The Room Moved, The Way Blocked (Stage 1) at Dikeou Collection

Wade Guyton’s installation Untitled, The Room Moved, The Way Blocked is a simple formation brimming with art historical and conceptual constructs. Made of parquet flooring, the block was specifically recreated by the artist to occupy a space at Dikeou Collection, and measures 12’ x 12’ x 5’. While it immediately comes across as intrusive, the block is actually quite engaging as it is meant to be climbed upon to continue through the galleries, sparking excitement and a sense of play. Beyond the instant gratification of scaling the block is a very clever yet cerebral analysis on minimalism and conceptual art. As an early work it also occupies a unique place in Guyton’s oeuvre, thus making it a compelling talking point about his evolution as an artist.

Untitled (Stage) at Hunter College, 1998

Bill Arning, who at Guyton’s Hunter M.F.A exhibition saw an earlier installation, Untitled (Stage), that preceded Untitled, The Room Moved, The Way Blocked, wrote in BOMB Magazine that it “points to a smartly evasive young conceptualist.” Since dubbed as a post-conceptualist, Guyton’s block takes the guiding principle of conceptual art - where an idea has priority over the object - and turns it into something that has to be physically grappled with as well as mentally. From Duchamp’s Fountain to Baldessari’s I Am Making Art, conceptualism has done much to expand the definition of art, but also distanced some of the audience with its perceived lack of aesthetic and narrative attributes. By adding the interactive element to The Room Moved…, Guyton transcends that analytical barrier and presents a work that can be appreciated by brainy connoisseurs and hyperactive children alike. Curator Devon Dikeou states the work is a “humoristic, if not metaphoric path to the fatalism of Modernism and Modern living.”

Guyton was only 26 years old when he initially created the first iteration of the block while studying under Robert Morris, a distinguished artist and theorist in the conceptual and minimalist genres. One can see Morris’ influence during this time through the use of large geometric sculpture and its ability to reinterpret space (this image is particularly resonant) . These days Wade is most known for his big monochrome inkjet paintings, but his engagement with sculpture and use of wood in particular is a longstanding part of his repertoire. Works like Inverted Woodpile from 2002, his X Sculpture from 2003, and his own studio floor which he recreated for his 2007 solo show at Petzel Gallery, demonstrate how the wooden installations were significant in generating the motifs and methods utilized in 2-dimensional form. In fact, a lot of his early wood sculptures do not exist anymore because he had no place to store them in his tiny studio on East 2nd Street.

X Sculpture installed at High Desert Test Sites 2, 2003

The block is one of the first installations by Guyton sold to a collector, and the fact that these early sculptures are rare and this is the only artwork by him on public view in Colorado makes it all the more special. Part of Devon Dikeou’s mission as a collector is to acquire works “in breadth,” meaning she wants to highlight as many facets of an artist’s output as possible. A Guyton collage resides in Dikeou’s installation Not Quite Mrs. De Menil’s Liquor Closet. It is small, delicate, and perched high on a shelf; it couldn’t be more opposite from The Room Moved…, yet the two works perfectly encapsulate the fascinating progression of Wade Guyton’s craft.

— Hayley Richardson

And now enjoy some memorable moments…

@rmcadstudentambassadors

@jessgade

@crookedfingersandbustedears

With spring comes flowers, birds, glimmers of summer, and sometimes one and a half feet of snow. But spring also brings back our Family Saturday Workshop series, which begin on Saturday, April 9. Inspired by a specific work or series in the collection, the Family Saturday Workshops aim to teach participants about materials and techniques used by an artist in the collection. The series begins with a look at Margaret Lee’s piece entitled Think About Tomorrow or Don’t from 2007, where kids and families will create their own wooden monument. These free workshops are fun for all ages. We invite you to bring friends and family to create your own Dikeou Collection inspired artwork.

Margaret Lee, Think About Tomorrow or Don’t, 2007.

The most recent Family Saturday Workshops from the 2015 season included Momoyo Torimitsu’s storyboard and performance workshop in July, Rainer Ganahl’s scarf printing workshop in August and Misaki Kawai’s character building workshop in September.

March 2015 Lee Stoetzel workshop.

Lee Stoetzel’s Accidental Tourism, is a series of close-up photographs captured from his studio windowsill, scratched glass and globs of paint that compositionally appear to be distanced landscapes. In this March workshop, participants took extreme close-ups of tile, wood grains and artwork textures from the collection to capture their own landscapes

August 2015 Rainer Ganahl scarf workshop.

Rainer Ganahl’s Hermes Marx series includes a set of four Hermes silk scarves that have been screen printed over with his own logo “Hermes Marx”. In this workshop, participants were invited to print over the existing printed fabric of a scarf with their own design. This act of printing over the pre-existing design, not only changed the aesthetics of the scarf but then appropriated the object into the participant’s own piece of artwork.

September 2015 Misaki Kawai character building workshop.

The last and most recent workshop was a Misaki Kawai character building workshop that had participants create themselves in the form of an iconic Kawai doll. Designing their own clothes, hairstyle and doll, participants learned about Kawai’s use of photography, sewing and doll-making in her work.

Looking to our 2016 Family Saturday Workshop series, we will teach workshops that include materials and concepts like cardboard, color theory, wood, paper mache and found objects to continue exploring the art practices found in the Dikeou Collection. Can you guess which artists use these materials?

The purpose of the Family Saturday Workshops is not only to get the audience thinking and talking about artworks in the collection, but to ignite their own creative process as well. Learning about how the objects in the collection are made, conceived or experienced allows a deeper understanding of the practice of art making and teaches new techniques to our audience. We have instructions to guide one’s way through the project but we also encourage the participants to incorporate their own ideas and techniques to the projects. Encouraging personalization incites the audience to not just replicate but to create from their own artistic energy. Teaching various techniques used in the collection also creates a relationship between the viewer and an art object. Conceptually understanding an artwork can be difficult, but if someone can physically create it themselves using a similar technique as the artist, the gallery-go’er is that much closer to understanding the work.

Keep an eye out for our 2016 Family Saturday Workshop press release, which will include an artist list with dates of the entire 2016 lineup.

-Madeliene Kattman

Patterns of repetition fill the gap that exists between static images and animated ones. A single, fixed image comes alive when it is repeated over and over, with some slight variation, to create movement and tell a story. Dutch artist Serge Onnen’s video animation, “Break,” surrounded by his illustrated pink wallpaper titled “Silence Fence” at Dikeou Collection, combines stillness with motion to create an installation that immerses the viewer in the power of repetition. The placement of Onnen’s artwork in the collection (in the women’s restroom) creates a combination of viewer experiences as well, where it can be seen both publicly and privately. This unorthodox location is actually quite advantageous as it is the most frequented room on the entire 5th floor of the building, continuing Onnen’s conceptual drive toward movement, stasis, and rhythm.

Onnen created “Break” and “Silence Fence” through drawing, and hands appear prominently in these works, thus making them additional important themes. In “Break” two arms extend from the left and right sides on the screen and smash together random objects like lamps, telephones, and beer mugs. The objects break apart into pieces, and the hands then touch in someway before they pull apart offscreen and reappear for another smash session. An eccentric, non-melodic, guitar plays the soundtrack. “Silence Fence,” which covers all the walls in the bathroom, is composed of people holding their hands to the their ears. Their facial expressions reveal various states of displeasure, insinuating that they are experiencing some terrible deafening noise. Perhaps they are absorbing this noise, placing the viewer on the quieter side of the “Silence Fence.”

The way Onnen poses his figures, with their hands held to their hands, expresses his interest in the complex relationship between our brains and hands. The connection these two parts of the body share is what enabled humans to create, to build, and evolve. It is also what gives us the capacity to draw, a creative activity that Onnen holds in the highest esteem, as it is the generative process for all other artful mediums and is accessible to every human on this earth. Drawing is an exercise that, when done regularly, strengthens the mind and sharpens coordination.

When there is a lack of mindfulness, hands become tools for destruction rather than creation. In “Break,” where heads are absent, the hands demolish objects that were originally designed and made with much thought and intention. The gentle way the hands touch each other, though, after they break something, suggests that this is not a violent act but rather one that symbolizes release. We are often slaves of our own creation, and recklessly destroying something can be mentally liberating.

-Hayley Richardson

To speak about the artwork of Lizzi Bougatsos is to speak about Lizzi Bougatsos herself.   Multidisciplinary, punchy, and ephemeral, Bougatsos’ art is the child of an urban wasteland. The world is her oyster and her apartment is her studio. Her visual art is conceived in short bursts: give her a month and she will give you an art show. Bougatsos is a performer by nature, which means that being a fashion icon and noted queen of the underground is a part of her art practice. It is impossible to find an article about her that leaves out the fact of her sweet witchy vibes and her celebrity friends. She works quickly, touting a plethora of different art works and collaborations, often made with found objects and smashed together with the brilliance of a quick wit. Bougatsos is most known for her performative capacity both in her musical work with bands Like Gang Gang Dance and I.U.D., her performance art at venues such as the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as her sculptural work that is represented by James Fuentes Gallery in New York.

In both her zingchat interview with zingmagazine and her lecture for School of Visual Arts, she describes an encounter she had with artist Suzanne Anker that would come to define her personal philosophy of art. “She [Suzanne Anker ] said to me, ‘This is sculpture’ [throws a no. 2 pencil in an arc]”.  This pedagogical moment was a profound one for Bougatsos’ career.  In truth, the aesthetic and metaphysical tendencies of her art can be traced back to this juncture: that of performance and sculpture. For Bougatsos, there is no distinction between those two mediums. A sculpture is just performance over a longer period of time. Each physical part of the object takes up space in a particular place for a particular moment in time be that the movement of a dancer’s body, or the time it takes for a material to disintegrate. Self-Portrait (2012) is a mold of the artist’s leg cast in ice which slowly melts as it is put on display in a gallery setting. The sculpture becomes a personal performance in destruction; Strange in its disembodiment, and beautiful in the natural slowness of its change from one state to another. Suzanne Anker’s observation about the nature of sculpture is so apt in describing Lizzi Bougatsos’ art not only in its philosophical implications, but in the fact of its humor. It suits Bougatsos’ style to have a story that is all at once funny, surprising and performative.

The Dikeou Pop-Up: Colfax location houses six pieces by Bougatsos dating from 2010 and 2012. Her piece Good Hair (2010) encapsulates these elements of humor, performance, and sculpture that dominate her art practice. The piece consists of a large stage-vanity scene with bright lights surrounding a frame. Where the mirror would be is a poster of comedian Tracy Morgan from his 2010 film Cop Out. Below the “mirror” is a shelf strewn with lipstick, a hair straightener, a half finished cigarette, a glass filled with red wine. As a viewer, the piece forces you to participate in the narrative of a person readying themselves for a performance. For a moment, you are the main character of the scene. You stand in front of the mirror and you laugh because for a moment you see yourself as the brashly funny Tracy Morgan.

Good Hair is a physically static art object, and yet it feels more closely related to a stage set than a marble statue. Bougatsos is able to soften the rigidity with which we usually see physical art objects. It is also important to mention that Good Hair is a self-portrait. Bougatsos considers herself to be a comedian: a purveyor of the same kind of Saturday Night Live, yo-momma defacing, character-driven humor that is associated with Tracy Morgan. Her art reflects a character wrought with celebrity. And yet, she is not the revered, godlike kind of celebrity, but rather the archetypal jester figure that asks for attention with an exposed tongue and thumbs in its ears.

Indeed many of the Bougatsos’s pieces that reside at the Dikeou Pop-Up read as one-liners. Pussy For Rent (2010) consists of a For Rent sign with the words “my pussy” scrawled in marker on the blank space. Bougatsos makes a sort of feminist joke about her own genitalia being real estate in a world where women’s bodies are constantly being objectified. In God We Bust, also created in 2010, is a green neon sign that that displays those words. The piece references America’s catch phrase, satirized with pun, written in the medium of a late night city. The sign reads like a quip uttered in the wake of silence after political debate meant to tease out some laughs to ease the tension of the room.

In Happy Ending 2 (2012) Bougatsos presents a large scale version of anal beads. Five large reflective silver balls are connected by a rope and hung from the ceiling. At the bottom a pink rose trails to the floor. This piece exemplifies the dichotomy between objects and their referential, societal meaning. The title of the piece and the rose component can be symbolically understood in more than one way. The saying “happy ending” conjures relations to both fairytale stories and sexual climax. The rose is a symbol of natural innocence and is also used as innuendo when related to taboo body parts. By changing the scale of a sex object Bougatsos allows the viewer to consider each part of the piece in the context of erotic imagery and also in a societal vacuum.

The pieces in the collection at the Dikeou Pop-Up also include the controversial Dick Toss II (2012) which involves an upside down American flag hung on the wall, overlaid by a poster depicting the body of an explicitly clad and faceless woman. She offers the viewer a game of beer pong and the caption reads “ATM: Get your balls wet”. Where the woman’s breasts would be, two toy sized dildos are placed with removable rings. The title invites the viewer to play a game, toss the rings and incriminate themselves in the overt sexual objectification that dominates American culture. Once again Bougatsos’s art is performative. Just as Suzanne Anker suggested, the second half of the sculpture is created when the viewer engages physically with the work, throwing the ring in an arc and playing a part in the performance. Thus we implicitly participate in the cringe-worthy imagery that Bougatsos’s wants us to admit to.

-Liana Woodward

Janine Gordon, AFI, 2001, silver gelatin print

The early 2000s: The era of boy bands, pop divas, blinged out rappers, and middle of the road alt rockers. In the midst of this music-for-the-masses arena one genre stood apart, like a big middle finger eager to burst the bubbly world of Pop: Metal. System of a Down, Rage Against the Machine, Disturbed, Slipknot, and Linkin Park dominated the airwaves and the Billboard charts, stomping the Britneys and Justins with ease. This “New Wave of American Metal” was fast, aggressive, and loud with dynamic musicians who knew exactly how to rile up their fans and unleash their angst. The crowds at live shows are quintessential representations of primal energy at its physical and psychological apex, and Janine Gordon captured the intensity with her camera to create her photographic “DIRT” series on view at Dikeou Collection. Gordon’s focus on the people in the audience shows that they were just as charismatic as the performers on stage, and, as a collective fandom, just as socially and culturally powerful.

The concerts Gordon attended took place at Randall’s Island in New York in 2001 and 2002, a time before everyone’s hands and eyes became glued to a smartphone. The body and mind were free to experience the music and the energetic environment without distraction, creating a perfect photographic atmosphere with no inhibition or distraction. She approached her subjects like a journalist, putting herself in the center of the action which “allows us to see the fury, the motion, the aggression, the camaraderie, the unity, and the spirit of a team/teenage life, angst, and revolution…” (Devon Dikeou, curatorial statement). Gordon’s photos serve as documentation of a specific sect of society, and the concert becomes a ritual ground where members of the sect perform a prescribed series of actions, primarily adulation of the music through movement.

Janine Gordon, Surfing, 2002, silver gelatin print

The figures in Gordon’s photographs are in the throws of the mosh pit. Whether circling, skanking, crowd surfing, stage diving, pogoing, or doing windmills, those who partake in this activity do so not with the intention to hurt others, but are accepting and forgiving of pain. Gordon states it’s one of the “dirtiest dances that youth culture embraces today,” but the pit really is a thing of beauty in its own right. Individual people coalesce into a swirling entity of humanity. There is no room for ego or vanity, and gender, religion, and sexuality mean nothing. Everybody is equal.

Naturally, mosh pits would not exist without the bands whose music incited such a concept. The early hardcore punk band Scream’s 1982 song “Total Mash” (which they pronounced as ‘mosh’), defined the ethos behind moshing in the lyrics: “Let me reach out and grab your heart / There’s no reason for you to stand apart / Prefab notions that hold your motions back / Cuts off your head, and tells you how to act.” Then there’s Penelope Spheeris’ seminal 1981 documentary “The Decline of Western Civilization,” which offered mainstream audiences one of the first looks at the punk and later hardcore and metal subcultures.

Dan Witz, 70 Commercial St, 2012, oil and digital media on canvas

The heaving allure of mosh pits and its participants have piqued the interest of artists who work in a variety of media. Dan Witz has created dozens of photorealistic mosh pit paintings that exhibit the same Baroque exuberance as a composition by Rubens, creating a compelling combination of classical, academic sensibility with chaotic and rebellious subject matter.

Bryan LeBoeuf, Mosh Pit (study), 2000, charcoal on paper

Artist Bryan LeBoeuf’s illustration of a figure crowd surfing exemplifies the state of physical and mental surrender one succumbs to while in the heart of the mosh pit. The overhead perspective and languid anatomy is like witnessing, or undergoing, an out of body experience.

Charles Peterson, Mosh Pit at Endfest, Kitas County, Washington, 1991

Charles Perterson, well known for documenting the grunge scene of the early 1990s, directed his camera toward the sea of bodies at intimate shows and large festivals alike, proving that no crowd or venue is too small or too big to instigate such a frenzy.

Janine Gordon, Plant Your Feet, 2001, silver gelatin print

Janine Gordon captured moments that are damn near divine within the hedonistic mass that is the mosh pit. Her ability to hone in on an individual within the group highlights how the singular intensity of one person has a ripple effect, creating a collective energy enhanced by the music. She bravely integrates herself into the pit to capture these moments, while other photographers would likely work from a more comfortable distance. The clouds of dirt kicked up from the movement of the crowd got into in her camera and developed into the film, creating an atmospheric effect and adding that conceptual layer and authenticity to the powerful “DIRT” series.

— Hayley Richardson