The Times Quotidian

Now Dig Into This
by Constance Mallinson

There are opportunities for sculpture everywhere. In a field, in a room, on a stage, in the street, on the ceiling, in front of a camera, etc. Every place inspires a different response. Some responses locate us in space and time and link us to particular people in particular places. These last offerings might be political. There are reactions to given events…..There are sculptures acting like sculptures and people acting like people and sculptures acting like people and people acting like sculptures. There’s stillness and motion. There’s the “littering” of space to mark it. There are pieces that last and pieces that erode. Materials are many—steel to video, plastic bags to newspapers. — Maren Hassinger

Performance artist, dancer, and sculptor Maren Hassinger is currently represented in the Hammer Museum’s contribution to the citywide Pacific Standard Time exhibitions, Now Dig This! Art & Black  Los Angeles 1960-1980 opening October 2. With artists as renowned as David Hammons, Raymond Saunders and Bette Saar, to lesser known artists, the exhibition showcases 140 works by 35 artists who formed an important creative community and left a vital legacy to the arts of Los Angeles. Although Hassinger has lived in New York City and Baltimore where she is director of sculpture at Maryland Institute College of Art, for the exhibition she has recreated River consisting of a serpentine thirty foot long galvanized chain intertwined with rope that was first exhibited in her native Los Angeles in 1972. Installed near the entrance to the main galleries at the Hammer housing the major portion of the exhibit, River in its new incarnation and context now primarily addresses issues of black identity, specifically in its oversized use of the symbols of slavery. The title could easily refer to rivers like the Mississippi that facilitated the slave trade. Or, like a slithering venomous snake the chains of racial oppression wind their way through the landscape to leave a legacy of pain and rage. Conversely, it also suggests the river as the means to travel north to freedom and the ensuing transformative power of expression that has characterized much historical African American music, dance, and visual art.

In large thematic survey exhibitions such as this one, it is often difficult to grasp the breadth of an artist’s investigations, or to not perceive the artist’s work as essentialized – involving only issues related to identity. Many of the works in Now Dig This engage specific references to black experiences: John T. Riddle Jr.’s 1965 Untitled (Fist), a mixed media sculpture that joins an upright shovel handle with a  crumpled rake resembling a defiant partly clenched fist, are limited to interpretations of black empowerment in the Civil Rights era. Melvin Edwards’ dark, welded steel aggregates of tools and machine parts are as formally beautiful as carved African masks but in their abundant phallic references seem to harness the threatening power of black masculinity. David Hammons’ 1973 Bird poses a black hand on an old saxophone the mouthpiece of which is a rusty work shovel: the soul of jazz sings of years of hard manual labor. For Hassinger, however, the formal and conceptual requisites that have driven her work for over 40 years reside, as a short bio in the catalog explains, in her use of industrial materials to “approximate natural forms and plant life……bridging the divide between natural and manufactured, interior and exterior, personal and public.”

Indeed, if one had been driving along the 405 Freeway near the North Mullholland Drive exit from 1979 to this summer, one might have seen amongst the rank scrubby growth Hassinger’s site specific work Twelve Trees #2, an orderly row of “trees” constructed from unraveled steel rope. With its curling strands like flying hair in a whirling dance, these hi-tech trees came to typify the kind of nature/culture tensions and material transformations that defined much of her work in the 80’s and 90’s into the present. Her outdoor installations varied from wiggly galvanized wire rope that appeared to bend and move with the wind to fields of wiry wheat sheaves.  Gallery rooms of leaning, writhing snake steel cables set in concrete mimicked seaweed growing from the ocean floor set gently swaying in slow motion by the currents. Much of this earlier work explored the problematic relationship of the industrial to the organic, and by inference, of natural chaos to order.

Hassinger’s roots were clearly in Post-Minimalism with its affinities to influential sculptors like Eva Hesse whose installations like those Hassinger viewed in the early 1970’s at the defunct Pasadena Museum of Modern Art around the time Hassinger had received her MFA in fiber art from UCLA. Hesse’s dangling strings of elongated latex sausages, suspended netted rubber spheres, supple biomorphic doughnuts, soft sacks of droopy egg/scrota forms and trailing hairy skeins were a sexy Surrealist challenge to the male dominated Minimalist art of the 60’s. Artists such as Hesse emphasized expressive, spontaneous process, reintroducing a sense of pleasurable craft, embracing the multiple contradictions and polarities elicited by reinserting eroticism, natural references and disorder into the manufactured primary forms and rigid systems approach that had characterized Minimalism. Writing at the time, Robert Pincus Witten remarked, “The limp, the pliable and the cheap were sought; the hard, the polished, the expensive became suspect.” Rawness, playfulness, and naturalistic coloration had replaced shiny stainless steel and prismatic colored plexi cubes.

That shift in artistic values allowed for a rediscovery of autobiography and social issues and hastened the interrogation of sexual, individual and racial identities so prevalent in the art of the 80’s and 90’s. The rationalistic, analytical basis of Formalism had yielded what Maurice Berger described as “the passive static art of viewing” to become rather a “phenomenological journey, a passage of tactile and visual discovery rooted in strategies of performance and theatricality.” For Hassinger whose dance and performance pieces focused on a consideration of the temporalities and theatricalities of entire sites and the dissolution of framing devices that impede direct communication with the spectator, a renewed humanism and engagement with materials resulted. The departure from traditional aesthetic concerns and the immersion of the natural into the social and cultural seen in choreographed performances like Ten Minutes (1977) in which tree branches were symbolic of the natural world, informed the use of the industrial materials like steel, concrete, plaster, infusing them with opposing qualities like fragility, growth, dance-like movement recalling shamanistic rituals. Conventional binaries and hierarchies that neatly separated industry from a thoroughly sanctified nature were challenged, suggesting that as nature is artificially reproduced—genetic engineering, theme parks, suburbia, etc. – and our infringement upon it intensifies, those changes bear examination. Given the strong emphasis on unorthodox sculptural materials coupled with the emergent environmental issues at the time, one would have most likely experienced the 1972 version of River as a highly experimental challenge to the sculptural status quo as well as a poetic addressing of the devastation of nature by industry in its symbolic transmogrification of water into steel and rope. Subsequent installations like Heaven 1985, a room of preserved and scented rose leaves covering the gallery walls or Blanket of Branches (1986) a ceiling mounted suspended web of bare intertwining branches, challenged traditional sculptural aesthetics aswell as requirements for permanency in traditional art valuation with their ephemerality. No longer substituting the illusions of the natural found in conventional landscape representation, these pieces initiated a contact with the landscape based not on separation and alienation but on a tactile and visually beautiful appreciation. Performances like Pink Trash (1980) in which Hassinger, clad in a suit fashioned from bright pink plastic garbage bags, carefully replaced trash that she had collected on site in several New York parks and then painted rose petal pink, had underscored but ultimately attempted to harmonize the rift between civilization and the natural environment via an art gesture. Further, her gallery installations like Perimeter (1990), a room sized open picture frame constructed of cut twigs and branches that delineated a corner of the white gallery, reversed the usual perceptual model of traditional landscape painting. Instead of designating a portion of nature for our pleasurable gaze, “nature” enclosed the viewer and space within the frame, directing attention to the artifice of viewing the environment in order to interrogate the boundaries that separate humans from the natural world. The work of this twenty year period continuously subverted expectations for representation, materials, proper art contexts, disarming and disrupting many of their associations with power, privilege, or repression. Our attitudes—positive and negative– toward the natural world rely on how culture frames the experience and Hassinger has continued to explore that dynamic for over forty years.

Beginning around 2000, Hassinger became more explicit in her exploration of public and private identities. She has made expressive masks of herself cast from strips of the London Financial Times to explore how we are impacted by economic news and the stories that create our collective and personal images. In Wrenching News (2008) shredded, twisted and wrapped newspaper was shaped into a mandala-like icon for spiritual contemplation and transformation. Rainforest (2004) fabricated of shredded, twisted and knotted newspaper then hung from the ceiling like a thicket of vines, reiterates content in early work that either represents the natural by the human manufactured or returns natural artifacts to the realm of culture to and dramatize the tensions, relationships and connections between those realms. Healing has assumed a more important role. The “Sit Upons” (2010) wove hundreds of strips cut from daily newspapers into seats for the “Global Africa” show so that participants can engage in “the simple act of sitting in repose” and gain a new understanding of the space around them but also in a way that promotes person-to-person communication, sitting together, telling personal stories. The Sit Upons invite a palliative counterforce to the detached stance of mass media. She references the act of weaving to the kente cloth factories of Ghana and Ivory Coast, the “origin of my practice”, acknowledging the importance of her heritage. Likewise in a video also named “The River” she made in 2005 for the African American Performance Archive, an interview with her uncle in St. Louis  evoked floodplains where debris is deposited to suggest this is what is inherited from our ancestors. Having realized these projects, she returned to the remaking of the 1972 River currently on view at the Hammer.

 

Then what does it mean to recreate a previous work of art with new intentions and perceptions and in light of current events? What of revisionism to fit a curatorial scheme? Are an artist’s intentions and ideas irrelevant anyway as determined by theorists who equate viewer interpretation with intention? Since an artwork is always subject to new discoveries and observations, we could reconsider Hassinger’s metal sculptures of the past as metaphors for co-existence, not only between nature and civilization but between the marginalized and the larger culture, i.e. a wire  shrub is “out of place” in a natural environment. The struggles to find a balance between nature and human life that much of her early work embodied extends now to human-to-human relationships. In examining Hassinger’s prolific four decade practice it became clear that unlike many of the pieces in Now Dig This that are so bound by the urgencies of the era in which they were made, The River has grown more meaningful and powerful from the particularities of its immediate and past contexts. Because it was originally made by a 25 year old artist who hadn’t lived yet to see the full extent of environmental degradation, globalism, the full significance of the struggle for equality, even the election of the first African American president, the artwork –in keeping with the non-permanent, ever changing nature of many of her previous pieces—now has multi-leveled associations. The work is no less about nature being subsumed by industry, the oppression of slavery and racial bias, or the ropes and chains that tie our trading ships laden with foreign produced goods to the docks leaving Americans without jobs and healthcare. If anything, Hassinger’s  reimagined  River is one of the few pieces in the show that accomplishes what might have been the single most important goal of post-war black artists: that no matter the race or gender behind it, a great work of art has the ability to touch us all in myriad ways.

Pacific Standard Time Arrives
by Nancy Cantwell

Initiated by the Getty Museum along with the Getty Research Institute, Pacific Standard Time has blossomed into a comprehensive collaboration of 60 cultural institutes whose focus will be the art and artists of Southern California from the years 1945 to 1980. While the official kickoff date is October 1st, the festival has already taken on wings with gallery exhibitions of works by such L.A. original as Beatrice Wood, Maria Nordman and John Outterbridge. I was thrilled when Scott Hobbs, brought to my attention that the work of Marjorie Cameron was to be included as part PST’s inaugural Getty exhibition “Crosscurrents” and featured as part of the Getty’s “Explore the Era” web archive. Scott along George Herms are both part of the Cameron-Parsons Foundation board and as such have been instrumental as keepers of the flame of this extraordinary Southern Californian original.

Here, in an interview conducted and shot by Hobbs in 2002, Herms speaks about his first encounters with Cameron who he aptly identifies as part of the “occult humanist tradition.”

Cameron has been a part of many posts I’ve written albeit in the shadows. As an actress, in Curtis Harrington 1961 cult classic Night Tide she is the enigmatic leader of the “Sea People” who speaks a cryptic language unknown to all but her legion of mermaids. In Kenneth Anger’s film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Cameron is cast in a leading role of “The Scarlet Woman” and “Kali” opposite Anais Nin’s character of “Asarte.” But it is within the context of her artistic contributions that are explored as part of PST where her greatest influences can be appreciated. Cameron became the poster girl for the 1955 Wallace Berman’s literary and artistic journal Semina. From the Cameron-Parson Foundation:

In the early 1950s, Cameron met the fellow LA artist and jazz enthusiast Wallace Berman who was fascinated by her artwork, poetry, and mystical aura. She later recounted that she was impressed by the fact that, shortly after they were introduced, he gave her a copy of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. Although steering clear of her occult activities, Berman was intrigued with her persona and, as she put it in her 1986 interview with art historian Sandra Starr, “He seemed to be interested in somehow promoting me.” In 1955 Berman used his photograph of Cameron as the cover of his literary and artistic journal Semina 1 and included in the issue a reproduction of a drawing she had made the previous year during her first experience with peyote, which she had taken after hearing a lecture by Aldous Huxley. The reproduced drawing became renowned when the Los Angeles Police Department cited it as “lewd” and shut down Barman’s 1957 exhibition of drawings, assemblages, and sculptures at Ferus Gallery. After this experience, Cameron, like Berman, refused to show her art in commercial galleries. She remained, however, a crucial figure in the Berman circle.

This is also well documented as part of PST in the accompanying interview with Lyn Kieinholz, author of L.A. Rising, and Getty curator John Tain.

Cameron will furthermore be a part of the exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, “L.A. Raw, Abstract Expressionism in Los Angeles, 1945-1980, From Rico LeBrun to Paul McCarthy.” This is all a rare opportunity to become acquainted with a mesmerizing artist whose influence is now irrefutably entrenched as a part of Pacific Standard Time.

Untitled (Portrait of Crystal), ca. 1961, Marjorie Cameron. Ink and gouache on wood panel. 43 1/2 x 11 3/4 ” Collection of Scott Hobbs. Permission courtesy of Cameron Parons Foundation

Semina cover with photograph of Cameron, 1955, Wallace Berman.Semina journal, no. 1 (1955) by Wallace Berman. Gelatin silver print mounted on cardstock. 7 1/2 x 4 in. The Getty Research Institute, 2564-801.no1.2. Courtesy of the Estate of Wallace Berman and Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles

A River Runs Through It
by Constance Mallinson

Badwater Basin in Death Valley, the lowest point in the continental US, is flat, empty, surrounded by desolate, desiccated mountains, and yet the near blinding whiteness of the valley floor symbolizes and enlarges upon the traditional ground zero for the artist—the vacant white studio wall. Or as Jean Baudrillard described the desert, it is the place of “superficial neutrality”, a “challenge to meaning and profundity.” Here on May Day this year Thai American multi-disciplinary artist Nuttaphol Ma began a 6 day, 138.3 mile documented performance/journey to the trailhead of Mt. Whitney—the highest point in the U.S.– carrying a body-sized lightweight handmade “boat” over his head. As recipient of the 2011 Feitelson Arts Fellowship, he has created a site-specific installation based on a prophetic dream and a lyric from the Sam Cooke song, A Change is Gonna Come at Barnsdall’s Los Angeles Municipal Gallery. Centered primarily on a two channel video of the walk shot by artist Victoria Tao, one video captures Ma walking on the highway away from the camera, the other depicts him walking towards it. The shoulder transported boat suggests a long and arduous sea voyage or the nomadic tent carrying life of Mongol tribespeople. Cars speed by intermittently and perilously close as the background scenery morphs from desert to foothills, to alpine forest. Perhaps the most arresting moment of the journey, however, is the sudden swift appearance of two fighter jets on maneuvers from China Lake Naval Base. They aggressively swoop low and loud from the sky, contrasting to the simple, rythmic naturalness of Ma’s footsteps, imposing their arrogant technology on the sublime ancient landscape. Because we never see Ma’s face or expression for it is concealed by the boat, because he continues walking in the presence of such naked power, the walk appears less like Ma’s ego driven personal struggle, but rather a gesture in communion with historic marches and heroic treks. By the time we see him reaching the portal to Mt. Whitney and the land boat is finally put down, there is a recollection of Gandhi’s march from Ahmedabad to coastal village of Dandi where he produced salt in protest against the British imposed salt tax, Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights marches, the universal immigrant seeking a better life against the restrictions of borders, threats of war and natural disasters.

As with his previous pieces like The Ruins of Daedalus’ Labyrinth seen at Pasadena’s Armory space in January 2011, Ma’s pieces are not easily categorized but are a kind of ecological mix encompassing sculpture, performance, video, and installation all inextricably bound with his current and past life, his dreams, spirituality,  objects from mass culture/everyday life, and diverse sociopolitical, anthropological concerns. At Barnsdall, the two Born by the River videos are projected onto suspended diaphanous fabric walls, the “building blocks” of which are based on measurements taken from intervals in the gallery’s columns, and sewn from discarded fabric packaging collected from Crate and Barrel where he is a fulltime employee. The sewing takes place in Ma’s Chinatown “sweatshop” studio he describes as “a laboratory to translate critical thoughts” – a site for examining cultural phenomena, patterns, attitudes. Here in solidarity with the rich history of immigrant labor, he carefully joined the bags, stamping the rows of muslin rectangles with the dates of completion; the visible stitches seem to reiterate every step of the journey. The meticulously shaped and seamed sacks now create an unforetold relationship with their new space where they assume new life and connectedness with the city. In fact, Ma stated, “Everything is a semi-colon” with every object repurposed and continuously recycled in subsequent work and challenges the western notion of the discreet finished, museum-ready artwork. Adjacent to one wall atop a small tower of found plywood disks discarded from an art student’s project is a galvanized bucket with an attached poem by Ma. It holds measured hardware store paint sticks wound with skeins of “yarn” fabricated from the plastic shopping bags sewn and stretched over the bamboo frame and removed from the vessel he carried in the current video before it was burned at journey’s end. Before the bags formed the boat sides, they had been crocheted into a large hanging “fabric”. The bags also await their reincarnation into a future installation. Part of the haunting, evocative soundtrack for the video is taken from a skipping, repeating section on an old record of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony interspersed with Tao’s violin compositions. The last symphony Tchaikovsky wrote before his suicide, the Pathetique is not an end for Tchaikovsky or this outmoded LP but is joined in a never ending chorus of consummate, melancholic beauty. The fabric bags made by anonymous Indian workers and almost discarded by the corporate store have become a commemorative wall underscoring the practices of our consumer culture willfully oblivious of the backbreaking work of factory slaves. Symbolically connecting the present with the past, a bell that is heard in the video soundtrack that has been used in earlier installations such as In the Red, a 2009 exhibition at Claremont Graduate Gallery in which Ma constructed his family’s original dwelling from  floors of handmade pallets and  suspended “walls”  constructed from Chinese restaurant place mats recalling the ones used in the family restaurant when they were new arrivals to Los Angeles.  In the center of the “house” sat a bowl over a power socket containing the bell ready to fill the space with its reverberations. This same bell is struck at the outset of Ma’s walk so that its vibrations would break and renew the space near the site where Chinese migrants toiled in the late 1800’s to clear way for the road used for the 20 mule team to transport borax across a rugged region called the Devil’s Golf Course.

Aside from the Buddhist reflection underlying Ma’s practice—universal love and compassion, divesting oneself of the ego-centered life and attachments to permanence or outcome (often embodied in contemporary western art), the exchange of love for pain and suffering in working out negative karma, concepts of rebirth, listening to dreams, “right” behavior and awareness to promote liberation and freedom to name just a few tenets—his work shares characteristics with a number of contemporary artists and trends in critical ideas. This work has its roots in the Fluxus Movement of the 1960’s when arch proponent Guy Debord espoused experimental participatory art events in order to disrupt and break the hold of capitalism. French curator and theoretician Nicholas Bourriaud has more recently specified a tendency he calls “Relational Aesthetics” in which artists work ”within the gaps of capitalism” in order to transgress traditional notions of property and ownership and to promote “a culture of activity to counteract market induced passivity.” Further for Bourriaud, “artistic activity is a game whose forms, patterns, and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts; it is not an immutable essence.” Art then operates in the realm of human interactions, not as an “assertion of private symbolic space” but as a challenge to the hierarchies entrenched in corporatism or the state and the underlying violence of globalism. Whether Rirkrit Tiravanija who hands out free soup and curry to audiences, Gabriel Orozco who slung a hammock at MOMA, or Jens Hanning who broadcast humorous stories in Turkish to disenfranchised immigrants in Copenhagen, a number of contemporary artists are fomenting tiny revolutions that take place in the face of giant superstructures, creating micro-communities and models of sociability. Their practices undermine art as commerce, opting instead to put forth ideas about art that Bourriaud describes as “a state of encounter” and a denial of “the existence of any specific ‘place of art’ in favor of a forever unfinished discursiveness …the production of gestures wins out over the production of material things.” Similarly for Ma, “the doing part of the art is like making a meal, just a process.”

This kind of approach, then, necessitates downplaying artisanal craft and the usual process of exchange. For “relational” artists, if there could even be a “goal” it is to unbind the artwork, expanding its territories exponentially from pure visual pleasure, virtuosity, and limited historical readings such as “Modernism” and “Postmodernism” to integrate and interact freely with social, political, and cultural environments. Why would fine artists want to seek this position? Notwithstanding the contradictions and ironies of celebrity that accrue to artists like Tiravanija, few within the contemporary art/culture industries would deny that art has lost much of its transgressive shock value and that artists who continue to be motivated by models of alienation with hollow , spectacle driven work do so primarily as marketing strategies for financial gain. Critics like Suzi Gablik have argued that this constitutes a kind of endgame in which the avant garde epater la bourgeoisie is decadently rehashed in the hopes that that paradigm can continue to lead to fame and riches. She believes the world is in such a state of crisis that artists can use their talents and venues to promote and emphasize healing, reconciliation, and understanding by any means at their disposal without losing art’s sense of inventiveness, playful engagement, complexity, or suggestiveness. Or as Ted Purves explained in his book “What We Want is Free”, artists can examine what benefits they might bring to society through acts of generosity, exchange, and democracy. The audience becomes much more of a crucial player, a collaborator, again subverting the traditional nature and status of aesthetic endeavors.

When I first became acquainted with Ma in 2007 he told me of a performance where he carried dirt filled pillowcases labeled “Made in Pakistan”, purchased at Walmart, up and down a mountain near Los Angeles. Bringing into focus labor practices that support First World consumerism, the piece is unlikely to stop Americans from supporting exploitive labor in their buying habits, but addressed levels of awareness that can be transmitted by small individual acts. On a more ambitious scale, Ma’s next piece will involve a reconstruction of his grandfather’s home in China, packing the components in shipping containers, and if possible, residing in the containers as they leave the San Pedro docks to be eventually installed on site in China. As in Born by the River which both refers to the dream sequence that “birthed” the artwork and the never ending currents of water on the globe that carry people, give life and also take it away, the river will now figuratively flow into the Pacific to not only allow Ma to reenact ancient trips, but also begin anew. Ma’s studio will morph from a small Chinatown sweatshop to a crammed crate, suggesting that the studio is no longer a specialized isolated place to produce art, but involves a continuum of spaces, locations, and configurations. Quoting the 16^th century Japanese poet Basho who wrote, “And the journey itself is home” Ma could have also remarked, “And my studio is never the same but also a journey.”

Please click to enlarge and for artwork details.

Rem Koolhaas’ CRONOCAOS at New Museum, Lower East Side, Manhattan
by Rita Valencia

Architecture is monstrous in the way in which each choice leads to the reduction of possibility.
—Rem Koolhaas

May 2011: New York City is at its greige gritty best. It is springtime and the promise of a rain is unfulfilled as storm clouds scutter uselessly across a blue sky.  In the lower East Side, where the New Museum now occupies its splendid SANAA designed building of stacked white boxes, the word CRONOCAOS is lettered in white Helvetica Medium on a chrome yellow awning on the museum’s homely neighbor, the site of a former wholesale business. The Helvetica poses as a kind of institutional graffiti, jaunty and cool in a “made ya look” way. The signage of the defunct business is still readable: “7 floors of Restaurant and Kitchen Equipment” in tasteless but functional sans serif. A large banner printed on vinyl is stretched across the windows above the awning with 4-color images of different pieces of food storage and display furniture. The names of these items are inscrutable to the uninitiated. “GVRB, GLDO, GRSD,” read captions below the images of shelving units that seem to float on sky blue backgrounds. A tagger’s mark has defaced the upper section of one of the banners, advertising a different sort of product for a different market. Art citizens might be proud to have wrested more real estate from low rent commerce. Koolhaas has something to say about that.

 

Inside, the floor plan of the show gives equal time to the vestiges of the previous occupancy. The floor surface is worn and creaky. A big reception counter still stands at the back of the space. Plaques and certificates declaring the integrity and skill of the deceased business owner hang on the wall beside the exhibition posters. A giant orange floor pillow sits glowing in the sun by the window facing the street. The Koolhaas exhibit, in disarmingly plain and direct fashion, guides the viewer along a path marked by white arrows on the floor, past hanging placards sequentially numbered and jam-packed with text. There’s an undeniable frisson that arises from the juxtaposition of the defunct commercial zone and the deliberate cultural zone.

CRONOCAOS is an essay/installation/manifesto, first presented at the 2010 Venice Biennale, in which Rem Koolhaas takes on the concept and practice of Historic Preservation, the darling of NGOs and city planners. This has been a surprisingly unexamined concept. It is inevitable that any architectural practice must confront a past that lives in structures guarded largely by the twin gargoyles of philistinism and committee-think. CRONOCAOS presents an impressive collection of hundreds of case studies and reports on recent developments/destructions. Bringing them together in one place exposes deep flaws in the current system of “preservation”.

Koolhaas builds his case on a large number of facts, many of them astonishing and absurd. To name a few: 12% of the world is inaccessible to new building or design due to its status as historically significant; the moon landing site has been been given U.S. Historic Preservation status; there is actually an acronym, IUJ, created by an international historic preservation NGO, for “Insignificant Universal Junk.” Koolhaas declares that in the countryside foreign farm workers have replaced farmers, a further demonstration of the replacement of the authentic with the ersatz, the enframing of the old natural-traditional order by a new techno-economic one. The story unfolds of preservation criteria that are vague, subjective and politically determined. Given this analysis, standard items of bourgeois cultural agreement such as “Postwar Architecture is Ugly and Deserves to Die,” don’t hold up. Koolhaas poses, “What Deserves Eternal Life?” and in so doing warns that the combination of a weak public sector and a decision-making bureaucracy keen on “preemptive mediocrity” will lead to the disappearance of architecture as a social project and the promotion of bland and faceless standardization which has no relevance to actual local human needs or cultural vicissitudes.

Koolhaas makes a compelling and lively case for rethinking the whole process by which structures or neighborhoods are selected for demolition or preservation. He has been ruminating on this idea for several years (see his article in Future Anterior, 2004) and the insights at the heart of his thesis are sound.  Koolhaas states  “…preservation is not the enemy of modernity but actually one of its inventions. That makes perfect sense because clearly the whole idea of modernization raises either latently or overtly the issue of what to keep.” Koolhaas’ archi-philosophical system addresses many specific cases. An entire wall of the exhibition is devoted to a make-it-yourself book: neatly arranged padded papers printed with pictures and text describing various restoration/renovation projects OMA (Koolhaas’ firm) has spearheaded, along with examples of  “progress” that has gone to seed. You can tear off as many sheets from the pads as you wish to create your own free catalog of the show. The catalog quickly becomes a disorganized mess but reminiscent of a McLuhan screed. He speaks of the status quo’s aversion to the “non-planned city”, using Lagos, Nigeria as an example, which arises from the exigencies of its residents and the broken social contracts of its governments. For Beijing he proposes a stripe-like  plan in which new and old are evenly divided within the city limits. This formalized and nondiscriminatory plan would ensure a more equalized distribution of old and new, where “historically significant” status is not conferred using sentimental, political, or crassly economic criteria.

What if, he asks archly, all architecture over 25-years-old were scrapped? The concept of abandoning one set of worn and uninterrogated values–authenticity, beauty, significance–for a more arbitrary and categorical system is one way of showing how a truly “democratic” system exposes the subliminal issues of preservation, which declares itself to be innately virtuous but in practice has become aesthetically corrupt, standardizing and, worse, boring.

Koolhaas’ argument builds up a head of steam that isn’t diminished by its lapses of fact or logical leaps–but they are worth mentioning. He cites the demolition of Berlin’s Palast der Republik as an example of the desire to symbolically destroy the last vestiges of communism. Although undoubtedly there were politics at play, he ignores the fact that this was a troubled building site where asbestos contamination played a big role in the decision-making. In calling into question the repurposing of decommissioned factories and warehouses as art galleries, he asks, “What is the effect on art if it has to animate larger and larger spaces that were dimensioned for industry, not for the intimate confrontation with art?” In fact, the confrontation with art has never been exclusively “intimate”, and art has a long history of animating enormous spaces from Greek temples to Gothic cathedrals, to the vast outdoors. To name just a few here in the US, MassMOCA, the Geffen Contemporary, and Dia Beacon show that these formerly industrial spaces can be exciting and effective venues where art seems to thrive. Koolhaas careens forward along this line of thought, asking, and “Is it a coincidence that these spaces have engendered an Apocalyptic Sublime?” “And how different is it from Hollywood?” By way of illustration, posted on the far wall as a sort of  “off the deep end” kind of zone, are works by fine artists alongside analogous works by their counterparts in the Hollywood culture industry; renditions of the monstrous, the teetering, the devastated and the dangerously large in nuclear glowing colors, or burnt and ashen grays. These juxtapositions are mostly fatuous and add little to the more rational aspects of the exhibition’s discourse. The cross pollination of iconography between the cultural realms brings up issues that are complicated and beyond the scope of Koolhaas’ manifesto. Still, it seems like the Romantic period’s Apocalyptic Sublime is due for reconsideration after the nuclear meltdowns, tsunamis, monster hurricanes, wildfires, and killer tornadoes of the past decade. If nature continues to have its way, Koolhaas will be assured of a long and prosperous future despite preservationists.

Even if the smell of uber-sophisticated marketing pitch under laces the Koolhaas manifesto, there is always the charming threat of iconoclasm to the Koolhaas mystique. If the concept of architecture were a building with columns, Koolhaas would have had the columns removed and replaced by invisible spheres of energy. The roof would become a forest, and the basement would be excavated until it was open to the sky. Any architecture worth attention is at heart a utopian proposition not subject to the laws of gravity, but subjecting the laws of gravity to its own unique vision.

[the author wishes to thank J. R. Bob Dobb for the title]

Further Specimens from the Flowerbank World,
Tom Wudl, L.A. Louver Gallery, June 2 through July 9 2011

Immensities and  Infinities: Further Specimens from the Flowerbank World is the artist Tom Wudl’s continuing investigation of the Avatamasaka Sutra (or Flower Ornament Sutra), a revered scripture of Huayan Buddhism. Earlier works by Wudl inspired by the sutra were first exhibited at L.A. Louver in Specimens from the Flowerbank World, November-December 2009. Read here the Artforum review by Annie Buckley.

There was a time when the world was small and man knew his place in it….Today, space is expanding beyond the reaches of the imagination….we inhabit immensities and infinities that also inhabit us. I have attempted to make visible to the eye with brush and paint that which is still sacred to us and which by other minds and methods has been reconciled, encoded and stored in numbers and equations. —Tom Wudl

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The Isfahan Bible, A Historical Meditation
by Aram Yardumian

Of Isfahan in the mid-seventeenth century, French traveler Jean Chardin wrote, “It is the grandest and the most beautiful town in the whole of the east” and its surrounding countryside “incomparable for its beauty and fertility.” Situated on the central Iranian Plain, at the vertex of trade routes, Chardin found the city a bustling hub of commerce and education as populous as London, with broad tree-edged avenues and lanes as agreeable as those in Paris (though they predated Haussmann’s renovation program by two hundred years). The walls of its mosques were lined with porphyry and marble, the chambers of its palaces filled with mirrors, clocks, and cabinets of the finest craftsmanship, and its coffers with so much fine art that they lay in disintegrating piles. Pietro della Valle called Isfahan the New Rome. Merchants from India, Georgia, and the Ottoman lands chose to build huge palaces with exquisite gardens in Isfahan both for its own entrepreneurial scope, and its position at the strategic center of caravan trade in silk and silver.

Standing as it did at the center of the Early Modern commercial world, Isfahan was referred to by Persian poets and statesmen as “nesf-e jahan”, meaning the place from which one could see each half of the world.[1] For this reason Abbas the Great, Shah of Safavid Persia, made it his capital in 1598, some seventy-five years before Chardin’s visit. At the time, the Shah faced the same geopolitical challenge the Assyrian Empire faced some 800 years before in the same place: how to secure the open northwestern frontier against the enemy, in this case the Ottomans. In 1604, he took a step toward a solution: scorch the earth and resettle all those who lived in the frontier. Among the uprooted were some 100,000 Armenians from Julfa, a city now in the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic. Those who survived the journey were settled in suburb of Isfahan called New Julfa and there were permitted a near complete religious freedom their descendents still enjoy today.

The Shah’s goals were, as Kathryn Babayan notes, a centralized Safavid state and absolute power, which would come with a tightened grip on the Eurasian silk trade. The resettlement program was therefore doubly calculating on the part of the Shah, for the Armenians brought with them their vast network of trade contacts and letters of credit, which indeed would increase the wealth and power of the city, and the empire. Though the caravan was their preferred mode of transportation east and west, the Armenians were also involved in maritime enterprise in the Indian Ocean theater and the Far East, and extended their influence from Iberia to the Moluccas. Their routes, as Ina McCabe has noted, did not follow the Silk Road of popular imagination; instead they carved their own ways through Anatolia to the Mediterranean, and north through Russia by way of the Volga, to the Baltic and from there to Amsterdam. As well, it seems, they travelled by sea from Bandar-e ‘Abbas to India, Manila and beyond. Of their presence in India Braudel asked, “What would Madras have been without the Armenians?”

The significance of this time and place to history and cultural contact rests on two facts. First, Armenians were and remain Orthodox Christian and were received and trusted as such while doing business among Protestants and even Catholics in Europe, whereas Muslim traders were both subject to prejudicial mistrust and hidebound by the restrictions of their Shari’at. Second, by virtue of their chamelionism, the Armenians gained timely and perhaps unique access to new European technologies such as clocks and the printing press, and introduced them to the East. Conversely, they seem to have been instrumental in the coincidental increase of Oriental fashions in Europe. Armenian church leaders recognized the value of movable type and campaigned to introduce it to their communities. Armenian traders established a printing press in New Julfa in 1636 (the first in the Middle East with one possible exception, and  the seventh, by my count, in all of Asia), and by the end of the seventeenth century in Venice, Marseilles, Lvov, Astrakhan, Leipzig, Amsterdam, and elsewhere. The early impacts of the printing press on nations outside Europe is not yet fully understood, but if we may draw on McLuhan, the invention of alphabets, and later the practice of printing with movable type (and much later, electronic media) is to create new social categories: they may, through a principle McLuhan calls “visual quantification”, engender nationalistic, religious, economic and other formations; they may either crystallize a language and with it a people, as it did with Armenian and Arabic, or it may send a language into remission, as it did with Latin. With the Armenian printing press came lexicons, Friday Books, psalmodies, and of course Bibles. Each of these editions had the effect of binding together literate individuals who may never meet one another, into a people.

All of this brings us to an appreciation of an obscure Armenian illuminated bible produced in this enclave in Persia, at the dawn of printed bibles. One of thousands of Armenian illuminated leaves which survive in various collections, the Isfahan Bible is part of the Getty Museum’s collection, and was recently on display as part of the exhibition Stories to Watch: Narrative in Medieval Manuscripts. Though there are several Armenian bibles from Isfahan, the Isfahan Bible in the Getty is a curiosity among them. Written and illuminated in 1637-1638, its existence is probably owed to Khachatur Kesaratsi, the prelate of New Julfa, who would have commissioned it. Very little is known of the artists, whose names were Malnazar and Aghap’ir, though it is likely they came from a monastery in old Julfa along with the rest of the immigrants.

The artists decorated their bible with scenes from the Old and New Testaments such as Creation, and portraits of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Many leaves are adorned with peacocks, roosters, and many unidentifiable plants and animals. Also included is a set of New Testament canon tables which helps a reader to cross-reference a story in more than one of the Gospels. A portrait of Eusebius of Caesarea, who developed the canon tables in the 300s appears in tandem with them. This manuscript was evidently inspired another, similar bible from 1623 (sometimes the date 1629 is given) by Hakob of Constantinople, as commissioned by Khoja Khachik in 1607. This prototype is in the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon (Inv. Nr. A 152), where I have yet to see them.

Fol. 13 of the Isfahan Bible illustrates the Creation, as described in Genesis 1-3. In the top left corner of the page we see God in what appears to be his Holy City, surrounded by four beasts of the Apocalypse. It is worth noting the absence of the nimbus or halo over God in all four of the panels in which he appears. Although the Isfahan Bible post-dates the High Renaissance, at which time use of haloes began to decline, the Byzantine and Eastern Christian communities, in maintained their own traditions, continued to depict them. Beside God’s feet is the inscription in Armenian, “By grace of the Lord the earth was filled, and by the word of the Lord the heavens were made”. Here begineth the Six Days of Creation, which are encapsulated in plaited medallions, each depicting the events of one day. The subsequent episodes, depicted in three horizontal sections, are followed from beneath God’s throne, first from left to right: the creation of Adam and Eve, below which is the temptation of Eve by the serpent and the offering the fruit to Adam, which is followed right to left. Then, again from left to right is depicted the expulsion of the couple from the gates of Eden (in this case, a walled city).

The artists’ prerogative to fit all of Genesis 1-3 on a single leaf may have been due only to material limitations, but it remains only one of several unique or highly unusual aspects of this manuscript and its prototype. Among the questions its existence raised for me as I stood in the Getty and stared at it: from whence its influences?—for all its apparent plainness it seems to incorporate motifs and elements neither Byzantine, nor Persian, nor Armenian. How does the art and architecture of the Eastern Christian churches ‘fit in’ to the broader discourse of art history and cultural production? [2] Why did the printing press not multiply in Persia and the Arab world as it did in Europe, the New World, and the Raj?[3]

And what role did the beauty and wealth of Isfahan itself play in the format and tone of this illuminated book?—Isfahan, the center of the world, though far enough from the Armenian imagination. In what sense, then, does the Isfahan Bible record the circumstances of its production? For the fertility of the Safavid capital at this time we may thank the immense self-interest of the Shah, whose goal it was to profit from the presence of Armenians in his capital. Yet in a move most Stalinesque he ordered thousands of the non-merchant class deportees, along with Georgian and Circassian captives, be ghulamized—that is, their ethnic, tribal, and religious ties to their home and family and identity be dissolved entirely. The Isfahan Bible is a vestige not only of life at the fork of east and west, ancient and modern, at the cusp of the printing press and the beginning of its slow and indelible change of the entire world, but also of fantastic change among Caucasians in the Safavid Empire, of peoples trying to hold onto something to which they would never return, in a new home where their freedoms were their prison.

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[1] This Persian phrase, which rhymes with Isfahan, is often understood to mean that in Isfahan one can see half of all that is in the world. The Arabic root word “nasf” implies bisection into equal divisions. Therefore, a less faithful but more accurate translation might be “Isfahan is the center of the world”.

[2] It turns out a thorough and comparative scholarly treatment of the transmission of medieval illumination techniques between regions is lacking; the best available is to be found in Christopher de Hamel’s A History of Illuminated Manuscripts.

[3] The first printed book in Persian did not appear until 1830. Perhaps this delay was due to opposition from Muslim legal scholars and even the scribes, who opposed movable type for their various reasons. Even as late as the early twentieth century, Persian books were by and large printed in India.

Paul McCarthy, Wallace Shawn and a Mountain I Know
by Guy Zimmerman

There are beefy guard rails now on the road up Mount Lemmon, outside Tucson. When I was a boy the drive was more of an adventure, the steep canyons littered with the skeletal remains of cars that had lost control on the tight curves. Often my grandfather would have been at the wheel, bent hands steering the pickup or, at other times, the big Cadillac he’d earned with hard labor and quick wits. I’d watch as the topography outside the windows shifted from saguaro and mesquite to pine forest, and the big rock formations came and went, spinning majestically as the road took us around and upwards toward Summer Haven near the summit. Today my father’s wife Elena is driving and my father, nearing ninety now himself, sits in back telling familiar stories about the mountain, tales of heartbreak and family conflict – an American saga rich in betrayals, regrets and petty intrigue. And the mountain itself has changed, the tall forests reduced to ash and bare rock by the fire that raged here six years back, its fury stoked by global warming and the lowering of the water table. I’ve only been here a few times since the 1970s, and the country itself has changed along with the topography.

The covert victories of art are everywhere. Near Bern, Switzerland in the summer of 2008, a gust of wind swept down from the North across the grounds at the Paul Klee Center and lifted the massive inflatable dog turd into the air. As big as a house, the turd, entitled Complex Shit by its creator, the international art star Paul McCarthy, eventually came to rest, in a shower of sparks, on nearby power lines. At RedCat some months back McCarthy’s work was celebrated by Wunderbaum, a young Dutch theater company, in a piece called Looking for Paul. I didn’t see the production, but people were laughing as they told me about it. From what I gather, Looking for Paul begins as a tirade against the misanthropic obscenity of a McCarthy sculpture called Santa Claus in Rotterdam, a thirty foot high bronze replica of a kitchy Santa figurine holding, in one hand, a Christmas bell and, in the other, an immense butt plug. The Wonderbaum piece then turns 180 degrees and becomes a raunchy bacchanal, a homage to McCarthy involving lots of ketchup, fake feces and simulated copulation. Wonderbaum, in other words, devotes an evening to a collective exploration of the mysteries of McCarthy’s appeal – how an artist so obviously venal and obscene, so flagrantly corrupt in his intentions, has come to seem also so vital and essential, restorative even.

The history of art is full of surprises, but so, of course, is everything else. The meaning of what we experience is never fixed in the way we expect it to be. Our ability to arrive at a clear and definite interpretation of what happened yesterday is forever compromised by what happens today, and also by what will happen tomorrow and all the days after. This is true on a personal level and it’s also true on a historical scale, and we tend to shrink from this alarming tsunami of “groundlessness,” and to cling to ways of seeing the world even when they no longer serve us. As we wind our way up the mountain, Elena, a working psychologist, is telling me about recent insights into the nature of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that suggest a neurological basis for this “stuckness.” The issue is the frontal lobe, our big cortexes packed with banks of neurons that hold the imprint of traumas long after other mammals would have shivered vigorously and gotten back to the demands of the moment. Tattooed on our gray matter, the tigers that leap at us continue to do so long after we have escaped immediate danger. Listening to Elena talk, I ponder how the curves of the road she navigates were set long ago by my grandfather and his compadres as they pursued their very American dreams. The particular vistas reeling past the car windows, I realize, were also set by these asphalt encodings, vistas that now provide a backdrop for the impressions of tourists and, occasionally, for the memories of traumatized grandchildren like myself.

We fool ourselves into thinking that the settling of the wild West really settled anything. The “nature” our forefathers were intent on taming has simply receded into a new kind of wilderness that rises up within us and in our collective future. Paul McCarthy leads us to the edge of that dark and so does the playwright Wallace Shawn, another transgressive shaman-clown energizing the cultural scene. Both McCarthy and Shawn plunder the rich vault of fairy tales, combining that plangent, Disneyfied imagery with dank and lurid sexuality. A gnomic figure, Shawn’s aesthetic MO is to locate darker threads in the zeitgeist and dramatize them in such a way that they can no longer be ignored. Shawn’s recent play Grasses of a Thousand Colors is a violent and erotic dream along the lines of Bataille’s infamous Story of the Eye. Basing his text on a 17^th century French fairy tale, Shawn concocts an apocalyptic saga of a scientist who has altered the food chain in vague and destabilizing ways that allow for cannibalism on a mass scale. The sexual escapades of this chatty sociopath are perverse and alarming, but no more so than the cocktail of lies served up 24-7 by Rupert Murdoch’s minions. Compared to Fox News, the violent and raucous obscenity of McCarthy and Shawn is refreshing in its candor, and often deeply restorative, offering engagement with our shadow material. And the timeless historicity these artists lift so shamelessly from the fairy tales our children read implicitly raises the question of how exactly we got here.

– 2 –

I consider myself one of the lucky white Americans in that my ancestry does not include slave holders or Indian killers, at least so far as I know. But I’ve read my grandfather’s memoirs, his accounts of a boyhood spent on a sequence of farms in Kansas at the beginning of the century, and violence lights up the edges of the story. His father, August, worked his sons hard. The continual, incessant physical labor – scything, threshing, baling, plowing, planting, herding and tending and canning and all the rest – came with physical abuse as well, discipline enforced with the aid of a bullwhip. In their teens, my grandfather and a few of his brothers confronted the old man about this violence in a primal scene worthy of Sigmund Freud. Striking back, August sold the farm out from under them and rode off with the furniture for Mexico, where he bought a ranch and prospered for a time. When the Mexican Revolution ended in 1920, August relocated to Northern California and died at the age of 105 after slipping on a cow pat in his barn and breaking his pelvis, a death sentence back in those days. My father met him there as a boy. A family trip North, a brief sojourn from his own boyhood of continual labor, soft only in comparison to what had been the norm in the preceding generation. Thrift and hard labor, a focused assault on the future in order to heal the wounds of the past – isn’t this what fuels the American engine of continual growth that is blighting the planet?

Complex Shit

In the carnival freak show of contemporary American life, I believe our shamen take the form of clown-artists like McCarthy and Shawn. Theirs is an art of violent juxtapositions and discordances, one that threatens to spill over into our “normal” lives and destabilize our false sense of solidity. I think of the painters Phillip Guston and Francis Bacon here. I think of R Crumb and William Burroughs. Donald Barthelme certainly also. I think of the playwright Irene Fornes and of the novelist Jane Bowles too. I think of Franz Kafka most of all – his gift for creating living dreams that only accrue relevance with the passing decades. These are artists of the “middle way,” artists who keep one foot firmly planted in the wretchedness of knowing we are completely in thrall to the worst things that happen to us, the childhood traumas stored in our cortexes; the other in the joy of being radically free in the embodied present, in touch with a limitless grace. How is it possible we could embody so completely both of these contradictory qualities at once? Such mysteries are made to be addressed by shamen or clowns…or a hybrid of both.

Driving through Summer Haven at the summit of Mt. Lemmon is painful. For me, these scenic vistas are littered with Proustian triggers that explode in great arcs of emotional energy above the darkened landscapes of my own shadow land. Here’s the rock formation called “Punch and Judy” where the tourists stop to snap photos, the scene for me of an old humiliation. Here’s Inspiration Rock, where I fled once in the grip of despair. Here’s the site of my grandfather’s old sawmill where I was almost bitten by a Black Mountain rattlesnake hiding beside the sawdust dump. It’s a helicopter pad now, maintained by the ever-vigilant fire department. The sense of being shackled to the past, the mechanistic cause and effect of emotional neglect leading to dysfunction, makes me long for the openness of dreams and art. I am drawn to work that reconnect us to the limitless freedom that is also our birthright whether we use it or not. The hillsides are blackened now, denuded by that catastrophic blaze, but lit up already with the green shoots of new growth emerging through the ash.

As I say, the world has changed along with the mountain. I have, in fact, spent my adult life witnessing a long crime. In thrall to the delusions of Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss and the to blind imperatives of the Capital markets, the right wing stooges in the Supreme Court and Congress are working over time to reduce the American middle class to the penury of those in India and China. And yet, capital, always fluid, has fewer new frontiers today and there are signs that labor is beginning – despite everything – to recognize itself on a transnational scale. Something is shifting, perhaps, in the root paradigms of modernity, even as we collide now with very unforgiving limits in terms of basic resources. And while I agree with those who believe that a tipping point is being reached, I don’t think we can assume the familiar model of revolutions since the 18th century will still hold. Our time perhaps resembles the 17th century in that regard, and it might be good time to re-imagine our sense of our possible futures, and to break the hold of the “dictatorship of no alternatives” that shackles us internally. We turn to transgressive artists like Shawn and McCarthy for an honest mirror in which to track the pornography that is taking place around us. Clowns are uninhibited in dangerous ways, but they can teach us about the tangle of the heart, and they pull off in art a trick we are all called upon to perform in life. The past must be confronted before we are released into our freedom. The violence inflicted on others long ago must be experienced fully before love can be discovered there, and then, perhaps, all becomes possible once more.

“Inside the Artist’s Studio” is an on-going series exploring issues in contemporary art through direct encounters with the artists themselves. Please click on the artwork to enlarge for all paintings particulars.

The Monochrome Reconsidered
By Constance Mallinson

Harmony Hammond and I had just turned onto the interstate leading out of Santa Fe to Galisteo where she maintains her home and studio when traffic assumed the sluggish pace caused by rubbernecking motorists. As if from a slow moving escalator, we then had our chance to gaze at the limp body of a smallish black dog in the center of the left lane, its curvy plush form like a thick brushstroke dolloped on a gleaming linen canvas. A larger mongrel dog frantically circled its companion’s corpse, its terrified eyes searching to comprehend the sudden surrounding walls of steel Hummers and SUV’s like tanks on a battlefield. A woman was trying to coax the frightened dog somewhere. Speeding off to a destination could not compete with the riveting life and death scenario playing out across the lanes. Fear of suffering and mortality always connects us to one another and for a sublime moment that little black dead dog owned an entire modern superhighway.

Recovering our speed and speech we were soon cruising through the sweeping juniper studded New Mexico landscape. One began to comprehend the obsession of early Modernist painters and photographers in this region with cloud theatrics, its multi-colored mountains, and the myriad shades of grey green sage punctuated by the bold geometric shapes of adobe architecture. Like strapping tape pulled across a corrugated package, the long roads hugged the brown earth recently dampened by snow only to disappear over sudden edges. Although Hammond was acclaimed as a pioneer feminist, lesbian artist for her groundbreaking, radical, assimilations of women’s handicrafts into fine art, it was difficult to imagine that the experience of this dramatic landscape wouldn’t profoundly influence her perception; it was also just as difficult to see how a landscape tradition that had by now become clichéd in the way it represented the American West would have anything to do with feminist politics and the kind of “monochromatic” painting she currently produces.

After a quick dusk tour of the hamlet of Galisteo, we settled into Hammond’s converted and expanded 19^thcentury adobe sheep barn, now beautifully appointed in southwest artifacts, contemporary art, rows of bookshelves, and a large kitchen. By the time we got into the studio it was already dark but a bright full New Mexico winter moon shining intermittingly through the clouds facilitated our way out. The studio was large, gallery-like, and well lit with about ten recent paintings of various dimensions presenting an exhibition unto itself. Without a close encounter, the paintings appeared to be monochromatic slabs or sections of marble, earth, and burnt expanses of plywood neatly arranged as in a display of archeological specimens. On the floor in the center of room, surrounded by piles of hardware store tarps and painting supplies were several paintings in progress. Swaths of loose  burnt orange  brushwork were being partially buried and interwoven with methodically applied new layers, like geological processes that slowly entomb, then eventually crack and shift to unconcealed substrata. A painting process so involved with its own record of patiently building surface while inviting so many rich references was an inquiry unto itself into the history and nature of monochromality.

 

The purging of pictorial imagery and painterliness  that had begun with Kazimir Malevich’s stark black and white-on-white squares of 1913-18 to be followed by Ad Reinhardt’s reductive, all black, nearly imperceptible geometries of the late 50’s began to free art “from the burden of the object” in favor of “pure feeling.”  That non-objectivism resonated with younger artists like Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland whose “hard-edged” paintings further questioned communicating subjective content abstractly. Eschewing “The Abstract Sublime” of the vast often single hued canvases of Barnett Newman described by Robert Rosenblum as a “perilous” surrendering to spatial infinity, and full of primeval Creation-like mystery, the emphasis in the new “post painterly” painting was instead on “opticality”. Countering  tactility stressed the sculptural and endangered painting’s truth to itself. Eliminating any extravisual literary or symbolic meaning drove painting toward a pure, irreducible essence. The all white paintings of Robert Ryman, often consisting of near identical thick strokes of pigment arranged in orderly rows on square canvases were self-referential, renouncing any meaning beyond the paint and materials themselves.

As the era dictated for any art form, painting in the early 70’s was almost exclusively the domain of men. “Serious “ painting was epic-scaled, often near monochromatic, and resolutely declared by Clement Greenberg to be free of the expressive gesture, overt narrative, and personal emotion that had characterized post-war American abstraction. In the late 60’s feminism invigorated personal narrative and post-minimalist attitudes reinserted handmade process into painting and sculpture. Artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns countered strict Greenbergian orthodoxies or the “theatrical” prohibitions of prominent critic Michael Fried by making paintings that were both sculptural objects and pictures rife with metaphor, narrative, and symbolism. At that time, Hammond was exploring cultural representations of the gendered body and breaking down hierarchies between art and craft through objects like the braided Floorpieces that mimicked lowly domestic braided rag rugs, and whose centralized circular forms were synchronous with the vaginal imagery that defined much early feminist art like Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party. Desiring to reclaim abstraction as female, she revisited and identified with domestic crafts such as weaving, basketry, and pottery as ancient sources of abstraction. The Floorpieces in their melding of rag rugs and modernist abstraction had also broken down hierarchies in artmaking, waging a dialogue and creating parity with arch-minimalists like Carl Andre whose gridded metal floor works seemed to embody a hyper-masculinist, industrial aesthetic. The braid, moreover, became an invocation of radical queer identity with the three strands—gender, sexuality, and art—interwoven among other strands such as history and identity. Paintings on old blankets from this era incorporated strips of found fabric and referenced “primitive” art while other early abstract paintings –precursors of the more recent monochromes–resembled close-ups of the surfaces of woven baskets or dark herringbone patterns.

Given her history of transgressing the proper boundaries of painting and sculpture, of her indebtedness to denigrated craft as well as an embrace of queer politics, the paintings presently hanging in the studio– although they share a superficial affinity with the monochromes of Reinhardt, Newman, Stella, and Ryman — couldn’t be more dramatically different. The minute slits or fissures that reveal the thinner often brighter underpainting  resulting  from  the spaces between laboriously laid down, countless layers of thick impastoed paint  mimic cuts in the skin, slashes in the earth, or the ripply crevasses of tree bark that lead deep into stories of the tree’s surroundings. In a predominantly black piece like Dark is Taken, the bright crimson underpainting  recalls subcutaneous blood, surging molten lava beneath a dark clotting flow, or smoldering embers under charred remains. Scarring, imperfections, pores, sagging and aging flesh are also suggested by the lumpy, crusty, but highly patina-ed paint. The paint seeps and flows imperfectly over the edges like a stretched membrane.  In this series she has also embedded criss-crossing strips of canvas tarp borders studded with grommets in the clotted pigment, imparting a sense of binding, bandaging, wrapping, swathing and corseting. Whether the predominant coloration is creamy white or black, the association is of paint as skin, the barrier between inside and out. Whereas male Abstract Expressionists like Newman and Mark Rothko were concerned with extending their metaphorical reach into infinitude or to the brink of a terrifying abyss where the human subject dissolves—Hammond intimately refocuses us on our bodies and via these gashes analogizes the exposure of deeply felt emotional and physical pain. Newman’s light- filled “zips” in the painting surface that signified mystical transcendence have been defiantly transformed to open wounds; the bands of color that stood erect in the centers of his large expanses of bold primary color, in Hammond have transmogrified into a web of interwoven scraps with multiple holes. In Newman and Rothko the canvas opened wide and was nearly emptied out, reputedly representing a transfiguration from  the physical body to the metaphysical, albeit accompanied by an undefinable anxiety over the great void or perhaps fear of apocalyptic annihilation. Hammond refills the vacant space with matter that matters. Muffle, a large iridescent, tarry black canvas appears as a wet, moldy dungeon door, its ancient nailed metal straps almost merging with the surface from being repeatedly overpainted. It denies entry into the enormity of pure space and grounds us—imprisons us– in the physical present where we confront the immensity, as Bachelard put it, “residing within ourselves”.

Even as in Sienna, terra-cotta colored like the New Mexico earth, where the strips also evoke aerial views of the roads paving the landscape, the painting becomes a metaphor of the earth as the skin of our collective body. As in many of the other works, it exists as a site of pain and attempted healing connoted by the tying, suturing, and joining. The droopy paint encrusted ties objectify the trope of the paint drip, further underscoring Hammond’s insistence on concrete experience in tandem with pictorial illusion and existential musing. Sienna subverts Western landscape myths predicated on the maintenance of certain boundless spatial illusions that promoted  endless wide open spaces ripe for rape, plunder, exploitation, mutilation. Hers is a sublime of difference, an alternative vision in which such narratives are challenged and we now encounter the” other”. As queer, and as a female artist, she has experienced adversity on the great masculine Modernist highway. Her interpretation, practice and reclamation of monochromatic painting is one of interrogating and conversing with that history, down to resisting the clean precise edges, cool geometry, and the bleak, unreal perfections with their putative universality. Instead she has us wallow in the muck, dig in and explore, peer through at ourselves to contemplate and bear witness to the bleeding, wounded body of the earth and individual.

Harmony Hammond’s next exhibition will be at Dwight Hackett Projects in Santa Fe this fall.

Wedded to the World, A Continuous Encoding
by Guy Zimmerman

I’ve often felt myself to be a kind of visitor to the land of the present. Not a tourist, please – more like a kind of honored guest. Yes, an honored guest en route from the respected kingdom of the past toward the glittering land of the future, and it’s like I’m bearing important documents of state. As such, I expect certain amenities which the squalid land of the present often has a difficult time providing. I take a breath and check my watch – I won’t be staying long.

My daughter Eliza took a whack at this way of thinking before she was six months old. We were in the back garden and the first cat Eliza ever saw came across the ivy beneath the rubber tree and jumped up onto the cinder block wall and paused, looking back at us. Eliza’s plump, infant legs went rigid with elation. The cat raised a leg to clean its paw with a pink tongue. It had a sleek black and white tail that flicked and curled. And when the cat leapt down on the other side of the wall, Eliza turned to me, eyes wide, to see if I too had witnessed the miracle. Something was conveyed to me in that look of hers, a vividness I had lost touch with. I was struck by the fact that similar revelations parade past us every moment, and only very occasionally, in the presence of infants or works of art perhaps, do we manage to notice them. Where does that capacity go, and what does it mean to regain it?

I’ve written previously about Jeffrey Hawkins and his effort to illuminate the structure of the brain. According to Hawkins, Eliza’s experience of that first cat would mark an episode of neural encoding. The imprint of the experience would get instantly filed away inside the vast branching Xanadu of Eliza’s cortex. From then on, each time Eliza would encounter a cat, her brain would call up the previous encounter and add nuance from there. Hawkins, like the people who mostly make such discoveries, is driven by pragmatic aims that demand a tight focus on technical accuracy, but the underlying reality is rich in poetics. The “invariant” capacity of mind indicates how completely we are wedded to the world. What is the mind composed of, after all? The vast catalogue of references that encrust our awareness is made up of nothing but world, and there must be some basic capacity too, beneath all those barnacles of trauma and joy. That mind that is nothing-but-world runs back through our memories to the beginning of time, a luminous ribbon glittering with diamonds.

I remember the shift that took place when language arrived in Eliza’s mind. The words came in fast, falling across her experience like a steel mesh. Language gave her power – enhanced her ability to navigate the social sphere – but words also amplified the alienating effect described above. The neural encodings of experiences like the cat were now linked to symbols, and the symbols were themselves embedded in grammatical structures and then aligned into narratives that are linked to values – a huge Rube Goldberg contraption that spins and rattles beneath a sign marked “Civilization.” In dreams we loosen the sutures of meaning, of language. A cat becomes itself once more, reconnects to a not-knowing that invites immediacy and vividness – presence.

A year or so after the first cat, came a second encounter in the garden. I finished a phone call and saw Eliza pointing to the ground where the body of a dead honey bee lay curled in the sun. Eliza turned to me with an anguished, puzzled look and then back again to the dead bee, and I could tell the knowledge of mortality had found its way into her awareness and was now casting its shadow there. Whether we are born on a battlefield or in a lush palace, this knowledge inevitably finds us, and in that shock we tend to gather what we know into a kind of armor that removes us even further from the present. We flee faster now down the tracks of language toward consoling narratives and, too often, into the impregnable fortresses of ideologies and fundamentalist belief. We develop a stupendous capacity for compartmentalizing, such that grotesque crimes like 9-11, Abu Graib and Guantanamo become possible. I find myself curious about the terror that fuels this process. If one could access that original seed of feeling, experience that sense of abandonment and isolation in full awareness, would it release us? Is this perhaps what artists seek to do over the course of their life’s work?

When I reached this point in the post my plan was to take up a story by Kafka that haunts me. This story, The Country Doctor, is a vivid dream that conveys us to the edge of that terrain in ourselves. But I was diverted from this intention by my encounter, at the UCLA Hillel in Westwood, with the visual artist and poet Junko Chodos, and by an exhibit of her paintings and mixed media work there. Junko and I had never met before, and I’m new to her work. I was immediately struck, however, by how completely the show illustrated the way art springs from that initial blow I describe above. Junko, as it happens, was raised on a battlefield – Tokyo during the fire bombing at the end of World War Two. Each night, as fire rained down from the black sky, she took shelter beneath ground and wondered what dying might be like. This threat from above remained oddly abstract, Junko told me, until one day she wandered into her uncle’s butcher shop and saw, hanging from a rack overhead, a decapitated hen fountaining blood. The sight stopped her heart. She developed a phobia of birds and a mania for making art. The subject matter of her art, winged forms shaped from tangled, bio-morphic machine parts dripping blood and shadows – convey a decades’ long working-through of somatic trauma gradually releasing into awareness.

Deeply felt, this search of Junko’s has produced meaningful insights about our nature as complexes of reactive patterns – “soft machines” in Burroughs’ phrase – but also something more. Junko and her husband, Rafael Chodos, gave me an hardbound book they have made together called ”Centripetal Art.“ Impressive and weighty and festooned with reproductions of her work, the book explores Junko’s life and work and illuminates her insights into the relationship of art to other forms of empirical inquiry, including the sciences. At home, I open the book at random to a passage in which Junko describes the critical importance of a passage out of Rilke. And I smile because this exact passage from the 1^st Duino Elegy long ago played a crucial role in my own engagement with creative work.

“…For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror we can just barely endure,
and we admire it so because it calmly disdains
to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.”

While Rilke often seems a bit stentorian to me now, I think of Nabokov’s comment about Shakespeare and how his “purple patches” were to be “rolled around in” with gratitude.

According to Hawkins, “invariant memory” is why the brain is such an effective tool with which to navigate a complex and ever shifting-world. This kind of info-processing shorthand weds us to pattern-based behavior in which we are absent from what is actually taking place. And yet for me the great mystery is why we aren’t completely determined, locked in by this continuous neural encoding. What accounts for the vividness of the cat? An underlying capacity for awareness still needs to be explained, and it’s not clear if this capacity can ever be measured or quantified. In Junko Chodos’s work I detect this awareness at work, conveying insights that can help us make peace with our mortal situation. In the end, isn’t it a separation from the vividness of Eliza’s cat that is born and that ages, frays with illness and dies? If so, is the death of a separation really something to fear? As the sages love to tell us, confronting terror can bring us home to a present that is not just a place we are forced to visit, but rather all that we have.