Sol LeWitt

1928 - 2007

The most moving & profound work of art I see on my day in Chelsea is neither the most well crafted (that would have been Chie Fueki at the Mary Boone Gallery, Amy Myers’ graphite & soft pastels at the Mike Weiss Gallery or the Hans Richter dada retrospective at the Maya / Stendhal – its last day there, alas¹), nor the most provocative (that would be “The Message is the Medium,” the group show responding to war & terror curated by Marshall Reese at Jim Kempner Fine Art), nor that with the biggest price tag (that has to be Richard Serra’s blocks & slabs at Gagosian). Rather, by far the work that drills deepest right through my soul is an exhibition of photographs by Hai Bo at Max Protetch, especially a series of eight portraits of peasants on bicycles approaching on a road in the flat rural northern landscape of the People’s Republic. Judging by the already harvested crops & the heavier weight parkas these men are wearing – five of the eight with Mao caps as well, at least three with gloves – the photographs were taken in late autumn & the suggestion of closure that comes with this is no accident. Indeed, it’s vital to the power of the work. Each individual photograph is just under four feet tall, mounted high enough on the gallery wall that you are almost eye to eye with each subject. The one on the far right looks to his right, as if to the other bicyclists – it’s a brilliant & unifying juxtaposition.

Framed as high art in one of the literally hundreds of galleries that dot the Chelsea between 10^th avenue and the Hudson River in what must be the most rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in America, these eight men – the title of the work is The Northern: A Man is Riding a Bicycle, No. 1-8, can be interpreted many different ways, including what I take to be the obvious symbolic one for this audience, that China is riding out of the past up to greet us, that these men are literally pedaling into their and our future. Even more than the allergic reaction to modernity we see in the various fundamentalisms – Islam’s variant isn’t so far from Christianity’s in this regard – the emergence of China will be the great story of this century. The past out of which these men ride is every bit as doomed (I want to hear to the dustbins of history) as is affordable housing amid the convoluted gallery scene of the west side of Manhattan (where, over tofu fajitas at the Empire Diner for lunch, I heard someone moan that you couldn’t rent a two-bedroom apartment in the area for under $5,000 a month any more). More than any other show that I saw this past weekend – and I trudged through dozens until my brain locked up & my feet screamed for relief from hard gallery floors – Hai Bo seems to have his finger exactly on where we are at this moment in the evolution of world history & captures it succinctly. It’s political without being directly political, aesthetic without being excessively formal, the series is both witty & graceful & terribly sad all at once. Family of Man, meet Late Capital.

The show is a telling reminder that what controls reception of the work of art above all else is context – not craft, not brains nor skills nor the ability to provoke, as such, save insofar as these aid in the manipulation of context, which in this post-conceptual era (or not so post-conceptual over at “The Message is the Medium” show), is every bit as much a material of art as any canvas, pigment or sculptural gunk.

Two other shows this same weekend make clear just why Hai Bo’s photographs are so powerful. One is “Brooklyn Abroad,” another series of photographs by Andrea Robbins and Max Becher that just opened at the Sonnabend, while the other is Reese’s show at the Kempner. The Robbins-Becher show contains two series of photographs, one of various Chabad Houses around the world. Chabad, the organization of the Lubavitch branch of Hasidism, the other of Hasids living in Postville, Iowa, a quaint Iowa farm town that is home to the largest per capita rabbi population in the world, thanks to the presence there of a major kosher meat packing plant. The Chabad Houses are called “770s,” after the last home of the late Rebbe Menachem Schneerson (1902-1994), located at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. All of these other Chabad Houses replicate the architecture of the original site, with its three-peaked roof and brick exterior. At first glance, these very large photographs look like a PhotoShop stunt, until you realize that the replicas are never completely exact. But what really jumps out is how much each sets itself aside from whatever the other local features of the landscape might be – thus for example the five-story São Paulo building is sandwiched between two high-rise apartment buildings, virtually the only building in the vicinity that doesn’t lockstep into the late-modernist urbanism of that city. In the Postville series, we see Hasids mowing lawns, working on tractors and playing baseball. The only thing missing from that series is the presence of Kevin Costner! Robbins & Becher are savvy enough postmodern artists to build in the requisite formalism to create their two series – in this sense, they’re no different from Hai Bo. But there is a sentimentalism about both of these sequences that combines with the gigantic and always bright-to-the-max color photography that yields a mock heroism as purely kitsch as any balloon puppy ever envisioned by Jeff Koons. Unlike Koons, however, I think they don’t have much control over their own uses of irony here, or maybe don’t even see it themselves. Family of Man, meet the Lifetime Channel.

Context works overtime at the “Message is the Medium” show, where the first thing that takes your breath away is, just to your right as you walk in the door, is a variant of the 1970 “WAR IS OVER / IF YOU WANT IT” poster/Christmas card of John Lennon & Yoko Ono. On the front desk is a huge bowl of political buttons, each reading “Imagine Peace.” But what you hear, omnipresent on the first floor of the Kempner, is the droning voice of George Walker Bush himself, around the corner broadcasting from a DVD that plays some of his semi-coherent babble about terrorism while on a TV monitor you see an ice sculpture of the word DEMOCRACY melting in some time-lapse process, a piece produced by show curator Marshall Reese with his partner Nora Ligorano (they have been producing work as Ligorano/Reese for some 20 years now). Immediately across the small room from the meltdown of democracy, so to speak, is a large (2000 piece) jigsaw puzzle by Christoph Draeger that shows a detail of TWA 800, the 1996 Long Island air disaster that has long been a point of contention for the conspiracy minded, some of whom think it was brought down by a ground-to-air missile, whether launched by al-Qaeda or friendly fire. In the main room, past the Marlene McCarty flag with stars only visible for blue states (a total of 19, and, as best I can tell, she has the right stars visible) and a couple of giant Carolee Schneeman prints whose relevance to the show overall escaped me, tho I was happy to see them there – they were the least predictable items in the exhibition – is another even larger Draeger jigsaw puzzle, this time of the oilfields of Kuwait burning in 1991. Upstairs, you can see a DVD of Yoko Ono leading the audience at the Tate in a flashlight salute that she declares means I Love You, followed then by the same at a giant concert in a stadium in Tokyo. Downstairs, Constantin Boym has a series of small sculptures, the size of the little memorial tchotchkes you get in souvenir gift shops, only this time made of cast bonded nickel. Included are the twin towers of the World Trade Center, with the holes made by the airplanes, the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Princess Di’s auto wreck in Paris, the little wood frame house in Los Alamos that we’ve each seen vaporized by a 1950s A-bomb test hundreds of times, a nuclear power plant that I presume to be Chernobyl, etc.

If the immediate context for the show is the present Iraq war and a sense of the horror that attaches itself to George Bush’s war on democracy, the reality that is offered up by the show is that this has been going on over & over & over now for nearly 40 years. This is a vision of the world as viewed by Noam Chomsky on his most dour day, and I think it has something of the opposite effect of the Hai Bo exhibit, in that I think it drains the viewer of any possible response. So you see a Hans Haacke C-print on aluminum of all the lights on Times Square, with one image of a presumed Abu Ghraib prisoner, only with a flag instead of a canvas sack covering his head, as bright as an ad for Coke. Far from invoking the horror of that prison or of the U.S. approach to prisoners in general, whether the 14,000 war prisoners we’re holding in Iraq or the 2 million we have here at home in our jails and corrections facilities (one of which is smack in the middle of Chelsea on 20^th Street), my reaction to too many of these images is numbness. I actually agree with many, if not all, of these artists, I share their anger & despair, but nothing in the show offered me any insight as to what to think or do next.

Not so Hai Bo. Precisely because he’s not dealing with the conflict of cultures at their most obvious pain points, his images offer up much more to think about, whether present in the images directly – just think of the role of the bicycle in the history of transportation, especially at a time with an author like Mike Davis is current penning a history of the car bomb, “the poor man’s nuclear weapon.” Think of the history of agriculture, of Communism (big and little C), of the Chinese regulation of society – Mao caps in 2006! – and of the role of images in contemporary life. The very lyricism of Hai Bo’s photography calls up its consciously conflicted function as an art object, and one senses a level of control over this that is unmatched anywhere in the Kempner show – with the notable exceptions of Ono & perhaps Schneeman, they’re all Adorno-ites there, confirmed in their belief that the lyric post 9.11 is barbaric – and utterly beyond Robbins & Becher altogether. Hai Bo’s show will be up through the remainder of the month. I seriously recommend that you take a look.

 

¹ And how ironic that an old Dadaist might prove the best craftsperson, or at the very least one of the best thereof. Those old aesthetic values turn out to have been hard to overthrow.

An image I saw of an African-American man’s skin nailed to the wall like a hunting pelt, constructed (fortunately) not of flesh but rusted roofing tin has stayed with me, haunted me, since I first saw it in the Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill last Saturday. If there is anywhere a more powerful image of the terror that was slavery, I have never seen it. Indeed, the figure’s spread-eagled posture calls to mind other, more recent images as well  -- prisoners at Attica, stripped naked, forced to assume this same position after Rockefeller’s goons retook the yard, even Rodney King, beaten into this position on the streets of Los Angeles.

Perhaps it is all the more amazing that this work was in a show that celebrates – legitimately – roots & family, the art work of the amazing Betye Saar & her two daughters, Lezley & Alison. The life sized pelt – its title is Skin Deep – is the work of Alison, whose work I was familiar with primarily from her illustrations for Erica Hunt’s book, Arcade, a decade back. As I circled & recircled through the galleries of this exhibit, accompanied by Ken Rumble & Chris Vitiello, I found myself struck by pieces, paying almost no mind to who did what.

Betye, for example, who has several pieces in the show that explore the implications of her own light skin within the American black community, as one piece entitled Cream (2001), a collage on hand-made paper – its tone exactly that of French vanilla ice cream – on which she’s attached an ancient, white child’s dress, at the bottom of which we see an image, perhaps of the artist herself as an infant (she’s 80 this year), above which is a little lock of hair, light brown in a small white bow, while at the top two other images, also ancient head shots of a man & woman – the triangulation is patently genealogical. Around all this are the handprints of small children. To describe it like this gives almost no sense of its elegance or cohesion, which are in fact integral to its impact on the viewer.

Lezley, on the other hand, is the most painterly of the three and often makes figurative/narrative objects, reminiscent of Joseph Cornell or Santeria altars. One can see everything in her work from Romare Bearden to Simon Rodia, the visionary sailor behind the great ship that is the Watts Towers. Her work is full of rich colors &, like both her mother and sister, reflects a sharp wit that undercuts any sense of an aesthetics of victimization.

This wit is at the core of the family’s politics. Two of Alison’s pieces, for example, employ wire to embody hair, entangled in one instance with small bottles, perhaps baby food jars, in the other piece one of the objects is a magnet. In another, she presents a mulatto woman – both in a print & a wooden sculpture – as striped, dreadlocks standing straight up to accentuate the effect.  And it’s around this issue of hybrid identities that one senses the impact of Betye’s late husband, Richard, of German & Scotch heritage, a painter turned art conservationist.

I’m happy to note that this exhibit both has a catalog – tho I didn’t see any copies at the Ackland when I was there – and is set to travel, first to Pasadena, then San Jose’s Museum of Art, then the Palmer at Penn State, where it will be from January thru April next year. I can assure my friends in San Francisco that this will be worth the drive down to San Jose to see. The Saar family is not unlike the Berrigan clan in poetry, an embarrassment of riches, each one doing significant & visually meaty work. The show is both serious & fun, which is a great combination. But I know that I’m going to be seeing that man-pelt in my dreams.

Bob Perelman was thumbing through my copy of Ed Ruscha’s They Call Her Styrene (Phaidon, 2000) the other evening, which raises the question of intermedia from another angle. Ruscha, if you don’t know his work, is a painter and photographer associated with the 1960s Los Angeles scene that proved to be an intersection between Pop, Funk and Conceptual art. His work takes different forms, but Styrene is representative of the works that have most attracted me: prints, drawings and watercolors involving anything from a single word to short phrases, often against backgrounds that are close to monochromatic but which may suggest a picturesque element. Styrene collects some 600 of these works into a single, affordable volume – I’ve seen individual paintings priced as high as $45,000. My question is this: fine as they are as visual works of art, are Ed Ruscha’s text pieces also writing?

Ruscha himself has a cryptic, but intriguing comment right at the end of the book: “Sometimes found words are the most pure because they have nothing to do with you. I take things as I find them. A lot of these things come from the noise of everyday life.” End of comment.

So far as I know, Ruscha has not undertaken to publish these works as writing, nor in the context of writing. As visual art, these works inhabit that territory that utilizes language for its own purposes. Its closest kin in that vein may be the signage of Jenny Holzer, the paintings of Lawrence Weiner, or the poster paintings of Barbara Krueger, but the more densely textual pseudo-philosophical musings of Joseph Kosuth and Art Language aren’t entirely unrelated either. Ruscha’s prints and paintings make use of color and the illusions of depth and texture in ways that Holzer’s do not and his works often lack the overt political commentary one finds in her work and in that of Krueger’s. At its most plain, a Ruscha work might consist of white sans serif letters centered against a black background:

A HEAVY

SHOWER

OF SCREWS

or

THICK BLOCKS

OF

MUSICAL FUDGE

or

WARM

AUDITORIUM

While Holzer has executed some pieces etched into benches, a form that has to recall the (literally) concrete poems of Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ruscha’s droll texts strike me in many ways being better writing. If, that is, they are writing at all. The last text above, for example, makes great use of the recurrence of the a, r and m sounds (not to mention the echo of the w one hears in the two instances of the u), an attention to the smallest of details that might be more apt to associate with the poetry of Robert Grenier. Microwriting such as this can invoke every pleasure one expects from the best of poetry. The first two pieces above aren’t bad either – both use the same strategy of invoking a single term that is “out of context” in its phrase (screws and musical), which functions to set the language around it into a kind of relief, classic demonstrations of what the Russian formalists called ostrananie, Brecht “the alienation effect,” and which Pound characterized as “making it new.”

In addition to reminding me at moments of Grenier, some of the more visually complex of Ruscha’s pieces, where richly textured “3D” words float in idealized pastel skies, remind me of how Hannah Weiner used to describe her visual hallucinations, words that would appear on people’s foreheads that to her seemed to be composed in “dog fur” or similar materials. Weiner used these messages to create her “clairvoyant” works, although that aspect of such found language is not carried through her writing – the closest she gets is to occasionally “erase” some lines of certain letters.

All of which makes Ed Ruscha’s texts function as an intriguing test of the boundaries of writing – how can a lone word such as “fud,” written in what looks like white ribbon on an intense red surface (onto which the letters cast shadows) function as a poem? It can / It can’t / It can / It can’t – like a Necker cube or other optical illusions, the text strobes in and out of the realm of literature (though it always remains within the realm of the visual). It may be that this flicker effect is precisely Ed Ruscha’s contribution to writing.

Some of Ruscha’s word works can be sampled on the web at the following sites:

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Golden Words

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>The Mountain

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>News, Brews, Mews, Stews, Pews and Dues

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Street Meets Avenue

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Now

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Mud

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Selected Works

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Miracle

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Angel

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Evil

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Waves of Advancing Technology