Jesi Khadivi

What is Out There Waiting

2011-05-06T03:16:00.001-07:00

originally published in Border Crossings issue 116

What is Out There Waiting: 6th Berlin Biennale
Curated by Kathrin Rhomberg

Not quite a statement, nor explicitly a question, the theme chosen to frame the 6th Berlin Biennale is at once ominous and open-ended, conjuring visions of the underrepresented, the oppressed, or the ignored lurking in the distance, waiting to be uncovered. Despite the temporal and spatial dislocations the exhibition’s title implies, curator Kathrin Rhomberg claims that young artists are thinking less and less about the future, choosing instead to reinvestigate 20th century concerns. Her biennale seeks to addresses this “new historicism” by presenting works that direct their gaze away from the formal and self-referential concerns of contemporary art and “outward, at reality.” As Rhomberg told Artforum’s Anthony Byt, “it became urgent again for me to ask: Is there a relationship between art and the present moment, and if so, what does it look like?”

A challenging question, to say the least, and one that cannot easily be answered, even within the parameters of a mega-show like a biennale, the very structure of which is poised to respond to contemporary issues. According to Rhomberg, what defines our current moment, or at least the things she would like to direct our attention toward, are art practices that engage with social, economic, and political “realities.” Wisely framing reality in the plural, Rhomberg is also concerned with the attendant gaps or cracks in reality, the distance between how things seem and how they are. Implicit in this question is how the invisible becomes visible, and how anything, whether an individual, collectivity, idea, or act constitutes its own visibility. Indeed, the production of reality is one of the strongest themes to come out of Rhomberg’s thoughtful, though at times maddening biennale.

In her attempt to take on such a slippery idea, Rhomberg strikes a modest tone, limiting the exhibition to forty-five artists and moving the bulk of the biennale’s six exhibition venues away from the bustle and noveau-glitz of Berlin’s Mitte to Kreuzberg. An air of seriousness pervades What is Out There Waiting, which eschews the spectacular site-specific works often commissioned for biennales in favor of more subdued, if not ramshackle installations and a curatorial tempo that tries to be deliberate, but instead often comes off as stilted and heavy handed. The work itself is predictably austere. After dutifully marching through the exhibitions six venues, some hidden on side streets and in unlikely locations, viewers may find themselves wondering, “is this what reality looks like?” The exhibition halls at Kunst-Werke, the biennale’s flagship institution feel practically empty, while visitors to the exhibition’s largest venue, a crumbling former department store on Kreuzberg’s Oranienplatz, are subjected to documentary video after documentary with little space to absorb the information contained therein.

An unfortunate by-product of this approach is that the works seem to seldom speak to each other. Indeed, the strongest relationships that emerge between works are often the most literal, like Renzo Marten’s Episode Three and Mark Boulos’ All That is Solid Melts into Air, though thankfully this does not diminish the seriousness or impact of either. Boulos’ two channel video juxtaposes the frenetic trading floor of the Chicago futures market with the artist’s interviews with resistance fighters in the Nigerian River Delta, where the local ecosystem has been decimated in the interest of foreign oil companies. Between outlining how “no bullet, no knife, no dagger can cut him” and telling the artist never to come to see him again, an elderly Nigerian man sternly commands Boulos, “make them remember us,” a not so subtle reminder of both the complexity and responsibility inherent in image making. This thread continues in Episode Three, Renzo Marten’s controversial 90 minute video which suggests that poverty, like any other resource, it is something that is bought, sold, traded, and exploited. Under the guise of a self-obsessed gonzo artist cum journalist, Marten’s stages a number of community meetings and trains local wedding photographers to document their own misery for profit. The Congolese may be poor, Martens reminds them, but they at least have their poverty itself, which they are giving away for free. To this end, Marten’s introduces a blinking neon sign reading "ENJOY POVERTY" half way through the film as both a directive to the Congolese, as well as a not-so-subtle indictment of Western consumption of "third world" poverty.

While political engagement is one of the leitmotifs of the exhibition, also expressed in the protest videos of Minerva Cuevas (Mexico) and Bernard Bazile (France), politics and history are at their richest and most expressive in works that are less explicit. After navigating the prescribed entrance to the exhibition through Kunst-Werke’s basement, visitors are greeted by a few live hens and a large wooden structure created by the biennale’s youngest artist, the twenty-four year old Kosovo born Petrit Halilaj. Entitled The places I’m looking for, my dear, are utopian places, they are boring and I don’t know how to make them real, the work is created from reconstructed beams from his parents’ home. A minimal and poetic construction, the work is an evocative blend of the personal and political, and one of the exhibition’s few doses of charm and humor.

Three to Watch

2011-05-06T02:53:00.001-07:00

Originally published in SOMA's travel issue

The only constant about the artistic landscape in Berlin is that nothing stays the same. Sure, there are common practices in the city: a rich culture of artist-run project spaces, hybrid/mixed-used venues and an unusually high concentration of artists who regularly DJ. However, mostly due to the financial precarity of earning a living here, it’s a city on the move. A large percentage of artists and cultural workers “based” in Berlin keep their studios and offices here while largely earning their income outside of the city.

In recent years, Berlin has become an international crossroads of sorts.

Although the financial incentives to work here are limited the city still possesses a magnetic draw for young creatives, hosting a large, semi-migrant community of young international artists who come here post-MFA in search of an affordable and relatively peaceful place to develop their practice.

Not everyone stays, but the influx and efflux of creative energy combined with the capital’s cultural legacy and strong base of institutions, exhibition spaces and adventurous cultural producers has made Berlin a dynamic hub for contemporary art. SOMA is pleased to introduce three emerging artists whose influence is felt both in Berlin and beyond.

Ariel Schlesigner, Untitled, (Bicycle Piece), 2008

Ariel Schlesinger | Oxford’s English Dictionary defines reverse engineering as “the reproduction of another manufacturer’s product after detailed examination of its construction or composition.” The Israeli, Berlin-based artist Ariel Schlesinger repurposes mass-produced objects to startling and poetic effect. Working with everyday materials like bikes, printer paper, rolls of masking tape and tea biscuits, Schlesinger’s subtle interventions create a mundane sort of magic: two cookies twist in a gentle embrace, a repurposed lighter is transformed into a gaslamp and a paper cup is torn to reveal liquid still contained inside. After two solo exhibitions with the Berlin and Ljubljana-based gallery Gregor Podnar, the artist has been included in a string of solo and group exhibitions throughout Europe. His auto-destructive Untitled (Bubble Machine) is included in the upcoming exhibition Under Destruction at the Swiss Institute in New York City in late June, the artist’s third exhibition in the United States.

Petrit Halilaj, The places I’m looking for my dear are utopian places, they are boring and I don’t know how to make them real, 2010

Petrit Halilaj | At the 6th Berlin Biennale, the work of the 25-year-old Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj’s installation stood out for its subtlety and scale in an exhibition full of heavy hitting political art. A number of rooms at Kunst-Werke were dedicated to the young artist’s work, including his massive installation The places I’m looking for, my dear, are utopian places, they are boring and I don’t know how to make them real, which greeted visitors in the museum’s entry hall. Made from reconstructed beams, the wryly-romantic work was an outsize replica of his parents’ new home, its half-finished quality simultaneously evoking the ruins of their prior home, which was burned to the ground in the Kosovo War. Halilaj’s participation in the Berlin Biennale made critical ripples: Centre Pompidou curator Christine Macel selected him as her pick for Artforum’s Best of 2010 and The Places I’m Looking for… featured prominently in the lion’s share of critical responses to the Berlin Biennale, quite an accomplishment for the exhibition’s youngest artist. Halilaj will present with Chert Gallery at Art Basel’s Art Statements, a section for solo presentations by emerging artists, and will open a solo exhibition at the Kunstraum Innsbruck in September.

Painting competition hosted by Leila Pazooki and Galerie Christian Hosp in Dafen, China

Leila Pazooki| Imagine Manet’s Olympia, her gaze direct as ever. Only this Olympia has none of the original’s brazen directness or nudity, instead she is clothed in what looks like a strange black jumpsuit. Leila Pazooki’s Aesthetics of Censorship, an ongoing research project that documents the censorship of art textbooks in her native Iran is only one facet of a multi-disciplinary practice that explores the elision and transformation of cultural, aesthetic and geographic borders. Pazooki’s neon work Moments of Glory struck a chord with critics at the recent art Dubai, spelling out a catalog of clichés familiar to non-Western artists and curators like “the Iranian Jeff Koons” and “Japan’s Andy Warhol.” The artist’s most recent project, Fair Trade, explores the relationship between artistic production and its reception in a globalized art world. Currently on view at Galerie Christian Hosp in Berlin, the exhibition presents the results of a painting contest the artist held in Dafen, a Chinese village home to factories where local artisans churn out copies of art historical masterpieces for hire.

Alongside a recreation of the London National Gallery’s room 17a, Fair Trade includes 100 copies of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s 1537 painting, “Allegory Of Justice,” ranging from meticulous replicas to childlike renderings. Look closely and on some you’ll see impressions from bubble wrap on still-wet paint.

Based in Berlin

2011-05-06T02:47:00.000-07:00

Based in Berlin
originally published in SOMA's travel issue

With hundreds of exhibition spaces and over 6,000 professional artists, Berlin has grown into one of the most attractive destinations for artists and art lovers in the world. It is no surprise, then, that the city is funding a large-scale temporary exhibition to demonstrate the “treasures the city has to offer.” What’s debatable is whether this show is actually a move towards the kunsthalle locals have been demanding or merely an attempt to sweeten Berlin’s public image at the expense of its cultural producers. At this point, it remains to be seen. But the debate is fierce.

Opening on June 8th, based in Berlin will feature works by 80 artists living and working in the German capital, and is organized by a team of five up-and-coming curators overseen by curatorial hotshots Klaus Biesenbach (MoMA), Christine Macel (Centre Pompidou) and Hans Ulrich Obrist (Serpentine Gallery). Six weeks of talks, performances and workshops will accompany the controversial exhibition, which is set to take place in an empty studio building on the brink of demolition. Site specific architecture will be created for based in Berlin by the renowned local firm Raumlabor, including a modular structure consisting of containers, trucks, prefab houses and other elements.

EYEOUT Rhineland

2011-05-06T02:44:00.001-07:00

Accurate, Insider, Up-to-date. Founded by curator Jan Winkelmann and art collector/software developer Ivo Wessel, EYEOUT offers an unparalleled view into some of Europe’s most dynamic art scenes. From museums to blue chips to out-of-the-way project spaces, EYEOUT will help you find what you’re looking for and even what you don’t know you’re looking for.I was pleased to join the EYEOUT team once again for their guide to the Rhineland.

You can find more information here.

Kunsttips von EYEOUT - EYEOUT Art Events

2011-05-06T02:36:00.000-07:00

Originally published in the May issue of Mitteschön
Art Tips from Eyeout
Jesi Khadivi

Sterling Ruby
8 April – 28 May, 2011
Sprüth Magers

Beautiful, brutal forms dominate Spencer Ruby’s installations. I Am Not Free Because I Can Be Exploded Anytime is no exception. Taking its title from a collaborative work by Jenny Holzer and the graffiti artist Lady Pink, Ruby’s current exhibition at Sprüth Magers includes painting, collages and sculptures that evoke the claustrophobia and paranoia of America’s cultural obsession with freedom. The main exhibition space is dominated by a palette of reds, whites and blues that alternate between vivid and restrained hues. The formal qualities of the works on view mirror this tension, ranging from brightly colored, organic fabric and fiber-fill hanging sculptures to more somber plinths and spray painted works on canvas. Peacehead, a spray-painted bronze sculpture of a collapsed peace symbol, perfectly encapsulates the exhibition’s mood of a nation’s optimism deflated.

Mie Olise Kjaergaard
Afflicted Fallout
29 April – 10 June , 2011
Duve Berlin

In 1941 the physicians Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg met in Copenhagen to discuss the question of the nuclear bomb. The meeting ended poorly, with Bohr storming out in fury. Mie Olise Kjaergaard’s fascinating exhibition takes the historic meeting as its subject and includes eleven gestural oil paintings that interpret the architecture of the building where the two acclaimed physicists met. Keeping with her intriguing research based and multi-disciplinary practice, the new body of paintings is accompanied by English translations of letters Bohr never sent to his estranged friend and colleague, along with a sculptural work that is also the key to find the location in Berlin where the artist planted Henbane and Belladonna, the two plants most likely to survive after an atomic bomb.

Alon Levin
End to the Grand Gesture
29 April - 18 June , 2011
Klemm’s

Alon Levin’s large-scale wooden sculptures reference modernist utopias and social theories about space, progress and growth. Order and its disruption are guiding interests in the artist’s practice and the conflict between the two generate a palpable excitement in the his work. As Levin says himself, “somewhere among the ruins there is the potential for the authentically new.” In his anticipated second solo exhibition with Klemm’s, Levin will create an wooden installation filling the entire gallery space, whose exact details are kept under wraps until its debut at Gallery Weekend.

The Spectacular of the Vernacular

2011-05-06T02:21:00.000-07:00

The Spectacular of the Vernacular
originally published in Kaleidoscope issue 10, Spring 2011
view in original context here

Distinctions between high and low have become increasingly difficult to pinpoint in recent decades, the channels between the two poles now more porous and nuanced than ever before. Building upon a history of large-scale exhibitions examining the relationship between the spheres of fine art and mass culture, Walker head curator Darsie Alexander’s exhibition “The Spectacular of the Vernacular” takes Mike Kelley’s observation—“the mass art of today is the folk art of tomorrow”— as its inspiration. Unlike exhibitions that have explored similar themes, “The Spectacular of the Vernacular” is not burdened by the weight of proving the relationships between the two spheres. Focusing on works made after 1970, the “The Spectacular of the Vernacular” explores a period of art in which the influence of mass culture is often taken for granted. The exhibition addresses how mass culture is experienced and addressed in daily life, as well as the appeal its forms have held for artists over the past four decades. In order to examine the scope and breadth of the influence of vernacular and consumer culture on contemporary art practice, Alexander brings together works that range in aesthetic and medium, engaging with humble, handmade, and folkloric iconography, as well as the sleeker sides of spectacle and commerce. With nearly forty works by more than twenty artists—Lari Pittman, Marc Swanson, Rachel Harrison, and Shannon Ebner among them—“The Spectacular of the Vernacular” presents both sides of the vernacular encounter: the nostalgia of roadside attractions and the cheerfulness of the carnivalesque.

Jessica Warboys

2011-05-06T02:17:00.001-07:00

Originally published in Kaleidoscope issue 10, Spring 2011
view in original context here

Jessica Warboys

In the words of critic David Lewis, the work of Jessica Warboys “walks a tightrope between presence and disappearance.” Working across a range of media that includes sculpture, performance, and film, Warboys explores the psychological space created by objects and mis-enscène. With an emphasis on narrative and the evocative role that objects and processes play in the construction thereof, Warboys’s work toys with the totemic quality of her materials, placing their physicality at the center of a web of associations and metaphors. This is seen most clearly in her partnering of materials and elements. Warboys often uses found objects and harnesses natural forces as part of her process. For a technique she calls “sea painting,” the artist immerses canvases into the sea, allowing the waves and wind to trace their impression upon the canvases’ surfaces. Warboys connects her sea paintings and cyanotype photograms to her broader practice through their spatial and temporal relationship to performance or, in the artist’s words, “improvised gesture.” The career of the thirty-four-year-old London- and Parisbased artist is rapidly picking up speed: in 2011, she can be spotted in “Satellite 4,” an exhibition at Jeu de Paume curated by Raimundas Malasauskas; “Madame Realism,” a group exhibition in Maastricht’s Marres Centre for Contemporary Culture, curated by Lisette Smits; Dublin Contemporary 2011; and at the Crédac in Ivry-sur-Seine this spring

Misfit Monochromes in SOMA

2010-11-25T06:21:00.001-08:00

My profile of the Japanese artist Kimiko Yoshida was published in the Obsession Issue of SOMA Magazine. Click here to read.

Dazed and Confused

2010-04-29T09:56:00.000-07:00

New piece in the film section of this month's Dazed and Confused

Eyeout

2010-04-16T11:26:00.000-07:00

In March I worked on texts for Eyeout, a new mobile-art application. Eyeout is the official guide to Berlin's upcoming gallery weekend. The introductory application containing all forty galleries participating in gallery weekend is available for downloadhere. American iphone users can find the application in the app store. Enjoy !

Art Schools

2010-04-14T20:01:00.000-07:00

My review of Art Schools: Propositions for the 21st Centurywas recently published in the Fanzine. Click here to read.

Candy Says

2010-03-31T10:22:00.000-07:00

My preview of James Raisin's new film Beautiful Darling was published on Interview's film blog yesterday.

My Barbarian

2010-02-16T14:19:00.000-08:00

My interview interview with My Barbarian was published in The Fanzine. A must read for any lovers of performance art or experimental theater.

Looking at LA

2010-02-09T07:36:00.000-08:00

What started as a fangirl list of my favorites of the famous quintessentially "LA people" has recently been published in the most recent issue of Fabrik Magazine as a short feature called looking at LA.
Fabrik can be found at most LA area art venues and bookstores or you can read the piece online here.

Und unserere Gesichter, mein Herz, kurz als die Lichtbilder

2010-01-28T01:27:00.000-08:00

Text by David Horvitz:
For the duration of 2010, John Berger's And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, will slowly be typed, word for word, and sent out in daily emails using an announcement list.* Each email will consist of a small text, most likely the size of a single paragraph, and take no longer than a minute to read. Similar (in size and time) to the quickly written email - those emails that come into our in-box, like text messages, and grasp our attention only for a moment (a moment of continuous distraction where you are not really there and nothing is really achieved -only the perpetuation of continuous fragmented stimulation). The attempt here is to play in this area of distraction, and, over time, attempt to to generate through accumulation and agglomeration, a larger, continuous and more graspable thought. Or maybe, through fragmentation, the book will be lost.

I've been doing translation into German for David's project. A process that is doubtlessly awkward and probably full of errors, but is making me love the German language and its texture deeply. I will be updating the site daily, or as close to daily as possible.

White Lightnin'

2010-01-26T05:36:00.000-08:00

White Lightnin' in the October 2009 issue of Dazed.

Kiersten Puusemp

2010-01-08T06:59:00.000-08:00

This piece was published in Artweek

Kiersten Puusemp: Whole Wide World
The Box
October 25th through November 15th, 2008
By Jesi Khadivi

In fits of pique or depression, everyone has dreamt of going as far away as humanly possible. On October 25th, the opening day of her solo exhibition at The Box, Kiersten Puusemp left Los Angeles. By the time people gathered for her artist’s reception on November 8th, Puusemp was in a helicopter hovering over the Indian Ocean, as far from Los Angeles’ Chinatown as geographically possible. Skipping town for a French territory in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Madagascar was not an escapist stunt, but a way of understanding the earth poetically and spatially. A project three years in the making, Whole Wide World is, in the words of the artist, “an attempt to touch something intangible, to physically experience something that cannot be sufficiently understood intellectually and to perceive the physical reality of a human existence that is limited to a concrete space within an infinite universe.”

This is not the first time the artist has been conspicuously absent from her own opening. She missed the reception for her thesis show at USC because her piece, Long Run, consisted of running a marathon. Everything the artist didn’t take on her expedition to the other side of the earth was left in the gallery. A nomad by nature, Puusemp’s few belongings took up only a fraction of the gallery space; one is confronted with a few pieces of well packed luggage and sundry domestic and recreational items, but mostly white space prevails. Puusemp eschewed presenting her things as art objects, instead opting to leave the remainder of her belongings exactly as they were when she finished packing her bags on the gallery floor. It took a lot of planning, and presumably great expense, to reach the pinnacle of the dialectically physical and intangible experience that Puusemp describes, but the deeply personal nature of the project is both the exhibition’s strength and its weakness. The poster for the exhibition which shows coordinates, maps, immunization records, and frequent flier mile calculations is one of the viewer’s only windows into the process of the piece. However, the culmination of the work (if we are to assume that the spatial relationship that the artist initiates or “makes known” is the function of the piece) is largely private. One must laud Puusemp’s curiosity and desire to explore the basic conditions of human experience. Regardless of her intentions, Puusemp opens many cans of worms simultaneously with Whole Wide World. Post studio art practice is old hat, so we’re used to accepting a jumble, or in Puusemp’s case orderly stacks, of non-art objects as art. But the artistic experience is difficult to pin down in Whole Wide World because the piece is both emphatically spatial, yet completely immaterial. How is the artistic encounter experienced? In a plane over the Indian Ocean? In Los Angeles thinking about a plane over the Indian Ocean? Is it all around us?

The exhibition elicits the contemplation of spatial relationships, the potential immateriality of art objects, the metaphorical artist’s journey, and the artist’s physical relationship to their art work in a globalized post-studio framework. However, Puusemp’s refusal to channel her experience of this journey is the most frustrating aspect of the exhibition. With the exception of the exhibition poster, documentation doesn’t play a role in the realization of this piece. Puusemp gives her audience little guidance. She ditches them in the dust while she takes her journey, leaving them with a room full of things she couldn’t take with her and their own ideas.

Anna Torma, Istvan Zsako, and Balint Zsako in Border Crossings

2010-01-07T08:46:00.000-08:00

My review of the Torma-Zsako family's exhibition at the Wilde Gallerywas just published in the Canadian arts quarterly Border Crossings.

first as tragedy, then as farce

2009-12-13T12:36:00.000-08:00

My review of Slavoj Zizek's latest book has been published in The Fanzine.

Dazed and Confused, October

2009-09-17T07:50:00.000-07:00

My review of White Lightnin' was published in the October issue of Dazed and Confused. Check it out at a newsstand near you!

Review//Modern Painters

2009-09-03T02:22:00.000-07:00

My review of this Summer's Richard Artschwager exhibtion at Sprüth Magers has been published in the September issue of Modern Painters/
Check it out here.

Artslant

2009-08-20T04:51:00.000-07:00

I've recently started working as a Berlin correspondent for the art website Artslant. My picks this month were Romantische Maschinen at the Georg Kolbe Museum and Allora + Calzadillaat the Temporäre Kunsthalle.

Berlin on the Brink

2009-08-07T15:52:00.000-07:00

Berlin on the Brink is an editorial about California artists in Berlin commissioned this Spring by the now defunct California art magazine, Art Week.

Berlin on the Brink
By Jesi Khadivi

My dreams of living in Berlin began in 2002. I was pursuing a degree in Art History and Theory, my apartment was both too expensive and too small, and Berlin’s burgeoning east side seemed like everything post-9/11 New York City was not: spacious, cheap and adventurous. I understand now that my feelings about the city were inspired by collegiate romanticism and disillusionment. New Yorkers at the time were obsessed by Berlin; the idea that German capital had the gritty charm of Manhattan in the 80s inspired a few of the 10,000 Americans that now live in the haupstadt to cross the Atlantic. But relating to Berlin solely through the guise of Nan Goldin era NYC is the equivalent of calling San Francisco “San Fran.” It establishes a false intimacy with the city that only illuminates how little the speaker knows about it. The same goes for Berlin mayor, Klaus Wowereit’s, oft-repeated “Poor but Sexy” motto, which the mayor used in an attempt to hype his financially ailing city to investors. When I moved to Berlin in 2007, I was surprised to not find a cheaper, utopian New York. But I did like what I saw: a laid back hybridization of art forms and practices. Everyone I met had a project (or three) and, even as a foreigner, I encountered an overwhelming sense of enthusiasm and genuine warmth for all sorts of creative endeavors.

After a year in Los Angeles, I returned to Germany in February 2009. Though Berlin is indelibly linked to New York in the American cultural imagination, my first night at O Tannenbaum, a free form bar that hosts electronic music, film nights, informal dinners and others arts oriented events in Neuköln, showed a growing migration between Berlin, San Francisco and Los Angeles, Berlin’s sister city. Although the director of O Tannenbaum is Dutch and the venue has an international following, the film night I attended had a distinctly Oaklandish feel, like a little Bay Area in exile. The night had all of the elements of a Bay Area DIY art event: no entrance fee, affordable and delicious vegetarian food and, most importantly, a dedicated and interconnected web of followers. The crowd at O Tannenbaum was mostly an audience of producers. One thing that has become clear to me on my second pass through Berlin, is that regional identity is nothing more than a shared experience. The bay area contingent that patronizes O Tannenbaum and some of its curators side projects are drawn together by friendship and mutual respect, but their reasons for being in Germany vary from marriage and grad school, to simply wanting a massive change.

Erin Weber, a recent CCA alum and the gracious host of the event, cooked a meal and presented the film Fantastic Planet. Weber has been in Berlin for a year and a half. She works in myriad collaborative capacities, running a small publication and audio-visual performance group called Pyramid Press and Dancing Pyramid, respectively, with the German artist Mella Ojeda. Many of the American artists based in Berlin pass through for only a year or two. One artist told me that Berlin was “the number one destination post graduation for CCA student” and “a pit-stop en route to American graduate schools.” Weber, however, plans to stay. When asked where she saw herself eventually settling down, Weber simply says, “here,” and went on to explain that she had worked so hard building a network of creative friends and collaborators, that it would be silly to pick up and move back to the states immediately.

Alicia Reuter, an American art-critic and curator who has settled permanently in Berlin, cites a lack of competition and an emphasis on continuing arts education as factors that compel Berlin’s art professionals to build bridges between different mediums and continents in ways that are not necessarily commercial. Telic Arts Exchange, the ambitious east side LA hybrid arts institution, is one of the newest international organizations to lay roots in Berlin. Conceived as a platform for art, architecture, media, and pedagogy, Telic curates exhibitions, stages live performances, and hosts the Public School, an amorphous committee-run educational experiment, in their Chinatown gallery. They selected their satellite location at Brunnenstraße 11 with the help of Berlin based architects SMAQ. The space, simply called Berlin, is a conceptual art gallery that will host exhibitions for at least one year. Their mission statement shows a nuanced understanding of the myths and realities of the German capital “Recognizing that art is experienced through so-called secondary formats of press releases, rumors, websites, advertisements, anecdote, and freely circulating images, Telic decided in 2007 to create a gallery within this particular place.” Even commercial gallerists are drawn to the promise and opportunities in Berlin, real or perceived. Gallerist Javier Peres, whose Peres Projects has branches in both Los Angeles, cites the city’s openness as a guiding impulse in maintaining galleries on both continents. “I like the freedom of Berlin, it is the most free city in the western world at the moment, one can do and not do as they please, and that works just fine for me.”

The Berlin based painter Ernesto Ortiz, another recent CCA graduate drawn here in part by the opportunities the city offers as the one of the largest art markets in Europe, cautiously agrees with Peres’ point about the freedom of Berlin. “When I first went back to San Francisco after being in Berlin for a year, I really felt the stark contrast of control in the street. It was as simple as noticing that people in Berlin ride their bikes wherever they wish, rules be damned. This includes sidewalks or wrong direction in the bike lane. There are no Parisian rules of dress or Italian bans on certain shoes. But then again, this is Germany, albeit a very free city in German with a strong American influence. There is still a very real German character trait of rule-making and passive obedience that is felt here.” While Ortiz enjoys Berlin’s cultural openness, like Telic Arts Exchange, he fully understands the myth of place propagated by the American art world. “This is city is a Mecca of social and historical myth,” he says, “I find ideas about Berlin to not be very developed as far as their complexity of understanding. Or simply put, they are quite superficial. Berlin is what Paris was for a long time. This image of European cultural and aesthetic superiority exist in a collective bourgeois basket of themes. Berlin is chic. And most people who accept this do not bother to question or understand why. For many artists I have met here, just the act of being here seems to be an accomplishment.”

Paul Tyree-Francis, a 26 year-old Berlin based artist via Los Angeles via San Francisco, believes the appeal of expatriating is especially attractive to artists and creative professionals. “The idea of being an outsider is a romantic notion, especially in Berlin. There is literally so much free and open space here. Everyone is hopeful that Berlin will culminate, but it continues not to. There was a piece in the New York Times recently about how the city has historically positioned itself to become a megalopolis and for myriad reasons it just never happens.” Living in a city in transition is undoubtedly appealing to artists and writers and is perhaps the key to the “freedom” that draws people here. But what will happen is Berlin ever reaches the pinnacle it is pushing for? Tyree-Francis laughs, If it ever did culminate it may just be an opportunity for everyone to complain about it and leave.”

Interview//Break On Through to the Other Side//SOMA

2009-05-30T05:36:00.000-07:00

Originally published in the April issue of SOMA
Break on Through to the Other Side
Text Jesi Khadivi

Tom DeCillo has never made a documentary film before. The New York based director, who gave Brad Pitt his first leading role in the film Johnny Suede back in 1991, generally leans towards dreamy, darkly comedic filmmaking. Genre jumping is no easy feat and directing a film about The Doors, one of the most beloved rock bands in America, is a baptism by fire. DeCillo has emerged unscathed, however, presenting a fascinating look at the men behind the music, comprised entirely of archival footage and excerpts from Jim Morrison’s little seen feature film, Highway. “I wanted to make the film without talking heads,” DeCillo explained, “sitting in the editing room for months looking at this footage, I felt like I was truly experiencing The Doors and I wanted the audience to share that direct experience.” DeCillo spoke with SOMA via telephone from New York City about his new film and the respective challenges of narrative and documentary filmmaking. When You’re Strange was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year and played to a packed house at the Berlinale in Germany. Since the film’s premiere on the festival circuit, Johnny Depp has signed on to do narration.

Where did Morrison’s Film Footage Come From?

Morrison went to UCLA film school back in 1965. He loved film, but his sense of it completely experimental and free form. Years after leaving film school and well after he joined the Doors, Morrison got some money together and went out into the desert with some old classmates from UCLA and a 35mm camera to shoot a short feature called Highway, based on a script that he wrote. What I loved about the film is how it portrayed a mythological loner figure wandering through the American landscape. Most people cannot believe that it’s Jim Morrison. We had a bizarre reaction to the film at Sundance. One distributor got up in outrage after and stormed out because he was convinced we used an actor.

Did he receive any recognition for the film within his lifetime?

Morrison was very proud of Highway and had real aspirations to be a film maker.
He went to two film festivals with it, but it was not very well received. Highway is a difficult film. As specific as Morrison with his music and the image he created, he did not quite understand that the same need applies to the visual medium. The film is like an extended tone poem that doesn’t make much sense, but I respect his effort. It’s the film he wanted to make.

Did you encounter any sour grapes or any resistance to telling the story of the Doors? Many former band members of these 60s bands are very bitter about their leaders stealing the spotlight and they resolutely want to avoid perpetuating their myth.

Each of the remaining band members had a different thing that they wanted to make clear and I had to honor that, but Ray Manzarek, John Densmore and Robby Krieger all effortessly praised Jim Morrison as a great friend and had no resentment for him in any way. That being said, I didn’t want the band meddling or editorializing what I was doing. There is a possessiveness about the story that bugged me a little bit. One of the best documentaries I’ve seen in the past ten years is Some Kind Of Monster, about Metallica. They hire a shrink because the band is falling apart. I didn’t want to just make a puff piece about The Doors

It seems rare for an LA band in that era to praise each other as you describe, especially a flamboyant figure like Morrison. It was stereotypically the San Francisco bands who lived together and played together while the LA bands got together only to play gigs and fight.

Morrison was addicted to jumping out into the void and not knowing where he would end up. The group was an amazing safety net for him. They allowed him to go out into outer space and always have a place to land. I think they really cherished each other.

There were times when they got famous that the announcer at a gig would introduce them “Jim Morrison and the Doors” and Jim would get so angry that he would refuse to go on and would make the announcer reintroduce them as The Doors.

Your films Johnny Suede and Delirious feature performances by Nick Cave and Elvis Costello. Did working with musicians in your narrative film making influence your decision to work on a musical documentary?

I have a great love of music. The combination of music and the moving image is an incredibly powerful mixture. Nick Cave was in Kreuzberg living with my friend, who was in a German punk band named Die Haut. He had read my script because it was sitting on my friend’s table and he called me saying that he’d like to be in my movies. He had a larger than life presence that many serious actors never quite attain. The same goes for Elvis Costello.

Do you find that there are any parallels between your narrative film making and documentary film making?

I like the documentary film, but I’ve always been drawn to the documentaries that resist categorization, like Errol Morris. They have a mystery to them, a slightly surreal quality that isn’t just a presentation of fact. I discovered early on that the best thing for me to do that would help me artistically was to think of the film as a narrative feature with an epic angle. It is ultimately a tragic story. I don’t mean that in a depressing way, but every one knows what happened to Jim Morrison. A lot of my films feature characters that are struggling to understand something about themselves.

Can you speak at all to the respective challenges of documentaries versus narrative film making?

There was a sense of relief that I didn’t need to exhaust myself trying to eke out performances that were crucial to the success of the film. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with actors like Catherine Keener and Steve Buscemi, who relieve that pressure a little bit, but it can be quite difficult.

While the footage was a given, there were moments of terror trying to tell a story with a dramatic arc: surprise, revelation, joy, all of the things that go into a real film. I didn’t want to paraphrase everything that I had read about The Doors. I needed to find something truthful in it, my own perspective. Ultimately, I came to the realization that I just wanted to show the band as human beings. The footage of Jim Morrison just laughing at times or being like a young boy is, to me, one of the most beautiful moments in the film.

Open Rights Group: The Big Picture of BIg Brother//SOMA

2009-05-30T05:33:00.000-07:00

originally published in the April issue of SOMA
Open Rights Group: The Big Picture of Big Brother
By Jesi Khadivi

In the wake of 9/11 and the wave of civil liberties violations that followed, ordinary citizens around the world have become accustomed to being viewed as guilty until innocent. Airports, bridges and monuments quickly become proving grounds of innocence when a slip of the tongue, snap shot, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time is construed as a dangerous activity. This system of surveillance and the performative gestures it inspires quickly spread to more intimate places, like telephone conversations and internet searches. While some view surveillance as an unfortunate, but necessary step in protecting other freedoms, an increasing number of concerned citizens are not willing to sacrifice their privacy to participate in the theater of innocence, claiming such violations damage the very fabric of democracy.

Citizens around the world celebrated Freedom Not Fear Day last October, a day of peaceful protest intended to counter some of the challenges facing democracy today. The response was especially spirited in England, a country where there is one CCTV camera for every 14 citizens according to the BBC. Londoners gathered beneath a statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament square to unveil a 4m x 5m collage comprised of UK surveillance images citizens uploaded to the website of the Open Rights Group, a grass roots technology collective dedicated to protecting an often over looked area of civil liberties, digital rights. Thumbnail surveillance photos coalesced to form an enormous portrait of UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, against a background of barbed wire and double helices. The Open Rights Group says, “Our message was clear: although as individuals we only see incremental invasions of our privacy, put together, these creeping changes constitute a wholesale shift towards a society predicated not on freedom, but on fear.”

Report//European Highlights from the Berlinale//SOMA

2009-05-30T05:28:00.000-07:00

originally published in the March issue of SOMA
European Highlights from the Berlinale
By Jesi Khadivi

The usually tame Potsdamer Platz came alive when journalists, film executives, international a-listers and movie lovers descended upon Berlin’s postmodern quadrangle of hotels and movie theaters from February 5th through the 15th for the 59th annual Berlinale, one of Europe’s longest running international film festivals. While Berlin’s grey skies and frigid temperatures don’t leave much room for glamour (some stars were actually shivering on the red carpet), the festival is an industry favorite because the breadth of its competition films range from quirkily salable films like Mitchell Lichtenstein’s family drama Happy Teeth, starring Demi Moore and Parker Posey to films like Katalin Varga, a sumptuously shot revenge film set in the Carpathian mountains by British, Budapest-based director, Peter Strickland,. Although Hollywood favorites like Michelle Pfeiffer, Blake Lively, Renée Zellweger, Steve Martin, Gael García Bernal all walked the red carpet, the Berlinale provides a forum for international cinema that is less Hollywood-centric and swag oriented than Sundance and more manageable than Cannes. Keeping with the spirit of the festival, I offer my top four European film picks.

4) Hilde (Kai Wessel)
The disarmingly beautiful Hildegard Knef went to acting school as a teenager during World War II, had a romantic entanglement with a Nazi official and fought against the Russians to remain by his side, married a Jewish American solider after the war, and (with different lovers in between) went on to make fifty feature films and record 23 albums. Kai Wessel’s film delivers a portrait of a talented and complicated individual with a level of artfulness few biopics ever achieve.

3) An Education (Lone Scherfig)
Sixteen year old Jenny sneaks Gauloises and sings along to French records trying to escape from the dullness of her tweedy prep-school-life. A bigger distraction comes from a charming older man who whisks her away from Twickenham and cello lessons to art auctions, horse races, and a Paris vacation that changes her life.

2) Alle Anderen (Maren Ade)
Maren Ade’s sophomore effort chronicles the fall out of a couples’ Saturn Return. While vacationing in Sardinia, the idiosyncratic lovers are grapple with their respective uneasiness about identity, success, aging, gender and social codes. The result is a hilarious, yet deeply felt journey into the heart of the 20s and all its discontents.

1) Katalin Varga (Peter Strickland)
Strickland captivates with a sparely elegant story about a woman who sets out on horseback seeking revenge for a crime that occurred 11 years prior. Mark Gyori’s camera conjures a primordial atmosphere for a timeless story to unfold. An impressive and intelligent debut.

Review//Katalin Varga//Dazed and Confused

2009-05-30T05:19:00.000-07:00

originally published in the May issue of Dazed and Confused
Katalin Varga
By Jesi Khadivi

The moral landscape mirrors the physical in Katalin Varga, a minimal and elegant revenge film shot in Transylvania’s Carpathian mountains. The plot is straight forward: Katalin was raped before the film’s action begins, resulting in the conception of her son Orbán. 11 years hence, her husband learns her secret and Katalin sets off on horseback, seeking vengeance. It’s a timeless tale, set in primordial landscape of rolling hills and dank mist. Inspired by Werner Herzog’s unsentimental view of nature, Greek born UK director, Peter Strickland, has crafted a gripping feature-length debut brimming with complexity, intelligence and ambiguity.

Although the project was five years in the making, actual shooting time was only seventeen days and Strickland’s budget was less than 30,000. The film was made with his own money and without any professional backing “The fear of failure was huge,” Strickland admits. Katalin Varga premiered to critical acclaim at the Berlinale Film Festival in February. However, critics looking for pat commentary on rape or Hungarian-Romanian tensions were frustrated to find few answers from a director more interested in exploring the twin themes of revenge and redemption.

“The idea of revenge is quite compelling,” first time director Peter Strickland told me in a Potsdamer Platz cafe , “There are no resolutions. Revenge is the one crime we can all relate to.” The recent popular resurgence of genre filmmaking confirms Strickland’s point; its explosive popularity is largely due to directors like Quentin Tarantino, whose Kill Bill films mash-up elements of martial arts, western and revenge films. “I wanted to take a pulp genre and transport it into another context,” Strickland says, “You don’t need to be Tarantino to do that.” As a pulp inspired film, Varga has little in common with Kill Bill. Revenge is rendered in broad strokes and explored through ideas of causality, redemption and forgiveness. Varga’s characters are more morally indeterminate than their pop-revenge films counterparts. Throughout the film, the boundaries between right and wrong and justice and injustice are continuously blurred. Like the best noir anti-heroes, Katalin and Antal, the man who raped her, have complicated, fractured psyches. Katalin has suffered a grave injustice, but is also a murder. Antal brutally raped Katalin, violating the sanctity of another human being, yet over the course of a decade he evolved into a sensitive man and a loving husband.

Though Strickland says the story could be told anywhere, its Transylvanian setting is inextricably linked to the film’s artistry. Strickland wisely chose a location capable of evoking the beauty and terror of personal and spiritual transformation. However, he’s careful to point out that the film’s themes are universal. “This could never be an authentic Transylvanian film,” he told reporters after the film’s premiere, “I’m English. I didn’t want to go the Kusturica route, which is a bit bombastic. I wanted to make something more like a ballad.”

Emergence Vernissage in Vice Deutschland

2009-04-21T06:02:00.000-07:00

From Vice Magazine Deutschland Blog

Freitagabend fand die Eröffnung der Golden Parachutes Galerie statt und da die Vernissage einmal nicht im Kunstgalerien-Strich Berlin Mitte stattfand, haben wir uns tief hinein nach Kreuzberg begeben, um uns das Ganze einmal anzusehen.

Im Rahmen der Ausstellung „Emergence“, die bis zum 15.Mai läuft, werden amerikanische und kanadische Künstler unterschiedlicher Stile präsentiert, die irgendwie einer philosophischen Theorie zuzuordnen sind, laut der komplexe Systeme und Muster durch eine Vielzahl an relativ simplen Interaktionen entstehen.

Wenn Zach Houston gerade nicht am Strand von L.A. absurde Gedichte auf Trinkgeld Basis verfasst und Performances aufführt, macht er arbeiten auf Papier, von denen er als „Arbeiten auf Papier“ spricht.

Melissa Frost. Eine sehr nette Künstlerin aus L.A. die aber die vergangenen Jahre in einem Haus in London verbrachte, von der das Wasser aus der Deckenlampe kam. Nun lebt sie aber in Berlin und beschäftigt sich mit absurden Statistiken.

Paul Tyree-Francis. Das Bild entstand nach einem Zeitungs-Foto auf dem Julio Camera, der Bodyguard von Britney Spears, die Scheiße aus einem Paparazzi prügelte. Das Bild heißt "People take pictures of each other, julio camera", ha, Wortspiel und so.

Shaun Owens-Agase &Tyler Peterson. Scheiß auf das Kleingedruckte.

Dieses Bild hängt im Schlafzimmer der Galeristen, stammt aus einer Oper und wurde auf der Bühne von einem unbekannten Künstler gemalt. Ein Liebhaberstück, genau wie ihre einäugige Katze Odin, die mich zu Tode erschreckte, da ich urplötzlich die Todesmusik Richard Wagners im Ohr hatte.

Paul, der Besitzer der Galerie, mit einem Haufen Ballons. Später versetzte er viel Besucher in Schockstarre, als sie platzten und es sich anhörte, als würde er frei nach André Breton mit einem Revolver in die Menge feuern.

Melissa Frost und Jesi Khadivi, die Künstlerin und die Galeristin. Die eine hat es in L.A. und London nicht mehr ausgehalten, die andere hat sich in Berlin verliebt.

Interview with Packard Jennings

2009-03-27T06:02:00.002-07:00

Originally published in Soma Magazine

Destroy After Reading: An interview with Packard Jennings
By Jesi Khadivi

When I met Packard Jennings, a key player in the Yes Men’s recent New York Times spoof, I was stunned to see that he looked more like a sharp, young English professor than his molotov-cocktail wielding Anarchist Action Figure, the black bloc look alike the artist planted in big box stores. Surprising, because most of Jennings’ diverse oeuvre, which includes video, sculpture, print, and interactive work, is socially and politically inspired. His Business Reply Pamphlet, a hilarious step by step instructional illustration on how to overthrow the tyranny of a soul sucking office job, was recently exhibited at the Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. The piece has a second life as a piece of return direct mail; Jennings collects business reply envelopes and mails the pamphlet back to anonymous sorting centers.

Jennings sat down with SOMA for a leisurely Saturday afternoon beer and talked about the evolution of his work and the role of humor in political art before heading into the museum’s aptly timed exhibition, The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now.

SOMA: How did you start making political and socially inspired work?

Jennings: I’ve been making political and social art for most of my life, but the shift into the public realm started around 1995. I lived in a warehouse in Oakland that overlooked a giant, day-glo Newport cigarette ad. After I figured out that I could access the billboard by a ladder at the top of my carport, I went up there and blacked out a tooth on one of the models. I always knew that advertisements affected us in our daily life, but I never knew how strongly until that simple gesture totally changed the atmosphere in my house.

In a field that is usually defined by the preciousness of objects, the billboard work was a healthy, almost Zen, exercise for me as an artist. It reminded me of what’s really great about making work, just doing it and letting it go into the world and interacting with a broader, non-art audience. Preciousness can intimidate people. I’ve certainly been in museums where people have felt that they are not qualified to express an opinion about the art. When the work is public, everyone feels like they have the right to an opinion.

SOMA: Is your public work ever funded by arts organizations or community groups?

Jennings: A grant from Southern Exposure, a non-profit gallery in San Francisco, enabled me to make my project The Lottery, a scratch off lottery ticket that would reveal a local’s story about their neighborhood. The idea was to transform a moment of inward focus towards community. They were available at four stores in San Francisco and Oakland and were free with the purchase of a lottery ticket.

SOMA: Do you ever collaborate on these projects?

Jennings: I collaborated with Steve Lambert on the Bus Bench project, a series of advertisements intended to neutralize advertising tactics like targeting children or manipulating peoples’ fears. We created a series of ads to counteract these practice and illegally installed them on bus bunches in the Bay Area. The anti-advertising ad we put on the bench correlated to the prominent concern in the area, which we determined by handing out surveys.

Steve and I collaborated again on Postcards From Our Awesome Future, a series of bus kiosk posters for the San Francisco Art Commission. We met with local architects, transportation officials and urban planners to discuss utopian visions.

SOMA: What were some of the key ideas?

Jennings: Re-wilding the urban population with plant and animal life that used to live in San Francisco. Another was finding alternate uses for parked cars. For example, a commuter vehicle could double as a library car, gym car, or a farmers market. They posters were particularly effective because the ideas were crazy.

This is the way that I think humor works in art work with a social aspect. It gives the viewer an entry point into radical ideas. When you laugh, your guard slips away. The key concepts behind the posters are actually great ideas. Naturally, you’re not going to have a dog park in a subway car, but it would be wonderful to check out books from a mobile library on your commute to work.

SOMA: Do you have hope for society and the city? You work has both utopian and subversive influences.

Jennings: I have hopes and fears. My work is rooted in frustration and a desire for self- empowerment, but also a real desire for positive change. Sometime that takes the form of something imaginary and utopian and sometimes it takes the form of exposing social problems. I’m still adjusting and modifying my strategy.

SOMA: One thing that is refreshing about your work is that although it’s often shown within a fine art context, its participatory dimension doesn’t seem coercive, which is often the pitfall of participation based works. Do you feel that any of your participatory works have been especially effective?

Jennings: I made a creative dissent workstation for my exhibition at the Catherine Clark Gallery. The public had access to a computer and camera and they could make one of five projects. For the newspaper project I provided a template for people to write the news however they saw fit. One person even put up a newspaper headline that said “Subversive Artist Demanding High Prices.” They totally ripped on me and put it on the wall, but I left it there. Free speech.

Another part of the work station was the “What the Fuck” sign that could be checked out of the gallery. The idea is to go stand next to the people with the signs for things like Subway sandwiches. Steve Lambert and I were discussing that the only way you know something isn’t advertising today is if there is swearing in it. Everything else adopts a subversive strategy to sell something. It’s really hard to tell.

SOMA: A Dada artist once said , “With its victory over the mainstream complete the avante garde has ceased to exist.

Jennings: That sounds about right.

SOMA: I think about that every time I watch MTV on an airplane.

Jennings: Everything that can be absorbed, co-opted, and sold will. That’s what the Anarchist Action Figure is about. It’s about the ease of commodification of radical ideology. I knew that it would be desirable

jesi khadivi interviewed for whitehot magazine

2009-03-27T06:02:00.001-07:00

originally published in whitehot

Noah Becker: You signed on with Whitehot from our Berlin office. After a great run in Berlin you moved to LA, now you are returning to Berlin. Can you talk a bit about your sense of logistics and how your projects fit into this migration?

Jesi Khadivi: Los Angeles was my “year on the mountain,” so to speak. My husband Paul and I lived in Ed Ruscha’s old art studio in the Echo Park hills where Ruscha made paintings of words being smashed or set on fire way back in 1964. Paul and I used our time there to make as much work as we could in relative isolation. Los Angeles has a thriving art scene, but is also one of the few places in the United States where one can experience country living in the city. As much as I enjoyed a peaceful place to work, Los Angeles is just too sprawling for me to live there long term. We love the energy of Berlin and its location in the center of Europe. It’s an amazing place to work.

NB: Tell us about your Gram Parsons project?

JK: I was working at the Edward Thorp Gallery in New York City at the time and was putting out feelers for extra work. I enjoyed working in the arts, but wanted a side project that was…different. I had graduated from Eugene Lang with a degree in Art History and Critical Theory in 2004 and after a year of working in a commercial gallery I wanted to do something more academic. I wrote to an old professor of mine, David Meyer, and asked him if he knew anyone looking for a research assistant. Much to my surprise he said, “Yeah, me.” I set out for something academic, but that’s not what I got. Instead I traveled between New York City and Los Angeles for two years interviewing musicians, guitar techs, and groupies for David’s biography of the late country rock icon, Gram Parsons. Basically I spent two years in cowboy boots immersing myself in LA rock and pop from the 1960s and 70s. It was a delight working with David and all of the hard work paid off, Twenty Thousand Roads was named one of the “Top Five Rock Books of 2008” by Rolling Stone and “#1 Rock Book” by Uncut Magazine in the UK

NB: You are opening a new space in Berlin. Is it top secret or can you let us in on some details?

JK: The space is on Kreuzbergstraße. My partner, the painter Paul Tyree-Francis, and I just signed the contract, so obviously the opening date is still in flux. The name of the space is Golden Parachutes. We'll be showing work by emerging contemporary international artists. In addition to a solo and group exhibition we'll host weekly film screenings and other assorted events. Although Golden Parachutes is a commercial gallery, Paul and I are both really inspired by hybrid venues that offer space for critical reflection and investigation. Ideally, we intend to offer our space to reading groups and plan a few ourselves. We've begun to plan our exhibition schedule and a few events, but I'd prefer to keep those details under wraps until they are closer to finalized.

NB: Do you drive a car or a bicycle in Berlin?

JK: Bicycle, of course.

clui: Examining America's Infrastructure

2009-03-18T16:05:00.000-07:00

The Center For Land Use Interpretation, or CLUI as it is more commonly known, resists moralizing about the environment. Founded in 1994 by artist Matthew Coolidge, the organization functions at the nexus of art, urbanism, and environmentalism. Not quite an art collective or cordoned off group of scientists, the Center for Land Use Interpretation has enjoyed tremendous acclaim within arts communities (the organization was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial), due in no small part to the organization’s conceptual underpinnings and tendency to mine the look of vintage Americana in the service of conceptual art and science. CLUI’s aesthetic is more like a dusty old office full of cool books, pictures, and maps than the organic, streamlined shapes of much contemporary eco-inspired architecture and design. Harkening back to the institutional penchant for instructional films in the 1950s and ‘60s, the center presents dispassionate yet informative photo presentations on environmental themes, such as waste management and oil production, at its Culver City office, an unassuming ground floor space on Venice and Bagley adjacent to the equally mysterious Museum of Jurassic Technology. Their recent exhibitions, “Post Consumed: The Landscape of Waste in Los Angeles,” which opened last May, and “The Trans-Alaska Pipeline,” which opened November 14, 2008, both garnered high praise.

The peripatetic organization uses the entire United States as its playground. The center currently has six sites in the United States: the main office in Culver City; a satellite office in the graying factory town of Troy, New York on the Hudson River; the impressive and expansive American Land Museum, on the periphery of the salts flats of Wendover, Nevada; another office housed in an old junk yard in the industrial fringes of Houston; and finally, the Desert Research Station in the Mojave, a research and exhibition facility that functions as a satellite to the Culver City Space. CLUI supplements their extensive infrastructure with touring shows: “Texas Oil: Landscape of an Industry” is currently on view at University of Houston and “Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes” is showing in Pittsburgh.

At first glance, CLUI’s exhibitions can seem ambiguous and difficult to gauge. Their detached stance borders on mysterious, partly because CLUI is not trying to push an explicit agenda other than “understanding the nature and extent of human interaction with the Earth’s surface.” Rather than directly lambasting social ills or positing utopian visions of the future, the organization explores America’s infrastructure and developed landscapes in rigorous detail. Everyday objects are presented on pedestals and classified with placards in their exhibition spaces and video, and their photo-presentations are always devoid of leading commentary. While the guise of complete objectivity is naïve, if not impossible, CLUI’s mode of presentation does enables its audience to understand post-industrial landscape as an ecosystem in its own right. The main interest of Coolidge and his team of geomorphologists, environmentalists, scientists, architects, and scientists lies primarily in cataloguing industrial ruins and the hidden places that nonetheless greatly impact our daily lives. In other words, CLUI does not seek to bring nature closer, but to explore human interventions in natural landscape.

They do so through a diverse program that encompasses multiple exhibition spaces, site-specific works, a quarterly newsletter called The Lay of the Land, and a thriving publishing series dedicated to exploring the urban fringes of the United States and military test sites. Think Mike Davis makes field guides. “Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America,” one of CLUI’s most popular titles, is a curated guide to the American landscape that explores sites they believe are “windows into the American psyche.” You may be able to find some of the show caves and ghost towns CLUI visits on tourist maps, but you’d be hard-pressed to find the pit mines, soap factories and landfills that comprise most of the journey. As “Overlook” suggests, CLUI doesn’t shy away from a good old-fashioned field trip. The organization has orchestrated trips to potato chip factories, abandoned launch pads, and power facilities and a visit to a waste facility was offered as part of last year’s “Post Consumed,” which chronicled the life of consumer waste from curbside to landfill through documentary videos, and by isolating and classifying common pieces of garbage. One of CLUI’s slyest site-specific works is Suggested Photo Spots, an ongoing riff on Kodak’s signs at national monuments and parks. Initiated by artists Melinda Stone and Igor Vamos back in 1997, the project involves installing signage at such unlikely points of interest as wastewater treatment centers and the Kodak headquarters.

CLUI exists in the hazy area between art and pedagogy that is becoming increasingly popular both in Los Angeles and internationally. Their stark, holistic approach could alienate viewers looking for an easily digestible call to action. However, their rich investigations of industrial, urban and suburban spaces is minimal, direct and revelatory, without the sensational or trendy modes of presentation that we sadly find so often in socially or politically based works.

Notorious

2009-02-24T00:56:00.000-08:00

My review of George Tillman's biopic of Biggie Smalls was published in issue 171 of Dazed and Confused, available on most newstands.

Christopher Wallace balled hard. Better known as Biggie Smalls or Notorious B.I.G., Wallace’s pop-gangster storytelling and exceptional lyrical prowess almost single handedly galvanized the East Coast hip-hop scene during a time that the genre was largely dominated by West Coast artists. By the time he died at the age of twenty-four, the father of two and award winning rapper had two platinum albums (His second album, Life After Death, debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts fifteen days after his murder).

Notorious follows Wallace from his humble beginnings as a teenage drug dealer through his meteoric rise to fame and untimely death. George Tillman’s (Soul Food/Barbershop) biopic attempts to expose the man behind the legend, subjecting the rapper’s woefully brief life to a literary treatment that largely fails; A deeper understanding of the artist’s life and times can be gleaned from his Wikipedia page. Still, we go to most big budget films to be entertained and Tillman and his cast don’t let us down. Melodrama and humor coalesce to paint Biggie’s story in broad strokes, dutifully chronicling the rise of Bad Boy Records, his troubled relationships with Faith Evans and Lil’ Kim, and of course, his falling out with Tupac Shakur and the ensuing East Coast-West Coast feud that ultimately cost him his life.

Tillman fleshes out his cast of seasoned professionals with a few young upstarts and the . rookies steal the show. Although the excessive joviality he brings to the role borders on Big-lite, first time actor and rapper Jamal Woolard (known on the mix tape circuit as Gravy), captures Biggie’s swagger and charm. Naturi Naughton imbues Lil’ Kim with a tantalizing mix of fire and vulnerability, outshining Puffy (Derek Luke) and every dude in the entourage.

Notorious isn’t ground breaking, but it’s fun—a bubble-gum guilty pleasure full of wise-cracks, spot-on period mise-en-scene and (best of all), lots and lots of music.

Narrowcast

2009-02-21T06:53:00.000-08:00

originally published in the January issue of The Magazine

Narrowcast: Reframing Global Video 1968/2008
LACE
6522 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles
(323) 957-1777
www.artleak.org

By Jesi Khadivi

In a recent episode of Planet in Peril on CNN, correspondent Lisa Ling met with the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger River Delta, also known as MEND, on the banks of a remote shore on the delta. Adrenalin was high and gun-fire filled the air as Ling gave a straight forward analysis of a region whose ecosystem had been virtually decimated by big oil companies.

Artist Mark Boulos also explores the indignity suffered by Nigerians in the hands of companies like Shell oil. His two-channel video, All That is Solid Melts into Air, which posits footage of Nigerian rebels preparing for battle against the frenzied activity of the Chicago Stock Exchange trading floor, offers more nuanced insight into dispossession and power than the Planet in Peril team could dream of. All That is Solid…, which derives its title from Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto, beautifully encapsulates the radical potential of video art, as well as its capacity for non-linear story telling.

Narrowcast revisits LACE’s seminal 1986 exhibition, Resolution: A Critique of Video Art. It is less a critique and more a celebration of video’s possibilities and the evolution of the form, especially as a political tool. In Political Advertisement I (1952-1984) Antonio Muntades and Marshall Reese show political ads transform from direct address to feel good sloganeering, and finally, to outright manipulation and scare tactics. Natalie Bookchin’s video Trip, comprised entirely of found footage from YouTube, explores international borderlands and the binaries that blossom there. Shot primarily on low grade consumer video devices like phones and cameras, Bookchin’s video consists of home made road movies from over seventy countries. Artur Zmijewski’s Game of Tag takes on a heightened significance when it is revealed at the end of the video that the naked game of tag is being played in the gas chamber of a former concentration camp.

In All That is Solid Melts into Air, a Nigerian militia member sternly advised Mark Boulos, “Make them remember us.” Though typically a concern associated with documentary film making, all the artists in Narrowcast engage with issues of memory and representation that are subtle, incisive and fresh, whether the film was made in 1986 or 2008.

wear your love like heaven

2009-02-18T09:38:00.000-08:00

Much to my surprise, the proposal I wrote for 33 1/3's open call about Donovan's Gift From a Flower to a Garden made their short list. Not the shortest shortlist in the world, but I'm happy to have survived the first cut. Out of over 500 applicants about 20 book deals will be offered. Check out the series.

Chinatown Land

2009-02-13T05:10:00.000-08:00

Originally published in Fabrik Magazine

Chinatownland
By Jesi Khadivi

Few cities are fortunate enough to have a gallery district as unique as LA’s Chinatown. This cozy, outcropping of garish pagodas and paper lanterns is a hyper-real version of a Chinese village, hence artist Andre Yi’s riff on the iconic Hollywood sign, Chinatownland, a sculpture which was displayed in a vacant lot on Hill Street until fairly recently. Chung King road, a kitschy pedestrian mall that houses many of Chinatown’s contemporary art galleries, was built in the 1940s as part of “New Chinatown” after plans for Union Station led to the razing of the original Chinatown. Long home to Chinese specialty shops and importers, the area’s store fronts began to be settled by art galleries in the late 1990s. Now teeming with cutting edge galleries and hip shops, all elbowing up against Chinese social clubs and restaurants, the area is home to a diverse range of art spaces, ranging from the experimental to the more established (many of the neighborhood’s galleries are nationally, if not internationally acclaimed). As can be expected of such a dynamic area, the neighborhood is in flux. Long time Chinatown denizens like Javier Peres (Peres Projects) and David Kordansky (Kordansky Gallery) have jumped ship for the West Side’s contemporary art hotspot, Culver City. Other galleries have been playing musical chairs with their locations. Katie Brennan of Sister Gallery took over one of the two Peres Project store fronts, and numerous other spaces have taken up new leases mere blocks away, or in at least one case, across the street from their original space. The folks who have stayed put, however, are keeping Chinatown’s collaborative spirit alive.

Telic Arts Exchange and the Public School
972B Chung King Road
www.telic.info

Telic Arts Exchange, one of the most ambitious east side hybrid arts institutions, was founded by artist/architect/educators Fiona Whitton and Sean Dockray in 2004. Conceived as a platform for art, architecture, media, and pedagogy, Telic curates exhibitions, stages live performances, and hosts the Public School, an amorphous committee-run educational experiment. Recent course offerings have included The Economy of Giant Ass Sculptures, The Democratic Museum, and Sado-Masochism: Theory & Practice. The Distributed Gallery, a series of video monitors installed in various art and commercial spaces throughout Chinatown, debuted in December to maintain the Telic’s public presence after their October move from a Chung King store front into a basement space across the way. Video projects by Geoff Manaugh and James Merle Thomas are next on deck.

Ooga Booga
943 N. Broadway, #203
www.oogaboogastore.com

New York City has Printed Matter for cool art books and ephemera, Angelenos have Ooga Booga. Wendy Yao’s tiny, well curated store is filled to the brim with clothing, artist editions, books, and records by venerable artists, musicians, and designers. Yao started the boutique to showcase the work of friends and contemporaries and it has expanded to a veritable who’s who of art, music, and fashion featuring clothing by Opening Ceremony and Bless, and editioned work by musician-artist Bjorn Copeland and German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. An artist in her own right, Yao will exhibit video work in May at the Distributed Gallery. Ooga Booga occasionally brings the party to the porch, hosting live music events in the stairwell adjacent to the shop.

The Mountain Bar/Mountain School of Art
473 Gin Ling Way
www.themountainschoolofarts.org
www.themountainbar.com/

A collaboration between sculptor Jorge Pardo and gallerist Steve Hanson (owner of China Art Objects), the Mountain Bar is Chinatown’s go-to for post opening cocktails. Stiff drinks, an opium den-like atmosphere, and the bacon-wrapped hot dog cart around the corner keep folks coming back for more. Each winter, the bar’s backroom houses the Mountain School of Arts, an eclectic, artist initiated free school founded by artists Piero Golia and Eric Wesley. Admission is by application only and past seminar leaders have included artist Franz Ackerman, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, and curator Bob Nickas.

Cottage Home
410 Cottage Home Street
www.thecottagehomela.com

Steve Hanson has his hands in multiple pots. The China Art Objects owner is a collaborator in one of the neighborhood’s newest galleries, Cottage Home, with fellow Chinatown big-wigs, Katie Brennan of Sister and Thomas Solomon. The 4,000 square foot former movie theater opened in July with a group exhibition entitled I Can See for Miles. The size of the gallery is unusual for Chinatown, known for its quirky storefront spaces and will allow the gallerists to show larger works than their solo spaces allow, a boon for their artists and an inspiring model for upstart contemporary galleries dealing with market challenges.

Via Café
451 Gin Ling Way

Via embraces its status as the resident arty Asian eatery by decking the walls floor to ceiling with paintings and drawings by local artists and hosting a video monitor for Telic’s Distributed Gallery The service isn’t always the best, but the food is delicious and the crowd is vibrant and good-looking. Stop at Via after your gallery crawl for mouth-watering, reasonably priced bowls of rice vermicelli and spring rolls, and other Vietnamese specialties.

The Box
977 Chung King Road
www.theboxla.com

Box director, Mara McCarthy, recently presented an exhibit by LA based artist Kirsten Puusemp in which the artist traveled the furthest distance possible from the gallery, leaving the exhibition space filled only with the things she couldn't take with her-- paper bags filled with canned goods, musical instruments, and a few wrapped presents. Not exactly salable stuff, but McCarthy, the daughter of LA art royalty Paul McCarthy, doesn't seem to mind, as she conceived the space as an educational project as well as an exhibition space. Like many Chinatown galleries, The Box is an interdisciplinary affair. McCarthy is dedicated to conceptually rigorous and challenging works that defy a conventional gallery model.

The Company
946 Yale Street
www.thecompanyart.com

Providing hope for aspiring young gallerists paralyzed by market woes, curator Anat Ebgi and artist Annie Wharton's opened the doors of their Chung King road adjacent gallery in November with their inaugural exhibition, Human Resources. Following in the footsteps of other east side hybrid arts venues, The Company employs a diffuse approach to programming hosting screenings, talks, and other events in addition to their rotating schedule of exhibitions. Rhizomatic, indeed!

Farm Lab
1745 North Spring Street
www.farmlab.org/

Located on the banks of the anemic LA river, Farmlab began as an extension of the Not a Cornfied Project, an Annenberg funded living sculpture by LA artist Lauren Bon in which 32 acres of industrial brownfield was used to plant corn for one agricultural cycle. Farm Lab shares Culver City’s Center For Land Use Interpretation’s (CLUI) investigation of land use issues within an art audience, demonstrating the multi-striated connections between art and urbanism, The warehouse space, located just north of Chinatown, hosts a wide array of talks, exhibitions, and special events.

Waltz with Bashir

2009-02-04T04:24:00.001-08:00

Orginally published in the film issue of SOMA

In the summer of 1982, Israeli soldiers invaded Southern Lebanon with the intent of “stabilizing” the civil-war-torn country used as a strategic missile range in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine. As Israeli forces waited to enter the capital city of Beirut, a treaty was signed between Israel and Palestinians stating that if PLO combatants were sent by ship to Tunisia, Israeli’s would remove the threat of a surge on Beirut. In the midst of this delicate cease-fire, Lebanese president elect (and Sharon favorite), Phalangist militia leader Bashir Gemayel, was assassinated while giving a speech in East Beirut. In an orgy of retaliatory violence, Phalangists stormed the refugee camps of West Beirut to avenge the death of their beloved leader. As is all too often the case with military blood debts, the victims of the brutal massacre that ensued in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila were exclusively civilians, many of them children and elderly.

Fast forward twenty-five years to two former soldiers sitting in a bar. Ari Folman, a documentary filmmaker, has been summoned by his friend, Boaz Rein Buskila. Visions of war have crept into the soulful accountant’s dreams. But Buskila is not plagued by apparitions of fallen soldiers or decimated battle fields. Twenty-six dogs have been chasing him since he left occupied territory, and they’ve finally tracked him down at his office. Because he had difficulty killing people, Buskila was assigned to shoot barking dogs. And he remembered each and every one he shot.

Unlike Boaz, Ari remembers nothing. But after leaving his friend, a solitary recollection of wartime comes flooding back to him a dream. Three soldiers awaken in the ocean, illuminated by flares from above. As they head into the devastated streets of Beirut, grief stricken Palestinian survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacres swarm around them in a hallucinatory procession.

Folman’s encounter with Buskila and the sole memory it elicits provided the impetus for his feature length animated documentary, Waltz With Bashir. Waltz follows Folman as he attempts to unravel Israel’s role in the Sabra and Shatila massacres, and by extension his own involvement. He interviews old war buddies, acclaimed war correspondent Ron Ben-Yishai, and a psychologist in his quest to locate and understand his missing memories. Untraditional as it may seem, Folman felt that animation was the only way to tell his story. And he’s right. In many ways, Waltz is a story without images. At least photographic images. According to Folman, very little decent archival footage of the first Lebanese War exists, and even if it did, news reel footage and army generals couldn’t begin to tell Folman’s story . With its focus on the spaces between memory, forgetting is a vital aspect of Waltz’s story. As is the dynamic nature of memory; At least three different animation styles and color palettes are used to evoke its ambiguity.

Waltz with Bashir is Folman’s third feature film and his second animated work. He experimented with the form in the animated introductory sequences for The Material that Love is Made Of, a documentary series made for Israeli television about the substance of love, based on American chemist Helen Fisher’s discovery that love is actual hormonal matter. Though the bold visual style that Folman honed in Waltz With Bashir is evident in its germinal stages in Material, his early animation cleverly riffs off of animated educational shorts, while Waltz mines the medium’s capacity for pathos (which is heightened by experimental composer Max Richter’s original score). Although Waltz’s casual format of folks sitting around talking about issues like dreams, repression and memory have prompted many to draw comparisons to Richard Linklater’s animated jaw-fest Waking Life, Waltz was drawn using a mixture of Flash, 3D and traditional animation techniques, rather than the rotoscoping used for Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. A favorite at the Cannes and New York Film Festivals, the film is a Golden Globe nominee for Best Foreign Language Film and an official Academy Award entry for Best Animated Feature and Best Foreign Language Film.

Folman does not wield the documentary form as a pedagogical tool, nor does he create a comprehensive contextual framework for the viewer to understand Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. He shuns traditional documentary’s fixation on experts and verisimilitude, which can desensitize viewers. By positing war at a dreamlike distance, Folman brings its atrocity closer. “War is so surreal,” Folman says, “and memory is so tricky that I thought I had better take the journey with the help of very fine illustrators.” The personal is political in Waltz with Bashir; In focusing on the non-linear and oft fantastical stories of fellow Israeli soldiers, Folman resists using documentary in the service of an official history, instead delving into the highly subjective and fragmentary testimonials of his peers. Waltz With Bashir impressively navigates the cross-currents of anguish, fantasy and war, all the while reminding us through the veil of post-traumatic reverie that war’s vagaries are very, very real.

Lat den ratte komma in

2009-02-04T04:22:00.000-08:00

Orginally published in Dazed and Confused, issue #130

Text Jesi Khadivi

“Are you old?” a young, cherubic-faced Swede asks his new dark, androgynous friend. “I’m twelve,” the child responds, “but I’ve been twelve for a long time.” Meet Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) and Eli (Lina Leandersson), two pre-teens living in the anonymous block suburbs of Stockholm in the early 1980s, a far cry from the drafty Transylvanian castles of vampire lore. Despite this, Let The Right One In, a minimal Swedish film about a twelve year old vampire and her budding relationship with her neighbor, Oskar, is one of the most outstanding experimentations with the genre in years. Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of the best selling novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist is light on the gore and heavy on the pathos. Oskar, a pale and friendless young boy, is repeatedly tortured at school. When a gaunt child and her much older caretaker move in next door around the same time that grizzly murders start happening in the neighborhood, Oskar forges a friendship with her over a shared Rubik’s cube. Already a bit of a gore fiend, Oskar soon discovers that his girl-next-door is actually a vampire and not even a girl, forcing him to choose between his nascent sense of morality and love for his only friend.

Working with a cast of stellar, largely unknown actors, Alfredson drains the bravado out of an essentially hyperbolic genre to create a film of unparalleled restraint and tenderness. Vital back stories in the novel, Oskar’s father’s alcoholism and the troubled relationship between Eli and her caretaker Hakan, are only wordlessly alluded to in the film, but the adaptation isn’t slighted at all by their absence. Far from it. The reliance of Let the Right One In on the suggestiveness of rich, visual storytelling lends the film an ambiguity that accounts for much of its charm. Alfredson depicts a world of losers: a lonely boy, a shrill single mother ashamed of her broken home, a gaggle of drunks, a grubby vampirette and the broken old man who takes care of her until his untimely death. Let the Right One In is a horror flick without a clearly delineated evil, other than repression and provincialism--byproducts of Blackeberg’s brutal landscape. Aggressors and victims alike are depicted as every day folk just trying to get by. Those looking for blood in the film will find it, but the gore factor is so subdued that it appears fantastical rather than gruesome. The trauma and violence of adolescence—the sensuality of bullying, the shame of being monstrous, and first pangs of sexual desire—are treated more in depth than any nocturnal blood letting. With a keen eye for nuance and elegiac pacing, Alfredson deftly probes his characters’ capacity to love and feel pain through intimate, revealing moments. The solemn hug a bloody-mouthed Eli gives Oskar after he watches her kill a man beautifully encapsulates the limitations of Eli and Oskar’s fragile relationship. Adolescence is depicted as a long Scandinavian winter, steeped in darkness and ice. While Oskar will eventually make it to Spring if he chooses to, Eli will continue to inhabit the dark, cold night.

Failing Up

2009-01-11T22:48:00.000-08:00

originally published in the January issue of whitehot

Failing Up: Or, vergangenheitsbewältingung
Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective
MOCA
By Jesi Khadivi

The Problem Perspective, Martin Kippenberger’s first retrospective in the United States, is a lot to take in. The artist worked in an exhaustive array of media including sculpture, drawing, painting, photography, and book art. Kippenberger built complex relational webs encompassing the role of the artist within cultural production, issues of authorship, Germaneness, shame, and guilt--all filtered through a caustically irreverent sensibility. Curator Ann Goldstein presents the breadth and depth of the artist’s extensive oeuvre, showcasing favorites like the photorealistic series of paintings Lieber maler, male mirseries (Dear Painter, Paint for me, ) and the sprawling installation The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s Amerika (1994), in addition to lesser known works. Kippenberger was nothing if not brash. For better or worse, his braggadocio deemed everything he touched a work of art, from paintings (sometimes painted by Kippenberger, sometimes others) to doodles on hotel stationary. His post-humous popularity is due in equal parts to his emphasis on the conceptual aspects of art and his fecund creative impulse. His extreme self-consciousness about his role as an artist (played out in his innumerable self-portraits) and his consistent exploration of art and value (the series Preis is perhaps the most succinct articulation of this impulse), have been hot topics for contemporary artists. Still, some of most compelling works in the exhibition are deeply rooted in the political history of his motherland, Germany.

Words are constructed like trains in the German language, strung one after the other to form compound words that elicit meaning so precise that they virtually deny translation. The well known word-train, Vergangenheitsbewältingung, or “coming to terms with the past,” was a highly loaded concept in Germany following World War II and the fall of the Berlin wall. Many Germans grappled with how to retain an understanding of their country’s exceptionally violent and traumatic recent history while building a new future. Though it doesn’t exclusively inform his sprawling, multi-faceted practice, shame, embarrassment, and failure of vergangenheitsbewältingung is a central theme in much of Kippenberger’s work. He pursues these tangled threads in works like Ich kann bei besten Willen kein Hackenkreuz entdecken (With the Best Will in the World, I Can’t See a Swastika, 1984), an abstract painting of fractured lines that allude to a fragmented swastika (the work was made during a time that depictions of swastikas were verboten). Put Your Freedom in the Corner and Save it for a Rainy Day (1990) is a direct response to the decision to tear down most of the Berlin wall upon the reunification of Germany. Equating the wall’s removal with an act of historical erasure, the sculpture consists of a broken vase shoddily glued back together displayedin front of a replica of a segmentof the Berlin Wall covered in Robert Gober’s wall-paper Sleeping Man/Hanged Man. Martin, ab in die Ecke und Schäm dich (Martin, Into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed Of Yourself), a life-size sculptural self-portrait of a man facing a corner wearing the artist’s clothing, is a more generalized depiction of shame and repentance. A gentle poke at history, as well as the artist’s well known drinking and carousing.

Culture Jam

2009-01-10T10:51:00.001-08:00

Culture Jam
By Jesi Khadivi
Originally published in artnet

Two months ago, undeterred by the flailing economy, art dealer Charlie James and curator Dane Johnson teamed up to open the Charlie James Gallery in Chinatown in Los Angeles. Their first exhibition, with the straightforward title "Western Front: Inaugural Group Show," featured works by three Bay Area artists from the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco -- Packard Jennings, Ray Beldner and Kara Maria.

Despite current market woes, or perhaps because of them, "Western Front" delighted in cold, hard cash. The suggestive political and economic undertones in the exhibition (some more subtle than others), succinctly articulate the gallery’s post-pop conceptual focus, which mixes agit-prop, conceptual high jinks and bawdy imagery.

Packard Jennings, a collaborator with the Yes Men on last month’s New York Times spoof, contributes several bitingly acerbic culture jams, including his Anarchist Action Figure, the Molotov-cocktail-wielding toy-sized sculpture that has already gotten a certain amount of critical attention. Another standout is his Business Reply Pamphlet, which provides step-by-step pictorial instructions on how to refashion a soul-sucking corporate office space into a nudist utopia, a work that was originally designed to be "shopdropped" in junk-mail sorting centers. The action figure is $2,800, while the pamphlet is $850, framed.

Ray Beldner, a Bay Area sculptor and installation artist (who also shows with New York dealer Caren Golden) offers a sly exegesis of the intersection of art, commerce and appropriation in his "Counterfeit" series, recreations of contemporary blue chip artworks made out of dollar bills. His hanging quilt, Golden Rule (Hollywood -- After Ruscha) (2003), is a version of Ed Ruscha’s Hollywood Sign made out of sewn U.S. currency, while his 6 Squares of Cash (after Carl Andre) (2002) is an Andre floor piece redone in flattened singles.

Beldner’s work fuses the appropriational impulse of Sherrie Levine -- among her first works were presidential portraits taken from coins -- with the obsessive, craftiness of contemporary collagists like Jonathan Herder and Mark Wagner. Prices range from $950 to $12,000.

Like her colleagues here, Kara Maria could be called a political pop artist. Her work explores the popular, well-trodden symbology surrounding U.S. engagement in the Middle East in a series of paintings devoted to the obscene links between petro-commerce and war. In The Muddiness of Right and Wrong, a towering skull wearing camouflage and RayBans gives a toothy grin while two scantily clad women vamp in the foreground.

One figure, naked except for her hijab, throws a seductive glance over her shoulder while the BP petroleum logo encroaches upon her bare ass. The work is available for $8,500. While the relationship between pornography and violence is fertile ground and the cultural context of violence warrants discussion, Walker’s powerful paintings run the risk of inspiring the very "war fatigue" that she seeks to combat.

"Western Front: Inaugural Group Show: Ray Beldner, Packard Jennings, and Kara Maria," Nov. 15, 2008-Jan. 3, 2009, at Charlie James Gallery, 975 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, Ca. 90012.

JESI KHADIVI is an art and film critic based in Los Angeles and Berlin.

Six Shooter Films

2008-12-21T22:16:00.001-08:00

Originally published in the holiday issue of SOMA.

Six Shooter Film Series: Bending, Perhaps Even Breaking International Genre-Driven Cinema
By Jesi Khadivi

Feeling broody? Go see a cop film. Want to sleep with your lights on for a week? Check out the latest Saw movie or any of its myriad spin-offs. There’s an appropriate film genre for whatever emotion you’re looking to elicit. Historically produced on the cheap to screen as opening pictures for bigger budget fare, genre films have expanded into a multi-million dollar industry with fans hungry for the next installment of their favorite superhero or slasher flick.

It wasn’t always so banal, however. The seminal French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema extolled the virtues of directors like Nicholas Ray (Larger than Life/Rebel Without a Cause) and Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho/The Byrds). The budding critics of Cahiers, soon to make their names as French New Wave directors in the 1960s, discovered the (not so) hidden existential poetry of the bleak film noir genre in the dark and smoky cine clubs of Paris. At its best, pulp has the uncanny ability to expose cultural zeitgeist. Noirs and detective films showed these young Frenchmen the darker side of the post-war American psyche. Despite the sea of schlock out there, the past decade’s surge in independent filmmaking has contributed to an expansion of media literacy. MTV has aped the techniques of French New Wave icon Godard for years and Quentin Tarantino, the post-modern film-mix tape-compiler himself, mines the traditions of Blaxploitation, Noir, New Wave, and Kung Fu to create the heady mélange of films like Kill Bill and Jackie Brown. The demand for intellectual genre cinema is growing. Always a step ahead of the pack, Magnolia Pictures aims to fill the educated demand for intelligent genre pictures with their Six Shooter Series, restoring the exquisitely moody, character- driven quality of the genre films of yore to the big screen.

The brain child of Tom Quinn, Magnolia’s dynamic head of acquisitions, the series was a labor of love for the production company. As its name suggests, six international films were chosen for the series: Let The Right One In (Sweden), Special (United States), Time Crimes (Spain), Donkey Punch (Britain), Eden Log (France), and Big Man in Japan (you guessed it, Japan). The series is organized in the tradition of the famed Shooting Gallery, an innovative former NYC-based production company and film series that brought us indie favorites like Sling Blade and A Time For Drunken Horses. “Some of the most exciting, forward-thinking cinema today falls under the genre label and deserves a showcase,” says Magnolia Pictures President Eamonn Bowles. The Six Shooter is intended as a platform to distribute some of these bold experimentations. The relative simplicity of the films in this series is perhaps their boldest innovation. Eschewing the pyrotechnics of many Hollywood movies, the films featured in the Six Shooter series take on a more contemplative and intellectual tone without sacrificing a whit of entertainment value.

The first film in the series, the award winning Swedish vampire film, Let The Right One In, was released on October 24thin New York and Los Angeles. Receiving nearly universal critical acclaim, the surprisingly tender story of a tortured young boy and his relationship with the 12 year old vampire next-door deftly encapsulates the radical potential of this latest crop of genre pictures: It’s smart, emotive, and though the film can be graphic, it doesn’t rely on violence to drive the narrative. Director Tomas Alfredson revels in what he calls the “unequivocal Swedishness” of his film, depicting the trauma of adolescence and the sensuality of violence with a rigorous attention to detail.

Les, the self-loathing, comic book obsessed traffic cop in Hal Haberman & Jeremy Passmore’s film Special, becomes convinced he is a super hero after participating in a clinical trial for “Specioprin Hydrochloride,” a drug intended to curtail the chemicals that produce self-doubt.. He stalks through anonymous streets and alleyways in Los Angeles, attacking innocent people that he imagines have committed crimes. Keeping with Magnolia’s unorthodox distribution methods, Special premiered as a VOD (video on demand) on HD Net in early November prior to its theatrical release later that month. (Back in 2006, Steven Soderbergh’s film Bubble was released simultaneously on DVD, HDTV and in the theaters).

While the time-traveling premise of the Spanish thriller, Time Crimes (dir. Nacho Vigalondo), is fantastical, the scariest and most compelling moments in the film come from the small, psychological gestures. Who knew that a man with a pink bandage-wrapped head miming holding a pair of binoculars could be so terrifying?

The new year will bring the British slasher-thriller Donkey Punch (dir.Oliver Blackburn), a story about 7 Euro party animals forced to duke it out after a freak death on a party yacht in the Mediterranean. In February, Eden Log(dir. Franck Vestiel), a French sci-fi horror flick about a man who awakens in a cave to find himself pursued by a mysterious monster will be released. Followed by Big Man Japan (dir. Hitoshi Matsumoto) in March, the funniest film of the bunch, a kitschy, super hero film in the tradition of Asian slapstick like Kung-Fu Hustle. Like many of the films in the series, Big Manconflates the fantastical and the everyday. “It’s a mock doc about an ordinary Japanese man who will hop into purple underpants to battle Godzilla type monsters,” Quinn explains.

With Let the Right One In and Time Crimes garnering rave reviews (both are already slated for English language remakes), things are looking good for the Six Shooter Series. While online film critics and Fantastic Festival patrons started the buzz, many of the films in the series are finding cross-over success in the art film market. Is another series from Magnolia/Magnet in the works? “If we can find the films, we’ll do it,” Quinn laughs, “but we’re not limited to six. We could do the Five Furious Fingers of Film. Or the Seven Samurai of Cinema."

Mungo Thomson @ the Hammer

2008-12-13T14:16:00.000-08:00

Originally published in the December/January issue of Artweek.

Mungo Thomson
Hammer Projects
By Jesi Khadivi

Taken as a whole, Mungo Thomson’s oeuvre has the deceptive simplicity and humor of a Zen koan. His conversational works filter popular imagery, folkloric tradition, and conceptual art practice through an emphatically Californian insouciance. Works like The American Desert (for Chuck Jones), a mash-up of Wiley Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons presented at the High Desert Test Site in Joshua Tree and Silent Film of a Tree Falling in the Forest (the title says it all) combine meditative investigations of space and landscape with an incredibly goofy (and at times downright corny) pop sensibility. Some of Thomson’s early work evokes the wickedly funny Italian conceptualist, Maurizio Cattelan. Tapestry (2004), a woven Ecuadorian wool rug is emblazoned with political slogans that are both insightful (Why are peace activists so violent?) and cracked (Kerry is Bin Laden’s/Bush is Mine). Between Projects (2001), a sculptural installation consisting of a dozen handmade pencils embedded in the ceiling of the exhibition space is hilarious because of the absence it evokes: a bored office worker casually winging pencils at the ceiling like darts. But Thomson isn’t all fun and games. He presented the deathly still Wind Chimes, six sets of charred garden variety wind chimes, in Red Wind, a group exhibition about the enigmatic and quasi-mystical Santa Ana winds. The work’s pared down simplicity and latent possibility encapsulated the dread and precariousness of the mythic winds better than any other work in the exhibition.

Thomson recently exhibited a variant of his ongoing Negative Space project in the Hammer Museum lobby through Hammer curator (and long time Cattelan collaborator), Ali Subotnik. Keeping with his history of experimenting with ambient sounds and sparse gallery installation, Thomson downloaded photos of the M74 and NGC 3370 galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and inverted them in Photoshop to create an photographic mural. The swirling, bubbling depiction of space debris elicits the tensions between positive and negative, fullness and void, verisimilitude and fancy. He leaves room for humor with the ambient loops that accompany the mural (he changes the frequency of whale calls so they sound like birds and vice versa).Thomson says that the project “came out of reflecting on the color of nothing; in outer space the void is black, and in the art context the void – the empty gallery – is always white.” Art work that interrogates its gallery context is as old as Marcel Duchamp’s 1,200 Bags of Coal (1938), if not older, and Thomson does nothing new by calling our attention to this. He succeeds, however, because Negative Space thrives in liminal, almost forgotten spaces: hallways, stair cases, and overhangs—making transitional spaces a locus of infinite possibility.

Chop Shop

2008-12-13T14:13:00.000-08:00

Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani creates a world alive with the textures of the outer boroughs in his second feature film, Chop Shop. The young protagonist, an enterprising street orphan named Ale (Alejandro Polanco), lives and works in a shady auto repair shop in Willets Point, Queens in order to secure a future for himself and his older sister Isamar (Isamar Gonzales), a lithe young woman prone to secretive relationships and nocturnal assignations. Ale knows how to hustle. He steals hubcaps, hawks bootleg DVDs, and works long hours at the auto shop, all the while squirreling money away in a rusty tin to save up for a catering van that will keep his sister close to him and be their ticket out of abject poverty.
Though he inhabits a child’s body, he clearly lives in a man’s world. Ale’s quest for material and emotional transcendence is rendered with an emotional acuity that is never saccharine. He lives in the shadows of the furthest reaches of New York society without the anchors of family, school, or creature comforts, and though forced by necessity to labor like a man, he reaps none of the benefits of inclusion in the adult world. Polanco channels this anxiety into a taut, energized performance that mingles the carefree joie de vivre of youth with the grim determination of a pre-teen faced with adult responsibilities too young. The rush of the hustle, chaos of the streets, and hurt Ale feels from being cast to the periphery of the grown-up world is viscerally articulated throughout the film. Despite this strong undercurrent of sadness, a feeling of hopefulness prevails.
Keeping with the tradition of contemporary Iranian realist cinema, Chop Shop explores the textures of place and the redemptive bonds of family. Willets Point’s swirl of pigeon keepers, mechanics, lunch trucks, and elevated trains is a playground as much as a prison for Ale and Isamar. Bahrani never pities his characters; instead he imbues them with soulful humanity and presents them as willful dreamers rather than victims of their circumstance. Even in the depths of disappointment they can depend on each other to pull through.

If I am Missing or Dead

2008-12-13T14:11:00.000-08:00

Orginally published in Ins & Outs.

By Janine Latus | Simon & Schuster 2008 | $15.00 | 336 pages

“I didn't want to do it, but you made me," Janine Latus’s boyfriend says after brutally beating her on a ski vacation. These ten simple words are practically synonymous with abusive relationships. It is a verbal trap so common that it borders on clichéd, yet it is one of the most distilled expressions of the perverse logic that drives abuse: the aggressor’s desire for absolution from blame and the victim’s search for whatever misdeed could make their loved one so cruel to them. Journalist Janine Latus skillfully explores the rhetoric of abuse in loose, lean prose in her gripping memoir, If I Am Missing or Dead. The book tells the story of Latus and her younger sister Amy, both charming, bright women who continuously choose domineering, abusive partners. Latus finally leaves her husband in the spring of 2002 after over a decade of marriage. Amy isn’t so lucky. Years after successfully leaving one abusive marriage, she is murdered by her boyfriend, a con artist rodeo cowboy named Ron Ball.
Despite the heart wrenching nature of her story, Latus doesn’t leave room for self-pity or florid depictions of abuse and redemption, no small feat considering that these stylistic flourishes are staples of the genre. Instead, she adroitly mines her history of abuse to expose the roots of her cycle of violence in a sensitive, non-sensational manner. Growing up in the pre-feminist Midwest, Latus is saddled with an imperious, lewd father who belittles his children, and she is subject to myriad unwelcome advances by older men. The narrative arc is structured like an abusive relationship itself; her father’s lecherousness and husband’s control issues are introduced into the narrative with little fanfare. Fleeting details are dropped like a warning sign that could be easily overlooked, like her father’s hand grazing her leg for a fraction of a second too long or the daily “weigh in” with her husband, until they spiral out of control pages hence, and her father is sidling up to one of her friends trying to cop a feel or her husband is monitoring her clothing and Body Mass Index. How one chooses to internalize power or perceived lack of it lies at the heart of this unflinching, evocative story that evokes the claustrophobia of infinitely regressive abusive relationships. It reminds its readers that all victims of abuse have agency, without succumbing to the moralization of a cautionary tale.

By JESI KHADIVI

Hung Liu @ Walter Maciel

2008-12-13T14:09:00.000-08:00

My review of Hung Liu @ the Walter Maciel Gallery was published by The Magazine. Check it out online or find it at a local LA gallery or newstand.

Hung Liu
Rat Years 1948 1960 1972 1984 1996 2008
Walter Maciel Gallery
2642 S. La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles
(310) 839-1840 www.waltermacielgallery.com

Rat Years 1948 1960 1972 1984 1996 2008

Chinese astrology is organized in twelve-year cycles. Each year is named after an animal, and each animal has symbolic associations believed to shape the tenor of the year.

Chinese-American artist Hung Liu was born in the year of the rat, an animal the Chinese associate with prosperity, order, aggression, war, death, and pestilence. Now in her sixth rat year, Liu has significantly shifted her focus inward for an exhibition of self-portraits, a marked departure from the meta-historical portraiture and abstract work she is best known for. Each piece is painted from a photograph taken during a rat year and accompanied by a digitally rendered painting of a drawing made at the age she was in the portrait. While the formula of pairing self-portraits with old drawings is simple, in this case it works. Liu's formal mastery lends her paintings a distinctive gravity. Painted on unprimed linen, the brushstrokes evoke the sketchy quality of a graphite drawing. When combined with the rich colors she uses to offset small details (a cape, scarf, or brooch), a dazzling play of textures ensues.

Though her self-portraits are intimate and compelling, Liu's Rat King series steals the show. A rat king is a mythic group of rats that live their entire lives bound together by their tangled tails, cemented by dirt, blood, and excrement. Liu began thinking of the folkloric rat colonies in the wake of the earthquake that decimated the Sichuan Province shortly before her trip to Beijing this year. The pastel-hued Rat King II is practically transcendental. Tails delicately twist together like a bouquet, the pale, half-erased rats seem like they are being beckoned to a spirit world. Rat King 1, on the other hand, is a broody, realistic depiction of a rat king preserved at the scientific museum, Mauritianum, in Altenburg, Germany. The image is darkly beguiling and violent, evoking myriad situations where humans are trapped by their conditions, whether political, social, or environmental.
by Jesi Khadivi

Lari Pittman

2008-12-08T13:33:00.001-08:00

My review of the Lari Pittman exhibition at Barbara Gladstone in Whitehot Magazine.

LA based artist, Lari Pittman, presents exuberant large-scale paintings in his third show at the Gladstone Gallery. His new body of work is a compelling twist on the tradition of vanitas paintings, 17th century Northern European symbolic still-lives that explore (among other things) man’s mortality and the fleeting impermanence of life’s pleasures. Unlike his Dutch and Flemish brethren, however, there is little room for somberness in Pittman’s paintings. The implied morality in Pittman’s work goes over like a firecracker rather than a lead balloon. On first glance, the paintings are garish. Like a design you would see on a suburban craft fair patron’s t-shirt. The colors are jolting and the iconography is mystifying. Pittman’s densely layered paintings borrow heavily from Pop (think James Rosenquist), tribal art (batik and Thai shadow puppets seem to be an inspiration), and graffiti art. Nonetheless, a bizarre unity begins to coalesce after a few moments with his work. In Untitled #14 a humanoid rabbit-type figure scales a pyramid festooned with delicately hatched patterns towards a shimmering star. A swollen rain/tear drop hangs delicately by a thread from the top of the painting. Bulbous fruits, and I use the word fruit lightly, are interspersed throughout the bottom of the composition, while intestinal looking piping twists throughout the image. The end result is a highly symbolic illustrative style with a Rube Goldbergian quirkiness. Untitled #7 shares some of the iconography of Untitled #2. Translucent layers of highly detailed patterns are painted atop each other. The shadow figures and dripping water remain, yet urns and fried eggs are added to the mix.

In Pittman’s hands, the anxious uncertainty of the vanitas painting is retooled into a celebration of life’s impermanence chock full of stylistic and multi-cultural references. The delicacy with which he paints his bubbles and urns are a paean to life’s possibilities rather than a portent of its brevity.

Camera Ephemera @ Found Gallery

2008-12-07T15:08:00.000-08:00

Originally published in the November issue of Whitehot

Polaroid photography is a loaded, over saturated territory. Vice Magazine and NYC enfant terrible Dash Snow, have popularized the genre via images of waifish chicks flashing their tits and strung out hipster guys blowing rails, brawling, and fucking. The raw immediacy of these images holds some appeal, but they lack sensitivity of artists like Nan Goldin and Ryan McGinley who document countercultural groups (that they belong to) without flaunting or pandering. The Vice Magazine Polaroid aesthetic has more in common with hip hop’s tradition of bragging and boasting than Goldin or McGinley’s penetrating snapshots. Staging bacchanalian rabble rousing for the camera is amusing, but quickly becomes tiresome. The compulsion to document oneself constantly underscores the possibility for counter culture to mutate into what journalist Douglas Harder calls “a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum.”

Ashley Tibbits’ first curatorial foray at Found Gallery is an effort to reclaim the Polaroid.Camera Ephemera attempts to reinstate the medium’s capacity for tenderness. “For many, such pictures are tied closely to memories of childhood, of family. Perhaps we realize that the physicality of holding a precious image in your hand might be a feeling as increasingly obsolete as the medium itself,’ Tibbits writes in her statement for the exhibition. She presents a wide range of approaches in this nine person show. “I didn’t want it to be a line of Polaroids on the wall,” she explains, “I wanted to show the different directions you could take the medium.” And she does. Camera Ephemera showcases 9 distinct photographic visions. Tibbits presents a series of self portraits of herself and an anonymous cut out figure enacting sweet, mundane routines. Clearly a paean to a distant (or past) love, the piece is cheekily endearing. Calethea deCanto’s warm, blurry photographs mounted on wood conjure up Maya Deren’s experimental film masterpiece, Meshes of the Afternoon, with its poetic evocation of inner experience.David Louang’s taut sun burnished portraits and interiors are clear indicators of the nostalgia and inherent melancholia Tibbits described in her curatorial statement. Joshua Wysocki’s framed landscapes are the most straight forward of the bunch, but his clear eye for structure and color make them one of the exhibitions stand-outs.

Despite their current ubiquity in underground art exhibitions and fashion/lifestyle mags, there are no solipstic party shots in the exhibtion.

What does Tibbits think about the popular bawdy boys club aesthetic of Vice? “Don’t even get me started about them,” she says and takes a sip of her coffee.

Digitial Issue of Fabrik

2008-11-18T07:54:00.000-08:00

The new digital issue of Fabrik is online featuring Information at the Signal, my interview with Ed Ruscha! Check it out here.

Julian Hoeber

2008-11-05T09:49:00.000-08:00

Published in the November issue of ArtWeek

Julian Hoeber: All That is Solid Melts Into Air
Blum & Poe
September 6th through October 18th
By Jesi Khadivi

In Sartre’s seminal existential novel Nausea, a young historian is cast into conceptual upheaval when inanimate objects and everyday situations suddenly become alien and menacing, thus beginning an odyssey of dissolution, despair, and ultimately a revelatory reexamination of the nature of being. Julian Hoeber’s third solo exhibition at Blum and Poe, a meditation on psychology and nausea entitled All That is Solid Melts into Air, contains a kernel of this anxiety, but there is no crybabying over the fractured psyche; the crisis of fragmentation is instead embraced and cheekily explored through art historical bricolage. Hoeber’s Op inspired drawings and eviscerated bronze cast heads stylistically diverge from the visceral gore of his slasher influenced films and photographs, but his trademark dark humor shines through the coy restraint of his new body of work.

The works on paper exhibit a mélange of influences-- Abstract Expressionism, Outsider Art, Pop, and Conceptual Art references all elbow up against one another. Blue and red lines zip vertically through Ab Ex, while gouache erasures of the concentric circular pattern creates a rippling effect. I Don’t Care…, an Op send up of Lichtenstein’s Drowning Girl, is a taut example of Sartre’s “sweetish sickness.” It’s the most successful of Hoeber’s attempts at optical illusion and its reference to drowning is something many Americans can relate to given the current mortgage and banking crisis. Whether intentional or not, Hoeber’s persistent Op spirals and bronze heads riddled with puncture wounds are chillingly evocative of the economy’s downward spiral and our seemingly endless state of military engagement. A litany of anxieties could be ascribed to the work, but the artist does not explicitly articulate any. Hoeber’s work engages with malaise from a distance and functions more as an exploration of angst than an overwrought expression of it.

Hoeber flexes his latent gore muscles in a series of “shot, beaten, and bitten” bronze busts on mirrored pedestals which are equally as illusory as the drawings. While the heads have been brutally pummeled and pumped full of lead, for the most part their faces are curiously dispassionate, as if they were killed during a moment of meditative contemplation or sexual ecstasy. The classical presentation and rarified material deny the adrenaline that could be derived from a more active representation of violence, yet (even more creepily) allow the material results of brutality to be appreciated at an aesthetic distance.

The artist clearly embraces what he calls “postmodern silliness.” In his artist statement he proudly proclaims himself a “tube” that has “eaten up all that dead stuff. Cooked it. Chewed it up and made some shit out of it…chewed up history, digested it and pushed out something which although stinking a little of death, has a certain whole synthesized, digested quality.” Lest we get too bogged down in high mindedness, it’s important to remember that Hoeber can be funny. Really funny. In his drawing Stupid Face, the glowering visage of an aging hipster hovers over yet another concentric circle and several works on paper have a knowingly juvenile fixation on breasts. Yet his work succeeds not because of his clowning, but because aesthetic and cultural rigor are conflated with jocularity.

Information at the Signal

2008-10-24T09:42:00.000-07:00

My interview with Ed Ruscha is on the cover of the latest issue of Fabrik. Check out the magazine here until I can figure out a way to embed the file. (It's on page 8)

John Lautner

2008-10-07T10:40:00.000-07:00

John Lautner: Between Heaven and Earth
Hammer Museum
Through October 18th
By Jesi Khadivi

Published in Whitehot Magazine, October

American architect John Lautner worked in the right place at the right time.
As one of the progenitors of Googie architecture--the ultra modern, futuristic architectural style that takes its name from a coffee shop Lautner designed on Sunset Boulevard-- his early work dovetailed with the burgeoning automobile and aerospace culture of 1950s Southern California. Lautner’s 1960 commission Chemosphere, a space aged octahedronal dwelling perched upon a twenty foot pole, was described by Encyclopedia Britannica as the “most modern home built in the world” and has been featured in numerous Hollywood films. Lautner’s structures are full of glass and exaggerated curves, many of them nestled in stunning natural landscapes. He was disparaged for his poppiness by many critics of his day (Googie architecture only began to receive academic credibility with Venturi, Izenour, and Brown’s Learning From Las Vegas), but his work remains compelling today because it functions at the interstice of organic architecture and the flamboyantly stylized anticipatory fervor of the atomic age. This fusion was doubtlessly fostered by the blend of natural and unnatural splendors in his adopted home of Southern California, his utilitarian North Woods upbringing, and the tutelage of his mentor, the seminal American architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Sadly, the Hammer’s Lautner exhibition is the least stimulating of this summer’s architecture fare (The MoMA and the Whiteney Museum in New York mounted exhibitions about pre-fabricated architecture and Buckminster Fuller respectively). Despite the loftiness of its title, the show is leaden and a bit of a downer. The exhibition is comprised of three rooms filled to the brim with architectural drawings and cardboard models. Large scale plaster models are installed in front of projections of landscapes, presumably to contextualize the buildings and give the viewer the feeling of “being there.” This only succeeded in drawing me closer to the exhibition text, which was informative and interspersed with thumbnail views of gorgeously executed photographs of Lautner’s buildings. It’s a pity there weren’t larger scale versions of these photos included in the show because they deftly encapsulated the complicated beauty of Lautner’s buildings. While the exhibition suffers from didactism, the accompanying programming is both thoughtful and inventive. The museum has hosted walk throughs of various Lautner homes, a screening of a documentary film about Lautner, as well as a symposium on post war architecture.

Michael Müller: Werke

2008-10-06T14:07:00.000-07:00

By Jesi Khadivi
Orginally published Art Review.com

In his first solo exhibition in the US, German artist Michael Müller (who has shows running concurrently in Düsseldorf and London), presents pairs of drawings and small paintings that not only converse, but complete each other. Best known for his work with drawing and text, Müller employs the act of drawing as an instrument of translation. Using each medium like a dialect of a mother tongue, he teases out exquisite variations in texture, perception, and understanding.

Müller's nine-part series (1 a:m_) Reflecting on Pink Elephants (all works 2008) is a restrained play of mirrored images. In Part 3: Reflecktion zu einem Fleck (Reflection of a blot), a small, high gloss painting of a Rorschach-inspired ink-blot on wood is echoed by an ethereal pencil drawing. Although it is discernibly the same image, the taut, hand-wrought scribbles imbue the drawing with a dreamlike, otherworldly quality. In Part 4: Diktatur der Form (Dictatorship of the form), a small piece of wood is painted a glossy white while the corresponding drawing is an exercise in compulsive mark making: the entire sheet is covered with small, delicately hatched pencil markings.

While Müller's work has clear formalist undertones, the exhibition does not suffer from a lack of humor or compassion. The two-part work Corner Love consists of a gestural gouache of an angler fish and a sculpture of a renegade minimalist cube snared on a fishing hook. One of the most gripping pieces is Der Versuch unter Hypnose abtrakt zu sein (The attempt to be abstract under hypnosis), a loving video meditation on the act of drawing, propelled by a minimal, ambient score. Three drawings produced during the making of the film accompany the projection in the mezzanine gallery.

Post Consumed

2008-08-20T08:03:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Art Review's site

Center For Land Use Interpretation, Los Angeles
31 May – ongoing

Review by Jesi Khadivi

Approximately 38,000 tons of waste is produced in Los Angeles County each day (actually down from the 50,000 tons per day in the 1980s). Because of the city's feverishly-scrutinized sprawl, car culture, and mass entertainment, it's a common target for a critique on detritus. The Center For Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), a somewhat mysterious or at least deliberately ambiguous organisation with a practice that encompasses art, environmentalism, urbanism and sociology, has been examining the uses (or misuses) of fringe and post-industrial landscapes in the US since its inception in 1994. Their current exhibition, Post Consumed, offers a stark, unadorned view of the journey of LA's waste, from curbside to landfill. The exhibition reads like an artifact found in the future; CLUI's approach to presenting this rich investigation is minimal, direct and devoid of any hint of sensationalism.

Most of the information here is presented through four documentary videos, dispassionately titled 'Collecting and Sorting the Trash of LA County', 'Diversions in the Waste Stream', 'Inside an MRF (Material Recovery Center)', and 'Landfills'. Everyday household objects are presented on a pedestal, with corresponding placards explaining how these items comprise the city's waste stream. There's also information on a floating proposal for the future of the city's garbage: a plan to compact trash at El Puente, the county's largest landfill, and load it onto trains for disposal at the Mesquite landfill east of the Salton Sea.

While the city of Los Angeles is referenced frequently throughout the exhibition texts, there is nothing particularly local about Post Consumed. The photographs of vast, anonymous lots and sorting facilities could have been taken anywhere in the US. CLUI's deadpan, detached assessment of waste production and management only underscores the universality of this issue, as well as the anonymity of its perpetrators.

Post Consumed is neither hopeless, nor hopeful. CLUI's retro, instructional approach avoids the chest-beating histrionics that could so easily accompany such an exhibition, and for the most part resists aestheticisation. But there are a few moments in the videos where the material veers towards the artful: the hypnotic repetitive back and forth motion of trash compactors, the surprisingly graceful ease with which garbage workers sort through waste for recyclables. Throughout the exhibition a clipped, staccato pulse of information prevails, leaving the viewer guessing what CLUI's stance on waste management really is. By casting an unflinching eye on the mechanism of waste production, Post Consumed asks the viewer to think about how we structure the by-products of our effluence, whether the system works, and if and how we want to change it.

Crying Over Broken Eggs

2008-07-07T13:57:00.000-07:00

Originally published in the April issue of the Brooklyn Rail

Crying Over Broken Eggs
By Jesi Khadivi

Known for his glacially paced, emotionally violent films, Michael Haneke has become one of contemporary cinema’s most loathed and feted directors. The Austrian takes on issues that many viewers would prefer to ignore—violence, class difference, power, guilt and sado-masochism.

He wowed American audiences with his 2001 film The Piano Teacher, his adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s novel about a masochistic piano teacher who becomes romantically involved with her much younger male student. Teacher won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. Caché (2005), a thriller about a wealthy couple tormented by mysterious home surveillance tapes and crudely scrawled drawings, won Haneke an even broader American audience. The film also won at Cannes and Haneke nabbed the Best Director, FIPRESCI Prize, and Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. Last October, MoMA celebrated his career with a retrospective that included all of Haneke’s theatrically released films plus his work for Austrian-German television, calling him one of contemporary cinema’s “most provocative and incisive film makers” and citing a cinematic style “at once musical and mathematical.”

For Haneke, the medium is the message. As with Hitchcock, many of his films toy with the passive voyeurism of film spectatorship. Unlike the British auteur, however, Haneke largely denies his audience visual pleasure. In a typically sadistic fashion, viewers will be punished if they take delight in what they see. And that’s the best case scenario. At his worst, Haneke borders on being didactic and preachy. His films are masterfully constructed but far from visually breathtaking; Haneke remains obsessed with the hidden mechanisms of film rather than the pleasures movies elicit. Many of his films are comprised of long static shots punctuated by brief eruptions of violence, tedious bouts of ennui punctured by flourishes motivated by desperation (A neck slashing suicide in Caché). Each film is a taut, beautifully constructed trap and Haneke feels like a cat playing with his prey before devouring it.

Haneke’s recent American English-language remake of his echt-disturbing 1997 German-language film Funny Games has generated a fair amount of controversy. Critics challenge Haneke’s use of violence and voices have been raised in a superior moral tone, ad nauseum. Funny Games’ plot is simple, timeless even. An eloquent, self-assured young man and his awkward, winsome sidekick show up uninvited at a bourgeois family’s country home and proceed to physically and mentally torture them, all the while displaying impeccable manners.

Most of the violence occurs off-screen and much screen time is devoted to lengthy deliberations and emotional abuse that leaves viewers fidgeting in their seat. The deferral of violence is painful and the classic villainous duo of sadist and buffoon heightens the discomfort.

The “action” begins when a nervous, well-dressed young man named Peter (Brady Corbet) comes to the family’s door. He needs some eggs. Ann (Naomi Watts) is happy to oblige. Peter breaks the eggs before he is out the door. Ann gives him more. He breaks her cell phone by dropping it in a sink full of water. Now Ann’s pissed. Approximately 34 minutes and ¾ of a carton of eggs from the film’s start, the golf clubs come out and the funny games begin. That’s a long-ass time to get some action in a thriller, especially within the lexicon of big budget American movie wherein heads roll within the first 15 minutes of the film. It’s impressive that Haneke preserved his pacing, but the film suffers in other ways. The acting is solid, not stellar. Naomi Watts shows impressive range as Ann, but she reads too friendly and cheerful to play high WASP (That is, until the strangers start beating her family with golf clubs and chairs). Tim Roth and Devon Gearheart give impressive performances, but the sociopaths killers fall flat. This is unfortunate, because the strength of the film relies on their performance. In the original the pair of villains have a creepy In Cold Blood meets Kafkaesque vibe. Peter is a bumbling decoy, and Paul the sadistic genius. The fearsome logic of Arno Frisch (the original Paul and Benny from Benny’s Video) had me trembling in my seat. His trim, dark long-legged physique and steely deadpan demeanor showed a deeply disturbed, repressed psychotic mind. Michael Pitt never becomes his character; he’s in it for the shits and giggles. Funny Games is only the latest example of how the actor shows excellent taste in directors and material, but consistently fails to bring the necessary depth to his roles.

While the look and pacing of the film are still fresh and engaging, other elements haven’t held up so well. It’s tiresome when Peter and Paul break the fourth wall and address the camera. One of Haneke’s great successes as a director is how effortlessly he builds meticulous environments and distills emotions and gestures. He reduces cultural compulsions to their bare essence, though the cheap mechanism of direct address in his films seems like overkill. In an art house German film from the late ’90s, the renowned “remote control scene” packs a bit more punch. It lacks the same gravitas in a Hollywood movie, whose audience is accustomed to trickery. After 11 years, Haneke’s conceptual flourish seems gimmicky.

Haneke said that he originally made Funny Games with an American audience in mind. He comments on the remake: “When I first envisioned Funny Games in the middle of the ’90s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American Cinema, its violence, its naïveté.” Funny, because the “Americanness” of the violence is one of the least interesting things about the film. What was so riveting about the original Funny Games and what inspired my partner to demand that I “turn that damned film OFF” is how cultural repression and proper manners dovetail so seamlessly with violence.

The thought of letting a stranger, however well dressed he may be, into a German home on such a flimsy pretense is hard to believe. To demand the remainder of a carton of eggs after already breaking 3/4 of them in a culture where people discuss and formally agree to use du, the informal form of you, is virtually unthinkable. Manners are written into the German language. The unrelenting “darf ich...” (may I?) posed by the intruders makes Anna, Georg and Schorschi players in the game more than Ann, George and Georgie. Linguistically, the Germans are sanctioning their own demise.

While script, shot sequence, production design and score are virtually the same, something gets lost in cultural translation. When Funny Games is divorced from its cultural context, it takes on the air of a beautifully constructed, Germanically pretentious exploitation film. If you take Funny Games at face value it’s not very interesting, not much more than a film school exegesis on voyeurism, complicity and pleasure. Haneke is a director steeped in European history and aesthetics; he fails at telling an American story. I was hopeful about his first mainstream Hollywood film, even excited. If Haneke attempts another American film he needs to build an American story from the inside out, rather than fix a pedantic European hawk’s eye to the failures of American culture. Because without subtext Haneke will remain a pompous outsider looking in.

A Fair Man: Stephen Cohen Talks About the LA Art Scene

2008-06-13T00:05:00.001-07:00

Photo Ted Cleve

My interview with LA gallerist Stephen Cohen has been published in the second issue of Fabrik Magazine.

Stephen Cohen casts his net wide. His galleries, the Stephen Cohen gallery in LA and Cohen Amador in New York, represent a staggering number of international photographers working in a wide variety of genres. As if running two internationally renowned photo galleries weren’t enough, he is the founder and driving force behind photo l.a., photo MIAMI and artLA. His fairs have not only been instrumental in drawing attention to the LA art scene, but have broadened the appreciation of photography by serious collectors. Cohen was named one of the “Top 100 most influential people” by American Photography Magazine and included Art + Auctions 2004 “Power List.” He spoke to Fabrik about the evolution of the bourgeoning LA art scene and art fairs while traveling in Europe.

FABRIK: How did you begin your career as an art dealer and how did you choose to focus on photography?

SC: I majored in Art (photography and sculpture) and Theater as an undergrad and went to USC film school for my graduate degree. Art dealing began by accident. I needed to work after graduating from film school, so I augmented whatever film jobs I could get with selling photography books, which I had been collecting since college. Eventually I started selling 19th century prints to dealers in LA. Soon I was doing road trips cross-country selling pieces I had on consignment that dealers in LA and NY considered unsellable. I got a reputation for moving inventory for dealers because I was able to sell them.

After a while I decided I needed to find more clients in LA, so I started photo l.a. which is now in its’ 18th year. My work on the fair allowed me to open a small gallery.

FABRIK: Your gallery has an outstanding artist roster. I’m impressed not only by the quality, but also the range of work you have chosen to represent. It seems that many galleries run the risk of overspecializing. What are the merits of representing such a wide range of artists and what are the potential challenges?

SC: My gallery directors and I feel strongly about our artists. I love vintage work but it’s getting harder to find and it’s very expensive. Contemporary photo-based work has become increasingly desirable for collectors. It is good to have a variety of work to offer them.

We are going through a period of letting some artists go as we add new ones. It is always a challenge to present new work to the public, but it’s satisfying when the response and sales are strong.

FABRIK: LA is quickly becoming an arts destination. At the same time, California galleries and artists often have a regional identity. Do you consider yourself a “California Dealer?”

SC: I am a dealer in California. We work with artists and clients from around the country and the world.

Photo: Ted VanCleave

FABRIK: Tell me about the evolution of the LA art scene and how being a dealer in LA has changed. Do you feel that LA is becoming an international center for the arts? If so, how do you perceive that transition?

SC: LA has a long history of artists coming out here for the weather, cheap rents and the light. The city was a cowboy town and was much more innocent in the past. It allowed artists freedom for experimentation since it wasn’t a center of the art world. Now people recognize that LA was a major force in presenting the work of young artists in the 60s and 70s that are now established in the art world. Ed Ruche immediately comes to mind. The Nick Wilder Gallery was in the forefront of this movement.

Now Los Angeles is back in the art world and stronger. Many established artists call the Southland their home and an increasing number of artists are moving here. It’s hard to pinpoint an LA style because it is a city of immigrants from other States.

Younger galleries have come on the scene over the past ten years and have made a significant impact internationally. Many curators and gallerists come here to grab the young artists at Cal Arts, UCLA, USC and Arts Center before they even have a gallery representing them. LA is hot in that sense.

FABRIK: How did photo l.a. begin?

SC: photo l.a. began in January 1992. I was traveling around the country and had more clients outside of the city than in LA. I initially planned to do the fair for a couple of years, get a good client base and move on. I opened my first small gallery with money from the fair.

As photo l.a.’s fame and reputation spread across the country, we had more dealers wanting to be involved. Eventually our first venue, Butterfields Auction House on Sunset Blvd., was bursting at the seams. After eight years we moved to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium where we were able to expand the size and scope of the fair. This year we moved to the Barker Hangar, which was a huge step up for the size and quality of the fair.

A local dealer suggested that I start a contemporary art fair, so I started ArtLA in 2004. Over the past four years, the fair has grown in stature and attendance. This year had an amazing group of impressive
dealers. Our committee was headed by Doug Hug, who was just appointed the Director of Art Cologne.

FABRIK: How do you think the art fair scene in LA differs from its New York and European counterparts?

SC: Fairs in New York and Europe have a longer history, not to mention the cache of art collecting in Europe. The fairs are much larger and attract a huge audience. US fairs like the Armory and Art Basel Miami Beach have become bigger players in the world and are anxiously awaited each year. While LA’s art scene is much more active than in the past, it doesn’t have the history of New York City or Basel.

FABRIK: Have collectors’ attitudes changed towards photography in your time as a dealer?

SC: Yes. There are more of them collecting photo-based work. On the whole they are becoming much better acquainted with photography through the photo and art fairs.

FABRIK: What do you have planned for your upcoming season?

SC: We are working hard on photo MIAMI which has become a benchmark for contemporary photography and one of the must see fairs during Art Basel Miami Beach after only two years.

We always have something of interest: new galleries, artists and special projects.

FABRIK: What are some LA based artists and emerging spaces to watch?

SC: Many of the young galleries in Culver City and Chinatown are exciting: Jail, in Chinatown; Roberts & Tilton and Blum & Poe, in Culver City and Acme in Los Angeles.

FABRIK: Do you have any advice for artists that are just starting out?

SC: Keep your day job. There are sacrifices if you are serious about your work and life as an artist. Nothing is owed to you and there are a lot of “outrages and injustices“ over what art becomes popular. I think an artist
always needs to look at other art and be a good editor of their own work.

In One Word Emotion

2008-04-11T17:36:00.000-07:00

In One Word Emotion
By Jesi Khadivi
Originally published in the April issue of Brooklyn Rail

Pierrot Le Fou opens with a lengthy voice-over explanation of Velasquez narrated over shots of a tennis game and a man leafing through paperbacks in an outdoor Parisian bookshop. Cut to the same man sitting in a bathtub with a cigarette dangling from his lips reading an art history text aloud to a pig-tailed child. Describing Velasquez’s paintings, he tells his daughter, “a spirit of nostalgia prevails, yet we see none of the ugliness or sadness, none of the gloom or cruelty of this crushed childhood.”

Our narrator Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a buttoned-up dreamer, a self described “huge question mark dangling over the Mediterranean horizon.” The acme of Godardian male protagonists, Ferdinand deplores and delights in his own alienation. Despite his shortcomings, his yearning for transcendence and depth is palpable, visible even through his veil of neuroticism and obvious need for control. In other words, Ferdinand’s ripe for self discovery. He wanders around a party—where guests communicate solely in advertising lingo—without saying a word to anybody until he strikes up a conversation (through a translator, no less) with a lone American. In a historic cameo, pulp director Samuel Fuller tells Ferdinand that “a film is like a battleground; It has love, hate, action, violence and death. In one word, emotion.” Pierrot Le Fou proves Fuller’s definition of cinema to be spot-on.

Pierrot follows Ferdinand and his ill-fated love for his former flame Marianne, a fun-loving con artist (the exact nature of her underworld connections remains shady, even after multiple viewings). Ferdinand and Marianne leave Paris on the run with a suitcase full of stolen money and proceed to rob, cheat and charm their way to the South of France. Marianne calls herself “a sentimental girl.” She likes flowers, animals, blue skies and music. A cunning woman-child, Marianne is as loveable as she is amoral. She can kill a man without blinking, but walks around for much of the movie swinging a well-worn stuffed dog. While she may not subscribe to traditional, or even sub-cultural ideas about right and wrong (ultimately she betrays everyone she meets, a big no-no in the underworld), she remains a woman in thrall to her emotions. This is due in equal parts to Ms. Karina’s evocative performance and the director’s complex adoration of his actress/wife Anna Karina. Velasquez’s spirit of nostalgia; its “open spaces and silences” pervade the film, which proves to be Godard’s paean to his fading youth (he was 35) and deteriorating relationship with his Karina, his long time collaborator and great love. Pierrot depicts lovers of the worst kind: a man who’s too hard-hearted to love effectively and who desperately needs to be loved, and a woman brimming with love and vitality who cannot be trusted.

The peaks and valleys of Marianne and Ferdinand’s love are punctuated with fine art and comic stills, flashing neon and excerpts from Ferdinand’s journal. This mélange of melodrama, road movie and crime film establishes the bold visual style that Godard continues to explore in Weekend, La Chinoise and Two or Three Things I Know About Her. It’s a poppy film, teetering on the brink of adulthood; a film about wanting to be seen, negotiating what it means to be alive, and the distance between feelings and ideas.

The Revolutionary Art Of Emory Douglas

2008-02-10T09:29:00.000-08:00

Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas
MOCA Pacific Design Center
October 21st, 2007 through February 24th, 2008

By Jesi Khadivi
Originally published in Whitehot Magazine, February 2008

For better or worse, style plays a significant role in propelling social movements and historicizing their images. The seductive, bomb throwing chic of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and Hanoi Jane’s power fisted mug shot have spawned numerous fetishist coffee table books and fashion magazines spreads. (Prada Meinhof, anyone?) Revolutionary groups live on in our popular consciousness because of the radical style they embody as much as their politics.

The Black Panther Party is no exception. Founded by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in Oakland, California in 1966, the Panthers espoused the importance of self-determination in the wake of a government that oppressed, neglected and exploited African American people. They started programs offering breakfast for school children, free food, free clothing and free shoes. Not only did they serve their community, they made being black look powerful. Their uniform of afros, berets and leather jackets perfectly encapsulated the Black Power movement of the 60s and 70s.

The Panthers built their brand beautifully. They were brilliant self-promoters. An integral part of the Panther “By any means necessary” image is the work of their Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas. Douglas joined the party in 1967 at the age of 22. His lithograph posters, collages and drawings were featured prominently in the party newspaper, The Black Panther. MOCA Pacific Design Center has mounted an impressive exhibition of Douglas’ work thanks to the generous assistance of collectors Alden and Mary Kimbrough, as well as other private collectors and cultural institutions. The exhibition features lithograph posters in both black and white and eye-popping color, an extensive selection of The Black Panther papers and a wall sized reproduction of Douglas’ design for Afro-American Solidarity with the Oppressed People of the World.

The right to self-defense was a critical component of the Panther credo. Huey P. Newton chose the metaphor because the cat never attacks unprovoked, but will fight to its death. Douglas’ representations of this ethos fuse Russian Constructivism, psychedelic poster design and FAP style propaganda. The overall tenor swings between the quasi-evangelical progressivism and aggression. Many of Douglas’ designs feature inspirational quotations like “We shall survive. Without a doubt.” As many, if not more, show the possession of a weapon as a vital step on this road to liberation. Douglas’ iconic use of women, children and firearms showed that the movement was nurtured, growing and nothing to fuck with.

Everybody Gets Screwed

2008-02-10T09:26:00.000-08:00

Everybody Gets Screwed
By Jesi Khadivi
The Yacoubian Building (2006), Dir. Marwan Hamed, Strand Releasing
Originally published in the Brooklyn Rail, February 2008

This good old-fashioned melodrama explores political corruption, sexual coercion, poverty, religious fundamentalism and the deep-rooted melancholia at the core of contemporary Egyptian life. At $6 million, Marwan Hamed’s directorial debut had the highest budget of any Egyptian film to date. The anxiously awaited adaptation of Alaa Al Aswany’s best selling novel tells the story of the Yacoubian Building, an elegant, old world building in downtown Cairo that has fallen from grace.

Once the home of well-heeled families, it now houses faded dignitaries, a homosexual newspaper editor and a rooftop teeming with dispossessed migrant workers from the countryside. Everyone has his or her cross to bear. Bothayna, a beautiful and conservative young woman, must help her mother support her siblings after her father’s death while dodging the leering eyes and wandering hands of her employers. Her childhood sweetheart, Taha, an earnest and studious janitor’s son, buckles under social pressure and shame at his poverty, and becomes a religious fundamentalist. Even the rich don’t have it so easy. Hatem Rachid, a cosmopolitan newspaper editor, lures young soldiers into his bed with bottles of fine wine. His smug countenance barely disguises the deep loneliness and isolation that he feels in a culture leagues away from accepting his sexuality. Haj Azzam, a millionaire drug lord/politician, takes a secret second wife after recurring wet dreams. Perhaps the most tragic figure in this social tableau is Zaki El Dessouki, a wealthy, foreign educated engineer from a distinguished Egyptian family. His neighbors still call him by the ceremonial title “pasha”, the rough equivalent of an English lord. His poorer neighbors revere him and ply him with requests for advice. Zaki’s social equals, however, see him as a skirt chaser fueled by copious amounts of alcohol.

At first glance, the film is a morality play with high dramatic flourishes. It’s shot like television and has the narrative engine of a soap opera. In spite of, or perhaps because of these traits, the film is surprisingly compelling. The power dynamic between men and women, rich and poor and urban and rural plays out between the sheets. Sex is the common currency driving the film and it provides insight into characters that would otherwise be lost beneath layers of schmaltz and melodrama. The sympathy that the simple, broad smiling soldier Abdo Raboh elicits as he unwittingly begins to succumb to Hatem Rachid’s advances is quickly complicated as he boasts that he frequently takes his wife by force when she is too tired to make love. The political and social ills of contemporary Egypt are expressed via sexual humiliation; everybody is screwing everybody else, but no one comes out on top.

Sister Act

2008-01-24T15:41:00.000-08:00

Originally published in Pitch

by Jesi Khadivi

Getting around late at night in Brooklyn can be a drag. Things have improved over the years, but back in 2000, commuters were known to throw things out of frustration waiting for the G train. It was a total buzz kill.

Imagine my delight when I was offered a ride in a pink Buick to a Madagascar Institute party in Cobble Hill. My lovely driver was Miss Tanya Gagné, one half of the amazing Wau Wau Sisters (the other is the fabulous Adrienne Truscott). Not only did I get a ride, I showed up in style. This fantastic pink whale of a car (complete with dice on the locks) is a perfect summation of Wau Wau style: a careful attention to detail, a deep understanding of genre and retro accoutrements, and a razor-sharp wit.

In her canonical Notes on “Camp”, Susan Sontag describes “camp” as an aesthetic phenomenon, a way of seeing the world. “Camp sees everything in quotation marks…to perceive camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.” The Wau Wau Sisters have built a deliciously cracked myth around their personas as performers that colors every aspect of their impressively varied and physically demanding act, which includes trapeze artistry, off-kilter hipster circus routines, and country and heavy metal songs played on matching guitars.

The Sisters tell the tale of their humble beginnings in the short Super 8 film, Wau Wau Sisters Meet! According to the legend, three strangers met “…somewhere off route I-95 in 1969,” and had a romp in the sheets together. “A few months and a few cocktails later,” the sisters were born. They lived unaware of each other until a chance meeting in knee socks and hot pants exploded into an impromptu dance routine with the neighbors that could put even the Sharks and the Jets to shame.

Adrienne and Tanya really are half-sisters, but they grew up separately. “Adrienne grew up with her mum on the golden shores of New Jersey and I grew up with my mum in the Live Free or Die State of New Hampshire,” Tanya explains. Performers from day one, they both independently took a shine to dance and gymnastics, and would regale family and neighbors with their respective routines. “We would even make colorful programs, charge admission and make weird snacks to give out,” says Tanya. The sisters began circus and trapeze work in their teens and twenties, and even worked for the same two groups: Circus Amok, a political one-ring circus/theater troupe; and LAVA, a Brooklyn-based dance group. “When we both found ourselves living and working in New York as performers,” Tanya says, “AND found out that we both wrote dirty songs and played guitars, the Wau Wau Sisters were born.”

I first saw the Wau Waus perform Sister Christian, a gymnastic strip-tease chock full of lesbian innuendo, set to the Night Ranger power ballad of the same name, at Galapagos, a bar and performance venue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2000. Clad in Catholic school-girl uniforms and knee socks (a Wau Wau costume staple), Adrienne and Tanya naughtily read the bible, smoke cigarettes, guzzle booze from chalices and tear each other’s clothes off during a series of handstands, splits, and assisted balancing acts.

The Wau Wau Sisters may prove the exception to Sontag’s point that “…camp which knows itself to be camp is less satisfying.” Sister Christian is more than a goofy, spicy strip tease by two beautiful women: it’s a deft interplay of bold physical comedy and high concept. The Sisters purposefully undermine their gymnastic prowess with cornball flourishes reminiscent of a middle-school talent show. The cheeky crucifixion at the end of the piece pokes fun at the prurient sensuality of passion plays, a sensibility that reached its pinnacle in Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ.

The act is laugh-out-loud funny and oozing with sex appeal. But these women aren’t just hot; they could probably beat you up. As anyone who has suffered through a yoga class can tell you, it’s hard enough lifting your leg straight up in the air, let alone dangling from someone’s toes or somersaulting on a trapeze.

The subversiveness of the Wau Wau Sisters’ acts is due in no small part to the self-aware sexuality that the new burlesque movement embodies at its best. “I think the neo-burlesque movement has been a pretty amazing opportunity for women performers, women in comedy and for performance art in general,” Adrienne told me. “There is a small element of the movement that is very retro and focused on being sexy. For me, that isn't enough to keep it interesting.” Adrienne acknowledges that there is tremendous potential for burlesque; indeed, the Wau Wau Sisters’ ingenuity as pioneers of the movement in New York City is a testament to just how interesting it can be. Although classics like Sister Christian are still included in their act, the Wau Waus are always working on new material—they’ve come a long way from the Galapagos days. Constant touring has required that they hone their routines, and they regularly incorporate new elements and surprises into their act. “We refuse to become bored or content as performers,” Adrienne explains. “I think we add a lot more new material and improvisation than the average touring show.”

Throughout all of their acts (and there are over 80 of them), the sisters combine physical comeliness with jaw-dropping physical dexterity, all in a variety of perfectly turned out costumes and props. As guests on the Sharon Osbourne Show, Adrienne holds a perfect handstand for over a minute in a skirt with a bull’s eye on her butt while Tanya sings her song Easy Target. Adrienne then sings the next song, a hilarious lament about being shunned by a boyfriend’s Texan parents, which ends, “The good Lord he protects us/from girls like you/who are poor,” while perched on her sister’s feet. They regularly perform with matching guitars while sitting on each other’s shoulders. Their trapeze routine, set to rock classics like The Clash’s London Calling and Guns N’ Roses’ Welcome to the Jungle, manages to be both spectacular and funny. Who knew it was possible to be witty while dangling upside down?

New Traditionalist

2007-11-16T10:48:00.000-08:00

New Traditionalist
Originally published in Pitch Magazine, October 2007

Seven male dancers take the stage, moving rapidly from left to right, with swooping arms set to a thunderous Beethoven piano sonata. Their gestures spring from classical ballet, but the emphatic lateral arm thrusts have the urgency of African dance. The company drops to the floor for a quick push-up reminiscent of butoh, a Japanese performance art that melds traditional Japanese dance with various Western influences. After the men’s athletic, aesthetic grab-bag, the female corps are a bit more refined, almost demure. Still, the pumped up score and the dancers’ quick, taut movements give both performances equal intensity.
The Sacramento Ballet performs Amaranthine in 2006, Helen Pickett’s first commission after Etesian, her break out piece for the Boston Ballet earlier that year. Because of Pickett’s longtime involvement with William Forsythe and the Wooster Group, I confess to her that I had expected “difficult” dance: deconstructive work with multi-media stage elements. ” You didn’t expect something so traditional?” she interjected, and burst out laughing. She hooked me with her choice of Beethoven for Amaranthine, whose compositions are difficult enough to play, let alone dance to (his piano sonatas are full of lightning-paced runs countered by abruptly slow phrasing with pregnant pauses). This astute choice of score speaks to the rigorous and emotive quality of Pickett’s choreography. It also speaks to her confidence as a new choreographer, which she has in spades.

Pickett’s pieces to date contemporize ballet via her distillation of gesture; the grace, agility, and rigor traditionally associated with the form remain. She is a dancer’s choreographer and gives her dancers the creative space to explore and push the boundaries of movement. Some movements are slightly off-kilter, imbuing her choreography with a richness that is akin to dissonance in music. The vivacious, loose-limbed male soloist in Amaranthine channels a loopy, unhinged nutcracker. His performance is joyous; I rewound and watched him on repeat.

No doubt Pickett’s confidence – and talent – is due to her rich and varied background; Her career signature is interdisciplinary collaboration and improvisation. Pickett is a transmedia flirt. She has worked with the some of most exciting and innovative names in dance, theater, and fine art: William Forsythe and the Ballet Frankfurt, the Wooster Group, the artist Eve Sussman and The Rufus Corporation, among others. While schooling me in the intricacies of dance and choreography via the telephone, Pickett dropped references to Paul Virilio, Iggy Pop, Baudelaire, and various mind-body integration techniques. Yet one of her greatest charms is how humble she remains for such an accomplished and heavily referenced woman. Her quest for knowledge, like her art, is a work in progress. “The more education you have the more you can riff…it’s an addictive personality,” she says.
As a student of the San Francisco Ballet, Pickett danced with the company under the direction of Michael Smuin, Lew Christensen, and Helgi Tomasson. After meeting William Forsythe, director of the Ballet Frankfurt (now the Forsythe Company), in San Francisco while he was choreographing New Sleep, Pickett went to Germany to audition for the company. It was an important move, Forsythe being a major innovator of contemporary ballet; his highly cerebral, intuitive choreography and inventive use of non-traditional scores stretch the limits of the genre. In 1991 Pickett became a lead dancer for the Ballet Frankfurt. Her working relationship with Forsythe lasted until the late 1990s, when she was forced to leave the company due to a recurring injury. The two remain fast friends. “I owe a lot to William Forsythe,” Pickett says. “I consider him one of my greatest mentors.”
After leaving the Ballet Frankfurt, Pickett joined the Wooster Group, the renowned genre-bending downtown Manhattan theater company known for its incorporation of dance, movement, and multimedia elements in its performances. She performed in a number of productions directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, including the Obie-winning House/Lights. One night, Pickett met the artist Eve Sussman in the lobby after a Wooster Group show. Sussman, who Pickett describes as “hyper-energetic,” told Pickett, “you look like the queen of Spain.” This mysterious compliment led to Pickett being cast in the role of Queen Mariana in the video installation 89 Seconds at Alcázar, a poetic meditation on the creation of Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas that blurs the boundaries between painting, appropriation, and video. The piece was a favorite at the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

Pickett didn’t rush to break out on her own as a choreographer. “If you‘ve worked with a bright light, it’s hard,” she told me. “But when I got into that studio and started choreographing, I felt like I was dancing again. When I left, I called my husband and said ‘I feel the completion again.’” She has an exploratory approach to choreography. A piece only takes shape once she has met the company. “I need to see personalities,” she explained. “I need to see the dancers’ strengths; to see them shine. Music is important; I need to see how people listen. I construct (the piece) as I go.”

All of Pickett’s commissions begin with a two- or three-day improvisation session with the dancers. She acknowledges that improvisation can be extremely difficult for classically trained dancers. Her improvisational approach, rooted in William Forsythe-based techniques and mind body integration exercises, is designed to help. “Improv is hard to do, period,” she says. “As people we are told what to do all the time.” The freedom Pickett offers is rare in the regimented, hierarchical world of ballet. It is the performing arts equivalent of giving employees stock in the company. It works. Pickett’s pacing is sublime; her choreography feels like a conversation. Tight movements are countered by expansive, interpretative gestures, and the tension generated between the two combines ethereal grace with restrained primal dissonance.

Following the making of 89 Seconds at Alcázar, some members of the cast (Pickett included) went on to form The Rufus Corporation, a loose conglomeration of artists, actors, dancers, and musicians. The Corporation’s most recent film, The Rape of the Sabine Women (a mod feature-length reinterpretation of the early Roman legend) will be presented concurrently with the premiere of Pickett’s commission for the Louisville Ballet on November 2nd & 3rd. The film will be shown in the atrium of the 21c Museum Hotel, part of a film program jointly sponsored by the 21c Museum Hotel, the Louisville Film Society, and the University of Louisville.

Pickett is a star in her own right, no easy task considering the experimental super-stars she’s collaborated with in the past. Her influences are synthesized and filtered through the prism of collaboration. Her work is unencumbered and liberating; It is a pleasure to discover.

Growing Up '70s Style: Clane Hayward's Hypocrisy of Disco

2007-11-07T11:14:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Venuszine.com

Clane Hayward’s memoir explores the progressive freedom and moralistic repressiveness of the hippie ethos with grace and humor. The Hypocrisy of Disco tells the story of Hayward’s nomadic adolescence in California, New Mexico, and Nevada between the ages of eleven and thirteen. She is shuttled between vacation cabins, open fields, and trailer parks by her quasi-mystical, macrobiotic mother until she is sent to live in New Mexico with her laissez faire, grease-monkey father and, finally, her straight paternal grandmother in Las Vegas.

Her story is a tragic and heartfelt testament to American idealism gone wrong. Clane’s mother H’lane’s anti-authoritarian open mindedness often spirals into didactic, controlling harangues about eating “shitfood,” which includes everything from oranges and cheese to cake. New clothes, party dresses, and other trappings of an average American childhood are also off limits. Describing a typical run-in over food, Hayward writes, “Your children eat out of garbage cans and off the sidewalk because of your head trips.” Food is a big issue for Clane and her hippie-kid cohorts, the Macroteam. These grudgingly macrobiotic super-heroes steal snacks from other kids’ lunches and bust into neighboring cabins to mainline sugar and dance to records. Their antics provide much of the levity in this otherwise disturbing, heart-wrenching book.

Hayward’s writing is strongest when she talks about the American West. Despite a childhood of hardship, frequent embarrassment, and sugar-lust, Hayward represents the idyllic beauty of Northern California in lush, broad strokes. As she grows older, she contrasts living among the redwoods with the bleak American expansionism of trailer parks, K-Marts, 7-11s, and empty parking lots. When a toss of H’lane’s I Ching coins determine that Clane should live with her father, Hayward writes of the journey, “…America is just one long highway baking quietly in the sun and waiting for the cars it bears. America from the bus felt like all space, all distance, and this made me feel empty inside and a little tired, my mind wiped clean, just waiting for the next thing to happen, waiting for the next place I would be.”

A feeling of weightlessness and quiet despair permeates Hayward’s story.She inhabits a world of mystics, stoners, and zealots eager to change the world, but whose stringent limitations build systems of exclusion that mirror the straight world they have repudiated.
—
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The Hypocrisy of Disco (Chronicle Books)
By Clane Hayward
256 pages
$22.95

New York Post

2007-11-01T08:03:00.001-07:00

From the column "Required Reading:"

Twenty Thousand Roads

by David N. Meyer

(Villard)

It's been 34 years since the overdose death of Gram Parsons at age 26. But the mythic story of the artist who brought rock and country together - through the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers and Emmylou Harris - calling it Cosmic American Music, continues to exert a strange fascination. With 34 pages of footnotes, plus a thorough discography and “recommended listening," Meyer gives Parsons a thorough, Peter Guralnick-like treatment.

honky tonk angel

2007-11-01T08:02:00.002-07:00

Twenty Thousand Roads is the lead review in Sunday's LA Times!!!!

click here to read!

Twenty Thousand Roads

2007-11-01T08:02:00.001-07:00

The date for the book release is drawing near and reviews are trickling in.

From The Atlanta Constitution Journal:

Bottom line: A terrific biography of a rock innovator that hums with juicy detail and wincing truth.

By the time he died of an overdose at 26, Gram Parsons brought the Byrds to Nashville, taught twang to the Rolling Stones and turned the spotlight on Emmylou Harris' serenades of high lonesome heartache. In the process, this Harvard dropout, who wore sequined suits as homage to the Nashville stars he loved, essentially invented country rock.

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Publisher's Weekly:

Gram Parsons is remembered as much for wearing sequined cowboy suits on stage and for being illegally cremated in the desert by one of his friends after dying of a drug overdose as he is for the half-dozen albums he played on in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the Byrds' classic Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Meyer (A Girl and a Gun) covers both aspects of the legend, but he gives particular attention to the way Parsons brought together elements of country and rock music to forge a new sound. After a leisurely telling of Parsons's “rich white trash” family drama in Florida and Georgia, including his father's suicide and the barely contained contempt of his mother's family, the biography plunges into his musical career, careening from one band to the next just as Parsons himself did. Meyer is appreciative but never adulatory of Parsons, who he believes threw his talent away; while citing the influence of the Flying Burrito Brothers' debut album, for example, he repeatedly mentions the band's “unbelievably sloppy” sound. This isn't the first biography of Parsons, but Meyer's semidetached stance as a critical fan makes it a valuable one, in the vein of Peter Guralnick or Greil Marcus. (Oct. 30)

Men's Vogue:
Now an encyclopedic and likely definitive Parsons biography, Twenty Thousand Roads, by David N. Meyer (Villard), gamely takes the measure of the man without fixing the legend even further in amber. Meyers, a journalist who teaches at the New School in New York, notes that Parsons "had everything: looks, cool, charm, charisma, money…?and threw it away with both hands." Nevertheless, "the most talented musicians in America would do anything for him." Why did they care? And, by extension, why should we?

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Les Enfants Terribles

2007-09-10T03:43:00.000-07:00

Originally published in The Brooklyn Rail, September 2007

Realism and fantasy collide in Les Enfants Terribles, the 1950 collaboration between celebrated directors Jean Cocteau and Jean Pierre Melville. Cocteau adapted the film from his successful 1929 novel which he wrote in a week-long haze of opium withdrawal. He commissioned Jean-Pierre Melville to direct after seeing Melville’s directorial debut, La Silence de La Mer. They’re an unlikely pair. Cocteau was known in literary circles as the “frivolous prince” for his willowy line drawings, poetry, and romantic, navel-gazing films featuring a high beef-cake factor. Melville became famous for his war pictures and hard-boiled Zen noirs.

The result is like Bertolucci’s The Dreamers with no sex. Equal parts Romeo and Juliet and Sunset Boulevard, with a dash of Cocteau’s roguish melancholia thrown in. The lush camera work and cornucopia of quotations from other films is thoroughly proto-New Wave. It’s no surprise that Bertolucci’s vampirish send-up to the genre borrowed so heavily from the film. What’s surprising is how boring Enfants (like Dreamers ) can be.

Les Enfants Terribles is the story of Paul (Edouard Dermithe) and Elisabeth (Nicole Stéphane), a brother and sister who retreat into a private fantasy world after Paul is struck in the chest with a snow-ball. Paul‘s weak heart requires constant supervision and Elisabeth willingly plays the role of psycho-sadistic nurse. They spend most of their time in their bedroom awash in old books, magazines, night creams and cray-fish. When their hermetic circle expands to include Gerard and Agathe—two hopelessly sweet, bourgeois saps—Elisabeth happily extends her passive-aggressive needling to  them as well.

Melville and Cocteau have different agendas, so its difficult to imagine them collaborating. The meaning of a Cocteau film is usually generated through flights of fancy. The result is either poetically moving or downright silly. The magic and perversity of Cocteau’s book seems cartoonish when subjected to Melville’s realism. In Melville’s defense, the screenplay so thoroughly obscures the book’s meaning that it’s surprising the author adapted it himself. The fantastical element so essential to feeling the story is consistently present only in Cocteau’s lilting narration, and Melville’s astute choice of Bach and Vivaldi for the score.

In some places, however, the marriage succeeds. A dreamlike, impressionistic snowball fight with achingly erotic undertones opens the film. Henri Decaë, Melville’s long-time cinematographer, inventively employs unorthodox camera angles and close-ups. Elisabeth pulls the audience into the childrens’ claustrophobic universe by complaining to the camera; she pre-dates Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo’s similar ploy for audience sympathy in Pierrot Le Fou by fifteen years. The performances gain momentum as the story progresses. By the end of the film Elisabeth’s controlling mania has reached Norma Desmondesque fever-pitch.

This Criterion release has a load of special features including interviews with actress Nicole Stéphane and other crew members and a short film about Cocteau and Melville’s collaboration. Despite it’s imperfections, Les Enfants Terribles is a worthy rental for Cocteau lovers and serious students of the Nouvelle Vague.

Berlin Calling

2007-08-04T05:09:00.000-07:00

Originally published in I-94 magazine, Issue #3

In 2003 mayor Klaus Wowereit dubbed Berlin "poor, but sexy" in an attempt to sell British businessmen on the leaps and bounds the city has taken in cultural production. Artists, designers, and hangers-on are drawn to the city by cheap rent, an abundance of artist run spaces and, of course, dance parties that last until happy hour the next day. Berlin began to establish itself as major player in the European art-scene during its 1990s art boom. Around this time, Klaus Biesenbach, now a curator at PS1/MoMa, founded Kunst-Werke, an exhibition space and studio program in an old mayonnaise factory in East Berlin with a group of young art enthusiasts. Through the tenacity of Biesenbach and a handful of gallerists, Mitte soon replaced Charlottenberg as Berlin’s gallery district. The number of exhibition spaces throughout the city has exploded with a consistent influx of artists, and designers and galleries are now moving further afield from more established areas like Auguststraße to Brunnenstraße and various warehouse and project spaces strewn around the city. Brunnenstraße, a well-worn section of Mitte once deemed ungentrifiable, is now home to boutiques, bars, New York escapees, and a rash of young galleries.

Despite all of the international attention Berlin has been getting, it hasn’t let its status as Europe’s burgeoning new art capital go to its head. A multi-cultural art/design/architecture crowd coupled with a hot club scene may bring people here, but the support of their colleagues and prime location in the center of Europe is why many young artists, curators, and gallerists stay. Sarah Belden, founder of Curators Without Borders, an exhibition space and residency program on Brunnenstraße, speaks to the enthusiasm and camaraderie of native and non-native Berliners.

"There is an amazing sense of optimism here - a sense that anything is possible for the young generation." She cites Berlin's rich cultural/political history as well as its "openness to the avant-garde, street culture, and the experimental" as the reason why Berlin has become a nexus of contemporary art. Alicia Reuter of Kapinos Galerie and ArtNews Projects, a non-profit magazine and exhibition space, shares Belden's excitement. When asked what sets the art scene here apart from other cities it took exactly two seconds for her face to light up and say, "The lack of competition!" This cooperative spirit makes living and working in Berlin an obvious choice for young people looking to expand models of art production, exhibition, and reception.

Brunnenstraße was pioneered by gallerists/curators, Jan Winkelmann (Jann Winkelmann/Berlin) and Klara Wallner (Galerie Klara Wallner) who set up shop on the street in 2004. It is the heart of young Berlin and the numbers that came out for openings this weekend shows that the optimism Belden talks about is infectious. Beers clutched tightly in hand, young attractive gallery-goers poured out of tiny exhibition spaces like clowns out of a clown car and thronged up and down the street. True to their co-operative spirit, most of the galleries coordinate their exhibition openings, so new shows receive a surge of attention. A wide range of work and exhibition styles are seen on Brunnenstraße, but Belden’s approach to CWB sums up the zeitgeist of young Berlin. She says, “I represent artists and sell their work commercially, but I also aim to create a platform for more experimental art projects, which may not always be commodifiable.”

As any arts professional who has worked in New York can tell you, this is a dream that is virtually un-obtainable in most of the taxi garages cum white cube exhibition spaces in Chelsea, so its not surprising that Brunnenstraße has its share of ex-New Yorkers. Belden was a gallery director at the Mike Weiss Gallery before her Berlin incarnation, Goff + Rosenthal recently opened a sister space here, and Helena Papadopolous was a New York curator before opening Nice and Fit and its sister magazine Stripped Bare. Both Goff & Rosenthal and Nice and Fit show work by international artists in a range of medium, many of who are living and working in Berlin. The street is not dominated by New Yorkers, however. Diskus and Amerika, started as “producer galleries,” collectives of recent German art school graduates, and are now re-establishing themselves as commercial spaces. Artnews Projects offers a platform for international galleries, curators, and artists to exhibit their work in Berlin.

The impulse to exhibit work experimentally is not exclusive to Brunnenstraße and seems to be a leitmotif of Berlin’s art scene as a whole. The ingenuity of venues like Super Bien!, a greenhouse exhibition space in Mitte and United Nations Plaza, an awkward Lego block of a building in East Berlin that houses seminars, screenings, and lectures in the Open University format, keep the Berlin scene fresh and intellectually engaged. Many of Berlin’s alternative venues offer the time and space to explore ideas that are not afforded any room in the contemporary art market place. Jet, a curatorial center in Alexanderplatz- the heart of old Berlin’s decadent nightlife and bars, as portrayed in Alfred D鐽lin’s seminal novel by the same name, and now a relic of Soviet Era design, has devoted an entire year to exhibitions exploring the idea of failure. Not too far away on Platz der Vereinten Nationen, is the United Nations Plaza, a space which bills itself as an “exhibition as school.”

For one year, a team of ten artists and critics including Martha Rosler, Liam Gillick, Anton Vidokle, and Walid Raad among others, gather together with a motley crew of artists, arts professionals, and students to discuss themes like the reoccupation of the factory, utopia, and the future of symposia. All seminars at UNP are free and, if you’re lucky and attend regularly enough, you may be treated to free beer, borscht, or a round of speed dating in the kitchen adjacent to the lecture room. Program, which occupies the ground floor of a former Russian hotel on Invalidenstraße, is an initiative for art and architectural collaborations and offers its ample space as a platform for emerging artists and designers in different fields to use as a platform to test the boundaries of architecture in an international and collaborative context. Platform offers 3 month long residency programs to artists, architects, curators, and theoreticians.

Reuter, an American critic and curator, believes spaces like this flourish because artists and arts professionals are actively attempting to build bridges between the US and European art scenes in ways that are not purely commercial. The freedom and flexibility that cheap and easy living offers artists in Berlin has allowed a scene to grow that is based more on understanding than on commerce, though the two seem to work just fine together here in Berlin.

Which One Betrays: Le Doulos at the Film Forum

2007-07-14T01:11:00.000-07:00

Which One Betrays
Published in the Brooklyn Rail July/August 2007

Le Doulos begins with a statement central to the unyielding world of noir ethics, “One must choose. Die…or lie.” Director Jean-Pierre Melville immerses us in the action from the get-go and, as is his style, explains nothing. We follow a solitary man on an anti-Night and the City riverside walk. Unlike Dassin’s unidentified sweat-drenched sprinter, our stranger walks slowly and deliberately, propelled by a dramatic score, jarring shadows and impressionistic clouds of smoke. His destination proves to be the suburban Parisian version of the house from Psycho. At this point we realize shit’s about to go down. Only it doesn’t, at least not immediately. After a disarmingly congenial and protracted meeting with the kindly owner of the creepy house, our man shoots him right through the heart.

Once we’re able to assemble the details, the story proves classic noir. Our night stroller, Maurice, is fresh out of jail. Gilbert, the kindly old man Maurice shot for no apparent reason, murdered Maurice’s girlfriend while Maurice was in the pen. Gilbert feared the girl might squeal. Now that Maurice has settled the score, he can set his sights on tomorrow’s heist—a job that will redeem all his years in the slammer. Enter Silien. Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a dandy sadist in counter-point to the barely restrained melancholia of Maurice (Serge Reggiani). A rumored police informer, but nonetheless a close friend to Maurice, Silien brings the gear Maurice and his accomplice Remy need to pull off their heist the following afternoon.

The story seems to end as soon as it begins. Within the first twenty minutes we get close ups of Maurice’s puppy dog eyes and nervous tics, a little bang-bang, and multiple warnings about Silien’s suspect trustworthiness from Maurice’s new pouty-cheeked girlfriend Therese. Maurice doesn’t care. He responds to cautionary warnings about Silien’s alleged ties to les flics with the stoic, “Silien is my friend…until proven otherwise.” Melville doesn’t make us wait very long for Silien to live up to his stool pigeon reputation. As soon as the job begins, Silien calls the police inspector. No worries, however. Melville has a switcheroo planned for us, two hours hence. In the meantime, now that Silien is a proven fink, we watch Maurice’s campaign to track down the squealer and Silien’s rampage of fighting and fucking.

Le Doulos shows a director in transition. Born Jean-Pierre Grumbach—he adopted the name Melville as a tribute to author Herman Melville—Melville fought in the French Résistance during World War II. His time in the Résistance has undeniably shaped his oeuvre, which can be split by critics into “résistance films” and “policiers.” After the war Melville, with no prior professional experience, sought work in the film industry and was denied an assistant director’s license. Undeterred, he financed and shot his own films on real locations, which earned him the moniker of France’s first “independent” filmmaker. Melville’s double-helix of outsiderdom—Jewish heritage in the face of WWII and lack of professional training as a filmmaker—enables him to portray sub-cultural groups with real-life vitality, and with an outsider’s contempt for sentimentality.

Le Doul is French slang for hat. In the milieu (the French underworld) Le Doulos refers to a squealer or informer. It is fitting that Melville, with his hawk’s eye for mise en scène and deep affection for the accoutrements of genre, would choose this title for his first gangster film. Although he described the film as a comedy of manners, Melville flirted with the gangster/noir genre in Bob Le Flambeur (1955). Bob Montagne (Roger Duchesne) encapsulated many of the attributes of a typically French noir anti-hero. Bob is plagued by the past and worse for the wear, but he still has the will to finish the job. He ‘s only got enough left in him for one last heist, after which he will “cash out.” Any time a gangster says he is going to cash out we know he’s doomed. Aging noir anti-heroes always go for the last job that will let them quit while they’re ahead (think Jauques Dassin’s Rififi), but their striving to transcend their social class is the hubristic longing that reinforces the maxim that losers always lose.

Le Doulos shares some of Bob Le Flambeur’s light-heartedness and predates the distilled existential dread of
Melville’s masterpiece Le Samourai. Melville’s characters have not been pared down to the point where style is their sole mode of existence. Maurice has a touch of ye olde self-loathing, but he hasn’t quite reached the end of the noir spectrum wherein he might consider himself barely human. Silien toes the line of style and substance. He can show frightening brutality, but considers himself a “good” man, as seen by the middle class home he built for himself, and his genuine affection for his old flame, Fabienne. The role was made for Belmondo. A god of the French New Wave, Belmondo’s slack-jawed arrogance and deeply felt don’t-give-a-shitness oscillate between lechery and unspeakable cool in a matter of seconds.

Unlike Belmondo’s performance, Le Doulos suffers at times from its inconsistencies. The pacing can be incomprehensible and if you as much as blink during one of the drawn-out interrogation scenes, you’ll miss a key plot-point. Depending on one’s mood, the combination of noir thematics and visuals with corn-ball comedic flourishes is either grating or hilarious. In one especially harrowing, abusive scene, Belmondo turns off his own theme music, which plays on a radio on the coffee table. Later in the film, Silien and an accomplice recount pushing a car over a cliff in a scene evokes the self-awareness of Truffaut’s Tirez Le Pianiste.

Much of the action in Le Doulos unfolds at a coy distance and, as in all Melville’s films, style is paramount. Belmondo’s charm and a groovy jazz score keep things moving. What the film lacks in pacing and plot—remember, Melville is not renowned for his dialogue—it makes up for in visual story telling. Landscape and mise en scène underline his characters’ loneliness, moral ambiguity, and desolation. Stephen Schiff astutely observes that in Melville’s films, “Genre is destiny and ethics.” Melville utilizes all of the genre touchstones—heavy shadows, trench coats, pistols, abandoned lots, foxy women (note Therese’s rockin’ outfit and Fabienne’s dramatic eye makeup) and, of course, Melville’s favorite, hats.

Moral ambiguity and the fallibility of objective truth and memory are central Melvillian themes. Belmondo’s Silien is a complicated character, simultaneously impish, charming and calculatingly cold. His motivations often seem compulsive, which makes sense when one learns that Belmondo was allegedly unsure of his guilt or innocence until he saw the final cut. The very concept of guilt and innocence is completely clouded in the film. Silien repeatedly refers to Maurice as innocent of the crimes that we watched him commit. Essentially, Maurice is innocent because he adheres to the gangster model of conduct. Despite his lawlessness, he follows the rules of the game. There are two, but in the end we ultimately do not know which one betrays.

Fay Grim: Hal Hartley hits the screen with his follow up to Henry Fool

2007-06-21T00:39:00.000-07:00

Fay Grim: Hal Hartley hits the screen with his follow up to Henry Fool

Originally published in Venus

When I was fifteen-years-old, I had a huge crush on a older guy who represented everything a wanna-be counter cultural high-school freshman thought was cool — he was tall, had a nose ring, listened to bands I had never heard of and had a deep knowledge of independent cult film. We would send each other long, rambling emails and in one of them he cryptically told me to “go watch some Hal Hartley movies.”

Little did I know, while boy-who-shall-remain-nameless and I were embroiled in our pretentious email fandango, Hartley was hitting it big with his film Henry Fool. Henry Fool tells the story of Simon Grim (James Urbaniak), a garbage man cum Nobel Prize winning poet living in Queens, and Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan), a drunken wind-bag novelist who storms into town and changes everyone’s lives. While living in the Grim basement and writing his epic Confessions, a work which he compares to the works of de Sade or Rousseau, Henry prompts Simon to begin writing, sweeps Simon’s nymphomaniac sister Fay (Parker Posey) off her feet and marries her, sinks into a pit of despair as a result of Simon’s success, and flees the country with great fanfare when his past threatens to catch up with him.

Fay Grim picks up where Henry Fool left off. It’s ten years later — Simon is still in prison for abetting Fool’s escape and Fay is left on her own with a fourteen-year-old son. She tells the world that she’s forgotten about Henry, though Hartley underscores her uneasy devotion to the man every time she utters the heavy-handed, transparent, “I’m single — sort of.” Fay is on the brink of succumbing to the foppish advances of Simon’s smarmy literary agent and moving beyond the shadow of her husband’s legacy when two CIA agents pay a visit. Agent Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum) and Carl Fogg (Leo Fitzpatrick) enlist Fay’s help in finding her missing husband, embroiling her in an international web of intrigue that isn’t that intriguing at all.

It’s not surprising that Hartley’s film is super self-aware or that most of the action in this unexpected political-thriller-comedy is anti-action. He’s an indie-demi god. That’s what those guys and gals do. Hartley’s bete-noire, however, is that he drowns in his own conceits. Fay Grim lacks the empathic character driven drama that made Henry Fool so memorable. Fool was an intense, though at times grating, meditation about the human spirit, the drive to create, and the rampant egotism concealed therein. In this go around Fool’s cast of anti-heroes in are reduced to marionettes enacting a vacant and convoluted spy spoof that forgets to be funny. But, hey, that’s what sequels are known for.

Let The Punishment Begin

2007-06-20T11:20:00.000-07:00

Barbara Sukowa, Günter Lapmrecht
© Karl Reiter

originally published in the Brooklyn Rail. June 2007

Let The Punishment Begin
Berlin Alexanderplatz, Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, MoMA and KW

If 2006 was the year of Werner Herzog, then 2007 belongs to Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Herzog captivated American audiences with White Diamond and Grizzly Man—documentaries hypnotized by the exploratory drives of the human spirit in all its glory, hubris, and niggling irksomeness. Both directors show men striving above their capabilities. Fassbinder, unlike Herzog, does not depict the poetic beauty in folly. He leaves little room for his characters’ redemption. Their lives are dominated by bleak, claustrophobic mise en scene and their own despair, rather than a Herzogian awe-inspiring expanse of nature.

Fassbinder, who died of a cocaine and sleeping pill overdose in 1982, shortly after his 37th birthday, will not get to cash in on the critical re-evaluation of his fifteen plus hour magnum opus, Berlin Alexanderplatz. Fassbinder’s complicated and exhausting work is finally available for a new generation of cinephiles to savor. The Goethe Institute subsidized the restoration of the film claiming that the original negative was in “catastrophic condition.” Work began in 2006 and was completed in time for the 25th anniversary of Fassbinder’s death. The combined efforts of MOMA, Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art, and the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation provide multiple avenues to engage with Fassbinder’s oeuvre.

MOMA presented “Fassbinder in the Collection” in April to commemorate their acquisition of a re-mastered 35mm version of Berlin Alexanderplatz. The series included sixteen films and two documentaries about the making and restoration of Berlin Alexanderplatz by Juliane Lorenz, director of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation. KW Institute for Contemporary Art concurrently mounted a sprawling exhibition curated by Klaus Biesenbach devoted solely to Berlin Alexanderplatz. Photographs of Fassbinder’s dog-eared, heavily underlined copy of Berlin Alexanderplatz, sketches and story boards, production stills and video-loops of selected excerpts from the film were all on view. The KW exhibition offered two possible approaches to the work. Berlin Alexanderplatz was screened in its entirety on a central screen in a small basement theater. Individual episodes were also screened on a permanent loop in fourteen different rooms. A massive catalogue with essays by Susan Sontag and Biesenbach, production stills, and a copy of the screenplay accompanied the exhibition. Süddeutsche Zeitung Cinemathek released a restored box set with six DVDs plus bonus materials for the European market. Criterion will release a domestic version with English subtitles by the end of 2007.

Fassbinder is perhaps the least accessible of New German Cinema, a movement of young filmmakers that spanned the 1960s through the 80s and was heavily influenced by the Nouvelle Vague and Italian Neo-Realism. Although a madman like Herzog and intensely personal like Wenders, Fassbinder lacks Herzog’s stunning cinematic style or Wender’s cynical romanticism. Fassbinder is as remembered for his flamboyant, drug-soaked life style and acerbic personality as he is for his Bundesrepublik Deutschland Trilogy (including The Marriage of Maria Von Braun, Veronika Voss, and Lola) and Ali, Fear Eats the Soul. The latter is a heart-wrenching fable about a cleaning woman in Hamburg who falls in love with a much younger Moroccan immigrant inspired by master tear-jerker Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows. With an economy of visual means and moments of silence that say as much as his dialogue, Fassbinder created a tableau as engaging and emotionally harrowing as Sirk’s Technicolor drenched melodrama and every bit as subversively camp. It is not surprising that Fassbinder, a portly, openly gay West German with proclivities toward deep, complicated, pseudo-sadistic relationships with his regular company of actors, built his reputation on the depiction of outsiders.

Fassbinder adapted Berlin Alexanderplatz from German Expressionist author and psychiatrist Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel of the same name for West German television in 1980. The story follows Franz Bieberkopf, a Weimar-era everyman and his struggles to reintegrate himself into society. Emerging after serving four years in Tegel prison for the murder of his girlfriend, Franz is thwarted at every turn. Bieberkopf, played to sweaty, smirking perfection by Günter Lamprecht is a rootless drifter with, at times, incomprehensible motivations. He—like his nation—makes himself a lot of promises and doesn’t keep many. During the course of thirteen episodes and an epilogue, Franz reinvents himself as a shoelace salesman, Nazi newspaper peddler, small time crook, and pimp. Shot in rich, muted chocolate and grey hues by Xaver Schwarzenberger—the cinematographer of Veronika Voss and Lola—Berlin Alexanderplatz is the ultimate expression of many of the themes that Fassbinder—with a staggering 44 films to his credit—presented throughout his career.

Fassbinder maintained a life-long interest in Döblin’s novel. A character in Fassbinder’s debut feature, Love is Colder than Death—played by Fassbinder himself—is named after the murderer cum honest man cum early Nazi cum pimp. Döblin was the first German writer to adopt the literary techniques of James Joyce. The narration constantly shifts person and is intercut with author-omniscient views of slaughter houses and random glimpses of strangers on the street that are never reincorporated into the story. Actions generated outside of himself consistently shatter Bieberkopf’s stream of consciousness. He shifts with alarming alacrity from being in control of his destiny to his life living him. In this way he resembles the down-and-outers in the films of German master Fritz Lang.

While Berlin Alexanderplatz is far from perfect, Fassbinder visually translates Döblin’s literary style with remarkable ease. Fassbinder’s visuals and his direction of the actors reveal the tension of the double-man. His gestalt oscillates between the poles of restraint and hysteria and Fassbinder makes sure that the audience never forgets the artifice inherent in either. As is to be expected in a fifteen-hour-plus film, there is a hell of a lot of talking. Fassbinder does not mix it up Hollywood style with establishing shot, reaction shot, close up ad nauseum. For long durations, it’s either/or. Fassbinder depicts lengthy deliberations through medium shots from static cameras far from any action (often in another room if he is shooting interiors), or the director will hold a close-up reaction shot for so long that it ceases to be a glimpse into a character’s soul and instead further emphasizes alienation and despair. Fassbinder allows his characters wide emotional berth—within the space of minutes they can go from a perfectly normal conversation to laughing maniacally or screaming with their eyes bugging out of their heads. In Episode Ten, Bieberkopf caresses and talks to a table full of beers for nearly five minutes. However, Fassbinder always reels it back in. Berlin Alexanderplatz has several moments that reach howling, clawing emotional pinnacles, yet despite the naturalistic mise en scene, we remain aware we are watching a film. The camera pulls away to depict a static tableau of suffering, underwriting Fassbinder’s dichotomy of restraint and theatricality.

Fassbinder usually loses me when his characters freak out. Their psychosis works brilliantly, however, within the seedy, simmering life of Alexanderplatz, the heart of old Berlin’s nightlife, prostitution, and bars. The cabarets, half-naked whores, and barely restrained anxiety of Berlin between the wars are perfectly suited to Fassbinder’s metier. Many of his films are glaring incitements of German society—class issues, masochism, dominance—while paradoxically being funded by German public television.

An Unsentimental Education

2007-06-20T11:19:00.001-07:00

Originally published in Ukula, May 2007.
Les Amants Réguliers (2005)
Phillipe Garrel
France
178 minutes

"We're all slaves of fashion," former Red Army Faction member Astrid Proll whispered to an interviewer in 2002. Revolution is sexy. Who could forget that god awful Diesel ad campaign? Or "Prada Meinhof chic" ? Is it my generation's careful attention to surface coupled with relative political complacency that leads media and fashion circles to fetishize violent youth movements? Phillipe Garrel's film Les Amants réguliers, an unsentimental meditation on Paris 1968 and its aftermath, takes the glitter and sensuality out of youthful dissent.

The film depicts young revolutionaries/opium addicts in the tedium of their day to day existence. Over the course of three hours they make art, hurl bricks, smoke opium, fuck, smoke more opium, write poetry, fall in and out of love, and smoke even more opium. This may sound lofty, but love and revolution is portrayed as overwhelmingly ordinary, almost haphazard and accidental. The film lacks the gritty air of sexuality historically ascribed to the French student movement, Baader Meinhof Gang/RAF and the Weather Underground. Garrel's unflinching view of the 1968 protests is based on lost documentary footage he shot of the riots as a young man. There are no climatic demonstrations, slogans or fancy Alpha Romeo get away cars in this film. The brick hurling in Les Amants réguliers is depicted in ultra-static long shots. A few cars burn, but other than that not much happens. The glacial pacing and austere high contrast black and white film posits a distance between the spectator and the film's characters that mirrors the distance between the characters and their actions.

After the demonstrations, an almost wordless love affair ensues between the disillusioned young poet François, played to pouty perfection by the director's son Louis Garrel, and Lilie, a sculptress played by Clotilde Hesme. The two pass each other with little fan fare dans la rue and meet several months later in the home of Antoine, a wealthy and troubled young man who financially supports a motley crew of twenty-somethings in his sprawling Parisian apartment.

Despite being set in a supposed revolutionary hot bed, there is little romance or political fervor in their intimacy. Francois and Lilie are resigned rather than compelled to acquiesce to the loose and easy sexual mores of the late 60s. In one scene, Lilie tells Francois that she wants to "do it" with their benefactor Antoine's cousin. Garrel does not follow the drama to the bedroom, but keeps his camera focused on Francois laying bored and dejected in bed. Lilie soon returns showing no signs of arousal or sexual abandon and plops down on their bed announcing that the cousin has "the smallest pecker ever" and that Francois' is much larger. The emotive threshold of the characters is surprisingly low and the overarching emotion tenor seems to be blankness and fear, but mostly blankness.

Garrel's film will not feed an audience hungry for a stylized depiction of revolutionary defiance. He gives us the moments in between. The moments where aimlessness is merely aimlessness and unease, self doubt, and boredom rule the day.

Förderpreis Bildene Kunst der Schering Stiftung 2007

2007-06-20T11:16:00.000-07:00

Originally published in Whitehot Magazine, April 2007.

The Ernst Schering Foundation Art award, a bi-annual prize that fosters the development of young German artists, set its sights on sculpture this year. The work of five artists, selected by jury from nominations by ten German cultural institutions was on view at the Berlinische Galerie through April 9th. Iranian born, Berlin based artist Nairy Baghramians won the grand prize, a grant of 10,000 euros. Baghramians, the only woman in the show, creates sparse geometric constructions from mirrors, wood and metal. Within the context of this exhibition, Es ist Ausser Haus (It is Outside of the House), with its impressive formal elegance, stands as an almost cliched example of feminine understatement in a room full of boys . The rough hewn works of the other nominees, all of whom are male, share a charmed appreciation of everyday objects, associations and gestures.

The show begins with a bang. Literally. A sculpture by Marco Schuler depicts two stubby men seated back to back wearing work gloves and dustbins on their heads. One holds a wooden wheel while the other proudly spreads his hands to showcase an erection almost as large as he is. The sexual energy continues in Jan Bünnig's moving, humorous sculptures which are described by the artist as "muddy, solid, slow and alive." Bünnig 's tumescent clay spire has the impressiveness of a monument and the innocent charm of a child's sand castle.

Michael Sailstorfer fuses two loci of masculine aggression in Drum Kit, a drum kit fashioned from the scraps of an LAPD police car. The playful open ended-ness of the piece makes it one of the standouts in the exhibition. The drummer and police man are recurrently imagined as rogue figures, however the police officer only becomes one when teaming up with other officers to create "force." The LAPD is one of the most violent police departments in the United States and the drummer is perpetually cast as the craziest band member in our pop cultural memory. By poetically dislocating both the form and its source material Sailstorfer potentially subverts the efficacy of power and violence.

The most modest and touching work in the exhibition belongs to Hamburg based artist Thorsten Brinkmann. The artist states that his work is born of an interest in exploring the "value of used objects and their relation to human beings." The fashionable dustbin chapeau makes a reappearance Soviel wie möglich auf einmal tragen (All That I Can Carry), a photograph of the artist laden with household appliances and construction materials. True Romans, an infinite series of small sculptures presented on Ikea drawer pedestals, explores the magical use value of recombined everyday objects- a water glass is split in two by a tennis ball lodged inside and a packing balloon is constrained by zip ties. The clumsy tenderness of these gentle restraints and reformations reinvigorate the objects with new life.