Huntington Beach Art Center -- GROUND US

Huntington Beach Art Center
GROUND US
Artists:
Kiel Johnson
Lucrecia Troncoso
P.Williams

When I first arrived at the space I picked up the flyer with general information about the show, which included the three artist statements. On this flyer above the show title it read, "Three large scale site-specific installations will amuse, engage and imagine a new and improved world."
... a new and improved world??? Unfortunately for all living creatures on this planet, this work does not show us something new but forces us to see what we have already done to ourselves and the horrors that could come of it. Certainly to my eyes nothing I saw even remotely improves on our world. Of course we are already living part of this nightmare and these works force you to accept that reality.

I love the way the artist's all ignored the curators bullshit description that sounds like something that was used to sell the concept of the show to some bonehead who doesn't want the art at this once-great art center to offend anyone. If it's one thing that gets me worked up, it's the idea of a curator or gallery owner telling the artist what their work will be about. When did this idea start? If the idea and inspiration for the artist are provided by the curator, what is the artist? Then there's the "artist" who comes up with the idea but lets someone else make the work.
What? I'm confused. See I thought the artist was supposed to do both, but what do I know?

These three works are harsh warnings of what is going on and what's to come.

Troncoso’s, "The Tree of Life (antimicrobial)”, and “Breath" piece is half brilliant and half useless. First the brilliant. Troncoso made a tree out of cellulose cleaning sponges. She says we are all trying to remove ourselves as much as possible from our great-great-great grandfathers the microbes. To me her tree symbolizes a planet of man-made sterilized environments that suck any organic pleasures right out our asses.
Being the father of two daughters myself, I am completely aware of the tendency today to control all aspects of our children's lives. All danger must be avoided, no contact with anyone who has not been given CIA clearance and don't play on the street because we all know that's when the molesters and rapists will get you.

We are all so worried about not dying we forget to live. A huge part of what has shaped me as a person is the fact that as a kid I played almost every day on the streets of our block with a variety of other kids. We created our own games, made our own rules, picked our own teams and found ways to always challenge ourselves. Yea, we got into some trouble and got into fights, but we also learned how to deal with it without some parent in our face saying, "it's ok honey, everyone's a winner", and bullshit like that. My oldest daughter didn't do any of that and I doubt my younger one will either and that, I fear, will be too bad. I don't know why this tree made me think of all this but it did and that to me is good art.

The "Breath" part I don't get: a four and a half minute video of the same trees blowing in the wind. Well, real trees still exist, just go outside, however faux sponge trees are a new one on me. It seams a lot of artists just want to use video because they think it's still edgy. Maybe it still is, but if you’re going to show me a moving two dimensional image on some kind of screen it better be good, because now you’re competing with the billions of dollars spent making images using the same tools, that most of us then watch at least for some period of time daily.

Kiel Johnson's "Survival Mode" is bloody beautiful but a bit much. It is something like getting two steaks for dinner. It was a little overkill.
His world has roads that led nowhere or in circles with buildings built on top of one another until the whole thing becomes a huge surprise ball.
Chaos, where too much is still not enough. We are burying ourselves in our crap! On second thought maybe he wants you feel like you just ate two steak dinners and stopped by Coldstone on the way home.

Now on to Mr. P. Williams' and his "The Finishing Touch".
I was circling the show a second or third time trying to let the work of the three artists sink in when I came upon a group of three ladies. I was in something of a trance looking at the P.Williams work when the conversation of the ladies became impossible for me to ignore. This was not because they were loud; they were not. It had more to do with how I like to let whatever is going on around me flourish and become part of my world. Or you could just say I was nosey. Anyway, I heard one of the women discussing how some of the materials from the show that were not needed for the eventual piece were still in her garage. With that, I had to introduce myself as a friend of P. The nice woman introduced herself as Becky Williams, none other than the artist's mother.
Now I had already been looking at "The Finishing Touch" for some time before this encounter and the interesting part for me is how my perception of the piece grew and expanded in unexpected ways after meeting Mrs. Williams and her two friends.

Before this twist of fate occurred I was noticing how drab, dark and expressionless this city made of trash, cardboard and wood was. Williams took a lot of time to carefully make dozens and dozens of buildings and cars, but he made them all without any character, only using black and grey paint with just enough detail to make it very clear what one is looking at. This is a jammed city of high-rise towers, with a road splitting the middle, with cars and trucks driving on this road going only back to where they started. The only words I could find on the piece were painted on the sides of the trucks that said things like, "dirt, shit, stuff, booze, body hair, bullshit and flesh". Grey airplanes dangled from clear wire above this nightmare. Now as if things weren't bad enough, there is a huge cardboard box with eyes, screaming mouth and claws painted on it, that is unmistakably one of P. Williams' characters. The combination of this sad downtown madness and this nutty looking giant was quite funny and depressing at the same time. This beast I will call The P. Monster. The P. Monster seams to be enjoying the fear he brings to this city. Perhaps The P. Monster has been there for years and that is why no one cares to bother to make life colorful or cheerful in any way. They all know they are doomed, so what is the point?

Now I missed the big performance part of this piece that happened a couple weeks ago so I have been very curious as to what happened. Well as luck would have it Mrs. Williams had the answer... she recorded the whole thing! Before we met, I noticed that she was showing her friends something that was recorded on her small pocket camera. I, of course, loomed in to look, and what took place after that was sheer joy. Now I'm not saying this is on the level of seeing my children born, but it was damn close. Human beings and the things they do fascinate me more than anything else in life.

There are times in our lives that are so great that if we are aware of them, as they are happening, it can make all the hell of this life worth getting through. Here I was at an art exhibit space, where I have exhibited my own work, which is located in the city I grew up in. I'm looking at a small screen of moving images that I'm told is of a performance piece, the very performance piece that I was so bummed out that I had missed. The camera is held by the mother of the artist above the actual artwork and accompanied by very sparse, but telling comments from my three new friends. Mrs. Williams was very careful not to explain what she thought was the meaning of the work. She said that everyone should come to their own conclusions. She was very proud of her son and was not the least uncomfortable with the work or how her two friends or I might feel about it.

Somehow as we watched the screen I felt a strange connection to these women. The art joined us in some way. This grainy film and tiny screen required that we all stood well inside each other’s personal spaces. This unique presentation of a performance began with a pan to show the considerable crowd and then for a while nothing happened. We were still huddled together, not sure what to do, just as the audience in the film was, then finally something began. Smoke started coming from several of the buildings. The planes started moving in erratic and senseless motions. Suddenly The P. Monster slowly came to life, moving in a most sinister and deliberate way. Finally this city was going to get what it had coming, and what it had feared for so long! Gasps were heard as The P. Monster began to destroy the city by kicking and pushing down buildings. Several high-rises were shredded and squashed in a way that would make King Kong or Godzilla jealous. The congested but orderly highway of cars and trucks became a scene much like Hot Wheels and their ramps dumped from a barrel.

I'm told that inside The P. Monster box was no monster at all, but a nice girl who is a senior student of P., who was nice enough to volunteer to destroy all his hard work. Now after the destruction was complete and pieces of the towers and cars are strewn all about, the hundred or more people in the audience didn't know what to do. This is the best part. A man comes over and knocks more stuff down. A woman starts franticly picking up things and trying to repair the devastation. One of the ladies watching this with me said that P. must have felt terrible seeing all his hard work destroyed. That made me laugh out loud. Her reaction was that is was sad that so much hard work should be ruined. The irony of that was priceless.

After the performance piece, someone did in fact put the whole city back together and this was the version I first saw when I came to the gallery.

Mrs. Williams informed me, after her presentation was all over, that I could see the whole thing on YouTube. So when I got home, I did. On YouTube is P.'s version of what happened and it is great but doesn't even come close to how much I enjoyed this wonderful gift of a moment with his mother showing me her personally captured, unedited version, as we all huddled together in fear of the wrath of The P. Monster.
Art gets no better than that.

--The Fish