Charles Gaines

SUSANNE VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES PROJECTS
6006 Washington Boulevard
September 10–November 5

Charles Gaines, Skybox I, 2011, acrylic, digital print, polyester film, LED lights, 7 x 12'.

Whether in peacetime or in battle, freedom is reanimated whenever it is demanded by a people who have risen up around its cause; Charles Gaines’s new body of work embraces the historical tide of protest and change fueled by these recurrent calls for liberty and, as such, is flooded with dimension and vitality in the wake of the Arab Spring. A three-panel LED light box, Sky Box I (all works 2011), experientially engages viewers in the ebb and flow of struggles for sovereignty over time. Each panel is inscribed with a text on human rights, starting with “A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed of England” (1649) by Gerard Winstanley and ending with Vietnam’s Declaration of Independence from 1945, with texts by Léopold Sédar Senghor and Frantz Fanon in between. As viewers peruse these passages, pinpricks of light appear in and around the words, while the space surrounding their letters gradually shifts to gray and then black, effecting a transition from bland type to starry night or virtual universe. Whether in eternal toil, eternal hope, or a quixotic fusion of the two, liberty is eclipsed by the forces of time and space.

In a group of large drawings on view in another room of the gallery, Gaines supplants Georges Bataille as author of his words via a complex system of self-made rules that grant the artist a wide degree of freedom as he recombines Bataille’s sentences. Applying this system to two Bataille texts, Gaines selects a page, then a word, and so on, essentially using Bataille’s prose as inspiration and linguistic font. In graphite-on-paper works, the new texts appear surrounded by a smoky haze suggestive of the fecund mental space that emerges between author and reader, or art and viewer, as a site for multiplicative meanings. Gaines’s rewrites are rife with poetic allusion; one of the drawings, String Theory: Rewriting Bataille #8, ends with what could serve as a fitting subtitle for the show, “But the edge is set to fear only leaping mystics.”

— Annie Buckley

Linn Meyers

HAMMER MUSEUM
10899 Wilshire Boulevard
May 7–November 6

Linn Meyers, Every Now. And Again, 2011, acrylic ink on wall, dimensions variable.

Numerous site-specific works have graced the expansive wall that flanks the wide staircase leading up to the galleries of the Hammer Museum; Linn Meyers’s Every Now. And Again, 2011, a deep violet and pale yellow wall drawing of rolling swirls, constitutes one of the space’s quieter and yet more memorable pieces. Indeed, it speaks volumes for the rare but powerful use of subtle sensitivity that an artist can bring to bear in addressing a public space. Using a process that pulls equally from intuitive choice and rigorous focus, Meyers has painstakingly applied each line of butter-colored ink to a surface painted with two rich tones of purple.

The Washington, DC–based Meyers was inspired by the color and light of Los Angeles, where skies can take on otherworldly hues––one of the few benefits of smog––and sunshine is intimately tied to landscape. While the undulating pale yellow curves and teardrop shapes, each made up of multiple strokes, do evoke the waves and mountains around the city, they call more readily on ancient mysteries: creatures that lurk at the bottom of the sea, the cyclical patterns of nature, and the handiwork, also drawn on walls, of prehistoric humans.

More recently than that, of course, artists have invoked the drawn line to depict or honor natural rhythms; Meyers’s endeavor aligns in particular with Vija Celmins’s intricate etchings of webs and water and Nancy Riegelman’s powerful paintings mapping her breath. Similarly, Meyers’s drawing magnifies the scope and intensity of singular marks through expansive patternmaking; taken together, the lines appear to pulsate, embodying both the physicality of her process and that of the space. Seen from the street, through the glass front of the museum, it connects inside to outside, enlivening the surrounding area and metaphorically embracing the city beyond.

— Annie Buckley

Marina Pinsky

WORKSPACE
2601 Pasadena Ave, Unit C
November 5–December 4

Marina Pinsky, untitled, 2011, color photograph, 40 x 54”.

Photographer Marina Pinsky assembles her still lifes from broken-down and rarefied formal components of life in Los Angeles: construction materials, food, and light. Her latest pieces (all untitled and from 2011) are lit from a low angle, bathed in a contrasty glow reminiscent of Southern California in late afternoon. In one image, a pair of mason jars, one half full of raw rice and the other of cooked rice, perch on two blocks of lumber. Below, two slices of toast rest near a glass of water and a plaster mold of what appears to be the heels of a loaf of bread. These items could be a cheap artist’s meal, parts of the grind of process—but here they serve as a rich palette of browns, silver, and glinting glass within a tenuously balanced composition.

In the background of another work depicting concrete, bricks, a lightbulb, and a silver can, Pinsky stacks a precarious wall of bricks. Thin wires protruding from the concrete impale tiny printouts of steel cans. The everyday strangeness of these unframed prints threatens to collapse at any moment beneath the weight of simple objects. They seem raw and adrift, markedly papery and barely held together, like crumbling concrete hung from rods of rebar.

Photography, too, constructs the city; a further work incorporates snapshots of fan palms poking through a chain-link fence. The piece alludes to photographers like Mark Wyse and Judy Fiskin, for whom Los Angeles architecture ultimately resolves into formal arrangements of sun and shadow. Pinsky treats this history as just another brick. The largest print in the exhibition features a single lightbulb pinioned to a concrete block. Illuminated by only this source, the concrete sinks into a richly pockmarked topography, as if one could arrange the elements of a visual city until it settled, propped up on its own heaviness.

— Travis Diehl

Pearl Hsiung

VINCENT PRICE ART MUSEUM
1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez
September 16–December 16

Pearl Hsiung, Volcanic Ash, 2010, still from a color video, 6 minutes.

This exhibition showcases the metaphoric breadth Pearl Hsiung achieves through a spectacularly narrow visual vocabulary that is biomorphic, geological, and deliciously raunchy. Hsiung’s explosive lexicon in these roughly thirty-five paintings, videos, and sculptures—featuring caves, geodes, volcanic calderas, barrel cacti, eggs, holes, and eyes— continuously roils, like molten lava, into new motifs that riff on in-and-out movement connoting not only natural cycles of destruction and rebirth, but also sexual role reversals and subversions. Clues that Hsiung’s oeuvre is about more than sci-fi and psychedelic fantasy abound most evidently in videos like the glam Volcanic Ash, 2010, in which the artist blackens her teeth with Oreos for close-up mouth shots while she sings. At one point, an image of her crotch, cropped and upside down in jeans, visually references the iconic cover of the Rolling Stones album Exile on Main Street. See also Heave Ho, 2006, a plastic floor sculpture shaped like a large geode adorned with a trashy gold bow and extruding a lazy, smooth, pink tongue from its jagged, crystalline rainbow center, like a vagina dentata response to that rock band’s famous logo. That said, Hsiung’s paintings are the highlight of this miniretrospective.

While her paintings are impressive for their technical feats alone (typically spray paint–stenciled landscapes adorned with high-gloss oil-based enamel patterning, color blasts, or decorative flourishes à la Lari Pittman), on a more conceptual level the works shown here provide a welcome assessment of Hsiung’s dirty glamour. The painting one encounters on entering, High Piqued, 2010, sets an ejaculatory tone with a depiction of a turquoise volcano set against a purple-red striated sky and spurting ecstatically above a sandbar that wears a ruby ring. Galaxies and rainbows appear in costume as well: Eye of the Beholder, 2004, for example, depicts a yellow-green rainbow wearing fishnets. In Shecretes, 2008, and Zealophiliac, 2007, cascading waterfalls terminate in ladylike fingers bejeweled with painted acrylic nails while areas of geothermal fissure offer bursts of orgasmic color. The exhibition playfully places pleasure at the forefront, and pleasure is derived from viewing these wholly satisfying images.

— Trinie Dalton

Edward Kienholz

LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART (LACMA)
5905 Wilshire Boulevard
September 4–January 15

Edward Kienholz, Five Car Stud, 1969–72, mixed media, dimensions variable.

First shown at the Harald Szeemann–curated Documenta 5 in 1972, Edward Kienholz’s epically scaled, psychically harrowing tableau Five Car Stud, 1969–72, depicts a Jim Crow–era lynching and has spent the past forty years stashed away in a Japanese storage facility, having never been shown publicly in the country whose dark history of racial violence served as its inspiration. Now lovingly restored with the help of the artist’s widow and longtime collaborator, Nancy Reddin Kienholz, the work has made its long-overdue United States debut at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a part of “Pacific Standard Time,” and it proves to have lost little of its power, despite the waning of its immediately topical political urgency.

Installed in a dark, cavernous room floored with the sort of loose, dry dirt one might find in any drought-blighted patch of anonymous Southern countryside, the work is lit only by the baleful glare of headlights belonging to the five titular cars. Four are arrayed in a semicircle, spotlighting a knot of life-size figures cast in plaster from the bodies of a willing group of Kienholz’s friends and relatives, who appear to be grappling in the dust. As you walk carefully among them and explore (at the encouragement of the helpful museum staff), these figures are revealed to be at work at a stomach-churning task: Their faces obscured by ghoulish rubber masks, the men—all white—are in the process of forcibly restraining a black man and castrating him with a rusted hunting knife. Lording over this sadistic scene, a shotgun jauntily cocked over the crook of his arm, is another man, who leans casually on the open door of the truck from which the victim was clearly pulled. He stands guard while the victim’s lover—a white woman—vomits in horror inside. The windows of the assailants’ cars are mostly blacked out, their obscured interiors adding to the sense that they are, like their drivers, predatory beasts. The only exception is the passenger side of one car’s windshield, through which we can see the figure of a boy peering out in terrified fascination, a cipher for the intergenerational perpetuation of racism.

The piece is unflinching. The experience of ambling about it, of mingling your footprints in the dirt with other footprints that seem as if they could be a map of the elaborate dance that led up to the violent scene frozen in the headlights, is totally enveloping and damningly implicative. It is the bracing intensity of this immersion—which comes over you like a freeze-frame nightmare—that saves Five Car Stud from fading into a mere record of historical trauma. Instead of instilling a sense of guilty comfort that such barbarity is safely quarantined in our past, the work evokes a queasy suspicion that human nature may not have changed much, but that the modes of oppression and the mechanics of prejudice may have simply become subtler and more insidious.

— Chris Wiley

David von Schlegell

CHINA ART OBJECTS
6086 Comey Ave
January 7–February 4

View of “David von Schlegell,” 2012.

Though David von Schlegell is better known (to those who know) for his numerous large-scale public sculptures of the 1970s and ’80s sited in the urban and natural landscape, the Park Place Gallery–adjacent artist was also a painter of considerable consequence and enduring vision. Beyond a selection of drawings, models, and maquettes related to his sculptural practice, this exhibition presents a rare opportunity to view von Schlegell’s late series of four-foot-square monochromes from the early 1990s. Poured over with a wash, each panel is a gradient field of darkly pooled pigment with a concentrated opacity that simulates surprising depth. Space recedes elusively along the work’s internal diagonal axis, suggesting the perspective of rectilinear architectures even as subtle modulations of tone and ghostly trails of pigment on the matte surface project some other, more ethereal and cosmic sense of liquid or gaseous space occasionally pocked with specks of dust like streaking meteors and galactic clusters. Von Schlegell used paint for its fluid chemical possibilities in a way that anticipated the now very contemporary look of abstract Color Field photography.

Four smaller and denser monochromes emanate a restrained radiance that proves even more gripping for the works’ intimacy. Bookended by vertical bars of wood, these more domestic objects contain an aged warmth and worn craft that ties them to a previous utopian moment in which the converging proximities of modernism and Minimalism determined von Schlegell’s formative historical context and pinned ideological stakes to each of his aesthetic constructions.

— Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

Emilie Halpern

PEPIN MOORE
933 Chung King Road
January 14–February 18

Emilie Halpern, Mysticeti, 2012, silver gelatin print, 26 1/2 x 39 1/2”.

The key to Emilie Halpern’s second solo exhibition at this gallery turns upon the relationship of what one encounters on the floor to that on the walls. On the floors of two separate downstairs rooms lie two entirely irregular objects: on one side, a smattering of twenty-nine empty emu eggs, some of which have been smashed, and on the other, a large puddle containing four liters of ocean water, freshly poured each morning. The presence of these thoroughly corporeal materials—the one invoking Halpern’s own recent experience with pregnancy, the other the measure of water required to fill human lungs––brings physical traction to to the artist’s larger body of work on show.

Like many emerging artists in the tradition of Conceptualism, Halpern works with a combination of sculpture and photography. Her elegant sculptures include understated objects such as Lightning Rod, 2012, a slender, thoroughly oxidized shaft, and non-objects such as Octopus, 2012, three inch-wide holes cut in a straight line through a door, a half-wall, and then a window, receding from front to back of the gallery. Her photographs are similarly restrained. Solar Delay, 2012, for instance, is a “white” silver gelatin print created by exposing the negative to eight minutes of sunlight, and Mysticeti, 2012, is an expansive, horizontal seascape interrupted only by a faint spray of water erupting at an indeterminate distance.

Such works flirt with the insular universes called forth in their formal correspondence with Hiroshi Sugimoto’s still seascapes or even Joseph Beuys’s rugged Blitzschlag mit Lichtschein auf Hirsch (Lightning with Stag in Its Glare), 1958–85. But Halpern’s work does not seek to inhabit or fashion its own inner worlds, whether meditative or social, respectively. As evinced by the very range of her stoic vertical works and more affective horizontal ones on the gallery floor, Halpern’s art nestles into the productive fissures between experience and imagination, unfixing object and viewer alike in the matrix between life and death.

— James Nisbet

Brian Bress

CHERRY AND MARTIN
2712 S. La Cienega Boulevard
January 7–February 25

Brian Bress, Cowboy (Brian led by Peter Kirby), 2012, color video, high definition monitor and player, wall mount, frame, 28 x 22 3/4 x 4”.

Slowed to near stillness, the eight video portraits on view in Brian Bress’s latest exhibition, “Under Performing,” show their subjects in various states of physical duress. In Beadman (Parker), 2012, a figure decked in thousands of tiny wooden beads jumps on a trampoline. While his colorful getup suggests a clownish whimsy, his leaden hops betray the tremendous burden of his weighty wardrobe. Janus (Max), 2012, shows a two-faced figure rotating before a lakeside scene; he wears a bodysuit and mask painted to match the brushstrokes and color of the background. Though he sits quietly, trying to merge with his surroundings, the sitter continually trembles—and thus bodily reaction causes efforts to fuse with aesthetics to go in vain. Further exploiting the tension between three-dimensional bodies and two-dimensional portraiture is Fancy Dress Ball (Brian), 2012, which features a performer amid a shifting ground that looks part Lichtenstein abstraction and part Art Deco ceramic motifs, trying to contort his camouflaged limbs to blend in.

These are performances that, as the show’s title indicates, are meant to fall short—all are acts that are impossible to complete or sustain for very long. Sometimes the roles imperil the actor more dramatically, as with Cowboy (Brian led by Peter Kirby), 2012, where the artist, dressed in a cartoonish foam cowboy suit, unsuccessfully attempts to draw various figures on a glass plane. His misplaced scribblings show how the thick, airless suit has also blinded him.

In Creative Ideas for Every Season, 2010, an offbeat road movie, a cardboard car passes through a desolate collaged landscape. The driver, speaking in words appropriated from Agnes Martin, considers with her puppet passengers the impulse that precedes any artistic production, before the assignation of failure or success. Like the astronaut in Bress’s Status Report, 2009, currently on view at the New Museum, she presses along the endless, video-looped road. “We do not ever stop,” she says, “because there’s no way to stop.”

— Genevieve Yue

“Out-of- . . . . . . . . . ”

MICHAEL BENEVENTO
7578 & 7556 Sunset Boulevard
January 18–February 25

View of “Out-of- . . . . . . . . . ,” 2012.

In a midnight-blue room at the back of this gallery hangs a lonesome work (Untitled [XIX L], 2007) by James Turrell: a small reflective hologram of two polygons, joined along one edge, though both are never visible at once. Light from the doorway bounces off the piece and casts a trapezoid onto the floor, which is flecked with glitter. “Out-of- . . . . . . . . . ,” curated by Leila Khastoo, is so multifaceted, so compressed, that even in this inner sanctum, the eye darts between dozens of glinting surfaces.

Crammed facing the entrance are fifteen monitors of various sizes, fed by tangles of cables. The ceiling has been lowered to around seven feet with black WeedBlock fabric. This aggressive display further fractures one’s distracted attention. The videos themselves deal with legacy (Francesco Vezzoli’s The Return of Bruce Nauman’s Bouncing Balls, 2006, for example, which presents a view of shaved testicles jostling above a snowcapped mountain); distance from history (Kerry Tribe’s casting call for actors to play her own family in an experimental documentary); appropriation (an Oliver Laric video of slow-motion stock footage); and artistic process (Packing Fountain, 1996, by Simon Leung, in which an art handler crates Duchamp’s fountain in real time). Yet the setup layers these more or less subtle meditations into a frantic, Internet-style jumble of associative overlap, itself foregrounding the push-pull of time, or the difficulty of attention to time. Leung’s video is angled toward a mirror on the wall in yet another level of reflexivity in a room crowded with deflections. The running commentary of A Video Portrait: Chris Burden, 1989, often overpowers the other audio.

The second half of the room contains just three large photos, each on its own wall and lit by assorted lamps. Zoe Leonard’s black-and-white prints of a mortared-over window (Wall, 2002) and cinder-blocked door (Untitled, 2000/2003) contrast with David Gilbert’s The Flea Circus, 2011, which depicts a messy artist’s studio. These images yield some floor space, but remain visually confining. The false ceiling stops as one enters the back room with Turrell’s piece, which, far from being meditative or phenomenologically musing in the way one might expect, now feels positively schizophrenic. As one exits the gallery, back through the crush of plinths and equipment, the black backs of the monitors seem almost serene.

— Travis Diehl