Tatzu Nishi: Readymades, 2007

Blum and Poe gallery host an exhibition by Tatzu Nishi, a Japanese artist based in Cologne, Germany. Tatzu's exhibition catalogue is extensive. He is an international artist, orchestrating works all over the world. His works, the works he envisions and conceptualizes usually involve the collaboration of engineers, fabricators and builders.

In this particualar show at Blum and Poe, Tatzu has created a chandelier from five 25' street lamps, suspended upside down in an array. The lights descend through a skylight in the top of the middle gallery, with their posts projecting fifteen feet above the roof of the gallery. In the main gallery, Tatzu has made wall paintings as clocks, with actual synchronized clock movements on each. These walls, turned into clocks can be 'purchased' as a concept. Tatzu will come and install another similar clock on one of the walls of your home. This method of selling concepts reminds me of California artist, Ed Keinholtz, who sold all his work this way.

In other works, not represented at Blum & Poe, Nishi has built structures and completely finished and furnished rooms around roof ornaments, famous sculptures and street lights. He extends the context of the gallery and the upset of the gallery by the readymade to a new level by building the 'gallery' around objects that otherwise go unappreciated and unnoticed.

War suck man suck war

Two shows opening in LA Chinatown rekindle concerns for those of us removed and on the far edges of the culture of war. At High Energy Constructs, Karl Erickson and Andrew Falkowski render images from movies and television series about war to underline the way the media has used humor and cult of personality to obscure and reduce the bloody awful meaning of war. Lovely rendered acrylic paintings and psychedelic hydra headed drawings, taken from characters in the sitcom, M*A*S*H inhabit the space at High Energy. Michael Smoller donned high fashion yesterday evening in one dashiki of a jacket. Bravo.

Meanwhile, at Chung King Project, a German curated, six artist show explores the theme of male fantasy, which as evidenced here, normally proceeds towards war, sex, war and sex and gloom and doom. Oh, and an occasional escapist abstraction. The work with the most tooth in this show were a series of Nazi photos that had been refurbished by the artist Martin Dammann, depicting gay Nazi men in various idyllic poses, sets and circumstances. Equally strong were pencil/ink drawings (shown above) by Damien Deboubaix.

I will work with Wangari Maathai

Benjamin Butler's New Trees

Karen Lovegrove gallery presents Benjamin Butler's "New Trees". Benjamin has explored tree forms for approximately five years. He told me that prior to the tree motif, he painted mountains. The painting's impact hits me when I engage with the subtle, spatial brush work. Lots of sensitive dry brushing of equally thick, equally spaced lines. The sharp edge of Benjamin's sables distinguish the body of his muse, the trees.
I was struck with the similarity of the new works on view this month in Los Angeles, with Mondrian's transitional works, the tree deconstructions in particular. Benjamin told me that his work was inspired by minimalism, and though it isn't minimalist, it seems to be a frozen moment akin to that stage referred to before in Mondrian's development. It's nice to see the kinship here, but it makes me wonder as well. Mondrian was moving on. Where is Benjamin Butler moving onto next?

A Practice in Islam

Several posts back, I wrote about the Iraq Painting, a painting that involves tallying up the death toll in Iraq according to a September 2006 study produced by Lancet. The number was 650,000 people and I had a difficult time understanding what that meant in lives. What is the impact of this number, 650000? So I started counting my brush strokes and found that I could average about 12000 marks per day.




I reached the 200,000 mark several months ago and haven't worked on the canvas since then. I will be exhibiting the finished piece in January 2008 at High Energy Constructs in Los Angeles. It will be complete by then.

In the meantime, I've taken on a new project and this one is also an exercise in empathy and experience. On August 18, 2007, I began practicing some of the tenets of Islam. I will continue to practice through Ramadan and will end the project at the end of Ramadan. The total number of days I am practicing Islam is 54.5 days, the amount of days it would take me to paint the entire 655,000 marks on the Iraq painting, if I painted 12000 strokes every day.

A few new works

Here's a look at the Redoubts, paintings I've gone back into since returning to LA. I'll just throw them up here for now.

Cris Brodahl: Iconic Clippings

The current exhibition on display at Marc Foxx Gallery in Los Angeles is a show of fifteen recently completed works by Belgian artist, Cris Brodahl. Walk into the gallery and you are immediately impacted by the odor of Black Forest wood, a strange sensation for a white cube gallery. The odoriferous effect is due to hinged doors with large wooden, Bauhaus-like hinges that do the job of either displaying, expanding, partitioning or concealing various works in the exhibition. The main gallery is overseen by a large painting,The Yellow Tree, the namesake of the entire installation.

The works are characteristically iconic and religious. These paintings are appealing because of their peculiar combination of conservative realism, apparently authentically felt religious themes along with surreal and dadaist and even formalist considerations that move the work towards a contemporary position of reification, irony and objectification. Though these works are rendered with a realist's painting sensibility, the painting breaks up in places and takes the viewer to both a photographic and a painterly experience, the ladder of which is particularly in effect when the brush strokes loosen. Each of the works works with figure and ground, usually a dominant figure in the composition, but cut out forms of other anatomical and geometrical features are painted in and superimposed on top of the dominant figures, breaking the continuity of any individual part and inventing possibilities for the viewer's iimagination and associations.


Meaning through the use of iconic and fetishistic imagery echoes some of David Salle's earlier work, though Cris does an altogether more excellent job handling the paint.

On the whole, the show is quiet, conservative with an edge and refreshingly spiritual, albeit with a fractured, dislocate aura about it. The inner pursuit is there and we the audience will feel it.