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.

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.

“Inside the Artist’s Studio” is an-ongoing series exploring issues  on contemporary art through direct encounters with the artists themselves. Please click on the image to enlarge and for all artwork details.

A Radical Arcadia
By Constance Mallinson

“There have always been two kinds of arcadia: shaggy and smooth; dark and light; a place of bucolic leisure and a place of primitive panic”, Simon Schama tells us in Landscape and Memory, one arcadia being “a dark grove of desire, but also a labyrinth of madness and death”. He further describes certain arcadias as purposefully and importantly untamed: “turf, gorse, heather, and timber, trees, shrubs and brushwood” of the heaths outside of 19^th century London were a cherished gift to the city dwellers—landscapes of urban imagination that answered certain needs for wildness, even unruliness. In much the same way, one might perceive the unkempt oak filled, scrubby canyons in the vicinity of Los Angeles as critical counterpoint to overdevelopment, neat watered lawns, and perfect patches of park.

In a series entitled Dusk which debuted this winter at Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica, photographer Brian Forrest explores in low light the beauty and terror contained in the undeveloped wooded landscapes that surround Los Angeles where he frequently hikes—places named for saints, surveyors or landowners like Santa Ynez, Sullivan, and Decker Canyons, or locations like Los Liones that conjure plentiful mountain lions in earlier times and still creep out hikers at twilight. Forrest displays a number of the large format lightjet digital prints in his sunny Streamline Moderne studio, the brightness being crucial to actually seeing the photographs: the near-monochrome, light sucking pictures appear initially as wall mounted slabs of finely veined black granite or intricate abstract pencil or charcoal drawings that when closely examined, the inky, velvety blacks yield delicate webs of infinite, subtly contrasting grey tones. The wide range in tones results partially from his use of color printing paper with black and white negatives. Only slowly do the bosks, dense foliage, grassy undergrowth, leafy detritus, exposed roots, masses of tangled branches, and dim patches of sky define the photographs as landscapes. There are no orienting horizon lines but in some like Sullivan Canyon #19, looming diagonals at the top tell us we are beneath a mountain. In other photographs, a small space opens beneath the trees to define a path or a streambed.  Often only a faint light beyond the embrangled foreground suggests a way out of the chaos. The overall effect is dreamlike and painterly, like a reverse impressionism in which instead of the scenes being broken into thousands of illuminating dots, we strain to see shapes and outlines emerge from the chiaroscuro before they sink into the night. It is photography driven to the very edge of perception and Forrest immerses us fully within this barely discernible, foreboding, destabilizing, but visually enchanting world. Caught between pleasure and horror—whether to linger in the thickets enjoying the abstract patterns, lacey intertwining lines, and nuanced lightplay  or to extricate ourselves from engulfment and darkness—such images are rife with metaphors: thickets of the mind, death, hope, passage, salvation.

Apart from its deliberate contrasts to conventional, picturesque landscape photography, the Dusk Series with its subject of the untamed forest at the outskirts of civilization is inextricably linked to historical dialogues and current debates about the role of wildness to civilization. Schama explains that in Germany “the forest primeval was the site of tribal self assertion against the Roman Empire of stone and law. In England the greenwood was the place where the king disported his power in the royal hunt yet redressed the injustices of his officers.” In his brilliant study Forests, the Shadow of Civilization, Robert Pogue Harrison details how Western institutions were formed in opposition to the forests. With particular contemporary relevance, he describes the ecological roots of Rome’s destiny, how the destruction of its forests for growing grain irreparably eroded the land and eventually resulted in its ruination. Despite the relentless felling of trees, however, the forest through the centuries importantly remained the site of pagan “alternative and outcast wisdom”, sanctuary of ecstatic Christian mystics, refuge of outlaws and lovers, the “places of weird enchantment” a’ la the Brothers Grimm, the inspiration for poets, philosophers and painters to probe darkness and obscurity, wonder and revelation. So as Romanticism with its emphasis on nature as palliative to and curative of civilization’s ills captivated 19^th century thought, Thoreau testified to the reality checking woods of Walden where he wrote “Not until we have lost the world do we begin to find ourselves.”  Harrison: …”Thoreau remains most radically American..In America freedom lies just beyond the bounds of the institutional order—a mile from any neighbor in the adjacent woods of Walden…those who would discover America must reenact the original gesture of departure…”  Similarly, in the 20^th Century, the forest was central to Heidegger’s philosophy; for him, forest clearings were a metaphor for allowing light into darkness. His forest was a world outside of and differing from urbanization and technology and presented a place to examine one’s conscience.  The essential task was to find one’’s way through this metaphorical forest. Many of these ancient legends, myths and Romantic musings continue to resonate in our cultural imagination, and the outsider status of the forest realm is an important symbolic antidote to overwhelming institutional order.

Art history, of course, has provided a wide range of forest imagery, from the Barbizon School and its Forests of Fontainbleau to the 19^th Century Hudson River Painters’ renditions of primeval nature. One painting in particular, Thomas Moran’s  Slave Hunt, Dismal Swamp (1862), however, bears  considering in relation to Forrest’s photographs.  In the Moran, a fleeing slave couple is wading through a swamp completely surrounded and dwarfed by huge trees and vines, seeking refuge like hunted animals. Escape seems dangerous and life imperiling  as the late afternoon sun wanes. Engaging the viewer’s emotions in this terrifying scene by relying on associations with a sublime natural experience, Moran created one of the most powerful, empathetic, anti-slavery icons of the Civil War period.

What Forrest’s photographs might offer as Moran did, is a locus to rediscover and revisit a radical American resistance to contemporary threats. In these photographs, spatial and object distinctions are imprecise, suspended in a zone between darkness and light with a feeling of timelessness. Submerged in this disordered” outlaw” or “outside” space, true to notions of the sublime experience of being lost or overwhelmed, we begin to reconnect with our senses, bodies, minds, and imaginations – as opposed to the dull responses  barely registered to mind numbing daily life resulting from the excesses of modern technological/hyper capitalistic society. If Globalism, for example, is understood as thriving only when humans are estranged from their individuality, nature, disparate cultures, anxieties, and unique spiritual beliefs, Forrest’s Arcadia of “primitive panic” can be restorative of authenticity in the way that the great forest legends and artworks promoted. In our age, the meditations on self preservation and actualization his photographs invite may help us realize the gravity of Thoreau’s words: “I did not wish to live what was not life.”

   

“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.

New Representations of the Natural
A six part serial essay and online exhibition focused on the contemporary depiction of landscape in the painting, photographic and sculptural arts.

Introduction and Additional Exhibition Artists:
Urbanature, An Introduction, Merion Estes, Roland Reiss and Elizabeth Bryant, Don Suggs and Karen Carson, Ross Rudel and Pierre Picot, Coleen Sterritt and Constance Mallinson

Essays by Constance Mallinson

LINDA STARK

Large urban parks are where most city dwellers go to “experience nature”, but Linda Stark’s series of Black Widow paintings inspired by the presence of black widows around her urban studio, reveal a more intimate, near erotic, encounter with the natural world. The spider’s trademark red hourglass shape has been enlarged, centrally placed, and rendered in red paint as though embossed, then surrounded with a textured skin-like black background. The shape has multiple references, she explains, “ from a shapely woman in a red dress to the ancient pagan symbol of balance and the equinox” but an identification of the feminine with nature is axiomatic. Stark’s painting method is laborious, as she drips, builds up and layers paint incrementally over an extended time, very much like natural geological processes. That simulation of natural processes using paint and the tiny flora and fauna collected from her immediate vicinity was the impetus for her Amber Rotations. The resinous varnishes in painting mediums seemed much like the tree sap that when fossilized, creates amber. Mixing various hued oil paints with medium, pouring layer after layer while embedding tiny plant forms and insects in the layers, eventually produced a painted equivalent of actual amber. Here, thick ribbons of paint radiate from a central “nipple” created from twisting and heaping the ends of the paint strips which at the other ends, congeal into fine points extending over several edges of the canvas. A sense of the both the micro and macro cosmic prevails, with references to sunrays and celestial formations as well as a spider’s perfectly designed web for ensnaring prey. Nature as substance is fully present so that rather than mere images of nature, subject and object are mutually constitutive undermining entrenched nature/culture dualities. Recalling John Fowles’ statement  that “Art and nature are siblings”, hers is a celebration and alignment of the very human act of making objects—that which comprises a civilization—with the smallest creatures around us. Eschewing the sort of labeling, naming and scientific classification that has always determined the use potential of every being in the natural environment , discarding that deemed worthless to the human scheme, Stark recognizes the most minute forms of life in our ecosystem. Her refusal to see nature as disconnected and alienated from our existence transgresses the grand progressive narratives of modernism and advocates a more inclusive path.

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NANCY EVANS

A pronounced anthropomorphism is found in Nancy Evans’ diminutive fantastical bronze figures cast from assemblages of found natural objects such as twigs, leaves, seed heads, dried flowers. Evans alludes to the boundary defying enmeshment of the human with the non-human, but her art envisions reassessing and transforming our relationship to nature by recalling the spiritual and cultural connections to nature of non-western religious and folk art. The intimate scale and finely executed details of her plant materials she molds from are in full evidence: “soft” shapes fold and flop, curve, collapse, and intertwine as they would naturally. Doll-like, totemic, they are loosely based on iconic goddess figures and are as reminiscent of fertility figures and ancient ritualistic pieces as they are of modernist organic abstractionists and postmodernists like Nancy Graves. Metaphorical of transplanting ideas and philosophies, the plants she uses for her molds come from her semi-tropical Venice neighborhood and suggest the way non-natives are nomadic and have settled into the area. Evans is convinced that “we are in a disintegrating culture where the specificity of the sign is manipulated and obscured” resulting in her desire to “find the archaic in her work and to explore the kind of residual psychic content of preverbal experiences to which Freud ascribes the religious or spiritual feeling of merging or oneness with the universe.” Tapping into our collective past when handmade objects were used purposefully, the sculptures equally apprehend our contemporary need to re-imagine nature, to be re-enchanted in ways that our mass commodity culture dismisses. In pieces like Tar Baby, a phallic pod with tiny arms, legs, and a face poised on a stylized flower, it is as much an evocation of the sacred lingum as it is a reminder of the ubiquitous use of animals in American folk tales or the existential ruminating caterpillar in Alice and Wonderland. Resolutely untechnological, anti-utopian and imaginative, Evans refers to a time when human made objects expressed a synergy with the natural world, and attempted to enact a relationship with it, recovering as Simon Schama describes “the veins of myth and memory that lie beneath the surface.”

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Upcoming in Urbanature, works by Ross Rudel and Pierre Picot

New Representations of the Natural
A six part serial essay and online exhibition focused on the contemporary depiction of landscape in the painting, photographic and sculptural arts.

Introduction and Additional Exhibition Artists:
Urbanature, An Introduction, Merion Estes, Roland Reiss and Elizabeth Bryant, Linda Stark and Nancy Evans, Ross Rudel and Pierre Picot, Coleen Sterritt and Constance Mallinson

Essays by Constance Mallinson

DON SUGGS

The breadth and complexity of Don Suggs’ studio work was apparent in his 2007 survey exhibition entitled One Man Group Show, a showcasing of paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs and combinations thereof, from as early as 1969 to the present. Although generalizing Suggs’ interests is difficult, what became clear about his forty year practice was his overarching inquiry into the historical presumptions and proscribed effects of diverse media and genres—whether a landscape, a portrait, a “factual photograph”, an abstraction , or crafted object. In the paintings which range from the wildly gestural to the photorealist to the geometrically abstract, the “subject” has often been landscape, not plein air impressions, but nature as a human construction. As early as 1984 his monumental, charcoal-drawn forest landscape executed over pages of a poetry manuscript was an amalgam of literary and artistic approaches of depiction, both implicated in translating or mediating the experience of being out in nature. By the late 80’s, that investigation had extended to luscious painterly reinterpretations of painted landscape icons and a series of hyperrealist picturesque mountainscapes overlaid with crisp, minimalistic geometric configurations with coloration derived from the landscape. Simultaneously disrupting the touristic postcard view and the historically determined, pre-fab appreciation nature, as well as deflating the supposed sublimity of Modernist abstraction, the Proprietary Views challenged the history of the observed landscape and became the basis for the recent Six Point Landscapes seen here. Working from memory and detailed notational studies of actual landscapes and using an elaborate painting “machine” with mathematical precision, Suggs creates multi-hued, concentric ringed abstractions that distill in a kind of order, all the elements in the actual landscapes, from skies to geologic formations to people. Superseding the original landscape spectacles, is the condensation into an intense visual experience of spellbinding, reverberating optical effects. Metaphors for the colonization of direct natural experience by art, media, and technology–its acculturation–the paintings seem to embody not just contemporary virtual reality aspirations but the estrangement from nature tragically solidified by an entire landscape picture tradition.

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KAREN CARSON

High keyed intensity and hyper- theatricality characterize the paintings of Karen Carson who has been involved with both urban and rural landscape imagery for the past twenty years. She has enlisted a range of nostalgic and kitsch references, from her Lightbox series alluding to the landscapes of commercial illuminated “animated” beer signs, to a Banner series of cityscapes painted on vinyl fabric mimicking real estate signage, followed by epic scaled panoramic firestorm paintings inspired by the fires that devastated Yellowstone Park. Borrowing from American advertising illustration, stylized Native American type motifs with which she creates elaborate borders, and clichés like fire breathing dragons and the fierce, contorted wild horses of cowboy art, Carson has used stereotypes to expose how nature is the product of fixed ideologies and a system of signifiers. Emotionally charged sublime Romantic- era landscape painting, the mythology of the American West, folk tales, indigenous American cultures, mass entertainment and consumer driven advertising have thus defined several centuries’ worth of nature perception. Because the landscape for Carson is always framed in terms of a familiar stereotype, the implication is that a pure experience of nature is impossible in media saturated culture; nature imagery is a sign of everything from macho manhood to authentic vacations to free n’ easy living. Continuing to interrogate western landscape tropes, the most recent paintings shown here depict groups of animated Arthur Murray style dancers on wide plains or beaches silhouetted, ambiguously, by dramatic firework displays or electrically charged skies. The standardized glowing Western sunset, mainstays of postcards and Arizona Highways, now seems to meet the apocalypse, possibly the sublime of global warming. With its intimation of “while Rome burns”, the wild abandon and unabated partying of these swingers is an unreserved analogy aimed at politicians and consumers who continue to fiddle until the end of time.

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Upcoming in Urbanature, works by Linda Stark and Nancy Evans

New Representations of the Natural
A six part serial essay and online exhibition focused on the contemporary depiction of landscape in the painting, photographic and sculptural arts.

Introduction and Additional Exhibition Artists:
Urbanature, An Introduction, Don Suggs and Karen Carson, Linda Stark and Nancy Evans, Ross Rudel and Pierre Picot, Coleen Sterritt and Constance Mallinson

Essays by Constance Mallinson

MERION ESTES

Merion Estes’ paintings of the last decade have explored the intersection of nature and culture through multi-layered collages of vibrant printed fabrics, found photographs, and expressive painting techniques in a “maximal visual overload.” Overlaying machine replicated natural images cut from fabrics and cheap art obtained from trips to Los Angeles’ schmatta district or Chinatown, computer downloads, and old magazines, with a vast painting repertoire of drips, brushstrokes, and vibrant swathes of color as well as her own lexicon of nature derived images, Estes creates a fast paced dialogue between the personal and authentic, the mass produced and artificial, the cultural and the organic. Passages in her work appear to mimic the energy and discursive processes of nature itself, suggesting a primal, organic basis to human activity. Her work sets into high tension traditional and exotic notions of beauty deemed pleasurable, desirable, playful, and erotic, against opposing forces embodied by violent paint strokes and storms of drips evoking fires, oil and toxic chemical spills, cataclysmic upheavals. Through her multiple references to natural life from the sea to the air, Estes evokes a sublime sense of endangered and fragile beauty that extends globally. Although beauty has been perceived as problematically entwined with objectification, possession, or fears of corrupting seduction, all strenuously to be avoided in postmodern art, Estes’ positioning of natural beauty as vulnerable to power, artificiality, degradation and darkness tells us that the problem lies not in finding beauty in nature but suggesting that all is well with it. Beauty becomes for Estes what Ella Shohat describes as “a new kind of popular, convulsive, rebellious beauty: one that dares to reveal the grotesquery of the powerful and the latent beauty of the vulgar.” Its liberation from standard expectations for the beautiful demands that we take notice to consider uncomfortable or unsettling issues. Her paintings are cautionary tales in an increasingly dystopian world, complex meditations on preservation and loss in our era of environmental instability.

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ROLAND REISS

Although not necessarily central to his studio practice, environmental issues have always been of concern for Roland Reiss who has had an extremely long and varied career as a sculptor and painter. Perhaps best known for his plexi-encased miniature tableaus from the 60’s and 70’s referred to as “Philosophical Homilies” “Dancing Lessons” and “Morality Plays” and his later abstract paintings incorporating hi-tech materials, Reiss has now turned to crisply rendered representational painting.  From his downtown Los Angeles loft one can take in near 360 degree panoramic views of the I-5, a huge truck depot, and the expansive Los Angeles skyline, a sprawling, seemingly endless landscape, but a view Reiss approaches not as a literal spectacle, but with an eye to the polycentricity of the experience. All the compositions are centrally and iconically located in fields of raw, soft brown linen which imparts a ground of “naturalness” to the paintings in contra-distinction to and in tension with, the unnatural appearance of much of the imagery. The effect is an oversized bouquet of architectonic forms, 16^th century Dutch still life, and stylized Modernist inspired geometric and organic shapes. Tiny skyscrapers, airplanes, the starry cosmos, floating grids, map-like patches, brightly chromed butterflies, are intricately intertwined with larger florals and foliage that seem to derive their brilliant hues from plastic and photographic models. Like a number of the artists presented in Urbanature, Reiss refers to a number of the defining narratives of Western culture, ranging from a colonialism that introduced exotic species to Europe, a utopian Modernist formalism that aspired to a universal language of form, to a postmodernism that encourages endless hybridization and cross pollination. In skillfully interweaving description with abstraction, the natural with the artificial, and historical pictorial modes with a more contemporary “post-natural” aesthetic, Reiss suggests that contemporary existence is a dense and layered mixture of influences and sensations. Whether his foregrounding of Birds of Paradise, Himalayan blue poppies and Asiatic lilies is symbolic of the vibrant imported cultural mix comprising vast urban areas. An assertion that authentic experiences of nature are difficult to achieve in an increasingly modified environment, or  a meditation on concrete versus natural beauty,  Reiss attests to the many facets surrounding  debates on how we currently define “natural”.

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ELIZABETH BRYANT

While contemporary photographers like Edward Byrtynsky and Robert Adams have infused a journalistic approach to documenting land development and commercial exploitation with the aesthetic concerns of art photography, Elizabeth Bryant uses the conventions found in traditional still life painting and a range of landscape motifs to explore what she describes as “strong correspondence between nature, representations of nature, and imagination.” Her past work  involved photographs of complex tableaus incorporating discarded student ceramics containing elaborate plant arrangements viewed variously in front of or through cut outs in scenic posters all set within actual sites. The playful trompe l’oeil spatial collaging with its conflicting integration of straightforward photography of places, camouflaged found photographs , natural and constructed artifacts, challenged assumptions about the ability of photography to faithfully and believably capture reality, exposing the fictions and manipulations at play in determining our views of nature. Growing out of the unique Los Angeles mix of nature and culture where one can cultivate food, hike in the mountains, and partake of cultural offerings, the recent photographs reflect on the complex global food chain through their references to endangered species, farming, hunting, fishing, cooking and eating. Monteverde Toad with Coal Lumps depicts a bright yellow banana cluster shaped vessel surrounded with lovely summer plums, an antique fruit knife, and a few charred lumps atop a decaying log, most likely in Bryant’s verdant backyard. Towering over this arrangement is an oversized poster of the noted fluorescent orange Central American toad. Like its luxuriant historical antecedents, this still life celebrates “nature’s bounty” but by its multiple signifiers of wealth, global resource consumption, cultural habits, bloom and decay, becomes an allegory for the present. For the world at this moment is precariously poised between providing food, space, energy, and quality of life for its billions of inhabitants. Will it be on the back of a tiny toad?

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Upcoming in Urbanature, works by Don Suggs and Karen Carson

New Representations of the Natural
A six part serial essay and online exhibition focused on the contemporary depiction of landscape in the painting, photographic and sculptural arts.

Exhibition Artists Include:
Merion Estes, Roland Reiss, and Elizabeth Bryant, Don Suggs and Karen Carson, Linda Stark and Nancy Evans, Ross Rudel and Pierre Picot, Coleen Sterritt and Constance Mallinson

by Constance Mallinson

Landscape painting and photography have always been, as Malcolm Andrews termed it,  “the barometer of anxieties over the balance of power between nature and culture.” A landscape is a mediated view of nature, one that has been aesthetically processed, a product of human control over wildness and natural chaos. This pictorial approach always maintains an uneven proportion of humans to non-human so that the fantasy of an undefiled, natural playground or respite, and unbounded resources remains intact. As W.J.T. Mitchell explains, in Landscape and Power, that mode of representation has been compromised and is “now part of a repertory of kitsch, endlessly reproduced in amateur painting, postcards, packaged tours, and prefabricated emotions.” Lusciously painted picturesque scenery, glossy Sierra Club calendars, seductive travel and advertising media featuring unspoiled natural environments, continue, however, to be the apotheosis of expressing our relationship to the land.

The framed landscape instills the individual viewer with a sense of mastery and control, from the high Renaissance’s rational and ordered structuring of space to the Romantic obsession with nature as path to spiritual and moral improvement. Representations of nature have always been analogous to advances in knowledge and perception while simultaneously promoting an estrangement from nature itself, a negation that has contributed to centuries’ long land and ecosystem destruction. Much of the landscape imagery we value, has its roots in Rousseau, Hobbes, and Thoreau with their notions that humans live more ethically and purely amidst nature, while Kantian theories of the sublime propelled the Romantics to find emotional solace, spiritual uplift and renewal upon gazing awe inspiring scenery. Less fixed in our psyches is the idea that such gorgeous landscape painting and photography have been tethered to progressive narratives that fueled imperialistic motivations from the colonial era through Manifest Destiny’s North American expansion to the present. Icons of abundance, nineteenth century photographers’ images of the American West made Easterners comfortable with and tantalized by the conquest and subsequent commercial development and domestication of the American frontier. Their legacy is today’s oil, nuclear, and chemical company advertising  depicting “reclamation” or respectful “coexistence” with the natural environment, or automotive corporations’ promotion of SUV’s in advertisements displaying the big polluters serenely situated among redwood forests or mountain streams. Assuming a false harmony with the natural, these kinds of familiar representations encourage deforestation, development, and mineral extraction by reinforcing historical perceptions and optimistic narratives of progress. Such idealized fictions succeed as they always have in making the viewer comforted by a view of nature we would like to believe will always exist – a symbolic liberation and escape from all the overpopulation, waste, mutilation, deterioration and obliteration being perpetrated globally. Landscape representation is one of the battlegrounds on which the continuing decline of the environment is being fought and the paradigm of the beautiful pristine landscape that has concealed that representation’s involvement in the process is being challenged and reappraised by a number of contemporary artists.

Though we are hardwired to the visual pleasures of natural beauty (everyone has somewhere in their possession seductive landscape scenery to revel in like pornography), environmental scientists, writers and activists like Rachael Carlson, Aldo Leopold, Paul Shepherd, Carolyn Merchant, Paul Taylor, and Rebecca Solnit, have alerted us to the imperilment of the natural world thus making the conventions and stereotypes of such scenery harder to maintain as “real” or “natural.” Solnit has equated landscape scenery with women’s bodies as a “pleasure ground acted upon” and has advocated for a nature based art that recognizes “landscape not as scenery but as spaces and systems we inhabit, systems our lives depend upon…..the circumference of possibility, the conditions of survival…. one whose focus is on relationships.”

Unlike popular older icons of landscape art like Ansel Adams who lived and worked for long stretches in the Sierras or the Romantics who drew and painted in situ, the most compelling artists have disassociated themselves from that Romantic paradigm, the Edenic sense of an open and free relationship to space, where humans are separated from but spiritually and materially nourished by their contact with eternal natural abundance. Like the painted  female nude, the traditional framed landscape with its scopic control, upheld the possessive gaze onto the other, emphasizing a dualistic worldview that enforced our alienation from  anything natural. By purging landscape of narrative, allegory and myth, as nature imagists like Adams or Eliot Porter had succeeded in doing in the past century, even a “modern” landscape had been characterized as progressing more and more towards pure nature. Paradoxically, the unattachment to recognizable myth or narrative, has enabled nostalgic fantasies and a certain dishonesty about the human impact on nature to flourish. More recently, however, postmodern landscape theory has determined the “pure nature” representation  as a cultural production, and exposed its hidden and illusionary ideologies.

With the knowledge that nature can no longer be neutral territory and that its conventions serve so many commercial interests, the eleven artists presented here explore through photography, sculpture and painting the re-assessment and redefinition of the natural at the beginning of the 21^st century, asking what we require of art in an era of environmental decay. Because older models are implicated in and aligned with nature commodification, they eschew picturesque romantic pastoralism or Arcadian retreats and derive their images of the natural from a deep involvement with their urban environments and the culture itself.  They realize nature cannot be viewed in isolation from human wants, needs, activities, and technologies, insisting on the fact that humans, even in sprawling urban areas like Los Angeles, are connected to and included in a vast ecosystem. They observe it within, not apart. As J.B. Jackson stated as early as 1960: “We are all victims, whether we know it or not, of a way of thinking that sets the city apart from any other kind of environment. At the root of this confusion is one single error: the error which proclaims that nature is something outside of us, something green which we can, perhaps enjoy as a spectacle or examine for future exploitation, but which is only distantly related to us. Nature, thus defined, belongs in the country and is all but totally excluded from the city; hence the oft-repeated outcry that urban man is alienated from it…..nature is actually omnipresent in the city: in the city’s climate, topography, and vegetation that we are in fact surrounded by an impalpable or invisible landscape of spaces and color and light and sound and movement and temperature, in the city no less than in the country.”

The role of the Urbanature artist in transforming our perceptions of nature in the 21^st Century is making the conflicting assumptions, anxieties and tensions over the intersections of urbanity and nature. Reconciling the contradictions between natural idealism and the technological progressivism that cities embody is among the primary challenges of these urban artists. An interrogation of the formative historical tropes embodied in art forms that have driven and “culturized” ideas of the natural and progress is always present in their work, often in the form of quotation or appropriation. Although none see themselves as overt environmental activists, these artists embody a feminist “personal is political” ethic, transposing politics from public power arenas to the area of transformative aesthetic experience promoting prolonged meditations on a human/nature interface. The essentialism implied by using the word “nature” as sufficient in describing the infinite variety and quality of organic life is unavoidable; the word itself reinforces hierarchies and totalizing narratives that these artists are critiquing and debating. It is offset by the diversity of approaches and their engagement of fresh, inventive, visual strategies. No discourse or imagery dominates, but all embrace the importance of locality. Influenced by the city as a mutating montage of scenery, constantly and instantly shifting from the constructed, social and cultural to the natural via the car and ubiquitous images of every conceivable subject, their art maintains a neo-Baroque sense of instability, evolution, reformation and realignment. Their work ranges from botanical studies/collages regarding the immediate urban habitat, interpretations of the recent natural and manmade sublime, imagery depicting the interpenetration of nature and humans, or examinations of the cultural structures and methodologies by which nature has and is pictured. A sense of loss over the idealized past is understood, but a crucial insight into that history and the present environmental situation is sought.

Included in the Urbanature galleries works by  Elizabeth Bryant, Karen Carson, Merion Estes, Nancy Evans, Pierre Picot, Constance Mallinson, Roland Reiss, Ross Rudel, Linda Stark, Coleen Sterritt and Don Suggs.

Upcoming in Urbanature, works by Merion Estes, Roland Reiss, and Elizabeth Bryant

A Decade of Negative Thinking by Mira Schor,  A Book Review
by Constance Mallinson

The idea is essentially repulsive, of a society held together only by the relations and  feelings arising out of pecuniary interest.  –John Stuart Mill

In 2006  a number of notable art critics were solicited to articulate the state and purposes of contemporary art criticism in a little compendium entitled Critical Mess. If any consensus was reached in these diverse essays, it was that the practice itself is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Among the reasons put forth were the entertainment-envy of spectacle driven artworks in which exegis is superfluous, the loss of a single Modernist mainstream trajectory that demanded debate, nuanced reflection, and art historical acumen, and the ADD nature of global culture. Raphael Rubenstein, riffing on a Mira Schor quote concerning contemporary critics’ fundamental lack of understanding or grounding in what really good painting entails, partially attributes criticism’s marginality to that inability to adequately assess painting, thereby reducing any expectations of the art and dialogue surrounding it. A lack of interest in the type of conceptual and formal rigor of critics Clement Greenberg or Harold Rosenberg partially fomented by postmodern anti-elitist tendencies and hostilities toward an “insider” art world have likewise contributed to the increasing obsolescence of criticism. The single most important factor in criticism’s dispensibility, though, has been the art market itself. Huge quantities of criticism being generated by a vast art press have, according to James Elkins, been rendered meaningless in the face of an art market that now relies primarily on “buzz” to fuel prices and gallery attendance. Ultra hyped press releases and seductive glossy advertising stoke high end consumerism, while art fairs, biennials and career-cementing magazine profiles channel artists to museum exhibitions thereby maintaining investments and museum viability (as well as all the ancillary businesses of real estate, publications, transport, and gallery personnel). The market now essentially substitutes for the sustained examination of the past. As Dave Hickey, writing in the February 2009 Art in America described it: “The noisy, ongoing quarrel about ‘quality’ that raged between collectors, critics, journalists, activists, publishers, dealers, curators, and scholars once generated a fairly stable consensus of relative value among players on the field,….a non-pecuniary consensus”…“Today we have a list of auction prices.” The Darwinian, neo-liberal economy reigns in today’s artworld, in which the improperly marketed, thus unrewarded, is assigned to garage sales while art that strictly adheres to the market’s orthodoxy tends to find its way  into important collections. With his characteristic humor and insight, Hickey makes his plea for traditional criticism’s assessments of quality and states. “The invisible hand of the market is not the hand of God. Weeds spring up when you don’t mow, so mow…..to do this properly, commitments must be made. Cultural consequences must be mediated upon as if they mattered–because they do.”

While we are certainly past any lingering modernist sense that criticism has the power and authority to save civilization, A Decade of Negative Thinking, collected essays by critic and artist Mira Schor (who was not included in Critical Mess), is centered on the kind of art critical practice that fiercely and tenaciously probes what actually meets the eye and what other “artificial stimulations” or “market fundamentalisms” are propelling the work. Although not in any way intended as a comprehensive analysis of the deleterious effects of the market on the reception and perception of contemporary art in the manner of Julian Stallabrass’s brilliant Art Incorporated, statements such as “The market frowns on writing against anything,” with the press release having supplanted anything deemed as “resistant responses” position Schor as a critic who writes in opposition to the market’s colonization of our senses. Instead, she insists that we look deeply, honestly, with questioning and knowledge. Authoritatively focusing on such disconnects rampant in the artworld—from “post or anti-feminists” whose mega success has directly benefitted from its feminist antecedents, to preposterous claims in the art press about highly collected painters—Schor, writes as if criticism is a near political right. She is less bothered with the overall relevancy of criticism in a world of semi-literates and anti-intellectualism and more concerned with the essential role of criticism to confront and rectify the distortions in our sight and thinking instigated by the unquestioned logic and supremacy of the art market. Since we are at the point of knowing what things cost but having no idea what they are really worth, Schor writes because the consequences in not doing so are irresponsible to the way contemporary life is experienced and valued, and ultimately to the way history is written.

A co-founder of the journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G with Susan Bee she has been writing about gender representation and painting since the mid eighties, and in 1997 published a collection of essays through the mid-nineties entitled, Wet: On Painting, Feminism and Art Culture. Her stated aim was to “address artists who…explore the potential of critical but productive temporal counterpoint.” Given Schor’s emphasis on resistance, it’s not surprising that her critically formative years were spent at the California Institute for the Arts Feminist Art Program run primarily by pioneering feminist artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. Through her intimate diaries and letters of the early 70’s, we glimpse a 21 year old Schor wrestling with her personal idealisms and the realities of clashing with  strong, ego driven goals of impresarios like Chicago. Perspicaciously, she wrote “..after a while it annoys me to put a painting up and hear myself criticized.” Founded in the frustrating experiences of attempting to solve the challenges and cope with the irritations within the program, the crucial practice of looking honestly and deeply, trusting perception, and articulating the apparent formal and conceptual issues in addition to contextual considerations of a work of art began to evolve.

 Schor also emerged a lifelong committed feminist, but one who has constantly re-imagined, re-evaluated, and re-invigorated what a feminist art has meant and might mean now. Unlike the early 70’s when  the art market was small and male dominated, one of the main goals for feminists was assuring entry into a closed system through parity in exhibitions and the art press  With the advent of poststructuralism, however, despite the fact that a number of women had been admitted into the system of important gallery and museum shows, Schor pinpoints how poststructuralism and feminist theory driven art in their anti-essentialism again marginalized much art practice by women, especially painting. What ensued was a sacrificing of “an overt identification with feminism in order to be allowed into the art industry,” resulting in “The ism that dare not speak its name. So ironically, that initial market access, has meant that a newer generation of women artists, in order to compete, such as highly touted performance artist Vanessa Beecroft, refuse to acknowledge and are even contemptuous of, the importance of a continuing examination of the discriminatory practices of  patriarchal systems. The “condition for art market viability is precisely to abjure feminism,” Schor states, “the cost of admission into the art market and art history.” Moreover, as determined by a market that needs to render commercially palatable everything in its clutches, the soft “feminism” of Beecroft’s  naked models that “flirt dangerously close to traditionally exploitive configurations”, has just the right amount of titillation and lack of real threat to ensure an artworld triumph. Schor’s solution to the appalling lack of feminist consciousness in female artists today lies in art historical education, in preserving the legacy of early feminist artists some now invisible in the belief that only “what is seen is valuable”, and in women continuing to publicly speak up against power. As opposed to the somewhat effective anonymous blogs with their supposed freedom to express subversive views about the art establishment without jeopardizing careers, Schor argues that this is a “moment when activism and political awareness is vitally important” and needs to be carried out with enough “gravitas to function effectively in a public forum.” In addition to protesting continued forms of patriarchy– in contrast to the early years of feminist art activism when the goal was primarily to gain economic advantages through a more level access to the market–Schor reveals in a number of essays here that the power currently invested in the art market to categorically define the quality and levels of art that are publicly seen and financially supported, and to control the discourse about those objects, must be equally challenged and examined.

Schor’s mistrust of the market is most apparent in her discussions of high profile art stars like painters John Currin, and Lisa Yuskavage. They “both specialize in representations of half naked young women, a type of Victoria Secret catalogue content reformulated and rendered with old master painting high value and high finish style to give it aesthetic legitimacy.” They exemplify that in our commodity-oriented culture, representations, in particular representation of sexually alluring women, are prized for its efficiency as a tool of commodification.” Yuskavage has been purported to paint like Vermeer, as well as Bellini, Rembrandt, Degas and other more contemporary masters, a ploy that Schor describes as an important mechanism of art historical validation as part of the overall marketing process in which patrilineage, unlike matrinlineage, makes work more collectible and strategically and speedily moves the artist to art reviews and museums. Ironically though, as Schor stipulates, it is not in any claimed similarity to Vermeer that Yuskavage’s work is important but rather that her work expresses rage at how the female body has been directed at the male gaze throughout history. Yuskavage’s denial of any connection to other women artists who work to expose the male gaze, keeps her out of the market margins. John Currin, likewise painter of watermelon-sized breasted women with Breck ad flaxen hair and simpleton smiles, is sold to the viewer as borrowing his subjects and technical expertise—including the cosmetic application of varnish (“like a veneer”!) – from Northern European Renaissance masters like Cranach. Such references are there to “signify Great Painting” for marketability and not, unfortunately, Schor relates, to resist “the spectacular production of femininity as a product that warps the lives of girls and women.” Confirming the essential “good” of the market over human values is one of the hallmarks of a free market economy. That artists should so readily conform to that rationale in lieu of the (traditional) modernist requisition to overthrow the status quo, reveals the extent to which the entire culture is embedded with these notions.

 

Artists now use the same marketing techniques of branding along with visual signifiers of “the new” or the contemporary, to create sound-bite ready commodities in what Schor describes as the “trite trope, recipe art, celebrity youth art industry.” As with Yuskavage and Currin, the rules of engagement for successfully marketing art now include the proper art historical references, modernist and otherwise. Market pressures force younger artists to work quickly through these influences to create successful formulae; once financially rewarded, change is unlikely. Highly regarded MFA programs, also dominated by a market ethos, push for branding—usually of a recycled style- over “long germination and revelations arrived at through constant failure.” High speed pitching techniques are designed to procure shows then press touting the large sums of money involved in sales. Young artists have been “bred into an unquestioning acceptance” of the rules and recipes, but ultimately become the victims. Arriving at a “mark that represents personal or formal investigation” is quite challenging, compromised both by recent theories that have undermined originality, the style shopping encouraged in art schools, and the rush to marketability. Schor hilariously describes the process of being on admissions committees in which jurors must cull the best students for highly selective programs and exhibitions. Newer influences or recyclings of the “right” obsolete style will usually give an applicant higher marks than sincerity, mainly because the student appears more “engaged with current ideas and contemporary culture.” However, the forms have become so predictable and generic that Schor was able to  devise a “pull down menu” of 60 styles currently available to aspiring artists trying to “emote individuality”, including everything from painterly,  cartoonesque, primitivistic, ironic, political  or abstract. Most of the successful work produced by appropriating an artistic style or hybridizing several styles, with the art market its goal, does not in any way critically address those traditions and fails to move the language of painting forward. Ironically, despite the explosively burgeoning art market of the last twenty years with its multiplying venues, biennials, and art fairs, the result is a disappointing familiarity with the art, especially painting, geared to sales and not, perhaps more interestingly, the struggles that currently confront the globe.

 In “Blurring Richter” Schor makes a chilling case in point by examining the now cliched device of the “blur” popularized by mega-successful German artist Gerhard Richter.  Richter has always appeared  to eshew a singular signature style by his 60 years of constant formal experimentation, leading to a kind of Richter effect of a multiplicity of styles as a strategy that could be branded: every new Richter development spawns its gallery ready imitators. With an exemplary critical address of traditions, Schor takes Richter to task for the moral, historical and contemporary art implications in his use of the blur in a 1965 painted interpretation of a photograph of his uncle posed in his Nazi uniform from the family photo album. Richter had previously claimed that blurring Uncle Rudi was designed to assume a neutral position through its ambiguity and lack of clarity, regarding the horrors and guilt associated with the Nazi past, a claim he has since repudiated. In comparing a real surviving photograph of her uncle Moishe who was murdered in the Holocaust, Schor reminds us how her family history is kept alive through remembrance of details, not repression. “True emotion comes from precision”, she quotes from Serge Klarsfeld who has made powerful Holocaust documentaries. Moreover, she describes how other contemporary artists from  Christian Boltanski, David Levinthal, and Bill Jacobsen and Jack Pierson have used the blur to express very different sentiments than Richter in terms of loss and remembrance. Although reputed to signify a “critique of heroic portraiture” among other things, Richter’s roundly hailed and rewarded use of the blur  facilitates  what Schor asserts is a “deliberate blindness”, enshrined as an “effect of indifference”  suppressing both collective guilt and killing the subjectivity of the viewer. The lack of emotional connection or engagement with the subject the blur enforces,  can make this method of depiction seem complicit with the cold hearted, detached demeanor of the Nazis who, like Uncle Rudi may have sent thousands to their deaths. For Schor, Richter’s widely appropriated visual trope has contributed to a stance of coolness and distantiation, an on-going infatuation with mediated experience, endemic in the visual arts today. In the meantime, for Richter and those he has influenced, the blur becomes a “triumphant gesture in the history of painting”, another example of artworld success that need not answer to any investigation of motive or lasting effect. Although Schor’s claim that despite Uncle Rudi’s death and the defeat of the Nazis, the effective abstracting and erasure of details of place, time, and facial clues, imply the Nazis may have scored a victory afterall. She might have added that the market has also trumped emotional pain and suffering, at all costs.

If there was an artist who exemplified working against market considerations to follow her personal painting convictions, it was Alice Neel. In her essay on Neel, Schor assesses the appropriateness of abstraction or figuration when examining feminist issues in visual art. Postwar American abstraction was fraught with sexism and unquestioned male mythologies regarding painting, presenting feminist analysis difficulties with abstract painters like Helen Frankenthaler. As feminism became a force in the 1960’s, debates over  how feminism should be framed in the visual arts veered toward representation in painting, and towards more explicit political statements. It would be extremely easy to reiterate Neel’s importance in essentialist terms, as articulator of the female gaze and constructor of the female body and subject, or as a maverick but marginalized, figure painter in a sea of abstractionists who gained prominence during the feminist art movement when illustration of gender theories and politics pulled representational painting from hiding. At the time many women painters still felt resigned to framing their work in terms of genderless Modernist universals that rejected overt political content or to confining their interpretations to what a distinctive female aesthetic looked like. Neel had been well appreciated in numerous high profile museum catalogue essays for her highly expressive characterizations, her compelling psychological insights into her sitters, and her democratic cross cultural, racial, and gender portraits. Schor brilliantly harmonizes all these tendencies by emphasizing Neels’ lesser appreciated skills as an abstract painter, painting not just in the service of representation and narrative, but in actual conversation with the act of painting. Schor helps us see drips, committed brushstrokes, “zones of abstraction”, “active relationships between figure and ground”, very much in the manner that Greenberg described the high modernist works of the 50’s and 60’s. This refusal to take for granted the accepted wisdom about an artist –Schor’s insistence on  writing about “what she thinks” is relevant rather than serving the dictates of the art market…to think about “the questions raised by artworks and events after their moment in the spectacle’s bright light”— is at the very heart of the book.

One of the brighter aspects of A Decade of Negative Thinking is the suggestion by Schor, as an artist herself, that certain artistic practices can counterbalance the postmodern Western commodity fixation. In the essay entitled “Modest Painting”, she describes this initially as a sharpening of our perception of images by amping down, rather than the standard ramping up. Schor makes small paintings that “don’t aspire to historical importance through physical domination of the viewer”, a genre-like designation that could consign the work to anonymity and the shadows, as any visit to a contemporary art gallery confirms. “Supersized” is the ticket to the enormous spaces of today’s most sought after museums. But contrary to the thinking that modesty does not connote a lack of painterly rigor or ambition, a modest work can demonstrate the artist’s interest in the painting itself rather than for his or her career. As she so cogently revealed in the Neel essay, one has to slow down to see the private and personal “which has fallen by the wayside of progress” usually to service the more pressing needs of the individual artist. Using the somewhat naïf-ly styled paintings of her father as an example she writes how they are steeped in authenticity with an ego present “only in the form of respect and tenderness” for his subjects. She provides “case histories” of modest painters, some of whom went on to great renown and others who remained minor players. Most were concerned  “less about constructing a career through a signature style than about enjoying the act of painting and sharing that enjoyment with another artist.” They were just good paintings that were preoccupied with, among other things, un-selfconsciousness, the non-heroic, a “sense of justice and a search for truth in painting”. Painters like Jack Tworkov (about who Schor has also written a book) and Myron Stout embodied these qualities in their perception challenging, sensual, and profoundly thoughtful works. More recently modest painters like Tomma Abts and Thomas Nozkowski have found deserved success, their motives not to be mistaken with a current artworld fave, Luc Tuymans whose paintings in their overt lack of ambition, their “insipidness” and seeming mediocrity have tactically and strategically carved out a highly successful (and now imitated) niche. In constrast to the “pictorial searching” of the earlier modest painters, the current slacker doodle art, and calculated simulations and appropriations of the abject play to an artworld that is so dependent on art celebrity status, that modesty of that sort has become a pose of disaffection and futility, “a face put on the commodity to sell it.”  Schor acknowledges that returning to “self consciously modest” painting can be seen as either the truest type of expression possible or might be surrendering any of its lingering importance to more spectacular media. In quoting from Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows: “Were it not for the shadows, there would be no beauty” Schor has us ponder the place and worth of sincere, personally motivated painting that runs the risk, as it did for Tworkov, of embracing the returns of a long term exploration of painting’s potentials as opposed to instant financial reward.

Certainly a culture that has been wholly constructed on the tenets of capitalism will continue to regard the attainment of monetary value as an important part of its overall value system. Part of a market system, however, is accepting that prices can fluctuate  precipitously, so revering a work of art based on its current price is an impermanent and unstable way of deciding what we might want to keep looking at and talking about. Discourse—the written or spoken record of the actual experience of an artwork—determines how effectively  the ideas and convictions embedded in an artwork historically shape culture itself. The counterinfluence of criticism on the market introduces and integrates multiple facets of perception into the validating process. As the art market continues to contract with the present economic crisis—a situation not obtaining when Schor’s essays were written-the lack of commercial options might increase the levels of noise and spectacle required to survive as an artist. Or it might, as Schor has invited us to do through her lively and incisive criticism, cause us to pause and consider that the unexamined artwork may not always be worth doing.

The Photographs of Mark Ruwedel at Gallery Luisotti, May 22-August 14, 2010
By Constance Mallison

The 20th Century evidenced an era of supersized ruins. Two epic wars, scores of civil conflicts, revolutions and fundamentalist jihads produced ruination on a scale never before experienced. The photographs, artwork, newsfilms and few extant ruins remain the crucial means of reminding successive generations of the irrationality that foments such destruction, but also of the constant examination necessary as antidote to devastation.

Ruination has fascinated artists since the Enlightenment and Romanticism perfected ruin gazing as an art form. The labyrinthine imagined prisons of Piranesi and his endless allee’s of crumbling Roman columns were, as Andreas Huyssen reminds us, simultaneous embodiments of the Enlightenment’s fixation on classical antiquity but also, important allegories of mutability that allowed Piranesi’s generation to slowly disentangle itself from classicism to embrace the freedom of modernity. In the nineteenth century obsessions with the sublime produced images of not only terrifying natural wonders such as raging waterfalls and icy peaks, but also painter Caspar David Friedrich’s Gothic dilapidations, surrounded with decomposing, rampant plant growth and solitary monks contemplating human impotence in the face of an infinite universe. American painter Thomas Cole followed with his painting cycle The Course of the Empire, a meditation on the frailties of civilization as evidenced by the vine covered fragments of ancient grand edifices. With its melancholic musings on mortality, Romanticism controlled the discourse on ruins well into the last century, fueled by the philosophy of Kant, who held that man’s unpleasant and terrifying encounters with the natural sublime, would, in its revelation of a human lack of control, bring us to recognize our limitations, thereby producing an uplifting psychic makeover. Likewise, thoughtfulness about the distant past positively engaged emotions to help contend with the perplexing and disturbing social changes that accompanied the rapid industrialization of the time.

Most experiences of ruination in the 18th and 19th centuries were of the Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias, variety– so distant that any threat or reminder of human pride could be neutralized in the assuring Kantian mode. What does it mean to view the ruins of one’s own civilization, to have no comforting millennia between oneself and the various agents of destruction? Should we serve the grand narrative of progress, removing, smoothing over, redesigning and reconstructing showpieces of Modernist utopianism as quickly as possible as the Germans did post World War II (that is now prompting a great deal of hindsight debate) and as Amreicans did after 9/11? Contemporary massive ruination like the Katrina wasted acres of New Orleans and the unemployment ravaged urban landscape of Detroit simply cannot be harmonized in the Romantic tradition. Nor, as the Germans are now learning, is a rapid polished makeover necessarily going to repair the damage to the collective psyche and make us forget. To designate an area of ruins with documentation preserving the damage done by the BP oil spill might do more to sustain full consciousness of the myths and facts that drive such catastrophe.

Photographers like Richard Misrach and Edward Burtynsky have been significantly documenting some of the most egregious recent environmental ruination in dramatic photographs of nuclear test sites and Third World industrial areas respectively. The superb artistry of their pictures, the terrible beauty, confronts the viewer with the unsolvable dilemma of aesthetics coexisting with suffering, pollution, and profiteering. It is perhaps the struggle therein that makes us act by rooting for beauty. That anxious truce between the depiction of environmental catastrophe and aesthetic pleasure was jump started in the early 1970’s by The New Topographers, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal and Robert Adams who photographed the defilement of the American Western pristine landscape by rampant land speculation and urban development. The New West was the tabula rasa of wide open land, ideal for promoting the post war American Dream. Exposing the re-enactment of the fictions of Wagons Ho!, these photographers represented the mushrooming housing tracts, the open desert spaces crisscrossed with vehicle tracks, and the young families starting their lives in the new post-war America hellbent on erasing the effects of wartime shortages and grimy industrial cities.

Combining a photo documentary approach with an artistry rooted in the representations of the Romantic sublime landscape and the Minimalist/formalist aesthetics of the Seventies, the New Topographers seemed to ironically signal the dismantlement of the idealized western landscapes of Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. While Adams and Weston maintained the fantasy of untouched Western wilderness, the New Topographers in turning their cameras on the collision of unrestrained industrial and residential growth and natural areas, began to pry open a dialogue concerning environmental degradation and to deconstruct the dominant Sierra Club, Ansel Adams influenced nature photograph. Any direct condemnation of the destruction of wilderness by such development was veiled in the New Topographers by their accent on the reductive abstract beauty of these sites: one has to look deliberately beyond the mesmerizing beauty of Robert Adams’s lovely abstract traceries made by dune buggies in formerly pristine sand dunes to realize an ecosystem is being ruined beyond repair. Rather shortsightedly criticized at the time as lacking the transparency we associate with photography that would allow for a head-on critique of such environmentally destructive exploitation, the New Topographers, unlike straight photojournalists, engaged a wide range of rich art historical references and multiple competing narratives, radical for the time. If somewhat conflicted or ambiguous, as the era was itself, The New Topographers’ depictions of suburban sprawl nevertheless offered many portentious signs that all was not right in paradise.

In his recent exhibition at Gallery Luisotti entitled Now It Is Dark, Los Angeles photographer Mark Ruwedel clearly establishes his affinity with The New Topographers’ scrutiny of the Western landscape, both in his studies of land development and in his use of exquisite hand made gold toned gelatin silver prints and silver chloride prints. Ruwedel’s earlier photographic works of abandoned railway paths throughout the West (a study spanning 20 years) recall the nineteenth century photography of William Henry Jackson and Timothy H. O’Sullivan. Ruwedel revealed the end of that historical, necessary phase of capitalism and its narrative in expanding the West, a sentiment that is updated in the newer series here. In these three distinct series, his camera focuses on abandoned homes in the Southern California exurban high desert locations of the Antelope and Imperial Valleys. The era that appeared boundlessly optimistic and plentiful in the previous New Topographers’ work of the 60’s and 70’s, here seems spent and utterly bankrupt.

All shot at twilight, evocative of Ansel Adams transcendent qualities of natural light but also metaphorical of waning and extinction, we see various singly portrayed uninhabited structures, many mid century homes, uncompleted or in various stages of decay. With the silhouettes of rugged, high mountains in the distant –that classic Western divide between “civilization” and the rugged outsider– the decaying structures are framed dead center, iconic portraits of generic American housing styles that pass as expressions of our individuality. Surrounding the variously wrecked or empty structures are dead and twisted leafless trees and shrubs, windblown detritus, tumbleweeds, decapitated palms, discarded mattresses, water heaters, junked cars, and torqued metal. Along with the peeling paint, missing shingles, bullet riddled cinderblock walls, boarded up windows and doors, and battered stucco, these eerie pictorial elements comprise a sort of foreboding “ghost town aesthetic” characteristic of Western mythology and its pervasive cinematic representations. The sense of mystery is heightened as well in small poignant portraits of single articles of clothing: strapless bras, boots, corsets, partially covered or filled with dust, slowly decomposing and being reclaimed by the earth. They remain only props or clues in resolving the whereabouts of the late residents.

One of the central questions here is whether Ruwedel is simply a neo-Romantic in his implications of the sublimity in human powerlessness over mortality and the destructive but inevitable forces of nature (and human nature), or whether he succeeds in raising more contemporary critical questions through his ruin gazing. The kind of humor and subtle wit felt in Antelope Valley #293 with its fading weathered plywood and corregated metal sheets neatly organized into strict geometries, but clearly hardscrabble and do-it-yourself, allows for both a parody of high modernist architecture–its purported “unity”– and Frank Gehry’s postmodern low materials and tipsy forms. It wards off an overdose of nostalgia and melancholia. At the core of these near post-apocalyptic photographs, however, is a serious consideration of the demise–a “darkening” –of the American Dream, here seen exposed, ripped apart, collapsing into chaos and disarray, e.g. a family’s belongings spill out of a stripped van like an animal’s entrails. Recognizing the Home Depot building materials, the bedding from the Mattress Store, and the late model van, we have little distance from the present. We imagine foreclosure, water shortages, nuclear and chemical pollution, or unemployment, as the reasons these homes lie in ruin, none of which are far from the current realities. The fragile desert land is blighted and trashed. A lack of specifics, though, moves us to the symbolic.

At a time of unprecedented environmental crisis, these unforgiving images force a reckoning with the notions of infinite plenitude, the pursuit of unfettered individual gratification and consumption, and its resulting waste as well as its human toll. Ruwedel, in situating our gaze on the unsettling present through this archive of failure, critically disrupts and undermines any lingering utopian myths or narratives of progress. We could dismiss these idle homes as just another soon-to-vanish part of “boom, bust, decay” cycles so crucial to the ethos of expanding global capitalism. Or we see them as a useful mnemonic for transgressing such narratives as the West as an endless supply of resources. By not obliterating, but preserving as Ruwedel has, the traces of the carnage, perhaps we can begin to contemplate what it might take to avoid being another century of supersized ruins.

Please Click to Enlarge and for Title Information

Constance Mallinson is a Los Angeles artist and critic who has exhibited nationally and internationally. She is a regular contributor of reviews to Art in America, Art,Ltd. and Xtra. Her last solo painting show at Pomona College Art Museum, Nature Morte, was reviewed in the Times Quotidian.

Nature Morte, paintings by Constance Mallinson
Pomona College Museum of Art, through October 18, 2009
by Rita Valencia

As a fiction writer, you learn first that as it addresses narrative, a great piece of fiction is like a path into a forest that never shows the way out. The same is true of poetry as it addresses the act of thought, or of painting as it addresses the act of seeing. (Such desultory ambulations are the crucial difference between these forms and the theory or philosophy that swarms around them, maybe with the exclusion of Derrida.)

Woodland Seen, Oil on Paper, 54×96 inches, 2009

In this new work of Constance Mallinson, the act of seeing goes into an imaginary forest from which an essence has been gleaned and transmogrified, but never explained. Mallinson actually picks up the objects which are the models for her work on morning walks in the wilds of the S.F. Valley, but nothing here, or there, is as it seems. These are paintings that are intricate, complex and luxurious, which invite long and languorous gazing. They also contain within them stories of an uneasily shifting reality, an ever-dying natural world, and primal acts of violence and regeneration embedded in the act of seeing.

We have walked through the woods in fall and winter, gathered the broken parts of trees, the detritus of the wild park land, its carcasses and hollow husks, empty seed pods and broken-off branches whose xylem and phloem have withered and collapsed; and these objects, released from reproductive function, seem startlingly familiar. It is nature’s uncanny familiarity that feels somehow more primal than the studied affection nature lovers know–although it is very likely this uncanny familiarity gives rise to nature love. We have listened to the whining and scraping of tree trunks pressed together by the wind, a plaintiff sensuality that is a strange echo of something that is ours. In Mallinson’s latest works, those acts are evoked and stirred into a witchery of weird and compelling iconography that resonates as both primitive fetish and art history–taken not in its academic, referential sense, but as a psycho-cultural cauldron which emanates images that haunt and re-manifest through the medium of the sentient artist.

Mallinson stirs up a primal scene of terror as we gaze into a tumble down pile of leaves and branches: the decay that is only form, and transient at that, re-formed into an horrific new manifestation. Her “Nature Mort” paintings have been likened to memento mori, and though I tend to see the fact that the chosen objects are decaying as decidedly secondary to primary act of seeing/gathering/compositing, “Severed Limbs” seems the most quotational of memento mori form.

This brings us to my personal favorite, as I confess a partiality to typography, eastern philosophy, and words: a painting entitled “You”, which displays the word “me” in its multifarious forms. From a great distance it is a pretty floral field picture, but on second thought and closer examination, a koan-like contemplation opens up, a wry portrait of the Self as a crisp, fragile and illusory thing, suitable for composting.

The questions Mallinson asks in her new body of work are not interrogatory–in demand of answers–but they are probes into the nature of forms as seen/unseen. In her gathering and recompositing, in this fetishistic anthropomorphous that calls to mind a certain sorcery she exercises the craftiness of the consummate artist. The “Nature Morte” series shows us how the dream fabric of our reality is inhabited by invisible beings engaged in acts that we have committed countless times, leads us into a forest of signs, and leaves us there to wonder.

Please click on the image to enlarge.

Couple, Oil on Paper, 95×52 1/2 inches, 2008

Olympia Decayed, Oil on Paper, 52 1/2×90 inches, 2008

Severed Limbs, Oil on Paper, 52 1/2×60 1/2 inches, 2009

You, Oil on Paper, 40 1/2×52 1/2 inches, 2008