Jasper Johns, "Map," 1961, Encaustic, oil, and collage, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Art (C) Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

A block of Grand Avenue in downtown L.A. was  completely blocked off a few days ago, but hanging across the barricades was a big red arrow pointing down Bunker Hill with “jurors” written across it. No other signs told passers-by anything about the construction or about detours, but to let the jurors get lost would be un-American. A friend of mine, an artist, was recently “Juror one” in an L.A. case thrown out after only a day. In that day, however, she parked below Disney Concert Hall and got in for free at MOCA. Jurors, it turns out, get certain perks.

Robert Rauschenberg, "Canyon," 1959, oil, housepaint, pencil, paper, fabric, metal, buttons, nails, cardboard, printed paper, photographs, wood, paint tubes, mirror string, pillow & bald eagle on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.

The jury happened to include another, younger self-declared artist, who at first struck my friend as savvy.  The two of them decided to visit MOCA together, and, walking through the room with the Johns and Rauschenberg work from the museum’s permanent collection, G. asked the question: “Rauschenberg or Johns? Who’s best?” “Well, I really liked those Rothko’s,” the kid she was with said, “but I guess Rauschenberg, if I had to choose, but Pollock’s my favorite.” Clearly, he didn’t get it. Rauschenberg vs. Johns is the litmus test. Your answer shines a mirror on what you want from the world, and on the art scene, it’s a way better personality gauge than, say, Meyers Briggs: The repressed, introverted and calculating Johns vs. the all-out exhibitionist Rauschenberg.

Jasper Johns owned the work of indomitable ceramicist and Dadaist Beatrice Wood, currently the Santa of a Monica Museum of Art retrospective. Wood attended the Arensberg salon (“an inconceivable orgy of sexuality, jazz and alcohol,” according to artist Francis Picabia’s wife), with Duchamp in the 1910s, and then continued art-making, mostly in California, for the rest of the century, until her death in the late 1990s. She made drawings, figurative ceramic sculptures and then whole armies of outlandish teapots, plates and cups, getting all the more daring as she got older. One teapot from 1983 is shaped like a fish. Johns never owned that one, however. The two of the works that were his in the current show include a small brown chalice and a gold plate, both relatively conservative objects but both still exorbitantly shiny, fair examples of the Wood’s oeuvre.  It’s hard to imagine Rauschenberg choosing those two though; I imagine him going for the bolder, weirder shapes—like the teapot with figures dancing on the lid.

Beatrice Wood in her studio

Wood wrote a book called I Shock Myself in 1985, beginning with the line, “While the substance of ceramics is clay and chemicals, the stuff of life is most certainly people.” Which, I guess, is why thinking about the fact that Johns owns Wood, and playing the Rauschenberg vs. Johns game remain endlessly interesting: they acknowledge that what art you want and like have some bearing on who you are as a person.

Marco Brambilla, "Civilization (Megaplex)," 2010, 3-D High Definition disc. Private collection, London.

“I believe we were born dead,” said motorcyclist-daredevil Evel Knievel, rambling to Sports Illustrated in 1968. He’d just cleared 16 cars in Gardena, CA, before crashing over the fountains at Cesare’s Palace, and was romanticizing about future stunts. “I have accepted the fact that dying is a part of living,” he continued. “If I make it across the Grand Canyon, I’ll be a millionaire. But I’m not all jacked up to make a big killing. I want to do this thing because I want to do this thing. I don’t know if it’s going to make a worthwhile contribution to society or transportation, but I’m going to do it.” He never jumped the canyon; no one with sway—the U.S. government in particular—would let him. But if he had, he’d have had an audience big enough to fill a stadium.  He knew it too: “if I have to get off halfway across[,] [o]ne hundred thousand people aren’t going to say ‘boo.’’’

Madness meets mechanics, brazenness meets skill—it’s the combination of real dexterity and superhuman (crazy) ambition that can turn a man with a motorcycle into a crowd pleasing phenom.

Stuntman Evel Knievel jumping 140 feet at 90 mph over 13 buses at Wembley Stadium, May 27th, 1975. He crashed upon landing. Photo by David Ashdown.

There’s something of this outlandish, expert ambition coursing through Marco Brambilla’s current exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Hailed as the world’s first exhibition of 3-D video art–a claim to fame that’s admittedly tinny (3-D film exists; how much back-patting does art deserve for catching up?)–the real pull of Brambilla’s show lies in the mad scope of its technique.

Angelino by way of Italy and New York, Brambilla has been filmmaking since the ’70s, experimenting, pushing buttons, keeping abreast of innovation. He’s known for appropriating blockbuster film clips and other iconic imagery, though the virtuosic density with which he pieces his appropriations back together is what makes him so singular. Most recently, he turned Kanye West’s egotism into magic, with his surreal, seductive video for the celestial single, “Power.” He also reportedly stole the show at the Loop video art fair in Barcelona, where Christopher Grimes Gallery featured his Evolution (Megaplex) in 3-D.

Marco Brambilla, "Wall of Death," 2001, Single-channel video. Collection New Line Cinema, Los Angeles.

The Santa Monica Museum show includes ten years’ worth of work, highlighting Brambilla’s savvy as  borrower as well as visionary.  When you enter the gallery—you’ll pick up your 3-D glasses on the way in, and save them until the very end—you first encounter Sea of Tranquility (2006), a grainy loop based on images of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing; then the pulsating, multi-layered Cathedral (2008), a kaleidoscopic fantasia of shots of mall shoppers; followed by HalfLife (2002), which, grainy again, invasively pairs surveillance footage of gamers with footage of the games they play. But it’s when you get to the fourth gallery space and see Wall of Death that the exhibition really begins to show its grit.

Long before Evel Knievel, motorcyclists performed the gravity-defying Wall of Death trick, often as a carnival sideshow. The “Wall” is the 20-30 foot vertical wooden side of a cylindrical drum that cyclists ride around after building up enough speed to coast horizontal to the floor. In Brambilla’s Wall, reimagined using black and white 1930s footage, the rider circles the drum endlessly, throwing up his hands in a magnetic gesture of showmanship. Brambilla used the Kinetoscope films popular in the early 1900s as the inspiration for his editing, and the loop has a quaint, vintage feel.

If Wall of Death depicts daredevilry, the show’s final two works, Evolution (Megaplex) (2010) and Civilization (Megaplex) (2008/2011), are themselves feats of daredevilry. They combine hundreds of looped videos from iconic films into scrolling inferno-like, 3-D opuses. They give gaping pictures of civilization as dark and complicated as Peter Jackson’s Mordor or Heironymus Bosch’s The Last Judgment. Crawling naked bodies from Pasolini’s Salo, Clint Eastwood striding forward, and the romantic soundtrack of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet—the panorama of references scrolls on and on. You feel as if you could fall in to the imagery headfirst and be lost for eons.

Yet, despite the undeniable impressiveness of Evolution and Civilization, it’s Wall of Death that remains for me the most exquisite and compelling of Brambilla’s works. To depict the totality of humanity in a manner worthy of both Spielberg and Dante is a feat, but to get at one man’s insatiable, tireless desire to perform the impossible? That’s precious because it’s particular.

Andrew Lord: between my hands to water falling, selected works from 1990 to 2010 Installation, 2010. Courtesy Santa Monica Museum of Art. Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studio.

The poet Frederick Seidel once received a death threat. It came via answering machine, in the form of a message left by a young woman. In a breathy voice, the woman said, “Frederick Seidel . . . Frederick Seidel . . . you think you’re going to live. You think you’re going to live. But you’re not. You’re not going to live. You’re not going to live . . . .” It was repetitive and frightening, but it also seemed like the wrong kind of threat to give a poet like Siedel. Even if he didn’t want to die, he knew he would. Much of his poetry fixates on that very fact, though the way he writes about death and the life that leads up to it often unnerves readers. “Give me Everest or give me death,” he writes  in Climbing Everest. “A naked woman my age is a total nightmare /but right now one is coming through the door/. . . She kisses the train wreck in the tent and combs his white hair.”  Verses like these that marry unexpected privilege with bodily dilapidation and a flash of meanness are hard to forget.

If Siedel’s poems were made of clay, each would more or less resemble an Andrew Lord sculpture: the crevices, fluids and disruptions of the human body would be unapologetic, ungainly and honest. Yet they would maintain a strange veneer of sophistication. Lord knows how to turn a clay vessel into a receptacle for everything corporal.

"Andrew Lord: between my hands to water falling, selected works from 1990 to 2010," Installation, 2010. Courtesy Santa Monica Museum of Art. Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studio.

between my hands to water falling, the current exhibition at Santa Monica Museum of Art, catalogues the past 20 years of Lord’s career and highlights four distinct bodies of work. Despite his irreverence, Lord, a British artist who began making art in the 1970s, plays into the revered tradition of ceramic vessels. In fact, his work, which has the air of something old and privileged, recalls Cellini’s Saltcellar at the same time that it recalls the childish ceramic mounds made by Michael Reafsnyder. For breathing, biting, swallowing, tasting, smelling, listening, watching, a series that began in 1994, Lord used impressions from his own body to shape the clay—a crude way of translating physical sensation into art objects. He literally bit, pressed into and clawed at his forms. The results are craggy gray vessels displayed on white pedestals. Siedel might say they look as though they’re “wrinkles of the ocean on a ball of tar.”

In smelling, the vessels are thin and elongated. In breathing, they have unevenly swelling bases, like balloons inflated by someone who has to regroup between each blow.  In swallowing, the most visceral of the series, the vessels are lumpy as if full of food and other objects, choking hazards that got lodged in the throat and never slid down. Though flesh-like and vulnerable, the sculptures in breathing, biting, swallowing, tasting, smelling, listening, watching are also glazed and embellished with streaks of gold coloring. Corporeality doesn’t have to be all grit.

"Andrew Lord: between my hands to water falling, selected works from 1990 to 2010," Installation, 2010. Courtesy Santa Monica Museum of Art. Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studio.

The untitled series, begun in 2004, reimagines ceramic work by Post-Impressionist Paul Gaugin. Lord emphasizes Gaugin’s weirdness over his voyeuristic self-importance and Lord’s blackish vessels double as caricatures and exotic creatures. Grouped together, they become an army of knotty bodies, an unromantic interpretation of Gaugin’s dabbling in the prehistoric. (Siedel wrote about Gaugin too, talking about a nose that, “looks like Guagin’s/ His silent huge hooked hawk prow”–and while noses in Lord’s work aren’t too imposing, there are some “hooked hawk” elbows).

Lord’s exhibition also includes two Fontana-like wall works with fleshy bumps protruding from them and a seven minute video of water gushing down a stream, the stream  that inspired Lord’s recent river Spodden series. The inadvertent effect of these inclusions is to emphasize how much more evocative Lord is when he works in ceramics.

Ceramics are possibly the most bipolar of the art mediums. When polished and over-crafted, they silence, even deny, life’s rawer aspects. But when handled with the virtuosic impertinence of a sculptor like Lord, they become a fleshed-out battlefield that pits refinement against ruin. between my hands to water falling, a collaboration with the Milton Keynes Gallery, continues at the Santa Monica Museum of Art through August 21st. A sister exhibition will open in the UK in September.

]]> https://www.dailyserving.com/2010/06/andrew-lords-bodies/feed/ 0 https://www.dailyserving.com/2010/01/sabbath-and-self-assurance/ https://www.dailyserving.com/2010/01/sabbath-and-self-assurance/#comments Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:31:49 +0000 http://dailyserving.com/?p=2827 L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Religion and art seem equally good at revealing people’s vulnerabilities, which is perhaps why the sacred often works so well as a subject for artists.

Nira Pereg, "Sabbath 2008," Still, 2008. One Channel High Definition Video with Sound, 7 min. 12 sec. loop, Edition of 7, 16:0 PAL 2 Ch Stereo. Courtesy Braverman Gallery, Tel-Aviv, Israel.

A month ago, I attended mass and was struck by how devout the acolyte looked, holding his brass candle-lighter and wearing his white robe. Then, following the service, I saw the same boy sans uniform, dressed in baggy jeans and impishly chasing girls through the parking lot. I did some cursory research after that, looking into how preteens came to be the church’s honorary lighters and snuffers of altar candles.

What I discovered wasn’t quite what I was looking for: the story of St. Tarcisius.

Tarcisius died at age 12, the victim of bad timing, bad laws, and misdirected passion. An acolyte in the early church, Tarcisius job probably didn’t differ much from today’s acolytes and altar boys: lighting candles, holding bibles, sitting and standing at the right times.

His problems began when a deacon came up missing (I don’t know whether said deacon fell victim to Roman centurions, or a common cold). No one could take the sacrament to the elderly and ill Christians, so Tarcisius hid the holy bread and wine under his coat– at this point, Christianity was against the law–and went out.

There’s some controversy over what happened next. Some say Tarcisius met two hostile Roman guards. Others say he met a group of boys, non-Christians his own age, some of them former playmates. I’m partial to this second version. In it, the boys asked Tarcisius to join their game (try as I might, I can’t picture them playing anything other than basketball), but he said “no,” maybe with a little too much self-importance (after all, he had Christ’s body and blood under his cloak). Feeling slighted, the boys began to tease  Tarcius, asking what he was hiding. Feeling bold and maybe even a little holier-than-thou, Tarcisius became stoically obstinate, like Joan of Arc joined with a little Paul Newman from Cool Hand Luke. One boy let slip that Tarcisius was Christian, unleashing a brutality that surprised Tarcisius’ assailants as much as it surprised him.

Kehinde Wiley, "Christian Martyr Tarcisius," 2008, oil on canvas; and the 1868 sculpture by Alexandre Falguiere French upon which it was based.

I thought of Tarcisius while at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (SMMOA) this weekend, watching Nira Pereg’s video Sabbath. While not at all about child brutality or premature martyrdom, Sabbath is about the self-importance that comes from having sacred responsibilities (or responsibilities somehow tied to something sacred) and it gives a pitch-perfect portrait of the sincerest kind of confidence, the kind that belongs only to those who believe in what they’re doing.

Set in orthodox Jerusalem neighborhoods, Pereg’s video depicts the ritualistic closing off of roads and thoroughfares in anticipation of the day of rest. Wobbly gates are dragged across streets, primarily by young men, and the grating of the metal upon the pavement is often the only sound. The video has the crisp, non-nonsense feel of a documentary.

In one scene, a teenager who has just positioned a final, unwieldy barrier across a relatively wide road urgently waves both hands, warning an approaching vehicle to stop; it won’t be let through. In another scene, a younger boy gets distracted mid-job and cluelessly stands in a merge lane until the honk of an oncoming car brings him back to attention.

Nira Pereg, "Sabbath 2008," Still, 2008. One Channel High Definition Video with Sound, 7 min. 12 sec. loop, Edition of 7, 16:0 PAL 2 Ch Stereo. Courtesy Braverman Gallery, Tel-Aviv, Israel.

The ritual of road-blocking seems like a rite of passage, and an empowering one. It makes you wonder if that endearing, confidence the young people in Sabbath display (there are older figures in Pereg’s work, too, but the young ones commanded most of my interest) could spill over into the other areas of their lives without coming off as self-righteous. But it also makes you painfully aware of the fact that road blocks can keep confidence contained.