Chaos Access TV

BY SKOT ARMSTRONG BUNKER VISION

Before the advent of online videos, the only way to take your moving images outside of the underground film and video art context was to get them on television. Chris Burden made commercials, and performance artists infiltrated The Gong Show, but the real hidden treasures found their way to cable access.

As a compromise for their monopolization, cable companies allowed anybody who wanted to make a show to have access to the local airwaves. MoMA recently screened a one-hour edit of one of the loopiest shows to ever grace New York television: Cash from Chaos (later known as Unicorns and Rainbows after the station started receiving complaints, and they had to pretend to be another show).

This show was the brainchild of Alex Bag and Patterson Beckwith. It screened in Manhattan late-night slots between 1994 and 1997. In a 2014 interview with MoCA, Bag explained her frustration with the hierarchy of “video art” and the art teachers who drew a hard line between high and low culture. She recounts a list of things that weren’t allowed by her video art instructor. In short: NO FUN. Video art was meant to be serious and high-minded. Performing a repetitious activity in denim was Art. Using costumes and references to popular culture were not.

It’s strange to look back on that era and realize how arbitrary those rules were. Another aspect to cable access as video art is that the people working in this medium couldn’t sit around and wait for virtuous inspiration to strike. Every single week there was a deadline to fill up the allotted time slot, which added urgency to the proceedings.

An interesting thing about doing a cable show was the air of legitimacy that it added to the players involved. In one episode, they scored an invitation to an event in Central Park, where BMW was promoting a tie-in with the latest James Bond film. After they filmed themselves taking the tabs of LSD that arrived in a collage mailed from Switzerland, they discovered that they had been invited to drive a BMW around the park “as fast as they can go.” There was a rather large police presence to keep the road clear, and knowing that the driver (filmed from the passenger seat) was frying on acid gave the viewer a sense of complicity in something genuinely transgressive.

One motif in these shows was to call product consumer hotlines to ask questions, which transcended the realm of prank calls by virtue of an earnest purpose. Another running motif consisted of wild interactions with actual VHS videotapes, which were struck with guitars, cooked in omelets and thrown into the street where cars ran over them.

The players became endlessly inventive as the need to fill their weekly half-hour loomed. In this bygone era, editing videotapes for mashups was achieved by wiring two video machines together, which, from the perspective of a time when telephones now include editing software, feels archaic and visceral.

Although the MoMA video compilation was only up for two weeks, it was great to see this chaos in a high-art context. You can catch bits of the show posted to YouTube, so it’s likely to have a long afterlife. Perhaps the endless new streaming services’ need for content will bring us a 21st-century version of cable access. Hope springs eternal.

Bridget Riley Hammer Museum

By Ezrha Jean Black

We tend to prize a certain class of “master” drawing above and beyond the no less essential sketches or more mechanical work; and we could probably put most if not all of the drawings in “Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio”—a compact but gorgeous wunderkammer of work that traces Riley’s artistic evolution from “looking by drawing,” through academic exercises and early inspirations, to the perceptual, intellectual and artistic breakthroughs that became foundational—into that category. But there is nothing here that doesn’t touch on some crucial discovery, observation or epiphany that turned a critical key in her development.

Bridget Riley became famous during the 1960s as her work in morphing geometric abstraction became further elaborated (and pigmented) and swept up into the Op Art movement that included notably, Julian Stanczak, Richard Anuszkiewicz and Victor Vasarely. But there was always a distinct difference in Riley’s rigorous focus on edge, contour and the movement of abstracted point, line and curve—also the eye itself.

An admirer of Seurat, whose own dense tonal studies in charcoal and Conté crayon undoubtedly influenced her, she found her way back to him through landscape studies in the late 1950s, though her point -illism is looser, with a focus on massed elements more than specific figurative incident. There are some fine examples of this in the show. But the real breakthrough moment comes through as a quasischematic sketch in pencil and black Conté crayon—really four essential zones: white, black, descending black horizontals like dashes, and eddying broken curved lines ascending in three directions toward the solid black field in the upper-right corner. It’s her sketched souvenir of a coastline drive with her sister: Recollections of Scotland (2) (1959)—as ephemeral as it comes—yet everything is here.

Around this time, Riley’s process becomes one of extreme distillation and refinement. Kiss and her three prismatic Untitled black circle diffractions in pencil and gouache (1961) signal breakthrough moments; and there’s a penumbral ambiguity in their reflections and refractions. It’s a short hop from this post-pointillism to the pulsation of Horizontal Vibration and Hidden Squares (1961), and again she has the patience to break it down to the moving points, as if moving in reverse—from diffracting the wave to the wave itself (e.g., her studies for Off and Shift (1963)). From this point forward, Riley moves steadily beyond optical breakdown to the movement of light itself—with increasing emphasis on tonality and decay—inevitably leading her back towards color.

Waves and stripes eventually push her in new directions (which nevertheless hearken back to her first inspirations and explorations). It’s impossible to look at her mid-1980s stripe series and not think of diffraction media, or the late 1980s and ‘90s works with verticals aggressively crossed by tessellating diagonals and not be reminded of her tonal studies and Seurat-inspired landscapes. Or certainly it is now that the curators of this show (Cynthia Burlingham, Jay A. Clarke, and Rachel Federman) have reminded us just where it all comes from.

Arthur Simms

KARMA

By Jody Zellen

Arthur Simms’ appealing ad-hoc sculptures are often fabricated from found materials with representational as well as abstract qualities. Simms was born in Jamaica in 1961 and came to the US in 1969. Many of his works are autobiographical, relating to his journey to the States, as well as what he learned as a child in Jamaica watching artisans make vehicles and other functional objects from found wheels and boxes. At an early age he began to make his own toys from wood, plastic and other discarded materials, and these sources remain essential to his practice today.

“The Miracle of Burano” is Simms’ first exhibition in Los Angeles. It feels like a mini-retrospective as it introduces the LA audience to his practice, including works from the 1990s to the 2020s. Many of his sculptures allude to carts or ships, while some incorporate wheels and bicycle parts, as well as toy cars. Chester, Alice, Marcia, Erica And Arthur Take A Ride (1993) is one of the earliest pieces in the exhibition. The title refers to the trip that brought Simms, his father and three sisters, from Jamaica to New York. In this sculpture, a web of thin rope encases wooden cross-beams that suggest the shape of the figurehead found at the bow of a ship. This assemblage balances on a tan milk crate and, because it is situated in the middle of the gallery, it can be viewed from all sides. While Simms does not illustrate the nuances of the journey, the rawness of the work hints at a difficult voyage. Red Bird (2008) features irregularly shaped bamboo rods fashioned together to create the outline of a sailboat. At the helm sits a small plastic red bird that first gives viewers pause, then elicits a smile. The work is simultaneously humorous and delicate.

Simms’ signature style is to wrap incongruous objects with wire or rope and assemble them into either large or small-scale towers in which they take on new meaning through juxtaposition. Apollo (2011) could reference the Greek God, as well as NASA’s rockets. In this work, Simms combines wood, glass jars and bottles, tying them together with wire so they appear like a cartoon figure floating in space. What could be seen as the figure’s head is a wire-mesh globe that is bisected by a piece of wood shaped like a police baton. The work has a freeform feeling of lightness despite its rough-hewn materials. Caged Bottle (2006) is another playful amalgamation of rope, wire, bottles and bicycle wheels. The sculpture resembles a dysfunctional cart filled with recycled detritus.

In this elegant display, some of the works sit on the gallery floor, while others are placed on a low elevated white, curved shelf, sep- arating the large from the small works, giving them all equal due.

The use of dysfunctional and abandoned non-slick materials infuses Simms’ works with a sense of nostalgia and history. Though recently created, they hearken back in time and draw from both his Jamaican heritage and his current surroundings. His poetic works speak to issues of relocation with both grace and humor.

Mai-Thu Perret David Kordansky Gallery

By George Melrod

There’s a special kind of push-pull pleasure to an exhibition that derives from conceptual interests, but is realized through material experimentation and finesse. Such was the case with Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret’s appealing new exhibition “Mother Sky.” My first impression was to marvel at the variety of tactics she brings to bear on her chosen medium of ceramic, but spending time with the show revealed the web of connections that she weaves between the disparate artworks. Grafting contemporary reflections on nature, mythology, craft and women’s history onto a serene classical layout, the installation felt like an elucidation of an internal cosmology projected outward to create a richly tactile indoor sculpture garden that invited leisurely viewing, stimulating brain and body alike.

The exhibition featured several bodies of work, whose at times unlikely dialogue lent the show an engaging frisson. A number of the works spring from a recent exhibition at the Swiss Institute in Rome, including a trio of arcing bird forms mounted on wooden plinths, which allude to ancient Etruscan funerary objects, as well as several squat frog sculptures—based on a decorative found object from her studio—which, spread across the floor, paraded their lush monochromatic glazes to luxurious effect. Holding court over the room was Minerva III (2022), a seated figure of the goddess of wisdom and justice (and, fittingly, a patron of arts and crafts and trade), coated in a deep red glaze. The piece is based on an altered digital scan of a 2000-year-old sculpture; the artist added computer-generated hands and replaced the generic facsimile face adorning the original statue with that of a Senegalese-Swiss family member, making it both more specific and more personal. Facing the figure from the far end of the gallery was a set of neons based on stitching patterns described by the early 20th-century multidisciplinary Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Set out like text across the wall, the lights suggest the disciplined expression of penmanship exercises, or even heartbeat readings: a testament to female artistic survival through methodical mark-making. Set out across one wall was a series of monochromatic rectangular ceramic works created from various disparate strategies: some with excised segments resembling leaves or droplets, some gouged by hand, some adorned with elegant bird forms. Looming over it all like a view of the planet was the show’s impressive and eponymous centerpiece: a huge circular ceramic work titled Mother Sky (2022) Created last summer during a residency at the Center for Contemporary Ceramics at CSU Long Beach under Tony Marsh, and divided into 24 segments, this colorful, immersive wall-work suggested an expressionist landscape, its furrowed ceramic skin evoking both painterly impasto and variegated natural textures. It even included frog and birds forms tucked within. Inviting the viewer to explore its gnarled, notched surfaces, the ambitious installation flaunted Perret’s ample talent, as an artist who channels her intuitive relationship with nature through a panoply of symbols and sources, and an approach to her medium that’s exuberantly hands-on.

Michael Hilsman Various Small Fires

By Shana Nys Dambrot

Still life meets prop table in a series of surreal symbolist tableaux, as painter Michael Hilsman inventories his dreams and sets the scene for unguessable actions to come, or inscrutable actions just past. In capacious landscape-based works, Hilsman offers horizon lines, divisions of land, water and sky, and the full-length figure. In much smaller compositions, his particular and peculiar family of arrayed objects snuggle and jostle each other rather than enjoying a stately, spread-out repose, and the figure (the “man” in the eponymous Man with… paintings) is reduced to the head—well, actually to the ear. Across and through and around, in front and behind, above and below this “man,” are set and strewn a lexicon of images that repeat like a coded language: thorns and the blood they draw; hands and gloves as avatars of presence; flowers and cacti as proof of life; water as the wavering subconscious mind; cutlery as tool and threat; oranges and other fruit for color and the warm season; cigars, playing cards, cups, a hammer, a gun, a skull and more.

With such crisp articulation of specific imagery, it can be tempting to focus on deciphering the meaning of each object and their discourse in the composition. But that misses two main sources of joy and adventure in the works. Joy, because the palette is so stridently eccentric, veering between alluring naturalism and queasy invention; the paint is applied with careful, heavy attention, splicing slivers of pictorial space from within its tipped-up flatness. Adventure, because it’s crucial to bear in mind that the artist himself is not entirely sure of the work’s ultimate meaning, or meanings. He has remembered dreams, had visions and intuitions, observed the world and drafted its imagery into the service of his contemplations, tickled an occasional funny bone, and basically laid it all out so that he could decode it for himself as well.

The titles are written inside the pictorial space, delicately lettered onto a color field, sometimes quite prominently, as though the paintings were field notes or journal entries. They are deceptively specific, like the imagery itself, seeming to lay things out but jealously guarding their ambiguity. Man with Cutlery and Citrus; Man with Roses ; Man with Book in Landscape; Hand, Flowers, Water; Still Life with Hammer and Things; Man Touching Thorn—these and other works (all 2023, oil on linen, ranging from an almost monumental 78 x 114 in., to a darling 11 x 14 in.) make use of deep blue, contrapuntal orange, flooded flesh, filmy green, mustardy yellow and bloody reds to both emphasize and deflect the pull of literalism. We witness the artist’s exegesis at a distance, but we are invited to make our own sense of it as well, as if his dreams were ours.

Eric Nash

KP Projects

By Genie Davis

Steeped in noir, as visceral and real as a photograph or a frame plucked from a black-and-white film, the rich monochrome charcoal works of Eric Nash draw the viewer into a quintessentially Los Angeles world.

While not a native of the city, Nash has embraced it with his incredibly detailed drawings, creating intimate impressions of the city he has called home for 25 years. In “Night Drawings,” the artist’s latest solo exhibition, the city hums to life after dark, pulling the viewer along on a fabulous freeway ride past iconic signs and landmarks.

Each piece captures a mysterious glow. In Hollywood Blvd. (all works 2023), Nash gives us a freeway sign lit with headlights and shadow. It serves as a billboard advertising the famous street in the city, illuminated by illusion, making it a place of movie-star dreams and a simmering foreboding. In Dance, a full moon shines like a giant pearl above a gleaming sign, inviting its viewers to get in step. It is a command as much as a request, exerting its own gravitational pull, just like that moon.

The Cactus offers another illuminated sign, this one rimmed in neon, advocating for the “The Best Tacos” against an inky black velvet sky.

Neon embraces a graceful sign for “Los Altos Hotel & Apts” in Los Altos, the words floating dreamily from a scaffolding atop a building. The night sky is not so dark here, brightened by city lights and soft clouds.

But most of Nash’s skyscapes are dark and deep—a bottomless soft void— plush and compelling. If it wasn’t for the illuminated signs and streetlights, one could fall into that night and never climb out.

Midnight Oasis underscores this point; an island floating in the darkness, two gas station pumps positioned beneath a service island roof, empty, spotlit, waiting to pull in travelers driving through the dark like moths to a flame.

Framed by the impossibly dark sky, Night Waters offers a liquid depth—a corner of a swimming pool glows from a light on its rim, shining an eerie welcome, a ghost of water, silvery and cool.

“Night Drawings” is in part remarkable for its superb mastery of craft, as Nash renders images so perfectly that they appear photographed, not drawn, at first glance. Working consistently within the boundaries of 30 x 44 in. paper, the artist’s latest series creates indelible images of light within darkness.

Borrowing from Hollywood film and fiction history, Nash is the Raymond Chandler of visual art; he creates iconic drawings that imprint on the viewer as much as their real-life counterparts imprint on the darkness itself, with pools of seductive light.

To enter the artist’s world in this exhibition is to plunge into a nightscape both entirely realistic and surreal, and experience a fierce depth of love for this city of often-lost night dreams.

Zimmer Frei Wonzimer

By Betty Ann Brown

Los Angeles is a city of immigrants: over 200 different languages are spoken here. Every immigrant comes to this country with an already established identity. Each has to jettison their old identities and craft new, LA-based ones. Some do so by making art.

One way to chart this process is to explore “Zimmer Frei,” an exhibition produced by Los Angeles artists who have traveled here from 13 different countries (finely curated by the Yugoslavian Snezana Saraswati Petrovic).

The artists employ media as diverse as their places of origin, from traditional painting to photography, film and computer technology. They present a wide range of formats, from single images to complex installations that invite viewer interaction. Here are a few of the standouts.

Alaïa Parhizi’s painting Sense (2022) depicts a standing human figure. It is unnaturally elongated, like a saintly figure on a Gothic Cathedral (complete with halo), or perhaps like an alien coming down to retrieve ET. Or is it a political alien who has fled another country for a chance at freedom? Carsten Bund inserts the historic precedent of portrait painting into Artificial Intelligence. He created a program that “paints” images in vibrant, expressionist colors— images that periodically coalesce into abstracted depictions of the human face. Many of the faces resemble portraits of Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941). The Russian-born painter spent most of his creative career in Germany, and thus serves as an éminence grise of the bicultural artists in “Zimmer Frei.”

Chenhung Chen uses industrial detritus (wires, cords, metal mesh, etc.) to create abstract sculptures that refer poetically to biomorphic forms (like diaphanous sea creatures) or possibly, ritual garbs (discarded gossamer robes). Her work exists in the liminal space between machine culture and vulnerable nature, even as it shuttles between her native Mandarin and adopted English.

Like Chen, Marisa Caichiolo deploys “non-art” materials, from dinner plates to tufts of grass and even locks of her own hair. She uses hair like embroidery thread to limn words and images across the shiny surface of sterling silver platters. Viewers are reminded of the way traditional women were defined by the gendered role of housewife. They gave of their very bodies to construct the physical and psychic spaces of their homes.

Snezana Saraswati Petrovic’s installation I Like Amerika and Amerika Likes Me (2023) is a ceremonial “home” inside the gallery. Strips of looped plastic dangle from a rectangular frame like tentative vines surrounding a sacred space. The plastic forms are juxtaposed with orchid leis from Hawaii. An oval mirror hangs on the wall opposite the entryway with a projected video at the level of a viewer’s face, challenging expectations about image and self-image. As with many of the artworks in “Zimmer Frei,” Petrovic’s installation continues the ongoing investigation of immigrant identity.

Global Asias

USC Pacific Asia Museum

By Meher McArthur

At the entrance to “Global Asias: Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art from the Collection of Jordan D. Schnizter and His Family Foundation” at the USC Pacific Asia Museum, stand two giant ceramic heads. One features a black-and-white striped neck, red crown and blue face turned sideways to face the other, which is faceless and mysterious, reflecting the puzzling exhibition title. Curator Chang Tan, born in Chan and now teaching Art History and Asian Studies at Penn State, examines Asian identity in this exhibition of works by 15 Asian and Asian American artists; she contends that Asia is as diverse as it is fluid.

In the first section, “Exuberant Forms,” includes vibrant, abstract works. Dinh Q. Le’s large woven photograph, Untitled (Coca Cola) (2007) is a collage of American brand logos like Coca Cola, SPAM, Oreos and a soldier aiming a bazooka. Hiroki Morinoue’s woodcut Pure Water (2001), and Barbara Takenaga’s stenciled lithographs Wheel (Zozma) (2008), are exuberant works of abstract patterning, while the grid of pop-style woodblock prints of Jacob Hashimoto’s The Hashimoto Index (2017) could be from anywhere.

In “Asias Reinvented,” figural works, often featuring Asian motifs, signal the artists’ roots. In Crossing the River: Chasing (2003), Hung Liu, an American artist born in China, draws from the Chinese “Three Perfections” with painting, calligraphy and poetry. A boy chasing a white bird through a river is flanked by lotuses and a poetic inscription in Chinese calligraphy. The work of superstar artist Takashi Murakami references not only Japanese manga and anime, but also Buddhist and Daoist concepts of impermanence, as in Of Chinese Lions, Peonies, Skulls and Fountains (2002).

The final section, “Moving Stories,” delves into societal issues within the “global Asian” experience. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s monumental handscrolls, Untitled 2008–2011 (the map of the land of feeling), I (2008–11), include copies of the Thai artist’s passports, city maps, mazes, time zones and recipes in a powerful self-portrait of his nomadic life. In Roger Shimomura’s bold three-panel painting, American Infamy #5 (2006), American soldiers in the watchtower of an internment camp look down on the Japanese Americans imprisoned below. Shimomura himself spent his early years in an internment camp in Idaho. Later, as an artist, he drew on the work of pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Japanese artistic traditions to illustrate this shameful historical moment.

A third of the world’s land area and more than 60% of its population, Asia comprises many cultures, including the Asian diasporas. Although large areas of it are not represented in the exhibition (or in the Schnitzer Collection), “Global Asias” still conveys the important message that neither Asia nor Asian art is homogenous. With the anti-Asian sentiment currently prevalent in the US, the many voices of global Asians need to be heard, and this dynamic, thoughtful exhibition should be seen.

Yolanda González Museum of Latin American Art

By Liz Goldner

The quality and diversity of the work of Yolanda González—a painter, illustrator, printmaker and ceramic sculptor—makes a solo installation of her work long overdue. This current exhibition, with nearly a 100 pieces from the career of the 59-year-old LA–based Chicana artist, does not disappoint. Embracing figurative and abstract styles, she often bases her portraits on herself, with clear inspiration from German Expressionism and Chicano art.

Following studies in studio art at Pasadena’s Art Center College, which she attended on scholarship, and a fellowship residency in Japan in 1994, González started a series of mostly monochromatic prints and paintings that depict dark bodies and bold gestural strokes. With titles such as Reaching for Sanity, Crossroads and Spiral, these works feature swirling shapes, surrounding staring eyes and faces that peer out at the world. Some of the pieces feature bright colors, like Metamorphosis in Red, which conveys passion with its shapes, reminiscent of hearts, and in the more somber Blue Conga, with its sideways face and skewed breasts. Continuing this series of two dozen works for three years, González describes it as an effort “to put a face on the monsters in our psyches, and to see the beauty in them.”

In 2020, González began her “Metamorphosis II” series in honor of her mother who had recently passed away. These darker pieces have such titles as With Eyes Closed…Nine Spheres and Through the Veil…Six Spheres. More figurative than work from her earlier ”Metamorphosis” series, they contain detailed faces and female bodies, often conveying soulfulness and even despair with their harmonious arrangements.

The artist’s acrylic-on-canvas portraits in the second gallery include Dream of the Artist (2013), which depicts three stylishly clothed and made-up women, with one posing for a portrait, and a second woman facing her while working at an easel. Both women, with dignified and sincere expressions, have almost identical facial features. Self Portrait with Scaramouch (1999) shows González attending a party in Italy, while elegantly attired in a black cape and a mask with the long fake nose typically worn by doctors and aristocrats during the Bubonic Plague. This painting, among many other vibrant works in the second gallery, is the artist’s most humorous piece in the show.

With features similar to those in her portraits, González’ ceramic sculptures in both galleries are finely wrought busts of women. Several watercolor and pencil works, including Portrait of Emily on Green (2022) and Dreams about you (2020), are portrayals of nudes who brazenly reveal their breasts to the viewers. The few watercolors of men in the exhibition are far less salacious and more modest.

González’ three acrylic still lifes, The Sweet Love of Red, Still Life in Blue and Still Life Pink Tulips, burst with profusions of colorful flowers in full bloom.

Emphasizing González’ expansive art practice, this exhibition showcases pieces that manifest her grief, humor and love of elegance.

Reservoir

You take the back lane, following the curve of street until it meets the steps to the reservoir. At the top, triumphant, you stop for a cigarette, puffing smoke in the face of legs and lungs. Let them burn this day before your crossexamination. In England, at least the skies will glower back this time of year but here, between the rows of houses on the hill, the mountains of San Gabriel just flash their flawless canines, and you remember a dog, five-thousand miles and several decades past outside a bookies’ shop, tethered to a trash can that it knocks down pulling on its leash. And in the din, the dog bolts, the metal lid still fixed around its collar.

Listen! Streets away, the effort to outrun the fear that chases it through the neighborhood, goes on. You stub out your cigarette and with your clattering thoughts, head to the water’s edge.

—MARTIN JAGO

Dead Men Don’t Marry

Solitude is a young man’s game. When you’re young, it builds character. When you’re old, it corrodes the soul. The way of the world, as you haven’t lived it, as it is lived by almost everyone else, weighs down too hard, and the older you get, the more isolated one’s position, the heavier it becomes. It’s too late for a lifestyle change. But one look at the lives of your married friends, usually reassures you that by remaining single you have made the right choice.

—JOHN TOTTENHAM