 Nearly Ten Months, Annetta Kapon
The uncritical critique of consumerism often singles out affluent middle-aged women as representatives of everything that is repugnant about capitalism. This misogynist scenario is still perpetuated in art that targets women as objects (never subjects) of a facile criticality that assigns men to production, and relegates women to consumption.
Renee Petropoulos makes an intervention in this contested territory with her work Nearly Ten Months, an installation with recorded soundtrack and translucent writing on the window of Weathervane, a women's clothing boutique on trendy Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, CA from February 2003 to July 2003.
In capital letters, on translucent acetate of various colors were fragments of conversations between employees and customers, and among employees. Quotes ranged from the boutique-specific "It's OK that it stands out from your waist?" or "I can sell it to you" to the Krugeresque "Are you sure you know what you're doing?", to the chilly "My husband is divorcing me," which was taken out because it made the women in the shop uncomfortable. It was then visible "under erasure," as viewers had to look at a black line where the statement would had been.
The soundtrack of the recorded conversations was a 90 minute loop that played during the opening hours of the store between 11-3 pm, and it was audible only inside the store, with jazz woven in. Thus the soundtrack became a kind of perverse biofeedback for the store workers who were the most immediate and constant consumers of the work they themselves had commissioned. The loop was both the magnetic tape and also a loop in which employee, artist and consumer are all engaged. In a kind of Brechtian distanciation effect the women see their own words materialized on the glass, holding up a kind of mirror, experienced however as external.
The "Ten Months" of the title refer to the time it took Petropoulos to collect, record, and organize the installation. The activity of planning and production, the regularity of visiting the shop, took on a low-key aspect of a performance that became integral to the process of the work. The echo of gestation is not accidental, as the artist became engaged with it as it developed and unfolded in a cycle of mutability.
Even though this daring intervention was on a street window and inside a boutique, I think that the store was not its real discursive site. Rather, I see the work as located in the abject (for the art world) terrain of affluent women and the unsteady division between seller and shopper, subordinate and peer, gallery and boutique. Here women solicited the production of art and also consumed it. The employees that generated the quotes of the installation were the same ones that were now consuming and commenting on the work; in fact the owner of the store was the one that suggested to Petropoulos the possibility of an art work. It reflects their unambiguous relationship of camaraderie (in terms of class and age) between the employer, employees and shoppers.
Rather than legitimating the tired dichotomy of, say, art against commodity, or indulging in the ecstatic embrace of shopping-as-art, the installation exists in a shop that sees itself as a gallery in the first place, with no fixed division between aesthetic, sexual and acquisitive desire. The installation asks: what kind of desire is generated here, and where does it belong? How is a shop different from a gallery? What relationships are taking place, and what is the quality of these relationships? The statements and fragments written on the glass are at once banal, personal and cryptic, suggesting that the conversations are more crucial to the shopping transaction than one might at first think. While the work can be consumed it cannot be purchased, thus resisting traditional commodification.
The spirit of the work is similar to another of Petropoulos's installations, "Flatter Me For Ever" in A Hundred Artists See God at the Laguna Beach Museum in July-October 2004. It consisted of a video showing the artist engaging in a mutual mirroring game with her twin babies on a big bed. A large sitting stool for the visitors
was covered in the same fabric as the bed in the video. Woman and babies are wearing pajamas matching the polka-dot pattern of the sheets. Flatter me Forever recalls, through a metonymic skid, the expression "imitation is the best flattery." But who is aping whom here? The twins, by definition a kind of doubling, and the mother, are engaged in an endless intersubjective loop. In this post Post- Partum Document piece and also in Almost Ten Months I see taboo subjects for art making: affluent women, shopping, babies. The other thing the two works have in common is mirroring (literal and metaphorical) and the idea that subjectivity is formed in imitation of something that we perceive as external.
In both works there is a kind of subject and object dialectic in which oppositions of worker/ customer and parent/child are not resolved in favor of one over the other, but in setting into motion the whole question of subjectivity and individuality. (Note that "individual" really means "indivisible, inseparable" from the Latin individuus.) A third example of this process is Petropoulos's work for the Metro Station in El Segundo in which sentences such as "I am here", "you are there", "are you really going?" "Did you pay them?" are inscribed in English, Spanish and German on a wall and in stone. Perhaps they recall a domestic argument, or perhaps they approximate the thoughts floating in our minds when we travel between places and therefore between identities.
Most people equate "personal" with "secret or private," but for Petropoulos the personal is the everyday and everybody. This is why she has employed text in much of her work displayed in public. Her sentences reflect personal relationships and thoughts that can only be located outside the mind. Paradoxically, her gesture comes from an understanding of the instability of language, which, she says, can never give our feelings their full gravity; nevertheless it's all we have when we try to describe something to one another.
Public Art is a contradictory discourse: On the one hand it has an implicit superiority, as if art outside or outdoors is more radical or subversive than inside the "white walls." On the other hand it is also seen as inferior, because it does not allow the artistic autonomy that is considered necessary. Nearly Ten Months is predicated on moving the site of discourse into a realm that does not sanctify or debase the work. Not sponsored by the infrastructure of a city or a gallery, the installation nevertheless functions in a place fully involved in commerce and exchange. It raises compelling questions about the relationship of the private to the personal, art to commerce, and public to art. Public art, here, has two meanings: Art in Public, but also art for the public as in: "people," including women.
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 Rosamund Felsen Gallery Press Release, 2009
For her upcoming exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Renée Petropoulos has made a series of new oil paintings on linen, forming the core of Homage, 1st Installment. In her homage Petropoulos invokes artists and writers in Modernist and Contemporary history and art history, ranging from Blinky Palermo to Edward Said.
Each of the oil paintings on linen merge the flag colors of two countries through imaginative and inventive geometric patterns. Petropoulos combines two national color schemes in overlapping lines of color, layered abstraction, plaid improvisations and impositions of colors, forming an inextricable linking of the two nationalities. She chooses the pairings by using personal, historical, associative and formal methods. Beginning with the autobiographical pairing of Germany–Greece, she travels beyond to combine France–Algeria, India–Portugal, and England–Sudan.
The positioning of the paintings and their relationships to each other in the gallery are precisely considered for the sightlines and physical experience of the viewer. Planning for abundant formal associations and optical interactions begin with designing the sizes of the canvases, continue in the painting process itself, and are finally realized in the gallery installation. Petropoulos enriches the encounter with the work in the first two galleries by placing unique sculptures, functioning both as seating and as color references to the paintings. In the third gallery the artist has designed a perimeter carpet reconsidering the subjects taken up in the first two galleries of boundaries, edges, and separations of public and private space.
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In the exhibition Social Arrangements, Renée Petropoulos reaches a significant point in her investigations by integrating her various projects. The exhibition contains many different components meant to be viewed in relationship to one another. Paintings, sculpture and audio are all used to alter the perception of the world and how it interacts with the viewer.
Oil paintings and watercolors remap the pathways between experience and imagination. The Paintings, Trip from Sri Lanka to Zanzibar (by boat) Version 1 and Trip to the Gulf States (by air) Version 1, are accompanied by soundtracks and recall a particular journey as the viewer moves from speaker to speaker across the paintings. Accompanying the paintings are seating arrangements placed in the center of the rooms creating an ideal environment for viewing and interaction. The artist perceives a relationship between the “seating arrangements” and the title of the exhibition Social Arrangements and has been creating seating arrangements since 1990 for various public spaces and exhibitions. Petropoulos is interested in how seating accommodates the viewer to interact with the artwork and environment.
Petropoulos also includes a series of woven sculptures in the form of flags and rugs. Like the paintings, the flags reference a journey to several countries. The variegated colors of different cultures are intertwined forming a pattern and creating the effect of depth, conceptually and visually. The rugs create a perceptual shift in the physical act of walking by allowing the viewer to navigate through the space. The rugs are based upon a “walking path” in a city. One is referring to a pastoral walking path in the central park of Berlin and the other to an urban interior walkway in central London.
Politics, culture and the very nature of representation come into question through the physical encounter with "objects". These static "objects" become agents that invoke time and movement and act to highlight one's engagement with the exhibition.
Gallery hours are 10-5:30, Tuesday-Saturday.
For more information please contact Lucrecia Roa at 310.828.8488
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 Rosamund Felsen Gallery: Press Release, 2007
In the exhibition Social Arrangements, Renée Petropoulos reaches a significant point in her investigations by integrating her various projects. The exhibition contains many different components meant to be viewed in relationship to one another. Paintings, sculpture and audio are all used to alter the perception of the world and how it interacts with the viewer.
Oil paintings and watercolors remap the pathways between experience and imagination. The Paintings, Trip from Sri Lanka to Zanzibar (by boat) Version 1 and Trip to the Gulf States (by air) Version 1, are accompanied by soundtracks and recall a particular journey as the viewer moves from speaker to speaker across the paintings. Accompanying the paintings are seating arrangements placed in the center of the rooms creating an ideal environment for viewing and interaction. The artist perceives a relationship between the “seating arrangements” and the title of the exhibition Social Arrangements and is interested in how seating accommodates the viewer to interact with the artwork and environment.
Petropoulos also includes a series of woven sculptures in the form of flags and rugs. Like the paintings, the flags reference a journey to several countries. The variegated colors of different cultures are intertwined forming a pattern and creating the effect of depth, conceptually and visually. The rugs create a perceptual shift in the physical act of walking by allowing the viewer to navigate through the space. The rugs are based upon a “walking path” in a city. One is referring to a pastoral walking path in the central park of Berlin and the other to an urban interior walkway in central London.
Politics, culture and the very nature of representation come into question through the physical encounter with "objects". These static "objects" become agents that invoke time and movement and act to highlight one's engagement with the exhibition.
Gallery hours are 10-5:30, Tuesday-Saturday.
For more information please contact Lucrecia Roa at 310.828.8488
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at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by Leslie Dick, The Narcissism of Small Differences
'Where are the depths concealed?’ ‘On the surface.’ – Hugo von Hoffmansthal
‘Women are considered profound. Why? Because one never fathoms their depths. Women aren’t even shallow.’ – Nietzsche
The more alike things are, the more significant the differences between them become, however slight. These minor differences, slight like a paper cut, not incapacitating, not even debilitating, more a distraction, peripheral, inconspicuous, these often tiny, insubstantial marks of difference become the site of passionate identification. We find ourselves in the detail, we distinguish, we express our preference.
The pattern lies on the surface, repetitive, and with each repeat, differences emerge. Are these differences mistakes? How does the flaw, the inevitable imperfection, register? Maybe there’s something to these errors, the slip of the tongue, or the brush. Someone says, somewhere, that it is in the slip of the tongue that we find our true voice. In the rough edge, the margin of error, something else comes through, as if from another dimension: a mark of distinction, a shadow, or a sense of elsewhere.
But repetition is practice, and practice makes perfect. Surely, if I do it over and over again, I will get better at it. What does it mean if I don’t? That there is no room for improvement? That I am already a master? Or am I proved incompetent, is this inability to improve mere evidence of my falling short?
Personally, I never like doing things I’m not already good at; I only enjoy in an unadulterated fashion doing things that I know I can do already. As a result, learning something new really takes a lot out of me. It drains the narcissism out of me, I feel humiliated, but more than that, it’s as if I don’t know who I am, what I might become, when I begin to do something I can’t already do, or do well. Or perhaps I shouldn’t say ‘do well’, but to my own satisfaction. Well enough, perhaps that’s the best term. There’s no objectivity here, only my own harsh judgement. I know I am very good at some things, but I can’t hold them in my mind for more than a moment. In any case, it’s true that I only really enjoy doing things I’m already good at, and as I am hypercritical, my activities are as a result somewhat restricted. My partner in life, however, has a much longer list of things he doesn’t do, and won’t try to do: he doesn’t drive, or swim, or sing, or shout. By contrast, I do all those things, quite well, or well enough. I am particularly good at driving and shouting.
When asked to define ‘the narcissism of small differences’, I can only resort to outdated structures of political affiliation, the perfect example of identification articulated through rivalry. Traditionally, one tiny Trotskyist splinter group hates and loathes and battles furiously and perpetually with another tiny Trotsktyist splinter group, lavishing more attention and resources on this adversarial differentiation than on the larger struggle against capitalism. It is an opposition located in almost invisible details, the vehemence of their justification utterly mysterious to even the most sympathetic outsider.
Yet these hypothetical splinter groups would seem to be a thing of the past, a social formation of the years before 1989, and possibly a more contemporary (and non-European) example would point to the struggles between fundamentalist religious groups, or maybe even groups of skateboard enthusiasts, in order to demonstrate the historical persistence of this phenomenon. We continue to care so much.
To repeat myself, it seems to be the case that we find ourselves in the small differences, as if details in themselves serve to mirror our most insistent characteristics. The small differences become more and more critical, as we labor under the injunction, thou shalt be unique. We are obliged to differentiate ourselves, yet simultaneously we are under a counter obligation to be similar, recognizable, one thing or another. The primary designation is one of gender: we must be instantly locatable on one side or the other of the great divide. As we become involved with one another, we tell and retell anecdotes about ourselves, to trace the specificity of our very own historical trajectory. We collect objects, artworks, clothes, shoes, in a desperate attempt to distinguish ourselves from our group: my 1950s lamp is fabulous, and very slightly different from your fabulous 1950s lamp. Life becomes a display of choices; we show them off (my car, my jacket, my new Puma sneakers) in order to register a unique (yet recognizable) personality.
I was over forty when I willingly chose to begin to try to do something I didn’t know how to do; I hadn’t had to do something like that since I’d been at school, some decades before, and I’d never really bothered, even in school, to try to be good at things I wasn’t already good at. I found out that I became enraged when I couldn’t do it right away; it made me nutty, I had no patience for it. I found out that if you do something over and over again, you can become better at it. I also found out that I had a very limited tolerance for that kind of repetition; I could say that it bored me, but I think it was more than that. I didn’t know who I was when I was trying to do something that I couldn’t already do.
Narcissism is about surface, and image, depending as it does on the structure of the mirror. We are locked in a visual structure within which an illusory (reversed, symmetrical) self is fixed, like a photo is fixed in the chemical bath. We fix ourselves, in the image, we are outlined, repaired, and stuck. In the mirror image, the mirage, we see only surface details, and it is as if each detail holds the key to who we really are. The frame and symmetry of the image holds us together, keeps me hanging on. Putting on my eyeliner, applying my red lipstick, I think, it is in the small differences, the little mistakes, that we find ourselves.
But in this system of differences, what form would a mistake take? Details delineate differences, yet these differences can only be designated mistakes within a structure of antagonism, a scene of judgement. Maybe there aren’t any mistakes? In which case, how could one decide which one is better? Yves Klein once made an exhibition of identical blue paintings, each exactly the same size, and then sold them for drastically different prices, based on the different quantities of ‘spiritual value’ with which the artist had imbued each painting.
In the car, driving through the city, my shiny exterior slides by all the other exteriors; I know there is depth there, but I can’t see it; I see only a series of surfaces, patterned, variegated, and I ignore what I can’t see. We slide by each other, surfaces, like outlines of ourselves, upright, vertically orientated, and on occasion, my façade faces your façade, like the encounter between two pictures, cutouts. But ‘deep’ is supposed to mean good and meaningful, while the surface, ‘superficial’, is on the side of bad and meaningless. The surface, the deceitful surface, is on the side of femininity, decoration, and masquerade. And make up, something that takes place, takes time, over and over again.
Like meaningless repetition, decorative patterns perform repeats. They are symmetrical, geometric, anonymous. They connect us to an elsewhere, another place where similar patterns are repeated, over and over. With their insistent repetitions, decorative patterns demonstrate their superficiality; they are not original, they lack the authority of the unique. They repeat their mistakes, and they resist valuation, at the same time as they resist improvement. Which one is better, which one best? These patterns repeat themselves, and maybe that’s a bad thing.
Identity is by definition repetitive, as I wake up morning after morning, look in the mirror, and proceed to move through each day, continuing somehow to be like myself. Only occasionally surprising myself, most of what I do is unsurprising, recognizable: it’s done over and over again. My rather restricted activities, my amorous proclivities, my stylistic tendencies are sustained and represented by my look, my characteristic gestures, my limited, yet wildly idiosyncratic vocabulary. It’s a matter of emphasis, where (in the repeat) the emphasis falls. This maintenance work, like the fixed image, holds me together, lets everyone know what I’m about. When it breaks down, at the edge, the margin of error, where the registration slips, something else comes through, as if from another dimension: a shadow, a sense of elsewhere.
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 at Rosamund Felsen Gallery: Press Release, with accompanying text by Leslie Dick, 2003
For The Watercolor Project, Renée Petropoulos responds to the vernacular architecture of Los Angeles by way of one of its most ubiquitous units: the cinder block. An artist with a long-standing interest in pattern and decoration, Petropoulos picks up on the unexpected possibilities of this dumbly utilitarian 'brick.' Though often used as a pre-fabricated component in homes, apartment complexes and light industrial buildings, cinder blocks also appear across Los Angeles in a variety less predictable structures, such as its brisoleils – walls of decoratively arranged upturned blocks that serve as false façades for many structures.
Descended from Moorish architecture, perforated brisoleils are designed to admit air and light to a building while at the same time shielding its occupants from external gaze. These false façades are as common in California as they are in countries like Algeria, India, or Brazil (places where, Petropoulos points out, mass development, a permissive climate and a cultural taste for visual pattern converge). For The Watercolor Project, Petropoulos traveled across Los Angeles photographing its complex and remarkable brisoleils. From the photographs she took, Petropoulos selected a single photo from which to work and painted from it in a serial fashion: starting one watercolor, finishing it, putting it away and beginning anew from the same image. Like On Kawara’s Date Paintings, Petropoulos’s subtle watercolors raise questions concerning regimentation and inspiration, repetition and originality, seriality and progress; questions that also help unravel the look and function of LA’s brisoleils and their relation to the programmatic applications of cinder blocks in normal construction.
In addition to The Watercolor Project, Petropoulos will also show Trip To Santa Barbara with Small Alterations, a series of seven black and white photographs taken by Petropoulos in 1976. The sequential, filmic, layout of Trip to Santa Barbara with Small Alterations, not to mention its chronological remove, develops a narrative aspect of The Watercolor Project that can only be hinted at through the different dates, locations and stylistic methodologies of the watercolors included in the project.
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