Hey LA:

I’m culture writer Carolina A. Miranda, with a dispatch from critic Leah Ollman about a conceptualist who has made art out of surveilling others.

Before I turn the mic over, I wanted to give you a heads up that LA artist Ryan Preciado has an installation on view at the Hollyhock House in East Hollywood. The artist is known for creating functional pieces (cabinets, tables, chairs) that are also sculptural objects. And his influences are myriad, drawing from sources like Indigenous craft and European high design. His interventions at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house include a series of stunning geometric textiles he produced with the Hernandez family of weavers in Oaxaca. Wright was influenced by the work of Latin American artisans; Preciado brings those traditions full circle. Ryan Preciado: Diary of a Fly is on view at the Hollyhock House through April 25th; hollyhockhouse.org.

🎟️🎟️ Attention KCRW members, we have a giveaway!
We have 5 household memberships for the Craft Contemporary, which entitle you to free museum admission, invitations to special events, and a 10% discount in their fabulous gift shop (one of my faves in LA). Respond to this email for a chance to win. Not a KCRW member? Join here.

A correction
In last week’s newsletter, I mistakenly identified the exhibition What a Wonderful World as What a Wonderful Life in a photo caption and email subject line. Apologies!

Now, onto Ollman’s review, as well as…

• Judy Chicago’s takedown of Google
• Becca Rothfield on criticism
• That Turning Point USA halftime show

Find it all below…

At top, one of Ryan Preciado's installations at the Hollyhock House features a chair of his own design and a textile made with the Hernandez family in Oaxaca. (Carolina A. Miranda)

THE LIVES OF OTHERS
by Leah Ollman

Sophie Calle, Mother-Father (2018) is part of the conceptual artist's retrospective in Orange County.
(Sophie Calle / Fraenkel Gallery / ARS / ADAGP)

You're not likely to overhear that familiar My kid could do that dismissal as you peruse Sophie Calle's engrossing and disarming retrospective at the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art. More probably, you'll be blurting out Can she do that?, or at least actively wondering it. No living artist weds brash curiosity and a willingness to poke at the boundaries of propriety quite like the Parisian-born and based Calle.

Now in her early seventies, the show takes us back to her auspicious, audacious beginnings. In the 1980 photo-text installation that sprawls the length of the show's opening wall, Suite Vénitienne, she chronicles her pursuit of a near-stranger through the labyrinthine passageways of Venice. She had met the man, "Henri B.," by chance one evening in Paris and learned that he was about to travel to Italy. Calle decided to follow, and keep following, surreptitiously and in light disguise, tracking the man's location and activities, making accomplices of hotel staff and others. Her black-and-white pictures and daily, typewritten entries read like a private investigator's dossier, punctuated sparingly with her own self-reflective musings.

Each of Calle's projects is, by her own description, a sort of game scaffolded by rules, though she leaves herself open to chance and serendipity. Think the droll, performative strain of Conceptual art, embodied by artists like Bruce Nauman and the SoCal-based Eleanor Antin, who elasticized identity and gender in her own multimedia works assuming fictitious roles. Closer still, in method and spirit, are the writers aligned with the 1960s-launched French literary movement Oulipo, who work within extreme, self-prescribed constraints, such as, most famously, not using the letter e in the composition of an entire novel.

A detail from Calle's Suite Vénitienne, 1980, printed 1986. 
(Sophie Calle / Paula Cooper Gallery / Collection Buffalo AKG Art Museum)

The winning of Calle's games, for her as for us, is in the play itself, in the slippage between earnest and improper, cheeky and tender, brazen and vulnerable, and ultimately, between person and persona. For one piece, The Hotel (1981), she took a job as a chambermaid and made probing inventories of the personal effects in the guestrooms she cleaned. For another, The Shadow (1981), she had her mother hire a private detective to follow her, "to provide photographic evidence of my existence." In the resulting photo-text installation, the hired man's photographs and notes appear together with Calle's own account of being surveilled. The parallel play clearly delights and intrigues her. "I wonder if he liked me," her text concludes. "Will he think of me tomorrow?" It’s fantastically meta.

Sophie Calle: Overshare was organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and gives North American viewers their first large-scale survey of the artist's work. Calle's early projects were her most nervy, and established her reputation as a watcher worth watching. Over the course of her nearly five-decade-long career, making photographs, books, videos, films, and installations, she's been shown at major venues internationally, from the Tate to the Hermitage. In 2007, she represented France at the Venice Biennale.

Calle studied sociology, not art, and it shows in her persistent focus on human behavior. As problematic as some unwitting participants found her early work, she's never been out to incriminate anyone. Her voyeuristic practices are in the service of catching people being themselves, and even more so, exposing her own complex, contradictory, composite self. In True Stories (1985-ongoing), Calle presents an array of her personal belongings in the manner of artifacts in a museum display. Each object, from a wedding dress to a love letter, is numbered, and a corresponding text tells how it factors in her memory and the continual making and re-making of her own identity. The writings accrete into an episodic autobiography, focused on how she sees herself and how others — parents, lovers, friends — have seen or defined her.

 
Autobiographies (The Bad Breath), 1994. (Sophie Calle / Paula Cooper Gallery / ARS / ADAGP)

Calle performed under the cover of neutrality in her early years, with documentary-style photographs and reports installed in grids or other orderly arrangements. Over time, her work has become more overtly emotional and visually juicier. Voir la mer (2011), a sensorily immersive, panoramic, five-channel video projection, exemplifies these trends. Calle found five people living in Istanbul who, despite the city's geographical orientation, had never seen the sea. Each is seen first from behind, standing on the shore, looking out. They then turn to face Calle's camera so that she, and we, can study how the revelatory experience registers in their eyes and expression. It feels visceral, the compounded impact of both seeing and being seen. We hear only the gentle, persistent rhythm of the waves; there are no words.

About midway through my wander of the show, E.M. Forster's famous dictum, only connect, started softly thrumming in the back of my head. Calle has always connected image and text, concept and form, but underlying all of her stealthily serious games is a desire for some sort of connection to another, whether staged, imagined, or actualized, and a tenacious drive to connect the disparate parts of herself. A lifelong project, indeed, and against the current backdrop of technological connection yet grievous social isolation, characteristically audacious. Can she do that?

AROUND THE INTERNET

It’s Carolina again. I’ll take it from here!

• Judy Chicago has a scorching story about working on the public art component of Google’s redo of Chicago’s Thompson Center.
• The president of Bard College makes uncomfortable appearances in the Epstein Files.
• The golden statue of Trump financed by crypto bros.
• The University of North Texas has closed an exhibition featuring an anti-ICE artwork.
• Speaking of which, Trump wants a new portrait of himself for the National Portrait Gallery.
• Ireland launched a plan to support artists with basic income.
• In the wake of the layoffs at the Washington Post, Becca Rothfield writes about what it means to be a critic for a general interest audience.
• Bruce Goff, who designed LACMA’s Japanese art pavilion, is the subject of a retrospective in Chicago.
• Painter Ali Eyal won the Hammer Museum’s $100,000 Mohn Award.
• Cultured magazine has a good interview with Eyal.
• Jerry McMillan, an artist and inveterate chronicler of LA’s art scene, has died at 89.
• The SoCal Museums Free for All will go down on February 22nd.
• Signing off with the best review of the Turning Point USA halftime show.

Thanks for reading! 🤓💻

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