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.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Champagne III -- Between the Ozone and the Carpet of Lights
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.'
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
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.”
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.”
Monday, July 14, 2008
Are You There, Champagne? It's Me, Ezrha.*
* [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)
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)
Sunday, July 13, 2008
A Mid-Summer Night's Concept High -- just try smoking this.
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.)
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.)
Monday, June 16, 2008
"Interesting": Euphemism for "Sucks"? Or just what it says?
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.)
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.)
Friday, June 6, 2008
Elegance as protest: Yves Saint Laurent -- Exemplary Sufferer, Exemplary Pleasure-Seeker
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.
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.
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