Sharon Lockhart, Laura Owens, and Frances Stark
September 15 – October 22, 2016
In June 1997, Sharon Lockhart, Laura Owens, and Frances Stark mounted a group exhibition at Blum & Poe Gallery in Los Angeles with three 48 × 48 inch works, one from each artist—a photograph, a drawing, and a painting. Made a few years after they graduated art school, the show was a chance to examine their ongoing artistic conversation and friendship.
Sharon Lockhart’s way of working over the past three decades has continued in the collaborative spirit of this show, her films and photographs developing out of intentional relationships with her immediate communities. As an opening to her season at The Artist’s Institute, we begin by revisiting this early experiment in finding one’s way as an artist among friends.… Read more
In June 1997, Sharon Lockhart, Laura Owens, and Frances Stark mounted a group exhibition at Blum & Poe Gallery in Los Angeles with three 48 × 48 inch works, one from each artist—a photograph, a drawing, and a painting. Made a few years after they graduated art school, the show was a chance to examine their ongoing artistic conversation and friendship.
Sharon Lockhart’s way of working over the past three decades has continued in the collaborative spirit of this show, her films and photographs developing out of intentional relationships with her immediate communities. As an opening to her season at The Artist’s Institute, we begin by revisiting this early experiment in finding one’s way as an artist among friends.
Selected documents from Sharon Lockhart, Laura Owens, and Frances Stark, Blum & Poe Gallery, Santa Monica, CA, June 7–July 12, 1997
Press Release, Blum & Poe Gallery, Santa Monica, CA, June 1997
Opening June 7 – July 12, Blum & Poe will present a collaborative exhibition of work by Los Angeles based artists Sharon Lockhart, Laura Owens and Frances Stark.
All three artists are actively working in distinctly different media, with Lockhart using photography and film, Stark using language and paper and Owens creating abstract paintings; yet, through an intense, often daily conversation involving discussion and examination of each other’s work, these three artists have influenced each other in varying ways.
This exhibition is an investigation into the nature of discourse and dialogue amongst friends, amongst artists. Whereas most group shows intend to highlight the obvious similarities between artists of a particular moment in time, this show intends to examine the subtle influences among a group of young artists coming of age at a crucial moment in the history of Los Angeles art.
A format of 4 x 4 feet per work has been established for each artist. A conjunctive multiple produced by the artists during the course of the show consisting of a box of influences, ideas and unique works by each artist will also be available.
There will be a closing reception for the artists on July 11, from 6-8 PM. Please contact Blum & Poe for further information.
Sharon Lockhart, Laura Owens and Frances Stark at Blum and Poe
Lisa Ann Auerbach, LA Weekly, Los Angeles, June 27–July 3, 1997
Sharon Lockhart, Laura Owens and Frances Stark’s show of, respectively, one photograph, one painting and one work on paper came out of the friendship and close working relationship among the three. Instead of having an overreaching or suffocating theme, as your basic summer group show might, the disparate media and practices of these youngish artists were put together because they emerged from a close-knit community.
They chose to make works 4 feet square, a size and format none of them had used before, so that there would be a formal common thread, a fair and equal starting ground. From this physical constraint, the works diverge in stellarly opposite paths. Lockhart’s photograph is a dowdy and down-home version of a Budweiser ad. Instead of three luscious babes in logo maillots, three sickly and sad-looking women stand trapped within sack cloths, which, when butted up next to one another, form the California flag. Their dirty, baggy gray socks poke out from beneath the sacks. Owens’ painting depicts a brilliant orange bromeliad on a bright-white gessoed surface. As in most of her paintings, it is the strange details that captivate, such as a razor-sharp blue line cutting through the space of the canvas. Stark’s delicate drawing looks from afar to be a hazy series of red and blue stripes, but up close it reveals itself to be endless vertical lines of text, which read, “the foreshortening of the mind’s perspective.”
What better way, I thought, to get to the bottom of this funky idea for a show than to sit down for a morning coffee klatch with the perpetrators, women I’d known for years? (Writing about friends is always a strange, politically dicey phenomenon; plus, you’re apt to use the wrong quote and pay dearly later.) Anyhow, in the spirit of the show, based as it is on these barely graspable notions of friendship and community, three of us—Sharon had left for Italy to premiere her new film—sat down and chatted about the idea for doing the show, and about the specific problems or challenges each ran into.
“I’ve just started reading Robert Smithson’s essays,” said Frances. “He makes it sound like in the ‘70s everyone was so smart, and they totally paid attention to each other, constantly writing and talking about art. He’s such a great writer, so direct and unpretentious. I wonder if it’s possible to have that sort of simple, straightforward interaction today—a sense of community through understanding or honesty.”
Laura added, “The three of us had been having solo shows and giving each other studio visits and helping each other decide how the work in each of the shows would be hung. Actual direct advice. We’d talk it all out.”
“Tim Blum and Jeff Poe noticed that,” said Frances. “They saw it happening and thought, ‘Oh, that’s funny,’ [since] our work looks so totally different. When we decided to actually do a show with a painting, a work on paper and a photograph, it clearly became an opportunity to be able to look at the work for what it is and to try to figure out exactly what’s happening between our separate practices. I know Laura and I have been talking a lot since we put it up—about context…”
“…how to hang shows…”
“…what other shows are up right now. We’re having major discussions all the time, and I think it’s because we set this up for ourselves.”
The three are also producing an edition together. Laura: “It’s in a square box, and we’re going to make it during the duration of the show. It’ll have things inside that inspire us. We’ll make a tape of a conversation, a mix tape, Xeroxes, drawings. It will be, in the classical sense of the word, a ‘hodgepodge.’”
The mixture of the three distinctly different media caused problems for Frances, whose drawing hangs from delicate linen tabs that adhere to the wall. “Of course, you know that 4 feet of drawing and 4 feet of photograph and 4 feet of painting are not going to look like equal surfaces. My piece isn’t framed and the painting is on stretchers and the photograph is archivally framed. Part of the decision for me has to do with the modesty of the paper on the wall, its simplicity. The vulnerability of the piece is really important.”
Whether or not the show comes together as a cohesive statement is immaterial to the artists, who feel that implicit connections between artworks that come from a shared sense of community are ultimately more important than thematic associations. “I would hope that curators might look at it and think, ‘Okay, I’m going to have a show that totally falls apart, and that might be better than a show that’s all about vanity or some other umbrella idea,’” suggested Laura.
“I think the most anyone might get out of it might be, ‘Hey, photo, drawing, painting, wow, they’re all so different, but they’re all friends and they all influence each other. Weird, huh?’” said Laura. “And that will be a total revelation for some people.”
As the conversation dwindled to a close, Frances brought up another issue that’s been plaguing her: “There’s a three-legged cat following me around, and I think it has something to do with the show.”
Exploring the Power of Three Among Friends
Susan Kandel, Los Angeles Times, July 4, 1997
Just as it’s (usually) a suicide mission to group of-the-moment artists under the pretext of a theme, it’s pretty much impossible to document something as elusive as mutual support and its correlates: conversations deep into the night, gossamer layers of influence (intended and not), casual advice taken too seriously, etc.
So once you accept that the premise for this show of one work apiece by old friends and emerging art-stars Sharon Lockhart, Laura Owens and Frances Stark (“an investigation into the nature of discourse and dialogue among friends”) was in fact a non-premise from the word “go,” you will probably enjoy things a whole lot more.
Owens’ contribution is a painting of a pineapple-esque flower hovering over a fecal mound, cut through with a spindly branch and silhouetted against a background white and bright enough to be the most shocking element of an already very weird (if beautiful) image. Lockhart offers a glossy photograph of the artists in question as the Three Anti-Graces, swathed in hand-sewn sackcloth that, when positioned side to side, composes the image of the California flag. Finally, Stark is represented by a subtly perverse drawing that masquerades as Agnes Martin-style stripes only to reveal itself as alternating rows of red and blue letters.
Each artist adopted a 4-by-4-foot format, something none had used before, ostensibly to level the playing field. It’s interesting, however, to see that despite efforts to the contrary, roles inevitably get assigned and parameters twisted.
Lockhart winds up doing the meta-commentary, making her piece either the most or least significant on view, depending on how you look at it. As the sole painting in the show, Owens’ work is automatically normalized, despite its obvious eccentricity. Stark’s unframed drawing––which at first appears modest, or at least delicate––plays deliberately with pomposity (her text spells out “the foreshortening of the mind’s perspective”), thus becoming weighty in its own right, perhaps even more so than the others. In any case, this exhibition is not a competition. Still, competition––like support––should not be underestimated as an impetus for artistic production. Perhaps it would make a provocative non-premise for another show
Sharon Lockhart, Laura Owens, Frances Stark: Blum & Poe, Santa Monica
Giovanni Intra, Flash Art, November–December, 1997
The field of artist-collaborations has been dominated by the Damien Hirst/David Bowie model: celebrities join, their “styles” fuse, and the new meta-celebrity artwork is born. A snowball effect. However, precisely what was compelling about the Sharon Lockhart, Laura Owens, and Frances Stark collaboration—made at the suggestion of dealers Tim Blum and Jeff Poe—was that it turned this model on its head. This was a very cryptic show, and one which did not seek a miraculous cohesion; on the contrary, the experiment proposed by this collaboration was an investigation of friendship and location in Los Angeles—as opposed to the production of bold gestures of objectification. In other words, it was an exhibition about thought. Lockhart, Owens and Stark’s collaboration was divided into two parts; a gallery show which featured one work by each artist—made in a strict 7,000 by 7,000mm format—plus an edition released at the exhibition’s completion. In the gallery each artist showed a single work in their customary medium: photography, painting and drawing respectively; the boxed edition which included a CD-Rom of sampled musical tracks, a video compilation of cinema footage, and a multitude of laser copied notes, images and works on paper, was a venue where mutual interests were archived, like images in a filing cabinet.
Lockhart’s contribution was a portrait of the three artists. Facing sideways from the camera, draped in a home-made flag of California, pieced together from strips of cotton and felt they stood, disengaged, highly bored. This is a very different vision of the young “LA woman artist” spawned on the pages of Harper’s Bazaar and vociferously trumpeted by the likes of critic Christopher Knight. The conceptual spin of Lockhart’s picture, it seemed, was to turn down the charm on the very notion of the “publicity” photograph.
Stark’s drawing, like the whole exhibition, was both hyper-labored and spare. It required the viewer’s eye to zoom down to a band of text in which tiny letters made with carbon paper impressions repeated the phrase “a foreshortening of the mind’s perspective.” This paradoxical suggestion was not so much nihilistic as obsessively considered. Likewise, Owens’ comic/realist painting of pineapple-like hallucinatory vegetation stretched, dented, and animated the picture plane from which it sprouted with a calligraphic, kinetic intensity—like an art-brut homage to Walt Disney’s Fantasia.
Including the edition, this project constituted about sixty discreet objects, which, in sum, could be considered a portrait of the artists, their work, and the nature of their interaction. This show was a multi-dimensional guide-book to the complex nature of these artists’ recent production—not so much a media event as an event of media.
Sharon Lockhart, Laura Owens, Frances Stark at Blum & Poe
Bruce Hainley, Artforum, November 1997
4 x 4. The format (in feet) for each of the works displayed and the principle under which the show operated: three “hot,” young Los Angeles artists who have been and remain close friends showed one work each, and during the show’s run, the fourth “artist”—the three friends working together—produced a multiple. The simplicity of the concept is airily honest about how things get done, stuff gets made, and the art world works. Sadly, some critics could not accept the idea of friendship as a premise for a show, even calling it a “non-premise,” which is, of course, precisely the point—who really wants premises messing up, as they too often do, the enjoyment?
The three works demonstrated the three friends’ differences. Lockhart’s quirky photograph of them draped in a rough mock-up of the California state flag—grizzly bear centering it—in part an homage to Arthur J. Telfer’s photograph, Flag Girls, Cooperstown, NY, 1918, remained an example of how she discerns the ominous atmosphere of the most banal circumstances, people not quite at home with who and where they are. Stark’s text piece, which spelled out in repeated vertical columns, read top to bottom, “A foreshortening of the mind’s perspective,” all in black typeface except for, in red, the word “perspective” and the apostrophe. The piece was unframed, and its matter-of-factness belied its delicacy. The painting exhibited by Owens provided an immediate contrast to Lockhart’s and Stark’s restraint, a bromeliad riot of color, orange and hot pinks, against a bright white background, the bouquet of big bloom and twigs in thick, swirling, groovy marks of paint. Despite the difficult-to-hear conversation going on between these works, or perhaps, importantly, not going on, together they did comment on the similarities between the trio. They are interested in exploring the facture of their respective media—photography, drawing, painting; unafraid of the “homemade” (a quality that warms even Lockhart’s work, which is, decidedly, the most austere and cool); and slanted and enchanted by what is near-at-hand, the world and words around them.
The collaborative multiple—glossy white boxes, each swaddled in an exuberant band of cloth, containing smatterings of information, influences (bits of texts, photos, a shiny gold CD of favorite tunes by Marlene Dietrich and various crooners), an Owens watercolor drawing of flowers as well as a pocket-sized Stark piece—presented examples of what moves the three friends but in no way defined friendship or simplified the intricacies of influence. It simply reiterated—and multiplied—the similarities the individual works already displayed. The multiple emphasized things assembled in the accompanying video, TRT: 48:20, July 11, 1997. Rated “G,” it showed surprising instances of what the friends like and what may end up somehow influencing their work: exuberance; women of strength, conviction, and smarts; daffiness; and a concern for how to make enough money to get by and do what you really want to do—i.e., an ecstatic spelling-bee champion; Gena Rowlands; cartoon animation; and documentary footage of the auction of one of Van Gogh’s sunflower paintings.
Thinking about the show, I considered how friends become friends and remain so, and how the art world mimics and makes economic such relations, whether or not it admits it as boldly as this brave little show did. Friends recommend to other friends things (music, artists, distractions) that they are excited by. Curators may apply theory-heavy constructs to such give-and-take, but even they generally find room for things made space for by allegiance alone. Art gets made because of these kinds of intractable goings-on. Most artists of any interest whatsoever only have conversations with (make work for) a few people, two or three, not many more. That large groups of people can at times partake of the conversation long after the fact amazes.
Two final notes. The video has a bit of an interview with John Cassavetes; he says something about a philosophy of life—which is what this show was an example of. Then he pauses and declares: “I have a one-track mind: all I’m interested in is love.” The title of the video, “TRT,” could be trust; the three artists/friends provide and are the missing “us.”
L.A.-Based and Superstructure (selection)
Lane Relyea in Public Offerings, ed. Paul Schimmel and Howard Singerman, Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001
Excuse me while I talk shop. It’s hard not to these days what with the art world humming along so impressively. Business is up and complaints are few. In fact there’s little discussion right now beyond reports of art world maneuverings that feels very compelling or urgent. Critic Bruce Hainley recently shrugged, “Who really wants premises messing up, as they often do, the enjoyment?” Attempting any sort of high-minded summary of our far-flung artistic field, proposing any program with which to cleave the relevant from the irrelevant, assembling any set of metaphors or theoretical imperatives or aesthetic criteria, means courting disaster. On the whole, theme shows of contemporary art are unwelcome, and the only characterization of the moment widely agreed upon is that “there are no movements now, no one thing.” Just looking at the variety of works by the six Los Angeles artists included in Public Offerings would appear to prove that. All of which makes writing about these artists as a group a bit tricky; if they do share anything it’s most readily apparent not in some formal or conceptual correspondence between their artworks but in the common shape of their careers. Interpreting works of art by analyzing career machinations is problematic enough, let alone doing so within the genteel protocols of an exhibition catalog.
Yet isn’t this precisely the dilemma Public Offerings poses? The title, at least on the face of it, promises art that assumes a generous, even humble posture before a gathered audience (“audience” even seems too passive a word––publics are thought to have enough coherence to judge and act). At the same time the phrase Public Offerings doesn’t entirely hide its origins in the world of high finance, cropped as it is from the marketplace lingo for a company’s first issuance of stock (“initial public offerings” or I.P.O.s). And behind these two readings, a third way in which the title makes sense is in its suggestion that the initial, the first, the beginning––of an artist’s oeuvre, of his or her career––will take place in public; it will be a public or at least a publicized event. What we’re talking about are artworks and artists whose public lives start young.
At any rate, this is what I take Public Offerings to be about, the kind of phenomenon it’s referring to. At the risk of coming across as indelicate, this essay will be about the extent to which I agree that this phenomenon has become newly definitive of art made over the past ten years, with consequences for the look and make-up of the work itself. I also think I know when I first felt the buffeting of those consequences
…
Today’s work has less to do with institutional critique than with what Hal Foster calls “the return of the real,” although it’s a decidedly sociological, everyday real rather than a psychoanalytic one. Nor is it an empirical real. For [Jorge] Pardo and most of the other L.A. artists in this exhibition, the real isn’t manifested in any single, inscrutable material object, confrontational in its mute and obdurate physicality. Rather it inheres in strings of relationships, in the tenuous and intimate connections that make up an artist’s scene or the ecology of his or her practice, in the interlocking and occasional slippage of components within those systems, and in their dense circulation of information (of objects, people, money, press, camaraderie, gossip).
…
The question is not whether to turn away from exhibiting and retreat into the privations of the artist’s garret. Rather, it’s a question of how this newly increased public exposure of art and artists is perceived and approached. It would be easy at this point to continue the teem of this essay and claim that the public for art today is considered for the most part metonymically, as just part of the literal and quantifiable context manifested around art and the system it must work its way through, an audience being something that emerges mechanically and punctually from art-school critiques to gallery and museum openings. This is no doubt true, but there’s more. While few would go so far as to describe existing art publics as communities (or group formations or subcultures or any word connoting a shade of agency), hints have been made at the central importance of friendships among artists. For example in a 1998 catalogue devoted to his work, Pardo listed on a couple of its pages the names of friends and influences, ranging from family members to fellow artists––just their names, with no further explanation or commentary added. And in 1997 Lockhart, Owens, and Stark mounted a show together based simply on their mutual friendship, “an investigation into the nature of discourse and dialogue among friends,” as the press release stated. Perhaps what’s being signaled here (and elsewhere, as in Muller’s hand-painted announcements) is a desire to imagine differently the kind of frame that situates and underwrites art, to acknowledge but then draw emphasis away from the institutional and ideological toward a more flexible social framing. And yet the publicly pledged camaraderie of Lockhart, Owens, and Stark was received as “a very cryptic show” that “in no way defined friendship or simplified the intricacies of influence” –– “it’s pretty much impossible,” one reviewer conceded, “to document something as elusive as mutual support and its correlates.” Here then is an indication of the quandary art now finds itself in, its existing in public but suspecting anything as explicitly formed as a public statement. Friendship, as part of these artists’ “living situation,” has to remain unorganized and inarticulate to be felt as convincingly genuine; it can’t be declaratively figured, made a theme or metaphor or position. And so Lockhart, Owens, and Stark tie their show together in a literal, mechanistic way by making work in four-feet-square formats, and Pardo falls back to the metonymy of a list.
List of Works
Library
Frances Stark, A Foreshortening of the Mind’s Perspective, 1997, 48 × 48 inches, carbon on paper. Private collection.
Sharon Lockhart, Laura Owens, and Frances Stark, 48:20, July 11, 1997, video and CD ephemera from boxed multiple, available for view on media player.
Stair
Arthur J. Telfer, Young Girls in American Flag Costume, 1918, silver gelatin print, 8 ½ × 7 inches. Courtesy Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York, Gift of Arthur J. Telfer, Smith & Telfer Photographic Collection
Study
Sharon Lockhart, Untitled, 1997, 48 × 48 inches, chromogenic print. Courtesy the artist.
Sunroom
Sharon Lockhart, Laura Owens, and Frances Stark, Untitled, 1997. Various media: Cardboard boxes with cloth obi containing 28 leaves, 1 watercolor, 6 color photographs, 1 announcement card, 1 card, 1 postcard , 1 stencil drawing, 1 color reproduction, 1 video cassette, and 1 CD-Rom. 11 ¼ × 11 ¼ × 1 ½ inches. 18 boxes out of edition of 48. Courtesy Laura Owens and Sharon Lockhart.
Laura Owens, Untitled, 1997, 48 × 48 inches, acrylic on canvas. Private collection.