Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Christine Miller, Rachel Elizabeth Jones, Sam Hiura, and Nia-Amina Minor pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Trulee Hall: She Shells
February 22 to March 30, 2024
François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, CA
Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1992) did much to persuade young girls that their truest, most feminine selves might actually take the form of a yearnful fish (with a bra fashioned from scallop shells, obviously). For the adults in the room, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Oscar-sweeping Poor Things (2023) also made much of the relationship between womanhood and the sea, framing Bella Baxter’s psychosexual evolution within a visual framework that heavily leans on the Victorian era’s mania for aquariums.
She Shells, Trulee Hall’s crowd-pleasing solo show with François Ghebaly, is not really about mermaids and is only sort of about the ocean—but it does deal with fabrications of white womanhood getting tangled up with the ocean, with the additional suggestion that the ocean could probably care less. And it’s very funny. And fun. Fun and funny.
Hall’s titular 6-minute, 5-second video She Shells is the pearl and the glue of the show—without it, the additional three video works, large cartoonish paintings of blondes with pasted-on eyes cut from magazines, crudely animatronic glory hole tongues, and seashore diorama set, might feel like wayward flotsam. The short blends puppetry, animation, and campy live action to tell of an emotional young woman (and her phone, selfie stick, and giant sunscreen bottle) using the beach as location for own production, written, directed, and starring her. “Gathering shells to surround my vagina,” our heroine sings pseudo-operatically, “they are the perfect decor.” She sings to an invisible audience, “so sexy and so sad and on the beach,” and getting “so much attention for being sad on the beach.” Her performance is interrupted by the pesky realities of the shore and eventually she is chased off by attacking seagulls.
John Berger was not talking about social media when he famously observed that “a woman is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself,” but the ruckus Hall creates with She Shells taps into serious lines of inquiry around female subjectivity while also reveling in a cozy, almost homemade kind of silliness. Nature can’t ever actually be reduced to an accessory or set piece, and constructions of feminine perfection are as fragile as sandcastles—and it’s okay to laugh about it. The humor is a precious relief.
Reflection: What do you want from the beach?
Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom
November 12 to June 16, 2024
MOCA, Los Angeles, CA
Don’t miss this show. (That’s what my friends told me, and they were right.)
Walking through, I was overtaken by the sort of sheepish dumbfoundedness that comes with being let in on a secret that is both laughably simple and profoundly complex—like how a magic trick is done or the answer to a riddle. Spanning 25 years of Paul Pfeiffer’s career, Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom is a slickly executed, strategically meandering exhibition that slices through overlapping matrices of entertainment and devotion with video, installation, sound, and sculpture.
Significantly, the nature of Pfeiffer’s work outlines, in no uncertain terms, that video works are always also installations—John 3:16, for example, is a short video of a spinning basketball looping on a relatively tiny LCD monitor extending from a metal armature about three feet from the wall. The work is lit so that together the armature and screen cast not one but three evenly spaced shadows. The focal point of the work is the video (or is it the basketball rapidly changing hands?), but the viewer cannot walk away without thinking about the specific mechanics of its presentation.
Over and over and over again throughout the show, Pfeiffer gently draws focus towards the structure and construction of attention itself, as well as the implications of accumulated attention in the form of celebrity, politics, mass gatherings, or the building of a wasp’s nest. He often uses semi-abstraction as a tool, as with the massive installation Vitruvian Figure (2008); it is easily recognizable as a scale model of an exaggeratedly large sports stadium, but its sheer enormity and lack of human figures, team insignia, and advertising logos make it alien-ish and threatening—as much a sucking vortex or Panopticon as familiar scene of national past-times. The scaffolding that supports the work and its viewing platform is, naturally, left visible.
Pfeiffer is not cultivating gotcha moments or being smart for the sake of being smart; he is using an expansive range of approaches to probe, with the precision of a surgeon, types of looking and how we use them.
Reflection: How is your attention held?