Around Town: From Music to Marches and Lights in the Dark
If history weren’t rife with examples of art as a form of protest, and if the concept of limited media were not so outdated, medium might be the culprit - maybe music is simply better suited to strong political messages. But artists have been working in sound, performance, film, and more in an exuberant anything goes mentality for decades. Were this level of experimentation applied to content, the results would be powerful. Instead, a disassociated malaise prevalent in much of society often raises its sleepy head in art.
Maybe youth is a factor. If so, it is relevant that both Young and Coyne have been making music for many years. But when high school students are filling the streets with their demands for fair treatment of immigrants, I have to wonder what happens to this passionate, edgy, and critical mentality when these same students get to art school. Certainly the tug of the market has something to do with it, the pressure of peers making work about house parties adds to that, and the incessant demand of art to be newer and more relevant certainly poses a challenge. Maybe that’s what’s driving the kids to drink - and then document it.
That’s exactly what Mike Long and Jesse Sugarman did in their “10 Beers in 10 Minutes” (which actually runs for a painful fourteen minutes), recently screened at the Getty in Reckless Behavior, curated by Glenn R. Phillips. Has our world gotten so complex, distressing, overloaded, confusing - choose your adjective - that young artists are too baffled or numb to pose an engaging or specific critique? The drive across town, on one of the first days of spring, was vindicated by the artist in the screening who did take a risk. Patty Chang’s “Shaved (At a Loss)” is a compelling and challenging work utilizing prop, costume, and action to challenge ideas of beauty and stereotypes of Western women and Asian girls.
I was hardly the first lining up to see what turned out to be a sold-out screening of the Getty’s video art collection. The event merited attention and crowds were there for more than the sunny day - that the Getty has chosen to lend its considerable clout to screen and collect video art in an increasingly market driven exhibition climate is a compelling statement in itself. It remains to be seen how their choice will shape the vibrant history of video, but here’s one vote for more of Chang and others like her.
More paper browsing unearthed an article - clipped and sent by my mother - from the New York Times. Holland Cotter’s piece about artist collectives points to the relationship between the market and protest. His essay relates that intriguing artist collectives like Critical Art Ensemble, Center for Land Use Interpretation, and Reena Spaulings are lesser known, while the lightweight provocation and celebrity status of the Wrong Gallery stoke its success. After fidgeting through the new Matthew Barney film at the Nuart earlier this week, while spring ushered in rain clouds to threaten outside, I’d place his star next to Wrong Gallery’s.
Wall space proved more promising. On the Wilshire corridor at Sabina Lee Gallery, San Francisco-based SungHonh Min’s impeccably produced exhibition is extended through May 5th and worth a visit. “17 Minutes 52 Seconds in 490 Square Feet” includes sheets of white paper, blotted with charcoal by the artist blowing on them one at a time. These snake around the gallery accordion style like a metaphorical beast that forms an uncanny vision of a body breathing itself. The work is accompanied by a strangely evocative soundtrack of the artist’s breath extended digitally that holds its own amidst sounds of the traffic outside.
And across town, in the lantern-strewn corridors of sleepy mid-morning on Chung King Road, I was treated to an early preview of the second part of Yoshio Ikezaki’s exhibition of sumi ink drawings and paper sculptures at LMAN Gallery. The artist has made a study of traditional Japanese papermaking and the sculptures, made from layers and layers of finely wrought pages, are strikingly archeological. It seems that emotions are stored in time and pressed between the sheets. While neither is overtly political, the means and processes of the two artists relay a language of experience that is inclusive, and thus communicative.
Less recently, but too relevant to skip, is an exhibition of Sylvie Fleury at Patrick Painter late last year. Rather than serve as a limiting factor, the gallery’s power in the international art market rather furthers the strength of Fleury’s “Strange Fire.” The artist dons a pair of glittery stars-n-strips stilettos to painstakingly smash a field of shiny Christmas tree balls – and a good amount of anesthetization along with them. Projected on a large screen, set at a diagonal in the corner of the gallery, a ghoulish and campy red light exuded from behind it calling to mind both the horror of war, with its incumbent flashing emergency lights, and kitschy counterparts in film and television. This dichotomy, so powerfully expressed in Fleury’s piece, is at the heart of protest in contemporary art – and the prevailing question of its absence, sublimation, or transmutation.
Annie Buckley is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles, CA
(Copyright Annie Buckley, June 2006)
