awol (art without limits)

Brand Anxiety

2010-02-13T00:00:00.000-08:00

11-12 February 2010

As a few of you may be aware, David McAuliffe and Nowell Karten of Angles Gallery hosted a ‘town hall’ style panel forum Wednesday night, led by dealer Marc Richards. (I’m sure there’s quite a bit posted all over Facebook by now – including, apparently, a bit of me.) I wasn’t quite sure what the agenda was going in; but 20 minutes or so into it (and I arrived there late, so we’re really talking about 30 minutes), it was clear that it was rather broad, mostly Marc Richards’ own, as far as I could tell, and as long as his arm. Oh my goddess was it long – as long as the gallery was over-heated (or simply underventillated, given the number of people in the gallery – not blaming David and Nowell who, after all, are new to this space, formerly Blum & Poe’s). An hour or so into it, I was dying under my layers of scarves and silk and cashmere and I was envying those smart people who had just worn T-shirts under their coats, sweaters and jackets. Broadly, the ‘topic’ at hand seemed to be the overall commercialization of the art market (which sounds a bit oxymoronic – as I’ve written before in artillery, it’s simply more obvious, routinized, economically cyclical and, yes, perhaps a little crass) and it’s nexus to public institutions, specifically museums of contemporary art. But, as I said, the larger points got a bit lost in Marc Richards’ endless questions and unwillingness to exercise a bit of editorial control over panelists and audience commentators. (Sure I include myself.) Whether anyone wanted to admit it or not, including Marc Richards, the focal point – or at least the trigger point – seemed to be the appointment of Jeffrey Deitch as the new Director of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art – which seemed, to put it mildly, odd and soooo off the point. Aren’t we all past this yet? Or even if we aren’t – and it appeared that more than one participant Wednesday night had mixed feelings about it, some of them, positively schizzy – you’d think we’d all be willing to just hold back the brickbats for a second (okay, four months) and ‘suspend disbelief’ for a moment. Frankly, speaking as the skeptical soul I am, I think it would be a relief.

Second to MOCA’s leadership, Richards’ agenda seemed to focus on MOCA itself, its management and trusteeship, past and current, its finances – and boy did Cliff Einstein and Dean Valentine both have a couple things to say about that, yet, tellingly, not nearly enough; and finally – what I thought going into this event, was going to be the main topic of the evening – the overall Los Angeles commercial art market, the emerging artists working within the economic parameters of that market, and the local L.A. art market’s and L.A.’s artists’ relationship to the larger, international art world and art market. You would think that last topic – already pretty broad – would be enough, but nooooo. And so I sweltered for well over two hours.

To address this last topic presumably, Richards brought, in addition to Dean Valentine, television executive, collector, and Hammer Museum trustee (and, as I learned this particular evening, a former MOCA trustee), Sarah Watson – who most of us have known from the Gagosian Gallery here and who has taken over directorship of the L.A. outpost of New York’s L&M Gallery, which is still under construction – to complete his panel. Those of us who have known Sarah from her long stint at Gagosian know her to be engaged by and supportive of local artists. It would have been nice to hear her weigh in further on a subject she is probably uniquely positioned to address – and there were a few emerging artists in the audience who were there for just such input, including an irrepressible Yun Bai – who, once based in Atlanta, held forth at some length on the dazzlements and disillusionments the politics of the Los Angeles art world has thus far presented to her. (Richards asked her if she might be available for a future panel.)

What is interesting about gatherings like this one is that you find out that people you think you know – or at least feel familiar with as ‘ known quanities’ in one context or another – turn out to be, something not quite completely ‘knowable’, whether in the art world or any other other social world they might inhabit. Some seem puzzling indeed, perhaps unknowable even to themselves, with a raft of tics and insecurities you might never suspect from seeing them at openings, auctions or museum functions. One common lingering insecurity is – incredibly, and, less-than-relevantly in 2010 – L.A.’s status as an “international” art center. I sat next to roving collector Lenore Schorr and directly in front of Don and Mira Rubell of Miami, who seemed to agree that L.A. has a kind of ‘second city insecurity’ problem – both respect to its status and its attitude towards its own L.A.-based artists – attitudes, as the Rubells were quick to observe, not unrelated to each other.

Follies

2010-01-31T23:57:00.000-08:00

30 - 31 January 2010

I'm on DEADLINE, of course. But before I entirely crash out -- a few notes from the last day or so. Saturday night saw openings at both See Line and Carl Berg Galleries, upstairs from the fair, as well as the usual reconnaissance. I missed half the X-TRA "1 Image 1 Minute" event organized by Micol Hebron -- which took off where Hebron's regular X-TRA magazine column/feature left off -- offbeat view/contemporary art history moment morphed into the equivalent of a 1-minute comedy stand-up or poetry reading, I couldn't decide which; but except for the three of the more entertaining stand-ups (Tim Ebner, I understand, was one; I have no doubt architect Benjamin Ball was another), I guess I didn't miss too much. (And where was Artillery Editor, Tulsa Kinney -- any of whose regular artist lecture features would have served handily for this purpose? That, I thought -- my own bias to one side -- was a glaring omission.) I thought Margaret Wappler's poem was quite wonderful (though I don't even remember the image she selected); and Shana Nys Dambrot managed to send up the whole thing while remaining remarkably pertinent and articulate about her subject -- a gritty Rodchenko photograph that retains a wonderfully sustained resonance for contemporary image-making. I wandered back to the fair where I returned to tempt myself with a few things just out of my reach.

This afternoon, I was back at the Pacific Design Center for Frank Escher's lecture in conjunction with the show the Escher-GuneWardena firm co-curated for MOCA, Folly.

A Closer Look

2010-01-30T15:23:00.000-08:00

30 January 2010

If you’re thinking I headed straight for the Oscar Tuazon’s at the Art Los Angeles Contemporary fair yesterday, you’re right and wrong. After the further delay of various errands, I finally made it over to PDC only to be waylaid by a figure in an International Klein Blue sweater (!) – Richard Hertz, the oral art historian (Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia; and The Beat and the Buzz – to which – full disclosure here – I contributed the instroduction), in the very pleasant company of Kim Light, Rachel Lachowicz, Alex Couri and Patrick Marcoux. Having just wrapped her colloquium on women in the art world (in which Rachel was one of the panelists), Kim felt free to chide me for my absence from the discussion. (As readers of this blog may recall, I offered a criticism of a group show Kim presented in New York, based partially on the absence of women artists from the group. I later learned this had more to do with art world politics and logistics than any curatorial agenda, which, knowing that world as I do, made perfect sense to me; and any criticism of that show must be (and herewith IS) qualified by those circumstances.) After an entirely salutary scolding, Richard and I shared our enthusiasm for the Sage Vaughn work in Kim’s space before I moved on – to the Intelligentsia coffee bar. (Believe me, I needed it.)

I’ve already mentioned the trend – very much on the wing – in avian subject matter in variously representational and abstracted painting and other media (in addition to the aforementioned Sage Vaughn, one thinks of Lisa Adams and Comora Tolliver). Another trend, which has probably been emerging for at least a couple of years – the sort of thing that ebbs and flows with the Zeitgeist – is photography-of-photography – the variously deliberate and random collage and (re-)configuration of photographs and photograph fragments, sometimes utilizing photographs of a particular subject or motive. My most recent encounter with this type of photography was at the Italian Cultural Institute here in Westwood, where Walead Beshty exhibited his most recent photographs in collaboration with the architectural firm, Johnston-Marklee in a joint show they titled “Later Layer” – which related (with mixed success) architectural maquettes of various housing developments designed ‘serially’ or in a layering process by the J-M firm with Beshty’s similarly serial and layered photographs (which presented as vivid shafts of colored light criss-crossing at various oblique angles – the original ‘subjects’ of which were largely abstracted architectural elements). Andrea Longacre-White does something similar using photographs of her studio, configured and re-configured, photographed and re-photographed until a satisfactory configuration of layers is achieved. Longacre-White’s photographs have not undergone the kind of darkroom manipulation Beshty’s apparently did, and (within the constraints of her studio subject) are far more monochromatic. (I believe there may have been some of these Beshty photographs available in another gallery booth, but I did not re-encounter them yesterday.)

I also re-visited the Charro-Negro Galleria (Guadelajara) space, whose overall roster of artists and gallery program interested me somewhat more than what they had available to view. (Maria Jose Lopez, the Galleria’s director, is so intelligent and completely charming.) I’m probably going to have to wait until I actually visit their gallery in Guadelejara – and I cannot wait.

Karyn Lovegrove, who I’d sort of lost track of a bit since she left the 6150 Wilshire complex, was showing work from her own roster, including Karin Apollonia Müller and Anna Sew Hoy, who, interestingly, may have a few new tricks up her sleeve. In addition to a few objects I saw inhabiting Karyn’s desk, I noticed what looked like gouache/ink/watercolor works on paper in one corner, which I learned were also by Anna Sew Hoy – a departure towards a new kind of abstraction for her: elaborated “blobs” as Timothy put it, in pen-and-ink and colored pencil – quite successful and very reasonably priced.

I stopped in briefly at Steve Turner’s space to have another look at a large painting by Jennifer Wyman, which in my slightly inebriated exhaustion Thursday night left a kind of paint-by-numbers-on-acid impression on me. Its overall design and (abstracted) subject did in fact reference camouflage-type pattern (an effect I learned she achieves with a turkey baster, (I assume) squirting these ‘camo-blobs’ in brightly hued acrylic pigments directly onto the canvas. The title more or less ‘filled in the numbers’ – “Combat Drag” – an ambiguous figure – soldier or devout female civilian, who could say? – in something that read as a “camo-burkha”.

Virtuosic painting abounds – Wyman is nothing if not technically adept; and I already mentioned the sweeping painterly lyricism of Monique von Genderen the other day. But sometimes you need a closer look. And it was great going back to The Breeder (Athens) to look at the work of L.A.-based Mindy Shapero. The Breeder has a phenomenal loyalty to Shapero and it is largely well-deserved. Speaking of my ‘on-acid’ impressions, I had a similar kind of first encounter with Shapero’s sculpture – an open construction in steel rebar with a ‘body’ mass of feathered, hand-cut, shaped and clustered plastic and, dangling at one end of a vertical extension of rebar, a ‘face’ plate or ‘mask’ of flat steel – ‘sheep’ or ‘ostrich’? – who could say? – but it did leave a very bird-like (that trend AGAIN!) impression. After the intial dazzle of that ‘thing’ (thank you, Hammer Museum), I was now able to focus on the painting – what from a distance resembled dramatically enlarged microscopic views of cells or organelles, in deep pigments heightened by goldleaf. (One panel had a entirely goldleaf backdrop.) Upon closer inspection, some of these (including the goldleaf panel) did look very ‘cellular’; others took on a mask-like configuration; still others in various abstractions of eddying waves and interior structure and incident – all very beautiful, almost breathtaking, taken (closely) in sum.

There were a few other events on my agenda for the afternoon and evening – including a vist to the (speaking of reconfigurations) ‘replicated’ Ferus Gallery around the corner on La Cienega. There were some beautiful things on view there, I will say that – including a great Billy Al Bengston, a lovely Joseph Cornell and classic Craig Kaufman (I’m forgetting a few other beauties – but go check it out if you’re in the neighborhood). I skipped a few other things, which I deeply regret, but, uh, I got waylaid again – by great conversation. John Kinkead hosted a barbecue for the painter Angela Dufresne, who will take up a one-month residency with Kinkead Contemporary in the coming month. I’m on fairly extensive record as a huge fan of Angela’s painting, so let me jump a bit here to say, (1) she’s been working in portraiture a great deal lately and her project with Kinkead will also deal with portraiture; (2) she’s also a phenomenal cook (and really knows her way around a grill, too); and (3) the pleasure of her conversation was not easy to break away from – though it was made easier by segue to another conversation with another local painter with whom she shares certain affinities – Matty Byloos – whom I also had the pleasure of introducing to her. I would have liked to have made it to Country Club – John Knuth’s new salon – but it was a terrific evening nonetheless.

Immersion and Encouragement at the Big Blue Whale

2010-01-29T16:08:00.001-08:00

29 January 2010

That last bit in my last post – if anyone even remembers (or even READ) it now was my impression of Wallis Simpson, the late Duchess of Windsor. Before I back-track so much as a week, much less to that particular Saturday evening’s scene at RAID Projects (a terrific show, by the way – “That’s the way I see things” – which is still up) and Duchess Marlene and the ensuing hi-jinks – I’m just going to jump straight into the RIGHT NOW (or at least last night) and lead off with what’s immediately on the horizon – which is, uh, whaddayaknow? – ART. I’m not sure if it’s “Art Week” or “Art MONTH” here in L.A.; all I know is we’ve been IMMERSED in it – and people like me are finding themselves out almost every night, getting no sleep – and, uh, no blogging – which is not to excuse myself, but I’m still learning trying to master the skill of sleep-writing – and with my laptop you never know what you’re going to wake up to find on your screen. Yeah, yeah – there’s a bit of art-and-culture political biz to discuss (both MOCA and LACMA) – but it will keep for now. Let me just allow that I am cautiously optimistic about Jeffrey Deitch at MOCA. He thinks creatively both curatorially and financially (the latter of which MOCA has a desperate need for); seems to have a pretty good handle on this level of administration and understands collections (the suggestions that he divest himself of a large part of his collection are simply rubbish). That’s pretty encouraging right there.

The best encouragement of course is good art – and there was quite a bit on view last night at the opening of Art Los Angeles Contemporary at Pacific Design Center. First, let me just say that the layout of the gallery booths was compactly but brilliantly arranged with gallery booths opening out and grouped behind the glass panels and vitrines of the PDC’s showrooms, giving almost every gallery great visibility while helping to channel the traffic between the booths and display areas (which was a bit heavy at times last night). It was also very sociable – you could nosh and chat with your pals as you strolled through the corridors between fair sections while glimpsing what you might want to investigate further in the booths without having to jostle drinks and hors d’oeuvres plates amongst the fair-goers having a closer look.

A few highlights. Some dealers really know how to do this sort of thing. Thomas Solomon (whose booth was so outstanding at last year’s artLA) is one; David and Nowell at Angles are another pair; and apparently, Kim Light – who everyone knows will almost always have something to show – is another. Her space was given over to Sage Vaughn, a painter and, more recently, animator of his paintings (which seems to be something of a trend). His subject might be called the tragically corrupt and transcendently beautiful natural world – in other words nature as altered by human activity, but also ineluctably cruel on its own terms – and the locus of endlessly varied beauties in a continuous cycle of bloom and decay. In his video and paintings, robins, bluejays, cardinals, songbirds (another trend here, no? BIRDS) soar and fall amid the dappled skies and urban decay of a drab urban backdrop. I couldn’t tear myself away from the animation; and the larger paintings were also very beautiful. His collages play up the uneasy yet serendipitous intersection between human-made and natural worlds on a material and slightly grittier level.

Speaking of beautiful painting – there was a beautiful Monique van Genderen at Michael Janssen’s (Berlin) space – a looping abstraction in luminous yellows and burnished browns that had was like a sunflower gesture or ideogram arching over its panel. Also a wonderfully imposing (in its slightly archaic-look) and vividly impastoed Ruby Neri at David Kordansky’s space. (By the way, David and Nowell had pulled one of the Tom LaDuke’s out of their inaugural show at their La Cienega gallery – it looked almost better here than it looked there. Tom Solomon was showing Analia Saban; he plans to change artists each day of the fair.) Speaking of the gritty urban (more or less the same context as Sage Vaughn’s but to far less transcendent effect), I like Michael Vasquez’s painting (at Frederic Snitzer, Miami); but – between one fair and the next, I’m beginning to wonder if he’s a bit overexposed.

I ran into Skip Arnold, insouciantly resting his glass on an a large glass-faced Oscar Tuazon cube and pouring himself a cocktail as he engaged Jonathan Viner (London) in spirited conversation regarding the methods and merits of Tuazon – an interesting-looking object that seemed (at first blush) both original and clichéd in equal measure. (Skip thinks we should jointly write a piece discussing these sculptures. I’ll think about it Skip – maybe after I have a second look today). They appear to be constructed of glass panels – variously cracked and shattered, steel or wood (for the frame), enclosing various materials limned through the glass panels – what looks like crumpled vellum or some kind of scrim, chicken-wire and assorted debris. I’m not sure Jonathan Viner knew quite how to take our Skip; but I’m sure he’s recovered by now. (I think Skip was enjoying the Tuazon as a prop more than anything else.) Interestingly both Jonathan Viner and a gallery called The Standard (Oslo) were showing Tuazon’s work (which I’m otherwise unfamiliar with). The Tuazon at Standard was equally striking – but I’ll have to get back to it later – as in NOW – I’m out the door and off again to ALAC.

Coupling Dramas and Unknowable Others (with apologies to David Humphrey)

2010-01-10T23:51:00.000-08:00

8 – 10 January 2010

I never did talk much about the Almodovar film, Los Abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces), did I? Nor for that matter much about The Lives of Pippa Lee, and Robin Wright Penn’s brilliant performance (with a deftly eccentric assist from Keanu Reeves towards the end, and of course yet another brilliant supporting performance from Julianne Moore (I have to wonder if most film directors and casting directors simply think of her now as Julianne “Can-Do-No-Wrong” Moore.), which also had outstanding art direction; and I wish I had (though I’m not going to get back to that right now) because it came up in conversation at dinner with a collector and artist pal after a couple of art events this past evening; but it’s clear that Opera Buddy and I weren’t the only ones who were blown away that the film disappeared after about a week here in L.A. (one assumes for Oscar consideration). Apparently it’s going to be re-released; so I’m giving myself permission to resume my commentary (if that’s what this is) when that happens (or maybe sooner if I have a moment.)

In the meantime, as I said, I was out this evening and, aside from the driving, I enjoyed it – though I must give an enormous credit to my pal, Marlene (who has appeared in this blog before as The Other Marlene (as in not Dietrich or Dumas) who practically set RAID Projects ablaze with her indefatigable curiosity and wit and had us roaring with laughter over sandwiches at Philippe’s to the consternation of a tableful of L.A.’s Finest right in back of us. She informed us that the preferred nomenclature in these circles today is “law enforcement” personnel; and she should know: although her native habitat is the wilds of the art world, like any writer (which is only one of her talents), she has explored a wide variety of turfs and terrains, making friends everywhere (and maybe a few ‘unfriends’ – you can’t have everyone you have to walk over fall in love with you; she has no enemies – it is impossible not to be charmed by her), and more or less getting what she wants.

Sometimes that’s information (we have that curiosity in common), and sometimes it’s stuff (we have that in common, too). This past evening, we both set our acquisitive eyes on watercolors and a video by Jennifer Levonian, an artist from Philadelphia, who may be a kind of genius. Her painting – which is figurative and naturalistic – has a rough, unpolished yet verismo quality about it – finely tuned to gesture, expression and social, cultural and emotional context. Really finely tuned, as it turns out – she turns out suites of such quasi-narrative watercolors and gouaches (and collage apparently) into brilliant short stop-motion animations that segue from American coffeeshop/consumer culture (à la Starbucks), to odd film clips, to American evangelical Christian culture to American courtship rituals and.what might be called the bleed between the quotidian pedestrian actuality of everyday/Everyman’s life and fantasy. One such stop-motion video was exhibited at RAID, You, Starbucks, which featured individually customized watercolor and collage covers for the DVD cases. The price was so astonishingly low that I won’t repeat it here; and I only hope there’s one left when I call Ryan and David back this week. I almost wrote a cheque on the spot for the Magnificent Marlene; but, well aware of my bad track record with Wells Fargo Bank, she stayed my too-willing hand.

The evening began with a book launch at the Edward Cella Gallery, which is right across the street from LACMA. David Humphrey, who many of us West-Coasters first came to be aware of through the graces of Gary Kornblau and the late, lamented Art Issues, has published an anthology of his criticism (much of it culled from those issues of Art Issues, as well as Frieze, Tema Celeste, and other art publications), interspersed not only with illustrations of the art that is the subject of his reviews and essays, but his his own art. I want to say, ‘accompanied’ rather than simply illustrated or interspersed, because with Humphrey, generally, and, I think quite vividly in this book, Blind Handshake (though I had no more than a cursory examination of it), you get a sense of the dialogue and counterpoint between his approach to his painting and studio art generally and his approach to discussing and criticizing the work of other artists. His own art is so distinctive, so utterly his own slightly skewed, almost whimsical, and very painterly style; yet there is almost no perceptible bias in his critical writing, except within the terms dictated by the art and artist under discussion (though, as he himself pointed out during his gallery chat, he is not unwilling to question the validity and limitations of those terms).

There is probably enough dialogue and dialectic within the book itself, without having to generate another dialogue surrounding it. But here he was, in the cozy confines of the Cella Gallery here in L.A. (he’s based in New York), and there was no reason not to have a taste of it directly from him. I had met David in person at least once before (at a dinner at Fearless Leader’s house), where he was relaxed and convivial (he writes/curates the “Barrage NYC” feature for Artillery). But I could see that, under these slightly more formal (and explicitly commercial) circumstances, he might need to be drawn out a bit; and Benjamin Weissman, a local fiction writer (Dear Dead Person) who also writes about art and artists from time to time (including in Art Issues, as I recall) was on hand to amplify the dialogue by another dimension or two. I wasn’t aware (not really thinking about the Art Issues nexus) they went back a bit together; but they do and Weissman proved to be an ideal interlocutor. Mr. Cella gave a big assist, not only with his gallery space, but by being the perfect host – including full bar and a bit of nosh for those of us on empty or near-empty stomachs. David and Benjamin had apparently already had the benefit of a ski trip (somewhere near Tahoe, I assume) to warm up to David’s book tour and warmed up further with a cocktail shaker of martinis (olives – dirty); and you could sort of tell that they needed it, David perhaps more than Benjamin. I think most of us were expecting the dialogue to focus on the book itself, but the book was as much a springboard for a series of exchanged questions and comments about the dual pursuit of making art alongside writing about art. (It’s clear, though, that Weissman’s primary pursuit is writing; Humphrey’s painting.)

What came across in the dialogue was the sense of someone not so much writing (reviews or critical essays) in a determined fashion (though a good deal of determination is certainly involved here), but making the writing ‘happen’ sometime after the encounter and intial response in a way not unlike the way the book was constructed – as an “organized wonderment”. But if the book was thus organized under an “umbrella of variety and levity”, Humphrey characterized the process of writing the individual reviews and essays as “painful.” “I truly hate it,” he flatly admitted. That his art writing – from his earliest work for Art Issues to the present – has always conveyed so much “wonderment” and so little pain is testimony to a great capacity for invention and extraordinary skill – qualities which, it could be said, are also found in his painting. Looking at the painting (and there were some good examples of Humphrey’s work in the rear gallery space), though, you see the evidence of a freer hand, a freshness and exuberance that need no coaxing or organization. When he is writing on assignment, Humphrey says, painting feels like a “truancy” – which may sum up the qualitative difference in freedom and invention. Painting takes him to a place of his own – something either appropriated or entirely invented.

It was interesting that the two writers whose names came up – as influential or simply objects of admiration (for both Humphrey and Weissman) – were William Gass and Mary Gaitskill – interesting because I’ve read so little of either (and, incredibly, almost nothing of Gaitskill), but more importantly because it was hard for me to make a connection between them and Humphrey’s (or for that matter, Weissman’s) work, written or painted. The only Gass I’ve read has been some of his essays in The New York Review of Books (and possibly elsewhere) and a few stories in (I think) The New Yorker). Gass is obviously brilliant on so many levels and I’ve always wanted to read some of his novels, but is he really, as Humphrey put it, “the living incarnation of Gertrude Stein”? As someone who made a study of Stein at university (I wrote a thesis on Stein and Picasso) and read her in some depth, it’s hard to make a direct connection; but then I haven’t read Gass’s novels (though reviews I’ve read convey little of the sense of the kind of perceptual field available in Stein’s fiction and poetry). I haven’t read Gaitskill either; but obviously I’m aware of her work and I could easily see the affinities Humphrey might share with some of her work to date – especially as it’s expressed and packaged in Blind Handshake. “Mixed up love acts” seems to describe the kind of cross-pollination that takes shape between the art and essays of the book. It’s as if Humphrey were finally recognizing how his work as a painter and writer might dovetail in an enterprise that draws on both but takes him into a far broader, more encompassing cultural sphere. Humphrey draws his subjects – which include Lucian Freud, Amy Sillman, Mary Heilmann, Tony Oursler, Richard Prince and John Currin (and many more) – into loosely (but very perceptively) themed sections which include “Coupling Dramas”, “Unknowable Others,” “Collective Solitudes,” “Prosthetic Selves” and “Good Liars.” (Interesting that the aforementioned affinities they cite with Gass and Gaitskill seem to float up to me out of these section headings.)

It was funny watching David wrestle again with issues he has obviously addressed many times before and in considerable depth – but that again echoes a kind of circling (and occasionally annoying) non-judgmental quality we take from some of these reviews. But, as he said, he’s willing to accept the possibility that one might positively judge something on the same criteria as another (possibly himself) might reject it. Although Humphrey evinces a slightly edgy distrust of the kind of post-historical ‘anything-goes’ contemporary art world of the last several years, Blind Handshake (and, I would venture to say, most of Humphrey’s critical writing) manages to present a kind of overview of the on-going evolution of art and cultural criticism in the kind of post-canonical/post-historical context that has taken shape since Warhol. I’m not even sure what Humphrey meant by ‘blind handshake’ – but it is a kind of ‘blind handshake’ effect that transpires between the artwork and/or artist and the culture that we find ourselves addressing again and again as cultural and technology continually and sweepingly ‘refresh’ the perceptual ‘screen.’ It is liberating and unsettling in equal measure. Pour me another, David.

For Your Consideration:

2010-01-03T23:58:00.000-08:00

28 December 2009 – 2 January 2010

Okay – obviously (see recent posts) I’ve been looking at a lot of movies lately. Well, as they say (in L.A. anyway), ‘tis the season. (I think the Oscar nomination ballots went out a couple of days ago.) Academy members are already receiving packages of screeners, scripts, notes and other “for your consideration” promotions, touting this or that writer, director, actor or actress or just the film itself for Academy Award nomination. I’m not an Academy member, but I know a lot of people who are and occasionally go to Academy screenings at AMPAS’s Samuel Goldwyn Theatre – which is one of the best if not the best screen in town. I no longer have the movie-going/viewing habits I once had (when it seemed as if I looked at a new (to me anyway) film at least every other day; sometimes every day or more than once a day for extended periods); but sometimes I’ll just arbitrarily pick a film or two to compare and contrast on one basis or another – most frequently writing or cinematography and editing, but occasionally on somewhat more ‘incidental’ (not that anything in movies is really incidental) grounds. And so, over the last week or so, I picked a pair in the ‘art direction/production design category’. I could have used other criteria, of course; but (1) everyone knows Nancy Meyers is obsessed with art direction in a peculiarly L.A. Westside way; and (2) Tom Ford – who sleeked up and all but re-branded Gucci, before moving on to – sacre dieu! – the house of Yves Saint Laurent – promised to be a new and very wild card in a business that – setting aside award ceremony red carpets – was worlds apart from couture and boutique fashion. I did not necessarily have high expectations either way. Nancy Meyers (with or without Charles Shyer) has never exactly given me a lot to chew on (though she’s a perfectly capable maker of filmed entertainment); and – well, Christopher Isherwood seemed a pretty ambitious undertaking for someone I viewed first and foremost as a fashion designer and merchandising wiz. But the advance word on the Ford movie was surprisingly good and – well, if the script was good; and we certainly might count on Ford’s eye for the film’s overall look – who could really tell? As for Meyers, Manohla Dargis, had already given It’s Complicated – let’s just call it a very ‘gentle’ review – and, at worst I thought it might go down like a milkshake, with a giggle or two about the Westside women’s world that I only know from some (increasingly rare) parties I’ve been to where they preside.

Before I really get into it – just a word about ambition. What I thought interesting and very smart about Ford’s approach to the Isherwood material was that he didn’t push too hard. It’s not necessarily a soft-sell, soft-focus sort of thing – quite the opposite; in Ford’s hands, very crisply told, with almost every frame deliberately composed and sharply focused. (In some sense, you can see the fashion-photography and merchandising sensitive hand a bit here: the precise lighting of each framed image, the balance of lights and darks in each frame, the pacing and articulation itself balanced in the sequencing of alternately light and darker chiaroscuro-laden shots.) But Isherwood’s story is allowed to play out more or less in its original judiciously articulated, well- (but not funereally) paced, nuanced, gently inflected (as opposed to ‘soft’) voice. Here in this sunlit Santa Monica (actually Glendale stands in for some of Santa Monica here – by way of the John Lautner designed Schaffer House) setting – at moments seemingly a suburban idyll – Isherwood’s tale of a real paradise lost – Isherwood’s tale of the mortal struggle for connection against the double barrier of depression and an isolation reinforced by social stigmatizationt unfolds over a single day and night broken by haunted memories, flashbacks, and epihanal moments that mark a kind of spiritual progress towards a transcendence that seems at first beyond reach. Colin Firth plays the English professor who, devastated by the catastrophic death, eight months past, of his long-standing lover, by early morning has determined that the day will be his last. He goes about his scheduled routine with stoic deliberation,

The Lethal Addiction of Battle

2009-12-29T15:19:00.000-08:00

26 – 28 December 2009

So where does an army orphan go in 2009? Well, it’s not as if there isn’t a war zone somewhere where s/he might be deployed. We have at least two – Afghanistan (which itself comprises a multiplicity of war zones) and Iraq – ever deadly, its dangers exponentiated by its illegitimacy, notwithstanding a gradually receding American ‘footprint’; to say nothing of Pakistan, easily conflated with Afghanistan’s border and mountain regions, as well as more covert operations inYemen, Somalia, and – who knows where else? A pity that this latest generation of orphans is as culturally orphaned as it is economically – although this is both overstating and understating the conditions of their ‘orphanage’ on a certain level. It’s not as if the senior officer ranks are any more culturally equipped to deal with the full range of exigencies and repercussions of armed conflict in these regions; though a ‘blind leading the blind’ staffing situation is not exactly ideal in what is very treacherous terrain. But on another level, how different is the state of their cultural ‘orphanage’, or simply alienation, from what is encountered pretty much across the board and even across class lines – especially given the state of public education – throughout America? Fortunately, this generation has grown up with current technologies within their grasp practically from the cradle. That’s one advantage – how much it’s hard to say. But also a whole range of entertainment media and forms have evolved right alongside the technology. How significant were video games and digital interactive media 20 or 30 years ago? Now, the release of a new digitally animated interactive game is a cultural event – albeit one some of us are only rarely (ironically) afforded opportunities to sample. In a sense, this generation has been prepped for a certain type of high-tech warfare before they’ve been out of children’s clothes much less contemplated donning combat fatigues.

All the more reason for this generation of orphans to opt into a military which offers to continue their technical/technological schooling and take it a level of professional competence that might be the difference between life and death. (Talk about being schooled within an inch of one’s life!) Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker offers a glimpse into one such class of ‘orphans’ – an emerging elite of “specialists” caught between the educated officers and rank-and-file recruits – in what must be one of the best, if not the best film on contemporary warfare, made to date. In its principal characters, it also gives us complex and fully dimensional portraits of three such ‘orphans’ – their social and cultural profiles, their psychology (and their professionalism) – on a par with anything available in cinema from the days of Lewis Milestone forward. What is brilliant about writer Mark Boal’s and Bigelow’s portrait of the senior specialist sergeant William James (I have to wonder if the name is a bit of a joke – a play on that godfather of American pragmatism, so many worlds apart from the contemporary world of these soldiers) – and to some extent the other two principals – is the extent to which they capture the extreme social alienation and psychological isolation embodied in his military renegade-wildcard-‘cowboy’ character. He half-saunters, half-swaggers his way through this devastated, dessicated landscape with an extreme, monomaniacal focus (which on a certain level doesn’t seem too far removed from the mindset of a championship game player), and a professional pride that is probably not so far removed from the pride of a professional like the hapless army psychiatrist, Col. Cambridge; with just enough of his core humanity in the game to connect him with his surroundings – the real consequences for communities and stark suffering of their inhabitants. We also get, by contrast, the depth (or surface – one in the same here) of his cultural alienation in ‘the homeland’. (You can also see how difficult it was to play this contrast here (and I suppose, write it into the script) in what is otherwise a truly superb performance by Jeremy Renner.)

The film opens with a very well chosen quote (like a flyleaf note on a book’s first page) from Chris Hedges, whose exceptional journalism out of Egypt and the Middle East, and many many war zones was (for me anyway) for many years one of the highlights of the front page international news coverage in The New York Times and elsewhere, and who understands some basic truths about armed conflict and the personalities engaged in it on various levels better than most. “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” The movie plays out with the same ‘grace note’ – with a clearly gung-ho Sgt. James (Renner) redeployed to Iraq with yet another army company. This is simply an amazing film that is not to be missed.

There have been many other fine films this Oscar nomination season (The Hurt Locker was actually released much earlier this year – though this was the first time I saw it.); and I may have a few notes about a few of them when I return to this space.

There is also some news – a warning note – out of LACMA, which may raise a few alarms; but that will wait for the moment, too. Suffice it to say for the moment that it may make for a certain painful contrast of its own with LACMA’s rather aggressive (at least in public media outlets) advertising.

Army of Orphans

2009-12-28T14:47:00.000-08:00

21 - 28 December 2009

Speaking of Big Dem (see one or two posts back), some time ago – oh weeks by now (actually it was November 18th to be precise) – I hooked up with Big Dem and an architect pal of his for an Academy screening of a new digitally restored print of From Here to Eternity, the Fred Zinneman/Daniel Taradash film from the amazing novel by James Jones. I’m not sure what his particular interest in the film was; but then he has plenty of movie world connections of his own and who knew about his architect pal – half the architects I know seem to have at least one project or another in production design. It had been literally a lifetime since I had last seen it; and I wondered how it would hold up. The film would be worth seeing – once, or any number of times – for the performances alone. Lancaster and Kerr are of course riveting – both so tightly wound, screen chemistry smouldering – the nightclub scenes featuring the pair are meltingly passionate. Montgomery Clift is also quite extraordinary, almost emblematic, in the role of Robert E. Lee Pruitt, bred in the bone to military service, the army’s orphan child. Pruitt playing taps for Maggio still brings me to tears right along side him. But many of the supporting performances are no less strong. The pathos of Sinatra’s performance as Maggio is still affecting, and made all the more so by Ernest Borgnine’s blunt thuggery in the role of his nemesis. Donna Reed gives what might be the performance of her lifetime in the role of the nightclub bargirl-dancer Lorene – self-invented but entirely without pretense; resigned and wan yet still so alive, ready to seize opportunity – the performance is masterpiece of naturalism. From Here to Eternity is, of course, not really a war film, though it culminates – really the boiling-over point for a film that has already climaxed more than once – in the attack on Pearl Harbor; but it engages issues critical to warfare and war-making, namely military culture, training and administrative bureaucracy and the military’s cynical exploitation of the species’ endless capacity for cruelty to psychologically manipulate and intimidate its recruits as individuals as a complement to the collective military discipline enforced by service rules and the organization as a whole.

Looking at it a second time, the film (its cinematography seems, not only wonderfully pitched to the drama, but simply note-perfect from beginning to end) seems a brilliant compression of what is after all a sprawling novel. Its ending seems all the more poignant and unforgettable for being underplayed. The same resignation that swims under the surface of Donna Reed’s entire performance is woven through the entire scene – crushing even the possibility of a future nostalgia. They abandon their romance with their soldiers, the Hawaiian islands, leaving them all orphaned together – all but a seriously diminished capacity for hope.

What has stayed with me since that second viewing is the sense of the army (and perhaps all military services) as a kind of warrior-class state orphanage. It’s obvious that most military recruits are drawn from the lower socio-economic strata of any society. Lacking opportunities in their economically pillaged regions, and – absent qualities or achievements that might airlift them out – desperate for opportunity of any kind, or simply escape, they enlist and take their slender, frequently brutal chances. You would think that might be it – that this pool of recruits is thinned out by casualties and that only the survivors (and most of them finished with their service by such time) would be available to breed; with no predicting in what direction their offspring might be led. Certainly in terms of its stated codes and policies, the military generally does not encourage its recruits to breed – at the very least it seems indifferent to such behavior (and in certain respects, it is completely indifferent). There is a saying amongst U.S. Army soldiers that, “If the Army wanted you to have a family, they’d issue you one.” But, whether it has something to do with the mix of Reserve, National Guard and non-regular units who have augmented the active service rosters since the advent of the Iraq war (in other words, soldiers who would be likely to have some family beyond their spouses), or the relative age or youth of recent recruits, or some subtle combination of peer, social and institutional pressures, soldiers in recent years, both anecdotally and to some extent statistically, seem to be increasingly susceptible to starting families and having children long before completing their active duty service.

This may be partially a simply cyclical or purely statistical surge to be offset by a corresponding downward trend at some point. But the trend seems to extend to single soldiers as well, notwithstanding that such behavior and choices may be career-compromising. To be sure, many if not most such soldiers don’t start out that way; presumably many of them were married (though one might guess they may have conceived the child before marriage). It may simply be complementary to a broader social trend. People feel empowered and entitled (justly or not) to have children regardless of their marital status or other social support network or even their means – for no other reason than that they can. (You’d almost think it was nothing more than an athletic or recreational endeavour. It never fails to amaze me how often financial and social responsibilities are given only secondary consideration in these decisions and behaviors.)

But what do you do when the kid is already there. In one instance, an AP story that I believe made the front page of The New York Times, the Army in effect told its recruit (an Army cook who had already served at least one tour of duty) to leave her child in a foster care facility she would scarcely have had a chance to research or investigate. The soldier, desperate for guidance or serious assistance of any kind, missed her deployment flight from her Georgia base to Afghanistan, rather than effectively handing over her child to strangers – and in short order (no joke intended) was disciplined. The soldier, Alexis Hutchinson, had to hire a civilian lawyer to take her case to senior officers before the disciplinary measures were withdrawn. (Common sense would have dictated that this was a public relations disaster in the making – but apparently that’s something in short supply on many military bases. Come to think of it, I guess Fort Hood and the Bethesda Naval Hospital would fall somewhere in this category, too.) The back story on this was that the soldier’s mother had offered to take care of her grandchild while Hutchinson was on her tour of duty, but then decided at the last minute that the task was too overwhelming given her health. (Eventually, she did take charge of Hutchinson’s child – presumably with some outside assistance.) All more or less reasonable – but begging the question, what was the soldier doing with a child in the first place?

Rules and regulations to one side – I don’t really think the U.S. military really discourages child-bearing at all. First of all, human instinct and psychology itself work against this: when people’s lives are in constant jeopardy, they have a built-in and urgent incentive to reproduce irrespective of the consequences to their offspring. It’s all about the basic biological imperative to reproduce and spread the DNA. Secondly, the military sets in place circumstances and conditions for what to some extent is a captive audience (at least until they are college age) all but guaranteed to yield some percentage of future recruits (at least from the ones who aren’t thoroughly alienated). Casualty (or dead) parent? No problem – just that much more incentive for offspring to compensate for or avenge their parent’s sacrifice So – plus ça change – has anything really changed from the days of From Here to Eternity with its Army of orphans? Well, yes. Of course – but that change has as much to do with an entirely transformed geopolitical landscape as well as several generations worth of technological and cultural evolution. The individual soldiers being sent to the theatre of war, whether from backwater small towns or urban metropolises, have also undergone a transformation. But more of that – in the next movie, so to speak.

Bicoastal Gazing through the Winter Solstice

2009-12-20T18:10:00.000-08:00

18 - 20 December 2009

As the Copenhagen climate talks wrap, the next Artillery gets ready to go to press, and everyone who isn’t shopping is heading off to snowy slopes, family reunions or other holiday destinations, it’s back to Global Warming Endless Summer L.A. (even as snow blankets New York and Washington, D.C.) – though I notice a few clouds in the sky as I write this. (Missing New York a bit lately.)

Speaking of L.A. in N.Y., I didn’t blog it (because I was enmeshed in hard print deadlines), but Kim Light, who’s been taking a New York sabbatical the last few months (geez – I think everyone in L.A. needs one), jetting back into town for a show now and again, hosted a group show in her New York digs somewhere on East 57th (I think near Second Avenue), featuring, among others, Anthony Goicolea and Ryan McGinley, as well as Bruce LaBruce (whose work has become quite tedious in recent shows), Dean Sameshima, -- and can you tell which way this is going yet? If you’re guessing correctly, you’ll be surprised at the title of this curated, one-night only, show: Youthful Gazes. Obviously the title should have been something like “One-Night Stand in Boyland.” All male; all vaguely (or not so vaguely) homoerotic. What? There are no youthful WOMEN??? Or would they have had to be LESBIAN??? (No problem with that, frankly – there are plenty of great artists who happen to be lesbian; but – setting aside my own proclivities for fairness’ sake – aren’t there a few interesting hetero girls who might qualify as youthful?) Or is there something wrong with the way women GAZE at things?

That said – I would have gone to have a look, natch, if I had been in town; but obviously I wasn’t, so I asked a pal who was around the corner at some auction (Bonham’s, I think) to stroll a few blocks east over to Kim Light’s NYC Box and have a look. I warned Big Dem (he’s a big bicoastal Democratic Party fundraiser as well as a sometime collector) that the line-up looked a bit heavy on the homoerotics for his particular tastes, but, like any smart collector, he’s always game for good work. I wasn’t particularly surprised that he singled out Anthony Goicolea’s Sleeping – a photographed (C-print) sleeping male figure infinity-mirrored to the end of its dormitory via photoshop-multiplication, mounted on aluminum and laminated, as the stand-out of the show. He described the video by Dean Sameshima, Boys In My Bedroom, as “a homoerotic wish list of segments from popular television shows, “ which he found interesting – but not exactly his thrill. I thought the Ryan McGinley looked interesting from what I could scan of it (but then I sort of like Ryan McGinley). While he was there, he spoke with an art critic from a New York publication, who expressed the opinion that the work on view was “not up to the usual standard” of any of the exhibiting artists.

I looked over the press release and found it very perplexing. Just how exactly is “the gaze in contemporary art practice” or the “interconnection of the viewer and the subject” being reevaluated in these pieces? I mean, to some extent, you would think that would be implicit in making contemporary art of any kind. Or, more precisely – what’s new or particularly “youthful” about this reevaluation? I’m not going to critique the press release paragraph by paragraph; but – just one more example – much as I like the Goicolea piece (and his work to date generally), I don’t really see that his piece here brings “into question” “the role of the gaze” “as a gender specific term, which defines traditional power relations between men and women.” And – really – should it? Once upon a time, yeah, sure – it did have something to do with the “traditional” power relations between men and women. But in 2009?? Would you really call it “gender-specific” in 2009? Or even 1979?? I don’t think so. And anyway – if this is being called “into question” – why aren’t we seeing some re-definition of this power relationship or gender specificity? We’re not. We just happen to be looking at images of men. So? Uh, like this has never happened before? Gee, tell that to Caravaggio or say, Leonardo or Michelangelo, or Raphael – or I COULD GO ON. Okay, enough said.

I want to talk about some movies – but first I have to go out to look at one. So I’ll break off here for now. More to chat about – mostly politics; but it will wait. Winter solstice – though you’d never know it here. Beautiful all the same. It’s been a nice – fine art-free – week-end here in Los Angeles.

Empire of the Senses: the Sisterhood of Scent

2009-12-13T07:37:00.000-08:00

11 – 12 December 2009

Packaging is always the big draw for me. (I mean who on the PLANET could resist the original Chanel No. 5 bottle?) Anyway, so I’m already heading for the shoe department (what did you expect? Went momentarily INSANE about a pair of black knee-high suede boots someone was wearing – only they were her own – 4 year-old Yves Saint Laurent.), and I stop before an interesting array of bottles – with interesting names attached to them – all French, all very evocative. The woman standing behind the table is no less interesting – and she’s wearing a spectacular jewel that I can’t resist commenting on. And she’s no mere saleslady. This is DelRae and these are her fragrances – and boy do they have a story to tell. I am, of course, pretty resistant (and exhausted) again by now. But poetry – literary or olfactory – can be a pretty effective draw; and there is poetry here. Début would seem to be pretty straightforward; and perhaps it is; but DelRae immediately sizes me up and gives me a whiff of fragrances that are nothing if not complex – e.g., Bois de Paradis, Eau Illuminée. The names alone take us back to the Château – no escort needed (the rare exception allowed, I really don’t think most guys would understand) – and I don’t just mean any château. I mean Versailles – its bosquets, follies and fountains, the Apollo Basin and the magnificent wooded allées that flank the tapis vert, the Trianons with their own lovely gardens and bowers. Do you remember what I said about that certain ‘veil’ – I’m not even sure if I can call it a scent or aroma; maybe a kind of olfactory aura – that seems to descend over you when you walk into the Crillon in Paris? That aura of restrained luxury, power and elegance. That’s the finish on these scents – a sort of light, slightly powdery envoi off what are essentially complex floral/non-florals, floral-aldehydes. As you might guess, there’s quite a bit here for a Chanel girl – and certainly what dominates here is a kind of very dense, rich, but subtle olfactory harmonic. But it goes a bit beyond density – there’s an expansiveness here – not so much a second floral/non-floral note or after-scent, as a kind of aura that radiates from it. As I said, this world has changed, and DelRae is a part of this new landscape – and that’s it right there. If with some of the Lutens fragrances, you had the sense that the perfumer was trying to develop a narrative on your neck, here it’s as if DelRae and her collaborator, Yann Vasnier, were trying to paint a landscape; and to some extent they succeed.

Amoureuse – also a floral/non-floral – with moss and woody notes – didn’t really do it for me – but that might have something to do with my headset (could I possibly feel less romantic than I do right now? ‘amoureuse’ is forever off my horizon-line) plus maybe a bit of olfactory overload for one afternoon. But after my first samplings and the usual sketchy disclosures regarding my preferences and occasional digressions, DelRae has yet one more for me to sample – a scent she insists is all but custom-tailored to my scent-silhouette.

Well. I have to love the name – Mythique. Though what, I wonder, is my myth? I’d like to think of myself as Pallas Athena; but I think I’d fall well below the goddess line – maybe even something slightly pathetic – down there with Chloe or Eurydice. But perhaps there’s a middle ground (I want to say parterre) as in Diana, the Hunter. That might work – but we were talking about scent, weren’t we? As I said, these are fragrances as deep and expansive as landscape – and this one is very specific (speaking of châteaux): Chenonceaux. The gardens of Chenonceaux have a narrative of their own – having to do with the rivalry of Catherine de Medici – of the famous Florentine family, who brought art, servants (including cooks who would forever and decisively influence French cuisine), and serious political chops to the Valois monarchy – and Diane de Poitiers, muse from the get-go and inspiration to cougars everywhere – she was 38 when she took up with the already-married (to Catherine) 19 year-old Henri II – who transformed the gardens at Chenonceaux and the Château, building among other things the bridge and galleries across the river Cher (still called the Pont de Diane), perhaps the most distinctive element of the château. I’m going on about the Château, no? Well – let’s just say that I immediately got DelRae’s inspiration for this fragrance, which is pretty damned complex – peonies, bergamot, ivy, jasmine, sandalwood, patchouli, and iris, among other things – which already sounds more like a garden than a perfume. Diane laid out the garden as a series of diamonds and triangles in which she planted parterres of fruit trees, vegetables and masses of flowers – roses, lilllies, violets (one thing that’s not in the fragrance) and more. After Henri’s rather spectacular (according to legend -- you don't want to know) death, though, Diane was – big surprise – expelled and Catherine began her own program of building and planting on the estate (is that where the Italian elements in the fragrance come in? E.g.., what’s identified as Italian bergamot and Florentine Orris butter ‘Iris pallida’?) – so that what you get at Chenonceaux is this schizzy but nevertheless elegant combination of essentially two (really more) competing gardens – along with that Cher-(I want to say Cheri) spanning pont de Diane. Are you reeling yet?

The scent doesn’t necessarily make you reel (maybe that’s a good thing), though unlike the others, it does seem (again like so many contemporary fragrances) to have a pronounced secondary note or harmony – which is where the iris is most pronounced – perhaps inevitable given the scent's complexity. In her publicity, DelRae says that she was inspired simply by the painting in the Louvre, Diane Chasseresse, Diane de Poitiers as Diana the Huntress (and I think I know which one she’s talking about – possibly by Caron; definitely School of Fontainebleau – though there are more famous representations here; e.g., the Houdon sculpture – let’s just say I could take a hike or two with that chien); and that’s enough for me right there. No point in trying to save those foolish boys and their lances, right? You just have to take your dogs and hunting gear and go right back into the woods. Or something like that.

DelRae knew I would like the iris because I mentioned I sometimes used an iris-scented dusting powder from Santa Maria Novella on my shoulders during summer. (It’s fabulous. They also carry an oil or essence (or maybe it’s just an eau de toilette) that’s also pretty fabulous, but very intense.) She was right; and I have to say (for this reason alone?) I liked her immediately.

Is there a sisterhood of scent? I have to wonder – because what seems at first so superficial is nevertheless undeniably intimate and can come to almost define a relationship – a physical connection at its most basic level. I remember who first gave me a box of that Santa Maria Novella Iris dusting powder. It was one of my Italian (and closest) friends. She’s someone who really understands luxury and at the same time is very down to earth. I had seen it on her dressing table, and had probably smelled it on her before I even knew what it was. She somehow knew it was right for me – certainly at least seasonally – just as it was right for her. And I’m reminded a little of our bond, our connection, almost every time I brush it over my shoulders. We’re sisters under the skin and however completely wacked either of us gets (and we can both get pretty wacked), we know that on some level we’re both pretty much there for each other.

Scent – who knew? (But then you probably didn’t think I knew that much about French art, did you? Well, I did – as a college sophomore anyway.) I don’t think it’s just me, either. This landscape is changing – as you may have noticed from that piece on Maurice Roucel, the perfumer for Frederic Malle, in Thursday’s New York Times. People seem to be embracing the scope and complexity of contemporary fragrances in a way we haven’t for maybe a century. (I thought it was funny that the article made reference to ‘Proustian memory’; I’m not alone.) But you know that’s what this is all about: that hunger for memory and in particular a kind of sensual memory that envelops an entire world – whether of childhood, past or early sex or romance, or simply a particularly evocative place. New York in spring (or autumn); Paris – just about any time. Los Angeles – when the jacurandas are in bloom, or just about to lose their flowers. L.A.’s own l’heure violette (as distinguished from the Parisian ‘l’heure bleue’) or, gris-ged out under a smoggy mist, l’heure mauve. (At play-off time, I guess we could call it l’heure Laker bleue.) It’s Paris-gray here the last few days (I’m still on deadline); and I’m loving it.

Lost In Scent - 2

2009-12-12T13:18:00.000-08:00

10 – 12 December 2009

How, you wonder, did we end up here? – the realm of the senses, as I put it a couple posts ago – and more specifically down to taste and smell. Before I finish up on this note (a little scent-appropriate argot for you there), we might be reminded just how powerful the synaesthetic and mnemonic properties of taste and smell are. Proust’s A la recherche du Temps perdu seemingly evanesces out of the fog of childhood memories brought into vivid focus by the commingled taste and fragrance of madeleines and chamomile tea. Listening to music (not necessarily those Beethoven or Bartok quartets I was talking about a couple posts ago, but certainly music at that order of complexity and sophistication) can occasionally evoke this kind of sense memory. And is there any city in the world that doesn’t have some distinctive olfactory association, even a kind of scent (albeit a very complex one)? Asked by a fashion magazine what his favorite fragrance was, Andy Warhol once replied, “New York in Spring” – and anyone vaguely acquainted with New York and specifically Manhattan knew instantly what he was talking about. (But then Warhol was genius that way.) There is a smell to Paris – and Saint Laurent’s sentimental and rather pedestrian rose-based perfume doesn’t come close to capturing it – that rises up full-blown in certain neighborhoods of the city – the Opera district, the Madeleine and rue des Grands Augustins, the right and left banks of the Seine near the Ile de la Cité, Saint Germain des Près, the rue du Bac. Obviously it’s so much more complex, and varies from one neighborhood to another. Yes, roses provide one note; closer to the mark, I think, flowering trees and various herbs; also bread and bakeries; tea, coffee, red wine; printed paper and the scent of various fabrics – both fresh off the bolt and lived-in attire; bath toiletries (which I suppose would encompass scent); human (and dog?) hair; the Seine and some of its pollutants. The smells of certain places make their own more specific impressions (or not). I don’t remember much about the Ritz, or even the bar there; but walking into the Crillon I was not exactly hit, or even enveloped, so much as veiled with a scent that evoked sheer august splendor. The only place for me that comes close to evoking that quiet, restrained, Louis-le-Grand grandeur of 18th century classicisme are the gardens of Versailles. Of course, there are a lot of other places in Paris that evoke a certain pomp and luxury in their scents. And I’m wondering if there’s a bit of Chanel No. 5 in that mix? (Hence my loyalty??) Probably; maybe a bit of Joy there, too; and some Guerlain fragrances. (L’Heure Bleue is said to be very city-inspired – and yes, you get that in the scent.)

A year or so ago, an artist mapped out New York by its various commingled scents and smells – an amazing kind of conceptual art piece. Jason Logan (a New York illustrator and author – who may be the artist I’m thinking of) wrote a piece in the Times summing up some of these neighborhood smells in brief olfactory word-collages. Under “Midtown,” amid some of the more predictable scents in the mix – e.g., garbage, urine, pretzels, etc.) were a few others that sort of let the reader know he really got it: e.g., “white wine sautéing ,” “salty Armani leather,” and a “touch of vomit.” Oh yeah, let me think – Lexington and 63rd, right?

So here I am at Barneys stopped for a moment at the Serge Lutens counter – a brand I’m vaguely aware of but not really familiar with – and I guess he’s evolving the packaging, the lines of the bottles and so forth. The titles of some of the scents are intriguing (again, speaking of those polarities) – some in a very basic, elemental way, some much more complex. Miel de Bois sounds wonderfully simple and fresh (though you wonder exactly what wood (as opposed to clover? or orange blossom?) honey would taste like). Then, speaking of les bois, there is (what the very charming sales girl describes as a Lutens classic) Féminité du Bois – which seems to be Lutens’ stab at a very complex harmonic – absolutely nothing simple about it. What it’s supposed to evoke, I’m not sure – a girl strolling or horseback-riding through the woods? (Dirt-biking would not be quite it.) Girls and trees? Girls in trees? Wood nymphs? This is one of those fragrances that combine florals, spices, slightly oriental notes for a completely eccentric registration. I mean that literally – it’s as if it were a fragrance that was trying to move past an olfactory harmonic into a kind of narrative. There’s a distinct and very edgy top note that’s both honey sweet and distinctly oriental, almost metallic, that then carries forward into the kind of floral/herbal mix that grounds it somewhat (I guess with your own skin chemistry). Then there are the kinds of fragrances that seem to really be striving for some kind of scent narrative on your skin. What exactly is Five O’Clock Au Gigembre about? (That’s the name – French and English – go figure.) I mean, what are we talking about here? Thai dumplings after (or maybe before?) sex? It is kind of sexy – at first – a less metallically edgy top note – very sweet, distinctly floral at first, then settling into its spice notes, the ginger (if that’s what it is) muted , slightly altered (but not by garlic, I assure you). And you know, it’s going to smell a little different two hours from now. This is what we seem to be getting in the world of scent. A two-hour movie – myth, fairy tale – with food, sex, atmospherics, incident – unfolding on your wrist or your neck. (Is that why they seem to be getting so expensive? Because in theory you’re getting at least two distinct scents in every bottle?)

Lutens has an interesting story – as designer, art director and perfumer – but I’m not going to go into it here. The scents were originally produced under the auspices of Shiseido, but are now under Lutens’ sole control. The more recent Lutens fragrances, however, are essentially the work of his current perfumer, Christopher Sheldrake. Looking at the Lutens publicity, you’re confronted with a library of scents, of variable olfactory (and seemingly narrative) complexity; and suddenly I’m reminded of – this is going to sound sooooo sophomoric – the fragrance ‘organ’ of Des Esseintes in À Rebours (or Against the Grain, in its English translation), the novel by J.K. Huysmans that more or less distills the essence of late Romantic Decadence in French literature. When you’re a college (well) sophomore, besotted in literature, art, philosophy (and, uh, drugs), it’s reassuring to think that people were living in their heads as much as you are 100 and more years earlier.

So – I continue strolling through the fragrance counters. The Chanel lady offers me a sample – and Chanel girl that I am, how can I refuse? – the new (I think) Eau Premiere – which speaking of veils of scent, more or less falls, I think, into this category. I mean, obviously they’re constantly adding to the variations and dilutions of the fragrance to sell more product; but sometimes it does seem a bit much. Closest analogy? The eau de Cologne or perhaps toilette, as mixed and/or decayed through the admixture of various cosmetic components that end up on the skin at one point or another. The salesgirl says something about a ‘powdery’ finish – and I agree with her; but wonder why you can’t just stick with the cologne and dusting powder after your bath or shower. (The cologne does have a slightly different ‘fade’.) Well. Something I suppose you could keep in a desk drawer for a quick daytime freshening. (Rrrrrriight – this from someone who rarely wears fragrance. Okay.) I have to go again – and we’re not quite there yet. Just one more stop – I promise. This is the pay-off, I’m telling you.

Lost In Scent

2009-12-11T19:16:00.000-08:00

7 – 10 December 2009

All right. The subject was Marilyn Minter – just bear that in mind, please, and remember that the first encounter under discussion here was with painting and photography at the Regen Projects second space. Okay? – because I know at least a few people – specifically Artillery readers (and goddess knows EVERYBODY should be reading Artillery regularly by now) – reading this are going to think – ‘Oh wait – you mean it’s okay for Marilyn Minter to do this sort of thing, but not Kenny Scharf?

First of all – bear in mind those Scharfs were paintings in a gallery and the discussion focused on the specific qualities of those paintings relative to other, generally speaking, commercial phenomena – including stuff that would fall into the context we now find ourselves – commercial, retail, mass-merchandised, utility/luxury/specialty goods – all of which are fine (and that applies to Scharf’s ventures out in this part of the world, too).

That said, the nexus here is a bit more narrow, more focused – and really not much of a stretch – certainly for MAC, if not Minter; and considering those colors in her paintings and photographs – of both cosmetic (and perhaps cosmetically enhanced) surfaces and flesh, as well as other physical phenomena – and the way they practically explode on the panel surfaces – variously pooling, eddying, sinking into and effervescing off the picture plane in varying densities and saturations – perhaps it’s not THAT surprising or unexpected that Minter might agree to collaborate on what after all are colors intended to be applied to the human face.

Okay – can we forget about it now? – because, as I said, MAC is no longer carried at the Barneys New York Beverly Hills store. But my disappointment faded rapidly amid the aggressive pre-holiday cheer – I guess that translates into salesmanship. Visiting make-up artists and stylists seemed to be everywhere and at least half the counters were busy with customers submitting themselves to full make-overs. Fragrance salespeople seemed particularly eager to show customers the new fragrances, holding out sleek new flacons and atomizers, waving engraved cards sprayed with fragrance – a retail phenomenon to which I’m ordinarily very resistant. (I alternate between two fragrances (when I wear fragrance at all) – the original blue-and-gold 4711 Cologne and Chanel No. 5 (the eau de toilette more often than the perfume) and rarely experiment with much else.) What can I say? It had been a long time since I was last at a make-up counter, much less a Barneys make-up counter. My resistance was slackened and – well, I can be very susceptible to the right pitch. And – let me put it to you this way – this was a pitch I hadn’t heard before. Frankly, this was a kind of fragrance I hadn’t experienced before – mostly because, whether awol (and Artillery) readers realize it or not, the world of perfume and fragrance has changed over the last few years. You’d have to be hiding down a black hole somewhere not to be aware of the extent to which the world of commercial and designer fragrance has exploded over the last 20 years or so. Sometimes it seems as if you can’t open a fashion or style magazine or even The New York Times Style pages without seeing some new fragrance – frequently not much less ephemeral than the celebrity whose face might be advertising it. Once upon a time, most any fragrance (obviously with a few exceptions) would have been composed predominantly of certain floral, non-floral (or musk, mineral, amber), spice, fruit or citrus essences with a small number or even a single essence dominating the scent. (E.g., the dominant note of Yves Saint Laurent’s Paris is rose.) However complex the scent (and obviously something like Chanel No. 5 is pretty complex), it presented a kind of single dominant olfactory harmonic. But as every designer and finally seemingly every celebrity began get into the scent racket, this inevitably had to change. The world of fragrance and perfume was suddenly wide open. In recent years, people have been drawn in any number of directions, by any number of impulses, where scent is concerned. Some of us (that would include myself) tend to be drawn back to basics (I love some of the straight floral and fruit essences you find at places like Santa Maria Novella, for example). And others are looking for something altogether different.

Just how different I was about to find out. But you’re going to have to wait just a bit more to hear exactly what I found, because once again, I’m off to another event; and if I don’t post this now (as I’ve been trying to over the last three days), I don’t think it’s ever going to go up. So excuse this lengthy preamble (I’m on deadline anyway) – and I’ll try to get back to this before the day is out.

Stillness After Eruption: beauty recognized

2009-12-08T04:46:00.000-08:00

6 – 7 December 2009

I did NOT drive straight to Barneys New York from the Marilyn Minter show at Regen Projects. I actually strolled down Santa Monica Boulevard to Robertson and the Margo Leavin Gallery to have a look at the Roy Dowells. They were paired (beautifully) with some absolutely fantastic new canvases (and panels) in pigment and collage by Brenna Youngblood. (There was also a trio of John Millers on one wall that for some reason (not simply the Op aspect) made me think of Bridget Riley (I keep thinking she’s done something almost identical to this sort of textural stress pattern in short oblique and vertical lines; though maybe hers were wavier). It’s interesting and occasionally refreshing to look at work by artists like Dowell who are still engaged with very basic, fundamental issues – the vocabulary and syntax – of empirical observation, reconstruction, deconstruction, decoding and re-synthesis – a kind of traditional (at least since the second half of the 20th century – a kind of post-Cubist analytic approach) way of working, painting – that is nevertheless clearly engaged with the world here and now. Working in a relatively small, self-contained format (about 16x12 sq.in., acrylic with collage), Dowell selectively ‘re-images’ a world or worlds and or diagrams over it, in a vaguely New Image way, variously paring away or making openings into an always ambiguous ‘external’ where illusionistic depth is always suppressed and the symbolic or semiotic elements, the ‘world’s’ flotsam are pushed to the rigorously ordered (or perhaps not-so) surface. It’s hard not to sound vague without going into specifics about one piece or another; but I really don’t have the time for that and in any case should probably go back for a second look. So many qualities that seem to allude to work both past and present (e.g., classic Cubism; a kind of poetic Minimalism, and more contemporary, graphic, even conceptual work).

Against this sort of backdrop it becomes all the more exciting to look at work by someone like Youngblood, who is similarly engaged with that external ‘world’ – its photography and illustration – its re-configuration and framing (literally – she plays with the frame and has absolutely no problem violating it) – but in a much more immersive, consuming way; unhesitant to radically re-order, almost obliterate it, only to unearth something very new yet true to the empirical experience. You sense (in the titles, too) this push towards a kind of narrative that has been thoroughly hashed out and all but thrown out, exploded – pushed into a crucible that leaves us with its essence, zooms in on the most crucial elements. It can be both very subtle and slightly crude. Youngblood is at her best when she pushes the envelope – violates the frame in every sense. It doesn’t always work, but sometimes it’s breathtaking. Again, I know I’m being infuriatingly vague – but I can only recommend you go have a look.

So ANYWAY – (panting a bit here – are we out of breath yet?) – I hooked up with my pal, Angel Chen, and her dog Romeo for a second look at the Marilyn Minters – and boy did I need it. Do you remember those fragmented, quasi-portraits in the back gallery? Well, I didn’t either – that’s how fast I went through it the first time – insane. And who did you think the subject (as almost always, based on a photographed subject) was? Maybe you thought it was someone like, oh say, Patricia Arquette. (There was one – that was a photograph, a large C-print – 3-4 portrait with the hand drawn up to the face – that looked more than a little like Isabelle Huppert, albeit an Huppert of at least a decade ago.) Uh-uh – take a look at the checklist. That face (in one of the paintings) pushed to the shower head isn’t called “Wettest Pam” for nothing. That’s Pamela Anderson! And she’s, uh, beautiful. I don’t mean Pamela Anderson pumped-breast sex-queen gorgeous. I mean, just – quite beautiful. And probably somewhat younger – yeah maybe a decade – looking. (Memo to Pam: You can take it down a level, doll. And you still have that rack. So.)

Minter is wonderfully self-exposing about her methodology and techniques. About half the works on view are straight C-print photographs – already rich in tonality and incident – really astonishing. The paintings – huge, expansive (108x180 sq.in.) – simply take it to the next (and the next and the next) level: the explosions and eruptions – of colored, flavored carbonated beverage, of caviar eggs (or looks like it anyway), colored sugar or granules (or, as in the Pam Anderson panels, simply water or spray), take on a painted life of their own, a heightened aura. (These large panels are mostly fragmented faces – noses and lips, tongues, barely-there eyes, mouths open to catch the bits of food and drink tossed at them.) Areas of pale, vari-colored or deeply pigmented flesh elide into quasi-abstract passages that yet meld with the depicted elements and the picture as a whole. (Richter, among others, seems influential here. But then his influence is ubiquitous.) They’re spectacular. But then we sort of knew they would be, right? What’s new and interesting here, is that smaller, just slightly more focused (or simply portrait-straightforward), quieter image: the Pam Anderson portraits. They are extraordinary. And Anderson is simply beautiful.

Okay – so after Angel has taken a flock of photographs of Romeo posed in the middle of the gallery in front of a couple of these amazing paintings, we regroup in the carpark to talk clothes and make-up (I guess in my case that means face-lift) – no seriously, make-up. It turns out Minter has minted (sorry) a new line of colors for MAC. Why are we not surprised? But still! Girlfriend! So – I’m heading over to Barneys straightaway to have a look (yeah, I know – NOW – I should have just gone over to Robertson – and I was right THERE – but, okay, I didn’t. So shoot me in the leg. Besides, I had to have a look at those Dowells and Youngbloods. So anyway, after a few detours, I head over to Barneys. And – well you probably know – no MAC counter (there hasn’t been one there for a few years). So…. but you know – I’m just going to leave it there for a minute. Because I have to get back to my research for my Artillery deadline. (I’m working on it, Tulsa – honestly.) I mean I really do. And then…. (ohhhh you have no idea)…. Back soon, I hope.

Enduring Enigmas

2009-12-06T21:15:00.000-08:00

5 – 6 December 2009

Before I descend utterly into the realm of the senses – specifically, those of taste and smell, I have to say that I’m still under the spell of something that went far beyond the olfactory and well into the realm of the idea pure (and never exactly simple), or simply figure, beguiling and ultimately enigmatic, all the while drawing us whole and sensually into its sonic architecture, ‘narrative’, tapestry – long before Duchamp served up his own ‘anti-olfactory’ and, against all protests to the contrary, stubbornly retinal, enigmatic art.

Listening to the Beethoven string quartets once, twice – and we can go on from there – always reminds us that we must listen to many of them again – though when exactly we can never say, and sometimes that day threatens to never return. It’s like re-reading (or simply finishing for some of us) Proust, Shakespeare, Mann, Joyce, etc. We never seem to get around to it. Fortunately, they appear from time to time on the radio, pulled out from stacks of CDs, etc.; though moving, through one’s everyday tasks or agendas, our attention may be drawn away – which is why there’s nothing quite like hearing them in one focused sitting, or sometimes better still, in live performance. Last night, it was the Opus 131 C-sharp minor quartet – that slightly rambling (though intense) essay (I want to say ‘quasi-fantasia’ – as with that other famous C# minor work) through several loosely related, sometimes simple but infinitely subtle themes, variations and moods – as performed by the Takács Quartet. I’ve had Handel on my brain a bit lately, as I’ve noted here; but listening to something of this scope, intensity and invention reminds us that the leap from Handel (or Bach) to Beethoven (a relatively brief time span) is like that from Newton to Einstein. Also, how, in that wildly free-form classicism that is his alone – how utterly modern Beethoven remains here and now in the post-serial/atonal/polytonal landscape of the 21st century; a fact brought home by the Quartet’s dazzling performance of Bartok’s polytonal/atonal (frequently near-atonal in its complex chromatic harmonies) String Quartet No. 4. The Takács Quartet has a special affinity for Bartok – especially his predilection for the pizzicato (an extremely percussive pizzicato, I might add) – and the quartet’s incidents and inversions, call-and-response thematic schemes and rhythms and and chromatic symmetries were aired with intensity and dazzling clarity.

Fun, huh? (The program – speaking of that ‘Newton-Einstein leap’ – began with Haydn (Op.71, No.1 quartet in B-flat major.) As readers of this blog are probably aware, this recital was part of an on-going series hosted by the ACE Gallery – at their Beverly Hills gallery – in its main, central gallery – an excellent, intimate, if acoustically imperfect space for this kind of music. The art on the walls right now is John Millei’s – about which I won’t say anything at the moment if for no other reason than the show hasn’t actually opened (at least I don’t think it has). It’s impressive; but – well you tell me – Duchamp (or Rembrandt or Raphael, etc.) would have a hard time standing up to the Beethoven Opus 131.

I went there straight (or almost) from Barneys – no shit – where I’d gone to look for a special edition of colors for MAC produced by…. Now that I’ve gone on, still under the spell of late Beethoven (and a beautiful gray afternoon in Los Angeles), I’m going to save this for later… oh yeah, I know what you’re thinking – at least those of you who read Artillery. “Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot”? as they say in military parlance (has everyone read the front page piece of the Sunday New York Times?). All right. Well, I’ll tell you. Later – it’s not as simple as you think (it really isn’t). And so I like to look at shoes (believe me it’s more looking than buying) and furry hats – so what? Okay, gotta, uh, finish reading the papers.

The Case Against Cute

2009-12-05T14:32:00.000-08:00

29 November – 5 December 2009 [preview draft]

I’m feeling distracted over the last day or so – even more so than usual (I must say the kick-off to the national holidays of greed and gluttony really did me in) – blowing past a couple deadlines, dropping a couple of books in favor of the Sunday Times and some fashion magazines, ignoring the toxic disaster of my apartment and skipping off into the autumn afternoon. And ya know what? – I’m just going to go with it. So I’ll talk about the beautiful mini-retrospective of Dora de Larios’s ceramic sculpture I just saw at the Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum another time. And of course, after shlepping off to Regen II to have a second look (my first was about 3 minutes long) at the Marilyn Minter show, I found the gallery shuttered for the holiday week-end – so that has to wait anyway. So – here’s my problem….

Except it’s not even really a problem. Cute. C-U-T-E. I live in L.A. – a city that might have been founded on cute – except it wasn’t; Anaheim, an hour or two south of here – home of Disneyland, at whose doorstep much of the blame, I think, can be placed, is that city. James Wolcott (I think it was James Wolcott – who, by the way, I think is pretty cute) already wrote something about this in his Vanity Fair column a month or so ago, so I’m going to avoid re-treading that turf. I’m a sucker for Nara and Murakami (though it’s the stuff beyond the kaikai-kiki thing that pull me back into it) and all sorts of Japanese – for that matter Eurasian – novelties; have acquired libraries of children’s books for my nephews, nieces and kids of friends (and saved a few for myself); am utterly a child of Oz and Neverland (the Barrie one, not the Jackson – though I’ll always love some of Michael’s music); love babies and almost all children under 10 and pretty much all quadruped animals. And greater than quadruped (I LOVE spiders). And no – there is absolutely NO truth to the rumor that I was the model for Eloise. I’m Madeline.

I’m still a child. But I’m not exactly innocent – if children ever are entirely. And like any other child, I’m voracious, insatiable. The cute and cozy is all well and good – but tell me MORE. And more and more and more. I have to see more, visit the dark places, look at what’s on the other side(s)… and then things change; stuff happens. ‘Cute’ suddenly seems stillborn, frozen in a moment for which we can’t even summon up a nostalgia – because there wasn’t enough there in the first place. Do you remember your first trip to Disneyland? Or (assuming you might live in some proximity to one of the parks) your second? (Was there a third?) I think I remember each of my three visits to the original Anaheim park – the first (naturally) and third being the most memorable. The park has changed significantly over the years; but I have never had any desire to return to it. There was nothing regrettable about the experience. I wouldn’t say there were any particular thrills – even the faster, more rollicking rides seemed relatively tame; but the park’s amusements were fun and entertaining – variously novel, charming, clever, creative, sensational, mystifying and, well, amusing. In retrospect, some of the hokiest, most dated amusements (e.g., from “Frontierland” and “Futureland”) bring the most delight – experiences and specimens pulled from a time capsule that recall not only the shows or amusement rides themselves, but the way we saw the world then – framed within a moment of time, now seen with historic perspective, from a child’s (not necessarily unthoughtful and sometimes surprisingly sophisticated) viewpoint.

But that’s half the point – or maybe the whole point. Once outside the park gates and past its initial charms, what the child inevitably realized (sooner rather than later) was how much was left out of the experience, how diluted (to say nothing of deluded) it all felt in retrospect, how much richer, more enthralling it might have been, rather than the sort of ice-cream-parlor-with-sideshows stroll it turned out to be. And then on the other side, when you recall that some of the hokiest things turn out to be the most memorable, you recognize what was most authentic, committed, among the entertainments – where the Disney Company gave itself over most completely and committedly to its slightly looney “Imagineers” vision.

Even Walt Disney and Co. weren’t always just about the ‘cute’. The earliest incarnations of Mickey Mouse have a much wider (and darker) expressive and affective range. Even in some of Disney’s consistently saccharine animated vehicles, the most interesting characters are frequently the villains or – proto-feminist touch here – villainesses: the Wicked Queen of Snow White, Maleficent of Sleeping Beauty, Cruella de Vil. (A girl could practically make role models out of these.)

Why did it have to stop there? Why should it ever stop there? What the child – selfish, greedy, curious (and yes, by degrees, innocent, even cute) – wants is nothing less than the world, or at least some world – drawn from the physical world, or invented whole-cloth out of the imagination. These are worlds of conflict and contention, competing social order and disorder, searching, striving, evolving ethics and nascent corruption, reason and chaos, logic and absurdity, wit and arabesque, delight and enchantment, magic and mortality. Corruption, chaos, absurdity, and finally death – yes, welcome to kiddieland. It’s a place I’m always happy to re-visit – through the mythos of certain fairy tales, the absurd, surreal Wonderland of Alice, James Barrie’s Neverland, Narnia, the mad, mad, mad, mad world(s) of Oz. (And sure – I like Paris and the Plaza Hotel, too.)

I’m not sure what triggered this particular blow-out on the subject: something uncharacteristically (and sooooo inauthentically, untruthfully) cheaply sentimental trod out by one of my siblings (made even more dishonest by his protest); the unrelenting and oppressive parade of ‘stupid pet tricks’ in one form or another that are a constant of the background chatter in the office where I work – from the ‘cute’ to the merely witless; the latest e-mail ‘cute’ cat video from a relatively intellectual pal who nevertheless gives me grief for my political vigilance (and, yes, occasionally the vitriol that ensues); the sort of oppressively cheerful, American greeting card viewpoint of far too many people (especially in this economy – what? it takes another Depression to bring them back down to earth?); or maybe the flood of good (and fairly superficial) reviews for a film (gee, that’s a shock) that, however charming (in the most superficial way), however clever (by very small and mostly technical degrees), whatever the merits of the story on which it was based, was really not much of a film.

The film I’m referring to is The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s animated film based on the story by Roald Dahl – several of whose stories have been successfully translated to the screen (e.g., Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and its earlier musical incarnation, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory; James and the Giant Peach; The Witches; and more). Though not far from the story (which is frankly not one of my favorites from Dahl), the film seems to alter its sly spirit, becoming slightly overbearing where the story remains quite light, yet if anything minimizing the real danger to Fox and his family. (There is never any doubt that Fox will somehow prevail, no matter what the dangers, how the odds are stacked against him, or how grimly determined and vigilant his enemies. (Perhaps a problem with the story: Fox’s enemies are never particularly clever, merely dogged and in fact quite stupid. Fox is by far the most clever of any of the characters – and knows it.) Wes Anderson knows he’s clever, too – and dogged – you’d have to be to pull off such a feat of animation; and that’s not the worst of it. It’s as if what he really wanted was to graft The Royal Tenenbaums onto the Dahl story, while re-making Fox into his avatar – really a kind of narcissistic homage – right down to his half-size-too-small bespoke corduroy suit. And voicing the characters? Forget about the predictable Bill Murray or Owen Wilson – Fox and his wife must be voiced by George Clooney and Meryl Streep (a pity the script should be so pallid with talent like that).

It was actually self-professed comedy-hater Opera Buddy who was initially eager to see the film. Why not? I thought, fan of Charlie, Willy Wonka, et al. that I am. For a screening audience, I thought the reaction was pretty enthusiastic. People seemed to laugh (a little too heartily) at all the jokes in all the “right” places, be touched by the picture of Fox and his family, and cheer them on. I could tell Opera Buddy was trying to muster some appreciation for the film – certainly it coaxed a few yuks, a smile or two out of us. But by the movie’s end, we were ready to dash for the exit, eager to be as far away from it as possible; and we each turned to the other to ask the question we always ask in situations like this: “Whose idea was it to see this???”

What was it the audience found so laugh-out-loud funny, so worthy of engagement with these characters (gee and I thought I was the sucker for furry friends both real and manufactured), so worthy of cheering? Forgive me, but I have to be just a bit suspicious of that kind of enthusiasm – I mean that as well in the 17th century Restoration sense, as in the sway of an almost religious fervor, rapture, a kind of blind faith; in other words, setting aside critical judgment. I can hear the other side of this argument: ‘well, for chrissakes it’s just a children’s animated film, right?’ Yes, but (speaking only for myself) the children’s stories, plays, films and animated cartoons that sustain my engagement take us to something and through something, ultimately showing us something in a way we may not have seen it before. (The story, cartoon, whatever doesn’t necessarily have to be that serious or sustained: I can think of many Warner Bros. cartoons that, in a few minutes duration, are completely satisfying. To say nothing of classic fairy tales.) As far as the end-point here, I can’t blame that entirely on Anderson – I think that’s straight from Dahl’s story. But it’s taken for granted that an original film will take some liberties with the underlying text – maybe a great many. And perhaps that’s the ultimate frustration here – the constraints we feel, not simply from the painstaking animation of the three-dimensional characters, but parallel to this, the scope of the characters’ actions and behavior: you want them to take more liberties.

This is what nags at me as I smile through the ‘cute.’ Is there a ‘flip-side’ to ‘cute’ – both the response or impression and the overall aesthetic? And why does that ‘flip-side’ seem to partake of something akin to fear and repression? Why does ‘cute’ ultimately seem like an obstacle or ditch along the steeple-chase to something more fully realized; something much more expansive or phantasmagorical? Over the last 30 or so years since the political right wing – here and elsewhere – largely hijacked the political dialogue and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the cultural dialogue (they will NEVER be able to constrain it entirely) – have people become more fearful of liberty?

Making Honey While the World Burns

2009-11-28T12:49:00.000-08:00

28 November 2009

After the immense disappointment of NOT being seated for the Los Angeles Opera production of Handel’s Tamerlano with Placido Domingo – ever seeking new operatic challenges – taking the role of the defeated Turkish sultan Bajazet, and the reportedly (at least from the buzz we’ve heard to date) amazing counter-tenor Bejun Mehta (as well as the very talented soprano Sarah Coburn as Asteria), Opera Buddy and I trekked out to console ourselves over sweet potato fries, spinach, tapas and a velvety Malbec at Kate Mantillini’s – accompanied by college football highlights on ESPN (one of our new favorite things) – then walked across the street to the Laemmle Music Hall to see Frederick Wiseman’s documentary film on the Paris Opera Ballet, La Danse – which is also a valentine to the lush monument to French opera, dance, spectacle and sheer grandeur that is the Palais Garnier itself. Wiseman takes us literally from its deepest foundations where carp and minnows swim in shallow canals, to the cupola with its lyre-screened windows that light the company’s rehearsal studios and audition rooms. La Danse is above all a portrait of the company – a kaleidoscope of its many seemingly randomly arrayed facets which, taken as a whole, assume an organic unity – the cultural institution as a living organism, and its symbiotic habitation in the Palais Garnier. I never knew that there was a fully operational apiary atop the Palais – a fascinating detail – but maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. Wiseman shows us the Palais as an intense hive of activity – choreographers (including Mats Ek and Wayne McGregor) constructing their ballets by all means necessary, intently shaping, pacing, and articulating their supremely capable principals; soloists rehearsing difficult step sequences, dramatic pantomime; dance masters rigorously, passionately training their budding stars and whipping their corps de ballet into shape – as well as the many workshops – art, costumes, hair and make-up – that support the theatrical production; and the kitchens that fuel this army. The viewer could almost be forgiven for assuming that Brigitte Lefèvre, the company’s formidable Director and Administrator, is the queen of this hive – her receptive but willful and sure-footed guiding spirit seems omnipresent – but the real queen here is always, as the title plainly states, the dance, the finished work, as well as the institution itself. Opera Buddy ducked out early – the unrelenting French (which of course I can’t get enough of) was getting to her; and it has to be said, in spite of the drama and polish of some of the finished production scenes (including a graphically bloody Medea), the last 45 minutes of the film flag somewhat. Still, I found it almost inexhaustibly absorbing and – jettisoning half that last 45 minutes – would have gladly sat down for a second helping. L.A. may not be the cultural desert it was 30 years ago; but we still starve for dance in this town; and, even the slender smorgasbord of Ek, McGregor, Nureyev, Balanchine and Pina Bausch on view in Wiseman’s film can be richly satisfying after a long fast.

For a fan of Handel opera (and, really, all Baroque opera) like me, it really hurts to miss something like the L.A. Opera Tamerlano. I take some consolation in the fact that the production (by Chas Rader-Shieber, with art direction by David Zinn) sounds absolutely dreadful – blackshirts, black suits, and a proto-Nazi scheme (with the exception of Bazajet and Asteria, who are inexplicably done up in period costume) against a stark staging. What could be more clichéd, more tedious? Ugh. Obviously, the singing is all that redeems it.

As usual, I’m going on – this isn’t even what I sat down to blog about – or not the only thing anyway – and now I have to jump. [While I've been writing this, I’ve been listening to the NPR news – the week-end program hosted by – speaking of tedious – Scott Simon; and wanted to throw in a few comments on that endless blather while he and a couple of interview subjects were chattering on – not unrelated to a couple of my other items; but it will have to wait. (Thank goddess for Daniel Shorr.)] It’s a bit off-topic, anyway, and – just to forewarn the itinerant blog-reader – political. Well. Hey – and while everyone’s going nuts over the State dinner gate-crashers at this past week, let’s just be happy that the Obamas have restored a bit of luster to the after-hours White House. (How glamourous Michelle looked – that’s something I think everyone, regardless of partisanship, can agree on.)

Michael Govan's Baby and other Thanksgiving Follies

2009-11-26T12:28:00.000-08:00

24- 26 November 2009

Okay – I really didn’t think it was going to be quite this long – but I’ve been having problems both trivial (relatively) and serious – and all of them disabling – with both my desktop AND my laptop; and things have been just crazy enough in my office to sideline whatever impulse I might have had to post from there. (It’s not always like that – but sometimes more so than others – like, uh, recently.)

Anyway, much as I would like to, I’m not even going to begin to retrace my steps (which are many) and just jump in with what’s in my scope at the moment, what’s on the table right in front of me, and generally what’s on my mind.

What’s in front of me right now is an item from Bloomberg by way of the Los Angeles Times’ Culture Monster blog regarding the status of that Jeff Koons boondoggle folly, “Train” – the full-scale 70-foot, mechanically functional 1943-vintage Baldwin 2900-series steam locomotive intended to be hoisted by an enormous crane and suspended above Wilshire Boulevard (or at least over the sidewalk, threatening only pedestrians foolish enough to attempt entering the museum through its main entryway). The status is, in a word, stalled; and maybe, to judge from the slightly resigned, pessimistic tone of the posting, a bit stale. Well, no kidding. Its sheer grandiosity made it stale before LACMA’s Wallis Annenberg Director, Michael Govan, managed to put into words just how stale it was – that is to say, stillborn – though Govan apparently doesn’t know this yet. Sometimes I get the impression that Govan is playing a museum director version of the Ira Levin/Roman Polanski character, Rosemary – as in Rosemary’s Baby – running here, flitting there, picking at this or that, all over town, unaware that the vision he’s gestating is something of an art world Antichrist – a monument to post-industrial and post-financial melt-down that may in fact be its singular (and single) artistic merit. Oh sure – go ahead and bankrupt the museum, squander millions that might actually be committed to real art with serious street-cred in and out of the critical dialogue, on and off the auction block – all for a $35 million folly (you read that right – yeah, I know the published estimates are in the $25 million neighborhood; but if you believe that, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you; oh and did anyone say anything yet about MAINTENANCE?)

As everyone knows, the same Wallis Annenberg who subsidizes Govan’s paycheck funded the feasibility studies on this project, but over the last year or so has reportedly lost much of her interest in it (a tribute to Govan’s persuasive skills that she mustered any interest in it in the first place) and wisely shifted her focus towards acquisitions of actual art and other LACMA programs. (By the way, if this posting should ever find its way to Ms. Annenberg’s transom, I am completely open to re-naming it Wallis Annenberg awol [On the other hand, I’ll have to check with my editor to see if she’d be willing to re-name my position Wallis Annenberg Staff Writer of Artillery Magazine.] I can assure her Foundation straight off that it would be a MUCH smaller investment than Govan’s subsidy. Frankly, the sooner the better – for starters, I could use some help getting to Miami Beach next week – no kidding.)

Setting aside the hazards – really an engineering nightmare, especially in a seismically active zone – of erecting such a thing in proximity to one of the most heavily trafficked blocks in Los Angeles – the thing at best reads as a monument to decline – and, in a way, a slap at the museum itself (which might not be entirely a bad thing); and I’m not even sure how apt such a notion really is – right now or 30 years from now or 130 years from now. (If Warren Buffett is suddenly bull-ish on trains and rail transportation – and we better be bull-ish on some alternative to the hopeless carbon monster our mass transportation is for the most part in this country – perhaps the train is not as much of an Industrial Age relic as the Koons project seems to imply.) Speaking specifically of follies – I mean in the classic sense – Govan is actually not stupid, and you have to wonder why he can’t seem to shake himself out of his monument-building lock-step and take the radical step of thinking small – or at least within the museum’s means, which so far, he’s pushed WAY beyond. I mean – why not an actual folly – something small enough to disappear in the rush of Wilshire Boulevard traffic – yet exquisite enough to conjure a rapture within the right perspective. He should make a research tour of some English stately homes and German shlosses to see how it’s done.

Of course, folly or whatever, then he has to find the right artist for the project; and I have to say I can't think of such an artist off the top of my head. But I'm pretty sure it's not Jeff Koons or Chris Burden. There’s more to say about all this – and a few other things – but enough for now.

Happy Thanksgiving, possums -- as Dame Edna would say.

Zombie of the Opera

2009-10-31T16:33:00.000-07:00

31 October 2009

It’s Halloween – so I’m back to spook you. To scare you. Well, contemporary art and music (& movies, dance, theatre, etc.) should be a little scary. Maybe a LOT scary. (And NO – that doesn’t mean GROSSED OUT. It’s not about cheap EXPLOITATION. In fact it’s not about CHEAP – EVER! Nor for that matter EXPLOITATION – EVER! Have I made myself CLEAR? (Or am I simply confusing the Scientologists who may be reading this?)

So – no – I’m not going to go into an extensive re-tread. Everyone here knows my story (and it’s a sad one); so let’s skip it. Yeah, yeah, yeah – I’m as exhausted as ever. So here we go. Last night (30 October) I went to the opening of conceptual art legend Stephen Kaltenbach’s very aptly timed and titled show at Another Year In L.A., S’Fear. Certainly some aspect of ‘fear’ – or certainly a kind of intimidating mystery – and of course, simply fear and apprehension of the unknown, have played prominently in Kaltenbach’s work in the past: what is hidden from view, scarcely limned through its container or shell (or title – which of course is its own kind of container). And so it was here: more explicitly (and, in one instance, theatrically) than ever. The fear – and the sphere – and the implicit mystery of geometries of two, three and more dimensions. Theatricality to one side – which I find irresistible – it’s a thoughtful and elegant show. So go. Oh – and you might bear in mind that Another Year may be moving from its current landmark Deco building on San Fernando because of some MASSIVE pile of a high school(?) that is set to rise directly across the street. (We need another high school? Why not just make the ones we already have BETTER? As in through MORE, BETTER TEACHERS? A little (or a lot) MORE MONEY??) So – one more reason to hustle over there and see the show.

Thursday night (29 October), Opera Buddy and I went to a screening of a film of the Barcelona-based Fura des Baus production of Wagner’s Die Walkure staged in the (Calatrava designed) Palau de las Arts Reina Sofia in Valencia, Spain, featuring Peter Seifert and Jennifer Wilson as Brunnhilde and Juha Uusitalo as Wotan with the the amazing Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana brilliantly conducted by the apparently indefatigable Zubin Mehta. (If you’ve forgotten how amazing he can be, I can recommend this filmed opera on that basis alone.) The production is heavily video and effects-laden – with the internecine dramatics of the first two acts a bit muddied by the staging – but redeemed by the climactic (always threatening-to-never-actually-reach-climax) third act and Brunnhilde’s agony – which reduced Opera Buddy (despite her reservations about the production overall) to tears, and me (after my exhausting workday) to simultaneous catharsis and paralysis. (I comforted OB – ‘hey Dads are like that. Ya try to make them proud of your battle prowess and they end up disowning you & you have to settle for them not letting anyone fuck you but a billionaire master-of-the-universe,’ Right?) Well. (I’m telling you, it was pretty fucking GREAT.)

Earlier that day, I had the great fortune of viewing a portion of Ann Janss’s extensive and eclectic collection of L.A. and other artists – which in addition to some phenomenal Michael McMillen pieces and an entire gallery devoted to an amazing H.C. Westermann series, See America First, provided me with an introduction to the work of Steve Galloway. (As usual, I have to ask myself – was my head stuck under a rock or something?). I’m not going to go into great detail at the moment; because I have to jet out to, uh, the Silver Lake Dog Park. (You think I’m joking, don’t you? Well think again.) If you see a zombie in the dog park, it’s just me. Back in a zombie minute. (That could be a few millennia, you realize.)

Murmures des Richesses

2009-10-10T11:34:00.000-07:00

9-10 October 2009

Oh who cares who was at the Burchfield opening at the Hammer? Annie Philbin, Cathy Opie, Marlene Picard, Mitch Handsone, Lydia Szamraj, television producers (Hey – I just wrote a treatment – have ya got a minute? I think I have a copy in the car.), models, investment bankers – all the usual suspects. (Never did fetch that treatment.) But let me tell you what I was doing (almost a week later!) before. First of all, there was a truckload of GREAT work at Bergamot Station, where I went to do a bit of reconnaissance. The Francesca Gabbiani show (the second part of a two-part show) at Patrick Painter was extraordinary. I’ve been a fan of hers practically from my first exposure to her work (which, speaking of the Hammer, I believe was through a Hammer Project space (or maybe it was in the main galleries, I don’t remember – but the Hammer gave her the exposure). But her work just keeps getting richer, denser – more elaborate, exquisite, too, of course – but always to a very controlled, specific end – the whole of the conceit, the composition, at the service of the unified effect. (Though it is impossible not to be drawn into the rich details of these ‘black mirror’ collage-tableaux.) In the work on view here, the artistic and decorative fashions of 18th century rococo pastoral are re-worked into a kind of swirling ecological cacophony ‘framing’ a black ‘mirror’ lagoon-negative space. But here the foliated and filigreed shells, flora and fauna of the benign 18th century pastoral-boiserie is given a more forbidding cast, veering into the depths of jungle or forest – barn owls looming over chameleons, reptiles and dense foliage.assembled into a slightly tempestuous froth. The effect is simultaneously haunting and enchanting. Trick-or-treat – Patrick: would you mind putting one of these in my candy sack? I could spend hours with any one of these singular pieces.

I’m jumping ahead a bit here, though (yeah, on a certain level, that makes no sense) – because on the prior Wednesday evening (that’s 30 September), I had the privilege of attending Ana Cervantes’ extraordinary piano recital – really a recital/recitation – a unique music, literary, and arguably even visual experience, almost entirely curated, commissioned and performed – I want to say breathed or launched upon the airwaves – by this marvelous pianist-performer. In the past, I’ve tended (a bit irrationally to be honest about it) to militate a bit against ‘program’ music – as a kind of coloration, literary or narrative, that the music doesn’t really need or support; that may indeed veer sharply from what the purely musical character delivers on its own abstractly. At the same time, I’m completely mad about film soundtrack music – as sensitive to score and sonic tapestry woven behind, through and surrounding film image, action and dialogue – the astonishing capacity a great score has to underscore, heighten or emphasize mood, prefigurations, undercurrents, suspense, climax – as I am to any other aspect of the film: script, dialogue, performance, direction, editing. I’m full of contradictions, I fully realize. Then of course we routinely, almost unconsciously, deal with the ‘literary’ bridges of popular and folk song, commercial music that bombard us daily, to say nothing of the heavy lyric and literary content of musical theatre (or could we stretch that to simply say theatre, period?) and, uh (GASP!) OPERA!

In other words, I guess I’m getting over such irrational biases. A good thing, too – because Ana Cervantes’s magnetic performance, which she titled Rumor de Páramo: Murmurs From the Wasteland effectively put to rest whatever reservations I might have had left about this nexus. (Which are really merely the reflection of my own interior tug-of-war between my literary and purely musical sensibilities.) To be introduced to great bodies of musical and literary work on the same evening for me is practically a formula ready-made for an ecstatic experience. By far the great literary inspiration of Rumor de Páramo is the work of Mexican writer, Juan Rulfo, one of whose principal works is the novel, Pedro Páramo. And as if he needed any endorsement beyond the genius (I think I can take the word of Cervantes, et al. here) of his work, Octavio Paz (a titanic literary hero for me, whose work alas I have only read in English and French), perhaps Mexico’s greatest man of letters, wrote that Juan Rulfo was “the only Mexican novelist to have provided us an image – rather than a mere description – of our physical surroundings.” (meaning Mexico itself). The only composer on the program with whom I was familiar was Arturo Márquez – who might simplistically be described as a Mexican impressionist, TKTKTK

Dandelion Whine

2009-10-04T16:14:00.000-07:00

2-3 October 2009

Before I pick up where I left off – and yes, I’m lagging behind again – here’s a discovery. The Blue Whale is apparently a beached whale on Saturdays. This has always been the case to some extent, as I’m aware – the building has long been mostly devoted to design, architecture, textile and furniture showrooms catering mostly to the trade who keep regular Monday through Friday business week hours. But until recently, it seemed there was always something open (besides the restaurant) – or at least some special event that kept the doors open for some segment of non-trade customers or would-be clients trawling the interior design studios. Not so – or certainly not so anymore. When I returned early Saturday afternoon for a bit of reconnaissance (mostly Carl Berg), I was dismayed to be told by a guard that the entire building was closed. That, I said confidently to him, was impossible. There were art galleries on the second and third floors that should be open for business. Should be – but apparently are not. As we both made calls on our respective phones, it became clear that there was no one at the Carl Berg Gallery. I left a message; but there was no reason to expect an immediate reply. The building is apparently closed on Saturdays to ALL. You would think this might change, given the re-purposing of so many of these spaces for art galleries – but nooooo. The galleries will simply have to find a way around this. Here’s a shout-out to Carl: I think some kind of party or salon at some bar – say half-way between that area and Culver City (not the Mandrake – which is something apart and unto itself) – should take the place of the gallery’s Saturday hours – which, let’s face it, are as important to clients and collectors as they are to the rest of us art world shmos cruising for a free view, intel, and something to talk about at the next dinner, drinks or, uh, BAR.

So – Erin Dunn (half the reason I was there) will have to wait a bit. But let me just preview more extended comments by saying it is one of the most astonishing debuts I have seen in some time. Carl Berg obviously agreed. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have essentially handed over an entire gallery – an enormous space divided axially into several smaller rooms or galleries – to this young artist, who only recently settled in Los Angeles after graduating from RISD, with only a few appearances in group shows to date. Obviously any artist this young (I’m not sure if she’s even 25) is still evolving and will probably veer some distance from what is on view here. But the assuredness of her vision (and its range) and technique – in addition to the exuberant, fantasist freedom with which it’s deployed – are truly astonishing.

The work is largely drawn from nature – but abstracted, heightened in color, composition and orientation, and scale to something that is a world apart – a garden of earthly delights transformed into a private fairyland of exquisite, almost monstrous creations. The closest comparison (in terms of both color and style) I can make is to the work of Odilon Redon. Some of Dunn’s flower paintings (I’m not sure what else to call them) struck this note most distinctly – but with slightly more immediacy, a more vivid charge. (And for the most part, they are larger than Redon’s typical scale.)

But it is not just the paintings. Berg did not just throw a gallery to Dunn. Her work – which ranges into collage/assemblage, objects, textiles – encompasses a world. It is something that requires this kind of space. I don’t mean to overstate or exaggerate, but it is visionary on an almost Blake-an scale. No, she is not a William Blake, a Bosch or Breughel, or – well perhaps it’s jumping ahead a bit to even put her in the same company with Redon. But it is a vision complete, compelling and coherent. Okay – let’s move on. I’ll come back to the Beached Whale. At some point.

This past evening (which now slips into the 4th) I’ve been to the opening of the Robert Gober-curated Charles Burchfield show at the Hammer – Heat Waves In A Swamp – which is something of a revelation viewed within the context of the past 15 or 20 years of Los Angeles art. I should say, with some embarrassment, a revelation to me – not obviously to Gober, nor to Ann Philbin. I had only the vaguest clue who he was – knew his work dated from some time in the early 20th century, knew he’d worked in Buffalo, New York, vaguely associated him with Ashcan School painters of upstate New York. As far as I knew (which was NOTHING), he might have just been another journeyman artist cum illustrator cum graphic artist (partially true – his work does have a graphic quality; and he earned his living for a time designing (with splendid success) wallpaper. Nothing could be further from the truth. In point of fact, he was the first artist given a solo mid-career retrospective at MoMA – which triggered an extensive correspondence with the redoubtable Alfred Barr. Edward Hopper singled him out for praise early in his career. (It was not long after that encomium that he was able to devote himself full-time to his art.) More recently (well, okay 25 years ago) there was a Metropolitan Museum show; still more recently (1993), a show at The Drawing Center. Well, we know where Ann Philbin was; but where the hell was I? Apparently sleeping under a rock somewhere – what? – my subscription to the Times had lapsed?

Of course, Opera Buddy (who I assumed had skipped in favor of the Resnais movies at LACMA) knew all about Burchfield. “Oh, of course – Charles Burchfield. He was a genius. I love his work.” (Am I awake yet?)

The work is not exactly a ‘wake-up call’, however much a revelation to me. Hopper praised Burchfield for his dedication to painting “life” or nature. But as a ‘naturalist’, Burchfield’s hand (and eye) are heavily stylizing – occasionally abstracting nature into a tapestry of interweaving ornament. It is at once schematic and elaborate – a simplified line extended and elaborated into a motif repeated or integrated within a composition of similar landscape elements – or ‘natural’ motives. And as much of a ‘naturalist’ as he was, he did not shy away from depicting the industrial landscape of the northeast and midwest U.S. It was easy to see how he could lend his talents quite successfully to wallpaper design – and of course, his designs were rich, fantastic. But it was a good thing he was able to get away from that business. His best work – mostly watercolors, or watercolors with goache, ink and graphite – has an almost ethereal quality – qualities he was able to sustain almost to the end of his career. One of the most amazing pieces – slightly monochromatic, almost grisaille – comes close to the end of his life (1961-65), Dandelion Fields and the Moon – silvery and shimmering.

In short (yeah, it deserves more than a ‘short’ – but bear with me for a bit), it’s a terrific show. Who was there? Oh let me get back to you about that.

Regarding Henry -- and Alicia

2009-09-30T04:47:00.000-07:00

29-30 September 2009

Before I continue my little tour around the two new 'fine arts' floors of the Pacific Design Center, I want to take just a moment to remember two amazing individuals who had an enormous influence on me.

You may have already read that Henry Hopkins -- former (and first, as I recall) director of the Hammer Museum (as well as UCLA's Wight Art Gallery) and for many years, the director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, artist, scholar, teacher, mentor to so many here in California -- died Sunday here in L.A. I last saw him not two months ago at an art/nightclub opening that featured the work of a gifted former student. Although he looked well and was in so many ways his affable self, it was clear that he was in delicate health. I only learned the next day that he was still recuperating from major surgery, which made his appearance all the more remarkable -- yet so completely Henry. Intrepid, ever willing to stray from the beaten path, always on the look-out for the new thing (though never unwilling to take a second look at the 'old'), alert to fresh sparks, willing to take on all comers -- that was Henry. However infirm he may have been that early evening, his eyes were ever alert and alive. His always amazing eye for painting was very much in evidence that evening as we walked through the show (of paintings by Angel Chen) -- applauding the artist's colorism, singleing out especially strong paintings, or simply passages of paintings -- at once the teacher's teacher and connoisseur's connoisseur, and always with such grace and good humor. More than once he took me aside to steer me towards an artist or artwork or simply some art world 'person of interest', to impart some bit of news he knew I would relish. That he was always so open, accessible, informative and encouraging to me, personally (and he was no less encouraging to so many), is something I will always cherish.

The second passing I must take note of is only slightly more distant chronologically and geographically. Alicia de Larrocha died in Barcelona Friday; but like most great artists, she was a citizen of the world, and my associations with her are ineluctably linked with New York and Los Angeles. I had the privilege of seeing her perform many times in Los Angeles -- at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion and the Hollywood Bowl -- both in recital and in concert with the L.A. Phil; and in New York at both Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. So much of what I have learned about classical form, and especially Mozart and playing Mozart at the piano, was shaped by her own precise and elegant playing. Brendel later became huge in my 'Mozart (and Schubert) universe' -- but Alicia de Larrocha was the original model, the template forever engraved in my mind whenever I listen or (still more rarely) attempt to play Mozart. And of course, she was my introduction to a world of French and Spanish music: Ravel, Granados, Albeniz. To this day I don't think she has an equal in her interpretation of the Spanish classics.

And, as anyone who attended her recitals can attest, her intelligence, poise and sensitivity, were manifest in almost every piece of music of played. She knew how to 'turn a phrase' and make it new every time, to make us hear it almost as deja vu and epiphany at the same time, to hear it written fresh as if the composer had just set the notes down. She retired only a few years ago -- a celebrated recital she gave with the Tokyo String Quartet at Carnegie Hall -- but for her many fans, her music-making lives forever.

Between Abandon and Atonement

2009-09-29T09:14:00.000-07:00

28 September 2009

Back to Thursday night (24 September) – and Saturday night (26 September) – a little late, I know (I could have used that Town Car I was, uh, ranting about, since my venerable Volvo decided to take a powder not long after I had left Kristin Calabrese’s and Josh Aster’s “Itty Bitty” show at Circus of Books; on top of which I lost my cell phone somewhere in that neighborhood. One more expensive detour I really didn’t need.) I left off talking about Mark Dutcher’s sculpture, but didn’t really address the painting; and I have to confess it was difficult to address this painting – in other words, settle my eye, my focus, upon it. Where would I find my way into the painting? How to ‘scan’, to ‘map’ it if you will, to really make sense of the palette (which was dominated by blues – lots of cobalt, Prussian, lapis, sapphire, midnight tones; many textured (including velvet, as Mark pointed out to me)? It was a very large panel. On top of which – or should I say, to the side of which – there was a separate rhomboidal panel or flange flatly painted in blue, hinging or folding out from the main rectangular panel. If I was having a hard time finding my way into the painting, this element was not helping me, nor for that matter helping me find a way out.

That Mark will eventually find his way back into the kind of painting he wants to make (and out of the labyrinth of texture, incident and other painterly problems he seems to have created for himself), I have no doubt. Of the curators, Dan and Ryan Callis, I have my doubts. But then maybe it’s just me: I confess I grew impatient trying to ‘read’ Monique Prieto’s usually very readable text paintings in that trademark Stonehenge megalith font of hers. But at least with Prieto, there’s something to challenge the eye simply in terms of the painting as a whole. Ryan Callis’s painting certainly scanned easily enough – but then most pattern-and-decoration type painting does. Certainly this is the ground for this kind of painting, though more geometricized here, with a nod to the incidental, even figurative elements. But so what? What is it getting at?

[I’m a little cantankerous, right now, aren’t I? You can see why it’s easy to let a blog go. Unless there’s something really exciting to talk about, why bother? It’ll get reviewed eventually, somewhere – hopefully by someone less jaded than I – so why not just let it go without comment? But, you know how the song goes – ‘the best is yet to come’; and so it was this particular evening. It may not keep us blogging here in L.A., but it sure keeps us going out to the art openings, concerts, movies, etc., looking for that new new thing that inspires us in a way nothing ever has before.]

Ryan’s brother/husband, Dan’s work was even more derivative – couched somewhere between a kind of semaphoric colorism and and the aforementioned pattern and decoration. The color was refreshing. It would look good as a summer print, I thought – but then we’re dressing for autumn aren’t we? In other words, could you show me something in a, uh, … INTERESTING?!! I’m not here textile shopping for Marc Jacobs. Ya know what I’m saying?

[No, I’m not going to stop now – you’ll why see in a second.] The most interesting painting – and some of the pieces were not, strictly speaking, painting – was done by an artist named Matty Byloos, whose work I’d never seen before. Speaking of texture, I wanted to get closer to the paintings (there were only two) to get a better sense of its relative thinness or flatness, saturation, and so forth – from a distance the color appeared laid down fairly thinly, perhaps scraped down – but people (the crowd was pretty heavy) kept wandering into my sightlines and so I moved on to the black-and-white drawings – completely different in character from the paintings, and perhaps even more compelling, somehow deeper on some level than the paintings, which had a certain matter-of-fact finality to them. With a foreclosure being filed roughly every seven seconds here in the U.S., what could be more timely, I thought, than paintings of houses that appeared boarded up and abandoned? But really this only scratches the (thin) surface. Abandonment and isolation are certainly keynotes here; but there is something further quietly sublimated off these surfaces, something haunted, forlorn, trapped energies, unfinished business. (Or was I just tired? Ready to get in my car and fall asleep at the wheel?)

The black-and-white drawings – which looked as if taken from some collection of stock images or photos, or handbook illustrations (or perhaps Situationist graphic images – are mostly domestic interiors, situations and genre scenes, suddenly interrupted or intruded upon by black-out balloons or clouds, black mists descending upon the centers and obscuring some critical bit of the depicted transaction. They were, like the houses, haunting and mysterious; schematic ‘bad dream’ images, in which the central action (usually involving one’s own consciousness) is somehow self-censored. I later learned that Byloos is also a writer, which does not surprise me at all – not that there is anything particularly narrative about these pieces – but all of them, paintings and ‘drawings’ (or is it the other way around?) exude an acute psychological intelligence.

There’s more to report: mostly on the group show at Carl Berg and the special showcase space he’s created upstairs on the 5th floor of the Pacific Design Center (I somehow doubt that he’s permanently annexed this space – but its current inhabitant just might make him do it.) In the meantime, remember this name: Erin Dunn.

RANT-ing and Raving -- but Still Here, Still Looking, Still Listening

2009-09-26T22:53:00.000-07:00

25-26 September 2009

I’m big on preambles, as anyone who has ever dipped into this blog knows – but I’m not even sure at this point who, or if ANYONE will be reading this – so I’ll keep this one brief. Every once in a while – and lately, oh let’s face it, MONTHS – awol goes, uh, AWOL. Well, maybe that’s not quite the way to put it. It’s more like – awol goes OVER THE EDGE. The last few months – really the last year – have been like that; and – well, do I really need to explain it? I don’t think so -- but I’ll try to sum up. It’s called LIFE; and it’s a bloody messy business. There’s the economy that’s foreground and background to all of this. There’s the tapestry of emotional turbulence interwoven throughout, but perhaps more dramatically over the past year or so. There’s politics – of the public forum, naturally -- always troubling; of the private, professional and workplace spheres (and the art world, too – but where to comment, intervene? I’m not about to jump into that unless I have my facts in order); and then, quite simply, the demands of working and making a living in this kind of environment. And there’s the stream of practical obstacles, private tribulations and everyday disasters that clutter everyone’s life.

I fall ASLEEP. Okay? It's bloody EXHAUSTING. (And here’s a shout-out: anyone want the part-time job of helping me get up in the morning? I need an assistant for this, no kidding.) So sue me – or better yet, come work for me.

Okay – Thursday night (the 24th): very hot-town-summer-in-the-city. Except, of course, it was fall. Dressed autumnally (fawn wool crepe, Ferragamo, matching suede court shoes), running late from the Black Glass Ellipse of the Flynt Publications Building, I made my way to the International Klein Blue Whale of Pacific Design Center (parking a nightmare), headed towards melt-down of course – but what a way to go. My first PLANNED stop was RANT, a group show curated by Dan Callis and Ryan Callis (brothers? Husband and wife (Ryan I think can be a girl’s name)?) – I know nothing about either of them as artists, and if their own work is any indication, I don’t have much interest for the moment in learning anything more. (I WOULD have liked to know SOMEthing about them, artistically, curatorially; but there was no printed information available at the show – or for that matter a checklist of the work, artist bios (some of whom are well enough known – e.g., Phoebe Unwin, Monique Prieto, Mark Dutcher, Alex Couwenberg), or curatorial statement – not that I really need one. I’m assuming that the title will more or less telegraph what the emphasis is supposed to be.) Touching on that last parenthetical point, I’m not sure if the show quite reached that fevered pitch, but for at least a few of the artists, you could see it moving in that direction, some more idiosyncratically than others. (Monique Prieto’s work, needless to say, fit RIGHT IN – hey, I mean that in a good way, sort of.) And for the rest – well, it added up to enough visual (maybe aural, too) cacophony to get you revved up to that point, more or less.

And I needed to be revved up – I had no idea to what extent. A good part of the third floor (and parts of other floors above and below) is now given over to art gallery space leased cheaply to any number of galleries and independent kunsthalle-type ventures (e.g., Lucas Reiner and John Millais’s space just kitty-corner from the “RANT” space) -- a by-product of the imploded economy and collapsing real estate market both. Most, if not all of them were either opening shows or just open for the spill-over crowds/business. There was a LOT to see.

I confess that my first draw to RANT was my friend, Mark Dutcher’s new work – which continues to evolve in a number of new directions – most interestingly, at least recently, sculptural – painted, of course – Mark’s commitment to painting is firmly manifest, as any of his friends would tell you. But I think sculpture has become much more than simply a digression for Mark. What will be interesting in the future will be the way he ‘brings it all back home’ to the ‘two-dimensional’ painted work. He is working out problems in both structure and ‘narrative’, if you will (or perhaps more simply ‘incidental’ – I’ll elaborate at some point on). The sculptures – painted mostly in primaries – reds, blues, yellows – were vertical, allusive to the figure mostly in terms of their human scale, segmented in separate rectangular and oblong wooden blocks – a cross between a kind of Giacometti-esque David Smith and a Jenga set (does anybody besides ME remember (and MISS!) Jenga – those little odd, notched pieces of balsa-wood that you stacked and stacked and stacked until some klutz (ME!) would knock them over? A great game to play while drinking cocktails or just before sex). Many of them were topped off with what functioned almost as miniature platforms for further incident – smaller elements arrayed across the tops (capitals? – or other architectural influence).

I have to break off – YES, I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING. Just forget about it. Please. I’ll be back. I promise. It’ll be a few hours. HELLO! – it’s L.A. – it takes a while to get around this bloody town. (Oh, by the way, Paige – would you mind sending a car? My Volvo is having, uh, circulation issues. And it better be a Lincoln Town Car. Oh yeah, did I tell you the driver needs to be cute? S/He does. Preferably someone with a first name of either Jimmy or Cindy. Preferably Latino/Mexican -- black hair, chiseled features, beautiful, smoked-mirror-smouldering eyes -- someone presentable and .... Well ... my Volvo isn't the only thing that needs servicing.) (I do go on, don't I?) My first stop is the Circus of Books where Kristin Calabrese and Joshua Aster have curated a show of “itty bitty paintings” that, knowing what those two are capable of, is likely to be GENIUS. (ps – more about Josh Aster, later, too.)

Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough

2009-06-27T22:18:00.000-07:00

26 - 27 June 2009

I hesitated to post one of my ‘quick-ones’ (thus making it not such a quick one, after all, no?) the other night (well my blasted computer and laptop had something to do with it, too); but having just come from Joshua Pieper’s opening at Rosamund Felsen (good show, by the way – conceptual/material handled with a very dry, delicate wit), where I had a conversation with Steve Hurd and friends on this very subject, I’m thinking I’m not the only person in the L.A. art world to have been similarly affected by the sudden (and still so very shocking) death of Michael Jackson – a genius entertainer and true pop superstar, whatever else you want to say about him.

Like so many of my generation (no – I can’t remember what that is exactly – (x + y + z)2, I think), I watched Michael Jackson’s career unfold practically from its inception. I listened and danced to Motown music, including many Jackson 5 singles, some of which struck me as Motown bubblegum, some which actually had an already distinct pop verve – a kind of fusion of Motown-style rhythm & blues and Lennon-McCartney inflected Anglo-American pop (“The Love You Save”; “Never Can Say Goodbye”; “Shake Your Body Down to the Ground” – which seems in retrospect like the Motown precursor to his later “Wanna Be Starting Something” – that brilliant lead track off Thriller). I think “Ben” was actually my favorite Jackson 5 single at the time simply for its sheer perversity. (I confess that my early pop music tastes leaned in the direction of hard blues (Anglo-American, alas) rock and downtown/art/underground sounds (the two poles of which I’m thinking would be somewhere around groups like the Stones and the Velvets). In other words, this was a pretty white pop culture. There were outstanding exceptions, of course: Aretha, Stevie Wonder, to say nothing of scores of black jazz artists from Miles Davis to McCoy Tyner. But jazz and the classical world stand somewhat off to the side of the mainstream pop world. And it was that world that the grown-up Michael Jackson would take by storm and utterly transform within less than a decade from his first solo records for Motown.

That said, it was an explosion heard round the globe that somehow only penetrated my very white, punk downtown world when, inevitably, it penetrated almost every style of pop music being produced during the decade that followed – with its sheer exuberance, eclecticism and irresistible rhythmic energy. That ‘force’ had ‘a lot of power.’ Within a couple years of its release, there was no escaping it – and who would want to? I recall a hipper-than-thou loft party in SoHo sometime in 1982 where the dance music mix began and ended with music from Off the Wall. Everyone there was super-smart, punk or professional – or both, hyper-educated, informed, engaged, so cool we would have turned blue if the party didn’t start heating up – and it did. We tried so hard to be detached and dispassionate, clutching our scotch and joints (and checking each other out, too, natch) – but the sound system was very good and the music swept everyone away. There was no holding back. ‘Get on the floor and dance’ the music commanded; and we obeyed. Half-way through the Off the Wall tracks on the mix, the loft was swirling with movement – jagged, lyrical, undulating, pulsating – just like the music. It was pure joy. I don’t think I had sex that night, but I definitely had an orgasm or two.

A couple of years ago, I was on my way home from a late and very frustrating night at my Flynt Building office, feeling like death and wondering for the umpteenth time how I could possibly wake up the next morning for more of the same. I was spinning the radio dial between news, jazz, classical and indie-rock stations aimlessly, not even caring what I heard from one to the next, when the first bars of “Don’t Stop ‘til You Get Enough” – with those urgent moans of Michael’s – suddenly began seeping from my speakers. Something compelled me to turn the volume up. And up – the music poured from the speakers as if on an ecstatic wave (I have a great sound system in my car). At that moment, it was like a musical speedball – dreamy, ecstatic, yet pulsating with energy. I was in heaven. And I wasn’t going to stop ‘til I got enough – which meant a stop at Amoeba to pick up a CD (my vinyl copy bit the dust what seems like millennia ago). (Good thing, too, huh? Amazon reported that the entire Michael Jackson catalog had sold out. They’re going to have to bloody re-issue most of the catalog. Who knows? – Michael’s $400 million debt may be liquidated a lot quicker than any of us would have guessed.)

Beyond the music, what made Thriller magical – really a kind of pop miracle no different from one of the great Freed-unit M-G-M musicals – was its conceptualization as a kind of global multi-media entertainment package. The amazing dancing and choreography that may have been born out of disco and musical theatre but went so much further. There was Astaire and Robbins in it, sure – but also Fosse and something you can only call Michael Jackson. We were witnessing the birth of a superstar and it was something to see. Something you had to be blind not to see – you couldn’t take your eyes off him.

Thursday evening (25 June), I was out with Opera Buddy – looking at an opera on film natch – an amazing 2008 Salzburg Festival production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. (Claus Guth did the production and Bertrand de Billy conducts members of the Vienna Philharmonic. The Don Gio is a very powerful Christopher Maltman, but he is almost eclipsed by his amazing – and very sexy – Leporello, played by Erwin Schrott. It’s a strange, almost surreal, very contemporary production – but I loved it; and of course the music is sublime – more on that in a second if I don’t run out of steam.)

Anyway, we almost got into an argument. “Michael Jackson dead!” – she all but cackled. Well, there was no escaping the shock of it. “ … (yawn) Oh so what … another pervert bites the dust…. What was he going to do with his career, anyway?...” Well, setting aside the probable fact that, whether his tour or new material would have been successful or not, whether he would have actually succeeded in making a comeback that, to many, seemed something of a long-shot, there would have been much he might have offered as a producer or mentor for new talent – i.e., the role that Berry Gordy, Quincy Jones and others had played for him; how, I asked, can you deny, not simply his manifest talent, but what he did actually produce. Joy, pure and simple. He brought joy to hundreds of millions if not billions of people all over the planet.

He was a strange cat – completely over-the-top-twisted, screwed up – issues for years. He did weird stuff and some terrible and probably out and out criminal things to some people (although regarding these incidents, you have to wonder: where were these kids’ bloody – more like blood-sucking – parents? – vultures.) And, come on for chrissake – nobody died. In fact they probably had a fabulous time (so they need a few years of therapy – at least we know they can afford it). Jackson was no Phil Spector – a complete menace to society who was a one-man argument for preventive detention years before he actually offed some poor girl.

Maybe Michael’s best years were behind him. Oh they probably were. But, like entertainment geniuses before him, he brought magic to thousands of millions. He brought us joy and will keep on delivering it as long as we can still hear music. No, he was not Mozart; and no we are not always in the right space, physically, emotionally, to enjoy what he offered us. But when we are – and we always will be at some point – it will seem like the amazing gift it is – a bacchant’s cry (and laugh) – a power of rapturous joy that we can never have enough of.

The Hunger

2009-06-17T18:18:00.000-07:00

17 June 2009

Just a quick one before I pick up where I left off (remember? Aaron Sheppard, et al.? To say nothing of Keith Tyson, Yayoi Kusama, Phoebe Unwin, Edward Cella, etc., et al.) – What’s the deal with museum, gallery or other art/culture events where the wine and/or hard liquor flow, or shall we say, are being poured with a heavy hand (a good thing, all things considered), but the food served is minimal to non-existent? Now, no one expects a gallery to hand you more than a glass of serviceable table wine or a spritzer at the run-of-the-mill vernissage. On the other hand, at what might be characterized as “special” events – special receptions, benefits, collector events, gallery events set off from the usual opening protocol, colloquia or other confabs, etc., where a slightly more ample libation might be offered; especially those events scheduled on ‘school’ nights at those somewhat ambiguous hours between ‘tea’, drinks and/or dinner – it might not be unreasonable to expect something to quell the hunger that, in the absence of an early dinner or a substantial ‘tea’, is surely swelling to a crescendo. Something perhaps slightly more than a breadstick (this is not a criticism of the fare at the Hammer, by the way) or a handful of salted peanuts.

EITHER OF WHICH WE (I speak for MANY of us) WOULD HAVE BEEN DELIGHTED WITH at the MOCA Contemporaries luau at the Catherine Malandrino Maison yesterday evening. In theory, the event was catered by the Malandrino café. In actuality, you could hardly call what we were presented with catering. In fact, you would have been excused for thinking it was a piece of performance art. Whatever it was, it was entirely surreal – the surrealism of it only magnified by the gathering haze of inebriation – inevitable if, like me, your last meal had been not much more than a light lunch and you had been hard at work for most of the day between 9:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. I should have guessed something was afoot when I was presented with a plate of half a dozen of the tiniest stuffed mushroom caps that were the first course of hors d’oeuvres to come out of the kitchen. It would be a long wait for the next plate (and I do mean plate, not platter). After a couple of surprisingly strong champagne & liqueur libations, I was really looking forward to something. As in ANYTHING. Anything appeared in the form of some microscopic-looking cherry tomato thing that looked tiny even on its toothpick. At this point, I was already practically drunk and wandered into the store to see what I scavenge. The wait staff had apparently retreated back to the kitchen again. Now what I saw was simply strategy: get the guests good and plastered and get them to drop a few quid BOTH on MOCA and on Catherine Malandrino shmatte. It made a bit of sense. The shmatte, such as it was, was fabulous. A beige-y draped cocktail dress beautifully draped and detailed in lace and netting would have fit me (once upon a (slightly more flush) time) brilliantly, and there was a quilted multi-colored mini-skirt that I seriously coveted. Unfortunately, my purse could scarcely budge for the parking valet – a situation that was moot because I was now in no condition to drive.

I was not alone. Clusters of guests were now huddling outside the kitchen door waiting to pounce upon whatever emerged from it. But you had to be very fast and very determined to get what there was to be had. The wait staff would rush out by-passing the beggars (us) outside the doors and rapidly fan back into the store – presumably to feed starving sales girls (or models? Presumably with a diet like this, you’d be ready for either the runway or the hospital.) By the second run, I was ready, and all but tackled one of the staff to grab my slightly-less-than-bite-size morsel of something vaguely resembling quiche.

Of course it wasn’t enough. By this time, I had joined a few other guests at the coffee bar, waiting for espressos and gnawing at the morning’s pastries and biscotti. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much left. I didn’t think I could even manage trying on the clothes in my condition and had already schmoozed half the Maison. A lot of people were heading over to LACE for the Fallen Fruit opening and performance, but I was in no condition to drive any more than a few blocks to the closest emporium selling coffee and FOOD (which happened to be Urth Café).

Look – don’t get me wrong. The reception was lovely. The clothes were fabulous. The drinks were …. Well there was Champagne. How bad could it be? But people with empty stomachs, whatever their taste for contemporary art, fashion, or for that matter the size of their wallets, need something MORE. Some galleries really get it (I’m thinking of a few Culver City galleries; a couple in Santa Monica; Lawrence Asher on Wilshire – you know who you are); but too often these are the exception. PLEASE L.A. ART WORLD: go ahead and spring for the Trader Joe’s nosh. The art audience’s (and your customers’) good will is not something that can just be written off.

Fractured but fabulous

2009-06-15T22:06:00.000-07:00

14 June – 15 June 2009

Before I come at you with a truckload of accumulated notes (no – I don’t mean going back the last three months – just the last couple of weeks), let me just tell you what grabbed my attention this week-end. (I hope this doesn’t sound like a Facebook page, which has been a slight, though sometimes entertaining, distraction since the MOCA “Mobilization” dragged me into its web.) First of all, as more than one person has pointed out in a general way, I haven’t been ‘around’ as much as I was prior to my return from the New York fairs. As some of you know, I was dealing with a number of professional, financial, and personal ‘challenges’ that vacuumed away an awful lot of my energy and focus. And crisis or ‘challenge’ aside, I felt an acute need to psychologically regroup and refresh my focus. It’s an on-going struggle and I don’t see myself emerging from it overnight. The more pleasurable side of this is that I find myself spending a bit more time reading (that is to say, reading and actually finishing books and long essays or feature articles). Lately I’ve been researching India and the subcontinent and spent part of this week-end finishing Octavio Paz’s In Light of India – a brilliant, magical sequence of essays about India and his experiences there (he was an envoy, and not long thereafter Mexico’s ambassador to India); needless to say every page is touched with Paz’s special genius. Next up is Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India. For pure pleasure I’m reading, Edna O’Brien short stories (she has a new bio of Byron that I’m sure is a hoot) and Colette’s La Retraite sentimentale – a sort of birthday book. (Am I revealing too much about myself? Yes – I guess that’s who I am these days.)

So you can see that ‘tales of the flesh’ might have an irresistible allure for me lately (‘spirit’ too, I suppose – but so much harder to sink one’s teeth – or eyes, ears and hands – into, no?). Besides I hadn’t been to Western Project in a while, I knew Carole Caroompas and Liz Young would be in the show; and – well, I had to go. One of Caroompas’s huge Before and After Frankenstein canvases greeted me as I walked in; and it was interesting studying its iconography for a moment and breathing in that almost hieratic, almost religious (albeit heterodox) quality it radiates. It could almost be an altarpiece, I was thinking for a second – only to turn into the main space of the gallery and be confronted with something that really was a kind of, well, shrine, a sort of devotional tableau – a shrine or an altar with a quasi-Chippendale pediment that – even from a distance – evoked cataclysm, catharsis (or at least a kind of baptism),transfiguration. I had to sort of hold back a bit. It was just a bit too much – with the ‘Chippendale’ topped frame giving way to extensions into the gallery space itself. I had to distract myself with Liz Young’s drawings and another Caroompas before I could really deal with it. (Caroompas – and Liz Young come to think of it – made me think a bit about Kaari Upson’s incendiary work again. What can I say? – the cutting, the re-configuration of flesh – gee, isn’t everyone obsessed with that on some level? At least in New York and L.A. Maybe all of America.)

And then it just happened – it was like I was just caught in some cheesy movie, helpless to resist its magnetic draw. (Upson again: how do you resist something as cheesy as the Grotto? You don’t. You just go with it. Enter that locus of utterly absurd insanity and just make it your own.) I felt the almond eyes of that slightly cartoon-ish, Fractured Fairy Tale Portrait of Dorian Gray figure upon me – to say nothing of that magical, mystical, ever so tactile frame, with its Munch/Jugenstil/Nouveau skulls and bones mouldings. And then of course, it’s there – like the wound of Amfortas in Syberberg’s film of Parsifal – those beautifully glistening labia…. “Don’t worry, Eve. You can always put that where your heart ought to be.”

Do you see what’s happening? Right as we’re writing/reading this? I’m coming apart just re-visualizing it, salivating a bit, even though it’s not strictly speaking that carnal. I’m not giving the artist enough credit. It’s much more articulate, developed – abstractly, symbolically, iconographically, narratively. Oh – the artist: his name is Aaron Sheppard. Like his Debutante in eclipse, or the fearful Symmetry of that transfigured scuba diver, he seems to have blown across the waters like Botticelli’s Venus on the half- (I was about to say clam – can you blame me?) shell. (Come to think of it, he does have a very Botticelli aura in person. Maybe it’s his long flowing hair.) In fact, he blew across the desert sands of Las Vegas (well, they don’t call it Vegas for nothing), which is where Cliff discovered him. And I’m so glad he did. Do you mind if I take a break? I need to eat something. I also need to say something more about Aaron Sheppard. Also about George Bolster, whose work I saw later the same evening at Chung King Project. (His “Madonna of the Tears” made me think of Barbara Hutton. “The bride wore black and carried a scotch and soda.”) In lieu of the Wooster Group’s Il Didone (long story – hopefully I can catch it this week).

Oh by the way, did anybody else notice (as if anyone couldn’t) the scaled-down New York Times Magazine this Sunday? Note to the Editors: BIGGER IS MORE.

Sturm und Drang (and Beauty)

2009-03-08T10:38:00.000-07:00

6 March 2009 (continued)

It occurs to me I zoom in on irony and desperation (above) in a mere two paragraphs – and certainly the layout of the show’s exhibitors might incline a quick 360 of the general Pier 94 toward those viewpoints; but obviously there’s so much more. And so much more that has nothing to do with either – really the flip side of that sort of impoverished pomposity. (Can there be, specifically, a poverty of pomp? As opposed to a mere dearth of it? Those Sailstorfer giltwood frames certainly addressed this directly.) But such affects must always coexist with their antipodes; and here (as always) desperation is outflanked by invention and the will manifest in any serious artistic enterprise; irony counterpoised against a straightforward determination of the actuality. Beauty trumps all – though it hardly ratifies an artist’s vision by itself. But it was interesting to see a certain range of varieties of beauty scattered amongst the exhibitor spaces on the Pier. You certainly saw that kind of invention and beauty at Sean Kelly. Or maybe it was about finding beauty in a time of almost brutal upheaval and uncertainty. As soon as you walked into the space, you were confronted with this sense of tempest and whirlwind – but also, undeniably, beauty: a beautiful swirl of a piss painting – a piss painting! (what – you didn’t think anyone was doing those anymore?) along side a funneling double helix of steel – almost a tornado of a piece – by Antony Gormley. (There were also some beautiful drawings by Gormley.) Also interesting work by Los Carpinteros that played with the notion of inter-connected structures falling apart; and minimalist studies by Iran do Espirito Santo (a Brazilian minimalist I know very little about) that played on similar themes. Kelly was also showing some classic Mapplethorpe flower studies, which made a stark contrast with the contemporary work foregrounded here. Made only a quarter century ago, one sees Mapplethorpe’s essential classicism in a new light – with their poignancy and solitariness magnified by the passage of time – and certainly our passage into these dark times.

It’s interesting how you’re also reminded at fairs (and not just The Armory Show) of the curves artists can throw one’s way. There were some interesting drawings by Joan Jonas at Wilkinson (London) – flattened, blotted ink studies of a butterfly and a nude figure – the sort of thing that might be done in a minute or over several hours or days. Less surprising were Fia Backstrom’s text drawings; but no sooner had I turned away then I was immediately struck (and that would be just the word) by a sequence of Jimmy de Sana photographs (from roughly 1979-1980) which astonish in their freshness, clarity, drama and anomalous, almost surreal expression, to this day. 'Whatever happened to him?' I wondered aloud – and Amanda Wilkinson was kind enough to fill me in. Sexually explicit, with frank exposures of astonishing debasement, they’re a bit raw (oh, nothing you can’t handle, dear reader) – but (setting aisde the ‘ick’ or ‘ouch’ factor) what they convey has an amazing clarity, and an inchoate sense of both immediacy and uncertain duration of time. Time flies whether and whatever you’re giving or taking. There was also work by Sung Hwan Kim, who is a Korean artist to watch. (Is Korea the ‘new China’? Or was it ‘there’ before and I just happened to miss it?)

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"It's so cold in Alaska." -- with apologies to Lou Reed

2009-03-07T13:17:00.000-08:00

6 March 2009

At The Armory Show

At first you wonder: is it as crowded? Is the audience as plentiful as in previous years? Then you consider – based upon the hour and flow of people in and out – yes, it is more or less. (Perhaps less, but not significantly so. Now whether the crowd holds as many willing buyers or collectors is another matter entirely.) What is immediately apparent is a certain deliberative air; not exactly focus – there’s far too much to distract or divert even the most focused eye for that. It’s a ruminative, thoughtful crowd. Collectors or not, people seem a bit more directly engaged with the art. The frenzy is gone – and that is all good. People are here to look, think, process the work, occasionally lubricated by a glass of champagne. The crowd could almost be said to be – and this is almost inconceivable in New York -- moving slowly.

Some of the galleries seem to underscore this newly judicious, deliberative attitude – e.g., a somewhat ironically placed white fluorescent piece by Joseph Kosuth from 1966 on the exterior wall of the Sean Kelly space, telegraphing this subdued mood: “Subject Described, Object Defined.” Others address the panic looming just outside (or presumably in reluctant collectors’ pocketbooks) more directly. The first thing you saw in the Galleria Massimo de Carlo (Milan) space was what looked like a broken marble cornerstone chiseled with the following dedication: “EVERYONE IS BROKE.” It’s by Elmgreen & Dragset, a pair of Irish and Swedish artists working out of London and Berlin, respectively. At Emmanuel Perrotin (Paris), the message was delivered by turns humorously, ironically, and perhaps a little desperately, too. Daniel Arsham showed a painting, predominantly in steel and charcoal grays – a bird’s-eye view of what resembled the shells of unfinished high-rise buildings or apartment blocks, protruding roofs of which spelled out the word, “W-A-N-T.” As you were thinking, ‘does it get any more desperate?’ you’d catch an eyeful of a neon piece by Paola Pivi – an Italian artist working in (get this) Anchorage, Alaska. (That would induce a certain irony and desperation. ) “Stop the complaint, we just bought it.” An artist by the name of Kolkoz had a slightly drier take on the theme with pieces that consisted of nothing but giltwood frames and mouldings – a more or less traditional giltwood frame (or frames) closing in on – more frames and finally simply filled with the frame mouldings. Michael Sailstorfer’s piece was almost a nullification of the spirit of Joseph Kosuth’s 1966 piece – a black polyurethane piece that looked like nothing so much as a set of black fluorescent tubes. I suddenly feel back in Berlin – that is to say, Lou Reed’s Berlin. “It’s so cold in Alaska.”

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The Pornography of Desperation

2009-03-07T10:48:00.000-08:00

5 March 2009

My first toe in the snow turned out to be not the Armory Show, but a run through Scope – it was nearly impossible to get to the Piers this particular evening – and frankly I was tempted to stop right at the newly renovated Alice Tully Hall, whose glass-faced façade disclosed a very warm and inviting looking bar and café. I consoled myself that I could always stop in afterwards. Inside (as opposed to outside) the pavilions, Scope has a slightly more manicured look this year – though the twilight may have enhanced the effect. ada (Richmond, Virginia) Gallery’s booth this year is close enough to the entrances that you could practically fall into it (no – I did not stop for a drink at Alice Tully Hall), and it’s always fun running into John Pollard who does such an amazing job with this gallery. This year, the gallery is celebrating the influence of the convulsive, hysterical films of George Kuchar, who is actually scheduled to present a few of his films at special events the gallery will present this Saturday evening (6-8 p.m.) and Sunday afternoon (12-2 p.m.). Kuchar really invented a kind of pornography of desperation; and, to judge from the business and economic news alone, you’d have to say these films have really found their moment. (Me – I’d just love to see some of these Wall Street money mis-managers cast and forced to act through a George Kuchar film.) John always shows something amazing, something surprising that takes you completely off guard; and I’m sure there’s more here that I should be mentioning; but I was most immediately fascinated by paintings and stop-action animations (from the paintings) he showed by Bruce Wilhelm – whose uncanny, abstracted, naïve style I found completely captivating -- e.g., horses and figures cantering into and out of a conventional landscape obscured by, morphing, or dissolving (more apparent in the animations) into other fragmentary elements, bits of landscape or other figures or color fields. Amazing (and not expensive!) There was much more; but, needless to say, I’ll be going back.

I’m not terribly familiar with dFaulken, a local gallery, but I was intrigued by their mix of artists – from expressive (if not tortured) and figurative, to rigorously cool abstraction, and they were friendly enough to invite me in when everyone was getting kicked out. I’m not sure what to make of an artist like Karim Hamid, whose work suggested a number of impressions or images superimposed upon each other and sunk into abstracted fields that might themselves be fragmentary images or merely background elements. A few were recognizably portraits. One of the portraits featured was of Chuck Close, a compelling one, recognizable though face and figure were all but blacked out. I was not so compelled by Sara Carter’s retro-De Stijl channeled abstraction – blocks and bars of color of varying density and transparency against dark fields – but perhaps it’s in synch with a certain mood of deliberation and determination that seems to be in the air. She’s certainly determined. I have more to say about Mark Gagnon, who showed some very interesting work – but I’ll have to come back to him. (He’s terrifically talented.)

Hey look – I know Costa Rica is incredibly beautiful (I’d love a place there myself) – but you can’t just plunk something down there on the beach or against one of those incredible landscapes and call it art. Can you?? (Or can you?) The Jacob/Karpio Galleria of San Jose, Costa Rica was showing some digital photography by Nefertiti Ingalls (love the name) – not without interest; and certainly an almost classical beauty and poise; and those gorgeous backdrops – but so what? This is not tai chi at the beach, honey. (Ya have to wonder – I came back from L.A. for this?)

There was a good deal of Chinese contemporary art and I have to talk about some stuff at Kuckei & Kuckei (Berlin) – but for now I’m putting it on HOLD. Gee, New York looks great under snow (although it’s already melting).

Baby, It's Cold Outside

2009-03-06T11:28:00.000-08:00

4 March 2009

Delays, delays, delays – ‘so what else is new?’, readers of this blog (jeeeeeezus – are you still with me?? I must send you all something fabulous.) are likely to ask. But you all know how much I hate to miss a phree-view or an opening night; and in this instance (i.e., The Armory Show), I have missed both. Look – I’m not crazy about it either. You brave the traffic, the winter cold (and it is freezing); and miss the opening? The injustice of it.

The worst part of it is leaving my apartment an unmitigated disaster zone (yet apparently still ineligible for federal disaster relief!) when people have to come in to take care of my feline daughters (oh you have no idea how many hours – DAYS – I spent trying to clean up. I’ve barely scratched the surface; though I can say that my couch and coffee table can once again be used as they were originally intended. A virtual Everest of books, catalogues, magazines, legal pads and notebooks had to be relocated to the more traditionally book-friendly loci of my apartment – like, uh, the bookshelves, and bookstands in my bedroom. I probably should have called upon earth movers; but instead I tried to do it myself with predictably mixed results. At least now there is the semblance of a flat (as opposed to craggy and mountainous) surface – the surface of the table. There are still a couple of rather imposing stacks of art books at either end of the table; but now there is actually enough room on it for, say, a couple of drinks, a tray of hors d’oeuvres (or, well, my laptop), an ashtray or two or a lighter, and a pack of cigarettes. Two people could actually have a civilized conversation here … as long as they didn’t try to move to another part of the apartment. That includes the kitchen, which belongs to the cats, my coffee cups, and whatever seems to periodically migrate there from my car, more or less in that order.

What am I talking about? No – the worst part is leaving my feline children – or, more accurately, their complete emotional melt-down prior to my departure. No mater how well you plan, how gradually you time the pre-departure organization (which in my case means cramming most of it into the final hours before the taxicab arrives), no matter how well you disguise the packing, there comes a moment when they just go completely haywire and then shut down altogether. (The critical moment sems to be when one of the larger bags either begins to fill up or gets moved closer to the front door.) There are no magic words to say to make them come around (although calling them to a final breakfast or dinner can have a momentary distracting effect) – except perhaps, “Alright, I’ll stay.” But then what? Even if the party of the first (or second) part secretly wants to stay – against her better interests, forsaking duty or obligations, or worse, opportunity for discovery, for pleasure – it’s always awkward. It devolves into a kind of mental shut-down. It’s cozy – a little too cozy – for a few minutes; and then it’s scary. Okay, kids – we’re back in Kansas – we never bothered going to Oz – land of the bleak and home of the gray.

The Kansas, of course, is simply in your mind – but you don’t escape it just by pulling the comforter over your (and your cats’) head(s). Though sometimes it seems as if you have to tear yourself apart to purge it from your system. You rip yourself to shreds, take incalculable losses – throw so much out – to find one fresh, new thing; one kernel of genius, one point of light in the churning sea of darkness.

It’s that delicate balance between hope and desperation.

The losses: well, you can start totting them up the instant you leave home. Half-way to the airport (running LATE!) and you’re already missing something – forget about its readiness for the caregivers. Then the curbside jostling; the rush to the airline counter, baggage check; the careering to the security screening.

Oh yes – the security screening. Well go ahead – screen and screen again. I have no idea why, but no matter how heavy or light I travel, the screening process is not a two tray, not three tray, but a virtual train of trays down that mysterious conveyer belt, in which something (occasionally something important) gets left behind or lost. I am invariably ‘wanded’ (with some electronic scanning device – believe me, it’s no fairy’s touch), prodded, patted down, occasionally probed, and all but asked to disrobe. What is it? The personal jewelry? The scarves? Okay – I wear a lot; but as for the scarves, it’s winter time, I need a couple of woolies around my neck. As for the jewelry, I admit to a certain amount of jewelry build-up – but I’m sure there’s a little something in my arteries by now, too. This time, the ‘agent’ insisted I ‘fold over’ my pants (what – to check for suspicious lingerie? – I knew I should have worn La Perla!). I started to unzip – I mean, I don’t care at this point; I’m in a frantic hurry and trying to monitor seven trays of stuff, including my shoes and a laptop – and she says, “You don’t have to unzip completely, just let me have a look underneath.” (Gee, have I ever used a line like that?) “Honey, these pants are skin-tight. You can’t get more than a finger down there unless I unzip – though you’re welcome to try.” She had her look and sent me running back to my trays.

It’s now been well over seven years since the Twin Towers fell. Guantanamo is scheduled to close within a year; the State Department seems to be reassuming its traditional imperatives after eight years of deferring to the Defense Department-spear-chuckers; and we have a new acutely intelligent, rational and determined President, with an equally focused and determined administration behind him. Hillary Clinton, George Mitchell and a host of other diplomats are flying over the world trying to administer acute first aid to our damaged foreign relations. You’d think traveling would get just a LITTLE easier – wouldn’t you? Or you might think, given our newly rational leadership, they might work out some new, rational form of passenger profiling – having nothing to do with the net for potential terrorists – but making it somewhat easier for the rest of us to pass through the security gauntlet that makes even domestic travel such a nightmare. By now I’m sure the people at LAX and Burbank know my personal jewelry and repertoire of scarves as well as their own stuff. Sometimes I think the only way to do it now is to prepack some plastic trays with all the personal stuff, and head to the airport in nothing but a trench coat (maybe with a bodystocking underneath) and just get dressed there. Chances are, they’re going to see it all anyway. I hope someone can address this at the federal level. It’s getting ridiculous. And I’m about to miss my goddamned flight.

Oh yeah – and I’m missing my earrings – the only ones I brought.

Well here I go.

[ps – I’ll bring you up to date on some of my L.A. notes from the last month, soon – promise.]

Fresh Holes in the Universe and a Baroque Resurgence (I)

2009-02-01T16:12:00.000-08:00

11 January – 31 January 2009

As I was saying …. Well, gee, is anyone really surprised Slumdog Millionaire swept the Globes? The only people who might have been surprised are those Hollywood-political types whose idea of a bankable movie is either something that might have played well as a made-for-television movie circa the 1970s or something likely to play well as a video game for the next couple of years, and/or the people who haven’t seen the movie. What passes for a Hollywood ‘establishment’ or its tattered remains – which seems to be mostly agency or agency packaging people – wouldn’t know a bankable script from a licensing agreement – or maybe an oil change. As long as the machine runs – might as well be their pathetic motto. It was also gratifying to see Mickey Rourke honored for his performance in The Wrestler. The Globe writers, editors and critics got it: ‘attention must be paid.’ I think it was also acknowledged in the daily press that both of these films were studio independent division projects that were nearly shunted off to television or video before finally getting distribution deals. Not to dismiss games – but this is the future of film (or digital or whatever) theatrical entertainment; and for the studios to take a cavalier or dismissive attitude towards the independents is sheer lunacy.

So where were we – oh yes, painting. Surprisingly painterly painting – in the midst of what might be Little House on the Prairie-Land (à la that Nara YNG Conestoga at Blum & Poe) or might be closer to the Kierkegaardian fear-and-trembling-and-sickness-unto-death terrain evoked in Valérie Favre’s brilliant show at Suzanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Come to think of it, the two might have a bit in common on that level. The work Favre showed evinced two distinct strains – one a kind of cartoon-ish emblematic yet fluid scrawl – think Ludwig Bemelmans (you do remember Madeline, don’t you? – in a similar blowsy sort of yellow, at that) in a kind of Sarah Kane-ish 4.48 Psychose setting (is this what we can expect the contemporary Madeline to grow up to?); the other a more expansive, quasi-narrative – almost lyrical -- and dazzlingly chromatic. There is an element of Doig here (but of course, also the Leipzig school, though no painter in that group shows a singular influence – Favre is entirely her own artist) – but more immersed, submerged – a sunken (not saturated) world caught on the surface. The palette is Bonnard-like – in the full Bonnard mature-to-late intensity of luminous purples and oranges relieved by verdigris and paler blues – notwithstanding the use of yellows and the mossy greens that fill out some of her quasi-narrative panels. I see I’ve used the ‘quasi-narrative’ descriptive twice, so let me explain. First of all, there is no explanation, nor for that matter a narrative; but there is certainly the suggestion of conflict, possibly mortal combat (e.g., ‘pugilists’ penned in a ‘boxing ring’), a ‘grim reaper’s’ scythe; a sense of simultaneous ascent and descent; a sense of overreach (that may parallel Favre’s own transparent ambition here), implosion, explosion (more little bunnies flaming out) – in other words, the mythological. There is a baroque quality to some of these paintings that is far from accidental. Mythological subjects are taken up in a great deal of late Renaissance and Baroque painting – with many other subjects treated as if they were mythic. (Who can say whether they lived up to it in actuality? In the paintings, they are mythic.) Oh – one more thing. At the opening, I overheard more than one viewer remarking on Gerhard Richter being an “influence.” Well, maybe and what of it? I’m as big a fan as anyone; but can we just get over Richter for a minute? Let’s face it: Richter is an influence on almost all contemporary European painting (and probably American, too). Favre’s work can stand on its own two(?) flaming bunny feet. It may be the best painting in town right now.

George Stoll’s show is by now long closed – and in any case, it was more than adequately noticed by the local press (well, ‘adequate’ may be stretching it – though my scan of Hunter Drohowska-Philp’s gave me some background on Stoll that I never really knew. I knew he’d had a Prix de Rome fellowship or something at the American Academy, but had no idea he’d spent so much time there). In any case, I thought the notices I saw (Christopher Knight in the L.A. Times and Hunter Drohowska-Philp’s (somewhere on-line – maybe the gallery sent it to me) were both fairly thoughtful. It’s no secret among my pals that I rather like Stoll’s work – he has a wry, ironic, almost wistful touch with, you might say, the paradox of life and art – not just its intimate, yet frequently paradoxical relationship, but the paradox of its continuity; its stream of ephemera – that sometimes make for something more than ephemeral – and its endurance, its persistence. Stoll intrigues – with his sensitivity to the gravity of what in outward appearance seems light, the sense of how one thing might stand for something quite different than what it superficially ‘says’ or ‘announces’; the sense of what is hidden or held or contained in forms both fanciful and more or less straightforward or generic. (I always have the feeling that Duchamp’s ball of twine, “With Hidden Noise” must have spoken to him in the most direct and personal way.) Stoll has worked with ‘Halloween’ themes before; but I thought it was interesting for Drohowska-Philp to point out an implicit reference in the Lightbox show to the Roman catacombs. Also Knight’s reference (or am I confusing it with something else?) to Baroque ‘vanitas’ – those gesso ice-cream breasts melting away into soupy oblivion (like my own ‘pre-molten’ pair??).

I’m not sure if it’s the impending inauguration of one of the most authentic individuals ever to assume the Presidency (and not a split second too soon), or the skyrocketing unemployment or imploding world economy, but – to judge from the arts and culture calendar alone – melt-down of one sort or another seems to be on almost everyone’s mind lately. You see the extreme rationalism cheek-to-jowl with a kind of (refreshingly) ideology- and religion-free spiritualism. What to call it? ‘Baroque Obama’? I’m only half-kidding. Without trying to comment directly on recent art market activity, it’s very hard to predict what is moving (in all senses), where the focus or emphasis is now or where it should be – I’m not sure that verb ever really applies; but on the other hand it’s a reflection of the real state of emergency we’re left in after almost eight full years of the Bush/Cheney state of emergency.

I’m not trying to make a case for the relevance of the L.A. art world, to say nothing of my odd peregrinations through it; but let’s just say I can find myself struck by that sort of dual resonance in the oddest places – art galleries included. The other night [January 10], I previewed Lester Monzon’s show at Kinkead Contemporary, an abstractionist whose work seems to be evolving with some sensitivity to this febrile climate around us. At one point a year or more ago, I would have simply viewed him as an abstractionist of a certain, uh, stripe – or grid or – you get the idea – not uninteresting, but nowhere close to the level of complexity he’s dealing with now. It would be radically over-simplifying to see this kind of painting as emerging from the pixelations of digital media, though certainly that is alluded to. But even within the underlying grids, stripes, checkerboard squares, roundels or, well, pixels, if you will – the color scheme is rigorously controlled – its own fabric (I mean that almost literally – it gives the impression of a textile weave) or manicured fields (dare I say landscape?) of brilliant yet subtle color gradients. Out of what might already be an interesting painting on its vivid yet restrained surface, a more painterly chaos erupts – though I’ve already exaggerated by using the word ‘chaos.’ Yet it’s almost impossible to resist the notion, given the control and restraint beneath. Is it simply the same tug-of-war of order and entropy? Order bleeding, if not exactly breeding chaos. Easier to look at it as a kind of painterly event that erupts or oozes from the not-so-randomly section of canvas (or linen). There is of course nothing random about it at all. The events, the brush-strokes, however sweeping or halting, seem, if not composed, then certainly choreographed. And so we’re back to a gestural style of abstraction – except that the old terminology – at least in this new context – doesn’t seem to apply. The gesture – signifying? towards? and how do we receive it? Or perceive it? And it’s not as if entirely floats free of this weave, this ground beneath it. Or does it – and where does it move the viewer?

Lester’s made something a bit more open-ended here – yet tethered to these brilliant swatches of an idiosyncratically manicured world – or maybe just the rods and cones of our eyes. It will be interesting to see where he moves these pieces of the seen and felt world – just as it’s already interesting turning and pivoting these pieces about in one’s mind.

It’s not a bad place to start from – the warp and woof (or whatever you call it) of an increasingly inter-woven – and pillaged – world we seem to have inherited. Lisa Adams similarly starts somewhere at the intersection of natural and constructed worlds – both in the most plural sense possible: the pillaged and polluted world; the natural world – or at least its invocation – of humanity, the biosphere; and the world reconstructed, transfigured, in imagination, in art. Adams titles her current exhibition at the Lawrence Asher Gallery (which I checked out the evening following the Monzon preview), after one of her paintings, The Future of Paradise Past, conveying its acute consciousness of that pillaged and polluted world which is our plundered legacy. The eponymous panel gives a literal sense of this hole in the universe – a ‘bird’s head’ opening to sheer sky around which quail-like birds repose or simply float. It is a deliberately floating, isolated, not so much mis-shapen as hybrid, universe – the physical world as re-built, re-written, re-embroidered as if the artist were projecting her own private Lhasa – the kind of Lost Horizon you might just as easily find outside your kitchen window as at the top of the Himalayas. (Mere coincidence that a pagoda (or a birdhouse??) looms out of Adams’ painterly blocks of acid yellows, whites, moss greens? – here surmounted by a red cardinal who seems to weave a mask out of a string in its beak. (The title: “After the Deluge.” Coincidence?? My guess is, no.) Elsewhere, filigree vines are fashioned variously into weaving parabolae, arches, necklaces or simply sentinels in twilight tones of storm-gray, flaming coral, lapis blues, and sullied cloud-whites – variously broken down into the suggestion of an incipient grid or simply swept across the panel. Funny, too, how, notwithstanding felicitously rendered birds and blossoms, the filigree vine can segue from seeming embellishment to something akin to barbed wire. You thought irony was dead? Tell that to Lisa Adams. This is a show replete with irony – but I mean that as a compliment. How else to get through something like what we’re clearly on the brink of?

Any more inaugural notes?? This seems something of a departure for Adams. It’s a mordant and, as I said, heavily ironic, show. I would have to guess this rather elegiac tone comes as much from where she’s standing right now in her life. But, how different is it for any of us here in L.A., to say nothing of the more benighted corners of the world? I’m looking forward to the celebrations in a week or so. But I have a feeling we can expect a few similarly sobering, cautionary notes from the 44th. This is a pretty terrific show.

[MORE TO COME]

Happy New World Order

2009-01-11T13:52:00.000-08:00

28 December 2008 – 11 January 2009

Happy New Year. I want to say ‘Happy New York’ – even though I’m here in L.A. There’s no snow on the ground here – but the weather has been uncharacteristically chilly (as low as freezing); and a glance to the east or northeast shows plenty of snow in the mountains. The ski resorts are busy.

No – I haven’t died – though obviously many have – in addition to my late pal, Gregory. It could justly be said that I was in mourning for a while – but not quite this long, notwithstanding the recent deaths of Harold Pinter and Eartha Kitt – whom I truly mourn – Pinter’s death only a few months after his near-peer, Simon Gray (Butley, Otherwise Engaged) whom I truly loved. Kitt’s death took me by surprise – she was so alive, so indefatigable, even battling cancer. Only a year ago, she was shaking the rafters of the Café Carlyle with her performance.

As I said, I may have been a bit sad, a bit down (and more than a little overworked until the last month or so), but it’s not like I haven’t been out and about. I have – most recently at the movies. (What – you were thinking, uh, a gallery? The opera? A recital (almost – I’ve missed a couple recently)?) Yeah yeah yeah – saw the Dumas (Measuring Your Own Grave – since closed), Kippenberger, Index (a truly excellent show of conceptual work – almost all of it culled from MOCA’s fine permanent collection), Louise Bourgeois – and I might as well add the museum-quality Raymond Pettibon show of recent work that was up at Regen Projects II. Yes, of course they’re all worth seeing. But so what? Allow me to first recommend, almost without qualification, The Wrestler, the new Darren Aronofsky film (from a script by former Onion editor Robert D. Siegel), with a searing, absolutely fearless, peerless, balls-out, no-holds-barred performance by Mickey (where has he been???) Rourke, that in and of itself takes the film to that ‘next’ (do we call it masterpiece?) level, a performance that all but screams bloody for an Academy Award nomination, if not the Oscar itself. The supporting performances are equally strong, even, to some extent by non-professionals that (as I understand it) Aronofsky used to fill in this very realistic human landscape. The sensibility – even the way it’s shot – very cinéma-verité – a lot of tracking shots and close-in work with what looks like a good deal of hand-held work – in a very grainy-color that looks almost as if it were deliberately shot in hi-def video and transferred to film (though I’m sure there are other ways the effect might have been obtained) is almost Burroughs-ian – though, dare I say it, with lots of heart. It’s all of us there scrutinized under that deli counter glass, as Randy the Ram serves us up a heaping platter of our own flesh and blood. The direction and performances wring pathos from every scene, every shot. It is at a pitch that, given different material or context, might risk being called pandering, but nothing panders in this film. It is the stuff of life pushed right up into the lens: the negotiation between life and individual identity; the construction (and deconstruction) of an individual identity and its integration or disintegration – or even cannibalization – into the fabric of life as it’s collectively, continuously negotiated, constructed, and reconstructed. Every moment counts, everything is at risk.

The supporting performances are equally strong. Marisa Tomei is simply over-the-top magnificent – a multi-layered performance no less down-to-the-ground, down-to-the-bone than Rourke’s. (And why not? They both play performers and parents. And Tomei’s body, I might add, is as perfect as ever.) Evan Rachel Wood is perfect as Randy’s estranged daughter. She wears the face of tragedy that all but stands in for what goes to black-out at the film’s end. Okay – you get the point – I liked the movie. (What I think I’m really a bit awestruck by is the script: how do you go from the Onion to this? Where did someone like Siegel get this stuff?)

Speaking of the everything at risk, every moment counting (and everything turning to shit) style of film-making, you could say that style merges with subject in the pyrotechnic hands of Danny Boyle, with his coruscating, scarifying, and yes, shit-drenched, roller-coaster of a movie, Slumdog Millionaire – the picaresque fairy-tale of a chai-wallah’s unlikely ascendance to fortune and fame in that super-rich, ultra high-tech island that is affluent India floating over the sea of mostly human shit that is also India and that threatens to inundate its dazzling centers (one potent political aspect of which was driven home vividly with the terrorist pillaging of the Taj Mahal and Oberoi Intercontinental Hotels at Mumbai’s center). I was complaining at some point last year about the relative poverty, the paltriness of certain ‘theme-ride’ mechanical movies (and even the latest Bond movie disappointed). Boyle has somehow managed to breathe life into this genre. How? By going back to the simplest kind of theme and story, the simplest kind of structure – and using every tool in the director’s and cinematographer’s toolbox to wring suspense, drama and comic irony from every cliff-hanging moment. Apart from its particular kaleidoscopic dazzle, what is most original about the movie is the way Boyle exploits that tension of the palace or temple of gold and alabaster floating on an ocean of shit. Salvation here is predicated on the immolation that rages all around the haloed hero and heroine – the ‘princess’ rescued twice, as it happens, from the ‘mud’ (the redeemed idealism; also evoked by Jamal’s rejection of the craven host’s attempted trick (or trap) multiple choice answer). Immolation (or inundation) is the common destiny – rendering the notion of salvation absurd or at best transitory. I have no idea if the screenwriters (Simon Beaufoy is credited with the script – which is based on a novel by Vikas Swarup) were consciously exploiting the particularly vile art direction of the Indian version of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? – which is astonishingly faithful to the American original – but the filmmakers make the most of this crucible – that fascist architecture of light and steel, the focused lanterns and super-trouper beams constantly raised and lowered and all but pinning the contestant like the hapless insect he is. The fairy tale payoff of faith and love triumphant is simply the shimmering curtain Boyle brings down on his own magician’s bag of tricks – an infectious homage to Bollywood song-and-dance that made me resolve to ditch European designers in favor of the frothiest Indian sari style for the new year. (Okay, maybe not.)

Okay – so much for movies (Jeeeeeezus – whatever you do don’t see Good; it’s soooooooo BAD!). Back to ‘stills’ (but are they ever really?). Believe it or not, I found the Yoshitomo Nara show at Blum and Poe very intriguing. Seductive – and I don’t mean the slightly Keane-esque aspect he’s given some of his urchins’ eyes. If the uncanny subversion of these nascent-apache Zazies is what draws us in (and I confess I’m still a sucker for it), it’s the painting that holds our gaze – that moves our eyes up and down the figure – the end result of painstaking glazing, scraping, re-glazing and re-scraping that produces that particular mottled yet immaculate ‘skin’-surface of the painting. There’s something uncannily pure and meditative about it – which puts another spin altogether on these smug (or simply quizzical) little mugs. An ‘environment’ (like a mini-studio or office in a wagon) lets the viewer in on the very impure genesis of this not-quite-alien species of art (and street – or at least school) life.

[MORE (much) TO COME]

The Last Wave Good-Bye

2008-09-09T06:14:00.000-07:00

8 September 2008

Seven nights or so ago, Gregory Poe left our company. My beloved Gregory Poe – I’m not sure if he ever made an appearance in this blog, under his own name or under some made-up monicker (something I occasionally do here). He was not ‘officially’ of the ‘art world’, though he certainly had an abiding interest, indeed a passion for it. And a great eye for it – or just about anything that touched the aesthetic realm. Or out of that ‘realm’ – meaning life. Gregory was one of those people, who for all their immersion in the world of art and the aesthetic (including design and style, generally), understood the difference between the two and was wise enough to choose life every time. Yes, wise – in spite of his own flaws and some foolish decisions, which he usually managed to see clearly amid many, many problems, difficulties, adversities enough to challenge anyone’s faith in life or art. Wise almost in spite of himself – he seemed to vanquish cynicism with his own cynical sensibility. Even in the fog of physical pain, depression, and (yes) drug dependency, he had a certain clarity that could cut through it all. He had no patience for anything less – from himself as much as anyone else.

Our ‘company’ – you were always on your best with Gregory – or you certainly tried to be. I make it sound a bit as if he were leaving a small party; and maybe that applies. You knew a party had already peaked when Gregory was about to leave. It was more or less, “Okay – yeah.” (Done this, seen that, made my point – the ‘point’, however subtle, however nuanced, always trenchant, even emphatic.) For someone who understood the social context as well and as deeply as Jane Austen and Joan Didion – especially L.A.’s – it’s hardly surprising that he knew how to navigate it. Gregory was famous for his own parties – some of them pretty big. (Gregory’s natural working environment might be the couture studio or the fashion runway, but I always thought the most natural habitat for him, at least here in L.A., was the rooftop of the Chateau Marmont.) And with Gregory you always felt as if you were at the hip center of the best, hippest party in town.

I should add that being on your best was less about how you looked (though, given Greg’s acute and encompassing gaze, it could hardly be overlooked) than what you presented – an idea, a story, an original voice, a line (in any sense), even a riff. It was all about the improvisation, the dance, the conversation. Greg loved jazz and jazz singers; and I think that was far from coincidental. Start anywhere (a blues line – or just a blue line – would be just fine) and see where it took you; see where and with what (or in what) you might end up. At the same time, the sensualist in Greg could not help but be aware of ‘key’, ‘choreography’, shape, texture and tactility, composition, architecture. He consumed it all voraciously and returned it back in full as story, performance (yes – even over the phone – a kind of performance; no one who knew him, especially in L.A., will forget some of those telephone conversations), his work. You could almost say that Greg’s working method involved a similar aesthetic immersion. His genius was an uncanny blend of the cerebral and the tactile or sensual.

Genius. It’s not a word I use lightly; and I would be hard pressed to give an example of one of his creations that represented a crystallization or culmination of that genius. (I have no doubt, though – especially if I went back through archives of his years designing in Japan – that I would find something worthy of this description. There was so much that was amazing on its own terms.) Nevertheless, there was an audacity to Greg’s creativity, his vision that at its strongest, at its best, was akin to genius.

Some years ago I began to notice a type of street fashion that I described to one editor as a kind of bricolage – something that might have evolved out of grunge or similar tendencies, but far more individual, refined and with a far broader range of affect; and it occurs to me that Greg was a kind of bricoleur of couture and style long before the term even had much currency in the art world, much less the world of fashion and style-making. I wouldn’t exactly call what Greg did couture povera (though as I write this, I’m thinking Greg would find this worth a giggle); but, just as there was nothing in the aesthetic realm that escaped his notice, there was nothing in the world at large, however humble or luxurious, that he might not seize upon as material. Greg was the perpetual ‘daft – and deft – punk.’ It was no accident that his star emerged as punk began to crest. The aesthetic he created – at first in accessories that were seen at that hip mecca of the time, Fiorucci – was both one version of it and a retort to it that could have only originated in L.A. or southern California. (It was a viewpoint or aesthetic that began to be consolidated for a time in the magazine Wet. I remember going to the Opening Ceremony store here in L.A. for the first time, and, seeing the old Wet magazines scattered about the décor, having a sense of homecoming. I knew I had to bring Greg there. Once upon a time, Gregory would have sold his fashion lines there.) Our friend, Carla Weber, put her finger on Gregory’s working method brilliantly, I thought, at his wake just yesterday afternoon, drawing a bead on days spent working, watching movies hanging out, and all but losing (or finding) oneself in the hilarity of his conversation. “His output was massive, and fun and silly and naïve and glorious and absolutely sophisticated.”

It would be impossible to put one’s finger on Gregory’s particular creative spark, but somehow, out of this cocktail of conceptual guile and naiveté, he managed to synthesize something entirely original, provocative and on the pulse. It had to do with being open to inspiration from anything and anywhere – movies, music, the endless conversation, the moment. Carla says it far better than I can: “He kept you laughing, entertaining you with his beautiful, ludicrous vision and yet creating an intimacy that was highly intoxicating.” Yes. (I’m thinking of Gregory as the close friend he was now – that moment when, having disarmed you utterly with some amazing story – a ‘fractured flicker’ of the real and surreal in one sublimely told anecdote – he would touch down to earth and quietly elicit our own dark secrets and intimacies.) Carla again: “[H]e was excellent at not just dissecting people, but human nature in all its glorious vulnerability.”

Gregory’s talent as a raconteur partook, yet almost stood apart from his design gifts. I’m not sure I would go as far as Carla, who said the other day, “His capacity to create a new language from the English language was hilarious.” But I know what she means. It was that volatile synthesis of verbal and visual. Greg had the story-telling talent of a film-maker, and by that I mean a great film-maker. (The comparison that comes to mind most readily is Billy Wilder – especially in his Paramount collaborations with Charles Brackett. Greg could have written Foreign Affair – or maybe his own updated version. Another is Preston Sturges. I think of conversations I had with Greg – at bars, openings, after-parties, even on the phone – that could have been entire scenes out of Sturges movies.) No coincidence either that his knowledge of film was exhaustive. And, though he designed costumes for several films, it was a pity he didn't do more. He had an almost innate sense of story arc; and his comic timing was sui generis. (Move over – WAAAAYYY over – Andy Kaufman – and a million others. Greg as a newly minted angel: “Hey, YOU – all hundred of you – get off of MY cloud.”) He knew how to build the story, the moment, then throw it away. At his best it was almost breath-taking. (Maybe you’re right, Carla.)

And of course there’s the musical side to that gifted timing – and I think a bit of Oscar Levant. We were both fans; and I think somewhere at the surly, cynical edge of Greg’s wit was something that descends from the Levantine line. I remember my first encounter with Gregory (at the old Studio Grill on Santa Monica Boulevard across from Trader Joe’s), followed not long thereafter by a telephone conversation – a rundown (in every sense) of local design talent, each thumbnail sketch more scathing and hilarious than the last. (I was co-editing a special issue of L.A. Weekly at the time.) Greg’s telephone narrative could almost have been published verbatim (and probably should have, now that I think of the problems we had putting that issue together). By the time we put the issue to bed, Greg was on his way back to Japan; but I made a mental note to stay in touch, and somehow we did.

Gregory was formidable then. I can’t imagine what kind of impression I could have made at the time. My VERY brief jag of dressing in boutique or designer threads had long since passed and I felt lucky to have a nice pair of shoes on my feet. (Maybe it was the shoes.) But then, as Carla has noted many times, there was beneath that edge, that temperament (and boy did Greg have a temper) and genius, a fundamental humanity in touch with an entire spectrum of human nature. I was always amazed at how well Gregory – haut-bourgeois, Beverly Hills boy that he was to his core – could relate to everyone and anyone. Over the years, that surf samurai stance began to give way to something not quite so hard-edged and perhaps a bit vulnerable. Gregory was vulnerable. He stood up to the corporate Establishment as it was then arrayed in his industry and was tsunamied right back down. He picked himself up, of course, and took his surfboard back to L.A. But L.A., a city he loved and knew better than anyone I know, could also be the fabled City of Nets to its native son – something that Greg in his infinite cynicism could undoubtedly see through; yet he was repeatedly stymied by its upsets and betrayals. To look at the profusion of surf- and skate-wear lines here, to say nothing of elements seen in contemporary design everywhere from New York to Milan, is to see the remnants of a hundred design careers Greg might have had.

Greg and I never really discussed that local brand of shmatte – the kind of surf- and skate-wear that’s a drug on the market these days – at any length, though it’s impossible to ignore his enormous influence. Regardless of its ‘artistic’ embellishments, it would seem so passé, almost irrelevant in the context of Gregory’s own work and overall perspective. I can just imagine his withering assessment: e.g., ‘How THIRTY years ago – which was, fortunately, NOT the Sixties.’

He could still look fierce (he was fierce). Every once in a while, especially when it rained, he would wear a leatherette hood that looked like the sort of headgear a Roman Catholic prelate of the Late Renaissance or the Baroque might wear – on the battlefield or in the torture chambers of the Inquisition. He made one think of a Medici or Barberini cardinal or pope (in or out of the Bacon-esque blur). About a year ago, after undergoing a long (and long overdue) rehabilitation for his long-standing chemical dependencies, he emerged healthier than he’d been for more than a decade, but nevertheless delicate, still clearly in recovery. It would be a long road back to full health. Now his look took on something gentler, almost saintly (especially in those quiet moments that, to those of us who knew him well, signaled something more alarming, perhaps deadly, than it looked – the absolute exhaustion of his patience: ‘I’m going to suffer your idiocy for another 15 seconds and then I’m going to have to blow your head off, darling.’). How would Bacon have rendered Saint Jerome? I wonder.

It is almost too ironic that Greg’s latest design line was to be a line of urns and funerary objects (the designs I saw before his death were fantastic) – an irony Greg would of course have been the first to appreciate. But the cruelty of Greg being cut down on the eve of his third act is almost too much to bear at the moment. One season ends and another begins and it almost feels unseemly that Greg’s passing should be lost in this tumult (to say nothing of the distractions of politics). Or perhaps we’re just trying to find his voice, hear it again clearly in that confusion of sights and sounds. Only a few evenings ago, I was chatting with Mary Woronov, another close mutual friend, and we were trying to locate, recapture something of that voice, wit, that way of telling a story – something that between the two of us (or maybe three or four) we might, in theory, be able to do. We couldn’t come close.

Another mutual friend rang up to say, "Wow -- this is really going to blow a hole in your life." He wasn't kidding; but I'm in -- well, good company: Mary, Carla, Pat Loud, Robbie Cavolina, among others; and, it goes without saying, his brother, Jeff -- the Poe of Blum and Poe -- as formidable as a sibling as he is in that global province we call the art world. No one loved his brother as well as Jeff.

There was laughter as well as tears at Greg’s wake; but – you couldn’t help but think – not as much as there would have been if Greg had been there. It’s a cliché to mourn the passing of youth and laughter in the wake of an untimely passing; but there was a kind of joie and verve, spontaneity and effervescence that seemed to pass before us and into the shadows, despite the afternoon’s lambent sunlight. I thought of the end of a book I had recently finished in a jag of research for a pitch – Nancy Mitford’s biography of the Marquise de Pompadour. Mitford’s description of Pompadour’s final recessional goes as follows:

“[The King] watched the Marquise as she went back up the long Avenue de Paris; in the bitter wind he stood there without coat or hat until she was out of sight. Then he turned away, tears pouring down his cheeks. ‘That is the only tribute I can pay her.’

“After this a great dullness fell upon the Château of Versailles.”

After Gregory’s passing, a great dullness seemed to fall upon the aquamarine skies of Los Angeles.

Sweet flipping bird

2008-09-02T00:00:00.000-07:00

1 September 2008

Where does a wild woman go?* Well look – I don’t call it awol for nothing. You want a story? Let’s see: I was doing corporate espionage in Prague and Budapest. Or was it just Prague? Or Buda? Or Pest? (Not an unlikely scenario when you think about it – assuming one of the people involved was divorce litigant, no? Kidding. Seriously – kidding.) I was pirating (legal) substances between Spain and Morrocco. But that took all the fun out of it, right? Like you need to have MORE FUN in Spain?? But then Fez – not necessarily about FUN, right? But I really don’t know anything beyond Barcelona and Casablanca. Seriously. (Oh jesus if you only knew who I sounded like right now.) I was held hostage by Robert Wilson’s minions at the Water Mill in Southampton. Or was it just a toxic reaction to that Botox blitz after a multi-magnum Champagne OD in some designer’s digs in Montauk? Or Malibu? Return to the Chateau. Marmont.

No – the closest I got to Barcelona this summer was via Woody Allen and Vicky Cristina. Disappointing but delicious anyway. My immobility puts a new spin on the stay-cation concept altogether. Oh I’m getting around a bit – but it’s exhausting – I’m not sure which is more – the fuel prices or just the endless driving (it would be so nice to have a driver in this town ). I’ve been out a bit – films (well it’s summer; you know you’re going to go to some movies even if they’re bad), performances, new music, the usual action in the museums and galleries. There’ve been a few interesting group shows around town (e.g., Circus, Fette; a nice sculpture show at Western Project). I haven’t been to the Conceptualism show at MOCA yet; but seems as if it would be a great follow-up to the Lawrence Weiner show that closed a month or so ago. But the last few nights have been mostly about politics. Thursday was officially Barack’s night – in L.A. as well as Denver; but so was Sunday afternoon. My genius producer pals Jane Cantillon and Richard Ross, who have lately reincarnated themselves as a nightclub act (so much more entertaining than your garden-variety superhero/heroine), threw a benefit together in their beautiful garden and raised a small truckload of money for Obama. I suppose that means for the U.S.A. – since the Bush administration have put a whole new perverse spin on the “Ask not what your country can do for you;” concept. They’ve made it pretty clear that that a Republican government is not going to be doing anything for anyone or any part of this country outside the wealthiest .25 percent or the oil/energy or military industrial sectors. Am I hopeful? It’s too early to ask. But at least it makes me feel less exhausted.

Oh who am I kidding? If I were any more exhausted, I’d be something like Alexandra del Lago in Sweet Bird of Youth – “Oxygen. Oxygen!” – trying to connect with my inhaler. (“Who are you? I don’t know you.”) Gee, isn’t that an appropriate metaphor for life in Los Angeles? Trying to stay connected to that creative spark without blowing up the hotel room. Trying to connect to the inhaler or oxygen mask. Just trying to breathe. It gets a little overwhelming.

Or maybe just exasperating. I’m not the most patient person around. Certainly not at 9:00 in the morning. (My father says it’s just our DNA – of which mine is a particularly defective specimen.) Which is around the time I was flipping through the latest W Magazine this past Saturday morning. What can I say? It’s that time of the year, kids (I almost typed ‘ids’ – I guess that would apply, too). No, no, no – I’m so past the shmatte – no patience for that, either (and goddess knows, no money for it). But…. well, there’s always something in les modes, no? Whether it’s some jacket in pink-satin that looks like a cross between a bed-jacket and a life-preserver, or some bauble that looks like a prosthetic or silicone implant. (Okay, I’m looking for something, uh, new, okay??) Or – I don’t know – I’ve gotta figure out some way to look, no? And then there’s the terrific photography. Fabulous editorial spread by Juergen Teller, featuring that terrific actress and human work of art, Tilda Swinton. (You thought I was going to say, Björk, huh?) A couple of others -- two Kates -- by the team of Mert Alas and Marcus Piggot -- Hudson (new and improved); Moss -- same-old and fabulous). Of course, this being that time of year, as I said, they're also going to throw some art and culture at us, and of course they do. Tara Donovan -- show coming up, great studio, great new house in Brooklyn; Philippe de Montebello -- getting ready to retire, not exactly someone making the rounds in Chelsea every week, but a class act nonetheless; Liza Lou -- show coming up (at L&M), colonizing the bead craft work force of Durban, South Africa to build her over-sized lunatic baubles. (Come to think of it, it would almost make sense as jewellery.)

Yeah -- did anyone else read that? It was too early in the morning for the adrenaline to start flowing. In the hour or two before cocktails, believe me I would have been seeing stars -- no need for Ms. Lou's sparklers, thank you. As if there hasn't been enough ink spilled over her sorry ass -- we have to have a full color spread documenting her exploitation for the sake of kitsch on a grand scale? On a fascist scale. Make no mistake about it -- this kitsch Guantanamo in fiberglass, crystal and bugle beads -- in no way transfigures its grim subject. It's just a Disney-fied monument to fetish. As if her being awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant wasn't enough to make you throw up. And the writer's (Christopher Bagley) studied neutrality gets to be a bit much.

Lou tries to answer her critics and just digs herself a deeper hole. "It's summing up someone's lifework as a mental oddity.... What's far more frightening for people is to consider the possibility that I'm completely aware of what I'm doing." Yes -- it is a lifework as "mental oddity"; and yes, her awareness of what she's doing makes it far more frightening." Her studio/workshop set-up sounds like a Jim Jones/People's Temple cult camp. Everything but the cyanide Kool-Aid, which I'm sure you'd be begging for at the end of a workday. If you didn't figure in the desert/heat and the overseers with the whips, you'd think the Egyptian slaves building the pyramids got a better deal. At least they were building an architectual monument, a wonder of the world. Lou's wage-slaves (and you can imagine what those wages probably are) are only building a monument to their master's fatuousness. (Robert Pincus-Whitten is quoted and it's hilarious -- and embarrassing, and damning -- in its absurdity: "There's that ambiguity between the extremely luxurious and the politically terrifying." Move over Damien Hirst -- let Liza Lou and Walt Disney show you how it's REALLY done. Did he get paid to write that? Or is he suffering from dementia?) And please don't even think about throwing that comparison with Late Antique or Renaissance mosaic work at me. Those artists and artisans may have worked like slaves, but they were artisans, not slaves, not piece-workers; cognizant of their important creative role in the great studios and workshops.

Setting aside the colonialism, the exploitation, even the not-so-latent fascism of the work -- it's just BAD. Lou is quoted as saying that in art school, "I was really hated for what I was doing." Are you sure YOU were hated, Liza? Maybe what was hated was just the work -- what you were doing. The rest of the pull-quote is "I was this strange little person, making things." Yeah -- you could say the same thing about the Unabomber. I could go on. There's sheer insanity in every paragraph -- presented entirely without comment, challenge, cross-examination or any qualification or analysis whatsoever by the apparently anesthetized reporter.

Enough. To think -- all those thousands of man- (or woman-)hours of drudgery and all those thousands of beaded and sequinned dresses all over the world that need repair -- including one or two in my closet. Can we talk about some real sparklers now? The healing kind -- brought to you by Shirley MacLaine. She calls it "Chakra Sky Jewelry." "Align your Spirit, Body, and Mind with sacred geometrical forms and healing colors of the rainbow that are imprinted with Chi energy." A priestess in the Rat Pack -- who knew? Oh, if they could see you now, honey. (What would Dino say???) You can't make this stuff up. Does Warren know about this? Why couldn't she just stick to acting and dancing? Or even writing. Honey, this time you've gone WAY too far out on that limb.

* The line (by Susan Tyrrell and Gregory Poe) is from Susan Tyrrell's one-woman show, My Rotten Life.

Champagne III -- Between the Ozone and the Carpet of Lights

2008-07-19T16:18:00.000-07:00

19 July 2008

I had a relatively quiet Bastille Day -- spent with, among others, L.A.'s Dopest and a small section of her posse at Il Buco and a few other pals at Vermont. But, after the fireworks of the week-end, I was ready to call it an early evening and dive back into (appropriately enough -- see below) War and Peace.

14 July 2008

That line below, of course, from the film, Boom, which was adapted by Tennessee Williams from his play, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. Flora ‘Sissy’ Goforth (Taylor), one of the ‘world’s richest women’ to inquiring writer/journalist/fortune-seeker or who-knows-what, Chris Flanders (Burton), who’s also known as an ‘angel of death’ because all the women he visits die soon after he leaves. Needless to say, Goforth/Taylor is not ‘going forth’, as she puts it, without one helluva fight. (I’ve gotta say, this is not a very good movie; but just writing those lines makes me want to see it again. What’s wrong with me? Frustrated Lautner-lust? PS – if the people involved with those Lautner house tours, including the hosts, wouldn’t mind, awol would love to come along – with Opera Buddy maybe? Or how about my Glam Gemini Genius collector pal (a/k/a, Marvellous (the Other) Marlene? I promise to be on my best behavior.)

By the way, before I skip on, what’s the deal with Lautner (in a zillion different texts I’ve come across recently – though not the catalog, which I haven’t seen yet) being referred to as a “little known” L.A. architect? Gee, that’s news to me. As compared to whom?? As far as I was aware, he’s been a fairly big name since I arrived on the scene here in Los Angeles some 20 years ago, at least in architectural circles. And of course, who could miss some of his more iconic houses from their many appearances in films and on broadcast television? Taschen of course now famously owns the famous Chemosphere house (ps – Benedikt, Angelika – perhaps we could have a chat up at the house about that book I should be writing for you. Big Kiss x 2.) (Oh no – am I beginning to sound like Edward (“Art Talk”) Goldman of KCRW? Please shoot me if that ever happens.)

Even before we got to the car, Opera Buddy was suddenly not feeling too well; and her dogs had to be walked before she could rest; so we parted at ACE. I had no sooner reached the elevator, though, when I was told they had stopped letting people up. I could understand that the galleries might be crowded (this was an ACE opening after all – which always attracts small cities of people, many of whom don’t ordinarily go to art openings), but it was before 10 p.m. and (as I was told initially) the opening didn’t officially begin until 8:00 p.m. Two hours would be a short time simply to take in this rather extensive and large-scale show – forget about the opening. But now I was told the opening was to close at 10 p.m. and no one would be admitted upstairs regardless how many came down. I almost gave up, but fortunately one of Doug’s lovely staffers came downstairs to rescue me. Security was heavy throughout the gallery, and I doubt I would have been able to make it beyond the first two galleries if not for the gallery staff and Pullen, herself, who, overheated and exhausted, was finally beginning to blow off steam and getting ready to go to the after-party at Luna Park.

As I indicated below, in part, the show is an outgrowth and extension of the Revolutionary Soldiers she presented through ACE at their photoLA booth in January. This was some of the strongest work seen at that fair – but what was interesting was how much darker some of these panels were, though, no differently from the brighter ones, also 3-layer Dura transparencies (as far as I am aware). Moving further into the galleries, though, we were suddently brought shockingly up to date – with close-up images of soldiers, some apparently wounded or languishing in various war-theatre settings – in bright vivid color. It only got stranger and more surreal as one moved through the cavernous galleries and as Pullen segued from wounded soldiers and battlefields to the weaponry itself, not excluding the microcosmic frontiers of warfare our brass were so apprehensive about in the lead-up to and initial invasion of Iraq. I’m talking about biological and chemical warefare. Transparencies of enlarged specimens of bacteria like anthrax glowed like surreal landscapes in their dark recessed spaces – subterranean, malevolent Miros – yet magnetic and compelling; dazzling in cerulean blues, cerises and glowing ambers. ACE was the perfect setting for a show – and it is a show – of this scale; but, no question about it, I’m going to have to re-visit it at a slightly more leisurely pace. There’s simply too much to see. I mean, this is almost a kind of surreal movie; and I had to wonder if this is a direction Pullen may be moving in. (She would not be alone, of course – consider Bruce Conner (may that genius rest in peace) or Julian Schnabel.) It is an enormous, almost visionary, undertaking of considerable historical as well as aesthetic sweep.

Pullen and her exhausted crew were already toasting with vodka shots before everyone was out of the gallery; and by the time she arrived at Luna Park, she was already coming apart a bit, with the release of what must have been an enormous burden of energy, angst and sheer physical tension from the exhausting ordeal of putting the show together and installing it that she had just come through. It was as if she had just come home from World War III and was overwhelmed by it all – the crushing agony of everything seen and done and the sudden emptiness of the safe place she suddenly found herself surrounded by. There were clearly a few issues to be addressed; but she was at that moment entirely unequipped to deal with them. After her triumph, she needed some reassurance; and I certainly hope she got it (and perhaps something to eat, too). There wasn’t too much I could add to the accolades besides, ‘Relax, Melanie – you won.'

Champagne II: Valium of the Dolls

2008-07-19T05:57:00.000-07:00

Late as always -- I'm posting these notes under a full moon (easily eclipsing Warner/Nolan's Dark Knight, I think, notwithstanding record grosses).

13-14 July 2008

Where was I? I make it sound (see below) as if Opera Buddy and I couldn’t wait to get away from the Fraser/Angstrom shows – but that’s not entirely true. In fact, the collector pal we were waiting for had already skipped over to the Hammer; and, aside from that shlep, we had quite a bit of ground to cover. (OB does tend to breeze through shows; but there were movies to see and dogs (2) to walk, so I think we can both be excused for pushing the pace a bit.) I have to say, we both enjoy the Fraser openings, which usually bring together a number of different contingents from L.A.’s art scene – from Honor’s own posse of artists (I think I’ve seen Rosson Crow at almost all the openings I’ve been to (including her own, natch), always looking smashing, whether done up as a Vegas chorine (as she was at her opening), or as her own glam self – in a charming pale sequined shift last night), to L.A. and visiting artists, to the scenesters, students and looky-loos (I guess that includes people like me), to the collectors. Honor brings out the collectors (e.g., Lenore and Herb Schorr – who were there last night, just as they had been to Honor’s Kristin Calabrese-curated group show last summer) because, between her curators and her own savvy pulse-taking of the Zeitgeist, she can usually be counted on to bring gallery audiences something both bracingly intelligent and just under the radar – stuff we may only be seeing for the first time, but find immediately compelling if not irresistible – in short what any serious collector of contemporary art is looking for. In other words – it’s a good party: the boldface names, known quantities, together with the ingénues, the ciphers, and perhaps a few unwitting geniuses.

The title of the Hammer Lautner show was Between Heaven and Earth, but the scene there Saturday night was more like “Between Tokyo and Mumbai.” It was more crowded than any opening I’ve ever attended there. We casually sauntered in, thinking it couldn’t be any more crowded than the entry areas seemed to indicate; but the very fact neither our invites nor credentials were checked should have given us some sense of the enormous surge that had just made its way into the museum’s courtyard. But there was no trouble getting to the bar, and it was only once we were on the second floor that we realized that something like a quarter of the L.A. art world might be there. The galleries were literally packed – with a line snaking out the door and extending clear down one side past the bar towards the bookstore and deejays. It might as well have been the line for Hellboy II (which extended around the corner of Hillhurst and Sunset Drive just past the Vista Theatre in my neighborhood). We headed for the bookstore – which is one of my favorite museum bookstores. It also has the best children’s section of any museum bookstore – maybe one of the best children’s sections of any bookstore; I’ve dropped a small fortune on books and toys for my nephew, Rufus, there and usually head straight to it – bypassing the catalogs and critical texts (of which they also have an excellent selection) until I’ve found something fabulous for him (and occasionally myself).

We took our time in the bookstore, but by the time we stepped out, there was still a line – a bit shorter, but nevertheless. A glimpse inside one of the galleries confirmed our worst expectations – i.e., what would we actually see? It was as if the entire Day of the Locusts swarm from Thursday night’s downtown art walk, had reconstituted itself in the two Lautner galleries. (About that scene, more later perhaps – talk about madding crowds! – you have no idea.) We strolled around a bit; we certainly weren’t alone. There were many familiar amid the many not-so-familiar faces in the throng. OB said she probably wouldn’t recognize Ann Philbin because she changes her look (or hair, mostly) too frequently – and indeed she had this evening; but there’s no mistaking her for anyone else – different hair, as chic as ever. OB wanted to look at the Henry Coombes video; but finally decided she lacked the patience to sit through it. I may have strained OB’s patience a bit myself, getting caught up in an engaging conversation triggered by – what else? – our admiring a pair of shoes (Louboutin). The conversation, though, was mostly with her equally chic pal, Neely, who runs a boutique a stone’s throw away from Fred Segal called Xin (I could be wrong about the store name). I had to ask her if her parents had named her after the character, Neely O’Hara (from Jackie Susann’s Valley of the Dolls); and she confessed they had. The real irony, as should be plain, is that there are a million Neelys in this town (and about a thousand of them might have been right there at the Hammer that night); but Xin’s Neely is definitely not one of them. On the other hand, she probably helps dress or accessorize half those Neelys at her boutique. Our conversation, however, was about neither shoes, nor clothes, accessories, pulp fiction, or even art or architecture, but about police harassment, and the grim aftermath of almost any arrest or detention – especially here in Los Angeles. Her scary (but hilariously told) narrative of a detention under the most slender of pretexts by some machineheads in blue in Fresno, prompted me to mention my acquaintance with “L.A.’s Dopest,” the criminal defense attorney, Allison Margolin (an artillery advertiser, I am delighted to disclose), whose business card I carry with me always – packed in my shoulder bag in close proximity to my Valium, another psycho-pharmaceutical essential for coping with the boys in blue (slow your racing heart as you speed-dial La Dopest on the cell). I suppose the logical thing would be to have a bail-bondsman’s card in there, too; but that’s more reality than I can bear.

Neely O’Hara (or at least the updated character from the movie version), of course, would have lived in a Lautner house. How could she not, with that reaching for the stars ambition, the skyscraping highs (in every sense) and the plunge-to-the-canyon floor lows? Lautner’s Marbrisa residence in Acapulco – stretched eerily (airily?) between its defiance of gravity and reach for infinity – always struck me as the kind of residence in which only gods or movie superstars could fashion a viable domesticity. It makes me think of the Burtons in Joseph Losey's Boom (although Marbrisa was built somewhat later – in 1973). Lautner would have known how to build a sort of chambered Nautilus of a doll, poised cliffside as if spilling artlessly from a prescription pill bottle. I guess I’m also getting at the particular mystery and mystique Lautner’s architecture holds for me, the contradictions; the qualities that are soaring and transcendent and the qualities that seem alienated and distinctly anti-urban. (Lautner was famously contemptuous of the city his houses were designed to overlook.) I can’t wait to see the show. I’ve heard the catalog is pretty good, too.

In the meantime, while Neely and I were chatting it up, our Very Independent Topanga Artist pal told us we had just missed our collector pal, and we were anxious to get back to ACE to see the Pullen show. So it was back into the night – the stars, the cars … “Ah, the insincere sympathy of the faraway stars.”

Are You There, Champagne? It's Me, Ezrha.*

2008-07-14T01:53:00.000-07:00

* [with apologies to Chelsea Handler]

13 July 2008 (later)

(Okay, bear in mind I’m a bit looped – several glasses of Champagne + 1 yerba buena non-filtered will have that effect – but that’s this afternoon, not last night, so my impressions should stand unencumbered by tonight’s perceptual alterations.) It was sort of a hoot to be followed only a few paces behind by Maestro Baldessari – in the company of Meg Cranston, whom I hadn’t seen for an even longer interval. I wasn’t really eavesdropping on his comments and conversation, but Opera Buddy and I enjoyed picking up the occasional tidbit here and there. It’s weird – I was weird – but I sometimes feel a bit sheepish in his company. I said hello to Meg, but not to – I almost want to say ‘God’. I’m out of my mind – so much l’étudiante devant le maître – which in a sense I must always be; but then back in the car, I’m ready to tear apart each and every thing and maybe even the entire show entirely on my own criteria. (Which we sort of did – OB & moi.) I will say, the god JB did seem to echo my own impressions about a couple of the pieces in the show. Out of the 12 or 13 artists in the show, only half made a particularly strong impression, though there was wit in abundance. Renee Petropoulos’s wall hangings in dense overlaid matrices of black and white ribbon, “Hello, Hello” and “Naaa, Na Na Na Naaa” were by far the most completely realized formally and perhaps the most successful pieces in the show, even achieving some degree of concordance with Klonarides’ title or theme for the show, (Dis)Concert, which in other ways made scant sense overall. (I can see an element of ‘disconcert’ or even simply, ‘dis’; but the point of many if not most of these pieces is quite distant if not entirely opposed to any notion of ‘concert’. There were exceptions – e.g., Cindy Bernard’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” single-channel video – which was pretty hilarious, albeit more or less static. (Cindy Bernard also did the almost scary photograph of Tower Records on Sunset – many months after its closing and stripped of all identifying insignia. Yeah, that too works on the level of ‘disconcert’. There’s an element of memento mori in a lot of this material.) But, as I say, these were exceptions. I liked Jennie C. Jones’ ‘drawings,’ if you will, in magnetic audiotape pressed under its glass. I’ll bet you never thought there was any use for Kenny G recordings (I include all media, of course). Well, after these witty, diagrammatic, almost epigrammatic ‘relief’ drawings, there’s one less use. They’re called “Breathless,” after Kenny G’s 1992 recording, Breathless. I also liked her impeccably titled hanging in cascading earbuds and wires, “Silent Clusterfuck (Black and Blue).” Kaz Oshiro’s “Wall Cabinet #2 (Sonic Youth), with its witty homage to Raymond Pettibon via that old record cover, is absolutely killer, of course. Delightful to see it here. I could go on a bit, but I’m just going to stop there. Among the other artists – Martin Kersels, Steve Roden (problematic), Stephen Vitiello (jokey or manipulative), Nadine Robinson, and Eamon Ore-Giron (speaking of album covers).

I noticed that for some of the pieces, there was a reference on the checklist to a “percentage of proceeds [of the sale presumably]” “serv(ing) as a donation to SASSAS – The Society for the Activation of Social Space Through Art and Sound.” Gee – we have to make a donation for that? We need a special “Society” for that?? I thought that was already done through, uh, sound and – oh yeah -- society – as in our not-so-Great one. Of course art never hurts; ditto that special kind of sound we call, music, even when it’s not very good. But isn’t that kind of ‘activation’ really just about engagement? Conversation? Communication? I’ll take that discount now, Steve (Roden), Martin (Kersels) -- & Steve (Turner). Kidding. Anyway, the one I really want is that elegant …. Oh forget about it. Or have I already? That’s the other thing. The premise for the show seemed a bit thin. Whatever the merits of the individual pieces, they didn’t necessarily add up to a thesis of any particular consistency much less cogency.

So much for the conceptual. John, cher Maître – isn’t it nice to know you’re still needed? And judging from what’s out there now, it looks like you always will be. Anyway, after I-Kinda-Wanna-High-Concept, we headed over to Honor Fraser, who was opening what seemed a far more eclectic (also simply bigger) group show. We had tentative plans to hook up with a collector pal who I thought should reacquaint herself with Honor as well as some of the gallery’s more recent offerings; but it was not to be. (She will eventually, I have no doubt; there is simply way too much going on here.) Coincicidentally, there was almost way too much going on in the show – with another double-bind kind of title, Jekyll Island – curated by Max Henry and Erik Parker (I know absolutely nothing about either of them). The title still throws me a bit. “Jekyll”? “Island” As in “Doctor”? Or are we talking about the Barrier island off the north coast of Georgia? With its famed plantations? Or its late 19th/early 20th century club for the emerging American ruling class? All of the above? There’s just a whiff of the political/paranoiac in a number of these (mostly) paintings. It’s the sort of thing that sort of oozes through the pores, in a manner of speaking, of the kind of painting that Steve DiBenedetto does (a kind of wildly expressionist fantasy that once upon a time I would have said was influenced by looking at too much comicbook porn – but now? Well, no one else has a palette (or palate?) quite like DiBenedetto’s). And, looking over the checklist again, what about something titled “Fuck the Flag” (Lizzi Bougatsos)? I guess there’s no getting away from either the porn or the political. But there’s also a risk of excessive calculation, of literal-mindedness here; in other words, the stuff that kills art. Agit-prop may go over well enough with a population of sheep (ask Rove and Cheney); but agit-porn is more fun for the rest of us. That includes the kind of agit-pastiche represented here by Joop van Liefland. ‘How old are you?’ I want to ask. 'Nineteen? You didn’t get this out of your system in art school?' Come back to the art world after your nineteenth nervous breakdown. I’m not a great fan of Glenn Brown, but there’s no denying he’s an interesting artist and no telling where he might go with the material he’s working with – in this instance the straightforwardly iconic, both as painting and as object (these from 1994 and 1999, respectively), both poignantly titled: “Beatification” and “These Days.” There was also beautiful painting from Shintaro Miyake and Jin Meyerson (though the kind of overbroad excursive style of something like his “The Lost Splendor of Meanings” became self-fulfilling prophesy – negating both splendor and meaning). Peter Saul, whose pop expressionism has never shied from the political, was of course hard to miss (“Stuck” (2007) – I always think Saul’s 20-odd year stint in Texas had some warping effect on his art – not that that’s a bad thing). But I was far more intrigued by Phoebe Unwin’s more elusive, miasmic style (offset in the smaller panels by a deep, almost jewel-like palette). I’m looking for Jekylls and Hydes in my ‘political’ ‘iconography’, or maybe the Hydes buried somewhere deep within – or his victims. (And then you wonder how we politically orchestrate this business. That usually leads me straight to the bar.)

Instead, after a quick stroll through the group show at Angstrom (there were a few interesting things – but maybe I can get to that another time), we got back into the car and drove to the Hammer for the John Lautner opening. (MORE TO COME)

A Mid-Summer Night's Concept High -- just try smoking this.

2008-07-13T15:53:00.000-07:00

12-13 July 2008

It was a classic L.A. mid-summer’s evening: competing priority openings – both group and solo shows – or premieres, hot movies, a Hammer opening bash (John Lautner architecture), and a pre-apocalyptic ‘conceptual art’ event on the Santa Monica beach and Pier. (The balance swung heavily to the conceptual end of things from the get-go. As we parked Opera Buddy’s dog-mobile around the corner from Carl Berg, we noticed a car with a white-haired gent pulling in behind us. “That looks like John Baldessari,” I said. “I don’t think so,” OB says. “Oh yeah, he’s probably too wrapped up in that “Glow” business in Santa Monica.” Then we walked into Carl Berg – and there he was, right behind us.) Too much heat in every sense (not to mention the unusual humidity), too much driving, and too much drinking – hopefully not mixed (I mean the driving and drinking), but by evening’s end (or morning’s beginning – the Santa Monica thing was scheduled to wrap at 7:00 a.m.), who could tell?

Fearless Leader had dictated a stop at ACE (the mid-Wilshire galleries) – and besides, I was anxious to see what Melanie Pullen was going to show after the major studio soundstage shoots she had planned immediately after the photoLA debut of her revolutionary soldier series. What had been tentatively planned sounded nothing short of amazing – something on the order of a fire-bombed Berlin, circa April 1945. My Flynt Building duties kept me away from the shoot, but my imagination drifted to baroque-bunker grotesqueries somewhere between Gregory Crewdson, Joel-Peter Witkin and – well, Melanie Pullen. It wasn’t as if the High Fashion Crime Victim series lacked for elaborate scenarios. The scheduled show was titled Violent Times which seemed to promise both a broad expansion of the thematic drift of what I saw at photoLA and perhaps an excursion into the brutal actualities of the contemporary social, cultural and political landscapes. It was – and on more levels and by entirely unexpected and unpredictable means than I’m prepared to address immediately – but it almost didn’t matter because I could scarcely lay eyes on more than a half dozen of the panels before I was told to come back later, that the opening would not start until 8:00 p.m. I could see that workmen were still installing show; but still, the irony was almost too killing. I am almost NEVER even on time for anything, much less early. And it was 6:00 p.m., not even 5:00 p.m., which is not an unusual start time for these things. Opera Buddy buzzed me from her car as I was about to get into the elevator, not realizing I was already there. We had a laugh over it as we regrouped and headed over to LACMA-land. The only thing I really had a good look at were a few of the American Revolutionary soldier pictures I had previously seen at photoLA; but peering deep down the hall into the back galleries, I could see some darker panels that looked different from anything I had previously seen from Pullen, so we were intrigued enough to want to come back.

Our next scheduled stop was Steve Turner, where Carole Ann Klonarides was curating a conceptual show based on sound – objects that made sound, were about sound or who-knows-what. All we knew was that Carole Ann curated it, Opera Buddy’s pals recommended it, and that was enough for both of us. But there was no point stopping there and not checking out the Carl Berg group show, too, which also seemed to have a pronounced conceptual bent – with a few twists and turns amid the sensory and occult. Time, Space & Alchemy was the title, and the only artist I knew anything about was Andrew Krasnow – whose piece – an hourglass trickling sand onto a pair of iron rods seemed to have both cosmic and very earthbound implications (impossible not to think of the WTC twin towers in that configuration – that a bit of a bore). It only got more conceptual from there (that should be a good thing, right? uh, maybe not). Ephraim Puusemp showed “Thirteen Balls” (2000-2008), somehow rolled together from dust found in tires (no shit) and presented in an elaborate box with a legend engraved on an aluminum plate – and a somewhat elaborate explanation. I’m sure there are some notes somewhere that can enlighten me about this; but my feeling generally, is that if a piece takes longer than the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle to figure out, it’s . . . . – well, it’s a problem. Carrie Paterson showed what looked like molecular models that were actually flagons for perfume essences (which could be sampled at a counter she set up in the second gallery). It beats the perfume counters at Barneys anyway – Simon Doonan, take note. Opera Buddy liked Claudia Bucher’s “Probe” – a kind of giant laser dragonfly constructed out of plastic tool packaging and Plexiglas – and so did I; but although OB liked the delicacy of the flickering LEDs in the “laser” housing, I thought it just made the thing hokier. So it was on to Steven Turner’s.

(I interrupt this narrative (or its editing anyway) to go to my publisher’s birthday party. MORE TO COME – I promise.)

"Interesting": Euphemism for "Sucks"? Or just what it says?

2008-06-16T00:23:00.000-07:00

14 June 2008

I realize my last preamble turned into something of an essay. I don’t think I need to apologize – and I never would anyway; but it occurs to me that the reader might be forgiven for thinking s/he had stumbled into the wrong blog. However, (again) before I post any notes on what I’ve actually been looking at (last night, an old – but dazzling – movie, War and Peace – the first two parts of a four part, seven-hour marathon of a movie – the 1965-68 Russian treatment of the Tolstoy novel (I think there was an older attempt – American or international co-production – made in the late 1950s, which, from what I’ve seen of it, is markedly inferior) – parts of which I can’t get out of my head), a postamble, if you will, on the sort of thing that might, hypothetically, be going through my head as I walk through or view a show (any show, really) for the first time. In other words, a headnote in the most literal sense. I was downtown for some openings this evening, including a couple in Chinatown (ps – I love Chinatown). Tennis Buddy was there, along with her brainiac sister, Jill; also, genius bricoleur and compleat artist, Frohawk Two Feathers – and a host of others from all parts of the L.A. art world – in fact all parts of the world. As openings go, a complete success. (Uh-oh – I can see the alarms going off – hang on for a second, will ya?) It was not, however, a particularly easy show (or certainly not in any but the most ridiculously superficial sense). In fact, appearances to the contrary (or not), it was fairly dense in context (historical and otherwise), craft and media, and, generally, in the process of its making, effectively setting up a dynamic tension with the finished work itself. (I was certainly not alone in remarking on this apparent emphasis on process.) As I stepped outside for a breath of air, I was greeted again by the gallerist putting on the show. “So – what do you think?” At this point, of course, I was the one heavily immersed in 'process'; in short I was still mentally processing the show – there was a lot to take in and a lot to think about. “It’s very interesting,” I said, aware that I probably sounded pretty neutral, or even a bit pat, about it. “Interesting?” she shot back, laughing a bit. “That means it sucked!”

There’s no escaping the fact that when a presumably friendly viewer says something like this at an opening/private view, at least 50 percent of the time, that is almost exactly what it means. Of course, the other 50 percent of the time, it simply means what it says, and even possibly something slightly more flattering. Chez moi, more often than not, it means, ‘I need to take my eyes off of it for a second and take my brain for a little stroll down the La Cienega and Washington Boulevards (or for that matter Wilshire or Chung King or Michigan or Main Streets) of recent memory.’ Sometimes it means anything between ‘I’m absolutely dazzled’, and – see above – and ‘I’m simply perplexed’, and – ditto. In this particular instance, what I had seen resonated on certain levels with a number of different things (mostly painting; also some photography) I had seen within the last month or several months, both here (in fact, on the aforementioned La Cienega) and in New York. So I was thinking about the fact that a number of artists seemed to be referencing certain (historical, among others) sources, subjects and structures in common; and also, as I mentioned, the relative complexity, even density of this particular artist’s process, more or less transparent in the work itself. Also about the specific historical contexts referenced. Now, many hours later, I actually can give a (still completely superficial) opinion. Yes – I liked the show. Dazzled? No – but that doesn’t say anything about the artist or the show, either. It wasn’t that kind of a show (and he’s not really that kind of an artist).

Just one more thing that separates fine art from – well, theatre for starters. It’s a tricky business. As everyone knows, this is stuff for the long haul. More than dance, theatre, music, literature, film, we tend to be thinking (if not looking) across the far horizon line; fully aware, furthermore, just how that horizon line may shift over ten, fifty, or the next 100 years. We’re not sitting through the after party or waiting overnight for the notices. What is to be celebrated is simply that it happened. To the extent that it is noticed – ideally, in some dynamic relation with the way it’s produced, perhaps – is all gravy. Fortunately, there are committed audiences here in Los Angeles and around the world for the fine art produced here (or for our galleries). The dialogue may not shape the art; but it may refine it to some extent; and certainly it contributes to the way we view it and think about it.

And anyway who cares what I think? At least for now – until my next deadline. (Coming up in another ten days or so, if I’m not mistaken.)

Elegance as protest: Yves Saint Laurent -- Exemplary Sufferer, Exemplary Pleasure-Seeker

2008-06-06T20:03:00.000-07:00

I started writing this, thinking it would simply be a preamble to the rest of my C.O.L.A. and L.A.C.E. auction (RePresent) notes (and a few other things); but, as you can see, it turned into a more extended digression -- almost an essay which, rather than pick over further, as it seems like I've been doing the last few days in and out of the Flynt Building (or in and out of bed), I've decided to post as is before I even post the rest of my notes (as well as the notes from the last couple of week-ends). I don't know about you, dear reader, but I'd need to take a breath after the block of text that follows. (Sorry about that.) You'd be forgiven for calling it nostalgia; but I prefer to look at it as Obama damage -- the 'damage' of hope. After this past Tuesday, I think I can be forgiven.

My hopes are now ... with the Lakers, of course.

2-3 June 2008

Saint Laurent is dead this evening as I write this. Shocking to think how large his shadow loomed only a few years ago – though, of course, it was just a shadow. He went out with fireworks – closing his house as if he were drawing the curtain on the spectacle of a century. But his glory – the sense of celebration and rebellion; the rigorous luxury; the avant-garde snickering at and seduction of the bourgeoisie; the seriously subversive, seriously elegant, seriously Parisian, seriously French qualities that characterized his greatest couture productions and the original rive gauche boutique lines – of his glory days had long since passed. To watch Saint Laurent moving haltingly, almost painfully among the sumptuous fabrics, the beautiful fitting models -- and his staff of brilliant couture professionals under the guidance of his muse and major domo, Loulou de la Falaise, taking the pulse, as it were, of both designs and designer – in the film, 5 Avenue Marceau, was almost painful. You had the sense that the pleasure of a luxurious fabric sculpted into a finished piece, the fragile beauty of the dressed model were his only oxygen. (It couldn’t have helped that he smoked incessantly.) You had the sense that the work alone was keeping him alive.

That Tom Ford managed to resurrect some of the qualities of his past successes could not have given him much cheer. His best work always had the spirit and currency of the new; whatever pleasure luxury and refinement could supply could never revive that spirit. The Saint Laurent we see in 5, Avenue Marceau is an almost shattered human being. But there’s something about this portrait (if we can really call it that) that leads the viewer to wonder if what we’re watching is an unfolding inevitability – a kind of via Dolorosa, the inexorable progression of a king’s court to its end (as if Saint Laurent, like Elizabeth I of England, was determined to die standing up).

It was Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent’s longtime companion and business partner, who said that Saint Laurent was “born with a nervous breakdown”; and there were many episodes of the designer’s life over the years that gave ample testimony to his emotional delicacy and imbalance, neurasthenia, his addictions, breakdowns and endless neuroses. Even the boy wonder cachet he enjoyed for his brief tenure at Dior was accentuated by an apparent reticence, what comes across in news footage from that period as almost a terror of press and publicity. He eventually conquered that terror; but would remain forever haunted by his demons.

Yet Saint Laurent’s life was also poised on the fulcrum of generational and cultural change. Born before war’s end in Oran, Algeria, a born cosmopolite in a colonial outpost; a homosexual during a time when, at least in the early part of his adult life, homosexuals were persecuted and stigmatized, notwithstanding whatever protective sanction his profession might have provided – he was a man flying by the seams of his trapeze dress. It could not have helped that not long after his success at Dior, he was drafted into the army for service in a cursed war that would have taken him back to Algeria. An apparently relentless hazing by fellow draftees and recruits was enough to break that delicate balance. (The only celebrity of the time whose military draft received more (and obviously far more flattering) attention was Elvis Presley.) His military hospital treatments probably ensured he would never be entirely free of his demons – particularly drugs.

But the world Saint Laurent returned to was already changing. Saint Laurent’s emergence as a star designer came at a pivotal cultural moment: the Sixties – a moment that saw an exploding youth culture, accompanied by an explosive surge of pop culture amounting to a mass renaissance, a blurring of distinctions between high culture and pop or mass culture, an erosion (if not leveling) of class differences; a moment of protest, rebellion, experimentation and sexual liberation. It was a moment Saint Laurent was perfectly suited, by culture, temperament and sensibility, to exploit. Having explored youth culture, Left Bank-style, even before he left Dior, Saint Laurent would now be free to take his inspiration as he found it – 20th century art (e.g., Mondrian, Cocteau, Massine, Miro, Picasso, Pop), Hollywood and film noir glamour (e.g., Dietrich/von Sternberg, Hawks, Huston), 19th and 20th century literature – Flaubert, Proust, Gide; rock’n’roll; and a certain street glamour as American as it was Parisian.

Saint Laurent’s genius was in trusting those sometimes impulsive sparks of inspiration and connecting them with the energy of the street, the circulatory rush of everyday life, particularly women’s lives; also a connection to the street as the ultimate stage, the ultimate runway, resonating with certain touchstones of a specifically French visual, cinematic and literary aesthetic. It was no accident that Luis Buñuel tapped him to design the costumes for Belle de Jour. Deneuve’s wardrobe as Séverine are a witty subversion of bourgeois proprieties: a severe, almost exaggeratedly proper, tailleur, elegantly, rigorously cut dresses, the trench coats of subtly varying lengths and details, with their variable military touches (collars, epaulets), in fabrics variously luxe and risqué (from wool boucle to black vinyl so shiny it looks like patent or even latex – rendered with clerical rather than military details, fit for the celebrant of a black mass), those patent leather pilgrim-buckle shoes, the luxurious fabrics themselves, which the film also make a joke of – all connect the worlds of comme il faut with comme ca veut, so to speak; Séverine’s dream world – the masochistic fantasy, the daytime brothel (a fantasy perhaps equally enhanced by Geneviève Page’s innate elegance) – with the quotidian realities of bourgeois households and commercial streets. (Saint Laurent also designed costumes for Resnais’ Stavisky, which – set in a world of 1930s “Biarritz bonheur” – must have been a romp for him.)

Regardless of his inspirations high or low, the best Saint Laurent looks partake of a certain cool elegance – without excessive refinement, a shade more street smart than, say, Givenchy; and with a nod (or slouch) to the specifically Parisian glamour of street and café. It was in its own way a kind of democratization of elegance that American designers – I think Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren, particularly; also Marc Jacobs and Stephen Srpouse – would be heavily influenced by. Saint Laurent reached across the Seine to Saint Germain-des-Près and the Quartier Latin only to make his influence felt clear across the East River. If the New York street glamour that is so familiar to us, especially in its downtown incarnations, was a by-product of Warhol’s enterprise, Saint Laurent had already put his finger on it and was ready to turn it into fashion. The kind of street fashion/street glamour that now seems a commonplace everywhere from Manhattan to L.A. (and one of the trademarks of Sex and the City) owes so much to Saint Laurent’s glory days – the days when he segued from couture to the boutique ready-to-wear of the rive gauche stores – the late 1960s and early 1970s when he partied with muses Loulou de la Falaise and Betty Catroux; the time of his fabulously androgynous safari pieces and evening “smoking” ensembles, so memorably photographed by Helmut Newton, among others.

Beyond that, Saint Laurent’s glory was something he shared with other great cultural trend-setters (icons, really) of that particular moment, from rock stars like Dylan, Jagger and the Stones, Lennon-McCartney and the Beatles, the Who, literary lions like Mailer and Vidal; Rudolf Nureyev; to filmmakers like Bergman, Godard, Fellini, Antonioni – a will to turn the mal de siècle into something like a joie de siècle. Saint Laurent embodies something akin to what Susan Sontag ascribed to, among others, Cesare Pavese – the ‘artist as exemplary sufferer’ So much of this period as it transitions into the following decade and the rest of the century is about, not so much idealism, as the failure of idealism. The flip side of Saint Laurent’s glory, the life of urban adventure, of pleasure, that he both sought and embodied, was his intense vulnerability – the ‘demons’ and often painful solitariness of his creative process; the legacy of a shy boy repressed by a colonial bourgeoisie, conventional mores, scarred by the brutality of the military establishment; the demons of his drug addictions. If you look closely enough, you can see it in the clothes (cf., especially, le smoking). Saint Laurent exemplifies the modern creative spirit as simultaneously one of exemplary suffering and exemplary pleasure-seeking. The pleasure is almost a measure of the pain.

One of the first ‘designer’ items I ever purchased for myself (on sale) after college was a pair of Saint Laurent/rive gauche pants, which I wore almost until the fabric was as frail as the lining. They remain the most perfect pair of pants I’ve ever worn (I include the many great pairs of jeans I’ve had over the years). Santayana called dress the "badge of lost innocence" – which doesn’t necessarily imply its opposite, whether an accrual of sophistication, cynicism or wisdom. Saint Laurent’s clothes are nothing if not sophisticated, but they’re much more. There is luxury in the fabric, the cut, drape, fit and details; but that’s only the beginning of their pleasure. The pleasure is in the wearing, even wearing out – a pleasure we pay for dearly; but in the failure of ideals, in the absence of love, it’s sometimes worth protesting our claim on both with the defiance of elegance, the ‘badge’ embodied in, as much as worn on, the sleeve – or the pants or the dress; to stride forward in the face of wisdom and cynicism both, with beauty itself our only shield.

To Bordellos or Bedlam -- No Way Back

2008-05-30T19:40:00.000-07:00

Looking again at the post below, I see my reference to a “second gallery,” by which I meant at the time the upper gallery. Having had a second look, let me remind myself and the reader that there was also an adjunct space (not the special project space) with a few more choice items from Ms. Schnibbe, including the not-quite-ready-for-icon-status teddy bear and bunny rabbit figures of “Are You My Mother?” and “Smilee’s Love Child” and Schnibbe’s kawaii riposte to Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, “Death Drive.” Aside from Schnibbe’s way with purples and pinks and the kawaii charm of these floating quasi-fetal creatures, this gallery also merited a look

18 May 2008

(Schnibbe cont’d.) The second level of Circus was given over to larger panels of abstract painting along the lines of “The Pornographic Imagination.” – with the Leger aspect morphing on this slightly reduced scale (yet apparently magnified) into curving quasi-organic Arp-like mazes, canals, and appendices (and ‘teeth’ and ‘nipples’ – and why shouldn’t they be in close proximity?) in deep matte reds and blacks (which also echoed the embryonic aspect of the teddies and bunnies downstairs). “For the Love of Amber Vega” was another porn set piece – though less porn ‘set’, per se, and more a slightly streamlined, even clinical (triangular red satin pillows), bordello chamber, albeit with some calculated ‘homey’ touches (the macramé chandelier drape; the knit bolster – with a skein of multi-colored yarns rolled up on the bed, ready to be taken up with knitting needles.

Schnibbe is fairly explicit (here and elsewhere in the show) about certain aspects of fetish the work explores. Where the paintings and drawings tease form and fetish (the thwarted drive), the ‘sets’ tend to explode it (the death drive untrammeled – or unraveled, as it were). Put the knives away – all you need is a pair of needles. Or maybe just your eyes.

(Later)

C.O.L.A. was absolutely fantastic this year – aside from the fact that Tulsa Kinney’s (referred to elsewhere here as Fearless Leader) doppelganger was finally exposed to the art world spotlight and revealed as – (what else?) an artist. An extremely interesting, even superb artist – Judie Bamber works with Polaroids and family photographs to produce obliquely observed, almost (at moments) severe, sometimes slightly off-kilter drawings and paintings of (among others presumably) family members – here, specifically, her mother (apparently relating to an on-going series of paintings and drawings). They’re quietly, unassumingly, but sometimes astonishingly beautiful, casting a stark light on both an extremely private and broadly cultural moment (via clothes, hairstyles, settings). That her mother is a beauty doesn’t hurt, of course; but the poetry is about far more than physical beauty. They can be almost chillingly matter of fact, yet – as rendered here in pencil and pigments – touch something deeper, harsher, yet humanly vulnerable. It’s halfway to Bedlam (à la Anne Sexton) but more than halfway back (without the manic touches) and almost as moving. (Interesting coincidence that Tulsa Kinney herself has painted more than one series of (vividly expressionist, and sometimes quite powerful) paintings based loosely on photographic material.) So – separated at birth, anyone?

Walking into the show, you were greeted by a stunning installation – a kind of dive-bomber greeting – cranes and planes and fighters and stealth flying wings in treated or what looked like vintage book leaves or pages – themselves altogether in a kind of fighting wing formation – Descent by Joyce Dallal, with the whole anchored by rocks and chunks of concrete at the floor. Although Dallal has worked loosely in this mode, and on this scale before (she has done many installations), it was impossible not to sense a certain debt to Pae White’s similar raining suspensions. Unlike White, Dallal apparently also works a great deal with text, as she does here; but – drama aside – it’s hard to know how effectively. There was the obvious cultural-political statement; and, well .... It's not as if we can actually read these texts -- even if we had the texts printed out for us -- on the vari-colored papers, to boot. Maybe I need to 'refresh (my) view' on this. (I should complain about drama??) And there was so much MORE.

The Other Side of Coy: Schnibbe, etc.

2008-05-26T16:40:00.000-07:00

17-18 May 2008

What a night. I’ve been obsessed with erotics lately – or maybe it’s just a symptom of some emotional/sexual flameout (my imagination in overdrive, my attitude as clinical as ever) – but even as certain things tend to clarify or cast an analytic bead on it, others seem to just pour fuel on the fire. That was the feeling coming away from Margie Schnibbe’s breakthrough show at Circus Gallery in Hollywood. Schnibbe is one of those people whose imaginations can be in several places – light and dark, playful and serious, physical/intellectual, actual/abstract, pornographic/platonic, child-like and adult, simultaneously – places which for her must seem both adjacent and always available – the playroom just the other side of the porn set, the bedroom just this side of the burial plot. Need I say I can, on some or many levels, ‘relate’?

She’s titled the show Honey Bunny, a title simultaneously coy and disingenuous. Coyness – and the flip side of coyness – is what the show is in part about. This is familiar turf for many of us (and not just those of us who work at the Flynt Publications Building) – Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley have both tracked this terrain to one degree or another – but Schnibbe’s approach is both more direct and deconstructed. The very emphasis on text, on typography, however simple (or coy), conveys a sense of both thwarted expression and ulterior motive. ‘What are you trying to say?’ The drawings frequently take the form of thought bubbles, white or black ‘child’s script’, or perhaps more precisely, the kind of child-like characters printed onto text or title cards for greeting cards, children’s educational or cartoon shows or toy advertising, or subtitles – set against a dense carpet of doodling – Murakami gone mad – that from a distance seem a vague gray scumble. (No accident those “googly eyes” she uses elsewhere; there are lots of googly eyes if you look more closely.) The vague scrim – or an explosion of pattern – those vaguely psychedelic mazes of swirling curves and spirals and stretched and broken teardrops and paisleys – or simply, in other instances, the wall – conveys another part of the ‘message’, perhaps more direct than any text. The names of the porn stars in the individual drawings Schnibbe has assembled into “The Birthday Party” installation are interchangeable. The point is the wall – and the ‘openings’ the drawings, thought ‘bubbles’, stars/names (even I daresay orgasms) represent. “The Pornographic Imagination,” Schnibbe’s large wall hanging on the north wall of the gallery’s lower level, both exemplifies this ‘scrim’ notion, but goes far beyond it. In fact, there’s nothing really ‘psychedelic’ or even kitsch/pastiched about it. In fact, Schnibbe’s deconstructive impulse is very much in evidence in what on extended view is a canny, even brilliant abstraction – with a nod to both Haring and Leger. Aside from its vivid yet controlled color scheme in dense purples and blacks and indigos, its broken and subdivided or truncated arcs, curves, loops, lines and circles give almost the sense of animated characters broken (or blocked, hidden) and suspended against (or behind) what is beneath/above (you see where it gets a bit tricky). It’s a piece that bears closer scrutiny – and if that’s not maddening enough, you’re invited to consider the installation right along side it – directly the opposite of that wall of porn stars, and (literally?) the set piece of the show – “Today Is A Good Day,” with the title descending in black-edged pink puffs towards what might as well be a gigantic sprawled stuffed animal à la Kelley. Well not exactly – it’s a little pillow-covered couch flanked by a dense pile of colored and patterned pillows (pink and fuschia seem to dominate the color scheme). Yes, it just might be. Coy or – well, collapsed (‘corruption’ per se is not the issue here) – you decide. I almost hesitate to talk about it further (and in any case may save my discussion for a review) simply out of reluctance to treat its post-existential/post-structural implications too literally (and naively? what the hell do I know? I haven’t really read/thought about this sort of thing since university). It’s the sort of thing that’s likely to send me fleeing to my part of the Flynt Building where all I have to deal with are the legal (and financial) aspects of these ideas (in a word, as the maîtres of, variously, French courts, lycées, ateliers -- and musées might deploy it, 'jouir'). In a nutshell, that’s the fascination of this show. Schnibbe’s take and handling on these issues is both playful and deadly serious.

I want to mention (or have I already mentioned?) something disturbing about … well, it was an evening for disturbing thoughts and images (even as they were playful and philosophical) – now I’m the one being being coy – flat out. Bear with me as I try to keep these juggled ideas airborne. (There was an entire second gallery level to explore.) (MORE)

Messages in bottles and embryonic stars

2008-05-24T17:02:00.000-07:00

I mentioned the “week-end just past” in the last post and I realize we’re already coming up on the NEXT week-end. I might be inclined to say that Margie Schnibbe’s show at Circus was the singular ‘event’ of the week-end, about which I hope to expand at greater length both here and pages elsewhere (including, of course, artillery). Except that the COLA show was something of a blockbuster – really one of the best in years – flanked to boot by a show by Dana Maiden (the Feitelson Award recipient) – a stunning L.A. debut. And Richard Telles had another impressive pairing: new (and very different) work by Monika Baer and some very dark, disturbing (and beautiful) painting by an artist named Tom Allen. Did I mention how beautiful L.A. has looked the last few days? Uncharacteristically cool, gray, stormy, the jacurandas in bloom, the air clean and fragrant with the mingled frangrances of citrus, jasmine and honeysuckle; and the Lakers headed (knock wood) for the NBA finals.

12 May 2008 (cont’d.)

From Chinatown, I headed north on Sunset back towards Silver Lake and Gallery Revisited which has regrouped its overall concept, so to speak, in the direction of – (voila) The Group – group shows exclusively for the next several months by its stable of artists – which is interesting in the sense it gives both of the impulses, ideas and aesthetics circulating among a certain segment (or segments) of the Los Angeles (or larger, or smaller) art community, as well as the tastes (whimsical, eclectic) and thinking (probing, enigmatic) of its director, Leora Lutz. Lutz is completely serious about the mission of her gallery and about getting the best out of her artists, at which she seems to have had some success with this show, without necessarily burdening them with too many constraints. At the same time (and if her artists are any reflection of this), she’s all over the map (or at least one part of that ‘map’); and, for all her focus and seriousness, she’s sly, quick-witted (and changeable), and one of those people who can never fail to make me laugh. Without getting too much into the specifics (or the specific pieces), the direction the show elicits is about the enigmatic abstraction and the enigmatic object, which may be two sides of the same coin. It’s a terrain Hammer curators have explored in some breadth (if not depth) – both with Thing and even Russell Ferguson’s The Undiscovered Country. The abstraction here is not on the same order as Ferguson’s ‘undiscovered country,’ which had a figurative/representational bias, but partakes of a similar sensibility: e.g., a cool abstraction like Elana Kundell’s oil “It’s A Wash” (which is really an incredible painting). (I’m happy to say that my publisher, Paige Wery’s, painting was no less creditable in this regard. The painting/object was heavily worked – but I think to a successful end. There were surfaces here that seemed not lunar, not Martian, but Jovian. We may all be be in the gutter, but some of us are looking at – uh, apparently Jupiter.) It was interesting that Paige’s piece somewhat straddled the turf between painting and object – and the terrestrial (specifically, a tree) and extra-terrestrial. More definitively ‘object’ and perhaps also extra-terrestrial was Ya-Ya Chou’s embryonic/placental object in blown glass and red plastic – call it ‘Star Fetus’ or Star Embryo (I don’t remember what the title was). Then there was something that had at least the familiarity of one of those Steuben paperweights – containing a text – you might as well call that ‘Message in a bottle from another planet’ (again, I don’t know what the title was). Familiar at least conceptually was the vividly enlarged tongue segment with its clustered, nipple-like papillae, by Lana Shuttleworth (“Tongues Will Wag:”). Yes, they will. Another vivid, and utterly mysterious construction, something that looked vaguely like a pair of red peppers was actually a collaboration between Julie Hughes (who also showed work of her own) and another artist (Pete Goldlust?).

It sounds far out; and it only got farther out – almost to the verge of ‘outsider’ status. But then aren’t we all, until someone ‘sends the car’ for us? (L.A.-speak – that may be going out of fashion; what with the price of gas, they’ll soon be sending a bike and sidecar – or maybe a pedicab. I’ll settle for the invite.) I’m probably getting a lot of this completely wrong; what notes I have are completely illegible. (I hope the artists – or Leora, who apparently has her own blog now – will set the record straight.)

I had to bypass Eagle Rock more or less (a mistake) for La Brea, where one of my amici Italiani insisted I come to a show at Liz’s Loft – that’s Liz of Liz’s Antique Hardware, who has opened up the space upstairs from her amazing emporium of antique and vintage hardware, fittings and lighting to display everything from arts decoratifs to fine art. It’s a fabulous space – and the party was fabulous, too – fabulous wine, food (Liz is a great cook on top of everything else) – maybe a bit too fabulous for the art (by Anna Dusi). The action was definitely on the floor (I was craving a Dolce Vita/Otto e mezzo make-over a la Ekberg or Aimée) – or maybe the ceilings. There were beautiful chandeliers – long flanges and fingers of frosted glass or rock crystal (Venetian, 1980s) that almost eclipsed what was on the walls. (Credit my pal, Alessandra Montagna, genius art director and purveyor of chic antiques, who apparently procured them for Liz.) I missed the art in Eagle Rock (e.g., Kristi Engle), but Liz and Sandra had gossip for me about Big-Penn (see previous posts) that was nothing if not distracting.

Inhaling, exhaling -- and still off-balance

2008-05-23T10:07:00.000-07:00

Before I continue posting this, a quick note about the week-end just past and the spring New York sales. I mentioned sometime earlier that they shook out more or less as I expected, though not necessarily with respect to specifics. The first principle is that quality trumps all – cultural iconography, historicity, provenance. (So much for the DeDe Brooks doctrine of “provenance, provenance, provenance.” Though it’s not like there aren’t exceptions; it’s a big, wide-open market out there.) Scanning over the most outstanding results, the quality is inescapable. Just to take randomly, say, the Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes bild (625), that fetched a record for the artist, it is not simply a prime example of Richter’s abstract style, it’s almost an epitome – and its style-setting influence over an entire range of visual arts is fairly apparent. So, to put it another way, regardless of the specific lots on the block, this is generally a thin, and pretty rarefied segment of the larger art market. Looking more closely at specific lots, I continue to be surprised at how strong the market for both Bacon and Prince (and to some extent, even Rothko) are – though obviously that, too, says something about the overall state of visual arts and, more specifically, the culture’s ambivalent, even (well beyond ironic) alienated relationship to image-making (e.g., reversal, appropriation, reconfiguration, recontextualization). The fact that the iconic Lichtenstein Ball of Twine failed to sell also says something crass about both his market and the culture.

11-12 May 2008

It’s funny. I was just saying something about the inhale-exhale symbiosis of the Kordansky and Hug spaces that works so well you’d think they planned it that way; and after the Vergueiro show at Kordansky that just about knocked me off my feet, I was ‘waiting to exhale,’ so to speak. But it wasn’t quite that simple. Erika Vogt’s show of C-prints and video didn’t exactly knock me off my feet – but they sure as hell kept me off balance – and in a very good way. Vogt’s work (inasmuch as I know of it – which is probably as much in the context of group shows or stuff she’s done with other artists), her art – in film, video or mixed media – appears to be essentially an art of collage, in which the actual art-making process is itself ‘collaged’ into the work (cut, sectioned or cross-sectioned, displacement, reduction, fossil, sedimentary; falling back upon itself (reflection)). But unlike collage in the original quasi-Cubist sense, this is is a collage in flux, where both actuality and representation are shifting (which would seem where she is going with video – where the ‘representation’ seems to recede before the viewers who bring their own actuality – presence, attention, shadows – to what seems linear yet non-narrative) in both space and time. (Though the emphasis here is on time – movement; the performative aspect aside, this remains essentially two-dimensional work.) Although her large composite C-prints have a certain virtuoso, tour de force aspect – they’re very sophisticated productions – it’s her video that is truly extraordinary – in terms of texture, color, its evocative-in-spite-of-itself quality, and abstract beauty. Though I was initially taken with C-prints, Vogt’s strength and future is in the video work. The more conventional photography and ‘collage/assemblage’ modes tend to lock her down into a two-dimensional domain her overall scope as long since outgrown.

One of the events, if not the event, of the evening was the Terence Koh ‘walk-through’ installation at Peres Projects. This was apparently the destination in Chinatown Saturday night. Without going into specifics (which, in any case, I can’t legitimately do here), the palette was white and the texture was powdery – and possibly painterly. I ran into Kulov there, who restrained my native curiosity with a gentle reminder that my choice of shoes for the evening might be less than suitable for this event – as his were also apparently. Advisory to gallery visitors: suede may be cozy, but you might want to bring a pair of old sports shoes for the walk-through. In the meantme, Kulov reminded me that we could not afford to miss Sandeep Mukherjee’s show at Sister, which I hadn’t been to in quite a while anyway. I must say I would have hated missing it – for the first gallery’s (yes Sister apparently has a ‘sister’ space – down the block and around the corner at Cottage Home) panels alone. I have long been familiar with Mukherjee’s substantial yet somehow ethereal etched duralene panels – frequently in intense, vibrant colors – but these were in black and white, which nevertheless did not lack for intensity. As with much of his work in the past, these too bore affinities with fabric and fabric art, but here the effect was as much about the play of light – a complex topography of reflection and refraction, rather than simply drapery or stippling – a kind of seismic mapping of light, mounting, eddying, diffracting, radiating. Also interesting was the way he brought off this effect in jet black (the surfaces were fairly matte, which made the topography somewhat more legible). There was something really wonderful about these panels – which left me completely unprepared for the long, horizontally oriented panels at Cottage Home – rolling, roiling, cycloids, starbursts and supernovae, in a jewel-like yet somehow earthbound palette of golds, ambers and verdigris – golden, luminous – galaxies rolling by on a rain/wind-swept grassy plain. I must sound ridiculous trying to compress the impression of some very large and impressive works into a quasi-metaphorical impression; but first off, the panels themselves appear to compress a theme Mukherjee has explored ‘in large’ elsewhere (a Schindler House installation); secondly, the structure and color are far too dense, complex and vivid to do justice to in a single paragraph. For anyone who might have coveted any of that work at Schindler House, this show is a must-see. (MORE)

Seven veils between heaven and hell

2008-05-15T09:27:00.000-07:00

I realize I'm posting this just following the Spring contemporary sales in New York -- and I may have a note or two about the results in the next day or so. For the moment, let's just say I'm not too surprised at the results overall (I'm intrigued to find out who picked up what) -- though perhaps a bit at exactly which lots failed to sell at their low estimate (or at all). For the moment, though, let me start feeding you last week-ends recap. (I'm feeling more confident since I predicted last night's Lakers-Jazz point spread -- which (coincidence??) exactly matched the Celtics win in Boston. Go Kobe (a true artist). Go Lakers.)

10 May 2008

The evening began well enough (though in an entirely unpredictable fashion) at High Energy Constructs. I’m not sure what I was expecting but the work took me a bit by surprise – which means that by the standards HEC impresario Michael Smoler has set for the space, it was a smashing success. You scarcely noticed the Laib-like (I’m not sure I really mean that) scaffold stairs against the north wall, for a heavily draped platform or balcony (a balcony!) obliquely opposite and looming directly overhead, covered in drapery – a balcony for an illicit assignation or dignitary visiting a theatre incognito. Or something. The title and (did I actually see a press release or comments? If so, I didn’t take them with me) checklist for the show – “The clarity of one is released in the other.” – didn’t exactly, uh, clarify whether these were distinctly individual pieces or collaborations between the two artists, Elonda Billera and Janice Gomez. But I suspect it was something of a dialectic between the two – at least that’s the way it came across – between the constructed and deconstructed, the concealed and chaotic, repression and rage. Specifically the hidden rages of domesticity set against the concealed repressions of public civilities – particularly, the civic space. E.g., broken and scattered tile, latticework, etc., disassembled drawers or shelving, etc. Although some of these pieces (by Billera?) seemed to recapitulate, or even a bit derivative, of what has become a fairly common strategy in contemporary sculpture (cf., e.g., Kaz Oshiro), there were exceptions – seemingly the footnotes to the show – which carried unexpected punch and poignancy (and wit); e.g., a cluster of egg-beaters or whisks dripping with what looked like a waxen better of flames – or maybe just something flambé. It was the kind of show that won you over with such small moments even as it was also the kind of show that was ‘greater than the sum of its parts.’ Still I seem to go from small moment to small moment. Directly across from the flaming whisks were a couple of tiny watercolors or gouaches, a figure study and a sort of landscape, by Branden Koch that immediately grabbed my attention – and (full disclosure) my checkbook. Should I be surprised that he also writes for artillery? They’re small but somehow almost sublime – something that touches the ephemeral, the sort of thing you have in your sights for a split second, but can scarcely grasp.

11 May 2008

Do I sound a bit on edge? Yes, I know I just said that the evening began “well enough.” But did it really? That sort of dialogue with that bit of fireworks at the end – the glittering jewel you glimpse as you quickly snap shut whatever little Pandora’s box you’ve sprung open for a split second – tends to leave me just a bit susceptible to whatever comes next. And my next stop was right across the street to Daniel Hug and David Kordansky. (Which means what? More trouble? Well … I was primed for something.)

That something was Nicolau Vergueiro’s show, Introducing Salomé – my hands were shaking slightly as I stuck the acute accent on the ‘e’. It sounds charged and it was – not just erotic (though it certainly was that) but with an energy that comes out of Vergueiro’s native Brazilian landscape itself. Yes – I confess some of this may simply be extrapolating from my conversation with the artist, who was there; but it does speak to something as sweeping and terrestrial as it is carnal and self-immolating – which, when you think about it, in the Brazilian context, are one in the same. And undoubtedly theatrical – you can practically hear the Strauss as you’re taking in the objects – though the theatricality is somewhat undermined by the disassembled, deconstructed, archaeological aspect of the pieces. There are pieces that seem to reference constume design (one with an inset sketch – a “Herod”) or props. But more important than the theatricality (or its frame, its proscenium, along the lines of an artist like Howard Hodgkin) is simply the performative aspect implied by both process and presentation. The ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ has here become an excavation or exfoliation of seven (or more, or fewer) skins, crusts; blooms, bodies, fragments. The only deadly sins here are the appropriating, all-consuming vision, and a transgressive imagination we (meaning Salome) are helpless to resist. Salome’s appropriation of the head of Iokannan here becomes an eye stood on end, an iris and aperture on fire, as it were, the flames licking the upper corner, which in this labial configuration becomes a bright silver clitoris, with the Baptist’s head either a floating image in the pupil or a kind of vaginal eucharist – ultimate communion and consummation. It’s a show of mitotic and metastasized meanings – fragments assembled from fabrics, pigments, glass, latex and found materials into objects that variously map or demarcate those extended meanings, or perform them in a sense (e.g., bits of text on one object that reflect personalities who developed or interpreted the Salome story – Nazimova, Rambova, et al.; objects that look to have been one thing or bits of several things reassembled into something slightly different, e.g., materials (including plastic bags) built up into another kind of receptacle or perhaps restraints (the “Herod Study” assembled two sack-like objects that might be described as bags or locks or restraints or shoes or who knows?); pieces variously laid flat or protruding in cascades of material that look like body parts or a configuration that appears modeled on the body (e.g., “Blooming Bodies at Every Intersection” or “Intercalations – Nine Miles East of the Dead Sea”). The very titles give some sense of the corrupting chemistry – of earth, sex, lust. ‘Intercalation,’ for example might connote a kind of extension or extrapolation or a strategic insertion or the introduction of a different chemical component (molecule or atom) into the reaction. The palette is earthen – soft pinks, tans, saffrons, verdigris – yes, the blood has already dried here. But then there’s that bit of silver glittering at the tip, asserting that signal moment of triumph over the material, its consumption and exhalation. Souvenir or saudades – or something still throbbing with life in all its unruly, intractable impulse, tumult and tumescence?

I sound a little unhinged (or maybe just a little frustrated – but not with the art). Fortunately, Daniel Hug usually promises the relief of an ‘exhalation’ after the heady ‘inhalation’ at Kordansky – though I have to say, although it was definitely a cooler show (in degrees Celsius) than the Vergueiro, Erika Vogt’s show of video and large composite lightjet C prints was just as thoughtful and provocative. (MORE)

Bottom lines and bubble money versus Eternity

2008-05-10T12:22:00.000-07:00

9-10 May 2008

I’m looking at what I wrote earlier this week (see foregoing post) as I think about the item in the Calendar section of today’s Los Angeles Times about Warner’s shuttering its independent divisions – I mean the whole enchilada. NO indie shop under the Warner umbrella – and no, I’m not particularly sanguine about the prospects for the New Line execs shepherding their projects adroitly within the Warners corporate flowchart (I realize this is just talking off the top of my head – I don’t routinely read the trades and rarely discuss the business with friends or family involved in it – but the last 20 years or so don’t give much cause for optimism). Am I the only one for whom this sounds just a bit draconian? (Oh yeah – and another seventy people out of work.) It’s sad when you think that some of the more interesting films showing up in the movie houses (Pan’s Labyrinth and La Vie en Rose, to name just the two the L.A. Times cited) came by way of Warner’s Picturehouse division.

The idea at Warners is that their regular development, financing, advertising and distribution arms will be able to perform the acquisition/development and/or promotion/distribution functions their indie kids did more or less, uh, independently. In other words, cut duplicative costs. Good bottom-line thinking, I’d say – assuming IT WORKS – which, given the difficulty some of these people have successfully putting out a picture at almost ANY price point, including the most astronomical, for anyone with an IQ over room temperature is pretty optimistic. In other words, if the company just puts out a few more bad movies or, worse, continues to hemorrhage cash, it’s NOT so cost-effective.

But – stepping back from the business for a sec and back to BUSINESS, as in Wall Street – this is just the news leader. The rest of the story is the same one that’s been going on for the last eight or nine months. The money has simply dried up. Would that the bad movies dried up, too – except that it’s almost too goddamned easy to make one. (But not, I would note, to write one.) The cash that was chasing these kinds of investments, thinking to score at least on the ancillaries or direct-to-video, is drying up. Haven’t you noticed? People in Hollywood are having trouble paying their bills. Sure, they’re still flying first-class, trying to kick up a little dust over breakfast wherever people breakfast these days in Beverly Hills or Manhattan (don’t look at me – I can barely crawl out of bed at that hour), dropping a few quid here and there. (Though it’s interesting to see the celebrity/designer clout behind all those new super-low priced lines for Target, H&M and all the knock-off chains.) But, as my sister has reminded me, that’s Hollywood – always keeping up appearances. The gardens will always look lush and manicured; the Bentley polished and detailed within a coronary-inch of your life.

Which brings us to – that’s right – the fine arts markets. (What – you thought I was going into Hollywood whine mode? Take me straight to Cedars next time that happens.) The relative strength, or at the very least, stability, has been noted in the most recent sales both in New York and London. Sure, there’ve been disappointments – unsold lots, guarantees that made the sales virtually break-even (or even slight losses) for the auction houses. But what’s surprising is that, on a certain level, it’s business as usual: the best works are commanding good prices – and not just from newly rich Russians or Asians or the petro-rich, but even those cash-poor (or poorer, anyway) Americans. Contemporary sales are always a bit trickier, as compared to Post-War Modern; but as we head into the week of the New York spring sales, I’m thinking that – especially as Chinese and other Asian money moves out of T-bills (hey – if nothing else works, starve the U.S. out of Iraq), hedge funds, derivatives and, well, everything from CDOs* to bad movies – it may find its way into the things that – relatively speaking anyway – endure. There are commodities and then there are commodities: stuff that resists ‘fungibility’, so to speak; the values that are, relatively speaking, eternal.

*** For those of you who don't read the business pages: collateralized debt obligation -- think junk cubed.

Phantom drivers; all-wheel vehicles (going nowhere)

2008-05-10T09:34:00.000-07:00

5 May 2008
.
What was originally on tap for the afternoon and evening was the Brahms B-flat major piano concerto with Leif Ove Andsnes. Instead, an afternoon of errands (with yet another detour into the endlessly fascinating Phantom Sightings show at LACMA) turned into dinner turned into … well, not one of the movies we had originally contemplated. A shlep into Beverly Hills or even the Arclight was out of the question. Fortunately, there are a couple of theatres in my neighborhood, including, most conveniently, the fabulous Vista straight back up Sunset. The fare: Iron Man. A decathalon might have been less tedious. As it was it looked as if at least ten men (and I mean men) wrote it – though they had to have been inspired to some extent by Sigourney Weaver’s performance as Ripley in her anti-Mama Alien full body scaffolding in Alien. I recall that L.A. Weekly’s Scott Foundas mentioned that, in addition to the obvious resemblance (on many story levels) to its direct ancestor, Robocop, this alternately lumbering and rocketing Golem of gold, steel, titanium, palladium – and just about every super-strong or super-conducting (or neither) alloy EXCEPT IRON bore some resemblance to the death-ray gazing robot of The Day the Earth Stood Still. (By the way, Scott, the name of the robot in that film is Gort, not “Klaatu.” “Klaatu” is simply the first word in the command Michael Rennie gives Gort to return to the spaceship – sparing humanity the fate we probably richly deserved then and still more today.) Unfortunately, if it weren’t thundering around in its crust-crunching, temblor-triggering boots or careering like a missile with its rocket boosters, it could almost be titled “The Night the Movie Stood Still.” Or perhaps – with director Jon Favreau playing a cameo as “Iron Man” Tony Stark’s chauffeur – Unengaging At Any Speed. Movies like this, the business theory goes, are supposed to be about putting the “dollars on the screen.” But aren’t they supposed to do something? You’re given more credible cinematic action and thrills in the opening credit sequence of the typical Bond movie than this. You get a lot of props, hardware, robotics, circuitry, wonderful computer graphic imagery, but they don’t exactly propel the plot forward at warp speed. That’s partially because the plot would like to be all things to all partisans, from America-First mothercouragefuckers to 9/11/01 conspiracy theorists – much as Stan Lee, Jon Favreau, etc., et al. want the character to embody every superhero from Beowulf to Batman (or is it Luke Skywalker? or Indiana Jones? There are little “Raiders” touches everywhere – from location shots of Afghan caves and desert dunes to musical flourishes). Which makes Jeff Bridges’ character a composite of Grendel, Darth Vader, Big Mama Alien, Dick Cheney and the Michelin Man. Ah – we are “the hollow men” – all those big chassis’s on steroids – aren’t we? In the meantime, the wasted planet doesn’t get any greener while our secretaries take great notes. (That’s what our role is here, sisters – amanuensis and handmaiden to the (apparently male) engineering geniuses.) All Gwenyth Paltrow really has to do in her anemic role is model – which apparently is enough. All you really need is a nice dinner suit or evening gown. She wears them well. The role isn’t nearly so kind to her. The dollars you can actually see working on the screen probably represent Robert Downey, Jr.’s salary. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have all that much to sink his boots into. If only the writers had had the courage to make Stark a thorough-going “merchant of death” (jesus – the American electorate elected a couple of them to the highest offices in the land); Downey could have really stretched. The production design is pretty pedestrian, too (by comparison with, say, the Bond franchise or the Alien movies). Fortunately some of the architecture was already paid for (I made it to Disney Hall after all – by way of a scene in the movie; though the super-sized Lautner-esque Malibu lair was probably CGI). The ending of the movie is nothing short of absurd. What – did they just take a scissors to it? (Which makes me wonder – was Scott Foundas drugged through the movie? Or was he paid off to write that nonsensical screed?)

It used to be that Hollywood’s big problem was blow. Now it seems to be steroids. Or maybe it’s just ADHD. Isn’t there some doctor who can write these producers a collective prescription for Ritalin? I have a writer’s (or perhaps writer-director’s) bias about this sort of business (or do I just mean the business?); but you have to wonder who’s at the helm in these sorts of vehicles – and maybe where they think they’re driving the audience. A director should be more than just a Teamster-driver at the wheel of an all-wheel drive utility vehicle. It was when people like Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges were practicing their profession.

Fictional spaces; stranger-than-fiction life

2008-05-09T20:11:00.000-07:00

4-5 May 2008

The last stop of the evening was Scalo/Guye for a show of photography by Daniele Albright – if you could legitimately call it that. The blurb on the invite described them as “photographs” yet “not photographic documents” in the same breath. The title for the show was Fictional Spaces. Well, having just come from the Crewdson luau, I felt I was ready to address a fresh take without reconfiguring my entire explication d’image m.o. But there is ‘fiction’; and then there is le nouveau roman – à la Robbe-Grillet (You’d think I’d know something about this. Apparently not enough.) I’m not sure about the fictional stuff. The images were definitely distorted, blurred (in both exposure and printing processes), cropped both horizontally and vertically, segmented laterally, and irregularly staggered with respect to each segment. Something about the four-segment photograph(s) of undulating, ice-blue ocean waves reminded me a little of Vija Celmins, both in comparison and contrast – the fixation of it (in more than one sense), as opposed to Celmins’ obsessive hyper-attentive rendering. But Albright’s point also seemed to undermine the notion of fixation. You had the sense of an abruptly shifting viewpoint, foregrounded, if not about to be submerged or pushed outside the conceptual ‘frame’, within a space that was both shallow and deep – reaching to a horizon-line not quite encompassed in the shot. In other words – now you’re treading water; now you’re, uh, NOWHERE; or perhaps just OUT THERE. Now, here’s the title: “these propagations and interfaces continue to multiply their interactions.” Ohhhhh-kaaaayyy. I have to ask: It’s in four panels. Just how many interactions were we supposed to see? I’m thinking the very deliberate discontinuities give the lie to this. The invite blurb further refined Albright’s photographic method and approach as “reformulations of perception that suspend the visual field between the known and the impossible.” Gee – sounds like some of the legal briefs I’ve glanced over within the last few months. (Oh yeah: the OTHER GUYS’.)

In general, I thought the longer panoramic, ‘horizon-line’ pieces (in four or five segments) were the strongest – though in no way did they compel a reconsideration of my phenomenology (hey – I studied with Heidegger’s English translator, donch’ya know?). Speaking of panoramas, I was just as taken with some of the dark, almost brutal, yet eerily beautiful landscapes and cityscapes of Balthasar Burkhard – whose show is scheduled to close at the end of the month. Somebody remind me to look at Resnais’ L’année dernière à Marienbad again – or maybe just about any Robbe-Grillet novel, any one of which might read as a straight transcription of the facts of my stranger-than-fiction life, lately.

Dazzling darkness -- the sapphire hour

2008-05-09T03:50:00.000-07:00

3-4 May 2008

There were three (maybe four, if you count Gagosian) big events this evening; and I only made it to two. I just missed the RAID Projects “Swap Meet” opening – the last show for an independent space that has really earned its street cred and then some – which might be the show I really wanted to go to the most; and I also skipped out on the Incognito benefit for the Santa Monica Museum which is usually so much fun – such a great place to see my favorite artist buddies, who are as busy as I am and so – rarely to be seen out except at events like these. I just couldn’t muster the energy (physical or petrochemical) to get out there; and besides it’s too much of a temptation. (I have an art habit; and unlike Nancy Reagan, I can’t say – and won’t bully myself into saying – no.) My first stop was the Murakami show, Davy Jones’ Tear, at Blum & Poe, which I thought had to be overkill after the LA MOCA and Brooklyn Museum circus; but was actually interesting enough to renew my fascination with Murakami.

I didn’t quite understand the “Davy Jones” reference – having missed Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest, the Disney/Bruckheimer extravaganza featuring Johnny Depp. From where I stood, it seemed that Murakami was both reaching back and picking up where he left off – specifically with the Daruma portraits that were a kind of elegiac pendant to the ebulliently ‘bright, guilty world’ of the (other) extravaganza that was (and is) the Murakami retrospective. When I was writing last fall about the dark undercurrents, commercial, political and otherwise, that linked such a surrealist sui generis as Dalí with someone like Murakami, I was struck by certain less-than-fully-acknowledged post-war and mid-century Japanese influences on Murakami, such as that echt disaster film-maker, Inoshiro Honda. Now, moving from the transmogrified classicism of these Daruma fantasies to the ‘landscapes’ and abstractions in the next gallery, it occurred to me that not only was Murakami expanding further on his own playfully abstracted extrapolation of Edo screen painting traditions and the Nihonga hybrid painting of his earliest academic excursions, but also moving forward through the last century’s mad clash of formal and pop cultural influences -- from varying degrees of abstraction and expressionism, from ab-ex drip painting to the pastiched graphic half-tones of Pop, to intensely saturated primary and secondary hues, to quasi-calligraphic eruptions and various quasi-historical or cultural references (e.g., Murakami roundels that morph into ttraditional Japanese stylized chrysanthemums), to the psychedelic hues and graphics of late-1960s commercial art (cf., Kubrick 2001 Star Child poster, referenced in the posting just below.)

(4 May)

The unanswered question here is just what is being represented or expressed. After the elegance and flashiness (yes, they coexist here) of the show, the B&P press release is informative but doesn’t help me draw any conclusion. The coupling of abstracted ‘landscape’ or ‘seascape’ or waves (or an abstracted hybrid pictorial formula whose ambiguity is underscored by the artist’s and staff’s obscure intentions) and ‘keyholes,’ surface ‘eruptions,’ dripped paint that seems to enter from another world, the surface play of traditional Japanese elements – all of it seems intended to juxtapose two actualities, each ambiguously exterior and interior: the ‘natural’ world (however defined or stylized), and an interior, ‘denatured’ or abstracted world – the world evoked by the Daruma paintings (or alternatively, the Inochi character and objects, the robot/replicant boy seen in the retrospective). But that may be part of the point: to stretch the 2001 analogy (since I seem to have it at hand), it’s that keyhole or black hole into another, possibly parallel universe (consider the Keir Dullea character’s (Bowman) re-birth in an antiseptic Alberti space), replete with the cultural and historical emblems of the other seeping, wafting through it; or alternatively, one universe afloat atop another. In the meantime, does the Daruma Zen icon simply answer the open-ended ‘Why?’ of the Mr. DOB trademark? A kind of ‘tune in, turn on, drop out’ for the 21st century? Or simply emblematic of a permanent oscillation between stasis or inertia and historical cycles – watchsprings in a perpetual motion machine? But there’s almost too much going on here – from the lushness of the jewel-like saturated colors, to the clash of surface incident, to the flash and polish of the silver and gold screen backgrounds. Murakami may be looking for the way out of one misconceived/misbegotten universe, but you feel lost in its dazzle before you find your way into the next one.

What did I just mean by that? That whatever ‘parallel’ universe we conceive freshly is bound to be as mathematically/aesthetically warped, inaccurate, messed up as the one we’re swirling around in? Gee – something else to think about as I take (took) in the very here/now (well, (t)here/then) universe of Gregory Crewdson’s show at Gagosian. As in so many Crewdson productions, it’s the magic hour settling over a quiet suburban setting – this one a Midwestern-looking community, by turns winter-bound and spring-thawed, of wood-frame gabled and saltbox houses, some opened or partially opened up to reveal a private moment of nascent or inchoate drama. I want to say, Crewdson is about the ‘magic hour visible’ – analogous obviously to the Miltonic ‘darkness visible.’ Whether the ‘magic hour’ (sunrise or sunset – or some simulation of it), or the glowing jewel-like twilight of so many of his other photographs (a kind of ‘sapphire hour’), there’s something anti-nostalgic about Crewdson’s superficially ‘nostalgia’ imbued pictorials (and similarly, an ‘anti-mystery’ about his ‘mystery’ shots) – the kind of hell Cheever mapped so masterfully in his novels and stories. These are Sartrean suburbs – imagine Huis Clos set on the Wisteria Lane of ABC’s Desperate Housewives.

Yes, I liked the show – more than I thought I would – but so what? I was getting – not bored, but a little anxious, distracted; feeling crowded and unmoved (it’s a Gagosian opening, remember?) at the same time – when I ran into artist/curator Kristin Calabrese in the company of bright young thing Josh Aster. We chatted a bit about the last UCLA MFA show (which, after all is where I first encountered Aster’s work), which we’d both seen a couple days ago, and caught up with each other’s news. I’ve been a bit of a fan of Calabrese’s for a few years, and even more of a fan since a couple of shows she’s curated (both at Angstrom and Honor Fraser – long before they became next door neighbors) which both seemed very much on-the-pulse and brilliantly sweeping and perceptive surveys of their aesthetic and intellectual terrain. Anyway – so we’re wandering around in the upstairs gallery – and Kristin mentions she has a show coming up – which is exciting right there; and well, maybe Sarah Watson still has one of the new paintings in her office and … well, I saw it. I felt blown away by, let’s call it a Guston-gust, when I saw it. (In other words the kind of feeling I had when I first saw Guston’s works in the 1970s.) Speaking of Sartre – let’s just say, Crewdson suddenly felt like Sartre-lite compared to this very real presence. And there was another. We went back downstairs to the backroom and there it was – unobtrusively unforgettable. I’m not going to give it away; you’re just going to have to wait and see it. Let’s just say it’s Andrea Mantegna meets Charley Ray meets John McCracken. Those two paintings eclipsed everything else (including the dazzle of Murakami) that evening; I could have gone home right then and there and just spun a little Haydn on the speakers. I’ve always thought Calabrese was an artist and thinker of considerable scope, but it occurred to me I was only just beginning to take the measure of her range – which is amazing.

Champagne for pale blue eyes

2008-05-07T06:04:00.000-07:00

3 May 2008

This may be an odd place to pick up my blogging quiver again; but then I only choose where I begin again, not where I leave off. Looking at my notes, I see a couple of half-edited post-Armory posts that never quite made it up which I may dust off and inset somewhere here another time. But I prefer to look ahead – or back only as far as the night or week-end just past (assuming the standard complement of libations, can anyone really be trusted to do more with any accuracy?).

Anyway I’ll spare you the details regarding my post-Armory virus – which in any case didn’t entirely stop me from going out [highlights – filtered through my feverish haze: the stunning LACMA Phantom Sightings show; not unrelated – Danny Jauregui’s show last week-end at Acuna-Hansen; an enthusiasm for Tim Ebner’s new paintings at Rosamund Felsen (which needs re-visiting post-fever); Martin Scorsese’s film of The Rolling Stones’ 2006 Beacon Theatre concert, Shine A Light].

So – just when you thought I’d had enough fairs for one season (or four) – last night, I found myself at the Modernism Show at the Santa Monica Civic – really not the most unlikely place for me to be. My apartment is a shambles; and I’m finally taking some serious steps towards renovation and redecoration. Of course I’m starting (logically or no) with re-hanging the art (always the most important thing for me, if not the most rational procedure; I know I’ll probably end up re-hanging it again). The second and third steps involve calling 1-800-GOT-JUNK and an industrial cleaning crew (they usually show up in full haz-mat regalia, ready for everything from bubonic plague to plutonium contamination, which for all I know may be present – gee, as if my DNA needed fresh damage). Anyway, I could use a new credenza, lamps, lamp tables, nightstands, rugs, etc., etc. (Though I could probably buy myself off with a nice cocktail shaker or bangle.) I was joined for the evening by one of my bi-coastal pals, Big-Penn, who, by contrast, has been on the prowl for iconic architectural properties. (If you think the market is depressed for these properties, think again. Neutra’s iconic Kaufmann house in Palm Springs, which is being sold at Christie’s contemporary sale on the 13th is expected – as many other art works to be sold that evening are – to fetch a record price.)

And so I headed straight for the art. Okay – not really – it’s just that the perimeters of these fairs (and not just Modernism or other decorative arts markets) tend to favor, if not fine art necessarily, at the very least graphic arts and prints (the splashier the better) and/or printed matter (art, shelter books and magazines and the like). So while Big-Penn seriously mulled over the very handsome pastel and pencil drawings, architectural renderings, and sketches of, among other things, iconic Neutra houses, at Edward Cella, I was diverted by the vintage movie posters (and an old acquaintance) at Walter Reuben, including a stunning Italian poster for the Leone/Grimaldi/UA Il Buono, il brutto, e il cattivo (very different emphasis from the American version which distinctly plays up Eastwood’s “Buono”), a Japanese poster for the DeLaurentiis/Paramount/Vadim Barbarella, which anticipates the craze-to-come for anime, and the psychidelic, eye-popping image for a poster for Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, once intended to merely paper vacant walls and construction sites and now fetching a whopping $16,000. (Wonder what the poster for Buñuel’s Belle de Jour would fetch.) This is really not such a stretch for me: I collected movie posters long before I collected fine art (and – to judge from current market prices – apparently sold some of my best for a song), and still have several hanging alongside the paintings and drawings at home. (Hey – DNA is a powerful thing, even when it’s all messed up.) Big-Penn and I both noted a certain amount of fashion (and Hollywood-style glamour) photography about (including at Cella) – but there was something distinctly – I’m inclined to say, almost deliberately – unengaging about a lot of it – as opposed to what was exhibited, say, at photoLA. (Has there been a mood shift about mid-century American style photography?) By contrast, one of the most charming and thoroughly engaging of the booths was that of Vintage European Posters (Oakland), whose staff made a brilliant stand-up show of their truly magnificent vintage travel/tourism, arts and advertising posters. It was Champagne for the eyes and (in lieu of Cortina, Zermatt, Davos, Basel???), I really needed it.

So much of what catches one’s eyes at fairs like these are what might be called jewellery for the walls, ceilings, tables, etc. – and in between the jewellery was some actual jewellery that doubled as art: specifically pieces by, among others, Calder, Gabo, Rickey and Louise Bourgeois on display at Didier Antiques (London); also beautiful pieces (especially earrings – I tried on a fabulous gold and enamel pair that were beyond reasonable) at, among others, Kimberly Klostermann (Cincinnati), Summerfield Stanton, and Linda Goldberg (Beverly Hills). The real household jewellery was abundantly on display at Greg Nanamura (New York), who showed a magnificent Curtis Jere chandelier that looked like cascades of corroding metallic stalagmites in patinaed bronze and a beautiful scattering of patinaed brass disks, knobs and roundels (“Raindrops”) intended to decorate a wall. And there was that credenza and lamps I needed – bases that looked like Chinese characters with trapezoid shades flanking a slender chrome mirror on the perfect black credenza. (And more earrings to covet: a salesperson modeled a fantastic pair of Lucite drops by Monies (Copenhagen).)

Habite (San Francisco) showed a beautiful, almost Irwin-esque mirror – a chrome edged, beveled glass circle set slightly off-center onto a larger disk of pale blue glass – a pale blue eye poised not only to reflect, but to spring back into one’s eye – by Fontana Arte. (They are opening a store on La Brea here in L.A.) I wanted to linger on – but I kept losing Big-Penn who goes through these things like a shark.

We ended up at Bridges Over Time (Newburgh, New York), where I was admiring a beautiful, streamlined sculpted chaise and Big-Penn (between the shmooze) had his eye on a striking Wesselman-esque pattern study. Ed and Betty Koren made the space feel like a cozy living room in a house on the Hudson (or maybe New Canaan) and I didn’t think Big-Penn was going to be able to drag himself away without the Wesselman wanna-be (or myself, for that matter, without a beautiful, slender Italian brass tripod torchiere), but to my amazement, he did; and we proceeded to a very Dolce Vita (another movie poster I once owned) scene in John Baldessari’s neighborhood.

Aside from what I personally coveted, what lingers on (in addition to that Irwin-esque “pale blue eye”) is the art. In addition to the abundance of fine art lithography and prints, there were a couple of truly outstanding paintings (at prices commensurate with their value), including a truly magnificent Albert Gleizes Cubist figurative abstraction at Trigg-Ison (who put on that amazing Masson show last fall), and a marvelous painting by Bay Area figurative abstractionist Bruce McGaw, “Chemical Plant by Freeway, Emeryville” at Dennis Clark Fine Arts (Carmel). Either one would be a significant expenditure (the McGaw, for example was $125,000); but given the overheated auction market, might be considered an extremely reasonable investment for the pleasure alone.

Check my PULSE in a couple of hours.

2008-03-30T11:37:00.000-07:00

30 March 2008

Well as far as I'm concerned, the verdict is in. I'm not going to whine about the predictability of the Armory or this aspect or another of SCOPE (which I thought, on the whole, was pretty successful); but of all the fairs this year, PULSE is by far the best. Not that everything was especially fresh or unpredictable (e.g., Freight & Volume (NY) showing Kim Dorland (but at his most trenchant, brilliant), or Galerie Stefan Ropke (Cologne) showing Sigmar Polke (nothing EVER wrong with that), but as is more or less self-evident, where novelty was occasionally lacking, quality was not. Barbara Stanwyck -- I mean Monya Rowe -- was here with some fresh Angela Dufresnes (always welcome); so was Rosamund Felsen, with an especially superb Steve Hurd, among other choice selections. Funny coincidence to run into Cindy Sherman on the other side of Rosamund's booth inspecting the -- what else? -- Morton Bartletts in Julie Saul's space. (She collects them apparently -- why are we not surprised?) Before I go any further, though, let me just say that I STILL don't know who won this year's PULSE prize (bestowed by Malgorzata Romanska). But my pick for the best gallery booth was that of Galerie Ernst Hilger (Vienna) -- with an amazing installation of video works (Irwin-esque yet something altogether different) by Timothy White-Sobieski, among other gorgeous specimens. Gotta jet. Check back in a couple of hours -- assuming I'm still breathing.

Ezrha Jean Black, New York

Stranger than strangelets: black holes uptown, bright stars down

2008-03-29T11:17:00.000-07:00

29 March 2008

I don't know if any of you have seen it (I can't see that you could have missed it -- it made the front page of The New York Times); but the significance of just about anything happening at the art fairs or the Whitney Biennial (which I intend to take in today) disappears altogether in the face of news that the world (and possibly the universe, such as we know it) may be eaten whole by a black hole (or "strangelet") that may be produced, among other subatomic particle debris, by the operations of the Large Hadron Collider, an $8 billion particle accelerator set to commence its atom-smashing activities sometime this summer outside Geneva. (Great -- yet another superlative I didn't know I needed -- ATOM-smashing.)

So who really cares that VOLTA NY was not (to be kind) exactly atom-smashing stuff? Although to look at work like that of Jota Castro's (in the Elaine Levy (Brussels) space), you might think he was on the right wavelength. Here, as in some of the other fairs (including the Bridge, which my pals, Kathleen, Duncan and I went to during the interval between the Robert Miller opening and the late dinner that followed), it's the small moments that count. (There were in fact few of these to be had at Bridge -- but I can't let my low blood sugar speak for me.) Another artist who seemed to have her finger on an apocalyptic pulse was Cathy de Monchaux (shown out of the Fred (London/Leipzig) space -- though the 'holes' (or reveals) here were white and gossamer, spun together out of what looked like bedspring wire, shredded tulle and linen, with vaguely figurative elements trapped in its skeins. Speaking of black holes, the Ian Burns installation (Spencer Brownstone) made me wonder if he could make any kind of sense of the chaos of my L.A. apartment. Between Burns and my therapist (who I missed this week) -- who knows? -- I could have some kind of breakthrough. Either that or end up as a shopping bag/cart lady. Speaking of which, the kind of painting and subject matter of artists like Sage Vaughn (whose work was on display at Bertrand & Gruner (Zurich) is practically a drug on the market -- at least in America. What made B&G think VOLTA was the place to show it off? Besides, we have Stanya Kahn and Harry Dodge now -- which should put this exhausted genre of painting definitively to rest. Ronald de Bleme's painting (Hamish Morrison, Berlin) has a slightly retro aspect, too -- with its bold geometric, curvilinear, just slightly biometric silhouettes, negative spaces and damped-down mid-20th century palette (think Tiki -- that's right TIKI!) -- but somehow, the energy, the rhythm of it, redeemed it for me. But, as I said, it was the small moments -- and one of the smallest and one of the best -- was my little epiphany at Tokyo's Taro Nasu, who were showing the figurative fragments of Takaaki Izumi in what, from a distance, looked like some kind of sandstone or even marble, but, close up, revealed itself as foam or styrofoam. As I was leaning over to pick up a card, I nearly crushed a tiny spongy fragment sitting on the desk (wouldn't that be just like me?), but (to my relief) it managed to recover its shape. They were like large (or, in that instance) small fragments of Maillol sculptures -- recreating and extending a particular moment of observation, survey of surface -- both enlarging and compressing it, or alternatively, rendering it as something that could be grasped (and felt) between one's hands. I wanted to put that fragment displayed on the desk in my pocket -- somewhere close to my heart -- and take it home. My favorite space was International Festival's -- which was nothing more than a bar set up to serve drinks and hand out information about the activities of this floating art collective which is, temporarily one surmises, based on Franklin in TriBeCa. This international trio (the young man I spoke with was from Sweden) uses old movies as templates for new films/performances shot as street theatre/reality films on the streets of wherever they happen to be. (Appropriately enough, they handed me a DVD of one, entitled, "On the Town.") They were so friendly -- it was all I could do not to break into song.) They're planning an expedition to Los Angeles in July, so we should have an opportunity to see them there; though given the way L.A. works (or doesn't work), for all we know they could end up in an actual film studio before they finish the project.

Bolting from VOLTA, I made my way downtown, not to the Battery, but to the Altman pavilions on West 18th. The buzz around town (meaning, really, the fairs and the galleries) was that this L.A. Art in New York fair was one of the best (albeit smallest); and the reason was quite simple: a lot of good stuff. The buzz around the fair, though, at least on this particular Friday evening, was that foot traffic was light. In theory, if you bring your best stuff, "they will come." The actuality is somewhat more complicated, and frequently dependent on circumstances remote from the fair itself. After a brief reconnaissance (I'm beginning to come around to Peter Rogiers, fette; I loved the piece Roberts & Tilton had in their space.) and quick check-in to artillery-Central, New York, I grabbed Fearless Leader and Paige the Rage, pushed them into a cab and we all headed down to TriBeCa for drinks at the mini-museum Susan and Michael Hort call home. (I wasn't going to take a chance with the brunch this year.) Talk about a lot of good stuff. It was almost overwhelming. The master bedroom alone was overwhelming. I have to say it would be hard for me to wake up and face that wall of Marlene Dumas, Elizabeth Peyton, Nicole Eisenman, Neo Rauch, and John Currin morning after morning. (And I love Marlene Dumas.) And that's not the half of it. One wall! After our YouTube panel, it was great to say hello to the real thing -- I mean the Paul McCarthy chocolate butt plug. (Again, not the first thing I'd want to contemplate in the morning.) But there's no way to adequately describe it within the space of a paragraph. I mean we're talking about 2,000 pieces here -- many of them absolutely first-rate. Let me just share a few of the pleasures: the Lisa Yuskavage shower curtain in the penthouse bathroom; the room full of Richard Tuttles (sublime), the Patty Changs, the John Currins (really some of the best), the Franz West, the Fred Tomasellis (again among the best), the Neo Rauch (and as you know, I'm not really a fan), Charlene von Heyl. There were also the discoveries (for me anyway) -- among them, Eberhard Havekost. I could go on and on and on -- but I've really got to go OUT again. I'll check in again after Pulse. Big kiss. MOI!

Ezrha Jean Black, New York

SCOPE, sublime and ridiculous; Night of the Locusts

2008-03-28T11:26:00.000-07:00

28 March 2008

I did say "a few other things" (I'm looking at the last paragraph of my last posting), didn't I? There were quite a few things -- but I'm not going to go into them just yet because I just got back uptown and it's already after 3:00 a.m. (One of my canine nieces just got up to keep me company, which is so sweet; but she's a bit under the weather and I don't want her to be up past her bed for my sake. I spent a good part of the afternoon at SCOPE -- once again in Walter Damrosch Park -- probably more time than I should have, if only because it seemed so cozy after the jam-packed Pier 94 and the frenetic pace required to take in a substantial portion of it. As with previous fairs, a number of SCOPE-commissioned installations enlivened the setting, even if one of them, "ImagiNAPtion," by a duo calling themselves Freedland & Mednick, Ph.D., seemed only to encourage viewers to sleep. What appeared to be an extensive use of fabric as a medium by a number of very different artists showing out of a number of galleries from all over the world scattered throughout the fair may have enhanced a sense of nurturing domesticity. It's a cocoon fair in so many senses -- nurturing emerging and newly established artists on the verge of final metamorphosis to maturity. But maybe I'm exaggerating a bit. I'm not sure anything was particularly eye-popping brilliant, but it was enjoyable and very manageable at every turn. (The catering was better, too -- much better -- than the Armory's.)

It seems that almost every fair I go to includes some L.A. gallery or art space I've never actually been to in Los Angeles; and this time around is no exception. Last year, it was David Kordansky at the Armory Show. This year it's Bonelli Contemporary at SCOPE. I had no idea they represented Kim Dorland -- who, let's face it, is almost everywhere lately. (Or is he?? Have I simply become conditioned to a certain acid-electric (in both color and attitude), dystopic treatment of the alienated American suburb?) They also showed strong, witty work by Matteo Bergamesco (surreal and painterly) and Bacon-esqe immolations by Elena Monzo, whose Not too far away, what looked like a 99-Cent store pile-up in soft colored fabrics was melting away at the New Image Art booth -- the work of Megan Whitmarsh -- directly across from a panel that more or less echoed the same effect -- a blow-up tent that looked like a melting tutti-frutti ice cream scoop against the neutral gray linen panel with tiny figures staggering in the foreground like refugees from a circus disaster. Cleon Peterson's bichromatic violence and the Date Farmers were something of a correction to that carnival mood. Humor is not the first thing one looks for in the fine art context, but at least initially it seemed to abound here. At Jack the Pelican (Brooklyn), Iris Schieferstein was breaking the fourth wall hilariously with a photograph and collage (or relief) diptych pastiche of Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon -- tiny but articulated masks protruding from the surfaces -- titled "Underfucked / Oversexed." (Boy can I relate.) I'm not sure if the gallery was going for an art historical theme, but on the other wall, Eric Yahnker was showing a masterful drawing after a Gentilleschi Judith Holofernes that inserted a sleek, smirking Liberace between the figures, ringed and gloved hands placed on her shoulders like some dark angel out of a MAD Magazine future bestowing infernal benediction. At brot.undspiele (Berlin), David Henry Brown, Jr. was updating the Christ mythology in (red-dominant) felt and fabric with a new universalist iconography based on pizza (new iconography for an over-fished planet?). It was a far more gender-ambiguous iconography as well. On one wall, Jesus emerged from a slice of pizza brandishing two slices (wow! -- the trinity idea in a slice of pizza -- who knew?); on the other, an apparently pregnant Jesus was gestating a new pie in his/her wood-burning "oven." I'm not sure where the platform heels fit into all of this; but I guess it was intended to express something divine or hormonal or both.

It was great to see John Pollard back again with ada gallery (Richmond, VA) -- still showing Jared Lindsay Clark's agglomerations of ceramic kitsch reconfigured into new art life forms. (Foreshadowing a trend? I noticed a number of artists engaged by the notion of new recombinant life forms. Genetic engineering or new mutations after nuclear or bio-chemical holocaust -- I guess we have our pick.) But the centerpiece of the space was a classical sculpture by Morgan Herrin carved not out of clay, stone or marble, but cut, carved and molded plywood 2x4s. I still can't quite get my head around just how this was accomplished, but strictly on a technical level, it seems quite a feat. (Lance Armstrong reportedly bought the piece.) The mythology of this piece was as mysterious to me as anything else: an imposing and nude female figure with a sword plunging into a snake at her feet, but with her head partially obscured by an octopus. If anyone can explain it to me, please send me an e-mail.

The theme at Andreas Binder (Munich) seemed to be the ephemeral sublime. There was outstanding if disparate work on hand by a number of artists from his stable, including Matthias Meyer, once associated with Gerhard Richter and clearly influenced by his work and technique, Phillipp Lachenmann and Tina Barney. The Lachenmann photographs -- inkjet prints -- were from his 2003 monochromatic "Grey (Surfer) Studies" -- sublime elisions of sea into sky with tiny figures isolated in the middle distance -- very reminiscent of a similar series of studies by Catherine Opie, but produced independently and sometime before Opie made her studies. Much as I liked Opie's surfer photographs, these are by far superior, almost sublime. The Barney drawings -- all on found or discarded papers (conservation would be an issue) -- were nothing short of amazing: a gestural line and hand rendered with force, economy, delicacy and precision for portraits both nuanced and iconic. At once familiar and utterly unique and very moving.

Before I continue with my SCOPE notes, let me jump ahead to the on-going art fair that is Chelsea. In the evening, I joined Fearless Leader and Glamourpuss Paige Wery for an opening at Superkathleen's space on 26th for the opening of a group show including, among others, Hans Van Meeuwen -- working-- in a domain somewhere between De Chirico-esque surreal monumentalism and the framework of, say, Charles Ray. Before the wine ran out, we went downstairs to the Robert Miller Gallery for the opening of Joseph La Piana's show, Kinetic State. I can't really comment on the art, although it was visible through a crowd as dense as any I have ever witnessed at a gallery or even a museum. The art may or may not have been kinetic, but it left me in a state best described as frenetic. It was a scene straight out of The Day of the Locusts. I gave up trying to look at anything or for that matter anyone and simply hung back near the reception desk and pointed my camera randomly into the crowd. It made the Gagosian pre-Oscar openings look like a minyan. It was a feeding frenzy -- but for what? In fact, there was a dinner afterwards, for one hundred (apparently the largest dinner ever held at the gallery). Superkathleen was (of course) invited and was kind enough to invite me along with her pal, Duncan -- a well-informed and extremely candid observer of these scenes. The dinner -- preceded by sushi and Champagne -- was fabulous (and hilarious); but I don't think I could have survived the evening without them.

Ezrha Jean Black, New York

Art Colony in a War Economy

2008-03-27T10:31:00.000-07:00

26 March 2008

Before I head downtown to "get bombed" at the artillery</span> party at Bar 119, let me just share a few preliminary observations. Certain galleries seem to have their pick of the prime siting -- on the central axis and/or relatively close (but not too close) to the entrance. E.g., Victoria Miro (London), Mai 36 (Zurich), White Cube/Jay Jopling (London), Sean Kelly (NYC), Hauser & Wirth (Zurich/London), Matthew Marks (NYC), Blum & Poe (LA), Anton Kern (NY), David Zwirner (NY), Emmanuel Perrotin (Paris). I have to assume these are veterans of long-standing at the Fair, who therefore merit prime siting. Coincidence or not, some of them seem to show the same groups of artists they had on hand last year -- strong work, not to diminish it, but nevertheless not particularly new (or always noteworthy), and certainly not entirely representative of these galleries' stables of artists considered altogether. I assume that's one reason why the Armory selection committee placed a few new participants among these old hands, e.g., notably, Simon Lee (London). Placement isn't everything, though. Rivington Arms seemed slightly hidden in its prime space directly across from Simon Lee (is it smaller this year?) -- right next to Elizabeth Dee. And some of the spaces seem to have impact no matter where they're situated: e.g., Paul Kasmin (who, as he did last year, show-cased only one artist), or newcomer Erna Hecey (Bruxelles, Luxembourg) (forgive my missing accent marks; I'm working with a different laptop and it's hard to even see what I'm writing).

27 March 2008 (2:00 a.m.)

No, I'm not blind drunk -- though with this tiny screen, it hardly makes any difference. Boy -- and I thought I was political. Stephen Cohen really gives me a run for that standing. I knew I had to catch up on my Artforums; who knew I had to catch up on my Nations, too? The spirited conversation continued up in my editor's hotel room between Tulsa, Paige Wery and me -- perhaps a bit too spirited -- the front desk rang up to let us know we were disturbing everyone on the eighth floor. (Tulsa said this was the second night in a row of complaints from her neighbors.) And we were discussing ART -- not politics. It was about as loud as a museum gallery. Quick -- someone call the police! four minutes 33 seconds of silence -- it's gotta be a terrorist plot! Gimme a break. I have to say that was another thing I noticed at the Armory: a plodding earnestness from so many gallery assistant directors when queried about this artist, that work. You'd think they were writing it all down in an exam blue-book, and frankly I don't think half of them would even earn a passing grade at the Marlborough School. (Or Dalton ? Fieldston?) Hey -- it's ART, not plumbing. (Or to Tulsa's hotel neighbors -- Hey, it's LIFE, not plywood.) Having had no more than a bite all day, Paige took me out again for a pizza-cap at a pizzeria on Lexington -- meager but much needed before I cabbed it back to Harlem.

It was nice to run into a few familiar faces before the evening was over on Pier 94. Heather Harmon fresh off a plane and still looking FABULOUS at Patrick Painter; Patrick himself of course and the rest of his staff, who are always so helpful; Superkathleen -- as in Kathleen Cullen, of Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts, one of the most energetic people I know, and the most fun -- in the company of collector Melissa Wolfson -- who knows a good thing when she sees it. One artist we couldn't stop talking about was Michael Vasquez, who himself materialized as we were toasting his praises with Champagne. I had myself only just seen his astounding paintings of neighborhood homeboy/gangsta mentors(he's from the St. Petersburg-Tampa area of Florida) earlier in the afternoon at the Fredric Snitzer Gallery (Miami) space (right next to Mai 36). He's only 25 and already a commanding painter. What a talent.

As for Mai 36, as I said above, something just a bit predictable about it -- not entirely a bad thing: wonderful pixelated Thomas Ruff C-print, John Baldessari's play on animal harvesting (e.g., turkeys, fish; the contrasting solitary praying mantis); Troy Brauntuch. A bit more interesting to me were the Jurgen Dreschers in gray mettalics -- one a panel covered in bubble wrap; also an ambiguous, deconstructed cardboard box -- all painted silver. the most interesting was an enigmatic Konrad Dedobbeleer -- "Anger takes the place of what is ignored." I wonder if American politicos are getting that message this political season. I think Obama has. Similarly at Victoria Miro -- except maybe I'm wrong. Yes, they showed Peter Doig -- but what Peter Doigs -- an amazing panel, 25x243.5 cm., "The Drifter" from 1996; also a number of Grayson Perry ceramics in a very new (for him) vein inspired by a residency in Japan. But the most interesting work was painting by an Italian woman, whose name I can't read from my notes. (Is it the hour or my amazingly illegible handwriting?)

Speaking of Simon Lee, who as I mentioned was placed in some proximity to these spaces, there were many very fine George Condo fright masks/figures available. Two beautifully geodesic puppies iin triangular-folded cardboard by Toby Ziegler, a Sherrie Levine O'Keefe appropriiation (beautiful -- but BORRRRRR-ing) and a marvelously witty John Armleder array of fake firelogs.
At Praz-Delavallade (Paris/Berlin) -- one of the most interesting (and political?) spaces of the afternoon, there was a great Andrea Bowers tribute to Marla Ruzicka (way to go Andrea); also great work by Edgar Arcenaux, Robyn O'Neil (a wonderfully terrifying poem for our time in grisaille) and Erik Schmidt (a man brandishing a hunting rifle). Also John Miller -- not the project you made in second grade. Rivington Arms showed John Finneran (whose work always has an amazingly flat yet serendipitous quality -- thought balloons with the most compressed expressions) and Leigh Ledare (she has a show coming up -- can't wait. Except I really can't wait -- I'll be back in L.A.)

A few other things: John Miller is suddenly (and I do mean SUDDENLY -- like, uh, where was he last year, and the year before that, and the year before that? Or did I just by sheer coincidence miss those shows and those reviews. Okay, it's possible.) HUGE. I wondered about this for all of two minutes -- which I think is when I ran into a few more specimens at a second gallery. Then it all began to sink in: war, the economy, and children -- the children we remain (and not necessarily in a positive sense, the children we obsess about -- yours, mine, theirs -- and the children we no longer seem to know quite how to raise. So we have to go back to second or third grade where we made those "arts and crafts" projects with macaroni or other shapely pasta and bits of sandbox detritus and rudimentary collage, gluing them to cardboard or plywood or some other sturdy support and painting them all gold or silver for a jeweled or encrusted effect. "Look, Mom! I made a decoration!" ('Yeah, and you're STILL an ugly little freak!' says Mom. Now I seem to remember that I didn't like second or third grade too much.) Instead of pasta or macaroni, though, what seems to be bubbling up through the gold paint is weaponry: guns and various gun parts, knives, grenades, bombs. 'It's the war economy, stupid. Oh and by the way, we'll need some of those neglected, maleducated kid sto kill some other people and maybe finish off each other once they're finished. Okay I have to stop for now.

Ezrha Jean Black, from New York

Leave-taking -- official & unofficial -- & my return to New York

2008-03-26T08:53:00.000-07:00

It's been more than a month since I posted here -- though not for lack of news or material. It's not as if I've entirely stopped going out or taking notes -- just posting them; though it's worrisome when first my editor, then my friends begin to ask where the hell I've been. My cats have wondered the same thing. They've been acting out for a week straight -- even before I was getting ready to take to the sky, which is when they either go out on the neighborhood warpath or shut down entirely. A few of my pals have known to look for me in the Flynt Building neighborhood where it seems I've been cooped up far more hours than usual. The result is greater than usual exhaustion; but I plod along.

Last week-end, I dug myself out of the rats nest of my apartment only for an Easter lunch with two of meinen deutschen freunden. I wanted to post a few notes about the Figures show up at David Kordansky and an interesting show by a local artist who calls himself elow at the Lawrence Asher Gallery, but was more than a little preoccupied with the logistics of getting out of my apartment and over to that of my pals here in Riverside Drive. (Besides, do you really need to read those pages of notes written through the anxiety of sequential panics over the last few weeks?) It's now been a full year since I began posting these notes and I am back once again where I started: here in Manhattan for The Armory Show and the many ancillary art fairs that will fill the island for the next week. Frankly I feel like continuing my hibernation -- well supplied with books in this magnificent apartment, distracted only by the view over Riverside Drive and Riverside Park -- windswept, warmer, but still a bit wintry, and beautiful as always. I'm indulging myself with the pleasures of the text -- all the 'texts' I have set down and never finished. (A copy of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections is open on the pillow next to me. I forgot how beautifully written it is. There are entire paragraphs that read like prose poems.) I read Colette on the plane over. Colette -- you can see I'm regressing. I'm not sure if I'm ready to plunge into that visual maelstrom on Pier 94. But plunge in I must -- and in just a few hours. And yes -- I promise you will be hearing all about it.

My editor's arrival in New York was less auspicious. No sooner had she parked herself on a barstool for a well-earned martini than her wallet was lifted from right beside her martini glass in a scenario straight out of Bresson's Pickpocket smoothly translated to Murray Hill. I am hopeful SOMETHING may be recovered simply because at least some of it was caught on videotape. But what a rude welcome. If you see her on the Pier or elsewhere in Manhattan over the next few days, I beg you to kindly overlook her caustic envoi. (And to think I usually make that sort of apology for MYSELF.) We're feeling a bit rusticated just now.

Speaking of my editor, I'm being pressed to submit an idea for an L.A. piece for the magazine -- and I'm still slouching towards Bethlehem with no destination in sight. Feel free to share any suggestions you might have with me. In the meantime, though, I must say it's great to be back in New York. Anytime in New York -- it's great to live it again.

Ezrha Jean Black, in New York

They tried to make me go to BCAM; I said "No, no, no."

2008-02-15T21:39:00.000-08:00

10 February 2008 (for Amy Winehouse)

Before I post what I was going to post a week ago, let me first say that NO, I did NOT GO to the BCAM opening. Fearless Leader and Fabulous Publisher went to the press preview Thursday and – though she submitted no direct comment to me of her own (her neutrality is somewhat understandable: the works shown from the collection are, almost without exception, superb; I believe a list is available from the website – both LACMA and Broad’s own)*, I found a comment she relayed to me from someone else who was there – a very knowledgeable perceptive and articulate (and widely published) L.A. critic – revealing. After asking FL for her thoughts, he responded with one of his own: “It’s all about money.” To that I might append a couple of corollaries, both more or less directly applicable to Mr. Broad’s apparently unslakeable competitive drive and his unshakeable need for control: it’s all about ego; and it’s all about real estate. Presumably we won’t be hearing too many complaints about the real estate for at least a few years, and maybe more. Between refurbished galleries on the rest of the campus, BCAM and the May Co. space, Mr. Govan, et al. should have enough lebensraum for, well, at least a tausendwochenreich. As far as Mr. Broad’s ego is concerned, I have an architectural proposal that, although probably not suited to the talents of Renzo Piano or Zaha Hadid, is sure to intrigue someone – maybe a Yale MFA or Architecture graduate. They would surely recall the design of the Beinecke Rare Book Library: a glass structure itself fully contained within an opaque but translucent ‘sarcophagus’ of Carrara marble. With all the talk (albeit understandably reticent at this stage) about yet another free-standing Broad facility for art, yet ambivalence about simply abandoning the elegant structure that now houses the Foundation, perhaps a structure, similar to the Beinecke marble box (but much larger) could be built around the building, holding the Foundation, art and library (and all those Beuys), and Mr. Broad’s ego, all at once. Presumably ego radiation danger should abate within, say, a tausendjahrensreich.

*By the by – has anyone else noticed that BCAM is listed on the Broad Art Foundation website as if it were simply one more proprietary component – or certainly an ancillary – of the Broad Art Foundation? Once you click on this BAF sub-head/’sub-entity’ for an ‘overview’, the unscrolled narrative presents BCAM as if it were a joint venture with LACMA -- which of course it is -- rather than an actual no-strings-attached gift to LACMA. (I’d love to see the deal memo on all of this.) As always, the language is carefully parsed – would that the press picked up on these things: “$60 million donation to create the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) at LACMA” ; in the next graf – “the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) at LACMA is open.” “BCAM at LACMA” – my emphasis. Not LACMA’s BCAM; not L.A. County’s BCAM – it just happens to be there on Wilshire Blvd. (I guess Armand Hammer beat Eli to the Wilshire frontage in Westwood that would have been more convenient to his office – though Hammer had an entire corporation behind him already hunkered down on Wilshire.) And it’s not as if that prime Wilshire Boulevard frontage has a negligible market value exactly – even in today’s depressed real estate market. As far as providing some architectural cohesion or coherence to the Museum complex (or at least that Wilshire frontage again), that remains to be seen. For the time being, I think they should just make the most of a rather syncopated beat.(to put the best spin on it), taking the length of that stretch of Wilshire between Curson and Fairfax, from the Pits and sculpture garden to that misbegotten ziggurat-pastiche by the Hardy Holzman firm (I’m not sure I even remember who designed this fortress – probably a team of architects, all working at odds with one another), to – I have no idea what’s going on with the ‘entrance pavilion’ – to say nothing of that Chris Burden installation (is that permanent? Reminds me a bit of a question occasionally (obnoxiously) posed to me: is it fashion or is it costume?) – to BCAM – and finally to the Streamline Moderne classic by Martin & Marx that was once the May Co. department store. (It surprises me a little that more hasn’t been done with those amazing spaces.) With all the attention splashed on BCAM, I sort of wonder if there’s a New Yorker-type cartoon in the making: the two buildings jostling with one another on the page: LACMA West to BCAM: “Hey, what am I – chopped liver?”

The Broad approach to collecting – I wouldn’t even call it high market/’blue chip’ (crass to use this kind of jargon in the context of art, however commodified), though of course, it is high market, if not top of the market, because, with rare exception, Broad’s penchant for control doesn’t seem to really allow him the latitude for the kind of risk top-market, high-stakes bidding entails – tells us something about what is lacking in this approach – and what may be missing in the collection as a whole: adventure, passion, discovery, a sense of the moment, the truly contemporary, a confidence of taste – however that may be characterized over the short or long term.

In other words, with certain exceptions (and there are always exceptions), I don’t think you ever really get collecting at the high end, without understanding something about collecting at the low, the new end. That doesn’t mean every new art starlet, every new graduating class from the major art schools. It does mean a willingness, an eagerness to seek out and seriously consider the new (or simply unseen, unanticipated; ‘emerging’ should also encompass the newly ‘emergent’ from well off the beaten (cyber- or other) track), a voracious appetite for new visual ideas, and to consider them in a continuously refreshed cultural context; ancillary to that is of course a vigorous engagement with the culture. It’s really not for the faint of heart, and – even in the saturated hyper-connected digitally extended world from which most of us operate – it’s not something that can be entirely accomplished from a Wilshire Boulevard office, a suite at the Four Seasons or a Gulfstream jet.

I was reminded of this as I made my round of openings this week-end (minus BCAM). I wasn’t sure what to expect from Eve Wood (whom I know a bit and have frequently enjoyed chatting and sharing discoveries with; her enthusiasm is irresistible) – and I have to say I was prepared to be less than thrilled. There’s a whimsical and anecdotal quality about these paintings that risks being labeled a bit ‘twee’. (Okay, is that what I’m doing here?) When I saw the image on the invite (“Between Sea and Land”), the thought-association that immediately came to mind was The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Sunflowers’ (as in Paul Zindel‘s play, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.). A whimsical (or so it seemed) portrait set against a fantastic arabesque-like backdrop of sunflowers set into a densely floral hedge sinking into the painting’s foreground/lower edge. The portrait has a slightly cartoon-schematic cast – a fairy tale figure (and configuration). What redeems it is the clarity of the painting within that arabesque. I’m not sure it matters that the portrait doesn’t really look like its subject (a well-known local artist); the real subject (I think) is the arabesque itself. (Aren’t we all, though?) This is the problem Wood sets up for herself: conjoining the ‘iconic’ with the anecdotal, while fully exploring/exploiting her capacities for painterly clarity, transparency and expressiveness. The unusual composition – a deliberately ‘painterly’ backdrop that both supports and undermines the ‘pictorial’ aspect, a slightly skewed or oblique orientation (congruent with the impulse towards arabesque) just off the vertical axis – certainly supports the latter of these objectives. The first is somewhat harder to achieve. Far easier, I think, to let that clarity work, in a sense, as a kind of reveal, to let the subject emerge within the painterly whole – which is what happens in the best of these canvases. E.g., notably “No Way Home,” a portrait of the artist’s mother looking up (stageward) amid a sea of red plush theater seats – beautiful character study, gorgeous painting; also “Every Good Story Has A Cherry In It” (which features Wood’s adorable dog) – already a ‘picture on a wall’ in rich amber tones relieved by chartreuse. In “Lone Wolf on the Prairie, the figure (here, unambiguously twee) floats amid a gossamer mille-fiori backdrop that needs no justification for its exuberant beauty, its sheer joie de peintre.

It was an evening of such small, contemplative pleasures – which continued at the Carl Berg Gallery – right across the street from the splashy luau my editor and I were missing at LACMA. Jessica Minckley, who was featured in the L.A. Louver Rogue Wave of 2005, showed a small gallery of enigmatic objects and panels/pages(?), that (with the exception of a series of watercolors made with pages actually torn from books) initially seemed quite disparate, yet with an eerie sense of correspondence. Taken in succession, though, that sense of correspondence built into an assemblage of dark, quiet power. From the “Epigraph/Epitaph” series of watercolors – simultaneously dark and bitterly ironic yet almost elegiac – to the nascent Narcissus about to lose his shadow (a framed watercolor panel that actually has its full blown/full-grown cut-out counterpart in a fabric silhouette attached to the frame and dangling to the floor. Between these book-ends, among other things, a life/death mask, a stack of pink bakery boxes stacked almost to the ceiling, with only the top box opened, a pair or salt-lick cubes suspended from a set of plastic fingers (used for grazing cattle), a ‘salt drawing’ laid over a magazine ad for Morton Salt. I had the benefit of a rather cogent chat with the artist; but ultimately, the book pages with their ironic texts and ineffable watercolors (scatters, tangles and hatchings of variously brights and pastels) are by themselves enough to nail down Minckley’s thesis. Consider just one or two out of the 10 or so watercolors. “Without Reason” is a dark cloud of hatchings (this one actually in pencil); the epigram on the flyleaf is by Hannah Arendt (that alone promising a mordant note), “ … the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, I want you to be, without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation.” The book: Amy Bloom’s Love Invents Us. Or, more simply/obviously(?), “Unanswered Prayers,” a spray of bright confetti on the flyleaf of – what else? – Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers. “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” Is there anyone who doesn’t know that one by heart? (And is there anyone – atheists included – who doesn’t routinely set aside its wisdom?) Amid such resonance, the revelers across the street could only seem like bright shadows, the Chris Burden installation a long row of candles to light their way to the Tomb.

The evening only grew darker – yet cooler, too – as I headed to Chinatown for Rommelo Yu’s show at Chung King Project – Nitwittliwitt, continuing his fascination with Sol LeWitt – yet both morphed into a kind of permutation of the classic LeWitt stereometric grid and projection, and with an implication of something queasy or unsettled. (Something I should have taken away from the Wood show earlier? – what happens when the axis tilts? The center doesn’t hold? And when it tries to right itself – or take another turn altogether?) Behind a curtain of orange and purple ping-pong balls (that’s what they looked like anyway) arrayed in a runic configuration (or perhaps a scroll of Greek characters – they looked like interlocked lambdas – stood Yu’s wobbly-looking (but surprisingly sturdy and well-constructed) wood ‘LeWitt’ openwork 27-(3x3x3) chambered “Shaky Cube.” The geometry of combinations and permutations took on a darker cast with the suite of fragmented pentagram studies Yu took from the pictorial structure of some of the first released photographs of the Abu Ghraib horrors. Any student of iconography has some familiarity with the vocabulary of political gesture, the semiotics of power, control, abasement, humiliation (and exaltation) – the examples, both royal and religious, fill the pages of art history texts. A cautionary exercise -- this dissection of humanity’s heart of darkness; sentence diagrams, if you will, in humanity’s grammar of self-degradation. Dark pleasures indeed at that wobbly core.

Art fairs and art films; Bassman and butterflies

2008-02-04T04:04:00.001-08:00

1-2 February 2008

Before I go over a few notes about Victor Man, the art fairs, Chloe Piene’s drawings, which always amaze me, Rosson Crow, and – speaking of the fairs – a late, very late discovery that is really a re-discovery, but either way, so bizarrely lagging behind the rest of the world, you would think I’d just crawled from beneath a rock where I’d been trapped for the last five years. That apparently is when the Farmani Gallery (on South Robertson) had a show of the work of Lillian Bassman, photographer of fashion, fantasy, and the ephemeral glamour, mystery and sheer joy of their intersection in the gritty grisailles of urban life. But more of that in a moment.

I mentioned that I might have a few words about Schnabel’s Le Scaphandre et le Papillon – and I do; except they’re mostly en français. Le Scaphandre is one of those movies that, as essential as language is to the film, to the story as Jean-Dominique Bauby writes it, seems to sweep away conventional grammar and syntax, indeed all the linguistic structures that comfortably occupy the mesh of neuro-synaptic networks that are the springboard for our verbal communications. And maybe that applies to visual language, too. Before even two minutes of the film have elapsed, you’re aware of a radical shift in the narrative and purely visual priorities of the film. That the film is intended to be told from the point of view of the “locked-in” Jean-Do Bauby is a given. But the film doesn’t lock itself into that framework but floats freely through and around it and, when necessary, entirely away from it – much as Jean-Do would have liked to himself. It is as if, having one destroyed one set of experiential filters, Bauby – from the conrfinement of his diving bell, his scaphandre (which nevertheless might be considered an implement of discovery) – and Schnabel behind his own two eyes, that of his camera and his seemingly limitless imagination, are continuously engaged in discovering (and rediscovering), reassembling, imagining another. Writing these words, I suddenly have an image (from Robert Polidori?) in my mind of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans – a scattering of old family photographs and mementos and pages of handwritten letters and journals floating on the dirty waters amid broken furniture and other flotsam flowing in and out of a ruined house. What of the past, the markers of identity, of residence, can be recovered from such disaster? Bauby’s actuality has nosedived into a dark murky full fathom five and reemerged bobbing on the surface, grasping for anything familiar, unfamiliar – trying to find a compass, a paddle (visual, emotional, physical, intellectual) to navigate a course back to himself, to his life. Irony fails here, at least initially. Outrage, indignation are what we viewers and Bauby grasp at; obliteration – even of self, to make peace amid this ‘sea of troubles’ (to the initial despair of his earnest ‘speech’ therapist, Henriette (played by Marie-Josée Croze); to sweep it all before us as we swim towards an ‘undiscovered’ surface. Light itself, in endless variations, unlocks the reserves of irony, however cruel, perverse. Sensually appreciative, even sexual within his scaphandre/sarcophage, Bauby laughs and bemoans simultaneously the cruelty of his fate. Schnabel’s task is to navigate a perceptual channel to and through this imprisoned Bauby, and to reconstruct his imaginative – liberation is too strong, too large a word – reengagement with a world that can never be the same. Light fades by degrees (or ’blinks’ closed) to darkness, returns fitfully to close on an image – the actuality, a memory, a schematic view of something that might or might not be happening – we are aware even within the first few frames that this is an image-maker of astonishing power. As self-pity gives way to acceptance, a process of transformation – out of light and darkness, memory and imagination, a projection or superimposition of one reality over another (or its subtraction, but more often not – Bauby’s realism, his poly-pragmatism is re-made into something more malleable, something that will admit the participation of its sidelined, paralyzed narrator/composer) – begins. Bauby ‘surfaces’ and the composition of his book (and recomposition of self) begins.

Without going into detail about the beauty, originality and power of the film (which I may develop at more length for artillery), let if suffice to say that, regardless of what Academy members are voting for in the Best Picture category (I’m not sure if Schnabel’s film is eligible; at the very least, it should have been nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category), this is the best film of 2007. I know it sounds absurd to make such a sweeping and categorical judgment. But – like the best films of Welles, John Ford, Bergman, Antonioni, Godard, etc. – it has changed (or should change) the way we look at and the way we make movies. (The film itself is a liberated and reengaged kind of film-making, if you will.) Can I be allowed to change my mind? (Well, my artillery copy will or won’t bear out my thinking about it.) I’ll admit I wasn’t as detached a viewer as I would have liked – I wept profusely through sections of the film (too many end-of-life issues, etc.). Let me see it again. Though I think it can be recommended without qualification to anyone who likes movies. I feel as if, just as Richard Strauss was able to say upon his deathbed that death was “just as I wrote it” (in Death and Transfiguration), Schnabel may one day be able to say much the same thing. Speaking of music, the film (not surprisingly) has a fantastic soundtrack. That I will state firmly and categorically. With respect to my own emotional response, almost ordeal, I would say to Schnabel – quoting from the film (and Bauby’s book) – in English this time: “I don’t mind you dragging me to the bottom of the ocean because you’re also my butterfly.”

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Speaking Truth to Power -- Schnabel, Mason, etc.

2008-01-28T13:41:00.000-08:00

27 January 2008

This has been the week of the art fairs in Los Angeles and of course I was there and of course I took notes – high and low. There were the usual suspects and the unusually suspect; the surprises (rare) and the real discoveries (rarer still) – in the expected and unexpected places. There was the buzz and there was the occasional stunned silence (lost in the din of course). Julian Schnabel was in town – not for the fairs or the fine art biz, but the fine movie biz – his presentation at the Directors Guild, along with his fellow best director nominees. I’m told he stole the show, which doesn’t surprise me at all. I only wish I could have witnessed it first-hand. From what I gleaned (from a writer-director who was there), it was a real ‘telling truth to power’ moment: an innovator showing up, in the most matter-of-fact, quietly down-to-earth and non-threatening manner possible, the flaws in an industry drunk on the latest technology, but mired in the hoary conventions of conventional Hollywood movie-making. It quite flummoxed a couple of his not-quite-peers on the stage. (More about Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, plus tard, say, a post or two from now.) (The other movie I took in this week – aside from Welles’ F for Fake (see previous post) was There Will Be Blood, about which for the moment I will only say: There was John Huston; and Daniel Day-Lewis, as great an actor as he is, will never bring him back to life; nor will Paul Thomas Anderson ever replace him or reproduce his achievement.

A lot of my New York pals were in town for the madness – including Super-Kathleen and a new colleague I’ll just call the Designated Italian Countess for now. Rivers of champagne flowed (and flash floods, too – hey can somebody do something about the storm drains in this town? My Louboutins are looking a little too low and beaten). I’m a bit smithereened – and soaked – by it all. It was also a seriously political week – and the week-end of the South Carolina primary, the results of which surprised me more than a little and gave me just a bit of hope. The Left Side of my family (we can forget about what I’ll just call the von Karajan-Right side of my DNA line) has more or less endorsed Obama; and although I’m an entrenched skeptic and distrustful of almost everyone in the power class, I can’t help hoping the Obama candidacy might just be the spur to turn this country around. In the meantime, the mainstream media continues to behave in this sphere much as the Hollywood studio potentates behave in theirs. Was I the only one who wondered why Bill Clinton was being spotlighted ad nauseam in a moment that belonged to Barack Obama? (That was no concession speech; though I have to give Clinton credit for his rhetorical flair and sheer chutzpah. But will no one tell him to GET OFF THE FUCKING STAGE?) And then there was the outrageously cynical dual New York Times primary endorsement. What the fuck is THAT about?? For once I was plotzing about something other than an art or music event – or my financial quagmire.

So if you don’t mind, I’m going to track back a bit again. (No, I’m not re-naming the blog “The Time Machine” – it would be more like The Science of Sleep (I loved the Gondry film – such wonderfully touching performances by Gael Garcia Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg) – it’s all I want to do after a week like the last.

I’m not going to talk about the L.A. Weekly “Annual Biennial” – although the opening at Track 16 at Bergamot Station was obviously the event of that particular evening (the 12th): it looked as if the entire L.A. art world had jammed into the Bergamot parking lot, to say nothing of the gallery itself which might as well have been a mosh pit – until I’ve read Doug Harvey’s essay in the Weekly. But – setting aside the fact that the emphasis was on painting, setting aside the caliber of the work on view (high for the most part), and that a good many of these artists are among the country’s best, even personal faves – let’s just say I have a few issues about it. (Is that okay, Tom Christie?)

No – I have to skip for a moment over to the show I might have missed that evening, but was sooooo glad not to. It’s a show I may write about at greater length somewhere down the line, but, on this political week-end (and ohmygod – the State of the Onion upon us!), let me just share a few things about this marvelously entertaining show by Rachel Mason, a recent Yale MFA and apparently a Daumier-in-the-making. It’s called The Candidate – and as the Presidential field is gradually being winnowed down, it may be useful to have a look – or two or three or more at this show of the winners, losers, poseurs and posturers, also-rans and even ‘never-rans’ – in short, the political animal in motion, as exemplified by the contenders in the Presidential horserace, fresh (or not so) out of the starting gate as of about fall of last year. The field has already lost a few since the show opened – e.g., Fred Thompson (not a minute too soon) and Joe Biden (there’s a particularly excellent rendering of Biden here; ditto Bill Richardson of New Mexico – which is almost a completed portrait); and will likely lose more (I’m thinking Giuliani’s number is up next – speaking of which, Mason has fingered him in her crosshairs as no political cartoonist has – at least that I’ve ever seen). But these are more than political caricatures. This is above all about physiognomy, the cast of facial expression – the political mask as prop to the will to power; and gesture – the physical expression of the extension towards, the reach and grasp for power, public acknowledgment (and endorsement). The artist has made the gallery space into a silent, but cacophonous echo chamber of gesture using podiums, microphones and cast plaster hands (the artist’s own) sculpted into various finger-pointing – directing, commanding, jabbing, hectoring, pleading; spread palm – exhorting, embracing, collecting, and pleading again; grasping the mic and the edge of the podium.

Beyond that, there’s a jagged movement and energy to the figures. They push towards us, to fill, crowd the viewer’s visual field. Mason’s line has a fluid, nervous, almost angst-laden energy perfectly suited to her subject. You sense her own reach, her extension towards the politician under her scope. Her project took first began to take shape after her boyfriend’s Playboy assignment covering the Edwards campaign was aborted. She took her sketches and kept right on going. Her own written observations amplify what is evident in the drawings: she doesn’t miss a thing. It’s interesting to see where the emphasis falls in these drawings – probing eyes, mouths and proboscis in unrelenting motion; and falling away from the face – hands, shoulders. The studies of Barack Obama had a Munch-like expressiveness. “He looks so white,” I said to the artist – which reminds us of something the media tends to overlook, that he is in fact half-white; and apparently I wasn’t the only one who had made such a comment. Perhaps as his campaign gathers momentum, the media will learn to look as carefully (if not as acutely, shrewdly or entertainingly) as Mason has.

I, etc. -- (Self-)Portrait as Fugue

2008-01-26T16:02:00.000-08:00

25 January 2008

I’m mixing things up a bit, I know. It’s simply the way my too-complicated life intersects with the L.A. art world. Again I start by posting a note to a late-dated note. But that’s the L.A. art world, too – the endless confluences, coincidences and correspondences that enmesh us like a rich and densely woven tapestry. I attended a screening of Welles’ F for Fake Tuesday evening (22 January) at the Hammer – one of a series of films presented in conjunction with the Francis Alÿs Politics of Rehearsal show. That the process and technique of this film would appeal to Alÿs and relate well to the substance of the Hammer exhibition is obvious – Welles narrates – emcees, if you will – a great deal of the film from his editing table; the seams, patches, ellipses, elisions are all (or mostly) exposed in plain view. The film is also, however occasionally self-involved or self-conscious, a masterpiece – a revisiting of Mr. Arkadin, and a number of other Wellesian themes and subjects in an entirely fresh context, tantalizing and electric in its feints and conundrums. It was also a fresh reminder of what the show at fette’s Gallery tried to express “mathemetaphysically” – i.e., the “inconstancy of FACTS as well as the multiplicity of YOU.” The film is itself a double, even triple (and more) portrait – a veritable fugue on the subject of identity, signature (in every sense) counterfeiture (in every sense), self-possession and projection. The ephemeral purchase each of us has on self-actualization, projection, identity (here reduced to a tragicomic joke). The contentious, dubious claim we stake on observation and expression – our own and others’. There are indelible scenes and portraits within this portrait: an amazing face-off between Clifford Irving, would be-biographer of Howard Hughes and Hoax perpetrator, and Elmyr de Hory, famed art forger (who made a specialty counterfeiting the Fauves, late Post-Impressionists and various School of Paris artists) and himself the subject of an earlier Irving biography; the fascinating (and drop-dead gorgeous) Oja Kodar; and finally Welles himself – at his editing table and on various locations, including Chartres, where he delivers an elegiac monologue. “Our songs will all be silenced; but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.” I have to remind myself of that once in a while.

12-13 January 2008

The natural follow-up to photoLA was a themed group show of photographic work curated by fette (with the further amplifications of one “Dr. L. Hernandez Gomez,” a “mathemetaphysician” with the “League of Imaginary Scientists”) for her Culver City gallery. Although it would be absurd to refer to the exhibition as simply photography, its insights into the medium and process were directly applicable to much of what was on view at the photoLA fair (the work Andrew Garn, Bruce Gilden, Trent Parke, Zachary Drucker and Brian Finke provide just a few examples). But the show goes to the heart of a much deeper problem of the both the medium and art itself; and beyond that to the problem of perception and (self-)definition. Although Fette had determined beforehand that photography would be the participants’ common medium for the show, her core idea was to ask each of the 25 artists (there are two collaborations by paired artists) selected to photograph themselves “representing someone else.” This is both specific enough and general enough to wreak a certain havoc in what would otherwise be a more conventional show of portraiture. Of course it also has a multiplier effect – which is what may have inspired Fette to bring in the collaboration of a “mathemetaphysician.” I think a pure mathematician would have sufficed; but I sometimes wonder if Fette takes a certain, almost perverse, pleasure, standing back and gleefully watching her prank unfold in ways she might not have foreseen herself. (The last lines of the Mark Antony funeral oration from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar suddenly come to mind. “Now let it work. Mischief thou art afoot, / Take thou what course thou wilt … Fortune is merry, / And in this mood will give us anything.”)

It does. If self-portraiture is above all portraiture, inherently a kind of doubling, (Unititled) u = ___ approaches this particular kind of auto-portrait en masque as a (quasi-)mathematical function. (In fact, the ‘operation’ as it is described sounds something like a quadratic equation applied in a social context and – well, let’s just say in infinite series. The infinite extends to the infinitesimal: we are, all of us, defining, refining, re-defining our notions of self, persona, other, and others (society, or the group) on a more or less continuous basis. In short, reality is slippery, and we need no further proof of this than a glimpse in our mirrors. Projection (self into the external; as well as the projection of others’ onto the self), extension, abstraction, displacement – any number of strategies are available here.

Some of the (not exactly self-)portraits are relatively straightforward. William Lamson shows a digital C-print image of his(?) face encased in a transparent (plastic?) mask in a kind of early medieval configuration, the mask bristling with pins (acupuncture needles?) which appear to almost pierce Lamson’s skin. It’s the social warrior in a moment of repose (or not – can we ever rest?), the self-scaffolding exposed beneath the (transparent) armor, the myriad projections – slings and arrows indeed – of a million friends, enemies and anyone looking for a momentary prop on their own reality and self-definition. Some are all pose and context (e.g., Kristian Haggblom, Ned Meets Kuzo; Kate Gilmore, Hungry Hillary – a bulemic’s poster-girl, Anouk Kruithof, musicnature • solvation)

Some are about the transition – the moment(s) of transformation/transaction – the exchange of attitude, persona; the blur (of posture, identity, gender). Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Amy Elkins and Arnaud Delrue provide examples of this. Performance, pose (costume) and manipulation are key elements here – e.g., Elkins and Delrue, who both wear dresses; Delrue’s an interesting contrast to Sepuya’s attitude blur. The performative aspect is more explicit in Deanna Templeton’s (a kind of vacant ‘advertisement for herself’ – Space Available) and Tobias Faldt’s. In others, the role play is multilayered – less blur than an accumulation of layers of identity, each interacting, commenting on the others (Suellen Parker, Roya Falahi, Raphael Neal and Eva Lauterlein providing excellent examples of this. Falahi’s and Neal’s are particularly brilliant).

Carlee Fernandez has explored this terrain fairly extensively and by now is an old hand at it; and I wasn’t surprised that her “Self-Portrait as my Mom’s Ex with 29 Palms Rainbow Stockings” had sold straightaway. (Victor Boullet explored another (digital) kind of displacement.) There are more examples than I have time to inventory – including the almost pure abstractions (e.g., Melanie Bonajo) – but there I go again. I’ll sum up only by saying Fette’s in a bit of a rut lately: she only does interesting shows.

She may be in a rut where openings are concerned, too. This one (Friday evening, the 11th) was particularly fabulous. Leora Lutz (of Gallery Revisited) was there, among many, and in fine form; and, as I was leaving, a spectactular looking film-maker I can only identify as Nana from Ghana walked in; among many, many others. I haven’t laughed so much in months.

photoLA -- The Big Look

2008-01-19T13:38:00.000-08:00

11 January 2008

Before I’m driven back (kicking and screaming) to the LACMA/BCAM/BAF fiasco, allow me to start off on a slightly happier note. (Hey it happens – even in my life.) Although photography has been inescapable in the fine arts practically from the advent of the daguerrotype, and an indispensable tool and medium in contemporary art, it’s never exerted quite the same pull on my curiosity and aesthetic palate as painting and three-dimensional media, or even motion pictures. But, as Lao-Tsu might have said, the longest narrative (or non-narrative for that matter) movie begins with a single frame. And – well you can ask Carole Caroompas (as I have blogged not too long ago) – or Gerhard Richter – or Andy Warhol (well maybe not Andy), or another million or so artists: some of those frames are as indelibly printed on our consciousness as anything in the natural or human-made world. So you want to know what’s new in photography? I’m not sure I can tell you anything you don’t already know, but there was something to draw in the eye almost everywhere you turned Thursday evening at the photoLA opening.

The advance publicity out of the photoLA was already promising – sixty-some galleries on board, in addition to various art/photo publishing outlets; Jeff Burton, John Divola and Connie Samaras featured in programmed “conversations”; the opening night kick-off with Julius Shulman; and galleries everywhere from Brooklyn to Prague I had no acquaintance with. What was interesting was that it was some of the ‘tried, true’ places that engaged and delighted at least as much as the edgy and new. (Although I have to wonder if such distinctions mean anything at all. The ‘tried and true’ stay that way by showing the freshest and strongest of the ‘new’. And as for the ‘new’….well, so little really is; the ‘edge’ dropping into the void but taking us nowhere we’ve haven’t been before. For (outstanding) example – setting aside the over-the-top Schoeller body-builders, the ACE Gallery booth was almost a beacon for the show. Stepping inside, you felt immersed in the luminosity pouring, strobing off the walls. One wall held lightboxes, against which hung a 3-layer ‘Dura-transparency’ of what looked like a clip of a grainy black-and-white film or animation – a sequence of (the same) 18th century soldier(s) running, jumping and brandishing his weapon. A chorus line of cadets, circa 1789. Except it was closer to 1776: I thought they were French; they were in fact American revolutionary soldiers. The effect of implied movement was paradoxically bolstered by the seemingly rhythmic insertion of the identical soldier image that began the sequence – A-B-A-C-A-D. To its left, another revolutionary soldier, emerging from the shadows, adjusting his tricorne, this one in luminous color and backlit by a burst of light washing over the soldier’s inclined figure. Turning to a table of printed matter, I flipped through a book of photographs by Melanie Pullen – apparently a follow-up to her original High Fashion Crime Victim series which made quite a splash when she showed them here in Los Angeles only a few years ago – not without a bit of disappointment, even exasperation. The first series were suffused with a particular aura both haunted and opulent – incongruous luxury set off vibrantly against settings variously gritty, pristine (except for the evidence of crime or violence), or simply magical – settings not merely fortuitously treacherous, but ripe for a karmic double-cross. Most of this more recently published series seemed bereft of that peculiar electricity. Only then, as I turned away to face another wall, was I informed that the transparencies were also the work of Melanie Pullen – her latest series on soldiers, which continues to be augmented – perhaps as soon as next week, as Pullen was later to inform me herself. A studio shoot is in the works – assuming a set for a bombed-out Berlin, circa 1945, can be successfully constructed on a studio soundstage. It was great to see her moving in a fresh, and trenchant, new direction (and great to see her, too).

On another wall, Jay Mark Johnson, showed equally luminous work, made with a special (and apparently costly) scanning camera, that answered Pullen’s kinescopic soldiers with sunlit slices of landscapes (and aquascapes) against which figures and incident moved laterally in choreographic precision across the elongated horizontal bands of the scanned landscape. Here, too, the element of the repeated figure (person, horse, gesture or movement), or the figure’s movement – as with the poolscape where the swimmer’s legs flutter sinuously in intersecting sine waves – imbued these minimalist, almost conceptual mappings with a kind of lyricism.

More lyrical still were Dennis Hopper’s large color C-prints of collected litter, debris and random cast-offs culled from various urban “walks” – New York, Venice, etc. – ‘inventory’ photographs, if you will; also, perhaps, non-linear storyboard Rich with color, incident and densely textured, they drew me in repeatedly, almost against my will, searching for the clue, the tell-tale artifact, the story.

But ACE was hardly the only gallery with something arresting, powerful, luminous, dark. A.M. Richard showed amazing work by Stephen Mallon, Andrew Garn and Jillian McDonald, among others. Andrew Garn in particular has an amazing range: street vignettes from Times Square from the 1970s and early 1980s (one stark, black-and-white – the absurd juxtapositions of 42nd Street of a certain vintage, emphasized by the ironic juxtapositions in texture and scale; a seemingly ‘painted’ study of a drag queen-prostitute, simultaneously forlorn and self-possessed – a monument in motion; finally imagery of industrial sites, alternately cool, distanced, then almost overwhelming in their intensity. (E.g., the coolness of a Bethlehem Steel site in disuse; and finally the dark, dust-choked late industrial inferno of Magnitogorsk, a complex of steel factories in Siberia – amazing images all that demand to be seen.)

The Magnum photo agency was also here – hardly at a loss for compelling images. Among the most interesting was Trent Parke, whose brilliant color photography has something of the street/social context, texture, and contrast of Garry Winogrand, but with an entirely different energy – displaced by a few degrees, dislocated. He plays with the light sources, setting off individual figures and elements just so, creating a kind of tension and suspense. [I failed to mention the photography of Bruce Gilden when I posted this -- a bizarre omission given the power of these images. Since I seem to be using quasi-iconic photographers as a very rough index or reference point here (see above), let me just say that these portraits and pairings and street scenes -- taken mostly from contemporary Japan -- have something of the brazen energy and off-hand intimacy of William Klein, but with something jostling and fresh, syncopated and disjunctive in the visual rhythm and balance, and -- dare I say it? -- Japanese (or maybe not). But let me come back to Gilden in my next post. (Yeeeesssss -- it's coming.)]

You can’t go wrong showing Stephen Divola and Stephen Cohen had Divola in both color and black-and-white. I also loved Zachary Drucker’s and Brian Finke’s color photography (Drucker, who was there for the opening, is himself completely charming). Also Nick Brandt’s haunting, monumental images out of Africa. And Lori Nix’s surreal, richly evocative slice of urban decay (e.g., her chromogenic print of a disused proscenium stage theatre interior, “Majestic” (2006).

I’m simply breezing over this work, I’m well aware; but – well, there was a LOT to see (and I’ll be back). The Czech Center for Photography (Prague) was bursting with brilliant black-and-white photography from as far back as the 1920s to the present (much of it astonishingly affordable – e.g., a vintage print dance study by Julius Andres was only US$500). Circus scenes, landscape grotesqueries, bucolic landscapes – the range and the quality of almost everything on view were extraordinary. (In stunning contrast to at least one local dealer, who will go unnamed, asking the most outrageous prices for his ‘found’ and ‘vintage’ generic recyclings.)

Up Against the Wall (or Back to Broad)

2008-01-12T15:33:00.000-08:00

Darlings -- I'm back -- but not exactly all there yet. There's so much to say -- and so much better left unsaid. I've been in an L.A. Breakdown mode lately and I'm grateful just to be let back into MY LIFE -- forget about the City itself or for that matter the L.A. art world. There are notes -- oh yes, there are notes -- and I mean to post them. But rather than throw them all out in an omnibus posting, I'm just going to start in media res, so to speak, posting just a bit (a couple days' worth, say) at a time. Bear with me -- and thanks for checking in.

8-9 January 2008

Jesus I hate to break my month-long silence just for a news item. As readers of this blog are only too aware, awol isn’t exactly about news, per se. More like (I would like to think, anyway), the back-story or up-front (and hopefully way ahead) story – or maybe a lateral cross-reference to some sidebar or ancillary story or just a bit removed from the ‘front’ page – which, as we all know, always requires some reading between-the-lines – and perhaps a bit more in recent years as they’ve been co-opted into PR mouthpieces for establishment agendas. (My brother used to be a virtuoso at this kind of cross-reading of The New York Times front-page political stories, and it sometimes surprises me he never ended up there editing it (he’s at one of the other major metro dailies); but I wonder now how he would have dealt with this subterfuge.) As many of my friends and colleagues here in Los Angeles are aware, I haven’t exactly been in seclusion over the last month. More like, submersion – as in, almost drowning, as in fighting for my life. But it’s not as if I couldn’t manage to bob to the surface now and then. I surfaced at Regen for Matthew Barney, for example – though arguably, that might easily have blended in with the overall drowning sensation I was trying to overcome. E.g., the (photographic) work on the walls appeared to be mostly a retread of Cremaster 3 – art direction shots and production stills – and the film shown appeared to be of a live ritual-cum-performance involving animals (always nervous-making) and elegantly shod but otherwise nude models performing a kind of static limbo and controlled excretions of foreign (to their bodies anyway) fluids (honey? Oil? Chocolate? Who knew?) – too mechanical to be dream-like but seeming to unfold in dead air. Not exactly Barney’s take on the ‘money-shot’ – but what? From cremaster to sphincter – is this Barney’s reply to the Courbet ‘origin-of-the-world’-view? I know life’s end is frequently accompanied by incontinence; but I’m not sure how this applies to the world’s end. But you’d think he might be ready to pull his focus out of the crotch. (I know that sounds funny coming from me, as I write this from my perch at the Flynt Building.) Barney was there – personable, still handsome, and very down-to-earth. Björk loves him; why can’t I?

But see – I’m already getting away from what pulled me out from under my security blanket, if you will. Yeah, yeah – I was out last Saturday, too. But can we save it for a minute? (Yes, I forgive your skepticism – since I assume you forgive my jaundice.) The first shock – and I didn’t even see it first thing – is that The New York (and not the Los Angeles) Times broke the story. What’s with that? Sam Zell transition issues? Okay, I’m sure everyone knows by now that Eli Broad announced today (yesterday?) that his Art Foundation would retain full control of his collections, rather than donating any significant segment of them to major art institutions. And I’m sure we all know which local art institution had the most riding on this decision. Why am I not surprised? Was it LACMA’s dubious track record with this sort of business? Goddess only knows how many L.A. collections have passed on LACMA in favor of other institutions, or simply the auction block. Then there are the notorious instances of those not-quite-ready-for-the auction-house curated exhibitions of private collections which, stamped with LACMA’s (no less dubious) imprimatur, headed straight to New York, leaving only a souvenir or two behind (e.g., the Maslon collection, which ultimately went to Sotheby’s). Then there was LACMA’s own foolish deaccessioning of a few years ago, which included unique, irreplaceable works by Ernst, Beckmann, Masson and Modigliani. Just how foolish we can finally judge today in concrete terms. (Do I mean that literally?) Hmmm…. In theory, the funds (and the auction results were less than spectacular) were to be used to acquire new works. I suppose we have to trust LACMA on that one. Except that I don’t trust anyone – I don’t have either the experiential or genetic architecture to support it (hell my life has been one long Charley Brown kick for a non-existent field goal). But without getting all forensic on their asses, and speaking of concrete, there’s been a whole lot of it poured into the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (already acronymized by the LACMA crew as “BCAM”) on the west side of the LACMA campus.

When some years ago Broad exhibited a generous 40 odd year swath of his art collection at LACMA – this was some time before his commitment to a building on the LACMA campus – I again wondered what the Museum itself might stand to keep from what was placed on view. (If nothing else, it seemed Broad seemed to be giving the nod to LACMA, as opposed to MOCA, on whose board he also sits.) There were of course the teasers: the token gifts – “Promised Gift of Eli and Edythe Broad” – though I noted that these were few and far between. None of the best Rauschenbergs or Johns bore such a caption. It was also interesting that one of the “promised gifts” was a room-sized Marcel Broodthaers installation – implicitly raising the issue of space.

What was also noteworthy was a certain lack of zing to the collection. Notwithstanding the masterpiece caliber, with a few exceptions (the Broodthaers, for example), it all seemed so safe, and – it sounds so cynical – “blue-chip.” (And of course the flip-side of this is that what is blue-chip today may not look so tomorrow.) A collection usually says something about its collector(s) and about his/their passions and ambitions. This was an impenetrable wall of currency in every sense.

Or maybe it’s about the wall. Just the wall. Broad is a builder – and he’s not too particular about what he’s building or how the real estate is squandered and the planet plundered with it. He started out ruining vast tracts of southern California with thousands of acres of mediocre housing – more suburban blight; and now he’s embarked on an almost megalomanical building program for Bunker Hill downtown. It’s Eli’s No-Trump bid. But of course there had to be some Wilshire Boulevard presence – another Name up there along with those of Ahmanson, Simon, Bing and Anderson. Was it mere coincidence that Michael Govan – who made his reputation as a builder – got Broad's endorsement for the Museum Directorship?

And so another culture palazzo is born. I was on the horn with Fearless Leader before you could say Sean Scully; but she’d only read the apparently blacked-out L.A. papers and was still going through her e-mail or something. I read her a few grafs and she joined me in my shocked-not-shocked space. Speaking of palazzos – believe me, unless they’ve somehow cauterized half their neural snynapses (you know – the ones that scream, ‘hey I need a 10-mg Valium stat’ when your prized shit isn’t hitting the fan so much as just blowing away), they’re plotzing over at LACMA. We’re talking about a mausoleum (somehow I always think of the Skull & Bones tomb whenever I pass it, which is a minimum of six times a week) with twice the square footage of the Whitney for chrissakes. Needless to say there’s plenty of room for that Broodthaers – to say nothing of the Chris Burden apparently to be shared with MOCA. (By the way, is that necessarily such a good thing? It’s fairly sizeable – which means it’s going to be a hassle shlepping it between Fairfax and downtown.) And how many Beuys pieces did they just acquire? Something over FIVE HUNDRED? You’d think they might WANT to spare a few. It’s not like they’re going to always be on view at The Broad Art Foundation. (The Broad Art Foundation is open to the public only on a very selective and by-appointment basis.) Which leads me to the obvious question. What the fuck was he talking about? – “We don’t want it to end up in storage, …” Honey, it already is in storage in your Art Fortress.

I see Michael Govan has made a further comment here (this morning’s (Jan. 9) New York Times. Talk about spinning – he might as well be a Whirling Dervish.“[H]e believed Eli Broad’s decision to keep his art collection in a private foundation that makes loans to museums is a positive development because it means none of the artworks will be sold…” Of course it means nothing of the kind – and more on that later. “Since Day 1 he’s privately and publicly given me a lot of support.” Uh, yeah. You built him a super-sized Skull & Bones. And for that you should have asked him for a helluva lot MORE.