Ora Clay, "Living My Truth," a fabric art installation at the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, Stanford 2/23/2

Ora Clay, "Living My Truth," a fabric art installation at the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, Stanford 2/23/2
Fabric art on racial politics and family ties, at Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IriSS), 30 Alta Road, near Stanford Golf Course.
Open to public during normal business hours. Show runs probably through June 2022.

Stephanie Robison at Marrow Gallery, San Francisco (published in VisualArtSource.com, 2/12/22)

Stephanie Robison
by DeWitt Cheng
Marrow Gallery, San Francisco, California
Continuing through March 5, 2022

Midway through Andrei Konchalovsky’s 2019 anti-heroic film “Sin,” we see the haggard, driven Michelangelo alone in his studio, caressing the marble knee of a draped statue. Pope Julius enters, demanding to see the Moses destined for his tomb, and pulling off the sheet to reveal that only the knee, emerging from the huge white stone block, is finished, he thrashes the artist. It’s actually a humorous take on artistic obsession, and if historically inaccurate, it is indicative of the seductive mystique of marble-made-flesh in classical statuary. That seductiveness has not gone away.

The Oakland sculptor Stephanie Robison juxtaposes polished marble, worked into Arp-like biomorphic shapes, with patches or three-dimensional shapes of colored felt that contrast humorously with the marble, suggesting, variously, fungi, anemones, foliage and even hairpieces. “Close Contact” comprises twenty-odd wall reliefs and a trio of freestanding sculptures set atop custom-made steel bases. The works, to quote her website (which features a photo of the artist happily “hugging rocks”), “synthesize and fuse: organic and geometric, natural and architectural, handmade and the uniform industrial.” The exhibit follows by a year the Portland-born artist’s “Cloud Construction,” a Christo-like wrapping of the interior space of the San Francisco Art Commission’s Grove Street Window Installation Site in white fabric. The effect was to mimic the fog banks that descend from Twin Peaks into Hayes Valley: terrestrial clouds, “seemingly innocent, perhaps even magical” that can “conceal, fog or obscure the world around us.”
Stephanie Robison, “Squeezing Blood from a Turnip,” 
2017, marble from CA on custom steel base, 33 x 13 x 7”
Fortunately, viewers of “Close Contact” can get up close and personal to the work, as they could not with the Grove Street installation, which was visible only through the window due to earthquake-safety regulations. The one-on-one relationship with Robison’s quirky creations, which change and metamorphose as we circumnavigate them, is a joy. Robison’s allusive/elusive imagery never coalesces into a single interpretation or reading.
Stephanie Robison, “Heart of the Matter,” 2022, 
reclaimed Italian marble, wool, 13 x 7 x 3”
Says Robison: “Sculpture for me is about tangibility and transformation … I have always been attracted to forms that are in direct opposition to each other or challenge their final aesthetic/functional appearance: I have intentionally carved stone to appear soft or sewn fabrics to appear rigid and architectural.”

“Heart of the Matter,” for example, appears to be a carved marble knee or elbow, but unaccountably endowed with a pink eye and a gray toupée. Move a bit to the right, however, and it reads as the head of a pensive white carp or beluga whale. “Division,” “Underbelly,” and “Niche” are vertical wall reliefs bisected by a horizontal axis or horizon line, with the felt-wrapped upper parts mirrored below by similar yet inexact ‘reflections’ in marble that anchor the lighter superstructures like ballast in a ship. “Desire” and “Spirit Rack” follow this bipartite structure more loosely, with the former suggesting the claw of a red sloth, and the latter the hybridization between an elongated heart, replete with ventricles, and a benign Edward Gorey creature. Two of the large sculptures, “Yellow Plague” and “Squeezing Blood from a Turnip,” take the form of blocks of white marble masterfully carved into indeterminate organic shapes suggestive of excavated dirt or mud, from which truncated roots or tentacles emerge. The tall “Merger,” with its accordion-bellows feet and cactus-pod head, is more overtly anthropoid, a descendant of de Chirico’s ironic, disquieting muses from a century ago.
Robison’s mastery of materials combined with her impeccably ambiguous humor may be seen as continuations of raucously iconoclastic Bay Area Funk Art, but her vision is generationally distinct, demonstrating anew that fresh, original art is possible even in the often-derivative Crazytown of the digital-era art world.
Stephanie Robison, “Desire,” 2020,
pyrophilite, wool, 12 x 6 x 4”
Stephanie Robison, “Niche,” 2021, Persian 
travertine and wool, 15 x 5 x 4”

Ai Wei Wei @ Large at Alcatraz (originally published in Arte magazine)

@ Large: Ai Wei Wei on Alcatraz

By DeWitt Cheng

In the 1950s, the cultural critic Alfred Kazin predicted that art would decline in cultural importance and that it would be regarded art with the same interest as, say, shopping or sports. It would forsake any claim to transcendent meaning.  That prophecy seems in some ways to have been prescient. Contemporary art, democratized and globalized, now enjoys a mass-market prominence undreamt of in Kazin’s day, but the esthetic epiphanies and moral authority of the past were largely jettisoned. 

But not completely. The art of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei demonstrates that conceptually based art can be beautifully crafted, accessible to a large audience, and extraordinarily successful. Even more noteworthy is Ai’s focus on moral and political issues, a stance that links him more appropriately to crusading novelists like Zola and Solzhenitsyn than to the darlings of the international art circuit—or, rather, the other darlings, for Ai is surely a star of the first rank both in spite of and because of his inveterate insubordination.

The son of a prominent Chinese poet who supported the 1949 Communist revolution but later ran afoul of it, Ai grew up in poverty and disgrace—and, literally, a hole in the ground—in remote, freezing Heilongjiang province.  He once said, “I wouldn’t say I’ve become more radical. I was born radical.” As a young artist in post-Mao Beijing, Ai helped to inaugurate change in an art world dominated by party orthodoxy and careerism both before and after his decade in New York City, promulgating the avant-gardist ideas of Duchamp, Warhol and Rauschenberg in capitalist but still undemocratic China. Ai’s impassioned protests over the deaths of five thousand schoolchildren in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (which he attributed to official corruption resulting in “tofu-dregs schoolhouses”) earned the artist a severe beating by police, causing a nearly fatal cerebral hemorrhage and, in 2011, a punitive three-month detention, accompanied with prosecution for tax evasion, bigamy, and spreading pornography. He was also forbidden to travel outside of China, a draconian punishment for this internationally known artist.

His San Francisco gallerist, Cheryl Haines, stepped in at this point, beginning the massive project that became @Large. Haines’s FOR-SITE Foundation had previously partnered with the National Park Service’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy on art installations (including one by Ai) set in other public properties, so when Ai asked for help in getting his work abroad, Haines thought of Alcatraz, the boat-shaped island in San Francisco Bay famed for its Civil War fortress and military prison and, after 1933, an escape-proof federal penitentiary housing infamous criminals like Al Capone. Less known but thematically relevant to @Large are Alcatraz’s detentions of Communists, anarchists, wartime conscientious objectors, and Hopi Indians who challenged government attempts to Americanize and deracinate their children. A picturesquely decrepit tourist attraction since its decommissioning in the 1960s, occupied by American Indian activists from 1969 to 1971, Alcatraz was an inspired choice. With its haunting, grim carceral history, embodied in rusted bars, shattered windows, crumbling concrete, and peeling paint, all contrasting with a breathtaking view of San Francisco Bay, The Rock serves as a poignant backdrop for Ai’s seven installations, all concerned with the issues of freedom, authority and human rights, not just in China, but around the world, i.e., at large—and all planned remotely, from Beijing, and installed by volunteers.

The seven installations are dispersed throughout two buildings on the island: the New Industries Building, a long warehouse built in 1939 where prisoners made clothing and did laundry overseen by guards patrolling an elevated “gun gallery”; and, uphill, at the top and center of Alcatraz, the Cellhouse, the largest concrete structure in the world when it was built in 1912, with artworks in its Dining Hall, Hospital Wing, Psychiatric Observation Rooms, and Cell Block A.

With Wind, Trace and Refraction are installed in New Industries. With Wind is a large group of handmade paper, bamboo and silk kites suspended from the ceiling, in the traditional dragon, bird and hexagon shapes, bearing screenprinted digital designs of flowers and birds, along with the symbols of nations with questionable human rights records; interspersed with the festive stylized patterns on the disk-like ‘vertebrae’ of the hundred-foot-long coiled dragon are quotations about freedom of expression from Edward Snowden, Ai Weiwei and others. Trace is a group of portraits of 175 political dissidents from 31 countries taken from Amnesty International records; the portraits, derived from pixelated photographs and executed in colorful LEGO blocks in Beijing and San Francisco, lie scattered in six clusters or zones, resembling, from a distance, baseball cards or stamps—an honor roll of dissenters accompanied by brief explanations of their offenses in binders at several podiums; included are the anti-Putin protester Andrei Barabanov, the CIA leaker John Kiriakou, the Iranian physicist Omid Kokabee,  the Tibetan singer Lolo, the American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, and the Tibetan Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, named by the Dalai Lama as his successor, who disappeared in 1995 at age six. Refraction is a monumental sculpture composed of curved polished-metal plates or shields, originally manufactured for Tibetan solar cookers, attached to a steel framework; taking the shape of a gigantic wing, the piece—which is not accessible to visitors, and is visible only in glimpses from small shattered windows in the gun gallery above—has a grandly absurdist quality, ponderously earthbound yet glittering and majestic.

The remaining pieces in the Cellblock building are less spectacular as autonomous art objects, deriving some effect from their appalling settings, but they are no less forceful as pieces of engaged political art. Blossom comprises a number of onsite plumbing fixtures that have been filled with scores of intricate handmade porcelain flowers that transform these porcelain sinks, tubs, toilets and urinals into humble memorials. In Illumination, the observation rooms used for mentally ill inmates are filled with recorded chanting by displaced Tibetan Buddhists and deracinated Arizona Hopi Indians, both groups marginalized by dominant majorities. Yours Truly, located in the Dining Hall, is a collection of postcards that have been addressed to political prisoners; visitors may select one or more from the racks and sit down at long writing tables to send messages of condolence or support. Finally, Stay Tuned, in Cell Block A, fills twelve small ground-level cells with the sounds of resistance poetry or music; viewers can sit on a small stool, imagine themselves confined to a 4x8 area for years on end, and listen to the Nigerian Fela Kuti singing Sorrow Tears and Blood (“Police dey come / Army dey come”); to the Iranian Ahmad Shamlu reciting In This Dead-End Street (“Danger! Don’t dare think. These are strange times, my dear.”); to the Chilean Victor Jara singing Manifesto (“My song is of the ladder / We are building to reach the stars.”); or to the New Czech Chamber Orchestra playing, six decades after the composer’s death, Pavel Haas’s Study for String Orchestra (Terezin 1943).

@Large is a collaborative art project that rivals in complexity in ambition two other grandly scaled artworks shown in the Bay Area in the 1970s: Christo’s Running Fence and Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. Is it time once again for art to aim at social change? Ai would say that it has always been time: “I live in a society where freedom is incredibly precious. We strive for it daily and put forth a great amount of effort, sometimes sacrificing everything to protect this value, to insist on freedom. Freedom for me is not a fixed condition, but a constant struggle.”

GARRY KNOX BENNETT: Time, Containment and Bling @ Transmission Gallery, Oakland

GARRY KNOX BENNETT: Illumination: Time, Containment and Bling
Transmission Gallery

Illumination: Time, Containment and Bling is an exhibit of twenty-three table lamps, boxes, clocks by Garry Knox Bennett, the legendary Bay Area artist and craftsman, renowned for chairs, tables, sideboards, desks and jewelry —several pieces of which are installed in a gallery vitrine—that match exquisite craftsmanship with Dadaist/Funk humor and wit. If the Bauhaus, that German academy of modernist style, was originally intended to marry traditional guild-based craftsmanship with modern technology and a machine esthetic, Bennett might be said to embody the Bauhaus beau idéal—that is, if Bennett had studied at the Bauhaus or any of  the postwar American institutions that followed, and if Bennett, who considers himself mostly self-taught (despite a stint at Oakland’s California College of Arts and Crafts). Had there been “Alumni Bauhaus” (or “Alumni Black MountainCollege”) bumper stickers, it is pretty certain that the self-directed artist—who hated high-school academics and preferred the solitude of shop class—would have laughed uproariously at the absurdity of the idea. In an interview, Bennett recounted his entrance into grad school: “I’m generally the biggest guy in any factory, and they’re going to give me all the hard work. And I said, ‘I think I’ll go to art school.’  So I went to Arts and Crafts. And it was the best thing I ever did.” His exit was equally fortuitous: ‘But, yeah, it was good, man. I mean, it was a good environment. They didn’t have any goddamn English classes. When I left, the rumor was they were starting an art history class. I said, “I’m outta here. I’m outta Dodge.’

Bennett’s larger-than-life personality is evident throughout out the lamps, witty sculptures more appropriate for  sculpture pedestals than surrounded by utilitarian iMac bric-a-brac on desks or nightstands. Bennett’s stunning mastery of a variety of materials and methods deserves to be appreciated as art, the expression of a creative sensibility transforming and transcending there purposes as utilitarian objects—and contravening the recently popular (and maybe only partially ironic) notion of art as futilitarian “useless work.”

Five of the lamps seem to me to derive from Surrealist sculpture, wherein various biomorphic characters (personnages) engage in mysterious doings: think of Tanguy, Ernst, Arp and Mirò. “Sergeant Pepper Lamp” (1996) the fanciful psychedelic Art-Nouveau vibe of its Beatles namesake, while “Cloud and Lotus Lamp” (1997), based on stylized motifs from Asian art, resembles a crouching cat or monkey from whose head a golden parasol emerges. “Blowtorch Lamp with 4 Lights” (2013) suggests the non-functional. absurdist human-machine hybrids of Dada,with its coffeepot/torch powering flame-shaped a quartet of Christmas-tree lights; the similar “Three Arm Lamp” (2014) employs the same flame-like bulbs, but here they emerge from the he'd of a simplified human or robot form who stands atop a blocky trident-shaped pedestal.  “Flowers” (2009) is an exotic garden of four or five varied lightbulb flowers—round, flame-shaped, mushroom-shaped, and tubular—that unite botanic with luminous efflorescence.

Other lamps are cleverly subversive variants of traditional lamp forms. “Paper Coffee Cup Lamp (2014) and STDBA #43” (2016) employ a paper coffee cup and a tuna-fish can as substitute reflectors, with hefty bases serving as sculptural pedestals. “Column with Dome Lamp” (2017) and “Post-Memphis Lamp” (2007) are such elegantly idiosyncratic that they might have come from the Memphis Milano design studio of the postmodernist architect Michael Graves. Postmodernist borrowing of architectural motifs for domestic objects and vice versa can be seen in Bennett’s small but monumental boxes and cylinders, which might almost be maquette for colossal monuments.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once noted the there are two types of people: those who divide the world into two types of people, and those who don’t. The apotheosized furniture of Garry Knox Bennett shows that he is clearly with the stubborn resistance.