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

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound
By David CarrierAPRIL 2022 | ArtSeen
Bouabré said that he didnt work from his imagination, but drew what delighted him. His delights included cloud formations; the natural markings on the surfaces of oranges, bananas, kola nuts, and leaves; numbering systems; and, more broadly, what he called knowledge of the world.

Aimee Parkison’s Sister Séance
By Jacquelyn Marie GalloOCT 2021 | Books
Sister Séance, the most recent novel by Aimee Parkison, far surpassed my proclivity toward all things strange and unusual and emparted a new context for one of the greatest and most fascinating movements of the 19th century.
Camille Pissarro: The Studio of Modernism
By Natalia GierowskaFEB 2022 | ArtSeen
The recently opened exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel, Camille Pissarro: The Studio of Modernism, is a Pissarro retrospective which, instead of uncertainty, would likely bring a lot of pride to the artist. Curated by the museums director, Josef Helfenstein, and Christophe Duvivier, this exhaustive show gathers nearly 200 works by the artist, including 100 paintings.
Cézanne Drawing
By David RhodesSEPT 2021 | ArtSeen
Cézanne brings his radical and extreme engagement with the practice of painting to his work on paper, endowing what is ostensibly conventional subject matterlandscapes, portraits, interiors, and still lifeswith an unpredictable charge.