Tag Archives: ArtCenter Talks (ed. Douglas)

CHARLES GAINES IN CONVERSATION

When I went to graduate school in the 1960s… I was faced with a dilemma… I was surrounded by ideas about art that I couldn’t identify with. I couldn’t identify with the practice of trying to decide what to put in a painting using a kind of intuition. Or looking at a painting as a vehicle for self-expression. It’s not that I looked down on that, or that I thought it was such a bad idea. It’s just that I wasn’t working in a manner that required that kind of behavior… Then I ran into a person who told me about a couple of books, which I bought and read. One was by the art historian Henri Focillon [1881–1943], called The Life of Forms in Art [1934]. The other was a big picture book on Tantric Buddhist art by Ajit Mookerjee [1915–1990]. In those books I began to find things that made sense to me in terms of art production.

[Focillon] had a Platonic perspective, that form was synonymous with number, with mathematics, with structure. And he said that form had a life of its own, had its own reciprocal fitness, had its own autonomous exigency..

This sounds like the tenets of high modernism. I don’t think it followed those tenets in talking about some kind of tautology or self-referential or self-reflexive apparatus. I saw it as a general critique of expressionism, which was central to my problem. I didn’t feel connected with the objects I was making, because when I made them, I wasn’t convinced that there was any connection between my motive to make something and the thing that I made. It just seemed arbitrary to me. I would see painters laboring in front of a painting, trying to decide whether a corner should be red or blue. To me it didn’t make any difference. It could be red or blue, you know? How can they feel good about a judgment that they make? On what basis do they establish this connection? And for the life of me, I couldn’t figure it out.

Focillon gave me the idea that you’re ultimately not the author of the object. You’re more like a vehicle of this realization without an author. With Tantric art I saw visual representation of the same idea.Charles Gaines*

This weekend—in conjunction with his Hauser & Wirth exhibition CHARLES GAINES—PALM TREES AND OTHER WORKS—join Gaines in conversation with Thelma Golden, Laura Owens, and Gary Simmons.

ARTIST TALK—CHARLES GAINES IN CONVERSATION with THELMA GOLDEN, LAURA OWENS, and GARY SIMMONS

Sunday, November 3, at 3 pm.

Hauser & Wirth

901 East 3rd Street, downtown Los Angeles.

“Charles Gaines, January 31, 1995,” in ArtCenter Talks: Graduate Seminar, The First Decade 1986–1995, edited by Stan Douglas (New York: David Zwirner Books / Pasadena, CA: ArtCenter Graduate Press, 2016), 172–197.

See Gina Osterloh on Gaines’ Shadows series.

Charles Gaines—Palm Trees and Other Works, Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, September 14, 2019–January 5, 2020, photographs by Fredrik Nilsen. Images courtesy and © the artist, the photographer, and Hauser & Wirth.

RALPH LEMON AT ART CENTER

“For Ralph Lemon, evasion and erasure are counterintuitive; they mark history’s traces and court the past’s return. History—with its discrete epochs, nameable masses, and willful actors—is neither salve nor refuge for those who lie beyond its rules.” — Thomas J. Lax, “For Starters”

Artforum editor-in-chief David Velasco will present the choreographer, dancer, writer, and visual artist Ralph Lemon in the last of this year’s graduate art seminars at ArtCenter.

DAVID VELASCO PRESENTS RALPH LEMON

Tuesday, December 11, at 8 pm.

LA Times Media Center, ArtCenter College of Design

Hillside Campus, 1700 Lida Street, Pasadena.

See ArtCenter Talks: Graduate Seminar, The First Decade 1986–1995, Stan Douglas, ed. (New York: David Zwirner Books/Pasadena, CA: ArtCenter Graduate Press, 2016).

Ralph Lemon and Okwui Okpokwasili perform Untitled (2008) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Image credit: MOMA.

GARY INDIANA IN LOS ANGELES

“In 1985, the Village Voice offered me a job as senior art critic. This made my life easier and lousy at the same time. I now had to actually enter all those galleries instead of peeking in the windows.” — Gary IndianaVile Days

Indiana’s art reviews for the Voice—collected and republished as Vile Days: The Village Voice Art Columns, 1985–1988—combine “his novelistic and theatrical gifts with a startling political acumen to assess art and the unruly environments that give it context.”

Indiana will give this week’s graduate art lecture at ArtCenter’s Hillside Campus.

In mid-January he will read from Vile Days and present the Michael Haneke film Happy End (2017) at a Hard to Read event in West Hollywood.

 

GARY INDIANA ON VILE DAYS

Tuesday, December 4, at 7:30 pm.

ArtCenter College of Design

Hillside Campus

1700 Lida Street, Pasadena.

 

GARY INDIANA AT HARD TO READ

Tuesday, January 15, at 7 pm.

Standard Hotel

8300 Sunset Boulevard, West Hollywood.

 

See ArtCenter Talks: Graduate Seminar, The First Decade 1986–1995, Stan Douglas, ed. (New York: David Zwirner Books/Pasadena, CA: ArtCenter Graduate Press, 2016).

Image credit above: Semiotext(e).

Below: Gary Indiana. Photograph by Hedi El Kholti, courtesy El Kholti and Indiana.

CODE NAME: LOTRINGER

“I think theory should be misread. To demand the integrity of a theory is a very strange concept mostly made for people who aren’t theoreticians.” — Sylvère Lotringer, circa 1990*

The centerpiece of BERNADETTE CORPORATION: THE GAY SIGNS**—a new exhibit at Gaga Los Angeles, in MacArthur Park—is ABC Pong (2017), a long table displaying, on one half, words engraved on an acrylic sheet indicating triggers for a free-association word game. Encased in the other half of the tabletop is a monitor screening a visually altered HD video of Sylvère Lotringer playing the game—the editor, publisher, writer, filmmaker, theorist in his Los Angeles apartment holding forth on art, semiotics, and the nature of time.

BERNADETTE CORPORATION: THE GAY SIGNS

HOUSE OF GAGA, 2228 West 7th Street (enter on Grand View), Los Angeles.

houseofgaga.com

gagareena.com

*Lotringer, in ArtCenter Talks: Graduate Seminar, The First Decade 1986–1995, ed. Stan Douglas (New York: David Zwirner Books/Pasadena, CA: ArtCenter Graduate Press, 2016), 61.

**A play on Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (1882).

 

Image credit: Sylvère Lotringer, film still from The Art of Time, 2010, directed by Katherine Waugh and Fergus Daly. Image courtesy of the filmmakers.

lotringer