Greg Wilken

Greg Wilken Curated by Sharon Lockhart

January 26 - March 10, 2012

2

CUE Art Foundation is a non-profit arts organization dedicated to promoting culture by supporting the creativity of under-recognized visual artists by offering comprehensive arts education programming for artists and students, and interdisciplinary arts events for public audiences.

Board of directors

Gregory Amenoff

Theodore S. Berger

Sanford Biggers

Patricia Caesar

Thomas G. Devine

Thomas K.Y. Hsu

Vivian Kuan

Corina Larkin

Jan Rothschild

Brian D. Starer

staff

Executive Director Jeremy Adams

Development Director Marni Corbett

Programs Director Beatrice Wolert-Weese

Programs Coordinator Ryan Thomas

Development AssistantAlexandra Rose

Gallery Assistant Jessica Gildea

curatorial advisory council

Gregory Amenoff, William Corbett,

Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jonathan Lethem,

Lari Pittman, Thomas Roma, Marjorie Welish,

Andrea Zittel

cue felloWs

Gregory Amenoff, Polly Apfelbaum,

Theodore S. Berger, Chair, Ian Cooper,

William Corbett, Michelle Grabner,

Eleanor Heartney, Deborah Kass,

Corina Larkin, Jonathan Lethem,

Rossana Martinez, Juan Sánchez,

Irving Sandler, Senior Fellow,

Carolyn Somers, Lilly Wei

3

We are very honored to show the work of Greg Wilken, generously curated by Sharon Lockhart. Through rigorous examination and documentation of moments in history, Wilken's multi-media practice illuminates the often murky waters of historical didacticism. As we continue to strive to meet our commitment to both emerging artists and the public, we are proud to be the first venue in New York City to exhibit Wilken's work. At CUE, artists like Greg Wilken and emerging writers like Tucker Neel, who wrote the young art critic essay found at the back of this catalogue, are given a platform to share their unique and worthy talents with the public, fostering an environment for mutual enrichment and dialogue.

—CUE Art Foundation Staff

4

The Road of a Thousand WondersI first came across “The Road of a Thousand Wonders” researching something else entirely. While

looking through newspaper clippings in a local archive, a postcard fell out. The image was of a striking

Neo-Baroque building with a tall central clock tower, pointed terracotta arches, abundant windows, and

circular turrets. It seemed to call out to you from the 19th century. The dark rusticated blocks of red

sandstone were imposing; it looked built to last. It didn’t. The first large courthouse in Los Angeles, it

was erected in 1888 and razed in 1936. The upper right hand corner of the image read “On the Road of a

Thousand Wonders”.

During the early 20th century, “The Road of a Thousand Wonders” was the promotional name

given to the Southern Pacific railroad line running from Los Angeles, California to Portland, Oregon. This

particular line, like many others still in use today, was surveyed and first laid out in the 19th century,

before the advent of the automobile. These early surveyors relied heavily on old walking trails, following

the traces of previous travelers. They found their way through the landscape by following a path of least

resistance; drawing a line that utilized natural grades that were not too steep, curves mild enough for

the trains of the time, and maximizing level ground. The routes of that time were laid upon, rather than

through, the landscape.

Automobile roads would later follow the first rail lines. Over time, new roads realigned the old

routes. The highways grew wider and straighter, bypassing small communities. We know the old roads

today as “business loops” and “scenic byways”. “The Road of a Thousand Wonders” follows roughly

the original Camino Real upon which Spanish missionaries built a system of religious outposts up the

Southern California coast. Portions of highway 101 would later be built to follow this course. Farther

north, Interstate 5 pursues the old line. These roads are literal palimpsests, offering traces of man’s

movement through the land.

The history of these early railroad lines contributed to the public’s perception of the West. Early

20th century boosterism enticed western migration, which increased railroad ticket sales. The Southern

Pacific Railroad Company invested heavily in printing postcards that depicted views along their routes.

The Road of a Thousand Wonders series is a visual record of a particular kind of looking at a particular

time. The traditional landscapes and city views traffic in, while simultaneously helping to establish, the

clichés of western imagery. What might traveling that road look like today? Where might it take us?

PB

Greg Wilken

5

PB

Biography

Greg Wilken is a Los Angeles based artist. He received a BFA with a concentration in photography from

Otis College of Art & Design and an MFA from the University of Southern California.

6

PB

Sharon Lockhart

At this point, it is a cliché to say that we live in an era of information overload. With all the emails,

web-surfing and media each person faces in a day, it is a fact of life. Yet in all that information, there is

much that is overlooked. We are more likely to look forward for new forms and content than carefully

back at the information stream itself. Greg Wilken’s investigations of lost or overlooked archival material

involve detailed research and conceptual analysis. He looks for those places in which the information

society becomes explicit: in which histories define the landscape, in which the bureaucracy attempts to

cover up it’s tracks, in which media shape the nature of spectacle. Almost all his projects involve elegant

self-published books in addition to photographs and/or films. His work is literary in the sense that it is

fascinated with the language of images and archives, and it carefully mines, both looking for ways to pick

apart that language and see how it relates to economic, political, and social histories.

7

Sharon Lockhart is a Los Angeles based artist working in photography and film. Her work has been the

subject of solo exhibitions at institutions worldwide, including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles,

Kunsthalle Zürich, Kunstverein Hamburg, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Musem in St. Louis, and the

Vienna Secession. In the fall of 2011, her installation Lunch Break was on view at MUMOK in Vienna

and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Espai d’art Contemporani in Castelló, Spain in

the winter of 2012. Her latest exhibition, Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol, opened at the Israel Museum,

Jerusalem in December 2011, followed by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in May 2012.

Biography

8

Greg Wilken

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

PB

24

PB

25

PB

Greg Wilken’s Terra Incognita

Tucker Neel

Greg Wilken arrives at his final images through a process akin to a fact-finding mission. On these expeditions

the artist is motivated by the discovery of a significant historical event or condition which results in research,

field explorations, documentation gathering, and the presentation of evidence, usually in the form of framed

photographs, films, and custom-made artist books. Taken at face value, it’s a fairly simple set of procedures, a way

of getting from A to Z, but the resulting works are anything but easy, demanding a cognitive shift from viewers.

Wilken’s On the Natural History of Juan Fernandez (2006), for example, was inspired by the story of Alexander

Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who survived for four years (1703-09) marooned on Juan Fernandez Island just off the

coast of Chile. The tiny island has since been renamed Robinson Crusoe Island after the famous Defoe novel

inspired by Selkirk’s tale. After conducting research, visiting the island, and taking photographs, Wilken printed

two large-format photographs: one of non-native plant species being removed from the land and one of native

plants being grown in a greenhouse. He also created a film of plants arranged in a garden, and multiple photos of

individual books floating in black expanses of space. In contrast to the implied didacticism of its title, this body

of work obliquely reframes a fractured natural and literary history of Juan Fernandez Island. Using disparate yet

connected images, it treats the land as a mythic non-site, a place in between physical and imagined reality. In this

project, as in the works on view at CUE Art Foundation, the artist gives his audience the narrowest bit of visual

information, with little attendant text. The underlying message of such a destabilized historical narrative is that

the past is not fixed and knowable, but rather the fleeting coalescence of reminiscences, everyday images, and

second-hand stories we tell each other.

Wilken often engages in library research, which no doubt inspires projects directly involving printed matter.

For example, Literary Encounters (2010) is a series of silver gelatin prints of hairs found in the pages of books. This

poetic collection of traces of the human body in contrast to the stark sterility of printed text points to the fragility

26

PBPB

Greg Wilken’s Terra Incognita

of human existence and the endurance of published ideas. In another series, one of the artist’s few hand-drawn

projects, Wilken meticulously renders the frontispieces of books where past owners left their marks via notes,

dedications or ex-libris, again contrasting the sign of living human presence with the mechanically printed word.

Such bibliographic inspiration translates most obviously into the artist’s own hand-made books—art objects

that reflect his fascination with happenstance, discovery and fractured comprehension. Wilken often isolates

images of a particular kind and contrasts them with other, seemingly unrelated pictures. This technique is evident

in Castaic (2010) which investigates the 1928 St. Francis Dam break outside of Los Angeles, the second most

deadly disaster in California’s recorded history. Castaic, the book, presents images from the rather mundane,

pasture-like dam site as it exists today. These images of overgrown golden grass are juxtaposed with cold

documentation of broken celluloid, remnants from a 16mm film. The implication of violence, the latent trauma

that permeates sites of now forgotten catastrophes, is present in this book—a realization arrived at through visual

associations rather than edifying narrative.

For the new body of work on view at CUE, Wilken was inspired by the Southern Pacific Railroad company’s

early 20th century photographic survey, “The Road of a Thousand Wonders.” This promotional title was used by

the railroad to describe their trains’ coastal journeys from Los Angeles to Portland. To promote this travel line,

the railroad commissioned photographic surveys to capture the vistas and attractions along the route, producing

numerous postcards, posters, and prints, now collected in a photographic archive. This pictorial record prompted

Wilken to travel the same route, sometimes by train, sometimes by car, creating his own image archive while

traversing the roads originally charted by the railroad. For the artist, this road is both a physical journey and a

metaphor for how we write and rewrite historical narratives in repeated but never fully successful attempts to solidify

a true understanding of the past. The original early 20th century archival project acts as historical anchor, providing

the artist with a road to travel, a space to contemplate, and an impetus to create images along the way.

Walter Benjamin, inspired by Baudelaire, characterized the urban flâneur’s meanderings throughout Paris

as a paradigm of perambulation for the modern man, the perfect way to experience and critique bourgeois

capitalism. Nearly forty years later, the Situationists would pick up this practice, championing the dérive as key

to exploring one’s surroundings. Given that consumer-friendly structures in the American West were once, and

still are, built around automotive transportation, perhaps we can take Wilken’s journey along the coast as a

kind of American post-industrial dérive, albeit across greater distances, and in solitude—a perfect on-the-road

reflection of an alienated country. In Wilken’s work we can see the abandoned main streets of drive-by towns,

rusting industrial architecture along highways, mall parking lots, and cookie-cutter weigh-stations, as our own

contemporary arcades, artifacts from our own “primordial landscape of consumption.”1 Inspired by Benjamin’s

and the Situationists’ use of the urban dérive as a model for production, Wilken takes to the road, allowing himself

PB

27

PBPB

to wander consciously, paying close attention to the particulars of the topography that engulfs and frames him,

taking note of the tangential and yet relevant ideas that spaces, places, and people inspire.

During a recent studio visit with the artist, I found myself pouring over dozens of 4x5 transparencies, freshly

developed from Wilken’s most recent journey up the coast. These are a fraction of the total gleaned from his

travels. The images depict lonely gas stations, desolate highways, a Valero service station abutting a humble

cemetery, overgrown brush lining an old road turnaround, and other banal scenes reminiscent of passing glances

or snapshots. While they may look less idealized, these images, like their Pacific-Railroad-commissioned postcard

antecedents, speak the language of everydayness that typifies the “feel” of passing through.

We turned to a box labeled “California Color Theory.” It held what appeared to be simple color tests of fruits

against complimentary backgrounds: limes against a cadmium field, oranges on a cerulean background, etc.

Another box contained shots of “California Skies,” images of wispy clouds, cumulous thunderheads, and azure

expanses. Yet another box was labeled “California Interiors,” holding pictures of kitchens and living rooms, each

with its own decorative touches: lace curtains, brass lighting fixtures, gaudy wallpaper, unremodeled cabinets.

Whether these iconographic taxonomies would make their way into the final exhibition had yet to be determined.

Nevertheless, their presence in Wilken’s studio gave the impression of a portrait compiled from contrasting,

seemingly unrelated image categories.

According to Wilken, his recent work takes great conceptual and formal inspiration from artists coming out

of the New Topographic Movement, inaugurated by a 1975 exhibition at the George Eastman House in Rochester,

NY, and featuring work by photographers like Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert Adams, and Stephen Shore. These

artists’ photographs dispense with the artiness associated with modernist landscape photography. The modernist

Ansel Adams, for example, long produced picturesque views that beautify—and thus beatify—rugged terrain

by capturing majestic natural lighting in dramatic compositions, suggesting a land bequeathed to its inhabitants

by the grace of God. Instead, the New Topographic photographers favor unspectacular everyday images of the

landscape.

It’s easy to read Wilken’s relation to this art historical trajectory, since his views of deserted streets and empty

parking lots bear striking resemblance to, say, Stephen Shore’s color photograph of an uninhabited commercial

intersection in Kalispell, Montana—the two images bearing the same signs of boredom, stagnancy, and weathered

obsolescence. Yet, as one glances through Wilken’s transparencies, a distant, more removed precedent comes to

mind, something perhaps more closely related to the archival impulse underpinning his recent collection of images.

While pouring over Wilken’s 4x5s and 8x10s, I was reminded of the late 19th century US geological survey

expeditions that attempted to capture the West under the aegis of American Manifest Destiny. The Pacific Railroad

survey that inspired Wilken was itself preceded by these larger, more inclusive compendiums. In many ways,

28

PBPB

Greg Wilken’s Terra Incognita

the US-government-sponsored expeditions gave “uninhabited” places, future places of “wonder,” an evidence of

existence, rendering the previously unknown “real.”

As cultural historian Alan Trachtenberg notes when discussing these early photographic expeditions,

“a photographic view attaches a posessable image to a place name.”2

In Reading American Photographs, Trachtenberg examines the way photographic surveys in the late 19th century

set out to document the West, serving as both a component of mapping and an aid to westward US expansion.

In one instance, he discusses a 1868-69 series of photographs by T.H. O’Sullivan with explanatory text by the

geologist Clarence King, part of a geological survey commissioned by the US Department of War. He notes that

these image spreads discard the strict chronological and typological rigidity typical of a government survey in favor

of non-linear image diversity with images of waterfalls, workers illuminated by flares, campgrounds, and panoramic

landscapes, conveying atmosphere instead of a categorization. Trachtenberg writes, “By their diversity, which

calls attention to our dependency for what we see upon the photographer’s choices and the camera’s position, the

pictures raise a question about cognition, the relation between seeing, investigating, and knowing—the question

which lies at the base of the survey as a whole.”3

The question becomes how best to capture the essence of conquest, the possibility of fortune, the grandeur

of nature in conflict with, and under the new control of, “enlightened” exploratory power. Amidst the seemingly

disconnected imagery, in the cognitive interstices between images, we find the spirit of the western project: a

bubbling mixture of hard work, reverence for natural wonder, and good-ol’ industrial know-how. While Wilken

operates under far less regimented strictures, and outside the purview of governmental oversight, his work too

presents a problem of cognition, how we understand and “know” vast expanses of land.

Wilken’s diversity of views all circulate around, but never quite fix, the subject at hand: the vast expanse of

terrain along America’s West Coast. Back in the 1860s, Clarence King characterized such a land as “terra incognita,”

unknown land, “a labyrinth of intricate changes.”4 Wilken’s transparencies make visible the conundrum of this

terra incognita. In his pictures we apprehend, if only momentarily, something all too familiar yet still unknown. In

presenting us with these disparate images, Wilken problemetizes the very notion of a photographic record, giving

rise to dispersed and transitory knowledge about history and the past’s relationship to the present.

1 Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (1972; reprint, Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 827.

2 Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images As History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989) 125.

3 Ibid., 134.

4 Ibid., 133.

PB

29

PBPB

The writer, Tucker Neel, is an artist, writer, curator, and gallery director in Los Angeles. Neel’s art investigates the production of political allegiance, memory, and collective experience. To view his complete projects please visit tuckerneel.com. Neel holds an MFA from Otis College of Art & Design and a BA in Art History and Visual Arts from Occidental College. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Communication Arts and Liberal Arts & Sciences departments at Otis College of Art & Design. He is a Contributing Editor for Artillery Magazine in Los Angeles, and his writings have also appeared in Art Lies Magazine, ARTPULSE Magazine, the LA Alternative Press, and X-Tra Magazine. You can read these writings at tuckerneel.wordpress.com. Neel is also the Director & Founder of 323 Projects, a telephone-based art gallery. To visit 323 Projects simply call (323) 843-4652 anytime, day or night, to hear audio art. For more information, visit 323projects.com.

The mentor, Richard Vine, is a senior editor at Art in America, where he writes frequently on contemporary art in Asia and elsewhere. He holds a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Chicago and has served as editor-in-chief of the Chicago Review and of Dialogue: An Art Journal. He has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the American Conservatory of Music, the University of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, the New School for Social Research, and New York University. His articles have appeared in various journals, including Salmagundi, the Georgia Review, Tema Celeste, Modern Poetry Studies, and the New Criterion. His book-length study, Odd Nerdrum: Paintings, Sketches and Drawings was published by Gyldendal/D.A.P. in 2001. New China, New Art, his book surveying art in China from 1976 to the present, was released by Prestel Publishers in fall 2008. It was reissued in an updated and expanded edition in

fall 2011.

................................................

This essay was written as part of the Young Art Critics Mentoring Program, a partnership between

AICA USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE Art Foundation, which pairs emerging

writers with AICA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit

aicausa.org for further information on AICA USA, or www.cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this

program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be

reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA's Coordinator for the program this season. For

additional arts-related writing, please visit www.on-verge.org

PB

30

PB

Image list:

All images: 2011, Pigment print, 15" x 17 1/2"

9. Near Monterey, CA. (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders)

10. Los Angeles, CA (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders)

11. Restaurant Interior, HWY 10 (On the Road of a Thousand

Wonders)

12. Near San Juan Batista, CA. (On the Road of a Thousand

Wonders)

13. Weed, CA. (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders)

14. Redding, CA. (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders)

15. Salem, OR. Restaurant Interior, Fresno, CA. (On the Road of

a Thousand Wonders)

16. Klamath Fall, OR. (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders)

17. Umpqua National Forest, OR. (On the Road of a Thousand

Wonders)

18. San Juan Batista, CA. (On the Road of a Thousand Won-

ders)

19. Morgan Hill, CA. (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders)

20. Restaurant Interior, SR 58, OR. (On the Road of a Thou-

sand Wonders)

21. HWY 5, OR. (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders)

22. Klamath Falls #2, OR. (On the Road of a Thousand

Wonders)

23. Salinas, CA. (On the Road of a Thousand Wonders)

Cover Image: Near Monterey, CA.

(On the Road of a Thousand Wonders) [detail], 2011

Pigment print, 15" x 17 1/2"

All artwork © Greg Wilken

ISBN: 978-0-9032853-3-5

Catalog design: elizabeth ellis

Printed by mar+x myles inc.

using 100% wind-generated power

PB

31

PB

Major Programmatic Support: Accademia Charitable Foundation, Ltd., CAF American Donor Fund, The Viking Foundation, AG Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Greenwall Foundation, The Greenwich Collection, Ltd., William Talbot Hillman Foundation, The Koret Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc., The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts (a state agency)

CUE Art Foundation’s operations and programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, corporations, government agencies, individuals, and its members.

media sPonsor:

Cover Image: Near Monterey, CA.

(On the Road of a Thousand Wonders) [detail], 2011

Pigment print, 15" x 17 1/2"

All artwork © Greg Wilken

ISBN: 978-0-9032853-3-5

Catalog design: elizabeth ellis

Printed by mar+x myles inc.

using 100% wind-generated power

2011

-20

12

511 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001212-206-3583 | cueartfoundation.org