Hot Coffee
It's impossible to discuss a group show like 'Hot Coffee' without asking a lot of questions like, 'who does art think it's fooling, anyway?' and, 'which is more crucial, flavour or substance?' Tom Lawson, Dean of the art school at California Institute of the Arts, and the curator of 'Hot Coffee', copped the show's title from a 1937 Edward Weston photograph, of a battered pictographic rest-stop sign somewhere in the California desert. The jaunty poignancy of a giant cup of joe steaming away in the middle of an already sizzling plain makes perfect sense if you've ever lived in Los Angeles, where ambition and good ideas routinely sublimate into an acrid, portentous haze. But away from home, as these artworks are, the situation just looks hopeless.
All six 'Hot Coffee' artists are 90s graduates of California Institute of the Arts. (A necessary disclosure: so am I). CalArts, which itself has run hot and cold as a pedigree-factory, is still known for some constants: one of them being that ideas come first and execution a distant second. This is manifested in 'Hot Coffee' as a brightly decrepit aesthetic, the kind of I'm-doing-the-best-I-can corner-cutting which most 'serious' artists outgrow when they hit the gallery circuit. But the 20- and 30-somethings in 'Hot Coffee' have nothing to grow out of, since arrested development is something LA tolerates as long as one pulls one's own creative weight.
That burden is loosely defined: Dave Muller, best known for organising the roving exhibition space Three Day Weekend, spent much of his graduate-school career hosting other students' shows in his studio. Now, he makes hand-lettered approximations of announcements for exhibitions by other Los Angeles artists. Formally, these unsolicited gifts look like art with pink mylar sheeting covering an oversize poster for Pae White and Greg Araki, and thick ropes of solder binding a series of giant metal postcards for Mitchell Syrop. Ultimately, viewers must decide whether Muller is cynically biding his time with this seemingly unambitious pursuit, or if he's just a really sweet guy and happy to finally have an excuse to make art.
One of the few artworks Marina Rosenfeld has produced is The Lingering Afterglow of Repetitive Longing (1996), a video loop of a woman (or maybe a long-haired man) playing silent air guitar, seen in silhouette on a patterned orange floor. One critic praised the rakish angle of Rosenfeld's video, projected casually into a gallery corner even though such nonchalance doesn't mesh with the clinical art-school title. The question of professionalism, then, hinges on whether this disjunction is purposeful or not; though if we decide it is, we must then decide whether to call Rosenfeld's work ironic or pretentious. (Unless, of course, we care to redefine our concept of professionalism.)
Laura Owens' one huge painting exhibits a similar sheepish ambition and a perfectly half-arsed execution: her untitled piece from 1996 depicts the lower half of a gloppily impastoed landscape hung low on a wall, the raw-canvas floor below it splotched by shadows of sickly pink and green. Also recalling (or is it critiquing?) crowd-pleasing Modernism is Kent Young's wall-sized grid of rectangular swatches of cloth old towels, upholstery vinyl, burlap, canvas much of it dingy and grimy, some of it frayed, stretched out like animal pelts.
Julie Becker's colour photographs of constructed rooms are more conceptually opaque; the few here start to mess with your mind, devolving into a looking-glass world of neatly arranged but unnameable dolls' house elements. Equally odd is an accidental sculpture entitled Tourists: London (1995), comprising a cardboard television crate supporting a metal film-reel can that contains a maddeningly inscrutable diorama of a miniature bureau and a white chalky substance.
Lastly, Andrea Bowers' series of 'Spectacular Appearances' (1996-97) threatens to sink 'Hot Coffee' under the weight of its legibility. Her three large drawings are each mostly empty, except for a small, perfunctory colour sketch of figures plucked from a crowd, dressed in quintessential white-trash American T-shirts and logo hats. Accompanying the drawings are two monitors playing hand-held video footage of an array of proletarian crowd scenes, like parades and baseball games. But the video compilations are mesmerising in a way that melts away condescension unlike most art-gallery patrons, these spectators appear to be having fun. Besides, if we didn't call them artists, the under-employed hand-labourers in 'Hot Coffee' would surely be considered white trash, too.
So what does one do with art like this? Art that refuses to take art seriously not because the artists aren't smart or capable enough, but possibly because they don't believe we deserve the best they can give. Think of their arrogance, and our longing. (And vice-versa.) Most art made in big cities is designed to be seen in enclosed white rooms with clean lines and hermetic logic following suit. But for art to survive outside locked-down institutions and dusty textbooks, it's got to find its way in the world. In Los Angeles, the studio windows stay wide open; the works in 'Hot Coffee' appear incidental because right now, art is incidental.
