Catherine Opie’s New Show Is Literally about Burning down the Establishment
Artsy reviews Department of Art Professor Catherine Opie's solo exhibition featuring Opie's first film, The Modernist. On View now at Lehmann Maupin in New York.
“Catherine Opie’s newest exhibition might make viewers fall for an arsonist. The black-and-white still photographs and accompanying film—Opie’s first-ever foray into the medium—are on view in “The Modernist” at New York’s Lehmann Maupin gallery through January 12th. The show follows an artist named Pig Pen as they set fire to modernist architectural icons in Los Angeles: the angular Sheats-Goldstein Residence and the Chemosphere, shaped like an elevated spaceship. John Lautner, Frank Lloyd Wright’s former apprentice, built both in the L.A. hills in the 1960s. After these torchings, Pig Pen creates collages that commemorate their crimes.
Bill T. Jones' "Analogy/Lance: a.k.a. Pretty the Escape Artist" at Royce Hall, UCLA, Sunday (Reed Hutchinson /CAP UCLA) The character of Pig Pen straddles reality and fiction. Pig Pen is the nickname of a true San Francisco–based artist and actor, Stosh Fila (they have never burned down any buildings in real life). The film, also titled The Modernist, is a silent slideshow of still images, all but for a moment when Pig Pen lights a match at the Chemosphere; a brief whoosh unsettles the viewer, giving potency to a close-up image of fire, that eternal symbol of both creation and destruction.
The complementary photographic series is a lovingly rendered portrait of Opie’s protagonist—whose greasy, center-parted hair, cheap white tank top, and impishly dangling cigarette suggest a 21st-century Steve McQueen. In Artist #2 (The Modernist) (2016), we see Pig Pen in the midst of making a collage—news clippings juxtaposed with their own fiery, orange scrawl. They show off a full sleeve of tattoos on their arm: bands of geometric shapes on the bicep, skulls circling the forearm, an insect on the back of the hand, block-lettered Xs and Os on the fingers. The ceiling above Pig Pen catches a delicate shadow of their arm and the writing implement. Opie’s camera suggests that the body—and not the collage—is the real artwork here."— Alina Cohen, Nov. 7, 2018
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Artsy website.
Stay engaged. Use #UCLAarts to stay connected.
