Ludovic Duchateau. In Dreamland, 2016; installation view, A Stark Project, Berkeley. Courtesy of the Artist and A Stark Project. Photo: Hillary Goidell.

French sculptor Ludovic Duchâteau’s first solo show in the U.S., In Dreamland at Berkeley’s A Stark Project, is a polished articulation of his dystopian obsessions, which previously found homes in miniature scenes of domestic life cleverly ensconced inside otherwise ordinary-seeming briefcases and among tentacular silicon sculptures engineered with e-waste. Originally a game programmer, Duchâteau abandoned digital media at the height of the first internet bubble in favor of working with a broader variety of materials [1]. The result is particularly striking, evidenced by the ominous installation, In Dreamland.

In the life-size installation featuring epoxy resin and aluminum wire (among other materials), a boy inside a black tarp has fallen asleep reading a famous graphic novel, Akira (set in “Neo-Tokyo” in the aftermath of World War III). The science-fiction titles that are scattered around his makeshift campsite complete the post-apocalyptic literary symbolism. Next to the boy, a cryptic life form emerges from the tent, its gigantic tendrils scouting the empty terrain; this massive, encroaching root system may be a projection of the sleeping boy’s imagination, or perhaps it is all too real—a slithering alien creature seeking to occupy an already ravaged world and replace the frail remnants of a depleted humanity. Either way, viewers are confronted with a heart-stopping scene that belies the pacifying title of the work.

The nightmarish quality of the horrifying habitat is transfixing, in the subliminally deranging manner of a bad accident that is glimpsed, then gone, leaving only a sentiment of cognitive dissonance and a disquieting aftertaste. The blackened radio flyer wagon that lingers at the periphery of the installation adds to the dread. In this sprawling, lifelike piece, Duchâteau reverses the usual dynamic of his smaller, more fastidious works, in which the blissful veneer of domesticity only hints at macabre truths coursing beneath the surface. Here, the unnerving effect of a mutated appendage snaking stealthily out of the boy’s exposed redoubt is the first thing viewers see. But closer examination reveals the relaxed position of the sleeping child, and the possibility that we are, in fact, worlds removed from an apocalyptic reality, inhabiting nothing more than a sinuous, ensnaring dreamland.

Ludovic Duchâteau: In Dreamland is on view through January 15, 2017.

Noah Sudarsky is the Project Manager at the Center for Environmental Structure in Berkeley. His art coverage has been featured in New York Press, the Village Voice, New York Magazine, Whitewall Magazine of Contemporary Art, and The Onion.

[1] Conversation with the artist.

Will Rogan. Erase, 2014; still from video, silent; 8:10. Courtesy of the Artist, Altman
Siegel, San Francisco; and Laurel Gitlen, New York.

Viewing Will Rogan’s MATRIX show at the Berkeley Art Museum leaves one with a lingering impression of something that can only be described, somewhat paradoxically, as homely elegance. Rogan’s quiet yet extraordinarily powerful evocations of time—how one experiences its passage, quickly and slowly, or simply observes its arbitrary nature—manage to embody both of these qualities in their sparing installation throughout the odd, liminal space allotted to MATRIX exhibitions. The show’s centerpiece, literally and figuratively, is Seven (2014), a small, ceramic, staircase-shaped sculpture festooned with seven handmade “melting” brass clock faces à la Salvador Dali. This sly, slightly louche historical reference is enchanting—especially when made by a conceptualist of Rogan’s caliber and intelligence. It is a deliberate move, a deadpan sleight of hand and eye that Rogan’s work as a whole invokes through both temporal and spatial manipulation.

Three black-and-white photographs, one on each wall, triangulate the gallery space. Two of them, both titled Scout’s Ruler and dating from 2013, were printed from the same negative and show his daughter’s homemade ruler with numbers written right to left—a result of her dyslexia. The punch line is that the prints are different sizes but hung far enough from each other that this shift in scale, not immediately apparent, begins to suggest a magic act. (Rogan’s artist’s book of magician’s obituaries, Broken Wands [2014], sits on a shelf in the gallery, hinting at such a reading.) The third photograph, Picture of the Earth Spinning in Space (2014), features a rotated manhole cover, and is a version of a color picture featured in Rogan’s first museum show ten years ago as a SECA award winner at SFMOMA. It, too, is a kind of measure of time, simultaneously marking movement forward and backward; it suggests both “development” (a kind of photographic in-joke?) and the retrograde implication of going from color to black-and-white, rather than the other way around.

The pièce de résistance of the show is Eraser (2014), a video of an exploding hearse shot with a special camera that takes 6,900 frames per second. Four seconds of “real” time become nearly six minutes of smoke and car parts that move, with the exquisite slowness of Butoh dancers, through a wintry landscape. It is a gift to be able to experience the events at a crawl. You can watch it as many times as you like without ever exhausting the almost pornographic thrill of feeling the tyranny of time all but perfectly tamed, even if only for a few ecstatic moments.

Will Rogan: MATRIX 253 is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive through June 9, 2014.

Maria Porges is an artist and writer whose critical writing has appeared in many publications, including Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture, American Ceramics, Glass, and a host of other now-defunct art magazines. An Associate Professor at California College of the Arts in the Graduate Program in Fine Arts, she likes to topiarize unsuspecting shrubbery and read out loud.

Kim Anno. Water City Kids, 2013. Large format photograph; 38 x 28 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Why celebrate when the world is going to hell? Kim Anno’s ambitious effort to envision the future of humanity through a multiplatform work of art offers an answer with play and consistent hope, despite imagery of rising waters and the gravitas of an ancient Greek chorus.

Water City Berkeley—a live musical performance centered around a dual projection that ran for two shows on Saturday, December 7, at the Kala Art Institute—is the fourth chapter in Anno’s Men and Women in Water Cities series, and it is the most ambitious to date. This ongoing project of Anno’s, who is Professor of Painting at California College of the Arts, marks two important turns that inform one another: the first, from abstract painting to film-centric work that engages contemporary political content; and the second, from working solo in her studio to a collaborative mode of production. Anno has embraced other artists—composers, choreographers, dancers, musicians, even cheerleaders—in order to enrich and to complicate the visions she harbors of our world and its future development.

Water City Berkeley’s vision of a half-submerged future draws on collaborations with Oberlin Dance choreographer KT Nelson, who has contributed beautiful compositions to the film performed by dancers half-submerged in the waters of the Bay. Composer David Coll’s provocative score, played live by SF Sound Players and the Berkeley Chamber Ensemble during the performances, is full of whimsical surprise due to its enigmatic rhythms and diachronic temporality.

The film itself is a carefully edited, 21-minute dual-screen projection featuring three sections carefully paced to deliver both a narrative and powerful imagery. The first sequence, “Work and Days,” features men and women in corporate dress on the beach and in the surf. The next segment, “Inexorable Tea House,” was filmed in the Tea House at the Oakland Estuary and combines readings from Oedipus Rex with a musical performance by a masked band of musicians (Kingdom of Not) accompanied by dancers. In the last and most dazzling section, “Poseidon’s Race,” a game of Capture the Flag is played on the beach, including dancers in referee costumes, athletes, cheerleaders, and children who seem to be performing a kind of ritual. Echoes of political domination are re-created in the form of play via the flags and airborne chest bumps.  The visionary effect of the cinematography is enhanced by episodic interventions from an extra-filmic live chorus, who recite passages from Greek tragedies from behind the seated viewers. The august voices of ancient playwrights, newly retranslated by Anno, give the film’s images a sense of history and a common destiny amid our world’s changing ecology. By the end of the performance, there was not a hair left resting on the back of my neck.

John Zarobell is Assistant Professor of International Studies and Program Chair of European Studies at the University of San Francisco. Formerly, he held the positions of assistant curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and associate curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

Lindsay Benedict. I’m Drinking My Hand (Roughing Up the Lips), 2010/2013; 16 mm film transferred with live Foley sound; 9 min. Courtesy of the Artist.

dirty domestic’s premise benefits from its location in the home gallery of Indira Martina Morre and Farley Johnston Gwazda, integrating (and imposing) Lindsay Benedict’s life with their own.

Benedict’s paintings are grouped by the emotional context in which they were produced:  autobiographical relationships between gesture, color, and the events they reflect. There’s an evolving conversation between these moments. In two month self-imposed residency with my mom (2013), a set of 15 acrylic paintings on paper, basic geometric shapes jostle with squiggles that possess unexpected lightness. The works on the adjacent walls reference the death throes of a relationship, layered and more visibly reactionary with the addition of spray paint. Together, these paintings impart a deliberate physicality, and they are Benedict’s first foray into the medium. In this sense, they read as efforts in pushing self-limitations: the lighter, more subdued groupings made in Florida (while attempting to connect with her mother, a painter, and with the breakup pending), and the more visceral, murkier works with text made after the aforementioned breakup in Brooklyn.

In her films, Benedict reaches further for self-clarity. It’s where the work engages 1970s feminist art, giving priority to performance with diary-like intensity. waking temps (2103) documents her daily routine with a Super 8 camera, complete with shaky visuals, grainy texture, and sync sound. It records 28 days, in 30-second intervals, of Benedict taking her body temperature to determine ovulation. Bathing, unscrewing jar lids, brushing her teeth—all made difficult while juggling the camera, a surrogate for the anticipated struggle of having a baby. Repetitive moments are spliced together, and her actions and sounds are a consistent, inevitable presence. After each interval, the familiar chime and vibration of a cell phone abruptly invades, leaving a black screen. The burden of this endeavor is palpably chaotic. What’s most enjoyable is unseen: the uncertainty of this process in the darkness, comforted by the whirring of the camera.

I’m Drinking My Hand (Roughing Up the Lips) (2010/2013), a self-investigation of sexuality, reads earnestly, almost instructionally. That’s perhaps the point, however tentative that process is. There’s a clever minimalism, reminiscent of Terry Fox’s The Children’s Tapes (1974)[1]; this is a black-and-white film with basic props. Benedict moves throughout the home—jumping from toilet to bathtub, tracing her upper body against a wall—spelling out the title of the film with black marker, on blank pieces of paper or the wall, and holding them up as testament to her self-exploration.

The parallels between the interior spaces in which Benedict created the work and the space they’re presented in are more discreet than provocative. I look forward to seeing the final integration, in which Morre and Gwazda will chart various daily events as instructed by Benedict.

dirty domestic is on view at Martina }{ Johnston Gallery through January 19, 2014.

Joseph Beuys. Das Schweigen - The Silence, 1973; 35mm film, varnish, copper, zinc; reels: 7.5 x 15 in.; box: 9 x 17 x 17 in. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Alfred and Marie Greisinger Collection, Walker Art Center, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1992. Copyright 2012 Artists Rights Society, New York, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photo: Courtesy Walker Art Center.

In Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta, the main character tells his young acolyte, “Silence is a fragile thing. One loud noise and it’s gone.” On my way to the UC Berkeley Art Museum’s Silence exhibition, I had a related thought: What would it be like to view an exhibition about silence in galleries full of walking, talking, sniffling, rustling people? Would they break my contemplative experience of the work? As an art patron I admit that I am regularly annoyed by other museum- and gallery-goers; and as Murphy’s Law would have it, the day I visited the museum was the monthly free day, attracting a larger-than-usual crowd. As misguided as it may sound, I wanted to see Silence in silence, and what I got was something different—and far richer.¹

Of course, John Cage (whose innovative 1952 work 4’33”inspired the exhibition) declared that there is no such thing as silence: “There is always something to see, something to hear.”² This was certainly true for the experimental films that were shown at the Pacific Film Archive earlier in February, as part of the exhibition’s related programming. The “silence” in the theater during films such as Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) was filled with noise: the hum of the HVAC system, the shifting of patrons in their seats, the occasional stifled cough or sneeze. But more than that, the films made me aware of what I was not hearing, which is to say, a tightly controlled soundtrack meant to direct my attention in a particular direction.

Some of the films’ lack of integral noise created an alternative experience, such as the state of synesthetic sound in Steve Roden’s four words for four hands (apples.mountains.over.frozen) (2006), a film in which handmade dots of colored marker flashed on the screen in ever-changing patterns; in my head I could hear horns and other brass instruments, depending on the bright colors that burst into view. Similarly, Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film(1962–64)—what the film curator Steve Said called “the most Cageian film in the series” during the press preview—changed my consciousness. The 8-minute projection consisted of ambient dust and debris on the surface of the film; random dark speckles popped and disappeared and linty threads seemed to wiggle their way across the brightly lit screen. As I concentrated on the chance animation of minute fragments, it felt as though time was stretching to accommodate my focus. Instead of being bored and restless, I became relaxed, content to watch this meditative flow, and suddenly aware of my own breath and presence in the space.

Kurt Mueller. Cenotaph, 2011–13; Rock-Ola - Legend - 100-CD jukebox with collected silences; 65 x 37 x 28 in. Courtesy of the Artist. Originally commissioned and produced by Artpace San Antonio. Photo: Todd Johnson.

Viewing the works installed across the street at the museum, I had a more intellectual experience. In the first gallery, Andy Warhol paintings—two Big Electric Chair works from 1967 and Little Electric Chair from 1965—hang amid a suite of canvases by Christian Marclay that isolate part of the original Warhol image and reproduce it in different colors. The silkscreened word silence on a pink canvas is shockingly different than the same word on a silver canvas, exemplifying how much color affects interpretation. I spent most of my time in this space, looking at the long vitrine in the middle of the floor that contains Marclay’s notes and sketches documenting his labor through the ideas on the works in the room. The notes, which include Internet printouts about the death penalty, are chilling.

Installation view of Create, curated by Lawrence Rinder with Matthew Higgs. Photo: Sibila Savage.

The growing spotlight on artists with developmental disabilities simultaneously questions ethics, challenges definitions in Art and inspires viewers. The current exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Create, features the works of 20 artists from three pioneering Bay Area centers for arts and disability – Creativity Explored, Creative Growth Art Center and the National Institute of Art and Disabilities.

Once in the museum, I found myself at an ethical crossroads. The only information provided was a brief introductory wall text at the beginning of the first gallery, and a slightly longer anecdote in the take-away, written by the co-curators Larry Rinder and Matthew Higgs, respectively. Both texts note that the artists included all have a developmental disability of some kind, but little else about their process, experience or intent. Except, of course, to clarify that the artists are not performing art therapy in a drab gray room with bars on the windows. The paradox for me remains in determining for whose benefit exactly, is the mention of the artists’ conditions made? In the introduction, Rinder mentions that the artists’ “status as outsiders is rapidly shifting to that of insiders.” This can be taken in a few ways: for my Mom, and others like her, who insist they were among the first to discover the phenomenon of outsider art, they may be greatly bereaved to hear that outsider art has hit the mainstream, and now even their t-shirts are $60 a pop. For others it can be seen as an advancement that has been a long time coming. The artists featured in Create all possess the level of talent, individual voice and depth to be expected of the those supported by the Berkeley Art Museum and other major institutions. This issue elicits a nagging feeling that questions the motivation of listing the artists as developmentally disabled. I cannot help but wonder how I would have viewed the art if I had not known this facet of the exhibition.

Michael Bernard Loggins, 'Fears of Your Life' Installation View. Photo: Sibila Savage

Trying to look at the artwork as untainted by the knowledge of the artists’ conditions, I saw three galleries filled with pieces so creative and uninhibited, my eyes hungrily devoured the unique detail in each piece. Four examples of Attilo Crescenti’s sprawling, surreal and abstract figure drawings demonstrate the potential of an unrestricted vision of the human form. Written in huge, black scratchy handwriting on the entire back wall of the first gallery, is Michael Bernard Loggins’ text piece “Fears of Your Life.” Loggins included all fears in his list, both the profound and the mundane:

13. Fear of being lost.

21. Fear of spiders and roaches.

And mouse raccoons and rats too.

52. Fear of rolling down a hill backwards.

82. Fear that if you are bad or naughty noone’s isn’t going to love you anymore.

Carl Hendrickson and Jeremy Burleson both created sculptures that blur the line between practical application and surreal artistic liberty. Hendrickson’s wood sculptures resemble recognizable structures at first glance, yet further inspection reveals that their construction negates their utilitarian function. Burleson’s sculptures of medical equipment made from tape, plastic and paper, maintain an amazing amount of detail and accuracy, yet cannot be forgotten as non-functional art objects.

Carl Hendrickson. Image courtesy of Creative Growth

Create brings up several important questions that remain unanswered, and perhaps will not be answered for some time. How are these artists different or the same as others featured in major institutions? How does an artist’s past or present condition affect the reception of their work? Is the image of ‘outsider’ art exploited by the mainstream in the same way as other minorities, subcultures or fringe societies? The success and importance of the exhibition is in its posing of these questions, and the opening of a dialog that may be continued by the art world, both inside and out.

Create was curated by Larry Rinder, the director of BAM/PFA and Matthew Higgs, the director of White Columns. On view from May 11, 2011 – September 25, 2011.