I’m at a bar in Palmdale and it’s nearly empty. From where I am sitting, I can see two men playing chess. Or, rather, they’re not really playing—they’re afraid to make a move. It’s Pawn to E4, followed by the all-too-familiar analysis paralysis: finger steadies the piece, eyes tighten, neck cranes and turtles to check for danger, and then…Pawn back to E2. Let’s start again. Every move never happens, just like this.
It’s a riskless game, and stagnant, and it reminds me of the state of the arts in Los Angeles.
Since forever, LA has been about risk. We tell big stories on big screens about success against all odds. Our stars come from nowhere, move here on hayseed budgets with bindles full of aspiration and little else. Our freeways host the most spine-shearing car chases in the world; our sports are considered extreme, our politics radical, our drugs potent; and, recently, we’ve been reminded that we all essentially live in one big pile of kindling that’s oh by the way right along the San Andreas Fault.
Chris Burden, Shoot, 1971, at F Space in Los Angeles.
LA’s art is no different, at least historically. In the ’70s—amid Nixon, Vietnam, assassinations, moon landings and riots—Chris Burden had himself shot and crucified (Shoot, 1971; Trans-Fixed, 1974), Barbara T. Smith had sex with three men in one performance (Feed Me, 1973), Pippa Garner flipped a Chevy’s chassis and drove it backwards across the Golden Gate Bridge (Backwards Car, 1974), and Paul McCarthy fucked a bunch of raw hamburger meat with a hotdog up his ass, and videotaped it for everyone to see (Sailor’s Meat (Sailor’s Delight), 1975). At the same time, CalArts, as we know it, opened, and counted among its faculty one artist who burned all his paintings (John Baldessari), one who called twenty minutes of blank film a finished film (Nam June Paik), and another who believed that artists should stop making art altogether (Allan Kaprow). The history of LA art, of course, is far more complex and diverse, but this is the genesis of its popular spirit, one that plumbs the depths of taboo and skewers convention.
That spirit, however, has faded. LA art is staid now. Maybe all art is. And it sort of makes sense, too. Up until very recently the art market has been healthy, even booming. But memories of 2008’s Great Recession linger in the rearview, so despite the upswing, a tendency toward stability, toward the sure thing, is understandable. It’s also unfortunate because the sure thing is categorically anti-risk. It calcifies convention: Institutions get comfortable, galleries follow, and artists end up having to choose between satisfying a mandate to exhibit or not exhibiting at all. To rock the boat is to threaten the art world’s prized equilibrium, so little-by-little all movements of any kind are discouraged, until the boat stops moving altogether and things become inert.
Take Jeffrey Deitch’s recent “Post Human” show, for example, a reprise of his 1992 show of the same name. One look around and it’s clear that the most challenging, insurgent works in the gallery—let alone the city—were made yearsby artists currently in their 80s, or who are now even dead. I’m thinking of McCarthy’s Garden (1991–2), of course, Charles Ray’s Family Romance (1993), and Cady Noland’s Rotten Cop (1988), but there are others. Even some of the more striking contemporary work—like Josh Kline’s Aspirational Foreclosure (Matthew / Mortgage Loan Officer) (2016) and Ivana Bašić’s I will lull and rock my ailing light in my marble arms #2 (2017)—“shocks” in the same way that American Psycho or Marilyn Manson shocks, which is to say, only to viewers still living in the 1990s, who haven’t discovered the internet yet. In other words, the best new works here are old hat… pastiche, even.
And that’s the good stuff! Most art shows in LA are about as avant-garde as a corporate happy hour, except without the funny business from Kyle in accounting. Our schools, too, are factories of modest work—CalArts and UCLA, yes, you—training artists to avoid risk, or at least render it invisible, by using concepts like opacity, camouflage and misdirection. At one point, these approaches were an effective counter to the art world’s commodification of difference. The many social justice movements of the 2010s spawned a market that valued marginality so long as it was legible in the work. That is, artists were encouraged to prove it—their identity, their culture, their trauma—and to be explicit enough about it for it to sell, which quickened a roundabout march toward reduction and stereotype. An opaque approach then, in theory, protected the artist’s subjectivity from the capital forces seeking to exploit it. However, it has evolved. More recently, opacity has been used as a tool to avoid rocking the proverbial boat, regardless of identity: Say what you want to say, but make it illegible, and position it juuuuust right. At least, artists can then maintain some degree of integrity without sacrificing career advancement. However useful, these strategies aren’t pioneering or revolutionary: David Hammons, for one, made an entire career out of them, starting in the ‘70s.
“Ha Ha Place” at Leroy’s, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy of Leroy’s.
Nevertheless, François Ghebaly gave us “Scupper” this September. If there were ever a group show that captured the preferred mood and approach of LA’s MFA high command, this would be it. Apart from some notable names, many of the artists were recent grads, and almost everything was so opaque that the gallery had to provide a paragraph-long explanation for each work in the exhibition packet. For the uninitiated, this is extremely rare, even for conceptual art. A good rule of thumb is more precision, less text, and here we had ten pages. It proved necessary, though, as the artists gave us very little agency as viewers, scant clues with which to decode the work. A slab of grain here, some discarded concrete there, a few street bollards in the corner—that was pretty much it.
The problem wasn’t merely that the art lacked an aesthetic punch or a clever turn of material, and it wasn’t that it required texts to complete its meaning. (This is the name of the game in conceptual art, for better or worse, and has been for some time.) No, the problem in “Scupper” was a new one, one born out of a careerist climate specific to now, and out of the tepid approach to artmaking it engenders. Here, the issue was that the texts themselves were the opaque artwork, totally separate from the work in the gallery. These texts were carefully crafted and chock-full of criticality, sure, but really amounted to little more than fail-proof language games that traded in an erudite brand of nihilistic doomcore, so masterfully idle that they too should’ve had supplemental texts.
Ask around and you’ll get all sorts of excuses: Things are precarious, many will say, No one wants to lose an opportunity. They’ll point out that audiences want to be soothed, that “challenge” is a thing of the past. Some will blame a culture of fear around voicing dissent, driven by the pettish mores of galleries and the people that run them. Others will point out that risk-taking is rare—after all, it’s risky—so we can’t expect much of it, and still others will argue that risks are being taken, that for some artists even existing is a risk (seriously, this has been said!). Professionalism, millennials and the algorithm are reasonable scapegoats, too, and of course it wouldn’t be the art world if the granddaddy of them all—capitalism—weren’t subject to some blame, ditto with the patriarchy and white supremacy.
It all boils down to anxious artists overtrained to overthink. Timely, relevant moves simply do not happen. As a result, an art world that was once ahead of culture and leading it, now lags far, far behind.
… And yet there’s hope!
Recently, small pockets of experimentation have taken root in LA. Many of them, it’s worth noting, are alternative spaces with much lower overhead than their commercial counterparts (but not all). For example, Public Notice, a gallery no larger than a few closets, beneath a house in Silver Lake, mounted a spate of anti-precious shows last year that added some attitude to a very buttoned up scene; Leroy’s (in addition to being somewhat of an architectural risk) continues to throw shows at the wall to see what sticks, and a lot of them do; Tiffany’s and Quarters, two similarly small spaces operating more sporadically, often eschew the over-considered in favor of unbridled instinct and pathos. Sometimes, it’s enough to simply let art happen as SALA did this past summer in a rundown house at the top of a hill in Mount Washington, or as Emily Lucid did in her anarchically curated “EDEN” show at LAST Projects in December, or as Nora Berman does almost daily on her SparklyMiracleZONE Twitch stream. Even revivals of work by artists like Ron Athey at Murmurs and the many at Deitch’s “Post Human” serve to spark the notion of risk’s possibility.
“EDEN” at LAST Projects, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy of LAST Projects.
In every case mentioned above, the approach to exhibition-making more closely resembles a game of tennis than it does a chess match. In a system like this, things are faster and looser, and more uncontained. You set your feet as best you can, you take a swing, you play with pace. The ball might not go where you want—it might not even make it over the net—but good news: It’s coming right back at you, right now, so get ready. There’s slippage, mistakes are made, nothing is perfect, yet things keep moving. Momentum takes hold. And that’s the point.
Now, the tennis approach isn’t risky in itself. But, if we’re to recognize reputational and capital concerns as two fundamental deterrents of risk-taking, then working smaller and with more frequency necessarily dissolves the gravity of each individual exhibit. Then, artists can test the waters, update ideas at low cost, and, frankly, be unprofessional. The perception of things matters less, so there’s no need to hide, no need to over-frame, no need to be precious.
It’ll all sing with energy when you care just a little bit less, when you’re forced to go off-script and react, when you do it yourself, and fast. That’s when ideas will rally and come alive, and when we’ll get the unexpected.
