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Category: z-Past Issues
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Lucy Bull
David Kordansky GalleryThere almost certainly are figures both human and animal, as well as a plenitude of botanical, arboreal, avian and possibly extraterrestrial apparitions inhabiting and defining the landscape-like spaces of Lucy Bull’s paintings. But closer contemplation makes it pretty clear that it has been the mind of the viewer which has placed them there, rather than the hand of the artist. Bull’s palette also lends itself to neuro-optical shenanigans, as its exponential hyper-artificiality collides with an intense experience of florid, fecund nature. Bull depoys a chromatic juggernaut featuring the radiant yellow-green of new spring buds, the sickly rosy-red flush of wounds, cool mint of magic hour breezes, emerald and teal prisms of oil slicks and ostrich feathers, explosive yellow of solar flares and astral smatterings like the pale lavender of wildflowers.
This shifting kaleidoscope is further activated by her array of studio techniques, so that the multivalent texture of every centimeter of surface is alive in its own unique gathering of strokes, streaks, pools, drips, smears, daubs, swirls, slashes, dashes and the most exquisite feathering. Looking at these oil paintings on linen, like the majestic Stinger and the courtly Permission (both 2021), the optical effect is like a zoom lens on the camera inside your eye—it seems to reach off the wall, there’s a bit of vertigo and the feeling of falling into the pictorial space. Soon the edges of the compositions pass by your peripheral vision and the massiveness of its flourishing detail envelops your field of sight and you are all the way down in there, inside the deep space of phosphorescent galaxies.
Lucy Bull, Stinger, 2021, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, photo by Jeff McLane. In Evening Switch (2021) there’s a sense of a classical grotto, a decadent place of Dionysian romping with tame peacocks, grape-laden trellises and secret magic. The dark heart of the image pulls the viewer’s body closer; the eye wishes to more fully enter and explore, to see in the dark. The most charismatic work of the exhibition is The Bottoms (2021), whose operatic melodrama is built on the tension between chartreuse and fuschia. The supernova center and string of fireball pearls both anchor and disrupt its expansive picture plane; the many forms of brushwork generate a universe of image and detail—but there is nowhere to rest the eye and nothing is finitely rendered. Neither reliably narrating nor entirely avoiding the phenomenological world, the work’s true subject is painting itself—both a scientific inquiry into the physical properties and behaviors of paint as a material, and a more esoteric, mindful investigation of painting as a way of expressing the inexpressible splendor of existence.
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Loosely Stated
ROSEGALLERYWith a large grouping of esteemed photographers—Jo Ann Callis, Tania Franco Klein, Kennedi Carter, Graciela Iturbide, Katsumi Watanabe and others— it’s the curator, not the artists, who moderates the conversation.
In a world defined by schisms and polarities, and a year-long hiatus on reality, “Loosely Stated” suggests a taciturn yet stimulating alternative to slackening mores, a pomerium free from constellated hatreds. With its many single-
subject photos of women and by women, of men and women of color by women of color, this exhibition is many things: an unlabeled feminism, a non-competing intersectionality, a polite insinuation of unspeakable American horrors. It denotes without crystallizing into fragile definition. No image steals the spotlight; each contains depth and multitude without transgressing upon its neighbor.In Jo Ann Callis’ Salt, Pepper, Fire (1980) we see a tableaux: white tablecloth, full cup of coffee, one salt and one pepper shaker, and immolating dinner plate—but do we notice the orange-washed phoenix sidling to the left? In haste, we miss the escaping bird; without which, the work loses its horrifying implication; patience snaps the image into sublime revelation. More than simple fire, this is a scene of gripping violence: animal sacrifice fleeing unobserved ritual. Perhaps patience is still valued in a world of breakneck consumption, expedited biases and rewarded delusions. If we take time, reorient ourselves to the sensed world and begin to hear with our eyes, multiple dialogues are revealed.
Kennedi Carter, Soon As I Get Home II, from East Durham Love, 2019, courtesy of ROSEGALLERY. Pioneering Los Angeles artist Callis has clearly influenced the emerging Mexico City-based Tania Franco Klein. In another room, two opposing walls feature Black subjects in contrasting representations: Kennedi Carter’s Soon As I Get Home II, from “East Durham Love” (2019) is a cropped closeup, an Ono/Lennonesque portrait of a man receiving affection from a woman (she is cropped, and only emerges with patient viewing); it utilizes colors that are oil-painting-rich and connotes a re-seized colonial mystique. Opposite, selects from Melodie McDaniel’s wide-shot black-and-white portraits of rider and horse possess cinema verite sprezzatura.
Yes, this room replete with female gaze doesn’t call attention to the label; it needs us to investigate and arrive at its reality. While not vying for huge exclamations or jaw-dropping denouement, “Loosely Stated” reminds us that the best conversations are never one-sided; that they are, at best, unresolved. It’s also a stark reminder of power exercised through inhibition; majesty, if you will. But can reconciliation of atrocities forge with this updated Neo-American ideal? Since we are formalized around a global anxiety, one that fissures into all aspects of our lived experience, inverts our perceptions, problematizes our instinct to care and to hug and to love, perhaps stillness represents the true act of defiance.
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Sula Bermúdez-Silverman
MurmursSula Bermúdez-Silverman’s solo exhibition “Sighs and Leers and Crocodile Tears,” at first seems to be a curious series of clichés, but a story begins to unfold—through Silverman’s attention to detail—about the history of power, erasure, hierarchy and otherness that has been built into the very fabric of culture.
Silverman seeks to expose the role of toxic masculinity, racism and colonialism in American culture by observing its various monsters throughout cinema. The body of work is a spectacle of elegant nostalgia that begs the viewer to question the true history, emptiness and destruction of imperialism; all the while, showing that the roads of terror point to a drive for power, a core tenet of toxic masculinity.
A beautiful large tapestry, titled Carrefour Pietà / Be My Victim (2021) serves as a spectacular centerpiece where all the other elements within the show rise and converge. It portrays a still from the 1943 classic film, I Walked With A Zombie (directed by Jacques Tourneur), paneled alongside a depiction of Michelangelo’s Pieta; the Virgin Mary holding Jesus. Here, the artist has employed the juxtaposition of light and dark in a symbiotic way; a Black man/zombie/monster carrying a white femme between images of Mother Mary holding Black Jesus.
Sula Bermúdez Silverman, Turning Heel, 2021, courtesy Murmurs. The first room to the right of the main gallery floor is lined with small resin cast sculptures resembling ornate windows that expose rooms, each filled with a different classic horror trope. Michael Jackson’s famous zombie-look from the music video Thriller, is seen in Porthole 1 (Proteus) (2020) and in Porthole 7 (Death and the Maiden) (2021), where a monster’s hand is caressing a woman’s behind.
In the main gallery, another tapestry hangs on the wall of the bride of Frankenstein, titled The Monster’s Bride (She’s Alive!) (2020) directly to the right. Three kitschy cookie-cutter dollhouses, titled “Repository I-III” (all 2021) made of isomalt sugar and epoxy resin sit atop illuminated bricks of Himalayan pink salt in the center of the gallery.
Glowing resin claws litter the corners of the room in zombie fashion, as if menacingly coming up from below. Turning Heel (2021), Lady With The Ring (2021) and Satan Arousing The Rebel Angels (2021) show the talons outstretched from beds of salt with found objects surrounding them. In some cases it’s a jar, a puffer fish specimen or carpenter bees.
The use of light and epoxy resin seems reminiscent of the late Mike Kelley’s body of work—“Kandors” (2005–09) specifically, with its use of low lighting and glowing sculptures—that take iconography from pop culture to transport the viewer into a space of unflinching truth, beauty, memory, sadness and terror.
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Johanna Breiding
Ochi ProjectsJohanna Breiding’s show of photography and ceramics at Ochi Projects defied singular characterization in favor of an enveloping tsunami of empathic correspondence—a tidal progression of images both intimate yet nothing less than oceanic. The exhibition’s slightly coy title, “Playing Submarine,” hinted more at Breiding’s narrative strategy, leading the viewer’s eye through brief image sequences that pushed larger perspectives alternately skyward and into a kind of collective unconscious with a pendant moment of self-confrontation.
The images were all tightly framed, self-contained, specific. The first, a vacuum hose spiraling out of a deck-side hole and into a pool’s turquoise water, bore the title, Imago (all works 2020 unless otherwise indicated), to which both psychoanalytic and entomological meanings might easily apply. Crown, the second image in this sequence—a bald head emerging from a pool of water, the diffracted lower body visible beneath the surface—completed the “imago.”
A glossy glazed black ceramic cat identified only as Vessel 57, provided a potent pause in the procession of photographs (digital C-prints, mostly color, but several in black and white), its open mouth echoing the preceding crowning, while signaling its communication with the installation as a whole. The next sequence sustained these motives of emergence, communication and containment: a deep recession in a snowbank against an alpine landscape in black and white; followed by color images of milk dribbling out of an open mouth; boiling milk bubbling stovetop from a small pot.
Johanna Breiding, Home, 2020, courtesy of Ochi Projects. Following a more chromatically intense visual pause, Breiding seemed to fold her subjects into the frame, including her own tightly locked left elbow and knee (Self-portrait with scars); a communion and confusion of the subjects’ respective fur involving a dog’s harness and a cleanly sectioned thicket of infinitesimally interweaving branches (Crutch).
The placement of the largest image, a mylar sheet stretched across a shimmering body of water (Second Skin), was a reversal—a shedding of skin for the aquatic domain, celebrated in the gallery immediately behind it. There, the balance of Breiding’s ceramic “vessels” (including a lobster, a sea turtle, sea snail and seahorse amongst other creatures or their shells) variously glazed in blues, white and sea-green, were gorgeously arrayed upon a long table. Against the wall, nine ink-and-charcoal drawings of body fragments and organs both human and aquatic, played like shadows of the hollowed vessels on the table.
Breiding’s final images tested the limits of legibility while climactically complicating the larger exhibition narrative. Home was a paper construction peaked, folded and creviced into a floating mountain; Cloud 9, a dark curl of cumulus cloud billowing into the sunlight, oculus to a space without limiting definition. The viewer’s gaze was finally met head-on in a small painting of a bobcat hung just off-center to the rear of a bed foregrounding a nude body’s bended knee in Apex, which seemed to sum up the contradictory juxtapositions of legibility and actuality—the ferocity underlying the vulnerability.
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Tarik Garrett
Hunter Shaw Fine ArtTarik Garrett’s compelling show addresses how the past intersects with the present. This minimal, mixed-media installation brings together appropriated documents, Polaroid photographs, junked wood, metal fragments, a partial tree trunk equipped with speakers and a portion of chain-link fence. Upon entry, the partially blocked space forces the viewer to navigate around a section of fence that spans the height of the gallery. Caught in the bottom of the chain-link fence are a narrow branch and a few brown leaves, suggesting the outside world where they may have once been subject to the elements.
Located toward the front of the gallery and easy to miss are two small white speakers embedded in the wall, from which a rendition of W.E.B. Du Bois’ adaptation of the patriotic song “My Country ‘Tis Of Thee” softly emanates. In the early 1900s, Du Bois’ augmented the original lyrics (written in 1831) to create a more honest depiction of the struggle of African Americans. A symphonic voice recites these altered lyrics and calls attention to racial and social injustices while simultaneously shedding light on how to interpret, or reinterpret, the other objects in the installation.
Tarik Garrett & Kevin O’Neill, 1, courtesy Hunter Shaw Fine Art, photo by Ruben Diaz. At the far end of the gallery, a sawed stump made from cherry wood sits on the floor—titled Moses of the colored man (all works 2021)—the stump functions as a podium with an absent orator whose voice is heard from small speakers that have been inserted into the wood. The soundtrack loops a 10-minute excerpt from Military Governor Andrew Johnson’s 1864 speech, announcing emancipation in Tennessee. In the speech, emotionally and sympathetically read by Garrett and overlaid with a percussive beat, Johnson announces to a Black audience (who are suspicious of the white politician’s promises and words) the end of slavery.
Hung on opposite walls are two collage works, 1 and 2, made in collaboration with Kevin O’Neill, in which Xeroxed historical documents about race and property, including the “Virginia Health Bulletin to Preserve Racial Integrity” from 1924; pages from Cheryl Harris’ “Whiteness as Property,” 1993; and Supreme Court rulings on trespassing from 1805, are juxtaposed with Polaroids of vandalized, graffitied and fenced-in properties, as well as images of cinderblock walls. These odd-shaped assemblages are funkily framed with salvaged 2x4s or metal piping— materials that are used in ad hoc as well as sanctioned construction.
Garrett’s works speak to the continued struggles and inequities that Black American and other people of color confront in a world of white domination. By weaving together historical songs and documents from official and unofficial voices with contemporary objects and images, Garrett frames prejudices both aesthetically and critically while taking his viewers on a journey through time.
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Vonn Sumner and Holly Elander
KP Projects[et_pb_section admin_label=”section”] [et_pb_row admin_label=”row”] [et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text”]Artists Vonn Sumner and Holly Elander each offer astonishing exhibitions of intensely personal artworks, that coupled with intimacy also present a prescient commentary on current socio-political times.Sumner’s solo show, “Burning Down the House,” features oil paintings the artist began in 2019—eerily ahead of its times with its empty boarded buildings, fires and dumpsters. Exuding an air of abandonment and mysterious wildness, his images are licked by flames creating a sense of attractive but dangerous purging. In 2020, the idea of “burning down” the urban forest’s growth has a more purposeful attraction.
The spare palette, with clean realistic execution of his images, creates a viewing experience that is lighter of heart. Dumpster Fire III (2019) is burning hot with destruction, but the orange and gold flames flare against a neon pink, graffiti-strewn wall as brilliant as any California sunset. Burned Out Building (2020) is an ashy, gravestone-gray, but the graffiti written across lower floors is brightly colored; a rainbow of words, the sky a brilliant dark-periwinkle. Internal flames, perhaps the psychedelic, appear the subject in works such as Byzantine Anonyme (2019). Fire destroys but also resurrects.
Vonn Sumner, Dumpster Fire III, 2016, courtesy KP Projects, photo by @birdmanphotos. Elander’s exhibition “Our Home” is quite different in subject and approach, but it too speaks of change to the natural world and the dichotomy of its human imprint. In part inspired by incidents from Elander’s childhood—including a raccoon on the roof, a snake in the driveway and coyotes trailing the family on a walk through the neighborhood—these delightful works bring wild creatures into a mid-century modern home similar to the house where Elander grew up. The palette is primarily quieter than in any previous series by the artist, although the vivid yellows of pitcher, background and insect in Mantis (2020) belie that. In other works, the background dissolves, leaving us free-floating in personal space. Regardless of palette and background, the visits by natural creatures from owls to wild cats to the coyotes prowling around a living room piano in Composition (2020) are alluring and magical, filled with immediacy, seemingly floating the viewer into the imaginary home.
Whimsical and warm, Elander offers a profound and poignant look at man sharing his space with nature. Her message is as simple as the acrylic works are carefully and delicately wrought. We all share the same planet, and all must be welcome.[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column] [/et_pb_row] [/et_pb_section]
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From the Editor
March-April, 2021; Volume 15, issue 4
Dear Reader,
It’s been a year now since our world started shrinking; lockdowns and quarantining made our worlds smaller. It was a foregone conclusion that the magazine would also start shrinking. One irony though, is that we gained two editorial pages. But this gain was a loss because we would no longer be running our popular society column, Roll Call, which consisted of snapshots of gallerygoers at art openings.
The photo collage was unique for any art magazine. Artillery featured the two-page color spread in the very first issue, and it was in every subsequent issue—that’s 15 years of LA art openings. People loved looking at the pictures, spotting “art stars,” friends, and maybe checking to see if they were featured themselves. It was usually the first page Artillery fans turned to when they picked up a copy. Who could resist?
The cheeky column featured local gallery openings along with museum galas, international art fairs and fancy benefits. We would accept pictures from local photogs, but mainly it was just me and my photographer, Lynda. We went to all the events, rarely missing a weekend. Sometimes it felt like drudgery. Who wants to work on Saturday night? Even though most gallery openings ended before 8, there were the after-parties, the after-after parties, the dinners and the bars that you might meet up at later.
While I did dread going to the openings more than I care to publicly admit, there were some openings that were great fun. The most entertaining were the well-attended events, which would mainly be museum openings or fancy benefits—there was definitely an improvement in the food and bev department. You could also choose to enjoy the anonymity and easily get “lost” in the crowd. Once we got there, Lynda and I would immediately make a beeline to the bar.
The main attraction at the tony openings was to hopefully get all the VIP’s mugs. Flitting about, drink in one hand, a cheese breadstick in the other, getting tipsier as the night air turned cool and the music got louder—the Dutch courage would make it easier to ask the celebs for a picture. By then, everyone else was feeling good, and might even be hamming it up in front of the camera. Half the fun was being outside, drinking and smoking and laughing—who cared about the art? Sometimes I didn’t even see the show! (I confess.)
It was fun mingling with a normally stuffy crowd, who would be getting a bit loose as the evening wore on. Stopping to share a puff with Henry Taylor or James Hayward wouldn’t be out of the norm. One time I dropped my full wine glass and it shattered to pieces right in front of Hammer Director Annie Philbin. She swiftly grabbed someone to clean up the mess and just brushed it off before going on her merry way.
“Beyond the Gallery” is our theme in this issue, where we look at new ways the art world may change. Things can never stay the same, which can be a harsh reality to accept. We know there can’t be art celebrations anymore, at least not in the near future. Should this epoch be something we learn from? I think and hope so, but it’s always fun to look back.
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Virtual Care Lab Creates Remote Connection
Getting Together, ApartThe Virtual Care Lab (VCL), launched at the start of pandemic life, provides a digital community space for the wide-ranging interests of artists, disability activists and remote-togetherness enthusiasts to converge. Words like collectivity, togetherness, collaboration, participation and community abound across the VCL, which describes itself as “a series of creative experiments in remote togetherness” and offers a plethora of trans-disciplinary workshops that live up to this mantra.
The homespun, early-internet aesthetic of the VCL’s virtual home base invites experimentation, with bright colors, endearingly mismatched and haphazardly placed images that maintain a consistently welcoming vibe. VCL is created and run by two kaleidoscopic artists and cultural workers—filmmaker and sound artist Sara Suárez and digital arts virtuoso Alice Yuan Zhang—in partnership with NAVEL, the vibrant community arts space and nonprofit that has been developing a presence in DTLA since 2014.
‘Portals’ page highlighting on-going, participatory digital arts projects from the Virtual Care Lab. While COVID brought a sudden surge of digital alternatives across arts and cultural platforms, and long overdue attention to digital and expanded practice art, the VCL seems to have established a digital arts platform uniquely suited for longevity. VCL’s primary focus is cultivating inclusive publics and experimenting with non-commodified ways of getting together. Serial, processual community events and workshops, like the monthly Organizers Hour for local activists, provide a consistency and regularity that pushes against the fractal, alienating temporality of internet immediacy and the constant onslaught of “newness” and real-time engagement demanded by social media platforms.
Every Saturday (2 p.m. PST), Kenny Zhao takes VCL participants on “field trips” to explore and learn from community spaces on the internet, with guided discussion exploring what kind of social glue holds each together. Zhao describes these events as experiments in “collaborative ideation,” a concept delineated by author-activist Adrienne Maree Brown. Brown’s theoretical framework for activism is inspired by LA sci-fi icon Octavia Butler, and fights to reclaim creativity, imagination and radical dreams of futurity from the jaws of capitalism, colonialism and the cult of neoliberal individualism, through collective creative practice.
Virtual Care Lab Events page showcasing weekly digital fieldtrips led by Kenny Zhao, ‘Gatherings’ Calendar, and Discord chatroom. The VCL’s digital infrastructure is spread across a home website, a VCL Discord page, and a profusion of inventive, horizontal digital platforms—including withfriends.com, yourworldoftext.com, Twitch streaming service, theonline.town, padlet.com, and are.ne (visual notepad)—among an array of more familiar tools to facilitate modes of remote group collaboration and live participation. On the VCL homesite, the community can access an events Calendar of upcoming “Gatherings,” and a digital archive chronicling past VCL projects; a weekly “Lab Hour” invites community ideation and experimentation. A selection of hand-drawn talismans with flashing collaged imagery bids visitors to enter the VCL “Portal,” each object linking to a different ongoing digital, participatory arts project.
Poetry Soup, 2020. One project created by Kehkashan Khalid (username) is inspired by sci-fi writer and leftist darling Ursula Le Guin’s theory of flash fiction as a thought experiment. The Untold Edition— Collective Diary (2020–21) hosted on Padlet (collaborative digital notepad), displays a watercolor map of the world with sprinkled geotags marking doodles, short fiction musings and snapshots uploaded by contributors across the globe to produce a collective diary. Through another “Portal,” Poetry Soup (2020), a Frank O’Hara poem is accompanied by interactive audience prompts that invite users to create a visual poem in a collage-style webpage.
One highlight of the Lab, Sites of Passage (2020), is a digital video piece by artist Lucy Kerr that was produced in a Gathering, and includes an audience score for ongoing remote participation. The piece explores the themes of embodiment, disconnectivity and the alone-together nature of socializing-by-Zoom. In the hours-long long piece, the eerie voyeuristic eye of the Zoom lens is obscured by a distinct fogginess over the domestic settings, reminding us how similar each of these spaces becomes in the seriality of the Zoom box. Bodies move in and out of the frames performing the mundane daily tasks, while blurred faces read monotonous, matter-of-fact accounts of the rituals and routines that occupy the expansive banality of home-time in lockdown.
Lucy Kerr, Sites of Passage (still), 2020 Lingering questions run through the varied VCL projects—How can art practice provide a critical social realm to imagine creative modes of collectivity outside the auspices of commodification, borders and capital? Can digital communities dream of alternate futures to the apocalyptic one we seem to be careening towards?
The VCL invites submissions for community-led projects centered on “Care As Practice,” defined as an ongoing project that engages active participation through remote access. This concept of collective care traces to notions of radical care in Black feminism that posits a lived, habitual ethos of communal responsibility and the cultivation of collective nurturing practices as the antidote to neoliberal atomization and alienation. Scholar Maria Puig de la Bellacasa conceives of a “triptych of care—labor/ work, affect/affections, ethics/politics” in which care is the “concrete work of maintenance in interdependent worlds.” These dimensions are interwoven throughout VCL, where an insistence on the real presence of the disembodied other in digital space cultivates a digital practice of mutual care. This paradoxical tension of disembodied collectivity seems to be where the Virtual Care Lab situates itself most comfortably.
Website designed by Alice Yuan Zhang in Partnership with NAVEL LA, 2020.
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8-bridges
Connecting the Bay Area and Beyond[et_pb_section][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text]Like many of us, I have spent much of the past nine months or so huddled in front of my computer. One day, an email arrived that really caught my eye. It was from 8-bridges—an organization I had never heard of—inviting me to save the date for a panel discussion featuring the directors of three cutting-edge Bay Area arts venues: Julie Rodrigues Widholm, the new director of UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Alison Gass, who has assumed leadership at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José (ICA) and Jay Xu, Director of the Asian Art Museum since 2008.
With these museums unable to open their doors to visitors these days, all have had to become very creative. Xu referred to “turning the museum inside out” when describing a trio of murals visible from the street, all newly created by Asian American feminist artists. Gass turned the entire exterior of the ICA into an exhibition space with a message aimed at getting out the vote. And Widholm is excited by the potential of a large outdoor video-projection screen, recently used to display photographs by Catherine Opie. This was the first in a series of three terrific panel talks, each featuring a trio of diverse museum directors.
Catherine Opie, Political Landscapes displayed on BAMPFA’s outdoor screen, 2020. Photo by Dave Taylor, courtesy of BAMPFA. So what is 8-bridges, the driving force behind the panel discussion? Named for the eight bridges connecting the Bay Area, it is the brainchild of a group of SF-based art leaders whose casual conversations evolved into a new online platform to increase the energy and vitality of the Bay Area arts scene in COVID times. The founding committee members are Claudia Altman-Siegel, Kelly Huang, Sophia Kinell, Micki Meng, Daphne Palmer, Chris Perez, Jessica Silverman, Elizabeth Sullivan, and Sarah Wendell Sherrill. Most of these are gallerists, running some of the best and brightest venues in SF.
I spoke with Kinell and Silverman, as well as Altman Siegel gallery Director Becky Koblick. The whole concept focuses on the idea of collaboration, and the premise that the best way to support the Bay Area art scene is by selling artwork. Kinell explained that 8-bridges evolved over “many weeks of conversations” between a group of colleagues, and involved many “minds and voices.” Koblick concurred: “Since we were unable to travel as much—which is such a huge part of our industry, to meet new artists and clients—we wanted to work together in the community to make sure we still had a voice during this time.”
Echoing the 8-bridges concept, the platform rolled out a schedule of online exhibitions by eight galleries presenting eight works each month. Another key feature of the platform is to feature an alternative space or institution each month, showcasing its mission and encouraging viewers to donate.
Alex Olson, Egg, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Altman Siegel, San Francisco. Sophia Kinell, the regional lead of the San Francisco branch of Phillips contemporary auction house, spoke with me of a recent New York auction: ”It was our best ever. We set major records for artists like Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas, Amy Sherald, Jadé Fadojutimi, and Vaughn Spann—an incredibly diverse roster of artists.“ Kinell said that “With 8-bridges, we are putting our muscle behind the institutional beneficiary. In the inaugural month of October, this was the Museum of the African Diaspora; in November, Creative Growth (Art Center), and in December an institution near and dear to my heart, the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito.”
While 8-bridges is fresh to the Bay Area scene, it shares a concept implemented successfully in other locales. Similar ideas were born in Los Angeles’ GALLERYPLATFORM.LA, and in New York, where megadealer David Zwirner launched Platform: New York. These online platforms are currently extensions of the gallery system but could certainly evolve into something else, with even more potential to expand the ways we interact with art. Artists increasingly have the ability to show and potentially sell their own work online as well. The challenge lies in making the experience richer and more authentic.
ICA San José installation view of Amir H. Fallah: The Facade Project, 2020. Photos by Impart Photography. A theme emerging across the board in the Zoom panel talks is this shift to the virtual. When I spoke with Widholm she emphasized that at BAMPFA, “Our staff has done a brilliant job pivoting toward digital programming… primarily with our virtual cinema programs streaming cinema accompanied by panel discussions and live interaction with filmmakers and people behind the scenes.” Another recurring theme is greater engagement with the local community. Mari Robles, incoming director of the Headlands, alluded to a shift in its involvement with local artists: the former “affiliate artist” program dissolved, to be replaced by something more integrated with its internationally acclaimed resident artist program. Finally, an idea that seems particularly urgent is creating internship programs for young people, particularly for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) youth for whom a career in museum work might seem off the radar. Monetta White, Director of the Museum of the African Diaspora wondered aloud, “Why did it take George Floyd for us to begin having these conversations?” With the reset on our cultural institutions provided by COVID, and magnified by the racial justice movement, it’s obvious that no one really expects, or wants, to go back to “business as usual.”
A key piece not only to 8-bridges, but to the future as an arts community, is collaboration, with various parties working together to share resources and promote art. While the impetus behind the new platform is to survive the COVID crisis, it also reflects a certain zeitgeist: the need for change in the art world as a whole. As sky-rocketing rents and exorbitant art fair fees have increasingly priced the smaller brick-and-mortar galleries out of the market, for many the shutdown may be the last straw.
Installation View of Sadie Barnette, The New Eagle Creek Saloon, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2019. Courtesy of the Artist, Charlie James Gallery, and Jessica Silverman. So how will emerging artists bridge the gap from obscurity to recognition? It’s great to hear brainstorming on ways in which galleries and museums, even auction houses, may work hand in hand with artists, creating opportunities and bonds that had not existed. Alongside these institutional shifts, one hopes that a new spirit of cooperation, rather than competition, may arise within the broader art world. With a teeming population sharing diminishing resources, perhaps it’s time to rethink some of our longstanding assumptions about images and objects.
Will 8-bridges disappear once we are able to return to “normal”? As Jessica Silverman says, “I think it will continue. I really believe that virtual and online programming alongside the physical is going to be the new paradigm. I think that it’s here to stay.” With the reshuffling of the deck when things reopen, many changes loom ahead. Art galleries will need to adapt and evolve, and in many ways, that’s a good thing.
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Jillian Mayer: Slumping Around
Sculptures for a Digital AgeMiami-based, internationally shown, multi-disciplinary artist Jillian Mayer is responsible for the “Slumpies,” an ongoing sculptural series designed for a theoretical space.
Put crudely, the “Slumpie” is an object meant to facilitate a more comfortable public-accessing of cyberspace. Taking it a stretch further, the Slumpie (as the artist herself claims) envisions “a practical solution to the contemporary world of cell-phone–dependent humans cum ‘post-posture’ persons.”
This makes the art object a real answer to a pseudo-hypothetical question: What do we do when our necks are crooked from too much doom-scrolling, or from walking-and-talking with our phones pressed to our ears, or from reposing bedridden and binge-watching for hours on end? It renders the series like a revolving showroom of imaginary solutions, as if some furniture-based corporation was hypothetically hiring the new Man Ray or Herman Miller to design a response to our self-obsessed, imaginarily fractured state of being, along with its subsequent, and expected, deformations.
Jillian Mayer, Slumpie 65- Thicc Zucc, 2017. Photo by: Signe Ralkov at Ofelia Plads (Coppenhagen). In light of this speculative marketing brief, the resultant objects are a hilarious hodgepodge of disjointed calamity; some “Slumpies” attach to walls and support akimbo elbows; others resemble lounge furniture, but with contorting undulations like mock medieval devices of detainment; some Slumpies resemble plinths or daises; others appear as both pedestal and trophied art object (therefore appearing quite useless in comparison to their also-mangled kin).
Variation and multiplicity aside, in the simplest sense, any given “slumpie” comes to life through its own publicity. Because of its being anti-sensible, the Slumpie is nonsense in privacy—it might even suggest a certain madness. The object invites the awkwardness of interaction, the seen-ness of the user overcoming its preposterousness.
Regardless of the artist’s statement, I would argue for the Slumpie as being meaningful through public engagement. That’s because the Slumpie is not actually a tunnel to a more comfortable internet experience; it is an object encouraging self-identification through its tandem participation—a union of IRL and URL, if you will.
Jillian Mayer, Slumpie 62 – Pray Chair, 2017. Photo by: Signe Ralkov at Ofelia Plads (Coppenhagen). I only re-encountered the Slumpie lately because I follow Mayer on Instagram; she had reposted others’ photos of themselves straddling, contorting and bending to fit the molding of a variety of Slumpies. And in this reposted sense, this post-Dadaist object becomes like an antenna directing a field of related, social-media transmitted objects, perhaps what would be replicating evidence of similar encounters.
I admit bias, though. I love the Slumpies series, if only because sometimes I see an unoccupied one and lack the imagination for its usage. I then see it in use, a person straddling it awkwardly, bent and turned in surrender to its absurdist design, and I enjoy a rush of endorphins, an unforced exhalation of windy suspiration.
Mayer portrayed a concern when she presented her most recent grand-master Slumpie, Fort (2020), at Miami’s Hotel Confidante, a hotelier’s structure of glass and orthogonality reminiscent of scenes from Brian de Palma’s Scarface. Mayer’s December exhibition was part of Art Week Miami Beach’s No Vacancy public art competition and exhibition. It kindly featured pump-station hand sanitizer for visitors and was wiped down between uses for pandemic safety. Fort included Wi-Fi honoring the zeitgeist of the series, i.e., web access. This latest Slumpie proved the tallest, widest, greatest of them all: less a solipsistic object of satire and more a carnival-size tiered cake, some 10- to 15-feet tall, begging to be climbed and played upon.
Jillian Mayer, Slumpie 69- Shark Fin, 2017. Photo by: Signe Ralkov at Ofelia Plads (Coppenhagen). In conversation with Mayer at the end of the year, she brought up some points: (1) The Slumpies refuse design efficiency by being molded with uncycled materials: resin, wax, styrofoam, and even wood from used palettes. (2) These materials hearken back to Miami’s leisure activities: boating, surfing, wood lifeguard towers. (3) Theoretically, these sculptures float—meaning they should persist long after the ocean’s rise.
Mayer describes Fort as part of a series of “quasi-functional sculptural furniture” that is “a rejection of contemporary design efficiency” and that is “presented as an interactive sculptural installation… ” The artist goes on to claim: “Fort is motivated by my concern that our cities, buildings and furniture will soon resemble the computer programs in which they were designed; clean lines on horizontal planes based on the optimization of manufacturing and their ability to be shipped flat efficiently… Fort is a rejection of this.”
So after volumes of user-centered selfies and conceptual ad–satirizing textual documents furnished by the artist herself, the key to grasping the Slumpie concept is to consider what it is not. The Slumpie is not comfortable; the Slumpie is not functional; the Slumpie might offer Wi-Fi access based on solar recharging capabilities (but it also might not; you’ll need to contact the gallery ahead of time, wink wink); the Slumpie is not public or private (a gallerist can be contacted to purchase them; others are cycled in and out of various public displays; some are just in artist limbo, either in transit, storage, or in rotation between galleries). And, if one accepts my argument, the Slumpie is not unless it is posted online.
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Safety First
Pandemic Protocols Create New PositionsWhat sort of working environment will the Los Angeles arts workforce return to once the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic is over? Or maybe a better question to ask is: How will we honor the skilled work of the preparators, installers, instructors, docents, assistants and more, whose combined efforts are semi-invisible to the public, yet without whom everything would fall apart?
Pre-COVID labor conditions were not always ideal for the average arts worker. One can peruse the Instagram account called @cancelartgalleries (its first post was on July 11, 2020) for a glimpse into the sort of abuse, neglect and underpayment that gallery staff have suffered throughout the years. Interns and assistants from Los Angeles and New York to London are sharing their accounts of maltreatment by some of the most blue-chip outfits you can think of. Additionally, many gigs associated with the deployment, installation and de-installation of gallery exhibitions were handled by independent contractors. Sometimes arts organizations hired permanent employees for these roles. As a consequence of the lockdown last summer, however, most of these workers saw their incomes freeze in an instant, with independent contractors especially wondering how they would survive.
I spoke with Prima, a freelance art handler (who uses they/them pronouns) about their experience in the spring of 2020. “There were just no jobs,” they said. “And there wasn’t anything that I could do about it. I’m in the US on an artist visa, which doesn’t allow me to apply for any federal aid.” Born in Thailand, Prima was slated to begin a well-paid contract with an LA museum when the lockdown mandate brought California to a halt. Another of Prima’s clients includes a gallery that they, for privacy reasons, leave unnamed. “I was able to readapt my skillset for an online version of the exhibition space,” Prima said. This, by its nature, is much safer than the work they were doing before the pandemic.
Safety for the art worker has probably never been as high a priority as it is now. In the entertainment industry, studios, producers and unions spent months deliberating over COVID production process standards. Billions of dollars were on the line for them; they could not afford to wing it. From those deliberations rose a new profession: the COVID Safety Officers, and their teams. On the flip side, by nature of the art installation process, the art world does not have an equivalent emergent role. In 2019, a preparator named Evelia transitioned away from her contract work for museums such as CAAM and the Hammer to become fulltime and salaried at an LA-based gallery. “Thankfully I’ve been working throughout this whole period. But I do know plenty of freelance workers who have been struggling.” As a former freelancer who is now in the position of hiring freelancers, safety is foremost in her mind. The workforce at the gallery that employs her has gone as remote as possible. She has tightened the pool of freelance talent from which she’ll hire for exhibitions—what may once have taken six people to do is now reduced to two at the most. To protect staff, in-person viewings of art are limited to one day a week and the gallery is producing online exhibitions. “People want to work, but under what conditions? And galleries can only promise so much, museums can only promise so much.”
Evelia says that one consequence of the pandemic is maintaining relationships with preparators at other institutions in a way that she never did before, simply because everyone is sharing resources and information about what is and isn’t working as they develop COVID safety procedures. “I think that there’s no interest in moving away from real exhibitions,” Evelia replies, when I ask for her opinion about what the future looks like for the gallery. “We are working under the assumption that things will get better. Maybe not like before, but with certain measures, things can be safe enough that someone could experience art in person.”
A safe post-COVID gallery or museum experience will be determined by how well its semi-invisible workforce is taken care of. Unlike in the entertainment industry, installation crews are rarely unionized, nor are their workplace standards governed by OSHA or a similar organization. And independent contractors have no work guarantees. “I still feel that we [as freelancers] are considerably underpaid and that we haven’t been afforded the substantial help that a part-time or fulltime employee would,” said Prima. There was some work that became available to them soon after the pandemic began, but as they didn’t have good health insurance, they sometimes declined: “As time went by and it seemed we weren’t going to come back to normal, I started taking some gigs. And it makes me feel a little compromised.” Prima also maintains their own art practice, which is why they made the choice to remain independent. “I made a conscious and empowered choice to do this kind of work. That doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t want things to be much better.”
Just this January, the Center for Cultural Innovation commissioned the Urban Institute to research and author a report addressing the plight of the California-based art worker from the standpoint of worker classification: freelancer vs. employee. It’s titled “Arts Workers in California: Creating a More Inclusive Social Contract to Meet Arts Workers’ and Other Independent Contractors’ Needs.” It arrives on the heels of the passage of last year’s controversial AB5 bill. The bill’s author and advocates meant well in trying to protect all sorts of gig workers from rampant misclassification, yet ultimately AB5 harmed many of these workers in the process.
Thankfully, the report isn’t just an accumulation of facts and data; the coauthors also spent time providing solutions for arts workers to build power. One macro-level solution could be to reform federal labor law so that independent contractors could collectively bargain. On the local level, one option could be scaling worker co-ops to include creative workers. While the report is available for download on both CCI and Urban Institute websites, they make it clear that the views expressed are the authors’ alone—six diverse experts, researchers, and fellows who regularly work on matters of workforce development, racial justice in employment and other pertinent social issues. That such an institutional effort was made is a testament to the times we live in. We are seemingly at a boiling point in our society when it comes to worker treatment—our previous ways of working are fast becoming unsustainable. Hopefully, the decision-makers for California’s museums and galleries and arts nonprofits take this report to heart.
Photography by Lara Jo Regan, 2021
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Architecture Must Be “Beautiful” According to Trump
Art BriefFormer President Donald Trump left office in disgrace, having incited an insurrection on January 6, 2021, the day Joe Biden was to be certified by Congress as the winner of the 2020 election. Trump made a speech to his crowd of MAGA misfits promising, in the style of cult leader Jim Jones, (although unlike Jones, Trump did not drink the Kool-Aid) to march with them on the Capitol building. Instead, Trump wimped out and watched the deadly assault on TV from the comfort of the White House while failing to send out the National Guard.
In view of the horrific acts of the last months of the Trump regime, a federal architectural executive order (EO) may seem to be a somewhat trivial matter. However, the EO Trump issued on December 21, 2020, was part of a number of so-called “midnight regulations” promulgated during his final days, including a series of regulations issued by the EPA stripping Americans of many vital environmental protections.
Donald Trump during in a Fox News virtual town hall at the Lincoln Memorial, May 3, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Joshua Roberts. The “beautiful buildings” EO had been in the planning stages for months, despite criticism from many architectural professionals. Trump favors neoclassical architecture, including such landmarks as the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial and the Capitol building (which he caused to be nearly destroyed). What seems to have ticked off Trump was the federal courthouse building spree over the last 20 years that gravitated toward modernist and postmodernist styles. (Trump is quite familiar with courthouses, having been involved in over 4,000 lawsuits.)
Ironically, Trump didn’t seem to grasp that many of his own glass skyscrapers were built in the modernist style, although few architects would consider the Trump Tower an improvement over the previous building on the 5th Avenue site—the Bonwit Teller building—an Art Deco gem that Trump rushed to demolish before the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission could save it. Trump Towers are late-stage modernist glass walled boxes—completely bland and forgettable.
Trump Tower in New York City, 721 Fifth Avenue. Trump yearned for monumental and imposing government buildings in the neoclassical style favored by Hitler. The Führer’s architect Albert Speer’s massive Reich Chancellery and other planned, but never built, grandiose structures were intended to glorify the regime—matching the preferred style of dictators such as Mussolini, whose hideous white marble Victor Emmanuel II National Monument scars the center of the Eternal City.
The Trump EO states that “Applicable Federal public buildings should uplift and beautify public spaces, inspire the human spirit, ennoble the United States, and command respect from the general public.” The order does not define “beautify.” “Beautiful” is frequently used in Trump’s limited vocabulary—he famously boasted that his Mar-a-Lago chef baked the most “beautiful” chocolate cake served at a 2017 banquet for China’s President Xi Jinping.
The EO specifically states that the “Brutalist” style is disfavored—maybe the one thing that is sensible. The dreadful Brutalist FBI Headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue are falling apart and should be demolished as soon as possible. However, the other specified verboten style in the order—Decontructivism—would rule out almost anything designed by starchitect Frank Gehry, including his recently opened Dwight Eisenhower monument on the National Mall.
E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Court House, 333 Constitution Avenue, September 10, 2010. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/THE
NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL.The day the EO was released, the prestigious American Institute of Architects was ready with a press release which “unequivocally” opposed the order and said members were “appalled with the administration’s decision to move forward with the design mandate” one month prior to the end of the Trump government. AIA members sent the White House over 11,000 letters condemning the EO.
Fortunately, President Biden should be able to nullify the Trump order with a skillfully drafted order of his own, although it may take a while, since his priorities are to marshal a federal government assault on the COVID pandemic, something Trump utterly failed to do. However, on the day after Trump’s EO was promulgated he appointed four new members to the US Commission of Fine Arts, making the commission completely white and male. It may be hard to reverse these appointments since they are for four-year terms and members may only be removed for cause.
The arts commission has wide-ranging sway over federal architectural designs. Three of the members Trump appointed to the commission are ardent traditionalists. One of them, Perry Guillot, a landscape architect, had a hand in Melania Trump’s widely panned renovation of the White House Rose Garden. Another architect, Rodney Mims Cook of Atlanta, specializes in what can only be described as plantation-style architecture—think Tara from Gone With the Wind—fitting right into Trump’s retro-vision of how to Make America Great Again.
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Eccentricity Isn’t Diversity
DecoderSo I was making the usual—you know: one part cherry juice, one part club soda, two parts peach juice—and thinking about how artists are eccentric. Balzac supposedly drank 50 cups of coffee a day, Grant Wood replaced his door with a coffin lid, and Paolo Uccello would jabber on about perspective when his wife told him to come to bed.
Artists’ assistants, art dealers and nieces who move in after strokes and ladder accidents all report that artists are weird and ask them to do weird things. This is true: I know multiple people who kept fat rabbits and they were all artists.
But y’know what? If someone asks me about my cherry-peach homemade soda I tell them how I spent two weeks vomiting because of whatever I was eating or drinking and then so my friend was like “Here, look, you need to be drinking more cherry juice and peach juice because of your blood type” and I don’t know but, importantly, this friend was hot. And also she was one of the only people I knew who’d got consistently hotter over the decade I’d known her—so I was inclined to take her dietary advice. And now I make this three-bottle drink and I vomit much less. You tell someone that and they don’t shake their head and go “Oh man, you artists!” they go “Oh, shit, that makes sense.” And, really: who doesn’t want to look at a fat rabbit?
You know who else is notoriously eccentric? Rich people. Also children. I don’t actually think the popular theory is true: that rich people are all pretentious and think they’re artists and artists are immature and act like children and children are too stupid to act normal—I think there’s a simpler reason we’re all eccentric: we don’t have day jobs.
None of us have to get used to Quizno’s because it’s the only thing to eat that’s walking distance from the office, none of us have to not wear things with Spider-Man on them, none of us come home every night at six far too destroyed to even consider building a birdhouse out of books we already read and didn’t like.
People would like to be eccentric and don’t, by and large, begrudge artists the right to be just that (unless they’re related to us). They would like to have the time and, especially, the freedom—or, freedoms, rather. Children have to beg their parents for so many things but have the freedom of having no responsibility; the rich have the freedom of having no morality; the artists have the freedom of not having to be reliable or productive—at least the way capitalism usually defines these things. Eccentricity does not reveal the eccentric person: it reveals the extent to which everyone is kept in line by their obligations. We all begin multifarious and then are narrowed.
Eccentricity isn’t diversity. Diversity is: everyone belongs! Eccentricity is: No one does! You can’t campaign on eccentricity. Non-cooperation hasn’t got much of a ground game. Yet everyone dreams of not cooperating. That’s why even people who aren’t eccentric like art: it shows them what things would be like if they didn’t have to make sense to other people. Diversity, which capitalism is learning to get along with, is: I belong here in Los Angeles, but also to the hidden and discontinuous community of the Jewish Diaspora. Eccentricity is: I belong here in Los Angeles, but also to the hidden and discontinuous community of people who love the tiny miniature-glass fronted worlds of Joseph Cornell. I have more to talk about with the other citizens of this invisible and polyglot empire than with any other group I might more easily name. We Cornell-ists love small secrets, and the spider-magic of tiny spaces.
Just as every zoo is nothing more than a catalog of ways to survive, the museum is a catalog of ways to be human—of what we’re like when we aren’t obligated to be something for someone. This antelope thing with a butt like a zebra? It had to be that way. This iron disk, tilted at an angle, with the details in copper wire? That is someone’s heart’s desire. This is what’s suppressed by all our surface similarity.
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Shoptalk
Art fairs and COVID, Desert XArt Fairs Aren’t Giving Up
Delays, delays, and more delays. Last year Art Basel rather optimistically thought it would proceed with its Miami edition in December. That was finally cancelled when they came to their senses. I think there were online viewing rooms and talks. I think I even attended one or two talks but, like many of you, I’m Zoomed out and only Zoomed in to a limited number of online meetings, talks and virtual galleries.
They are going ahead with Art Basel Hong Kong on May 21–23, and the flagship fair in Basel has been moved to Sept. 23–26. The Hong Kong plan is a puzzler, not only because of the hazards of flying for people from many countries, but they currently do NOT allow nonresidents to enter Hong Kong, with a few exceptions such as those “approved by the Hong Kong SAR government to carry out anti-epidemic work.”Will they have an Art Basel exception? That would be imprudent. Hong Kong has kept its COVID infection and mortality rate exceptionally low, and you’d think they would want to keep it that way. An old friend of mine, a long-term resident there, told me they were saved by everyone immediately putting on masks in public—they had had SARS and flu risks before, so knew the drill.
In the past year art fairs have slipped in importance as sales channels for galleries, from third to sixth place, according to Artsy’s Gallery Insights Report 2021. First on the list is the old school way—outreach to existing clients, as before. Second are websites, which overtook walk-ins; and third is social media. Of course those rankings are no surprise since virtual interactions have usurped real-life interactions. Also, the report says, the marketing budget for social media by the average gallery increased 92% over the previous year, so clearly the rise of social media as a sales tool is fueled by investment in social media strategies. Lots more fascinating stuff in this report; check it out at https://pages.artsy.net/rs/609-FDY-207/images/Artsy-Gallery-Insights-2021-Report.pdf.
We did not have our January/February fairs this year, and Frieze LA has set a new date for the week of July 26. Frieze LA used to take place in February, if you can think as far back as to early 2020. I must admit I barely can, my brain somewhat addled by Quarantine Fog, but I seem to remember it was a good one, and that it was freezing cold as I explored the Back Lot for art installations and performances. I have heard that the next Frieze LA will NOT take place at Paramount Studios—I don’t see this online, but heard it from a gallerist who has previously participated in the fair. Paramount is a notoriously expensive venue, not just for the space, but because of the amount of security that has to be hired. Where will Frieze LA pop up next? We have some amazing locations in LA, right? Felix has done remarkably well at the Roosevelt Hotel, and ALAC had a comeback last year at the Hollywood Athletic Club.
Desert X installation view, Cara Romero, Jackrabbit, Cottontail & Spirits Of The Desert, 2019, photo by Lance Gerber, courtesy of Desert X. Desert X is Back
Desert X put off its February opening and has just announced rescheduled dates of March 12–May 16, 2021, focused in the Coachella Valley. Since it’s all outdoors, you can drive around to visit the art installations in your own safety bubble, your car. They’ve cut back on the number of artists and the geographic reach of the installation pieces—due in part to financial and city partnership factors. Last year the city of Palm Springs dropped their support due to the launching of Desert X AlUla, held in Saudi Arabia and funded by the Saudi government. Several Desert X board members including Ed Ruscha resigned in protest, citing that country’s human rights abuses and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
This year there will be 13 artists from eight countries—four of them based in New York but only one from California, Kim Stringfellow, long known for her research and work on the “jackrabbit homesteads” made possible by land grants from the Federal government. She will be recreating a version of one of these homesteads—the real ones dot Highway 62 as you drive out from Joshua Tree. (Their previous events hosted 16 artists in 2017, 19 participants in 2019.)
Each project was commissioned by artistic director Neville Wakefield and co-curator César García-Alvarez, and most of the artists traveled to the area to do research and visit sites. Wakefield believes the new configuration is better for visitors. “Geographically, it’s more compressed,” he has said, “and there are fewer artists, but at the same time it represents a much greater diversity of voices, with themes of social justice and environmental equity running throughout in significant and powerful ways.”
There seems to be more local community engagement, from sending art kits to local schoolchildren for separate projects by Judy Chicago and Oscar Murillo, to eliciting words from women’s groups to be featured in Ghada Amer’s installation in Sunnylands in Rancho Mirage. Since Desert X’s launch in 2017, there has been criticism that they did not engage the community enough, and I’ve seen pieces that were insensitive to place. Take that Richard Prince installation of blown-up Instagram posters featuring a dysfunctional extended family—presumably, one located in Desert Hot Springs where the installation was. The installation was vandalized soon after the opening, so it was shut down for most of that edition.
Attendance is free, and a map of the installations will be posted starting March 12 on desertx.org and via the Desert X 2021 app.
Desert X installation view, John Gerrard, Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) 2017, 2017-2019, photo by Lance Gerber, courtesy of Desert X. Kudos!
Let’s be thankful the world is still spinning, COVID vaccines are arriving, and artists are still making work and getting support for making work. Kudos to Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Rafa Esparza who won USA Artists grants this year—they are two of 60 across 10 creative disciplines to become a 2021 USA Fellow. It’s a terrific grant given through a nomination process, accompanied by an unrestricted $50,000 award.
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PROVENANCE
The City of Tomorrow, TodayIn a 1953 photograph for a spread in LIFE magazine on LA County’s city of Lakewood, a bird’s-eye view looks down onto a newly paved suburban street. The street is lined with moving trucks as far as the eye can see as family after family busily unpack their belongings. The burst of activity counterbalances the monotonous sprawl of two/three bedroom homes that fill the frame. The exuberant families are unfazed by the severity of the surrounding tracts, where telephone poles stand in place of any tree. While today we know that the photograph was staged, it is not altogether misleading. Within the first month of opening, 200,000 people came to admire Lakewood’s accessibly priced model homes. By the time this photograph was taken, the self-proclaimed “City of Tomorrow, Today,” boasted an incredible 17,500 new homes—making Lakewood one of the largest developments of its time. As many as 50 homes were sold per day with a record 107 being sold in a single hour; people wanted into Lakewood.
The subdividers responsible for the project broke ground in February 1950 and proceeded at breakneck speeds. A new home was completed every 7 1/2 minutes, some 40 to 60 houses a day, with a record of 110 houses erected in a single day. To entice future homeowners, the developers centered Lakewood’s 17,500 private, single-family homes around what was briefly the largest mall in America, surrounded by an unprecedented 10,000 free parking spots. The neatly gridded suburban tract reflected the burgeoning ideals of the midcentury era. As low-interest FHA loans made buying a home possible for white middle-class suburbanites, residential developments like Lakewood ballooned. With well-paying jobs in aerospace at either the nearby Douglas or Hughes plants, the community offered an ideal locale for young families seeking a secure place to raise their families. However, the midcentury American dream fortified by the proliferation of low-interest FHA-backed mortgages perpetuated racial divisions; the United States government granted less than 2% of FHA loans to people of color.
Photograph by Bettmann/Corbis. When Joan Didion published her 1993 New Yorker article “Trouble in Lakewood,” the racial demographics of Lakewood had remained largely unchanged, but the communities’ stint of economic prosperity was beginning to dwindle. The self-proclaimed “City of Tomorrow, Today” could hardly have anticipated the changes to come. In 1989 alone, half of California’s aerospace workers had been laid off and only 16% of those workers would find another job over the next two years. The newly depressed city was overrun with violence; countless sexual assaults, burglaries, a pipe bombing, and numerous other felony arrests marked the community in 1993. The bucolic haven had transformed, even while residents insisted the community remained “upper-middle class.” Today’s Lakewood has suffered from the continued ebbs and flows of the market, facing lost jobs, closing malls and enduring confusion on the definition of “middle class.” A short drive to the infamous neighborhood today reveals the decaying white picket fences of the idyllic midcentury landscape. Visitors today are no longer greeted by the city’s original, cheery motto, but instead by the words: “Good Ideas Last for Generations.”
