Impermanence

Impermanence Barbara T. Smith John Coplans Hannah Wilke

Cirrus 2017

Impermanence Barbara T. Smith John Coplans Hannah Wilke

July 8th August 19th, 2017 Cirrus Gallery 2011 S. Santa Fe Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90021

Cirrus 2017

Impermanence Introduction Cirrus Gallery is pleased to announce Impermanence - a group show featuring works by the artists Barbara T. Smith, John Coplans, and Hannah Wilke. The exhibition probes the themes of change and transformation, using the body as a common site for discussing our human state of flux.

The exhibition debuts a new print edition by Barbara T. Smith, Signifiers.

Throughout her career from the early 1960’s until today, Smith has explored feminine identity and the use of the body as a language to communicate ideas beyond ourselves as well as human nature, our physicality and mortality. With Signifiers, Smith has continued her tradition of using her body and new technology in order to explore the passage of time. Smith’s work is highly personal and selfaware. She invites the viewer to see images of her hands as the subject, as well as the process by which the work is made. With Signifier 1 we can see an image of Smith from her 1960’s Xerox portraits, veiled behind her hands from the present day. The powerful presentation of her aged hands in these works builds upon her larger investigation into the enduring strength and fragile nature of identity and humanity.

Like Smith, John Coplans’ photographs show the passage of time as it manifests in the body as it ages. The four works included in this exhibition keep with Coplans’ career-long treatment of the body as both subject and object. Selected from a series that was created over a 20-year span, these self-portraits present parts of his body in stark, black-and-white detail. These photographs are closely cropped, mapping his joints and skin with a thoroughness and attention to detail more akin to how one would document a monument or art object rather than one’s own body. The result is a frank scrutiny of the temporariness of the body as it relates to artistic traditions of display.

For Impermanence, Hannah Wilke widens the consideration of our temporary state. Hannah Wilke is best known for her works exploring feminism and sexuality, frequently using her body as her template throughout the 1970’s, and in the 1990’s, she chronicled her body’s changes while undergoing cancer treatment in life-size, full color photographs. Courtesy of the Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles, selected photographs from Wilke’s Intra Venus Series, her final project before her untimely death from lymphoma in 1993, bravely confront the temporality of youth and health while challenging feminine ideals of representation with humor and courage. In addition to the photographs on display, two artist catalogues will be available--the original exhibition catalogue

Intra Venus, and A Breathed Yes, a posthumous compilation of art by Wilke and poetry by her sister, Marsie Scharlatt, which Wilke proposed in the 1970’s.

Barbara T. Smith lives and works in Los Angeles and Cirrus is delighted to once again show her work. Our first exhibition together was in 1971 when she first installed her enormous fiberglass environment Field Piece at Cirrus in Hollywood.

Throughout her career, her work conveyed powerful representations of her fears and anguish over the conflicting pulls of being a wife, mother, and artist.

These highly personal and intimate works are indicative not only Smith’s use of

the body as an artistic medium, but also the emergence of both feminism and performance art in Southern California. Smith’s recent solo exhibitions include The Smell of Almonds: Resin Works, 1968 -1982 at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York and Words, Sentences & Signs at The Box Gallery in Los Angeles. Her work has been included in the following exhibitions: Out of Action: Between the Performance and Object, 1949-1979, Los Angeles, 1955-1985: The Birth of an Art Capitol, WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, which traveled extensively including shows at PS1, New York and Pompidou, Paris, Installations Inside/Out: 20th Anniversary Exhibition, The Armory Center for the Arts Pasadena, CA, and

the Pacific Standard Time exhibitions in Southern California in 2011 including The State of Mind, Orange County Museum of Art, and Under the Big Black Sun at MOCA/LA. Her work has been reviewed in publications including the Los Angeles and New York Times; Frieze; Art in America; Artforum; Der Lowe; Die Lowen; and Avalanche; among others. Her work sits in the collections of the Hammer (Field Piece), LACMA, MOCA, and The Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago.

John Coplans was born in London in 1920 and was educated in England and South Africa. In addition to his practice as a visual artist, his career has encompassed teaching (University of California, Berkeley), writing (as a founding editor of Art Forum), curating and advocacy for contemporary art. As Senior Curator for the Pasadena Art Museum (1967- 1970) he curated Serial Imagery, a seminal exhibition featuring works by Warhol, Kelly, Duchamp, among others. He received two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowships and four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. authoring numerous books and articles on art criticism, and curating and advocacy for contemporary art. His art museum positions included senior curator of the Pasadena Art Museum from 1967-1970 and director of the Akron Art Museum from 1978-1980.

Hannah Wilke (1940-1993), a pioneering feminist conceptual artist, worked in sculpture, drawing, assemblage, photography, performance and installation.

Innovative and controversial throughout her life, Wilke is considered the first feminist artist to use vaginal imagery in her work, and her place in 20th century art continues to be established since her death. Wilke received many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and NEA Grants, and she taught art at the School of Visual Arts, New York, gave workshops as a visiting artist, participated in panels and conferences about women’s art, and lectured extensively. Intra Venus, the group of monumental photographs documenting her final illness and treatment, was exhibited posthumously at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in 1994 and traveled to Yerba Buena Arts Center, San Francisco; Santa Monica Museum; Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Greensboro, NC; Woodruff Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Nikolai Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen; and the Tokyo Museum of Photography. Intra Venus received First Place Award in 1994 and 1996 for best show in an art gallery from the International Association of Art Critics (U.S. Section). Since her death, Wilke’s work has been exhibited at Solway Jones Gallery, Los Angeles, and Alison Jacques Gallery, London, and in major museum exhibitions including WACK! at MOCA and elles at The Centre Pompidou.

Wilke’s work has been included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, MOCA, LACMA, the Whitney, the Hammer, Tate Modern, The Centre Pompidou, Moderna Museet, and many other national and international collections.

Impermanence Essay by Douglas Roberts After initial notoriety as an artist exploring the darker recesses of human emotion and the psyche of the mind, Edvard Munch (Norwegian, 1863-1944) suffered a nervous breakdown in 1908. For two decades prior, he painted works of psychological themes tied to evocative notions of universal suffering. Based on the late 19th Century tenets of Symbolism, Munch was influenced by the generation of writers and poets who articulated themselves through novels and manifestos describing an aesthetic largely against Naturalism. Symbolism was in favor of spirituality, mysticism and imagination, even dreams. Although Munch embraced Naturalism in those early years, his own declaration to explore personal attempts to make art that would explain life and its meaning to himself, fell to dismissive negative criticism from both art academia and his very pious father, who regarded his son’s work as a travesty of art. Munch nonetheless persisted away from Naturalism with his malevolent, anti-establishment spell akin to the bohemian ideas regarding the passion to destroy is also a passion to create. Munch concluded after many early experiments in painting that Impressionism too, did not allow for sufficient expression, and thought the idiom superficial. He felt the need to explore his own emotional and psychological state.

Subsequently after the breakdown caused by the clash of these pursuits, Munch underwent the equivalent of electroshock therapy generating a marked change in works that altered the three and a half decades that followed. A calmer spirit emerged. He stopped his heavy drinking and his work became more colorful which led to a wider, more receptive audience. However, the darker themes exploring the human condition persisted, adding to the self-searching cycle of his life describing emotional and physical states. One of his final paintings, a self-portrait titled Self Portriait, Between the Clock and the Bed (1943), remains a metaphor to a mortal threshold for the time we have in our conscious world before we pass to the next from our death bed. Munch places himself between these two symbols in a sunfilled room, overflowing with a life of artworks hanging behind him, and next to the bed where he will eventually die.

Munch’s own glance at mortality presents us with the impermanence of where all things will eventually go. More than half a century later, these three artists; John Coplans (British-American, 1920-2003), Barbara T. Smith (American, b. 1931) and Hannah Wilke (American, 1940-1993), explore their own mortality through works that illustrate the time-aged body right up to the final day of our mortal selves.

Edvard Munch Self-Portrait, Between the Clock and the Bed 1943

(above) Bedspread of Edvard Munch Munch Museum Oslo, Norway

One notion of impermanence comes to us through the ideas represented by Anicca, a Buddhist spirituality of a conditioned existence that is transient, without exception — nothing lasts, everything decays. Human life embodies this evolution through the aging process and the cycle of repeated birth and death. Likewise, the Buddhist doctrine of Anatta illuminates impermanence though the idea that no physical or mental object is permanent, and desires for attachment to people or things causes its own kind of suffering.

Hannah Wilke’s suffering is documented in her final exploration of her own decay through the images captured as self-portraits from the decline resulting from lymphoma and represented in this exhibition. Her life’s work began with the use of her own voluptuousness seen as living sculpture. Her early works from the 1960’s were among the first to arise out of a rebellious feminism that explicitly depicted vaginal metaphors through sculpture in various media including clay, porcelain, chewing gum, laundry lint, kneaded artist easers and latex. And, like her counterpart in the exhibition, Barbara T. Smith, created performance art pieces with feminist narratives. In the mid-1970’s she began to incorporate photography as part of her oeuvre where she merged her vulval sculptures made from chewing gum by sticking them to her naked body and photographing herself in satirized classic “pin-up” poses juxtaposing a narcissistic glamour with a kind of whole-body scarification. She would later refer to these works as “performalist self-portraits,” and this body of work continued right up to the final series IntraVenus (1992-93), a 2-year photographic record published after her death.

Though Barbara T. Smith may only suffer from the advance of the clock of time on her aging body, her most recent works shown here in this exhibition explain that existence is indeed transient. With her marriage falling apart, she too found her voice in the 1960’s creating performance art pieces that were at the forefront of feminism. Her thematic exercises surrounded her own self-image using her body illustrating female desires, sexuality, spirituality, even love and death. She embraced her artist-self by publishing photo-copied artist books using collaged images of herself and children showing portions of her body and articles of clothing made on a Xerox machine she kept in the house. In the 1970’s, performances continued on themes inspired by religion, the ritual of eating and preparing food, and world travel. For this exhibition, a new body of work comes full circle, once again using the Xerox machine to link the time of a younger self to its impermanence of a well-lived, sculpture-infused broken and wrinkled hand through time. A ghostlike portrait peers from within capturing a Munch-filled reverie.

John Coplans spent the first half of his life struggling with artistic pursuits in his native England. After WWII, he found art as an expression of his exploration for greater meaning resulting from the tumult of war. Bound in the optimism he encountered with abstract expressionism and later the early throws of the Pop Art movement, he ultimately saw his own voice as derivative, and lost confidence in the challenges. However, in 1960 his passion for American art forced a life-changing move to the United States where he was able to find a new voice in writing about art ideas articulated through his own style of commentary and manifesto. The writings

blossomed, first in teaching and later in the founding of the magazine, ARTFORUM. While his artist career fell by the wayside, his writing pursuits brought curatorial, exhibition and museum projects that would lead to his becoming a museum director.

Ultimately, this platform allowed him to fulfill his life long attachment to art in an evermore high-profile way. But his love for the activity of art-making did indeed came back to him late in life. Not unlike the late works of Edvard Munch, whose life time of the emotional and physical state of mind mirrored Coplans’ writing and editorializing, the pursuit of a higher form of connectivity through image making

resulted in a series of photographs once again depicting the impermanence of all of us. Much like his fellow female counterparts in this exhibition, Coplans found that his body provided the reference necessary to tell the story of time advancing before the bed. Never apologizing for depicting his 70 year old torso, “damn classical art,� he would say, he found a way to make something that generated curiosity while finally making art that was uniquely his.

Impermanence Images

Signifier 1 2016 Archival pigment print 41 5/8� x 30 1/2�

Edition of 35 705C-BS16

Signifier 2 2016 Archival pigment print 41 5/8” x 30 1/2” Edition of 35 704C-BS16

Signifier 3 2016 Archival pigment print 41 5/8” x 30 1/2” Edition of 35 706C-BS16

Signifier 4 2016 Archival pigment print 41 5/8” x 30 1/2” Edition of 35 707C-BS16

(above)

(opposite)

John Coplans Hands Spread on Knees 1985 Gelatin Silver Print Image Size: 34” x 39 1/2” Mount Size: 36” x 41 1/2” Frame Size: 38” x 43” Edition of 12, 11/12 Signed by Coplans en verso Printed and framed by Coplans 001-85-JC

John Coplans Back and Hands 1984 Gelatin Silver Print Image Size: 21 3/4” x 16 1/2” Paper Size: 24” x 20” Frame Size: 30” x 24” Edition of 12, 9/12 Signed by Coplans en verso Printed and framed by Coplans 002-84-JC

John Coplans Hands with Buttocks 1987 Gelatin Silver Print Image Size:17” x 21” Paper Size: 20” x 24” Frame Size: 25 1/2” x 29 1/2” Edition of 12, 11/12 Signed by Coplans en verso Printed and framed by Coplans 003-87-JC

John Coplans Interlocking Fingers, No. 7 1999 Original 4 x 5 Type 55 Polaroid Gelatin Silver Print Artist’s Proof Image Size: 3 1/2” x 4 1/2” Paper Size: 4 1/2” x 5 1/2” Frame Size: 20” x 16” Signed by Coplans en verso Framed by Coplans 004-99-JC

Hannah Wilke Intra Venus Series No. 7 February 20, 1992/August 18, 1992 Diptych, chromogenic supergloss prints with overlaminate 41 1/2� x 71 1/2� each Edition of 3, 1/3 001-92-HW

Hannah Wilke Intra Venus Series No. 6 February 19, 1992 Chromogenic supergloss prints with overlaminate 41 1/2� x 71 1/2�

Edition of 3, 2/3 002-92-HW

Hannah Wilke Knotted Up 1992 Unique set of 4 photographs 14” x 49 3/4” 003-92-HW

Impermanence Pricelist

Barbara T. Smith Signifier 1 2016 Archival pigment print 41 5/8” x 30 1/2” Edition of 35 705C-BS16 $2,500 Barbara T. Smith Signifier 2 2016 Archival pigment print 41 5/8” x 30 1/2” Edition of 35 704C-BS16 $2,500 Barbara T. Smith Signifier 3 2016 Archival pigment print 41 5/8” x 30 1/2” Edition of 35 706C-BS16 $2,500 Barbara T. Smith Signifier 4 2016 Archival pigment print 41 5/8” x 30 1/2” Edition of 35 707C-BS16 $2,500

John Coplans Hands Spread on Knees 1985 Gelatin Silver Print Image Size: 34” x 39 1/2” Mount Size: 36” x 41 1/2” Frame Size: 38” x 43” Edition of 12, 11/12 Signed by Coplans en verso Printed and framed by Coplans 001-85-JC $15,000

John Coplans Back and Hands 1984 Gelatin Silver Print Image Size: 21 3/4” x 16 1/2” Paper Size: 24” x 20” Frame Size: 30” x 24” Edition of 12, 9/12 Signed by Coplans en verso Printed and framed by Coplans 002-84-JC $12,000

John Coplans Hands with Buttocks 1987 Gelatin Silver Print Image Size:17” x 21” Paper Size: 20” x 24” Frame Size: 25 1/2” x 29 1/2” Edition of 12, 11/12 Signed by Coplans en verso Printed and framed by Coplans 003-87-JC $12,000

John Coplans Interlocking Fingers, No. 7 1999 Original 4 x 5 Type 55 Polaroid Gelatin Silver Print Artist’s Proof Image Size: 3 1/2” x 4 1/2” Paper Size: 4 1/2” x 5 1/2” Frame Size: 20” x 16” Signed by Coplans en verso Framed by Coplans 004-99-JC $6,500

Hannah Wilke Intra Venus Series No. 7 February 20, 1992/August 18, 1992 Diptych, chromogenic supergloss prints with overlaminate 41 1/2” x 71 1/2” each Edition of 3, 1/3 001-92-HW

Hannah Wilke Intra Venus Series No. 6 February 19, 1992 Chromogenic supergloss prints with overlaminate 41 1/2” x 71 1/2” Edition of 3, 2/3 002-92-HW

Hannah Wilke Knotted Up 1992 Unique set of 4 photographs 14” x 49 3/4” 003-92-HW

Contact: Jean R. Milant Gallery Hours Tues-Sat, 10am-5pm www. cirrusgallery.com • cirrus@cirrusgallery.com CONTEMPORARY PAINTING AND SCULPTURE • PUBLISHERS OF FINE ART GRAPHICS 2011 South Santa Fe Avenue, Los Angeles, California 90021 • T 213.680.3473

John Coplans images courtesy of Carl Solway Gallery Hannah Wilke images courtesy of Marsie Scharlatt and the Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles Š Donald Goddard Edvard Munch images courtesy of Munch Museum, Oslo Installation images courtesy of Cirrus Gallery Cover image: Barbara T. Smith, Signifier 2, 2016 Catalog text by Saskia Bailey Impermanence essay by Douglas Roberts Layout and design by Nico Hernandez For more information visit www.cirrusgallery.com Cirrus Editions Ltd Š 2017

Cirrus 2017

ISBN 978-1-387-11749-9

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9 781387 117499

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