Ulises is a collectively run art bookstore and exhibition space—modeled after venues such as Printed Matter and Dexter Sinister in New York—whose quarterly, essayistic presentations constellate works of art, publications, and public programs around a curatorial theme. “Active Voice,” this season’s apt focus, places the politicized, pop-inflected narrations of Hannah Black’s recent videos and Steffani Jemison’s looped sound work Same Time, 2014, into dialogue. In Jemison’s recording, which is softly amplified throughout the room, an a cappella group weaves lush harmonies around the text of Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton’s Vietnam War-era speech at Boston College. The immersive aural pleasure of this work signals Newton’s desire, expressed in his closing line, “to develop a value system that will help us function together in harmony,” despite seemingly insurmountable differences between radical communities. On a monitor with headphones, Black’s video Intensive Care/Hot New Track, 2014, collages spoken fragments of stories of sexual violence, celebrity, and extradition over disembodied floating limbs.Mark Beasley’s Twelve Books & Seven Records: Re-Voice, 2016, comprises a reading and listening list available to browse onsite, as in a reference library, and as a printed takeaway card. Its references include Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997) and Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln’s jazz LP We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite (1960). The bookshop’s shelves display a range of on-theme materials, which supplement Beasley’s concise syllabus, including Pascal Gielen’s The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude: Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism (2010) and filmmaker and performer Wu Tsang’s monograph Not in My Language (2016). Communal furniture—long, low benches and a wide central table designed by Jody Harrington—invites extended reading, active listening, and conversation, all essential in these troubled times.
Tag: artforum
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500 Words: Louise Fishman
The artist Louise Fishman, primarily known for her large-scale abstract paintings, is the subject of two forthcoming exhibitions: “Louise Fishman: A Retrospective,” a fifty-year survey show at the Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase, opening on April 3, 2016, and running through July 31, 2016; and “Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock,” an idiosyncratic presentation of her miniature works at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, which opens April 29 and will be on view through August 14, 2016. Here, she talks about her beginnings as an artist and the evolution of her work.
While in graduate school in Champaign-Urbana, I took the Illinois Central Railroad to Chicago and saw a hard-edged Al Held painting in a show of Minimalism at the Art Institute of Chicago, which had a big impact on me. The earliest painting in my retrospective at the Neuberger, In and Out, 1968, was influenced by that Al Held work. When I moved to New York after graduate school, I thought I was going to meet the Abstract Expressionists. I found out very quickly that there was no place for me, though; I wasn’t going to be sleeping with Milton Resnick or any of those guys for passion, for love, or to become an artist. My involvement with the women’s movement started out as a strict practice of feminist consciousness-raising, and then I got involved in the lesbian movement, which really changed my life. I blossomed in a way I don’t think I would have without it. I’d watched my mother and my aunt, who is a well-known painter in Philadelphia, be isolated and stepped on. It was hard to imagine a career as a female artist then—but I loved painting.I am a very formal painter; I have a classic art academy background. On nights off from Tyler School of Art and my shifts as a salesgirl, I went to a community center in Philadelphia called Fleisher Art Memorial. I loved that place, and it was free. I took a class where they had a model pose for three and a half hours and you used water-based clay to render their form, and then you’d tear it down and throw it away. It was OK because it was just about learning. Understanding the clay, the feel, had a lot to do with how I developed as a painter. Color also takes on a materiality that I feel. There are periods when I have taken cold wax and mixed it with paint so that it has a different surface, it is much more physical. The group of paintings I made when I came back from seeing the Auschwitz and Terezín concentration camps in 1988, “Remembrance and Renewal,” used beeswax that had ashes and little pebbles ground in with it. Works from this series are also included in the Neuberger exhibition.Scale is as important to me as any other material is—the thickness of the stretchers, how far the painting sits from the wall, in addition to color and surface. It is a very interesting thing to go from a little painting to one that involves the whole body. A little painting is your eyes and your nose and a little bit of your hand; a great big horizontal painting involves walking. Once you’re beyond the reach of your hands, it’s less about the body than it is about moving in the studio. I found these tiny canvases in an art supply store in Berlin and thought, Oh my God—this is perfect; what an idea, to use canvases that are this tiny. At the ICA, we will decide how to install those paintings in the moment—the museum is set up for this kind of improvisation. It’s a good fit because my work is so erratic and it’s all rather unique but interconnected—the books, the little paintings, and sculptures. It’s very interesting that I didn’t know that Ti-Grace Atkinson was the first director of the ICA, in 1963, but I knew her from the women’s movement—she was a brilliant feminist theoretician. Ingrid Schaffner, the curator of my show, said that we had to have Angry Ti-Grace, 1973, in it, which is part of my “Angry Women” series of paintings.In dealing with the Neuberger retrospective and looking back at all my work from different periods, I see now that I was fully formed in each stage. It’s not like I’ve hit the top of my abilities yet either. I’m a little different from some painters, probably, in that my work varies so much. But then, as artists, we’re always becoming.
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Repeater: Painting like music like handwriting
In the essay accompanying this exhibition, curator Kelsey Halliday Johnson quotes Ian MacKaye, founder of the DIY label Dischord Records: “Playing music is like handwriting; if you play a song over and over, it starts to evolve.” “Repeater,” named after a 1990 album by Fugazi, includes drawing, sculpture, and video by three artists who translate the formal properties of sound, color, texture, and line across mediums for eccentric abstractions that bring to mind the flamboyant post-Minimalism of Frank Stella, Yayoi Kusama, and Claes Oldenburg. More intimately scaled than these art-historical antecedents and installed in close quarters at this tiny artist-run gallery, twelve brightly colored, highly patterned works by Lee Arnold, Mark Brosseau, and Meg Lipke reverberate in a visual conversation reminiscent of the sonic repartee between layered tracks of a song.Arnold’s animation Signals, 2012, converts a single note’s subtle microtonal layers into rectangles of saturated color—red, green, yellow, blue—that tessellate on a square vintage television monitor. Mounted on a wall next to this work is Lipke’s Fingered Fragment, 2014, a fist-shaped stuffed textile piece approximately the size of a couch cushion. Thick, unevenly dyed batik cross-hatching traces the soft sculpture’s contours; chocolate brown, forest green, and golden yellow block its surface into larger sections. Nearby are “Selection of Tablet Drawings,” 2016, and “Twenty Panels,” 2014–16, collections of Brosseau’s eight-by-ten-inch drawings made using digital and analog means, respectively. With the first displayed serially on a digital photo frame and the latter on slim wooden mantels, their domestic presentation confirms the sense that this exhibition addresses human creative relationships as much as it does rigorous, rehearsed formal experimentation.
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Jennifer Levonian’s animation provokes self-reflection
Jennifer Levonian’s short, surreal cut-paper animation Xylophone, 2015, muses on the everyday clichés and complexities of gender, gentrification, and creative living in transitional urban spaces. Wryly referencing Philadelphia’s rapidly changing neighborhoods and rendered in swift, fluid watercolor marks, Levonian’s leafy farmers’ markets, tastefully rehabbed row homes, and yoga-studio lofts adorned with “Breathe in love, breathe out peace” posters glow—uncomfortably brightly, perhaps—alongside shuttered payday-loan places on derelict blocks. Seemingly trapped within this environment, a sleep-deprived, voluptuously pregnant quilter stitches swatches of fabric, exercises awkwardly with other moms, and entertains a rambunctious daughter—whose antics eventually lead her and her mother to climb atop a street-corner billboard platform where, wind coursing through their hair, they escape into a kind of psychic freedom. Three quilts by Levonian, hung directly outside Xylophone’s screening room, echo both her protagonist’s practice and mental state, as well as the repetitive labor of animation. One, Jewelry Box, 2016, features a grid of linear drawings of exaggeratedly confused and despairing faces surrounded by cursive phrases that indicate either disappointment or frantic explanation, such as “I’m not mad . . . it’s just that . . .”The textiles share gallery space with a second solo presentation of Sarah Gamble’s densely layered mixed-media paintings. These semiabstract works also foreground powerful mental and emotional states, but they do so by evoking murky inner worlds. Central to Untitled, 2015, a small, square work, is a rough, black oval whose thick, matte paint stands in relief against the canvas over a starburst of muddy pinks, oranges, and yellows. Many other works, such as Grief House, 2016, feature multiple pairs of eyes integrated into their backgrounds. Like Levonian’s faces, they appear to watch the viewer watching them, provoking thorny self-reflection.
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Catherine Pancake’s complicity in Bloodland
Midway through Catherine Pancake’s video on citizen surveillance of the natural-gas fracking industry, Bloodland (all works cited, 2015), a female voice-over quotes Hito Steyerl’s 2009 essay “In Defense of the Poor Image,” on the cultural implications of highly circulated, low-resolution digital artifacts online: “The imperfect cinema is one that strives to overcome the divisions of labor within class society. It merges art with life and science, blurring the distinction between consumer and producer, audience and author.” This idea informs Pancake’s own self-critical, essayistic methodology, as manifested in the filmmaker’s first exhibition to constellate video projection, handmade objects, archival documents, and still photography. Bloodland collages YouTube-sourced clips of East Coast fracking sites and excerpts of Pennsylvania-based antifracking activist Vera Scroggins’s protests with shots of dying wildlife and Pancake’s recordings of woodland dance performances. Through screen captures of multi-tabbed web browsing and Pro Tools video editing, the footage is manipulated within the frame of what is presumably the artist’s computer screen, displayed throughout the video. This reflects the ways in which all Internet users scan, consume, and create narratives both on- and off-screen. Opposite the projection of Bloodland, an imposing floor-to-ceiling grid of ninety-five court transcript pages documents a corporation’s legal case against Scroggins. In lieu of a wall text, this is an assertive act of transparency.At the gallery’s rear is Each one a case, composed of four white pillowcases for children’s beds, neatly folded on roughshod shelves like miniature shrouds and digitally printed with images of Pancake’s family’s West Virginia acreage, ruined after timber clear-cutting. One print includes the artist’s brother, an industry-employed geologist, creating a narrative that suggests Pancake’s own complicity in this contested environmental issue.
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Becky Suss’s domestic melancholia
In her 2011 memoir, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson observed of the genre: “Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story.” The act of covering, then, in Winterson’s book and in Becky Suss’s first solo museum exhibition, refers not only to concealment but also to adaptation. In a body of recent paintings and ceramics mostly prompted by the demolition of her deceased grandparents’ home on Long Island, Suss integrates the material facts, fictions, and revisions that constitute her memories of the domestic spaces of her childhood. Seven large canvases depict individual rooms at three-quarter scale—a dining room, living room, bedroom—complete with (re)collections of art, literature, and furniture. Each presents a closely cropped tableau with flattened perspectives reinforced by a focus on patterns that confirms the scenes’ static midcentury period. Bedroom (Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám), 2015, for example, depicts 1950s-era palm-leaf wallpaper, bright wood grain, and a concentric-semicircled bedspread. The objects featured appear desirably without wear, and the books’ spines are blank, withholding information. This is reiterated by the glazed ceramics displayed on the floor—including Untitled (stack of books), 2015—the invitingly glossy surfaces of which deflect attention from the fact that they are stripped of identifying information, bringing these period rooms out into the visitors’ personal space.Two small, square paintings of the artist’s garden in Philadelphia, Kensington, Winter, 2010, and Kensington, Summer, 2010–11, together interrupt the show’s hypnotic sense of frozen time. The skeletons of trees in snow followed by bursts of wiry green have greater perspectival depth and an emotional immediacy absent from the domestic canvases. Their concise portrayal of the vitality of change contrasts with the exhibition’s overwhelming melancholia.
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Gabriel Martinez’s elegy for Fire Island
Gabriel Martinez’s elegiac exhibition “Bayside Revisited” invokes the historic potency of Fire Island, New York, as a gay fantasy space and safe haven. By integrating archival materials related to the community into new prints and an installation, Martinez augments the current historical canonization of queer culture and the AIDS crisis recently seen in Keith Haring retrospectives and the Tacoma Art Museum’s “Art AIDS America” survey. This exhibition’s anteroom displays a digital collage of vintage gay magazine ads while melodies drift through a suede curtain. When the curtain’s drawn aside, a dimly lit room emerges, revealing Untitled (Bayside Projection), 2015, a spinning mirror ball installed low to the ground that casts a dappled projection of a segment from Wakefield Poole’s celebrated art-porn film Boys in the Sand, 1971, onto a wall sparkling with sand and glitter. The film’s setting, a notoriously cruise-y stretch of Fire Island’s beach and forest, recurs throughout the exhibition in large-scale metallic prints and a slide presentation, titled Meat Rack, 2015, of tenebrous trees.Also casting a shadow here is Boys star Casey Donovan’s death from AIDS-related complications in 1987. A solarized print series, “Radial Projections,” 2015, captures a disco ball’s reflections that resemble cell structures. Mounted on the other side of the film projection wall is Live Hard, 2015, a sort of memorial quilt gridded with lightly used black-patterned handkerchiefs on wood and laser-etched with a depiction of a part of the island recently decimated by an accidental fire. The impact on this major queer-identified space, when so few exist, reverberates heavily.