dayoutlast

dayoutlast is a record of my direct engagement with mostly contemporary art, mostly Los Angelean.

As this blog has evolved since its 2010 inception, so has my perspective. What I once perceived as central within the investigation was what was central, literally, within the photographic frame that I shared here. While still an important consideration, such thinking has also given way to more peripheral considerations, ones also accompanied occasionally by text (written manifestation of thought) and the oscillations between them. What's missing here are larger unknowns surrounding issues of presentation and representation; the amount of time and space it actually takes to accomplish such first-hand observations; and the quandaries between documentation and interpretation.

Despite my attempt to communicate here with image and text what is essential in some respect about the artwork, neither representation should ever be considered a substitution for the primary viewing experience. Of course, occasionally there are exceptions.

Most of the time, these posts are merely remnants---residual fragments---from my last day out.

--Justin Lowman

Saturday, March 15, 2014

Marcia Roberts @ Rosamund Felsen

#60-12 Soft White, Dome Series, 1969

acrylic on canvas over kapok, wood backing

48 1/2 x 48 1/2 x 4

#47-6 Light Gray, Dome Series, 1969

acrylic on canvas over kapok, wood backing

48 x 48 x 3 3/4 inches

#48-7 Soft Medium Gray, Dome Series, 1969

acrylic on canvas over kapok, wood backing

48 1/2 x 48 1/2 x 4 inches

#2 Hard Black Series, 1969

acrylic on canvas over kapok, wood backing

48 x 48 x 3

Los Banos, Diablo Mts Series, 2001

acrylic on canvas

22 x 30 inches

Detail.

Estero, Santa Lucia Series, 2003

acrylic on canvas

22 x 30 inches

Detail.

This show took me a moment because the first works in this show that I encountered (the ones near the bottom of this post) were oddly scaled for what they suggested. I would love to see them on a large scale, larger than Rothko.

It wasn't until I made it into the back gallery where four works (the ones at the start of this post), one on each wall, were hung in a kind of arrangement (an apparent kind of specificity) that pushed me around by their placement and simplicity. Robert Irwins' mid-sixties paintings just before his acrylic discs came to mind, and so I thought these ones existing in parallel with his was something worth thinking about.

Upon further reflection, in fact upon posting the images here, I came to think more so about Morgan Fisher. Of course, Mary Corse, in my mind, was everywhere in the rooms. Once such associations subsided, I was able to enjoy them for what they are in the present and how I was able to think back through the paintings as objects of place (cf. titles), placement, and displacement of their times.

Keltie Ferris "Doomsday Boogie" @ Santa Monica Museum of Art

Boogie Sapien, 2013

oil and acrylic on canvas

Dimensions variable.

Gates, 2008

oil on panel

55 x 43 inches

Indigo for Sylvester, 2011

oil on panel

16 x 20 inches

3rd Order Magic Square for Harmony, 2013

oil, marker, and pencil on panel

47 x 43 inches

Like the other painting show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art right now ( Keltie Ferris ), it's really hard not to dismiss this work as mere decoration with great technical facility (in which case on all accounts, I am held at bay by either form or concept rather than passages of expression, elements within the composition that recall a human record and therefore time). On the other hand, I also enjoyed making connections to aboriginal applications from, say, Australia, or Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie of 1943. Then video games and lite-brites...

Unlike threads of color discussed elsewhere in this blog, Jane seems to be more fixed on the point, literally toward more remote perceptions regarding particles more than waves. Infinitely divisible, I liked how she reinstated Indigo for the electromagnetic spectrum. I could ramble on with free-associations, but suffice it to say that something else did hold my attention here in a good way. Maybe it was the illusion of light.

Saturday, March 8, 2014

"The Granite Block" @ Overduin & Co.

Ken Okiishi

"Gesture/Data," 2013

flat-screen television, VHS transferred to UBS stick (color, sound) and oil

36 1/2 x 21 1/4 inches

Ken Okiishi

"Gesture/Data," 2013

flat-screen television, VHS transferred to UBS stick (color, sound) and oil

35 x 20 3/4 inches

Sergei Tcherepnin

"Giving Rein: Rainbow Melody," 2011

2-channel reduction for cardboard and aluminum;

SanDisk clip, audio, stereo amplifier, 16 gauge speaker wire and performance photograph

TRT: 11 minutes/6 minutes

61 x 36 inches

Pamela Rosenkranz

"Collector, Chi, Morning Walk (Yellow)," 2014

Ralph Lauren Paint (Collector) home acrylic latex paint, emergency blanket

83 x 63 inches

wall dimensions variable

Pamela Rosenkranz

"Collector, Chi, Morning Walk (Red)," 2014

Ralph Lauren Paint (Chi) acrylic latex paint, IKEA Fargrik bowl

6 x 6 x 3 inches

I like when a show causes me to dig deeper, in this case to dust off an old book, Rosalind Krauss' "A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition" from 1999 in order to rethink her proposal of a post-medium artwork as a function of a self-differing complex rather than mere modern reduction.

How the works in this show might represent such a proposal on one side is interesting; how they seem confused is less so. How the works are contingent on themselves as discrete objects and how they are contingent on each other in a context of a group show, some further dependent on the gallery space itself, is toward the point and the questions. For example, to paint on the surface of a flat-screen may call attention to the complex on which its support stands (a media device processed via older systems). The checklist reinforces this thinking because we are only meant to read the work as two dimensional regardless of time nor depth of the surface nor the apparatus itself. Hence, this work is to be understood, flat (on a flat screen, get it?) and therefore in support of someone like Greenberg's modernist reduction.

On the other hand, works by Pamela Rosenkranz and Sergei Tcherepnin point to the self-differing complex, works that refer to things outside of themselves and contingent on both time and space of the viewing situation. Rosenkranz "red" paint filled IKEA bowl is a case in point. I was viewing it in relation to the yellow painted wall (see photos above); the photo documentation on the gallery's website places it within both works, ones on opposing walls (see here). I suppose this is one of the, er, um red herrings in the show. The other concern one might register upon comparing my photos and the gallery's, is the photoshopped omission of the plumbing in the upper right-hand corner. To me this is dissatisfying in several ways, not the least of which is how I think it to be one of the most remarkable and interesting specific features of this space. I assumed Rosenkranz did too...

Like some of the artists in this show, I haven't quite made up my mind about these things, but perhaps it's because we are still straddling the awkward transition between analog and digital kinds of living. As a way to defer conclusion, I recommend reading Krauss and get back to me. Better yet, make something of it.