Shana Lutker
Vielmetter Los Angeles
On a low, mirrored tabletop reflecting the ceiling, Shana Lutker set out more than three hundred leather gloves that, despite their superficial anonymity, constitute something like a group portrait. Each glove in a.k.a. Public Opinion (all works 2017)—the fifth installment of her ongoing series “Le ‘NEW’ Monocle: The History of the Fistfights of the Surrealists,” begun in 2012—represents, in a winking metonymic sleight, a Los Angeles–based artist. The contributors sent Lutker a tracing of their nondominant hands, and Lutker then transformed the drawings’ contours into oversize gloves in an array of colors: light and brighter pink, sunny yellow, black, orange, and turquoise. Lutker has made her email address publicly available so that people might continue to reach out to her for inclusion in future iterations—the work’s appendages thus continually multiply in number, at the same time amplifying its effect.
At Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Lutker arranged the gloves into a matrix of tidy rows keyed to names organized alphabetically, beginning from the upper left and ending in the lower right. While forgoing labels on the plinth, and secreting away any identifying features on the interiors of the leather casings (where corresponding initials were stamped), Lutker nevertheless provided the viewer with a list of who appears, and where, starting with Scoli Acosta, Nick Aguayo, and Brody Albert, and concluding with Bedros Yeretzian, Jenny Yurshansky, and Jody Zellen. Three places remained unfilled at the provisional termination, as if anticipating the addition of still more props—extensions of those who have yet to, so to speak, lend a hand in a gesture of solidarity that goes beyond intellectual or ideological difference.
Lutker has stated that the series grew out of her fascination with the interpersonal dynamics of the Surrealists, and, more specifically (as indicated by its title), André Breton’s infamous fistfights. For the most recent version of the series on display in this show, Lutker invoked an incident from 1935 when Breton and a group of friends dined at La Closerie des Lilas, a favored restaurant on the boulevard du Montparnasse once frequented by Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine, and later immortalized by Ernest Hemingway in his 1964 Parisian memoir, A Moveable Feast. As the story goes, while dining there one evening Breton spied the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg, who had criticized him in print the year before. The French Surrealist then approached Ehrenburg and hurled insults at him before slapping his face with a green leather glove. Lutker takes this encounter as a parable of armament against the vicissitudes of critical fortune.
In the other room of the gallery, Lutker extended her meditation on Ehrenburg by making a series of freestanding and reflective sculptures with intersecting planes of mirrored steel that fit together like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. They refer to something in his anti-Surrealist screed—namely, a scene from a 1923 Charlie Chaplin film, A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate, which features a love triangle involving a starving artist. What emerges from this backstory is a suite of ten abstract urns, vases, and other similar forms that intimate figurative outlines: feminine vessels echoing the decorative objects that dot Chaplin’s frames in A Woman of Paris. Lutker takes pains to indicate this connection in each work’s title, which includes the time stamp of the precise moment of the would-be original’s appearance, as in the tall and elegant-footed form of Woman of Paris, 11:53. As flat, almost holographic specters, the women of Paris threaten to dissolve into ambient circumstance. The arrangement of gloves in a.k.a. Public Opinion offered a rather more urgent assertion of purpose, however tragicomic it may be.