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This Week's Contents
(scroll to see the full content of each article; click the cup to compensate the writer):
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Is Laura Parker's Finch Worth
a Thousand Words?
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Silent Defiance: Ceramic Sculpture by Paul Metivier |
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Coming Soon to Your VAS
Gallery and Museum Announcements:
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Is Laura Parker's Finch Worth a Thousand Words?
by Andy Brumer
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Laura Parker, blue bird," 2014, archival pigment print, 9 x 13" |
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A teaser. A spoiler. My commentary on Altadena-based photographer Laura Parker’s enchanting image of a bird will contain EXACTLY one thousand words. This is not an exhibition review, it is about a single work. This is not directed to artists and art professionals who gravitate to academic journals; I direct it to you, an informed but more casual reader.
Two of history’s great geniuses concur that establishing a written document as a worthy partner to the visual object it chronicles. And so I quote: “One picture is worth a thousand words.” Confucius: “Hearing something a hundred times isn’t better than seeing it once.” Leonardo Da Vinci seconds that emotion, having written, “A poet would be overcome by sleep and hunger before (being able to) describe with words what a painter is able to (depict) in an instant.” I take the two sages' challenge seriously, I am ready to come out scribbling.
The guiding aphorism made its first entrance in 1911, when, during a Syracuse (NY) Advertising Men's Club banquet held to discuss how to augment publicity in journalism and advertising, a guest speaker invoked editor Tess Flanders to implore the writers and editors in the audience to, "Use a picture. It's worth a thousand words.” In a 1921 article in “Printers’ Ink,” a trade journal, Fred R. Barnard further popularized the phrase in his writings about the use of images in advertising.
“Worth” implies an equivalency in terms of aesthetic value. But it weighs in way lopsided as far as the labor necessary to produce it. For writers to establish their reviews as the emotional and intellectual mirrors of the works about which they write, producing a thousand words is a lot of work! But, hey, in the Covid-19 era what else do we have to do?
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Laura Parker, “Naked Eye Object (yellow),"
2007, digital c print on aluminum, 26 x 26"
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Laura Parker, “Pot bottom (fractal)," 2005,
type c print on aluminum, 16 x 16"
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While not a painting, Laura Parker’s photograph of what looks like an ordinary finch sits framed inside of a circular splash of white light that is itself balanced on a rope-like wire in a kind of telescopic tableau that, suspended, overlooks a foggy and impressionistically rendered image of the sea. A smaller cobalt blue sphere or large dot hovers diagonally over the bird’s head almost centered in the upper quarter portion of a pitch-black backdrop. It feels like a permanently receding and ever-present, terrifyingly deep universe. So in setting up this little game of a thousand words for myself, perhaps I am merely diverting myself from conventional questions about the ethics of discussing works within one’s own collection.
Parker is a magician with the lens, a techno-wizard in developing her photographs, whether in the dark room or at the computer. Her work never fails to cajole the eye into playfulness. It confounds the brain with “good confusion.” It asks of us to trust in something greater than dull certainty and more formidable than avowed fact. In so doing it echoes Hebrews 11:1-3, where faith is defined as “the substance of things hoped for/the evidence of things not seen.”
For example, in another one of her photographs we wonder, “Is that bronze ball an image of the sun?” No, it’s the glowing burnt base of her comfortable old bronze tea kettle. In another we see … the moon? Fuggedaboutit. What we’re actually seeing is a cropped close-up of the bottom of an ordinary Styrofoam cup. Parker’s bird photo takes a decisively lyrical turn apropos of the Minimalist poet’s cap she quite comfortably and frequently dons. It eschews her somewhat signature sleight-of-eye way of working, because looking at it we instantly know this image of a bird is, well, an image of a bird.
But what does she have the little fella sitting on? A wire. Really? A wire that just happens to have quivered its way from nowhere and suspended itself from nothing a hundred feet above the Pacific Ocean?
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Laura Parker, “Moon,” 2015, archival pigment print, 16 x 60 1/4” |
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The wire, which upon close examination looks like a very thin and tightly braided rope, bends and points dreamlike up and diagonally toward the left center of the composition and smack dab into the middle of the visual quotation of that John Baldesarri-like blue “dot.” However, rather than displacing a human face, as such colorful dots often do in the late master’s photo-montages, Parker’s adds a bubble of imagination to a narrative that the bird itself seems to have thought up. In other words (but who’s counting?) the dot forms a rotational joint over which the rest of the work rises and dances like an exuberant exclamation mark.
Wallace Stevens’ poem, “The Idea of Order at Key West” begins, “She sang beyond the genius of the sea.” We the reader, along with the poet, hit the pause button on our daily/minute-by-minute distractions to observe a woman walking along a Florida beach in order to to listen to her song. Parker’s camera, in this instance, offers similarly seductive music. Stevens’ poem goes on to read that this woman “was the single artificer of the world/In which she sang,” before concluding “that there never was a world for her/Except the one she sang and, singing, made …”
The poem makes me wonder just whose world is it that I’m writing about as I’m looking at this photograph? Is it Laura Parker’s world? The virtual world of felt space that, to borrow Clive Bell’s phrase “Significant Form,” her image has tantalized into being? Or is it my world as I’ve constructed it at this very moment and in this very act of writing? In the midst of the pandemic, cornered in my house, for which I’m nevertheless eternally grateful and blessed to occupy, I wonder whether the act of creating, be it a poem, a photograph, a painting, the playing of music or the writing about all of the above may allow for the opening of optimism to be breathed into us once again?
And so I give you one thousand words. But the truth is, a picture is not worth a thousand words after all. It is worth a whole lot more. It is worth everything.
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Andy Brumer is a poet, book reviewer and art writer, whose work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner, Artweek, Artscene, Visual Art Source and many other publications. His latest book of poetry, with drawings by Joseph Slusky, is Below Understanding. He also writes about golf.
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Silent Defiance: Ceramic Sculpture by Paul Metivier
by Matthew Kangas
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Paul Metivier, “The Henchman #3,” 2009, terra cotta paper clay and stains, 6 x 14 x 7”. Courtesy Gallery IMA. Photo: Richard Nicol |
Paul Metivier, “Kindred #3,” 2019, terra cotta paper clay, stains, terra sigillata, and barbed wire, 23 x 22 x 7”. Courtesy of Gallery IMA. Photo: Paul Metivier |
Paul Metivier, “My Son, My Executioner,” 2019, terra cotta paper clay, 19th-century wooden chair backrest, stains, 16 x 15 x 7”. Courtesy of Gallery IMA: Photo: Gallery IMA |
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At a time of rowdy marches, outraged protests and growing awareness of systemic racism in the United States, artists are increasingly being recognized for anticipating many of these themes with their anger at inequities, not to at mention violence perpetrated against citizens of color and non-violent demonstrators. Paul Metivier is such an artist. For the past decade, the Renton, WA resident has been creating realistic wall-mounted effigies of individuals who are expressing inner rage, often with eyes closed. In a series of installations in Seattle at Gallery IMA and in Auburn, WA at Green River College where Metivier teaches, the “Processions” (2009-2020) literally advance from the gallery wall, torsos and busts coming toward us. Their silent defiance of authority and existing inequalities activates the white cube space with considerable power.
Metivier’s background has fired his conscience and generated his unceasing concerns about African-American men being threatened and murdered by law enforcement officers. Descended from French-Canadians who arrived in the U.S. in 1904, the Metiviers may have been “métis,” mixed-race indigenous people who intermarried with French colonists as early as the 17th century. In the mid-19th-century, Metivier’s mother’s family were victims of the forced relocation of Cherokee and Chickasaw tribes from North Carolina to Oklahoma. Robbed of their land, they were subjected to decades of discrimination, violence and displacement. Other family members include African-Americans, Mexicans and Caucasians. Seeing social crises from a 360-degree viewpoint in a sense, Metivier identifies with the suffering of African-Americans and other people of color because he is one of them, officially recorded on the tribal rolls in Oklahoma.
Inspired by his mother, the painter Patricia Mitchell Metivier, who graduated from college after raising eight children, Metivier studied ceramics first at Orange Coast Community College before transferring to California State University at Long Beach, where he concentrated on Native American studies and was introduced to mold making by noted artist Tony Marsh. At the University of Washington (MFA, 2001), he was encouraged by professors Akio Takamori (who specialized in images of Japanese-Americans and other global immigrants) and Doug Jeck, whose full-frontal life-size male nude sculptures were as scarred and embattled as Metivier’s would become.
Besides exhibiting regularly in clay-world group shows in such venues as Texas Tech U. and Green River (where he began teaching in 2003), Metivier delved deeply into his heritage, creating male images and effigies of mixed-race individuals, stained dark brown, orange and black. Often with eyes closed, but with foreheads bulging with tension, the partial figures were also seen in group exhibitions in Long Beach, Bellevue, WA, and Lincoln, CA.
After a solo debut at Berozkina Gallery in Kirkland, WA, in 2005, the sculptor, now 53, began massing the heads and torsos into wall-mounted “Processions,” gatherings emerging from the wall to confront the gallery viewer. Their appearance was defiant and uncannily alive. In groups as large as 15, irregularly stacked and positioned on the wall, the “Processionists” represent varied people of color as well as varying facial expressions, emotions ranging from silent defiance to cries of rage. As the artist recalled of his own childhood memories of corrupt police in southern California, “In my old neighborhood, cops were not welcome because we did not see them as help. . . or as helpers. . . we saw them as antagonists of any situation.”
In addition to the ensconced busts, free-standing heads on metal rods, such as the “Henchmen” (2009) and the “Neophytes” (2010), uncomfortably read as severed heads on posts, a familiar public sight in medieval Europe. Using an unusual mix called “terra cotta paper clay,” Metivier is able to form while giving the effect of deep gouging and carving. Wood-grain effects also mimic earlier humble materials of oppressed peoples. With shaved heads, clawed cheeks, and downcast eyes, these series are less defiant, more vulnerable, having been brutally acted upon. They represent the extreme low-point of victimhood: helpless, violated young men, pinned to a post, and appearing to be decapitated with ragged, bloody necks and shoulders. Apart from the dark stains, color is avoided, accentuating a tombstone, memorial look.
Three other works are typical of the varying compositions the artist has employed to convey his silent defiance. Clustered together rather than spaced separately, “The Procession” (2015) crams 16 male heads into another bulging confrontation. With and without hats, the men frown and cringe together and look out towards the viewer. In “The Kindred #3” (2019), a young man, a middle-aged man and an old man with a beard and an Afro haircut made of barbed-wire, simulate three generations, gazing away from each other, but tied by blood and shared experiences of suffering and discrimination. “My Son, My Executioner” (2019) ends our examination on an ambiguous note. A wooden chair back is jerry-rigged to act as a picture-portrait frame for a single figure of carved clay. Antique-looking but with a thin stream of red-orange blood streaming down his cheek, we do not know the cause or the outcome, only that the circumstances could have been avoided in a culture where such violence is available only for Metivier’s elegies of explosive anger and quiet defiance.
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Paul Metivier, “The Procession,” 2012, installation view, terra cotta paper clay
and stains, dimensions variable. Courtesy Gallery IMA. Photo: Richard Nicol
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Matthew Kangas is a corresponding editor for Art in America and Sculpture magazine. He has written for numerous publications including the Seattle Times, Artweek, Preview and Art Ltd. Four collections of his reviews, interviews and essays have been published in New York by Midmarch Arts Press and are available at Amazon. Books by Matthew Kangas at Amazon. He is also the author of the recent award-winning monograph Italo Scanga 1932-2001.
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Decomposed Art
by Bill Lasarow
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Agnes Denes, “Wheatfield — A Confrontation,” 1982, Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan. |
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I’ve been invested in repeating my connection to the process of disposal, decay and rejuvenation in new form for decades. For the most part that has defined my approach to process, a cyclical structure that miniaturizes a lifetime into a non-threatening timeline. It’s a way of observing from a godlike perspective what I know is eventually going to be personal. We engage in this compression all the time, it’s a banal way to inject purpose and action through life rather than lying around, passively waiting for the inevitable. By exercising this power in aesthetic terms, markers are left in the world forming a manner of speech. The most commonly understood products of this impulse are meant to resist or stand outside of nature. The sculptural practice of carving form out of hard rock or cast bronze is one of the easiest examples to grasp this principle. The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans obsessed over this. For whatever reason, I crave just the opposite. |
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So naturally artists who focus on recycled materials or the reassembling of discrete parts into new wholes tend to strike a chord with me. The early terrarium jars of Alan Sonfist, a noted if not quite first tier land artist, awoke me to the possibilities that art created to decay over time could hold the eye in the moment while enticing the mind to project ahead. They fused the traditional function of the vanitas to larger ecological issues that were at the time just beginning to emerge — this was in the 1970s, when we first began to see Mother Nature on the run. What most struck me about Sonfist’s enclosed ecosystems was their melting quality of color and form. These oddball terrariums that were a minor stop on Sonfist’s aesthetic journey; he is most certainly not best known for them.
Of course Sonfist, like Agnes Denes, Mel Chin, Andy Goldsworthy, Buster Simpson and others, was much more frequently drawn to sculpt the Great Outdoors itself, not just place things in it. Denes’ “Wheatifield—A Confronation” (1982) memorably said of her golden minimalist rectangle, placed that summer smack into the most vertically developed piece of real estate on the planet: “I decided we had enough public sculptures of men sitting on horses.”
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Mel Chin, “Revival Field,” 1991-ongoing; plants, industrial fencing on a hazardous waste landfill. Project in conjunction with Dr. Rufus Chaney, senior research agronomist, USDA |
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This, asserted about 40 years ahead of the current movement to topple General Robert E. Lee and numerous other expressions of white supremacy from public admiration, is an example of aesthetic thinking that anticipates a much later political impulse.
Denes revisited this classic gesture as recently as 2015 in Milan. The spirit by then had become more communal and relaxed; while the political rhetoric informing it has only become more urgent. Artists such as Denes and Sonfist gained public attention in good part for the audacity of their grand ambition in the face of a public generally not ready for it. But it was Sonfist that I encountered first, so the images stuck in that manner of youthful first impressions: they shape your subsequent thinking disproportionate to their larger significance.
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Steve Thomas, “Yew St Cane,” 2020, color photograph |
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Denes along with Chin were so very effective in imposing aesthetic form onto nature. The political polemic that each produced in many of their major projects expresses their desire to catalyze a transformation of society. Chin’s ability to add layers of performance that involves large numbers of participants (including public school students in the case of the lengthy “Revival Field” project) is excelled equally by very few artists. Some of my own projects have been miniaturized echoes of his expansive example, and mainly served as a reminder that I am an intimist.
Which brings me back to Sonfist’s little jars. They relate to those artists who would monkishly devote themselves to the grind of producing something small and complex. One of my early teachers, Max Hendler, spent a decade on about a square foot sized watercolor of a patch of dirt. That act of devotion bespoke fragility at the same time that it articulated eternity. Man that turned my head around. I saw it in the illuminated manuscripts — literally the product of monks — that were, and remain on permanent view at the Getty Museum. Tim Hawkinson more recently used his own nail clippings to construct little birds that occupy one small corner of one of the most eclectic bodies of work I know of. These were investments of something deeper than time. They just asked to be overlooked or disposed of. But their vulnerability and image reveals some very, very deep roots. Whether smashed by some boot heel or gradually decomposed over time, their essence feels stronger than the forces that grind them into oblivion.
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Just a few days ago a local art center in Pomona sent in a video of a veteran local photographer, Steve Thomas, who shot a series of images from his compost pile. Thomas takes a low key joy in simply observing what’s there and what it looks like as it changes. While not exactly revelatory, the images drove me to refresh my acquaintance with my own backyard compost pile: the transitional state of kitchen scraps, the cloud of fruit flies, the finished dark stuff that emerges out of the bottom of the bin. And I saw Sonfist’s bottles and Denes’ wheatfield. I felt the moment in the cycle that August represents, the height of the summer season. I brushed my hands in the dirt and felt history, not from last year to this, but the millennia present right there on the surface. For all of the basalt and marble and bronze that has bulled its way into the present from the ancient world, I saw in the compost’s decomposition what immortality really means. |
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Bill Lasarow is the Publisher of the VAS Weekly Newsletter. Beyond that he makes things and does projects that interest him. Visual Art Source
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