a.k.a. Public Opinion
Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA
November 18, 2017 – January 6, 2018
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Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to announce a solo exhibition with Los Angeles based artist Shana Lutker and the fifth chapter of her ongoing series, Le “NEW” Monocle: The History of the Fistfights of the Surrealists.
This new chapter of Le “NEW” Monocle stems from an incident that occurred in Paris on June 14, 1935. On that night, André Breton and a group of friends dined at La Closerie de Lilas, a favorite restaurant. Upon leaving, Breton spotted the Russian critic Ilya Ehrenburg across the Boulevard du Montparnasse. The year before, Ehrenburg wrote a stinging piece of criticism about “Les Surrealists” in Vus par un ecrivan d’URSS (Views of a Soviet Writer). Breton ran across the street, surprising Ehrenburg, yelling “Do you know who I am?!” He identified himself by reciting the critic’s insults, verbatim, while rhythmically slapping him across the face with his green leather glove.
Struck by the need for artists to arm themselves, metaphorically at least, Lutker has re-envisioned Breton’s glove as a talisman and a badge of confrontation. a.k.a. Public Opinion is a large installation of more than 300 over-sized leather gloves, each dedicated to an artist in Los Angeles. Starting with the sacrosanct hand of the artist and translating it into a clownish glove, Lutker offers a monument that is simultaneously a battalion of tongue in cheek weapons. The artists represented here responded to a call to participate in the project by contributing a tracing of their hand. The gloves are arranged alphabetically and each artist is identified by a stamp of his or her initials. Lutker’s colorful gloves are not meant to be worn and suggest that good humor and the support of one’s peers might be powerful weapons in fights with ideological and intellectual stakes.
Ehrenburg’s take down of the Surrealists began with a detailed description of a scene from a 1923 Charlie Chaplin film titled A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate (which circulated in France with a different title: Public Opinion.) The film is about a woman who finds herself in the middle of a love triangle with a rich playboy and a starving artist. Ultimately, she scorns both and returns to the countryside to take care of orphans. The sets and interiors in the film—Chaplin’s first drama and a critical failure—include a number of urns, vases, and other suggestively feminine, but inanimate forms. Lutker has transposed these “women of Paris” as a group of freestanding mirrored steel sculptures. Exaggerated, abstracted, and anthropomorphized, the shapes take on a new character, stepping out from behind the shadows of the film. At the same time, they are quite literally shadows of their former film-set selves. Here they are collected in one room, reflective and flattened into two intersecting planes. They elude the three dimensions of their source objects, hovering somewhere in between flat and fat.
Lutker began this body of work as an index of the history of the Surrealists in 2012. Works from the series have been exhibited and performed in galleries and museums in the United States and abroad. This includes solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Pérez Art Museum Miami; the 2014 Whitney Biennial and Performa 13 in New York; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; Hauser & Wirth in New York and Los Angeles; 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica; Barbara Seiler Galerie and Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich; Wetterling Gallery in Stockholm; and TAIX in Echo Park. In February 2018, Lutker’s work will be included in Moments of Being: an exhibition based on the writings of Virginia Woolf at Tate St. Ives, England.
Artists represented in a.k.a. Public Opinion:
Scoli Acosta / Nick Aguayo / Brody Albert / Andy Alexander / Mark Allen / Tom Allen / Basma Alsharif / Kevin Appel / Carmen Argote / Joshua Aster / Claire Anna Baker / John Baldessari / Judie Bamber / Ray Barrie / Michaela Bathrick / Jeff Beall / Whitney Bedford / Kristin Beinner James / Jesse Benson / Scott Benzel / Stephen Berens / David Berezin / Christy Roberts Berkowitz / Ellen Birrell / Jennifer Bolande / Andrea Bowers / Kristen Bradford / Johanna Breiding / Anna Breininger / Brian Bress / Tanya Brodsky / Kaucyila Brooke / Henriëtte Brouwers / Elizabeth Bryant / Nancy Buchanan / Natalie Marie Byrne / Jedediah Caesar / Sarah Cain / Kristin Calabrese / Ingrid Calame / Joshua Callaghan / Lilli Carre / Michael Carter / Carolyn Castaño / Simion Cernica / Carol Cheh / Young Chung / Poppy Coles / Sarah Conaway / Ginny Cook / Heather Cook / Miles Coolidge / Mario Correa / Kate Costello / Eileen Cowin / Zoe Crosher / Sydney Croskery / Nathan Danilowicz / Phil Davis / Corazon Del Sol / Travis Diehl / Eli Diner / Tomory Dodge / Michael Dopp / Robert Doran / Barbara Drucker / Dana Duff / Sean Duffy / Karen Dunbar / Sam Durant / David P. Earle / Don Edler / Alyse Emdur / Nancy Evans / Kirsten Everberg / Krista Feld / Patricia Fernández / John Finneran / Luke Fischbeck / Jaye Fishel / Nick Fisher / Peter Flaherty / Magnus Flowers / Corey Fogel / Bella Foster / Andrea Fraser / Heather Frazar-Smith / Erik Frydenborg / Victoria Fu / Amy Garofano / Bia Gayotto / Sonja Gerdes / Liz Glynn / Sayre Gomez / Valerie Green / Brigitte Nicole Grice / Katie Grinnan / Karl Haendel / Julia Haft-Candell / Mark Hagen / Yaron Hakim / Lia Halloran / Leila Hamidi / Michelle Handel / Kevin Hanley / Ross Hansen / Jenalee Harmon / Jacci Den Hartog / Michael Hayden / Tanya Hayden / Drew Heitzler / Nick Herman / Roger Herman / Brennan Hill / EJ Hill / Yarrow Earth Hock / Julian Hoeber / Joel Holmberg / Violet Hopkins / David Horvitz / John Houck / Anna Sew Hoy / Pearl Hsiung / Bettina Hubby / Melissa Huddleston / Elliott Hundley / Hanna Hur / Bridget Jacobs / Chris James / Elaine Jen / Kathleen Johnson / Kysa Johnson / Matt Johnson / Vishal Jugdeo / Steve Kado / Stanya Kahn / Chris Kallmyer / William Kaminski / Farrah Karapetian / Mary Kelly / Michael Kennedy Costa / Dorna Khazeni / Dwyer Kilcollin / Kathleen Kim / Soo Kim / Becky Kolsrud / Alice Könitz / Joey Kotting / Olga Koumoundouros / Nick Kramer / Christopher Kreiling / Jason Kunke / Natalie Labriola / Jacqueline Laurita Cortese / Mimi Lauter / Jon Leaver / Sophie Lee / Anthony Lepore / Dan Levenson / Janet Levy / Karen Liebowitz / Candice Lin / Galia Linn / Matt Lipps / Hailey Loman / Andrea Longacre-White / Benjamin Lord / Jason Bailer Losh / Shana Lutker / Lauren Mackler / Erica Mahinay / Monica Majoli / Michael Mandiberg / Marisa Mandler / Elana Mann / Christina Catherine Martinez / T. Kelly Mason / Emily Mast / David Matorin / Anna Mayer / Jake Kean Mayman / Thomas McDonell / Rodney McMillian / Nick McPhail / Daniel Mendel-Black / Ignacio Perez Meruane / Adam Miller / Allison Miller / Joshua Miller / Nicole Miller / Yunhee Min / Nour Mobarak / Dianna Molzan / Simone Montemurno / Rebecca Morris / Erin Morrison / Ragen Moss / Megan Mueller / Carter Mull / Warren Neidich / Davida Nemeroff / Claire Nereim / Larissa Nickel / Patrick Nickell / Jennifer Nocon / D'ette Nogle / Yann Novak / Brian O’Connell / Alison O’Daniel / Deirdre O'Dwyer / Kathryn O'Halloran / Alex Olson / Catherine Opie / Julie Orser / Gina Osterloh / Mamiko Otsubo / Laura Owens / Tyler Matthew Oyer / Carlye Packer / Rachel Paprocki / Michael Parker / Jane Parshall / Galeria Perdida / Alex Perliter / Paul Pescador / Renée Petropoulos / Gala Porras-Kim / Ali Prosch / Noam Rappaport / Sarah Rara / Heather Rasmussen / Brian Ratcliffe / Diana Relth / Isaac Resnikoff / Joanna Reynolds / Matt Rich / Marco Rios / Mark Rodriguez / Mark Roeder / Rachelle Rojany / Juliana Romano / Amanda Ross-Ho / Evelena Ruether / Miljohn Ruperto / Amy Russell / Ben Russell / Robert Russell / Kathleen Ryan / Analia Saban / Stephanie Sabo / Yoshie Sakai / Connie Samaras / Lauren Satlowski / Anna Schachte / Asha Schechter / Marty Schnapf / Kim Schoen / Kim Schoenstadt / Betsy Lin Seder / Paul Mpagi Sepuya / Katie Shapiro / Brian Sharp / Leslie Shows / Corrie Siegal / Matt Siegle / Susan Silton / Utah Snyder / Patrick Staff / Erica Ryan Stallones / Cammie Staros / A.L. Steiner / LeRoy Stevens / Aurora Tang / Mateo Tannatt / Victoria Tao / Ethan Tate / Stephanie Taylor / Mungo Thomson / Clarissa Tossin / Tam Van Tran / Cody Trepte / Kerry Tribe / Lia Trinka-Browner / Devon Tsuno / Jason Underhill / J. Parker Valentine / Lesley Vance / Keith J. Varadi / Valerie Veator / Mark Verabioff / Bob Vieira / Anuradha Vikram / Shanna Waddell / Christine Wang / Margaret Wappler / RJ Ward / Dawson Weber / Dana Weiser / Daniel Wheeler / Flora Wiegmann / Brica Wilcox / Bob Wilhite / Jesse Willenbring / Karen Lee Williams / Lisa Williamson / Andrew Norman Wilson / Carlin Wing / Brook Sinkinson Withrow / Rosten Woo / Jonas Wood / Aaron Wrinkle / Peter Wu / Tucker Wulf / Jemima Wyman / Xin Xin / Rosha Yaghmai / Bedros Yeretzian / Jenny Yurshansky / Jody Zellen
This project is ongoing. If you are an artist and would like to contribute a drawing of your hand, please send a tracing of your non-dominant hand to shanalutkerproject@gmail.com
Installation photos by Robert Wedermeyer.