Truth Syrup
Josh Atlas, Nicole Van Beek, Richard Bott, Michael Kennedy Costa, Chet Glaze, Daniel Mendel-Black, Florian Morlat, Nora Shields
October 10, 2016 – November 6, 2016
Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, Orange, CA
I would be at great pains to say ‘where’ is the painting I am looking at. For I do not look at it as a thing; I do not fix it in its place. My gaze wanders in it as in the halos of Being. It is more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, than I ‘see it’.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings
A painting is an object that is like you and me part of our world. Yet, art historically speaking until recently, we did not primarily perceive it as a thing, because painting’s intrinsic quality, the disruption and displacement of the spatial continuity of the world lies precisely in the fact that real space plays a subsidiary role. It is thought to refer to a world beyond our own. The countless comparisons of painting to the window, the portal and the many paintings that literally show windows and frames seemingly corroborate the view that an objectivized exterior is reported to the interior of our minds.
With the minimal and post-minimal experiments and their production of objects developed from the concerns of painting, real space was thematized in the context of pictorial thinking. The objects and their critical analysis tied in with the same view that sees the object of art as an exemplary representation of correspondences of form. Figure-ground relationship was transposed from the 2nd into the 3rd dimension and was now a conversation between physical objects and the gallery space, but it did not lead to a qualitative change in the discourse of the reality of painting. It was still seen externally, logically and scientifically.
More recently the influence of poststructuralist discourse emphasizes painting’s status as visual text. Visual idioms are reduced to the model of written discourse, and painting is proposed as a field that produces meaning to communicate ‘legible’ content. If we understand painting in this way we reduce it to a model based on conceptions of instrumental reason and marginalize the act of making in favor of the consumption of meaning.
Here the thinking of French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty presents a radically different view of the objecthood of painting: Rather than seeing the world as a compilation of things in space, which also contains our bodies and which can be ‘reported’ via painting, the emphasis is put on recognizing spaciality as part of our Being. We only ‘have’ space and the things in it because it is our condition as Beings to be physical, corpo-real, and not because we ‘understand’ space abstractly-scientifically from a speculatively proposed outside. Rather than seeking the view into an idealized world or reducing painting to an instrument of logical reason, a carrier of information that can be read, an emphasis is put on the mobility of the body, and how we access the world through it.
In a historically unprecedented moment in which a never-ending stream of digital quasi immaterial images zips through our minds it is this exhibition’s concern to recall that paintings, as the ancestors of these images are things that are made of the same stuff as we are and share our reality. The artists gathered in the exhibition may or may not see themselves first and foremost as painters; Their commonality is an interest in simultaneously rupturing and conciliating the spatial continuity of the art object in relation to our world.
My Skin is my Crustle (Pink Marble)
Carmen Argote, Lynda Benglis, Young Joon Kwak, Lila De Magalhaes, Jennifer Sullivan, Xina Xurner
August 29, 2016 – September 25, 2016
Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, Orange, CA
Showing video works at the interstice of self awareness, identity politics and the normative offerings of mass and social media, this exhibition presents a selection of feminine perspectives on the sensual realities of excessive acquisition and collecting (hoarding), appearance enhancement (cosmetics), sexual selection (dating), and free time.
Skin, next to eyes, ears and nose, connects our inner experience to the exterior as one of the body's sensual boundaries, and is only the first layer within which we live and relate to the world. Our skin gives us an instantaneous impression of our surroundings, and we notice if it’s warm, cold, wet, dry, still or breezy. Through it we understand the broad palette of human interaction, from our parents’ affection to our lovers’ touch. The importance of our largest organ is reflected in a trove of idioms. We feel at home in our skin, my sister is thick skinned and last nights movie got under my skin. We take care of it with baths and lotions, and we use it to communicate our identity, with make up, or using permanent images, wearing Brandings or tattoos.
As we zoom out, and away from the body, clothing and architecture appear as secondary and tertiary layers of protection and identity. While important to one's well-being, they are not directly part of the body, and successively have more to do with communicating our self image and our status within society; Modes to show one's convictions, preferences and personality.
The triage of skin, clothing and habitation lies at the core of the individuals’ sense of identity. Navigating between the possibilities and constraints of these forms the works in the exhibition explore notions of home and the meanings of inhabiting any one of these realms. From the contacts we make to the stuff we collect, to the the place or person that makes you feel at home; Our skins can be krustles indeed.
The Emblematic
Hillary Baker, Nate Fors, Keith Haring, David Kiddie, Elizabeth Murray, R.T. Pece, Antonio Puleo, Ken Price, Anna, Sew Hoy, William T. Whiley
Co-curated with Natalie Lawler
July 18, 2016 - August 14, 2016
Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, Orange, CA
This exhibition brings together work from Chapman University’s Escalette Permanent Collection of Art with recent selections from Los Angeles.
From the exaggerated female shape of the 'Venus of Willenberg’ some 35.000 years ago and sculptures of genitals found throughout antiquity, to heraldic flags and corporate logos; Abbreviated depictions have always been part of the human world.
Within the last decade their importance has taken on a new dimension. Anyone who owns a smartphone (which in today’s art world is everyone) knows that the ability to navigate your phone fast determines the number of shows you will see, and people you will meet on opening night. Society has been heavily primed for this hyperlexia of signs by over a century of mass media, mass communication and the necessity to simplify the messages of corporate industry and entertainment into quickly comprehensible abstractions.
'The whole world at our fingertips’ we effectively spend hours of the day looking at a relatively small excerpt of that very world. Currently at a maximum resolution of 300 pixels per square inch we’re always on the chase for the next connection, linking meanings, people, times and places. Herein lies the trickery of the device, which always only mediates world, but never becomes real itself, even when it is an essential tool to navigate reality. It’s great for administration, not so great for contemplation.
But wasn’t contemplation inextricably tied to the two dimensional surface - and to looking at art more generally speaking - until recently? William Copley said something along these lines: “Paintings are subversive, because they are silently, but insistently showing their hidden messages. They are subversive, because they’re always there.”
It takes the artist focus and time to manipulate her materials, be it on the picture plane or in space, and in some way this has to be mirrored by the onlooker, to unravel the information the artwork contains. It is the opposite of the quick, scanning glance sliding around the smartphone’s display, Netflix’s homepage, or your Instagram feed. The works in the exhibition engage in the idea of emblematic concentration and abbreviated depiction, but at a pace that invites contemplation. So, let's take it slow this summer, like we used to, and catch our breaths at the Guggenheim Gallery.
UP-ISH
Dewey Ambrosino, Kristi Lippire, Renée Petropoulos, Margo Victor, Jennifer West
February 1 - March 11, 2016
Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, Orange, CA
Up-Ish; Catalog
Aside from its meaning as a state of psychological well being, the word ‘high’ implies value and authority. High school, high art, and high culture are respectively the best versions, and prepending ‘high’ to these nouns attests to the quality of their objects. The German term “Hochdeutsch” (High-German) suggests that this particular pronunciation is superior to other dialects, and that there is a good and a better way of speaking the language even though grammatically there is no difference. High can also imply unobtainability, a desired result may be out of reach, and of course we must ask - high in relation to what? Naturally, to its counterpart, ‘low’ - Go figure. Deepening this thought, however, we see that when speaking about high versus low culture we ultimately speak about the Judeo-Christian concepts of good and evil, Heaven and Hell, and all their implied value judgments. Through this language we inform our politics, ethics and philosophy and not least our aesthetic decisions.
Well, how do you get high? - By going up.
Up, in contrast, speaks about directionality, and while it could be used to describe how to actually get from Hell to Heaven, the word itself leaves the destination undeclared. Even when you’re high you can still go up. Although up is also situated within the polarity of high and low, it is relative to the individual agent’s position within the whole, as opposed to high which suggests an absolute point of reference, the final desired state. Up emphasizes the path, not the outcome, it emphasizes possibility along the way, rather than a value judgment.
Lastly the ‘up’ we are talking about must not be confused with the relentless brutality of the positivism prescribed by the media and the advertising industry. Our ‘up’ leaves questions of superiority and functionality behind, and asks for our pathway within the whole, the individual within the structures of our world, in which we move in more or less straight lines, upward-ish.
In this sense, up is the direction the artists in the show take, to elevate us and see our world from remote vantage points. Some literally lift the camera into the air or focus their lens onto celestial bodies, while others move up in spiritual ways, placing our understanding of the political, economic and scientific order ‘up and away’, outside of society’s usual lines of vision.