The Cool School, directed by Morgan Neville (2007, 86 minutes), documents the genesis of the LA art scene from the late 1950’s to the late 1960’s by telling the story of Los Angeles’ Ferus Gallery. Following the development of Walter Hopps’ initially inclusive, expansive vision for Ferus Gallery to its eventual sculpting into an exclusive, cosmopolitan business by later partner Irving Blum, we are introduced to many of the gallery’s key players and given access, through present-day interviews, to their stories. The film’s title seems to refer to its thesis: that the Ferus Gallery entourage literally schooled Los Angeles in the development of cool, teaching it how to act like a city that had an independent, sophisticated, and art-focused cultural center. We are instructed in the view that the Ferus Gallery served as the catalyst that helped catapult Los Angeles’ cultural development from a conservative backwater to a city with a world-class art scene.

The Cool School follows the Ferus Gallery director/owners Walter Hopps and Irving Blum from the gallery’s inception to its bitter end. In the beginning, Walter Hopps worked with an indiscriminate number of artists from San Francisco and Los Angeles. Irving Blum’s partnership focused the gallery, cutting out the San Franciscans, and representing, at least for a time, only a select set of LA artists. That core set of male artists was Ed Keinholz, Ed Ruscha, Ed Moses, Larry Bell, Ken Price, Billy Al Bengston, Craig Kauffman, John Altoon, Robert Irwin, and briefly but notably, Wallace Berman. We learn what it was like to be part of the cool school through the descriptions and artifacts of the artists themselves. Narrated in hard-boiled voice-over by Jeff Bridges, The Cool School combines vintage photographs, period newsreels, and archived interviews with present-day interviews. Although perplexingly rendered in black and white, the present-day interviews give the film its real meat, offering up perspectives on history from key artists, collectors, gallery owners, and critics who were Ferus Gallery insiders, with some additional counterpoint from a few outsiders. Indeed, the theme of insiders and outsiders recurs throughout the retelling of Ferus, as a picture quickly develops of the core Ferus artists as a clique-y, competitive group of men who were as famous for their macho antics and bad-boy posturing as they were for their abstract expressionism, assemblage, and innovative use of materials.

The outsiders’ perspectives provide useful contrast to the enthusiasm of the Ferus insiders. For example, the film is punctuated by the crankily acerbic perspective of NY art dealer Ivan Karp, who, as the voice of New York, has nothing but nasty things to say about LA’s museums, galleries, and collectors, its artists, their media, and its art scene in general! His unilateral distaste for everything LA does a good job of validating one of the film’s central theses: that by staying in LA and shunning New York the Ferus artists were rebelling, perhaps dangerously, against the established art market.

Though they may have been rebels, they were not activists seeking social change. They were modernists trying to express individual artistic visions and to gain personal fame and glory. Nowhere is this more clearly evident than in the film’s examination of women’s place in the Ferus Gallery. We hear from Sonia Gechtoff, one of the San Franciscans who was excluded from the gallery once Blum came on board. One of the few women interviewed, her part in the film is brief but memorable. A cutting-edge abstract artist, Gechtoff’s short history with the gallery underscores the lack of recognition, and deliberate exclusion of women from Ferus. In sum, Shirley Nielsen Hopps, the ex-wife of both Hopps and Blum, says, “They serviced the men. That’s what the women did. Simple as that. They put up with it. They cheered, cried, (and) they’d cook.” Nielsen Hopps’ comments make it clear that while Ferus was in its heyday, women were relegated to purely supporting roles. However, the film makes a connection between the fact that the Gallery’s exclusionary practices ultimately contributed to its demise, citing the sea change in the art world in 1968 characterized by a move away from elitist male-centric modernism and towards “the beginning of feminism and democracy in the arts.”

The Cool School is educational, providing an interesting perspective on the development of LA’s art scene. However, for a film about a critical period in the development of art, many of the stylistic choices seem arbitrary, such as heavy use of fake film crackle, or the punctuation of black and white scenes with red, like a cigarette butt’s red ember against an otherwise colorless field. Indeed, many of the aesthetic choices seem to distract from the film, rather than add to it. Also, the film seems a bit loose structurally, and could use a tighter focus for greater cohesion, as timelines and storylines are sometimes confusing.

The film ends with Ed Moses lamenting that Walter Hopps never got around to writing down his memoirs. According to Moses, this is a great loss because only Hopps knew the real story, and without his memoir, the record will be lost. Moses complains that now, “the record is going to be interpreted, rather than defined. That’s the problem with critics and everybody, they think they have to interpret what’s going on- all they have to do is see it!” But history is really the art of interpretation, as is borne out by the artists’ different versions of history. For example at the 2004 reunion of surviving members there are divergent opinions about which of them blackballed de Kooning’s bid for entry into the gallery. History, or the truth is different depending on who is telling the story.

The film walks a complex line between lauding the genius of the Ferus project, and pointing out its failings. On the whole “The Cool School” seems to err on the side of romanticizing the mythos of Ferus. However, the film’s grand commingling of the art, the relationships, the gossipy scandal, the personal tragedy, and the business practices of the Ferus Gallery, set against the background of LA’s burgeoning cultural development makes for entertaining, if slightly peripatetic viewing.

Published in Artillery Magazine, March/April 2008

Sam Lee Gallery, Chinatown

Pipo Nguyen-duy’s “East of Eden” at Sam Lee Gallery is an exhibition of beautiful, large-format, staged color photographs that manage to be lyrical, sentimental, conceptual and narrative, all at the same time. A self-confessed response to the loss and rebirth of America’s Edenic status in the post-9/11 imagination, East of Eden is Nguyen-duy’s attempt to explore and rebuild the mythos of American exceptionalism. Taking his historical cues from the Hudson River Valley School’s use of the landscape to explore ideas of nationalism and optimism, Nguyen-duy presents us with landscapes that play out some of the fears, anxieties, and grief in our orange-alert consciousness.

Nguyen-duy’s theatrical scenes are firmly fixed in the tradition of staged photography. Their aim is not to reinvent or question the medium, but rather to use its narrative potential to tell us the kind of stories that we need to hear. The photographs hit home because they point out something that we already know, crystallizing our more obvious fears (like terrorists in the grass, or a child witnessing an explosion at the end of the earth), but also pointing to the possibility of a path of mourning and moving on.

East of Eden presents an assortment of images on terrorism, the traumatic and the everyday. These staged photographs do not attempt to mimic reality, choosing instead to dwell in the theatrical world of make-believe. “Mountain Fire” evokes every disaster movie Hollywood has ever produced. “Pumpkin Field” and “Lazy Boy” are achingly beautiful landscapes that bring to mind the nature-as-enemy genre of horror films (there’s something evil in that water/pumpkin field/forest). But not all of the photographs are filmic; in fact most have painterly composition. For example, in “Marching Band,” a dozen bedraggled marching band members sit on the edge of a riverbank. Rather than marching, or even playing their instruments, they sit in somber contemplation, never more isolated than when in a crowd.

“Swordsmen” and “Walk Home” seem emblematic of the work’s themes. In “Swordsmen,” a group of white-clad, masked fencers thrust, parry, fall, and help each other up in a snow-covered wood. They fight, but in a controlled way, with rules. It’s a fantasy of benign, regulated aggression that I appreciate, one that is so laughably the opposite of the terror to which “East of Eden” responds, that I can only see it as a tongue-in-cheek, self-aware longing for a world where differences are settled in plain sight, according to a common set of rules, and with sportsman-like camaraderie. “Walk Home” is both an ending and a beginning, the proverbial walk of shame home after a one-night-stand, still clad in last night’s party clothes. There is shame here, but also hope, anticipation, and excitement at the effulgent possibilities in the day ahead. Optimism in the face of ignominy, the desire for order and honor instead of chaos and disorder-Nguyen-duy presents a fantasy for us that is not quite, but just east of paradise.

Published in Artillery Magazine Fall 2008

“There’s a poet says his favorite place on earth is Italy, cause that’s the only country where men weep openly. Well I ain’t never been there, but I’ll go before I die, and I’ll walk though the piazza watchin’ people watch me cry.”

From “I Cry Easy,” Brett Eugene Ralph’s Kentucky Chrome Revue

Shortly after I first became acquainted with the odyssey that is Brett Eugene Ralph’s Kentucky Chrome Revue, a male friend of mine asked me how I felt about the album. When I gushed about how much I loved it he replied, “Must be a chick thing. All the women I know feel the same way”. While I have since talked to many men who are great fans of Revue, the idea that there was some sort of gender divide in response to the album puzzled me.

What I think my friend might have been referring to has to do with emotion. In my view, the appeal of Brett Eugene Ralph’s Kentucky Chrome Revue is its frank, bare expression of feelings. An album of let downs, breakdowns, and inadequacies, Revue does what music does best; it makes you feel. Ralph is not ashamed of and indeed he delights in an exhibitionistic display of emotion. There is no cynicism, no theory, no critical distance. Revue unabashedly revels in a straightforward, balls-out, heart-on-sleeve emotional wallowing, parading his shame, gut hanging out. The album’s strength is its description of weakness and vulnerability. An apt metaphor for the album as a whole, the “Chrome” in the album’s title refers to Duct Tape, the poor man’s silver. Like the character in “I Cry Easy,” Ralph takes pride in exhibiting his soft spots, which is not something men in this country are encouraged to do.

Though the lyrics and tone of the album revel in weakness, the outrageous all-star cast of the Revue contains some of Kentucky’s most illustrious contemporary musicians, among them Catherine Irwin, Will Oldham, and Wink O’Bannon. Rather than being overwhelmed by all the stars, Ralph is supported by them. A prime example of this is Freakwater’s Catherine Irwin, who sings most songs with Ralph, either in duet or in backing vocals. Irwin’s voice is a superb, mellifluous instrument, but rather than drowning out Ralph, the two work in perfect counterpoint to one another. Ralph’s voice is yet another example of the theme of strength through weakness. Rather flat and nasal, by all rights it shouldn’t work, and yet it does because of the fallibility, vulnerability, and authenticity that it embodies.

For all the emotion it contains, Brett Eugene Ralph’s Kentucky Chrome Revue is no downer. “I Cry Easy” is practically a rousing sing-along, a jubilant choir belting out the chorus along with Ralph. The most bittersweet of songs, “Happened to Be,” which describes a violent, drug-addled, abortion-strewn relationship, still manages a sweetness of melody and instrumentation that produces the kind of pain that feels good. Earnest though it may be, Revue also has moments of self-conscious humor, as in Ralph’s version of Iggy Pop’s classic “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell” in which, after an impassioned plea for love, the singer reminds the listener that everyone’s looks will eventually go to hell.

The irony of women loving the album is that Ralph’s representations of women run from the unflattering to the misogynist. As revealed in songs like “Women Always Do,” the narrator’s view of women is often compromised by the dysfunctional relationships he has with them. The album is populated by extreme stereotypes such as prostitutes with hearts of gold, cheating women, or self-destructive and abused girls. Nonetheless, the fact that the men in Revue are equally damaged takes the sting out of his representations of women. Drifters, emotionally stunted men, and addicts complete the cast of characters.

However, Ralph is not interested in simply representing stereotypes of the poor south. If anything, Brett Eugene Ralph’s Kentucky Chrome Revue is an attempt to come to terms with and even rejoice in the abject heritage of the rural indigent. For example, “Grandpa Was A Hobo” simultaneously paints a picture of the mantle of masculinity that forbids men from admitting weakness, and of a young son struggling against those injunctions and taking pride in his ignominious lineage. Altogether, Ralph creates an album that is both lament for and celebration of the characters that populate his Kentucky.

June 14, 2007

Richard Ross’ Architecture of Authority at ACME is a series of photographs of architecture that is active, aggressive, built for a specific, state-sanctioned violence. Interrogation room, interview room, pat down room, booking bench, holding cell, and lethal injection room, the lesson here is end-game- the state has made you, and it can literally unmake you, stripping your rights, your individuality, your freedom, and your life.

The photographs are hung in restrained salon-style groupings of up to four images that relate to one another. Though comprised of individual works, the groupings make sense, forcing us to see the similarity of spaces, the replication of authority’s tactics relative to a specific goal. For example, the hallmark of the interrogation room is a single chair, though the accessory in Santa Barbara is a roll of toilet paper to stem tears and runny noses, while in Guantanamo it’s handcuffs that attach to the floor. Minimalist and almost monochromatic, the photographs are devoid of the bodies, emotions, and actions for which the rooms were built. Stark, crisp photographs that show every detail in the frame, the punctum in the images is their relentless referencing of human bodies, and yet their refusal to show us any. But the bodies are there like ghosts, populating the empty images. We imagine the people who have sat in the interrogation chairs, or on the booking bench. We feel the guard’s uneasy authority in the lethal injection room, ineffective air-conditioner blasting on the back of his neck.

It’s difficult to choose the most chilling, but for me it’s the segregation cells at Camp Remembrance, the new Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Open to the elements, the cells simultaneously expose and imprison the prisoners. These flimsy structures seem to say everything about the administration’s justification for holding the prisoners in the first place, underscoring the inequity of our war on Iraq.

In the East gallery, most of the photographs are from television police procedurals like Law and Order, and NYPD Blue. Showing our cultural fascination with a fictionalized version of the moment of interrogation, of getting to the truth, these photographs comment on our glamorization of what is ultimately an intensely unglamorous architecture. Two real interrogation rooms are set in this gallery. Smaller photographs, they seem squeezed onto a smaller wall, like afterthoughts that can’t compete with our fantasy of interrogation.

Architecture of Authority is about the spaces that enable the excesses of authority. Ross’ point seems to be not that architecture forces us to behave in certain ways, but rather that without collusive, willing ambassadors of the state, architecture is powerless. Architecture of Authority shows us that without the guard, the bureaucrat, the official, and the prisoner, there is no apparatus of authority, just a bunch of empty rooms.

Summer 2007

The Office, Huntington Beach, CA
Feb 24- March 23, 2007

My mother has a decorative plate collection that hangs in the dining room. State plates proclaiming “Montana, the Big Sky State!” mingle with delicate blue Dutch Delft dishes. At first blush, the china plates in Mindy Cherri’s “Sexpectations” at The Office in Huntington Beach mirror my mother’s collection. White plates with blue lettering are cozily hung salon-style on blue ribbons, domestic Americana transported to the gallery. However, it quickly becomes clear that the pretty plates are not just good clean kitsch. They’re actually quite dirty. And I mean dirty the way your mother would, the kind of dirty that, in my early days, would make my mother threaten to wash my mouth out with soap.
Mindy Cherri’s “Sexpectations” is comprised of an assortment of delicate white china plates, each emblazoned with its own dirty word. Cherri painstakingly creates the sparkly Old English calligraphy on the plates by placing scores of crystals with a dental tool, going back in later to excise any remaining glue and to polish her dirty words to an azure brilliance. “Beaver” “Pussy” “Dickalicious” “Slut” are among the dirty words that erupt on the plates.
Thinking about the exhibit brings to mind another of my mother’s exhortations to “clean your plate”, and makes me wonder, what does it mean to have an embellished hanging plate scream “Beaver” at you? I think that Cherri’s plates represent a return of the repressed, an attempt to show how the things we want to hide (or hide from) come back, not so much to haunt us as to tease us, to poke fun at our prudishness. Rather than exemplars of mid-American domesticity, these plates are an uncomfortable reminder of the funny, messy, dirty body, that-which-domesticity-tries-to-contain. Cherri’s plates serve up delicious contradictions, putting that-which-should-be-hidden on display.
Cherri buys china pieces ready-made from a company that sells mostly to people who hand-paint china. The upper-class-aspirational, society past-time of hand painting china invokes visions of ladies of leisure, Junior League members who train future generations of young ladies in suitable manners, protocols, and behaviors. That Cherri’s plates are not at all suitable is part of the joke.
Like someone gone crazy with a Bedazzler“‰, Cherri puts her own salacious spin on the kitsch memento. An in-your-face re-appropriation of craft, a re-imagining of the readymade, Cherri’s sculptures meld the modernist simplicity of Duchamp’s urinal with the kind of elaboration and embellishment that still signify “beauty” in pop culture America. In so doing, Cherri takes the piss out of the public, the masculine, and minimalist modernity, instead serving up the domestic, the kitsch, the feminine, and embellishment. “Sexpectations” is deliberately quaint, decidedly funny, and quietly disruptive.

“Echoes: Women Inspired by Nature” at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art
Santa Ana, CA
May 8, 2007

“Echoes: Women Inspired by Nature” at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art complements the national re-investigation of feminist art work spearheaded by the WACK show at MOCA. Curated by Betty Ann Brown and Linda Vallejo to focus on women who have been inspired by nature, “Echoes” brings together an eclectic group of nature-inspired work, ranging from celebrations of mother nature in her glory to apocalyptic notes on her decline. Call me a cynic, but I found the work the most interesting on this latter end of the spectrum. In fact, I would say that this sub-category work is not so much “Inspired by Nature” as it is inspired by the unnatural, particularly with respect to man’s effect on the environment.

Take for instance Kim Abeles’ “Presidential Commemorative Smog Plates”. In the early 1990’s, at a time when global warming was commonly regarded as a kind of hoax orchestrated by left-wing radicals, Kim Abeles was quietly creating art using LA city smog. Abeles placed stencil cut-outs of U.S. presidents’ faces on china plates, and them left them on her rooftop, letting the smog do its work. Combined with piercing quotes from each president that reflect their administrations’ impact on the environment, Abeles’ work is even more trenchant and timely in 2007 than it was 14 years ago. A brilliant piece of political, environmental work, Abeles’ work should be on permanent display in a major U.S. venue.

Another artist in the show whose work is inspired by the unnatural effect man has on nature is Yaya Chou. Her two pieces “Joy Coated” and “Chandelier” are both sculptures that go past the merely unnatural and into the synthetic. “Joy Coated” is more didactic, a child-size mannequin coated in Gummi Bears that melt at the child/doll’s extremities, having/becoming the jouissance of childhood obsession: candy. The highly saturated, surreal colors of the Gummi Bears underscore this sense of humor and unease, evoking our nation of obese children, poisoned by toxic, synthetic food. “Chandelier” is a more subtle variation on the theme. Also made from Gummi Bears, it emits not only an eerie amber light but also an attractive/repugnant smell of dusty, hot, gelatinous High Fructose corn syrup, akin more to the nauseating sweetness of bug spray than to the enticing aroma of butter cream frosting.

There are other notable examples of the unnatural in the show, including Linda Frost’s creepy “The Tortured Souls” series, digitally manipulated photographs commenting on the use of animals in testing, and Pamela Grau Twena’s “Protecting the Seeds”, a circle of bronze cast barbed apples that warn of the consequences of man messing with nature. Set in a circle protecting a few dessicated grapes, Twena’s thorny apples evoke other fabled apples (Eve’s, Helen’s, Snow White’s). Except in this case it is not just woman who is punished for her transgression, but rather all mankind if our machinations with bio-agriculture produce the kind of monstrous fruit that Twena imagines.

Samantha Fields’ “In the Belly of the Beast” is the most apocalyptic of the group, and also the one that brings us from a meditation on man’s unnatural effects on the environment to nature’s infernal responses thereto. Depicting the hills of LA on fire, her somber acrylic painting is both a vision of hell and a warning. The LA area chapparal needs fire as part of its cycle of growth, but sprawling over-development combined with global warming’s drought and flood pattern redistribution make it so that fire is increasingly lethal. Fields’ piece seems to say that nature will have the last word, even if it means the end of us.

Published in Artillery Magazine