01 • Lum Art Magazine • Winter 2020

Santa Barbara • Ventura • California Interview with Barry McGee Ry Rocklen Abaseh Mirvali and Wendy Chang on Lara Favaretto The Oxnard Plain HK Zamani in dialogue with Tom Pazderka Hank Pitcher Dug Uyesaka

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Editor Debra Herrick Writers Jaime Bailon Kit Boise-Cossart Brian Paumier Tom Pazderka Cover Design & Photography Arturo Heredia lumartzine.com Contributors Noelle Barr Alexa M. Highsmith Maiza Hixson Madeleine Eve Ignon Alyssa Long Marshall Sharpe Special Thanks Norton Herrick Mike VanStry Kristyn Whittenton Printed in Carpinteria, California Lum Art Zine Vol. 1 • No. 1 ©2019 editor@lumartzine.com lumartzine.com

lum – word root from Latin lucidus from lucere, ‘shine,’ from lux, luck, ‘light’ Lum Art Zine features arts & culture in and around Santa Barbara and Ventura, California.

Created collaboratively by local artists and writers, Lum Art Zine is committed to great writing and meaningful conversations about art. lumartzine.com launched as an online publication in July 2018. Over fifty arts stories have been featured thus far, including exhibition reviews, interviews and studio visits with local artists breaking through and international art stars showing in our cultural hubs. lumartzine.com is now a living compendium of artists working and exhibiting in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties, as well as a catalyst for community and arts practices.

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Review

Ry Rocklen, Pixie, 2018.

Ry Rocklen: Pixievision Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation • Ojai

By Debra Herrick Ojai’s spunky mandarin variety—the pixie—got a little extra sun this season from LA-based sculptor Ry Rocklen, artist in residence at the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation.

Since the ‘70s, the pixie has gone from backyard fruit to quintessential Ojai, now dotting more than fifty of the valley’s family farms with the ubiquitous sweet glimmer of orange.

Rocklen’s mixed media study of the pixie joins the artist’s ongoing series, Food Group, and features a commissioned video and stoneware cast iterations.

The conceptual piece also includes an upcoming

public performance of a person wearing a life-size pixie costume. The personin-costume will then be reproduced in miniature at the original size of the pixie via 3-d printing.

In “Pixievision,” the short film, digital renderings of the pixie intercept handheld meanderings in the farmer’s market. The pixie’s technological reproductions move from technical, to comical, to grotesque.

“Pixievision” is a burst of pop art for late capitalism and the digital age. It critiques consumption while paying homage to agricultural history. The work proliferates representation

while pleasuring the viewer with unexpected forms of reproduction.

Size matters for Rocklen.

His pixie is enlarged and shrunk throughout the study as he makes copies from copies in new media.

The stoneware cast pixies that are true to size are elegant minimalist sculptures.

A Rocklen pixie rests in the bookshelf, on the table, small, light and unintimidating. On the other hand, the life-size pixie costume performance promises to be absurd and ham-handed, drawing the peculiar pena ajena (cringeworthiness) that adults in food costumes generally garner.

It’s not just form that

Rocklen manipulates, but pleasure and discomfort.

“What seemingly begins as a playful nod to local,” says Freddy Janka, CGBF e x e c u t i v e d i re c t o r a n d curator, “has become a formal indexical investigation through a myriad of shapes and forms provided by the pixie.”

To be sure, Rocklen has squeezed quite a bit of juice from the pixie.

Ry Rocklen in Residence: Pixievision • July 1 to September 19, 2018 • Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation, Ojai • cgbfoundation.org WINTER2020 3

In Conversation

Abaseh Mirvali and Wendy Chang on Lara Favaretto • MCASB

By Debra Herrick On the occasion of the opening of Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara’s solo exhibition of artist Lara Favaretto, the museum’s executive director, chief curator and CEO, Abaseh Mirvali, spoke with Wendy Chang, director of Rennie Museum and Collection.

Abaseh Mirvali: I was thinking about what artist I was going to start my tenure with as director and chief curator of MCASB. You know, you go with the artists that you think are going to represent the philosophy that you want

Top: Lara Favaretto, Coppie Semplici/Simple Couples, 2009.

Below: Lara Favaretto, Lost & Found, 1998. Photos: Brian Forrest 4 lumartzine.com

for this museum, a philosophy based on congruence in life.

These concrete pieces belong to a series that came to life in 2010 and are basically blocks of recentlypoured concrete, on which Lara imprints an action with either her body or a construction tool, and thus, starts a dialogue between the material, the gesture imprinted, and the audience’s reaction to what each piece has to say. For example, “Boring” and “Fisting,” concrete works exhibited at UCSB and at MCASB Main Space.

I think the first time I saw one of the concrete works, I just started crying. I felt the movement, what she had done with her body, and how she had impacted and molded that sculptural piece—it just moved me.

At the same time, we could have a long conversation about minimal art, abstract art, arte povera and all the other kinds of “–isms” and how she beautifully works off of that, but what really mattered to me was her commentary on the human

c o n d i t i o n a n d h o w, a s beautiful and as moving as these pieces are, they are also meant to make you think about issues of accumulation and why we need to accumulate so much.

What we do—how we determine things are worthy or important or precious— how we assign value to them.

These are all things that really matter to me.

Wendy Chang: At Rennie Collection, we have about ten works right now and likely we’ll be adding more.

I think when you first see her art, there is a tendency to really be lost in the joy and playfulness of it. And that is all there. I think that is the brilliance of her work, that the layers of it don’t necessarily hit you immediately full force.

Because I think that could be very hard to take. She has a generosity to the way she makes her art that envelopes you and welcomes you into her magic. And as you sink into it, you start to experience it, physically experience it.

When you’re standing next to one of the brushes and

it’s spinning, you’re hearing sounds, you’re smelling the brushes, you’re feeling the wind. It’s a very physical experience. As it starts to wash over you, you start to contemplate.

For Bob Rennie, this was the second work that he acquired. The first was the confetti room, “Tutti giù terra/We all fall down,” that involved one ton of confetti. The second work he acquired of Lara was a set of seven pairs of these brushes, “Coppie Semplici/Simple Couples.” Now, no one that I can think of is buying these thinking, “I’m just going to put them in my family room.”

So, it isn’t about the ability to just easily put it on the wall.

When Bob Rennie sees these works, he envisions seven pairs of couples at a dinner party. You start to really read the human nature and the human condition and the personalities of every single brush. As this pink one is spinning madly and taking up volumes of space and her partner is quiet. We’ve all known couples like that, where one dominates and

then they take turns. They have their rhythm between them, and they have their rhythm amongst them.

And when you start to think of it that way, and you’re in the room, you no longer see something as mundane as car wash brushes. You’re starting to see literal personalities represented.

You’re starting to read them as people and their colors symbolize something and the spin means something.

You start to try to figure out the relationship. Is this a happy marriage? Are they a married couple? Is this a parent and child? All of a sudden, something as simple as car washes—something that, if you’ve ever taken your car through the wash, you probably never even looked at the brushes, you n e v e r e v e n c o n s i d e re d them—and yet, all of a sudden, Lara has made you think of them and connect them with your life and your human experience.

A b a s e h M i r v a l i : Yes, I think that’s very much it.

The appropriation of used or forgotten objects is a big part of the work and that’s the whole point of her wanting you to focus on these disposed or lost things.

You know concrete couldn’t be a humbler material to work with, but she gives it this energy. So, from an art historical perspective there’s this piece of concrete, it’s a sculpture, but she gave it energy. She gave it movement by infusing her body, by putting in a gesture.

Whether she dug, or she punched them.

The series of suitcase works, “Lost & Found,” are often suitcases Lara bids on at auction. These are suitcases that people lost.

Airlines lost them, and then

after a certain amount of years they auction them off. Lara Favaretto goes, and she bids on them. And she opens them up, and she will hide something in there. Then, she locks them up and you are not allowed to open them.

As a result, the works can never be shipped.

There could be a grenade—a Kalashnikov— in there. We do not know what is in that suitcase. “Lost & Found” is a piece that resonated with me personally and speaks so beautifully to everything that she is concerned about and that has come up

created in 1998. It is a t w e n t y - y e a r- o l d p i e c e .

Artists always want their new work to be seen. That’s understandable. One of the incredible powers of Lara’s work is that it is timeless.

Above: Lara Favaretto, Tutti giù terra/We All Fall Down, 2004. Photo: Carly Otness. Top: Lara Favaretto, Fisting and Boring, 2012. Photo: Brian Forrest

over and over in her work: feelings of people who have been forgotten or want to be forgotten, or have been disappeared involuntarily, or just the concept of loss or being forgotten and what that means.

Wendy Chang: The interesting thing about the suitcase is that it was

Yo u h a v e a s u i t c a s e that as you look closer, becomes instantly dated.

No one has a suitcase like that anymore. This piece looks so timeless, it’s so nostalgic, it makes you think of grand European trips. It makes you think of these amazing things that can happen when you travel.

But when it’s just left on its own, rather forlorn, suddenly, because of our more current history, something that once was just an innocent thing, becomes so loaded with threat, so invested with fear.

Now when Lara created this work, 9-11 hadn’t happened.

There wasn’t heightened security like we have these days. You’re never going to find a random suitcase just left somewhere without it being a security emergency.

An artist doesn’t have to be able to see into the future.

What an artist has, is the ability to tap into the human experience. The works that were created twenty years ago, before massively historical things happened, those works can still carry on, and carry on with their original loaded meaning, and then carry new meaning.

Lara Favaretto • February 12 to April 28, 2019 • Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara mcasantabarbara.org

All images courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara.

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The Oxnard Plain at The Basic Premise • Ojai

By Jaime Bailon and Brian Paumier

Top: Valerie J. Bower. Bottom: Spencer Moody Opposite page: Top: Vanessa Wallace-Gonzalez. Bottom: Jaime Bailon 6 lumartzine.com

Oxnard is a place rarely seen or understood by those who don’t live here. When you drive down the 101 through Santa Barbara and past Ventura you’re greeted by an expanse of farmland. “Between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara” is what people say, or “north of Malibu” if you’re trying to impress someone. A four-day trek through the Santa Monica Mountains up the coast, where the mountains become the sea, where half of our land is dedicated to growing food, where we turn beets into sugar and labor surrounds you as far as the eye can see.

When you see PJ’s Bikini Bar and the Santa Clara Chapel along El Camino Real, you will know where we are from.

When the sweet smell of strawberries is punctuated by the smell of manure on a hot day, you’ll know where we are from.

The idea of synergy comes to mind when I think of The Oxnard Plain. Meeting at a time and place for a short time, existing there, then moving on. But documenting that and letting it live in a container that’s easily accessible to people looking for community. Filling voids, finding trap doors leading into open space, telling the stories of this region, the mundane and the daily depicted in some sort of beauty.

Manifesto Everything The Oxnard Plain does is a collaboration between artists and an homage to the past. We understand and acknowledge the bias that we may bring to the process of publishing and curation and creating a visual identity. But as a collective, we are here to serve our community and are always listening, open to acknowledging that a lot of times we don’t know.

It’s an interesting thing creating printed matter when you hear talk that the world is moving the opposite way.

We are aware of the space we take and the products we create. The zines we publish are meant to be ephemera.

We try and publish everything as an open edition, so they don’t become collectible.

Ephemera and documentation of ephemera is how The Oxnard Plain came to be founded. A realization that there is a lack of good historical resources that will endure the ether of the internet and as a response to the unfortunate format of pop-up art events.

Print is at an interesting crossroads, books are still seen as sacred items and the means to produce books easily is within reach. Yet, many people don’t realize the impact print is still having on our society. By focusing on this niche, The Oxnard Plain is able to bring people together to help create a common visual vernacular.

The Oxnard Plain is an a r t i s t - r u n o rg a n i z a t i o n fostering the development o f e m e rg i n g a r t i s t s a t critical moments in their practice. Through dynamic programming, access to w o r ks pa ce, m entorship and skills exchanges, The Oxnard Plain is a catalyst for innovative creation within contemporary art and self-

publishing. Our core mission is to support and activate a vibrant community deeply engaged in the arts.

The Oxnard Plain exists in many forms: online at oxnardplain.com, through satellite exhibitions, as well as being head-quartered at Carnegie Art Museum Studio Gallery in Oxnard. This longterm partnership began January 2018, with the help of Brian Paumier artist/educator and museum board member.

Since then, we have been able to provide workspace, digital lab access, and a range of programming from exhibitions and conversation series to a workspace residency program. Our organization has provided artists with both working facilities and platforms for discussions as they develop their practice. With a strong commitment to education and local heri tage, we showcase the works of young local art makers. The Oxnard Plain at The Basic Premise is a collaboration between a commercial gallery and a non-profit artist run space attempting to bridge the gaps of the fragmented art world of Ventura County.

All ideas lead to a book.

The Oxnard Plain at The Basic Premise is an extension of the book: the towering, intimate portraits o f “ Te m p o ” b y Sean Maung, the grainy black and white photos by V a l e r i e B o w e r, Kevin Novales’ meticulously flawed polaroids, Jaime B a i l o n ’s s m a l l installations and Spencer Moody’s paintings and poetry. Books come off the wall. The mundane and daily seen is brought forth

with unspeakable beauty.

Since planting roots with the Carnegie Art Museum in Oxnard, The Oxnard Plain is now the main funnel for programming, using group shows to help artists interested in having a studio practice. Vanessa Wallace-Gonzalez, our first resident artist, produced her solo show during a threemonth residency that began from her participation in

our inaugural group show.

Vanessa works in collage and uses manipulated photographs, local flora and fauna. Vanessa’s second solo show, “The Individuation,” will open on November 9, 2019 at The Basic Premise.

The Oxnard Plain September 28 to October 19, 2019 • The B a s i c P re m i s e , O j a i • thebasicpremisegallery.com

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Interview Barry McGee SB Mid Summer Intensive • MCASB

By Debra Herrick Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara began the summer with an epic site-specific exhibit from San Francisco-based artist Barry McGee and his crew.

I met with McGee the afternoon before the opening. Piles of art lined the gallery floors as installation of over 700 individual pieces hit critical mass. Known for bringing the street vibe to the white box, McGee brings a tidal wave of Santa Barbara surf culture to MCASB in his exhibit SB Mid Summer Intensive.

Debra Herrick: When was the last time you were in Santa Barbara?

Barry McGee: I come here a lot. It’s really sensible. I stay in Carpinteria or a little north in Goleta. I like both of those towns. I’ve been coming here my whole life to some degree.

Have you learned anything new about Santa Barbara in working on this exhibit?

Well, there are a couple things that are really ingrained and built into Santa Barbara for me. Some of the best surfers and surfboard shapers are from here. So, it has this ongoing history with me that I like. And there is this weird underground thing going on here with surfing.

It’s not about the corporate and contest part of surfing.

It’s for something else that people surf. And I like that.

There’s a real soul here.

Bloom Project Gallery is basically for Renny Yater who’s been here since the late 50s. I initially got interested in his boards because there was 8 lumartzine.com

one in an old surf shop and I saw the logo and I was like this logo is amazing—just design wise.

Yes, that’s my entry: surf.

That’s just what I do though to get off the land and clear my mind. It was sometime in the 90s that I came across an old Yater longboard and I was like “wow.”

Can you talk a bit more about the “Mid Summer Intensive”?

It’s all the things I love about this town—all in one room—as kind of a minor thread. Originally the show was supposed to be me and Robert Crumb, the both of us, but they couldn’t get Robert Crumb for some reason and the whole show landed in my lap. I was trying to figure out a loose narrative to pull it all together.

It kind of started that I wanted it to be like a municipal museum. You know those municipal museums?

Where it just has artifacts from the locals. I like that layout where it’s everyone’s family heirlooms that end up there, like a people’s history. I want this show to be like a community center, as a common thread, like a community center art show.

Inside the Healing Center

Barry McGee during installation of SB Mid Summer Intensive at MCASB. Photo: Arturo Heredia

All the local folk contributing.

In my mind, that’s how I want it to be, but starting in 1960, right around there.

Do you have a favorite work or grouping in the show?

Renny Yater just brought these photos that are from that period, the 1960s. They are stunning. I don’t know what to say about them, they’re just unbelievable.

They pull on all the heartstrings.

What can you tell me about the healing center within the exhibit?

It’s an effort to help with the current climate we’re living in, heal through the arts. An attempt, I’m not sure if it’s going to work. It’s something that has a lot of creative energy. Enough that you feel somewhat healed,

inspired and encouraged—a kind of uplifting feeling. Not in a way that’s outwardly political, but completely political.

What thoughts or questions are circulating in this exhibit?

A couple questions are being posed for sure, a few mysteries. Things I’m not sure what they are, I’m still working on them, seeing how they look together.

I’m really trying to keep it like the municipal museum thing where it’s really like a hodgepodge of my work and someone else’s work that shouldn’t be together but is together. It feels collaborative and like a loose narrative.

I just put it out to a couple people that if they had any works with Santa Barbara in the mindset and people responded. So, I have all that

material and I’m trying to not tie it into my work but have it all in the same space. I don’t know what the reason is that they’re in the same space.

When the exhibit is complete will you have controlled every aspect or allowed for others to contribute their points of view?

That’s what I think is the best part—letting other people fill in the blanks or share the space—it’s more of a dialogue. There’s something weird about solo. I don’t like solo. Not one person deserves that, for me the spotlight’s too harsh. I like when there’s a conversation, like 30 different ideas thinking about the same location in mind. It feels site specific. I want it to be like a site. It just happens here and that’s it. It wouldn’t work anywhere else. It wouldn’t work in Los Angeles. It wouldn’t work in San Francisco. Its built for here.

Do you have any rules for your practice?

I have loose rules, but I try not to. But art is pretty wide open. I could go to total control to absolutely no control in a five-minute span.

How would you describe yourself in three words?

A mess. Wait, that’s two words. A real mess.

And the show?

It’s a mess now but it’s tightening up. A lot of things.

I don’t know what is going to happen yet. I like that. I’m a little anxious—how am I going to land the plane?

Barry McGee: SB Mid Summer Intensive • July 1 to October 14, 2018 • Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara • mcasantabarbara.org

All images: Barry McGee: SB Mid Summer Intensive, Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara. Photos: Arturo Heredia WINTER2020 9

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Review

Hank Pitcher Goes Primal Sullivan Goss An American Gallery

By Kit Boise-Cossart Given the phantasmagoric nature of today’s visual entertainments, it’s a wonder that an art gallery can hold our attention. Case in point: the meditative spaces at the Sullivan Goss Gallery located on narrow Anapamu Street in Santa Barbara. A quiet inner dialogue in the gallery space shuts out noises and distractions from our selfie lives.

Hank Pitcher’s solo show, “Primal,” features seductively simple pastel-infused figurative landscapes that become objects of our thankful contemplation.

With figures on a blended ground, the big representational works present themselves, surreptitiously, as healing advisors to our pain-ridden lives, setting off the disrupted and urbanized landscape that lurks nearby.

Whether depictions of the fecundity of oversized bees in an open field or the psychedelic succulents and Coreopsis at Pt. Conception, “Primal,” is mostly about big paintings that seek to find a place of basic and substantial rest in our conflicted, overpopulated world.

While these works are to some degree unsettling, they don’t trespass on our senses like a Francis Bacon meat market dismemberment, anyways. Pitcher’s paintings are something that any of us, depending on our temperament, might be able to live with at home, certainly at work or in the public sphere.

Think David Hockney.

Nonetheless, affording one of Pitcher’s paintings is another story. Best to visit his shows and think about how to be a part of and to enjoy his vision of our local ecology. These panels may not hang together again—perhaps until a retrospective at say, LACMA or MOMA, once Pitcher and crew have passed beyond their beloved studio space on the bluff at UC’s Coal Oil Point Preserve, west through the Chumash’s hope of a “Western Gate,” at Pt. Conception.

Hank Pitcher: Primal • February 28 to April 21, 2019 • Sullivan Goss An American Gallery, Santa Barbara • sullivangoss.com

Opposite page: Hank Pitcher, HGD at Sands, 2018. Above: Hank Pitcher, Bees and Wild Radishes, 2018 WINTER2020 11

In Dialogue HK Zamani Revisits Prague with Tom Pazderka Tom Pazderka: First off, I want to say, thanks for showing me the short documentary “Dialogs” that was filmed 30 years ago for the exhibit, “Dialogue: Prague/Los Angeles.”

I’m now probably more American than Czech. At the time of that exhibition, 1989, I was living in Czechoslovakia and I was eight years old. Looking at this footage though, I’m struck with a sense of strong nostalgia, belonging and understanding, of having seen something like this at

between the two countries.

During the film, the camera briefly docks on the front of a building which was known by every Czech at that time, because each town had one of these. There is a big red star near the rooftop and the words “Lidovy Dum” (House of the People). We’re now close to the thirty-year mark since the November Velvet Revolution.

Last year marked 100 years of the independence of Czechoslovakia and the establishment of the US/ Czech political relations.

Czech artists were the best young artists of Prague.

“Dialogue: Prague/LA” has become historically symbolic since the Velvet Revolution followed shortly after. There was a fifteen-year celebration of “Dialogue” that took place in LA and Prague in 2004. It was partly funded by the Czech government.

The original exhibits took place at Lidovy Dum with all artists, Galerie Mladich with some of the Americans, and lectures and my performance with Tomas Ruller at Gong. I believe our posters with both

that time. We were never that far from Prague, where this event took place, just a 30-minute train ride.

The exhibition was designed from the beginning as a dialogue between American artists from LA, and Czech artists stationed in Prague, at the dawn of post-communism in Czechoslovakia, arguably in the entire region of Central and Eastern Europe. The question was, what would develop when these two groups of artists got together in an exhibition? All, despite the decades’ long rift

The time seems to be ripe to dredge out some old history, no? But also, your performance, where you and a Czech artist use hoses to “wash” or hose each other down. It’s a simple and powerful work—the symbolism of washing away the grime and dirt of the past between the two countries and its peoples.

Czech and US flags were pasted around town, and it was the first time to see the American flag in Prague since 1967.

I arrived a week earlier than most LA artists, and sat in on many conversations conducted in Czech. The mood in Prague was Kafkarna or Kafka-esque. Many of the artists didn’t have passports.

They were unofficial artists since they refused to support the government’s policies. Tomas was invited to Documenta but could not participate since he didn’t have a passport.

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HK Zamani: I was thirty in 1989. On my first visit to Prague, we had just graduated with our MFAs and were treated as the representatives of LA. The

The Czech artists were going along, but had doubts that the “Dialogue” could continue to LA. Who would have known that there would be a miracle with the Velvet Revolution? Then there were fundraising efforts with the help of Jane Fonda, and the Czech artists were brought to LA in June 1990 to exhibit at Otis Art Gallery, Santa Monica Museum, and a couple of other locations where all artists showed together. Another catalogue was produced, this one was on the Czechs.

On a personal level, Czech culture was a substitute for interacting with my own Iranian roots. I haven’t been back to Iran since 1974.

Czechs were Eastern and Western simultaneously, like me. On some level, I felt more of a connection to them than to most of my American colleagues.

For our first collaboration, I invited Tomas to throw mud at me, and I didn’t explain why. But it was because I saw myself as the ugly American.

He thought about it and accepted as long as we would have a wash afterwards. It was a great piece to close the “Dialogue.” In LA, for the fifteen-year anniversary, we did a new version of the original piece. I feared being arrested performing it in Prague during the Communist era, but we came closer to that at Barnsdall Municipal Art Gallery in LA. They refused to give us permission to dig our own bunker/graves for the mud fight and wash, so we did it without permission. The gallery called the police. It was a powerful piece in ‘89, and it continues to be timeless. Our last performance together

was last year. I was in LA, and he was in Brno in the Czech Republic for his retrospective museum exhibit.

I h a v e ha d the m ost profound experiences in the Czech Republic. It’s almost home. The first time that I read “Metamorphosis” was in Farsi.

Tom Pazderka: Many years ago, I saw a documentary about the Czechoslovakian political climate of the late 1980s, I believe it was called, “The Long Wait for Spring,” a play on words on the Prague Spring of 1968.

There were many artists that participated in politics in those days, perhaps spurred by the moment, and Havel himself was a playwright.

There seems to have been a window that opened, however briefly, in which artists played an important role in the country’s political life. The very fact that “Dialogue” happened is itself a powerful political act.

HK Zamani: I remember that some of the folks I met in 1989 became politicians. I believe that was short-lived.

The “Dialogue” was like the impossible being made possible. Zdenka Gabalova was the Czech curator for our “Dialogue,” and Barbara Benish was the LA artist/ curator. Zdenka continued to work as a curator in NY, then became a Czech diplomat. Her ex-husband, Ivan Gabal, was involved in politics and continues to be a politician.

Barbara Benish was always political. I believe one of her recent projects is about collecting plastic detritus from oceans. She spends the summers at her mill in Czech Republic near the Austrian border, managing an artist residency and exhibition

program, and teaches at UC Santa Cruz part of the year.

I was somewhat jealous of the arrangement that artists had in Czechoslovakia.

They had humble flats and separate studios. That’s all that I’ve ever wanted. Many of them thought Reagan was a great president and desired his brand of capitalism. I was surprised by that. But they learned soon about the deficiencies of capitalism.

Some of my past performances have been overtly political and emotionally motivated; for example, the veil performances since 2001.

Even abstract painting can be perceived as political. I think that work must be art first. If it is perceived more as politics than art, it’s weak.

Tom Pazderka: Is there a position that art can take that is non-political? Pat Passlof once wrote in a manifesto—“no”—no to politics, no to “content for content’s sake, message, political correctness, selfexpression, sincerity, ideas, technology, communication, gender issues, race issues, issues period, relevance, taste, deconstructionism, conceptualism, experts.

Fuck cleverness. Fuck sophistication.”

H K Z a m a n i : I vacillate between making work that is overtly political, mainly some of my performances, and abstract paintings that are a different kind of political.

I think it was Habermas who suggested abstract art was political in its apolitical aspect. I go along with that. Then again, abstract expressionism was used by the US government as art of the free world to promote capitalism.

“Politics of Support” is a

theme that I have explored in my work, such as, “LA Art Court” series and the Kamikaze Exhibit programming at PØST.

Above: HK Zamani, Day and Night, 2006-7. Below: East/ West, 1989. Collaboration with Tomas Ruller. Performed at Gong, Prague, Czech Republic. Opposite page: Fashion of the Veil, 2009.

Track 16, Santa Monica, California. Photo by Emma Jürgensen WINTER2020 13

Review

Above/opposite page: Dug Uyesaka, pulp n’glue – remix vol. 1

Dug Uyesaka: pulp n’glue – remix vol.1

Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara

By Tom Pazderka There is a certain freshness to Dug Uyesaka’s work, though it almost always looks like it’s been made sometime in the 1950s or 60s at the height of Abstract Expressionism.

At the Architectural Foundation, Uyesaka presents thirty small works.

Made over the past three years, they read a bit like a visual version of a punk or metal album. Those who listen to either genre will understand. Two- to fourminute songs—fast, riffy, catchy and to the point.

There is no reason for a ballad here.

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U y e s a k a ’s w o r k s a r e small and unpretentious with punk/metal genrelike titles such as “Into the Unknown,” “Chosen One,” “Move,” “Manifestation” and “Cirrus.” Even the title of the show has a cut ‘n’ mix bravado, a panache for sampling and resampling.

The work owes much to its predecessors and influences, like Rauschenberg or Schwitters, but it comes up with something entirely and subjectively different. It may seem primitive, but it is highly sophisticated.

Uyesaka has an eye for just the right placement

of elements within a composition. A line here. A cutout there.

That the work is almost entirely made on or from book paper is not misleading, this move is a subconscious sigh in an age of digital culture.

Books have become more of a curiosity or collectors’ item rather than repositories of knowledge or therapeutic currency. How many people read a book to relax these days? There is no nostalgia here though.

“Pulp n’glue” is more whimsy than maudlin. I like work that is about something, and looking around the show

I see endless references to text, and all of it, besides one lone example is handwritten, pointing to a past in which books were hand-copied by monks and took months to produce, objects for intimate study, not general use.

But Uyesaka’s style also points to a more recent past—pulp fiction novels— when books were cheap and taking notes in the margins didn’t affect the resale value. pulp n’glue – remix vol.1 • July 17 to September 13, 2018 • Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara • afsb.org

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