The world is a diminished place in “I Don’t Watch the Internet,” Fleisher-Ollman Gallery’s seventh annual emerging artist survey. A non-themed invitational that’s big on miniatures and works that whir and clack, the show rounds up modest-scale sculptures, and drawings and forlorn videos that fit with the current economic climate.

James Johnson, Stop Following Me, image courtesy Fleisher-Ollman Gallery

Viewers are in the land of disenchantment with nine artists who are wizards of sentimentality (or faux sentimentality). This isn’t kitsch, although, like most artists, these individuals seem to have been inspired by Jeff Koons, the master of post-modern irony and ambiguity.

James Johnson, Stop Following Me, 2009. neon sign, foam insulation, cardboard, box, extension cord. 12x48x12" 1/5

Stop Following Me, a neon word piece by James Johnson, is the most overtly postmodern piece in the show. The fabricated neon sign is in its shipping box, lid-open, on the floor. From afar, the box emits a delicious blue light that reels you in, the hook for the passive-aggressive punchline. An edition of five, Stop Following Me is an object conflicted– like a teen who hates you yet needs a trip to the mall, please. If the piece is a comment on the dumbing-down of our whole culture, I buy it.

Cari Freno, Hold (from the Pocahantas State Park series) 2009 HD video loop, ed. 35

Videos by Cari Freno, Hold and Hang, are also highly postmodern. The artist, seen embracing a tree (in Hold) and hanging from a tree (in Hang), seems to accept and poke fun at “tree-hugging” at the same time.

Jay Hardman, Cake Block, 2009. synthetic chocolate cake, frosting, wood, concrete

Even works made from new materials—like Jay Hardman’s wonderful miniature landscapes made of chocolate cake and icing, or James Johnson’s minimalist dollhouse rooms—contribute to the ambiance of a played-out universe, a place we know and are fond of but are emotionally distanced from.

Gabriel Boyce, Green Screen 2009, aluminum tubing, plastic webbing, rivets 70 1/2 x 55 1/2 x 1"

There is cultural commentary everywhere. Gabriel Boyce’s Green Screen, a hand-fashioned “Shoji” screen made of cheap plastic webbing and bent aluminum rods is an unlikely mashup. But as a comment on American tackiness washing over something elegant, Green Screen is right on Target (ahem).

Jordan Griska, Gas Pump, 2009. vintage 1960s gas pump, hydraulics, 53x24x18"

Jordan Griska’s Gas Pump, a real pump reduced to child’s size by a series of origami folds in the metal frame, feels cautionary. The piece (which smells vaguely of gas) is somehow both cute and monstrous.

Ashley John Pigford, 28,770 Megabytes, 2008. computer hard drives, micro controller, electronics, wood, wire. 36x34x6"

Ashley John Pigford’s interactive computer-part gizmos clack and knock wood (literally, with wooden mallets on xylophone keys) when you push a button. The hacked and neutered electronics are reduced to court jesters—vehicles of entertainment. And John Broderick Heron’s table-top construction landscapes teetering on sticks show a world completely out of whack.

Installation shot, with Jay Hardman's Vacancy in foreground and Sarah Laina Koljonen’s Comma Scroll, rear, on wall

In a weird twist, most of the drawings in the show (apart from a series of small works by Boyce) feature small items scaled to supersize proportions. Sarah Laina Koljonen’s Comma Scroll puffs up and elongates several commas to ridiculous proportions, a comical play on the lack of commas in eastern grammar — or, perhaps, the super abundance of commas, in western grammar. Sebastien Leclercq’s monumental faux graph paper drawings (blue pencil on paper) likewise elevate the lowly graphing sheets to gargantuan proportions for risible ends.

A big dose of postmodernism might not be your cup of tea this holiday season, but this show will keep you smiling.

“I Don’t Watch the Internet.” Through Jan. 16. Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, 1616 Walnut St. 215.545.7562.

Ribas’ choices for the Arcadia Works on Paper exhibit raise issues of sharing, reproducibility and loss of copyright control. They raise disturbing questions about the value of all art at a time when works on paper have never been more highly valued.

James Johnson, 14K Sentences on Conceptual Art, 2009, framed silkscreen print on letter-sized sheet of 14 K gold on acid-free board, 14.75 x 12.5 inches

Ribas first shots across the bow, the first pieces in front of you as you walk into the gallery, are Michael Davis Carter’s gator, a tissue paper piece that appropriates the LaCoste alligator logo, and James Johnson’s 14K Sentences on Conceptual Art, a 14K gold sheet of paper on which is silkscreened an appropriation of Sol Lewitt’s Sentences on Contemporary Art. The reflective quality of the material and the art historical appropriation serve as a conceptual treatise on material value and creative value–Lewitt’s creative capital, Johnson’s creative capital, the means of production that crosses lines between the handmade and machine (computer) made and printed.

Gabriel Boyce and Preston Link, Health Care Bill, 2009 printed paper 11 x 8.5 x 3 inches

In that same front room, Gabriel Boyce and Preston Link offer on a pedestal another conceptual work–Health Care Bill, three inches of Congressional bureaucratese downloaded from the internet and stacked on a pedestal, the work representing value beyond the ability of most of us to calculate. I found it especially amusing that the gallery needed a young woman to stand guard over this particular piece, to make sure no one commandeered a piece of paper from the bill, a piece of paper of questionable value without the context! And

Bruce Campbell, Directional drawing, 2008, graphite on cut paper on board, 43.25 x 65 inches. This is the largest piece in the show.

Bruce Campbell’s Directional Drawing, with words scrawled over a paper incised with a Frank Stella geometric shape–another art-historical appropriation–brings into question 1968 aesthetics and value at the same time that Campbell appropriates and incorporates into his own value system a piece of Stella’s creative capital!

Robert T. Pannell, Revision, 2006, photo etching, 11.25 x 24 inches

Robert T. Pannell and Pernot Hudson pull the rug out from the assumptions of our common culture–oy, those Indians got such a bad deal, speaking of value. Hudson’s print/drawing of a sheriff’s badge, Samburg’s Finest, drips with irony.

Mia Rosenthal, Breakfast cereals of this great nation, 2009, detail, ink and graphite on paper, 32 x 22.5 inches

The counterpoise to all these rather cynical meditations on value is a wall of five drawings that range from contemporary deadpan to doodly to an old-fashioned elegance of line–all of them raising questions of aesthetics. In this group, Mia Rosenthal’s cereal box grid drawing, an obsessive Roz Chast-like reuse and filtering of mass produced advertising, most pointedly continues the conversation about authorship and value (this and Leah Bailis’ Corner were the only works in the show I had seen before, but I was happy to revisit both of them).

Andrea Beizer, Three In bed, 2009, graphite on Arches, 22.5 x 31 inches

The others in that group on the wall with Cereal… suggest that cultural fashion and value are fickle, from Andrea Beizer’s Three in Bed, which passes for a contemporary cartoon, to John Costanza’s What did you do to the Booze Hickey? #2, which passes for a mid-20th-century one. In the mix of shifting tastes–Erika Mayer’s Knapsack Nation and Dino Vasquez Gargas Positivas.

Erika Mayer, Knapsack Nation, 2008-9, etching, 11 x 14.75 inches

Turns out there’s nothing in this show that doesn’t raise these questions about value and aesthetics. But the conversation about value is the more interesting and edgy of the two.

Mark Stockton, Composition 3, 2009, grphite of BFK Rives, 29 x 22.75 inches

As the show moves into the back room, a number of works copy popular culture images, using hand-reproduction methods that reinterpret the original values. I especially loved Fay Stanford’s Indigenous Princess, a highly unlikely image that turns the sentimentality of kitsch into a wild thing. Closer to my point about copying are Kristina Martin’s movie still and Mark Stockton’s Composition 3, the latter a drawn clipboard of media-celeb images. Matt Neff’s prints may valorize or criticize the Wu Tang Clan. He doesn’t give enough away for me to guess, but he’s playing in the same pond of appropriated pop culture.

That art work appropriating manufactured imagery is so widespread surely shows how far behind the courts are in handling the phenomenon of Shepard Fairey’s reuse of an AP photographer’s Obama portrait. The contentiousness about Fairey’s authorship, ironically, raises the value of the hand work, cheaply reproduced and sold over the internet, and the value of the photo, even more cheaply reproduced and sold over the wire services.

Gabriel Martinez, Untitled (Peking Ducks),"Pink" 2009, archival pigment print, 31 x 59 inches

Gabriel Martinez Untitled (Peking Ducks), “Pink” photo raises so many issues of identity, ownership, advertising, beauty, cultural hegemony, gender, duplication, yadda yadda yadda that it leaves me breathless. Martinez took the photo with a Holga camera in a gay pick-up park in Peking. He asked the subject to pose for him with pink Peeps ducks serving as a mask, but the subject, afraid of being recognized, tore out a magazine ad and covered his face with the advertising image of a woman’s face, and covered her unseeing eyes with the Peeps. The clash of cultures  is played out here in numerous ways, especially with the Western photographer and his Western Peeps and the Western influenced Eastern advertising image. Not to mention, on the love front, that peeps will be peeps. Amazing!!!

Quentin Morris, Untitled (Dec. 2008), 2008, December 2008, black gesso and polymer acrylic, 28 inches in diameter, courtesy Larry Becker Contemporary Art

Quentin Morris, who is a perennial presence in the Works on Paper show, expressed disappointment during the opening because his black circle was hung high on the wall like on ominous moon threatening the art cosmos. In a way he’s right. His work’s meaning got highjacked by the curator for his own purposes! But even when hanging at the normal height, the piece serves as an elegant question mark. Is it reproducible? Depends on who you ask. It is a philosophical conundrum for its refusal to behave like an ordinary drawing or declare its value in quantifiable terms.

Hannah Heffner, Baby Bubble, 2009, cut paper and bubble wrap, 14 x 11 inches

Speaking of drawings, Hannah Heffner’s Baby Bubble is also slippery. The baby bump is bubble wrap and any sense of transcendent birth is completely undermined by the deliberate crappiness of the material inserted in the cut (old-fashioned) image, a page from a magazine. When I was in the gallery, I was sure the page was a hand-made reproduction. Now, as I look at the picture, I am not so sure. The action of the man’s hand becomes a giant question with the intervention of the bubblewrap. This was arguably the riskiest piece in the exhibit!

On the surface, the show had a tremendous respect for small work and for drawing and draftsmanship and craftsmanship and art history.  Although gray, black and white and conservative on the surface, underneath, the show is slippery.If it really is ushering the end of originality and the end of handmade in a world of infinite reproduction, all of this writing is about a bunch of wildly overvalued work–except for that sheet of gold. I don’t buy it–yet.

Here’s the complete list of who’s in the show:

Leah Bailis, Andrea Beizer, Gabriel Boyce & Preston Link, Bruce Campbell, John Costanza, Michael Davis Carter, Hannah Heffner, Pernot Hudson, James Johnson, Sebastien Leclercq, Erika Mayer, Gabriel Martinez, Kristina Martino, Quentin Morris, Matt Neff, Robert T. Pannell, Mia Rosenthal, Fay Stanford, Mark Stockton, Judith Taylor, and Dino Vasquez.

The Arcadia Works on Paper 2009 show runs to Dec. 21.

A woman stood guard over Gabriel Boyce and Preston Link's Health Care Bill, 2009, at the opening. printed paper 11 x 8.5 x 3 inches

Exhibit juror Joao Ribas, who is curator of MIT’s List Visual Arts Center (and former curator of the Drawing Center), selected 22 works by 22 artists  from 1,256 entries submitted by 567.  (The press release said 22 works, but I count 23).

In Ribas’ introductory talk just before the opening event, he immediately distanced himself from the talk’s ponderous title–4 Points Towards a Present History: Knowledge, Representation, Freedom and the Subject. “The real title is, Things I Have a Problem With.” That got a laugh.

Michael Davis Carter, gator 2009, detail, tissue paper, custom frame, 13.25 x 37.25 inches

Ribas spoke like a man with too many ideas–he started and restarted sentences, redirected them and then trailed off to begin again.Yet he still delivered a coherent talk, exploring aesthetics, the suspect reality of images, and the evolution of art objects as things that reflect symbolic value and freedom (of the artist) to make choices that don’t necessarily further society or its commercial ambitions.

Pernot Hudson, Samburg's Finest, 2008, silkscreen/graphite on paper, 19 x 25 3/4 inches

The aesthetics part of his talk was charming–including his projection of David Attenborough’s BBC bower bird video.  And the bit about suspect reality in art and images became especially interesting when he brought up Islamist beheadings on video as indisputably real and as the “most iconic images in contemporary culture.”  (The shakiness of Truth in art was another important theme underlying his selections for the show).

Kistina Martino, Subtitled Film Still: "And the Day After that..." 2009, black colored pencil on paper, 16 3/4 x 17 x 20 inches

But it was Ribas’ synopsis of the history of the value of art that interested me most. Here’s my synopsis of his synopsis (this is sort of like crunching down an image on the computer so it’s still recognizable but barely–and of course this too is highly suspect).

The story goes that society, hellbent on creating utile things that it values and needs, has no intrinsic commitment to art. So art is outside the needs of society. And art objects reflect freedom of the artist to operate outside the needs of society. Art represents “radical individual will–the antithesis of what was associated with capital [i.e. money].” So in the 15th century, a division grows between utile valuables provided by the craftsmen of the guilds and non-utile products of artists.

Fay Stanford, Indigenous Princess, 2007, ink on yupo, 21.25 x 15.25 inches

The freedom required in making art, the freedom to make choices and refuse others’ wishes, “creates a class of object that can’t fit into society in the normal way.” It cannot be priced in the same way ordinary goods are priced, and it is not based on consumer needs.

This history leads artists to later “commodify themselves as bohemians,” Ribas said.

As a symbolic marker of wealth rather than a manufactured product for consumers, art takes on a utopian identity, Ribas suggested, precisely because it is made outside the assembly line.

Matt Neff's two Wu Tang Clan-inspired works, GZA 2009 letterpress, 28.5 x 20.5 inches (left); Protect Ya Neck, 2009, etching, 28.5 x 20.5 inches (right)

Technology, however, has messed with this evolution of art as a symbol of value and freedom and mystical power. “Everyone can express himself through technology. …Technology changes how freedom is expressed. The consumer is also the producer.” At this point, Ribas brought in an aside (or maybe not at aside, it being very much to the point) that the World Bank defines wealth as natural capital and creative capital.

With technology, the concomitant sharing/reproducibility and loss of copyright control give every ordinary Joe freedom to choose. How do you preserve the model of authorship when all around us that model no longer applies? Ribas asked. “The artist no longer has a place of privilege With sharing, now everyone has choice.”

Post on the show next!

"U.S., Russian Satellites Collide"

But Breaking News didn’t quite work this angle— and so much the better and wiser, I realized. That idiom, though less explored maybe in a gallery context, gets plenty of rotation already, in exacting parodies like The Onion and Stephen Colbert… so there’s less reason to explore its well-worn avenues.

Gabriel Boyce and Preston Link, instead, seized the content of headlines for their source, and in an interesting way. Celebrity deaths and public shaming, air disasters, health scares, tidbits of world gossip— things that occupy us for a matter of weeks then fade away forever into Oblivion. The great Now of telecommunications— the same shit on different days that demands worldwide attention without ever explaining why it deserves it.

What Boyce and Link seemed to be doing was trying to counter this Forgetfulness. To playfully expand this paper-thin Now— the newsfeed for the last year— into something a little more memorable and monumental; albeit lightly and in tokens and models… To give it a little more weight and reality.

For instance, the Airbus that skimmed to a landing on the Hudson last year, announced in the Breaking News blotter as a “Miracle on the Hudson.” That crash was miraculous and remains to this day the world’s very best illustration of the word “elation.” At the same time, there was something silly about the whole undisaster. The passengers almost looked bored waiting for rescue on the wings of the floating aircraft. And this incredulity gets captured nicely by the Breaking News team with a wooden, Playschoolish recreation of the event, sitting on the gallery floor.

"Miracle on the Hudson"

Another object that really made the fleeting concrete is their recent celebrity death memorial; a wall of black, stacked, faux-marble, inscribed à la Maya Lin, with the names of the deceased. J.G. Ballard. Robert Novak. Les Paul. Chanel. Farrah Fawcett… A monument not as much to any particular celebrities as to the strange character of celebrity mourning. You read all these headlines of infinite glibness and cannot connect whatsoever with the sentiment. You might, for example, read of the great death-triad of Fawcett, Jackson, and McMahon:

“I know we all are going to die at one time or another but the thing is we never know when or who will go next. I was so shocked to hear of these three dying. We look at these celebrities and think they will be here forever. After seeing what Farrah went through with her battle to survive it made me realize they are all just like us. They are humans too and they do have their problems also. Just because they are big stars doesn’t mean they are trouble free in life.” –Jan Barrett, Michael Jackson Dies–Makes Number Three in the Celebrity World, Posted on June 26th, 2009 at Blogger News Network

Judging from this passage, I imagine that the author should be moved to tears by the Breaking News memorial, which takes her eulogy to its ludicrous conclusion by setting the sentiment in eternal stone.

The Wall of Recent Celebrity Death.

So, Breaking News, rather than adopting the forms and format of the News idiom, took it the opposite direction: pulling these stories and moments out of that idiom and serving it up to us in a more concrete way. And though many of these stories— like the dying chihuahua— were not exactly world issues, there is something to be said for deflating sensationalism into small, palpable toy-models that sit comfortably on a desk. This way, they can finally be considered, collected, and properly measured; rather than just being flashed across the screen and washed away on a wave of cultural amnesia. They even went so far to make one of the pieces— the one about the typhoon in China— an interactive piece of the sort you may find in a science museum…  A making present of distant events, which oddly enough, actually works. I will most likely remember these news items for some time to come.

In the end, though, the Breaking News team still slipped in a few newsy accoutrements, like logo pens, a news blotter, and the name of the show written across the back wall in true newsroom font.  Just some fun, to appease gimmicky folks such as myself.

pens News goodies, available at Berlinchen.

Breaking News, Little Berlin, October 2-31, 2009.

So there was so much going on last month I didn’t get some things up that I wanted to let people know about, especially the April show at Vox Populi.

Actually, the Kristin Reynolds is still up in the back room, and tonight Voxumenta opens, which looks like it should be worth a visit (I’m counting on the wonderful Voxennial vibe from last year to carry over into this year).

So I’ll start with Reynolds since she’s still up. She’s got lumber and flat, patterned boards arranged in a gravity-defying cascade. This work would not have been made without Sarah Sze having gone before, but Reynolds pumps up the materials to a point where they no longer suggest delicacy or the whirl of the cosmos or ephemeral vulnerability.

detail of hand-creatures from Reynolds’ installation

What I liked best about this work were the rubber puddles on the floor and the cast creatures, sort of Mickey Mouse hands taking off on their own. I also liked the overblown pins. And I liked walking through the barriers in the space, like the displaced, low-floating clouds as well as the pokey pieces of lumber.

I took the work as a suggestion of disaster, of buildings falling, of the flat patterned boards as dislocated wallpaper patterns, although they looked like fabric patterns to me–but no matter, they seemed to be about the patterns life as we know it under some kind of threat. Which it is…

Joseph Hu’s toothpick holder, a recreation of an gift he can’t bear to part with

Also at Vox were works by Joseph Hu, who focused on paper sculptures this time in his Hard to Hold exhibit. I loved the Pop vibe of the cherry chapstick, which was the micro version of Claes Oldenburg’s Lipstick. I also loved the craftsmanship made visible (almost) in the bowl. The works are recreations of objects of sentimental value to Hu, things he can’t quite bear to dispose of. In the care with which the sculptures were made and the considered, simplifications of the originals, the emotion comes through.

I thought the toothpick holder won the prize as an unnecessary object that somehow survives all the cuts because someone we love gave it to us.

by Gabriel Boyce

I also liked stepping among Gabriel Boyce’s stuffed birds in his Gone Borneo exhibit at Vox. The beautifully crafted creatures overpowered the small models of things like boats. But both had a funny toy-like quality. The realistic bird poses battle with the stuffed toy quality and the paper feathers for dominance, and make these objects open enough for some wide-ranging speculation.

by Sarah Daub

And Sarah Daub’s paper cut-out drawings, in her Close Call exhibit, the best of them have a creepy fear factor that threatens with the most unstable of materials. I especially liked the ones where Daub creates a back layer of paint that fills in some of the cut-out spaces. Daub made it into the Arcadia Works on Paper show, this year.

Blowback still by Karina Aguilera Skvirsky

In the Video Lounge was work by Karina Aguilera Skvirsky. The one I enjoyed from beginning to end, Blowback, depicted people dressed in Arab garb emerging from behind trees and approaching until they form a phalanx in an idyllic park scene. The approaching group has a floaty quality, unrooted from the real ground. And the whole scene raises questions about our assumptions and fantasies about people and threats and safe places.

Before going for ice cream at Space 1026 Friday night (see post), my friend, curator Andrea Kirsch and I stopped at Vox Populi to see the new members’ show. Stefan Abrams, Doina Adam and Mauro Zamora (and Zamora’s collaborators Carolyn Hesse, Gabriel Boyce and Brooklyn-based artist Paul Loughney) all had new work of a satisfying nature.

Doina Adam’s crocheted monofilament “blanket” on the wall casts great shadows.

Adam’s glass and mixed pieces conjure metaphorical landscapes of the mind. Her works most reminded me of Barry Le Va’s (also internalized landscapes and surreal mindscapes) from his show at the ICA in 2005.

Andrea pointed out the great shadows cast by one Adam piece, a loose “blanket” of crocheted monofilament hung on the wall. Because of its materials and construction the piece is almost invisible. In a way it’s more ephemeral than the grey shadows which become like a drawing on the wall. (I want to point out that this particular space at Vox is the gallery of barely visible art. Justin Witte and others have also put near impossible to see white on white works in this space.)

Mauro Zamora and Carolyn Hesse’s collaborative sculpture/painting also casts some wonderful shadows and colored light.

In back, Zamora’s collaboration with Carolyn Hesse produced another work whose cast shadows draw on the wall. Hesse, whose sculptural works Libby and I had seen at Sharktown in January, made the bent wood ski trails on the wall. And Zamora painted the insides of the bent wood swoops so that what’s cast on the walls is a glowing orange light line as well as the grey shadows. A very nice piece indeed.

Zamora and Paul Loughney’s painting/collage on the wall.

Zamora’s mural on the wall continues his paintings’ inside/outside motif. Here, one wall is worked up with a collaborative collage by Paul Loughney.

Mauro Zamora and Gabriel Boyce’s collaborative drawings with spray graphite and spray paint. Little gems.

And in some delicate, smoky drawings, Zamora and Vox member Gabriel Boyce have poetry on the walls. The tiny collaborative works, made with stencils, spray graphite and white spray paint evoke Sherlock Holmesian London with pea soup fog and suspicious goings on. Very lovely.

Stefan Abrams’ auto show photo at Vox. Cinematic without narrative. They pack a weird visceral punch. You want to piece together the story.

Stefan Abrams‘ auto show photos are amazing. Before I knew they were shot at the auto show I assumed they were staged photos that together made a kind of cinematic whole communicating angst about isolation and unhappiness in our times.

They still communicate that — in spades — regardless of where they were taken.

Another Abrams auto show photo. There must have been a dozen (sorry, my note-taking slipped.

And those magical white dots that appear reflected in the windshields of all the cars? They are some points of magical light, perhaps rays of hope, or perhaps false expectations of good. Who knows. This is a great body of work by Abrams.

The show has a lot of icy, glassy, slippery, reflective surfaces and great shadows as well. All in all the works talk back and forth beautifully in another great members’ show.