...a little wisdom in the midst of nonsense.

No opportunity to get out and see any shows today, so I will just post a little something from the excellent The Daily Practice of Painting, by Gerhard Richter.

However ineptly - desperately ineptly - I set about it, my will, my endeavour, my effort - what drives me - is the quest for enlightenment (apprehension of "truth", and of the interconnections; coming closer to a meaning; so all my pessimistic, nihilistic actions and assertions have the sole aim of creating or discovering hope).

Yawn

As much as I wince at the idea of even spending a few seconds weighing in on the silly Mike Weiss Gallery v. Eric Doeringer (Dough wringer? Hmmm...) controversy, see here for Eric's side of the story, I must put my two-pence worth in. Should artists be allowed to sell crap on the street, propped up by the tiresome theoretical nonsense they learned in art-school? Well, yes, I suppose that in a country like America, that must be allowed. And should serious gallery dealers, who show serious and committed artists in their gallery, be allowed to complain about said second-year art-student crap littering the front of their premises? Yes.
Eric, take a note from Sherrie Levine (and by the way, where is Sherrie these days), and investigate the possibility of doing something original.

Curdled Skin, Pricey Deer Shelters and some Hope

Just bits and pieces as the week-end approaches:

Can this be right: 800,000 British pounds (that's the equivalent of 1.4 million US dollars at today's exchange rate) for an abandoned deer shelter in England to be turned into one of James Turrell's "sky spaces? The Guardian has just a tad more information here, but if I know the punters, there will be more, slightly hysterical responses to follow.

And in today's NY Times, Michael Kimmelman gives an appropriately limpid review to the Ecstacy show currently up at MOCA. I was at the opening, all the light show/dj/pop-rocks give-aways seemed corny, like what it would be like if you were a teen-ager and your parents organized a party for you and your "hip" friends. Well-meaning, but kind of sad in that way of gifts that just miss their mark.

The only gems in the show, if they can be called that, were the Paul Noble drawings, and a couple of the Glenn Brown paintings. But looking at Brown's paintings, I couldn't help but see the overwhelming "influence" of the artist Ivan Albright. Never a big fan of the curdled-skin school of portraiture, but I did think it was brilliant that they used one of Albright's paintings in the 1945 film of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

All in all, I didn't even come close to experiencing anything mildly euphoric from the show, let alone ecstatic. Closest I came to an altered state was a stomach-ache from those damn Pop-Rocks. Read the article here

But there's always hope. This week-end some shows that may have promise are opening:

• Christopher Murphy's intelligent and well-done (read: no curdled flesh) paintings at Hunsaker Schlesinger gallery


• The Figurative Impulse opening at Forum Gallery (it's a large group show, so there's bound to be some curdled skin, but also a few treasures, notably some Odd Nerdrum works)



• Although it had it's opening last week, I really want to get down to Orange County (no, I won't be calling it OC) to see the John Waters exhibit at the Orange County Museum of Art. Unimaginably risque exhibit for that bland land, kudos to them for that (take note Schimmell), and a great web-site, but I'm a bit disappointed that the only two films of Waters' that they're screening are his most mainstream and palatable. What, no Eat Your Make-Up? I'd like to see someone do a re-make of this masterpiece, with Tyra Banks playing the nanny.


• And in Culver City, a couple of shows, Mike Giant at Lab 101 and Tim Forcum paintings at d.e.n contemporary

Would this Work With A Damien Hirst?

An interesting article a few days back dealing with art-as-therapy, specifically having oldsters who are suffering from Alzheimer's visit a museum, stare at a painting or two, and recieve semi-miraculous benefits! An Andrew Wyeth was one of the paintings mentioned, particularly his haunting "Christina's World". But I wonder, would it work with other more contemporary, how shall I put it, more outre art? See here for the full article.

R.I.P. Arman

Last of the New Realists, Arman is dead. In 1960 he filled a gallery in Paris (Galerie Iris Clert) with trash and garbage (not the last we've seen of that), two years earlier his friend and fellow martial arts enthusiast Yves Klein emptied a gallery completely out for an exhibit. Then started the accumulations, the taking apart and reconfiguration of objects, the occasional partial incineration of objects. Soon, it started looking all the same, too much of too many things, and he was kind of forgotten. But he was a pioneer in his time, and it will be interesting to see in the next few years what the inevitable reassesment will be.

Three Women

Out to see an exhibit of collages and journals by Exene Cervenka, seminal doyen of the early L. A. Punk scene, the Lilly Munster of a poetic three-chord over-drive, her aesthetic a combination of hill/rock - a - billy and sunshine flecked Goth.....I loved X, saw them a few times in their hey-day, and so off to the Santa Monica Museum I headed.....I wanted to like it, wanted to love it, alas....
But first, a short digressive disclaimer: I started this blog feeling that one of the parameters would be that I was going to forego, or at least keep short, tirades and screeds about the sorry state of the artistic nation, and to try and accentuate the positive, because there really is a great quantity of good art out there, and I am aware of how difficult it must be for even mediocre artists to make work and get it out there.
Having said that, this was a disappointing show. Gloppy, slap-dash zine-like collage, little or no formal integration of elements, and the content, if it existed, seemed not much more transcendent than personal mementos or passing thoughts. If they have any kinship to any other art that I've seen in galleries, it would be a smaller and more cluttered version of Alexis Smith. The work had little or no drawing or painting, save for the occasional scribble, seemingly to fill a blank spot or add visual texture. But even the scribbles seemed poorly executed.
The journals, displayed in a small glass case, were only slightly more interesting. Same aesthetic, but possibly because of their less formal nature, a little less worked over and hence, visually more accessible. All in all I was surprised to find that her visual art had none of the punch of X's music, none of the dissonant harmony that she created with John Doe, nor did it seem to address or embody any of the concerns they sang about.
This begs the question: should the criteria one holds art to shift depending on its maker? Because she has created an interesting (and historically important) body of work in another field, should we give her a break on these collages, attempting to locate them in the context of her other work, or should we judge the work separately, in and of themselves, not allowing any leeway as seeing them of the same punk diy sensibility that has informed her music?



From there a drive north, to see, of all things, an exhibit of the paintings of Zelda Fitzgerald at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, located on the campus of Pepperdine University in Malibu. I have seen some very good shows here, the last one I made the trek for was an excellent over-view of Claes Oldenberg's works on paper.
Now, I knew only the cursory tabloid version of Miss Zelda, (martinis/ feather boas/ nervous break-downs) and I certainly didn't know that she was a painter. So, I walked into the show skeptical, but rather quickly found myself charmed into an appreciation of this minor, but unassumingly magical body of work.
The show consisted of about 50 gouache on paper works. Initially inspired to paint diversions for her daughter Scottie, she did a series of cut-out and painted paper dolls, some depicting the family, and in others, characters from the era of Louis XIV or from classic fairy tales. To contain these she painted and cut out a pumpkin coach, fashioned of heavy paper and with a wire hinge so that it could function as a portfolio. It was very expressive in a hand-fashioned way, painted in the style of early 20th century fairy tale illustrations.
More free-wheeling and eccentric were the framed triptychs on paper, depicting various characters, some from a historical era, some from fairy tales. The oddest of these was a framed triptych on paper depicting the Big Bad Wolf from Little Red Riding Hood, wearing a long white flowing party dress, with red lipstick and mascara heavily laid on, striking a somewhat limp-pawed pose.
The figures were competently rendered in a naive manner, except she seemed to have been influenced by Picasso (she met him when her and F. moved to Paris in 1924) in terms of that particular grotesque rendering of limbs: ballooning musculature and enlarged hands and feet. Think Picasso's cave women.
My favorite was a single frame gouache on paper from 1945, titled Old Mother Hubbard. Incorporating a topsy turvy perspective, with what looks like the floor of a house up-surging and splitting in the middle, it has a crazy-quilt visual rhythm to it.
Not a great show by any means, minor work to be sure, but it's charm lay in its simple, unpretentious manner. It has a homey make-do innocence about it, almost extinct in this age of everything store-bought and pre-fashioned, and it evoked memories of simple childhood toys, quiet time passed in the making of simple things.



The Shahzia Sikander exhibit at Otis College of Art and Design is in conjunction with a fellowship where she was in a teaching residency there for four weeks. It consisted of a series of large gouache on paper pieces, a series of smaller gouaches, and two projected digital video animation.
The larger pieces, all done on a heavy paper tinted a dusty rose hue, were very well done, the line and imagery interlaced so that abstractly embroidered areas melded nicely with imagery often drawn from traditional Mughal painting. These were paintings that were big and spacious, but as one got closer, you could get lost in deciphering the Bosch-like detailing. Over-all they seemed to be about the cyclic beginnings and endings of the world, all at once, without a reliance on too obvious imagery.
A smaller series of 9 "Land-Escapes" hewed closer to the tradition of that flattened perspective found in miniatures from the Mughal and Persian traditions, but also seemed more opaque and dense, more abstract than the larger ones.
The two digital animation pieces, SpiNN and Pursuit of Curve were nice, but felt unnecessary, as the imagery and tone seemed just like the paintings, only they were moving and accompanied by a slightly new-agey soundtrack. Like the paintings, the narrative thread remained ambiguous enough to let the viewer bring their own interpretation to it.
I know there's been loads of critical exegesis spooned out in the art magazines on her work as regards post-colonial re-appropriation and hybridization blah blah blah....That's all very nice and fun to read for about 3 minutes, but the work doesn't need long-winded intellectual over-explanations. It's beauty and intelligence stands on its own, and is all the better (for me) without the art-speak nonsense cluttering up my experience of it.

Gift from Above, er, Below?

Well, after today's traumatic experience of coming across one of those angels, went to see a show that gave me some respite, visually and conceptually. Peter Beste's photo documentary work of Norwegian Black Metal at Black Market Gallery in Culver City.
Fascinating peek at a frightening subculture, Norwegian youth violently unearthing their Pagan Norse roots through black metal, occasional bloodlust, and a nature worship that Caspar David Friedrich might have approved of.
I'm always fascinated by these obscure subcultures, and this is a succinct over-view of a scene that I'd heard a bit about. Beautiful photography, real film (not digital) and a well-integrated mix of color and black and white photographs, with just the right amount of text on the occasional wall tag lending some insight into this darkly magical world.
A very timely show to welcome us into the Halloween season. The above photo is King Ov Hell, from the band Gorgoroth.
Peter Beste has an interesting web-site here, showing some of his other photo-documentary projects.

Abomination

On my way up to Malibu to see the Zelda Fitzgerald painting exhibit (more on that tomorrow), came across this. Hadn't seen one for a while, and I'd forgotten how hideous they were. When are these eyesores going to disappear? If this is what angels look like, send me to Hell.

Yes, Yes, Stop Thinking So Much!

Just came across Edward Winkleman's blog, and his thread on the recent upsurge and interest in Andrew Wyeth was very interesting, and as one can see from the resulting comments, touched a nerve. I like some of Wyeth's work, particularly the rougher studies in pencil and watercolor, where he leaves off before getting too fussy and finished. But I can see the logic on the other side of the fence, as well. Some of the work comes close to something one might see on musty old magazine covers. But I think to dismiss Wyeth entirely is about something more than just the work, suggesting perhaps the fear of not seeming politically correct or sophisticated enough. One of the commenters on that thread posted a Joseph Beuys quote, which I'm posting here, as I think it rings of a wisdom that's much needed in these times.

"Art looks more towards a field where sensitivity is developed into an organ of cognition and hence explores areas quite different from formal logic. I have to admit that only quite a small minority is still in a position to understand pictures. The times educate people to think in terms of abstract concepts... most people think they have to comprehend art in intellectual terms—in many people the organs of sensory and emotional experience have atrophied."

—Jospeh Beuys

Occasionally I like to play a little game wherein I wonder, "If I could have any painting or work of art in the history of it all, which would it be?"
Today I was thinking about portraiture, and how the commissioning of such really doesn't occur anymore like it had throughout history. The last painter of any real significance who did commissions was Andy Warhol. And there was a period in the late 70's early 80's where Warhol seemed to be doing a portrait of anyone who would put up the cash.
I'd like to see the concept and practice make a resurgence....and with that thought, here are a couple of portraits by two artists , Frank Auerbach and Antonio Saura, who I would commission to do my portrait, had I the money, they the inclination, and in the case of Antonio Saura, life. He died in 1998. As you can see, I'm feeling a bit expressionistic and swirly today.

Rainy Day Musings

"....Someday a real rain is gonna come and wash all the scum off the streets....." Yes Travis, that is the hope, but for today, this is as close as we're going to come to a real rain.
Los Angeles always looks better in the rain, and I love the way the natives go a bit bonkers, forgetting how to drive, staying in and battening down the hatches, and cluttering up the news programs with an almost apocalyptic concern over the drizzle.
The best thing that could happen to the culture of this town is for a straight year of London's weather. Pitch the writers and artists into some serious existential weather, prevent them from going down to the seashore or the gym, force them to stay in and work.
And nothing better on a rainy day than to stay in, have a cup of tea, and catch up on some of the art magazines that have been piling up unread of late. There is a beacon of sanity out there, and his name is Matthew Collings, a regular contributor to Modern Painter magazine.
The magazine as a whole is stellar, particularly in the muddy context of the other magazines claiming to cover the arts.
Collings writes on colour, or at least that's where he takes off from, in the (?) issue, and here is just a taste, from an article titled How Contemporary Art is Redeemed from Shallowness :

Here's a definition of the word "aura" that will help you with what you're about to read. It has two meanings in general usage: it is a mysterious glow that comes off works of art, and it is something spooky that radiates off ghosts. We know Walter Benjamin got it right about mechanical reproduction - about art not having a special aura anymore. It no longer requires a cultic or emotional response. It is demythologised. On the other hand, we know that if it's contemporary art it's totally re-mythologised as well. It radiates a special sense of mysterious faux-clever and faux-political meanings, which replace not so much aura as the sentimental narratives of religious art. In catalogues for officially approved shows filled with spacemen dressed in African fabrics, and headphones relaying the mumbles of people who believe they've been probed by Martians, we read articles droning on about resisting power - an idea that comes from the Frankfurt school of philosophy but which now, in its purely curatorial one-upmanship phase, sounds more depressing than anything Adorno ever wrote about Donald Duck or Guy Lombardo. This is our modern version of empty droning from the vicar's pulpit.
Why not stop thinking like that? Think about art instead. What makes it up? Form and meaning - form can be anything, but while in theory meaning in art can be anything, in practice the explosion of new meanings in contemporary art seems to go with an utter dreariness of form. Therefore meaning or content is wrong at the moment - let's ditch it. Form includes colour. Let's look at this.

And he goes on from there, and it just gets better and more intelligent.....An interview with Mr. Collings can be found here.

And if that's not enough, here's a bit more.

A Small Sampling

Out and about to a few openings last night. No real diamonds seen, but a few notable gems here and there. Went into Culver City first, where there seems to be a new gallery opening weekly. This area could finally be the realization that all collectors and artists in Los Angeles have been dreaming of for years. It seems Los Angeles has for many years, off and on, been trying to get a downtown scene going. Back in the eighties with MOCA opening up down there, hope glimmered, artists started finding cheap spaces to work, a couple of artist's hang-outs emerged, but alas, nothing significant came of it. Then in the last few years, downtown seemed to come up again, with a few galleries opening up down there, and over in adjacent Chinatown. And it looked like again, something significant might happen. But, and here's the big but, two significant problems remained: traffic and location.
Few are willing to enter into rush-hour traffic to get downtown to an opening, and then find themselves down in an area without any place to have a drink, eat, or shop or see a film afterwards. And that has been the problem of downtown. And until there are shops and theaters and cafes and bookstores and a sense of community down there, most of the collectors and serious culterati (most whom live on the west-side) I know are rarely going to make the trek.
So, Culver City has many things going for it, and for the moment someone is taking the ball and running with it. These two sites, while pretty much only a map, give a nice overview to the galleries down there. Here's another site, with interactive maps!
First off, stopped into Blum & Poe, where I was looking forward to seeing the two-man show of George Condo and Nigel Cooke. Titled Black, it seemed a bit thin curatorially.....The Condo part were umpteen black life-size heads in bronze, painted black, set out on a grid on waist-high pedestals. Expressively done in a manner where the modeling process of the heads was apparent, only a couple had that goofy Picasso meets Daffy Duck look I've loved about Condo in the past. The rest felt a bit generic, and given that there was the trademark Condo-ness in a couple, I was a bit puzzled, and frankly disappointed. Cooke's contribution were paintings, four or five large ones and couple smaller. His trademark look with horizon line place just above the bottom of the canvas was still there, but these were night scenes, hence, lots of black (Note to Blum & Poe: oh, black! I get it!). I wanted to like them, I really did. I like Cooke's work, and saw a show of his at Andrea Rosen a few years back that was delightful. But, well, the particular aspects of his paintings that really got me in the past were the little subtle pentimenti that showed up all over his urban landscapes, so that you might be looking at one part of the canvas for minutes and things were continuing to come off it and amuse and delight you. Not so with these new paintings. 90 per cent black, a bit of painted urban clutter at the bottom, but the interest for me was swallowed and disappeared into the black. He's a very good painter, and these were perhaps a momentary side-step.
Next door at Sandroni Rey a video installation by Chloe Piene. I like the idea of video, I've seen some good video art over the years, and still believe it can be a viable part of art history. But there needs to be lots less of it, and when an artist chooses to use it, first and foremost they should realize that it is much more difficult to make an interesting video piece than it is to make a good painting. One might think just the opposite, hence we have a glut of boring and transitory imagery floating on and off gallery walls these days. I wont go on much about this other than to ask: why does my attention span last longer looking at a simple minimal painting than a projected video with sound of a teen-age girl sitting in her bedroom going through some adolescent break-down?
Some interesting painting down the walk at Anna Helwing Gallery by a painting duo named Andres Lutz and Anders Guggisberg. A melange of figurative and abstract, a bit messy but for the most part well-done. Some nods, intentional or not I don't know, to various Germanic painters....Saw more than a nod to the dead drunk painter Martin Kippenberger, and a few winks at early George Baselitz and a few of his lesser cohorts. But damn good to see some real painting without any saucer-eyed Japanese lolitas in them!! And, and, yes, they even had a successful video piece playing in an adjacent room: A small projected piece, interestingly vignetted around the edges, of a mountain climber slowly and arduously trudging through a blizzard of snow toward the camera. It was a small understated piece, no sturm and drang, no sex, no violence, none of the cliched emotional bells and whistles that in our time we have been inundated with, but I found myself watching it, and going back to it. Well done A & A!

I'm not sure what's going on down the block at the Scion Gallery...There were lots of kids there, that's for certain. And there was a car in the middle of the huge gallery space. And graffiti paintings on the walls. And a dj. But what are they selling? Cars and a lifestyle, I suspect. When you google search for it, this turns up in the top ten results. Scary. I'm not buying.

a beginning.....

This will be a blog for the occasional review of interesting art exhibits in and around the Los Angeles area......and the occasional digression further afield, either art in other parts of the world that I come across during my travels, or musings on the state of contemporary arts and literature in general.