Dear Reader,
Art reviewed below.
Katja Farin – “Hum of Virtue” – In Lieu
Solo show of figurative paintings that want to be both loose and composed, personal and universal. There are bugs in most of the paintings. This makes me think of the show’s title, which I like because I also think bugs are virtuous. I think this show is very post-Nicole-Eisenman in that it consists of lightly fantastical queer slice of life imagery that is both depictive of mysterious human interaction (like Beckett or something) while simultaneously being composed formalized painting Surfaces about, to some degree, painting. It’s the latter quality that makes me think of someone like Alex Katz or Fairfield Porter, two artists of an older generation who were interested in depicting life as an excuse for Doing Design, which feels like a polite WASPy impulse to me. For Katz & Porter, this is painting at its most gently diaristic, recounting a day of bourgeois leisure rather than one of brainy queer postmodern worldstruggle ala Eisenman or, I think, Farin. Farin’s paintings, for all their bright color, detail, and lived elan, have soft edges, as though seen through a haze. I don’t find a lot of urgency in them. There’s a calmness that feels more Katz/Porter than Eisenman. I think the strongest quality of this work is the color. The physical act of painting doesn’t seem particularly labored-over here, no especially obsessive-looking brushwork, there are flowers and bees rendered with bare minimum daubs, figures outlined with flat cartoony intuition. Occasionally, the paintings do exhibit obsessive interactions of pattern or texture, clashing textiles that seem to sit on top of the scene like a painting within a painting, loose clunky repetitive abstraction that seems at odds with the softness around it.
I find myself wondering if the people in these paintings are the artist’s friends or if they have this slumped candle from one of the paintings in real life. These paintings feel very personal and the haptic poetic intimate press release seem to reinforce this. I find myself wanting the press release and the paintings both to be more specific but that’s something I need, not something the artist needs. This is very clearly their world and that’s ultimately the show’s most winning quality, I get the sense that the artist enjoyed making these. These paintings would look nice hung in a colorful house and I’m sure eventually they will.
Group Show – “Ensemble” - Chateau Shatto
Illegible group show with a cute painting of Detective Pikachu but mostly looks like art. Casual ready-made-ish conceptual sculptures, decent abstract paintings, individual pages from books beautifully framed to some obtuse philosophical end. Press release says it’s “an exhibition formed around the bonds and curiosities shared between galleries, without thematizing these relations.” Lol, no doubt. The highlight for me was a trio of 1978 works by the late Barbara Hammer, who, according to her website was a “feminist filmmaker and pioneer of queer cinema.” Two striking black and white photographs of who I assumed was the artist and a very nice video of some double exposed naked dance/body/movement stuff which I didn’t finish watching. Second place highlight are the beautiful frames/mounts that Steve Bishop uses for his small wall-mounted book-page and photo ephemera, which maybe add up to something but I couldn’t tell you what.
Bjorn Copeland – “POP STD” – Shoot The Lobster
I like the name of this show and I like capital letters. Copeland was in the band Black Dice, who I described to my friend as “early 2Ks palatable indie drone art school ‘noise,’ Pitchfork approved, Paper Rad adjacent.” Would Bjorn bristle at this description? I’m not wrong. The press release describes them as a “seminal electronic rock band” which sounds more like a description of Nine Inch Nails to me. This is a small show in a small space which is dirty and needs to be swept. There are 5 works in the show. On pedestals, there are 3 trash-biomorph assemblages unified by a coating of sandy glue, ruins of the modern world but also hungry-alien body-horror ala Tetsuo from Akira. One of these pedestaled sculptures is a lamp and everyone likes a lamp. This work looks fun to make and even though it is stupid, the sculptures have a formal logic and are handsome and well balanced. There are some “found mop and broom handles” joined into long poles leaning in the corner, a casual color-field gesture that says I know who Isa Genzken is and also I’m cheap. The worst piece in what is basically a good show is the rectilinear assemblage on the wall called “Office Space” that really doesn’t have more to offer than an undergrad vibing on Rauschenberg and Kienholz. There is a wild-and-free masculinity to this show muted by a stoner laziness that, especially in combination, rubs the wrong way. That and the gallery needs to be swept. Still, if I’m standing with my back to the wall-work and all I can see are the pedestaled works and the color poles, the show is well designed and weird without being pretentious, it is gross and accessible in ways that appeal to me. Solid 6.5/10
Group Show – “Busy Work At Home” - Nonaka Hill
Sloppy, endearing, tremendously personal group show that rises above both its “covid theme” and its grating bourgeois genesis. Who’s to say that rich people can’t make insular lifestyle art for the broader public?
Without any context, the show looks like an avant-garde staging of a design show at LACMA. What’s an art object and what’s a ready-made and what’s a commercial object designed by an artist bleeds together into an aesthetic whole. Gallerist as artist? A table is the thing to look at but also the things on it, the designed extension cord under it, and the wallpaper behind it. In this way, the “home” aspect of the title is very emphasized, a place where all objects have meaning and are personal. Designed things get used.
The press release doesn’t offer much, coyly focusing on some early 20th century Japanese “tatebanko” prints - colorful sheets designed to be cut into paper dioramas, displayed flat and intact on the walls of the gallery. The press release says these prints are “the inspiration for our meandering exhibition, which stages artworks, design objects, costumes and garments, antique furnishings, film and video, camouflaging with ‘Wallscape’ murals from Bless and a few room accents from Target to create tableau which may, for some, evoke diverse conditions experienced in our current Covid-19 pandemic.”
“For some,” indeed! Oof. To what “diverse conditions” could they possibly be referring? Each home-interior depicted in the 5 enormous photographic Bless wallpapers would cost more to rent than most can afford and reflect a very limited and highly designed European wealth-condition. These images become a theatrical backdrop for the kind of home implied by the show’s title. This is not a broken or abusive home, this is a clean, well designed, and worldly home, albeit one that I have to admit feels lived in and has a sense of humor. The “busy work” of the title that gets done in this home is repetitive, crafty, domestic. Most of the “artworks” in the show (as opposed to the “design objects,” etc.) reflect this, with the sculptures of Otterson and Obana dealing with repetitive craft-acts of shaping or embellishment. Even Toru Otani’s small drawing/collages feel like house-work at a very desk-drawer scale, both quick and careful and appearing in unexpected corners of the space.
In this staged home, children play with expensive rare high-design toys like Enzo Mari puzzles, Bauhaus woodblocks, and some wonderful magnetic sculpture-toys by Alice Hutchins. The Bauhaus blocks are displayed casually next to an iPad showing cute short videos of Aki Goto’s cute kids doing cute things in upstate New York, urging me to make the connection that these toys are not just nice for rich grownups but actually fun for actual kids.
Goto also has some “hanten” in the show, traditional Japanese winter coats that she presumably made at home in isolation to wear at home in isolation (cozy, home, etc.). Now they are hung on a wall in a gallery for sale but they’re priced more like expensive ready-to-wear clothes than wall-works. An Issey Miyake coat-pattern is lying on the floor under one of the Enzo Mari tables. Across the gallery, Adelle Lutz’s “Urban Camouflage” pieces, two suits and two dresses painted to look like brick and stone architecture, are displayed on mannequins next to some paired handbags on antique tables.
Lutz’s garments are costumes from David Byrne’s “True Stories,” a 1986 Talking Heads musical art-film featuring Jon Goodman, Spalding Gray, and Pop Staples among others. I didn’t have to Google this. As a certain kind of bourgeois culture-person, I’ve seen this movie more than once. But what if I wasn’t, or I hadn’t? How famous is David Byrne actually? I know he has an HBO show that I see billboards for, but also I live in LA.
On a rug on the floor, in front of Lutz’s costumes, is what looks like a thick fashion magazine open to a photo-spread of Byrne wearing the suits on display in the gallery. Around the corner is a low TV showing the scene from the movie featuring the costumes and a young Jon Goodman, too. These flip contextualizing elements, acting like museum didactics, are installed like everything else in the show, spilling into the work around it, confusing the artwork and its “exhibition prosthetics.” The magazine and the video really tell me nothing, just that these clothes are from something with some people that I might recognize. I’m not provided with the garments’ history as much as I’m told that there IS a history to them. I’m not sure how strictly useful this information is, but it is not totally ungenerous and basically I like it as a gesture.
Similarly, there is an Enzo Mari book open on one of his tables and all the toys are displayed with their labeled packaging. I find the dated commercial wrapping for the Issey pattern functioning the same way: not not-history
The TV showing the “True Stories” clip is plugged in using a really nice chunky black extension cord covered in geometric shapes, I wanted one. The extension cord is another Bless product, like the photographic wallpaper. I didn’t know what Bless was and a friend had to explain it to me, “heady jokish alt fashion for art ppl, 90s alternative, conceptual, links to Margiela and Purple magazine.” All of a sudden, I didn’t want the extension cord so much, it felt like maybe it wasn’t for me.
In a corner window of the gallery was a lamp decorated with used wine labels as a sort of variegated paper lampshade. Apparently the labels index some of the fanciest wine around and they were recognized by the chef at Petit Trois, the luxury restaurant next door to the gallery. I think I heard that the labels referred to something like $200k worth of wine. Lol. I guess it’s a nice lamp? I don’t love paper lamps and red wine makes me sleepy. That said, I can imagine the electric light filtering nicely through the layered paper in a dark room.
This show is aggressively classed and class-signaling, the wallpaper becoming its defining feature, both enticing and repulsive, presenting some bohemian ruling-class domestic ideal. How cynical is it? How self aware? “Heady jokish alt fashion for art ppl,” somewhere between aspirational and self-effacing?
Ultimately, I liked this show a lot because even though it is filled with extremely insular bourgeois references, it is also populated by warm and inviting artworks, designed objects, garments, toys, videos, and fundamentally: care. The show is filled with unprecious detail and invites joyful discovery. It looks great and is entertaining and even educational to be in. There is as much charming actual trash as there is earnest art and rarified luxury. The show is messy, fun, oddly accessible, cohesive, and looks enough like real life - or at least like a fun luxury retail space - to confuse and/or entice both the art and fabled non-art-audience alike. Recommended, 8/10.
Group Show – “Shattered Glass” – Jeffrey Deitch
Classic bright colors overloaded Deitch group show of fun figurative work by “40 international artists of color.” Basically, I find this show pretty generous and easy to like. It feels classic, earnest, and cared for by its artists.
What I’m most interested in about this show, though, is how conservative it is, how little it looks like the contemporary white avant-garde in art. It is almost entirely straightforward depictive painting and sculpture with editorial and augmentation being the exception rather than the rule. This is Jeffrey Deitch, a white gallerist operating at the highest level of a largely white art world. The rent on this big clean Hollywood location has to be very high but I’m sure it’s not an issue. I don’t think Deitch exhibits things he can’t sell, despite this space presenting itself as “museum style,” which makes me think of Carl’s Jr. describing its burgers as “restaurant style.” Since opening this space in 2018, Deitch has mounted a lot of group shows filled with as much pseudo-intellectual blue chip decorative pap for the ruling class as genuinely weird ugly shit. Heck, sometimes those two things are even the same. When he was at MOCA, people criticized him for being too populist, too gauche and commercial. I have always thought of him as ultimately an artist’s gallerist. He has his finger on the pulse even when that immediacy feels opportunistic.
Jeffrey Deitch has been an ultra high end dealer for a long time. This space opened with an exhibition by Ai Wei Wei. He was a VP at Citibank. He’s an institution, an industry. I’m reminded of a meme about the corporate responses to last summer’s civil rights protests, corporations saying “we used to be gay, but now we’re black.” Do I think “Shattered Glass” is opportunistic? Absolutely. Do I think it functions as a necessary corrective in an unreasonably white art world? Definitely. Do these two qualities cancel each other out? Not at all. This is one of my favorite things about any “pop” media. Pop is just popular, populist. You can’t just decide something is for everyone, the population actually has to ratify and reinforce its desire for the content. While content producers can predatorily predetermine what the public wants and cater to this perception, there’s never a guarantee it will slap and ultimately the people decide. Songs designed in commerce-labs with 15 demographically enhanced songwriters and producers still get played at weddings, they still become a couple’s “our song,” they can still reflect sentiments that are true – hence their popularity. What you’re left with is products that are condescendingly crass and exploitive while managing to still be personal, intimate, and reflective, you have to hold both because both are true. It’s kind of like what life under capitalism is like, generally: both.
While black excellence and the “shattered glass” of implied ceilings and protest-adjacent storefronts feel like very of-the-moment themes, the work itself is old fashioned. No twee flippant crinkly trash and twig sculptures, no jokey primitivisms, no aggressively graphic designed MFA didacticisms, no memes. These are mostly highly rendered paintings on canvas of people doing things and expressing things. They occasionally veer into the fantastic or symbolic, the trippy and/or edgy, but this is the exception, not the rule. This makes me think of POC repopulating white art history. When the dominantly white art world was prioritizing “old fashioned” and “conservative” work like this, black voices were almost entirely excluded. Now, the white art world has moved on to being embarrassed about being an artist and making cool post-modern work incorporating all the shameful detritus of an art history POC weren’t part of. I know that figurative painting is “in” right now, regardless of demographic, but this largely isn’t that kind of figurative painting, this is a kind of art by people about people that has never been “out.”
There is work here that feels Contemporary in terms of its formalism/materiality, work like Kandis Williams, Lauren Halsey, Mario Ayala, Jaime Muñoz, and most of the video work in the show. My favorite pieces were a drifty dark painting of two figures walking by Kenrick McFarlane and the work of Fulton Leroy Washington aka Mr. Wash who seems to be the highlight of every show he’s in right now. There are no Nikita Gales or Cameron Rowlands in this show, young black artists challenging the forms of what constitutes media rather than its imagery. This is not a value judgment, it’s not that kind of show, but in a big group show in a “museum style” gallery, it can’t help but feel like a survey or some state of the union, and its statistical sampling skews heavily to a thing Deitch already does. Why wouldn’t it?
When I visited this show, it was quite busy and almost all of the attendees I saw were POC. I wondered at the collectors’ demographics. What it might mean for white people to have work about black life in their home. Whenever I see a show at Deitch, it’s filled with people, and not the same people I see at other galleries. I think Deitch attracts a lot of non-art-insider visitors who are not shopping and are just there to see the work. I think most of this work is probably sold by the time it goes on display. So, in this sense, the gallery really is “museum style.” The collectors get private appointments, right? They come by themselves on weekday mornings or days when the gallery is closed to the public? But they pay for the exhibition to be open to everyone? Isn’t that basically how the Hammer works?
~*ARTWORK OF THE MONTH*~
“Warp Speed Brand” by Ben Sakoguchi, 2020, in “Chinatown” @ Bel Ami
In a show overstuffed with amazing paintings, this one was my favorite. Enough has been written about this show and enough has been made of Sakoguchi’s background. He is 83 this year and spent his early years in a Japanese internment camp. He has produced playful, political, paranoid, and highly personal work since the 1960s and he taught painting at Pasadena City College for 30 years until the late 90s. I like to imagine him teaching painting. The way he works a canvas is serious, effective, colors pop according to the smart harmony of graphic design, shapes appear to be meticulously outlined in tape before being populated by tiny-brush detailed soft daubs like impressionism that add up to slick flat images like the commercial graphics Sakoguchi constantly references, and in acrylic no less.
The press release for this show calls its timeliness sad and that’s true. The centerpiece of this show, a multipanel work called “Chinatown” from 2014, deals with Asian American racism and violence head on, mimicking commercial forms in a tumbling mashup of cultural quotations around stereotype and violence, flat cartoons appear next to highly rendered corpses of real people with somber historical footnotes in text painted with a draftsman’s careful execution. That this work was already true before March 2021 is no surprise, but how true it continues to feel is what’s sad, what stings, and what’s effective about Sakoguchi’s work. Bel Ami is on the second floor of a Chinatown medical building. There is a content warning on the show’s door in English and Chinese that the show “contains images of racist violence, stereotypes, and text including racial slurs.” The paintings are unflinchingly disturbing.
The work I’ve singled out above is from the other body of work in the Bel Ami show – a series of 10x11” paintings that date back to the 70s, all depicting imaginary orange crate brands as a jumping off point for whatever it is Sakoguchi wants to say. All of his themes are here, global racisms of all sorts, state apparatuses and their machinations, their violence, war, the Cold War, Southern California history and geography and science and industry, art history, technology, the swirling everything of his life and likely parts of yours, given how thorough he is.
Sakoguchi’s work reminds me of two of my favorite things: David Wojnarowicz’s mid-80s illustrative hellscape paintings (which Sakoguchi predates by 20+ years) and the sort of amateur op-eds and manic public poetry left pinned to telephone poles and bulletin boards. Sakoguchi’s work has all the urgency of needing to release a painful idea and all the madness that comes with it. Sakoguchi plays expertly with a space triangulating an image of that madness, how that madness comes to be, and the thing itself, the real madness, the real chaos and violence of racism, of his life, of all of our lives. These paintings manage to be true and beautiful and beautifully crafted while being constructed almost entirely of “ugly” images and ideas. Rating: Advanced Practitioner.