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By MARTHA SCHWENDENER
Published: April 6, 2007

In the 1950s art and poetry were the hottest couple in downtown Manhattan. Painters referenced poetry. Poets wrote art criticism. John Ashbery claimed to approach words “abstractly, as an artist uses paint.” In the 1960s, however, poetry’s influence faded and advertising became art’s favored muse.
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Friedrich Petzel Gallery

“The Awful Last of It,” by Matthew Brannon, on letterpress on paper.
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Friedrich Petzel Gallery

“Pulling Out,” (2007) on letterpress on paper.

Now, in a small, tight show at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, organized by the branch’s manager, Howie Chen, and titled “Where Were We,” Matthew Brannon brings these subjects — art, poetry and advertising — back together, after a fashion.

Art in this context is no longer the big, gestural, heroic painting it was in the 1950s, but neatly composed poster-size prints. Mr. Brannon’s silkscreen, lithograph and letterpress images borrow from traditional art sources like Japanese ukiyo-e prints, but more significantly from mid-20th-century advertising layouts, corporate reports and the textile designs of the Swedish artist Astrid Sampe and the Finnish company Marimekko.

Poetry is reconceived as a cross between pop-music lyrics and advertising slogans. And advertising? The public relations arm of the American Dream, with its winning blend of snappy text and eye-catching image, is presented here as a roiling stew of poisoned psychology where nothing is possible. (Mr. Brannon titled an earlier series of posters “A Pessimistic Production.”)

“Pigs, Like Us” features silhouette images of office supplies (paper clips, pencils, Post-its) and an iPod — emblems of the white-collar worker — rendered in crisp, atomic-era advertising colors: red, black and sky blue. There is also an expressionist touch in the form of a ring of coffee from a mug. Below these pictogramlike images is text, standard for Mr. Brannon in its emphasis on paranoia, careerism, consumption and excess. It reads, “They had to pump her stomach/amazing what they found/among the arugula, watercress, bluefin tuna, age-dried steak/there it is/your heart/and look .../a bunch of razor blades/little light bulbs/cocaine/little travel bottles/anti-depressants/your old untouched job application.”

“Say It Again” shows a 1950s-style backyard grill rendered in atomic blue and an existential rumination: “When you read this I will be dead/Well if not really dead — then one day/and you too — one day/will be dead/but even then/one could say/that you had read this/but that’s not what matters now.”

Artistic concerns collapse into noir halfway through “Adult Education,” a poster populated with black silhouettes of pigeons. “It’s abstract,” Mr. Brannon starts, “it’s totally abstract/I copied it/I stole it from you/I ripped the page right out of the book/word for word/you weren’t doing much with it anyway/uh.../when we pull off we make a right/then it’s about five miles before we turn left onto the dirt road/you should see it on the right/the place where the bodies were found.”

In his writing, Mr. Brannon has carved out a niche between classic Conceptualism, with its cerebral, perceptual musings, and the fragmented borrowing of Language poetry (and perhaps even the crime fiction of Jim Thompson). Mr. Brannon also owes plenty to Mike Kelley, Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger, artists who have mined the depths of mainstream consumer culture and employed text in their works.

But where irony has been a mainstay for Mr. Prince and Mr. Kelley, with the artist standing apart from mass culture and commenting on it like a disinterested viewer, everyone is implicated in Mr. Brannon’s work — even the contemporary artist who wants, as much as any American, an iPod, organic produce and someone perfect to love him.

Two posters without text particularly recall Ms. Sampe’s textile designs and include items from a sushi dinner, depicted as colorful geometric motifs and laid out against pink and light-blue grounds. In the upper corner of one poster is an abstracted but identifiable image of an American Express card, a reminder that tasteful objects and our desire for them is tied to the world of commerce and advertising.

In this context, referencing mid-20th-century visual culture — and especially design, with its populist, utopian view toward outfitting the world with attractive, modern accessories — seems particularly appropriate. Mr. Brannon generally avoids specific historical markers, mixing contemporary images with styles from the past, but he throws up a tiny flare in one work: a letterpress print with an abstract motif — a large, unbounded square filled with smaller black and yellow squares — that simply reads, “JFK International Airport.” The work serves as a terse nod to an age when everything seemed possible, even flying to the moon.

We’ve been there and done that, of course. Yet, Mr. Brannon reminds us, even that didn’t sate our desires, cure our phobias or make us happy.

“Matthew Brannon: Where Were We” continues through Aug. 31 at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, 120 Park Avenue, at 42nd Street, (917) 663-2453.
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Art Review | 'Remote Viewing'
Tapping Into a Glut of Information and Making Sense of It All

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By GRACE GLUECK
Published: June 3, 2005

The very nature of the museum beast, particularly the contemporary one, demands that its curatorial side make exhibitions: finding subjects, identifying movements and discovering affinities, or work that fits together. The goal, naturally, is to continue seducing the art-going public whose appetite for the new seems increasingly voracious.
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Sheldan Collins

Creating realms that hover somewhere between representation and abstraction: Franz Ackermann's "Untitled (evasion 1)" (1996).
"Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing" is at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street, (212) 570-3676, through Oct. 9.
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Alexander Ross's "Untitled" (2002). This work will appear in an exhibition of recent paintings and drawings titled "Remote Viewing," at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

A better-than-average example of this ambitious show-hatching and packaging is the latest offering from the Whitney Museum of American Art: "Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing." The savvy brainchild of the curator Elisabeth Sussman, the show presents eight artists who invent "new worlds that exist somewhere between representation and abstraction," as she puts it in the show's catalog.

The "invented worlds" conceived by these artists are based on the torrents of information that assail us all today. They are swollen by scientific theory and technological data, electronic imaging, geopolitical events and such, along with growing literacy about culture and history.

There is no thought that the group forms a movement or shares a common style, Ms. Sussman says; their work is diverse (although the general rubric "narrative abstraction" might be a handle).

What the artists do share, it is suggested, is the ability to whip slews of disparate information into their own visual cosmologies, from the architectural plans, site maps, graffiti and comic-book art that inform the explosive worldscapes of Julie Mehretu to the laws of thermodynamics, mythology, religion and such that feed the snaky, jungly compositions of Matthew Ritchie.

As for the "remote viewing" in the somewhat misleading title, it is an adaptation of a term that described the psychics, known as "remote viewers," who were recruited by United States intelligence organizations during the 1960's for their ability to throw light - presumably for our country's benefit - on places or things they hadn't seen.

The painters chosen represent a wide range, although they all draw from the barrage of information common to us all. Some of them are familiar, like Terry Winters and Carroll Dunham (the two old masters of the group); the others - Ati Maier, Franz Ackermann, Alexander Ross, Steve DiBenedetto, Ms. Mehretu and Mr. Ritchie are newer to the scene.

They are a mixed lot, too, in their capabilities. Some have strength and depth as painters; others have the shallow slickness of illustrators. If many of the works lack emotional resonance, that is not the issue here; in this cool show it's not insight, but inflow and outgo that count. It's a bit of a stretch to bring together eight artists of such diverse expression and expect to find a common high of achievement and originality. But overall the work does not lack interest, and Ms. Sussman's rationale for putting it together is persuasively argued.

While there is no dearth of artists who actually employ technological means to fill the bill, the beauty part is that all of the participants here use paint (or colored inks), working unabashedly with old-fashioned implements like brushes, pigment, pens and pencils.

What's more, the show is well laid out, with each artist given a separate space where the work is displayed without bumping into anyone else's. In several instances artists have painted black-and-white imagery as an accessory to their main exhibits directly on the walls.

Mr. Ackermann, for example, has covered one wall of his niche with a tangle of white lines on black that might symbolize his global wanderings in the service of his politically oriented art. On it he has hung a painting of a face, partially covered by a dense rash of mini-images that seem to consist largely of crumpled futuristic buildings.

Chief among his other paintings is "Untitled (evasion 1)," whose slick, hard-edge pinwheels and architectural forms in brilliant colors seem abstractly to evoke the seductive lure of luxury living.

A quite different source of information is mined by Mr. Ross: that of nature itself. He paints lush, lip-smackingly shiny but nightmarish vegetative growths of unidentifiable breed. "Untitled" (2004) is one repugnant example: it depicts several long, thriving stalks with the color and sheen of green and red peppers, pocked with hollows and deep fissures. But these mutant veggies, seen against a stylized blue sky so Poppishly cheery it could be whistled, are nothing if not menacing.

The most ambitious work, at least in terms of size and visual complexity, is Ms. Mehretu's vast ink-and-polymer drawing, "The Seven Acts of Mercy" (2004). A panorama 21 feet wide by 9½ feet high, it is based on a complex grid and comprises at least two layers of obsessive penwork. Its delicate formal structures, hinting at ancient sites and futuristic architectural strategies, combine with tumultuous clusters and bursts of line that dance and whirl across the surface like opposing natural forces.
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"Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing" is at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street, (212) 570-3676, through Oct. 9.
Readers
Forum: Artists and Exhibitions

One of the two "senior" artists who bookend the show, Mr. Winters - whose past work has shown the influence of mathematics and electronics, space and information technology - is represented here by three recent oils and works from several print and drawings series.

"Display Linkage," the largest and strongest of the oils, dazzles with its layers of fluent curved and circular orange markings on a yellow ground. Mr. Winters refers to his complex patterns as "invented language," whose colors and shapes have a syntactical function, their energy making vibrant connections with one another and acting on the viewer in metaphysical ways. But you don't have to know you're being acted on to savor the work.

The raw-rowdy-funny-freaky paintings and drawings of the other "senior," Mr. Dunham, reflecting perhaps the ceaseless battle between frustrated humanoids and a bad-tempered universe, never disappoint. His chef-d'oeuvre here is "Solar Eruption" (2000-01), a giant battered yellow sun, far from benign, with a big-lipped sneering mouth and disruptive protrusions (including Mr. Dunham's signature testicles and bared teeth) flaring from its rim.

A particular treat is an assortment of small Dunham drawings revealing that the more Mr. Dunham's work changes, the more it remains endearingly the same.

This fuzzily focused show works, not so much because of its rather nebulous premise, but because it is well planned and fields some innovative art. And, to speak metaphysically, because it all hangs together.










October 16, 2006

Jack H. Skirball Screening Series
Re-Animation:
An Evening with Lewis Klahr

Los Angeles premieres

"Lewis Klahr is one of the most original and prolific artists of his generation. Intensely archeological in his approach to autobiography and cultural ephemera… he is a creator of atmospheres—ontological terrains where events and emotions register with archetypal power and dreamlike intensity." Mark McElhatten

Independent filmmaker Lewis Klahr works with cutout animation because of his love for materials that give him access to memory and history, and the kinetic interspace they create between the personal and the cultural. His films explore "the pastness of the present." They involve a recombination of elements, a retelling of forms and events, a slowing down of time—and can be most accurately described as re-animation . From his abundant body of work, Klahr has selected three pieces never before shown in Los Angeles: Marietta's Lied (1998, 4:30 min, 16mm), Pharaoh's Belt (1994, 43 min., 16mm) and Daylight Moon (A Quartet) (2002–04, 40 min., 16mm).

Marietta’s Lied (1998, 4:30 min., 16mm)

Marietta's Lied is a collage animation set to Erich Korngold's exquisite song from his opera Die Tode Stadt. The piece uses cutouts of German cabaret performers from 1935 to render in mythic shorthand the tragic story of the emigration to Los Angeles of many European Jewish composers such as Korngold himself. The film was commissioned by soprano Constance Hauman for her narrative recital Exiles in Paradise -- with Bill Vendice at the piano -- premiered in New York in 1998.

Erich Korngold (1897-1957) was an Austrian Jewish composer whose opera Die Tode Stadt was a major success in Vienna in 1920. As the rise of Nazism forced him to emigrate in 1934, he settled in Los Angeles to write film music. Upon his return to Europe after 25 years, he realized that his early musical work had been forgotten.

The Pharaoh’s Belt (1994, 43 min., 16mm)

The Pharaoh’s Belt, an epic cutout animation and Klahr’s first foray into 16mm, received a special citation for experimental work from the National Society of Film Critics in 1994. Film historian Tom Gunning praises it as “his most masterful film to date” in which “ Klahr provides a lesson in modern hieroglyphics, assembling collages of contemporary demons and divinities in the guise of advertising images culled from a consumer culture's larger-than-life presentation of its products and the ecstasies they offer. These hyperbolic presences with their radiant colors and alternate promises and pitfalls provide the landscape for a childhood quest that teeters between nightmare and promised land, as Klahr's characters negotiate a labor of extrication from the morass of Betty Crocker chocolate icing, formica kitchens and parental phantoms toward a mastery of the imagination and the attaining of true love."

Daylight Moon (A Quartet) (2002–04, 40 min., 16mm)

* Valise (2004, 14:30 min.)
* Hard Green (2004, 5 min.)
* Soft Ticket (2004, 7 min.)
* Daylight Moon (2002, 13:30 min.)

“Here in middle age, I finally give myself permission to directly draw from some of the richest source material imbibed in my childhood: indelible memories, impressions, physiognomies, as well as second hand experiences and things I have imagined or fantasized about -- World War 2, baseball, the Mississippi River, mythopoeic crime. The quartet is a symmetrical structure suggesting wholeness; four is the number of the directions, the winds, The Beatles, completeness. In working on the series, I witnessed the reappearance of the Deep Sea Diver figure, that had been the protagonist of my first cutout animations in Picture Books for Adults (1984-85) and my first 16mm film, The Pharaoh’s Belt (1994). I can’t help but wonder what his reemergence heralds for me: the beginning of a new phase or merely the final grace note for the one that’s ending?” -- Lewis Klahr

About the filmmaker:

Master collagist Lewis Klahr has been making films since 1977. He is known for his uniquely idiosyncratic experimental films and cutout animations which have been screened extensively in the United States, Canada and Europe -- in venues such as New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Biennial, the New York Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Lincoln Center Walter Read Theater and Los Angeles Filmforum. He has also received commissions from European arts organizations such as the Gronnegard Theater in Copenhagen, Denmark (Lulu) and the Rotterdam International Film Festival (Two Minutes to Zero). His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Klahr is a 1992 Guggenheim Fellow and has also received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the NY State Council of the Arts, Creative Capital, The Jerome Foundation, and the NY Foundation of the Arts and Creative Artists Public Services. Commercially he has created special effects and animation for television show openings, music videos, commercials, a documentary and a TV movie. He created cutout animation for Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000) and Louis Massiah’s W.E.B. Dubois: A Biography in Four Voices (1997). Lewis Klahr teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.

Selected Filmography:

* Picture Books For Adults (8 films: 1983-85)
* Tales of the Forgotten Future (12 films: 1987-1991)
* Whirligigs in the Late Afternoon (1996)
* Lulu (1996)
* Green ‘62 (1996 6 min. silent color 16mm)
* Calendar the Siamese (1997)
* A House Is Not A Home (co-directed with Travis Preston, 2004)
* Engram Sepals (7 films: Melodramas 1994-2000)
* The Aperture of Ghostings (3 films: 1999-2001)
* The Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy (2003-04)
The Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy (2003–04) by Lewis Klahr; 16mm, color, sound, 33 minutes, print from the
maker
Two Days to Zero (2004) by Lewis Klahr; 16mm, color, sound, 23 minutes, print from the maker
Two Hours to Zero (2004) by Lewis Klahr; 16mm, color, sound, 9 minutes, print from the maker
Two Minutes to Zero (2003) by Lewis Klahr; 16mm, color, sound, 1 minute, print from the maker
A feature length narrative compressed 3 different times into 3 separate films of diminishing duration until
the synoptic is synopsized. A crime story told 3 different ways concerning the events of a two month period
leading up to, and immediately following a bank robbery. The imagery has all been appropriated (the fancy, art
world sanctioned term for stealing) from 4 issues of an early 1960s comic book version of the then popular,
American TV show 77 Sunset Strip. (Lewis Klahr)


Sep 25



An evening with Lewis Klahr
Los Angeles premieres!

New York <> Los Angeles
N.Y. and L.A., King Kong versus Godzilla. Two silents, two trilogies, the nineties to the zeros, all local premieres.

Currently based at the California Institute of the Arts, renowned filmmaker Lewis Klahr brings several new films to Filmforum.

The program includes:

Green ‘62 (1996, 6 min. silent)
A curved restaurant window on the Bowery-- a portal to an older New York.

The Aperture of Ghostings (trilogy, 2001, 12.5 min., sound)

the trilogy includes:
Elsa Kirk (5 min. 1999)
Catherine Street (3 min. 2001)
Creased Robe Smile (4.5 min. 2001)

In the mid 1990’s I unearthed three photographic contact sheets of 3 different women in a thrift store in the East Village. Only one was named and dated-- Elsa Kirk, Feb 22 ‘63, but all looked like they were from the same photographer and time period. There were 12 images per sheet of these Models/Actresses and I found myself intrigued by the strong sense of fiction and document in these photos. At first, I was unable to translate these images into collage animation. So I reversed my usual process and began making xerox enlargements of the sheets which became backgrounds for a series of flat collages. Gradually, these became storyboards for the films and led to the hieroglyphic montage style of the completed trilogy---an approach that I had intuited when first attracted to the potential of cutouts two decades before, but had never been able to capture on film.

A House Is Not a Home (2004, 16mm, 15min., b&w, silent)
By Travis Preston & Lewis Klahr
with: Joan Macintosh, Marissa Chibas, Henry Stram, Andrea LeBlanc and Jeff Williams.

“A House Is Not a Home uses 1940’s trance films, an indigenous genre to Los Angeles, as a jump off point. A guided improvisation shot on a Saturday morning and afternoon, our challenge was to create a psychodrama with trained as opposed to amateur actors. On the editing table we discovered our “story” and that the modern house (circa 1965) that served as our set had become as important a character as any of the performers.”
-- Lew Klahr

The Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy (2003-04, 33 min, color, sound, color)

Two Days to Zero (2004, 23min.)
Two Hours to Zero (2004, 9min.)
Two Minutes to Zero (2003, 1min.)
Music by Glenn Branca an excerpt from “The Ascension” (1980).
Film commissioned by the 2004 Rotterdam Film Festival “Just A Minute” program.

A feature length narrative compressed 3 different times into 3 separate films of diminishing duration until the synoptic is synopsized. A crime story told 3 different ways concerning the events of a two month period leading up to, and immediately following a bank robbery. The imagery has all been appropriated (the fancy, art world sanctioned term for stealing) from 4 issues of an early 1960’s comic book version of the then popular, American TV show “77 Sunset Strip”.

More on Lewis Klahr:
Called the “reigning proponent of cut and paste” by critic J. Hoberman of the Village Voice, master collagist Lewis Klahr has been making films since 1977. He is known for his uniquely idiosyncratic experimental films and cutout animations which have been screened extensively in the United States and Europe. New York’s Museum of Modern Art has purchased four of Klahr’s films for their permanent collection and curated 3 one person shows with him since 1989. Klahr has also been included in the Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art (1991 & 1995). His epic cutout animation “The Pharaoh’s Belt” received a special citation for experimental work from the National Society of Film Critics in 1994. From 1995 to 1997 Klahr’s shorts (“Altair”, “Lulu” & “Pony Glass”) were included in the New York Film Festival. Lulu was commissioned by Copenhagen’s Gronnegards Theater for their critically acclaimed production of Alban Berg’s opera that ran in August 1996. Klahr’s “Calendar the Siamese” was included in the 1997 New Directors/New Films series as a featurette. Klahr’s series “Engram Sepals”, a feature length sequence of seven collage films was the subject of an Image Innovators program at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater in May of 2000. The Rotterdam Film festival commissioned Klahr to create “Two Minutes to Zero” for a series of 10 one minute films produced for the 2004 festival. Klahr premiered two new series at the 2004 Toronto and New York Film Festivals. In the latter he presented a one person show. Klahr is a 1992 Guggenheim Fellow and has also been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the N.Y. State Council of the Arts, Creative Capital, the N.Y. Foundation of the Arts, The Jerome Foundation and Creative Artists Public Services.

“Lewis Klahr is one of the most original and prolific film artists of his generation. Intensively archeological in his approach to autobiography and cultural ephemera he created two major series in the eighties and nineties- PICTURE BOOKS FOR ADULTS and THE TALES OF THE FORGOTTEN FUTURE..... J. Hoberman has called Klahr “ the reigning proponent of cut and
Paste.” one reason the casual viewer might find surface resemblance to the work of experimental animators like Harry Smith, Stan Vanderbeek and Larry Jordan. But Klahr more appropriately belongs to the lineage of filmmakers like Anger, Harrington, Kuchar, Warhol and Cornell. Artists who also had a profound understanding and affinity with Classical Hollywood while forging permanent departures through radical form. And like Jacques Tourneur, Klahr is a creator of atmospheres, not mere evocations of mood and setting but ontological terrains where event and emotion register with archetypical power and dreamlike intensity.”
- Mark McElhatten , curator,Views From the Avant-Garde, N.Y. Film Festival


Lewis Klahr's Elsa Kirk




PICTURE BOOK FOR ADULTS
by Lewis Klahr

Date: 1983/1985 Running Time: 35:25

* Deep Fishtank Birding (2:50)
* Enchantment (3:15)
* Pulls (3:25)
* What's Going On Here, Joe? (4:08)
* The River Sieve (4:40)
* Candy+s 16 (3:00)
* Deep Fishtank, Too (4:21)
* 1966 (8:20)

Picture Books for Adults is a series of eight short Super 8mm films transferred to video in which Klahr incorporates found footage and paper cutouts for their association with domesticity and childhood. The images, collected from old encyclopedias and text books are intended for children, but these images are clearly created by adults who aim to seduce childhood imagination into paths of acculturation and socialization. Klahr unmasks the original, pedagogical function of these images, rediscovering in them a potential for dreaming and adventure.

"In much of [his] work, the very familiarity of the source material... creates a compulsion to identify these images dredged from collective memory. The guessing game, however, has more to do with the surrealist making-strange-wrenching familiar images from their familiar contexts than the coyness of postmodern allusionism." (Manhola Dargis, Village Voice)
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