November 10, 2007
November 09, 2007
Steven LaRose’s Otherworldliness
The following essay was written for the exhibition catalog for:
Steven LaRose: Portraits or Landscapes from the Uncanny Mist
November 10 - December 22, 2007
Kristi Engle Gallery
5002 York Blvd. Highland Park, CA 90042
Opening Reception: November 10, 2007, 6:00 - 9:00 pm
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Steven LaRose’s Otherworldliness
Well into Kevin Costner’s underrated film Waterworld, there is a moment when the camera views “the Mariner” about three-quarters from the rear and we catch a glimpse of a gill behind his ear. It’s an unexpected, even shocking moment—although it makes sense that a future water-covered earth resulting from melted polar ice caps would require the evolution of gills, it’s jarring because it’s an otherworldly way of being that exists “outside of or not in accordance with nature as we know it— nonnatural, preternatural, transcendental[1].” Because of his gills, the Mariner can dive to the remains of previous civilizations at the ocean’s bottom to retrieve objects or artifacts valued as treasure. Looking at Steven LaRose’s new paintings, I think of the Mariner’s gills, the kind of world he lives in, and his activities.
Context
Over the past year or so I have witnessed the development of LaRose’s current crop of paintings via virtual studio visits. Generally, he reports progress on his blog[2] with images and writing elaborated in discussion with a community of fairly regular visitors, while finished work is captured and sorted in Flickr [3]. Anyone can look, although clearly, seeing paintings on a monitor is no substitute for the actual thing. Still, peering over the artist’s shoulder, even edited and in pix
els, is a privilege few people experienced in the past.
It has been fascinating to follow the ups and downs and back and forth from my ringside seat. Having watched LaRose’s (heroic) struggle with the many paths his work took until he wrangled them into a more focused, though certainly not myopic, direction, I think of how he has entwined several components into a combination that is integrated and strong. Three components in this recent work I want to discuss are subject matter (the otherworldly), material (the properties of colored liquid), and viewer experience (the sublime).
Otherworldly
From the first moment I finally relaxed enough to successfully snorkel I was immediately enthralled and terrified. I knew that I had entered a hostile and indifferent world in which I am a complete foreigner, but that I could carefully visit and observe. For years I have known: I am no Mariner. Floating face down on the surface of the ocean, one sees tremendous beauty, but in colder and deeper waters, particularly, the sights are almost monstrous and vaguely repelling, or compellingly otherworldly.
LaRose’s images ooze a sense of otherworldliness. His images depict some other form of life from an environment foreign to me. The scale is weird and indefinable, and we can’t really know how large something is: near or far, microscopic or gigantic? What kind of space is depicted: shallow or deep? Are two depicted objects supposedly different sizes or instead positioned closer to and further from the plane upon which they’re painted? Despite all of my looking I can’t know with certainty where I am in relation to the images, and, in fact, I don’t even know if I’m in the same world. I’m a visitor.
Numerous ambiguities let me look at these images in several ways. The two shapes in Beautiful Miasma might be ocean life, microbial life, or extraterrestrial life—are they parent and child, or prey and predator? 05-26-07-b is simultaneously a Jurassic Cyclops skull, a setting sun over a megalithic formation, and an egg or eyeball in a bell jar. 05-22-07-c is a snail and a cauliflower, a dendrite and a nebula, and antennae and an explosion. 
Is this nature or fabrication, history or fantasy, science or monstrosity? Although “outside of accordance with nature,” I take some consolation in knowing that it’s all simply paint on a flat surface, but only a little consolation—because everything I see is unnamable and uncertain I am filled with the inner struggle, even anxiety, of approach-avoidance, fascination and revulsion, and a deeply engaged ambivalence. And I like that, in a creepy, familiar sort of way.
Liquid
The story goes that God made a form and blew life into it, resulting in Adam. But that’snot necessarily a useful model for the artist: He made the form that He imagined to receive the life that He had planned for it, whereas the artist struggles to find a form into which he desperately hopes to be able to breathe some life. The former is perfectly conceptualized execution, while the latter is chaotic trial and error. The artist finds ways to realize form and life, though the route may be indirect and unexpected, delayed and unknown.
Many of LaRose’s recent images are made by blowing on the paint though a straw, or with a compressor or hairdryer; by pushing the paint with objects; and by tilting the horizontal support. The thought of blowing paint brings Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin's The Soap Bubble, ca. 1734[4], to mind, but rather than blowing a perfect sphere, LaRose’s blown shapes resemble burst bubbles and splattered liquid. Yet I don't see accident and disorder; but instead composed images of colored liquid deliberately shepherded into complex layers of skittering lines and choreographed shapes like explosive floral fireworks.
Pushing colored liquid around a horizontal surface with a straw is a risky business for an adult attempting to make serious images. It’s related to Surrealist techniques: coulage, frottage, grattage, heatage [5]. It’s also a grade school thing, akin to scratching lines through black ink to uncover the brilliant waxy crayon field below. Is this a way of suppressing expected art skills, or developing new or unexpected skills? For LaRose, whose drawing and painting skills are extremely impressive, to blow paint is to avoid an expected dexterity of the hand, while employing other extremely sensitive parts of the painter’s body—mouth, tongue, throat, lungs—areas that are soft, delicate, vulnerable, hidden.
Sublime
Edmund Burke's idea of the beautiful and the sublime, published in 1757[6], is that the “Beautiful…is what is well-formed and aesthetically pleasing, whereas the Sublime is what has the power to compel and destroy us [7].” In Tracey Bashkoff’s excellent introduction to the catalog On the Sublime[8] she quotes Burke, noting that beauty is “that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it” and the sublime is founded on “whatever is qualified to cause terror.” She notes that in comparing sublimity and beauty, 
Burke concludes that “they are ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure.” Bashkoff says, “Those things in nature that cause terror by their association with potential danger are sources of the sublime. But this danger may be at a distance or even staged, and therefore causes delight rather than pain. These things ‘are capable of producing delight; not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror.’”
Delightful horror: floating on the ocean's surface, staring into the darkness and strange life below; the strangeness of the Mariner's gills, and the mystery of his deep dives and life on the vast ocean; the fascination, revulsion, charm, and uncanniness of LaRose's images. The otherworldly is the sublime.
LaRose’s large painting 100207 contains an ominously roiling, multi-chambered amoeba floating in the sky, tentacles hanging down, billowing clouds around it; I think of the mothership in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, hovering over the staged landing area, blasting its five ominous notes. In 061307B a spotted, cushiony anemone-like shape is buoyantly suspended, reminding me of the foreboding danger in Albert Bierstadt’s Storm in the Mountains[10], ca. 1870, a view of a lush green valley towards mountains over which churns a mass of rain clouds, forming an arched space under which we look into the distance. The weather hangs heavily, in constant motion and perhaps about to clear, but we can’t be certain, so there is caution. This is the sublime: something awesome yet threatening that we should avoid, but which fascinates us despite our strong sense of self-preservation.
Treasure
LaRose’s sense of the otherworldly, his exploitation of the inherent physical qualities of colored liquid, and the notion of the sublime in his art make for an integrated body of work. Despite the variety of images, he is operating under a singularly strong and coherent vision. He conjures a strange world out of paint, the movement of his body, and the swift sureness of his eye. While painted images are unavoidably flat, square, and composed, LaRose’s images are also deep, vast, and difficult to identify, shocking and surprising. He is the Mariner, diving down as far as he can, almost recklessly, to pull out treasures of strange shape and utility that have been submerged in a darkness too difficult to access through the form or language which we habitually use. His is a rich and serious undertaking.
Chris Ashley
Oakland, CA
October 2007
[1] http://www.wordwebonline.com/en/OTHERWORLDLY
[2] http://stevenlarose.blogspot.com/
[3] http://www.flickr.com/photos/larose/
[4] http://www.metmuseum.org/special/chardin/soap.R.htm
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealist_technique
[6] http://tinyurl.com/3yo498
[7] Ibid.
[8] On the sublime: Mark Rothko, Yves Klein, James Turrell. Bashkoff, Tracey. Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. 2001.
[9] Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Steven Spielberg. 1977
[10] http://tinyurl.com/3dwkjq
Images:
Top: Steven LaRose: 05-26-07-b, 2007, ink on panel, dimensions unknown
Middle: Steven LaRose: 052207c, 2007, ink on panel, dimensions unknown
Bottom: Steven LaRose: Beautiful Miasma, 2007, ink on panel, dimensions unknown
November 08, 2007
November 07, 2007
November 06, 2007
SFMoMA: Cornell, Wall, Eliasson
This was originally published at the new group blog just launched a few days ago to cover Bay Area art: Bay Area ArtQuake.
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- The Cornell show is on the third floor, which is normally the photography galleries, and has been that way since the museum opened. I normally walk through the museum like a trained rat, knowing what era or medium will be in which gallery. It was a little disorienting.
- All three shows are in dimly lit or dark galleries. Man, that's hard on my eyes. Here we are having a wonderful streak of beautiful November weather, and I feel like I'm wasting the day at a matinée. But I understand why the lights are low:
- Cornell's materials are vulenerable to exposure;
- Wall's light box photos need the lights dimmed;
- Eliasson fun house installation depends controlled lighting.
- Each of the shows involves a very different kind of looking, a different sense of scale to the body, and a different kind of space:
- Cornell's space is close and intimate-- the head or face is in relation to the object;
- Wall's is the public space of outdoor advertising-- the body in relation to the object;
- Eliasson's is environmental-- the body in the object, and a kind of rubbing together of nature and architecture, which I guess would be something along the lines of landscape architecture or environmental planning.
- They finally changed the paintings hanging in the Clyfford Still gallery! Nothing to do with Cornell, Wall, or Eliasson, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
More thoughts on Joseph Cornell
I thought I knew Cornell's work pretty well, the collages and boxes and films and drawers full of photographs and ephemera, but I was wrong. Of course there is the myth about him as the obsessive naif, and I suppose I bought into that. But this exhibition shows him as an artist with extreme focus and clarity of vision, and the nerve and chops to realize his vision.
While Cornell's focus and vision might initially seem narrow, they were not simple; this work is complex in ways I don't think I can understand. It's mysterious, and layered, and cinematic. I think there is something in much of his images that is about capturing the feeling of singular moments in film- a moment or person of beauty, a certain juxtaposition, a movement, some kind of grandeur, something that happens in one moment in a film and then is gone; sitting in a dark theater watching moving images of projected light is thrilling, but certain moments in this medium can feel magical. I think Cornell was after that magic.
That, and backyard astronomy, which is another kind of camera and cinematic experience. And celebrity worship, another kind of star gazing, And also the theater of the Peeping Tom or voyeur. And something that might look to us like nostalgia, but which was in Cornell's time the objects and images from his childhood, and from the generation just prior to him. These probably aren't original ideas on my part; they're probably in the literature, but Cornell's art definitely works in these many areas, as you can see for yourself.
Think of the Scrovegni Chapel, which is really one big box, and looking up at the ceiling, which is a deep cobalt blue above littered with gold stars, and substitute Lauren Bacall for Mary, and you're drifting towards Cornell.
It is a huge, impressive show, a bit of a landmark. The biggest surprise for me was seeing the skill with with Cornell made things. Components of some of the boxes are quite finely crafted, and there are collages that show genuine sophistication in terms of how color from different pieces are combined, how texture is laid next to another, how line and edge are used. This formal kind of stuff is something I did not expect to be bowled over by. He knew what he was doing.
The low light in the galleries combined with the amount of work can tire the observer, so plan your visit: at first, you might quickly walk through the show; next walk back through and carefully see the first half the show; after that, take a break at a cafe; finally, go see the rest of the show. Take your time-- it's worth it.
More thoughts on Jeff Wall
Lots of big photos, lots of light boxes. Most look staged, though there are a few where you can't quite tell for sure. I'm guess that they're all staged. OK, so it's tableau. It's artificial. No Henry Wessel or Diane Arbus here. We're talking Baroque.
It's great to see the beautiful Northwest, and interesting to see the lower middle classes making it big in 20th century art. Many of the people look a little downtrodden, and often wherever they are posed looks rundown, beat up, neglected. What are the images in these light boxes supposed to be selling? It doesn't look like a healthy product. Maybe they're public service announcements. I can't tell.
Those light box images are kind of grainy looking-- bet they looked fantastic when they started showing up in the 80's. It's a funny thing about, say, Vermeer or Bouguereau or Seurat or whoever you want to name- a painting made two hundred years ago still has the same visual resolution as a painting made today. You know, no one at Sony's research labs is working on making paintings with a better resolution; every painting has 100% resolution, and always will... well, except for The Last Supper. But I think it's a little depressing, you know, the state of photography-- all those light boxes, and they already look like relics stored in a billboard company warehouse.
Wait, am I looking at stills from some mid-80's TV show that I didn't know existed?
Wall wants to make paintings that have the impact of large paintings- impact in terms of size, and impact in terms of subject. He wants to be a history painter, like Jacques-Louis David or Charles Le Brun, but his history is that of the suburbs, the shabbily built and poorly planned, the oppression of being a capitalist worker pawn, the ordinary struggling person, our neighbor, how a fire engine pulls up to a house down the street we walk out on the porch and shyly watch from a distance.
They're spooky, and the size and the medium provide distance. We can look really closely without getting personally involved with anyone. We are witnesses with impunity. Whatever happens has so many witnesses that my testimony isn't needed. Something not so nice is going on, but there will never be any justice. That's the way things there.
We all know by now that photography lies. Knowing that Wall's work is a deliberate fabrication allows us to put that idea aside and to focus on a truth. The truth is that much of life is not glamorous. Most people, even famous people, still put their pants on one leg at a time. We are cruel and judgmental, although our conscience pushes us to overcome that base instinct. Wall's photos give us the opportunity to experience the distance between higher states-- consciousness and conscientiousness-- and more basic ones-- impulse, reaction, habit, and to observe how we move from one to the other. It's more cerebral than emotional, cool than hot. The notion is good; filling, but not that tasty.
More thoughts on Olafur Eliasson
Can anyone tell me why this show is better than anything at the Exploratorium? Sure, this is some family-friendly show. Makes you feel all good because you experience something kind of basic and pure and simple. But basically, it's purely simple backyard science-- fill a wading pool with water and drop rocks into it to watch rings collide and cross, and observe the shimmer of glimmering light on the pool's bottom.
What is the big deal here? Didn't Lucas Samaras already do the mirrored room? Why isn't Larry Bell a God, rather than this latest Golden Boy. How is Eliasson's moss wall a better work than any Richard Long stone or mud installation? Why is this better art than sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon watching a sunset? Why is this better than any waterfall? Why are major art institutions so enamored with this stuff? First Matthew Barney, and now this.
I don't care how many people laid on their backs in the Turbine Hall at the Tate gazing at the fake glowing sun of The Weather Project. This is some lazy stuff. And don't get me started on the BMW with the refrigerated exoskeleton-- you can keep your hi-tech message art.
What is with all of the clamor about this show? Why are people oohing and ah-ing? Geez people, go out on the balcony and walk through Barnet Newman's Zim Zum. Leave the museum, walk across Third Street, and enjoy the fountains at Yerba Buena Gardens.
Or, go back and walk through the Cornell show.
I like the groups of photos well enough, so some points there, but otherwise I can't even say, "Hey, Olafur, nice try." No Clapping Man-- he's napping.
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All images borrowed from sfmoma.org
Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination: Saturday, October 06, 2007 - Sunday, January 06, 2008
Jeff Wall: Saturday, October 27, 2007 - Sunday, January 27, 2008
Take your time: Olafur Eliasson: Saturday, September 08, 2007 - Sunday, February 24, 2008