Thanks you guys for coming.
I don't know how many of you know Alma's work or have kind of been introduced
to it over the years but Alma is a really
incredibly special artist in my mind. I've had
the pleasure of writing about his work in the past
and I've gotten to know him and it's really quite a
leap in this recent body of work.
Alma is a self-taught sculptor.
He left Utah ran away as a teen
and went to New York and one of the ways he supported
himself was actually teaching himself to carve and
made objects, which he went on to the streets of Soho back
when Soho was the center of the Contemporary art world
put up an ironing board and would sell these objects.
I first came across his work in people's
homes in L.A. and I had no idea what I was looking at.
I kept seeing them pop up––these tiny little stone carved
objects that had kind of seemingly like
a relationship in my mind to Cycladic
figurines from ancient Greece to bird stones
from North American,
First Nation, you know
objects that were carved to look like stones.
Things like that. These archaeological objects and tribal
objects and talismanic kind of objects.
I saw them. I didn't know what I was looking at and eventually I've figured
out and heard that was this guy Alma Allen.
Alma has subsequently
he had moved out to the desert, Joshua Tree, where he had set up a
studio and began carving larger and
larger works, started to use more mechanical
means in his work, but always building by hand.
So the thing about Alma's work in my mind,
it was always this connection to tactility,
to the hand, to touch. And I've written
about his work in terms of those terms before and I always kind of
there's a touchstone, there's a beautiful little
quote from the German romantic
writer Goethe who in his
fifth Roman elegy has a line this
poem that says "see with a feeling hand and
feel with a seeing hand" this kind
of inversion of the senses. The looking and touching and
touching and looking. I don't encourage you to touch, but there's a
sensuality to the work that Alma's work feels like
it needs to be touched. There is this kind of like desire to
do so, and with these works
what you know, there's a whole history of these
types of objects going back through modernist sculpture
back to Brancusi and whatnot that
I kind of connect Alma to almost organically,
but in terms of that kind of relationship to
the history of abstraction, with Alma's work
there seems to be kind of a
it's a phasing back and forth between what we
might think of as pure abstraction and something more organic.
But also this kind of Netherworld between
two worlds, and I think in this new body of work,
you can really see this idea of the the artwork as
membrane, as reflective body,
reflective surface in these vertical wall reliefs which
are the first time he's kind of gone on to the wall in this
more painterly kind of way. Typically even if
he's gone vertical like the sculpture out in the garden you will
see at the end of this talk,
they have not been based on the wall. So this is the
first time and it's really a breakthrough for him and I
was talking to my friends and colleagues here at
Blum & Poe today. He has an amazing
exhibition currently on view, and Jessica
you'll help me if I pronounce the name incorrectly, but
Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico, which was
a commission, the building, by Diego Rivera
to house his collection of pre-columbian and
other artifacts that he had given to the Mexican Government
and Alma has an exhibition on view through near the
end of May there, which I am hoping to get to, and just saw
the images for the show today, and
a lot of this work because he's now moved his entire studio to Mexico.
So he went from Joshua Tree to Mexico where he set up a big
foundry. He's starting to
do his own kind of casting, himself, in-house,
which is incredible to have that kind of control and ability
to like connect to the work on a
one-to-one thing in your studio as opposed
to working with a team at a foundry somewhere else.
But this body of work, I mean, I these wall reliefs
for me there is this
a sense of the idea of the mirror in
my mind, the tain of the mirror, if you think about the mirror and
you go to the back of the mirror and you scratch an old mirror,
you can take away the actual reflective material.
This idea of the tain of the mirror being the kind of metaphorically the
reflection back the inversion of the world that you're
in front of, and except for
this one, which I can make an argument by why, you know,
this kind of absorptive kind of quality, the other three works in
the room share this kind of—on the wall—share
this kind of reflective kind of material of a
veil, of a membrane, something organic, but also
something built. You see his hand at work here,
you know, you feel like he's been doing something behind
it like to actually get those kind of
shapes coming out. But at the same time it looks
like it could also have been an accretion of geological time
of the movement of the earth through a
surface that he then somehow brought on
to the into the bronze
when he was making this. This work
here, strangely enough, I've always
referred to his works of having an organic quality. He had
often on these small sculptures these stones and had
these little protuberances that he kind of carved out
that felt like arms, appendages, or the pseudopod
of an amoeba that was reaching out into
our world from its world. This actually I
found out today is inspired by the niches
and the works that are in the
Sorry, now I'm going to trip over it, the Anahuacalli Museum
in Mexico, and it's actually I
walked in the other day or at the opening. I was like that looks
like an elephant. Could it possibly be an elephant?
And indeed he's kind of started to
do this more kind of work related more
to iconographic representations in
this case of an elephant. But you know, if you think about it, it doesn't
surprise me at all.
Because I've never really thought of Alma as an abstract artist. I've
never thought of him as somebody who is dealing in
a discourse of abstraction
in that high modernist kind of very rigorous
kind of non-objective the
history of non-objective the discussions of
art as a non-objective entity in the world. His work
has always seemed grounded in the world that
we live in, as abstract as it might be. So when
I talk about the hand and that quote from Goethe, I'm
really thinking about the way in which we learn
and that we can communicate through
touch rather than through the more sort
of abstracted and distanced idea
of vision and that tactility comes out
in here, but at the same time, you know a more
sort of this feels a little more familiar to
me than this newer body of work. This reminds me of
other pieces he's made before, but it absolutely has this
kind of connection to the history of
abstraction, but that's also looks like
it could be something based on a chitinous
kind of form from a mollusk, from something
organic, something that lives in the world, an entity or
an animal that we don't know or potentially a
plant or something along the
lines of that. But you know, I think that
in this case and I wasn't able to ask him about the
more, you know, clear iconographic references
that he's making to the natural
world in something like the elephant.
But the other things that kind of come to mind when you start looking
like the work behind you is the way in which
you can reference natural, geological kind
of formations of the idea of a mudslide. He's
very influenced right now by the landscape
in Mexico, which is
volcanic and this idea of volcanism, which you can
a number of like artistic movements over the
last 50, 60, 70 years, including artists
in Italy under the Arte Povera sort of
rubric, the poor art kind of movement. They were
very, Giovanni Anselmo was very
interested in this idea of volcanism and the way in
which the energy of the earth and gravity and
all of these things that in the sort of natural world
kind of affect the way in which our bodies kind
of move through the world and I think intuitively because I think
Alma is a man of few words, but he
I always think of the work and I
don't mean it in a kind of savant way but like there's an intuitive
quality to the way his hand thinks,
and I'm going to say it like that: his hand thinks, that I
think is related to someone like
Giovanni Anselmo who was much more conceptual in his
approach to kind of making sculptural objects.
But if you think about this as a mudslide, as a kind
of moving in a hand, you start to see the interaction of the human hand,
the form, a body, they you know,
this is a much more kind of abstracted notion of
that but these kind of undulations of waves of something
in the natural world or over
here we start to you know,
all I can see is a face on a tree in
this one. So it's like this idea of bark, of
burnt volcanic ash, you
think of Pompeii, you think of
The way in which the natural world, you know wins in
the end, in the sort of
battle of humanity versus the world. The world
always wins, you know in a way, the natural world. But this
one again also bronze cast as well.
But this has this kind of black hole
effect, the absorption of light, where these others
are then playing with this idea of reflecting light back in this
kind of way, but they're equally tactile. They're equally
painterly. And that's the other thing with
this body of work I started thinking about, if up to
this point in time Alma in my mind
is really
dealt in a very parallel way with the
history of sculpture in a more intuitive way,
these I think deal with this idea of
painting, and what is painting, and what is
something that exists on the wall. They are not
traditional paintings, but they have a painterly kind
of hang. They have a painterly kind of
aspect in terms of the way in which they kind of one stands
in front of them. Even the heights at which he's hung them,
and the way in which they've kind of been formed, and there's
a whole tradition conceptual tradition going
back certainly back to suprematism
in the first decades of the
20th century about what is a painting—
if you think about Malevich's black square and you
think about the radicality of that gesture well before
my parents were born, you know, it's like like how radical was
that, and I think about Alma's work and think about this and the
way in which painting became other
in a sense. If you have the high moment of
European and American modernism, but especially
in the post war period with American abstract expressionism, which
you can absolutely think about in terms of this work
and think about the way in which it looks think about
the painterly way he's put a patina on here.
You can read it that way, but then
there were many artists who started playing
with sort of what I might
call like alternative means of painting or and not
some necessarily anti-painting—although some
might think of it that way—of artists like even
here like John Baldessari who started putting
photo emulsions on canvas and then using it as a
photographic medium chaining the painting into a photograph and
back and forth or somebody again out of
the Arte Povera movement, Giulio Paolini, who
like put stretcher bars on the wall, and that was it. So there was
a negative space of like the support of the work.
So painting became something other in the '60s people
started even questioning the kind of confines of
what it would mean to talk about
putting a painting of something on the wall. These
are in essence paintings of something
but they are not figurative paintings. They're not a one
a reflective representation of the world except in
these three works. I kind
of love
in the light how you start to see the ghost of
yourself walking through them. This one, you know, it's a
Hall of Mirrors in a sense, but at the same time it's it's not
a distortion that is meant to be humorous or
slapstick or anything. There is
this kind of ghostly, you know,
veil here that doesn't fully reflect
back in any kind of polished way,
you know in this kind of quasi-painting,
but does show the world for what
it is. And that is a choice that he made, you
know the choice he made to put a patina
on this that would take light bounce it back, or, in
this case, absorb it, completely absorb it, because
here it's the opposite. If you stand here between these
two you have this kind of incredible negative positive
energy between the two and you know,
the elephant with the more organic, in my
mind, tree-like kind of form with this kind of
mediated by this cucumber-like
or sea cucumber-like kind of
geometry of unknown animal and/or
plant from somewhere historically or
living today.
So for me,
thinking about Alma's work, and let me just make sure I didn't and hit
all of my main points.
That you know is this idea of abstraction
I don't really think they're abstract. So for
me, the reason they're not abstract is because they're an
index of his hand moving through
the world. They are
formed, they're pushed, they're in the
models that he makes for these are very much
you know derived from his hand moving
through the world. So for me that idea of touch
that idea of creating an
object with a hand that sees in
a sense is in fact
a representation of the world we live in without being
a figurative work in that traditional sense.
I think that this form here,
it's unclear what it is. It's growing out, it does have
a base, it grows out in a traditional kind of sculptural way. It's like
framed in a sense, coming out of
the garden here, but what I love about it is
that it looks as though it could have been a petrified piece
of wood. It could have been some sort
of form taken from lava flow. It's this
idea of an extrusion of something from the Earth itself coming up
into this verticality and Alma has
made other works earlier in the last
10 years that in my mind more directly
you know, he's got this work that reminds me so much
of Brancusi's "Bird in Flight," but yet
it has this way more idiosyncratic set
of kind of moves and like counter moves as
the curves kind of go through the
sculpture but it's also a vertical sculpture based, you
know with the floor base.
So I love this in conjunction with the
works inside, the flatness of those works, and the way in which
they cause this kind of effect with the mirroring,
you're walking into kind of the strange kind
of almost, it's almost like a camera obscura you're
walking into with these kind of reversed images of yourself and then the
negative of the black space, and then out here you get
it just going out again into the world off the wall independent kind
of living on its own as this object kind
of moving around. I would encourage
you, I am trying to get to Mexico to see the show, if you
are in Mexico in the next two months, to go
to the Anahuacalli Museum and
because the images I've seen it is a total installation it
is a take over of the museum inspired by
the museum. Alma apparently spent hours and
hours and hours and hours. Apparently, the custodians
of the museum said he probably knows the collection now better
than anybody working there, and he
was completely inspired by this building
of Diego Rivera's that he commissioned
and was able to
you know, I was asking how it happened but it turns
out that through connections, friends of
friends knew the granddaughter of Diego Rivera
and so they hit it off. They had
a total complete sensibility match and
he was able to kind of do this project there, which
definitely seemed to me like the
culmination and the beginning of something new in his work
like it is his move to Mexico, the larger
studio with the foundry that he's kind of set up.
It feels like he was
always meant to be there and that this show is like the
beginning of a whole new chapter in the career as he
moves forward.