Craig Kauffman. Untitled, 2009; drape-formed plastic with acrylic lacquer & glitter.

Craig Kauffman has a shoe fetish. He’s had it since he was a child. “My mom wore high heels,” Kauffman explained in a 2008 interview, the same interview in which he talked about the affect campy lingerie ads from Frederick’s of Hollywood had on his adolescent mind. (“Blow-up bras, stuffed padded bras, rear ends,” Kauffman recalled. “[Frederick] was a genius.”) The work that stems directly from Kauffman’s fetish—dumb-fisted, transparent paintings that L.A. Times critic Christopher Knight recently referred to as “rather tepid”—is far from compelling. But the fact that the artist known for sleek, vacuum-formed abstractions lusts after stilettos and patent leather pumps? That is compelling, especially since freshly lacquered custom car parts are more often assumed to be Kauffman’s main muse.

New Work, Kauffman’s soon-to-close exhibition at Frank Lloyd Gallery, features two paintings of shoes, but these hang on an unobtrusive side wall. The central attraction, a series of delicate, drape-formed plastic shells that look like glitter-filled candy dishes, hang in the main gallery. The glitter is real and, like the acrylic wall reliefs Kauffman began making back in the 1960s, each shell has a perfectly smooth surface. The hot pink, aqua, Astroturf green, and lavender that color these sculptures have the manicured gloss suited to a Prada showroom.

Read the full review here.

Alex Bag and Ethan Kramer, Le Cruel et Curieux Vie du la Salmonellapod, 2000; (video still); 11:48 min.

With artworks cutting across history and displayed in groups of abstract logic, Aquatopia could be described as a conceptual survey; it explores its theme from diverse historical angles and artistic perspectives. Here, the ocean is a filter, a site for interpretation, a toolbox of images and relations, and a stage for the sexual, spiritual, scientific, and narrative imagination. Firmly framed in the fantastic, artworks and objects are relieved of their descriptive duties and instead evidence their author’s fears, dreams, and wonderment. The brilliant antique copper diving helmet, the set of biological scientific etchings, the eighteenth-century map—each inspires new associations beyond their original purpose.

Contemporary works seem in their element. Located in a handsome video cluster, Le Cruel et Curieux Vie du la Salmonellapod (2000), by Alex Bag and Ethan Kramer, is a double riff on the nature documentary format and the fantastic violence of romance (in the dreamed-up world of the disgusting, hilariously chimeric Salmonellapod), playing this subjectivity to amazing ends. Ashley Bickerton’s nylon-equipped Orange Shark (2008) is perfectly fits the exhibition, as does Spartacus Chetwynd’s squidlike fabric construction. Shimabuku’s Then, I decided to give a tour of Tokyo to the octopus from Akashi (2000)—one of my favorite artworks in any circumstance—exactly captures Aquatopia’s double exposure of the ocean as both unfathomable phenomenon and site for personal experience. Nearby, Herbert James Draper’s A Water Baby (1895) leaps out of its circular frame, absurd and absolute in its sea-foam sentimentality.

Liz Craft, Old Maid, 2004. Bronze, 9 x 53 x 24 in.

While lacking a seeming sense of order—none of the works are grouped according to type, subject, medium, or arranged historically or by origin—Aquatopia’s construction feels highly considered. At first, the exhibition’s historical leaps caused me to fear that the curators had chosen to rely too heavily on spurious juxtaposition. I was scared that the exhibition would simply be a collection of Interesting Things (related to the ocean), much like Leckey’s The Universal Addressability and other scattered, perhaps too fashionable, contemporary modes of curating. To a certain degree, the curatorial choices reflect a similar gesture: many works included in Aquatopia were not meant to be exhibited in this manner—or at all—and part of the pleasure of examining works like the aforementioned copper diving helmet comes from examining it as art, placed as it is in a display context. However, the majority of works in Aquatopia are proper contemporary artworks, built as such, and those not in this category were chosen carefully and seemed to become more of themselves in the context of the exhibition. Often, the works appear arranged in unmarked clusters, patterning between contemporary and historical: in one room, Guy Ben-Nar’s homemade interpretation of Moby Dick (2000) plays a few meters from Gustave Dorés’s prints from Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1876); in another, the lapping waves from the Otolith Group’s quest for the undersea Drexciya, depicted in its film Hydra Decapita (2010), wash over the small huddled body of Liz Craft’s bronze Old Maid (2004), lit from above through emerald and azure gels.

JMW Turner. Sunrise with Sea Monsters, 1845; oil on canvas; 36 x 48 in. Courtesy Tate, London

Aquatopia is perhaps a perfect summer exhibition for a museum of the size and scale of Nottingham Contemporary. It offers as much to devoted followers of contemporary art as it does to children, as the exhibition’s content and breadth is rich territory for the museum’s educational directors. While it included a number of powerful and hard-edged works, Aquatopia remains one of the most enjoyable museum exhibitions I’ve attended. It is full of drowned wrecks, humor, and irony, and functioning almost like a postcard for the show, one of James Turner’s finest paintings, Sunrise with Sea Monsters (1845). An unfinished work, it was titled only by its interpreters, who discovered monsters in Turner’s waves.

Aquatopia is on view at Nottingham Contemporary, in London, through September 22, 2013.

Craig Kauffman, "Untitled," 2009. Drape-formed plastic with acrylic lacquer & glitter.

Craig Kauffman has a shoe fetish. He’s had it since he was a child. “My mom wore high heels,” Kauffman explained in a 2008 interview, the same interview in which he talked about the affect campy lingerie ads from Frederick’s of Hollywood had on his adolescent mind. (“Blow up bras, stuffed padded bras, rear ends,” Kauffman recalled. “[Frederick] was a genius.”) The work that stems directly from Kauffman’s fetish—dumb-fisted, transparent paintings that L.A. Times critic Christopher Knight recently referred to as “rather tepid”—is far from compelling. But the fact that the artist known for sleek, vacuum formed abstractions lusts after stilettos and patent leather pumps? That is compelling, especially since freshly lacquered custom car parts are more often assumed to be Kauffman’s main muse.

New Work, Kauffman’s soon-to-close exhibition at Frank Lloyd Gallery, features two paintings of shoes, but these hang on an unobtrusive side wall. The central attraction, a series of delicate, drape-formed plastic shells that look like glitter-filled candy dishes, hang in the main gallery. The glitter is real and, like the acrylic wall reliefs Kauffman began making back in the 1960s, each shell has a perfectly smooth surface. The hot pink, aqua, Astroturf green, and lavender that color these sculptures have the manicured gloss suited to a Prada showroom.

Liz Craft, "Candy Colored Clown," 2010. Metal, bronze and yarn.

Similar colors characterize Liz Craft’s current exhibition Death of a Clown, on view four doors down from Kauffman’s in Patrick Painter Inc. Caft’s show includes imposing metal screens on which clown faces have been created out of bronze vases, ceramic dishes and thick colored yarn; two clowns, one laughing and one crying, impressionistically sculpted with Giacometti-like license; a tiered table; a witch face; and an orange-haired girl who looks like Milais’s Ophelia might have had she died a hippie on a grandmotherly pink couch. Bruce Hainley once wrote, “Craft is never not crafty in her deployment of materials,” the double negative mimicking the way Craft’s aggressive material choices negate her domestic, decorative subjects. Loopy and comedic though her subjects are, Craft’s perversion of bronze, steel and fiberglass is dead serious and it’s also part of the reason Death of a Clown speaks to Kauffman’s New Work.

While Kauffman’s sculptures are ethereal, Craft’s are industrial and opaque; while Kauffman’s are abstract, Craft’s are representational. While Kauffman belonged to The Cool School, the group of ‘60s artists who equated artmaking with machismo and made Los Angeles a scene, Liz Craft was Too Cool for School, according to a catchy Spin Magazine article Dennis Cooper wrote about her and her UCLA cohorts. Yet both sculptors fixate on material objects, both have a notoriously Californian obsession with commercial material and fetish-finishes, and both work in the realm of warped whimsy (though I’m not sure if Kauffman means to be as warped as Craft does).

Craig Kauffman, "Untitled," 2009. Drape-formed plastic with acrylic lacquer & glitter.

When I imagine Kauffman and Craft’s exhibitions merging–and I often do, even though I know the two wouldn’t and probably shouldn’t ever come together–it’s a deliciously disjointing opus in which Kauffman’s dishes protrude from Craft’s clown faces, or sit on top of her fiberglass furniture. The work of Kauffman, once associated with machismo, plays the stereotypically delicate, feminine role. The work of Craft, always prodding the domestic, plays the more heavy-handed stereotypically masculine role. This inversion is satisfying.