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Diehl, Travis, “In the Flesh Part I: Subliminal Substances,” Artforum, November 2015
CRITICS' PICKS
Los Angeles
“In the Flesh Part I: Subliminal Substances”
MARTOS GALLERY | LOS ANGELES
3315 West Washington Boulevard
October 23–December 5
Ivana Basic’s Asleep (all works cited, 2015), one of three glossy lumps of
flesh cast in wax and silicone, resembles a slightly torn organ resting on a
pillow. Listed among its materials are “weight,” “pressure,” and “body.” Has
process become material? Are there body parts here? Perhaps after
decades of engineered food, it’s our materials list that includes alien
matter. Mounted to a nearby wall is Display Unit, U-238, a PVC exhibition
case printed with texts and diagrams and inset with samples, by collective
Encyclopedia Inc. In the cheerful didactics of a science museum, the piece
surveys irradiated consumables from dentures to ceramic cups that had
their colors boosted with trace uranium. An incorporated video, subtitled
Yellowcake, demonstrates the use of a cake mix but invokes pulverized
uranium ore. Both pale powders come courtesy of the miraculous industrial
atomization of American life—nuclear energy, processed nutrition—by
which materials became ingredients.
Encyclopedia Inc., Display Unit, U-238, 2015, digitally printed Sintra PVC, digital
video, ceramic mug, glass figurine, dentures, bananas, Brazil nuts, carrots, lima beans,
36 x 48 x 6".
No wonder the contents of Sean Raspet’s installation (Technical Milk) and
(Technical Food) read like a recipe for either Mountain Dew or pesticide—
“gamma-octalactone” and “gamma-decalactone,” to name a few—but are
in fact synthesized versions of the flavorful parts of milk and food. Inside
white canisters, the artist has mixed these compounds with the mysterious,
bland supplement known as Soylent, in order to lend it a comforting taste.
At an adjacent table visitors might sample from five jugs of water that
Raspet has tainted with different artificial flavors. The day may come when
we can speak of a gastro-chemical art in terms of abstraction and
mannerisms and styles. In the meantime, we have such instructive
artworks as these to remind us that, when it comes to our bodies, a more
corporate materialism is the avant-garde.
— Travis Diehl
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Ahn, Abe, “When Our Bodies Become as Artificial as the Food we Consume,” Hyperallergic,
November 10, 2015
‘In the Flesh Part I: Subliminal Substances,’ installation view (all images courtesy of
Martos Gallery)
GALLERIES
When Our Bodies Become as Artificial as the
Food We Consume
by Abe Ahn on November 10, 2015
LOS ANGELES — We are what we eat, the saying goes, but do the artificial
components of the modern diet make us something other than human? The first
in a series by curator Courtney Malick about natural and artificial bodies, In the
Flesh Part I: Subliminal Substances at Martos Gallery presents works that
question what is or isn’t natural, and what has the capacity to both kill and
sustain us.
Preservatives and hormones make up a substantial part of our industrial food
supply, while waste and plastics are reconstituted into food we regularly consume.
Despite our heavy reliance on artificial substances, the stigma of the artificial
persists. Synthetic materials like wax, silicone, and linoleum mimic the organic
finish of fleshly organs and human skin in Ivana Basic’s sculptures resembling
body parts produced in vitro. Nicolas Lobo’s video “Hongshuai Indoor Fountain”
depicts rivulets of soy sauce dripping down impressions of aluminum cans and
footprints — a reference to the recycling of human waste, in this case hair that
was allegedly used by a Chinese company to create amino acid syrup for the
production of soy sauce.
Nicolas Lobo, “Hongshuai Indoor Fountain” (2015)
In “Display Unit, U-238,” Encyclopedia, Inc. traces a brief history of the use of
radioactive materials in consumer goods. Examples of objects with trace
amounts of uranium (an old glass figurine, ceramic mug, and dentures) comprise
the wall display, while a vitrine containing bananas, carrots, brazil nuts, and lima
beans is accompanied by text describing the foods as examples of the “most
naturally radioactive.” The perceived safety and danger of domestic goods are
further complicated by a video titled “Yellowcake,” which references the name of
the powdered form of uranium and demonstrates the use of a consumer-grade
cake mix.
The enduring popularity of “meal replacement” beverage Soylent suggests
people can ostensibly meet their nutritional and caloric needs through liquid form,
no matter how joyless or dystopian the idea might seem. Sean Raspet’s
installation features a display of Soylent containers labeled “technical food” and
“technical milk,” and invites gallery visitors to try out samples of five chemically
flavored waters, the titles of which only reveal their specific chemical compounds.
A survey asks visitors to describe their tastings, which range from the mildly
pleasant (hints of cinnamon and vanilla) to the outright abhorrent (scents of
rubber and plastic), turning the installation into a case study for the perception of
“natural” and “artificial” flavors and the mimetic capabilities of taste and smell.
Ivana Basic, “Asleep”
“Subliminal substances” contained or described in the artworks are characterized
by the processes that make up the manufacturing supply chain and the
chemicals that transform, enhance, or preserve our bodies in the same way they
do to what we eat. In the Flesh gives us a glimpse into a future in which food
insecurity and industrial production meet their high-water mark. While this future
is not complete immiseration, it’s close, especially if there’s more Soylent and
human hair soy sauce on the horizon.
Encyclopedia Inc, “Display Unit, U-238”
Sean Raspet, “(Technical Food)” (2015) and “(Technical Milk)” (2015)
‘In the Flesh Part I: Subliminal Substances,’ installation view
Highlights 2015 – Evan Moffitt
frieze.com/article/highlights-2015-%E2%80%93-evan-moffitt
9800_(1).jpg
‘9800’, 2015, installation view at 9800 Sepulveda Boulevard, Los Angeles. Courtesy J. Shyan Rahimi
Growing up in Los Angeles, as I did, could at times be an exercise in collective self-pity. ‘LA is a teardown city,’ my
architect mother used to say with sarcasm – a place where minimum construction spends would result in blandly
functional temporary structures, easily replaceable when their occupants could no longer turn a profit. Outside critics
have long bemoaned the ‘inauthentic’ nature of the city, characterizing key architectural movements like Spanish
Revivalism as little more than an Epcot model of imported pastiche. Most locally produced art, however good,
stayed local, limiting LA’s international profile to a place for blockbuster films and aerospace technology – a
perceived provincialism in fine art terms that has made it difficult for the city’s missionaries (like myself) to sell its
charms further afield.
2015 was LA’s year of positive self-realization. It was the year the city’s artistic community woke from a long siesta
of self-doubt, prodded awake by a surge of new residents and a fetishistic media frenzy. The New York Times,
which has served Southern California snark for a century, ran repeated editorials this spring labelling LA a
‘bohemian paradise’ and a ‘Paris Amid the Palms.’ (Though these were accompanied by sensationalistic coverage
of the record California drought and resulting wildfire season, suggesting the traitors fleeing Manhattan for
Manhattan Beach were kindling on a parched pyre.) Major events packed the LA cultural calendar, bringing in more
than the usual international art crowd. A blockbuster contemporary art museum (The Broad) opened its doors, and
another one (MOCA) won back local support with major institutional reforms. A major blue chip gallery (Maccarone)
christened their new downtown LA branch, while two others (Sprüth Magers and Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel)
prepared theirs for early 2016. Dior director Raf Simons joined his Saint Laurent colleague Hedi Slimane as a parttime LA resident, and German designer Bernard Willhelm relocated his Paris studio to Beechwood Canyon, at the
foot of the Hollywood sign. Furious, unprecedented debate raged over the released renderings for Peter Zumthor’s
demolition and redesign of LACMA’s campus, which prominently featured a building bridging Wilshire Boulevard –
what critics dubbed ‘the freeway overpass.’ For better or worse, it became clear that LA’s rise as the international
contemporary art world’s destination city could not be stopped.
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Santos_Dumont_1.jpg
‘Chris Burden: Ode to Santos Dumont’, installation view, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), 18 May – 21
June, 2015. © Chris Burden; photograph © Museum Associates/LACMA
At the Getty Center, ‘Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World’ featured dozens of stunning,
rarely exhibited ancient Greek and Roman bronzes, most fished from the bed of the Mediterranean and
painstakingly restored. The well-researched show provided visitors with extensive information about Hellenistic
bronze-casting techniques as well as the sculptures’ presumed origin, appearance, and function. The Getty
exhibition title could have described Ode to Santos Dumont (2015), the last work Chris Burden completed before his
passing on 10 May. Exhibited at LACMA after preliminary test flights, the semi-translucent dirigible turned circles
around the museum’s vast Resnick Pavilion, its hull catching flashes of sunlight in a soaring testament to Burden’s
creativity.
Eli Broad and Michelle Maccarone shared top billing in September, when the former’s jewel box museum and the
latter’s warehouse gallery opened within days of each other. At Maccarone, towering translucent resin paintings by
Alex Hubbard inaugurated the pristine space, catching generous sun from skylights in acknowledgement of
Southern California’s greatest natural asset. Elizabeth Diller’s design for The Broad similarly embraced the sun with
a vast open gallery floor topped by angular skylights. But the museum’s ostentatious opening (firework displays, a
star-studded red carpet, press buffets and multi-day street closures), and the sanitizing decadism of its curation
(pairing David Wojnarowicz and Julian Schnabel, for example) distracted from this architectural accomplishment.
Across the street, in contrast, MOCA’s new Chief Curator, Helen Molesworth, rehung a selection of the museum’s
permanent collection to feature scores of non-white and non-male artists in inspiring arrangements both clever and
subversively queer.
MOCA_Permanent_Collection.jpg
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‘The Art of Our Time’, installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), 15 August, 2015 – 30
April, 2016. Courtesy MOCA, Los Angeles; photograph Brian Forrest
MOCA also lent its institutional backing to the fledgling The Underground Museum, a storefront art space founded
by artist Noah Davis – who passed away in 2015 – in the working class neighbourhood of Arlington Heights. Davis’s
exhibition there last year, ‘Imitation of Wealth,’ showcased famous contemporary master works that the artist had
replicated. Like the Sturtevant retrospective that travelled to MOCA that season, ‘Imitation of Wealth’ critiqued the
art world’s racial and economic exclusivity. The knockout William Kentridge show that followed brought the ‘real
thing’ to audiences that might not often make it to MOCA’s hallowed halls. Similarly Art + Practice, a pet project of
artist Mark Bradford, transformed a Leimert Park storefront into an exhibition space, bookstore, and centre for foster
youth. With support from the Hammer Museum, Art + Practice inaugurated its space with work by Bradford and
Charles Gaines, followed by stunning shows of works by Njideka Akunyili Crosby and John Outterbridge. Both
projects demonstrate that ‘giving back to the community’ is not a trite philanthropic sentiment but an important and
attainable goal for art institutions. That charge is being lead in South Los Angeles.
It was also refreshing, in 2015, to see a new crop of projects in unusual and nimbler spaces. The gallery Arturo
Bandini – named after the dejected LA writer in John Fante’s novel Ask the Dust (1939) – held its inaugural show in
a temporary shed on the roof of a parking structure. Another ‘shed show,’ a group exhibition curated by Bolivian
collective Grupo Anan called ‘Joe’s Cantina’, brought me to the dusty multi-acre hilltop plot of Cudayh, a new outdoor
art and performance space overlooking downtown. Climbing the cactus-strewn road up to the titular cantina, its
cracked asphalt too dangerous for cars, I felt as though I could be somewhere else entirely; though it was clear I
was nowhere but Los Angeles. I drank mezcal at the bar, a corrugated aluminium hut, and watched dry ice smoke
rise from the inside of a white wooden cube, upon which the show’s works had been hung. The quirky (and clearly
illegal) ‘art bar’ reprised an earlier effort, by four Austrian artists-in-residence at the MAK Center, to turn one of the
carports in Rudolph Schindler’s modernist, Mid-City apartment building into an approximate replica of Vienna’s Adolf
Loos-designed American Bar. ‘Los Bar’ was, for the month or so it was open, my favourite place to drink in Los
Angeles. Cramped quarters encouraged conversation between strangers squeezed up against the plywood bar and
its blue pool noodle bumper. (There was blessedly no cell reception, and thus freedom from digital distraction.)
Meanwhile, the Schindler-designed Bethlehem Baptist Church in Compton hosted a spare and serene solo show by
Robert Barry. Clear vinyl letters covered the white walls, spelling words only legible from an angle in the chapel’s
ample daylight.
Imitation_of_Wealth_(1).jpg
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‘Noah Davis: Imitation of Wealth’ 2015, installation view The Underground Museum, Los Angeles. Courtesy The
Underground Museum; photograph Karon Davis
Though far from small, the strangest exhibition space of all was 9800 Sepulveda Boulevard, which gave its name to
the jam-packed November exhibition ‘9800.’ Organized by J. Shyan Rahimi in collaboration with seven fellow
independent curators – Ana Iwataki, Courtney Malick, Pierre-Alexandre Mateos, Mara McKevitt, Mebrak Tareke,
Charles Teyssou, and Marion Vasseur Raluy – the show occupied seven floors of a disused modernist high-rise
office building on LAX airport property (built in the 1950s to house Ford Motors’ West Coast headquarters). Art
found eerie company installed on dull blue-gray carpets under flickering fluorescent ceiling lights – used after its
closure for police drills, the building’s walls are riddled with bullet holes. In the teller booths of a wood-panelled lobby
bank, writer Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal cheekily installed text on glass panels and small video monitors detailing a
lengthy investigation of the online psychic business, Oranum.com. The building’s creepy and cavernous basement
featured dozens of works, including artist collective Encyclopedia Inc.’s revelatory installation dissecting Colin
Powell’s false UN testimony prior to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Illuminated by a dim spotlight, in a windowless
room with walls yellowed by age, the installation’s hanging banners and static audio vividly recalled the later horrors
of Abu Ghraib.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my favourite shows outside of Los Angeles. The Guggenheim’s elegant On
Kawara retrospective coiled the artist’s quotidian practice and the museum’s architecture together in a spatiotemporal Möbius strip. Camille Henrot’s wacky, working phones at Metro Pictures (cue reference to Drake’s hit 2015
single, Hotline Bling) made my eyes well with tears of laughter on not one, but two visits. Dr. Seussian wall-mounted
cord phones offered users creepily soothing advice on how to deal with frustrated, techno-illiterate fathers;
disobedient dogs; philosophical and existential crises; and unfaithful lovers. Jim Shaw’s dizzying New Museum
retrospective surprised, shocked, and amused in equal turns; it was unclear whether the contiguity between Shaw’s
own work and his vast collection of Seventh Day Adventist memorabilia, also on display, was due to Massimiliano
Gioni’s curatorial decisions or the artist’s aesthetic obsession for cultish arcana.
A+P__MG_2603.jpg
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Art + Practice in Leimert Park, 3 August 2015. Photograph Natalie Hon
The past year was, for me, a tale of two cities as I moved from Los Angeles to New York toward the end of the year.
2015 certainly had its Dickensian highs and lows: record winter storms struck the East Coast while a record drought
hit the West. Two venerable art schools – Cooper Union and the University of Southern California Roski School –
were embroiled in controversies that raised fears about the future of arts education. A city with half a dozen
premiere MFA programmes, Los Angeles has rarely doubted the security of its schools – but when in May all but one
of Roski’s MFA students dropped out in protest of unilateral changes to the curricular and funding model of their
programme, the whole city snapped to attention. Part of what makes LA great is the collegiality of its arts community;
more often than not, big-name artists will happily discuss their work at openings with their younger peers. The
increasing professionalization of art schools and the skyrocketing cost of higher education in America threatens to
commercialize Los Angeles into, not a place for making things, but a place to make it.
It could be tempting to classify gentrification as a growing pain, part of LA’s rise as a global cultural capital. But the
experimentalism that attracts so many young ‘creatives’ there is the very thing threatened by their exodus. The
cycle they may well bring is familiar, perhaps even inevitable: as prices rise to meet demand, people are displaced,
and neighbourhoods slowly change their character. If there has been an awakening in Los Angeles, some of it has
been rude. Artists have seen rent become unaffordable in, ironically, the Arts District, where developers sold the
presence of studios as hip credibility to new tenants of hulking mixed-used housing developments. Developers’
intentions are not malicious (just capitalist), but the effects of their labour could be described as the re-whitening of
LA’s urban core. To love LA for its ‘teardowns’, for what it already blessedly is, may be to love what is soon no
longer.
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9800 @ 9800 S Sepulveda Blvd reviewed
aqnb.com/2015/11/12/9800-9800-s-sepulveda-blvd-reviewed/
Fuxus
11/12/2015
Protected under Los Angeles’ historical preservation codes, 9800 S Sepulveda Blvd lies as a vacant testament to
1960s Los Angeles, one where the junction of freeways, air travel and mass mechanization correlated with greater
personal and economic mobility. The nine-story building was designed by Welton Beckett, the architect responsible
for the Capitol Records and Theme buildings, as part of a larger development skirting the LAX airport. It is this
backdrop of surplus modernism that provides the setting for the 9800 group exhibition, occupying eight floors of the
empty building with more than one hundred artists’ works, performances and site-specific installations including
Rachel Lord, Zoe Crosher, Khalid Al Gharabali + Fatima Al Qadiri, Sam Lipp and many more.
As part of the show, nearly every floor is taken over by a certain curator or organization. Three spaces are
particularly noteworthy, starting with J. Shyan Rahimi’s curated lobby and basement titled If I Did It that alludes to
varying displays of concealment, deception and entrapment echoing the title of O.J. Simpson’s memoir. This
narrative is loosely drawn on the ground floor with a text-based piece ‘Burning Questions?’ (2015) by Tracy Jeanne
Rosenthal mounted on multiple acrylic panels describing her descent into a web-based pop-up subscription service.
Above her work hang video pieces by Simone Niquille depicting distorted, digital masks of Britney Spears and
other pop icons. Further on, an installation by Sean Raspet vaporizes synthetic sugar that, when inhaled, creates a
sensation of sweetness deep in the throat.
In the basement, the scale of the work grows more ambitious. A videogame
by Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch’s Witness 360 + Fitch + Trecartin
Studio allows you to fly as a drone around a Masonic Temple and, in
another room, Doug Rickard’s selection of banned Youtube videos depict
an underbelly of illicit behavior across the globe. Yet perhaps the best
illumination of the relationship between concealment and malfeasance is a
room occupied by an installation by Encyclopedia Inc. featuring an
overlapping audio soundtrack of Arabic and English. These recordings were
ostensibly used to justify the evidence of Iraq’s acquisition of uranium
PLAYTIME (2015) @ 9800 S Sepulveda, Los
Angeles. Exhibition view.
concentrate ‘Yellowcake’ in the lead-up to the United States’ 2003 invasion
of Iraq. For a selection of work rooted in the concept of questionable
motives, it is the best demonstration of an illicit intent lost within the process of the dissemination of meaning.
On the fourth floor, is a selection of much more modest works curated by Parisians Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and
Charles Teyssou. As opposed to the other floors, Mateos and Teyssou’s exhibition includes no Los Angeles artists,
instead focusing on relational works with instructions, performances or non-classifiable activity. The opening night
featured Luis Miguel Bendaña and a room ringed with Maraschino cherries in small communion glasses, as well
as a performance by Puppies Puppies consisting of a massive yellow python meandering about a central room. In
one corner office, French designer Item Idem has set up an installation of a stack of LED lights, which capriciously
turn off when the door is opened. In another darkened corner office, internet artist sstmrt’s soundtrack plays into the
empty room, a sequence of bronchial coughing, wheezing, sobbing, urination and possibly even sex. This
soundtrack, combined with the office’s outlook of Sepulveda Blvd and onto the tarmac of LAX, projects a visceral
impression of Los Angeles’ ceaseless urbanity, one of both musing alienation and diffused impersonality.
On the rooftop, Matthew Doyle’s sound installation ‘SSB[39!], Leq i.i.d.’ (2015) utilizes the data generated from
decibel meters monitoring community noise levels around the airport. Developed in collaboration with Sam Wolk,
the program uses permutations of the data with the input of a rooftop microphone to sends impulses of white noise
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across three speakers on from there to the sun deck, creating particularly
cacophonous blasts when Santa Ana gusts hit the building. The embrace of
this noise data network, with its variable streams, vectors and paths, is in
many ways a recognition of the arbitrary functionality of Los Angeles and its
lost modernist promise. 9800 S Sepulveda Blvd, as a relic of a uniform
spatial awareness, has been replaced by the ubiquity of other forms of
uniform connectivity, a dialogue that 9800 successfully addresses in spite of
its bewildering scale. **
PLAYTIME (2015) @ 9800 S Sepulveda, Los
Angeles. Exhibition view.
The 9800 group exhibition is on at 9800 S Sepulveda Blvd, running from
October 29 to November 15, 2015.
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MATERIAL FREE COCKTAIL
dismagazine.com/blog/79851/material-free-cocktail/
In the Flesh Part l: Subliminal Substances features artists whose work utilizes inorganic ingestible elements found in
food, medicines, cosmetics and technological devices. Some of these consumable and non-consumable products
emit chemicals and radioactivity that our bodies absorb through the skin. Inorganic ingestibles include, but are not
limited to, GMOs, pathogens, hormones, pesticides, steroids, preservatives, radiation and plastics. Such substances
seep into our bodies more and more consistently, while the term “organic” is applied liberally and FDA regulations
continue to decrease. Click here to see the list with our top rated lighted makeup mirror.
Through the work of Ivana Basic, Encyclopedia, Inc., Nicolas Lobo and Sean Raspet, In the Flesh explores the
ways in which our bodies very slowly adapt, morph and mutate as a result of the increasing seamlessness between
what we think of as purely organic or natural matter, such as skin and flesh, and inorganic, ingestible substances
that are regularly consumed. Furthermore, the exhibition imagines how such porosity will eventually, over time, alter
human bodies and shift what is considered “natural.”
Below, find cocktails conceived by Arley Marks for the opening reception of In the Flesh Part I: Subliminal
Substances, curated Courtney Malick, on view at Martos Gallery, Los Angeles October 23 – December 5, 2015.
INGREDIENTS:
ERYTHRITOL
Erythritol ((2R,3S)-butane-1,2,3,4-tetraol) is a sugar alcohol (or polyol) that has been approved for use as a food
additive, and whose industrial level, it is produced from glucose by fermentation with a yeast, Moniliella pollinis.
Erythritol is 60–70% as sweet as sucrose (table sugar), yet it is almost noncaloric, does not affect blood sugar,[4]
does not cause tooth decay, and is partially absorbed by the body
TARTARIC ACID
Tartaric acid is a white crystalline organic acid that occurs naturally in many plants, most notably in grapes
CULINARY GRADE POPPING CRYSTALS
Pop Rocks is a carbonated candy with ingredients including sugar, lactose(milk sugar), corn syrup, and flavoring
NATA DE COCO
Nata de coco is a chewy, translucent, jelly-like foodstuff produced by the fermentation of coconut water, which gels
through the production of microbial cellulose by Acetobacter xylinum.
SPARKLING WATER
Carbonated water (also known as club soda, soda water, sparkling water, seltzer water, or fizzy water) is water into
which carbon dioxide gas under pressure has been dissolved.
INSTRUCTIONS:
1. To make your sour mix, add ¼ cup tartaric acid, 1+3/4 cup erythritol, and 2 cups water in a large sauce pan
2. Simmer, but do not bring to a boil
3. Stir until all the ingredients have dissolved, which should occur within 15 minutes.
4. Pour 20 ounces of soda water in to a large decanter
5. Add about 1.5 ounces of sour mix, and adjust to taste
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6. To mix MATERIAL FREE COCKTAIL first put on white lab coat, then combine:
• 1 oz chilled Material Vodka
• 2-3 oz sour mix soda
• 1 small spoonful of culinary crystals
• 3-4 cubes of nata de coco
Enjoy with fleshy sculptures and friends!
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