Is Nothing Sacred? Sarah Lucas at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco


A few months ago, I wrote about the new curatorial strategy in effect at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, of showing contemporary artwork interspersed with the permanent collection of traditional European art. The artist was the sculptor Urs Fishher, and I had mixed feelings about the exhibition, which was installed both in the French neoclassical courtyard dominated by Rodin’s iconic  TheThinker, and inside, amid the works of Rubens, Rembrandt, Poussin, and other dead white males of lesser note.

 It’s at http://www.visualartsource.com/index.php?page=editorial&aID=4169.

The current sculpture show, entitled Good Muse, by Sarah Lucas, is stylistically similar, hip and ironic, apparently geared toward attracting younger viewers unable or unwilling to confront the boring, passé art of politically incorrect creators. While Fischer achieved a certain piquant charm by juxtaposing his large bronze casts of amateurish clay sculptures with the columns and courtyard, and Rodin’s pensive colossus, Lucas’s soft figurative sculptures merely disrupt whatever contemplative atmosphere may remain in the museum in this year 100 or so of Our Duchamp.

But first, a quick tour d’horizon. A large pair of women’s boots cast in concrete, Jubilee, stands at the center of the foyer gallery, with its permanent Rodin residents now flanked by translucent cast-resin toilets placed atop small refrigerators and pedestals. The visual discontinuity is enough, but the pretentious banality of the curatorial notes is in my opinion excruciating. Jubilee is presented as a contemporary riposte to Rodin’s Gates of Hell (placed, as it is, amid details from that monumental work): the material, we’re told, conjures up the cement boots of gangster lore, “and thus aligns a woman’s sexual power with ... renegade violence.” The seven Floppy Toilet works, cast in urine yellow, and seemingly melting or dissolving, “serve as a reminder of our servitude to the biological needs of our bodies,” with their “unexpected and often comical grace ... contradict[ing] their scatological implications in favor of more existential considerations.” Two abject, dolllike sculptures made from tights stuffed with cotton fluff, and entitled Tit Teddy (Gates of Hell), are ignominiously placed atop the pedestal for Rodin’s The Three Shades, while two similar stuffed-tights figures, sit in adjacent galleries. Titti Doris, a cluster of balloonlike breasts with long spindly legs but no torso, arms or head, slumps in a chair, “a fertility goddess wrapped up in the insecurities of a little girl.” Washing Machine Fried Egg, a pair of flaccid legs surmounted by sunny-side-up eggs for breasts, “simultaneously iterates and lampoons the patriarchal idea that a woman’s purpose is ... serving a husband’s sexual appetites and domestic needs.” The monumentally ithyphallic Innamemorabiliumumbum “combines the iconic tropes of the reclining odalisque or harem girl with that of the predatory satyr eternally ready and on the hunt for love.”

Even more appalling is a trio of nude female figures, truncated at the waist and sprawling or reclining suggestively. Cast from life in white plaster, they derive from the Greco-Roman marble-statue tradition, but they’re the anithesis of classical dignity and gravitas: the supine Margot has a cigarette inserted in her anus; the sitting Pauline has one in her buttocks; the prone Michele, legs spread, has a cigarette placed in her vagina. The explanatory labels discuss female exploitation and empowerment—you go, girl, victim!—but how can any self-respecting woman, especially an enlightened, educated one,  see these as anything but deeply offensive and, yes, misogynistic? To be fair, Lucas trashes the male gender as well, as we’ve seen, but are people really as contemptible and mindless as portrayed here? (Rodin’s portrait of Camillle Claudel and hers of him stand, by the way, near the entrance to the toilet-rich gallery.) The classic tradition, with Rodin as its Romantic culmination, often ennobled man, and we live in an antiheroic and sometimes misanthropic age—for out anthropogenic sins?— but it was also cognizant of madness and tragedy, none of which is on display here.

These two shows, Fischer and Lucas, purport to honor the work of Rodin. Want to do that, for real? Tolle et lege (take up and read): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burghers_of_Calais

(Reprinted from VisualArtSource.com)

Jessica Hess "Less is More" at Hashimoto Contemporary, San Francisco (reprinted from VisualArSource.com)



JESSICA HESS: Less is More
Hashimoto Contemporary

The San Francisco painter Jessica Hess, who mixes a realist vision, photorealist technique and a bent for conceptualism and even social comment, is back, with fifteen new hyperrealist works depicting slices of architectural life of urban America, from New England to Alameda, and from Portland to Detroit.  Her decidedly unglamorous views of dilapidated or graffiti-enhanced buildings attain a kind of poeticization of the everyday and banal —what most of us walk right past and overlook—but without politics or pathos: most exude a kind of wry humor, delight in the idiosyncratic, an attitude that one associates more with Pop art than with visually punctilious photorealism, which tends to glorify and memorialize its subjects. Hess’s use of photographs is actually closer to David Hockney’s multiple-perspective Polaroids than to the measured classicism of, say, Robert Bechtle’s views of suburban California.

Hess shoots up to a hundred photos of each site and constructs from the 4x6 prints a collage, altering color and even weather and time of day to suit the direction that evolves during the painting process. If her previous show, More is More, in 2015, focused on capturing the abstractions that graffiti glut could create on abandoned buildings’ walls, Less is More (with its implicit reference to the functional Bauhaus architecture, sans ornament, of Mies van der Rohe) examines the mostly unadorned structure—except for the “buff” painting made by building managers covering up graffiti with irregular rectangles of tan and gray paint, suggesting Hans Hofmann canvases with the saturation levels nearly zeroed out. Hess: “I love weathered surfaces, faded colors, decay. The older I get, the more I appreciate subtlety.”—DeWitt Cheng

 

 





 

 

Christian Maychack's "Reciprocals" at Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco (reprinted from Artillery magazine)



CHRISTIAN MAYCHACK: Reciprocals
Gregory Lind Gallery
By DeWitt Cheng

In Kafka’s “The Cares of a Family Man,” we meet a small, strange creature lurking on the narrator’s stairway and in his foyer. No animal, but a spool affixed to wooden crosspieces, trailing bits of thread, it’s a “broken-down remnant” composed of scraps, an animated bricolage. When asked its name, it stops rolling, and replies, in a voice “like the rustling of fallen leaves,” Odradek.

Some of Kafka’s absurdist humor—gentler in this story than elsewhere—informs Christian Maychack’s mixed-media artworks. The artist combines painting, sculpture and installation into bricolages that seem almost animate, and playfully subversive. Maychack studied art in the San Francisco Bay Area, and absorbed its traditions of assemblage, trompe-l’oeil illusionism, and personal mythology; but also the post-minimalist interest in imbuing emotion and presence into abstract structures; he cites the personal, idiosyncratic work of Jessica Stockholder and Martin Puryear as major influences. While working as an art installer and preparator, Maychack began using the skills and materials from that job to go beyond traditional painting and printmaking. One might describe his weirdly humorous works as a quest to “re-enchant” art (to use the term employed in 1991 by the then-disenchanted art critic Suzi Gablik), although the work achieves its effects abstractly, through the interplay of wood, steel, and pigmented epoxy clay.

“Reciprocals,” Maychack’s fourth show at Gregory Lind, comprises eleven assemblages, all from 2017: nine wall-hanging reliefs, with two small sculptures mounted on pedestals. They’re small- to medium-sized, but charged with energy and humor, reflecting the artist’s interest in interchange and interchangeability “between painting and sculpture, front and back, an object and its surroundings, etc.... I often use color to create moments of seeming flatness. Pastels and tinted whites interact with negative space, the pieces’ irregular shapes, along with shadows and the whiteness of the wall, to create a disoriented object.” That phrase may suggest Harold Rosenberg’s term, the ‘anxious object,’ used to describe the experimental works that came after Abstract Expressionism’s existential drama, but did not denote work deliberately provoking viewer anxiety. Rosenberg imagines the works pondering, “Am I a masterpiece, or an assemblage of junk?”

Well, maybe both, such is the dichotomous magic of art. Eight of the works—untitled, but numbered—belong to Maychack’s Compound Flats series, begun in 2011, all employing pigmented epoxy clay pressed into the apertures of chair caning, like fossils in a clay matrix. Some viewers saw the clay-embedded caning as photographic, so the pieces had a provocative ambiguity. (Art history mavens will remember that one of Picasso’s 1912 Cubist still lives employed a printed textile of chair caning to similarly playfully discombobulating ends.) The new works forgo the chair caning but without loss of complexity. Compound Flat #62 is composed of a rectangle and triangle fashioned from wooden sticks suggestive of stretcher bars that have been combined or superimposed; ridges and fields of red, gray and whitish epoxy clay transform this patched scaffolding into deconstructed painting; Manolo Valdes’ heavily impastoed (and faceless) takes on Renaissance portraiture come to mind. Compound Flat 50, 52, 59, and 58 (subtitled Pink Dropout) are based on stacked double rectangles, suggesting open sash windows—or, again, stretcher bars—divested of their glass or canvas, with swaths of fabric (actually pigmented epoxy) inserted into the mechanisms, holding them in place, or together; the window idea is borrowed, of course, from traditional painting. Perpetual Climber and Compound Flat 60 deviate further from rectangularity into idiosyncratic shapes that perfectly balance the centrifugal, expansive  accidents of the creative process with the centripetal, contractile shaping of the organizing aesthetic sensibility.

 

 



 



 



 

Claire Colette Re-Enchants Geometric Abstraction at Johansson Projects


Claire Colette Re-Enchants Geometric Abstraction at Johansson Projects
(reprinted from East Bay Monthly, September 2017)

Geometric abstraction is usually considered to have originated in the United States in the 1960s, with innovative painters like Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Lawrence Poons, Ellsworth Kelly and others, whose ostensibly took the modernist painting to its logical conclusions. Perhaps the art-critic and prophet of that era’s formalist analysis, Clement Greenberg, was unaware of it, but geometric abstraction actually originated a half century before, in Europe—with Kasimir Malevich’s revolutionary Suprematism, and it was anything but an exercise in formalist pure visual aesthetics. Malevich was utopian without reservations or embarrassment, a Christian mystic from the Ukraine who found in the black square (a motif which adorns his grave) an icon for a new age; Mondrian, similarly, now known for his primary-colored stripes, was deeply influenced by Theosophy, the alternative religion of disaffected fin-de-siècle intellectuals.

 Claire Colette’s abstractions in Monument Eternal continue this lineage of spiritual abstraction. The show’s title is borrowed from Franya Berkman’s creative and spiritual biography of Alice Coltrane (the wife of John Coltrane in the 1960s), a brilliant musician and composer who fused gospel, rhythm and blues, jazz, bebop, Hindu devotional hymns and European classical music, and, as Swamini Turiya Sangitananda, performed with other musicians pursuing “spiritual aesthetics.” Colette’s paintings depict the sacred architecture and the creation myths of various cultures, along with the astronomical phenomena studied throughout human history, but they’re filtered though a minimalist, modernist sensibility. Without titles like The End is the Beginning, or The First Hour of the World, or Adityas, referring to the offspring of Aditi, mother of the Hindu gods, one might not discern the spiritual dimension, still problematic for those raised on the outworn creed of dogmatic materialism yet capable of suspending considerable disbelief in art, fashion and politics. Monument Eternal runs through October 28. Reception Saturday, September 9, 3-5pm. Johansson Projects, 2300 Broadway at 23rd Street, Oakland; open Thursday through Saturday 1-5 and by appointment, (510) 444-9140; johanssonprojects.com. —DeWitt Cheng

 

Fall Picks 2017 (reprinted from Oakland and Alameda magazines, September 2017)

STATE OF THE ARTS

Garry Knox Bennett at Transmission Gallery, 770 West Grand Avenue, Oakland, www.thetransmissiongallery.com. Oakland’s master of witty and immaculately fabricated art furniture (including hippie-era Art Nouveau-ish roach clips) returns to the East Bay gallery scene, twelve years after his 2005 Oakland Museum show at the large lobby at 555 12th Street. Details on the show are sketchy at the moment, and might includes lights and lamps, but however things evolve, the show, which might include chairs, desks, clocks and tables, will be amazing, delightful, and a testament to old-school craftsmanship, freewheeling imagination and irrepressible humor. Bennett: “Some people call me an artist. It’s flattering, but I’m not. I have friends that are artists, but I’m a damn good furniture maker.” Reception Friday, December 1, 6-9pm. December 1 - January 20.


About Abstraction: Bay Area Women Painters at Bedford Gallery, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek. www.bedfordgallery.org. The recent regressive turn in American politics points up the fact that the social progress many of us foolishly took for granted was never safe from attack. It’s no surprise, either, that women artists are still under-represented; some change has taken place since the 1970s, but too little, and too late. Still, shows like this one, focusing on local living artists who happen to be abstractionists—and women, Reg!—are valuable in keeping things moving forward. The seventeen painters are Lorene Anderson, Eva Bovenzi, Donna Brookman, Heather Day, Amy Ellingson, Linda Geary, Rebekah Goldstein, Danielle Lawrence, Naomie Kremer, Michelle Mansour, Alicia McCarthy, Mel Prest, Cornelia Schulz, Ema Sintamarian, Michele Theberge, and Canan Tolon. September 24 - December 17.


August Muth: Tactile Radiance at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, 480 23rd Street, Oakland, www.chandracerritocontemporary.com. Muth is a Santa-Fe-based artist who has been working with holograms, those three-dimensional projections (now familiar from Star Wars and other movies) for thirty years. He creates his own works (with a proprietary emulsion) as well as assisting other artists; the James Turrell holograms shown recently at Pace Gallery in Palo Alto are collaborations, I presume. Muth’s holograms convey not desperate appeals to Jedi knights, but geometric forms floating in color fields, hovering almost tangibly in the viewer’s space. Muth considers light to be a tactile medium, and these holograms are not illusions, but “photonic truth.... Through my work, I strive to record with precision the perceptible light-space-time phenomena.  As these three elements intertwine, a three-dimensional topography of pure light is formed, revealing a window into the elusive realms of the light-space-time paradox.  Luminous veils of light invite the viewer into a multi-dimensional journey.... Light is the faithful archivist of time.” First Friday reception, September 1, 6-8pm. August 4 - September 28.


Earth, Wind and Fire at Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Avenue, Richmond, www.richmondartcenter.org. Remember when postmodernist art theory declared nature dead a decade ago, and long live culture? It’s not worked out exactly as we in the fact-based universe would have hoped, but maybe the sullen kid at the G-20 meeting in Hamburg will take a hike.  This show, Earth, Wind, and Fire, explored the reality of our place in the natural world through the artifice of — art, made by the social landscape (for lack of a better term) painter Chester Arnold, the conceptual artist Paul Kos, the figurative glass sculptor Clifford Rainey, and the painter Abel Rodriguez, a member of Colombia’s Nonuya people, now in exile, who shares his intimate knowledge of the Amazon ecosystem entirely from memory: "I had never drawn before, I barely knew how to write, but I had a whole world in my mind asking me to picture the plants.” Reception Saturday, September 9, 5-7pm (probably). September 12 - November 18. —DeWitt Cheng