Review: Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

We eat light, drink it in through our skins. With a little more exposure to light, you feel part of things physically. I like feeling the power of light and space physically because then you can order it materially. Seeing is a very sensuous act–there’s a sweet deliciousness to feeling yourself see something.
—James Turrell

The Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego is currently showing Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface at their two locations. The show is an overview of the mainly California, Light and Space movement. They range from the little known Douglas Wheeler or De Wain Valentine to the art world giants Robert Irwin and James Turrell. The Light and Space movement is often mistaken for Minimalism and indeed on the surface, that appears to be true. However, where Minimalist artists—Donald Judd, Robert Ryman and Ad Reinhardt to name a few, sought to objectify experience through reduction against the subjective psychology of abstract expressionism before it, the Light and Space artists were focused almost exclusively on phenomenology and the nature of perception. The overlap between the two art movements appears in the geometry, reductive presentation and material of Light and Space artists’ work.

It is certainly no accident, that California artists in opposition to their east coast counterparts, developed an acute receptivity to light and material. The prevailing light of California’s climate, whether it the glaze of dream-like sunshine in the south or the foggy, ethereality of the light in the Bay area to the north, light in California is very different from the light of the northeast. The weather is itself reductive and outdoor spaces tend to be more important than indoor spaces. The material sensitivities of Light and Space came from a combination of Hollywood backstage craft and car culture. Robert Irwin has talked about his many hot rods. The American Graffiti (A film by another Californian – George Lucas) obsession with cars led to a hyper-sensitivity to surface, sometimes painting more than 17 coats of paint and lacquer. That same obsession with surface carried over to art with slick spheres of resin or highly polished, chemically treated glass. The California Light and Space artists found materials purely a medium for delivering altered states of perception, not objects unto themselves.

There were two striking components of the show in San Diego. The first was the odd juxtaposition of a show which focused on the phenomenology of light and space in a place where that was ever present. In other words, the exhibition conveyed indoors what was usually experienced outdoors. Secondly, I found the show largely melancholy, which was surprising given the context of the work.

I have seen several of James Turrell’s Skyspaces, or openings that he has carefully shaped in the ceilings of various locations which allow the viewer to confront the photons penetrating our atmosphere throughout the day as a tangible experience. We don’t often think of light (photons) having physicality until we witness a cutting laser, but photons indeed carry mass. This mass in reaction to the physical components of our atmosphere creates a living entity that becomes an object unto itself, as a sculpture or a car would be. Without the grounding of other objects it is difficult to lend scale and in turn, mass to the sky.

"Afrum" by James Turrell at the MCASD

The subtle layers of color variation created by photons hitting various particles in our atmosphere ends up becoming simply blue, or grey. It is the unwitnessed umbrella to our everyday existence, taken for granted and rarely experienced as an entity unto itself. Turrell of course, wants us to return to a more ancient perception of our atmosphere, the sky with mass. Unfortunately, there was no sky space at MCASD, but only Turrell’s artificial light spaces. Experiencing Afrum (White) or Stuck Red and Stuck Blue, reduced his work to a parlor trick. These obvious riff’s on colorfield painting, although beautiful, held much less potency than his Sky Spaces command. Walking into an empty gallery space or a darkened theater-like room to view one of these works somehow nullified the phenomenon. We are so accustomed to artificial light being projected at us now, the pieces ended up looking nostalgic, empty diorama’s of light from some museum of dead physics.

Robert Irwin’s large coated glass piece and cast acrylic column, carried a similar fait accompli to Turrell’s work. Combined with pieces by John McCracken, Helen Pashgian, Craig Kauffman, and De Wain Valentine, who primarily work(ed) in acrylic and resins, felt dated, and quaint. The experience was akin to re-watching Logan’s Run, the 1976 science fiction movie starring Michael York and Jenny Agutter, and realizing the memories of a 13 year old boy cannot sustain the much older, adult man. The sophistication of computer graphics (CGI) today has ruined most films prior to 1990 relying on special effects (the notable exceptions being Blade Runner, Star Wars and of course 2001: A Space Odyssey). The reason for this is Arthur C. Clarke’s third law of prediction, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I went to MCASD with recollections of magic and left seeing dated technology and dated art. The exhibition’s focus is on phenomenon, but one generation’s phenomenology is another’s banality.

The exhibition was not entirely without merit. Irwin’s cut out windows at the La Jolla branch demonstrated a simple yet brilliant shift in our perception of glass that seemed timeless. Arguably, in this age of architecture overrun by glass facades and boxes, e.g., Apple stores, Irwin’s work seemed highly relevant. By removing roughly one square foot of glass from the center and the corner of a gallery space window that overlooked the ocean, perception immediately clouded the idea of surface and space. This object (windows) that we take for granted is actually a physical reality altering our environment. Were you indoors or out? Were you looking through an opening or entering into a different dimension of time/space? My friend Carol who joined me at the La Jolla branch where the cut outs are, immediately questioned whether the holes in the glass were holes at all. It required us walking right up to the hole and putting a hand through it to confirm.

Larry Bell’s cubes also held up surprisingly well. Perhaps it is his extraordinary attention to detail and use of glass as opposed to acrylics that carried them. Bell has been producing these glass cubes for decades now, focusing on the confusion of volume. Donald Judd in his essay Specific Objects (1965) sums up this emergent new form of Light and Space sculpture,

Abstract painting before 1946 and most subsequent painting kept the representational subordination of the whole to its parts. Sculpture still does. In the new work the shape, image, color and surface are single and not partial and scattered. There aren’t any neutral or moderate areas or parts, any connections or transitional areas. The difference between the new work and earlier painting and present sculpture is like that between one of Brunelleschi’s windows in the Badia di Fiesole and the façade of the Palazzo Rucellai, which is only an undeveloped rectangle as a whole and is mainly a collection of highly ordered parts.

On the left, Brunelleschi’s Fiesola façade. On the right, Palazo Rucellai sketch.

Judd aptly recognized early on, what was unique about the Light and Space movement, that is focused on volumes created by light and space as an object. In Brunelleschi’s Fiesola façade, the windows are illusory spaces that borrow from Persian geometry and leverage linear perspective to create dimensional complexity that is not inherent in the physicality of the façade itself, unlike the Palazo Rucellai, which relies on the standard formulaic divided space of windows and columns. Bell’s “ghost boxes” as they’re sometimes called, works off the same principal as Brunelleschi but advances it with 20th century material. The object becomes the volumetric space contained in the cube while simultaneously referencing an even larger dimension reflected and refracted in the glass that forms the cube itself.

At the downtown location, a lone painting (I’m using that term loosely) in a darkened room by Mary Corse called Untitled (Space + Electric Light) left me unsettled and full of delight. The piece is a 4’ x 4’ square of milk plexiglass with neon lighting behind it, but Corse deliberately tampered with the neon, causing the lighting behind this otherwise clean, white illuminated square to flicker and jitter. These disruptions were not the typical fluorescent transformer flickering, but something more potent. The quality of light gave the piece an alien quality. The buzzing and flickering left the viewer wondering if they were viewing something greatly advanced or a technological relic from the past.

An installation by Douglas Wheeler called DW 68 VEN MCASD 11, worked in a way I normally expect when experiencing a Turrell. In fact, when I entered the room I thought it was a Turrell. A wall with recessed neon white light emanating from all four sides at the end of the room made the entire room a light sculpture. Wheeler should be as famous as Turrell and Irwin, but for unknown reasons he has not achieved their prominence. Wheeler’s work uses light as a device for nullifying edge and transgressing the classic rectangle of painting. An obsessive artist with a mathematical precision to his work it must be considered largely off-putting by a generation of critics who support junk-assemblage postmodern punk works. Despite the fastidiousness of Wheeler’s work it was a joyful highlight of the MCASD exhibition.

Surface of a California hot rod (L) compared to "Untitled" by Craig Kauffman 1968 synthetic polymer vacuum-formed plexiglass with acrylic lacquer 23 x 51 x 12in.

The best of California Light and Space art, like all art, transcends time and provides as much of a platform for ethereality today as it did when first shown in the sixties. If some of the works materiality doesn’t hold up after four decades, we realize that our own environment hasn’t either. The utopian promise of the aerospace and industrial design that grew out of 1950s California often looks dated and beleaguered today, just as watching the original Star Wars does. A large number of mainly European artists owe their success today to the artist of the Light and Space movement of the sixties and seventies, Olafur Eliasson the most famous among them. The Pop art world swallowed much of the promises offered by Minimalism and the Space and Light movement, with its easy to digest accessibility. But now that the weight of decades of irony feels more like a desert found at TGIF’s—too sweet, too big and leaving you with a stomach ache after. The return of aerospace dominance, this time with a darker pretense in the form of unmanned drones and video-guided bombs, leaves an opening for revisiting the Light and Space movement. Our sense of phenomenon may have shifted more comfortably into CGI but our need for grounding in the wonders of the present will never leave us. A similar show at David Zwimmer in NYC in 2010 was eloquently summarized by the poet critic Peter Schjeldahl,

In the sixties, puritanical New Yorkers (me included) like to deplore the air of lotus-eating chic that Bell shred with other California minimalists. Today, after what seems an eternity of having been pummeled by the big-ticket swank of stainless-steel bunnies by Jeff Koons and tanked sharks by Damien Hirst, I find Bell’s slickness generously candid…There’s no crime in art’s looking like a luxury. It is a luxury. Meanwhile, the intellectual integrity of the cubes, merging Euclid and reverie, proves rock solid.

Our systems of knowledge are all built upon perception and the ontology of phenomenon. The only limitation to that knowledge is our denial of things greater than ourselves and our unwillingness to embrace the unknown and unknowable. Although at times quaint and dated, the Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface exhibition can still serve as a gentle reminder that wonder can be a gateway to modesty.

Reality Bites

The Bravo TV series, Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, now in its second season, is a ‘reality’ television show acutely focused on the world of art. Why not? Reality television which began with game shows and found its seat of power in “The Real World” began to wain as a genre in the mid aughts and needed fresh blood. Dancing with the Stars, a British born ballroom dancing escapade bore the first real fruit in its adoption in America, a country far more obsessed with celebrity, or at least a country bearing more celebrity offspring. The brilliance or sadism or both of juxtaposing professional ballroom dancers with ‘B’ and sometimes ‘C’ list celebrities (and now offspring of vice presidential wanna-be’s) was an inspiration befitting a Warholian wet dream. That inspired dalliance, has become the pro forma reality TV format. It extends from America’s Next Top Model through Project Runway to American Idol to Top Chef. The central theme being, any amateur with enough gusto and narcissism can become a professional sharing the limelight with the likes of Heidi Klum, Alexandra Beller, Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) or Gordon Ramsey. And now, that conceit tilting against the windmills of Malcolm Gladwell, is fully realized in the ultimate enigma of contemporary culture — fine art. Forgive us Narcissus.

The most prominent member, with the most street cred in the art world on Work of Art, is the Senior Art Critic for New York Magazine, Jerry Saltz. A former art student at the famous School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later an adjunct professor there, he fell away from art making after college. In fact at one point in his history, he was a long haul trucker. Saltz has quoted Charlie Parker’s  “If you don’t play the saxophone for a year, you get a year better.” and added

After two years of not working at all and fretting about it all the time I stopped making art altogether. I haven’t made it since. I miss it. I miss being able to listen to music while writing, working with materials, and the amazing psychic space making art creates. Soon, I became a long distance truck driver; my CB radio name was the Jewish Cowboy. I’d come on and say ‘Shalom, partner.’ While driving trucks I thought about how much I loved art and the art world. I knew I wanted to be part of that world no matter what. I thought writing criticism would be easy, so I decided to become a critic.

In 1998 he took a position as the Senior Art Critic for the Village Voice newspaper in New York, then the dominant force in art taste making in arts capital city. After eight years of writing for the Voice and Art in America, he took the position he still maintains today. He is an ardent fan of irony and Warholian Pop descendants and is a progressive adopter of the Facebook culture, using his profile page as both a dais and community bulletin board. In 2009 ArtReview named him the 73^rd most powerful figure in the art world. Saltz was a clear choice as an anchor for Work of Art because he maintains a very populist vernacular about a culture which is the farthest from populist. He is witty and self-deprecating, which removes the stain of elitism his cohorts, including his wife Robert Smith (Senior Art Critic for the New York Times) are often coated with by mainstream media and middle America. In other words, he was the perfect combination of art world establishment and affable schlub. We don’t much care for informed criticism in this country, but we love our pundits and Saltz is the closest thing to a pundit the New York art scene has.

Being an art critic is to be a critic of the core of societies future. Most of the time it must appear as though one is criticizing the air we breath or the invisible man. If we are to believe the seriousness of Saltz, and Bill Powers having been quoted they hope the show creates a bigger audience for art as a whole, then we should take a critical look at the show. In the book The Crisis of Criticism, the editor, Maurice Berger lays out a beautiful description of what criticism can be in practice;

The strongest criticism today—the kind that offers the greatest hope for the vitality and future of the discipline—is capable of engaging, guiding, directing, and influencing culture, even stimulating new forms of practice and expression. The strongest criticism serves as a dynamic, critical force, rather than a s an act of boosterism. The strongest criticism uses language and rhetoric not merely for descriptive or evaluative purposes but as means of inspiration, provocation, emotional connection, and experimentation.

We are all participants in the absurdity of life, but to play in the art arena/world one must be just a little bit unbalanced. The making of art in a fiercely capitalist society is hard enough, but the effete inner circle of the New York art world, the so-called epicenter of great art, is nearly impossible. The gallery owners, auction houses and art fair doyens of New York live by what Robert Hughes said, “The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.” It is no surprise that when Wall Street takes a dive, so follows the art world. Do those who create wish to be judged by those who wish they could? Is it possible for someone who stopped ‘making’ to have an eye for that which they no longer have the personal will to create themselves? Aren’t we talking about taste-making here and the very Renaissance idea of verity in the form of established beauty within the guidelines of the cultural elite? Isn’t that why in recent years, without shame, Versailles has been the host to solo exhibitions by the Pop Art pugilists Jeff Koons and Haruki Murakami? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the executive producer of the show is the former co-star of Sex in the City, a TV show based largely on gossip and absurd fashion. That the two leading members of the art world who are judges, are fans of Warhol’s legacy is no accident either. To add insult to injury (or irony?), Mr. Powers’ co-owns the Half Gallery with the infamous author James Frey. Yes, that James Frey, the one that hoodwinked Oprah and convinced a ton of people to buy into his false biography of pain-killer-free dental rehab. As icing on this illustrious Pop cake, we have the ‘model’ China Chow and her ridiculous haute couture dresses and perilous high heels (a mimic of Carrie from SITC perhaps?) and the seemingly always mystified Simon de Pury the co-founder of one of the largest art auction houses in the world. Shakespeare said it best, “Like a fair house built on another man’s ground; so that I have lost my edifice by mistaking the place where I erected it.”

I am not making an argument here against criticism or Jerry Saltz’s particular criticism, but rather its waning value to 21^st century popular culture. An accidental conspiracy of the internet and capitalism has promoted amateurism above professionalism. Indeed the current art world itself, may be the most devilish trader in this idea. Saltz, as a cultural critic, has abdicated his responsibility to elevate our understanding of art. Despite the fact a liberal arts education in America is vanishing, we have never been a culture, as Europe is, well versed in the idiosyncrasies of fine art. Our patience is low and our drive is toward capital and superiority at all costs. Art does not fit into that notion very well at all. Publicly supported/sponsored art just makes sense in Europe, where as in the U.S. it requires complicity in a lie. A lie that we are a culture at all and the public will “get it” if we simply set public money aside for it. Whether it’s Serra’s Tilted Arc, Mapplethorpe’s S & M photography or Ofili’s elephant shit Virgin Mother, we as a nation are uncomfortable with conceptual thinking. The only conceptual thinking tolerated is of those who make so much money it obscures criticism. I’m thinking of the late Steve Jobs here. Ask any random American on the street what gestalt means or who Andre Serrano (a guest critic on the show), Damian Hirst or Jeff Koons are and you’ll get an equally quizzical tilt of the head. All of the aforementioned artists would be referred to as ‘blue chip’ in the art world and their work sells for thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in the leading galleries.

Ultimately, my disappointment with Saltz and company in The Making of Art comes down to something said by Howard Beale (Peter Finch) in the masterful 1976 movie, Network;

I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!’ So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’

Why the hell is nobody on this show mad as hell? Two seasons now of artists dancing like monkeys before an ever increasing television audience and not one of them is breaking the rules and getting pissed off at being treated like a captive in a zoo? And Jerry Saltz, like some Stockholm Syndrome victim expurgating sensibility in exchange for sympathy for their captors? In the last couple of weeks I’ve taken the time to query artists on their thoughts about the show and I get one of two solid responses. One camp simply doesn’t give a damn because they dismiss it as the same formulaic crap that is Project Runway or Top Chef. They see it as a dismal attempt to put amateurs lacking social graces and borderline personalities in a room together to ‘perform’ for an audience that knows little or nothing about the creative process they are pretending to compete in. The other camp of artists take the position, not of disappointment in the formulaic show or even Jerry Saltz, but rather the pathetic and regressive behavior of people who call themselves artists and yet follow the rules given them explicitly, i.e. the contestants. When contestant aren’t crying over criticism or whining about how hard things are for them, they’re busy gossiping like teenagers about sex or wistfully dreaming of how they’ll spend the next $20,000 bonus for winning that week’s monkey dance.

A part of me watches the show and thinks Andy Warhol is still alive living in a penthouse in Las Vegas producing Work of Art, as yet another cynical gesture intended to tear the last vestiges of art apart at the seams like the defeated Scot, William Wallace was drawn and quartered. Never before was Woody Allen so prescient when he said, “Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.” And that’s why Work of Art is actually dangerous. As the historian Kenneth Clarke said at the opening of Civilisation, “great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts. The book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless you read the two others. But of the three, the only trustworthy one is the last.” And therein lies the broken promise of the show and the damaging deceit it carries out — that art in America, in the 21^st century is nothing more than a series of clever skits, designed by the cynical and carried out by the greedy. With each successive week of Work of Art, season two, we see the producers throw more and more money at the artists as an incentive to perform as if all that matters is fame and cash, and of course that is the only way to achieve great art. The allure is great as we live in a society ever more divided along lines of economic strata. The rich do indeed get richer—much, much richer and believing in the American myth leaves one either isolated and adrift from society, fighting an uphill battle against a mighty foe—greed, or succumbing to participation in the belief, we as a nation will only endure and remain strong if we place money at the top of our idealistic pyramid. Work of Art: The Next Great Artist portrays the last bastion of hope for a cultural legacy, art, as nothing more than a device like all others, developed and pursued for riches at the expense of anyone else who stands in the way. Work of Art portrays all artists as whores, who think they can cleverly bend the rules, convincing the elite they have produced something truly sustaining and enriching in the hopes of making a fast buck. We no longer glorify our gods, our emperors or science, we only glorify money.

Some of you will say, but who cares about a silly television show only a small demographic of American’s will watch. Why does it matter? To me it matters because it is a symptom of something larger and in this case that symptom is in my own backyard. I suppose if I were a chef or a fashion designer, I would have already written about these appalling shows, but Work of Art deals with my profession—art making. More importantly it matters because we can do better and succumbing to this nonsense makes us all complicit, even if we don’t watch. Saltz has at least 5,000 Facebook friends and he writes a column on art in a populist magazine, New York Magazine, and now he’s on television. In other words, he influences popular culture, much more than he cares to admit. This has a trickle down effect on all of us in the same way that bad design does. Accepting silly gamesmanship and mediocrity as art and playing that back to a larger audience, largely ignorant about art, is negligent and narcissism. As mentioned, Jerry Saltz and Bill Powers have both commented on how they participate in the hopes of making art accessible to a larger audience. I maintain, that a larger audience experiences art, fine art (for lack of a better term), by way of indirect exposure. Just try to imagine how much influence Picasso has had on popular culture in the last one hundred years and the closest thing he ever came to making what you could call “pop” was a series of ceramic plates. He is however, a household name, even among the great uninitiated masses and rightfully so. He foresaw the conceptual dynamics of quantum physics before it was put to mathematical formula and his sense of fragmented, folded space has changed the way we interact with things from iPod’s to clothes. We accept a looser organization of things more easily now because of the huge impact Picasso had on society. Art does not need to be, nor in many cases should it be, more accessible to a larger audience. That is the Pandora’s box Warhol opened when he shifted art away from making to making money.

I was saddened frankly to watch an established artist who calls himself “The Sucklord,” kowtow to the judges and diminish his own creative abilities in the hopes of self promotion and a quick buck. Artists on the show are punished for not working outside of their own oeuvre, and yet, presumably that is how they managed to be selected for the show. This reeks of typical art-school crits, where tenured professors sit in judgement of burgeoning artists and fearful of their own tenuous grasp on the art world, pour vitriol and disdain on another’s creative expression. Work of Art  also reinforces terrible stereotypes:  the art school girl, the art slut, the freak, the redneck self-taught artist, the euro-trash artist and on it goes. Place can be paramount in an artist’s work and throwing an Arkansan into the mix with seasoned kids from New York and LA is simply throwing the proverbial Christian to the lions. In both seasons of Work of Art contestants hailing from rural towns are akin to blacks in horror films—sacrificial lambs. Asking a painter to make something of a gutted Fiat’s parts, proves nothing about that artists’ ability, other than their ability to perform like a trained seal. Art at its core is subversive, dangerous and guileful because it asks questions that most people would rather leave unasked. Its power lies in its truth. Not some ultimate truth, but the truth that we are all better off when we question the status quo and we understand the rational is inextricably connected to the irrational. Work that leaves you bewildered, stunned, shocked and questioning is always the best art. Art that is mystifying and misunderstood in its own time is usually the most important in the long term. As long as the artists on Work of Art continue to play by the rules, the title of the show will remain the ironic joke it is. As Dave Hickey has said; “If there is no art, no culture, then what the fuck are we going to talk about? These are our stories and our stories are all we got!”