YOU ARE HAPPY AND SEXY

I startled Jay in the laundry room trying to plug in the vacuum so I could clean out the car. They asked, “are you still writing”? I took a deep breath and exhaled, “yeaaaaah”, staring at two ground squirrels named anxiety and bitterness, poking their heads out of the ground of my soul. There might be a zine in the future, they says, maybe, quizàs. Whatever it is, I’m in. And this is it. You’re reading it right now. It’s about nothing, like Seinfeld. It’s about laundry rooms, vacuums, painting, pain, and “ting”. Because that’s what painting is - half pain, half “ting”. I tried to paint men but they’re just not as interesting as women are to me. Sorry. I tried painting wrestlers but people thought they were boxers and liked them too much. Nobody knows what they’re looking at when they look at my paintings so they just decide it’s nothing. When they think they know, they’re wrong. Nobody wants to believe they’re looking at pro wrestling. Most people think if they catch a glimpse of pro wrestling they’ll become one of those people. Because only Trumpy philistines watch pro wrestling, doesn’t he know it’s all fake? Spoiler alert: Painting is fake, too. All your favorite streaming shows you put on the background while you do other fake shit? Fake, fake, fake. Every billionaire’s self-made story? Fake. As. Fuck. Guess what smarty-pants? Every pro wrestling fan knows it scripted, choreographed and pre-determined. Just like your dumb fucking life, since day one. At least Kenny Omega is aware. El Hijo del Vikingo understands this. The audience for painting in Los Angeles? Not so much.

This is not about me (is “unselfaware” a word? Does acknowledging that make me seem more self-aware? Do I care?). My writing is like scripture - it reveals more about you than it does me. I’m writing this during the last meeting of an advanced life drawing class I teach at Casual State Fullerton. I’ve been adjuncting for 18 years. The app I’m writing this in puts a red line under the word “adjuncting” because it’s not a real word, because it’s not a real job. I graduated from here with an MFA 16 years ago. It took them that long to hire me back. The options were be a gallery artist or go into teaching. Now, if you want a full time professor job, you have to be a gallery artist. The message is clear: if you’re not a commercial artist, you’re dead. I started running into people that couldn’t wrap their brain around “art for art’s sake” in ‘09. People who don’t understand the reason for anything existing if it’s not to make money. People who ask the security guards at museums if the paintings are for sale. “Why don’t you try to be a gallery artist?” “Why don’t you sycophantically kiss the ass of boorish cokehead exclusionists who will sell your whole show at a discount to a Russian oligarch’s daughter-wife or a Mexican narco who will store it all in a freeport until the art advisor tells them it’s time to flip?” One time I had a studio visit with a gallerist who kept talking about themselves and their program and how they have 5 other studio visits today and I kept wondering if they were ever going to turn their head and actually look at my paintings hanging on the wall.

My earliest memory is hearing the song “Angela” by Bob James; it is the theme song to the show “Taxi”, which premiered in 1977. I was born in ‘78. I remember sitting on the ground, pulling my father’s records out and looking at them. Bob James albums. Paul McCartney albums.  On Mondays and Wednesdays, I get up at 5, leave the house at 6, and arrive at around 7 to the community college that lets me teach one section of one 2D Design class that starts at 8 and ends at 11:20. It’s a 90 minute round trip. Near the end of the semester like this, the students are just working on their projects while I sit at the desk and think about how fucked the world is. The world these young students will go forth into knowing how to mix secondary colors and find implied lines in compositions. They walk into class and get right to work. When you’re young you don’t question the point. You are the point. The moment is the point. Everything is new. Everything is novel. Every message you get from the world is “YOU ARE HAPPY AND SEXY”. You’re in the abyss and darkness is filling up the space like you’re in a car underwater? YOU ARE HAPPY AND SEXY. When you’re done for the day, and you try to relax, and you’re sitting there, and now you feel absolutely terrified, absolutely scared to death about nothing, about everything, YOU ARE HAPPY AND SEXY. You’re smart enough to know there are no more ways to make an honest living, true knowledge like that you can’t un-know YOU ARE HAPPY AND SEXY. I’m middle-aged so I get a different message: YOU ARE SAD AND UGLY. AND OLD.

Here and There

Two summers ago, the last real summer, we went up to the Bay Area. One particular painting at SFMOMA, Zapatistas, by Alfredo Ramos Martinez, follows me to the Whitney in New York in early March of 2020, right before the world shit its pants. In between, during the 2019 holidays in San Antonio, I recognize a piece at Ruby City by Cornelia Parker from a similar one on the cover of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe. I pick up reading In the Wake again in the summer of 2020, too late. At SFMOMA my mother stands next to a nice Clyfford Still painting for a photo, horizontal with jagged black forms haloing a flickering flame of red and orange. She and Michelle stand between two Ellsworth Kellys for a photo; two triangles together, two people together, two squares together. In New York Michelle takes a photo of me next to a painting by Lyubov Popova, Painterly Architectonic, from 1917. That painting is in a documentary I show to my students. Photos like this prove that artworks are real, that they are experiences in the world, more than just "images" or "content". Popova's forms are sharp when you just look, but when you see them, you see the precarious entropy shattering the surface, trying in vain to redraw her design. The second photo I took at SFMOMA on that trip was of a painting by Imi Knoebel that is also geometric pink and red with neutral colors like Painterly Architectonic. In researching Popova, I discover they made sneakers with imagery from her paintings on them. This disgusts me. I buy a pair in my size (men’s 9).

At the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford I take a photo of my mother taking a photo of Rodin’s Thinker. A month later at the museum at Pomona College, I take photos of photos on photos, Todd Gray’s infinite regression rabbit holes, worlds within worlds, framings and re-framings on scales human to cosmic. For the first time ever, I lay eyes upon a painting by Kaye Donachie at the Independent Art Fair in Tribeca. It appears to be a sad clown painting. For the first time ever in the states, I see work by Swiss painter Miriam Cahn here, startling vertical portraits of naked humanoids daring to be looked in the eye. Back in San Antonio, a work by Cruz Ortiz at Ruby City titled El Jesse Amado reminds about one time in college, for critique in a painting class, Cruz arrived early and installed a hanging installation in the studio with theatrical lighting and chairs around it in a circle. When we had all sat down and the critique began, Cruz, in costume, handed out photocopied pictures of actor Eric Estrada. Good times. 

The only photo I take from "Painting After All" by Gerhard Richter at the Met Breuer is of a painting depicting a blurry skull in the corner. The show opened the week we arrived; it closed a week later. After the Bay Area trip, in my studio I photograph a plastic skull on a broken plastic column. At the Whitney, Michelle poses in front of the full-size facsimile of Man, Controller of the Universe, the mural by Diego Rivera. The photo I take is an homage to one I took of her in front of the real mural at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, years ago. That mural is a recreation by Rivera of one destroyed by Nelson Rockefeller, Man at the Crossroads, at Rockefeller Center in New York, more years ago. In the movie Cradle Will Rock, Reuben Blades plays Rivera and John Cusack plays Rockefeller. In the movie Frida, Alfred Molina plays Rivera and Edward Norton plays Rockefeller. 

Before New York, in Culver City, Kristy Luck’s paintings hover between this world and another at Philip Martin Gallery. It is the last gallery exhibition I see in person in Los Angeles for over a year. Ree Morton at the ICA is the last museum show in LA I see. Right before Christmas 2019, at LACMA, the part of it they didn't tear down, we see a slow motion big bang in Black City by Julie Mehretu, an ominous storm of lines and bends and feathery marks, the eye of the hurricane is the eye of the viewer. If you’re close enough to see the chaos, you’re part of the chaos. Frothing seas of people on every floor of MoMa in March 2020, Michelle is a pink blur holding a coat in front of One: Number 31 by Jackson Pollock, the last image from the old timeline. Black City and One: Number 31 – across time and space and lunch, in my head, the two paintings finally meet. 

A stinging, crystalline glow surrounds the lost futures of the old world, what the stories were all leading up to, the next steps before the grand staircase collapsed. There were signs all around, in January 2020 I present two paintings in an exhibition called “Death Cult” curated by Max Presneill at the Torrance Art Museum. A large painting in the show is of a toothless skull by Cindy Wright titled LOL. So endeth the decade after the crash and before the plague, a no man’s land of scrambling meaning in forbearance, in deferment, automatically debiting income-reduced payments directly from your account. In the twilight moment after New York but before the big chill, the actor Max Von Sydow dies. I post an image of him from The Seventh Seal with a subtitle from one of Death’s lines, translated from the Swedish: Shall we finish our game?

Thoughts Left on the Page

installation view, Daniela Campins: In the Middle of This Frase, Eastside International (ESXLA), Sept 15th - Oct 20th, 2017

Part one of a series, working title: "Postcapitalist Painting"

Introduction

To the outside world, it seems that Los Angeles’s cup runneth over with new art museums and high-end galleries. Some of these new, moneyed cathedrals of fetishized capital exist to present high-end contemporary art collections that include million dollar acquisitions by the likes of Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Richard Serra and Basquiat (Broad, Marciano). Others are sprung from real estate development riches (Main Museum), or are new incarnations of older, established institutions (ICA-LA). Without digging too much deeper, one could be forgiven for thinking that the art world begins and ends among these spaces and the new mega gallery outposts that are springing up along side them, affirming the legitimacy of the art within, in part, by their market performance (Hauser and Wirth, Spruth Magers, Maccarone, Matthew Marks, etc). The art exhibited at these places wins the public relations battle, and this side of the scene has its front to the world at large. But beyond the spectacle of this there is a community of established, working, contemporary artists at the ground-level in Los Angeles producing important work, despite little engagement with the moneyed side of the art world-industrial complex. A great deal of what they produce is painting. Such a great deal in fact, that some definitive currents and strategies have emerged among the painters of this community. What they all have in common is a direct and human-scaled approach – most of these works range in size from modest to minimally heroic; and a strong indexical sense of the presence of the artist themselves – as this work is not industrially fabricated in quantity by the alienated labor of technicians in warehouses but hand produced in the studios and studio spaces of artists who are more than likely maintaining a living alongside their practice that has little to do with the market demands du jour. Some of the overlapping aesthetic and conceptual groupings that have emerged among the work of these artists range from edge-to-edge intuitive abstract strategies, to more materially-based pattern and grid riffs all the way to deconstructed, figurative investigations and more.

Front to Back

Snow in the Desert, 2017, acrylic on canvas

Half-way between the vibrant exuberance of Rebecca Campbell’s images and Luc Tuyman’s clinical stroke-by-stroke reproductions lay the gliding, neutral toned figures of LA based French painter Claire Tabouret. In Eclipse, the artist’s first solo exhibition with Night Gallery, portraits and scenes are transcribed in a loose, assured line. The monoprints and canvases reveal a casual draughtsmanship unhindered by any photographic flatness. Despite the contrasting patterns that come together to form figures and backgrounds, every moment of detail in Tabouret's pictures is merely suggested. These suggestions contribute in different ways depending on the body of work. In the Frosty Morning depicts a figure in a coat, suit, and hat. More information would be required to make out this individuals face. This lack of info creates mystery; mystery invites narrative. The withholding of key bits of information is at work in Snow in the Desert and The Wanderer, both of which feature figures (characters?) whose backs are turned to the viewer. In other smaller portrait works, the suggestive line work serves to de-personalize the figures. The smears of paint across their lips highlight the interpretation of these largely imagined figures as more like mannequins than models. This is an engaging and wise riff on the notions of the subjects artists paint vs. literal “painted subjects” of models wearing cosmetics, and the problematic generation of images of them as mannequin-like objects.

Installation view of Claire Tabouret: Eclipse at Night Gallery, Los Angeles CA. Image from nightgallery.ca

The press release of the exhibition attempts to diffuse any viewer-generated narrative momentum by spoiling the ending in several of the works. The figures in the larger works and monoprints are characters from history, of various levels of obscurity and notoriety, and knowing a little bit of their stories imbue each scene with a poetic fascination. With this info, the turned backs, snowy scenes and desert wanderings dovetail into themes of isolation, obscurity,  and operating with one’s “back to the world”, to paraphrase Agnes Martin, one of Tabouret’s up front subjects and inspirations. The portraits and group scenes have their “front” to the world, and consequently seem less individualistic and more anonymous than the obscured figures of the other works. If there is an incongruity within the exhibition it is with the two group scenes, the titular The Eclipse and The Viewers. Both are reminiscent of earlier, more assured group portraits of debutantes, one of which was scene here in LA last year at SADE in Lincoln Heights. The anonymity of the faces in these two newer group scenes confuse their effect next to the smaller portraits, which make better use of such depersonalized blankness, their faces serving as canvases within the painting. 

                                                            

The Wanderer (Blue), 2017, acrylic on canvas

In The Frosty Morning, 2017, acrylic on canvas

There are more aesthetic lineages at play in Tabouret’s work that reference some of figure painting's all-star team. Elizabeth Peyton comes to mind with some of the portraiture, and the visual wonder and abstraction surrounding the figures in some of the larger works has a Peter Doig feel. In some instances, Tabouret transcends the superficial qualities of her influences for deeper, more genuine effect. Functioning in all of the canvases is a disarming, restrained and informed use of neutral hues that serves to contextualize the images as having a life before they were references, and imparting a slower, more contemplative read. The paintings are apparently begun with brighter colors that are muted over time, and some of this higher intensity color remains in the monoprint works. Many of these articulate Tabouret’s themes better and more immediately. The mediation of the monoprint process contributes a beneficial layer of abstraction and simplified color that deepens and enhances formal cues of narrative, isolation, and mystery. While there are select passages in the canvases that glide with painterly insight, some of the monoprints’ entire compositions exude this quality. Delicate renderings of fleeting light and cast shadow just coalesce in these works, suggesting even less specific information than the paintings.

The Stains (Brown) 2017, acrylic on canvas

The Stains (Garnet) 2017, acrylic on canvas

Accidentally On Purpose

Allison Miller, Bed, 2016, Oil, oil stick, acrylic and collage on two canvases 113 x 93 inches overall, 56.5 x 93 inches each. Photo by Jason Ramos 

Splotches, squiggles, stripes, deckle edges. The namable things in Allison Miller’s paintings exist just over and under the threshold of identifiable, representational imagery. Each of the decisions documented on her canvases are paradoxically imbued with both intuitive investigation and methodical consideration. Individually and as a whole, the works in her first solo exhibition at the Pit in Glendale, Screen Jaw Door Arch Prism Corner Bed, assert an internal visual logic that defies immediate verbal articulation. However, the presence of the squiggles, grids and framing devices open her language up enough to prevent a completely hermetic system. Bold and graphic declarations of color, shape, and composition give some of the canvases, like Corner, Jaw, and Bed a flag or banner-like feel.

Jaw, 2016, Oil, acrylic, and collage on canvas,
 60 x 52. 5 inches.
Photo by Jason Ramos

Door, 2015, Oil, oil stick, oil pastel, and acrylic on canvas.
Photo by Jason Ramos

The squiggles are accompanied by a bold black stroke of paint and dual, taped-off "less-than" mathematical signs in the largest work of Miller’s to date, Bed. The work is a double decker stacked diptych that commands the entire back wall of the Pit’s next door gallery, the Pit II. Just like her imagery, Bed stands within an in between space, this time between painting and installation. The perspective of the room amplifies the visual destination of the canvases themselves, the angles along the floor and ceiling aligning with the sharp, sideways double-V signs, in turn reiterated by the freehand marks adjacent to them. Passages that seem dictated by controlled accident or chance subsequently reveal specific, conscious addressing of the drips, smears, and cover-ups upon closer reading. Isolated drips in the painting entitled Jar seem surrounded by force fields deflecting a spray of black and pink misted paint. Points of contact between red and green bacon-strips of paint on the left side of Drag Arch are emphasized with dark strokes that seem copied and pasted from the right side of the painting, where they are gathered together within a bright yellow trapezoidal field. Further inspection of the yellow patch recursively uncovers what could be more of those bacon strips on a microscopic scale, or perhaps very far away.

Screen, 2016 (detail)

Jaw, 2016 (detail)

Some of the moves, such as the aforementioned force-fielded marks, sideways V’s, and dark strands and squiggles, have occurred enough in her previous recent work to indicate an idiosyncratic lexicon going back to at least 2007. Denser, fussier compositions from the aughts have now given way to more open fields and a bolder, more striking juggle of higher-key hues. Light-valued grounds in a lot of the earlier work situated them within a drawing context that the work of Screen Jaw Door Arch Prism Corner Bed transcends with a more painterly all-over consideration of the format. Foregrounded linear elements still serve to organize and activate some of the compositions, such as in Bed, Screen, and Door, but in others, they now serve to accent and contrast the fields of color and shape, as in Prism, Corner, Drag Arch, and Jaw. All of this adds up to a slow, satisfying distillation of an abstract language that flirts with hipster nonchalance, but only upon first glance. Sustained viewing is rewarded by unexpected formal revelations in each work. These revelations make Miller’s decision and process available to the viewer, and invite a deeper kind of seeing and use of simple, abstract elements. 

Drag Arch, 2016, Oil, oil stick, acrylic, and pencil on canvas 60 x 58 inches. Photo credit: The Pit, Glendale, CA

Screen, 2016, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches. Photo by Jason Ramos

Hand–Eye Coordination

If there's an odd familiarity to this installation it’s probably because Holy Mountain was an influence, as it mentions in the exhibition statement. Transforming the space by activating the floor is in Polly Apfelbaum’s wheelhouse, but in Face (Geometry) (Naked) Eyes, Apfelbaum deftly activates the perimeter and other parts of the space as well. Bold, primary, formal choices dominate overall, such as the stripe which frames a diverse series of wall mounted ceramic pieces. These eccentrically shaped ceramic paintings contribute multiple layers of contrast and linkage throughout the installation. The rough, intimate, individual quality of the ceramic pieces pop against the immaculately designed hard-edged environment. This also connects and contrasts the hand-woven floor pieces designed and produced by Apfelbaum with weavers from Oaxaca, Mexico. The back and forth is amplified by the handmade ceramic beads suspended over the rugs. Each bead seems indistinguishable from one another until closer inspection reveals the unique, organic form of each one.

The ceramic paintings presented here highlight an intersection of ceramics and painting that is a recurring interest in the current moment. Allison Schulnick, Mary Hill, Ry Rocklen, among others have made use of clay’s materiality, presence, indexicality, and evidence of the hand to present objects that have undeniably painterly qualities. Apfelbaum’s wall mounted pieces read as shaped abstract works, faces, paint palettes, open books, plates, dishes, personal pan pizzas and more. The extensive sampling of these particular, tactile, craggy, bubbly, expressive works give viewers an opportunity for detailed, close-up looking. Face (Geometry) (Naked) Eyes as a whole is best taken in from wide angles, and the arrangement of rugs encourages this vantage point as viewers are forced to the perimeter (though there is the option of walking on the rugs with booties). 

The wooden wall pieces mounted in the back area come up a bit short. They are almost invisible from the entrance, blending in with the deep red background they're set against. Upon discovery it’s easy to see their formal and conceptual links to both the ceramic paintings and the rugs, as well as the satisfying level of craft they embody. Though their camouflaged placement within the gallery also gives them the feeling of being tacked on, like an afterthought.