12.12.2010: NO SHIRT, NO SHOES REQUIRED AT THE GEFFEN CONTEMPORARY

It’s 80 degrees in LA right now. You could go to the beach to celebrate this, but then you’d probably find yourself in a crazy amount of IT’S 80 DEGRESS IN DECEMBER OMG traffic. If you’re not lucky enough to have a pool at home (or if you are, because I’m pretty sure yours doesn’t have a sick light show), may I suggest a dip in Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s “psychedelic swimming pool,” officially titled Cosmococa–Programa in Progress, CC4 Nocagions, currently up at The Geffen Contemporary. ”Psychedelic swimming pool?” you may ask. “In a museum?” Well, the MOCA has put together "Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space," the first major museum show to “situate pioneering Latin American artists among the international canon of those working with light and space” by recreating large installations by the likes of Carlos Cruz Diez, Lucio Fontana, Julio Le Parc, Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida, and Jesús Rafael Soto. While I certainly have reservations about a show that places Latin American artists within a larger contemporary art context by showing them with…other Latin American artists exclusively, this is definitely a rare chance to see some major, influential works. The word suprasenorial was first used by Oiticica to describe the all-consuming nature of his installations. The use of the word “installations” here is actually sort of questionable; really, what these artists do is use light and color to create environments that make the audience, by walking through them, as integral a part of the work as what was made by the artist. I’d say it’s safe to assume that you don’t become part of a work without having a pretty epic experience in it, and really, if you’ve seen or are familiar with light works by non-Latin-North American and European artists, this show will blow your senses out of the water. I guess literally? "Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space" is up at the Geffen Contemporary until February 27, 2011.

Article originally published on the TENOVERSIX blog.

12.04.2010: JULIAN HOEBER WILL MAKE YOU SICK

Julian Hoeber, who I became totally obsessed with upon viewing his video Killing Friends for the first time, has put together Demon Hill at The Hammer Museum. Based on “gravitational mystery spots,” his installation mixes high art and slightly more low-end spectacle right in line with the rest of his work (a self-aware video about sex and murder; busts of the artist that have been blasted with shotguns). This time, however, the audience in right in the middle of the action, and his exploration of the line between real and staged experience forces even the most logical mind to question itself. (Come on, we’ve all been to Knott’s Berry Farm and seriously wondered how they got a marble to roll up.) Julian Hoeber’s Demon Hill is up at The Hammer Museum until January 23. We’re still in the midst of The Hammer’s 20 days of free admission, so the only reason to not attend would be a weak stomach.

Article originally published on the TENOVERSIX blog.

07.09.2010: BOX SCHEME

Over the past few years, L.A.’s Chinatown has become an increasingly popular home base for smaller galleries that don’t have the same commercial aspirations as, say, Blum & Poe. Six galleries in the neighborhood play host to “Box Scheme,” the CalArts 2010 MFA exhibition curated by Ana Vejovic Sharp, former director of David Kordansky Gallery and China Art Objects.

At the more promising end of the spectrum are two works at Charlie James Gallery. Patricia Fernandez's Sculpture for Copies, a bookcase filled with both originals and copies of familial artifacts under glass, highlights the ambiguity and specificity of remembering. Steve Kados' The Grand Table is comprised of a long, low wooden table stacked with newspaper-like sheets of paper and a large magnifying glass. Each of the sheets contains excerpts, in exceedingly small type, from a novel about the adventures of a man traveling around the world. The artists create personal fictions, to varying degrees; we’re being lied to, but we’re in on the deceit.

At Actual Size, Zach Kleyn's The Rapture, Remembered: Episode 2: The Gingerbread Lesson is reminiscent of the manic Ryan Trecartin. In this video, a teenage girl from the late 1980s fondly recounts a lesson on the Rapture her grandmother gave her while they were baking gingerbread cookies together. The entire video is dubbed in a man’s voice, making the old woman’s use of phrases like “the beast” and “the mark” all the more confoundingly entertaining and once again highlighting the strange way in which the human brain processes the past. Cody Trepte's work at Dan Graham Gallery also plays with memory by pairing pristine photographs with degraded silkscreens of similar images. At Cottage Home, Bjarki Bragason's work draws parallels between an Icelandic reporter embedded in Iraq and the artist himself. Epilogue Letters (her withdrawal) pairs a video of the Iraqi countryside with a voice-over reading of a letter from that journalist. “In many ways, I made the whole thing up,” the reporter confesses, speaking of a need to bend the truth in order to earn respect from her military hosts. Braganson uses the war reporter’s angst to spotlight his own frailty and the possibility of being exposed as a fraud: the common nightmare of the practicing artist.

Unfortunately, these few mature works are not an entirely accurate representation of the sprawling MFA show in its totality. Many say that this young generation is one without a movement, but if the graduating crop from CalArts is any indication, tomorrow’s artists share a predilection for Day-Glo colors and rambling statements-as-titles: Margaret Haines's My Friend Once Told Me The Best Way To Say Fuck You In Los Angeles Is Trust Me; Orlando Tirado Amador's When He Makes a Beast of Herself She Forgets the Woes of Being A Man. Still, there were a number of interesting ideas to be found in these six spaces, and CalArts provided a new reason to visit this burgeoning Chinatown art scene — itself a work-in-progress, considering that many of these galleries have been open for the same amount of time the artists have just spent in grad school.

Article originally published on Artinfo.

04.07.2009: THE GAME OF MEMORY

A man around 80 years old is asked what he looks like. He has dark brown hair. He is asked how old he is. Late 40s or early 50s, somewhere around there. He is asked about the Gulf War. It was a conflict having to do with Mexico and Cuba. These are not the responses of a man who has lost his memory due to old age or a recent accident; these are the responses of a man who has lived this way for most of his life.

Henry Gustav Molaison is the subject of Kerry Tribe’s new film installation, "H.M.," currently on view at 1301PE in Los Angeles. H.M., the initials that represented him in innumerable scientific reports, was born in 1926. He acquired severe epilepsy in a bicycle accident at nine, and on September 1, 1953, at 27, underwent an experimental procedure in which his left and right medial temporal lobes were removed. His epilepsy was gone, but so was his capacity to retain any new information past the immediate memory mark of 20 seconds.

Tribe’s interpretation of his story is conveyed with enough layers to confuse even those with all aspects of memory fully in tact - re-staged interviews and tests; abstract visuals of crossword puzzles and floating stars; Tribe’s (or the person whose notes she’s reading? or a fictional character all together?) personal memories with and about H.M. The viewer is even put to the test just as he was, pictures of famous faces flashing onscreen in an effort to understand where the memory of important events begins and ends. This audio-visual onomatopoeia is further extended in the 2-channel projection. The official description states that the same film is shown next to itself, a 20 second delay between the adjacent projections, but even after watching it a number of times, I remember the two films as being slightly different.

For H.M., time was liquid, not linear or fixed as people tend to understand it. He used clues from his immediate present and distant past to understand what was going on around him. Tribe’s installation is probably as close as any of us will get to experiencing what H.M. did, no temporal lobe removal required.

Article originally published on Anthem Online.

03.05.2009: DAN GRAHAM: BEYOND

"Dan Graham: Beyond" at MOCA Grand Avenue begins with a quote from the artist: “I love magazines, because they are like pop songs, easily disposable, dealing with momentary pleasures.” After reading this, one ventures into a room containing two of his fully constructed two-way mirrored pieces. No matter one’s age, the thrill of being able to see people who can’t see you is indeed quite the momentary pleasure. In the same vein, his use of mirrored glass in Girl’s Make-Up Room, where one is able to look.. inside.. a girl’s.. make-up room.. turns playful into downright creepy, but I digress.

The next room contains samples of his magazine work, which oddly enough seem to be the only pieces with any sense of permanence; they are on paper, preserved in frames and glass cases. Other works follow as such: the performance documentation is pretty cool, the most recent photographs aren’t that great, and the small, decidedly corporate-feeling architectural models date work that, when actually experienced, feels consistently contemporary. (“Sonic Youth” “tagged” on the model of Skateboard Pavillion? Really, Dan Graham?)

The real show stopper is the installation of Public Space/Two Audiences, at least it would have been had MOCA followed directions. Viewers step into one of two rooms, divided by glass, one of which has a mirrored wall. They are supposed to stay in there, doors closed, for 10 minutes, but the first time I went, no time limit was enforced and the second time, the doors were left wide open. The inability to hear what is going on in the other room, despite having a perfectly clear view, causes a lot of awkward smiles, staring contests, and a sense of forced comradery with complete strangers, putting into practice Graham’s question of public versus private space, being watched versus watching.

A video Graham made of Minor Threat in ’83 and a large projection of Rock My Religion (1965-1990) end the show in an attempt to show the artist’s connection to a fuck you, in-your-face youth culture. I felt like I walked out with blue balls.

Article originally published on Anthem Online.