A Fine Example

Julian Hoeber, The Execution Changes, Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, Ca

2011

Artslant

Comparing the language of the press release to the reality of experiencing Julian Hoeber’s current exhibition “The Execution Changes,” leaves one feeling a little confused. According to the PR, Hoeber is cited for using a fixed set of operations like Sol Lewitt (specifically the late artist’s wall works) to build his compositions and an oppositional use of color and texture to reveal irrationality in a rational system. We shouldn’t focus extensively on press releases, largely written by beleagured gallerists, but the above comparison is pretty problematic as color and texture aren’t enough to break the stern geometric properties and right angles of rationalism. Besides, there is nothing irrational about these paintings, aside from their proposed affiliation to the Conceptual Art of the 60s and 70s.

Although there is a little bit of Lewittian geometry, most will relate the paintings as multiplied and skewed variations on the geometric abstraction of Josef Albers‘ series Homage to the Square as well as with his relationships to the internecine German Bauhaus school (as seen in Hoeber’s Endless Chair, 2010, a greatly designed and rationally assembled modern piece of modular furniture depicting a black to white value scale). It is only fair to say that although the execution changes for Hoeber, which seems to happen often, the real and actual historic forms of its educational origins have not. The Execution Changes, the series that lends the show its title, is also mentioned (via PR) as being part of a larger, open-ended project where Hoeber plans to make 1,000 unique objects in various mediums. While being unique is still in question, these are objects and not wall works; to acknowledge them as something unique even in regards to Lewitt is absurd as they still present themselves as serialized: traditionally and formally intact.

Julian Hoeber, Installation View, 2011, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

If one actually carried out an exhibition of literal textured wall works it’s easy to imagine what that might look like and if we were to argue that what has changed is an object in place of an idea, then we are simply peddling backwards. In the press release Hoeber writes,

“Since my system hasn’t developed a rule for limiting method of execution, it is my responsibility to behave as if I have no rules in this regard. Call it conceptual art made like a craft project, because craft is what conceptual art repressed. And also because it is just plain beautiful.”

Craft is used rather loosely here in relation to an already complicated position attached to the work and there is little to do with craft here unless subversively manifested, located perhaps in the formal craft put into the works. What is suggested is that what has changed or been replaced is the repression of craft by conceptual art. But is the artist speaking of craft projects like yarn and popsicle sticks, the Arts and Crafts movement, or is he speaking of craft as in skill, refinement and aesthetic properties of objects? If “The Execution Changes” is hinting at the craft of an object, which I believe it is, then the works have actually declined in relation to Lewitt’s wall works and Albers’ painterly precision.

—Aaron Wrinkle

(Images: Julian Hoeber, Execution Changes 7 (VS Q1 CJ DC Q2 BCJ DC), 2010, Acrylic on panel, 62.5 x 44.5 inches framed (158.8 x 113 centimeters). Courtesy of Blum & Poe and the artist)

This doesn’t mean they (Hoeber’s) are bad paintings because they are not. His furniture is reminiscent of Lewitt’s sculptural aesthetics; whether machine made or handmade, craft, materials and aesthetics have always been blatantly obvious in so-called Conceptual Art and or Minimalism and I’ve never bought the idea of discarded worth of materiality and object-hood. The statement, “it is just plain beautiful,” speaks more towards the works context than anything with the exhibition reading like a collection:  the upstairs gallery evokes a private viewing room supported by the conservative open face framing of the paintings as if they’ve been presented before, already engulfed by the museum or being prepared to be re-sold and placed accordingly.

I enjoyed the exhibition and commend Hoeber for his ability to do as he pleases, but was turned off by the writing supporting the work as well as the bypassing and non-admittance to direct historic references and more remote influences in closer proximity. Mike Kelley is relevant to Hoeber’s chaptered-like titles and painting approach in the former’s Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction Series, his relearning to paint Hofmann-esque and his Missing Time Paintings; all locations of his original trauma of education.

Julian Hoeber, Execution Changes 8-15, 2010, Acrylic on panel, Eight parts; 24 x 17 inches framed each (61 x 43.2 centimeters)

Regardless of trauma, we are blessed and cursed with our formal understanding and don’t suffer from a permanent educational complex of amnesia. If anything, the contemporary art world needs to forget its education altogether. This said, you might come to further Kelley-esque subversion in Hoeber’s His and Hers, 2011, shaker-like wooden rockers w/ stuffed animals switched out for needle-point pillows and sheets mimicking the forms of their painterly counterparts. If Kelley’s aesthetics were read as abuse then Hoeber’s are necrophilic as the rockers remind us of coffin like beds.

For Kelley and Hoeber these kinds of strategies have proven fruitful but the consequence of such gestures is unforgivable in regards to their influence upon the persuasion of emerging artists fixed to scenes, textbooks and art magazines. For sometime, Los Angeles and abroad has seen endless reinterpretations in the 90s into the early 2000′s of Kelley’s perverted adhoc-isms, Jessica Stockholder’s redundancy of mixing painting and design and more recently a new found glory of ancient modernism, photographic formalism and the aesthetics of conceptual art, if there are such aesthetics of the latter.

Contemporary art and its history have simply become readymades, acting as stand-ins for some pretense. It is this situation that causes an over abundance of similar neo-academic art being made today because it is supported extensively. If the Execution Changes was conceptual art made like a craft project it would look more like Mike Kelley (old or new) than Josef Albers, but to Hoeber’s credit the exhibition ultimately can be viewed as conceptually derived, being that the critique of it’s objects and forms are heavily reliant on the artist’s choice of language or what Lewitt would refer to as the “idea.”

—Aaron Wrinkle

(Image: Julian Hoeber, His and Hers, 2011, Plywood, fabric, needlepoint, foam, Two parts; 25 x 30 x 80 inches each (63.5 x 76.2 x 203.2 centimeters). Courtesy of Blum & Poe and the artist)

Frieze Writer’s Prize Submission 2010

Aaron Wrinkle

Support Group

Organized by Michael Ned Holte

Thomas Solomon Gallery at Cottage Home

Chinatown, Los Angeles, Ca

“It’s all about… Gaylen Gerber!” is painted on stacked billboards outside the gallery, this introduction to the Los Angeles exhibition Support Group, a work of Kathryn Andrews, is a false statement..

You have to navigate the exhibition around Andrews’ Friends and Lovers, an enclosed chain length fence taking up the majority of the gallery. Here guests are forced to approach what they know: conversation with friends or surrounding artworks. Inside this jail of sorts on two identical concrete block walls facing each other are matching cartoonish bear portraits painted by Andrews, yet appropriated from Phil Lumbang, a local street artist. Unfortunately, Lumbang isn’t mentioned anywhere in association to Support Group. This is problematic, but nonetheless sets up a framework for the exhibition and this review as most support groups tend to reveal problems.

Adjacent to Andrews’ oversight is Mateo Tannatt’s Monster Model: Bluescreen Version, a re-contextualization of his Gallery Project Pauline. Acting as a stand up sculpture for exhibiting art, its flat vertical surface is covered in bright blue paint, rock climbing fixures, post pictures generation artworks and jigged cut outs for viewing video art, all credited in the gallery checklist along with others represented by Tannatt in the gallery’s reception room. Connecting all of this was Drawing for Monster Model: Blue Screen Version After Paul Sills, (original director of Chicago’s The Second City) a process drawing indicative of Tannatt’s other use of Cottage Home, the casting operations for a horror film carried out in the office upstairs when the gallery is closed. This mimics Sills’ historic role as a director and the mundane activities to occur in a gallery’s off hours, but also delves into the gallery’s former life as a cinema house replacing film w/ the actors themselves. Tannatt has a grasp on Cottage Home and the content within it, understanding what activities are deemed ok for the public.

Chicago artist Gaylen Gerber’s contribution to Support Group was painting the north, east and west walls of the gallery grey and putting transparent gels on the north part of two part fluorescent units. It should be noted that Tannatt’s works are the only works that exist outside of Gerber’s contribution, existing on the white walls of the gallery and reception room and escaping the altered lights. This is an important distinction in regards to Gerber’s past claims that his work is “institutional and true even if the architecture it goes on isn’t.” Gerber’s grey walls fail to support anything as the white walls of Cottage Home act as the true “institutional” support here even in Gerber’s attachment of paint. Gerber’s contribution is further complicated with his decision to remove his name from the gallery’s title sheet, only to list that: the gallery includes latex paint and transparent light gels. In the past Gerber has always supported others, but here he has taken on the role of the rest of us by, dare i say, giving allowance to an institutional support.

We cannot very well forgive Andrews for her negation of Lumbang or believe her painted words, but we can acknowledge her blatant evocation of the institutional through her fence unit and Tannatt stood proud, chipper and sober delivering his speech of past recreation with friends, while Gerber challenged himself and the group, proving even a veteran-ed spokesman on the institution of art can relapse. Even after stepping out those grey walls were still there though, reminding me that they were part of the institution after all. Tucked away under the gallery stairwell was Ned Holte who had apparently fallen off the wagon. He was smiling though so I knew it must have been a successful meeting.

The following day Mr. Solomon whispered Lumpang’s name in my ear proving once again the institution reigns.

Image Kathryn Andrews, It’s All About Gaylen Gerber, Billboard Painting, Cottage Home, Los Angeles, Ca, 2010

 

 

DAN GRAHAM Press Release 2009

DAN GRAHAM
1842 Glendale Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90026
DanGraham1842@gmail.com
(323)-600-5731
By Appointment Only

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

Dan Finsel and Cary Georges
Dan Graham
October 2 – October 30, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, October 2nd, 8–11 pm
Live Performances by DG (Aaron Wrinkle and Laura Kim)
and The Order (Cary Georges and Davey Shook) at 10 pm

On October 2nd, 2009 a portion of a revamped storefront in Echo Park is being presented as an exhibition space called Dan Graham. Dan Graham, the inaugural exhibition, will include works by Dan Finsel and Cary Georges. This exhibition proposes new ways of re-examining historical presentations of monochrome painting and performance and conceptual sculpture through contemporary presentations of pop-cultural, art historical and conceptual production and analysis.

The mission of this site is to function as an exhibition space, to facilitate research, lectures and critiques. The aim is to create a context that’s conscious of the past, present and future contents and forms of art.

“We should readily ask ourselves if we regularly take the content of a given show for granted? Do we have the tendency to overlook work in it? Or the work that went into its making? Or the making of the work in it? Aaron Wrinkle’s Dan Graham space takes its first steps as a gallery and a “gallery” after many were taken in its making…to ask what constitutes the foundation of a gallery, as architecture designated for a specific use and as a framework to explore in and of itself…Wrinkle’s choices to pursue this project involve generating this very question.” (excerpt from “Dan Graham 1842: A building can only ever come from (a) building” written by Adam Feldmeth)

In his psycho-sexual performance video work, Dan Finsel investigates the structures of digital video production through sampling, editing, gender flip dress-up and strategic presentation. He has managed this through side-stepping digital video production’s common animated use value of green and blue screens by simply using them as background wall paintings in his videos and video installations. This framing puts emphasis on the appropriative narratives FInsel presents so chillingly in his excavations of the pop phenomena television series Beverly Hills 90210 and his oedipus like predicament with the recently deceased and side-stepped celebrity Farrah Fawcett (before her death).  In a recent presentation of his 90210 derived video at the Malibu Art Fair with Parker Jones Gallery, Finsel left the blue and red plaid carpet, which the rest of the fair hosts’ chose to remove from the site, in an office like room of a once-school for troubled youth. He threw a monitor up to present his video and painted blue screen paint in recta-linear form/fashion on a newly built wall. This turned out to be the best case scenario for Finsel’s work as it solidified the potential for content and contextual overlapping to occur. Imagine the room here was once the principal’s office, the monitor displaying evidence of the troubled teen and the wall painting an art history lesson on monochrome painting.

For Dan Graham, Finsel has put away plot and video presentation to give the viewer a more immediate relationship solely with the green screen through the means of material nurture and an acknowledgment of monocrome painting. This choice highlights the essential visual sameness of a green screen and a monochrome while simultaneously allowing both contents to differentiate themselves, proposing an exorcism of modern visual meaning through the tactics and tools of a pop cultural and postmodern toolbox. This all being projected on and in a white wall context.

Cary Georges, an artist /musician, is the perfect candidate to re-represent, validate or give proof to the contemporary worth of conceptual art. For his thesis at CalArts, Georges gave a finger to the normalcy of academic pretension through his manipulation of attributes relative to conceptual, performance and post minimal practice. By exploiting the tropes akin to conceptual art’s performance documentation and forms of post minimalist sculpture in videos of weight lifting and jump roping mixed with a little bit of weed, grafitti and tie dye, Georges reconstituted what good conceptual art can be. This notion was elevated by a video of the artist stacking cinder blocks on a football field, which were then placed in the gallery with  “let’s fuck”, “death awaits you” and a pot leaf scrawled across them to accompany the other performance videos and a tie dyed banner that read “real”. Although, a distinction could be seen here between the difference of making art in an art institution and the more athletic, almost military context of a football field, this conflation of usually proposed oppositional contexts, that being the academic and the athletic along with Georges’ choice of words or “language”, advocates for a much needed focused language-driven and socially rich art form. What is real here is the notion of art-making itself with its representations of the now and then. By manipulating this historicity and challenging typical reads and presentations of conceptual art and minimalist gesture Georges actually ends up supporting and elevating these forms by attaching meaning. This meaning gets back to the commonalities of what actually was and is occurring, which is fucking and dying, not non-meaning or so called non-representational object making.

For Dan Graham, Georges has created a similar manifestation in the form of time based sculpture.  Here he has fabricated a sculpture to grow marijuana. This piece highlights recent progressive thinking in California legislature for the decriminalization of the drug, while at the same time shows Georges’ determination to continually examine and shift the ideas of what is contemporary conceptual sculpture.

-Aaron Wrinkle

This exhibition is accompanied by two essays by Adam Feldmeth.