More Salt Lake City Musings: Smithson's Spiral Jetty and Concerns for Conservation

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970.

After the rather drab photographic work (reviewed in previous entry) I viewed at the Salt Lake Art Center, my Thanksgiving holiday to Utah was proving to be fairly art-less until a last minute decision to drive out and see the Spiral Jetty constructed within the Great Salt Lake. What I have always found interesting in land art or site-specific work is the possibility for the work to change or disappear given the environment within which it is placed. Part of the unique character of site specific art is its permeability and tangibility not found in artworks displayed carefully within the white walls of a museum or gallery. So, I found it humorously coincidental that, while reading the New York Times online this morning, I ran across an article titled, "How to Conserve Art that Lives in a Lake?" Concerned with the Jetty's previous dissolution into the lake and its reemergence over the past few years, the article discusses The Dia Foundation's constant documentation and photography of the Jetty to chart its changes in order to make decisions concerning its eventual conservation. With growing industrial projects planned to be carried out near the sculpture, as well as natural interventions such as silt build up and varying water levels, the Spiral Jetty is in constant transformation, lending an air of fluidity that leads many art enthusiasts to worry over its possible temporary existence.

The Dia Foundation, which is also in charge of conservation over Walter De Maria's Lightening Field, a site-specific sculpture of metal rods implanted in the earth of rural New Mexico, is responsible for the precarious and difficult decision of whether or not to intervene in the natural life of site-specific works in order to preserve them for future generations. In my opinion, to conserve or restore these works is to damage the original intent of the artists who created them, Smithson noted for stating, "I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day. " It is necessary to allow these works a process of erosion, decay, or survival on their own terms as they relate to their environments, instead of interrupting their processes with the desire to preserve the work. For as much as I enjoyed walking out onto the lake and seeing Smithson’s work, the most beautiful part about it was that, in that moment, the Spiral Jetty existed for me alone. Whatever condition the sculpture was in when I viewed it will change over time and the next visitor to the Great Salt Lake will experience a different artwork. The transitory nature of the site-specific work is what provides it with importance. To “fix” or restore the Jetty, or any other environmental work, is to compromise the function of the work itself. As Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, once removed from its original, intended location at the Federal Plaza in New York City, could no longer be an artwork as its fundamental environment is was created for was removed, so does alteration of the Spiral Jetty, or its environment, compromise Smithson’s intent and the integrity of the artwork.

Richard De Maria, Lightning Field, 1977.

Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, 1981.

Exhibition Review IV: Thanksgiving Trip to Salt Lake City, Utah: Tillman Crane's Jordan River Photographs at the Salt Lake Art Center

Tillman Crane, Swimming Hole, 2006.

With little knowledge of Salt Lake City, much less its contemporary art scene, other than Joseph Smith’s spiritual revelations, polygamy, and ornate Mormon temples, I was intrigued to make the eleven-hour drive to my best friend’s Utah home for the Thanksgiving holiday. Admittedly skeptical about critical, radical art produced in the city where most of its inhabitants don conservative, white undergarments under their clothing as a symbolic reminder of the sacred covenants of Mormonism and as a literal source of protection from the world’s evils, I ventured to the Salt Lake Art Center to view their current exhibitions, located just a block from the central Mormon temple from which all streets in Salt Lake radiate outward. Its mission statement claiming to “encourage contemporary visual artists and art which challenge and educate public perceptions of civil, social and aesthetic issues affecting society,” I suspected that should analytical and engaging artwork be found in Salt Lake, it would likely be at the Art Center.

Entering the photography exhibit of contemporary writer and artist, Tillman Crane, I was surrounded by a plethora of images concerning one of Utah’s most vital waterways, the Jordan River. Former mayor of Salt Lake City and now current Director of the Utah Rivers Council, Ted Wilson, coincidentally happens to be my best friend’s stepfather, and educated me on the river’s redemptive history throughout our walk through of the exhibit. Originally marking the boundary between civilization and the rugged unknown of the west, the Jordan River quickly became polluted and unusable in the age of industrial revolution and Mormon settlement in the early 1900s. It was not until the 1970s that a series of laws enacted under the Environmental Protection Agency led to gradual cleanup and protection of the Jordan. Crane’s photographs document the Jordan River from its source at Utah Lake to its mouth at the Great Salt Lake. In most of the photographs, Crane depicts the river in its natural state, while in others there is evidence of human interruption, engineering, and re-routing. Crane works with large format cameras to produce palladium prints that appear metallic and slightly washed out, lending an air of mysticism to the photographs.

In the photograph, Swimming Hole, Redwood Road (2006), Tillman’s camera captures a warped, twisting tree overlooking a spot of the river frequented for summer swimming sessions. Heavy contrast evades the image, the river’s water and fallen branches pervading its ripples falling almost transparent behind the dark tree in the foreground. The photograph appears calm and still with little movement depicted in the river or the tree’s leaves, providing the viewer with a serene scene of a local haunt. Tillman presents the Jordan River in a nostalgic, inspiring way akin to most previous and contemporary art photography. Swimming Hole immediately reminded me of monumental photographs by early photographers such as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams concerned with providing the spectator a grandiose view of America’s magnificent geography. As Abigail Solomon-Godeau notes in her essay, Photography After Art Photography, photographic works by artists such as Weston and Adams present “an auratic image” not invested in art’s role in institutional or representational critique, but rather, in framing “an intrinsic, aesthetic field.” Swimming Hole, while pleasant to look at, in my opinion is not an interesting or unique image. The photograph is beautiful and the use of palladium to provide the river a glowing, silver tint is aesthetically pleasing, but does not challenge the viewer in terms of “public perceptions of civil, social and aesthetic issues affecting society,” as the Salt Lake Art Center claims its exhibitions to do. The photograph quickly fades from memory as the visually striking image provides nothing critical to think about, and thus, nothing worth remembering after the exhibition.

Ansel Adams, Siesta Lake, 1958.

Edward Weston, Juniper, Tenaya Lake, 1937.

Tillman’s photograph titled Trestle Bridge (2008), while shot in similar style and produced with the same metallic sheen as Swimming Hole, is aesthetically more interesting in terms of diagonal lines captured in the scene. The photograph presents a steel, rather industrial-looking bridge stretching above the Jordan River, whose diagonal line parallels that a concrete embankment nearby, graffiti scribbled across its surface. In the background, trees and brush huddled around the water’s edge mingle with the distant Wasatch mountains and Utah skyline, creating a dichotomy between man-made materials and those of nature. Viewed in light of a possible commentary or analysis of the artificial and imposed on the native, Trestle Bridge slightly ventures into the realm of, what Solomon-Godeau describes as, photography after art photography, or photography used in postmodernist art to critique or draw attention to a system of representation. However, the work ultimately fails at escaping categorization as an auratic image, for any critical analysis gleamed from the work is ultimately the viewer’s own, the photograph produced to monumentalize the Jordan River and its beautiful attributes, rather than to make analytical commentary.

Tillman Crane, Trestle Bridge, 2008.

The distinction between avant-garde photography and art photography, states Solomon-Godeau, “lies in the former’s potential for institutional and/or representational critique, analysis, or address, and the latter’s deep-seated inability to acknowledge any need to even think about such matters.” It is clear that Tillman’s photographs of the Jordan River are concerned with the harmony and elegance of the image over stimulating analysis. While visiting the Salt Lake Art Center provided a leisurely break from the often stressful atmosphere of the winter holidays, Tillman’s works, sadly, failed to impress upon me Salt Lake City as a place producing interesting and radical art, and instead, as producing conservative, “pretty” work suitable for the Mormon viewer’s eyes.

The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery: National Print Exhibition

Wandering through Barnsdale Park in Los Feliz this past weekend, I stumbled upon an enormous printmaking exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Los Angeles Printmaking Society and featuring work from local Otis College students, the show displayed over 150 contemporary prints of multiple processes, including serigraphy, lithography, and intaglio. Of notable interest in the artworks presented were prints by two artists, JenClare B. Gawaran and Poli Marichal. Although different stylistically, I felt that these two artists' works communicated with one another through addressing similar themes of identity and character.

Gawaran’s print, titled “Manika,” presents the torso of a female body, holding up a paper-chain link of different women (fig. 1). Upon closer inspection, one realizes that the women actually represent the same person dressed in different clothing, such as the scrubs of a doctor, or a traditional Filipina dress. Whether or not the woman depicted in the paper-chain link is herself, it is clear that Gawaran is exploring issues of identity through the multiple representations of the same figure in different suits. Gawaran’s artist statement presented on her website emphasizes her interest in cross or multiple identities, as she remarks, “As an Asian-American, my current work splits the phrase and myself into two separate identities. My goal is to discover aspects of my background that I previously took for granted, as well as to see how I conform (or not) to traditional Filipino customs and expectations.” Manika may be an insight into Gawaran’s anxieties concerning what role she must play in society as both Filipina and American.

Marichal’s print, titled “Vigilia,” similarly represents a certain cultural identity as does the work of Gawaran, but concerns Latin Americans. Standing atop a tall rock, a lone wolf stands quietly, seemingly content with his position as a slight grin crawls across his face. In contrast, cowering beneath the rock is a family attempting to sleep, a child huddled listlessly near its mother’s chest. A water jug in front of the male figure suggests the family has been traveling or hiding for a long period of time, and have now finally closed their eyes out of exhaustion. The difference between the calm, content wolf and the weary, tired family below are indicative, perhaps, of the Latin American immigrant experience as one that is draining and dangerous, a “wolf” constantly on one’s heels. As a Puerto Rican artist, Marichal is likely calling attention to the identity of the nomadic immigrant, never quite at home or at peace in a strange country. This lost, or fragmented identity is portrayed through the exhausted faces of the sleeping family. The prints of both Gawaran and Marichal consider cultural identities and the anxieties or difficulties associated with being the “other.”

Exhibition Review III: Monster Drawing Rally 2009, The Outpost for Contemporary Art

This past Sunday, community members of North East Los Angeles ventured to the Eagle Rock Center for the Arts to witness artists producing their crafts. An exhibition whose proceeds supported the Outpost for Contemporary Art, a non-profit devoted to cross-cultural exchange and local artist collaborations by developing artistic projects that stimulate social interaction and emphasize process, the Monster Drawing Rally featured a live drawing event consisting of four, one-hour shifts with 25 contemporary Los Angeles artists creating work simultaneously each hour. As the artworks were completed, they were displayed on the gallery walls for viewing and purchase. Far from a traditional gallery show, the spectators watched 100 artists draw, paint, collage, and silkscreen in rapid succession in a sort of controlled artistic chaos that was invigorating and fascinating to view.

Walking in between clusters of slightly intoxicated guests to the circle of tables where the artists produced their works under the curious eyes of spectators, I was quickly drawn to the paintings of a young artist, Jessica Minckley. A recent Otis College graduate whose work has been shown at LA Louver in Venice as well as Carl Berg Gallery where she held her first solo exhibition, I watched as Minckley dipped her brush in vibrant watercolors to paint text and drawings over torn pages from an antique book. Describing her work as recontextualized found objects that are “sentimentally charged” with spiritual or psychological suggestions, her works appear deeply personal and intimate, as if the viewer is allowed to peek into Minckley’s thoughts and ponderings on old words written on a yellowed page. An example of such work is a piece titled “Without Representation,” in which Minckley draws swirling, delicate lines that come to create a circle on an old book page displaying the words of an Arab proverb: “Happy who has seen the most water in life.” The blue lines appear as a musing on the proverb, their flowing quality seeming to move like water, and their circular shape indicating some type of constant, ongoing eternity. The work appears peaceful and somewhat mysterious, as it is up to the viewer to ultimately make sense of the combination of Minckley’s drawing mixed with the previous words on the page. A seemingly hermetic process that depends on her own inner perceptions, interests, and vocabulary inspired or conjured by the text on the book page, Minckley’s work displays quietude and introspection.

Jessica Minckley, Without Representation.

Leaving Minckley’s table in a surreal, pensive state, I floated towards the table featuring artist Brian Bress, whom I found hunched over a stack of magazines, feverishly cutting away. An artist that works in many mediums including photography and video (which he described as “mindless dabblings”), Bress’s comment and collages reminded me of surrealist works by Max Ernst in which he would unconsciously mix and match images of old etchings and mass culture advertisements to create bizarre works that leave the viewer to wander through their absurd complexities without ever really finding a clear meaning through the cuts and clippings. In Bress’s collage, “D.B.,” a portrait of a woman is covered in long, cut up images of flowers, vines, and tree branches to create a biological veil that covers her face. Bress also places more vine-like, crawling collage pieces at the bottom of the work, which stand stiffly as menacing knifes. Rather than a candid image of a beautiful woman, Bress’s interference complicates and disrupts the original photograph, displacing its original signification with added, disjointed collage pieces. While the original intent of the image of the woman is still intact, it is complicated through Bress’s manipulation. As the viewer attempts to negotiate between the woman and the tangle of vines and bark in front of her, the images, while distinct, must be read through each other, thus confusing the relationship of either image to its signifier. Bress’s collages strike me as similar to a surrealist or post-modern exploration into found images and their intentions, and the frustration or anxiety of the viewer when s/he cannot read the collage in any given way.

Max Ernst, Untitled.

Brian Bress, D.B.

Lastly, I would like to describe the work of an artist I stumbled upon before exiting the Monster Drawing Rally. Stuck in the corner table next to a plethora of large sound equipment, Sarajo Frieden sat with her drawing pencils spayed out on the table, creating tiny geometric shapes which she then connect together with embroidery thread. In Frieden’s work is the element of the handicraft, as she frequently implements sewing and needlework into her canvases. As she noted in her artist statement displayed at the Monster Drawing Rally, the location of her Los Angles studio, situated between Little Armenia and Koreatown, acts as “a host of disparate vocabularies from the worlds of fine, folk, and decorative art,” the influence of which can be seen in her folktale, narrative works. In her work, “Landscape 1,” Frieden depicts a fairytale vista in which multi-colored cloud forms emit rays of intricate, embroidered patterns. Geometric mountains and hills sprout from the ground while other indeterminate, yet seemingly fitting abstracted shapes float calmly throughout the piece. The cacophony of color, shape, and line draw attention to the simple landscape as one that is not realistic, but created through the hand of an artist who experiences different languages, cultures, and histories on a daily basis. Watching Frieden work was almost as mystifying as one of her drawings, as she held most all of her pencils in one hand, and appeared to scribble rapidly, as a child would, onto paper to make her artwork. Her dreamlike creation, along with the works of Minckley and Bress, cemented my afternoon as a transportation into the minds of other human beings, and their consequent views of the surrounding world.

Sarajo Frieden, Landscape I.

Survival Research Laboratory: Man and Machine

An interesting video highlighting the performance art of Marc Pauline and the Los Angeles artist collective, Survival Research Laboratory(SRL). Founded during the late 1970's, SRL aims to show interactions between machine and machine, or man and machine. During a heightened time of technological overload post Vietnam and the Cold War, SRL is interested in the often visceral, bloody scenes of war, death, and destruction that is transmitted to the general public through technological mediums, ie television and radio. Frustrated that these mediums flatten and neutralize the horrors of modern times, SRL has put on several performances that highlight and expand upon that horror. The video above (1980)shows SRL's man-made machines attacking and exploding each other and themselves, effective as suicide/homicide apparatuses. Later works have similarly explored the relationship between man and machine, using robots to systematically work together to tear apart the bodies of dead animals in front of a willing audience.

Exhibition Review II: Pasadena Museum of California Art’s Wayne Thiebaud: 70 Years of Painting, October 4, 2009 – January 31, 2010

Wayne Thiebaud, Cake Window, 1976.

The Pasadena Museum of California Art (PMCA) is currently home to over one hundred and twenty drawings, etchings, prints, and paintings from the talented hand of Wayne Thiebaud, the now 88-year-old artist. Arriving at the October 9^th PMCA benefit dinner and members opening in a lavender colored button down and a heavy pair of glasses weighing on his nose, Thiebaud, when asked to describe the intentions of his art, unabashedly stated with a slight smile, “It doesn’t really mean anything.”

Thiebaud’s humorous response appropriately defines his rather multidimensional style of painting, alongside other Northern California Funk artists such as William T. Wiley, Roy de Forest, and Manuel Neri (many of whom taught with Thiebaud at UC Davis’ fine arts department), which frequently links high art with pop culture in a sarcastic, bold, and interesting way that starkly contrasts the Abstract Expressionism work emerging contemporaneously from the New York school. Known best for his paintings of candy apples, cakes, and other confections, PMCA’s Thiebaud exhibition also highlights the artist’s less familiar paintings of brightly colored, semi-abstract California landscapes and unique renderings of the traditional subject of the human figure.

Upon entering PMCA’s main gallery, an explosion of vivid colors splashed on canvas hits the eye of the viewer. The obvious initial works to view, as noted by the hoards of museum members who crowd the gallery wall, mouths slightly salivating, are Thiebaud’s dessert paintings. In Cake Window (1976), Thiebaud paints a variety of cakes placed delicately on high stands, their shadows looming below on the stark, white display case. The cakes are rendered in rich pastels, allowing the frosting and decorations to glisten and seemingly drip from their realistic shapes into the viewer’s mouth. However, while clearly images of sugary treats, Thiebaud makes no attempts to hide his graceful, painterly brush strokes, as his hand is easily identified in the layers of while paint surrounding the cakes.

The image of the consumer object such as Thiebaud’s cakes, or paintings of French fries, ice cream, and gumball machines, recall Andy Warhol’s similar exploration of commodity as subject, such as his Campbell’s Soup Can.

Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Can, 1968.

However, although both artists have focused on the familiar and recognizable, Warhol’s soup can is much more faithful to the original than Thiebaud’s. His food item illustrated for the viewer in near perfection (at times implementing silkscreening to get a mass-produced, commercial effect), Wharhol’s can lacks what Thiebaud’s painting showcases through his cakes with respect to daring line, color, and gesture. While Warhol is usually cited as similar in style to Thiebaud’s food paintings, Thiebaud’s bold colors and thick paint seem more akin to the work of Claes Oldenburg in terms of expression and humor, such as his Floor Burger.

Claes Oldenburg, Floor Burger, 1962.

Similar bold colors, exaggerated strokes, and deeper abstraction describe Theibaud’s landscapes on view at PMCA. In his painting, San Francisco West Side Ridge (2002), Thiebaud paints the frequently depicted rolling hills of San Francisco in a way that confuses the viewer’s perception of the work. The flowing hills are painted instead in terms of straight lines, as if one was viewing a sloping street from directly in front, appearing parallel to the horizon line. Similarly, Thiebaud renders the descending hill in the foreground in a diagonal fashion. The colors of the landscape are no less realistic, painted in hues of neon green and orange. The long shadows cast by the tall, Victorian houses hit the pavement below in various shades of blue. As in his Cake Window, the visuals are discerned, as one can see that Theirbaud intended to paint a landscape. Far from being a traditional Calofornia landscape painter like his forefathers Millard Sheets and Maynard Dixon, Thiebaud’s unique angles and color choices place San Francisco West Side Ridge on par with abstract expressionism, but in a more controlled, quintessentially California way.

Wayne Thiebaud, San Francisco West Side Ridge, 2002.

Of unusual significance for the viewer of Thiebaud’s work are his canvases laden with most traditional, and thus, frequently dull subject, the human figure. Thiebaud’s painting bodies, however, fail to disappoint and are instead treated to the same pastels, layers of paint, and broad strokes as his dessert images. In Three Prone Figures (1961), Thiebaud depicts three beach-goers lying on their backs, faces down in the sand. Their pale bodies float side by side in the middle of the canvas, surrounded by a sea of white paint. Far from a fun day at the beach, the isolation of the three figures from each other as well as to their surroundings suggest a longing and distance between the bodies, as a supposedly happy memory appears tinged with a disturbing loneliness. It is worth noting that, while viewing Three Prone Figures, I heard a couple remark that the stiff corpses were more appropriate for body bags than a day in the sun. As Thiebaud remarked in the Palm Springs Museum Art Museum, “The isolated figure series… are not supposed to reveal anything. It’s like seeing a stranger in the some place like an airline terminal for the first time. You look at him, but you don’t have any particular feeling about him.” Thiebaud’s treatment of the figure, much like his desserts and landscapes, are familiar images displaced into the realm of the slightly fantastical and strange, providing the viewer with a different and far more interesting perspective with which to observe quite ordinary subjects.

Wayne Thiebaud, Three Prone Figures, 1961.

Rebecca Campbell: Nostalgic Dreaming

Rebecca Campbell, Daddy Daughter Date, 2009.

During our class discussion of contemporary painters last week, I was reminded of a Los Angeles-based Artist, Rebecca Campbell, whose work I saw last February at LA Louver Gallery in Venice. The show that I saw was entitled Poltergeist, and featured Campbell's works that focused on childhood memories and nostalgia of growing up in Salt Lake City, Utah. Among an installation of a giant, velvet covered avocado tree with blue birds perched atop its branches, and gold-plated bees strung from the ceiling (seen below), Poltergeist featured a collection of haunting paintings both life-like and seemingly dreamy, which transported the viewer back into Campbell's dusty, religious, and hazy childhood. The opening image of this entry, Daddy Daughter Date, features a young Campbell staring at her father seated in a recliner, his body illuminated from the glow of the television. One gathers a sense of loss or nostalgic longing from the painting, a combination of the melancholy color palate and cold, impartial distance between father and child. Similar paintings in the show feature bleak images of street lamps and telephone lines, rendering the city a quiet, almost deadly place.

Campbell's work returns painting to the figural and realistic, but is not quite the same rendering of the female nude as neo-expressionists attempted to harken back to in their attempts to recapture traditional painting styles. While Campbell is clearly trained in formal, painterly elements of accurate shadowing, depth perception, etc., she does not allow these qualities to hinder her voice in the painting, and creates works that clearly speak of her conflicted memories associated with Salt Lake City.

Rebecca Campbell, Do You Want to Hurt Me? 2009.

Rebecca Campbell, Satellite, 2008.

Rebecca Campbell, Rainbow After Dark, 2009.

Rebecca Campbell, Gretel, 2009.

Rebecca Campbell, Snow Queen, 2008.