ISSUE II WINTER 2016 HISTORY AND THE ARCHIVE
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Interview
Focus
Staging Concrete Plastic
Letter from the Editor Subverting Historical narratives within the archive.
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by KollActiv An exhibition in print curated by KollActiv (Ann Harezlak and Kirsten Cooke) in collaboration with selected artists which explores the divisions of material (artwork and archival.)
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Transcending History: Narratives of Frohawk Two Feathers
Feature
by Kofi Forson
Interior Expressions: The Art of Cindy Rehm and Kristofer Heng
Kofi Forson speaks with Umar Rashid AKA Frohawk Two Feathers about the subversion of historical narratives in his work.
Lorraine Heitzman discusses symbolism in the collage work of L.A. artists Cindy Rehm and Kristofer Heng.
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by Lorraine Heitzman
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PUBLISHER, EDITOR Kathryn Drury
Current
Review
The Necessity of Process, Rebecca Beachy at New Capital by Liz McCarthy Liz McCarthy reviews Rebecca Beachy’s most recent show Inherencies as part of the re-opening of New Capital Gallery in Chicago.
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Haway the Lasses!: Rewriting the Hack Model by Victoria Bradbury Victoria Bradbury covers Rewriting the Hack, a 48 hour hackathon engaging histories through code which took place in Newcastle, UK in November.
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DESIGN Julia Bohan
Pulse
Studio Cooking at the Armory Center for the Arts Pasadena by Kathryn Drury A dinner discussion with Gordon and Arden Surdam about their recent week-long collaborative residency project which considers the ways artists feed themselves in the studio.
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FOR MORE INFO EMAIL: armseyeart@ gmail.com ON THE COVER I am Taken , Cindy Rehm Photo: courtesy of the artist
The entire contents of ARMSEYE and armseyeart. com are Š 2015 by Armseye Magazine and may not be reproduced in any manner, either in whole or in part, without written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR KATHRYN DRURY
Arms*eye (or var arm*scye) FUNCTION: NOUN ETYMOLOGY: ARMSCYE FROM ARM + ENGLISH/SCOTS/ULSTER DIALECT SCYE, SEY ARMHOLE ARMSEYE PROBABLY FOLK ENTYMOLOGY FOR ARMSCYE.
What are the limits of the archive and history? From whose perspective are they assembled or written? What does it mean to document a place in time, or, for that matter, to dismantle it and reassemble it to suggest new meaning? How does the internet, technology, our present dependence on media, and our mediated experience change our perception of the linearity of time? What histories are we telling, retelling, and collectively rewriting? Is “true history” possible? Perhaps the only way to understand our past is by analyzing the archive—not one that can be found in a curated drawer, though that can be useful—but one that is in constant ARMSEYEART.COM
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flux, a product of a human hive mind, an archive that is the product of the Internet. These lines of inquiry are central to most of the pieces featured in our winter issue. It seems fitting that answering these questions about where we are going, where we have been, and how we will show ourselves to the future are being asked in our winter issue. In the curated section of this issue, Ann Harezlak and Kirsten Cooke, who together form the curatorial team KollActiv, have created a touring exhibition and platform called Concrete Plastic: a stage for exploring the divisions of material (artwork and archival) through reconsidered curatorial 2016
methodologies. The project began in 2011 and was put into action in 2014, when Cooke and Harezlak asked a group of artists working in the US and UK to make pieces responding to the contents of archives and local histories. The product of this discourse can be found in the first section of this issue, and will also be featured in an exhibition staged In L.A. in coming months. The artists included in Concrete Plastic are Michael Bizon, Sinead Bligh, Chris Cawkwell, Patrick Coyle, Dana Berman Duff, Annabel Frearson, Steve Klee, Anne Guro Larsmon, and Kim Schoen. In The Necessity of Process: Rebecca Beachy at New Capital, Liz Mc Carthy reviews Rebecca
Inherencies at New Capital Projects , Rebecca Beachy, Installation View, New Capital Projects, Chicago
Beachy’s recent show Inherencies, which marks the reopening of New Capital Gallery in Chicago. McCarthy discusses Beachy’s use of animals and organic elements in her work, as well as the spiritual quality that Beachy’s installations take on within the gallery setting. With Transcending History: Narratives of Frohawk Two Feathers, Kofi Forson discusses with Umar Rachid, AKA Frohawk Two Feathers, his recent work which explores alternative narratives of history, his background, and the power of naming and reframing the past. Haway the Lasses!: Rewriting the Hack Model, written by Victoria
Bradbury, covers Rewriting the Hack, a two day hackathon, organized by curator Suzy O’Hara and artist Shelly Knotts, which featured thirteen artists, hackers, technologists, theorists, historians, and archivists. With participants, O’Hara and Knotts investigated the ways in which women have shaped technology and industry both historically and in the present, particularly in the North East of England. In Interior Expressions: The Art of Cindy Rehm and Kristofer Heng, Lorraine Heitzman covers the work of collage-based artists working in Los Angeles and discusses the theme of
restructuring context in both of their processes. Studio Cooking at the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena: A Conversation with Meghan Gordon and Arden Surdam documents the week -long performance series organized by Gordon and Surdam during their residency at the Armory which explored “how artists feed themselves while they are working.” The series featured handcrafted ceramic bowls by Orr Herz and food performances by guest chef-artists Páll Haukur, Eric Kim, David Bell, Anthony Bodlovic, Lisa Jugert, and Amanda Katz, as well as Gordon and Surdam.
Staging Concrete Plastic Curated By KollActiv
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Dense clouds hang low in the air, amplifying the heat of the day and emitting grey tones that merge with the stone of Tate Britain’s frame opposite. Gazing up at the red brick buildings flanking his body on three sides, a man waits for his allotted time to visit the archive. Feelings of anticipation had built up during the several months prior to his visit. His mind started to secrete images: effervescing thoughts and questions flash across the inner surfaces of his cranium. How will the collection be presented? What will it include, and will I gain future access to its documents?
Where to begin How to begin | commencement
As hands hover above a silver keyboard, her eyes follow the edges of the screen down toward the grains and knots of the wooden surface below. They reach the inner folds of her notebook, she opens a page, glances at a section of text and then reverses her gaze; returning her concentration to the desktop. Tapping the name of an online archive into the search bar produces an icon: a blue snake consuming its own tail. As the icon continues to rotate, rich aromas of coffee tantalise her senses. She reaches toward the steaming mug to her left. Whilst taking a sip of the dark liquid, she clicks on the link presented by the search engine: a move that opens a series of digital still images presented by an online collective archive.
What are the rules | commandment Discussing works with the head of collections, he discerns that the archive is not centered around particular artists but through a series of categories. In his search for works and ephemera by Lawrence Weiner and Keith Arnett, he stumbles into a conversation that plots the workings of the archive; a spatial catalogue acts as a carousel of information. Documentation dancing in and out of focus within different categories that maintain connections between material.
Structure | housing | accessibility to find / redefine / define— is to also author | authority
A list of subjects appear on the screen as she clicks on a tab labeled architecture. She is instantaneously transported into a conversation with Billy Al Bengston and Frank Gehry occurring on a Santa Monica rooftop. Hovering within the space of discussion but not directly participating, she listens to memories of the pair’s collaborative 1968 show at LACMA. Scrolling down the page, she catches framed glimpses of the show. Accompanying the textual voices of her companions, the article discloses that the materials, which composed their architectural method of display, were a mixture of a life-sized wax replica, re-purposed temporary walls, and rented furniture.
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A silence to these questions (to give more than what was given) implicates a dig. She looks at the artist’s book which has been placed on its side, and questions whether it must be read to be activated, or if it could form the proposition for an empty set. It is an object in-itself. Simultaneously, in another country; a database of words is being constructed, that will disembowel a text in order to reconfigure a monstrous translation. Concurrently, her hands morph into letters that absorb the touch of her fingers. Her gaze mingles with the digital pixels on the monitor. “Most ephemera goes in the bin,” a conjecture that pierces the silence of the clinical space. Latterly, the divulged phrase is elaborated upon and it is garnered that ephemera is a Greek term, which directly translates to mean, ‘for one day’. It is also imparted that the term was first deployed by the natural sciences for organisms with brief life spans. Downstairs in the college canteen a Coca- Cola bottle is ejected from another vending machine: consumed, digested and discarded it is fragmented whilst the projected amount of sales continue to spiral. Further suggested links appear on the side bar and so she follows one thread but then quickly retraces her steps back to the homepage. Clicking on the art category, she is suddenly immersed by a fluid highway, which is only broken up by the frozen moments of a time that has been constructed out of space. Scouring the horizon above her hands that are clutching at the clammy faux leather of her steering wheel, she becomes aware of a series of consecutive billboards that signpost the passage of time through the distance she has travelled. Images of decaying foliage, ancient messages and hints of blooming jasmine flash past her field of vision. LA’s urban structures house these poster artworks and in an act of inversion are re-envisioned for a gallery space.
Given: Project = Concrete Plastic Exhibition making components =Curators+Archives+Artists Artists+Archives+Curators = Hybrid Form(s)? A tenuous difference exists between collections and archives, if at all, but the latter, we are told, can be understood as preserving the organic connections within a volume of documentation. There is no more material to be collated because it is formed around unique works that are not published and will not be reproduced. Collections are constantly growing and being added to because they construct categories (as opposed to archiving a one-off item), which can then expand with the new forms of art.
Among these multiplicities the players, on this stage for exploring the divisions of material (artwork and archival) through reconsidered curatorial methodologies, are: KollActiv (Kirsten Cooke, Ann Harezlak); East of Borneo Collective Archive Online; Special Collections, Chelsea College of Arts Library, University of the Arts London; Michael Bizon; Sinead Bligh; Chris Cawkwell; Patrick Coyle; Dana Berman Duff; Annabel Frearson; Steve Klee; Anne Guro Larsmon; and Kim Schoen.
A man, in black and white, is sat playing a grand piano in the corner of a room flooded with the sun’s rays, which cascade down from the skylights carved out within the wooden structure. Striped and patterned rugs are strewn across the hard surfaces of the domestic interior. Photographs stripped of material context appear and are reinserted with meaning, through a narrative that describes an architect’s habitation in the Californian desert as his firm builds a hotel.
Opening the book with their hands, they can feel the dry texture and weight of the page. Physical odours produced by the pulp and ink travel towards their nostrils. They begin to imagine artworks that respond to the archival material but write and perform new spaces and systems: creating new objects that produce alternative states within the world.
Herein this exhibition find new works alongside existing works and responses presented as collective discourse. A current in a hybridized mode of production, a stream of catalysts as primary to producing primary...
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AUTHORS AND WORKS IN ORDER OF ENCOUNTER KollActiv is a platform for co-authored projects by founding curatorial practitioners Kirsten Cooke and Ann Harezlak KollActiv investigates the treatment of archival objects within curatorial practice: deploying the productive friction between the authors different approaches towards the nature and display of objects. From 2011, KollActiv has been developing the project Concrete Plastic as an alternative methodology that challenges the canonical models within contemporary curatorial and archival practice. Interrupting and enveloping normative procedures, the curators are primary producers that have created the platform and restrictions for the project. Artists collaborate through their responses to archives and ephemera, which are the primary objects and stimuli for their interventions. Concrete Plastic has explored the divisions of material (artwork and archival) through reconsidered and hybridized methodologies. Concrete Plastic incorporates discussion and production, artistic practice based in the USA and UK, with local host archives and histories: intervening in the historical and contemporary curatorial discourse surrounding the ontology of the art object and archival practice.
Kirsten Cooke is a curator and art practitioner currently in
the last year of her PhD at the University of Reading (with an MA in Critical Writing Curatorial Practice, University of the Arts London) who lives and works in London, UK. Cooke’s research is concerned with locating curatorial strategies that stage the ontology of artworks within a system predicated on value. Cooke is also part of a co-authored project entitled Material Conjectures, the recent projects of which include: Kwartz Kapital Konstruction Kollider, Beaconsfield, London; Asymmetrical Cinema, Beaconsfield, London; One Dimensional Disco, kynastonmcshine, London.
Ann Harezlak is a curator and art historian (MA Critical Writing and Curatorial Practice, University of the Arts London), who is lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. Harezlak has assisted in the development of major archival projects at Special Collections, Chelsea College of Arts Library, UAL; Tate Archive; the Henry Moore Foundation; and the Ian Hamilton Finlay & Michael Harvey Archive. On-going and recent projects include: Concrete Plastic, KollActiv, London & LA; With Gemma Levine & Henry Moore, Tate, London; The Promise of Something and Nothing, LA; Henry Moore in the Gemma Levine Archive, Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity, Tate Online; Arrive and Likewise Depart, LA. ARMSEYEART.COM
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Steve Klee
Research table composition for The rubber hand illusion (instruction piece), 2015 The rubber hand illusion (instruction piece): a description of an artwork yet to be made.
Michael Bizon Spotty Difference II, 2015
4. The Blue Spot is below, the Blue Spot is above 3. The Only Doorway is unfocused, and focused 2. The door is scratched, the door is pristine 1. Their backgrounds oppose ANSWERS Michael Bizon is an artist currently living in Los Angeles.
Patrick Coyle
This Ephemera collection Description, 2015 Reordered description of the Ephemera Collection at Chelsea College of Arts Library. Patrick Coyle, b. 1983, Hull, UK, is an artist and writer. He completed MFA Art Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London (2010) and BA Fine Art at Byam Shaw, University of the Arts London (2005). Coyle recently delivered performances at Tate Modern, ICA and Wellcome Collection (all London), and contributed texts to The Cambridge Literary Review (Issue 8/9); A Circular (2 and 3); Invisible Fabrick (Norwich); and Dear World & Everyone In It, New Poetry in the UK (Bloodaxe Books, Northumberland).
Dana Berman Duff Catalogue Series, 2014
Filmmaker, artist, and educator. Films screened at many international film festivals including Toronto, Rotterdam, Edinburgh, and Cairo, among others. Art exhibited at Whitney Museum, New Museum and galleries in N.Y. and L.A. Teaches at Otis College of Art and Design. Lives and works in L.A. and Mexico.
Instructions for the rubber hand illusion, whereby a healthy subject experiences an artificial limb as part of their own body: 1. You will observe a facsimile of a human hand while your own hand is concealed. 2. Both artificial rubber hand and the invisible hand will be stroked synchronously with a brush. 3. Gradually, the felt strokes will become aligned with the seen strokes of the brush. The rubber hand will ‘become’ your hand. During this illusion, in the words of ‘neurophilosopher’ Thomas Metzinger, the conscious model of the “organism-as-whole”, or our “phenomenal self model (PSM)” is shown to be distinct from the actual limits of our body. The PSM is a relatively autonomous product of neural activity - a ‘system’ that might be tricked… The rubber hand illusion creates a lacuna, drives a wedge between the apparent immediacy and accuracy of our direct phenomenal experience and reality; we don’t really grow a phantom limb. Leafing through some boxes of ephemera held in Chelsea’s archives, a process of touching, holding, examining – an encounter of tactile immediacy – reveals a collection weighted towards Conceptual Art. Text predominates, ‘Instruction pieces’ are common. This genre of art can be seen to question the phenomenological presumptions of Minimal and Post-minimal art. Instruction pieces, carefully formulated in precise sentences, need not be rendered spatial, need not be experienced by a present and mobile body. A lacuna is introduced here too, between art and the necessity of its bodily reception. My contribution to the exhibition will be to overlay these two lacunas: to create an instruction piece, which - if realised – results in a bona-fide scientific experiment, an experiment that itself casts doubt on the presumptions of phenomenal
spectatorship.
Steve Klee is an artist, writer and teacher with a current fascination for the question: what can science do for art, and art for science?
AUTHORS AND WORKS IN ORDER OF ENCOUNTER Anne Guro Larsmon
RIDE (Freeway signs I-III), Welded steel, 2013 Anne Guro Larsmon b. 1981 is a Norwegian artist based in Oslo and Los Angeles. She graduated from California Institute of Arts in 2013. Exhibitions include: The Remains of the Day, (Michael Thibault Gallery, Los Angeles); Pool/Heat (Kunstforeningen Verdens Ende, Norway); FREEWAY (IAC Malmø, Sweden); and The Spring Exhibition (Charlottenborg Kunsthal, Germany).
Kim Schoen
Kleine Enzyklopädie (grey), from The Empty Library, Light-jet print, size variable, 2015 Kim Schoen is an artist, writer, and co-founder of MATERIAL Press. Her work in photography and video installation focuses on the rhetorics of display. Recent exhibitions of her work include: Have You Never Let Someone Else Be Strong, MMoCA, (solo show); IAAWTTCN (Camberwell Space, London); Remembering Forward (LAXART, Los Angeles); Objective Considerations of Contemporary Phenomena (MOTInternational Projects, London); Stupidious (South London Gallery, London); and Unsparing Quality (Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles). Schoen’s work has been written about in the Los Angeles Times, Art in America, and her essays on repetition and photography (The Serial Attitude Redux, The Expansion of the Instant) have been published in X-TRA Quarterly for Contemporary Art.
Annabel Frearson
Wollstonochlincraft 1791-1971, 2015 Wollstonochlincraft 1791-1971 is a new work that presents compound words amalgamated from ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ (Wollstonecraft, 1791) and ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ (Nochlin, 1971). Annabel Frearson rearranges existing cultural objects into new relationships. Projects include expanded spectacular reworkings of complete books from Baudrillard, through ‘Frankenstein’, to ‘Mein Kampf’. She is based in London, UK, and has exhibited internationally.
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Chris Cawkwell
Buy the World a Coke, 2015 The Coca-Cola bottle is an everyday object of mass consumption; for some it represents a symbol of imperialism and it has become, globally, a symbol of capitalist consumerism. Buy the World a Coke was initially conceived as a series of interventions on Coca-Cola bottles being sold within the public domain: QR codes adhering the side of bottles link to a web page displaying an online counter – continuously counting up at the rate at which Coca-Cola products are bought and consumed on a global scale. As the bottle progressively empties of dark brown liquid, the barcode printed in white becomes increasingly invisible, to the point where the link is no longer functional. The work, as intervention, goes beyond the viewer in the gallery or museum, and extends to a wider public who may be unaware of their contact with art. This act, through which the product is consumed, is mimicked within the gallery space, as audience members are invited to take a “refreshing” Coca-Cola from a fridge located within the gallery. And, either leave the product and QR code intact as an art object, or use a bottle opener located upon the gallery wall to open and consume the liquid that helps comprise the link. The work is re-presented within these pages as an ongoing archive to our consumption of a product that has become completely engrained within social constructs of everyday life. See Chris Cawkwell's work at http://kollactiv. com/buy-the-world-a-coke-2015/ Born in Leicester 1985. Lives and works in London. Cawkwell’s work explores the relationship between global marketing and consumption; utilising contemporary technologies, performative and interactive elements to critique the social systems and processes which operate around us, and highlight the rate at which products are consumed and commodified.
Sinéad Bligh
Retained original, discarded copy, thermal fax paper correspondence, 21 x 32.9cm, 2015 Sinéad Bligh’s area of study is in the possibilities of varied knowledge-sharing and collaboration amongst those in different roles of art, scholarship and exhibiting, and particularly the role performed by the archive in this interplay. Bligh’s practice explores these collaborations between space and its agents, addressing the nature of interconnectivity between object and situation and questioning its by-products knowledge and perception. Current Archive Assistant and Researcher for the Barry Flanagan Archive and recent Chelsea Arts Club Trust Research Fellow at CHELSEA space (Sept 2014 –Sept 2015), Bligh continues to explore archival methodologies through the media of sound, text and installation, often deployed through curatorial and artistic collaborations.
Dana Berman Duff Catalogue Series, 2014
LOS ANGELES EXHIBITION HOSTED AND SUPPORTED BY:
Interview
Umar Rashid
Frohawk Two Feathers: Transcending History: The Narratives of Frohawk Two Feathers By Kofi Forson What is the origin of the names Umar Rashid and Frohawk Two Feathers? Frohawk Two Feathers: Umar Rashid is my birth name. I have a slave surname attached, but I don’t use it anymore. That surname was the name a slave owner gave to one of my ancestors. Umar Rashid is the person that I am, the originator of everything I do. Frohawk is an alter ego I created when I moved here to Los Angeles. I began to explore my genealogical lineage and found that I had some Native American (Choctaw) and European ancestry. You studied at New Concept Development Center where you emerged from a multi-cultural setting. During this experience, you learned to speak Swahili. How were you influenced by these experiences in your formative years? The scholar, Haki R. Madhubuti, who founded Third World Press, opened the school because he didn’t like the curriculum of the typical White American educational system. At the school I learned about Kwame Nkrumah before Abraham Lincoln or even George Washington. I learned about the history of my people first. It helped with my search for identity early on and led to a greater appreciation of the world. You grew up in Chicago. How did the urban lifestyle ARMSEYEART.COM
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PROFILE / UMAR RASHID Umar Rashid, AKA Frohawk Two Feathers is a black American artist who was born in Chicago in 1976. His work has been included in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the 21C Museum; the Wellin Museum of Art; the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; and the Nevada Museum of Art, where his work has been featured in solo exhibitions. In 2014, Rashid exhibited at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, as a MATRIX artist. His artwork has also appeared with the work of Duke Riley at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. More recently, his work has appeared in several shows at the Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York, as well as in several group shows at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the San Diego Museum of Art Street Jam, and the Burlington City Arts, Vermont. In addition to his extensive show record, in 2011 Umar Rashid published a book, entitled The Edge of the Earth Isn’t Far from Here.
and gang culture affect your consciousness? Growing up as a minority in an urban setting, you see two groups of people as powerful, outside of the family structure. The people you view as having an extreme amount of power are the police and gang culture. When I was growing up, gangs were prevalent. I gained a weird sort of admiration and a sense of profound fear for them. Admiration and fear mixed is a very powerful cocktail. When I
Previous page: Battle Flag Of The Former Frenglish Empire, 2014, Cotton, 54 x 33” Above: Dreaming of Zanzibar, 2015, Acrylic and ink on pine, 13 x 10 1/2” Opposite: All Praise To Damballah, 2015, Acrylic, walnut wood, deer sinew on goat hide, 35 x 35” Next page: Per Capita, 2014, Acrylic and wood stain on olive wood, 15 x 6 x 7 inches each
create these stories about the colonial empire I channel some of the admiration and fear into the characters: the protagonists and antagonists and everybody in-between within the narrative. Among your courses at Southern Illinois University were photography, film and writing. How did they contribute to your vision as storyteller, illustrator and painter? What were the circumstances of your life there, and how did they influence the evolution of your work about ARMSEYEART.COM
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the Frengland Empire? Southern Illinois University was my crucible. I manifested from a racist environment, became a separatist, and joined the Kwame Toure/ Stokely Carmichael All African People’s Revolutionary Party. I saw a crack in that thought system and subsequently reached out to other groups. This was the beginning of my work about the Frenglish Empire. I was heavily influenced by Sam Greenlee’s film The Spook Who Sat by the Door. I sought inspiration from the films of Spike Lee, Gordon Parks, Melvin Van Peebles, and Haile Gerima. Their work made me realize that with film, I could tell a story with words and sound. My writing teacher, Kent Haruf, a well-known author, advised me to pursue writing. At the same time I was transitioning from the film department to the photography department. The work I was making became more emotive. It didn’t have anything to do with the concept of blackness. I was trying to learn the media, shooting environmental stuff, doing Franz Kline work (laughter.) Later the writing and storytelling merged with the imagery. One of the last shows I did before I left school was called Japanese Africans. It was the first time I used images and words together. This is how everything was launched. The basis for the narrative presented in your work is an imagined, fictitious empire known as the Frenglish Empire, which consists of an alliance between France and England which endures wars, imperialism and colonialism. How important are the dates and people in history in relation to retelling these tales? As much as they are fictionalized, how are they
REVIEW: UMAR RASHID, FROHAWK TWO FEATHERS
represented in truth and fact? I was trying to find a perfect time in history in which I could place the Frengland Empire. I imagined this happening at the end of the English Civil War when Oliver Cromwell died. After he died the Stuart Monarchy returned from exile for a short time. During that period, I felt it was my chance in actual history to interject a different narrative. I read chapters of actual history, expounded on it, and changed the names.
I took actual stories and wars, the Six Years War, Eighty Years War, Queen Anne’s War, and the War of Austrian Succession, and made it into my own story. I added my very own culture: black culture and hip hop. I included a tattoo system to create a codified language. I got ideas from Jay A. Rogers’ One Hundred Amazing Facts About The Negro about the African diaspora and all its accomplishments. The Frengland Empire ends in the late 19th Century.
You’ve taken your personal history along with world history to articulate the narrative of the Frengland Empire. It goes beyond levels of philosophy. It becomes almost transcendental. Another facet of what I’m doing is finding out who I am, the pursuing of my very own identity, all the many beings within. Perhaps that is the way to achieve transcendence. For the last show I did at the Hudson River Museum, I wanted to bring back the inceptive magic of the work. I brought in elements of mythology and philosophy from the colonial period and different aspects of violent colonial enterprise. Among your many shows is Kill Your Best Ideas, The American Proteus, An Invocation, and The Wars Between The Rivers. The last spans the years 1791 to 1793. What are the circumstances surrounding this project? How was it represented as an exhibition at the Hudson River Museum? As an exhibition, it was straightforward. I added some cultural elements: there was a Trojan horse and canoe which was loaned to me along with some Hudson River paintings. The work involved a three-year story arc, the last segment of a long narrative I started back in 2012. It deals with how Frengland manifested itself in the Americas. I talked about the arrival of Europeans on the American continent and the subsequent fall of the Native American Empire. It was crucial that I tell this story because of how I identify, plus its horrific and tragic circumstances. With The Edge of The Earth Isn’t Far From Here, your exhibition and book from 2011, you represent the Cape Colonies. You unearth events in a Cape Colony of 1792. What was the narrative for this project? Events from the Frenglish Empire narrative in relation to this show which took place in Cape Town, South Africa, October 25th to ARMSEYEART.COM
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November 25th, 2011 happen after the Hudson River Museum show, February 7th to May 17th, 2015. I tied the story to the Cape Colony because it helped establish who the Dutch were. The Dutch play a very important role in my history as well as colonial history. The story is about a Frenglish garrison in present day Cape Town and how they take over Dutch holdings. After the fifty years war the Dutch attempt to get their colony back. The Frenglish with allies fight against a resurgent Dutch empire, outsmart them, trick them into landing at a different port, and eventually destroy them in battle. What has been your evolution from the gallery system to museums? How has exhibiting in museums changed the priorities of your work for the purpose of education and less as commodity? The difference between working with a gallery and museum is that partly the galleries are concerned with personal agendas and sales while the museum as a cultural entity is solely invested in the artist and the work. Museums are more concerned with the narrative. But the gallery system is necessary; without it I could not afford to make work at all. I’m able to make money with a good gallery, allowing for further development of the work. And with a good gallery, I’m able to make
doing shows on the east coast and Europe. In terms of Frengland, this show is important because I’m addressing the next phase, Latin America and the Caribbean. The history of colonialism in that area is the focal point of what I’ll be doing for the next five years. How do you approach the art form of portraiture? What is the relevance of Romanticism in your work? Which artists or art movements do you cite as an influence? Delacroix, Delacroix, Delacroix, I can’t say his name enough… painters like Theodore Gericault, Rubens, Romantic Era Painters, and people who weren’t celebrated, such as connections that I would not make anywhere lithographers. Also indigenous art. A good else. Plus, they do a lot of the heavy lifting example would be that I might merge a so that I can focus more on output. The highly stylized form of Romanticism with the museums augment the story by making style of an unknown painter from it available to the public. I’ve the Congo. That’s where I get the CURRENT been lucky to exhibit in different postures and posing. I like the work SHOWS: museums across the country A Primitive Future in Jamel Shabazz’s book Back in the and to participate in and create Days. It had a big influence on me. I – Subliminal educational programs for children would also include Byzantine icons, Projects and adults, as well as to give talks Catholicism, Adinkra symbols, old about the process and the work OPEN RECEPTION Egyptian portraits, hieroglyphics and itself. Working with museums Saturday cave paintings, and artists like Jacob allowed my work to evolve, December 5, Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and fostering and furthering my 2015 Basquiat. I take all these influences narrative, just as my work provided All images courtesy and combine them. enrichment to the museum. of the Umar Rashid and Subliminal Projects
What current projects are you working on? Where are you in the process of detailing the history of the Frengland Empire? I’m working on a group show called A Primitive Future. It’s basically me and other artists who work in a Faux Naïve Style. We make work out of skin and found material, masks and bottle caps. The show will open here in Los Angeles at Subliminal Projects in Echo Park, Shepard Fairey’s gallery. I’m going to be in the show with Ben Venom, Lucien Shapiro, AJ Fosik, Ravi Zupa, and Haroshi. It’s sort of my reintroduction to the L.A. art scene. I’ve been
What about the way you present your art? How do you proceed in telling narratives while presenting the work as paintings? I’m a storyteller first, so I learn as I go. I really enjoy creating in a vacuum. Going with what’s in my head instead of using influences. It’s difficult to escape influences. They are so subtle, the way they slip. But I do my best to keep my work original. To be honest, I do believe it’s all been done before. Kofi Forson is a writer living in New York City. His current blog is Black Cocteau.
Feature
States of Mind
The Collages of Cindy Rehm and Kristofer Heng By Lorraine Heitzman
The collages by Los Angeles artists Cindy Rehm and Kristofer Heng are anything but conventional: they are modest in size and made from common materials, but there is poetry lurking within. Using narrative and evocative titles to describe their collages Rehm and Heng sever images from their original source material and reconstruct them to reflect their own interior lives. These artists investigate themes personal and public. While Rehm and Heng share techniques and an aptitude for assembling disparate images to create new psychological states, their collages explore and express very different realities. Cindy Rehm is an artist with one Fluevog boot planted firmly in the 21st century and the other in footprints left by the Victorians. Her work mines the emotional terrain of visceral ARMSEYEART.COM
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obsessions, haunting meditations, and gender politics. Rehm’s work exhibits a specificity and attention to craftsmanship coupled with a sense of irony that serves to make personal the political elements of her work. Rehm’s meticulously rendered drawings of hair and veils showcase her exceptional talents as a draftsperson. Her prolific performances and videos rely upon her ability to evoke emotional, darkly textured scenarios. Her collages engage the viewer through different means: some are dark and cloaked in mystery, referencing gothic sensibilities, while others are light, weightless, and more contemporary. Some are hybridized, fragmented images harkening back to early modernist conventions but steeped in a surrealist brew. Each series provides insight into her vision of the breadth of female experience.
V , Cindy Rehm, courtesy of the artist Rehm’s interest in gender issues began while she was studying printmaking and painting during her undergraduate studies at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. At college she was awakened to the hierarchy and misogynist attitudes prevalent throughout the art world and academia, but it was the Alison Saar exhibit in 1993 at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. that galvanized her feminist perspective. Recognizing the male dominance in the museum’s collection, she appreciated Saar’s personal, small, and intimate work; it was a pivotal moment for Rehm. The emphasis on craft and handmade qualities resonated with her upbringing that was defined by selfsufficient women: “I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, where there was no immediate access to art or museums. I was always drawn to my maternal Grandmother’s magic of “making something from nothing.” She was constantly knitting, crocheting, and sewing clothes and stuffed animals from her own patterns. She was a kind of visionary crafter and used any scrap of material she could find to make her creations…I have always seen her as one of the smarter, more resourceful people I have known.” – Cindy Rehm in conversation with the author.
The time between undergraduate and graduate school solidified her interest in depicting in art, narratives of emotional pain, women’s bodies, and the female experience at large. Simultaneously, her commitment to a materialsbased approach to working, including traditional crafts, also rose to the surface. Rehm attended the graduate painting program at Towson University in Maryland. There she broadened her studies to include installation and
performance. Her mentors in the painting, drawing and art history departments were supportive; however, ultimately, her education was self-directed into the burgeoning wave of 90s feminist art.. Due to this influence, the gestures of cutting and stitching figured prominently in her drawings and performances. Saar, Louise Bourgois, and Ann Hamilton, all artists who influenced Rehm’s work, emphasized the tactile qualities of the materials they employed. Others,
such as Carolee Schneeman, Anna Mendieta and Hannah Wilke impressed upon Rehm a new understanding of performance art and an interest in the metaphysical and spiritual in art. When asked what inspires her now, Rehm replies without hesitation, “Reading.” She reads turn of the century Victorian texts, literary criticism, historical texts, and feminist history whose underlying themes are women’s lives, their bodies, and symbolism. She is currently a co-leader of the Cixous Reading Group, a book club founded by Alexandra Grant three years ago in connection with the 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica. They began by reading the work of Clarice Lispector; now, up to 20 poets and visual artists meet monthly to read and discuss feminist texts.
Black Veil , (top and bottom right) Cindy Rehm,
courtesy of the artist
Rehm speaks about her collages within the context of her evolution as an artist. After graduate school, she no longer wanted to paint but still desired to make objects. The Surrealists’ use of collage, particularly Max Ernst, inspired her. She began working in collage shortly after completing a large series of ink drawings that were as meticulous as they were ARMSEYEART.COM
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the fashion industry challenge us to examine the many ways in which we are complicit in the ways women are defined by society. Contradiction and irony are at the heart of the
Virgin/Whore , Cindy Rehm, courtesy of the artist
Black Veil series.
laborious. As an antidote to the lengthy process the drawings demanded, the spontaneity of collage appealed to her. In 2010, Rehm began a series of collages entitled Black Veil. This new collection of work dramatically changed the hermetic, scientific approach of her previous drawings, to a lively, graphic commentary on women objectified and masked. Taking images from fashion magazines, Rehm isolated
women posed in groups and covered them with veils, some severe and unadorned and others fancifully hand-painted. Although veils may serve to protect and cover women in many cultures throughout history, in Rehm’s collages, they emphasize the confident and defiant poses of the female form beneath veils. At the same time, the objectification and marketing of women’s bodies in the media and as seen in
In her 2013 series, Virgin/ Whore, Rehm completed 24 collages in which she alternates portraits of women partially or fully concealed behind mirrors and veils. Constructed from black and white prints, Rehm assembles the haunting and introspective collages into a sampler of our own projections. One collage in the series features a portrait of a female model with her face obscured behind a veil-like shroud. The viewpoint is positioned from above so that the viewer is looking down on the model. With blonde hair as sleek as a Breck Shampoo girl, and wearing a white blouse and headband, Rehm’s collaged figure is at once feminine and childish. We only see the curve of her cheekbone.and suggestion that her eyes are closed. The overall effect is that the figure is passive and submissive, neither violent nor angry. Juxtaposed to this image is a portrait of a woman whose face is hidden behind an ornately framed mirror without a reflection. As disquieting as the passive portrait, but equally as disturbing, this blank
Virgin/Whore , Cindy Rehm, courtesy of the artist
portrait conveys an active, defiant mood. The viewpoint, this time, is positioned from below. The mirrored woman’s face is unseen, wisps of dark hair undulate from beneath the mirror, and, if her eyes were visible, they would be challenging the viewer. Despite the mirror obscuring her face, this figure conveys a sense of defiance. Though neither image specifically conveys Rehm’s title Virgin/Whore, the title evokes the practice ARMSEYEART.COM
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of labeling women based on archetypical constructs of femininity that neither explain nor elucidate individual
I am Taken , (top right) Cindy Rehm,
courtesy of the artist
women’s identities, but instead are projections they must bear. Earlier this year at Elephant, an artist space in Glassell Park, Rehm exhibited a solo show entitled Psychical Research. In addition to videos, Rehm included new collages that brokered the difference between her earlier, and recent 2016
work. Taken, one of these collages, shows the profile of a woman in a plain, black dress, standing with her head thrown back and her arms gesturing toward her throat. A swath of fabric covers her face, more suffocating than the ecstatic pose might indicate. In contrast to the photocopied images, the background is painted by hand in a manner that heightens the gestures and isolation of the figure. In Liminal, the partially clothed figure is posed in front of water and clouds in a disorientating outdoor landscape. A large orchid replaces the woman’s head, and her arms reach towards her face. Because of this scale shift, it is not clear if the figure is being suffocated by the
Vestige , Cindy Rehm, series, courtesy of the artist has been
Liminal ,
Cindy Rehm, courtesy of the artist
orchid, or if she is on display. This past July, Rehm spent a month-long residency at PAF (Performing Arts Forum) near Paris. During the residency, she created a video called Dora Dreams, and completed several series of collages. In one of these collages, Scrapbook Simone, Rehm takes a simplified approach. Small black and white images, hand-colored with red markers are arranged like mounted butterfly specimens. Each item, isolated and precious,
scrutinized carefully and presented to the viewer in an almost scientific way, encouraging a dispassionate gaze. How are these items related? Like rebus puzzles, a common medieval device used to depict words with images, these images seem to depict strange and mysterious stories in which limbs and lace are intertwined In the series Vestige, another
Scrapbook Simone, (top left and right) Cindy Rehm, courtesy of the artist series completed at Rehm’s PAF residency, a female figure is shown in each collage in varying states of dress and undress. Taking images from fashion, Rehm has created an image in which lace morphs into snakes and collars choke rather than accessorize. Bondage, both literal and sexual, is suggested, and an overall impression of subjugation pervades the work. Using remnants from other work, Rehm combines modernist compositions with her vocabulary of Victorian and psychological symbols. The recurring references to Victoriana in Rehm’s work reflect many of her interests and how she approaches ARMSEYEART.COM
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imagery. She is clearly fascinated by the history of investigations into women’s hysteria, which was treated as an actual illness by doctors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, often by horrific means. Rehm interprets the phenomenon in this period of study as a physical manifestation of the female experience. Clairvoyants and mystics also gained traction with Victorians, telling stories that were unable to be told by conventional means. After reading about the suffragette movement and the case studies of women analyzed by Freud, Rehm embraced a feminism that centers on the psychological and spiritual life 2016
of women. Her collages are also telling the untold stories of women today. With her work, Rehm gives voice to those who have been opposed, silenced, and subjugated and asks us to look into our own lives to find the ways we are muted and distanced from our full selfrealization.
Isolated from the noise and bustle of construction outside of his studio in downtown Los Angeles, Kristofer Heng creates his collages amid stacks of 3 x 5 inch index cards and paper cutouts. There are file cabinets filled with thousands of carefully cut magazine images stored for future use and printed “fragments,” his term for visual representations
MORE INFORMATION AND IMAGES BY THE ARTISTS: cindyrehm.com I kristoferheng.com
Two figures dancing on rocks in dense fog, near a body of water , Kristofer Heng,
of thoughts, somewhat akin to haikus. Images awaiting a small shift in position or a slight change in text are pinned up on one wall. His studio gives the impression of a sanctuary where meditations accompany thoughtful actions. Heng embodies that impression with his quiet, careful demeanor. Growing up in Southern California, Heng was surrounded by his father’s collection of antique cameras, so perhaps it was this familiarity that initially drew him toward photography.
When his family moved to Sweden he studied photography in high school, but returned to the United States after graduation upon the advice of his teachers. He was admitted to The Art Center College of Design to study photography, and eventually switched to fine arts as his interests quickly expanded toward collages, sculpture, and installations. Nowadays, Heng pursues writing with as much zeal as he pursues his collages. Sometimes his writing stands
courtesy of the artist
alone, and at other times it supports his images as titles. He explains that he values the titles and images equally and prefers to think of himself as an artist rather than identifying with the more limited definition of writer or collagist. It is this fluidity of identity and his tendency to blur lines between text and image that is at the basis of his current artwork. In 2013, Heng embarked on a project entitled 365 Fragments. Each day for a year, he wrote a poetic observation. He then selected 20 of them to print on index cards. He left these prints on car windshields and in other public places. A sampling of these fragments illustrates his eye for small details— descriptions of an action, a event, or a thought, and where and when it happened. His collages work in the same way Among the artists that Heng cites as influences, the first is that of Francesca Woodman, a photographer, who in her brief life presented a body of work both
A collage wishing it could perfectly recreate the sound of women walking, dressed in floral print Kristofer Heng,
courtesy of the artist
The light leaving 8th street and a couple of people noticing Kristofer Heng, courtesy of the artist ARMSEYEART.COM
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extraordinarily beautiful and poetic. Using her image in various guises, dressed and undressed, as both protagonist and as object in staged photos, these photographs offer just enough information to sketch out a story, but not enough to anticipate the conclusion. Woodman’s photos are fragments of narratives in ways that are corollaries to Heng’s approach to collage. Other influences he mentions are Felix Gonzalez Torres and Andy Warhol, both artists grounded in storytelling and the deft co-mingling of pathos with beauty. What does a jeans-clad man, a pencil wielding hand, birds of prey, naked limbs, and an elephant trunk have in common? In Heng’s hands, they meet up in Two figures dancing on rocks in dense fog, near a body of water. It is a sparsely populated non sequitur of a collage with clearly delineated images floating on a yellow ground. However illogical these disparate images appear at first glance, one must look to the title and arrangement for clues. The male and female components infer the titular figures, but there is nothing to suggest they are interacting, and the truncated bodies are isolated. The male figure is about to be set upon by the bald eagle as other birds look on. Both figures are aborted, cut off; their sexual identities are in a confused, conflicted
state of being, “in the fog.” But the title hints at a hopeful conclusion; they are dancing, after all. In A collage wishing it could perfectly recreate the sound of women walking, dressed in floral print, similar methods and themes are at work. Feminine flesh predominates, with another truncated, clothed, male figure leaning in. The title suggests longing and, again, the isolation of images on the page imbues the collage with humor and melancholia in equal measure. Heng uses draped and naked classical statuary figures on pedestals as stand-ins for the population outside his studio in The light leaving 8th street and a couple of people noticing. A businessman, though headless, seems to be in a voyeuristic pose facing the other figures and an empty marble plinth. Floating above him in a somewhat randomlooking placement are small images of a lion, dog, male figure, miscellaneous floating windows, and paraphernalia from outdoors. There is plenty of white space around each object, giving the impression of isolation and quietude. In contrast to this separateness, Heng attempts a more social construct in Two people kissing
Two people kissing and thinking about things. Kristofer Heng,
courtesy of the artist
and thinking about things. Here he implies the efforts of people to communicate. Heng literally has drawn thought bubbles around two groups of pictures cut from magazines with lines leading down to the originators, the heads, or more accurately, scalps, of two men. Each bubble contains body parts: hand, feet, and faces, but also food, drinks, animals, and domestic tools. Some are cut out completely while others have been cut to emphasize what is missing. There is nothing overtly ominous here; in fact the overall effect is a happy and optimistic one. Heng’s inquiries may seem nonsensical at first, but his collages aren’t silly; rather they reveal psychological states of longing and isolation. His titles
claim a desire to communicate moments of mystery and questions of identity. Heng focuses on the ineffable human experience and seeks to elevate the particular to the poetic through his observations of daily life. Through their collages, both Rehm and Heng share an ability to manipulate printed matter and wring meaning out of generic images to express their individuality. Whereas Rehm exposes the dissonant natures of women’s interior and exterior lives in a manner that is assertive, but cloaked in mystery, Heng speaks the quiet language of the poet, using the flotsam and jetsam of his cutout images like so many words on a page.
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Review
An Aching Desire for Process Rebecca Beachy: Inherencies at New Capital Projects, Chicago By Liz McCarthy I have always associated scent with Rebecca Beachy’s work. Beachy’s solo show Inherencies marks the highly anticipated reopening of Chicago’s New Capital Projects this November. Upon entering the newly
prepared exhibition hall, I wondered what aroma I would experience during this encounter. I did not find pristine white walls, freshly constructed; in fact, there were none to be found. Instead, a soft, ancient,
chalky smell emanated from the space: the smell of dry bone, burnt bone, crushed bone. Surrounding me, every nook and cranny of the aging brick-lined exhibition space was packed with meticulously arranged animal bones.
This summer, at the residency 8550 Ohio, I had the opportunity to work alongside Rebecca Beachy. In a large, Amish, openair barn situated in rural Ohio, soft gusts of summer breeze regularly sent the faint smell of rotting flesh from Beachy’s station into my ceramics studio. Beachy finds her medium in animal bodies: birds, deer, snakes, anything scavenged during her long walks through unregulated natural environments, or taxidermy excursions. While initially her work might seem like a result of her fascination with death and decay, upon speaking with Beachy about the work and her relationship to animal materials, it becomes clear that her process is born out of deep respect for the fragile beings that inhabit the natural world. During the course of that summer residency, she spent most hours of daylight scrubbing cow skin with various acids. Just as some artists use charcoal, she reductively pushes and pulls her material, adding salt here, scraping back hair there. The character of the animal’s movement
Previous page, left, and opposite, Installation views, Capital Projects, Photograph by Liz Weinstein
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REVIEW: TRANSIENT DECAY REBECCA BEACHY, INHERENCIES AT NEW CAPITAL PROJECTS,CHICAGO
in life and the amount of time it has spent decaying dictates what final form may emerge from its skin. In the exhibition, this hide is one of the few pieces hung in a traditional way. The piece is suspended above a soft tungsten light that illuminates all the intricacies of the material. The piece is stretched at its corners. The soft glow of the illuminated hide hints at the animal’s previous life force. In some ways, there is a battle happening in Beachy’s process. Because of the delicate and liminal state of her material, she is always fighting against time, atrophy, and chemical imbalance. Beachy’s bags of animal bodily materials must be temperature controlled and treated with salt and lye to prevent them from decaying. Occasionally part of Beachy’s process involves relinquishing her works-in-process to nature, if they tip over the edge of decomposition. Eggshells must be stored in soft fibers to prevent crushing, and tiny animal teeth must be sorted in small containers so they don’t blend with
the debris of other organic materials. This painstaking level of care, organization, and attention-to-detail is apparent in Beachy’s chosen modes of display. Delicate rodent jawbones, spines, and hips, as well as hollow bird bones are carefully
arranged in gradations of size and hue on salvaged windowpanes. One larger glass pane has been covered in a myriad of textures and with rich pigmentation: bits of rust, burnt rock, chunks of twisted bone, a flaking horse hoof, and a smooth sunbleached turtle shell. Although preservation is inherent in the maintenance of these materials, what is more conspicuous is their activation through deconstruction. Beachy builds a relationship to her objects and their energies by manipulating them
with her hands. The various techniques of physically acting on the material are a part of her ever-evolving methodological vernacular. The first Rebecca Beachy installation I ever encountered was in a Chicago apartment gallery in 2010. On a long, thin table were three pointed mounds of powdered material. The mounds appeared similar in texture until closer inspection revealed that they were actually the remnants of different structures. What the previous structures might have been, I could not say, but I was curious. After further investigation, I found the answer: the powders were from a mallard duck carcass, a box turtle shell, and eggshells. In the Inherencies exhibition, Beachy’s main process of experimentation included firing the bones of seven different horses in a ceramic kiln, heating them to extreme temperatures so that they twisted and were reduced to simple mineral composites. All of the animals came from a farm in rural Ohio. The other material in the exhibition resulted from techniques very typical of Beachy’s process. These methods include crushing eggshells into fine powder, cracking brittle forms with stone, and burying material in the earth for later excavation and recovery.
REVIEW: TRANSIENT DECAY REBECCA BEACHY, INHERENCIES AT NEW CAPITAL PROJECTS,CHICAGO
A striking element of this exhibition is Beachy’s engagement with the architectural history of the project space to activate the numinous, relic-like quality of her careful arrangements. The gallery’s exhibition hall is tucked into the back of a large, early 20th Century industrial building converted into artist studios. The hide piece is probably the most, in a sense, autonomous piece in the show, and the only item hung at a traditional gallery height. The boundaries of the other objects blend into the peculiar features of the industrial brick room. There is no exhibition list; viewers must rely on their own attention to detail while discerning what mysterious elements are part of the installation. While experiencing the space, viewers are made to look up and in, squat on the floor for closer inspection, or re-evaluate the detailed qualities of the façade that at first appeared to be original to the structure. There are many strange holes and receptacles, referential to the past industrial life of the project space. Within these interstices, Beachy grafts her relics: piles of fired bone shards and bird remains mummified in dung. The brick walls of the space were in great need of some tuck-pointing when New Capital began to do their renovation. Beachy’s solution became a permanent ARMSEYEART.COM
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Right: Installation view, Capital Projects, Photograph by Liz Weinstein
installation of bone-based mortar. The artist- made mortar, for the most part, is disguised by its function, though upon closer inspection, thicker clumps of the grey material are visible. The most curious architectural element was located at the back of the project space. Below a hole in the floorboards, an ominous ladder descended beneath the space into a dank pit. By climbing down the ladder the I found that the space below was lined with cracking foundation, lit by only a couple of chicken coop warming lights. My nostrils filled with soft mold smell; the dull light suspended above illuminated a light layer of ground eggshells dusting the surface of the strange subterranean halfroom. In the opposite corner of the entrance, across a treacherous rubble floor, was one single light, illuminating a mummified bird. This mysterious sight evoked, in my mind, the moment in Egypt in 1922, when the light of Howard Carter’s torch first passed over the shadowed masses of Kings Tut’s sepulcher. It is not clear why the objects in this exhibition are important, but the great attention paid to their treatment forces the viewer to reverently contemplate their
significance. Beachy’s magic lies in her ability to pull objects from the context of our lived experience and illuminate them beyond mere artifact. The work presented in Inherencies is evidence of how the primacy of organic systems can be harnessed as a tool for the artist to engage with material. Beachy follows in an artistic tradition similar to the material deliberations of Eva Hesse and the animistic conjuring of Joseph Beuys. As with Hesse and Beuys, Beachy’s work bows to a necessity for the mystical in the physical phenomena of our world often absent in contemporary Western civilization. These artists share the exploration of shamanic qualities more often referenced in Eastern traditions: In the 1980s-2000s, the conceptual investigation
Only by temporarily shedding the accepted perceptual logic of his culture can the sorcerer hope to enter into relation with other species on their own terms; only by altering the common organization of his senses will he be able to enter into a rapport with the multiple nonhuman sensibilities
that animate the local landscape. It is this, we might say, that defines the shaman: the ability to readily slip out of the perceptual boundaries that demarcate his or her particular culture-boundaries reinforced by social customs, taboo, and most importantly, the common speech or language in order to make contact with, and learn from, the other powers in the land. His magic is precisely this heightened receptivity to the meaningful solicitations--songs, cries, gestures--of the
larger, more-thanlarger human field. —David Abram, The Spell
of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a MoreThan- Human World (Vintage Books, 1997), 9.
of material process became eclipsed by an explosion of video, digital photography, and social practice. An answer to why these methods of artmaking have returned to favor now might be that, as digitally mediated experience becomes increasingly ubiquitous, our physical agency has become more vulnerable. Particularly in urban environments, in social relationships and the workplace, digitally automated systems have increasingly infiltrated and mediated our lives. As our
experiences become more and more virtual, process artwork like Beachy’s has been reestablished to the front lines of artistic agency and production. This line of artistic inquiry is imbedded in the thorough exploration of material sensuality, now scarce in our technologically stymied culture. Some exhibitions function as reflections on political and social structures, or they challenge aesthetic sensibilities. With Inherencies, Beachy presents a more primordial experience: an environment for being, where it is not necessary to understand the content, but rather to experience the presence of both the visible and imperceptible forces in the room.
Current
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Current
Haway the Lasses! A Re-write of the Hack Model Rewriting the Hack: A 48 Hour Hackathon Engaging Histories Through Code By Victoria Bradbury
“H
away the Lasses” is embroidered on the back wall of a tiny room containing garden plant labels and paper furniture. LEDs light the perimeter as a data-driven tinfoil pickaxe arcs back and forth. This art project is a miniature window into a world of history reactivated through art and technology. In the North East of England, “Haway” is slang for “Come on!” It can be heard echoing across football stadiums as fans encourage their teams to dig in, get it together, and score a goal. “Haway the Lasses” is a collaborative prototype that resulted from a hack event held in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, in November 2015. It uses physical computing and data to dig up and re-present industrial histories. Here, the phrase encourages women to move forward and carry on into the future.
Like many hacks that are increasingly activated through the arts, “Rewriting the Hack” was produced to create a space for participants to test strategies, initiate new ideas, and create collaborative projects around a theme. The hackathon format originated as a platform for collaborative coding to build commercial digital applications. In such events, programmers come together to develop software over a span of 24 to 48 hours. These commercial hacks emphasize uninterrupted work over an intensive period, often including all-night coding sessions and the consumption of copious amounts of caffeine. In this tech-sector model, hackers compete for prizes, and winning teams receive cash or support to develop projects. Notably, participants in such programming events tend to be overwhelmingly male. “Rewriting the Hack”
challenged the traditional format of the hackathon by bringing together a group of thirteen artists, hackers, technologists, theorists, historians, and archivists to interrogate ways in which women’s perspectives have shaped industry, both historically and at present. In particular, this event focused on women’s narratives and histories specific to the North East of England. The organizers, curator Suzy O’Hara and digital artist Shelly Knotts, planned the format of the hack to offer participants a balance of structure, freedom, inspiration, and materials that would spark ideas while seeding the creation of new projects. Like many hacks, this one unfolded over two days, but without insanely long hours, gallons of Red Bull, and all-night sessions. The women worked from 10-6 on a Saturday and a Sunday while consuming reasonable amounts of tea, coffee, and biscuits. In “Rewriting the Hack,” as with similar
Previous page, above, and right: All photos courtesy of Victoria Bradbury and Mark Hursty.
events held in arts contexts, competition was removed; the emphasis, instead, was placed on collaboration, networking, and the generation of new ideas. While this was the first female-only hackathon held in Newcastle, it was not the first hack event to focus on issues important to women. In May 2015, MIT Media Labs hosted “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck,� a competitive hackathon in which teams of participants of all genders competed to create alternatives to existing ARMSEYEART.COM
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breast pump designs. Other initiatives are in place globally to inspire more girls and young women to code. A key example of this is Black Girls Code, which holds events and workshops that aim to increase the number of girls and women of color interested in STEM fields. There has been an increasing emphasis in recent years on teaching code in public education. In September 2014, the UK government made programming a mandatory part of the school curriculum 2016
beginning in the early primary years. Programming is increasingly considered a stable career path for teens while parents scramble for their kids to learn skills that can lead to future jobs. The road to steady employment has frequently shifted over the past 100 years. Mining and shipbuilding were once stable career choices for young men in the North East of England, but jobs in these industries began to decline after the Second World War. At the same time, computing was a rapidly developing field,
and in the first part of the 20th century, many computer programmers were women. As Katherine Hayles underscores in the title of her 2005 book, My Mother was a Computer, women often worked as “Computers,” or people making detailed mathematical calculations before machines could do this type of work. As industrial jobs became scarcer, more men moved into computer programming. The stereotype of the programmeras-female thus moved sharply toward the stereotype of the programmer-as-male. As the gender balance of the computer science field shifted in this way, computing boomed. It would therefore be male programmers who would write much of the code that underlies today’s computer operating systems. Twentyfirst century computers heavily influence our thoughts and actions through the structures of Internet searches and the operation of mobile devices. The code that runs them is largely hidden from view and has largely been written by men. How did shifts in industry lead to women’s voices being removed from code, which is an ever more powerful driving force in our lives? What are the experiences of the women who do work in technology today? “Rewriting the Hack” was initiated to explore some of these questions by bringing a variety of women together
to work collaboratively on creative projects. Participants in “Rewriting the Hack” included Francesca Sargent, who traveled from Cornwall to be a part of the event. Sargent began tinkering with web programming as a teenager, and then pursued it intently, becoming an expert coder who now creates projects with artists and academics at FoAM Kernow. Rosa Menkman, known for her pioneering work with GLI.TC/H, traveled from Amsterdam for the hack. Carmin Karasic is a digital artist originally from Boston who is also based in the Netherlands. Karasic had a background working in software and business when she decided to pursue digital art with a passion beginning in 1994. Joanne Armitage is a computer music researcher based in Leeds, and Aude Charillon is a librarian developing projects around copyright law, and public domain. Lindsay Duncanson is an interdisciplinary artist
who founded the experimental vocal group Noizechoir, Eve Forrest researches citizen journalism and on and offline image-making, Cally Gatehouse is a communication designer working across print and digital media, Hwa Young Jung facilitates collaborative projects in the design sector, Sanjee Ratnatunga is an economic development practitioner creating structures to support underrepresented voices in business, Jenny Pickett builds cross-media art and sound installations, Diana Nowacka researches tangible user interfaces, and Elizabeth Dobson fosters social enterprise through sound and music. The venue for “Rewriting the Hack” was The Core, Science Central, built in 2014 in Newcastle to house offices in which cutting-edge technologies are researched, including movement-tracking systems and electric cars. The Core is the first of many buildings that will sit in a science plaza on the site of an
old coalmine. In addition to this emerging landscape of innovation, the North East of England boasts world-class arts and cultural venues, including The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, The Sage Gateshead, and internationally renowned organizations like CRUMB: The Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss and Above and right: All photos courtesy of Victoria Bradbury and Mark Hursty. Culture Lab. Newcastle is also rich in history; the “new castle” strikes, were also scanned and Because most “Rewriting from which the city derives included. The hack’s legacy the Hack” participants would its name was built in the will continue through the meet for the first time at The 11th century. The Mining availability of these materials Core, O’Hara and Knotts Institute, located near the in a digital format for future carefully planned the structure city’s central train station, was projects and research. of the event to facilitate founded in 1852 to research In addition to archival quick idea generation and the improvement of mining materials and data sets, collaboration. Katherine safety. It then evolved into an “Rewriting the Hack” provided Beaumont kicked off the first institution for the preservation AV equipment and a kit morning with a monologue of histories and archives including microcontrollers, interrogating her memory related to the mining industry. sensors, motors, conductive of women in her family line. Librarian Jennifer Hillyard materials, fabric, paper, Beaumont asked, “Who got was invited to “Rewriting the cardboard, digital projectors me here? Who stood behind Hack” to present materials and flat screen monitors. me yammerin’ in my ear to from the Institute’s archive Attaya Projects, a Newcastlekeep on keepin’ on and keep for use by hack participants. based interactive design and your head?” She remembers In the weeks leading up to the media arts firm, donated her foremothers through their event, the Mining Institute many of these materials. names, which would otherwise scanned materials related to Hack participants were be erased from history. women’s writing on mining encouraged to bring their Beaumont said in a thick communities, including text own laptops and favorite Geordie tongue, “In censuses, on the wives and daughters software. This is common in the women disappear. You of miners and a chapter on hacks, as it is easier to get up need to know whose lass they childbirth in the copper mines and running with projects were each year. I mean you of the Andes, none of which when participants have need their dah or husband’s had been previously archived digital materials they are name if mums and wives in digital format. Excerpts already familiar with using you’re lookin’ to reclaim.” from We are Women We are (i.e., learning a new coding After this performance, Strong, a publication about language from scratch during Knotts ran an algorithm that women who were active a hack is not advisable, though she wrote in the live-coding during the 1980’s miners’ it has surely been attempted!). environment SuperCollider to ARMSEYEART.COM
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randomize participants into initial brainstorming groups who would mind-map the key themes of, “Systemic Obstacles,” “Structural Inequalities,” “Voice and Visibility,” “Revealing Narratives,” and “Feminizing Code.” The hack then moved into a conceptualization and research period as participants formed three groups based upon the topics discussed. Initial ideas were formulated, and a prototyping phase followed for the remaining hours of the afternoon. After an intensive first day, participants left for the evening with a clear trajectory and momentum to approach a second day of work. Day two would focus on project execution as initial concepts were developed into tangible outcomes. Groups pursued ideas around business etiquette, language used in biographies to underscore power dynamics, and the visibility and voice of women in code. Projects that resulted from the hack included the a booklet, led by Cally Gatehouse, called 29 Things to Do at Work, and a tablecloth by Sanjee Ratnatunga and Lindsay Duncanson that is intended to be used at business meetings to facilitate conversation with those who are less likely to be heard. A 19th century embroidery manual inspired the aesthetic for these two works, whereas
their conceptual direction was influenced by conversations that evolved about power structures present in business contexts. Jenny Pickett demonstrated what would happen if the history of computing had been different; she wrote a script for removing men from the operating system of her computer. Another group created an interactive loudspeaker that emits a reading of We are Women, We are Strong. This piece activates a proximity sensor that reads the distance of a listener. When one stands far away from it, the text is read by a male voice. When one stands close, a woman’s voice reads the words. “Rewriting the Hack” closed with a casual public reception showcasing these and the other prototypes created. During this time, groups and collaborators discussed how the works would continue to
be developed after the event. Has “Rewriting the Hack” re-written ways that hackathons can be delivered and experienced? During the event, participants considered new ideas while working with concepts and materials that they already activate in their own careers. The atmosphere was not stressful. It was not about showing off or competing for first prize, but rather it presented a rare opportunity for women to meet and discuss their experiences working in arts, technology, and business. They did this while making projects together; this extended the outcomes of their meeting from conversation into creative action with tangible results. Dr. Victoria Bradbury is a new media artist who has recently organized art hacking events in the UK and Europe and advised on “Rewriting the Hack.” She completed a PhD with CRUMB at the University of Sunderland in 2015.
Pulse
Studio Cooking A conversation with Meghan Gordon and Arden Surdam at the Armory Center for the Arts Pasadena By Kathryn Drury
A
s part of their week with the Women’s Center for Creative Work’s Parlor at the Armory residency, at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, Meghan Gordon and Arden Surdam, organized Studio Cooking, a six-day performance series focusing on the food artists eat in their studios, questions of labor, and how food affects relationships. The project sought to answer the question, “How do artists feed themselves while they work long hours in the studio?” Performances occurred every afternoon from November 10- 15. Each featured a guest artist, writer, or curator practicing in L.A., each of whom presented something edible within the context of the performance. Through sculpture, video, and music, the series evoked an array of themes, including the meaning of nurture, ecology, home, longing, memory, discomfort, and nostalgia. I had the opportunity to experience firsthand the presentations of Páll Haukur’s piece performed by Caitlin Adams entitled, a dissipated body, Eric Kim’s Family Dynamics: Ensemble Performance and Eating with guest Kathleen Kim, and Lisa Jugert’s Das Auge Isst Mit and so Does the Brain. A few days later, after the week-long program had come to a close, Meghan Gordon and Arden Surdam explained, fittingly over a dinner prepared by Gordon, some of the other installations, the process of creating Studio Cooking, their backgrounds, and their plans for the future. ARMSEYEART.COM
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Previous page: Páll Haukur, a dissipated body performed by Haukur and Caitlin Adams Left: In loving Memory of Fat Jasmine, hosted by David Bell and performed by Anthony Bodlović
Meghan Gordon: This is ratatouille, but a French person would hate that I call it that. Ratatouille is not supposed to have any meat in it, so I call it blasphemous ratatouille! Writer Anne Swan taught me to make it at a residency. I was going through a difficult time prior to the residency and was in a weird headspace. Luckily, a friend of mine from another residency, Robert Gutierrez, was also there. He is a lovely man about 15 years older than me, and we bonded because he is full Filipino and I am half. He and I made a pact
with Anne to cook for each other so that, for two days in a row, we would not have to stop work, but still would have a beautiful meal every night. I wonder a lot about social practice and this desire for deeper connections and a kind of intimacy with people. When working with guest artists who collaborated with me on some times, a traveling curated bar I created, I would have this intense best-friend sort of relationship with them; we ate together and worked together late nights and full days. This is how I relate to people: I need a long
period of time alone and then a period of intense intimacy— not in a romantic sense, but sharing a collaboration and conversation. A continued dialogue or train of thought. Arden Surdam: In a way, that’s exactly what happened throughout Studio Cooking. For months, Meghan and I would work our day jobs and sneak in phone calls during the afternoon or meet in the evening to discuss the project. Planning for the series functioned on an epic scale (since we were organizing six back-to-back
performances) and because of this one inevitably enters very personal spaces. This type of intimacy only increased during the actual residency. As an only child, this struck me, because for an entire week at the Armory I was never with just myself. As a predominantly visual artist, the social aspect of of being an organizer or curator is an integral,yet revelatory
position to be in. Especially since I am a somewhat solitary person. Kathryn Drury: How did Studio Cooking start? MG: We were in school together in the CalArts MFA program and became friends—that is the very beginning. I have made a lot of friends who are ex New Yorkers that moved to Los
Angeles. I am from Purchase and had been in Providence at RISD; Arden is from Manhattan and attended undergrad at Oberlin. AS: Studio Cooking grew organically from our friendship. The fact that we are both from the east coast sometimes makes relating easier. We ,met regularly for studio visits, and since Meghan was living in her studio at CalArts, she was cooking there as well. I had already been coming by her studio for meals, and Meghan eventually opened a bar, which was an excellent spot to hang out. MG: The MFA experience was an endurance test. I am not sure how anyone got through, but I knew I needed to maintain good eating habits. I wasn’t eating from the cafeteria. I was living in the studio, going to the gym to workout and shower, and then coming back to the studio to work. AS: Exactly! It’s almost impossible to maintain any type of normality unless it’s a priority! I would often find myself nibbling on raw vegetables because I had joined the CSA Abundant
Left: Studio Brunch, Performed and Hosted by Amanda Katz ARMSEYEART.COM
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Harvest. I rarely had the chance to go home and cook anything, MG: Studio Cooking came about from an ongoing dialogue we were having about artists’ cooking and food-related artwork we had both seen in critique classes, in performances, or in gallery shows. Gustavo Gómez-Brechtel, a great friend of mine, fed people every week by grilling meals in the studio courtyard. He was also making strange bacterial experiments in his studio, but he did not seem interested in cooking as art, though he formed a community around these meals. Taralyn Thomas made coffee for a critique class, and everyone started spilling their coffee in this really strange way. I eventually realized it was a performance. We were interested in the struggles of living without a kitchen, a very real problem since the CalArts cafeteria caused a horrible outbreak of norovirus that sent 70 people to the hospital that year. The cafeteria’s response was to redecorate. AS: We were consistently discussing alternative modes of art-related eating and decided to make a recipe book for food performance. Simultaneously, Meghan was programming lecture
dinners where she would give artists, including myself, a stipend to cook for those who attended the lectures. She provided a fantastic opportunity for CalArts students to meet L.A. artists, writers, and curators at our relatively isolated campus in Valencia, CA. These dinners allowed us to eat, talk, and learn more about them and their practices. It provided an intimacy that isn’t afforded in large lecture halls. MG: I wanted to provide what I believed the school should have been providing, as it did 20 or 30 years ago, when there were opportunities for students to foster relationships with, and to learn from working artists. When I began running a residency program called locsksmith inn, in collaboration with Leander Schwazer, I invited a variety of lecturers, not all artists, who could lecture on an area of interest and who were willing to participate in studio visits with students. Afterwards, I would throw them a dinner. It’s very important to create a nurturing community in an educational setting. This initially seemed impossible at the school, but it was important to try to change it in whatever way I could. What were your curatorial
criteria when you chose the artists? MG: We were thinking about creating balance in the programming. We called Studio Cooking a series of meal-events, so something had to be served. AS: We were much more flexible with the parameters of what the artists could do. We never had a “this is going to be a huge problem” moment. We were coming from an artist’s perspective as opposed to a perspective shaped by a curatorial or institutional context. MG: Time was a big factor; some of these projects lasted as many as five hours—too long for anyone to stay. There was no point of climax or building of the audience’s energy to focus on something. Visitors were free to cycle in and out. What is the difference between organizing performances and being a curator? AS: Prior to the actual series, our lives were consumed by organizing. We were constantly meeting with artists to hear about developments in their performances as well as to coordinate within the structure of the Armory space. However, during the series we were deeply engaged with performance.
MG: I don’t describe myself as a curator. I see organizing as part of my practice and I think of all of it as performance. It’s different because I am involved in each step of the process. When an artist and I decide to do a some times project together, I provide the context, and I ask them to bring me ideas. From that moment, my ideas, my opinions, my interests are all going into their project, and their practice inhabits the fictional bar. The project becomes the product of our relationship. There is a difference between facilitating guest artists’ projects through Studio Cooking and collaborating on hybrid projects through some times. Studio Cooking was a bit like running a residency that was technically a residency for us too. We asked our artists questions like: What tools do you need to make this work? How can we help you do this smoothly and efficiently? Who do you want to attend? How do you want people to respond? RESIDENCY HIGHLIGHTS
a dissipated body, created ARMSEYEART.COM
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by Páll Haukur, and performed by Caitlin Adams, incorporated sculpture-based installation, performance, video, and memento. Upon entering the space, I was greeted by Arden Surdam and Meghan Gordon, who instructed me to climb a metal staircase situated in the middle of an open plan classroom. At the top of the stairs, I found a hole just large enough for my head. Behind me on the landing was a small camera on a tripod. I pushed my head through the opening to find that it was surrounded by a large, flat pool of honey. To my 2016
right, also surrounded by the honey pool, was Páll Haukur’s head emerging from another opening. His expression was peaceful as if he were asleep. To the right, a micro-projector played a looping video of a small blonde girl standing in front of a cathedral. Her arms were outstretched and her expression ecstatic as birds landed on her continuously as the video looped. The audio consisted of a series of overlapping, jumbled tracks, one of which seemed to be Haukur describing the project. Across the pool of honey was a large white piece of paper, onto which
Left: Páll Haukur, a dissipated body performed by Haukur and Caitlin Adams
was projected the image of my back, as seen by the camera on the landing. Live houseplants were scattered throughout the installation. Adams walked into view, and stared at me, after which Haukur’s eyes opened and fixed on me in a blank, piercing, almost intimidating way. Adams picked up a paint roller loaded with black paint, and, looking at me with a suspicious expression, proceeded to paint out the projection of my back. Adams produced a small handmade ceramic spoon, which she taped to a long dowel. She then squeezed honey from
a plastic bear dispenser into the spoon, slowly moved the spoon across the honey pool, and held it in front of my mouth until I ate the honey. Afterward, she brought the spoon slowly across the honey pool, detached it from the dowel and left the room as Haukur closed his eyes and appeared to sleep. Meanwhile, the audio and video continued to loop. I walked back down the stairs and was greeted by Arden and Meghan, who gave me the washed and beautiful, roughly molded spoon as a take away. MG: Páll Haukur is one of the smartest, most interesting artists I met at CalArts. His thesis show was a huge installation of giant drawings and videos, there was one of a ship sailing and one of him being tattooed with an image of waves. In the middle of the installation, a giant sculpture was positioned in the middle of a circular pool of honey. Páll scheduled time slots for people to perform; I was asked to write a true story in the honey and, as the honey settled, my words would disappear. The whole show really blew me away. The installation of Páll’s sculpture for Studio Cooking was very time-consuming and required both Arden and I to stay focused on what was happening throughout the day. We had only one install day for the entire week of
Studio Cooking, and we used it to set up Páll’s piece. He made at least four different SketchUp renderings in the planning process, and we had to meet with all the supervisors at the Armory to deal with fire safety, etc. The performance was for 10 individuals, which was Páll’s original intention. Family Dynamics was created by Eric Kim, who included his sister Kathleen Kim in the performance and presentation of the meal, as well as in the musical performance that followed. Both Eric and Kathleen Kim work as organizers in the L.A. alternative gallery and music scenes on top of their full time jobs in public health and humanitarian law. For Studio Cooking, they teamed up to present an amazing spread of skewered vegetables and barbecued meats, rice, and rice wine and light beer. The atmosphere was defined by artists and friends who sat together talking, as children and dogs ran and played throughout the space. Multiple hibachi grills were arranged on the floor, and served as the main cooking area. After everyone had eaten, Eric, Kathleen, musician friends, and others played an array of musical instruments, including electric guitar, acoustic violin, keyboard, tambourine, and a Stroh
violin, in a collaborative, improvised jam session.
observe and become a part of the larger performance.
MG: I met Eric Kim through openings. He has always been supportive of my work and is involved in so many different things. What was interesting to me is the relationship between him and Kathleen. The Armory asked the WCCW and us to do something, so we asked Eric, and he wanted Kathleen to have a voice! That collaborative context was really compelling to me. Both of them are publicly involved with very interesting organizing projects, but their homes are havens for artists and musicians. The first time I went to Eric’s house there were people standing around the pool eating. At Kathleen’s house there are usually musicians playing in every room also around a pool. So it is really like choosing your own adventure. I felt euphorically high during Eric’s performance! There was so much going on! I kept thinking about participation in performance, and what it is to relinquish the role of organizer to the collaborative energy that is organically occurring in the space. I didn’t need to narrate what was happening. Instead, I played some strange little percussive instruments and a set of woven maracas. There were so many people there that I had not met before, and I found myself content to
AS: Meghan was like, “There are dogs and live wires and babies!”
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MG: Hibachis all over the floor… AS: A legal nightmare! MG: The event began, and we immediately blew a fuse! Our entire Studio Cooking installation was built that morning, so, by the time everyone was jamming and eating skewered food, the wires were crisscrossing all over, and people, kids, and creatures were walking all over the place. It was beautiful. In loving Memory of Fat Jasmine was hosted by David Bell and performed by Anthony Bodlović. Although Bell was initially invited to perform for Studio Cooking, he designated Anthony Bodlović to host instead. Bodlović relayed an elaborate story about “Fat Jasmine,” a pop-up pizza shop that was supposedly the lovechild of David Bell’s relationship with an ex-girlfriend’s best friend named Ashley. Neither Ashley nor David was in attendance. Bodlović explained the symbolic significance of each of the ingredients as dining participants created and cooked their own 2016
pizzas. As the pizzas were baking, Bodlović led a group therapy session in which each participant told stories about food and loss. Finally participants were asked to spit pizza into an urnshaped spittoon created by Bell and positioned in front of a 7x5’ painting entitled “AJH”(pictured). AS: I really can’t do justice to Anthony’s performance—his personality and language, and the concept of a pizza séance as a conduit for art therapy, although he may disagree, was electric. Anthony is a natural performer. I can’t recall the last time I met someone who was so comfortable embodying a character. He has this marvelous ability to personify the absurd through grief and, most importantly, prescribe emotions, significance, and life to otherwise inanimate objects—like, “Yeast is alive and the flour is dead and the tomato is in the middle, but the garlic and the honey are the purest form of life.” MG: Bodlović set up a fiction that was completely believable because he mapped out this whole world and followed through… there were Right: Family Dynamics: Ensemble Performance and Eating, hosted and performed by Eric Kim with guests Kathleen Kim and friends.
all these characters, some of which were food, but also the spirits of the two people, the creators of the “Fat Jasmine” pizza, who were not in the room. AS: And David invited all of his ex-lovers to the meal and of course, didn’t come. Almost everyone there had some experience with David, so Anthony was able to connect the guests through their conceivably awkward intimacy, disappointment, and resentment of David. It was pleasurably dicey. MG: There were so many layers to Bodlovic’s fictional space. His performance was staged as a memorial for a pizza making collaborative that had existed between these two people before their friend breakup. This memorial was to be the last time “Fat Jasmine” pizza would be made. He talked about the spirituality and philosophy of food and how different foods function, higher levels of being, and the way we interact with food. Quite literally, we were all making these pizzas together, when he started doing group therapy! Everyone was very honest within the space he created with his performance. It was very mediated, but it also allowed the audience to have a lot of agency, which is really rare. There was a point
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when Anthony was describing what “Fat Jasmine” was and who David and Ashley were, and it occurred to me that maybe that never happened. Maybe “Fat Jasmine” never happened. A couple of people claimed that they had eaten David’s pizza before, but nobody had experienced “Fat Jasmine” pizza. What goes into a “Fat Jasmine” pizza? MG: A lot of honey! Flour, water, honey, yeast, salt, red sauce, cheese, herbs, tomato, onion, mushrooms… AS: And naturally intangible ingredients: anxiety, absence, sorrow and regret. Das Auge Isst Mit and so Does the Brain, performed by Lisa Jugert, involved a set course meal with a printed menu. In her performance, she introduced foods she eats in her Chinatown studio, including “freestyle rice rolls, duckling eggs with dipping sauce, tostadas with toppings, che tai, boba Thai tea, and durian.” Jugert explained that though she is from Berlin, her diet has been heavily influenced by her new life in Los Angeles. She noted that each time she moves somewhere new, she adjusts and absorbs local customs and incorporates local cuisine into her diet. Each course was introduced by Jugert and served to viewers by Surdam and 2016
Gordon. As participants ate, Jugert photographed each course in front of a different backdrop while describing it, as well as her own history with the meal. Studio Brunch was hosted by Amanda Katz. In for the long haul of a five hour conversation, Katz prepared a Jewish style brunch at a long open table piled with lox, bagels, cream cheese, tuna salad, juice, coffee, capers, onions, lemons, celery, apples, pickles, tomatoes – all lightly prepped and placed in the Studio Cooking ceramic bowls made by Orr Herz. Three waves of participants attended, each sitting down, eating, and jumping into the conversation. Intended as a forum for discussing the challenges of the artistorganizer or participantfacilitator, the discussion shifted with each group. A girlfriend wanted her boyfriend to compare producing a friend’s music with making his own. A couple from Pasadena asked about artists’ labor. Michael Ned Holte talked about keeping a record of daily labor including who he has dined with or what he has cooked. Two artist couples who did not plan on meeting at Studio Brunch recounted some of their shared Rosh Hashanah dinners over the years, including how to divide up the labor based on who enjoys what tasks. Emotional labor
Right: Das Auge Isst Mit and so Does the Brain, Hosted and Performed by Lisa Jugert
was a recurring. MG: I met Amanda while organizing a some times project with my friend Katja Mater, a Dutch artist who lives in Brussels. Katja told me that she needed a studio with lights to photograph my bar so that we could “paint it slowly over time,” documenting it with “multiple exposured instant film.” I put out a call on social media and got a hit back from Monika Bruczyk, the director of Sculpture Space in Utica, NY. I had done a residency there
right before moving to L.A. Amanda, a believer in the extended network of artist community, just handed the keys of her Santa Monica studio over to Katja and I, and we made our show. I thought it was a very special moment because I felt so alone in L.A., and then she trusted us. AS: Meghan subsequently introduced me to Amanda, and I later learned we grew up near each other and took tap dancing classes together in New
York. Throughout our conversations, I kept reflecting on her relationship to dance, because she was quite good at it, and was always brought to the front of the class. I studied ballet until I was 15 and I wonder if there’s a link between that type of performance and the social sculpture performance Amanda and I are both interested in now. What are your food influences and art influences? What influences
home, family, and love? MG: Definitely! I have friends who never ate with their families, which is crazy to me! I would cook food and they would take a bowl and go somewhere else with it! I would be like “Hello, what are you doing?” and they would say “Oh I am going to go to my room and…” And I would say, “No we eat together, I made this food for us, and we are going to eat it together!” There are a lot of different eating habits; I didn’t realize it until later.
Above: Family Dynamics: Ensemble Performance and Eating
you when you are cooking? MG: Lovers, people who have taught me a recipe, people I am cooking for. For me, certain recipes are inextricably linked to people. Cooking them for someone new. Sometimes I don’t tell people where I learned to cook something; it’s a secret. It sometimes feels good or sad to cook a recipe depending on ARMSEYEART.COM
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the history. My mother is a really good cook, but she never taught me how to cook at all. Have you ever gone back to ask your Mom to teach you recipes? MG: Yeah she shares recipes with me now when I ask. She makes a lot of amazing Filipino dishes including a tilapia recipe using the whole fish, sinigang, adobo, lumpiang, and pancit. Would you say that cooking is inextricably linked with 2016
AS: For me, this is where everything starts to blur in my practice. My mother was neurotically clean, and I’ve picked up those habits. But, for some reason, the studio and the kitchen is where I love for things to get out of hand. When my pieces grow mold or attract ants or begin to smell, it draws this very sensual pleasure that I’ve found make even the messiest artists recoil. It probably has to do with a fetishized childhood rebellion since my parents were so intent on manners. Its delightful to get sloppier as I get older. However, a lot of my cooking experience was learned from a German farmer named Arvo Thomson I met when I was 18, when I WWOOFed on his farm in New Mexico. It was honestly more a homestead than farm. I spent my Oberlin January
terms with him. It was often too cold to grow anything, so we ate a lot of meat. During my first year with him, Arvo shot an elk, which needed to be butchered immediately in order for the meat to not spoil. I had never worked with such an enormous animal, but we dismantled the elk through the night, and it was clear that I would never be a vegetarian. What role does food play in art and community building in the art world? MG: We separately have meals with other artists frequently. In a city like Los Angeles, where domestic space is so highly valued, dinner at home is more possible than it was in NY. AS: I feel strange if I go a few months without a large dinner party. People often talk about art, but it’s certainly not a requisite. What philosophies or Art Histories influenced your work? MG: Painting has influenced the ways I think about making work. I joke around with Kristof Trakal, an artist from Berlin I have worked with, that Artificial Hells by Claire Bishop is our bible – wait I think he said that. Anyway, I think this was really important to me because it covered a whole realm of art history not covered in my first round of art school. Recently, I have
also been lingering on this small book of conversations called The Company She Keeps by Celine Condorelli. The way she describes her practice as supporting other people’s work. She is doing research on collaboration and friendship, and what that means. That is very fresh to me. She is aware of the theory, but is not trying to rebuild it. AS: Oberlin was the same. Technically, I was so proficient, but there were major gaps in my understanding of theory and art history. I’m reading Hal Foster’s new book Bad New Days, and I’m fascinated by his projection of the grotesque in the 80s. This intersection of food, indulgence, and the abject is why I really enjoyed Páll’s piece. The moment in a performance when you are uncertain what to do—whether to ingest or reject—that discomfort is really significant to me in art. I was looking at Daniel Sperry’s Eat Art when I was working on my MFA thesis exhibition. He was running this artist restaurant and photographing all of the detritus that was left after dinners. The resulting photos are off-putting and yet glamorous. Camille Henrot, should be put on that list, who sometimes uses food in her work, but regardless she makes the sexiest videos you’ve ever seen. What are you planning for the future?
AS: The documentation is really an important part of the piece, as is decompressing and trying to figure out how to move forward. MG: We will be making a little booklet of documentation for Studio Cooking. We’ve gotten invitations, but we want to move slowly. AS: The book is one of the end goals of the entire piece. But I think people walked away with really interesting experiences. MG: In the future, I have a some times project happening in January in San Francisco at SOMArts Cultural Center. It is going to be a multi channel video installation and performance; it will be the documentation of a project I worked on with Jeepneys (Anna Luisa Petriska). The performance happened in August at Museum as Retail Space, where Lisa Jugert is the director. AS: Camille Weiner, who is an associate curator at Roberts & Titlon, will be curating an exhibition of female identifying artists slated for this May that I’m organizing with Andrea Huber and Hannah Plotke. And following this, Hannah Plotke and I have an upcoming exhibition in September 2016 at The Situation Room.
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