Thoughts on Howard Fried's Derelict at the CCA Wattis Institute

The Howard Fried show at the CCA Wattis, on Kansas street, opens with a wall-text by the curator. The curator describes a phone call, where Fried said one of art’s primary allowances was the opportunity to deviate from dominant forms. Reading the text, I heard the sound of a trumpet. I made no connection between the improvisational music and the show— assumed the industrial, barn-like building simultaneously functioned as a rehearsal space for musicians.

Fried had a series of abstract lithographs spaced in a grid. I forget what the exact process is for lithography— something time-consuming, archaic, arduous. The process-oriented work had visual impact: meticulous marks of blue and white color congealed in formations that resembled weather patterns, a rorschache test, the scarred concrete floor I was standing on. 

Moving on, I was confronted by two elevated cardboard boxes. The boxes faced a wall and gave the impression of possession, though I was unable to see what they possessed. As I poked around, the music got louder. I noticed the overhead speakers and finally connected the trumpet sounds to the show. Beyond the cardboard boxes were two grainy video works— Condom (1975) and Intraction / Ghost of the Creamer (1973).  Condom was displayed on a black, floor-based monitor. Intraction was wall-projected. 

In Condom, the camera cut back and forth between men and women. I heard the people’s responses, not the interviewer’s questions. People argued about gendered power disparities. The dynamic between on-screen figures was unlikely and curious: their expressions were anguished, their laughter bitter, they cut across each other and avoided the camera. Because the issues remain relevant, and because the video was formally self-reflexive, the work felt fresh. In the accompanying wall text, Fried basically says the impetus for the piece had to with people being fake. He was seeing people hold certain political beliefs and then behave contrary to those beliefs. So when he was shooting the video and asking the questions he would say, in no uncertain terms, I don’t care what you think. To illuminate hypocrisy, to explore the gap between “appropriate postures” and an individual’s real-time actions, are prime reasons for provocation.

Fried highlights a hierarchy involving his position as artist and interviewer, the interviewees, and the video’s controlled form. The video’s controlled form was shown by a wall work that diagramed the shooting schedule. With its meticulous penmanship, the diagram was uber rational and totally insane; it looked like a print-out from an industrial engineering textbook. Indeed, Fried’s use of prefabricated orderings draws attention to an industrial studio system, where risk avoidance, and the need for absolute control of all variables, is a key contributor to financial gain. 

Moreover, the artifice of these methods mirror the artifice of the contributors’ fake beliefs. The work functions as an ambiguous statement on (1) the fabricated elements of media presentations; (2) how people behave in groups when a camera is present; (3) the disparity between publicly and privately held beliefs; (4) who plays puppet master— the artist, the individual’s own self-delusions, the viewer? etc, etc. The work’s title is equally ambiguous. Condoms signified a new age of personal choice. They also stop life. Here, technology, authority, and orthodox perceptions function as condoms. 

From what I saw of Intraction / Ghost of the Creamer, during my first visit, the video was a continuos take of a diner counter. The camera used one angle, and a tension existed between uncontrolled actions and controlled photography. We hear a lunchtime crowd’s quiet crush, no talk. Figures circulate through the frame, while a creamer-cup is passed around. The camera is fixed in the traditional anti-pleasure position of early video art, where artists, self-taught in the operations of the new video equipment, tended to put the camera on sticks, turn it on, and that’s the extent of the cinematography. The title “Intraction” is bizarre and germane. I can only locate the word “intraction” between intractable and traction. The former word means: hard to deal with, hard to control; the latter word means: the act of pulling a thing over a surface. The video shows a creamer cup sliding across a counter-top.   

On my second visit to the show, the video was totally different. I read the wall text this time and it stated the artist had been teased by his editing staff for his “uptight” cutting style and taste in jazz. So Fried let the technicians make their own edit, then exhibited that cut as Ghost of the Creamer. The Ghost video used more sophisticated photographic methods, replete with montage and dissolves, and the trumpet playing was more aggressive, the whole video more puissant with an unapologetic weird style. Takeaway: if the right people say you're dead, lie down. 

Architecture was a dominant feature. The gallery was split between a perimeter and a walled-off, semi-accessible core. A giant coffee cup, submerged in a wall, was inside the walled-off area.  I had to squeeze through a corridor, to view the giant coffee cup.  The corridor led me to several peepholes. The peepholes allowed me to view inside the cardboard boxes I had encountered earlier. Each box contained a small mock-up of a table and a coffee cup, and both mock-ups were skewed so the models were sideways. 

Fried was a long time teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute. He gave a talk there, earlier this month. I watched it on Vimeo. He wore a Titleist hat, a raincoat, and had bad posture. For the first thirty minutes, he probably said ten words. He appeared lost, like he’d wandered into the building hoping to buy consumer electronics, realized he was onstage and talking about art. Then it clicked and the talk went ninety minutes. I’ve attended maybe thirty of these SFAI lectures, never seen one go beyond sixty minutes— a possible intimation into the reserves that made Fried such a respected teacher. I was surprised to hear Fried return several times to the issue of homelessness. More specifically, he observed the architecture of homeless encampments to be wild, unregulated expressions of what happens when people are left to their own devices.  Urgency is double-edged: it creates a need for prefabricated cliche to communicate quickly; or, it creates unique associations, without custom, and soaked in immediate desire. In reference to art, Fried said “life gets in the way.”  

Fried walks a tight rope between tight formalisms, and a looser, more casual conceptualism. The overall feel of the show was cold and hallucinatory-  an oddly clinical realm of search and counter-search, where the physical space doesn't match the image, and where political postures don’t click with real-time behaviors.  Fried never values orthodoxy of perception, and he allows life in. 

thoughts on Swimming Underground: My years in the Warhol Factory by Mary Woronov

Excellent insight into the personalities that fueled Andy Warhol's scene. Woronov was there when it happened and she writes candidly about the day-to-day vicissitudes that tend to be erased/ignored from traditional attempts to narrativize this scene. NY in the late sixties sounds tough and Woronov was nineteen when she arrived at Warhol's studio, having run away from her upper class painting education at Syracuse University. I had the privilege to hear Woronov speak during a class I took at the San Francisco Art Institute. She spoke at length about Warhol's process as a filmmaker, citing how his main interests lay in the "mistakes" and how a person would try to hide their personality behind a character, and how what interested Warhol was the attempt at hiding. She also underscored Warhol's brutality as an artist: his bleeding edge disdain for normal America. Woronov is an acting legend in her own right, having acted in hundreds of films. Unfortunately she's been type cast as the BDSM mistress. This character genesis no doubt beginning with her role in Warhol's Chelsea Girls. Two days after her talk at SFAI, my teacher arranged for me to give Woronov a ride to the airport. I showed up at the hotel to be informed by the desk clerk that Woronov had already left. The idea that somehow I was unable to connect with this figure in transit seems fitting. The rebellion of her anti-acting aesthetic exists in another dimension, a space and time I hope younger artists can somehow grasp, recollect and reintegrate into their own disruptions

Some thoughts on Shana Moulton by way of Chris Burden

With the recent one year anniversary of Chris Burden’s death, now seems an appropriate time to evaluate the danse macabre, between performance and sculpture. Trained at UC Irvine, many of Burden's nascent student works, were large-scale public sculptures. He then eschewed objects for body-based actions: "As a young artist I tried to figure out what sculpture really was," Burden said, "and my conclusion was human action, movement­­--  performance, in a sense, was the core of sculpture."

From 1971 to 1974, Burden produced a series of durational, spooky, physically intense performances, that re-defined alternative art. Like many artists, who worked in performance early in their careers, as he got older, Burden stopped performing and returned to his original medium specific interests. His final work, Metropolis, was a large scale model of LA. But the fifty-four, unflinching performances, he did in his twenties, made his name and set the tone for artists interested in action, mediation, and violence. 

LA is home to Hollywood's illusion-factory. In the introduction to his collected performances (available on UBU) , Burden says what's important is not the video or photographic documentation, but the experience itself. When asked why he shot himself, for his Shoot piece, Burden said: "getting shot is as American as apple pie," and that whenever he turned on the TV, someone got shot, so he wanted to know what that felt like. Burden's unadorned, anti­-pleasure aesthetic, his 8mm one minute and thirty second video, is the underside of Sam Peckinpah's baroque violence.

In her video series, Whispering Pines 6/7/8, Shana Moulton uses performance to explore new age spirituality and digital culture as a relief from physical pain. The video begins with Moulton in a green screen environment. The first shot establishes Moulton sitting on a couch, working on a puzzle. We cut to a POV of Moulton, studying the puzzle. She can’t find the final piece and she tears the room apart. The video cuts to Moulton walking through a trade-show environment. She's surrounded by cheapish, plastic tree and nature models, the type of products sold on infomercials. 

Next shot is back on the couch, with Moulton unpacking a tree sculpture. We hear a synthesized, meditation­-like soundtrack. When she plugs in the tree, animated, powder blue streams of water pour from it. We cut to a close-up of Moulton's face, as animated water streams from her eyes, like tears. Moulton finds the puzzle piece but when she fits it into the puzzle, she notices the piece has her picture on it. She completes the puzzle and is nonplussed by her dissatisfaction. Her reaction is ambiguous. We can't tell whether she's actually in pain, or just faking it, a melodramatic reaction to a scenario that's unimportant.

Moulton engages with new age objects that are marketed as fulfilling a need for serenity, stability and peace. The video questions the dichotomy between mind and body. If modern medicine is unable to quantify a person's pain, because that pain is not manifesting physically, does the pain exist? In a youtube interview, Moulton said she was a sufferer from chronic pain, enough to get disability benefits, and yet she wonders whether the pain actually existed, or whether it was all in her mind. 

I n Whispering Pines 6/7/8, Moulton pulls a pore strip, the product used to remove blackheads, from her nose. On the underside of the blackhead remover is a fictitious quote: "Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thought, and you break the chains of your body, too.”­­— Jonathan Livingston Seagull. These  objects promise psycho­-physical freedom from pain. The video ends with Moulton escaping up a ladder into a Rave. Surrounded by ravers, she dances furiously, then vomits.

Moulton's video, T he Mountain Where Everything Is Upside Down ( 2008), is shorter and more sinister. She continues her dual interest in new age ephemera­—  the cheap, plastic objects, that recreate the natural world­, and her interest in infomercial, body­-improvement culture. The video begins with Moulton inflating an exercise ball. We see a diagram for how to use the ball. Cut to Moulton in a rocking chair, wearing a carpal tunnel wristband, and rotating yin-and-yang zen balls in her hand. On her shoulders, she wears plastic bags, filled with unknown liquid. She then uses an ab-cruncher, while wearing a neck brace. Cut to her using the zen balls, then suddenly, she's in pain, and the balls drop. 

The camera frames her in a wide angle, sitting, surrounded by her crystals, while the objects move, containing Moulton in a grid-like spin redolent of old science-fiction shows that used the TV image to “hypnotize” the viewer. Cut to a close­-up of Moulton removing a square from her forehead, so that red streams, like video game blood, pour from her brain. 

The UBUweb description is apt, when it declares the video as more than flashy visuals— “it investigates the human need to place faith in something.” For Moulton, faith in new-age objects and practices prove ambiguous: they promise new perceptions and the possibility for an inchoate, psycho­-physical freedom; but Moulton's work simultaneously highlights the possibility of faith exacerbating a pastel-­colored, total-pain.

When artists write novels: some thoughts on Jill Magid

“Players only love you when they’re playing.” Stevie Nicks

"Time is all that anyone is ever left with. There's nothing "pretty" about the diaries Theck was writing. Reading them that friday evening in Berlin made me understand that writing can be bad and still be part of something good. That "art" is really "artifact," exhibit A, exhibit B, of something else: a person's whole experience and life. And that always there is the chance that this will fail. That things will not work out." Chris Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia

The artist Jill Magid’s project, Finding Tarden, was an attempt to “show the face” of the Dutch Secret Service, by writing a novel. Magid’s end result was proposed as aesthetic: she’d have an art show, where she’d exhibit the novel, in book form, inside a plexiglass vitrine. Or at least that’s the way Magid sold herself to a militarized, government agency. It worked. Magid was granted access to agency employees. She interviewed employees in a pseudo-HR role.  The interviews occurred in filmic locations redolent of noir cinema: smoke filled hotel bars and Amsterdam cafes, sparse living rooms in the off-hours. To gain intimacy with workers, to explain her project and their necessary participation, Magid created a pitch video: she re-staged a scene from a Godard movie, where the heroine coquettishly seduces the viewer. Godard once stated all you need for a movie is “a gun and a girl.” Ironic considering Magid’s ultimate aesthetic statement was the creation of a novel, not a film; and doubly ironic considering what is absent from this project is any articulation of the violence this agency thwarts or, perhaps, actualizes and amplifies. 

Magid opens her novel by describing scenes that involve her standing at her apartment window. She’s unable to sleep and she watches the flickering booths of the prostitutes below. Men stop and enter. When the men finish, the sex worker’s little screen goes up, and the men appear in the doorways. Their heads lean toward the woman, while their bodies are halfway onto the street. Takeaway: experiences happen behind closed doors and certain things are unknowable to a voyeur. The project resulted in a highly controlled online document. I was unable to download it but I pulled out several quotes on second reading: “I had no intention of importing something I’d made in the studio. I wanted to be intimately involved with the organization. I wanted to penetrate it” (My emphasis). Magid’s interest in an erotics of the unfolding of information parallels her method of penetration into this power system. Normal language often breaks down. She switches between journalistic prose and metaphysical poetry. She ends the novel stating she wants the system of power to enter her.

Magid attempts to make an invisible, highly dangerous organization visible, by investing that organization with attributes it doesn’t possess. Her mode of seeing the system in all its nakedness, is the language of contemporary culture: seduction. She seduces employees. Her interviews feel like dates. With men she is coy, supple, ready to be shaped, but still shrewd and worthy of respect. With women she is a confidant, a fellow player in the game of hard power. But hard power is the world of one-way diplomacy and militarized action, ie, the world of the Dutch Secret Service. Soft power is about reconciliation, brokering deals based on agreement and future possibilities. Magid’s method of interaction with the organization is all soft power, an interpersonal adventure.  

Magid at once succeeded and failed to show how the Dutch CIA worked. The body of the novel was redacted. Crucial information necessary for the reader’s understanding of the Dutch CIA, was erased. Yet on a more conceptual level, Magid posed the problem of the work, at the site of the work; the Dutch Secret Service redacted her novel: they control the flow of information— that’s how the Dutch CIA works. Magid’s redacted novel highlights how information is highly scripted and controlled by systems of governmental hard power that exist beyond a world of aesthetics.  Moreover, an aesthetic gesture that makes these systems ambiguously beautiful and us, the reader, complicit in their nebulous beauty, is noteworthy.