Catherine Taft

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  print July/August 2020

  “Psychic Plumbing”

  On the white landing page of the website www.thecanarytest.com, two surveillance-style live feeds appeared side by side and a time signature gave the current hour, minute, and second in Pacific Standard Time. The cameras were trained on Canary, a new downtown off-space housed in a former clothing store. One was positioned at the front of the long narrow space and the other at the back, where metal racks and clothes hangers were still installed. The gallery’s inaugural show, “Psychic Plumbing,” existed in these two locations: the physical space and its 24/7 broadcast online. But this past March,

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  print April 2020

  Johanna Went

  Grotesque props, crude puppetry, absurdist costumes, fake blood, and noise characterized Johanna Went’s riotous and scatological performances from the late 1970s and ’80s. A central figure in the Los Angeles punk scene of the time, Went was well known on both US coasts in her heyday and gained a cultlike following in LA underground art and music venues such as Al’s Bar, Club Lingerie, Hong Kong Café, and the Whisky. Alongside her collaborator, the composer Mark Wheaton, and a revolving cast of musicians, performers, and stagehands, Went blended experimental music, sculpture, spoken word, and

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  print February 2020

  Liz Magic Laser

  Liz Magic Laser’s best work examines how politics, technology, psychology, and media are used to manage and calibrate human impulses and motivations. Consisting of two recent projects produced for European institutions, In Real Life, 2019, and Handle/Poignée, 2018, this show demonstrated the centrality of analysis and passé pseudoscientific aesthetics (think infographics and cyberpunks, modernism and New Age) to Laser’s practice. Perhaps the latter interest accounted for the vague belatedness that haunted both works, whose investments in semiotic experimentation and technological

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  print December 2019

  Judy Chicago

  Not unlike Judy Chicago’s famed installation The Dinner Party, 1974–79, this exhibition took a clear and radical stance against the historical erasure of a woman and her work. Of the thirty-nine pieces making up this survey of Chicago’s prolific output from 1965 to 1972, almost half (nineteen sculptures and photographs) had been refabricated or printed anew within the past fifteen years. This work looked unapologetically fresh alongside older sculptures, paintings, and drawings. Conceived and executed around five decades ago, many of Chicago’s original works did not survive owing to the lack of

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  print September 2019

  David Hammons

  In a 1998 profile of David Hammons in these pages, Manthia Diawara observed, “The use of art against art is, of course, a familiar strategy by now, but what remains interesting is what becomes of the artist in his rebellion against convention. . . . In one sense, aura is everything in Hammons’s art.” For an artist known for refusal, Hammons projected a surprisingly strong aura in this loose retrospective, his first exhibition in Los Angeles in forty-five years. New and older sculptures, paintings, installations, found objects, archival ephemera, and works and films by other artists sprawled over

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  print May 2019

  GROUP MATERIAL

  IN 1973, while still in graduate school, Suzanne Lacy organized an elaborate happening. Titled Maps, the piece instructed fellow students to travel to points across Los Angeles’s Southland—from campus to a mental-health hospital to a meatpacking factory—carrying butcher-paper-wrapped lamb’s organs, and to reassemble the entrails into approximate anatomical order at the final stop. The performance was quietly provocative, otherworldly. The following year, she partnered with a lawyer to prepare another, similarly visceral work. That piece, titled Body Contract, 1974, took the form of a fourteen-page

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  print April 2019

  Glenn Ligon

  Throughout his career, Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini spoke and wrote about his search for the “elsewhere,” which he defined as an alternative to the “anthropologically mutated” West. Indeed, his unfinished five-part film Notes for a Poem on the Third World—which was to be shot in the late 1960s in Africa, India, Latin America, the Arab world, and “the black ghettos” of the United States—would have attempted a revolutionary and anticapitalist political positioning of the real. Glenn Ligon takes on Pasolini’s mode of postcolonial, essayistic storytelling in his sculpture Notes for a Poem

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  print March 2019

  SURVIVOR SYNDROME

  DIANA—ROMAN GODDESS of the hunt, fertility, and childbirth—swore never to marry. Neither wife nor mother, she was a celibate separatist living in a forest with a band of virgin maidens. Among the animals in her care were the bear, the boar, the goat, the stag, and packs of wild dogs. She herself was a predatory animal, armed with bow and arrow, breast exposed to facilitate a smooth shot. Diana swiftly punished transgressors of her law, a code that maintained the delicate balance between humans and wildlife. She famously disciplined the hunter Actaeon when he stumbled on the goddess and her nymphs

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  print January 2019

  Raúl de Nieves

  The work of Mexican-born, New York–based artist Raúl de Nieves owes much of its sensibility to early-1970s glam: its artifice, excess, and glittering attitude toward gender. But there was nothing nostalgic, ironic, or retro about the seven figurative sculptures, four mosaiclike wall works, and three drawings that comprised this show. Rather, the works’ dazzling, obsessive surfaces seemed earnestly drawn from some collision of nature, Pop, and fantasy in the service of pure theater. The actors here were six three-foot-tall bodies, each a construction of fiberglass, glue, and multicolored plastic

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  previews January 2019

  “SUZANNE LACY: WE ARE HERE”

  Curated by Rudolf Frieling, Lucía Sanromán, and Dominic Willsdon

  In the field of social practice, Suzanne Lacy is a pioneering and deeply respected figure, having worked for nearly five decades to define this mode of production through activism, performance, community outreach, and pedagogy. With fearlessness, urgency, and, at times, humor, she has tackled complex and vital issues, from rape and systems of violence to international borders, environmental sustainability, and women in leadership. Presented jointly at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,

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  print November 2018

  Harry Dodge

  Harry Dodge’s recent works might well be the love children of the machine age and the digital revolution; his exhibition at the nonprofit space JOAN, “Works of Love,” comprised twelve new sculptures seemingly generated via intertechnological commingling, or perhaps through the tinkering of some ham inventor. Objects such as Pure Shit Hotdog Cake and Black Transparency (The Cloud Polis draws revenue from the cognitive capital of its Users), both 2017, looked like homespun satellites, teetering structures of wood, aluminum, resin, and other found hardware (Black Transparency even counts a “rocket

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  print September 2018

  Todd Gray

  Writing in these pages in 2013, critic Bruce Hainley asked, “Aren’t the ‘life,’ ‘body,’ and ‘face’ of Michael Jackson in the running for some of the most abstract events of the last century?” Indeed, in his lifetime, Jackson complicated notions around his own race, gender, and cultural identity, and his transformation (what Hainley pointed to as “transgendering”) took place before a critical public eye. Todd Gray was Jackson’s exclusive personal photographer in the late 1970s and early 1980s—and thus enjoyed a proximity that allowed him a privileged view of the celebrity in construction—and many

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  print Summer 2018

  Nicole Eisenman

  If history painting aims to convey the course of empire through the depiction of mythic or moralistic episodes, then Nicole Eisenman’s canvas Heading Down River on the USS J-Bone of an Ass, 2017, is likewise a tribute to recent American history, our country’s progress allegorized as a one-way trip down a swampy cataract. More than ten feet tall, the work depicts a sailing vessel—the impossibly large jawbone of a donkey—with a torn sail, manned by a solemn piper, a ghoulishly pasty sailor, and a politician-like fat cat, who lurks in the shadows. Perhaps an update to Emanuel Leutze’s

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  print April 2018

  Simone Forti

  Musing on virtual reality in the pages of this magazine in 2017, Douglas Coupland remarked, “When a new technology triumphs, it allows the technology it’s rendered obsolete to become an art form.” Surprisingly, in that same text, Coupland characterized the use of holograms in art—except “by Simone Forti and a few others,” whom he characterized as deploying them “to great effect”—as a “flash in the pan.” While holography has only hesitantly been embraced as a valid art medium (and rarely as a triumphant technology), the question is not so much about novelty as about the depth of an

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  print February 2018

  Gary Simmons

  Since the early 1990s, Gary Simmons has brandished the act of erasure as a means to visualize race and the history of its representation and misrepresentation. To employ this technique, the artist would first draw on a chalkboard, then smear the image, leaving faded traces of the drawing surrounded by chalky, gestural streaks. Although these marks seemed violent, the image refused to disappear.

  In his six large, mixed-media works at Regen Projects (all works 2017), Simmons built on his early chalkboard drawings, utilizing the formal aftereffects of erasure—forceful blurring—in the service of

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  print January 2018

  William Leavitt

  It’s difficult to tell if William Leavitt’s work reflects an imprecise past or a strange, near future, and it’s exactly this temporal blurriness that makes his work so compelling. Comprising eleven paintings and three theatrical, flat-like sculptures, his recent exhibition “Cycladic Figures” proposed alternate realities in which the stuff of the past—for example, rotary phones, Polaroid cameras, and Greek statuary from 2500 BCE—collided with fantastic technologies, both real and imagined. As with much of Leavitt’s oeuvre, this pileup of images was set in a distinctly Californian

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  print December 2017

  Elizabeth Axtman

  In her 2003 essay “Pimp Notes on Autonomy,” Beth Coleman writes, “The fame of black people . . . is a fame based on the foresight that race does not exist anymore, which does not necessarily make a body right.” O. J. Simpson’s infamous claim, “I’m not black, I’m O. J.,” could be read as a similar assertion, a cultivated self-definition of Simpson as a public figure pointedly outside of racial politics. But after the former NFL running back’s dramatic fugitive flight, “trial of the century,” and murder acquittal, he would never again be exempt from race in America (as if such an idea was possible).

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  previews September 2017

  AMALIA PICA

  Pica’s sculptures and performances are calls to action: They implore us to look, listen, and participate. Political subtexts—addressing everything from military dictatorship to governmental bureaucracy—inform the London-based artist’s practice; for this show, she mines the architecture of war and the obsolescence of technology. Building on her 2010–12 sculpture Acoustic Radar in Cardboard, Pica will exhibit new works in the same material, these based on early sonic equipment used by the British after World War I. The series “In Praise

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  print Summer 2017

  Jennie Jieun Lee

  Among the torso-like, vertically oriented ceramics placed at deliberate intervals throughout “Seizure Crevasse,” Jennie Jieun Lee’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, a pair of small sculptures situated in and near the gallery’s eponymous pit were the most ominous and compelling. At the bottom of a five-foot-deep, roughly eight-by-four-foot rectangular recess in the gallery’s cement ground (an architectural leftover from the space’s former days as a car repair shop), a modest abstract ceramic piece with a glossy, multihued glaze rested like a decapitated head in a grave. Hovering over the

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  print February 2017

  Michael Decker

  In 1968, brothers Wallace and Russ Berrie manufactured and sold a line of kitsch plastic objects known as Sillisculpts. The Sillisculpt served as a kind of 3-D greeting card that reflected the popular sentiments of Vietnam-era America; each featured a small, trophy-like figure, typically cast in off-white resin and fixed to a base stamped with a saccharine or humorously lewd phrase: I LOVE YOU THIS MUCH; WORLD’S BEST MOTHER; UP YOURS!; THERE’S NO PLACE FOR SEX IN THE OFFICE . . . SO LET’S MAKE ONE. As subtitles for the upward gazing dopey, doe-eyed figures, the phrases spoke alternately to