Friday, July 22, 2016

The Stage Is Set

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The suite of paintings that first greet the viewer of Me, Myself and I, Jay Lizo’s solo exhibition at LAM Gallery, swirl with spatial effect and motion. Blizzards of graphically rendered cartoon leaves, branches, pebbles, and bits fall through each work. Based on Hiroshige prints, the feeling of chaotic movement in the works is palpable, completely recasting the usual tranquil stillness of the source images. Underlying compositional structures control the whirlwind imagery to assert the mixed media works as abstract paintings. The shattered remains of any identifiable pictorial information align as abstract image fragments within optically dazzling, ambiguous, multi-level spaces.  


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The paintings of Dreaming Of A Year of Hiroshige serve as the introduction to the rest of the exhibition, comprised of three distinct bodies of work in total. The following main room is likewise alive with vibrant color and visual activity. In the middle of the room, resin-cast microphones fittingly amplify the content of Song From My Hero Collection, a grid of portraits of Lizo’s role models. Identifiable likenesses among the portraits are Richard Pryor, Ira Glass, Billie Holiday, Wolverine, Bruce Lee, Mark Twain, Angela Davis, Etta James and many others only indicated by their first names in the titles. Rendered graphically and in bright, flat color, they are all awkwardly caught unposed in the act of speaking or performing among abstract geometric elements that read as colored stage lights or spotlights. Taken together with the microphone sculptures, the paintings read as a vividly clamorous chorus, transforming the space into a performative arena. Spoken words, sung lyrics and physical actions are translated into vivd portraits of chromatic contrast augmented by sculptural suggestions of human presence and voice.


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The Luscher Record Test, of which various iterations have been presented before, most notably at the fondly remembered Weekend in Los Feliz in 2013, is well tweaked here as a complement to the hero portraits. Presented alone this project is probably the highest-concept of Lizo’s work, in spite of it’s natural visual affinity here as a component of the allegorical performative concept of Song From My Hero Collection. The intuited logic of presenting performers, microphones, and records in the same room solidifies the overlap of Lizo’s interests in music, painting, performance and self-portraiture – the latter of which is used to describe the color-rich circular paintings of The Luscher Record Test, as evidenced by the exhibition’s overall title, taken from the accompanying animated video that beams from overhead, like a spotlight. The idiosyncratic, conceptual implementation and love of records and music in Lizo’s practice puts him and his work in the interesting company of artists such as Dave Muller and Sean Duffy, whose work has included record albums as both subject and object. Overall, the three presentations of Me, Myself, and I showcase Lizo’s articulate use of formal and conceptual languages to uncover personal and poetic intersections of color, portraiture, objectness, and performative presence.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Island Hopping

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A lot of boxes are checked off for Made In LA 2016, even poetry, in the form of the exhibition’s subtitle “a, the, though, only”, which was also exhibiting artist Aram Saroyan’s piece for the biennial. In light of the invitation of fashion collective DIS to curate the 9th Berlin Biennale around the same time, the inclusion of participants in Made In LA 2016 that identify as a fashion design label (Eckhaus Latta), a conceptual entrepreneur (Martine Syms), and a member of a trend-forecasting group (Dena Yago) seems to forecast a trend in contemporary art at the biennial/art fair level that echoes the buzzy, corporate tech industry trend and language of “disruption”. Disruptive innovation is originally described in 1995 by Clayton M. Christensen as "innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect” that “tend to be produced by outsiders" (The Innovator’s Dilemma, 1997). If the divided reviews of the Berlin Bienniale are any indication, it is a trend in art that is meeting some resistance. Fortunately, this year’s iteration of Made in LA, curated by bona fide art curators Aram Moshayedi and Hamza Walker, is designed as "condensed monographic surveys, comprehensive displays of multiyear projects, the premiere of new bodies of work, and newly commissioned works from emerging artists”, as opposed to a more blended, equalized grouping of more artists, as in biennials past. Many of the rooms and areas of the exhibition stand on their own and often demand consideration as a series of individual projects and solo exhibitions.


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Made In LA 2016 succeeds on the grounds of diversity and plurality. But a reminder of how diverse the population of artists in LA is, or how pluralistic their forms of production are is hardly revelatory at a contemporary art biennial in 2016. Viewers of art have been conditioned to expect more from biennials, figuratively and literally – this year’s artists count is 26, down from 35 in 2014 and 60 in 2012. Conversely, the exhibition offers less overwhelming, more intimate encounters with the work, reading at times like a clinical, abridged version of Surround Audience, last year's New Museum triennial. Standouts among the compartmentalized presentations of Made In LA include spaces devoted to Hugette Caland, Kenzi Shiokava, and Rebecca Morris. Others, like the presentation of Margaret Honda's films in thier canisters, Sterling Ruby's welding tables, and Guthrie Lonergan's Mn’Ms website hack would test the credulity of some viewers, and confirm the the beliefs of skeptical and/or cynical ones. There was apparently an ambient sound piece from Lonergan throughout the museums galleries, and though I bent down to get closer to the speakers in the rooms, I never heard anything. Perhaps that was fortunate, as Lonergan’s collaborators for the piece, Barefoot Music, are proudly credited on the Hammer website for the theme songs of reality TV hits like Top Chef and The Real Housewives. I felt a mixture of ghoulish intrigue and offense at the idea of Todd Gray’s Ray Manzarek performance (shades of Roberto Cuoghi), but I never saw him, as the Hammer website explains that there is only an "off-chance that Gray should visit the museum” during his performance. A gallery devoted to Fred Lonidier’s Labor Link TV easily feels like a single component of a hypothetical and perhaps overdue Lonidier museum retrospective. The sampling offered of Martine Sym’s work similarly whets the appetite for a broader overview of her multivalent production. The web page paintings of Joel Holmberg exhibit intriguing surface and conceptual qualities, but also feel stuck within cynical, Koons-esque painting “quotes”.


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There are sparks of dialog between some presentations. Gala Porras-Kim’s and Daniel R. Small’s projects share an affinity that recalls both the strategies of Fred Wilson and the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Rafa Esparza’s crowd pleasing underfoot installation also links up with those works, all three underscoring a connecting theme of anthropological excavation. Kenneth Tam’s video and Mark Verbioff’s installation could be mortal enemies, bros, or frenemies. But it is Silke Otto-Knapp’s large scale multi-panel watercolor in the lobby that sets the stage for the whole exhibition, with an image of islands, an apt metaphor for the overall exhibition structure, and maybe Los Angeles itself. Made In LA 2016 brings together representatives of many of the islands we have come to identify as existing within the contemporary art sea: painting, sculpture, installation, performance, film, video, etc. Colonies and trade have been established with the islands of fashion, reality television, the tech industry and more, expanding the definition and reach of the contemporary art territory. But who are the colonizers and who is the colonized? If the language and machinations of corporate capital continue to overtly influence the world of art (the original “disruptive innovation”) in a reversal of art’s historically disruptive character on culture writ large, what space will there be for authentic articulations of un-alienated labor from creative individuals of their own free will, beyond the concerns of how their labor fits in with commodification, monetization, and corporatization? Who benefits most from a blurring of the line between what it means to be a contemporary working artist and what it means to be a worker within the dubiously defined, mythical “creative class”?


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Sunday, July 3, 2016

The Eyes Have It

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For Your Eyes Only, John Mills’s newest solo exhibition at Rosamund Felsen, is not about the 12th James Bond film from 1981 starring Roger Moore as 007. But the title is a clue as to what parts of the viewers’ body should be prioritized when experiencing this current body of work. Mills’s second solo with the gallery has him continuing with the square format, the white-ish grounds, the modest-to-heroic scale, and a visual language inspired by early European abstraction. A surface critique might argue for some more bolder, declarative evolutionary changes from one exhibition to the next, but as pointed out in the title, these works aren’t for a viewer’s cynical, novelty-seeking lizard brain. These works are for your eyes, only, the eyes being the only part of our brain that is in actual physical contact with the world outside of our own heads.

Having staked his claim with his format, ground, scale and referents, Mills’s new work is free to juggle the possibilities and delights offered with painting’s phenomenological effects. Space is stacked, folded, stretched and warped; marks, dabs, and scribbles flow, writhe and repeat themselves as if moving through time. Elements in each composition obey a felt sense of optical logic, the edge of the canvases being the most influential formal element. In the larger works Ellipsis, Sign Language, and Formal Foilbles, dabs/blobs/circles/dots bounce off the frame like Pong, tracing their paths into another spatial dimension, never bouncing out of the frame. Underneath and around them in the background and on their level, more familiar Mills-esque elements follow the blobs’ lead. More than even his last exhibition, Mills’s work reads like transcriptions of consciousness, reactions to emerging visual structures in each painting, a result of their being based on smaller drawings. Flashes of identifiable imagery are now joined in equal measure with more direct visual sensations; in Birdcage, Off the Wall, and Mental Charms the picture plane is carved and contoured on top of distant, hazy, clouds of fluffy background. While the emergent imagery in his last solo, High on Signs, frequently took the shape of suggested faces, heads, leaves and feathers, here scribbled into the grounds are goofy cartoon character bits and pieces, comically floating around, as in the paintings Commune and the aforementioned Off the Wall, recalling somewhat the line and character of Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson.



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Suggestive associations abound in all the paintings, perhaps the most visually poetic being Out There, a smaller work from 2015. Simple diamond shapes read like kites in the wind, completing a recurring motif of motion through time and space. This work along with the paintings titled Master Stack and Nature Crush inch up to referencing landscape imagery, yet another possibility offered by the broad range of the abstract square format, the ultimate modernist invention. Mills’s squares this time, however, rely less on their identification as revivals of modernist aesthetic than as accessible, sensitive meditations on the affecting presence of marks, dabs, lines, scribbles, doodles, smudges, shapes and other basic visual responses. They are in a closer arena of work that would include such masters of affecting simplicity as Richard Tuttle, Mary Heilman, and Robert Ryman, though with an eye towards the basic components of intuitive pictorial imagery that is reminiscent of the recent work of Laura Owens, David Lloyd, Chris Martin, and Torey Thornton.