At the land art survey at the Geffen it was fun to re-encounter Michelle Stewart’s giant 1973 graphite drawing “Kingston,” which I remember seeing at the Art Institute of Chicago shortly after it was made. Fun, and full of memories, but I can’t say it’s a deeply compelling work of art.
Which was my response to the bulk of the show. It was another of MOCA's revisionist global histories, exactly like their earlier surveys of body art and conceptual art: room after room of photos, drawings, instructions and videos from hitherto uncelebrated artists in Israel, England, South America, Eastern Europe, …. Obviously there was an attempt to be polemical and ignore canonical names like Michael Heizer or Walter de Maria, but for that to work they needed to find some work as interesting as theirs. The international survey was informative, but unfortunately none of the stuff they rescued from oblivion was very compelling art.
This was a disaster, because even the best things in the show lacked visual appeal. The nature of the work meant that most of what was exhibited was documentation about work rather than the work itself. The moment when you could generate a transgressive frisson by exhibiting notebook pages, crude snapshots and typed pages has passed. Instead of a fresh new world of possibilities, it now seems to express futility and deadness. A display of receipts from an imperfectly-remembered party.
There were a few exceptions. The main one was Alighiero Boetti’s 1971 Dodici forme dal 10 giugno 1967, 12 engraved copper plates. Each plate reproduced a map of Israel from the front page of a newspaper, minus all the text except for the date. This was the moment of the Six Day War, and so all the maps were different. The wall of shining copper plates was a delight. The content was at once concretely visual and intellectually demanding. It provided the mix of austerity and sensuality that conceptual art is supposed to deliver, but almost never does. Was this piece in the 2002 Zero to Infinity show? I feel like I’ve seen it before.
Other than that, the best thing in the exhibit were the movies. I'm astonished to be writing these words, but there you are. Film & video seemed more relevant than those foxed scraps of paper. Certainly more engaging.
The exhibit started brilliantly with a presentation of the Eames’s 1968 Powers of Ten. It established all the important tropes: space, geometry, nature, cartography, fantasy, discovery, a dispassionate tone, clear methodical procedures, acceptance of whatever the procedure generates (or the appearance of accepting it), ….
Robert Smithson’s 35-minute 1970 film, Spiral Jetty might be the best thing he ever did. It gave him an opportunity to make explicit all the links with cosmology, paleography, science fiction, construction. He threw in his personal business, his grand vision, his issues, his hang-ups. And he even has sly self-critical moments where he makes a joke of the act of representing his sculpture. It’s the greatest student project presentation of all time. None of his other works have anything like the depth and scope of this.
There was also a room with Michael Snow’s La région centrale (1971). It was mesmerizing, and I sat through a lot of it. A mechanized camera surveys a grim mountain top in North Quebec, left to right, up and down, slashing sideways, spinning around. The soundtrack, which I didn’t realize existed, was rather sweet. Yes, it’s unbearable (3 hours!) but it’s not unwatchable. It completely messes with your perceptions. Large sections blur into unintelligible forms and colors. And I admit after a while I became fixated on the hairs that popped up in the lower left and right corners. When the camera is swinging around like mad, they’re about the only thing in focus, so they’re hard to ignore.
Since MOCA went to the trouble to create little theaters for screening the Smithson and Snow movies, did they really have to use DVD versions? Was is really so impossible to screen 16mm prints? Especially since they took the trouble to create a projector for Mary Kelly’s worthless coal installation.
In a totally different key, there was also CBS’s 1962 documentation of Jean Tinguely’s End of the World, II project in the desert. Hilarious and touching. The cart of dynamite creeps toward the shopping cart full of footballs, but fails to explode.
Instead of a museum exhibit, Ends of the Earth should have been a film series.
[A bad repro of the Boetti piece]
[Detail of Meleko Mokgosi, Pax Kaffraria: Sikhuselo Sembumbulu, 2012]
It’s telling how irrelevant all that work was to the talented kids in Made In L.A. across town at the Hammer. Fifty years on, this energetic proliferation of alterative art practices has led to … more paintings, sculptures and drawings. Contrary to the best efforts of very talented people, art not only did not become free activity accessible to all, but has become a even more of a commercialized luxury commodity industry than ever before. Perhaps it is question of no longer beating your head against a wall. I enjoyed Made in L.A. more than I thought I would. I particularly liked:
- David Snyder’s video installation featuring fake music videos, a police helicopter poised mid-screen, a campy vampire hand fumbles for the crosswalk button in Hollywood, plus a dozen other nutty things. It was cacophonous and alive.
- Karthik Pandian’s slide projector installation that evoked Grove Press editions of Jean Genet, brainy articles on alternative theater in the Sixties.
- Meleko Mokgosi’s magnificently painted epic of African grandees.
- Vishal Jugdeo’s eerie HD video installation centered in a haunted apartment in Mumbai.
- Roy Dowell had a menagerie of funky, funny abstract sculptures that were like exceptionally cheerful kindergarten projects.
- Liz Glynn’s beautifully crafted recycled wood interventions. One was rough wood on one side, and new-fronted drawers on the other.
- There was a hilarious Television commercial for communism by The Propeller Group.
[Untitled sculpture by Roy Dowell, 2008]
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