A person attends a lecture or seminar usually for one of two reasons: he or she is required to go for work or academic purposes, or the person chooses to go out of their own personal interest. People from both situations comprise the audience for these gatherings, thus creating a mixture of those who are energized and engaged and those who are antsy and bored. Moods change, though, and someone can leave with the opposite impression than when they arrived. For twenty years, Rainer Ganahl has attended hundreds of seminars and lectures and photographed the speakers and their respective audiences, which has become his aptly titled “Seminars/Lectures,” or “S/L” series. The Dikeou Collection is home to fourteen of these photo sets, which date from the early days of the series and serve as a document not just of Ganahl’s own intellectual interests, but of the zeitgeist of that particular decade. This project also appeared in issue 15 of zingmagazine , with accompanying text by AS Bessa. This fall recent photographs from “S/L” were exhibited at Kai Matsumiya, which highlighted the artist’s persistent quest for knowledge and dedication to the project, as well as the current intellectual, cultural, and social climates of our time. When someone like Ganahl places themselves in the roles of spectator and artist simultaneously within the speaker-audience exchange, the resulting imagery adds new layers of value and interpretation to the event.

Rainer Ganahl, “Seminars / Lectures
Linda Nochlin, Glory and Misery of Pornography,” 1996, 20” x 24", edition 2/2

The documentation and dissemination of lecture material is rampant these days thanks to the internet, with a special nod to YouTube which now has more than 2,000 TED Talks and countless other lectures available to view. Often the camera will zoom out from behind or to the side of the speaker to show the audience, but all that is seen is rows of shoulders and heads - the audience has no identity or personality. “S/L,” though, gives equal attention to the audience and speaker by allowing each to have their own photograph. This mode of presentation also highlights Ganahl’s interest in the Socratic dialogue, or method, in which there is a dualistic exchange to stimulate critical thinking and illuminate ideas.

Socrates is credited as being one of the founders of Western philosophy, particularly his contributions to the field of ethics. Plato was his greatest student and did much to document his life and teachings. This 17th-century Italian engraving by Johann Friedrich Greuter shows Socrates surrounded by students outdoors where they are not distracted or troubled by the everyday activities happening in the background. The scene can be a metaphor for Socrates’ belief that only the trained mind is prepared to see beneath the deceptive appearances of the words and actions of others to the deeper realities of life. The relationship between instructor and student is rich subject matter for artists as it can take shape in numerous contexts over history.

The idea of “formal education” as we know it today developed in the medieval period and evolved from much older Christian cathedral schools and monastic schools. The setting for Laurentius de Voltolina’s Italian 14th-century painting appears to be inside a church or monastery, and shows that not much has changed in the classroom since medieval times. Teachers’ pets in the front, slackers in the back.

Pieter Mierevelt’s Anatomy lesson of Dr. Willem van der Meer predates Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp by fourteen years and was a likely inspiration for the famous work. Mierevelt’s painting gives a clear look at the instruments and the pupils look straight at the viewer as if they are part of the lesson. This image speaks to Ganahl’s aims to dissolve the barriers between teacher, audience, and artist. Anyone else up for some spaghetti and meatballs after class?

Ganahl would find a likely kindred spirit with Joseph Wright of Derby who depicted many forms of learning in his art. Whether it be in the realms of science and astronomy, or art and literature, Derby beautifully captured the wonderment and joy of learning in his subjects. A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrey is representative of the Age of Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, that started in 1766 when this painting was made, where the illumination of the mind is reinforced with the striking light in the scene. Scientific lectures and demonstrations presented by traveling scientists were a popular form of public entertainment during Wright’s lifetime, and, like Ganahl, he likely attended these lectures for his own personal enjoyment and inspiration.

[caption id="attachment_4688" align="alignnone" width="500"] STM620298; Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri, USA; out of copyright[/caption]

Education for children in America was established during the colonial era and was available only to boys, but co-ed classrooms gained prevalence in the late-18th century. Winslow Homer’s Country Classroom from 1871 depicts a single-room school in the Catskills. Though there are both boys and girls present, they are still seated at opposite sides of the room with the exception of the crying boy sitting with the girls. This time period is when most women were able to work outside the home for the first time, and schoolteaching was popular as it seemed to fit into their “womanly duties.”

Speaking of womanly duties, only women were allowed to instruct other women in art classes in the 19th century because art made and taught by men was much too serious and important to be concerned with the opposite sex. Marie Bashkirtseff’s In the Studio from 1881 carries a tension that emanates from the instructor and one of the students, a feeling to which many art students can relate. The young model in this figure class looks directly at the viewer as if he can sense the tension as well, breaking that invisible artist-subject and subject-viewer barrier with a look that implies, “I can’t believe she just said that.”

Flash forward to the not-so-distant future where outsourced teaching will become the norm. “Engkey” is a robot technology that teachers can access remotely. There are about 30 of these robots in use in South Korea right now, teaching English to primary school kids. Technology is becoming more prevalent in education all the time, and while it can be useful in helping students access information quickly, there is no guarantee in its ability to help students retain this information. There is something to be said about the connection that can only be established through person to person interaction, a crucial aspect in creating memories and making cognitive connections, which is how real learning happens. The day will surely come when robots will be regular fixtures in our homes, workplaces, and schools, but hopefully it will not get to the point where we forget how to teach ourselves and become dependent on machines for knowledge.

Surely Rainer Ganahl would be present for the day that a robot gives a lecture to an audience of humans for the first time for the ever-growing “S/L” series, but for now we can still enjoy the images he captures of humanity today.

“Artists - Recent Photographs from My S/L Series”  is on view at Kai Matsumiya through November 1, 2015.

— Hayley Richardson 

The Dikeou Collection houses some puzzling artworks that defy space, materiality, and presentation, but with some background information provided by one of the docents or from the cell phone tour, visitors can understand the meaning and intent behind them. One of the simplest and most unassuming of works, though, is the one that raises the most questions that can be tricky to explain. A Fine Monday Morning by Luis Macias is a series of ten lithographs that, according to the curator’s statement, meditates on “the between-ness of things.” This includes the “between-ness” of art and decoration, client and creator, what is spoken and what is heard, permanence and impermanence, integration and consumption, real and surreal. The scenes are from inside Bette Midler’s luxurious Fifth Avenue apartment, for which Macias was one of its interior decorators and fabricators. These seemingly banal shots of lamp fixtures and staircases are interrupted by cartoonish speech bubbles filled with phrases that make no sense like, “dirt in the T-shirt Molly is the real brainabuse.” Frustration is the underlying cause of this gibberish, which stems from a broken intercom system that cannot be repaired or replaced - a situation that irks both the designer and the patron. A story such as this, about the dramas of decorating one’s home, would bore your face off if it was told over brunch by your mother-in-law, but Macias turns it into an artful symbolist tale of intrigue that leaves the viewer wanting to know more.

Exhibited alongside A Fine Monday Morning is a thirty-minute video by Macias called Superbarn. Superbarn is a documentation of Lucy Dikeou’s (Devon Dikeou’s mother) home in Aspen, Colorado. The video begins with Lucy telling the story of how the home came into being, starting off as a barn before undergoing renovation in 1969. She mentions the prolific early-twentieth century English poet, novelist, and garden designer, Vita Sackville-West, who transformed the mid-fourteenth century Long Barn in Kent, England into her grand home, thus aligning herself and her domestic achievements with that of English cultural nobility. Ms. Dikeou worked closely with her personal designer to create the detailed, finely tuned interiors of her home, which she describes room by room. Everything from the wallpaper, hand towels, and planters, to the artwork and chandeliers has a unique story about their origins and Lucy’s adventures in acquiring them, which she earnestly recounts with much specificity.

There are moments when Macias’ camera pans across a bookshelf or through a closet of robes when one can hear snippets of conversation from people out of view saying, “I don’t want to go to lunch with him,” or “I wish you wouldn’t say those things.” These brief instances are what make the connection between the video and the lithographs apparent. They are those fragments one overhears from another room, echoing down the hall and permeating through walls, that only make sense when in their immediate presence. Superbarn and A Fine Monday Morning show how the home is an environment that appears orderly on the surface but has surreal undertones created by those who share an intimate relationship with the space, but to which they may not be attuned because they are so enmeshed with their surroundings. Macias has the ability to assimilate himself with these spaces and their residents, but is still far enough removed to notice all the quirky eccentricities and reinterpret them artistically.

Artists and designers have a long history of utilizing one another’s strategies and materials to manifest their own creations, but rarely do they share their underlying concepts of function and expressiveness. An artist like Andrea Zittel and designers like Charles and Ray Eames are examples of professionals who have achieved much success in their abilities to cross over from their respective form/function realms and create a balance between the two. The question remains, though: does one has more precedent or influence than the other? According to New York designer Marc Hohmann , art is “a compass for design.” Conversely, Kevin Buist from ArtPrize posits that art presents questions and problems while design seeks to answer and solve them. They basically constitute two sides of the same coin. Where they do intersect is that both art and design have the ability to convey messages that make us think differently about the world. In regards to Luis Macias, he problematizes domestic space by compounding the familiar with the deranged, and challenges the viewer to probe beyond what is obvious and realize how outlandish the ordinary world can be.

A Fine Monday Morning appears in issue 8 of zingmagazine , and Macias’ statement for the project says, “This three-nippled artist lives and works in the most beautiful and fashionable island in the Mediterranean Sea: Mallorca. When asked about his domestic mood, he answered, ‘What I hate most is to bend down in order to get my slippers under the bed.’” A fine example of an artist presenting a problem. How does the designer in him respond? See below.

-Hayley Richardson

Before visitors enter the Dikeou Collection on the fifth floor of the Colorado Building, they encounter Misaki Kawai’s Mars Investigation Laboratory installation in the building’s lobby. For as massive as the piece is (it couldn’t fit in the elevator to make up to the galleries), few people make mention of it until they see her Untitled (Large Plane), at which point they exclaim, “Oh! This is by the same artist who made that piece downstairs.” Misaki’s style is so distinct that first time viewers can identify her work without even being that familiar with it. Her artwork is an honest reflection of her personality; she believes art should be fun and she values imagination and integrity over technique. On the surface her execution may appear rough and puerile, but anyone who has personally handled, assembled, or physically been inside of these artworks can vouch for how expertly crafted they are. Her familial and cultural background, along with her collector’s mentality, provide the groundwork of her aesthetic, but it is her ability to shun convention and create by her own rules that has made her a stand-out artist in the saturated New York scene.

Misaki’s father was an architect who painted for a hobby while her mother made clothes and puppets. She went to art school in Kyoto and then moved to New York to start her career. In her biography she is compared to Atsuko Tanaka and Yayoi Kusama via her use of color, pattern, and material, but another rich area of Japanese aesthetics that Misaki draws from is heta-uma, “an anime-derived method that risks amateur aesthetics by embracing basic expression.” Heta-uma loosely translates to unskillful but skillful, or as Misaki describes it, “bad technique, good sense,” and was coined in the 1980s by a Japanese illustrator named Teruhiko Yuasa. The style gained traction in the mid-1970s when Japan experienced an economic resurgence and stable political atmosphere. Artists were eager to experiment and assimilated with mainstream culture.

Illustration by Teruhiko Yuasa

Painting by Suzy Amakane

Prevalent characteristics of heta-uma artwork include loud colors, visceral line work, bent perspective, and odd proportions. Scenes are humorous, but also involve violent and/or sexual fantasy. Manic people, bootlegish pop-culture characters, and bizarre imaginary creatures populate the spectacle. In America, heta-uma would fall somewhere along the spectrum between art brut and kitsch, but it is too deliberate and conscious in approach to follow the latter and tends to be more subversive and deranged than the former. Heta-uma is its own brand of weirdness that only the island-dwellers of Japan could concoct, and Misaki Kawai has carved her own niche within this particular genre.

Mars Lab, detail

Large Plane, detail

Large Plane andMars Lab are heta-uma in the sense that they eschew any serious subject matter or commentary and the zany environments look more like something out of a child’s fantasy than art made by an adult. The human characters inside these environments have elongated bodies with torsos that turn into heads with no necks or shoulders, tiny, spindly appendages, and mops of fur for hair. The characters’ faces are photos of people she knows, admires, or of herself (think of those bootleg references). The mad scientists in Mars Lab breed yellow Furby creatures, while members of The Beatles ride first class in Large Plane with a caged gorilla in the back while four versions of Misaki aimlessly pilot the craft. All of the fabrics used in these installations are second-hand and mismatched, clashing with one another and creating a dizzy optical effect; the eye can hardly stay focused, instilling wonder and confusion. Traditionally, heta-uma is two-dimensional, appearing in anime and manga, but Misaki brings the style into the three-dimensional realm, thrusting these miniature yet also mammoth worlds into our reality.

One can’t help but be charmed by the light-hearted innocence that emanates from Misaki’s artwork, but she doesn’t shy away from the risque elements that are a part of heta-uma. Issues of Playboy and internet porn can be found on the plane, and she portrays nudity and other suggestive imagery in other artworks, but exercises enough restraint to keep viewers happily engaged instead of shy away. In broad terms, a lot of Japanese pop art is either cutesy or lurid, but Misaki effortlessly balances this dichotomy, making her an innovator in this particular genre. Heta-uma is still an underground movement, but Misaki’s art moves easily in the public domain, from venues like the Museum of Modern Art in Japan to the Children’s Museum of the Arts in NYC. By fusing the familiar and the domestic with her relentless imagination and quirky techniques, she is able to introduce the heta-uma art form to people of all ages around the globe.

-Hayley Richardson

Vik Muniz’ The Last Supper (Milan), created in 1997, was one of the first artworks incorporated into the Dikeou Collection; it is also the first in his popular series, “Pictures of Chocolate.” It is a harbinger of sorts, imbued with a sense of preeminence that set the trajectory of the collection and of Muniz’ chocolate streak, yet it is not an original composition. The Last Supper (Milan) is in fact a copy of a copy, stemming from Da Vinci’s iconic 1495 fresco and subsequently appropriated by Warhol in 1986, which served as the inspiration for Muniz’ chocolate painting. Food, religious iconography, and appropriation are potent themes in this multi-layered work, but one crucial aspect of Muniz’ process in creating The Last Supper, along with much of his body of work, is one that is frequently glossed over, and that is its destruction. He meticulously creates images, both appropriated and original, out of food, dust, trash, toys, earth, and air, photographs them, then disposes of what he made, keeping the photograph as the art object. “Destroy” has strong and deliberate connotations, very different from “temporary” or “ephemeral,” which are soft and passive. What does it mean for an artist to intentionally destroy something of their own creation? What path is he following or setting by participating in this act?

Muniz started on this path of destruction out of necessity. In the early ‘90s he made sculptures out of plasticine to photograph, and then destroyed the sculptures to continue the process because he had only a small amount of the material to work with and would reuse it to make more sculptures.

From “The Sugar Children” series, 1996.

In 1995 he traveled to the island of St. Kitts in the Caribbean where he befriended the local children whose parents worked in the sugarcane fields. Struck by the parents’ emotional and physical plight, and their children’s inevitable inheritance of this difficult life, he created portraits of the children out of sugar, photographed the results, and then swept away the sugar and preserved the remains in small jars. This was a breakthrough series for Muniz which resulted in an invitation to participate in a major photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. His process remains the same today - create, document, destroy. Most artists would weep at the thought of destroying something they put so much work into, but for Muniz it is quite practical. Sure, he could use some kind of adhesive or fixative to give his handmade creations more permanency, but they would lose the legibility that only a photograph could produce.

”Double Mona Lisa, After Warhol, (Peanut Butter + Jelly),” 1999.

According to the Collaborative Arts Resources for Education website, Vik licked away his Last Supper chocolate painting after he photographed it, but it is not likely that he would have licked/consumed all of his food-based work. In his biography/catalogue raisonné, Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer, he stated that he hates the taste of peanut butter, which is one of the materials he used in his Double Mona Lisa (Peanut Butter + Jelly), so it is doubtful that he would have destroyed the piece by eating it. Perhaps he allowed someone else to consume the food; there is no definite answer. How he destroys the images he photographs, though, is not as important as positioning him amongst other artists who have done the same thing but for differing reasons.

Janine Antoni, “Lick and Lather,” 1993-1994.

Chocolate is a seductive substance, one that has tantalized artists for decades. Janine Antoni’s Lick and Lather uses chocolate’s decadent allure as a vehicle to express the dualistic yet circular relationship between creation and destruction. The defacement of these works was meant to be self-inflicted, but Lick and Lather has twice fallen victim to the mouths of viewers who bit off noses from the chocolate busts. Here we see how destruction functions as a means of creating an artwork, but also harms it when not performed by the artist. When an artwork is charged with a high level of intimacy from its creator, especially an intimacy that entails a level of degradation, the viewers’ boundaries can become blurred and feel that are they welcome to partake in the process.

Robert Rauschenberg, “Erased de Kooning Drawing,” 1953

One of the most (in)famous cases of a destroyed artwork is Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing , in which Rauschenberg obtained a drawing from the renowned AbEx artist for the sole purpose of erasing it from the page. Rauschenberg did this to discover if an artwork could be made through erasure, and initially did this to his own drawings, but found this method ineffective and uncreative; he had to erase a work of significance. de Kooning gave Rauschenberg one of his drawings, and, in knowing his intentions, chose one with media that was especially difficult to remove. It took Rauschenberg about a month to achieve a bare page, which was then placed in a frame inscribed by Jasper Johns. Vincent Katz aptly surmised Rauschenberg’s radical destructive tendencies: “Erased de Kooning Drawing symbolised what was iconic about much of what Rauschenberg did in those days – iconic and iconoclastic at the same time… it stands for an era when something seemingly negative could, in fact, turn out to have positive repercussions.” de Kooning willingly sacrificed his own art so that another artist could manifest his own vision. The story behind this work is far more valuable than piece itself, in both its original form and final form.

Sometimes an artist disposes of their work simply because they don’t like it. Monet took a knife to thirty of his waterlily canvases, John Baldessari burned more than a decade’s worth of art, and Louise Bourgeoise would break her small sculptures if they did not satisfy her. These instances often lead to a renewed perspective and creative rebirth. Attachment can lead to stagnancy, a lesson that Vik likely learned on a visit to The Asia Society in New York in the mid-‘90s. There he saw a beautifully intricate and painstakingly executed sand mandala get swept away by the Tibetan monks who created it. Flabbergasted by what he saw, Vik incessantly questioned one of the monks how he could destroy something that helped create. Finally the monk admitted that he took pictures of the mandala before it was swept, a tip that he likely kept in his head during that journey to St. Kitts.

-Hayley Richardson

Ester Partegàs is interested in examining the minute, overlooked aspects of prevalent themes in contemporary life. As the adage goes, the devil is in the details, and Partegàs scrutinizes broad issues of place/space, consumerism, and isolation with her replicas of portable headphones, newspapers, candy bars, and airplane pillows in her sculpture, Homeless (1999), at Dikeou Collection. She dissects these details and replications even further in Detours, a series of drawings she began in 2001 that mimic cashier receipts, one of which she created as a poster for zingmagazine issue 17. When viewers encounter Homeless and Detours, they are presented with objects that are common and uninteresting yet embedded with compelling insight that begs for a closer look at the things we deem unimportant yet engage with on a daily basis.

Homeless is a replica of an airplane chair constructed out of wood and styrofoam, accessorized with wares that only serve temporary functions before being discarded. The chair and its accoutrements represent the living environment of the contemporary nomad and their entrapment in consumer culture. Who is this contemporary nomad? Judging by the bags from Helmut Lang and Kate Spade, the laptop, and the copy of The New York Times, this is a nomad who likely travels for business. The ubiquitous name brands and the need to stay informed and connected via the internet and newspaper are what ground this traveler with some sense of familiarity as the scenery and the people change. The chair itself is a grounding mechanism as well, serving as the place where one eats, sleeps, works, and maybe squeezes in some entertainment and socializing. These objects provide familiarity and functionality, but not comfort, which is a feeling most naturally achieved in a home environment.

When one is outside of the home and in the public realm, it is to be expected that everything a person needs will have to be purchased. Gasoline, parking, picking up dry cleaning, lunch, shopping…every activity is essentially a monetary transaction. With Detours Partegàs takes sales receipts, the calling card of consumption, and turns those transactions inward. Phrases like “I can’t stand the house anymore,” “Some days I feel so worthless,” and “I am desperate for something new and exciting” appear on the receipts with each word itemized as a product and its cost. Essentially,

Detours shows how everything outside the home comes at a price, and even one’s most private thoughts can be nickel and dimed while in the midst of these transactions.

Image courtesy of Foxy Production

Image courtesy of Foxy Production

Image courtesy of Foxy Production

Ester is currently exhibiting a new body of work in her solo show, “The Passerby,” at Foxy Production, where she turns her focus to objects that would be found at construction sites and camp grounds rather than travel destinations and department stores. In “The Passerby,” she recreates and recontextualizes plastic tarps, buckets, box containers, and shipping labels by meticulously and beautifully recrafting them and placing them in a gallery. Tarps, which are cheap, durable, and meant to cover and protect things more precious than themselves, are transformed into gauzy polyurethane veils which are hung from the ceiling like fine silks. The crinkled texture of the heavy tarp, formally a weathered sign of use, is now an area of visual interest that is more comparable to delicate gold leaf than foldable plastic. The buckets and storage bins are cast in a colored resin with their handmade qualities not immediately apparent, encouraging viewers to closely inspect these items that they would otherwise ignore. These containers are filled with oversized silkscreened replicas of shipping labels and airline tags, which are documents of people and objects passing between various destinations.

Ester Partegàs’ ability to subtly yet effectively point out the deeper meanings inherent within seemingly inconsequential items helps us to gain a greater understanding of the world around us. She does very little to change these objects’ appearance or function, but by simply giving them some handmade love and attention and tweaking the context she amplifies their value. The effectiveness of her work has longterm sustainability beyond the gallery space, meaning we can learn how to train ourselves to be more mindful of the objects we live with everyday, appreciate their usefulness and craftsmanship, and therefore feel satisfied with simplicity. Doing so will lower our drive to consume and allow us to find peace with the way things are and not what they “should” be. Her work at Dikeou Collection and her show at Foxy Production begs us to be considerate of the space between places and things and the details that populate these spaces. In doing so, life starts to fill out and become whole as opposed to a series of connect-the-dot motions with so much emptiness in between.

-Hayley Richardson