Some Art in San Francisco Part 8
Katy Grannan, Oliver Lee Jackson, Mike Henderson, Hunter Saxony III, Johnny Abrahams, Ishan Clemenco, and Andrea Carlson
No take here on the political violence dominating the news cycle, except to point to this (which gets it right morally) and this (which I believe gets the theory right).
Katy Grannan at Fraenkel
Perhaps the alleged downturn in the art market will usher in its own kind of vibe shift, one away from the rather undue privilege that has been paid to painting (particularly by young, attractive women), and towards an appreciation for, and greater valuing of, strong image makers, regardless of the delivery medium. Katy Grannan is one such strong image maker. Yes, she is identified as, and probably identifies as, a photographer, but we would do well to jettison these nominations. Grannan is just a damn good artist.
The new work at Fraenkel comes out of Grannan’s move to Humboldt County, a stretch of coastal northern California long mythologized as a libertarian escape from CA’s burdens of liberty. Without a given community, Grannan advertised on Craigslist and other channels for subjects willing to be photographed. The outcome is a series of astounding prints all working within a subtle grayscale that recall the best of Weston, but which have a kind of beauty and oddity that is all their own.
I’m thinking in particular of Morgan, Arcata, CA (all works 2025), a portrait of a young woman looking away from the camera whose long hair has been wrapped around her neck. The visual effect is confounding. An initial content-driven impression is that hers is a kind of headscarf, that the feminine-coding of long hair is its own kind of religious observance. But that’s to miss the ambiguity at work in that the sweep of hair and the tight framing of Morgan’s chest and shoulders. As the model turns her head, the wrapping of her hair appears to turn her body, such that one gets the impression that she is turned away from us, in some impossible contortion. To look at the left half of the picture is to see, to think one is seeing, the back of the model’s head. The subtlety of the print, the tight tonal scale, takes out details from the shoulders and upper chest, which on a glance could just as easily be shoulders and upper back. And so forth and so on. It’s the lightest of sensations, but it’s unmistakeable, this betweenness of front and back, this turning.
The fashionable thing would be to call this a “queering” of the image. And perhaps it’s that. There are other images that seek out this ambiguity in the features of Grannan’s subjects themselves. Tony, Arcata, CA shows its sitter topless, and post top surgery. Samantha, Arcata CA looks like an impossibly young Steven Tyler. But “queer” has become an unsubtle term, and can’t bear the critical weight that has been foisted upon it over the past decade. It certainly can’t handle some of the sexiness of Grannan’s other images, such as Damla, Mad River, CA, which picture, and sitter, are just hot, as is the look given by Alex, Arcata, CA.
The formalist in me needs to note that in almost every case Grannan’s models are turning in some fashion, physically turning on themselves, or away from the viewer, even if implicitly, when wrapping arms around themselves. One could almost take this as a rebuke of Rineke Dijkstra and the authority of “facingness” that portraiture, especially photographic portraiture, entails. That might be to go too far. But it’s there, this turning that Grannan presents to us, and it structures the way that Grannan’s subjects and images appear. Why it does so is a question worth pursuing.
Oliver Lee Jackson at Rena Bransten
Oliver Lee Jackson deserves a major retrospective on the order of what Jack Whitten has received at MoMA. Maybe one is in the works, but if it is, I have heard no whispers of it. Now that Jackson can count Andrew Kreps and Lisson as gallerists (both post-2020 pick ups) alongside Rena Bransten, who has shown the artist since the 1980s (kudos), there is additional commercial powder for such an institutional effort. So someone needs to light that fuse.
I say this not as a fan, but as a genuinely curious newcomer, as it’s possible many people will be to Jackson’s work, even though he has been active and visible for more than fifty years. Bransten has mounted a micro survey that includes paintings, prints and sculptures, most made in the past twenty years, with a couple from 1983, when Jackson was included in that year’s Whitney Biennial. It’s quite a range, from a pair of paintings made this past summer, which recall late Twombly, to a pair of black-on-black works from 2013, to a series of funky intaglio prints based on works from 2007 but produced this year (like Twombly, Jackson’s sculptures don’t impress).
With most recent shows presenting only handful of new work, occasionally in the context of a shotgun scatter of prior pieces, it’s hard to get a sense of Jackson’s project. (The little writing that I consulted on it is laughably inadequate—the writing, not the amount of it.) On the evidence of the work, Jackson moves quickly (the fox to Whitten’s hedgehog? more Polke than Richter?), and so what one wants is to see the full sweep, to understand the works on their own terms, which requires seeing them together, as the events and outcomes and authors of their own history.
The most recent genuine survey appears to have been mounted by the Institute of Contemporary Art in San Jose, in 2017. The St. Louis Art Museum put together another micro survey of 12 paintings in 2021. But the past 10 years have been dominated by gallery shows, with Bransten leading the way, Kreps and Lisson following dutifully along, and the now shuttered Blum and Malin (the latter rather ignominiously) bringing up the rear.
I want to say that Jackson is making strong work today. From what’s on offer at Bransten, the current painting is far more disciplined than Jackson’s 1980s work (but what a limited comparison!). All of the energy is still there, only now it is honed, and less self-consciously performed—or thought through, as with the black paintings. But I need to see more to have any confidence in such judgements, and gallery shows and jpegs aren’t going to cut it. This is the career that a museum survey was meant for.
Mike Henderson at Haines
Could one say the same for Mike Henderson? Probably. Though Henderson’s work comes off as less of a question mark. The work is confident in its own status as work, the kind of artistic labor that is consistently satisfying its own curiosities about what it can do with paint. As images, as compositions, they are more and less compelling. The strongest in this show, notwithstanding its title, is for sure Notes from a Good Cry (2024), followed by a work from more than a decade ago, Cross Section (2013), which hints at Henderson’s earlier interest in language and letters as a resource for finding and composing pictorial forms.
The big centerpiece work, Avalanche (2023-25), is the kind of work that painters will get and publics most likely won’t. That is, to get it, you really have to want to get into the process with a kind of forensic interest in how Henderson’s marks are made. Seeing the work demands getting up in its business, and most people are just too polite or too put off by their own ignorance for that. So they will leave the work at the level of the image, which is not without its merits, appearing as it does like some crazy collage made entirely of paint (superficial echoes of Jacques Villeglé here). But it just isn’t that.
The real treat here are some early 16mm films that have been transferred to video and which show not only the social conscience that has been written about as integral to Henderson’s work from the 1960s and 1970s (before a fire destroyed the bulk of his studio and early archive), but also his sense of humor, so integral to having an incisive eye. Dufus (aka Art), first made in 1970 and revised in 1973, shows Henderson performing as different personas: the “Dufus”, the “Scum-Bag”, the “Dork”, the “Mofoc!”, the “Splurnk”, and Henderson himself as “Me”, each of which has their own answer as to the big question of “where it’s at”: “Work,” “Love,” “Fucking,” “Money,” “Life,” “Art.” That last word isn’t voiced with any confidence. As the “Me” persona says, “I don’t know about me.”
Now more than half a century later, Henderson’s got a pretty good idea, about art at the very least.
Hunter Saxony III at Eleanor Harwood
There is so much to enjoy about Hunter Saxony III’s work, and so much to dislike about the pigeonholes it is stuck in. The drawing skills on display are just undeniable, and that alone is gratifying. I can hear other artists and critics dismiss this as the “performance” of skill, in the same manner that one can dismiss the “performance” of labor (which I myself have done), but it will be obvious (to anyone with eyes) that Saxony III’s skills are in the service of something other than themselves. There is an inventiveness, a pushing of conventions and forms that puts one in mind of what it must have been like to go for Baroque in the 17th Century.
But what are those conventions and forms? Here is where the pigeonholing comes in. “Calligraphy art” and “tattoo art” have the same dismal ring to them as did “mail art” or “body art” at one time, names that indulge categorical thinking, and relegate artists to historical cul-de-sacs if not lives as mere service providers. One wants more from this work than just instances of calligraphic virtuosity. The resources are deep—Chinese ink drawing (Saxony III’s contemporary Sun Xun offers a signal example here), 18th-Century decorative art and architectural embellishment, illuminated manuscripts, Ed Ruscha—and Saxony III is either drawing from them or welcome to them.
The challenge is how not to be a pigeon, how not to home in on what’s comfortable, known, pat (and this includes political sloganeering as much as clever figuration). The ambition needs to match the skill, and that means working on bigger canvases (perhaps literally) of history and medium and form. It also might mean letting go of certain received ideas, such as both qualified and unqualified notions of “excellence.” Because what comes after excellence, if not art?
Johnny Abrahams at Romer Young
Abrahams work is very satisfying, but I don’t quite know what to do with that. The paintings scratch a number of itches: formalist, craft, chromatic. But they are works that seem to want to stand outside of their moment, outside of history, not bothering with any search for an absolute or an infinite. Not that this is a requirement, but it’s difficult to see what’s driving the work, other than that sense of satisfaction, which, again, is not at all easy for even the best artists to render.
When I was in architecture school, I had a classmate whose sketches and finished drawings for highly-inventive structures were beautiful and compelling in their own right, beyond the designs they described. What I was attracted to in that work is the same thing that underwrites Abrahams signature paintings: the form, the line, that is just ever so slightly off parallel. Here, the big eight-foot tall oil-on-burlap works show the canvas divided into into vertical thirds, and those forms are “stacked” against each other with edges that just barely touch in places. The facture of the oil paint application (its texture) echoes the vertical form and the heavy warp of the of the burlap, all of which exhibit a character that is somewhere between manual and mechanical (which I take to be the point of the smaller duo-chrome works).
Like those architectural drawings, though, Abrahams works assume a right-angle environment as their background condition, even as such slightly-off angles are exactly what the built world is composed of. And that’s the thing: no one designs for such just-off angles (not even Gehry); they just happen. Seeing them composed, as in Abrahams paintings, raises the question: How far can this go?
Michael Heizer famously ripped out and repoured, and then ripped out and repoured again, sections of City (1970-2022) when some angle was just a fraction of a degree or two off of what was intended or desired. Is such a similar maniacal desire for control over form and material at work in Abrahams paintings? I want there to be—and granted, Heizer is a loaded comparison—but I just can’t tell. Is Abrahams ripping out and repouring to get something not yet got? Or is the repetition an attempt to get again something already settled and satisfying? One hopes it’s the former, but fears it’s the latter.
Ishan Clemenco at Climate Control
“Delightful.” That’s the word that came to mind as I was leaving Climate Control’s space in the Mission, where Ishan Clemenco’s deceptively simple acoustic sculptures were still shimmying away. Composed in part of old gas cans that sit on the floor and anchor single steel rods that stretch to the ceiling and serve as the hinge pins for pairs of old-school calipers, the sculptures are “activated” with a light pluck of the rods, which sends the calipers shaking down the poles and creating a resonant rattle. (A tool normally used for hanging Japanese scrolls is on hand to push the calipers back to their starting positions.)
The installation is titled, presuming I’ve got the kerning and style right: n.T. calipers: [A T O M I C F I E L D: Hiroshima/Nagasaki 1945/2025]. These kinds of concrete poetics are indicative of artists of a certain vintage, and though Clemenco is new to me, the vines that supplied his nourishment and to which he pays homage—Yoko Ono, Blinky Palermo, Mel Bochner—wrap around that mix of post-60s spiritualism and intellectualism that help flavor such dated esoterics.
As Clemenco offers in an accompanying text, the show “remains a reflection upon war, on the proliferation of armaments, and the legacies of the current, and historical consequences of human aggression, with prospects for compassionate resistance, and hope for creative solidarity in the face of power.” Forgive me if this wasn’t my first or even fifth thought after looking a some chalk lines and listening to the whistle of falling calipers. And that should be okay. Those chalk lines, that piano, those calipers, they are all in their way compelling. They are not solutions or configurations that would be easy to get to; there is an intelligence, a world, at work behind this work. But framing it all as resistance to the atomic age’s history of violence just screams Summer-of-Love San Francisco, which is far too parochial, even for San Francisco.
There is room today for a return of some kind of high-conceptualism, but I suspect this really needs to come with a view of, or on, the future, one that isn’t dismissive, or nihilistic, but clear-eyed and intelligent (and also not dopily optimistic—c.f. “abundance” or “fully-automated communism”). It’s difficult to pull off, particularly in the middle of twin technological and political revolutions, ones that demand wholly new abstract languages of competence. (What is populism if not another valence of artificial intelligence?) Artists often want to see more in their work than is there, to laden it with meanings it can’t quite handle on its own. It’s understandable, but one wants to add the reminder: sometimes delight goes deeper than we imagine. Sometimes delight is enough.
Andrea Carlson at Jessica Silverman
The best works of Andrea Carlson’s in this show, her first with Jessica Silverman, are the ones blessedly free of iconography. Exquisite Bundle (2025), for example, a gouache on paper work of overlapping and elaborately-chevroned egg-shaped forms that have been divided into four horizontal sections and then rearranged, presents a simple visual puzzle that refuses easy resolution. What I mean by that is, one can put the pieces back together in one’s mind easily enough, but the patterning and geometries keep the arrangements moving, such that “back together” isn’t really the point. Roni Horn’s drawings take this rearranging and patterning to its most elegant and compelling conclusion, and I would be interested to see Carlson push further in this direction—that is, past the simple quadripartite divisions and the way they too easily call to mind early illustrated children’s games and the Surrealists’ appropriation of the latter via their exquisite corpse exercises (which, presumably, is the “exquisite” reference of Carlson’s title).
I don’t expect that pushing to come anytime soon, though, as Carlson’s practice has to-date appeared supremely invested in narrative. She is a talented illustrator and image maker; her best earlier work resembled nothing so much as bizarre, highly stylized b-movie posters (I’d personally wish to see more in this vein). And though the new work seems to have discarded that illustrational impulse, there is a storyline not far below the surface.
The two black-and-white works closest in form and character to Exquisite Bundle carry the titles The Being at the Front of the Canoe and The Being at the Back of the Canoe. So what kind of “beings” are these? In contrast to Exquisite Bundle, these two works’ geometries remain coherent across the horizontal divides of the paper, even as their patterns change. So what might this signal? Is this formal coherence a kind of maturity? If one’s a “back” and another’s a “front,” are they perhaps a couple in this “canoe”? Is that little “bundle,” still all knees and elbows and trying to figure itself out, their progeny? Is this a familial tale as old as time?
If that sounds like it’s going too far, try reading the gallery’s PR. The point is that even in these works, from which nearly all indications of reference have been interestingly scrubbed, the yearning for narrative is strong, as if without it, the work might decohere into nothing more than its own exquisite bundle (but wouldn’t that be something to see!).
Carlson is billed as an “indigenous futurist,” so it’s no mystery what narrative is overly indexed in her work. But whereas prior work did seem to embrace the odd and the anachronistic, a melange of imagery, artifacts, and animals all made to inhabit the same plane of representation, as if pulled from the pages of some apocalyptic coloring book (I take this as Carlson’s leaning into the “futurist” half of her billing), the mural-type works on view here lean back into more clichéd signifiers of North American “indigeneity”: bears and wolves, canoes and water fowl, drums and beaded costumes.
Though notably, in one work called Unearthed Cannibal (2024), Carlson seems to nod — knowingly, it would appear — at the expectations placed upon self-identifying indigenous artists to embrace the politics of representation: in the middle of that work one finds written “ADD SENSITIVE CONTENT STATEMENT «HERE» WHEN COMMUNITY MEMBERS ARE IN AUDIENCE.” Contrast that with The Buffet (2025), where one reads “SAVE YOUR EARTH / YOU CAN’T GET OFF.” This message seems straightforward enough, and cosigns the environmental movement’s embrace of indigeneity, though one does want to point out that it is written as if from the point of view of some patronizing alien (which is probably how climate-change deniers view Greta Thunberg).
Are these ambiguities and ambivalences intentional? It’s hard to say. Perhaps 2025 is different than 2021, when Carlson penned an essay titled “The Earth is our Mothership,” and was very convinced of the significance and salience of indigenous “epistemologies” as correctives to dominant “settler” narratives. Perhaps she still is. Reading that essay today, I couldn’t help thinking that its relentless dividing of our North American world into “Natives” and “non-Natives,” into the “indigenous” and the “settlers,” finds its echo in the current calls from the right to divide the U.S. into “Heritage Americans” and whatever falls outside that asinine category. It’s far time we let go of all such illusions.
Carlson’s move away from narrative, away from illustration, suggests a first step in this direction—a refresh for how images mean and how forms signify, how there are, in fact, universals worth defending that for sure have something to do with where we come from and the histories that shape our thinking, but which have even more to do with the future—singular—we might hope to build.