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.