Generous Backers!

Thanks to the following Generous Backers who helped my recent exhibition “Ars Lumina” come to fruition!

Chris Bamberg

Carl Holvick-Thomas

Morgan Gee

Brad Gutting

Brenda Kamt

Euca Burrows White

Kathy Merritt

Laraine and Rich Frohne

Diana Arterian

W.A Murphy and Claudia Blake

Jeri Burdick

Belinda Monat

Bill Holden

David Sugarman

Annie Wharton

Joel Sugarman

Sean Eisele

Allie Bengston

Jas Johl

Hailey Samis

Laima Kardokas

Nick Urban

Brian Overend

Adam Russell

Maxwell Rappaport

Regina Rivard

Tara Milch

Casey Zandona

Annalora Burrows

Andrew Jones

Richard Sammons

Matt Finton

John French

Kathleen Eisele

Wes Holden

Lina Jan

Danielle Wozniak

Elijah Wolfson

 

Curriculum Vitae

Recent Exhibitions

2011: Sliding Down, R&R Gallery, Los Angeles CA

2011: Advance Guard, Sancho Gallery, Los Angeles CA **

2011:  Fast Forward 2, Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara CA

2011: La Gran Pachanga, 111 Minna Gallery, San Francisco CA

2011: Snap To Grid, Center For Digital Art, Los Angeles CA

2010: Abstract Visions, Flash Gallery, Lakewood CO

2010: Art of People Watching, The Hive, Los Angeles CA

2010: Art Soup 2, Mime School, Los Angeles CA

2010: Euphonious Bells, Echo Curio, Los Angeles CA*

2009: Art Soup, Silver Echo Gallery, Los Angeles CA

2009: Noiseferatu, Downtown Independent, Los Angeles CA

2009: Space, Echo Curio, Los Angeles CA

2009: Penultimate Obsolescence, Echo Curio, Los Angeles CA*

 

* solo exhibitions

** Curated by Samuel Partal

 

Reviews

2011: Jonelle Vette, After We Slid, Vette, November, 1 2011, Los Angeles CA

http://jonellevette.blogspot.com/2011/11/recap.html?spref=fb

2011: Paul Redmond, Echo Park Gallery Brings Together Five Emerging Artists, Echo Park Patch, September 16^th 2011, Los Angeles CA  

http://echopark.patch.com/articles/echo-park-gallery-brings-together-five-emerging-artists#photo-7752842

2010: Helen Kearns, It only gets weirder… and better, Fine Arts LA, April 24^th 2010, Los Angeles CA

http://www.fineartsla.com/tag/yoshitake-expe

Kreanome (κρεανομέω)

The Kreanome series takes its name from the Greek verb meaning 'To Divide Flesh.' The series takes as its theme this division, with its biological and metaphysical implications. The Kreanome represents both the internal struggle of cell division/replication, and the liturgical cutting, dividing and consumption of flesh as in the rituals of the Mithraists, the Orphic and Dionysiac cults, and the Roman Catholic rite of the Eucharist. Shown here are six of the twelve images which comprise the series

		
		
		

			

				
			

			

				
			

			

				
			

			

				
			

			

				
			

			

				
			

			

		

Images

Here’s a mini portfolio of photographic work. Everything was shot on Ektachrome 100 35mm transparency film and not digitally altered in any way. Keep in mind that these are low resolution scans of the original slides and as such they lack some of the sharpness and detail of the originals. For more information concerning prints, prices, to request a portfolio or to arrange a private viewing feel free to contact me directly at samuelpartal@gmail.com

“Holy Eucharist” ©2008,  Lambda Print

“Ovum” ©2009, Lambda Print

untitled, ©2010 One of ongoing series: “The Kingdom of Heaven” so far consisting of hundreds of skies

“Erythrocytes” ©2008, Lambda Print

“Blue Orpheus: Three Landscapes” ©2009, Lambda Print. Number 2 of a triptych

“Beatific Vision” ©2010, Lambda Print. One of 12 piece series

“Orbital ” ©2009, Lambda Print

“Gloaming” ©2009, Lambda Print

“Cortical Vessels Under Glass” ©2008, Lambda Print

untitled ©2008 Lambda Print

untitled, from “American Landscapes” ©2009, Lambda Print

untitled, from “American Landscapes” ©2009, Lambda Print

“Mike Fu” ©2008, Lambda Print

Self Portrait ©2004, Lambda Print

A Parable

Once, when the world was young, lived a race of rare beasts, focused and savage, to whom the Gods in their infinite wisdom had seen fit to reveal the light of the divine.

These strange telluric creatures, puzzled by the thin and delicate airiness of the light, the spirit which was their newfound possession, began to develop new tendencies, to feel strange new sensations acutely, like a cold and tremulous bleeding. They became aware, increasingly, of a lack, of the oppression of their incompleteness in the face of the other. The absence of a name, of a certainty of role or function became increasingly terrifying to them, unbearable.

So they built towers, obelisks. They grapsed desperately upwards, towards their gods who remained unmoved. They wrote libraries, built cosmologies and illuminated their ornate maps. They indulged in the hermetic pleasures of the arcane and the esoteric.

Eventually they seemed to slow, sullen, no longer driven by vital impulse, no longer overflowing, merely gliding inertia. They looked backwards, and were filled with shame and mistrust towards their collective actions. They turned inwards, mining the subjective and trading on bartered analysis. They dismantled their structures and buried their scrolls.

At some uncertain point in their history, they seem to have vanished, their bodies dissolving gently into the rarified air. Leaving only the light behind them, only this.

Roland Barthes: ST. Ignatius Loyola: Matthew Barney

Here’s a little bit of Critical Theory I wrote on a whim, please enjoy:

Abstract:

Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle is a unique species of the ‘multiple text’ as described by Roland Barthes in his analysis of the ‘Exercises’ of St. Ignatius of Loyola. It is unique in its convoluting of the interlocutory stages which constitute the multiple text, essentially rerouting the system into a textual feedback loop. This amounts to a subversion of the traditional, linear dialectical approach to liturgical communication  exercised by St. Ignatius and a supplanting of the ritual-interrogative method of Christianity with the Pagan doctrines of sacrificial offering and eternal recurrence.

I

Begin then, with a fairly long quotation from Roland Barthes’ essay on St. Ignatius Loyola. In this excerpt Barthes is analyzing the ‘multiple texts’ of Ignatius’ Exercises, a document written in the sixteenth century for the successful administration and practice of a retreat for meditation and prayer.

“Our reading habits, our very concept of literature, make every text appear today as if it were the simple communication of an author (in the present instance a spanish saint who founded the society of Jesus [jesuit order] in the sixteenth century) and of a reader (in the present instance ourselves): Ignatius loyola wrote a book, this book was published, and today we are reading it. This outline, suspect for any book (since we can never never definitively demonstrate who is the author and who is the reader) is assuredly false with regard to the Exercises. For if it is true that a text is defined through the unity of it’s communication, we are not reading one text, but rather four texts, disposed in the shape of a small book in our hands.

The first text is the one Ignatius addresses to the director of the retreat. This text represents the literal level of the work, it is objective, historical in nature: in fact, criticism assures us that the Exercises was not written for the retreatants themselves, but for their directors. The second text is the one the director addresses to the exercitant; the relationship of the two interlocutors is different here; it is no longer a relationship of reading or even of instruction, but of donation, implying credit on the part of the receiver, help and neutrality on the part of the donor, as in the case of psychoanalyst and analysand: the director gives the exercises (virtually as one gives food or a whipping), he manages the material and adapts it so that he may transmit it to single organisms (at least this is how it used to be, today it seems the Exercises are given in a group). A maliable material, which can be elongated, shortened, softened, hardened, this second text is in a way the contents of the first (thus it can be called the semantic text); by that, we mean that if the first text constitutes the proper level of the discourse (as we read it), the second text is like the argument; and it follows that there need not necessarily be the same order; thus, in the first text the Annotations precede the four weeks: this is the order of the discourse; in the second text these same Annotations, bearing on the matters that can continuously concern the four weeks, are not anterior to them, but somehow parametric, which attests to the independence of the two texts. This is not all. The first and second texts had a common actor: the director of the retreat, here receiver, there donor. Similarly, the exercitant is going to be both receiver and and sender; having received the second text, he writes it with a third, which is an acted text made up of the meditation, gestures, and practices given him by his director: it is in a way the exercising of the Exercises, different from the second text insofar as one can detach oneself from it by imperfectly accomplishing it. To whom is this third text addressed, this speech elaborated by the exercitant on the basis of the preceding texts? It can be no other than the Divinity. God is the receiver of a language whose speech here is prayers, colloquia, and meditations; furthermore each exercise is explicitly preceded by a prayer addressed to God asking him to receive the message that will follow: essentially an allegorical message, since it consists of images and imitations. To this language the Divinity is called upon to respond: there thus exists, woven into the letter of the Exercises, a reply from God, of which God is the donor and the exercitant the receiver: fourth text, strictly anagogic, since we must trace back from stage to stage, from the letter of the Exercises to its contents and then to their action, before attaining the purest meaning, the sign liberated by the Divinity.”

…And another, further on, “here the drama is that of interlocution; on the one hand the exercitant is like a subject speaking in ignorance of the end of the sentence upon which he has embarked; he lives the inadequacy of the spoken chain, the opening of the syntagm, he is cut off from the perfection of language, which is assertive closure; and on the other hand the very basis of all speech, interlocution, is not given him, he must conquer it, invent the language in which he must address the Divinity and prepare his possible response: the exercitant must accept the enormous and yet uncertain task of a constructor of language, of a logo-technician.”

What to make of this?

Barthes’ particular reading of Ignatius’ Exercises posits a theory concerning how a written work can generate many sequential layers, or hypostases, of fundamentally ‘textual’ activity. This is a widely applicable paradigm. This is to say any text which has as its purpose the incitement of the interlocutor to act, that is to act according to a set of formal, or to use Barthian language, linguistic principles which are intended to be implicit in the text itself, can be considered a multiple text in the sense that Barthes describes Ignatius’ Exercises to be. Essentially, the Exercises are a script for a performance, mediated by a director, enacted by the exercitant for an audience (which for Ignatius is the christian god but can effectively be any abstract formulation of an absolute or totality) from whom a response, whatever signified form this may take, is expected.

This formulation of Barthes’ tetradic structure can be used to describe any form of text which acts as a script for performance or dissemination. The film script, perhaps the most obvious example of this paradigm, can be shown to follow Barthes’ criterion exactly.1 The literal text, the written script itself, is intended first for the director, whose conception of that text forms the second level, the semantic text. This semantic text is used to facilitate the exercitants (everyone involved in the project) in creating the acted text, the performance. It is particularly worthwhile to note that in this reading the ‘performance’ is not merely the behaviors which will be filmed and seen on the screen by the intended audience. Rather the ‘performance’ in the film project consists, like the performance of  Ignatius’ ‘Exercises’, in two stages. First the Semantic text,  the scheduling of every action which goes towards the assemblage of the completed project, from acting out scenes to moving cameras and lights, serving food, discussing ideas, even sleeping between working hours; everything which is intended to occur during the duration of the project becomes a sign in the acted text inasmuch as it is dictated by the schedules derived from the initial literal text (the shooting script etc…). It is in this way primarily that the semantic stage distinguishes itself, it has been given  to the exercitants by the ‘director’, who extrapolates the semantic text for the benefit of his exercitants. The third stage, the ‘acted text’ is the actual performance of the semantic text. Where the semantic text is  the argument for how the performance must be performed, the acted text is the performance itself, regardless of its fidelity to the intentions of the semantic text. To paraphrase Barthes, the acted text is independent of the semantic text inasmuch as it can be performed incorrectly, or aberrantly.  Finally, the anagogical fourth level emerges from the media of the documented performance, no less mystic than that of Ignatius’ Exercises despite its ostensibly secular nature; for the documentation of actions, and the dissemination -through various media – of the rituals of the acted text, is a statement, an offering, and an offering implies response, if only the passive response which consists of the augmentation of the whole, the totality of texts and of actions; an imperceptible shifting of the absolute.2

II

Matthew Barney’s self described ‘biological opera’ has been called contentious and  inscrutable, it has also been appraised by many to be the zenith of neo-baroque conceptualism and a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk par excellence. It is, additionally a unique species of multiple text. Unique in the sense that it posits a cycle, a mechanism which repeats its operations endlessly. Moreover, the five films which constitute the project ‘The Cremaster Cycle’ do not attempt the Sisyphean task of narrating the cycle as conceived in it’s un-circumscribable totality, but more modestly to represent only a single revolution of the cycle as it is conceived in its five stages. The ramifications of this, in terms of a formal analysis, are fascinating. For one thing, the project is in a sense larger than itself, the five films themselves (each with their corresponding sculptured materials and books of exegesis) function as a demonstrative proof of the existence of an endlessly repeating organic process which far surpasses in scope any collection of artifacts. An organic process which  Barney has likened to “a sexually driven digestive system.”3

If the tetrad was chosen by Barthes to accommodate the four weeks of Ignatius’ Exercises, the Cremaster Cycle will be better suited to five layers of text. An elucidation of the means by which this is accomplished can reveal what meaning this work of neo-baroque arcanum has for those looking for a vehicle by which to communicate with the divine, as the exercitants of Ignatius’ Exercises surely were. The kind of formal examination outlined by Barthes’ will afford an understanding of how such communication may be possible using the cycle as a vehicle.

In the Cremaster Cycle the literal text is the conception of the work as a vague and undefined totality. This is not to say it is the artist’s mental conception of the work, not an idea at all really, rather it is a force, engendered in the mind of the artist, and once created external to it. It is the force through which the organism wills the cycle into being, generates and sustains it. It is the supra-formal impetus which looms over each and every revolution of the cycle. The semantic text then is continually being written with each subsequent revolution of the cycle. In some sense it could be considered as a totality, to be composed of every imaginable combination of parts within the formulae of the cycle, though this designation is perhaps so abstract as to leave one staring into a void of infinite recombination. Suffice to say that this concept of the semantic text fulfills Barthes’ criterion that it “encompasses the literal text, is the argument for that text”. In the case of the Cremaster Cycle this semantic stage is a unique process. One must consider this semantic stage to be concerned primarily with the fabrication of works of physicality and plasticity: sculptural and architectural spaces. Essentially what is happening in this stage is the creation of the space in which the drama will unfold, the resultant narrative being more or less beholden to these spaces. To return to Barthian language this stage corresponds to the linguistic stage of articulation, in which a new closed system is created through the exclusion of external forms and is delineated by those forms that are allowed to remain inside the system (or organism, as for Cremaster the linguistic and the biological are inextricably bound together).

In this context the process of articulation could be considered as a sort of analogue of fetal development. Such a system/organism, once defined embryologically, would constitute a language (in the sense of a recombinant modular method for producing meaning) which could produce various interdependent texts (the biological analogue here being genetic processes, e.g. protein synthesis). In the context of the Cremaster Cycle this language is the ineffable form of the Cycle itself, a kind of genome. This totality, which must be understood to be a totality in the sense of being more than any sum of its parts (what biology terms the ‘emergent processes’ of an organism) represents the total amount of textual (or genetic) permutations which can occur within the system, or the sum total of possible dramatic or narrative conflicts which could potentially occur in the lifetime of the Cremaster organism. The Cremaster is a living and acted language, a liturgical genome. In contemplation of the Cremaster language, as in the study of genomics, one is offered a glimpse of that elusive abstraction, the inconceivable totality implied by the notion of infinite recombination, realized in concrete and discrete terms because these recombinations are not passively ‘read’ but performed, celebrated. The Cremaster genome is doxological because of its corporeality, a language rapt in robes of sinew and bone.

In Barthes’ analysis the semantic gives way inevitably to the acted text, the discrete physical manifestation of those initial conceptions which originated in the mind of the author of the primary text. In Barney’s Cremaster Cycle however, the interlocutors are multiplied. The acted text (which in this case must be different for each ‘cycle’ performed by the Cremaster system) is continuously generated by the supra-formal characteristics of the Cremaster organism itself, the inscrutable anatomy of the total organism, it’s genome as described above. It is interesting to note that these eternal, supra-formal characteristics would be as incomprehensible to the individual ‘characters’ within the cycle as the  larger systems which govern the body must be to the individual cells whose tireless actions sustain and generate them.

As Barney himself states the characters/actors function as “host bodies” which the supra-formal elements of the Cremaster system “inhabit temporarily in each chapter.” In other words, the same process of transubstantiation by which the entity that inhabits Gary Gilmore in Cremaster 2 transfers itself to the female corpse in the beginning of Cremaster 3, or the sign for the state of the organism manifests itself now as a football field in Boise, Idaho now the Utah salt flats, the Chrysler building, the Isle of Mann, Budapest, is the same inscrutable process by which ever new ‘host bodies’ or vehicles are chosen by the supra-formal agents of the Cremaster system in each new revolution of the cycle. It is precisely here, where the exercitants of the acted text are trapped in a strange platonic interlocutory relationship with the agents of the language (or system-organism) itself, where the bifurcation of the acted text occurs: into transitory exercitants, and eternal supra-formal agents whose ultimate formlessness requires host bodies for their manifestation.

The extent of this bifurcation of the acted text can be illustrated with a quotation from Barney’s synopsis of Cremaster 2, “ on the biological level it corresponds to the stage of fetal development in which sexual division begins. In Matthew Barney’s abstraction of this process, the system resists partition and tries to remain in the state of equilibrium imagined in Cremaster 1.”4 Barney’s unique approach to the multiple text is this notion of a system  which ‘resists partition’  a system imbued with a reflexive self awareness. So much so that it may attempt to resist the very teleological forces which articulate its growth and allow for its existence.

It is this relationship between agents and the whole, between the system and it’s drives even, which constitutes the  bifurcation of the acted text, corollary to the bifurcation of sign and function found in the semantic text. These bifurcations are themselves the structural elements which allow the Cremaster Cycle to effectively eschew the traditional interlocutory sequences established by Barthes and function as a fully self referential system. Barney’s self referential narrative cycle could be construed as a linguistic form of the feedback loop,  a mathematical equation which performs endless cyclical calculations by plugging the answer to each succesive operation of the equation back into the initial equation as an algebraic factor. In other words, once the equation is supplied with it’s initial factor for x, it will produce on it’s own an infinite amount of self generated and  self referential factors which can be likened to the theoretical ability of the Cremaster Cycle to generate an infinite amount of new content with each successive revolution of the cycle. A weird form of eternal recurrence.

Drama, or conflict in the narrative, results from the the performance of the acted text by the exercitants (the actors/characters), and in the particular case of the Cremaster Cycle this drama is produced by the dialectical relationship between the exercitants and the supra-formal agents who, like the Olympian gods, may descend to the level of the acted text to inhabit a suitable host body of their choosing. As Matthew Barney put it, ” the characters carry out a pre-determined biological role, to do what they were programmed to do, any conflict or emotion comes from a combination of those roles.” That is to say that all dramatic conflict in the narrative comes from the structural quality of each character’s functional (or formal) role within the system. The inevitability of the drama is itself a characteristic of the system. The ascension and descension of the cycle, with the attendant gathering and releasing of tension condition the drama in such a way that no character can escape their role as a host, as a sign. The more one struggles against their symbolic role the more fully the role is achieved, it is in this respect that Barney’s work is tragedy in the most classical sense, and possesses, at least symbolically, all the potency of complete catharsis. As every narrative cell performs its functions and the metaphors are burned for fuel there is victory and defeat, digestion and nourishment, pathos and hubris, there is gestation and synthesis. The drama of the Cremaster Cycle remains a metabolic one.

The anagogical meaning, or intention, of such a work of art seems inscrutable. Primarily because the work is entirely self referential. The initial process of articulation required for the creation of the system has been carried to such an extreme as to eradicate all external context. This is ultimately the strength of the work, the self sustaining independent reality of the open system, the open text. Any content may be consumed by the system and the excreted and digested material both will always be purely and essentially Cremaster. This is the transcendental quality of the organism, (the organism as hypertext) and it is this quality which constitutes the anagogical significance of the Cremaster Cycle.

To illustrate, a brief quotation from the synopsis of Cremaster 3, which as the central work of the cycle, the spinal cord of the work, contains every phase of the cycle in miniature, and thus constitutes an intelligible microcosm of the work in entirety. “Cremaster 3 narrates the construction of the Chrysler building, which is in itself a character- host to inner antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence.”5 The ultimate character in Cremaster 3, as it is in the Cycle as a whole, is the space in which the action takes place, the building whose architectural form defines what actions are possible. The system itself is the central protagonist because it supersedes any individuation, it is wholeness, universality. The forces engendered within it vie for primacy in their proscribed formal roles, some rebel others compete in candidacy. Ultimately the goal of these character-forces is integration into the whole, spiritual transcendence.

While Ignatius’ religious rituals were meant to be a language for the open discourse of the individual and the absolute, the Cremaster Cycle posits an alternative absolute in miniature. It attempts to usurp the universality of the divine by offering it a microcosm of itself. A sacrificial offering akin to the offering of a lamb, of any living organism. The organism as microcosm of the universe. If Ignatius hopes to interrogate the deity through ritualized communication designed to provoke answers to particular questions, then the Cremaster Cycle attempts to capture the deity by offering it it’s double, to reflect and ensnare it and thereby to bring it back to earth, to enthrone the spirit once more, in blood and flesh.

Endnotes:

1. Italo Calvino has already pointed out the similarities between Ignatius’ Exercises and the modern film script in his ‘Six Essays For The New Millennium’

2. It should be noted that filmmaking is by no means the only evocative analogue of the multiple text as Barthes defines it. The music score functions in the same capacity, passing from composer to conductor and players, swapping interlocutors (or host bodies) until written text is transmogrified into action and media and carried into the plenum of consciousness to wait for the inevitable silence which prefigures response…

3. From an interview with Barney, pbs series ‘art 21′

4.From ‘Synopsis’ of Cremaster 2 on http://www.cremaster.net   It should be noted that the theme of sexual differentiation during fetal development is one of the most central concepts in the dreamlike logic of Cremaster Cycle. The process of sexual division corresponds to and evokes the initial act of cell devision which prefigures the organism’s existence. It is essentially the culmination of this initial division, reflecting it on the grandest scale, the articulation of the total organism from the division of the undifferentiated biomass.

Foreward

Hello,

My name is Sam. I have created this personal press in the hope that it will provide a nice, simple place for those who may be inclined to view some of my work, to do so on their computer. I consider myself primarily a visual artist, and though I do intend to post some examples of my photographic and sculptural work on this site, I think a personal press will provide a nice opportunity to indulge my literary tendencies. Having said that, I would like to assure you that I will not be indulging in any of those tendencies right now. Let’s keep this informal. The following is a list of personal information in no particular order:

Favorite sports teams: San Francisco 49ers, Toronto Blue Jays circa 1994.

Favorite meal: Bucatini in Bolognese sauce (cooked at home), Burrito from La Cumbre, SF

Favorite wine I can afford: Santa Margherita Chianti, 2006

Favorite non-wine drink: Kentucky Bourbon, for example Bulleit, Buffalo Trace, 1796

Favorite political radical alive during my lifetime so far: Fela Kuti

Very first thing I would buy upon receiving a very large sum of money: Burberry suit, two button pinstriped

Favorite television program aired during my lifetime so far: Reading Rainbow

Favorite doomed political leaders: Emporer Justinian, Jimmy Carter. Justinian tried way harder.

Some artists I’d like to think of as my spiritual forebears for very different reasons: Thomas Wilfred, Stan Brakhage, Eva Hesse, Joseph Beuys, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Cindy Sherman, Mark Rothko, Hiroshi Senju

That seems to me to be enough inanities…. Yes?     Mes Amis, Je Vous Present: Ma Travail Des Beaux Arts et Belles Lettres                      … Git ‘r Done!