Rachael: Do you like our owl?
Deckard: It’s artificial?
Rachael: Of course it is.
Deckard: Must be expensive.
Rachael: Very.

-from Blade Runner

Frank Benson, "Human Statue (Jessie)"

What is it like to be a 3D scanner capturing a beautiful woman? When I meet it someday on Cleverbot, this is what I will ask the Rapid Prototyping apparatus behind Frank Benson’s Human Statue (Jessie), now up at Taxter & Spengemann.  Do the quantifying calculations of volumes, occlusions, curves, and folds ever amount to a qualitative response, the way innumerable neural complexity leads to consciousness?

And what is it like to be a 3D printing machine that sculpts a beautiful model? It is the conduit between image processing data and the subsequent tantalizing output. On which end is the “art?” (Irrefutably sculpture, Human Statue still carries the Sol LeWitt torch, as do Cory Arcangel’s irrefutable prints of Photoshop gradients, where instructions are at least as important as their result.)

Does it matter that the 3D machines are blind? Blindly faithful to the data being processed, and blindly committed to the sculptural parts, in spite of the whole? We think of another screenplay interrogation, that of Godard’s Contempt, when the staggeringly beautiful Camille submits to Paul for a piecemeal appraisal of her body, from toes to face, just like the layer-by-layer construction of the rapidly prototyped object – something rapidly approaching “consumer version.” Asking him to view her from the mirror, Camille directs Paul to the picturesque  reflection of herself, just bundles of lightwaves, rather than the warm, corporeal body laying next to him. To each question, he answers in a solemn affirmative.

“Can you see my feet in the mirror? Do you think they’re pretty?
And my ankles, do you like them?
Do you like my knees, too?
And my thighs?
Can you see my behind in the mirror?
Do you think my buttocks are pretty?
And my breasts, do you like them? What do you like best, my breasts or my nipples?
And my shoulders, you like them?
And my arms, do you like them?
And my face? Everything? My mouth, my eyes, my nose, my ears?
So you love me totally?”

The transubstantiation, where Camille regains her body and resumes animation, occurs midway through the exchange, when she asks, “Do you want me to kneel down?”

Which might be the question frozen in the pursed lips of Human Statue (Jessie). Atop a small pedestal, Jessie is elevated just slightly above eye contact. You can see her eyes from the side, but her platelike shades forbid a frontal view. These shades are like artifacts from the 1980s: the decade when rapid protyping first emerged, the decade of Nagel, and the decade of Blade Runner. The shades cover much of her face, just as the designer gown, asymetrically wrapped around her torso, covers much of her body. The gown conceals her nudity, while the shades conceal her eyes – the windows to the soul.  In this aspect, Human Statue (Jessie) equates nudity with humanity, or at least an aspect of it.

Frank Benson, "Human Statue (Jessie)"

Iconic Patrick Nagel

The Aphrodite of Cnidus was nude and infamously, seductively lifelike enough to get molested by a surprise overnight guest. It inspired many other nude Venuses, each mimicking its contrapposto stance and hands raised to cover “the naughty bits.” The Venus of Arles, however, is clothed, which frees up her hands for less purposeful expression.

Frank Benson, "Human Statue (Jessie)"

Human Statue (Jessie) folds her hands, palms upward, in front of her waist. They correspond to the overturned urn at her feet, but they seem like the ballerina’s First Position (despite the feet). Her pose is uncomfortably stiff, like a mannequin, yet her face is so dimensional and richly textured – unlike the marmoreal smoothness of her Venus predecessors – that you might hold your breath while watching for hers.

I've Got a Broken Face: Image by Johnny Misheff for T Magazine

-Especially if you’ve met her! The model is Jessie Gold, an artist, dancer, choreographer, and musician in NYC by way of Miami. She’s one of the most striking beauties in the New York art worlds, and by selecting her, Frank Benson is also proposing a new model with subcultural valence for the evolving definitions and cults of beauty.

Boris Vallejo, "Pygmalion and Galatea," 1988

With no access to her eyes, my gaze drops to her lips.  A masterpiece of nature in real life, they are plump and textured here, and exaggerated by the metallic face paint the real Jessie wore for the image capture. Looking at these lips reminds us of kissing, of resuscitation, and of course, speaking. My mind wanders to Mona Aamons Monzano, the composite woman and “blonde Negro” of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle: “She was as brown as chocolate. Her hair was like golden flax.” Mona dies when she immediately freezes to death by bringing to her lips the Ice-9 contaminant from the soil beneath her.  Mona’s last movement was rising from a kneeling position.

“Would you wish any of these alive again, if you could? Answer me quickly. “Not quick enough with your answer,” she called playfully, after half a minute had passed. And, still laughing a little, she touched her finger to the ground, straightened up, and touched the finger to her lips and died.

Frank Benson, "Human Statue (Jessie)" --- "I looked down and saw what I was not meant to see. Mona had slipped off her sandal. Her small brown foot was bare."

Let this summer be a summer of love.  Spoon on the beach.  A sexy sea salt solstice.  A tanline matching the contours of his or her arms around you.  And after an outdoor shower to rinse the sand from forgotten regions, or a sleepy ride back on the LIRR, leaf through Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art by Ken Johnson, published by Prestel.  Just as Central Park can’t match Fire Island for summer UV bliss, joints and beer can’t match LSD for creative expansion.  Dig?  This book casually advances the possibility that art history has overlooked an important factor.

First, this book is not about which artists did which drugs while making which artworks.  Only three artists are explicitly identified with studio DUI: Adrian Piper, Alex Grey, R. Crumb and Charles Ray.  Others, such as Deborah Kass (incompletely), R. Crumb (mellifluously), and Chris Martin (shamanistically), mention their own psychedelic drug experiences outside the studio, but otherwise, we are denied this giddy gossip.

Second, this book doesn’t prove any causation between pharmacology and art. It doesn’t identify LSD with certain discernable features in a painting, for example. And it doesn’t attribute any genre, subgenre, or work of studio art directly to one drug or another. We find no specific scrutiny of individual artworks for psychedelic inspiration: no painting undergoes a piss test. In fact, two of the first expository pages are about art that looks like it could be LSD-inspired, but actually is not.

Third, it doesn’t explicitly catalog art made during drug experiences. So if you want to know what happens when great artists get high, you’ll have to spike their Kool-Aid yourself. In one exception, however, we learn, “In the 1970s, Sigmar Polke hung out in Afghanistan, the go-too place for the world’s best cannabis and opium-based products. In some paintings and drawings Polke made his pharmaceutical interests explicit…”

Rob Pruitt, Orb Spider on Sleeping Pills (Gold), from an experiment by Dr. Peter Witt, N.A.S.A., 2006

So what does this book do? Are You Experienced tours us through the popularization of psychedelics in the 1960s. Johnson visits the subcultural conditions and consequences of this, especially from Beats (Kerouac) to hippies (Kesey) and its tastes in and effects on visual art in all media. According to Johnson, the psychedelic revolution expanded the visual territory of art, but it also corralled the postmodern dialogue, including topics of race, institutional power, and sexuality. Johnson admittedly bypasses etiological proof of any of this, instead harnessing his artist-journalist skills toward revising contemporary art through a post-psychedelic glass. Even if drugs weren’t a direct motivation, how is it that some art looks trippy? And would it have been possible without the surrounding psychedelic revolution? Where else do we find related content? Johnson quotes the writer Nick Bromell, “You may never have taken LSD, but America has.”

Ryan Johnson, "Pedestrian," 2007

Frank Haines, "Untitled," 2010

Many passages are outstanding. Johnson observes patterns among the institutions that filter insider artists from outsiders, and how the politics of the contemporary art world coincide with those of the revolutionary 60s. Still, he points out, the art world restricts its counterculture activity to the safe confines of the museums and galleries. “Artists have, for the most part, realized their revolutionary fantasies symbolically in the safety of the art world and its various institutions,” he writes, yet without the acerbic sting of Tom Wolfe’s criticism of the 1960s New Left in his The Painted Word. Johnson reserves his ammo for other purposes, such as a detailed analysis of a Christopher Williams photograph, from which he masterfully extracts countercultural content and a fascinating historical footnote. And in the chapter O Pioneers, Johnson compares Crumb and Guston, canon names that here preface a discussion about the true self, and then via Rosenquist, how the self relates to society:

Peter Doig, "Blotter," 1993

Other sections are less surefooted. The examples of Andy Warhol don’t fit in the chapter From Expanded Cinema to Cyber-Psychedelia. The videos selected, Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964), were made before the psychedelic revolution and anyway, Johnson’s folk psychology feels too soft. Transversely, Warhol would have been a better fit than David Salle in the section Last Exit Painting, where Salle embodies “visually enervating, soul-chilling misanthropy,” “harshly sardonic humor,” “suburban sublime,” “an abysmal spiritual vacuum.”

Johnson’s vernacular writing style and candid, anecdotal presentation remind us that Johnson is writing based on his suburban, hearsay experience of the 60s. “What I knew came from T.V.” he shares: far outside the circle of the Merry Pranksters, but much closer than most readers. Still, his abundant sources and supporting footnotes prove the rigor of his research, and he exercises a generous economy of paraphrasing postmodern theories, a skill he might have developed from writing frequent, concise reviews in the New York Times.

That is why the trip sours when he veers into digressions, distracting autobiography, and imbalanced documentary detail. A spread on Roger Brown feels relatively unjustified, compared to the dimensionally-deprived details in a William T. Wiley image. Johnson writes about his discussion group in grad school, which doesn’t seem newsworthy enough to appear outside of a preface. And for a book this invested in subcultural activity, it’s not enough to say, “Following my graduation five years later, campus political climates took a conservative, preprofessional turn. Punk happened, but so did neoliberalism and Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech.” A lot happened when “punk happened,” demanding more treatment than this cursory loogie.

The Flaming Lips, "Finally the Punk Rockers Are Taking Acid" album cover

Okay, but more importantly, Johnson casts a wide net that reaches art in all media, as well as Hollywood, history, music, fiction, and youth culture. He welcomes intuitive associations across audiences, say Meg Webster and Steven Spielberg. Like a factoid-enriched fanboy, he pauses for noteworthy trivia, such as the fact that John Lennon and Yoko Ono financed Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain. We are invited to explore underexposed, yet powerhouse artists such as Paul Laffoley. And like the precision-minded professional he is, Johnson selects terrific images, all printed lavishly and brilliantly. Having large, bright paintings reduced in scale from big canvases to the domain of your lap gives new light to some artists in particular, such as Phillip Taaffe and Fred Tomaselli.

Phillip Taaffe, "Choriosa Speciosia I," 2007

Christian Holstad, "Blue Boys Don't Need Drugs with Voulkos," 2003

Ultimately, readers are privileged to access Johnson’s transparent, unassuming first-hand accounts of initial encounters with new art. Rather than write from within “the paradigm,” Johnson responds in unapologetically subjective terms, ingenuously bringing his volumes of experience to the art and ideas in question. His apocryphal My Utopia, in which he dances naked in public, is both touching and challenging, offering critics a defense against cynicism and dreamers a cue to engage the art establishment. As an individual – not an ideological enlistee – Johnson writes about material close to his heart and valuable to his imagination. Your history is not my history.

Lane Twitchell, "The Blood and Sins of this Generation," 2003

Long lines to see at Mark Grotjahn’s Nine Faces at Anton Kern Gallery.  They are lines but they aren’t “lined.”  Rather than ruling an edge or tracing an arc, Mark Grotjahn strings along atomic, individual kisses from the brush. The punctual daub, the incipient line.  Each line, like a bow or branch mingles with others until forming a thicket.  Thickets group into a bramble.

The line widths, parallel tendencies, and tubular volume could derive from the corrugated cardboard beneath them.  But what about the emergent faces, from which Grotjahn supposedly derives his paintings?  Perhaps the process is to reconcile the ribbed plane of the cardboard ground with the transverse arcs of the face.  Ten-line highway meets frog.  Grotjahn’s lines are fortified with overlapping segments of impasto paint.  Where the brush pulled away from the surface, the paint rises in low relief with tantalizing, glistening rivulets, each delicious like an oiled Brazilian rockclimber blowing kisses from the granite cliff he climbs.  Over and over again, from edge to edge.

MG, "Untitled (Lotus Paul Signac Face 41.31)," 2010 (detail)

Halved, Ohm

“The radiating, ricocheting lines never submit; the flaring planes never emerge,” writes Roberta Smith on Mark Grotjahn’s Nine Faces.  Irresistible force meets immovable object.  “The faces hold their own, if just barely, to affirm in staunchly contemporary terms the human presence behind all art.”

Mindy Shapero, "almost every color and silver leaf ghosthead guide that will bring you to the ghosthead god, you can only visualize the guide when you have entered a monsterhead, and you first have to be serene enough to be able to even see the monsterheads before you can wear one.," 2006

Like narrating a nature documentary, she’s poetically, rightfully comparing to interspecies struggle – overwhelming predators versus resistant prey – the formal trials underway in Mark Grotjahn’s larger-than-life-sized, oil on cardboard on linen paintings.

"Untitled (Geo Abstract Reveal Face 41.61)," 2011

It doesn’t end with self-indicating dots and dashes, but it also doesn’t continue toward connecting the dots and dashes into conclusive images.  Microscopically parsing his fundamental markmaking, she plants Grotjahn in the Abstraction Jungle, but gazing, perhaps condescendingly, at Figuration City.

detail

She’s also describing Mark Grotjahn’s straddling stance between modernism and the art of today. He is beyond subjective markmaking but short of the framework unto objective imagery – or back from it.

"Untitled (Lotus Paul Signac Face 41.31)," 2010

-The perplexing state that he is in; her puzzling writing on the wall.  First, how can one be staunch while still being contemporary?  “Staunch” is the folded forearms of modernism, the tight lips of rigid history.   And doesn’t this look like painting you might have found 60 years ago hanging in carpeted galleries on the Upper East Side?

Faceless: Philip Guston's "Painting", 1954

But if it is staunchly contemporary, than what is it staunch against?  “Staunchly” invokes refusal, steadfastness, Ironclad.  What does the Contemporary refuse?  Maybe the facelessness of abstract expressionism, where a lot of individualism went into the work, but a lot of monolithic masks were the closest we got to faces?  Maybe the adventitiously illustrative digressions of the academic masters before that?  Then, how would the Contemporary feel about surrealist and AbEx face-friendlies like Miró, or facebreakers like Picasso?

Page 32, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud

Half Dome Harry, by me

Grotjahn turns his back on the signifying nothing of “pure” abstraction and the gratuitous striptease of imagery and its overpopulation.  He’s back in the jungle, but he remembers the city.

Henri Rousseau, "Two Monkeys in the Jungle," 1909

Les Edwards, album artwork for The Prodigy - "Music for the Jilted Generation" LP, 1994

Dasha Shishkin, Dark Angel of Projective Vomiting, 2011

Desaparecido at Zach Feuer is Dasha Shishkin’s fourth solo show in New York, where she restores her drawings toward uniform seriality and connective imagery.  As if diagramming the tenuous distinction between “drawing” and “painting,” she works on both sides of translucent Mylar, often (though not exclusively) drawing on one side and painting on the other, dry and wet facing opposite compass points.

That misleadingly makes it sound like formalist abstraction.  Demure about its perversity, the imagery throughout the 20 or so works includes densely composed congregations of malnourished sociopaths, prison surveillance vantage points, and floor plans so fragmented that they buckle into cracked vignettes.  Occupying institution-scaled interiors resembling spas/baths and restaurants/cafeterias, the 100% women inhabitants leisurely chat with each other while smoking cigarettes, while others indifferently dismember selected sisters, who themselves are fully conscious and conversing till the cleaver makes its final chop.  Faces are sparsely articulated, as wan as Hergé’s Tintin on painkillers, though emotive engagement wriggles forth from the posture of the wasted bodies.

"Form: it is the foundation and the condition of all things; smoke itself should be rendered by a line." -J.A.D. Ingres

This society of deranged women – cool, not hysteric; industrious, not degenerate – has achieved the gyno-topia: communal living independent of males.  Simultaneously, it has regressed to the savage disorder of cannibalism, harnessing and directing members’ consuming drives inward.  All regulated and disbursed from the kitchen: due to no evident desperation, the women slice, dice, and butcher each other; but they do it with bureaucratic ardor and calm. What should be gory bloodbath seems as innocuous as mutual grooming.  And where it isn’t explicitly illustrated, the carnage is implicitly pervasive.  Food prep haunts each fetishistic protuberance, and each act of grasping, cutting, pinching, tugging, and other treatment of matter, itself subsumed as flesh.

To Serve Man.  In steaming piles, like mussels or dim sum.

(But then, what does it mean when these piles contain stray phalluses?)

Dasha’s handiwork encompasses the neurotic dissonance of the factory barbarism (barbarism begins at home).  She boldly streaks her garish palette in haphazard curtains, indiscriminately permeating the figures, though brakes for patterns, dutifully “painting in” wireframe chairs and the tiled floors.  Her decisive lines do not flinch as they confidently delineate contours and appendages, yet they seem blinking and twitchy, like a nervous teen or outback tweaker.

Meat is Murder

Dasha Shishkin, Dark Angel of Projective Vomiting, 2011

Desaparecido at Zach Feuer is Dasha Shishkin’s fourth solo show in New York, where she restores her drawings toward uniform seriality and connective imagery.  As if diagramming the tenuous distinction between “drawing” and “painting,” she works on both sides of translucent Mylar, often (though not exclusively) drawing on one side and painting on the other, dry and wet facing opposite compass points.

That misleadingly makes it sound like formalist abstraction.  Demure about its perversity, the imagery throughout the 20 or so works includes densely composed congregations of malnourished sociopaths, prison surveillance vantage points, and floor plans so fragmented that they buckle into cracked vignettes.  Occupying institution-scaled interiors resembling spas/baths and restaurants/cafeterias, the 100% women inhabitants leisurely chat with each other while smoking cigarettes, while others indifferently dismember selected sisters, who themselves are fully conscious and conversing till the cleaver makes its final chop.  Faces are sparsely articulated, as wan as Hergé’s Tintin on painkillers, though emotive engagement wriggles forth from the posture of the wasted bodies.

"Form: it is the foundation and the condition of all things; smoke itself should be rendered by a line." -J.A.D. Ingres

This society of deranged women – cool, not hysteric; industrious, not degenerate – has achieved the gyno-topia: communal living independent of males.  Simultaneously, it has regressed to the savage disorder of cannibalism, harnessing and directing members’ consuming drives inward.  All regulated and disbursed from the kitchen: due to no evident desperation, the women slice, dice, and butcher each other; but they do it with bureaucratic ardor and calm. What should be gory bloodbath seems as innocuous as mutual grooming.  And where it isn’t explicitly illustrated, the carnage is implicitly pervasive.  Food prep haunts each fetishistic protuberance, and each act of grasping, cutting, pinching, tugging, and other treatment of matter, itself subsumed as flesh.

To Serve Man.  In steaming piles, like mussels or dim sum.

(But then, what does it mean when these piles contain stray phalluses?)

Dasha’s handiwork encompasses the neurotic dissonance of the factory barbarism (barbarism begins at home).  She boldly streaks her garish palette in haphazard curtains, indiscriminately permeating the figures, though brakes for patterns, dutifully “painting in” wireframe chairs and the tiled floors.  Her decisive lines do not flinch as they confidently delineate contours and appendages, yet they seem blinking and twitchy, like a nervous teen or outback tweaker.

Meat is Murder