Dioramas

  An exhibition at Palais de Tokyo, Paris 

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Earliest Human Relatives (1994)

         Recreating a three-dimensional scene frozen in time and space, the diorama is usually
         enclosed in a display case, composed of a painted backdrop, props and figures...
         Although the etymology of diorama means “to see through”, the device also stands
        as a screen onto which a world of fantasy and fiction merges with the display of
        knowledge and science.— Text panel, Dioramas, Palais de Tokyo, 2017

The room is quiet and very dark-- like a theater before the curtain goes up, or a film begins. Standing there, I’m suddenly transported back to the moment at which my love of museums first began: of arranged, explained and exquisitely presented objects and images, housed in buildings that (more often than not) look like temples, because--well—they are, serving up the myths of history and culture.

I try to remember what I was gazing at, entranced, at that long-ago primal instant. Was it a family of stuffed animals, posed in front of a painted sky? Or was it some Neanderthals, crouching in the dirt? I have stood in front of so many dioramas, lost in their worlds. Before movies-- let alone Virtual Reality Experiences—these magical windows invited viewers like me to project themselves into other times and places. Generations of museum-goers have enjoyed their effects, and the pleasant illusion that they offer some kind of real knowledge.

Night at the Museum (2006)

In Dioramas, curators Claire Garnier, Laurent Le Bon and Florence Ostende have assembled a spectacular and immersive exhibition exploring the history of this form and its influence on artists in the 20th and 21st centuries. The lightless entryway of this marvel-filled show is where my Proustian memory is stirred. The first thing visitors encounter, once eyes are accustomed to the penumbral gloom, is a loop from the 2006 movie Night at the Museum. Over and over, museum guard Ben Stiller spectacularly shatters the glass of the display purporting to tell the story of explorers Lewis and Clark, in order to free their beautiful native American guide Sacajawea. Serving as a kind of prologue, this film loop cleverly sets the stage for the rooms of dioramaphilia that follow, by defining and dissolving the ‘third wall’ at the same time that it suggests that there will be an examination/critique of the practices of museology.

Jean Paul Favande, Naguere Daguerre 1 (2012), 19th century painted canvas and digital creation

In the first galleries, the story of the invention of the diorama as a theatrical venue in 1822 is revealed through Jean-Paul Favand's 21st century digital enhancements of Louis Daguerre and Charles Bouton's dreamy images, originally created on both sides of semi-transparent canvas. In the image shown here, plays of colored light illuminate the sun going down over the bay of Naples, while Vesuvius erupts nearby. These 'dioramas,' featuring current as well as historical events, became popular fairground attractions for the rest of the nineteenth century.

Caterina De Julianis, Santa Maria Maddalena in adorazione della croce, 1717. Polychrome wax, painted paper, glass, tempera on paper and other materials

Continuing into the show, visitors soon discover that Catholicism was using some of the same display strategies much earlier, in works intended to stimulate faith during the Counter-Reformation. An assortment of religious events from the Bible or the lives of the saints are enacted by slightly creepy wax figurines in front of painted backgrounds. These are the first true dioramas, as the term is presently used; they were likely made by nuns in convent workshops, as a way of making visible the mysteries of faith. 

Walter Potter, Happy Family

In the next gallery, there is something quite different: displays of 19th-century taxidermied animals and birds, some in dramatic engagements (predator and prey, for example) in naturalistic settings. Some practitioners, though, went against this 'realistic' trend, seeking their inspiration in fairy tales or Christian themes.   The fictitious 'happy family' pictured here of birds, rabbits, squirrels, mice, a monkey-- and even a cat-- is by celebrated English taxidermist Walter Potter. His own museum included some 10,000 specimens, presented in whimsical scenes like a schoolroom filled with fifty little rabbits in tiny suits of clothes, seated at desks.

In the hot, close dark (the day I visit, it’s over 90 outside, and considerably warmer within the exhibition) the next gallery presents one of the most important uses of display as educational tool. This is in museums of ethnography and history, where they became a vehicle for the preservation of the practices, dress and devices of the past.

diorama by Riviere

The father of this kind of diorama in France, Georges Henri Riviere, is highlighted here for his innovative approach to conserving his nation’s patrimony. Some of the other ethnographic scenes feature excruciating moments of colonialism. 

Like a kind of interesting punctuation, works by contemporary artists are interpolated between historical objects as the show progresses. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs of natural history exhibits appear in several places, including not far from a

grid of transparencies of paintings used as diorama backdrops-- jungles, forests, rocks and clouds. Another contemporary work near these glowing rectangles is Jeff Wall’s Giant (1992), featuring an immense, naked, sixty-something woman, standing calmly in the middle of a library-- seemingly unnoticed by the patrons. The modest scale of this piece (19 x 23 inches), especially in comparison with most of Wall’s epically-sized work, invites close-up examination. The closer one gets, the more powerfully claustrophobic and disturbing it seems.

Jeff Wall, Giant (1992)

Sugimoto is not alone in his photographic examination of natural history dioramas.  This subject has also been the subject of works by Diane Fox (represented here as well) and by Richard Barnes, who is known for his handsome pictures of all kinds of ‘behind the scenes’ moments at museums. Barnes' image of a man immersed in the task of vacuuming a bison display encapsulates much of what Dioramas is about, as evidenced by the exhibition’s curators’ description of the show as exploring the concept of the uncanny, describing it as ‘the unsettling experience of an everyday situation.’

Diane Fox, Ubersee-Museum Bremen, Bremen, Germany 2005

Richard Barnes, Man With Buffalo ( 2007)

The presence of photographs by Sugimoto and Barnes seems only right; there could hardly be a show about dioramas that did not include them-- or, say, Mark Dion, who has a piece in the large gallery at the end. There are, however, some surprises. These include Robert Gober’s weirdly intimate black and white photographs of-- natural history museum displays. At first baffling, these small images suddenly make a kind of sense when seen as studies for the artist’s truncated wax figures. Research reveals that, in fact, Gober has described his wax work as being “inspired by animal dioramas in a natural-history museum—examples of figurative sculpture far removed from the Classical tradition.”[1]. (Perhaps one of the catalogue essays explores this connection more thoroughly, but as I unfortunately can’t read French, I must rely on my own intuition and the few wall texts that have been translated into occasionally fractious English.)

Anselm Kiefer, Family stories (2013-17)

 Also revelatory are an enchanting series of pieces by Anselm Kiefer. They consist of two rows of boxes inset in the wall; these are filled with delicately layered silhouettes, evoking the worlds of fairytales and dreams. The artist describes them as “the story of a life in Germany at different stages: the peasant woman from the Black Forest with her great-grandson… the altar boy who wants to become a pope; a photograph drawn from a father’s war diary… or the walk with my friend during which Martin Heidegger’s brain suddenly lies on the soil of the forest...”

Charles Matton, Giacometti's Studio (1987)

Other highlights include work by French artists Charles Matton and Richard Bacquie. There are several of Matton’s exquisite miniature rooms-- their contents scrupulously researched-- including  Alberto Giacometti’s studio. In a minuscule version of a grand movie theater, a film plays on the screen. Bacquie, an iconoclastic and gifted sculptor whose career was tragically cut short at 42 by cancer, deserves much wider recognition than he has had outside France. His work here is a full-sized replica of Duchamp’s Etante Donne that breaks its illusions by removing the walls and its single point of view, allowing viewers to walk around the figure. For me, this disconcerting deconstruction of Duchamp’s masterpiece recalls nothing

Richard Bacquie, Sans titre. Etant donnés : 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage…, 1991.

else so much as the moment at the end of the movie The Wizard of Oz, when the charlatan of a wizard tries unsuccessfully to distract Dorothy and friends by bellowing “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” as he frantically manipulates his controls. 

But I digress. As another one of the exhibition texts reminds us, “Staging a realm of optical illusion in which the laws of perception are constantly challenged, the diorama is a world of fantasy but also a critical platform for artists. What if the world we live in were nothing but a large diorama in which we experience the spectacle of our own life?” The curators drive this idea home by including a second film loop near the end of the exhibition. In this brief excerpt from the penultimate moments of

The Truman Show (1998)

The Truman Show (1998), Jim Carrey/ Truman discovers that he has, in fact, lived his entire life inside a shooting stage by ramming his sailboat into the painted ‘sky.' Seeing a staircase in the wall, he climbs the steps. Carrey’s escape is a reminder that everything seen in the museum is framed by the building itself—by the fact of experiencing it here, bathed in the museum effect.[2] Each of these dioramas is a story within a story, and so on. There is no end.

Duane Hanson, Housepainter II (1984)

As a final coda, a worker grasping a paint roller stands mutely by the exhibition’s door. This figure turns out to be a hyper-real sculpture by Duane Hanson from 1984--  symbolizing, perhaps, the end of make-believe (as the wall is returned to pristine white) and the return  to reality-- as you walk out of the darkness, and back onto the streets of Paris, itself a giant open air museum. Turning to look back towards the river, the Eiffel Tower suddenly looms up in the near distance. Just for a moment, it looks painted, as if brushed on a backdrop of achingly bright blue. Then a family of tourists walks by, in terrible fanny packs and shorts, and everything is normal again.  
__________________________________

[1] https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81069
[2]"The museum acquires social authority by controlling ways of seeing, and the objects around which museal vision is directed gather meaning from their context within the museum." http://www.archimuse.com/publishing/ichim03/095C.pdf

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Dioramas, which opened on June 14th, continues until the 10th of September, 2017. A substantial, heavily-illustrated catalogue with essays (in French) is available from Flammarion. The exhibition includes work by Marcelle Ackein, Carl Akeley, Sammy Baloji, Richard Baquié, Richard Barnes, Erich Böttcher, Jacques Bouisset, Cao Fei, Philippe Chancel, Joseph Cornell, Louis Daguerre, Giovanni D’Enrico, Caterina De Julianis, Mark Dion, Jean Paul Favand, Claude-André Férigoule, Joan Fontcuberta, Diane Fox, Emmanuel Frémiet, Ryan Gander, Isa Genzken, Arno Gisinger, Ignazio Lo Giudice, Robert Gober, Duane Hanson, Edward Hart, Patrick Jacobs, Arthur August Jansson, Anselm Kiefer, Fritz Laube, Pierre Leguillon, William Robinson Leigh, Charles Matton, Mathieu Mercier, Kent Monkman, Armand Morin, Lorenzo Mosca, Dulce Pinzón, Walter Potter, Georges Henri Rivière, G-M Salgé, Gerrit Schouten, Ronan-Jim Sévellec, Pierrick Sorin, Peter Spicer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Fiona Tan, Jules Terrier, Tatiana Trouvé, Jeff Wall, Rowland Ward, and Tom Wesselmann. Obviously, I've just scratched the surface with this brief essay. If we're lucky, maybe an American museum will stage an exhibition of this scope and caliber at some point in the future. If we still have museums.

Future Art School

Close your eyes. Imagine a world in which school, beyond minimal skills in reading and math, is something that only a wealthy few are able to attend. Especially, to study something as arcane and uselessly creative as art.  In that time and place, there’s a girl who has a gift-- for visualizing space, making something from nothing; creating sculptural work that fits inside and goes through and around whatever is there, eccentric objects often activated by old-style engines and pulleys of string.

You see her first as a woman, less than thirty; tall, with long, muscled arms, chopped hair, and hands covered with the kind of scars that come from working with almost useless tools. But then, in a sudden flashback to a decade before, you are at the moment she’s accepted to the last remaining art academy, awarded a (rare) scholarship. She’s set to go, suitcase packed, when her deadbeat, petty-criminal parents are killed--maybe an accident, probably not-- and she has to give up her hard-won exit from the polluted squalor of her under-class world to take care of her younger sisters. (Girls, especially vulnerable in this future, are frequently kidnaped for slavery or organ donation.) Vanishing with them to escape their parent’s debts and crimes, she never shows up on the first day of class, or any other.

But now, at last, she has managed to get the girls into adulthood and decent lives. One is in a trade school, learning how to fix the vast climate-control systems necessary for all the cities; the other fell in love with a fellow orphan and emigrated to what used to be Finland. So it is that this gifted young woman is finally ready to go to school.

Back in the future present, it’s night. Dressed in clean clothes-- a patched, coarse shirt with short sleeves, baggy chino pants-- she carries the same big, beat-up suitcase she packed initially ten years before, up the steps of an imposing pillared building. Surprisingly, the door is unlocked. She walks through corridors and silent rooms looking for art, and when she finds it, she puts her suitcase down.

She’s standing at the center of the ground floor of the building. It's a tall, domed space; balconies run around its perimeter on several levels. Light from the city outside leaks in through a ring of high windows, faintly illuminating concrete sculptures that are clustered around her. Neither good nor interesting, they’re based on bits of old-fashioned architecture; arches and sills, doorways and corners, covered with badly-rendered ornament. She can’t believe her eyes. THIS is what she has spent the last decade of her life—no, the last TWO decades, counting the years when she was a girl—working towards?  She sits on one of them, head in hands. Then, quietly, she raises her eyes. 

She goes back to her bag and throws it open. Then she looks around. She goes through several  battered steel cabinets, pulling things out: metal rod, string, plaster bandage. She finds some old mixers, removes their motors. She is ready to begin.

She starts to build a net of forms and functions, using some of the concrete forms as foundations for her system. She makes diamonds and triangles and crosses of rod, welded together with a torch from the suitcase. Rotating belts of bandage interconnect it all, moving, alive, but rickety and ticklish beyond belief. It keeps breaking down; she fixes it, patient. She has stripped down to an undershirt, solder on her clean pants and a big smear of dirt on her thoughtful face.

Then she hears a sound. She looks up and sees a girl with pale hair and wire-rimmed glasses, in the topmost balcony high above. But the girl says nothing, just melts into the shadows, and no cops show up, so our heroine just keeps on working, absorbed in what she is making, this fantastic work of art that transforms the room by covering it with a silvery network of shivering lines. She thinks that someone will be coming soon and it will all be over, but she doesn’t care.

A man with a beard comes through the door. She stops. He quietly asks who she is. She wipes her hand across her face and puts her shirt back on, embarrassed a little, and tells him she's the student who never came. He tells her his name, but she knows who he is, knows his voice: he's the teacher who called her to tell her that her long-ago application was accepted. But now he tells her more. When she didn’t show up, after all he had overcome to get the school to take and support her, he had been passed over as Chair, for the man who now teaches students how to make work like his own—namely, these ghastly concrete doorstops. He tells her that he tried, but couldn’t find even a trace of her. She bows her head. She explains what happened. Her parents’ death, her little sisters. Then, quietly, she says, --but I'm here now. I didn’t even want to write; I just came, to see if there was, could be, a way…

He shakes his head; tells her that the new Chair decided they should have no more scholarships, and that he doesn’t know where the money to get her through the program will come from. But then, he stops. Walks through the world she has created. Says, don’t go anywhere. Just stay here. Sit. Please.

She sits. Runs her palms down the front of the shirt, tries to make her hair lie smooth with her fingers. Thinks about the past. How hard it was for her to save them all-- the awful, often dangerous work, hiding her sex so she could get those jobs. But still, all the while, she had kept on thinking, making  little sculptures out of junk and bits of trash, that she would leave around for others to find. She pictures some of the places she later encountered her creations: behind the bar in a gambling house, on the dashboard of her boss’s truck(that one was a shock), and once, in the pocket of a dead man she found lying on the street.

The teacher returns. He says, we have figured something out. You'll have to work thirty hours a week as the assistant here. You certainly have the skills, which none of the other students do. You'll be working for me. You can come home with me now.

She flinches. Thinks that maybe he means to take advantage, nice as he seems. Has she managed to avoid exploitation for years, only for this to be where it happens? But then she sees the girl from the balcony, coming into the room, and she realizes that the girl is a woman in late middle age--  hair silver, not blonde, with wrinkles framing her mouth and eyes. (This is unusual; people in the privileged classes commonly have youth procedures done every few years and avoid looking old until they die.) The silver-haired woman puts her hand on the man’s arm, smiling shyly. Of course. She’s the one who brought him here, before the night watchman walked in on the impromptu sculpture and its maker. They are husband and wife—both professors, she says, taking the younger woman's hand. --We've dreamed of a student who could change what’s happened here. And we think that might be you. We can make you this offer, but only on a single condition. You must stay for six years, instead of four, living with us. At the end of that time, you’ll have your Artist Letter.

The young woman is speechless. For decades, even if allowed to attend the academy, no one in her social class has been given the special papers which function like a pass, allowing entry into the world in which the very few live. She will eat real food; read real books, instead of fuzzy scratched-up screens. Most of all, she will soon be able to see real art.  Silently, she nods agreement, tears running down her dirt-streaked face. The three of them stand there, listening to the chirping motors. One hiccups slightly as the bandage slows and chafes, and the man reaches into a drawer for something better. The student makes the substitution while her new teachers watch.

They are all very tired, but unable to leave. Clearly afraid that it’s only a dream.

Now: open your eyes.

The art of the political: some thoughts about 'Alt-Left' at the Berkeley Art Center

Towards the end of a 2011 interview about political art, artist and writer Victor Burgin remarks to his interlocutor that “The art world congratulates itself on the fact that art today has a larger audience than at any time in its history—but this is simply an epiphenomenon of the increasing mediaisation of art. As the saying goes, ‘we get the art we deserve.’”[1] As I walked slowly around the Berkeley Art Center recently, that saying (which, as it turns out, was never actually said by anyone except Burgin) came floating up to the surface of my mind. The show I was visiting, ‘Alt-Left: Local Treasures,’ is described by its curator DeWitt Cheng as "a Bay Area Art response to the Alt-Right.’" The work of six artists: painters Mark Bryan, Michael Kerbow and Ariel Parkinson; collagists John Hundt and Vanessa Woods, and sculpture by ceramicist Pancho Jimenez, filled the art center’s eccentric but lovely space with beautifully-made images and objects that take the viewer by the throat with their content. So to speak.

Installation view of Alt-Left at Berkeley Art Center

Ariel Parkinson, Growth Economy (1975)

Michael Kerbow, Sequester (2015)

Subjects include of-the-moment Trump caricatures by Bryan as seen above  (as well as an older work—a savagely funny Alice's tea party/Last Supper featuring Bush 2, his unholy father and cabinet members) and dark, dystopic meditations on consumerism and its consequences by Kerbow. Parkinson’s works, rather than addressing present dilemmas, are all from the '70s, when she lived in Berkeley, and consist primarily of agitprop portraits and poster-worthy images of subjects like the Concorde—gone, but not forgotten-- or US Steel, rendered in ink on paper. (The portraits include figures whose contributions to our present dilemmas are profound: Earl Butz, secretary of agriculture under Nixon and Ford and architect of what I would describe as our Crap Food Empire[2], as well as Howard Jarvis, one of the authors of Proposition 13,[3] the single driving force behind the near-failure of California’s public school system.)

clockwise from left: Kerbow, Bryan, Jimenez

Jimenez’ sculptures, surreal agglomerations of cast or molded toys, small figures and other objects into other forms, seem to address both environmental and cultural issues, their imagery suggesting the way memory works by juxtaposing fragments into something whole.  

John Hundt, installation view at BAC

Hundt and Woods’ inclusion here begin the tilt the show towards a more abstract interpretation of Cheng’s avowed intention, as their collage works—exquisite, intelligent, intriguing—seem to have more tangential relationships to art as sociopolitical criticism. Hundt’s titles: Conspiracist ideation, Blown Away (Assassination of Liberty), Alt-facts (all 2017)—suggest that current events are on his mind, but the images do not.

Vanessa Woods, Mirage (2016)

Woods’ pieces utilize subversive associations to nudge the viewer towards a new understanding of images drawn from many sources, ranging from National Geographic-esque ethnography to art history.   

Thinking about why these collagist's work was included made the experience of seeing the show both more memorable and more troubling. If these are political works, what does that term mean? Cheng quotes Peter Selz’s assertion that “Some critics and artists have argued ‘if it is political, it is not art,’ while others stipulate that ‘if it is art, it is not political.’ My contention is that not only can artists comment significantly on politics in their work, but political engagement in specific situations can produce authentic art.”[4] While I am not completely sure what this means—something that often happens to me when I read Selz’s prose—I think he might be saying that art which focuses on issues can be good art, partly because of the artist’s desire and willingness to engage.

I love the works in this show. And I want to believe that art changes lives (another unattributable catch-phrase). California has a rich history of deeply political art; works from 1945 to the early 2000s are explored in the book by Selz from which Cheng draws his quote. And Bryan and Kerbow’s pictures have a clear place in current Bay Area figurative practice: painters such as Chester Arnold, Walter Robinson, Louise Stanley, and Scott Greene (well, he studied here, and shows his work here).

Mark Bryan, The Mad Tea Party (2005). Note sheep in foreground.

And maybe it’s important that art engage with social issues. No. There’s no maybe here: for some artists, an address of the unfolding drama in front of us-- whether direct or not-- is the only acceptable response. Seemingly, that’s the case for the individuals here, in a variety of ways. But can art push the future in another direction? Or can it only register our anger, frustration and desire for change? I just don’t know. The only thing I am certain of is that whether or not art addresses politics, it is political.

Epilogue: Some years ago, I worked on educational materials for a show that restaged the Degenerate Art exhibition. This recreation was originated at LACMA in 1991 by its brilliant curator Stephanie Barron and then traveled to Chicago, Washington DC and Berlin. The 1937 ‘Entarte Kunst’ show was an attempt by Nazi Germany to destroy modern art through vilification. Works by artists affiliated with such movements as the Bauhaus, Blue Rider, and New Objectivity were shown next to slogans painted on the gallery walls saying things like “crazy at any price.” Though culturally valueless, according to the Nazis, works stripped from museums were then sold to raise money for the Third Reich.

Degenerate Art exhibition, Munich 1937, news photo

As one reviewer of the LACMA show reminded readers, “Nobody can imagine President Bush ordering NEA chief John Frohnmayer to strip our museums of all art from Picasso to Warhol, declaring it obscene and selling it to pay for the Persian Gulf War. That is absurd. It is not, however, impossible to imagine a good number of American citizens who think modern art is bunk having a fine old time razzing it were it be somehow stripped of its cultural cachet…(the) show has become a cautionary tale about what symptoms signal a culture that may be in danger of going off the rails. Just a gentle reminder. In 1937, Germany had already jumped the track. We have not.”[5]

And neither have we, some twenty-five years later. Not yet, anyway. But we shouldn’t feel too comfortable: which is, in the end, the takeaway of this show. There may be no NEA soon, so stay tuned.

Chester Arnold, Collection

[1] http://norgunk.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/DOXA_10_ENG_Victor_Burgin_22-27.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(1978)

[4] Art of Engagement: Visual Politics and California and Beyond: Peter Selz and Susan Landauer, UC Press 2006

[5] William Wilson, “Revisiting the Unthinkable: Nazi Germany’s Degenerate Art Show at LACMA,” Los Angeles Times, 2/15/1991

Poison

I.
The incident occurred at 0600 hours, when the secondary safety system experienced a computer malfunction. At that time, a statistically non-significant portion of material was released into the immediate environment in the form of a vapor cloud. This has resulted in certain possibly temporary changes in the local ecology. Long-term effects are being studied, but are unlikely to be fatal in more than a small number of cases.

The physical integrity of the building surrounding the tank was not compromised. Once containment was achieved, production was brought back online within two work days.

Although skin lesions, prolonged nausea and convulsions have been reported by residents within a three kilometer radius of the facility, liability will be limited, as some symptoms had already been noted over the three years since the facility went on line, at which time residents were notified in writing that problems could occur should they spend more than a stipulated amount of time within a certain distance of the facility (a circle that encloses the existing town and nearby farms). Litigation is therefore expected to be limited to the most severe cases, i.e., permanent disfigurement, birth defects, and loss of life (children younger than 2 or the elderly).

II.

It was just after dawn when the big tank blew. It sounded like the whole damn place had gone up. Windows busted clear down to the south end of town, miles away. Then a big, ugly beehive of orange gas came out, smelling worse than anything you can possibly imagine, and that amn’t all—most every tree, bush and blade of grass within a quarter mile was stone dead in a week. Nothing came back, either, right around the plant, and it seems like it’s going to stay that way for good.

The most amazing part of the whole damn thing is that the factory itself wasn’t even damaged. All that poison just blew itself out, all over us. They got the place going again inside of a day and a half.

I don’t feel too good these days, and I sure don’t want to work there anymore, but the kids need to eat. 
 

III.

As you can see from these pictures, the whole event was a real photo opportunity. When I’m doing ‘art’, I like early morning light, because it produces the most interesting shadows, but the real reason I was set up there that day was I had been hired to shoot some pictures of the office building for the annual report. After the explosion,  all I had to do was reposition my camera.  Remember--- part of being an award-winning photographer is always being ready for ‘accidents’ like this.

Formally, the sensuously-rounded shape of the cloud in this next shot presents a dynamic contrast to the geometry of the building under it. (laughter.) Nice color, too—that saturated orange against the blue of the sky.

This last one was taken in one of the town parks, about six months later, when I figured it was safe to come back to finish the shoot. That teenage girl in her crop top on the  dead grass says it all. Besides, a little skin will always help you to sell your work to magazines. Take it from an expert: if you can show’ em pain, humiliation, sex or kittens, you’ll be on your way to making a sale.

IV.

There was a big noise which woke me and my brother up and them it smelled really bad and my mom wouldn’t let me play outside and Ricky’s mom won’t let him come over here any more. I don’t care about not playing in the yard anyways because the grass died and all the leaves fell off the tree even though it isn’t fall. Grandma wants us to come stay with her but Lyle has these scabs on his arms and he keeps throwing up so we have to stay here until he gets better.

How to write a catalogue essay

As someone who both reads and writes a lot of catalogue essays for contemporary artists, I was intrigued to find instructions online-- on E-How, of all places-- for writing one. (I confess that I have come to rely on computer queries for everything from converting centimeters to inches to recipe substitutions, like milk soured with lemon juice for yoghurt, or instructional videos on, say, regrouting a countertop or installing a faucet.)

The E-How directions for writing an essay seem at first glance to be as direct as those for home repairs. Still, the devil is in the details, as the expression goes. Experience has shown me that it is one thing to watch someone effortlessly sweep fresh grout into those tiny cracks between tiles and entirely another to manipulate the stuff yourself. But I digress.

The instructions for essay writing suggest beginning with biographical detail, such as“facts about the artist’s birth and early upbringing, education, exhibition history and any awards she might have won. This should be easy to summarize by researching details of the artist’s life online.” Right. This will be simple because the Internet is such a goldmine of accurate information about the formative experiences of most artists.

The next step is to evaluate the artist’s work to date, in order to identify “some major turning points in her career,” as well as a consistent theme. “Analyze that theme. This is the fun, subjective part. You have already presented all the information. Now it’s your turn to make your own contribution to the artist’s work.”

This is the fun, subjective part. Fun, maybe-- though honestly, that isn’t exactly the word I would use. I might lean towards enjoyable, interesting; challenging. But subjective? Not if you are doing a good job. Why, I ask myself, is it that when Civilians* talk about analyzing and evaluating art, the same idea nearly always surfaces-- that such discussion lacks objectivity and inevitably veers off into some kind of thickety underbrush of creative flights of fancy?

Catalogue essays are not about making something up. They are about finding the clearest way to describe and explain. The catalogue writer opens a door, makes the viewer’s experience of the work more meaningful and satisfying, and puts the work in a context that helps it to be understood and appreciated.

Oh, I almost forgot: in the E-How instructions, the last thing the essay is supposed to do is to draw a conclusion by synthesizing objective fact and ‘fun’ fiction together in order to “make a lasting impression on the reader” – but of the artist’s work, rather than your prowess as a writer. Well, of course. Isn’t that the whole point?

*Civilians: those who define themselves as not of the art world.

Acts of Dog

Another in a series of occasional posts of fiction about art and artists

It was so nice of you to come by. You comfortable? Can I get you some coffee, soda, anything? No, no, it’s OK, I really don’t mind not being able to drive anymore. I can’t remember recent events so good, but you know, stuff that happened in the seventies… that’s another thing.  Did I ever tell you about my cousin's kid, Steve the artist? No? well, for quite a while, he made his living by producing these little tabletop replicas of buildings--houses, mostly, with the occasional commercial property creeping into the mix-- out of clay. It was perfect for him. Few people would have the patience to reproduce every fricking detail like that, but Steve was a pretty literal guy.

Oh yeah, this is a good story... One day, he gets a call from someone who says he wants to have a model made of his business, in honor of its 25th anniversary. OK, Steve says, fine, no problem, send me photos, architect’s drawings, I’ll get started. No, no, the guy insists, come out and see it, and gives Steve the address. Meet me there at 1, OK? He hangs up. Steve realizes he doesn’t even know what the business is. Still, no problem. He gets into his truck and drives over there, and what does he find? A hot dog stand. It’s a standard drive-up building on a paved lot with parking, ugly as sin like everything else that was built out in the western suburbs, but it’s called Mr. Mighty Dog, and there are these two crazy-ass giant hot dogs standing on the roof.

One is wearing a lion skin across its hot dog chest and the other is—well—a girl hot dog, and she‘s ogling the first hot dog’s, um, biceps. Steve can’t believe it. It’s awesome, it’s breathtaking, but he’s thinking about the technical problems those hot dog figures might present when the guy pulls up and jumps out of his car, full of pride and enthusiasm, checkbook in hand. It’s a matter of minutes and a price is agreed on, the deal is made and Steve has a deposit in his hand. So he goes home and, pretty soon, he gets started.

He has plenty of pictures to work from—taken from every possible point of view, even up on the roof. The guy has clearly been taking photographs of the place for years: in some, the dogs are wearing holiday outfits—you know, Mr. and Mrs. Claus—but in others, they look like Elvis impersonators. Stuff like that. One even features the two of them in graduation gowns. As Steve puts the parts of the building together, piece by piece, he thinks about how the owner will be able to get little costumes made for the model too, dressing it up, you know, seasonally.

Finally, the model is finished, and the guy comes over to see it for the first time. But he’s not happy, not at all, because the hot dog couple is kneeling on the roof instead of standing up. What the fuck?- he screams. Steve tries to explain, reminding the guy that he told him from the get-go that clay has limitations and some things just aren’t possible, but the guy isn’t having any of it and he leaves pretty abruptly.

Naturally, Steve is beside himself. He has spent quite a bit of time on this piece and the rest of the money is obviously not forthcoming. He has bills to pay, a wife and one, no, two little kids at this point, a mortgage—you get the picture. He and the hot dog guy shout at each other on the phone a few times, but nothing gets settled. Steve doesn’t want to go to a lawyer—that could be expensive—but months have gone by, it’s August now and nothing is happening. He tries calling his friends to see what they think he should do but everyone is on vacation.

Suddenly, almost literally out of a clear blue sky, a freak bolt of lightning from a passing late-summer thunderstorm knocks the big hot dogs to their knees. Zango, just like that. Just like the model, that is.

The next day, a check for the balance due arrives at Steve’s studio by messenger. While he is standing there staring at it, the phone rings, and it’s the guy, calling to tell him about the lightning. Just before the owner hangs up, he says, - I understand a warning when I get one.  

One of Steve’s kids wanders in. As the little boy throws his arms around his dad’s legs, he looks up at the photo of the Mighty Dog restaurant, still pinned on the wall. Daddy, he says sweetly, didja ever notice that dog is god spelled backwards?

The Empty Frame

Something about Portable Art: a Project by Celia Forner, an exhibition of artist-designed jewelry currently on view at Hauser & Wirth NY, brings the court of the French monarchy in the eighteenth century to mind. Perhaps it’s the ‘commissioned series of performative photographs’ of actress Rossy de Palma interacting with various pieces that suggests this particular historical reading of luxury goods as doodads for the super-rich, epitomizing the fickle tastes of a decadent society in which a vast income disparity between an aristocracy defined by wealth and--well, pretty much everyone else-- is leading inexorably towards cataclysm. Let's take a closer look.

John Baldessari, Nose Earring (Gold) (2016). © John Baldessari. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery and Hauser & Wirth.

In Spanish fashion photographer Gorka Postigo’s sleek images, De Palma is the perfect model for pieces designed by a number of A-list artists. These include (shown above) John Baldessari’s startling Crowd Arm: articulated elbow armor, rendered in precious metals and equipped with alarmingly sharp-looking spikes. In another picture, De Palma seems to be channeling Salvador Dali, as the camera zooms in on half of her face, her right ear adorned with a Baldessari-designed single earring in the shape of a full-sized Roman nose (not dissimilar from her own handsome profile).

Salvador Dali and friend

A third image shows De Palma in Cristina Iglesias’ Arm Piece, Shoulder Piece and Hip Piece. It is difficult to imagine how the last of these would actually stay on the body, if the wearer wanted to, say, sit down, or (God forbid) walk. Like the extravagantly tall wigs of the eighteenth century, which required their wearers to kneel on the floor of a coach to get to a party, or corsets so tight that they caused semi-permanent indigestion, the implication here seems to be that fashion exacts a price but that it is one worth paying. (In this case, the actual dollar cost of one of these works of wearable art is  between $15,000 and $120,000.)

Cristina Iglesias, Arm Piece, Shoulder Piece, andHip Piece (2016) © Cristina Iglesias. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery and Hauser & Wirth.

A necklace of big colorful blobby discs designed by Mary Heilman (there are seven variations) is beautiful. I did find myself wondering if someone would don such a large and memorable piece more than a few times. 

Mary Heilmann, Untitled (2016). © Mary Heilmann. Courtesy the artist, 303
Gallery and Hauser & Wirth.

Perhaps-- like haute couture (or, in truth, a shocking number of garments bought on impulse)—buyers only intend to wear such an object once or twice, if at all.

Or maybe such a piece does become part of its owner’s everyday routine. Bharti Kher’s forearm-covering Warrior Bracelet (2016) terminates in a lion’s head that encloses a hidden handle; one grips it to hold the bracelet in place while wearing it.

BhartiKher WarriorBracelet (2017). Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

The artist describes his invention as 'an empowering accessory… a skin the shaman carries… Wear it to work and keep it in your bedroom for when you need to call into being your warrior.’ 

The Portable Art project began over eight years ago with a commission to Louise Bourgeois by Spanish collector/ super model/ jewelry designer Celia Forner (she and husband Francesco Venturi have been described as “an absurdly glamorous couple”).  Bourgeois’ spiraling bracelets are showstoppers: extravagantly lovely (and hopefully hollow-cast, or wearing them would duplicate the experience of spending a few hours in manacles).

Cuff — Louise Bourgeois, 2008
22kt yellow gold plated silver, pink marble stand

An additional, smaller cuff of twisted, ropy strands of gold is shown resting on what appears to be a pink marble phallus. In this case, the buyer seems to get something to wear as well as something to fondle while wearing it.

A total of fifteen artists have been commissioned by Forner: John Baldessari, Phyllida Barlow, Stefan Brüggemann, Subodh Gupta, Mary Heilmann, Andy Hope 1930, Cristina Iglesias, Matthew Day Jackson, Bharti Kher, Nate Lowman, Paul McCarthy, Caro Niederer, Michele Oka Doner, and Pipilotti Rist. Regrettably, only a few of the pieces created can be seen on the Hauser &Wirth site. Some sound tantalizing, including Rist’s "large scale, lucent polycarbonate and computer wire squiggle necklaces," titled Jewellery for Wintertimes (2016). One imagines a big ol’ mess of plastic and wire, challenging to wear but worth the effort. And where are the ‘slyly elegant’ butt plug necklaces designed by Paul McCarthy, available in silver, gold and rose gold?Maybe a photograph isn’t necessary, as they most likely look like a tiny version of the sculpture shown below. In any case, a fully-illustrated catalogue of the show is available for interested buyers.  

Paul McCarthy, Tree (2014)

In setting the stage for this exhibition, the press release also asserts that “Prior to the era of Modernism, boundaries remained firmly fixed between painting and sculpture, classified as ‘fine art’, and jewelry, which belonged strictly to the province of applied arts.” I picture Benvenuto Cellini, celebrated Renaissance goldsmith and sculptor, rolling in his grave at this pronouncement.  But no matter. Press releases abound in such hyperbolic statements. This one also invokes the precedent of various Modern Artists who dabbled in wearable art—Lucio Fontana, Georges Braque—as well as the wild inventions of Surrealists Dali, Max Ernst and Man Ray.  But the most important inspiration for the project seems to have been an exhibition of Alexander Calder’s jewelry at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2008, the year that Celia Forner began commissioning works. Calder apparently made some 1800 pieces over the course of his lifetime, out of hammered or twisted wire and bits of pottery or beach glass, many as gifts for family or friends. Some of the words used to describe these earrings, necklaces and brooches are ‘whimsical,’ ‘Bohemian,’ or ‘unconventional.’

Alexander Calder, The Jealous Husband (1940), on Anjelica Huston

As one description put it, 'At a time when diamonds and mink coats were typical displays of wealth, these daring, calligraphic pieces had little in common with contemporary bijoux.’ Calder loved to laugh, as suggested by this outlandish piece (note the sharp shoulders) titled The Jealous Husband.

Reflecting on Calder's lighthearted inventions, I find myself imagining Baldessari, famed for his own trenchant sense of humor, chortling madly over his designs. While the single nose-shaped earring is entertaining, the weaponized arm cuffs are at least as savage as they are funny. Then there’s his little enameled bluebird with diamond eyes, perched on a curved ‘shoulder stand’ of suede-covered metal-- Mr. Blue Bird on my Shoulder (2013).  Best of all, though, is the artist’s Picture Frame for the Face Necklace (2011), modeled here in one last irresistible picture of  De Palma.

John Baldessari, Picture Frame for the Face Necklace (Yellow Gold, Rhodium; Rose Gold) (2011). © John Baldessari. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery and Hauser & Wirth.

In this vaguely disturbing image, the empty frame hanging around De Palma's neck simultaneously evokes a nightmarishly Trumpian version of eviscerated press credentials and the oversized gold pendants popular in hiphop circles known as pimp jewelry. Combined with her blank expression, the frame’s absence of content brings to mind Hans Christian Anderson’s story of the emperor’s nonexistent new clothes, even as it suggests the (current) presidential dictum that substance is far less important than a dazzling, golden setting. 

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Post scriptum: mentioning Salvador Dali as a muse is a bit foolhardy in the age of the internet. It is much too easy to come up with images like these. 

Phillip Maisel/ Maggie Preston and Black Crown Gallery

Black Crown Gallery is a marvel. Located on a quiet side street in downtown Oakland, its tiny space consists of a long, high ceilinged and very narrow room with the requisite white walls. A small table at the entrance serves as the ‘office.’

But how much space is really necessary for a gallery to serve its function well? Both Bass & Reiner and Jack Fischer’s satellite gallery at Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco’s new gallery mall) are similarly petite. Margaret Tedesco's exhibitions, staged compactly in what appears to be the living room of her SF apartment (Second Floor Projects), have long been admired.

Black Crown Gallery, partial view

Size isn’t everything. And in Surface Tension,  Black Crown's current exhibition, the gallery serves as a serendipitous frame for the work of two artists, both of whom are continually expanding from their photographic roots into new experimental territory. Phillip Maisel’s sophisticated fool-the-eye compositions of color and texture, reflection and illusion are presented in groups of varying sizes (both the images themselves, and the groupings) ranged across the gallery’s walls. Three of Maggie Preston’s laser-cut steel sculptures rest on the concrete floor, punctuating the space like sharp but cryptic black exclamations. Preston’s startlingly eccentric pieces (and the photographs from which they are derived; one of those hangs behind the gallery desk) have their point of origin in a black cardboard template the artist found in a pile of scraps at a ‘creative reuse’ center. To her photographer’s eye, the template suggested the arched frames of picture albums, though in actual fact it turns out to be an aid for storyboarding—its shapes used to lay out the cells that chart a narrative sequence.

Maggie Preston, 8255 (2016)

Twisted and folded, doubled or stretched, the cardboard’s elongated rectangles splayed out into sharp triangular points suggest nothing so much as the space between: that which is left behind, conjured into another life through Preston’s manipulations. She photographs their bent shapes against a stark white background; only a hint of shadows remains to suggest their dimensionality. In contrast, the sculptures-- like some of Anthony Caro’s work dating from the ‘6os and ‘70s--  assert their physical presence even as they fractiously seem to deny it, scrappy limbs extended towards wall or floor, turning at unexpected moments.

These are the latest iteration of Preston’s ongoing (oxymoronic) project of what she describes as ‘photographic sculpture.’ To make them, she uses a computer program to trace the black form's outline on a picture, then gives the resulting file to her fabricator. Their entirely anti-narrative titles are the sequences of four numbers generated by the camera’s memory card.

Maggie Preston, 0687 (2016)

Maggie Preston, 2564 (2016)

Which is funny, since telling stories has traditionally been one of photography’s main jobs. Still, the ubiquity of cameras in contemporary life and the concomitant onslaught of images everywhere, all the time, makes the kind of work featured in Surface Tension—well, inevitable. Work that makes us look for much longer than the second we think it takes to absorb what an image has to say.

Phillip Maisel, For your "Open" 3250, 2682, 3683-2, 3253-2, 3254, 3216 , all 2017 (L to R, installation view)

For the last several years, Phil Maisel has been perfecting his singularly nonlinear approach to still life, layering images and sheets of paper or board against a wall in a shallow space and taking a picture. Here, such arrangements serve as a point of departure; the finished piece--simultaneously collage, sculpture, and photography-- sometimes includes other elements, such as a shiny piece of neutral density filter, slender hanging chains, or parts  cut and bent to yield dimensionality. Most diabolically, in that the brain strains to keep up and figure out what is really going on, some pairs of photos trade parts, furthering a complicated set of visual illusions. In For your “open” 2677 and 2682 (Maisel uses numbers too), careful examination reveals that a large trapezoid cut from the center of each has been inserted into the other. There are three such pairings in the show, but they aren’t next to each other.

Philip Maisel, For Your "Open" 2677 (2017)

Shadows are sometimes part of the image and sometimes real, cast by a cut and raised curve. Works of different sizes are hung so that their bottom edges are perfectly aligned with each other, as if standing on an invisible ledge. Confused yet? Good. 

The palette of this body of work has a retro feel to it, though pinning down the precise time frame of Maisel’s exquisitely-admixed hues is tough. Triangles and trapezoids of salmon and teal (or is it turquoise?) with accents of mustard slyly evoke everything from Art Deco to the fashion crimes of the ‘90s.

Both Maisel and Preston are MFA graduates from California College of the Arts, where one of the gallery co-directors, artist Christopher Nickel, was the photo studio manager for some time before attending grad school at Stanford. The other co-director, Chrissy Cano, graduated from CCA’s Visual Studies program in 2013. Shows since Black Crown’s inception last fall have presented the work of recent MFAs from CCA as well as from Stanford and UC Berkeley. Much of what has been shown (four out of five artists so far) has consisted of explorations out at the edge of photography or its influence/ inspiration; Elizabeth Moran, for instance, makes ‘abstract cameraless images that may or may not document evidence of paranormal presences,’ and Lauren Ashley Toomer’s drawings are based on various photographic sources such as crime scene pictures or images from anatomical dissection labs. Tanja Geis’ large scale cyanotypes use this unusual photographic printing process to generate haunting blue and white images of ecological devastation. And Kate Nichols’ paintings incorporating silver nanoparticles as well as photograms are described as investigations of ‘the interrelationship between vision, perception and light.’

Every show has been markedly different, though all have embodied both elegance and intelligence.  With gratitude, I note that the press releases are both revelatory and tantalizing. And, finally, if you are wondering, as I did, about the gallery’s name, it honors the Black-crowned Night Herons that have been long-time residents of the area, roosting in trees around downtown. Drawn in profile, one perches above the gallery’s name on their logo, complete with the species’ distinctive glowing red eye.

As an artist, critic and devoted Oaklander, I’m looking forward to whatever comes next.

The line between truth and fiction: four parables

Last week, reading of Brad Pitt's 'apprenticeship' to Thomas Houseago in the wake of divorce (the implications here are too strange to even contemplate-- heartbreak turns you into an artist? Release from marriage to a crazy person makes art seem like a plausible career choice?-) I thought of a very short fiction I had written. One thing led to another... so I offer you these four brief meditations about art, life, curating, writing, and-- well-- love.

____________________________

“If paintings are windows,” he shouted, “then I’m Brad fucking Pitt.” She flinched, but only because his voice was so painfully loud it seemed as if her eardrums might be damaged for life.  She knew she was right. She had never said a word about windows, portals, or anything the like; instead, she had simply stated that she could see space in the mud-colored rectangles, hanging on his studio wall. She could see it now: a world in there, beyond the wood and paint, and she knew he never would. Still, it didn’t really matter. The only thing that did was whether or not collectors would buy them for a satisfying price.

____________________________

I thought you came here to see my work,” she says, arms folded tightly across her tiny chest. I have. But something about those things, curled in various positions on the studio floor, makes me want to tear off all of our clothes. I’m not sure what might happen next—once we are naked. Would we mimic the poses suggested by her pieces, two blobs entwined in a sticky embrace? Or just-- lie there and moan? I know I am not acting in accordance to her expectations of a curator’s cool demeanor. I sigh, and ask for a cup of tea and some kind of chair. It’s time to hear her pitch.

____________________________

The problem with language is that it is made out of words. I can tell you about a person, a place; a smell, a sound, or a quality of light, but my description is just an abstraction of the things I am talking about. Although a word can evoke a feeling (and often does), there is no guarantee that the contents of a powerful phrase: the associations that lie beneath its skin, will be the same for you that they are for me. Unable to enter each other’s minds, we can never be sure that our experience of things truly coincides—that the color of the sky or the taste of rice is the same for us both. All we really know (or think we know) is that what we call rice isn’t what we call blue.

____________________________

We were talking on the telephone, when unexpectedly (offering it as advice well meant) he told me I should “let art go.” Give it up, since nothing new would come out of my hands—only the derivative, limp or coy. Moments later, carefully placing the receiver in its cradle, I remembered with a vague regret how polite and serious I had been, the night I went to see his work. I had liked him, and thus had needed to respect him; yet, surrounded by those blandly agonized figures, I’d imagined his paintings as a school of ugly fish. I imagined them now: hitching a ride on fickle currents, bottom feeders sucking on a flow of refuse, a jumble of dirty bits and scraps drifting down from the lucent surface. As I called up this image in my mind, I could hear him saying, “you should stick to writing.” I wondered if he knew what this could mean.

Weave Weft and Heave Heft: Emily Payne

I saw Emily Payne’s recent exhibition at Seager Gray Gallery on the last day of the show: a beautiful Sunday afternoon, on which a wash of sunlight highlighted the shadows—both real and drawn—around an assortment of mesmerizing sculptures and wall pieces. Payne has been exploring books as one of her primary materials for many years; unlike many other ‘book artists,’ she mostly uses singular elements such as covers-- either the outside surface, book spines, or boards, rather than sculpting pages/ manipulating the whole volume. Payne’s painting-like compositions that combine book covers and boards, such as Almost Night (2015), invoke patchwork quilts. Parts fitted together like the pieces of a puzzle composed of multiple rectangles of dark color are interpolated with a scattered punctuation of white and cream.

EP, Almost Night (2015)

 Other materials that take a major role in her work are wire and, as mentioned before, the shadows cast by her own pieces. Over the course of the show at Seager Gray, Payne came into the gallery almost every day to draw on the walls and even the pedestals on which smaller wire pieces rested. The results in some cases were true fool-the-eye creations, mysterious marvels that only revealed themselves when the sculptures were shifted.

EP. Prism Pinwheel (2016)

Payne’s wire works are inventive and varied, including both spiraling forms-- sometimes partially filled with book covers, as in Prism Pinwheel (2016)-- and a kind of woven, open fabric, sometimes hanging on the wall in a drift of links like Wire Shroud (2016) and, at others, connected together into freestanding tubular forms open at both ends that suggest a familial relationship to Ruth Asawa’s crocheted wire works. (Asawa and Payne’s mother, poet and fiber artist Nina Payne, were lifelong friends.) 

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EP, Beacons (2016)

EP. Wire Shroud (2016)

EP, Tumble (2017)

In some of the most entrancing works presented in this show, a field of book boards becomes a canvas onto which Payne draws the projected shadow of one of her own wire pieces. One of the largest and most spectacular of these is Tumble (2017), featuring a spiraling curve 'tumbling' across a five by five foot surface. A delicate wash of gouache highlights the contrast between the form’s interior and exterior.

Payne's two pieces titled Weave Sample, one composed of wire and the other, a negative image of its shadow on book boards, are like echoes of each other. Deciding which of the two is the twin (doppelganger? stunt double?) is, seemingly, up to the viewer.

EP, Weave Sample (2017)

EP, Weave Sample (2016)

EP. Light Shroud (2016), Optical in rear

Something about Light Shroud (2016)-- an ascending curve of book covers perched, in a state of suspended animation, on an old typing table-- suggests hidden mischief. Like the self-propelled broom in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice[1], it seems as though some of Payne's pieces might be capable of movement on their own when we aren't looking. This hint of a secret, magical life-- invoked, in part, by the artist's constant experimentation with materials, combining and recombining them in different ways—reminds us that, to her, the air around her works: the space they move through and the shadows they cast, are as essential to our experience of them and in some senses as ‘real’ as the pieces are themselves.  

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ait_Fs6UQhQ

Shoot

“Guns have a purpose,” Tom said. “And it isn’t shooting pieces of paper.” He had backed me into a corner at the Tick Tock Tap, and he was raising his voice. This was partly because people were shouting all around us- it was a noisy bar-- but he was also very annoyed with my (his word) contradictory behavior. I couldn’t help it, though. I had recently started college, out in the middle of the western plains, and I was pumped so full of ideas about everything from Buddhism to Marxism that sometimes it all got mixed together. Despite the fact that he liked to follow me around with a helpless dog-like ardor, it drove Tom crazy when I would start a sentence with something about the sanctity of all life and end it by saying that, come the Revolution, I would be ready, after years of target practice with 22s at summer camps.

I had no satisfactory reply to his assertion, that night. Pinned to the wall, I finally agreed to go hunting with him the following day. So there I was, standing in a field in the near- freezing dark, in the butt-end of November, cradling someone’s shotgun in my arms. Tom had brought his hunting buddies: two big amiable brothers with pale blue eyes and tiny immaculate moustaches, whose names I immediately forgot—Beau and Joe, or maybe Jess and Fess. Tom informed me pointedly that these two had killed most of the meat their family ate since they were big enough for the job. With shy, sweet smiles they assured me that this included slaughtering hogs and chickens as well as bringing home  “game-- y'know, critters and birds.”

It was profoundly quiet as we began to walk. The sun came up, and I marveled out how our shadows reached out far in front of us. The brothers scanned patiently and constantly, with identical squints. Since it was, they said, the one day that three hunting seasons overlapped, I could shoot at pretty much anything that moved and it would most likely be OK.

We spent several hours looking for signs of natural life, but we didn’t see a thing. Not a v of geese headed south; not a stray animal scat, not a footprint—nothing. It was like a party without the guest of honor. Finally, we gave up and went back into town. Tom was so embarrassed that he made me promise not to tell anyone. Wary of the subject altogether, I never talked about guns again.

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Seventeen years go by. I am standing in the living room of my girlfriend’s apartment in San Francisco, waiting for her to come home to her formerly-revolutionary neighborhood, now mostly occupied by industrious young couples with well-paying jobs and well-dressed babies. It’s late, just at the graying edge of darkness, and I’m looking out the window through a telescope. She keeps it there on a tripod— to look at the stars and to shame the people in the building on the opposite corner into closing the blinds before they walk around naked. I check, but no one’s home there yet, so I pivot the instrument around and look the other way, into Golden Gate Park.

As I idly pan across a little glade some distance away, I suddenly see a man about my age, dressed entirely in black and carrying a really big pistol with a silencer on it. (By now, movies have taught me a great deal more than college did about things like guns.) His posture and progress make it clear that he is sneaking up on someone. I think I’m about to witness a murder and there’s nothing, seemingly, I can do about it. I shout at him uselessly as he raises the gun with both hands, sights along the barrel and fires. He runs towards his victim and I follow him with the telescope, now shaking crazily, along the edge of a small grove of trees. I am trying to get a look at his face so I can identify him to the police.

My heart is beating so hard I’m seeing spots before my eyes as he stops, reaches down, and picks up a rabbit with a hole in it big enough to see right through. He pulls a camera out of his pocket and photographs the bleeding shreds at arm’s length, holding them next to a piece of paper he has carefully unfolded. Then he stuffs everything—carcass, gun, and paper—into a garbage bag, shoving it under his jacket before he disappears into the dark beneath the trees. Disturbed and nauseated but profoundly mystified, I tell no one about what I’ve just seen. It is just too awful to describe or explain.

A few months later, I am at the crowded opening of a show of performance art documentation at a big raw ‘alternative space.’ As I disinterestedly scan a wall of pictures, one catches my eye, and with an exclamation I squeeze my little plastic glass of wine so hard it cracks, leaking its contents onto the concrete floor. I am staring at an image of a hand that holds both the blasted remains of a rabbit and a creased white page with a quote from Baudrillard about simulacra written across it, spelled Bodriard and semulackra.

Later, at a bar, I remember Tom in the Tip Top, shouting at me about putting bullets through pieces of paper. For a moment, I wish I still had that that big cold double-barreled shotgun that he tenderly laid in my city-girl arms, so I could go back and shoot that photograph.

The (Imaginary) Museum

“Consider what a museum might look like, were its collections to consist solely of the support materials and exhibition paraphernalia accorded to significant art or artifacts.”— wall text panel, The Imaginary) Museum

In The (Imaginary) Museum, viewers peruse elaborate, dramatically lit cases and wall displays containing detailed labels and beautiful, custom-made mounts for a variety of (absent) (fictional) objects. Listening to an audio guide for what isn’t there, visitors can also participate in educational ‘games’ of the sort available in teaching institutions: drawing lines connecting ambiguous silhouettes; identifying mysterious sounds, or perhaps completing sentences that subtly over-determine our relationship with history through its relics.  
At a time when many artifacts must be hidden from sight due to political, religious or social forces, The (Imaginary) Museum offers an opportunity to consider how much time we actually spend looking at objects and images in galleries and museums-- compared with the many minutes we spend reading the labels, listening to the curator/ artist/ expert talk, or looking at the exquisite setting the institution has constructed for its treasure.
Three object descriptions from the museum follow. Just as you would in its hushed, dim halls, you can imagine the works being presented. Because, of course, as possibly real as they sound, they are not there—or, for that matter, anywhere. 

1   Mothwing evening gown, dressmaker’s sample, 1928.

Made entirely of wings from Hyalophora cecropia, this miniature dress would have served as a visual aid for customers interested in ordering evening wear in one of the modiste’s most expensive materials. The giant silk moth is North America’s largest native moth and reaches wingspans of up to six inches, though smaller specimens have been used here to give buyers a sense of how the larger insects would appear in the completed gown.
In nature, these spectacular russet and black markings are short-lived; adult cecropia have a lifespan of less than two weeks. Gathering the necessary quantity for the flounced skirt and train of this particular style would have been quite labor-intensive.

2   “golden” spike, early 1890s

In the 19th century, ceremonial railroad spikes such as this one were created for the celebratory moment marking a line’s completion. This particular ‘golden’ spike, identifiable by the imprint of a two-headed eagle, was made to serve as the final link connecting the Bulgarian trans-mountain railway. Unfortunately, it was stolen on the night of July 19th, 1894, before it could be driven into the ground. 
The thieves believed it to be solid gold, and successfully sold it as such to the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1896; he reported its disappearance during the occupation of the Ottoman Bank by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation on the 26th of August of the same year.  Miraculously, it resurfaced in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, discovered in the rubble of a house on California Street. At that time it entered the (Imaginary) museum’s collection. Its value is primarily historical, as it is made of pyrite, otherwise known as fool’s gold, covered with 24 carat gold leaf.

3   French hair substructure (for high hairstyle known as ‘a la fregate’), used late 1770s. Wire, padding, wood

In the eighteenth century, women’s hairstyles reached a level of excess unmatched before or since, in both size and detail. This wooden platform and padded wire structure served as the hidden armature for one of the most elaborate of these theatrical constructions. Buried deep within, it would have supported a towering wig ornamented with feathers, jewels and—as the name of the hairdo indicates-- a model war ship, or frigate, riding on powdered waves of horsehair. In front and back, the wearer’s own hair would have been ‘blended’ into the wig and held in place with lard. (This last ingredient made such wigs attractive to rats, which sometimes made their homes in them.)
While wearing such a ‘high hairstyle’ must have been uncomfortable in the extreme—both because of its weight and, in many cases, what must have been a distinctly rancid odor-- it is possible to imagine its appeal. Such wigs nearly doubled the height of the average female courtier, dwarfing her male counterparts. Still, the wearer had to be careful while attending balls to avoid catching the lofty wig on fire. After several unfortunate incidents, chandeliers at court were permanently raised.