Danielle Sommer

by Danielle Sommer, January 31, 2012, DailyServing

It’s been said that over the course of four short years – from 1968 to 1972 – the Eugenia Butler Gallery set the bar for conceptual art in Southern California. Butler, whose own mother fled home to work as a Harvey Girl, left Bakersfield, CA, to serve in the United States Marines, eventually becoming a Master Sergeant. After the war, Butler married James Butler, a lawyer and military pilot who made a small fortune by conducting the first lawsuit against Thalidomide, a drug with known negative side effects, on pregnant women. Perhaps due to the fact that she did not need the gallery to turn a profit, or (more likely) due to her innovative tastes, Butler took chances on work that others couldn’t, and her roster of artists grew to include Allen Ruppersberg, William Leavitt, Eric Orr, John Baldessari, James Lee Byars, Ed Keinholz, Dieter Roth, and her own daughter, Eugenia P. Butler. Yet somehow Butler’s story has remained largely unwritten, with nary a Wikipedia entry to speed things along.

Thanks to the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), the Getty Center, and Pacific Standard Time, for the next three months, Butler’s influence will be on display in three West Hollywood exhibition spaces, at 8126 – 8132 Santa Monica Boulevard, just about a mile from the Eugenia Butler Gallery’s original location, 615 La Cienaga. Titled Perpetual Conceptual: Echoes of Eugenia Butler, the show is both a primer — with works from Paul Cotton, Lawrence Weiner, Ed Keinholz, et al — and an homage, with curatorial stylings that recall many of the makeshift exhibition spaces of EBG’s era. In short, LAND, “a public art initiative committed to curating site- and situation-specific contemporary art projects,” chooses exhibition locations based on specific projects rather than maintaining a single venue. Perpetual Conceptual‘s three venues are located one right after another on the edge of WeHo, in a small, unassuming strip mall, right next to a donut shop.

The bulk of the exhibition comes from Butler’s personal collection, now in the hands of her granddaughter. Joseph Kosuth’s photostat Nothing, 1967, is perhaps the most immediately familiar work: a deep-black square, in the center of which is written the definition of “nothing” in cream-colored font. There are also several pieces of typewritten and hand-drawn ephemera by Lawrence Weiner containing instructions for creating specific artworks, such as “One standard air force dye marker thrown into the sea.” There’s quite a bit of work on display, including both primary and secondary artifacts. William Wiley’s Movement to Black Ball Violence, 1968, a ball of black friction tape made in response to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death, remains poignant forty-four years later, even more so due to the letter of instruction Wiley typed to go along with the piece, which asks that anyone who wishes to blackball violence add 150 feet of tape to the ball.

Though this particular piece is “closed” (Wiley called an end to it in 1969), the genius of LAND’s exhibition strategy is that many pieces and artists will be reactivated or looked at in depth using the two other exhibition rooms that adjoin the group space. Currently, Eugenia P. Butler’s work is on display in the concept space, and there will be restagings of Dieter Roth’s Steeple Cheese, 1970 — Roth’s first exhibition in the United States in which he packed 37 suitcases full of cheese to rot, with one to be opened each day — and Ed Keinholz’s Watercolors, 1968, a bartering project. Keinholz painted a group of watercolor paper with “prices” (such as “Timex Electric Watch”) and invited people to trade him the object for the watercolor. This past weekend also saw the restaging of Eric Orr’s Wall Shadow, 1970, in the back parking lot, a performance piece in which Orr took a palette of cinderblock, built a wall, traced and painted its shadow with gray paint, and then dissassembled everything so that only the painted shadow was left. Like Wall Shadow and the Eugenia Butler Gallery itself, my bet is that Perpetual Conceptual will be brief in its physical existence but long in influence.

Radio segment produced for the Patt Morrison program, 89.3 KPCC.

A few weeks ago, UK-based Waterstone’s Booksellers did something shocking: they dropped their apostrophe, claiming that there is no use for the tiny little mark in the digital age. More accurately, their managing director stated that “Waterstones” is just straight-up more versatile when it comes to a world full of html code, URLs, and email addresses. You may also have noticed that some of your favorite online websites fail to italicize, and instead use double quotes around things like book and movie title – also a product of the collision between punctuation and digital media.

Plenty has been said about the effects of texting and email on spelling and vocabulary, but where does punctuation stand in the 21st century? What should be preserved, what should stay, and how do we make the decisions – or are they already in process?

by Danielle Sommer, January 24, 2012, DailyServing

“Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and of making it obsolete.” – Susan Sontag

In her 1977 essay, “The Image-World,” Susan Sontag wrote that the practice of photography – and the overabundance of images that come along with it – leave us desensitized to the “real” world. Despite the fact that photographs are considered traces of their subject, we typically see photographs as independent, material objects – separate from their original subjects and somehow more palatable. They even occupy a specific moment of time, different from our own, turning the present into the past and the past into the present.

But Sontag was writing about the role of the photograph as she knew it, which never included sculpture, or photographs functioning not just as traces of objects but as actual simulations, or three-dimensional copies.  The last year has seen a rise in artists working with photography in sculpture, with more than a few of these artists choosing to juxtapose “real” objects with their 2- or 3-dimensional, photographic copies. Is there a difference between images functioning like this in the world and “the image-world” that Sontag describes? Or are they one and the same?

Ironically, even as Sontag was puzzling over “The Image-World” and the rest of the essays that would become On Photography, searching to delineate a niche in the fine art world for photography, curator Peter Bunnell took an even larger step. In 1970, Bunnell launched “Photography into Sculpture” at the Museum of Modern Art, “the first comprehensive survey of photographically formed images used in a sculptural or fully dimensional manner.”

The show included a work by Jerry McMillan called “Wrinkle Bag” (1965) – perhaps one of the first of its kind. “Wrinkle Bag” was not merely a photograph, but a high-quality, black-and-white reproduction of the texture of crumpled paper, cut into the shape of a brown paper lunch sack. In its recent re-manifestation at Los Angeles’ Cherry and Martin Gallery, “Wrinkle Bag” looked eerily contemporary, perhaps because this type of photographic reproduction has resurfaced recently in the works of contemporary artists, like Urs Fischer, amongst others.

In 2008, Fischer collaborated with Gavin Brown on the exhibition “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?”, at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. Fischer and Brown hired a photographer to document the gallery’s previous show – “Four Friends”, which included work by Donald Baechler, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf – and then wallpapered the gallery with the images, printed in a 1:1 scale.  The results were chaotic, with the photographed work punctuating, even interrupting, the current exhibit.  There were even moments where a photographed object was juxtaposed against the original, as in the case of the security guard.

Fischer repeated this technique last year for his solo exhibition at the New Museum, taking photographs of the entire third floor, including the ceiling, and then re-papering those same walls at a 1:1 ratio. 2-d images of the side of the exit sign line up with the exit sign itself; the ceiling is covered with a huge photograph that includes two-dimensional images of flickering flourescent lights, right next to the lights themselves.

By all reports, this was a challenging room to walk through, although reactions varied – many went through to quickly and missed the minor details. Conversely, the reward for those who took their time was an unsettled feeling brought on by the proximity of “real” and “unreal” copies of the same object. There is a visceral difference between experiencing a photographic image on its own and as an image returned to its original context, or placed back in the image world as an object.

Perhaps the most intriguing of these artists is Miriam Bohm, who has completed multiple series – Inventory and Areal, for example – in which she photographs objects such as packages, arranges those photographs in ways that echo the original arrangement, and then rephotographs them. The result is a complex layer of images, leaving you, as the viewer, with nothing concrete save the object of the photograph itself. In the words of Brendan Fay, writing for Artforum, “In Bohm’s hands, it is the photograph’s presence as an object that provides the most immediate basis for apprehending the image it contains.”

“Our unlimited use of photographic images not only reflects but gives shape to this society, one unified by the denial of conflict.”

Sontag was curious about the image-world she described, including whether it was the only variety possible. She even proposed an ecology of images, or a mitigating of sorts. In reality, we’ve gone the opposite direction – more images surround us than ever – but when artists insist on re-inserting an image back into its original context, or even threaten to use it to replace an object, it’s hard not to believe there’s a shift afoot.