Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

If I had one complaint about the Hammer Museum’s PST show “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-80,” it was that the exhibition was organized by a curator who isn’t on the Hammer’s staff. My concern was that the knowledge related to the development and execution of the exhibition, knowledge that should have become institutional, won’t.

Fortunately the exhibition was accompanied by a fantastic, thorough, photo-rich catalogue (and here’s hoping it’s required reading for every new Hammer curator). The photos in the catalogue are extra-important: I suspect that it’s the first time many (most?) of them have been published. The catalogue was edited by exhibition curator Kellie Jones.

(Also good: The exhibition seems likely to be re-constituted in New York, at MoMA’s PS1 outpost. The deal isn’t finished, but last week a Hammer spokesperson told me that it’s “very likely” the show goes to Queens.)

This catalogue excerpt comes from Naima J. Keith’s essay “Rebellion and Its Aftermath: Assemblage and film in L.A. and London.” It’s related to the excerpt I published from the “Under the Big Black Sun” catalogue.

The [Watts] uprising in Los Angeles led artists to consider the transformative power of art, which was realized in the reworking, quite literally, of the physical ruins of South Los Angeles. As artists crafted works out of the charred remnants of their world, a form of assemblage art was  born. Mixed-media assemblage, or the use of actual objects to construct works of art from component parts, became key in articulating the desire to develop new and more complex means to understand and comment upon society. The resulting movement was by no means monolithic, however; rather, artists developed a multitude of ideas about the artistic potential of assemblage. For Noah Purifoy, discarded objects were democratic: they didn’t discriminate against those who could not afford or access “fine” art materials. For John Riddle, assemblage was a clear metaphor for the process of change required of art to “advance social consciousness and promote black development.” As John Outterbridge noted, “What is available to you is not mere material, but the material and the essence of the political climate, the material in the debris of social issues. At times even the trauma within the community becomes the debris that artists manipulate and that manipulates the sensibility of artists.”… [Image: John Outterbridge, No Time for Jivin' from the Containment Series, 1969. Collection of the Mills College Art Museum.]

Many black artists in Los Angeles mobilized the medium of assemblage as a way to comment on the role fo the artist as a social agent. For Outterbridge, art with social commentary evolved naturally from the climate of the times — he came to think of himself as an “activist-artist” whose “studio was everywhere.” Outterbridge’s interest in discarded materials, however, started from a young age. His father ran a business in segregated Greenville, North Carolina, collecting and recycling metal machine parts and farm equipment. The artist also credits his grandmother for inspiring him with the handcrafted necklaces and beaded pouches (asafetida bags) she used in her healing practice. For Outterbridge, artifacts made by healers to ward off ailments and ill will possess a curative and transformative aesthetic power that he aspires to deliver in his own work. Drawing inspiration from Dada, folk art, and African sculpture, Outterbridge translates discarded materials into poetic configurations that explore both social and political themes. Objects in his Containment Series — such as Eastside-Westside (c. 1970) — were constructed from cut and flattened tin cans with charred wood and rusted nails brought together in ways that avoided stereotypical markers of African American identity and were topically loaded wtihout being overtly polemical. By manipulating found materials, Outterbridge excavates personal and cultural histories that have been covered over, neglected, and hidden.

“Doin’ it in Public: Feminism and Art at the Women’s Building,” which closed at Otis College’s Ben Maltz Gallery over the weekend, was less an art exhibition than it was a presentation of archival and documentary material related to the history of feminist-driven art in Los Angeles.

As a result, it’s a show that is probably better in book form than it was in gallery form. Fortunately, Otis published two excellent, thorough books in conjunction with the project: “From Site to Vision: The Woman’s Building in Contemporary Culture,” a book of essays edited by Sondra Hale and Terry Wolverton; and a catalogue of the Otis exhibition, which was edited by exhibition curators Meg Linton and Sue Maberry.

This excerpt, from the catalogue, details how the women and artists at the Women’s Building responded to the growing crisis of rape in Los Angeles. It’s a striking example of how artists were on the vanguard of responding to a substantially neglected issue.

While participating in one of Chicago’s classes at CalArts in the spring of 1971, Suzanne Lacy, who had studied under Sheila de Bretteville in the Woman’s Design Program at CalArts, proposed a performance in which an audience would enter a large theater with low lights and listen to audio recordings of women narrating their stories of sexual abuse. Lacy and Chicago located seven women willing to share the horrors that they had experienced, and recorded their previously untold stories. These testimonies formed the background for Ablutions (1972), which Lacy created in collaboration with Chicago and two of Chicago’s other students — Sandra Orgel and Aviva Rahmani. Ablutions was performed in the spring of 1972 in Los Angeles, just before Chicago left CalArts to form the [Women's Building] with Arlene Raven and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. The performance employed visceral items — one thousand unbroken egg yolks, twenty gallons of beef blood, wet gray clay, broken egg shells, piles of rope and chain, and beef kidneys that covered the floor and walls — along with women’s bodies submerged in tubs of egg yolks, clay, and blood. Ablutions combined bodies, objects and voice recordings to expose the horror of sexual violence against the female body and embody themes of female bondage, fertility, cleansing and recovery. [Image: Ablutions performance at Guy Dill’s studio, with Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy, Sandra Orgel, and Aviva Rahmani (Sponsored by Feminist Art Program at CalArts), 1972. Collection of The Getty Research Institute. Photo courtesy Lloyd Hamrol.]

It must be noted that no self-help book for rape victims had yet been published at this point; Ablutions predated by seventeen years texts that encouraged victims to speak out, such as Bass and Davis’s Courage to Heal. Significantly, Lacy, Chicago, Orgel, and Rahmani made an artwork that constituted an early testimony of sexual trauma, providing a precursor to works that artists connected with the WB would create to address similar themes. Ablutions represented an early attempt by feminist artists to consider their increasing concern with rape in American culture…

Ablutions and One Woman Shows were precursors for Three Weeks in May, which was sponsored by the Studio Watts Workshop (a community development corporation that worked with artists), the WB, and the City of Los Angeles. On Mother’s Day in 1977, shortly after Los Angeles had been designated “Rape Capital of the Nation,” various events took place around the city that addressed teh subject of sexual violence against women. In its diversity, complexity, and range of activities and artworks, Three Weeks in May was extraordinary. The projeect included installations, speeches by politicians, interviews with hotline activists, self-defense demonstrations, speak-outs, media articles and programs, and performance art, all designed to grab media attention and generate awareness and discussion about rape in American culture. In addition to Lacy, key participants included the general public (particularly the television-watching public and the live audiences who viewed the performances), police, politicians, self-defense instructors, anti-rape and anti-domestic violence activists, and the print and electronic media.

Related: The LAT’s Jori Finkel talked with Lacy about her 2012 re-presentation of the project. She also reported that Lacy and LA museums have not come to any acquisition-related agreements and that Lacy is now in “discussions” with NYC museums.

Perhaps the least publicized element of Pacific Standard Time is the scholarship and catalogues published in conjunction with many of the PST exhibitions. Many of them contribute mightily to our understanding of post-war art in America. This is the fifth in a series of posts in which I’ll feature excerpts from the best catalogues published as part of Pacific Standard Time. Today: “Under the Big Black Sun,” a Paul Schimmel-edited catalogue of the eponymous MOCA exhibition. The catalogue includes essays from Peter Frank, Kristine Stiles, Tom Crow, Frances Colpitt, Charles Desmarais and Rebecca Solnit.

Most of the writers are more interested in excavating under-told stories, particularly about artists investigating socio-cultural topics, than in including the big-shots. For example, the years the show examines, 1974-81, are the peak years for Richard Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” explorations, including paintings made in Santa Monica and prints made usually in San Francisco. Diebenkorn was not included in the exhibition and wasn’t even mentioned in the catalogue. Too pretty, not political enough.

Ergo, this may be the PST catalogue that launches a thousand PhD dissertations. At every gently curving freeway exit ramp, the catalogue’s authors challenge our idea of how art developed in the post-Vietnam era. (Which makes it similar to this one.) The catalogue+exhibition’s spirit of scholarly-minded, dig-deep, raise-questions revisionism — this was very much a Schimmel-MOCA show rather than a Deitch-MOCA show — is reflected in Schimmel’s introductory essay. Even if you’re deeply committed to the usual story of post-Vietnam art, you’ll probably enjoy the ways in which “Under the Big Black Sun” challenges what you think you know. If you love art history more than you enjoy the scene, this is a book you should have and read often. Schimmel:

“Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981″ addresses the dynamic period in American art when modernism, characterized by a master narrative of progress and succession, reached a dead end, and a multiplicity of movements, forms, and genres began to take shape simultaneously. Indeed, the very notion of art history was called into question during this pluralistic period. As critic Arthur C.Danto explained, pluralism carried with it the “implication that there was no longer any historical direction. That meant that there was no longer a vector to art history, and no longer a basis in truth for the effort to spot the historically next thing.” Thiswas partly the result of the individual artist’s own practice — including the spirit of questioning and experimentation occurring in and beyond the studio — taking precedence over affiliation with anygroup or movement. [Image: Guillermo Gomez-Pena, The Loneliness of the Immigrant, 1979/2011.]

In hindsight, pluralism can be seen as one of the most important developments to affect post war art. Moreover, as this exhibition argues vigorously,what cohered as postmodernism during the 1980s in New York effectively codified ideas and concepts evolving from art made in California between1974 and 1981. Featuring 139 artists working in awide array of mediums and styles, “Under the Big Black Sun” examines the exceptionally fertile and diverse production from all across California during this tumultuous transitional period in United States history, which was, incidentally, bracketed by two Presidents from California: Richard Nixon,who left the White House in 1974; and Ronald Reagan, who ascended to it in 1981… [Image: Chauncey Hare, Standard Oil Company of California, from "This Was Corporate America," 1976–77.]

***

Art-historically speaking, the mid- to late 1970s was absent of any dominant movement, “ism,” or style; it was an “in-between” time when diversity and experimentation were the rule of the day, as some scrambled to find the next “important” trend while others took advantage of boundaries coming down to forge connections between previously distinct realms of practice, such as photography and conceptual art, or media critique and performance art. The next “ism” to emerge was postmodernism, which theorized the dissolution of master narratives and traced the cultural determinantsof a multiplicity of art forms and genres that proliferated at that time and continues to this day. California had a special role to play as artists began to question seriously the assumptions of modernism — with its obvious connections to the similarly authoritative moral, political, and social institutions that were crumbling all around — as well as the primacy of New York in determining what was art-historically valid. New York — still perceived to be the center of the commercial and creative art world, having launched Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Conceptual art, Pop art, Post-Minimalism, etc. — remained on the lookout for the next important movement, sporadically claiming performance art, Neo-Expressionism, and even Pattern and Decoration as its own and advancing each as the “next big thing.” In service to the market, artists in New York were often lumped in as part of a movement before they even had a chance to develop their own voices, which restricted their capacity for experimentation and inhibited their development. When New York did embrace California art, it was often within a narrow provincial context, in which, for example,assemblage was viewed as a secondary response to Robert Rauschenberg. [Image: John Outterbridge, Broken Dance, Ethnic Heritage Group,1978–82.]

In reality, California had seen the inception of many contemporary art movements and media,including assemblage, ceramics, photography, social documentary photography, art and technology,video, conceptual narrative, installations, environments, art in public space, Funk, Finish Fetish, Minimalism, Light and Space, New Topographics, Earth art, performance art, body art, Conceptualism, and a plethora of other developments that focused on aspects of what was a rapidly changing an dpolitically unstable time. While the art scenes in Northern and Southern California did not cohere stylistically in ways that were conducive to the market, the overall scene was marked by profound ideological sympathies. Art-making in California remained a fluid, open, and malleable endeavor; artists were associated with each other and with certain sets of ideas but were not limited by them, and friendships were as much defined by neighborhoods, associations, interests, and lifestyles. Nontraditional institutions and artist-driven galleries and collectives created a looser structure that served as an alternative to the commercial system and provided a way for artists to see each other’s work. This openness was the single most significant factor in the unprecedented inclusion of feminist, gay, Chicano, African American, and Asian American communities within the mainstream artworld — their radicalism in many ways coming to dominate, from an iconographic standpoint, the second half of the 1970s. [Image: Patrick Hogan, Untitled (R-30), 1978.]

Perhaps the least publicized element of Pacific Standard Time is the scholarship and catalogues published in conjunction with many of the PST exhibitions. Many of them contribute mightily to our understanding of post-war art in America. This is the fourth in a series of posts in which I’ll feature excerpts from catalogues published as part of Pacific Standard Time. Today: “State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970,” which was co-organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and the Berkeley Art Museum, where it opens on Feb. 29. I recently wrote about the exhibition for Modern Painters magazine and it’s been the subject of numerous posts here and on 3rd of May.

“State of Mind” is the best kind of revisionist exhibition, one that challenges our ideas about previously understood art histories. The exhibition is especially strong in revealing how many familiar artistic strategies had their genesis in California in the late 1960s and early 1970s, an area that was probably then the world’s leading hotbed of conceptual practice. I was struck by how often the catalogue ended chapters or segments with some form of this locution: “[M]any of the artists from the 1990s whoa re cited as part of the international relational aesthetics movement invoked the interactive works of this earlier period, especially those of [Allen] Ruppersberg and [Tom] Marioni.” Especially given the ephemeral nature of much of the work examined by the show, this may be the most important Pacific Standard Time-related catalogue.

I could probably quote ten similar examples, but here’s just one. From Constance M. Lewallen’s discussion of California-based performance art:

Perhaps no other female artist, with the possible exception of Yoko Ono in her 1965 performance Cut Piece, put herself more on the line to challenge received notions of female passivity and to test the limits of artist-viewer relationship than Los Angeles-based artist Barbara T. Smith in Feed Me, a performance included in “All Night Sculptures” at MOCA in San Francisco. [At right: Performance documentation.] On April 20-21, 1973, in a simulated boudoir, Smith allowed visitors, one by one, to enter a small space — in which she lay fully exposed — and to interact with her as they chose. On an audiocassette her voice repeated, “Feed me, feed me.” By intentionally leaving herself vulnerable to any interaction, including sexual intercourse, she shifted the responsibility for behavior onto the mostly male participants. Although at the time some saw this as counter to feminist principles, for Smith it was both a method of self-transformation and “a negation of male conquest.” Feed Me anticipated Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm O (1974), in which Abramovic also assumed a passive role vis-a-vis the public, who were free to use on her any of seventy-two objects — some pleasure giving, others that would inflict pain.