BLOG NUMBER 50: Infesting Los Angeles

There is no better way to celebrate our arrival at blog number 50, than to recognize a new exhibit featuring co-founder of artbouillon.com, Rachel Bernstein.  Rachel's work has attacked the enormous front window of L.A.'s excellent Craft and Folk Art Museum (just a block down form LACMA on Wilshire).  She has created an infestation of finger-like protuberances that spread like an invasive growth on the building's exterior and interior.

Rachel's installation is part on an exhibition cleverly called Social Fabric, curated by Berkeley's Anurahda Vikram.  It features a group of artists who are using fabric to create fine art, with a social edge.  Use of fabric in art is itself a politically message, since fabric has been treated as a medium for women, hence not worthy of fine art.  The work display represents the fiberart revolution, which seeks to correct that gendered ranking, by bringing techniques such as sewing, needlepoint, and knitting into legitimacy.

Some of the work on display is overtly political.  Consider Allison Smith's marvelous gas masks.  Using old photos from military museums, Smith recreates fabric masks of the kind that were once used in battle during the brutal first half of the 20th century.  The handmade fabric designs have a quaint charm that hangs in grim tension with the knowledge that the originals would have be worn under conditions too horrendous to imagine.  On display in the show are some of the actual gas masks that Smith has created as well as a photo series of iconic images, which turn these tools of war into fashion garments.


Stephanie Syjuco's work is another case in point.  With the help of craftspeople around the world, she makes crochet knock-offs of designed handbags.  The bags serve as a reminder of the hegemony of big brands, which have come to epitomize status and the global spread of capitalism.  Syjuco's practice also draws attention to the fact that makers of designer products often use underpaid workers in developing countries.  By participating in the production of the knockoffs, foreign workers can reclaim their dignity while creatively condemning exploitation.

Another highlight of the show is work by the Combat Paper Project.  Participants in the project are veterans, who take their military uniforms and convert them into pulp, which they they make into paper and use for making art.

Rachel's work is political in a different way.  She is interested in what may be the defining obsession of our species: the quest to control nature.  Invasive growths represent the uncontrollable.  Her fabric fungi invade interior space, bringing the outside in, as it were, asserting the indomitability of nature.  Over the duration of the exhibition, she will build on her window installation, as if it were growing, and encroaching inexorably on the normally pristine museum.

Rachel's work also challenges the boundary between the beautiful and the grotesque.  Invasive growths are usually repellent, but Rachel's rendition has poetic allure.  She has another installation in the exhibition gallery and some photos of her fungi in various urban and wild settings, including a New York subway station.  In the latter context, they represent not just the encroachment of nature, but the encroachment of art.  Metaphorically, perhaps, art too is an alluring and uncontrollable fungus that crops up in surprising ways, violating expectations, and posing positive challenges to prevailing norms.

Weiwei Cool

There are several ways to make an artist documentary.  You can film the artist creating or discussing their works, you can do an exposé revealing the artist's personality and personal life, or you can present the broader social context and the artist's involvement in issue that transcend art.  Three recent documentaries illustrate each of these styles: Gerhard Richter Painting is about the process of making art, Marina Abromavic: The Artist is Present is a Geraldo-style character portrait, and Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry is mostly about politics.  Alison Klayman's film follows Weiwei as he takes on the Chinese government.  The film packs a powerful punch, though we learn little about the artist's works or methods of creation.  Moreover, the political issues are presented with little nuance, allowing Western viewers to gasp in horror at Chinese oppression of free expression, while hearing little more than a sentence of dissent (articulated by a New Yorker journalist sympathetic to Weiwei's position).  That is forgivable, though, because Weiwei's battles, from tragic to trifling, do seem to fall on the right side of justice, and he is a rare reminder that artists can have an impact, while also producing work that earns a place in art history independent of its moral message.  Weiwei's charismatic personality shines in this film, both arrogant and humble, serious and prankster, strong and fragile.  The titular epithet, never sorry, speaks to the artist's unflinching resolve, which is presented in almost every frame.



Weiwei is presented as more of an activist than an artist.  His effort to gain recognition for the children who died in the Sichuan earthquake is movingly documented.  This has been a theme is his work, but here it eclipses other things he's done, so that, for example, when taken to a major retrospective in Munich, we see an earthquake-themed facade being installed, but little on other works, shown in passing.  One exceptation is a neolithic vase, which he defaced with a Coca-Cola logo (left), extending earlier work (above), in which such antiques were willfully destroyed--a chilling echo of the cultural revolution.  A bit more attention is dedicated to the photogenic sea of sunflower seeds, which he commissioned artisans to sculpt and paint using traditional methods.  They are seen (above right), filling the ground floor of the Tate Modern.  We also get a glimpse of Weiwei's relationship to other artists, including Tehching Hsieh, He Yunchang, and rock musician, Zuoxiao Zuzhou.  Women artists, including Weiwei's partner Lu Qing, are given less air time.  With this supporting cast, we are able to see that Weiwei's political activism has progressed in tandem with his efforts to support the Chinese art scene.


One nice feature of Klayman's apotheosis of a film is her emphasis on social media.  Weiwei has made extensive use of blogging and Twitter to bring attention to his causes, and, in so doing has shown the power of these resources to promote awareness and to mobilize large numbers of people.  Weiwei compulsively tweets his encounters with police and government officials. He watches them as they watch him, and the world watches these reflexive watchings. Perhaps in this perverse tangle of spectatorship, we can see that Weiwei's activism is not separate from his art, but an exemplification of it.