Cheri Gaulke

About the LACE Installation

in Exhibitions / News / Performance / Video  by Cheri Gaulke

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/10/pst-a-to-z-los-angeles-goes-live-at-lace.html

Quote from the L.A. Times Culture Monster by Sharon Mizota: “Although there are ten artists or collectives included in the show, only three of them have installed works in the gallery in any traditional sense. Cheri Gaulke’s installation greets viewers like a shoe store with only one choice—hot red high heels. The shoes are provided in most women’s and men’s sizes, and viewers are encouraged to wear them while walking around the gallery. Building on early performances that advanced a feminist critique of women’s footwear, Gaulke has also created a video loop of various people walking in the shoes across different natural terrains—mud, sand, rock, etc. It’s amusing and gets its point across—nature never planned for high heels.”

Cheri Gaulke in Two Pacific Standard Time Exhibitions

in News  by Cheri Gaulke

I am excited to tell you about two exhibitions that I am in — Doin’ It In Public and Los Angeles Goes Live. Both exhibitions are part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945-1980, an unprecedented collaboration initiated by the Getty, that brings together more than sixty cultural institutions from across Southern California for six months beginning October 2011 to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene. My openings are Tuesday, Sept. 27, 8-10 pm (with a performance at 8:30) at LACE in Hollywood and Saturday, Oct. 1, 4-7 pm at Otis College of Art and Design in West Los Angeles. Read on for more details and click on the links for locations.

The first is Los Angeles Goes Live: Performance Art in Southern California 1970-1983, an exhibition, performance series and publication project that explores the histories and legacies of performance art. My new work, Peep Totter Fly (commissioned and presented by LACE as part of Los Angeles Goes Live: Performance Art in Southern California 1970-1983), is an interactive video installation and performance that revisits my 1970s and 80s critique of high heels. The installation will present gallery visitors with a wall of red high heels, available for wearing while viewing the rest of the exhibition. With sizes large enough for most men and women, this will give viewers an actual experiential challenge to their ideas about high heels. Centered on the wall is an evocative video that depicts high heels traversing natural environments, relating the objects present in the room to live and recorded performance.

To create this new work, I put together a team of young artists, many drawn from my association with Harvard-Westlake School where I am Head of Visual Arts. Nick Lieberman ‘11 assistant directed, Gabe Benjamin ‘11 edited the video, and Wiley Webb ’12 created an original score composed of natural and human sounds. To create the video, we traveled to a variety of Los Angeles locations, braved 115-degree temperatures in Death Valley, and strutted through the stark volcanic landscape of Iceland. At the exhibition opening, performers (including members of HW’s Scene Monkeys) will activate the installation with a performance that ventures into the streets of Hollywood and back again.

Peep Totter Fly opens Tuesday, September 27, 8-10 pm with the performance at 8:30 pm. The exhibition runs from September 27, 2011 through January 29, 2012 at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in Hollywood.

In addition, costumes from a performance group I cofounded, Sisters Of Survival, will be on display as part of the exhibition Recollecting Performance curated by Ellina Kevorkian at LACE.

The second exhibition, Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building comprises an exhibition, two scholarly publications, and series of public events that document, contextualize and pay tribute to the groundbreaking work of feminist artists and art cooperatives that were centered in and around the Los Angeles Woman’s Building (downtown L.A.) in the 1970s and 1980s. I will be showing two mixed-media installations that chronicle the work of two collaborative groups I cofounded – Feminist Art Workers (1976-81) and Sisters Of Survival (1981-85). Feminist Art Workers combined performance art with feminist education principles and its members included Nancy Angelo, Candace Compton, Cheri Gaulke, Vanalyne Green and Laurel Klick. Sisters Of Survival wore nun’s habits in the spectrum of the rainbow and created anti-nuclear performances and was comprised of Jerri Allyn, Nancy Angelo, Anne Gauldin, Cheri Gaulke and Sue Maberry.  Doin’ It in Public was curated by Meg Linton and Sue Maberry and will be on view October 1, 2011 through January 28, 2012 at the Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design in West Los Angeles. The opening reception is Saturday, October 1, 4-7 pm.

Feminist Art Workers will be performing on October 16 at a symposium and reunion called Still Doin’ It: Fanning the Flames of the Woman’s Building.

I am deeply honored to be a part of these exhibitions that make visible some very important historical moments in my artistic life and the life of Los Angeles.

Media Literacy Comes To The Multiplex

in News / Teaching  by Cheri Gaulke
 
Morgan Spurlock at ArcLight Hollywood wearing his coat embroidered with sponsor logos

Last night I attended a screening followed by a Q and A with one of my heroes — Morgan Spurlock. Spurlock’s new film POM Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold was a look into the world of product placement in films. His concept was to make a movie about product placement that was entirely funded by product placement. Spurlock brings a wonderful personal style to his work – a balance of humor and social critique. He’s similar to Michael Moore but Spurlock projects more heart or at least personal warmth. At one point in the film he was psychoanalyzed by professionals that help companies determine what kind of brand they are. They decided Spurlock’s brand is a combination of mindful and playful. I’d have to say they nailed it.

Spurlock as Conceptual Performance Artist

Spurlock is an independent filmmaker, but to me he is also a conceptual performance artist.  The conceptual comes out in the way the film folds in on itself. The product and process are one and the same. He’s a performance artist in the way we used to mean it in the 1970s. Yes there’s a theatrical quality to his performance but more importantly there’s a kind of ritualized activity. He uses repetition and creates a public spectacle as he pushes the boundaries of his physical and emotional stamina. His audience serves as witness to his challenging journey of self-discovery. This can be seen most obviously in his first film Super Size Me (2004) in which he ate three meals a day at McDonalds for a period of 30 days. It started out funny but ultimately he put himself at physical risk and thus raised awareness about issues of diet, weight, health and class. His work has precedents in the tradition of performance art. One example is Eleanor Antin’s Carving: A Traditional Sculpture in 1972 in which she sculpted her own body through dieting and documented the process. Or the work in-progress Cut: A Traditional Sculpture by Heather Cassils who is doing the opposite by bulking up her body through a process of exercise and treatment. Cassils artwork is part of Los Angeles Goes Live for which I am also creating a new work for fall 2011. My performance about high heels is called Peep Totter Fly and like Cassils’ was commissioned by LACE for Los Angeles Goes Live: Performance Art in Southern California 1970-1983 as part of Pacific Standard Time, an initiative of the Getty. POM Wonderful is his primary sponsor earning the naming rights on the actual movie title. When Spurlock met with the company execs in the film I couldn’t help but notice the highly sophisticated art collection in their offices. I suspect on some level company founder Lynda Resnick also responds to the conceptual performance art aspects of Spurlock’s work.

As a high school teacher of Video Art I am grateful to Morgan Spurlock. He brings a media literacy message to young people like my students. Appearing in his film are many of the people I use in my own media literacy curriculum from Sut Jhally to Ralph Nader. Go see it. Help him meet his box office goals. You’ll not only laugh, you’ll learn something.

This may the only time you’ll see a naked man on my blog.

Poster for Spurlock’s movie POM Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

-Cheri Gaulke

Sisterhood City Conversation Continues On KPFK’s Feminist Magazine

in News / Talks/Panels  by Cheri Gaulke

Critic Peter Frank, artist Cheri Gaulke, Otis gallery director Meg Linton, artist Sandra Rowe, artist Linda Vallejo, critic Betty Brown at the Sisterhood City panel at LA Art Show 2011. Photo by Angela Maria Ortiz

On April 27, 2011, 7-8 pm, I will be appearing on the radio program Feminist Magazine on KPFK 90.7 FM. The conversation with host Lynn Ballen is a follow-up to the panel discussion called Sisterhood City: Feminist Art in Los Angeles moderated by art historian and critic Betty Ann Brown. Brown, as well as artist Linda Vallejo, will also join the on-air conversation. Our original Sisterhood City conversation at the LA Art Show on January 21, 2011 was great fun. At the time I was writing a catalog essay about collaboration and critic Peter Frank made some insightful observations that I ended up quoting in my essay. “Collaboration, at least on some level, is key to making art socially relevant.”

In reading more about our host Lynn Ballen I noted that her first feminist consciousness came when she was  twelve and living in South Africa and read about “the amazing ’70s women’s movement happening in the far-away USA.” I imagine that’s what we’ll be talking about as well as our current projects.

Feminist Magazine is the weekly Southern California radio show with feminist perspectives. You can catch it live Wed. 7-8pm PST 90.7 FM Los Angeles 98.7 FM, Santa Barbara, 99.5 FM Ridgecrest/China Lake & 93.7 FM San Diego. Or listen live at http://kpfk.org/listen-live.html. Check out Feminist Magazine’s  website for archived shows at http://feministmagazine.org/ 
 
-Cheri Gaulke

Gaulke Goes Gogosha

in News  by Cheri Gaulke

Gaulke Goes Gogosha

Check out my new hot pink glasses purchased at Gogosha Optique in Silver Lake. On March 1 they made me Face of the Day, describing the look as pa · nache noun pə-ˈnash, -ˈnäsh
A term used to describe someone who has a dashing confidence of style.

Example: “Cool and Vibrant, Cheri exudes Panache in her Derome Brenner “Stardust” in Hot Pink.”

I still love my black multi-colored rhinestone vintage French frames from Society of the Spectacle in Eagle Rock. The ones that make me look like Yoko Ono (see previous post).

http://www.gogosha.com/2011/03/gogosha-optique-face-of-the-day-cheri-gaulke/