THE Magazine - Los Angeles

Under the Knife at the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena

Typical of the Armory Center's high curatorial standards, Under the Knife took a broad theme and made it memorable through impeccable selection. Cutting -- with scissors, blades, or lasers -- was the common denominator, but each of the twelve artists maintains a distinct aesthetic, and there was a wonderful visual balance in the galleries between highly sculptural pieces and work that hung relatively (but not completely) flat upon the wall, and between hard-edged and feathery-edged stuff. Curator Sinéad Finnerty-Pyne clearly has a keen eye for both the beautiful and the well crafted.

Two artists were given entire rooms. In See-Through Super Sag Chris Natrop draped a dimmed room with very large hand-cut paper and hand-dyed PETG cutouts; set up three video projections, which seemed to reiterate the dripping, slipping effect of the translucent cutouts; and suspended small speakers amidst the plastic stalactites to emit spacey electronic music. Serendipitously, the music was also appropriate to the other installation nearby, Charlotte McGowan-Griffin's Illuminated Forest. The most poetically mesmerizing piece in the show, the installation, placed at the end of a former vault, consisted of many lit rondelles graced with delicate botanical cutouts and vaguely Pop-Arty designs. The rondelles consisted of the ends of tubes stacked atop one another, with colored lights projected from the other end. Some of them changed like mood rings, sometimes dominated by a blue/green, at other times a kind of mauve. To be sure, Illuminated Forest was very design-driven, but it proved mesmerizing, and I wished I could simply sit there and bathe in all that eco-energy.

Also worth mentioning were works by Francesca Gabbiani and Lana Shuttleworth, especially the latter artist's two complementary tableaux, Underground and Under Water, both made from cut polyvinyl chloride on panel.

In a museum setting, a project space is reserved for the coolest new emerging artist making experimental, edgy work. In a community like the Brewery Arts Complex of arts studios, a project space and its participants tend to run the gamut. The Brewery exhibit highlights the many accomplished artists who have exhibited in the project space, such as Steve Roden, Linda Parnell, Samantha Fields, Shirley Tse, Andre Yi, Kymber Holt, and Waylon Dobson.

The Armory Center has divided its space into small galleries with micro-representations of the curatorial roster from the fifteen-year history of at the Brewery Project. Many shows are represented, and a few genuinely interesting curatorial visions are highlighted. Under the direction of John O'Brien, the show gives a lot of attention to artist-curators with each vignette, spelling out the name of the curator on the wall. A few of these artist-curators, such as Wendy Adest and Karen Koblitz, stood out.

Adest curated the bold and meandering A Simple Complex, where an excellent quilt by Daniel Marlos, World Wide Web, virtually overpowered the entire wall with its optical transformations. Koblitz created an interesting international context for her own work in her show From the Earth/Dalla Terra. Within this environment, Tetsuji Aono created a magnificent pairing of porcelain and fabric in his beautifully crafted ceramic gnomes. In Untitled 2007, Aono's kitschy gnomes are covered with Swiss cheese holes and surrounded by opulent fabrics, mirroring the dual influence of pop and venerated culture on the co-temporary maker. In the same show, Phyllis Green creates the stunning Rock Pool 2007, with a scintillating mirrored plinth as part of the installation. The mirrored element reflects not only the sculpture but also the Armory Center's paired-down industrial ceiling. The literal reference to the glass ceiling collapses on itself and becomes a reflecting pool of narcissistic enticement.
Perhaps the whole show could be summed up as a kind of monument, like the one Green proposes. The artist's project space is but a glass cube that inserts the maker into the environment of the white-walled museum through an object of the artist's own design and making.

In her multi-room video installation Tapestries, Marsia Alexander-Clarke explodes the boundaries of the medium, conjugating abstract and imagistic vocabularies and playing them out in sequences and systems that appear and disappear on a palpable ground of silence, like Bach keyboard variations or minimalist compositions. This is no coincidence: Clarke's multi-segmented imagery uses contemporary musical principles according to which abstract forms and image fragments from a filmed event, like single notes or sounds, are arranged into repeating, changing, merging, and scattering patterns.

Tapestries is also a cross-shaped, wall-hung grid of twelve screens in which backgrounds change from red to magenta to black while emblematic shapes (a yellow disk, a purple ellipse, a striated triangle, a self-duplicating tessellated image) appear now fixed, now in motion, in and across the screens, touching and overlaying, recalling the shuttle movement in the weaving of tapestry patterns, the intersection of inner and outer space.

Paisajes/Passages is a wall-size projection in pale grays, mauves, and greens in which a diagonal silhouette, duplicated in parallel images, moves slowly across the projected space. The image is then minimized to a few inches and repeated in rows, changed in color and content, creating a dialogue between continuity and disruption as small figures break through the rows. We, too, become agents in disruption and duplication as we must part a heretofore invisible curtain at the center of the wall to cross over to the next room. There, Red grabs us like a kinetic Rauschenberg in its capture of simultaneous fleeting images reduced to geometries floating in space. Lastly, eyes cascade amidst raining, zipping strips of images in the screens of Lluvia/Rain. Throughout, Clarke transports us to the sacred space of witnessing, where every fragment is a moment of totality.

This major exhibition will include over half a century of works on paper by one of the founders of contemporary art in Southern California. Curated by Jay Belloli, director of Gallery Programs at the Armory Center for the Arts, this show will be accompanied by a color-illustrated catalog that has been published by the Armory to mark this unprecedented occasion. The catalog will include a DVD interview with the artist.

Following early influences such as Henri Matisse, the conceptual art of Marcel Duchamp, and the work of the New York Abstract Expressionists, Craig Kauffman came to be one of the founders of contemporary art in the 1950s in Southern California along with artists like Wallace Berman, Robert Irwin, Edward Kienholz, Ed Moses, John Altoon, and Billy Al Bengston. Kauffman's 1957 sensual, light-filled paintings were lighter in hue and value than was the norm at the time, and, according to Belloli, with these works, Kauffman "single-handedly enlivened abstract art in Southern California, making it much more open and fresh." The airbrushed, vacuum-formed, three-dimensional works that he created in the 1960s definitively transformed the painting of the region and helped to create the environment that led to the creation of the Light and Space art that followed. These plastic pieces, painted in bright acrylic lacquer, popped through to a brand-new approach as to what an artist might dare to incorporate as a working medium in his or her art-making process. Although his drawings are largely unknown, the works on paper are essential to understanding Kauffman's artistic progression, and, in fact, the artist began making mature drawings beginning in the early 1950s. Encouraged by his family from an early age, when his whole-hearted interest in art was recognized, Kauffman demonstrated his mastery of the drawing medium while he was still in high school. A number of distinct periods of creative output will be covered in this exhibition, including: line drawings made from 1957 to 1958 (including some that were shown at the celebrated Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles); abstract drawings in paint that were created in Europe during the late 1950s and early 1960s; sketches and a large engineering drawing for Kauffman's vacuum-formed pieces, done in the 1960s; sketches for possible temporary art installations from the mid-1960s; drawings for abstract paintings from the mid-1970s; representational drawings rendered in ink and watercolor created during the decade following 1976; acrylic and ink drawings made in the Philippines during the period from 1993 to 1998; and drawings done in pencil, glue, and glitter on paper, from 2006 and 2007. In addition, the show will include a few of Kauffman's new banner drawings that are based on his Frederick's of Hollywood collages of the early 1960s.

The majority of the works in this exhibition, the grand achievement of more than fifty years of versatile and masterful drawings, has never been seen by the public, and although Craig Kauffman is a major figure in the rise of Southern California contemporary art, this is the first one-person museum exhibition of his work in over twenty-five years. The show will be on view in the Susan and John Caldwell Gallery at the Armory.

Puppet Show hosted a range of expressions that second-handedly voiced darker tendencies, laments, and subverted desires. Puppets have a history of acting out, providing stern commentary on politics, gender, race, society, relationships, and autonomy. Each work in the exhibition, still or moving, confronted visitors with smart, caustic commentary. Glee was scarce, but there was plenty of humor, even if it was mostly the kind that makes you squirm. From Bruce Nauman's post-modern Punch-and-Judy video, enacted by real people, to Dennis Oppenheim's clickity-clacking sea of self-portrait marionettes, Puppet Show mounted a full frontal attack on our notions of physical and psychological security.

The mutable roles of puppet, puppeteer, and viewer pose a provocative conundrum. Kiki Smith's hanging plaster limbs and Louis Bourgeois's mobile of body parts elegantly depict suspended animation, presenting the body as lifeless and poised for manipulation. William Kentridge's What Will Come, a swirling animation based on Italy's 1936 conquest of Ethiopia, is projected onto a silver cylinder that reflects the images, visible only from a particular distance, onto a tabletop.

The exhibition doled out aggression and humanity in equal measure. In Natalie Djurberg's stop-animation Feed the Hungry Children a prostitute sashays into a tenement teeming with boys covered in their own filth. Initially she rebuffs the waifs' pleas for maternal satiation but eventually acquiesces with copious streams of Claymation mammary milk. In Christian Jankowski's The Puppet Conference, television puppetry's "most distinguished figures" -- including Fozzie Bear and a reincarnated Lamb Chop -- gather for a panel discussion on the state of puppets in broadcasting. The audience is itself an amusingly motley crew of puppets, including a chatty toilet brush and an exuberant owl.

Good Doll, Bad Doll, curated by Michael Duncan, proved a compatible bedfellow to the Puppet Show. Duncan assembled a quirky array of artist-created dolls that also contended with potent universals, but their tales seemed more personalized and cathartic. Freed of the context of performance, the dolls conjured a more intimate exchange; it was just you and the dolls in silent conversation.

Good Doll, Bad Doll cleverly set up each gallery like a mini-museum devoted to a particular sensation. While a major theme in the Puppet Show was subjugation, Duncan's survey offered liberation; the dolls functioned as vehicles for purging, reconciliation, and healing. As dolls bear the projections of our wishes and dreams as well as the icky stuff we don't publicly discuss, Good Doll, Bad Doll established a satisfying balance between dark and light. Tony Oursler's Hellsucker spewed rank tidings, but Vanessa Chow's carnival of charming characters fashioned out of felt pointed to a happier place. Clayton Bailey's Blob Creature manifested a push-pull of empathy and repugnance; a ceramic lump with wonky eyes, no mouth, and entrails for `limbs,' Bailey's blob appears childlike, a blob-toddler, capable of maturing into monster or loveable pet.

While puppets are often vocal extroverts, dolls seem more introverted; they can insinuate gross characterization but are ultimately inanimate, sworn to keep our secrets. Morton Bartlett created a foster family of dolls, fifteen lifelike plaster children whom he cherished, posed, and photographed. The dolls and photographs were discovered after Bartlett's death, and as featured in Good Doll, Bad Doll, the photos only hint at their subjects' history and vocation. Their mystery is ever alluring.