04.16.2012: LACMA’S IN WONDERLAND (OR HOW I LEARNED TO LIKE SURREALISM AGAIN)

I may or may not be partial to Frida Kahlo’s Autorretrato con Collar because the cat in is the spitting image of my handsome black cat, Mung.

I’m a female, Mexican-American artist, so as soon as I heard about "In Wonderland" at LACMA, I emailed my mother and set a date to see it with her. Not only would there be Kahlos (I can’t be the only little girl who grew up simultaneously scared to death of and totally in love with the work of the woman whose image I was as familiar with as Our Lady of Guadalupe), there would be work from Francesca Woodman (every female, teenage art student’s wet dream, amirite?), Maya Deren (My other cat’s name is Glamour Girl, the cat she shared with Alexander Hammid), Louise Bourgeois, Dorothea Tanning, Remedios Varo, Yayoi Kusama, pretty much every badass female artist living and working in the US & Mexico around the same time as dudes were painting melting clocks.

Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon was the opener of the exhibit. While this was totally sick, what was even sicker was winding through the exhibit and occasionally hearing the soundtrack for it, contributing to the show’s extreme nonlinearness.

While I’m not in love with the name of the exhibit (I don’t necessarily think “grown ass female artist making pretty revolutionary work” when I think Alice), the subtitle, "The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and The United States," does something that, at least for me, was a pretty big deal from the get-go. For about 2 or 3 years now (because of Black Dahlia Avenger, I admit), the word “Surrealism” has sort of been a dirty word for me. I mean, duh, the work’s great, but those guys were misogynistic d-bags who basically stole an entire movement from their mothers (That may be a stretch, but if anyone can remember the name of the exhibit that showcased the insane photo collages of the mothers of Surrealists, plz let me know). Laaaaame. So in addition to Kahlo & Krew (BEST. GIRL GANG. EVER.) not generally being labeled Surrealists, that whole movement was starting to seem pretty tired and icky to me.

L to R: Duchamp’s Etant Donnes vs. Dorothea Tanning’s Birthday. Which makes you feel better about having a vagina?

But then along came Ilene Susan Fort and Tere Arcq to punch my brain in the face with the biggest “DUH” I never thought of. These women were totally Surrealists, and their work is work that not only I can fall into the rabbit hole of (nyuck nyuck nyuck), but my mom can, too! And Mexicans, and Mexican-Americans, both populations almost never addressed in the fine art world. And that is exactly what makes this exhibition so amazing. It is a collection of Surrealist works that utilize the visual and emotional vernacular of those generally seen as “other,” a group I am firmly planted in, a group that most people I know are firmly planted in, and you know what? It is just as mind-blowing as the work of the Surrealist men. I actually maybe even like most of it better. Snap.

Bridget Tichenor’s Autorretrato. Ugh. Slays me every time.

What most affected me about going to see "In Wonderland" was not the work, for the most part quite influential to me; it was all of these people, a majority of them women, many of them people of color, being so pumped to see the work. The crowd around Las Dos Fridas gave me an anxiety attack I haven’t experienced since the Mona Lisa. In the end, this show is way more than just a celebration of the female Surrealists; it is celebration of all those who look at these works and think “Finally, someone who gets me.”

"In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States" is at LACMA until May 6, 2012, when it will be traveling to Quebec and Mexico City.

Article originally published on the TENOVERSIX blog.

04.21.2011: K-KERRY KERRY TR RY TRIBE’S CRITICAL MASS

Kerry Tribe's pieces tend to be sort of like a bunch of really enthralling academic essay about rad, obscure historical figures. She's both a story teller and a disseminator of a ton of meticulously researched information, but instead of reading these essays, the audience experiences them, generally via video, sound, and installation. This feeling carried over into her latest performance, Critical Mass, a live restaging of Hollis Frampton's 1971 film of the same name, at The Hammer on April 7.



Frampton expanded a few minutes of footage into a 25 minute film via sound and video editing. Kerry Tribe used actors with commendable memorization skills to perfectly reenact the audio, along with the expected motions of a couple's fight that will never be won by either side. Though this seems like it might be incredibly frustrating to watch, certain repetitions seem to emphasize the actors' points, while others repeat the ridiculousness of this fight (both the fight itself and the phrases that date the original piece - "far out" and "hippie colony" were two stand outs). Pretty much everyone in the audience cracked up at least once. In fact, the few points at which the fight is allowed to continue uninterrupted by the editor's hand, while they give the audience more information as to what is potentially going on, were sort of, well, boring; the stutters and repetition actually added a certain amount of raw emotion and frustration that feels very real in the situation being staged....Sound like something you're bummed to have missed? Well, you're in luck! Tribe will be restaging her restaging at LAXART on April 22 at 7 pm.

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.