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Notes on Renewed Appropriationisms
Curated by Lauri Firstenberg
Including the work of Siemon Allen, Wade Guyton, Ellen Harvey, Seth Price, Anton Vidokle and Kelley Walker
With Projects by Ruben Ochoa and Michael Queenland
The Project LA March 13 - April 24
Opening Reception Saturday March 13, from 6 – 8 pm
Exhibtion Press Release
This exhibition offers a few reflections on a young generation of artists whose disparate engagements with the operations of appropriation suggest that it remains an incessant and viable strategy. The show examines some of the turns and tendencies of recent appropriationisms that are personal, political, formal, popular, historical, technical and self-critical. We see appropriation take a variety of forms, from a direct lifting of cultural artifacts to a more veiled resuscitation of the vernacular. What once pertained to solely the act of collecting and cutting is now the domain of sampling and hacking. These young neo-appropriationists have a craftiness to their work, through slight or masked mediation. Their production often is invested in the resignification of personal, political or historical memory, entering the terrain of the critical-nostalgic. Both formal and socio-political questions are addressed in such casual gestures of looking, remembering and re-appropriating to provide infinite possibilities and potential for representation.
Our era of digital reproduction and the excess of accessible and inescapable visual information at super-speed, perhaps prompts a need to isolate images, return to representation in a deliberate, exhaustive manner, to dwell on signification, circulation, translation, recontextualization and reconfiguration of visual languages. New York based multi-media artist Kelley Walker’s digitally montaged poster takes on the propandist logic and language of advertising, summoning its audience to “Reappropriate.” Walker’s poster presents the work as a secondary graphic output - a token of the actual work itself-a CD rom, that includes directions for the potential alteration, replication and dispersal of the piece. The image of a Californian backyard, devastated by an earthquake, is decorated with vividly toned amorphous abstractions characteristic of digital painting. Culled from a book, the page crease in the image spread remains. The action of lifting is made apparent. This is a game of contradictions played out within the logic of the computer. With a click, what could camouflage the act of co-option is not put into service. Rather, the neurosis of the Internet is evoked, providing an a-temporal, frenzied informational moment. Decorative patterning meets disaster – the results of a search engine gone wrong.
Art and Obsolescence
Emblematic of a generational drift towards a new brand of appropriationism, the lexicon that is often reclaimed by this young generation of practitioners is that of the television, the internet, and the video game. Historic time is the 1980’s. Pre-Play Station II psychology fuels a kind of memorializing gesture on the part of New York based artist Seth Price. His nostalgia for vestiges of a not-so-distant past includes a chronicle of popular images and personal memories – Capri Sun, Fruit Roll-Ups, Yoplait, Sony Walk-Mans, Apple II and Atari. This adolescent memorabilia serves as the basis for a kind of archiving of the detritus of the digital age. In Global Taste, A Meal in 3 Courses, Price steals an element from Martha Rosler’s eighties classic. Interested in Rosler’s recontextualization of popular cultural iconography, particularly, her montage of commercials from the 1980’s, from Hot Pockets, to Granola Dips, to Dennys, Price isolates and reanimates one aspect of her original tri-partite video installation. Price’s further decontextualization of Rosler’s media-critique, signals a perfect performance to actualize Price’s "retro-fixation" via Rosler’s recuperation of a particular moment in the media-imaginary of a lost Michael Jackson and E.T. loving America. In this way, the work primarily speaks to the artist’s fascination with advertising as an archaic cultural relic.
Reprocessing of Form
Wade Guyton’s neo-minimalist reductive architectonic sculptures are representative of a young generation of artists gesturing to minimalism’s enmeshed traditions of sculpture, architecture and design. In Untitled Action Sculpture (chair), Guyton deconstructs a generic design object. A sinuous silver metal sculpture is composed of co-opted legs of a Breur-style chair, pulled, prodded, and reconfigured it into highly formal abstracted terms. Guyton’s most recent corpus began as black manual drawings, interventions onto found material, torn pages from design, home and sculpture publications, largely from the sixties and seventies. Obscuring and disfiguring the image with a rudimentary graphic negational gesture, primarily, an inscription of a black X cancels the found image. Guyton’s mark both obliterates and engages with the visual terms of the appropriated material. These drawings address the concerns of his sculptures – the negotiation of ornamentation versus function, the production of contingent temporary structures reduced in form to signify merely on the level of style.
The Politics of Appropriation
Born out of the artist's methodical, daily practice of collecting, Siemon Allen’s work signals a series of installations engaging the media-image of South Africa. In re-examining the presence of South Africa in pop culture and in the press, Allen challenges the viewer to encounter the entanglement of global politics, economics and culture. Allen’s series of collections – South African stamps, American newspapers, model guns, reverberate with his earlier collections of personal cultural artifacts from his white suburban middle class youth - Hardy Boys books, Doc Martens, model airplanes, Tintin comics. These relics excavate personal and cultural memory. These acts of appropriation historicize the contemporary, creating at once temporal rift, collapse, and camouflage.
Aestheticization of the Ordinary
Russian-born, New York-based artist Anton Vidokle’s project is invested in the co-option of modernist, revolutionary iconography via various techniques of abstraction, decontextualization and resignification. His work reveals the transference and translation of signs, removed from the realm of the socio-political to the space of the commercial, into the terrain of art in the guise of the popular, referential and the institutional. This made manifest in a series of stickers Popular Geometries, of faux logotypes, mainly extracted from Eastern European and Latin American companies. The multiple transpositions of early modernist language is not purely an aesthetic question for Vidokle, but a reflection of his concern with the manner in which the early utopian ideals of modernism were dissipated by the market, and depleted of their revolutionary social potential. The artist is concerned with the circuit of modernist language appropriated into corporate and popular vernacular. Nuevo, marks a public performance of painting the facade of a defunct train station in Mexico City at the Salto del Aqua metro stop red in a modular fashion. A film and photographic project is based on the facade of this modular, modernist structure turning the surface into sign.
This exhibition is based on an article of the same name (Parkett 67, 2003). Lauri Firstenberg is the newly appointed Assistant Director/Curator of the MAK Center, Los Angeles.
The exhibition continues at ART2102 with Salto del Agua - A film by Anton Vidokle and Cristian Manzutto
Opening Reception: Tuesday March 16th 6-9pm - Exhibition runs March 16th through April 24th, 2004 Gallery Hours: Fri & Sat 12-6pm or by appointment.
ART 2102 - 2101 East First Street LA CA 90033 T.323.401.3441 info@art2102.org
Oscar bombs
"The Passion of The Frodo" sweeps, and more beautiful stars bravely impersonate the genuinely homely to great success. But all the crooked teeth in New Zealand can't save a dull, dull Oscar night
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By Cintra Wilson
March 1, 2004 |
Squarer than robot-shit. All the joy and irreverence of a hotel management seminar. Strictly by-the-book, and the book was the New Zealand census, apparently, and less interesting. The fearful cadavers of the Academy laid down the law with their spotted old talons and brought down an unbearable evening of easy-to-chew television for the elderly and prim that looked and sounded like a slowed-down version of the Lawrence Welk show without all the stimulating colors. Not even the clothes were interesting, apart from Uma Thurman, who wore a Fabergé baked potato.
Janet Jackson ruined tits for everyone, so the vast majority of dresses were strictly Mormon prom. Even Elvis Costello wore a plain black jacket, for The Christ’s sake. Nobody even had interesting new plastic surgery, apart from Joan Rivers, whose face looks like it was gnawed out of marzipan by the savages of Easter Island, and Angelina’s Billy Bob-shaped laser scar.
Actually, I think the horrendous cash success of The Passion of The Mel was responsible for all possible fun being extracted from this year’s ceremony -- cranky old Oscar figured out that most of America hates sex, dancing, gay people, ethnic people, ribald or drug-related humor, and opinionated or irreverent takes on current political events, so the golden man decided to show us just how well-behaved and self-censoring he be; Hollywood fidgeted like kids in Sunday school, and us unwashed heathen out here in TV land had to resort to binge drinking.
"Movieshe are the forshe thot bindshe ush togethah. Shelebrate the mahgic," croaked the decrepit Gone Seannery, establishing the octogenarian Bisquick casserole flavor for the evening in the first five minutes. Even the ordinarily amusing Billy Crystal had crystallized into a pillar of Klonopin -- who were his writers? Who in this day and age rhymes Old Man River with "Dark as mom’s chopped liver"? That’s comedy so anciently borscht-belt it should have been in Aramaic. When he picked Julie Andrews as his designated whipping-matron, it was clear the corporate fear factor was jacked up to orange alert.
There were no pleasant surprises. Tim Robbins beat out a token Asian and Djimon Hounsou, that beautiful African, for best supporting actor; I thought Hounsou deserved it more. The Wonderful Magical Black Person is now a cliché so absurdly pervasive I’m surprised there aren’t Franklin Mint collector plates of damp-eyed homeys gazing heavenward in a spiritual, Native American fashion, but Hounsou still brought a lot of heart to his role. Tim was not exactly a revelation in his dunced-out portrayal of an emotionally damaged guy, but he has been loitering purposefully around Hollywood long enough, and he must have promised to behave; usually an incorrigibly mouthy liberal, Tim’s thank-you was so safe, you knew somebody had his balls in a professional threat-sandwich.
The Road to Oscartown has always been paved with retardation and weight gain, which is why it was obviously Renee Zellweger’s turn to get best supporting actress -- fat, thin, fat, thin….she may be the greatest actress since Oprah. But lately, getting the award is all about Puttin’ On the Ugly: beautiful young Hollywood hotties playing grizzled and wizened hard-luck cases. Let’s review: It worked for Nicole Kidman and her extra nose last year, and Halle Berry’s realistically hideous sex with Billy Bob Thornton’s deflated ass-flaps in 2002. Hilary Swank got the gold when she transformed herself into young Donny Osmond, and it almost worked for Salma Hayek when she grew her mustache out.
But when I think of homely, miserable, ornery, masochistic jockeys with eating disorders, Tobey Maguire doesn’t exactly gallop to the forefront of my mind. Lizzie McGuire would probably make my short list before Tobey. Don’t try to tell me there’s no scraggly little ex-fuck-ups in Hollywood. You know what casting call might have been a stroke of casting genius for "Seabiscuit"? Corey Feldman. That kid has the face of pain. Any of Young Hollywood’s recently sober casualty-boys would have done the trick….but "Spiderman"?
Concurrently, when I’m thinking of hard, early American women barely scraping out a living, subsisting on tablespoons of dirt and weeds at the end of the Civil War, I do not think of Nicole Kidman and Renee Zellweger, the two most wildly pampered women in L.A. and possibly the world, who probably needed to have their hair strands individually mussed for hours each day they shot "Cold Mountain."
Hot-hot-hot model/ballerina/actress Charlize Theron bravely gained 30 pounds, shaved her eyebrows and spent a half an hour in the makeup chair each day getting all ragged-out and splotchy. Her genuinely terrifying performance notwithstanding, I’d have rather seen the best actress award go to an organically homely person.
"Lord of the Rings," realistically, had no competish.
"Master & Commander" was a silly male costume-drama, a moistened "Gladiator," what with Rusty Crowe and his locks of goldenest Clairol, pouncing manfully about the deck with his beefy guts of lager, minding scuppers both bow and stern. Whilst cannonballs splintered the poop-deck and wee boys arms were sawn off, me whistle was whetted for e’en finer upcoming computer graphicks dramas on the high seas, like "Troy." Nay, that film ‘twas neither sentimental enough nor was there sufficient bodice-rippage for the Oxygen demographick.
"Seabiscuit" was a stink-pony – superclean schlock from nose to bumper. Spare me the sight of quaint, depression-era crowd scenes that look like they’ve been swaddled in tweeds by J. Crew, surging in rapture to majestic life-insurance violin orchestrations. That shit was strictly for Burl Ives, Pepperidge Farm and creamy ranch dressing.
"Mystic River" – eh. Sorry, boys: Emotional Violence for Dummies. While Sean is great at bawling openly towards the sky-cam in "Why hast thou forsaken me?" fits of bathos, unrestrained Mook Feelings do not count as emotional nuance, in my book. I’ve seen more skillfully calibrated grief at Super Bowl parties. Sean Penn is unquestionably the finest actor of his generation, but his Best Actor win was strictly the Academy playing catch-up ball -- they got embarrassed that they didn’t recognize him for "Dead Man Walking" or his most naked Oscar bid, that dribbling "Sam I Am" gambit. Sean’s time was overdue, but Mystic River was just one Mexican soap-opera out of dozens he’ll flex his scenery-chewing skills on in the years to come; Bill Murray, on the other hand, may not get another shot. Sad, I say.
"Lost in Translation." OK – I’m jealous of Sophia, I admit it (knuckle-biting spleen, arrrgh, arrgh.) I haven’t seen the movie yet, but she’s clearly got great taste and gets her inspiration from smarter sources than anyone else, at the moment – still, she’s too young and the movie was too quirky to compete with the whole of Middle Earth.
I didn’t really dig the maudlin Irish sob-fest that was "In America" – it was a shamelessly heart-poking, Spielbergian emotional short-con -- basically "The Color Purple" for broke, co-dependant Catholic honkies, shot in glorious Technisqualor. Samantha Morton is the most Serious Actress going, these days, in that she tends to naturally look like she’s put on twenty extra pounds and a prosthetic nose, but that vintage Givenchy dress looked a bit like twin Edsel grills strapped to her tits, and it just wasn’t her night.
"Lord of the Rings: The Passion of The Frodo" was, for me, a great tool of conversion to Hobbitism. They got me where I lived. I was riveted to my seat for the full three hours; I cried so much that by the end I was holding a cardboard tub of polenta. A wildly ambitious and unbelievably realized monster achievement in the genre of epic filmmaking. Bully for the elves, but it’s not like this sweeping win of Peter Jackson’s was any great shocker – certainly, nobody needed to watch the dental nightmare that was the 76th Oscars all the way to the end to figure out who was going home with the big jackpot.
Shame on you, Oscar, for being such a craven corporate pussy. Shame, shame, shame. The only way you can possibly redeem yourself is to get Dave Chappelle to host in 2005 – if not, you may as well go lay down and die in some Opus Dei donation box, because the TiVo contingent will have nothing to do with you. You’ve never had genitals, but now you clearly have no spine.
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Dark Side of Free Trade
By BOB HERBERT
The classic story of the American economy is a saga about an ever-expanding middle class that systematically absorbs the responsible, hard-working families from the lower economic groups. It's about the young people of each successive generation doing better than their parents' generation. The plotline is supposed to be a proud model for the rest of the world.
One of the reasons there is so much unease among voters this year is the fact that this story no longer rings so true. Books based on its plotline are increasingly being placed in the stacks labeled "fantasy."
The middle class is in trouble. Globalization and outsourcing are hot topics in this election season because so many middle-class Americans, instead of having the luxury of looking ahead to a brighter future for the next generation, are worried about slipping into a lower economic segment themselves.
This is happening in the middle of an economic expansion, which should tell us that the terrain has changed. In terms of job creation, it's the weakest expansion on record. The multinationals and the stock market are doing just fine. But American workers are caught in a cruel squeeze between corporations bent on extracting every last ounce of productivity from their U.S. employees and a vast new globalized work force that is eager and well able to do the jobs of American workers at a fraction of the pay.
The sense of anxiety is growing and has crossed party lines. "We are losing the information-age jobs that were supposed to take the place of all the offshored manufacturing and industrial jobs," said John Pardon, an information technology worker from Dayton, Ohio. Mr. Pardon described himself as a moderate conservative, a longtime Republican voter who has become "alienated from the Republican Party and the Bush administration" over the jobs issue.
Mr. Pardon does not buy the rhetoric of the free-trade crusaders, who declare, as a matter of faith, that the wholesale shipment of jobs overseas is good for Americans who have to work for a living.
"There aren't any new middle-class `postindustrial' or information-age jobs for displaced information-age workers," he told me. "There are no opportunities to `move up the food chain' or `leverage our experience' into higher value-added jobs."
The simple truth, as Mr. Pardon and so many others have found through hard experience, is that enormous numbers of well-educated, highly skilled white-collar workers are having tremendous trouble finding the kind of high-level employment they've been trained for and the kind of pay they feel they deserve.
The knee-jerk advocates of unrestrained trade always insist that it will result in new, more sophisticated and ever more highly paid employment in the U.S. We can ship all these nasty jobs (like computer programming) overseas so Americans can concentrate on the more important, more creative tasks. That great day is always just over the horizon. And those great jobs are never described in detail.
These advocates are sounding more and more like the hapless Mr. Micawber in "David Copperfield," who could never be swayed from his good-natured belief that something would "turn up."
We've allowed the multinationals to run wild and never cared enough to step in when the people losing their jobs, or getting their wages and benefits squeezed, were of the lower-paid variety. Now the middle class is being targeted, and the panic is setting in.
No one really knows what to do — not the president, not John Kerry or John Edwards, and most of all not the economists and other advocates who have been so certain about the benefits for American working men and women of unrestrained trade and globalization.
What happens when the combination of corporate indifference and the globalized pressure on jobs and wages becomes so intense it weakens the very foundations of the American standard of living?
The fact that this critically important issue is finally becoming an important part of the national conversation is, to borrow a phrase used in another context by the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, "a good thing."
Perhaps an honest search for solutions will follow.