"Greater LA"

Edgar Arceneaux, Orpheum Returns — Fire's Creation, 2010. Wood shelf, clay, science book, sugar, in "Greater LA," at 483 Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, through June 10, 2011.

"While many of the artists included have exhibited in ... New York, they’ve never been contextualized as a group that shares, however subtly, an identity based upon their geography," reads a curatorial statement by the organizers of "Greater LA," a sprawling show on view in a second-floor SoHo space through Friday. The show, it continues, "aims to be this contextualization, giving physical form to the oft-heard suggestion that the work made today in Los Angeles is some of the best in the World."

That's an ambitious statement, and one backed up by an equally ambitious show, with some 100 works by almost 50 artists, brought together by gallerist Joel Mesler, collector Eleanor Cayre, and curator Benjamin Godsill. Much of it is very large, very heavy looking. There is, for instance, an enormous, richly colored tapestry by Pae White, whose last New York solo show was almost 15 years ago, way back in 1997 at the I-20 Gallery. An installation by a relative newcomer, Alex Israel, is similarly epic, filling a space the size of many Lower East Side galleries with rented movie props: a row of metal lockers, a spinal column, and a standing gauze cast, among other items.




Liz Glynn, Capstone from III, 2010-11. Reclaimed forklift pallet stock.


Pae White, Studio A-Z, MMVII Tapestry 2, 2007. Cotton and polyester.



Many of the artists here are venturing — or have already been welcomed — into the upper tiers of the art world. They show on the contemporary art circuit, picking up ideas while on tour, and the geographic association offered sometimes feels incidental or forced. If there's an L.A. aesthetic or style, it's not discernible here, though there are some works that feel uniquely indebted to the city, like Alex Prager's rigorously staged melodramatic photographs, which are pure Hollywood product. Prager was featured in MoMA's recent "New Photography" show, and as Roberta Smith notes in her review of "Greater LA," she is not the only name that will be familiar to New Yorkers. Matthew Chambers has had solo shows at Mesler's New York galleries each of the past two years — at Untitled in 2010, and at Rental in 2009. He's represented here by a beige-colored triptych, with panels that — moving from left to right — ape the styles of Frank Stella, Eric Fischl, and Mark Grotjahn.

Patrick Hill is another familiar name, and a positively thrilling sculptor, but his work here is unusually weak, lacking the erotic charge of the marble-and-wood works he showed at Bortolami a few months back. (Another piece from that series, an exciting one, is at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, just a few blocks away, through July 8.)


Hill, Flirty Fishing, 2011. Wood, glass, rope, dye, and glue.


Matthew Chambers, Exacting Shorthand, 2011. Oil and acrylic on canvas.


Patrick Jackson, City Unborn (gold), 2008


Kaz Oshiro, Untitled Still Life (Abstract Painting with Duct Tape in Grey), 2009. Acrylic on canvas.


Mark Grotjahn


Partial installation view of Alex Israel, Property, 2011. Rented cinema props.


Partial installation views of Andrea Bowers, 14 Chairs, 2010. Fourteen metal folding chairs and spray paint. Edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs.



Another well-known figure is Andrea Bowers, who presents a witty fourteen-folding-chair tribute to seminal artists and art-world denizens. A chair for Sol LeWitt is covered with grids, one for Marcia Tucker is inscribed "Bad Girls," and Donald Judd gets immaculate, polished metal.

Other welcome sights include a super-fragile stacked-glass piece by Patrick Jackson (which was dutifully attended by a security guard at the opening); a trio of Grotjahn sculptures — messy, silly asides to the nine gorgeous and carefully wrought paintings now at Anton Kern; and a tiny annex space for the Dan Graham Gallery, a heady conceptual experiment in exhibition making that I would have expected to come from New York. I'm also intrigued by Eduardo Sarabia's contribution, less by the actual work — pretty photorealistic paintings of a woman in front of a verdant landscape covered with abstract daubs and blurs — than by his steadfast and admirable refusal to repeat his glorious 2008 Whitney Biennial homemade-tequila bar, which would no doubt be a certain success. (He's been absent from New York since then, and his last solo outing was at I-20 in 2006.)


Matt Johnson, American Spirits, 2010. Paper, plastic, foam, paint, and magnets. At the opening, this was set to the side of the pedestal; usually, though, aided by those magnets, it spins magically in the air.

Exactly 30 years ago, Peter Schjeldahl wrote a piece about the Los Angeles art world for the Village Voice. "This is never going to be a real art center unless, in the process, it ceases to be L.A.," he said. "The very word center is solecism here." "Greater LA" does not prove that the city has become an art center. There's no way it could: that term has become difficult to define, even meaningless, in the intervening three decades. There are centers everywhere today, in countless metropolitan areas and online, and they are almost as likely to be organized around web sites and curators as they are to be based in specific neighborhoods. Which makes the exhibition a refreshingly unusual and bravely retrograde affair, aiming as it does to identify and share the leading young artists of a single distant city. I hope it returns next year, with Mexico City as its focus this time, or perhaps Brussels or Brooklyn or Budapest.

Larry Gagosian

From Christopher Knight's review of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA):

Of 176 works on three floors, 139 are by artists who have shown with the same gallery -- Gagosian, commonly considered today's leading commercial powerhouse. That's nearly 80%. BCAM turns out to be GCAM. Such a narrow vision feels insecure, more investment deal than adventure.

Quality journalism. It'd be interested to see a breakdown of other collections based on institutional / commercial representation over the years. What percentage have been affiliated with Castelli or the Dia Foundation, and so forth?

Quick Notes 1

City Ordinance Fight Over Kiefer Sculpture [NYT] (from Art Law Blog)
Andrew and Christine Hall, two major art collectors from Fairfield, Connecticut, bought Anselm Kiefer's Narrow Are the Vessels and put it on their lawn. It turns out that it's so big that it qualifies as a 'structure' under Fairfield town ordinances, and they have to apply for a permit to certify its 'appropriateness'. Needless to say, there's a law suit in court. What the article doesn't explain is whether it's a matter of making sure the work is aesthetically appropriate or merely structurally so. (Kind of an important distinction, especially since it's blocked from the street by shrubs.) As is the case in many of these stories, the real problem may be class issues. Says the town attorney, Richard Saxl: "We’re dealing with people who are not used to being told 'no.'" That's a great comment to make to a journalist at the Times, Dick.

When Did Klimt Become the Thing? [ArtNews]
Says Robert Rosenblum, “I myself love Klimt up to a point, but it’s like going to a Viennese bakery.” That's about as weak an endorsement as any endorsement as I have ever heard. I like Klimt a lot - more than Rosenblum, at a minimum - but I'm hard-pressed to disagree with the argument that his prices are enormously inflated at the moment. The ArtNews piece provides a pretty helpful overview of how prices rose so dramatically over the last decade. It should be no surprise that it was spurred, in large part, by the collecting habits of a handful of people. With most of his major works now snatched up, prices will have to fall, but it's not hard to imagine that prices for more minor works have been increases for as least the near to medium term. But still, why Klimt? Rosenblum and others want to chock it up to the work's nostalgia value. Isn't that true of all art, though? Turn of the century Vienna is great, but so are lots of other eras. An additional possibility: the resolution of the ownership of a few major Klimt's dating back to World War II has helped facilitate a temporary market burst. And now most of them are sold - into arrangements that appear to be relatively permanent. Vienna Expressionism is the new French Impressionism.

1970s Police Manual to LA Gangs and Graffiti (from abLA)
Imagine how impossibly cool this could be. Click the link. Be amazed as all of your expectations are surpassed.