Humor Us at the Municipal Art Gallery
The Municipal Art Gallery of the City of Los Angles is possibly one of the best exhibition spaces for contemporary art in Los Angeles, and not enough people know it. On Sunday, when I attended the opening for Humor Us, I immediately ran into a friend, a painter who’s exhibited across the globe, and who’s lived in LA for 15 years but had “Never been here before.” It’s the kind of space that I’d kill to apply a curatorial hand to, but that I know might never be able to adequately promote any project that takes place there. Hope is on the horizon, though. The gallery is going back to being free to the public (they’ve been free for three weeks now), and they’re working to get volunteers to come in and help them extend their hours. Having worked with the City for years, I can see how these small things are victories, that change and progress can only be accomplished with a slow, patient and steady hand.
The opening was packed, sure it’s a group show, and each artist can drag their pals, but the crowd seemed more healthy and lively than usual. I spoke with Gallery Director Mark Greenfield about the show, and he was frank in telling me that he had to tell the curators that there were limits to his support, especially on the web and PR front and that they would have to make their own gravy there. Which is why Humor Us is the first show at MAG that I can recall having anything like a web presence - a website put together by the curators to support the show (question - is website design becoming part of the curatorial process? Are shifting industry practices causing galleries to off-load much of the necessary work that servicing the Internet style of things has made for us?)
Humor Us is possibly the best show that I have ever seen in the space. It’s also one of the best “Asian themed” exhibitions I’ve seen. I’ve seen a lot of easily categorized contemporary Asian work that almost seems designed not to offend, to not be presumptuous or to challenge anything. The work in this show is fun, and challenging, and in a number of cases sexual. Large portions of the gallery are off-limits to minors, as a fair portion of the work involves graphic nudity or content.
I didn’t shoot all of the show, there were a lot of people in the house, and I was having trouble getting decent shots. Notably absent from my Flickr set of images for this show and this post is an image of four hand knitted jockstraps - the jockstrap is one of my favourite garments and symbols, an essentially mysterious and almost comically functional object that has its own community of devoted fetishists. I also wasn’t able to get a decent shot of Pearl C. Hsiung’s work - but for reference, The Flog has a set of images from he current show at Steve Turner. I’ll have to go back and catch that, and some other works, later.
Artists participating in the exhibition are: Susan Choi, Young Chung, Allan deSouza, Cirilo Domine, Reanne Estrada,
Anna Sew Hoy, Pearl C. Hsiung, Terence Koh, Byoung Ok Koh, kozyndan, Dinh
Q. Le, Candice Lin, Sandra Low, Sandeep Mukherjee, Uudam Nguyen, Kaz
Oshiro, Joey Santarromana, Niphan Sawannakas. The show has three curators:
Viet Le, Yong Soon Min and Leta Ming (art.blogging.la interview with Leta Ming).
above - Sandra Low - I encountered Sandra Low’s work while hanging it in the Art and Democracy show at Angels Gate. Her work was some of the best work in the show, really technically competent stuff, and I’ve followed her work since. All of the images in Humor Us are scroll paintings of little girls doing something naughty or silly. Low has an amazing ability to segue between different styles of painting in a single image, somehow making them work together. The more I keep looking at her work, the more I like it.
Above - Shane Abad - I love the way little hands and feet feel on my body (from a series of 6) - This series of staged photographs places the artist in a series of domestic settings with a dwarf. It’s made eerie by the fact that I’ve seen this particular model in another artists work, where the unusual geometry of her face was used for effect. The model also has a series of visible scars on her chest, which sort of break the illusion, or make the illusion, depending on how I’m thinking about these works at any particular moment.
Above - Susan Choi, Shit - Pornographic imagery is popular in art these days, and I’m usually very critical of it. When you make an image that uses symbols and imagery that make reference to pornography, you have to realize that you’re suddenly competing with a whole industry who’s really good at delivering pornographic content to the public. They’re doing it well, and you have to compete or at least reference that field on some level. In other words, it has to work as porn, in order to work as fine art, or the credibility of the piece can easily break down.
Choi’s work, which is apparently all self portrait oriented (something I’m fond of, personally) very comfortably straddles the boundary between “fine art” and pornography. In the words of a friend who I ran into at the gallery “This work is making me horny!” So she’s overcome the barrier of “making art that doesn’t live up to its reference.” Beyond the imagery, her technique is solidly competent - watercolour is a medium that’s often misused or under-used in contemporary work, and it’s just the right medium for these works.
Above - Sandeep Mukherjee, untitled (Singing Heads) - I know that it’s nigh impossible to see here, but this piece consists of the outlines of scores of singing heads etched into Duralar with a needle tip. It’s really, really hard not to run your fingers across this piece to feel the lines of the drawing. Another reason why reading an art blog isn’t the same as seeing the exhibition for yourself. The colour on this piece is a hotter pink in person, as well.
Above - Uudam Nguyen - Somehow I managed to not get the title of this piece. It consists of hundreds of buttons, each of which contains the words “…I’ll Fuck You…” in one or another context. As in “Tonight I’ll Fuck You As a Gemini” or “I Will Now Fuck You as a lonely housewife.” You could buy the buttons from a pair of vending machines, but for the opening they had a bargain bin of buttons you could buy for a quarter. People were rummaging all afternoon. I bought one with a paragraph long piece of text on it. The headphones suspended from the hanging talk balloons would play a computer voice (eerily similar/identical to the voice from Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen’s Listening Post) reading out the various statements. Watching a pack of people all listen to a computer tell them how it was going to fuck them, while they all tried to explore the piece was great.
above - Allen deSouza, Jesus Loves Me, Still - This piece, an installation assembled from fishing rods and semen impregnated tissues molded into the shape of tiny men, gave rise to the best thing I overheard all day “So, tell me what art supply store sells semen?”
so Above - Byong Ok Koh, Rollercoaster - The sign in front of this piece reads “unfortunately, a snail was not allowed to participate in this exhibition.” This piece is supposed to be displayed with a snail moving along the rollercoaster “track” surface. I spoke with both Michael Lewis Miller, who’s the head preparator at MAG and Mark Greenfield about this piece, and they both felt that displaying the piece with a live snail would attract the attention of unwanted publicity due to possible allegations of animal cruelty, which apparently was an issue when the piece was previously displayed.
Being the kind of jerk who’s not concerned with the rights of animals, I heartily disagreed with both of them, and if the piece was in my gallery I would have no problem displaying it with snail intact. It’s a snail - not a rabbit having makeup squirted into its eye. But then again, perception is reality, so I can understand their apprehensions. They gallery already has taken a number of risks with some of the work displayed in this exhibition, and even though I use MAG as a mine canary and reference for the limits of what kind of work that I can show at Angels Gate, I probably wouldn’t exhibit other works that they have on exhibition at AGCC if I was hosting the show.
I love this piece, but I was sort of disappointed by it, probably because I had imagined it differently, and fallen in love of my perception of what the piece was. Until I saw it, I thought the little snail was strapped into some kind of cart that moved at high speed on a rollercoaster, over and over again (I presumed that the cruelty potential had something to do with forcing the snail through this experience, not its simple presence as unknowing participant). My imagination was that the purpose of the piece was to put the snail into an inherently unnatural experience - moving at high speed. For a snail, that would be like going to the moon or something of equal amazingness, something to really write home about, and I enjoyed the idea of seeing an artist share an essentially human experience (the use of our technology for a visceral and unnatural experience that’s both frightening and wondrous) with a life form that’s incapable of creating that experience for itself.
above - Byong Ok Koh, Toothbrush - I’m including this piece because it’s so similar (and yet different) to McLean Fahnestock’s piece As Close as I Will Ever Get, which also features two toothbrush heads interacting. I’ll presume that Toothbrush is obviously meant to be a play on teeth and gums as a surrogate mouth - a funny assemblage piece, a one off, and my take on As Close as I Will Ever Get is of piece that I find extremely moving and serious, a piece that’s at the same time passionate and sad. I like how both of these artists have taken objects which are everyday and banal and made them their own separate and distinct tools for their own self expression.
Technorati Tags: Susan Choi, Young Chung, Allan deSouza, Cirilo Domine, Reanne Estrada, Anna Sew Hoy, Pearl C. Hsiung, Terence Koh, Byoung Ok Koh, kozyndan, Dinh Q. Le, Candice Lin, Sandra Low, Sandeep Mukherjee, Uudam Nguyen, Kaz Oshiro, Joey Santarromana, Niphan Sawannakas, Viet Le, Yong Soon Min, Leta Ming, art, Municipal Art Gallery, City of Los Angeles, art exhibition, Asian art, Humour Us
