Dear Reader,
Art reviewed below.
Olga Balema – LOON – Hannah Hoffman
Lots of table-scale clear plastic sculptures, on and off the floor, folded and bent like plastic-trash Calders or Fecteaus. Thin translucent sheets adhere to themselves, melt with solvents, are subtly splashed and rubbed with muted acrylic paint. The work feels brittle, about brittleness. The sculptures catch the light in the lovely second floor gallery and reflect and glint in ways that are not not charming. The press release says the work is “disorienting,” and I was once disoriented, unclear whether one of the delicate assemblages had fallen off its pedestal, or if it was staged to look that way. It was staged. The press release says “Balema’s practice tends to integrate unappealing qualities resulting in a body of work that can be brutal, abrasive and harsh.” This appeals to me, I am always interested in art that is explicitly Not About Pleasure . I like sad and scary movies. That said, these works are so quiet, so light, so “writ on water,” more twee and demure than they are actively Shitty, that they insist on almost nothing, like soft echoes, art so convincingly about residue that it’s barely there. The crinkly disposability Balema alludes to could be bleak if I wanted to go along with the mood-board, but I’m not convinced.
I saw the show with a friend who’s “not really into art” and doesn’t go out of their way to see it almost ever. They walked around this show making funny exaggerated skeptical faces and when we left said “the whole art world is ‘emperor’s new clothes’ to me.” While I agree that the art world is fundamentally powered by mass delusion, I don’t think this show illustrates that perspective more than any other. I think this show is earnest and thoughtful. If anything, it feels conservative and high modern for its investment in weight and material, pedestals and not-pedestals. This show kind of bums me out, which I think is part of the artist’s intention.
Rochelle Goldberg – Aluminum Casts – Commercial Street
Semidomestic micro-space strewn with castings suspended in armatures of twine, wire, cable, cardboard, metallic detritus. The title is [funny?] because it’s not totally accurate. Individually, the aluminum castings of old cell-phones, cans, dolls, toy star-wands, incomplete bulbous shapes that could have once been round organic foods… None are individually remarkable as objects or even that “carefully” cast, they seem open to internal variation. They are all in states of decay and mutation. There’s something about Sculpture 101 here, mold making and casting, a familiar object made of another material and its conceptual repercussions. Honestly if you described this show to me, I would say it sounded lame but I assure you it is not lame. What is moving and engaging and confusing and creepy about this show is what Goldberg does with the objects grouped, how they intersect and connect and via what armature.
Metal cabling roughly affixed with visible hardware and wall crumble supports a big disc of silver-painted cardboard, from which hang, and are connected via wire and twine, a selection of castings and real cans? Bulbs? Phones? Wands? Outside and through the implied wobble-cylinder of twine and dispersed metals, aluminum wands hang from cabling in rows like laundry or sheet music. The lines which connect the smaller objects in space look like motion diagrams, something about blast radius, or a paranoiac’s pushpin connections in string. In a larger space with real spotlights, this work could be part of an apocalyptic modern dance routine.
A round wall work with collaged dimensional heads is confusing, sickly. It features a metallic party streamer that feels so familiar it’s almost Too Soon. This appeals to me. There are other small nooks with a collapsing doll head and a “framed” cell phone work. If I’m honest, these two compositions feel Minor when compared with the rest of the show. I wouldn’t say they undermine the more obviously Central work, but maybe I would. Trash can science fiction energy, crumbling and flaky apocalypse, a new kind of garbage that sticks around. This show is like a tinfoil hat or the stressful movie 12 Monkeys. Recommended!
Masaomi Yasunaga – 石拾いからの発見 / discoveries from picking up stones – Nonaka Hill
“Over seventy” elegant chaotic ceramics, mostly vessel-form, assembled using glaze - just glaze - to adhere endless little stones and colored ceramic bits into pokey lumpy pods. The gallery is full to bursting with occasionally sharp-edged organic shapes, things with cavities and layers, “chitinous,” but also art historical, anthropological, sentimental/sedimental. The pieces vary in size and style, some amoebic or invertebrate, biomorphic abstract, some curling decorative melting Mediterranean. I’m feeling bone energy, spine energy, ruinous waste of historical seabottom. There is comfort in these objects. They are familiar ur-shapes and they are softly colored in chunky inviting patterns you might find on shaggy textiles; concentric rings, purple, black, sea foam, pattern hazy but pattern visible. This work looks expensive! The gallery was full of old rich people who seemed to love the work as much as I did. All of us strangers in the gallery were in a good mood on account of this enjoyable work. I especially liked the pieces that incorporate cute animal forms because, like so many of us, I like cute animals.
There is a spooky red lit caveman diorama hidden inside a wall in this show. Peering into the low opening, the ceramics are organized on straw and among stone age furniture/architecture. I guess this room is an expression of the imaginary place this artist imagines the work coming from. I’m not super interested in these objects being “fictional.” I didn’t find anything particularly narrative about them in the sunlit gallery, away from the red-light diorama. I like these pieces better as things from my world, where they are more at odds with their surroundings, but undeniably of them. Overall, great show, inspiring forms.
Cruel Youth Diary: Chinese Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection
Bridget Riley Drawings: From The Artist’s Studio
Together In Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection
Hammer Museum
Cruel Youth Diary is a historical slice of a group show, culled from the market-swaying collection of SoCal collectors, “the Haudenschilds.” The work is smart and dark, conceptual performative photo and video from 90’s and early 2k’s China. Some themes are urban living, sex, smallness of life, projection of wealth and artistry, individuality, the looming virtual…lots of pathos and humor, relatable turn-of-the-millennium content. Urban capitalism and its reluctant beauties. The work is very playful but not necessarily jokey or flashy. Large and handsomely printed photographs full of brazen photo-editing, text overlay and collage. The accompanying didactics illuminate a scene I was totally unfamiliar with until I visited the show. Highly recommended.
A long time ago I worked for an art book distributor and there was always a lot of Bridget Riley merch around and I thought it was very corny and wack. The clean flat pastel colored shapes did not impress me. They felt as conservative as art could get, even vaguely cynical. For a mostly digital millennial like myself, “my kid could do that” becomes “my computer could do that,” and that’s close to how I felt about her big smooth paintings. There aren’t any paintings in this show, it’s all works on paper and even though they’re signed and framed, a lot of the work feels preparatory rather than the most resolved form of the ideas presented. Intricate patterns fade out and change at the margins and handwritten notes from the artist to herself indicate ongoing inquiry.
It is precisely because we are in an era when dense patterns of subtle geometric variation can be so effortlessly shat out by automation that seeing them done by hand on paper is so tickling. For an artist whose most realized public forms are executed by assistants to be as smooth and handless as possible, seeing the hand and mind behind the curtain is something else entirely. The straightest lines aren’t that straight, it’s not all rigorously mathematical, and still these two dimensional sixty year old works on paper cause genuine perceptual trip-outs, which is kind of remarkable. Seeing the way Riley paints her mother in early figurative work, seeing her marginalia and invested obsession, I feel a course correction on my understanding of Her Project. I haven’t seen any of her paintings IRL since seeing this show but now I’d like to. I think I will still like the works on paper better. It is a righteous thing to do trick magic on perceptual organs, especially with such basic materials.
The main reason to check out the collection show is Simone Forti’s mid-seventies hologram and plywood sculpture, which captures the artist in an abbreviated dance-move on rainbow plastic. Hard to explain. Impossible to photograph. Artwork of the month, for sure.
