Cover Story
Moving Beyond Cars
We suspect Los Angeles might have a car-crazed reputation, but we also know this city has a vibrant community that likes to take bikes, buses and sidewalks, too. de LaB is partnering with Rethink LA, GOOD, the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, Dublab, Green Aid, The Architect's Newspaper, Tommy B, APA-LA, and the A+D Museum for an event that shows how L.A. can move beyond cars. We'll be heading to the exhibition Rethink LA: Perspectives on a Future City which envisions a Los Angeles fifty years in the future. And we're challenging everyone who attends to use alternative transportation.
That's right—the goal is to make this a completely car-free party. If you recall, they did this last year and it was lots of fun.
Board a bus, take the train, ride a bike, map out a walk, jump on your scooter, hire a horse and buggy, break out your hoverboard... just get here in a way that illustrates an L.A. that's not auto-dependent. Connect with friends and travel together. Document your trip on Twitter, Flickr or Facebook using the tag #RethinkLA. When you get to the event, they'll have an opportunity for everyone to record how they got there, where they came from, and what happened during their journey.
$10 at the door / $5 for students
RSVP to rsvp@aplusd.org
• Spin-artists from Dublab will be DJing
• Free beer from New Belgium Brewery
• LACBC will have a bike valet out front
• GOOD will be collecting statistics on your journey to turn into an incredible alternative transportation-based infographic
• While on your journey, email photos to moving@rethink.la then watch the slideshow at the party
• Document your stories with the Re/corder, journeys and creative stories will be retold by Architects Newspaper
• Ride-Thru bike photos by Tommy B.
• Interactive urban workshops with James Rojas
• Greenaid will be talking about their seedbombs
Rethink LA: Perspectives on a Future City :Through September 4 at the A+D Museum
Los Angeles is the personification of our suburban nation, and this archetype is both celebrated and condemned for how it has shaped our society. It is now 55 years after the Federal Highway Act changed our national landscape, and 50 years after the dismantling of Pacific Electric Railway changed our metropolis. Once deemed the city of the future, LA is on the precipice of a new epoch. A sea change in demographics, cultural allegiances, and lifestyles are beginning to shift our collective decisions in terms of the way we will live, work, play and travel. Like our predecessors, what grand decisions can we make right now to construct our shared future?
RETHINK/LA presents a series of visions based on both the stark environmental realities of the present and the optimistic possibilities for the future. This exhibit explores the effects on our city by framing the questions:
What does our future look like?
Where are we going and how will we get there?
Will we choose the status quo or seek a better more sustainable Los Angeles?
Perspectives on a Future Cityfast-forwards 50 years to illustrate a new American dream.
A Note on the Collaborative Process
Indicative of a team-oriented design process, throughout the exhibit are examples of a partnership cultivated between the contributors and the curatorial team. Resulting in installations ranging from visionary collages, videos on the present city, and sound installations of local decision makers. These works represent a unification of expert voice and creative vision, both necessary viewpoints in the future city.
About Rethink/LA
RETHINK/LA is a collaboration of creative individuals who are intent on re-inventing Los Angeles; through partnerships with select non-profits and impassioned organizations we believe that together we will create a singular, stronger, unified voice for the future. Rethink/LA will develop annual partnerships to creatively vision important issues and objectives that will affect our cities for future generations.
Last Call
Lesley Vance
Vance's paintings make use of a full range of effects associated with oil paint. Their compositions, activated by illusionistic plays of light and wet-on-wet brushwork, function as vessels for the movement of paint itself: for hue, viscosity, and the relationship between hand and medium. The work is defined by this simultaneous action, one in which paint can be seen both for its intrinsic properties and for its ability to imply fictive spaces.
While Vance's process begins with the observation of actual objects that she arranges and lights in the studio, the paintings are records of an evolution of materials, and of the transformation from one set of objects and light effects to another. In Vance's work abstraction is a force that establishes alchemical relationships between artworks and the circumstances that give rise to them.
The new paintings often depict attenuated, dispersed shapes rather than consolidated ones, as if to call attention to light's calligraphic movement across the visual field. They also chart unexpected connections between the lineage of the still life genre and a host of other archetypes and movements throughout the history of art. In particular, some of the new works conjure the otherworldly light, perforated spaces, and 
strange familiarity that the surrealists brought to painting during the first half of the twentieth century.
A body of new watercolor works on paper represents another material expression of these concerns. Like the paintings, they are documents of a multi-phased process of looking and legislating the transition of light from one medium to another. Their brushwork, however, occurs at a smaller scale, and brings out more intimate aspects of the forms and their relationships to the overall composition. The differences that separate the watercolors from the paintings are differences of degree rather than essence. In this sense they are not representations of pre-existing things, but essays on light as the basic force of representation.
Current
Abel Baker Gutierrez: Swimming
Taking inspiration from rock music's aesthetic trends to Scout culture and Old Master paintings, Gutierrez utilizes a diverse range of source material to create paintings, photographs, sculpture and video installations loaded with potential interpretations. His recent work reflects upon society's obsession with youth culture, issues of "growing up", and ideals of masculinity, yet these subjects are negotiated through a visual vocabulary that effectively blurs the distinction between social critique and melancholic nostalgia.
Gutierrez's newest body of work, presented in this series titled "Swimming", is comprised of oil paintings and a video installation that looks to Scouting culture and the Realist traditions of bathers (e.g., Courbet, Millet) for point of reference. Inspired by painters such as Thomas Eakins and Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, who painted adolescent figures engaged in outdoor activities during the Victorian era, Gutierrez's own subjects are decontextualized from a specific temporal or social scenario—unaware of the contemporary viewer's idealizing, eroticizing, and prejudicial gaze. This complicity of the physical, perceptual, and philosophical—classical painterly techniques, art historical references, and 20th century Scout ideologies—operate as an inquiry into the complex structures of masculine hegemony (issues dealing with learning and performing gender; definitions of masculine behavior), ideas about continuity, and prompts the viewer to reevaluate his or her position in ever-shifting social constructs.
Based on black-and-white and color photographs sourced from 1950s and 60s scouting manuals and magazines as well as found film footage, Gutierrez's appropriated images from this bygone era further underscore a sense of ambiguity and ephemerality. Intimately scaled and emotionally charged, his new work portrays slight and languid figures set against an atmosphere of peril. Using contrasting layers of thin and dark glazes, loosely rendered figures of young men and boys occupy amorphous bodies of water, build rafts, and demonstrate rescue breathing techniques. Evoking a sense of the uncanny, the figures are removed from their original context through the ritual of brushstroke, and in the case of his video, digitization. In the video, a found color film excerpt of boys playing is transformed into a slow moving and haunting silvery digital specter.
Abel Baker Gutierrez was born in California and earned his BFA (2009) and MFA (2011) at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA. Gutierrez's work has been included in numerous group exhibitions in California, including Back to the Future, Think Tank, Los Angeles; Keeper of Light, Sandroni Rey Gallery, Culver City; A Picnic in Eden (as part of a collaborative project with artist Bettina Hubby), The Company, Los Angeles; Playing Dumb, Amy Adler's Studio, Los Angeles; as well as L.A. Napoli, Cercle Blanc Gallery, Berlin. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
Current
Entering Abstraction
Throughout the exhibition, artworks take viewers through a journey that reaches across a spectrum of approaches. In some works, such as those by Tony Beauvy, Sherie Franssen, Doug Glovaski, Julie Graham and Chris Trueman, paint sits on the surface in various configurations, offering itself in pure tangibility, while other artists, such as Udo Noger, hide the source of imagery behind veils of transparent fabric, letting ambient light play a role in the works’ completion.
Benjamin Britton’s work merges apocalyptic narrative with bold expressions of paint, while figurative and nature-based elements provide undercurrents to Trang Le, Ann Thornycroft and Anne Pundyk’s painterly works. Eben Goff enters into the realm of object-making, and Margaret Griffith creates the illusion of three dimensions in her grid and urban-based watercolors.
Robert Kingston and Katrin Moller allow the process of their work to remain rough and transparent, revealing episodes of layering and sanding, while Matthew Penkala and Sharon Weiner present a more refined, finished approach. Michael Salerno and Alison Rash engage in their own versions of automatism, incorporating line, drawing and color.
Last Call
Johnny Cubert White: Casual Encounters
Documenting his Casual Encounters with the urbanscape through photography, White plays a key role in at once understanding, participating in, and portraying street scenes.
By its public nature, street art, whether it wants to or not, invites interaction from the environment. Vandals, contributors, city cleaners, nature—they affect the physical evolution of the art. White, “a person who walks the city to experience it,” keenly observes the evolution of works by artists such as Shepard Fairey, Banksy, Mr. Brainwash, and Jonny Fenix. At times, he is the documentarian of a moment in the process of decay. Though we get a glimpse of the original works, these photos also capture their decline, reflecting their ephemeral nature. He provides a context that explores art weathered by time, human interference, and nature. Other photos include a dimension of street art in the context of its environment. White superimposes shadows, light, and urban objects with the art, asserting a reinterpretation of the original work. In all his photos, layers play a significant role in the composition, whether they are stripped or imposed.
He composes layers in other urbanscape
photos—that of living icons. These photographs reflect an instinct for image and iconography that hark back to his history in filmmaking. They superimpose images in reflections, and he captures an iconographic narrative based on a metaview of the subject. His photography represents subjects in ways other than their original intent. They have been captured by a follower who, with his strong sense of the city, is at once a part of it and apart from it as an objective observer; he pays homage to ephemeral art by documenting its eternal ideas.
In Casual Encounters,” White reflects Baudelaire’s sensibility that found “traditional art inadequate for the new dynamic complications of modern life,” thus demanding that “the artist assert himself in the metropolis”—the heart of the flaneur. In 1977, Susan Sontag observed:
"The camera has become a tool for the flaneur. The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flaneur finds the world picturesque."
We see this concept in the works of Eugene Atget, and later photographs of Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans. In the current urbanscape, Johnny Cubert White undertakes his photography by the same philosophy.
Johnny Cubert White received an MFA in filmmaking from the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As a filmmaker and artist in Chicago, he was hailed by Chicago Social Magazine as an “avant-garde barnstormer, [He is] conceivably the closest thing this town has to an authentic impresario." His undergraduate degree in philosophy and writing was earned at Atlanta’s Oglethorpe University.
Last Call
Americas Latinos: North - Central - South
There are no borders to the rich and constant interchange of artists, writers, musicians between the peoples of the Americas - from north to south...from south to north. The differences are often simultaneously startling and distinctive but beautiful and universal. At all times this flow of ideas is stimulating.
Comparing the latent power of Catlett’s Sharecropper and the anguish of X.J. Iniguez’s woman of VietNam we begin to scratch the surface of the scope of the works done by the Americas Latinos. Other notable artists in the show include: Jean Charlot, Wm. Theo Brown, Frank Romero, Francisco Mora, Emilio Renart, Fernando de Szyszlo, Francisco Zunigia, Enrique Grau, Raul Milian, Pablo O’Higgins and David Alfaro Siqueiros to name a few. These artists hail from Argentina to Peru to Columbia, Mexico and the United States.
Features
A Few New Points of View
Oscar Wilde wrote, "Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital." And so in keeping with our goal of providing a comprehensive resource which reflects the true nature of our sprawling art scene, Artweek.LA is pleased to announce the addition of two bloggers who really know their way around the Los Angeles art scene: Jane Chafin and Tracey Harnish.
Jane Chafin
Jane Chafin is currently director of Offramp Gallery, which exhibits contemporary art in an historic house in Pasadena, CA. Jane was a painter and worked as registrar for the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. She put her painting aside and moved to New York, where she pursued a career in journalism. There she was editorial director of CultureFinder.com and did some freelance writing for the LA Times, the BookReporter.com and the New Yorker Magazine's marketing department. She moved back to the Los Angeles area and opened Offramp Gallery in September 2008. Many know Jane for the weekly blog she writes for the Huffington Post.
Tracey Harnish
A native Angelino, Tracey attended Otis College of Art and Design. In addition to writing about art for the Huffington Post and CultureMob.com, she blogs about the LA art scene on her blog, LAArtDiary.com. Tracey is also an artist whose work has been shown in various group shows. She was recently awarded First Prize at LBA's California Open exhibition. Tracey's business, ArtWhiz.biz, helps artists with individual artist promotion.
Jane and Tracey will share their unique perspectives each week which you can access under the Blogs menu.
Previews
A Public Conversation with Carlos Montes & Amitis Motevalli
On May 17, 2011 at 5:00 AM the SWAT Team of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and members of the FBI raided the home of Carlos Montes, a long time Chicano activist and active member of the Committee to Stop FBI Repression. After ransacking his house, taking his computer, cell phones and hundreds of documents, photos, diskettes and mementos of his current political activities in the pro-immigrant rights and Chicano civil rights movement he was arrested on one charge dealing with a firearm code and released on bail the following morning. He has another court appearance this Friday, August 12, 2011.
On May 21, 2001, Amitis Motevalli was fired for refusing police searches from Locke High School. Under the supervision of Motevalli, the students at Locke High School formed an organization called the Locke Student Union (LSU) to improve their school. During the time Motevalli was teaching at Locke she, along with these students, were feed up with an extreme shortage of textbooks, other materials, lack of school teachers, lack of clear and consistent disciplinary rules and more importantly the brutal random weapon "searches" on students. After 9/11 the "weapons search teams" became more antagonistic of the students and disregarded the students civil liberties. Motevalli had enough, as did the LSU, and the results of fighting back for civil liberties, justices and equality in LAUSD ended in being fired. Motevalli's case went up to the Supreme Court.
This event is in-conjunction with Andrea Bowers and Olga Koumoundouros' project "Transformer Display for Community Fundraising: Version 2.
About the Speakers
CARLOS MONTES was a co-founder of the Brown Berets, a Chicano working class youth organization in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s. The Brown Berets were inspired by and often compared to the Black Panther Party. Montes was one of the leaders of the Chicano Blowouts, a series of walkouts of East Los Angeles high schools to protest racism and inequality in Los Angeles-area high schools. He is portrayed by Fidel Gomez in the 2006 HBO movie Walkout.
The agenda of the Brown Berets was to fight police harassment, inadequate public schools inadequate health care, inadequate job opportunities, minority education issues , the lack of political representation, and the Vietnam War. It had a 13 point program that included self determination for Chicanos. It set up branches in Texas, New Mexico, New York, Florida, Chicago, St. Louis and other metropolitan areas with Chicano populations.
Montes was indicted twice for the ELA Blowout (he was one of the East LA 13) and later with 10 others for conspiracy to commit arson by the LAPD at a demonstration against then Governor Regan in 1969. After threats against his life and beatings by the police and many arrests on false charges he went underground and lived in Mexico and later Juarez and El Paso where he did labor organizing. He was rearrested in May 1977 and tried. However, with a competent legal defense, community support and a defense committee he was found not guilty of all charges. The Walkout indictment was thrown out of court as unconstitutional.
Montes remains an activist and is a leader of Latinos Against War, a Latino antiwar organization based in Los Angeles and a member of the immigrant advocacy group the March 25 Coalition.
AMITIS MOTEVALLI was born in Tehran, Iran and moved to the US in 1977. In 1995 she received a BA from SFSU in Art with a minor in Women’s studies and in 1998 an MFA from Claremont Graduate University. Her work as an artist incorporates a combination of near-eastern aesthetic with a western art education. Motevalli states, “Being an immigrant in the US shows in my work a duality of culture, both natural and learned. In all of my work, I create a dialogue that critiques dominant views of oppressed people and culture in general”.
Her work in art education is with youth who share a similar duality in vision. Motevalli has been active in creating social change with her students on issues of civil rights within the class through pedagogy or working with students and community to organize around issues that effect their quality of life and access to education.
Amitis Motevalli is a recipient of the California Community Foundation Fellowship and the Visions of California Award. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, exhibiting art nationally and abroad as well as organizing to create an active and resistant cultural discourse through information exchange, either in art, pedagogy or organizing artist and educators.
Previews
Feed Your Head
As a cultural center, the Hammer offers a diverse range of free public programs throughout the year, including lectures, readings, symposia, film screenings, and music performances. The Hammer’s Billy Wilder Theater houses these widely acclaimed public programs and is the new home of the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s renowned cinematheque.
Here are just a few of the events in the week ahead:
Paul McCarthy Discusses Paul Thek : Tuesday, August 9, 7:00pm
As an influential stalwart of the Los Angeles art scene for many decades, Paul McCarthy has used his unique and at times haunting vision to investigate a broad range of cultural topics ranging from high art to popular culture. McCarthy will discuss the work of artist Paul Thek. In conjunction with the exhibition Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective
Joan Miró : Wednesday, August 10, 12:30pm
Lunchtime Art Talks take place every Wednesday at 12:30pm. The Hammer's curatorial department leads free and insightful 15-minute discussion about works of art currently on view or from museum collections. This talk will be led by Elizabeth Cline, curatorial associate.
Sing Your Favorite Book : Thursday, August 11, 12:00pm
Join us this summer for a residency with musician and sound curator Jessica Catron. For her project Sing Your Favorite Book, performers will sing excerpts from their favorite books, in conjunction with the exhibition Ed Ruscha: On the Road.
Today’s book will be sung by Jessica Catron.
Mindful Awareness : Thursday, August 11, 12:30pm
Mindful Awareness is the moment-by-moment process of actively and openly observing one’s physical, mental, and emotional experiences. Mindfulness has scientific support as a means to reduce stress, improve attention, boost the immune system, reduce emotional reactivity, and promote a general sense of health and well-being.
The free weekly drop-in sessions take place in the comfortable seats of the Billy Wilder Theater and are open to all who are interested in learning how to live more presently in life. No special clothing is required, and participants are welcome to stay for 5 minutes or enjoy the entire 30-minute session.
Sessions are led by instructors from the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center. Visit www.marc.ucla.edu to learn more about the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center.
All Hammer Public Programs Are Free
Tickets are required, and are available at the Billy Wilder Theater Box Office one hour prior to start time. Limit one ticket per person on a first come, first served basis. Hammer members receive priority seating, subject to availability. Reservations not accepted, RSVPs not required.
Parking is available under the museum for $3 after 6:00pm.
Current
The Golden Ass
Be it romantic dalliances with his family’s slaves or entanglement in a plethora of occult rituals, Apuleius’ main character (also called “Lucius”) was often found throwing caution to the wind…so much so that at one point he was transformed into a donkey, only to be changed back into a human by the goddess Isis near the story’s conclusion. AWLA has compiled an insouciant exhibition that loosely references this iconic story, which incidentally exists as the only Latin novel to have been preserved in its entirety.
“The Golden Ass” recognizes the intangible mélange of hustlers, intellectuals, smooth-talkers, vandals, fashionistas, bitches, aesthetes, and princesses who inhabit California’s Gold Coast, where “ass” is often viewed as a more important currency than intelligence or blood, sweat, and tears. But the works selected for this show are, for the most part, the opposite of ass. “The Golden Ass” concentrates instead on the work of artists who either lithely negotiate the nebulous terrain between gorgeous and abject, or simply make works that exist in a moment where beauty merges subject and form to create a dialogue of sumptuous intrigue.
Featured are works on paper by John Espinosa and Bobbi Woods; paintings by Joshua Aster, Awkward x 2 (Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe & Rebecca Norton), Rachel Kessler, Leon Benn, Kyle Coniglio, Delia Brown, Margarete Hahner, Dennis Hoekstra & Noah Olmsted, Chris Oliveria, Britton Tolliver, Mette Tommerup, and Greta Waller; Photographs by Francie Bishop Good; sculpture by Timo Fahler and Gregory Kucera; and videos by Sam Anderson, Kate Gilmore, Clynton Lowry, and Julia Sherman.
Last Call
Kenji Fujita, Zak Kitnick, Sam Pulitzer: Live at the Acropolis
Kenji Fujita will exhibit his Studies for Objects, three sculptures in a variety of ubiquitous materials such as paper bags, cardboard, plaster and plastic ties. Fujita’s work is the raw material of an ornamental undertaking left in its state of rawness. The materials lie on the floor in a seemingly unmonumental manner, as if indifferent to being elevated, as if they could be studies for objects without also being objects. Kitnick describes Fujita’s sculptures as having an “elegance that is better understood in terms of balance. The equilibrium in Fujita’s work is the result of trial and error, the result of spending time, the result of other results.“
Inverting the triangular boundary between art, décor, and utility, Zak Kitnick’s work explores how these parallel worlds borrow from each other equally, acquiring and defusing each other’s radical and banal models. Kitnick brings traditional cover-ups to center stage, riffing off the idea of what it means ‘to screen’ something—to image and project, but also to block out. As this simultaneous blocking and offering up to vision take place, the decorative and the autonomous aspects of art are also put into play; each is blocked and screened. Conceptual art’s interest in décor as at once the antithesis and inevitability of art is opened up here once again. Dichotomies erupt—haptic/optic, image/object, art/decoration—in an infinite regress. The work is color-coated and color-coded at once.
Sam Pulitzer’s work, too, takes ornament as its starting point, but it moves from the interior of the house to the exterior of the body. It imagines architecture as a body, a surface that can be boored out and plugged. Pulitzer’s ‘plugs’ intersect the midline between Fujita’s floor sculptures and Kitnick’s wall vents by literally piercing into the gallery walls with 1” gauged metal ear plugs. This act of formal transgression stems from Pultizer’s interest in reframing the way an object gets “mis/recognized” in the context of an art gallery. Piercing has tribal and/or spiritual origins in a community, but the index of its reference routinely gets appropriated by teenagers as an act of self-expression and individualism. Pulitzer considers the way codes such as these are nuanced and distributed within culture.
KENJI FUJITA Lives and works in Staatsburg, New York. Fujita received his B.A. from Bennington College, Vermont, and his MFA from Queens College, New York. He attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. His work has been exhibited at Samson Projects, Boston, Jean Bernier, Athens, Daniel Wienberg Gallery, Los Angeles, Cable Gallery and Luhring Augustine, New York, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Venice Biennale. He has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. He is currently a Visiting Associate Professor of Studio Art and an MFA faculty member at Bard College. He is also an instructor in the School of Visual Arts’ MFA program.
ZAK KITNICK b. 1984 in Los Angeles, CA. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Kitnick received his B.A. from Bard College. Selected exhibitions include the Queens Museum, NY, PS1/MoMA Museum, Long Island City, Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, Landings Project Space, Oslo, Artists Space, and Center for Curatorial Studies, Annandale-on-Hudson. Gallery exhibitions include an upcoming solo show at Clifton Benevento, New York, Rachel Uffner, New York, Bugada & Cargnel, Paris Shane Campbell, Chicago, and Johan Berggren Gallery, Sweden. His work has been written about in The New Yorker, Huffington Post, Art in America, Interview, and is included in the Younger Than Jesus: Artist Directory.
SAM PULITZER b. 1984 in Fremont, New Hampshire. Lives and works in New York City. He received his B.A. from RISD in 2006 and since then has exhibited at Real Fine Arts, NY, Okay Mountain, Houston, TX, Greene Naftali Gallery, NY, The Emily Harvey Foundation, NY, Cleopatra’s, NY, and Red Eye Gallery, Providence, RI.
Last Call
Wicked Little Critters
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.[Genisis 1:26]
Philosopher Rene Descartes is famous for separating the human mind from its body, but he also distanced the human from the animal, declaring that animals had no minds per se, and therefore were incapable of feelings, consciousness or language. He would vivisect live dogs before an audience to prove that animals felt no pain. One wonders if the same can be said of his audiences… Descartes’ failure of empathy may explain how our industrial systems of animal husbandry have justified not only inhumane but also downright cruel treatment of livestock.
Temple Grandin reminds us in the title of her latest book: Animals Make Us Human. There is no reason to doubt that every species must have some type of emotional life and language through which to express themselves, even if it is only through interpretive dance. We may not yet understand other creature’s communications, but ignorance is no proof of non-existence. Animals do have consciousness, every bit as much as we have. Furthermore: animals also have Art.
Housecats and dogs make fetishes of their favorite toys. They perform rituals, and do tricks; some even sing and dance. They are capable of strong emotions and exhibit morality. They know when they have been bad and good. When ignored, domestic critters can even be wicked if they must to get attention.
Descartes underestimated the problem of human/animal relations. Recent complexity theorists have coined an appropriate term for social problems concerning interdependence and uncertainty: they call these Wicked Problems, or even Super Wicked Problems if those who are trying to solve the problem are also the same ones causing it. For instance, global warming would be one example, compounded by the fact that time for a solution is quickly running out. Our relationship to the flora and fauna around us is critical to redefine “dominion” as good stewardship of our shared domain rather than domination. Not just for humans, but for all beings.
It is astonishing how much Internet traffic involves the observation of animals. Technology may have been spearheaded by military logistics or funded by proliferating pornography, but in practice, LOL Cat pictures and videos of wild beasts on trampolines get more hits than most content produced commercially. It is as if today’s pixel pushers have an irrepressible need to shepherd, like neurotic urban border collies who try to wrangle parked cars. Nothing makes us recognize our humanity like observing how personified our critters seem to behave and, inversely, how animalistic humans act, especially when fighting and reproducing. As we continue to develop an increasingly complex cybernetic network of artificial intelligence, we need our pets more than ever to remind us to interact directly, offline, about primary issues of food, shelter and comfort. Emotional intelligence and moral intelligence can never be found in Descartes’ remote language of the mind.
The 12 artists in this show all take for their subject the interpretive relationships between humans and animals. The artworks reveal among other things, how clearly we comprehend the minds of critters, and how much we project ourselves onto them.
Particularly the wicked ones.
Artists featured:
Stephanie Allespach
Krista Chael
Erin Cosgrove
Leeza Doreian
Chris Doyle
Matt Driggs
Dana Hoey
Mitsuko Ikeno
Ian Patrick
Hirsch Perlman
Christopher Reiger
Holly Topping
With special contributions by the Main Street Museum and the Seabiscuit Foundation Prints from the Endangered Species Print Project will also be available for purchase with all profits donated to Animal conservation organizations.
Last Call
Matt Connors, Robert Cumming, Florian Morlat
For this exhibition, Matt Connors and Florian Morlat invited Robert Cumming to exhibit the photographs he made in Los Angeles in the early and mid-1970s. Like many conceptual photographers, Cumming embraced the photograph as an objective tool to document his narrative conceptual impulses. However, his photographs are separated from those of his peers John Baldessari and William Wegman by his interest in the construction of the photograph itself, especially with regard to the picture plane. At his house and in his backyard, Cumming built elaborate set-ups that when photographed resolved themselves to present odd tableaux that were concise and open-ended, serious and funny, obvious and mysterious. The photographs he took resonate today with the same uncanny wit and authority they had when they were made. The exhibition, Matt Connors, Robert Cumming, Florian Morlat, presents an open-ended dialogue concerning the structure of art objects and how we look at them.
Matt Connors’ work is currently the subject of a two-person exhibition with Fergus Feehily at the Dallas Museum of Art. In the fall of 2011, Connors will have concurrent solo shows at Lüttgenmeijer and Veneklasen Verner (both Berlin). He has had solo exhibitions at Cherry and Martin (Los Angeles), Canada (New York) and The Breeder (Athens). His work has been reviewed in the New York Times and Artforum. Connors received his BFA from Bennington College in 1995 and his MFA from Yale University in 2006. He lives and works in New York.
Robert Cumming’s works are in the collections of such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Baltimore Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Denver Art Museum; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu. Cumming lives and works in Massachusetts.
Florian Morlat will have a solo exhibition at Cherry and Martin in February 2012. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Galerie Ben Kaufmann (Berlin), Rowley Kennerk Gallery (Chicago) and Daniel Hug Gallery (Los Angeles). Significant group exhibitions include YBA, curated by Ali Subotnick, Mauritzio Cattelan and Olaf Metzel, Berlin Biennale (Berlin); Florian Morlat and Thaddeus Strode, Michael Hall Gallery (Vienna); Abstract Art Now—Strictly Geometrical?, Wilhelm-Hack Museum, (Ludwigshafen, Germany); and Home Show, Revisited, Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (Santa Barbara). Morlat studied at the Akademie der bildenden Kuenste, Munich, received his diploma from the Kunstakademie Duesseldorf in 1996 and his MFA at University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 1999. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
Previews
Gone Fishin'
While some paintings render the foliage and fauna of the sea, others register underwater scenes as unfamiliar worlds of psychological uncertainty. The selected artists’ all participate in a kind of rhythmic process which gives the show a strong sense of depth and vitality. The show will include the reconstructed photographs of beach scenes by Rusty Scruby; sea paintings on canvas by Lynn Hanson, sea creature paintings on canvas by Yeun- Mi Lee, surrealist underwater seascapes by Corrine Chaix, as well as many others.
Previews
The Optimist’s Parking Lot
The Optimist's Parking Lot, a group show curated by Suzanne Adelman and Keith Walsh, proposes a state of being that metaphorically draws upon the provisional or transitional status of this zone, which may be a stop within a journey, the location for a political sit-in, or possibly even one’s home. In this way, a parking lot is much like a gallery: A way station for art objects, and a zone for expectation, contemplation, deferment, anxiety, advocacy, and exaltation.
Optimism is, in fact, a noun. Common definitions of the word also often cite Gottfried Leibniz’s 17th century philosophy that the existing world is the perfect world as it was conceived through God the master architect. This notion has given way in the last four centuries to a humanist sensibility and, as embodied through artistic production, realizes phenomenological zones of self-empowerment. The decision to create, and the will to do depends upon a certain optimism—which may also be considered a utopian gesture. Inevitably, optimism evokes its counterpart, pessimism and dystopia. This expressed struggle is often enfolded into the various processes that transpire during the making of art, and may find its reification in the work’s formal aspects, or its manner of response to external conditions. How might the work acknowledge, filter, or avoid references to our larger contemporary context of economic malaise, corporate capitalism, geopolitical unrest, environmental catastrophes, and conservative social mandates? How might art help us better imagine our individual and collective futures? The relationship of form to content also brings about the question of whether art functions well as evidence of optimism or not. Can art be a more reliable indicator of the complexities of optimism than a smile or an upbeat spiel?
The poetics of The Optimist’s Parking Lot attempts to remind us of the multifaceted nature of optimism: the challenges of considering a sense of future and possibility--along with its potential detours, waiting, and endgames in the context of current events.
The Optimist’s Parking Lot feature the work of Lisa Anne Auerbach, Aaron Brewer, Kristin Calabrese, Mason Cooley, Young Chung, Dorit Cypis, Mark Dutcher, Doug Harvey, Steven Hull, Steve Hurd, Charles Irvin, Ed Johnson, Vincent Johnson, Molly Larkey, Amy Sarkisian, Kyungmi Shin, Jen Smith, Thaddeus Strode, Suzanne Adelman, Keith Walsh, Chris Wilder, and Aaron Wrinkle.
Previews
Touchy Feely
In the early 1980s a debate was gaining steam within architectural circles. At its center was a series of essays by critic Kenneth Frampton, outlining an approach he termed "critical regionalism," in which the architect attempts to synthesize the vernacular of a particular region or culture, delivering back to the local person an experience of place that was both in tune with theirs, and yet decidedly unhindered by regressive scenographics. In his formulation, Frampton proposed that the critical regionalist counter the hegemonic force of visuality by a return to the "whole range of complimentary sensory perceptions which are registered by the labile body: the intensity of light, darkness, heat and cold; the feeling of humidity; the aroma of material; the almost palpable presence of masonry as the body senses its own confinement; the momentum of an induced gait and the relative inertia of the body as it traverses the floor; the echoing resonance of our own footfall."
Exactly how the so-inclined architect (as "master builder") was to honor the human propensity to experience space via a melange of sensory perceptions was bound in the tenets of a new professionalism: the heroic destruction of universalist junkspace hiding beneath an "individuated" armature. If "anarchitectonics" would purport to classify all activities, structures, and interactions in the developed world as irrational, regionalism then set out to tackle the collusive forces of postmodernity via stratagems which today retain an oddly elegiac currency. Natural light falling on a sculpture trumps its commodification. Geographic features are augmented, not flattened. Structural elements organically form interior spaces. Flora is the only acceptable facade. Air-conditioning is out. Locally abundant materials are preferred. These techniques would result in a spatial poetics utterly at odds with today's proliferation of Green Building stemming from the programmatic application of codes, ratios, and use-scenarios. One imagines, perversely, Dupont's "Corian" as regionalism's totemic apotheosis.
Neither a show about Los Angeles, nor a thematic on the local, this exhibition borrows from the regionalism debate the notion of an apologetic interlocutor who intervenes in the proliferation of placeless spaces. As progenitor of authentic culture, can the regionalist artist (as "minor builder") readily engage in a-tectonics, or is this simply an anthropology of the nearly available? 10 artists have created works in response to this prompt: Diana Al-Hadid, Sam Anderson, Constance Armellino, Nathan Azhderian, Darren Bader, Erik Frydenborg, Miles Huston, Fawn Krieger, Lisa Lapinski, and Jacques Vidal. Touchy Feely is curated by Peter Harkawik.
