Portraiture has been a constant in art-making since the waning Middle Ages, and really since art first appeared (though they wouldn’t have called it that), which may extend back into prehistory. I would further conjecture that such early art itself encompassed a kind of portraiture, whether or not its first subjects were even human. The earliest worlds were also wild places in which predator and prey were probably on slightly more equal footing—each keen to deconstruct (in every sense) the other’s world. Plus ça change.
It’s hard to say whether the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns of 2020 were an impetus for a fresh revival of portrait-making and viewing. But the timing of shows like the Met’s 2021 Alice Neel retrospective, People Come First and the David Zwirner Gallery’s re-mount of the Diane Arbus 1972 MoMA retrospective in 2022 seemed to respond to a moment in which people were re-examining their relations within societies and polities, both with each other and with themselves. ARTILLERY itself made portraiture the subject of its March-April issue this year. Part of that reexamination might well be viewed on a continuum with political and cultural developments of the preceding decade, though on-going brutality and violence inflicted upon communities of color also reminded us that our republic’s own barbaric ‘pre-history’ was never too far away.
Aleksandra Waliszewska, Untitled [Face], 2022–23. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & PoeSuch issues of identity and representation are one of several points of departure in “Pictures Girls Make”: Portraitures, curated by Alison M. Gingeras for Blum & Poe. Both parts of the exhibition’s title are key. “Pictures Girls Make” alludes to a comment Willem de Kooning reportedly made to his partner, Elaine, dismissing her penchant for portraiture, as a kind of “pictures girls make.” Whether or not Willem ever saw the irony in his remark, Elaine de Kooning, like so many artists before and since, was undeterred. The feminist second wave did not necessarily change the way we see, but certainly it helped change the way we think about seeing (also, I think, the way we look at each other—perhaps even more so for men than women). And what, after all, does “portraiture” entail or imply? Likeness, ‘identity’ scarcely scratches the surface, even when the subject’s face entirely fills the frame. Again, it goes back to visual art—and portraiture’s—earliest foundations: not merely depicting what was seen, but telling a story—the how, what, and why of it. In the best of these portraits, the viewer finds access to another world and learns something about the way that world looks (or looked) back.
The sheer quality of the work exhibited, alongside Gingeras’ curatorial scholarship and shrewd insights into the larger historical and cultural contexts in which artists forged their styles and which shaped their (and our) view of the world, make this a museum class show. But Gingeras has a gift for inter-weaving stylistic, aesthetic, cultural, thematic and narrative threads across historical periods, simultaneously refreshing our view of both historical and contemporary work and bringing them into sharp focus, which puts this exhibition into a class of its own.
Umar Rashid, Autumn in the Schwarzwald (Black Forest)…, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe
The scope of her reframed and recontextualized view of portraitures is apparent from the viewer’s first glimpse. The gallery’s entryway space (“This is what these lives looked like,….”) is hung with a spare selection of 19th and 20th century and contemporary paintings that variously document, reflect, protest, celebrate, fantasize, and mythologize African-Americans’ views of themselves and their worlds. Andrew LaMar Hopkins’ Bridgerton-worthy fantasy Creole Duchess (2023) is flanked by Joshua Johnson’s early 19th century Portrait of a Woman (a white woman, who was likely a patron) and an unknown (‘Louisiana School’) later 19th century Portrait of a Creole Gentlemen. Winfred Rembert’s haunting Pregnant in the Cotton Field (1996) is literally worlds away from the Stettheimer-like charm of Rosalind Letcher’s The Bunny Hop 1965. The incomparable Ernie Barnes gives us a full-on guts-and-glory vignette of a world he knew inside and out in his 1966 Football Players (executed before his retirement from the game!), while the coolest Prussian general in the Black Forest reins in his beautiful white mount en route to a strategy session with his fellow officers in Umar Rashid’s Autumn in the Schwarzwald….
Chidinma Nnoli, They are you, You are them, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe
From this alternately sobering, reflective, and soaring entrée, Gingeras gives us a selection of portraits and self-portraits alternately meditative, deconstructed, tentative, self-reflexive, matter-of-fact, and fanciful—or all of these simultaneously (in keeping with her keynote quote (from Joan Brown), for this section of the show, “I am not any one thing….”). Besides Brown, the artists include March Avery, Chris Oh (paying tribute to the 16th century painter Sofonisba Anguisola—only recently receiving long overdue recognition for the power of her portraiture); Katja Seib, Devin Troy Strother (rendering his auto-portrait by way of brilliantly displaced deconstruction), Nigerian artist Chidinma Nnoli, evoking the divided self in a manner and palette rarely seen since Serusier and Denis; the young Polish artist, Agata Słowak’s self-dissection, recalling the most scabrous of post-Expressionism Weimar painting (and for many of us, Stephanie Barron’s brilliant New Objectivity exhibition for LACMA), Mela Muter’s quietly assertive ‘palette-portrait’; June Leaf, and more.
Alice Neel, Nancy Greene, c. 1965. Courtesy of Blum & Poe.
The spirit of Alice Neel anchors the next gallery. People may not “come first” exactly; but certainly she was dead-on in noting that “People’s images reflect the era in a way that nothing else could….” We see this directly in the way people move. Gesture (and style and fashion) are also a huge part of this. But the times (cultural, political, economic) also leave their distinct imprint on the face separate and apart from the toll imposed by gravity, heredity and the elements. Even so, the range of this very concise selection is astonishingly broad—variously coy, casual and forthright, even defiant; illuminated, haunted and almost hermetically surreal. There’s a kind of electricity that radiates off these portraits whether it’s the billowy shadow aura that echoes the contours of Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita’s bobbed-hair beauty or the northern light glow that seems of a piece with the charged gaze of Chicago Surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie’s 1936 self-portrait. The paintings are all extraordinary on their own terms, but the second Muter canvas here, Zigeunerfamille (Gypsy Family) (1930)—a breastfeeding mother all but projecting herself (and her infant) into the foreground, her seemingly reticent musician husband some paces behind her—has a visceral power that almost propels it out of its place in time. But no one escapes history—or mortality.
Here Gingeras pivots to poetry—a digression, not a distraction. The portrait is simultaneously mask and unmasking. Larry Rivers famous O’Hara Nude with Boots (1954) is here, alongside Elaine de Kooning’s own 1962 portrait—with O’Hara’s distinct features blurred beneath a pale pink cloud from her brush. (Why does unmasking always seems to portend some kind of legal challenge?) Mark Grotjahn’s Untitled (Skull) nods both to ultimate unmasking and the ultimate mask—no longer to be betrayed by that ‘tongue that could sing once’ or ‘politicians’ that might ‘circumvent god’ (quoting from Shakespeare’s Hamlet).
Elaine de Kooning, Frank O’Hara, 1962. Courtes of Blum & Poe.
The last two galleries confirm and consolidate the main points of Gingeras’ recontextualization of portraiture and more expansive redefinition of its domain. Setting the Neel affirmation that “People come first” to one side, Gingeras emphasizes both inclusivity and the life stories represented. “Portraits are pictures people make,” she declares, embracing not simply the flux of personal, sexual, racial, ethnic or cultural identity, but an expanded notion of how this can be represented and what it might look like. Her inclusion of works by relatively unknown artists (e.g., Jerome Caja, whose work has a fetishized, almost devotional charge, or Elisabetta Zangrandi, who appropriates Velasquez’s Las Meninas to her own ends), as well as the auto-fictional domain of Karolina Jabłońska and Robin F. Williams’ dissolving film still, confirms this sense of redefinition. We are some distance from Arbus here—not merely entering into other worlds, but the shadows and shadow selves and lives within those worlds.
Gingeras makes clear the extent to which contemporary art has expanded our sense of what portraiture means and what it conveys. But what further sets the show apart from museum shows of similar scope and quality is a connective harmonic resonating from gallery to gallery, even painting to painting. There’s a poetic and musical cadence to the exhibition independent of its affinities with Ashbery, O’Hara, Shakespeare, et al. There’s no ‘discorrupting’ (Shakespeare to Whitman to Grotjahn) the bodies or whatever fascinating traces they’ve left for the rest of us to contemplate. What “Pictures Girls Make” ‘sings’ is an air as free-floating as consciousness itself, and it’s exhilarating.
Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Skull), 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe.
Blum & Poe
2727 S. La Cienega Boulevard
Los Angeles, 90034
On view through October 21, 2023
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[et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text”]We are supposed to wish upon them when we see them fall. But however sentimentalized shooting stars may be, they are merely rocky debris skimming the atmosphere — all their mythology is manufactured by those of us watching in awe from our Earthly confines. In the five new paintings of Theodora Allen on view in Syzygy, utopian and metaphysical ideals meet celestial bodies and ethereal mindscapes in Allen’s timeless, contemporary visual lexicon.
In the centerpiece of the exhibition, the triptych Syzygy (Narcissus) (2021), two shooting stars encircle a flaming central star. Aligned diagonally across the panels, this titular work has achieved syzygy, an astronomical phenomenon where celestial bodies configure in a line. It’s also bursting with mythology and Allen offers a grounding touch by portraying scenes from different interpretations of the myth of Narcissus in the center of each star so that they look like diamond portals. Through Allen’s rigorous painting process, the triptych assumes a translucent, ghostly quality, as though the shooting stars are supernatural overseers of human stories and affairs.
Just as Narcissus became enamored with his own reflection, the rest of the exhibition is rife with mirror images and repeated symbols. Falling Star (Memento Mori) (2021) is a similar image to the triptych but unlike its counterparts, it shoots straight down rather than toward the orbit of another star, serving as a standalone reminder of mortality. Employing mirrored color palettes, composition styles and motifs throughout the series, Allen engages with themes of regeneration and cyclicality, the creation and destruction of the natural world.
In the trio of smaller scale geometric paintings — The Amulet, Origin and Struck (all 2021) — infinity symbols interlock, the tails of comets link to form shields and an arrow pierces a heart into symmetric halves. Though the symbols are imbued with familiarity and history, the originality with which Allen wields them transports viewers into her otherworldly realm full of imagined landscapes, images and ideas. In Allen’s hands, everyday emblems become meditative and elusive, positing existential questions about whether we are looking inward and outward from ourselves.
The reality of shooting stars may not be as romantic as their lore and astronomy may have disproven their magic, but Theodora Allen beautifully reminds us of how they tether us to our instinctive needs for reflection — of the past, of the future, of ourselves and others.
Blum & Poe
2727 S. La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034 Thru Feb. 26th, 2022
As I wrote to preface ARTILLERY’s 2021 “Top Ten” compilation, there could have easily been a parallel list of 10 or more shows and exhibitions approaching the level of the ten I selected. At one time, the magazine designated a few “honorable mentions,” usually, as I recall, footnoted in fine print. (There are only so many pages, after all; space limitations are a real thing.) This, too, was originally going to be appended to the “Top Ten” list; but after some discussion with my editor, it became clear this might not be quite enough—especially considering a number of important out-of-town shows that (especially in view of a ‘travel hesitancy’ no doubt corresponding to some extent with the far more pernicious ‘vaccine hesitancy’) demand to be brought to California.
Lynn Hershman Leeson, “Seduction” (1985)
Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted curated by Margot Norton
New Museum – New York
June 30, – October 3, 2021
In some respects this slightly constricted retrospective brought Hershman Leeson’s work full circle—having presented Hershman’s Electronic Diaries as encoded into a strip of synthetic DNA, and personalized antibodies created in conjunction with the pharmaceutical company, Novartis. But I sometimes wonder if there is any way to do justice to the full scope of Hershman Leeson’s work without institutional commitment on the scale of an entire museum (possibly more than one institution). This is a plea to L.A.’s MOCA to commit the resources necessary to bring an expanded version of this show (see, the ZKM/Center for Art and Media’s Civic Radar) to the museum(s). If they need help, they might look up Amelia Jones (who led a terrific conversation with the artist by Zoom in conjunction with the exhibition) who may have an idea or two to move this forward—see that original Top Ten again.
Lynn Hershman Leeson, Electronic Diaries (1984-2019)Alice Pelton, The Voice (1930)
Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group
Group exhibition curated by Michael Duncan
(Emil Bisttram, Ed Garman, Robert Gribbroek, Raymond Jonson, Lawrence Harris, William Lumpkins, Agnes Pelton, Florence Miller Pierce, Horace Pierce, Dane Rudhyar, Stuart Walker)
Albuquerque Museum – Albuquerque, New Mexico
June 26, – September 26, 2021
Fortunately, I don’t have to beg anyone to bring this show to L.A.—it lands at LACMA at the end of 2022 (to run well into 2023). The operative word here is transcendental—in both material and spiritual senses. The work here ranges loosely from the surreal and symbolist to biomorphic and geometric abstraction to non-objective painting, with some emphasis on a concept of light and space that seems borne out of the American Southwest—yet in its most outstanding examples distilled to a purity and intensity that seems illuminated to an astral dimension. Duncan’s brilliant show promises to make the L.A.’s next winter solstice the most radiant day of the year.
Clarence Holbrook Carter, “Following” (1973)
Clarence Holbrook Carter – American Surrealist
Various Small Fires – Los Angeles
January 23, – February 27, 2021
Readers will notice that there is something of a blur amongst several of these exhibitions (really almost all of them—but with particular emphasis to a radically transmuted or transformed and ultimately transcendent vision of physical and cosmic dimensions, of consciousness itself. Carter’s work seems to ‘land’ somewhere between Pelton and De Chirico—and birth and death—but with an intensity that could summon Lovecraft’s Cthulhu out of the cosmic void.
Make-Shift Future
Group show curated by Elliott Hundley
(Kevin Beasley, Elaine Cameron-Weir, rafa esparza, Max Hooper Schneider, Eric N. Mack, Alicia Piller, Eric-Paul Riege, Kandis Williams)
Regen Projects
March 27, – May 22, 2021
A truly spectacular show of masterpiece assemblage work by eight artists at the top of their game. ‘Every picture tells a story’ and each of these works deliver a world—“disquieting and uncanny situations” in Hundley’s words—looking to “massage loose the underpinnings of our attachments to contemporary mythologies … and reveal … so many blind spots.” They do—and ‘I can see clearly now….’
Ohan Breiding, installation view of ceramics and drawings (2020), from “Playing Submarine,” Ochi Projects
Ohan [formerly Johanna] Breiding: Playing Submarine
Ochi Projects
February 6, – March 20, 2021
Breiding’s work defies categorization both technically and conceptually—personal on an almost tactile level yet seemingly borne out of a collective unconscious, but all leading to a kind of personal confrontation with both self and community. They are an artist to watch.
Tom Allen, “The Song” (2021)
Tom Allen: The Song
Chris Sharp Gallery
October 30, – December 4, 2021
A spare show of five flower ‘portraits’—but they more than made good on the promise conveyed by the show’s title. The sheer chromatic vibrancy alone shook the gallery floor to ceiling in a range that went from schoolboy-treble to the Queen’s Throat. But beyond the chromatic effulgence, Allen cultivates and seems to pry something further from his captive specimens—a mystery or romance innate to the thing itself—taking the viewer (and conceivably the artist himself) by surprise.
Hans Holbein the Younger, “Lady with Squirrel and Starling” (portrait Anne Lovell?), oil on panel (ca.1526-28)
Holbein: Capturing Character in the Renaissance
curated by Anne T. Woollett, Austėja Mackelaitė, and John T. McQuillen
Getty Center
October 19, 2021 – January 9, 2022
Beyond the ‘flattening’ of history that seems an inevitable side effect of accelerating technological change, seismic social and political disruption, and environmental degradation, I was not surprised that this breathtaking exhibition drew so many contemporary artists here. Portraiture stops history short, faceting and dissecting character across culture and the electrically reactive skeins continuously woven between subject and artist. A ‘world-wide web’ indeed—and not so flat after all.
Alice Neel, “The Family” (John Gruen, Jane Wilson & Julia), oil on canvas (1970)
Alice Neel: People Come First
curated by Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
March 22, – August 1, 2021
More portraiture, and even more irony—absurd to ask if the world needs it or why; we’re all (clearly) goingthere, and here’s why. People may or may not “come first.” (I disagree with Neel’s fundamental motivating principle.) But Neel connects with what connects us—whether (com)posed or seemingly caught between movements or a characteristic gesture, we see and hear the dialogue—questions, more than assertions, of ‘self’. It’s not who we are; it’s how we are. The painting provides us with an open-ended ‘why?’—and so there we are. (The show will travel to California this year, but not Los Angeles.)
Sonia Gomes: When the Sun Rises In Blue
Blum & Poe
November 6, – December 18, 2021
As noted above, it’s hard to say whether ‘people come first’—but their stories can be compelling; and encountering this Brazilian artist’s work in an American exhibition space for the first time, it was astonishing to see and feel a powerful narrative sense wedded to a formal command of material and space that made me think of John Outterbridge’s assemblage work (also Senga Nengudi) as if distilled through the formal syntax of Anthony Caro. The materials—textiles and fabric remnants, driftwood, heirloom fragments—are collected close to home (she is based in São Paulo), but her meticulous workmanship and brilliantly composed and articulated form have a cumulative power that seems capable of transporting us to another dimension.
No—you didn’t miscount. There are only nine more here. But we’re already well into 2022—and did you really need any more?
Belief – whether you call it religion, spirituality, or anything else – is as vital to our lives as shelter or sustenance. Myth-making is how lessons are passed down, how mysteries are explored, and how home is remembered. These functions of belief are all found in the works of Anna Weyant, Alexander Tovborg, and Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, whose works are on view in three separate shows now at Blum & Poe.
Admittedly, when I was planning this review, I was only going to write about Anna Weyant’s show “Loose Screw,” because it’s just simply that good. In terms of technical ability, Weyant’s works rival the Dutch Golden Age masters which inspire her work, and in terms of narrative, she surpasses them. Through her beautifully rendered oil portraits and still-lifes, Weyant constructs fantastical vignettes engaging with absurd and often unsettling subjects. These scenes are modern fairytales, which grapple with lessons of loneliness and pain – a woman falling down stairs, another laughing alone with her hand wrapped in bandages, and a horrid dinner of raw eggs, piranha, and impaled bread.
But while I could write a full review on Anna Weyant alone, it would be to the great disservice of the spectacular paintings and sculptures of Alexander Tovborg in his show, “Sacrificial Love.” Tovborg weaves a complex web of mythology in his show, using a dazzling array of gemlike colors to create muses, goddesses, and idols of every variety. The paintings are of an imposing size, and the figures within them emerge from their settings as if etched into rock faces. Female figures clutch instruments and are wreathed in foliage, while a few hold young girls in reimagined depictions of Virgin and Child. Tovborg invites us to reckon with our connection with history and mythology, and how the way we view the world has been informed by the stories of our past.
But while Tovborg and Weyant explore the beliefs of societies both real and imagined, Ogawa’s collection of works is far more personal. Within the brightly colored, pictorially flat paintings, Ogawa amasses figures and stories which represent her own interpretation of home and history. She wields her mixed Japanese and Brazilian heritages like twin torches, equally illuminating the canvases. The figures – mostly Black children, with almond eyes and simple clothes – participate in mysterious rituals or performances, often staring out at the viewer as though the curiosity that they inspire is mutual.
Blum & Poe 2727 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90034 Thru May 1st, 2021
We have abandonment issues lately/forever – desolate, disconsolate and a bit fragile. In Henry Taylor’s painting, that fragility coexists with an incongruous durability – a hard thing that cracks against identity or classification or simply swallows it up. Taylor’s paintings for this show are hung above complementary settings: a field of quasi-adobe dust and dirt, broken only by a solitary, hacked-up tree, a water pump, and a painted-over wall of cinder block partially sheltering a tarp-covered tent and evidence of life fallen apart; and a blue vinyl ‘swimming pool’ centered within a green grass border (portraits of subjects at leisure). Backdrop, setting, landscape tend to rush (or fall) forward in Henry Taylor’s paintings. He’s described his style of portraiture as ‘landscape; and that holds true in this show of (mostly) painting and portraiture. It’s as if palette-knife thick swaths of pigment were pressed flat beneath glass or abraded or otherwise thinned into the sheerest strokes (e.g., the gesture of a leg or its covering) or dispersed into background or foreground. The portrait is a kind of identity tent for Taylor, the setting or landscape completes the subject or pulls it apart – or sometimes both at once.
Blum & Poe 2727 S. La Cienega Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90034 Show runs thru November 5, 2016
I have a confession. At some point between Graduation and 2010 or 2011 (whenever he last recorded with Katy Perry), I lost track of Kanye West. Yes, of course I was peripherally aware of what he might be doing, whether in terms of his own planned record releases or his featured appearances and collaborations with other bands and solo artists. Clearly he was still all over the place with his hands in a thousand productions. But to the extent I listened to any number of these songs or productions, it was no more than in passing (over the radio, a YouTube clip, in the car, etc.) and, even to the extent that some of these collaborations featured some well-known signature vocalists and songwriters (e.g., Rihanna, Paul McCartney, Jay Z, Beyoncé), most of them scarcely registered. But then, I haven’t been a huge fan of McCartney (in recent years) or Beyoncé (recently). In recent years, Kanye has dipped his fingers in a number of pies, including fashion and – we might have seen this coming – art.
In an age of collaboration when every artist (in every medium and in every domain) seems to be everyone’s guest star/artist/designer, this may have been inevitable. And certainly the music and other media industries have always been eager to capitalize on the merchandising potential of any emerging star or hitmaker through the licensing of any and every aspect of their personality and style signatures. Kanye had made his interest in the fashion world known for some time, though I must admit I never saw the roll-out of a full-blown ready-to-wear line coming. To give him credit, his investment of time and resources in the fashion domain has been serious. His Yeezy line, however, has not been a success, notwithstanding a promotional investment that must be staggering (his last couple of Fashion Week collection launches packed Madison Square Garden); and frankly –with or without the mentorship/collaboration (‘is that all there is?’) of Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing, I really don’t see how he can sustain it.
But of course it’s more than just Adidas or Balmain or Sony/BMG these days. West has moved in recent years beyond music, design and, more broadly, ‘content,’ to shaping and controlling the production and distribution of that content – through the streaming service, Tidal, teaming up with some of his principal hip-hop collaborators; and DONDA (which so far seems to occupy a space somewhere between a think-tank and something like Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop). I’m guessing, too, that he’s had some advice from a mass-licensing matriarch who really knows how to make a franchise fly: Kris Jenner. West was arguably already an Empire-level force in the music world; but with his marriage into the Jenner-Kardashian hydra-clan, you have to wonder if West’s new focus is simply mergers and acquisitions.
In the meantime, two parallel cultural forces have continued to transform the culture at large: specifically, an acceleration and democratization of celebrity culture, which really only began to accumulate momentum as a mass media/mass cultural phenomenon from the late 1960s; and secondly, hip-hop culture itself, which now permeates mainstream culture from Broadway to blogs (including this one), arguably changing its texture and fabric. And why would we expect anything else? If hip-hop (or its derivatives) forms some part of the soundtrack to our daily lives – not simply setting the mood or tone, but a subtext, even an agenda – we should expect it to bleed into other segments of the culture from media and consumer product advertising to politics to, well, art.
But there’s a feed-back mechanism at work here, too. The typical West production (and many others), a reconstituted narrative of fragmentary incident, physical and psychological backdrop, and embroidered cultural reference, vacuums up everything into its free-form epic stream. Yet the dramatic payoff is slender if it exists at all. Its sensationalized disclosures seem more pathetic than prurient. (The phrase ‘too much information’ might be applied as a blanket term to cover the entire subject of Kim Kardashian, not just her cosmetic procedures.) We’d already had a taste of this with Yeezus and that ridiculous video for “Bound 2.” The video (by Nick Knight, if you can believe it), special effects and all, manages to be so overblown and cliché-riddled it seems intentionally made to be parodied – which it promptly was – by James Franco and Seth Rogen and later on NBC’s Saturday Night Live.
There was also a parody (on a slightly different tangent) by Trey Parker and Matt Stone for South Park – which I could have also predicted. Listening to Kanye West in recent years, the character who first came to mind consistently was always Cartman. (Okay I am a fan of the series – but it’s not as if I think of South Park listening to, say, Kendrick Lamar or Rihanna or Beyoncé, or even Jay Z.)
“Have you ever asked your bitch for other bitches?” he asks in that song. Are you kidding? West would ask Mick Jagger for Keith Richards (or perhaps more recently, Dolce for Gabbana). “Jesus wept.” At least. “Mulholland Drive, need to put up some got damn barricades/I be paranoid every time” (this from “No More Parties In L.A.”). And in the same song – “I feel like Pablo when I’m workin’ on my shoes/I feel like Pablo when I see me on the news/I feel like Pablo when I’m workin’ on my house….” – and, well, we know where this is going. (This is from his most recent album, Life of Pablo.) The landscape of Kanye West’s songs has become a red carpet trampled to Marilyn Minter-esque dust – equal parts paranoia, self-aggrandizement and luxury-branding.
We should have seen it coming – with Pablo; still more recently with Vanessa Beecroft staging his Madison Square Garden Yeezy (Adidas) launches. And then there was Jay Z’s 2013 Pace Gallery encounter with Marina Abramović (for “Picasso Baby”). So last Friday night, at a dinner party in Hollywood, the talk was peppered with buzz floating among guests and from their cell phones about the exclusive, invitation-only opening for a brief week-end glimpse at Kanye’s new art installation at Blum & Poe. Something on this order had been foreordained when the video for “Famous” had been released. West was fairly open about his inspirations (Matthew Barney and his celebrity cameos; Vincent Desiderio’s painting, Sleep). Kanye – about to launch his Saint Pablo tour – surveyed the scene by Skype hook-up; but Kim Kardashian – in an ostensibly Kanye-designed body-skimming fishnet caftan that looked more sad than sexy – was there; along with Kendall Jenner (ultra-casual but fabulous as always), a smattering of celebrity and other guests (including some mutual pals). One of our pals was tweeting and Facebook-ing from the event, which made for still more hilarity (the responsive comments were alternately bored and pitying). I inserted my own comment that I hoped she had asked Tim or Jeff how much the gallery was paid to host the exhibition. (My guess was $1 million.)
Tim Blum had already been quoted (by the Daily Mail) that he saw the work as a perfectly legitimate sculptural installation that might be sold much as any work of art by the gallery. Presumably a buyer could be found – that’s not a big problem in the big wide wild global art world. But there’s a certain risk – and not just to the gallery’s reputation. Now come conflicting reports: that the sculpture is priced to sell at $4 million; and (20 hours ago) that Tim Blum was misquoted and that, although the piece may be touring (also not certain), it is now in storage with no firm price set. In the meantime, this is a lot of expense – and I have to bet the gallery was paid something for it. (Note: I have not contacted Tim Blum, Jeff Poe or any gallery director or representative for comment on either of these stories or regarding the exhibition itself.)
I suppose that B&P might have been in competition with other galleries for such a launch – Pace, Gagosian; possibly Regen Projects. But the reaction among many of us last Friday was more along the lines of ‘Really?’ Then, too, a more exasperated, ‘what next?’ At what point, do we start to ask if the emperor no longer has his clothes? Certainly they’re looking a bit threadbare. (Kim Kardashian’s sad shmatte seemed the best illustration of this.) And they’re definitelynot chic. At one time or another, it seemed as if Kanye West might want to be the next Quincy Jones. For all of his influence and musical collaborations, he has a long way to go to make anything like that happen; and at this point, I just don’t see it.
At what point do we see him in bed, not with Kim or Caitlyn, but merely that avatar of cultural narcissism himself, Donald Trump? And why should we want to? Do we really care that he’s down $50 million and feels compelled to turn to the public (or art galleries) on top of the Jenner-Kardashian enterprise for investment? Someone remarked recently that for Kanye, it was not a matter of #BlackLivesMatter (which I have to assume he also endorses), but #CelebrityLivesMatter. But to paraphrase a different kind of celebrity, ‘there is no there, there.’ There’s just no weight or meaning to it. The “rich nigga problems” of Kanye’s jewellery, his Maybach, his “bitches,” are neither a cultural nor an economic priority – nor any priority at all. Kanye has moved well beyond monetizing his creative output to monetizing celebrity – not exactly a new phenomenon, but in recent years, an almost cancerous one. But the worst part is that there is no art in it. It’s hackneyed and repetitive and impoverished.
For all the buzz at the dinner last Friday night, there was no ‘FOMO’ or ‘fear of missing out.’ It was more as if we were witnessing (from a comfortable distance) the ultimate manifestation of Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle.’ I was reminded of a tweet one “Eve” posted after the last Yeezy roll-out – “The Kardashians, the Jenners and the Wests have individually and collectively JUMPED THE SHARK. #HideousAtrociousHorribleAwfulPeople.” And, uh, no Kanye, you didn’t make Taylor Swift famous. Nor for that matter, Beyoncé, Alicia Keys, Kendrick Lamar, et al. For a few hours last Friday, it was as if Kanye had turned the Blum & Poe gallery into a flaming Trump Tower of megalomania; and most of us would have wished it a continent and an ocean or two away. “No more parties in L.A., baby”? If only – for the meantime, “Buckle up, buckaroos!”
The L.A. art industry never rests (as if awol ever needed proof of that!); but tradition dies hard, and art galleries and museums break out the new season alongside other arts and cultural venues. Matthew Barney had already screened his not-so-new (2014 – and six hours long!) film, River of Fundament, right alongside his new MOCA show, Matthew Barney: RIVER OF FUNDAMENT at the Geffen Contemporary, while a number of art and fashion (or art-fashion collaborations) had also debuted new lines or work. (These included Carla Fernández’s exhibition of fashion, furnishing and textiles, The Future Is Handmade, which will be on view at Red Desert – 850 S. Broadway, 6th floor, downtown Los Angeles – through September 28th. More to come on this….) Fashion Week was already underway in New York. Here in L.A., the week-end (I was about to say, ‘the water’) really broke Friday night with Matthew Barney’s Water Castings opening at Regen Projects and Blum & Poe’s double show of painting by Kazumi Nakamura and a brilliant trio of Kyoto ceramic sculptors (Kazunori Humana, Yuji Ueda, and Otani Workshop) curated by Takashi Murakami (who was present for the opening); as well as a preview for a brilliant show of abstract (or, as it was termed here, ‘post-abstract’) painting and sculpture out of Houston, Texas, at Wilding Cran Gallery.
Caught winding my way about Culver City Friday night, I never quite made it back downtown for the preview, but had an opportunity to view the show late Saturday evening – and it was well worth the wait. Saturday’s openings were awash in outstanding painting, from Sarah Awad’s excellent show at Diane Rosenstein, to Miriam Wosk (though you couldn’t really call this show – which, ranging between a tapestry and a lenticular piece, exploited just about every medium – painting) at LAM, to Camillo Restrepo at Steve Turner, to Chris Barnard at Luis de Jesus, to Dan Bayles’s virtuoso theme-and-variations on Constantino Brumidi’s U.S. Capitol rotunda fresco, The Apotheosis of Washington at François Ghebaly. Even so, Christian Eckart’s elegantly curated exhibition of ten artists, all hailing from the Houston area more than held its own. I’m still puzzling over the title – “… a pointy toe boot up the backside” – but I could be excused for taking the ‘backside’ to be L.A.’s own. Here in what, between artist studios and an explosion of galleries large and small, is rapidly becoming an epicenter of L.A.’s burgeoning art-industrial complex, we had a glimpse of a layered dialectic between eye and extensions, forms wrought by the mind’s eye, media and materials, and sheer light and space far from the madding crowd.
I don’t think I would have called these ten artists – who included David Aylsworth, Sharon Engelstein, Tad Griffin, Geoff Hippenstiel, Paul Kremer, Joe Mancuso, Marcelyn McNeil, Aaron Parazette, Susie Rosmarin and Brooke Stroud – post-abstractionists. What they seemed to have in common as a group was a post-modern, freshly contextualized approach to late 20th century abstract tropes: the frame/edge, (color) field, geometric/fluid-/hard-edge, gesture, the spatial, interior-exterior, and deconstructive, the potential/actual opportunity for the surreal, the optical effect. (But you get the idea: they really covered a sweeping range of abstraction with a freshness and vigor rarely seen anywhere.)
Griffin’s quasi-suprematist takes on the grid were stand-outs that spoke to a gathering darkness just over the digital/cybertronic horizon. Marcelyn McNeil, David Aylsworth, Aaron Parazette and Paul Kremer embraced the power of shape, color and fluid form (literally in one instance by Parazette) to engage the latent surreal moment or gesture with grace and wit. Susie Rosmarin’s rigorous essays in line, color, pattern and process dazzled with their vibratile opticals. Mancuso and Aylsworth connected and compressed the residue of memory into all-over formal abstraction. The installation beautifully supported Eckart’s dialectic of abstractions amid the larger dialectical cacophony we contend with at almost any given moment in the fine art production – ooops!—I meant ‘entertainment!’ – capital of the world.
Finally a shout-out to François Ghebaly himself, who, in addition to hosting a pretty terrific pairing of artists (I didn’t really mention Candice Lin’s contribution, You are a spacious fluid sac; but how can I not love the notion of “Minimizing Males”?—I mean, come fucking on!) – managed to rescue two of the most adorable husky-mix dogs I’ve seen in some time, who were left abandoned in the alley feeding onto the Night Gallery perimeter and had been parked (with water and treats) at the entrance during the evening’s openings. François – you are one mensch I will never minimize. My return visit will include dog treats and I look forward to it.
Griffin’s quasi-suprematist takes on the grid were stand-outs that spoke to a gathering darkness just over the digital/cybertronic horizon. Marcelyn McNeil, David Aylsworth, Aaron Parazette and Paul Kremer embraced the power of shape, color and fluid form (literally in one instance by Parazette) to engage the latent surreal moment or gesture with grace and wit. Susie Rosmarin’s rigorous essays in line, color, pattern and process dazzled with their vibratile opticals. Mancuso and Aylsworth connected and compressed the residue of memory into all-over formal abstraction. The installation beautifully supported Eckart’s dialectic of abstractions amid the larger dialectical cacophony we contend with at almost any given moment in the fine art production – ooops!—I meant ‘entertainment!’ – capital of the world. 
Sonia Gomes: When the Sun Rises In Blue
