All that is solid melts into air: Report from Los Angeles
If you don’t live in LA, it’s a good place to come to gain some perspective. If you do live here, it’s the easiest place to lose it. When you’re just visiting, it’s simple to recognize what you already think you know about the city from movies and TV. But when you actually live here (or grow up here, like I did), you walk around in this weird Truman Show bubble, viewing the place as if it’s playing out on a screen in the distance, and seeing yourself like you’re being filmed on some hidden camera.
While driving in West Hollywood this morning I passed a crush of paparazzi wildly pressing themselves and their zoom-lenses against the glass of a store window, but couldn’t see beyond them or tell who were they photographing. In a local dog-walking spot, Runyon Canyon, joggers pass slowly enough to eyeball each other, hoping for a celebrity sighting. From the top of the canyon, you can see the Hollywood sign in the distance and view the rest of the city from a dizzyingly high perspective, giving you a view on things you can’t notice while you’re driving through it. I grew up in a house that afforded a view of the LA basin, from downtown and even toward Long Beach, and west to the Pacific Ocean. Not until I left did I realize what a good perspective it gave me of the way the city’s sprawling and segregated neighborhoods relate and connect – something much harder to discern from a car window.
Naturally, LA’s museums and contemporary art spaces try to use views like these as a means of removing themselves from the sprawling surface streets. The Getty Center has a stunning one, which probably attracts more tourists than the exhibits. The new Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) tries to create one with its grandiosely steep escalator, which takes viewers three stories into the sky, where they come out to overlook the Hollywood Hills in the distance, and directly beneath them, the giant red lettering announcing the new LACMA pavilion under construction.
It’s hard not to read something ominous into this proud announcement of things to come, particularly amid the scandal surrounding MOCA’s possible closing and Eli Broad’s and LACMA’s possible role in bailing them out. (Just this morning, following the meeting of MOCA’s board of trustees, the Los Angeles Times announced that LACMA proposed a merger with MOCA, to save them from their financial troubles.)
Inside Broad’s BCAM, however, there are no traces of recession. The top floor features a collection assembled according to groups of works by individual artists, and it’s the first time I experienced a collection of American contemporary art that I can confidently describe as ‘patriotic’. The first work to greet you is Jasper Johns’ Flag (1967), followed by areas dedicated to works by Robert Rauschenberg (including a painting featuring a portrait of JFK), Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, Cy Twombly, John Baldessari, Andy Warhol, and Jeff Koons. It’s an undeniably impressive collection, one that feels fresh and current, if not somehow uniform in spirit. Each mid-size, colourful canvas seems to repeat the same masculine artistic gesture. And though there is something patriotic about the mood, there is also something brazen and even slightly vulgar about these works too. Traveling from Rauschenberg and ending up at Koons, works that might have intended to criticize or comment on a crass American consumer culture now seem comfortably part of that very same culture, and proud of it.
It’s impossible for me not to say something biting about the obvious fact that every artist represented here is male – with one concession – a mural by Barbara Kruger installed inside the elevator shaft (only visible when the elevator has descended), aptly and acerbically entitled Untitled (Shafted). There’s no excuse for not at least making some effort to correct this gross gender imbalance before opening the collection to the public, and the installation of Richard Serra’s monumental sculptures on the first floor seems only to add insult to injury.
On the other side of the courtyard, at LACMA, the temporary exhibition ‘Hard Targets: Masculinity and Sport’ is tucked away on the top floor of the Hammer Building. A fairly academic thematic of how artists contend with the typical heterosexual and competitive male stereotypes that dominate athletics, including works by Mark Bradford, Harun Farocki, Brian Jungen, Shaun El C. Leonardo and Collier Schorr. Of these, Schorr’s studies of male wrestlers are the most engaging and sensitive. But a picture printed in the exhibition’s pamphlet – Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger in only a tight swimsuit, taken in 1976 – provides the most insight into the exhibition’s inspiration.
Not far down the street from LACMA, the small complex of galleries at 6150 Wilshire continues to provide a concentrated and intimate collection of impressive shows. Of these, Anne Collier’s exhibition at Marc Foxx is the best. Collier shows an incredibly rigorous and disciplined series of her conceptual still life photographs, which address the very idea of the photographic image – including images of photographs already hanging on gallery walls and 8×10 prints in photographic developing trays. These might all seem a little too restrained if it weren’t for the inclusion of a close-up of a vintage 1950s porcelain figurine of woman holding a small camera that’s aimed straight back at us. At the neighboring galleries, 1301PE has a show of thick drippy forest paintings by Kirsten Everberg – groves of birch trees loosely rendered in shades of blue in gray – and ACME is showing large sculptures made of painted foamcore by New York artist Davis Rhodes.
Of all of LA’s museums, the most consistently interesting programmes take place at the Hammer, which at the moment features a group exhibition called ‘Oranges and Sardines’. (Group shows and Hammer Projects are also rounded out by the stellar events programme: when I was there, a few teenagers were already camping out in line for an advanced screening that night of the new Mickey Rourke film, The Wrestler.) ‘Oranges and Sardines’ is a group show about abstract painting, in which several artists, largely known as “painters’ painters”, were invited to select and exhibit works from the collection alongside their own. It’s one of those exhibition concepts that might briefly enter a curator’s mind and then quickly get dismissed as too gimmicky or too much of a one-liner, but here it’s been played out to the end. Mark Grotjahn, Wade Guyton, Mary Heilmann, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl and Christopher Wool each selected several works, in what I imagine is probably an interesting show for art students. But it’s fascinating to see the strong and pervasive influence especially of Phillip Guston and German artists of Isa Genzken’s generation. The highlight for me was a work selected by Heilmann – David Hockney’s intimate, quintessentially LA painting, Little Splash.
The three Hammer Projects on view at the moment – by Nathalie Djurberg, Erin Cosgrove and Aaron Curry – are skillfully curated to reflect a common interest in the use of child-like, imaginary yet all-encompassing worlds to describe much broader and darker themes. I’m looking forward to seeing Shirana Shahbazi’s upcoming project, which opens in a few days, on 20 December.
From the Hammer I took advantage of the clear weather to head up to that giant office building on the hill (where I used to work), The Getty Center. The ride on the futuristic monorail from the parking lot to the hilltop where the massive galleries and buildings are located provides a vertiginous look down on the 101 Freeway, where you can get a sense of traffic conditions for the way back. Once you’re up there, the weather seems to change and you feel removed from the city. I went to the Getty for a lecture in the auditorium between the brilliant writer Lawrence Weschler and Robert Irwin (who, among other things, designed the Getty Center’s vast garden). The two cut a curious pair on stage – an aging intellectual with a sped-up, nasal voice wearing a tweed coat, and a relaxed gray-haired dude in a baseball cap and jeans. They’ve been friends for 30 years and the discussion started with a picture of them both back in the day; remarkably, they’d changed little. But their banter on stage was sometimes tense, almost fraternally competitive. They were ostensibly there to promote Weschler’s new collection of his conversations with Irwin (_Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees_), but the most interesting aspect of the talk was the perspective they inadvertently provided on the state of the art market – from two guys who’ve basically seen it from the birth of the contemporary art market to the crisis today.
Particularly poignant in this context was a story Irwin told about representing the US at the Venice Biennale toward the beginning of his career. According to him, his minimal concept for his contribution – to outline a square on the ground and let leaves from a tree fall within it, which would constitute the work – actually arose after he’d been told he didn’t have any budget to exhibit his original concept. This might be a prelude to the kind of inspirations and changes that could follow in the upcoming years. And as Weschler succinctly put it, ‘Any work of art is somewhere between priceless and worthless. To call it anything else is comedy’.
More postcards from LA to come.
If you don’t live in LA, it’s a good place to come to gain some perspective. If you do live here, it’s the easiest place to lose it. When you’re just visiting, it’s simple to recognize what you already think you know about the city from movies and TV. But when you actually live here (or grow up here, like I did), you walk around in this weird Truman Show bubble, viewing the place as if it’s playing out on a screen in the distance, and seeing yourself like you’re being filmed on some hidden camera.
While driving in West Hollywood this morning I passed a crush of paparazzi wildly pressing themselves and their zoom-lenses against the glass of a store window, but couldn’t see beyond them or tell who were they photographing. In a local dog-walking spot, Runyon Canyon, joggers pass slowly enough to eyeball each other, hoping for a celebrity sighting. From the top of the canyon, you can see the Hollywood sign in the distance and view the rest of the city from a dizzyingly high perspective, giving you a view on things you can’t notice while you’re driving through it. I grew up in a house that afforded a view of the LA basin, from downtown and even toward Long Beach, and west to the Pacific Ocean. Not until I left did I realize what a good perspective it gave me of the way the city’s sprawling and segregated neighborhoods relate and connect – something much harder to discern from a car window.
Naturally, LA’s museums and contemporary art spaces try to use views like these as a means of removing themselves from the sprawling surface streets. The Getty Center has a stunning one, which probably attracts more tourists than the exhibits. The new Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) tries to create one with its grandiosely steep escalator, which takes viewers three stories into the sky, where they come out to overlook the Hollywood Hills in the distance, and directly beneath them, the giant red lettering announcing the new LACMA pavilion under construction.
It’s hard not to read something ominous into this proud announcement of things to come, particularly amid the scandal surrounding MOCA’s possible closing and Eli Broad’s and LACMA’s possible role in bailing them out. (Just this morning, following the meeting of MOCA’s board of trustees, the Los Angeles Times announced that LACMA proposed a merger with MOCA, to save them from their financial troubles.)
Inside Broad’s BCAM, however, there are no traces of recession. The top floor features a collection assembled according to groups of works by individual artists, and it’s the first time I experienced a collection of American contemporary art that I can confidently describe as ‘patriotic’. The first work to greet you is Jasper Johns’ Flag (1967), followed by areas dedicated to works by Robert Rauschenberg (including a painting featuring a portrait of JFK), Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, Cy Twombly, John Baldessari, Andy Warhol, and Jeff Koons. It’s an undeniably impressive collection, one that feels fresh and current, if not somehow uniform in spirit. Each mid-size, colourful canvas seems to repeat the same masculine artistic gesture. And though there is something patriotic about the mood, there is also something brazen and even slightly vulgar about these works too. Traveling from Rauschenberg and ending up at Koons, works that might have intended to criticize or comment on a crass American consumer culture now seem comfortably part of that very same culture, and proud of it.
It’s impossible for me not to say something biting about the obvious fact that every artist represented here is male – with one concession – a mural by Barbara Kruger installed inside the elevator shaft (only visible when the elevator has descended), aptly and acerbically entitled Untitled (Shafted). There’s no excuse for not at least making some effort to correct this gross gender imbalance before opening the collection to the public, and the installation of Richard Serra’s monumental sculptures on the first floor seems only to add insult to injury.
On the other side of the courtyard, at LACMA, the temporary exhibition ‘Hard Targets: Masculinity and Sport’ is tucked away on the top floor of the Hammer Building. A fairly academic thematic of how artists contend with the typical heterosexual and competitive male stereotypes that dominate athletics, including works by Mark Bradford, Harun Farocki, Brian Jungen, Shaun El C. Leonardo and Collier Schorr. Of these, Schorr’s studies of male wrestlers are the most engaging and sensitive. But a picture printed in the exhibition’s pamphlet – Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger in only a tight swimsuit, taken in 1976 – provides the most insight into the exhibition’s inspiration.
Not far down the street from LACMA, the small complex of galleries at 6150 Wilshire continues to provide a concentrated and intimate collection of impressive shows. Of these, Anne Collier’s exhibition at Marc Foxx is the best. Collier shows an incredibly rigorous and disciplined series of her conceptual still life photographs, which address the very idea of the photographic image – including images of photographs already hanging on gallery walls and 8×10 prints in photographic developing trays. These might all seem a little too restrained if it weren’t for the inclusion of a close-up of a vintage 1950s porcelain figurine of woman holding a small camera that’s aimed straight back at us. At the neighboring galleries, 1301PE has a show of thick drippy forest paintings by Kirsten Everberg – groves of birch trees loosely rendered in shades of blue in gray – and ACME is showing large sculptures made of painted foamcore by New York artist Davis Rhodes.
Of all of LA’s museums, the most consistently interesting programmes take place at the Hammer, which at the moment features a group exhibition called ‘Oranges and Sardines’. (Group shows and Hammer Projects are also rounded out by the stellar events programme: when I was there, a few teenagers were already camping out in line for an advanced screening that night of the new Mickey Rourke film, The Wrestler.) ‘Oranges and Sardines’ is a group show about abstract painting, in which several artists, largely known as “painters’ painters”, were invited to select and exhibit works from the collection alongside their own. It’s one of those exhibition concepts that might briefly enter a curator’s mind and then quickly get dismissed as too gimmicky or too much of a one-liner, but here it’s been played out to the end. Mark Grotjahn, Wade Guyton, Mary Heilmann, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl and Christopher Wool each selected several works, in what I imagine is probably an interesting show for art students. But it’s fascinating to see the strong and pervasive influence especially of Phillip Guston and German artists of Isa Genzken’s generation. The highlight for me was a work selected by Heilmann – David Hockney’s intimate, quintessentially LA painting, Little Splash.
The three Hammer Projects on view at the moment – by Nathalie Djurberg, Erin Cosgrove and Aaron Curry – are skillfully curated to reflect a common interest in the use of child-like, imaginary yet all-encompassing worlds to describe much broader and darker themes. I’m looking forward to seeing Shirana Shahbazi’s upcoming project, which opens in a few days, on 20 December.
From the Hammer I took advantage of the clear weather to head up to that giant office building on the hill (where I used to work), The Getty Center. The ride on the futuristic monorail from the parking lot to the hilltop where the massive galleries and buildings are located provides a vertiginous look down on the 101 Freeway, where you can get a sense of traffic conditions for the way back. Once you’re up there, the weather seems to change and you feel removed from the city. I went to the Getty for a lecture in the auditorium between the brilliant writer Lawrence Weschler and Robert Irwin (who, among other things, designed the Getty Center’s vast garden). The two cut a curious pair on stage – an aging intellectual with a sped-up, nasal voice wearing a tweed coat, and a relaxed gray-haired dude in a baseball cap and jeans. They’ve been friends for 30 years and the discussion started with a picture of them both back in the day; remarkably, they’d changed little. But their banter on stage was sometimes tense, almost fraternally competitive. They were ostensibly there to promote Weschler’s new collection of his conversations with Irwin (_Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees_), but the most interesting aspect of the talk was the perspective they inadvertently provided on the state of the art market – from two guys who’ve basically seen it from the birth of the contemporary art market to the crisis today.
Particularly poignant in this context was a story Irwin told about representing the US at the Venice Biennale toward the beginning of his career. According to him, his minimal concept for his contribution – to outline a square on the ground and let leaves from a tree fall within it, which would constitute the work – actually arose after he’d been told he didn’t have any budget to exhibit his original concept. This might be a prelude to the kind of inspirations and changes that could follow in the upcoming years. And as Weschler succinctly put it, ‘Any work of art is somewhere between priceless and worthless. To call it anything else is comedy’.
More postcards from LA to come.
