Fabrik - Issue 40

Jess

Untitled (with Pooh Figure), 1953, Collage, 18 x 23 inches, Courtesy of the Jess Collins Trust

Lawrence Jordan January 5–February 2

J. John Priola February 7–March 9

Jess March 14–April 20

Anglim Gilbert Gallery 1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 Gallery Hours: Tues–Sat, 11–6 (415) 433-2710 | www.anglimgilbertgallery.com

Contemporary Art

FEATURES 16 Tristan Duke (Part I):

The Magus in his Youth

By Lawrence Weschler

34 Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451:

A Cautionary Tale

By Richard Speer

48 Para Art and the Center

for Land Use Interpretation

By David Pagel

64 Inside Outside

By Margaret Hawkins

78 #NatureToo

By Constance Mallinson

92 REVIEWS From Los Angeles, Irvine, Encinitas, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Tucson, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Denver, Boulder, Houston, Dallas and Chicago

Contributors Margaret Hawkins has authored three novels and a memoir. Prior to her career as an author, she wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times for 20 years. Hawkins currently teaches arts journalism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Portions of her article, “Inside Outside” were researched during a SAIC residency in Krems, Austria.

Constance Mallinson is a Los Angeles based painter, writer and curator. Her work is represented in many public and private collections and her writing has appeared in numerous publications such as Art in America, Xtra, The Times Quotidian and Artillery. She will be included in an upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in 2019.

David Pagel is an art critic who writes for the Los Angeles Times. A professor of art theory and history at Claremont Graduate University, Pagel also serves as an adjunct curator at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY. He recently published “Talking Beauty: A Conversation Between Joseph Raffael and David Pagel about Art, Love, Death, and Creativity” (Zero+).

Richard Speer is an author, critic and curator based in Portland, Oregon. His essays and reviews have appeared in ARTnews, Visual Art Source, Art Ltd., Artpulse, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and Salon. His forthcoming monograph on abstract expressionist Sam Francis will be published in 2020 by Scheidegger & Spiess.

Lawrence Weschler (New York based, though LA born and steeped) is the author of 20 books, including Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (on Robert Irwin), True to Life (on David Hockney), Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders (on the Museum of Jurassic Technology) and coming this summer, a memoir of Oliver Sacks. For more, visit: www.lawrenceweschler.com 6 FABRIK

Jonathan Parker, SC #92, 2018, acrylic on canvas, sewn, 14” x 11”

jack fischer gallery 311 potrero avenue san francisco, ca, 94103

1275 minnesota street san francisco, ca, 94107

www.jackfischergallery.com 415-522-1178

Contemporary Art

Founder & Publisher Chris Davies Co-Publisher Bill Lasarow Executive Editor Megan Abrahams Managing Editor Molly Enholm Associate Editor, Features Marlena Doktorczyk-Donohue Associate Editor, Reviews Peter Frank Creative Director Chris Davies Art Direction and Design Chris Davies and Paul Soady Proofreader Debra Wacks Contact Editorial: editorial@fabrikmedia.com Advertising: advertise@fabrikmedia.com Web: fabrikmagazine.com Mailing Address 269 S. Beverly Drive, #1234 Beverly Hills, CA 90212 Subscriptions Subscriptions are available at fabrikmagazine.com Single Issue: $25 (Domestic); $35 (International) Annual Subscription: $60 (Domestic); $90 (International) Information Fabrik Magazine is published three times a year by Fabrik Media, Inc., 269 S. Beverly Drive, Suite 1234, Beverly Hills, CA 90212. Contents may not be reproduced in part or in full without the written permission of the copyright holder.

The opinions expressed are those of the artists and writers themselves and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Fabrik Magazine or Fabrik Media, Inc. Copyright © 2019.

All rights reserved.

Contributing Writers J.D. Beltran Quinton Bemiller DeWitt Cheng Shana Nys Dambrot Robin Dluzen Molly Enholm T.S. Flock Peter Frank Suvan Geer Lawrence Gipe Liz Goldner Michelle Grabner Jonathan Griffin Matthew Kangas Amanda Malloy Michael Paglia Hearne Pardee Caroline Picard Maria Porges Wesley Pulkka Deborah Ross Raphael Rubinstein Michael Shaw Richard Speer Matt Sussman Donna Tennant Lynne Trimble Lisa Wainwright Jeanne Willette John Zotos Cover

Tristan Duke Hair Chair, 2005 (See page 14)

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Printed in Los Angeles.

CONTEMPORARY ART ISSUE 40

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mokha laget Spatial Chromatics

January 5–February 16, 2019

HipHop, 2017; acrylic, pigment and flashe on canvas, 65 × 40 inches

meridel rubenstein Eden in Iraq

February 23–April 6, 2019

Dawn and Dusk #1, 2017; archival pigment on aluminum, 21 ½ × 27 inches

Brian Gross Fine Art

248 Utah Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 (415) 788-1050 www.briangrossfineart.com

Welcome to the New Fabrik!

With this issue, we catapult ourselves, and you, into new territory, in both a literal and metaphorical sense. Literally, although still Los Angeles-based, we’ve expanded our coverage beyond Southern California to include the major art centers of the western United States. Metaphorically speaking, as part of the natural evolution of the magazine, and in response to the prevailing socio-political-environmental-cultural issues of our times, we’ve made a concerted decision to address some of the bigger questions about the meaning of art and its current role in the human condition.

In terms of our expanded geographic and philosophical purview, this new direction represents a significant and—we think—exciting shift. You will notice the magazine has many more pages. These are filled with substantive commentary on, and critical analysis of, contemporary art. This issue presents 30 reviews of recent and current exhibitions at galleries and museums from the West Coast to Chicago, and from as far north as Seattle to Houston in the south.

Also inside are five feature articles by renowned writers and artists who take an in-depth look at some intriguing and timely topics: Lawrence Weschler profiles artist / inventor Tristan Duke, whose work is featured in the current Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition, 3D: Double Vision; David Pagel explores the phenomenon of “para art,” taking us inside the Center for Land Use Interpretation; Margaret Hawkins introduces us to innovative programs that provide resources for artists with mental disabilities; Richard Speer considers François Truffaut’s 1966 film, “Fahrenheit 451,” as “a prescient documentary of our times;” and Constance Mallinson takes an art-historical stance on how artists interpret and portray the natural environment.

We invite you to be transported!

Megan Abrahams Executive Editor 10 F A B R I K

Janna Watson, Moody As Light, mixed media on panel, 48 X 36 inches

FOSTER/WHITE GALLERY 220 THIRD AVENUE SOUTH, SEATTLE, WA 98104 SEATTLE@FOSTERWHITE.COM WWW.FOSTERWHITE.COM 206.622.2833

Publishers Note After ten years of publication, Fabrik Magazine is entering a new and exciting phase. It has been our privilege since the beginning of the 2017-18 season to meet with and discuss this new iteration of Fabrik with many of the top galleries throughout the Western United States. A great number have joined with us to address what may be the central issue facing the art world today: Is art primarily a vehicle for aesthetic and intellectual discourse, and cultural and personal evolution? Or is it the ultimate luxury good, its development driven by market forces and shaped by analytics?

Fabrik’s publishers, editors and writers have elected to seek out great stories well told. As long as we find those stories (of which there is no shortage) — centered as they are on creative ideas, cultural resonance and contemplation of the possible — we are determined to share them. We reject a narrative of gratifying the connection between art and commerce or furthering a conversation revolving around auction prices, art fair sales and hipster trends. Fabrik’s conviction is that we benefit the art world — and culture at large — by presenting an art-centric discourse in the format of a magazine that is both printed and digital.

It is significant that Fabrik has attracted the whole-hearted endorsement of the numerous gallery and museum partners who have already joined with us in this mission. Perhaps the most frequent comment we heard during this past year was: “This is something we very much need at this time.” Galleries tell us that visitors and collectors are too often poised to discuss matters such as “return on investment” and “asset value.” That orientation risks overlooking art’s centuries-old, profound role of inquiring into great ideas, the nature of beauty and investigating what and who we are.

These are among the very themes that Fabrik is driven to explore. It is time for this course correction in the art world.

Ultimately, the verdict lies with you, our readers. Inside these pages, you will find stories and ideas that serve as a lens into the meaning and experience of our best artists and thinkers, and the creative processes they embody. We’re confident you will love the engagement and will want to stick with us issue after issue.

Chris Davies Bill Lasarow 12 F A B R I K

Jun Kaneko, Untitled (Dango), 2018 glazed ceramics, 88.25 x 28.5 x 18”

KANEKO

110 UNION STREET SUITE #200 SEATTLE, WA 98101 TRAVERGALLERY.COM

Lawrence Weschler Tristan Duke. Diorama Boxes, 2004-2008 Wooden boxes with viewing lenses and miniature dioramas inside, 8 x 5.5 x 4.5 inches All photos courtesy of Tristan Duke.

TRISTAN DUKE ( PART I ): THE MAGUS IN HIS YOUTH

You may have first encountered some of the gob-smackingly prestidigitaceous marvels of the young LA magus Tristan Duke at LACMA’s current 3D Double Vision show (those astonishing rotating aluminum platters off to the side in the first room after the entrance, where, thanks to the scratches he’s somehow hand-etched into the platters, sequential Platonic solids seem to hover, ghostly translucent, pirouetting in midair above the turntables). Or by way of the recent Disneyreleased vinyl LPs of the music to “Star Wars” (above which wraithlike simulacra of the Death Star and the Millennium Falcon likewise seem to gyre). Or maybe it was by way of those mind-boggling in-folding and exfoliating handheld notched wooden contraptions (cubes transmogrifying into dodecahedrons in the flick of the wrist, for godssake). Or by way of several of his secret optical-trapdoor contributions at Culver City’s endlessly confounding Museum of Jurassic Technology.

Or as in my case, it might have been by way of the Liminal Camera, the shippingcontainer-sized pinhole-camera-obscura mounted atop a flatbed truck which he and his artistic collaborators in the Optics Division of downtown LA’s Metabolic Studio have been dragging all around the country, documenting scenes of ecological devastation on walllength sheets of photographic paper (and not infrequently developing the results in the very toxic muds left over, as in the Owens Valley, by all that blight).

Whatever the occasion, and even if you had not yet heard his name, you too might have found yourself wondering, as I certainly did, WTF, WTH is this guy!?

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Tristan Duke Icosahedron (intersecting plate), 2014 Hand drawn hologram on metal plate with rotating turntable, 10 x 10 inches.

Photography by Joshua White/ JWPictures.com

Tristan Duke, Composite image of the artist’s ad-hoc laser holography lab in the Museum of Jurassic Technology’s bathroom, 2010.

Courtesy of the artist.

So it turns out, as I recently discovered on a visit to his tiny private studio squirreled away in a cubbyhole workspace in the bowels of the Jurassic, that Tristan Duke — he prefers that I refer to him as simply Tristan — is a joshingly boyish (open-faced, close cropped yet still unkempt brown beard) 37- year-old gentleman, given to long-sleeved pearl-buttoned cowboy shirts and black Dickies workpants which might well put you in mind of Woody from the “Toy Story” series, or maybe it’s just the gleaming aw-shucks conviviality the two seem to share.

Tristan was born (1981) and raised in the college town of Urbana Champaign, Illinois, “an island in the cornfields,” as he likes to say. His parents landed there in headlong flight from their shared stereotypical suburban upbringings in Park Forest, Illinois (the site as it happens of the dismal 1950s sociological study, The Organization Man). Though even back there his family had its curlicue aspects. His mother’s father, for example, was a seemingly conventional “Mad Men” type, though on the wacky side of the spectrum, being one of the advertising illustrators who worked on such seminal icons of the era as Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops and Frosted Flakes’ Tony the Tiger.

Tristan’s mother’s brother fled home for the circus (not entirely to their parents’ distress), eventually befriending Roger Brown and other stalwarts of Chicago’s Hairy Who art scene, then becoming a noted trompe l’oeil painter. Tristan’s mother — herself something of a proto-Buddhist — became a specialist in Chinese art and presently came to constitute the entirety of the Education Department of the Krannert Art Museum on the campus of the University of Illinois there in Urbana. Tristan’s highly educated father got an MA in ceramics, but really wanted to be a painter, albeit an intensely private one, with a hermetic visual language and highly ambivalent attitudes toward the art market (he never had gallery representation and made his living as a handyman/carpenter/contractor).

Tristan’s own upbringing was enveloped in something of a Bohemian vibe; his parents were so poor that for a while early on they took up residence in the university’s Japan House where they were both studying the Japanese Tea Ceremony (“So my own first steps,” notes Tristan, “literally came across tatami mats”). In later years the family would move from one time-worn, hundred-year-old house to the next, his father fixing them up, selling them, and everyone moving on. A family friend and neighbor turned out to be Chungliang Al Huang, the storied close advisor to both Alan Watts and Joseph Campbell; another of his mother’s friends was Cecilia Vicuña, the eminent Pinochet-era Chilean émigré poet and performance artist. Hardly a conventional upbringing.

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Tristan Duke Hologram Box, 2012 Laser hologram in folding display box, 3.5 x 7.5 x 4 inches.

Photography by Tristan Duke

Yet for all of that, Tristan’s childhood was also steeped in standard heartland American tropes: a large tribe of cousins living close at hand, diving into each other’s houses and running around in nature. “Our parents just turned us loose, we’d be riding our bikes into the cornfields, building forts, catching turtles, and the like—we and our friends pretty much had the run of the town.”

Though Tristan proved a consistently above average student and enjoyed science (particularly those classes that allowed him to indulge his Rube Goldberg side) and math classes (the latter that is, until geometry gave way to algebra —“For me, I had to see it, or even better build it or draw it, to understand it”). If truth be told, he hated school in Urbana, from beginning to end (“Why,” he’d demand, “do I have to keep wasting my time on all this crap?”), and from day one seemed to resist its social striations and demands. All the way back in preschool he’d staged a semester-long war with a teacher who had his charges draw, then would transcribe their dictated explanations of what they had made at the bottom of the drawings.

“Tristan does not have anything to say about this drawing” was the caption beneath every single one of his.

What he did love from the very start, though, was drawing. His spiral notebooks became festooned over with doodles and diagrams, often at the expense of almost anything else. He’d spend hours at home, in the company of friends, scrawling away across big sheets of paper. He also became obsessed with glue guns; his father brought home randomly shaped pieces of scrapwood from his jobs that Tristan would contrive into ever more elaborate structures. Despite this relentless drive to express his visions, Tristan did not much like art classes. He hoovered up techniques — perspective, Photoshop and the like — but rejected all the intellectual snobbery and the hierarchy of teacher’s acolytes, actively resisting being drafted into the clique of “art stars” as the teacher dubbed them.

There were about 300 students in Tristan’s Urbana High graduating class, though he was not one of them. The year before, administrators noticed he’d simply stopped attending school – he would do the homework, pass the tests, but was never there. So they expelled him into a special school for gang members and drop outs, where he endured a fairly harrowing semester (though they did let him read whatever he wanted, and he read everything: Salinger, Baldwin, Snyder and Trungpa). He went on to the local community

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college to finish his last semester’s units, and received a full scholarship to the University of Illinois, only to drop out after one week; college, it seemed, was just not going to be his thing.

“Had I grown up with any other family,” Tristan once told me, “I’d likely have become a scientist — given the kinds of things I was drawn to — though with the family I had, I was pretty much stamped from the start.”

Stamped, that is, to take the other road. So he dropped out of college and spent the next several years bumping about in Urbana, “working in coffee houses, hanging around with the other fuck-ups, trying to figure stuff out.”

What stuff? “Well, life and things.” Things, especially: he’d wake up in the middle of the night, his mind aflame with ideas, with contraptions he just had to try out — his “insomnia machines,” as his mother took to characterizing them. For example, he “borrowed” one of his father’s yardsticks, the kind that used to come with a veritable farmer’s almanac of tables on the back side (the number of ounces in a pound and pounds in a ton, centimeters in an inch, inches in a foot, yards in a kilometer, acres in a hectare, the speed of a horse, a car, electricity…light). Tristan proceeded to slice, facet and hinge the yardstick into a stack of roughly 2-centimeter-square-stubs for which he contrived a series of overlapping, folding, connecting joints such that the resultant approximately wallet-sized, pristinely engineered gadget – his Non-Euclidean Ruler, as he’d taken to calling it – could turn and flip in his hand, displaying one select info segment followed by the next, over and over, opening wide and closing shut, in a deft eternal rotation. “And see,” he now pointed out, as he showed it to me, “here comes the table with the hectares and then here”— turn, turn, turn —“the one with the speed of light: all the sorts of figures you might one day find yourself needing out there on the farm.” Artful, elegant, and downright mesmerizing.

Not that he didn’t remain deeply ambivalent about art, or at any rate about the art world: he was after all his father’s son, deeply torn about monetizing his creations, or subjecting them to the typical art gallery horse races and betting salons. If anything, he wanted to fend off all such commercial considerations and simply focus purely on the give and play of creative, insomniac inquiry, always willing to jerry-rig other ways of making a living.

After his parents divorced, his mother moved out to Los Angeles to head up the education department at the Hammer. Which is, in turn, what brought him to LA a few years later, in 2002, and into an auditorium at

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Tristan Duke, Hair Chair, 2005. Photomicrograph of microminiature chair made from single strands of human hair and glue. Courtesy of the artist.

UCLA where David Wilson happened to be lecturing on the history of the micro-miniature.

David Wilson was the founder of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and if you don’t know about that diminutive giant of a fellow and the tiny epic museum that he and his cohort have been conjuring into existence off Venice Boulevard in Culver City, you should drop everything and head over there right now, or at least take a moment to look them up.

While the audience that evening in the UCLA auditorium was becoming ever more confounded and confused by the little man’s peroration, as it somehow tumbled straight through an initially straightforward survey of masters of micro-miniature calligraphy, painting and sculpture, on into the marvels of Soviet rocketry set against swelling chords of Purcell’s the “Aria of the Cold Genius,” from his King Arthur opera, and moving well beyond that—for Wilson’s flights of fancy not infrequently entail a certain amount of, shall we say, slippage—Tristan for his own part was growing ever more thoroughly engrossed and entrammeled.

F A B R I K 25

For one thing, Wilson was summoning forth long suspended (suppressed?) memories of a time, ten years earlier, when Tristan’s mother had invited a micro-carver named Chen Zhongsen over from Fuzhou in Southern China for a special showing of his drop-jaw astonishing achievements. These included poems calligraphed across a single strand of hair and long sequences of ornate Chinese ideograms etched onto a single grain of rice, all culminating in a live demonstration where the master proceeded to cover over a miniscule, certifiably blank pebble with all manner of microscopic carved inscriptions, deploying no magnifying equipment whatsoever and, for that matter, doing so with his eyes closed!

Inspired by the UCLA talk, Tristan resolved to visit with Wilson at his museum the very next day and was completely bowled over. Here was an artist who had somehow cracked the mystery of how to stay true to one’s art and vocation while steering clear of the perversities of market pressures.

Well clear at that – and to this very day (no one can figure out how he keeps the place running.) Wandering through the museum’s labyrinthine halls, with their myriad trapdoor mysteries, Tristan grew increasingly impressed by the democratic quality of Wilson’s sly deceptions, the way he was constantly playing with his guest’s perceptions and yet letting them see how he was doing so. For example, in the space given over to Athanasius Kircher, the way Wilson and his team were regularly deploying Pepper’s Ghosts to sublimely haunting effects.

Tristan and Wilson subsequently convened in the still-under-construction tearoom upstairs and spoke for hours: a regular mind meld. At one point Tristan pulled out his “Non-Euclidean Ruler,” and began putting it through its paces (suddenly, he noticed, as if for the first time, how in one of its rotations, the name of the owner of the yardstick’s sponsoring lumberyard surfaced in big letters, DAVID W) . . . it was just one of those kinds of meetings, everything just seeming meant to be, culminating with Tristan’s plea to Wilson, “What can I do? Just tell me what you need, I’ll do anything.” Which is how Tristan came to fashion, for starters, the mold, featuring the Museum’s primordial totemic visage, “Mr. J,” for eventual use in a run of chocolate bars — yes, chocolate bars — for the museum shop. As the years passed and Tristan started traveling back and forth between Urbana and LA, he took to designing other magnificent, quirky objects for the Museum Shop and for that matter becoming sporadically involved in installations within the museum itself.

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Back in Urbana, though, the lure of the miniature began to take hold.

Tristan would wake up in the middle of the night, possessed by visions. In his spare hours, he began crafting miniature scenes, meticulous dioramas not much bigger than the final joint in your pinkie. “I was making these things because I simply had to,” Tristan recalled, “their manufacture infused with all the angst and pressure of that time in a person’s life, with all the urgency of my trying to make sense of the world.” Tiny foreshortened hallways, teeny room-scapes (another of the advantages of this sort of work being that it didn’t require much by way of studio space, as he really didn’t have any). In one instance, he inserted a Pepper’s Ghost of his girlfriend at the time in a long red ball gown, hovering translucent in the middle distance of a tapering hallway; in another he contrived the effect of a television hidden behind an intervening wall, its flickering light playing upon an abandoned chair visible through an open doorway. How had he done that? By taking the surprise audio mechanism from a cat food box which sang “Meow, meow” and rewiring the thing’s circuitry so that instead it sent staccato electrical pulses to a tiny LED bulb hidden off to the side of the pinkie-nub sized room.

One challenge, however, became how to display the results. A building across from the coffee house where he was working got condemned and wandering its emptied halls, Tristan began extracting the peephole eyepieces from out of the doomed apartment entry doors. Back home, at his midnight desk, he would fashion exquisite blond wood boxes, slotting in his carved miniature dioramas, meticulously adjusting the lighting effects, closing up the box and then inserting the peephole scopes with their fish-eye lenses that, enforcing spooky depths of field, rendered the objects simply magical. As the work evolved, the boxes somehow began to resemble baby birds, their boxy bodies atop elegantly curved, intricate brass legs, with the beaks formed by those re-purposed door peep-scopes now seeming to tilt up expectantly, invitingly, toward any passing viewer (“Feed me!” Feed me with your attention.)

“I used to love watching visitors as they’d lean down to peer in,” Tristan said. “Eventually, in 2005, I mounted a little show of the pieces at the Angel’s Gate Cultural Center down in San Pedro. Because of the nature of the lenses, the experience had to be essentially private: only one person at a time. And it wasn’t necessarily entirely clear what you were gazing at — there was a dreaminess to the effect, and people’s responses were often deeply subjective, projecting as much into the scene as they were drawing out from it.

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Tristan Duke Diorama Box 2, 2004 Mixed media and mirrored projection (pepper’s ghost).

Courtesy of the artist.

“For me, meanwhile, across those endless nights of making things, I came to realize that my primary interest was becoming perception itself: the optics, the lenses, the focal lengths — all pointed to something deeper.

I was becoming fascinated by the way perception feeds into the experience of meaning. The way the Alchemists of old used to conceive of the camera obscura as a model of the mind itself; I was captivated by the marvel of how we come to experience anything at all across that thin membrane — mind — that perhaps is only just seemingly separating self and world.”

And it was thus that Tristan now determined that he wanted to pursue a more advanced education after all. It came down to a choice between CalArts, with its exceptionally well endowed, elite interdisciplinary arts focus, or the Naropa University, a conspicuously less well endowed liberal arts college founded in 1974 in Boulder, Colorado, when the Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa invited Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, John Cage and other similarly minded beat and avant-garde types to help innovate new ecumenical (though Buddhist centered) ways of teaching and knowing. In the end, Tristan chose Naropa, because it offered a wider and more eclectic way, he felt, of pursuing questions of perception and meaning — besides he had never wanted to be simply an artist.

At Naropa (from 2005 through 2010), he began by tapping back into his family roots, and indeed his own primordial memories, launching into an extended study of chanoyu — the way of the Japanese tea ceremony.

In keeping with his more recent concerns, Tristan focused on the phenomenological aspects of chanoyu, including, and perhaps surprisingly for such a visual soul as his, its experience as a soundscape. These studies culminated in an exquisitely modulated short essay on “The Acoustics of Tea,” which started out by citing a poem by Sen Sotan, a 17th-century grand tea master (“If asked the nature of chanoyu / say it’s the sound / of windblown pines / in a painting”), concluding four delicately observed (or should one say “heard”?) pages later, with Tristan’s observation: “The acoustic landscape of tea is beautiful and subtle, offering a complex interplay between silence and non-silence, intention and non-intention. The silence of tea is a pregnant one, from which laughter is liable to burst at any moment. It is the silence between the heartbeats. Here in the tearoom we may happen to hear the sound of one hand clapping.”

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Such attention to attentiveness spread over to another early focus of Tristan’s time at Naropa as he now followed his miniature diorama passion clean over into the micro-miniature. Once again studying the processes of his childhood hero, the master Chen Zhongsen, as well as engaging several other micro-miniature practitioners, contemporary and ancient, Tristan began to recognize in the micro miniature passion another form of contemplative practice.

A long paper he subsequently compiled on this body of research culminated with an account of his own first attempt at a micro-miniature sculpture (ridiculously gross and crude though it was going to be when compared to the work of the masters he had been surveying, but still): a chair he hoped to fashion out of strands of hair from one of his tea ceremony teachers, using no magnification and limiting himself to only a needle and a razor. It took him three attempts, each representing hours upon hours of focused concentration. The first time, just as he was turning to the attachment of the final leg of the chair (an exceptionally delicate moment in the process), a slight flicker of frustration flashed across his mind, instantaneously transmitting itself to the tips of his fingers. Though his hands shuddered barely a 32nd of an inch, he figures, the sculpture looked like it had been run over by a truck.

The next day he started afresh, this time keeping his attention completely focused, pausing to regain his composure between each operation, succeeding at great length in affixing that final chair leg, at which point he let out a deep sigh of satisfaction, blowing the entire work clean away in the hurricane of his outbreath. The next day, a third attempt, steady, steady, steady, and only after he’d safely stowed the completed chair under an upturned teacup did he let out a full exhalation. At which point he felt the sudden desire to be out and about, under the bright sun and the vast Colorado sky, jogging up a winding mountain road. “Breathing deeply,” he concluded, “my arms swinging freely, and with my heart pounding, I was suddenly struck by an expansiveness unlike anything I had ever experienced. I felt so tiny, and yet gigantic all at the same time. As my feet pounded against the mountain path, I was repeating the mantra, ‘I am the point of a very fine needle.’”

Coming in Fabrik, “Tristan Duke (Part II): The Magus in His Prime”

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Richard Speer

Fahrenheit 451, Year 1966, Director François Truffaut.

Courtesy of Photo 12 / Alamy Stock Photo

Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451: A CAUTIONARY TALE

Jeff Koons. Gazing Ball (Ariadne), 2013 (Detail view) On view at the Centre Pompidou Photograph by Dious (2015)

There is a scene toward the beginning of François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 that isn’t in the Ray Bradbury novel from which the film was adapted.

After a busy day of burning books, the story’s protagonist, “fireman” Guy Montag, is riding home on a suspended monorail. Although he does not appear to notice, fellow passengers are engaged in conspicuous spectacles of self-obsession. A flaxen-haired girl kisses her reflection in the tram’s window, a young man languorously massages his own shoulders, and a woman nuzzles her fur collar, eyes closed in delectation. No one is conversing; the absorption with self is complete. This appears as avant-garde filmic collage at its most obvious, but the random images are rife with meaning — and prognosticating power.

No one on the monorail is reading a book or newspaper; the government has forbidden them. Books — their paragraphs, sentences, and most elementally, their words — have lost currency. Without words as a bridge to other people’s ideas and contexts, to the world outside themselves, these voluptuary self-smoochers and fur-fondlers have lost the faculty of empathy.

Unable to acknowledge or feel a world beyond the self, Truffault’s urbanites are rendered infantilized, unindividuated, and — most relevant here — wholly subject to the state.

Watching Truffaut and co-screenwriter Jean-Louis Richard’s 1966 take on Bradbury’s 1951 classic today, does not feel like a nostalgic look back, but a prescient documentary of our times, with one essential caveat. While 36 F A B R I K

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books have not been literally outlawed today, words and the depth of thought to which they give permission are increasingly marginalized, ever under siege; not by the state directly, but by a stealth, relentless loss of complex language, and a move to increasingly and exclusively imagistic forms of experience and human connection.

The trajectory is not exclusively technological, but as Truffaut noticed before most of us did, technology certainly colludes. The units of ideological discourse and, more importantly, creative output, have been historically contracting — from epic poem to stage play, from novel to novella, to short story, on to Cliff’s Notes and the Wiki summary. The tradition of political oratory descends into the presidential tweet storm; corporate culture and mass media pare our collective experience into ever-shorter, dumbed-down sound-and-scene bites: KFC, the HuffPost, a gourmet is now a “foodie.” The written letter has ceded to the email, the email to the text message, the text message to childish acronyms such as LOL, ending at the wholly wordless emoticon, quintessential nadir of our devolution from the language of Shakespeare to a menu of iPhone pictographs that Apple prescribes, and we accept. These, then, are the prominent signifiers and boundaries of that most subtle of events: human consciousness. Imagine a world where a brown thumbs-up comes slowly to stand in for/address the profound complexities of race. Truffaut did.

Word-challenged, me-engaged, we have become a disinterested populace, immersed in our screens, our selfs, our self-ies. This is by now a tired yarn, but what we fail to notice when we either ignore or lament the loss of the word, is that such a condition leaves a citizenry politically disengaged, primed for dictatorship. Bradbury’s version showed us a society of bookless lemmings in a totalitarian state, but Truffaut showed us totalitarianism’s less obvious precursor — the narcissism that arises when words are devalued and empathy atrophies. If ever there were a time to revisit Truffaut’s film and attend to its message, it is now.

From the very beginning of Fahrenheit 451, Truffaut zeros in on the repercussions of devaluing the written word. He begins the film not with traditional printed credits but with an unseen narrator announcing the names of actors and crew as the camera zooms in on images of television antennas.

The message is clear: Words are expendable in the mass-media paradigm.

In an early scene, Guy Montag, lying in bed with his vacuous wife, Linda, is reading a newspaper, except there is no news in it, only comics – quick-read 38 F A B R I K

caricatures with no words, no dialogue, not even so much as a thought bubble. When words vanish, Truffaut implies, thoughts too become less relevant.

The center of Montag and Linda’s home is their “wall unit,” a flatscreen television that plays shallowly consumerist images of women dispensing beauty tips and getting facials, as well as proto-reality TV programs narrated by an anodyne hostess – recall this is a full 50 years ago when TVs were still cutting edge. Occasionally, the players turn and appear to ask Linda questions, giving her the illusion of interactivity. Between programming that stages these stand-ins for connection, the wall unit displays non-stop kaleidoscopic patterns, pretty colors going around in pretty patterns, then going around some more. Nearly everyone, Linda included, is hooked on mood-altering pharmaceuticals, which further dull the mind, discouraging genuine reflection and any engaged political agency that such reflection might arouse.

Without recourse to written notation, school children learn mathematics, not by scribbling out equations, but by reciting sing-songy formulas applied to nothing real in the world. Knowledge has become the province not of the analytic but of the repeated and the rote. Prescient?

Truffaut wanted the film’s soundtrack to underscore the eventual impact of all this: infantilization. His brilliant pick for composer, Bernard Herrmann, deployed a battery of glockenspiels, marimbas and xylophones to highlight the juvenile mentality of a bookless, thought-thin world. In Herrmann’s orchestrations, these clunky percussions bang away in sinisterly mindless cadences, telegraphing a society that is part kindergarten, part concentration camp. In this sensation-centered, concept-phobic society, no one remembers dates or events, because no one writes in diaries or sends cards to mark important occasions. Linda can’t remember where or when she and Montag met; Montag can’t remember how long he’s worked on the book-burning force. When Linda buys Montag an old-fashioned straight razor to replace his electric one, she erroneously tells him, “It’s the very latest thing. Everyone’s using them now. Can I throw your old one away?” With no words, there is no history, there is no memory, and we do not know what is new or what the same is.

The image in front of us — the prevailing screen — meters the only sense of time. All sense of what has come before, any conception of cause and effect have evaporated. This, Truffaut suggests, is what happens in the absence of written history: personal memories fade, followed by cultural memory. Unrecorded, lessons of the past go unheeded, police brutality goes F A B R I K 39

Random International, Rain Room.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo by Megan Abrahams (2016).

undocumented, genocides come and go and political accountability ceases.

As the opiated masses gaze at pretty patterns on screens, governments wage internal and external wars no one reacts to or questions.

The parallels to our current era are chilling and manifold. Whatever side of the blue-red image battles you find yourself on, no one can deny that our president is an empathy-challenged former reality-TV star whose speech patterns are repetitive and whose syntax is a mash-up of grade-school taunts and mind-numbing doublespeak. His preferred mode of — unilateral — communication is the 280-character tweet. It is notable that Trump, a personification of our word-phobic age, reportedly reads neither fiction nor nonfiction but prefers pre-prepped briefings short on words, heavy on pictures. Predictably, we have witnessed state sanctioned unremitting attacks on our free press, the historical word-armed watchdogs of democracy.

Like the denizens of Fahrenheit 451, we have been de-worded, dumbed down and infantilized. Like them, we have bought into the illusion that our self-preoccupation equals self-actualization and self-sufficiency. In fact, we are more dependent than we have ever been. The film’s habitués depend on the state; we depend on our screens and the unseen special interest billionaires who mediate those screens to their ends. Our apps purport to curate, customize and maximize our every whim, fostering a false sense of control and self-containment, but like Freud’s dependent oral stage infants, we would be lost if the digital tit suddenly dried up. What might happen if the signal flickered and died?

Could we write a cohesive idea longhand or compute distances by long division, or would decades of verbal atrophy betray our total dependence? More impor40 F A B R I K

F A B R I K 41

tantly, could we muster the intellect and fortitude to defend humanism and compassion against imminent threats, having spent the last decades immersed in fast-satisfaction juvenilia like video games and Instagram?

Suddenly Bradbury’s and Truffaut’s dystopias appear not so distant from our real-world status quo. This is evident not only in our current political crisis but also in the arts. The visual arts — which have always reflected a notion of our collective humanity, our profound ideals — increasingly reflect the literal, the local and the utterly banal. Like Truffaut’s monorailing onanists, today we take an unflagging interest in gazing at our own images. If there is a visual leitmotif of our day and its ethos, it is the reflective surface – that pluperfect conceit for our conceit. Whether in Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate in Chicago or Jeff Koons’ balloon animals and gazing balls, we never tire of the stare that stares back. “In a reflective surface, your existence is being affirmed,” Koons told Art in America in 2014. “When you move, your abstracted reflection changes. The experience is dependent upon you; it lets you know that art is happening inside of you.” You, you, you.

The last 30 years of art practice and discourse — at their best — celebrate art that includes, rather than dictates to, the viewer, but even this noble cause descends into a surface of images that are “all about me.” Random International’s Rain Room lets us play God, puts you at the center of a faux cosmos, controlling the weather with your movements. The kaleidoscopic, contentless imagery that plays on the wall units of Montag and Linda’s living room prefigures the shiny, flashy sensation-stroking that used to be the province of packaging design but increasingly infiltrates fine art. We find it in the LED-light fantasias of Leo Villareal and Hap Tivey, the immersive polka-dotted many-mirrored installations of Yayoi Kusama, the sequin-encrusted tableaux of Liza Lou, Mickalene Thomas, and Shawne Major, the bubble gum-palette paintings of Omar Chacon or the pigmented grids of Albert Contreras. On the art-life boundary, ASMR promulgates hypnotic imagery of food coloring drip-dropping into water, pink soap sliced into mesmerizing patterns, and audio of gently pelting rain, or microphones being sensually patted with fluffy makeup brushes.

This is not to suggest that any of these cultural products are content-deficient, rather that they are superficially spectatorial in nature and tend to balm and mesmerize more than to pique and activate. Anesthetized by the glitz, we’re less likely to look to images to project us into far-away lands, to afford us glimpses of the next world or the not-like-me; we do not 42 F A B R I K

Anish Kapoor, Cloud Gate, 2006 Stainless Steel, 33 x 66 x 42 feet at Millennium Park, Illinois

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engage images to understand the plights of the persecuted and aggrieved — we look for the gratification of our own faces, our own butt-selfies and dick pics, our own visuals parroted back. It is not a portal into other minds we seek, we want a hand-mirror. Bathed in happy glowing colors, ogling our over-documented body parts, we are neither engaged or engage-able. Our cultural condition is one of stupefaction, of being struck dumb: mesmerized in the moment, unable to speak, write, or dream of the past or future. No words written, uttered or required. The nation grows silent, voices of dissent muted, a citizenry lulled into passivity, image-opiated, proudly unerudite, easily manipulated.

In Truffaut’s film, the government wages secret wars, men are summoned to military exercises and never return, state-controlled media broadcast propaganda sound bites unchecked by a free press. There is no press because there are no words. Truffaut’s vision is prophetic — a cautionary tale.

Narcissism is certainly neither new nor necessarily evil. Neither this writer nor Truffaut would be short-sighted enough to make such claims.

Central to the Enlightenment was free will and a celebration of individual agency as against autocracy; late-19th century aesthetes and avant-gardists lauded a sort of preening cult of the self. But those eras had their chroniclers, like an Oscar Wilde (among others), whose rapier wit deployed words as weapons to model creative thought, to advance and historicize challenges to blind authority. The Jazz Age trafficked in youth absorbed in subjective superficialities, but the ethos of that rebellion found expression and critique in the lasting prose of Scott Fitzgerald. The idealism of the hippies gave way to sexual hedonism, set the stage for the “I’m okay, you’re okay” crazes of the 1970s and the Me Generation widely lampooned for its unapologetic solipsism.

But that very moniker was coined, investigated and distributed by satirist nonpareil Tom Wolfe, as well as poignantly scrutinized by high and low culture thinkers like Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, or the whole of Rolling Stone, with its pages so packed with logorrheic excess, that its layout was dubbed “the wall of text.” As egocentric as each of these eras was, they did not want for words; they left their mark on us as words.

In Truffaut’s film, Montag embarks on a crusade to rescue words and books from the oblivion to which the state has consigned them. He begins to steal books from the pyres he is forced to ignite by day and reads them later in the middle of the night. With the zeal of a monk he devours tome after tome, intent upon rediscovering the knowledge of the past. Truffaut even 44 F A B R I K

outfits him in a terry cloth robe with an exaggerated cowl to heighten the monastic associations. As Montag’s passion for books grows more feverish, he barges in on Linda and her friends to read aloud a passage from David Copperfield, like an evangelist. One of the friends begins weeping. “I’d forgotten about all those feelings,” she cries. Dickens has transported her into the minds of characters who inhabit a world far removed from her own. This is what great words/books/artworks do – they liberate us from the myopia of our microcosm and invite us to investigate, to transcend the self, to know the Other. Acronyms and emoticons simply don’t have that power.

Images are not the enemy of books, nor are pretty lights, polka dots or selfies. Images and words have coexisted as reflections of personal and collective consciousness for millennia. It is only when images supplant words that the critical faculty suffers and the mind, lacking empathic connection to others, dead ends at narcissism and political lethargy. François Truffaut illustrated these connections more than a half-century ago. It seemed hyperbolic then. If there is a message here, it is that only by re-elevating discourse — as Montag does at the conclusion of Fahrenheit 451 — can we set aside the hand mirror.

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ROBERT PRUITT DEVOTION California African American Museum through February 17, 2019

KOPLIN DEL RIO

313 Occidental Ave S | Seattle, WA 98104 206.999.0849 | info@koplindelrio.com

IN RESIDENCE: PORTLAND THROUGH MARCH 2 Ben Buswell, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Sibylle Peretti, Heidi Schwegler Jessica Jackson Hutchins Crowned, 2017, kilnformed glass Courtesy of Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York.

bullseyeprojects.com 503-227-0222

David Pagel

PARA ART AND THE CENTER FOR LAND USE INTERPRETATION

Sometimes a bicycle is just a bicycle. No matter how beautifully crafted the sleek, two-wheeled piece of human-powered transport, it’s still a tool: an exceptionally efficient mechanism for moving individuals from one place to another, without burning gas or doing much damage to the environment.

The first part of that description has a lot in common with what we expect from works of art: that they are images and objects and stories and songs that move us, changing the way we relate to our surroundings while doing all sorts of things to our conscious—and unconscious—understanding of ourselves and the world we inhabit. Bicycles and works of art both deliver experiences otherwise unavailable to us, intensifying the highs and lows of our connections to our surroundings, broadening horizons, expanding possibilities, and generally making life more meaningful. But it’s important to resist the impulse to treat bikes as works of art, as somehow endowed with some kind of magical mystique that makes them seem to be better than other things and deserving of special privileges.

That is particularly true today, when the Supreme Court has muddied the distinction between wedding cakes and artistic expression (i.e., free speech), when people happily “curate” their own lives (online and otherwise), and bartenders have been replaced by “mixologists” and “cocktail designers.”

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Pavement Paradise: American Parking Space. Installation view at The Center for Land Use Interpretation, 2007

Foreground: The Landscape of Golf in America. Installation view at The Center for Land Use Interpretation, 2015

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Initial Points: Anchors of America’s Grid. Installation view at The Center for Land Use Interpretation, 2012

Text

Additional photographs from CLUI exhibition, The Ground Our Food Eats: Industrial Fertilizer Production in the USA, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, 2018.

Intrepid Potash, Wendover, Utah. The Center for Land Use Interpretation.

Intrepid Potash Cane Creek Mine, Moab, Utah. The Center for Land Use Interpretation.

At a time when overspecialized preciousness seems to have teamed up with an unwillingness to draw any lines between art and anything else made by humans, it might be more interesting to forget about art for a moment and start, instead, thinking about para-art—objects and images and storylines that inspire fascinating turns of mind while never insisting or presuming to be works of art, especially if that means standing apart from the nitty gritty vicissitudes of everyday life.

Bikes are like that. So is every exhibition ever organized by the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) since it opened in 1994. The idiosyncratic institution located on Venice Boulevard in Culver City is all about para-art.

Founded and directed by Matthew Coolidge, it is a plain, unassuming place, a sort of DIY information booth, an easy-to-use venue whose letterhead and logo state that all of its work is “dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.”

Its bricks-and-mortar features are modest: a single exhibition space—about the size of a public-school classroom—that includes a front desk, a two-shelf book store, an even smaller gift shop, a rack of brochures free for the taking and a backroom that functions as an all-in-one office, library, research center and workshop.

With similar efficiency, its website, www.clui.org, lays out its mission: “The CLUI exists to stimulate discussion, thought, and general interest in the contemporary landscape. Neither an environmental group nor an industry affiliated organization, the work of the Center integrates the many approaches to land use—the many perspectives of the landscape—into a single vision that illustrates the common ground in “land use” debates. At the very least, the Center attempts to emphasize the multiplicity of points of view regarding the utilization of terrestrial and geographic resources.”

For the last 25 years, Coolidge and his small staff have organized exhibitions and events that, like bicycles, function in many of the same ways that art does, and, like bikes, do not insist on being seen as works of art. Rather than worrying about their status, identity, and what category they might belong to, the works in all of the exhibitions organized by CLUI simply go about their business—laying out lots of information about a particular aspect of how humans have used—and are using—the land that makes up the United States, and, in the process, inviting viewers to interpret that information however we see fit.

As Coolidge puts it, “It’s a funny situation. Yes, art is supposed to be a product and a byproduct of what we do. But we don’t start the discussion by F A B R I K 55

asserting that we are artists and that our exhibitions present works of art. At the same time, “information” is too stale a term to describe what we’re about.

We’re telling cultural stories, hopefully so people from lots of backgrounds—art backgrounds, tech backgrounds, other backgrounds—can get something from our work. It’s the general public we’re trying to reach. We want what we do to be compelling to lots of different people. Sometimes the idea of art gets in the way of that.”

It’s important to distinguish what goes on at CLUI from anti-art. At the heart of anti-art is the desire to destroy—to toss out art and everything it stands for because its downside (elitism, pretense, expense and stifling solemnity) has won out over its upside (enlightening, edifying and informing an expansive audience). Para-art has a more complex—and paradoxical—relationship to established art. “At CLUI,” Coolidge says, “We like art. It’s part of the language we use, part of the context and the spectrum of the dialogue we’re having. It’s not the only part.” Rather than engaging historical works by attacking them directly, works of para-art leave traditional art in the background, preferring to foreground what they can themselves do in the present, while, at the same time, leaving viewers free to come to our own conclusions about the similarities and differences that link and differentiate art and para-art. The relationship between the two types of art is more nuanced and slippery than oppositional.

Its fluidity—or open-endedness—demands participatory engagement. Works of para-art are works of human ingenuity and insight that open the eyes and expand the minds of individuals, often in the same ways that the best works of art, the best works of journalism, and the best works of scientific inquiry change the way we see the world and, better yet, live in it.

To visit an exhibition at CLUI is to feel as if you’ve stumbled across the mongrel offspring of a booth at a mid-level tradeshow and a project at a middle-school science fair. Monitors, both touchscreen and otherwise, are handsomely installed amid big color photographs, slide shows and wall labels, all with captions that explain the subjects documented and explored in the presentations. None of the digital images or videos in the exhibitions is listed as having been made by an individual artist. Each is simply referred to as a “Center for Land Use Interpretation photograph.” Neither are the dimensions of any pictures noted. Nor is any one presented as being unique or even limited to an edition. That’s because it’s more important that the information delivered by the exhibitions makes its way into the world, by way of viewers who visit the modest center physically or via its website.

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Intrepid Potash, Wendover, Utah. The Center for Land Use Interpretation.

Intrepid Potash Cane Creek Mine, Moab, Utah. The Center for Land Use Interpretation.

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Mosaic Bartow Facility, Bone Valley, Florida. The Center for Land Use Interpretation.

Phosphate Mines, Phosphoria Formation, Idaho. The Center for Land Use Interpretation.

At the same time, the exhibitions at CLUI don’t rule out the possibility that art may be everywhere—that it exists whenever human beings shape our surroundings by transforming nature through artifice, will, and effort. In either case, if art is to be found at CLUI, it happens in your head—as a consequence of what you perceive and apprehend. And that idea leads back to what Conceptual Art does when it works best: change minds and transform our relationship to previous ideas, not to mention the world around us, by treating our thought processes and frames of reference as raw materials to be worked on—just like works of art. Coolidge explains, “At CLUI, we are on the generating side, not the receiving end. Whether what we do is art or not is up to others to think about. It’s a point of view, a set of thoughts, that create art. Anything can be art… But that is a matter of how it affects you, the decisions you come to. Art is a discussion, a dialogue, a channel, among many. It’s an adventure, it’s inclusive, it’s forever changing.”

The recent CLUI exhibition, The Ground Our Food Eats: Industrial Fertilizer Production in the USA, turned the tables on conventional thinking by inviting visitors to see the links between what we eat and what we feed the plants we eat. It started simply: In plain language, a placard explained that 95 percent of the food consumed in the United States is the product of industrial agriculture, and that the nutrients those plants need—primarily nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium—come from industrially produced fertilizers. Those fertilizers are made of inorganic elements and fossil fuels, all dug from the earth in open pit and underground mines. Three touch-screen monitors took visitors on a tour of dozens of mines, plants and processing facilities, as well as the vast network of natural gas pipelines, railways, rivers and seaside ports that connects them. Concise, matter-of-fact captions linked them to other businesses, including the manufacture of ammonia and explosives, both military and civilian. A corporate network—of subsidiaries, partners, and competitors—came into focus, outlining relationships among multinational corporations, the U.S. government, the agriculture industry, and the vegetables in your salad—not to mention the feed livestock eat, until they become dinner. The Ground Our Food Eats ultimately revealed that whether you are a carnivore, a herbivore, or even a vegan, you are, inevitably, a geophagist: a person who eats the Earth—whether you like it or not. For better or worse, we’re all in it together, even if those facts are obscured by those who benefit from keeping them hidden.

That’s one of the best things about CLUI: Its exhibitions invite visitors to think big, in terms of systems rather than only from the indiF A B R I K 59

vidual’s point of view. Art, for the most part, typically has focused on the latter— on the achievements of geniuses more than on the collective activity of humans, irrespective of our backgrounds, genders or ethnicities. Taking a more expansive perspective, CLUI programs explore what humans do as a species—and the consequences of those actions—in an engaging manner accessible to anyone who knows how to use a cellphone. As thought-provoking as the most sophisticated art being made today, the Center’s exhibits also function in ways that play off of scientific or sociological research: revealing truths about the world slowly and steadily, by connecting the dots across various fields, disciplines and social groups, especially when that information does not immediately meet the eye but must be carefully and conscientiously dug out of reality and then woven into narratives that are open to further interpretation, discussion and, hopefully, understanding.

Previous exhibitions include Desert Ramparts: Defending Las Vegas from the Flood (2017), which examined massive, flood-control structures as a kind of anonymous land art; Hollowed Earth: The World of Underground Business Parks (2016-2017), which revisited the idea of underground art in terms of corporate architecture; Executive Decisions: The Personal Landscape Legacy of American Presidents (2016), which focused on the intractable relationship between history and myth; and The Trans-Alaska Pipeline (2008-2009), which charted the uneasy overlap of nature and culture and humanity’s precarious place in it all.

In a sense, CLUI’s staff is a group of hardworking para-artists, who, like paramedics, paralegals and enthusiasts of paranormal phenomena, prefer the hands-on immediacy of interactions that take place before the specialists get called in, the experts take over, and big, bureaucratic institutions—like hospitals, law firms and museums—get involved. Para-artists find freedom at street level, far from the ivory towers of academic institutions and the white walls of commercial galleries and museums. In another sense, they do what journalists do, but with less editorializing: They present information necessary to be a citizen in a democracy. In yet another sense, they do what Robert Irwin did when he found that galleries and museums were not places to go to get away from it all, but places to visit to refresh our perceptions of the world around us, to sharpen our senses so that we might intensify our experiences, deepen our understanding of reality, and live—more fully and sensitively and insightfully. That’s what happens at CLUI, regardless of whether you think of its work as art.

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Split Personality 7 - 74” x 64” - Acylic on canvas

Tom Bolles

March 20 - April 25 - 2019

Andrea Schwartz Gallery

545 4th Street San Francisco, CA 94107 (415) 495-2090 www.asgallery.com

Anthony White Smoke and Mirrors

DISCO INFERNO, 2018 PLA on panel, 38 x 35 inches

GREG KUCERA GALLERY

212 THIRD AVENUE S SEATTLE, WA 98104 206.624.0770 www.gregkucera.com staff@gregkucera.com

Johann Garber, Haus der Künstler, 2011 © museum gugging

INSIDE OUTSIDE Margaret Hawkins

On a hot summer night, high on a hill overlooking the Vienna Woods, the museum opening reception gets underway — as these events typically do. People show up in fancy dress, Champagne flows.

Entering this festivity unannounced, from a wooded path, are the featured artists, Karl Vondal and Johann Garber. Artists are natural aristocracy at these occasions and do as they like. These men keep their distance, seemingly oblivious to the social scene around them, and settle quietly at a table with a museum staff person. Then the director makes a speech, the doors open and the invited guests enter to view the exhibition.

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Museum Gugging, Garber-Salon, Foto © Ludwig Schedl

If the opening is typical, the artists are not. For one thing, they live here. Opened in 2006 on the rebuilt site of a former pediatric psychiatric hospital where Nazis once imprisoned and executed mentally disabled children, Museum Gugging, in Maria Gugging, Austria, is the flagship of The Art Brut Center, a unique compound where artists with serious mental illness live and work. Once accepted as residents, primarily on the merits of their art, artists are free to live there for life.

Also on the grounds are a sunny, open collective studio stocked with art supplies and a gallery that sells residents’ art – and provides them a fair cut of the proceeds. There’s also an event space called The Birdhouse for the many bird paintings that adorn it, and the Artist House, where the residents live. Colorfully painted inside and out by past and present artist-occupants, the house exudes the vibe of an art school dormitory (although far cleaner), with kitchen facilities, big windows, a lounge and ample outdoor space that includes an anthropomorphically painted barbecue grill and a tennis court.

Director Dr. Johann Feilacher describes Gugging’s mission in simple terms – it’s a place for artists, currently 12, to live and work. Feilacher, a psychiatrist and an artist himself —who exhibits internationally and keeps a sculpture studio nearby — is uniquely qualified to understand the needs of the residents.

They are, after all, the needs of any visual artist: studio space, materials, exhibition opportunities, the company of other artists. And respect.

“Respect is what saves your life,” he says, echoing Elyn Saks’ words from her 2007 memoir about schizophrenia, “The Center Cannot Hold:” “When you’re really crazy, respect is like a lifeline someone’s throwing you.

Catch this and maybe you won’t drown.”

Gugging provides psychiatric treatment, but therapy —both talk and pharmaceutical — is secondary to art-making, and optional. What residents do not receive, and what Dr. Feilacher does not believe in, is art therapy. Art is their work, he says.

Something else Feilacher does not believe in is the myth of the mad genius. “To say a mentally ill person is [by definition] also a genius is stupid, a fairy tale,” says Feilacher. “There’s the same proportion of geniuses in the group of mentally ill people as there is in any other group.” He chooses the artists who live at Gugging for their talent, and says they make art for the same reason anyone makes art, because they want to and because they must, not because they are mentally ill or because they are told to, and certainly not to make themselves “better.”

Once a year, Feilacher takes everybody on vacation, by bus.

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Johann Garber Krickerl, 2010 © Privatstiftung— Künstler aus Gugging

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Perhaps Feilacher’s unusual approach to psychiatry comes from his atypical background. Feilacher started as a painter. He attended art school in Vienna, switched to medical school, and began a career in emergency medicine before quickly finding he preferred psychiatry. Meanwhile, he kept making art. Now his monumental wood sculpture, fashioned from fallen trees, can be found in sculpture parks in Europe and the United States.

Feilacher’s vision, while radical, is neither romantic nor sentimental. He believes in creativity and talent, in the inviolability of art-making as a fundamental human endeavor.

Psychiatrist Leo Navatril founded Gugging as The Center for Art and Psychotherapy in 1981. Navatril had been using drawing as a diagnostic tool, and when Feilacher took over in 1986, he recognized that some of the drawings his patients made were more than merely symptomatic, revealing not only a view into the patients’ mental states, but also real talent. He set about refocusing the Center’s mission and renamed the place The Artist House, to reflect its new emphasis on art over therapy.

Now called The Art Brut Center, in a nod to Jean Dubuffet and his advocacy for the purity of art made outside the mainstream, the center has evolved into a protected zone where creativity flourishes outside the usual structures that shape it – financial, academic, critical. Residents of Gugging are selected because they are particularly talented – not because of their mental illness, but in spite of it.

Much that’s been written about self-taught and outsider artists focuses on their specialness, an attitude of cloying exceptionalism that marginalizes both the art and the people creating it — while unrealistically valorizing mental illness and, often, the poverty that can accompany it. Gugging is the opposite 70 F A B R I K

Johann Garber. EIN GROSSES SEXI-BLATT, 1999

of all that. Interested parties willing to make the trip will find it open, welcoming and deeply normal, if you accept creativity and diversity as norms.

What is exceptional about the place is what it lacks – art world trappings, the vast mercantile structure that assigns value, drives sales, fans fame and cultivates prestige. Yes, there’s a museum and a gallery, but these are mainly for the visitors, and to help support the mission. The heart of the place is the creative spark it keeps lit – namely, that human drive to make.

Jean Dubuffet defined Art Brut as “those works created in solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses.” Art made from no motive F A B R I K 71

but art-making itself, by children, or by people with mental illness or disability, can stun with its power and directness.

Why, after all, does anyone make art? Pablo Picasso: “The purpose of art is washing the dust off the daily life of our souls.”

Nearly 5,000 miles from Gugging, on another blistering summer day, David Holt sits in the shade on the south side of Chicago, drawing a portrait of a dog in his signature graphic style. Nearby, a young woman reads tarot cards. A DJ plays Latin music. It’s Sunday afternoon at the Bridgeport Art Center, and Project Onward is holding its Pet Portrait Slam. For 30 dollars plus tax, a Project Onward member will draw a portrait of your dog from life or a photograph.

Holt, who tells us via an artist profile on the Project Onward website that he is a Virgo, enjoys softball, basketball, weightlifting and is involved in autism advocacy, copies the dog’s contour onto a piece of corrugated cardboard. He is methodical and focused, following the dog’s outline around seven appendages – two ears, four legs, and a penis. Holt works quietly for a while, then asks what color the dog’s eyes are. “Light brown, like peanut butter,” the dog’s owner says. Holt picks up a caramel-colored oil pencil and begins to fill them in. He will get $15. The other half goes to Project Onward.

Founded by the city in 2004 as a pilot initiative for six artists who had aged-out of a local youth job-training program, Project Onward was de-funded in 2014, requiring a move out of their high-profile quarters at the Chicago Cultural Center. Now the facility is happily relocated on the fourth floor of the less-central but vastly more commodious former Spiegel Catalog warehouse turned multi-use art center in the Bridgeport neighborhood.

Unlike Gugging, Project Onward is a day program, but its mission is similar – to provide studio space as well as sales and exhibition opportunities for artists with mental disorders and disabilities. Members range in age from their 20s to early 70s, commuting to the studio from all over the city and some of its suburbs. Studio space and materials are free, but to qualify, applicants must demonstrate talent and commitment.

“All are well aware that this is a job that requires them to make art for sale,” said Nancy Gomez, executive director. Board president Marsha Woodhouse, who got involved with Project Onward early on when her daughter joined the program, put it differently, “This is not babysitting.”

“Most galleries that sell outsider art focus on the bios,” Woodhouse said. “Here we focus on the art.” On a tour through the studio, she lamented the fetishization of outsider artists. Even in this city, where self-taught artists are part of the story the art community tells about its provenance, where 72 F A B R I K

(Below) Karl Vondal, 2017 © Foto: Ludwig Schedl

(Bottom) Karl Vondal, Paar unter Palmen, 2013 Privatstiftung - Kьnstler aus Gugging

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the work of outsiders inspired the young artists who became known as the Chicago Imagists, too much is made of biographies, their sad personal stories. She wants people to know that Project Onward is about art and artists, not mental illness and disability. (Please see p. 138 for our review of Hairy Who? 1966-1969 at the Art Institute of Chicago.)

The tour quickly makes this point obvious. The artists are downstairs making pet portraits, but even in their absence, the rambling common studio buzzes with purpose, creativity, joy. Each artist has a roomy wellequipped space, with art supplies galore and just the right mix of mess and order. These are digs that many an MFA student would envy.

Mental illness can be isolating. Both Woodhouse and Gomez pointed out that Project Onward is also about community. “Most of our artists have been with us over five years,” Gomez said. “So we consider ourselves not only friends but family. We are very selective in the quality of art when we’re interviewing a new artist, but also we want to make sure that a new artist is a good fit personality-wise.”

Five miles north and a world away, in the pricey River North neighborhood, Chicago art dealer Carl Hammer presides over an elegant, eponymous two-story gallery known for representing the estates of self-taught artists. Hammer started collecting folk and outsider art even before he opened his gallery in 1979, while he was still a high school English teacher. Now his roster includes the best artists of the genre – former slave Bill Traylor, visionary Joseph Yoakum, preacher Howard Finster, infamous Chicago recluse fantasist writer and painter Henry Darger, whose 15,000 page novel was discovered in his one-room Southside apartment after his death in 1973, and hometown favorite, Lee Godie, who lived on the street in Chicago for decades, late in her long and peripatetic life – she died in 1994 at the age of 85 – and was known for hanging out on the steps of the Art Institute where she sold her drawings to passersby for astoundingly small sums.

Swanky surrounds notwithstanding, the spirit and intensity of Hammer’s artists echo what one finds at Project Onward and Gugging. This collision of contexts by which we come to know this kind of art raises questions about social justice, to be sure; Hammer acknowledges the possibility that the art world is sometimes guilty of exploiting artists. Still, the fact remains – without a market that buys and sells art, much of this work would simply disappear from view. The real attraction for Hammer, he says, is not market potential but the mesmerizingly fresh sensibilities of the art itself.

He cited Dubuffet’s definition of art brut —“anything produced by persons 74 F A B R I K

David Holt at work on Creation of Man. Photograph courtesy of Project Onward.

unscathed by artistic culture” — as the key factor that influences his decision to represent or collect an artist.

A few weeks after the Gugging opening in the Vienna Woods, artist Karl Vondal makes his way toward a drawing table in the museum where, for the duration of his show, he will create art alongside his exhibited drawings.

A gregarious man, he appears to enjoy this arrangement. Recognizable in the same baggy orange T-shirt and cargo shorts he wore to the opening, he approaches a visitor, gesturing to be understood. Vondal speaks German, the visitor only English. The artist makes it clear he is offering a trade, a small erotic drawing on the back of a gallery card for money to buy a can of orangeade from the vending machine. An undercover transaction ensues – sales are usually handled by the gallery – and a price is agreed upon.

Vondal jams the ten-euro payment in his pocket, then throws in an extra drawing, maybe as a thank you, or just to flirt. The buyer blushes and slips the drawings carefully into the little bag that holds the postcards she’s bought. She notices a stack of more drawings spread out on Vondal’s table to entice — handmade currency. Drawings are valuable, they’re tradable for euros, which in turn can be exchanged for orangeade and chips. It’s that simple and that beautiful. Later at home in her English-speaking country, the buyer takes out the cards, props her favorite on her desk.

It shows a naked man and woman engaged in stand-up sex in what looks like a tropical paradise. The man is in profile but the woman is shown in full frontal display. She looks like a blow up sex doll with an O for a mouth, zaftig curves and big yellow hair. Twirling flowers seem to propel a small island toward the couple. On this island stands a tall palm tree. The tree is the star of the drawing. Its dome of foliage vibrates outward like a frizzy hairdo; its trunk leans voyeuristically toward the couple as if to get a better look.

Two eye-like coconuts at the top of the trunk seem to bug out to watch, their shape and size perfectly rhyming with the woman’s breasts.

It’s the oldest subject in art: The Woman of Willendorf comes to mind. Picasso as well. Is Vondal somehow consciously taking part in an art historical dialog? Feilacher doesn’t think so. Reluctant to characterize the style of the art his residents make, he concedes that the one quality that does distinguish the art of the mentally ill is that it is “uninfluenced.”

“It is not necessary for these people to have Picasso in their head,” he says. “And they are not able to. They can’t copy. They couldn’t imitate a Picasso because they are not interested in anything other than what is in their own mind.”

This single-mindedness may be why art brut fascinates. Brut, as in raw. In the over-saturated, hyper-educated, so consciously strategic world of visual art, where every image is begotten by or borrowed from one that came before it, here are artists who live closest to the bone, who simply create.

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Lee Godie, Eldorado, c. 1970. Mixed media on canvas, 26 x 21.5 inches (unframed).

Courtesy Carl Hammer Gallery

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Lauren Bon and the Metabolic Studio Not A Cornfield, 2005-06 Inside the “eye” of the central space you could walk a spiral. This is the area that was handplanted in a traditional Native American way. © Metabolic Studio

Constance Mallinson

#N ATURE T OO

Nature exists to be raped.

— Pablo Picasso Nature too awaits the Revolution!

— Herbert Marcuse Over several decades environmentally active artists have produced artworks that document and challenge the spaces, systems, processes and language involved in human interactions with nature and the physical world. A substantial body of contemporary art presents nature as a multi-faceted subject rather than as object-acted-upon. These works reconfigure and interrogate existing norms, stressing themes of partnership, mutual needs, connectivity and respect for the rights of nature.

Following the groundbreaking work of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, who directed art to environmental ends, many contemporary artists have conjoined human artistic activity with issues around nature to co-create impactful artworks. The most notable of these artists, such as Andy Goldsworthy who since the late 1980s has used live and decaying vegetation, rocks, ice and sand to create ecologically sensitive art with and within a growing, living nature, are radically reinterpreting the definitions and cultural attitudes towards nature. Eschewing conventional artistic productions and representations, Goldsworthy and a global community of artists are emphasizing the interactions, exchanges, ephemeralities, contingencies and transformations endemic to natural processes. Examples of art that sees nature as other than what author John K. Grande termed “aesthetic real estate” are numerous.

Reintroducing the idea of natural systems and a growing, living nature into the urban consciousness, Los Angeles artist Lauren Bon and Montrealbased Doug Buis have created “interventions” in urban environments by planting or regenerating native and non-native species in abandoned spaces and public parks. Collaborating with the scientific community, multi-disciplinary Los Angeles artist Jessica Rath explores the impact of human behavior on 80 F A B R I K

Jessica Rath, Resonant Nest, 2015 Installation view of “A Better Nectar” at University Art Gallery, CSU Long Beach.

Photograph by Brian Forrest

native species and food plants. Her recent installation, a better nectar, was an immersive, human scaled recreation of a bumblebee’s journey from its underground nest to process floral signals in the search for nectar. Incorporating handmade sculpture, sensitive watercolor renderings of flowers, light projections and sound recordings of human voices interpreting the bees’ various hums, Rath draws viewers into intimate and wondrous appreciation of one of our crucial partners in the biosphere’s survival.

While our era is producing paradigm-shifting artworks embracing the mutualism of humans and nature, examining historical prototypes reveals a quite different perspective. The thundering waterfalls, moist forests, green hills interspersed with copses, turquoise waters stretching to the edges of the imagination filling centuries of paintings, photographs and illustrations comprised the main historical and imagistic forces shaping our attitudes towards nature. Landscape art, W.J.T. Mitchell suggests, does not simply signify or F A B R I K 81

symbolize our relationship with nature, but is an instrument that promotes and enacts cultural and economic power. Not surprisingly then, an examination of the historical constructs of landscape reveal not a mirror held up to nature but a reflection instead of human longings, needs and will.

Western civilization’s equation of progress with a relentless push for territorial and economic power had to begin with controlling and dominating an often unsurmountable nature. Though history confirms that there were matriarchal fertility goddess cults in ancient Malta and Knossos, as well as indigenous cultures that equated and continue to equate nature with a giving, nurturing mother force, the archeological record tells us these were short lived and rare, abandoned in favor of patriarchal systems supporting masculinity’s capacity to conquer presumably obstructive natural forces.

To achieve such ends and perpetuate the belief that nature is a vast repository of resources serving human/male consumption, nature had to be objectified. Any familiarity with feminism recognizes this mechanism--objectification permits exploitation.

Eco-feminists like Carolyn Merchant make the connection between exploited femininity and exploited nature. Women have needed to scrutinize the imagery that entrenched patriarchal culture. Similarly, the current desecration, endangerment and violation of the natural world on a scale now threatening the planet necessitate similar scrutiny of the gendered nature tropes and mythological devices embedded in exploration, science and language for centuries.

Stereotyped conceptions like Mother Nature, Eve, Magna Mater, and Virgin Land, fashioned the perception of nature as passive, “ripe for the taking” and ready to be owned and improved by heroic men. Whether implemented consciously or subconsciously, this terminology and imagery drove and even assisted economic and territorial expansion, arguably contributing to the roots of the current eco-crisis.

Merchant identifies the Garden of Eden story as among the earliest phallo-centric myths used to manage nature and solidify man’s rightful domination within it. Eve’s actions expelled man from the garden and Adam’s task was to reclaim it. Some of the very earliest explorers’ maps included symbols for nature/its landmarks imagined in the guise of naked females ready to be “taken;” Merchant speculates that these acted as less than subtle inducements for rapacious discovery, conquest and settlement. The Colonial era was replete with rhetoric and images likening undeveloped lands to fair 82 F A B R I K

Asher Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1849, Oil on canvas. Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. F A B R I K 83

virgins in nuptial beds and wombs — waiting to be opened, ready to pour forth their bounty.

European landscape art developed — as did the whole of Western culture until the ‘60s — in the absence of any female-generated interpretations; the male lens determined all forms of representation. The natural world was fully construed as a surrogate female, fetishized and subjected to the same curious and controlling gaze. Note philosopher Francis Bacon’s precept that nature must be forced from her natural and primitive state and molded by the artful hand of man.

With nature firmly cast as a subdued female object, 17th and 18th century Dutch and English paintings of plowed fields about to yield fruits, or fecund hills dotted with flowers induced both pleasure and proprietary instincts. Wide, open vistas suggest and invite expansion and exploration, and were crucial to the advance of empires. In “The Experience of Landscape,” Jay Appleton raises the possibility that images of “refuge” provided by trees and shrubbery in these 18th century landscapes immerse creator and spectator in the predatory visuals of (male) violence like hunting, war and surveillance.

Theories of the sublime and the beautiful by 18th century philosophers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant expanded gendered land narratives. In Phillip Shaw’s “The Sublime,” he notes that Patricia Yaeger describes the sublime as a mode that depended upon a notion of the feminine in support of the masculine sense of self. Any vast landscape inspiring astonishment, awe and ultimately terror was characterized as sublime. The driving assumption here was that only masculine mastery, rationality, courage and self-reflection could transcend or overcome destabilizing confrontations with an awesome nature. It is hard to quickly dismiss Yaeger and others offering this view when we consider images like Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above A Sea of Fog” (1818). A bulky male figure, back to us, poised on a mountain, dominates the picture plane and takes in the infinite expanse, erect in his ability to conquer awe/emotion with logic. A finer example of Kant’s logical transcendental male subject cannot be imagined.

By the mid 19th century, American landscape painters applied similar concepts to their wild and yet unsettled land. A female nature — illogical and disordered — required power and mastery in order for civilization to progress and prosper. Carolyn Merchant mentions US writers of the time who ”used the imagery of sexual assault to advocate the mining of female earth for metals.” Merchant’s “Reinventing Eden, The Fate of Nature in 84 F A B R I K

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, c. 1818, Oil on canvas, 373 x 29.4 inches.

Collection of Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany.

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Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970 Photograph by Retis (2015)

Western Culture”, references that Appleton also suggested a pervasive if subconscious sexualized anthropomorphism in US landscape imagery of the 19th century. He notes a “persistent aesthetic interest taken in river valleys at the point where they pass through ridges or mountains”… in gorges that read as vaginal symbols, in dark caverns “partially concealed by foliage”… in clefts and chasms that even a skeptic can acknowledge as invoking the vagina (Jay Appleton, “The Experience of Landscape”).

Consider Asher Durand’s Hudson River painting “Kindred Spirits” of 1849, featuring as its subjects the artist Thomas Cole and the poet William Cullen Bryant, standing at a precipice before a rushing waterfall. Here also is Cole’s textual, hardly subtle, graphically erotic relation to the “land,” excerpted from Matthew Baigell’s “Thomas Cole:” 86 F A B R I K

Beautiful vision! Now the veil is rent, And the coy earth her virgin bosom bare Slowly unfolding to the enraptured gaze Her thousand charms.

Thomas Cole, (who interestingly enough was described as an early environmentalist) and other artists like him, used such conceptions of the land to visualize and romanticize American Manifest Destiny, with its directives of populating the land, clearing forests, draining swamps and decimation of native tribes. In “The Magisterial Gaze,” Albert Boime describes the production of this type of art tellingly: “The myth of nature and its conversion into religious doctrine…. [centered] on the need to resolve the antimony between nature and culture, between the Virgin Land and its deflowering… far from being passive recorders, [these] participated in the very system they condemned and projected it symbolically into their work.” More nuanced but to similar ends, the writings of Thoreau, Emerson and Muir venerate a gendered nature via references to her mysteries and metaphors of suckling mothers, fallen virgins and sublime mistresses.

With the advent of the camera, landscape photographers competed with painters, adopted their tactics and often joined ranks with military, geological and railroad enterprises to advance the growing travel, mineral and land development industries. Continental settlement was facilitated by appealing to the theological, political, industrial and social interests at the time. Written accounts were rife with sexual allusion. A traveler returning from an excursion in 1846 gleefully wrote: “Here they glide over cultivated acres on rods of iron, and they rise and fall on the bosom of the deep, leaving behind them a foaming wheel-track.” Another wrote of huge machinery as “a steam screw upon the landscape.” Rather humorous to 21st century eyes yet blatantly phallic are A.J. Russell’s split canyons with spewing steam engines crashing through, William Henry Jackson’s trains prying open canyon walls and gorges, and Carleton Watkins’ multiple pipes ejaculating plumes of water over the rounded rocks in hydraulic mining operations, as referenced in Leo Marx, “The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America.”

All these photographic strategies coalesce in early 20th century advertising photography that yet today continue to use gendered tropes for F A B R I K 87

marketing purposes. Parts of nature, even redwood trees, are contextualized as symbols of male virility or longevity. So long-standing and normalized are these hidden persuaders of a feminized nature and masculine machine that powerful vehicles then as now base their appeal to males with representations of wheels tearing through deserts, streams and countryside. Also symptomatic of our loss of contact with nature in an urbanized world, is the “nature porn” industry, what writer Rebecca Solnitt likens to “girly” calendar pin-ups: desk calendars, coffee table books and posters offering up a glossy, juicy land that we cannot wait to get into.

Twentieth century artists gauging progress as an unremitting assault on realism sought and arrived at a fully abstract art; literal landscape depiction all but disappeared. The near total censure of the female body and nature in abstract art — defined in terms of heroic male Ab Ex gestures — was not an amelioration of gender stereotyping but actually a demonstration of its persistence in extremis. The millennium-long objectification of nature/ the female body, as well as their 20th Century erasure in abstract art, was a major catalyst for feminism. Emerging feminist art of the 1960s focused on the female body, goddess imagery, and body performances, to interrogate an obvious lack. While bringing about less marginalization, there was little to change longstanding ideologies. The development of a “get back to nature” site-specific art in the 1970s renounced urban galleries in favor of remote natural places. Uninhabited land — the Salton Sea, the desert — continued to invite discovery, exploration, and in this iteration, looked like innovative institutional critique. Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer gained notoriety with “Earthworks,” large scaled outdoor art involving massive engineering, violent land alterations and the imposition of male energy and will. These artists were occasionally criticized as being allied with human rapaciousness, ego and its harm to the fragile earth. Responding, Smithson described himself instead as not representing the sublime that is historically encountered in painting, but actually producing or “fathering” it— with himself as a natural force, recalling Jackson Pollack’s famous dictum, “I am nature.”

In place of entrenched domination, oppression and exploitation, there is a growing quest for a biocentric ethic based on the idea that all living things have intrinsic value and rights to exist. Humans, as the only moral agents on earth, are ethically obligated to reduce environmental impact and to choose lifestyles that minimize natural destruction. Feminist artists have

88 F A B R I K

Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1969 Photograph by Retis (2012)

dismantled patriarchal structures by innovative strategies designed to encourage inclusivity, abolish stereotypes and remedy marginalization. Effecting such a monumental change involves unmasking exploitive historical biases and allegiances in representing nature and seeking new visualizations.

Reforming long-standing anthropocentric and selectively gendered views of earth to create a relationship with nature that is mutually beneficial will entail diverse cultural productions that recognize and promote the health and autonomy of nature. With climate change and species extinction now major existential threats, artists — as throughout history — will be essential in visualizing and understanding humanity’s place and role in the ever-evolving events.

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LOS ANGELES California African American Museum and Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush (A Two-Part Exhibition) September 23, 2018—January 20, 2019 Text Lawrence Gipe If art careers were measured in poker hands, Nina Chanel Abney would definitely be pulling a Royal Flush, the title of her double survey exhibition. Both shows collectively trace the productive trajectory

of Abney’s decade-long career to date. Seen in succession, her brash and powerful works culminate in a provocative advocacy for the relevance of contemporary narrative painting.

Originally conceived for the Nasher Museum at Duke University, Royal Flush was curated by Marshall N. Price, whose interest in Abney’s work began with her appearance as the youngest member of 30 Americans. This groundbreaking group show, selected from the Rubell Family Collection of contemporary African-American art, has traveled

Nina Chanel Abney, Forbidden Fruit, 2009, Acrylic on canvas, 55 1/2 x 67 inches. Private collection. Photo by Peter Paul Geoffrion. © Nina Chanel Abney. Courtesy of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

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the U.S. since 2009, and will end its 17-venue tour at The Barnes Foundation in 2020. The exhibit 30 Americans gave (and continues to give) Abney exposure within a stellar cohort, ranging from Kerry James Marshall to Carrie Mae Weems.

In Royal Flush, Price and Abney chose to represent the artist’s work in the years subsequent to 30 Americans (2008-2012). These are expressionistic and powerful amalgams of political and personal content. There are echoes of James Ensor’s macabre clots of masked characters in “Randaleeza” (2008), for instance, where Abney depicts then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as a grotesque caricature. Rice is portrayed with her teeth bared, her scorched, tattooed skin optically grating against an acidic green background. Everything about “Randaleeza” is discordant, from the keyed-up chromatics to Rice’s sloppy bikini: it manages to be bleak, funny and vulgar all at once.

Isolated in the left third of the piece, Rice is depicted as grimacing and vacant, strangely disconnected from the intense drama unfolding at her side. The central character of this conflagration is Randal, based on a friend that Abney used as a model.

Randal’s crouching figure is caught in the throes of a pitbull attack, in what turns out to be an allusion to Michael Vick and illegal dogfighting. The Vick affair was reported in a luridly exaggerated manner that smacked of racism during the summer of 2008, 94 F A B R I K

dominating the news cycles more than any concurrent story. All these strata of content in “Randaleeza” comprise a perfect storm of Abney’s early obsessions: the optics of race and gender in the media, the ambivalent role and exploitation of African-American figures in the public eye, and personal narratives and symbols that weave in and out of non-hierarchical compositions at the whim of her fervid imagination.

Since 2008, Condoleezza Rice’s political influence has waned and her star has faded, but the painting “Randaleeza” endures as a visceral yet timeless display of disgust. The same is true for the prescient “The Party’s Over” (2008), a withering take on both the white-dominant media’s preoccupation with Bill Cosby’s trials and the moral failure of Cosby himself. This phase of Abney’s work culminates in “I Dread to Think” (2012), a multi-paneled, epic-scaled composition that looks like Picasso’s “Guernica” (1937), crossed with a WPA mural.

With regard to Abney’s surfaces, her paintings after “I Dread to Think” avoid even the occasional drip or expanse of transparent color in favor of crisp, graphic layering.

This fulcrum point in her process is perfectly illustrated in the collage, “First and Last” (2012), which combines vestiges of her original handling of pictorial space with these newly emerging strategies.

It’s tempting to credit this shift on Abney’s participation in

Nina Chanel Abney, Untitled (Yo 123), 2015, Unique ultrachrome pigmented print, spray paint, and acrylic on canvas, 56 x 56 inches. Private collection. Photo by Peter Paul Geoffrion. © Nina Chanel Abney. Courtesy of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

a workshop celebrating Romare

stenciled words and generic shapes

direct use of cutout forms might

to emojis and social media static.

Bearden’s collages. While Bearden’s have provided Abney reinforcement, many other antecedents come to mind, from Stuart Davis, William

H. Johnson’s wartime “Jitterbugs,” and Kara Walker’s silhouettes. At

any rate, the outcome for Abney’s

production was a flatter space, built up from solid masses, patterns,

(like teardrops, arrows, etc.) that refer The last five years of work in Royal

Flush (2012-2017) represent Abney’s exploration and development of this denser approach to image

making. The relative efficiency of

her latest process allows the work to be printed, or translated into

public murals with greater ease. The F A B R I K 95

downside is its repetitive, formulaic nature, which makes one painting blur anonymously into another.

Abney’s subjects remain as confrontational as ever in this later phase, with police brutality and discrimination often in the center of the action. A series of work chronicling a certain “Pool Party at Rockingham #1” (2016) evinces a refreshingly kinky side to her topics.

Abney was recently quoted as saying, “For me, progress for the black artist in the black art world is when we don’t even have to be called ‘black artists.’ Why can’t we just make our work? It has to be about blackness or race…where white artists don’t have to think about those things.

They can just make things.” Clearly, by simplifying her forms, Abney is searching for a more universal approach to “just making things.”

Pomona College Museum of Art Project Series 52: Hayv Kahraman September 4—December 22, 2018 Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects Hayv Kahraman: Silence is Gold September 8—October 27, 2018 Text Quinton Bemiller Beauty and suffering are inseparable in the work of Iraqiborn, Los Angeles-based artist, Hayv Kahraman. In two recent companion exhibitions, Kahraman presented idealized paintings that are seductively gorgeous, yet also alarming. Hybridizing the 96 F A B R I K

aesthetics of Italian Renaissance painting, Persian miniatures, Japanese woodcuts and other artistic modes, Kahraman’s images of She – a recurring female figure based on her own body – represent harrowing realities of colonization, marginalization, violence and displacement. At the same time, there is strength in these empowering images of collective females, and a remarkable sense of diasporic cultural identity.

The richness of Kahraman’s creative output is rooted in her personal story. As a child, she was part of the mass exodus of Kurds from Iraq, a direct result of Saddam Hussein’s attack on the Kurdish people in the wake of the First Gulf War. Kahraman and her family fled to Sweden, where she began making art as a child; she later studied design in Florence, Italy. While the artist acknowledges both her own suffering and that of others, her paintings do not solicit pity but preserve the dignity of their victimized subjects. Implicitly but pointedly, Kahraman’s paintings address issues of sexual violence, domestic abuse, gender inequity, racial and ethnic stereotypes, and asylum. Gross hypocrisies flourish in today’s world, and Kahraman implicates each of us to some degree.

Silence is Gold was Kahraman’s first exhibition in Los Angeles, and featured an impressive 32 paintings ranging in scale from the intimate to

Hayv Kahraman, The Kurds, 2018. Oil on linen, 98 x 76 inches. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

the expansive. Mostly oil on linen, many of the paintings employ a weaving technique derived from hand-woven fans known as mahaffa.

These fans, which Kahraman describes as “an elemental symbol of Iraq,” have significance to the artist as family heirlooms. In these paintings, she recreates the woven effect by cutting into her fine-linen canvases, weaving in remnants of other paintings; simultaneously harming and mending the canvas, both literally and metaphorically.

This act references past traumas endured by Kahraman and the

transformations she has made in her life. Many of the paintings are titled “The Appeal.” Each of these depicts a woman contorting her body into different gestures while holding a mahaffa, an image based on a charity advertisement campaign.

Kahraman presents sexuality as a complex issue. In paintings such as “Boob Gold,” “Pussy Gold,” and the “Pussy Donation Box” series (all 2018), the female subjects confront the viewer directly, not as innocent victims but as messengers of reality.

The “Pussy Donation Box” paintings have literal slits cut into the canvases, F A B R I K 97

Hayv Kahraman, Barricade 1, 2018. Oil on linen, 50 x 78 x 3 inches. Photo by Jeff McLane. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

into which cash donations can be inserted. As anthropologist Miriam Ticktin explains in her essay for the exhibition, Kahraman’s paintings “echo Orientalist fantasies in places like colonial Algeria, documented in old colonial postcards, where women were featured as oppressed and imprisoned in harems, and yet their largely fictional entrapment actually served as sexual fantasy for the West.”

When victims are not sexualized, they are often depicted, critically, as the “suffering other.” Kahraman has spoken about the 1991 relief concert, “The Simple Truth: A Concert for Kurdish Refugees,” a five-hour telethon aired in 36 98 F A B R I K

countries in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s genocidal attack. The artist points out that the refugees were depicted as “impoverished brown Kurdish bodies.” Her paintings, “The Celebrity,” “The Kurds” and “The Audience” include graphic spotlights, referencing the drama and artifice used to raise charitable donations.

The title of Kahraman’s exhibition, Silence is Gold, suggests that many people prefer refugees to be silent.

Kahraman gives them a voice.

At the closing reception for Silence is Gold, Kahraman’s performance, US and THEM, brought actual female bodies into the gallery space. Composed of dancers from The Sharon Disney Lund School of

Dance at CalArts, with vocal music and choreography by CalArts faculty Jessika Kenney and Ariel Osterweis, the experience added an additional layer of richness to Kahraman’s work.

The dance troupe moved throughout the gallery in a gradually intensifying display of contortions, sexualized movements and sounds, and cooperative actions.

Another collective performance

by Kahraman was presented at Pomona College Art Museum, where five works by the artist were displayed in the intimate Project Series Gallery. One of these paintings, “Barricade 2” (2018), was acquired by the museum.

The largest of these works was the triptych, “Read Me from Right to Left” (2017), (on loan from the WASSART Collection, Switzerland).

In this piece, ten female figures in nearly identical poses stare out at the viewer. The women are set against gestural swaths of broad, inky black brushstrokes contrasting with the pristine linen ground. The figures in the left and right panels are filled entirely with mahaffa-like woven

canvas strips. The piece was inspired

by President Trump’s 2017 travel ban, which triggered the artist’s uncomfortable memories of her flight from Iraq as a child refugee.

The title suggests that understanding people is much like reading text: just as Arabic cannot be read leftto-right like English, immigrants, migrants and refugees deserve to be understood on their own terms.

Sprüth Magers Bridget Riley: Painting Now November 16, 2018— January 26, 2019 Text Jonathan Griffin A retrospective survey of paintings by British national treasure Bridget Riley is a rare treat in Los Angeles, and this exhibition of work made between 1960 and the present, defiantly titled Painting Now, proved that the 87-year-old artist is still firing on all cylinders.

The first and second canvases of “Memories of Horizons 1-3” (2014) hang together, at right angles; perhaps owing to their size (nearly

Bridget Riley, Horizontal Vibration, 1961, Tempera on hardboard, 17 1/2 x 55 1/2 inches. © Bridget Riley 2018.

All rights reserved. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers.

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11 feet wide), the third is across the room. At first – and second, and third – look, 1 and 2 seem identical: horizontal stripe paintings in Riley’s signature hard-edged style, dominated by shades of dusky rose and violet with aquamarine accents.

As one glances back and forth, rhythms emerge, subtle gradients build up then are interrupted, one color affects its neighbor, a third tone often fizzes at the meeting of two colors. (Robert Irwin comes to mind; “Memories of Horizons 1-3” is in direct dialogue with his painstaking rows of colored fluorescent tubes.)

Eventually, the difference between the two paintings becomes apparent: a single stripe, near the top, that is mauve in one canvas and orange in the other. The entire painting pivots on this modest change.

If this observational exercise sounds like hard work, it isn’t.

There is a joyful generosity in Riley’s painting that is nevertheless undergirded by rigorous perceptual study. The upstairs galleries are dominated by examples from the series “Measure for Measure,” the earliest of which is from 2016 and the most recent 2018. Riley burrows through endless possibilities within narrow parameters. All the paintings in “Measure for Measure” feature the same brown, sage green and violet discs, arranged (as opposed to Damien Hirst’s far less rigorous spot paintings) in diagonal grids. Initially, the somber “Measure for Measure” paintings seem almost depressing 100 F A B R I K

in comparison to the jazzy élan of black-and-white paintings such as “Cascando” (2015) or the early, dizzying, “Descending” (1965). As always, however, Riley rewards patience. The drab discs start to pulse and the negative white space around them appears to glow, as if backlit.

There is magic in Riley’s paintings, but as with the best magicians, she does not try too hard to hide the trickery. She is not trying to fool you, but to teach you.

Even though, for many years, she has employed skilled draftsmen to execute her paintings for her, the eye still catches the occasional pencil mark or line wobble. Those stripes are not masked with tape, but are hand-painted. Their imperfections – visible only up close – make Riley’s paintings all the more marvelous, since at a distance of a few feet they seem inhumanly perfect.

Kohn Gallery Tony Berlant: Fast Forward September 22—November 2, 2018 Text Peter Frank From the start, Tony Berlant’s technique, engaging eccentric cuttings of printed metal affixed with brads to flat surfaces, has proven so readily identifiable that it not only represents, but signals the artist. The method effectively brands Berlant in one of the coziest fits in modern Western art. He has employed this labor-intensive, industrial-era method

Tony Berlant, Garden, 2018, Found and fabricated printed tin collaged on plywood with steel brads, 57 x 72 in.

Photo: Karl Puchlik, Courtesy Kohn Gallery.

for more than half a century – quite a long run. Such faithfulness to both medium and method constantly challenges Berlant to wrest significant changes from one body of work to the next, that is, to constantly come up with distinctions that are true differences.

In this most recent selection spanning the last four years, Berlant offered a group of the free-standing and wall-hung objects, most small in scale, that have always peppered his exhibitions and that are normally the charmers of the show. Shaped as blocks, double-sided panels, or even house-like formations, and

clad in collaged, punctured metal skins brimming with detail, they show off Berlant’s colorful and obsessive manner to maximum effect. This time, however, they were overshadowed – not just physically – by the immense panels unfurled in the gallery’s forward room. Many apparently concocted in just the last several months before the show, these vast fields of repeated, usually patterned shapes and silhouettes washing across one another, pull Berlant away from his Pop roots and towards a more painterly model.

Not only their size, but their febrile imagery, conjure the expansive F A B R I K 101

gesturality of Abstract Expressionism and equally the vitality – and depth of field – of 19th-century American landscape painting. Busily rhythmic as they may be, and comfortably as the Pattern & Decoration label affixes to them, these deliriously engulfing panels are only secondarily about surface: they are explorations in lateral structure, non-atmospheric space and the resulting dynamic that hums in the eye between second and third dimensions.

Laband Art Gallery at Loyola Marymount University Judy Dater: Only Human October 6—December 8, 2018 Text Michael Shaw Only Human, a modest-sized survey of Judy Dater’s work covering five decades, makes a compelling case for the continued relevance of traditional black-and-white portrait photography. It’s not an easy sell, as rows of thoroughly matted and framed silver gelatin prints can quickly dissolve into an academic, overly craft-based realm. Dater grew up in Los Angeles but has spent the majority of her career (including her formative years) in the Bay Area, and was mentored by some members of the photography collective Group f.64, including legends Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham.

Perhaps her most famous image, included in the show, features an elder Cunningham peering across the base of a large tree at nude model 102 F A B R I K

Twinka Thiebaud (who is featured on her own in another Dater portrait).

In Dater’s photo, as opposed to the painting that inspired it, Thomas Hart Benton’s “Persephone, (1939)” Thiebaud peers back at her onlooker.

This feminist impulse of Dater’s, defying and/or subverting the objectified gaze, has taken various forms, from her frank portraits of women, whether clothed or (in the case of “Maggie Smoking, Mill Valley, California”) topless but empowered; smoking a cigarette without the slightest vulnerability to Dater herself, in a 1970 self-portrait, standing nude above a crater by a lake with a sparkler lighting her crotch from behind, creating the appearance of male urination in the process.

Dater was also an early portrayer of androgynous individuals, looking at gender fluidity as far back as 1964, with “Anna, Grass Valley, California,” a portrait of a woman who both owns her identity and, through her receding posture into an inclining wall corner, also withdraws. Gender ambiguity reappears more than 30 years later, in the midst of Dater’s travels in Rome, in “Paola Tenti, Rome, Italy.” The subject bears in her breast pocket a small reproduction of Caravaggio’s “Boy with a Basket of Fruit,” a clever, if somewhat contrived, shortcut attempting to draw an art historical arc in androgyny.

Dater’s subjects, also spanning the spectra of age and ethnicity, tend to carry a tremendous visceral

“Judy Dater: Only Human” installation view at the Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University.

Photo: Ruben Diaz. Courtesy of the artist and Laband Art Gallery.

presence, whether it’s the moonlike, floating bald head of a man

in “Dreamer, Berkeley, California” from 2014, or the muscular and

unapologetic sexuality of “Nehmia, Mill Valley, California” (1975).

The power emanating from

Dater’s photographs isn’t flashy or spectacular, but it is of more than

enough substance to transcend the rote associations of the black-andwhite photo ghetto.

Craft & Folk Art Museum Merion Estes: Unnatural Disasters September 30—January 6, 2019 Text Suvan Geer The power of the decorative in

Merion Estes’ hands is that she can

make abstraction and pattern slide so swiftly from visual beguilement into active riot. This 20-year survey at the Craft and Folk Museum pulls together some of the artist’s most restless and disturbing takes on the beleaguered state of the natural world.

Most of these artworks are tapestry-sized, multiple-layered fabric collages made with photo transfers as well as myriad decorative shapes, landscape fragments or animal images laboriously hand cut from mass produced printed fabric.

The elements are assembled quiltlike and glued down into repetitive patterns or suggestive landscapes on unstretched fabric grounds. But it is the way Estes then stains, paints, drips or over sprays these fragments F A B R I K 103

Merion Estes, Cooling Trend, 2017, Fabric collage and spray paint on canvas, 86 x 115 inches.

Photo by Matt Kazmer. Courtesy of the artist.

with aggressive, eye-popping

is a cool ribbon of transparent

blues — along with sprinkles of garish

relief seems fraught as the blue

yellows, oranges, reds and electrified glitter — that makes her surfaces into

a no-holds-barred call for attention to environmental destruction.

“Cooling Trend” (2017) is a

blue. Yet even this moment of

current carries with it a rain of black drops suggesting the presence of contamination in the wind.

Unnatural Disasters presents

large-scale (86 x 111 inch) collaged

nature as a traumatized landscape

Amid its fiery cross currents, wind

collided against the planet’s delicate

sky of radiant orange visual heat. tossed black blossoms and red

burning silhouettes of flying black

crows, small patches of fresh vivid green seem to shrink under the

barrage of a number of yellow rising suns. Waving through it all though 104 F A B R I K

where human industry has forcefully balance. The dire threat envisioned

here may be repellant, but the artist’s adroit use of pattern’s decorative rhythms, gangbuster colors and

fragments of delicate imbedded

beauty compels us to keep looking.

Ibid Gallery, Los Angeles Craig Kucia: unnatural disasters November 17—December 15, 2018 Text Shana Nys Dambrot Craig Kucia’s paintings on canvas and paper provide a crash course in 20th century art history – each one of them. They contain accumulated techniques and stylistic denominators referencing and recombining, in various ratios, Guston, Braque, Matisse, Magritte, Pollock, de Chirico, Pattern &

Decoration, Photoshop and sampled popular culture. But this is not simple appropriation; Kucia’s imagery is original to himself, in both autobiographical and more broadly cultural contexts. Kucia’s eccentric palette, textile-like pattern fields, frequent use of impasto in both purely optical and depictive metonymic instances, and knack for making personal talismans out of familiar things, all combine to produce a universe of wit and pleasure.

Craig Kucia, mostly bones that bruise easily, 2017, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches. Photo by Ruben Diaz.

Courtesy of the artist and Ibid Gallery.

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Certain motifs – trompe-l’oeil sheets of paper taped to walls, lit cigarettes, floral wallpaper – recur throughout the images. A few of the paintings are sparse and explore single ideas; several of the most impressive contain compendia like indices, determining allegories for the artist’s individual and archetypal experience. For example, in “skull sculpture” (2015) a pedestal made of Pollock drips undergirds a stack of skulls in a procession of styles and references – classical, calavera, Cubist, contemporary and a coconut.

In the masterful “in the absence of bad news we were like bats” (2018), we finally see the artist’s face, or at least half of it. His brain is a painting dangling from a wire hanger, his right hand balances a stack of nine dead songbirds, each one a different combination of color and technique.

A piece of blank paper taped to the wall, a pet cat whose head is a clock, a tree branch growing through the table, and other elements of motifs seen across the show populate this space. Kucia’s shirt pocket is full of pens and paintbrushes. It’s all operatic yet straightforward, fraught yet frank, endearing and strange.

Only the toilet paper is a mystery.

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Nicodim Gallery Robert Yarber: Return of the Repressed September 8—October 30, 2018 Text Jeanne Willette Robert Yarber has warned against trying to tie down the content of his paintings through a futile search for meaning. “These works are not distilled in any way,” the artist has written, “either in my own mind or anyone else’s. They’re open to interpretation. The spelunker of the future will go into these caverns of my mind and make of them what they will. I take responsibility for this.

It’s dangerous.”

Rather than go down the rabbit hole that is the mind of Robert Yarber, ask instead a Foucauldian question: What conditions made these works possible? Chronology provides part of the answer. Yarber caught the crest of the 1980s postmodern wave, riding the return of repressed painting and given permission to break all the modernist rules. Properly installed, these works hang low, enveloping the viewer, who is sucked into the vortex that Yarber has punched in the flat grid of modernism. In these works from the ’80s, and nightmares painted the other day, the ecstatic mash-up of low culture bubbling up from an orgy of drawing masquerading as painting is permissible only when all that was serious and formalist has been put to death. The dark nightmares of suspended figures, in “Gas and

Robert Yarber, Gas and Limited Oxygen, 2018, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 132 inches. Photo by Lee Thompson.

Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery.

Limited Oxygen” (2018), rimmed with garish slashes, seem to reflect our precarious times in which we are all trapped in drug-induced dreams from which we can’t awaken. Yarber’s Rimbaudian descents into blazing hells are the more fearsome for their resistance to interpretation. Meaning has been swallowed by fear itself.

IRVINE, CALIFORNIA Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine R. Luke DuBois: Music into Data::Data into Music September 29, 2018— February 2, 2019 Text Liz Goldner Set in a darkened exhibition space, lit primarily by videos, Music into Data::Data into Music explores the auditory, visual and verbal

structures and underpinnings of contemporary culture. Four of the six pieces by R. Luke DuBois in this multidisciplinary show reveal that videos can be manipulated to sound otherworldly and/or cacophonous, thereby addressing the deluge of sensory ephemera in our lives.

In two pieces on view, DuBois, an artist-musician who works with IT platforms in music, processed sound and video, depicts “time-lapse phonography” or music (contained within videos) that is slowed down.

Illustrating this concept is “Vertical Music (for twelve musicians filmed at high speed)” (2012), a compelling video, featuring musicians playing a chamber piece composed by DuBois. Each player was recorded separately; then the videos were slowed down, resulting in nuanced concentration by the performers, F A B R I K 107

R. Luke DuBois, Music into Data::Data into Music, Installation View at Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine. Photo by Will Tee Yang.

along with music that borders on the

(2009-2010) documents 365 musical

seven of the artist’s classically trained

speakers with earbuds. Remarkably,

surreal. The similar “Video,” featuring musician collaborators, is slowed down to one-tenth of recorded speed, portraying the players’

subtle gestures and expressions.

Two cacophonous, and pointedly

political, videos feature acceptance

speeches of presidential candidates.

The second video, “Acceptance

2016” (2016), contains speeches by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump,

which the artist manipulates to make

the candidates appear to mimic, and then correspond with each other.

Eclipsing the time-lapse

phonography, “A Year in MP3s” 108 F A B R I K

compositions accompanied by

DuBois created a piece of music every day for a year—a nearly

heroic feat in our inundated world.

“Prosody: WSB” (2014), even more conceptual, includes a typewriter

used by writer William S. Burroughs.

It also contains parts of his text,

and an audio track of Burroughs

reading his novel, “Junkie,” in his nasal but deeply resonant voice.

This 60-year-old recording becomes a counterpoint for the exhibition’s often-discordant sounds.

ENCINITAS, CALIFORNIA Lux Art Institute Lia Halloran: Artist-in-Residence September 7—November 3, 2018 Text Molly Enholm Los Angeles–based Lia Halloran has long explored the intersection of art and science, an idea manifest in the artist’s choice of both subject and medium. In her recent series, Halloran traces the cyanotype process back to its origins.

Astronomer Sir John Herschel invented the process in 1842 as a way to duplicate his extensive notes about the very subject Halloran explores here. Creating large-scale cyanotypes, some up to six and even eight feet in height, Halloran uses the sun to create images of the universe — solar selfies, if you will. But the images have a history of their own.

The artist’s research was abetted by a

partnership with Harvard University, allowing her to use historic

astronomical photographic plates as sources for her imagery. These plates were made by a group of

women who worked at the university from the late 18th century until the

20th. Rather than being recognized individually for their contributions,

the women were known collectively as “Pickering’s Harem,” and later as “The Harvard Computers.”

The exhibition at Lux included

ten cyanotypes and one of the artist’s hand-inked negative transparencies, countered with a series of smaller

portraits of planets, stars and solar systems, mounted in a diamond

formation in the far corner of the gallery. These monochromatic

visions convey a feeling of grandeur and simplicity, despite the vast

complexity of Halloran’s subject.

Kant’s well-worn definition of the

sublime, predicated upon the feeling

Lia Halloran, Triangulum, After Adelaide Ames, 2016, Cyanotype print, 168 x 84 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

F A B R I K 109

of terror when confronted with the incomprehensible vastness of the natural world or the universe, never quite manifests here. But neither do Halloran’s galactic cyanotypes offer a dry, rational taxonomy. Rather, what comes across is the sheer splendor of this experience, as if crystallizing that moment at which the unknowable is brought into the framework of the known. It is captured in the swirling pools of cyan blue into which the sun has bleached the spiral paths of distant galaxies alongside traces of the artist’s gestural brushstrokes. These marks do not embody an emotional exercise, as is regularly attributed to the gestural brushstroke, but instead provide an indexical sign of humanity’s presence within, and mediation of, the sublime of our wondrous, ever-expanding universe.

SAN FRANCISCO McEvoy Foundation for the Arts No Time September 21, 2018— January 19, 2019 Text JD Beltran A year ago, photographer Cristina Mittermeier’s photograph of a starving polar bear on an ice floe transformed “climate change” from vague concept to horrific and searing reality. For many of the estimated 2.5 billion people the image reached, it was a visceral depiction of this possible, even probable, future.

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Mittermeier’s photo underscored the power the image has to irrevocably shift how we think, a power leveraged in No Time, an ambitious, far-reaching exhibition at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, organized by curator and Executive Director Susan Miller.

The show assembles more than 50 works that illuminate art’s ability to momentarily frame, shape and alter our ideas about the landscape and the natural world around us.

Some works might even jar us out of complacency, compelling a deeper humility and perhaps a call to action in our own lives. In Graciela Iturbide’s humble black-and-white photograph, “Mujer Ángel, Desierto de Sonora, México” (Angel Woman, Sonora Desert, Mexico) 1979, a Mexican woman atop a mountain scans a desert landscape, boombox in hand.

It’s an apt metaphor for the entire exhibition: we are merely visitors to this landscape, seeking our way, and bringing along our own soundtrack.

Trees loom large in many of the works, serving as graceful subjects, bystanders, or symbols. In “Tetons,” nature’s inherent beauty shines from Lee Friedlander’s barren and snow-drifted trees as they offer a luxuriant, lacy winter curtain. Larry Sultan’s “Backyard Hercules” (2008), by contrast, depicts a homeowner, dwarfed by eucalyptus trees that have showered his residence with their debris, as he hunches over a pool rake in futile ritual. A nearby Mitch Epstein photograph features

a gigantic verdant pine that has managed to thrive straddling a cliff, its roots hanging in thin air.

Other works mine and subtly mock our tendency to mimic the natural landscape in built environments. In Diane Arbus’ “A lobby in a building, N.Y.C.” (1966), a mundane office building lobby suddenly becomes a

bucolic riverbank thanks to the magic of floor-to-ceiling wallpaper.

The show’s sculptural works are a highlight. Kim Simonsson’s installations—strange, surreal sculptures of tiny child travelers garbed in exploration gear and covered in bright green moss— appear in all three rooms of the

Kim Simonsson, Spaceman, 2017, Stoneware, nylon fiber, 33 1/2 x 12 x 20 ¾ inches. Photo by Robert Cass.

Courtesy of Jason Jacques Gallery.

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exhibition, extending the notion that we are merely visitors on this planet.

Tony Matelli’s stunning “Weed #414” (2018), a painted bronze of a flowering weed (indistinguishable from the real thing), is brilliantly staged in the space, a site-specific intruder appearing to grow out of a crack where the wall meets the floor.

In a companion media exhibition, film curators Kathleen Maguire and Samuel Sharkey assembled an extraordinary collection of 13 films and videos. Many films utilize the lens of abstraction, using technology and the element of time to tap into the seductive geometries and rhythms of natural forms and phenomena: waves, mountains, sun and light. Notable is Jan van IJken’s mesmerizing “The art of flying,” in which tens of thousands of starlings create undulating sculptures in the sky.

One cannot regard this work without the sobering realization that the show’s title really does mean no time; given recent reports, we’ve little more than a decade to shift the habits of the entire planet, or else face its likely demise. In Lars von Trier’s 2011 movie “Melancholia,” a giant silver planet heads towards a deadly collision course with Earth, and one of the characters fashions a flimsy, awkward loop of wire to track the planet’s closeness by its scale in the circle. The loop resembles a lasso, a fitting metaphor for his feeble attempt to contain the inevitable. Like the artwork in 112 F A B R I K

No Time, our efforts to frame and contain nature can certainly gift us with beautiful, poetic, indelible moments—but they also remind us that, in reality, nature cannot really be harnessed.

Catharine Clark Gallery Sandow Birk: Imaginary Monuments II October 20—December 22, 2018 Text DeWitt Cheng In his Imaginary Monuments II drawings, Sandow Birk continues to entice us with an intriguing view of history and politics. Following his 2015 Imaginary Monuments series, Birk depicts, in twelve large ink drawings, grandiose neoclassicalstyle monuments: mountains of columns, capitals and pediments, rendered in detail worthy of lateeighteenth-century antiquarian artists whose aesthetically preserved Roman ruins served as historical documents and meditations on the ravages of time. A decade ago, Birk, then artist-in-residence at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, was fascinated by the idealism of the Smithsonian’s founders, as recorded in documents he examined, yet bemused by the kitschy superficiality of the “tourist world” along the National Mall outside. The gap between theory and reality permeates these elephantfolio-scale drawings of an ideal city full of text-covered monuments, replete with tiny observers. Birk’s

Sandow Birk, Cleaning the Brush from the temple of Unbelief, 2018, Ink on paper, 42 x 60 inches. Courtesy of Catharine Clark Gallery.

absurd utopian structures recall the captivating visionary architecture of the Napoleonic era buildings proposed by Boullée, Ledoux and Lequeu, but too colossal or fantastic to be built.

If Birk’s panoramic vistas and infinitesimal detail recall magnificent vanished civilizations, his titles and faux-engraved texts—celebrating the durability of logical fallacies, including whataboutism; countries bombed by the US; income equality; American sanctimony; and useless platitudes—subvert delusions of grandeur (as if we were now in that mood). Today, we cannot understand these impressive monuments to

history and philosophy—and human ingenuity and idealism—without a measure of rueful irony. “Hiking in to the Monument to the Age of the World” (2018) portrays two pilgrims traipsing to a ruined column memorializing Archbishop James Ussher’s 1650 “The Annals of the World,” which, based on biblical calculations, assigned October 22, 4004 BC, around 6 p.m. as the date and time of Creation. The wealth of philosophic and religious references in “Clearing the Brush from the Temple of Unbelief” (2018)—Spinoza, Shelley, Nietzsche—shows that God is dead, again, and many are His eternally returning prophets.

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UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive Christina Quarles: Matrix 271 September 19—November 18, 2018 Text Matt Sussman

and mis-read, by others. The Matrix

Christina Quarles’ large-scale figure paintings offer beguiling new ways of portraying difference, frequently pushing the limits of representation. Such ambiguity, however, offers a persuasive visual correlative to the messy and often dissociative experience of living in a body that will invariably be read,

two, and sometimes more, elongated

271 exhibition consisted of six acrylic paintings made during the last two years and three new ones. All nine canvases depict arrangements of human figures, embracing or

intertwining around one another

like eels in a basket, amidst sherbet-

colored landscapes that disintegrate around them. The occasional curve of a breast or haunch suggest

the female form, but the gender of Quarles’ subjects is implicit, a

Christina Quarles, June Gloom, 2017, Acrylic on canvas, 50 x 56 inches. Collection of Jill Soloway. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Pilar Corrias, London. © Christina Quarles.

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secondary concern. Quarles seems more interested in, say, their hands.

Her figures’ appendages are extraordinary neo-Mannerist tributes, their fingers splayed open like spider mums and delicately outlined in black, whereas a wash of gray or tangerine is frequently enough to suggest the rest of a body. This toggling between transparency and substance is a hallmark of Quarles’ brushwork, and carries over into the liminal spaces these bodies occupy.

Quarles has terraformed the vibrant palettes and picturesque vistas of David Hockney’s ’60s poolside patios into rectangles of pattern or shape that jut perpendicularly from the picture plane like stage flats, destabilizing distinctions between exterior and interior space: sunsets appear on billboards, plantings become wallpaper. But for all their vibrancy and play of surfaces, Quarles’ paintings are suffused with melancholy; titles such as “June Gloom” (2017) or “Are Hands, Are Tied (Our Hands, We Tried)” (2018) are certainly suggestive in this regard. The summertime sadness is a burden carried by the figures within them, discernable in their slumped shoulders and splayed limbs. The ambiguity of their embraces suggest eroticism can be as much a matter of holding space for a shared solace as it is of sex itself. Quarles has spoken of how tiring it can be to have to continually negotiate being seen as black and queer. Exhaustion becomes a symptom of the larger

violence of living under prevailing regimes of gender and race — an exhaustion that is both psychic and physical. Quarles’ paintings, despite their initial slipperiness and dazzling technique, quite clearly depict this hidden cost attendant to the burden of being visible.

Paul Thiebaud Gallery Wayne Thiebaud: Monotypes December 1, 2018—January 26, 2019 Text Hearne Pardee Wayne Thiebaud likes to test the limits of his materials. Known for transforming heavily worked paint into cake frosting or for applying it in sculptural layers to poignant renderings of mountain crags, he’s inverted his procedure in his Monotypes, making direct impressions on paper of surfaces prepared with watercolor and ink.

Freed of the weighty tradition of oils, these airy, gestural prints—quick and unique—have more in common with photography. They inspire a fresh spirit of discovery and sheer visual exuberance in an artist who once aspired to be an art director, as he revisits themes from his paintings that reflect the influence of comics, advertising and movies.

There’s only one piece of cake among the 41 works in this series, created in two working sessions: six in collaboration with painter Nathan Oliveira at Stanford University in 1977 and the remainder in San Francisco at Crown Point Press in F A B R I K 115

Wayne Thiebaud, Untitled (Players), 1991. Monotype, image: 10 3/4 x 15 1/4 inches, sheet: 21 1/4 x 24 15/16 inches. Photo by Phocasso / J.W. White. Courtesy of Paul Thiebaud Gallery.

1991. The Crown Point prints explore a wider range of inks, watercolor pencils and pens, applied to grounds of aquatint to achieve a fluid fusion of drawing and color. They combine delicate meshes of lines with squashed blobs of pigment. The technique lends itself to atmospheric effects that recall Turner and Constable, evoking the sublime, but Thiebaud also incorporates irreverent cartoon devices, like a diagonal horizon line from corner to corner, or a cloud poised like a thought balloon over what resembles the Empire State Building. Above crowded freeways, isolated figures in high office spaces recall Hopper’s cinematic anomie, while groups of 116 F A B R I K

figures on the beach, including the

flying acrobats in “Untitled Players” (1991), lend urban anonymity to recreation; they suggest a

compendium of contemporary life

rather like Dziga Vertov’s landmark film, “Man with a Movie Camera” (1929). One of the largest prints, of an elaborately plumed circus

performer, emphasizes the overall theatricality.

Casemore Kirkeby Gallery Suné Woods: This Body is Alive September 8—November 17, 2018 Text Maria Porges Suné Woods’ beautifully paced

and installed exhibition invokes a

dreamy world, aqueous yet earthly, in which bodies are alternately at rest and in motion. Movement is either portrayed directly – a 21-minute video features Woods in the ocean, a yellow jackfish swimming around her – or implied, in complex, dimensional photographic collages, their paper roughly formed into bas reliefs. Across the end of the main room, visitors may rest on a triangular thigh-high platform covered in purple shag carpeting.

The platform and the video serve as a frame for the photographic works in the two main rooms.

Woods’ found-image collages behave more like objects than images, offering a pleasantly unsettling visual experience. Their deeply crumpled surfaces obscure fragments of bodies, landscape

and sky into irregular shapes that subvert any kind of conventional expectations of how photographs are supposed to behave. A grouping of seven such pieces (Of Water 1-7, all 2018) seems at first to be a constellation of pure form. Close inspection reveals that, within their pale gray tonality, bleached-out views of ocean waves can be seen below a low horizon and a blank, pacific sky, like a memory half hidden from conscious view behind the constant chatter of daily life.

As a reminder of our relationship to (and dependence on) nature, these and other of Woods’ works also function as metaphors for our interdependence, not only with other species, but each other.

A sound installation plays over the carpeted platform at a discreet

Suné Woods, This Body is Alive. Installation View. Courtesy of Casemore Kirkeby and Suné Woods.

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volume. Combining Tibetan bells, crickets, the voices of two performers and gurgling water sampled from the video of Woods and the jackfish, it subtly alters the viewer’s experience of the entire show. Delicate shards of music and beautiful noise seem to reify the fragmented figures in Woods’ collages, clarifying their poetic message.

PORTLAND Russo Lee Gallery Ko Kirk Yamahira: deconstruction and reconstruction October 4—27, 2018 Text Richard Speer Obsessively meticulous and labor-intensive in their construction, borderline perverse in their

fetishization of process and materials, Ko Kirk Yamahira’s mixed-media constructions push painting into the realm of the sculptural. The works begin as color-field paintings or silkscreens, but they don’t stay in that form for long. The Seattlebased artist uses an X-acto blade and scissors to unweave portions, or the entirety, of each canvas, deconstructing the picture plane into an assortment of hanging threads and fuzzy nap. He variously combs, drapes and otherwise manipulates these components, while also placing the stretcher bars in counterintuitive positions until the painting has essentially become a site-specific sculptural installation.

The results of this reductive process recall the geometries of Robert

Ko Kirk Yamahira, “Deconstruction and Reconstruction” installation view at Russo Lee Gallery.

Photo by Eric Mellencamp.

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Mangold or Ellsworth Kelly, or Sam Gilliam’s radical reimagination of the potentialities of canvas.

In Russo Lee’s front exhibition space, Yamahira’s dramatically installed works (all untitled) seemed to dialogue with one another in an intuitive call-and-response. The symmetrical layout of a charcoal gray canvas contrasted with the jaunty, jazz-like asymmetry of a rose canvas, while in the center of the gallery, a completely unwoven canvas yawned in a wide arch, the rectilinearity of its stretcher bars playing against the lyricism of the drooping, sinuous threads.

Interestingly, the artist’s facility with coaxing shape and source material into virtuosic—and sometimes visually perplexing—configurations shares a similar modus operandi with another Seattle-based artist, Joe Rudko.

Although they work in very different media (Rudko’s métier is works on paper), both artists intuit that radical acts of destruction and reassembly allow a picture plane and the elements that undergird it to be seen in fresh ways. With surgical precision and inexhaustible compositional invention, Yamahira recontextualizes the building blocks of painting into sumptuous, unexpectedly sensual objects that defy easy categorization.

SEATTLE Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) Gary Hill: Linguistic Spill ([Un]Contained) July 26—September 29, 2018 Text Matthew Kangas Linguistic Spill ([Un]Contained), exhibited last summer through early fall, was connected to a similar concurrent project of Gary Hill’s at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon, Portugal. Meanwhile, Hill’s Seattle Central Library work Astronomy by Day (and other oxymorons) (200305), commissioned for the Rem Koolhaas-designed building, was removed due to faulty equipment and other technical glitches.

Visitors entered Linguistic Spill ([Un]Contained) through CoCA’s unusually narrow, deep space, triggering lights and floor-and ceiling-based video projectors.

Accompanied by audio, numerous projectors transmitted wildly gyrating, green linear patterns onto the ceiling and walls. Proceeding further into the space without obvious pathways, viewers created their own meandering performance in the midst of flashing green lights, laserlike, exploding networks and blaring, crackly electronic static.

Contemplating any broader potential meaning of a piece ostensibly titled to draw attention to language, one thinks of the remarks of the late Robert Morris who said he F A B R I K 119

Gary Hill, Linguistic Spill ([Un]Contained) installation view at Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA). Photo by Joseph C. Roberts. Courtesy of the artist.

wanted to make art that “does not seek control through explanation.”

Leaving interpretation in the hands of the visitor, Hill’s installation is among his most self-contained and concise.

As in the best of his works, such as “Tall Ships” (1992) (a darkened corridor with a phalanx of electronic equipment on either side), the human body, not technology or critical theory, is the recurrent element in Linguistic Spill ([Un]Contained).

As one navigates in the flickering darkness, various routes of access or exit are illuminated, demarking a 120 F A B R I K

newly found theatrical dimension or coerced choreographic movement.

In this sense, Hill is perhaps the most choreographic of video sculptors.

At the same time, Linguistic Spill ([Un]Contained) grows out of Hill’s earliest developments in expanding sculptural space with different media elements such as video, sound and light. Free of words, the work could yet symbolize the sensory overload made so common today by the instant accessibility of social media and other vehicles of information reception.

Greg Kucera Gallery Marie Watt: Companion Species Calling Companion Species September 11—October 23, 2018 Text T.S. Flock There is no shortage of kitsch featuring man’s best friend. Rare is the nuanced exploration of the primal pact between humans and dogs, as portrayed in Marie Watt’s exhibition, Companion Species Calling Companion Species. In her array of textiles, etchings and sculptures depicting dogs, wolves and wolf-dogs, Watt regards humans’ fierce and beloved partners with unabashed reverence.

Archeological evidence places the advent of domesticated dogs well before that of organized

agriculture, let alone written

history. In fact, anthropologist Pat Shipman argues compellingly in her book, “The Invaders: How

Humans and Their Dogs Drove

Neanderthals to Extinction,” that

it was the domestication of dogs

by early human hunter-gatherers that allowed the two species to

dominate wherever they roamed—the beginning of the end for countless other species, including ancestral wolf-dogs themselves.

There is, thus, a dark side to

this coexistence, one that becomes clearer if one attempts to step

outside an anthropocentric frame.

Watt seems at first to be doing the opposite, literally putting human words in the mouth of a baying

Marie Watt, Companion Species (Underbelly), 2018, Aromatic cedar, 130 x 183 x 136 inches.

Courtesy of Greg Kucera Gallery.

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wolf-dog on an embroidered wool blanket (the exhibit’s eponymous piece). However, the concepts conveyed—of family, determination, conflict—are essential to social animals, with or without a common tongue or abstract thought.

The exhibit was dominated by a nearly 11-foot tall, reclaimed-cedar monument of a reclining she-wolf resting on a crate-like pedestal. This served to scent the gallery with the flavor of the wilderness and declare the reverent nature of this body of work. Most affecting, however, was Watt’s preoccupation with the canine tongue, which appears throughout the works. The softness, the silliness, the affection associated with it stands in such contrast to the creature’s sharp, predatory aspects. (In one work that shows only the tongue embroidered on a wool blanket, she refers to it as a “petal.”) Amid the show’s exuberant caninophilia, these gentle lingual gestures remained exercises in ambiguity rather than sentiment, a sign that—even without a common tongue—we’re still learning from each other.

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TUCSON Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson Blessed Be: Mysticism, Spirituality, and the Occult in Contemporary Art September 15—December 30, 2018 Text Lynn Trimble Even as traditional religious practice wanes in American life, pop culture is laced with pseudospirituality, from mediums turned TV stars to tarot cards as party trick. Enter the art museum, hailed as church for the religion-less by Blessed Be curator Ginger Shulick Porcella. Embracing social justice as the new spirituality, Porcella built a compelling altar to inclusion.

The outside of MOCA Tucson was hung with Mikala Dwyer’s “The Expectors” (2018), large-scale fabric banners imbued with eclectic symbolism. Here, the museum staked its claim as sacred space, and never let go. Inside, a cavernous gallery functioned like a medieval cathedral, large windows and other architectural elements invoking a sense of awe. Other dimly-lit spaces resembled the passageways of ancient catacombs.

Works by 19 artists were exhibited in these spaces, where plays on the contrast of dark and light prevalent in several religious traditions heightened the artwork’s collective impact. Primarily largescale works, including three of Christopher Carroll’s “Magic Squares” frescos (2016) and Scott

Cassils, Becoming an Image Performance Still Nos. 1-4, 2013 (National Theatre Studio, SPILL Festival, London) C-print, edition of 5, 22 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson.

Treleaven’s “Animal Chapel” drawing (2015), hung on white walls inside the main gallery. Open space abounded, giving each art object the aura of a precious relic.

The Cassils’ installation took center place in the midst of all this.

A large black box—similar in size to to a Catholic confessional—the exterior of the piece featured performative photographs of the artist vigorously working 2,000 pounds of clay. Inside, recorded sounds from Cassil’s labored quest darted all around, signaling the power required to manifest things unseen.

Several artists in the show work with non-conventional materials such as body fluids, grape Kool-Aid,

and tincture from poisonous plants, prompting reflection on practitioners from pagan sects to cult leader Jim Jones. Mystery was a common thread here, imbued through materials, subject matter and the curator’s magical use of space.

A door led to a series of small rooms, one including Candice Lin’s video recounting 19th-century forced labor in the Caribbean (“La Charada China,” 2018) and a related mixed-media installation that takes the form of a shamanist offering (“Despacho for Chinese Coolie Laborers,” 2018). Nearby, another room was filled with documentation for Adam Cooper-Terán and Steven Johnson Leyba’s decade-long F A B R I K 123

practice of publicly cursing corporations that fuel war and injustice, with a hex altar inviting viewer participation (“INVOKATION OV RECKONING: A Curse on Your Corporate Masters, A Magickal Retrospective,” 2008-2018).

The exhibition thus linked spirituality with social justice.

Perceptions of unseen worlds magnified the need for action in the known world, rather than promulgating escapism or apathy.

It was particularly poignant in the context of contemporary American life, now seeped in fear of the “Other” and rife with disenfranchisement. Exhibition materials referenced “the human impulse to belong and participate,” conveyed by artists who privilege feminism, indigeneity and queer identity. Zadie Xa’s trio of garments bearing fantastical images, for example, are rooted in a form of feminist indigenous shamanism in Korea.

More than a mere survey that happened to explore spiritual impulses, the exhibition relied directly on the power of art to generate mystical experience, translating that power into action.

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SANTA FE Charlotte Jackson Fine Art David Simpson: Illumination October 5—November 3, 2018 Text Amanda Malloy Incorporating Interference paints — transparent formulas containing reflective coated mica flakes — over his mono-pigmented works, David Simpson has managed to capture one of the most elusive elements of painting: light. One of the earliest post-painterly abstractionists, Simpson produces not minimal, but rather, as he puts it, “essential” painting. Pared to their most basic elements, there is a clarity and organic lightness to his work. These paintings are not dependent on shape, line, or composition; their sole concern is the convergence of color and light. Simpson’s ingenious use of Interference pigments brings his paintings to life with an opalescent sheen. They are not flat and monochromatic, but shift notably, depending on the angle from which they are viewed and the light source that illuminates them.

Yet, as the artist himself has acknowledged, this opalescence could easily come across as merely, or overly, beautiful or decorative.

Simpson combats this in two ways.

First, in exhibition (as shown here), the pairings of colored panels have a slight dissonance that subtly disrupts the pure, delicious pleasure of the seemingly luminous

David Simpson, Blue Monday, 2017. Acrylic on canvas on board (interference pigment), 34 x 34 x 2 inches.

Courtesy Charlotte Jackson Fine Art.

paintings themselves. Secondly,

paintings. Stark black backgrounds

detected in an individual piece,

forms. While very different from

slight variations in texture can be such as a natural patina of erosion.

The exhibition also included a

number of small acrylic-on-canvas works that deviate schematically from Simpson’s Interference

highlight pastel-toned abstract

their counterparts in the exhibition, like fireworks against a dark sky,

they continue to explore light while incorporating its contradictory element, darkness.

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ALBUQUERQUE 516 Arts Currency: What Do You Value?

November 17, 2018— February 23, 2019 Text Wesley Pulkka Walking into the polemical exhibition Currency: What Do You Value? is a bit like stepping onto the set of Toho Studio’s 1961 B-movie sci-fi thriller “Mothra” about a mythical monstrous moth, mutated by nuclear radiation, that rescues twin kidnapped fairies from the evil clutches of fictitious capitalist Clark Nelson. The trigger for this reverie is the trio of giant flying insects high up in the gallery’s atrium. These Mothra-scale creatures are actually butterflies constructed of images replicated from United States currency. These and other banknote laden butterflies are the brainchildren of Erika Harrsch who is also responsible for the dystopian masterpiece “Inverted Sky” a gorgeous mural-scale acrylic and collage on canvas that uses more banknote butterflies, man-made products and resulting jellyfish that are now filling earth’s acidic oceans, as harbingers of death, resurrection and final decomposition. Traditionally, butterflies have been emblematic of transformation and transmutation of the human soul after death. But in the context of this installation even the human soul has been monetized.

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Beyond Harrsch’s assessments, the Occupy Museums installation titled “Debtfair” focuses on labor, the burden of debt and rising living costs experienced by 97 New Mexico artists. The presentation includes a cutout wall section of sheetrock in the shape of the state of New Mexico housing 25 art objects; mounted adjacent to a large video screen that acts as a wailing wall for artists not among the 25 selected. The video showcases the work of all 97 artists with short statements by each about their financial difficulties.

At the south end of the main gallery is “The New Bootleggers: Fabricating (Im) Propriety,” an outstanding installation by Albuquerque artist Leonard Fresquez and 19 others that explores the world of knock-offs. While reminiscent of Keith Haring’s East Village shop that carried “knock-offs” of Haring’s own work in the form of postcards, tee shirts and prints, Fresquez asks deeper questions about who benefits from trademarks, product logos and name branding when unknown artisans are pressed into making such presumably rare objects. Fresquez’ storefront and interior could stand alone as a complete exhibition.

Albuquerque master painter Scott Greene offers “Deluge and Mountsanto,” two lusciously dark and impeccably executed murals that chronicle our descent into the morass of obsolescence endemic to

Scott Greene, Mountsanto, 2018, Oil on canvas on panel, 72 x 60 inches.

Courtesy of the artist and Turner Carroll Gallery, Santa Fe.

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a consumer-based economy. Greene is a truth-telling environmentalist who (to paraphrase Bob Dylan) can paint the rubber off the tire and scare the bird off the wire. In “Mountsanto,” Greene renders a mountain of sheep, home appliance carcasses, empty oil drums, foliage, an old neon cross and myriad other discards, all being climbed over by an industrial-grade farm tractor belching black smoke. The pyramid of waste reaches into a murky sky like a giant tumor growing on the earth’s surface, the result of corporations like Monsanto controlling what farmers can grow and the invention and exploitation of GMO crops, chemical fertilizers and patented seeds.

The show also examines the value of quotidian jobs. The workers holding those jobs are depicted as western movie set stage flats in Ramiro Gomez and David Feldman’s archival print series of groundskeepers, day laborers and maids. The figures are cardboard cutouts placed in settings that include “Las Meninas, North Facing Road, Bel Air” (2017), depicting two maids dressing a young-woman who was culled from Diego Velazquez’ 1656 painting “Las Meninas.” The 2017 composition is set in front of a gated California mansion.

Suggestions of Mothra’s charges loom again in “Black Tears and Black Rain,” a masterfully ambitious mixed-media mural by Albuquerque printmaker Yoshiko 128 F A B R I K

Shimano. Shimano cites the 1941 sinking of the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 as his inspiration, including in his picture the fossil-fuel-fairy-circles that formed as tears of oil rose above the Arizona and the black rain, contaminated with high levels of radioactive dust, that fell in Japan days after the blasts. Despite its content, Shimano’s elegant masterpiece offers the message that even arch-enemies can heal differences and become friends and allies.

Currency is a compound complex carnival filled with side shows emphasizing some aspect of our surreal global economic system that gives birth to coleslaw investment instruments like the derivatives market, currently valued at one point four quadrillion dollars, dwarfing the annual gross world product of about seventyfive trillion dollars. While some academics still debate the nuances surrounding the commodification of human expression, the artists in this installation confront the quotidian reality of a kitten crushing top-down economic system from behind a bulwark of whimsey, disdain, sadness, bravado and the enormous talent demanded by aesthetic mastery and hard work.

DENVER RedLine Margaret Neumann: What Lies Between November 10, 2018—January 6, 2019 Text Michael Paglia What Lies Between is the largest and most significant exhibition of the nearly 50-year painting career of Denver artist Margaret Neumann, who is represented by Rule Gallery.

Put together by independent curator Simon Zalkind, the survey fills the enormous main exhibition space at RedLine. Looking back over the several decades’ worth of Neumann paintings Zalkind brought together for What Lies Between, it was remarkable to notice how fresh and new everything appeared, maybe more so now than ever before.

To say that Neumann’s oeuvre is idiosyncratic is almost an understatement. Regardless of the whims of fashion, Neumann has relentlessly followed a singular path of her own forging. And for the most part, as she went along, she was out of step with the predominating trends of her time, aside from the undeniable affinity her work has with 1980s Neo-Expressionism. The thing is, Neumann got there in the 1960s.

It was at that time that Neumann fell in with a group of artists who were students (which is what she was) or faculty at the University of Colorado in Boulder. These artists would go on to change the face of

contemporary art in Colorado, and beyond, for decades afterward. The group included hyperrealist sculptor John De Andrea, pattern-painter and Drop City co-founder Clark Richert, ceramicist Betty Woodman, and dozens more. Even in this stylistically diverse collective, Neumann’s approach was really out there.

What Lies Between reveals that Neumann’s first mature phase appeared in the late 1970s and early ’80s with paintings such as “Puppet Master.” Her depiction of the female puppet is pointedly crude, looking back to her earlier work, but the silhouettes of the two men rising on the left, in brushy black against a deep red ground, are crisply delineated at the edges, which anticipates where Neumann was to go in the later paintings. A prime example of that later work would be the striking “Pink Swimmer” (2003), painted just over a decade ago. Basically, the composition is a pair of vertically stacked color fields, pink over orange, divided by a thin stripe of dark yellow. The color fields have been heavily worked with brush-marks, drips and smears, but have been de-emphasized by their complete transformation into mere backgrounds through the introduction of that black silhouette.

The shadow figure suggests a drowning man, and floating above, a sketchy outline of his face.

The figures and other representational elements in a Neumann painting define F A B R I K 129

Margaret Neumann, Pink Swimmer, 2003, Acrylic on canvas, 54 x 54 inches. Courtesy RULE Gallery.

themselves through the implicit (and often disturbing) narrative they suggest—a woman manipulated by men, a man drowning–and that dark quality becomes the predominant characteristic of each work. This sense of foreboding is also reinforced by Neumann’s moody deep palettes, allowing these narratives to speak to a sense of alienation, despair, or danger. Even though the figurative depictions are 130 F A B R I K

typically pared down, as in “Pink Swimmer,” Neumann employs this simplification to push the imagery to the forefront, allowing it to decisively overtake the more abundant abstract content of her paintings. And it is Neumann’s embrace of abstract techniques resulting in her rough and active surfaces that was the biggest revelation of the show, considering she’s been known for decades as a figurative artist.

DENVER/BOULDER K Contemporary, Denver Daisy Patton: A Rewilded Arcadia October 6—27, 2018 CU Art Museum, Boulder Daisy Patton: This Is Not Goodbye July 19—November 17, 2018 Text Deborah Ross At its most basic, Daisy Patton’s work revolves around selecting old family photos from random sources, enlarging them several times over, and essentially defacing them with boldly colored swaths of paint. The resulting panels, some stretching up to 8 or 10 feet, are mesmerizing insofar as they elicit imagined narratives. Of course, there is much more substance to the work, given that Patton grounds herself in at least a couple of esoteric theories.

One concerns the photograph as the “death of a moment” as described by philosopher Roland Barthes (1915-1980). By drastically altering photographs, Patton lets the depicted moments linger and take on new meaning, and in the process, evoke individualized memories in each viewer. A second influential theory for Patton comes from anthropologist Michael Taussig (born 1940), who describes defacing cultural relics such as family photographs can force a “shock into being.” The objects are revivified, even if there are no family members left to cherish them. As Patton writes in the online art and poetry

platform Dialogist, “I paint to disrupt, to reimagine, to re-enliven these individuals until I can either no longer recognize them or their presence is too piercing to continue.”

Patton’s assimilation of these concepts was spectacularly on display in overlapping exhibitions this past fall in Boulder and Denver.

This Is Not Goodbye was based on funerary photos as popularized before the turn of the 20th century, in which families kept memories of a funeral by photographing the deceased in his or her casket, amid floral arrangements, crosses, sentimental objects and other trappings. A Rewilded Arcadia re-appropriated photos spanning several decades, concentrating on couples and individuals ostensibly depicted in happier times. The paintings are intended to spur multiple interpretations regarding the context of the poses. Together, the two shows demonstrated Patton’s undeniably excellent eye in selecting abandoned photos from the thousands she pores through from sources such as eBay and thrift stores. The shows also gave evidence of the artist’s transformative restraint, as the photos retain their haunting quality amid the profusion of garish color fields, the application of patterns of various types, and rudimentary labels inscribed in the artist’s handwriting. Especially prominent are botanical designs and vines referencing Victorian wallpapers and fabrics that wind F A B R I K 131

Daisy Patton, Untitled (May 15, 1933), 2017, Oil on archival print mounted to panel, 80 x 102 inches.

Courtesy K Contemporary.

through the compositions, hinting at connections among the subjects.

In “A Rewilded Arcadia,” the floral embellishments also serve to suggest an eventual return to nature, or perhaps decomposition.

Two works with particular poignancy and narrative punch, one from each show, shed light on how the artist fuses anonymous black-and-white photos with the complex layering that has become her signature painting style. One of the standouts from CU is “Untitled (‘For Darling,’ The Bride),” in which the photo is of a presumably young bride. She lies swathed in gray 132 F A B R I K

inside a casket Patton has turned pink. Vines reach every corner of the painting, overlaying the enlarged photo and various areas of color in which Patton experiments with textures and dotted patterns.

There’s an unexpected harmony to the elements that suggests the naturalness of death. From K Contemporary, “Untitled (Leonar 5746)” presents five women, presumably friends, in a garden-side pose. Patton applies vibrant hues to the women’s coats, shoes and faces, while encircling them with vines and connecting them to the garden. The relaxed poses don’t entirely sync with

the intense eye contact the women make with the camera, eliciting thoughts as to the real nature of their relationships.

When the possible negative connotations of defacing a family photo are out of the equation, Patton’s works reflect earnest, even tender, acts of resurrection. Not only are the deceased paid tribute, but memories are reactivated, relationships are glimpsed, and a lasting humanity remains at each painting’s core.

HOUSTON Gremillion & Co. Fine Art Fernando Casas: Limits & Proximities September 13—October 13, 2018 Text Donna Tennant Limits & Proximities: A Survey

of Works Spanning Six Decades,

summarized the artistic oeuvre of

Bolivian-born Fernando Casas. The seminal piece in the exhibition is

the nearly six-by-seven-foot “Interior with Disappearing Mirror—After Velazquez” (2018). “This is the

painting I have wanted to paint for 40 years,” Casas said, “but I

Fernando Casas, Interior with Disappearing—After Velazquez, 2018. Oil on Oval Canvas, 68 x 87 inches.

Courtesy Gremillion & Co. Fine Art.

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never dared do it because I didn’t have anything original to say to Velazquez.” Like all his recent work, this painting is a domestic scene set in the Casas home-studio. Four figures intently regard the artist, who gazes into a mirror situated in the foreground, though not actually depicted. The viewer’s perspective is that of the artist, who is represented as a headless figure. “Where is the looking subject?” Casas first pondered in the 1970s. His conclusion was the head, a void from which all visual reality appears. “It is something like consciousness,” he said. “It is impossible for one to see their own head without a mirror.”

The disappearing mirror in this painting allows the artist to see himself, his friend Bruce, his partner Terry, and his niece Minina, as well as his dogs, Gaia and Karma, simultaneously. This is a polar image, a reference to the six-point nonEuclidean spherical perspective system that Casas has been perfecting for years. He sees the visual world as a surrounding reality, not a window-like scene. In other paintings, he has also experimented with depicting time, the fourth dimension. Over the course of some 30 solo shows, Casas has continued to investigate the intersection of art, philosophy and science as a conduit to understanding the nature of reality and perception. Fittingly, he holds a doctorate in philosophy, which he teaches at Rice University. A 190page scholarly catalog with eight 134 F A B R I K

essays, two by Casas, accompanied the show.

David Shelton Gallery Vincent Valdez: Dream Baby Dream September 7—November 10, 2018 Text Raphael Rubinstein Some works of art possess the uncanny ability to attract new layers of significance. Usually this happens over a long period of time, but on occasion, new meanings accrue quickly. Such is the case with the paintings Vincent Valdez has been making in recent years. In September 2016, the artist unveiled a massive canvas titled “The City I” (2015-2016) that featured an ominous gathering of robed and hooded figures clearly meant to evoke the Ku Klux Klan.

The painting predated Trump’s election and the demonstrations at Charlottesville which emboldened white supremacists across the country. Since then, “The City I” reads differently, as prophecy as well as protest.

Valdez’s newest paintings, a suite of 11 works collectively titled “Dream Baby Dream” (2018), also seem affected by events that hadn’t yet happened when they were painted. Each of these large, dark grisaille oil-on-paper compositions depicts eulogists at the June 2016 funeral of Muhammad Ali. (In this regard “Dream Baby Dream” stays close to actual events, in contrast to the invented, highly allegorical scene in “The City I.”) We see the

Vincent Valdez, Dream Baby Dream (1), 2018, Oil on paper, 42 x 72 inches. Photograph by Peter Molick Courtesy of David Shelton Gallery.

figures, usually singly, standing behind a podium, flanked by large flower arrangements and pointing microphones. Their expressions range from the solemn (Rev. Kevin Cosby) to the anguished (Natasha Mundkur). The only relief from the somber grayscale are tiny touches of red and pink around the figures’ eyes, lips and ears. The glossy surfaces reflect light so strongly that from certain angles, areas of painting vanish in the glare. Viewing the show the day of the Pittsburgh shootings, it was impossible not to imagine the victims’ eulogists at an altogether different funeral, one for the progressive, aspirational American society Ali embodied.

“Dream Baby Dream” is the title of a 1979 song by the proto-punk duo Suicide. (Valdez clearly has admirable musical taste: “The City I”

took a cue from Gil Scott-Heron.) Like Bruce Springsteen, who has covered “Dream Baby Dream,” Valdez reads the song’s message as one of faith and hope, likely not how it was heard in late ’70s New York, where the “dreams” Alan Vega sang about were more likely to be induced by heroin or derelict romanticism than by visionary politics. But the meanings of songs change, as do the meanings of art works. What gives these paintings their considerable power is not only their visual restraint but also their refusal to preach. Valdez leaves it up to the viewer to determine what they are about, a rare thing in political art.

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DALLAS Dallas Museum of Art Cult of the Machine: Precisionism and American Art September 16—January 6, 2019 Text John Zotos Cult of the Machine: Precisionism and American Art presents an engaging and thorough investigation into the dialogue between fine art and industry during the era of American ascendance early in the last century. A major group effort, this comprehensive exhibition, organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, draws on the collections of more than 50 institutions, and is accompanied by a scholarly exhibition catalogue published by Yale University Press.

Inspired by the 1913 Armory show, artists responded in particular to a selection of pieces by the European avant-garde. Cubism, Expressionism, and Futurism (and soon Dada) were liberating artistic styles that American artists quickly transfigured into an American context. Critics who first saw the work of Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keeffe, Morton Schamberg and Charles Sheeler, dubbed these artists’ urban, mechanistic art Precisionism. This exhibition convincingly argues that these artists were not simply copying the Europeans, but were creating bold, original aesthetic expressions 136 F A B R I K

inspired by the American metropolis and the machine age that made it possible.

One of the major art forms to define the last century was cinema, so it’s no surprise that visitors are first greeted by Ralph Steiner’s “Mechanical Principles” (1930), a nine-minute film originally shot in 35 millimeter. A repetitive array of machine parts, gears and pistons silently undulate, clearly expressive of an abstract and hypnotic process built on automated exactitude and assembly-line manufacturing first used in the United States. These images set the stage, placing the art in context. The exhibition shows precisionist paintings and photographs looking back toward Picabia’s “Dada Machines” (one on paper included here) and forward to the American present. Morton Schamberg’s “Painting (Formerly Machine)” (1916) is a classic example of a flattened, abstracted gadget from the printing industry, reimagined as fine art with arcs, circles and lines harmonized on a uniform background. The formal qualities of the object are decontextualized from its purpose as a machine, elevating the image beyond the merely technical.

Some 14 years after the Armory show, also in New York, the Machine-Age Exposition went on view in 1927. Fernand Léger designed the cover for the catalogue, which depicted an abstracted, multi-colored ball

Charles Demuth, Incense of a New Church, 1921, Oil on canvas. 26 x 20 1/8 inches. Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Gift of Ferdinand Howald. Courtesy of Dallas Museum of Art.

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bearing. The exhibition called for the union of architecture, artists and engineers in the building of a new social landscape through mass production and large-scale projects.

These ideas were comparable to the philosophy of the Bauhaus school in Germany, and such conflation of art and industry also thrived during this time in America. A drawing on paper in ink by Louis Lozowick, “Machine Ornament No. 2” (1927), was part of a series done for the Exposition and celebrates abstract forms fused with the power of industry through bold graphics that propel the machinery toward the viewer.

By the time precisionist painting reached its mature stage in the work of Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, the style was marked by the discernable absence of human beings and a polished surface with imperceptible brushstrokes.

Celebrating machined surfaces and architectural feats, they seem to argue that the presence of the human figure was redundant, except perhaps to illustrate scale. In Demuth’s “Incense of a New Church” (1921), only the smoke and soot of a steel mill stand as evidence to the human work force inside, pollution ironically equated to incense from a religious service.

Included in the exhibition was a gallery of industrial design objects in an arrangement that referred to the Machine Art exhibition curated

by Alfred Barr at the Museum of 138 F A B R I K

Modern Art in 1934. Among other surprises are masterworks by one of the only female precisionists, Elsie Driggs, whose painting “Blast Furnaces” (1927), with its horrific tones and mammoth edifice, asks a significant question: how alienating was this new world and what cost to our environment does the apparent euphoria portend? These are questions that precisionist art, for all its celebration of gears and smokestacks, prompts us to ask today.

CHICAGO Art Institute of Chicago Hairy Who? 1966—1969 September 26, 2018—January 6, 2019 Text Lisa Wainwright The question mark in the title of the exhibition, Hairy Who? 19661969, suggests that we remain at least relatively unfamiliar with the dynamic synergy of the six Chicago artists who exhibited together in the late 1960s under the quirky moniker, “Hairy Who.” We may be aware of individual players – Jim Nutt, perhaps, or now Suellen Rocca – but the group’s collective history has been less accounted for. There was no Hairy Who without the Hairy Who exhibitions: this is the conceit the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) took up in re-assembling work from each of the group’s six shows (The Hyde Park Art Center in 1966, 1967, and 1968; the San Francisco Art Institute

Suellen Rocca, Bare Shouldered Beauty and the Pink Creature, 1965, Oil on canvas, on two joined panels, 83 1/4 × 59 3/4 inches. Courtesy: The Art Institute of Chicago, Frederick W. Renshaw Acquisition and Carol RosenthalGroeling Purchase funds. © Suellen Rocca.

in 1968, The School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1969, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1969). A second AIC gallery complemented the main show with collaboratively designed posters, announcements and comicbook-like catalogues, preparatory drawings, sketchbooks and some of the lowbrow source material that distinguished Hairy Who’s practice.

Organized sequentially, the shows unfolded with arrangements of work, in some cases not seen together since their original presentation. The opening punch was Art Green’s “Consider the Options, Examine the Facts, Apply the Logic” (1965), an organization man (then-Secretary of Defense

Robert S. McNamara) atop an architectonic scaffolding punctuated by yellow starbursts below a cartoon bubble declaring, “No!” Here is Hairy Who’s nemesis, the uptight corporate dude from the “military-industrial complex,” welcoming viewers to a show of artists who cheekily defied convention, dipping instead into the unedited flow of their subconscious, challenging normality with a deviant joie de vivre.

Left of the Green hung the first of the Jim Nutt grotesqueries that recurred throughout. “PFFFPHTT” (1966), one of Nutt’s characteristically deformed, tattooed, and masked figures, is rendered in acrylic behind Plexiglas – an unusual technique F A B R I K 139

evidently inspired by the graphics of pinball machines. Knives pierce the figure’s eye sockets, wormy rivulets of blood spill out of wounds, and a distended green tongue with the words “wet bombs” at its tip drips red projectiles. It’s compellingly gross, a kind of mid-century American Neue Sachlichkeit.

Across from the Nutt were three dazzling Wirsums arranged together as they had been in 1966. “Son of Sol Moscot” (1965), with its “scotch tape” eyewear and guitar peg-head nostrils, makes for a super-groovy image drawn from an old eyewear manufacturer ad. “Spawning a Yawn with a Yellow Awning On” (1966) is a brilliant play of pattern against pattern, while the facial elements in “First Quarter of Moon Dog” (1966) coalesce as a secondary figure.

Wirsum’s are wildly inventive shapes set within conventional portrait formats.

Right away, the Hairy Who’s proclivity for figuration, the lowbrow source material, and their engagement of humor, sexuality and general irreverence was all in evidence. This formidable beginning never really let up. The first two rooms recreating the 1966 and 1967 shows set the tone for the entire exhibition, as the style and content of the six artists changed only subtly in the short four years of exhibiting together. The six historic exhibitions comprised very different installations that necessarily responded to the changing venues, and the AIC did 140 F A B R I K

its best to capture the off-beat, funky spaces of the original galleries. False walls were used throughout, creating smaller galleries. Subtle pastel colors distinguished one show from the next. Cool walls served as a foil to hot paintings.

Suellen Roccas and Gladys Nilssons are in abundance, and their presence is significant, given the paucity of exposure otherwise given to women in the history of pre-1970s art. Almost every room featured Nilsson’s funny genre paintings crammed from top to bottom with fulsome figures strangely clad in kooky outfits, often goggled, and sometimes nude, and all engaged in an assortment of prosaic activities.

Nilsson is known in particular for her gorgeous wet-on-wet watercolors, and there were some tasty ones in the show. Rocca’s characteristic melee of odd-ball hieroglyphs – pinup girls, palm trees, engagement rings, hot dogs, pocketbooks, wigs and other wackadoodle motifs – stock her contributions in the show.

Eroticism simmers just below the surface of these deftly rendered girlie visages.

The installation tactics got yet more interesting in the galleries documenting 1968, rooms that include some of the found bric-abrac the artists originally exhibited with their paintings. Substituting for the use of linoleum wallpaper in a few of the original shows were two massive framed linoleum backdrops hosting the strange color silkscreens

Karl Wirsum, Youdue, c. 1966, Black and colored fiber-tipped pens and colored crayons, with brush and black ink, on white wove paper, 13.89 x 10.9 inches. Courtesy: The Art Institute of Chicago, restricted gift of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel W. Koffler. © Karl Wirsum.

F A B R I K 141

of James Falconer on one side and Nutt and Rocca opposite. The pictures looked fabulous against the patterned linoleum and exemplified the unorthodox display of the original exhibitions. Further on sat four painted lawn chairs from the Corcoran gallery exhibition, now arranged on a pedestal that knocked them up a few notches.

The real question here is whether the Hairy Who shows, and the group itself, could retain their radicality in the classically austere galleries of this major museum. What was lost was the unique verve of the original spaces, but what was gained was a deep dive into Chicago’s manifestation of a complex era. One came away with less a sense of the distinctiveness of individual shows (although the excellent catalogue proves an important resource here), but more an appreciation of the cumulative energy of a group of young artists saying something about human behavior in 1960s America.

That initial question – what constitutes the Hairy Who? – was well answered.

Corbett vs. Dempsey Celeste Rapone and Betsy Odom: Everlast September 21—October 27, 2018 Text Michelle Grabner The work of Celeste Rapone and Betsy Odom linked up seamlessly to advance an exhibition steeped in unequivocally gendered pictorial and sculptural invention. The exhibition’s 142 F A B R I K

title, Everlast, evokes the eponymous boxing glove manufacturer, suggesting a competition between the two artists (extending the implications of the gallery’s own name) and their divergent visual languages. The Everlast logo appears in Rapone’s painting “Full Crouch” (2018), and the graphic brand also makes a knowing nod to the photographic image of Basquiat and Warhol standing side-by-side, fists up and donning Everlast boxing shorts and gloves for the poster announcing their joint 1985 exhibition. But at its core the title-play illuminates Rapone and Odom’s humorous approach to art-making and the bounty of rip-offs, quotes and puns that undergirds the work of both artists.

Odon’s sculptural objects graced the tops of standard gallery pedestals, suggesting various interpretations on familiar accessories and sports apparel. The to-scale vernacular items include a single cork-soled Birkenstock, a single Doc Martin boot, a life vest, a batting helmet, a bugle, a lawn chair, shoulder pads and a “Schutzhund Glove” (used for training dogs). In these highly crafted simulations, Odon relies on incongruent material choice and ornamental flourishes to alter familiar subjects. For example, “Life Vest” (2018) remakes the vest’s variously shaped buoyant pads with colorful tooled leather and paint.

“Gym Shorts” (2014) is fabricated from tooled leather. The shorts are stiff and take a vessel-like form on

Betsy Odom, Life Vests, 2018, Tooled leather, paint, thread and strapping, 19 x 17 x 8 1/2 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Corbett vs. Dempsey.

the pedestal. A decorative flower pattern is embossed on the smooth red leather, and the linear articulation of the thick white thread used for stitching suggests a fetish article alien to the hips and thighs it evokes.

Misshapen and pliable, Rapone’s figures are pulled from Nicole Eisenman’s lexicon

of expressive anatomy. The figures’ contorted relationship to the painting’s edge and to various props leads to complex compositions that overshadow any psychological connection to the female protagonists. “Resporting” (2017) is an entanglement of limbs, tennis rackets and striped uniforms F A B R I K 143

and tennis shoes. The violet and pink painting bristles with small punctuations of green. Like all of Rapone’s paintings included in Everlast, it is an active and humorous image. But unlike Oden’s work, where humor gives way to a deep and uncomfortable truth about bodies, accessories, and identity, Rapone’s wit remains joyously superficial.

Regards Judith Geichman: Diamond September 12—October 24, 2018 Text Robin Dluzen Chicago-based artist Judith Geichman sees images and potential artworks in the stained concrete, spills and crumbling walls of the city. It’s because of this quality, of not being separate from the world nor simply illustrating it, that Geichman’s neutral-hued paintings feel so much of our world. Modernist in many ways, the paintings in this exhibition harness the power of gestural marks to embody and instill emotion. In previous bodies of work, Geichman based her compositions on patterns, both as grounds and in a kind of signature scraped, triplepronged mark. Patterning recurs in Diamond, though it seems under duress by comparison. In one of the artist’s untitled works, masses of spray painted marks and smudged brushstrokes encroach upon a harlequin motif, while in another the pattern is literally cracking into pieces 144 F A B R I K

on the surface. In Geichman’s two largest canvases the diamond pattern is rendered as the most tenuous of structures, barely recognizable in a loose, spray-painted hand.

One of the most telling pieces, however, was an installation of seven diamond-shaped paintings peppered with splatters and strokes on bare canvas, six of them nestled together while the seventh hung off to the left, as if it strayed from the flock.

This lone canvas is not just falling to the wayside, it is in itself coming undone, with a folded edge flapping loosely, unstapled from its stretcher.

Throughout Diamond, structure is undermined, sometimes through the apparent dismantling of some rigid formulation, sometimes through the sensation that a foundation is disintegrating. At a time of social upheaval, viewing these paintings conjures familiar feelings of unease and chaos, as well as that of freedom and potential. Or maybe we just respond to the Rorschach-like nature of Geichman’s abstractions, projecting the content we see in them from within us.

Aspect/Ratio Hương Ngô: Reap the Whirlwind September 7—October 20, 2018 Text Caroline Picard In Hương Ngô’s latest exhibition, Reap The Whirlwind, the artist samples archival documents, vintage pulp novels, film sequences and historic postcards to recover

Judith Geichman, Untitled, 2018. Acrylic, enamel, spray paint, on panel, 45 x 33 1/2 inches. Photo by Brian Griffin. Courtesy the artist and Regards, Chicago.

representations of Indochinese women. Using distinct material reproduction techniques, Ngô questions the politics of the viewers’ access. Ngô’s female protagonists include Nguyên Thi Minh Khai (1910-1941), an historic

revolutionary whose letters appear in framed facsimile on the gallery wall. Although originally written in French, Ngô laser-cuts her own handwritten English translations in the margins of the documents, demonstrating the relationship F A B R I K 145

Hương Ngô, Reap the Whirlwind Installation view at Aspect/Ratio.

Photo by Tom Van Eynde. Courtesy the artist and Aspect/Ratio.

between archive and artistic discovery. In these notes, Khai pledges herself to the communist revolution over any suitor and admits to the danger of surveillance by authorities “that makes it impossible to correspond freely.”

While subsequent works in the show parallel Khai’s willful determination and admitted restriction, the viewer takes on Ngô’s task to uncover that tension.

Four large reproductions of Western postcards portraying Indochinese women — a woman taking a bath, for instance — hang on the opposite wall. These images, printed with high gloss black ink on black paper, are difficult to see. Viewers must position themselves in specific positions to catch reflecting light, 146 FABRIK

and even then, only a portion of the figure appears. The effort mirrors the psychological and physical demands placed on the images’ subject by the original camera, but it also illumines the difficulty of engaging historic stereotypes from today’s vantage point. A vitrine in the center of the gallery contains bricks and romance novels about women in romantic relationships with French men. Excerpts from these books focusing on the role of concubines, are reproduced with heat-sensitive ink and rebound on a side display shelf. As with the postcard portraits, viewers must use their bodies to access the excerpts, in this case by placing a palm on a page to make the words legible with their body heat.

ED MOSES Through the Looking Glass

JANUARY 26 - MARCH 30, 2019

WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY

Arrive well.

ArtCrate™

curatorial.c om/artcrate s

CURATORIAL ASSISTANCE EXHIBITIONS & ART SERVICES

Greg Murr, Blooms [dark cluster 18h], acrylic on canvas 38 x 40 in.

New works

by

GreG Murr

opeNiNG February 1, 2019

725 Canyon Road | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 USA turnercarrollgallery.com | 505.986.9800

ROBGRAD robgrad.com

“ Tr us t M e ” fro m O v e r thro w th e Q uo A t Fa b r i k Pro j e c t s t h ro ug h 0 2.16 .19

©2019 Rob Grad

Tansey Contemporary

Museum quality objects at the intersection between fine craft, contemporary art and design from an international roster of artists. Featuring: Litany of Failures, A Solo Exhibition of New Works by Cheryl Ann Thomas January 24 - 28, 2019 A Solo Exhibition of New Works by Leopoldo Cuspinera Madrigal March 7 - April 7, 2019 Preview works and our exhibition schedule at www.tanseycontemporary.com

Spun, Cheryl Ann Thomas, Porcelain, 26” x 19” x 17” 1743 Wazee Street, Denver, CO 80202 (720) 596 4243 | info@tanseycontemporary.com

K. IMPERIAL FINE ART

49 Geary Street, Suite 440 | San Francisco, CA 94108 kimperialfineart.com Emil Alzamora, On the Royal Road 1, 2018, ceramic, unique, 22” x 17” x 8”

PETER BLAKE GALLERY STEPHANIE BACHIERO DECEMBER 2018 - FEBRUARY 2019

INSTALLATION FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: CATENARY, 2017, BRONZE, 8.5 x 6.5 x 8”, PINNACLE, 2018, ENGINEERED AEROSPACE COMPOSITE, 36 x 47 x 22”, TRANSFORM, 2018, ENGINEERED AEROSPACE COMPOSITE, 72 x 86 x 58”

435 OCEAN AVENUE LAGUNA BEACH CA 92651 | PETERBLAKEGALLERY.COM | (949) 376 9994

IN MEMORY OF

Arnaldo Roche-Rabell 1955 — 2018

Lisa Golightly Tom Gregg Francis DiFronzo January 12 - February 16

DANIEL JOHNSTON

( IN COLLABORATION WITH HIS SISTER MARJORY JOHNSTON )

DRAWINGS TO LISTEN TO A ND

IN COORDINATION WITH “HI, HOW ARE YOU” DAY

SONGS TO LOOK AT

OPENING RECEPTION SATURDAY JANUARY 26, 2019 6PM - 9PM

REDBUD GALLERY 303 EAST 11th STREET HOUSTON, TX 77008 713-854-4246 www.redbudgallery.com

L I N DA H O D G E S G A L L E R Y

sylwia tur JA N U A RY

nicholas nyland JA N U A RY

elizabeth gahan F E B R U A RY

patti bowman MARCH

3 1 6 F i r s t Av e S o u t h , S e a t t l e , WA 9 8 1 0 4 l i n d a h o d g e s g a l l e r y. c o m / 2 0 6 - 6 2 4 - 3 0 3 4 l h o d g e s @ l i n d a h o d g e s g a l l e r y. c o m

FPCONTEMPORARY

Betty Gold Solo Exhibition Opening January 12, 2019, 6-8pm Lisa Bartleson Solo Exhibition Opening March 2, 2019, 6-8pm 5835 Washington Blvd. Culver City, CA 90232 • P: 323.935.1355 paul@fpcontemporary.com • www.fpcontemporary.com

ANNE YAFI

Dip In My Daydream

January 25 - February 23, 2019

65GRAND CHICAGO

WHERE MYTHS TAKE HOLD Rediscover Medusa, Cupid, Hermes, Bacchus, and other beloved mythological heroes and gods.

The Getty Villa. One mile north of Sunset on PCH. Reserve your free tickets today.

Mosaic Floor with Medusa, Roman, about 115–150.

Stone tesserae.

The J. Paul Getty Museum

getty.edu/villa

Richard

DIEBENKORN Beginnings, 1942–1955 January 12 – March 31, 2019 Opening Reception: Sunday, January 13, 2019, 2–4 pm

Richard Diebenkorn, Untitled (Horse and Rider), 1954.

Oil on canvas, 21 x 24 in. (53.3 x 61 cm). © Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

This exhibition was organized by the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation in Berkeley, CA in conjunction with the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA.

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Stargazers: Intersections of Contemporary Art & Astronomy

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February 7-April 6, 2019 Reception: Thur., February 7, 5-8 p.m.

Four centuries a�er Galileo Galilei pointed a telescope skyward, and coinciding with the opening of OCC’s new planetarium, this mul�-media exhibi�on reflects on ques�ons of space, �me, and the human condi�on within and beyond the observable universe.

Lita Albuquerque, Russell Cro�y & Laura Gruenther, Lia Halloran, George Legrady, Carol Saindon Clayton Spada & Victor Raphael, Penelope Umbrico, United Catalysts Russell Cro�y and Laura Gruenther, Look Back in Time, 2016, installa�on view detail from San Jose Ins�tute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA. Photo by Marco Zecchin / Image Center.

For more information about related events visit orangecoastcollege.edu/DoyleArts These events are ADA compliant. Accomodation requests related to a disability should be made no later than five business days prior to this event by contacting (714) 432- 5629

December 9, 2018 - February 17, 2019

Cat y s Ch ge/L ‫ה‬r Ger ch

Skeletal Remains, unique gelatin silver print by Luther Gerlach, 2018.

PA O L CRUDE Recent landscape paintings by Karen Kitchel

Gallery Talks 6 pm Karen Kitchel Jan 24 Luther Gerlach Jan 31 Waterway #4 (Clear Creek), asphalt emulsion, tar, wax, powdered pigments, and shellac on canvas by Karen Kitchel © 2016, 50x50 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Robischon Gallery, Denver.

CARNEGIE ART MUSEUM 424 South C St.

Oxnard, CA 93030 | 805.385.8158 | carnegieam.org

SOMEWHERE IN

BETWEEN through March 17, 2019

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

Carmen Argote Hagop Belian Guillermo Bert Maryrose Cobarrubias Mendoza Ismael de Anda III Beatriz Cortez Michelle Dizon Cirilo Domine

Patricia Fernández Carcedo Keiko Fukazawa Bia Gayotto Flora Kao Seema Kapur Nery Gabriel Lemus Yong Soon Min Amitis Motevalli

Hillary Mushkin Camilo Ontiveros Raksha Parekh Renée Petropoulos Gala Porras-Kim Ben Sakoguchi Evelyn Serrano Clarissa Tossin

Curated by Bia Gayotto and Michele Cairella Fillmore

WINTER BREAK HOURS: (effective Jan. 2-20) Mon-Thurs: 12-4pm Sat-Sun: 12-4pm Fri: Closed Closed for Holiday Jan. 21

REGULAR HOURS: (resuming Jan 22) Mon-Tues: 4-8pm Wed-Thurs: 12-4pm Sat-Sun: 12-4pm Fri: Closed

FOR INFO:

(909) 869-4302 artgalleries@cpp.edu env.cpp.edu/kellogg kelloggartgallery

W. Keith & Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery California State Polytechnic University, Pomona 3801 W. Temple Ave. Bldg. 35A, Pomona, CA 91768

W. KEITH & JANET

KELLOGG UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY

dnj MOVED TO:

3015 Ocean Park Blvd Santa Monica, 90405 www.dnjgallery.net

“What’s New?” IN 3 INSTALLMENTS

Through March 16th, 2019 Featuring dnj Gallery artists:

Sia Aryai, Catherine Asanov, Ellen Cantor, Ray Carofano, Darryl Curran, Corey Grayhorse, Suda House, Gil Kofman, Clay Lipsky, LA Marler, Rick Risemberg, Annie Seaton, Dylan Vitone, and Melanie Walker.

Opening Reception for Installment (3): Saturday, February 2nd, 2019 Gallery II: Exhibiting each artist individually for a two week period through March 16th, 2019 (details on website)

SANTA MONICA AUCTIONS At Bergamot Station

EST. 1984

Presents

The 35 Year Anniversary Public Live Fine Art Auction

Sunday March 3rd, 2019

Preview Live and Online

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Stuart Kusher

The DNA Show | February 23—March 30

2636 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90034 fabrikprojects.com

Brandon Kusher The DNA Show February 23—March 30

2636 S. La Cienega Blvd.

Los Angeles, CA 90034 fabrikprojects.com

LA’s premiere event for experiencing, collecting sharing & purchasing art. Featuring over 110 prominent galleries from over 18 countries Exhibiting painting, sculpture, works on paper, installation, photography, video & performance.

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A new international art fair launching at Paramount Pictures Studios February 15–17, 2019

Photograph: Trevor Hernandez @gangculture

Tickets at frieze.com

FEBRUARY 10–MAY 12, 2019

Free Admission hammer.ucla.edu | @hammer_museum ALLEN RUPPERSBERG, GREETINGS FROM CALIFORNIA, 1972. ACRYLIC ON CANVAS. WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK; PURCHASE WITH FUNDS FROM RON BAILEY, PETER NORTON, PHIL AARONS, KEVIN BRINE, BETH RUDIN DEWOODY, RAYMOND J. MCGUIRE, JON SANDELMAN, AND DAVID WASSERMAN, 2005.16. COURTESY WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART