LA Times REVIEWS “Collaboration Labs”
Comments (0) PST, A to Z: ‘Doin’ It in Public,’ ‘Collaboration Labs’
October 21, 2011 | 12:00 pm
by: Sharon Mizota
Pacific Standard Time will explore the origins of the Los Angeles art world through museum exhibitions throughout Southern California over the next six months. Times art reviewer Sharon Mizota has set the goal of seeing all of them. This is her latest report.
It has become increasing clear, six weeks into Pacific Standard Time, that while Southern California artists and designers made some amazing objects, the intangible things they created were equally, if not more, important. This applies not just to performance art, which is by its nature ephemeral, but to the Eames’ legacy of design education, and the support systems, both creative and financial, that L.A.’s African American artists devised for themselves.
This idea is abundantly apparent in two exhibitions that look at the legacy of feminism and collaborative artistic practices: “Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building” at the Otis College of Art’s Ben Maltz Gallery, and “Collaboration Labs: Southern California Artists and the Artist Space Movement” at the 18th Street Arts Center. The former is a sprawling, near overwhelming presentation of artwork, documentation, posters and other ephemera from The Woman’s Building, the hub of feminist art practice in Los Angeles from 1973 to 1991. The latter presents the work of five artists or pairs of artists whose work was highly collaborative and who were also involved in founding and running art spaces.
To be sure, “Doin’ It in Public” covers some of the same ground as 2007′s “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, but where that show was organized largely around the work of individual artists, “Doin’ It in Public” highlights collaboration, not just in the development and administration of the Woman’s Building — which included galleries, workshops, classrooms, a travel agency, a bookstore and a cafe — but as a creative strategy and a political statement.
The show opens with the origins of the building in the Feminist Art Project developed by Judy Chicago in 1970 at Fresno State College and CalArts and quickly moves into documentation of the Building’s founding in 1973, near MacArthur Park. Drawn mostly from the Woman’s Building archives housed at Otis, there are inspiring photos of women carrying sheets of drywall, erecting scaffolding and driving forklifts; an assortment of diplomas from the Feminist Studio Workshop, conferring a “Mistress of Feminist Art” degree; and posters from the Women’s Graphic Center, including works by Patssi Valdez (of Asco), Betye Saar, Carrie Mae Weems and Alexis Smith.
One poster, advertising a course in graphic design, by Woman’s Building co-founder Sheila Levrant de Brettville embodies open-ended possibility. Next to a gob of ink and a palette knife, it reads: “If this were your broadsheet, what would you say?”
In direct contrast to a male-dominated art world that stressed individual achievement and autonomy, the Woman’s Building represented a radical experiment in collective empowerment. The show culminates, after winding through a curling corridor of display cases, in a more open space showcasing a number of large-scale collaborations. This includes colorful documentation of the performances of Sisters of Survival (S.O.S.), whose members wore brightly colored nuns’ habits and used the look of international semaphore to draw attention to nuclear war and disarmament. (The habits they wore can be seen in “Los Angeles Goes Live” at LACE.)
The members of Mother Art have strung a clothesline with pillowcases embroidered with exhortations that place “women’s work” in a global context: “Scrub out discrimination against immigrants,” “Sweep away privatization of resources.” And a wonderful installation by Waitresses’ founders Jeri Allyn and Anne Gauldin evokes their in situ restaurant performances of the 1980s: As you sit at a ’50s-style diner table, a jukebox plays a selection of playful yet penetrating stories of forgotten figures and social inequities. (You can hear some of them here.) It’s the ultimate sucker punch: How about a little consciousness-raising with your soda pop?
Like “Doin’ It in Public,” the works in “Collaboration Labs” all have a performative aspect. And they were all produced collectively, mostly by women. Video artist John Dorr, who founded a screening room for experimental video called EZTV in 1979, is the only male artist featured, although male performers appear throughout. In photos or videos, we see them improvising in dramatic costumes in Rachel Rosenthal’s “Instant Theatre” pieces from the 1950s, or getting their nude bodies taped to a wall under the supervision of Barbara T. Smith. The video documentation here of Smith’s 1972 performance is a nice complement to the partial re-creation of the piece — the broken strands of tape and the pencil outline of a body — also currently on view at LACE. It’s also interesting to compare it to Asco’s “Instant Mural” (pictured here), which also plays with figurative representation.
Suzanne Lacy’s and Leslie Labowitz-Starus’ large-scale performances/protests about violence against women are also part of “Doin’ It in Public,” and have been documented elsewhere. They are examples par excellence of the unity of aesthetics and political activism.
Yet the biggest surprise in “Collaboration Labs” is how such efforts reflected innovative uses of technology — not for technology’s sake but as a means to build community. Dorr’s EZTV was the first public screening room for video art and became a meeting place for ACT UP and Queer Nation; he also saw the potential for public television access, making plans for an unrealized television channel with the call letters K-GAY, broadcasting from West Hollywood.
Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway were among the first artists to use simultaneous live video and on-the-fly editing. The show includes an incredibly detailed storyboard from their 1977 piece, “A Space with No Geographical Boundaries,” in which they orchestrated live feeds from several different locations and used editing and special effects to enable, for example, two dancers in two different locations to see one another and dance together on screen.
Also on view is a recording of perhaps their best known work, 1980′s “Hole In-Space,” a live satellite video feed between outdoor locations in New York and L.A. in which people on either side could not only see one another but talk in real time — long before there was an app for that.
Otis College of Art and Design, Ben Maltz Gallery, 9045 Lincoln Blvd., (310) 665-6905, through Jan. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays. http://www.otis.edu/public_programs/ben_maltz_gallery
18th Street Arts Center, 1639 18th St., Santa Monica, (310) 453-3711, through Dec. 17. Closed Saturdays and Sundays. www.18thstreet.org
Upper photo: Installation view of The Waitresses’ “American Dining: A Working Women’s Moment,” 1987/2011 in “Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building.” Credit: Chris Warner
Middle photo: Sisters Of Survival and Marguerite Elliot, “Shovel Defense,” 1982. Photograph by Sheila Ruth ©Sisters Of Survival and Marguerite Elliot
Lower photo: Rachel Rosenthal, “Instant Theater,” performance, 1961-62. Photograph courtesy of artist
“Collabs” Makes LA Weekly’s ‘PST Greatest Hits’
October 21, 2011 12:22 pm
by Catherine wagley
A hole ahead of its time
In 1980, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz set up two two-way video screens, one in Century City and one at Lincoln Center in New York. They used satellite technology to connect the two screens, but didn’t publicize the project, now called Hole in Space. They just waited to see who would discover these real-time portals into another city. Over the three days the screens were up, the crowds gathered in front of them got bigger and bigger. People rendezvoused with family members remotely, flirted, proposed. At 18th St. Art Center, you can stand right between the video feeds as 1980s New York talks to 1980s L.A.
LA Times Review on York’s “second life”
August 25, 2011 6:40 pm
The walls of the small project room are lined with sundry photo documentation, a video (which was not working when I visited) and a large diagram of the relationship between artist, history and time. The photos are all digital prints, supposedly reproductions of original material. But the malleability of digital technology — it’s all too easy to make new things look old — throws these claims into doubt. There are no objects that date from the ’70s, raising questions about Chang’s reliability as a historian. If something is written in a wall text, we generally accept it as true. But how do we really know? The disconnect between the show’s claims and its content reveals how history and truth are really matters of trust.
By: Sharon Mizota
18th Street Arts Center, 1639 18th St., Santa Monica, (310) 453-3711, through Aug. 28. Closed Saturdays and Sundays. www.18thstreet.org
Top: York Chang, “No History!,” 2011. Image courtesy of artist.
Middle: York Chang with Fernando Sanchez, “High Performance”: the Corrections Issue, 2011. Image courtesy of artist.
Huffington Post Reviews 18th Street Yarn Bombing
June 29, 2011 1:58 pm
Yarn Bombing Isn’t Just About Knit and Run Anymore
by Jenna Milly
Yarn Bombing. It’s not just about knit and run anymore. Over the past few years, yarn bombing – the art of covering public spaces with yarn and fabric of any kind — has become less of a vandal’s delight and more of a community experience. As seen in Santa Monica, California, recently when dozens of fabric artists came together to “bomb” the 18th Street Arts Center. Co-organized by Arzu Arda Kosar and Heather Hoggan, the group aims to bring people together in peace, love and creativity. The event included yarn art by over 65 artists, including screenwriter Guinevere Turner, a.k.a. “Captain Hook” in the yarn bombing community. Turnstyle News sat down with Arzu Arda Kosar to hear about how she took the concept of the knitting circle to a whole new stratosphere.
Turnstyle News: How did you come up with the idea for this yarn bombing event?
Arzu Arda Kosar: It started out as something we envisioned, as being really small, and it really grew much larger. From the very get-go, our interest was inviting artists and non-artists, alike. Trying to make this open to more people who might be involved in knitting and streets art or any form of creative concern. We hoped we could put a lot of people together to see what we would get, to mesh high arts and low arts. We have over 65 artists participating.
Turnstyle News: What kind of artists will you be showcasing?
Arzu Arda Kosar: I couldn’t be any more impressed with the crowd that has responded. We have people who are career artists and people who are accountants. For example, there is an older lady who was knitting because that was her way of relaxing, but then her problem was she didn’t have any purpose for all this production. She was making all these cozies and things that nobody wanted. But then when she saw this event on Facebook, of all places, she said, “I now know what to do with my knitting.” I think her goal was to make 100 hummingbirds.
Turnstyle News: Yarn bombers usually knit and run, but here you’re displaying the art alongside the artists. Was this on purpose?
Arzu Arda Kosar: We really wanted people to come and hang out together. We were hoping for some sort of synergy that would help people get to know each other or help them learn new techniques or find like-minded others that they could connect and network with. We also hoped people would bounce around ideas and create new projects. In fact, it has already happened. Several of us participated in an empathy circle for the Japanese disaster. We made a 12-foot knit red circle. We wanted to so something for the community.
Turnstyle News: What feedback have you gotten from those involved?
Arzu Arda Kosar: A lot of the people have told me that they are so happy to be involved because they have so much creativity that they didn’t know what to do with and now they can focus it on something. Some of them also felt like that all work that they’d been doing all these years, that was almost unwanted production, became meaningful and wanted. They felt a sense of accomplishment.
Turnstyle News: What do you think about yarn bombing as a form of vandalism?
Arzu Arda Kosar: Yarn bombing can be considered a form of vandalism as in the case that you’re not really asking for permission. People who are involved in yarn bombing, who aren’t participating in a festival atmosphere like this, a lot of times, their motivation is they want to add color to an environment. Or, especially in Europe, yarn bombers are interested in making some kind of political statement. For example, if they add a soft cozie to a rifle of a statue that’s in the park. But again, that is their idea of making that environment better. It may not be somebody else’s idea of making that environment better. But ultimately, the idea of doing this through knitting, or crocheting or yarn, is the idea that you can remove it without actually damaging the original structure that you’re attaching it to, unlike paint. You can easily remove these items with scissors. And half the time, it will degrade anyways, because yarn isn’t meant to be out on the street forever.
Turnstyle News: What attracted you to this form of art?
Arzu Arda Kosar: It’s very very different than the street art we’re used to, which is typically young, male, underground, dangerous, back streets of New York type of thing… Street art doesn’t necessarily have to be like that. I actually came upon street art when I was working with a group of youths. I was trying to identify youth groups by following their street art, geographically and psychologically. I wanted to communicate with them. It was difficult. I couldn’t just go up to them as this 40-year-old woman and start talking. So, I started trying to get them to react to me by putting up stickers and different forms of street art. They noticed and started to ask, “Who is this new person putting up street art?” “Does she have street cred?” “Is she for real?” I was doing stickers at the time, not yarn. But it was my way of trying to get through to a group of people who I would otherwise not be able to create a dialog with. It was a two-year project. I realized that I don’t have to look tough and dangerous. I don’t have to adhere to a male sensibility when creating my art.
Turnstyle News: Do you think it’s important for more people to experiment with yarn bombing?
Arzu Arda Kosar: I’m very much pro public art. I’m very much pro supporting anyone who something to say or who wants to put out creative art into the environment. You don’t have to be a professional artist. You don’t have to have gone to art school. But if you have done all of those things, like if you’re a gallery artist and you’ve done that, that’s fine, too. I’m very much interested in seeing the lines between high arts and low arts blur. This is one great opportunity for this to happen and for it to happen in public realm.
Click HERE for link to article
SEE MORE YARN BOMBING PHOTOS >>
LA Weekly Review on Andrew Rogers: Time and Space
May 13, 2011 4:30 pm
Andrew Rogers, Land Artist: Now Playing on a Continent Near You
by: Shana Nys Dambrot
Australian artist Andrew Rogers has spent the last 13 years bouncing between 13 countries on all seven continents, working with over 6,700 people in all, creating sculptures in deserts, glaciers, gorges, city centers, national parks and mountain ranges — including one just a short drive away in Yucca Valley.
Rogers’ works are hyper-local, constructed of earth and rocks culled from indigenous geological materials, following the character of each location’s landscape, with imagery based on the folklore of the region. Though they’re designed in Rogers’ distinct style fusing clean construction, muscular but simple lines, crisp, confident handling of stone and a knack for envisioning what it will look like from the air, they are physically built by hundreds upon hundreds of local laborers. Big-budget and high-profile productions, their economic effects on the locales are almost as long-lasting as the stone used to make the artworks.
Andrew Rogers: Time and Space, which opened at the 18th Street Arts Complex on Saturday night, is a selection of 68 aerial and satellite photographs of this ground-breaking, pun intended, outdoor art project, comprising 47 of his “geoglyphs” and being shown together in L.A. for the first time.
At an affable and very civilized dinner following the opening reception, I had the honor of being seated next to the artist. Since he started 13 years ago, he told me, he’s been getting more and more invitations from countries eager to participate, and he next travels to work on new pieces in Namibia and Argentina.
Whether that’s due to the presence of enlightened art lovers in the civic agencies of the world’s most remote regions, or to the economic impact the arrival of a Rogers project has on the local populations who are always hired to help build the works — each one directly employs at least 1,000 people and at better than average wages, $5 rather than the customary $2 or less — is hard to say, but the result is the same: these things keep getting made. And he’s eager to point out that “people have tended to become invested in what they’ve helped create, adopting the projects and by and large choosing to protect and preserve them.”
He fuses a basic belief in the universal accessibility of Western-style modernism with ambitious ideas about the “essential interconnectedness of peoples to each other, and of humanity to the earth” into a hybrid vision that’s halfway too New-Age for some critics. But with a relative disregard for the cynical conventions of urbane art-world types that goes well with his Aussie accent, he’s fashioned this ambitious notion into an example of global thinking meeting local circumstance.
California and the American Southwest in general has an historical affinity for this genre; one need only think of Christo and his valleys full of yellow umbrellas; earthwork pioneer Robert Smithson and the legend of the Spiral Jetty; theoretician and conceptual architect Michael Heizer; and James Turrell with his big dig at the Roden Crater, although Rogers feels that Turrell isn’t rightly a land-artist, since “he hasn’t even finished the one piece yet!”
Heizer’s “City” isn’t fully completed either, but regardless, like them, Rogers is motivated by “the challenge to use [the raw materials of the planet] in a new and different way, and make them convey meaning in a way no one’s ever seen.”
His recently-finished work in Turkey is now the world’s largest contemporary land art park, giving beloved and world-famous U.S. sites like Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, de Maria’s Lighting Fields, and upstate New York sculpture park Storm King a run for the title. It includes 12 massive stone structures, most built by hand, the lines of which are about 4 miles long and took over 10,500 tons of stone to erect.
On a side note, the monumental Turkey installation made it all the more salient that the other gallery at the 18th Street complex currently features the brilliant and vivacious Los Angeles-Istanbul Connection show, bringing together work by five Turkish and five LA artists in painting, sculpture, photography, video and installation. With this happy coincidence, together with the curators’ presence in the eclectic, international makeup of the dinner crowd, Rogers must have felt right at home in yet another foreign land
Click link for LA Weekly’s actual review: http://blogs.laweekly.com/stylecouncil/2011/05/andrew_rogers_land_art.php
