne Ellegood and Jamillah James (Los Angeles: Art + Practice Foundation, December 2015), exhibition catalog.