Dorit Cypis, The Rest in Motion 1, 2002, C-print.

Joshua Harris’ book I Kissed Dating Goodbye starts with a nightmare: Anna stands at the alter in her white dress in a pictaresque chapel facing her soon-to-be-husband, David. She’s holding his hand. Then, as they begin to recite their vows, a girl walks up the aisle and takes David’s other hand. Another girl comes too, and takes hold of the first girl’s hand. Then a third girl comes, and so on, until a chain of six girls stand there. Anna wonders if it’s a joke. “Who are these girls?” she hisses.

“These are the girls from my past,” David says. They don’t matter to him now, he assures her, it’s just that they’ve each taken a piece of his heart.

“I thought your heart was mine,” says Anna.

“It is,” he says. “Everything that’s left is yours.”

A scenario like this, Harris will go on to argue, can be avoided. If you kiss dating goodbye.

His book, now sort of a millennial abstinence movement classic, came out in 1997. My mother, who still sometimes warns me to “save my heart” as if it’s a depletable resource, read it before I did. The heart part was only half the story, of course. The body part played a bigger, though less explicit, role. You had to save that too.

Dan Finsel, The Space Between You and Me: You borrow her dress, she borrows your boyfriend, 2012, Black and white photograph.

I picked up a newer book by Joshua Harris recently, called Sex is Not the Problem, and read something that I had heard directed toward women in some form or another during all my growing up years: “The way you dress can either help or hinder men around you who are trying to resist lust.” I mean, clearly there’s truth to that. But here’s what else Harris says: “Sure, guys can resist the temptation to lust, and it’s our responsibility to do so, but your dressing immodestly makes this very difficult.” And he adds, “There’s a difference between dressing attractively and dressing to attract.”

Is there? And is it the difference he thinks it is?

I must have still been an undergrad when I first started experiencing nude exhaustion. Already I’d been in art schools and the art world long enough to have seen too many so-so nude performances, photographs and paintings.  It was impossible to still think nakedness itself was seductive. But what I loved, and still love, are those beautiful, bodily movements that materials — fabric, clay, even industrial stuff like metal armatures and aluminum — can make. Dorit Cypis took a photograph in 2002, called The Rest in Motion, in which the billowing fabric of a curtain looks like a body’s bent-forward backside. You look at it and feel volume, softness. It attracts.

Installation view of Formwandler, Richard Telles Fine Art, 2012.

Another photograph I saw recently had a similar effect. It’s Dan Finsel’s, it’s installed in Richard Telles’ current show Formwandler and it’s called The Space Between You and Me: You borrow her dress, she borrows your boyfriend (2012). A black and white image, it shows a dark cloth over what must be a tall mound of clay. The cloth wrinkles, ripples and falls down, in some places past the wheels of the dolly that the clay rests on.

Finsel knows his large clay mounds, covered or not, look like bodies, and he uses bodies to shape them, often just hands. (“It’s like a romance,” he said in a video interview, while he and a dark-haired woman massaged the clay, their hands next to each other. “We’re barely touching each other, but you have to act like we’re thinking about it.”) Then, in some images and videos, a nude blond woman lays on red clay, shaping it with her weight. But in The Space Between You and Me, there’s no flesh visible. There’s not even clay visible. It’s fully dressed and the fabric alone suggests its bodily weight. It’s better, more sensual and suggestive, than any sheer skirt or spaghetti-strap top I’ve ever seen.

]]> https://www.dailyserving.com/2012/08/dress-attractively-or-dress-to-attract/feed/ 0 https://www.dailyserving.com/2012/04/its-embarassing/ https://www.dailyserving.com/2012/04/its-embarassing/#comments Fri, 06 Apr 2012 07:00:06 +0000 http://dailyserving.com/?p=25521 L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

B. Wurtz & Co. at Richard Telles Fine Art, Installation View

Two years ago, I met this guy, an artist from New York who was in L.A. to collaborate with an Indie rocker. I met him the day I was rendezvousing with someone I’d met through Twitter — we both wrote about art-like things, had similar taste, knew some of the same people and kept responding to one another’s tweets. So we thought we should meet in person. The Twitter friend had blogged about this New York artist (the one collaborating with the rocker) once and so the New York artist texted the Twitter friend to say, “Hi, I’m in L.A. Want to meet up?” The Twitter friend thought the New York artist was someone else, someone he knew better, and invited him to breakfast. After he figured out with whom he was breakfasting, and after they’d finished their meal, the Twitter friend, whom I had yet to meet in person, brought the New York artist with him to rendezvous with me. By the end of an afternoon spent gallery hopping in Culver City, the New York artist and I were convinced we’d met before. “Maybe at an opening or a party,” he said. “It’s a really small world we traffic in,” I said, meaning the art world is small. “I know,” he said. “It’s embarrassing.”

B. Wurtz & Co. at Richard Telles Fine Art, Installation View

I thought he was right: it is embarrassing to go to a meeting, reading, or opening and recognize half the people there. It impoverishes the world’s bigness and, sometimes, makes my own likes and interests seem about as wide and deep as a cocoon. But sometimes it also feels cozy.

B. Wurtz and Co., the show that’s up now at Richard Telles’ West Hollywood gallery, feels cozy. It’s about B. Wurtz — the New York-based artist who has been working since the 1970s, making delightfully, elegantly underwhelming art out of raw wood, plastic bags, wire hangers, stray socks and the like — and how he resonates with other artists who do or have worked in similar veins. The curator, Matthew Higgs, directs the New York alt space White Columns and chose the show’s title because he liked the title of a 2001 photography show that started at MoMA and traveled to The Getty: Walker Evans & Co. This earlier show delved into resonances between Depression-era documenter Evans, his contemporaries and his successors. Of course, Wurtz is different than Evans, in that he’s less famous and probably less immediately legible, but still, writes Higgs, the “serendipitous correspondences – both formal and psychological” between his work and the work of other artists are worth noting.

B. Wurtz, Untitled, detail, 2012, wood, plastic bags. Courtesy Richard Telles Fine Art.

When you walk in, you see plastic bags of staggered heights hung on thin wood poles attached to a wood stand by B. Wurtz. You see a pyramid of cobbled-together cat photographs by Vincent Fecteau on one wall and, on another wall, strips of rubber, locks of hair and paper twisted together by Richard Hawkins cascading down toward a shoe box on the floor. There is a framed collage of coin package wrappers lined up by Gabriel Kuri. Found objects are carefully re-purposed and composed in formally intelligent ways. Nothing even veers toward maximalism; this is minimalist abstraction made out of what you’d find blowing through the streets. It’s easier to appreciate if you’ve seen what minimalist abstraction looks like when it’s highly, expensively fabricated and commanding. This work commands and demands nothing; it’s happy to just exist for those who care to notice.

In an interview B.Wurtz may have conducted with himself (I have yet to confirm this, but the questions were certainly posed by someone particularly familiar with the artist), the interviewer asks where Wurtz made his work for a 1998 show. Wurtz answers, “in my apartment, the roof of my building, my studio, or a close friend’s garden. I saw no reason to go further.”