If you’ve ever wondered how an earthworm or a barnacle has sex, you’ve probably never thought to ask Isabella Rossellini. But she knows. And you can even watch her demonstrate it – in a series of short films Rossellini has developed and starred in for the Sundance Channel, entitled ‘Green Porno’. I admit, when I received a copy of the accompanying catalogue to ‘Green Porno’ recently – which looked like the kind of children’s book you might find in a museum shop and featured a photograph of Rossellini on the cover cuddling up to a giant shrimp made of construction paper – I dismissed her, and the project, as crazy. And she still, in fact, might be. But when I stumbled upon a few episodes of ‘Green Porno’ on television this weekend, I also discovered that these short films are an inspired kind of insanity.
Each of Rossellini’s campy, instructional films is not much more than a minute long, and each stars Rossellini as some kind of insect or sea creature, dressed in a makeshift costume made of paper or other disposable materials. In each one, Rossellini matter-of-factly describes, then demonstrates using extremely low-budget special effects, how – if she were, say, a dragonfly, or a mantis, or a starfish – she would copulate and reproduce with her animal mate. In the film beginning ‘If I were a snail…’, for instance, Rossellini explains: ‘I can withdraw my entire body into my shell, where I can hide my vagina and my penis,’ then gleefully whispers to the camera, ‘I have both!’ and retreats into her giant snail shell made of cardboard.
Don’t be too fooled (or excited) by the title of ‘Green Porno’: these films resemble middle-school biology film reels much more than they do porn (even the weirdest kind). But they could also be Rossellini’s version of feminist video art. Rossellini (who is the daughter of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini), as an aging film star and an enduring sex symbol, plays the roles of both male and female insects with gusto. She adopts the giant nose of an angler fish or sucks food like an earthworm without any traces of self-consciousness, and with a deadpan knowingness. In fact, she says she was inspired to do the films by her childhood interest in entomolgy. And strangely, her roles as female whale, spider, or praying mantis seem to express the power of female animal sexuality as an extremely apt analogy for female human sexuality. In a short film simply called ‘Why Vagina’, she explains, ‘Eggs are precious; sperm are cheap… If I were any female, I would want to protect my precious eggs… I would have a tunnel, and it would be a labyrinth. It’s intricate and it’s unique. It’s species specific, so that I am not screwed by a bear…. That’s why I want my vagina.’
You can watch all of the Green Porno shorts on the Sundance Channel website.
As the art world has grown it has sprouted many cumbersome appendages. One of these awkward outcroppings is the hiring of public relations companies to promote biennials, museum exhibitions and other events. At best this promotional structure, which often inexplicably bypasses the institution’s own PR department, means that journalists are given more information and access to the organizers and artists in the event. At worst it gives rise to a proliferation of a kind of institutional propaganda – this can be as hands-off as a thick press kit or as full-on as a booked schedule of interviews with curators and speeches by museum directors. In any case, it’s how I found myself in the official apartment of the president of the Centre Pompidou, listening to an amplified speech next to a mountainous dish of shrimp and duck liver.
I should provide a disclaimer here to make it clear that this is no fault of the PR company involved – they did their jobs professionally and went above and beyond fulfilling the wishes of their client. But the biggest loss in an arrangement like this is that the PR company is called upon to do the interpretive job of a curator or a museum department that hasn’t done theirs. A 50-page press pack, no matter how lovingly prepared, can’t serve to explain a curator’s chaotic and malformed idea of an exhibition.
Such was the case at the opening of the Centre Pompidou’s ‘Nouveau Festival’ – a five-week festival billed as a ‘non-stop research lab into today’s creation’, including exhibitions, conferences, screenings and performances, with up to ten events per day by more than 160 participants. Last week’s opening in the ground-floor spaces of the Centre Pompidou proved to be a literal manifestation of this overweeningly ambitious project, a chaotic admixture of unrelated events that no press person could make sense of, no matter how dedicated.
I’ll admit that the initial confusion began with my inability to speak French, combined with a schedule for the opening night’s events that was printed only in French. I kept looking and re-looking at it, trying to solve it like a maths problem. Starting times and artists’ names were listed in bold, but no matter how many times I read it I saw nothing that prompted any sense of recognition. Just the jumble of information on this single sheet of paper conveyed the sense of an event that had been drastically over-planned. A ‘new festival showcasing today’s creation in all its shape and colours’ may have sounded promising in press releases, but it quickly became clear that not much consideration had been given to how all these shapes and colours would function together in time and space.
Feeling disoriented, I followed the escalator up to Galerie Sud, which houses the permanent installations of the festival, each demarcated by black curtains that could be opened or closed around them. I was looking at things that seemed to suggest art, that even reminded me of art – a metal cage housing paintings on racks, a platform surrounded by scaffolding from which you could look down on the space, a square of carpet with a laptop in the middle and headphones radiating from it – I even recognized Carsten Höller’s well-lit Mirror Carousel (2005), but none of it was gelling into something I would call an exhibition. Is it possible to have a festival of static art works? Is that nouveau?
I wandered aimlessly for the first half an hour, riding up and down the escalator a few times, checking the time on my phone against the printed schedule, but still not encountering anything recognizable as ‘performance’, until I entered Espace 315. Here was an empty stage with a wooden backdrop, topped by an enormous theatrical mask with an exaggeratedly bulbous nose. I made my way to the back side of the stage, which was actually a wooden cube lined with blue curtains, somewhat like a large coffin, and adorned with stumps covered in gold. Inside, a group of four performers from La Compagnie du Zerep – two men and two women dressed in outfits fit for a dinner party, were constructing a series of short, 20-second tableaux vivants in the space. They struck pose after pose, with deadpan expressions, using the props around them, which included a dish of cookies, a dead alligator, and something that looked like an oversized bicycle horn. The actors were perfect parodies of characters from French films about middle-aged bourgeois couples in Paris: the men played macho while the women played frustrated housewives. One picked something from her teeth while the other held her stomach as if she’d just eaten too much; In each successive tableau the man checks his breath, his hair piece falls off, he buries his face up her skirt. More than anything the performance was an act of stamina and invention as they improvised each new pose, barely breaking their straight faces while the audience laughed hysterically.
But the mood was disturbed shortly afterward as a procession filed through the crowd to the other side of the stage. This turned out to be an orchestra of about 20 accordion players, Les Accordéons de Paris. There are, I realize now, many different types of accordions. And many different types of accordion players. They each donned black Zorro masks, and proceeded to play theme songs from 1980s television shows and other standards for contemporary accordion. Meanwhile the giant plaster nose on top of the stage set hovered over their heads.
And with that, I’d apparently seen all the performances on the schedule for the evening, excluding the ones I couldn’t find and the ones I’d already seen that were scheduled to repeat throughout the night. I wandered around a bit more. The theatre troupe was booked to perform for another four hours, and I wondered how they’d keep that up. They seemed really delirious and sweaty. Outside the gallery I took a seat on a tiger-striped bench beside a live lizard in a terrarium. I felt confused. Maybe I was misled by the original press materials, which, among many names I didn’t know, had promised performances by Elmgreen & Dragset, Aurélien Froment and Andrea Fraser. But none of them were there. I couldn’t even find a schedule that published when exactly they would be there. Is this the point of a ‘Nouveau Festival’, that we have to let go of these classifications? Or perhaps the organizers were trying to recapture some of the original function of the Centre Pompidou as a multidisciplinary space that encouraged crossover among the arts. But if this opening was any indication, this model no longer holds up, or at least needs a clearer structuring principle to justify it.
The next day we visited the off-site half of the festival, a (relatively) conventional exhibition entitled ‘The probable fate of the man who swallowed the ghost’, housed in the Conciergerie’s Salle des Gens d’Armes, the cavernous basement of the former royal palace. This space, with its Gothic vaulted ceilings, was once where the king inspected his knights. It was later converted into the prison where Marie Antoinette was detained. We were accompanied by press representatives from the Centre des monuments nationaux; the festival’s Art Director, Bernard Blistène; and a few of the participating artists – all with their own interests to promote but none of which came together. This show, Blistène informed us, was about the ‘body in space’ inspired by a performance of Merce Cunningham’s Scenario (1997) and designed and conceived by the ‘human orchestra’, Christian Rizzo. I didn’t feel so badly about not knowing who he was, even after the curator described him as ‘the most famous choreographer in France’, because I quickly realized that he described every participant in the exhibition as the greatest or most famous at something. Hence, the exhibition included ridiculously high striped high-heels created by the most famous shoe designer in France, Benoît Méléard, as well as sculptures by the very famous cock-ring designer and most famous piercing artist, Jean-Luc Verna, who joined us to give a short but revealing lecture about the glass cock-rings that he had designed (_Bracelets érotiques_, 2009), which he reminded us several times were indeed wearable. Glancing at my notes now I see that I wrote ‘all the cock rings are wearable’ several different times. To me they looked a bit big to be ‘wearable’, and also sharp, and made of glass, but I let that slide because I genuinely believed he might strip down and demonstrate them if I asked any more questions.
Though the list of artists involved was impressive, for the most part each one had contributed only a small figurative piece, most of which were placed on a black stage-like platform that resembled a catwalk lined with tall globe lamps that dimmed and illuminated alternately. This shiny runway, designed by Rizzo, was peopled with sculptures by Berlinda de Bruyckere, Katharina Fritsch, Antony Gormley and Ai Weiwei, among others, in what was perhaps the largest collection of contemporary figurative sculpture I’ve seen in one place at one time. A procession of ghosts made of white bed-sheets and cartoonish drawn on faces seemed to emerge from one of the apses off to the side. This work, Ghosts (2003) by Olaf Breuning and Bernhard Willhelm, was actually one of the few successful works, if only because it seemed to be gleefully escaping this bizarre, stilted art/catwalk in a former prison/palace. When I asked if there were also performances taking place in this part of the festival, the curator pointed to a man dressed as a toreador lying on the ground (Pierre Joseph’s Le Toreador – personage a reactiver). Yes, of course.
The afternoon continued with a visit to the official apartment of the President of the Centre Pompidou, a modest residence situated across the plaza from the Pompidou. The President, Alain Seban, read from a prepared speech – at a Perspex podium that boasted another, shorter podium expressly for his glass of water – about statistics and figures (‘Four heads of department report to me’) and the museum’s future plans (‘Our Indian project will be centred around society issues, et cetera et cetera’). We diligently scribbled this carefully controlled collection of bullet points in our notebooks, if only to avoid having to make eye contact, particularly when someone on the plaza outside started yelling angrily, and I could see the President’s gaze fix on something through the wooden shutters, as if he were making a mental note to tell his assistant later to have that nuisance removed.
Over a dish filled with bread and paté, I tried to figure out what exactly about this arrangement had made me so uncomfortable. Was I just disturbed by the aims of the festival itself, which felt out of step with Blistène’s insistence that the museum can accommodate the ‘latest trends in art’? To me this looked more like the creation of something with no specific point of reference, historical or otherwise. (When I asked him if there was an ‘old festival’ or some other precedent for the ‘new festival’, he could refer only vaguely to the initial spirit of ‘crossing boundaries’ when the Pompidou first opened in 1977.) It seemed to be a symptom of an unspoken imperative for the Centre Pompidou to do something ‘cross-disciplinary’, even if the elements included might function best inside their own disciplines. Such a hugely ambitious programme would have benefited from a more rigorous institutional structure and some thought as to which kinds of performance might be able to exist simultaneously, and which are better given their own forum so as not to get lost in the shuffle. Blistène’s hope for the visitors to become ‘_flâneurs_’ in the space seemed a poor analogy, as Baudelaire’s flâneur was most likely never assaulted by an entire orchestra of accordionists wearing Zorro masks.
I saw more naked bodies on display on my one-day mid-winter trip to Warsaw then I am used to or comfortable with. Performances involving the body, primarily the naked one, have been and continue to play a large part in the Polish artistic tradition. But there is much more to the Polish art scene than men with no pants, which I had the chance to learn thanks to the incredible openness and frankness of the members of the small but ambitious artistic scene of the capital city.
Visiting galleries in Warsaw is what I imagine it might have been like to walk around Berlin’s galleries 10 or 15 years ago. There are no outward displays of wealth from these spaces, no opaque brushed-glass windows or large vertical metal door handles. For the most part, galleries are housed in modest, sometimes crumbling flats, or tucked away in backyard buildings. It’s hard to tell whether these traces of decrepitude are partially an affectation, or whether they’re due solely to a lack of funds. Either way, there is a refreshing lack of pomp and bling on show.
There are also apparently less rigid professional boundaries in the art scene. Colleagues talk openly about fellow colleagues, galleries are eager to promote not only their own artists, but others, too. There is a vague sense of patriotism – while galleries here might be able to cash in on artists from nearby burgeoning scenes in the Baltic states, Ukraine, Romania or Russia, they prefer to represent primarily Polish artists. Members of this tight-knit artistic community are glad to wear multiple hats; many galleries for instance, function simultaneously (if not confusingly) as commercial and non-profit spaces.
Another sign of the lack of precious elitism in the art world in Warsaw is that local and national politics are often tangled up in art – there is no high-brow disengagement from the national political landscape, as may be found in other countries. Political activity is a deep-rooted part of the artistic tradition. Artur Żmijewski, for instance, has recently joined the leftist political movement in Poland, openly mingling his artistic and political beliefs.
My first stop after exiting the train station and running smack into the ominous, looming figure of the Palace of Culture and Science stretching upwards into the sky and cloaked by swirling snow flurries, was a somewhat run-down former castle that is now the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle. The castle already hosts an International Artist-in-Residence programme, but the condition of the exhibition spaces leaves much to be desired. The castle is currently hosting two exhibitions: the first is a scrappy exhibition of production shots, set pieces, costumes and archival material from the films of the German independent film director Ulrike Ottinger. Homemade Viking helmets and crocodiles wearing boots joined ample video clips of little people and transvestites. But most striking was the shabby installation – bumpy carpet and fabric haphazardly stapled to the wall did little to help the cause. The larger exhibition spaces were dedicated to ‘May Man Rot’, which, as stated on the press release, celebrates the ‘300th anniversary of Lodz Kaliska’, a radical artist’s collective. As it turns out, this is actually their 30th anniversary (not 300th) and despite the feminist rhetoric, the collective consists of four men. Even more strangely, the exhibition comprised room after room of large photographic murals of naked, large-breasted women performing ‘male-oriented’ labour, such as naked, large-breasted women felling trees and naked, large-breasted women mining coal. I thought perhaps these were pioneering feminist performances from the 1970s, but that was impossible, since all the naked, large-breasted women were wearing brightly colored Crocs. According to Warsaw locals, the group of men responsible for these male-fantasy murals were once important members of the critical art scene in the late ’70s, but, since then, apparently, they may have failed to realize how out-of-step their current work is. Unfortunately none of their influential early work was on view to suggest otherwise.
A new gallery guide published by Zacheta National Gallery, ‘What’s On in Warsaw Galleries’, makes navigating the local galleries relatively easy. My first stop was Galeria Leto, a recently founded gallery which represents Wojciech Bakowski, one of three Polish artists who will be featured in the upcoming New Museum show ‘Younger than Jesus’. Director and founder Marta Kolakowska gave us a comprehensive overview of the current scene in Warsaw. All of the artists she represents are Polish, and many of them hail from nearby Poznan, which, according to Kolakowska, has a burgeoning artistic scene, developing at a distance from the current trendiness of Warsaw.
It was there that we also got our first lesson in a subject that has always confused me: the difference between Galeria Foksal [the not-for-profit space opened in 1966 and the most influential and important avant-garde gallery of its generation] and Foksal Gallery Foundation [the commercial gallery established by one of the founding members of Foksal Gallery, Wieslaw Borowski, in 1997, as a way of earning money to fund activities of Foksal Gallery and continuing its traditions]. Even the local journalists in Warsaw occasionally confuse the two, but in fact, the two spaces operate independently of each other, with none of the associations that their similar names might imply.
Though we didn’t have a chance to visit the original Foksal Gallery, we did make it to the Foksal Gallery Foundation just in time for the final screening of a film by young local artist Anna Molska (born 1983, freshly plucked from the influential studio of Grzegorz Kowalski at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw). But Molska’s work shows nothing of her youth and relative newness on the scene. The Weavers (2008) is based on considerable arcane references: the dialogue, uttered in Polish by three miners from the Silesia region, is based entirely on Gerhart Johann Hauptmann’s 1892 eponymous play. Though the original play is about the mid-19th-century revolt of textile workers in the Owl Mountains, the action and dialogue translate aptly to the current conditions of the Polish mining region, and, by extrapolation, to the global economy. The grizzled workers are shown working in dank underground tunnels and traipsing through poorly lit corridors, stripping out of their heavy uniforms, showering naked and soaping each other’s backs – while not oblivious to the young artist filming them. Molska’ work somehow has the feeling of both a gritty documentary and high artifice and theatricality, gracefully choreographed to an antiquated play.
After the show, we were lucky enough to by given a tour of the former studio of Edward Krasinski, the Polish artistic legend whose reputation has been revived and preserved through the efforts of the Foksal Gallery Foundation, which has kept the studio intact and organized an exhibition and publication around it. Tours are available by appointment, and I can only say that a trip to this studio is worth a trip to Poland.
While FGF is located on the third floor of what could pass for a small office building or doctor’s practice, Raster can be found on the top floor of a dilapidated flat, and approaching the door is like knocking on the door of a college dorm room, complete with peeling paint and stickers. There’s no concern with pristine white-cubeness here. The front office hosts a cosy bookshop that also sells t-shirts and a selection of records and CDs. Serving multiple purposes, the gallery also publishes an online art magazine about the Polish art scene (in Polish). The exhibition space itself consists of two very modestly sized rooms, currently showing Aneta Grzeszykowska’s 2008 film Headache, which – and I was getting used to it by now – featured the performance of a naked dancer. Each of her four disembodied limbs performs a choreographed pantomime against a pitch-black background. The effect of the limbs performing in concert, yet detached from her body, is seamless, and the film ends at the exact moment when the woman’s torso is reunited with her dancing arms and legs.
The performance was a fitting prelude to the opening night of the ambitious exhibition ‘Performer’, on view at Warsaw’s largest contemporary exhibition space, Zacheta National Gallery of Art. The exhibition featured a crowded, rather overwhelming collection of film and video performances, primarily historical, which included violent or extreme mutilations of the body by well-known artists such as Marina Abramović, Carolee Schneemann and Hermann Nitsch, alongside archival documentation of performances and rehearsals with renowned Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski. Unfortunately the significance of the director’s work was overshadowed by the looming presence of works by artistic giants like Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman and Otto Muehl. To round out the already bizarre preponderance of male genitalia I’d seen on the trip, the museum was also showing a vast exhibition of drawings collaboratively made by Paul McCarthy and Benjamin Weissman, most of which featured their doodles, watercolours and sketches of testicles and penises.
Our last stop in Warsaw was the temporary home of the Museum of Modern Art, not far from its future site, which will be directly adjacent to the Palace of Culture and Science, and is slated to open (after considerable delay already) in 2014. The temporary site is a pleasant two-story glass-faced building, featuring a permanent neon installation by Paulina Olowska and a sculpture at the entrance by Monika Sosnowska. On view is the first retrospective of the influential Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu, ‘In the body of the victim 1969-2008’. The exhibition spans Grigorescu’s entire career, from his early 8mm films from the 1970s, which documented the changes imposed by Nicolae Ceausescu in Bucharest. The highlight of these early, political works was an imaginary conversation that the artist staged between himself and the Romanian dictator, Dialogue with Ceausescu (1978, 2007). Less interesting were his extensive series of films from the late 1970s, which documented the artist conducting various performances in the nude, and his latest work Sleep (2008) which recorded the artist’s thin, pale, naked frame while asleep on a sofa. Notably, the exhibition also contained a significant archival element, a row of vitrines displaying Grigorescu’s notebooks, diary entries, sketches and recordings of his dreams.
Before departing for the train station to get the six-hour ‘Warsaw Express’ back to Berlin, I dined on some traditional Polish soup and dumplings. For some reason, I just wasn’t in the mood for sausage.
Go back and check out my last blog from LA and you’ll see a photograph of a sign posted in Runyon Canyon, a local LA hiking spot, warning visitors to wear proper footwear because of steep slopes. I liked the ‘fear of falling’ aspect of that sign, until yesterday, when, hiking up the exact same canyon, I watched a pretty dramatic helicopter rescue of an ill-footweared hiker. The whole spectacle lasted about an hour, with the helicopter circling over our heads to lower the paramedic to the ground, then returning to pick up the hiker and hoist her up precariously by a cable, as dust and dry brush blew in our faces. When I talked to one of several firemen left on the ground after the helicopter flew off to the hospital, he said the woman had ‘twisted her ankle pretty bad’. Um, all that for a twisted ankle? Yep.
And speaking of dramatic rescues, since my last entry, another rescue has taken place, as MOCA has been bailed out by Eli Broad. No helicopter necessary. But MOCA’s predicament did make me think about how the museum got stranded like that in the first place, and about a particularly LA trait. Okay, so I’m oversimplifying a bit, but it seems like, here, much more so than in New York or London, for instance, it’s cool not to care. In fact, not caring is way more important than caring. LA is laid-back … on the surface. You’ll see people wearing sweatsuits while they’re out shopping, carrying giant lattes in paper cups and looking like they just rolled out of bed. It’s a kind of blasé, show-offy self-deprecation. Maybe the art world here adopts the same strategy. I’m thinking of some of the galleries in Culver City that purposely haven’t changed the facades left behind by their former tenants, so that you could drive by, or even walk by them, without noticing what’s inside.
Probably the highest concentration of galleries in LA at the moment is along a generic, seemingly shuttered stretch of busy La Cienega Boulevard, near the concrete banks of the LA River. Its an unlikely place for gallery hopping – buildings are so nondescript you’re not sure whether to enter from the front or the back, and if you enter from the street you’re pretty much guaranteed to be the only pedestrian out there. Along this stretch, though, are some of LA’s best galleries, hidden behind the metal gates of modest former stores or offices. Though Anna Helwing has gone, Peres Projects, Cherry and Martin, and David Kordansky are moving in. When I visited, shortly before many shows closed for the holidays, the shows on view were spotty, and between good galleries you’re bound to find at least one bad one. By far my favorite show was at Taylor de Cordoba – a refreshingly earnest photographic collaboration between Sasha Bezzubov and Jessica Sucher called ‘The Searchers’. These medium-format images of Western tourists in the spiritual meditation and yoga centers of India transcend the medium and their potentially banal subject matter. They could be on the scale of Andreas Gursky’s or Thomas Ruff’s work, but these photographs show that images don’t have to be blown up to huge dimensions to be monumental. Other stand-out shows in the area were George Stoll’s sculptures at Kim Light and Yishai Jusidman’s square format paintings after photos from ‘The Economist’ at Angstrom Gallery.
In another world nestled behind the skyscrapers of downtown, the galleries on the tiny strip of Chung King Road might as well exist on a studio back-lot. This might possibly be the smallest pedestrian zone in LA, a former home to gift shops and restaurants and now almost entirely revamped and taken over by galleries populating the tiny, narrow two-storey buildings. While some galleries have recently moved on, others have moved in – like Chung King Project, which was showing attractive 3-D collages made of strips and swatches of fabric and other found elements by Maeghan Reid. These modest works had a an unselfconscious, free-spiritedness that excused their potentially cliché subjects. Galleries here are hit and miss, too, though David Patton had a Darren Almond exhibition that you might expect to see in blue-chip gallery or a project room in a museum. Here, Almond showed his recent work ‘Bearing’, a 35-minute, almost silent video of workers appearing and disappearing in the billows of noxious yellowy-orange smoke in a sulfur mine in Indonesia. This arresting video had an unearthly quality – the ground inside the volcanic crater is almost never visible, cloaked by layers of sulfuric fog, and you can almost smell the toxic gasses.
Nearby, at the recently bailed-out MOCA, Martin Kippenberger’s long-awaited retrospective is an unexpected flexing of male muscle. I thought the show would help me get to the bottom of Kippenberger’s seemingly outsized influence on art students and young artists today. It’s certainly not his painting style – the paintings in the show, with the exception of the series ‘Lieber Maler, male mir’ (Dear Painter, Paint for Me, 1981), which he hired a sign-painter to paint – are uniformly ugly. The sculptural installations are scattered and unwieldy and almost seem like furniture amid the overcrowded walls. Kippenberger was nothing if not prolific, and his authentic impulse to create is definitely captured in this show. Kippenberger was the ultimate dude – his body of work is varied and irreverent, and he was never afraid to turn his sarcastic, lewd humor inward on himself, as evidenced by the abundance of self-portraits of him wearing bike pants or striking embarrassing poses. Maybe what appeals to young artists about Kippenberger was the degree to which he appeared not to care. He constantly downgraded the status of painting, and himself as a painter. He was bawdy and self-deprecating, and, somehow, in the slacker culture of LA, he fits right in.
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’.
A recent episode of the television show Mad Men – a brilliant series about Madison Avenue advertising executives in the early 1960s – featured a work of contemporary art as its surprising symbolic centrepiece. In this episode, the boss of the ad agency, the eccentric Mr. Cooper (who always makes employees remove their shoes before entering his office) is rumoured to be calling his executives to his office, one-by-one, for a personal meeting. His workers are convinced that the meetings are a cover-up – that they’re actually being tested on their reactions to Mr. Cooper’s new acquisition, a painting that cost him 10,000 dollars. The executives decide to break into his office after hours, to get a head start on formulating their opinions about the new ‘picture’. Upon opening up the door, they find a red and orange Mark Rothko hanging on the wall. ‘Hmph. Smudgy squares’, declares the secretary. One of the executives, the head of the television department, who is first-up for his personal meeting with Mr. Cooper, decides there are two possibilities: ‘Either Cooper loves it, so you have to love it, like in an emperor’s new clothes situation, or he thinks it’s a joke and you’ll look like a fool if you pretend to dig it.’ None of them, not even the ‘creatives’ or the art department, can come up with a meaningful interpretation of such a modern work of art. When the head of TV is finally called in to see Mr. Cooper, he admits, ‘Sir, I know nothing about art.’ To which Mr. Cooper divulges his secret: ‘People buy things to realize their aspirations – it’s the foundation of our business.’ And then, before dismissing the topic, he adds with a grin, ‘But between you and me and the lamppost, that thing should double in value by next Christmas.’
Either nothing has much has changed about American’s perceptions toward art since 1961, or the episode is a reflection of how we in the US view contemporary art today, seen through the lens of our past. Namely, we understand art primarily for its financial value. A recent cover story in Time (the first time, probably since Andy Warhol, that the magazine featured a contemporary artist on its cover) pictured Damien Hirst beside the headline ‘Bad Boy Makes Good’. Underneath it, the subtitle gushed, ‘Thanks to an unprecedented auction, the merrily morbid British artist Damien Hirst is about to land the biggest payday in the history of art.’ So ‘making good’, in this case, doesn’t mean making good art, it means earning lots of money. The article, which focuses mainly on Hirst’s prices and his impoverished background (calling him a ‘cash cow’), is illustrated with several images of Hirst’s work: their titles are printed in black, while their ‘Estimated Prices’ are printed even larger, in siren red. The article presents his artwork in the only terms it assumes its readers will understand: what makes him worthy of inclusion in this magazine is not the quality of his artworks, but the prices they can fetch.
