Scene & Herd: Lighter Fair

Originally Published on Artforum.com

02.01.07

Lighter Fair

Los Angeles

Left: Collector Don Rubell and dealer Kevin Bruk. Right: 1301PE director Alexis Johnson. (All photos: Andrew Berardini)

The second half of January has been surprisingly hectic in the Los Angeles art world, though last weekend’s offerings—museum-exhibition openings and an art fair—brought a quiet denouement to the frenzy of activity. The third-annual Art LA fair, held in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, was the most recent attempt by local boosters to compete with more pedigreed rivals—in London, New York, Basel, and Miami—and prove that the West Coast can also support a big-deal commercial showcase. But I learned quickly that market-driven cheerleaders are about as convincing as used-car salesmen, especially when no one’s buying.

Art LA felt a bit like an adventure in munchkin land: Everything seemed diminutive, from the number of galleries (an expectedly small turnout) to the size of the booths (imagine a midsize bathroom). Nevertheless, a number of quality spaces were brought into the fold, including Daniel Hug, Patrick Painter, and Susanne Vielmetter Projects. But the most charming contenders at Art LA were the nonprofits, which injected the sales floor with a little mirth and experimentation, including editioned cupcakes at LACE and a squelching Styrofoam orchestra from Machine Project that sent more conservative collectors scurrying for the outside bar.

At the Thursday-night opening, full-time fair director and Midwest transplant Tim Fleming exuded inexhaustible cheer, flecked with moments of self-reflective honesty. “Most of the big LA galleries signed on in the last month,” he conceded, the thinking being, “‘Let’s do this scrappy little art fair.’” There were supporters and customers, of course, including Don and Mera Rubell, Dean Valentine, Seth Geller, LACMA’s Lynn Zelevansky, and MoCA’s young collectors group (the beneficiaries of the opening-night festivities). But conversations with dealers, normally eager to inflate sales statistics, brought news of few transactions. Tellingly, the dealers’ gossip centered around other fairs—anecdotes from Miami, booth locations at the Armory, and, in one case, the viability of the upcoming Gulf Art Fair in Dubai.

Left: Artist Ezra Woods and Nicole Klagsbrun's Carolyn Ramo. Right: Dealer Susanne Vielmetter.

Wilshire Boulevard stalwart SolwayJones made the best of the situation, setting up a classic Tom Marioni installation in their booth, where, above a primrose-yellow refrigerator stuffed with bottles of Pacifico, a sign announced, "THE ACT OF DRINKING BEER WITH FRIENDS IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF ART, 1970." I couldn’t help but sit and knock one back with the veteran conceptualist. “I got asked to do a show in a dry county in Tennessee,” he explained, pausing to sip the dregs of his bottle. “They told me I couldn’t bring any beer.”

Two days later, the Hammer Museum orchestrated Vija Celmins’s triumphant return to her alma mater, UCLA. The Celmins drawings retrospective—which opened last fall in Paris—was accompanied by soft openings for the current batch of Hammer Projects, including exhibitions by Erik van Lieshout, Ezra Johnson, Jan van der Ploeg, and the debut of a new film by Austrian artist Mathias Poledna. I spent half the night combing the crowd for the notoriously shy Celmins, to no avail, but I did manage to meet van Lieshout, a reputedly rambunctious Dutchman (“My challenge is to lose control!”), who seemed well behaved on the arm of new Hammer adjunct curator Ali Subotnick. Through the revealing interviews in his disarmingly funny documentary video on view, van Lieshout came off as a friendlier and more humane version of the aggressively bleak Lars von Trier, if such a thing can be imagined.

Strolling through the Celmins retrospective, one wondered how the artist’s labor-intensive, mostly grisaille drawings, dating from the late ’60s to today, would cope if they had emerged in the current frenzied climate. Here the work had space to breathe, and while most, it seemed, gladly succumbed to its genius, I heard one youthful upstart pronounce it “boring” with a dismissive flourish of his hand before disappearing into the tony crowd. Leaving the main lobby, I bumped into artist and CalArts dean Tom Lawson, whose artwork is as ripe for revival as Celmins’s. He filled me in on the previous night’s dinner, where literary luminaries Gore Vidal and Jean Stein held court alongside art-world heavy hitters. I asked how Celmins was surviving amid all this pomp and circumstance. “She’s shy, but she’s tough. And though Vija’s been through a lot, she’s come out quite all right,” he assured me.

—Andrew Berardini

Left: Hammer director Ann Philbin. Right: Artist Erik van Lieshout with Hammer adjunct curator Ali Subotnick.

Left: Dealer Daniel Hug with artist Bobbi Wood. Right: Art LA director Tim Fleming.

Left: Chung King Projects' Francois Ghebaly and Konstainer's Mihai Nicodim. Right: UCLA dean and Hammer adjunct curator Russell Ferguson.

Left: LACE director Carol Stakenas. Right: Dealer Angela Jones, artist Tom Marioni, and dealer Michael Solway.

Left: Collector Seth Geller with LACMA curator Lynn Zelevansky. Right: Dealer Zach Feuer.

Critic's Picks "Kinky Sex (Makes the World Go 'Round"

Originally Published on Artforum.com

"Kinky Sex (Makes the World Go 'Round)"

Author: Andrew Berardini
02.15.07

01.20.07-02.24.07 Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery,

“We don’t even have to win this war,” snarls Jello Biafra over speakers in this group show that, not unlike the Dead Kennedys, struts and frets in ways both caustically irreverent and politically raw. The “Secretary of War” who narrates the tune (after which the show is named) outlines to another official the economic necessity of a new geopolitical conflict, a salient theme for this group of artists. Raymond Pettibon’s ink drawings are heartbreakingly human, playing off the grandiose iconography that brings men to war. In one, an image of an old soldier touching names on the Vietnam Memorial is accompanied by a rattling text composed of the titles of war films. Elsewhere, Erlea Maneros’s four deconstructed newspaper cutouts give individuality to each of the suits and soldiers swimming in the white space that surrounds them. More flippantly, Manuel Ocampo’s rough-and-ready painting Department of Homeland Security of Avant Garde Cliches, 2007, plays in the intersection of art, theory, and politics. Chris Johanson’s light-fingered echoes of Pettibon’s inked noirs employ a folksy naïveté both in content and in execution; one piece, an abstract kaleidoscope loquaciously titled Maybe Peace Is Love / Stop the Wars / Pro-activate USA in Peacefull / Co-exist Till Death Do Us Part, 2007, shows the split of the painting’s proceeds if sold (one-third to the artist, one-third to the gallery, and one-third to the ACLU).

Both oblique and heavy-handed, figurative and abstract, “Kinky Sex” questions the political relevance of antigovernment rhetoric in a gallery. But whether spray-painting the walls like Barry McGee’s mechanical vandal or quietly protesting as in Saul Alvarez’s photo of a lone man in a field sporting a sandwich board that reads I'LL HAVE NO PART IN YOUR END OF THE WORLD, the artists in this exhibition give necessary vent to both personal exasperation and the iconoclastic impulse.

Scene & Herd: Wack Pack

Originally appeared on Artforum.com

03.05.07

Wack Pack

Los Angeles

Left: Artist Catherine Lord, curator Helen Molesworth, and "WACK!" curator Connie Butler. Right: Artists Martha Rosler and Martha Wilson. (All photos: Andrew Berardini)

“Vaginas, vaginas, vaginas. Aren’t they wonderful?” one local female curator whispered to me, and indeed, the moment I stepped into Thursday’s VIP reception celebrating “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” her point had been won. The first thing one sees upon entering MoCA’s Geffen Contemporary is Magdalena Abakanowicz’s thirteen-foot-tall knitted red vagina; imagine Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde as a gargantuan tea cozy.

Strolling among the roughly 450 works by 120 women artists, I was struck by the exhibition’s overwhelming diversity, from the truth-telling portraiture of Alice Neel and the bawdy pageantry of Judy Chicago to postfeminist Cindy Sherman and posthuman Orlan. Inspired efforts—seldom glimpsed by viewers outside of textbooks—appeared around each corner: nude snaps of performance artist and Throbbing Gristle member Cosey Fanny Tutti from her 1976 “Prostitution” show, held at London’s ICA, or Mako Idemitsu’s inadvertently hilarious film Inner-Man, 1972, in which a dancing naked male is superimposed on an image of a placid geisha.

In the main gallery, one rambunctious donor in a fur coat overturned an Isa Genzken floor sculpture when she clipped it with her very high heels. Security arrived on cue to admonish her, to which the dowager protested, “How was I to know it was art?” Nearby, the ubiquitous writer-curator Warren Niesluchowski stood in front of a pink-and-black Mary Heilmann (a taste of the painter’s upcoming retrospective, opening in May at the Orange County Museum of Art). The exhibition “really does re-create the moment,” he told me, tugging at the silk scarf around his neck. “Who knows what history will do with the movement, but right now it’s monumental."

MoCA director Jeremy Strick, designer Lorraine Wild, and MoCA chief curator Paul Schimmel. Right: Artist Judy Chicago.

As the crowd sipped white wine beneath a psychedelic green light show installed on the museum’s outdoor plaza, Carolee Schneemann tugged on my elbow and wondered aloud, “What on earth is ‘WACK!’ supposed to mean?” My slow reply didn’t suit the artist, infamous for pulling a scroll from her vagina in a 1975 performance, so I ducked into the lobby and checked the catalogue: Curator Connie Butler chose the word to echo the acronyms of the many feminist activist groups operating at the time. (The new coinage, it should be noted, is not itself an acronym.)

Back outside at the bar, I overheard artist Karl Haendel call out to photographer Walead Beshty, who was nibbling grilled vegetables, “I didn’t know you were a closet feminist!” The delightfully (but not overwhelmingly) female crowd clasped hands and shared hugs, making the affair feel a bit like a high school reunion, an impression underscored by the many artists turned out in their finest taffeta and lace. The mood was euphoric.

The following day, the light show gave way to faux-Hawaiian decor for an artists’ lunch held on the same plaza. Long tables were set with brightly colored tablecloths and bamboo chairs, and the hot sun glared overhead as eighty-nine-year-old LA artist and lithographer June Wayne delivered the commencement speech. She glided to the lectern slowly, but once there her words were delivered with energy and panache. Presiding like a female Capote—petite, bespectacled, and in possession of a rapierlike wit—she offered a mélange of history and advice, including my favorite remark of the afternoon: “Feminism will have won when women can be as mediocre as men."

After Wayne’s valediction, the exhibiting artists queued up for their own moment at the podium. What began as a simple declaration of name and location (“Monica Mayer, Mexico City”) was quickly seized as an opportunity to be heard, and proclamations against the war and memorials for the dead followed. MoCA director Jeremy Strick, wearing a black turtleneck and a wool sports coat, kept a firm, professional smile on his face as he attempted to remain cool despite the eighty-degree weather. A grim-faced Abakanowicz delivered an extended lecture on powerful European women throughout history. “We were not just one moment. There have always been powerful, fearsome women.” It took Suzanne Lacy, grande dame of the city’s long-lived Woman’s Building here in Los Angeles and chair of the MFA Program in Public Practice at Otis College, only four words to deliver the same message. Raising her fist jubilantly, she called out, “Suzanne Lacy! Fierce feminist!"

Left: Artists Orlan, Suzy Lake, and Marte Minujin. Right: Artist Carolee Schneemann.

Left: Writer and curator Warren Niesluchowski. Right: Artist Suzanne Lacy.

—Andrew Berardini

Scene & Herd: Painting the Town

Originally appeared on Artforum.com

03.21.07

Painting the Town

Los Angeles

Left: Getty Research Institute director Thomas Crow with artist Thomas Lawson. Right: Artist Laurie Nye. (All photos: Andrew Berardini)

While the Irish-at-heart stumbled through Saint Patrick’s Day fueled by unnaturally green beer and endless Jameson whiskey, I meandered past the car wrecks and sobriety checkpoints while trying to discern something—anything—about the state of painting in Los Angeles. With the evening promising a pair of Toms and new exhibitions at a trio of galleries with complimentary acronyms (LAXART, 1301PE, and ACME), I opted to limit myself to nonalcoholic beverages in order to increase my chances of making sense of it all.

At LAXART, artist and CalArts dean Thomas Lawson was celebrating his first painting solo in, well, a really long time. Having helped a generation of students chart its course, it only seemed fitting that his triumphant return should feature a series of map paintings. Nearly a dozen canvases explore the fantasies and follies of cartography, and they are paired with small portraits of current political leaders and the victims of their decisions. To launch the exhibition, the nonprofit gallery sponsored a Tom vs. Tom battle royale, with Lawson going head-to-head with the Getty Research Institute’s Thomas Crow, who will soon depart Los Angeles for the NYU professorship recently vacated by Robert Storr. Sharing a microphone, the two Toms sat at a long wooden table and sparred sotto voce about geopolitical mayhem and the trouble with abstract painting.

Near the end of their cordial yet evasive exchange, the dogged Crow finally pinned Lawson down by asking, “Would you say there’s a bit of romanticism in your paintings?” Sipping from his Campari and orange highball, Lawson grinned and replied, “Yeah, I’d cop to that.” Punctuated by incessant camera flashes, the conversation felt like a press conference. A woman behind me mused, suppressing a giggle, “They look like a couple of TV anchors! ‘And back to you, Tom.’”

Left: Artist Charline von Heyl. Right: Artist Shana Lutker with LAXART curators Aram Moshayedi and Lauri Firstenberg.

After the talk, I inched northeast to the gallery complex at 6150 Wilshire, where a slew of painting shows opened simultaneously: Paula Kane and Laurie Nye at Karyn Lovegrove, Nicola Tyson at Marc Foxx, Charline von Heyl at 1301PE, and Monique Prieto at ACME. Every gallery I hit was crowded, and, seeing faces familiar from my Culver City stop, I couldn’t help but wonder why no one has yet launched an opening-reception car-pool switchboard.

Los Angeles loves to hate painters—whether homegrown or imported. A few years ago, I attended a CalArts panel where the quirky, delicate Laura Owens was nearly lynched by a mob of students that lambasted her for numerous alleged crimes—from her “lack of politics” to her palette—without acknowledging the anticanvas stance beneath their anger. True to form, a few twentysomethings, having never made it past the bucket of beer in the courtyard, panned Saturday evening’s shows with offhand sneers. Perhaps they were uncomfortable with the one thread connecting the work: It all teetered on the verge of abstraction, walking the line between fantasy and reality without committing to either. In a way, you could say Los Angeles does the same thing.

Passing a six-car pileup on the 10 freeway on my way to Prieto’s dinner, I decided to avoid snarled traffic by dropping in on the Chinatown “Art Walk” and a smattering of openings: Eve Fowler at Thomas Solomon, Drew Heitzler at Trudi, and a group show at Jack Hanley organized by Chinatown’s resident hard-edge abstractionist, Bart Exposito. If the 6150 Wilshire and Culver City openings draw the fine-suit-and-fur set, laid-back Chinatown remains pleasingly dedicated to jeans and sweaters.

Left: Artists Carter Mull and Nicola Tyson. Right: Artist Monique Prieto.

I passed through a drunk-driver dragnet—a disheartening reminder of the holiday—on my way to Cobras & Matadors, the hip tapas restaurant in Los Feliz where ACME was toasting Prieto. The celebration felt like a CalArts ten-year reunion, with Prieto’s classmates Ingrid Calame and Owens at one table. The painters and gallery staff were joined by “Undiscovered Country” breakout star Edgar Bryan; artist Joe Sola, accompanied by his wife, LACMA’s Erin Wright; and composer Michael Webster. With dreadlocks spiraled into a knot on top of her head, Calame rested her hands on her pregnant belly throughout our conversation, her beatific grin a disarming contrast to her sharp wit. With mussels and sweet endive salads before us, conversation roamed widely but always returned to the theme of my evening: painting. “At CalArts, most artists were poststudio, but there were a handful who weren’t fabricators. Monique, Laura, and me . . .” Pausing, she glanced across the table at her chums. “At the time, we received very little encouragement,” she remembered. “Except from Tom Lawson. Without him, everything would have been much more difficult.”

And back to you, Tom.

Left: Artists Allyson Spellacy and Justin Beal. Right: Artist Catherine Opie.

Left: Writer Eileen Myles. Right: Artist Karin Apollonia Muller.

—Andrew Berardini

Critic's Pick: Channa Horwitz

Originally appeared on Artforum.com

Channa Horwitz

Author: Andrew Berardini
04.03.07

03.24.07-04.21.07 SolwayJones,

Channa Horwitz’s elegant drawings and paintings derive their design from a simple mathematical language, and the minute variations of their predetermined patterns play out in this exhibition across multiple series. Informed by a Conceptual imperative, Horwitz’s oeuvre falls somewhere between Minimalism and Op art, though it avoids easy placement in either. Repeating an array of eight colors and angles, the work presented here possesses the subtle, hypnotic quality found in Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, though Horwitz art is tempered by a quality not found in his ruler-derived compositions: The grids, at first glance seemingly automated, reveal on closer inspection imperfections that bring a necessary human element to the work. Like Mary Heilmann and Agnes Martin, Horwitz infuses cool geometric abstraction with an unexpected warmth and humanity, so subtle as to be almost missed.

The paintings in “Variances” are crafted from strict limitations, an Oulipian gesture that paradoxically frees the work. Horwitz extensively deploys moiré patterns, highlighting the interference created when two or more grids are set at angles to one another. Intersecting lines forming circles and squares create seemingly infinite permutations. In a series titled “From Pink to Burgundy Circle Variation,” color grids intersect on eight canvases, each larger than the one that precedes it. And though each work shivers with its own optical electricity, seen together the series moves more like a musical composition than a mathematical problem. Conceptual substance couples with visual delight in this long-underappreciated and nearly forgotten artist’s impressive practice.

Critic's Picks: Matt Greene

Matt Greene

Author: Andrew Berardini
05.04.07

04.07.07-06.09.07 Peres Projects,

In this exhibition, Los Angeles–based artist Matt Greene moves toward a more personal investigation of feminine iconography. Reminiscent of nineteenth-century Symbolism in composition, content, and literary associations, these distinctly modern paintings acknowledge the influence of popular culture on the subconscious, which Greene investigates with personal, intuitive panache. Most of the paintings depict variations in pose and form on a single female figure on a spare, ethereal field of pale color or an abstracted stairway. The women—and cross-dressing men—in Greene’s paintings (though it seems as if only one endlessly mutable woman is truly the object of his aesthetic affection) appear like characters in an epic historical drama, poised like glam soldiers with swords, provocatively dressed postfeminists unafraid of their own allure. Both Edgar Degas’s ballerinas and highbrow sex shows come to mind. Because of the works’ attractive style, technical facility, and content, some have dismissed Greene’s oeuvre as being suited for, in the words of one writer, “male hedge-fund managers with a yen for lap dances.” Though one can be reflexively suspicious of the seductive quality of the pretty paintings, such a reading woefully ignores the strange, subtle qualities residing literally and metaphorically beneath the surface. They are pretty paintings, yes, and are burdened with the politically correct baggage that attends to a male artist addressing “erotic” subjects, but a sense of intense deliberation—spiritual, physical, and intellectual—pervades the work.

Critic's Pick: Matt Chambers

Originally Published 7/18/07 on Artforum.com

Matt Chambers ANGSTROM GALLERY 2622 South La Cienega Boulevard June 2–June 30

Trudi impresario Matt Chambers’s promising debut exhibition fills this space with an installation that’s equal parts messy skater crash pad, secret hideout, and whip-smart forest of cultural reference. Large drawings line the walls like cave paintings documenting the strange rituals of the Trudi gang; they are populated with nude women, lunatics in striped ties, and monsters with razor-sharp teeth. A divine messiness inhabits every available square inch. Chambers has emptied his entire life into the show: The spray-painted carpet torn from his apartment’s floor stretches across the cold gallery concrete like the skinned hide of a postmodern beast, his entire wardrobe forms a tepee in one corner, and many documents he’s received—from thank-you cards to recommendation letters—lean, in five frames, against the back wall. Chambers marshals this hodgepodge as evidence of a made-up gang he calls Trudi, which functions in LA’s Chinatown as an art gallery the size of a telephone booth. The Trudi gang, a collective of one, functions like Frank O’Hara’s Personism with a skateboard, writing endless love letters to mentors never met. Crass, Lawrence Weiner, the Bernadette Corporation, Bas Jan Ader, On Kawara, and Jean-Michel Basquiat all feature in Chambers’s cosmogony, and the ubiquitous pop icon Andy Warhol makes a cameo by name. The layout of one drawing mimics the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, except the bass drum reads WARHOL'S THUGGISH CHILDREN (perhaps a covert reference to the recent New York article on Dan Colen, Terence Koh, and Ryan McGinley). Whether it’s a declaration of self or an indictment of the world Warhol shaped, one can’t be sure; I lean more toward the latter. Even though the disorderly spread echoes the pop machismo of Colen or Aaron Rose’s “Beautiful Losers,” Chambers seems to possess, amid all the detritus, a highly sensitive and passionate temperament that counters the others’ superficial chic. —Andrew Berardini