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I’m taking an evening class at the college this semester, which gives me plenty of opportunity to visit my old haunt the ECC Art Gallery. I don’t think I have time to cover the show in detail (it’s really interesting - I’d like to spend more time with it - go see for yourself), but the gist is that both Keiko and her partner Dennis Callwood work with young people who are involved in the penal system to create amazing work. My immediate reaction brings to mind the work of Gajin Fujita, who’s work is the result of the inevitable mingling of Japanese graphic culture and the folk typography of Los Angeles graffiti. There’s something very different about Keiko and Dennis’ work, though - the young people who they work with are not “graffiti artists”, the darlings of a suburban art consumer crowd, but gang members - their use of art and typography serves a practical, everyday communicative purpose. More thoughts on that later, I suppose.

I leave for Thailand in about two hours, but before I go, I’d like to single out Keiko Fukazawa’s ceramic work for some love. The full Flickr set of my images from the show is here, for your pleasure.

above - I don’t have the title - This pitcher is huge. I’m not 100% sure about the process on Keiko’s work, but it appears that she makes ceramic objects, shatters them and then glazes them in pieces. That’s what it looks like. After being glazed, she re-builsd them. I’m sure much can be made of this process of destruction and repair as a metaphor for descent and redemption, and that’s the most obvious interpretation of much of her ceramic work. I’m not sure if she works with others to actually glaze the pieces, or if she bases the glaze work off of other’s drawings, but either method seems appropriate. I’m not an expert on the history of ceramics, but there’s definitely a stylistic and color reference to earlier ceramic work.

above - I don’t have the title (detail) - The inside rim of the big pitcher. This is an amazing use/reference to the folk typography of Los Angeles gang culture. There’s a whole history to how these letters came to be like this, as heavily serif-ed Old English lettering mutated and simplified under the weight of time. Looking at this work, it somehow seems easier to be critical of “street art”, if only because of it’s relativistic and arbitrary tendencies.

above - Dragon - One of several plates/platters in the show. These are about 2.5′ - 3′ in diameter. I really like the blue & white colour pattern on this, if only because it reminds me of classic blue and white china.

above - Trade Mark - Another plate. This piece just looks great. I’ve seen a fair amount of graffiti smurfs over the years, and it’s nice to see one in glaze. The reproduction of the Milky packaging is really well done up close.

above - Kimono/Good Luck & Wedding Cake/Good Luck - the use of auspicious color and the modification of a traditionally white wedding Kimono through the addition of marker graffiti seems really well composed to me. This piece/installation makes up the entry space to the show and is really striking. The wedding cake is built up of connected maneki neko’s (lucky cats) and the white on white ceramics reminds me a lot of Tom Sachs monchromatic works, which I have always really enjoyed, especially his action figure based interpretation of the major arcana.

Anyways, that’s the short version - there’s more images coming when I get back.

Not to be MAN-centric, but given all the bitching I’ve done about the De Young lately, I feel I need to second Tyler Green’s dissatisfaction with the De Young as an AEG King Tut venue.  It’s bad enough that this turd/scam fell on LACMA, but the De Young, too?  In my two visits to the De Young, I’ve left feeling that the museum is just slugging along, regardless of their fancy pants new building.  Is the secret goal of the re-openend De Young to lower my expectations and then lower them again, as some kind of conceptual curatorial project?

Green says it better than I can (emphasis mine) -

The addition of the Tut $how to FAMSF’s exhibition schedule is director John Buchanan’s first major misstep. The de Young is one of America’s best-attended art museums, and the re-opening of the de Young in Golden Gate Park is one of the more substantial triumphs in recent American museumdom. The de Young doesn’t need Tut. 

I recently did a studio visit with Kim Schoenstadt, whom I caught up with on Tuesday night at the opening for her new exhibition at the Harris Gallery at the University of La Verne. It’s awesome, and everyone should see it. Kim has a really thorough flickr set of the exhibition, including process/installation photos on her two projects that involved input from students and staff, for your viewing pleasure.

Art blogger Tyler Green threw this question out there in response to the American Institute of Architects list of 150 favourite American buildings. So I’m responding with my list. I’m sure this list will come across as pedestrian or “out of it”, but I don’t care. Personally, my favourite building hasn’t been built yet. That building being the isolated Brutalist concrete bunker that I live out my days in after I withdraw from society and become a survivalist hermit.

Here they are, in no particular order

Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA

This building is still in my system, and I can’t stop being in love with it, so I’m getting it out of the way by listing it first. The BAM/PAF building demonstrates what’s best about Brutalism (my favourite style of architecture), by not forgetting to be inhabitable and usable. It echoes the geometric depth of a Gehry, but does so in a much more subdued and elegant way. I’ve always loved college campus architecture in general. If you want to read more about this guy, just check out my last post.

The Chrylser Building, New York, New York

An ornate monument to America’s triumph as an industrial power, the Chrysler Building is the closest thing our society has erected to a pyramid. The stainless steel spire of the Chrysler still dazzles, a fitting crown for the king of New York skyscrapers. I’ve never seen it up close and in person, but I feel like I know it, through films and photographs of it’s iconic interior and exterior. One of the things that makes this building one of my favourites is how it was crafted to be a thing of splendor and beauty both inside and out. It’s a building so gonzo that it’s surprising that it even got built.

Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, Austin, TX

In my various travels, I keep returning to this building. The structure sits simple and revealed on the UT Austin campus, adjacent to a beautiful fountain and across from the campus’ iconic tower. Outside it is plain and dignified, inside it is surprisingly filled with life. The interior of the building is smartly designed, providing the public with an awesome multi-story interior window showing the shelves of red boxes that contain the 40 million pages of documents housed there. While I understand and appreciate the greatness of Lincoln, I cannot truly relate to the struggles of his day. I have never been in the library without shedding tears for the pains of the 1960’s and for LBJ. It masquerades as tourist attraction, but it is really a mausoleum to the memory of man and his era.

Pan-Pacific Auditorium, Los Angeles, CA, built 1935, burned down in 1989

Built one year after the almost mythincal, ur-design of the Chrysler Airflow, the Pan-Pacific Auditorium was an early example of the short lived Streamline Moderne movement. Taking it’s design cues from art deco and incorporating nautical themes, this building, and others like it, embodied the proto-science fiction fantasies of a world at the far end of the industrial age. In an era when Los Angeles became synonymous with suburbia and car culture, this building was a gutsy reminder of the hopeful intentions of the city I love most.

It’s almost fitting that this building no longer exists, as the movement it symbolised seems perpetually unfulfilled and aborted, as if the utilitarianism of the post World War II world had not enough room for Streamline Moderne or Art Deco. I came to love this building through multiple watchings of Xanadu, and I believe I have faint memories of passing it as a child, which may be why I have such a strong attachment to it.

San Francisco City Hall, San Francisco, CA

I never fail to be amazed by this building. This building, built to replace the city hall destroyed in the 1906 earthquake/fire, represents the coming of age of cities in the Western United States. Being from Los Angeles, where architecture is temporary, and where our “real architecture” tends to be domestic in orientation, I’m amazed at the sheer classiness of this building and the buildings that surround it. There was a moment in the mid 19th century when California was a nation unto itself, and this building would have made a fitting capital for a growing republic. My “California Secessionist” sympathies aside, this building makes a fitting center of government to San Francisco, America’s most “European” city.

The End

So that’s it, my five. These are all buildings that I love, for whatever reason. Buidlings that I thought about for this list included Ted Kaczynski’s shack, the Vehicle Assembly Building, Los Angeles City Hall, the Cal Trans District 7 Headquarters, the Winnebago/RV (not a building, really, but like a building and uniquely American), the Texas Capital Building and the Lincoln Memorial.

On my last trip up to the Bay Area, as mentioned in my previous post, I made an unplanned visit to the Berkeley Art Museum to see their new show, A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s. I’ve never really given much thought to Nauman’s work, primarily associating him with his many neon-text pieces. But enough about Nauman, for now. I’m really more interested in talking about the building that houses the Berkeley Art Museum, itself.

The Berkeley Art Museum Building

I’m in love. I’ve had a lot of disappointing experiences in museum design lately. I’m still having trouble excising the disaster that is the Portland Art Museum out of my mind. I continue to be disappointed by the De Young Museum. Unlike bad art, bad museum design can’t be so easily undone, or stashed in the basement. Once you’ve built it, you’re stuck with it, you’re bound by all of the narrow minded board decisions that shaped it, the design by committee, whatever went wrong, it’s there, edified in polished concrete and whatever novel material was the flavour of the day, for the gristmills of generations of complainers.

Back to the love. I love this building. I love every part of it, from the lower level entrance where they very smartly installed GRAPEFRUIT, to the amazing interior space that gives me curatorial envy like nobody’s business. Just thinking of the potential of the space makes me quiver somewhere deep and arty. It’s even better looking than most museums when seen from orbit.

I’ve been playing a lot of Metroid Prime & Metro Prime Echoes lately, and the interior of the space immediately resonated with me as a video gamer. Coming into the main space of the museum, you are confronted with a vast, auditorium like space, with the main exhibition areas being a series of open platforms that practically cry out for Cremaster 3 style intervention from aspiring video game character Matthew Barney. It’s just so easy to picture him wearing a pair of Powerizers and trying to jump from floor to floor, preferably while dressed as General MacArthur, but I’ll take a satyr costume if that’s all he can dig up.

The beauty of the museum is the platforms. Because they have open ends, all of the exhibition spaces are free of the tiny rooms phenomenon. They’re much more receptive spaces for installation art or performance, and you never feel like you are in a rat warren, which is all to common in facilities housing the permanent collections of fine art museums. Basically they’re a series of white box galleries with about 1/3 of the walls removed and replaced with a four foot high balcony area. The platforms are connected by both access stairs and some very wide ramps (certainly wide enough to accommodate the movement of major artworks - very well thought out), and walking up or down the ramps provides a little breather in your art viewing experience. I know that gallery visitors are always bitching about places to sit and chill out, but I really would rather see more non-art spaces that break up the tedium of what can sometimes be an endless series of objects, and the ramps kind of provide that function, by making the spaces connected by what function as hallways with vistas, as opposed to doorways. Re-reading that last sentence makes me realise that I’ve spent far too much time in museums lately.

Although I’ve never been to the Guggenheim, the platforms strike me as Guggenheim-esque kind of operation, an attempt to take a building with a conservative footprint and create the illusion of space. The Berkeley Art Museum is a big success, as it somehow manages to avoid the pitfalls and traps that plague museum design. Every space you are in seems bigger than it is, and you are never, ever in a tiny room.
A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s

To me, Nauman was a take it or leave it artist before I saw this show. I’ve never found his text work as interesting as everyone else seems to, and I have trouble being interested in what seems like a career built upon a desperate search for attention and recognition. This competes, however, with my sympathy for artists who use their self or their body as a jumping off point for their works, which Nauman certainly does.

Much of Nauman’s sculptural work bores me to tears. I just cannot become involved with it. Some part of it seems like he’s just fumbling around, searching for novel ideas. Some of it arouses my interest, though. Mold for Modernized Slant Step, a piece created as part of the 1966 Slant Step show at the Berkeley Gallery, draws my interest, if only because it exists as part of a body of responses to an enigmatic and largely useless object, a footstool with slanted steps that was found in a junk shop.

What I did enjoy most from the selection of Nauman’s work were the videos and the sound piece, Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room. Nauman’s 10 minute films, which I was wholly unaware of before entering the building, immediately realised themselves as the direct antecedents of Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint pieces, and really made me startlingly aware of how “not in a vacuum” those pieces came to be. Seeing them for the first time, as someone born in 1978, they appear as “performance video pastiche”, almost a comical look at the much mocked meaninglessness of performance and video art in relation to the outside world. They are the kind of material that makes up the source vein of ironic mockery of performance art itself. And they’re beautiful for it, and I spent a lot more time looking at them than I do most video art that’s out there. The bulk of it just bores you to tears while it dousing you with pretension.

Nauman’s not lacking in the pretension, but I felt mesmerised by the composition and the action of his films, especially Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk), which brought me a sort of “Ministry of Silly Walks” joy, through its exercise of futility, and Stamping in the Studio, which somehow kept me engaged, maybe because the idea of an over-intellectualized performance artist stamping around in a room devoid of others is a pleasing mental image. The aforementioned sound installation, Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room, was perhaps the most stimulating and interesting piece in the exhibition to me. A small room, constructed inside the gallery for the exhibition, containing only the sound of the artist repeating the title, just worked me over with that good mix of sensory deprivation and over-sensation that clicks the breakers on and off in your grey matter.

Tara Donovan: Colony

I somehow missed her show at ACE - I think I have some kind of moral repulsion to ACE that makes it hard for me to want to enter their building. I don’t know. I’ve made up for that lapse in art viewing, having seen her sculpture/installation Colony at BAM. This piece spoke directly to my little LEGO heart - it’s the kind of nano-scale thing I like to build on lazy Sundays - putting the real world aside. Colony consists of a sort of city sprawl in miniature, composed entirely of the sawn off back ends of pencils.  This was the best thing I saw at the museum, and it occupied a lower level, concrete bound, project space that allowed it to be viewed both from a roped-off distance and an interesting overhead view.  I still can’t decide if this was the best place for this piece to be, but I enjoyed it a great deal as the end of a surprisingly awesome first visit to the Berkeley Art Museum.

I’m still writing about my trip up to SF last month. I just saw too much stuff. Anyways, Michele and I were advised that a new Bruce Nauman show had opened up at the UC Berkeley Art Museum. We were going to be in the area the following day, so we added it to our already packed itinerary.

After finding an amazingly good parking space, we entered the museum to discover GRAPEFRUIT, an exhibition of works by Yoko Ono in the entrance area to the museum. Yoko Ono is one of my favourite artists. I’ve always been able to connect deeply with her works, and they do something humbling to me. Confronted with her works, I fell naked and given license to be more alive than I am. I find the idea of her mental presence terrifying and comforting at the same time.

I’d always loved her work, but I first encountered it in person at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, France, around Christmas of 2000. The piece was Film Number 4 (bottoms), which consisted of nothing more than an ass level shots of bottoms walking. One of the most mesmerising and intimate pieces of conceptual film I have encountered, like the rest of her work, it has a capacity to engage me in a way that other art does not.

Mentally wrestling with the very broadness of “what is art” has been an almost constant feature of my mental landscape for the past several years. Work like Yoko’s really forces me to ask the question where does art begin and end. For the past year, I’ve been far more engaged in my martial arts practice than I am in my “artistic” practice, I feel more artistically satisfied as a martial artist than I ever have felt as a “visual artist”. Early into my practice of naginata, my sensei responded to an almost ridiculous descriptive statement made by a student about kendo by ejaculating the statement “Kendo is an art form”. I can’t presume to have knowledge as to her general perspective and interest in art, it’s been the most thought provoking art related statement I’ve heard in a long time. I see some kind of synonymity between my experience of the martial arts and my experience of Yoko Ono’s work that I lack the words to explain.

Back to Yoko. So experiencing her work, especially her instruction paintings, the part of me that wants to limit things, to give them names has to ask “Is this really art, and if it’s not art, what is it?” Another part of me is so engaged by and transformed by the experience of her work that I cannot help but as “Is this something way better than art, like a nameless virus that changes you forever?” To the best of my knowledge, there is no right or wrong answer to any of these questions. I know that I am deeply moved by her work, and that something in it tickles a part of me that I cannot reach myself.

On to the show. The show occupies a lobby area and a hallway that leads to the main floor of the museum. The walls were all painted a sky blue, and the show primarily consisted of Instruction Paintings presented as white vinyl text. In addition to the Instruction Paintings, there were some physical objects in vitrines, a copy of imagine, a copy of the book Grapefruit, a white telephone and a bowl of “Imagine Peace” buttons from her last Venice Biennale project.

At first I was all “Who the fuck put a Yoko Ono show in a goddamn lobby!”, until I realised that a lobby/hallyway is the perfect location for a Yoko Ono exhibition. Upstairs in the main museum sits the Bruce Nauman show, struggling for legitimacy, wrapped in curatorial justification. Downstairs lies a Yoko Ono show, needing no edification or assistance whatsoever. There was a piece on a spare patch of wall between the doors to the men’s and women’s rooms in the hallway, and it was perfect there. I spent a lot of time hanging around in that hallway/lobby, and I could have spent a lot more.

The images below are all a little on the lo-fi side, because they were taken on the sly with Michele’s super sneaky Casio camera. I really like them, probably because of the content, but I’m really into the shadows in the corners and the grainy quality, so they’re as is, straight from the memory card.

Above - Telephone Piece for Berkeley - This telephone, a 1966 ITT Model 554 wall telephone, occasionally is called during the course of the exhibition by Yoko Ono. Seeing this piece made me want to just sit down against the wall and wait. I have nothing better to do, and the realisation of that is at the center of my relationship to the piece. There’s something so staggeringly viewer dependent about her artwork, it almost only exists due to the “observational presence” of the viewer.

above - TOUCH POEM - Some of Ono’s Instructional Paintings are mechanically impossible to do and some of them seem like challenges. This is the latter type, made all the more challenging to the 48% of us that can’t even complete the first step on our own.

above - MAILING PIECE I, II & III - In my Kyudo (Japanese archery) dojo, we are often engaging in moving meditations that require us to engage in thought processes very much akin to these three pieces. Some of the Instruction Paintings occupy a grey area where conceptual art and meditative practice overlap.

Yoko Ono once said something dismissive about conceptual artist, declaring herself not as a “conceptual artist” but as a “con artist”. This topic has been brought up before, in questioning the motive for the past several generations of “institutionalised artists” that have been oozing out of grad programs - the idea that contemporary art has become a con where suckers buy meaningless junk backed up by over-intellectualisations designed to create illusory relevance, creating a self perpetuating cycle of bullshit. Ono’s con is of a different nature, she’s conning the art audience and hopefully the larger public into mental territory that is largely avoided in Western philosophy.

above - DANCE PIECE FOR STAGE PERFORMANCE - One of my favourite Instruction Paintings, because it combines some of my favourite things, dance, darkness or night, matches, audience participation and rules. One of the interesting things about this piece is the wording. The second sentence begins with the word “Ask”, rather than the word “Tell”. I’m not sure if this is an accident of English being her second language, but I feel that it gets to the heart of her own relationship with her audience, this action of asking, rather than of telling.

Moving up the spiritual ladder, you’ve got your straight out gods. Japan has always been a melting pot of religious beliefs, home to a multitude of characters chock full of raw mojo. As a Jew, I find polytheistic traditions tempting like forbidden fruit - my own beliefs seem colourless and uptight compared to the pantheons of old. If you’re going to believe arbitrarily in an invisible superhero, why not make it the whole Justice League, rather than just boring old Superman. Japan seems to have held on to its pantheistic beliefs far longer than a country apparently so filled with happy cellphone jockeys should be, and I guess that’s part of the magic of the place.

The two gods below seem to be popular guys, one a great example of Japan’s ready absorption of Chinese mythology, and another a homegrown and very Japanese dude. The first god, Fukurokuju, is one of the Seven Lucky Gods of Japanese mythology, and is an Japanese amalgamation of the Chinese Three Star Gods. Both of the examples below were described as “Gods of Wisdom”, but I’ve found more references online to him as a god of “Happiness, Wealth and Longevity”.

The second god is Ryujin, who’s technically both a god and a dragon, which is mythological for double badass. Ryujin. like most other sea gods is a big intervener, using his proto-Pokemonesque collection of “Tide Jewels” to intervene in human affairs as it suits him. He may be, or may not be, the grandfather of the first emperor of Japan, depending on what source you are reading.
So here they are, two gods who are popular subjects for netsuke. One of the things that may be telling is that both of these gods are minor figures in the Japanese pantheon and that I haven’t seen any real examples of the core gods of the pantheon, such as the creator gods Izanagi and Izanami, nor of the widely worshiped sun goddess Amatereasu. This leads me to think that the deities pictured below were considered more acceptable for casual wearing, or that they might have been exceptionally popular subjects due to their perceived power over daily aspects of human life. As always, all of my LACMA netsuke photos are in their Flicker set, and all of my netsuke images are in the Netsuke and Inro Flickr group.

The Netsuke

above - Fukurokuju: God of Wisdom - This guy always seems happy. I rather enjoy the idea of a god who is wise and happy. all to often in contemporary society we marry intellectual brilliance with unflappable stoicism. I like to think that the kind of wisdom and happiness that he represents is the joy of realising the meaninglessness of attachment to ideas, and that is the source of his laughter. The label is here.

above - Fukurokuju: God of Wisdom - This is a more serious presentation of Fukurokuju than the first example. The exaggeration of the cranium on this example is much less controlled, and seems humorous to me, despite the fact that this example seems much more serious than the first. Look at the brow line on this one - the emotional context of the face almost suggests a sense of intent, or even anger. The label is here.

above - Ryujin: Ruler of Seas and Tides - This wood netsuke is carved with great style. There’s something cozy and loose about the details that gives the figure a great sense of consistency in its design. Ryujin is a dragon who can change shape into human form, but most of the depictions I’ve found seem to cast him either as a dragon with human features or a human with dragon features, as in this example. The label is here.

above - Ryujin: Ruler of Seas and Tides - Here we see a more aggressive Ryujin. He appears mostly human here, but there is a sort of dragon tail thing that comes off the back of his head. It’s really hard for me to speak to the quality of this piece, given that the pigment is so worn. Not my favourite stlye of carving, I guess. The label is here.

above - Ryujin: Ruler of Seas and Tides - Here is ryojin in a more dragon-like pose. He’s still mostly human, but the positioning of the body is such that he looks more sinuous. He’s also clearly holding what appears to be a jewel of some sort, probably one of his “Tide Jewels”. This is my favourite of the three Ryujin in this grouping, as the body language is really well done. The label is here.