January/February 2024, Vol. 18, Issue 3 by artillerymag

JAN / FEB 2024

Collective Consciousness

NOW OPEN Betye Saar, Drifting Toward Twilight, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles. © 2023 Betye Saar. Photo: Paul Salveson. Generous support for this exhibition is provided by Mei-Lee Ney and the Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation. Additional funding is provided by an anonymous foundation, Terry Perucca and Annette Serrurier, Faye and Robert C. Davidson Jr., and the Virginia Steele Scott Endowment for American Art.

PETER LODATO DIAMONDS, DIVISIONS, & VOIDS

WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY

KOJIINTERTWINED TAKEI

JANUARY 13 - MARCH 2, 2024

2525 Michigan Avenue E-1, Santa Monica, CA 90404 info@williamturnergallery.com 310.453.0909 www.williamturnergallery.com Image: Peter Lodato, Cool Red (Magenta) Diamond on White, oil on canvas, 72”x 60”

IZUMI KATO

FEBRUARY 27 – MARCH 23, 2024 INAUGURAL SHOW

RICHARD SERR A .

N OT E B O OK DR AWI N G S , 20 2 3 EIGHT NEW ETCHINGS

GEMINI G.E.L. 8365 MELROSE AVANUE LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069 32 3.651.0513 GEM I N I GE L .COM E DI T I ONS@GEM I N I GE L .COM M O N DAY–FR I DAY 9AM– 5P M Notebook Drawing III, 2023 1-color etching, artist’s approval screenprinted on verso Fuji Kozo DHM-11 paper 24½ x 27½” (62.2 x 69.9 cm) Edition of 40 RS22-3603

Jose Dávila

Photographic Memory

January 20 - March 9, 2024

1 3 5 7 N H I G H L A N D AV E LO S A N G E L E S CA 9 0 0 2 8

The Optics of Now: SoCal Glass

Jan 27 - April 13

Palos Verdes Art Center

pvartcenter.org

WANDA KOOP Objects of Interest

Wanda Koop, Ukrainian Quartet - Power Plant, 2023

January 20 – March 9, 2024

2276 East 16th Street & 2050 Imperial Street Los Angeles, CA 90021 info@nightgallery.ca

LIFE IN THE ABSTRACT Curated by Bradford Salamon Don Bachardy Jane Bauman David Buckingham Susan Feldman Christopher Georgesco Benjamin Jackel David Michael Lee David Lloyd Gordon McClelland Janet Rosener Brett Rubbico Bradford Salamon Alicia Savio Jan Taylor, in memoriam William Wray Mark Zimmermann

Catalog essay by Peter Frank William Wray, Chachella Colors, 62 x 48 inches, oil on panel

JANUARY 20

MARCH 20 2024

OPENING RECEPTION: JANUARY 20, 7 PM

BALDWIN AVENUE GALLERY 12 N. Baldwin Ave, Sierra Madre

Justin Williams January 2024

ROBERTS PROJECTS

DIANE ROSENSTEIN GALLERY

AMIR ZAKI Nothing To Say

February 24 - March 30, 2024 831 N Highland Ave Los Angeles, CA 90038 dianerosenstein.com

[detail] Amir Zaki, The Chef, 2023, Archival photograph 60 x 48 inches // 152.4 x 121.9 cm, Edition of 2 (+2AP) Courtesy Diane Rosenstein Gallery © Amir Zaki

A hub for many of Los Angeles’ most creative artists, designers, and curators. 2024 Gallery Exhibitions Opening Nights

January 13 February 17 March 23 April 27

Mark your calendar!

TIEZE Art Fair & reception March 2

1206 Maple Ave

Los Angeles, CA 90015 213 827 3754

@bendixbuilding BendixBuilding.com

For leasing Inquiries: www.bendixbuilding.com/leasing

Now on view at MOLAA!

September 9, 2023 - May 5, 2024

Alexandre Arrechea (Cuba, 1970) Fish Bite / La mordida del pez, 2022 Ink on wood / Tinta sobre madera 26 x 55 x 1 ½ inches / pulgadas Courtesy of the artist / Cortesía del artista

September 9, 2023 - March 31, 2024

Paola Vega (Argentina, 1977) Blue /Azul, 2018 Oil on camvas / Óleo sobre lienzo 37.4 x 18.89 inches / pulgadas Courtesy of the Artist / Cortesía de la artista

628 Alamitos Avenue, Long Beach CA, 90808 562.437.1689 info@molaa.org

molaa.org

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62 52 32

TABLE OF CONTENTS VOLUME 18, ISSUE 3, JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2024

Collective Consciousness FEATURES Skid Row Museum Clayton Campbell

Libby Rosen Tara Anne Dalbow

Made in L.A. Shana Nys Dambrot

Danie Cansino Eva Recinos

Acaye Kerunen Ezrha Jean Black

William Blake James Cushing

COLUMNS

DEPARTMENTS

Bunker Vision: Casa Susanna Skot Armstrong

Shop Talk: LA Art News Scarlet Cheng

Art Brief: Leon Black Stephen J. Goldberg

Field Report: Tomorrow Theater Emma Christ

The Digital: Analia Saban Seth Hawkins

Ask Babs: Accessible Art Babs Rappleye

Peer Review: Ishi Glinsky on Kristopher Raos

Poems: Klipschutz, John Tottenham

Comics: Community Arts Butcher & Wood

REVIEWS Teddy Sandoval Vincent Price Art Museum

Fred Wilson Pace Gallery

Keith Sonnier parrasch heijnen

Kenwyn Crichlow Diane Rosenstein

Rosemary Mayer Hannah Hoffman; Marc Selwyn Fine Art

Vishal Jugdeo Commonwealth and Council

Hanna Hur Kristina Kite

Richard Mensah Band of Vices

ON THE COVER: Libby Rosen, Party Line, 2022, courtesy of Night Gallery. • OPPOSITE PAGE, clockwise from top left: William Blake, Satan Exulting over Eve, 1795, courtesy of the Getty; David Byrne at the Tomorrow Theater, photo by Mario Gallucci, courtesy of PAM CUT; Nabilah Nordin, Sling Hype, 2023; ATUK—Alur for “I have taken to Flight,” 2023, photo by Evan Walsh, courtesy of the artist and BLUM; Kristopher Raos, Untitled (Shell be coming around), 2023, courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, © 2023 Kristopher Raos, photo © 2023 Yubo Dong; Ishi Glinsky, Inertia—Warn the Animals, 2023, photo by Charles White; Danie Cansino, Tres Gracias (Three Graces), 2023, photo by Yubo Dong, 2023, @ Danie Cansino, courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery. artillerymag.com

FROM THE EDITOR Dear Reader,

In this issue, our new feature contributor Tara Anne Dalbow interviews Libby Rosen—a collaboration between artists Anne Libby and Anna Rosen—whose art graces our cover. The writer’s first paragraph really struck a chord with me. She boiled down the notion of collaborations and collectives in the art world as being rebellious and iconoclastic in nature. Certainly, many were borne out of protest, but many of them today have entered the mainstream art world and had their work sold in galleries. The “solitary creative genius” can become an elitist construct that fuels capitalism, but is that necessarily a bad thing? It’s kind of like saying that everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. I wouldn’t have an art magazine if I didn’t embrace the art world wholly, along with all its worldly manifestations. The artists profiled in our “Collective Consciousness” January–February issue are either collaborators or artists whose work involves their community. Clayton Campbell covers the downtown scene with the Los Angeles Poverty Department right around the corner from The Broad and MOCA. LAPD (yes, they are called LAPD) sponsors an organization that shows and promotes homeless artists—working artists who once lived in homes. While on the East Side, across our new Sixth Street Bridge, writer Eva Recinos reaches out to Danie Cansino whose Baroque-like paintings of Chicanx culture in Boyle Heights and Los Angeles expose an insider world mixed with Latin mythology and religious symbolism. Besides her paintings being visually stunning, Cansino captures the vitality of her community by mentoring others. The same goes for Ugandan artist Acaye Kerunen. She works with her community and the land’s natural resources in her complex textured sculptures. Veteran writer Ezrha Jean Black reaches out to the artist via email as Kerunen wistfully shares her concerns regarding the dwindling wetlands in her country. When confronted with the variety of artists and their processes in these features, I am humbled by their deep concerns about our environment and willingness to get involved and give back to their communities. Maybe art isn’t all about commerce and becoming the sort of lone creative genius art star that whiles their hours away in the studio (or more likely orders their assistants around!). The collaboration of Libby Rosen “liberated” them from the burden of always just focusing on themselves. The art world embraces individualism, the antithesis of community, collaboration and collectives. Being a writer and artist myself, I strongly uphold the concept of the creative-solitary-genius practice. But in the end, everything becomes about community, and we can feel good about that. We are humans and need other humans. Even artists need other artists—and dealers! Let’s be thankful that we can have both, for now.

F E AT U R E D C O N T R I B U T O R S

Eva Recinos is an arts and culture journalist and creative nonfiction writer based in Los Angeles. Her reviews, features and profiles have been published in the Los Angeles Times, KCET, The Guardian, Hyperallergic, Art21, Aperture, Poets & Writers, among other publications.

TULSA KINNEY EDITOR

Tara Anne Dalbow

is a writer, editor and curator living in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in academic journals as well as Autre, Khôra, Typo and Blackbook, among other publications. She has her MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and is finishing a literary novel.

Clayton Campbell

is an artist and writer. He has contributed numerous reviews, essays and features to Flash Art, Artillery, Art Voices, ArtPresse, Res, Contemporary Magazine, THE Magazine, After Image and DART.

• ALEX GARNER PUBLISHER

EDITORIAL Bill Smith - creative director Cat Kron - reviews editor Emma Christ - associate editor John Tottenham - copy editor/poetry editor John Seeley - copy editor/proof Dave Shulman - graphic design CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Ezrha Jean Black, Laura London, Tucker Neel, John David O’Brien COLUMNISTS Skot Armstrong, Scarlet Cheng, Stephen J. Goldberg, Seth Hawkins

a writer and critic for Artillery. A former LA Weekly theater critic, she is currently writing and researching a historical novel and revising her film and theatrical scripts from the past decade.

S TA F F

CONTRIBUTORS Anthony Ausgang, Emily Babette, Lane Barden, Natasha Boyd, Arthur Bravo, Betty Ann Brown, Susan Butcher & Carol Wood, Kate Caruso, Max King Cap, Bianca Collins, Shana Nys Dambrot, Genie Davis, David DiMichele, Christie Hayden, Alexia Lewis, Richard Allen May III, Christopher Michno, William Moreno, Barbara Morris, Carrie Paterson, Lara Jo Regan, David S. Rubin, Julie Schulte, Allison Strauss, Donasia Tillery, Daniel Warren, Colin Westerbeck, Eve Wood, Catherine Yang, Jody Zellen NEW YORK: Annabel Keenan, Sarah Sargent ADMINISTRATION Mitch Handsone - new media director Emma Christ - social media coordinator

Ezrha Jean Black is

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S H O P TA L K

LA Fairs in the New Year

The fairs are coming again, and the leader of the pack is, of course,

Frieze Los Angeles (Feb. 29–March 3, 2024), returning once more to the Santa Monica Airport. There will be more than 95 exhibitors, with about half from the greater LA area. This time it’s all under one big roof—last year there were two, with the hip cool galleries in the big tent on the hilltop, and the rather neglected ones in the Barker Hangar at the bottom of the hill. The former was constantly jammed with visitors, while the latter, which housed the “historical” galleries and the emerging ones … not so much. Fortunately, Frieze management listened to the attendees’ complaints, and architect Kulapat Yantrasast and his WHY studio expanded the size of the big tent. One hopes that management does something about the confusing parking—last year people were taken back to the wrong lot and wandered about for an hour before they could find the right one. Also, there was a crying need for more food options, as long lines swamped the few providers. “We look forward to welcoming galleries from around the globe (including leading art spaces across Asia, Africa, Europe and South America), from Korea to Mexico, Japan to Germany,” said Christine Messineo, fair director of Frieze in the Americas, “alongside a strong core of exhibitors from across California.” Other shows in February include the LA Art Show, which now takes place on a different week, Feb. 14–18, again at the Convention Center in DTLA. Felix is returning to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, starting a day earlier than Frieze on Feb. 28, but also running through March 3. artillery • jan/feb 2024

SCARLET CHENG

Now for something fun and different. Long ago in 1987 an Austrian actor/artist named André Heller realized a longtime dream to create “an art amusement park.” He signed up more than 30 international artists to help design rides, pavilions and signage, and two of them, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, even traveled to Europe to work on their pieces: a merry-go-round and a chair-swing ride, respectively. That summer Luna Luna was launched in Hamburg, Germany, with contributions from Jean-Michel Basquiat, Salvador Dalí, Sonia Delaunay, David Hockney and Rebecca Horn. Nearly a quarter of a million visitors checked in. Sadly, despite the park’s success, Heller lost his funding. At the end of summer, the project closed and went straight into storage—for more than three decades. Two years ago, the lot was sold to a conglomerate headed by DreamCrew—an entertainment business founded by rap superstar Drake and producer Adel “Future” Nur—and has been undergoing extensive restoration. By the time this writing is published, “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy” should be open at the Ace Mission Studios in Boyle Heights—with about half the historic attractions on exhibit. Most are solely for viewing purposes, as the rides are too fragile and too valuable to be ridden. Among the attractions will be Hockney’s enchanted forest, Dalí’s geodesic dome (mirrored on the inside), Scharf’s chair-swing ride and Delaunay’s painterly abstractions on an archway. You may wonder how Delaunay’s work is here since she passed away in 1979; Heller had met with her earlier and got permission to use some of her work. Nicely interspersed throughout are old photographs and didactic material about Luna Luna, the project, and its artists. There will also be performers circulating about, and of course, food and souvenirs for purchase. Don’t miss Heller’s wedding chapel, where you can marry whomever, even whatever, you wish!

The Artful Lunacy of Luna Luna

A carousel designed by Keith Haring, Luna Luna. artillerymag.com

S H O P TA L K

Movies and Endings

Over at the Huntington Betye Saar is a national treasure, still vital and

creating artwork at 97. Recently the Huntington commissioned her to create a room-sized installation for its American galleries, and in November it was unveiled as Drifting Toward Twilight (on view through Nov. 30, 2025), with a vintage canoe floating across a “river” of branches and twigs retrieved from the Huntington grounds. She used to visit the grounds as a child, with her mother and aunt, “who were both avid gardeners,” she explained during the preview. “I wanted to do an installation that somehow integrated materials from this area.” Seated in the canoe are five “figures”—the three in the middle are birdcages perched on wooden chairs, and the two on either end are posts topped with antlers. While Saar needs a little help getting around these days, her mind is still sharp as a tack. In the gallery she quickly saw that she wanted more branches and plant material underneath the boat to give it the sense of it floating through water or ether. She picked up some branches from a pile on the side and walked around the canoe, filling in the thinner areas. There’s a light that emanates from beneath, and Saar didn’t want viewers to see the source. “It should look more mysterious,” she said.

Many people would like to be artists—and why not? In popular culture they’re seen as successful outsiders who live large and outlandishly. Plugging into the fantasy is the HBO documentary aka MR. CHOW, about the colorful Michael Chow of the titular restaurant and now painting fame. The movie traces his life from son of a renowned opera singer in China to art student in London to starting a chain of upscale Chinese restaurants. From the ’60s through the ’80s, Chow lived life in the fast lane. He was married to Grace Coddington briefly, and then to Tina Chow, and traded meals at his restaurant for art by regulars such as Basquiat. These days he wants to be known as an artist as he’s shown—flinging paint and hammering on giant canvases in his giant studio in an LA warehouse. Then there’s Anselm, a feature-length homage to the legendary Anselm Kiefer by director Wim Wenders. Like many, I was impressed by Kiefer’s extraordinary painting/multi-media “Exodus” series, on display last year at the former Marciano museum under the auspices of Gagosian. Wenders’ Pina is one of my favorite dance films of all time, so I was naturally drawn to seeing his doc, even in 3D, which is really not my favorite format since it makes me nauseated. Kiefer has a studio in the south of France—not just a warehouse but warehouses with acres and acres. His work is monumental, requiring monumental spaces to work in. This is a fascinating peek into his life as an artist. However, I felt Wenders was a bit too worshipful, and wondered if his subject is as dour and ponderous as this doc makes him out to be. Finally, X-TR A magazine, most recently published quarterly, is folding as announced on Instagram. Founded in 1997 by two artists, Ellen Birrell and Stephen Berens, it covered a wide gamut of the arts including the visual arts, dance and fiction. The fall 2023 issue included a conversation between Shirley Tse and Alice Wang. Alas, another LA-based arts publication bites the dust. But what a great run!

artillery • jan/feb 2024

BUNKER VISION

ARE WE NOT MEN? Decades before there was a public internet, people

were using the post office and self-published magazines to build communities. An interesting example of this was heterosexual men who liked to cross-dress. In the 1950s and ’60s, it was completely illegal for men to cross-dress, even in the privacy of their own homes with the blinds drawn. When the LAPD wanted to harass the queens (who were presenting as flamboyant males) who hung out in Pershing Square in downtown LA, they would check the labels of everything they had on to make sure that none of it was made for women (for which they could be arrested). This led to a whole industry of extravagant clothing that had tags with the words FOR MEN. The cross-dressing heterosexual men, who claimed disdain for the LGBT community, were anxious to show the world that they were as red-blooded and normal as their maleattired counterparts. They had no desire to change their pronouns or become women. The first publication aimed at this demographic was founded in 1960 called Transvestia. The early issues were pocket-sized and easy to hide. In 1962 the founder started an organization called The Hose and Heels Club, where members met in affluent homes for crossdressing parties. Everybody arrived dressed in male attire to avoid blackmail situations. Someone who attended one

SKOT ARMSTRONG

of these parties described the men as behaving like young bridesmaids gossiping at a pre-wedding party. The founder of the magazine developed a lot of “official” terms to explain their intent. The one that stuck was Femme Personation (or FP for short). When he needed to reach out to the larger world, FP became Full Personality Expression. Before long there was a rival publication called Turnabout, which was prone to mocking these shrill attempts at “legitimacy.” In the late 1950s a resort in the Catskills started catering to this crowd. Originally called Chevalier d’Éon, the name was changed to Casa Susanna when it moved to a smaller location. It recently gained a certain amount of fame when a photo collector found a box of snapshots showing activities at the resort. A recent documentary, Casa Susanna (2022), tells the tale more fully. The talking heads are the daughter of one of the members (who knew that something was up when her father spent five hours in the bathroom getting ready for Halloween) and two attendees who eventually became women. The current unfortunate panic about drag and men using women’s restrooms can be seen in a new light, when one factors in these heterosexual male cross-dressers. Given how prone conservative politicians are to projecting, their closets might contain some glamorous surprises.

Guests pose for a photo in the PBS documentary Casa Susanna (2022). artillerymag.com

ART BRIEF

THE CURIOUS CASE OF COLLECTOR Billionaire founder of private equity firm Apollo

Management, Leon Black, was at the top of his game in 2021 both as a Wall Street financier and as one of the world’s leading art collectors, owning works valued at more than $1 billion (he paid $120 million for a version of Munch’s The Scream). But by the end of that year, Black stepped down as chairman and CEO of Apollo and as the Museum of Modern Art’s board chairman. Black’s association with reviled child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was the cause of his fall. Since 2021, three women have accused Black of rape in connection with his relationship to Epstein (one case was dismissed last May). In January 2023, Black paid $62.5 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands to settle claims relating to Black’s involvement with Epstein. Black had visited Epstein’s private island in the Virgins several times. The islands had threatened a lawsuit against Black for facilitating Epstein’s nefarious operations by paying millions to his companies chartered there for tax advice. It has been reported that Black and Epstein, the latter found dead in his prison cell in 2019 while awaiting trial, were

close friends as well as business associates. In 2020, Dechert, a law firm hired by Apollo to investigate Black’s dealings with Epstein, found that from 2012 to 2017, he paid Epstein $158 million—an astonishing amount for “tax advice.” No law firm or accounting company in the world charges an individual anything near those fees for tax consultation. In July 2023, the Senate Finance Committee, investigating sophisticated tax schemes used primarily by the top 1% to avoid payment of billions in taxes, sent a 16-page letter to Black asking him to provide responses and documents to numerous questions. One of the committee’s key inquiries was whether Black originally deducted the $158 million he paid to Epstein, who had advised Black that he could do so, and if it should have been classified as a gift subject to taxation. Dechert also found that Black had used a loophole in the IRS code to avoid more than $2 billion in gift and estate taxes in conveying assets to his children through GRATs (grantor retained annuity trusts), complex devices which allowed Black to retain income from a trust while placing it in trust for his heirs. Above: Leon Black.

artillery • jan/feb 2024

“Black’s association with reviled child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was the cause of his fall.”

LEON BLACK

STEPHEN J. GOLDBERG, ESQ.

Epstein—neither a lawyer nor a CPA—claimed to Black that he had invented a “proprietary” method for setting up GRATs. In addition, Black availed himself of another tax avoidance device, a 1031 exchange which was originally devised under the tax code to permit delayed payment of capital gains taxes on like-kind sales and purchases of commercial real estate. Until the IRS nixed them for personal property in 2017, 1031 exchanges were also used to shelter like-kind exchanges of artwork from capital gains. The main advantage of 1031 exchanges was that a collector could buy and sell art and avoid paying capital gains taxes for years. A 1031 exchange requires a third party to qualify the transaction as “arms-length.” This past October, The New York Times reported on a 1031 artwork exchange designed and executed by Epstein for Black. On November 23, 2016, Black sold a Giacometti sculpture for $25 million to the Haze Trust (controlled by Epstein, not known to be an art collector), and on the same day a company controlled by Black bought a Cézanne painting for $30 million using the proceeds of the Giacometti sale. The Times uncovered

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the fact that the day before the sale, Epstein had wired money from a larger account, the Southern Trust, to the Haze Trust. The Southern Trust was a vehicle that Epstein used to collect fees paid to him by Black, making it appear to be a self-dealing transaction. However, Black’s use of Chicago Deferred Exchange Company, which specializes in providing third party services for 1031 exchanges and which created the companies in the transaction, may provide him with some cover. A similar transaction between Black and Epstein involving a Braque and another Cézanne was also identified by the Times. While the paper says that both the Giacometti and the Braque were sold at auction in 2017, it could not identify the sellers or buyers. Much of the Senate Finance Committee’s demand for detailed information from Black is still outstanding. Black’s responses in September to the committee’s July letter were found to be largely inadequate. Hopefully, the chairman, Senator Ron Wyden, will continue attempting to unravel the mystery surrounding the Black-Epstein dealings.

T H E D I G I TA L

A MOMENT FOR As with most endings, there exists introspection. The

show is done, the crates have been shipped, the pieces have been sold—or not. Regardless of the success or accolades, regardless of the critic’s opinions, reality is now filled with days of waking up sans deadline. The infinite to-do list has expired, the phone no longer rings. In this deafening quiet after action, we as humans naturally pause and contemplate—if even just for a blink. This is the fleeting moment in life that I am intrinsically drawn to, the moment in which hubris wanes with fatigue. This undervalued and underexplored/exploited moment has always intrigued me—the comedown, the aftermath, the dust-has-settled moment. This moment is where I find myself catching up with Analia Saban. The fever-pitched apex of excitement for “Synthetic Self”—at her conjoined Los Angeles exhibitions at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery and Sprüth Magers—has ended, purposefully forcing our conversation into past tense. While her new work is a momentous acknowledgment of how

global dealers must now collaborate, my interests lie not in artworld hugs. The conversation of significance explores Saban’s laser critique, artistically focused on cooling this blip in the digital timeline. In a hipster coffee shop in K-town, we were able to talk art, tech, computer fans (some made of marble in her new work), blockchains, crypto, FTX, AI and its beautifully sinister overlordly implications. Saban was able to reflect on some of the pre-exhibition thesis: “With this show I really wanted to grasp this moment [humanity’s digital timeline] as it is so important. We are not giving it enough thought. I feel like the ride can be taken away overnight. Through art and primitive materials—beeswax, canvas, wood, marble—I wanted to address these totally abstract and high-tech issues we are facing for the planet.” I may come off in a multitude of ways depending on mood or situation—a lover of technology but also a fatalist regarding our trajectory as a connected and pulsating human organism being prompted forward by the next

Left to right: Flow Chart (Painting a Painting), 2023; Circuit Board with Deliberate Lines #4, 2023. 26

artillery • jan/feb 2024

SYNTHETIC SELF-REFLECTION

SETH HAWKINS

decimal place on ChatGPT. With almost ominous undertones I have re-listened to the recorded version of our coffee-shop conversation. Christmas music blares in the background as we have an academic conversation on the implications of AI and the role/duty of the artist during this time. Saban astutely speaks about self-driving cars, Open AI and Sam Altman, while I pepper in cynical jokes about Arnold and Skynet taking over as “Jingle Bells” continues to march forward. What a curious time we are existing in—whoever programmed this simulation truly does have a twisted fucking sense of humor. Throughout history, the classic canon acknowledges the artist as an unwavering explorer and proponent for technological advancement, while in the same breath its most vocal critic. The graceful interplay between creator and technological tool is in many cases where honest critique happens. This is where the acute vision of someone like Saban carries so much value. She has built an impressive career off conceptual destruction—questioning and reconstructing

objects into something invariably altered, while also uncannily familiar. In much of this current status-quo life AI is trying to perfectly measure up to what it is to be human. Saban is purposely making works subtly riddled with minute errors or miscalculations, her own gentle way of commenting on the current state of artificial intelligence—or rather the previous outdated iteration. Through unsleeping unblinking reverberations, the errors are hunted down and eliminated from the matrix. As we scroll Instagram, gone are the sensual days with imagery containing six-fingered hands and emotive expressions completely unfitting to the visual dialog. In less than three years since OpenAI introduced DALL-E, AI prompt-generated images are nearly indistinguishable from reality. Art emulating digital life emulating the human existence—distilled down to its binary essence and regurgitated back via a seven-word prompt phrase. Let the holiday music rock on while Mr. Smith tirelessly hunts for us in the coffee shop.

Prompt Drawing: Deep Fake (detail), 2023; all courtesy the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery and Sprüth Magers. artillerymag.com

PEER REVIEW

ISHI GLINSKY ON A standout artist in 2023’s “Made in L.A.” biennial, Ishi Glinsky often plays with scale in his sculptures, paintings and drawings that reflect the customs of his tribe, the Tohono O’odham Nation. Fusing the past with the present, Glinsky examines pieces from his community, both contemporary and archival, some made a thousand years ago. His sculptures include giant pairs of beaded earrings and necklaces that span an entire wall and a 10-foot-tall studded leather jacket with the name of his tribe on the back. Feeling the importance of painting both a friend’s woven basket and items from his cultural center at his reservation, Glinsky is dedicated to honoring and carrying indigenous knowledge. For this issue’s “Peer Review,” Glinsky discusses the work of Los Angeles–based painter Kristopher Raos, his longtime friend, and Raos’ recent show at Charlie James Gallery.

Above: Ishi Glinsky, Traveling with Me, 2022, courtesy of Chris Sharp Gallery. Right: Kristopher Raos, Untitled (Boing, Spank, Wave goodbye), 2022, courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, © 2023 Kristopher Raos, photo by Yubo Dong. 28

artillery • jan/feb 2024

KRISTOPHER RAOS When you come across one of Kristopher’s paintings, you’re hit with a tidal wave of color. The depth comes from his hyper-meticulous techniques of his own development. His understanding of process and material is beautiful, and as a technician, he is really inspiring. His paintings are almost sculptures because of the way he makes his stretcher bars; the canvas is reinforced to stretch around a curve, like upholstery. In his recent show, there was a large painting, Untitled (Shell be coming around) (2023), that zooms in on an advertisement for Shell. I wasn’t aware until I was standing in front of it that it is two pieces, so effortlessly stretched and fitted perfectly that it looks like one. Another version of this is Untitled (Boing, Spank, Wave goodbye) (2022), which features a Michelin Man arm interacting with a cool, curved shape—there’s a lot of talent and hidden labor that goes into these forms. Looking at the work, I feel like I’m in the passenger seat, either going 150 miles per hour or sitting bumper-to-bumper in Los Angeles,

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peering at a homemade sign. I love that I can envision where he’s taken typography or handpainted words from. He can call out map points in LA, and say Sunset and Hyperion is the inspiration of a painting. The reference could be a homemade business sign that’s a little filthy from the soot, and he turns it into a really sharp, abstracted version of it, working with these visual keys that are in the city. In my own work, there are these moments in history where I zoom in, and I like Kristopher’s editing process, how he picks parts of these logos to make them contemporary and minimalist. I respect his decisions, and I get a lot of joy from viewing his work, which is needed. Some pieces are so serious, and you have to emotionally prepare. With his paintings, just my retinas have to prepare. Throughout the years, he’s developed his steps to comunicate so cleanly and morph maybe lower-quality materials into something extravagant, and I feel confident that he gets a seat at the table of hard-edge and minimalism. —As told to Alex Garner

COMPASSIONATE VISIONS The Skid Row History Museum and Archive (SRHMA),

founded by artist John Malpede and directed by Henriëtte Brouwers, is located at 250 South Broadway. It is a unique community art center, as well as a museum and archive for the historical displacement of people in Los Angeles due to immense income inequality. A critical part of the downtown arts ecology, SRHMA is a project of Malpede’s Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), the first performance group in the nation made up principally of homeless people, and the first arts program of any kind for homeless people in Los Angeles. The publicly available archive speaks to the importance of place-keeping in a downtown community overlooked for decades. SRHMA affirms this through the art, activism and organizing of more than 1000 artists and creatives who have worked with LAPD for 35 years. The SRHMA can be traced back t0 2008 when The Box gallery hosted an exhibition and series of performances and talks by LAPD, then provided them the resources to make and develop new work, which included an installation of 60 prison bunk beds for their 2010 project “State of Incarceration.” Evolving from project-to-project work to a more expansive practice that required a physical space in 2015 with the founding of SRHMA. Two major exhibitions of 2023 exemplify SRHMA’s goals to focus on a constellation of interrelated issues of continuing importance to Skid Row. These include gentrification and community displacement, drug recovery, the war on drugs and drug policy reform, the status of women and children in Skid Row, mass incarceration and the criminalization of poverty. “Cosmology and Community: Networks of Liberation,” the first of SRHMA’s “Community Curators” series, introduced Charles Porter, project coordinator for United Coalition East

Prevention Project, who has been working in the Skid Row Community since 1999. He collaborated with visual artists Dimitri Kadiev, Joshua Grace and Ellie Sanchez, each of whom responded to Porter’s language. Porter’s original poetry was written on the gallery walls and mixed with murals painted by the three artists. The poetry referenced his family history and origins in a historical free Black community in New Jersey, as cultural learnings on Skid Row. Throughout the gallery were participatory stations that had video, audio and a notebook containing both historical and contemporary documents. A four-person exhibition, “Enough is (never) Enough; Hard Truths and the People Who Live Them,” featured photographs and texts from the “One of Us” series by artist and educator David Blumenkrantz. He included works by four photographers who have experience with homelessness: Bobby Buck, Cleta Felix-West, Lelund Hollins and Ian Storm. The exhibition, viewed by the artists, is an expression of growing frustration with the slow pace of reform and change that leaves the well-being of thousands of Angelenos in a state of limbo and generates an alarming death toll. The latest homeless count reveals a 10% increase in homelessness in LA this year alone. According to Brouwers of SRHMA, “The situation for the homeless is worse than ever now.” This is due to city neglect, lack of political agency and the terrible effects of fentanyl flooding the drug market. In 2021, LAPD again joined forces with The Box in the “Compassion & Self-Deception Project.” It dared to imagine a downtown that attracts people who value the wisdom and compassionate practice exemplified by Skid Row residents and workers. Next time you are at Hauser & Wirth, The Broad or MOCA, remember that SRHMA is just a stone’s throw away; go pay a visit. David Blumenkrantz, PJ, 2019.

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THE LOS ANGELES POVERTY DEPARTMENT BRINGS ATTENTION TO SKID ROW ARTISTS CLAYTON CAMPBELL

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BEYOND DANIE CANSINO: SEEING LA THROUGH HER LENS EVA RECINOS

Previous spread: Jessica (As Olympia), 2023, courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Opposite page, left to right: From 3rd to 5th St. (detail), 2022, courtesy of Rubell Museum; LA ESCALERA (#7), 2019, courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles; all photos by Yubo Dong.

High drama and Baroque chiaroscuro meet tattoo art in Danie Cansino’s elaborate paintings of Los Angeles and Chicanx culture. The artist and educator draws from her own life—family, friends and the neighborhoods she knows best, including East LA and Boyle Heights. Raised in Montebello, Cansino says information sharing is a crucial part of her work. “I want to be able to give the knowledge that I have to a younger generation to further form artists,” Cansino said in a phone interview. This, she added, means investing in one’s community, and bringing knowledge back to one’s home. Cansino’s training in art and art history began in community college, where she balanced classes with apprenticing as a tattoo artist. At Laguna College of Art and Design, she focused on the technical skills that would make her portraiture even stronger. Reimagining tropes and filling in the gaps for absent Brown bodies, Cansino creates diptychs and intricate portraits of people she knows, while referencing Rubens and Manet, as well as cultural touchpoints like the Mexican myth of Popocatépetl and Iztaccihuatl. Her works call into question who gets portrayed in masterpieces and which communities are excluded. Cansino recalled going to the opera recently and feeling completely out of place because of the audience demographics. Even as someone who is part of the art world, she didn’t feel like she belonged. “If we move down to a smaller scale and we look at galleries and institution shows, how comfortable do people in my community feel going to those spaces?” Cansino wondered aloud. “I’m sure that my MFA show at USC was the first time that my parents have ever been into an art gallery … I remember telling one of my professors, ‘I bet USC has never seen so many tattooed faces in their life.’” Beyond portraiture, Cansino also renders scenes familiar to certain communities. From 3rd to 5th St. (2022) demonstrates how Cansino transposes the

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PORTRAITURE

grandiosity of Baroque painting onto contemporary Los Angeles. Through a delicate play of light and shadow, the artist depicts a group of kids flocking around an ice-cream truck. The driver floats above the action, illuminated by the angelic glow of the vehicle—it’s almost possible to hear the jingle of the truck’s song in one’s head. Still lyfe with tattooed fruit (2021) references the process of practicing tattoo art on fruit, before moving on to human skin. The painting seems to tell us that tattoos are permanent, but life isn’t. While these oil-on-panel paintings reference regal

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compositions and classical techniques, Cansino also embraces a more common, accessible tool in her work: the ballpoint pen. Many of the ballpoint pieces use repurposed cardboard and plywood—a reminder that art doesn’t require expensive materials to come to life. In LA ESCALER A (#7) (2019), Cansino renders a highly detailed composition showing a figure giving someone a lift with his hands. We can’t see where they’re going, but the energy of movement and camaraderie are palpable. Once again, Cansino invites us to see the city, and her community, through her lens.

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ACCESS TO ABSTRACTION Communal and collaborative art practices have long

appealed to artists as a means of disrupting the patriarchal mythology behind the solitary creative genius, and escaping the art-market matrix of competition and authorship. For the two Los Angeles–based artists behind Libby Rosen, Anne Libby and Anna Rosen, collaboration afforded them not only freedom from the ritual of production and promotion, but liberation from themselves. The two women first met in New York City when Rosen walked into a gallery where Libby was temporarily working, carrying an enormous Skechers display shoe. Rosen disclosed that the sneaker was part of an art project and described her fascination with unconventional materials and formal experimentation, which paralleled Libby’s own interest in degree and tone. Their friendship was solidified in that moment. “The shoe was a perfect litmus test,” explained Rosen when I visited them in their joint studio, adding, “and that Anne was laminating seaweed for her next exhibition.” Libby, who primarily works in sculpture and wall relief, combines construction materials, mechanical parts and domestic consumer products to disrupt perspective and subvert systems of order. Exploiting the mimetic qualities of surface texture, transparency, reflection and luminosity, she engenders illusions that range from the polemic to the poetic. One might find Formica tables, window blinds, polished aluminum, metal hardware, satin and the retroref lective fabric of nighttime security guards arranged in intricate architectural towers or quilted together and affixed to plywood. Rosen, also interested in the subversive possibilities of structural facades, creates symbolically charged, decorative trompe-l’oeil paintings across limestone and various textile constructions. Practicing a traditional Turkish marbling technique known as ebru, or cloud art, she floats pigment straight from the tube onto water baths, where the drops spread and condense, swirling in and around one another to form

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ANNE LIBBY AND ANNA ROSEN FIND FREEDOM IN COLLABORATION TARA ANNE DALBOW

Libby Rosen, Early Moon, 2022, courtesy of Night Gallery.

balletic and phantasmic shapes. Then, using a paper clip, she coaxes the paint into recognizable iconography, such as flowers or faces, before transferring the entire image onto a paper or textile surface, just as one would a monoprint. Libby was working on a quilt that resembled the curtain glass visage of modern skyscrapers when she first asked Rosen, whose studio was in the same converted warehouse building in downtown LA, for some of her marbled textiles. “These massive towers are so gridded and monumental—everything about them is planned, except for the reflections of light,” Libby told me. “That opportunity for disruption and destabilization felt really psychedelic and aesthetically similar to Anna’s marbling.” When Libby integrated the painted silk into her architectural grids, the unfurling flourishes of color uncannily evoked the flickering motion of light atop glass and the iridescent rainbows that refract from

unintentional prisms. Encouraged by the synthesis of their respective visions, they began collaborating in earnest. Their process—cutting up the quilts, re-marbling directly on the silk, topstitching along grids and gestural lines, repatching and repainting—created their form. Each step preserved like layers of sediment beneath the final facade. At times, they work in tandem but more often hand the quilt back and forth in a rhythmic calland-response that enables them to disrupt, as light disrupts mirrored windows, and deepen—as psychedelics deepen ordinary perception—each other’s processes, and in turn, their own. “Working together is like being suddenly free from all the conscious and unconscious rules and constraints you set for yourself,” Rosen said. “I have far greater access to abstraction from working with Anne and a broader experience of color.” For Libby, Rosen’s inf luence loosened her dependence on conceptual ideas

Above: Libby Rosen, Dance the Mutation, 2022. Right: Libby Rosen, Shower Scene, 2022; courtesy of Night Gallery. 38

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and diversified her engagement with her material, which, she added, “really opened up what’s available and made space for surprise and exploration.” Within the textile sculptures, the alchemy of dissonance strengthens the presentation of their affinities, producing a palpable electric current. The tension between the rigidity and precision demanded by Libby’s process, Rosen’s fluidity and openness to the interventions of chance animates their convincing illusory effects. Similarly, Rosen’s narrow palette of bright, super-saturated hues combine with Libby’s neutral and nuanced tones—rather than clashing—give the work a 3D quality and likeness to carved bas-reliefs. The finished silk quilts, affixed to stretcher bars like canvas, appear both structural and decorative, ephemeral and monumental, surreal yet familiar as a window you look through daily—only to find a different view each time. The striking impression of the whole transcends the sum of its parts and any distinction between the two artists’ contributions. “What started as us adding two equal but separate things together, created this entirely new, third thing,” said Rosen. When asked what that third thing is, they simultaneously answered: their relationship. Along with the dissolution of authorship and its attending tendencies toward self-promotion and overidentification came the transfiguration of the art object from a commodifiable good to a record of an intimate aesthetic connection. “My feelings about these are so much more positive. I can have empathetic, healthy, happy thoughts about them because they’re as much Anne’s as they are mine,” mused Rosen. The feeling of shared joy extends beyond the artist to the viewer. Standing before a florid winking face slipping between pearlescent patches on one of their quilts, it’s nearly impossible to keep from losing yourself in the conversation you’ve been so generously welcomed into, as I did time and again. “You can tell people feel more included by the collaboration, and maybe more connected to it,” said Libby of the response to their first exhibition under the pseudonym Libby Rosen at Night Gallery last year. “Whenever you can reach someone, and there’s real communication going on through the work,” added Rosen. “That’s a reason to keep making art.”

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“Encouraged by the synthesis of their respective visions, they began collaborating in earnest.”

ACAYE KERUNEN FINDS PURPOSE AND COMMUNITY IN A SCARRED LANDSCAPE EZRHA JEAN BLACK

THE HERE AND NOW OF IT

URBAN SAMURAI, 2023, photo by Evan Walsh, courtesy of the artist and Blum Gallery. 40

You’re in an otherwise familiar room or space, struck by how unusually airy and refreshed it seems. At the same time, wafting through the interior that constitutes your “mind’s eye,” you’re struck by a sense that, in one way or another, you’ve been here before. The art itself is like nothing you’ve ever seen before; but again, oscillating and permeating through it all is the sense of something that has come before. Then the title given to the exhibition impresses itself upon the visitor: “I am here.” The whole of it is all here and now—as the viewer awakens to the realization of everything that has happened throughout the past 40 or 50 years, what is happening in the present, and what we can see will happen in the next four or five decades. On the second-floor gallery at what was then Blum & Poe—now BLUM—the show’s title (like the titles of the individual works themselves) was rendered in Alur, the western Nilotic dialect spoken in the southern West Nile and Great Lakes region of Uganda— “A NI EE” (I am here). The Ugandan artist—Acaye Kerunen—was there, too (chicly suited in shocking pink), with videographer Cyril Ducottet, her collaborator in producing her 2023 three-channel video installation, Iwang Sawa, or In the eye of time. Time is a theme that recurs in her work—drawing attention to both the process through which the work is crafted and constructed into art, the raw and finished materials with which it’s made, the terrain where many of those raw materials originate, and the time reclaimed by the artisans themselves in refashioning or deconstructing otherwise utilitarian materials into the stuff of art. In playing on this connotation of “burning time”—a colloquial expression in the Alur dialect, implying “wasting time”—the work also becomes an implicit retort to the legacies of patriarchy and colonialism that once relegated women—and the entire region—to serving the ends of others, whether merchants on the other side of the world, or farming and trading men who effectively governed their lives. Downstairs, the visitor was invited to pause at a tent-like installation—Kendu (or “hearth”), constructed mostly of barkcloth draped over a small hive-like dome structure—for a coffee or tea, as if to similarly burn time, or perhaps more accurately, contemplate the time burning outside. (Kerunen has collaborated on several iterations of this work.) There are few such pauses for Kerunen due to the growing praise of her work. Nevertheless, she was able to make a few comments by email in response to my queries. I mentioned the implicit dualities and ambiguities in the works (and their titles) and wondered what artillery • jan/feb 2024

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“I realized later how fast my little green world was disappearing.” —Acaye Kerunen

an “eye of time” view might be from such a perspective. Her remarks were sometimes quite direct, but also occasionally as enigmatic as the works I referenced. In Aneni (“I see you/I have seen you”), a circle of banana-rind fiber floats in a rectangular field of blackened barkcloth, seemingly held in place by three raffia bracelets. The circle is looped over three times into irregular intersecting figure eights—as if testing the proposition encapsulated in the title. It’s tempting to draw comparisons to what might superficially be regarded as precedents from the European or American modern canon (Jean Arp in this instance), but between material and mathematical dimensions, Kerunen toys with and challenges the viewer’s assumptions and expectations. The way we see, and what or who are seen, are constants in the dialectic of art, but the intersection of media and the moment magnify the significance of what is playing out in the work. Themes of metamorphosis and f light run through the work, beginning with the beautifully articulated chrysalis-like Nyalak (2023)—or “The one who crawls about”—with braided cords flailing around it as if to lasso its “caterpillar” into a safe berth or just failing to prevent its escape. In Atuk (2023)—or “I have taken to Flight”—a beautiful piece of raffia woven into grids of interlocking red and green lozenges is draped and turned as if a bat, bird or butterfly poised to do just that. Kerunen’s work as an artist and curator is only one large part of a career dedicated to communicating her ideas about ecosystems, societies, African Great Lakes and wetlands of

Uganda—which notwithstanding that country’s efforts at preservation are under threat no less than other regions of the continent. “I grew up like a jungle girl,” said Kerunen, “foraging for vegetables, climbing trees, knowing where to find the best fruit. I realized later how fast my little green world was disappearing. Wetland mass coverage has been reduced by more than half in the last 10 years. This is scary.” These Ugandan regions have long sustained a thriving craft culture that includes the kind of weaving and basketry that provide the foundation of materials used in the production and assembly of Kerunen’s works, and she has drawn on some of the best of these craftswomen in fabricating them. Depending on the work or project, she may have anywhere from seven or more women working with her, some of whom are well on their way to becoming artists themselves. There was a tension between the cultural and even geographic specificity of the materials and their reimagination and reconfiguration in the works, which brought me back to her comment regarding “more sides to familiar narratives.” Was there a larger, more contrapuntal narrative or commentary here? “Yes. Social and political revolution. My personal growth and liberation from many things, people, contexts.” Reexamining how that counterpoint plays out in the individual works, the viewer sees just how the personal narrative Kerunen has constructed in “A NI EE” is bound in the Kampala hills, Ugandan wetlands and with her own family’s story—a kind of matrilineal mythos. “I turned to poetry and imaginary worlds for escape and to engineer my own kind of fair world,” said Kerunen. Art was first a vehicle for “competing mostly with my elder sister for the selective attention of my mom. Later, it was to earn her love, since she was an artist herself. Still later it became rebellion—a way to spite her by making things in ways I knew would trigger her attention. Now I do it for me—as catharsis, for healing, for joy. I love joy.”

ATUK—Alur for “I have taken to Flight,” 2023, photo by Evan Walsh, courtesy of the artist and Blum Gallery. 42

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FIELD REPORT

LOOKING AT TOMORROW DAVID BYRNE TAKES ON THE HOUSING CRISIS IN THE NORTHWEST EMMA CHRIST

One wouldn’t expect the prelude to a screening of David Byrne’s American Utopia to be a conversation—facilitated by the polymath—on affordable housing, but that’s what happened this past November at the Tomorrow Theater in Portland, Oregon. For one hour Byrne, joined by Madeline Kovacs, a housing development manager, and Montana State Representative Danny Tenenbaum, held the attention of the full auditorium as they discussed residential infill, accessory dwelling units and the various pathways Oregon and Montana are taking to tackle the plight occurring in the two states (and across the country). While Byrne and the housing crises seem like an unlikely pairing, it is exactly this surprise that the Tomorrow Theater is aiming for. As the new East Portland outpost of the Portland Art Museum (PAM), the building is not only a physical expansion but an experimental one too. Occupying the old Oregon Theater which over its 100-year history, has been a theater for many genres (most recently X-rated), the Tomorrow Theater is the home for PAM CUT—the museum’s new media arm called the “Center for an Untold Tomorrow.” As an extension of the CUT, Tomorrow Theater aims to explore new modes of storytelling and to provide experimental programming that is as adaptive as it is creative, embracing mediums from virtual reality to classic film to “social cinema,” in which costumes are encouraged and dance lessons are provided. Its website even has a space to submit your own ideas for future programming. It wasn’t just the public opening of the new venue but also the kickoff for its “Carte Blanche” series, in which artists were

invited to take over the space and do what they please. Consider it a short-term residency where creatives can run wild and showcase whatever they’ve been ruminating on. For Byrne, that was to discuss the positive work being done by champions of affordable housing, a subject he’s discussed in his online magazine Reasons to Be Cheerful, and to present his new film to an audience that got up and danced to songs advocating for a rhizomatic form of community. Up next is costume designer Ruth E. Carter, whose accolades include Oscars for Malcolm X and Black Panther. While the theater has obviously (and thankfully) been deep cleaned and renovated since the adult theater closed its doors in 2020, the revamp by Osmose Design nods to the building’s eccentric history. The yellow hallway is dubbed the “I Am Curious (Yellow)” hall, after the movie that pushed the theater from arthouse to X-rated theater. Suspended from the lobby’s ceiling is a metallic silver sculpture of a mattress—an homage to the former seating (and reclining) arrangements. Richly colored, ruched curtains made by the Portland Garment Factory (one of many artist groups that contributed pieces) adorn the walls of the interior, and repurposed bowls form the lighting in the lobby. The atmosphere, which Director Amy Dotson says was partially inspired by its vaudeville past and Vivienne Westwood, is a far cry from the classic museum design found at the downtown art museum—but that’s just the point: The theater functions almost like a site for the city’s alternative and niche pockets of art to converge and create. It’s a place where one can suspend any expectations of yesterday or today, and instead just let a tomorrow unfurl around.

David Byrne at the Tomorrow Theater, photo by Mario Gallucci, courtesy of PAM CUT. artillerymag.com

THOUGHTFUL SPECTACLES “MADE IN L.A. 2023: ACTS OF LIVING” AT THE HAMMER

SHANA NYS DAMBROT

They say how a person does one thing is how they do everything, and the most recent edition of the Hammer Museum’s biennial, “Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living” (its sixth), put the axiom into practice. Curators Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez, along with Luce Curatorial Fellow Ashton Cooper, proceeded from the intriguing perspective of selecting artists whose work deal in some essential way with the fabric of everyday life, both on an intimate, individual scale and with a broader, rhizomatic sense of culture as community. There were multiple examples of very fine contemporary painting, updates to vernacular genres of portrait and landscape that give the international scope of divergent life experiences and public society their due. But at its most memorable, “Acts of Living” featured a trove of narratively engaging, materially adventurous, immersive-curious, genuinely surprising and original displays. Often unapologetically Instagrammable, yet at other times treading into more esoteric, anti-aesthetic territory, the biennial featured many artists who achieved compelling balances between thoughtfulness and spectacle, confession and theater, emotion and art history. There was also a notable presence of gigantic (and in other ways maximalist) painting, and striking textile work, along with a prevalence of sculpture made from as many different, unconventional materials as possible and in some cases by a plurality of collaborators— offering welcome dynamism, evidence of the human hand and little mysteries to solve, on an impressive scale that traditionally signals a classic institutional biennial. I f you on ly s aw one pie c e f r om t he show on I n s t a g ra m, it wa s probably Ishi Glinsk y ’s Inertia—Warn the Animals (2023), the 11-foot-tall mosaic Scream mask whose cloak morphed into a wrap-around altarpiece or reliquary, displaying many varieties of cultural symbolism and personal artifact. “Mixed media” is a vastly insufficient term for its universe of hand-wrought items of canvas, resin, wood, foam, 44

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Clockwise, top, from opposite page: Ishi Glinsky, Inertia— Warn the Animals, 2023, photo by Charles White; Akinsanya Kambon, Woman as God—The Creator of Life, 2022, courtesy Pan African Art Museum; Guadalupe Rosales. Installation view of the Hammer Museums’ “Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living,” the work of Guadalupe Rosales at center, photo by Charles White; Page Person, The Glittering World, 2023, courtesy of the artist. Dominique Moody, N.O.M.A.D., 2015–23, photo by Khari Scott, courtesy of the artist and the Hammer Museum. Next page: Luis Bermudez, Table Offering, 2004.

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Opening Reception: January 13 at 4 PM

pigment, ink, industrial adhesives, steel, aluminum, fiberglass, goatskin rawhide and deerskin rawhide, among other unusual materials. In Glinsky’s approach, the fusion of borrowed Pop iconography and Indigenous ceremonial craft-based objects (often made by other Native-American artists and designers) represents a strange kind of liminal cultural context, as well as a subversive reversal of the usual extractive cultural appropriation. Another collaborative work was the festooned architectural vessel by artist Tanya Aguiñiga and the AMBOS collective cross-border project was an accrual of tactile testimonials to existence and hope. By using the historical concept of the quipu—talismanic handcrafted memory records—as an active bulwark against cultural erasure, this particular piece and the project in general give monumental form to the energy of an engaged community. Its physical form enacts this further, as its heft and maximalist surface resolves on closer viewing into increasingly singular and individual objects/ gestures—hands reaching backward and forward through the spaces of history.

Guadalupe Rosales’ practice is also concerned with record-keeping at the intersection of the personal and the collective—crowdsourcing primary documentation online and transforming this citizen archive into accumulative environments of amped-up color, pattern and aesthetic theatricality. Her work for the biennial was like a dance club at the end, or perhaps the dawn, of history. If some artists seek to describe or embody a sense of oneness between daily existence, artmaking and the world, Dominique Moody lives it. She pursues her peripatetic, performative and site-responsive assemblage practice from the platform of her mobile live/work studio, N.O.M.A.D., which she graciously parked at the museum and opened to visitors several times during the run of the biennial. In a way Page Person’s riotous celebration of color and texture also represents the fusion of life and art. Grounded in her own evolving sense of self and confidence, riffing on her intertwined interest in drag persona/performance and painting, Person’s conflation and cross-pollination of costume and canvas calls to mind iconic art-historical antecedents such as R auschenberg’s 1955 proto-combine Bed, in its doubling of biographical record and body-embracing materials. Melissa Cody makes weavings in much the same way—referencing historical textile work of the Navajo people, as well as the scale of royal tapestry and the syncopation of hard-edge abstraction. Esteban Ramón Pérez is also in a conversation with modern abstraction on an institutional scale, but it’s AbEx and he uses leather. The evocative, gestural line-drawing enacted by ribbed seams, eyes set in motion across subtle variations in tone and surface, and the warmth of the expansive scale provoke germane reconsiderations of their own. Likewise, the materially assertive and history-weighted Mesoamerican-infused ceramics by Luis Bermudez, and the radiant, regal and soulful earth-magic of the politically fearless, ancestrally propelled ceramic vessels and plaques by Akinsanya Kambon, provided remarkable examples of work that are indelibly present as themselves, while containing multitudes of meaning in their folds. This kind of suffusion of technique with the artist’s hand, materials of craft, energized legacy and modern conscience are emblematic of the biennial’s investigation of how artists live today.

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Kiel Johnson Kevin Kowalski Galia Linn Elana Mann Elyse Pignolet Aili Schmeltz Diane Silver Camilla Taylor Sean Yang Galia Linn, Dino Egg. Large. Heineken Bottle (Detail), Red sculpture clay, crawl white glazed stoneware, 2016

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peting vaquero and queer sensibilities the artist drew from. Sandoval also encouraged collaboration with his peers, as evidenced with La Historia de Frida Kahlo (1978), a black-and-white photograph documenting his Kahlo drag persona with Los Angeles artist Gronk. The exhibition attempts to make connections to national and international artists working at the time by including them alongside Sandoval’s work—an intriguing, if diverting, juxtaposition. Some of these artists were known to Sandoval, others not, but the attempted linkage seems aesthetically inspired and ultimately unconvincing. The totality of the exhibition is a heady and remarkable assemblage of one artist’s generous approach to his artworks, a revelation of the multivalent Sandoval, who is no longer sequestered with his faceless men.

KENWYN CRICHLOW

DIANE ROSENSTEIN GALLERY By George Melrod

Teddy Sandoval, Untitled, c. late 1970s–1980s. Courtesy of Paul Polubinskas, the Teddy Sandoval Estate at ARS, NY. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

TEDDY SANDOVAL

VINCENT PRICE ART MUSEUM By William Moreno

The Vincent Price Art Museum has mounted an ambitious and idiosyncratic survey of a little-known slice of Los Angeles art history. “Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art,” curated by Dr. C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz, sheds light on the artist’s practice and his ersatz school. Butch Gardens, the school’s namesake, was a raucous ’70s gay bar on Sunset Boulevard—I can attest to its animated scene—that hosted the performance shenanigans of artist Robert Legorreta, also known as “Cyclona,” among others. The project’s allusion to Busch Gardens, the Los Angeles brewery and amusement park that was in operation during the same time, was a wry parodic reference. Most of the works on view were gleaned from Sandoval’s estate and span the late 1970s–80s, a seminal, coming-of-age era for the queer Chicano artist, with the exhibition highlighting his works on paper—prints, drawings, artist photocopies and mail art—as well as his ceramics. At some point Sandoval began employing what came to be his signature style: portraits of faceless men with the fulsome, prominent mustaches that were then en vogue. 48

These works are shrouded in anonymity: One such picture, Untitled (late 1970s–80s) portrays an erotic mise-en-scène, perhaps a fantasy bathhouse, with a muscular, faceless man pondering his options. It’s part allegory, part personal projection—Sandoval celebrated the Latino, gay, macho aesthetic of the moment. Yet he also seemed quite aware of branding in his creation of the Butch Gardens School of Art, whose handle he later utilized as an organizing entity for his practice. Not a school in the traditional sense, the moniker cleverly spoofs the institutional system that deliberately excluded Latinos from the historical art canon and from intellectual discourse. A particular revelation is his prodigious collection of “Mail Art/Male Art,” reflecting the prevailing ’70s trend of mailart projects. Installed as a wall-mounted vitrine, the modest-sized works are a euphoric stream-of-consciousness display with an astounding variety of erogenous queer desire. Produced for the most part on card stock, it’s a sweeping manifestation of Sandoval’s multifaceted career. Another highlight is the mixed-media work, Chili Chaps (1978) composed of acrylic, clay, dried beans and metal belt buckle with appliquéd imagery. The work both honors and injects humor into the sometimes com-

With his first solo show in California, the Trinidadian painter Kenwyn Crichlow makes a memorable debut, displaying dynamic, reflective abstractions that engulf the viewer in a spectrum of sensations. Born in Trinidad and Tobago when it was still a British colony, Crichlow came of age after the Caribbean nation gained its independence in 1962. A grant to study art at Goldsmiths College in London in the 1970s marked a dramatic turning point for his practice, as the young painter was directly exposed to some of the great Modern masters for the first time. He was especially moved by Monet’s water lilies, and by the works of Rothko, with their intense emotive and immersive color fields. Titled “Incandescence,” his new exhibition at Diane Rosenstein juxtaposes some of Crichlow’s works from the 1970s with paintings from the past two decades. While the early works are grounded in the daily life of his island nation, depicting figures in abstracted landscapes, the artist’s recent works are vividly abstract. Here, the artist’s washy textures transform into vigorous post-Expressionist swaths, dabs and brushstrokes, while his palette is distilled into brilliant jewel-like displays of primary and secondary colors that suggest tropical flora and hint at elemental forces: yellow and white for light, red and orange for fire, blue for sea or sky, green for vegetation. For all their abstraction, the works offer a surprising depth of field, like depictions of an imaginary space flecked with teasing glints of sensory experiences. Although informed by the landscape, the artist willfully avoids direct allusion. The resulting works are gloriously artillery • jan/feb 2024

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Kenwyn Crichlow, Blackened Earth: The Hope for Freedom, 2022–23. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy of Diane Rosenstein Gallery.

liminal, confronting viewers with a heady indeterminacy. Setting the tone for the show is Kissing the Horizon (2006–10), a dazzling horizontal triptych, in which five reddish bulb-like blobs along the base of the canvas seem to erupt into vertical yellow flames or crystals against a roiling red field, which is bedecked with coiling blue ribbons and a few leafy strokes of green. Its opposite in terms of color, Light Dancing on the Borderline (2019) presents twirling vertical yellow and white pillars against a teal blue expanse. But if one feels fiery and the other watery, both similarly orchestrate order from chaos, culling a sense of internal structure that seems almost musical at times, with flows of energy set off along a rhythmic armature of vertical elements. Foreday–d’light at d’horizon (2023) depicts an effusion of gold specks amid streaks of canary, ochre and mustard. As with others of his works, these energy flows can be read as physical, biological or more ethereal—as if gazing beyond the surface of phenomenological experience to reveal the dynamism beneath. Spanning the entire color wheel, the striking horizontal triptych titled Blackened Earth: The Hope for Freedom (2022–23) offers fields of deep indigo illuminated with shimmering pink sprays, crimson streaks and brilliant yellow flares. The result is at once sumptuous and haunting, as if the artist is raising sputtering torches against the darkness of our own subconscious fears to reveal teeming life forces—creating a luminous portal between the external world of natural phenomena and the oceanic churnings of human emotion. artillerymag.com

HANNA HUR

KRISTINA KITE GALLERY By Gracie Hadland

Like the checkerboard floor of the gallery in which they are displayed, the two largest works in Hanna Hur’s exhibition, “Two Angels,” are gridded and divided down the middle. However, unlike the somewhat haphazardly arranged gray, black and white tiles at Kristina Kite, the canvases are nearly symmetrical with a slim gap of negative space between the two panels of each. Angel (all works 2023) is colored with candied pink and orange squares, red colored pencil outlining the squares. Angel ii is black and white with seven red stripes mirroring those of its roommate. The paintings are installed across from one another, hung closer to the floor than the ceiling. With their addition, the room suddenly feels smaller; the paintings tug at each other’s wings. A slim wooden bench divides the gallery, one end on the black-and-white part

of the tiled floor and the other end on the gray section. The presence of the bench establishes a particular vantage point from which to view the works, either with your back to one or the other or turning your head between the two. The installation invites, nearly insists on, a contemplative encounter with the works, further emphasizing their spiritual implications. The bench points to the back room where there are six other works on paper that demonstrate the development of the gesture that manifests in the larger canvases. As I write this, my slight dyslexia keeps exchanging the order of the letters in the word angel. I keep writing angle. The two things are seemingly at odds with each other: “angle,” a measured intersection between two lines, and “angel,” a benevolent spiritual being whose presence is ethereal and ambiguous. From one emerges the other; the “image” of an angel surfaces on top of the grid. Though it’s hardly an image, rather a suggestion through symbols: Semicircles along the inner edges of the canvases form a kind of body down the middle and horizontal lines extend to the outer edges suggesting its wings. Hur has left a gap between the two panels, as if for some divine spirit to take up residence. The meticulous precision with which the grid is produced is broken up by this mysterious valley between the work’s panels. The labor put into the construction of the grid is thus the record of time and the counting of squares, and of the almost phantom presence of a ruler. Hur begins most of her works with this repetitive act. Like that of a writer doing research or taking notes, it’s a rigorous, quantifiable activity from which something more miraculous, a painting, emerges. In Angel, the acrylic of the underpainting has the

Hanna Hur, Angel, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery. 49

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effect of a photographic print, sun-faded. But without our having witnessed the repetitive gesture of their construction, there is something angelic about the works, something that seems to appear out of nowhere. That, perhaps, is the inexplicable core of any creative process that begins with a blank canvas.

FRED WILSON PACE GALLERY By David S. Rubin

Over the past three decades, Fred Wilson has frequently exhibited objects in unexpected juxtapositions as a means for examining things in a new light. For his groundbreaking 1992 installation, “Mining the Museum,” he selected racially biased items from the collection of the Maryland Historical Society and presented them together—a strategy that called attention to historical omissions and misrepresentations of Black Americans. In this exhibition, organized to commemorate the 20th anniversary of his participation in the Venice Biennale, Wilson juxtaposes several of his previous sculptures—made of Venetian Murano glass—with works from other projects. Wilson’s signature glass sculptures, the first in this style to be fabricated in the color black in Venice, include working chandeliers, wall reliefs and blown-glass “drip” sculptures. The chandeliers and mirror reliefs, essentially black-hued versions of the city’s flamboyant decorative objects, are especially ornate. As instruments for probing the layered meanings of “blackness,” these two bodies of works are based on Shakespeare’s Othello, in which the lead character, a Moorish military commander in the Venetian army, weds the noblewoman Desdemona—with ultimately disastrous results. While the black chandeliers (there are also white ones) feel funereal, it is in mirror reliefs such as Bat (2009) that Wilson most forcefully expresses the horror that we might associate with the “Black Death,” the bubonic plague pandemic that devastated Venice in 1348, as well as with the atrocities that African Americans have faced over the centuries. With the oval shape of the frontmost mirror suggesting a wide open mouth, we can almost hear the spread-winged bat’s scream, an expression that has art-historical parallels in iconic works by Caravaggio and Munch. By contrast, Wilson’s black glass teardrops, which cascade down the wall in Dead End (2023), are distinctly minimal and exquisitely lyrical. Conceptually, he relates them to droplets of tar (as in “tar baby”), ink (used for signing 50

away the rights of slaves) and oil (the toxicity of which adversely impacts low-income Black communities). He also connects them to the sadness he experienced as a child, when he was ostracized as the only African American at his elementary school. As revealed in a separate section of the exhibition, themes of slavery and death have been prevalent throughout Wilson’s oeuvre. Examples include framed broadsides advertising rewards for runaway slaves from “Mining the Museum” and a bronze-cast replica of a 1904 sculpture of an enslaved man from the Congo who was put on public display and subsequently committed suicide. Here, Wilson has cleverly wrapped a white silk scarf around the sculpture’s base as a dual reference to a KKK uniform and a noose. A sense of loss and mourning over injustices to African Americans is also deeply affecting, yet beautifully understated in two sculptures that resemble sarcophagi. Peering through the black glass of their exteriors, albeit with some difficulty, viewers will discern inkwells and oil cans, accompanied in one of the sculptures by a resin skeleton, a solemn reminder of both historical lynchings and the senseless murders that continue to this day.

create sculptures and works on paper that convey this same sense of social intimacy to the viewer while also memorializing the artist’s friends, her family and the fleeting ecstasy of a life lived in celebration of the ties that bind humanity. This exhibition unfolds across two gallery spaces on different sides of Los Angeles. Each layout emphasizes groupings of the distinct bodies of work that Mayer made at different stages of her life. The earliest work in “Noon Has No Shadows,” made in the early 1970s, is a series of colored pencil drawings on paper that function as proposals for the artist’s signature soft sculptures. Sketching allows her to create fantastical draping structures that are unencumbered by gravity as they float on the center of each sheet. The fiction-

ROSEMARY MAYER HANNAH HOFFMAN; MARC SELWYN FINE ART By Christie Hayden

The act of writing is a process of appropriations. Words predate the user, who then borrows and deploys them. With each new text, these tools of communication are shuffled to embody another of their possible sequencings, attempting to connect the writer to their audience—and thus to find a shared interpretation of the world around them. Artist Rosemary Mayer, in “Noon Has No Shadows” at Hannah Hoffman and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, used words among other readymade materials to

Rosemary Mayer, Untitled, 1971. Courtesy of Hannah Hoffman Gallery. artillery • jan/feb 2024

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al fabric folds of Untitled (8.27.71) (1971) droop lazily and exquisitely. These works, like their correlating actualized sculptures, are references to Mannerist paintings from 16th-century Italy. For instance, Mayer’s Portae (1974) was inspired by Rosso Fiorentino’s Volterra Deposition (1521), expressing the kinship she felt with artists of this period. Mayer saw similarities between her time, coming just after Minimalism, and the Mannerists who worked in the aftershock of the Renaissance era. In the 1980s, Mayer made several temporary monuments. Some of the works on paper exhibited here, in reference to Mayer’s overnight performance Moon Tent (1982), at the home of art historian Robert Hobbs, are tokens of these ephemeral artworks and times shared with friends. This jovial spirit washes over the viewer as it ripples out from Moon Tents for Autumn Moon (1982), with colorfully drawn phrases such as “Can you stay up late?” and “Have you got the time?” These phrases glorify the pleasurable, though occasionally mundane, moments that occupy our days. NO MORE MONEY (1983) is a drawing of a salmon-colored starfish flanked by the aggressively capitalized titular phrase. By combining text and image, Mayer achieves a perfect cacophony with a deeply humorous impact. It is as if the artist is reaching through the space of the paper to remind the viewer that levity and humor can be coping mechanisms in the face of hardship. Whether we are broke or trying to subsist under capitalism. Hey, look—a starfish.

picting only one person suggest that self-love rooted in contagious confidence is the best antidote to infectious negative narratives. For example, Locked In (2023), whose circular interior frame is echoed throughout the exhibition, shows two lovers surrounded by a halo of celebratory, Jolly-Rancher-neon green leaves. The brotha king sports a ginger–ale hued yellow brimmed hat; a soul queen reclines nearby, reaching to touch his arm as it sinuously boa-constricts around and down her caramel shoulder. Their eyes speak of contentment and commitment. The use of jute rope suggests a twined swirling journey. Mensah’s portrayal of affection between a Black couple invokes Jacob Lawrence’s The Lovers (1946) or Autumn of the Rooster (1983) by Romare Bearden. By contrast, Mensah’s Young King II (2023) portrays a teenage warrior whose ivory-trimmed shirt complements his coffee-hued skin, his eyes weighing all options and possible outcomes. In his hands, the jute braid suggests less entwinement than the choices he holds and considers. The confidence reflected in his posture seems

to augur his future—as a leader, committed family man and effective mentor. Moreover, the intentional portrayal of this man provides an alternative positive, discourse pertaining to the future of Black males, much like Kehinde Wiley’s Portrait of Oluranti Olaose II (2023)—both portraits of which, in their own way, cast their subjects as the heroes of their narratives, and reiterate the themes of strength, directness and dignity that the AFRICOBRA movement emphasized. Ultimately, these works shatter prevalent and insidious stereotypes about people of color. To be sure, this A Free I Can artist visually narrates stories that should be. As Charlie Parker once said, “Hear with your eyes and see with your ears.”

KEITH SONNIER PARRASCH HEIJNEN By Peter Frank

Post-minimalist Keith Sonnier, who passed in 2020, was too prominent a figure to fall into the shadows, as have so many of his con-

Richard Mensah, On the Cusp, (detail) 2023. Courtesy Band of Vices.

RICHARD MENSAH BAND OF VICES

By Richard Allen May III When writer and poet Peter J. Harris wrote in his poem Only Wine (2004): Blessed be the laughter of lovers for it separates the edges of the future / bless me with your laughter, Blessed be the music of lovers for it spices the taste of all creation / bless me with your music, he testified to what continues to be absent from media’s news broadcasting of African-American life: Black love and the joy emanating from it. Richard Mensah’s figurative works give physical impact to Harris’ words through his exhibition, “Tangled Embrace.” In works that combine oil and acrylic painting with faux leather, jute rope, gold leaf and marble dust, Mensah speaks unapologetically to the uninterrupted sacred space where chocolate visceral connectedness is cultivated through the act of tender touch and fearless embrace. Even his paintings deartillerymag.com

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temporaries. But given his striking originality, restless inventiveness and impact upon a broad range of peers and younger artists, Sonnier’s star should have shone even more brightly than it has since the ’70s. This exhibition seeks in its own modest, intimate way to rectify that oversight—not by accruing and displaying a mini-survey of Sonnier’s own work, but by signaling the influence he has had specifically on younger artists. What the show’s title, “Live In Your Head,” proffers is not so much the power of his own work but the artist’s enduring mark on subsequent art in three dimensions. This might make it sound as if painterly values were foreign to Sonnier’s practice. Just the opposite is true: He treated his shapes and materials as marks and amplified their coloristic presence until the elaborate structures he built could be looked at as drawings and paintings in space. There’s nothing like neon to juice such a tendency, and Sonnier is perhaps best known as the wild man of American neon art. Neon was a fairly prevalent device in the art of Sonnier’s era and just before, but artists like Chryssa, Stephen Antonakos and Martial Raysse engaged neon in a highly decorous, and formally rigid, extension of Pop Art. Sonnier, by contrast, echoed the medium’s expansive pioneer, Lucio Fontana, in filling headspace as well as exhibition space with erratic glowing elaboration. (Did Sonnier know Fontana’s early neon work when starting out himself? Probably not, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find otherwise.) His close-athome model was, of course, Dan Flavin. But Sonnier’s approach from the outset was, if anything, a gentle rebuke to Flavin’s purity

Vishal Jugdeo, still from Deo’s Moon, 2023.

even as it was a warm embrace of his palette. The three works in “Live In Your Head,” from diverse points in his career, do not sate a Sonnier jones, but in context they do demonstrate his appeal to younger artists in the show such as Jessica Stockholder and Ann Veronica Janssens, whether or not they use neon in their work. Go wide, Sonnier encourages his fellow artists, and don’t be self-conscious about what you use and how you use it. Let it fly. Art is shape. Art is stuff. Art is light—yes, at one and the same time. Sonnier had an almost magical way of animating his pieces, and the supporting cast here, reflecting his genius, has found its way to a similar vitality. Right now is a good time for sculpture, and, as the show reveals, Keith Sonnier is one reason why. The other laudable artists here include Nabilah Nordin, Madeline Hollander, Kennedy Yanko, Terence Koh, Maya Stovall, and, for some reason, Sonnier’s co-generationist Mary Heilmann, represented by a tiny little darkly golden canvas—peculiar, endearing, and so out of place that it’s perfectly in place.

VISHAL JUGDEO

COMMONWEALTH AND COUNCIL By Natasha Boyd

Keith Sonnier, Ucua, 2016. 52

Two men are talking in a car, as low green fields stream past the windows. “This used to all be fruit trees but the new owner tore them up,” says the driver. “And he planted rice?” the other man incredulously asks. The first man doesn’t answer but shakes his head in disgust. “Do you think rice is a symbol?” asks the other, then lets out a burst of nervous laughter at his own question before it can be answered. The passenger is Vishal Jugdeo, whose latest project, a series of videos titled “Caribbean Television,” proposes to explore the legacy of colonialism in Guyana. Jugdeo’s family history acts as the source material. In the work’s first episode, Deo’s Moon (2023), at Commonwealth and Council, his interlocutor is the titular Deo, Jugdeo’s real-life uncle. Roguish, handsome, and a little down on his luck, Deo makes for a compelling guide to

the ancestral seat his nephew left long ago. The episode unfolds through two overlapping conversations. One is between Jugdeo and his uncle as they drive around Guyana during the day, sightseeing and talking about the country’s troubled history—“The queen, bless her soul, brought the troops here and destroyed Guyana,” Deo says at one point, with tranquil irony, “and we never recovered.” In the evenings their conversations are looser, lubricated by alcohol. The second strain of conversation, between Jugdeo and his two cousins, Shalini and Dharani, is mostly conducted over a Zoom screen, although their discussion—about being the three queer cousins in the family, and about the colonial heritage of the Indo-Guyanese, whose ancestors were brought into South America as indentured laborers—also overlays Jugdeo’s single-channel footage, most of which looks like it was shot on an iPhone. When his camera is not trained on his uncle, Jugdeo tends to hold the frame still, letting construction equipment, farm workers and relatives pass in and out of it, creating a window rather than a replication; these shots appear, additionally, to be taken most often through a car windshield. Guyana appears through layers of glass. Big-hearted and ambitious, Jugdeo’s piece nevertheless feels a little heavy-handed at times. The effort to relocate the family drama with the drama of history is a noble one, but Jugdeo too often seems satisfied to offer some critical terminology in the video chat and call it a day. A little less Zoom analysis between the three cousins would have gone a long way, especially since Jugdeo and his uncle’s conversations are laden with enough awkwardness, affection and alienation for the audience to interpret on their own. Do we really need a lecture on how queer histories “resist the archive?” By contrast, one of the most memorable shots in Deo’s Moon is of a farmer bathing in a rice paddy, grinning and splashing water down his naked back, before he notices Jugdeo filming him. The artist drops his camera, and the smiling bather dissolves in a green cloud as the camera spirals towards the earth. artillery • jan/feb 2024

Image courtesy of the artist and Sow & Tailor, Los Angeles.

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ILLUMINATIONS WITHOUT LIMIT

“WILLIAM BLAKE: VISIONARY” AT THE GETTY JAMES CUSHING

The Tyger, 1795, courtesy of the Getty Museum. 54

William Blake embodies a wild paradox in Western cultural history. The only great poet who was also a gifted painter, Blake was a barely educated autodidact whose ideas anticipated Freud, Marx and Einstein. Never published in his lifetime, The Tyger (1795) is now the most frequently taught lyric poem in American and British high schools and universities. His lifetime (1757–1827) dates him with the English Romantics, yet he had little or no connection with the “Romantic ” movement or with any movement at all except that of the mythological figures he saw so clearly in his mind. The current show at the Getty respects this paradox by embracing his dual identity as poet and painter, which is appropriate, since the goal of all Blake’s creative work is nothing less than the transformation of the reader/viewer’s relationship to reality. Two key Blake aphorisms indicate what’s at stake: “If the Doors of Perception were cleansed, everything would be seen as it is, Infinite” is one, and “How do you know but that every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight, close’d by your senses five?” is the other. Blake’s poetry and art both aspire to a shared result: the cleansing of fear and the opening of the mind to love. His personal mythology, with character names such as Urizen, Orc, Enitharmon and Oothoon, was the way Blake dramatized the possibility of this transformation and the life it could provide. Organizers Edina Adam and Julian Brooks have ambitiously aimed at a full picture of Blake as a professional printmaker, painter-illustrator (mostly in watercolor or tempera, mostly of Bible scenes),

and poet-prophet of the illustrated (or “illuminated”) books, the center of his work. Among these is a rarity: all 18 plates of his “illuminated” poem America: A Prophecy, made in 1793. Muscular figures with punk rock hair leap out of flames as the poet intones, “On my American plains I feel the struggling afflictions / Endur’d by roots that writhe their arms into the nether deep … ” True then, true now. Of course, a handpr inted, handcolored version of The Tyger, along with other plates from Songs of Innocence and Experience (1795), are on display. As with seeing Dalí’s 1931 Persistence of Memory, one is struck by the smallness of these plates, as balanced against their size in the culture. The Tyger is a little bigger than a baseball card. The museum supplies magnifying glasses, and when one examines the “illumination,” the secret of the poem is revealed: The tiger is calm and alert and nothing in the scene is on fire. There is no danger anywhere except in the speaker’s mind. The poem is a warning about paranoia. After a couple of hours absorbing “William Blake: Visionary,” I stepped out onto the Getty terrace. It was a clear November day. Sometimes, the view the Getty gives of the city competes with the art on the walls. Sometimes the view even wins. But sometimes, the view becomes a complement to the art, even an illustration of its guiding spirit. That’s what happened to me with the Blake show: The city itself, and the sea and sky beyond it, appeared as a 3D example of the boundary-defying genius on display indoors. LA looked infinite. artillery • jan/feb 2024

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MATERIAL RECOVERY: p r i n t m a k i n g w i t h r e c y c l e d m at e r i a l s

J a n u a r y 2 0 — M a rc h 2 3 , 2 0 24

Yeansoo Aum • Elisabeth Beck • Andra Broekelschen • Alexandra Chiara Christina Yasmin Fesmire • Karen Fiorito • Carole Gelker • Bill Jaros Nguyen Ly • Diane McLeod • Jared Millar • William Myers Marina Polic • Francisco Rogido • Olga Ryabtsova • Laura Shapiro Tracy Loreque Skinner • Mary Lawrence Test • Paula Voss • Zana Zupur Guest Artists: Karen Feuer-Schwager • Kim Kei • Wendy Murray Jackie Nach • Victor Rosas • Fred Rose • Mary Jo Rado Marianne Sadowski • Jillian Thompson • Katie Thompson-Peer Curated by Christina Yasmin Fesmire and Jared Millar opening reception : January 20th, 2pm – 4:30pm gallery hours: Thursdays – Saturdays, 10am – 4pm

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Nguyen Ly, Box Fragment, 2023

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Above & Below Views from

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POEMS / ASK BABS

ASK BABS BABS RAPPLEYE

POEMS STEALING LIFE

Closer and closer to fifty, years turn months, weeks, days, and I have trouble staying asleep. Around two I get up to read in the living room, then lie down, this time on the couch, turning the transistor radio to KGO, distracting myself, returning, life slipping away. For now it is okay, pages left behind in the big red chair; the disembodied talk show talk an angry lullaby to quiet my own. Readymade, it came again tonight: One night I will simply not be here. Which is not okay. But not okay is okay too. —Klipschutz

THE LUGUBRIOUS GAME With my love in my cold, old, dry hands, I privatize my urges, launching myself into blank interiority, falling into shapelessness. All the remaining energy leaves my body. It is strenuous, abrasive and draining work, and it is beginning to feel absurd in a way that it never did before. Perhaps even this uninspired pleasure will be denied me as I grow even older. —John Tottenham

ACCESSIBLE ART Dear Babs, How do you feel about an artist selling prints of an original artwork that hasn’t been shown or sold yet? Since it’s a print, the cost will be more affordable to the average buyer. Do you think this lowers the value of owning the actual piece of artwork? —Reluctant To Reproduce in Rhode Island Dear Reluctant: There’s a long history of artists creating works intended for reproduction. These artists are often labeled “commercial,” emphasizing their focus on financial transactions over the perceived authenticity of allowing only the original piece into the public realm. However, in my opinion, this distinction is outdated and elitist. The inimitable Walter Benjamin, in his 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” posited that copies of artworks have revolutionary potential. He believed reproductions could challenge the power of the “aura” surrounding the original, making art more accessible to a broader audience and breaking it free from its historical confinement to religious and royal domains. For Benjamin, the mechanically reproduced work of art could better reflect the true nature of society and its systems of oppression and exploitation, ultimately empowering the masses to engage, analyze and use images to fight fascism. Pretty much everyone inhabiting the upper echelons of the art world has either read or pretends to have read Benjamin’s essay, but despite this, the “aura” still frames what art does and does not enter the collections and institutions that bestow cultural significance on objects. Uniqueness of the original also adds vastly to its owner’s social and financial capital. The blue-chip art world prioritizes rarity and exclusivity, often perceiving copies as “cheapening” the value of the original. If your aspirations are to be represented by an internationally established mega-gallery, consider how the proliferation of copies of your work could complicate selling the original to a prestigious collector. My advice is to embrace the opportunity to make your art accessible to those who appreciate it. The essence of your work lies in its ability to resonate with people, which, in the end, is what really matters.

artillery • jan/feb 2024

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