Part inspiration, part disruption: thoughts on the work of David Aguirre and his six-month residency at the UNPUBLISHED STUDIO

It was an old-fashioned thing—not like a beam balance, but pre-digital—the kind you can cheat if you shift your weight—a little less, a little more. It was square and heavy, despite looking plasticky, with a gently-etched non-slip surface, buffed down to a dull white from years of step-ons and step-offs, all in the service of answering a single, pedantic question: what does it weigh?

It may seem crazy that among all the possible flora—let’s see—the black, heat-melted cactus blossoms—the limp, faded bok choy—the putrid, buzzing lemons—that I’d open an essay on David Aguirre’s work by describing something so not-from-nature. It’s true that all things natural bleed through David’s work—he loves the color blue, especially in its most watery iteration; he loves hiking, and walks that are so tedious and sweat-inducing that they’re practically marches; he loves clay—its weird, wet lumpiness, its ability to go from coil, to mountain, to bead; that it can hold things. He loves fruit. And while a significant portion of his artwork ended up being scavenged, more or less, from my yard, (you should have seen me—shaking my little fist at David as he stood under my lemon tree, picking the hard, green lemons-to-be— “What the fuck are you doing?” I yelled at him), there were many nights when I gazed out over the back deck to see the studio glowing, David bent over one of his many work surfaces, slapping or rolling or smoothing the clay—he was The Artist, if ever there was one. The next morning would be a near-cornucopia. It was something to behold.

The early days of his residency were occupied with building and stretching a series of large (but not huge) rectangular canvases and hanging them in a row on the back wall of the studio. These ended up as light, ethereal paintings in colors that reminded me of swimming pools—translucent, gentle—they sort of, acquiesce. Blues, aquas, teals, surrounded by browns, ochres, and other colors reminiscent of sky and earth—the kinds of colors in scenic painting kits. On top of these swathes David would paint a few fruits: a banana bunch in yellows and greens, a red apple. I’m still not really sure what to make of these paintings (David explained that they were like faces); they certainly functioned as a kind of marked exhalation from his previous work, which embraced the crass, shiny, wince-inducing elements of pop culture, rather than a tranquil, vegetal state of nature. In later iterations, these paintings received more embellishment—ceramic medallions, clothespins, little bits of nature stuff. Oranges. I’ve learned that David’s is an additive process.

 If the first few months of the residency were a study in focused energy—painting as an iterative practice invested in exploring a singular theme and form—then the second half embraced a more punk-rock, fuck-it-up mentality—a dizzying, fruit-fueled, clay-slinging, assemblage-ing, found-object, sculptural extravaganza raging from dusk til’ dawn. In my version of the art fantasy, it was one of our meetings that catalyzed David’s practice; but regardless of what spirit moved him, he was certainly possessed, ending his residency with such a large and eclectic body of brand-new work that I had to ground myself with the one object I was already familiar with.

I still don’t know if it has a title. When I saw it, I loved it instantly. My old scale, the one I had used to weigh plaster, clay, boxes—which had been tucked inside an open shelf—had migrated to the ground. On it, David had placed two things: a little hand-painted cut-out of the Earth, and a rather large foot, made of blue painter’s tape. The foot itself was a gnarly thing, maybe an ogre’s foot, with a fat arch and stubby, splayed-out toes. It was mottled with clay, as if it had been intended as an armature, or escaped some dank, enclosed space. A foot and an Earth on a scale. Not an additive gesture—a simple one. 

Something special about this artwork is that I don’t need to explain it. It’s visceral and immediate, instantly calling forth our own ubiquitous experience to this object of fraught relationships. It’s also all the special art words—oh, indexical, symbolic, metaphorical, maybe even metonymic; it has a telescoping effect on our human scale, and we are at once the ones tipping that scale, but also made small by it, all while comprehending the weight of the world that sits on top of it. It is an artwork that spews forth a hundred adages, expressions, puns; it’s a thesaurus in a neat little square; it’s a reminder; it’s a silly thing; it makes us laugh, while it is somehow just serious enough. It has such a pleasing combination of artifice, with the painted Earth on paper, and then the sculpted, clunky tape-foot, and then the found scale—it’s real, you could step on it—you already have. It’s a thing of history, picturing Atlas battling the Olympians, the old world versus the new, those poetic scales of justice. Those are a few of the things I like about it. I could go on.

If you missed David’s open studio, then you won’t understand how different this artwork was from the others. There was a clothing rack on wheels wrapped in plaster, the central armature on which a plethora of items were affixed—clay tulipiere, bok choy leaves clipped into a multi-pronged hanger (it looked like a chandelier), clay faces, those thin, paper beauty masks, more limbs made of tape—there was a five-gallon-bucket-turned-swamp-cooler, and a fountain made out of what I think was a black rubber bed pan, pumping with filthy black water that splashed across the studio wall. There were books and notebooks, a pile of fruit drawings, and a jumble of ceramic coils that looked like a sharp nest of snakes. There were things that were beautiful, and things that were ugly, and my big, sweet, delicious lemons rotting in a plastic bag that hung from the ceiling. 

After David moved out, he left behind two artworks and a note. One artwork was for Sarah—a cone-like ceramic planter on a rubber yellow chain (he knows how much she loves gardening). One was for me—another simpler, gentler artwork—a small, layered, mixed-media drawing on paper. At the bottom of this paper is a little grid, with David’s signature blue-tape-bits and fruits; above that is a soft, smudgy drawing of a globe with what looks like an organ sack, or perhaps a placenta, hanging from it, all reminiscent of a hot-air balloon. Above that is a small graph-paper-like grid, almost like a blank area to write-in your own something; and hovering above the grid, the word Monday, written in bubble letters, floats in a hazy pink cloud. Around the edges of the drawing is an almost imperceptibly small script describing the many anxieties of Monday; the Monday blues. I fell so hard for this artwork; I was so touched by its intimacy, its smallness—I swear, it whispered things to me; it seemed...alive. For all his artworks, with their over-abundance of nature, their flamboyant ephemerality—for me, this is the one where his spirit really resides.

The UNPUBLISHED project has always been an experiment. I continue to be shocked at how profound it is to share space with an artist in the midst of their practice. One simply cannot tacitly observe—one is sucked in, subsumed by not only the art, but by the artist, and ends in a boundless, amorphous puddle of thoughts and feelings not all that suited to committing to words. There are many, many more thoughts and ideas I have for David—some kind, encouraging, useful—others more stern, or unworkable, or across too many boundaries. Art is like that. In its wildest moments, we cannot remember, discern, accept, who has authored it—it becomes something that seems as if it is an obvious answer to a question we didn’t realize we’d asked. It’s part energy, part fog; part inspiration, and part total disruption. In other words: David. 

-Georgia

David Aguirre - July 14, 2019 (42 of 7)


David Aguirre was the UNPUBLISHED STUDIO artist-in-residence winter/spring 2019.

Georgia is a writer in Los Angeles. She is a co-founder of and lead contributor to UNPUBLISHED, a recent contributor to X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, and is currently the Review Coordinator and Writer for the School of Art at CalArtsGeorgia also directs the UNPUBLISHED STUDIO, a need-based workspace and mentorship program for artists in Los Angeles.

Click here to read her recently published review of Matthew Lax’s Brunt Drama at Los Angeles Contemporary Archive.

Click here to subscribe to UNPUBLISHED essays and events.

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

Photos by Cedric Tai.

 

 

Suit as site: A quickie on Alika Cooper’s “Buoy” at Odd Ark LA

Summer is something dangerous in LA. Fires speed across our crispy hills and canyons; mortars with names like Bone Breaker and American Dog Fight explode at all hours, offering up something more like rage than patriotism; the grid surges and dies under the load of our ACs and Apple products; and perhaps most importantly for readers of this blog, the art world takes a short and unfulfilling nap—the kind where you fall asleep sitting up and are jolted upright by the reliable yet embarrassing bodily gesture of your instinct not to face-plant. Just in time for this hazardous season comes Alika Cooper’s Buoy, a linguistic nod to this nautical beach-going time of year, and a visual representation of perhaps the most feared thing of all: the bathing suit.

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Running a temperature (2018), 48 x 36 in

I’m excited to be writing about bathing suits right now. Forget painting—this garment is in a class of representation all its own. If there was an object that could possibly represent the pain of the impossibly complex history of femininity, war, and the future destruction of the human race, it would be the bathing suit. I’m no historian, and have a horrible memory for such things, but even I know that the bikini, that two-piece corrupter of modesty and perpetual object of ambivalence in many a woman’s life—literally as representative of American freedom as abstract expressionism—was named after the Bikini Atoll—the site of a long series of nuclear testing by the United States, for which the inhabitants of that island were exiled. From now on, let bikinis and nuclear war be synonymous in your head. But back to Alika.

Alika is not an artist I knew until a few days ago. Through the magic of Instagram and art-world acquaintances, last Friday I landed at Odd Ark, a new-ish commercial artist-run gallery in Highland Park. The space itself, very professional but somehow unpretentious and at home in a strip-mall with a jiu jitsu studio, was pleasant to visit; not that any of this matters, but I like how the gallery is arranged so that visitors can be alone in the show. I’m always very self-conscious about looking, and here, I felt I was free to be a bit weird, and not feel the need to censor my odd facial expressions, for which I am unfortunately known.

But let me get right down to it. Buoy, like a beach toy that gets carried out on a wave but manages, to the child’s astonishment, to return, is not graspable, or perhaps appreciable, on first impression. There is something generic about Buoy at first, not boring, but unsurprising—the usual dangers of showing moderately-sized figurative paintings made with a marbleized, abstracted, colorful touch. Dare I say the paintings look very Los Angeles? No, I don’t, because I don’t believe LA looks like a thing, other than maybe a palm tree and a brush fire (and a helicopter?), and so my instinct was immediately to speak to the artist, who succeeded in making a show that one could tell was serious and perhaps even important, but not necessarily in making a clear way to find out just what that importance was. My journey would take the form of a sandwich; from the gallery, to the artist’s studio, and back to the gallery. Yum.

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Installation image of Buoy

I like to talk to artists about their work because I’m interested to know what they think of it—or rather, what it means to them—and because I like talking. Our meeting wasn’t long, maybe an hour—and I took no notes, so I cannot perfectly nor faithfully recount anything that was said—but it was easy to be humbled by Alika’s approach to art-thinking. On the subject of bathing suits, she stated that it was a funny thing to be “into,” but she’s just “into it.” We discussed schools and methodologies, and I, like an idiot, asked her if she had an ethos. No, she said. We flipped through a few paper portfolios of Alika’s last few shows (she has had many; this is her third solo show in Los Angeles). We were computer-less, and while her work table was covered with remnants and future scraps for a series of bronze casting she’s been working on, the rest of her wares were modest. It appeared she had made no preparations for my visit, and this felt intensely admirable, because preparation is something that can be hard to resist. Here was an artist who was quietly, and without pretension, assembling something that might say something for her.

But back to the subject of bathing suits, and to painting. It’s true that Alika’s work may be described as something like collage; she more or less paints large swatches of fabric and then cuts them up and reassembles them into an image—in this case, images of women in bathing suits, which come from photographs of women in bathing suits. And in addition to being collage-y, they’re also puzzle-y; the fabric is not pasted over itself in a series of layers, but rather sliced open and placed inside, which disrupts, in the craftiest way possible, the picture plane. The first time I visited the gallery, none of this was evident to me. Each artwork appeared flat, and I was perplexed by what could possibly be at stake in a woman artist making faceless, detail-less representations of women in bathing suits. To put it plainly, it seemed like something a man would do—it made me frown in the same way I frown when I think of DeKooning’s women. That being said, curiosity got the best of me, and instead of being engaged in the materiality of the work or the “competition” (as Alika referred to it) between figuration and abstraction, I just wanted to know why she painted them.

I realize I’m working backwards here, but a bathing suit is a sight of anxiety. I think Alika’s perspective was invested more in the composition of the bathing suit photos, and not the suits themselves—more the idea of them as editorial scenes. In her press release, she wrote about the invisible labor of women “bobbing to the surface,” and about the suit’s floral patterns as “warning signs” and “markers of survival.” I see it a bit differently.

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Lake (2018), 48 x 36 in

As an object, the bathing suit has a transitive property. This is so hard to explain, I’m really struggling—it’s like the bathing suit is the object that mediates the meaning of a woman’s body for that particular place and time—while a bathing suit takes on a similar form and function to underwear, it is necessarily public in a way that bras and underwear must be private; it represents the necessity for decency (to cover) while simultaneously requiring the display of femininity (to uncover). This garment determines when and how a woman can show her body, and in the process of this mediation, reveals the bafflingly incongruent expectation that we will inhabit all feminine ideals at once. To put it as superficially as possible, a woman in a bikini at a poolside restaurant is one thing; a woman in her bra at McDonalds is completely another. That the place where we are in relation to the design and fabric of the garment covering our nipples determines our level of decency and sanity is disgusting—furthermore, the double standard of male nipples versus female nipples is among the most disturbing double standards that exists in American culture, if not in the law—at least in the state of California. And in the context of bathing suits, the policing of women’s bodies, whether being told to cover or uncover, depending on where in the world you live, is two-fold; the bathing suit grants us cultural permission to physically be ourselves, while determining that the correct body is the one that fits inside the suit and appears, quite dumbly, like the women in Alika’s photographs.

It feels so crazy to be writing and thinking about standards of beauty—and yet that is where this work and this writing took me. I feel it goes without saying, though I will say it, that I have my own anxieties about bathing suits. I even have had bathing suit resolutions. I’ve said the phrase “beach body,” and meant it with some sincerity. I’ve envied skinny women in G-strings and athletic women in sporty one-pieces and I’ve especially envied the fat women in their snug-fitting bikinis, chasing their kids around the beach, or eating sandwiches, or boogie boarding, or sitting cross-legged at the edge of the surf and forming wet, drippy sandcastles on their knees. I have longed to banish my insecurities about my body, and while I still can’t totally wrap my mind around what this idea is doing in a crafty painting show, somehow the subject was just unsettling enough to squeeze it out of me.

Leaving lady-insecurity land and dropping anchor in modern painting, these are not abstract paintings. There is no tension between figuration and abstraction—what we have, actually, is an abstract painting on fabric that’s been cut up and re-configured into the pre-composed image of a woman. To me, this work is anti-expressive, and is a much more accurate and functional representation of the way identity is formed—a nearly-crude patchwork of moments that we hope will manage to express a kind of beauty or wholeness, despite the truth that we are just a series of fractured histories we did not invent but must dwell within. I agree that Alika’s paintings reference the idea of abstraction in the sense that the collages are made of abstract shapes that have been painted previously in an abstract style, but to me, they render abstraction useless. They say, guess what’s not abstract: woman. Hard to assemble, yes; not easy to represent in a simplistic way, yes; more labor than meets the eye, yes; but an abstraction—not I.

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Blot out the Sun (2018), 24 x 20 in

Maybe. I’m oscillating on my interpretation of the show, and while it isn’t exactly a comfortable feeling, it’s not undesirable, either. I still can’t make sense of the facelessness of the figures; and it’s true that when the women are non-specific, they become abstracted ideas of women, (though not abstract paintings!), which may be considered a criticism. On that subject, I am somehow reminded of Dana Schutz’s Swimming, Smoking, Crying (2009), which is—despite her issues with abstraction—a really good painting, and gets to the silly, simmering heart of the impossibility of being female—something that begins to creep up on you in Buoy. The second time I came to the gallery, the dimensionality of Alika’s work really stood out to me—the bumps, the raw edges—there is so much texture in the work, it made me want to run my fingers over it; something like the raised edges of a wound. There is also a prettiness to her paintings that is quite heartbreaking, which made me feel sad for all the flowers that have come to represent femininity in Western culture, and even sadder for the little girls who will wear the bikinis with the flowers, and even sadder for the garment workers around the world, many of whom are children, churning out colorful suits for women to feel self-conscious in, and for artists and writers to use as metaphorical objects of cultural significance.

So, what started as something that seemed flat ended up as something full of texture; what started as a puzzling gesture became a propositional space in which the work asked me questions, and I looked inside myself, and around a little bit, too, for the answers. Of course, there is no answer—the painting is as complicated as the woman who rendered it. Aren’t you? At Alika’s studio, she took me into the dusty, narrow hallway where she hangs her painted fabrics to dry. This was my favorite thing I saw there, and the thing that excites me the most about her work. There, in that hallway, pinned to the wall as unassumingly as if they were sheets on a line, exists the simple yet vast material of what might be formed into a kind of expression; and I can see that Alika’s work is a way of cutting and sewing her own garments—a gesture toward inhabiting a body that may one day finally be permitted to represent itself. In this indeterminate space, “being into it” is the first step in getting something out of it; it may not be an ethos, but it’s a hell of a way to move through the world. Even better.

Buoy is on view at Odd Ark LA in Los Angeles, CA from May 12 to June 24, 2018. For more information on Alika Cooper, please visit her website: http://www.alikacooper.com/

The featured image at the top of this post is Seaside (2018).

All images courtesy of Odd Ark LA.

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