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Tag: Jennifer Steinkamp
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Refuge from the Inferno: L.A.’s Best Summer Group Shows
‘What is it with dudes and trees?’ I wonder for a second as I’m about to put this up on-line—thinking more about Shakespeare’s pastoral romantic comedy than the cool oasis of a summer group show René-Julien Praz has curated at Praz-Delavallade’s L.A. premises. (Though I suppose I could ask Paul McCarthy, who produced a somewhat notorious rendition along these lines for Paul Schimmel’s landmark Helter Skelter exhibition for MOCA in 1992.) But then I’m a bit of a tree-hugger myself, though it would never occur to me to abuse them with romantic sentiments of any kind. (Nor political for that matter.)
Shakespeare’s As You Like It creaks a bit (for the Bard) a few decades after the first encounter; but there’s no getting around its pastoral charm. I was about to say ‘melancholy charms’, which makes no sense—except actually it does a bit. (Consider Jaques: Shakespeare wrote his own songs for the show; but consider the possibilities of a 20th century update. You don’t suppose Noel Coward wrote “World Weary” for him, do you?) I mean how could I not like something so deeply trans? That had to come across on some subconscious level. Of course the Duke has to exile Rosalind. The less-than-perfectly court-adapted Orlando is scarcely aware of the extent to which he has overthrown the ‘natural order’. Rosalind consciously defies it.
Klea McKenna, “Palms #2,” 2017 Human relations with trees are a bit strained lately. Having thinned out their ‘herd’ with our demands for paper, building materials and their many attractive by-products, we’ve failed to reciprocate by thinning out our own predatory hordes and checking our continuous stream of toxic emissions into the environment we share, thereby threatening our mutual survival. Who can say how Shakespeare would have updated his settings? He would scarcely recognize his drought-stricken Albion this summer. Amazingly, Arden (the Ardennes?) might still bear some resemblance to its ancient majesty, notwithstanding Belgian and French development and the trail of destruction the Germans left between Belgium and France 75 or so years ago. But Jaques’ line would probably be something along the lines of ‘I told you so.’
Summer is a time for group shows everywhere, and not just in L.A.; but they are particularly rich this summer in L.A. and offer brief escape—not necessarily to Arden or Arcadia (though come to think of it, Los Angeles County has its own Arboretum in the County’s own ‘Arcadia’), but nevertheless to an air-conditioned space, which this particular summer might actually be life-saving.
Sometime this year, Tarrah von Lintel realized that her gallery was entering its 25th year—half a world away from its origin point (Munich), but having nurtured rich associations with many artists along its trajectory through New York to Los Angeles. Parallel to her collectors, von Lintel’s relationships with the artists and their works have amounted to an on-going dialogue with their processes, ideas and obsessions—and a larger dialogue with the art and culture for which the work is a focal point. These include many of the artists for whom von Lintel has assumed representation here in L.A., including Farrah Karapetian, Canan Tolon, Christopher Russell, Carolyn Marks Blackwood, Christiane Feser, and Floris Neusüss; but also artists who von Lintel has long represented, including Joseph Stashkevitch, Antonio Murado, and Roland Fischer. A few of these have yet to mount solo shows with the gallery in Los Angeles, including Tokyo-based Izima Kaoru, who followed a long career in fashion photography with several iterations of Landscapes With A Corpse (a number of which bear uncanny parallels to Melanie Pullen’s High Fashion Crime Scenes), and more recently a high-concept follow-the-sun series of acutely refracted photographs of the sun abstracted to a line or curve.
A conceptual blur parallel to the willful confusion and commingling of media (especially photography and painting – or work that resembles one or the other) is a through-line that runs through much of this work, including that of artists no longer represented by von Lintel. In addition to a first in-person encounter with Kaoru’s abstracted Tokyo winter solstice, it was interesting to revisit ‘zero-degree’ work by both Sarah Charlesworth (a faintly limned Book diffused in a pool of white light from 1999) and the aggressively etched chromatic striations of Marco Breuer (from 2003 – Pan (C-245))—a kind of drawing-by-extraction (that makes for an interesting transition to the work of, say, Edward Burtynsky, whose principal subject is the scarrified earth that is one of the most visible and dramatic legacies of the anthropocene). The contrasts in mood and medium are both refreshing and startling. Compare the near-stridency of the Breuer with Klea McKenna’s more recent gentle rubbing on gelatin silver paper in Palms #2 (2017).
Von Lintel was en route to France by the time I visited the show, but she may be back in L.A. before the show closes (August 18th); and she’s serious about engaging the gallery’s audience in an on-going dialogue about the work and the artists. With this notion of a gracious engagement with the gallery’s visitors in mind, the rear gallery has been staged as a kind of salon—replete with classic 20th century furniture and accessories—designed by Carole Decombe; and I can’t imagine a more delightful refuge on the kinds of blistering days we’ve been having in Los Angeles. Von Lintel may continue her ‘salon’ into the fall—but this is a show worth seeing regardless.
Patrick Nickell, “Ideals of strength and beauty,” 2016 As is pretty clear from some of the (mostly photographic) work just referenced, there is considerable continuity between medium and concept in the execution of any work of art. However idea-driven the work may be, no small amount of thought and effort are invested in its visualization and execution. In the contemporary post-conceptual landscape, artists increasingly feel free to articulate and enlarge upon ideas and concepts through engagement with the materials themselves and processes that are continuously improvised, modulated, and reinvented. There was never anything remotely oxymoronic about Carl Berg’s Conceptual Craft exhibition at Denk Gallery last year; and that remains true in this year’s far more diverse and expansive iteration. You could even find parallels to the artists’ treatment of materials between some of the work in the Von Lintel show and this show. Consider the drama of the iridescent chromatics in Tim Ebner’s seemingly folded, pleated and corrugated squares of powder-coated forged steel; or George Stoll’s ethereal parabolas and catenary curves of colored disks and glass beads. Stoll’s work often plays ironically upon notions of celebration and festivity—a zero-degree abstraction of human vanity, so to speak. (Or the inverted vanitas, where the commonplace and utilitarian is invested with a transitory illumination.) The ephemeral is given a notional permanence or duration, the intangible given material mass.
Patrick Nickell’s glass sculptures go directly to that domain of the ideal and/or idealized—the paradox of giving concrete form to, as one of the work’s titles express it, “something that can’t be found.” Or what if it can be found—albeit under an electron microscope. Or a loom? Or beneath a pattern-cutter’s paper or muslin? Or rendered, as Rachel Lachowicz has done here with C Lycra Knit (2018), in a kind of cyan-blue plexiglas—though conceivably I’m reading too much into Lachowicz’s choice of color. (Lachowicz has used monochromatic ‘signatures’ before, however—e.g., most notably in her 2017 tour de force crimson installation, Lay Back and Enjoy It.)
This is a very refined sort of craft—something that can conceivably be held in the hand as well as the mind’s eye—yet something that, as Lachowicz’s work indicates, can be infinitely extended in any conceivable direction under a variety of pre-set conditions. There are few if any limits (certainly not in our post-conceptual domain); and the furthest extremes of this range can be pretty expansive indeed. Consider Gjoj de Marco’s Replica of A Confessional Central Section – Cinema Prop F1-1808 A (2018), looking pretty much like what it must have once been in goddess only knows what movie or movies. These sorts of properties get reused and recycled quite a bit. (I mean that’s why studios have art departments and property masters.)
But here’s the thing: what might be held in the hand (or two), its shape, texture, physical dimension and tactilely registered detail, is capable of its own free-form and unpredictable extension into other worlds or dimensions that emerge exclusively from the artist’s imagination—or that imagination in its random encounter with all phenomena and signifiers in its orbit. Kristen Morgin turns a random audiotape cassette—picked up at a garage sale from the looks of it, now stained and battered (though apparently with most if not all of the song titles spelled out—not an insignificant detail here)—into a trapdoor into the universe. The source object is an old country music hit, but Morgin’s There Goes My Everything (2018) transforms it into a cosmic explosion. Before you spiral off into the Milky Way, there’s more. If one object throws you down an astral chute, consider a juxtaposition of two, say Death Wish and Pierre Who Didn’t Care (referencing both the Brian Garfield thriller-turned Charles Bronson movie and the Sendak classic), or a Pretty Mick Jagger and Free Kittens (the cover of the Performance soundtrack with its stylized portrait of Jagger, with a random yard sale sign).
A number of works invoke this sense of infinite expansion more specifically (e.g., Ross Rudel’s subtle chromatic intervention on a zig-zag pleated ‘infinite column’, Blue Stripe (2016); or Tom LaDuke’s full-fathom talismanic Oceans (2015) with its delicately filigreed pewter head planted atop a water-washed stone). It was equally bracing to see work that unpacked the ‘concept’ of craft (or technique) itself (e.g., Sean Duffy’s Sfumato, 2018).Denk is one of the most beautiful spaces downtown to view art, and there is nothing in this show that does not richly plumb the pleasures of both concept and craft.
My favorite among these shows, though, might be the aforementioned Praz-Delavallade show (but then, as I said, I’m quite mad about trees). I’m also a lover of great painting—and there’s a lot of it here, alongside painterly work in other media, including video (e.g., Jim Shaw). René-Julien Praz hasn’t made the gallery over into an Arden (or I suppose Ardennes would be equally apt for this particular gallery’s directors), although he sets the mood as we’re ushered towards the ‘birch grove’ wallpapered rear of the gallery, with Jennifer Steinkamp’s gently undulating poplars whispering alongside from their darkness in the midst of this otherwise immaculately white space. But that’s a clue, too. There are dark, or certainly shadowed moments in the midst of this sunlit space. Praz’s ‘Ardennes’ is a series of moments that take our measure of nature, our perception of, and variously willful and passive projections upon it, our fraught co-existence with it, and our yearning to reclaim or recapture its variously fearsome and fragile beauty.
Further into the gallery, we continue to sort out the terms of our approach – our ‘to see and not see’ (to paraphrase Oliver Sacks) ‘forest-for-the-trees’ relationship to reality—as for example in Catherine Opie’s soft focus, barely limned grove of trees (mounted here against the birch-papered wall), Untitled #2 (2012), which I always associate with dark winter evenings. (Some works in this series were, I believe, photographed in such conditions, but not all; and not this one.) Then Kerry Tribe’s installation with video (Forest for the Trees, 2015) spells out the dilemma explicitly. That tentative, conditional approach contrasts starkly with the “radical” and ambiguous space Francesca Gabbiani shows us in a palette pitched some distance from nature. Amber and terra cotta are found in nature, but Gabbiani effectively denatures them against a backdrop of black and deep purple with a neon glow. A ragged frond of fern and few tufts of grass are the last earth-bound remnants of this “destruction.” Then there are the remnants of the human-built environment here – joists or louvers, lumber planks or trim that give evidence of a structure on this site. It’s as if that amber volume rising to the upper edge of the canvas were a kind residual aura of what was once “radical.”
There are no apparent roots to return to here. Nature’s tenuous hold seems to melt away – like those ‘purple mountains majesties’ of what was once a beautiful continent (and planet). On the wall opposite, James Welling exploits a similar palette in a kind of deliberate reversal—foliage rendered on Kodak Metallic Endura paper (this is all we’re told) through what I’m assuming are Photoshop manipulations of what looks like a photo-negative image, or possibly two layered images (007, 2017). There’s also a vague hint of flame here, reminding us of the flames consuming so much foliage around us. Welling foregrounds purple leaves or blossoms against a bright yellow background in a companion image (001). It’s all a bit too bright, which can only bring on dark thoughts; and it’s as if Kim McCarty is offering our eyes an oasis of calm in her two spare watercolors—her signature minimalist brush trace here rendered almost ghostly, what might be a trace of lavender pressed from the flower (of a marijuana plant) dissolving into the white paper as if into the light itself.
Disappearance is a subsidiary theme here. (Not sure if that has anything to do with Shakespeare—exile was more or less the thing there.) Certainly we’re not likely to see ‘sea-changes’, much less ‘coral’, which we’ve mostly killed off (but then that’s a different play). Cole Sternberg addresses this erasure more or less directly (a wooded sky being erased, 2017) with its hillside treeline sinking beneath a mottled pink sky. But there is that moment we cling to for its melancholy beauty (like Jaques?)—Matthew Brandt distilling that melting-away to the sublime in silver on silver gelatin (AgXBD752A, 2018) in a moment that seems to simultaneously pull us 200 years back even as we see our likely terminus 200 (okay 20) years forward.
The sublime will bury us (as Charles Gaines documents chillingly in Absent Figures: Rainier, Version 2, Marine Transport Files, 2000); but we leave our trace, variously brutal and poetic. There are many instances here, from Sternberg, to Adrien Missika’s Botanical Frottages, to Kirsten Everberg and Matthew Chambers, whose gorgeous foliage studies evoke both joy and an autumnal melancholy (which may seem pretty joyful in the dog days of summer).
No forest offers refuge here; but as Pierre Ardouvin might put it, [t]he night is not over (2018)—which might be the universal GPS. (Two molded white resin feet peek from beneath a velvet curtain printed with a woodland scene, replete with pond and flowering trees.) We’ll all be hiding there soon enough.
The souvenirs we take from a show like this are as dark as they are sunlit—the monsters as abundant as the golden moments. Whitney Bedford’s gorgeous painting, The Time Inbetween (2015), summed up a then-now-forever moment, poised between that ‘fear of hope’ and ‘knowledge of fear.’ We’re still here for the beauty—and there’s quite a lot to be had in this beautiful show.
Talk to Me runs through August 11th at Von Lintel Gallery, 2683 La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles 90034. Conceptual Craft II runs through August 18th at Denk Gallery, 749 E. Temple St., Los Angeles 90012. As You Like It or C’est Comme Vous Voulez runs through August 18th at Praz-Delavallade, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles 90048.
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Sometime between the morning of November 9th and the current holiday season, there was an interruption in the more or less weekly postings in this space. It’s not like it’s never happened before. I do drop out of sight now and again; and there are those intervals when I’m between destinations (or already there) and the wi-fi connections seem to vanish in some cloud that isn’t The Cloud. Except that AWOL wasn’t really AWOL, in the usual sense. Sometime between the 9th and the 10th, AWOL had gone into a kind of shock. It was sort of like waking up after a black-out drunk episode and slowly reconstructing the events of the previous evening and figuring out what might have happened in the ‘blacked-out’ bits; going over the narrative meticulously, only to arrive at a climax and ending that simply could not have happened. I think this might have happened three or four times in the first 24 hours, usually punctuated by severe nausea. (Hey that can happen after a black-out drunk night.) Over the succeeding month or so, I went through any number of days that began in anxiety, fear and anger (never a great way to start the day), periodically interrupted by ‘bubbles’ of denial from which I would emerge into a slightly dotty déja vu state – ‘oh, right…. It’s the same fright show it was two hours ago, right.’ Except of course it wasn’t – because with each fresh announcement, appointment, tweet from the Perp-Elect or his designated henchman or hench-wench, it seemed to just get scarier. And so it goes – as Linda Ellerbee once used to say.I’m operating less in a ‘bubble’ and more of a ‘back-burner’ mode lately – the truly insane reality is always in the background (and on the front pages); but I’m trying to limit my focus on it to those morning and (usually) late afternoon moments with the newspapers and/or on-line and radio news. In the meantime, we have to try to get on with our lives; re-think, reformulate, mobilize, strategize and resist, resist, resist the drift towards ‘normalization’ which inevitably finds its way to front pages and broadcast news. And a lot can happen in 20 days.
For the moment, I’m going to go back to where I was in those 48 or 72 hours before November 8th. I was looking back then, too – though as a way to gauge how we might move forward – not necessarily with the hopeful, almost optimistic spirit I found so striking in the watershed moment I was taking stock of in those pre-election days, but with a view to how we might reframe and refocus conversations – not only about art, but about the culture, the disruptions and displacements wrought by new technologies, transformed economies and commercial models, and the tattered political ethos that seemed further challenged by social and economic inequities, institutional incapacity and environmental degradation. The anxieties remain the same; but also, I think, a slender hope. I’ll try to pick up where I left off when I come to that singular ‘moment,’ when I was just finding my way into the L.A. art world (and out of town at that)….: : : : :
As the country goes to the polls and Artillery prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary (would it be too presumptuous to claim to be some part of the ‘Obama legacy’ that needs to be sustained into the next Presidential administration?), it’s hard to resist a long and slightly wistful look back – conscious of the still larger shadow of history looming over one’s limited generational perspective. It’s impossible, almost inconceivable to take stock of everything that has led to this point both politically and culturally; almost impossible to point to any single factor that shifted the direction of our thinking and broader perspective. It’s harder still to reconcile that perspective with a significant part of the culture that seems to stand on the other side of a distorted two-way mirror; and difficult to ignore the aspects of our political and cultural reality that have led us to what cannot be called anything but a very bitter divide, if not the precipice of a neo-fascist political order. I’m too exhausted to be really angry; and beyond casting my vote and encouraging others to do the same, hesitant to commit to a political movement other than saving the planetary biosphere – the foundation of everything we have.
Artists will probably go on making manifestos for as long as they make art, but it’s impossible not to distrust almost any purported avant-garde manifesto on its face. The notion of an ‘avant-garde’ seems itself almost meaningless in a time when the art being made seems to reach in every conceivable direction, including the overlooked past; and spatial, temporal and imaginary dimensions unique to the individual artist. My favorite of the most recent crop is probably Grayson Perry’s 2014 Red Alan’s – ‘Red Alan’ being the ceramic sculpture of his own childhood teddy bear, ‘Alan Measles.’ (Makes sense to me – but then visitors to my bed would encounter not only my teddy, but a plush chocolate lab.) It’s certainly the most practical. Consider Item No. 2: “Failed paintings to be sent to DISASTER zones to be used to make tents.” Goddess only knows there are enough of them both.
The exclusionary micro- and macro-aggressions of so many of the manifestos of the 20th century seem almost beside the point when that point is not merely to articulate and privilege a place for a certain kind of art or art-making, but to build a world and conversation around it, to amplify and expand its possibilities and possible domains – in short to change the way we see, talk about, and make sense of the world.
There have been many fairs and biennials since I started writing for the magazine (and as long-time readers of the blog are aware, AWOL began as a fair/biennial blow-by-blow). But looking back, one in particular stands out – some five years before Artillery began – not simply for its quality (which may still be unsurpassed), but for its historical moment and everything it stood for at the time. It was a rare moment of optimism both for the larger art world and the Los Angeles art world in particular (and I give it some credit for underscoring that new reality). Closing out her stint at a well-known zine, my editor had sent me to a biennial, being curated by a writer, critic and all-round culture guru we both adored. The writer was Dave Hickey, a frequent contributor to what was then probably my favorite L.A. magazine, Art issues (which also featured a regular column by Doug Harvey, Skipping Formalities); and the biennial was SITE Santa Fe’s fourth, Beau Monde: Toward A Redeemed Cosmopolitanism.
Beau Monde staked out a very idealistic ground. Above and beyond everything else, before pointing or prognosticating in any specific direction (although it did in fact make a kind of speculative projection towards a certain open-ended view of where western contemporary art might be headed), it privileged a kind of conversation that up to that point had rarely been seen in the contemporary world. It was no accident that the show had been meticulously designed (by the Graft firm from Silver Lake), that the movement and rhythm of the space had been as deliberately (and comfortably) plotted out; that the vibratile Jennifer Steinkamp digital installation that ushered the audience into the space would be immediately answered by Alexis Smith’s elevated ‘salon’ with its flaming Ruscha-esque American Southwest sunset skies, repeated in the rich reds, yellows, amber and black striations (oxygenated with a bit of white) in the rug that covered the elevated platform of her installation space. Smith’s sky was inscribed with the legend, “Heaven for weather. Hell for company,” which might be interpreted literally – reflecting the physical beauty of its Santa Fe, New Mexico location; but might also be interpreted more ambiguously. The line is a paraphrase of a famous Mark Twain bon mot (he used several variations of it throughout his career) – implying that heaven would not in all likelihood be his social priority; that (as usual) the cool kids as might be cordoned off into a separate smoking section – in hell.
Hickey had already formed an idea of the kind of biennial exhibition he wanted and most of the artists who might be curated into it before he set to work (with his Graft colleagues) plotting out its installation. What he wanted from his artists was pretty much exactly what they were already doing (or had been: two of them were somewhat elderly and one (Hammersley) was in fact deceased); and he could trust them to deliver. But Smith’s piece was one of the few installations specifically commissioned by Hickey for the show; and although its slight elevation off the floor of SITE’s rehabbed (and Graft-transformed) industrial space dampened its impact, its point was made. This would not simply be a themed biennial, but a series of conversations that gave presence and substance to that theme – the stuff that might actually create and re-create that ‘beau monde.’ And even as Smith’s ‘statement’ piece was set apart, you quickly sensed its echoes – e.g., in the large Bridget Riley painting not quite directly across from it – a blue/yellow, pink/green beribboned abstraction (a kind of self-conscious interrogation and reconsideration of her own ‘Op-Art’ style); even in the Steinkamp digital waves only just traversed.But nowhere did you sense that vibratile dialectic more than in the gallery where Hickey paired Ellsworth Kelly’s four irregularly rectilinear and skewed panels rotating just so, Blue Black Red Green, with Ken Price’s morphous, pulsating, almost fluorescently glazed ceramic sculptures – a conversation you could almost swear, emerging from the gallery, was substance-enhanced. (The picture here in no way does justice to the drama of the installation.) There were cooler zones, too – e.g., Josiah McIlhenny’s cool white tribute to Adolph Loos.
If you’re getting the sense that pleasure itself was privileged here, you’re not far off. Hickey (like me) is a beauty freak unembarrassed to wear that bias on his sleeve. But Beau Monde went beyond even those aesthetic parameters to approach something on the order of music, of dance, of play. No accident here that Steinkamp had teamed with Jimmy Johnson, who created music for the installation. By the time the viewer reached Jessica Stockholder’s slightly dystopic installation, s/he might be dancing. In that regard, too, the biennial was highly influential. Whether acknowledged or not, the most important museum (and for that matter some major gallery) exhibitions cannot today be considered fully, much less successfully, installed without consideration for the sheer pleasure of the experience. (LACMA gets this in spades; and Philippe Vergne just took the Geffen to this level with the Doug Aitken Electric Earth mid-career retrospective.)
You can dance with this, you can move with it (Darryl Montana’s Mardi Gras costumes even seemed to suggest a suitable sartorial accompaniment – a brilliant grace note to Hickey’s show) – the exhibition seemed to reverberate with this implicit message at every turn; or just hang out for a bit – as the couches on the periphery of the Stockholder installation invited us to do. This was an extension of another familiar Hickey preoccupation and critical criterion, really a linchpin of so much of his writing – the social space of art. This was never exactly a new phenomenon; but it was Hickey who drew special attention to its role, not merely in creating the ‘aura’ of an artwork, not merely in its capacity to animate the physical and/or cultural space around it, but the attention (or distraction) and dialogue of viewers around it – how that level of social engagement and its ancillary conversations themselves might contribute to and enrich the critical evaluation of the work of art. For Hickey, the significance of such social/spatial/temporal aspects are magnified in recent decades and have become critical factors in the evaluation of contemporary art.
It puts a slightly different spin on Jasper Johns’ wry 1967 commentary, The Critic Sees. We do in fact look and see with mouths wide open and tongues frequently moving at full throttle. For that matter, maybe the spectacle frames have some influence on the process. Nothing wrong with any part of it as long as we feel free to put it all into reverse and contradict ourselves, or look at (and talk about) it from another angle. I sometimes wonder if Hickey’s true philosophical antecedents aren’t closer to Oscar Wilde than to Charles Sanders Pierce or William James. (There was certainly some theatricality in evidence in some of the sections of that show – e.g., the aforementioned Kelly/Price gallery, the Murakami ‘balloon’ in its slightly liturgical niche, ready for its ascension.) But Hickey also seemed to be nudging us in the direction of what these objects and installations might become (consider the dramatic tension between the Prices and Kellys, the possibly ‘combustible’ product between the two); where they might take us – which is after all the essential point of this kind of exhibition. The ‘Johns-ian’ footnote to this would be that this might simply be another way of describing the way we encounter all works of art – the way an art object plays upon our perceptual faculties, and our experience and memory of the encounter. There is the object – itself the product of this kind of transformation (‘take an object; do something to it; do something else to it’); our experience of it, and our conversation around it – both expanding over time; and finally ‘placing’ us in a new, slightly altered space – perceptually, conceptually, culturally. Whether artists actually create a beau monde or take us to it, they certainly give us some navigational tools, and ideas about improvising new ones. The ‘beautiful world’ is no less intimidating for its beauties, its transformations. It may be yet another circle of hell – but as Alexis Smith’s Santa Fe ‘salon’ implied, it just might be the place you want to be.
I’ve had some time to think further on that vision of a beau monde in the weeks since the United States took its great flying leap towards un monde où il ne ferait jamais beau – and certainly fresh hells seem to be opening every day. Whether the planetary biosphere, much less U.S. citizens, can withstand this government’s promised assault will not be known for a few years. But as Johns and all great artists remind us, an object and the world around it can change in the time we’re looking at it. There are no walls or barriers that can impinge upon our ability to look, alter, reconfigure, reshape, exchange, revisit, and revise views (or plead for new ones), and utterly transform those worlds – or transport us to new ones. I don’t necessarily think we need to leave the planet to find them – though I wouldn’t try to deter Elon Musk or Richard Branson or anyone else from trying. But while we’re still here, I’m hoping L.A.’s best artists – and the world’s – keep taking us to the farthest edges of their imaginations. If the political and cultural status quo present us with a reality where the very notion of ‘norm’ is effectively shattered (or certainly mocked – as it is on an almost daily basis in broadcast media), there is nothing to hold them back.
I loved that the special edition print Alexis Smith produced for Beau Monde – a kind of digitized rendition of her installation’s serape-like rug, was captioned, “NOTHING IS NEW EXCEPT WHAT HAS BEEN FORGOTTEN.” The phrase is actually taken from one of Marie-Antoinette’s often witty retorts to her opponents (and later, her jailers) and reads as fresh and timely today as Smith’s ‘heaven and hell’ citation for her salon installation. “Il n’y a de nouveau que ce qui est oublié.” As newspaper front pages and websites fill with what has been effectively “forgotten” by the grotesques and gargoyles gnawing away (willfully or unconsciously) at their own platforms, it is the artists who will be charged with filling the void with actual news – and I hope to be here reporting some of it.
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Passage
ACME’s late summer group show, Passage, chooses subtlety over ‘statement’, quietly suggesting a spectrum of emerging ideas and directions through its artists’ varied address of notions of passage or transition in their work. In doing so, it also gives a glimpse of the gallery’s particular wealth of extraordinary painters. Even some of the work that is not painting here has a ‘painterly’ quality (e.g., Amir Zaki or Jennifer Steinkamp). The converse holds true amongst ACME’s unabashedly heterodox painters. Dawn Clements’ draughtsman-like work has always been about transition. But consider Daniel Cummings’ Arp-esque scrollwork here as a plan for a sculpture. Or Michael Henry Hayden’s emerald-green painting-object, Untitled (Palm Frond #8), which, painterliness to one side, might be just such a fragment. Kristin Baker goes small, too – with her almost tactilely rendered Dog-Eared ‘pages’. In addition to the gallery’s best known stars (e.g., Aaron Morse, Kurt Kauper, Tomory Dodge), Neal Tait and Natalie Frank compose brilliant essays on metamorphosis with their work here. If you love painting, the show is not to be missed.
ACME
6150 Wilshire Blvd., Spaces 1 & 2
Los Angeles, CA 90048
Show runs thru September 17, 2016
Sometime this year, Tarrah von Lintel realized that her gallery was entering its 25th year—half a world away from its origin point (Munich), but having nurtured rich associations with many artists along its trajectory through New York to Los Angeles. Parallel to her collectors, von Lintel’s relationships with the artists and their works have amounted to an on-going dialogue with their processes, ideas and obsessions—and a larger dialogue with the art and culture for which the work is a focal point. These include many of the artists for whom von Lintel has assumed representation here in L.A., including Farrah Karapetian, Canan Tolon, Christopher Russell, Carolyn Marks Blackwood, Christiane Feser, and Floris Neusüss; but also artists who von Lintel has long represented, including Joseph Stashkevitch, Antonio Murado, and Roland Fischer. A few of these have yet to mount solo shows with the gallery in Los Angeles, including Tokyo-based Izima Kaoru, who followed a long career in fashion photography with several iterations of Landscapes With A Corpse (a number of which bear uncanny parallels to Melanie Pullen’s High Fashion Crime Scenes), and more recently a high-concept follow-the-sun series of acutely refracted photographs of the sun abstracted to a line or curve.
But here’s the thing: what might be held in the hand (or two), its shape, texture, physical dimension and tactilely registered detail, is capable of its own free-form and unpredictable extension into other worlds or dimensions that emerge exclusively from the artist’s imagination—or that imagination in its random encounter with all phenomena and signifiers in its orbit. Kristen Morgin turns a random audiotape cassette—picked up at a garage sale from the looks of it, now stained and battered (though apparently with most if not all of the song titles spelled out—not an insignificant detail here)—into a trapdoor into the universe. The source object is an old country music hit, but Morgin’s There Goes My Everything (2018) transforms it into a cosmic explosion. Before you spiral off into the Milky Way, there’s more. If one object throws you down an astral chute, consider a juxtaposition of two, say Death Wish and Pierre Who Didn’t Care (referencing both the Brian Garfield thriller-turned Charles Bronson movie and the Sendak classic), or a Pretty Mick Jagger and Free Kittens (the cover of the Performance soundtrack with its stylized portrait of Jagger, with a random yard sale sign).
A number of works invoke this sense of infinite expansion more specifically (e.g., Ross Rudel’s subtle chromatic intervention on a zig-zag pleated ‘infinite column’, Blue Stripe (2016); or Tom LaDuke’s full-fathom talismanic Oceans (2015) with its delicately filigreed pewter head planted atop a water-washed stone). It was equally bracing to see work that unpacked the ‘concept’ of craft (or technique) itself (e.g., Sean Duffy’s Sfumato, 2018).
My favorite among these shows, though, might be the aforementioned Praz-Delavallade show (but then, as I said, I’m quite mad about trees). I’m also a lover of great painting—and there’s a lot of it here, alongside painterly work in other media, including video (e.g., Jim Shaw). René-Julien Praz hasn’t made the gallery over into an Arden (or I suppose Ardennes would be equally apt for this particular gallery’s directors), although he sets the mood as we’re ushered towards the ‘birch grove’ wallpapered rear of the gallery, with Jennifer Steinkamp’s gently undulating poplars whispering alongside from their darkness in the midst of this otherwise immaculately white space. But that’s a clue, too. There are dark, or certainly shadowed moments in the midst of this sunlit space. Praz’s ‘Ardennes’ is a series of moments that take our measure of nature, our perception of, and variously willful and passive projections upon it, our fraught co-existence with it, and our yearning to reclaim or recapture its variously fearsome and fragile beauty.
Further into the gallery, we continue to sort out the terms of our approach – our ‘to see and not see’ (to paraphrase Oliver Sacks) ‘forest-for-the-trees’ relationship to reality—as for example in Catherine Opie’s soft focus, barely limned grove of trees (mounted here against the birch-papered wall), Untitled #2 (2012), which I always associate with dark winter evenings. (Some works in this series were, I believe, photographed in such conditions, but not all; and not this one.) Then Kerry Tribe’s installation with video (Forest for the Trees, 2015) spells out the dilemma explicitly. That tentative, conditional approach contrasts starkly with the “radical” and ambiguous space Francesca Gabbiani shows us in a palette pitched some distance from nature. Amber and terra cotta are found in nature, but Gabbiani effectively denatures them against a backdrop of black and deep purple with a neon glow. A ragged frond of fern and few tufts of grass are the last earth-bound remnants of this “destruction.” Then there are the remnants of the human-built environment here – joists or louvers, lumber planks or trim that give evidence of a structure on this site. It’s as if that amber volume rising to the upper edge of the canvas were a kind residual aura of what was once “radical.”
Sometime between the morning of November 9th and the current holiday season, there was an interruption in the more or less weekly postings in this space. It’s not like it’s never happened before. I do drop out of sight now and again; and there are those intervals when I’m between destinations (or already there) and the wi-fi connections seem to vanish in some cloud that isn’t The Cloud. Except that AWOL wasn’t really AWOL, in the usual sense. Sometime between the 9th and the 10th, AWOL had gone into a kind of shock. It was sort of like waking up after a black-out drunk episode and slowly reconstructing the events of the previous evening and figuring out what might have happened in the ‘blacked-out’ bits; going over the narrative meticulously, only to arrive at a climax and ending that simply could not have happened. I think this might have happened three or four times in the first 24 hours, usually punctuated by severe nausea. (Hey that can happen after a black-out drunk night.) Over the succeeding month or so, I went through any number of days that began in anxiety, fear and anger (never a great way to start the day), periodically interrupted by ‘bubbles’ of denial from which I would emerge into a slightly dotty déja vu state – ‘oh, right…. It’s the same fright show it was two hours ago, right.’ Except of course it wasn’t – because with each fresh announcement, appointment, tweet from the Perp-Elect or his designated henchman or hench-wench, it seemed to just get scarier. And so it goes – as Linda Ellerbee once used to say.
For the moment, I’m going to go back to where I was in those 48 or 72 hours before November 8th. I was looking back then, too – though as a way to gauge how we might move forward – not necessarily with the hopeful, almost optimistic spirit I found so striking in the watershed moment I was taking stock of in those pre-election days, but with a view to how we might reframe and refocus conversations – not only about art, but about the culture, the disruptions and displacements wrought by new technologies, transformed economies and commercial models, and the tattered political ethos that seemed further challenged by social and economic inequities, institutional incapacity and environmental degradation. The anxieties remain the same; but also, I think, a slender hope. I’ll try to pick up where I left off when I come to that singular ‘moment,’ when I was just finding my way into the L.A. art world (and out of town at that)….
Hickey had already formed an idea of the kind of biennial exhibition he wanted and most of the artists who might be curated into it before he set to work (with his Graft colleagues) plotting out its installation. What he wanted from his artists was pretty much exactly what they were already doing (or had been: two of them were somewhat elderly and one (Hammersley) was in fact deceased); and he could trust them to deliver. But Smith’s piece was one of the few installations specifically commissioned by Hickey for the show; and although its slight elevation off the floor of SITE’s rehabbed (and Graft-transformed) industrial space dampened its impact, its point was made. This would not simply be a themed biennial, but a series of conversations that gave presence and substance to that theme – the stuff that might actually create and re-create that ‘beau monde.’ And even as Smith’s ‘statement’ piece was set apart, you quickly sensed its echoes – e.g., in the large Bridget Riley painting not quite directly across from it – a blue/yellow, pink/green beribboned abstraction (a kind of self-conscious interrogation and reconsideration of her own ‘Op-Art’ style); even in the Steinkamp digital waves only just traversed.
But nowhere did you sense that vibratile dialectic more than in the gallery where Hickey paired Ellsworth Kelly’s four irregularly rectilinear and skewed panels rotating just so, Blue Black Red Green, with Ken Price’s morphous, pulsating, almost fluorescently glazed ceramic sculptures – a conversation you could almost swear, emerging from the gallery, was substance-enhanced. (The picture here in no way does justice to the drama of the installation.) There were cooler zones, too – e.g., Josiah McIlhenny’s cool white tribute to Adolph Loos.
If you’re getting the sense that pleasure itself was privileged here, you’re not far off. Hickey (like me) is a beauty freak unembarrassed to wear that bias on his sleeve. But Beau Monde went beyond even those aesthetic parameters to approach something on the order of music, of dance, of play. No accident here that Steinkamp had teamed with Jimmy Johnson, who created music for the installation. By the time the viewer reached Jessica Stockholder’s slightly dystopic installation, s/he might be dancing. In that regard, too, the biennial was highly influential. Whether acknowledged or not, the most important museum (and for that matter some major gallery) exhibitions cannot today be considered fully, much less successfully, installed without consideration for the sheer pleasure of the experience. (LACMA gets this in spades; and Philippe Vergne just took the Geffen to this level with the Doug Aitken Electric Earth mid-career retrospective.)
You can dance with this, you can move with it (Darryl Montana’s Mardi Gras costumes even seemed to suggest a suitable sartorial accompaniment – a brilliant grace note to Hickey’s show) – the exhibition seemed to reverberate with this implicit message at every turn; or just hang out for a bit – as the couches on the periphery of the Stockholder installation invited us to do. This was an extension of another familiar Hickey preoccupation and critical criterion, really a linchpin of so much of his writing – the social space of art. This was never exactly a new phenomenon; but it was Hickey who drew special attention to its role, not merely in creating the ‘aura’ of an artwork, not merely in its capacity to animate the physical and/or cultural space around it, but the attention (or distraction) and dialogue of viewers around it – how that level of social engagement and its ancillary conversations themselves might contribute to and enrich the critical evaluation of the work of art. For Hickey, the significance of such social/spatial/temporal aspects are magnified in recent decades and have become critical factors in the evaluation of contemporary art.
It puts a slightly different spin on Jasper Johns’ wry 1967 commentary, The Critic Sees. We do in fact look and see with mouths wide open and tongues frequently moving at full throttle. For that matter, maybe the spectacle frames have some influence on the process. Nothing wrong with any part of it as long as we feel free to put it all into reverse and contradict ourselves, or look at (and talk about) it from another angle. I sometimes wonder if Hickey’s true philosophical antecedents aren’t closer to Oscar Wilde than to Charles Sanders Pierce or William James. (There was certainly some theatricality in evidence in some of the sections of that show – e.g., the aforementioned Kelly/Price gallery, the Murakami ‘balloon’ in its slightly liturgical niche, ready for its ascension.) But Hickey also seemed to be nudging us in the direction of what these objects and installations might become (consider the dramatic tension between the Prices and Kellys, the possibly ‘combustible’ product between the two); where they might take us – which is after all the essential point of this kind of exhibition. The ‘Johns-ian’ footnote to this would be that this might simply be another way of describing the way we encounter all works of art – the way an art object plays upon our perceptual faculties, and our experience and memory of the encounter. 