Tag: Artist-Run Space

Little show, big, big, sophisticated heart: Anna Mayer’s “As I Say Dying” at AWHRHWAR

Published on by Posted by Georgia

As I Say Dying is an art show by Anna Mayer currently on view at AWHRHWAR. Let me disclose that I am a little nervous about this writing, because…Anna. I was the first person to arrive at the opening of her show last Saturday, where I chatted awkwardly with Aline and gulped a glass of white wine that certainly emphasized the pink tones of my cheeks, under the harsh-for-skin but good-for-art light. I live down the street from AWHRHWAR, and when I realized they would be having a one-person show, I was more than delighted to attend and get that show unpublished, if you will. The first time I saw the show, I was into it, but it was a little elusive. I also felt weird being alone; like, performing looking? I was performing looking, but also I was looking looking, and when I’m looking looking, I’m looking for inspiration, or to be inspired—for that little sentence to pop into my head, so that I realize I can go forward with that sentence and turn it into a constructive thought, and this is why art is both mysterious and beautiful and upsetting, and the thing that makes life worth living, besides arguing, sushi, and the beach. But back to the art, and the artist, of course.

The night of the opening, Aline introduced me to Anna (I had told Aline right away that I wanted to review the show; Anna had not arrived yet, because I showed up early, in order to actually be able to see the show). I told Anna I intended to review her work, and that she could walk me through if she wanted, or not; she said we could meet over the weekend. Already the gravity and commitment of the situation is hitting me, and I’m thinking, I hope I can pull this off. I don’t know, this artwork just exudes confidence, steadiness; that was my impression. Not finished-ness, per se, but something deliberate, a feeling of being rooted. Anna’s urns seem to take up the “right amount” of space; they are on these absolutely huge pink pedestals (I am on the Ben Moore website now—is it Salmon Pink? I’m choosing a color “family,” and now scrolling across a color “spectrum”; is it Dusty Mauve? Peaches N’ Cream? Savannah Clay? I get it now, the color is a poem—it’s so linguistic and elusive, it’s absolutely beautiful). The tops of the pedestals, which have a little rim around them, are covered with sand, and the sand color very closely matches the pedestal color, if not exactly. I find stability in this sand/pedestal color-match decision; it seems a choice that requires planning; otherwise, it is arbitrary, which would be impressive, too. I have no cohesive train of thought here; let me try to be focused. When you enter As I Say Dying, there is an immediate consideration of scale; the pedestals denote the importance of the urns, the epic-ness of them, which they do not contain within their own rather modest scale; but their color and preparation resist the white-cube status that makes pedestals and plinths the bane of every artist’s existence. Lest we forget that a pedestal is a symbol, Anna is here to show us in this context, they have a different, and explicit, meaning.

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Left: Matter of Having 2, ceramic, glaze, paint, flint, 2018. Not-to-scale replicas of funerary urns made by the artist. Right: Pale Clay (Sailor), hooked rug, 2017. (AWHRHWAR)

Atop the pedestals (yes I said “atop”), are funerary urns. How do I know this? The title sheet, of course, which reads [smaller pedestal] Matter of Having 1, 2018; ceramic, glaze, paint, flint; Not-to-scale replicas of funerary urns made by the artist in 2017. And for the larger pedestal, the same thing, only, Matter of Having 2. I am not looking at an image of these artworks, and I have not looked at one since Sunday. But I can tell you about them, absolutely. Their surfaces are all about texture, subtlety, and impossibility (as in, ceramic or surface impossibility). The smaller urn has a diamondy court-jester pattern, and I know it’s blue (cerulean blue?) with like, little beads in it that look like round sprinkles—and gold. Blue and gold—campy like a sports team, but soothing, royal, tasty like a sprinkled donut. The larger urn is white, mostly, with a veiny texture—or is it more like the texture of a popcorn ceiling? Painted on the front and back of the large urn is a grid of colors—not a strict grid, but something more abstract looking, more pale; I know, because I know, that this is glaze, meaning it is fired, while many of the other applications on this work are paint, meaning, they are applied after firing—what I call on my resume “experience with cold-surface application.” The two vessels (the word vessel just came out, I meant to use urn) share a few important characteristics, and I don’t know which to point out first, because they both contain what lesser critiques of art call the “reward” of close looking; the lids of both urns have a yellow shadow inside the rim, by shadow I mean, the inner rims are painted in this subtle way, they almost look like they are glowing; and then there are the slits in the urns, which are magical if not a bit disturbing, they are so violent, and practical, and vaginal, and intimate, and strange.

I have written, much much too poetically, about how the artwork looks, and how that look makes me feel. But what about what they mean? At women’s crit crew the other night, I had an exchange with an artist who questioned my interest in the fantasy of art; in the possibility of what it could be, as opposed to what it is. To allow this aspect of my art-view to be questioned or even undermined would be too heartbreaking to abide (and also determining the difference between what an artwork is versus what an art could be is not something I think I believe is possible); but her counterargument was more related to making sure the artist has agency within their work—that it isn’t just sort of a blank canvas waiting for mouthy critics (like myself) to come along and torment it into the subject of our choosing. I don’t know where I’m going with that, other than I want to give a shout out to artist agency, and to acknowledge that Anna’s artworks have a lot of agency; perhaps this is a more politically apt, feminist, artist-friendly version of my initial impression of Anna’s work as confident.

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Matter of Having 1, 2018, ceramic, glaze, paint, flint; Matter of Having 2, ceramic, glaze, paint, flint. Not-to-scale replicas of funerary urns made by the artist. (AWHRHWAR)

So, titles first, or again, in this case: Matter of Having 1 and Matter of Having 2. And the description: not-to-scale replicas of funerary urns made by the artist in 2017. We know from the press release that the urns were made for family members; and we know that we are looking at replicas, not “the real thing”; so, I go back and forth between being certain that the urns were actually used for burial (the press release refers to the works as being made in a time of extreme grief), or if they represent a death, or the possibility of death, or impending death, or the fear of death. What’s really striking here is what I will call the “precise vagueness” of Anna’s language describing her work; it straddles, in the most emotional and yet object-centric, physical way, the edge of metaphor and reality; in the most sophisticated way I can possibly comprehend, these artworks occupy the space of what is, and what is not. Are they symbols, representing the anxiety of death, pain, and loss? Or did they contain a literal death, actual cremated remains? And in times of grief, just what is the difference? For me, this is the central question of this artwork; the inability, sometimes tragic inability, to separate what something is from what something could be; it is all, it is both.

What else should I say about Matter of Having 1 and Matter of Having 2? I started with titles twice, but never got to them. Well, they’re a bit cryptic, but it’s a play on words; this is an artist who may be more invested in language than I am. All of her work has this metonymic quality, I can’t quite describe it, but the subject and the object are always existing on these planes that are just barely legible, but yes, they are legible. Matter means both subject and substance, which refers to what the vessels may contain; and having means, well, having; both an obligation to, but also in the sense of possessing; and to think of what we have means to think of what we’ve lost.

What else? That there are two urns; that they come in a pair; that one is larger; that they are decorated differently—all of this suggests a coupling, which in death signifies the most tragic of losses—parent and child; brother and sister; husband and wife (for me it would be of course be wife and wife); mother and father. I want to say something beautiful about this, but I don’t really know how. This is a sad story, regardless of how it ends; that it functions as an artwork in such a sensitive and sophisticated way is a testament to how Anna values art; it reflects her willingness to make herself vulnerable to its possibilities; to labor over its material demands; to speak through it what cannot, or who cannot, speak anymore.

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Pale Clay (Sailor), 2017, hooked rug. (AWHRHWAR)

I’m feeling sort of emotionally drained by this, but I want to continue just a little bit more, to address the other works in the show, so I’ll try to stay focused. Pale Clay (Sailor) is the back of a hooked rug; the image hooked into the rug is a section of a Paul Klee painting that Anna’s mother transferred into a knitting pattern (Klee was Anna’s mother’s favorite artist). This is an artwork that totally operates on subtlety and deep emotional reverence. I can tell you easily what it is not: an image hooked into a canvas rug and shaped like a painting, whose materials and presentation are intended to represent female labor or women’s work. What this artwork is is harder to describe; the layers of information are so complicated. My mom works in a knitting store, and has been knitting for as long as I can remember. The magic of the yarn store—the puffiness, and the colors, and the grids, and the sharp objects, and the manifestation of line into shape; all of this resonates with me. For Anna’s mother to create knitting patterns from her favorite artworks—it’s so intense, like, the beauty of the thought, the love of art and pattern and color and labor; I don’t know how to articulate it; it sounds just like Anna’s work. And in Pale Clay (Sailor), Anna honors that labor and the spirit of that gesture—not by knitting the pattern, no, not even by hooking it into a rug—but by translating it into an object that can be worshipped as work of art, as it deserves to be. I often wish I could worship my family through a work of art. I’ve certainly tried.

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Pale Clay (Unknown Grid), 2017, hooked rug. (AWHRHWAR)

Pale Clay (Unknown Grid) operates in a similar way, emphasizing the grid even more, thus drawing a parallel between the grid of the artist, and the grid of the mother, and conflating them, which I love. This artwork is hung in the “office” of AWHRHWAR, which I also love, as a gesture toward gallery conventionality; the prized artwork in the back office, which lay-visitors to the gallery never see—it’s too special. And of course Pale Clay is a play on words (Klee is pronounced more like clay), so yeah, Anna is flexing her aural muscle here, if you will, but probably more importantly, satirizing the convention of titles; what they tell us about an artwork, and how.

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Uttteruent -1 (Writing for Life), 2018, ceramic, glaze, paint, text. (AWHRHWAR)

The last work in the show, (I don’t know why, but I see it as last), Utteruent-1, is the most enigmatic. It’s extruded clay tubing, open on the end, with tiny words written on the tubing, so that you have to look really closely to read the writing. Honestly, I thought it was a sort of a sculptural bicycle frame until I saw the words on it; Anna explained to me something about the planes of the sculpture, and the different words representing language on different planes. I recall telling her I understood how she wanted the artwork to operate, though I would never have, in a million years, described it in those terms. By now, I have lost all sense of how I thought Utteruent-1 operated, but if nothing else, it is another iteration of Anna’s commitment to the material and conceptual versatility of ceramic; if it wasn’t already clear, her technical ceramic skill is on full view in this artwork, as well as her transcendence of it as a medium from which one well-known artist sold ashtrays at Gagosian, and another lesser-known artist made an unglazed hotdog in a bun that I use as a paperweight (with much affection).

As I Say Dying is a little show with huge emotional resonance; even for me, this writing has been a kind of catharsis; you don’t need to know this, but through much of this, I wanted to cry. Had I not been in a library, I very well may have done so. I don’t know. We have to let art be emotional. We have to let it be personal—to touch us, both as artists and consumers of art. This is a difficult time to argue in favor of emotions, and yet I must. Artists, if you are out there in your studios, agonizing over ways you can make your artwork both grandiose and intimate, while it simultaneously pivots on and transcends your identity, please cut it out and do what you really feel inside. Take Anna as your inspiration, and remember that you can be skillful, subtle, sophisticated, emotional, confident, vulnerable, and worldly, all without leaving your own head, if that’s what you choose. I’ll be there.

As I Say Dying is on view at AWHRHWAR in Los Angeles, CA, from February 15 to March 10, 2018. For more information on Anna Mayer, please visit her website:  http://annamayer.info/

The featured image at the top of this post is Matter of Having 1 and Matter of Having 2, image courtesy of AWHRHWAR.

All photographs by Jason Gowans.

Thank you to Sarah for editing this text!

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

 

 

 

 

 

An OPaf quickie, but really, Artemisa Clark: Artemisa Clark’s “On Record” at ELEVATOR MONDAYS at Other Places art fair

Published on by Posted by Georgia

There are a lot of different kinds of artwork in the world. I am a believer in this difference—that it “takes all kinds,” so to speak. It makes no difference to me if art is good or bad; for the most part, I’m happy that it’s there. I’m going to guess that the organizers of Other Places art fair (OPaf) feel the same way—and for that, and their unsung efforts to successfully pull off this event, I say, thanks.

As a person that thinks about art a lot, and then tries to verbalize those thoughts regularly, I think it’s worth saying that most of the art I write about does not inspire me, or excite me, or generally produce any specific, pronounced feelings. It’s a slog; to use an annoying but apt athletic metaphor, art-thinking is a marathon, not a sprint. When I see art, I do not know what it means. I do not know what the fuck it is. But I trust that if the artist cares about their artwork, and is invested in it, I too can care, and become invested in it, and then I can get something special from it, that special art feeling where something you’ve encountered helps you articulate a complicated thought that maybe would not have been articulated if that artwork didn’t exist in that way. I am sure the many delightfully messy booths and intriguing but plainly odd installations (mudslinging?) at OPaf offer these delights, when given time, attention, and compassion (I should know; nearly all the shows I’ve reviewed had some presence at OPaf, either the space or the artist); BUT, there was one special thing at OPaf that really transcended my typical marathon approach and sent me into a full-on sprint; that is, Artemisa Clark’s performance, On Record, as presented by ELEVATOR MONDAYS.

Is it possible to write a full, essay-ish length review of an ephemeral artwork I saw at an art fair for about five minutes of what was a 300 minute duration? If you saw just 15% of a painting, would you wake up in the middle of the night wondering if you were a worthy vessel to appreciate this type of profound expression? If you deemed yourself worthy, would you be able to get your thoughts out in time to watch the Super Bowl? These are the hard-hitting questions.

What’s cool about OPaf is the same thing that is so uncool about Art Los Angeles Contemporary (ALAC); whereas ALAC is just a transposition of art to a warehouse for ease-of-shopping (yes, it’s an airplane hangar, but that’s like a warehouse for an airplane, yes?), OPaf is taking the art wayyy out of the gallery, past the warehouse, all the way to the shipping yard itself. It’s outside, in like, a carved-out paved hilltop I cannot exactly describe. It feels sort of like an alleyway on the top of a mountain, (or “hill,” as we say in LA), and it also feels like an aqueduct, and also like a mote. There is an “entrance,” at the front of the mote, designated by a table and handmade sign suggesting a small donation. That’s fine. But what’s interesting about an arbitrary entrance to an outdoor space is that it gives what should seem to be a hierarchy-less landscape a quite profound hierarchy; there is a front, and a back. In flea-market land, (and I’m sure at ALAC, too), closer booths cost more $$. By the time you get to the “back” of OPaf, which takes about two minutes, you have to walk up a set of built-in stairs, next to a chain-link fence, to reach the top of a concrete retaining wall, to get to the last few galleries. I’m not explaining this well, but imagine that OPaf is a basin, with a rim at the top; when you get to the back of the basin, there are more galleries on the rim, but you have to walk up there.

The few galleries on the OPaf rim are all helplessly outshined by the epic view of the Port of Los Angeles. This is no typical ocean view; while us west-coasters pretty much guffaw at a blue blue ocean panorama on a warm February afternoon, this is not Venice Beach; beach bums and the tourists excited for the opportunity to blend in with them do not ride tandem bicycles and eat burritos from styrofoam Perry’s on the Beach containers; no, what we see on our way to San Pedro, and then from the top of Angel’s Gate Park, is the essence of a globalized world; the great migration of people and things, and the military that serves and protects that vision.

I see Don’s ELEVATOR MONDAY shirts hanging on the chain-link fence surrounding the basin, and we (Sarah and me) walk over. Right away Don is playing the gallery attendant, telling us to read the press for the show (his slim stack of press releases ripples in the wind, held down on the ground with a big old rock). ELEVATOR doesn’t have a table or a booth to indicate its presence, but it does have two site specific artworks: Nina Sarnelle’s Nike X and My Dead Hand, and Artemisa Clark’s On Record. Don tells us that Artemisa Clark is reading “right now,” and he points away from OPaf and toward the water; about 500 feet in front of us, separated from the crowds, stands a person, her back to the ocean, bent forward a little, holding something. No one is within earshot of her, and Sarah and I approach and stand there, listening, and looking, too.

It’s always weird when you approach someone doing a performance, and there’s no one else there. Like, they are performing to no one, sort of. Reading to no one really emphasizes this feeling of an absent audience, because reading out-loud is a labor usually performed for someone else’s benefit. So this is the first thing I feel, when I approach On Record; it is saying something profound about audience, or lack thereof.

Of course I am listening to her reading, and though she isn’t quite projecting her voice, I can understand her words clearly. The words matter, yes, but On Record is an extreme visual spectacle, glued together with the words Artemisa speaks while she shows us her body in front of this ultimate and awe-inspiring landscape. Let me explain this better. When I approached her, I did not know what she was reading. There is a clear description in the press release, but we didn’t read it until after. So I had no information about what I was about to see or hear, other than the artist’s name. It’s easy to tell right away that she is reading some governmental or other kind of institutional document, describing an inspection of a site (I assumed it was the site where we currently were; I was not far off). It’s a report, and it’s not a positive one; a lot of problem areas, and areas that need improvement. I can see with my eyes that there are redactions in the text (I think she also says the word “redacted” when she gets to those parts), but seeing the redaction visually assures me that this is a real government document. I can’t remember specifics of what was read, as in, specific sentences, and I have no transcript from which to quote. Certainly this was due to lack of time spent, aka, my fault, and not a lack of clarity on the text’s part.

Okay, so there is what was read (the content of the text), and then how it was read (everything else). First of all, she’s holding a huge stack of papers, at least a full ream (500 pages). And it’s windy. So her hands, with long, painted nails, have to grip the papers, and the papers are fluttering and flipping and all the while she is gripping, reading, turning a little into the wind, a little out of the wind, squinting a little at times, head bowed over the page, body a little bit forward, hair blowing into her eyes a little bit, a little bit sticking to her lips; my god, she’s like the Marilyn Monroe of alternative art fair performance art, windswept, a little messy looking, but totally determined, anchored to the earth by her beat-up looking combat boots, fitted to her bare, quivering legs. When a woman performs anything, it can become sexual; and I find my profound attraction this artist and this artwork a confusing and perhaps embarrassing mix of the romance of the ocean, my permission to look at her bare flesh, the sound of her voice beating back against the wind, and the power to stand alone, not feigning art but really being it, really doing it, on the periphery of the basin of man-made bullshit.

Yes, this is a site-specific artwork, and the text that Artemisa reads (“news articles and official documents regarding the now-defunct INS/ICE San Pedro Processing Center on Terminal Island”) is meant to be political. I mean, it is political, absolutely, and I do not mean to take importance away from the content of the text—but the thing that makes this artwork so poignant is not that it is a condemnation of the government, or that it calls attention to the tragic and dizzying human rights violations that took place so close to that beautiful site—it’s the fact that we, we artists, are oblivious to even the most basic cruelties, the ones that are taking place right under our feet, or just a short drive away; it is a condemnation of us, the audience, who is barely there; she stands on the periphery of the periphery, not just outside of Other Places, but with the backdrop of the edge of the earth; On Record is the condemnation of our smug outsider status, with our convoluted art-objects and Topo Chico, and our small talk and our car artworks and all of our insider fun and gossip. You see, there is nothing complicated about On Record; it’s just, a reading, outside, on a beautiful day. And when I say nothing complicated, I am talking of course about its execution, not its subject. Yes, yes, the wonders of object-based artwork are marvelous and many, but just think about this, her simple gesture, to read aloud in a performance where she plays herself, using the fucking world as her stage. It’s brilliant.

I think that’s all I’ve got. Don, I want you to know—it isn’t lost on me that a gallery typically the size of an elevator (since it is an elevator) was suddenly transformed into something expansive, massive, agoraphobia-inspiring, as opposed to claustrophobia-inspiring. I like that little touch—it shows playfulness, but also adaptability. You set a high standard, and I hope you always will. As for On Record—thank you to Artemisa for taking the opportunity to model how we as artists can be simultaneously peripheral and dominant; simple in gesture but complicated in thought; exposed, but somehow channeling the power of an entire coast. And as for Other Places art fair? Yeah, cool, I’ll be there again next year.

On Record was an artwork performed by Artemisa Clark on February 4, 2018 at the ELEVATOR MONDAYS booth during Other Places art fair at Angels Gate Park in San Pedro, CA. For more information on Artemisa Clark, please visit her website: http://www.artemisaclark.com/

Thank you to Sarah for editing this text!

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

 

 

Reagan as a Halloween costume, IKEA, and the downfall of civilization as plotted by teenagers in your garage: Regina Mamou’s “How the West Was Won” at Adjunct Positions

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How the West Was Won is an art show by Regina Mamou currently on view at Adjunct Positions. Have you ever been to an art show at Adjunct Positions? The location alone is worth seeing—the house is not just any house but one of those classic craftsman things with a steep stairway going up the hill through a surprisingly lush (but water wise, of course) garden of mature succulents. And unlike other houses in the neighborhood, it doesn’t look like its been “restored”; it feels old, authentic—meaning, it isn’t playing a version of itself to sell an idea of east LA; rather, it stayed put in the hillside, hidden in plain sight, protected by the flora and maybe even some invisible fauna (there is a catio, aka, cat patio). What I’m saying is, I like this place. The vibe is less “art as party” and more “art as block party.” Some of this vibe is due to the location of the first gallery at Adjunct Positions—a street-level single-car garage built into the hillside and outfitted with french doors. The rest of the artwork is shown up in the house, which causes a stratification of audience across the property—little art people and artworks dotting the hillside. For some reason it makes me think of the SIMS.

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Looking for Freedom by Regina Mamou. (Austin Radcliffe)

Getting a grip on the variety of elevations at Adjunct Positions is only necessary in so far as it seems to have influenced How the West Was Won. Looking for Freedom is the title of the artwork in the garage, and on opening night, it contained a performance. I find it so tricky to write about these spaces in which performances happened, and then, for the duration of the exhibition, just the “traces” of the performance are left. Where did this idea come from? Not strictly for Regina, but for all of us? I am tempted to bow out of Looking for Freedom completely, because I almost can’t wrap my mind around reconciling its two forms: the opening performance, which featured two Reagan-masked men in black behind generic-looking stanchions, pulling pre-”glitched” screen prints of David Hasselhoff from an almost fetishistic-looking, handicraft, customized revolving four-station print cart, and piling them up on an IKEA table; and the gallery without the performance, which is the IKEA table with two floppy Reagan masks, a few beer cans on the floor, a print display rail affixed to the wall, and a tornado of Hasselhoff prints looking as if they were thrown about the room, in a fit of rage, or total indifference. The stanchions, which the night before had served as a pseudo fourth wall for the printing performance, were clumped toward the entrance, so that they stanchioned nothing at all.

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Looking for Freedom (opening night performance) by Regina Mamou. (Regina Mamou)

In a reductive way, this is a very straightforward artwork to interpret, even with a minimal understanding of its references; the Reagan-masked screen printers stand in for a kind of political propaganda machine; and David Hasselhoff, of all people, is a cheesy celebrity whose heterosexual-but-pretty-boy values are being espoused. The “glitch” in the print signals that all is not right; and the stanchions, while playing to their divisional strength, also serve as a cue of both a corporatization, I guess, but really, a “genericism” (not a word, sorry).

I’ve said I am being reductive, and really, I don’t want to be. What if I take my artwork-goggles off and assume that nothing is standing in for anything? Not all artworks are symbolic. They are not all metaphorical. So, this is where the garageness of the gallery comes in—the kind of production that happens in the marginalized space of a garage, disconnected from the house, segregated from the family, away from “creature comforts” (I hate that term, sorry), but also away from the authoritarian eye of the parent. The garage, people, is the place where we find freedom, even if it is a sort of reductive, adolescent, mask-wearing one; and so Looking for Freedom becomes less about a hoaky Hasselhoff we can all easily recognize as satirical, to a teenage, fuck-the-world, punk-rock DIY printing party where we’re all getting fucked up and plotting the downfall of civilization. Of course, this (wild) interpretation is predicated on the location of the other artworks on view, Looping Swans and Kimilsungia; predicated on the idea that the “domestic” (cringe again) locations of those artworks is indeed significant; I think what’s probably more important is the fact that Looking for Freedom is itself an artwork which performs a production that is likely, or at least plausible, to be taking place in that location (a garage). Therefore, Looking for Freedom doesn’t transcend the space of the garage; rather, it uses it as a subject. Now let’s go up to the house.

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From foreground to background: Kimilsungia and Looping Swans by Regina Mamou. (Austin Radcliffe)

First of all, that the gallery space of Adjunct Positions is designated by a four-foot wide installation of white laminate flooring over whatever synthetic oak-looking flooring makes up the rest of the house is architecturally insane but pleasantly mysterious. I won’t dwell on it here, because chances are if you visit this space enough, you get used to it, and you adjust; but Kimilsungia, the artwork installed therein, seems tailor-made for it, which consequently makes it seem like an additional, utterly artificial addition to the artwork. The artwork itself is a series of identical orchids in matching pots displayed on those floating white laminate IKEA shelves. The artificiality of this artwork is overwhelming, despite the “natural” flowers, and I don’t know what to make of that feeling quite yet. Another part of Kimilsungia is the bronze plaque, which you could almost miss if it wasn’t so clearly defined on the gallery map. The plaque reads “In 1964 the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea acquired its own flower, a botanical symbol of the nation. Its name is the ‘kimilsungia,’ or ‘flower of Kim Il Sung.’ Later, in 1979, a special greenhouse, the Central Botanical Garden in Pyongyang, was created to specifically grow ‘kimilsungia,’ also known as ‘the flower of loyalty.’”

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Kimilsungia (detail) by Regina Mamou. (Austin Radcliffe)

Actually, the first thing I did when I walked inside the house was go straight for the couch, to watch whatever was on the little TV, an artwork called Looping Swans. The artwork is the television set, VCR, and VHS tape, and a looping video, 1 minute 28 seconds in length. At the opening, which was a perfectly lovely event I could have spent all night at, I sat for at least a half an hour on that couch, watching/looking at Looping Swans over and over until I no longer saw or heard anything in particular, but was instead hypnotized by the incessant stepping, glitching, and musical stylings of that video. But what was I looking at? A ballet, of course; or, a recording of a performance of a ballet. An old recording, made apparent by the filmic blurring and stretching of the image, and the otherworldly blue light emanating from it. I’ll guess that the ballet is Swan Lake, but only because of the title of the artwork, Looping Swans. Oh, and there’s an orchid on the table next to the TV set, and the table is from IKEA.

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Looping Swans (video still) by Regina Mamou. (Austin Radcliffe)

Have we covered everything, at least what there is to be seen with the eyes? Looping Swans is a sculpture and a video, set up in the weirdly tight living room at the back of the house. According to the title sheet, its media is listed as Television set, VCR, VHS tape. Kimilsungia refers to the orchids and the bronze plaque; its media is listed as orchids, bronze plaque. Looking for Freedom is the opening night performance, and its media is listed as stanchions and screen prints. So, what patterns are emerging? We’ve got celebrities hither and thither; Reagan, Hasselhoff, Kim Il Sung, Swan Lake. We’ve got flowers; orchids, to be exact; the Flower of Loyalty, to be exacter; and, perhaps most profoundly and transcendently, we have IKEA.

My idea of what this show is is a really bumpy roller coaster ride. One minute I’m thinking it’s all about garages and rebellion (especially in contrast to the uniformity of flowers and ballet, sitting docile in front of the TV set, blending into the domestic scenery, yet totally artificial, banal); the next, I’m thinking it’s all about the transcendental, cross-cultural power of IKEA (313 stores across 38 counties!). It’s fucking fascinating (curse word used for emphasis) that IKEA  never makes its way into the materials list, since its the clear through-line between all the artworks, bringing How the West Was One closer to a cohesive thought made up of small, distinct artworks. If IKEA is missing from the materials list, then what else must be missing? It could be anything.

Regina walked me through How the West Was Won on the Monday after the show opened. BUT that was nearly a week ago (at the time of this writing), and so I cannot remember the specifics of what she said. This memory lapse allowed me to retain most of the original sensation of encountering the show, and before I discuss our conversation a little bit, I will make a few last observations.

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From left to right: Kimilsungia (detail); Looping Swans by Regina Mamou. (Austin Radcliffe)

When you sit and watch Looping Swans for a long time, you start to feel exhausted; exhausted empathetically for the performers, but also visually and aurally fatigued by the repetition. In some way there is a cruelty to this kind of endless loop of dance, which outside of being impossible is also painful. So, we are presented with this kind of fantasy world of pain and rigidity, so much so that the orchids, a beautiful and somewhat reputationally temperamental flower, become a little bit human. The rigidity and suffering of the endless performance in Looping Swans is transposed onto the orchids of Kimilsungia, which appear in your peripheral vision (and to the left of the TV) and it is suddenly very, very clear how a flower could be used as a means of subjugation, especially in a gendered way. And if flowers can be used in this way, so can anything, right? Even Hasselhoff? Exactly.

Earlier in this writing, I was making some crazy argument about garages; I was thinking about the site of the house as being specific to a house and its house-parts. Partially, this is because my disbelief in the site as a house is never suspended, and this complicates my interpretation of the artwork. I don’t really think Regina meant for the garage to “be” a garage, although it did not come up in our conversation. We did talk about the complexities of having a performance, and then showing the gallery/garage with the performance “remnants.” She was undecided about what purpose the stanchions now served; should the audience be prevented from walking around in the previously “performers only” area, scattered with the Hasselhoff prints and beer cans? Actually, there were only two cans, and we dedicated a significant amount of time discussing if the cans should be in there, or not. Like, who wants to see empty beer cans in an art show? It seems sort of pretentious. For me, it always makes me feel like I missed the party, and I hate missing the party, because if I missed it, I probably wasn’t invited. I think I saw Looking for Freedom in a kind of intermediary state; it was still literally “as-is” from the performance, with nothing re-staged, nothing moved. We were both looking at it, trying to make sense of it—me from the perspective of having witnessed the performance, and Regina from the perspective of having conceived and staged it. This is a good place to be in art; something intermediary, where thoughts have an opportunity to form, float, and dissipate, maybe even stick. If I was unable to form a non-reductive cohesive thought about Looking for Freedom, it’s because it’s not an artwork that values cohesive thoughts, or finished products; it’s a series of suspiciously clear moving parts waiting (and willing) to be surprised by what they produce.

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Looking for Freedom (detail) by Regina Mamou. (Austin Radcliffe)

That being said, I learned a lot of really interesting stuff from my walk-through with Regina. Apparently Hasselhoff has a much greater political resonance than I knew—especially in Germany, where he is über popular (haha). And I thought Regina said that during the cold war, the Russian government played Swan Lake on repeat, so that no news coverage was accessible; but clearly my brain oversimplified that part of the story, because Regina sent me this to clarify: “When tanks rolled into Moscow on 19 August 1991 during a dramatic anti-Perestroika coup by Soviet hardliners, the USSR’s state-controlled airwaves offered a curious response—a continuous loop of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.” The story of the orchids is practically a hero’s journey, involving a trip to North Korea where Regina purchased these special orchid seeds, and then worked with a greenhouse in Hawaii for the past year to grow them in a special way. The IKEA fixtures are not coincidental, either, but Regina explained that she wanted to limit the information she gave about the work, so that the interpretations could be broad. I can totally appreciate this instinct; artists like Regina, driven to research-based artwork (based might be too strong, perhaps inspired) often have a clear, correct outcome for their work. That Regina is focused on ways to expand the possibilities of content, not restrict them, is certainly something I feel excited about—I just wonder if the instinct to broaden a specific artwork through omitting the specifics of its making really achieves that. After all, isn’t it structure itself that helps us test the boundaries of our thought, our production?

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Kimilsungia (detail) by Regina Mamou. (Austin Radcliffe)

I said that IKEA was the only clear through-line between the artworks, and in a superficial way, it is; but the title of the show as a whole, How the West Was Won, is spinning political; that there is a west, yes, but also, that it was won. Okay, that’s quite obvious, but I am saying that each individual artwork depicts a kind of nationalism, or some kind of propaganda—Swan Lake was used somewhat openly as a means of propaganda, if I understand the story correctly; the Kimilsungia is also thinly veiled, or not (the flower of loyalty!); and then Hasselhoff; of course he’s being sold and disseminated to us, too. How the West Was Won is a complex art show, and has proven good at producing some complicated, albeit slightly confusing, thoughts in response, at least for me. This may sound silly, but my favorite part of How the West Was Won is that IKEA products slip there way into all of Regina’s artworks, hidden in plain sight. It gives them, of course, the same status as the orchid. And while we do not all have rows of exotic plants or a penchant for screen printing 80s-era celebrities, we probably have a Hemnes or a Billy somewhere in our living spaces, secured to the floor or wall, affordable yet stylish in a “neutral” way; keeping us satisfied, if not aspirational—at least for the moment.

How the West Was Won is on view at Adjunct Positions in Los Angeles, CA, from January 13 to February 24, 2018. For more information on Regina Mamou, please visit her website: www.reginamamou.com.

Thank you to Sarah for editing this text!

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

 

What if we could see that our identities were ideologies? Pamela Valfer’s “Three Dimensional Stimuli, and Reflected Versions” at ELEVATOR MONDAYS

Published on by Posted by Georgia

“Three Dimensional Stimuli, and Reflected Versions” is an artwork by Pam Valfer currently on view at Elevator Mondays. While there are at least four distinct elements to this artwork, I’ll consider it a single piece, even though the quotation marks indicate a show title as opposed to an artwork, which would instead appear in italics. This isn’t really important, except that I am interested in artworks which form into a singular vision when shown together, or that can be read “off of eachother” if you will—but from the perspective of the artist. This is the reason I only write about one and two-person shows; I am less interested in curatorial constructs, and more interested in artistic ones. The thing about Pam’s piece, so perfectly scaled, installed, and conceptualIzed, is that it simultaneously uses the construct of the gallery (an elevator, and a tiny one, at that) while seeming to shed all notions of curator or curatorial intervention. I suppose what I’m saying here is that while this show is incredibly “man-made,” or constructed, it retains subtly, but also unity; it’s a packaged experience.

If it seems that I’m being too vague, it’s because I’m trying to figure out how to describe what it’s like to enter Pam’s artwork, and why while you’re in there, a lightbulb goes off, and you’re just like, “this is an awesome artwork.” I rarely feel that way in the moment about an artwork—but it is the narrative construction of this piece, from beginning to end, that sets you up, builds you up, to a kind of climax, which ends as an anti-climax, and then the lightbulb moment. Okay, still too vague. Let’s walk through it.

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From the opening of “Three Dimensional Stimuli, and Reflected Versions.” (Pamela Valfer)

If you’re like me, you read the Press Release for “Three Dimensional Stimuli, and Reflected Versions” for the show when you received the invitation. I got mine in an email, and since I am interested in Don’s gallery (I have shown there myself) and I am friendly with Pam (her husband and I were classmates in grad school), seeing the show was a no-brainer. I read the press release, which is sort of hard to describe—it’s several sentences interspersed with links, and excerpts of the content of those links, which are all in different fonts and sizes than the “sentence,” which pretends to be a traditional description by starting with “Pamela Valfer’s exhibition ‘Three Dimensional Stimuli, and Reflected Versions’ explores how mental rotation tasks.” In total, it’s six pages long. If you just read the press release, and you’re not in front of the actual artwork, it makes no fucking sense. I immediately responded to the invitation by asking if Pam had written this press release. The answer was yes. Okay, so we can agree, it’s really an artwork, not a press release; maybe it’s both.

I have evidence that it’s an artwork, and I will argue that because the printed press release, which exists in the gallery sitting area where the press releases usually are, includes the links, printed in color, it wants to stage itself as some kind of hyper-object, or at least a really weird contemporary paper/internet hybrid thing. Including a link before a quote is not a standard way of quoting or attributing—it implies a kind of narrative reading structure, it implies a path that the artist wants us to follow. Yes, it’s an awkward and difficult to read text mash-up, but it’s kind of an analog search path. Think of it like this. Let’s remove all the links. We end up with the following text:

Pamela Valfer’s exhibition “Three Dimensional Stimuli, and Reflected Versions” explores how mental rotation tasks can be affected by space, and sound. But what is the object that is being promoted? Stimulus is constantly being absorbed. We strain to see it, as it is underneath our feet and above our head. We become passive to see it, as it is underneath our feet and above our head. We believe it, as it is underneath our feet and above our head.

The links that appear interspersed in the original text are what we would presumably search for and click on, to make sense of the words and concepts being used to describe this art show. So at first it seems that Pam has laid the path she wants us to follow—to find the information she would want us to find. But, when you get to the three similar end lines, two of which have strikethroughs, you realize, it’s not the path we follow as readers; rather, it is the path she followed as the artist. I interpret the strikethroughs as a kind of transparent writing/editing process; a way of demonstrating that a subject is being “figured out.” Retrospectively, I’ll apply that logic to the links—the artist wants us to see her thought process. I’ll call it, “the journey of this artwork,” even though that’s cheesy, because it feels like that. So, all in all, it is simultaneously the narrative that the artist followed; the narrative that the artist wants us to follow; a constructed narrative artwork; a press release; and, I must say, a verbose and confusing document that may or may not be meant to be comprehended. I’d say, it’s both a metaphor for and physical manifestation of the vastness and quickness of internet information, but also its superficiality. It’s a few plunges into an unfathomably deep pool of information, which can be used for good or for evil, and certainly will be.

Such a complicated object, and we’re not even inside the show yet! This is literally thrilling. As you approach the gallery, which is actually an old elevator that Don made into a gallery, before you see inside it, you hear music. The volume of the music is weird. It’s not so loud that you can’t have a conversation, but it is so loud that you’re definitely hearing it; like, you can’t really tune it out. So even though the gallery itself is very little, the show really begins several steps away from the artwork, several steps before your realize where the music is coming from. This is another gesture toward narrating an experience, and another additional stimuli, a la the wordy and nerdy title of this show. Oh, and it’s classical music.

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Looking into the gallery at “Three Dimensional Stimuli, and Reflected Versions.” (ELEVATOR MONDAYS)

Inside the gallery is a rug, on the floor, where rugs belong, and a flat-screen TV, on the ceiling, definitely not where TVs belong. On each side of the TV there is a round white speaker—the source of the maddening music. So we’ve got a rug on the floor, printed (or painted) with an image, which looks like some kind of bare-bones rendering of a building drawn in perspective. An even simpler way of describing it would be a series of connected open cubes, rendered in perspective. The rug is white, maybe a warm white or an ivory, and the image on it is black. Also visually important is that the rug is on some kind of rubber backing, which sticks out beyond the rug, and creates a frame. So it could be construed as a rubber-framed rug print. As someone who has dabbled in rugs myself, I think it’s important to point out that many rugs have images on them, usually patterns. The quality of a rug may be determined by the image—if it is woven in, or printed on top; if it is made by hand, or by machine. Rugs don’t come with rubber-backings, like this one has, unless they are welcome mats, and even welcome mats don’t usually come with perimeters. I’m trying to get at the fact that this rug thing is very synthetic. It’s not a rug, it’s a rug-faker; but more on that later.

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“Three Dimensional Stimuli, and Reflected Versions.” (ELEVATOR MONDAYS)

The flat-screen TV, mounted to the ceiling, is playing a video; if it’s on a loop, I don’t know how much of it I watched, which also means I don’t know how long the video is. I guess more than a video, it’s an animation; it’s the image on the rug, but rotating around in a three-dimensional space; again, a black drawing on a white background. This kind of image rotating in space as it does in this video recalls both architectural renderings and silly/engrossing crime shows, whose sets and plotlines revolve around some not-real technology that makes holograms that solve crimes, or something like that. All this contributes again to the synthetic feel of the show. Nothing is just “as-is”; everything is constructed, or should I say, everything is a construct.

One element I didn’t consider until this moment are the two fluorescent tubes that light the show, which are also hung from the ceiling in such a way next to the speakers as to look like sculptural elements. In this sense they are related to the rug, so I guess they are light-fakes; and I overheard Don say that the ceiling is false, too, so that’s a ceiling-fake; and the elevator, which it stationary; well, that’s fake too.

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“Three Dimensional Stimuli, and Reflected Versions.” (ELEVATOR MONDAYS)

So at this point, we get that the “three dimensional stimuli” of the title of this artwork is floating in an animation above us, and its “reflected version” is under our feet (if we are standing in the gallery, looking up). We also get that the “mental rotation” of the press release is the rotation of the object, and the “space” is the gallery/elevator, and the “sound” is the music. I love how the next line in the press release is posed as a question, and at the perfect moment, and in no objective way: “But what is the object that is being promoted?” It’s the question of the hour, or of the show, and if you read the press release in its entirety you will understand, and if don’t, you will never know, unless someone who read the press release tells you (or the artist tells you). The use of the word “promoted” is really key here—it speaks to its non-neutrality, that somehow within the artwork Pam is assigning a subjective value to something that seems too object-like to resist objectivity. If there is a crux of the artwork, then it is the use of that word, promoted—not displayed, or screened, or shown, or on-view, or “that we see,” or my least favorite, explored—promoted. Which is what art does, and what design does too, and that this piece argues architecture is responsible for, and even decorating, and even entertainment. And this is why I want to shake Pam and say THANK YOU! Because this is a totally anti-modern artwork in so many ways, but the most important is that it demonstrates, in a weird sciency-theory-y way, that design is not neutral, and of course, neither are we.

Okay, so it’s the Trump/Pence logo, wherein the T penetrates the P (I thought even Trump knew it is typical in conservative-land for the P to penetrate the V). Stupid jokes aside, we get to the humor of this artwork. Yes, I’m pretty sure it’s humor, and not irony. Actually, its place in this artwork fits at least one definition of irony: incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (Merriam-Webster Online). So, that the T penetrates the P in the Trump/Pence logo is funny, and that this whole highly theoretical-seeming, highly-stylized, supremely slick artwork revolved around the T/P logo is also funny; but it also represents irony, and so does Trump’s presidency. I love this aspect of the artwork. It’s like, maybe that’s the lightbulb. When you’re standing in the gallery, looking up, and everything you’ve read and heard starts to make sense, and then you get that recognition of what you’re looking at, you sort of think, oh, I get it…the irony of it all! And if we can pull ourselves together long enough to think about Trump (which we can), we have the very same thought. The irony!

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“Three Dimensional Stimuli, and Reflected Versions.” (ELEVATOR MONDAYS)

Of course, the thing I am not describing in great detail are the excerpts from the press release, which you may want to read now, if you haven’t done so yet. Each one is very different, and as we have traced, relates to a specific part of the artwork. Honestly, this stuff is very heady, and I only engaged in reading each one enough to get the jist of it; these aren’t really ideas I am personally interested in, or find very compelling. I don’t “nerd out” on stuff like this, so to speak. So the vague but lasting impression of each “concept” (as I’ll call them) for me goes something like this: 1) mental rotation has something to do with how the brain recognizes objects, and something to do with intelligence, and those objects are called stimuli; 2) that architecture, specifically ceiling height, affects the way people are able to solve problems (in an almost literal way); 3) the “Mozart effect” is when spatial cognitive tasks are improved after exposure to Mozart music; 4) that everyone made fun of the Trump/Pence logo; 5) the Norman Klein excerpt about “truthiness” was not something I could really comprehend; and 6) Hito Steyerl is saying something about proxy perspectives, and how we see things from above, even when we’re not seeing things from above. Of course, you and I are free to delve further into these ideas, or not; personally I like where this artwork takes me with only my superficial attempt at internalizing its concepts.

But perhaps that feeling, too, is a subject of this artwork; maybe not just our unwillingness to go in-depth, but our inability, too. Could I make a cohesive thought from all of these snippets of theory and psychology and internet gossip? No; but when I step into Pam’s elevator, I mean gallery, I experience all these ideas just a little bit, and as I stare upwards at the revolving penetrated P, I have a fleeting moment where I feel I have glimpsed the structures that undid the world that I knew to be real. Or maybe, Pam is arguing, they were always truthy, always unstable.

I think I’m getting to the end here, and I don’t know if I’ve really pinned down what this artwork is at all. It’s slippery, and it’s addictive, it’s too theoretical but it’s also brainless, it’s futuristic but also retro; it’s a rug and a TV and Mozart, and three pages of color print-outs. It’s far out.

I also want to say, props to Pam for making a political artwork that doesn’t evoke, either literally or metaphorically in any way, the American flag or its colors, and that doesn’t use rage to channel energy toward a rhetorical sentiment. I think this makes this artwork authentic, because in some ways, it speaks to her position. What we are experiencing here is political artwork that forgets about identity and reconfigures it as ideology. Pam is the artist, but the subject position is that of an object; we look up and down, we stand, we listen; inside, it is us that becomes the three dimensional stimuli, and perhaps everyone else is the dark mirror, the “reflected version,” if you will.

What else is there to say? It’s very important that you see this artwork in person if you can; images of it are almost pathetic, compared to the real thing. I’m really proud of this artwork, even though I didn’t make it, and that’s a totally new feeling for me; it makes me feel like, maybe art can communicate something beyond language, at least for a moment.

I didn’t have a title for this writing until I got to nearly the end of it. Usually some kind of title pops out at me, or I have it in mind before I start. For this show, I asked myself, if you had to take away just one idea from the entire artwork, what would it be? To me, it was what if we could see that our identities were ideologies? Well, what if we could? What if we could see that our rugs, and TVs, and music, and color printers, and color print-outs, and our houses, and our studios, and our friends, and the way we look up at things, or down at things, that all of those were ideologies thriving just beneath the surface of banality? I don’t know, but I’m willing to think about it. Even though in this dimension, for now, the T is still penetrating the P, in another dimension, there is no P or T at all. We’ll have to picture it; rotate it; chuck some of it away.

“Three Dimensional Stimuli, and Reflected Versions” is on view at ELEVATOR MONDAYS from Monday, November 6th, 2017 – Monday, January 1, 2018. For information on Pamela Valfer, please visit her website: http://pamelavalfer.com.

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