Greg Wilken: Curated by Sharon Lockhart

Greg Wilken

Greg Wilken Curated by Sharon Lockhart January 26 - March 10, 2012

CUE Art Foundation is a non-profit arts organization dedicated to promoting culture by supporting the creativity of under-recognized visual artists by offering comprehensive arts education programming for artists and students, and interdisciplinary arts events for public audiences.

Board of Directors

Staff

curatorial Advisory Council

Gregory Amenoff

Executive Director Jeremy Adams

Gregory Amenoff, William Corbett,

Development Director Marni Corbett

Lari Pittman, Thomas Roma, Marjorie Welish,

Theodore S. Berger Sanford Biggers Patricia Caesar Thomas G. Devine Thomas K.Y. Hsu Vivian Kuan Corina Larkin Jan Rothschild Brian D. Starer

Programs Director Beatrice Wolert-Weese

Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jonathan Lethem, Andrea Zittel CUE FELLOWS

Programs Coordinator Ryan Thomas

Gregory Amenoff, Polly Apfelbaum,

Development Assistant Alexandra Rose

William Corbett, Michelle Grabner,

Gallery Assistant Jessica Gildea

Corina Larkin, Jonathan Lethem,

Theodore S. Berger, Chair, Ian Cooper, Eleanor Heartney, Deborah Kass, Rossana Martinez, Juan Sรกnchez, Irving Sandler, Senior Fellow, Carolyn Somers, Lilly Wei

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We are very honored to show the work of Greg Wilken, generously curated

by Sharon Lockhart. Through rigorous examination and documentation of moments in history, Wilken's multi-media practice illuminates the often murky waters of historical didacticism. As we continue to strive to meet our commitment to both emerging artists and the public, we are proud to be the first venue in New York City to exhibit Wilken's work. At CUE, artists like Greg Wilken and emerging writers like Tucker Neel, who wrote the young art critic essay found at the back of this catalogue, are given a platform to share their unique and worthy talents with the public, fostering an environment for mutual enrichment and dialogue.

—CUE Art Foundation Staff

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Greg Wilken The Road of a Thousand Wonders I first came across “The Road of a Thousand Wonders” researching something else entirely. While looking through newspaper clippings in a local archive, a postcard fell out. The image was of a striking Neo-Baroque building with a tall central clock tower, pointed terracotta arches, abundant windows, and circular turrets. It seemed to call out to you from the 19th century. The dark rusticated blocks of red sandstone were imposing; it looked built to last. It didn’t. The first large courthouse in Los Angeles, it was erected in 1888 and razed in 1936. The upper right hand corner of the image read “On the Road of a Thousand Wonders”.

During the early 20th century, “The Road of a Thousand Wonders” was the promotional name given to the Southern Pacific railroad line running from Los Angeles, California to Portland, Oregon. This particular line, like many others still in use today, was surveyed and first laid out in the 19th century, before the advent of the automobile. These early surveyors relied heavily on old walking trails, following the traces of previous travelers. They found their way through the landscape by following a path of least resistance; drawing a line that utilized natural grades that were not too steep, curves mild enough for the trains of the time, and maximizing level ground. The routes of that time were laid upon, rather than through, the landscape.

Automobile roads would later follow the first rail lines. Over time, new roads realigned the old routes. The highways grew wider and straighter, bypassing small communities. We know the old roads today as “business loops” and “scenic byways”. “The Road of a Thousand Wonders” follows roughly the original Camino Real upon which Spanish missionaries built a system of religious outposts up the Southern California coast. Portions of highway 101 would later be built to follow this course. Farther north, Interstate 5 pursues the old line. These roads are literal palimpsests, offering traces of man’s movement through the land.

The history of these early railroad lines contributed to the public’s perception of the West. Early 20th century boosterism enticed western migration, which increased railroad ticket sales. The Southern Pacific Railroad Company invested heavily in printing postcards that depicted views along their routes.

The Road of a Thousand Wonders series is a visual record of a particular kind of looking at a particular time. The traditional landscapes and city views traffic in, while simultaneously helping to establish, the clichés of western imagery. What might traveling that road look like today? Where might it take us?

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Biography Greg Wilken is a Los Angeles based artist. He received a BFA with a concentration in photography from Otis College of Art & Design and an MFA from the University of Southern California.

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Sharon Lockhart At this point, it is a clichÊ to say that we live in an era of information overload. With all the emails, web-surfing and media each person faces in a day, it is a fact of life. Yet in all that information, there is much that is overlooked. We are more likely to look forward for new forms and content than carefully back at the information stream itself. Greg Wilken’s investigations of lost or overlooked archival material involve detailed research and conceptual analysis. He looks for those places in which the information society becomes explicit: in which histories define the landscape, in which the bureaucracy attempts to cover up it’s tracks, in which media shape the nature of spectacle. Almost all his projects involve elegant self-published books in addition to photographs and/or films. His work is literary in the sense that it is fascinated with the language of images and archives, and it carefully mines, both looking for ways to pick apart that language and see how it relates to economic, political, and social histories.

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Biography Sharon Lockhart is a Los Angeles based artist working in photography and film. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions worldwide, including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Kunsthalle Zürich, Kunstverein Hamburg, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Musem in St. Louis, and the Vienna Secession. In the fall of 2011, her installation Lunch Break was on view at MUMOK in Vienna and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Espai d’art Contemporani in Castelló, Spain in the winter of 2012. Her latest exhibition, Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol, opened at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem in December 2011, followed by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in May 2012.

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Greg Wilken

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Greg Wilken’s Terra Incognita Tucker Neel

Greg Wilken arrives at his final images through a process akin to a fact-finding mission. On these expeditions the artist is motivated by the discovery of a significant historical event or condition which results in research, field explorations, documentation gathering, and the presentation of evidence, usually in the form of framed photographs, films, and custom-made artist books. Taken at face value, it’s a fairly simple set of procedures, a way of getting from A to Z, but the resulting works are anything but easy, demanding a cognitive shift from viewers.

Wilken’s On the Natural History of Juan Fernandez (2006), for example, was inspired by the story of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who survived for four years (1703-09) marooned on Juan Fernandez Island just off the coast of Chile. The tiny island has since been renamed Robinson Crusoe Island after the famous Defoe novel inspired by Selkirk’s tale. After conducting research, visiting the island, and taking photographs, Wilken printed two large-format photographs: one of non-native plant species being removed from the land and one of native plants being grown in a greenhouse. He also created a film of plants arranged in a garden, and multiple photos of individual books floating in black expanses of space. In contrast to the implied didacticism of its title, this body of work obliquely reframes a fractured natural and literary history of Juan Fernandez Island. Using disparate yet connected images, it treats the land as a mythic non-site, a place in between physical and imagined reality. In this project, as in the works on view at CUE Art Foundation, the artist gives his audience the narrowest bit of visual information, with little attendant text. The underlying message of such a destabilized historical narrative is that the past is not fixed and knowable, but rather the fleeting coalescence of reminiscences, everyday images, and second-hand stories we tell each other.

Wilken often engages in library research, which no doubt inspires projects directly involving printed matter.

For example, Literary Encounters (2010) is a series of silver gelatin prints of hairs found in the pages of books. This poetic collection of traces of the human body in contrast to the stark sterility of printed text points to the fragility 25

Greg Wilken’s Terra Incognita

of human existence and the endurance of published ideas. In another series, one of the artist’s few hand-drawn projects, Wilken meticulously renders the frontispieces of books where past owners left their marks via notes, dedications or ex-libris, again contrasting the sign of living human presence with the mechanically printed word.

Such bibliographic inspiration translates most obviously into the artist’s own hand-made books—art objects that reflect his fascination with happenstance, discovery and fractured comprehension. Wilken often isolates images of a particular kind and contrasts them with other, seemingly unrelated pictures. This technique is evident in Castaic (2010) which investigates the 1928 St. Francis Dam break outside of Los Angeles, the second most deadly disaster in California’s recorded history. Castaic, the book, presents images from the rather mundane, pasture-like dam site as it exists today. These images of overgrown golden grass are juxtaposed with cold documentation of broken celluloid, remnants from a 16mm film. The implication of violence, the latent trauma that permeates sites of now forgotten catastrophes, is present in this book—a realization arrived at through visual associations rather than edifying narrative.

For the new body of work on view at CUE, Wilken was inspired by the Southern Pacific Railroad company’s early 20th century photographic survey, “The Road of a Thousand Wonders.” This promotional title was used by the railroad to describe their trains’ coastal journeys from Los Angeles to Portland. To promote this travel line, the railroad commissioned photographic surveys to capture the vistas and attractions along the route, producing numerous postcards, posters, and prints, now collected in a photographic archive. This pictorial record prompted Wilken to travel the same route, sometimes by train, sometimes by car, creating his own image archive while traversing the roads originally charted by the railroad. For the artist, this road is both a physical journey and a metaphor for how we write and rewrite historical narratives in repeated but never fully successful attempts to solidify a true understanding of the past. The original early 20th century archival project acts as historical anchor, providing the artist with a road to travel, a space to contemplate, and an impetus to create images along the way.

Walter Benjamin, inspired by Baudelaire, characterized the urban flâneur’s meanderings throughout Paris as a paradigm of perambulation for the modern man, the perfect way to experience and critique bourgeois capitalism. Nearly forty years later, the Situationists would pick up this practice, championing the dérive as key to exploring one’s surroundings. Given that consumer-friendly structures in the American West were once, and still are, built around automotive transportation, perhaps we can take Wilken’s journey along the coast as a kind of American post-industrial dérive, albeit across greater distances, and in solitude—a perfect on-the-road reflection of an alienated country. In Wilken’s work we can see the abandoned main streets of drive-by towns, rusting industrial architecture along highways, mall parking lots, and cookie-cutter weigh-stations, as our own contemporary arcades, artifacts from our own “primordial landscape of consumption.”1 Inspired by Benjamin’s and the Situationists’ use of the urban dérive as a model for production, Wilken takes to the road, allowing himself 26

to wander consciously, paying close attention to the particulars of the topography that engulfs and frames him, taking note of the tangential and yet relevant ideas that spaces, places, and people inspire.

During a recent studio visit with the artist, I found myself pouring over dozens of 4x5 transparencies, freshly developed from Wilken’s most recent journey up the coast. These are a fraction of the total gleaned from his travels. The images depict lonely gas stations, desolate highways, a Valero service station abutting a humble cemetery, overgrown brush lining an old road turnaround, and other banal scenes reminiscent of passing glances or snapshots. While they may look less idealized, these images, like their Pacific-Railroad-commissioned postcard antecedents, speak the language of everydayness that typifies the “feel” of passing through.

We turned to a box labeled “California Color Theory.” It held what appeared to be simple color tests of fruits against complimentary backgrounds: limes against a cadmium field, oranges on a cerulean background, etc.

Another box contained shots of “California Skies,” images of wispy clouds, cumulous thunderheads, and azure expanses. Yet another box was labeled “California Interiors,” holding pictures of kitchens and living rooms, each with its own decorative touches: lace curtains, brass lighting fixtures, gaudy wallpaper, unremodeled cabinets.

Whether these iconographic taxonomies would make their way into the final exhibition had yet to be determined.

Nevertheless, their presence in Wilken’s studio gave the impression of a portrait compiled from contrasting, seemingly unrelated image categories.

According to Wilken, his recent work takes great conceptual and formal inspiration from artists coming out of the New Topographic Movement, inaugurated by a 1975 exhibition at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, and featuring work by photographers like Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert Adams, and Stephen Shore. These artists’ photographs dispense with the artiness associated with modernist landscape photography. The modernist Ansel Adams, for example, long produced picturesque views that beautify—and thus beatify—rugged terrain by capturing majestic natural lighting in dramatic compositions, suggesting a land bequeathed to its inhabitants by the grace of God. Instead, the New Topographic photographers favor unspectacular everyday images of the landscape.

It’s easy to read Wilken’s relation to this art historical trajectory, since his views of deserted streets and empty parking lots bear striking resemblance to, say, Stephen Shore’s color photograph of an uninhabited commercial intersection in Kalispell, Montana—the two images bearing the same signs of boredom, stagnancy, and weathered obsolescence. Yet, as one glances through Wilken’s transparencies, a distant, more removed precedent comes to mind, something perhaps more closely related to the archival impulse underpinning his recent collection of images.

While pouring over Wilken’s 4x5s and 8x10s, I was reminded of the late 19th century US geological survey expeditions that attempted to capture the West under the aegis of American Manifest Destiny. The Pacific Railroad survey that inspired Wilken was itself preceded by these larger, more inclusive compendiums. In many ways, 27

Greg Wilken’s Terra Incognita

the US-government-sponsored expeditions gave “uninhabited” places, future places of “wonder,” an evidence of existence, rendering the previously unknown “real.”

As cultural historian Alan Trachtenberg notes when discussing these early photographic expeditions, “a photographic view attaches a posessable image to a place name.”2 In Reading American Photographs, Trachtenberg examines the way photographic surveys in the late 19th century set out to document the West, serving as both a component of mapping and an aid to westward US expansion.

In one instance, he discusses a 1868-69 series of photographs by T.H. O’Sullivan with explanatory text by the geologist Clarence King, part of a geological survey commissioned by the US Department of War. He notes that these image spreads discard the strict chronological and typological rigidity typical of a government survey in favor of non-linear image diversity with images of waterfalls, workers illuminated by flares, campgrounds, and panoramic landscapes, conveying atmosphere instead of a categorization. Trachtenberg writes, “By their diversity, which calls attention to our dependency for what we see upon the photographer’s choices and the camera’s position, the pictures raise a question about cognition, the relation between seeing, investigating, and knowing—the question which lies at the base of the survey as a whole.”3

The question becomes how best to capture the essence of conquest, the possibility of fortune, the grandeur of nature in conflict with, and under the new control of, “enlightened” exploratory power. Amidst the seemingly disconnected imagery, in the cognitive interstices between images, we find the spirit of the western project: a bubbling mixture of hard work, reverence for natural wonder, and good-ol’ industrial know-how. While Wilken operates under far less regimented strictures, and outside the purview of governmental oversight, his work too presents a problem of cognition, how we understand and “know” vast expanses of land.

Wilken’s diversity of views all circulate around, but never quite fix, the subject at hand: the vast expanse of terrain along America’s West Coast. Back in the 1860s, Clarence King characterized such a land as “terra incognita,” unknown land, “a labyrinth of intricate changes.”4 Wilken’s transparencies make visible the conundrum of this terra incognita. In his pictures we apprehend, if only momentarily, something all too familiar yet still unknown. In presenting us with these disparate images, Wilken problemetizes the very notion of a photographic record, giving rise to dispersed and transitory knowledge about history and the past’s relationship to the present.

1 Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (1972; reprint, Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 827.

2 Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images As History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989) 125.

3 Ibid., 134.

4 Ibid., 133.

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The writer, Tucker Neel, is an artist, writer, curator, and gallery director in Los Angeles. Neel’s art investigates the production of political allegiance, memory, and collective experience. To view his complete projects please visit tuckerneel.com. Neel holds an MFA from Otis College of Art & Design and a BA in Art History and Visual Arts from Occidental College. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Communication Arts and Liberal Arts & Sciences departments at Otis College of Art & Design. He is a Contributing Editor for Artillery Magazine in Los Angeles, and his writings have also appeared in Art Lies Magazine, ARTPULSE Magazine, the LA Alternative Press, and X-Tra Magazine.

You can read these writings at tuckerneel.wordpress.com. Neel is also the Director & Founder of 323 Projects, a telephone-based art gallery. To visit 323 Projects simply call (323) 843-4652 anytime, day or night, to hear audio art.

For more information, visit 323projects.com.

The mentor, Richard Vine, is a senior editor at Art in America, where he writes frequently on contemporary art in Asia and elsewhere. He holds a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Chicago and has served as editor-in-chief of the Chicago Review and of Dialogue: An Art Journal. He has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the American Conservatory of Music, the University of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, the New School for Social Research, and New York University. His articles have appeared in various journals, including Salmagundi, the Georgia Review, Tema Celeste, Modern Poetry Studies, and the New Criterion. His book-length study, Odd Nerdrum: Paintings, Sketches and Drawings was published by Gyldendal/D.A.P. in 2001. New China, New Art, his book surveying art in China from 1976 to the present, was released by Prestel Publishers in fall 2008. It was reissued in an updated and expanded edition in fall 2011. ................................................

This essay was written as part of the Young Art Critics Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE Art Foundation, which pairs emerging writers with AICA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for further information on AICA USA, or www.cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA's Coordinator for the program this season. For additional arts-related writing, please visit www.on-verge.org

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Image list: All images: 2011, Pigment print, 15" x 17 1/2" 9. Near Monterey, CA. (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders) 10. Los Angeles, CA (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders) 11. Restaurant Interior, HWY 10 (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders) 12. Near San Juan Batista, CA. (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders) 13. Weed, CA. (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders) 14. Redding, CA. (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders) 15. Salem, OR. Restaurant Interior, Fresno, CA. (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders) 16. Klamath Fall, OR. (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders) 17. Umpqua National Forest, OR. (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders) 18. San Juan Batista, CA. (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders) 19. Morgan Hill, CA. (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders) 20. Restaurant Interior, SR 58, OR. (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders) 21. HWY 5, OR. (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders) 22. Klamath Falls #2, OR. (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders) 23. Salinas, CA. (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders)

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Cover Image: Near Monterey, CA. (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders) [detail], 2011 Pigment print, 15" x 17 1/2" All artwork Š Greg Wilken ISBN: 978-0-9032853-3-5 Catalog design: elizabeth ellis Printed by mar+x myles inc. using 100% wind-generated power

CUE Art Foundation’s operations and programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, corporations, government agencies, individuals, and its members.

Major Programmatic Support: Accademia Charitable Foundation, Ltd., CAF American Donor Fund, The Viking Foundation, AG Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Greenwall Foundation, The Greenwich Collection, Ltd., William Talbot Hillman Foundation, The Koret Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc., The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts (a state agency)

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