Dear Reader,
Art reviewed below.
Sam Gilliam – “Moving West Again” – David Kordansky
Gritty-foamy abstractions (paintings?) on enormous shaped/beveled canvases (panels?) that look like edgy tabletops designed as a collab between Alex Israel and Franz West for Memphis. Which is to say: imagining these works in a home is very decorative-architectural. They’re sandy, light and drifty, whites and off whites. Gurgling pastel colors pop through motion blur swipes and scrapes, in the way that so much ab-ex painting is like looking at dance footwork diagrams – a record of the artist’s gestures. I do not find these particularly rewarding to look at, nor do I find them all that unpleasant. They look pretty fun to make and it’s hard for me not to think about cute old Sam Gilliam making them.
If some tanned and earnest SoCal sculpture bro produced these after he got back from surfing, I would be less inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. These could very easily be lingering “zombie formalism.” But: Sam Gilliam is 87 years old and these canvases are huge. I doubt he lifted them himself but maybe he surfs at sunrise and drives an old Tacoma, who knows. Without assuming anything about Gilliam’s physical fitness, I’ve spent enough time with the elderly to basically know the kind of motion they’re capable of, even at their most rigorous. I imagine Sam Gilliam gets up whenever he wants, eats a small meal, looks out his nice-view window, has some coffee and gets to his roomy, light filled studio, where his eager young employees have prepared big smooth vaguely sci-fi canvas shapes and say to him: go nuts, boss. Maybe he puts on music or listens to a podcast or is in a silent trance all day. Maybe everyone leaves and he’s the only one touching the surfaces or maybe he directs a team and doesn’t touch them at all. Any way you slice it, it’s an effort, a production. There are so many pragmatics to consider when an 87 year old body wants to make this work. This endears it to me, even if the final product looks like a Turner painting of one those white/turquoise/purple paper-cups people like but painted using stucco. Why am I ok with Sam Gilliam making this work and not someone else? I think this is a bad look on my part and an unhealthy bias I need to keep an eye on. This work is ultimately furniture and would be totally weird in any home. Wet cocaine energy, cotton candy dawn, some hazy Miami Vice dimension peeking through cracks in a dirty strip-mall wall covered in bits of old popcorn? OK!
David Altmejd – “The Enlightenment of the Witch” – David Kordansky
Three rooms of increasingly demented bust-type figurative sculptures, culminating in a spotlit full figure giving birth that, if not totally realistic, is rendered in much detail. I think my favorite thing about these sculptures is the broad spectrum of “finish” that goes into each one. They are installed in such a way that they pick up more and more detail as you walk through the space. Quick sloppy sketch-like gestures exist side by side with high-fab simulations ala Duane Hanson or Tony Mattelli, but not as (wannabe) de-authored as either of those artists. An anatomically lush head-severing is decorated with little googly eyes and a nose and a tiny cigarette, a base recognition of the cross-section’s faciality. :-) Quick squishes of cheap colored air dry clay add up to figurative curves on par with an Italian master, I’m not kidding. Barely rendered stick/lump “fairies(?)” with dirty clear-acrylic wings cut with blunt scissors hold up the elegantly silhouetted hodgepodge legs of a figure giving birth. Glassy cadaver eyes are embedded in the underside of each thigh. The birthing vagina and fake-wet follicle-threaded crowning baby head appear under a belly painted in black & white tribal op-art geometrics reading “LOVE.” This shit is bonkers. Sometimes the colors are soft and pastel, brushy, sometimes the colors are medically literal, sometimes things are uncolored and unfinished, muted hardware store colors of sculpture materials. Intricate clear acrylic armatures are cut with rough edges and glued together with oozing visible seams. I particularly love the half-finished or unfinished pedestals, covered with stupid clay decorations, pencil marks, personal notes and material lists, mistakes, some are physically stuffed with both wooden and mechanical pencils.
This show is Pretty in tiny glimpses, sometimes it’s cute, even twee. Mostly, though, it’s anxious and ugly. Mostly, it’s demented body horror done up with trashy pastel crystals and at least a partial disregard for how they’ll look in a rich person’s home. David Altmejd has been around for a while, he shows at Andrea Rosen which has one of those spicy Chelsea rents to pay, not to mention its careful & hunky preparators. Kordansky is this kind of gallery too, I guess. I know this gallery is “in Hollywood” (sort of), but it feels more like it’s “in Beverly Hills.” I’m sure someone will buy this work but I’m so curious to know who! I love this work and would not really want to live with it. That said, if I did live with it, I’d probably find new details every day. It would be continually challenging and unfolding, changing all the time, a nice work to be in a long term relationship with. I bet that at different phases of my life, the corporeal fantasmagoria would take on all kinds of different meaning. Rock on, David, good on you.
People hate this work! People think David Altmejd is so cringe! He challenges their notion of good taste and not in a cool post-modern way that knowingly quotes an ugliness we can all agree on! This is gauche culture-quoting personal expression, this is electro-clash mall-goth Lord of the New Age Rings indie pop bands with wolf and sasquatch in their name! Altmejd’s classic synthetic white glitter fur/purple crystals/hot glue/acrylic mirror shards could be an Urban Outfitters wintertime window display and frankly, his cultural influence is probably one of the reasons they look like that! In talking to people, I guess I’m the only person who thought this work was cool in 2006 and yes sometimes I wore a terry-cloth headband when I went dancing.
It’s notable that most people I’ve talked to about this show have a very bad reaction, openly hostile, hadn’t even considered seeing it, and yet so many of the same people went positively googoo for the Thek/Kudo/Hooper-Schneider show as if that work is somehow cooler and more thoughtful than this Altmejd show at Kordansky. To be fair, the work of Thek and Kudo might be but Hooper-Schneider’s definitely isn’t and people give that guy substantially too much credit. That some of the people I know would be more willing to accept MHS than D.Altmejd as part of Thek and Kudo’s material lineage is shameful and wrong-headed. I think this Altmejd show is great and simultaneously challenging and inviting on so many levels. I think it’s cleverly fabricated in a way that expresses both intense care and also a stupid, lazy, weird sense of humor, and all with more concern than pretension. This show isn’t for everyone, a predilection towards trippy body horror gross-out and fetishy special-effects detailing helps. It’s not conventionally attractive, it’s often outright ugly, it’s certainly not decorative in the domestic sense. If you liked the Thek/Kudo/Schneider show and think you’re too smart and tasteful for this one, I would encourage you to leave that shit at home and go take a look. Recommended!
Group Show – “Psychosomatic” – Various Small Fires
Not great but unusually likable summer group show of 15 women making sculpture in Los Angeles. Not to gossip but it turns out people don’t like this show, either, which I guess I understand but seems kind of like an over-the-top reaction. Even if some of the work feels phoned in bordering on not very good, very little of the work is terrible and it feels like a very earnest show, a human show. I have low expectations for this gallery and taken as a whole, this show is very much Right On.
Upon entering the show, the first work you see on your left is by the artist who curated the show. Haha, OK. I like Isabel Yellin’s work but I think her muted interior-designy colors and slick powder-coating undermine how actually weird and juicy the work can be. I am particularly fond of the ceiling-mounted mechanical sculpture by Trulee Hall. It’s called “Humping Corn, and Other Phallic Veg,” and that’s exactly what it is: corn and other phallic veg (“found and made”), horizontally suspended on steel string and gently “humping” back and forth in mid-air. The moving pieces makes a nice sound in the quiet gallery. Nearby, I am always happy to see Alison Saar’s baroque sun bleached detritus and her “Still Run Dry” is some sort of dissipated and deformed blown glass system of human organs - rusty, dirty, earth-tones of neglect. Something I like about Saar’s work is the way in which things that look found might be fabricated and vice versa. The good and great work in this show carries the stuff I’m less interested in and while I was there, had me giving all of the work more attention. There’s enough good work in the show to give all of it the benefit of the doubt, a similar feeling to the contextualizing animus of a permanent collection at a museum, the attention given to one work carrying over to the next thing on the wall. Olivia Erlanger’s work usually doesn’t do much for me but her “10:59 PM,” especially sandwiched between the Saar and Hall pieces, was a highlight of the show.
A random-ish summer group show of people that probably all know each other doesn’t need to be perfect. A multigenerational pileup of women in LA making odd and serious sculpture results in pleasant connections for the viewer and, I would imagine, for the artists involved. In this sense, the show establishes a very casual premise which it exceeds by leaps and bounds. I am, however, going to nitpick it a little because why else am I doing this?
My biggest problem with the show is the way it’s installed. The “main room” of the gallery features all the work I described above and looks good. My big problem is that the show is divided into three spaces and the two “annexes” (a small back corner room and an outdoor courtyard) have lame “themes” (intentional or not) that undermine the work banished to them. In the outdoor courtyard, all the work is similarly chunky ceramic and suffers for its sameness, I make flattening connections I might avoid if it was contextualized by other work. I will admit that if Alison Veit’s outdoor mirror was closer to Dwyer Kilcollin’s indoor chair, I might wonder if they were by the same artist, so, that separation makes sense.
The small indoor annex seems to be loosely trompe l’oeil themed with the exception of Anna Sew Hoy. Now, don’t get me wrong, bring on the illusion, I can passionately trompe with the best of them, but the paired work of Kristen Morgin and Anne Libby didn’t do it for me. Morgin’s actual-size reproductions of used and defaced children’s books and DVD cases are executed with an admirable and unfussy detail that is impressive but not great art. I wonder how many other artists have the same or similar projects? Likewise, Libby’s extremely shiny and heavy looking polished aluminum casting of some skewed venetian-blinds looks like an undergrad’s first casting opportunity but with the erudite patina of something that wants to be sold.
Anna Sew Hoy’s puffy chunky pink ceramic coil-pots filled with sand and rocks and decorated with text/poetry/words that seem to add up to some kind of fumbling and fractured but actually tender intimacy sit on the floor between these two pieces. Why is this work in the trompe l’oeil mini-annex? Why isn’t it out front in the chunky ceramic rock garden? How would Morgin and Libby’s work look in the main room? Would they make connections with Rosha Yaghmai’s framed collage/drawings with their torn-book-page bone/root/drip ideas about architecture? Or next to the so-much-better-than-it-has-any-right-to-be dumb gesture of Amanda Ross-Ho’s wonderful “Untitled Crisis Actor, (HURTS WORST 2),” which is a blown up and pathetic reproduction of one of those grimacing “how are you feeling” pain chart faces and is also definitely a kind of corny trompe l’oeil? To be sure, it’s of the same family as the Morgin/Libby work, i.e.: I remade this non-art thing in my studio so it’s art because it’s bigger or smaller or a different material, etc. Why do I like this Ross-Ho piece and not the other work? Yes, it’s my own wacky taste, but to be fair, it’s more than that and additionally not just because of the contextualizing/diffracting work around it. The difference is that artists like Ross-Ho (and Trulee Hall in this show) editorialize, both reproducing and deforming their source material and even their titles hint at some world beyond the parts I recognize, unlike Libby and Morgin, who respectively call their works “untitled” and whatever the 1-to-1 actual title of the book or DVD is. Maybe this work is aggressively anti-metaphor, against speculation, maybe my expectations are unreasonable. OK.
Anyway, all gripes aside, I like this show! The work feels frank and plain-spoken, and like I said, ultimately contains so much good art that the total bar is raised on all of it. The show’s frankness is not too earnest and there’s still a lot of wryness and dryness, but not like sarcasm or irony to hide behind, and without the hesitation or deflection that comes with it. Frank and plain spoken without hesitation or deflection is the way I’m always hoping people will talk to me, so that’s a very appealing gesture. This show reminds me that there’s a lot of great and strange art being made in LA and it’s been here for a long time and will keep going. People will drift in and out of each other’s friend groups and art scenes and connections are made naturally, and in that way this show just feels True, which is more than can be said of most contemporary art. I also enjoyed the press release by Christina Catherine Martinez, which shares all the same qualities I just described. You don’t need to read it to enjoy or understand the show (thumbs up), and it is a deep but light optionally utilitarian amuse-bouche treat. There’s a lot of work in this show and chances are, if you’re reading this, you probably know at least one of the artists. Of all the phoned in summer group shows happening right now, this one is probably the best and if it’s not, it’s certainly the one I’m writing about.
Patrizio Di Massimo – “Close At Hand” – François Ghebaly
I had to rewrite this review because I wanted to be less generous. This show was junk food for me, easy to like in the moment but left me hungry and a little grossed out - in the pejorative sense and not the disruptive useful one. These are stately illustrative oil paintings of European white people doing funny awkward things. The Doing Funny Things part seems to take precedence over the act of painting, which possesses very little Personal Style or urgency, and if these pieces reference European Art History, they do so only as much as any oil painting of a person does, which is to say: who cares. While I was in front of them, I enjoyed looking at these pieces. They’re fun and safe, like flipping through New Yorker cartoons. Your parents might ask: What the heck is happening in this one? I’m told the figures in the work are the artist and his friends and in one, the man I’m told is the artist has fallen off a cliff in swim trunks, splitting his head open while his blonde ponytailed partner obliviously tans on the cliff above. Is this some Woody Allen “poor me” type thing? To be honest, this painting makes me feel bad for the guy’s girlfriend/wife. In another painting, two guys wrestle over a smart phone in front of a futon. In my favorite one, “Mum’s Floral Robe,” a wild-eyed mother and daughter come to disturbingly open-mouthed blows in a quaint domestic setting.
These paintings don’t really reward close viewing. The subjects’ faces are emphasized above everything else and while their expressions are often specific and evocative, I find their bodies, environments, and accessories under-rendered and under-considered. I found this show Pretty Funny and I liked flipping through the book of his other work.
Rindon Johnson – “The Valley of The Moon” – François Ghebaly
This show wants me to do too much work! Without the press release, this show is a series of smeary colored-leather panels stretched like paintings and some discrete bio-organic objects hung at weird heights and also on the floor, plus 2 very different videos and one high-hung ring of neon. This show felt very casual and masculine and had a spare post-Michael-E-Smith energy. After looking at the press release, I learned I am supposed to see this show as a complicated poetic system with these simple objects aiding and standing in for rich, difficult, interlocking concepts. Unfortunately, I didn’t read the press release until right before I sat down to write this, so, there you go, sorry.
I should tell you, I almost never read press releases or titles until after I look at a show, especially if I have to scan a QR code and read it on my phone. I walked through this show looking at the big folded rumpled leather canvases, covered with what looked like random bird shit and spores and wild-and-free decay-splat. Then there were these waist-height white lumps on the wall that looked like big spit balls. Then there was the imperfectly-circular red neon ring hung very high. There’s a grainy video of a slide or an arch or something and some time passes, and then there’s a shell of something on the ground and it’s like a wasp’s nest or armor or something, I don’t know. It isn’t adding up for me. Some more leather canvases, some of these ones are smooth, less fucked up.
I heard some spacey sonorous chimes and I entered a room with a nice peaceful CGI animation of fleshy shapes floating through digital water, simulated light filtering from above, oceanic feel. The TV was plugged into a fancy looking and partially transparent computer, presumably for some heavy duty CG rendering. I sat and watched this video for a while, actively liking it to the same degree that I was confused and annoyed by the generic stoic withholding of the work I’d seen so far. The floating shapes in the video have different skin textures and colors, they are bizarre biomorphic things with more personality than you might expect, eyeless fetal Pokémon, protoplatonic life-forms half imagined. They are captivating to watch, floating in their amniotic simulation, bumping into each other in the beautiful fake light. It’s a very engaging and calming effect with the chime soundtrack, screen-saver cinema, primordial aleatoric sitcom.
After watching this video I left the show, all the more confused for having finished on such a high note. Sitting down to write this, I looked at the titles and press release and saw that the stretched leather pieces have very long titles. For example:
Later, a slow moon laboring over the hillside, Later, the fog reflects the moon, Later, my blood is sucked and I itch, Will we will we ever find home, the car calls us in the distance, To walk the stairs, to take off my shoes, to stand, Wringing hands, scratching grass blades on toe nails, You are starting to see things we could never see before like, You have been born, Or how I waited a whole year for September, A piece of fruit, A source of fire, An edge, An excuse on a small scrap of paper, The woods in my mouth, It is so hot today like yesterday and the day before.
Do I hear an echo of humorless screamo? This title is so dense and specific! Was I supposed to hold it in my mind while I looked at the faded gray leather which looked like more “zombie formalism” still breathing? Is this what they call Concept Art? They tell me this artist is a poet, which I believe, but why is this shit on stretcher bars? I think the artist is probably a good poet, I do like the writing in some of the titles.
Reading on, it turns out the work uses “furniture grade cowhide, a byproduct from industrial beef production,” which the artist smears with stuff and leaves outside for a year! He’s interested in the work being a “byproduct” of a process, looking at the way capitalist systems produce endpoints, regardless of that endpoint’s desire to be produced, i.e.: dinosaurs to petroleum to Vaseline, grass to cows to commercial beef production, and, as poignantly addressed in the press release, “American blackness…[as] a byproduct of another capitalist mega industry: the transatlantic slave trade.” Reading about this comparison, I’m interested but not seeing it in the work. I want to quote the press release again because it says something compelling about the mysterious film I enjoyed so much:
Johnson’s handling of cowhides speaks to a recognition of animal agency, questioning the ethics and sustainability of our industrial meat practices. Elsewhere in the exhibition, a virtual reality film picks up on this attunement to animal life. May the moon meet us apart, may the sun meet us together is a virtual reality film rendered in real time. The work is part of the artist’s ongoing Nere Gar series which began with 2019’s Meat Growers: A Love Story, a speculative fiction wherein a new understanding of plant and animal sentience has spread through American society, leading to fraught new debates: to what extent do we take into account the wishes of our food? Among the scientific breakthroughs of this alternate era is a newly engineered species of marine dwelling animals, the Bists, who float peacefully through the water, filtering and feeding on the microplastics that suffuse the planet. May the moon depicts a gathering of these telepathic chimeras. A calm, twinkling soundtrack, composed by Anthony Green and Elizabeth Baker, plays as we consider the convening of these aquatic others, our transhuman evolutionary offspring.
I love an animal agency theme! I love speculative bio-ethics! I love the connection to the transatlantic slave trade! A hot interlocking concept I can get behind. But the video is so abstract, so intuitive, so weirdly relatable in spite of its mystery. The video doesn’t need that paragraph, but it has that paragraph anyway. OK. I think the relevancy/complexity/urgency of the stuff this artist talks about in his titles and press release needs to be emphasized differently within the work itself. But, as usual, that’s what I need and not what the artist needs. I am very interested in the content of the press release but, with the exception of the final video, I was almost totally unmoved by the show without it. Are the stretched leather works and the sculptures more interesting or challenging now that I know their story and titles? No, and I know, it’s my problem. I think a lot of work and thought probably went into this show.
Nanami Hori – “Which Rice Bowl?” - Bel Ami
Ambitious and far out, highly visual “conceptual” but playful, systems-art that looks like a group show but isn’t. Paintings, sculptures on the wall and floor, vaguely scientific diagrammatic pencil drawings, all share themes and imagery that bounce between individual works like broken code. The show and the iteration of its themes feel obsessive and even though the work is *fun* there’s a candy dark edge to it, a nervous gallows humor. I don’t think all of the work could totally survive on its own and the show is at its best when the shapes and ideas are iterated together, incongruously: related concepts and imagery showing up in very different work simultaneously. As a result, you end up with some under-rendered and under-considered moments that wouldn’t wow alone but fit in with their surroundings. The works are discrete but the total-internal-communication is palpable. If I were an art advisor who wanted to recreate what I like about this show in a private home, I would say to my mark: “Buy two of the extremely different looking ones and display them together.”
I can’t honestly say it’s the most generous show, but it’s full of familiar if not recognizable public and pop culture imagery and is rendered in appealingly harmonized colors and surface treatments, so it’s not totally insular either. The work isn’t aggressively ugly, it’s regularly “cute,” it’s fun, legibly personal. There is clever and complex wordplay on some blocks on a rug. There’s a face made out of ready made plastic vegetables, some stressed cartoon faces on wood panels perforated with hooks, there’s a little foam core house, there are paintings on canvas with foxes and boys that say “I’M YOUR WORST NIGHT MARE…” One of my favorite aspects of the show ends up being some of the brushwork in the oil paintings. None of these cartoon renderings need to be anything but flat, mimicking print, to get their point across, but instead they’re rewarding up close, elegant brush pulls of color through color, looking cared for, careful, and still loose like a hand, AKA Can Paint.
While the definite endpoints of Hori’s systems aren’t ever fully tangible, that there is a system seems architecturally clear, like seeing a foreign alphabet. A lot of the material signifiers and just-enough-information-tease of it are very up my alley so my curiosity was plucked but I can see that not everyone would feel that way. Someone who wasn’t interested in this probably-fruitless speculative decoding might say “some of these paintings are terrible! What the hell are these meaningless diagrams! What does it all add up to? Why should I care?” They could say, like I said of Rindon Johnson’s show, “This show wants me to do too much work!” These would all be reasonable questions and assessments and I’m not all that proud to say those assessments overlap with what I like about this show. That said, unlike Johnson, I think the motivating systems are pretty prevalent in Hori’s actual work.
The press release is annoying art speak but not wrong and includes some of the artist’s notes and a very funny and true feeling diagram of the artist’s networked concerns. I don’t think this show demands the use of the press release or the diagram, it doesn’t solve or make the work didactic. From my perspective, the prosthetic texts don’t propose anything the objects can’t support. A philosopher I’m sure I’m always misquoting says “Bad philosophy generates answers, good philosophy generates more questions.” This work is propositional, a question machine, and if these are the kinds of questions that appeal to you, there’s a longer booklet of her notes available at the gallery. The pamphlet reads like poetry and research and reads how the show feels. The question asked in the show’s title (“Which rice bowl?”) becomes an equation around variability inside systems and cross contamination. The artist considers sustenance, sickness, death, alzheimers and memory loss, popular movies, all as entangled systems of relating - relating to each other internally and out to the artist and her life. The installation does what (I think) a lot of poetry wants to do (I’m thinking of something like Lyn Hejinian calling poetry “the language of inquiry”) and what a lot of arty-academia/creative non-fiction wants to do: make dramatic intuitive connections between pre-existing cultural material and filter it through Some Body’s experience + make it look good.
Overlaying systems and connections on top of a world that doesn’t want or need them is a very bullshitty grad school Adam Curtis type thing to do and don’t let anyone tell you it’s hard. It’s much harder to find those connections “in the wild” (even if the wild is your own internal dialogue) and illustrate them without force, without fudging. To observe these connections voyeuristically without disturbing them. Nanami Hori’s systems are self generated, she doesn’t come across as a particularly journalistic or academic artist, but I think that this work successfully does what a lot of “good” journalism and academic work does and what very little art manages to do. Is “Which Rice Bowl?” a success? Not in the extreme, but it feels like a very good start.
~*ARTWORK OF THE MONTH*~
“Chuper Nachos” @ La Chuperia across from the coroner.
After looking at the art, we watched the sun set over these ideal nachos. You can see the golden hour reflecting on the table and in the salsa. The ingredients which constitute these nachos taste fresh, the chips are substantial, and the unmelted room-temp shredded cheese seems gross at first but seamlessly blends with the beans and ripe avocado and crema in a salty gluey way that is not unlike a seven layer bean dip, which is about as flattering as a comparison can get. Against all odds, this unmelted cheese is a structural boon, preventing chip-toppings from dissembling and reducing the amount of bare chip experienced when pulling apart melted cheese. For under $20 you can feed two hungry people and not one shall feel sick. 10/10