The second Made in L.A. biennial at the UCLA Hammer Museum indicates both the scope and diversity of the city’s many emerging and early-mid-career artists, and the pull that the art academy continues to exert on artists long after the completion of their degrees. The biennial’s emergence in 2012 marked a milestone in the evolution of Los Angeles as an art capital, no longer content to wait for New York to eventually anoint its hottest up-and-comers. Working from, and against, the example of the Whitney Biennial, which launches many international careers each year (but really should be subtitled “Made (Mostly) in NYC”), Made in L.A. 2014 further develops its predecessor’s approach of surveying Los Angeles artists with an eye to the broad ethnic, gender, and medium diversity that is apparent throughout the city’s artistic landscape. Even so, there is a conceptual through line to much of the work on view, which seems to be in rapture to an absent past or an unknown future.

On initial viewing, it would appear that being present in the moment is difficult to achieve in Los Angeles, as artists’ works fluctuate between unarticulated malaise and utopian ambition. At times the v0ice of an influential senior artist comes across more strongly than that of the exhibiting artist. I perceived the euphoria of youth, but also the collective malaise of young people who have been disempowered to make change by being inundated with the revolutionary nostalgia of previous generations.

Emily Mast. B!RDBRA!N (Epilogue), 2012; exhibition and performance as part of Public Fiction’s
Theatricality and Sets series. Photographer: Anitra Haendel.

From the start, I was struck with a sense of perpetual rehearsal for a performance that never comes. Installations by KCHUNG and Public Fiction were the first I encountered, and both were primed for potential action that had either already passed or not yet begun. KCHUNG, an indie radio station run by an artist collective, had set up a broadcast booth, but no information about programming was made available. Public Fiction had locked their space and labeled the outside, leading visitors to fumble in surprise when the normally accessible gallery space refused them entry. While such hiccups may be characteristic of large institutions’ difficulties in interpreting performative practices for audiences, this initial experience set an antagonistic tone.

Every two weeks during the run of the show, Public Fiction will install a different project in which an artist will be paired with a writer at the Hammer while a third artist performs at the collective’s downtown space for the same duration. They work with artists whose practices span installation and performance, such as Emily Mast, whose work is also on view in the museum. Mast’s crude sculptures made from quotidian materials double as props for absurdist performances. Her work is informed by the French–Californian artist Guy de Cointet, who pioneered the stage-prop approach on which her work relies. In the context of the Hammer, it is difficult to understand the full scope of her work, not least because her video and sculptural installation, shown on two different floors, are both crammed into interstitial passageways that severely compromise the work’s viewing. Whether this is due to overcrowding (the show occupies the whole museum, including the permanent-collection galleries), or by the artist’s design as a means of problematizing the work’s reception, is unclear.

Clarissa Tossin. Brasília, Cars, Pools, and Other Modernities, 2009-13 (still); Volkswagen Brasilia,
pool-cleaning equipment. Dimensions variable. Originally commissioned and produced by
Artpace San Antonio. Courtesy of the Artist.

Clarissa Tossin addresses nostalgia and challenges stasis in her installation, in which she tiles the museum lobby’s staircase like a swimming pool and parks a Volkswagen Brasília at the center. Driving the car from its namesake city to Los Angeles, she sought to gain access to a private home in Santa Monica that is the only work that Brasília’s architect Oscar Niemeyer ever created in the United States. Brasília, the capital of Brazil, is strategically located at the center of the country’s large landmass, and was inaugurated in 1960 as a Socialist vision of Utopian governance. The Brasília car represented a similar achievement in the eyes of the people, as it was wholly designed and built in the country. These two forms represent the parallel evolution of Modernism in Brazil in the mid-20th century, which, like other non-Western Modernisms that emerged around the globe, is better understood as a complement to than as an outgrowth of Euro-American Modernism. The utilitarian car had the added benefit of disguising Tossin, who posed as a pool cleaner to access the Niemeyer-designed home when permission was impossible to gain. Tossin’s route highlights the interconnectedness of North and South America. Her intervention draws attention to the elitist tendencies that still plague the application of Marxist-derived political philosophies within artistic as well as postcolonial spheres, and to the unseen labor required to maintain the Utopian facades of Modernism.

Channing Hansen. Polytope Soap, 2013; hand-spun and dyed Merino, Corriedale, Cheviot, holographic polymers, Romney, and Teeswater Locks, yak down, silk noils, commercial thread,
cotton, viscose, polyamide, and cedar; 58 x 56 in. (147.3 x 142.2 cm). Courtesy of the Artist. Photo by Joshua White.

Channing Hansen’s Quantum Paintings are crocheted visualizations of the warps and wefts of space–time derived from mathematical models. These incredibly clever artworks are also formally intriguing. The use of different yarns allows for a variety of scales and textures to emerge. The variety of source models leads to gaps and protrusions evocative of Modernism’s blurred boundaries between painting/sculpture and figure/ground. Hansen makes compelling work that packs a conceptual punch. He’s also not the only artist in Los Angeles to use fiber as a means of physically describing intangible mathematical phenomena.

Margaret and Christine Wertheim of the Institute for Figuring have been conducting explorations of this kind and exhibiting them widely since at least 2005, initiated by mathematician Daina Taimina, who hit upon the idea of crochet as a means to describe hyperbolic space in 1997. This is not to say that Hansen’s work looks similar, or even that he takes a similar approach. Rather, the comparison is instructive because it demonstrates how two artists with established practices in Los Angeles are considered differently with respect to their locations within the city’s arts ecosystem. It’s difficult to discern whether Hansen’s presence and IFF’s absence result from Hansen’s work being “painting” rather than “sculpture,” from individual vs. collective authorship, from family connections, or from the preference for men with MFAs over women with varied backgrounds in anointing craft practices as art. That distinction has marked the craft revival that has swept contemporary art this past decade, but is absent from the larger maker culture that is rapidly displacing art as the public’s benchmark of aesthetic achievement.

In keeping with the repetition of ideas across history, the title of this text is taken from a work by Francis Alÿs that lent its name to the retrospective exhibition organized by the Hammer in 2007–08. That show explored the Sisyphean nature of 21st-century art, as gesture or process for its own sake, inevitably futile. Several years later, the processes have become more elaborate and the gestures more overt. Still, the emphasis on replay rankles in a biennial of current art.

Made in L.A. 2014 is on view at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles through September 7, 2014.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

Francis Alÿs. Railings, 2004; still from film; 9:15.

The organizers chose not to reveal much beforehand; the only instruction was to meet at the Kadist Art Foundation at 7 sharp. Inspired by City Dance, Bay Area dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin’s 1977 performance that unfolded in over nine locations in San Francisco, Citydance featured nine videos projected around the Mission district on two occasions. Anne Lesley Selcer punctuated each video by reading one of her poems on the first night, and Stephanie Young did the same on the second night. For both evenings, the locations were as varied as the selected works and highlighted the juxtaposition of one city’s image onto another. For example, at the corner of 20th and Harrison Streets, Francis Alÿs’s Railings (2004) was projected on the bottom of a wall underneath the metal fence of John O’Connell High School; the video animated the space with the sounds of the artist dragging a stick across different railings in London.

Even though each person had a map, the group simply followed the route without really knowing exactly where the next video would be projected. This feeling of uncertainty added an exciting element to the event. The tour was quite adventurous. Before leaving, Kadist director Joseph del Pesco announced that they did not obtain permission for some of the locations.  In order to watch Jon Rubin and Lee Walton’s Playing Apart (2011), the group had to pass through a gate into a small, empty, almost wild field, increasing this feeling of interdiction. Both nights ended with a final video screened at the Kadist’s space at Folsom and 20th Streets, followed by a talk with the artist. On the first night, Dara Friedman’s Dancer (2011), in which 60 performers danced around the city of Miami to multiple musical genres, cast a vibrant ambiance over the entire evening. Javid Soriano’s Factotum of the City (2013), a documentary that follows a former world-class opera singer living in destitution in the Tenderloin, concluded the second and last evening. A short conversation with the artist followed, although no words were necessary to translate the poetry, beauty, and tragedy of this film. Through the unexpected locations and uncertainty over whether or not the event would be shut down, Citydance offered a different way to look at and walk around a part of our city. Its configuration also allowed an audience that was just passing by to be part of the adventure.

Citydance took place at the Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco, and in various locations around the Mission district on September 25 and October 23, 2013.

Marion Cousin is an independent curator. After starting her career in France, she moved to San Francisco in Fall 2012 to undertake an MA in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts. She is the cofounder of doubleBread, an art organization based in San Francisco. 

Terreiro: Marilá Dardot and Fábio Morais, Longe daqui, aqui mesmo (Far from here, right here)

What makes an art exhibition political?

The 2010 São Paulo Bienal, There is always a cup of sea to sail in, uses Brazilian poet Jorge de Lima’s line as a metaphorical container to address the ambitious theme of art and politics. The head curators Agnaldo Farias and Moacir dos Anjos see the title as an expression of the essential aspiration of the exhibition, “to affirm that the utopian dimension to art is contained within art itself, not outside or beyond it; to affirm the value of poetic intuition in the face of ‘tamed thought‘ that emancipates nothing, though it permeates political parties and even formal educational institutions.” (29th Bienal Catalogue, 21) This is an infinitely large concept in the palm of ones hand.

Guest curator Chus Martinez sees the political as a resistance to the slogan, the summary, and the pamphlet. Through artistic research and practice, reorganizing information and reinventing research contributes to how we see the world. If art itself is a political act by way of it’s disruption of current logics and the opening-up of space to conceive and experience new possibilities, then what is at stake when mounting an exhibition that considers the world outside of the cup?

Joachim Koester, Tarantism, 2007, 16mm film loop. Courtesy Galleri Nicolai Wallner, photo: Joachim Koester

What is the resonance of an exhibition like this?

The scope of the biennial format has the potential for wide impact; organizers anticipate a million visitors and have implemented a large educational project. In training 40,000 teachers to educate students about contemporary art, the potential for art’s rethinking of conventions to seep beyond the contained art world is an exercise in politics. The biennial’s geographic and geopolitical location has impacted the curatorial choices reflected in an awareness of its southern position; a constellation of relationships between art produced in Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia are in a robust discourse here.

The resistance to articulate a cohesive comprehension of the politics of art is evident in the titles of the Terreiros or “yards” – architectural spaces produced by participating artist and architects as discursive areas for discussion, contemplation, and socializing inspired by the function of Brazilian public spaces like plazas, courtyards, and the street. The titles of these six spaces are dominated by dichotomies: O outro, o mesmo (The other one, the same one), Dito, não dito, interdito (Said, not said, indirect), Lembrança e esquecimento (Memories and oblivion), Longe daqui, aqui mesmo (Far from here, right here), Eu sou a rua (I am the street), and A pele do invisível (The skin of the invisible).

Tatiana Trouvé, 350 Points towards Infinity, 2009, installation.

For all it’s ambitions, the biennial remains an act with skin, there is an outside and an inside. The edges of the exhibition are flexible, morphing and incorporating new elements, yet barriers remain. This is not necessarily a bad thing; if movement and change is to occur, then we must visualize an edge of difference.

The challenge of summing up an exhibition who’s purpose is to resist the summarization of experience is massive. So instead, in the spirit of the anti-slogan, the works presented here are simply and unapologetically a smattering of what one would find in the biennial.

Carlos Bunga, Simultâneo, fragmentado, descontínuo (Simultaneous, fragmented, discontinuous), 2010, site-specific installation.

Spain-based, Portuguese artist Carlos Bunga’s architectural installation of columns made from cardboard, tape, and white paint could, if for only a moment, be a part of the existing architecture. The facade of this is only momentary though and deception doesn’t seem to be the crux of the piece – instability, fragility, and eventual ruin does. As much as the work is an installation, it is an action: to build and destroy.

350 Points towards Infinity (pictured above) is a circular installation of hundreds of pendulums hanging in contrasting diagonal directions. Here, movement is interrupted and paused. Paris-based, Italian artist Tatiana Trouvé’s static installation gives the sense of time suspended just before imminent impact.

Henrique Oliveira, A origem do terceiro mundo (The origin of the third world), 2010, site-specific installation.

Exploding from the angular, severe architecture of the biennial building Henrique Oliveira‘s The origin of the third world’s round form swells into the exhibition space. The Brazilian artist constructed with thin, rough plywood an interior space for the visitor to explore. Suggesting a primordial space of knowledge and make-shift architecture common in Brazil.

Danish artist Joachim Koester’s black and white silent film loop of dancers performing convulsive movements (pictured above) is based on an obscure dance performed in Southern Italy until the 1950‘s. The dance’s function was to enact a therapeutic spasming in order to work out the poison of a tarantula bite. For Koester, it is the space of freedom that the dance offered in a world controlled by Catholicism. The video exhibits a choreography of possibility, and perhaps, through sympathetic magic, seeks to regain and harness some of that space of freedom.

Chim Pom’s (Inaoka, Mizuno, Okada, Hayashi, Ellie, Ushiro), Brazil Love, is a 3-channel video installation of the Japanese art group members cavorting in different locals in Brazil. The trickster group uses offensiveness as a tactic, at one point we see the words ‘Crack Land’ appear on screen as members interact with locals on a beach. A consistent prop that accompanies the group is a giant plywood effigy, which morphs as new maneuvers are acted upon it over the course of their ventures. Japanese pop enters a dark and ironic place through subversive shock and determined political-incorrectness.

Gil Vicente, Autorretrato IV - matando Ahmadinejad (Self portrait IV - killing Ahmadinejad), 2010, charcoal on paper

The series Inimigos (Enemies) are drawings depicting the artist, Gil Vicente, with a knife or gun to various figureheads of institutional power, from the Pope to Brazilian President Lula da Silva. These symbolic assaults make visible the disillusion with political leadership. The suggested violence has resulted in the demand of their removal from the biennial and threatening of legal action by Brazilian Bar Association president Luiz Flávio Borges D’Urso.

After New York’s MoMA denied a loan of Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 series for the biennial, Sandra Gamarra Heshiki painted copies of the works in conceptual tone that doubles Richter’s original paintings.

In an attempt to incorporate other social groups and different forms of art, a group of graffiti artists who where persecuted for tagging within the last biennial where invited to participate this year. Extending the breadth of the question of political art is likely not the only motivation, inviting the artists to contribute video and photography of these urban acts also appeases some of the criticism that the institution received in how they handled the graffiti acts of the previous biennial.

Francis Alÿs, Tornado, Milpa Alta, 2000-10 video documentation of an action (55 minutes). Courtesy David Zwirner, New York

In Tornado, the artist Francis Alÿs recorded himself over the period of 10 years chasing and thrusting himself into twisters in the dusty Mexican landscape. The ritual of Alÿs attempting to reach the eye of these storms is a way for the artist to grapple with notions of chaos, order, and change through natural phenomena.

Steve McQueen‘s Static is a looped video of images shot from a helicopter circling the hyper-iconic statue of liberty. At times it seems as if the truncated statue is floating silently through the landscape, while at other points, the silence is violently chopped by the audio of the helicopter, that familiar sound which tends to conjure up violence and war. The work’s strength is the lack of suggestion or proposition, rather it provides the audience with an open space to interpret the alternative view of an iconic image.

Simon Fujiwara, The Personal Effects of Theo Grünberg, 2010, video, performance, installation.

Simon Fujiwara morphs histories, fictions, and evidence in his installation, the culmination of a research project that follows the stories of three men named Theo Grünberg. The artist acquired the library collection of university professor Theo Grünberg, which led him to discover two other men of the same name, a Nazi prisoner and a botanist who’s research brought him to the Amazon. The physical materials and accounts of the three men become one story here, where reality and fiction weave a narrative of 20th century Germany. A fuzzy collective memory as seen through the material accumulation of specific characters.

Kiluanji Kia Henda’s, Icarus 13, photo and sculpture-based project looks at post-colonialism in Africa through a quasi-utopian narrative of man’s first journey to the sun. The title recalls the Greek myth of Icarus who, escaped Crete with wings his father crafted from wax and feathers, so capricious with the sensation of flying, he accidentally flew too close to the sun. The wax of his wings melted, and flapping only his bare arms, Icraus fell to his death. Blending a futuristic vision with an archeological tone, Henda re-imagines possible histories and futures.

Sophie Ristelhueber, #24, WB series, 2005, inkjet photograph on wallpaper.

French artist, Sophie Ristelhueber contributes wallpapered photographs of newly-formed, make-shift barriers and roadblocks in the West Bank. In these images geological time is ushered forward as a means to morph political territories. Throughout the biennial, these photographs of dirt and rock dividing roadways architecturally intervene at various points of the exhibition.

Oscar Bony, La familia obrera (The working-class family), 1968/1999, performance, documentation.

Conceptual Argentinean artist Oscar Bony in 1968 produced an installation performance of factory worker Luis Ricardo Rodríguez and his wife and son. The family mimicked daily activities while audio of domestic sounds played in the background. The result was a performance of oscillating identity, between portraying and being. In the biennial, the viewer experiences the work as a framed, large-format family portrait / performance documentation along with wall text describing the 1968 performance.

Jonathas de Andrade, Educação para adultos (Education for adults), 2010, 60 posters on photographic paper. Courtesy of the artist

Recife, Brazil based artist Jonathas de Andrade’s project uses the aesthetics of an adult education method to disrupt fixed notions of every-day vocabularies and themes. Making adjustments to pre-existing posters owned by the artist’s mother, Andrade playfully questions the interpretive veracity of image and text while exposing ideological residues in education material.

The 29th São Paulo Bienal runs September 25th through December 12th in Oscar Niemeyer’s modernest pavilion in Ibirapuera park.

A Story of Deception is the title of Francis Alÿs‘ current retrospective on view at the Tate Modern. The title of the exhibition, which spans the artist’s two-decade long career is borrowed from a work of the same name, and appropriately provides the exhibition’s subtitle and introduces the gallery visitor to Alÿs’ work. The 16 mm film, A Story of Deception, captures a mesmerizing and unobtainable mirage on the horizon. The camera centers itself on a road, halved by a dotted white line and follows it across an arid Patagonian landscape. The film’s imagery and intent are oblique and deceptively simple – allowing a variety of creative, metaphorical interpretations. The road can be read as representative of a border and the unobtainable mirage as the often out-of-reach goal of border crossing.

Francis Alÿs, Ambulantes (Pushing and Pulling), Mexico City, 1992-present Slide projection. Courtesy of Francis Alÿs and David Zwirner, New York. Image by Francis Alÿs © Francis Alÿs.

While Alÿs is most readily associated with the film or video documentation of his actions, this retrospective takes care to illustrate the multi-media nature of the artist’s practice and is curated thematically. Film and video work is presented with related photographs, paintings, drawings or other ephemera. In one particularly successful example, Paradox of Praxis I or Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing (1997) is shown near photographs taken in Mexico City dating as early as 1992. These projected photographic images from the series Ambulantes (Pushing and Pulling) feature street vendors and workers bearing loads in the streets. The connection is evident between these photographs and Paradox of Praxis, in which Alÿs pushes a block of melting ice through the city’s streets. Both point to the often comical futility of contemporary labor.

The artist typically begins his work with an action, allowing other media to play a supporting or planning role, but that is not always the case. The artist works in a variety of media, including photography, sculpture, animation, drawing and painting. Paintings such as Le Temps du Sommeil (2003-present) and Silenco (2003-present) illustrate that Alÿs is influenced by urban advertising. They also reference the precedent – intentionally or not – of past artists like Magritte.

Film or video documentation of Alÿs’ carefully planned actions remain the most compelling and most capable of conveying both subtle and overt political messages. In Re-enactments (2000), Alÿs references the gun violence of his adopted Mexican homeland. When Faith Moves Mountains: A Project for Geological Displacement (2002) is one of Alÿs’ most well known works for its sheer monumentality. In it, the artist directs 500 volunteers to form a line and physically move a sand dune located outside of Lima, Peru. Armed solely with shovels and the spirit of collective effort, these volunteers complete a task whose apparent futility belies its profound metaphorical statement. This great effort of ‘geological displacement’ points to the immense shared burden of geo-political displacement.

The contemporary nation-state border, as a contradictory line that is both increasingly restricted and crossed, is an important theme in Alÿs’ art practice. The artist addresses the hypocrisy of the border in works such as The Green Line or Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic (2005) in which the artist walks the 1948 armistice border line between Israel and Palestine. Trailing a leaking can of green paint behind him as he walks a now defunct border, he quietly and profoundly points to the idiocy of human suffering caused by an arbitrary line of division. Loop (2007) chronicles the artist’s purposefully ludicrous route across the US – Mexico border as he travels from Tijuana to Australia, up the Pacific Rim to Alaska, and then finally to California. The epic route of travel taken in lieu of the actual distance between Tijuana and San Diego highlights the difficulty of this border crossing for illegal economic migrants. Also referring to the theme of border crossing, The Rehearsal (1999-2004) features a red Volkswagen Beetle that continually tries and fails to reach the top of a dirt road.

The exhibition makes a strong conclusion with the premiere of Tornado (2000-2010). This newly completed, 55 minute video documentation from hand-held camera footage was ten years in the making. It captures the artist as he places himself in the path of high-altitude tornadoes in Mexico – enduring severe winds and no visibility brown-outs in attempts penetrate the tornado’s central vortex where the air becomes eerily still. Alÿs places himself in peril – throwing himself blindly into chaos in hopes for resolution through the extraction of meaning. Or, as curator Mark Godfrey argues Tornado is again concerned with the border crossing and the immense difficulty of entering and leaving geo-political zones in our increasingly mobile world.

Francis Alÿs Tornado Milpa Alta, 2000-10 Video documentation of an action and related ephemera 55 minutes Courtesy of Francis Alÿs and David Zwirner, New York Image: Video Still © Francis Alÿs

Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception remains at the Tate Modern until 5 September. The show’s next stop is Alÿs’ home country where it will be presented at Wiels in Brussels (9 October – 30 Janurary). The exhibition comes state-side next year to New York’s MoMA (8 May – 1 August 2011).

Francis Alÿs is represented by David Zwirner in New York and Galerie Peter Kilchmann in Zurich.