Marlborough Contemporary
Mark Hagen
1972 —
Born Black Swamp, VA
Education
2002 —
MFA, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA
1994 —
BA, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA
The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, CA
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2016 —
The Big Hole, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, NY
Travesia Cuatro, Guadalajara, Mexico
2015 —
China Art Objects, Los Angeles, CA
JOAN, Los Angeles, CA, U.S.A.
2014 —
A parliament of some things, Almine Rech Gallery, London
Guest Star, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, NY
2013 —
Paleo Diet, China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles, CA
Black Swamp, Almine Rech, Brussels, Belgium
2012 —
TBA de nouveau, Almine Rech, Paris, France
2011 —
TBAA, Galeria Marta Cervera, Madrid, Spain
TBA, China Art Objects, Los Angeles, CA
2010 —
Succession & Simultaneity, China Art Objects, Los Angeles, CA
2007 —
Give it up smooth, Mandrake, Los Angeles, CA
2006 —
Circulation and Light Visit, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA
Group Exhibitions
2015 —
Theories on Forgetting, Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Lost in a Sea of Red, The Pit, Glendale, CA
Sweet 16, China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles, CA
Eagles II, Marlborough Madrid, Spain
2014 —
Eagles II, Marlborough Monaco, Monaco
Sèvres Outdoors 2014, Cité de la Céramique, Sèvres, France
Dans un intérieur Meubles, oeuvres murales & textiles d'artistes, Almine Rech Gallery, Paris,
France
Another Cats Show, 356 Mission, Los Angeles, CA
Show Off, Associate Mission Building, Rockbound, Shanghai
The White Album, Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA
Too Many Things Are Too Many Things, Sputnik/Barbara Seiler, Basel, Switzerland
Platform, Curated by Nicolas Trembley, Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels, Belgium
2013 —
And Mae and Mac and Me, Barbara Seiler Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland
Rocks and Clocks, Ambach and Rice, Los Angeles, CA
Endless Bummer II, Curated by Drew Heitzler and Jan Tumlir, Marlborough Gallery, New York,
NY
Painting in Place, Curated by Shamim M. Momin, Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), Los
Angeles, CA
A Handful of Dust, Contemporary Arts Forum (CAF), Santa Barbara, CA
Kiss Me Deadly, Paradise Row, London
Flicker, Curated by Jan Tumlir, Control Room, Los Angeles, CA
2012 —
TC: Temporary Contemporary, Bass Museum of Art, Miami, FL
Art Basel Miami Beach Art Public, Curated by Christine Kim, Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach,
FL
Lost Line: Contemporary Art from the Collection, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los
Angeles, CA
Treating shadows as real things, Curated by Andrew Berardini, Public
Fiction, Lauren Mackler, Museo della Sindone, Turin, Italy
Perfect, International Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles
XYZ, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA
Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco, CA
One Day At A Time, Peres Projects, Berlin, Germany
Knowledges, Mount Wilson Observatory, Los Angeles, CA
More and Different Flags, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, NY
Made in L.A. 2012 New Art Now, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA?
Spare Me, Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2011 —
California Dreamin' - Myths and Legends of Los Angeles, Curated by Hedi
Slimane, Galerie Almine Rech, Paris, France
Seven Los Angeles Artists, Curated by Scott Benzel, Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles, CA
Painting and Space, Luce Gallery, Turin, Italy
Tabula Rasa, Galeria Marta Cervera, Madrid, Spain
April, Jack Hanley Gallery, New York NY
2010—
Inauguration of China Art Objects in Culver City, China Art Objects, Los Angeles, CA
RE-DRESSING, Bortolami Gallery, New York, NY
POINTS OF VIEW, Portugal Arte 10, Lisbon, Portugal
Animal Style, curated by Drew Heitzler, Pepin & Moore, Los Angeles, CA
Succession & Simultaneity, 2 person show, China Art Objects, Los Angeles, CA
Current Trends in Modern Painting, Center for the Arts, Los Angeles, CA
2009 —
Extra Extra, curated by Jed Caesar, China Art Objects, Los Angeles, CA
Inaugural show (video screening), Eighth Veil, Los Angeles, CA
1999, China Art Objects at Cottage Home, Los Angeles, CA
2008 —
California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA
Desertshore, curated by Jan Tumlir, Luckman Gallery, Cal State Los
Angeles Constellation, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL
HOST, Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA
The Writing on the Wall, Parks Gallery, Idyllwild Arts Academy, Idyllwild, CA
2007 —
Paper Bombs, Jack Hanley Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2005 —
Futurism Restated Again, Rental Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Post No Bills, curated by Matthew Higgs, White Columns, New York, NY
2002 —
MAKING, LACMALab, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
PROJECTS
2010 —
Vapor Parade, window project, LA><ART, Los Angeles, CA
2009 —
Be like the wind, blowing over the land, be like the wind pretty lord, blowing over the land, Mini
Wrong Gallery, LA><ART, Los Angeles, CA
2006 —
Circulation and Light Visit, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA
Public Collections
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA
Mark Hagen
Mark Hagen, « Black Swamp », Almine Rech Bruxelles, 14.03_10.04 2013
The temporal impossibility at the heart of the work of Mark Hagen. Whether through its use of
unstable materials or practice of anachronism, it causes the accident while contradicting and loves
to refute timelines by modifying scheduling. And even in the titles of which he adorns his works,
mostly open to a "To Be Titled" completed a summary categorization parentheses. Likewise, his
first solo exhibition in France at the Almine Rech Gallery [1] was entitled "TBA again", "TBA"
for " To Be Announced ", which, followed by "new," brushed the illogicality by placing us in a
position of waiting cyclical something indeterminate since no information on the content of what
was left to be determined not filtering through the set of words. However, this title was not
actually foolish because "TBA again" was a reconfiguration of parts already shown in previous
exhibitions entitled "TBA" [2] and "TBAA" [3] ( To Be Announced Again ). There is indeed in the
works of the Angeleno, mainly in his sculptures, a dimension of impermanence due to modular
structures and recyclable component elements.
The series of works of interest here are partly rooted in a visit to the artist at the Louvre, including
a display of microliths Neanderthal who then inspired to Success in Every Direction (2007), a
concentric assembly obsidian blades on a white wooden board. Obsidian, he learned to carve for
the occasion, is a volcanic glass extremely hard, dark but translucent color. It is currently used in
cardiac and eye surgery because its edge is thinner than steel scalpels but is also popular with
lithotherapists who ascribe many mystical powers.
More recently, Mark Hagen made a series of Subtractive Sculptures for which it uses a modular
aluminum and steel structure that holds as many tetrahedral kites Graham Bell as geodesic domes
of Buckminster Fuller and Richard disorientation Constant Nieuwenhuys principle on which it
hangs plates polished obsidian. You should know that the chemical composition of obsidian is
made of formed structural units of tetrahedra to understand the relationship between the "black
mirror" in fact Hagen and support. It should be noted here - and without wanting to state a truism
in the history of sculpture - the carrier, its modularity is not given as the basis but as a constituent
element of the work in the same way that the stones .
compositions of obsidian points arranged on panels or canvas evoking much scientific
classifications archaeologists that most folk collections of Indian arrowheads and other artifacts
recovered by now the tourism industry with displays roughly geometrized on chassis aluminum as to be Titled (Subtractive and Additive Sculpture # 12) , 2012 - unfold very classical
philosophical themes such as the place of man in time and space, in a form of questioning by
perpetual, once again, the total modularity of the support like stones and therefore their multiple
formatting options.
Mark Hagen Vue de l’exposition / Installation view : « Made in LA » 2012, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
The works that are most noted work of Mark Hagen lately, either at Made in LA at the Hammer
Museum [4] or in the last edition of Art Basel Miami Beach [5] , are part of his series of Additive
Sculptures . It is molded cement components assemblies from packaging to consumer objects
strung on steel reinforcements in the form of either single column ( stack ) or perforated wall
( screen ). By far, these arrangements evoke some pre-Columbian architecture, by alternating
basic and pretend geometric shapes engraved with mysterious patterns.Closely, recognizing
patterns of bits of molded plastic bottles, we think more to a kind of fossilized remains of the
contemporary industry a vestige of this. What troubles here is that these forms do not appear
specifically dated, they could almost even, as noted by the artist, come from the future.
Or, as Frank Stella said:
"... There is still structural elements. The problems are not really different. I always compose a picture and if you
file an object, you must organize the structure. I absolutely do not think our work is radical because you never
discovers new structural elements. " [6]
Continuity forms through history, their relatively limited repertoire are among the major issues
that fascinate Hagen who also likes to recall that the Egyptians were using a kind of cement over
two thousand years before Christ.
From very size variable, the screens still show generally the standard dimensions of common
building materials, such as those of gypsum board chair rails galleries, in a similitude relationship
with the place where they take place. Because they are flexible too, their verticality is constantly
thwarted by the possibility of their reconfiguration, affirming their erection faces this hesitation
implied by their assembly method. The question they raise the contingency of the work from its
registration context echoes that of the intervention of chance in production that are found in
the Additive Paintings . Returned to painting - forsaken time studying at CalArts with Michael
Asher and Douglas Huebler, among others - in 2004 because it seemed anachronistic and
unpopular enough then to be worthwhile, Mark Hagen relied on an accidental discovery to select
the media.Indeed, after observing the fading of burlap bags out there long, he chose to use this
fabric which will leave large canvases folded and stacked in his garden for a few months before
making its substrate. Each layer of fabric leaves an imprint on the one below in the manner of a
frame, creating a network of links between future paintings. He then proceeds to almost the
opposite of a "traditional" painter using white acrylic paint (outdoor) in layers so that it pierces
the fabric installed horizontally. When he falls off the canvas and the tarpaulin on which it was
put, the plastic folds seem etched into the paint that is molded like. They are in addition to
random discolouration of the fabric and simple geometric patterns, deducted from the canvas
itself, from the division of its dimensions.
Mark Hagen To Be Titled (Additive Painting #76), 2011. Courtesy the artist, Almine Rech Gallery Paris/Brussels.
The body of work that develops Mark Hagen oscillates between order and chaos, intentionality
and random drawing non ethnocentric metaphysics as the latest astronomical discoveries but also
the non-linear conception of history developed in particular by Manuel De Landa [7] . He has also
just published a book artist in 2013 ?: A Doomsday Day Planner as an agenda embellished with
one hundred and fifty historical predictions of the doomsday cult, which invites me to leave the
word the purpose under one of his sculptures: We-have seen the future and we are not going .
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
↑ At the Almine Rech Gallery, Paris, from 13 January to 23 February 2012.
↑ At the gallery China Art Objects, Los Angeles, from 21 May to 25 June 2011.
↑ At the Marta Cervera Gallery, Madrid, from 15 September to 12 November 2011.
↑ Made in LA , the first biennial of Los Angeles organized by the Hammer Museum in collaboration with Laxart, the
Hammer, to Laxart and Barnsdall Park from June 2 to September 2, 2012, curated by Anne Ellegood Ali Subotnick,
Lauri Firstenberg, Cesar Garcia and Malik Gaines.
↑ To be Titled (Additive Sculpture, Miami Screen), 2012, présenté par la galerie Almine Rech lors d’Art Basel Miami
dans la section art public au Bass Museum, commissariat : Christine Y. Kim.
↑ Minimal Art, A Critical Anthology, sous la direction de Gregory Battcock, Berkeley, University of California Press,
1995, p. 180.
↑ Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, New York, Zone Books, 1997.
Mark Hagen
Mark Hagen, « Black Swamp », Almine Rech Bruxelles, 14.03_10.04 2013
Temporal impossibility lies at the heart of Mark Hagen’s work. Be it through his use of unstable
materials or his praxis involving anachronism, he provokes chance while at the same time
contradicting it, and is fond of refuting chronologies by altering their order. And this applies even
in the titles he gives to his works which, for the most part, open with a “To Be Titled” completed
by a brief categorization in brackets. Similarly, his first solo show in France at the Almine Rech
gallery [1] was titled: “TBA de nouveau”, with TBA standing for “To Be Announced”. Which,
followed by “de nouveau”, verged on illogicality by putting us in a situation of cyclical
expectation of something indeterminate, because no information about the content of what
remained to be determined filtered through the set of words. Nevertheless, this title was not really
nonsensical because “TBA de nouveau” was a reconfiguration of the pieces already shown in the
earlier exhibitions titled “TBA” [2] and « TBAA » [3] (To Be Announced Again). In the works of
this Los Angeles artist, and mainly in his sculptures, there is actually a dimension of
impermanence resulting from the modulable structures and the recyclable elements which form
them.
The series of works of interest to us here have some of their origin in a visit made by the artist to
the Louvre, and in particular in a display of Neanderthal microliths which subsequently inspired
him to produce Success in Every Direction a concentric assemblage of slivers of obsidian on a
white wooden panel. Obsidian—which he learnt how to work for the occasion—is an extremely
hard vitreous volcanic rock, with a dark but translucent colour. It is currently used in heart and
eye surgery because its cutting edge is finer than that of steel scalpels, but it is also highly sought
after by litho-therapists who attribute many mystical powers to it.
More recently, Mark Hagen produced a series of Subtractive Sculptures, for which he used a
modular aluminium and steel structure which has as much to do with Graham Bell’s tetrahedral
kites as with Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes and Constant Nieuwenhuys’s principle of
disorientation, on which he affixes sheets of polished obsidian. It helps to know that the chemical
composition of obsidian is made up of structural units formed by tetrahedra, in order to
understand the relationship between the “black mirrors” which Hagen makes with it, and their
support. It should be noted here—and without intending to utter some truism about the history of
sculpture—that, through its modularity, the support is not presented like a stand, but rather like a
component part of the work, just like the stones.
Compositions made of obsidian heads arranged on panels and canvas, conjuring up as much the
scientific classifications of archaeologists as the more folkloric collections of Indian arrowheads
and other artefacts now salvaged by the tourist industry in more or less geometric displays on
aluminium stretchers – like To Be Titled (Subtractive and Additive Sculpture #12), 2012 –
develop very classical philosophical themes, such as man’s place in time and space, in a kind of
perpetual questioning by way of, once again, the total modularity of the support and of the stones,
and hence the many different possible ways of giving them form.
Mark Hagen To be titled (Additive Sculpture, Screen #14), 2012. Bass museum, Miami. Courtesy the artist, Almine
Rech Gallery Paris/Brussels.
The pieces which have brought Mark Hagen’s work most to notice in recent years, be it during
Made in LA at the Hammer Museum [4] or at the latest Art Basel Miami Beach Fair, [5], are part
of his series Additive Sculptures. Involved here are assemblages of cement elements moulded
directly on the packaging of day to day consumer objects inserted on steel bars in the form either
of a simple column (stack) or of a pierced wall (screen). Seen from a distance, these arrangements
evoke some kind of pre-Columbian architecture, through the alternation of basic geometric forms,
seemingly engraved with mysterious motifs. Close up, recognizing snippets of motifs of moulded
plastic bottles, one thinks more of a sort of fossilization of the leftovers of contemporary industry,
as a vestige of the present. What is disturbing here is that these forms do not seem to be
specifically dated; as the artist observes, they might almost even come from the future.
Or, as Frank Stella put it :
« …we’re all still left with structural or compositional elements. The problems aren’t any different. I still have to
compose a picture, and if you make an object you have to organize the structure. I don’t think our work is radical
in any sense, because you don’t find any really new compositional or structural element. » [6]
The continuity of forms through history, and their relatively limited repertory are among the
major issues which fascinate Hagen, who is also fond of recalling that the Egyptians were already
using a kind of cement more than 2000 years before the Christian era.
The screens, which vary greatly in size, nevertheless usually borrow the standard dimensions of
current construction materials, for example those of sheets of plasterboard used for gallery walls,
in a homothetic relation with the place where they are set up. Because they too are modulable,
their verticality is forever being thwarted by the possibility of their reconfiguration, the assertion
of their erectness collides with this hesitation implied by their manner of assemblage. The
question of the contingency of the work in relation to its context of inscription which they raise
echoes that of the intervention of chance in the production, which we find in theAdditive
Paintings. Returning to painting—which he had abandoned while studying at CalArts with
Michael Asher and Douglas Huebler, among others—in 2004, because it seemed to him to be
anachronistic and sufficiently unpopular at that time to be worthy of interest, Mark Hagen relied
on an accidental discovery to choose the medium he would use. In fact, after observing the
discoloration of sacks made of jute which had been left outside for a long time, he elected to use
this textile, leaving large canvases folded and piled up in his garden for a few months before
turning them into his subjectile. Each layer of canvas leaves an imprint on the one below like a
photogram, thus creating a network of links between the paintings to come. He then proceeds
almost in an opposite way to a “classical” painter by applying white acrylic paint (for outdoor
use) in successive coats, in such a way that it goes through the canvas installed horizontally.
When he raises the canvas and detaches it from the tarpaulin on which it was laid, the folds of the
plastic seem engraved in the paint, which is as if moulded. They are added to the random marks
of the canvas’s discoloration and to the simple geometric motifs, resulting from the canvas itself,
based on the division of its dimensions.
The body of works developed by Mark Hagen thus wavers between order and chaos,
intentionality and chance, drawing inspiration from non-ethnocentric metaphysics and from the
latest astronomical discoveries, but also from the non-linear conception of History developed, in
particular, by Manuel De Landa [7]. He has, incidentally, just published an artist’s book
titled 2013?: A Doomsday Day Planner in the form of a diary complemented by more than 150
historical predictions of the end of the world, which invites me to give the last word to the title of
one of his sculptures : We have seen the future and we are not going.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
↑ At the Galerie Almine Rech, Paris, from 13 January to 23 February 2012.
↑ At the China Art Objects gallery, Los Angeles, from 21 May to 25 June 2011.
↑ At the Marta Cervera gallery, Madrid, from 15 September to 12 November 2011.
↑ Made in LA, the first Los Angeles Biennial organized by the Hammer Museum in conjunction with LAXART, at the
Hammer, at LAXART and at Barnsdall Park from 2 June to 2 September 2012, curated by: Anne Ellegood, Ali
Subotnick, Lauri Firstenberg, Cesar Garcia and Malik Gaines.
↑ To be Titled (Additive Sculpture, Miami Screen), 2012, presented by the Galerie Almine Rech at Art Basel Miami in
the public art section at the Bass Museum. Curated by: Christine Y. Kim.
↑ Minimal Art, A Critical Anthology, edited by Gregory Battcock, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995,
p.180.
↑ Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, New York, Zone Books, 1997.
TheNewGarde:5EmergingL.A.Artists
By Paul Young | Photos by Ji Shin | Angeleno magazine | December 6, 2010
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/31/2014
ARTBOOK | D.A.P. Presents Mark Hagen's 'Ramada Santa Monica'
Bookstore Installation at Art Los Angeles Contemporary
Visit us January 30 - February 2 in the Entrance Tent at the Barker Hangar, where we
present artist Mark Hagen's Ramada Santa Monica bookstore installation, housing
hundreds of monographs, exhibition catalogs and artists books by the world's most
respected museum and art book publishers. Book signings with Bettina Hubby and Dave
Cull and Chris Johanson, also hosted within Ramada Santa Monica, are listed below.
,
published by Hatje Cantz/David Zwirner/Regen Projects, More Than You Wanted to
Know About John Baldessari Volumes One and Two, published by JRP | Ringier,
and Wes Lang, published byPictureBox, among many others.
MARK HAGEN was born in 1972 in Black Swamp, Virginia. Recent exhibitions
include Painting in Place by LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division); Made in L.A. 2012 at the
Hammer Museum; Handful of Dust at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa
Barbara; TC: Temporary Contemporary at the Bass Museum of Art; Lost Line: Contemporary
Art from the Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and California Biennial
2008 at the Orange County Museum of Art. Hagen’s artist book 2013? was published in
2012 by Paper Chase Press. Public collections include LACMA and the Hammer Museum.
He is represented by Almine Rech Gallery, Paris and Brussels, and China Art Objects, Los
Angeles. He received his MFA from CalArts in 2002 and lives and works in Los Angeles,
California.
Mark Hagen’s Ramada Santa Monica for
ARTBOOK | D.A.P.
January 09, 2014
Space frame sculpture encompasses the Art Los Angeles Contemporary
on-site bookstore
Scott Benzel & Mark Hagen ; Against, 2012; books, cut and polished coprolite; Photo by Robert
Wedemeyer
Mark Hagen, The Alhambra, 2013, aluminum and stainless steel space frame, 153 x 182 x 242. Courtesy of
International Art Objects Galleries
Scott Benzel & Mark Hagen ; Suddenly — No More Time!, 2012; books, cut and polished coprolite; Photo
by Robert Wedemeyer
Los Angeles artist Mark Hagen and renowned bookseller ARTBOOK | D.A.P.
collaborate to present Ramada Santa Monica, a sculpture and bookstore
located in the expanded entrance tent at ALAC 2014.
Titled Ramada after provisional shelters of the American Southwest, Hagen has
designed the framework to which the DAP bookstore will be adhered. The fourth
iteration of an ongoing project with space frame systems, it is both an
expressive sculpture and utilitarian display space for ARTBOOK | D.A.P.’s
extensive list of monographs, exhibition catalogs and artists’ books. The space
frame will include numerous new sculptures, as well as collaborative works with
artist Scott Benzel inspired by ARTBOOK | D.A.P’s own fixtures and provocative
book selection.
Founded in 1990 under the name Distributed Art Publishers, ARTBOOK | D.A.P.
is widely considered America’s premier source for books on contemporary and
twentieth century art, photography, design and aesthetic culture. Over the past
two decades, ARTBOOK | D.A.P. has been the exclusive distributor for hundreds
of seminal publications from the world’s greatest museum and independent art
book publishers, while always remaining committed to the work of emerging
artists.
Mark Hagen was born in 1972 in Black Swamp, Virginia. Recent exhibitions
include Painting in Place by LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), Made in L.A.
2012, at the Hammer Museum; Handful of Dust, at the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara, TC: Temporary Contemporary, at the Bass
Museum of Art; Lost Line: Contemporary Art from the Collection, at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art; and California Biennial 2008, Orange County
Museum of Art. Public collections include LACMA and the Hammer Museum.
Artlyst:‘MarkHagen:AParliamentofSomesThings’,October14,2014
Mark Hagen
Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels 14 March - 10 April
2013
By Sam Steverlynck
Almine Rech’s Brussels gallery is housed in an imposing industrial 800m2 space that must
present exhibiting artists with quite a challenge. Its vastness could inspire huge and site-specific
work, yet in the three years since Rech opened here, few artists have responded in that way. Los
Angeles-based Mark Hagen does so, however, and rather convincingly. Walking first through the
smaller exhibition space, one sees a monumental space underneath, accessible by a staircase.
Hagen emphasises this difference in level by making a self-supporting construction in metal
space frames – structures formed by interlocking struts – that forms an L-shape, jutting out from
the first-floor space and meeting the wall of the lower main space at an angle. The construction,
with its open and closed structure, also slightly disrupts the general overview you’d normally
have from above.
Space frames in the shapes of cubicles recur throughout the exhibition, functioning as
autonomous sculptures but sometimes also as pedestals and room dividers. In their attempt to
suggest a nomadic way of living via modular structures, they evoke the 1960s utopian
architectures of Yona Friedman et al. On top of the frames, or in front of them like door stops,
the artist has placed volcanic glass boulders, polished to a slick, mirrorlike finish. This obsidian
has almost become an anachronistic material, associated with prehistory and long since
replaced by materials easier to handle. Hence its obsoleteness contrasts with the space frames,
which recall utopia but have now been put into industrial production.
The cement screenlike sculptures further along also have a somewhat prehistoric feel, almost
recalling Aztec architecture. They are formed by stacking repeated volumes that look abstract,
yet are revealed on closer inspection to be cast from postal packages and soft drink bottles.
Some look like marble, yet they are made from the high-quality cement normally used for LA
highways. Here as elsewhere, Hagen plays with his material’s origin and history, and deliberately
injects temporal confusion by its almost anachronistic look.
The shape of the accumulated cement blocks is also echoed in the paintings in this show. With
their white geometrical angles, they initially resemble Minimalism. Yet they are the result of a
deliberate reversal of the traditional painting process: Hagen used burlap (for its rough, tactile
quality), covered parts of its verso with adhesive tape, then poured acrylic paint through from the
rear. The covered areas remain blank; the uncovered ones absorb the paint, hence playing with
negative space. Within the fixed framework he set up to make these works, Hagen also allows
for accidents. Some of the surfaces display the imprint of a rock used as a support; others show
traces of tape. Hence the creation process is inscribed in the final product. Hagen’s new ‘cast
tile’ paintings, where he uses plastic tiles, plastic sheeting and packing tape as foundations, are
a variation of this technique. The poured paint on the backside of the burlap sheets is also
squeegeed, creating blue colour gradations that loosely recall those of the volcanic glass.
Though referring to the legacy of Minimalism and Postminimalism, Hagen reconsiders and
opens up this tradition by applying unusual materials that are not slick but possess a strong
sense of physicality. His work might be set up according to related principles of repetition and
variation, yet it also embraces the notion of coincidence and accident. The result is a series of
multilayered works that proudly bear traces from their process of creation.
Waiting for a Techno-Future
ART LOS ANGELES CONTEMPORARY
FEB 1ST, 2014 2:24 AM
Now on view in the entrance of Art Los Angeles
Contemporary, Ramada Santa Monica is the fourth iteration in Mark
Hagen’s series of space frame installations—this time housing the
catalog of materials from independent publisher Artbook |
D.A.P. Aluminum triangles join into modular architectural units,
towering floor to ceiling and enclosing a corner of the lobby, where
polished fossils (in fact fossilized feces) act as bookends.
We've seen the future and we're not going titles Hagen’s 2012 space
frame work, that one affixed with rough slabs of obsidian. The pleasure
of this uneasy pairing springs from its clever twinning of aesthetics and
eras of technology: the irregular cuts of obsidian with the uniformity of
the space frame, the material of prehistoric weaponry with the template
for 1950s modular design. We’ve seen the future and we’re not
going both rejects technological accelerationism and admits a
melancholic truth: our utopian techno-future simply has not come.
This ambivalence about technology, the failure of positivism to deliver
on its promises, animates Hagen’s space frame sculptures, as they call
out to (and become implicated in) the sinister evolution of the form. In
the middle of the twentieth century, space frames were perfected by
utopian architect Buckminster Fuller in his geodesic domes. Now,
luxury car manufactures including Audi and Lamborghini advertise
their use of the space frame, testifying to the recherché design. This
evolution is unsurprising. Buckminster Fuller’s ideals of totalizing
efficiency as well as neologisms like “synergy” find exquisite
expression in corporate management; the hippie communes founded on
his principles collapsed within the decade. Rather than build utopia,
space frames have successfully secured capitalism’s hold on utopian
rhetoric—the revolution happens in Silicon Valley each day. Space
frames enact Adam Curtis laminations in All Watched Over By
Machines of Loving Grace, echo David Graeber’s recent eulogy to
flying cars. Contemporary technology presents conservatism dressed up
as change.
How do the structures of capital modulate our ability to imagine? Mark
Hagen often titles his sculptures “additive,” “subtractive,” or both,
attuning us to his process not as one of creation but modulation, of
accrual and removal. Irrespective of material, obsidian or aluminum,
Hagen’s modulation can produce both cynicism and (nostalgic)
wonder. From utopian to neoliberal design, art object to vehicle for
commerce—I’ve seen the future, and I’ll see you there.
Written by Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal.
From top: Scott Benzel & Mark Hagen, Against, 2012, books, cut and
polished coprolite; two views of Mark Hagen, Ramada Santa Monica,
2014, aluminum and stainless steel space frame, melted down space
frame parts & car rims, wire anodized with Diet Coke, dimensions
variable; Benzel & Hagen, Sundial: Nudists Uncork / Ankh: Something
is Happening and You Don't Know What It Is..., 2014, coprolite
bookends, naturist magazines, 1963 - 1969, 11" x 8.5" x 13"; Benzel &
Hagen,Concrete Poetry, 2014, coprolite bookends, pulped copies of Un
coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard by Stephane Mallarme,
Gallimard Edition and "Pages intentionally left blank, 12"x 14"x
9". Bookend photos by Robert Wedermeyer and installation view
photos by Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images.
Made in LA 2012
HAMMER MUSEUM, LAXART & LA MUNICIPAL ART GALLERY,LOS ANGELES, USA
Slanguage Untitled, 2012, mural on the exterior of LAXART
Who needs another biennial? Los Angeles does, according to the Hammer Museum. The reason:
‘Simply put, the artists,’ says Hammer curator Anne Ellegood in her catalogue essay. While artists
are undeniably thick on the ground in LA, not all are good. The curators of ‘Made in LA 2012’ –
Ellegood and Ali Subotnick from the Hammer, joined by Lauri Firstenberg, Malik Gaines and
Cesar Garcia from its ‘sister institution’, LAXART – set themselves the challenge of finding 60
biennial-worthy artists who are either emerging or under-recognized. These criteria allowed for
the inclusion of several artists born in the 1980s alongside more established elders such as
Channa Horwitz, now in her 80s.
Aside from this corrective mission, the biennial declares itself to be themeless. Nevertheless, some
identifiable threads run through the show. (Or shows. There are, in fact, three institutions
housing work: the Hammer, LAXART and the LA Municipal Art Gallery.) Crafty, handmade,
intimately scaled objects predominate – as seen in Roy Dowell’s painted papier-mâché totems, in
Zach Harris’s psychedelic carved wood frames and in Zac Monday’s winsome crocheted monster
costumes, worn by performers in the galleries. The corruption of fine art by craft techniques is no
longer the radical strategy it once was; what emerges here instead – not necessarily
uninterestingly – is the merging of art practice with personal choices about lifestyle and leisure.
Some of the best work in the biennial is by Joel Otterson, whose table bearing butch ceramic
figurines and a lamp describes a richly allusive queer domesticity (Tableau Vivant; Burned and
Scarred, 2008–12).
In the catalogue, the curators cite five watchwords that recurred in their notes: ‘archaeology,
materiality, mythology, theatricality and subjectivity’. For better or worse, these are never made
explicit in the exhibition itself, though they are hinted at through the placement of works –
archaeology, for instance, through the installation of Liz Glynn’s project comparing items
smuggled across the Gaza Strip with those found in pyramids at Giza next to Karthik Pandian’s
Mad Men-inspired slide installation Carousel(2012), Erica Vogt’s installation of arrayed,
indeterminately functional objects and Patricia Fernández’s taxonomies of inherited buttons and
fabrics.
The watchword ‘subjectivity’ benefits from a little unpacking. On the face of it, the term points to
the multiplicity of perspectives that Los Angeles accommodates: Meleko Mokgosi and Nzuji de
Magalhães both contribute paintings and sculptures that reflect, rather straightforwardly, on
aspects of African culture; Nery Gabriel Lemus and Vincent Ramos both make work about their
concerns as Latinos in California. Brutal Set (2012), a performance by Math Bass involving
several of the artist’s friends, seemed mainly to do with subcultural cohesion and posturing.
Zackary Drucker’s excellent film SHE GONE ROGUE (2012), in collaboration with Rhys Ernst,
places Drucker in clichéd narrative situations that are subverted by queer and transgender
performers, such as Vaginal Davis, appearing alongside the artist’s own family.
There is another kind of subjectivity, however, that is unrelated to external social realities. The
curators make a significant observation on contemporary Angeleno art by foregrounding artists
who work with a particular self-absorption, even an apparent naiveté. This is not the referenceheavy, over-educated brand of conceptualism that has become internationally ubiquitous in
recent years; instead, artists such as Ry Rocklen, Caroline Thomas, Sarah Cain, Rubi Neri and
Scoli Acosta make objects and pictures that are mystical, sometimes seemingly mystified by
themselves. The epithet I often reached for was ‘visionary’. The finest examples of this – Mark
Hagen’s We’ve Seen the Future and We’re Not Going (2012), in which a modular aluminium
structure holds sequential slices of polished black obsidian, and David Snyder’s cacophonous Me
TV (2012), a crazy architectural façade cradling screens that blare with his self-performed
television shows – though outwardly different, both captivate through their weird but highly
evolved systems of interior logic.
Another highlight is Goods Carrier (2012), a video installation by Vishal Jugdeo who used the
biennial’s generous production budget to shoot a film with actors in Mumbai. While sculptural
props shuttle automatically across the darkened gallery floor, Jugdeo’s actors perform naturalistic
(though scripted) interactions that are entirely bereft of narrative context. Despite its eccentricity
and exoticism, the work avoids the threatened narcissism of the subjective authorial position
through its astuteness about the currents of globalised culture and its representation.
Not all the work here is good. Considering that every curator supposedly agreed on every artist,
too much seems complacent, limp and lacking in ambition. The problem, maybe, is that the
biennial isn’t sure of its main purpose. Is ‘Made in LA 2012’ an experimental hatchery for nascent
art practices? That would be no bad thing, and its intermittent quality would be forgivable. But
also to boast – either to an international audience or to local citizens – about the calibre of art
here seems hubristic. There is a prize (of US$100,000) for one artist, on whom all visitors can
vote, but the exhibition isn’t particularly crowd-pleasing, and wall texts are impenetrable. This is
not the best of all LA – far from it – but neither is it a focused analysis of a particular aspect of the
city’s diverse art scene, as attempted by the Hammer’s previous series of ‘Invitationals’ (which the
biennial replaces).
A microcosm of the show is distilled in Slanguage’s ‘takeover’ of LAXART, which the collective
(founded by Mario Ybarra Jr. and Karla Diaz) has filled to the brim with art works by themselves
and by the young people who take part in their workshops in the harbour town of Wilmington.
There is no sense of connoisseurship here; their motto seems to be ‘come one come all’. What is
important to Ybarra and Diaz is establishing an authentic, autonomous language (hence the
group’s name) that faithfully represents an existing local culture – but which, nevertheless,
sometimes reveals surprising, unique visions. That is what ‘Made in LA 2012’ achieves, and
perhaps that is all one should hope for.
Jonathan Griffin
Issue 121 March 2009
2008 California Biennial
ORANGE COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART, LOS ANGELES, USA
Raymond Pettibon, No Title (I Thought California) (1989/2008)
I thought the California Biennial would be diff-erent. Guest curator Lauri Firstenberg (with the
help of assistant curator Aram Moshayedi) took a Raymond Pettibon lithograph from 1989 as a
starting-point for her edition of the California Biennial (aka the Cal-Bi). Pettibon’s piece No Title
(I Thought California) (1989) pictures a rumpled man running with his back turned; written
above him in the artist’s spidery scrawl are the words ‘I thought California would be different.’ A
print of this hung in the artist’s watering hole and bar in Culver City, the Mandrake, taunting
drunks on their way to the toilet and giving more than a woozy few of us a little case of California
angst. For this Biennial the print appears as an off-site project, a larger-than-life billboard
towering over Hollywood.
Ostensibly the Cal-Bi, first established in 1984, is supposed to feature work made in the state, a
strange localism amounting to a billowy ‘Hurray for us!’ To get to the main site of the Cal-Bi, grab
a freeway or two to Newport Beach. Make a left into an industrial park just past the Fashion
Island mall (called Fascist Island by local punk rock toughs) and then another left into a
nondescript car park and you’ll find the main stage for the Biennial: the Orange County Museum
of Art. Three vinyl banners hang in front of it, the kind that usually advertise cultural events.
These particular ones feature golfers and palm trees, but Sam Durant has spray-painted them
with sayings from the immigrants’ rights movement: ‘Who is the illegal Immigrant Pilgrim?’
(Untitled, 2008). While Pettibon officially holds the banner for the exhibition, its real banner
hangs here in the car park, courtesy of Durant, and it encapsulates a lot of what doesn’t work
about the Cal-Bi. The politicking seems nostalgically bent towards a kinder, simpler time of
activism, which generally entails the artist taking a polite nibble at the hand that feeds him: some
of the boosterist developers whose use of immigrant labour it seems he seeks to expose (to whom
I’m not exactly sure) could well be among those who fund the museum and consequently
purchase his work. This work is about as helpful to undocumented immigrants as wearing a Che
Guevara T-shirt.
The strange political boundaries of California are more aptly captured by Jedediah Caesar with
his work bright hot day long dark night (2008), a 1992 Toyota pick-up with 3,505 miles of patina
and parts of California picked up on a road trip that took the artist all over the state and its varied
terrain – a strange geological time capsule of the open road rolling over a multifarious landscape.
In that vein the amorphous arrangement of the Cal-Bi included 29 off-site projects spread all over
the state. Many of these were either long in planning or already realized and simply absorbed by
the Biennial. But even if they failed to be realized or realized properly – Piero Golia’s Lighted
Sphere (2008) at the time of writing was still sitting in a fabricator’s storage waiting for permits
long overdue – the simple fact that they were all over the place made it impossible for anyone to
ever see all of them anyway. Different parts were better than others, but the off-site projects,
distributed between Northern California and Tijuana, Mexico, inevitably spread the Cal-Bi so thin
it often disappeared (even though roughly 90 percent of the artists came from Los Angeles).
Nevertheless, a number of artists included managed to capture imaginaries both local and
international with their practice. Morgan Fisher calculated his own height and weight from two
different points in his life into surface areas that form perfect monochrome white squares on the
floor, entitled Self Portrait (March 1994; height 6’ 41/2”, weight 184 pounds – body surface area
3,332.5 square inches) (1994/2008), and Self Portrait (January 2002; height 6’ 41/2”, weight 188
pounds – body surface area 3,355.75 square inches) (2002/2008). Placed one inside and one
outside the museum, the two works gave you the shivers as you stepped over them – although the
sundry footsteps that marked them suggested many had trampled will-nilly over the artist –
providing a darkly funny take on the modernist monochrome. Mark Hagen’s painted re-creation
of a cease-and-desist proclamation, written in the thick scrawl of a schizophrenic and addressed
to the ‘psychic underworld’ (Dear Psychic Underworld…, 2007), is dangerous proxy for the
strange end-of-continent madness and New Age tomfoolery deeply embedded in the California
image.
With a localist mandate, the Cal-Bi is a hard gig. Firstenberg and Moshayedi should be
complimented for their ambition in even taking on this project, and then attempting to expand
the field of its fragile inquiry. They avoid many, but not all, of the stock clichés of California, but
perhaps Pettibon had it right from the start: I thought California would be different.
Andrew Berardini
Arts Libre: ‘Mark Hagen - Sculpture’, in La Libre Belgique, n°129, January 2012
NATURAL HISTORY:
ANTHONY LEPORE AND
MARK HAGEN
BY ANDREW BERARDINI
THURSDAY, JUNE 16, 2011
| 5 YEARS AGO
Anthony Lepore's New Wilderness mimics a national park visitor center.Courtesy of Francois Ghebaly Gallery
To make a landscape is to tame nature. We think of it as a picture of the land, painted or
photographed, carefully framed on four sides, more or less flaccidly hanging on the wall.
Landscapes were appreciated first by Renaissance bourgeois ramblers and open-air
painters as scenery, as they were at the point in history when nature wasn't about to eat or
crush or leave them to die, starving and naked to the vultures.
Nature still does this sometimes, but as in Werner Herzog'sGrizzly Man, there's some
element of collective dumb surprise when a modern man who frolics with wild bears gets
eaten by one, as if nature hadn't got the memo we'd already beaten it. A classroom nature
film from The Simpsons sums it up best: Man Versus Nature: The Road to Victory.
The landscape has become less a document of whatever scene, and more a document of
how we place ourselves in relationship to it: We're looking at ourselves looking at nature.
In a remarkable exhibition at a duo of galleries, François Ghebaly on La Cienega and
M+B in West Hollywood, artist Anthony Lepore photographs visitor centers at national
and state parks. While the photographs at first appear to be of nature itself, Lepore uses
some subtle element in the photograph to reveal that the natural scene is actually fake —
merely a depiction of the centers' educational interior decorating.
In Forest Light, for example, the majestic forest gives itself away as wallpaper when we
see the light switches in the wall. In Salt Carpet, the ripples of sand and dust in the salt
flats are of a similar texture and shade of beige to the carpeted wall on which the
photograph hangs in the visitor center, making the viewer blink a few times to figure out
the difference. Sometimes these simulations even take on a strangely tender character, as
in Stray, where a branch reaches out gently from the diorama that contains it.
These photographs are as much about depiction as redepiction. The frames are carefully
selected to play with colors in the image and are smartly placed in the gallery about where
the photo's subject would be in a visitor center. Some are in photographic sculptures that
play with the elements of re-presentation, including Slot Canyon, a light box that mimics
the soda machine it's capturing. At Ghebaly, Lepore has crafted a topographical map
platform with a staircase leading up to it, blocked off with a bit of chain to unauthorized
personnel, as it were. These photographs aren't just images, but objects attempting to
impact the gallery space.
It's not all postmodernist smoke-and-mirrors — there's something peculiarly felt in these
photographs. The raw grandeur of nature still holds some kind of physical and spiritual
power even as Lepore shows how much those feelings are built on how we think we're
supposed to view nature.
Still, it's hard to go to Yosemite and not see it all through the filter of Ansel Adams'
camera or the guidebook you brought along in your rucksack or all the somewhat goofy
exhibits one finds with their drab Eisenhower-era special effects. As a child I found them
altogether creepy, like a bedridden grandparent bathed in pine-scented sanitizer, but as an
adult, I find the exhibits have an antiquarian charm, and I feel weirdly impressed — along
with Lepore, it seems — with their outdoorsy, civic-minded earnestness.
Our artists haven't always been looking at us looking at nature. Well after the pictorial
grandiosity of Adams, artists a couple of generations ago were attempting to bring art out
of the gallery and into the landscape itself. The so-called "land" artists, like Robert
Smithson, Michael Heizer and, later, James Turrell — all of whom likely will be featured
in MOCA's exhibition on the movement in 2012 — did rather macho interventions with
landscape, mirroring in many ways heavy industry's fast-and-loose use of land, not to
mention the sign outside U.S. National Forests: "Land of Many Uses." Land art often is
enshrined in quasi-spiritual tourist pilgrimages, and its heyday has mercifully passed,
as very few artists since feel the compulsion to dramatically alter the landscape for the
sake of sculpture.
Around the corner from Lepore's exhibition at Ghebaly, at China Art Objects Galleries,
artist Mark Hagen in his solo gallery debut, entitled "TBA," has found another way to deal
with nature, working with it in a collaborative process to make his show of sculptures,
photographs and paintings.
In the series "Additive Paintings," the California sun first tans the burlap canvases. Hagen
then pours paint onto the burlap in symmetrical geometric patterns, the pooling paint
drying into a layered skin making the surfaces look almost like the topographic maps that
Lepore photographed. They're placed in the same gallery as "Additive Sculpture," an 8foot-tall, 48-foot-long wall composed of concrete molded from consumer packaging such
as plastic bottles and cardboard boxes, with remnants still clinging to the concrete.
In the series "Subtractive Sculptures," Hagen attempts to impose form on the amorphous
structure of obsidian stacked onto roughly welded steel plinths. The minimalists, an art
movement hand-in-glove with land art, sought perfect simple forms, often using new
industrial materials like plywood and plastics. Hagen's obsidian blocks, naturally
impossible to make into a cube, make fun of how minimalists' drive to purity was a
wholly synthetic and industrial gesture. To Hagen, nature defines its own forms.
In the third gallery, Hagen presents a series of "Directionless Field" photographs
capturing mirrors, lenses, diffraction films, prisms and other optical glass pieces. They're
shot as still lifes; the light bends and bounces and becomes both the pure subject of the
photograph and its true shaper, more than the photographer.
In each series, Hagen's process allows for nature — in the form of gravity, light and
material — to define what the finished product looks like. Such processes mimic the kind
of conceptualism that Sol Lewitt outlined in Sentences on Conceptual Art: "Irrational
thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically." But Hagen's material manifestation
is wholly his own. Each of the works in the exhibition blurs the boundary between naturemade and man-made. The process returns again and again to what the artist calls
"authorial disorientations" — moments where the art makes itself.
Humankind exerts such a strong effect on nature that scientists give us our own geologic
era, the anthropocene, which is to say the whole idea of "Man Versus Nature" isn't quite
true anymore. But these two artists show that nature is as much part of us as we are of it.
Despite all the ways we've successfully tamed and framed it, there's still something
strange and powerful in letting nature run its course.
Man about town: ‘Mark Hagen Dreams On’, By Alex Coles, June 2011
OCULA CONVERSATION
A conversation with Mark Hagen
Artist, Los Angeles
Stephanie Bailey London 21 Oct 2014
This year, Mark Hagen presented an exhibition essentially split in two parts: the
first part being shown in the London space of Almine Rech Gallery, and the
second part making its appearance at the gallery’s booth in the 2014 Frieze
London art fair. Both bodies of work are exemplary of Hagen’s love affair with
material and form, but are also contrasted in colour. For the gallery show, Hagen
presented paintings constituting white acrylic pushed through burlap over
titanium frames anodized with Diet Coke, shown alongside sculptures produced
from volcanic glass, epoxy on aluminum and honeycomb panels. Meanwhile, at
Frieze London, Hagen presented gradient paintings and sculptures, in which
black acrylic on burlap paintings framed sculptures employing luminous colour
gradiations. In this interview, this LA-born and based California Institute of Arts
graduate (who studied with Michael Asher, Charles Gaines, Leslie Dick and Sam
Durant) discusses the processes behind making his work, and the influences that
shape his practice.
Let's start with your exhibition in London at Almine Rech Gallery,A Parliament of
Some Things, which presents sculptures and paintings that allude to minimalism
and post-minimalism. First, could you talk about the process in making the works
presented here? They have been produced by pushing paint through burlap onto
glass planes supporting sheets of wrinkled wrapping plastic, lengths of packing tape,
and geometric configurations of cut tile, which reflect the construction of your
sculptures.
The various historical movements that these works might appear similar to are
not the precedent for the work. There was never a moment when I decided, “Hey,
I like post-minimalism, let’s make something that looks like that.” The
appearances of the work are the result of my selections of specific materials and
methods of making that satisfy my interests. My paintings are produced
horizontally, pushing acrylic exterior house paint in white or black—or blends of
the two—through burlap onto substrates underneath, plastic sheeting, glass,
packing tape, plastic tiles, venetian blinds, even body bags. Gravity and the
painting’s own viscosity drives it into the recesses and after drying makes a cast
or an analog of this substrate. The paintings are essentially low relief sculpture
and in turn, my sculptures are usually painterly.
Could you explain the title of the exhibition, and how it conceptually frames the
works on show?
The title comes from a philosophical concept of Bruno Latour’s describing a
governmental body in which all things, real and imagined, have equal
representation or agency. The agency of artists and of art works is one of my
concerns and I design many of my pieces with the possibility of expansion,
subtraction, enhancement, and so on, in an attempt to extend their agency in
space as well as time.
There is a part of a sculpture in the exhibition called ‘a parliament of some
things’, which is a twelve panel, screen-like sculpture made of honey-comb
aluminum panels skinned with volcanic glass and titanium sheeting anodized
with diet colas. Here it has been divided up into four discrete sculptures, but
conspicuous pinholes on the panels reveal the potential for future additions and
permutations.
How does this exhibition build on your practice as a whole? I am thinking about
past projects, such as your space frame installations, which included a collaboration
with D.A.P Artbook to produce a framework at the entrance of Los Angeles
Contemporary and bespoke bookends made from polished coprolite.
This London exhibition and my solo booth at Frieze were originally conceived as
one show for one space before the opportunity to split them up came about. One
grouping would focus on expanding on sculptures and paintings people would be
more familiar with, while another grouping introduces new pieces entirely. My
space frame—which doesn’t make an appearance here—but is indeed in sympathy
with the sculptures that do, I conceived and designed as a catch all for my
sculptural aspirations. It can be a discrete sculpture, or an intervention, or a
display device, or an alternative space for other works. Like my other sculptures,
it aspires to a democratised, sculptural nomadism, all the while approaching the
architectural and the monumental yet opposing both with their typical
venerations of power, hierarchy, and permanence.
How does this current show also feed into your experiences studying in California
and having worked as an assistant to Sam Durant? In this I am also thinking about
the aversion you noted to the so-called fetish finish of LA art.
I went to CalArts and studied with Michael Asher, Charles Gaines, Leslie Dick
and Sam Durant and worked as Sam’s assistant after school briefly. I don’t have a
problem with any of the artistic movements that have come out of California, I
just avoid some of the physical, material aspirations of certain ones like “fetish
finish”, as they seem too easily aligned with commercial products and interests.
In this, who or what has influenced you as an artist in terms of artists, movements,
and techniques amongst other references?
Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cubes and his Shapolsky et al. have always been
huge for me, and Seth Siegelaub’s Artist’s Right’s Contract, Edward James’ Las
Pozas in the Yucatan, the space frame works of artist/architects Yona Friedman
and Constant Nieuwenhuys, the concrete works of William George Mitchell,
Dieter Roth’s early books, Olaf Metzel’s Auf Wiedersehen. I also always find
inspiration outside of art: the ancient cities of Cahokia and Lalibela, for instance,
epigenetics, generational theory, the discovery of exo-planets, the rights of
uncontacted tribes, Neanderthal art, animal personhood, ancient Egyptian
cement, and African fractals.
Certain phrases and words used to describe past exhibitions have included ‘technofuturist’ and ‘up-to-date primitivism’. How would you describe your work in a few
words?
I’m interested in the breakdown and complication of qualitative hierarchies,
history, and vision. As well as the destabilizing effect exploring the origins of
things has. Asking, “How could it have developed differently?” conjures
unrealised trajectories and sets the stage for change. —[O]
PATRICK HILL: CURL KINKS, AND WAVES
MARK HAGEN: TBA AGAINGALERIE ALMINE
RECH
As usual the Almine Rech Gallery presents a double exposure. In this case there are two American artists, Partick Hill
and Mark Hagen.
Top gathered the work of the second. In the first room, mixed two types of works. Painting the walls Additive which
are as large canvases of raw jute yellowed by the action of sunlight on which the artist has posed gray geometric
prints. The drawing - kind of visionary tangram - is drawn by joining the shapes drawn by the paint applied with a knife
through the frame of the canvas, and gaps on the rest of the surface. At the center of the room there are sculptures that
resemble the palisades. They are formed by stacking packs of cement footprints and bottles used by the artist as
bricks. Spontaneously we think of food packaging, but nothing says that the artist does not use bottles of "White
Spirit".
The second room accommodates one big sculpture. With nothing around it looks like a sort of combined ruin of
Suprematism and curiosity cabinet. One endures some references like these pieces of obsidian carved in geometric
shapes, but broken, and the other eclectic assembly of these mysterious and collected treasures. All stones are arranged
on a metal structure with rough welds that evoke the hull of a ship being dismantled.
Downstairs, we find the ten sculptures of Patrick Hill. From one work to the other combines and recombines, elements
that we believe from a Californian bath. Thus, each sculpture is made from a wooden pavement a dark glossy color of a
glass plate, and a gray marble, and the other a cut to round shapes and regular features sinks and bath mats. Everything
is carefully maintained by brass rivets. In addition, the marble slots are covered with small cyan or yellow dotted form
of shells.
The reference to David Hockney and his californian way of life is everywhere, and that the reference to abyss in cubist
sculpture through the English artist. But we can also see one other, that of the credits of the television series "Saved by
the Bell" with its bold colors and graphics hopping.
Beyond these similarities sculptures are developed and modulated in order to multiply the viewpoints. They all appear
to be stages of a transformable object, a kind of handicapped furniture chimera caught between the desire to be a coffee
table and a diving pool.
Trade shows Patrick Hill and Mark Hagen at the gallery Almine Rech in Paris from January 12 to February 11, 2012
A PARLIAMENT OF SOME THINGS
Ana Bambic Kostov
Extracting semi-expected pictures of distinctive textural quality from an inversely composed
scene, Mark Hagen investigates the planes of the unseen, attempting to present us with mere
fragments of the existing, yet visually incomprehensible matter. His technically cultivated objects
stand in opposition with the paintings, both questioning the limits of human senses and the
physically proven occurrences beyond their reach. Hagen’s practice is highly experimental, only
foreseeable to a degree, but conceptually, perfectly synced with his endeavor of explaining the
entirety of the universe. Even though he does not succeed in portraying all the fragments, his
journey is far from over, whereas the observer can only get an approximately accurate idea of
what is invisible, by gazing at all of Hagen’s works, one at a time, and connecting them mentally
into
a
coherent
assembly.
Almine Rech Gallery in London is hosting a solo exhibition by Mark Hagen this October,
presenting his latest exploratory pieces.
Mark Hagen
Concept Begins with Hagen’s Creative Process
A very particular creative process of Mark Hagen implies the immanent concept of his paintings.
They are made by pushing black and white paint through rough fabric, onto glass planes that
support pieces of wrinkled wrapping plastic, tape, cut tiles and other material. When the paint
dries, the textile paint carrier is peeled off from the surface, leaving a distinctive mark on a jarring
texture. What is left is actually a negative imprint of what was painted, only controlled by the artist
to an extent. Making a negative, a positive aspect of his paintings, Hagen toys with the concept of
the seen and the unseen, addressing the natural limitations of human vision and the rendering of
a picture in the brain. His work unveils that there is more than we are able to grasp, but he, being
a human, only scratches the surface in trying to depict it. In the process, the artist employs only
black and white paint, conjuring countless shades of grey, that sink into, and emerge from, one
another.
Mark Hagen
Monochromatic Realms Are Broader
Creating on the grounds set by monochrome painting, Hagen’s philosophy explores the idea that
eyes only detect that what looks back at them. By relinquishing color, the artist intends to remind
the viewer that the spectrum we perceive as colorful is only a tiny fragment of the visual realm,
while his works are meant to suggest the beyond. Using paint as not only chromatic, but textural
medium, the artist creates pictorial hybrids, alluding to the topography of the planet, and the
components of its soil. Fascinated with geological substances, from the amorphous nature of
mud, to perfection of mineral structure, the artist created his latest works works that evoke the
omnipresent, eternal, yet hardly recognizable natural phenomena.
Mark Hagen
Mark Hagen’s Sculptures
Just as paintings of Mark Hagen contain certain sculptural quality, his sculptures reflect painterly
character. Reminiscing a postmodern bas-relief, the pieces are made of 4 x 8 ft honeycomb
aluminum sheets, cut into irregular shapes, joined together by the mobile, rotating edges. The
works are covered with thin sheets of anodized titanium, reflecting the light in rainbow spectrum,
alluding to the painting. By connecting his three-dimensional pieces and the paintings, Mark
Hagen transcends the medium, delivering a sole message with a single piece, or an entire
installation, still allowing for various interpretations of his suggestive, abstract works.
Mark Hagen
A Parliament of Some Things at Almine Rech
Entitled A parliament of Some Things, the upcoming exhibition by Mark Hagen is filled with
antagonistic visual conversations, constantly alluding to what is not there. Some things are
depicted, while some remain in the domain of imagined, pursued only through relentless
exploration, if ever understood. Opening on October 13, the show will remain on view at Almine
Rech London gallery through November 11, 2014, provoking the further seeing of reality.
Almine Rech Gallery is known for the progressive art exhibitions, such as The Bruce collabroative
show presented at its Brussels chapter.
Experimental practices are what drives contemporary art forward. Read about experiments made
by Andy Warhol with Factory Shadows, mark making practice of Lucy McLauchlan or the series of
prints of the famous light artist James Turrell.
Mark Hagen
Mark Hagen
All photos are merely for illustrative purposes.
Mark Hagen. A
parliament of Some
Things
October 13 -. November 8, 2014 at the Almine Rech
Gallery in London, United Kingdom.
Mark Hagen, Pleasures Finite, Infinite Needs, detail, 2014, Acrylic through burlap, anodized titanium
frame with Diet Coke, 72 3/4 x 48 3/4 x 2 inches (framed), © Mark Hagen - Photographer unknown, all
rights reserved , Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech Gallery
The paintings of Mark Hagen is produced by pushing the black and white
paint, through pieces of burlap, on glass panels supporting plastic
packaging crumpled paper, packaging tape, geometric configurations made
of cut tiles, etc. Once the paint has dried, the fabric is removed from the
textured surface, absorbing its negative mark on what will become the
obverse of the work. Here, in a nutshell, the process used by Mark
Hagen. However, we have tried to explain this process in detail, it is
nevertheless disconcerting because these works, we see face as we see every
painting were literally composed in reverse. The artist can predict the
result that up to a point - though increasingly with time - and this intrinsic
uncertainty is transmitted to the viewer. From the perspective of the
reception, every visual effect is also the subject of a reversal, as if he had
gone through the hard shell of the skull, moist folds of the brain, optic
nerve loaded slide. Think about the vision of this body so implicitly leads to
divorce the phenomenological world. In other words, what is blind in the
process of Hagen is blinding, even if this is directly linked to how we see
reality, many or few, depending on our physical and mental disposition.
Gradients schemes, which have a preference, are made only from two tubes
of paint, which nevertheless produce endless variations of gray, distinct
colors that can not be differentiated, which inevitably drown in the wash
continuous experiential. The brilliant and prismatic frames anodised
titanium surrounding this latest series of works seem at first that complete
lack experiential, but actually serve to emphasize. Like physics likes to
remind us, the chromatic richness that we detect in the world corresponds
to only a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum as a whole, and the
colors included in this narrow strip are then reduced further to those we
can name. Between an infinity of colors and the absence of color, fullness
and emptiness, these paintings highlight our sensory limits to suggest that
exceeds.
We see only what we recognize. As Novalis wrote, "the eye sees only the
eyes," or to put it less poetically, he sees only those parts of the world have
turned to him and that, somehow, return his gaze. But what about the
rest? Hagen appeals to the model of monochromatic painting as a point
teleological limit of the modernist trend essentializing and holistic
reduction as a sort of ruin, one thing that can not reflect all that through
his absence. If it returns the gaze, then it is at least with one eye closed, and
we can note here the significance of tactile component. The incongruities of
the surface are visually recorded in the manner of chiaroscuro, but also
exist as objective forms, prominent. The paint is used as a sculptural
medium in a process of casting and molding that clearly impinges on the
virtual nature of graphic or visual arts, with the felt presence of what is
there in reality. The result, hybrid, rout categorization, while pointing
towards full output of art; but it also born analogies with land topography
and its basement dense layers, made of earth and rock, crystals and
fossils. A fascination with geological forms, magma mud at the perfect
symmetry of minerals, played a key role in this work from the beginning,
and also seeks to direct attention beyond our immediate field - in this case,
to the depths millennia of time.
Hagen's paintings incorporate elements of sculpture and the reverse is also
true. The paintings are named that way because they are hanging on the
wall, and sculptures, in turn, because they rely on the ground, but the one
and the other are essentially planes loaded with a mixture of information
visual and physical form - a kind of relief. Some autonomous work he has
done in the past were assembled as masonry walls composed of small
pieces like bricks, but made from supermarket packaging found and then
molded in cement. By contrast, the most recent works are cut in
honeycomb aluminum sheets measuring 1.20 meters by 2.40 meters to
form irregular shapes latticed whose ends fit together, allowing them to
rotate . A bit like prehistoric monuments which were made a cubist touch,
they can boast of greater dimensionality, but derived from a shallower
source and can return to the flatness imminently. As a final touch, these
buildings are covered with thin layers of titanium anodized, giving them
the same iridescent effect that the above frameworks and reinforces the
pictorial aspect. Thus, materials, tools and techniques through a range of
formats - painting and sculpture, but also product design and architecture establishing a readable continuity from one work to another, and between
art and outside world.
Alternating between mechanized standardization models and a craft
customization, Hagen works reveal their production processes in their
finished form so as to show us as fragmentary and tentative examples of a
broader development. composition of motifs are repeated, but also varies
constantly, reversed it, overturned and there, sometimes with elements
added, now retired. The guiding principle and logic that govern these
achievements can only be grasped in stages as and when the work is made,
so to speak, on the spot. Consequently, the ideas are not imposed on
things, but rather reveal themselves through negotiation, which involves
compromise. The subject must sometimes yield to the will of the subject
and even turn against itself. This is what the procedural artists have always
undertaken, of course, but Hagen makes it a little differently, because it
does not pretend to release the object, or treat more ethical, more suited to
the ecological level, for example. The "parliament" of the title is a
controversial place, where a consensus can not be achieved by mutual
investigation of black holes in our business.