PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

John Baldessari, Wallace Berman, Elisheva Biernoff, Jedediah Caesar, Geoffrey Farmer, Rachel E. Foster, Rodney Graham, John Gutmann, Todd Hido, William E. Jones, Jordan Kantor, Edward Kienholz & Nancy Reddin, Alicia McCarthy, Gareth Moore, J. John Priola, Stephen G. Rhodes, Will Rogan, Mungo Thomson

Route 2: Undisclosed Destination is the second exhibition in an annual series to be drawn from the 101 Collection based in San Francisco.

The preestablished premise for this exhibition is that it is a “collection show,” composed exclusively of works by artists originally from, or working at, America’s Western end.

This exhibition asks whether there are commonalities among the works beyond that aspect of their provenance. And, moreover, whether it is even possible to speak about a common cultural history specific to the West Coast. To what extent can we really generalize about West Coast–based contemporary art? Given our increasingly international art world, many critics would say that the strategies and forms associated with contemporary art from the West Coast do not radically differ from those of practices based elsewhere.

But it is certainly true that the setting of this art’s production does influence some of its distinct features, its specific flavor. Among these features is an emphasis on the scenic landscape, West Coast cities carrying the load of having served as imagined Arcadias for utopian thinkers and idealists. The city of San Francisco, where this show takes place, seems especially trapped between its amazing natural and urban scenery and a history that seems to haunt it.

The 101 Collection includes works with a historical scope, potentially allowing for an essay in distinct trajectories and influences, or conversely an argument for the lack thereof. Undisclosed Destination appropriates the metaphorical image of the namesake route by drawing two different paths that run parallel, and in tension, throughout the exhibition space, borrowing themes and topics traditionally used by museums to organize collection-based exhibitions. The first is landscape, a long-established subject in art. This path includes straightforward depictions of West Coast natural and urban scenes as well as works that deal in a more oblique way with aspects related to the American territory, for instance questioning the way it is understood and represented in the popular imaginary or by means of spectacle as beautiful and privileged, (an aspect that resonates with the fact that Los Angeles and Vancouver have been privileged sites for the development of movie industry).

The second path is arranged chronologically, allowing an apparent genealogy of influences and correspondences to emerge. One constant seems to be a modality of production that involves reuse and repetition (of both materials and topics). Although these tropes could allegedly be said to correspond to forms of categorization associated with a rather modern approach to art making or art exhibiting (one that contemporary art theory and criticism has long rendered obsolete), they still constitute a ghostly umbrella under which contemporary forms of exhibitions, in particular in museum settings, are measured, trying to adapt and expand their definitions.

After wandering through the exhibition space and seeing it in its entirety, the show seems to function as a theatrical narrative. Its two introductory paths are ominous and in retrospect seem to be constant allegories of their own deaths, and this is no surprise since the contemporary seems to be constantly fascinated with phantasmagoria

In fact one of contemporary art’s most salient agenda items since the postmodern turn is that of revealing the different levels of artifice and construction in historical narratives of progress or development. It could be argued that many of the artists featured in this exhibition are concerned with these issues, and perhaps to a certain extent they are interested in revealing these mythical constructions around the West Coast against the backdrop of a different reality. Whether certain or not the artworks assembled in these paths or “routes,” ultimately prove to undermine the very premises under which they have been gathered. In this way, the show’s narrative aims to make patent its own artifice.

Route 2: Undisclosed Destination was curated by Sharon Lerner. Lerner holds an M.A in Curatorial Practice from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and a B.A. in Visual Arts from the Catholic University in Lima, Peru.

Lerner’s recent curatorial projects include: We have as much time as it takes at the Wattis Institute (May – July, 2010), Fernando Bedoya’s solo show Clase Ve. Obra Abierta at the Luis Miro Quesada Garland public galleries (Lima, 2008) and Tener Lugar [Experiencia, Acontecimiento y Posibilidad] at Centro Fundación Telefónica (Lima, 2008). In 2007 she was invited by the Goethe-Institute to participate in the educational program of Documenta 12.

Lead sponsorship for Route 2: Undisclosed Destination has been provided by the ArtNow International Foundation.

Founding support for CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts programs has been provided by Phyllis C. Wattis and Judy and Bill Timken. Generous support provided by the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, Grants for the Arts / San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, Ann Hatch and Paul Discoe, and the CCA Curator’s Forum.

LINKS:

Review on Art Practical

In the film La Nouvelle Kahnawake the French duo Patrick Bernier and Olive Martin zoom-in on a Mohawk tribe of Canadian First Nations people, located on the south shore of the St. Lawrence river across from Montréal (Québec, Canada). Yet the film is as much about the artists research and presence in Kahnawake as it is about the Mohawks who live there. The artists appear throughout the film, embedding and acknowledging their own position as outsiders noting, “If this is a documentary then the subject is us.”  But it’s not just a documentary, nor a critical analysis of the legal loopholes, business practices and cultural histories of the Mohawks. It’s a poetic and performative investigation of relationships in the global sphere, impacted by a cluster of forces so multiple and complex as to become abstract, almost metaphysical.

The Mohawks’ foray into technology points to the economic and cultural effects of globalization. More specifically, the story of the Mohawks of Kahnawake is indicative of a profound re-definition of the instruments and location of power in the global network—casting the internet as an untamed continent and a small band of native people as the new pioneers. The title of the film, “New Kahnawake,” suggests an extension of the physical territory of Kahnawake, currently occupied by about 8,000 first nations people, through its transposition to a new land: the virtual domain of the world-wide-web. And like the British or French colonialists who brought their culture to the New World, this new Kahnawake territory mirrors the struggles of the land-dwelling Mohawks. The social and political situation of the Mohawks, in both domains, remains unresolved due to manipulations by outside forces. The artists intentionally fold these mirrored territories to overlap in the film, layering the often incompatible artificial language of the virtual with the concrete physicality of the real, making visible the social and political tensions within and beyond the community.

Repeatedly throughout the film, screens and windows frame the camera view as a reminder of the conceptually porous relationship between the two Kahnawake territories, and of the computer screen as a window. Other markers in the film point to the digital in equally subtle and liminal ways. In one scene, a deepwater container ship floats down the St. Lawrence Seaway Canal bearing the moniker NAVIGATOR; a name familiar to long-time internet users as Netscape’s now defunct web-browser. A sharply spot-lit man in a red hat periodically interrupts the film accompanied by a professional and commercial voice-over. He’s an avatar inspired by the logo for RedHat, a successful software company that has packaged and sold the free and open-source operating system linux.

While a dominant narrative in the film remains elusive, online gambling is a provocative leitmotif in the fragmentary series of vignettes. Gambling is a morally dubious enterprise, heavily controlled by governments in the west because of its ability to ruin lives, but also because of its ability to generate significant revenue. Yet the deployment of casinos as a mechanism for economic recovery is a strategy familiar to native people across North America. The Kahnawake Gaming Commission (http://www.gamingcommission.ca) currently licenses and regulates over 50 online gaming companies which produce about three hundred online casinos. The company that provides internet service to these clients has been knowingly named MIT (Mohawk Internet Technologies) and hosts approximately 40% of all the online gambling website on the internet, an impressive share of the global market. It’s this significant share that gives the Mohawks, despite their small population, a kind of power, if only a symbolic one.

During their almost six months in the Artnow residency in San Francisco, Bernier and Martin have been expanding their research toward developing an exhibition connecting the ideas and dilemmas they discovered in Kahnawake to other nodes in the global network. In particular, the artists collaborated with auctioneer Steve Bowerman. For the final soundtracking of the film, Bowerman adapted his rhythmic chant to vocalize internet trace-routes, a series of web addresses that start in China, ricocheting across the globe all the way to the website of the 777 Dragon Casino in Kahnawake. He will also collaborate with the artists on a live performance during the run of the exhibition at YBCA, auctioning off ephemeral internet addresses. The exhibition itself functions like special features of the film, presenting extended shots and contextual material from their research in Kahnawake and collected during their stay here in San Francisco.

LINKS:

Review in San Francisco Chronicle

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

Eleanor Antin, Jennifer Bornstein, Juan Capistran, Bruce Conner, Mario Garcia Torres, Rodney Graham, Colter Jacobsen, Tim Lee, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Kristen Morgin, Catherine Opie, Raymond Pettibon, Allen Ruppersberg, Mark Soo, Ron Terada, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, James Welling

Route 1: R for Replicant is the first exhibition in an annual series to be drawn from the 101 Collection based in San Francisco. This exhibition aims to investigate contemporary image production by exploring the issue of how images shape and challenge our understanding of reality, and more specifically our understanding of American identity.

The starting point of the exhibition is the Voight-Kampff machine, an imaginary mechanism of interrogation used to distinguish humans from replicants (or androids), proposed by the American writer Philip K. Dick in his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and later visually represented in Ridley Scott’s 1982 science-fiction classic Blade Runner. The Voight-Kampff test involves a series of questions intended to elicit emotional reactions in order to detect a capacity for empathy. The test’s result becomes ambiguous however, when it is conducted on an experimental replicant model whose artificially implanted memories allow her to generate empathic responses. The metaphor of the test thus suggests the possible interchangeability of the artificial (memory) and the real (experience), and ultimately questions the very notion of existence and reality. If the replicant is not merely a simulation of a human but rather a being that experiences an alternative reality, then perhaps images do not provide replicas of reality, or fake realities, but alternative realities that might or might not be experienced.

Featuring works that comment on contemporary image production through interventions related to history, narrative, memory, and experience, the exhibition proposes an investigation of the “materiality” of these images by tackling the issue of what images can or cannot make visible. “Materiality,” in the context of this exhibition, does not refer to the works’ physical presences through print, drawing, or film, for instance, but rather to an understanding of images – recycled and accelerated to the point of seizing their own means of production – becoming actual things, interfering in real life, affecting it, and even altering it. Using various strategies, whether playing with iconographies, borrowing cinematic imagery, commenting on popular culture, referencing and reconstructing history, reorganizing existing objects and images, or storytelling via documentary, the artworks in this exhibition create new meanings beyond their connections to existing realities. History and stories, documentary images and staged images, actual locations and invented scenes are all parts of the same regime of truth.

The structure of the exhibition is intended as a kind of variation on the Voight-Kampff machine. Artists/artworks, audiences/artworks, and artists/audiences operate as both inquisitors and suspects. While artists examine American identity by proposing alternative realities, audiences’ perceptions of received ideologies are challenged, and the notion of reality and truth become uncertain through image interpretations.

Whereas the humorous title of Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? upholds the traditional assumption that androids are machines and run on electricity, the renaming of androids to replicants in Blade Runner, given the latter term’s associations with microbiology and genetic engineering, redefines them as alternative beings, different than humans. This redefinition of their characters actually points to a constellation of inquires regarding identity: the identity of the replicants, of us as readers and viewers, and of human beings in general. Pushing these inquires a step further, this exhibition questions not only the identity of America as presented in the works, and the identities of today’s artists as image makers and cultural producers, but also our own identities as consumers and observers of the visual culture that we encounter in our daily lives.

Route 1: R for Replicant was curated by Xiaoyu Weng. Weng received her M.A. in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts (2009) and holds a B.A degree in Art History and Art Administration from China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (2003). Her study at CCA was supported by the Asian Cultural Council Starr Foundation Fellowship and the Carmen M. Christensen Graduate Scholarship from CCA.

Weng’s recent curatorial projects include: The Secret of the Ninth Planet at Queen’s Nails Projects and Photo Epicenter in San Francisco, Bioanthrophony, Playspace Gallery, San Francisco, and The Mythology of the Secret Recipe – Americana: Kentucky, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco. Weng has completed internships at the Ikon gallery in Birmingham, UK, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California.

LINKS:

Review on Artslant

THE EDUCATION OF AURÉLIEN FROMENT: THE EXHIBITION FORMERLY KNOWN AS THE EXHIBITION FORMERLY KNOWN AS PASSENGERS
by Jens Hoffmann

As the final participant of The Exhibition Previously Known As Passengers, French artist Aurélien Froment does what might seem a logical conclusion to the 24 month-long exhibition, especially when one considers his analytical and self-reflexive approach to art making. Froment will stage what one might call a retrospective, or perhaps even an unauthorized biography, of the entire exhibition. The artist is recalling fragments of some of the art-works presented over the last two years and using remains of the permanent exhibition structure-walls, signage, benches and pedestals-to create his own exhibition.

Froment is interested in understanding this final episode of the exhibition as the start of something new, rather than as something to provide a concluding argument. He views the various incarnations of the exhibition as an index of wide-ranging heterogonous contemporary artistic practices, which allow his show to become a portrait of the exhibition by disassembling and remixing parts of its components, objects and gestures. Froment plays with the twists and turns that Passengers has proposed over its run and incorporates the curatorial concerns of the show into his overall concept: the exhibition’s hybrid nature of simultaneous solo and group exhibition, its orientation towards process and constant change, as well as its heterogenic character in regards to both the type of work shown (film, sculpture, photography, installation) and the diverse cultural backgrounds of its participants.

It would be, however, wrong to assume that Froment was plainly recycling materials without any further thought. In fact, the larger part of the exhibition incorporates artworks created by him in response to the above-mentioned concern. The closest we ever come to actually seeing any of the artworks from previous shows is in his piece Modèle d’exposition (Exhibition Model) (2009) based on the popular children’s memory game in which a number of square cards are placed on a table and turned over repeatedly in order to find a second identical card. In Froment’s version, we see 48 pairs of cards, with which the audience is invited to play, displayed on a specially constructed table. Another piece titled Index (2009) is a rubdown transfer onto a large piece of paper of the participating artists’ names from the vinyl letters at the gallery entrance that chronicle the progression of the Passengers exhibition. Other works include Dance Lessons (2009), 50 black wooden footsteps that trace the various paths of the visitors through the show, as well as the two-part photograph Panama, Pacific, International, Exposition (Palace of Fine Arts) (2008), which refers to the San Francisco museum built as a temporary structure for the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair to celebrate the completion of the Panama canal but has since become a permanent place for exhibitions and other cultural events. All these works strongly relate to the history of Passengers yet also closely relate to Froment’s overall oeuvre when one considers his interest in archives, museology and theatrical devices.

At first glance, other works seem less related to the Passengers exhibition, but when viewed in the context of this show their connection is quickly revealed. The silent, six-minute video, Rabbit (2009) speaks about the idea of literally tying things together. The film is about nautical knots and based on the format of instructional films for aspiring sailors. Froment presents eight different knots; each one is accompanied with a rhyme (presented as subtitles) that explains in childlike terms how the knot is made i.e. ‘Build a well, A rabbit comes out of the hole, Circles around the tree, And jumps back into the hole.’ While this particular rhyme is well known and refers to the so-called Bowline knot, Froment adapted it to create rhymes for the seven other knots himself.

The work Debuilding (Case Study # 8, Pacific Palisades) (2009) is perhaps the most indicative for an understanding of Froment’s associative practice and his interest in overlapping narratives and seemingly unrelated historical events. Consisting of an inkjet print depicting an image of the famous Eames House in Los Angeles and a series of 65 painted wooden blocks, the piece is based on an anecdote that describes the building and design process of the house in relation to the shortage of building materials during World War II. To get around the problem, the architects constantly adapted to the changing conditions and began building various elements of the house from the same basic materials, which led to a breakthrough in regards to modular architecture. The small bricks that accompany the photograph are painted in a color chart based on the image and are a remake of the famous children’s building blocks created by the German 19th-Century pedagogue Friedrich Froebel, who also pioneered the concept of the kinder-garten. Another American modernist architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, who the Eames admired and often spoke of as a great influence on their work, got a set of Froebel building blocks as a gift from his mother in his youth that supposedly triggered his interest in architecture.

LINKS:

Review on Art Review