#1998

I came to LA in 1998. Fresh off the bus from Canada. Well, plane. But just as starry-eyedas anyone. I was a part of the Royal ArtLodge in Winnipeg so community meant everything to me. Now I’m just in LA and just trying to figure it out. A year later, my best friend Paul moved to LA and we had each other as a bit of home here.

For what it’s worth, I just want to say that this account of my experience might not be accurate to everyone but this is what I remember.

In my first year of graduate school at UCLA I was lucky enough to meet Frances Stark, Laura Owens, andPae White. The talk around UCLA was that Chinatown was the hot art scene at the time. They were connected to Steve and Giovanni at China Art Objects and soon I spent every weekend there and some weeknights. I saw a lot of things that got me so excited about art, and I was lucky to have a group of established artists to call my friends.

Twenty-some years later, at some event, I ran into Kevin Hanley(who was a part of that crew) and we commiserated about Chinatown —for me, it was the LA art scene when I got there; for him, the scene really started in ’94, but likely earlier. In the early ’80sthey went to Madame Wong’s in Chinatown to watch bands play. A really nice thing I remember Steve telling about that time was how Mötley Crüe played Madame Wong’s — and the other bands were punks, so when they got the chance, they messed up the soundboard, and when Mötley Crüe went on, it was just adisaster. This was the world that I walked into. These were the people I was friends with. Very strong beliefs. A very strong concept of what art was supposed to be. You lived, filtered, and produced. When Kevin and I had that conversation about when Chinatown started, it was prompted by me talking to somebody and saying Chinatown started in 2006. For me it was ’99. And Chinatown started before even I was there —but I got to be a part of the of Chinatown in the late ’90s and early 2000s, and I am grateful for that.

China Art Objects opened, I believe, in’99. Roger Herman already had a gallery in Chinatown called Black Dragon Society, and I was a gallery sitter there. I had worked at Blum & Poe for two days and was let go (I was incompetent as an art handler). I was a student at UCLA, and Roger found money for me to sit in the gallery. At the same time, every Saturday, I would take a Trader Joe’sbag of drawings to Chinatown, and collectors would be waiting to buy them. They were only$40, so anybody would have bought them. WhatI did resonated with some people, I think— but what resonated more was the spirit ofChinatown at the time.

China Art Objects was started by Giovanni Intra — a Fulbright scholar from New Zealand— along with Steve Hanson, Amy Yao, Peter Kim, and Mark Heffernan. What I got jumped into was pretty special. I think about how many times I would spend hours in Chinatown during the week, just hanging out, and the people you’d see there— collectors, artists, musicians. One day the band The Cult came in and had themselves photographed in front of JP Munro’s painting, which hung magnificently in the space at China Art Objects. This was the groundwork they laid, and I was lucky to be a part of it. My first round of Chinatown happened, in my recollection — and again, you can argue with me, but I don’t think that I’m wrong —with spaces run mostly by artists who were half professional half feral. That vibe drew a lot of people in. The buzz. The freshness.The humanness.

All around the same time, crazy stuff started to happen, as written about in “The Jester” (LA Weekly). Eric Wesley, who is such a brilliant artist, had his first show at MetroPictures. He got a little bit tipsy, somebody called him the N-word, they engaged, and Eric threw a chair through the glass door of Passerby, Gavin Brown’s bar. At the time, Eric’s thing seemed huge for us because even though I had done a show at Petzel in New York, Metro Pictures was an established gallery. That meant something.

That same weekend, Giovanni Intra was in New York for Eric’s opening — we were allso fucking proud of Eric, Eric should be abetter recognized artist. Giovanni was coming off a spectacular Miami Basel, and God, you have to love a person who loved art that hard. This beautiful person had beautiful thoughts. Deep, deep, deep thoughts.

Giovanni, in his Prada shoes that he bought with money from Basel — died of a heroin overdose that same weekend.

In 2006 Josh White invited me to the“Black Pussy” Jason Rhoades installation and I remember not knowing what I was about to experience and being a little nervous. Jason had created this incredible work and you would see people from every walk of life. Sadly Jason died a few weeks after I was there and when I look back, for me that was kind of the end of that era.

Scenius (thank you, Emma): Brian Eno’s term for collective genius. It doesn’t start with one person — that person is immersed in an unplanned grouping of people who end up building a community of genius.

Daniela asked me to write an end to this, and I was stuck. But two phone conversations with friends made me feel like I could stick a landing. First, chatting with my friend Emma Cat-acutan. Emma brought up a Brian Eno clip about Scenius — a potential title for a show she is curating. Emma is actively creating a scene in San Diego.

Second was talking with Josh White, who is likely one of the foremost witnesses to the LA art scene from the ’90s to the present. He has shot everyone’s work. Josh reminded me that we weren’t professional in the sense we think about it now. We weren’t trying to be strategic. We were both serious and not. We just lived and created.

I am grateful for the people I have had the luck to be around.