Merle Schipper
Merle Schipper
[1]
[2]
[3] 
[4](1) John Baldessari, "Studio", color lithograph
and screenprint, 30 1/4 x 38 1/2", 1988. From "Made
in L.A.: The Prints of Cirrus Editions" at Los Angeles County
Museum of Art.
(2) Marcel Broodthaers, "Un Jardin d'Hiver," installation
at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
(3) Hannah Wilke, "July 26, 1992: #4 from Intra-Venus",
71 1/2 x 47 1/2", chromagenic supergloss print, 1992/93.
Photo: Dennis Cowley.
(4) Guilio Paolini, "Apoteosi d'Omero", installation,
dimensions variable, 1970-71. Photo courtesy the collection of
Annick and Anton Herbert, Ghent, Belgium. From the exhibition
"1965-1975: Reconsidering the Object of Art" at the
Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA).
Two very recent arrivals serve up art history that might well
edify folks that weren't around the art scene a couple of decades
back, and even fill memory gaps for many who were! Besides that,
they offer some stimulating reading and, especially in the case
of the first, some rather exceptional quality in reproductions.
Made In L.A.: The Prints Of Cirrus Editions, published
by Los Angeles County Museum
of Art, is the catalogue raisonné of Cirrus Archive
Editions, documenting the show currently on view. This is a most
handsome volume, sheathed in a jacket of former L.A. artist Vija
Celmins' Sky (1975), with its cirrus cloud overlay. Beautifully
executed, its reflects Cirrus' standards in the printed page as
well as reproduction, and it offers biographical essays on some
60 artists, residing both in and out of the local area. Looking
back over a full 25 years, it is a worthy tribute to Cirrus' pioneering
founder and director, Jean Milant, who is recognized for his welcome
of experiment in both process and material--no matter how unorthodox
or untried Cirrus found a way--and for his support of artists
from the newly emerged to major names. It also acknowledges the
printers who were the artists' collaborators.
Curator Bruce Davis's essay, moreover, is more than a history
of Cirrus Editions. It serves up a history of L.A. art over the
full quarter century, if abridged, from Light and Space, Finish
Fetish and Pop, through Conceptual Art to the neos of the 80s,
and, in fact, right up to the multifarious present. Remarkable
as it might be, Cirrus' achievement alone might well document
this community's growth as an art center.
The Museum of Contemporary Art's
Reconsidering the Object of Art 1965-1975 is not focused
on Los Angeles, although it does cite some of the local figures
who played a role in the Conceptual movement. In surveying the
decade of its rise, it covers the global scene to survey such
phenomena as Robert Smithson's Earthworks, Gordon Matta-Clark's
house-projects, Daniel Buren's stripes, Gilbert and George's performances,
and André Cadere's bars (wooden poles, not what you lean
elbows on). Conceptualism's use of text, perhaps its most wide-spread
representation, if only for its ease for travel and immedicacy
of communication, is represented by a long list, including Victor
Burgin, Hannah Darboven, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, Art and Language
and others.
Lucy Lippard's essay in Reconsidering reads like a breathlessly
delivered personal memoir, but it just might boost some viewers'
grasp of what conceptual art is all about, as well as detailing
its evolution. In addition, Jeff Wall examines the place of photography
for extending conceptual art's domain, while Susan 0. Jenkins,
in the introduction to her chronology of group exhibitions, applauds
the role of Lippard, Seth Siegelaub and others. With illustrations
in black and white, it includes biographical essays on the artists
by co-curators Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer.
Both of the above are pretty hefty tomes, but they can't compete
with the weighty Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology, documenting
the show organized by Washington's National Gallery and New York's
Guggenheim that showed up at MOCA earlier this year. Fear not,
though, there are lots more pictures than words here, and full-page
plates like A sock and fifteen cents (Studies for Store Subjects)
(1962), or Clarinet Bridge (1992), speak eloquently to
convey what Curator Germano Celant calls bodily thingness in his
close-up retrospective view of the artist's career. Reproductions
like these attest to how formidable Oldenburg's objects really
are in their multiple references and implications, sexual and
otherwise.
Much of the writing is by Oldenburg himself, and reproduced as
executed; printed by hand (big) or typed (small), and tends to
be confessional, the artist admitting, for example, having "combined
my unworldly fantasy in a shock wedding to banal aspects of everyday
existence" (1966). Along with Celant's, Claes Oldenburg
and the Feeling of Things, the book includes essays by Mark
Rosenthal and Dieter Koepplin.
Celant's quote of Oldenberg's "finding ourselves in things
and things in ourselves" is fitting too, for French artist
Annette Messager, whose exhibition, organized jointly by MOMA
and LACMA, was mounted here over the summer. Her combining of
found objects, stuffed animals for example, with things made by
her own hand, ranging from prints, drawings and such, to "woman's
work," like knit, embroidered and sewn objects, as well as
writing on the wall by her hand, attest to the unorthodoxy of
her stance whether as artist or feminist, discussed and illuminated
among the many complexities in her work by MOMA curatar Cheryl
Conckelton. LACMA's Carol Eliel views the work in relation to
sources and influences, with biographical information.
Messager's installations often engage body parts, leading to the
subject of the body itself, and a lead-in to Intra-venus,
the final work of Hannah Wilke. The play on words suggested by
the title, standing out starkly in red letters on the cover of
the slim, black-wrapped catalogue, hints at the nature of the
photographic work executed before the artist's death from lympoma
in 1993. Here, accompanying the exhibition at Santa
Monica Museum of Art, art historian Amelia Jones defends Wilke's
earlier use of her body as art, derided by critics as "narcissistic
and exploitational," suggesting in her response that it was
to "interrogate and explore profound issues of the embodied
female body as both artistic subject and object." She also
effectively contends that Wilke's "objectifying" her
body during her illness was a brilliant riposte to her critics.
Another catalogue that examines the place of the body in contemporary
art is Vital Signs from the Municipal
Art Gallery, in which Margaret Lazzari and Noel Korten surveyed
depictions as they range broadly: some beautiful, some not, some
healthy, some ill, offered by a number of artists in the exhibition
it documents. But the catalogue for Uta Barth's show at MOCA makes
a departure. This one shows how magically Barth's camera transforms
the space of walls into a magical light.
Getting back to history, Pacific Dreams: Surrealism and Fantasy
in California Art, 1934-1957, from UCLA/Armand
Hammer Museum, presents some that has been long neglected.
The show brought attention to names like Rose Mandel, Dorr Bothwell,
Will Connell, Gerrie von Pribosic and John Gutmann, among others
somewhat better known, such as the still active Lee Mullican and
Edmund Teske, who contributed to the L.A.'s first truly avant
garde movement. Susan Ehrlich's deeply researched and insightful
essay examines the period in Northern and Southern California,
noting the activity in Los Angeles during the 1930s, when a lively
community focused on avant-garde art, especially the collection
of the Walter Arensbergs; continuing in the 1940s while Man Ray
was resident, along with the ongoing connection between art and
the motion picture world. Additional essays by Terence Pitts on
Surrealist photography and Lucy Fischer on experimental cinema
are accompanied by biographical essays on each of the artists
(including mine on Claire Falkenstein), with illustrations in
both black & white and color.
Very briefly: Jim Shaw's Dreams (1995, Los Angeles, Smart
Art Press) is highly imaginative in both words and pictures, something
to pick up to stimulate some fantasies of your own. If you can
find a copy of Mac McCloud's poems (privately printed) prepare
to receive a big lift! Finally, Molly Barnes' How to Get Hung
(Boston: 1994, Journey Editions) has been around a while, and
by now may have helped out a good many newly emerged artists,
but please, label your slides from the top!
