ArtSeen
MARGARET LANZETTA Reign Marks
DAVID PACKER Les Bidons
Margaret Lanzetta and David Packer’s one-person shows at Le Cube in Rabat both cast backward glances to Duchamp’s aesthetics of Etant donnés and exile, as well as to Western Modernism’s historic reframing of the Other as exotic and primitive. Yet the world has changed a bit since the first half of the 20th century, and in the contemporary work of Lanzetta and Packer, a nod to the past serves as a starting point—a given—and becomes part of the choice to make work at a nexus of cultural transition.
On View
Le Cube, Independent Art RoomMarch 16 – May 9, 2012
Rabat, Morocco
Having just returned to New York from nine months of working in Morocco, interfacing with a country that is “emerging” into the global contemporary art world, neither Packer nor Lanzetta is unaccustomed to functioning outside of his or her element, and it’s not their practice to escape. While the artists both work freely with found motifs and imagery—Western and otherwise—the ways in which they do so incorporate the historic and the contemporary with a directness that bypasses obscurantism and, at these artists’ best, the romantic.
Lanzetta’s paintings and prints have always asserted that imagery, design, and decoration travel effortlessly amongst countries and across periods of time. Before we can identify the origin of a motif or trope, we adopt, own, manipulate, and communicate that which we seem to seamlessly absorb—using visual impact to our own ends. As Lanzetta has fed her increasingly omnivorous appetite from an ever-widening field of visual cultures, however, she has also dug deeper into these sources’ histories, exploring how form speaks to notions of aesthetics, power, and beauty. In 2009, for example, she traveled throughout Syria and India in order to research the historical development of ikat weaving, both technically and visually, along the Spice Route.
To create many of the paintings on view in her exhibition, Reign Marks, Lanzetta employed a universal interlocking knot pattern found in Celtic, Roman, Byzantine, Chinese, and Arabic decoration, chopping, slicing, and reworking the basic knot as a formal device. These paintings reference the imprinted stamps used historically in China to signify and identify imperial patronage.
In her multi-paneled silkscreen entitled “Dharma Index,” Lanzetta really hits her mark. Here, Lanzetta overlaidMorrocan zellij patterns adopted from the Royal Palace in Fez (printed in a Hindi palette of deep pinks and orange), onto fragments of Diasporic mosque floor plans. She ventures thus into an edgier, but somehow still lush and lyrical, sampling of the “incommensurable narratives” described by art theorist Terry Smith in his studied definition of the contemporary.
David Packer’s sculptures, drawings, and wall collages evince a wry belief in the ability of both physical presence and imagery to influence the viewer’s relationship to information—political, cultural, technological, and through these, textual. As a master practitioner of architectural and technical ceramics, Packer speaks simultaneously of the intimate and the grandiose. At a 2006 Kohler Residency, he fabricated five bright red, life-size V8 car engines, which were suspended from the ceiling on chains as an installation entitled The Last of the V8s; this piece has been exhibited in Chicago, Sheboygan, Michigan, and Bellevue, Washington.
In Les Bidons, Packer has worked with Fez craftsmen to fabricate ceramic replicas of the plastic water bottles found in all Moroccan cafes. As Packer says, “Plastic is the new ceramics.” Arranging multi-tiered groupings of these delicate white multiples—whose color, surface, and sleek irony call to mind Duchamp’s “Fountain”—on locally-made tables, Packer places one blue and one black bottle within each assembled piece. In a region where water is scarce and oil is plentiful, the colors blue and black have particular meaning.
Packer’s investigation of the visual qualities of old and new technologies was extended in a series of found-object astrolabes and collages. Cobbling together a poetics of functional sea-faring instruments from cast-off bric-a-brac and broken bits, the artist considers the never-ending, osmotic flow that underwrites cultural exchange. Exhibiting astrolabes in the Arab world carries particular meaning given the device’s Islamic origins and importance as a tool used in finding and colonizing the New World.
Finally, Packer’s series of photographs of local high-power lines and telephone poles speaks of the streaming of power and information, as well as the sad beauty of shared physical banality sometimes wrought by change.
Contributor
Carol Schwarzman
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Renée Cox: Returned
By Jan AvgikosOCT 2019 | ArtSeen
Sometimes it takes years to fully appreciate the importance of a work of art, to evaluate what impact it might induce, and to see it in the context of a legacy that has yet to be realized. So it is with Renée Coxs monumental black and white photo diptych, Origin, created in 1993. Initially only the left half, a towering nude full-length self-portrait entitled Yo Mama, was exhibited.

Zombie Vérité: Olivier Meyrous Celebration
By Micah GottliebSEPT 2019 | Film
In 1998, French documentarian Olivier Meyrou was hired by Saint Laurents business partner and former lover Pierre Bergé to document YSLs final haute couture collection before he retired and sold the company to the Gucci Group. Meyrou documented the house of YSL until 2001, following its legendary namesake in and out of 5 avenue Marceau with unprecedented access.

Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism
By Megan N. LibertySEPT 2019 | Art Books
Djuna Barnes (18921982) remains one of the most important lesser known modernist figures. A true Renaissance woman, Barnes was a literary pioneer of modernism, writing queer novels like Nightwood (1936) and Ladies Almanack (1928), in addition to plays, poems, and her work as a New York-based journalist.

Barthélemy Toguo: Urban Requiem
By Ann C. CollinsMAY 2019 | ArtSeen
It started with a passport. For artist Barthélemy Toguo, movement through the world was tethered to the small book he was required to carry when he traveled, within which his progress could be tracked at every border he tried to cross.