art - others

Michael Phelan, untitled works (Four Humps, Mesa Tan; Three Humps, Red; Two Humps, Mesa Tan), 2014
Powder-coated structural steel tubing

Have written about Phelan's work a number of times (for Artforum, Very, Sculpture, and "the blogosphere") and noticed that he was showing last month at Horton Gallery in NYC. I missed it but am liking these images above, from the gallery website. Phelan hews close to the crossover point where minimalist art could be confused for public works or lifestyle accoutrements. Out on the street these "hump" works might be bicycle racks, or '60s playground fixtures. Indoors, they have the reverent display that drives haters of minimal art to distraction. I sincerely wish Phelan the best and hope he will be able to rise above the context of Horton, which I know mainly as a gallery/dealer that shows interesting Texas artists (e,g., Ed Blackburn, Ludwig Schwarz, John Pomara) and drops them after one or two shows. It would almost be better for them not to have NY exhibitions than to be treated that way. Phelan is based in NYC and Marfa, so maybe he'll escape the Horton curse.

From a web page called eclectic obsessions:

Frank Zappa recruited artist Neon Park to create a subversive image based on
a cover story from the September 1956 issue of Man's Life, (a Men's adventure
magazine). After showing Neon a copy of the magazine, Zappa inquired, "This
is it. What can you do that's worse than this?" Neon's answer was to craft a
parody of an advertisement for Schick brand electric razor based on the
"Weasels Ripped My Flesh" theme. The record company released
the album despite its reservations about the album cover.

This is an iconic '60s/'70s LP cover, subversive because it gives a disgusting and disturbing spin to bland and hopeful Eisenhower-era advertising, and because one did not expect to witness self-mutilating "cutting" behavior while shopping the pop music bin. The genius of the image is taking an actual slogan and context from the "repressed" side of the '50s -- a homoerotic painting of a bare-chested man being attacked by wild animals -- weasels no less -- and grafting it onto a safe image of a man shaving with a newfangled device from America's flying car future. A double irony is that the weasels illustration was on the cover of the magazine (albeit back-of-the-rack) while the shaver is barely glanced at commercial fodder from the inside.

One might wonder about the fate of such an image today. In its day, it needed gatekeepers who felt uncomfortable about it but ultimately approved it, and it needed a distribution scheme, in particular, cardboard record sleeves shipped to stores across the country, including discount centers in small towns dependent on the "coasts" for culture. It needed an authoritarian structure to push back against, and it needed to be able to "slip through the gates." Now it might garner a few hundred tumblr notes, depending on who was releasing it, and it might help improve an LP's click-through or download visibility, but without a hot button topic such as racism or sexism it has nothing to rebel against. It's merely disgusting and disturbing (and well-painted).

Knowing that Sara Ludy has been included in Eyebeam's upcoming The New Romantics exhibition, let's take a look at her website. This work is romantic in the sense that Mies Van Der Rohe, Lionel Feininger, Gerhard Richter, and David Cronenberg are romantic, which is to say, it's not romantic at all. If anything, the work turns a clinical and classical eye on clichés of romanticism: open, airy spaces, model communities in the exurbs, travels through psychedelic inner worlds. The persistent vibe is one of authorial distance and analysis: even the found internet junk, such as 3D advertising from the retail and real estate sectors, has a calm, measured feel. This could be construed as "new romantic" only if the term "new" means "anti-" or "not."

A couple of examples. Ludy describes Pan GIFs as "a series of animated gifs displayed as tiled backgrounds. Each gif is composed of two photographs that alternate with a linear transition, creating a repetition which both embraces and attempts to break the mundanity of everyday landscapes and architectures." By means of a simple, sweeping left-to-right pan one photo gradually eclipses a second, different-angle view of the same subject (a forest, a wall with cast shadow, a plant in a planter). While the scan is occurring a clear reading of both images breaks down. Because the GIF is "tiled" the scanning movement repeats across the entire screen, providing a view rather like an insect's compound eye. This causes a single predominant color or texture momentarily to colonize the screen. The lurch into a de-familiarizing zone of pure form is a classical technique, even though the underlying images may be romantic ones of gardens and hillsides. But even the disrupted tropes aren't that romantic: they seem to have been chosen for a vibe of sterile alienation.

Or consider the 2011 video Transom: "a space portrait of Market Station in Leesburg, VA," where "historic buildings were uprooted and relocated to form [a] commercial complex in the 1980s." Instead of the usual tear-downs of historic structures to make way for a new office/retail complex, the Leesburg project rehabbed some old buildings and moved them to the complex, so that "a railroad freight station, a log house, two barns and two gristmills" (per Wikipedia) can now lead a zombie existence as the site of "high-tech and legal offices, retail shops, and restaurants." Ludy's virtual walk-through of the vintage architecture strips out its real-world textures, reducing it to the cold, angled planes of 3D modeling. Like the Pan GIFs, a series of slow wipes prevents our getting any real sense of the physical presence of these "old time" buildings. The drone-y background sounds make this feel like a tour of Chamber of Commerce hell. Visually seductive, severe, cerebral, the work comments on a romantic ideal of a vanishing America rather than embodying it.