Afterall: John Bock at Regen Projects

Originally Published on Afterall.org

John Bock at Regen Projects
Andrew Berardini
10th March 2007


Just as the young Cy Twombly's foray into military cryptology later informed his gestural abstraction and childlike scribbles, John Bock's double degree in art and economics now seems inextricably linked to the understanding of his practice. This informed access to symbolic economies of scale, type and flow, is guided and refracted through the skewed prism of a mad professor - a cryptic academic so full of knowledge and history that any sense of metastructure breaks down, exuberantly, like the old canon to which the academy once clung. But rather than chattering through the theoretical battles that defined a rather bloodless war fought in the pages of journals and dissertations that a generation of would-be intellectuals thrilled to misunderstand, Bock's own practice moves with a frenetic energy that not only invites misunderstanding, but seems to downright encourage it. Rather than fretting the loss of meaning as the Tower of Babel comes crashing down, Bock revels in mimicking the gestures of a doomed civilization.

At Regen Projects,¹ four bolts inserted rudely into the wall support four coarse ropes that lead to a makeshift theater in the centre of the room, made of nylon drop cloths. Surrounding this stage are a number of Bock's trash sculptures and framed drawings torn from sketchbooks – most of them notes for performances or films – hanging from the gallery walls. Littered with hardly legible scrawled text in multiple languages, with scraps of magazines and photographs thrown into the mix of trashy and dramatic absurdity, Bock's video, drawings and sculptures delight in the playground of obsession, madness and pataphysics symptomatic of the meaninglessness that is at the centre of our culture and the organization of our knowledge. The works in the show appear as props to an absurdist play: '2 hair dryers, beer can with hair, tea bag, milk carton and wood' or the much shorter but still equally ridiculous, 'sock with eggs'. These are the types of items that usually appear in Bock's performances, improvised lectures composed from a suitcase packed full of carefully collected junk, from which he riffs into convoluted and absurd diatribes that mash the jargon of aesthetics, politics, science, economics and pop culture into a babble rife with signifiers.

The heterogeneous, non-sequitur presentation of the work gives the impression that this is simply a collected reframing of pieces brought together under one roof, offering the chance for a general assessment of Bock's varied practice. However, there is one notable addition to his oeuvre: the rather quiet drama played out in the video Frau im Hotel (2006). The strange tension underlying the video in both tone and content seems vaguely reminiscent of the interior examinations of Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape (1958); a defined aesthetic impulse emerges in this moody narrative, in which our attractive subject enacts a perilous flirtation, deciding whether or not to eat the cake or the pills.

The trivial made grand, Frau im Hotel forms the crux of this exhibition – as many of Bock's performances have done in the past. A young woman in a lace shirt (a wedding dress?) looks mournfully out of the window and then at a rather oversized, unappetizing hunk of chocolate cake. She lights a cigarette and opens the large round window next to the table at which she’s sitting. She leans in close to the crevice between the window glass and the frame, blowing the smoke out in into the chilled urban air, the noise of traffic leaking into the warm ambience of the hotel room. Throughout the film, she vacillates between the chocolate cake and the cigarette, finally settling for a bottle of what appear to be diet pills that she pulls out of dresser drawer – otherwise empty except for a full pint glass of water.



The round window, as the carefully framed shots remind us, functions like a trompe l’oeil; the composition invites comparisons to both religious painting and renaissance portraiture. However, she isn't static paint on a flat surface, but a moving image going through the plaintive gestures in a performance of the trivial. After a couple of viewings, it becomes almost funny, a joke, perhaps, on Freud's little interior theatre of desire. Bock gestures towards the mythic and revels in its absence.

When I look at John Bock's work, I find myself wanting to compare his videos and performances to literature, but they careen out of any easy genre definition as he sabotages any effort at constructing a typology. He moves through the whole panoply of tactics that are at an artist’s disposal, circling the void at the center of what Baudrillard defines as our simulations. Bock has often been compared to Kurt Schwitters, and, reading a line like ‘Discover the Ur-sculpture’ in one of his drawings, I can’t help but think of Schwitters's Ur-sonata (1922-32), a musical composition of nonsensical phonemes. Bock’s practice moves like a meth-addled genius poring over the 21st century – as Schwitters once pored over a bombed and burned Europe, collecting the broken, abandoned and disused for his art. But the breakdown Bock engages in is not one of destroyed master narratives during World Wars; it is one of a culture of rarefied and often misunderstood academia, of collectors and hoarders of schizo-capitalism, of the jumbled ubiquity of simulacra – what’s left over after the semblance of meaning departs. Simply put, after the illusion of form disintegrates, there is no longer anything connecting all systems of signs but their own meaninglessness.

The same way Schwitters's collages document the breakdown of meaning, and Twombly's implied cryptography endlessly refers to ancient myths that are no longer present, Bock's practice performs the empty gestures of meaning with intellectual force and creative zeal, as if he knew – and no longer cared– that meaning no longer exists, and never really did. Bock seems to encourage misunderstanding because there is nothing left to be understood, apart from the dissolution of the central myth of meaning: there was never a Tower of Babel in the first place.

1 Regen Projects, Los Angeles, 20 January–3 March 2007, http://www.regenprojects.com


Images:
1 Frau im Hotel, 2006, DVD with signed back-up tape, 3 minutes. Courtesy of Regen
Projects.
2 Untitled, 2007, metal, egg and can, 41 x 28 x 25 inches. Courtesy of Regen
Projects.
3 Untitled, 2007, wood chair, wire, metal, 1 milk carton, 1 yogurt cup, 25 x 37 x
17.5 inches. Courtesy of Regen Projects.
4 Untitled, 2007, 2 hair dryers, beer can with hair, tea bag, milk carton and wood
12.5 x 27.5 x 16 inches. Courtesy of Regen Projects.

Lorna Simpson at LA MoCA

Origianlly published on Afterall.org

Lorna Simpson at LA MOCA
Andrew Berardini
7th December 2006


Lorna Simpson's mid-career survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles¹ dazzles and disappoints in equal parts. The traveling show, composed of work from the last twenty years of Simpson's practice, largely consists of photographic image/text pieces and video work accompanied by stills. The driving conceptual force behind the work is the intersection of subjectivity as filtered through the black American experience with its particular issues of representation. Simpson engages these issues with varying success, and the show, mirroring this, moves from the emotionally and conceptually potent in pieces like The Park (1995) and Easy to Remember (2001), to the philosophically obvious and formulaic in work such as Untitled (guess who’s coming to dinner) (2001) and Corridor (2003).

A review of Lorna Simpson's retrospective would be remiss in not mentioning her iconic images of headless anti-portraits of black men and women with their (often cryptic, and sometimes repetitive) accompanying text. These quiet, minimalist pieces manage to comment upon and commodify the experience of black American women by draining them of any identity. Simpson's mannered approach to representation and figuration, specifically in relation to black identity, creates iconic images. But where they succeed in iconography, they fail in nuance; their cold attempts at sublimity stiffen on the wall.

The best of the photo/text pieces manages to subtly allude to layered narratives and nuances of observation and perception. The Park, a large six-panel serigraph on felt, presents a night view of New York's Central Park seen from above, with an edge of buildings looking down upon it, a sweeping urban landscape that captures the simple beauty of the view while flagging the sinister or transgressive activities that may occur within its darkness. One text piece, resembling a shorthand diary entry, tells the brief story of unpacking a telescope and pointing at the park to see a lone man watching 'figures from across the paths'. The other text, to the right of the six-panel park scene, outlines the mission of a sociologist studying the 'private acts in the men's public bathrooms', adopting the role of voyeur 'in order to go noticed and unnoticed at the same time'. The sociologist records the activities of the men who frequent the public bathrooms, as well as their license plates 'when applicable for later'. This piece functions in breathtaking layers of observation, concealment, participation, and sexuality. It presents the ethical dilemmas and ambiguities when the public and private bleed into one another. And although no figures are readily perceptible, none of the actors is allowed true anonymity. Even the viewer is implicated, a voyeur to the intrigues alluded to in the text.

In contrast, the most ineffective of the photo/text works, Untitled (guess who's coming to dinner), part of a series of similar pieces, has the same elegant, mannered aesthetic delivery that's characteristic of Simpson's work with none of the subtlety that makes a piece like The Park so engaging. Forty-two three-quarter back cameo photos of a young black woman are unevenly displayed and cut out of milky, semi-transparent Plexiglas. These cameos are juxtaposed with the vinyl lettering on its surface enumerating the titles of black and blaxploitation films in alphabetical order starting with 'guess who's coming to dinner' and ending with 'sweet jesus preacher man' (both titles as they appear in the piece). This juxtaposition comes off as a sophomoric gesture taking obvious (and lifeless) notions of identity and placing them side-by-side for effect,

A similarly weak comparison is made in Corridor, a double projection video installation of the two women on both screens enacting the mundane motions of everyday life, one in 1860 and the other in 1960. The women (played by the same actor) do their toilette, communicate in their respective historical modes (hand-writing and telephone), and look contemplatively off into space. And although I appreciate Ms. Simpson's attempts to respond, it fails to make any substantive political critique. In other words, her recording of the mundane activities of two black women in pivotal moments of African-American history is, well, mundane. And although there is doubtlessly some political statement beyond neat clichés on the surface, I neither know nor care to pierce these superficial tropes to find out.

Overall, Lorna Simpson's aesthetic practice is pleasingly tranquil and composed, but these measured pieces only succeed politically when they connect to the uneasy ambiguities of real human experience, and fail when they only gesture towards those ambiguities with pretty and cryptic language lacking true critical engagement. The self-consciously poetic text only serves as a mask to the easy platitudes that may have seemed sexy in the halcyon days of multiculturalism, but now come off as tinny.

But whereas certain pieces hit false notes, the unified humming of a video piece like Easy to Remember is in contrast deeply moving and distinctly human. Easy to Remember manages to celebrate the individual differences of its subjects with tonal variation from the fifteen sets of highly different isolated sets of black lips, while still acting in aural and aesthetic unity. This piece accomplishes wholly what is dealt with varying success throughout the retrospective, in turn throughout her career, which is the aesthetic unity of the individual and the universal, through the filter of black American experience. The unequivocal success of this piece redeems any other misgivings or failures found in the other work. And it in fact, (almost) justifies the necessity and importance of this retrospective to the current social, political and artistic conversation surrounding the show.

1 16 April-10 July 2006, Los Angeles MOCA, http://www.moca.org


Image:
Lorna Simpson, Easy to Remember, 2001, 16 mm black and white film transferred to DVD (2:35 minutes looped). Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery

Scene & Herd: Hollywood Premiere

Originally Published on artforum.com

07.25.06

Hollywood Premiere

Los Angeles

Left: NADA President Andrea Smith, NADA cofounder John Connelly, and NADA President Emerita Sheri Pasquarella. Right: Artist Walead Beshty. (All photos: Andrew Berardini)

When the conversation grew too promotional, too professional, or simply too much, I ducked out of the throng of young dealers and headed to the quieter side of the terrace at the Standard Hotel on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. The pastel blue of the pool and the soft pink glow of the balcony lights made the night feel plush and clubby—an atmosphere in tune with the PR strategy of the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA). Bigwig dealers are keen to tell you that nada means “nothing” in Spanish, but proud NADA members had traveled from far-flung places like North Carolina and Massachusetts to attend this summit.

It was the first humid evening of the inaugural NADACON, an amorphous series of weekend events, which included the opening party, one brunch, three collection tours, one artist-curator talk, one panel discussion, and one private roundtable meeting that I was reminded multiple times I was not allowed to attend. NADA, according to their mission statement, is about honest dealing and community and not, as their epithet might imply, selling art. The party was collegial. Dealers and gallery assistants clanked bottles of swampy Grolsch and exchanged well-rehearsed repartee. As the night wore on, the poolside became ever more dominated by dealing, the kind that’s usually preambled with wheeling. In other words, the sort usually found at “the fair”—two words that dripped off lips in rushed whispers like an impure thought.

Left: Dealer Mary Leigh Cherry, Dan Hug, and NADA fair director Heather Hubbs. Right: Dealer and art advisor Lowell Pettit.

The NADA brass welcomed me with open arms. I was handed from NADA fair director Heather Hubbs to NADA president Andrea Smith to NADA cofounder John Connelly back to Smith and finally to President Emerita and NADA mastermind Sheri Pasquarella, who presided over the event like last year’s prom queen. Upon being asked why she stepped down from such heights, she responded, “NADA needed to spread its wings and fly, like the Mariah Carey song.”

The next morning we gathered for a brunch of dim sum, chicken feet, and Bloody Marys at Black Dragon Society’s new space in Chinatown, where the young dealers in young art were looking a little gray. After breakfast, new NADA member and art advisor Lowell Pettit championed NADA’s supportive network and waxed lyrical about the strangeness of the word dealer in the association’s name. “It highlights the excess and exclusivity of our business,” he said. “But what other professions call themselves dealers? Antique dealers, car dealers, card dealers!"

The next day, the shuttle bus, a mighty beast of seasoned age whose history was marked by the scraped-off casino logo on its side, took us from the Standard to the Ovitz Family Collection in Santa Monica. Ovitz was not in attendance, but collection curator Andrea Feldman Falcione led the tour with a sophisticated intern, Julianne Rosenbloom, in tow—a step up from the Broad collection tour, where a recently recruited intern led the proceedings alone.

Left: Taka Ishii Gallery's Jeffrey Ian Rosen. Right: Julianne Rosenbloom with Ovitz Family Collection curator Andrea Feldman Falcione.

Past the imitation-brass Lichtenstein of a setting sun in the courtyard and through the glass front doors, I walked into the lobby and was greeted by a Kippenberger nude portrait of Michel Würthle. Walking from office to office, I observed the work of Raymond Pettibon, Julie Mehretu, Ed Templeton, Diane Arbus, Peter Doig, and many of his students. There were a cluster of Leipzig artists, a Richard Prince for every occasion (one painting appropriately included a check made out to Ovitz for $175,000 to “Buy Back Painting”), and a large number of Blum & Poe protégés. Although most pieces were stunning, the rhyme or reason of the collection was, let us say politely, impossible to discern.

After a question from Pasquarella, who chewed gum and blew bubbles throughout the tour, about whether the employees knew the value of the work on the walls, I asked Feldman Falcione, What is the unifying force of the collection? She had dropped hints about Ovitz’s tastes; he doesn’t really like video, he once had a penchant for photos, but he’s now seriously into imagistic paintings. After hemming and hawing about space and process, she eventually proclaimed with a tone of finality, “We buy works we like.” The tour ended. As Feldman Falcione was swarmed by NADA dealers with outstretched business cards and inquiries about unsolicited submissions (she accepts them, by the way), I asked her intern what she thought the collection was all about. “I work under a Richard Prince,” she said with a shrug. “I'm not sure, but . . . he knows what he's doing with his money."

Left: Samson Projects owner and director Camilo Alvarez with dealer Jeff Bailey. Right: Artist Eric Wesley.

Left: Artist Fiona Jack with Black Dragon Society director Parker Jones and Anna Helwing Gallery director Stacy Fertig. Right: David Kordansky Gallery's Natasha Garcia-Lomas, artist Violet Hopkins, and FoCA director Stacen Berg.

Scene & Herd: Intoxicating Atmosphere

Originally Published on Artforum.com

08.18.06

Intoxicating Atmosphere

Los Angeles

Left: Artists and Mandrake proprieters Flora Wiegman and Drew Heitzler. (Photo: Justin Beal) Right: Dealer Jeff Poe. (Photo: Christopher Williams)

“It’s gone from Irving Blum to Blum & Poe. Art on La Cienaga has finally come round,” said dealer Jeffrey Poe, martini shaker rattling in hand. Poe, who owns Blum & Poe with Tim Blum, pretended to Irving's swashbuckling fame at the Ferus Gallery back in the '60s, and today's scene of capable artists and wily dealers may well reclaim the boulevard’s former glory. Last Wednesday, for one night only, Poe bartended and artist Dave Muller DJed at an insiders’ pre-opening of LA’s newest art bar, the Mandrake, which sits behind a nondescript storefront on the new gallery strip. As the official launch is September 2, only an upturned cardboard liquor box set upon a pole out front announced, in scrawled black marker, “The Bar Is Open.”

Walking into the woody, low-ceilinged space, I could see the party had already begun. LAXART curator Lauri Firstenberg and Maccarone director Erica Redling swapped gossip and quipped, “Doesn’t Dave Muller look like the Incredible Hulk?” Artists Mark Grotjahn and Jennifer Bornstein huddled in a corner shirking the limelight with new Jack Hanley director Alexandra Gaty, while Poe, sunburned and clad in a Greek fishing cap after a day at sea, lumbered behind the bar, slingin’ drinks much more slowly than he sells art. Founded by artists (but, true to art-world ways, funded by dealers), the Mandrake was formed as an entrepreneurial extension of Champion Fine Arts, but wasn’t officially christened until artist Christopher Williams finally nailed the name. For a while, wags dubbed the space Untitled, but after failed attempts and a little emotional infighting, they decided to pay homage to the venue’s previous incarnation as a gay bar called the Manhandler.

Left: Angela Hanley gallery director Allyson Spellacy. Right: Artists Marc Grotjahn and Jennifer Bornstein with Jack Hanley gallery director Alexandra Gaty. (Photos: Andrew Berardini)

Williams and his wife, MoCA curator Ann Goldstein, were in attendance at the low-key fete. He balked at being photographed, but compromised by snatching the camera out of my hands and snapping a quick pic of Poe looking like a grizzly Hemingway in front of a cigar-chomping Castro. Muller stood in the large room at the end of the bar surrounded by stacked records, as if stuck in the middle of one of his signature music-archive paintings. “It all started with me being a DJ as an undergrad. It’s good to get it out into the world like this again.” The party, music, and unpretentious creative energy of this art bar echoed Muller’s Three Day Weekends, even though the only art on hand was a lonely video piece by art collective and band Hurray, which played quietly to no one in the desolate backroom. (This same “Backroom,” by the way, was curated for a spell by Magali Arriola, Kate Fowle, and Renaud Proch and featured artists Thomas Lawson, Allan Kaprow, and Euan Macdonald, among others.)

As the night wore on, artists, dealers, and writers reconvened in a mellow way before the September 9 opening-night cluster-fuck art bonanza. During a calm moment behind the bar, Poe stopped to talk about what’s going on. “LA is slow and low,” he said. “It’s just as happening as New York, but it’s not as flashy. LA is far-flung and displaced, but it’s all here.” Slipping away to fulfill a drink order, he returned with a Corona, taking a comradely sip before handing it off to a cute drunk girl. I asked Poe what the difference was between art dealing and bartending. After a contemplative pause, he said with a shrug, “They’re both service industries.”

Left: Curator Lauri Firstenberg and Maccarone gallery director Erica Redling. Right: Artist and DJ Dave Muller with Jeff Poe. (Photos: Andrew Berardini)

Art and liquor have been bedfellows for a long time. When I queried a comfortably smashed Allyson Spellacy (Gagosian installer and director of the new, by-appointment-only Angela Hanley Gallery) whether she thought artists drank too much, she took a swig from her beer and lamented, in her low Irish brogue, “Not at all. They dooonnnn’t drink enough.”

—Andrew Berardini

Scene & Herd: On the Road

Originally Published on Artforum.com

09.15.06

On the Road

Los Angeles

Left: Dealer Patrick Painter with artist Won Ju Lim. Right: Dealer Tara Sandroni Hirshberg with artist Hernan Bas and dealer Kristin Rey. (All photos: Andrew Berardini)

The Los Angeles art world opened last Friday and Saturday with a volley of bangs—and a whimper or two. While Chinatown exploded with openings on Friday night, I started my weekend sniffing cryptic fish dishes at the low-key dinner thrown by Sandroni Rey for artist Hernan Bas. We convened at the Social, an overpriced lounge usually infested with the Hollywood B-list but populated that night by a crowd familiar from Bas’s paintings: young, delicate, and mostly gay. Gallery director Nu Nguyen reluctantly admitted that the artist’s age was “twentysomething” when I noted that his CV revealed no birth date but proudly recorded the name of his high school. After dinner, I shared a cigarette with artist Paul P., in town for his opening at Marc Selwyn. We talked about his impending move to Paris with his boyfriend, artist Scott Treleaven. “Toronto’s so provincial. I almost moved to Los Angeles, but who wants to drive everywhere?”

The next night, the comment ricocheted around my car as I made the grisly crosstown trek to that art amusement park in Santa Monica called Bergamot Station. During a brisk walk-through, I saw no less than three different galleries hawking Ed Ruscha pieces. I stopped by the inaugural opening of Patrick Painter’s new gallery, where Jim Shaw had a show of dream sketches and bronze vices in the form of disembodied girls’ heads. Catching up with Painter, who was pounding Diet Cokes and chain-smoking on the front patio, I asked about his recent cameo on the HBO television show Entourage: “The last time I acted was in I Woke Up Early the Day I Died, Ed Wood's final script. I was Matt Dillon's roommate, you know. Art and Hollywood—LA is fucking mixed up."

Left: Anthony Kiedis with Gagosian's Martha Otero. Right: UCLA Hammer director Ann Philbin with Marc Foxx gallery director Rodney Hill.

My next stop—the Hiroshi Sugimoto show at Gagosian in Beverly Hills—bore out Painter’s quip. There, Red Hot Chili Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis was midtransaction with Gagosian salesperson Martha Otero. “Does the price include the frame?” asked the musician, as gray-haired patrons shuffled through the cavernous gallery with the eighty-dollar catalogue, waiting for Sugimoto’s autograph like teenyboppers at a rock show.

Back on the road, I shot down Wilshire Boulevard to the 6150 gallery-plex, and then elbowed my way through another multitude (where were all these people coming from?) to catch a glimpse of Sterling Ruby’s show of magazine cutouts on glimmering metallic backgrounds. Working the door, gallery partner Rodney Hill enjoyed a what-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation chat with tanned Hammer director Ann Philbin. Ten feet away at ACME, I squeezed into “Cheerleaders and Bandwagons,” Katie Grinnan’s aptly named show, where the throng engulfed her fantastical sculptures.

Left: Norton Family Foundation curator Kelly Barrie with artists Ruben Ochoa and Edgar Arceneaux. Right: Artist Jim Shaw and Marnie Weber

Even though I was feeling saturated, thoroughness compelled me back into the car to close out the evening in Culver City, where the crowds were thickest and not seeing art was a foregone conclusion. The exception was the show of young Chicano artist Ruben Ochoa, whose re-creation of a freeway overpass filled the newish nonprofit LAXART. To cross the gallery (and pass under the work), one had to sign a liability release. With blurry visions of collapsing Serra prop pieces, I signed on the dotted line and headed in. Ochoa, clad in Miami Vice chic, could recently be seen driving a tortilla van–turned–art gallery to LA events, but now, rather than taking the gallery on the road, he’s taken the road to the gallery.

Time for the after-party—a poolside affair at the Avalon in Beverly Hills with more unassuming intimacy, curious-smelling food, and a gaggle of well-educated curators, including the California Biennial’s Rita Gonzalez, LAXART’s Lauri Firstenberg, and the Norton Collection’s Kelly Barrie (son of artist Mary Kelly). Chris Kraus wrote in Video Green that nobody talks about art in LA, but Barrie does. Lounging on a divan, the cool blue light from the pool washing over us, he anointed Rodney McMillian’s performance at Susanne Vielmetter the best show of the evening. With regard to the LA art boom, we agreed the big-market bang couldn’t last. "All economic indicators point toward an imminent collapse. But what makes LA great are the artists who choose to live here, not the marketplace.” Then, pausing to look over the party in full swing, he added with a rakish grin, “We're here now and we're having fun, right?"

—Andrew Berardini

Left: Artist Paul P. with dealer Marc Selwyn. Right: Artist Zoe Crosher and dealer Tim Blum.

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Scene & Herd: Broad Dayligh

Originally Published on Artforum.com

09.19.06

Broad Daylight

Los Angeles

Left: Eli Broad. Right: The ribbon-cutting ceremony for UCLA's Broad Art Center.

“I do believe that LA is one of the great art capitals of the world,” pronounced Eli Broad to the donors, dignitaries, and artists attending the suitably pompous opening of UCLA’s new Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center, the munificent billionaire’s latest attempt to secure his legacy as a city father. Fresh from his latest bid for the Los Angeles Times, the former land developer and insurance executive bequeathed $23.2 million to the Art Center that bears his name (less than half his $50 million gift to LACMA, but who’s counting?). The unseasonably cloudy day did not dampen the enthusiastic spirits of the architects of this new boosterism. Assembled on an outdoor platform in the large plaza in front of the majestic but chilly Richard Meier–designed structure were the Broads, Meier and his architectural amanuensis Michael Paladino, artist Richard Serra, and the First Lady of California, Maria Shriver. Los Angeles, merely a century and a half old and only a metropolis since World War II, is still fertile soil for groundbreaking bids at immortality. Marking a decisive victory in the ongoing war of the LA art schools, Christopher Waterman, dean of the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture, declared, with a warm glance at Broad, that this was another milestone in the relationship between “enlightened benefactors and public institutions.” Other milestones perhaps include Broad’s substantial donations to UCLA’s rivals, like CalArts’ Broad Studios and Claremont College’s Broad Center and Broad Hall.

Although I anticipated hearing about the importance of UCLA’s art department amid this fanfare, I did not expect to hear “UCLA is the greatest art school in the world” three times—most notably from Richard Serra, whose 42.5-ton Cor-Ten steel sculpture, T.E.U.C.L.A., graced the plaza behind the podium. (It may be the heaviest piece of institutionally branded artwork in America.)

“I don’t see anyone I know. This isn’t for us. Inside is for us,” said the affable artist Mark Bradford, surveying a sea of suits and pointing at the Art Center itself. As the crowd around the dais dispersed, I followed the slow-moving heads of white hair into the Center.

Left: Artist Richard Serra. Right: Artists Catherine Opie and Mark Bradford.

Remarkably, the work of the UCLA faculty displayed in the galleries (which in the future will show mostly student art) buttressed the university’s enormous ego. Recent works by John Baldessari hung next to Appliance House, 1998–99, a lighted steel box by Jennifer Bolande, and not far from James Welling’s abstract light-screen photos that oozed orange and yellow magma. Chris Burden enjoyed a prominent video projection that showed excerpts of selected performance works from 1971–75. Despite his abrupt and not altogether happy departure in December 2004, UCLA still proudly exhibited his work and listed Burden, alongside Nancy Rubins and Paul McCarthy, as distinguished emeritus professors. Mary Kelly’s Mea Culpa: Beirut 1982, 1999, a piece of compressed lint marked with words describing the death of a laundress during a bombing of the city of Beirut, offered powerful, though lamentable, contemporary resonance.

I headed out of the galleries and wandered through the sterile white hallways examining a fraction of the eight stories of offices, studios, and classrooms. Not wishing to be late for a potential free meal, I scurried across campus to the private lunch at the chancellor’s mansion. I managed to mix with the crowd sipping white wine on the front driveway, where I overheard artist and UCLA faculty member Christian Moeller complain, “This is the most boring event.” While attempting to enter the luncheon, I was given an irritatingly well-mannered and icy brush-off by a wall of smiling PR people. Demeaned but not defeated, I lingered glumly in the driveway, wondering whom I might spy on the way out. The grand impresario himself was one of the first to leave, and I was dumbfounded to see the esteemed collector struggling on his own to put a unwrapped, framed picture into the trunk of his shiny black Cadillac. Evidently, it didn’t quite fit, so he shoved it unceremoniously into the backseat. Then, climbing behind the steering wheel, he clipped on his shades and disappeared into traffic on Sunset Boulevard.

Left: Architect Richard Meier. Right: Suzanne Booth with LACMA director Michael Govan.

Left: Artists and UCLA faculty Casey Reas and Christian Moeller. Right: UCLA/Hammer curator Russell Ferguson.

Scene & Herd: County Fair

Originally Published on Artforum.com

10.04.06

County Fair

Newport Beach, CA

Left: Sonic Youth at the opening of the 2006 California Biennial. Right: Susan and Leonard Nimoy with OCMA director Dennis Szakacs. (Photos: Carla Rhea, courtesy OCMA)

The drive down to the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) for the 2006 California Biennial revealed a landscape peculiar to this corner of the world: palm-tree-lined freeways choked with SUVs, a vast plateau devoid of landmarks except the spires and lights of giant malls, and the palpable feeling that everything not made of stucco was made of plastic. The OCMA seemed almost consumed by this vast sea of tract homes and office parks, and though few of the artists showing inside are from “the OC,” the culture inside the museum finds a way to deal with the California culture outside, a mélange of the sunstroked superficial and the ingeniously irreverent. Walking in from the parking lot, I ran into one of the biennial’s curators, Rita Gonzalez, standing near the velvet couches of Kianga Ford’s sound installation (which, with the noise of the crowds, I never managed to hear). Gonzalez, who works at LACMA, was invited to join the exhibition team after Irene Hoffman left midresearch. “Everyone’s coming in with road rage,” she observed, sipping from a martini glass filled with sickly sweet fruit liqueur.

The weekend-long celebration began with an invite-only dinner, where wealthy local donors rubbed elbows with the future art stars this exhibition hopes to launch. When I finally found my place card after a confused hunt, my tablemate, Steve Hansen of China Art Objects, grimly joked, “Even the seats are curated.” Each table was a delicate ecology of patrons, young artists, their dealers, and a smattering of invitees from other museums and events such as inSite, San Diego; and the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore (a frequent OCMA collaborator). Above the bar, a video by Mario Ybarra Jr. played a frantic montage of the many hand-painted (and often multilingual) signs that populate Southern California roadsides. Philanthropist, actor, and painter Leonard Nimoy, sitting at the head table, was particularly taken with the Chicano artist’s work and seemed quite receptive to Ybarra’s pitch over dinner to lead bus tours of the local barrios.

Left: Biennial artist Kate Pocrass. (Photo: Andrew Berardini) Right: Biennial artist Kianga Ford with biennial curator Rita Gonzalez. (Photo: Carla Rhea, courtesy OCMA)

As if guided tours were requisite for any venture south of LA, the following day I found myself on a bus with San Francisco artist Kate Pocrass, whose “Mundane Journey” through Orange County attempted to find incidental beauty in the streets. Outside of Pocrass’s tour, the bus briefly stopped to see yet another hunk of Richard Serra steel at the Segerstrom Concert Hall, Orange County’s two-hundred-million-dollar attempt to prove that its corporate oligarchs can be philanthropists, too. I sat next to an elderly collector who wore the black pants suit and oversize Italian sunglasses representative of her breed. After bragging about her recent purchases of works by artists whose names I’d never heard before, she offered this insight when asked her thoughts on the biennial: “Let me put it this way, I haven’t seen anything I’d buy.”

Later that night, hundreds of local OC kids eagerly lined up outside the museum to see Sonic Youth perform at the official public opening. Before the doors opened, a private cocktail party thrown by Deutsche Bank was my excuse to spend some time alone in the galleries. To make sense of this large group show, the curators invented themes that dealt directly with some aspect of California art’s unique personality, such as “Fantasy Verité” and “Adaptive Identities.” Though sometimes derivative of their famous LA-art-school teachers, especially Mike Kelley and Charles Ray, the work of the thirty-one artists and collectives in the show displayed a multitude of imaginative solutions to the “problem” of California. For example, artists Marie Jager and Leslie Shows followed the strategies of science fiction and fantasy to their inevitably dire conclusions, capturing a California continually threatened by apocalypse. Jager’s work, a ten-minute video telling the story of a toxic purple cloud that kills everything in its path, complemented Shows’s collage paintings, which depict bleak landscapes whose textured ruins capture the sweeping beauty of spaces devoid of humans but not their influence.

As the opening chords of Sonic Youth’s set rang out, I headed back into the packed lobby. Bleached hair and nautical tattoos were the norm for the crowd, most of whom seemed to skip the art and shoot straight to the stage. Qualms among the artists about having a New York band at the California Biennial evaporated as the music gained steam. Near the end of the set, I caught up with the museum’s chief curator, Elizabeth Armstrong. “Orange County is brand-new, a suburban frontier,” she said. “And who knows, in a few years California may become so much a part of the international art world that this type of exhibition will become irrelevant. But right now, this place is really hopping.”

Left: OK Go lead singer Damian Kulash with biennial artist Shana Lutker. (Photo: Andrew Berardini) Right: Kira Perov and artist Bill Viola with biennial curator Elizabeth Armstrong. (Photo: Carla Rhea, courtesy OCMA)

Left: Biennial artists Andy Alexander and Marie Jager. (Photo: Andrew Berardini) Right: Biennial artist Lordy Rodriguez, biennial curator Karen Moss, and biennial artist Ala Ebtekar. (Photo: Carla Rhea, courtesy OCMA)

Left: Biennial artist Kambui Olujimi and biennial curator Elizabeth Armstrong. (Photo: Carla Rhea, courtesy OCMA) Right: My Barbarian's Malik Gaines and Alex Segade with biennial artist Pearl C. Hsiung. (Photo: Andrew Berardini)

Left: Artists Sidney Felsen and Joni Moisant Weyl. Right: Biennial sponsor Victoria LaVasseur with Rebecca McLarand and OCMA trustee Carl McLarand. (Photos: Carla Rhea, courtesy OCMA)

Left: Rita Gonzalez with biennial artist Mario Ybarra Jr. (Photo: Andrew Berardini) Right: Biennial sponsors Twyla and Chuck Martin. (Photo: Carla Rhea, courtesy OCMA)

Left: Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation director Billie Milam Weisman and Christie's Zach Miner. Right: Biennial sponsors Victor and Barbara Klein and OCMA's Dr. Eugene Spiritus. (Photos: Carla Rhea, courtesy OCMA)