The Digital Issue by artillerymag

MAR/APR 2022

BRADFORD J. SALAMON FORGING AHEAD

JANUARY 29 - MAY 7 2022

167 N. Atchison Street, Orange, CA, 92866 714-516-5880 Hours: Tue - Sat, 11am – 5pm Admission FREE with online reservation at: tickets.chapman.edu www.hilbertmuseum.org

CURTIS RIPLEY CHROMESTHESIA

Chromesthesia: n. \ˌkrō-mes-ˈthē-zh(ē-)ə\ Seeing sound in color

WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY 2525 Michigan Avenue E-1, Santa Monica CA 90404 www.williamturnergallery.com 310.453.0909

Curtis Ripley, You Don't Know Me, oil on canvas, 60”x72”

February 19 - April 16, 2022

Art 2022 Auction May 7, 2022

Registration begins April 23 – to preview art and buy tickets go to pasadenaartalliance.org Online Bidding Opens May 1, 2022 ParticiPating artists as of feb. 1: Kim Abeles • Wendy Adest • Abel Alejandre Dawn Arrowsmith • Linda Besemer • Anne Blecksmith • Natalie Bookchin Nancy Buchanan • Fatemeh Burnes • Sigrid Burton • Loran Calvin • Marta Chaffee Elizabeth Chandler • Neha Choksi • Christian Clayton • Julia Couzens • Katy Crowe Krysten Cunningham • Jacci Den Hartog • Margi Denton • Sarajo Friedan • Gajin Fujita Francesca Gabbiani • Yvette Gellis • Phyllis Green • Mark Steven Greenfield James Griffith • Lia Halloran • Asher Hartman • Roger Herman • Carol Horst Faith Hughes • Wayne Hunt • Phung Huynh • Pamela Jorden • Joan Kahn Craig Kauffman Estate • Alice Konitz • Rebecca Levinson • Krista Machovina Kaoru Mansour • Jay McCafferty Estate • Duncan S. McCandless • Dan McCleary Michael C. McMillen • Brittany Mojo • Nancy Monk • Pamela Mosher • Kenton Nelson Hung Viet Nguyen • Thinh Nguyen • Stephen Nowlin • John David O’Brien Echiko Ohira • Miguel Osuna • Zlatka Paneva • Ignacio Perez Meruane Renee Petropoulos • Kristin Posehn • Astrid Preston • Roland Reiss Estate Ana Rodriguez • Steve Roden • Heather Rosenman • Ed Ruscha • Eddie Ruscha Blandine Saint-Oyant • Elizabeth Saveri • Debra Scacco • Kim Schoenstadt Jaime Scholnick • Molly Segal • Joel Shapiro • Wayne Shimabukuro • Susan Sironi Barbara T. Smith • Anne-Elizabeth Sobieski • Gretel Stephens • Coleen Sterritt April Street • Emily Sudd • Moffat Takadiwa • Joan Takayama-Ogawa Warren Techentin • Mark Todd • Devon Tsuno • Esther Pearl Watson • Ann Weber Pae White • Julie Wilson • Jessica Wimbley • Tyrus Wong Estate • Chris Young

Pa s a d e n a a r t a l l i a n c e FosTeRing APPReciATion FoR conTemPoRARy ART in souTheRn cALiFoRniA since 1955

VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES

Ellen Berkenblit Other Shapes at Night March 12 - May 7, 2022

1700 S Santa Fe Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90021 +1 213 623 3280 vielmetter.com

10 CELEBRATING

YEARS

Featured Solo Exhibitions: Debra Scacco: Water Gold Soil Land and Image: Chris Engman 2002-2022 Sam Comen: The Longest Shift Super A: The Other Way Around

MAY 14 - AUGUST 21, 2022 @LANCASTERMOAH

@MOAHLANCASTER

Lancastermoah.org | 661-723-6250 | 665 W. Lancaster BLVD, Lancaster, CA 93534

Sara Birns

Explorers of the Garden Planet

April 2 - May 7, 2022

Sara Birns, Life Ain’t all Buttercups, Rainbows and Cupcakes, 2021, Oil pastel and colored pencil on brown paper, 42 x 33 in.

HOSTILE WITNESS LAD DECKER

LADDECKER.COM

LADDECKER

ALFREDO RAMOS MARTÍNEZ

1871, MONTERREY, MEXICO — 1946, LOS ANGELES

MARCH 12 - APRIL 23, 2022

LOUIS STERN FINE ARTS 9002 MELROSE AVENUE WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90069 310.276.0147 LOUISSTERNFINEARTS.COM

VENDEDORA DE FLORES, C. 1932 , CONTÉ CRAYON ON PAPER, 57 1/2 X 43 1/4 INCHES; 146.1 X 109.9 CENTIMETERS ©THE ALFREDO RAMOS MARTÍNEZ RESEARCH PROJECT

curated by Lawrence Gipe and Beth Waldman

APRIL 2 - JUNE 11, 2022

LUCIANA ABAIT KIM ABELES FATEMEH BURNES LINDA CONNOR RODNEY EWING GUILLERMO GALINDO / INTERVENTIONS WITH RICHARD MISRACH LAWRENCE GIPE DIMITRI KOZYREV ANN LE CONSTANCE MALLINSON RYAN MCINTOSH LIZ MILLER-KOVACS DEBORAH OROPALLO & ANDY RAPPAPORT KIT RADFORD AILI SCHMELTZ ALEX TURNER BETH DAVILA WALDMAN RODRIGO VALENZUELA AMIR ZAKI

IMAGE CREDIT: LIZ MILLER-KOVACS, 2021, BRAUNKOHLE VENUS, VIDEO, 4 MINUTES 22 SECONDS

Table of Contents VOLUME 16, ISSUE 4, MARCH-APRIL 2022

The Digital F E AT U R E S NFTs and Bored Apes - by seth hawkins Petra Cortright: Digital Pioneer - by jody zellen Nancy Baker Cahill: Outta This World - by tucker neel Casey Kauffmann: Hot Sh*t Girl - by lauren guilford The Materiality of The Digital - by eli ståhl It’s All About Meme - by anthony ausgang

F E AT U R E D

26 28 32 36 40 42

R E V I E W

Laurie Anderson: The Hirshhorn - by sarah sargent

C O LU M N S ART BRIEF: Jeff Koons - by stephen j. goldberg, esq DECODER: Responsible Art - by zak smith BUNKER VISION: Forgiven Children - by skot armstrong SIGHTS UNSCENE: The Geffen - by lara jo regan

C O N T I N U E D

20 24 52 58

ON THE COVER: Ape #6196, “Ape Squad” on the Solana blockchain, courtesy Lennon Sue Hawkins. See page 26. ABOVE: Nancy Baker Cahill, Slipstream 001, 2021, digital video. RIGHT: Casey Kauffmann, Cassandra (drawn 4), 2019, oil pastel on paper, 32” x 40.” NEXT PAGE, Top: Laurie Anderson, From the Air on view in “Laurie Anderson: The Weather,” 2021. Photo credit: Ron Blunt. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Bottom: Erika Lizée, The Subtle Body Prepares for Emergence, 2021, Acrylic, Duralar, plastic, 30 x 8 x 3 feet.

From the Editor Dear Reader,

50 54 D E PA R T M E N T S 18 22 44 60 60 62

SHOPTALK: LA Art News by scarlet cheng BOOKS: René Magritte by skot armstrong ART LIBS: Jackson Pollock by allison strauss ASK BABS: Is It Exploitive? by babs rappleye POEMS by john tottenham; klipschutz COMICS: Joseph Wright of Derby by butcher & wood

R E V I E W S No Humans Involved @ Hammer Museum Mary Brøgger @ ROSEGALLERY Eric Croes @ Richard Heller Gallery Elsewhere is a Negative Mirrors @ Vellum LA PORTALS @ Angels Gate Noelia Towers @ de boer Raymond Logan @ George Billis Gallery Richard Wyatt Jr. @ Steve Turner Miles Regis @ Von Lintel Gallery

46 47 47 48 48 49 49 50 50

CT: Karla Knight @ Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

48 50 14

Can anyone get excited about digital art? Apparently they can, as is abundantly evident in our new issue, The Digital. Everywhere I look now, I see digital art, and there is no shortage of digital artists to cover, and certainly not ever enough information on what the hell a NFT is anyway. Didn’t we see this coming? With a world so hooked on our devices, it was just a matter of time before art would start appearing at the stroke of a thumb on our smartphones. And it was inevitable that somebody would figure out a way to monetize it. So rather than me pontificate on a subject that is as foreign to me as, well, a foreign language, I will elaborate on what’s inside this issue. Eli Ståhl writes about the politicized digital work of Guinea-based Tabita Rezaire, whose art explores the connection between the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the internet cable system and its racialized materiality. Expanding on Rezaire’s insights, Ståhl suggests ways that internet users who imagine themselves sharing “the cloud” need to come back down to earth. LA writer Tucker Neel interviews Nancy Baker Cahill about her newest work involving a new app that she helped develop for her projects. One such piece is located over the Atlantic, outside of Miami. One would have to travel there to “see” it, but one would also need a smartphone with the app downloaded—see, we really can’t live without our devices. Jody Zellen, an Artillery regular (who is also an artist working in digital) interviews pioneering LA artist Petra Cortright— who began producing digital work at the onset of her art career (lacking the money for traditional art supplies)—and recounts her journey from unicorns and selfies back to digital paintings stretched on canvas that hang on gallery walls. Does it go full circle? One recent article I read about NFTs—while trying to bone up on my digital vocabulary— reports that many NFT collectors are now buying real paintings with real paint on real canvas—and IRL. Imagine that! Is digital art here to stay? Are we scoffing at the shock of the new, as has been the case with every art movement since Impressionism? Is this a development in contemporary art that we have to hate (according to John Waters) if it’s any good at all? Many galleries are trying it on for size and beginning to accept cryptocurrency. Seth Hawkins, who writes enthusiastically about NFTs in this issue, has already been collecting NFTs and embraces the new art form (which really isn’t all that new at all). He’s got a whole set of Bored Apes—one graces our cover—and I gotta admit, I like those Bored Apes. I may not know much about digital art, but I know what I like.

WITHOUT YOUR INTERPRETATION

ULYSSES JENKINS FEBRUARY 6–MAY 15, 2022

MUSEUM

Los Angeles | hammer.ucla.edu | @hammer_museum

PORTRAIT OF ULYSSES JENKINS, N.D. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST. PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN.

FE AT U RED

CON T RIBU T ORS Tucker Neel is an artist, writer, designer and educator in Los Angeles. He’s an Associate Professor in the Communication Arts and Liberal Arts & Sciences departments at Otis College of Art & Design. tuckerneel.com

Lauren Guilford is a curator and art historian based in Los Angeles. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Art History from University of California, Santa Barbara. Lauren is a Master’s candidate at the University of Southern California where she is currently writing her thesis on the history of alternative art spaces in Los Angeles. Seth Hawkins, a passionate creative working on the fringe of technology, art, crypto and NFTs. He has existed in many facets within the arts as writer, designer, studio manager and production director at major museums. He is co-founder of Code2Matter, that focuses on public art from digital inception to monumental object. Jody Zellen is a Los Angeles-based writer and artist who works in many media simultaneously making interactive installations, mobile apps, net art, animations, drawings, paintings, photographs, public art and artists’ books. For more information visit www.jodyzellen.com.

STA F F

Tulsa Kinney Editor/Publisher EDITORIAL Bill Smith - creative director Max King Cap - senior editor John Tottenham - copy editor/poetry editor John Seeley - copy editor/proof Dave Shulman - graphic design Frances Cocksedge - editorial assistant

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Ezrha Jean Black, Laura London, Tucker Neel, John David O’Brien

COLUMNISTS Anthony Ausgang, Skot Armstrong, Scarlet Cheng, Stephen J. Goldberg, Lara Jo Regan, Zak Smith

CONTRIBUTORS Emily Babette, Lane Barden, Ezrha Jean Black, Natasha Boyd, Betty Ann Brown, Susan Butcher & Carol Wood, Kate Caruso, Bianca Collins, Shana Nys Dambrot, Genie Davis, David DiMichele, Lauren Guilford, Alexia Lewis, Richard Allen May III, Christopher Michno, Yxta Maya Murray, Barbara Morris, John David O’Brien, Carrie Paterson, Leanna Robinson, Julie Schulte, Eli Ståhl, Allison Strauss, Cole Sweetwood, Colin Westerbeck, Eve Wood, Catherine Yang, Jody Zellen NEW YORK: Arthur Bravo, Peter Brock, John Haber, Annabel Keenan, Sarah Sargent

ADMINISTRATION Anna Bagirov - sales Mitch Handsone - new media director Catherine Yang - associate communications editor Rocie Carrillo - production intern

ADVERTISING Anna Bagirov - print sales Mitch Handsone - web sales Artillery, PO Box 26234, LA, CA 90026 213.250.7081, editor@artillerymag.com advertising: 408.531.5643, anna@artillerymag.com; editorial:

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Eli Ståhl writes on international solidarity and world-making practices, artistic and otherwise, particularly in relation to matters of environmental urgency. They hold an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London and a BA in History of Art from University of Copenhagen.

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S H O P TA L K

S CA R L E T

C H E N G

“Twenty Years of Painting: 2001-2021” at the historic Santa Monica Post Office last January.

Art Fairs: They’re Baaack!

and Chicago, and basically replaces Art Palm Springs, which had been struggling. Lots of exuberant, fun work there, which suited the whimsical mood of Palm Springs.

The art fairs have returned, and with such a burst of optimistic energy and creative dedication that stirred me to the core. Maybe they’re signaling relief from the curse of COVID—or at least our wishing for it. (Though Frieze has been quite careful checking visitor’s vaccinations and insisting on masks—good.) And maybe during all the imposed quarantines and self-isolations, artists have devoted themselves to making work that requires concentration, time and vision. For an artist, turning inward can be a very good thing. On a quick walk-through of Frieze Los Angeles (Feb. 17–20), I was floored by the quality of work—such beautiful, and beautifully made, art. First, they’re in a new location, with an expanded tent next to the Beverly Hilton. Okay, not the best location, and quite inconvenient for parking. However, there’s a lot more to see—the number of galleries has jumped from about 70 to over 100—the tent is in three parts, not just one. Here are a couple of my favorites—Mindy Shapero’s hypnotic paintings made with spray paint, acrylic, copper, gold and silver leaf on Belgium Linen at Nino Mier. A Betye Saar mural from 1983, L.A. Energy, which is re-created on the outer wall of Roberts Projects. It is a playful array of the letters “L” and “A” floating midst colorful, curved shapes. Julie Roberts told me that Betye herself, at 95, came to the fair to supervise. The LA Art Show (Jan. 19–23) seemed remarkably quiet when I went by to visit on a Friday afternoon, staying till evening, but this was after the winter holidays when the Omicron surge was on. Intersect Palm Springs (Feb. 10–13) debuted a few weeks later, an extension of an art fair that has already had some success in Aspen

Comings and Goings

More New York galleries are moving into Los Angeles. In November, Vito Schnabel launched a new gallery in the Old Santa Monica Post Office, with a major show of Francesco Clemente, “Twenty Years of Painting: 2000–2021.” The space is huge—15,000 square feet—with a double-height ceiling, and some nice 1930s details. I’m told they’ve rented the space for a year. Griffin Kayne is merging with the New York mega-gallery Pace, with gallery founders Bill Griffin and Maggie Kayne becoming managing partners of Pace. The two will continue to run the gallery, which apparently will take on the Pace name in April. Thus Pace regains an Angeleno presence again after leaving Beverly Hills, where they had a gallery from 1995 to 2000. Visitors to the lobby of Disney Hall will be greeted by a new art installation by Frank Gehry—it’s based on the Mad Hatter’s tea party from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Ten larger-than-life-sized figures made of brightly colored metal are gathered around an internally lit table. Remember, the hall was designed by Gehry—and plagued by costs overrun, until Eli Broad and other Angeleno angels stepped in to help. The name of the piece? “Wishful Thinking.” See more SHOPTALK and LA fair coverage, including Felix Art Fair, on our website: www.artillerymag.com

15 YEARS IN PRINT

FEATURING SHOPTALK, LA art news ART BRIEF, Legal art column PROFILES Up-and-coming artists REVIEWS of LA’s outstanding shows ASK BABS, Snarky art advice column BUNKER VISION, Eclectic underground films DECODER, Zak Smith breaks down the hierarchy

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The Appropriation Artist BY STEPHEN J. GOLDBERG, ESQ.

A RT

BRIEF

What a ride! From Jeff Koons’ series “Made From Heaven,” 2014.

Superstar artist Jeff Koons has been sued for appropriating the work of others— again. The latest lawsuit, Hayden v. Koons, was filed last December in federal court. It concerns a series of works, “Made in Heaven,” that depict the sexual exploits of Koons and his ex-wife, the Italian porno star, “La Cicciolina” (little chubby one). At the Whitney’s 2014 Koons retrospective I had the misfortune of viewing blown-up photos of the couple vigorously copulating, including views of Koons’ genitals. I left the Whitney feeling the show should have been labeled “Made in Hell.” The plaintiff in the suit, Michael Hayden, is a set designer for films and the creator of the platform upon which La Cicciolina “performed” in Italian porn movies. The lawsuit concerns a sculptural work from “Made in Heaven”—a life-size image of Koons mounting his inamorata, who was wearing lingerie and stiletto heels, on a pedestal of faux boulders with serpent. Hayden in his complaint alleges with a straight face, “The intended purpose of the Hayden Work was to serve as a work of fine art on which Cicciolina could perform sexually explicit scenes, both live and on camera,” and that Hayden did not intend that his work “would be used commercially by anyone other than Cicciolina.” The lawsuit claims that Koons appropriated the “exact” Hayden sculpture in “Made in Heaven” (1989) three times—for a lithograph initially commissioned by the Whitney Museum and first displayed as a giant billboard towering over downtown Manhattan, as the polychromed wood sculpture, and then in an oil painting entitled Jeff in the Position of Adam. The “Made in Heaven” series catapulted Koons to fame—exactly what Koons intended according to an interview on the Whitney’s website quoted in the lawsuit: “I thought you know what I’ll do? I’ll create this billboard that’s advertising a film. I’ll call it Made in Heaven, and it’ll be starring myself ...It’ll be like I became another star ...” Koons is utterly shameless. In recent years Koons has faced a series of infringement suits. A case filed by a photographer claimed that Koons painted and sold an unauthorized copy of a Gordons Gin ad virtually identical to the version published in magazines. That suit dates back to a series of liquor ads Koons copied and painted in the late 1980s. In 2018 Koons lost a trial in France concerning yet another infringement claim stemming from his “Banality” series. Koons usually defends these suits by invoking the exception to copyright infringement known as “fair use.” In the art world the issue boils down to whether the subsequent use of another artist’s copyrighted image is transformational. This column previously examined two major decisions concerning Koons’ alleged infringement. The first, Rogers v. Koons (1992), involved the image of a group of eight German Shepherd puppies that photographer Art Rogers had taken and reproduced on postcards sold to the public. Koons, who rendered the image into a wooden glossy multicolored sculpture String of Puppies, sold an edition of four in 1986. The Puppies work was part of Koons’ “Banality” series that included the widely-known sculpture of Michael Jackson reclining with his pet chimp, Bubbles. Koons claimed that not only had he substantially transformed the image, but Rogers’ photo was the epitome of the banality he was parodying. The court held in Rogers’ favor, finding that Koons had failed to substantially transform the original image. In a 2006 infringement case, Blanch v. Koons, another federal judge came to the opposite conclusion. Koons used a copyrighted photo published in a magazine, taken by plaintiff Andrea Blanch, a fashion photographer. The photo contained an erotic image of a model’s legs, which Koons incorporated into a painting titled Niagara, that included photos of other women’s legs, trays of donuts and Niagara Falls. The court found that Koons’ use of the image was transformative, noting that Koons altered the original photo’s “colors, the background against which it is portrayed, the medium, the size of the objects pictured, their details and crucially, their entirely different purpose and meaning ...” In testimony, Koons explained that he was commenting on the banality of common imagery in advertising. In the Hayden case, Koons may proffer the additional defense that he was engaging in a parody by inserting himself, a former investment banker, into salacious imagery with a famous porn queen. Courts have long recognized that parodies lie within the fair use exception to infringement. However, Koons may find that while he may have intended “Made in Heaven” to be a parody, consistently failing to obtain a license to use others’ copyrighted artwork is no laughing matter.

Magritte: A Life By Alex Danchev 439 pages, illustrated Pantheon Books

RENÉ MAGRITTE and the First Art Gang REVIEWED BY SKOT ARMSTRONG

BOOK S

When an artist achieves the kind of iconic status where they are known outside of the Art World, there can often be a tendency to codify their myth into something that might pass the Elevator Pitch Test. René Magritte has suffered more than others from this oversimplification. A new biography shows us that still waters run dangerously deep. Although the author died before the book was completed, enough finished material and notes were left for an astute writer to complete the last chapter without a noticeable shift in tone from the rest of the book, and there are copious footnotes. Magritte’s father made and lost two fortunes; he chased skirts and gambled; he hung pornographic prints on the walls of their house and taught the children to blaspheme. He fancied himself a hypnotist: the library that young René grew up with was all books on mesmerism and spiritualists. With his brothers, René formed a gang that was the terror of the neighborhood; they destroyed toilets with yeast and possibly robbed graves. One of the young Magreitte’s major influences was the work of the filmmaker Louis Feuillade, whose serials about glamorous criminal gangs inspired the activities of his own gang. When he was 13, René’s mother drowned herself, and his father married his mistress. A year later, Magritte decided to become a painter. Although he had a high regard for Max Ernst, he preferred the company of writers. In fact, he did a lot of writing over the years, including art theory, philosophy and detective stories (unfortunately, none of this writing is currently available in English). He also collaborated with writers for subject matter and titles for paintings. Magritte’s work didn’t start selling immediately. In the late 1920s he was able to arrange a stipend from a group of collectors, who would receive paintings in exchange. When the stock market crash of 1929 wiped out his investors financially, a giant cache of his unsold paintings was dumped on the market for about 60 francs each. He was briefly affiliated with the Surrealists until André Breton expelled him. Despite that, Breton remained an avid collector of his work. When Magritte started to be included in group shows, it was not uncommon for his work to be displayed behind an adults-only curtain among such other “upsetting” artists as Dalì and Balthus. When he wanted to produce a monograph during the Occupation he financed the project by forging art. One of these forgeries made it into his Catalog Raisonné as an interpretation of a Titian. He had combined elements from two Titian paintings into a new work. He even briefly forged currency. Magritte’s adventures in the demimonde help us to understand that he was not just a bourgeois painter of clever jokes (a common misconception during his lifetime). Throughout his life, he always had a gang. In the 1950s they staged tableaux vivantes and made movies, and this biography serves as a useful roadmap to an aspiring publisher or media company looking for “lost” texts, or underground films. The book itself is a lavish object. In addition to the sections of color plates, there are rare photographs throughout. Along the way we meet writers and artists who have fallen out of favor. Even if Magritte is not your primary interest, it’s a great snapshot of the milieu and period that it covers.

WMC William Moreno Contemporary Los Angeles Art Advisory - Consulting

william@wmcontemporary.com @artmavenLA

BY ZAK SMITH

DECODER

Illustration by Zak Smith

Responsible and Irresponsible Art

The art-bureaucrat class is currently in a state of great anxiety over the differences between responsible and irresponsible art. The artists aren’t, but these categories aren’t up to them. Whether she wants to be or not, Kara Walker will—for the foreseeable future—be packaged and promoted as a Responsible Artist, and regardless of any articulate interviews the directors give about the philosophical or cathartic power of catharsis, pain and gore, the Saw movies will continue to be viewed as Irresponsible Art. Away from these polar extremes, the rest of the artists await the Great Dividing. Who is Enlightening? Who appeals to our Lower Instincts? Who will get to do what? With whose money? Responsible Art includes all art where it’s clear to an uninformed viewer why someone might think it would be morally improving to look at it. Irresponsible Art is everything else. Ways of being Responsible can conflict: An in-all-ways-pious Reformation crucifixion is Responsible Art and so is Soviet-era state-sponsored satire at the expense of organized religion—they’re both clearly getting something across about right and wrong. Big cultural conflicts always manifest themselves in attitudes toward Responsible and Irresponsible Art: Adolf Hitler hated jazz of course. His pilots didn’t, though—they’d fly around and pick up jazz on their radios and he couldn’t stop them—it was a problem. Their duties to drop bombs in the name of racial disharmony did not align with their taste. The Soviet Union had notoriously strong views on the need for art to be Responsible, and—after a brief flirtation—decided abstraction wasn’t. The CIA saw and then seized the opportunity to fund this Irresponsibility. It was a way to make American life seem open and cool without having to give money to someone who might a paint a landlord getting lynched. Now there’s an AbEx painting in every bank, hair salon and seaside motel. A decade later the Cold War took another turn. Americans began complaining not only that their sons and brothers were being recruited into a war against a Communism, but that the books they were reading, the music they were hearing, and the films they were watching were, too. So, the ’60s happened. Mainstream culture had been religious, anti-communist, pro-family, and—crucially—comprehensible. So, the counterculture went about being all the other things. Yes, John Lennon sang about giving peace a chance—which is very Responsible—but he also sang about newspaper taxis appearing on the shore—which isn’t. We all strive, now and then, to be Responsible—and we should—right and wrong are a big deal. But in the great pick-up game of life, Team Irresponsible gets not only abstraction but drugs, dreams, sex, dream-logic, and most of the better jokes. The control of Responsible Art is important—most of our major cultural institutions are scrambling as we speak to lay claim to it—but as these examples prove, whoever controls Irresponsible Art will win in the end. People can agree on The Beatles. But, but… what about the Trump Question? Well, in this light you can see it’s more of a Trump Answer. Trump was the first Republican presidential candidate to openly espouse Irresponsibility, which had, until then, been a preserve of youth and, therefore, the left. JFK cheated on his wife with Marilyn Monroe? Bill Clinton smoked dope and got blowjobs? Well look at me, I fuck porn stars and my toilet is solid gold. Trump’s masterstroke was to take what had always been a subtext of the GOP project—that if you just distribute money and power unevenly enough then some of us will get to spend all day laying by the pool doing ketamine off strippers’ butts— and made it text. His 2016 opponent was, like him, rich, white and talked funny, but was his opposite in that she radiated Responsibleness. She could only express the Democratic Party’s promise (that if you distribute money and power evenly enough then we’ll all be able to eat and then send our children to art school where they can do ketamine off each others’ butts) as subtext. It was still a close race—we all know that—but Trump had revealed to his friends that you could lean all the way in on Irresponsible and the church people and rear admirals would still vote for you. We may have only got our country back from him on account of the great tsunami of collective Responsibility demanded by COVID. But don’t let them have Irresponsible—it may not look so great right now, but we’ll need it later.

REBECCA CAMPBELL Painting Feminine Power A survey exhibition of Campbell’s prodigious output over the past fifteen years that features figures in dreamlike, allegorical settings in which gender politics, dogmas, and nuanced interpersonal, familial relationships are explored. Traveling to the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University, June 1-December 17, 2022.

HOLLY TOPPING The Calamity Hustle A solo exhibition of Topping’s new paintings that tell a tragicomic coming of age story of a onetime SoCal-80’sParty-Girl who finds herself stranded in a Westworld-like absurdist fantasyland of her own imagining.

February 15 – March 24, 2022 Free admission to all events

Modified Gallery hours for Spring 2022 Tuesday - Thursday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Free campus parking.

Artist Talks

Rebecca Campbell March 3, Thursday, 12:15-1 p.m. Holly Topping March 10, Thursday, 12:15-1 p.m.

Receptions

March 3, Thursday, 5-7 p.m., preview reception March 5, Saturday, 1-4 p.m., opening reception, with artist walk-thru by Campbell and Topping, 1-2 p.m. Images: Rebecca Campbell, Fool, Seer, MFA Grad (Kyla), 2011, oil on canvas. Holly Topping, Copperhead Carol, 2018, oil on linen Exhibitions organized by Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion, and curated by Tyler Stallings, director/senior curator. Major support for the Spring 2022 exhibitions provided by Yasuko Bush, in memory of John Bush. Additional support provided by The Rallis Foundation, Sylvia Impert, Orange Coast College Foundation, and Associated Students of Orange Coast College. Masks are mandated for indoor events on campus. (714) 432-5738, www.orangecoastcollege.edu/DoyleArts

CONTEMPORARY COMMERCE From Mortar To Metaverse BY SETH HAWKINS

Above: Honorary Bored Ape #19 by BoredApeYachtClub (BAYC): an NFT collection of 10,000 original Bored Ape NFTs. Opposite page: Online gallery of Damien Hirst’s “The Currency:” A collection of 10,000 unique NFTs that correspond with original artworks, which the collector can choose to exchange with the virtual NFT for after its acquisition.

Eth, bit, sol, meta, block chain, bored apes, crypto punks, kitty litter squad, non-fungible, minting, mining, tokenizing, gas fee, hot wallet, cold wallet, generative NFT, destructive NFT, candy machines, early adopters—yes this is English—just not the English of our youth or even the English of a few years ago. This is the contemporary language of commerce and the new verbiage for the art world to understand. If you don’t know what this means, start googling, because the ship has left the dock and you are waving goodbye as everyone else is already on the Open Sea. Even a goofy ape with a hipster hat from a derivative collection can get a cover shot these days. If you braved the Omicron variant to be at Art Basel, you know that major galleries are moving from brick and mortar to the metaverse. Artists are no longer producing works with classical materials such as paint, bronze and photography but rather with AI algorithims, generative layers and 3D models. Art editions have somehow ballooned from 3+2AP’s to a 5,000 unit drop. And guess what, they cost more for 1/5000 than 1/3. Crypto is no longer a speculative fiscal structure that exists only in the arena of the cyber elite, it is something that is bought and sold everyday—even by yours truly—on the coinbase app simply a cell phone thump away. The NFT world has brought a whole new type of collector into the speculative art world: a collector who is digitally wealthy, crypto-swole, and has very few places to spend that wealth. If you were one of the smart (more so lucky) ones that spent a couple hundred bucks and bought in at the start of Bitcoin or Ethereum, you are now sitting on a hot or cold wallet with many many more zeros behind the one. Why sit there looking at your imagined digital $ that’s going to fluctuate, why cash out and pay taxes? In classic Buffet strategy—diversify your portfolio. What that means is, buy a pesky penguin, get some generative NFTs from your favorite artist, or buy a soon-to-be-minted farting cat from the Kitty Litter Squad. It is as if we have stepped through a tiny hidden door in the back of the blue-chip art-world space and have now walked directly into Willy Wonka’s factory. All is possible: you just need to mint it. Much of the new pseudo-art that is taking over the NFT platform is being made by artists or collectives previously unknown to the general canon or common discourse—but does that matter? Sure, the art world elite (e.g., Damien Hirst) has a foothold

in the NFT space, but what is a Beeple, a Bored Ape, or most importantly, what is generative art? To all of these questions, there is a simple answer: those of us entrenched in the world of art understand that the rules were thrown out long ago—why ask so many questions? We are not some old man yelling at the kids to get off our lawn. Art is about taking new ideas to the limit, breaking the rules, and creatively making it up as we go along—cut up a shark, paint a lily pad, cover yourself in ketchup and cut a giant finger off, or maybe an ear—bring on the chaos. The NFT world is no different; it just came out of left field and sucker-punched the traditional art world as COVID stole our focus. No one saw it coming—well maybe gamers, but the last two years were a perfect storm to launch the crypto-fueled NFT market. COVID, skyrocketing prices of digital coins, and the whole world locked in front of computers tinkering when they were supposed to be on a Zoom meeting. A Hollywood writer couldn’t have scripted this monumental change more perfectly. Regardless, we are here and it is not going away any time soon. (Even a goofy ape with a hipster hat from a derivative collection can get a cover shot these days.) So either find your digital footing or sit on the porch yelling at the kids. Those previously established/successful/traditional blue-chip artists will always have a seat at the table, but they are being moved from first class to coach. A new class of artist is in town and, interestingly enough, many have never been successful in the traditional market, yet their NFT collections “mint out” in a matter of minutes for a cool couple of million dollars. As the time of papacy-ruled art wanes, Gagosian has given way to pixelized NFT collections that sell for much more and don’t need locations in Beverly Hills, Paris and Park Avenue. Where will this end? It is currently boundless, with one of the paramount aspects to this revolution being that NFTs actually protect the artist. The wealthy have always been sheltered by their curated collections and set auction prices. The blockchain is the ultimate equalizer; true provenance and the smart contract is the one time in history when an artist can not only formally show that what they have created is original and unique, but can also collect royalties on secondary market sales. No longer is it only the whales that get whalier, our people—the creators—finally have protection in this new metaverse of art.

NFTs ARE A NO-BRAINER Pioneering Petra Cortright INTERVIEWED BY JODY ZELLEN

Petra Cortright’s URL, www.petracortright. com, could be considered a work of net art. Practitioners of net art (beginning in the mid1990s) often used the internet as their medium, sometimes populating their pages with images and data from other websites. Cortright’s home page is a montage of appropriated animated gifs that include twirling roses, dragons, smiley faces, twinkling and spinning globes, as well as a straightforward list of links dating back to 2006 that takes viewers to her myriad projects. While celebrated for her net art, Cortright rose to prominence with a series of YouTube videos where she recorded performances in front of her webcam, often using stock special effects combined with silly, campy and girly gestures. The works attracted a following which inspired Cortright to devise an algorithm based on views to determine the price of each work. Ever entrepreneurial, it is no surprise that Cortright has begun to create NFTs. While Cortright has segued from screenbased net art to NFT’s, her digital works have also been presented as room-sized projections and as framed, printed images. She is a master at manipulating digital files, be it those culled from the worldwide web or created in

Photoshop. Her recent photographs add to and subtract from pictures of the natural landscape to become evocative abstractions that have an otherworldly presence. Cortright responded by email to my questions. JODY ZELLEN: Can you speak about how you got started as a digital artist and the evolution of your practice from net art to performance-based videos, to installations. Then to more gallery-oriented photographic works and finally to NFTs. PETRA CORTRIGHT: I wanted to be a graphic designer when I was younger. I thought that was the only option to be artistic and work with a computer, and at the time it was. I quickly realized that I despised the idea of people instructing me to “change” things to some client’s taste, so I dropped out of two art schools trying to figure things out. I struggled for a long time; the only outlet I really had was the internet. Early groups of new-media artists who later became net artists who later became post-internet artists and so forth. I have a painter’s brain; there was very little precedent for any painting being done on computers. I liked using video in a painterly way, to see

Above: Mainbitch.mov, Webcam video, 2012 Opposite page: WRITING PRIVATE EYE_SWINGERS suplemento alimentario+ong+espaÒa_striptease previews, 2021, digital painting on Belgian linen, 33 x 33 inches; unique, certificate of authenticity: PC_FP4661.

how I could make live effects feel like brushstrokes. I posted them online because there was nowhere else to put them—I wasn’t in school anymore and all my friends and peers were online. I was involved in groups online and that’s how people got to know the work. People would email me asking if I wanted to be in shows. I was happy to have shows but would always inform the gallerist I had no money to produce anything physical. So physical work was [only] produced if the gallery had some kind of budget. Later on, I started working with (an infamous) art dealer who helped me produce physical work. We have been working together for a decade now. I’ve always felt outside of the art world

and like to experiment. There is not a lot to lose in doing what you want—contrary to what most people in the art world might tell you. NFTs were a no-brainer to engage with as I had basically already been making them for the last 15 years.

Women of Wrestling_zoid’s bikini links USA TODAY BUSINESS_Tomb+Raider+2 Game, 2021, digital painting on Belgian linen, 33 x 33 inches; unique, certificate of authenticity: PC_FP4662.

I consider you a pioneer and innovator with respect to the creation of digital works. Do you feel like you are part of an ever growing (or shrinking) community, and how has that influenced your work and strategies toward exhibiting and sharing your works? When I was young, I really felt part of a community online but I haven’t felt that way for years now. There are many factors to this:

the internet has changed but so have I. In youth you seek things that you no longer seek as you get older. What are your thoughts about NFTs? I know you have entered this marketplace; how did it go for you? How do you conceptualize an NFT edition in relation to the other works you make? Do you think it is a viable way to “sell” art? I’ve released a couple hundred of them— it’s gone great. I had no expectations, and everything has exceeded my expectations. The normal “art world” barely seems like a viable place to sell art, NFTs feel just as “real” as that. While it is (seemingly) easy to create digital artworks, to mint NFTs as an individual is pretty complicated as you need numerous accounts and cryptocurrency to start, and once the work is available to see and buy, it seems the “sales” really are dependent on marketing and (self) promotion—more so than, for example, having work on the walls of a gallery. I know you said selling NFTs feels as real as showing and selling at a gallery yet there are differences, at least to me, between making physical objects that hang on a wall and making something 100% virtual that is sold and collected as a ‘”token.” Can you speak to these differences and your preferences as well as your feelings about the dependency on social media to spread the word? There truly isn’t a difference for my work. I have made work on a computer for 15-plus years; it was already digital. It was more work to “print it out” for the galleries. The format of the work slot fit so easily into NFTs. The way I work, I can easily make a couple hundred paintings a day; people don’t seem to ever really understand that about my practice. I haven’t ever been able to release that many through the traditional art world, but with NFTs it’s a nice way to show how massively scalable the practice is. I have had to hold back for so many years, and I still have to even with NFTs. I produce more than I can release. You still have to cringe-ily shill and self-promote in the traditional art world as you do in the NFT world, so again I don’t really see a difference there either. The sales of my NFTs have been surprising: entire new groups of collectors picked them up via Twitter. In a way I had very little to do with it, which I love. I think it’s a mistake to say it’s easy to create digital artworks. It’s not and that’s why there is so much bad work out there. Minting is straightforward and most sites are very user-friendly: plug and play and skins over open sea. With any new technology there is a learning curve, but people are trying to make it as accessible as possible.

SEEING THE WORLD ANEW Nancy Baker Cahill Challenges the Limits of Perception BY TUCKER NEEL

In 2017, my friend—artist/curator Nancy Baker Cahill—invited me to see the art she was creating using virtual reality technology. Until that point, I knew Nancy to make ambitious drawings and otherworldly videos depicting abject, flesh-like topologies; works articulating her long-standing interests in questions of physical embodiment. She made real drawings with real materials—like carbon, pigment and paper—stuff you can get your hands on. So, it was a bit of a surprise she had moved into using complicated state-of-the-art technology, leaving the “meat space” for a virtual tabula rasa. “Sometimes people get motion sickness. So let me know if you feel like you’re going to puke,” Nancy said after fitting my head with virtual reality (VR) goggles. “You ready?” BOOM. Suddenly a maelstrom of black and gray shards was moving around me, in me, and through me, rocking in a coded breeze of zeros and ones. I remember screaming something apropos like, “HOLY SHIT!” I thought I was ready. I wasn’t. VR is definitively fucking awesome. Nancy eventually helped me zoom out to see her drawing in its entirety: an empty circle in a limitless expanse surrounded by sharp, short marks created using one-of-a-kind brushes she developed herself to maintain a sort of creative independence and not rely on someone else’s tools. She pointed out that the work was a 3D digital iteration of one of her Hollowpoint graphite-onpaper drawings, which hung on the wall nearby—an essential fact that tied this virtual work to its analog doppelganger. As Nancy loaded more works from this series, I found myself wading through immersive abstractions resembling falling comets, swirling hurricanes and teeming undergrowth. When I left her studio that day, I knew Nancy had discovered a transformative way to expand on what she had been doing all along: creating things that make your body see itself and the world anew, challenging the limits of perception. To experience Baker Cahill‘s fully immersive digital worlds—or any VR work for that matter—you need access to prohibitively expensive equipment. To get around this barrier, Baker Cahill worked with Drive Studios to create and release the free 4th Wall app in 2018. The app uses augmented reality (AR) to place digital representations of artworks in the “real world.” All you need is a smartphone or tablet with a cellular connection to experience her work—and the works of other artists—in the space around you. The app lets you scale her drawings to fit in the palm of your hand or consume the entire room. There’s a tangible surrealness that accompanies seeing something through your phone’s camera, which usually shows you what is right in front of you but instead relays something that is not and cannot be physically “real.” It’s a sensation that makes one question reality. When I spoke recently with Baker Cahill, she noted that her AR explorations have caused her to ask: “How can we as artists use this technology not just playfully but also harness its subversive potential to trigger poignant conversations about responsibility?” One of the ways the 4th Wall app helps answer this question is by acting as a platform for public art, allowing users to experience AR works in specific, geolocated spaces, placing their bodies in proximity to an artwork that is digitally present yet physically invisible. One AR piece that utilizes this there/not there dichotomy to bring the past into the present is Holy Family Spiritual Church by Chandra McCormick,

which consists of a singular black-and-white photograph of Black women gathered in prayer, dressed in white veils and gowns. The work was realized in 2019 as part of “Battlegrounds,” an exhibition Baker Cahill co-curated with Jesse Damiani. For the exhibition, the pair worked with 24 artists to create 31 AR works in locations in and around New Orleans. Floating like a phantom billboard in a vacant lot in the Lower Ninth Ward, McCormick’s AR work testifies to the historical importance of churches in the area that were once helmed by Black female leaders. Systemic racism and encroaching gentrification may have caused these sites to disappear over time, but McCormick’s AR piece reanimates this past in the here-and-now. Her digital image functions better than a billboard because its virtual existence is nearly impervious to the ravages of time, putting on a different plane

of temporal cognition. Once you see the work, it is always there; its AR presence fixed in memory and digital code. “It relates to the “territory of consciousness,”” Baker Cahill notes. “That’s the subversive potential of AR.” In addition to developing a robust curatorial practice with projects like “Battlegrounds,” Baker Cahill creates her own public artworks using VR drawings and the 4th Wall app’s AR environment to address complex social and political issues. On July 4, 2020, she launched Liberty Bell, geolocating an undulating VR animation, what she describes as, “a writhing, seething mess of threads, something that crawls out of its own skin,” near significant landmarks in six US cities: Boston, Washington, Charleston, SC, Rockaway, NY, Selma, AL and, of course, Philadelphia. Accompanied by a raucous soundtrack created by Baker Cahill’s

Previous spread: Mushroom Cloud, 2021, augmented reality land art. Above, top to bottom: Mushroom Cloud Mycelia 1 and Mushroom Cloud Mycelia 2, both 2021, augmented reality land art. Opposite page: Thoughtshape, 2021, projection mapped sculpture.

longtime collaborator Anna Luisa Petrisko, the tolling bell embodies the turbulent political discourse of an election year and the fraying state of American democracy. It’s a fitting metaphor for the burgeoning metaverse. Many of Baker Cahill‘s other public works employ animated representations of visual catastrophes near sites impacted by climate change. For the 2019 Desert X Biennial, she placed two of her signature pieces in the Coachella Valley, one among the area’s sprawling wind turbines, the other over the Salton Sea, spatially and conceptually tying the two locations together, juxtaposing sites of renewable energy with the casualties of environmental degradation. In Mushroom Cloud, exhibited in Miami in late 2021, she created a cataclysmic explosion over the Atlantic that turns into a network of mycelial nodes, connections in a seemingly endless web blanketing the sky. The piece, which also engaged avenues of participation and exchange through NFTs and blockchain-enabled contracts, exists as a split-second reference to the slow-moving climate catastrophe and a hopeful reminder of the complex yet unseen linkages that connect life on the planet. Currently, Baker Cahill is preparing her most ambitious AR public works to date for the 2022 Elevation Biennial in St. Moritz and Gstaad, Switzerland, where she will unveil two animated drawings that engage in a call-and-response between the two locations. In all her works about climate change, she provides a brief but powerful opportunity for contemplation and connection, shrinking the sublime terror of impending disaster into something observable and psychologically understandable. Her work is experienced collectively in public, compelling her audience to engage in discussions with other people about what sorts of “realities” must manifest to avert total ecological collapse. In addition to her public works, Baker Cahill currently develops projects for traditional gallery spaces and emerging online venues dedicated to showcasing and selling NFTs. Much of this work results from complicated processes engaging the conceptual and perceptual limitations of material space and the digital codes that govern the creation and transmission of information. It’s complex stuff that always results in visually intoxicating outcomes. She begins this piece by making intricate drawings (which form the foundation of her practice) then tears apart and transforms these works on paper into dynamic sculptural objects that emerge from the wall. After this, she documents these sculptures and brings them into the computer, translating them into 3D digital objects, which she then turns into moving animations. Finally, she reinserts these animations back into the “real world” as videos, limited edition prints, or as illuminated projections thrown onto her original paper sculptures. “I’m asking, what is sculpture in digital space?” Baker Cahill tells me, adding, “The work is a celebration of hybridity. I’m charting or indexing what gets lost and gained through a series of mutations and transformations.” When discussing her ongoing experiments with VR, AR and most recently Cinema 4D, Baker Cahill notes, “I think a lot about all the tools we have to play with reality creation. Part of the work is about what it means to manipulate reality, to mutate what is ‘known’ using all this ...trickery.” While her work is undeniably attention-grabbing—due in part to its use of state-of-the-art technology and the ways it plays with fundamental principles of human perception—it also asks us to consider essential questions about how we create our own realities using information and tools that we don’t consciously control, from the internet code that determines how we engage in the emerging metaverse, to the biological constraints of the human retina. Hers is an art steeped in two worlds, the primordial world we inhabit in our flesh suits, and the new experiential digital infinite that awaits around an ever-narrowing corner. Whether you’re ready or not, this is the future. Are you ready?

HOT GIRL SH*T A Conversation with Casey Kauffmann BY LAUREN GUILFORD

“Who is She?” GIF installation, 2020, drawing, video and app manipulation, various monitors and tablets; photo by Jackie Castillo.

Casey Kauffmann is a hoarder of cyber content. Her image archive is a black hole of digital debris, infinitely consuming, tearing apart, and spitting out images—a spaghettification of visual culture. Kauffmann is known for her digital collages that populate her Instagram page, @uncannysfvalley. These assemblages are strange, fragmented manipulations of a visual language that Kauffmann continuously rearranges and reimagines. A manic hyper-femininity runs through her work, combining asses, baby animals, and the latest photoshop filter to disorient and warp popular significations of women. Her digital practice also informs her drawing practice, which serves as another filter to contort and subvert constructs of femininity. I had a conversation with Kauffmann about coming of age in San Fernando Valley, the construction of identity on and offline, and the current state of digital art. LAUREN GUILFORD: How did growing up in Los Angeles in the ’90s shape your practice? CASEY KAUFFMANN: My dad worked for Mattel for 30 years making Barbie commercials, and my mom is a former pageant queen from the valley—I have a picture of her in the Hollywood parade wearing a fur bikini. I also have three sisters, so I grew

up with a really strong femme influence. Anyone who grows up in LA—especially women and femme-identifying people—can attest to the oppressive nature of physicality, consuming images and ideas about what femininity is and should look like. Growing up, I was a huge fan of Lisa Frank, which has obviously influenced my aesthetic. All of this set me up to have a relationship to visual culture that is both celebratory and critical. How do you view the role of the internet and technology as it relates to the construction of identity, online and offline? I think the starting point for me is my personal history and the influence of social media and reality television. [It was] an era that didn’t just want to be in people’s living rooms; it wanted to be in their bedrooms. This idea of intimacy is a construct that is synthesized by the user. We seek out authenticity—or some idea of authenticity—and try to make that online. Can you be real in front of a camera or in the presence of being viewed? Can you access some sort of realness when you’re performing and being watched? In daily interactions, every interaction is a performance. I don’t think there is a fixed self when it comes to the formation of identity in person-to-person relationships. When the internet was developed in the ’90s, there was this utopic

idea that it would be post-racial, post-gender, post–all binary constructions of identity. But there is no escaping these binary constructions when all of the options given to you are facilitated and made by a corporate structure. There’s a back and forth between us creating ourselves on the internet and the internet creating us AFK (away from keyboard). Can you talk about your series, “Who is She?” “Who is She?” started as a theory I developed for my thesis show when I was making drawings of women from reality television, popular culture and art history. I’m always interested in that crescendo of drama—the height of hysteric identifying femme emotion, and when I say that, I mean mass culture’s idea of what hysteria looks like. When I started making these drawings, I realized I could isolate that crescendo of drama and how it comes down to facial gesture—the gesture of a hand or lips, that undiluted high drama. I would crop out that part of an expression, then use the liquify filter on Photoshop, which is used to make eyes bigger, boobs bigger, waist smaller, butts bigger. I would manipulate the face to have the highest amount of drama in that digital image, then draw it, scan the drawing, then liquefy it again. It’s a kind of back-and-forth between the

between these worlds must be challenging, but by doing so, I think you create possibilities for new art audiences. How do you keep these audiences in mind? It’s challenging. I would say that when I make work, I think about audience in terms of accessibility and reaching a wide variety of people. Nothing gives me more joy than a 16-year-old commenting, “This is my life!” I identify with that sophomoric soul that’s inside of all of us saying, “Not fair!” I’ve become interested in the particular things that I can consume so I don’t think as much about what other people want from me. When it comes to traversing the art world, it’s tough—because I believe that conceptually the art world really understands and appreciates my work. Galleries claim to be interested in digital art, but they are still in the object-centric mindset and don’t really know what to do with my work—which has always been a struggle for digital artists. It’s sad that digital artists kind of get left behind in lieu of people making work that is more easily monetized. I also think my work would be more palatable if it wasn’t a bunch of pornographic images of women with their pussies in mud.

physical and the digital. I was also thinking about how I could bring my digital practice into my drawing practice and manipulate the image to get it to an abstracted, almost monstrous level. The title refers to the fact that these are disembodied gestures decontextualized from their source, which is often how we experience femme images online and shapes this visual lexicon of what a woman is. There is a kind of sinister and playful tension in your work. Can you talk about the role humor plays in your art? I consider humor to be an entryway. I’m talking about really difficult personal emotions, and when things are funny, they can access a wider group of people. The humor in my work comes from a real place of anger, anger about feeling like you’re not being listened to or understood. These things that are funny are also inherently tragic. I feel super-aligned with recent trends like Yassification and bimbo culture. Growing up watching the reality television show Simple Life and shows like that really influenced my concept of femininity. But what I love about Paris and what I love about a lot of these very front-facing iconic women is that they have to operate in this place of self-awareness. This is a kind of macro version of what women experience on a micro level all the time. All of this really defines my sense of humor. I would rather laugh than cry. Do you keep a digital archive of the images you collect online? Do images reoccur in your work? It’s a fucking mess. It’s my goal not to repeat images, but it has happened from time to time and, when it does, it’s super interesting. I’m not concerned about what an image means; I’m more interested in the dynamics of popular exchange that brings the image to my phone. It’s crazy when I look at collages from 2015 and see an image I used a week ago. Like, how did this cycle back through Tumblr or Instagram and arrive on my phone again? Is there any way to understand the ebb and flow of exchange? When I think about this exchange, I think about Hito Steyerl’s essay “In Defense of the Poor Image,” which has been an important text for me. You engage somewhat disparate audiences: the art world and the many sub-worlds that populate the internet. Navigating #2022sofar, 2022, iphone collage

You’ve mentioned your intention to create a more “democratic” art world through your digital practice. How does your work expose the limitations of the commercial art world in terms of production and circulation? My work is democratic in that it’s funny and made of things that everyone has access to. It unintentionally exposes limitations on production and circulation—conceptually and technically—but with the intention of accessibility. You don’t have to go to a gallery or a museum to view my work, which also creates a problem because the art world functions off of scarcity. So does the NFT space despite its inception of democratization and agency for the user. My work is not scarce. I have thousands of pieces, and anyone can view them. [It] is cheap in that sense, and I love cheap things! Can you talk about your recent NFT endeavor? How do NFTs relate to your democratic hopes for art? I still feel hopeful about the NFT space. I know a lot of artists making conceptually rigorous work that is being sold successfully as NFTs. It’s exciting to finally have a means and an infrastructure for compensation for work in its native form. Showing my work in a VR environment is fucking awesome. It’s kind of the way my work is meant to be seen. In NFT spaces, the work goes beyond my Instagram page and operates in an archival way for these images that will eventually be lost forever due to tech changes and software updates. [It] is archiving the moments that these images are popular. I also think many people who run the NFT space are involved in too many projects to actually give the things they are involved in the proper amount of care and attention they deserve. How do internet-oriented practices such as yours comprehend the world and the historical moment we are in? This is a difficult time for digital practices. The internet is experiencing a kind of constant narrowing, starting as this big utopian and democratic idea and, as corporate ownership continues its stranglehold, things continually narrow. Since the pandemic, I can already see the homogenization of content through ideas of popularity and likes. I believe we’re on the precipice of a change where things are coming more from co-creative spaces like the blockchain and the metaverse where people are more interested in creating spaces together rather than interacting with things that have already been created for them, like Instagram, where you’re subject to what these white men in Silicon Valley have made for you.

Dale Brockman Davis February 6-March 20, 2022

Matter Studio Gallery

5080 West Pico Blvd . Los Angeles matterstudiogallery.com

Celebrate with us! Judy Baca: Memorias de Nuestra Tierra, a Retrospective

Guadalupe - The Queen of the Land - Group Exhibition

DREAM TEAM BY Crack Rodríguez

From Long Beach to Tijuana Yvonne Venega

Pablo Rasgado

Narsiso Martínez

Abstraction in MOLAA Collection

Gabriela Ruiz

Extended though March 2022

Opens February 27, 2022

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Opens November 20, 2022

Representations of the Body Group Exhibition Opens March 27, 2022

In collaboration with Museo del Barrio

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COMPLEX INTERACTION Tabita Rezaire and the Materiality of The Digital BY ELI STÅHL

The digital is an arbitrary category. In everyday speech, it is sometimes used as an opposition to the material: a digital copy, artwork or exhibition versus a material one. The digital is presented as something existing outside of the material realm and the history and politics thereof; an apolitical utopia that does not hold the same accountability as the “real world.” However, the line between the digital and the so-called real is constantly blurred if it ever existed in the first place. “Our wireless life is very much wired,” as Guinea-based artist Tabita Rezaire points out in her video work Deep Down Tidal (2017), in which she explores the racialized materiality of the internet. Galleries’ and museums’ use of online exhibition platforms and the digitization of museum collections have been accelerated over the past couple of years by technological advancements as well as lockdowns that have made accessing “regular,” in-person shows difficult and at times even impossible. In many instances, the digitization of content has made it more accessible across varying access needs and financial situations—a much-welcomed change to increasingly privatized and commercialized art institutions. Another recent digital tendency within the art world is NFTs. Although they have existed since 2014, non-fungible tokens (NFT) became commonly known last year when an NFT artwork was sold for as much as $91.8 million, gaining international media attention. Surrounding both digital exhibitions, collections and artworks, such as NFTs, is a discourse of immateriality. However, critics have also pointed out how NFTs specifically—which rely on blockchain technology—are polluting the atmosphere due to their high electricity use, as they require extensive “mining” done by computers. The smooth interface and minimal hardware that the user engages with—be it a smartphone, laptop or tablet—may create the illusion that whatever takes place digitally has a minimal physical presence and impact but in fact it is estimated by the French Environment and Energy Management Agency that digital technology consumes 10% of the world’s electricity, and that if the internet was a country, it would be the third largest consumer of electricity, following China and the US. The internet is created in fiber optic cables, lying on the seabed. Around 60% of the world’s population is counted as active users of the internet but many don’t realize the physical aspects of this quotidian phenomenon.

DEEP DOWN TIDAL

In the opening scene of Tabita Rezaire’s video work Deep Down Tidal, a person floating on a cloud in outer space is having an amicable phone conversation stating they have been banned from Facebook for posting that white people should give them back their land. This comedic opening portrays an absurd reality of political censorship of marginalized people on social media. The songs playing from the phone speakers are in various languages and originate from different parts of the globe, referencing the international nature of the internet. The video, which is a collage of popular cultural references, Google searches, satellite images, the phone conversation, a voice-over and more, explores the connection between the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the internet; the racist history and present of the internet and its materiality.

Rezaire’s interdisciplinary practice is focused on healing through speculative, scientific imaginaries, and spans video, installation and performance lectures. She envisions organic, electronic and spiritual network sciences as healing technologies. Deep Down Tidal deals with the history and politics of the materiality of the internet. In the video, Rezaire mentions the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable laid between the United Kingdom and the United States in 1858, following the colonial shipping routes and colonial relationship between the two countries. Today, electric fiber cables lying on the seabed make up 99% of the world’s internet. The cables, thick as a garden hose, are laid out by special cable ships. On the website Submarine Cable Map, one can trace the hundreds of undersea cables that make up the internet and information including its length and its owners. The cables are generally owned by private companies such as Google and Meta (Facebook), therefore governed by private, corporate interests. Rezaire refers to the cables as “the hardware of the new imperialism,” speaking of how the internet is used to uphold already existing colonial power dynamics between the different countries. Naming the cables “hardware,” Rezaire acknowledges how these cables are the very material of the worldwide web. She plays with the notion of the internet as a “cloud” and the implication that it is non-terrestrial while explaining its underwater reality. By crosscutting between scenes from outer space and the sea, she hints at the connection between the two and the common alienation from both. “Internet is not in the clouds, it lies on the sea floor,” she says, but it may well be that the cables are as hidden undersea as they would have been in the sky.

ALIENATION OF LABOR

The immateriality, or rather invisibility, of the internet is part of the general hyper-alienation of labor that characterizes the 20th and 21st century. “Cables are spaces where labor, knowledge and capital are sunk into the sea, ” Rezaire says. The undersea cables are not invisible to the workers who make them or lay them down, or to the marine life that is invaded by these cables. But the average user of the internet, who may be using the internet daily, has never seen underwater network cables and may very well not even be aware of their existence. The ignorance of the users of the internet allows for the continuation of a discourse of the internet as a space outside of the material realm and its consequences—be it on climate change or racism or workers’ rights. The alienation from the internet is in many ways like any other kind of disconnect between worker, consumer and product—as with food, textiles and so on. However, the relative novelty of the internet and the lack of technical understanding of its workings may be intensifying the already exacerbated sensation of detachment. By telling the story of undersea internet cables, Rezaire creates an opportunity for a critical engagement with what to many is a common yet arbitrary realm; the digital. The digitalization of certain aspects of society, including aspects of the art world, has in many ways increased accessibility and created new opportunities for creative exploration. The internet has changed the world and holds vast potential to continue to do so—within as well as outside of the art world. There is no point in writing off what we may refer to as “the digital,” but it’s worth asking what it is that we are actually referring to. Complex interaction with the means of the internet and the digital at large requires a more specific, subtle language that may yet to be both invented and implemented. Familiarizing ourselves with the specifics of the digital and its histories, through art, education and more, renders possible a nuanced participation with the digital and its potentials as well as with its material consequences and working conditions. In order to do so, we must not think of the digital in opposition to the material realm but rather as an integral part of it, including its politics, histories and complexities. The digital must not be regarded as a utopian or dystopian other, but as a continuation of the layered, intertwined worlds that we inhabit. Our wireless life is very much wired. Stills from Deep Down Tidal, 2017

It’s All About Meme BY ANTHONY AUSGANG

A meme is unit of cultural information, such as an idea or belief, transmitted from one person to another. The word is an alteration of the Greek mimeme, meaning something that is imitated, not duplicated. The difference is important, as each iteration of a meme reflects the biases of its creator and subsequent co-creator. Memes in their analog form were first identified in 1976 by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who confirmed that the primary component of meme-culture is the creative act of remixing and sharing memes with others. Applied online, this makes the customization of memes a facile method for social commentary and personal expression. Artist Shephard Fairey introduced his famous sticker meme “André the Giant Has a Posse” in the 1980s, and at the time he described it as a joke, “a skate crew thing that has no meaning except to cause people to react.” Fairey’s Situationist approach jibed with the era’s predigital zeitgeist and the meme became globally ubiquitous; an impressive accomplishment considering that the sticker was spread only by Fairey and his street teams. But even so, The Walrus contributor Nick Mount believes that “following the example set by galleries, some street art is more about the concept than the art.” So, when Titan Sports sued to stop the use of André the Giant’s trademarked name in 1994, Fairey promptly updated it with the iconic branding “OBEY.” Conceived in analog form, the OBEY meme was eventually digitized and went online. But despite Fairey’s cultural prescience, the combination of still-image and text that is considered a digital meme’s classic format first appeared in Nehal Patel’s 1997 meme “Mr. T Ate My Balls.” Since then, internet memes are almost exclusively presented as jpegs and viewed on phones or laptops. In 2015, the Queen’s Museum of the Moving Image presented the show “How Cats Took Over the Internet,” and it was a rare chance to see internet memes as wall pieces

Top: Meme Generator page, pixel dimensions vary. Bottom: Business Cat memes, pixel dimensions vary.

in a museum. But many didn’t agree with the concept and, after some criticism, Carl Goodman, the museum’s executive director, defended the show, stating that “we’re not saying that it’s art, we’re not saying that it’s not art; we’re saying it’s culturally significant.” On January 1, 2011, Something Awful forum user Apple Jax posted a picture of her boyfriend’s cat Emilio wearing a tie while sitting on a living room couch. The photo was reposted to Reddit with the title “Business Cat”, then put on MemeGenerator. A second Reddit thread entitled “Business Cat Ain’t No Joke” marked the first appearance of the image macro, initially captioned “No LOL Here, Get Your Ass in My Office.” The “standard” Business Cat meme now featured a close-up of Emilio and his tie in front of a starburst background with an overlaid text that usually included something an office boss would do or request, but with a feline twist. Professor Ryan Milner posits that, “based on spatial online context, memetic imagery becomes fluid. The user must be in the know to understand the underlying message before the meme can effectively spread and evolve while in their hands.” As the Business Cat meme’s customizations proliferated, it became what is called an “advice animal image macro series.” Since then, the template’s combination of feline and office totems has proven so popular that, since there are certainly no limits to its duplication, its number of uses could be accurately described as infinite. Memetics is the study of information and culture based on the analogy of Universal Darwinism. Digitally, it comes down to an algorithm that leads to a meme’s evolution through selection and variation. But as is the case with many memes that go viral, Business Cat puts an emphasis on humor, a quality Milner finds essential. “Humor is a great way to make something resonate, and if people see something that resonates with them, they are more likely to make it their own before passing it on.” Apologies to Marshall McLuhan, but the meme is now the message.

artlounge.co

Now showing artist Justin Prough in the Magic Box at the Mondrian Los Angeles Hotel

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An Art Review for The Nation by Clement Greenberg, January 24, 1948 BY ALLISON STRAUSS

Art Libs is our take on Mad Libs, the popular party game/book series created by Leonard Stern and Roger Price in 1953. How to Play: As in the original Mad Libs, players blindly fill in the words of a story template, then discover the absurd story they’ve written. It’s best played with at least three people (good for video calls). Since you’re the one seeing this page ahead of time, you be the scribe/reader. Ask the other players to think of the types of words indicated beneath the blanks in the story below: “Give me a noun.” “Give me a verb,” writing in their answers accordingly. (Also substitute personal pronouns as needed.) Go through the prompts like a list, do not read the story as you go. Once the story is all filled in, read it aloud to the amusement of all. Make the Surrealists proud! Jackson Pollock, Number 1A, 1948

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ENTERTAINMENT & THE ARTS ATTORNEY

Stephen J. Goldberg

A creative lawyer for the creative community (323) 740-2800 • Stephen@stephengoldberglaw.com

F E AT U R E D

R E V I E W

No Humans Involved Hammer Museum By Ezrha Jean Black

The landmark exhibition “No Humans Involved” was remarkably compact, filling a single gallery at the Hammer with installations by only seven artists. Its impact, however, was seismic and sustained. Its title alone was enough to take viewers aback—and that was part of the point. The term “N.H.I.” was first reported as appearing in internal Los Angeles Police Department communications, referring mostly to suspected street gang members, virtually all of them Black or Brown. Stanford literary philosopher and critic, Sylvia Wynter, seized upon this and events surrounding the 1992 LAPD beating of Rodney King to challenge what she regarded as its signal reflection of the implicitly racist linguistic and epistemological foundations of Enlightenment concepts of humanity. The result was a sprawling 1992 epistolary essay challenging not merely conventional notions of humanity, but critical methodologies attached to art, culture and aesthetics. Curator Erin Christovale used this essay as the springboard for what is essentially a visual symposium to “interrogate and disrupt notions of what it means to be (hu) Man.” Whether it might “[offer] inklings of a future humanism that holds the potential for physical, cognitive and social liberation,” is slightly more fraught. Certainly Wilmer Wilson IV’s 2017 Measures Not Men—a 7-foot wall of salt blocks like a blown-up frame of movable type inscribed on both sides—a “war memorial” in more than one sense—put paid to any simplistic reading of the notion, neutralizing the white-hot anger of its inscribed message (a letter sent to a Mississippi sheriff in the wake of a spate of lynchings of Black army veterans, promising to “burn the entire state” if it did not stop), yet literally rubbing salt into a wound that does not seem to close in our youthful “democratic experiment” of a republic. Directly across, from Wilson’s wall/war of words, SANGREE, the collaborative partnership of Mexico City artists René Godínez-Pozas and Carlos Lara, countered with what almost seemed to pastiche the notion of a museum exhibition itself. Here, in this grouping of work from their Abiogenators series (playing on the notion that human life might have emerged out of a non-biological chemistry of clay, mud and earth), the artists constructed a semaphoric choreography of brilliant-hued vessels, masks and their connective supports—piers, pillars and pedestals in volcanic stone (cantera rosa).

“No Humans Involved,” installation view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Photo: Jeff McLane.

Aparicio Sepultura with the WangShui Suspended Animation, “No Humans Involved,” installation view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Photo: Jeff McLane.

That nonorganic construction was answered in turn by what from certain angles looked like a roiling sea of flesh—Sondra Perry’s large-scale mount of multiple lenticular panels, which proved to be exactly that, Flesh on Flesh (2021), a 3D image of the artist’s own facial skin surface morphed (via digital tools), into a super-magnified pigment-and-blood saturated terrain of pools and ridges, continuously refocused as the viewer moved from one end of the mount to the other, as if to foreshadow its ultimate transition into the stuff of earth and sea. Before encountering any of these installations, though, the viewer was confronted with Eddie Aparicio’s monolithic cube of amber, Sepultura de semillas / Sepulchre of Seeds (2021), morphing and melting down through the duration of the exhibition; embedded with everything from fragmented steel and plastic car parts to organic detritus. At almost any angle, you could make out ceramic plates and cutlery, bits of fabric, straws and cigarettes, discarded commercial packaging—the detritus of a neighborhood, also its lifeblood. As both distillation and real-time decomposition of such notions, Aparicio perhaps came closest to the question framed in Christovale’s gloss of Wynter’s thesis: “How do you measure a life?” No More Tears (2020), a luminescent jungle cavern constructed by siblings Mulowayi and Mapenzi Nonó, working collaboratively as Las Nietas de Nonó, seemed to most directly reference the trauma embodied in that dark police code, borne out of hunger (what might be walls of timber or stone looked like a patchwork of tortillas) and yearning for escape as if from desert islands (fantastical river rapids faded into view from inset digital screens; repeated on screens representing the Nonós’ formerly incarcerated cousins, the Salgado brothers and echoed in their “third eyes”). WangShui’s overhead anamorphic video projection, Suspended Animation (or Scr...pe) (2021) with its blue boreal sea of protoplasm in undulant metamorphosis, inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, suggested that the imponderables of human life might only be answered by the equally imponderable alternative of an entirely transformed life form projected into the cosmos—effectively bringing the exhibition full circle; in short, that a future cognitively liberated ‘humanism’ might not be entirely human at all.

R E V I E W S

Mary Brøgger ROSEGALLERY

By Deborah Krieger

After remaining indoors for over a year, it’s refreshing to be confronted with the idea of the natural passage of time in the outside world—how life consciously accumulates and mutates, even when we aren’t there to watch it happen. Mary Brøgger’s retrospective

time, or of changing nature, in any particular way, Untrodden works perfectly within the overall context of “Altercation” by attempting to falsify its premise. Placed on the gallery floor, Untrodden consists of a large swatch of sickly gray-green industrial carpet. Unlike moss, or algae, or coral, this carpet is not alive, and was never alive, and will never decay in anything resembling real time. Rather, the consciously artificial Untrodden will meet its end only when the last Twinkie on Earth goes stale. For all the intricate production present in “Altercation,” this body of works shines in how unconstructed it truly seems. Like lichen spreading over the side of a rock, they appear to have the potential to grow and change and thrive beyond the purview of human eyes, hands, and imagination.

Eric Croes

Richard Heller Gallery By Jody Zellen

Mary Brøgger, Untitled (low folding seat), 2021. Copyright Mary Brøgger. Courtesy of ROSEGALLERY.

exhibition “Altercation,” a small survey of her textiles, fiber art, and sculpture (all works mentioned 2021) illustrates this essential. Brøgger uses wool, acrylic yarn and cotton gauze not as the building blocks of garments and rugs—as human-cultivated applied arts— but rather to emulate living organisms like coral, moss and algae that represent nature in uncontrolled form. Indication, a felted wool wall hanging, quickly gets at this theme. Where a work with these materials might have a repeating pattern or pictorial motif, the artist uses patchy blues, whites, yellows and grays abstractly, suggesting wispy clouds drifting across the sky. In the gallery space, Indication is installed across from the plywood construction Untitled (low folding seat). You can’t sit, but you want to, and you want to be able to just look at Indication and relax, staring deeply into its beautiful nothingness. Untitled, a massive “wool painting” (per the artist’s description), similarly illustrates the animating force that drives “Altercation”— the clash between how we think of Brøgger’s materials and how she uses them instead. The work hugs the convex corner of a temporary wall rather than lying flat, suggesting a pale ivy clinging to a building. It’s a simple choice of display, but one that speaks volumes, because Untitled ends up seeming truly alive—and live against the wishes of a civilization that would prune it back into something consciously tended. Where Indication and Untitled evoke moving clouds and irrepressible ivy, There and Black brings the accumulative qualities of coral—the organism and the ecosystem—into play. Created out of acrylic yarn and mixed media, There and Back gives the impression of having existed forever beyond the bounds and concerns of human time, just endlessly attaching thin yellow crusts of paint to its black surface of simulated polyps and anemones. While the ceramic works in “Altercation” are a little out of step with the show’s theme in that they don’t reference the passage of

Towering more than six-feet high, three large glazed ceramic totems confront viewers who enter the gallery space. These works— Fakir’s Foot, Philosof’s Foot and Fantomas’ Foot, (all 2021–22)—by Brussels-based sculptor Eric Croes, function as the introduction to his exhibition “The Gods Must Be Crazy.” Each vertical column is constructed in the spirit of an Exquisite Corpse drawing combining eight to ten colorfully glazed objects ranging from candles, plants, animals and books to head-shaped vessels with mask-like features. The base of each sculpture is a sturdy, thick, flat disk upon which sits a cartoon-like depiction of an oversized foot purportedly belonging to the namesake of the sculpture—Fakir, Philosof or Fantomas. In Fantomas’ Foot, Croes has stacked a foot covered in a white athletic sock, a coiled pot embedded with the face of a man who has a rope coming out of his nose that wraps Eric Croes, Vesta’s Hand, 2021–22. Image courtesy Eric around the upper por- Croes and Richard Heller Gallery. Photography by Hugard & tion of his face, a hol- Vanoverschelde. lowed out red die, a green stem with leaves, a white puckered sphere like an oversized golf ball, a brownish, mask-like head with closed eyes and an open mouth; and a bright blue head with tears running from its oval, carved out eyes. The sculpture is topped with an old-fashioned orange candle holder and a white candle with a bright yellow flame. The other totems combine seemingly unrelated objects that begin to tell a story alluding to the protective nature of these Gods. While the totems hold court in the front gallery, smaller, more human-scaled, gargoyled sculptures fill the back space. Each work is an amalgam of hands, animals and faces that become a figure. These creatures sit atop low stools with bony white legs beneath various colored bases. They beg to be seen from all sides and the way they are displayed—centered in the gallery on low white pedestals—allows for this. It seems evident that Croes is having a blast

R E V I E W S constructing these sculptures, inserting personal, as well as universal symbols into his Frankenstein forms. On the backside of the Vesta’s Hand, the artist has created a face with holes for eyes, red circles for cheeks, and a small mouth with a protruding pink tongue. The top of the head merges with clunky, albeit realistically rendered fingers with translucent blue fingernails. The tail of a green snake wraps from one side of the hand to the other. Here, the fingertips are small mask-like faces with outstretched tongues and empty eyes and the thumb is both a spout and a skull. Each hand is likewise an inventive combination of faces and functions. By titling the exhibition “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” Croes creates a playful irony. If the Gods are crazy, they can be, or do, anything. This allows him to make figures with qualities that relate to both actual and invented Gods. Drawing from folklore, mythology and history, as well as his imagination. Croes manifests a menagerie of figures with a range of personalities and expressions. Whether the starting point is hands or feet, these sculptures surprise and delight, providing viewers with challenging imagery to decipher and savor.

city of terraced gardens, an isolated paradise with no egress, or a memory palace for the ages—the citation of Greco-Roman, Babylonian or even Olympian motifs complicates the rush toward pure futurism with obvious delight. Escher meets Eco in Kirk Finkel aka untitled, xyz’s Monument of Errors (2022, digital, MP4, 32-second infinite loop). Inspired by the speculative writing in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, this vibrating confection of distorted Roman architecture turns sacred geometry into a playground for poetry. Nate Mohler’s Echo the Color (2022, video, 2:45 minutes) glories in fusing mediums. He works with a combination of street photography, drone footage and AI to generate Fauvist scrolling landscapes that turn language about movement in painting into something literal. It’s like he’s fulfilling the goals of the fin-de-siècle painters using tools of the future; at the same time, he’s exploring the present in these aerial love letters to the city of Los Angeles.

PORTALS Angels Gate

By John David O’Brien

Elsewhere is a Negative Mirror Vellum LA

By Shana Nys Dambrot This thoughtful, surprising, eclectic yet focused group bridges the gap between an elevated gallery presentation and the untamed wilds of the cryptoart space. “Elsewhere is a Negative Mirror” is organized around the theme of architecture. Displayed on high-res screens, at no point until purchase does it matter that the work lives on the blockchain. Curators Jesse Damiani and Sinziana Velicescu conceptualized the show posing questions such as, if artists are indeed creating a new world, what kinds of spatial and temporal structures will be imported? What will be replicated or reimagined, used as symbols to elevate or smash? untitled, xyz, Monument of Errors, 2022. Courtesy What laws of physics, gravity, perspective and Vellum LA. time will they obey, subvert or ignore? The assembled artists answer these questions by mining not only fantasy and literature, but the territory of art history, which has in its own way asked questions like these before—especially the last few times the world changed forever. In Luminous Depths (2022, photography with digital render and effects, 18-second infinite loop), Peticia Le Fawnhawk and DeepLight Labs offer a perfect, motion-enhanced take on de Chirico-style surrealism in a scene where a lone figure in a windy, desert expanse faces a luminous portal to the unknown. Vince Fraser’s Deconstruct to Reconstruct (2021) digital-mixed reality/AR video animation, one-minute infinite loop) has the majesty of a Sphinx, revealing that its flamboyant colossus is backed by scaffolding, a resplendent work in progress. Sabrina Ratt based Machine for Living, Deconstruction I (2018–21, video, 1:06-minute infinite loop) on a Brutalist complex outside Paris. As a verdant, prismatic stream floods tiers of concrete the piece asks, whose Utopia is this? In Mari.K aka MadMaraca’s Happy Place III (2021, digital 3D) Ruskin’s battle of the sublime and picturesque still rages. A floating

Thresholds—with their curious balancing act between two places, spaces or states—have always exercised a tremendous pull upon human imagination. It is, without even working at it, a naturally apt analogy for multiple types of transformation. The number of

Erika Lizée, The Subtle Body Prepares for Emergence, 2021. Courtesy Angles Gate.

commonly used phrases in our language that we take for granted shows how we all understand the liminal quality that the concept of a brink reveals. In the truly grand geography of greater Los Angeles, going down to San Pedro always still surprises, as this tip of land, the bottom-most point of LA, opens onto the ocean. Surmounted by a seemingly endless number of dock rigs and ship riggings, boats, and containers, it really feels like you’ve arrived some place other than the City of Angels. Located in what was once a military base, the cultural center of Angels Gate has taken a decommissioned barrack and transformed it into art galleries. On the top floor of the main gallery “PORTALS” inhabits the slightly diminutive spaces, and the art installed there in turn plays around with the sense of portals being something from a port (which is a portal) and each being a portal to elsewhere. What engages so wonderfully about this exhibition is that it avoids a monolithic definition of how all this disparate art fits with the thematic premise. There are works that look like framing devices through which one could gaze from one physical world into another. Erin Harmon’s low-relief cut-paper architectural constructs, Echo and Occulus (both 2015), Yevgeniya Mikhailik’s smoky drawings on translucent paper from the Barrow Series (all 2021), and Howard Schwartzberg’s willfully awkward abstract Open Space Ban-

dage Paintings (2020) all allude to multiple interpretations of these gateways. There are others in which the boundary being crossed is more of a philosophical nature. These loosely corral visual quanta that lead us to consider our presuppositions, as one moves from the certainty in one moment to the instability of another. Svetlana Shigroff’s wild mythologem-laden tapestries, Esther Ruiz’ somber light-and-reflection works, and Elana Mann’s handcrafted sound conveyors all share in this impulse. There are works in which the brink being pursued is much more symbolic in nature. They work on visualizing the movement from one state of being to another, as one goes from life into the afterlife, from the present to the transcendent. Alicia Piller’s dense Blue Memories, Flooding Back. Navigating Tongva Waters (2021) and Erika Lizée’s expansive and astounding The Subtle Body Prepares for Emergence (2021) are both rapturous site-specific works that underscore these complexities. As with the most entrancing of exhibitions, “PORTALS” springboards a viewer’s imaginative musings into an altogether unexpected set of considerations. It’s like a box within a box within a box, and not only physically fitting together but conceptually and imaginatively. It is a perfectly fitting liminal experience to have at one of the outer limits of this immense city of many portals.

palette, and a flat, illustrative texture. Each painting also has a stark and brightly lit overexposed quality that blows out colors and adds to the photo-realistic impression. The works are all cohesive—they could easily be photos taken by the artist during the COVID lockdown of the last two years. While only some of the paintings are figurative, each piece functions as a kind of self-portrait, as the subtle storyline woven through the paintings leads the viewer to infer that even the still-life paintings are autobiographical. By illustrating the self in fetish-ware of submissive motifs like schoolgirl and gimp, the artist’s own sexuality is presented as matter of fact, which is inherently subversive when the artist is a woman. There is also a darkly humorous, sardonic quality that’s demonstrated in Self Help, which shows the artist sitting in a schoolgirl outfit reading a book with the title “HOW TO STOP SUFFERING (immediately).” The artist is clearly playing with ideas of identity, and while the paintings are a bit tumblr goth-girl aesthetic, I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with bringing the world of e-girl BDSM self-portraits into the “art world” and galleries. Towers’ paintings are markedly of the moment without coming off as trite or derivative. Instead, they are vulnerable, risqué, cheeky, feminist explorations of the self and solitude.

Noelia Towers

Raymond Logan

By Leanna Robinson

By Genie Davis

de boer

Noelia Towers’ new collection of works, “Opening an Umbrella Indoors” (all works 2021), presents a world of dichotomies: pleasure/pain, soft/hard, natural/synthetic, obscured/vulnerable. The collection of paintings is consistent in its motifs of both overt and covert sexuality, and natural flora and fauna. In each of the figurative paintings, all self-portraits, the artist’s face is obscured, either by her body-positioning, composition structure, or by objects and fabric. In this manner, the viewer gets only part of the story, and an air of mystery is added. In many ways the still life paintings help fill in those gaps and, like obscure clues, offer hints at the artist’s hidden self. Towers offers the viewers both a dead bird (Ferit de mort) and cut flowers (Remember Me and Memorial To Self). By presenting these living things that have suffered death, or certain to reach it soon, Towers plays with the theme of the death of nature, and perhaps the death of innocence. Towers’ painting style is in the vein of photorealism in that it is clearly based on photographs as references, and the finished works appear photogenic, but lack the hyper-realistic details present in the likes of Chuck Close. Towers’ technical strength is her treatment of different textures. In Vow Of Silence—the wood texture of the wall, the detailed lace neckline, the floral dress and shiny latex accessories—all Noelia Towers, Vow of Silence, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and de boer, Los Angeles. Photo by Jacob Phillip. receive different treatments that are effective in breaking up the painting composition. The attention to detail on textures also gives the paintings an editorial quality—the patent leather shoes, and lace-up boots could be pulled from images in a magazine. That said, the oil paintings have a pointedly matte finish that is accentuated by the muted color

George Billis Gallery From George Washington’s celebrated portrait to Frank Sinatra’s mug shot, Raymond Logan paints a wide range of subjects with exquisite depth and color. His layered palette resembles sculpture, crafted of hue and shadow. While each portrait in his current exhi-

Raymond Logan, John Coltrane, 2021. Courtesy George Billis Gallery.

bition is instantly recognizable, they are not realistic in the truest sense of the word. It is as if an explosion of colored confetti had descended from the sky and reshaped itself into the personification of a human being. All the elements are there, but it is those many disparate pieces that form a realistic whole. Created in oil paint, using both palette knife and brush, Logan’s images are exhilaratingly lovely and magical. That magic is the sleight-of-hand the artist employs, cohering disparate slivers of color into a cohesive image. His strategy employs intensely thick texture and a rich understanding of color. The works have reverence and gravitas, coupled with a lively

R E V I E W S playfulness, born of both the artist’s execution and the connections he evokes between the viewer and the subject. His figures range in size from small portraits to large works. The image of Washington (46”x 46”) is as thoughtful as it is iconic, and the president’s face is flecked in American red and blue to build a surprisingly authentic skin tone. His fierce blue eyes match his elegant jacket. Unlike many portraits of the first US president, rather than a haughty look, his appearance is thoughtful, even bemused, as if he were thinking, “we really accomplished something here—I hope.” There is a similar sense of hopefulness in Logan’s smaller portrait of Frederick Douglass (16”x 16”) , who nonetheless seems to simmer with a fierce strength and burning passion. His hair, rendered primarily in shades of blue, semi-circles his countenance as would a halo befitting an icon. An older, white-haired rendering of Douglass, in a diminutive but powerful 8”x 8” format, speaks less of fire and more of resolution. Among the largest works is Sinatra’s mug shot (60” x 40”), in which a decidedly young performer faces drummedup indecency charges with a look of pained consternation. While Logan creates landscapes that are equally evocative, the current exhibition depicts only portraits of those who have influenced the artist, both highly public figures and personal friends and family. In many cases, the photographs Logan refers to in his work are based on photo shoots he’s staged himself; in others, they represent images that are meaningful to the artist and connect to his own personal zeitgeist. He notes that his work is meant to serve as a “dialogue between the viewer and myself about those shared connections.” From John Coltrane lovingly cradling his saxophone, to intimate portraits of personal friends—Charlie, Greg and Lalo, as well as Logan’s wife, Julie—the images are nuanced, thoughtful, and above all else, represent a visceral, glowingly alive rendering that reveres some classic icons and creates new ones.

Richard Wyatt Jr. Steve Turner

In fact, just as John Coltrane revolutionized the saxophone into an instrument never heard before, Wyatt’s heightened vision coupled with expert eye and hand coordination transforms a surface with abstract lines and marks as if playing A Love Supreme (1964) on paper. Glory Cloud (2019), for example, introduces Wyatt’s father at age 88. In a society that glorifies the notion of permanent youth, this work dismantles such a destructive obsession. Portrayed as if stepping out of the sky, this realistic yet interpretive rendering differentiates shirt texture from skin surface, suitcoat from mustache and beard, hands with veins from suitcoat with buttons. Moreover, his penetrating stare suggests that wisdom comes with age. Like Dean Mitchell’s watercolor portrayal of an older African American male in For Freedom (2020) and Carolyn Lawrence’s acrylic work, Pops (1970), Wyatt accomplishes the same; he captures the essence of the human experience. Additionally, within the context of a 21st-century global pandemic that ravaged African Americans and the elderly, this personal aesthetic choice is socially conscious and timely. Road to Recovery (2021) and The Gifted One (2021) show Wyatt’s ability to expand the boundaries of the Photo-Realism movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The former image is a graphite portrait of his daughter wearing a face mask, demonstrating the tenderness of Wyatt’s application of chiaroscuro. With a three-quarter view, her eyes anticipate a hopeful future. The latter is a timeless charcoal snapshot of the late NBA great, Kobe Bryant. A first reading of both images reveal Wyatt’s skill at capturing the nuances of skin texture. Finally, there is Joyce, (2021) in which Wyatt’s rendition of his wife of 43 years demonstrates his advanced skill at portraiture regarding facial features, proportions, and shadow contrast. Starting with the hair and then to the earrings and to her glasses, this image breathes life; he captures the look of love as her eyes suggest the value of memory. Each intricate pencil mark and suggestive contour line communicates an uplifting message to his wife, family and community. Ultimately, “Loss, Healing & Restoration,” accomplishes what is implied by the title—acknowledgement of pain with a single-minded focus on transformation. A visual historian of his community, Wyatt’s works reinforce the sacred interconnection to others.

By Richard Allen May III Capturing human dignity through drawing requires commitment not only to clearly see but to deeply observe. Current works by Richard Wyatt Jr. at Steve Turner gallery encapsulates such an act. As a muralist in the tradition of such predecessors as Charles White, John Biggers and Hale Woodruff, the Los Angeles-based Wyatt is no stranger to portraying humanity with proficiency and sensitivity. The Capitol Records building, Watts Towers Art Center and Ontario International Airport all testify to the caliber of Wyatt’s public art. Ye t t h i s c u r re n t Richard Wyatt Jr, Road to Recovery, 2021. Courtesy exhibition of pencil, Steve Turner. charcoal and graphite works on paper places him in a much-deserved category of his own within an art canon that tends to consistently ignore some while invariably celebrating the same individuals.

Miles Regis

Von Lintel Gallery By Catherine Yang

Trinidadian artist Miles Regis searches for hope and meaning in the ugly and chaotic. An astute social commentator drawing from his experience as a Black man who emigrated to America 31 years ago, Regis imbues each canvas with a rich visual narrative dealing with racial injustice, identity politics and the healing power of unification. The impeccably crafted mixed-media paintings in “Better Days Ahead” fuse image with text to create moving portraits of the pain and frustration of our contemporary world while simultaneously translating these emotions into idiosyncratic beauty. Upon entering the gallery, viewers are immediately transported back to the summer of 2020 and the raw heat of protests that suffused the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Rife with scenes of homebound families and political strife, the works are unambiguously of the moment. Regis is not concerned with creating a time capsule, however, but with representing how the sense of unrest that gripped the nation is inescapable for Black Americans and pervades all aspects of their daily lives. His vivid hues and active compositions burst with hurt and anguish, as well as harmony and hope. One striking painting Be Careful (2017, 51” x 47”) of a Black figure with exaggerated features is encircled with frenzied swaths of color and lines, watchful eyes and dire warnings: “Everybody Is Watching,” “Don’t Be The Stereotype.” Of similar scale America (2020) declares, “I Can’t Breathe” on a sign flanked by masked protestors of various skin tones but similarly raised fists. The largest, 70”x 56”, and one of the most arresting pieces, We Just Tired

Miles Regis, Be Careful, 2017. Courtesy of Von Lintel Gallery and the artist.

(2021), shows a lone Black woman standing in darkness, shrouded with flames, raising a sign that speaks the words of its title. Their pain and hardened courage are palpable in their expressions. Regis’ paintings are often finished with splatters of paint droplets and frenetic etchings across the surface of the canvas—personal touches that point to the exasperated urgency of both the artist and his subjects. In settings of domestic leisure just as in those of political action, Regis’s all-Black subjects do not smile; rather, they are wary-eyed and morose, imparting the feeling that they are pensively waiting, never feeling completely safe or at ease. And yet, Regis’ positive message of healing through togetherness is equally as loud as his condemnation of racial injustice. An unmistakable optimism permeates each piece, and his paintings are ultimately celebrations of Black resilience and harbingers of hope. In the same breath, he proclaims pride in his identity and faith in the future of our nation. Sweet Surrender (2021) measures 56”x 44” and depicts a couple bowing their heads together, showing us that moments of compassion are still within our grasp, as long as we remember to turn to one another for solace. In the Connected (2021, 33”x32”), a kaleidoscopic diagram of Black profiles welded in a ring of light echoes this sentiment: We are all “Connected.” These works are hard to look at, yet impossible to look away from.

Karla Knight

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT By Annabel Keenan

Karla Knight is sending us a message. With maps, symbols and UFOs, there are mysteries in every piece. Four decades worth of paintings, tapestries and drawings are on view in Knight’s first institutional solo show, “Navigator,” at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT. Signs and glyphs dart from top to bottom and side to side. Spacecrafts weave in and out of orbs and all-seeing eyes. Some imagery appears to be based on recognizable symbols, but the artist purposefully presents her work without meaning or explanation. Pointing to the mysteries of life itself, Knight tempts the viewer to seek their own rhyme or reason.

Visually, the show is minimal in its color palette, with most works limited to a few, mainly solid colors; yet the overall effect is surprisingly impactful. “Navigator” spans Knight’s career beginning with early works on paper from the 1980s inspired by her interest in language, Ouija boards and UFOs. Knight’s lifelong fascination with all things science and occult stems in part from her father’s career as an author of books on astronomy, ghosts and the supernatural. These smaller, earlier pieces are almost academic in their investigation of symbols, as if a documentation or discovery, perhaps all working towards a larger, secret lexicon. The symbols in her earlier works evolve into full landscapes later on in Knight’s career. Wayfinder 1, 2, and 3 (2020) form a monumental triptych of indecipherable glyphs, spacecrafts, orbs and charts. The triptych is part of a new body of tapestries on reclaimed cotton from seed and grain bags from the 1940s and 50s that Knight found on eBay. The works titled Fleet Mind 1 and 2 (2020–21) add to the exhibition title’s suggestion of movement or searching, but they leave more questions than answers. What is the fleet doing? Is it navigating towards a final destination? Is it protecting the yellow orb? What are the shapes and grids of symbols that surround the fleet’s delineated borders? The orb at the center of the fleet constantly reappears in Knight’s work as both a central figure and a member of the background. Perhaps communicating some unknown message, the orbs also recall the classic, grainy photographs of UFOs that Knight would have seen throughout her father’s books. Another image possibly taken from her science studies is the periodic table that appears in Blue Navigator 2 (2021), an arrestingly rich blue tapestry with a white grid filled with small white symbols. There Karla Knight, Blue Navigator 2, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and is an irresistible Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York. temptation to try to identify the signs. Yet again, we are left with infinite questions. Do the forms in the center represent spacecrafts or a space station? Are they extraterrestrials? What message is communicated in the intricate symbols so neatly organized in the white grid? Is this a blueprint for a machine? Ultimately, Knight leaves no clues, allowing the viewer to parse meaning as they choose. Overall, the show is a celebration of some of life’s greatest mysteries, as well as an invitation to let your imagination take over.

The Digital Mob BY SKOT ARMSTRONG

B U N K E R

V I S I O N

The battlefield of public opinion: Forgiven Children, 2020

It’s a familiar story these days: somebody is killed in broad daylight in front of witnesses. After the lawyers (and judges) perform their machinations, the killer walks. A new round of comments and editorials appear about how there are two justice systems. The digital age has brought with it a paradigm shift in what these two systems are. In the old days it was mostly about having enough money to grease the right palms. Now it is also about winning in the court of public opinion. A relatively unknown person can harness mob fury with an internet connection, a social media account, and a good story. The killer may escape legal consequences only to discover that their life is ruined. Forgiven Children (2020) explores the aftermath of such a case. The film’s tone is set when four unruly adolescents destroy a roadside shrine. A little girl who seems to have some stake in the shrine is crying across the road, as an older relative tries to comfort her. The destruction is random and thorough. The boys make their way to the side of a lake, where they meet a “friend” who builds crossbows out of chopsticks. The alpha boy grabs the crossbow and aims it at the neck of the boy who built it. A stare-down ensues. The trigger on the crossbow is pulled, and its maker is shot in the neck. He does not die immediately, so questions arise as to why he was allowed to die. One of the boys confesses to the police early on. The high-powered lawyer that the parents have hired gets the boy to change his story, and the killer walks. All of this occurs in the first 20 minutes before the credits roll. For the next 100 minutes we watch the aftermath. The tone of the film resembles a Patricia Highsmith novel. There is no question of “whodunnit” or why they did it. The celebratory mood of the legal victors is short-lived as the trial-by-public begins. The methods employed by the film to convey the reaction of the digital world heighten the sense of unreality as lives unravel. This starts as the family celebration is interrupted by news reports of angry mobs. Real-life visuals are overlaid with comments typed onto the screen we are watching. As the mob tracks down the killer (egged on by an internet celebrity), the parents lose their jobs and are forced to move. Before long the strain breaks the parents’ marriage. The father departs with a note— left beneath his removed wedding ring—saying that he can’t take it anymore. The victim’s parents push back with a book about the killing’s effect on them. The killer eventually approaches the victim’s parents to apologize, only to discover that their house has been attacked by people taking his side. Both the killer’s house and the victim’s are covered with bloodstains, lurid fliers and hateful graffiti. In the end there are no winners in the public trial. If one is feeling enraged by similar events in real life, this is a good reminder that things are seldom as simple as they appear. Time wounds all heels.

Luna Anaïs Gallery presents

RADICAL DAWN curated by Alicia Piller May 2022

Silvi Naçi, Untitled (bathtub), 2022, mixed media

www.lunaanais.com @lunaanaisgallery

F E AT U R E

R E V I E W

UNNERVINGLY PRESCIENT Laurie Anderson at the Hirshhorn Museum BY SARAH SARGENT

Four Talks on view in “Laurie Anderson: The Weather,” 2021. Photo by Ron Blunt. Courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

“Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is the largest US exhibition of Anderson’s work to date. At 74, Anderson continues to be immensely creative as multimedia artist, performer, musician and writer—the show includes more than a dozen new works. A storyteller first and foremost, Anderson is an astute observer and interpreter, who gathers together threads of information from personal history, news reports, natural phenomena, human behavior and so on, weaving these together into simple stories, loaded with power. One of her most potent, A Story about a Story (2015) is a standalone tale printed on a wall panel; it describes how Anderson, as a child of 12, broke her back while trying to perform a flip off the high diving board at a pool. She missed the water, hitting the concrete instead and was confined for several months to a hospital. The story is about how we remember things and what we choose to forget, or forget because what we went through is too traumatic to deal with. In this story of the spunky kid trying to stick out from the crowd of seven siblings by doing daring things, you can see the nascent fearless impresario who’d grow up to dazzle audiences. It’s not just a story that she buried deep within her subconscious about the horrors of the hospital ward where Anderson was kept awake at night by the screams of dying children, it’s also, in effect, Anderson’s Rosebud. Another anecdote from Anderson’s childhood forms the basis of The Lake (2015/2021). This time, it’s paired with a grainy black-andwhite film of kids skating. The footage, projected in oval vignette form, feels antique and nostalgic. It’s blurry and indistinct like an ancient memory reeling through one’s mind. Accompanying text describes how as a young girl Anderson saved her younger twin brothers from the depths of a frozen lake. The near-tragedy is shocking. In Anderson’s telling she astringently conveys her own curiosity and mettle, her role in her family and her relationship with her mother. It’s no wonder that words, the building blocks of the stories Anderson tells, feature prominently in her work. She loves the sound of them, their meaning and even how they look: scrawled, printed, computer generated, shredded or broken down into individual letters. Technology is a major preoccupation. Anderson both embraces it, using all sorts of devices and experimental musical instruments in her performance work—voice filters, synthesizers, adapted violins, etc.—some of which she has invented or collaborated on. But Anderson is also wary of technology and its dehumanizing potential. Her book Scroll (2021) speaks to this. Composed of text generated by artificial intelligence using a combination of Anderson’s writings and The Bible, the end product has decipherable meaning, but is very strange and rather unsettling. Habeas Corpus (2015) is certainly an important piece (and an important piece to show in Washington DC) given its focus on the injustices being perpetrated by the United States government. The piece centers on Mohammed el Gharani, who at age 14 became the youngest prisoner held without charge at Guantanamo. The original version, at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, was live and featured a two-way camera. Not only did this allow el Gharani to see the visitors and their response to him, but visitors and subject shared this intense, human, real-time event. That electrifying element is absent in this version and I didn’t like the way the oversized blocky statue distorted the film of el Gharani so he appeared deformed. It was distracting and undercut the solemnity of the work. You didn’t notice this distortion in Anderson’s similar small-scale film-sculpture hybrids and they are far more successful. The figures in these actually look like three-dimensional people in miniature. From the Air (2009) which features Anderson and her dog, Lolabelle, sitting in side-by-side armchairs is one such example. The Anderson figure describes the walk they took in California when Lolabelle first encountered large birds of prey and how the dog’s reaction echoed in her memory. Another is the mesmerizing Citizens (2021) with its bright row of individuals who stare confrontationally at the viewer

while rhythmically striking a pinging knife against a whetstone. Four Talks (2021) features an enormous site-specific painting of graffiti-like scrawls of text and images (all done single-handedly by Anderson in the weeks leading up to the opening) that covers the floor and four walls of a large room. The written musings of facts and sayings and the drawings have an edgy urgency; they seem to blare at you from around the room. A soundtrack plays music, nature and animal sounds and Anderson’s voice. Four sculptures are positioned around the room. These include two over-sized birds, a raven, The Witness Protection Program (2020), and an extremely talkative parrot, My Day Beats Your Year (2010/2021). There’s also a wrecked gilt canoe, To Carry Heart’s Tide (2020), over which Anderson ponders, “How can you fix something that’s really broken?” On one wall, What Time Can Do (2021), a meditation on substitution and desire, features a shelf arrayed with fragile objects. Every now and then the recorded clackety-clack of a train going by shakes the objects on the shelf. The piece was inspired by a friend of Anderson’s who lived near the train. She had a collection of porcelain tchotchkes on a shelf and when the train went by, the shelf shook. Eventually, one by one, the precious objects

have become animated and are streaming outwards into the hallway towards you. Some of the new works, though certainly stylish, don’t seem to have a lot of there, there. Salute (2021) is arresting with its scarlet flags on robotic arms that snap and scrape the floor, but even with the ominous background music and lyrics to O Superman (1981) and its reference to “electronic arms” enlarged on one wall, its seeming swipe at nationalist authoritarianism feels hollow. Likewise, Wind Book (1974/2021) with its fluttering pages manipulated by hidden fans, is pretty cool, but to what end? Neither piece has a story attached to it and perhaps this is why they seem less compelling. However, there are others that also don’t, Citizens (2021) and Sidewalk (2012), for example. But these works have such presence they don’t need a story to complete them. To be fair, Sidewalk does have a tangential relationship to A Story about a Story. The work features a long rectangular container, resembling a section of sidewalk, that’s filled with shredded pages of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. A series of videos is projected in opposite directions on each of the rectangles that make up the “sidewalk.” The paper bits create a topographical expanse of mountains and valleys which distort the film. Much of it is indecipherable, but every now and then one can see in the flickering clips nurses, swimmers at a pool, an old farm, images that relate to Anderson’s personal history. Included in the exhibition are a series of Anderson’s paintings. These are large, lushly painted works. Against a background of thinly applied color, Anderson places gestural swirling lines that add energy and describe an overscale item: an old work boot, an alligator, a face, a tree. Though perfectly respectable in terms of technique, the paintings are kind of meh when compared to the pizzazz and inventiveness of her multimedia work. At times “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” seems like a retrospective. The show includes very early performance pieces, posters from her live shows, and a large selection of the musical instruments she either made herself, collaborated on, or commissioned. These are placed near the end of the exhibition, possibly to subvert the sense of linear progression, but their presence still suggests an overview of her career. Anderson has made it clear in several interviews that she didn’t want a retrospective and, looking around at “The Weather,” it’s clear she’s not done yet. At other times, the show seems like a random collection of works. I felt I was taking a stream of consciousness walk through Anderson’s mind as she played around with ideas, but I can imagine few things more interesting and engaging. While she seems unnervingly prescient at times, I believe Anderson’s just a really good observer, who picks up on things long before the rest of us and then puts her own particular spin on them. Her observations about the world enthrall us because it’s a world we inhabit and recognize. Anderson is our guide and her person is inextricably tied to the work. To experience it is to experience her—her intelligence, her humanity, her wonder, her goodwill, her can-do attitude, her humor. A Midwestern soul sister to Harper Lee’s Scout, Anderson resembles an ageless sprite who cajoles us into consciousness with work that provokes, informs and entertains. With the Hirshhorn show, Anderson demonstrates that much like the weather, her works and the information they are based on, are arbitrary and unpredictable, and like that overarching atmospheric phenomenon, they’re also capable of buffeting us with terrific force.

The friend would replace the broken ones with less and less valuable pieces until there was nothing on the shelf but junk. were dislodged and fell to the ground. The friend would replace the broken ones with less and less valuable pieces until there was nothing on the shelf but junk. The sculptures add a three-dimensional element to the space, making the whole more visually interesting. They also suggest possible relationships amongst them and with the words and images of their backdrop. However, I was so astonished by the painting, it monopolized all my attention. I made a point of retracing my steps back to the hallway leading into the room where Chalkroom (2017) (a collaboration with Hsin-Chien Huang) is projected on the walls. Originally a virtual reality piece, it was reformatted because of COVID-19 restrictions. Though not as immersive as wearing VR goggles, the effect aptly simulates 3D space and is, at points, thrillingly disorienting and vertiginous. You don’t notice it during your first walk-through, but placed where it is, it’s the perfect companion to Four Talks which is visible through the doorway. Chalkroom uses the same black-and-white scrawled words and images with some notable additions: the conga line of stick figures, a tree boasting letters instead of leaves that fall to the ground as the motion of the film shifts downwards. The footage is so densely packed, it’s hard to absorb all the information, the flood of images and words, perhaps a stand-in for the assault of information we encounter in our everyday lives. It’s an odd funhouse space with long corridors, portals and opposing planes of chalkboard that fragment and fall apart. Letters float towards you like driving snow or stars streaming past a rocket ship. Your position as viewer has shifted and now you are not just observing, you are moving through it. And as you stand there looking into the other room, you have the sensation that the scrawled writing and pictures that cover the walls and floor of the Four Talks room

ROBERT ZENT CHEW

RHONDA CR BURTON

CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPES

SUNSETS AS ABSTRACTION PHOTOGRAPH, PENCIL AND COLLAGE

The Other Art Fair April 1-3 Oil on Canvas

EXHIBITION APRIL 13 - MAY 7, 2022, TAG GALLERY, 5458 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles 90036 WWW.ROBERTZENTGALLERY.COM

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Superbowl Sunday at the Geffen Contemporary; “Das Zimmer” (The Room) in Pipilotti Rist Exhibition, Los Angeles, 2022

Where Artists Go To Art.

TAG Gallery 5458 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036 323.297.3061 • taggallery.net • @taggallery

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BUT IS IT EXPLOITIVE?

Kiefer Lights a Big Cigar

—KLIPSCHUTZ

The Poet’s Garden Without these words, without these needs, how much simpler life would be: free from invidious and irrelevant comparisons, resentful longings, and obscurely realized self-actualizations: a life less whole, a lifeless hole... but a destiny, at last, within my control - striving only towards resignation, a worthy goal. —JOHN TOTTENHAM

Dear Babs, I recently saw a gallery show where an artist staged photographs of a person experiencing extreme poverty, collaborating with them to execute the pictures. The photos were moving, but they left me feeling kinda gross. Am I guilty of unethical voyeurism? Does the artist/subject collaboration mean the work isn’t exploitive? Is it okay or even noble for artists to make work about inequalities/oppression/injustices they themselves are not experiencing? —Confused in Artland Dear Confused, First off, I don’t think you’re guilty of “unethical voyeurism.” It’s safe to assume you had no idea the gallery was exhibiting the photos, so you weren’t ethically bound to avoid them to align with your moral convictions. You didn’t say who the artist in question is, but to make my job easier let’s assume you’re talking about Jeff Bierk, who collaborates with his poor and unhoused friends to make popular and collectable photographs. I’m not going to make a broad statement that this sort of photography is inherently exploitive, but it certainly demands we ask important questions. When it comes to collaborations between artist and subject, you have to ask who benefits most from the relationship. In the case of Bierk, we need to ask: Is the work truly collaborative, representing the intentions of both parties? The artist says it is, but what do his subjects/friends think? Do Bierk and his subjects/ collaborators equally benefit financially, professionally, socially from the work? According to interviews, he does split profits from sales equally with his subjects, but he certainly accumulates more social capital and professional creditability from the work. Perhaps the most important question is what, if anything, does his work say about poverty today? Is it possible for artists to make work about injustices they are not experiencing? Take Martha Rosler’s 1974–75 work, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, that juxtaposes descriptions of inebriated states with photographs of storefronts in The Bowery, an area with a long and notorious history of homelessness and criminality. But Rosler’s photos have no people in them, and the texts don’t really describe the images; the connections between the two are left up to the viewer, leaving one to question the economic, political and social forces that form these associations. It’s about urban inequality that doesn’t rely on emotional reactions to pictures of a people experiencing poverty. Is it noble? Maybe. Is it a great work of art? Absolutely.

Image by Jeff Bierk

& waves the heavy machinery into place He rearranges the rubble speaking whichever language suits the occasion He & Tony saunter through a tunnel in the South of France “It’s my gesture” is what he says about his art His use of lead & straw reminds me of a Jack Gilbert poem Kiefer & Werner Herzog must never meet If they have, they must never admit it (When Gerhard Richter met Stockhausen neither one was left unscathed) Kiefer carries the weight of the world on his shoulders & shakes it off with a flick of his cigar

ROBERT ZENT CHEW

RHONDA CR BURTON

CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPES

SUNSETS AS ABSTRACTION PHOTOGRAPH, PENCIL AND COLLAGE

Sepulveda Pass Oil on Canvas

The Other Art Fair, April 1-3 EXHIBITION APRIL 13-MAY 7, 2022, TAG GALLERY, 5458 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles 90036 WWW.ROBERTZENTGALLERY.COM

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The Digital Issue

Articles inside

SIGHTS UNSCENE: The Geffen - by lara jo regan

BUNKER VISION: Forgiven Children - by skot armstrong

Laurie Anderson: The Hirshhorn - by sarah sargent

ART BRIEF: Jeff Koons - by stephen j. goldberg, esq

NFTs and Bored Apes - by seth hawkins

It’s All About Meme - by anthony ausgang

Nancy Baker Cahill: Outta This World - by tucker neel

Casey Kauffmann: Hot Sh*t Girl - by lauren guilford

The Materiality of The Digital - by eli ståhl

Petra Cortright: Digital Pioneer - by jody zellen

DECODER: Responsible Art - by zak smith