Recent Paintings Posts + Forthcoming Essays

This blog is not dead. Despite a lack of updates over the past few months, I have been seeing amazing things, most notably, the Michael Jackson Fan Festival this past December and Mark Bradford’s retrospective at SFMOMA and YBCA, including a reunion with Mithra (now rightly renamed Detail).  Post are forthcoming but delayed.  In the meantime, here are some recent New American Paintings post for those that have not already seen:

Interview with Seattle artist Ben Waterman

Reconsidering the mirage, in light of the James Harris show of the same name

Review of Denzil Hurley and Robert Storr’s show on view at Francine Seders Gallery

Claire Cowie | Treehouse no. 2, 2012. gouache, ink, graphite, sumi color and collage on paper, 41 ¾” x 29 ¾.” From "Mirage" at James Harris Gallery.

New American Paintings Blog: Sarah Awad and Storm Tharp

I review Sarah Awad’s commentaries in museum space and the space Storm Tharp creates through an unlikely pairing of figurative and abstracted works on the New American Paintings Blog.

Storm Tharp: Nosebleed, 2011, Ink, Fabric Dye on Stretched Paper, two panels 84” x 33 ¾” Image courtesy of James Harris Gallery.

New American Paintings Blog: Julia Freeman at 4Culture

Julia Freeman wrapped Gallery 4Culture in hand-painted and collaged floral wallpaper;  life-sized cutout photographs of shrubs and dark, amorphous masses float aimlessly within its center, intended to be pulled and arranged within the space by viewers. My write up of the experiential result is here.

© 2011, Julia Freeman, VERY LITTLE ROOM FOR MISHAPS, mixed-media installation, Photos by Julia Freeman.

New American Paintings Blog: Interview with Claire Cowie

Claire Cowie’s colossal multi-panel work on paper, Dead Reckoning, turns the smallest of gallery spaces into a deceptively vast environment. The artist’s new show at James Harris Gallery contains only a handful of works: a twelve-panel painting, acrylic and collage works, and several thematically tied sculptures and small works on paper. Each piece features heavily layered compositions of imagery, techniques, and materials that coalesce into an immersive, physical experience for the viewer. My interview with the artist here.

Claire Cowie., Dead Reckoning, , 2010, Gouache, acrylic, watercolor, India ink, and collage on paper, 100 x 90 inches. Courtesy James Harris Gallery, Seattle.

New American Paintings Blog: Letting Go of the Weight

Seattle-based gallery SOIL’s March shows Flat & Bright and The ghosts of Joey Veltkamp provide an antidote to the city’s dominance by heavyweight painter Picasso in recent months. I write up these two shows on New American Paintings Blog here.

Andy Arkley and Julie Alpert, Flat & Bright. Photo: Amanda Ringstad.

 

Joey Veltkamp. The Ghost of La Libertine. Photos: Amanda Ringstad

Glowing from Afar: The Look of Light with Ulterior Motives

Spencer Finch‘s The Light at Lascaux (Cave Entrance) September 29, 2005 5:27 PM beckons from behind a corner inside Western Bridge. Although only visible through its reflected light prior to physically entering its gallery, the glow of the piece would dominate the entire art space, were it not sequestered. This is because all of the works on view in group show Light in Darkness incorporate light in some form, while also providing the only light in Western Bridge; all utilitarian lights in the space are extinguished for the run of the show.

Spencer Finch, The Light at Lascaux (Cave Entrance) Sept 29, 2005 5:27 PM, 2005 , fluorescent light fixtures and theatrical gels, 15 3/8 x 240 in., Edition of three, Image by justinkrol on flickr.com.

As one of the brightest pieces of Light in Darkness, The Light at Lascaux‘s punch of light radiates from across the exhibition, providing the surreal suggestion of a window in an overtly windowless space.  Inside the gallery, seven angled rows of fluorescent light fixtures covered in a variety of theatrical gels recreate the natural light environment of the work’s title. This simulacrum reconstructs a place and time beyond the present moment: the transitional light suspended between the darkened Lascaux caves and their surroundings, as day moved towards night on September 29, 2005.  The resulting sensory experience is difficult for the human eye to process. When confronted head-on, the light itself seems implausibly created from this foreign, constructed structure, and consequently, gazing into its grid of color is mesmerizing.

Throughout the darkened Western Bridge, other individual works surface as pockets of light: Olafur Eliasson’s Neon Ripple slowly pulsates in water-like rings of light affixed to a disk on the ceiling; delicate bulbs similar in structure to a drink discretely fade and re-emerge in Claude Zervas’s Elba; the single incandescent bulb of Martin Creed’s Work No. 312 flashes from a balcony overlooking the space. This set up fosters a sporadic, attention-driven viewing of Light in the Darkness: as a light appears and disappears, our eyes and body follow the brief spectacle, seeking the source as though it were a spotlight roaming across the skyline. The combined effect of various light sources interchanging throughout the exhibition accentuates the way human perception of light changes upon its liberation from a utilitarian role.

Light’s ability to command attention as a spectacle manifests most prominently in the city of Las Vegas, where artificial light contributes to the creation of an intoxicating environment in the interest of casinos.  Located in the middle of the Mojave Desert, in the daytime, Las Vegas is an unappealing place; piercing sunlight casts a whitewashing sheath over everything it touches, resulting in a highly undesirable cityscape difficult to sell as a vacation destination.

“1957 Las Vegas Strip,” YouTube video by gerlock11.

As the sun sets over the Strip,  the casino signs quietly begin their nightly routine, culminating in an overblown spectacle of illuminated, animated words and symbols when darkness finally falls.  Mid-century Las Vegas experienced the most complete transformation between day and night, from glaring intensity to hypnotic glow, through the use of neon signs to entice drivers from the road into the gambling oases. Similar to The Light at Lascaux’s recreation of a specific place and time, neon lighting enhanced the themed environments created within the casinos: the sky blue lights in a Greco-Roman font comprising the sign for Caesars Palace evoked the colors and appearance Americans, trained by popular culture, could associate with Greece and Rome.

Independently, each sign was a glowing, aesthetic spectacle, illuminating and darkening in such a way that passersby absolutely had to look. Together, the mass of flashing lights coalesced into a cloud of color and activity that transformed the city from a place unpleasantly bleached lifeless from the sun, into a series of intoxicating, coercive light forms that invited visitors to experience everything before them.

“1957 Downtown Las Vegas at Night,” YouTube video by gerlock11.

Contemporary Las Vegas casinos have largely replaced neon signs with LED billboards at the entrances to their resort complexes. Despite the spectacle inherent to overblown, new technology, many people yearn for neon’s return, seeing it as indicative as “authentic” Las Vegas. Although LED lights can more perfectly replicate specific images though digital projections, the recreation of a particular environment is lost through this more directly representational presentation. The LED lights introduce a harsh, chaotic barrage of images that fail to offer the attractive, hypnotic effect of repetitive, animated light sequences.

The unique properties of neon signage produce schematics of light and movement that cannot be replicated in another medium; the inherent nature of this form of light itself contributes to its attraction to the human eye and mind. Similar to the effect of The Light of Lascaux from across the building of Western Bridge, the delicate compositions of particular light formats draw the human eye to the light’s source, creating a relationship between light and viewer that goes far beyond the mere illuminated room.

New American Paintings Blog: Hit the North (47° 60′N)

Sumi ink, aluminum, western red cedar and Gore-tex comprise the unexpectedly diverse body of work by Seattle-based artist Victoria Haven in her new exhibition Hit the North (47° 60′N) at Greg Kucera Gallery.  I write up this show as my first blog post for New American Paintings Blog here.

THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME, Victoria Haven, 2010, Ink on paper, 60 X 70 inches. Image courtesy of Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle.

Beyond the Beautiful Parking Lot: Lewis Baltz’s Prototypes and the Las Vegas Studio

In Chicago there are two exhibitions of late 1960s architectural photography approximately two miles apart: Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown is on view at the Graham Foundation while Lewis Baltz: Prototypes/Ronde de Nuit is presented at the Art Institute. Comparing Las Vegas Studio’s documentary photographs to Baltz’s “Prototypes” seems like it should be a straightforward endeavor. The two sets of images focus on commercial architecture of the west, including signs, parking lots, roadways and building facades. Elements of the New Topographics movement strongly affiliated with Baltz’s practice can also be found among Venturi and Scott Brown’s photographs of the automobile-focused architecture of the Las Vegas Strip. Yet, instead of highlighting these similarities, viewing both exhibitions in rapid succession more clearly highlights the visual distinctions between a group of artistic images posing as documentary photographs and a body of archival photographs presented as conceptual works of art.

Lewis Baltz’s forty Prototypes hang single-file, in numbered order, around the perimeter of a single gallery in the Art Institute’s Modern Wing. Rigid uniformity dominates the space: each silver gelatin print is identical in size and frame, all titled according to the city in which they were taken. The persistent sunlight, stark commercial buildings and absence of people in the images definitively allude to the weather, sensibility and sprawl characteristic of the west coast. Other than this the Prototypes provide minimal details that distinguish the individual California cities from one another.

Lewis Baltz. "Laguna Niguel." 1970. Gelatin silver print. Laguna Art Museum Collection, Anonymous gift, in memory of Beula Prince © Lewis Baltz. Image from artblart.wordpress.com

The notation of arbitrary specifics as the works’ titles causes the images to be positioned as documentary in nature, but this stylization is then contradicted by the way Baltz presents his subjects within the photographs. Each image appears carefully constructed with precise attention paid to the basic photographic elements of composition, contrast and clarity. In Laguna Niguel, a forgettable building shares the stage with an equally banal parking lot, causing neither to be shown it its entirety. Instead, the forms of the building and parking lot together create the work of art; the photographed objects dissipate into a two-dimensional construction as abstracted from reality as the man-made landscape that serves as this artwork’s medium. Through its deep contrasts, isolated lines and highly conscious framing, in Laguna Niguel, the real elements of a city turn into elements of art abstracted from reality.

In contrast to the minimalist installation of the Prototypes, Las Vegas Studio appears ornate in its hanging throughout the rooms and stairwells of the Madler House residential building housing the Graham Foundation. Although Venturi and Scott Brown primarily intended for the images in this exhibition to be used as documentation for their 1968 study of Las Vegas, seeing the photographs independent from the final study raises the question of how they function as works of art in their own right.

It is known that the group visited Ed Ruscha’s studio immediately prior to their arrival in Las Vegas; they also directly reference the artist’s empirical approach in the panoramic, street level series of images titled “Ed Ruscha” elevation of the Strip, an imitation of Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Despite the influence of Ruscha and the use subject matter similar to the pursuits of New Topographics artists, most of the photographs in Las Vegas Studio are overtly aesthetic and composed; highly saturated colors, strategically illuminated neon lights and unexpected juxtapositions between commercial elements suggest the architects aimed to accomplish more than merely document the landscape before them.

"Riviera Casino, Las Vegas, 1968." Students and Professors of the Las Vegas Studio. 1968. Image from johndan.com

Particularly in the context of being framed, matted and hung salon style for exhibition, the Las Vegas photographs appear as though they aspire become works of fine art, rather than documentary footage. Their titles are straightforward and factual like those of the Prototypes, but unlike Baltz’s approach, the meaning of the Las Vegas Studio pieces still gravitates back to the physical subjects; a photograph of the Riviera’s parking lot and sign is entirely about the Riviera’s parking lot and sign. Although this gleaming image is easily among the more beautiful photographs of a parking lot ever created, the work of art is signifier of the casino, more similar to the physical Rivera sign than to the the parking lot of Baltz’s Laguna Niguel. Hardly a failure, the fact that the Las Vegas Studio images aptly represent the landscape of Las Vegas at the time of Venturi and Scott Brown’s seminal study demonstrates the inherent success of the project; when viewed in tandem with Baltz’s Prototypes, the questions raised by each exhibition diverge but ultimately offer a more complete view of their place and time.

Obscuring the Wunderkammern: Figurehead in the Peabody Essex Museum

Installation artist Charles Sandison has coated the Peabody Essex Museum‘s East India Marine Hall in a dark, drifting sheath of digitized ship logs and journals .  Titled Figurehead, the enlarged strings of writings travel across the historical space’s walls, objects and visitors in disjointed paths that correspond with the weather of Salem, MA, via algorithms and data pulled from the internet. After adjusting to the visual overload of the installation in the same way one’s eyes adapt to a darkened room, the finer details began to emerge; the museum’s founding collection is also in this room, the paintings, figureheads and other artifacts absorbing the projected strands of text.  Physically overwritten by the ship captains’ perfected script and darkened to the point that many objects were unrecognizable, the East India Marine Society collection was transformed by Sandison’s installation into something distant and phantasmal that hovered above the otherwise conventional museum.

FreePort [no. 001]: Figurehead, Charles Sandison, East India Marine Hall, Peabody Essex Museum. Image from metrowestdailynews.com.

The Peabody Essex is the oldest museum in the United States currently in operation.  As its complicated name might suggest, the institution has gone through various mergings and additions since it opened to the public in 1825 as the East India Marine Society Hall. The namesake East India Marine Society of Salem, Massachusetts was a group of individuals who “…navigated the seas beyond the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn, as masters or supercargoes of vessels belong[ing] to to Salem,” as was outlined by the Society’s 1870 bylaws.  This group of sea travelers convened in order to share information about exploration of what they referred to as the East Indies; part of this mission included sharing the objects accumulated during their travels as the public collection that ultimately became the museum. It was though this effort that Society members created a particular asset: an authentic, American wunderkammern.

“East India Marine Hall and General View,” H.P. Ives, 1859-1885, stereoscope, image from New York Public Library.

The image of the original Peabody Essex, alongside that of Charles Wilson Peale’s collection, comprises what popular culture has taught us us envision when we hear the phrase, “curiosity cabinet:” a wide assortment of aged cases and shelves filled with items that now would fall into specific museum genres, including natural history objects, historical artifacts and fine art. Most curiosity cabinets resulted from a particular aristocrat’s personal holdings of taxidermy, decorative objects and man-made wonders. Yet with roots in a collaborative founding rather than an individual’s point of view, the brand of wonder found in the East India Marine Society cabinet was also collective; as objects gathered by a group of entrepreneurs traveling trade routes in the 18th century there was a uniquely American aspect to this artifact compilation.

Charles Sandison’s Figurehead interacts with this original wunderkammern by projecting directly on top of its objects; figureheads from the Society’s ships absorb the glowing text most prominently but it also infiltrates the case containing a deteriorating, taxidermied penguin and floats across the paintings and busts of nineteenth century gentlemen.  Figurehead obscures all objects in the East India Marine Hall to the point that it is hard to even know for certain what one has seen while visiting this room; the pervading sense uncertainty characteristic of foreign environments has been created within one of the country’s most American spaces.

FreePort [no. 001]: Figurehead, Charles Sandison, East India Marine Hall, Peabody Essex Museum. Image from the Peabody Essex Museum.

While visiting the installation, other visitors I encountered in the space found the experience entirely frustrating; labels for the objects were impossible to find in the darkened room, as was often the case for the objects themselves.  The only readily available context was the reference to life at sea provided through the projected nautical jargon of the ship logs; the East India Marine Hall had been transformed into a place that could only be understood by viewing the objects extremely closely and deciphering the collection through the perceptions allowed by the conditions of the room. In this regard, Figurehead is  itself a total representation of the wonder to be found on an exploration.  While this affect is created by a media-based experience, it is also one that cannot be communicated through digital media alone; physically being in the East India Marine Hall is required.

Immediately outside the East India Marine Hall, the streets of Salem are flooded with commercial mini-museums, capitalizing primarily on the Salem Witch Trials and other clichéd urban legends connected to the region. These places are intended to appear wunderkammern-like without owning any objects that would be found in a true curiosity cabinet. One such place is the 40 Whacks Museum, which focuses on murderer Lizzie Borden and houses collections of skulls and hatchets, among other things.  The space is branded to look more or less like a wunderkammern, with aged props, elements of the grotesque among the collection and traditional cases much like those in the East India Marine Hall. Yet essentially all objects in the museum are reproductions, replicas and creative interpretations of historical objects, conceived of and arranged for the purpose of selling Lizzie Borden merchandise to tourists.

The 40 Whacks Museum, Salem, MA

Commercial museums like the 40 Whacks attempt to conform to the image pop culture has created for curiosity cabinets in order to capitalize on the public’s affinity for wonder. In contrast, Charles Sandison’s Figurehead is a contemporary version of a wunderkammern. Unlike commercial imitations, the artist has rethought the wunderkammern in terms of both the history of this concept and the Peabody Essex museum’s own history.  In this regard, Sandison distilled the essence a curiosity cabinet: the uniqueness of the individual museum in which it resides. Figurehead’s true medium was the historical context of the Peabody Essex Museum reconfigured into a representation that bridges the digital and physical roles museums now play. Poignantly, the relationship between physical and digital information is one museums still struggle to negotiate and fully understand; Figurehead‘s successful merging of the dichotomy suggests there is still something to be learned from the wunderkammern, even for the institutions built upon its foundation.

Pop Culture on the Rocks: Lost Guggenheims, Fallen Showgirls and the Liberace Museum

The last time I visited the Liberace Museum, an older woman invited me to try on a giant, patchwork coat. Providing the requisite opportunity for participation the way almost all American museums now do, this coat allowed visitors to feel the added weight Liberace experienced while parading across the stage in one of his elaborate garments.  The woman overseeing the coat was a museum volunteer and clearly a lifelong Liberace fan.  As I tried on the 40 lb garment and posed for the camera, she let us know the coat’s cacophony of shimmering  fabrics were handmade by another volunteer and consisted of fragments from the ensembles of former showgirls.

The room in which I tried on the coat was the highlight of the museum: the costume gallery. Spread across two buildings in a strip mall on east Tropicana Avenue, the Liberace Museum showcased five primary collections; biographical photographs, a handful of vehicles, and a melange of pianos were displayed in the building nearest Tropicana Avenue, while the space on the other side of the parking lot housed the costume collection and selections of Liberace’s Baroque home furniture.

Costume gallery, Liberace Museum, 2008

This week, the Liberace Museum closed indefinitely. While many news sources have reported on this closure since its announcement in early September, I suspect few people under the age of fifty actually visited the physical space.  Dave Hickey’s seminal essay “A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz” in 1997 book Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy provided incentive to visit and reconsider the value of Liberace to American society’s acceptance of the gay community. Likewise, Lady Gaga’s popularity and overt derivations from the piano star’s approach to celebrity suggest Liberace remains relevant to contemporary audiences (see Eric Felten’s “Lady Gaga and Liberace: Separated at Birth?”). Yet, the two instances I visited suggested there was not an enormous body of Las Vegas visitors clamoring to get into the modest space so far east on Tropicana Avenue that the museum ran free, hourly shuttles to and from the hotels on the Strip.  The one occasion I took the shuttle back to the Strip (as opposed to taking a $30 cab ride or renting a car; public transportation is reportedly not for tourists) the only other party enjoying the footage of Liberace performances shown on the shuttle’s TV was a group of three from Australia visiting Las Vegas for a week.

Liberace Museum, 2008

In general, Americans do not visit Las Vegas for the form of culture found in museums. Some have suggested that the closing of the Liberace Museum might be attributed to its isolated location, away from the tourist areas of the city. While the free shuttle was one solution to this concern, the closure of museums throughout Sin City over the past decade demonstrates that its site was not the only reason for the Liberace Museum’s demise.

In some ways, museums seem a natural fit for Las Vegas between of the constant flow of people in and out of the city and the high concentration of resident performers, architects, designers and other creative individuals required to support the entertainment excess for which Vegas it is known. Considering how the shopping, dining, sexual opportunities, spectacle and general branding as a place where one can do anything without regret play a significant role in Las Vegas “culture,” it is easy to forget that gaming is the single reason for the city’s position as a destination in America.  Gambling makes all other things Las Vegas is known for possible, and ultimately, all roads in the city’s tourist districts lead to (and are paid for by) gaming.  This situation creates an interesting relationship with culture, particularly because Las Vegas has spent so many decades creating a culture around gambling that makes it appealing to a mass audience, as opposed to only those who consider themselves “gamblers.” Contemporary popular culture is essential in Las Vegas’s ability to sell itself, and hence the city is designed to reflect the most present of moments in American consciousness.

In the 1990s Sin City capitalized on the public desires for “edutainment” and family friendly activities through the addition of cultural amenities to casinos.  A few remnants of this era still exist, including the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art and the Mandalay Bay’s American Zoo and Aquariums Association accredited Shark Reef. The Venetian Casino opened two museums affiliated with the Guggenheim and designed by Rem Koolhaas in 2001: the Guggenheim Las Vegas and the Guggenheim Hermitage.  The Guggenheim Las Vegas exhibited only The Art of the Motorcycle before its closure in  2002. The Guggenheim Hermitage lasted until 2008, showing works from the collection of its namesake Russian institution and the New York affiliate by big-name modern painters, such as Picasso, Lichtenstein, Mondrian and Kandinsky, among others.

Guggenheim Hermitage, Venetian Resort Casino, 2001, image from rex-ny.com

When the Guggenheims opened in the Venetian, they made sense in terms of the casino’s theme through their adherence to the American perception of Italy as a place for high culture and artistic mastery. Yet the permanence and preservation that  define museums are antitheses to the way visitors approach Las Vegas, as a place without a past, consequences or a future that is definitive; anything can happen with a roll of the dice. Likewise, museums defined by history struggle to find a place in the community (both tourist community and residential community) of such a place; here, “Las Vegas history” is merely a theme equated to the “French Riviera,” “Old West” and “Tropical Islands” represented within the casinos .

The role of Las Vegas’s history is made clear on the Zeigfield Stage in the Bally’s Casino, where Jubilee! continues as last remaining showgirl production on The Strip.  Similar to the fate of its museums, Las Vegas has seen a dramatic loss in the showgirl productions that once dominated the city, beginning most prominently with the closing of the Stardust’s famed productions in 1999 and the end of the Tropicana’s Folies Bergère in 2009. 

Jubilee! perseveres in an almost parodic production that includes an original “Titanic” number that borders on the absurd; when I attended a performance earlier this year I found myself surrounded almost entirely by tourists from Asia.  The vintage styling of the rhinestone costumes, pronounced smiles and homemade backdrops now appear more like the “living history” component of a historical museum than a contemporary performance. If the inclusion of former showgirl outfits in the participatory coat at the Liberace Museum isn’t evidence enough, the showgirl production’s relationship to museums is made even more pronounced by the opportunity to take a formal tour of the Jubilee!’s wardrobe and sets on select days of the week.

Jubilee!, Bally's Casino, image from nytimes.com

As a physical manifestation of popular culture and mainstream American interests, Las Vegas is known to exist in a state of constant flux. Even the community-based Las Vegas Art Museum shut its doors in 2009; hence while Liberace’s legacy may have suggested the museum he built would have an endless audience in Las Vegas, the city in which his career was cemented, a part of me was not surprised when the announcement came that it too would disappear. Las Vegas is not nostalgic, only temporal.  Popular culture does not remember; if it did, at least a portion of the hoards of Lady Gaga fans that visit Las Vegas annually could be expected to flock to Liberace’s pianos and costumes as a means for better appreciating their favorite star.  Instead, I suspect a very small minority of the Little Monsters even know who Mr. Showman was.

Ultimately, the outcry of the press regarding the Liberace Museum’s closure has been surprisingly pronounced for an institution that received relatively little notice when it was doing anything but closing. While there is a natural inclination blame the Las Vegas environment for its lack of recognition of the past, that would be the easy way out. Las Vegas, as a money-driven city, feeds from mainstream trends and culture.  In the case of the Liberace Museum’s closure, the question to ask is the following: what it is that prevented us, the Americans who created what Las Vegas has become, from remembering to visit, or simply remembering at all.