DECODER: Always About Kayla - by zak smith

13 Ways of Looking at Kayla

BY ZAK SMITH

DECODER

It can be a disservice to describe an artist whose art describes a constantly changing self.

1. Kayla Tange looking platonically calm, platonically Asian, platonically a performance artist, dressed in an all-white so crisp it might be paper, in a great glass box surrounded by a respectfully quiet audience, surrounded by an unobtrusive low-noise soundtrack, surrounded by an art gallery, painting with a pale wooden-handled brush. Slowly she’s painting the inside of the glass box white. 2. “I’ve straight-up given lap dances on a La-ZBoy boy that was duct-taped or like they’d say ‘People were murdered outside yesterday’ and you’re just like ‘…cool?’ Back in the day there was a place in the valley called Bob’s Classy Lady. I mean come on, the name alone—so bad but so great! Sometimes I’m like I think I just worked at these places because—well, besides needing the money there was something relatable for me about it. I was equally attracted and appalled by seedy clubs.” 3. Something indescribable. A sculpture, something like a volcano of nail polish and something like a universe forming, impossibly glossy, oozing, unformed, fountaining, very red over a dry white base. Barigongju Entry Ritual, 2021, unfired clay, acrylic. About the size of a saucepan. 4. I’m in the back of the Uber, heading up Vermont, watching her 2017 piece Dear Mother, which is a video-letter to the birth-mother who she never met. Who refused to meet her. I’m crying. Because of a goddamn piece of performance art. On a phone. 5. “I did a show that Luka Fisher and Tristine Roman curated called ‘A Golden Fool’—the cops came, and everyone ran out. I was naked, running across the street, robe barely hanging. It was so fun—‘Remember that time that we were in this warehouse—there were people covered in glitter and jewels jacking off in the rafters, it was wild.’” 6. Children and old people using sticks to draw in the sand filling a white frame on a gallery floor. Each drawn line revealing a glow from underneath because the sandbox conceals a lightbox below. On YouTube, we see Kayla in a could-be-couture arrangement of translucent and artful black-and-white fabric kneeling over, and writing in, her own box; then, in another stylishly asymmetrical outfit, talking about healing. Cello music. 7. Kayla in nothing but a blonde wig and white underwear, winking over an asymmetrically dropped shoulder back at the audience, in a cellphone photo I’ll draw a picture of. That picture will be published in an art book. 8. Kayla in a sky-blue-and-white hanbok framed in front of a window which itself frames a daylist section of a Los Angeles street. Lifting colors from bright upright bottles of yellow, red, purple, etc she smears them on plexiglas while the art audience watches her and also the projection to her left, showing an abstract film of the painting she paints in real time. 9. Kayla as a sex-nun in latex, crawling, collecting anonymous confessions on scraps of paper, which become the raw materials for the next piece. 10. “I have like thousands of confessions, boxes of them. Like, they’re horrible, I mean like people are talking about like murdering people. Like why do I need that in my house? Do you know what I mean? But it was like I wanted to collect the most I possibly could to develop some understanding of humanity ...I don’t know that I could do these pieces again.” 11. Something alien and elegant, a figure in a glittering gown, far too tall with a glowing bluish-pale sphere beneath a veil for a head, holding feather fans. There is music from one kind of club, and then a different kind. Before it’s over the creature will reveal itself to be Kayla, again, basically naked. Kayla calls the version of herself who does this “Coco Ono.” 12. “I was like how am I supposed to make objects? I have nowhere to put them, I don’t have space to make them ...I found my way into performance from like stripping and stuff because like I just needed a bag of clothes.” 13. “I just feel like: maybe I want to seduce. So why not say something also?”

Stop Being Supportive

BY JOHN TOTTENHAM

It might come as a shock to some young people but there was once a time when not every single person was an artist. People are always talking about “the role of the artist in the digital age,” as if it’s an entirely different game these days, and, it’s true, things are very different: The art world has become both less and more competitive now that almost everybody thinks of themselves as being a writer and/or an artist owing to the mass delusion of artistic credibility facilitated by the dubious freedoms of the internet. What a felicitous turn of events it is that you happen to like the work of all of your friends, and that all of your friends like your work in return. One posts one’s poems, paintings (or, worst of all, one’s photographs) online, one’s friends like them, and this means that one is some sort of artist. The more friends one has, the more of an artist one is. To exist on social media is to exist in a realm of constant unanimous, reciprocal admiration, surrounded by yes-men and women who unreservedly validate one’s aspirations and pretensions. If somebody likes you as a person, or wants you to like them, they like your work. That’s all it takes. As Oscar Wilde observed, “Bad artists always admire each other’s work.” With the lack of quality control in the digital age there “THERE IS is no escape from essentially talentless people playing at being artists. Most of them are wasting their time, and everybody else’s, by assuming they have anything NO ESCAPE FROM of value to contribute. And forget about style or originality: that all went out with the manual typewriter. ESSENTIALLY It is now impossible to stop this torrential influx of vanity art and unchecked mediocrity. The doors have been flung open and it’s a free-for-all of colTALENTLESS PEOPLE lective narcissism that has spread into the fickle realm of galleries and publishing houses. If one PLAYING AT BEING commands enough of a social media presence— if one has enough friends—the powers that be will be much friendlier towards one. I would cite ARTISTS” examples of this all-too-pervasive phenomenon but I’m on cordial terms with some of the people whose careers have benefited from it and don’t want to risk upsetting their fragile egos. Time will shake them out. Or will it? Maybe this sorry state of affairs could go on forever. Maybe it could get even worse. There’s no reason to think it won’t. It has been getting worse for years. How are these punishers, pretenders, poetasters and Renaissance dabblers going to realize they’re getting away with murder if nobody ever tells them? On a personal level, even if it is for their own good, it is difficult to criticize the work of an acquaintance whom one likes as a person, who is talentless but essentially harmless. As is the work itself: harmless. These days it often presents itself as being dangerous, subversive, transgressive, etc., but it is completely harmless: Transgressive is the new harmless. Anyway, nobody takes it very seriously, including the artists themselves: the work usually serves only as an occasional cerebral adjunct to the social life. Artists that can’t draw or paint, writers that have no command of language, singers who have no voice of their own. That’s the new art world order, and the role of the artist in the digital age should be to take a stand and actively discourage people who (shouldn’t) call themselves artists from producing and disseminating their worthless works. We can all do our part, either by ceasing to produce ourselves, or by discouraging others from doing so. The time has come to Stop being Supportive.

Poem April 3

The language you are now reading will be born tomorrow morning when the sun that resides in each one of us turns back into music.

You and I will be in transit, as usual, rolling along the new roads, practicing our stories in case we’re asked about our adversaries.

The language? Rinse your hands in its shapes, lift up your eyes, accept its disobedience and its habit of separating the human body from the lilacs it desires. And of burning any habit into the present moment.

—JAMES CUSHING

Do It Again

A blissful grind along a powdery track, a delivery system into a black hole. The destination lies straight ahead, wrapped in warped warmth, outweighing desire and assuming control. This sinister sweetness nullifies the usual consolations and makes light of agency, so that you’ll go to any length to make weakness a strength; and when life becomes too stark again, and you want to turn the lights down low again, you’ll always go that extra mile to let your willpower crumble into a flaky white pile.

—JOHN TOTTENHAM

Bad-Ass Art-Collecting Grandma

Dear Babs, I follow your column and thought your answer to the question concerning censorship of art in one’s own home for the sake of one’s grandchildren was spot on. I’d like to take this issue a bit further. I own a Larry Clark photo that I proudly display on my walls. It’s the cover of Clark’s Teenage Lust book showing teenagers engaging in sex, with the man’s penis exposed. I now have young grandchildren and I’m wondering if you think this photo might be too much for them? —A Larry Clark Fan

Dear Larry Clark Fan, Thanks for reading my column (and the compliment). I think your scenario is a bit different because it revolves around a specific work of art, so allow me to elaborate on your description: The untitled photo from 1981 is of a naked couple French kissing in the backseat of a car. The young man’s hand modestly covers the woman’s genitals, and while she does hold his penis, it’s not necessarily erect; her hand covers its shaft, and the camera captures only the tip.

Clark’s other photos in this pioneering body of work are much more explicit, including teens shooting up and full-on fucking. The picture you have is comparatively tasteful and far from pornographic. It’s an image that echoes Egon Schiele’s drawings, Manet’s Olympia, and many classical sculptures. I don’t think it’s going to corrupt your grandchildren. It’s art, and they’ll see it as art. If anything, I bet they’ll ask why the car’s backseat has no seat belts.

I wonder how Clark’s photo interacts with the other art in your house. Is it next to a family portrait? An abstract painting? A mirror? Is it in the living room, bedroom, bathroom, or kitchen? If you move the Clark photo, shouldn’t you consider moving everything else? Maybe it’s time to consider if and how you might rearrange your collection to best shape the conversations you want to have with your grandkids now and in the future. Or don’t change a thing; it’s your house after all, and you get to put whatever art you want in it. If it were me, I’d want to be the badass grandparent with the famous Larry Clark photo, even if it means I have to have some awkward conversations along the way.

Andrea Bowers, Letters to an Army of Three, 2005 (still). Collection Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

Andrea Bowers, My name means future, 2020 (still). Courtesy of the Artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.

Andrea Bowers

Hammer Museum

By Anne Martens

In swirls of citrus yellow and lipstick red, a neon sign just inside the entrance proclaimed: My Body My Choice, Her Body Her Choice. The words of protest—framed by recycled cardboard to echo the font’s curvaceous forms—seemed to flash a prescient warning the day the exhibition opened. By the end of the week, Roe vs. Wade was struck dead.

Set in the decade prior to the landmark legislation’s birth, other artworks tell Roe’s backstory. The installation Letters to an Army of Three, Displayed (2005), with its 1960s sherbet-hued wallpaper, blissfully evoked an era of limited options. Through emotionally tinged letters interspersed between the colorful patterns, young women appeal to an activist group to seek illegal abortions. In Make My Story Count, Letters to Planned Parenthood (2011), writers express gratitude for reproductive healthcare, their stories revealing the cruel policies that harmed them.

Andrea Bowers’ art embodies a multitude of timely issues. For decades she has amplified causes from human rights to protecting the environment. Activist chants ring throughout her work: as colorful, neon-lit slogans; as huge drawings made of black marker on collaged cardboard inspired by vintage agitprop; as signs held by demonstrators who are singled out from a crowd and drawn small on large paper, encouraging us to see the individual behind the collective; as silence, embodied in a sculpture made with shredded wood from a clearcut forest, gathered after the protests failed.

Andrea Bowers, Disarm Rapists (Original illustration, “Disarm Rapists / Smash Sexism,” by Betsy Warrior, 1971), 2017. Photo by Jeff McLane. Courtesy the Hammer Museum.

Andrea Bowers, Trans Liberation: Beauty in the Street (Johanna Wallace) (in collaboration with Ada Tinnell), 2016. Courtesy of the artists and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.

Bowers’ art speaks both subtly and loudly. Subtle, in the ways she communicates through activism, as an observer. Loud, because through her practice, she hands over the proverbial megaphone to those who are outspoken. This is evident in videos she makes about activists she admires, like forest defender John Quigley, whose tree-occupying tactics convinced Bowers to join in; and Indigenous rights activist Tokata Iron Eyes, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, whose youth and ebullience belie a determination to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. One understands how personalities shape movements.

In a recently made video, This Meeting is Being Recorded (2021), Bowers is the main subject. At a time of cultural reckoning over race relations in America, the stated intent is to interrogate social structures. Bowers speaks to the camera as if she is sitting in a psychologist’s office. She looks pensive. She fidgets. Her somewhat comical monologue is a collage of whiny white women’s voices, including hers. What spills out is contorted logic. Because of Bowers’ involvement, the piece seems less an examination of collective dynamics than it is of the artist’s own need to self-examine privilege.

Bowers is fascinated by women activists of today and in history. Her female subjects are often larger than life—literally. There’s Betsy Warrior, a 1970s activist against domestic violence, whose own artwork of a young woman performing a kick boxing move inspired Bowers’ depiction of her in Disarm Rapists (2017). There’s a series of photographs of trans women, also shown in superhero mode. In Trans Liberation, Beauty in the Street (Johanna Wallace) (2016), a dark-haired woman strides toward the camera in bright red shoes, framed by palm trees and dramatic light. It takes a moment to notice the brick in her hand.

Sometimes Bowers employs “women’s work” materials, like fabric, to make a point. Soft Blockade (Feminist Blockade) (2004) is a quilt with a chainlink fence pattern stitched across it. In the exhibition it hung like a barricade between galleries. The piece evokes civil-disobedience tactics—protestors interlocking bodies as a means to resist and disrupt—but also the barriers that shut them out from contested sites.

A similar visual element, razor-wire fencing, repeats across a series of floor-to-ceiling drawings called No Olvidado—Not Forgotten (2010). Only up-close do you realize that the relentless chain-link pattern is comprised of names of migrants who died crossing the US-Mexico border.

It’s astonishing how Bowers can find the perfect visual metaphor and precisely apply it, even across varied subject matter. But the greatest strength of her work is in how she links symbolic imagery to the mythologies of America; all those broken promises of equality and freedom.

In My Name Means Future (2020), we see Tokata Iron Eyes in the land of her ancestors. We look down from the sky in an overhead tracking shot and watch herds of buffalo sweep across grasslands, the scene ending with a single, standing beast. In Bowers’ art, we’re repeatedly reminded of what’s lost, but also what’s worth fighting for, even when the odds are stacked.

Working Together

The Getty Center

By Colin Westerbeck

“Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoigne Workshop” is a photography exhibition on view at the Getty Museum that chronicles the history of an extraordinary partnership of Black photographers.

Founded in 1972 by Louis Draper, the Kamoigne Workshop was a collaborative comprising African-American photographers. Draper is singled out in the exhibition’s title because he was the founder of the workshop who was able not only to supervise all his colleagues, but to assign to each the project best suited to his talents. He characterized the world in which they were all living as having the room—and a need—for them to work together. Their home base was Harlem, a place that Draper described as “Hot breath streaming from black tenements, frustrated window panes reflecting the eyes of the sun, breathing musical songs of the living.” His urgent view of the workshop’s mission was not just an exclamation but an inspiration.

“Kamoigne” is word drawn from Kikuyu, a native language of Kenya. Literally translated, the word means “a group of people acting together.” At the end of the workshop’s first year, an annual portfolio was published, which became a tradition. One of these even caught the attention of Henri Cartier Bresson, a photographer who had also been a founder of the co-operative for photographers called Magnum. The influence both he and Magnum had on the Kamoinge photographers can be seen here and there in mid-1960s photographs by Draper and some of the others.

That said, Draper and the members of the workshop all stayed close to home with photography of life as lived by Blacks. Their work (mainly blackand-white prints) ranged from candid shots of the ever-flowing life on the streets to the stilled presence of a portrait photograph. But despite the success that Draper had earning the trust and rewarding the ambition of the workshop’s members, there was one prominent exception—Roy DeCarva.

DeCarava had been the most productive member of the workshop after Draper himself in the early days, so Draper tried hard to talk him out of his resignation. But DeCarava wouldn’t budge. The reason was that being a reporter with a camera didn’t permit him to fulfill his true ambition, which was to be an artist. Though he and Draper remained friends, DeCarava became the widely respected and inventive artist he had always dreamed of being.

Over time the purpose of the Kamoinge Workshop shifted. In 1992, a new generation with different backgrounds were enlarging the way photography was represented. While Draper remained a force in the organization he had founded, he also yielded recognition to this new generation whose members were college-educated and whose goals were more aesthetic than editorial. One result was that the word “workshop” was dropped from the organization’s name. By then, Draper’s own work in the medium had expanded in ways that encouraged him to welcome what the organization he had founded was to be called.

Barboza, Kamoinge Group Portrait, 1973.

Vielmetter Los Angeles

By Max King Cap This edition of Pope.L’s thinning theatrics presents a series of immaculate white shacks, their size of a two-holer, containing a carpeted bench, where viewers may test the limitations of their endurance. An unsuspecting and luckless couple may sit together in one of these dark and claustrophobic huts and view a bizarre rendition of themselves that makes Edward Albee’s Martha and George seem frothier than Ozzie and Harriet. It will leave the viewers nonplussed and ears aching, for the videos presented in these cramped and darkened sheds are willfully eccentric and the audio overwhelmingly loud. The back of the shacks reveals the black mechanical side of the video monitors. This aspect is far more peculiar, in its technical necessity, and far more intriguing than the hut and the films shown within. The rear end of a TV is the hands-down winner in the exhibition, in that it retains mystery and is not overbaked.

The former beating heart of this sideshow, a single final shanty, seemingly dismembered, appears as a wizard’s rubbish-strewn lair, exploded and abandoned until so much byzantine effort is realized as a fool’s errand. The projector is feathered with Post-it notes and stands outside the three-walled open shack like a broken-down kinetoscope; vinyl tubing lies on the floor. The rubber-masked actors, the bee-keeper-suited experimenter, the fortissimo audio, are all more than a viewer should be forced to endure. But there’s more, in the form of beans: low- priced Sainsbury baked beans. These beans litter the gallery walls as well as the huts and bear the signature and seal of the artist. Their vitrines—resembling miniature bank vaults—are spot lit, as if ready for their close- up. If so, much patience will be required. Their shape has a familiarity, much like the “Break glass in case of fire” alarms that once dotted the halls of midPope.L, Black Factory Sainsbury’s Bean dle schools. The cans are Can Under Pressure #1, 2005–20. Courtesy Vielmetter Los Angeles. misshapen, suggestive of spoilage, as if their gaseous interior breakdown threatens to overwhelm their metal seals and escape in a vitrine-soiling explosion. Such a result would have been welcome, giving some life and interest to the repetitive and underwhelming array.

Also included are some of the colorful and crudely lettered text works on paper for which the artist is best known. They are mounted daintily, almost as an afterthought, and seem embarrassed by the lack of subtlety and depth in the rest of the exhibition. Some of them are missing, leaving only an illuminated empty bracket on the gallery wall; a deliberate escape should be presumed. The exhibition’s entry work is a pedestal with a Plexiglas box atop it, stickered carelessly with saran wrap, giving it the look of a Halloween decoration. Inside the box is a schematic of the sheds. Its revelatory dimensions add nothing to the exhibition.

Von Lintel Gallery

By Jody Zellen In 2011, Melanie Willhide experienced the theft of her computer and back-up drives. Once these items were recovered, she discovered her files had been corrupted. Rather than abort the project she was working on, she embraced the glitches now embedded in her images and used these distortions and fractures as the basis for a new body of work that engaged with the space between abstraction and representation. In her latest digital images, “Elegy of the Garden” she continues these investigations, now using flowers, some real, others artificial, to comment on climate change and the pending environmental crisis.

Using a camera and a hand scanner, Willhide captures the colors, shapes and textures of the flowers and then digitally combines them, breaking them apart, tracing, extending and reshaping their various parts. These fragments are Melanie Willhide, This Quiet Persistent Rain, placed into unrecognizable envi- 2021, Archival Pigment Print. Courtesy Von ronments filled with ambiguous Lintel Gallery. shadows and heightened colors that suggest undersea worlds or celestial expanses. Her constructed images are dynamic compositions that interweave actual flowers with facsimiles. The inevitability of wilt and decay of the real, is emphasized through her manipulations as the plants are reduced to off-colored pixels.

In Dull Drought Distanced Dear (2020) Willhide uses faux flowers. This distorted arrangement sits above a deep gray background surrounded by vertical streaks that suggest movement, in addition to red/green/blue and cyan/magenta/yellow artifacts that invade the composition and as digital glitches. While the flowers in Dull Drought Distanced Dear are obviously artificial, the white petals and purple buds with differently hued green stems in Our Sighs Into Nothingness (2020) are combined to create a vertiginous landscape that extends both horizontally and vertically across the composition like an alien reflection in murky waters. The disjointed flowers feel both drawn and blown apart as they hover in digitized space.

The flowers within Thread the Dews all Night (2022) and Whether by Day Abducted (2021) have been transformed into seductive, albeit uncharacteristic shapes and colors that reference natural forms abstracted through Willhide’s skilled digital manipulations. She carefully layers what appear to be painted gestures with black shadows as well as delicately traced lines. The floral forms in Shroud of Stars (2021) have been transformed into flat areas of color, again emphasizing the abstracted aspects of the composition. In the center of The Quiet Persistent Rain (2022), it is possible to make out the delicate forms of the light purple/pink flower with its translucent white pistil. In this image she surrounds the original with enlargements of different opacities to create a sea of floating flower parts combined with delicate white outlines of the plants, all atop an opaque dark gray background.

In Willhide’s digital constructions, the more one looks, the more one sees. These photographs are not the expected depictions of flowers in nature, rather they suggest rogue environments that have undergone perplexing transformations. Though beautiful, they allude to seemingly inevitable climate dangers as the artist infuses the work with an uncanny and unsettling aura. Within her “Elegy of the Garden,” there is both hope and foreboding.

The Hole LA

By Genie Davis

In his current exhibition, the artist’s fifth at this gallery, Adam Parker Smith employs classical sculptural forms in a fresh new way, featuring six large sculptures, approximately 35-feet or one cubit diameter.

Working in white Carrara marble on a stone pedestal, Smith’s figures (all works 2022) are resting, seated or standing, but regardless of position, startlingly compressed. The result is beautiful, strange and compelling work that resonates with our fraught present times. Beset by climate change, wars, inflation and other global problems, as well as America’s innate political and cultural stressors, a viewer might well feel as if the weight of the world was compressing body and soul much as these images are constrained.

Orchestrated and realized as a team effort, Smith conducted this grand rendition working with master carvers, a robot and museum digital research teams. The artist used 3D modeling programs to compress and recreate Hellenic and Baroque sculpture compacted into a cube. This work is homage and emotional statement; where once fine figures stood proud or reclined at ease, these same reshaped figures are confined, changed, altered, and thus redefined.

Here are Augustus of Prima Porta, once supine, now cast in an impossible twisted yoga-like pose; Venus and Amor, with Venus’ beauty hidden, face pressed down, as if mourning, comforted by Amor. Even in what appears the depth of despair, her perfect fingers still clutch her apple. David is likewise bent and twisted, face cast down, unready to take on Goliath. Rock and rope remain in hand but clutched now like a child’s blanket. Cupid Triumphant is no longer so, wings compressed, turned inward, unavailable for flight. He is essentially standing on his head, bent double like a crushed butterfly. Apollo of Belvedere is likewise in a convoluted state, foot and hand nearly parallel.

These beautifully rendered figures are forced to fit in the marble boxes they were chiseled from. They amuse and confound, requiring the viewer to decipher not just what figures they are reimagined from, but to become reacquainted with their characters. One cannot view fearless David in quite the same way after seeing him here, in his redefined, agonizingly twisted shape. If this is what we have made of our heroes, our gods long past, what are we to make of ourselves, our futures? For Smith, the humor inherent in reshaping takes precedence over angst and cultural anxiety. Having previously used resin and pasta noodles to reconfigure Greek urns and Meissen vases, his true purpose is engaging viewers to reconsider how they look at these classic forms. Removing the distance and reverence with which we’ve endowed these sculptures over time, crushing it as the exhibition title suggests, we can view the figures more personally, see them in a fresh light, adore not the high regard with which they have been anointed but rather their beautifully realistic human forms. Making these figures vulnerable allows the viewer to witness them more personally, to realize that even within their perfection there is struggle, and alongside their strength is the weakness of being alive. Smith takes these classic forms and locates them in our relatable present.

Sergej Jensen

Regen Projects

By Ezrha Jean Black In his current show, “The Adult Life,” Sergej Jensen seems intent upon demonstrating his capacity for conventional, gestural painting (and for that matter, chromatics), as well as the subtle auto-constructions of stitched and collaged fabrics and pigments he is already known for, though he does this (naturally) in a slightly perverse way. The viewer was immediately confronted with two similarly scaled oil paintings on linen (as distinct from the sewn linen—where an approximate grid of irregular fragments of linen or other fabrics are stitched together in some fashion to construct the finished support). Here, Jensen builds up thick brushstrokes of variously pale or bright, light or leaden hues into furry textured specimens we may be persuaded are a Pink Dog (all works 2022) and Blue Dog. The subject simply confirms the fact of the painting-image.

The gesture here may be both artist’s and subject’s. Consider a pair of mascaraed shut eyes (in Pink Dog) worked over as if for a fashion runway, the charcoal bonbon of a nose wedged between those waves of white fur and an embankment of paws. There are suggestions of that other Jensen in a flourish of pale pink (like a ghosted bird) scraped away from the deeper rose-amber of the background. Blue Dog takes a slightly more transitional approach, the dog’s undercarriage lost between crisscrossing brushstrokes scarcely differentiated from the blue surround, the eye a mere slit echoing figures in Jensen’s more straightforwardly abstract work. That ‘slit’ recurs else- Sergej Jensen, Pink Dog, 2022. Photo by where—most prominently in Sergej Jensen, Courtesy Regen Projects. one of two much larger (by at least 30 inches in height and 20 in width), almost forbidding works with the presence of bronze doors (both Untitled). The seams are pronounced in both, but fewer in the more deeply coppery of the two, where the slit intrudes from the left like a blade. In its darker companion, the seams are embossed-welded into a cage-like grid, as if in black cast iron. Heavy vertical brushstrokes of crimson fingers or flames seem to lick at the grid as if from within this cage, with the associations one would expect given the state of the world.

On more familiar terrain—here, a ‘ghosted’, vaguely architectural silhouette (a UV-printed image) in eliding shades of rose, lavender and mauve, fading behind a scrim of white, Jensen conveys a sense of impatience with his own repertoire of both subject and technique, titling the work, Inachevé—less a description of its finished or unfinished state than a suggestion of what lies beyond it. As it turns out, that’s a lot. Jensen moves between dense, richly pigmented, almost neo-expressionist studies, to Rymanesque maximal-minimalist (e.g., what looks like a bone-scan sunk into roughly gridded white stippled linen with glimmers of rose or mauve underpainting), to a slightly Richteresque Abstraktes Bild progression of ridges and washes in half-tone grays and whites. For several of the works, the

artist identifies the re-sewn linen as “moneybags.” Without verification, it occurred to me that Rihanna (a photograph from one of her concerts provides the image for one of the paintings) would appreciate the specificity.

Theodore Svenningsen

Torrance Art Museum

By David S. Rubin Since 1985, Theodore Svenningsen has been working sporadically on “Primitive Structures,” an ongoing series of paintings, mostly black and white, that are seductive at surface level, yet purposefully unsettling upon closer inspection. When viewing the 12 works from the 36-year survey at the Torrance Art Museum, we are immediately drawn into each composition by quiet bursts of atmospheric light filled with tiny flecks of paint that suggest mist, fog, smoke or water, the presence of which serves to establish a mood of mystery and intrigue. Within these enigmatic settings, Svenningsen has staged a variety of ominous scenarios, most of which are seen behind architectural grids that bar us from entrance and thereby turn us into witnesses rather than participants. In some examples we seem to have stumbled upon strange apparitions of floating objects or anthropomorphic statues, while others provide encounters with abandoned ritualistic structures, the most recent of which house volcano-like eruptions.

Having earned BA and MA degrees in philosophy in his youth, Svenningsen approaches painting much like a philosopher would, by asking questions. Specifically, his position is that our universe is composed of more that we don’t know than that we do know, and he represents this idea metaphorically or allegorically by making works that appear in some way illogical or quixotic. In Structure (1985), the earliest painting of the series, three details suggest that there is more than meets the eye and thus impel us to want to know more. In the center of the composition, the continuity of a purple cage-like structure is broken where a connecting strip has either come loose or was never finished. In the lower background, light visible through a pointed arch-shaped crevice in the wall suggests that something mystical or ritualistic is occurring behind it, while a similar effect is achieved at the top of the painting by the presence of a hanging thread that simulates lightning. In a group of shaped paintings from 1986, Svenningsen forsakes elaborate details in favor of a more minimal approach, with three of the paintings themselves trapezoidal and another resembling an hourglass. In shaping the paintings as such, Svenningsen transforms each into an artifact from an unknown time or place. For the two examples painted in color, he employs the greens and oranges of popsicles or Kool-Aid, causing the contents of their interiors to seem liquefied. In the orange version, a caged funnel suggests a scientific experiment is taking place.

As reflections of the instability of the present-day zeitgeist, the newest black-and-white paintings offer a particularly effective wakeup call. Painted in 2021 during Covid lockdown, The Lighted Tower and The Lighted Structure both contain a central image of a conical tower within which an explosive emulsion is tumultuously rumbling as its fumes permeate their surrounding environments. In the latter, the turbulence is enveloped by a petrified forest of brittle vegetation stripped bare, a haunting reminder of current threats posed by climate change, political unrest and constantly mutating viruses.

Theodore Svenningsen, Structure, 1985. Courtesy of the artist. Warren Neidich, “The Brain Without Organs: Aporia of Care,” detail, 2022. Image courtesy of the Museum of Neon Art. .

Warren Neidich

Museum of Neon Art

by John David O’Brien The elusive relationship of the brain and the mind has always fascinated without ever quite being resolvable. It is as though we collectively hold the convoluted gray mass that constitutes the brain in suspension with respect to its relationship to the entity whose non-physical indefinability is connected, although unclearly.

The chart of line drawings on the wall function as a kind of glossary or index. They have been identified by the artist, Warren Neidich, as corresponding to the shapes mapping the folds on the outer layer of the brain. These glyphs, quasi-letters and jotted lines are used in combinations both painted and in the form of neon lights as a kind of nonliteral exploration of the mind as transcribed brain lines. The rationale for creating these installations and paintings goes far beyond their physical presence, reaching out to induce the viewer to consider philosophical and conceptual questions about the accumulation of information and use of that accumulation by capitalism. Sometimes the connection is literally beyond a viewer’s theoretic grasp, yet the experience of the exhibition is intense.

Neon light and color has always existed in darkness. The way it pierces the dark with its deeply saturated colors is shocking yet physically engaging. Neon is normally viewed in animated progression, and the installations in the exhibitions avail themselves of lights flickering both on and off, and multiple reflections of those lights in mirrored surfaces, as well as light moving inside the glass tubing to ensnare the viewer’s attention.

The hanging sculpture Brain Without Organs (all works undated) is comprised of white neon tubing that mimics the folds on the outer layer of the brain. These sulci, grooves and gyri flicker, illuminated in a space containing stenciled words and reflective walls. The words are neologisms that range from relatively comprehensible to less decipherable. It is through this language that the artist brings the viewer into contact with the larger picture which has been dubbed by the artist, neuroaesthetics. This approach works with the acceleration of information technology that is pumped into our mind through our eyes, and the artist wants us to consider how that effects the brain development.

The connection between these brightly lit works and these much broader themes is particularly evident in one work; it is in a smaller gallery and illuminated by black light. The fluorescent paintings that are activated in the space are illustrations of the brain, or studies for the installation. Just inside the entrance, one of the works shows fragments cut from newspapers and collaged alongside the glowing patches of paint. Political figures and writing about

politics are contrasted by the quality of the patches laid out almost like a swatch sampler. It is the most overt attempt in the exhibition to directly correlate the physicality of the brain and thoughts that include politics. It is also prophetic, the link is readily apparent but defies interpretation.

Alternate Realities

Norton Simon Museum

By David DiMichele “Alternate Realities” at the Norton Simon Museum presents the work of four California painters from the mid-20th century: John Altoon, Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell and Emerson Woelffer. These artists formed part of the California version of Abstract Expressionism, a New York-based movement that had connections to art in other locations. While similarities to the New York painters abound, it is really the differences that stand out in this exhibition. The work of the west coast painters is characterized by a lightness, lyricism and playfulness that is often not evident in their New York counterparts.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the work of John Altoon, who in many ways is the star of the show. Known for his large gesture paintings, particularly from the “Ocean Park” series, Altoon was a consummate draftsman, able to support himself through illustration, and his prodigious drawing skills can be seen in the many arresting works on paper in the exhibition. Jim’s Fancy (1966), a wacky, spirited work in airbrushed watercolor and ink, conjures the bright light of SoCal, as well as links to surrealist automatic drawings.

Richard Diebenkorn, who like Altoon was a very accomplished draftsman, is represented by two large oil paintings, but it is the small sketchbook paintings that are such a delight in this show.

A myriad of unbound sketchbook pages are shown in frames and on pedestals in sheets of plexi; the formal inventiveness and extemporaneous nature of the small works makes for a compelling compendium that benefits from being able to be seen as a group.

Sharing the center gallery with Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell is the most “controlled” expressionist in the group. Lobdell’s work, represented mainly by lithographs and one large canvas, seems somewhat against the grain of the more spontaneous work of the other artists. Yet the processes evident in the surfaces of the finished prints betray an interest in the “life of the artwork” aspect in common with the other artists. Lastly, Emerson Woelffer shines as perhaps the most contemporary looking artist in the show. Also represented mainly by prints, Woelffer’s comparatively minimalist works have more in common with the work of Ellsworth Kelly than with the gestures and mark makings of the Abstract Expressionists. The flatness, simplicity and even the seemingly torn edges also suggest the late work of Henri Matisse, surely a strong influence on all the artists exhibited. The exhibition was organized by Chief Curator Emily Talbot, who makes the pertinent point that these artists did not completely reject figuration for abstraction but “instead they forged a productive dialogue between the two modes.” Despite the prevailing formalist rhetoric about “pure” painting from the 1950s and ’60s, this dialogue seems to have produced some of the most enduring art of the period, as evidenced by this handsome exhibition.

Frank Lobdell (American, 1921–2013), Figure Drawing Series No. 33, 1966. Courtesy Norton Simon Museum.

Russell Crotty

Porch Gallery Ojai

By Shana Nys Dambrot Works on paper by Russell Crotty are a mix of travel journals, celestial cartography, landscape sketches, stream of consciousness narration, auric cross-hatched impressionism, and sculptural installation. Their palette is that of desert and the night; their imagery of constellations and rock formations are those of both the world and the imagination. In both long works on paper that unfurl in scrolls and in suspended spherical drawings, “NOCTURNES: Refrains from the Backcountry” continues and expands Crotty’s hybrid interest in the phenomenology and interpretation of the natural world.

The handwriting is a visual device of drawing, its tight places and wide-open spindly architectures create and frame moments of colored grounds, which are the ground. The scrawl in Extreme High Desert Boulder Problems (2022, 12-inch diameter; all works: ink and gouache on paper on fiberglass sphere,) endlessly repeats its eponym, like a mantra or madman’s obsession; its depiction of the landscape contains the widest variations in color, brightness and boulder contour. Far North (2011–22, 24-inch diameter) offers a litany of things that are different, unique or absent about the top of the world — “doomsday preppers, enterprising clam-diggers, seaweed chaos, a flannel paradise, mill towns, fog and rain, more coffee, few postmodern critics.” Some of it is outright funny, anecdotal almost, clearly culled from direct observation; more often it’s semi-obscure and delicately emblematic, like poetry.

The writing is nearly always an element of texture, encapsulating the geological surfaces upon which the viewer stands, in the pictorial space and in the world. Unique equatorial ridgelines divide the spheres roughly in half, at the horizon; bands of crepuscular light peek from behind the crags, launching upward toward a vaulted sky populated with long-studied astronomy, organic but intentional. Receding stacks of hills and mountains in incremental tones and hues create space and scale between the viewer and the distances. It’s impossible to ever see these drawings in their entirety at once; you must move, to be in motion, to, in fact, orbit them, mimicking the gliding tracks of heavenly bodies themselves.

Crotty’s drawing style itself is an impossible amalgamation of unfathomable thousands of flicking strokes of ink, the subtle hombres of color radiating, like the light, from prepared gouache grounds. The mark-making is thick and thin and layered like the terrain itself, evocative, optically onomatopoeic. In the case of the spheres, the whole of the scene is executed after the paper has been mounted, so that the drawing takes place on the globe, taking its curvature into account, and thus is at one with the orb and sits comfortably on its surface like a skin or the weather. A nocturne is a study of night built from swells of repetition and contrast; it’s a dreamy, pensive form of music — in this case, literally the music of the spheres.

Russell Crotty, NOCTURNES: Refrains from the Backcountry, 2022, installation view. Courtesy the artist.