Artist’s new film at Nuart
not merely a declaration of intent. It is central to the creation of an identity. A world that excludes the artist’s values is ascertained and described, while a new world that includes and engages them is not merely proposed but insisted upon. Manifestos demand.
“I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero,” Claes Oldenburg wrote in 1961. As the words are spoken, Blanchett, decked out as a tightly coiled, upper-middle-class mom calling her family to a precisely orchestrated Sunday dinner, seems poised to shatter like untempered glass.
The specific relationship between this domestic vignette and Oldenburg’s Pop art text is unclear. Perhaps that ambiguity is because the artist has always denied that “I Am For …” is indeed a manifesto. He calls it a satire. In poetic language, he goes about tearing down the era’s lofty critical demand for abstraction as art’s theoretically highest value, replacing it with a matter-offact catalog of everyday ephemera.
Among the 95-minute film’s more convincing hybrids of image and text is the startling collision afforded by Tristan Tzara’s 1918 Dada manifesto. Blanchett, chicly attired, declares: “I speak only of myself since I do not wish to convince, I have no right to drag others into my river, I oblige no one to follow me and everybody practices his art in his own way, if he knows the joy that rises like arrows to the astral layers, or that other joy that goes down into the mines of corpse-flowers and fertile spasms.”
She delivers this beleaguered, post-World War I shriek of worn-out horror as a graveside eulogy. A shellshocked throng, arrayed in black as a classical frieze like “A Burial at Ornans,” Courbet’s epic 1850 painting of a provincial funeral, awaits the lowering of a flower-bedecked casket into the earth.
Originally presented at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image two years ago, “Manifesto” was shown on 13 individual screens suspended in space. A viewer could move among them, the fractured person known as “Cate Blanchett” happening all at once.
Now, projected on a single screen at the Nuart Theatre starting Friday — the work loses that edge. Reassembled into a linear film (about 30 minutes have been cut), “Manifesto” retains control of sequence and time. Rosefeldt attempts to inject a bit of the old breakup by intercutting among a few vignettes, but the effort feels perfunctory.
The loss isn’t debilitating, however, which is one measure of Blanchett’s power as an actor. She slips into the jarringly disjunctive roles of stockbroker, garbage worker, corporate CEO, punk, scientist, puppeteer, choreographer, TV news reader and teacher, as well as the aforementioned Mom and eulogist.
The film opens and closes with her transformation into a grimy homeless man. His vagrancy, adrift in the chill ruins of a bleak industrial landscape, presents a rootless person without a known identity.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, independent manifestos replaced the rules formulated by staterun art academies. The possibility for movement away from society’s assigned roles made them a staple for art. With skill and erudition, Rosefeldt’s film surveys the aftermath.
Nuart Theatre, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., L.A. Starting Friday. (310) 473-8530, www. landmarktheatres.com
Thousands roam an indoor desert
No man — or woman — is an island in a new installation by London-based Israeli artist Zadok Ben-David. Sand is the unstable ground on which thousands of individually cut-out figures stand, each visually intertwined with the others in an otherwise barren desert.
Using a chemical-etching technique, Ben-David cut more than 3,000 miniature figures from thin metal sheets. They fill a gallery, standing upright on a field of sand more than 37 feet wide and 43 feet deep.
The images are based on casual photographs the sculptor took on global travels — “People I Have Seen but Never Met,” as the title of the exhibition (his third) at Shoshana Wayne Gallery explains. Nobody does anything the slightest bit unusual in this proliferation of individual portraits.
People stroll, take selfies, crouch to tie a shoelace, check their cellphones, hurry on, search inside a purse or set a backpack on the ground for a rest. A woman in a kimono uses an open fan to shield her head from the sun.
A boy rides a bicycle, a man looks at a book. Most of the people are alone, though a few couples appear.
Each figure is less than a foot tall. Dispersed among them are more than 50 relative giants, not quite waist-tall; their height is the only distinguishing feature that separates them from the throng. (The big ones are cut from steel rather than aluminum like the small ones, apparently for sturdiness.) Given the photographic precision of the cutouts, the shift in size is like a sudden close-up taken from a telephoto lens.
Ben-David painted all the cutouts matte black, which gives the figures the graphic punch of two-dimensional ink drawings in three-dimensional space. The acute precision with which the metal is cut and the fine-grained sand is brushed resonates against the easy casualness of the figurative activity. Ben David is looking hard at informality.
Maquettes with a small number of cutouts in plexiglass boxes in a side gallery allow for close viewing, although absent the installation’s sheer numbers they feel like boxed-set souvenirs. I also kept wondering what the main installation might be like if a riot of color were introduced — something Ben-David has done in other works — a joyous cacophony of excited variety instead of the rather dour sobriety of this monochrome field.
Since the cutouts afford visual transparency, what we see are figures glimpsed within figures. Women are within men and vice versa, sexes are interspersed, races commingle, ordinariness is exalted through it all. Everything feels transient, ephemeral. The sentiment might not be uncommon, but its artistic manifestation is.
Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica. Through Saturday; closed Sundays and Mondays. (310) 453-1595, www. shoshanawayne.com
Stark portraits of obsolescence
Barely a single living soul is glimpsed in 48 black-andwhite urban photographs from the late 1970s and early 1980s by Berlin-based Ulrich Wust. When people are there, they’re typically obscured behind the windshield of a car on an otherwise empty city street, hidden within a dark sidewalk shadow in the composition’s margins or far off in the distance, back near the vanishing point of a brick roadway lined with shabby buildings.
In a picture of a wintry city park, the only person playing is a static sculpture of an athlete with a ball, frozen in mid-leap. Call these photographs civic portraits without the civitas.
At Christopher Grimes Gallery, Wust’s debut in an American gallery (he has shown at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Mass.) is a somewhat mixed affair. The cityscapes are at once novel and familiar.
Trained as a city planner in Communist East Germany, Wust began to use a camera in 1972 to record and study urban development in a straightforward, inexpressive manner. One result is a visual format that recalls long-established artistic motifs by German forebears like Bernd and Hilla Becher, Albert Renger-Patzsch and August Sander from earlier in the 20th century, as well as American photographers like Lewis Baltz, Judy Fiskin and others related to the New Topographic movement of the 1970s and after.
Wust pictures the city’s putative soullessness before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Patterns of construction that underlie a superficial urban diversity often look strange — alienating, mostly, in these emotionally blank photographs.
More compelling is a group of seven more recent color pictures (they date from 1990, as Communism was in collapse) selected from a larger compendium. They might be called portraits of domestic objects — a desk lamp, a spice grinder, a thermos, a plaid purse, etc. The lamp is tattered, the grinder filthy, while the handbag’s handle is incongruously tangled up in rubber bands.
Here to be remembered, however dimly, and not forgotten, each is placed in profile on the same babyblue checkered tablecloth before a baby-pink floralpatterned wall, like portraits uniformly chronicled in an authorized yearbook or a catalog of damaged goods. Collectively titled “Nachlass” (“Estate”), they are what is left behind when an entire society dies.
Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through June 17. Closed Sunday and Monday. www. cgrimes.com