It’s a jungle is the name of the the installation dominating Henry Taylor‘s show at Blum & Poe. It is a jungle, but it’s also a graveyard and a playground, a densely layered labyrinth of refuse and memories cobbled together in the most pleasing manner. Bleak black bottles of bleach, mops and spears envelop artifacts from cherished memories of African-American culture. The spectre of racism looms near, establishing a mood as melancholy as it is magnetic– but Taylor refrains from placing obvious value judgements on his juxtapositions and references, instead opting to create an emotional data set from which viewers may extract what they choose.
Huge, gorgeous paintings fill the rest of the gallery with family and friends, heroes and archetypes rendered in vivid colors and passionate brush strokes. Taylor hails from downtown L.A. and he seems to takes pleasure in capturing the beating heart of his community. For instance, from an interview with Artinfo:
The stunned-looking woman seated in a chair in a 2010 canvas, for example, is a crack addict Taylor met on the street and paid to pose late one night. Asked whether he worries about letting strangers into his loft, which also functions as his studio, Taylor, 52, shrugs. “I wanted to work. You gotta get what you gotta get. So far so good. One girl stole my CD player.”
A feeling of intense intimacy creeps up on you in the midst of Taylor’s work. Little by little, he pulls you into his world and you’ll find yourself reluctant to leave. Check out some photos I took at the gallery after the jump, and head on over to Culver City to see it in person before the show closes this Saturday!
[ Ed. note: Dave White is a hoarder of radness. His house is brimming with awesome art objects carefully collected over the years, so I asked him to write a series of posts chronicling his connoisseurship. It all began with the purchase of one record... - Graham ]
An excerpt from the notes of a boxed, 12” piece of vinyl by Christian Marclay, one I bought in 1990:
From June 4th through July 16th 1989 the floor of one of the Shedhalle Galleries, Zurich, was covered with 3500 copies of a record titled Footsteps. During the six weeks of the installation, people were invited to walk on the records—willingly or not, they had to step on them to reach the adjacent galleries where other sculptures were exhibited. The one-sided recording, containing the sounds of footsteps, was recorded in December 1988 in the deserted hallways of the Clocktower (N.Y.) and in the studios of Harmonic Ranch (N.Y.), where Keiko Uenishi’s tap dancing was mixed in. During the gallery installation the work could be looked at, stepped on and walked through, but the recording was never heard…
At the end of the exhibition, the records, which were attached to the floor with double-sided tape, were removed.
One thousand of these records have been made available, apart from a special edition of one hundred copies signed and numbered. Dedicated to the memory of Fred Astaire.
I was already a fan of Christian Marclay, even though I was about as land-locked from both the art world and the weird music world as a person could get. I had some compilations he was on and I’d bought his 10” EP called More Encores where he mangled up the music of people like Maria Callas and Jimi Hendrix. I was a college student in Lubbock, Texas, and since the internet wasn’t around to make every single thing ever created accessible within seconds, it meant I had to dig and hunt to find the stuff I wanted to see and hear. And I had hunted down and loved his turntable re-interpretations of pre-existing sound. I don’t want this explanation to come off like “In my day I had to walk to school uphill in the snow” because it wasn’t like that. It was exciting. You learned secret stuff and shared it with the friends who also wanted in on that secret.
Anyway, my boss at the indie record shop I worked in said, “I can get this for you at my cost but it’s still going to be as much as you make in two weeks of work.” Now, I also made money by washing dishes in a women’s dorm cafeteria and feeding breakfast to a friend with really profound cerebral palsy. I always juggled two or three jobs to keep myself afloat while going to college part-time. But in spite of multiple employments this absolutely necessary indulgence was out of my reach.
Because I wasn’t reliant on my parents to live, I didn’t feel guilty about lying to my mother for some emergency art cash. I said I needed to buy groceries. That I was strapped. She wrote me a check. I remember it being somewhere in the neighborhood of $100. Maybe $150. It’s been a while and I didn’t keep good financial records back then. But it might as well have been $10,000. That’s how little wiggle room there was in my personal budget in those days. (And yes, I paid her back eventually. And not just in hugs.)
I took it out of the box, played it once, then put the accompanying poster on my bedroom wall—it’s a shot of the installation featuring all the records, including whichever one of them became mine—and placed the record on the floor. For 21 years now it has remained on the floor inside whatever front door I’ve rented. It’s been walked on by countless visitors, including one actual famous person, the label is sun-faded and the recording itself has been footstepped right off, wiped out of playability. And in the meantime Christian Marclay has become a big art world star. That makes me pretty happy. I like to think that every time a new person asked me why I had a record on my floor, my explanation turned them into a fan and I helped his reputation that way. I realize how delusional that is. It’s sort of like thinking that the shoes you don’t wear very often are sad about it.
With 1100 of these things floating around, Footsteps barely straddles the line between functional recorded object and what most people would call a proper piece of art. But to me it was my gateway drug art purchase because it inspired and satisfied a gnawing cake-hunger in my belly. That’s the itch most people who collect stuff all feel inside, the one that tells you that life is going to be so much better after you get that thing in your hands. And when it really does make life better that’s when you know you made the right decision. And I totally did. I’m going to go stomp on that record right now.
On a recent trip to Chinatown, some invisible force drew me into the POVevolving gallery, where I was confronted by an 18′-long foam skeleton. The piece, Dead Man, dominates the space, floating just a few inches above the floor. It reminds me of those wooden mannequins that pervade art classes across the globe, except huge and suspended in an indefinitely cadaverous pose. Dead Man is the centerpiece of New York artist Clark Goolsby‘s show STRANGE/LOVE, comprised of paintings and sculptures rendered in pleasing shapes and a fluorescent color palette that I’ll never not adore. Pictures after the jump.
Art, in one very limited sense, is an economy of symbols and materials. In today’s bustling digital marketplace of aesthetics and ideas, Andrew Laumann’s work is like your favorite neighborhood corner store, perpetually well-stocked with Millennial fantasies of absolute power with no responsibility. Punks rocket through a boundless void or drop from trees like overripe fruit, totally prosaic shit like chain-link fences and CD-R cases become symbols of infinity. How to spend this energy? How to use this junk? What kind of feeling can it get us?
The labor of an artist is always bound up in desire, but the wants and needs reflected in Laumann’s paintings, prints, sculptures, and collages seem strangely achievable: getting high, walking through a forest, collecting tokens of good-times-past, refusing to think about death. Yet art is none of these things and while it might make you feel nostalgic or pleasantly fucked-up in an analogous way it’s not about to replace the grand human ventures of exploration and conquest. Laumann’s work is so sublimely satisfying because we want more than the-thing-itself, we want to see it from every angle, experience it from every vantage point, and generally confound that sneaking suspicion that we’ve already done every fun thing that there is to do in this world. Give us little monuments and letters to god and tell us it will always be this great forever.
For the second installment of her ongoing story series for Future Shipwreck, deftly skilled painter and fabric artist Megan Whitmarsh shares some thoughts on embroidery, Jim Henson and selling out. Don’t miss Megan’s solo show Radiant Artifacts at Rosenthal Gallery in San Francisco, which is on display through December 4th. Texans, you can check out Whitmarsh’s work at the Marty Walker Gallery in Dallas, where she’s participating in the sculptural group show Small Works: Art + Object.
In grad school in New Orleans. I was bored with my own abilities in painting. I guess I felt like everything cool had been done and way better then I was going to do it. In retrospect I think embroidery is a natural medium for me partly because I grew up around it (my mom sewed and embroidered) and because I am drawn to limited, simple technologies. I don’t even like to use a sewing machine. I think there is something optimistic about using very simple mediums—it gives the viewer a sense that they too can create.
I saw the pilot of The Muppet Show in NY at the Museum of Television and Radio and you could see the puppeteers in the background wearing black leotards and moving around. The sets and everything were so simple you felt like you could go home and make your own Muppet show with some felt and some stuffing. I love that. My favorite muppet when I was a kid was probably Animal although I did own a Miss Piggy doll that had purple silk gloves. I secretly thought Kermit was boring. As an adult re-watching the Muppets I had this “aha!” moment that Kermit represented Jim Henson and was the artist orchestrating the whole thing. He made meta-jokes which as a kid I could not access, but now recognize. Kermit added a layer of sophisticated awareness and pointed out the edges of the frame so to speak. A kind of wink to the audience but in a way that held no irony or distance. I think Henson is really a genius artist whose work was generous and incredibly layered.
It is also interesting to me that he started out making commercials- particularly in the 60’s which you would think of as a virulently anti-commercial time for artists and hippie type people. He seems evolved in that he could operate in the commercial world with ease and be subversive in a quiet yet determined way, but always with gentleness. I think it is cool that he managed to make real, radical and lasting art while finding funding from some pretty non-creative industries. It seems especially pertinent now as artists are constantly crossing the line between “fine art” and the commercial world—and there is always a little anxiety about this naturally. I heard that No Age played a corporate gig and they changed their name for the event so that No Age did not “sell out”. But this seems silly. It’s only selling out if you make something you don’t want to make for money. If you are making what you want to make how is that selling out? It’s just redistribution of money. Better to go in the hands of the artist then stay in the pockets of a corporation, right?
The Sandwich is based on a idea of approaching and touching strangers without inconvenience disguised under cover of simple mask and excuse. We dressed up as 2 pieces of non-vegan sandwiches and gave away printed excuses with convincing polaroids for people that where running late that morning. We seriously had a fantastic time. We’ve never touched more people in 4 hours. And they were happy about it. That doesn’t happen often in life when touching strangers. For a short time there was even a line formed.
Just one of the many colorful and unexpected projects from trans-continental siamese twins Dora and Maja.
Tobias Madison‘s carefully composed installation pieces transport you to a quiet and mysterious place, where the alienation of technology and the warmth of nature entangle. Giant swirling, digital abstractions invite you into a pastel void, before houseplants pull you back into a realm of familiarity— only to reveal the splatters of paint upon their leaves that render them eerie floral taxidermies. Bamboo shoots soak, sinister, in tanks of gorgeously opaque Vitamin Water. Compact discs melt down the depthless darkness of a scanner’s surface, a prescient dream of optical media’s slow motion death scene. It’s strangely sorrowful, the morbid mood Madison’s colorful constructions exude… and yet something pulls me toward these spaces. I want to sit in these stark surroundings for hours, maybe days.
Turbo Props, an installation at the Institute of Social Hypocrisy in Paris. Curated by Oliver Laric and featuring a prop video game console, tropical plants splatter-painted by Tobias Madison, and a printable monument to the late, dearly missed “.yu” domain extension by Aleksandra Domanovic, among other fine art pieces. The ISH makes a point of noting that they “asked Oliver Laric if he could spend one night with his installation. He agreed.”
Unless you’re having a seizure right now, you’re looking at a GIF of a sculpture by Matt Furie. Furie’s first sculpture since art school was heralded by a barrage of flashing lights at Show Cave’s Corn on the Macabre III. The Halloween show also featured the talents of fellow Future Colors of America collaborators Aiyana Udesen and Albert Reyes, spooky new works by Leslie Winchester and Ariana Papademetropoulos, and a projector plugged into Furie’s Return of the Quack. Pictures below!
I, Popeye is Takeshi Murata‘s radical reinvention of everyone’s favorite cartoon sailor as a 3-D sad sack, confronted by inconsolable inadequacy and unspinachable ennui (as opposed to the sinister sexual schemes of his familiar foe, the interminably burly Bluto). It’s an unauthorized fan-fiction short film legally enabled by the archaic conventions of of European copyright law, which unexpectedly propelled Popeye into the public domain last year.
Murata twists a cartoon of heroic triumph into a litany of failure—the opposite of what Disney does when adapting a tale that, in the Grimms’ telling, doesn‘t end happily. The halting, minor-key version of the Popeye theme song in Devin Flynn and Ross Goldstein’s soundtrack and the leering, moneyed Popeye pictured on the anti-hero’s T-shirt—a caricature of pop-culture icon as commodity—are two details that contribute the video‘s effect. But the key factor is the medium itself. By rendering the characters in the kind of slick three-dimensional animation commonly associated with big-studio production, Murata intensifies and complicates the discrepancy between the official Popeye and his own “folk” version.
Murata’s short is on exhibit at The New Museum’s just-opened Free, which brings together a bevy of Internet and Internet-adjacent artists like David Horvitz, Jon Rafman (Kool-Aid Man!), and Rashaad Newsome. This stupendous-sounding show, curated by Lauren Cornell of Rhizome, also features the IRL premiere of Ryan Trecartin and David Karp’s revolutionary web video project, Riverofthe.net. Throughout Free‘s three-month run, the museum will be hosting a series of in-depth talks with the creators of such marvelous online entities as DIS Magazine and Kickstarter. Delicious!
