Walking in L.A.

Someone recently commented that my blog is as much about shows I didn't make it to as ones I did. So true, so true. Quite out of character, than, I went to TWO (read 'em: ONE, TWO) art things this past weekend. Checked out Fatima Hoang at Concrete Wall on Saturday (one clever punch line repeated too many times in too small a space) and then went on the Brewery Art Walk on Sunday. I felt pretty frustrated on the art walk -- a lot of the work felt so contrived, unoriginal and uninspiring. Of course, easy for me to judge when I'm not the one producing work. One thing I have to say for the artists at the Brewery is that they all seemed truly committed to their practices and disciplines, and pretty prolific, too. In the end, their passion and commitment was pretty inspiring. I can see how such an environment would be so conducive to working, working, working. It's supposedly the largest live-work art colony in the world. I did see a couple of works towards the end that I thought was really compelling. Will have to google and see if I can find more info on the artists.

Upcoming: I will be volunteering at VITAL SIGNs, an NAAO (National Association of Artists' Organizations) National Conference. My way of getting in for free. Yay for free! I have a feeling a lot of the content will go over my head, or at least be stuff that I can't really do anything with right now. I just thought it would be good to expose myself to stuff like that, though.

Artists Just Wanna Have Fun

Does anyone want to see his installation at Concrete Walls (@Cafe Back Door in the rear) this Saturday? Yes, he is an artist. The press release below proves it!

================

April 21 – June 16, 2007

Opening Reception & Special Video Projection: Saturday, April 21, 2007, 6-9pm

Concrete Walls is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Fatima Hoang. Hoang's site specific installation masterfully incorporates video, sculpture and performance to transform Concrete Walls into a space fit for hip hop icons, groupies and rock stars a like.

Hoang aka the "Rockness Monster" is the 2005 National Air Guitar Champion" and developed cult status on websites like youtube.com and usairguitar.com after he performed, what is now his signature song, "Raining Blood" by Slayer.

Fatima Hoang received his MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2005 and his BFA from the University of Hawaii. He has shown at Conner Contemporary in Washington D.C., Artists Space Project Room in New York, NY, and the Huntington Beach Art Center in Southern California. He has also been featured in ARTnews, the LA Weekly and the San Francisco Chronicle. Hoang is currently ranked #3 in the Air Guitar Hall of Fame and performed at the Air Guitar World Championships in Finland in 2005.

Gallery Hours: M-F 8am - 6pm, SAT 8am – 3pm Free parking in rear

Concrete Walls
@Cafe Back Door
5484 Wilshire Blvd. (rear) Los Angeles, CA 90036
323.933.4020
info@concretewallsgallery.com

www.concretewallsgallery

Unmotivated

Ok, yet again I missed a show I was determined to make it to. Did not get to see Stations of the Cross ... BUT I did get myself over to Barnsdall and see the Multiple Vantage Points show. I also went for a stroll on Chung King Road in Chinatown (this guy Andy Alexander that I went to school with has a show at China Art Objects). Maybe it's because I'm feeling under the weather these days, but I just did not feel compelled by the overall scene at either places. There were a few things that I liked but, on the whole, I felt like I could have done without. I wonder if it's my laziness -- I don't want to put in the effort required of the active viewer. I just want it to be made easy for me. Not surprisingly, it was the visceral works that I liked best. Over at Chung King Road, I think it was the whole gallery vibe that was turning me off more than anything. Not that I was ever really into it, but if I was in any way, I am way over it. Had an interesting talk with a fellow artist-cum-entrepreneur named Brande Jackson about this. I guess I feel that the functionality and relevance of art (whatever that may mean) outside of the context of art has become far more important to me than anything else. Within the structure of commercial galleries and such, the discourse seems limited, even incestuous. I'm sure that's going too far but how I've felt about it for awhile now.

I really wrestled with my artist statement tonight (due for class over a month ago). I don't think I've ever felt so tortured trying to put words on paper. I console myself with the thought that the statement can only get better from here. The main struggle is lack of motivation about going forward (with my design studio, with all this art stuff ... everything?). And, anyway, how does one write about one's art practice when there is no practice to speak of?

Sol LeWitt Passes On

Sol LeWitt passed away last week. He pioneered some amazing ways of thinking and producing art. So many of his ideas, particularly those in which the ego/persona of the artist diminishes for the sake of art, even while art itself is taken down from its usual place of reverance for the sake of the idea, are so inspiring to me. You can read his obit here.

Untitled, Part 2

I was finally able to track down the drawing that I did with Young Mi back in February. You can see the full drawing and the original post here but below are some details. You can click on them for a larger view.

Single Wooden Chopstick Looking for Same

I had lunch with my friend Jane the other day and when I opened up my chopstick packet, out came this sad little guy! I can't imagine what happened to the other one. Two chopsticks in the night ...

My Life Flashing Before My Eyes

In the end, I didn’t catch the Magritte show. I was very disappointed but I'm over it now. I'll live. A sad substitution, I know, but I read Howard N. Fox’s (LACMA curator of contemporary art) interview of John Baldessari in the museum newsletter. (I am compelled to tell you here that I used Cliff Notes just ONCE in my life -- for Moby Dick -- and felt that in the end I only cheated myself ... Ok, I made that last part up.) Anyway, a couple of things that Baldessari said got me thinking. For one, he said that there are "all kinds of narratives, and the ruling narratives are the ones that most people believe in." Kind of obvious, maybe, but I appreciate this idea. I think it's very true. I would add that it's super important to understand the ruling narratives really well in order to subvert or dissect them which hopefully instigates thought and discourse. Meaning, one can't completely disengage from what is understood as the status quo. To disengage is to leave reality, in some sense, and even then it's limited because eventually you come back to the world around you and then you go eat lunch at McDonald's or watch TV or whatever.

Another idea that Baldessari brings up in his take on Magritte: "imagery is more overwhelming than words. If you open up a book and there's text on one side and an image on the other, we're going to look at the image first … it is a little treacherous because we might get seduced too easily." Fox's response to this statement, but in regards to Baldessari's work: "Your own work seduces the viewer but never lets that very seductive moment be consummated because you're always confounding the viewer." Cristina and I talked about something similar to this last night, the idea of presenting a work without context or without answers and how this can be an exclusive or elitist act. I guess this practice supports the pre-existing idea that art is unintelligible by and irrelevant to society at large. I’m sure there must be a way to confound and mystify while respecting the viewer, while still engaging in a mutual dialogue … Of course, one also has to deal with particular misunderstandings and misgivings toward art that have been in place for a long time in popular culture.

ANYWAY, to address the title above. I am taking this course called "Get Your Sh*t Together" (asterisk theirs, not mine) through Side Street Projects. In many ways, I'm learning what it means to be an artist and how to be a professional one. Our first assignment was to write our obituaries, the idea being to figure out what we ultimately want to accomplish and what we want to leave behind. I'm not dead-set (ha ha) on accomplishing everything I wrote but it was a helpful exercise in figuring out what my direction should be. I would imagine my obit would change by the end of this course but it felt strangely therapeutic to flash my imagined life before my eyes, through the power of MS Word.

So here it is. Don't judge me. And if you must, I don't want to hear about it.

The artist and philanthropic entrepreneur Helen H. Kim died on Thursday, her 78th birthday. The cause of death is as of yet unknown. Kim grew up in Los Angeles after emigrating from Korea at the age of seven. She received her BFA from the UCLA School of Art and Architecture in 1996 and began to show work in various disjoined group and solo shows for the next 10 years. Never feeling completely at ease in the paradigms of the established gallery and museum circuits, Kim ambiguously straddled the line between, in her own words, “the role of the civilian and the cultural, anthropological mediator” during this period. It was in 2008 that Kim began a newly focused, life-long commitment to the arts, having in the previous year come to personal resolutions about the role and functionality of art in both the private and public realms. This established a personal manifesto about art and strategies for cultural, spiritual and political awareness that informed her career for the remainder of her life.

Kim sought to “bring art to the streets,” creating unconventional venues through which the public experienced ideas of religion, spirituality, culture, displacement and alienation. Her site-specific works repeatedly drew the attention of local media, though generally as whimsical spectacles or odd occurrences due to the novel modes of presentation. Often, the works were presented anonymously so that the experience for the viewer was completely visceral and without the categorization of art. Kim felt this particular moniker disallowed the true art experience for a public generally unfamiliar and disconnected to the art world. Kim’s work, unlike that of many street or public artists of her time, flew under the radar because of the lack of branding or marketability in her practice. Despite this level of anonymity and lack of conventional categorization, Kim found and developed a small and dedicated following.

In addition to what she dubbed her “street-level” art practice (which also included the web), Kim carved her place in the art world through small but established galleries and museums throughout North America, Europe and Asia. She used this cache to progress her idea of bringing art to the streets by creating work in public spaces in conjunction with various art institutions. This eventually lead to projects funded by organizations as varied as Amnesty International, the Korean American Foundation of the Arts and several Christian organizations referred to en masse as the Emerging Church. Throughout, the intention behind Kim’s body of work continued to be to blur the lines between spiritual and intellectual, high and low cultures, the mainstream and the marginalized. It was specifically “the sphere of otherness” in which Kim was interested. She, having experienced the sense of otherness first as an immigrant then as a woman, came to believe that the sense of otherness was a part of every human experience. She sought to create a space for dialogue based on this commonality. After working with numerous groups on such projects, Kim founded her own organization, Group Effort, which promoted global dialogue and awareness about and on behalf of disenfranchised peoples primarily, though not exclusively, through the arts. Group Effort is now under the leadership of Kim’s daughter and fellow collaborator of many years.

In the end, Kim stated that her purpose in life was to “live authentically and truthfully. Otherwise it would be a life wasted, and what would I have to say for myself when God Himself asks me what I was up to in my 70 to 80 years on earth?” We can only wonder what conversations Kim is having with God as this goes to print. Kim is survived by her husband, daughter and Group Effort.

Sympathy by Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar is an African-American poet from the late 1800s is one of Maya Angelou's favorites. This poem is where she drew the title of her autobiography, I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS.

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;

When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals --
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;

And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting --
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore, --
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings --
I know why the caged bird sings!

Rainbow in the Clouds

One of the things I’ve been wondering about is what it looks like to be a female voice of influence and empowerment in the world. I feel that I’ve been enculturated to think that to be feminine in the larger society is to be objectified, frivolous, weak, even altogether irrelevant. In the past, my solution to this was to extract the feminine out of my voice, or at least to present it with enough academic qualifiers to justify its presence. Recently, though, I’ve been wondering what it looks like for a woman to maintain her sense of self (not just as a female but her whole self of which her gender is one aspect) and command others’ attention and respect.

Last Friday, I went to hear Maya Angelou speak at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. I was working as a press guide for the Oscars last week so it was a bit of a to-do to rush to Downtown from Hollywood on time after my shift. I got there fine, though, and I felt a sort of wonderful, melancholic solitude as I insulated myself against the wind in my ratty coat. Hope Street was so deserted and quiet as I marched up the hill to the Music Center but the Pavilion itself was abuzz with families, friends and couples lining up to get in. Sometimes there's such a pleasure in getting lost in the crowd.

I was so exhausted and worried that I wouldn't be able to focus. I was at the edge of my seat through the whole talk, though, and the exhaustion just made me emotionally open – I pretty much wept through the whole thing.

Maya Angelou’s presence was so magnetic. She got a standing ovation as soon as she appeared on stage. Her voice was so commanding and yet so at ease. She knew herself and her place in the world. She was at complete peace and yet not resigned or complacent. Her knowledge and her peace had movement. She not only moves herself through the world but she clearly causes movement in others too.

She spoke of how, in Genesis, God gave his people the gift of the rainbow to ease their worries that the rain would never stop. She spoke of how one can see rainbows even in the clouds, that even though the rain hasn't completely stopped, there is the hope that it will someday. Then she spoke of those who were rainbows throughout her life, and how she strives to be a rainbow for those who are lost in the tumult of life. How all of us can and must be rainbows in the clouds for others. Maybe it sounds cheesy but the way she spoke of these things was so grounded in the timeless truth of humanity and its needs that she cut through whatever cynicism we are accustomed to exulting as reality, intellect, enlightenment. I think this is why I wept.

Untitled, 02/11/07

Untitled (cuz a title was never discussed), 2007. Oil pastel and carbon on canvas, 36" x 50".

So ... this is the drawing that the illustrious Young Mi Chi and I collaborated on. It's all oil pastel and pencil. We went nuts all over the canvas with the pearly irredescent oil pastel, though you can't really tell from the photo. I'm going to try to post some details later but if you want to see the drawing in person, come to the Mayan on Sunday.

Click on the image for a (slightly) larger version.

Memories and Cravings

Goal for the foreseeable future: baby steps. Meaning, 1 “art activity” every 2 weeks. Then thoughts about said art activity. Embarrassingly basic and minimal but must remember: baby steps. I meant to go to LACMA to check out the Magritte show last week (really interested in how John Baldessari installed the show) but I didn’t get around to it. You know how life can be, sometimes.

I did collaborate on a drawing with a friend of mine, an artist named Young Mi, yesterday at Mosaic. She would very likely squirm at that description – it’s funny how we're so capable of extending such monikers on others and how difficult it is to accept them ourselves. Anyway, I drove up to Oregon along the PCH once, videotaping the view out the window. Something about capturing moments while willingly trapped in a car fascinates me. I never did anything with the footage I took then, but recently I elonaged a 10-minute piece from Big Sur to about an hour. Young Mi and I projected it onto a canvas from behind and then drew on the surface with cray-pas while the video was playing. It definitely had a huge performance element to it, which unnerved us and yet energized us at the same time. We'd tried it once before, but that time the work never took flight from interesting concept to compelling end-product. I think it was due to lack of strategic dialogue about logistics and such. I guess we realized this but still felt ok – because it was so much about performance and real-time, it was good to just "do it" in order to figure things out. At any rate, we talked through things a great deal this time around and I believe the drawing was stronger and more successful because of it. We also felt much more comfortable drawing and working side-by-side this time around since the getting-to-know-you element of the original effort was out of the way (we've collaborated on lots of things but never in a way where the interaction was so immediate and time-sensitive). In fact, I reneged on the original idea of taking turns drawing to allow each other the whole canvas at a given time. I hope Young Mi didn’t mind. I couldn’t help but jump in. Being so invested in the process, it was difficult to sit back as ideas and general enthusiasm got the better of me. We ended up having some technical difficulties but I think the work we produced is very cohesive. It was about loss, love, journey (both physical and symbolic) and alienation filtered through childhood memories.

It felt great to DRAW. And it felt great to produce something that was attractive. It felt great to CREATE, as cheesy as that sounds.