Critic's Picks: Dietmar Lutz

Originally Published on Artforum.com

Dietmar Lutz

Author: Andrew Berardini
11.07.06

10.21.06-11.25.06 Karyn Lovegrove Gallery,

The paintings in German artist Dietmar Lutz’s solo exhibition are like blurry snapshots that linger along the edges of memories. The show consists of over a dozen large-scale paintings (with a few smaller works mixed in) of Lutz's friends and accomplices, caught sometimes at leisure, other times while at work in their studios. All have a quiet, intimate feel, which creates an interesting counterpoint to Lutz's work with the artist collective hobbypopMUSEUM, what with its overtly political subjects, among them the Baader-Meinhof gang. Leached of political content, these paintings seem fetching attempts to capture fleeting moments, retaining a soft-focus universality common to movie-star portraits of another era. Lutz’s bright treatment of his subjects plays with color and Pop figuration in a manner reminiscent of David Hockney. In one painting, a man—mimicking Pollock?—drips paint onto a large canvas; in a neighboring piece, he smiles, relaxed, as the same work hangs on the wall behind him. Walking into the downstairs gallery Lovegrove rented for the month to present Lutz’s large show, one is confronted with two different paintings of the same woman, large black glasses hiding her visage like a starlet. One extra-blurry picture seems like a toss-away copy of the other, but together they reveal a playfulness that succeeds by capturing the simple, luminous qualities of personal interaction. They remind me of a photograph found in the road, smudged with dirt, the people smiling at the camera, a lost memory so close in resemblance to my own that I wonder where I’ve seen them before.

Scene & Herd: Paper Chase

Originally Published on Artforum.com

11.10.06

Paper Chase

Los Angeles

Left: Ooga Booga's Wendy Yao. Right: Paper magazine editors and cofounders Kim Hastreiter and David Hershkovits. (Except where noted, all photos: Andrew Berardini)

On every page of Paper magazine, the message is simple, direct, and to the point: Party, party, party, until you trip away from a hip cultural event in your Balenciaga shoes and puke into your eight-hundred-dollar Marc Jacobs bag. Paper, once a hip local broadsheet for the downtown New York scene, went glossy when the scene did and now relishes a well-constructed reputation for twenty-four-hour fashonista bacchanals that put college fraternities to shame. I joined the fashion rag Wednesday evening for its second annual Los Angeles Paper Project on day two of a caravan of promotional concerts, panels, neighborhood visits, and art walks around LA.

Attempting to avoid the promised crowds at the PR extravaganza, I arrived early to get a good look at the galleries. Paper’s interns and organizers were already gathered amid crates of Italian beer stacked on the sidewalk next to ice-cream trucks blaring reggae and giving away designer cosmetics.

I cut away from the Bernard Street cul-de-sac and up to adjacent Chung King Road, where red Chinese lanterns hung in eerie silence and the gallerists were unruffled by the promise of bedlam to come. I showed Parker Jones of Black Dragon Society the canvas schwag bag Paper was distributing to the chic patrons of the arts who were due to arrive any moment. “I [Adidas logo] Chinatown” was emblazoned on the bag, to which Jones pronounced, with a rakish grin, “Keep your shoes off my town.” Peres Projects, which is featuring hilarious neon one-liners by Dan Attoe, seemed a bit livelier, with five young hired hands typing away at computers, instant-messaging gallery owner Javier Peres, at that moment far away from his LA space. Steve Hanson and Maeghan Reid of China Art Objects and Red Krayola member Tom Watson were sipping Tsingtao beers in true Chinatown fashion, beneath rich paintings of Blakean depth and spiritual darkness by J. P. Munro, throwing a party of their own until Paper’s arrived.

Left: Artist and 2nd Cannons founder Brian Kennon. Right: Artist Patterson Beckwith with dealer Dan Hug.

I meandered back to Bernard Street to see the single art performance of the night, at Daniel Hug Gallery. Patterson Beckwith had set up a portrait photography studio, and the small line awaiting pictures was the nearest thing to a crowd I’d seen all night. “Be sure to get it signed,” Dan Hug whispered to me conspiratorially. But Beckwith would have none of it; he marked the backs of his spectral black-and-white Polaroids with a blue stamp that authoritatively stated, “This Artwork Produced By Patterson Beckwith ©20__.” As the stillborn night rumbled to a close, the army of interns had fled to the next stop of the caravan in Echo Park, and there was nary a free beer to be found. The last remnants of the-crowd-that-never-was huddled around the entrance of the Bernard Street galleries. All the faces around were likable Chinatown artists and dealers: Ooga Booga’s Wendy Yao and her boyfriend, artist Nick Relph, joking with artists Eli Langer, Bart Exposito, and Brian Kennon; Francois Ghebaly of Chung King Project talking about the upcoming fairs with Kordansky’s Natasha Garcia-Lomas and Jack Hanley’s Alexandra Gaty. This evening, New York couldn’t connect with LA's Chinatown, but the neighborhood moves at its own pace and sets its own agenda. As I was leaving, I bumped into collector Michael Gold, surveying the scene through his yellow-rimmed glasses. “It’s hard for magazines to stay alive, especially art magazines,” he said. “So many come and go. Who can blame them for trying to get more advertising?”

Left: Black Dragon Society's Parker Jones and Cammie Staros. Right: Collector Michael Gold.

Left: Artist Bart Exposito. Right: China Art Objects' Steve Hanson and Maeghan Reid with Red Crayola's Tom Watson.

Left: Gallerists Francois Ghebaly, Natasha Garcia-Lomas, and Alexandra Gaty. Right: Holy Shit's Matt Fishbeck. (Photo: Hedi El Khoti)

Scene & Herd: Meet and Magritte

Originally Published on Artforum.com

11.20.06

Meet and Magritte

Los Angeles

Left: Artist Katherine Ross and Jorge Pardo with LACMA director Michael Govan. Right: Artist John Baldessari. (Photos: Howard Pasamanick)

The art world’s fawning seduction of young Hollywood employs a universal language: parties. From Tinseltown fantasy to Belgian Surrealism, my two-day jaunt through an odd swath of LA art began last Tuesday night at “pARTy 2006,” a New Yorker–sponsored event at Gemini GEL in West Hollywood, where young patrons of local cultural institutions gathered to rub elbows and hawk memberships. An army in well-cut suits and festive polyester shirts arrived to celebrate LA’s cultural capital, with well-wishers heralding from MoCA, LACMA, LAXART, LA Opera, and the Music Center, bearing names reminiscent of street gangs (“The MoCA Contemporaries” and “The LACMA Avant Garde”).

Greeted by a roomful of John Baldessari prints, I moved on to investigate the labyrinthine complex’s galleries and print shops before the party reached full swing. Gemini had some choice recent work on display, including pieces by Jonathan Borofsky and Elizabeth Murray, as well as four incredible prints by Bruce Nauman. When I remarked that Gemini GEL’s selection of artists was, while undeniably impressive, decidedly mature, Joni Moisant Weyl of Gemini replied, “We’re constantly courting younger artists, and in the next few years you’ll definitely see some changes.”

A Kiki Smith–designed carpet replaced the customary red one; it led to a nearby white tent in which the growing crowd gathered, cocktails and cell phones in hand. Lithe cochair Bettina Korek moved with grace and speed amid the peculiar mélange of thirtysomething entertainment bourgeoisie, gliding from Hollywood celeb to respected curator. The constant chatter was evidence that she had successfully melded disparate groups, though it also distracted from a plaintive performance by LA Opera–sponsored tenor David Lomeli. The New Yorker name drew out a number of LA’s usually reclusive writers, including Jori Finkel of the New York Times and Emma Gray of Art Review, whose husband, Chris Lee of the Los Angeles Times, pointedly commented, “How ironic that the New Yorker is pushing for LA’s cultural legitimacy.”

Left: Gemini GEL's Sidney Felsen and Joni Moisant Weyl. Right: Artist Mike Kelley. (Photos: Andrew Berardini)

Such stature seems perpetually at stake for self-conscious Los Angeles, and it often hinges on ambitious museum shows, like the Baldessari-designed “Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images,” which opened the following night at LACMA. Recently, there’s been a spate of artist-curated and -designed shows, with variable results. But to excuse Baldessari from any curatorial malfeasance, he came on board the project just six months ago, at the invitation of Michael Govan, the museum’s universally admired new director. Everyone I talked to—especially women—regaled me with stories of Govan’s intelligence and charm. I found him chatting with MoCA director Jeremy Strick in the show’s main gallery, not far from Vija Celmins’s giant comb. “These things are in planning for years,” he explained. “I couldn’t change the show, but I could change the way it’s shown. Baldessari’s design is both wild and respectful.” A radical departure from largely sterile institutional presentations, the exhibition borders on the theatrical. Guards in bowler hats and suits stand throughout the gallery on floors thickly carpeted with a plush white-clouds-on-blue-sky pattern and beneath ceilings coated with photos of choked and knotted area freeways. The exhibition features sixty-eight works by Magritte alongside sixty-eight works by contemporary artists, including Charles Ray, Ed Ruscha, and Baldessari himself. It’s magnificent, really, and highlights the irreverence in the LA aesthetic, though a few individual works seem too literal or curiously misplaced.

Late in the evening, I found Baldessari sitting on the far edge of the white-marble plaza with dealer Emi Fontana and show contributor Mike Kelley. Kelley wasn’t convinced by the inclusion of certain artists, and at one point demanded to know, “What the fuck is Rauschenberg doing here?” Baldessari simply nodded his great white mane and laughed, saying in his deep, velvety voice, “The first thing I asked Stephanie Barron when I saw the show was, ‘What is a Rauschenberg doing here?’” A young, dark-haired girl in a bowler hat quietly interrupted Baldessari, then put her arm around him while a friend snapped a picture. I slipped away from the table, encountering French artist and provocateur Orlan (and her very surreal white-and-black hair) midway across the plaza. After snapping a quick photo, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a card emblazoned with—of course—a picture of her face. She leaned in close and pointed with a long fingernail to her website address. “You want to see some real work. You ought to go here.”

—Andrew Berardini

Left: Artist Orlan. (Photo: Andrew Berardini) Right: Actor Pierce Brosnan with Stephanie Barron, LACMA senior curator of modern art. (Photo: Howard Pasamanick)

Left: Security guards at LACMA's "Magritte and Contemporary Art." Right: LACMA president Melody Kanschat with trustee Camilla Chandler-Frost. (Photos: Andrew Berardini)

Left: Musician Graham Nash. (Photo: Howard Pasamanick) Right: "pARTy 2006" event chairs Jim Deutch, Melanie Tusquellas, Bettina Korek, and David Nathanson. (Photo: Andrew Berardini)

Left: Curator Paul Schimmel. (Photo: Patrick McMullan) Right: LAXART curators Lauri Firstenberg and Jeffrey Uslip. (Photo: Andrew Berardini)

Left: LACMA curator Rita Gonzales with OCMA curator Aimee Chang. Right: Artist Nick Relph. (Photos: Andrew Berardini)

Left: UCLA Hammer director Ann Philbin. Right: Dealer Shaun Caley Regen. (Photos: Andrew Berardini)

Left: MoCA Focus artist Alexandra Grant and Stacen Berg, assistant curator of the CCA Wattis. Right: Dealer Honor Fraser. (Photos: Andrew Berardini)

Scene & Herd: Last Supper

Originally Published on Artforum.com

12.06.06

Last Supper

Los Angeles

Dealer Kim Light with Franz Ferdinand's Nick McCarthy. Right: Artists Ed Ruscha and Marnie Weber. (All photos: Andrew Berardini)

Last Saturday marked the final batch of openings in Los Angeles before the galleries trouped to Miami Beach. A strange mood of exhaustion and reservation pervaded the thinly populated Culver City crowds, ready for one marathon to end and another to begin. I started my trek at Blum & Poe, which presented Dave Muller’s new paintings of dissolving album covers. The artist lumbered through the galleries, infant daughter strapped to his chest, stoically observing the observers. Dealer Jeff Poe received visitors in the gallery’s storage area and tried to pass off former Warhol superstar Louis Walden as his father; the uncanny likeness won a gaggle of believers. Walden appeared at one point with another Warhol holdover, inexplicably lugging around the bottom half of an Elvis silk screen (which Poe nobly dubbed “the King’s better half”).

I left Walden and Poe to their antics and headed down to Lightbox Gallery, where a minor buzz had developed around the possibility of a performance by Scottish rock superstars Franz Ferdinand; the band’s guitarist, Nick McCarthy, had curated the current show. They didn’t play, though another band fronted by McCarthy did, putting on a concert more dour church choir than moody cock rock. The exhibition featured a lot of young Glaswegian art—soft-focus images of girls in sylvan light, painted and sketched in delicate lines that fell somewhere between earnest high school doodling and Lisa Yuskavage. Collector Seth Geller, built like a graying linebacker and wearing a dark sweatsuit, was hard to miss among the shabby-chic rock-’n’-roll crowd—kids who looked coolly at one another rather than at the art. “I’m a collector, but I’m also a businessman,” Geller told me. “Though the work is interesting, I have to do some more research.”

At MC, a bluish cloud hung over the chain-smokers celebrating Paul Pfeiffer’s images and video installations of heavily attended basketball games with the players digitally removed. A shadow of the athletes cut from the photos could be found in the gallery staff, booked on the following day’s flight to Miami Beach and ready for their own big game.

Left: Collector Seth Geller. Right: Artist Louis Walden and dealer Jeff Poe.

Next, I drove over to the Sue Williams opening at Regen Projects, arriving just before the doors closed. As I entered the gallery, one wit exclaimed, “So, you’ve come to see the genitals.” Williams’s paintings of abstracted body parts made the lingering attendees appear like the last few standing after a cartoon massacre. Perhaps fans of Williams’s previous work with text, the distinctly literary crowd included writers Benjamin Weissman, Amy Gerstler, Rachel Kushner, and Trinie Dalton (with new husband, artist Matthew Greene).

Leaving the body parts behind, I sped down the freeway to catch a glimpse of Jim Shaw’s new show at Patrick Painter (his second this season!). The quiet gallery had recently been vacated, and I stood alone under the large set paintings that had been reclaimed and modified by the hyperimaginative artist. One depicted a troop of life-size zombies in business suits, ringers for the moneyed classes that will doubtless haunt Miami next week. Painter hosted a dinner for Shaw at a cavernous barbeque restaurant in Koreatown. Opting for an intimate gathering, the artist had invited anyone and everyone who had ever worked for him—sixty people, it turned out. I managed to find a seat in the throng two tables over from Painter, Shaw, the Ruschas, and artists Ivan Morley and Marnie Weber. I’m not sure whether it was the youngish crowd or simply Painter’s retinue, but the mood here felt refreshingly jaunty. After a brief speech by the dealer, we chatted over a cigarette in the darkened bamboo garden off the main outdoor seating area. (A distinctly shaped green leaf, emblazoned on his black hoodie, symbolized another possible bad habit.) Painter explained his multiple Shaw exhibitions as “a smushed retrospective,” proclaiming that if the museums won’t do it, he will. “Sorry it took me a while to come over, I always get social anxiety when there’s people.” He took a drag from his cigarette, the restaurant lights reflecting off his glasses. “Small crowds are tough, give me an art fair anytime. Forty thousand people and I’m just fine.”

—Andrew Berardini

Left: MC Gallery director Renaud Proch with artist Paul Pfeiffer. Right: Artist Dave Muller with daughter Frances.

Left: Dealer Patrick Painter with artist Jim Shaw. Right: Dealer Christian Haye with assistant Harry McGowan.

Left: Writer Benjamin Weissman. Right: Writers Amy Gerstler and Trinie Dalton with artist Matthew Greene.

Left: Dealer Lizabeth Olivera. Right: Artist Andy Alexander.

Critic's Pick: "Interventions"

Orignally Published on Artforum.com

"Interventions"

Author: Andrew Berardini
12.27.06

12.16.06-01.27.07 Thomas Solomon Gallery ,

From beautiful photographs of Gordon Matta-Clark’s artfully sliced buildings to Robert Smithson’s Photo-Markers (from Six Stops on a Section), Laurel Hill, New Jersey, 1968, the pictures by the first-rate artists in “Interventions” circumscribe sites and situations that blur fiction and nonfiction. Each work disrupts accepted meanings and our understanding of material verity, coaxing the indeterminate potential from otherwise scripted spaces. Laurie Anderson’s Duet for Door Jam and Violin, 1975, reclaims a familiar space, her interaction with the doorway defining the very essence of the composition. Some of the characters standing in the garden of Scott McFarland’s Discussing, Michael O’Brian with Artist and Model on his Property, 2005, have been digitally added, and the mystery of who is “false” and who is “real” undermines the common notion that photography is a documentary medium. His work, like the others in the show, transcends the basic terms of photography by employing sculptural tactics. Bas Jan Ader’s Untitled (The Elements), 1971/2003, says it best: The artist sits on a rocky crag facing the distant camera. Behind him lies the crashing grandeur of the ocean’s infinite horizon, and in his hands he holds a sign with the word FIRE emblazoned upon it. The contrast of the elements—from the sublime ocean to the constructed signifier Ader bears—accentuates the picturesque setting. Like much of Ader’s work, this piece astounds and moves using romantic visual imagery and a critical awareness of the melodramatic modes of such narratives. The real and the imaginary are inextricably bound at these sites, and the artists’ interventions cut a new entrance (not unlike Matta-Clark) into a vast network of meaning hidden beneath the familiar.

Scene & Herd: Delirious Los Angeles

Originally Published on Artforum.com

01.26.07

Delirious Los Angeles

Los Angeles

Left: Artist Steve Roden. Right: Artist John Bock with dealers Anton Kern and Shaun Caley Regen. (All photos: Andrew Berardini)

Driving from West Hollywood to Culver City to Chinatown last Saturday night, I couldn’t help but think of Woody Allen’s brief but miserable Los Angeles sojourn in Annie Hall. Cruising in a convertible down a preternaturally clean, palm-tree-lined street, Allen, the perpetually miserable New Yorker, jibes, “The architecture’s really consistent isn’t it? French next to Spanish, next to Tudor, next to Japanese.” His offhand derision did capture the schizophrenia of the LA art tour on this unseasonably chilly winter night, which offered up mournful sound art, whimsical abstraction, punk polemics, playful Germans, and pistol-packing Aztec warriors.

I rushed across the windswept plaza of the bleak palace that houses the MoCA Pacific Design Center in an attempt to find what I’d heard was a rare live outing by Steve Roden. Nary a performance was found (I’d heard wrong), but I was greeted instead by Dark over Light Earth, the polymath artist’s latest sound work. Roden’s project, initiated by Tim Ivison, draws inspiration from the paintings on view in “MoCA’s Marc Rothkos.” I climbed the stairs into the galleries, where the dim lighting and dour color fields made the music sound like a cyber-requiem for a suicide. The thin crowd of collectors, hipsters, and architects hovering in the gallery appeared dutifully awed by the churchy atmosphere, though they still managed to talk business. A group of collectors hemmed and hawed about their inability to secure work by this artist or that, one plaintively lamenting, “In California, the art market is worse than the real estate.”

Leaving the associated talk midway, I trotted down to Regen Projects for the opening of John Bock’s show of objects and drawings. Another rumored performance came to naught (unless his repertoire now includes quietly sipping beer). But even without one of Bock’s trademark lectures, the show secured his reputation as a mad scientist, the drawings reading like makeshift plans for world domination, with endless digressions.

Left: MoCA director Jeremy Strick. Right: Dealer Anna Helwing with artist Mario Ybarra Jr.

Back in the car, I shot south to Culver City, where at Blum & Poe, Chris Vasell’s quiet, abstract paintings hung like wallflowers on the edge of a party that hardly seemed to acknowledge their presence. Vasell’s color washes, like Roden’s sound piece, channel the ghost of Rothko, with the rich colors fading in and out like a failed séance. Around the corner at Anna Helwing, Mario Ybarra Jr.’s show had drawn the Chicano and Latin-American community, with artist Daniel Joseph Martinez and curators Bill Kelly and Rita Gonzalez coming out to support the inveterate jester. In the drawings, Aztec warriors in blue jeans battled with hydras and cholos, giant eagles swooped down on Mexican cowboys, and teenagers sported assault rifles in front of single-family homes. Ybarra seemed happily dazed with his own good luck, cruising the gallery quietly, a mischievous gleam in his eyes.

At the newly redesigned Lizabeth Oliveria, former Dead Kennedys frontman and onetime presidential candidate Jello Biafra’s high, nasal whine and political agitation played to the packed gallery crowd. The opening brought out the reclusive Raymond Pettibon, whom I just missed, but whose darkly comic narratives hung alongside work by Chris Johanson, Manuel Ocampo, and Erlea Maneros.

Narrowly avoiding another night spent at the Mandrake, our art scene’s newest watering hole, I cut out of Culver City and hopped on the freeway to Chinatown, where the galleries were open later and a planned after-party at the Mountain Bar had been the buzz everywhere I’d visited. I started at Jack Hanley, where Matthew Higgs had curated (with Creative Growth’s assistance) a show of drawings by Aurie Ramirez. It was curious to see the reserved Higgs, a couple of dressed-down collectors in tow, motioning to iridescent and simply rendered drawings of young girls performing fellatio. Down the street at Daniel Hug, the massive black-cloth revolving sculpture by German artist Florian Morlat morphed the gallery into an impromptu dance floor as dowagers in fox furs two-stepped out of its way.

Left: Benedikt Taschen. Right: Curator Matthew Higgs with dealer Jack Hanley.

When the security gates finally clanked shut along Chung King Road, the assembled revelers moved en masse to the Mountain Bar. In the dim red light, Los Super Elegantes lounged on pillowed divans, San Francisco–based curators Kate Fowle and Dominic Willsdon tipped pints of lager, and, on the dance floor, half the students from the Mountain School of Art gyrated onstage to Higgs’s DJ set. Although I still overheard comments perfectly resembling Woody Allen’s depictions of a culturally vacuous LA (“Right now it’s a notion, but I think I can get money to make it into a concept and later turn it into an idea”), I can’t remember going to a better party, and many commented on how it felt like the old Chinatown—before the economic boom made everyone suspicious, rapacious, and mean. The mixture I experienced all night supported Allen’s comment, though LA’s schizophrenia is as much a charm as a detriment. As I was leaving the Mountain, I caught up with publisher Benedikt Taschen, stuck in line behind a group of twentysomethings at the bar’s door. I asked him if he’d seen any good art, “Yes, I saw some good art,” he enunciated in his clean German accent. “But I had better Chinese food.”

Left: Artist Florian Morlat. Right: Artists Yoshua Okon and Kori Newkirk.

Left: Hammer curator James Elaine. Right: Artists Lari Pittman and Roy Dowell.

Left: Artists Sarah Conaway and Sterling Ruby. Right: Artist Matt Fishbeck.

Left: Anna Helwing director Stacy Fertig with artist Maya Schindler. Right: Artists J. P. Munro and Thomas Helbig.

Left: Artists Karl Haendel and Kelly Nipper. Right: Architect Tom Marble and artist Jonathan Pylypchuk.

Left: Artist Ry Rocklen. Right: Artists Dwayne Moser and Soo Kim.

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.