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Best of 2015 – Jennifer Moon, Jemima Wyman, and Robby Herbst at Commonwealth & Council

admin — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 08:00:39 +0000

As part of our ten-year anniversary celebrations, we’re considering the best of a decade of arts criticism. Today’s selection comes from the editor in chief of our sister publication, Art Practical: Kara Q. Smith opines, “It’s not easy to write about three shows in 1,000 words, but what I love about this review by Matt Stromberg is his ability to nod to the [California] art history that informs these artists while synthesizing the contemporary acuteness of the projects at hand. Spend some time revisiting each one, they’ll feel as prescient as ever.” This article was originally published on December 1, 2015.

Jennifer Moon. JLS (Jennifer Laub Smasher), 2015; K’NEX, Habitrail tubes, Popsicle sticks, foam sheets, ceramic 3D print figurines, electrical wire, electrical tape, dental floss, hemp, duct tape, wood, inkjet prints, cardboard, construction paper, foamcore, fabric, folding table; 2 parts: approx. 68 ½ x 156 x 152 in.; 77 x 48 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles.

As contemporary art seems to be increasingly the province of the 1%, with continual record-breaking auctions, it may be difficult to appreciate the revolutionary origins of modernism. Early 20th-century art movements like Constructivism, Futurism, and Dada sought an aesthetic, social, and political break with the past, often with utopian goals for the future. A trio of solo shows at Commonwealth & Council aim to reinvigorate contemporary art with this revolutionary zeal.

With her Phoenix Rising series, Jennifer Moon explores the revolutionary potential of love, with ample doses of candor and humor. One particularly memorable image from Phoenix Rising, Part 2 features Moon seated in a “Black Panther”-style wicker chair, with her Pomeranian at her feet, both of them wearing matching red berets. For Moon, the personal is indeed political. A far cry from Kazimir Malevich’s severe, stark black square, Moon’s work is idiosyncratic and playful, though her aims are no less radical. Phoenix Rising, Part 3: Laub, Me, and The Revolution (The Theory of Everything) resembles a junior-high-school science fair exhibit that provides a blueprint for revolution on both a macro and micro scale. The centerpiece is JLS (Jennifer Laub Smasher) (2015), a model made of Popsicle sticks and construction toys that snakes through the gallery. It resembles a DIY version of the Large Hadron Collider, only instead of smashing protons together, it will send Moon and her partner Laub hurtling toward one another at the speed of light. Instead of the Higgs boson particle, they are searching for a new form of love free from “hierarchies, binaries, and capital,” as an explanatory panel states. 3D-printed figures of the pair stand at the entry point, ready to embark on their experiment. It is a charming and whimsical riff on quantum theory.

Jennifer Moon. 3CE: A Relational Love Odyssey, 2015; HD Video; 11:15; edition of 3 + 1 AP. Courtesy of the Artist and Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles.

The two have also produced a video, 3CE: A Relational Love Odyssey (2015), modeled on the reboot of the popular science series Cosmos. Adopting the wide-eyed wonder of Neil deGrasse Tyson, Moon and Laub appear in front of the green-screened cosmos, or idyllic nature scenes, as they narrate our journey toward a new society. The work has a lighthearted tone, but there is no irony as they implore us to “surf the empathic waves of relational love.” The sincerity of their welcoming and expansive revolutionary vision is compelling.

Jennifer Moon. GFT (Gut Fairies Transplant), 2015; mouth blown glass, wood, vinyl tubing, fecal matter, condom, ass-wipe, rocks, sand, charcoal, filtered water, corks, Prehnite with Epidote crystal, Blue Calcite crystal, Smoky Quartz crystal, refrigerator, inkjet prints, cardboard, construction paper, foamcore, fabric, folding table; 2 parts: approx. 64 x 275 x 21 in.; 77 x 48 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles.

Moon turns from the abstract concept of love to the very concrete trillions of microbes that make up our gut biome with GFT (Gut Fairies Transplant) (2015). It resembles a mad scientist’s lab, with curiously shaped glass vessels—hand-blown by Laub—flanking a fridge full of corked jars of, well, shit, discreetly labeled with “LAUB” or “JENNIFER.” The piece sets the stage for a symbiotic fecal transplant merging their “second brains,” as the gut biome is often referred to. What kind of empathy would be engendered if we were united not by beliefs, but by the trillions of microscopic organisms that literally make us up? Moon’s revolution is not characterized by a joyless severity often associated with radicals. On the contrary, she makes the complete overthrow of society seem fun and altogether possible.

Jemima Wyman. Conjuring Radical Openness, 2015 (center); bronze; 20 x 19 x 9 in.; unique edition of 3 + 1 A.P. Conjuring Power, 2015; DIY fabric-prints on cotton poplin, painted steel rods; site-specific installation; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles.

In her exhibition Conjuring Radical Openness, Jemima Wyman looks back to the historical use of design in service of revolution. Influenced by Soviet propaganda textiles of the ’20s and ’30s, Wyman’s fabric swaths feature hypnotic patterns that incorporate the masked faces of various contemporary protesters. She throws together disparate groups of the disgruntled, with little concern for shared geography or ideology. Michael Brown, Scientology, Free Gaza, anti-war, and pro-LGBTIQ all blend together in flowing fabrics of outrage. The ideas driving them are not Wyman’s; it is their methods she is interested in. From anonymity comes power and freedom. At the center of the hanging bolts of fabric, Wyman has placed a bronze bust made from a T-shirt wrapped around a head. There is only an empty void where the eyes should be, a monument to the communal protester that takes on a sinister tone. Contrasted with the breezy, cheerful prints, we are reminded of the divide between the hope of progress and the too-often disappointing post-revolution reality.

Robby Herbst. Body Surfing, 2015; colored pencil, gouache on watercolor paper; 22 ½ x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles.

Robby Herbst’s work also reflects a disconnect between idealism and how it is manifested. His series of colored pencil and gouache drawings depict scenes from the New Games movement of the early ’70s. Conceived as a non-competitive, community-based alternative to traditional sports, the first New Games Tournament was held in 1973 in Marin, California, ground zero for post-hippie New Age humanism. Herbst has rendered activities, like Hug Tag or Parachute Games, in luminous cyan, red, and yellow, with an illustration style reminiscent of progressive books of the time, such as The Joy of Sex. The colors don’t line up, giving the impression of an off-register printing press. The sensation of something being amiss is echoed by the intrusion of technological symbols in these bucolic images of teamwork. Some are a bit heavy-handed, like an iPhone hovering over a shaggy-haired group engaged in an amoeba race. In other pieces, Herbst nails the manner in which the inclusive, nontraditional culture of the Bay Area gave rise to an entrepreneurial tech industry that has co-opted the very values that made it possible. (How else to explain a company whose motto “Don’t Be Evil” seems sharply at odds with its decision to support the NSA’s far-reaching surveillance plan?) Across an image of people bodysurfing, Herbst has overlaid a corporate graphic that charts various stewards of the new economy, such as Airbnb and Uber, against an axis labeled “Increased Rate of Disruption.” Ironically, the chart bears some similarity to Moon’s explanatory panels, though containing vastly different notions of disruption.

Jennifer Moon: Phoenix Rising, Part 3: Laub, Me, and the Revolution (The Theory of Everything); Jemima Wyman: Conjuring Radical Openness; and Robby Herbst: New Games were on view at Commonwealth & Council in Los Angeles through December 19, 2015.

Jennifer Moon, Jemima Wyman, and Robby Herbst at Commonwealth & Council

Matt Stromberg — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 08:00:10 +0000

Jennifer Moon. 3CE: A Relational Love Odyssey, 2015; HD Video; 11:15; edition of 3 + 1 AP. Courtesy of the Artist and Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles.

Robby Herbst. Body Surfing, 2015; colored pencil, gouache on watercolor paper; 22 ½ x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles.

Jennifer Moon: Phoenix Rising, Part 3: Laub, Me, and the Revolution (The Theory of Everything); Jemima Wyman: Conjuring Radical Openness; and Robby Herbst: New Games are on view at Commonwealth & Council in Los Angeles through December 19, 2015.

Summer Reading – No one cares about art criticism: advocating for an embodiment of the avant-garde as an alternative to capitalism

admin — Sat, 22 Aug 2015 07:00:26 +0000

Today we continue our Summer Reading series with an essay on art criticism and poetry from our friends at Temporary Art Review. Author Steven Cottingham throws down a challenge: “How can art criticism be so close to art but fail to reflect any of its spirit? […] Maybe there is a future where art criticism is no longer a supplementary, reactionary activity. Maybe it can become revolutionary.” This article was originally published on March 23, 2015.

Jenny Holzer. You Are a Victim of the Rules You Live By, n.d.

There’s an increasingly old adage, first invoked by Brion Gysin, stating that innovations in writing are fifty years behind innovations in visual art. But surely innovations in art criticism are a further fifty years behind.

In Parkett 84, Charles Bernstein argues that “art criticism, insofar as it succumbs to a paranoiac fear of theatricality that induces frame-lock, lags behind poetry at its peril.” I am going to argue the same: identifying professionalism—and therefore capitalism—as the key catalysts behind art criticism’s undying crisis.

In a 2008 feature for X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, Damon Willick elucidates how art criticism has “seemingly been in crisis for at least the last fifty years.” I could list off a dozen other articles and a couple conferences vaguely articulating the “crisis in criticism,” (I’m sure you’ve seen them lurking out there) but I’d rather offer something else. Willick says that “today’s discontents have idealized [Clement] Greenberg and critics of his era as the antithesis of the noncommittal, jargon-laden art historians/critics they believe have guided art criticism to its current state.” But even the preeminent critic Greenberg himself opined that “contemporary art criticism is absurd not only because of its rhetoric, its language, and its solecisms of logic. It is also absurd because of its repetitiousness.” That was in 1962.

Art criticism, once practiced almost solely by poets, now has very little in common with contemporary poetry. Leaving the flamboyant realms of Guillaume Apollinaire, Frank O’Hara, and other dead white men, art criticism became stolid, academic, and serious. But I was reading about how William S. Burroughs looked to painting to “revive” his writing. Inspired by the likes of Hannah Höch and Nancy Spero, he borrowed techniques of collage, cut-up, and chance, and applied them to the written word. Poet and criminal defence attorney Vanessa Place draws from long-standing traditions in conceptual art when she moves words from courtroom transcripts, unaltered, to her books of poetry. Once, she tweeted, “Poetry is now fifteen minutes ahead of art.” I retweeted her. These conceptual techniques are increasingly interdisciplinary, en route to fully being embraced by a broader mass culture. Yet art criticism lags on, both the subjects and styles of its reviews as isolated and protected as an artwork in a white cube. All of it, ignoring so much.

Read the full article here.

Remnants of Revolution: Writing on the Wall in Barcelona

Celie Dailey — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 07:00:33 +0000

Cities are filled with innumerable details and a foreign land can be barrage of data. In Barcelona, on a walk, I drift from details of leafy building ornamentation to blank walls of flaking stucco, submerged in texture of all kinds. Man’s signs are everywhere, waiting to be decoded. Though I know nothing of graffiti, I am captivated by the drawing, the view of a flat space, and the obscured messages.

Places layer upon each other when moving through an unknown city. I think of Brooklyn one evening, looking for a friend’s house, walking on an empty shuttered street, but here it is mid-afternoon in the neighborhood of Gràcia and the shops are closed. As it was, I became enamored with murals and I had George Orwell‘s Homage to Catalonia in my hands.

“More shots rang out. The bullets from the tower were flying across the street and a crowd of panic-stricken people were rushing down the Ramblas, away from the firing; up and down the street you could hear snap – snap – snap as the shop-keepers slammed the steel shutters over their windows.”

A need to protect property has endowed Barcelona with a kind of blank canvas, the shutters that guard the glass windows of shops. Doors roll down over the whole storefront, blocking the ability to window-shop while the store is closed. Then, there is art that comes to fill the void.

Diverse and striking murals line the streets of Gràcia. With tight streets that give the feeling the old village it once was, Gràcia is located inland from the touristic Ramblas promenade and nightclubs, and outside of wide, octagonal grid of Eixample. The feeling is that graffiti is allowed here; it is tolerated and it is loved.

Within the graffiti world, the opponents of the status quo are often in dialogue and in opposition with each other–murals are painted over, tags are obliterated, layers of messages cake the neighborhood walls.

“For under the surface-aspect of the town, under the luxury and growing poverty, under the seeming gaiety of the streets, with their flower-stalls, their many-colored flags, their propaganda-posters, and thronging crowds, there was an unmistakable and horrible feeling of political rivalry and hartred.”

Graffiti, viewed as vandalism shows a deteriorated neighborhood, but the same image viewed as art endows the neighborhood with a sense of place and identity. Being there is a more valuable experience for some.

The Guardian reported in their December 2010 article “Barcelona shopkeepers face fines over graffiti decoration” that city officials having been cracking down the street art, from graffiti tags to commissioned works, calling it “antisocial behavior” that “degrades urban fabric.” Sometimes the murals are decorative or creative works but often the paintings seems associated with the stores themselves, working as signs. The quality of the murals varies from door to door and even if not great art, they add to the city’s character.

“They had hauled down their red flag and hoisted the Catalan national flag. On the Telephone Exchange, the starting-point of all the trouble, the Catalan national flag and the Anarchist flag were flying side by side.”

In the most revolutionary of times that Orwell witnessed, the anarchist and the Catalan flag were flying together; a duality was persevered. When the anarchists were quelled, their flag came down. In Orwell’s time, the city was thriving with propaganda posters and messages carved in walls. Spain was being torn apart into conflicting groups struggling for control. Civilians were thrust into the midst, and on the anti-Franco side, opposition groups splintered apart.

“Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the barbers’ shops were Anarchist notices (the barbers were mostly Anarchists) solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves. In the streets coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes.”

Graffiti shows current situations and trends. It responds first, and because its creation happens in public, it is seen immediately. Its goal is often to ignite social change. In the mural above, it is the message to preserve the neighborhood-community-vila, though the idea of finding a Catalan identity in art began around the turn of the century. The mural speaks of a dichotomy, resist and create popular culture, with references to “Block bloc” and fiery collapsing cityscape. Outsiders should not dictate identity it seems to say.

Seeing the flames, the Eurozone firewall comes to mind, recently raised again to protect Europe from Spain’s economic problems. High rates of unemployment plague the country and its youth. Vibrancy is on the streets but shops and restaurants are dull and expensive. Predominant culture feels worn out.

Imitations of traditional culture are propagated for the sake of tourism. On a windy late winter day, I walk through the village of Barceloneta where seafood restaurants serving paella all along its oceanfront have mostly empty expansive seating, but a few blocks into the interior and there is a crowded bar serving hot battered seafood and beer. The tourists are not here to fill up the tourist joints.

The spirit of revolution persists in home-made posters instructing social action. A stenciled sign tells me that I am welcome here but that the rental of a holiday apartment is destroying the local socio-culutral fabric.

“I turned around and saw some youths, with rifles in their hands and the red and black handkerchiefs of the Anarchists round their throats, edging up a side-street…”

Remnants of revolution are all over the city. Orwell characterizes Barcelona as “a town with a long history of street fighting.” His book gives a cross section of the Spanish Civil War, but even before that, Barcelona’s streets saw many sieges on the city through the Catalonian Civil War, Nine Years’ War, War of the Spanish Succession, and the Peninsular War, as well as the infamous Tragic Week (1909) which pitted the national army against the working class, probably still in the minds of Barcelonans during the Spanish Civil War. With the Republican government overthrown, Franco’s dictatorship ruled Spain until his death in 1978.

An election last November in the midst of economic troubles brought a change from the socialist policy of Zapatero to the conservative Popular Party headed by Rajoy. Depictions of the hammer and sickle can be found all over the city. Imposed on Spain’s flag, the symbol seem to be leftist or anti-fascist, though not clearly socialist, communist, or anarchist. Some have been defaced with spray paint, showing political factions among those who paint the streets.

“…every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties…”

Barcelona stores were used as prisons during the Spanish Civil War. Today, scenes behind those walls often remain a mystery and shop hours are often sporadic. When a location that I’ve walked by several times is suddenly awake, an open shutter radiantly changes the general street scene.

On a narrow Gràcia sidewalk, I see the depiction of human lethargy and weakness on the door of an evangelical church that holds its services behind there. I’ve seen other murals by this artist around town that show creatures vomiting in this same black and white linear style that looks like hair or scales. A different painter has picked up on this same idea of ornamental overlay on the figure-it seems right out of Barcelona and its sea of tiny detail, but lacks the grandiose design. Instead, the ornamental detail in the figures below seems to be weighed down by their repetitious form.

“…its huddle of human bodies, its lack of furniture – just the bare stone floor, one bench and a few ragged blankets – and its murky light, for the corrugated steel shutter had been drawn over the windows. On the grimy walls revolutionary slogans – ‘Visca POUM!’ ‘Viva la Revolución!’ and so forth – had been scrawled. The place had been used as a dump for political prisoners for the months past.”

Andrea Michaelsson’s Amy Winehouse appeared on the BTOY Flickr photostream on August 11, 2011 for the first time, over a month before the singer’s death. Known for her depictions of women, her paintings of Winehouse show her cultural intuition. Winehouse’s death makes her stenciled image ghost-like. Another woman I find in her stencil style is actress Ginger Rogers.

Andrea’s focus on celebrity as power embraces popular thought and shows powerful women within the existing structure. Her icons are gorgeous, but work to transform their world through their creative endeavors. She looks outside her culture for many of her inspiring figures that she displays on her hometown streets.

“The safest thing at present was to look as bourgeois as possible. We frequented the fashionable residential quarter of the town, where our faces were not known, went to expensive restaurants and were very English with the waiters. For the first time in my life I took to writing things on walls. The passageways of several smart restaurants had ‘Visca POUM!’ scrawled on them as large as I could write it.”

The problems that Spain faces are hunched on the back of its citizens. The individual, however, can do very little it seems. We are told to be confident and continue spending so that the economy can bounce back. Graffiti often evades consumer culture and their use of the rolling door might be in protest, though their art is essential decoration and contributes to the sense of place that is Barcelona.

The “aftermath of the financial crisis” according to the nytimes.com is “grim”: “about half the age group under 25 out of work; €600 billion, or $820 billion, in mortgages outstanding after the end of a construction boom two years ago; and an exchange rate overvalued by 10 percent according to the European Commission. Productivity and competitiveness are low.” So many of us today are young artists in a challenged economy. The young artist in a challenged economy is an archetype of our current world, and it is not just the young people of Spain that face such a fate. Concepts drive us all forward. The young struggling artist is not unique to Spain, though they certainly face a challenge in a unique heritage.

Looking outlined in chalk, on an old wooden door, a crab holds a camera whose lens is labeled luna, illustrating the meaning of the phrase “shoot the moon”.

“In such places things happen quickly, the factions are ready-made, everyone knows the local geography, and when the guns begin to shoot people take their places almost as in a fire drill.”

That impression of preparedness to fight led Orwell to remark on Barcelona’s history of street fighting. Today, graffiti artists struggle to define and speak to their own culture. Messages scrawled on the wall are not a new form of expression, but one of the most basic means of public communication, and graffiti is international in scope. Theirs is an artform that is expressive, decorative and essential to street life in Barcelona and elsewhere. They desire to contribute to a Spanish identity that is not sculpted by financial gain. It is landscape rich with ideas and idealism needed to move culture out of the old world. Graffiti is the voice of a highly fractured group, but there is a unifying message about the power of art.

All photographs by Celie Dailey.