Steven Gee - Blown up Deatails!

 

 

 

Torben Ribe - Interior Painting

Nathan Hylden - Jokes and Monochromes

Nathan Hylden

RICHARD TELLES FINE ART, LOS ANGELES, USA

Untitled, 2011 acrylic on aluminum

The facetious joke – or is it a wry compliment? – about white monochrome paintings is that they hardly differentiate themselves from the walls they hang on. Despite choosing as his pictorial subject rectangles of blank white wall, Nathan Hylden worked hard to make the paintings in his exhibition ‘So There’s That’ as unblank and as unneutral as possible. They are richly inflected by light and subtle colour, by movement and painterly incident. They are even covertly personalized: some of his paintings refer, in their compositions, to the artist’s exact height. Their mutually interfering layers – photographic screen-prints over gestural brush marks, underneath graded fogs of spraypaint – mean that there is always a lot to look at. The traditional anti-aesthetic of unadorned blankness is dashingly aestheticized.

A suite of seven untitled paintings (all works 2011) deploys many techniques already tested in the artist’s earlier work. Despite being listed (and sold) separately, these works were made simultaneously, their sequential variation integral to their meaning. It is sad to imagine the group being split up. Seven photographs of Hylden’s studio wall show the shadow of a stepladder moving, from image to image, across the frame (presumably the result of the setting sun, although the effect could easily have been faked). In the photographs, leftover masking tape corners show where one of the artist’s previous pictures – cut to his exact height, as his paintings often are – was once fixed to the wall. Hylden transferred the photographs, at one-to-one scale, onto thin sheets of mirror-polished aluminium as half-tone screenprints, sandwiching them between a ground of wetly brushed zigzags and a topcoat of sprayed white acrylic so that it became almost impossible to separate, for instance, accidents of printing from imperfections in the original wall, or brush marks from photographed smears of wall-filler. Formalistic process and deft illusion are flattened to the point at which the paintings very nearly surrender to the blankness of the wall again.

Despite their conceptual and processual tightness, Hylden’s paintings are luxuriantly easy on the eye. They are neat, secure in their conceits and confident of their affects. They provoke none of the discomfort one might feel in front of, for instance, a noisy Christopher Wool painting (an obvious influence on Hylden). They are awash with sunlight and calm.

A pair of ambitious new paintings, however, in Richard Telles’s main gallery, admitted the artist into less-charted territory. These works, also untitled, are outwardly simpler than the series of seven paintings in the smaller rear space. Again, they show a patch of the artist’s studio wall, photographed and converted into a half-tone pattern, overlaid onto a brushy wet field of pearlescent gold.

What is astonishing about them, however, is their scale: each canvas measures almost three-and-a-half by six metres. Hanging side by side, they occupied most of the gallery’s longest wall. The section of studio wall that they represent, however, lit from the side so as to accentuate its texture, must only be a few centimetres wide, and the half-tone image is blown up so that each dot is the size of a thumbnail. To help us gauge the scale of the magnification, Hylden has included in one photograph a screw, half sticking out of the wall and casting a long shadow diagonally across the canvas. In the second picture, it has been removed. It is, in a sense, a great big picture of nothing.

Increasing the size of a painting can be a cheap way of making it more impressive, but Hylden does not approach scale lightly. In the past he has favoured the matter-of-fact equivalence of picturing objects at life-size. Here the effect is to immerse the viewer in the crazy logic – and intermittent collapse – of an intricate system of representation. While the paintings are impossible to view at a distance (it is a narrow gallery) they are also dizzyingly hard to look at up close. The phenomenon suggests that the critical moment in all of Hylden’s work – the other paintings in this exhibition included – is when he causes the viewer to zone out, to get lost on the threshold of conflicting representational registers. Hylden shows that sometimes even pictures of nothing can be too much.

Jonathan Griffin

Julius Heinemann

80's Fashion in the 25th Century - 'Retro Futurism'

 

 

Buck Rogers - Looking back at Something that Looked Forward

Time Machine: Buck Rogers

Buck Rogers – all white teeth, innuendo-laden badinage, fey robots and tight jumpsuits. That’s what the name means to most of us, remembering as we do the low-brow, high-camp 1980s series from the vast stables of Glen A Larson, whence many a wonky nag and almost thoroughbred SF TV show came trotting onto our screens. The show followed Larson’s “fire and forget” approach to producing, appearing with much fanfare and running for a mere one and a half seasons before sinking into a quagmire of high mediocrity, becoming a something that today seems laughably bad. But Buck Rogers was once much more than this, entrancing several generations of Americans in magazines, comic books, radio and screen, and the sad whimper that his last hurrah endured does a great disservice to his legend.
Anthony Rogers first appeared in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories magazine. Penned by Philip Francis Nowlan, the tale was entitled “Armageddon – 2149″. It was a clever piece of science fiction that had the forces of the future waging war on one another with a variety of military inventions that have since become commonplace – infrared ray guns for night fighting, jet planes, bazookas, paralysis rays and more, though Buck’s flight-endowing jumping belt is still sadly unavailable. The famed Hugo Gernsback, at the time editor of Amazing Stories, firmly stated of the tale: “We have rarely printed a story in this magazine that for scientific interest as well as suspense could hold its own with this particular story. We prophesy that this story will become more valuable as the years go by. It certainly holds a number of interesting prophecies, many of which, no doubt, will come true.”

Buster Crabbe plays it straight.

His prophesy was a good one. Soon after the story’s publication, newspaper mogul John Flint Dille commissioned Nowlan to create a comic strip featuring the adventures of the hero. Entitled Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century, the strip began its run on January 7th 1929. It was to be a phenomenal success, running in over 400 newspapers simultaneously at the height of its success.
Many of the Buck staples are present in the original stories. Buck Rogers, an ex-WWI American fighter pilot, is a surveyor in Pennsylvania who gets trapped in a cave-in and is put into suspended animation by a strange radioactive gas. When he awakes 500 years in the future, the heroic Buck becomes a pilot once more, a secret agent and head of the Rocket Rangers. He lives in a futuristic city of “metalloglass” full of marvellous devices. His enemy is Killer Kane, an evil Mongol who is trying to dominate the world, and his ally Ardala. Buck’s cohorts are the genius Dr Huer, Wilma and her younger brother, Buddy.
By 1932, when the spin-off radio serial was launched, Buck memorabilia crammed the bedrooms of American boys. Hundreds of thousands of people tuned in to listen to the adventures of the space hero four times a week, whose gadgets and gizmos were simulated on the airwaves by the clever use of power tools (his psychic disintegration ray was an electric razor, for example). Buck Rogers was, in all ways, a household name.
In 1939 Buster Crabbe, who had played Buck’s imitator Flash Gordon, donned the robe of the time-displaced adventurer for a cinema serial. This Buck’s origin stepped up the science fiction wow-factor – he­ is flying a dirigible with his colleague Buddy (changed from his earlier role as Wilma’s brother) when they go down over the Artic. The ship is carrying an experimental gas, Nirvano (a shameless piece of McGuffin pinched by ITV’s poor 1999 drama The Last Train). The pair are instructed to inhale the gas in order to preserve their lives. Of course, when they wake up, they’re not in early 20^th century Kansas any more, so to speak. This serial – of the kind that ran before the main feature in the days before televison – had Buck and Buddy revived in 2440. Killer Kane is again the villain, this time at the head of a band of super-gangsters which rule the Earth. Buck joins the freedom fighters, and, in a complicated plot, seeks aid from the planet Saturn. The 12-parter was recycled endlessly, being cut together for a 1953 film release, Planet Outlaws and edited again for television in 1953 in the shape of Destination Saturn. It even ran in the ’70s and ’80s on British TV. Though virtually indistinguishable from the Flash Gordon serial, it was far more polished than other SF offerings of the time, and had a kind of muscular vitality the ’80s version lacked. The wiry Buster Crabbe, an athelete, was a world away from the toothy avuncularity of Gerard.
The TV show that followed in 1950 was, by all accounts, a disappointment, though it is difficult to gauge as there are reputedly no copies of this long-forgotten piece of TV history. It was only the second ever TV SF show after all (the first being Captain Video and His Video Rangers), and the signature elements of Buck Roger’s universe, the constant action and clever gadgets, were severely hampered by the static, live nature of television.
The TV show finished in 1951, and Buck went into a slow decline. Nowlan had long left the comic strip behind, and it lost much of its power. Though it ran until 1967, it was confined to but a few newspapers. “Buck Rogers”, once a commonplace synonym for all that was futuristic in the speech of Americans, became a derogatory phrase applied with the same level of disdain as someone might have said “Doctor Who monster” ten years ago.
There was no Buck for 12 years, until maverick producer Glen A Larson got his hands on the property, launching a new

What science fiction needs is more comedy robots.

Buck onto an unsuspecting public in 1979. Many of the main elements of the story remained wholly intact, but the concept was retooled for the age of disco. “The original space man! The ultimate trip! Buck Rogers swings back to earth and lays it on the 25th Century!” screamed the jive-talking tagline. But disco was not the only innovation since Buck had last entertained the masses – feminism had come along in the meantime and grabbed the world by the proverbials. In response to this, Deering was promoted to Colonel, (though the character was always in need of rescuing and actress Erin Grey had to a) Dye her hair blonde and b) prance about in a shiny catsuit – feminism was yet to be fully integrated into the popular consciousness) and had an arch relationship with Buck with more than a hint of “mother knows best” to it. Ardala too was given preminence over Killler Kane, who was reduced from emperor of the world to henchman. She was now a sexually bored yet ultimately dangerous Princess, daughter of King Draco, evil overlord of one of Earth’s antagonistic ex-colonies. Again, empowered as actress Pamela Hensly was, Ardala was required to prance around in a whole range of adolescent-bothering outfits. Not that this upset Gerard, who had the pair of these lovely, self-determining chicks fighting over him in the show.
“All those beautiful women were one of the reasons I had such a good time doing it! It was in my contract ‘scantily women only’. We were kind of kinky, a little ahead of our time,” He told SFX in a 1999 interview.
Originally intended as a pilot for a TV show, Buck Rogers went on general theatrical release in the US where it tapped into the public’s fondness for the character, grossing vast amounts of cash.
“The figures are burned into my mind,” Gerard told us, figures tripping off his tongue as he recounted his glory hour. “It took 35 million in one month, before being removed from screens because it had been pre-sold to cable. It was one of Top 5 grossing pictures in 1979. In the opening weekend alone it took 12 million dollars, and this was three dollars a ticket at the time.”
(These big figures, predictably, prompted the third re-release of the old Universal Buster Crabbe serial).

Feminism's advent had a minimal impact on the new Buck Rogers. The last Wilma might have been a capable colonel, but men were encouraged to look at her tightly clad backside.

Unsubtle flirting aside, this Buck was a different man. Though he was known to floor the odd Tigerman with a well-aimed punch, he was also a caring, sharing gentleman. The series writer’s bible said of him “As a character Buck Rogers outwardly presents a flip, sardonic, devil-may-care guy, and an adventurous spirit. Beneath this facade is a serious and caring man who is alone. For all of the marvels of the 25th century, Buck Rogers is cut off from everyone he loved or cared about.”
And what marvels! Actually, no. The keyword with Buck Rogers’ 80s incarnation is ‘fun’, and that in the lightest sense. Behind the recycled, unused Battlestar Galactica concepts (another Larson show) and Ralph McQuarrie spaceships, the stories suffered from the curse of syndication – the need for the series to be shown in any order at all cut out any character development or story progression, with many narrative inconsistencies between episodes. The future looked like a bad nightclub furnished by early Ikea, so soulless and plastic that when Buck paints faces on his furniture many viewers must have empathised. But the show illustrated one important social shift – the idea of relentless social progress through science had taken a beating, and it was often Buck’s knowledge of the old ways that got him out of scrapes. This aside, the show relied heavily on comedy, particularly from Twiki, Buck’s mentally deficient midget robot sidekick, and this did not make for the gut-wrenching tale of one man lost across the centuries. Even when the film tried to capture this aspect of Buck’s character, when he sneaks out of New Chicago to his ex-girlfriend’s grave, it slips into pathos.
Worse was to come. Glen A Larson had become little more than a name in the credits once the film had aired, and, as much of a magpie as he was when it came to other’s ideas (Gerard affectionately called him a “bandit”)  the TV series lacked his screwball creative energy, and Gerard allegedly argued with the chief writers on the project. Then came the second series…
Where the first series was goofy but fun, the second was risible. Buck joins the crew of the Searcher, a spaceship commissioned to search out “the lost tribes of man”. The first series’ bible made much of Earth’s relationships with her former colonies, though these were never satisfactorily explored, but this level of plagiarism from Battlestar Galactica, was too much. The second season retrod old western and Star Trek plots. Mel Blanc, the cartoon genius who had voiced Twiki in the first series, was replaced by Bob Elyea for much of the second series, to fans’ mystification and outrage, and the little bot’s limelight was stolen by Krichton, an awful robot who owed much of its ancestry to a standard lamp. Buck wasn’t the only anachronistic throwback on board either, a bemused Wilfred Hyde White was wheeled onto the show to stammer and dither his way through awful lines, in a cardigan! Not very sci-fi. Gerard rages against this new direction.
“Our new producer John Mantley had no idea, one of his ideas was to replace Mel. A complete rip off of Star Trek was another. We ditched all those classic characters – Ardala, Killer Kane, the Tigermen. I was saying ‘Look, I’d really like Buck to stay on Earth. Why would he want to leave? He’s been gone for 500 years. The man needs to look around for a while, not go flying off again. John Mantley did not know what he was doing. He did the last part of Gunsmoke. To hear him tell it he reigned during the headier days of Gunsmoke, but he simply presided over the demise of that and the demise of Buck Rogers. He actually bragged about the fact he ripped off one of his Gunsmoke scripts for the Hawk episode. He actually bragged about it, he thought it was really funny that he cast Barbara Luna in both roles – she was the Indian princess and she was Hawk’s wife. The thing is, to actually laugh about it, to have so little respect for the audience, as to say, fuck ‘em”
The audience got the message, and deserted the show in droves. It was canned. Buck disappeared from the popular awareness, only an RPG, published in the late eighties, keeping his memory alive.
But his tale is perennial one, that of a man out of place, in a new world that presents many opportunities as much as it makes him yearn for that which he has lost. With TV SF reaching new levels of sophistication, perhaps it is time for some enterprising producer to take up the torch of Buck Rogers, and carry it once more to light the darkness of the future for us all.

Alex Olson - 21st Century Modernism

Frieze

October 26, 2012

Alex Olson’s paintings are less decorous than they seem at first glance. In fact, high drama is often hidden behind their moderate scale, formal elegance and sense of containment, which belie how assertively her work wrestles with paint as both material and sign. Marks that seem familiar quickly become unfamiliar; colour functions in surprising ways. Her paintings also suggest a conflicting array of actions that include spreading, pouring, wiping, scraping, abrading and sponging, but also writing or leafing through books.
In previous works, Olson overlaid scrawled grids or fields of cursive marks or scratches with radiant splotches, graphic squiggles and flat areas of paint. Something different was going on in the paintings in her most recent show ‘Palmist and Editor’, which featured varied pairings exploring tensions between contradictory ways of presenting or interpreting information; this syntactical gamesmanship extended to interplay between the paintings. The show’s title suggested both an expansion of possibilities and a paring down – as well as the textured lines of the palm and the smoothed-out lines of text associated with editing – and similar disjunctions were at work throughout the show.
The paintings hung nearly flush with the walls, on thin stretchers, directing attention to the surfaces of the works, which could be read in various ways. Olson uses mundane, even crude, tools – palette knives, window scrapers, cheap brushes – to create discrete layers of alternately delicate and emphatic indexical marks. Some works are built on a layer of paint textured with allover brushstrokes or swirls that recall the patterns on cheaply plastered ceilings. The paint Olson then applies either delicately stains the grooves or sits atop it in a thick, opaque layer. Relay (all works 2012), one of the larger works in the show, initially suggests two elegant decorative columns of blossoms or birds, but the feathery shapes are simply areas of paint that seem to have been sponged on – or sponged on and wiped off – over the textured ground.
In the more comical Divulge, a wide pinkish band with wavy sides like the cartoonish result of a huge tool dragging paint down the canvas at an angle, is layered over a charcoal-grey ground textured with allover spirals. If flesh, or silly putty, could be squeegeed onto a surface, it might resemble this emphatic pink shape. Divulge is one of several paintings in which Olson has neatly applied thick swathes or stripes while leaving a messy edge. It’s as if with the same gesture she’s depicting a brick and the cement oozing beneath it: both stasis and movement, solid and liquid. In Place, wide blue and white lines made with a palette knife – leaving a ridge of paint where the knife was lifted from the canvas – create a Rothko-esque composition: a larger rectangle formed of white marks stacked on a smaller one formed of blue marks, on a tan ground. The ground also evokes aged paper, just as the jaunty arrangement of lines somehow recalls mid-century illustration, making the lines’ heft all the more startling.
In Place and other works in the show, high Modernist painting seemed to be a distant touchstone. Palms for an Editor suggests a muted echo of work by Barnett Newman – with red layered over blue in a stripe down the centre of the canvas, against a mottled grey background – although the scale is closer to that of a reproduction in a lavish coffee-table book and the motivation entirely different. In all of Olson’s work it’s as though surfaces have been placed under a spotlight to better allow them to be read, interpreted and speak to one another.
-Kristen M. Jones

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Walker Art Center Blog

October 5, 2012

In this series of online studio visits, the 15 artists in the upcoming Walker-organized exhibition Painter Painter respond to an open-ended query about their practices. Here Los Angeles–based artist Alex Olson converses with exhibition co-curator Eric Crosby.

Eric Crosby
To begin, let’s start with appearances. Whenever I encounter one of your paintings, I learn something new about paint—its materiality, its consistency, its presence as image and surface. What is paint to you, and how do you describe your use of it.

Alex Olson
I’d say there are two main qualities of paint, specifically oil paint, that especially appeal to me. One is its enormous range as a material. Depending on how it’s applied, it can read from graphic to visceral. Most of my paintings take full advantage of this quality, incorporating a variety of tools and marks to arrive at the finished piece. The second quality is its extensive history. It’s impossible to make a mark at this point that doesn’t come with a historical referent, but this is actually a huge benefit. You can pull from art history’s enormous catalogue and build off of a past meaning, re-situating it in the present toward a different end. In doing so, it’s important to understand how a specific mark or idea functioned in the past versus now, and to consider what using it now would mean, but this creates even richer possibilities to choose from.

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art ltd.

July 1, 2012

Painter Alex Olson contributes five works to the biennial that reach equally into the archives of AbEx and Minimalism, sparking a lively dialogue between the two. Olsen received her BA from Harvard and subsequently studied at CalArts, where she received her MFA in 2008; her practice combines additive and subtractive processes--impasto, sgraffito; sgraffito, impasto--suggesting a synthesis of her bicoastal education with a leaning towards historic influences. In her previous body of work, she explored abstraction with a Twombly-esque edge: a persistent scrawling relief scratched into the surface of her works ranging from a misshapen modernist grid to chaotic scrawling lines overlaid with thick patches of paint. Two of the works seen at the Hammer, Proposal 1 and 3 continue that explosive energy with bright multi-colored graffiti, while the others seem to have found a means of control without any measurable loss of passion. In Proposal 2, a transcendent white-on-silvery-white creation evoking equal helpings of James Hayward and Mary Corse, revels in pure luminosity. At the end of the lineup, Proposal 5, a curved stripe runs off the upper edge of the canvas, painted in a striking peach-on-charcoal combination, suggesting the infinite expansion of space and possibilities left open to explore.
-Molly Enholm

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Interview Magazine

August 20, 2010

Once upon a time, in the 1960s, if you were a "good" painter, according to contentious critic Clement Greenberg, you made abstract works with big block of color and a little bit of shading to acknowledge that no matter how hard you try, there's still always some sense of 3-D illusion involved when pigment gets on canvas. Half a century later, a "good" artist makes no fuss about a painting's status as an object. Which is why 32-year-old Los Angeles-based painter Alex Olson finds herself in the middle. "My paintings have to do with how you read surfaces," the CalArts graduate says, referring to her groups of works on very thin stretchers that aren't quite a series but "a giant conversation among paintings, some of them louder than others." If her paintings could talk, they'd speak of recurring, very basic shapes, and thin brushy oils. "They're of an abstract vernacular but with loads of signification," Olson says of the deceptive shadows under her flat painterly patterns. Olson makes her solo New York debut at Lisa Cooley gallery on September 1.
-Alex Gartenfeld