Southern Exposure
MCA
******
By Richard Cooke
Jeremy Blake is fascinated by the haunted Winchester House
This show is the result of an exchange programme, where the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego hosts works from the MCA, and vice versa. Our end of the deal is a group show spanning four decades of work by some of the West Coast's most established artists, names like Robert Irwin, James Turrell and John Baldessari. Southern Exposure's strength is its variety; it's not a survey, a greatest hits collection or a study of schools, but rather an conversation, an articulated response to contemporary American culture from a range of voices, some loud, some quiet.
Not surprisingly for a show coming from TV land, the most robust health is in the new media work. The Johnny Appleseed of California video art, Bill Viola, has two works, both on a more modest scale than the huge Tristan Project currently displaying at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and St Saviours Church. The first is Heaven and Earth, his famous 1992 work that juxtaposes footage of his dying mother and newborn son.
It might sound heavy-handed, but it's a quiet, discreet work that draws attention without being ostentatious. With the squall of Viola's son and the death rattle of his mother silent, both wear the same expression. You can hear the other work, Eternal Return, before you see it; it gushes. "If I were called in/To construct a religion/I should make use of water". Philip Larkin wrote that, but it serves as Viola's motto too.
Kota Ezawa takes the footage of the OJ Simpson trial verdict, and turns the principles into blocky, colourful cartoons, like an episode of South Park. Reinscribing (and looping) this endlessly propagated piece of film with this childish overlay has a strange, compelling effect - it somehow seems less cartoonish than the original. Behind this mask of colour, we can reappraise the event itself without a conditioned pre-conception taking over: it's somehow more real than the real thing.
La region de los pantalones transfronterizos (The Region of the Transborder Trousers) is a topographical model overlayed by a video projection of a satellite image. Produced by the collaborative group Torolab, it tracks a handful of border crossers through GPS devices in their trousers. It captures the weird paradox of the border at Tijuana, simultaneously one of the most surveilled and most porous in the world. In the eerie blue computer lines, the anxieties and paranoias are writ. So is some of the perplexing, dissonant humour, both in the "transborder trousers", and in the scenario that puts the viewer in the same position as some Hollywood general plotting megadeaths.
To use some of John Baldessari's Terms Most Useful in Describing Creative Works of Art, this out of the ordinary show will satisfy, impress, arouse, invigorate, challenge and influence. Enjoy.