I see all those layers and life here in your videos, objects, performances, deepening the grace of your movements and the susurrus of your words, knowing that such simplicity is not easily won. Just a few flickers from an enduring and illustrious career. When I stop to read back about your lifetime of accomplishments and confluences, I can’t help but admire you all the more: learning improvisation with Anna Halprin in San Francisco in the 1950s trying and moving into your own through the techniques of Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, and Trisha Brown your presence at the birth of Judson Church your collaborations with Yoko Ono, La Monte Young, and Terry Riley. Your performances are the jump and splash of a brook, the color of a found leaf, a painted flag wrapping a woman as the river dances around her. The sketch is a smudged pastel of a sweetly pink dick sprung from a star-spangled jack-in-the-box. The charcoal and pastel drawing opens her exhibition at Los Angeles’s appropriately named The Box, setting a tone of equivocation between politics and entertainment-a timely commentary considering the farcical climate of the United States’s incipient despotism. Such sentiments surely lingered on the mind of Judith Bernstein as she drew COCK IN THE BOX midway through Johnson’s six years in power as US president. Johnson’s characterization of the penis as a tool to leverage force was an influence: one anecdote has the president, plagued by reporters asking why the United States was in Vietnam, unzipping his pants, pulling out his flaccid cock and saying: “This is why!” No more poignant example of power mislaid.
Whether those lewd sketches were made to parody politics in wartime, as comic relief for those on the john, for camaraderie, or to alleviate boredom, the big boy’s room provided a space to think patriotism through masculinity. There is no image more prescient of modern displays of masculinity and status than Judith Bernstein’s drawing COCK IN THE BOX (1966), inspired by a history of Vietnam-era bathroom-stall graffiti. Collectively, the objects reaffirm a tired narrative of dysfunctional Colombian life, but individually they. The small trove of items she brought with her is arranged on a low table as an untitled and undated installation: comics, letters, some dried leaves, and a cheat sheet for Mortal Kombat 3 (1995). One is Los Angeles-based Gala Porras-Kim, who fled Colombia when she was a child, packing hastily in the middle of the night after her family was threatened. Along with all these clichés (eagerly resold to Western audiences through film and television), Colombia is a society of familial warmth and communal resilience, a place where humor, love, and magic play important roles in the survival of its people.Ĭurators Víctor Albarracín Llanos (who is Colombian) and Corazón Del Sol (who grew up there) allow all of these narrative threads to entwine through the work of 32 artists, most of whom live in Colombia but some of whom now reside elsewhere. If your first associations with Colombia are cocaine, paramilitary violence, and the rapacious plunder of natural resources by neo-colonialist corporations, then you are only half right, according to this spirited, unkempt, and organizationally flawed exhibition of Colombian artists at The Box, Los Angeles.
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