Bill Lasarow

The Museum of Antiquities and Hope for Egypt's Future

2011-02-08T15:10:25-05:00

The stunning events that continue to unfold at Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt feature a building as one of the major players: The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. Particularly throughout the recent days of clashes, this repository of one of the world's most deeply historical legacies stood vulnerable to fires and looters, quietly towering over both citizen protesters and government goons as a uniquely aesthetic as well as cultural witness and judge.

Ghosts are far more palpable here than superstitions in the mind of an impressionable child: the unseen remains of Pharaohs clearly exerted a psychological force that cut through Wednesday's primitive street fighting. Last week, as Mubarak's National Democratic Party headquarters burned across the street, a group of irregulars from among the citizenry occupying the Square gathered to repulse a crowd of would-be looters. Unlike Bagdad's National Museum of Iraq, where "stuff happened," count this as a victory for the cultural heritage not just of a nation but of the world. Even two mummies initially reported as having been decapitated by looters turned out to be just fine.

It used to be that even here in youthful America time was a determining factor in our consideration of what was deemed "museum quality." The Neo-Classical museum buildings of a century ago drew the public to view the Old Masters, and what living artists produced was a seldom to be seen sideshow. The rise of a network of contemporary art museums that followed the example of German Kunsthalles during the last 30 years has forever altered the way we discourse with history, essentially shaping it on the fly as we consider one subject after another. The idea that we stand in awe of a set of fixed achievements implies a diminishing of our own potential. Given the opportunity to preserve the living remnants of those achievements puts us on a more even footing with them.

Now it is the assumed task of the Arab world -- Egypt, for the moment at least, spearheading the manner by which it happens -- to reshape their political culture on the fly. The act of protection afforded the objects stored in a single building provides more than testimony for the power of cultural heritage. It was an act of self-awareness in the midst of chaos. What they will become is very likely made better by that act of cultural preservation, and it goes far beyond the continued existence of the objects in that museum. Yes indeed they give the Egyptian people and, in this case, the family of nations an important focal point of shared commonality. Beyond this, for Egyptians this act of selfless preservation provides a hopeful symbol that this source of pride will translate into a leadership able to serve that nation with analogous selflessness. The image stands as a reference point by which the world will judge them.

Figuring Things Out

2011-01-28T03:16:10-05:00

Mike Kelley, "Odalisque," 2010, foam coated with Elastomer, wood, aluminum, wig, found objects, velvet, cotton batting, 56 x 115 x 30", at Gagosian Gallery.

Marlena Donohue observes in her review of Charles Garabedian's retrospective, "we return to the figure to figure things out."

This is more than clever wordplay, it's an unspoken bond between artist and audience that brings together existential and social continuity. Art being what it is, I prefer that such investigations undertake fresh propositions rather than confirm established assumptions. Garabedian has been, in a very different way of course, a West Cost Cy Twombly, embracing a deeply classical mythos in a manner that subverts our visual expectations. His vision leaves grand narratives intact while permitting us to bring them down to our level. Laura Macklin comes to a surprisingly similar point of realism from a nearly opposite direction, the quotidian video of a family member who was an inveterate shutterbug whose home movies and snapshots span more than a half-century. Her formal devices and editing compress time so as to allow the viewer to presume the vision of a life as though it is we who are living it. There is an underlying tension between the quasi-eternal quality of a sunset and the evolution of her subject's surroundings that is unsettling without browbeating us.

Carolina Silva, "Against Gravity (or the Oddity of the Flooded Land)," at Lawrimore Project.

Time-based imagery is familiar enough when the medium is film, but Carolina Silva drops sand falling like rain so as to turn a table into a canvas -- or more accurately, a screen. If you are mesmerized by the constantly shifting images and associations, you may wind end up staring at this tabletop for many minutes. That's a pretty ridiculous image, but how different, really from staring into a campfire? As a vehicle for self-absorption and reflection, this is wonderfully offbeat comfort food. Rock 'n' roll informs, no directs, the colored pencil and collage works of David X Levine. These are far from being illustrations to song lyrics, their ambition is to personify them. Titles provide the reference to (mostly) familiar songs that the images would never conger up on their own. The game, then, is how the images entice you to play Find the Connection.

David X Levine, "Carol Mountain Green," 2009, colored pencil and graphite on paper, at Eight Modern.

For Rusty Scruby the central premise is to break up his personal narrative in order to reconstruct it. The formal technique conveys a feeling of the passage of time, but this has a completely different meaning for us than the artist, for whom this is built on revisiting his personal past. There is a distinct element of nostalgia or longing lodged firmly in this gracious work that turns abrasive in the hands of Mike Kelley. Whether revisiting Superman's home town together with our childhood fascination with superhero comics, or more adult engagement with Ingres' odalisques and other art historical icons, Kelley slaps down any temptation to settle into those fond memories. He rescues them only to place them, charred, on life support and throwing in small but jarringly apparent details that are about as warm and fuzzy as the point of a needle. The point of such looking backwards turns our hunger for the familiar on its head, not what most folks want during historically tough times. But this is just what I prefer over the snake oil of false feel-good histories that so many political and media narcissists peddle in order to line their pockets or expand their power. And it's how art, real art, helps us to "figure things out."

Rusty Scruby, "Between Two Worlds," photographic reconstruction, 48 x 48", at PYO Gallery LA.

The Art Lessons of Tucson

2011-01-13T05:40:47-05:00

Margie Livingston, "Study for Spiral Block #3," 2010, acrylic paint, 6 x 6 x 6",
at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

The shooting in Tucson, Arizona last weekend produced some valuable teachable moments over the course of the week. It was tempting to attribute the act to an atmosphere of political extremism that has produced a number of near and smaller tragedies, but the more substantial cause in this case was mental illness (itself an important public issue). Sarah Palin's self-consciously crafted statement revealed how the real person can be glimpsed even in the most controlled public performance. In her case it was a shocking, but not surprising display of empty bromides, intense hostility and narcissism. Then the president demonstrated the right way to produce a larger message to the nation even as he eulogized the victims as individuals. Their personal stories became the components of a narrative that integrated a larger mythos of family, community, heroism and that sense of possibility that energizes us to move forward. Hope, even in the face of great grief or hardship. There is an important point to this, and I find a path to it through my own experience of art.

When I look over the exhibitions our editors and writers are excited by week in and week out I experience each artist's work for its own particular merits. For example, this week we cover Laura Mackin's series of videos, "Time Enough," based on over a half century of home movies by a man named Dean. The artist successfully recasts endlessly quotidian banality into an aesthetic statement that emerges out of processes of categorization and compilation. Regarding Margie Livingston's objects constructed from acrylic paint, Jeannie R. Lee says that they "started with a hairball." The challenge of depicting the light filtering through so ordinary an object launched the artist into a journey in which one thing lead to another until, over time, the work comprising her current exhibition came into being, with no obvious relationship to that original source. Just as these two artists generated a body of work from the most seemingly unpromising starting point, so do the videos of Mackin and sculptures by Livingston display an intriguing connection between the rapid fire but related fragments in the videos and the rolled or folded sheets of paint. That connection readily expands to include some aspects of the other art our writers engage so as to create a common, one might say a civic space. Significantly, this is inevitably a large and open-ended space, one might say a free space.

Long experience has taught me that given that such a meritorious gathering is made up of arbitrary parts, there are larger lessons, coincidentally shared as well as contradictory issues, a meta-narrative that implies a new if imperfect whole.

What the president did with the random biographies of the shooting victims, who themselves have entered into the national mythos at random, was illuminate that inevitable connective tissue. I think we all gathered that his was a metaphor of national reconciliation, a call for civility. That this is the über-theme of the Obama presidency is not a point that need be elaborated on or critiqued here. What struck me is that without realizing it my private knowledge has been that the nature of art draws even the most diverse creative people into shared orbits all the time. Not in spite of but by virtue of the very pursuit of distinction there arises common purpose. The patchwork is rough, but so is that of America itself.

The tragedy of Tucson provided the unexpected occasion for collective self-examination. The president's narrative has clarified the process. If it is important that Americans challenge each others' ideas without, as he suggested, doubting adversaries' love of country, it is essential that we honestly criticize the creative production and strategies of artists while never forgetting to honor the largesse of the aesthetic enterprise.

Laura Mackin, "Dean collection," shot from 1946-2006 by a man named Dean, 2008, C-print, 9 1/2 x 10", at Half/Dozen Gallery, Portland, Oregon.

Censorship and Civic Mindedness: There Can Be a Difference

2010-12-23T17:23:23-05:00

Still from David Wojnarowicz, "A Fire in My Belly," video, 1992.

On infrequent occasions a cause célèbre will arise that is a matter of concern and reflection on our society's enshrinement of free speech and expression. I do not believe the cases of censorship in recent decades came close to eradicating those key freedoms. Nor do the two current cases begin to bring us to that doorstep. Which does not render the dual stories involving Italian muralist Blu and the late artist-activist David Wojnarowicz (he succumbed to AIDS in 1992) uninteresting or unworthy of concern. One is really nothing more than an exercise in unilateral but nuanced civic mindedness; the other is an instance of genuine censorship. The comparison between them, particularly since they occurred at nearly the same moment, is instructive.

The rhetorical attack against a work that was on view at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. by Bill Donohue, president of the conservative and religious Catholic League, with support from Republican House leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor labeled Wojnarowicz's video "A Fire in My Belly" "hate speech" that was "not the first time the Smithsonian has offended [Christians]." The Smithsonian reacted by pulling it from an acclaimed exhibition, "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," the theme of which is gay and lesbian identity in art.

Regarding Blu's mural of caskets draped in dollar bills (rather than the Flag), which was removed by museum staffers, MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch is quoted in the LA Times: "This is 100% about my effort to be a good, responsible, respectful neighbor in this historic community... As a steward of a public institution... [I was] considering the sensitivities of the community... [Blu had] ended up working in isolation without any input." The reason for such sensitivity? The Department of Veterans Affairs building is directly across the street facing that wall of the Geffen Contemporary, and a few yards away stands "Go For Broke," a memorial to Japanese American servicemen. Far from seeking to stifle expression, Deitch owns the decision was his, and says he took it in the context of the curatorial process preceding opening of the much anticipated "Art in the Streets" exhibition that debuts next April. It would be a vast stretch to conclude that this was an act of censorship or even a gratuitous exercise of control.

The spiritual core of the Wojnarowicz action is a heart of darkness, and an all too familiar tactic of the right. Congressional Republicans used it to raise the cudgel of "hate speech," a transparent and hypocritical tactic, given that they have routinely offered only roadblocks to related hate crime legislation. The only malevolence to be seen is the bigotry of the accusers. The work itself is an intensely expressionistic manifestation of personal sadness and rage over the death of the artist's mentor and lover Peter Hujar.

But don't expect such facts to provoke one instant of reflection among people who possess no interest in the art whatsoever. This act is solely about power and politics; aesthetic insight and personal reflection are entirely beside the point. Much as Republican efforts to defund the National Endowment of the Arts on the basis of four artists' grants made a generation ago, this is all about inflaming the emotions of constituent groups whose wish is to eliminate such expression altogether. There is virtually no money at stake, nor is there any threat to anyone at all, but that does not matter to a demagogue.

Equally implicated, but in a wholly distinct way, is the Smithsonian, parent to the National Portrait Gallery, which immediately surrendered to the pressure. No defense was offered, either spirited or principled. In a letter to the Smithsonian's Wayne Clough, Warhol Foundation President Joel Wachs wrote, "Such blatant censorship is unconscionable." That the bigoted wing of the ideological right displays a capacity to act the scoundrel is one thing, but that high level administrators of one of America's most important cultural institutions cooperate seemingly without hesitation amounts to an absence of the sort of vigorous resistance that is a regular down payment for the preservation of freedom.

Still from video of MOCA staff removing Blu's partially completed mural from the Geffen Contemporary.

The Artistic Anatomy of an Economic Recovery

2010-12-09T12:11:38-05:00

It's way off across the country relative to where I sit in Los Angeles, but last weekend the capital of the art world rested squarely in Florida, where Art Basel, Miami Beach shed its unconventional light upon god knows how many satellite art fairs. The headline in the Miami Herald? "Strong Art Basel Sales Signal Elite's Economic Recovery." Boy, I sure hope some of it trickles on down to me.

Of course when the mainstream media gets their claws into an art story (set aside the staff art critics, who are positioned way off at the spiral edge of any news organization anyhow), it's mostly about the money, with any column space left over reserved for the novelty of how in hell something that looks really dumb on the face of it turns out to be purchased for some ridiculous dollar figure. Here in film industry capital L.A. we're used to those Monday articles assessing the past weekend's movie box office leaders. But the collective judgment of about a million fans buying a $10 ticket, these sidebar novelty stories tell us, is one heckuva lot better than a few rich weirdoes willing to shell out the price of a house for a video of some woman with gold leaf hangin' off her face.

So the old story heats up as the high end of the art market begins to gather momentum: the decadent elite are taken for a ride by a bunch of con artists, versus the philistine hicks who think they understand what they know nothing about. Great news, it's all coming back, so let the good times roll!

The world that nearly all of the artists live in hardly resembles that of their collectors or many of their dealers. But when it comes to a uniquely prestigious fair like Art Basel, it's difficult to tell if more observers are fascinated by how it reflects the present state of art practice or that of the national economy.

Think about the average ticket buyer. For about the same amount of time you'd spend at a movie (and considerably longer if you prefer) you stroll past one mini-exhibition after another. Some things leave strong impressions, much is quickly ground up in the garbage disposal of your memory; overarching narratives of the encounter arise only to be replaced as you encounter more and more booths.

But this is not the experience of that tiny elite buying slice of the public, in particular those who attend prepared to drop six or seven figures on an individual artwork. These purchases are not a product of the whim of a chance encounter, at least not ordinarily. This is not window shopping, baby! And if you are an established dealer you've been in contact with a number of clients well in advance of the weekend. They are primed to expect you to be bringing in particular works by particular artists. If you are worth your salt you know what they covet, are bringing the merchandise to them, have made the proper restaurant reservations, and the weekend is well shaped well before the trip into town. The size of the crowd is less important than "the quality of the people" as so many dealers phrase it. They aren't speaking of their moral standards. We are talking about the playground for the rich.

Of course that is not the case for most dealers, particularly as you move out into the peripheral fairs. These folks and their artists are hoping to catch the eye of the more casual buyers and make enough cold sales to pay for the plane fare back home. With some luck, a few will attract the eye of a major patron or museum curator who can make a difference. Rather than bringing or meeting their contacts, their presence is driven by hopes of attracting attention and building a bridge to draw them closer to the main hall.

The real issue lurking behind the media caricatures and the dealers' networking is whether the bags of money stacked in the center of that playground correlate with the quality of the art that makes it in. And, let us assume that the finest of fine art attracts the biggest of big bucks. Is that how history is made?

JR's Wholesome Illegalities

2010-12-03T15:20:54-05:00

JR, "Women are Heroes," 2008, urban installation, Favea Morro Da Providencia, Rio de Janeiro.

While there has been a continuing push and pull between the presence of serious public art and graffiti vandalism for decades, at least one artist has taken it to the streets in a strikingly new way, JR. This Paris-based activist began documenting street art a decade ago, and after a few years decided to get into the act himself. The formal structure of his work is simple, but the execution is complex, the aesthetic mix is rich, and the ultimate results of his projects have proven nothing short of remarkable.

JR, "Wrinkles of the City," 2010, urban installation, Red Town District, Shanghai, China.

JR dispensed using his own name and identity because he mounts his projects, quite by intent and by his own description, illegally. He neither seeks nor obtains appropriate authorization for the posting of the supergraphics he creates from black and white portrait photographs. People, often making faces, are shot close up with a 28 millimeter lens ("28 Millimétres" serves as another name for JR's operation). Much as Robbie Conal used to do, off goes the artist and his associates, urban guerrillas operating in the middle of the night, to paste up the cheap posters in the area they have targeted. Obviously there is no concern for permanence, and ironically the notoriety gained from projects in Paris ("Portrait of a Generation"), Jerusalem ("Face2Face," which covered eight Israeli and Palestinian cities), Rio de Janeiro (Women are Heroes"), and Shanghai (the newest project, "Wrinkles of the City") has catapulted JR to something like celebrity status. If this is noteworthy, it is the radically different kind of "celebrity" that JR has become that catches and holds my attention, and the reason I want you to know about him.

JR, "Face2Face," 2007, urban installation, Israel.

Most of the art world, rooted as it is in the broad tradition of the avant garde, has gravitated towards the economy of the elite, sustaining itself by pandering to the plutocracy. JR panders instead to the poverty-stricken, the dispossessed and the marginalized. They do not merely serve as his subject matter, bringing difficult lives into the discourse of the gallery environment in the manner of Alfredo Jaar. They are mounted where the subjects are located, in the slums and shantytowns of the world. Unauthorized they may be, but in this context they are more than welcome, they are more than provocative, they are empowering, even transformative.

JR, "Wrinkles of the City," 2010, urban installation, Red Town District, Shanghai, China.

Rather than melting into their environments, JR's projects surprisingly enliven them; his black and white format activates contrasts of indigenous color and urban decay around them. We suddenly desire to see much of what we otherwise prefer to avert our eyes and attention away from. If we normally think of murals affixed to the walls of buildings, how about putting them on trains, on roofs, on The Fence that politically segregates two territories? This echoes the piecemeal impulse that drives the much smaller actions of taggers or ordinary folks motivated to leave their mark of protest, but with a coherent visual plan fully alert to the possibility of where and why the images of faces or eyes are placed, all then recorded for broad dissemination.

JR, "Unframed," 2010, urban installation, Vevey, Switzerland.

Perhaps most surprising is the tone JR's work projects, which is all optimism and good humor. How this is achieved is worthy of its own essay, but it is clearly central to the intent and responsible for much of its impact. The process of realizing each project is both collaborative and social. The boundary separating the artistic team, the subjects of his imagery and viewers/participants is encompassing rather than discreet. By disarming the threatening posture of rage and injustice these projects better convey the condition of poverty for what it is while conveying the message that, yes, we can do better.

JR, "Women are Heroes," 2008, urban installation, slum of Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya.

Additional note. JR was recently named as recipient of the 2011 TED Prize. TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, is, as they say devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. This unique organization, known mainly for its lecture series that amounts to high entertainment for nerds, is worth familiarizing yourself with if you are not already aware of it. Visit http://www.ted.com

Those Tricksters!

2010-11-23T15:50:25-05:00

H.C. Westermann, "Female Figure," 1977, wood, glass, ink, watercolor, photograph, 79 3/4 x 24 1/8 x 31 1/4", at John Berggruen Gallery.

Strong statements, be they in visual art or any other creative medium, are meant to leave a lasting impression. Artists take on big and important issues, be they topical or formal or psychological, and inject all the passion and analysis they can muster. Why, then, do such efforts often fall flat? In a nutshell because they end up lacking in nuance. High minded intent and powerful conviction generally equals a lot of hot air. It's one reason why the pairing of William Wiley and H.C. Westermann at John Berggruen Gallery (San Francisco) is such as event; individually each is beloved for combining rapier sharp visual intelligence with downright goofy humor. The personas are highly theatrical, but both convey a subtext of barely contained concern. They rarely take it too far because, their art tells us, they rarely get carried away with their own message.

Michael David, "The Navigator (Small)," 2010, encaustic on wood, 21 3/4 x 32 x 2", at Bentley Gallery.

If an image can be didactic without a title, and Michael David's often are, removing the imagery, as David does in his current encaustic paintings seen at Bentley Gallery (Scottsdale, Arizona), focuses your attention first on optics. But check the title of the show's central work, "The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes," and the cinematic quality of the blood red sun of a tondo, and see if that doesn't take you in some surprising directions. If the landscape's presence is indirect in his body of work, it couldn't be more explicit to both the form and content in Vanessa Renwick's current project at PDX Contemporary (Portland), "as easy as falling off a log." Given the Pacific Northwest locale, shades of Ken Kesey's Stamper family, the show conveys how immersion in the environment pushes us to anthropomorphize it. A send-up image like "flat as a board (knot)," translating a bit of tree bark and pine needles into a frontal nude, helps puncture, without contradiction, the environmental polemic.

Vanessa Renwick, "Woodswoman" video still from "as easy as falling off a log," 2010, video installation, at PDX Across the Hall.

Memory and ghost stories form an engaging foundation to Augusta Wood's photographs of the empty interiors of the former home of the artist's grandparents. In this exhibition at Angles Gallery (Culver City, California) she projects old snapshots from different times in the past to re-animate those spaces, so you know just how personal these images are. The twist is how Wood is able to focus interest on the images themselves; visual experience and where we take the images trumps family biography. Nuance implies complexity, and if Wood's pictures are certainly that, the journey we take with William Brice appears to go in just the opposite direction. In an exhibition at L.A. Louver Gallery (Venice, California) covering about 25 years of stylistic evolution, it is striking how Brice moved from an overtly sophisticated interpretation of the figure to a cartoonishly simplified look. But, where humor seems to come from the core of, say, H.C. Westermann's aesthetic, Brice pretty much banishes it. His response to the human body came more and more to be informed by history and architecture, with the formal and the sensual components banging hard together only to merge seamlessly. It's a remarkable trick.

William Brice, "Untitled," circa 1984, pastel and ink pen on paper, 18 x 24", at L.A. Louver Gallery.

Then there is the trickster, willing to appear the fool until you immerse yourself enough to see the world through the artist's eyes. Benjamin Patterson, long beloved in Fluxus circles, has only begun to emerge from career-long obscurity in recent years. This retrospective at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is well earned. Neo-Dada absurdity works best when the wit flows naturally and the ridiculous images and performative actions are taken dead seriously by the perpetrator. Jazz and classical music are central to Patterson's background, and if it is hard to tell so at a glance, his landmark retrospective revels in what the artist loves to do. The very qualities that have gradually built a body of work worthy of veneration could hardly, and more ironically, mock the system in which it flourishes more. It's enough to make you think that art may not help the world so much by revealing mystic truths as by just being silly. But, of course, it's not. That's the point.

Benjamin Patterson's restaging of Nam June Paik's "One for Violin," 1962, at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
Benjamin Patterson and Peter Kotik, SEM-Ensemble performing at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, Vienna, June 1992. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Wolfgang Traeger.

Taking an Oblique Path and Finding the Center

2010-11-12T13:23:16-05:00

Lisa LaLa's installation project "The List Wall" at Hausmann Millworks, San Antonio, Texas.

On a recent swing through Texas I was impressed by how frequently the word "process" came up in my encounters with dealers, curators, writers and artists. There is a simple intent to the term behind which lies a great deal of complexity: how you get from point A to point B is important to how an artist arrives at an image. The complexity of both elements can be extreme and obvious, but the visual rhetoric of art is more receptive to object simplicity to flow out of a lengthy and complex process than the other way around. When a museum curator cites an artist's process they are validating their aesthetic intent. When a gallery director cites it they are conveying the seriousness of their program.

It helps to cast one's view just beyond the art world to recognize the significance of this. There is a temptation to dismiss the posture of the art professionals as merely subscribing to the deep influence of conceptualism. After all, it is an established historical fact that students of visual art can recite by rote. But it would be patronizing to suggest how lovely it is to encounter art in so-called back water parts of the country that engages the discourse of the major international creative centers, starting with New York. We are just as tough on formulaic, vague, or unconvincing art coming out of Texas as that coming out of California.

John Newman, "Marooned in Green Glass with Yellow Ballerina," 2003, mixed media, 21 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 9", at Texas Gallery, Houston, Texas.

The cultural environment in a particular region is an idiosyncratic reflection of the active participants. Perhaps the most telling difference between the highly charged environment of major centers, where stakes and emotions run higher, and a regional setting was articulated by one artist in San Antonio. He pointed out that artists who move there from New York or Los Angeles are often ready to argue and compete to establish a position; but after some months they come to learn that artists there actually accept aesthetic disputes in stride and routinely help out one another. Common cause trumps the blood sport.

Afterward I happened to be near the campus of Texas A&M University, and was being served in a local restaurant by a bright, well educated young man with the ambition of becoming a top chef. He struck up a conversation with me, probing enough to learn that I was in Texas to engage the art world there. He was surprised at my response to his question: that coming from Los Angeles had I actually found an active, energetic creative scene at all. I told him there were important creative communities in multiple cities throughout the state. What a surprise! I shared with him that it may be a very special niche, but it is full of drive and purpose; after all, what is the most interesting way we can use the time in the world that we are each allocated? He proceeded to offer to make our party one of the unusual cheesecakes he had learned how to make in the course of his training as a pastry chef.

Dessert. Courtesy Alinea Restaurant, Chicago. Photo: Lara Kastner

The Revolution Ended. Long Live the Revolution

2010-10-14T19:01:03-04:00

Steve Roden, "Bowrain," 2010, mixed media, from his exhibition "When Words Become Forms," at Pomona College. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer / Pomona College Museum

Process and practice have been central to what visual artists do for a long time. It's easy to forget that until about a century ago technique in the service of an established cannon of officially approved subjects was normative. There was a reason the avant garde was synonymous with radicalism. In the half century that linked Impressionism to Dada and Surrealism a series of avant garde movements were overwhelmingly regarded with ridicule and hostility. The infrastructure of market and critical support was virtually non-existent. It's easy to romanticize a glamour that, with very rare exception, was not present.

The view that how an artwork came into being, and the companion notion that the personal coherence of an artist's body of work was important, was not a topic of consideration prior to those early avant garde movements. Similarly, prior to the Italian Renaissance the proposition that an artist be judged based on the individual nature of their thought and achievement, that the very name of an artist should be linked to their work and their works' reputation was beyond consideration. The iconic names of da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael occupy a lasting place in our historical narrative not merely because they were superior talents. It was they who fomented a broad cultural redefinition of what an artist was.

Such paradigm shifts come about only in part as an act of will on the part of historically remarkable individuals. More crucially the cultural and intellectual pot is always simmering until, with time and a kind of chemical reaction, it suddenly comes to a boil. I've long held the view that the framing device of "post modernism" is a pertinent but inaccurate reading of the historical period that follows such an eruption. We live in such a period. It is unsurprising that in the decades that follow there is a quieting down. It is downright Hegelian. The radical movements have been absorbed into the auction markets, art fairs and museums of our day, and however hard a given artist may try to upend such commodification, or to challenge the frequently sterile civility of contemporary academic discourse, the conditions required for a new liberation do not exist. The liberation took place. We are experiencing a era of playing out its meaning rather than awakening to the mere possibility. I have no doubt that we are also exposing ourselves to the possibility of a new enslavement, or at least repression. Exhilaration is, after all, heightened by fear.

I happened to visit Steve Roden's survey exhibition recently at Pasadena's Armory Center, a show that is gathering up a bushel of critical bouquets (we'll be running an article by one of our own writers in the next few weeks, though I cannot say how laudatory or critical it may be). This is art of a high order, I have no reservation in joining that general chorus. Yet it typifies my point. Roden is intellectually curious, a reader, a listener, an observer. A book by oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau inspires one series, "the silent world." Another derives from deliberately chosen non-art sources. A long series of paintings responds to a single musical score (which the artist refrains from naming so that the familiar source will not shape the way we see the paintings). The visual conclusions vary greatly, but the aesthetic core holds steady. Rich in terms of reference and process, Roden eschews precision in favor of spontaneity. The blend of concentrated analytical seriousness is palpable. But there is a joyful, cockeyed smile plastered all over these rooms. Many artists approximate this, Roden personifies it. This is the delicious fruit of what was once a revolution. Now it's a way of life. And the best way to preserve it? Continually extend it.

When Is an Art Walk Not an Art Walk?

2010-10-07T11:56:07-04:00

Every major city with half a central art district has an art walk of some kind. Some are publicly run, some operated by a local organization. They occur monthly, quarterly, and annually. Some include a variety of local businesses as part of the mix, others are gallery only occasions. One may be frequented pretty much by a handful of local denizens, another draws tourists from around the world. But none are like the Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk that has taken place on the second Thursday of each month for the last six years in what used to be known as Skid Row. Over 20,000 revelers show up each month. And if you happen to own a gallery in an area that can only wish about attracting that many people, do be careful what you wish for.

Back in 2004 Bert Green, owner of an eponymous gallery he had recently relocated to the unlikely corner of 5th and Main, long known primarily for its alcoholics and homeless, launched this particular Art Walk with a handful of cohorts in art in tow. No one really came. But gradually they did, as over the course of several years art fans from the increasingly gentrified central city and elsewhere, looking for reasons to justify their flight from suburbia, found one. The city noticed and helped out, as did the neighborhood Business Improvement District. More galleries began to pop up, until after several years of effort Green and his colleagues were drawing a few thousand souls to sample their offerings.

True to a process that has played out in many other cities for just about forever, new businesses sailed in, catering to the thirst and whims of a growing audience with some money in their pockets out to enjoy themselves. The chemistry and moment arrived, and to the consternation of the original band of pranksters an evening that miraculously attracted a few thousand drew ten, then fifteen, and suddenly twenty thousand or more. Art fans gave way to revelers, and as the evenings became bacchanals the gallery people became less and less merry. The original audience of friends and supporters melted away into that good night, leading all too many for whom the Art Walk is named to agree: the Downtown Art Walk was an event all right, but no one was there for the art.

Fascinating how success is not necessarily commensurate with happy endings; the theme is rife in literature. The galleries are laying plans to reinvent their Art Walk early next year so that it becomes, well, an Art Walk again. There is a narrative tale to this worthy of a feature film, or at least a soap opera. The L.A. Times deemed it salacious enough to warrant a Page One feature (below the fold, still quite a rarity for an art story to be rated front page news by their estimable editors).

But it is not my purpose to recount the details, or distinguish the heroes from the bad players. No, it is simpler than that. The arc of the story is really what is most illuminating. Creative individuals make a difference to communities, launching initiatives that are galvanizing. The growing participation of many are beyond the control of the few. Original intentions take unpredictable twists and turns. But just as the train apparently goes off the tracks, creative vision and purpose driven determination translate into recovery. The players are there, right there in Downtown Los Angeles to accomplish that, and I think they will. And there are some small number among you in other locations who have or will start your own engines of change. Remember that it will not be easy, there will be setbacks in the very midst of the most exhilarating breakthroughs. Keep your focus on the creative integrity of art. It'll be OK.

Tolerant Squares

2010-09-28T14:17:01-04:00

Phase two of three in the remake of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art campus evinced talk of squares from among the museum principals who have moved and shook the western end of the Miracle Mile. And the accumulated changes have surely lifted that stretch of Wilshire Boulevard east to La Brea. And so happy talk about the place becoming the central square of Los Angeles' mushy sprawl at this week's press opening managed to resonate a bit. Particularly if you can warm to the image they were selling of masses of people heading down there on the Metro Rail yet to be for family jazz concerts, the coming new restaurant and, oh yes, a side order of priceless art for those willing to hoof it into one or another imposing box.

Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo ©2010 Museum Associates/LACMA.

At the time the May Company building went up as the keystone to the Miracle Mile in 1940, highlighting twenty years of development dedicated to A.W. Ross' paean to the rising culture of the car, the mid-Wilshire district entered into a generational stretch as the place to head to in L.A. The 1964 opening of LACMA did not ultimately prevent its gradual slide towards dowdy irrelevance that has now been arrested, and possibly even begun to reverse.

At the press podium under the kind of pristine sky practically invented by Los Angeles, architect Renzo Piano unsurprisingly revealed the beginning of his process was to draw LACMA Director Michael Govan a square. Of course it's not that simple, he explained to the relief of all present, and proceeded to wax poetic about light much as I can imagine A.W. Ross rhapsodizing about the coming importance of the automobile. In conclusion, his big box would be a tolerant space for art. And here I was daydreaming what a grand space it would make for a big box store such as Costco, or a magazine distributor's warehouse. I appreciated his language.

Attributed to Barthelemy Blaise, "Bust of Geoffroy Chalut de Verin," circa 1787, marble, 34 3/4 x 22 3/4 x 17". Photo: Diane Calder

The Resnicks and their collection of 17th to early 20th century Western European decorative art and paintings may together be the squarest element of this elite circle gathered at the town square. Stewart Resnick sat politely and silently throughout with a smirk nearly worthy of Dick Cheney. And like Cheney, this powerful man doesn't need to say a word at meetings. Wife Lynda, a born entrepreneur who launched an ad agency before turning twenty, is the front woman of this enterprise. Coiffed and poised to the nines, one would hardly recognize her as a former friend and cohort of Daniel Ellsberg. Thank God for some irregularity in these perfect squares.

The artifacts of civilization carted over from their Beverly Hills manse is hyperinflated fluff that is laid out in a series of temporary enclosures that feel like a forced march, as back and forth you go. The entire effect is so unremittingly repressive that when it finally spits you back out into the open central space in which the superb "Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico" exhibition holds forth, the spirit is immediately lightened, the mind ready to read lots of labels instructive on the subject of ancient Mexico. The contrast makes a sage of Mr. Piano. This is a tolerant square indeed.

Installation view of "Colossal Head 5," 1200-900 BC, basalt, 73 1/4 x 56 11/16 x 49 1/4". Base by Michael Heitzer. Photo: Michael Buitron

The Radical Nature of Powerful Convictions

2010-09-21T13:22:26-04:00

Nobody reminds us more of how radical it once was for an artist to turn their back on representational painting -- or of the rewards of persistent conviction -- than Paul Cézanne. Cézanne was out of step even with his Impressionist fellow travelers, being primarily interested in the concrete fundamentals of geometric form, rather than the intangibles of light. The narrative of European modernism's emergence under the stamp of his influence has been in place for much of the last century, but the roots of American modernism were also fed by his source. It's important to keep in mind that Cézanne embodied an important side of the reaction to the onset of photography when considering that some of our most innovative American photographers incorporated much of his aesthetic thinking behind the lens.

Paul Cézanne, "Bathers," 1898-1900.

At one time, the modernist architecture of mid-20th century Los Angeles expressed jet-age futurism. Much of it is given a second skin of scaffolding by Deborah Aschheim that allows you to alternatively regard it as just going up or about to come down. If the move away from representation half a century earlier had been full of danger and controversy, the referenced architecture conveyed optimism and possibilities yet to be imagined. Fifty years later, as Aschheim makes palpable, much of that sensibility has faded. Time certainly changes how we regard not only art, but what it references. The aesthetic potential of digital media remains engaging, but no longer startling. The way Arcy Douglass applies it to mural-sized light works and graphically aggressive paintings is closer to the kind of Pac Man graphics that launched digital media into the public sphere three decades back than to au courant Cloud programming. Retro digital art: it had to happen.

Arcy Douglass, "Field-2," 2010, digital work.

Abstraction feeds directly back into the landscape sensibility of Paula Castillo's bare metal sculpture. As Kathryn M. Davis notes, the very harshness of her forms and association with the stripped clean skeletons of the victims of the Southwestern desert environment are hardly celebratory, but they pay stoic homage. There is something both poignant and grandiose about the way contemporary artists such as Castillo and the Bay Area's Judith Belzer turn strategies of abstraction back towards an examination of nature. Belzer's use of tree bark may not today make us wonder why she deigns to call this art, the way most of Cézanne's peers did, but the vast space and scale wrought from such Lilliputian means does stimulate our sense of wonder. Not too shabby.

Judith Belzer, "The Order of Magnitude #2," 2010, oil on canvas, 38 x 42".

Another of our most celebrated early modernists, David Alfaro Siqueiros saw art as fully engaged in the political process, and his politics were unquestionably radical. We tend to shy away from equating radicalism in art with that of politics. But I can't help but connect the real or imagined emotional charge -- as basic as sex -- between the two. There is a jumping off an edge with the certainty there is no safety net below that sets off that adrenalin rush. If done with courage, knowledge and insight the end result is not disaster but glory.

Rendering of David Alfaro Siqueiros' "America Tropical," 1932, by Luis Garza.

The Republican Party Today, Part 2: The Sucker Wing

2010-09-02T13:12:40-04:00

Watching some of Fox News' coverage of the Glenn Beck hosted event at the Capital Mall over the weekend I caught about the umpteenth clip of one of his fans pointing out that they were there to support the Constitution. And, oh yes, that the President does not believe in it. Disagreement for many, perhaps most of these people adds up to a consistent conclusion: We are True Americans, and liberals, the "hate America crowd," are knowingly and deliberately working to destroy it (as Mr. Beck loves to say, "liberalism is a cancer." Eradicate it!). It's a conundrum so resoundingly stupid that my emotions get a bit carried away. "No lady," I want to scream at that inscrutable screen, "it's YOU who do not support the Constitution. It's you and the millions of useful idiots like you who have made it possible that America will be destroyed."

The Kleptomaniac Wing of the Republican Party came that close to dong just that three years ago, and these people are the very enablers who may permit them to finish the job. They love to think of themselves as such Patriots; the liberals, on the other hand, are traitors. Naturally liberals want to refrain from reflecting back such silliness, so they typically end up defending their own patriotism. But the truth is nearly as simple as the minds of these followers: They are not patriots at all; this particular mass of American humanity is selfish, narcissistic, and extremely fearful of losing what little they have. Or what they think they have. They've already had a fair amount taken from them by the very oil, banking, and armament execs that encourage and support them politically. And who will be thrilled to knock them back to the streets and perhaps, if all goes well, debtors' prison; it's just business after all. These victims hand their parasites the means by which they engorge themselves; in return they get to think of themselves as "patriots." It's fun to dress up in Red, White and Blue; you feel good about yourself.

Imagine how in an America of the Koch brothers making and Grover Norquist's highest ideals we have no minimum wage, no child labor laws, no public education, no social security, no regulation of business, no environmental protection. And just imagine what we will all retain because of it: Liberty! Shout that principle to the rooftops; do it effectively and you will rake in millions of dollars in donations or revenue from the very patrons who so enjoy doling out those dollops of Liberty. This is not the American liberty that I know and value, in which the individual's free will is taken as a given. It certainly is not the liberty from which we have gradually constructed the public structures that exist to protect and further the integrity of that natural diversity, not to mention the broad economic interest of the middle class. What these folks grasp as "constitutional" is feudalism, a wholly other sort of social contract.

It's the Sucker Wing of the Republican Party that will always make sure the true American elite maintains some sort of perch. During the 1930s the Kleptomaniac Wing flopped when it came to seizing the public sector because Roosevelt and the Democrats succeeded in convincing most of the Sucker Wing that they really would be suckers if they voted against their own personal interests. They succeeded at this in good part because they "welcomed the hatred" of the kleptomaniacs. The black comedy we see playing out today suggests that the kleptomaniacs have improved their techniques and sharpened their investments. Liberals, by contrast, are mostly unwilling to even try to separate the marks from their predators; many of them, too many, appear to long for their piece of the action.

Add the two wings together, kleptomaniacs and suckers. We now have an impressively virulent incarnation of a major party. It yearns to swallow the county whole and purify it. All I see coming out of the other end of this is one enormous turd. And it stinks.

Squint

2010-08-19T03:35:35-04:00

Claude Monet, "Rouen Cathedral in Full Sunlight, Harmony in Blue and Gold" (detail), 1893, oil on canvas, 42 1/8 x 28 3/4".

Painters commonly employ a very simple technique to see the general appearance of a composition: They squint. After hours, weeks, or months of building an image, sometimes from an innumerable quantity of details, they stand back and check what they have been doing from the perspective of how all of the details congregate into a more simplified whole. Boy, can that be a can of worms.

When an artist talks about fearlessness it can mean a lot of different things that are not readily visible when you pay a visit to their latest show. Consider. If a painting is invested with a lot of minutiae that don't quite come together, or do so the wrong way, however beautifully executed the particulars may be, however much time has been invested ... the squint often reveals it. Out it goes. Five minutes of overpainting and poof, gone, but hopefully for the better. Think about what may finally be unseen when you visit the next show. Imagine doing something like that in your own line of work; hey, maybe you've done that. It can be wrenching.

The squint serves an aesthetic purpose of course. It is one of the simplest among an arsenal of small weapons that artists draw on to further their visual intent, refine the final result, and align an image with the ideas they are concerned to address. But that simplicity also conveys a profound lesson in seeing whose application is universal: Never fully trust what you know.

Probably one of the main reasons I've spent my adult life in the art business is that nothing is taken at face value. I regard that idea with the utmost reverence. Anything familiar is subjected to the squint test. What does it look like when I try to NOT be familiar with it? People embrace certainties all the time, often trumpeting a pride in holding beliefs they have unshakeable faith in. I run the other way. Absolute certainty is a sure sign of vacuity. Beneath the outer crust of an echoing sameness of profession it can get ugly. One of the things I'd love all of us to do, all the more so with respect to the truths we regard as most self-evident, is to follow the example that so many artists routinely exercise. Squint.

Claude Monet, "Rouen Cathedral in Full Sunlight, Harmony in Blue and Gold," 1893, oil on canvas, 42 1/8 x 28 3/4".

The Complementary Wings of the Republican Party

2010-08-05T14:40:23-04:00

The Republican Party of today has divided itself into two factions that are destructive of American values and our national security. Worse, taken together it is not a given that the internal struggle to control this party adds up to electoral disunity. Just as many conservatives once argued that in the struggle between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union there was a falsity to any notion of what was justifiably termed "moral symmetry," commentators seeking to be evenhanded are incorrect when they argue that there is an equality of extremism on the right and on the left.

The more traditional wing of the Republican Party has for generations conducted a program that they casually and regularly accuse liberals of conducting: Class warfare. In fact it is they who conduct class warfare, currently best exemplified by the Bush tax cuts, and wonderfully articulated as an economic policy principle recently by Senator John Kyl (R-Arizona): It is not necessary to offset tax cuts with concurrent tax increases, but it is necessary to offset any addition to the Federal budget with an offsetting budget reduction. When Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner stated the other day that "... America is a less equal country today than it was ten years ago ..." he meant that the separation between rich and poor is not only greater than it was quite recently, but that it is greater due to the intended consequences of the Bush tax policy.

We tend to assume that the erosion of the economic position of the American middle class is a product of unintended consequence. I am suggesting that this is not the case. If many rank and file Republicans are nice people who would never knowingly subscribe to such a formulation, their ideological rigidity cripples their capacity to critique. For them the Great Recession was not the product of conservative policies taking their natural course, it was the product of circumstances beyond the control of those policies. To wit: it was something that no one could have seen coming. This assertion, one we all heard on multiple occasions throughout the Bush Presidency, is not only flatly false, it is nothing more than the Big Lie method of altering what is true via simple repetition. It is a blunt instrument that still works quite well, thank you.

But the Republican Party is not, through this wing, controlled by such well meaning people, even if one headed our government for eight years. The transfer of wealth into the hands of an elite class of people -- no, an EXTREMELY elite class of individuals -- is about cowing the general population so as to extract maximum productivity with optimized control. The goal of establishing conditions by which what the post-war generation imagines to be "middle class" is meaningfully lowered is not only, on the whole, more profitable, but has produced a more pliant population and workforce. A more desperate and insecure pool of workers is better than a content and secure pool of workers from this perspective. And, on the whole, that is a reasonable description of our present condition.

It has been presented as fact that the collective unused capital among our major corporations today totals about $1.8 trillion. It is interesting that the rank and file of both the left and right generally believes this excess capital was not legitimately earned, but fleeced from the country as a whole. The view that the $700 billion TARP bailout of 2008 was a rip off of the American people has settled into common wisdom for many. Of course it is not that simple at all; save for some of the particulars it may have been the single most pragmatic decision made by then President Bush. It was also a clean break with his personal ideology. (This counts. Consider what a President Rand Paul would do. With conviction.)

But it is a simple truth that a number of the richest people in the country suffered little or no loss of income whatsoever, and that AIG counterparties received collateral payments related to credit default swaps in full thanks only to $105 billion in public funds. The thievery is real at this level, and it is just as real at the level of tax policy. The problem for the Kleptocracy wing of the Republican Party -- that is the alliance of certain elected officials and private sector individuals to embezzle the nation's wealth for themselves "without pretense of honest service" -- is how to convince the very victims of the crime that they and their policies should be preferred to those who genuinely represent the interests of those same victims? On the face of it this sounds ridiculous. But it is anything but.

The answer to this question is not part of the scope of this piece. But I do have a word to offer describing the people who favor the false arguments of the kleptocracy: Suckers. But millions of such suckers add up to a genuine electoral force that, energized by wrongly directed indignation and emotional identification with the "home team," may threaten to engulf the land. They thrive as the second and complementary wing of the Republican Party. Republican Suckers.