SanArt

John Baldessari, "Beach Scene/Nuns/Nurse (with Choices)", 1991 courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Within the first few pages of the season 5 Educators’ Guide, readers are asked to think about the power and influence of juxtaposing images in order to give the viewer very different experiences. In the spirit of John Baldessari, a few of my classes recently embarked on a project to explore how juxtaposition not only has the power to send visual messages, but also has the ability to tell us about ourselves when we create works of art.

Over the course of a few days, I asked students to bring in and collect images they would like to combine in a single artwork. After assembling the images and cropping them a bit, I asked them about the images they selected and what these images said about their interests, their habits and their passions. One student remarked that the images he selected basically described his obsession with money. Another described her images as things connected to food, which is something she loves and finds comfort in. Still another described his images revolving around the work he has done related to environmental issues.

As students assemble their works this week, we will also begin moving into some small-group research exploring how juxtaposition can be used to send messages simply by placing certain images side-by side.

Nancy Spero "Masha Bruskina / Gestapo Victim" 1994, courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York

Students will be asked to work with partners to research and collect images (fine art reproductions, advertisements, posters, etc.) that send specific messages through juxtaposition. Along with viewing works by John Baldessari, we will be also be looking into works by Yinka Shonibare MBE, Nancy Spero, Kerry James Marshall, and Eleanor Antin.

Creating high quality works of art that are technically proficient can be very satisfying for both the teacher and students, but when we have the opportunity to make students more aware of the images they see and how they relate to larger themes and broader issues, we are teaching students not only how to create works of art but also how to interpret them.

Sally Mann, "Candy Cigarette" from the series "Immediate Family", 1989. © Sally Mann. Courtesy: Gagosian Gallery.

In today’s roundup you’ll read about three kids in Switzerland, political defiance, Latin American photography, a map upstate, Opera House sails, the nature of light, and airborne balls:

• The Family, The Land is the first museum exhibition in Switzerland devoted to the work of Season 1 artist Sally Mann. The controversial photographs of her three children, published in the 1992 book Immediate Family, will be on view along with recent works, some of which picture her children in adulthood. The artist, according to the museum, “questions memory and the ephemerality of life,” or as Mann has stated, “what remains.” The Family, The Land is on view at Musee de L’Elysee through June 6.

• On March 11, a conversation between Julie Mehretu (Season 5) and Pat Steir (moderated by Susan Harris) will take place at the RISD Museum. Both artists will discuss the central role of drawing in their work, with a focus on issues specific to women artists of their respective generations. The event (free and open to the public) is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Pat Steir: Drawing Out of Line, on view February 16 through July 3.

• Art21 artists Barbara Kruger (Season 1), Laurie Simmons (Season 4), Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Koons (both Season 5) are included in Your History is Not Our History — a group exhibition organized by artists David Salle and Richard Phillips for Haunch of Venison. The show features works produced in the 1980s by artists working in New York City. Phillips says, “We reject the sterilized view that is offered…and hope to offer a more accurate portrayal of the energy and experimentation that was permeating the city during that time.” According to Haunch of Venison, “Salle and Phillips believe that the best work of the 1980s shares a belief in the necessity to take forms, ideas, and content to their extremes.” The exhibition continues through May 1.

• Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line at Malmö Konsthall in Sweden brings together work by artists John Baldessari (Season 5), Simon Denny, Mario Garcia Torres, Thomas Kratz, Falke Pisano, and Ryan Siegan-Smith. The title is borrowed from a 1973 work by Baldessari in which the artist repeatedly documents his attempt to toss — with geometrical precision — three balls in the air. This piece has guided the entire exhibition, which explores an artist’s own self-awareness in the conceptual and pictorial dimensions of their work. Throwing Three Balls is on view through April 11.

• Works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) and Alfredo Jaar (Season 4) are on view at the Museum of Latin American Art in the exhibition Changing the Focus: Latin American Photography (1990-2005). Comprising over 75 works created by 35 artists from the four regions of Latin America (Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean), Changing the Focus explores personally-charged response to local and global issues grounded in the contemporary Latin American experience. The exhibition, which continues through through May 2, is the first survey of Latin American photography and photo-based art generated between 1990 and 2005 to be presented in the Los Angeles area. Read the LA Times review.

• Living Under The Same Roof, an experimental exhibition at the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), is organized by Curator-in-Residence, Ana Paula Cohen. Over the course of the exhibition, the CCS museum will in effect become a laboratory activated by the audience. Visitors are presented with a map of the entire Marieluise Hessel Collection — some 2,000 objects — developed in collaboration with Paris-based Brazilian artists Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain. The public is invited to select works from storage to be seen in a viewing room in the museum space. The works will then be displayed in a rotating system according to weekly requests. A series of related artist talks have been organized in collaboration with Bard College undergraduate studio arts professor and Art21 artist Judy Pfaff (Season 4). Speakers include Pfaff, Nicole Eisenman, Robert Longo, Matt Mullican, Martha Rosler, and Stephen Shore. View the complete schedule here.

• Works by Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Kara Walker (Season 2), and Paul McCarthy (Season 5) are included in the group exhibition Abstract Resistance, on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis through May 23. The show focuses on artists working from the 1950s to the present who have revolted against the aesthetic orthodoxies of their times. Starting with Michel Foucault’s assertion that “where there is power, there is resistance,” curator Yasmil Raymond argues that art made since World War II has been shaped by traumatic historical events in complex ways. Such art, she says, is “resistant to interpretation; it withholds information, it tends to evade identification, and certainly it protests interrogation.” Abstract Resistance proposes a new framework for art that is “aesthetically inventive, ethically engaged, and politically defiant.” In conjunction with the exhibition, the Walker will publish a collection of essays that will be available online in April.

• A new publication dedicated to the work of Season 3 artist Hiroshi Sugimoto has been released. Nature of Light focuses on Sugimoto’s recent investigations into the science and presentation of photography. Published to coincide with his upcoming exhibition at the Izu Photo Museum in Japan, it also offers detailed documentation of the artist’s architectural and landscape redesign of that space. For more information, visit the RAM Publication website.

• Laurie Anderson (Season 1) and her husband Lou Reed (of Velvet Underground) will co-curate this year’s Vivid Sydney in Australia. Previously called Luminous, the live performance festival is partly inspired by the illumination of the Sydney Opera House sails. This year’s festival (only the second in its history) includes large scale light installations and projections; music performances and collaborations; creative ideas, discussion and debate. Reed said: “We see Vivid as being a critical, high-value anchor event in Sydney’s calendar for years to come. Something that has been built and is owned by Sydney, [it] can’t be bid away and will drive those visitors and those dollars and that image of Sydney around the world for many years.” Vivid runs from May 27 to June 21.

• John Yau has written about the work of Robert Ryman (Season 4) for the Brooklyn Rail. Ryman’s exhibition Large-small, thick-thin, light reflecting, light absorbing is on view at Pace Wildenstein through March 27.

Matthew Broderick in "Election"

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.”
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“What’s the difference between morals and ethics anyway? Anyone?”
— Matthew Broderick, Election

If there’s a tipping point in the minds of those casually interested in contemporary art, it’s almost always on moral or ethical grounds. “He/she did what to a dog/sold what for a billion dollars/did what to a dead cow/did what to a crucifix??” your amazed friend asks, and suddenly all credibility is leached from the subject. You’re embarrassed; you get your coat. Later on, you blog resentfully at your friend’s apparent narrow-mindedness (and defriend him: take that!). Art’s leapfrogging of moral and ethical niceties is a Romantic hangover that once was noble and exciting – Courbet, Baudelaire, 2 Live Crew – and now reeks of ghettoized cliché. It’s the thing people don’t like about contemporary art. And the less contemporary art complies with “real world” ethical and moral structures, the less it is of the “real world.” And yet this is what we value in art (in its current late-Romantic state): its ability to discuss the things avoided in the mainstream imagination. To ask difficult questions. This is the double bind of contemporary art’s relationship with ethics. Its purported snubbing of conventional (Judeo-Christian) ethics both allows it to discuss the undiscussable and removes it from the discussion.

When Santiago Sierra created a gas chamber in Pulheim, Germany, in 2006 – filling a synagogue with exhaust fumes from six parked cars, accessible only for five minutes to visitors wearing gas masks – he whipped up a predictable furore. That most critics of the work (including me) never experienced the work doesn’t really matter: that it raised ethical questions does. This is the unfortunate situation contemporary art gets itself into when tackling sensitive ethical or moral issues: the media storm generated by the work is the work, and the original piece itself is drowned out by the buzz of voices. Art of this kind negates its own irrefutable trump card, its visual singularity. The problem is that visual art’s status as chief cultural question-raiser has been gradually usurped, not just by other more immediate cultural products, like cinema or TV (Inglourious Basterds treats the commercialization of the Holocaust in a far more successful – read, “widely seen” and “aesthetically enjoyable” – way), but by the multiplicity of dissenting voices made possible by the advent of the Internet. Why bother jetting in an internationally recognized artist at spectacular fiscal and environmental cost to raise ethical questions when you can do so yourself, sitting at home, with Doritos crumbs all down your shirt?

Jeff Koons, "Art Magazine Ads (Artforum)," lithograph, 1988. Courtesy the artist.

Or take Andrea Fraser’s 2003 performance/video Untitled, in which she had sex with a collector for $20,000. The video – which is the entire “performance” shot from a CCTV camera above the bed in a posh hotel – does the rounds every so often, and featured in Tate Modern’s Pop Life show last year, a show which itself raised, inadvertently or not, certain ethical issues. Fraser’s video is, of course, about ethics. Neither of the parties involved were knowingly exploited, unlike the majority of paid-for sexual encounters (but those don’t raise questions, do they?). Fraser’s work, like Sierra’s, is made with an eye to its afterlife in text; it doesn’t need to be seen to be known. In the Tate’s Pop Life catalogue, Untitled is described thusly:

Fraser challenges the idea of access as a literalised pun – she is “in bed with the collector”…[she] brings our attention to her deliberate reversal of conventional power relationships by exaggerating the strength of her own position…[she] radically mak[es] visible attitudes of complicity…[and] problematise[s] the ideal of artistic autonomy upon which the art market hinges…

“Problematise,” “brings attention to,” “radical” — this is the sound of art talking to itself. Contemporary art such as Fraser’s and Sierra’s seeks to absolve itself from ethical responsibility by preemptively defining its own ethical framework. The dead language of contemporary art becomes the means by which this is achieved. A work of art might perform in a way that in “the real world” would be considered unethical, immoral, or criminal, but within the nested discourse of the academic write-up, it’s not unethical; it’s raising questions about ethics. And in order to do so, art must think of itself as existing outside of – perhaps even above – the moral framework that structures ethical decisions in other cultural arenas.

Joseph Beuys's "Action Piece," 26-6 February 1972; presented as part of seven exhibitions held at the Tate Gallery 24 Feburary – 23 March 1972. © Tate Archive Photographic Collection.

You’re not really supposed to discuss moral and ethical matters around contemporary art, though. Disdain for moral squares is so entrenched that those questioning the morality of works of art are jeered at from the ramparts as backwards or unsophisticated. Express discomfort at Sierra’s synagogue or Fraser’s fornication or at a range of diverse “question-raising” activities (Andres Serrano, Damien Hirst, the Chapman brothers, etc.), and your contemporary art membership card is permanently revoked. They tear it up in front of your face and leave your headshot with the Art Basel bouncers. It’s a measure of contemporary art’s insecurity that discussions of ethical issues are relegated to the sidelines. No amount of furious Rachmaninovian typing about the New Museum’s show of Dakis Joannou’s private collection, for instance, was ever going to slow its tank-like inexorable forward motion. It’s worth reading some of (not all of; it’s time you can never get back) the wildly disproportionate back-and-forth on that show by New York art bloggers (it’s barely known about outside of New York, by the way). Ethical in-fighting looks comically pedantic to art world outsiders, and it’s easy to forget there’s any art actually involved. And isn’t that what we ought to discuss — the possible ethical dimensions of a post-Romantic art? Anyone?

Bueller?

In 2009, artist Nina Schwanse relocated from New York City/Philadelphia to New Orleans to continue her video practice at the University of New Orleans. Her work refreshes the typically didactic terrain of mediated female objectification with verbal and visual wit. With each video, she channels a fascination with notoriety into an ongoing exploration of self-representation—an ontological dilemma faced in social contexts of all scales, but especially the macro that is increasingly common in our technological age of instant and accidental celebrity.

In her words, she aims to “restructure the narrative and formal language of news media, advertising, and pornography to create disjunctive portraits that intend to disappoint the expected course of entertainment,” and while doing so, she evokes personas that are genuinely entertaining. She plays most of these characters herself, limiting the degree to which they are allowed to present themselves on camera. When they address the viewer in first person, their speech is matched with speechless modeling, a separation whose tension produces caricatures that resonate beyond superficiality.

k-a-t-e(s) (11 mins., 2010)
Schwanse becomes the pantheon of celebrity Kates who congeal as a somewhat multi-faceted contemporary definition of the name. Her Kates offer deadpan excerpts of their biographies, personal PR, and, of course, humility.

My Happy Family (13 mins., 2009)
Edited outtakes of the artist’s moderately tomboyish sister at about ten years old, in rehearsal for a 1990s pizza commercial directed by her father and co-starring Amanda Bynes (whose severity amidst giggles foreshadows her career as a Disney star). Prompts from off-screen steer the girl’s descriptions of a happy family and the perfect boyfriend away from her own values and towards comically preordained norms like a big white house, children, and pizza by candlelight.

Homegrown (1 min., 2009)
Following the weird tropes of TV call girl ads down to their promises of consummate availability and their scintillating syntax, Schwanse merchandises a female figure—whose head is occluded by a giant, gothic bonnet—in various pastoral flavors and settings.

If I Knew Then (3 mins., 2008)
With a self-proclaimed interest in women “from the pre-internet age of the tabloid 1990s,” Schwanse styles herself as Amy Fisher and monologues on the art of being Amy Fisher, or the work of being the artist Amy Fisher, depending on how you see it and her. “Artists work hard, you know? You have to work hard to be hot.”

"Yummy Smurf Cake." Source: bluebuddies.com

I don’t know about you but I can’t get enough. I promise not too play with my food too much (maybe) but I can guarantee I will be asking for seconds. It’s one of the busiest weeks in the Art World and a lot of it is happening in New York City. Although I have been on the verge of art overload, with my eyes literally buzzing the other night from over-stimulation, I won’t be shouting mayday because I have the optimism that I will experience something intriguing the very next moment just by default. My favorite so far is the muli-layered curatorial contrast between the more traditional yet uber-commercial Armory Show and the INDEPENDENT.

Meanwhile, I bet you all are still hungry as well – so here you go!

• It’s Pure Beauty! Otherwise known as an exhibition of that very name, featuring John Baldessari, which opens in Spain; the Whitney Biennial in NYC; Shrewd & Sassy Survey of American Arists opened in Nebraska; Collier Schorr’s German Faces at the Modern Art Gallery in London…Nicole Caruth Rounds Them Up here. At 19 additional bits and bites, this week’s most recent roundup is a whopper!
• EDUCATION | Teaching with Contemporary Art. How do you hold an art exhibition in your hand? Read Part One of this  interview with Tod Lippy, founder and editor of ESOPUS magazine, by Joe Fusaro, for some insight into how Lippy has materialized his curatorial vision in a plethora of pages released on two very anticipated dates per year. In Part Two, Lippy talks about the periodical as useful a resource for educators.
• What are you thinking, I mean eating? Don’t know? Try charting it out. You might get some  some unexpected answers. In Gastro-Vision: Stomache, Nicole Caruth gives us the scoop on artist Christina Mazzalupo’s very colorful food diaries. It’s true that what you eat can’t only be measured as a numeric caloric intake.
• How does the Internet see you? Here’s a new way to ask this androgynous digital connector, in the form of an initial question posed by Aaron Zinman of MIT.  Meanwhile, be sure to read on here as there are many other connections made.
• Have you every chosen not to be, well, the most polite that you could be? What was the outcome? Here’s a glimpse into Paul McCarthy’s studio, a workshop that often dares to be irreverent. In this video, Paul McCarthy | Lifecasting, the artist is surrounded by various figurative sculptures, including an oversized bust of President George W. Bush. McCarthy discusses the process of casting from life and the resulting perfections and imperfections. Be sure to also watch Jessica Stockholder | Form. Stockholder discusses the strength of form and the difficulty in articulating the meaning behind abstract shapes from her home in New Haven, Connecticut.
• Inside the Artist’s Studio | Christa Holka. Vanity, queerness, friends, and family. Sometimes the seemingly superficial is actually quite intimate. Holka talks about her photography, past travels, lifestyles, and hopes for the future.
• Welcome Kevin McGarry, our new guest blogger! Kevin is a writer and curator based in Brooklyn, NY. His journalism has recently appeared on Rhizome, T Magazine Blog, and the online editions of Art in America, Artforum and Interview. Read about his first impressions of Skin Fruit, the exhibition curated by Jeff Koons at the New Museum.
• Flash Points: Must Art Be Ethical? What would happen if you took a stray animal off the street and put it in a gallery as a work of art? According to  David Yanez, perhaps no other exhibition has caused as much controversy over the ethical use of live animals in art as Exposición No.1., a show by Guillermo Vargas, a Costa Rican artist also known as “Habacuc.” IT took place on August 16, 2007 at Galería Códice in Managua, Nicaragua. YOU ARE WHAT YOU READ.
• The Oscars, aka prom night for Hollywood, are just around the corner! Who does the Academy love more: the noble savage, the noble soldier, or the noble soldier-turned-savage? Are you on the edge of your seat or what? If you answered “or what” to that question, you might prefer to spend this Sunday at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, whose current exhibitions offer an excellent antidote to “movie magic.”
• Building relationships can be hard for some and quite natural for others. What about that space in-between? How does photographer Alec Soth work at his relationships with his subjects? Read The Process Behind the Portrait, an interview with Soth by Rachel Craft.

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EXCLUSIVE: From her home in New Haven, Connecticut, Jessica Stockholder discusses the strength of form and the difficulty in articulating the meaning behind abstract shapes.

A pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations, Jessica Stockholder’s site-specific interventions and autonomous floor and wall pieces have been described as “paintings in space.” Her work is energetic, cacophonous, and idiosyncratic, but closer observation reveals formal decisions about color and composition, and a tempering of chaos with control.

Work by Jessica Stockholder is included in the exhibition Embrace! at the Denver Art Museum. The exhibition includes site-specific installtions by 17 artists, spread throughout the museum’s Frederic C. Hamilton Building. Stockholder’s installation, titled Wide Eyes Smeared Here Dear, spans several levels of the Daniel Libeskind-designed building. Embrace! is currently on view at the Denver Art Museum through April 4, 2010.

Jessica Stockholder is featured in the Season 3 (2005) episode Play of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Watch the full episode online at PBS Video

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller and Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Mead Hunt. Sound: Merce Williams. Editor: Jenny Chiurco and Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: Jessica Stockholder.

Alec Soth, "Donald and Tamara," from the series, "NIAGARA," 2004.

The practice of photographic portraiture is rife with ethical implications – from the subject’s awareness of the project, to the artistic choices made throughout the session, to the work’s resulting place within the art market. The process behind the portraiture is particularly interesting to me, especially in how the relationship between the artist and subject can impact the ethical considerations of the project. The artist Alec Soth’s frank style of portraiture is realized through his ability to make his subjects feel comfortable in front of his camera. In an article last year in the New York Times, Julian Cox, Curator of Photography at the High Museum, was quoted, saying that Soth “communes with his subjects and his environment through the ritual of the photographic act. He’s a very natural type of communicator. That’s part of his magic formula for having his subjects turn themselves over to him.” Soth was kind enough to allow me to interview him about the relationships he builds with the subjects of his portraiture, and how it affects his resulting work.

Rachel Craft: I’d be curious to learn more about your process leading up to the photography session. When you find a subject, what are your first steps?

Alec Soth: My approach really varies from project to project. When working with a large format camera, I’ll often approach people while leaving the camera in my car. I’ll just talk to them, explain what I’m doing and ask if they’ll pose. In terms of the explanation, I try to be as honest as I can about what I’m doing. But sometimes this is made difficult by the fact that I really don’t know what I’m doing. Lately I’ve been working in a really free-form intuitive way and I’ve been having a hell of a time communicating this to the people I photograph.

Alec Soth, "Sunshine, Memphis, Tennessee," from the series, "Sleeping by the Mississippi," 2000.

RC: Does your relationship with your subject, and how easily he or she accepts the idea of your project, influence the resulting work?

AS: I wish there was a formula for great pictures, but there absolutely isn’t. Personally I don’t like to be too close to the people I photograph. If I could, sometimes I think I would take their picture without us ever talking. I like to imagine their personality based on their physical attributes. For this reason, it is really rare that I photograph family and friends.

RC: Your portraits always feel like a very honest portrayal of the person. To what extent do you allow your subject to choose how they represent themselves and to what extent do you project your own perspective on their portraits?

AS: It’s really hard to say. I mean, I don’t go out with a bag of a costumes and ask people to perform in my play, but I’m not comfortable saying that I’m entirely neutral. I choose the people, I choose the moment to snap the shutter and I choose the final picture. All of these little decisions add up to a lot of power in terms of how the person is represented.

RC: After the subjects confirm that they will participate, what kind of agreements do you make with them? Has there ever been a disagreement or objection to a photograph after it’s complete and how do you handle those kind of situations?

AS: With the slower, large format portraits, the subjects sign releases and I send them a picture. This release is very short and doesn’t really cover much. For me, it is just a way to confirm that they are okay with me using the picture. But lately I’ve been doing a much faster kind of photography that doesn’t allow for releases. We’ll see what happens. I’ve only had one situation that has blown up in my face. This was a rather exceptional situation and I prefer not to go into the details. But in the end, everything got worked out and I’m free to continue exhibiting the picture.

RC: I know that you interview many of your subjects. Do ethical considerations influence your decision to conduct these interviews? And how do their stories factor into your work?

AS: My work is all about wandering around in hopes of connecting experiential dots into a larger picture. These little informal interviews are all about finding ways for me to make connections. The interviews are rarely visible in the final project, but they help form the scaffolding for the project.

Alec Soth, "Adelyn, Ash Wednesday, New Orleans, Louisiana," from the series "Sleeping by the Mississippi," 2000.

RC: In the text that accompanies your photograph of Sunshine in the Sleeping by the Mississippi series, you returned to Memphis to give her a copy of your work. Is this a typical part of the process?

AS: It is rare, but it sometimes happens. Oddly enough, it just happened. I photographed a woman named Adelyn on Ash Wednesday in New Orleans ten years ago. She recently contacted me by email and we had a nice little chat. She’s currently living in Austin but told me she was going back to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. So I flew down and photographed her again. It was a thrill. The funny thing was that the encounter was only about fifteen minutes long. We didn’t talk that much. I don’t really want a transcript of those ten years of her experience. I want to look at the picture and imagine those ten years.

RC: Do you discuss the resulting location of the artwork (art market, museum, gallery) with your subjects?

AS: Well, in the case of Adelyn, when I photographed her ten years ago, I was a complete nobody. I never imagined that this picture would be on a museum wall. Nowadays I do sometimes explain this, but in a limited way. The odds that the picture is good and will be seen is still awfully slim.

Do-Ho Suh. "Who Am We? (Multi)," 2000. Four-color offest print on paper, 25 sheets each: 24 x 26 inches. Courtesy Lehmann Maupin Gallery.

Do not miss out on the chance to be a regular columnist on this site! If you are a current student—in a graduate art program, artist residency, or non-traditional higher education program—Open Enrollment wants you. Full details here. The deadline is tomorrow.

Diana Thater, "Los Angeles Theatre Marquee," 35mm production still from "Between Science and Magic," 2010. Courtesy the artist.

The Oscars, aka prom night for Hollywood, are just around the corner! Who does The Academy love more: the noble savage, the noble soldier, or the noble soldier-turned-savage? Are you on the edge of your seat or what?

If you answered “or what” to that question, you might prefer to spend this Sunday at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, whose current exhibitions offer an excellent antidote to “movie magic.” Disassembling that particular phrase is the crux of preeminent video/film/installation artist Diana Thater’s newest work, Between Science and Magic. Thater’s installation (also on view across the country at David Zwirner Gallery until March 13) features a film of a magician repeatedly performing the iconic rabbit-in-a-hat trick, while Jeffrey Wells’s concurrent exhibition, Seeing While Seeing, represents a clever manifestation of Wells’s own distinctive approach to  deconstructing parallel themes of illusion, trickery, and suspension of disbelief.

Jeffrey Wells, "Seeing While Seeing," installation view, 2010. Courtesy Santa Monica Museum of Art.

The low-tech trompe l’oeil animations in Wells’s installation are just as psychedelic and phantasmagoric as the high-end CGI phosphorescent forests in Avatar, and are far more lively and dimensional. As you enter the museum’s project room, the walls begin to dissolve before your eyes. With a series of subtle projections, Wells deftly liquifies two corners of the room into wiggly lines, while strange after-image-like rectangles appear and disappear around the two pictures that hang on adjacent walls. Even as you attempt to anchor yourself by reading the exhibition’s wall text, the letters begin to dance off the page, glowing and pulsating. The exit sign suspended at the top of the doorway echoes itself onto the nearby ceiling and opposite wall, as though reflecting itself onto a watery surface. The effect of the work is simultaneously disquieting and invigorating. Suddenly, the world around you feels malleable, porous, and oddly comical. The projectors are revealed, but it’s not entirely possible to determine exactly how Wells produces these strange effects – and you kind of don’t want to know. Wells, like a magician, has performed a trick that leaves his audience buoyant with pleasant bewilderment and inquisitiveness.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Wells’s mutating wall, Diana Thater addresses both the intersection and divergence of art and magic in her installation commissioned by the SMMoA. I must say that I find it a bit of a stretch to describe this particular work as an installation, although Thater herself would probably argue that projecting her film on the wall of the Santa Monica Museum constitutes it as such. I would disagree entirely with this classification were it not for the two speakers that amplify the mechanical whirring of her two film projectors. This effect ultimately allows the work to fill the vast space of SMMoA’s main gallery, rather than simply existing on a single plane. In addition, the piece is comprised of two separate films, though the projectors align to produce a symmetrically balanced split-screen effect.

Diana Thater, "Between Science and Magic," 2010. Two 16mm films, 2 modified Eiki RT-0 projectors with custom loopers, 2 amplifiers, 2 equalizers, 4 speakers. Dimensions variable. Installation view, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Moica, CA, 2010. Courtesy the artist.

The film begins with a double-vision moment, in which famed magician Greg Wilson appears simultaneously in both projections, executing the classic magician’s feat of producing a white rabbit from an ostensibly empty hat. In a rather tired gesture of meta-ness, Thater initially shot the sequence in her studio, then screened it at the historic Los Angeles Theatre–the self-proclaimed “last and most extravagant of the ornate movie palaces,” constructed between 1911 and 1931. She then filmed that screening, so what you’re actually watching is…(drumroll please)…a film of a film. Did that just blow your mind or what?

The left-hand camera orbits Wilson counterclockwise, filming the scene from a new angle as he repeats the trick in 14 different takes, while the right-hand camera remains stationary. His actions and timing are so exacting that it is impossible to determine at first if the right-hand projection is comprised of the same take on a loop, or if Wilson is executing the trick multiple times.  Meanwhile, this temporary disorientation is multiplied by the initial ambiguity of the left-hand screen. During the first half of the film, it seems as though the magician himself is rotating clockwise. Thus, the mechanisms behind Thater’s process remain just as opaque as the magician’s, until finally a camera appears in the background of each film (manned by Thater and her director of photography, respectively).  “Crossing the line” and exposing the crew are signatures of Thater’s films, but I believe that the maneuver takes on greater significance in this particular piece. While LA Times critic David Pagel bemoans Thater’s “dreary” attempt to distance her artwork from the lowly world of entertainment, I am inclined to disagree with his qualms — not only because his review is part of a longstanding personal feud with Thater, but because I find the work ultimately rather generous. Although revealing the crew in this moment does serve to distance the piece from the slick universe of “movie magic,” it simultaneously decreases the distance between the viewer and the work. Suddenly, you find yourself in on the joke, becoming privy to the “science” behind Thater’s “magic.” And in that moment, the work feels satisfying and generous, despite its aura of austerity.

Diana Thater, "Josephine," 35mm production still from "Between Science and Magic," 2010. Commissioned by the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, London and David Zwirner, New York.

Diana Thater: Between Science and Magic and Jeffrey Wells: Seeing While Seeing are on view through April 17, 2010, along with Nira Pereg: Sabbath 2008, a video projection that also explores ideas of illusion, transformation, and staging. For more ruminations on the dubious confluence of art, magic, and entertainment, check out Karthik Pandian’s Grand Canyon Journals.

Noble soldier transforms into noble savage in "Avatar." Via Hollybeam at photobucket.com