James Franco and Kalup Linzy. Courtesy of the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery.

Since General Hospital brought the two together in 2010, James Franco and Kalup Linzy’s collaborative work has been rooted in a shared sense of camp, performance, and a fusion of art and show business. However, as is clear in James Franco & Kalup Linzy: Collaborations at Fort Myers’s Bob Rauschenberg Gallery, on view through June 3, Franco and Linzy arrive at and move beyond their collaborative work in tellingly different ways.

The exhibition is structured, physically and thematically, around Ozara and Katessa (2017), a new ten-part video installed in a structure resembling a TV production set. A wooden cube built for the series fills nearly a quarter of the large gallery. The structure’s impromptu character adds to the artifice. At the center of the series are its namesake characters: Ozara (Franco), a theatre director with aspirations to “cross over” into film by way of her latest project, and Katessa (Linzy), an actress dedicated to her craft, and the star of Ozara’s new project. Like many of Franco and Linzy’s past collaborations, Ozara and Katessa draws heavily on the narrative conventions and melodramatic stylings of soap operas set against dialogue voicing that is digitally altered and overdubbed.

Throughout, Franco overacts, genuinely enjoying the pantomime and lip syncing. He is abidingly self-aware and folds contemporary art into light entertainment so thoroughly that it’s disorienting. Linzy is comparatively subdued. In contrast to Franco reveling in farce, Linzy digs into something much more personal. For example, another video in the exhibition, Linzy’s First Soap Opera (1994), deploys a typical soap opera story arc to detail the deterioration of the ozone layer, in a video replete with emotional havoc and histrionic dialogue and music. Notably, this piece was originally a high school science homework assignment. While many of his peers may have doodled in diaries and sketchbooks, a then-teenage Linzy utilized soap operas as a mode of personal expression—a deep well from which he still draws. Although Collaborations features a partnership, it is Linzy’s emotional heavy lifting—earnest in its campiness—that gives strength to the exhibition.

James Franco & Kalup Linzy: Collaboration will be on view through June 3, 2017.

Danny Olda is a freelance art critic and editor. He currently lives and works on the west coast of Florida.

Kalup Linzy. Romantic Loner, 2013 (still); video; 73:00. Courtesy of the Artist.

Calder Yates: You went to college at University of South Florida, and then you got your graduate degree there. Did you take any time between undergrad and grad school?

Kalup Linzy: Nope. From age 5 to 26, I was in the system as a student. In college I worked in the Winn Dixie photo-lab department. When I finished grad school, somebody suggested I go back to the photo lab and I was like “no way.” I didn’t want to be standing in the Winn Dixie photo lab department with a graduate degree. So then, when I got to New York, there was a brief period for like a year where I had to get public assistance and I had to get food stamps and I was so embarrassed because I had a master’s degree. And the social worker was like, “Why are you embarrassed?” It’s not that I was freeloading, it just got to the point where I needed the extra help.

CY: Did you find a job?

KL: I found a temp agency and started working for The Mark [Hotel]. It was 2005. The Mark actually wanted to hire me full time because I guess I was the only one willing to get up at 3:30 or 4 a.m. to oversee the kitchen. I would get off around 2 o’clock. But I didn’t have the energy to go to art stuff because I literally had to be in bed by 7 or 8 p.m. to wake up the next morning to do it all over again. And then I got the Marie Walsh Sharpe residency and I was able to quit the job. Since then, I haven’t done anything completely outside of art.

Kalup Linzy. Melody Set Me Free 4.0 “We Wiki”. 2014 (still); video. Courtesy of the artist.

CY: No other odd jobs? Were you an artist’s assistant?

KL: Well, I did have an interview for the Ricky Lake show, but I didn’t get the gig. It depends on what you mean by “odd jobs.” I was working for Whitfield Lovell and Fred Wilson [while working at the Mark Hotel]. After I did Sundance in January 2016, I went to Miami and did a residency. And then I went to Tampa and did a residency. And, you know, I’m teaching at the School of the Visual Arts (SVA), too, so it is a hustle. But all the jobs are connected to my career, so it doesn’t feel like “odd jobs.” I never had my entire income come from one thing or one source anyway.

CY: Did these residencies help?

KL: Yeah, I guess I’ve been fortunate because I went to Skowhegan. It gave me access to a New York network before I actually moved there. When I got the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, and I remember Whitfield telling me that you may or may not come across a fellowship like that again. And so he gave me advice and said invest it in equipment and computers and cameras.

Kalup Linzy. Melody Set Me Free 4.0 “We Wiki”, 2014 (still); video. Courtesy of the Artist.

CY: What’s the new project with James Franco?

KL: It’s a new series called Ozara and Katessa. I wrote the script and directed it, but it’s a collaboration. His production company is also financing. We play different characters. I’m doing the voice of one of his characters and he’s doing the voice for a different character. We both take turns playing damsels in distress.

CY: Do you still feel like you’re hustling? Does it ever slow down?

KL: The thing is, I don’t think the hustle ever slows down. The money does, is the issue. If there’s nothing going on, I can create something to do and approach people. But the money slows. I don’t think the hustle slows for any artist. I don’t know, I don’t want live in my means. I’m always trying to get to something else more, something bigger. I don’t know what that will look like, but I’ll know what it feels like.

Like a calm place, where things are a little bit more settled, and you have the right finances. I don’t know when that’s going to happen. It still feels precarious, but I’d rather be doing this than not. Probably in Florida—my imagination runs wild in Florida, and I can think. I’d love to be there part time. My mother and my aunt, they’re getting older. Sometimes it’s nice to be around that calmness.

Harmony Korine. Spring Breakers, 2013 (film still); 01:34:00. Courtesy of Spring Breakers LLC and A24 Films.

Part 1: Alien

What’s in a name, homegirl? What’s in a name?
Everything and nothing that you thought,
When y’all’s mothers and fathers named you
Sarah, or Eve; or yo’ brothers Cain, and Abel.

These be ancient names, like Moses, and Jesus,
And Mohamed, and Pharaoh; but all these names
Be of the earth, be of man; and homegirl,
I be anything but of this earth. I am in it,

But not of it; I’m deep in it, relish it, like vagina;
Like an alligator deep within the swamp water
Who gets to lie about and eat the fishes passing,
Sweet pods of Mother Nature’s love I accept.

But I’m Alien, girl, an alien. The sheikh gathers treasure,
Not because he needs the glitter, but because
That sumofabitch can. I’m a racist, girl, a racist
Against the human race. I’m not of this world.

Read the full article here.

James Dean and Natalie Wood on the set of Rebel Without a Cause.

A 29-nine-year-old man in a Mercedes Benz led cops on a high-speed chase a week ago, traveling across four L.A. freeways and ending up on surface streets. He hit three cars and injured five people, including himself and a three-year-old boy who had been a passenger in an SUV. The reckless driver apologized “from the bottom of my heart” for hurting the boy. “I would never disrespect no one’s child,” he reportedly said. He said other things too as cops cuffed him. In video footage from Fox 11, he declares, “I am Vardan Aslanyan and I got swag.” His eyes are wide and concerned, and he’s wearing a perfectly white t-shirt, that, in the intense lights flashing from cameras, headlights and police cars, makes him glow. “Why did you lead cops on this chase?” asks a reporter. “Because I’ve got swag and I wanted to make it look good,” Aslanyan answers with the intense sort of sincerity you might employ if saying, “I had to. There was no other way.”

“Are you on drugs,” the same reporter wants to know. “No, sir,” says Aslanyan. The reporter tries again: “Do you take drugs or alcohol?”  “What is drugs?” asks Aslanyan, and he still has that serious, wide-eyed look. He must be on something, or maybe he’s newly off something. Either way, his delusion has completely engulfed him, and this makes him compelling to watch, despite the fact that he’s just done something egregious.

Harmony Korine, Caput, 2011, still with James Franco at the center.

The scenes from Aslanyan’s arrest reminded me of James Franco’s recent art world contribution, Rebel, a show backed by MOCA and held offsite in a Hollywood building owned by furniture dealer JF Chen. The show features work by Paul McCarthy, Aaron Young, Harmony Korine, and others, including Franco, and was inspired by the 1955 Nicolas Ray film, Rebel Without a Cause. That film stars James Dean, of course, and has a high-speed race in it, which ends with the death of a too-cool-for-school kid named Buzz. Dean himself died at high speeds, and a ruined replica of the car his car hit stands erect at the entrance to the MOCA show.

But I think it was Aslanyan’s white t-shirt that triggered the comparison. Franco wears one in the film Harmony Korine directed for Rebel, though Franco’s t-shirt has a black and white head of James Dean on the front. In Korine’s film — and a number of other works in the show — Franco appears as James Dean, or as Franco-as-James-Dean, since this show revels in everything “meta.” He and an army of women on bmx bikes are about to take on the gang of Sal Mineo (Mineo played “Plato” in Rebel without a Cause), also all female. The women get naked and wield machetes, murdering each other as blood accumulates. The men face off, too, and Franco beheads his rival.

It was all shot in a downtown L.A. parking lot, but at JF Chen’s space, it plays inside a bungalow like those at the Chateau Marmont, where director Nicolas Ray stayed while filming the original Rebel. Ray and Natalie Wood (Dean’s costar in Rebel without a Cause) are rumored to have had an affair in this bungalow, and Franco’s exhibition is full of sleekly fabricated, replicated bungalow. Videos, including one where Paul McCarthy gives a Natalie Wood look-alike a bath in goo, screen in most. When the show opened on May 14, the bungalows had clean facades. But as of June 5^th, the exhibition had been “vandalized,” blood red pigment splattered all over, obscenities painted over doorways and blow-up sex dolls scattered around the pool area (which the show has to make its site really resemble a hotel) and the landscaping. There’s a lot of red splatter.

Installation view of Rebel, post vandalism.

This kind of vandalism feels like a privileged, adolescent attempt at rebellion, like the kid who rebels by destroying his own expensive toys. These artists have a great space, and a budget. But while they’ve scraped the surface of the covert relationships and weirdness that lurk beneath an iconic, cinematic idea of rebellion, they can’t get much deeper because there’s so little subtlety in their tool box, and there might not be much sincerity either. No one involved in the Rebel show can possibly believe red paint that looks like blood taps into the psychological aimlessness and angst that made James Dean’s rebel iconic, can they?

Remember that scene where Dean and Wood are sitting under a tree and Wood tells Dean he shouldn’t believe what she says when she’s with the rest of the kids? “Nobody acts sincere,” she says, and then Dean kisses her on the forehead, a gesture that reminds us the rebellion Dean, Wood and Sal Mineo channeled in 1955 wasn’t actually “without cause.” The characters didn’t feel they belonged to the world they saw around them and so were hiding out from that world’s insincerity with each other.

While the Rebel show at JF Chen closes tomorrow night, those of you in L.A. can see a better, subtler extension of it, Rebel Dabble Babble, at the Box LA in Little Tokyo through June 7.