Altman Siegel Gallery

My review of O the sleeping bag contains the body but not the dreaming head at Altman Siegel gallery. Work by Alice Channer, Anicka Yi and Aaron Flint Jamison.
http://www.artslant.com/sf/articles/show/34771

Oakland Art Murmur

I attended my first Oakland art murmer last night since moving to the area. It was quite the occasion, with Telegraph Avenue between 19^th and 27^th street blocked off for a variety of street stalls, music, food carts and other entertainment. There were also numerous galleries and studio spaces around downtown Oakland open until 9pm, and many of the bars and restaurants had live music filtering out the doors. I arrived early, when the streets were still being blocked off and many vendors were only just arriving. This meant I got to take a leisurely wander and get a look ahead of the crowds, I even got a tarot card reading and my portrait drawn for free, before queues started forming.

The street fair boasted mainly pretty objects for sale, handmade jewellery, cacti in an assortment of glass jars, leather purses and hand printed tshirts. I was glad to have only brought the bare minimum of cash with me, to resist spending my weeks wages on all the beautiful things on sale. Much of the art here was street art, silkscreened posters of Obama smoking a joint, posters from the naked bunny project, a guy with his own steam punk customized bicycle with a pull along mobile gallery adorned with matching paintings. 

As I got to the galleries in the surrounding area, the crowds had swelled and it became difficult to get into many of the venues. there was a good selection on show, with open studios FM displaying by far my favorite art of the evening. Mostly ceramic artists, with one photographer, one printmaker and a painter thrown in for good measure, the stand out was a selection of prints small delicate black and white etchings with accompanying typescripts. In the push of the crowd I didn't manage to get the artists name, but his stand was surrounded by the haunting marionettes of Peter St. Lawrence, and despite scrutinizing their website I can't seem to track him down.

A couple of doors down was Manna Gallery with an exhibition by Jhina Alvarado-Morse, a series of beige photorealistic paintings and some large abstracts by Linn Thygeson. Photo gallery had a show of vintage esoterica a nice collection of prints from the collection of Louis Klaitman. There were some real  classics in there from the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Annie Liebovitz, Ralph Eugene Meatyard and William Wegman. In Mercury 20 was the very amusing show "Pet Peeves" by Julie Alvarado and Charlie Milgrim. A series of dog portraits on one wall faced down a very odd collection of green bowling balls against the other wall- the "pet peas" of Milgrim which were dressed up in leads and collars, put in cages and fish tanks in a mockery of the containment and control of animals as pets. While the humor of these works quickly wore off, Dave Meekers exhibition "Lucky" had a little more depths. These sculptures "conceptualize the luck that surrounds us. The artist imagines this intangible with an inviting sense of humor. Luck is aligned with chaos and chance. It comes in many shades of good or bad, big or small, and may have very little to do with our own desires, wills, or intentions. These works are lyrical, associative, and built on the premise that every day we are presented with lucky moments of one kind or another, and that we may choose how to interpret, accept or reject them". (www.davemeekerart.com)

I will definitely be going again next month, and saving up in order to indulge in the assortment of beautiful things on sale. I also hope to venture further downtown, towards Jack London square and pop into some of the other galleries that I didn't have a chance to explore last night. As well as all the art on show (a lot of which is being sold at very reasonable and affordable prices) there is a delicious selection of food, wine tastings, live music, DJs and other arts and crafts to part you from your hard earned cash. 

I would advise starting early though- as the night descends into rather messy drunken revelry pretty quickly with queues to get into all the bars and the streets thronged with teenagers and drunks. 

The website for the whole event along with maps of participating galleries can be found here: http://oaklandartmurmur.org/

Without reality: There is no utopia

Without reality there is no utopia in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts attempts to compile a collection of artworks that "focus on political systems, their temporal nature, and the fragility of democratice ideals".
The show features a varied range of meiums, artists and messages, tied together by a rather tenuous claim to the political. I found the scope to be too broad, encompasing too many voices and losing its stated purpose amidst the chatter of so many voices of protest, freedom and revolution.

The exhibition takes its premise from the philosophical conceptions of Jean Baudrillard and Andreas Huyssen.  According to Baudrillard, what has happened in postmodern culture is that our society has become so reliant on models and maps that we have lost all contact with the real world that preceded the map. Reality itself has begun merely to imitate the model, which now precedes and determines the real world: "The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory. “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real” he is suggesting we can no longer distinguish between nature and artifice.(Full text here) (artists are claiming to break through this barrier ??)
Huyssen is then brought in to conclude that since the real has been lost and supplanted by the simulacrum, utopia can no longer exist, since it is intricately related to the superation and improvement of reality.  The disappearance of the real thus results in the disappearance of the utopian. This is why, according the curators of the exhibition, it is "urgent and necessary to reset the real, to return to reality, or, at least, to its analysis, in order to attempt to apprehend a new utopian thought. the situation demands it". I find several problems with this statement, besides to over enthusiastic use of commas. Although not being all that well versed in Huyssen's theories I am a little shy to criticize, it does seem to be rather a leap to presume that utopia cannot exist without reality- for how then is it supposed to become a reality? Surely the dreamscape of the simulacra make a ripe ground for the introduction of a utopia? Or must utopia always be on the outside, a ghost dogging the edges of the real?
Either way, the exhibition sets up a nice philosophical premise as its introduction that gives the viewer a lot to chew over before the any of the art itself is introduced. Then we come to the problem of how to connect this grandiose concept to tangible works of art. Here the curators insert another conceptual step: they divide the exhibition (and the physical space) into two asymmetric sections. The first is titled: "Description of the Lie", as a prologue to the systems of production of the simulacra of the real. The second section is titled: "Collapses", which is further divided into four collapses; the collapse of communism, the collapse of capitalism, that of democracy and that of the geo-political. This further categorization is defended by another quote from Huyssen "Utopia never dies alone: it drags along its counter-utopia". Thus communism is suggested to have dragged along its counter utopia, capitalism, which in turn involves a geo-political implosion.

With all this complicated conceptual setting up before any artwork is even introduced, I was starting to feel the need for a map to trace the development of these ideas. And as you turn from the descriptive written introduction on the wall, there before you is indeed a map. Perestroika Timeline is a long black banner interrupted by white text and images which cut into the smooth line that circumscribes the gallery walls. The text refers to various incidents in the collapse of communism: the fall of the Berlin wall, the end of the soviet union, the reunification of Germany and the dissolution of the Warsaw pact. At the end of the timeline there is a split, between a utopian idealistic possible outcome and the negative damaging reality. Created by Chto Delat? http://www.chtodelat.org/ a loose collective of Russian poets, artists and philosophers, singers, designers and critics, reality is presented as a chronological sequence of events that leads towards a political collapse, and is presented as preventing and obstructing reality. So far, so political.

The rest of the exhibition follows this same vein, works that are engaging with the negative outcomes of specific political regimes, while not actually positing any alternative, escape or even addressing any more pressing questions. Many of the pieced felt like filler, chosen for their mildly anti-capitalist or pro-minority focus, such as Carlos Motta's Ideological Graffiti, which archives the opinions of citizens of 12 Latin American countries focusing on the perception of interventionist policies of the USA.

Another timeline, which was a little more successful as a work of art, was Daniel Garcia Andujar's Postcapital 1989-2001 Which takes imagery from the media and ideological stereotypes and generates a bizzare melding of two extraodinary resonant moments in recent history: the collapse of the Berlin wall the the destruction of the twin towers in 9/11. A digital archive gathered from images on the internet, the piece covers the majority of an entire wall, the shiny colourful images attractive like familiar adverts. It's only on closer inspection that the message is revealed: Che Guevara in an ad for sports shoes, an ad for a men's magazine with an image of the Kennedy assassination, in which Jackie is the one shot and a tagline of "if men are your target make sure you don't miss them".

As described on the project website:

       "Here, Andújar views the developments subsequent to the “fall of the Wall” not as aspects of postcommunism but rather of postcapitalism. Emerging here is the question as to what extent capitalist societies have changed in absence of their erstwhile counterparts and which new walls have been erected through the global politics following events of 1989 and 2001. The triumphal course of capitalism and of the Western democracies has by no means proved to guarantee peace, security, and stability, as the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, the war in Iraq, or, even more recently, the slumps in the U.S. financial markets have demonstrated. “Postcapital” is an attempt at reading the complex and divergent realities of the twenty-first century by virtue of their forms of representation: the review of an age whose prelude has been pinpointed by Andújar as localized between 1989 and 2001". 

Ignasi Aballi"s Listados (World Map) 2010 takes a less pictorial approach. In a series of frames, the artist lists the names of every country to appear in news headlines in every section of every edition of the spanish daily, El Pais over the course of one year. The result is a printed version of a tag or word cloud, with the size of the font and recurrance of certain names indicating the bias and focus of news media. It is a measurement of the appearance and disappearance of collective or individual presence of countries and events that took place, based on the priorities of newspaper editors. By default this creates hierarchies of visibility of some events over others. Listed alphabetically I found myself wanting to know how the list would appear if ordered chronologically, or if compared to similar listings from other newspapers, both in the same country and in others. 

While Aballi's work raises a complex set of questions about the relationship between media and public interest, other works in the exhibition were more blatantly political, not always to positive effect. 

Oliver Ressler's work contained too much news and not enough art, and the predominance of charts, maps, timelines of political developments and ideologies became tiresome, such as Zeina Maasri's political posters depicting various signs of conflict from Lebanon's Civil War. While visually pleasing, the posters have very little insight besides revealing bias and design strategies for propaganda.  This is symptomatic of the general failing of the exhibition as a whole, the leap between the first and second proposal is not made, the response of the art to the collapse of utopia is a loose collection of political imagery with no message. 

This for me, sums up a major problem with group exhibitions, while the theoretical premise contains an interesting and powerful idea, the actual art fails to measure up, perhaps due to it being a group show, I felt that some of the works were being made to ascribe to a preset concept  in which they did not fit comfortably. 

Emin on Art and Love and Art

“I love art,” Emin went on. “And art loves me more than any man has ever loved me. Art has never let me down. When I’ve been my lowest of my low, art has always come and picked me up. I can’t say that about the men I’ve had relationships with. It’s about forever and ever. The last thing I do before I die will be art, definitely. Whereas people come and people go. I wish I could have a lover like art, that loved me as passionately as art loves me, or who I could give as much back to.” Read more: The New Yorker

The Fantastic Planet

I met a rather interested character in a hostel in San Francisco recently. He was visiting the city for a few days from Stanford and started talking to me in the computer room, looking for some human conversation I think. A Phd student of applied physics, he also taught a music technology class and showed me his website for generating music through computer programming. I didn't understand it much, but he asked me about my area of study and had a surprising interest in Land Art and Andy Goldsworthy in particular. He also told me about this crazy little French animated movie, The Fantastic Planet and insisted we watch it together. Unfortunately the movie room was occupied, and we ended up going out to a bar instead, but a few weeks later I finally got around to watching it by myself, and now I'm sorry I didn't get the chance to see it with him, I would love to know what he had to say about it.

A bizarre, surrealist animated film, it was made in 1973 and directed by Rene Laloux, with animation by the writer and artist Roland Topor. The graphics are more akin to the painting than the animation tradition, with slow movement and sketchy lines, all the colours are subdues browns and the whole landscape is reminiscent of a surrealist Dali dreamscape. The imagery is very dream like, with large moving plants that devour each other and populated with a variety of threatening animals and anamorphic forms.
The story centers around a distopian future, reminiscent of planet of the apes, where human creatures called Oms are the playthings of the large Draags, blue creatures who are a hundred times the size and are an advanced species of meditating aliens.  They keep the Oms as pets, and regularly carry out mass exterminations of the wild Oms living in the forests. The plot follows the life of one Om, Terr, adopted when orphaned by a young female Draag named Tiwa. Tiwa's father is one of the ruling elite, and through Tiwa's daily lessons, Terr learns about the culture and history of the Draag planet. When he eventually escapes to join the wild Oms, he takes this knowledge with him to help build space ships for the Oms. With these ships, Terr travels to the Fantastic Planet, where he destroys the huge grey statues he finds there that allow the Draags to reproduce, thus threatening the whole race and simultaneously preventing a mass extermination of his own species.
The film was produced between France and Czechoslovakia and is an obvious allegory for the Soviet Occupation of Czechoslovakia. With the oppressed rising up to threaten the rule of their oppressors, it has resonances for any master/slave society, and can be read as an allegory for many different historical and political regimes as well as an influence on many more recent science fiction universes, from the Empire and Rebels in Star Wars, to the Naa'vi and soldiers in Avatar.
What is unusual in this portrayal of rulers and ruled, is the sympathetic portrayal of the Draags, particularly Tiwa, Terr's owner. In the beginning of the film we see her play with him like a pet, and we laugh at his antics along with her. Innocent of any wrongdoing, it is difficult to blame her for her treatment of him, as she does appear to be genuinely fond of him. The beginning of the film focuses on the civilization of the Draags, and we view the story from their perspective, it is only when Terr gains an education and becomes self-aware that the point of view shifts and we begin to sympathize with him.  When he escapes to join a colony of Oms in the wild, Tiwa disappears from the story, and we never learn her reaction or opinions to the following events. I found her to be a more sympathetic character than Terr, who plays the role of savior, uniting the warring Om clans to bring them salvation. A rather boring and predicable theme.
Strangely enough, the random scenes of large threatening plant life forms are more terrifying than the scenes of mass extermination of the Oms, possibly because the Oms are never given any personality or likeable qualities. The haunting atmosphere of this world is made all the more by the score by Alain Goraguer. It's experimentally trippy psychedelic sound fits the strange quirky animation and the weird slow pace of the narrative perfectly. The music and animation are the most fascinating parts of this film. I'm not a huge fan of science fiction other-worlds, and the story left me a little cold, particularly the abrupt ending, where the two warring species suddenly are able to live in perfect harmony with no hangover from their previous hierarchical society. I enjoyed it best when it abandoned all plot and focused instead on lengthy close ups of the beautiful painterly faces of the Oms, and the extended scenes of the planets flora and fauna.

Contemporary Korean Art

While contemporary Chinese art has never held much appeal for me; too overhyped and market driven, recently there seems to be an emergence of Korean artists in the west. My attention was first grabbed when in a museum bookshop I came across a beautiful edition of Korean Eye: contemporary Korean Art following the exhibition Korean Eye: Moon Generation,  the first international exhibition of Korean Contemporary art. It features sixty of Korea’s most renowned artists. There were some delightful surprises, fresh innovative stuff that easily challenges the most recent work coming out of America or Britain at the moment. There did seem to be a recurring theme, of bodies and identity, whether due to the bias of the curators or the artists, I’m not certain.

Here are some of my favourites:

Kim Joon

Joon’s work depicts large group portraits of anonymous bodies uniquely tattooed with a variety of patterns and colours.  He uses 3-D animation software to construct the body or bodies he wants, grafting on the type of skin he desires - animal skin, artificial skin, or human skin, even the skin of a leather bag or skin of a shoe. He uses this surface skin and grafts it onto the 3 dimensional image he created. This computer program is called 3-D Studio Max. It is the program used to create animated films. Some of his works include tattoos of logos, a reflection of the inscription of universal brands in our daily lives, perhaps even a wry comment on the trend for tattoos of brand names. The artist sees tattoos as a form of collective identity: “In history, anthropologists will tell you that tattoos were used for different kinds of purposes. Sometimes they were used to define boundaries, or to have your own social groups. Then at other times it was to punish somebody in a negative sense, to reject you. There is a notion of acceptance and rejection- a sense of belongingness and non-belongingness. The tattoo or tattooing doesn’t have just one singular meaning, but has multiple meanings, and conflicting meanings”.

Bae Joonsung

In his series ‘The Costume of the Painter’, he paints onto transparent acrylic films. Using recognizable old master paintings, he inserts young Asian nudes that are only revealed as the viewer walks by as a sort of hologram. The use of photography to update and invade traditional paintings plays on the relationship between the two media, and suggests a way of harmonizing the two, rather than opposing them. The viewer interaction in order to reveal the female nudes also introduces an element of play, creating a sort of peep-show effect. 

Lee Rim

‘The Mess of Emotions’ are large oil paintings originate in artistic performances, drawn from photographs of the artist or a model covered in black and white paint. 

"Our relationships are not decided alone.

Through various experiences and

conversations, thoughts are shared,

learning our differences and similarities.

This is the moment when spirits

combine. This feeling is unique in

forming relationships. As such, based on

the feelings of people, I first perform the

nervousness that only I may feel and

then transfer the image of that feeling

onto a flat surface. Even though we live

in different environments, at a certain

point in time we feel the same when we

look at an object. When I am having a

conversation with my family and friends,

I feel that we are of the same mind.

I believe that one admits differences

and similarities of each creature through

interacting with each other. Based on

a perception of this commonality, I try

to put my incidental excitement into

a two-dimensional surface of colours

presenting you with another imaginative,

phantasmagorical world.”

-artist’s statement.

Here are a few more not included in the exhibition who still deserve a mention:

Yeondoo Yung

In the Wonderland series, the artist takes children’s drawings and recreates the scene which he then photographs. Here is the making of, as related on his website: Jung’s new series of photos, “Wonderland” (2004), presents costumed ado­les­cents posing in sets based as closely as possible on children’s drawings. He collaborates with many peo­ple to bring to life the boundless imagination in the drawings. For four months, Jung oversaw art classes in four kinder­gartens in Seoul and collected 1,200 drawings by children between the ages of five and seven. After pouring through them, he carefully selected 17 drawings and interpreted their meanings. Then he recruited 60 high school students by pass­ing out hand­bills at their schools in which he invited them to act out the scenarios in the children’s drawings. In order to recreate faithfully drawing details such as dresses with uneven sleeves or buttons of different sizes, he convinced five fashion designers to custom make the clothing for the photo shoot. He also made props unlike any scale found in real­ity but similar to those in the drawings.

“Wonderland” changes fan­tasy into photographic reality without the aid of computer-generated graphics. The works, entirely made by hand, are a tremen­dous group effort similar to a stage production that captures the sudden changes in the actors’ forms, in the midst of people going about their lives against the back­drop of the city.

Sora Kim

Sora Kim’s ‘Abstract Walking’, deals with a theme very close to my heart. A sound installation, it presented a vast spatial and temporal territory that encompassed diverse stories and interpretations, and invited viewers to walk in this abstract territory. Produced for the Artsonje Center in March 2012, Kim collaborated with different artists and participants throughout different stages. First she collected stories of journeys from the participants. Then nine writers turned the stories into scripts that included their personal reflections and interjections. Next, eight musicians created accompanying scores, which were edited into one sound piece by music director Younggyu Jang. In the gallery the finished piece is played, “creating an abstract territory where the detritus of the collected spaces and time and the interpretations of various artists are scattered throughout; and suggests ways to experience art in an emancipated way, walking in the artist’s abstract territory”. A video work also accompanied the exhibiton. This creation of territories and emphasis on walking reminds me of the artist Francis Alÿs, who uses similar practices to create his artwork, as in the piece ‘The Green Line’,  in which he retraced the border between Israel and Palestine carrying a leaking can of green paint, telling the story of a fraught political history through the medium of walking.  Less politically charged than Alÿs perhaps, but Kim’s conceptual practice uses art as a means of communication, creating a space for non-hierarchical exchange and using elements from everyday life to produce unexpected dialogues.

  

For Inkeater (August 2012)

No, not ill-intent,
but ignorance.
To a fly's eyes
the world is magnified.
It's mass inflates;
When crushed,
then by his own weight.