C.L.A VERSUS NYC By Michael Haight
People from C.L.A. will tell you New Yorkers are too straight-to-the-point too blunt you over the head, while people from N.Y.C. will tell you Los Angeleanos are hard to understand because they never get around to asking you for what they want from you, they want you to just give it, and that the Angeleanos are really the blunt ones, blunt in terms of shallowness and self-promotion, quick to play to their own airs.… …Like the many veins the Livin’ L.A. show pushed and pulled with theme of Los Angeles and its image as wealthy stereotype /or a cynical lack there of, The Visitation encouraged outsiders to voice their love or dislodging of L.A.’s personae, while at the same time allowing these artists an inferential treatment of NY and other cities’ influence on art making. Artists are vessels through and true, yet the light that shines through, those translucent hold-
ers, is transformed by the coloration of an artist’s personal culture mingling with the new. The Visitation is one that provides viewers with a range of artists who, despite their variegated statuses in art-world’s society, make chance and change on the temporal stricture and contemporaneity of just a length of visit. Centered on those of NYC culture visiting LA vis-à-vis those of LA intersecting with NYC, is the implementation of how residing in a certain setting (regardless of time table) allows an artist the leeway into new forms and new modes of thinking, believing, reliving, and destroying what they know and what they have come to know. In the same way that I could not come to shit upon New York City, none of these artists could do the same upon the subject matter they produced while away on visitation.
DEMOS / I’VE LIVED IN A HOTEL MY ENTIRE LIFE
Demos is the Upper West Side Hotel lobby Marble and Bizzanatti Torche-Leather bound chaise sétte On display Location geographic Anaphylactic shock of glancing Bestowed upon one’s tender-footed charm Haze grey-blue such the light rendered explains only you as a hue avarice in chains neither adherent to nor pursuant to Louis-Vuitton floor models. A. Hadlen Schmailer, prominently-writ Scholar-at-Large, speaks with an affectation downright against such simply laid color, “Slick work bores unless the process of said work is unknown and the audience unaware of such procedure’s difficulty.” Well then, A. Hadlen Schmailer needs to grow up in an UWS Hotel sometime.
Peter Demos Untitled 2011
DARK SEXINESS OF BENGLIS MINUS THE DICK / MIN AND THE DICK
[ART GRANDMOTHER I wearing oversized black framed glasses and thirty-five too many pearl necklaces atop her broached-out bleached-out tweed emsemble from some Upper West Side imitation Chico’s—for God’s sake Chico’s? with Dior?] Why hidden in the corner is the objectivity too morose? [ART GRANDMOTHER II squinting off-screen to a darker corner of the gallery wearing creamsicle orange all over except for white flats (that should have been pumps) and a white belt far too wide but with such soft leather] This space is best hidden like that baroque monstrosity on 87th West that Clyde rents to a young Jewish couple but they have a Californian sheen. Oh, would you just look at this Benglis [ART GRANDMOTHER I to ART GRANDMOTHER II] Is this a Benglis? [ART GRANDMOTHER II to ART GRANDMOTHER I] Is this a Benglis? It is a Benglis She’s the one with the, [clears throat] Art Forum penis [ART GRANDMOTHER I looking down at her crotch] Yes, Benglis took the dip with Californian ink and that New-york-porn-dick-instinct… [ART GRANDMOTHER II blushing] Artforum ads will never be able to stuff it like she did. [Cut to: INTERIOR; Pictured in the hallway, Brownstone, 10th street Brooklyn not Manhattan, 3rd floor halfway, half-way through; ART GRANDMOTHER I’s voice filters through echo] There’s a nook where we thought a God-father clock might serve to add a little charm however my grandfather’ don’ have no clocks so we settled on this fluid divan of something like Brancusi’d lick. And on top we framed Benglis’ dick. [Cut to: ART GRANDMOTHER I and ART GRANDMOTHER II Medium shot; Laughter; Guffaws] [SHARITS trembles]
Lynda Benglis Voile Humaine 1981
Lynda Benglis magazine article
MIN MINUS THE MEAHGER
Have you ever rode the Staten Island Ferry just to go to the Staten Island Mall after already chugging on the slow train from the Bronx and even swinging over to your sister’s in Queens because her five children’ve gotta buy clothes for school and Staten Island’s got the best Gap and clothes that always fit because they have loose straps and five o’clock we gotta
Yunhee Min Aphonic Duet v.1 DVD
find your sister or else her father’s likely to CANDY! slap her til apologizing for spendin the whole time talkin at CANDY DON CHU him boyfriends’ friends and disrespecting her Auntie whose taken so Baby you GOT a Toy much of her time, not to mention money, and drag YO WHO OF YOUS SMELL? you’s down here then decide to not help her even when we said that was the stipulation she’d be going with you all. Selfish Princess. Selfish Princess. God that water is glittering so bright…
HAVING A BEER WITH FRIENDS, OLD, NEW, AND ALIKE
Something I once heard on facebook was a close friend admonishing the thought of some restaurant goer in a sushi-matic setting his video getter and leaving it on the conveyor belt to survey all of the other restaurant goers to the tune of folks making rude remarks and gossiping in the background? Such nasty things they said. Nasty, Nasty, Things. Someone was certainly being outed, while another chose to hide in broad daylight. We’re all fine now, since we haven’t gotten all together as ‘friends’ in quite a while. That was 2008. Transcript[Video: Rotating Gossipers] :Did you tell him? :Did you tell him? :Well, did you tell him? :I told nothing :I didn’t tell anything to no body :No body at all :No body at all? :Who said it first? :He did :He really? :He really did :How much money does she have in her purse? :How much do you? :What is in your purse? :My grandfather always said, ‘never look in a woman’s purse’ :Wait, was he speaking in metaphor? :He was talking about the transaction? :The transaction? :The transaction :The transaction of your customer to her :Purchases? :No, can’t be metaphoric :Or actually if it was a sin then he’s suggesting something along the lines of it being unnatural :Unnatural in the terms of who? :Alimentary manufacturers limited :Isn’t Herbert Hoover, Jr. the proprietor of that grand establishment? :Absolute, absolute :And what do you suppose is this conveyor belt here? :And you suppose we’d end up at a conveyor right here :Is that constitutional? :About as constitutional as Herbert’s new something over someone :Oh my god :Did you tell him?
Installation shot of Rotating Gossipers
WHAT IS TOURISM? WHAT IS VOYEURISM?
Middle schoolers will tell you that camera phones are in this season with colored cases to match your brand new Ked’s from Lady Footlocker. Middle schoolers will tell you their mom’s so cool cause she takes us out shopping in a place called Beverly Hills and like these hills are from so many shows but I like all the shops the shops are at a place called Row Deyo and its cool how it got its name like all the shops are in this row and you go and want to spend the
Installation shot
whole day yo ah oh my god when last time we went I saw Arnold Mother Fucking Schwartz a Fucking nagger and I got a shot out side this shop and he was coming with his lawyer or something they were buying a new ring my mom said is for his wife and why she needs to have him buy her a ring doesn’t make sense because they were already married then some guy took a picture all right up in my face and it was cool because I felt what it was like to be a Pop Poh Rot Zi
THE WALL OF NAKED ACQUAINTANCESDEARS OF ACCONCI
What do you do with a group of acquaintances with whom you all find yourselves spinning round and round within the same inane conversation topics? Call them your business partners. What do you do with a group of acquaintances with whom you all find yourselves naked and waiting in line for the one? Call them your sex partners.
Vito Acconci Model for Convertible Clam 1990
What do you do with a group of acquaintances with whom you all find yourselves standing in a room awkwardly holding wine silently figuring whom to talk with first? Call them your artistic selves. Acconci’s artistic selves divide him geographically, conceptually, intellectually, and convergent upon his contextual parlor games.
STEVENSON MISSES NEW YORK AND HE’S ALREADY BEEN BACK THERE
For a while now Stevenson has been missing New York, and grandma asks, “has he even left for California?” while the laundry lady listens with one ear turned to the telenovelas station and granny, disturbed, begins to incubate in her own effulgence. Sammy Sosa says, “Smooth paintings like finish fetish, bro.” Why do New Yorkers like to make fun of LA people with the cynical references to
Milton Stevenson Abstract Painting with Double Rainbow 2011
our stereotypical preferential backgrounds? Palm trees, come on…rainbows…come on… sunshine, come on, come on, come on come on… I’ll show you a map that reads “REFRIED CYNICISM” and how to get there. PROMISE TO VISIT SOMETHING THAT ISN”T A CRISSFORSAKEN PALM TREE FOR ONCE
THE MAP, THE IMAGES, THE ANECDOTES
There is a bit of anecdotal evidence laden in the map on the wall with the pictures. Most investigative viewers find this written on a flap: Once when I visited New York I neglected to have a bowel movement for near on seventy-two hours. Since landing at the airport, taxiing to Barnard, picking up a friend-love, catching dinner, meeting up with a member of punch-in-the-face fraternity, heading to Williamsburg, failing to speak to an audience about my gesture, drinking, eating arduously, meeting friends and roommates of colleagues, eating, eating caterpillars shipped from the Tibetan’s grassy shores on the edges of Chomolungma. caterpillars with parasites foaming out their skulls, becoming aphrodisiacal, sleeping in friend-love’s dorm room, wandering Columbia, canoodling,
Michael Haight Trip to New York, November 2011 2012
eating, MOMA visiting, identifying frozen fluids on the street, Central Park Wintering, Confusing myself with a wealthy widowing Earl of some winnowing Connecticut Country Club or a Bank Man’s son with his trophy-prize dame in his flatulent, flatulent eye, sleeping, sleeping arduously, arduously ardent love-making, sneaking away to shower, being pushed into the shower, loving showering-making, sleeping tentatively, eating tentatively, getting into the cab, escaping, arriving at the terminal before my flight all got in the way of all that was in there twice of what I should have had been listening to myself on the account of my body, I was unable to do such-and-such a thing as expel the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me, god.
WHY THE ANECDOTES?
Is each and every work an anecdote? Is each an antidote to missing what’s missing when you’re just visiting? Is a visiting experience something that lives on in a tangible labor? Do some works say less to the concept as the other artists expound in their works a geographically distinct style? Or is experience mainly the story that lives on the voices of those involved, and those who further—who share and whom shares further—the story from there? Yunhee Min’s work involving the boat trip and the car wash alludes to this anecdotal evidence as a valuable function of the experience. A pleasant boat ride is all we know while a friend is told the holistic anecdotal antidote to such a flaccid experience: It is video of her daily commute to an island in Canada where she taught at the time. One is unable to grasp the importance of the routine, the banality, the quotidian wandering mind that drifts off each day as the boat
Yunhee Min Aphonic Duet v.1 DVD
tells the time: day or night, work or play, pay or no pay. Visit often. Juxtaposed with a visit to a carwash and the references to a cultural shift displayed in a person as they move from one culture to another, the piece entitled Rotating Gossipers examines another cyclical interpretation of a tourists submerged entity amongst a carousel of mimicking faces. Anecdotes are the vehicles that carry believers back to the Mecca, the Shrine, the Auditorium, the Castle, the Cave, the Playhouse to engage in specific behavior, as an artist placates the muse and makes reliquary of the studio. ANECDOTES ARE THE MYTH SAY MAX ENRST-ESQUE READERS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES!
WHAT WAS AARON DOING WHEN ATTACHING ALL THOSE PIECES OF COLORED PAPER TO FOAM CORE AND THE WALL?
Wrinkle’s studio work is something some times granted to be sleek if you understand his directions of side-by-side informations granted for the intellectually weak. The colored slips of paper are the gallerys from new york who have been there done that in the L.A. scene. The Terge Nicolaisen The Nongestural Visapainting Enlargement work across from it eyes the paper suspiciously. The Terge Nicolaisen is the gesture of the one who isn’t involved because
Documentation of the original spaces
REJECTED. It is there on the wall. Read it. There is no need for a row boat to traverse the river and bridge the two. Aaron’s gesture is in his placement, his vestigial choosing of sorts while Terge, regardless, makes gestures. Sure, whereby the selections of colors are art historically specific and make a note of fandom, all resting smugly against the wall. [SHARITS EXPLODES]
Letter from Terje Nicolaisen to Aaron Wrinkle
ACCONCI’S WALL
Matt Zbrog Writes: Acconci’s work captures slices of one man at different times and locations. But grouped together they form a progression that is not unique to the artist alone. While there is a division or fragmentation running through and between his works, there’s also a unifying effect. See the bridge project, or the video where he asks us to come inside, or even Pull, where he attempts to bring a woman from the audience into the performance. Of particular note: anyone can play his ‘parlor games’, and many people intentionally or otherwise have. The blueprint nature of his gallery displayed work seems to encourage reenactment. And while the original event may be divided from repeat performances - geographically, temporally, intellectually, even somewhat conceptually - I think Acconci still finds or at least sought connection in this echo effect, and I know at the least that I and other artists have, too.
Installation shot of Vito Acconcia show
As for how this relates to the concept of self or selves - consider the first time you found a video game glitch or hard won puzzle solution, and, in so figuring, connected, consciously or not, with the fleeting consequential experience of thousands of other bedazzled selves across time and space who figured out the very same thing at some other point on the universe’s 4-D map but also arrived precisely where you did, at the top of the Mario flag pole, with a significant bonus.
Or something.
Acconci shows the experience is possible for the home audience—only be sure to closely follow the directions. Your dinner parties will never again be the same.
GAINAN LET’S MOVE THIS LAND
Artists Statement: A collapse of pathetic romanticism is evident through the documentation of varying performances in my work. Suggesting histories of epic longevity with cumbersome materials and uninhibited expressions, I am invested in articulating the properties of self-imposed commitment as well as unsolicited motivations. Furthermore, the lynchpin of my recent work has been to make the audience aware of the actions taken throughout my practice. Those actions are both suggested and literally demonstrated at times as a crucial performance articulating the constant negotiations of ubiquitous objects. As the studio was mentioned above as a reliquary to an artist’s practice, here Gainan stands to purport the implications of action as the reliquary rather than the physical space. His literal visitation of sites specific and actions in course destroy the notion that the studio is a necessary, ritual driven, inherent space. Life is the ubiquitous object of the totality of objects and the 2 + 2 that equals 5. To Gainan’s work a visitation is a serious noun of business-like sorts—he specifically uses the term ‘negotiations’ for Christ’s sake and that can be seen both figuratively, literally, an attempt to move, an attempt to persuade, an attempt to absolve. This in situ performance applies an organic variance of the self on the path of unsolicited motivations. He is a sadhu, a flinching of feeling. Visitation. Visiting: the romance of visiting. The distribution of self across multiple locations interacting in situ, creating in situ, traveling for the sake of creation and within the intent of art created on your presence/your behalf. Justin Gainan Let’s Move This Land, 2011
GAHL
What do visitors get from a New York if they are eating a California? What are Those Aquainted with MANHATTAN able to wonder if they happen to ponder over to their pied d’terre and sniff California all 2,798 miles from New York? YOU WOULD SMELL SO MANY VITRINES OF WHITNEY ART BEFORE CRASHING THROUGH IOWAS CITRINES OF HEFFERS AND SWEAT FROM THE UTAHANS PORNOS TIL TAHOES SPOUT OF FRESH KILLING GOUT GIVES YOU ANY HINT OF THE GEORGIA PEACH YOU MISSED ON YOUR WAY TO GET TO WHERE THE AIR IS VENICE THE AIR IS MIXT MARIJUANA MAGIC MIKE DICK SWEAT CANDY APPLE INK JET JHERI CURL LIP RENT COME UNGLUED [PETUNIA sniffs]
Ted Gahl Medium (Sails) 2011
Ted Gahl She 2011
We may have stories of sex, let-on friends, lovers, shapes of description like skin in the dark, and bull’s-eyes created by cocaine target practice. Who says Queens isn’t beautiful? Or the Bronx when it’s just hazing into springtime? Asking ‘Why can’t Jersey feel it?’ like Los Angeles wondering ‘Why can’t New York feel it?’. That’s why. Why because beige halls and the like look better in sandy country—‘What, oil?’—white marble, white marble. No wonder each has next week to filander the all black Demos-ware.
WHAT IS THE ELABORATION ON THIS PIECE?
Apparently the Min and Meagher collaboration is an illustration or “peek” into their relationship as curators in their project gallery Silvershed. This collaboration blah blahs the blah blah blah’s order of relegation inheriting the honor to integrate the artists’ practice into the Art Historical Canon vis-à-vis the Cirrus Archive. California’s Gold with Huell Howser is funded by a generous grant from the Ralph M. Parson Foundation. [HUELL Howser in leather toques Brooks Brothers cuffed khaki shorts with a Tommy Bahama blue and bamboo polo t-shirt and a wisp of the vole crew cut in-situ] How do you collaborate? [MIN demure] Arrhythmically [MEAHGER nonplussed] Wagered to please [HUELL] Well, golly [MIN and MEAHGER blink] [HUELL pointing with his rolex encrusted arm to the cactus-looking sculpture] Would you look at that? [MIN and MEAHGER blink one and a half times] [HUELL astonished with the spray painting on the walls] Look at that [MIN crosses arms while MEAHGER slouches] [HUELL hands on hips; to MIN] How structured is your collaborative process? [MIN sidelong glance to MEAHGER; MEAHGER scratches nose while answering] Its really just five steps [MIN repeats MEAHGER’S tone] Just five steps [HUELL resigning off camera to the SHARITS] Well, wouldja [SHARITS rumbles]
Patrick Meagher Eternal Spring 2006
Yunhee Min and Patrick Meagher Installation
NICOLAISEN IS A VISITOR FROM EUROPE
Hails from where? Nicolaisen’s Adventure into non-gestural painting is a gesture towards those City of L.A. paintings hanging on avenues made of paintings with a finish car-like—a fetish. Said of that reference coming from a person of the cold weather, midnight sun persuasion means it is no Papaya Dog, that’s why. Nicolaisen’s proposal was not correctly executed by gallery staff. As noted in the proposal. Nicolaisen asks that one color be used twice: there isn’t a color used twice. We visitors often lose belongings when traveling. The communication between point A and point B, the company held in responsibility of logistics, the tension one rides while expecting
Terje Nicolaisen The Nongestural Visapainting Enlargement 2012
all to be there when finished at the point of arrival—these vis-à-vis Nicolaisen’s lost color, are the comrades in arms as the fate of our luggage intensifies our attempt at survival. The visitor, at the behest of the city, is transmogrified without a care, like the wrath of nature cleaning shop during hurricane season. Floridian’s and their humid soaps of flop. We do not know, we cannot care. It isn’t our belongings leaving impaired, unknown, FULL STOP.
Opposite page: Terje Nicolaisen’s proposal for The Visitation
DAVID HOCKNEY’S DOCUMENTATION OF CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD AND DON BACHARDY FROM 1976
Christopher Isherwood peeks from under those leafy eyebrows and wonders why aren’t the figures on the painting across from him all just boys. Barchardy wonders who did it better, Hockney, or him?
David Hockney Christopher Isherwood And Don Bachardy 1976
Michael Haight Hongdae at Dawn (Nostalgia #2) 2012
PAUL SHARITS BUFFALO IV
I’m NOT T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, THIS unless you want me to pee.
Paul Sharits Buffalo IV 1977
MILTON STEVENSON’S ABSTRACT PAINTINGS
Milton Stevenson’s abstract paintings live on a beach that is called a shore near a clapboard inspired by the bayside where driftwood naturally occurs in dusk orange and moonbay chartreuse and seabay azure with other paintings backdropped upon mauve-grey-velour stasis velour stasis backdropped upon those shades people put below skylights and the shadows cast by latte-colored streams of filtered light and everyone just gardarned smelled of mustard all while the pall malls belltowered who’s her fritz the whole time geezer’s playing dominoes
Milton Stevenson Abstract Painting (#003) 2011
only one starched shirt less than joan of ark’s covenant lost then redrawn by scotch taped sea dream men of photographic knowledge and arch-dukes of synergy all betwixt the Danish oxcart from two plus two equals ten advisory committee between you and me fred ethel thinks one of ems a spy and that you and me bout to find out whether or not then fix em. All ok fred.
CRAIG KAUFFMAN’S WORK SITS SILENTLY.
Craig Kauffman’s work sits silently along a daydream bed behind a cabinet floor to ceiling with cans of fresh-baked bread sommelier-distilled bat-formed incredulity defacer insecurity maker of sky mall coffee dispensers posing as coffee makers. This adds up, they tell you, to the immense defaming royalty of none other than no one who uses said work in their own “work.” [Craig KAUFFMAN shouting] You knew that they’d do it to me! You knew! [ASSISTANT of gallery owner or curator’s assistant] We’ll speak to the curator at once! Honest we will! [KAUFFMAN persistent] He said he’d put me there! Over there! No! Not here! There! There! [ASSISTANT] Take a breath Mr. Kauffman. It’s fine. This wall, [pats wall] this wall is fine if only for a visit. [SHARITS Explodes]
Craig Kauffman Untitled 001 1976
Cirrus Editions Ltd. 2015