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Tag: Art

  • Richard Bassett “Options”, Jack Fischer Gallery

    I usually focus on modern and contemporary art’s ability to give the mind space away from emotion and shift focus to the textures, shapes, colors and concepts of the pieces themselves. Options, Richard Bassett’s current solo show at Jack Fischer Gallery, however, does not give the viewer that luxury. One is forced to make a choice between ironic detachment or complete emotional engagement.

    Bassett has made several series of handmade needlepoint pillows over the years for various shows. It is an object and medium more associated with craft than fine art, something that while visually pleasing is more likely to be sat upon than gazed upon. Bassett subverted the expectations of pillows in previous exhibitions, depicting violent crimes such as convenience-store robberies. The series featured in this show is of cats and dogs, images that are quite common on pillows (indeed, I suspect many readers may have cat or dog pillows at home). But these are not the happy, tender, images of animals we are used to seeing in domestic decor, but rather photographs of abandoned or abused animals at shelters.


    [Richard Bassett, SH_F_BL. 15″x15″x4″ wool, linen, and down, hand needle pointed, 2012. Image courtesy of Jack Fischer Gallery.]

    In our culture, animals are bred for the purpose of serving human needs. Domesticated cats and dogs are dealt the difficult task of providing comfort and company, making them utterly vulnerable to human whim. This becomes especially clear when these animals end up in shelters.

    Putting distressed animals or surveillance footage of crimes on pillows can seen as typically post-modern and ironic, and perhaps it ultimately is for the majority of people who view these pieces casually or critically. But for me, it is hard to look at the faces of the animals behind bars (especially the cats), and not feel a sense of empathy for them and thus a sense of pain and sadness. The images evoke feelings for the particular cats pictured, as well as for the plight of shelter animals in general.


    [Richard Bassett, DSH_M_B/W. 15″x15″x4″ wool, linen, and down, hand needle pointed, 2011. Image courtesy of Jack Fischer Gallery.]

    Adding to the poignancy of this show is the fact that Richard Bassett passed away days before it opened in early February. This was a sad loss for his family and friends, as well as his admirers in the arts community. It is hard not to view the exhibition in this context as a memorial and a retrospective. Interspersed among the needlepoint pillows of “Options” were several works on paper under the simple title “Drawings”. Among these drawings were images of enlarged braille supposedly depicting gay porn from the 1950s. I have no means to declare the artists’ intent in either these braille drawings or in the needlepoint images animals. But I feel that he is posthumously challenging me to do exactly that.

    The exhibition will be on display at Jack Fischer Gallery through March 9. I encourage readers who enjoy art, or love companion animals, or both, to see it.

  • Taraneh Hemami, Resistance, Luggage Store Gallery

    Through our Thursday-night experimental music series at the Luggage Store Gallery, I have seen quite a few art exhibits on the walls (and the floor, and the ceiling). The current exhibition, Resistance!, is notable for both its theme and its presentation, and worth an article of its own separate from our musical exploits.

    Resistance, a solo exhibition of work by artist Taraneh Hemami, is about “the visual culture of protest.” More specifically, it presents a history of dissent in Iran and among the Iranian diaspora through reinterpretations of elements from the archive of the Iranian Students Association of Northern California (ISANC). Art shows about resistance and protest are a dime a dozen in these days after the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. This one is notable for being visually strong, with a very stylized and minimalist presentation that in some cases belies the violence of its subject.

    This can be seen most clearly in Blood Curtain, in which a curtain of red beads hangs quietly in an empty corner of the gallery against monochromatic walls and curtains. It is at once beautiful and also uncomfortable with its obvious depiction of blood.


    [Taraneh Hemami, Blood Curtain, 2013]

    The curtain is made from 8mm glass beads and suggests a hand-crafted artifact, a theme that reappears throughout the exhibition. In Theory of Survival, portraits of martyrs from book covers are reproduced in glass frit on large panels, again in black and red. From a distance, the texture looks like carpeting, but when one looks closely the glass becomes apparent.


    [Taraneh Hemami, Theory of Survival, 2010-2013]

    More traditional craft can be seen a series of rugs that at first appear to be an elegant wall decoration but take on additional meaning when one realizes that these designs were from images of rugs created by prisoners. Other pieces were less subtle in their message, such as Notes from Evin Prison, named for the notorious Iranian prison that still appears in headlines today. Here, laser-cut metal is used to render both a harmless looking sign with the piece’s title as well a large and explicit figure in black and red being tortured. There were, however, more hopeful images as well. In People Power Revolution, the laser-cut metal forms depict throngs of revolutionaries. The main image of violence in this piece, a security guard being skewered, is almost cartoonish.


    [Taraneh Hemami, People Power Revolution, 2013]

    The prevalence of red among the pieces suggested an association with 20th century Communism in addition to blood and violence. The Communist motif was reinforced by the frequent appearance of five-pointed stars. I thought this was odd at first, because I was using the 1979 Iranian revolution and the recent protests against the Islamic regime as my reference. ISANC was actually active from 1960 to 1982, and thus its archives mostly predate the 1979 revolution and document earlier periods of resistance and protest when Leftists symbols would have been in wide use. Nonetheless, the images seemed like they could have been from the protests since 2009.

    Resistance will be on display at the Luggage Store Gallery through February 28, with a closing reception that evening.

  • Wordless Wednesday: Angular Disorientation



  • Wordless Wednesday: Mirage



  • Wordless Wednesday: Half and Half



  • Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde, MoMA

    As usual, my trip to New York included an afternoon at MoMA. I don’t always research the exhibitions in advance, I just show up and sometimes can be happily surprised. And upstairs from much publicized display of Eduard Munch’s The Scream, I found one such surprise. Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde catalogs the art movements that initially rose out of the ruins of post-war Japan, mixed and blended with international avant-garde trends of the 1960s, and ultimately moved more into alignment with Japanese culture at large.


    [Nakamura Hiroshi. Upheaval (Nairanki). 1958. Oil and pencil on plywood. 36 1/4 x 72 7/16″ (92 x 184 cm). Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya. © Nakamura Hiroshi, courtesy Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya]

    As one might expect, many of the 1950s pieces, only a decade after the end of World War II, are a bit bleak, and in some cases quite absurdist. This is consistent with the rise of butoh in the performing arts during the same period. But we also see examples that share characteristics with abstract expressionism that was happening in the United States at the same time.


    [Yamaguchi Katsuhiro. Vitrine: Deep into the Night (Vitorīnu: Yoru no shinkō). 1954. Watercolor on paper, oil on wood, corrugated glass. 25 3/4 x 22 1/4 x 3 9/16″ (65.5 x 56.5 x 9 cm). Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. © Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.]

    At the same time, the architectural pieces associated with the Metabolism movement were quite optimistic. Although some were fantastical in their designs such as Tange Kenzo’s A Plan for Tokyo, 1960 , there were a few that were actually built, such as Kurokawa Kisho’s Nakagin Capsule Tower Building.

    The span of the exhibition intersects with Fluxus, and a few of the artists featured in last year’s Fluxus 50th anniversary exhibition made appearances here as well. Many of the Japanese artists that would become associated directly or indirectly with movement crossed paths at the Sogetsu Art Center, including Yoko Ono and Ichiyanagi Toshi. Among the pieces documenting this fertile ground were Ono’s Cough Piece and the graphical score Toshi’s IBM for Merce Cunningham. I still find inspiration in pieces like Toshi’s score four decades later.


    [Ichiyanagi Toshi. IBM for Merce Cunningham. 1960 (Fluxus Edition announced 1963). Score. Master for the Fluxus Edition, typed and drawn by George Maciunas, New York. Ink, typewriting, and graphite on transparentized paper. 8 1/4 x 11 9/16″ (21 x 29.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift. © 2012 Ichiyanagi Toshi. Photograph by Peter Butler]

    I was not at all surprised to see Yoko Ono represented once again in this exhibition. But I was happy to discover Akasegawa Genpei in the exhibition, though his membership in the Hi Red Center.


    [Hi Red Center. Hi Red Center poster (recto). Fluxus Edition, edited by Shigeko Kubota, designed and produced by George Maciunas, New York. Edition announced 1965. Offset printing on paper, double-sided. 22 1/16 x 17″ (56 x 43.2 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift. © The Estate of Takamatsu Jirō, courtesy Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo.]

    The Hi Red Center again intersected with the world of Fluxus, even appearing in a Fluxus edition and hosting many associated artists as guests. But beyond that, Akasegawa Genpei was involved in original and sometimes controversial conceptual pieces. In his “Anti Art” objects, I could see that start for his work in the 1980s on “hyperart” or “Thomassons”. (Thomassons have been discussed on this site in earlier articles and will undoubtedly come up again.)

    The later section of the exhibition chronicled the transition from the gritty and often monochromatic style of early conceptual art to a brightly colored cartoonish style associated with Japanese Pop Art. It is easy to see the rise of manga and anime in Japanese popular culture in this trend, though the content in these pieces is often more serious and subtle.


    [Tateishi Kōichi (Tiger Tateishi). Samurai, the Watcher (Kōya no Yōjinbō). 1965. Oil on canvas. 51 5/16 x 63 3/4″ (130.3 x 162 cm). The National Museum of Art, Osaka. © Estate of Tiger Tateishi, courtesy The National Museum of Art, Osaka.]

    Although I quite liked Tateishi Kōichi’s painting shown above and others in this part of the exhibition, overall the pop art did not hold my attention in the way the preceding sections on conceptual art did. But overall, this was a great exhibition that I was happy to come across.

  • X Libris, Root Division

    X Libris opened this past Saturday at Root Division in San Francisco, and I had the opportunity to attend. X Libris is “an exhibition exploring the book as a mode of communication in flux.” More and more of our media is migrating from print to digital form, and even the venerable book isn’t immune from this. But the book as an object still retains value for many of us, even if we do much of our reading via digital media such as e-books. We display books, arrange them carefully in rows on shelves or gracefully positioned on tables. Some of the pieces directly lament the loss of books as a central element in our lives, while others explore the printed page as an artistic medium separate from its traditional function.

    One corner of the gallery was taken up with a large “architectural installation” made entirely of books. One could walk in between the undulating walls and look at the titles. Although most of the books were closed, every so often there would be an open one. I encountered at least one or two mathematical texts.

    One of the most eerie pieces was Alexis Arnold’s “Flood”, which featured distressed and disheveled encyclopedias encrusted in borax crystals. It could have been a scene from a major natural disaster such as Hurricane Sandy or Katrina, with floodwaters causing first one form of damage as they rise, and then another as they recede leaving behind salt deposits. The knowledge contained in the books is just out of reach behind the translucent crystals. Another piece that treated books destructively, but more humorously was Michael Kerbow’s installation of pages as autumn leaves to be raked.

    Pantea Karimi created ink drawings with repeated motifs on heavy paper, arranged in unfolding structures on shelves. The result is a colorful and meticulous tribute to the bookshelves that many people proudly display in their homes, but also a lamentation that such displays are gradually becoming rarer.

    If books as source of textual information (or escape into fantasy) is waning, what of the physical form of the book as an artistic medium unto itself? Several pieces presented books that were physically books with pages that one could flip and look at, but intended as objects of abstract or conceptual art rather than something to “read.” These examples by Laura Chenault have color and texture but no text.

    Still others were more distance from our expectations of the standard book form. Lauren Bartone’s complementary pieces “Letter Trash” and “Leftovers” presented a jumble of letters pasted onto a background and piled on a shelf, respectively. Steven Vasquez Lopez did away with letters and symbols altogether, using only intersecting straight lines on paper, as in this piece entitled “Jooked”:

    One might ask what such a piece has to with books, but for me it did bring to mind the whole genre of “abstract comics”, a topic for another time.

    X Libris will be on display at Root Division through December 1. You can visit the exhibition page for more info.

  • Guy Overfelt #BLACKLIGHT, Ever Gold Gallery

    Last weekend I had the opportunity to see #BLACKLIGHT, conceptual artist Guy Overfelt’s solo show at Ever Gold Gallery, before it closed on November 3rd. The main installation of the show was “hesher tribute” to renowned artist Dan Flavin, whose work involves abstract lines of light (you can see an example in this show at David Zwirner in New York in 2009). Overfelt’s tribute uses these light elements arranged in a pentagram in a darkened room with mirrors:


    [Courtesy of Guy Overfelt and Ever Gold Gallery.]

    It was interesting to peer directly through the infinitely vanishing series both head-on, as in the image above, or from the side. Indeed, the effect of side or oblique views was more disorienting, especially coming into the dark room during an exceptionally bright and sunny afternoon in San Francisco. Indeed the contrast between indoors and outdoors is what made this a particularly strong experience.


    [Courtesy of Guy Overfelt and Ever Gold Gallery.]

    It is the pentagram element that makes this “hesher” art. The darkened posters from L.A. punk shows that cover the wall before the installation and a curtain in the rear of the gallery would appear be at odds with the hesher theme, which is distinctly different from punk even if they overlapped during the early 1980s.


    [Courtesy of Guy Overfelt and Ever Gold Gallery.]

    Some rather colorful posters were also presented separately as framed oil-on-linen pieces.

    The gallery describe this exhibition as Overfelt’s last exhibition, stating somewhat mysteriously that “You’ll never see Guy Overfelt’s face in San Francisco nor his work after this exhibition.” I hope that is not in fact true, as the work of this 2012 SECA AWARD nominee is growing on me.

  • Wordless Wednesday: California 41

    This is one of the new pieces I have this fall for San Francisco Open Studios!



    If you link up, please leave a comment as well.

  • Cindy Sherman at SFMOMA

    The huge Cindy Sherman retrospective at SFMOMA will be closing in a week, and I would be remiss if I did not write a few words about it. Her work, which is almost entirely composed of self portraits, is often described with terms like “masquerade,” “caricature,” “persona”, and her still images lend themselves to the idea of performance and play. I had the opportunity to see the exhibition a few times and found the her use of invented persona and performance inspiring as my own work in both music and visuals moves in that direction.

    While much of the attention has focused on Sherman’s more over-the-top and exaggerated portraits, I found her early Untitled Film Stills to be among the most compelling. In these pieces, she successfully transforms herself into realistic roles and characters that one might see in films of the 1960s and 1970s.

    ‘
    [Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21. 1978; gelatin silver print; 7 1/2 x 9 1/2″ (19.1 x 24.1 cm); The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel; © 2012 Cindy Sherman  Source: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art]

    The transformation from her real appearance and character into these fictional roles through costuming, makeup and expression is already apparent, and one would not think they are all the same person if seen outside the context of the exhibition. It is the realism coupled with black-and-white that makes these portraits stand out from the rest of her body of work. There was also one particularly interesting series of images documenting the Sherman’s transformation from her everyday self into one of the characters.

    One the other extreme are some of her more recent portraits, depicting female archetypes from contemporary society as well as a series devoted to aging “society women”. She uses the same elements of clothing, hair, make-up, setting and pose as in the earlier images, but here the effect is to make these everyday tools of beauty and personal identity into something strange. Some results of beautifully exaggerated, others veer towards the grotesque. But in all of these pieces there is a deliberate falseness to the facades and personae.


    [Cindy Sherman, Untitled #463, 2007-08; chromogenic color print; 68 5/8 x 6″ (174.2 x 182.9 cm); courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York; © 2012 Cindy Sherman. Source: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.]

    Once again, these images suggest performance, ranging from burlesque to reality television to more experimental performance art where the visitor is confronted with this exaggerated form of human appearances and has to figure out how to interact with her.

    Another take on fictitious persona can be found in her history series from 1988-1990. Here, she uses the same elements to recreate scenes either directly referencing or suggesting historical works of Western painting. She transforms herself into the a variety of women as well as a few men that one might see in paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries.


    [Cindy Sherman, Untitled #193, 1989; chromogenic color print; 48 7/8 x 41 15/16″ (124.1 x 106.5 cm); courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York; © 2012 Cindy Sherman. Source: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art]

    In some cases, they are quite convincing, while in others they are once again deliberately exaggerated through the addition of prothetic facial elements, lactating breasts, as so on. There was even one portrait that at least to me looked more like a Klingon from Star Trek than a European aristocrat.

    Not everything in this exhibition was playful. A few of the characters were clearly meant to be battered or abused women. And entire room was devoted the period in the 1980s when she moved away from self portraits into more abstract pieces. This was the height of the AIDS epidemic and these images portraying dismembered bodies and rotting flesh were very difficult to look at.

    Finally, in a nod to the focus on digital technology of San Francisco and SFMOMA, Sherman presented a wall-to-ceiling site-specific mural that used Photoshop rather than traditional techniques to alter her appearance. In the piece, we see her larger than life in a variety of characters, the most memorable had her in long hair and long flowing dress, more reserved than in her later photographic portraits. The use of Photoshop also is a reminder of how the ideas of invented personae is more accessible to more people than ever before.

    As I said in opening, this exhibition was an inspiration as I move into more invented personae and theatrical performance in my own work, whether in music, video or photography. It is more of indirect influence through the mechanics and discipline of her production and the idea of the characters and transformation, rather than a desire to specifically emulate what she does. In that sense, the timing could not have been better.

    Cindy Sherman will remain at SFMOMA in San Francisco through October 18. If you are in the Bay Area and have not yet seen it, I recommend doing so. The exhibition will next travel to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and then onto Dallas.