untheoretical stories

ADIA MILLETT : The Gold of Silence

ADIA MILLETT : THE GOLD OF SILENCE 

  Adia Millett : Breaking Patterns

California African American Museum Los Angeles — February-August 2019

 

ADIA MILLETT, Section 8 2016, Fabric/textile 140″ x 120″ Courtesy of the artist, Photo RA

Be broken into a million pieces.

Only then will your heart no longer be confined

by the precious delusion of your own identity.

And perhaps you will stop being a house

with a few windows for the light to pour in.

Instead you will be the ground and the sky.

You will be the echo of your mother’s cry 

and the imprint of your father’s feet.

You… will be everything!

ADIA MILLETT

Edmond Jabès:

ECRIRE, C’EST RENDRE LE SOMMEIL AUX MOTS. LA PAGE EST LE DORTOIR; ALORS LE REVE PREND LES RENES ET TU PEUX BOIRE A L’ETAPE.

TO WRITE IS TO GIVE THE WORDS THEIR SLEEP. THE PAGE IS THE ROOM FOR SLEEPING; WHICH IS WHEN DREAMS HOLD THE REINS AND YOU CAN DRINK BEHIND THE LINES.

 

THE GOLD OF SILENCE

by Rosanna Albertini

Neither words nor images are easy. They only expand in a visual body moments in which the writer, in our case she’s also the artist, has lost memory, explanations, even the measure of time, and holds her breath in hope that a new world will appear on each page, in every art piece. And I would like to wrench more from Adia Millett about fabric and deconstruction, her pacing and undoing to the point of forgetting the heaviness of the house, both object and word. But, more words would pass through the intersection between her life and mine. I stay with the silence of her art as I see what she drew from history or natural events and remade, maybe skipping lightly and quickly, from afar, the ‘precious delusion’ of her own identity.

Daydreaming is the secret. A golden needle was held by Millett’s neurons, escaped her brain, became the vessel of a thread: a thread of breeze or light, and yet strong and farsighted. My, our daydreaming can only be different from hers when we look at her quilts, but we breath the air between the 8 sections of the house, whose door is there? Does the house wrap the artist around her body or live inside her, recombining layers of fabric with untold stories by many steps preceding words?

ADIA MILLETT, Medicine Wheel 2018, Fabric/textile 120″ diameter Courtesy of the artist Photo RA

Ancestors’ spread a monumental asymmetrical wisdom from a temple with one white window at the center. Fabric adds softness to the timeless speech. Adia Millet brought here, now, the ancestors’ voice gripped in stitches, for our eyes’ soul. She went through the magic of a natural environment: the grass sleeps in the green, birds rest among the clouds, the sky sleeps in the blue, the sun blows insomnia from an orange eye, time sleeps in the wheel. Perhaps humans didn’t really step in. 

ADIA MILLETT, Ancestors 2017, Fabric/textile  65″ x 73″ Courtesy of the artist, Photo RA

Darkness is the not seen, an unknown fable obnubilated by lack of light. A wound was necessary, red like a horizon. A golden rain falls down from the wound, it’s the fable crying gold.

ADIA MILLETT, Golden Shower 2016, Fabric/textile 104″ x 92″
Courtesy of the artist, Photo RA

Then tiny houses scattered on tables. Millett doesn’t stop making houses, gloves for explosions of feelings that ask for shape, protection maybe. Metaphors materialized in illuminated small inner spaces from which, once more, what emanates is silence.

The white, luminous center — one or many minuscule lamps —  regulates shadows and meanings, the infinite meanings each of us can imagine. If we are not delusional, we may feel the same in front of a closed door of a neighboring house. Beyond the door museum rooms with no labels, cabinets of daily wonder. We can only guess, make up stories. 

ADIA MILLETT, Blind premonition (flowers) 2009  Mixed media assemblage, 12 x 13 x 14″ Courtesy of the artist, Photo RA

ADIA MILLETT, Capital Gain 2011 Mixed media assemblage 12 x 9.5 x 26.5″ Courtesy of the artist, Photo RA

ADIA MILLETT, Rolando’s Ancestors 2011 Mixed media assemblage 22 x 12.5 x 9″ Courtesy of the artist, Photo RA

When a long history of human traffic and money is included in a tunnel ending with a vanishing point, with ships sealing the void and money growing on trees instead of apples and pears, I saw the power of tales, the more absurd, the more revealing. A popular Italian story brings up the belief that trees with coins instead of leaves would grow when planting a coin in the ground. Poor Pinocchio, blinded by the beliefs of the poor who dreamed of a new life. Capital Gain is a clever, shameless piece. So are the other miniature spaces. Erasing time, including feelings in a niche, the artist invites us to open heart surgeries. Bleeding becomes gold, if you let your heart explode into a million pieces.  

ADIA MILLETT, When I Was a Little Boy 2011 Mixed media assemblage 9 x 13 x 18.5″ Courtesy of the artist, Photo RA

ADIA MILLETT, When I Was a Little Boy 2011 Mixed media assemblage 9 x 13 x 18.5″ Courtesy of the artist, Photo RA

Bibliography

Edmond Jabès, Le Livre de Yukel, Paris, Gallimard, 1964

JENNIFER NELSON : “From Zero to Gold”

JENNIFER NELSON: “FROM ZERO TO GOLD”    

                   

Myths are the soul of our action and love. 

We cannot act without moving toward a phantom. 

We can only love what we create.   

(Paul Valéry, A Fond Note on Myth, 1928)

Jennifer nelson as a living Caryathid under the lintel of the National Bank of Greece

JENNIFER NELSON  at the National Bank in Athen (Greece)

 

THE LIVING CARYATID, by Rosanna Albertini

 

This is a story of time going in a circle and art losing the pace 

of climbing eternity and rather emerging from human turmoil 

like a white lily from the mud

for Jennifer Nelson is an adhesive substance attracting 

as a magnet the needles that four years ago History scattered 

in Greece giving the country entropy in a broken vase leaking 

disorder and randomness feelings of pain and dreams of hope

that usually remain buried for us looking from afar

under the surface tension of the news

and sink and disappear in the ocean of human despair

which remains untold because life collectively doesn’t have commas or periods

those only belong to single humans not so clear about their meaning

 

her family life in Greece was blessed by motherhood a spring of joy 

while austerity appeared like a collective disease invading the citizens’ soul

stifling them under neutral computation as if numbers had ingested 

a secret justice held by the clock of the European Central Bank

International Monetary Fund European Stability Mechanism

 

July 3, 2015 Alexis Tsipras  OXI Speech — NO to the EUROVULTURE

 mythological politics where time present and time past are only one

 “…it was from this very place that Zeus abducted Europa.

 [and with her generated the Minotaur]

It is from this very place that austerity technocrats want to abduct Europe again

from its democratic traditions. NO. We tell them NO on Sunday. 

[The referendum brought up 61% of NOs]

Our NO will make History. Whatever happens, we are the winners. 

I urge you to ignore the sirens of terror. Greece is and will remain

the cradle of European civilization.”

From LINKS, International Journal of Socialist Renewal. July 31, 2016

had the prime minister mentioned the small man in the streets of Athen who 

revealed some time ago in the past the beauty of human conversation 

including lack of illusions and ended his own life Socrates drinking cicuta

to obey a power stronger than his philosophical approach to life

this contemporary prime minister would have known he was only

postponing his poisonous drink …. nine months after

“Europe offered Greece 86 billion euros of loan in exchange 

for a tightly policed Greek government implementing a package of reforms:

pension cuts tax increases privatizations labor market deregulation”

and Tsipras said YES

We were at that speech in Syntagma Square. It was quite moving as we got off the train, we couldn’t get out of the station, there were so many people. 

And everyone was amazed. We’d all thought we were alone in our thoughts and then suddenly it was clear that we were a massive democratic block standing against this insane policy. 

As everyone looked around in surprise to find that people of all stripes and persuasions were agreeing with this resistance, a chant of “No” broke out in the metro.

The square was, in fact, a huge party that night…But democracy didn’t help us. The banks were more powerful. (Jennifer Nelson)

 

Nothing grandiose or expensive was possible for Jennifer Nelson 

American artist who moved to Greece to discover she was married 

to the place with “heavy commitment and light material” 

“wind in and wind out breath and sound and voice held by the lungs 

ingesting the seeds of grief from which one gets coughs and bronchitis”

 

Greece 2015 – Austerity time

Pointless to add that any country could fall into the same pit. 

Debts: the way they become visible, is on paper. People read them as if they were a natural outcome of the banking machine, “instead they are constructed, games of power, art isn’t any different,” says the artist. One has only to decide what kind of game, who are the participants. Jennifer wanted to be fertile despite every challenge, to do something out of nothing. 

An artist friend who had been close to Joseph Beuys, Soulis Moustakidis, showed her the way: ZERO CAN BE GOLD. Moustakidis made an underground press carving messages in potatoes and used potatoes to stamp on papers he stuck under unknown cars so when the cars moved all the papers flew around like leaves. This action took place under the Junta dictatorship.

 

Jennifer Nelson’s ART piece: UNTITLED ( MESOGHEIA) 2016

The Caryatids Porch of Erechteion, Athens, 421-407 BC (Wikipedia image)

Intricate hairstyle of a Caryatid, displayed at the Acropolis Museum in Athens (Wikipedia image)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Standing between two columns underneath the lintel of the Greek National Bank,

Nelson embraces the posture, silent exposure and stillness of the feminine statues   

holding the ceiling of the porch that sticks out of the Erechteion, a temple placed on an Acropolis ledge facing an ocean of petrified waves. Poseidon’s rage after throwing his  trident against this temple? This is the city of Athens. The six Caryatids, steady and quiet, lift a knee as if starting a step to fly out of their temple. If they go, the porch doesn’t have any more reason to be.

JENNIFER NELSON, Untitled (Mesagheia), 2016-present, Bills, Home made glue, Gold paint (from Germany) Work in Progress,  Photo Panos Kokkinias

A PAPER WEDDING DRESS. Jennifer’s phantom is in her mind. The idea moved her knee towards an art piece born in Greece, wrapped by the stone walls of her husband’s family house. The PAPER DRESS  was her reaction to the hours spent in long lines in front of the banks’ doors waiting for the weekly money, like everyone else, in a dignified solitude. Banks were shut down. It was like “being taken prisoner of the contingent numbers and times” Jennifer says, “you can loose house, electricity, commodities, but also something bigger. Dead end has been experienced individually, in secret and in shame, within each small family unit.”

Delving mind and hands into the bills’ paper our Jennifer artist captured the numbers negative energy, and touched the paper’s resilience, to readdress them into a new life of opposite sign. She collected as many papers she could and used them to make a replica of the traditional Attic wedding dress, symbol of fertility and richness, mostly embroidered with gold and covered with jewelry. Around her, with her, many other hands -children, women and men- worked and are still working to accomplish the artwork. The enormous neckless is exclusively made out of paper bills whose fibers were broken and made flexible again by human tips of fingers, also by her son Nasos’s fingers.

Working Hands, Photo by Athena Stamatis

Her long hair braided exactly like the Caryatids’ hair, Jennifer Nelson has made herself a Caryatid of our time. Nameless and voiceless. Except for her dress that spreads a j’accuse louder than thunder, and brings the feelings of shame to a glorious, collective ending.  

As she wears them, all those numbers printed on paper, credit cards, bonuses, bank symbols, are changed into embroidery, decorations, become talismans. But the art is not the dress by itself. It is the dress around the artist’s body, touching her skin and bones, keeping her flame alive. 

Jewels of Debts

Fragility turns into strength. Such a delicacy is probably the best adhesive substance. It gave to the makers of the piece an uncertain space in their minds through which a personal dream could appear, for a second or perhaps forever. We don’t know. Socrates again: the value of thinking, and of exposing thoughts to the public. Ancient myths were based on the belief that, when we think, we touch something despite distance and separation. Our mind’s eyes have fingers. Sensations from our physical life are saved inside the mind, their energy can be replicated and amplified. 

This PAPER DRESS is the kind of art piece I would like to see as the prototype of a generation of pieces, all over the world, the talisman to get out of a misery that is not from lack of money. As T.S. Eliot’s words put it:

“Internal darkness, deprivation

And destitution of all property,

Desiccation of the world of sense,

Evacuation of the world of fancy,

Inoperancy of the world of spirit;

This is the one way, and the other

Is the same, not in movement; while the world moves

In appetency, on its metalled ways

Of time past and time future.

T.S.Eliot, Four Quartets 

 

And Jennifer Nelson:

Of egg opportunities lost

and debt that won’t be forgiven

naked to your math,

I loved I love I will love 

The Alchemist’s Account (four line excerpt)

JENNIFER NELSON, Democracy is a Party, 2019, videostill

 

Bibliography

T.S.Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950, Harcourt Brace & Company New York, San Diego, London, 1980

Rosanna Albertini, Technological Rituals, USC Annenberg Center for Communication, 1999

 

TRULEE HALL : a story of baskets, women and eggs

A STORY OF BASKETS, WOMEN AND EGGS

About THE OTHER AND OTHERWISE by TRULEE HALL

an immersive installation at Maccarone Gallery, Los Angeles 2019

TEXT BY ROSANNA ALBERTINI

“When a new form appears, it isn’t to express a new content. … We must turn over the object as if we were turning a log over the fire. Than the object can be perceived as if it was the first time.” (Viktor Sklovskji)

 WOMAN CHICKEN EGGS   Trulee’s installation spreads out in two rooms as big as a plaza: painted, sculpted, in videographical stories, partially contained in incomplete rooms, the main theme seems to reproduce itself endlessly, each time with a different configuration. It’s one body with separate parts, each of them a story of woman, chicken, and eggs. Despite the cold isolation of limbs, as if a 3D computer graphic had been transformed into a physical, surreal landscape, the interaction with each part is compelling, absorbing, disorienting. 

Baskets are everywhere, even hung on the ceiling, mostly empty, gracious, useless, decorative. I wonder about baskets, they might be the core of the site. They might be the artist’s offering, silent mask of her personal self. Just filled with life. She can be in a basket, and be contained. She, and all of us, only believe we lead our journey. The eggs made us, the basket transports us to the end of days and our stories with us, until we disappear and the stories remain, as in the Maori legendary tales. My brain is pulsing, just a fleeting moment. Something new fills Trulee Hall’s space,  it could be that it makes me think. For an artwork of these days, a rare trove.

Viktor Sklovskji of 1976 helps me to keep my distance from intellectual temptations about art. Trulee Hall is my present antidote.

“Oh yes. Another of those intellectual passions — new perception, new ways of displaying, and you go on dreaming that reality will change. In 1916 we invented a poetic practice centered on estrangement. I was personally so involved that much later I wrote about art pretending art is not an object, nor a material; it is pure form, arithmetic relationships. I wrote it with passion, but I was wrong. Art is pulsing thinking. We just produce a parallel imaginary reality in which, as Albert Einstein said, ‘We transfer the center of gravity of our spiritual life to find a peace that does not happen in the storm of life.’”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE OTHER AND OTHERWISE    A fictional conversation between Emmanuel Levinas, Trulee Hall, Plato, Rosanna Albertini

RA      Otherwise?  

EL      “Otherwise than Being!” To be human very simply means that we live as if we were not beings among beings.” “You forget – Emmanuel Levinas continues –  that you began somewhere when your existence started. Your being alive, on earth, is not disembodied.”

PLATO,      untouched by idealism:  “Humans are bipeds without wings.”

RA      And here the artist invites us into an enchanted palace where both bipeds, with wings and without, share the eternal ritual of giving birth, producing eggs and being stupefied in front of the sexual essence of every body. The immaculate conception is such a beautiful fable, je vous salut Godard! 

TH      What happens in my sculptures? Legs and feet are fragile, the bust has been reshaped by thousand years of history. Altered like the mountain excavated  in their veins and with limbs mutilated by cannonballs, bullets, hurricanes and diseases, rebuilt out of remains. Still, personality and energy swirl around the body revealing their physical movement. They have colors and shapes. 

“The other” of my piece is female. She is a double her: the one we think and the one we see, the one I belong to in my body, and the one who happens in my brain. A computer image along with her technically generated other, a clay mate.   

RA      Are you saying that we forget we are animals among animals? Content to carry a brain prisoner of a box, an object easily seduced by the book of faces and links without roots? It’s true that your chickens also have their double. 

TH      It’s hard to see ourselves as human animals. We get lost in our head.

EL      I am actually filled with my materiality, she makes who I am. Not true that spirit and mind fall into the body to become prisoner of a deadly box. My freedom grows and expands through and out of my physical life. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I write about the whole body of this palace of wonders I realize that names are not included, except, maybe, as eggs of multiple names. Moving between small rooms with no doors or ceilings, walls that are  paintings and paintings that are walls for video images, clouds under the ceiling tickled by a population of swaying baskets, islands of colors keeping paintings, floor and walls together in the same atmosphere, I don’t have any doubt, this is not a place for pure forms, or intellectual distinctions. It’s an art piece giving a body to real feelings of our time, about the female figure in her entire natural power, stripped from propaganda of any kind. The artistic effort and accomplishment are monumental.

 

 

TRULEE HALL, Side By Side By Suggestion, single channel excerpt from a 2 channel video in an immersive installation. First shown at Gamble House in 2016, and in 2019 at Maccarone Gallery Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist and Maccarone Gallery.

 

Trulee Hall builds a  monument for the female beast, turning beauty and the beast (the old story) upside down. The male was a cursed monster, the female a model of beauty, patience, and devotion. Female existence in Trulee’s art seems to be extricated from cultural stereotypes and brought back to a sweet common destiny: to be a vase for eggs. No different from a chicken for the same purpose. In one of her fantasy video stories a chicken is asked to understand if the ear of corn offered to her is edible or not. The chicken’s eye looks like a piece of glass, petrified in a dilemma. John Baldessari did the same teaching a plant the alphabet. 

TRULEE HALL, Serene Vulnerability 2018,   Courtesy of the artist and Maccarone Gallery

TRULEE HALL, Oblivious Baskets 2018,   Courtesy of the artist and Maccarone Gallery

TRULEE HALL, Showing the Rooster 2018,   Courtesy of the artist and Maccarone Gallery

TRULEE HALL, Chicken Lap Lady Portrait, Courtesy of the artist and Maccarone Gallery

A hand made fairy tale. Surprising, disorienting like a forest with many trails. We don’t know where they go. Being more and more under the spell of looking at art in museums or museum like galleries, we are driven to thinking that space and objects in it are the point. Here instead, obsessive variations around the same theme connect every part of the installation with an impeccable logic structure. Threads are invisible. No directions. One has to perceive the invisible connective texture. 

Oh, Simone Forti’s freedom in letting her body talk to the place! With her in mind I follow my body, ignoring where I am. But at every corner, in front of every call for attention, I realize that each stop is time, the time of a face to face with the organs of a scattered female body. Not the kind of time that doesn’t belong to anybody, the banality of proximity, nor time measured by the hands of the watch. Nope, it is the face to face with my own physicality displayed in front of me: funny, playful, ridiculous. Curious as a child who discovers her own flesh, I don’t blush. It’s an orchestra, and I’m part of it. 

A choreography for the same forms: woman, chicken, egg, holes, rooms for living mutate into different entities. Dots on the fabric fly toward the ceiling as white snow flakes, expand in the clouds, solidify in eggs. Between forms, no need of words. Conversation is only visual. The spiraling forms could be snakes, roots, or nothing determined, like a trace of energy in the air. In some cases, their end blooms with an ear of corn. Sexuality and fantasy aren’t separate. Which makes harder the task to mention them, or to identify them with only one single name. It all depends on the way our imagination works.

Perhaps, once more, words are getting separate from things, disconnecting from books, and similitudes are reinstated between forms, from one to another image. The difference with the ages preceding printed books is the man made nature of contemporary images. We read the outcomes of human labor. We read for instance Trulee Hall’s visual statements. Only my passion for writing convince me to put words on them. A group of birds drawing their flight in the sky would be more appropriate. Whether the artist is aware or not of these many implications of her art, is not something I know. 

Courtesy of the artist and Maccarone Gallery

A celebration of giving birth.  Female breasts expanded into golden ears of corn?  Not only that, entire bodies of many women are sculpted, almost encrusted in the thick, golden wall at the entrance. Surprising, shiny and painful. To step into the round hole between two active breasts spreading a small, white fountain of milk, opens a hole in my stomach as if I were bringing my present body into the birth space I knew well when I brought my daughter to the light. Like then, I feel my animal nature taking over any other part of me; no identity card, just a female beast.

 

Bibliography

Viktor Sklovskji, Theory of Prose. Translation Benjamin Sher, Elmwood Park, Ill. Dalkey Archive press, 1990

Emmanuel Levinas, Le Temps et l’Autre,  QUADRIGE/PUF, @ Fata Morgana, 1979

Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Published the first time in 1974. Translated into English by Alphonso Lingis, Springer, Dordrecht, 1991

Simone Forti, Thinking with the Body, Edited by Sabine Breitwieser for the Museum der Modern, Salzburg, Hirmer, 2014

A.W Reed, Maory Myths & Legendary Tales, New Holland Publishers (NZ), 1999

 

Suzanne Jackson : Another Angle of Vision

SUZANNE JACKSON : ANOTHER ANGLE OF VISION

text by Rosanna Albertini

about Suzanne Jackson’s “holding on to a sound” at  O – TOWN HOUSE, Los Angeles 

February-March 2019

 

SUZANNE JACKSON, Inventory Letters 2010, Acrylic, handmade paper, mesh fabric, Plexiglas, wood, 28.5 x 66 in  Courtesy of the artist and O-Town House LA

“The geography of our consciousness of reality has enormously complex coasts and is broken up by any number of mountains and lakes.”  

“There is no mirror that shows us ourselves out of ourselves because there is no mirror that can draw us out of ourselves. Another soul would be necessary, another angle of vision or thought.”   

(Fernando Pessoa)

A painting, maybe? This is me, the painter’s granddaughter. He used to hold my hand after dinner as if a journey was starting. It was, all around the perimeter of his studio where I slept my best nights. Before getting into sleep, we moved from a painting to another. There were no words. I learned that landscapes, those painted by him, were a thin layer of reality he had brought home for us to see again, the feeling of their light.

Smell of turpentine. And smell of cows began in my memory, of grass and mountain cheese. Paintings were not mirrors of the land, neither of our perceptions. A mixture of now and then, seventy years after, tells me that we held hands while a part of us slipped out of our bodies to join the painted image, the invisible soul of her. Like flying for real, not dreaming. I was too young to be aware what it was. Thinking?  Even now I avoid it. Art asks for another angle, many many others. 

With Suzanne Jackson I messed up titles and artworks. I’m going to find the correct combination. But, for a moment, I like to miss it. I stay with her suggestion: “holding on to a sound.” I open our discovery of her paintings with a Mexican poem from Nahuacatle.

In the house of paintings

the singing begins

………

With flowers you write,

O Giver of Life:

with songs you give color,

with songs you shade

those who must live on the earth.

 

SUZANNE JACKSON, birdmusic – holding on to a sound 2011, Acrylic, Bogus paper, string, 28 x 29.5 x 6 in   Courtesy of the artist and O-Town House LA

SUZANNE JACKSON, Gamet Zagbite 2016, Acrylic on layered acrylic, Garnet medium, and mixed papers, 36 x 57 in   Courtesy of the artist and O-Town House LA

SUZANNE JACKSON, finding joy in the mirror 2016, Acrylic, wood veneer, Bogus paper, loquat seeds, 55 x 37.5 in Courtesy of the artist and O-Town House LA

Having the sound to continue in her and prolonging its waves in her painted and sculpted work, Suzanne Jackson grabs the texture of the space she is in. Sounds spread and travel without geometry, they hit the chambers of our ears like the light hits the receptive sticks in our eyes. So does this artist, a woman of my age, a mature woman. She hits our soul.  In each piece is the geography of her feelings and thoughts in a specific moment: valleys and streams and spots of joy, sunny, next to the bloody moments or dark layers of…I don’t know if to call them colors…they are personal reverberations of the living, so intense that wood, paper, fabrics fold and turn and adapt to her need to escape flatness, maybe also the verbal simplification.

 

SUZANNE JACKSON, Moons in Double Copper Sea 2017, Acrylic, wood veneers, acrylic detritus on cradled Arches papers, 35.5 x 45 in   Courtesy of the artist and O-Town House LA

SUZANNE JACKSON, Good News Baby! 2016 Acrylic, graphyte on un-stretched canvas, 54 x 62 in
Courtesy of the artist and O-Town House LA

A long scroll becomes a solidified wave on the wall. We can read the feelings. Stories have been filtered, some marks remains. The response to her painted reality is a preverbal silence. The chest filled with emotions.

The sigle pieces expand, wrinkle and contract, accordion like.

SUZANNE JACKSON, Voiding Petitions 2014, Acrylic, graphite on canvas, 14 x 12 in   Courtesy of the artist and O-Town House LA

 If the surface is flat, sometimes, the painted action is not. How our consciousness opens up: by layers, ideas at times, the flesh other times, and not without lacerations. Red wounds. It’s the theater of life.

SUZANNE JACKSON, Marilyn and Maya Watch Fog 2006, Watercolor on hardboard panel, 8 x 10 in   Courtesy of the artist and O-Town House LA

Marylin and Maya watch fog: maybe the most naturalistic of this group of recent artworks by Suzanne Jackson. It’s a very small watercolor, two open hands joined by the thumbs could frame it. It stops me like a bullet. Close and far images will disappear. They are devoured by the big mouth of fog like memories fading through time. I can’t stop watching this tormented scene. From the void of my mind another painting surfaces and floats over Suzanne’s image without covering it. It’s maybe the same intent in both pieces, I don’t really know. The other painting is an Italian oil painting by Pietro Annigoni, the portrait of a country side villa near Pisa, which becomes lontananza (an absent distance) behind a gate in the foreground, and a tree. The gate seems closed forever. The singing stops.

Mark Rothko 1943

“The world is what an artist makes it.

And in this world the eye is only an element of the totality of experience, has no precedence over feelings and thoughts.

A picture is not its color, its form, or its anecdote, but an intent entity idea, where implications transcend any of these parts.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, composed by Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon – Translated by Alfred Mac Adam, Exact Change, Boston, 1998

Mark Rothko, Writings on Art, edited by Miguel Lopez-Remiro, Yale University press, New Haven and London, 2006

Technicians of the Sacred, edited with commentaries by Jerome Rothenberg, Third edition, University of California press, 2017

Lenz Geerk : MAGIC SOLITUDES

In the exhibition ‘The Table Portraits’ at ROBERTS PROJECTS, Culver City, CA – September-October 2018

 

LENZ GEERK. Untitled, 2018 Acrylic on wool 60 x 40 cm
Courtresy of the artist and Roberts Projects

MAGIC SOLITUDES

by Rosanna Albertini

“I like the way the art world is changing in the last few years, especially since Trump and #Me Too, there is more focus on relevant topics, psychology, society – which for me is often more meaningful than art about art.”  Lenz Geerk

 

The sky is flat and gray over the rain. As gray as the pages of a book Geerk painted with no words inside; only a small branch with leaves  appears, it might be an alien presence. 

There must be something personal I share with Geerk’s paintings. And it is not only a sense of familiarity with a painted world explored by Italian modern artists from the beginning to the middle of the 20th century, such as  Massimo Campigli, Mario Sironi, Filippo De Pisis, Giorgio De Chirico, Carlo Carrà and others – even Amedeo Modigliani. Their sceneries were often called ‘metaphysical.’ Big word in these days, I let it go. Perhaps these Italian artists only preserved an ossified gallery of figures and buildings to replace a landscape of ruins dominated by wars and misery — humans and cities under the same spell —  with imaginary monuments of their minds. Artists avoided resemblances to reality, bringing to life new under-cover mythologies wearing beauty and distance.

LENZ GEERK, Study for Gray Flower, 2018 Acrylic on wool 30 x 40 cm  Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects

LENZ GEERK, Bee, 2018 Acrylic on wool 40 x 60 cm    Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects

LENZ GEERK, Blue Flower, 2018 Acrylic on wool  50 x 40 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects

Although holding some vague echoes from the past, Lenz Geerz figures belong to this present time, and are completely physical. I meet him here. And  I need to keep his painted images as soft as the compressed wool on which they appear. I want to see them through the body of the painted world, many steps before understanding. 

They are all equal in their lack of gaze. Their eyes are closed or they look down, absorbed by the body itself or by it’s action: eyes focused on a gray flower became gray, maybe thinking of a dirty look. Pupils lost among gray pages are opaque, inert like felt. It seems the act of throwing the gaze around, or looking far, is deadly dangerous. The grabbing is questioned: long fingers more like flowers stems than bony limbs, touch  without trying to possess, to appropriate. Yes, reality as we know it has become a disturbing, invasive machinery. The artist isolates his creatures from the ordinary, tired visual language of our time, he lets humor and tenderness take shape apparently without effort, a blue flower on his belly. He is not protesting nor letting go, he calls for intimacy, introversion, and pensiveness. 

These bodies  expose themselves and in so doing they conceal their own secret. Folding, throwing the arms in odd gestures, or magically sitting on the water, birdlike, in a space out of time, they could be boneless figures finally free from  the renaissance myth of the man bringing the whole reality into the measure of his mind, and replicating the fruits of his intellectual power until he can’t control them anymore and starts devouring them, like Chronos with his children.  There is the pressure of reality, but Geerk’s painted images resist, their secret untouched. I don’t want to break it, do not know what the artist had in mind, but I have to the impression to breath a secret pleasure of solitude. 

LENZ GEERK, Pressed Leaf, 2018 Acrylic on wool   60 x 40 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects

 

“They are more than leaves that cover the barren rock

They bud the whitest eye, the pallidest sprout,

New senses, in the engendering of sense,

The desire to be at the end of distances,

The body quickened and the mind in root. 

They bloom as a man loves, as he lives in love.

WALLACE STEVENS, The Poem as Icon

 

LENZ GEERK, Beach Scene, 2018 Acrylic on wool 24 x 30 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects

 

Each painting is filled with interrogative figures, they are human and yet, they seem to miss something. Their state of mind is sucked into their body. A head, her long dark hair and the hands turn into silent, physical language: while she heavily lays her jaw on a table her hair and hands expand, growing bigger as cats know how to do. It’s a humanscape shaped by sleep’s heaviness, an island smothered by a coat of snow. 

LENZ GEERK, Sleeping, 2018 Acrylic on wool   20 x 30 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects

I see myself as one of those figures, a twenty-seven year old woman turning her eyes inside her own body dumped in a large chair surrounded by palms, in the hall of a Parisian student housing. Daydreaming, she was lost in the palms’ movement: hands with more than five fingers, too weak and floppy to grab anything around. In Paris she was completely alone for the first time in her life. She was confused. Suddenly the barricades of books she had physically built in ’68 during the student upheavals, and the imaginary ones she had constructed in her mind, trying to make sense of an incomprehensible decision her parents had taken when she was ten, fell apart all at once.  Dust from the Berlin Wall made her memory even fuzzier. Almost twenty-eight years old! Life doesn’t solidify in the twenties; the only thing one can do is to move on. Her desires had been chopped as well as her hair since she was ten. They both grew again. Not immediately, not fast. I look at her embraced by the chair. I see an immaculate conception taking shape in her mind puzzled by a bundle of feelings. During that daydream, she received a desire of pregnancy she had never had before. I don’t know where such grace came from. From the absence of immediate pressures? From solitudine, perhaps. A few months after, a new life was in her. 

Lenz Geerk is twenty-eight years old. 

LENZ GEERK, The Lovers, 2018 Acrylic on wool   80 x 59.9 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects

Bibliography

WALLACE STEVENS, “The Rock” in  The Collected Poems, p.525,  Vintage Books Edition 1990

Karen Carson RIGID FORMS PULSANT COLORS

What’s sensibility? It is that which exists beyond our beings and yet constantly belongs to us. … Imagination is the sensibility vehicle … We will make fun of our conventional psychological world, to make ourselves free from it.

Yves Klein 1959

THE SECRET DOVE      

Karen Carson’s most recent bas relief paintings, Los Angeles

By Rosanna Albertini

Rou-cou spoke the dove,

Like the sooth lord of sorrow, 

 Of sooth love and sorrow,

Rou-cou spoke the black to the wooden body that bursts open in the center of the painting with a song of yellow and pink.

“ I am more interested in the glamorous visual product that comes out of pain as opposed to the painful, dark, victimized images.” KC

It’s a fact: the splendor of two wings not completely symmetrical overcomes the terror of a body not allowed to move; colors marry the wooden limbs brushing against them like memories of a sunny day. Colors ask angles and lines to preserve a feeling of joy as humans cannot, and box it in so perfectly that time wouldn’t steal it, its hands were lost.

And a hail-bow, hail-bow, 

To this morrow.

Three windows smile and cry. The architectural forms are rudimentary and irregular like each cell of our body making faces at every change of food, temperature, or the daylight sinking into the night. A house for the heart, hidden behind curtains of paper thoughts. A house for closed eyes, pulsing in our veins.  

She lay upon the roof,

A little wet of wing and woe,

And she rou-ed there,

Softly she piped among the suns

And their ordinary glare, 

The forms get sharper and pointed. The rectangular edges of the painting are elbowed aside, and the twin triangles try to grow out of it like skeletons in search of their body. As might be expected, they already are in the artist’s body, but they slip out through the tip of her fingers, and the hair of her brush. “Rou-cou” whispers the center, “Leave me quiet, it’s hard for me to separate one day from the other, not to mention the colors of my feelings. I get darker and darker despite the suns of the flowers, and the sunset pink. Let me withdraw, and disappear.”  

The sun of five, the sun of six,

Their ordinariness,

And the ordinariness of seven,

Which she accepted,

Like a fixed heaven,

Also in the life of painted forms there is a moment of acceptance. Not resignation, or giving up with standing proudly through the waves of light and time and days and nights. It’s ordinary life. Forms accept their need of changing, smoothing their edges, almost trespassing into the body of the next form. The painting becomes a place of encounters: each bar waiting for the meeting with another, close, bar. Stripes rather than bars? No, for they are rigid, making obstruction. The closest bar is an alien presence. Not a mirror, she is opaque. Next to another bar the first who walked in is finally allowed to know how she can be, what to say or not, in their visual conversation. They pull triangular tongues and lick each other. 

Not subject to change . . .

Day’s invisible beginner,

The lord of love and of sooth sorrow,

Lay on the roof

And made much within her.

The story takes shape as it happened since the beginning. The landscape is done, although Adam and Eve didn’t know how to call it, how to name each other. Fire and water and air over the ground were also unnamed. But the biggest surprise was Eve generating strange creatures unable to stand by themselves. Eyes weren’t big enough to contain the infinite surprises of the new world. Painted forms over thousand years became enormous eyes absorbing the measured, the artificial dress of the earth. And the lord of love and of sooth sorrow made within Karen Carson the artist, as he did ever since within so many artists, the most recent miracle: a magnificent construction, for no use nor abuse. It is called art, if someone still remembers what it means. 

Wallace Stevens    SONG OF FIXED ACCORD

Rou-cou spoke the dove,

Like the sooth lord of sorrow,

Of sooth love and sorrow,

And a hail-bow, hail-bow,

To this morrow.

 

She lay upon the roof,

A little wet of wing and woe,

And she rou-ed there,

Softly she piped among the suns

And their ordinary glare,

 

The sun of five, the sun of six,

Their ordinariness,

And the ordinariness of seven,

Which she accepted,

Like a fixed heaven,

 

Not subject to change . . .

Day’s invisible beginner,

The lord of love and of sooth sorrow,

Lay on the roof

And made much within her.

 

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, Vintage Books, New York, 1990

Originally published: Knopf, New York, 1954

In the last paragraph indirect, undeniable reference to The Diaries of Adam and Eve, by Mark Twain.

All the paintings are “Acrylic on bas relief wood” N.I Untitled 5   16x29x1 1/2 inches;  N.II   Untitled 18   18x24x1 1/2 inches;  N.III Untitled 11 18x24x1 1/2 inches;  N.IV Untitled 2  18x24x1 1/2 inches; N.V Untitled 16  18x24x1 1/2 inches;  N.VI Untitled 20   30x24x1 1/2 inches

FRANK MASI : The Remote Life of Images

FRANK MASI : THE REMOTE LIFE OF IMAGES

after his recent journey to Japan

 

 

 Rosanna Albertini to Frank Masi — Los Angeles, December 2018

Dear Frank,

Your photographs of Japan are a dream of unreality. They are beautiful in an odd, almost disquieting way. I look at them and think, maybe Japan is not the point. The man I met many times in the past is a well organized, a practical person in love with the arts, and a very interesting collector of art. But these images that you grabbed and printed: the partial opacity of a window through which you saw the uncertainty of a blurred garden, and the frame of leaves tickling your curiosity; your oblique gaze through another window big this time that seems to protect from intrusion the peace of an inner space; the silent observation of manufactured clay cups waiting to dry – you call them ‘quiet’- these are works of a dreamer. A less mercantile term than the word artist.

Did you ever meet Fernando Pessoa?

 “In dealing with any object, the dreamer should try to feel the clear indifference that that object, taken as an object, inspires. The dreamer should know, with an immediate instinct, how to abstract from each object or event anything in it that is dreamable, leaving for dead in the Exterior World anything in it that is real — this is what the wise man should seek to achieve in himself.”  The Book of Disquiet

Still drying Kutani clay / quiet tools / no wind no fire / waiting

Haiku by Frank Masi

It seems to me that’s exactly what you do, whether the object of your attention is a river, a branch, a stone in a forest or an old wooden house falling apart, or a pair of pink gloves hung behind a glass door of a simple house, a daily routine sanctuary. Don’t mistake me, pulling the door of history shut behind you makes you free from the devils of History, objectivity and documentation.  But then, is Japan as a real country the center of your work? And, does it matter? Problem: the questions come from a limited experience that came to me via Japanese artists and friends in Los Angeles. My gardener Eto is my largest source of information. He was born near Hiroshima. He is reader of old poems whose language is today obsolete, forgotten.  He remembers trucks filled with corpses passing by his village, and stories of his life as an after war child, when he and his school friends worked in the countryside cutting vegetation with machetes. By accident, the head of one of them was cut along with the leaves. See, History is a bitch, a cutting weapon against art. 

Fact is, looking at your photographs I didn’t think of Japan, I mainly tried to unveil your perception while you captured moments that became images and in so doing mutated, moving from the surrounding reality to your instinct that hunted for silent meaning in a dreamed landscape. Photography is a surgical act, images are cut out from the body of reality. And yet it’s an act that guides me to your own sensations. Your images are the two faces of the same human reality: preservation of nature and urban variety of dignity and decay.

Forest shadow moss / mountain child rock / river clouds / sky somewhere

Haiku by Frank Masi

Visually omitted, the human presence is embedded in the scape of the land. And your eyes through the camera seem to rediscover fragments of a remote life in places and objects, a life that escapes time as well as control. Objects and landscapes are more foreign than national identities.  Maybe I felt something similar on a beach in Turkey, such a pristine and isolated site that I almost forgot about civilized life.  There was no sand, only red pebbles with round shapes sculpted by the waves. Not rocks, they were remains of pottery from ships sunk to the bottom of the ocean during ancient storms. I was walking on naked bones. 

“Nature is not mechanical to that extent for all its mornings and evenings, for all its inhabitants of China, or India or Russia, for all its waves, or its leaves, or its hands. Its prodigy is not identity but resemblance and its universe of reproduction is not an assembly line but an incessant creation. Because this is so in nature, it is so in metaphor.”  Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel 

“The true poem [or painting, or photograph] is not the work of the individual artist; it is the universe itself, the one work of art which is forever perfecting itself.” Ernst Cassirer,  An Essay On Man 

I must tell you, your photographs of Japan brought me into a cloud of nostalgia, reopening themes that never leave this blog, like termites attacking an old piece of wood. Nostalgia not for Japan, where I’ve never been, I’m thinking rather of an intellectual paradise with many comfortable chairs and humans sharing, comparing ideas, sometimes fighting to the death around the objects of their efforts, hoping to understand and to enjoy tremendously, face to face, the mysterious disconnection between images and words. How many times do we really feel the power of our voice, a sound which adds time and physicality to the bunch of words that we call ideas? Once more, writing eliminates sounds. Thoughts for eyes, strange as they are.

We are not far from Christmas, maybe the tail of The Kite will turn into a comet, and lift your images in a luminous constellation. 

I wish I had a kimono / and walked with others /wearing kimonos

Haiku by Frank Masi

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, Translated by Alfred Mac Adam, Exact Change, Boston, 1998

Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel, Essays on Reality and Imagination, Vintage Books, New York, 1942-1951

Ernst Cassirer, An Essay On Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture, Yale & New Haven, 1944

 

 

 

E’wao Kagoshima: WHITE AUTUMN and other visual stories

E’ WAO KAGOSHIMA

at THE BOX, Los Angeles, June-August 2018

After his exhibition, the artist started a mail art communication with the gallery and Mara McCarthy. 

E’wao Kagoshima, White Autumn 2016. Acrylic, pastel, ink, and collage on paper, 15″ 1/2 x 18″3/4 (framed dimensions)  Courtesy of the artist and The Box Gallery

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BODY BOX BINDING 

— about E’wao Kagoshima’s world of physical language —

By Rosanna Albertini

Maybe the autumn wants to be white. A flood of summery red brightness fills his memory, he can’t get rid of it. Dryness is drifting across his eyes. The place is real and inscrutable. Shrunk to the bones or happily swimming in water, fish pull my hair and push my brain into an unfamiliar space, as if “rejecting the idea that everything is in its right place; there isn’t any.” (Robert Rauschenberg) A tree grows from a bone and a pink branch from a woman. There is no land or sky, we see an abstract space of transformation. The artist’s duty is to an absolute living, out of time or common sense.

Let’s pretend the alphabet starts with B. Art, area, affection, affliction, adoption, adulthood would disappear from language. Same kind of displacement wrings the world of physical language, E’wao Kagoshima’s pictorial world, out of any expected grammar. Every thing, and each form, have a mind of their own. Humans along with butterflies, toys, birds, plants and words communicate with the living landscape they are in as they like it, as they dream, without rules or restrictions. The same happens to humans, animals, objects or undefined figures.

“Everyone is right. Things become true as soon as someone believes in them. Reality is within us; our mind creates its truths. And the best truth will not be the one sanctioned by reason.”  

André Gide, The White Notebook

Kagoshima’s colors might be the prevailing message, they fade or intensify like the daily mood. The artist has absorbed the natural beauty and sends it back as luminous islands from his brain: sometimes dry, often wet images, can he feel his brain is wet, as neurobiologists have discovered? They didn’t see red fish though, with smiling lips after swallowing dreams of government (John Kennedy), a cat, now part of their aquatic body — red fish looking after a red human baby.  But E’wao did. 

E’Wao Kagoshima, Parallel Case 2012. Pastel, colored pencil, ink, graphite, and collage on paper, 10″ 3/4 x 13″ 3/4 (framed dimensions)  Courtesy of the artist and The Box Gallery  

E’wao Kagoshima, Breathing Skin 2012. Pastel, colored pencil, acrylic, ink, and collage on paper, 10″ 3/4 x 13″ 3/4 (framed dimensions)   Courtesy of the artist and The Box Gallery

It’s a space beyond limits where some artists like to be. John Baldessari taught a plant the alphabet in 1972. He showed the plant the letters with patience, repeating their sound to make sure that the plant’s brain could grasp and memorize. And Nico Muhly composed I drink the air before me in 2010. Sounds and atmosphere of the living environment enter his entire body, not only filtered by the ears. Steve Galloway placed American alligators walking on the clouds in mid-air. Many other artists can probably be added, but these I know well, as well as Haruki Murakami’s books in English translation.  

E’wao Kagoshima, Saving Diaspora 2016. Pastel and colored pencil on paper, 15″ 5/8 x 18″ 3/4 (framed dimensions)  Courtesy of the artist and The Box Gallery

But in the end, I see what I see, missing Japanese language and Japanese life experience. I don’t understand Kagoshima’s images, like a blind woman talks of colors never having seen them. Simply, I love them. There is a stark naked reality in his painting and drawings: a spellbound territory, completely personal, that seems to me distant from either Japan or New York, where E’wao  moved  in 1976. My illusion? Could be. I hoped to learn from Japanese literature, only to realize that many characters and situations of Murakami’s books also belong to the Western tradition; they circulated all around the world in fables and stories for centuries. As I would like to pick out some Japanese evidence in Kagoshima’s images of Saving Diaspora, I could cry like his blue mouse, my mind lost and taken by the transparent lines of a butterfly, almost invisible, which to me is the feminine organ — as my grandmother called it since I was able to understand language. Of course I loved to detect the butterfly in such a claustrophobic room where a face cries blood and memories are petrified on her forehead.

 Storytelling is a universal art, each artwork by Kagoshima is a visual story. A woman slips out from the elephant’s trunk, maybe the cats dancing around her came from the elephant’s nostrils. The elephant seems happy to throw a shower on her and the cats. There is no separation between the three different species.   They bear the same light colors of nakedness and celebrate their closeness.

E’wao Kagoshima, Distortion One 2015. Acrlic on paper and pencils, 24″ x 19″ 1/4 Courtesy of the artist and The Box Gallery

E’wao Kagoshima, Nose and Tails 2018. Acrylic on canvas, 80″ x 60″ 1/2 Courtesy of the artist and The Box Gallery

Breathing Skin opens an incongruous series of dialogues: a fish with a crab, a bird to a fox, a woman to another identical woman, an undefined human creature bubbles water in a tank that could be a head. An exquisite gentleness permeates the drawing, lines are smoothed by water. It could be mist, or a layer of air flattened on paper.

Kagoshima’s life wasn’t easy at times, his art congealed feelings into poetry of distortion, and open-eye dreams. In his personal new world fish are bigger than the Statue of Liberty, and Sleeping Beauty floats in a miraculous clarity in the middle of an intestinal maze. The forest around the castle grows in green spots so powerful they cannot be contained, and spread on the frame. Happy birthday E’wao, it’s so good to meet your dreams. 

E’wao Kagoshima, Sleeping Beauty 2017. Mixed media on canvas, 24″ x 20″ Courtesy of the artist and The Box Gallery

“It’s all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. 

It’s just like Yeats said: in dreams begin responsibilities.

Flip this around and you could say that where there’s no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise.

Just like we see with Eichmann.”         Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore                  

Kagoshima was born in 1945 in Niigata, one of the 4 cities destined to become a target for The Atomic Bomb in Japan. The town was spared in favor of Nagasaki.  We are both children of the war sprouting from the same year, new leaves in a time obscured by lack of imagination. Only one Italian scientist around Enrico Fermi in his laboratory imagined the scientific monster they were pursuing. He was a Neapolitan dreamer. He quit, and disappeared. To write it now, it sounds like a fairy tale. Our little brains born then did not know anything and yet kept growing as if their souls had been wrinkled by the fears and destructions around. To these days, any personal deception is linked to a primeval spot of darkness in human hearts. As an art student, one afternoon with friends E’wao was enchanted by the sunlight going through the beer falling from the pitcher into the glass. He had the idea of two metal sculptures that made him one of the few pop artists in Japan.

At the Box I saw his artwork for the first time during the summer, a one person exhibition. Immediately after, E’wao’s mail art to Mara started, almost weekly, from New York to Los Angeles, sending little by little fragments of his life to a place of trust, of friendly reception, a sort of harbor.  

                                           

 

 

SCULPTURE IS IMPLACABLE : YOU GET WHAT YOU SEE

SCULPTURE IS IMPLACABLE : YOU GET WHAT YOU SEE

Richard Deacon and Sui Jianguo

at L.A. Louver, Venice, CA — September 2018

 

Installation view, photo RA

SUI JIANGUO, Planting Trace – Constellation 1, 2018  cast bronze 19 1/4 x 9 7/8 x 9 7/8 in.
© Sui Jianguo. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

Holding a humming bird inside

by Rosanna Albertini

What you see, at first, is a population of hand made bodies, mostly small size, on pedestals and little tables. Their shapes are unique, any comparison with the natural world is pointless. Only three of them are taller than a normal human. Tables are part of the piece. But it’s not easy to focus on each single piece. A circulation of movement in the air around the sculptures, the light they spread maybe from inside their artificial organs, as if air was their blood, pushes me from one to another and from one to another room without thinking of objects, perhaps following an inaudible music, a four hand concert with a Chinese-European score.  “Open up, bloom, pause. Breath, pause, pause and breath.” 

Indirectly, Richard Deacon suggested this metaphor years ago, describing his play with a vocabulary of forms: “ten different shapes, together they can make a sentence, even a song.” 

RICHARD DEACON, Flat 10, 2014 glazed dark clay
22 1/4 x 27. 1/2 x 22 7/8 in. © Richard Deacon.
Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

RICHARD DEACON, Fold in the Fabric 5, 2018
Sculpture: wood (Holly and Cedar), epoxy
Table: fumed oak and MDF board; Sculpture: 
12 1/4 x 13 3/4 x 11 in. Table: 18 x 21 5/8 x 21 5/8 in.© Richard Deacon. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, 
Venice, CA

RICHARD DEACON, Cuttings 1, 2018
Sculpture: stainless steel;Table: oak and MDF board. Sculpture: 18 x 14 3/4 x 13 1/4 in.
Table: 21 7/8 x 21 5/8 x 21 5/8 in.
© Richard Deacon. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venic

Variations on the same theme in modestly sized pieces fill the space with gentle songs, and with peaks of sculptural actions in two registers: the first one pausing in neatly cut geometrical surfaces, some shiny, some completely rough—the stainless steal’s whistle joins the voice of the wood cracking and protesting—  and this is Deacon’s work; the second register comes from a folding and unfolding of sculpted bodies, like buds who discover the emergence of leaves, or figures of body parts covered with skin language: Sui Jianguo transferring into his pieces the surface of his own hands, a universal language which is uniquely his, not necessarily Chinese, just his own.

SUI JIANGUO,Planting Trace – Meteor Garden 3, 2018
galvanized photosensitive resin 3D printing 7 x 9 7/8 x 4 in.
© Sui Jianguo. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA.

RICHARD DEACON, Size is Everything #2, 2018
Sculpture: wood (Oak), epoxy, pigment, bronze
powder, aluminum powder. Table: fumed oak and MDF board 18 x 21 5/8 x 21 5/8 in.
 Sculpture: 11 1/8 x 12 x 2 in. 
Table: 18 x 21 5/8 x 21 5/8 in.
© Richard Deacon. Courtesy
of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

RICHARD DEACON, Size is Everything #2, 2018
Sculpture: wood (Oak), epoxy, pigment,
bronze powder, aluminum powder
Table: fumed oak and MDF board
Sculpture: 11 1/8 x 12 x 2 in.
Table: 18 x 21 5/8 x 21 5/8 in.
© Richard Deacon. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m told the two artists are friends, no reason to doubt it. I’m wondering whether they connect via visual vocabulary, rather than spoken language. And asking myself what Jianguo’s titles mean, all Planting Trace, with a few qualifications added: matter, constellation. ganoderma. Opposed to Deacon’s titles: Flat, Cuttings in various numbers, New Alphabet, Fold in the Fabric. Deacon tells me that “cutting” is what makes his pieces. He cuts and fabricates and asks the matter to cooperate. Jianguo, this time, squeezes the clay, lets his fingers find the forms. Maybe some of these pieces are from his blind work: the artist refusing to see what his hands are doing. Had he realized how implacable sculpture is.

A glimpse of history pierces my mind making me think that both artists, (and myself for the matter) belong to the after war generation. Deacon’s father was in the RAF, Jianguo lived through communism and cultural revolution in China. The outcome is these artists are workers, builders of their lives, perhaps rediscovering their lives through the art they produced. 

Their art isn’t about aesthetics, it’s about life. Sui plants fragments of his body into our mind: traces, as he says, marks. Which seems to me a real revolutionary move out of the pain or mixed feelings he had about Mao and Maoism and the artificial equality that ideology had forced into people. His little and big sculptures bring up his personal self, the one unmistakably marked by his fingerprints. Although he will never be a Western artist, he has to wear, here and there, fashions that other artist of the past almost codified in the public imagination. Art history is an open book, as landscapes are, even in the small space of a garden. I like to call them gardeners, these two artists, gardeners planting their art.

Alternating in the same big space, their sculptures take me into a familiar sense of enjoyment that fills me every time art pieces I see for the first time greet me, waking up remote impressions, not at all déjà-vues, rather déjà-felt, in front of other sculptures. The problem is, life and manners and perception of real things wrap around the person of the artist, and sink beyond the skin, invisibly, exactly as it happens to the viewers of an art piece. I can’t explain why the twisted and almost screaming gestures of Jiankuo’s big pieces, as if form was unfolding herself free from her material essence, make me think of Camille Claudel’s reckless women, trying to get out from their feminine body, and from a history of humiliation.

SUI JIANGUO,Planting Trace 1, 2014-2016 cast bronze 114 1/8 x 70 7/8 x 67 in.
© Sui Jianguo. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA.

RICHARD DEACON, New Alphabet GHI, 2018  stainless steel and paint
94 x 80 3/4 x 18 1/2 in. © Richard Deacon. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Ve

Showing me the three vertical layers of his Alphabet, light gray and white painted like a wedding dress, Richard Deacon displays his pleasure in finding, trying, combining, working with helpers, solving problems during the fabrication…until the middle layer almost disappears but is there, “like the ham in a sandwich.” He is telling, very simply, that the invisible part is the clue of the piece. Yes, what you see is what you get, but you have to look through the surface, beyond the drawing, to pose your eyes on the sleeping beauty. 

The visual world fills his perception, and stay inert in his memory, until the secret humming bird moves his sharp beak, the tiny scissor, from a recess of his heart. Then Deacon is at work to bring his way of splitting away from the continuous ligaments that keep our bones, our cities, our days and years together, anchored in natural necessity. Cuttings, separation, disclose a different image of the world: by avoiding the natural look of any of his creatures, Deacon fills the art pot with mysterious treasures: a spot of red in the middle of a square piece of wood thick enough to stand, for example. A square hollow centers the back of the same wood. Red color reappears. Beware of the words! What I see is a sensation of something existing, not a sentence. Title is: Size is Everything.

Physical entities whose content “is the significance of its material.” They represent “nothing other than themselves.”  They “suggest and reflect our existence,” They are “thoughts produced by action.” All the quotes from Giuseppe Penone. Deacon’s creatures are cut out from reality to direct our attention toward repetition and reinvention of forms, time doesn’t matter, to renew our attachment to infinite variety.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Giuseppe Penone, Ramificazioni del pensiero-Branches of Thougth, Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, 2014

Mario Merz, Lo spazio e curvo o diritto, Hopeful Monster editore, Firenze, 1990

And this is the link to Douglas Messerli’s beautiful text:  http://artla-bas.blogspot.com/2018/09/a-sculpture-of-small-writ-large-richard.html

RICHARD DEACON, Courtesy L.A. Louver, Venice CA

SUI JIANGUO – Courtesy L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

SIMONE FORTI : how to position yourself in the world, with grace

Free Consultation — Chicago, January 30, 2016

“I’m trying to find the relationship to my dance and the world.” Simone Forti 1989

Stills from Video: Jason Underhill

 

 

From Simone Forti’s notes written in Vermont, in the spring 1989:

David Bradshaw came to visit me a few evenings ago. We were talking about the phenomenon of development and damage to environment. He said, “people are in such a hurry to get symbols of satisfaction.” I don’t remember the exact context, but it made sense. It reminds me of my sense about posturing that goes into having certain political attitudes or ‘positions.’ Making choices out of concern for how you are perceived, being hot stuff, liberal, or patriotic, or what have you.

One thing that strikes me in the winter is the sweetness of warm-blooded beings. I sit surrounded by ice and snow, warm in my clothes like a juicy hot plum, a rare thing, knowing that here and there there is a bird, a rabbit in its hole under the snow, warm, juicy, marvelous.

It keeps coming back to me that certain things I am aware of, the national, global things that strike me, frighten me, break my heart, come to me defined by the news. Not homelessness. I see that. But the rest, it’s like a body of information that comes to me and makes me shout “Don’t you see?” And I do believe that media gives a kind of reflection of the world. The world. Gives me images that seem solid.

Issues are named. In a way they are names. They are constructed of experiences. They come to me as the digestion of many stories. They identify the tide of a problem. But it’s hard to say what you mean with grace. By grace, I mean the way thoughts and perceptions really go. A maze of juxtapositions of sense and nonsense, pulling towards meaning.

What I am learning, I am learning slowly. My previous living gives me no way to name it. Of the things I expect to name, I see only traces. That which I see, I have no names for.

 

When she performs, Simone moves sending out into the air, sometimes, stories and names, or songs, that are told by her entire body. Powerful as well as invisible, the world goes through her mind like the birds’ voice in the morning, or the river flush of the freeway through the city.
I first thought that her own words from 1989 were more than eloquent company for the images of Free Consultation, her performance by the lake in Chicago. But then, because my previous living gave me the pleasure of reading, through words and grammar, the imaginary visions of brilliant, dead people,  I’m challenged even more by living friends. And Simone is not less alive than the the yellow butterfly I see every day dancing among the yellow flowers of a bush in my garden. Her immersion in the world tunes her feelings without turning out the lights of her thinking body.

A few years ago I went with Simone for a walk in Will Rogers Park. I think it was in June. The delicate undulating of the new grass grabbed our attention, but at a certain moment we stopped seeing it. “That which I see, I have no names for.” We were in a corral, no horses around. Yet we were seeing horses running, and listening to their high-pitched neighs. We were just standing still in the middle of a vibrating place, absorbing smells and hints, those dispersed by the wind. That was also what we call world. It’s constant transformation, natural power and beauty often mistaken for entertainment. How she is perceived, nature doesn’t care.

As for Simone, she likes to speak with her dead. Once more, she follows invisible threads of a natural history. Her dead father, now under the surface of the Westwood ground. She tells him, “You were in a military prison, right? Watching how the flies cleaned their front paws and then their back paws.” She says these conversations help her clean her mind. I also talk to my dead people, my Neapolitan blood. Maybe they increase my confusion, the sense of how much I don’t know about them, but they also make me aware that my life is much easier than the one they had. I even have time for writing and publishing, the least productive of all activities. “As long as you are free, says my grandmother Rosa, and she offers to me a handful of pastina.”