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LA Roundup: Rachel Harrison, John Baldessari and Edition Jacob Samuel
By Joshua Mack
Rachel Harrison, Regen Projects, 27 May – 10 July
Rachel Harrison balances her disparate materials in elegant, classically beautiful compositions that demonstrate a greater maturity in her work but lack the edge that has made her practice fascinating and challenging to follow.
Harrison’s prickly aesthetic, her often aggressive combinations of lumpy, seemingly crudely painted masses and cheaply mass-produced stuff – canned goods, brittle Halloween masks, polyester wigs – can be discomfitingly beautiful in equal measure to the roughness of her forms and materials and the striking visual combinations she creates from them. So it’s hard to know what to make of this new work. Here Harrison’s once-challenging combinations and colours are now synthesised in ways which are simply, and classically, beautiful.
Yes, her colours remain refreshingly vigorous, bright and metallic, but their calicolike application (there are also several monochrome works) not only achieve a highly controlled compositional unity but complement the massing of her somewhat boxy, lumpy forms. These appear to rise and turn with the subtle contrapuntal energy of ancient Greek kouroi. They energise the space around them in much the same way as their historic forebears.
Harrison also seems to be using colour in a new way, uniting her combinations of elements into fully realised wholes. For example, in Pablo Escobar (2010), a cascade of ceramic peppers hangs down from the sculpture’s ‘waist’. Its loose fall functions as foil to the work’s somewhat boxy massing; the peppers’ shiny greens, yellows and reds complement its colours.
The show also includes a new version of Voyage of the Beagle, a photographic compendium of facial images taken from various sculptures and illustrations. This ongoing exploration of how features can be represented and read, and the meaning, or lack thereof, behind them, makes for visual fun, but the series remains her most approachable and, to my mind, easiest work. More interesting, if slightly unresolved, are a related series of ripped and overpainted photos. These have a cadavre exquis feel in which disparate halves of faces are paired. They are rougher than the Beagle works and develop a greater tension between figuration and abstraction, archetype and specificity.
John Baldessari: Sediment, Margo Leavin Gallery, 22 May – 10 July
Photographic images printed on canvas and overpainted in flat matt tones of grey, black and white have the artist giving way to easy humour. In this new work, Baldessari continues his reductive approach to picture-making, omitting all but two or three signature details from photographic images. These objects are rendered as flat black-and-white silhouettes on grey backgrounds and are described in a band of text along the lower edge. These can be prosaically deadpan: ‘Hand holding gun and portion of frame’; or slyly referential: ‘Three overcoats ascending stairs’, which riffs on Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912). Duchamp’s cerebral games, his exploitation of the disconnect between linguistic and pictorial description, and the abstract nature of both are, of course, the ultimate source of Baldessari’s essays.
Photo: Brian Forrest. Courtesy Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles
Photo: Brian Forrest. Courtesy Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles
But in this case, to what end? While some of the pieces achieve a visually engaging play of abstract form against grey ground, like the blobs which stand for the coats or the Cheshire Cat teeth of what is identified as Elton John’s smile, most of the pieces are subdued and rather flat in the sense of just too obvious and slightly dull.
Outside the Box, Edition Jacob Samuel, 1988–2010, Hammer Museum, 23 May – 29 August
A master printer and old-fashioned connoisseur works with some of today’s most interesting artists to create, in many but not all cases, innovative formal and aesthetic results using traditional and, to many, stodgy techniques of intaglio printmaking. Jacob Samuel, who judging by the interview published in the brochure available at the entrance to this show sounds like one of the smartest, coolest, most down-to-earth people one could, if lucky, hang out with, began making etchings in Santa Monica in 1974. Four years later he started spending time and then working with Sam Francis at his print studio, the Litho Shop. Along the way he also made etchings at Gemini, a bastion of printmaking on the West Coast. He opened his own studio in 1988.
collage, with chine collé. Collection UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Samuel’s strengths derive from a combination of deep respect for the medium of etching – honed on numerous trips to Europe, where he visited the great living master printers and studied the work of artists like Rembrandt, Goya and Picasso – with an almost clichéd Southern California take on life. On his first day of work, Francis told Samuel that he was ‘in an artist’s studio, and we’re not making prints for dealers or collectors…’. To which Samuel responded: ‘If the waves are good, can I come in late?’
Understanding that artists are most comfortable in their own studios, where they can work with the materials they choose, Samuel developed a small travelling print shop which ‘fit into two carry-ons’. With his kit, he’s enabled Marina Abramovic to make etchings using her own saliva and Rebecca Horn to draw with rose petals dipped in nitric acid.
Collection UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
The results, at their most interesting, do more than translate an artist’s ideas into print, they allow the artist to achieve effects they haven’t been able to in other media. Take, for example, Juan Uslé’s Blumania (2000): hardground, softground, open bite, white ground, spit bite, sugarlift aquatint with chine collé. The works’ luminous contrast of blue and black, their saturated hues and the slightly burred edges the etching techniques lend Uslé’s printed registers give these pieces a tonal depth and gestural subtlety his paintings often lack. Gabriel Orozco’s Polvo Impreso (2002), softground etching impressions of lint, capture the powder consistency and variegated density of dust balls while abstracting them completely. Their delicacy extends the often hard-edged obviousness of Orozco's quotations from and appropriations of everyday detritus.
Collection UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Other work seems, well, conventional. Peter Alexander’s translations of photos shot at night from a plane over LA, done in 1989, seem gimmicky, like latter-day Pop art with little verve. Matthew Monahan’s etchings take on too hard an edge, look like figural versions of Stanley William Hayter’s prints from the 1940s. They lack the gentle poetry that makes Monahan’s work evocative. Still, the show in its totality is a testament to artistic vision and authenticity, most refreshing given how commercial so much of what’s seen today is.
Rachel Harrison, Regen Projects, 27 May – 10 July
Rachel Harrison balances her disparate materials in elegant, classically beautiful compositions that demonstrate a greater maturity in her work but lack the edge that has made her practice fascinating and challenging to follow.
Harrison’s prickly aesthetic, her often aggressive combinations of lumpy, seemingly crudely painted masses and cheaply mass-produced stuff – canned goods, brittle Halloween masks, polyester wigs – can be discomfitingly beautiful in equal measure to the roughness of her forms and materials and the striking visual combinations she creates from them. So it’s hard to know what to make of this new work. Here Harrison’s once-challenging combinations and colours are now synthesised in ways which are simply, and classically, beautiful.
Yes, her colours remain refreshingly vigorous, bright and metallic, but their calicolike application (there are also several monochrome works) not only achieve a highly controlled compositional unity but complement the massing of her somewhat boxy, lumpy forms. These appear to rise and turn with the subtle contrapuntal energy of ancient Greek kouroi. They energise the space around them in much the same way as their historic forebears.
Harrison also seems to be using colour in a new way, uniting her combinations of elements into fully realised wholes. For example, in Pablo Escobar (2010), a cascade of ceramic peppers hangs down from the sculpture’s ‘waist’. Its loose fall functions as foil to the work’s somewhat boxy massing; the peppers’ shiny greens, yellows and reds complement its colours.
The show also includes a new version of Voyage of the Beagle, a photographic compendium of facial images taken from various sculptures and illustrations. This ongoing exploration of how features can be represented and read, and the meaning, or lack thereof, behind them, makes for visual fun, but the series remains her most approachable and, to my mind, easiest work. More interesting, if slightly unresolved, are a related series of ripped and overpainted photos. These have a cadavre exquis feel in which disparate halves of faces are paired. They are rougher than the Beagle works and develop a greater tension between figuration and abstraction, archetype and specificity.
John Baldessari: Sediment, Margo Leavin Gallery, 22 May – 10 July
Photographic images printed on canvas and overpainted in flat matt tones of grey, black and white have the artist giving way to easy humour. In this new work, Baldessari continues his reductive approach to picture-making, omitting all but two or three signature details from photographic images. These objects are rendered as flat black-and-white silhouettes on grey backgrounds and are described in a band of text along the lower edge. These can be prosaically deadpan: ‘Hand holding gun and portion of frame’; or slyly referential: ‘Three overcoats ascending stairs’, which riffs on Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912). Duchamp’s cerebral games, his exploitation of the disconnect between linguistic and pictorial description, and the abstract nature of both are, of course, the ultimate source of Baldessari’s essays.
Photo: Brian Forrest. Courtesy Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles
Photo: Brian Forrest. Courtesy Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles
But in this case, to what end? While some of the pieces achieve a visually engaging play of abstract form against grey ground, like the blobs which stand for the coats or the Cheshire Cat teeth of what is identified as Elton John’s smile, most of the pieces are subdued and rather flat in the sense of just too obvious and slightly dull.
Outside the Box, Edition Jacob Samuel, 1988–2010, Hammer Museum, 23 May – 29 August
A master printer and old-fashioned connoisseur works with some of today’s most interesting artists to create, in many but not all cases, innovative formal and aesthetic results using traditional and, to many, stodgy techniques of intaglio printmaking. Jacob Samuel, who judging by the interview published in the brochure available at the entrance to this show sounds like one of the smartest, coolest, most down-to-earth people one could, if lucky, hang out with, began making etchings in Santa Monica in 1974. Four years later he started spending time and then working with Sam Francis at his print studio, the Litho Shop. Along the way he also made etchings at Gemini, a bastion of printmaking on the West Coast. He opened his own studio in 1988.
collage, with chine collé. Collection UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Samuel’s strengths derive from a combination of deep respect for the medium of etching – honed on numerous trips to Europe, where he visited the great living master printers and studied the work of artists like Rembrandt, Goya and Picasso – with an almost clichéd Southern California take on life. On his first day of work, Francis told Samuel that he was ‘in an artist’s studio, and we’re not making prints for dealers or collectors…’. To which Samuel responded: ‘If the waves are good, can I come in late?’
Understanding that artists are most comfortable in their own studios, where they can work with the materials they choose, Samuel developed a small travelling print shop which ‘fit into two carry-ons’. With his kit, he’s enabled Marina Abramovic to make etchings using her own saliva and Rebecca Horn to draw with rose petals dipped in nitric acid.
Collection UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
The results, at their most interesting, do more than translate an artist’s ideas into print, they allow the artist to achieve effects they haven’t been able to in other media. Take, for example, Juan Uslé’s Blumania (2000): hardground, softground, open bite, white ground, spit bite, sugarlift aquatint with chine collé. The works’ luminous contrast of blue and black, their saturated hues and the slightly burred edges the etching techniques lend Uslé’s printed registers give these pieces a tonal depth and gestural subtlety his paintings often lack. Gabriel Orozco’s Polvo Impreso (2002), softground etching impressions of lint, capture the powder consistency and variegated density of dust balls while abstracting them completely. Their delicacy extends the often hard-edged obviousness of Orozco's quotations from and appropriations of everyday detritus.
Collection UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Other work seems, well, conventional. Peter Alexander’s translations of photos shot at night from a plane over LA, done in 1989, seem gimmicky, like latter-day Pop art with little verve. Matthew Monahan’s etchings take on too hard an edge, look like figural versions of Stanley William Hayter’s prints from the 1940s. They lack the gentle poetry that makes Monahan’s work evocative. Still, the show in its totality is a testament to artistic vision and authenticity, most refreshing given how commercial so much of what’s seen today is.
Tags: artreview, contemporary art, edition jacob samuel, first view, hammer museum, john baldessari, joshua mack, margo leavin gallery, outside the box, rachel harrison, More…
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