Uncategorized – un-pub-lished

Superficiality Is A Place I Go

Published on March 6, 2024March 6, 2024 by Posted by Georgia

An unpublished essay written by Georgia in 2016.

Superficiality Is A Place I Go

Prologue

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My grandmother Shirley was survived by her third husband Sam by nearly four years, and when he finally died, it was the last time to empty the house. Though prior to her death she had attempted to give my sister and I everything, this proved difficult in the distance between Boston and South Florida (picture airport security ripping open a mysterious and meticulously packed box of crystal Ralph Lauren rocks glasses, or a carry-on tote filled awkwardly with high-heeled shoes and leather Falci purses.) Understandably, the large items never made it on the plane, you know, furniture, mirrors, rugs, things like that. Anyways several months later it was last call;

was there anything I wanted from the house, before the estate sale began, or before the trucks hauled everything off to Goodwill? I have a happy memory of the sunroom off that house, a long, shining, white-tiled room surrounded by glass at the edge of a golf-course; in the center was a kind of perfect still life; a white wicker chaise with white cushions, a stack of magazines probably on top of a white garden seat, and the flat black and white Zebra rug, adding a little Chinoiserie drama to the stark white room; it was beautiful, and profoundly Palm Beach. Of course I wanted the rug.

Some time later I opened a badly-handled cardboard box to find a large, floppy and incomprehensible thing in my hands. Holding it up in front of me, I had no idea what it was. It could have been moments or hours before I realized it was my rug, from the sunroom, from the sunroom by the chaise. Up close and tactile, removed from my mind and put into my hands, its Palm Beach glamor faded; and then as I laid it on the floor it returned. This thing in my mind called rug was hardly a rug at all; it was a painting, that we walked on. In a way there aren’t really words to describe what this means to me. After all these years I’ve become an artist, and a decorator of sorts, too, unable to give up either. I miss everyone and everything from that time.

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Picture an office in a basement somewhere; gritty drop-ceiling, leak stained and brown-ish; half-burned out fluorescents behind that thick textured plastic effecting a dull, unflattering light; and a deep, hollow silence, like pressing your ear to the opening of a seashell. What’s weird, or unique, about seashells is that they sound like the ocean, which is where they came from; as displaced objects they embody not just the physical trace of their origins, but the aural one, too; for me it’s the sound inside the shell that becomes transportive, and in this sense I think of it as a memory. The space we’re standing in is A402, a CalArts campus gallery that defies logic in its non-conventionality, at least for institutional purposes. There’s no track lighting, the ceilings are low and distracting, and there’s that half-ocean half-ghost sound, whistling and gently rattling through different shapes of pipes and other ventilation, all out of sight. I’m trying to say you can’t stand in this place and really be here. Everything about it is completely unstable. It resists gallery-ness, office-ness, art-ness, grounded-ness generally. To me it is a space that remakes itself in every incarnation, and I have never entered it twice and seen it in the same way. By nature of its architecture, its disrepair, its noisiness, it is in a constant state of re-imagination. It reminds me of a kind of thought space I could only inhabit when I was a child, when tin foil and toilet paper tubes could be a rocket-ship, and a boiler room could be outer space.

Ibai’s show begins by a semi-obstruction of the gallery doors, where a towering triangular particle board and black vinyl object stands on casters. Exceeding the height of A402 itself, this object isn’t inside the gallery, and it never can be. It has the potential for mobility, the potential for un-obstruction; but in its unfamiliarity as an object it becomes scary, almost uncanny, and no one wants to touch it. It’s on the verge of fitting into an art vocabulary, but I can hardly describe it to you. It’s almost like a giant particle board bookshelf on wheels, only it has no back or sides, and there is a long piece of vinyl which has been painted black and stretched over the object, which must be nine feet high. Impressed or painted onto the vinyl are two crosses, barely visible depending on the light. Seriously, this object is barely comprehensible, a kind of sculptural rabbit-duck illusion. Here are my first impressions: sound bouncer/blocker; light bouncer/blocker; apparatus for stretching/painting rolls of clear vinyl; sex toy/object; religious object; ritual object.

The rest of the show is not possible to describe in detail. Ibai has designed a stage that juts out into the gallery; made of particle board, it is many-sided, and has a few things sticking up out of it–a mic stand, a drum, a giant speaker made of the same particle board, a white LED stick–the stage has no sides, we can see everything underneath it, including a pile of wires. Though the space beneath the stage is dark, the pile of wires is lit by the white LED. A flat-screen monitor placed perpendicularly to the stage sits on the floor in the corner, playing a 7 minute video loop. The video is of a staged-looking rehearsal, where a few different performers sing the nonsense phrase “I laugh if I doodle dah day” in varied styles; the camera pans across the bunched-up fabric of a piano cover, and zooms into a few of the performers’ clothes. As the video loop ends, audio begins from the giant speaker tower; the sound is something between the score for a dramatic movie and a drum circle, increasing in intensity as the music plays on. Lastly a few of the clear ceiling light tiles have been replaced with red plastic and the rest of the lights removed; this washes the space in an eerie red light; the back of the gallery is the darkest light, the middle the redist light, and back the whitest light. Outside the show is the regular institutional light, along with the giant incomprehensible object.

Picture another office-ish looking room, same drop ceiling, but cleaner, same lighting, but more of it; this room is big, it’s carpeted with a system of tiles in something black-speckled and resilient, utterly replaceable; it’s filled with chairs, more chairs than you could need, never stacked, just rearranged, pushed out of the way, or pulled closer. They dictate the space by making it less navigable, sometimes treacherous, you’re surrounded by a disarray of empty chairs. The walls here are white and fairly smooth, mainly because they’re concrete, and nearly impossible to nail into, though some do try, and succeed. There are two entrance doors diagonally across from each other, and one closet which looks so much like an exit that a sign above it reads “not an exit”; this has the effect of making the room feel like it’s floating in the middle of the school, since one could exit from nearly any wall. This is F200, a CalArts classroom with the odd ability to mean nothing to no one, despite years of famous teachers and lecturers, countless critiques and arguments, and the endless numbers of student artworks hauled through its doors and hung with tape from its impermeable walls.

If A402 is like a seashell, then F200 is like a church basement. As an art-space it’s a visual conundrum, as an institutional space it’s like a prison for toddlers. Almost no artwork can escape the room’s psychological drain. Has an artwork ever looked good, let alone felt good, in this room? No, but in this sense it asks us to use our imagination, and we always do; the room has this magic, for sure, but it is a dark magic.

My drawing is a triptych, pen and pencil on stonehenge, 30”x40”. From left to right, the first is a horizontal pen and pencil drawing of a messy bed in a large bedroom. It could be a hotel room, but it’s probably not, because of some framed pictures on the nightstand, and a few other personal items that would be out of place in a hotel room. There are lots of pillows in this drawing, and some of the things are only halfway drawn, and other things have a lot of pencil lines around them, with a lot of smudging and eraser marks. The style is mainly contour, very graphic looking, with no shading to speak of; there is the occasional all-inked surface of the paper where an object’s shadow might be, or an invented shadow. The middle drawing is vertical and contains, in about 1.5 inch letters drawn and shaded in with pencil, the following thought:

Start with really earnest writings and then go back and edit them to be less embarrassing. The more you write about your family the more your whole art practice turns to mush. People say you should bring sex back into your work. Therapists say sometimes people want sex as a substitute for something else, probably attention. Either way the desire for it represents something else, and this thought can make sex undesirable and disappointing.

The registration lines on this are faint but visible, and the words are almost level across the page, but start to angle slightly up toward the end. The last drawing in the triptych is hung horizontally again, and is also a pen and pencil drawing of a messy bedroom. The perspective indicates that either we’re closer to the bed, or the room is much smaller. Overall this drawing is stylistically similar to the first one, but even less finished looking.

The scale of the triptych is impressive, and the drawing style works to blur the line of what may be considered finished, or complete. There is a transparency to these drawings, which are unconcerned with showing eraser marks or pencil smudges, or revealing the process of their making. In some ways they are a total mess, and in some ways, to some, this might give them a subtle beauty.

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Art is made up of much of the same language as objects. Traditionally, different artistic disciplines have been concerned with different problems. For example, painting is concerned with surface. Sculpture is concerned with volume. Later in history they converge, but it’s not difficult to look around and find them separated again, if not literally, than in the passive seedbeds of our minds. In post-modernity, arguably, painting isn’t a higher art than sculpture; abstraction is not more avante-garde than illustration. But language permeates our bones, and the hierarchy is present in the language. Ibai’s show, in A402, with the hollow seashell sound, its premise is depth, different kinds of depth. The stage bifurcates the space by reminding us that there is an above and a below, not just of his stage but of the very ground we stand on. There is darkness and lightness, redness and whiteness, logic and illogic, inside of sound and outside of sound, comprehensibility, and incomprehensibility. Ibai’s show is the kind of immersive experience that has such a precise balance of factors that it goes beyond depth and into drowning. I will think of it often.

I can’t be a passive observer of my own artwork. Even if I think I can, nobody would believe me. Back in F200, with buzzing fluorescent lights and the sea of chairs, I want to talk about the meaning of superficial. The paper, the lines, the materials, the immediacy of words, of sentence structure, of stating thoughts, of something as basic as “pen” or “pencil”; a clear line for the eye to follow, and a familiar image, in the form of a letter, or a pillow, or a shoe. When you make a drawing, in the most conventional sense, it hangs flat against the wall, or it lays flat in a drawer, or on a table. Flatness is one of its inherent qualities. Chances are you can’t touch or hear the drawing, or interact with it in any way, except with your eyes. For me, this creates a kind of stare down between myself and the artwork, and the inability to touch or taste or have a multi-sensual experience lends such flat things, like drawings, a superficial quality. In a spatial-metaphorical way, flatness echoes flatness, volume echoes volume, depth echoes depth. The abstract expressionist painters, among others, were fixated on this, too. Think of Rothko, with a giant canvas whose colors recede in both directions at the same time, and also, not at all.

If Ibai’s artwork drowned me, in that moment, in that space, then in this moment, in this space, my artwork was pushing me away. When I first had this thought, it had a negative feeling. There was depth, and then there was superficiality; in art discourse, and at least in the English language, depth is a measurement, but it is also associated with thought or emotion. To have depth is to be meaningful, serious, maybe poignant. Ibai’s show had all kinds of depth, especially in the metaphysical sense. But if depth is a concept but also, a place, shouldn’t superficiality be a place, too? A place with its own value system, its own possibilities, its own version of depth, not an inverse, but an alternative, next door, not across the hall? I think our minds have been playing a visual and linguistic trick on us. We think of superficiality as a concept, as opposed to a space of inquiry, a space that lies intentionally along a surface, I think of it more like looking at the ocean than swimming, the experiences are different but related, there is mobility between them, and potential, and changes in temperature.

In my life, space has always been important; the way a room gets laid out, what goes inside of it, if those things can fit through the door, if they’ll look the same in this light or that. In Style By Saladino, Saladino writes:

Every home should be a sanctuary: entering it you should immediately feel physically and emotionally protected. Inside there should ideally be two different, but equally important, kinds of space that metaphorically might be described as a cocoon and a cathedral. We all need space that offers comfort and security, and shelter from the cold, noise or darkness outside. But, paradoxically, we also need space that liberates us from terra firma, allowing our spirits to soar and our imaginations to take flight.

Of course, Saladino was a decorator, and decorating his artform; his style was characterized in his concept of conflating what space meant and what it looked like. His approach to decorating was to have two different, one could say opposite, types of physio-emotional spaces existing simultaneously. And though those spaces had opposite qualities, none was desired more than the other, but both were understood as vital. If this is not a personal philosophy of artistic production, I don’t know what is. What made Saladino a great decorator had little to do with taste and everything to do with belief and passion for a concept; though not every room could achieve this ideal concept, his decorating was aspirational, and for all these reasons, I cannot see it as something separate from art.

There are a lot of reasons why Ibai’s artwork had depth, and I had superficiality. Partly it’s the medium, partly the location, partly the different types of labor used in the production of each artwork. I think you could argue that to a different audience, on a different day, Ibai’s piece could have had superficiality, and mine could have had depth; and on another day, they would have had a different place entirely, and so on. For me, there’s no exact science, no single set or group of parameters, or juxtapositions, to create the perfect space. Sometimes it’s about arrangements, creating the illusion of depth in a small space, or making a huge space feel intimate, or making a huge space feel huge, for that matter. In the 18th century, Chinoiserie was considered by some to be morally ambiguous; in the 21st century, it can be as ambiguous as a rug, or a painting.

-Georgia Lassner, 2016

When the home becomes the body and the body is the Hulk: Pau S. Pescador at Tyler Park Presents

Published on October 19, 2023 by Posted by Georgia

Some of Pau Pescador’s photographs—on view through next Saturday at Tyler Park Presents on Sunset Boulevard—are so visceral, so conspicuous, so odd and frightening, and yet they are also so radiant, playful, juicy, raw, somehow both biting and tender that even a writer who’s only supposed to be writing about clay can’t resist the chance to ascribe adjectives to this small but powerful exhibition. Ostensibly about Pescador’s experience of home in relation to her gender transition, with all its incongruities, expectations, perils, and outfit changes, When the Home Becomes Body struck me as a profound encapsulation of female identity in a changing body, bearing it with jarring honesty, vulnerability, and the vanity all women must confront, lest it be thrust upon us.

Comprised of two distinct series that take nearly opposite photographic approaches, Pescador’s show is filled with images of bare legs, breasts, hairless chests, long fingers with long red synthetic fingernails, polkadots, masks, wigs, bits of food, blobs of curly brown hair, bedsheets, and so much else—feminine tropes of appearance and sexuality swirled into a messy still life of everyday objects. The exhibition’s namesake series, When the home becomes body, is produced by photographing various domestic spaces staged with an abundance of objects, and then projecting the images back into those spaces, now vacant. In When the home becomes body (4) (2023), we seem to be sneaking a look into a jumbled kitchen, only to realize it’s a facsimile of a kitchen, projected onto a tiled kitchen wall. The visual gymnastics are destabilizing—and though I eventually understood that I was looking at a photograph of a stove projected above that same stove, with a real-life hand and swoop of hair disrupting the edge of the projection’s frame, I so related to the ghostly repetition of expectations; the mess, either psychological or literal, that is always there to clean or organize or defend: the kitchen as the oppressive pinnacle of female exceptionalism.

Pau S. Pescador, When the home becomes body (4), 2023. Digital c-print Framed: 18.75 x 26.75 x 1.25 inches (47.62 x 67.94 x 3.17 cm)

What I love and cherish about this show is that it induces a kind of two-way mirror, where I see Pescador and her experience of gender transition (among other things) but I am also permitted, invited, to see my own. Even though postpartum is only a period of six weeks, it’s also a perpetual state. Some women, or vagina-having people, reach hormonal stasis, while others feel drained of estrogen. Some postpartum bodies return to their pre-inhabited shape, while others have stomachs that resemble literal piles of dough. Some pubic areas can be made smooth and inviting, while others are coarse and beard-like. I could go on. When the home becomes body reminds me that all people, or nearly all people, are either forcing their body to change or forcing it to stay the same. Rarely is it a place of peace or equilibrium.

Pescador’s Home is where the c*nt is (1) (2023) and Home is where the c*nt is (3) (2023) really relish in this in-betweenness of perpetual change; the alienation one can feel at the sight of their own body. Home is where the c*nt is (3) is a point-of-view shot of Pescador lying back on her bed. Her arm is outstretched almost as if to say don’t; her breasts fall to the side, the skin of her sternum smooth with just a hint of stubble. Behind a grimacing Hulk mask, her eyes follow you, brown curly hair spilling out the sides. The story goes that Dr. Robert Bruce Banner became the Hulk under duress, his physical powers consummate with his level of anger—which was always high. Sky high. The vision of the vulnerable, naked woman on her back, masked by the enraged Hulk with the glimmering white teeth and electric green skin—it so perfectly encapsulates the pain of change, the peril of authenticity, the danger of acknowledgement.

It’s possible I’ve gotten this a bit wrong—made it more about my own subjectivity than the artist’s. But I can’t help but rejoice in the fact that through Pescador’s work, I’ve looked into the face of the Hulk and seen my own. There is, of course, so much more to trans experience than the vulnerability embedded in When the Home Becomes Body that spoke to me most. Pescador’s work manages to be dead serious but also irreverent, what with penis-aprons and leaf brooches covering scrotums, a la the Fig Leaf for David. Pescador has given new life, depth, and darkness to the semiotics of domesticity so much of Art has put aside as passé; and she’s given us an opportunity, happily, to see ourselves—even as we grimace.

-Georgia

When the home becomes body is on view at Tyler Park Presents from September 16-October 28, 2023.

Georgia is a writer, critic, and educator based in Los Angeles. She is currently a visiting lecturer at the Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Chapman University in Orange, CA.

Click here to read her recent review of Color/Form: Color Theory and the Art of Ceramics at the Diana Berger Art Gallery.

Click here to subscribe to UNPUBLISHED essays and events.

You can also read Georgia’s writing on What About Clay?, a new writing project organized in collaboration with A-B Projects.

As always, thank you to Sarah for editing this text!

The featured image at the top of this post is Home is where the c*nt is (3) (2023);
Digital c-print, framed: 16 x 12.75 x 1.25 inches

Images courtesy of Tyler Park Presents

It’s not a party: Thoughts on the work of Anna Hrund Másdóttir and the first ever UNPUBLISHED open studio and BBQ

Published on February 23, 2019February 23, 2019 by Posted by Georgia

It’s possible that Anna Hrund Másdóttir’s artwork is antithetical to barbecue. Or should I say, it is antithetical to the act of barrel-cooking large cuts of meat for a crowd—in this case, six racks of baby back ribs, dry-rubbed, slow-smoked, finished face-down on a hot grill after a smear of tomato-y Kansas-style BBQ sauce that thickens until it’s sticky, jammy, everything stuck in your teeth. Despite that Anna’s work is also frequently constructed of foods (though not usually the perishable type), her food/art objects (think: a fragile stack of pink, sugary wafers) have little to do with the kind of showy, messy, frenetic indulgence they were unwittingly staged in opposition to.

Conversely, the non-food foods used as materials in Anna’s artwork employ a very different kind of vocabulary—processed, mass-produced, pre-packaged—non-perishable, individually served, ready-to-eat. Anna’s foods are crunchy; brittle; certainly not sticky, or at least, not any more. They may be feathery. Rectangular, but with a soft edge. A little bit wobbly. They could flutter, you could blow them away, you could mistake them for something else. The politeness, the rationality, the precision of Anna’s work—it all came into sharp, almost painful focus for me once it was inserted into a space in which it did not feel at ease—that is, the space of performativity, fire, flavor, drunkenness, never-ending chatter. A space which was a near-antonym of the singular word Anna used to describe her work the first time I asked her to describe it to me: meditative.

Putting aside the ubiquity of meditative, it’s a strange word for an art practice that at first glance seems so playful, eclectic, textural, even shiny. Meditation is for repetition, not variation. I reasoned that meditative applied to the way she assembled her works—their elemental architectural quality—the way various objects are stacked, inserted, bundled, woven—while others are placed in such a way as to make them look somehow different, more special than what they are. For example, a badminton birdie displayed feather-side down, accentuating its form as both delicate and utilitarian—an inspiring combination of something both heavy and light, intended to soar. Yes, this all seemed like a plausible interpretation.

But let me try describing a few of the objects to you. There is a ball-like clump of pink marshmallows held together with rubber bands. There is a green topiary ball on top of a stack of two wide rolls of tape. There are three white marshmallows on a white piece of paper. There is a chalky, broken rainbow. There is a large piece of single-sided red tissue paper wrong-side up. There is a piece of cellophane with a squished marshmallow on it. There is a piece of crinkled iridescent gold foil piled with clear plastic cubes. There are shards of blue-and-white taffy. There is a brown-and-white feather-duster inserted in a fluffy pink polyester paint roller which is stacked on top of a natural-sponge paint roller. There is a small pile of shards, sparkles, and dirt. There are rolled-up tubes of pink polka-dotted paper threaded onto a metal ring. There were many, many, artworks, or one artwork, or none—or too many to describe, and certainly too many to list—if listing is a way to possess, or to understand. Despite the pleasure of closely looking at Anna’s array of idiosyncratic objects, to my frustration, language does not have a luscious effect on her artwork. Articulation only seems to serve as a kind of deconstruction—words as tools which try to disassemble something very tangible (floss, taffy, a feather-duster) into something poetic—words that fail to understand that Anna has already transposed these viable objects to a place of unreality, fantasy, whimsy—that poetic place of complete non-function.

My theory is that in order to fully occupy Anna’s work, one must first picture some kind of store—the shiny linoleum floors, the long metal shelves, the pegboards and hooks, the price-codes, the boxes, all the shapes of packaging, the tags hanging about, even the banal pop songs playing over the PA. Then we must picture Anna shopping in this store, scanning the cosmetics and candy and whatever aisles, searching for something that we can’t picture—every aisle a traversable space of fantasy—every symbol and sign occupying a completely unique psychological looking-space. When I imagine the state of altered consciousness Anna must enter into to shop in her invisible art-supply store, I think, yes, I understand this work as a site of mediation, as a site with the possibility of altering the consciousness of the visitor as much as the maker—as long as we look past the inclination to narrate, and as long as we pause our privileging of metaphor as a necessary component with which to construct art.

In a sense, Anna’s work is about the non-think, which is a bit different than meditation—a kind of ultimate late capitalist dérive, whose outcome is to re-order our sense of how art constructs meaning, and instead allow it to deconstruct—to take meaning out of. Think of it this way; de-contextualizing an object, whether it is food or tape or something else, may turn it into something useless, or into something art—it is time, attention, culture, and criticism that decides. For example, a product like a bag of pink-dyed jet-puffed marshmallows, already uncanny, takes an almost inevitable next step into the space of something even weirder and more futuristic (rubber band marshmallow comet!?). It’s not that Anna toils in her studio making assemblage sculptures from found objects or non-art materials—it’s that her practice proposes something grave buried inside the form of something fun, light, sweet, even pretty—that function, i.e. purpose, is malleable; that at any moment, the logic of our social and material systems—what you eat versus what you sculpt, a tool versus a totem—are prone to disintegration. In short: The world is not fixed.

Indeed, disintegration is paramount to Anna’s work. To enter her studio is to see things broken, however gently. There is the sad, puckered marshmallow; the floss all loosed from its neat container; the fistful of disconnected wires drooping together over a nail; a lemon leaf planted in a sponge. Not to say that these objects aren’t beautiful, or somehow soothing, or even delightful—but what I missed when Anna said “meditative” was the melancholy inherent in that meditation. As zany, titillating, and downright playful and fun as Anna’s work may appear (the dancing shelf!), it is a lonely proposition, taken up in the space of quiet thoughts. It’s not a party, or a barbecue, or an event of any kind at all. It is a solemn art.

I’m still glad that Anna agreed to do an open studio as part of her residency. I’m glad we had something like a party, because art is worth celebrating, regardless of the fact that we are bound to get it wrong— writing the wrong words, choosing the wrong color, buying the wrong glue, cooking the wrong food—so it goes. But don’t forget—every time we take a risk on art, we open the possibility of getting something right, too—not so much by giving it a poignant ending, but an ellipsis—something to be continued.

-Georgia

Anna Hrund Másdóttir was the first resident of the unpublished studio.

For more information about Anna and her projects, please visit www.annahrund.com.

All photos by Cedric Tai.

Thank you to Sarah for editing this text!

Georgia is an artist and writer in Los Angeles. For more information on her projects, visit www.georgialikethestate.net

Irreverence isn’t the half of it: Alice Lang’s Mutha of a mutha of a mutha of a mutha at Abode Gallery

Published on September 25, 2017September 26, 2017 by Posted by Georgia

Mutha of a mutha of a mutha of a mutha is the title of an exhibition of artworks by Alice Lang. As I see it, there are three iterations of this show that are possible to encounter: 1) the “opening” event; 2) the “by appointment” hours; and 3) the “dinner party.” So far I have experienced two out of three of these iterations, and it is from these experiences that I come to this writing. I think it’s important to distinguish how different the encounter with the show was when it was just me and Alice in the gallery together, without the other fifty (or more?) people that attended the opening. The thing about this space, as the name of the gallery suggests (Abode) is that it’s an apartment, and a pretty small one, at that. And, since it’s on the second floor, it’s not like there is an easy overflow out the front or back door, or to some outside space, as there often is for tiny-ish galleries of this sort. Basically I am saying it was packed in there, and while I was able to see some of the artworks that were hung up high, I was shocked, upon my second encounter, at how much is going on below the waist that I was completely unable to perceive. It simply was not visible. I am saying there is another show entirely happening “below the belt,” if you will, and while it may have been unconscious or perhaps not predictable, it is certainly not antithetical to the subject matter of the show. In fact, it supports it, both literally and figuratively.

Installation shot of Mutha of a mutha of a mutha of a mutha — Living Room installation shot of *Mutha of a mutha of a mutha of a mutha* by Alice Lang. Image courtesy of Abode Gallery.

Silly puns aside, I’m talking about the pieces of furniture that Alice’s sculptures sit on top of. Their thick, smooth-sanded (and I think untreated) plywood tops are cut in unusual, somewhat retro looking shapes, like the kidney bean, while their tall, plaster-textured, lumpy legs are painted in chalky pastels. There’s also a plainly constructed three-sided box, but with U-shaped cutouts on the side, reminiscent of children’s furniture; and another piece which is a tubular plaster construction, again lumpy, again pastel, again cartoonish and otherworldly. These works are completely unlisted in the title sheet, which in itself is incredibly extensive (there are fifteen artworks in the “Living Room” alone, all with unique titles). These pieces of furniture, which you could call pedestals (I think Alice cringed when referring to them in that way, which she did for clarity’s sake) are arguably the largest artworks in the show, but remain unmentioned. Honestly, this is basically all I want to talk about, but before I get too far down that rabbit hole, there are several other aspects of this show I want to consider.

If I had to describe to someone what this show looks like, I would call it a show of sculptures, made of clay, which at first glance appear to have an amateurish quality; matte pastels (pastel penises, to be exact) remind me of the off-the-shelf low-fire glazes often available to children at paint-your-own-pottery stores; lumps of clay take on figurative shapes appearing to be molded only by the act of squeezing one’s fist together; “mask” faces, reminiscent of the famous and now infamous balaclava (which has appeared in Alice’s work before) look almost like paper, in the sense that they have a flatness and a cut-out ness, since they are constructed from simply cutting mouth and eye holes from a flat slab of clay. This flatness is something that I think most users of the ceramic medium do not desire (these pieces hang on the wall, or lay flat on a table; they don’t adhere to the placement rules typical of ceramic sculptures). Why don’t I think ceramic artists desire this? Well, as someone with an extensive background in ceramics myself, I would argue that it’s antithetical to the medium; the beauty of clay is its unique capacity for volume, and the unique way that hands, and maybe hands with tools, are able to control that volume.

IBG_2514 — On the wall, from left to right: Deep down Detox, 2017. Lava glaze and magic sculpt on tinted porcelain; Warming mineral, 2017. Lava glaze and magic sculpt on tinted porcelain; Overnight Recovery, 2017. Lava glaze and magic sculpt on tinted porcelain. On the mantle: Ouroboros, 2017. Mother of pearl on ceramic and tinted porcelain. On the floor: Better half #3, 2017. Tinted porcelain and ceramic. Image courtesy of Abode Gallery.

Volume these artworks may lack, but detail they do not. Despite appearing somewhat crude, many of these sculptures offer us weird, hidden moments of delight; tiny, realistic penises appear rendered in pink and gold (realistic not as in super-real, which is another ceramic tradition, but as in there is a distinctive ball vs. shaft). One figurine, called Vital Lift, shows a female figure holding her breasts up, I think, but the breasts are actually simple faces—flattened balls of clay with two pokes for eyes and a swipe-poke for a mouth. To me, this is a funny sculpture. This lies in the fact that instead of rendering breasts on the figure, Alice just formed two balls and mushed them on so they stuck, and made a little face on each. It’s the epitome of randomness and uselessness, and I begin to see this work as the expression of an intuition that cares little for volume or tradition, or even symbolism. For women to be silly is certainly a bold move—Alice, I would offer it is a feminist one, which is incredible, because it manages to be feminist without being ideological, which is what I think this artwork, and this artist, is most interested in.

To get back to the penises, they appear frequently. Two sculptures, Hydraburst and Active Mud, are figures draped in the balaclava mask, and the tiny penis is sticking out a little bit through the mask’s mouth-hole. I think reading these sculptures as symbolic or allegorical would be a mistake; it’s more about scale. This gaping mouth-hole, and the mask itself, are just so much bigger than the penis! I mean, it’s a joke, right? It’s like, this balaclava mask, which became a symbol of feminine power through the Russian anti-Putin art collective Pussy Riot, is so much bigger than the penis! Just look at the size of the mouth and the size of the penis. Who’s in charge here? I think it’s Alice.

IBG_2547 — Hydraburst, 2017. Crystalline glaze and magic sculpt on ceramic. Image courtesy of Abode Gallery.

IBG_2541 — *Shirt cocker (flowers)*, 2017. Luster glaze fabric and beads on ceramic. Image courtesy of Abode Gallery.

Shirt Cocker (flowers) is another funny and emasculating artwork; in this one, the gold-penised figure wears a cute little flower-beaded shirt. It’s enough to make you laugh out loud, but this is getting really serious. I keep emphasizing this, but there is a power play here. God made man, but not from mud; no, it was the Golem that was made of mud. I think of Alice as the god here, and she sure is a cruel one, forming all those tiny penises when they could have been any size she desired; cutting and sewing little beaded shirts for her Golem men to wear, when they could have had plain, neutral fabrics, and perhaps the dignity of pants.

Further along in the show the penises get bigger, but they never get more respectable. Her Better Half sculptures constitute another linguistic joke, with a pair of severed thighs constructed from coils, and pieces of colored clay stuck between some of the layers of coils, and a penis rendered in orange, purple, and yellow, those childish colors I mentioned earlier. All this, the linguistics and the colors and the coils, they’re all foils for a deadly serious issue: how does one live as a woman attracted to men? Heterosexual, that’s what they call it. Should you make your own? Should you simply engage with a simulation? Is the joke that the penis is the better half, or that we are all laughing at this dismembered male body?

IBG_2477 — From left to right: *Better half #4*, 2017. Tinted porcelain and ceramic; *Pore Rescue*, 2017.
Lava glaze on tinted porcelain; *Anthurium muse*, 2017. Tinted porcelain and ceramic. Please note that the last sculpture in this image is not listed on the title sheet. Image courtesy of Abode Gallery.

Anthurium muse is just too damn much for me. It’s a giant penis-head coil with like, a leaf patch and a claw coming out of it? And it has eyebrows? It’s terrifying and really, really weird, and again, I would attribute it to not-always-silly not-always-pretty intuition, which Alice wants to make sure we understand can be naughty as easily as it can be nice.

To return the “show beneath the show” (as I think of it), the furniture that Alice has built constitutes at least four unlabeled and unmentioned artworks; I’d say the vases, bowls, and plates Alice made for the “dinner party” portion of the show (this is a structure of the gallery, not of Alice’s work) count as unlabeled artworks, too. I asked Alice about that, if they were intentionally left off of the list of artworks, or purposely not listed in the materials section of the artworks they appear beneath. She said she didn’t think of it, and she also said something about constructing the pedestals to be viewed in a home space (maybe she said domestic? Maybe she said living space? I wasn’t taking notes). I don’t know if I believe any of that, or really what they have to do with appearing in a home space (they certainly don’t look like any of the furniture I have in my house, and I have A LOT of furniture). What I do get out of this is that Alice snuck a bunch of art into her show that, in some regard, she would not have to be held accountable for: what I mean by this is that they don’t belong to us, the audience; they’re not for sale; no, they’re not for us at all.

IBG_2461 — From left to right: Hydraburst, 2017. Crystalline glaze and magic sculpt on ceramic; Vital Lift, 2016. Tinted porcelain and ceramic; Shirt cocker ( flowers), 2017. Luster glaze fabric and beads on ceramic; Active mud, 2017. Crackle glaze on ceramic. Image courtesy of Abode Gallery.

In a way this is the perfect metaphor for this show, not that it needs one; but that part of this work does not belong to you. You, as in me. We can covet Alice’s artworks, which are appealing in their irreverence (a word she used, for sure), but we can never own the intuition that made them. There is a spark somewhere in there, a love for something, a desire to use her hands, as clichéd as that is; a desire to use weird colors and just to be, I’d say, unique; to be herself. We can take one of Alice’s Shirt Cockers home, and it may inspire us, but we’ll never be that person, who made those weird things. Perhaps they will inspire us to be ourselves.

IBG_2439 — *Mutha of a mutha of a mutha of a mutha.*…, 2017. Marbled paper and acrylic on paper. Image courtesy of Abode Gallery.

There are still two important things (among many) that I haven’t addressed, but I’d like to. One, of course, is the namesake artwork of the show, Mutha of a mutha of a mutha of a mutha, a really big drawing whose materials are listed as “marbled paper and acrylic on paper.” The second is the text that accompanied the invitation to the show, which I think was a collaboration between Alice and Abode. These things are, naturally, linked, and I’m thinking about what that link is. Here is an excerpt of that text:

Welcome to the cult of the Mutha where candy colored relics of humanity’s future past are preserved. A matriarchal society, the Mutha was preoccupied with the corporeal and its connection to the natural world. . . . There is much still to learn from these fragments of their world, secret histories of power and possibility yet uncovered. We offer them up to you for your enjoyment and understanding, and in hopes that the ethos of the Mutha can flourish and thrive. (http://abode.gallery/Alice-Lang).

I told Alice that when I read this piece of writing, it made me think I was going to see a very different show. Basically, it set me up to experience her work as a narrative, and also, as a relic. The cult of the Mutha. Like, what the hell is that? I know from talking to Alice, and also from my own experience growing up in New England (where mother is pronounced “mutha” and Georgia is pronounced “Georger”) that she is referring to the way she pronounces the word mother. Of course, saying mutha of a mutha of a mutha could mean many different things. Here, as the above text informs us, it refers to a matrilineage, but I still find it perplexing. I mean, we are all mothers of mothers, unless we’re daughterless mothers, or unless we’re mothers with daughters but those daughters don’t have children, or unless we’re not mothers at all…so actually, very few of us are muthas of muthas of muthas, or, it is certainly not a given. Is the cult of the Mutha a matriarchy gone horribly awry, in which only women who birth women who birth women are accepted in society? Or, is it aspirational? My mother had me, and now I hope I have a daughter? Or, is it cyclical? Are we trapped in the cycle of mothers and daughters?

IBG_2450 — From left to right: *Moisture Surge*, 2017. Crystalline glaze, magic sculpt, ceramic and tinted porcelain; *Mutha of a mutha of a mutha of a mutha*…., 2017. Marbled paper and acrylic on paper; *Selection vase*, 2017. Tinted porcelain and ceramic. Image courtesy of Abode Gallery.

I would argue that in a sense, the idea of mutha of a mutha is a trick; it’s a nonsensical narrative; or, if it makes some sense, that sense really has no meaning. I said to Alice, I’m really excited to write about your show, because I don’t want that text to be the only writing associated with this work. And although it was a jerky and probably unnecessary thing to say, what I mean by it is that the text certainly functions as part of the artwork (or at least in a similar way as the artworks) but it doesn’t describe the artwork. Not that I think anything should or could describe it. But it leads me to look for a narrative within this show, which I would argue I will never find, or is not worth finding. As for the drawing Mutha of a mutha of a mutha of a mutha, it is absolutely stunning, aesthetically “yes” in all the ways her other artworks say “no” or even, “fuck you!” I think that drawing is also a gesture towards patience; that Alice has it, despite the immediacy of her sculptures (ceramics often looks this way but believe me, it is not this way…this show represents a commitment, that’s for damn sure…).

Alice and I talked about feminism in art—if you’re a feminist making art, are you a feminist artist? If you’re making art about feminism, are you a feminist lady? I told Alice these are things I never think about. And I wondered out loud why she should be an artist whose job it is, aside from the impossible task of making art, to figure out what exactly it is, and how it should be properly categorized. I realize now that this show isn’t all about “p” things (penises, pastels, power, pink walls, Pussy Riot), but it is also about the task of making this work, of performing as the artist who makes it, and waiting for the second half of that performance; which is to be judged. I think this is why Alice saved so many of the artworks for herself by not listing them, or heck, even thinking of them as artworks.

IBG_2572 — *Beta bust*, 2016. Tinted porcelain and ceramic. Unlisted bowl, vases, and plate. Image courtesy of Abode Gallery.

There are many aspects of this show that I did not go into at all—the piece in the bathroom; the idea of how the dinner parties will play out; that many of the artworks are vases (they have Anthuriums, a kind of flower, inside them); that the mask-on-penis figure sculptures are based on a sculpture Alice encountered at the Getty; the particularity of the gallery, with its dingy carpet and moldings on the wall, all which appear crusty and somewhat gross and run-down (some may call it “Old Hollywood”); the complexity of the many techniques Alice used to produce this body of work; and other things I am forgetting. Mainly I would say this show inspires us to let our inner freak out; but also, not to suffer fools; that we, as potential Muthas, have the capacity to create and to destroy; we are silly; we are decisive; we are god-like creatures.

Mutha of a mutha of a mutha of a mutha is on view at Abode Gallery in Los Angeles, CA through November 17th, 2017. Gallery hours are by appointment. For more information on Alice Lang, please visit her website: http://www.alicelang.com/.