Two Exhibitions in September: Beyond Geometry and Ed Ruscha

LA county museum of Art is an unpretentious gem hidden at Wilshire Boulevard. Under the glow of Getty it does not get much attention from the public although it has one of the best art collections in the country and frequently mounts impressive special exhibitions. Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1949s-70s, was an ambitious thematic project that sets out to examine the role of simplified form in art from a global point of view. It lumps many post-world war II art movements into one compact space, giving special attention to non-American artists whom have not been widely exhibited in this country, encouraging the audience to find the links and evolutions in such an expansive intercontinental discourse. Starting from early geometric art to concrete and neo-concrete art (some put all these three under post-painterly abstraction as opposed to abstract expressionism), the show becomes the most lively at the op art, kinetic art and American minimalism phases and then somehow ends up confusingly with all the diverse styles of “conceptual art”. With all the unusual forms, sounds, colors and lights and pieces all over the places, the exhibition hall feels like an Exploratorium for an untrained layman. The experience is further discounted due to the cramped space. Since most of these pieces work on the senses and perceptions, a spacious and well-lighted environment is much more preferred (as in Dia Becon). The other problem is the inclusion of the conceptual art. It seems to me that any of the new movements after kinetic art, no matter it is installation, performances or environmental art, as long as it dealt with forms or used serializations, they can all be included here (which they did). They do fit under the theme “Beyond Geometry” here, but somehow the connection with geometry could be quite a stretch. On the positive side, I really enjoyed works from a few South Americans: Lygia Pape, Helio Oiticica, and Jesus Rafael Soto. They may not be as spiritually ground-breaking as minimalism, but they were quite skilled and experimental and left wonderful works that aged better with time.

Ed Ruscha has always been lionized as the icon of pop art from LA. But instead of seeing his works in LA, I caught the large retrospective at New York Whitney one day before the show was closed. Actually the exhibition was divided into two parts. The photographs were shown at the first floor, and the drawings and larger pieces took the entire third floor. However, I found the photography session much more memorable than his more well-known word paintings. Some of his photos, such as all the buildings on Sunset Boulevard or the aerial view of parking lots, were already famous enough to end up in art history books. But it was the more obscure photo books and early photos taken in his Europe trip that caught my eyes. In the photo books Ed Ruscha demonstrated his deadpan humor that was both hilarious and thought-provoking, while in the European photos we could already detect many of the ideas and aesthetics he would develop much further in his future paintings. Even among the word paintings, the works from 60s and 70s, although often in much smaller canvases, give away much more subtlety and tenderness his later and larger paintings don’t have. Their small sizes draw the viewer in so that all the details and shades are observed, yet the linguistic meaning of the word remains mystic and indecipherable since there is not much background to interpret it other than the word’s own meaning. This ambivalence is exactly the trick. In 80s and 90s, Ed Rusha’s paintings got bigger and more colorful and start to resemble the posters more and more. On the first sight they almost look computer-generated by some graphic designers with slick surfaces and block letters of varying sizes. The earlier charm is unfortunately lost.

Motorcycle Diaries

Few books affected me more than Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries in my younger years. The book inspired both wanderlust and an everlasting adoration for Che. It also helped form my own ideology and political judgment when I was still ultimately apolitical. Years passed and the book has been staying on my shelf collecting dust, while I traveled much of South and Central America and felt strangely home in all these remote countries I would never have imagined to set my feet on. I could only say that all these adventures, all these affinities to a vast continent so different from my own, probably started from this small magic book.So when I heard the book was adapted into a movie by Brazilian director Walter Sallers, it became the most waited film of the year for me. I was afraid the movie would destroy all those imaginations built through the years (with backdrop landscapes culled from my own traveling), but a visualization of that enchanting and strenuous journey is also very appealing and exciting (especially with Gael Garcia Bernal in it).

I finally watched the movie with a large group of friends, many of whom with Latin heritages. I walked out of the theatre with mixed feelings. The movie is almost just as good as I expected, yet I found it unsatisfying. Maybe the fault is the medium itself. In order to make a coherent movie, Sallers spent much of the time building up the plot and the characters and even ended the movie with a Hollywood-like triumphant crossing of the Amazon, many of which were not even mentioned in the original book. Sallers also took the liberty to cut and paste the diaries and rearrange the small anecdotes to make the story flow better. I don’t see this as a bad practice, but it certainly altered the existing pace and rhythm of the book. The voice-over is the best Saller can do to convey the tone of the book. Gone are the poetry and the cerebral reflections. But as visual medium, a film can also do what the book can’t do. Unfortunately Salles could only provide some breathtaking landscape without personal feelings. The movie sees what a usual traveler sees. It is not necessarily what Che had seen.

The problem could be that Salles may not be the best person to adapt a road story like this. It is too easy for him to trap us in the same sentimentality he was so good at in his earlier films (Central Stations). Just as the book, the movie has a light and comical air in the beginning but eventually took a somber turn once the protagonists got to Andes, but this turn was rather sudden and the witnessed miseries did not point well to the wakening of Che’s political conscience. The tears were simply too cheaply won. As a book, Motorcycle Diaries was much more than a tour of places or tour of hearts. Even if the movie tried hard to go beyond that, it did not succeed.

As a reference, I went back to reread the chapters in one of the best biography book “Che Guevara: A Revolutional Life”, written by Jon Lee Anderson. Salles clearly took some notes from the same pages since much of the highlights in the movie were all here (but not in the diaries). Two more observations: The final close-up of real-life Alberto (who is well into his 80s) reminds me of “Rabbit Proof Fence”, and the back-and-white stills of the workers and peasants and Indians seemed to come straight from end of “Mango Yellow”, another Brazilian film on working-class people in Recife.

Incidentally, as I am also finishing reading Garcia Marquez’s General in Labyrinth, I can not help but compare Che to Simon Bolivar. Both were ferocious fighters, poets, avid readers, and rigorous intellectuals. Both grew up in privileged families and traveled widely. Both died young and fought the whole life for a united America but failed miserably in the end, and both became martyrs to inspire millions to follow. Heroic and tragic, Che and Bolivar are unique to South America, to its tumultuous history and continuous struggling, to its melodramatic culture sensibilities and sentimentality, to its need for hopes, dreams, and optimism. As today’s extreme capitalism continues to divide the world into rich and poor and exhaust the world’s natural resources, we have more reasons to challenge the status quo and seek alternative solutions for a better and fairer society. Che would always to be the symbol of this idealism and this selfless search of the truth. The violence he resorted to has proved to be futile and unwise, but his high spirit and combatant energy would live on. As I stood outside the theatre and looked around and saw all those young inquisitive faces, I felt I was one of them.

Urban Illusionist: Yang Yong

Since YangYong burst into the scene in 1999, she has been hailed as one of the major symbol for the new art trend coming from the south. Still in her twenties, her works have already been well exhibited around the world, with solo shows in Asia, US, and Europe. The success of YangYong raised two critical questions: Judged from a more universal point of view, are her works real breakthroughs in the contemporary photography? How is she positioned in the current Chinese avant-garde movement?

More than one critic described her style as Nan Goldin’s, which I would dispute. Nan Goldin often uses snapshot method to catch people in the middle of the act, or barely out of the act for a brief pose. She would often use harsh flashlight to emphasize the raw emotional state of the wounded characters, and the effect is often intimate and disturbing. YangYong, on the other hand, is clearly in much more control. She used both her friends and the strangers to stage the scenes, asking them to act out either under her guidance or improvise. She often changes the camera angle and reconfigures her group of characters to convey a sense of change and mobility. Also, she is very meticulous about the background and the lighting, using mostly natural light to construct an alienated, intensely-color-saturated urban jungle where her characters seem random, lost, distant and melancholy. YangYong appears to be much more a film maker than photographer, which came as no surprise since she was first a video artist before focusing on photography. You can clearly see some of Wong KarWai in her. Her training in painting also influenced her significantly, giving these images superb color, lighting, and sculpture-like compositions.

Therefore there is really nothing technically innovative about YangYong, but her images are fresh and beautiful. The other methods, such as staging, performance and serialization, are also very popular among Chinese art photographers, but YangYong is among the few who are able to produce the most poetic and unforgettable works. She quickly caught the attention of the international art world partly due to her subject matters, which are often beautiful prostitutes in a commercialized ever-changing Chinese city. In the end, foreigners also see exactly what they want to see, and her success comes from a perfect fusion of her talent and the particular need of market and history.