Dennis Hollingsworth

LA DriveBy

Sunset Blvd, Echo Park.

Beneath the Beach, the Paving Stones

Phoenix Truxtun

The USS Truxtun lives again!

My old navy buddy, Pat Costello wrote in recently to report the upcoming commissioning sometime this spring of a new Arleigh Burke class destroyer (DDG-103) that will bear the name of our ship, the USS Truxtun, CG(N)-35. Our old boat was decommissioned and chopped apart several years ago, sands in the hourglass.

From my timeline bio:

1. "Make a hole!"

2. We said "Aye!" and meant it.

3. The sea to the horizon, the horizon all around you. As far and farther than you can see, the sea. To be a tiny speck in the vast Pacific, a universe of water where the closest land is directly below the ship.

4. Dark rooms and colored lights and urgent numbers and nautical miles and grease pencil and squawk boxes barking orders and funny stories.

5. Liberty and beer and pockets full of money and girls and "Me So Horny!" and bars and museums and taxis and buses and snorkeling and Coppertone and civillian clothes that never seemed to fit well.

6. I saw "The Last Detail" a month before I enlisted and discovered later that it was a faithful and nuanced representation of life in the Navy.

Javier Tapia

I am extremely fortunate to have met Javier Tapia, an artist based in Copenhagen (born in Santiago, Chile, lived for a time in Barcelona), he his now in Los Angeles invited by UCLA's Prof. Mary Kelly to head up an Interdisciplinary studio for six months. Affable, intelligent, direct, challenging, simultaneously open and informed. In the first hours of our meeting at Hop Louie, he laid this on my table with a big smile: "I don't know you very well, but I have to say... that any artist who thinks that art is located in an art object... is a FOOL." What a wonderful start to a conversation!

The image above is from his exhibition and associated publication, Monte Carlo Club. You can find his work on his personal website here. Click and click and click his links. Along with artists that I personally know such as Andrew Hahn, Javier a perfect exemplar of the pan media artist, a considerable inspiration for me.

A bottomless cup.

A New Vitrine

Henry Was Here

One day recently, as I was busy cracking my egg (details in the link) in the studio, Henry Taylor dropped in. I told him of the progress of the work, of my efforts to surprise myself painting to painting.

Henry said "Uh huh." And walked over to the work table and picked up a sharpie.

Henry is a natural graffiti artist. I'm not saying that Henry is a graffiti artist, far from it. The fine arts and the street arts are two different worlds indeed (each world seems to get off on knarfing energy from the other). The categories hold and the distinctions remain... but I won't let that stop me from making cross comparisons. Henry kicks street graffiti art ass. I mean, he is better than any graffiti artist I have ever seen, better in terms of knowing no boundaries when it comes to reaching out and daubing, scribbling, marking, drawing, writing on any surface that is in front of him. Most graffiti artists are trapped in the conventions of the genre, locked in the nuance of Krylon overspray and the lexicon and typography of domesticated graphic intervention. They like to think of themselves as pirates, that property is a crime, but they tend to practice their interventions in lockstep. Henry is free of all of that. For example, he can start drawing on a piece of paper and follow the drawing off the margins onto adjacent surfaces, onto the the table top, onto the wall, onto the floor, where ever the drawing demands to exist. Where ever he is, whatever is in front of him, there is a suitable support for his art. Once, in the back room of PruessPress, Henry was looking at Joel Mesler's collection of ChinaTown photographic group portraits framed under glass. These are a kind of memento, a yearbook type of documentation of who's who in this specific art community in Los Angeles. And lo! There was a sharpie in front of him, so he picked it up and started scribing various jokes, drawings and remarks and occasional good natured insults onto the surface.

So here he was in front of my blank canvas with a sharpie in his hand. He reached up and scribed the beginnings of a collaboration onto the canvas. "Here you go, break your egg with this."

A few days later, Henry returned to the studio and I had managed to wrangle the painting through various stages. "Hey Henry, throw some licks on this thing, this is a good time." It was interesting. He started with a scrap of cardboard torn from paint tube packaging. The first move was to scrape paint from the eye. Then he took a large palette knife and stripped off the background screed of suavecito field in which the portrait was suspended, all the while talking nonstop about his son, his boyhood friends, his life in Oxnard. We took turns, smooth going.

Rebels don't like the suave thing. Interesting.

Cologne Art Fair

Next week, the Cologne Art Fair will open, commanded by former Chinatown gallerist Dan Hug. Sadly,I won't be able to travel to Germany to attend the fair and give Dan a congratulatory handshake in person... it would be wonderful but alas, alack. So here is a backslap online, all the best to you, Dan. I hope this fair is a smashing success for you, for us and the art world!

It's going to be a great time, as a horde of LA art denizens will be flying over, good time to be had by all.

The Big Lick

I've been talking about breaking the egg for some time now. This is a reference to the imperative to challenge oneself in the studio, to fracture one's creative narrative, something I believe that is incumbent for artists of all stripes. An artist has to grow and make the turn into new territory, otherwise we are merely mindless automatons churning out worthless product, pathetic superficial masturbation. The degree of fracture is a personal decision, and I think that the art world is diverse enough to encompass a broad range of egg cracking. This, all to the glory of civilization, amen.

Still, this is the tough part of an artist's life. Breaking one's egg is generally not a pleasant experience. Relinquishing one's pattern, I think that everyone would agree: in that way, pain lies. The bigger question is how much of a break is a legitimate crack of one's mental universe? Back in 2003, I had a show at the erstwhile Chac Mool Gallery in West Hollywood, LA. I didn't blog it at the time, but the opening was graced by the presence of the great Robert Rauschenberg (Why not? Some type of modesty, I suppose.). Rauschenberg was kind enough to impart a quantum of advice: "Always make things differently. Keep changing." At that moment, my first thought was that while he himself could fly the flag of the cracked egg, his oeuvre was remarkably uniform in terms of the continuity of the kind of choices and changes that he characteristically employed. My second thought was the example of artists like Jonathan Lasker, whose singular determination was remarkable and impressive. (I had met him once or twice before, but never did I get the warm-fuzzies that radiated naturally from the likes of Rauschenberg.) Thus, I had found another compass, the poles of Robert Rauschenberg and Jonathan Lasker.

While the question of how much rupture one should endure is a personal one for every artist, the danger remains: the hazard of breaking the yolk. The strain of creativity is real, as most artists can attest to the specter of mental depression that can haunt a studio. The possibility that creative destruction can also unleash a kind of personal destruction is real. That the crisis will not find it's release in epiphany, that one's creative reservoir has been depleted, that you are not all what you had hoped you could be, that you might fall desperately short of the standard of the great exemplars of art history... all these monsters lurk beneath the thin veneer of confidence that we use to navigate the social art world.

So it was that I found myself here in the spring of 2009 wrestling as always with the mandate of egg cracking, looking for some elbow room in my project. Bart Exposito and I have been talking about how each of us were wrestling with our own respective eggs, each of us feeling particularly besieged recently. I stayed with the works on paper, experiments for me are best worked out on paper since failures that result in scrape offs have a lesser psychic cost when the scales are smaller, and risk is therefore more easily forded. The image above is a gloss of how the train of thought traveled.

(Bart, by the way, had popped out the other side with a brilliant resolution of his efforts, his initial small format canvases can be seen here, here and here.)

After eleven WOPS (works on paper) were digested in dribs and drabs, it was high time to work large, and in I went. I didn't feel as if I had a particular breakthrough to carry from the recent WOP cycle that could inform the larger painting, so I decided to paint an overall composition, floating elements in a kind of colloidal suspension, the challenge of which would have been a delicacy of touches, a cloud of paint licks. Unfortunately, the marks that I had made were larger than they should have been, the first touch led the way in scale and I followed through hoping the journey would finally bear fruit. It was good enough result, albeit dammed as it was by faint praise. I let it stand and hung it on the wall. It, after all, was in a tradition of similar paintings that I have engaged in before, I was hoping that this apology would be sufficient.

Friends would visit the studio and I would note their reactions. When Andrew Hahn first saw the painting, he said: "Dennis, what if you scraped it all down. Wouldn't that be interesting, the residue of your marks?" I choked down the implied critique, my apprehensions were becoming confirmed. Other friends simply ignored it, preferring to view other paintings in the studio. Another confirmation by omission. One character, a friend of a friend, had a more guttural response. He was one of those scrappy bohemian artists with several rehabs under his belt, an apparent devotee of Charles Bukowski. Characters like this tend not to like the lyricism in my work. His response was almost violent. "That green. I don't see anything there. THIS PAINTING SUCKS." Got it. Thanks. Now you can leave.

Then Bart sat in a chair in the studio later in the night after we closed Hop Louie, our favorite local bar. He looked at me in the eye, took a long drag of his cigarette and said: "You copped out, didn't you?" I was determined not to flinch. Damn. "You're right, Bart. I give up. I'm on my back like a possum, you can have your way with me. You're right." A beat, two. "You're right." Even later, in Andrew studio (he didn't hear Bart's evaluation), he said: "What you need to do is plant a big lick on that painting."

So I did. I mean, I didn't intend to plant a tongue on the canvas, despite the apparent resemblance. I knew that I had to clear out some space for some intrusive act. I didn't want to scrape it off, there was much I liked about it as it was. A new move had to be simultaneously independent and integrated into what was already there. So I surgically removed each feature and planted them to the side, recalling the peeled paintings from last year. Julian Schnabel's typical swaths of swooping clotted color was hovering in my head, but there was no way I was going to imitate the overbearing-bed robed-obnoxious genius so slavishly. Indeed, in so much as my all-over type of compositions tend to recall Claude Monet's water lilies, I was thinking of a huge carp swimming into the visual field. It was only later, when Andrew was looking at the finished piece, he said: "Hey, did you paint an actual tongue?" I nodded. Andrew generally doesn't like to know what the imagistic associations that abstract painters conjure in their work, such chatter makes him cranky. So I was surprised he asked. I didn't think of a tongue again until he mentioned it, but no doubt, there it was. What I didn't tell him at the time was that it was a tongue... and a fish... and a Schnabel smack down... and a cascade of red imprintations, flecked in black.

Whatever one sees, there it is. Imagination. That's what art is all about, right?

Ahora

Mail Call

Harold Hollingsworth, my distant cousin, wrote in:

Dennis/Cous

Are you blowing those spores up in scale, cause if so, I'm in! It is the year of go big or go home, and your moves, if larger in all scale of subject, and that is how I see your marks, will be the path, hope you are well!

--
harold hollingsworth

Here's my reply:

Hey there Harold:

There's a natural limit to the size of the monads. Already, my paintings are super heavy. If I go larger, it will have to be via some kind of special fabrication, Hollywood style... and I'm not into the histrionics of the hyper extended pan media artist.*1 I would prefer to move in terms of painting than move in terms of trans-media.

Is painting over? I was told that this was the case back in grad school, but being a stubborn son of a gun, I was determined to continue with my ambition to paint. The author was very much alive and his death was far too exaggerated... as a matter of fact, we in the art world tend to literalize metaphor and artifice. On the other hand, I was leafing through a catalog of Eva Hesse yesterday, and I could see how she took a cue from her paintings and sprung into sculpture. But then again, her spring board was more elemental (line and tentative feeling) than something in terms of a specifically defined form. Perhaps this is the best guideline for pan media extensions: that the script for the jump should be conceptual rather than formal.

Is painting over? I thought I found something like a hidden pull down menu for painting: a formal element natural to paint itself, a reassertion of the materiality and reality of paint, an unpopular counter-argument against the conceptual sidestep that art history took. I used to argue that Clem Greenberg missed the point when he emphasized a disembodied argument for the imagistics of painting. By pushing the materiality of paint, have I inadvertently sidelined imagistics and therefore painting in general? Quite possibly.

Of course, if I could pony up a five figure budget and make what you're talking about with a simple phone call, Jeff Koons style, that'd be the way to go. But right now I can only make bunny ears with my pockets pulled inside out.

Thanks for the encouragement, it's much appreciated. Photo close ups in the blog tend to get people excited like that. The blog is perhaps misleading in that way. People tend to light up when they see the vitrines in person too. Some people have asked me if I would make them larger. Maybe I should try glass blowing or find a shop somewhere who could make vitrine where a person could stand inside? I wonder...

Many moons ago, my old navy buddy was egging me on to do the same thing. Same answer. The big question is how much an artist should play to the audience and how much can we lead? Maybe the former should be dammed and the latter is the only way to go for the real artist. And maybe an artist who can't hear critique is a self absorbed narcissist. But like the arguments of abstraction/representation or democrat/republican I tend to think that it's not about one or the other but about both. The question is about how much and in what proportion can one simultaneously follow a vision and live in a community that acts on the stage of art history.

Thanks again,

-Dennis

UPDATE: *1: "I'm not into the histrionics of the hyper extended pan media artist."

Well, this sentence is a bit over the top. I do have a critique against forced diversification, compelled by the popular notion that since we are living in diverse times, that all artists have a duty to reflect and represent such diversity by expressing themselves in a conventional spectrum of media.

This should not be confused with those artists who naturally follow their curiosity into a variety of mediated expressions. The operative word here is "curiosity" (Ahem. #1) External voices, regardless of how intelligent they might be, should never be permitted to displace the origin of vision that each of us are born with in this world. I have, we all have encountered those artists whose curiosity has a naturally wide address... but in an art world so burgeoning with artists, and with conventions of representation that are widely disseminated, it is a bit hard to read this distinction between the authentic and the programmatic easily upon first glance.

But these distinctions exist for certain. There is a way, and there are many ways, to do the spectra well.

Indeed, since I had substituted undergrad architecture with undergrad art school, my belief in this spectrum is nicely anchored and as hard as concrete. The deal is that when I have dipped into each experience, I tend to drink deeply. Three examples: Since I was raised as an AirForce brat and since my father was such a legendary figure for me (he fought in Korea, thrown into the maw of the Pusan perimeter at the onset of the war, all of which he was quiet about, by the way), it was incumbent upon me to matriculate into the armed services. So I joined the Navy for 4+1 years (the plus one to get an interesting job while I was at it). Architecture: 6 years of school and four in the field for apprenticeship and licensure. Painting: 18 years plus 6 overlapped.

With what I hope is a small risk of braggadocio, I submit these biographical facts for the record.

I do in fact, love all media. I am however, a particular kind of lover of all media.

The crux of the matter for me probably is an issue of simultaneity, something about which one should perhaps not be so Taliban about.

I would very-much-like to live long enough to dip deeply in each well. (Pause for prayer.)

Amen.

***

The question as to where the vitrines are leading is touched upon in the next email.

Chris Ashley wrote in recently:

Dennis, the vitrines that you've shown on your blog, and the April 1 post showing the wood (not cardboard, right?) armature, are fascinating as individual objects, first, but also in how they are revealing extensions of the kinds of structure, figuration, and space that exist in your paintings, maybe similar to the way de Kooning's 60's sculptures made clear how he thought of or felt about the figures in his paintings at that time. I like yours, and wonder if you intend to make more.

Best wishes,

Chris

Hey Chris:

Thanks so much for the encouraging words. Yes, that's cardboard and cork that you see, attached with hot glue into a rigid armature using boxed frames and cantilevers. I buy the vitrines at the local curio shops here in Chinatown, take them apart and insert these assemblages. These things are straight extensions from the painting project, using the menu of three dimensional touches to agglomerate a form. I paint the elements onto a paper palette and let them dry (I refer to this as my oyster breeding farm), at least to the skin. Once the skin gets leathery, I slice them off the palette and attach them to the armature, the wet cores being a perfect adhesive.

I'm having fun, but I am also figuring out along the way, the limitations/possibilities of a transliteration of painting into sculpture. A few friends are quite excited, telling me that I should shift form painting to sculpture, that this is a better expression of who I am. I take the compliment but I am not sure about that entirely. Others want this to remain a "B project" or even a passing fancy. I tend to think that the scale limitations will keep this in a B-level and this level is a bit crowded, the blog for example. I am not particularly eager to merely scale up to a six foot vitrine... but then again I saw a glass case here in CT that is a bit inspiring. I have no axe to grind against the pan-genre artists, but I do believe that to get anything interesting done in painting, one has to get an exclusive mindset about it, Jack of all trades and all that. I do hold out a possibility that once I have found a base camp on Mount Painting, extensions into other arenas are possible. Again, the blog is an example, even though it has no cred as a recognized medium in our art world.

Yet.

As far as sculpture, I have had an abiding interest in the type of sculptural practice that mashes and manipulates material. Clay more than carving comes to mind. I like the kneading and dexterity that are involved in this approach. I tend to think that this is an overlooked avenue in our artworld, with many fellow artists valuing the maxim that art material is anything within your reach. The recent assistance I rendered for Henry Taylor as he prepared for his show here at MeslerHug is a good example. For some time, I had been thinking about mashing cardboard together with hot glue, kneading and shaping busts that explore character and anatomy along the way. I wanted to use Henry as a model, so when he asked if I could help him assemble some things, I was all too happy to assist.

As an aside, I have always admired Tom Sachs' work, and I had long thought that in a parallel art universe, there is a Dennis exploring along that vein. My only beef with his stuff is the hard anchor to explications of Theory (...sorry, this is a digression to an incidental remark... a double-down drift). From my experience in architecture, model making and conceptual instrumentality has always been very exciting.

Henry's studio is full of discarded cardboard boxes, a prime element in his palette. I had suggested that I could be of some help to him if he ever wanted to mash the cardboard into new forms. One day last fall, Henry asked if I could help him create a life sized figure in cardboard. Keeping to his language, I quick assembled a box to the dimensions he was thinking of. Along the way, we endowed what became his football player with gonads, painted it black and I mashed together a right arm as Henry topped it off with one of his mannequin heads that he tends to have on hand.

I should know who wears # 45, but I don't. Alas, alack.

Several months later, I had a chance to make the sculpture I was thinking of, a bust of Henry himself. As I started to glue of the cardboard forms, Henry kept handing me materials, a foam display head (already painted), so I dropped my intention. I was in his studio after all, not mine. He handed me a plastic packaging element as an example of the type of material he tends to like in his sculptures... as it happened: anything within his reach. So I put my agenda aside and incorporated his palette, cutting the chin and mouth off the foam head so I could cock it back and indicate Henry's characteristic occipital shape of his skull. I shaped a forehead as it covered the existing foam face and then I jacked in the plastic packaging for a nose and reattached the chin/mouth for a final flourish. I thought Henry would slather it with paper mache, to naught. It was all fun for me, but still I was thinking of the plastic aspect of sculpture.

A couple of nights ago, a group of us were helping Henry put together a piece that he had been thinking about as his hours of prep time for the show dwindled. He was thinking about the haves/have-not life of living in downtown LA, and he wanted to make a city scape with street life below and a hand reaching up for what would eventually be either a request for alms or a toast for an empty hand, he was thinking of how to fabricate the hand: wire and paper mache? I told him that I could throw together one from cardboard splish-splash (I was still dwelling on the idea of the plastic potential of cardboard), so I started whipping out a hand in cardboard as fast as I could.

I had a great time with it. And I am indeed planning to explore it further.

Last night is another example. Henry and I were in his studio, and he had started to make what would amount to a prison cell from a cardboard box. What kind of cell was it? What color was the floor? Concrete or wood? Should the walls be brick? No, that's old school. Henry was thinking of something specific and contemporary. What kind of bed was it? A cot. So I started to make a cot with whatever was at hand, in Henry's way. Corrugated cardboard cut with scissors and razor blades, folded knit rags to make a mattress. I even made a pillow and stuffed it. Henry, by this time had made a commode from the severed top of a clorox bottle, he flipped it upside down, painted it and placed it in the cell. Then I asked if the cell had a light in it. Was it a bare bulb? (This was a leading question, I was thinking of a Guston bulb.) I then made something out of wire and hot glue. I suspended it in the room. After a time (4 am to be exact), Henry said: "I think it's too much like a doll house." And then I began to understand a little bit about his aesthetic: there was a issue of poetics in play here, not only the poetics of his subject, but of the way he reached for and manipulated his materials. My inclinations were too specific for him, it was driving him off his game.

All in all, I'm learning a lot, and basic issues are still in play. But I think that there is something to your observation about the armature, and I think that my recent adventures with Henry are an illustration of this. I'm not sure where all this is going, but I'm having some fun along the way.

I've been drifting off into an idea of an image of a first stage of a seppuku in chip board: a desultory samurai sitting against the wall with nearly a square cut out of his abdomen, cardboard entrails and viscera spilling out onto his lap.

Don't ask me why.

Thanks again and I look forward to a physical toast together when we first get a chance some day soon,

-Dennis

Painting

WOPS

Work on Paper.

WOPS

Work on Paper.

Ahora

R. L. Burnside: Come On In

Henry Taylor at MeslerHug

Here are some install shots taken this morning.

More to come...

Ahora

Prismatic

Saturday night in the LA artworld seems to be all about ChinaTown tonight: Henry Taylor's debut of sculpture at MeslerHug, a show at Fran?ois Ghebaly's Chung King Projects featuring Candice Lin: The Sexual Life of Savages, and a lot of people in the neighborhood have been talking quite positively about Erik Frydenborg's debut show "PROTEIN RECITAL" at BONELLICONTEMPORARY.

See you there?

Ahora

Thinking About

Donatello's Magdalene.

(Image Source.

Jay Bolotin at Cirrus

Here's a large fragment of a song performed by Jay Bolotin at his opening last week at Cirrus Gallery. I had an interesting conversation with him, coming away with the notion that a repeated Kafka quotation in his prints referring to paradise was a kind of emerald or somesuch gemstone which refracted his yearning to reconstruct his Jewish Eastern European heritage through the prism of Southern culture, a Kentucky Torah in other words.

It is a rough video. I should have stood closer to my subject instead of the lazy situationalism of whip-it-out-and-catch-what's-in-front-of-you photography. But I liked the Joycean/Tom Waitsean/Kurt Weillean/Cat in Heatean overtones in what I recorded. So I post it here as a keepsake.

Aquarium

(Like life in a vitrine. Cottage Home is a time share gallery that China Art Objects shares with Sister and Tom Solomon. The space was a former Chinatown theater and the projection room on the second floor affords a nice perch to survey the crowd.)

Vitrine

Ahora