SO Catalog

Significant OrdinarieS

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

Significant OrdinarieSdavid HOrvitz | LOuiSe LawLer | wiLLiam Leavitt Jeffrey vaLLance | mark wySe

January 26 – April 14, 2013

University Art Museum – California State University, Long Beach

School of Art – California State University, Long BeachGraduate Program in Museum and Curatorial Studies1250 Bellflower BoulevardLong Beach, CA 90840

Publication ©2013 Graduate Program in Museum and Curatorial Studies, CSULBAll rights reserved

Catalogue designed by Khara CloutierPrinted by Typecraft Wood & Jones, Inc., Pasadena, CA

ISBN: 978-0-615-74324-0

Significant Ordinaries was curated and organized by David De Boer, Eamonn Fox, and Mary Grace Sanchez in partial fulfillment for the CSULB Graduate Program in Museum and Curatorial Studies.

5Significant OrdinarieS

If artists since Marcel Duchamp have affirmed selection and arrangement

as legitimate artistic strategies, was it not simply a matter of time before curatorial practice—itself

defined by selection and arrangement—would come to be seen as an art that operates on

the field of art itself ? Aaron Schuster¹

Significant Ordinaries explores diverse acts of presentation as the means for making art. Each of the five artists of Significant Ordinaries—David Horvitz, Louise Lawler, William Leavitt, Mark Wyse, and Jeffrey Vallance—has a distinctly different take on the act of presentation as a contemporary art form. For this exhibition, we propose to reveal how their differing approaches to curatorial selection and display disrupt the authority associated with authorship by acknowledging the complex interplay of— and the dynamic space between—object, creator, viewing context, and audience. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, curating is the act of selecting, organizing, and displaying.² With curatorial processes deeply embedded in contemporary artistic production, and co-opted to describe nearly any act of organization, most basically “curating” is a vehicle for justifying an object’s presence in the world. More specifically, and perhaps paradoxically, the artist’s appropriation of the role of curator not only destabilizes the value and meaning of objects but also activates the role of the viewer by suggesting that they too are part of the artistic process. In contrast to the physical engagement of viewers in a variety of types of Conceptual Art, including the contemporary genre of so-called “participatory art,”³ here the spectator is encouraged to partake intellectually in the artist’s project of (re)interpretation.


Building on, but also questioning, some assumptions basic to the genres known as Conceptual Art and Institutional Critique, this approach—which Jeffrey Vallance identifies with the neologism “procurating”⁴ —reconfigures the relationship between the artist and curator, privileging neither the act of original creation nor the authority of ultimate presentation. Moreover, the intellectual certainty, overt political agenda, and confrontational approach of Institutional Critique is replaced by an attitude of curious engagement as well as an ambiguous relationship with power structures and politics. The deeply nuanced practices of the artists in Significant Ordinaries can be understood in part by providing a historical context that reveals their connections and ruptures with previous generations of conceptually based artists.

Significant Ordinaries: Art Historical ContextAs early as 1913, artist and patriarch of Conceptual Art, Marcel Duchamp, questioned the nature of art making by shifting from a material aesthetic experience, as described by the individual artistic practice of making objects, to a practice rooted in language and premised on context. In Fountain (1917), a porcelain urinal which he famously signed with the pseudonym “R. Mutt,” and his Bôite-en-Valise (1935-1941), comprised of a leather case containing miniature replicas of his artworks, Duchamp foregrounds the creative acts of selection, arrangement, and display as central to the production of meaning.⁵ This “discovery” of the contingent nature of art, based on the interpretative role of an assumed audience, stands in stark opposition to theories that posit modern art’s origin as self-contained and its meaning as determined by the artist alone.⁶ This “activation” of the viewer repositions art from a closed dialogue between artist and artwork about “what” a given object means, to an open discourse on “how” meaning may be created within shifting social systems.

In the 1960s, the privileging of discourse over materialist concerns in the creation of an artwork was central to the development of Conceptual Art, with artists such as Sol LeWitt and Lawrence


Weiner relinquishing not only the role of artist as maker but even the necessity of a physical art object. LeWitt created guidelines for artworks that were executed by assistants and Weiner devised statements displayed as typographic texts on gallery walls. In their influential essays from 1967 and 1968, these artists underscored their intent to create a condition where the viewer is needed to “participate in the receiving of the artworks’ meaning.”⁷

A new type of Conceptual Art, with an overtly political agenda, developed in the early 1970s. Proponents of this movement, known as Institutional Critique, revealed how the inherent structural qualities of art institutions imbue objects with both monetary and cultural value.⁸ In New York and Europe, Hans Haacke sought to expose the capitalist ideologies and operations of the art establishment, often focusing on art museums and their donors. On the west coast, Michael Asher moved away from creating objects by instead altering the space of galleries or repositioning objects in order to de-center the power of the institution and to shift how art is perceived.⁹ In the 1980s and 1990s, Institutional Critique was extended and redefined by artists such as Andrea Fraser and Fred Wilson through museological interventions and installations, mimicking curatorial decisions of arrangement or presentation in the museum to include interdisciplinary subjects, such as psychoanalysis, as well as broader socio-political issues, including gender and race.¹⁰

Artists within the genre of Institutional Critique aimed at making visible the socially constructed boundaries of the museum estab-lishment in order to question its claim of neutrality. However, in his analysis of artists who exposed museum and gallery administrative structures, art curator James Putnam suggests that these artists never intended to subvert institutions in their entirety.¹¹ Instead, he proposes the museological method of curating attracts artists precisely because of its link to the authority of museums. Thus, through adopting the methods of curating, artists are able to simultaneously adopt the power associated with museums and to question it.


In the artworks of Significant Ordinaries, artists Lawler, Vallance, Leavitt, Wyse, and Horvitz do not merely challenge cultural institu-tions from a privileged position within the museum. Instead, they blur the line between artistic production and curatorial practice. This dual position is actively embraced in all its ambiguity. By investigating the linked issues of archiving, appropriation, and taste, these artists challenge viewers to question their habits of understanding, and their assumptions about the creation of value and, ultimately, meaning in artworks. By assuming the role of curators as makers of cultural value, their own inevitable involvement with dominant social systems of art production and consumption is implied. The determining principle for the following discussion of artists is in the movement towards a greater questioning of the role and authority of the artist.

Louise Lawler: Revealing ContextCuratorial arrangement, both obvious and more covert, distinguishes Louise Lawler’s artistic practice. Her photographs typically depict other artists’ works in institutions and in private collectors’ homes, evoking a nuanced exploration of collecting and display. In the essay, “Louise Lawler: Pictures from the Exhibition,” art critic Eleanor Heartney defines Lawler as the preeminent post-modernist.¹² For Heartney, this status derives from Lawler’s practice of using photos of single or multiple artworks in order to engage the complex and contingent contexts of art. Dovetailing with several postmodern critiques, Lawler’s “exposure of an artwork’s existence as an object among other objects undermines the modernist fetishization of the art object. . . reinforces art’s status as commodity . . . [and] evokes postmodern debates over the myth of authenticity and individual-ity.”¹³ By making other artists’ work an integral part of her own art, Lawler shifts attention from the singular object, to the associations created between different works of art and their diverse environ-ments of display.


Fig. 1. Louise Lawler, Freud’s Shirt, 2001/2003, Cibachrome, 5 x 4.5 inches.

Many of Lawler’s photographs show multiple works on display in a museum gallery, artworks being installed in those galleries, or art viewed by museum visitors. In Freud’s Shirt, (2001/2003) (Fig. I) Lawler presents art in a more private context, likely a boardroom or home—domestic settings being one of her favorite environments. A sociological reading of the photo might suggest how art often


functions domestically both as interior decoration, coordinated with furnishings, and as evidence of conspicuous consumption. In this case, Lawler photographed a detail of a Frank Stella painting from his Scramble series (begun in 1967), in conjunction with chairs and a highly reflective table that refracts the painting—disseminating and distorting the image. By photographing art in its “ordinary” circumstances, Lawler challenges the viewer to interpret this photograph as revealing the elite economic context for art. However, such a reading is only one interpretation.

The formal elegance of Lawler’s photo, like Stella’s painting within it, positions it too as a fine art commodity, to be sold, zealously collected, and displayed in conjunction with other pieces—as in this exhibition. In similar fashion, the way in which Lawler composes and “frames” the photograph through her subjective point of view, asserts her authority over this private setting. The overt quality of this “framing” acknowledges Lawler’s artistic, authorial hand. Given that Lawler’s strategy is opaque, it is tempting to analyze the photograph as signaling the juxtaposition of material versus intellectual, and inevitably the viewer is left to ponder the ever-expanding rings of interpretation.

Jeffrey Vallance: Framing CollectionsWhereas Lawler’s critiques often picture art in institutional contexts, Jeffrey Vallance creates art by literally framing objects in ways that suggest a religious context. Through his artwork, Vallance extends the modes and implications of display in order to reflect on collecting as a deeply engrained human activity that tampers with, but not necessarily challenges, established institutions. Often humorous, Vallance’s embellished presentations of everyday objects, installations, and attendant writings direct attention to both the social and personal significance of objects, and the contexts that shape their meaning. A collector since childhood, Vallance has amassed a wide range of objects. In his artistic practice, Vallance displays these objects in ways that allow the viewer to draw connections between the artwork and the

Fig. 2. Jeffrey Vallance, Juliet’s Balcony, Verona, 2006, mixed media, 24.5 x 8.5 x 8.25 inches.


original context from which the objects came—essentially to his life experience. Frequently, Vallance displays these objects as “relics” of our society in custom-made containers that resemble Christian reliquaries. Vallance takes on the role of the curator by showcasing the works—and invoking the lives—of others in an effort to reveal cherished cultural values and belief systems.¹⁴

In his book Relics & Reliquaries (2008), Vallance relates a story that contextualizes Juliet’s Balcony, Verona (2006) (Fig. 2). During a trip to Europe he found himself sharing a hotel room with an ex- girlfriend at a romantic tourist destination while his then girlfriend waited “faithfully at home.” At the historic site of Juliet Capulet’s balcony in Verona, Italy, Vallance describes a scene in which, while rubbing the breast of a statue of Juliet for “luck,” a man selling kitsch Romeo and Juliet souvenirs passes by him and amongst the vendor’s goods is a tray of buttons promoting the punk band the Dead Kennedys. Vallance found this detail so incongruous that he deemed a pin to be the “perfect souvenir of my ‘romantic’ pilgrimage to Juliet’s Balcony.”¹⁵ The artwork he produced in response to this experience includes as its centerpiece a 1936 Cambridge University Press edition of Romeo and Juliet in which the editor’s name—George Sampson, a noted scholar of English literature—is far more prominent than the name of the play’s author, William Shakespeare. Vallance placed the worn book in a reliquary-like housing, with a Dead Kennedys’ stylized “DK” button serving as a herald, ringed in golden laurel above it, and both surmounted by a figurine that could well be a saint.

Vallance’s anecdotes allow the viewer to experience the artist’s reasoning for his collections and their display. They also suggest the way a curator might theorize or contextualize an artwork on a gallery wall label or in a catalogue essay. While Juliet’s Balcony, Verona may be thought to satirize the “holy” contents of traditional reliquaries, upon closer reflection, it mimes the form of the reliquary—and thereby is transformed from a vehicle of worship to one of self-reflection. The reliquary serves as a literal and conceptual frame that signals the importance of curating objects and experiences


as central to the artist’s writing of his own life. Through this peculiar relationship, Vallance challenges the viewer to question his or her own attachments to personal, material possessions and the ways in which value is created through narrative. Through acts of selection and display, Vallance’s own mundane life experience, as a Lutheran raised in Los Angeles’ iconic San Fernando Valley suburb, becomes the stuff of art.

William Leavitt: Theater MethodWhile Vallance introduces personal narrative through his art, William Leavitt positions the viewer within scenes typical of

Fig. 3. William Leavitt, Cutaway View, 2008, mixed media installation, dimensions variable.


suburban interiors. As a painter, installation artist, and theater director, California transplant Leavitt often recreates the banality of suburban domestic settings as hybrid installations that he calls “tableaux.”¹⁶ By deploying fragments of popular vernacular culture within the frame of modernist residential architecture, Leavitt evokes silent narratives in his “theater of the ordinary.” The culture of Los Angeles plays a significant role in Leavitt’s art, as his themes revolve around Hollywood’s use of illusion to suggest reality.¹⁷

A resonant example of Leavitt’s distinctive tableaux, Cutaway View (2008) (Fig. 3) appears to be an extracted corner section of a suburban dwelling that includes domestic accouterments (a potted plant, framed painting of a horse, and lighting). The illusion is completed by the presence of the viewer who activates the faux domestic environment as a faux resident. The vernacular of Cutaway View confronts the viewer with real portions of an imagined domestic interior. In fact, Cutaway View operates as a decontextualized “home;” its walls are theater flats propped-up with exposed lumber. On the plain wooden reverse of the “wall,” Leavitt presents a crafted “history” of the painted horse referencing “Hollywood backstories.”¹⁸

Leavitt’s work evokes absurdity, while arguably his organization, or curating, of suburban decor foregrounds selection and display as the means or process of art making, implicating the aesthetics of suburban culture and issues of taste. By placing such banal items on display within an art institution, these “ordinary” objects become objects of significance, as things worthy of viewing and interpreting. Whereas Vallance’s reliquaries mix the mundane with the tran-scendent and enliven them through anecdote, Leavitt’s tableaux invest the everyday world with theatricality in search of a script. As Leavitt states, “I’m trying to frame some story through an object or a painting or a situation that would lend itself to further narrative.”¹⁹ It is up to each viewer, like an actor on a stage, to provide his or her own version of the story. To a large extent, that script is premised on how the spectator acts, or reacts, to Leavitt’s sparsely arranged sets.


In the work of Lawler, Vallance, and Leavitt the increasingly overt artistic acts of selection and display result in the activation of the spectator. Viewers move from theorizing about the circumstance of the work to imagining the commemoration of our lives in relics and to wondering about how the decoration of our own environments reveals our values and creates our meaning. The physical spaces of art become the art itself, with Lawler drawing our attention to social context, Vallance creating physical and narrative contexts, and Leavitt making the context, the space, and the work. In contrast, for Mark Wyse and David Horvitz the spectator is provoked to reinterpret and reimagine the function of their artworks and thus to conceive their “framing” while effacing the lines of authorship.

Mark Wyse: Blurring AuthorityIf the curatorial contexts of Vallance and Leavitt are architectural, involved with extending and bounding objects in physical space, Mark Wyse’s approach builds upon that of Lawler. He utilizes a process of re-arranging and appropriating imagery both from his own collection and from historical photographs and illustrations. He then deploys the space of the gallery wall and the art catalogue to imagine new relationships within what could be termed “art historical space.” In Wyse’s project entitled Seizure (2009),²⁰ the artist combines reproductions and illustrations of other artists’ works together with his own photographs in white frames of the same size. Art critic Charlie Schultz notes that Wyse’s process equalizes differences of scale, medium, and, of course, authorship—only differentiating their relationships through space.²¹ Wyse thus empties the given meanings and associations from these works by placing them within new contextually specific relationships. Wyse’s interventions through re-contextualization demand the viewer’s re-interpretation. Schultz’s observations about the Seizure project focus on four works: Boy (Fig. 4), a photographic detail of the painting Vincent and Tony by Alex Katz (1969); Cartier (not pictured here), an image of the Cartier luxury brand logo; La Jolla (Fig. 5), a photograph of groundcover in the affluent city of La Jolla, CA; and Father Figure (Fig. 6), a silhouette portrait of Marcel Duchamp.

Fig. 4. Mark Wyse, Boy, 2009, archival inkjet print, 19 x 15.5 inches (framed).

Fig. 5. Mark Wyse, La Jolla, 2009, archival inkjet print, 19 x 15.5 inches (framed).

Fig. 6. Mark Wyse, Father Figure, 2009, archival inkjet print, 19 x 15.5 inches (framed).


To Schultz, Father Figure looks downward with the gaze of dis-approval at the two symbols of beauty and luxury—one (Cartier) manufactured, and the other (La Jolla) natural. In contrast, the sad looking Boy is placed across the symbols of beauty perhaps because of an “unbridgeable gap”²² based on the different notions of beauty. Yet even Schultz is the first to state the instability in his own interpretation, when he confesses a concrete meaning is “impossible to tell” because the subjects are presented with so much anonymity.²³ Within Seizure’s own arrangement there is an inescapable ambiguity.

For Wyse, the word “seizure” indicates less a physical response and more a mental reaction. It correlates to his psychological state while viewing a photograph. Wyse states that “my body projects onto the photograph new attachments, new thoughts that have nothing to do with and everything to do with the image I am looking at.”²⁴ Wyse continues, “the photographic image is intimate and defensive at the same time. The photograph is less a representation of the world than a representation of a thought that reflects a relationship to the world.”²⁵ In this way, works of art, as with thoughts about them, are not limited to the authority who creates or appropriates them. By reframing and re-presenting diverse artworks through idiosyncratic arrangements, Wyse performs as a curator but one who avoids, and thus defers, the authority and logic associated with curating.

David Horvitz: Giving Up Control If Wyse is drawn to the processes of selection and display but ultimately abrogates the power dynamic associated with these acts, David Horvitz takes a more positive view of curatorial creativity. However, rather than delegating the curatorial role to the artist exclusively, he extends it to the viewer, who becomes an active participant in a process initiated by him. His provocatively titled work, Drugstore Beetle (Sitodrepa Paniceum)²⁶ (2010) consists of a four-flap folder that includes commissioned artworks from twenty-seven different artists. Horvitz originally made thirty editions of this work and his curatorial process involved making


an exhibition-ready “book,” assigning it an International Standard Book Number (ISBN), and gifting copies to various institutions around the world. Similar to the destructive library bookworm Sitodrepa Panicea, suggestively alluded to in the project’s title, the editions are invasive in nature. Through its acceptance into a library archive, each edition of Drugstore Beetle becomes part of the cultural establishment.²⁷

By placing the project within the kind of folder commonly used by libraries, Drugstore Beetle editions take on the guise of an archival object that allows for simultaneous assimilation and infiltration. Once embedded within the library, Drugstore Beetle can be checked out by library patrons, allowing each user the opportunity to curate the work by (re)organizing its constituent pieces according to his or her own taste or interpretation. In this way, the contingent nature of curating extends to the library staff and its patrons. Along with interpreting the pieces through arranging them, the patron may well question the ways in which this presentation has occurred. As Horvitz points to the vexed relationship between the work of art and its reproduction in books and exhibition catalogues, he also problematizes authorship in various modes.

Some of these possibilities are suggested by the edition of Drugstore Beetle housed in the Helen Topping Architecture and Fine Arts Library collection at the University of Southern California. Upon accepting the work for the collection, the art librarian chose to include her correspondence with Horvitz in the four-flap folder. The correspondence between the two has expanded the original artwork and demonstrates how patrons can further transform the work. Far from criticizing the role of the curator (or the institution in which the work resides), Horvitz radically extends the privilege of curating through this collaboration with the institution and its patrons, thereby transferring curatorial authority from the artist to the audience.

Fig. 6. Marley Freeman, Untitled, 2010, acrylic on paper, 7 x 6.5 inches. *The artwork is shown on the top of the stack, it is part of a collaborative project by David Horvitz, entitled Drugstore Beetle (Sitodrepa Paniceum), 2010. ©Marley Freeman

Fig. 7. Santos R. Vásquez, A Meta Archive Project: Library Outtakes, 1996-2002, C-print, 10 x 8 inches.

*The artwork is part of a collaborative project by David Horvitz, entitled Drugstore Beetle (Sitodrepa Paniceum), 2010. ©Santos R. Vásquez


Conclusion: Who Makes It Art?

I have always believed that it is the artist who creates the work, but a society that turns it into a work of art

Johannes Cladders ²⁸

To varying degrees, in all the works of Significant Ordinaries, the ambiguous authority of the artist-as-curator is extended to the viewer. Thus, the most relevant questions may not be how and why artists take on the guise of the curator, but how audiences participate in contesting and authorizing meaning, and what so doing means for artists and for viewers. Once valence is redirected from the artist to the viewer—with meanings contingent upon expanding contexts—then the circles of interpretation spread out, as do the reflections in Louise Lawler’s photograph, Freud’s Shirt. While this dynamic association between artist, artwork, and audience is central in all manifestations of Conceptual Art, the artists, here, imagine those relationships in different ways and to different ends. Most importantly, perhaps, these artists, unlike their predecessors within Institutional Critique, do not simply reference curating as part of a critical dialogue with elite institutions. Rather, through acts of selecting, arranging, and displaying, they invest objects, even ordinary objects, with the significance customarily attached to “art.” In the work of Lawler, Leavitt, Vallance, Wyse, and Horvitz, we become aware of how the relics of our lives, the mundane spaces of daily existence, the ways that we access and use information, and the physical activation of the audience are conditioned by—and imbued with—the processes of artistic organization. This extension and releasing of space into the ordinary world, where the viewer is included and the artist’s relationship to the work is insignificant, creates a gesture where the artist has the potential to disappear.


Notes.

1. Aaron Schuster, “Harald Szeemann: 1933-2005, Visionary Belgium,” Frieze Magazine, May 2005, http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/harald_ szeemann_1933_2005/ (accessed November 2012).

2. This definition also suggests that curating is done with “professional or expert knowledge.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 20 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), s.v. “curating.” Also available at http://www.oed.com/.

3. Other terms that have been used to describe “participatory art” include: social practice, community-based art, littoral art, and contextual art. Art historian Claire Bishop describes “participatory art” as a practice in which “the artist is conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects than as a collaborator and producer of situation; the work of art as a finite, portable commodifiable product is reconceived as an ongoing or long term project with an unclear beginning and end while the audience, previously conceived as a ‘viewer’ or ‘beholder’, is now repositioned as a co-producer or participant.” Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 1-2.

4. In an email from the artist to the curators of Significant Ordinaries, Vallance suggests inventing the word “procurator (from professional + curator)” to describe his organizational practice and development of narrative discourse around seemingly ordinary objects. Vallance’s term might also punningly suggest the verb “procure,” the acquisition of goods and services, and signal the accumulation of objects and re- purposing it in artwork. Jeffrey Vallance, e-mail to David DeBoer, March 21, 2012.

5. Francis M. Naumann, “Duchamp, (Henri-Robert-) Marcel,” Grove Art Online. Marcel Duchamp is associated with Dadaist and Surrealist art during the early 20th century. Many of his works challenged conventional traditions concerning the notions of art. His work has greatly influenced the output of post-World War I Western art. http://www.oxfordartonline .com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T023894?q=marcel+duchamp&search=quick&source=oao_gao&pos=1&_start=1&size=25#firsthit (accessed October 2, 2012).


6. This approach is most frequently associated with Clement Greenberg, the art critic and theorist who championed non-objective art and abstract expressionism. In his essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Greenberg describes how the inception of non-objective art arises from an attempt to imitate God by creating something of validity solely on its own terms. Clement Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism: Perception and Judgments, 1939-1944, Vol. 1, edited by John O’Brian. (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1955), 8.

7. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum, June 1967; Lawrence Weiner, “Statement of Intent,” 1968. First published in January 5–31, 1969, exh. cat. (New York: Seth Siegelaub, 1969), unpaginated.

8. Nizan Shaked, “Institutional Critique,” Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T2086985?type=article&goto=I&_start=201&pos=214&size=25 (accessed November 2012).

9. Michael Asher’s work also asserts a hyper-critical approach toward “authorship,” often associated with theorists Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. For a broader discussion of the issue, see Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990), 105-143.

10. Shaked, “Institutional Critique.”

11. To make the point, James Putnam quotes artist Ilya Kabakov “…the war with the ‘museum’ continues to an ordinary strategy of artistic production that has already become traditional for our century…and nevertheless, the only place where all this ultimately winds up is the museum, that same culture it is fighting against and which it repudiates. And as a result this very ‘struggle’ itself, or more precisely, the history of this struggle, comprises the very fabric, the very history of culture.” Kabakov’s status as a Jewish exile from the Soviet Union both underscores the authority of his critique, and suggests that his stake in the issue might differ from that of artists raised in capitalist democracies. James Putnam, Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001), 92-93.

12. Eleanor Heartney, “Louise Lawler: Pictures from the Exhibition,” Art Press, no. 301 (2004), 37.

13. Ibid, 39.


14. Jeremy Hight, “Interview with Jeffrey Vallance,” Whitehot Magazine, March 2011, http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/2011-interview-with-jeffrey-vallance/2226 (accessed August 2012).

15. Jeffrey Vallance, Relics & Reliquaries (Santa Ana: Grand Central Press and California State University Fullerton, 2008), 112-113.

16. In the Oxford English Dictionary, “tableau” is defined as being a representation of the action at some stage in a play (esp. a critical one), created by the actors suddenly holding their positions. Also as a stage direction; hence drawing attention to a dramatic scene or situation. Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 20 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), s.v. “tableau.” Also available at http://www.oed.com/.

17. William Leavitt, Anne Goldstein, and Bennett Simpson, William Leavitt: Theatre Objects (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011), 9.

18. A fictional narrative attached to the backside of Cutaway View describes the history of the horse painting and the horse’s ties to racing, interpersonal melodrama, and the mafia. Leavitt describes the text as “kind of a joke about Hollywood backstories” – a pun since “it’s literally on the back of the set.” Lily Simonson, “Looking at Los Angeles | Flat Affect,” Art: 21, April 28, 2011, http://blog.art 21.org/2011/04/28/looking-at-los-angeles-flat-affect/ (accessed November 2012).

19. David Pagel, “William Leavitt: Multi-tasker at Heart,” Los Angeles Times, March 6, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/mar/06/entertainment/ la-ca-spring-william-leavitt-20110306 (accessed November 2012).

20. Mark Wyse and Charlie White, Seizure (Bologna, Italy: Damiani Editore, 2011).

21. Charlie Schultz, “Take Hold,” Artslant.com, http://www.artslant.com/ny/articles/show/15866 (accessed November 2012).

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Mark Wyse, “500 words,” Artforum.com, http://artforum.com/words/id=28197 (accessed November 2012).


25. Mark Wyse, “Seizure,” (press release), Wallspace.com, http://www.wall-spacegallery.com/MEDIA/00971.pdf (accessed November 2012).

26. Sitodrepa Paniceum is the scientific name for the most notorious bookworm, whose high reproduction rate sends larvae in the hundreds of thousands each year burrowing into books and shelves, according to David Horvitz. David Horvitz, “Drugstore Beetle (Sitodrepa Paniceum): An Explanation,” http://drugstorebeetle.wordpress.com/2010/03/27/an-explanation/ (accessed January 2012).

27. Ibid.

28. In an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Johannes Cladders, curator and director of the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, Germany, discusses how artists since Marcel Duchamp have relied on the audience to complete a work of art. Hans Ulrich Obrist, A Brief History of Curating (Zurich: JRP | Ringier & Les Presses Du Reél, 2011), 57.


Exhibition ChecklistLouise Lawler, Freud’s Shirt, 2001/2003, Cibachrome, 5 x 4.5 inches, edition 53/100. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York. ©Louise Lawler

Jeffrey Vallance, Juliet’s Balcony, Verona, 2006, mixed media, 24.5 x 8.5 x 8.25 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. ©Jeffrey Vallance

William Leavitt, Cutaway View, 2008, mixed media installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles. Installation view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo credit: Brian Forrest. ©William Leavitt

Mark Wyse, Boy, 2009, archival inkjet print, 19 x 15.5 inches (framed). Courtesy of the artist. ©Mark Wyse

Mark Wyse, La Jolla, 2009, archival inkjet print, 19 x 15.5 inches (framed). Collection of Evan Walsh. ©Mark Wyse

Mark Wyse, Father Figure, 2009, archival inkjet print, 19 x 15.5 inches (framed). Courtesy of the artist. ©Mark Wyse

David Horvitz, Drugstore Beetle (Sitodrepa Paniceum), 2010, mixed media, archival four-flap, 12 x 9.5 x 1.5 inches (folder). Courtesy of the Helen Topping Architecture and Fine Arts Library, USC.


Artist Biographies David Horvitz is an artist from Los Angeles currently based in Brooklyn who works with the Internet to play with, and investigate the public distribution of images. His work incorporates various aspects in image circulation, often involving infiltration into institutions such as Wikipedia. He received an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of Art at Bard College in 2010. Since then, Horvitz has exhibited nationally and internationally for Tate Modern (London, 2010); CAA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (San Francisco, 2010); Art Metropole (Toronto, 2008); Berkeley Art Museum (Berkeley, 2011) and New Museum (New York, 2010). In 2011, Horvitz was nominated for the LUMA Foundation Discovery Award (Arles, France). He received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Award in 2011.

Louise Lawler is a central figure in postmodern photography. Her work encompasses highlighting other artists’ works in various environments such as private collectors’ homes, museums, and auction houses. Receiving a BFA from Cornell University in 1969, the artist has exhibited extensively in the United States and Europe. Lawler has had multiple solo exhibitions at Metro Pictures, New York. She has also shown at Sprüth Magers (London, 2011); Wexner Center for the Arts (Ohio, 2006); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 2012), and Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, 1988). Her work is also in the collections of the Kunsthalle Hamburg; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Art Institute of Chicago. Louise Lawler lives and works in New York.

William Leavitt is a Los Angeles based painter, installation artist, and theater director whose work is influenced by the Los Angeles landscape and culture. Leavitt holds an MFA from Claremont Graduate School and a BFA from the University of Colorado. He has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, 2011); LA><ART (Los Angeles, 2011); Santa Monica Museum of Art (Santa Monica, 1990); Orange County Museum of Art (Newport Beach, 2011) and


Kunstverein Braunschweig (Germany, 2006). Institutions such as Hammer Museum, UCLA (Los Angeles); The Museum of Modern Art (New York) and Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) have his works in their public and private collections. He currently teaches at Marymount College in Rancho Palos Verdes.

Jeffrey Vallance is an artist who acts as a researcher whose work deals with symbolic narratives taking on many forms such as painting, installation, published texts, sculpture and video. He has exhibited at such institutions as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, 2006); CSU Fullerton Grand Art Center (Santa Ana, 2007); The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh, 2011); Centre d’édition contemporarine, Genève (Switzerland, 2009), and Jean P. Haydon Museum of American Samoa (Samoa, 2009). Many of his works are held in such public collections as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles), Hammer Museum, UCLA (Los Angeles), and Moderna Museet (Sweden). He has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2004) and the Foundation for the Culture of the Future (Sweden, 2001). Vallance currently lives and works in Reseda, California.

Mark Wyse is an artist and writer whose work centers on re- contextualizing and appropriating imagery while questioning photographic meaning and intentionality. His recent essay, “Too Drunk to Fuck (On the Anxiety of Photography),” was published by Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art in Words Without Pictures, edited by Charlotte Cotton and Alex Klein. Wyse holds a BA from the University of Colorado and an MFA from Yale University School of Art. Wyse has exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in addition to his seven solo shows at Wallspace Gallery in New York. His works are in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. He currently resides in the Bay Area.


AcknowledgementsSignificant Ordinaries was made possible with generous funding

provided by Associated Students Inc. at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) and the Instructional Related Activities fund, CSULB. The curatorial team wishes to express our gratitude to Christopher Miles, Interim Dean, College of the Arts and to the Fine Arts Roundtable for their generosity. We extend a most grateful thank you to the University Art Museum leadership, Christopher Scoates, Director, Kristina Newhouse, Curator of Exhibitions, and their staff, Angela Barker, Shirley Brilliant, John Ciulik, Amanda Fruta, Elizabeth Hanson, Ilee Kaplan, Pet Sourinthone, and Brian Trimble for their helpful direction and insight. Much appreciation is also due to Doris Taylor, and Cherlyn Comer for their invaluable assistance. We would also like to acknowledge Matthew Cabrera, Coordinator of CSULB Student Resource Center.

The curatorial team is thankful for the generous cooperation and artwork contributed by artists David Horvitz, Louise Lawler, William Leavitt, Jeffrey Vallance and Mark Wyse. For adding context to the exhibition we would like to extend our gratitude to the CSULB Visiting Artists committee, Finishing School, David Horvitz, William Leavitt, Jeffrey Vallance, and Mark Wyse. Appreciation is extended to Margo Leavin and Sarah Hymes of Margo Leavin Gallery; Nicholas Knapp, Michael Plunkett, and Karine Haimo of Metro Pictures Gallery; Jackie Bekiaris and Paul McDermott, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery; Luisa Aguilar, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Ruth Wallach, Head Librarian of Helen Topping Architecture and Fine Arts Library, University of Southern California; and Evan Walsh. We would also like to thank Khara Cloutier for the design of this catalogue and Margaret Black for her advice.

We owe the utmost gratitude to our team of assistant curators Karen Karyadi, Lauren Nochella, Kristy Odett, and Arianna Rizzo for their hard work and dedication to this project. This exhibition would not have been possible without the inspired efforts of our advisor Dr. Kendall Brown and previous advisor Dr. Nizan Shaked. Their enthusiasm, expertise and guidance throughout every stage of the process was invaluable.

Significant Ordinaries was curated and organized by David De Boer, Eamonn Fox, and Mary Grace Sanchez.

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