Two New Artist’s Books
Two new artist’s books, Civil War and Dispersion, have been released to coincide with the exhibition at JB JURVE.
About Civil War:
Civil War is a re-articulation of Bertolt Brecht’s 1943 poem, “The Active Discontented,” in which each of the 22 lines of the poem counterpoises a montage of images drawn from conflicting spheres of capitalist spectacle.
24 pages, color. Available from blurb. Can be previewed.
About Dispersion:
Dispersion enacts the “sprinkling” that serves Brecht as metaphor for egalitarian distribution in the nine-line poem “Of Sprinkling in the Garden” as a dispersal of the text of the poem itself, which has been transformed via conversion into an enlarged ANSI text image into a sequence of alphabetic fragments spread over 190 pages. The book supplements the presentation at JB JURVE in Los Angeles of the same poem as a dispersible floor piece (with the text spread over 180 letter-size inkjet prints placed on the gallery floor) that visitors were invited to walk over and shift with their feet.
200 pages, black and white. Available from Amazon. Limited preview.
Upcoming Show at JB Jurve, Jan. 14–Feb. 11, 2012
Civil War (Who Gorged Themselves on a Plate of Promises), 2011 (inkjet prints, tape, 153 x 88 inches)
Civil War, LA-based artist Mario Cutajar’s first show at JB JURVE, takes its name from a slogan spray-painted on a wall above a burning car set alight by Italian protestors enraged by the financial shenanigans that precipitated the current global economic crisis. The image of the burning car, montaged with a publicity shot of a face-to-face couple from the cable TV show The Real Housewives of New York, is presented as a photomural-size enlargement assembled from 142 inkjet prints. This montage and two similarly sized others on display at JB Jurve originated as part of a suite of 22 that Cutajar created as an accompaniment to Bertolt Brecht’s 1943 poem, “The Active Discontented.”
A fourth, floor-placed piece rearticulates the text of another Brecht poem, “Of Sprinkling in the Garden,” which Brecht wrote while living in Santa Monica as a refugee from Nazi-ruled Germany. Cutajar has enlarged the text, sliced it into letter- size sections, and invited gallery visitors to reshuffle it with their feet as they move about the gallery. “Of Sprinkling in the Garden” records the joy of showering water on all the thirsty trees and plants in the poet’s garden, including the weeds and “even the naked soil.” The floor piece reenacts this egalitarian distribution as a dispersion of the text itself.
Cutajar notes that “Of Sprinkling in the Garden” resonates with the Maoist slogan of “Letting a hundred flowers blossom,” to which the Occupy movement and the mass mobilizations associated with the Arab Spring have given new pertinence. “The gallery can also be conceived of as a site of pleasure and cultivation linked to Brecht’s allegorical garden, where the sprinkling of water has erotic as well as political connotations. Brecht’s poetry fuses politics and art into a single metabolic process of taking in and intensifying the reality at hand.”
Cutajar use of montage conjures that of John Heartfield, whose work he has in the past directly referenced. “But it is Heartfield as he appears through the intervening filters of Situationist graphics, what I think of as the Franciscan aesthetics of Arte Povera, and the DIY improvisations of hacking. Capitalism derealizes the world by repressing connections, by compartmentalizing. It separates destitution from accumulation, war from business, military aggression from the way propaganda constructs the enemies that justify its application. Montage is a way to piece things back together but without hiding that this reconstruction is provisional, of the order of a psychoanalytical interpretation, which Freud was the first to recognize, is always a myth.”
In addition to the wall-mounted works, the gallery will also make two related, limited edition artist’s books (Civil War and Dispersion) available for perusal.
JB JURVE is located at 742 North Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90012-2820.
Spectre
Spectre evolved into Civil War. See above.
Spin
Spin takes its cue from Walter Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer,” in which he dismisses the distinction between “writing and image” and proposes that the photographer “give his picture the caption that wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it a revolutionary useful value.” In these altered news photographs, I have supplied the caption as a single word that cuts, disrupts, and reconstructs the image as a photo/text hybrid that must be viewed and read simultaneously. The title, Spin, invokes the now customary euphemism for dissimulation but also the Situationist practice of détournement and, more distantly, Magritte’s notion of ”the treachery of images.”
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