Dear Reader,
Art reviewed below.
Vija Celmins & Robert Gober – “Vija Celmins / Robert Gober” - Matthew Marks
Entangled career-spanner for some grand dames of trompe l’oeil severity. Gober has gallows humor, Celmins is blunt and earnest like Hemingway. Paintings and sculptures, all on the wall. Is this a retrospective? There’s a lot of work across two gallery spaces. Depiction as sport. Both of these artists deal in facsimile, reproduction, it’s a lot of work to duplicate real experiences out of art materials. One of Gober’s famous sinks flows continuously and I totally forgot that it was made of bronze. Is the point that it’s bronze and I should remember this or is the point that it should be so convincingly plaster that I forget it’s bronze? Can I hold both to be true at once? Do I sound like your therapist?
The most recent Gober in the show is a vitrinescape I liked quite a bit. Sort of a trashy earnest Joseph Cornell box, signature waxy flesh curtains, false painted wood, false painted mayonnaise packet, just out of view. One of Bob’s main moves is straddling the line of convincing mimicry, emphasizing odd details in a way that makes the reproduction uncanny. The packet sits and folds hyperrealistically but its logo is deranged. Gober delights in the yucky and maybe feels some shame about his fussy. I know a lot of rigor-oriented artists who deform their own work out of shame. I think this is a boring subject for art but I get the impulse and it seems productive when used as a tool to make work about something else, i.e. Bald’s Big Bob over here. This work is making meaning in a fun way, symbolic crumbs both crude and subtle.
If Gober feels fussy, Celmins can feel almost fascistically obsessive. Precision-oriented dragon chasing. Because her work exists on small canvases and panels, illusion that competes with lived reality isn’t really on the table for VC. The best she can do is like a very high res image or convincing window, but the work is so damned flat so maybe not so much a window. The canvases are unbelievably smooth, hubba hubba, the brushwork is invisible in the starry night works, almost. They attract tiny flecks of dust which stand out on the super smooth black surfaces. What can you do? The older painting of cars didn’t do much for me.
I found myself drawn to a small casting of the corner of a packing blanket. Who cares? Prehistoric Home Depot sculpture bro art in pastels? Examining the casting closely, I’m all “pfft, it’s full of tiny bubbles” and then the bro is me. Whatever, I like it, it hovers out from the wall and I like how it’s colored, it’s a nice size, it’s got meaningful weight-illusion. I wasn’t sure whose art it was, could be either, though the colors made me think Gober. The sparseness, however, and frankness, the hyperfocus reminded me of Celmins. I wanted it to be Celmins because I liked it. It was Gober.
There’s always a Vija Celmins on display somewhere in Los Angeles and it’s been this way for as long as I can remember. She has been overexposed to me by no fault of her own. I am especially numb to the starry nights but her big comb sculpture, usually up at the Broad, is maybe one of my favorite sculptures by anyone ever, managing to out-Artschwager Artschwager in sinister stillness but without Richard’s goofy “adjustments.” I know I’m supposed to like Gober more, the work is more “complicative,” I’m a post-modern bricolage kind of citizen, no doubt, but I often find Gober’s work smug, preachy and self-satisfied around both its subject matter and its own materiality. It’s clever but it is not thrilling. I don’t like work by Celmins as often, mostly just because I see it more, but when it hits, I might say it hits harder. Her name is a blessing to musicality, so let’s put some respect on it.
I also liked the prints and drawings in the other gallery but not as much. MM gets points for free off-street parking.
Samantha Rosenwald – “Shoe Show” - Sebastian Gladstone
Speaking of musicality, the name of this show sounds like “Chucho,” like Valdez, and close readers will already how I feel about Latin Jazz, which is to say: I like it. So, walking through this show, I am muttering “chucho” to myself, chu-ing on the words like gum but without the repulsive cud habit. Just kidding, to each their own. Chew it up, reader.
This show is as described. What Gremlins 2 did for Gremlins, this show does for a painting of an ankle and a foot in a shoe, which is to say: variations on a theme. Lady gremlin, electric gremlin, spider gremlin. In this show there’s a snake shoe and a cake shoe, a bro-y “boy” shoe and a petit-bourgeois “girl” shoe. These are much touched, detailed colored pencil drawings on big canvases. In some places, the canvas beneath the drawing has been sanded smooth while in other places, chunky texture remains. This difference in texture appears seemingly at random and not in a bas-relief Gina Beavers way. I saw another show last year at this same gallery where an artist did the same thing. Tristan Unrau makes highly rendered oil paintings on randomly chunky surfaces. Is this a desirable surface quality in contemporary painting or is it the unique desire of this gallery? Gremlins 2 but the gremlin is a specific kind of canvas-surface-finishing and there’s an electric one, and a lady one…
I really like Rosenwald’s Hand, her Personal Style. While most of her proportions and rendering gestures choose the cartoony over the “real,” there is weight and depth and meaningful rotated contour in these images. The color is especially notable, and the colored-pencil color-matching to depict a realistic copy of Infinite Jest is funny but, if I’m honest, I can’t tell how dumb it is. Is the joke that Rosenwald is laying on the cultural signification Too Thick as a gag? Or is she just laying it on too thick? If what’s at stake in this work (haha, sorry) is the sincerity of its signification, that’s fine, but that’s not one of my favorite subjects.
Ultimately, I like this show more than I want to, which is maybe an ugly thing to say. Maybe the idea is that it’s just fun to invent different kinds of themed feet and the sincerity can be always shifting and who cares, just have fun. Get that bag and have fun doing it. Obviously and by all means. Why am I suspicious of serial work like this as prefigured crass commercialism? A body of work as a branded seasonal collection. The serializing requirements of maintaining a career in contemporary art, especially painting. It’s not fair. I am, once again, projecting my own political neuroses onto another artist.
My favorite piece in this show is the “Dutch”(?)-themed ant farm clog. I am particularly fond of ant stories and enjoyed the Dutch-theme society the ants appear to have built into the wooden sole of the clog. There’s an ant house on fire with some ants freaking out nearby and this constituted a real moment of pathos for me but then I follow the tunnel to another ant burping and farting the very same fire and it feels like a joke again. Is this ant just on fire and in retreat? Is it my own sick imagination that made the ant burping and farting the flames? Why would this ant be burping and farting flames? Why would there be an Auntie Anne’s soft pretzel themed shoe? However history answers these questions, neither image creates any problems for me in my life. As they say on the poster for Inception, “Your mind is the scene of the crime.” My mind, for sure.
This gallery let me, a stranger, use the bathroom, and for that I commend them. This show will be closed by the time I post this. Parking around this gallery is fucked.
Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine
Joan Didion: What She Means
Picasso Cut Papers
Hammer Museum, all.
As you can see, Pablo is the only one that didn’t get a colon in this situation and that makes it seem like a description of something he did (cut papers, true statement) or a command to action for the artist. This cracks me up. Also, the branding for the Joan Didion show (which was curated by the writer Hilton Als) reads in alternately colored stacked words that say WHAT JOAN SHE DIDION MEANS which is a classic internet joke about graphic design and the chaos of meaning, people seek out stuff like this for their archives of vernacular hilarity.
I love the Bob Thompson show. It makes me happy. Big and small colorful oil paintings with references to religious art, Poussin, the artist’s social and intellectual circles, music, sex, birds, group dynamics, etc. These paintings feel like a glimpse into someone’s unified mythology, artifacts from a moving dreamworld. There is real darkness in some of these paintings and real ugliness that is sometimes rendered in a chunky dumbness that only emphasizes its brutality. Most of the time, joy, humanity, transcendence and movement are rendered more lightly, with long graceful sweeping gestures and short skittering deftness. “The colors, Duke, the colors.” Some cool yoni-power content, angels flashing their private areas. I don’t like the colored walls in this show, they feel “cheugy,” which the work itself is not by virtue of being too personal and too weird, despite its attractive brightness. The supplemental materials and historical context stuff are enriching and meaningfully contextual, kudos.
The Picasso show is made entirely of paper scraps that the Beatles of visual art made as studies for other works or as toys and masks for his kids and friends. As usual, there’s a lot of emphasis on where Picasso was at in his life and who he was having an affair with, and the palatial estate he was occupying etc. I skimmed the didactics partially because there was so much stuff to look at. I’m not like a big Picasso fan or hater or apologist or anything. I like this one weird chunky painting of Don Quixote in a funky handmade frame I saw somewhere on the east coast but I didn’t watch the Antonio Banderas biopic and I never think of those freaky ladies in profile. I had very little expectation for this show. If anything, it’s annoying that I’m expected to care about this guy’s vanity garbaggio. I, too, have a lot of funny trash, and am usually proud of myself when I resist the urge to fetishize it.
Picasso Cut Papers, however, fully dunked on me, and humiliated me in front of my own expectations, whose respect I will have to wormishly reclaim. This show rocks. It’s irritating how good it is, how charming and alive these crinkly little scraps are. They are inventive and unworried, expressing realistic movement in ways that shouldn’t be possible, in ways that reinforce fake ideas about magic in someone’s stupid hands. They also invoke an obsessively touching-oriented practice. Fold a piece of paper enough times and you can figure wild shit out too, which is a great lesson for kids and adults alike. I liked this show so much that I got the catalog which actually looks like crap and only reinforces the weird animus contained in the actual old garbage scraps, which is kind of nice and, like, magical. Phooey.
The Hilton Als Joan Didion show takes up three large galleries and is a group show moodboard around women and Southern California with archaeological snippets from Didion’s life peppered throughout. It’s like Creative Nonfiction as an art show. The didactic at the beginning of the show tells you who Joan Didion is not really what she means, which I guess means I have to figure it out myself. Despite liking Didion and Als, I have to admit I walked through this show pretty quickly, it was very full. I spent time with a lovely early Vija Celmins of a hand firing a gun, I enjoyed the supplemental artifacts from Didion’s life, there’s a Cady Noland, Ben Sakoguchi, I took a picture of a beautiful Hughie Lee Smith painting that reminded me of Kay Sage who I thought also could have been on the moodboard for this show? Is that right? There are a number of beautiful Betye Saar pieces and we love that whole family, so that’s worth the price of admission alone, which in this case, is nothing, because like all museums should be, the Hammer is free. Pro-tip, the parking garage is under construction right now so all parking is free and unticketed, no goofing.
I walked around the Hammer store which is the most cheugy part of a very cheugy institution. I don’t need to get into my resentments around the tchotchkefecation of art practices, how everyone has a clothing line or a ceramics collective. Capitalism plays itself. I admit that there’s cool and mostly expensive stuff in this store, books especially, but I mention the store to draw attention to a quote on its wall, which I can’t stop thinking about.
“The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” The quote is attributed to “Tony” Cade Bambara, who I had to Google, but is actually Toni Cade Bambara, a black feminist activist and author, contemporary and colleague of Gloria Anzaldua, who, for me, is a very solid vouched-for-by. I posted this quote in the #pics-and-spam channel of my Discord for science fiction writers and not that many people gave a shit. The only responses I got were basically like “nah, not for me, but you do you.” Okay, sure, maybe it should read “One role for an artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” Is it the Hammer’s store and Instagrammably colored walls making the revolution irresistible? What makes something irresistible? Let’s not forget that the Adrian Piper retrospective (a blunt and brutal story about the aesthetic to social criticism and activism pipeline) came to the Hammer, and not LACMA or MOCA. Museums, which, at the time, were still charging like $25 to get in. Anyway, this is a good time to go to the Hammer for a variety of reasons.
