Dear Reader,
Art reviewed below.
Stan Douglas – “Stan Douglas” – David Zwirner
Big horizontal prints of photocollages, framed, no glass, collaged for staged near-realism rather than just for fun or surrealism. Without the press release, I see staged Zeitgeist, MSNBC-core. Figures Photoshopped into expertly collaged composite backgrounds, cars burning, praying, protesting. I can tell from the signage and text in the imagery (I am a detective) that these images take place all over the world, these are global concerns. It turns out these are all significant sociopoliticocultural events of 2011, recreated on green screens and sets during the pandemic, which adds a dimension of spooky isolation to the not very spooky process of Photoshopping people into different backgrounds.
The digital collage is good but it’s not, like, great. Illusion and trickery are secondary concerns if at all. Figures sit uncannily on top of conflicting perspectives and depths. The actors are hammy and exaggerated like overeager extras. That the physical prints are so utterly gorgeous, that there is no glass in the frames, makes all of this information that much more available to me. I get the sense that Stan Douglas isn’t trying to “deepfake” me, this is more like Pageant of the Masters, cosplay, civilian reenactment. The scenes feel true if not a little hokey, a little on the nose. The subject matter is heavy stuff but the actors are having visible fun and the huge prints feel more like Where’s Waldo than Bosch. Is this work Doing Politics? I’m afraid to ask this question because I like Stan Douglas and I think the answer is no.
In a cavernous back room, two big videos face each other in the dark. Each screen shows a pair of rappers. One pair is in London rapping in English and the other in Cairo, rapping in Arabic. They take turns freestyling and visibly enjoying the others’ contributions as they trade bars. The beat is great, grimy and skittering, loud in the gallery, mixed perfectly, beautifully, the sound is carefully spatialized and I found myself turning around to catch things I started to hear behind me. The music was so good it was hard not to dance and I did dance a little, as there were no other guests. I wondered if people were dancing in this room during the opening, I bet they were.
Is this video Doing Politics? What are the politics being done? It’s touching to see four artists separated by [so many things, material and ideological, language especially] enjoying each other’s work, enjoying each other’s relationship to the beat, the sounds they made with it. Seeing it in America, the birthplace of hip hop, as an outsider to a globally evolving phenomenon…Is it Doing Politics to say We Live in A Society and it Changes? Is it Doing Politics to make this idea danceable?
Zoe Barcza & Liz Craft – “Inside Out Outside In” – Clearing
Inside Out Outside In is a good (and true) title for this show of sculptures by Liz Craft and paintings by Zoe Barcza. Both artists are doing body; invitation and exclusion, passages, openings, and blockages therein. That said, I think it’s a trash title, it’s giving BFA.
Craft’s cast aluminum silhouettes, stylized to look like manhole covers and architecture, paired with two wall works that are like little sculptural quotations of bleak blocked passages. I have a lot of love for Liz Craft and while loyal readers will recall my beef with the material Bronze and the great validational metallicizing of sculpture more broadly, Craft is someone who consistently does it right. Her bronzes are insistently contemporary in their execution and the imagery they draw from, but more than a lot of random Let’s Cast It In Bronze (or aluminum, etc. etc.), its scale and the visible way it was touched before casting, justifies its pretentious capture. Anyway, that’s all to say that I basically think Craft’s work in this show stinks. I hold her to an unreasonable standard, it’s not fair. I can see liking one of these things in a retrospective of her work, as a muted outlier to the level of detail I’m hungry for. I can see them being funny. I like manhole art in theory, for sure, great texture, symbolic sewer barrier, I am all for it. These works feel like sketches or tests, they are slight despite their serious actual weight. Same for the wall works.
If you are not following the work of Zoe Barcza, you may not realize how often her work changes and grows and eats itself. It is especially unusual to see someone trying to make a living selling paintings who is brave (or mad?) enough to appear differently with every show, discrete bodies of work with discrete aesthetic rules. In the last few years, Zoe’s paintings (which often feature text, usually feature airbrush and stencil, sometimes feature collage, sometimes leave exposed canvas, sometimes make reference to popular culture or real people) have been getting weirder, rougher, ruder. So, I was surprised when I first saw these because of how bright and colorful and slick they are, which as any Angeleno knows is weirdest roughest and rudest of all, the sexy carnival simulation at the heart of our local dream machine. I’ve never seen paintings quite like this from Barcza, certainly not in LA.
They are bright bright saturated pinks and blues, ostensibly stenciled but featuring new painterly surface treatments. The images are full of body parts, close up; pierced nipples, butts, vaginas, mid-corpus foldings, lit in wild colors and layered (projected?) with eyes and mouths, faces, witch’s noses, like close-ups of especially nightmarish feminized Tony Ourslers. The twisted imagery is layered with comic book speech bubbles, populated by the fractured chewy texts on self-worth and intimacy that appear regularly in Barcza’s work. Tbh I think she is one of visual art’s current Great Poets. I especially loved her in-painting texts in the show Birth Refusal.
It’s insane imagining any of these paintings in a rich person’s house, especially hung next to something else they bought at Clearing, home of much who-gives-a-shit Chill Art. Recommended!
Sarah Charlesworth – “Neverland” – Karma
We here at 1-800-LA-ART-THING love Sarah Charlesworth and once had a really profound Art Experience in a room full of her Stills, the huge black and white imagery of people falling and jumping from buildings. Unfortunately for Sarah Charlesworth (RIP), we are living in a post-Charlesworth world, both literally and figuratively, where artists like Elad Lassry and Sara Cwynar have helped carry her torch but slick colorful “studio photography” of a less inspired kind is ubiquitous in BFA, MFA, museum, and gallery environments.
This body of work from 2002 is classic Charlesworth: Objects dead-centered on colored backgrounds in matching frames, no glass. There’s even Magritte’s pipe. These were giving me Checked Out Late Period Baldessari vibes (see his emoji works). What do our clever vernacular archivists do when everyone becomes a vernacular archivist and Wall Work is no longer an Efficient way to present the information? I’m not trying to put any disrespect on Charlesworth, I am committed to her cause but I am unable to find any excitement in this work on this day. If two of the discrete frames were stacked or layered, as she was known to do, maybe I would like that more. At one end of the room, a blue on blue statue of the Virgin Mary (blue background & frame) is hung next to a red on red devil mask (red background & frame) and these both gave me some kind of optical illusion trip out, the works seemed to bulge at me as I tried to get a hang on their internal depth, which reminded me of being an acid. Now this, I like!
Nandi Loaf – “Lot 99” – Sebastian Gladstone
This was a funny show to see right after Charlesworth. Photos insisting they are objects in a monumental grid of aluminum squares that looks like Instagram irl and climbs a single wall of the stately and otherwise bare Gladstone gallery. Like seeing a shiny new Charles Ray sculpture alone in a room, the images feel like a monument, a single focal point, even as it consists of (and sold as, I believe) discrete works.
It’s like a mood board…arty books and bourgeois snacks, Marilyn Manson CD, Funko doll of the clown from IT, Schnabel’s Basquiat movie on VHS. Some of the images are nicely composed though I don’t think that’s the point, the prints look good on the aluminum, no doubt. There’s a transparent quality to the ink that allows the shine of the aluminum through. Lovely.
I’ve never seen this artist’s work before and a cursory Google Image scroll says conceptual prankster. According to the press release, this is the artist’s most “vulnerable” work, an assessment that the author of the press questions later on in the text. I also have questions about what’s vulnerable in this work. Are the texts and objects and meals depicted “cringe?” They seem normal. Does bad taste still exist? Does this catalog of images index some unspoken trauma or lifeshame for the artist? Is the mood board a joke about the way that people talk about and depict themselves with accumulated branded stuff? The books they learn from? The meals they eat? Is the title an allusion to an auction lot? Material leftovers from a material life? Instagram as machinic diagram of subjective elan, Gerhard Richter’s Atlas. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Or something, lol. I dunno.
That this work has me spinning about authenticity says more about how acculturated I am to the nested symbolic exchanges that constitute visual art. As ever, no one is under any obligation to make art for artworld outsiders, but as I don’t know that many, I can only speculate on their response to this work. I recall how I felt in the 2021 Eliza Douglas show at Overduin. Slick annoying work that is genuinely about signification. Both shows made me feel tired and cynical. Lot 99 has a pretty good press release.
Max Hooper Schneider – “Falling Angels” – Francois Ghebaly
In a recent interview for the New York Times Style Magazine, Max Hooper Schneider called his work “literally a set of conditions with no plot,” which is an assessment I can embrace after visiting this show. Four rooms of sculpture, all hyperactively produced in 2023 with one exception. The mood is fractal-abject dystopian glam, flavors of science fiction, ecology, heavy metal. Most of the work is stylized assemblage, accumulation and accretion art. Much is made of Hooper Schneider’s scientific background and his Ivy League landscape architect’s crunchy fastidiousness. The materials lists for his sculptures are ultra-specific about the provenance of materials, as if to insist that they aren’t being used randomly, intuitively, or as the artist himself describes above, “with no plot.” In the extensive mainstream press for this show, MHS is abundantly clear that his work is experimental but not about precision, which is interesting because that’s not really how the show is sold to me at its promotional edges, and in these profiles, despite his insistence. Luckily for him, the chaos of the work makes itself available.
A room of too many electroplated vegetables and twigs are called Bonsais and they do look like the cultivated mini trees and also Chinese scholar stones. Browngold science horror humor, bananas, broccoli, etc. On the morning I visited the show, I got a promotional email from the gallery trying to sell me framed electroplated french fries, not appearing in the show, the great tchotchkefication, etc. This work reminds me of modular synthesis or darkroom chemical abstraction, i.e. generating conditions for something to happen and culling from there. This is process abstraction not about precise repetition, but about planning an experimental act/approach and seeing how it unfolds. I think the artist would probably agree with me, but I don’t think it’s as interesting as he does. I like seeing people make more choices.
A room of helicopter crash suspended from the ceiling with dangling vertical light tubes over a manmade pond full of discarded neon signs saying all the generic things neon signs say in Los Angeles. Nails, 213, Botox. They are not organized into poetry, there is no slippage of meaning, they don’t add up, they are just themselves and therefore the platonic neon sign, the sign could say anything, better if it doesn’t. Ambient metal plays from the rafters and electricity sparks from the water to the dangling lights and this constitutes a moment of real embodied excitement. This piece reminds me of Jason Rhoades but less weird, a William Leavitt set piece imitation of a Jason Rhoades, which sounds weirder than this piece is.
This room also has a cool sculpture (2021) of an ambiguous metallic spider egg machine wiggling its legs mounted on top of a half fossilized crocodiley dino skull on a fun curved pedestal. This is a nice piece, who knows what it’s about. There’s something Leavitt-y about this piece too, spare representations of “basic” interactions that reveal disturbing distortions and questions at the scene’s “normative” core. The other piece in the room, the show’s titular “Falling Angel,” the piece I described in the paragraph previous, doesn’t behave this way for me. It does not add up or internally conflict in a generative way. Like the set pieces Leavitt is critiquing, it seems almost designed to be meaningless, background, the more generic the content the better.
In the next room a bunch of weirdly-low-pedastaled black lit fish tanky vitrines are full of glass mushrooms and plastic plants. They look fun to make and there’s a penis in one of them but they’re all kind of interchangeable. They have an Etsy vibe. It’s a hard sell for me that this work is “critiquing capitalism” (-his gallerist) or about ecological crisis in any real way. Dealing shallowly haphazardly with the symbols of that universe does not constitute critique, to moi.
In the final room (Ghebaly’s galleries are always installed in this funny guided loop) is the best piece in the show and what could have honestly been the only work in the show, and I would have spent more time with it without being exhausted by thanklessly searching for meaning in the chaos prior. This tabletop sculpture is a miniature-scale diorama of a post-apocalyptic drive-in movie theatre on “Route 666,” populated by tiny chunky melting screens all “watching” a large “mother screen.” The drive-in’s lot sits between two allegorical environments: one of trippy melting flora and figures that reminded me of Bruce Bickford’s “Baby Snakes” and another of blackened palm trees and oil derricks, giving a hellish Angeles I know to be true. The big mother screen is flanked by Egyptian hieroglyphics which seems unnecessary to me, but this piece still adds up to something and feels more chock full of choices and specificity than any of the other “sculptural conditions” in the show. Maybe it’s a matter of personal taste, maybe everyone wants the author to die and the fun scientist to rule, finally democratize creativity like the technocrats want. “Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.” Hooper Schneider throws chaotic symbolic input into his cauldron and what happens happens? It’s like the million monkeys with typewriters, but they can only write specific words about science and ecology and decay. Yes, says the artist, then the random likelihood of meaning production is even greater!
In the T Mag interview, when the artist says “My work is like that, dude…Literally a set of conditions with no plot,” he’s comparing the work to his beloved “death and black metal” and this to me seems like a fundamental misunderstanding, especially for a trained scientist. Playing and writing extreme music of this variety requires a rigor and precision that cannot exist without choice-making, without repeated acts of hyper-specificity. It’s some of the least accidental music around and I want to see more of that in this work. I have a lot to say about it because it’s close to home, aligned with a lot of my personal research and aesthetic interests. Everybody tells me he’s a super nice smart guy and I have no trouble believing that but there’s nothing less metal than a contemporary art show of non-choice luxury goods, even if they do appear rotting or trippy.
