UCLA Hammer Museum
Los Angeles, California
Mechanicals of Corner 02: Hollyhock (Re: Transition), 2001, dimensions variable, Latex, marker and graphite on wall.
Installation at the UCLA Hammer Museum (Destroyed).
Jesse Bransford
Lobby Wall
June 3 - September 16, 2001
Claudine Isé
Installation View of Corner 02: Hollyhock (Re: Transition), 2001, dimensions variable, Latex, marker and graphite on wall.
Installation at the UCLA Hammer Museum (Destroyed).
Filled with strange pictograms that seem to have been cut from one moment in time and pasted into another, Jesse Bransford's paintings and drawings are a peculiarly postmodern amalgam of medieval bestiary, nineteenth-century celestial atlas, and twenty-first-century Web page. In Bransford's art, dragons, chimeras, and other preternatural creatures cohabit with bubble-helmeted spacemen, cloaked demons and knights, zodiacal symbols, and figures from Greek mythology; flying saucers whiz past castles, pentagrams, skulls, black holes, electronic force fields, and cryptic diagrams. Drawing upon conspiracy theories, the doctrines of fringe religious groups, occult studies, and cultural phenomena such as Dungeons " Dragons, heavy metal music, 1980s-era video games, Star Trek, and Star Wars, he explores the relationship of modern myth systems to the social construction of reality.
Combining existing images with personalized icons, Bransford structures his compositions hermetically, each according to its own unique set of rules and symbols and its own system of meaning. His drawings bring together disparate images in nonlinear narrative constellations. As with myth, meaning is gleaned intuitively rather than logically, and Bransford's viewers must interpret the queer symbols and signposts scattered about his horizonless landscapes in the manner of explorers charting vast unknown territories. The artist once described his works as "a drawn clash of esoteric belief systems";1 he is keenly interested in the methods by which subcultures, "secret societies," and other clandestine groups conjure meaning from chaos, often by jury-rigging broken bits of metaphysical machinery into vehicles for self-understanding.
Installation View of Corner 02: Hollyhock (Re: Transition), 2001, dimensions variable, Latex, marker and graphite on wall.
Installation at the UCLA Hammer Museum (Destroyed).
The images assembled in Bransford's 1997-2000 Gestalt series of black-and-white drawings, for example, are filtered through the fictional reality of the Star Trek cosmology, which has personal significance for the artist and millions of other fans. In their schematic composition, ultra-flat pictorial space, and allover arrangement of figures and icons, the Gestalt drawings recall celestial planispheres, atlases, and other two-dimensional maps used by astronomers to plot the changing position of the stars and other heavenly bodies. Gestalt No. 12 (The Left and Right Hands) depicts the floating visages of Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the Starship Enterprise, and Marshall Applewhite, leader of a bizarre Christian sect known as Heaven's Gate. Hoping to leave their physical "shells" behind and find redemption in a "Kingdom of Heaven" populated by angelic extraterrestrials, thirty-nine members of Heaven's Gate committed suicide in 1997 with the intent of beaming up to a UFO that they believed was trailing behind Comet Hale-Bopp. Bransford's fascination with this cult derives from its self-styled religious cosmology, which drew equally from familiar science fiction tropes and globally recognized brand symbols such as the cometlike Nike "swoosh" to symbolically rewrite Christian master narratives of death, resurrection, and salvation. Other drawings mix curious illustrations from medieval treatises on science and medicine with images from pulp sci-fi, Dungeons and Dragons lore, and other symbols from the artist's personal lexicon. Some images are easily recognizable, others less so. Most viewers will not be able to identify all of the symbols at play, nor are they meant to. Indeed, misrecognition is part of the point. Bransford's works are encyclopedic in nature, but what is being catalogued are obsolete or cultish forms of knowledge and visual information that have lost their cultural legitimacy (or never had it in the first place). Yet the old symbols stubbornly persist, even if the meaning behind them is lost. Synthesizing symbolic forms of popular and arcane knowledge, Bransford's drawings suggest that the modern can never entirely extricate itself from the archaic and that our visions of the future are inevitably bound up with ideas about our past and present. As new forms of knowledge arise to displace older ones, the beliefs we once held take on an increasingly mythical character. In turn, a good portion of what science takes as a given today will likely seem absurd hundreds of years from now. The compelling notion underlying Bransford's art is that all belief systems are shaped by the vicissitudes of history, no matter how conventional or idiosyncratic they may be. His works can thus be read as allegories of the history of ideas.
Installation View of Corner 02: Hollyhock (Re: Transition), 2001, dimensions variable, Latex, marker and graphite on wall.
Installation at the UCLA Hammer Museum (Destroyed).
The ideas informing Bransford's mural for the UCLA Hammer Museum's lobby wall stem from the artist's recent interest in the dialectic of liberation and control underpinning modern architecture, an ambiguous duality that he sees embodied in the monumental forms and mystical overtones of Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House. Completed in 1921, the house was Wright's first Southern California project, and he drew inspiration for it from the forms of pre-Columbian Mexico, combining them with his own mythic interpretation of the California landscape. To Wright, the Maya temples represented might, authority, and immovability, "an architecture beyond conceivable human need."2 Integrated within the cataclysmically predisposed Southern California landscape, the Hollyhock House was intended to incarnate a dualistic vision of destruction and regeneration.
Bringing together this and other imagery, Bransford's wall drawing transforms the Hammer's stairwell into a mythic passageway. The vertical, geometric form that seems to project itself spatially and temporally across the expanse of the long wall is based on Wright's Hollyhock motif, a glyph that is repeated throughout the interior and exterior of the house. In Bransford's explorations, the glyph becomes a symbol of transition between the material and immaterial realms. He incorporates a number of other images, including a medieval woodcut portraying Death as a skeletal figure and a building composed of stacked rectangular volumes that narrow at the top. Floating above this building is a mysterious glyph that looks like an upside-down question mark. Both the building symbol and the glyph have appeared on the covers of records by Blue Öyster Cult, a 1970s-era band known for its enigmatic lyrics and mystical album cover art. The glyph is itself a reworking of both the astrological sign for Saturn (planet of difficulties, restrictions, and discipline) and the alchemical symbol for lead.
Installation View of Corner 02: Hollyhock (Re: Transition), 2001, dimensions variable, Latex, marker and graphite on wall.
Installation at the UCLA Hammer Museum (Destroyed).
The image of the building (which appears on the cover of Blue Öyster Cult's second album, appropriately titled "Tyranny and Mutation,") radiates a monolithic and somewhat menacing power that embodies the artist's own ambivalence about modern architecture, while also recalling the temple-like structure of the Hollyhock House. The fact that Bransford has selected this particular constellation of images to reside temporarily within the Hammer Museum's walls is not accidental. His mural hints at a brutalist aesthetic lurking within the museum's interior lobby, with its leveled planes and angled stairwell, which resonates with his own ideas about the Hollyhock House. Significantly, Bransford's interest in both buildings lies in the mythic and symbolic associations he finds in them rather than in their "real" histories. In a similar fashion, viewers of Bransford's wall drawing might also choose to see this work self-reflexively (and more than a little ironically), as a provocative comment on the history of the museum as an image archive and a force of cultural legitimization.
Claudine Isé is assistant curator at the UCLA/Hammer Museum.
Notes 1. Jesse Bransford, interview with Hudson of Feature, Inc., 1998, available online at http://www.sevenseven.com/bransford and http://www.featureinc.com. 2. Frank Lloyd Wright, in Neil Levine, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 141, 455 n. 79.
Jesse Bransford was born in 1972. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. In 1996 he received a B.A. from the New School for Social Research and a B.F.A. from Parsons School of Design. His work has been included in exhibitions at P.S. 1 Institute for Contemporary Art in Long Island City, New York; Feature Inc. in New York; M du B, F, H & G in Montreal; and Sandroni Rey in Venice, California. This Hammer Project is Jesse Bransford's first one-person exhibition in California.
Installation View of Corner 02: Hollyhock (Re: Transition), 2001, dimensions variable, Latex, marker and graphite on wall.
Installation at the UCLA Hammer Museum (Destroyed).
Hammer Projects is a series of exhibitions focusing on the work of emerging artists.
Hammer Projects are made possible by The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support is provided by the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and Peter Norton Family Foundation.
UCLA Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90024
Information: 310-443-7000
http://www.hammer.ucla.edu
Occidental Petroleum Corporation has partially endowed the Museum and constructed the Occidental Petroleum Cultural Center Building, which houses the Museum.
Copyright © 2001 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
This and below: Images of the Hollyhock House in 2001.
Collection of the Artist.
Ruminations in the Wake of the Project
Note: this text was written for docent lecturers as a reference for their lectures on the exhibition.
Frank Lloyd Wright's first West Coast project, the Hollyhock House, filtered through the internet (I had never been there).
A strange modernist hybrid, almost post-modern in it's synthesis of two sensibilities. Encrusted all over it what I call the Hollyhock Glyph, on everything, even the lightposts. What is it?
Some weird talisman of an ancient culture (Mayan? Aztec?)* who knew secrets we can only suspect? Perhaps a symbol derived from a meeting with M. Blavatsky (Wright was a notorious spiritualist). Maybe another abstraction from nature, the Hollyhock flower.
*their calendars could predict eclipses better than we could until recently, using a math focused on 13, a prime number. They also built pyramids rivaled only by the egyptians. Oh yes, they also practised human sacrifice on a grand scale.
The glyph opens a rift in my understanding of modernism, of architecture - their goals... It seemed to refer to an architecture of death and transformation, an alchemical castle atop a hill in the city where all our dreams are made (gulp!). My fascination now had a notion to graple with. The site is a corner in a Museum in Los Angeles. The corner is an architectural event I've been really interested in as one who generallyworks on flat surfaces. From this perspective, the corner has a wealth of allegorical possibilities. For instance: If the surface of the wall is time, then death is a definite corner, the corner can represent the threshold of death. It's one of the oldest most cliched stories ever told. And it's told again and again and again. In the context of Architecture, particular a work of Wright's, the redundancy of the story seems relevant for some reason.
From the elevator entrance I developed a kind of prologue, in the spirit of an older, longer film or piece of music. The main characters are there, humanity, in the form of a pair of warriors, death, smiling and laughing behind them, and the paired Hollyhock Glyphs, one for each of the walls/states. Between the Glyphs is a 2-d replica of the Emergency exit that exists in actuality between the two walls. This wall visually restates all that is to come in the path down the stairs.
The top of the stairs, the 'tower of power,' the Heavy Metal enclave, the base material, the castle of the material world. Above it the sign of Saturn, and of lead (Heavy Metal, get it?), it's from a Blue Öyster Cult album, a topic I've been on for a while, wondering where evil comes from (if it's anything other than in our head) and why it can be so attractive, especially in music. Architecture seemed a likely suspect* until I realized I was using it as a stand-in for human activity in general, a guilt hangover from too many books on the environment (the world is burning you know). The Tower is the most hand-drawn part of the piece, the geometry buckles under the weight of my high-school notebook drawing ability, when I started drawing BÖC logos.
*To my way of thinking, architecture was once a butress against the harsh realitles of nature. Now I feel it is in some ways becoming a surrogate for nature, the first step in a totalising control structure (a la Foucault) that will keep us in line and subjugate our desires to the will of the 'mass'. Check out the surveillance cameras in the space around you.
In selecting the figures that populate the staircase I looked high and low for depictions of the alchemical transformation described earlier. The descent into the mire, the blackening of the admixture (alchemists called it the nigredo) followed by the rebirth in a new form. The corner, the exit. I wanted to derail history, something I've been interested in for years, so images of people from different times and places sit one next to the other. They are all headed in the same direction and the closer to their destination they get, the more defiant they become, colors becoming more and more vibrant until... The skeletons all come from medieval woodcuts of the "danse macabre," a popular subject in the wake of the black death, reminding us of the folly of our worldly aspirations (architecture, art).
To the stars from the stairwell, on the landing, to reverse the relationship. The wall shifts, the Glyph reverses in shape and color. We're not in Kansas anymore, I guess. Guarded by the unicorn, a strangely western symbol of purity and eternity, the eye has shifted planes, hopefully making the allegorical shift as well.
So, the corner functions as a separation between the literal, architectural impulses I saw in the Glyph and the other-worldly, spiritual or metaphysical qualities I suspected the form contained.
P.S. I actually went to the Hollyhock house towards the end of the installation and was amazed at what I saw. The house was in ruins, awaiting a renovation from the city that is about 20 years over due. I felt I was peering into an archaeological site, the last ruin of a long lost culture. The sight resonated with my previous ideas of the ruins of the modernism I think of when I look at Wright's architecture: the attempt to fuse a particular idealism to the real.
