Artillery Magazine

Tag: John Altoon

Robert Berman has a world to sell to you.
Santa Monica Auctions’ ongoing reinvention

Robert Berman has always understood one essential factor driving the art market—and especially the auction market: the passion of collectors. To hear him tell it, you might think it was his own collector’s passion more than anything else that pushed him into the art business, but that would only be half the story.

Louise Nevelson, “Celebration No. 5” (aquatint, 1979)

Collectors return to auction sales rooms principally for two reasons: the sheer thrill of the ‘get’ (which between the phones and the sales floor and everything that leads up to it can be a staggeringly capricious business), and the connoisseurship of auction house experts. Berman studied art and art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but only began acquiring serious connoisseurship when an extended post-Art Institute odyssey landed him in Paris. His post-graduate education began at the Hôtel Drouot—really an aggregate of many quasi-independent auction houses (operating under an umbrella organization controlled by BNP Paribas), where he acquired specialized knowledge in, among other things, prints, Picasso, Duchamp, and Man Ray. Four years later, he visited Santa Monica and, for reasons explicable only by the great writer, critic, and sometime playwright Kenneth Tynan and a few other persistent residents, decided to stay.

Larry Rivers, “Homage to Picasso” (1974)

In 1979, he opened B-1 Gallery—a time when L.A.’s art commerce (with one or two notable exceptions) was still pursued principally along La Cienega and Santa Monica Boulevards in West Hollywood. The rest is … well, not his story alone—but reflects the kaleidoscope of L.A.’s art history and commerce. He remained in Santa Monica, migrating away from the beach to Broadway; and outgrowing that space, moving in 1994 to Bergamot Station, where he has remained—spreading himself between several gallery spaces, depending upon his exhibition requirements. Along the way he has entertained all comers, with a special view towards Latin American (including outsider) and Latinx art, and photography. With that kind of ‘open-door’ attitude, a dealer can expect a lot of art to pass through a gallery. In 1996, in conjunction with Track 16 Gallery, he co-curated a celebrated Man Ray exhibition. The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiatives drew Berman into two remarkable participating exhibitions—the first, paired exhibitions of commercial illustration and photography and conceptual photography (including, for example, Robert Heinecken); the second in 2017 (for PST: LA/LA) a collaboration with the New York gallery, Ricco/Maresca, including Carlos Alfonso and the obsessive, hallucinatory visions ‘outsider’ artist Martin Ramirez.

Carlos Almaraz, “Mural for Home Savings” (1988)

But it was never enough for Berman to simply bring in ‘outsider’ art; he has always delighted bringing in the world outside the so-called ‘art world’ of major collectors and art insiders—which is why he has always enjoyed hosting auctions of art collected and accumulated at various intervals over the years. Pre-pandemic, under the auspices of Santa Monica Auctions, he had been routinely hosting auctions twice a year. Post-pandemic, Berman has effectively transformed his back-of-gallery operations to the front of the house. On a recent visit, his gallery/headquarters/showroom was all but exploding with treasures from every part of the world, as well as selected works from three estates with whom he has worked privately to round off what may be one of his most alluring sales to date. Whether surfer-signaling to the outside world, or opening a keyhole view into his own private world and driving motivations, Berman has made a 1987 Raymond Pettibon drawing the signature image for Santa Monica Auctions’ upcoming November 6th sale—a solitary surfer careening down the face of a towering wave just ahead of its curling crest, Untitled (My Purpose in Life). It’s well-paired with a 1989 Longo-esque Untitled (I Thought California Would be Different), a print from Diana Zlotnick’s celebrated collection.

Raymond Pettibon, “Untitled (I thought California would be different) 1989

But this is scarcely scratching the surface of a sale unusually rich in Latinx art (from Almaraz to Zúñiga), painting, drawing, rare prints and photographs, and rarities irresistible to their devoted collectors. Having just come from New York and the David Zwirner re-mount of the Diane Arbus 1972 Museum of Modern Art retrospective, I was astonished (yet not) to see a photograph I’d all but suppressed from my memory—one of her grainier 1967 images, Patriotic Young Man With A Flag, N.Y.C.—as disturbing now as it was then. But what drew me closer were works that had a kind of personal iconicity—works that leave their indelible imprint yet remain quietly sequestered somewhere in the back of the mind until we come upon them again in a radically dislocated context (which is what auction sales floors inevitably are). It’s a kind of re-discovery, and I found it coming across one of Elger Esser’s pale horizon-line embankments, Seudre Frankreich (2001), which draws me back even as I write this. (How’s this for a last look?)

Elger Esser, “Seudre Frankreich” (2001)

And as if I needed to be reminded that (unlike Mr. Berman himself) I would never abandon the Paris I love like no other city, the Sonia Delaunay prints and delicate, almost ephemeral Quatre Petits Projets de Tissu (1925-1933) and a Robe de Nuit (1924), which I can only hope she made and wore, took me back both to that enduring world of great couture and design houses and the many petits mains that make them run, and the vibrant cultural capital that gave us Cubism, Surrealism, and what would evolve into the landscape of contemporary art. There are more examples of this elusive, ephemeral quality than I can name here (the Almaraz pastels are superb; and I was especially taken with some very unusual Motherwell and Sam Francis prints); but that sums up the paradox of art and commerce: the capacity for such works, such images to grow, to assume an almost talismanic hold on our imaginations. We’re simultaneously imprinting and imprinted and scarcely aware of it until we bring what become self-contained worlds home to our own private worlds. Arbus would have understood this; and so apparently does Robert Berman.

Santa Monica Auctions Fall sale will be held Sunday, November 6th, 2022, 1:00 p.m. at Bergamot Station Arts Center, 2525 Michigan Avenue, Santa Monica 90404. For further information, contact Santa Monica Auctions directly by email (info.smauctions@gmail.com) or telephone (310) 315-1937.

Ed Ruscha, “The End” (1991)

October 27, 2022
John Altoon: Works From the Estate

There are some artists you know are great immediately because they provoke such disparate and conflicting emotions simultaneously that they practically throw you physically off balance. John Altoon is one such artist. The most feral of the Ferus Gallery Cool School, Altoon’s influences ranged from abstract expressionism to surrealism to commercial illustration – but transmuted through his art, you feel as if they belong to him exclusively. His vibratile color harmonics take something from Gorky, Guston and Sam Francis; and his nervous, zig-zagging line owes something to Steig; but transmuted through his art, they belong to him alone. You feel the work’s impulsive urgency and a musicality that resonates long after you pull away – with echoes of Parker, Monk, Mingus and probably a bit of Chet Baker at least as pronounced as those AbEx antecedents. Of three museum-quality shows up at Los Angeles galleries right now, this Kohn Gallery show in particular feels as if it could have been annexed directly to LACMA’s superb 2014 Altoon retrospective; it should not be missed. There’s no encapsulating the scope of this magic – but, with apologies to Dylan, don’t say we ‘never warned you if your train gets lost.’

Kohn Gallery
1227 N. Highland Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Show runs thru October 29, 2016

October 5, 2016
‘Are the stars out tonight?’ Harmonic convergence for a new art season

The beginning of another arts and culture season also marks a point where we really start to feel the impact of everything we’ve been experiencing over the preceding orbital/calendar year and start to take its measure. Events move swiftly; you can feel as if you’re stepping onto a speeding train just leaving your apartment; and to miss an event in one’s agenda, or just a day’s news can make you feel as if you’ve missed a station. Our connection to the everyday realities can seem so fragile, so contingent; yet that connection, those realities are themselves being continuously redefined and renegotiated. We need to make course adjustments, reorient the compass, re-navigate. We’re looking forward to the new – thrilled by the possibility of fresh ideas, sensations, beauties (and maybe a little desperate?); taking charge of the negotiations; but it helps to make sense of where we’ve been. (Then again – do we ever really know?)

This year, the best of the first major fall museum exhibitions and gallery solo shows collide, converge, fuse and spark to give us a hint of resonance, new direction, fresh looks at things we might have missed or overlooked, as well as those elements of course correction and perspective that always need to be refreshed.

We get more than a hint of resonance with Doug Aitken’s mid-career retrospective, Electric Earth, which (with MOCA Director, Philippe Vergne’s unstinting and hands-on commitment) practically makes MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary over into a resonant vessel of sight and sound. For Aitken’s show, the Geffen – which has never looked better – is splayed out into an open maze of almost 20 years of Aitken’s architectural/sculptural/experiential multi-screen installations, along with various photographs, lightboxes, collages, sculptures or other objects that offer a kind of emblematic road map to Aitken’s process, a connective tissue that invite the viewer to ‘walk this way.’ Vergne has reconfigured and plotted out the space to parallel Aitken’s process, with its infinite expansion or compression of the moment, convergence of microcosm and macrocosm, and sense of harmonic decay.

I thought the passage in Vergne’s catalogue commentary, expanding on Aitken’s [film] editorial process, summed up both his own installation strategy and Aitken’s fundamental approach: “ … a visual and temporal space conceived to suggest the expectation of narrative order, a tension toward ‘what comes next,’ a dynamic that is endlessly pointing forward giving rise to an open form – improvised and interfaced with thematic relations between sounds and images that strategically dissolve and reconstitute a visual, time-based, and harmonic landscape. This sense of pacing, of interrupted moments, of shifting and floating is simultaneously a summary of a narrative and the negation of that narrative.”

This is the museum exhibition as immersive experience; and the viewer floats away from it ready for pretty much anything that follows. Assuming you’re not spent from the experience (and pace yourself – you may need more than one), you might segue over to Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel for a museum-level exhibition of the work of the Austrian artist, Maria Lassnig, surveying in 31 paintings almost the entire span of her long and diverse career – a kind of prismatic kernel of the major retrospective of her work that appeared at the Tate Liverpool this summer and will soon travel.

Maria Lassnig is quite simply the greatest painter you’ve never heard of – except you actually may have, in recent years anyway, only to … well, … push her off the radar again. Lassnig finally began to achieve the recognition she deserved in the last quarter of her career; but her growing audience had really only the barest clue of her daunting scope. The Tate curators – and here in L.A., Lassnig Foundation Chairman, Peter Pakesch and our own Paul Schimmel – have done us all the favor of seizing upon the breadth of this extraordinary career and unfolding its varied objectives and mechanisms of inquiry, its approaches to media, its psychology and overall consciousness, sheer mystery and abundant humanity, into a kind of compact narrative of the artist’s life that, spread out through only five beautiful galleries, is quietly breathtaking.

Grounded in a figurative tradition informed by expressionism, Lassnig veered early into abstraction of varying degrees of painterliness and coolness, but always true to herself and her own artistic investigative spirit. The bodily, performative aspect of her gestural style turned her toward a more distinctly psychological, introspective and body-conscious approach, and her work in the 1960s and 1970s took on a more self-conscious, even surreal cast. Her later work, though cooler in palette and approach, partook of even more intimate, diaristic detail. Her subject is, above all else, consciousness itself – and she is true to it to the end.

Helen Frankenthaler, “Brother Angel” (1983), acrylic on canvas, courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Across town, there are two other museum quality surveys – and no less breathtaking. The Gagosian Gallery’s 25 year survey of Helen Frankenthaler’s painting, Line Into Color, Color Into Line, clarifies (with some curatorial help from Yale art historian Carol Armstrong and the eminent writer and curator, John Elderfield) the complex genesis and structural sophistication of work that is occasionally viewed through an over-simplistic ‘color field’ prism. The 18 canvases that span the years 1962 to 1987 demonstrate a complex and evolving dialogue, not merely of drawing/line/design and color in the classic sense, but formal conundrums of the line in two-dimensional color-zoned space; line and/or color and edge; mark, subject and (colored) ground; and depiction and mark-making generally. They’re also, quite simply, gorgeous paintings; and if you’re heading to Gagosian to ‘educate the eye,’ be assured that your eyes will also be satiated with pleasure.

John Altoon, from the Ocean Park series

You may experience a sensation of time warp or displacement at the Kohn Gallery’s exhibition of painting and drawing by John Altoon (but then, hey – after the Aitken show, you’re ready for it, right?). ‘Didn’t I just…?’ Sort of – especially if you were at the Altoon retrospective at LACMA in 2014. But rest assured, you’re at Kohn – it’s just that good. Just about everything you would want from an Altoon survey is here, from the more densely abstract paintings (some from the 1950s, some from the 1960s); the commercial pastiches of the early 1960s; the slightly surreal and brilliant color abstractions of the 1960s; the Ocean Park series; those tussles between the abstract and figural that occur throughout; to (finally!) the virtuoso erotic and quasi-sexual farces and fabliaux executed well into the late 1960s. It’s all here – so just go crazy and try not to spend all your money. It’s a commercial gallery, not LACMA, goddamnit!

Okay – so naturally, you’re now thinking of heading to LACMA – and why not? It’s not too far and there two more superb shows that demand your attention: The Serial Impulse at Gemini G.E.L., a 50^th anniversary survey, an elegant and compact survey of the classic best of Gemini’s groundbreaking editions; and an absolutely sublime show of 17^th century Chinese landscape painting, Alternative Dreams: 17^th –Century Chinese Paintings from the Tsao Family Collection.

And now this ‘brief list’ is getting out of hand, so before I break off (to pick up again before the week-end), let me just give you a quick list of the remaining essential shows so far:

Henry Taylor, Blum & Poe, Culver City

Tom Knechtel: Astrolabe, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills

Tom Knechtel “The Reader of His Own Self” (do you get the impression we might be going somewhere with this? See, Artillery’s “Pick of the Week” for this week) – with

Mira Schor: “Power” Frieze and War Frieze (1991-94), CB1 Gallery, downtown Los Angeles

Edith Beaucage, Luis de Jesus, Culver City

Ry Rocklen, Honor Fraser, Culver City

Rodney McMillian, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City

Jun Kaneko: Mirage, Edward Cella Art & Architecture, Culver City

And we haven’t even talked about music or theatre (or opera) or movies – or fashion. But we will. Before I go, here’s one thing that’s definitively out of fashion: the Peter Zumthor ‘Gumby’ blob that wants to eat Wilshire Boulevard. Do we have to resurrect Godzilla and Mothra to dispatch this thing? Calling Roger Corman….

Tom Knechtel, “Avery (2)” (2015), ink on paper, courtesy Marc Selwyn Fine Art

September 21, 2016
Get Ready – Here It Comes

As regular visitors to awol are familiar with by now, I tend to veer off the track a bit, linger a bit too long over this curiosity or that novelty (hopefully without pushing you all into a full-blown meditation – I assume you have your own facilitators for that), or alternatively, come at you fast and furiously with something that just exploded on the scene – meaning right in front of me.

Every once in a while, though, I have no choice but to go straight to the main event. (It helps when it is a ‘main event.’ E.g., the L.A. Philharmonic Così easily satisfied these criteria.) A bit of focus and urgency are warranted when the constraints of time and logistics are pressing.

So get out your calendars and agendas (or tablets) and start setting aside a few dates – beginning with this week-end. Aside from the fact that two of these items are ‘last-chance’ alerts, between fairs, festivals, beach trips, vacation plans, family concerns, you know you’re going to run short of time, so start penciling in the dates now. I know the 2014 edition of Made in L.A. is coming up at the Hammer next week, and the line-up is very promising; but there will be time enough to preview its best work in the next few weeks. Right now, here’s what can’t wait:

Last Chance

If you haven’t already seen Caught Looking at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, you have exactly three days to do so. The show of five Los Angeles-based artists, all women – painters all, but with a very open, playful and adventurous approach to medium and materials – was curated by the Armory’s chief curator, Irene Tsatsos, inspired by, among other things, the cultural-political circumstances that shaped the Armory’s founding and its evolving role in the community, and more specifically referencing a quasi-classic feminist text, Caught Looking, a collection of essays on feminism, pornography and censorship in the post-second wave feminist dialectic. The original Caught Looking addressed issues surrounding, among other things, the ‘objectifying gaze’ – sexual objectification, exploitation, aggression, violation and violence, misogyny; and the reflexive impulses and rationales for censure and outright censorship. The essays vigorously countered these reflexive and reactionary tendencies and their implicit surrender to an inherently patriarchal and repressive legal construct.

Each of the artists – Simone Gad, Tracy Nakayama, Ruby Neri, Lauralee Pope, and Mary Weatherford – take up the notion of the ‘objectifying gaze’ in both the social/sexual/erotic and a much larger sensual, conceptual and philosophical sense. Each of the artists in her own way up-ends the terms of the ‘look’; sustains the furtive glance into a longer, more deliberative consideration; socializes and contextualizes the furtive, the fetishized or exploitive into something discursive, contingent, mindful, and exploratory.

Speaking of the ‘look,’ I realize I haven’t given you the slightest visual sense of the works on view. You’re just going to have to trust me. It’s a very broad range; and there are a few other things I need to jump to. Just GO – and watch out for the Pasadena parking Nazis.

The Land Where the Good Paintings Go

That would be, believe it or not, the Resnick Pavilion at LACMA, where Timothy O. Benson has curated (or co-curated? – a slightly different iteration of the show debuted at the Kunsthaus Zürich) one of the most spectacular shows of painting (and drawing and graphic work on paper) this museum has ever seen. Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky, which explores the nexae between French Post-Impressionism and German Expressionism, and their immediate offshoot movements (the Fauves, the Brücke and Blaue Reiter), promises to be the must-see show of the summer. If I seem to give undue notice to the painting, the fault (if that’s the word for it) lies with the painting itself – its sheer, gorgeously vibratile light and color – its vibratility set off still further by walls painted sapphire blue within painted black ‘faux-boiserie’/‘shadows.’ (The installation is by David Ross of Frederick Fisher and Partners.)

It’s hard not to become a bit jaded by historical survey shows at any level. I mean, how many is the average art viewer exposed to over, say 20 years? (To say nothing of an arts (primarily) journalist of more than 30?) Although there have been a number of shows at various major museums over the years distinguished by their historical or theoretical rigor and clarity, most of the very best share one characteristic: the quality and uniqueness of the work on view. All too often I’ve walked through shows that featured between, say, one and four first-rate pieces practically lost among second-rate and mediocre examples. That is unacceptable.

The work on view here is a mix of somewhat familiar and vividly fresh, if not completely unknown, masterpieces drawn from some of the best museums and private collections all over the world with that one thing in common. They’re all of the very highest caliber, the absolute best. By the time I got through the show Wednesday morning, I practically had to pick my jaw up off the floor. It’s almost staggering to think how Benson and his staff pulled off this curatorial feat. I have never seen a show of this consistency of quality at LACMA. (And rarely for that matter, even at the Met.) It’s as if the Frick dropped an entire wing into the Resnick’s west galleries.

The Feral Boy of Summer

As if that weren’t enough (and speaking of the ‘objectifying gaze’), the most feral of the Ferus bunch, John Altoon, is being given his first (believe it or not) retrospective in his hometown. Those of us who have known Altoon’s work for most of our lives (and wonder what took so long) are already familiar with his virtuoso draughtsmanship; but his range as a painter and stylistic breadth are also astonishing. The variability and richness of his color palette surprise anew for those of us who haven’t seen his painting in some time. Ab-Ex influences filter beautifully through his California sunlit lens – from Ocean Park cool to richly mineral or jewel-tone. The musicality with which he moves between richly harmonic color fields to white, neutral or airbrush/patterned space for his choreography of graphic imagery and biomorphic abstraction could be compared to jazz. There’s a marvelous synthesis of influences: the coloristic affinities he shares with Gorky, Guston and possibly Sam Francis; De Kooning’s figurative abstraction; the jagged, enervated graphic line that, however filtered through such disparate sources as Steig, Picabia, Giacometti and commercial illustrators, is his alone; the choreography of biomorphic abstract forms that owes something to Tanguy (and possibly Miro) – all filtered through the California commercial environment – but which, again, he makes entirely his alone (and as such has clearly influenced successive generations).

It’s really quite breathtaking and I must urge you to see it again and again, after which you should head to Amoeba, pick out some Charlie Parker, Freddie Hubbard, and Frank Zappa/Mothers discs and go home to drench yourself in the music. I have a few minor issues with the installation – if there’s one artist who doesn’t need any ‘pull quotes,’ it’s Altoon (Ruscha’s is just barely passable); and some of the other wall texts might be trimmed (are we really worried about ‘political correctness’ with a show like this? come on); and, uh, Laura Owens?? Otherwise the show is beautifully installed; and Carol Eliel has curated the show brilliantly.
[And don’t forget Kaz Oshiro ‘s show at Charles White Elementary School.]

So clear a date on your calendar for the west side of the LACMA campus and get ready for Radio City Music Hall-length queues. L.A. (and possibly most of the world) will be descending upon the museum in droves and Godzilla wouldn’t be able to keep us all at bay.

The Figurative, The Abstract, and the Sensational

All at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects in Culver City. The ‘figurative’/representational would be Raffi Kalenderian; and although he’s been working in L.A. for some time (he studied – and later showed – with Roger Herman), his work was new to me. The paintings might be viewed as a species of portraiture, but are really subjects in their environments, stark and roughly hewn, but very articulate and richly evocative in physical and psychological detail. They reflect a prescient dystopic unease, contemporary alienation; the still, abstracted moment before the….[fill-in-your-disaster-or-personal-crisis-of-choice]. The details are alternately teasing and telling. You could write an essay on the way he uses the color white alone.

As abstraction goes, Nick Aguayo’s work is pretty great; and his handling of palette, composition, is nothing short of masterly. In that mastery, Aguayo has clearly absorbed some significant influences (there are several that come to mind, including for example, Howard Hodgkin; also other North and Latin American painters); but the work manages to stay in the contemporary moment – which is quite a trick. The palettes range from the coolly neutral to fresh juxtapositions (orange, pink, green); and Aguayo has some penchant for juxtapositions generally. (The question is – is that enough?)

I’ll just admit right now that I favor the Kalenderian work – it’s just so starkly original, of the moment, and profoundly moving. But both painters are clearly first-rate talents; and between the two of them, the shows are exhilarating. If you’re in that neighborhood and you feel like you need a visual vitamin/O₂ blast, check into the Vielmetter space. You won’t regret it.

MixMaster – Ed Moses and Larry Poons at William Turner Gallery – Bergamot Station, Santa Monica

Speaking of jazz, the Ferus boys, and color field abstraction, William Turner chose to let these two established masters jam expansively in his spacious Santa Monica gallery. Although both painters are well known for their rich color harmonics (and Moses has been producing some of the best work of his career in this vein recently), the dialogue (styled by Turner, as The Language of Paint: Selected Works) was as much about materiality, texture, the notion of painting itself, as about the harmonics (or for that matter, the language) of color and composition. If anything the Poons paintings seemed to neutralize the color – frequently to a beige-y pinkish faux-flesh tone (though – true to his color-field past, all-over and covering the canvas), in thick folds with an oatmeal-like texture that looked like rolls of flesh rippling off the canvas.

Although Moses’s work in recent years has addressed materiality, tactility, texture (also ground, surface, metamorphosis, decay), the work he’s showing at Turner takes a far more varied approach, reaching both forward into his crepuscular color waves and backward towards the grids and lozenges that were once a signature style. (The sense of decay is especially pronounced here in terms of both color and light and time itself.) In between are the shimmery moiré cascades of fading sunset-jewel colors looping over black hollows and grounds that evoke both Morris Louis and something much, much darker. There’s something almost elegiac about this work.

June 6, 2014