. :. ... : : J u l i e    B e c k e r . ..

(by Mark von Schlegell)

    I
What may well be Julie Becker's most representative work of 2000 is a kind of book. But it's unpublishable, as much an actual notebook as an artist's book. It's a white plastic photo-album binder filled with recent sketches, notes, plans and drawings. The inked-in page numbers can be wiped off the clear plastic sleeves. Even without them, the book inheres as a scrapbook, but as a singular entity, it is paradoxically multiple. Becker's plans are drawings, her drawings plans, and all of them are investigated, prodded, and supplemented by additional handwritten marginalia. Nonetheless, each page is discrete, proposing its own cosmology, with a style peculiar to its needs. The book can be construed as a series of such pages, or flipped through to yield a disjointed, fragmentary narrative about the artist's apartment, studio, imagination, hometown, bank, economic situation, and preoccupation with sparkles. It doesn't matter where you start, or which way you turn the page, or indeed how many pages you look at at once (though facing pages always comment on each other if only to say, don't get lost). Becker's book materializes what Borges conceptualized in 1941 as "The Garden of Forking Paths."

On one page, an outlined alphabet, each letter a fat, doodled cartoon, gives way to "FEDERAL BABEL/ CALIFORNIA." It's one of many references to Becker's local bank, whose architecture looms into the drawings as an everpresent conspiracy, extending to implicate the scrapbook itself in its accounting. On another page are two sketches (one in awkward pencil, one a clipped scan) of Aeolus, the boy god of winds and storms. The makeup cloud puffing through his pursed lips sparkles off the page in Technicolor, unfurling in tender, swirling pencil lines. The drawing is both blueprint and realization of special effects in the material world. On page two, a colorful abstraction the artist Magic Markered in the'70s (as an 8-year-old in Los Angeles) survives half-smudged on a yellowed notebook page. In the corner, in cursive, is "To Mom from Julie." The work is as "adult" as that on any other page. But the drawing isn't here to ironize notions of high art, but to call attention to the fact of each drawing's material history.

On another page, the distant form of an astronaut set against a more distant planet Earth gestures from behind two spooky aliens in the foreground. Penciled across a white space is the barely discernible comment, "Activity in other worlds-otherworldly activity." Yet, cc's the astronaut, not the alien, who is the otherworldly being here, hailing from beyond. It is due to this insistence on present-day actuality (today in space, there are UFOs, they're us) at the expense of psychology's repression of the oddity of the way things are (the real mysteries of the real universe as it really is) that Julie Becker's work can be understood as philosophical. I don't mean to say that she buys into positivism or any hard "reality" (she, like us all, has inherited the real's postlapsarian critique); it's that reality, if shared only by consensual hallucination, is ripe with mystery, evil, good, love, aliens-and sparkles. And it uses art, like it once used philosophy, to perceive itself. Since Duchamp, we've grown accustomed to an art that "discovers" the normal is paranormal. In Becker's work, we find a corollary that threatens to overwhelm the entire equation: the paranormal is normal.

    II
In the gallery, Julie Becker's work, which can be seen as a kind of remodeling of the psycho-scape, has this distinction: it overpowers, undermines, and vanquishes the (at best) pop- and (at worst) pseudo-utopianism of art world mythology. While it appears fully conjoined to the history of recent international art, its anomalous effect depends on the degree to which it understands itself as occupying the geophysical world as well. Becker's drawings are as much about the Cal Fed branch on Sunset east of Alvarado as that particular bank is about those drawings' value.

Like a Sol LeWitt, Becker's Golden Force Field (Museum fir Gegenwartskunst Zurich, 1999) exists both as a set of objectified instructions and as a fully realized work of art. Large gold dot stickers are placed around the grid of a given room so that at least two can be seen marking any possible plane within it. One then considers the fact of the force field's existence. Viewers expecting the immediate comment on the nature of art regularly encountered in the galleries may well move on. But in observing the tenets of the best conceptualism (Lawrence Weiner's 1969 dictum, "the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership"), the few visitors who pause to accept the specific challenge of the specific work have a surprise awaiting them.

Whereas a Weiner communique passes with near-instantaneity into the consciousness, Becker asks the viewer to enter into a narrative relation to the particular work's possibility. As you consider the force field's presence, you hallucinate its existence, if only in negative, and are forced to acknowledge (this is a kind of sculpture, after all) that it therefore actually exists-and before you know it, you're stuck with a paranormal pun. When more than one person (i.e., artist and viewer) entertains the same illusion, it's woven into the fabric of the real. In a text supplementing the installation, "Personal Notes for the Golden Force Field," Becker herself outlines the viewer's passage through this narrative of negative discovery into the impossibility that is itself a kind of antirational force field. "The Question now is: Is it possible to create a `golden force field' in this space anyways? But wait a minute, what is a force field? Is it something that pre-exists human intervention? Did man invent this in his own home, planet earth? ... For Christ's sake is a Force Field a natural occurrence in the first place? Answer the question!!!" The exclamation marks are as genuine as any in the history of modern art.

    III
As I'm writing this, I'm listening to the radio. Becker's favorite AM thinker, Art Bell, has been forced off the air, so I'm listening to NPR. They're running a program about Orson Welles and The War of the Worlds, describing Welles's 1938 radio invasion from Mars as part of the director's "almost magical" ability to intermingle fiction and fact. My point here isn't simply that the GFF purposefully enacts just such a Wellesian performance (albeit in a world as radically private as Welles's was public). It's that this information was provided to me by a coincidence itself insistently paranormal. Despite the good-natured denials of my conscious mind, the GFF has extended through time and space to continue insisting on its impossible reality.

WE MUST CONTENT OURSELVES WITH THE MYSTERY, THE ABSURDITY, THE CONTRADICTIONS, THE HOSTILITY, BUT ALSO THE GENEROSITY THAT OUR ENVIRONMENT OFFERS US. Philip K Dick, La Paranoia - (1974) '90s post-conceptualism hasn't managed to trap the informational complexity and anarchist humor of early conceptualism within its dead end of ironized art-as-art theory. Indeed, the success of work like Julie Becker's is a validation of the historical importance of its '60s and '70s ancestry. Just as young artists like L.A.'s Dispute Resolution Services adopt conceptualist documentation strategies merely as the art world entrance to their real world interventions, Becker lays out the stark, often beautiful minimalism of conceptualist aesthetics as a trapdoor into the present universe.

Becker's 1999 photograph Poltergeist participates in the transcendently deadpan celebration of the amateur photograph as practiced by figures like Dan Graham or Robert Smithson, but its ideational concerns and its performance open onto a particularly contemporary set of concerns. A television showing Spielberg's 1982 Poltergeist, the scene in which the abducted child speaks to her TV-viewing family-from the nether dimension of ghosts, is caught emitting a baroque tower of light swirling into the artist's "real-world" bedroom. An actual poltergeist has been documented, the first I've seen.

At a certain moment in our nation's history, mothers and fathers, in search of their new postmodern selves, began to leave large numbers of children in front of televisions, VCRs, stereo systems and comic books. At the same time, the inherited moral structures of our culture were one by one consumed by a massively expanding capitalist juggernaut. Also, various mind-altering substances were readily available via a newly accessible black market. And science fiction-the mode that dominated the conceptual impulse of popular culture-was increasingly proving, through rapid technological change, a significant author of the real. In Becker's Poltergeist, it seems to me that Spielberg's Poltergeist has been unsealed, undelivered, and stamped, "Return to Sender."

    V
Julie Becker's various studios, as well as her previous apartments, appear in her art not as works in themselves, but as the sites of the cosmologies the art accesses. Each Becker installation is itself a kind, of studio, actually, offering bits and pieces of new anti-paranoid subjectivities with which to piece together a world that can be perceived only at the expense of all certainty. In 1999's Suburban Legend, as it was most recently installed in the basement of China Art Objects Galleries in Los Angeles, The Wizard of Oz is projected without sound on a fold-out screen. While watching, the visitor sits on a homemade wooden bench, dons headphones and listens to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. It's been a longtime teen mind-blower that the 1973 album is an occult soundtrack to the 1939 MGM musical. In the installation's nostalgic, basement privacy we're treated to a demonstration. Becker plays guide, taking us by the hand, leading us along the yellow brick road of this particular set of paranormal confluences. There's just enough light to read the artist's long but admittedly fragmentary enumeration of specific coincidences, if you happen to miss any yourself. Silenced, the film's imagery is released from the burden of its narrative into a pop Wagnerianism, as profoundly cynical (with the first cashier rings of Pink Floyd's "Money," Dorothy steps out into wonderland and the film bursts into its mystical Technicolor) as it is romantic (the terrible tornado and Rockwell/Steinbeck Midwest of the film's opening sequences become themselves surreal cartoons of the tragic infant unconscious). The silent Dorothy, so continually surprised, moved, frightened, and homesick, is surrogate for audience and artist alike, not wandering inexorably toward some gaudy, artificial reconciliation, but toward one of Professor Marvel's unavoidable magic tricks. And a small dog is licking her heels.... The rest is up to the viewer. (L. Frank Baum's turn-of-the-century psy-fi novel was itself the originator of a body of anti-paranoid investigation; it offers, apparently unintentionally, a miraculously specific allegory of American gold-standard politics.) There's a remote control handy, to pause, rewind or fast forward.