Mel Bochner’s Burnt Tongue

Mel Bochner, "No," 2009. Oil on canvas, 60 x 45 inches. Courtesy Marc Selywn Fine Art.

Los Angeles galleries are brimming with minimal, kind-of-conceptual abstraction at the moment — Paul Davis’s successions of hinges and wood and Joe Fyfe’s felt and muslin Motherwell spin-offs at ACME; Matt Connors’s posed expressionism and empty frames at Cherry and Martin; Leonor Antunes’s hanging brass triangles at Marc Foxx; or Lisa Williamson’s controlled outlines and understated installations at the recently closed David Kordansky exhibition. But of all these, it’s veteran Mel Bochner who makes the keenest impression.

Mel Bochner is obscenely smart. He has the pedigree and, when he wants to, the vocabulary of an academic. He has taught at the New School and Yale, and written about the “oddly circular history” of perspective and linguistics in Wittgenstein. But through forty-five years of making, he’s managed to keep his artwork visually crass, provocatively simplistic, and, as a result, wittily incisive. In his current exhibition at Marc Selywn Fine Art, a series of comfortably large, kinkily colored paintings run through sequences of synonyms. Visually staccato, the paintings look the way that  Charles Bukowski soundbytes sound.

Bochner, who has called himself a “belated beatnik,” had his first exhibition back in 1966, at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Then, like now, he was questioning the grammar of art. In a particularly memorable piece, he used word portraits to engage work made by his contemporaries–in Portrait of Eva Hesse, a slew of tactile-sounding verbs circle around the word “wrap,” which anchors the drawing. It’s an abstraction of an abstraction that pulls Hesse’s ideas out of the context of her work and yet it’s surprisingly accessible. Pared down to “wrap,” “limit,” “ensconce,” and “tie-up,” among other words, Hesse (or at least the Hesse represented by these verbs) seems like a spatially-obsessed poet who’s fixated on everything bodily, which is actually fairly accurate.

Since then, Bochner has done a variety of public works, written about Donal Judd and serialization for Artforum and, among  other ventures, begun a refreshingly whimsical series of drawing not too ingeniously derived from Roget’s Thesaurus.

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Cultural Landscapes, Aesthetics, and Tigers: A Conversation with Mitchell Hearns Bishop

Mitchell Bishop at the Adamson House, Malibu, California. Photo: Maria Gilbert.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been preparing a presentation about time-based art for the colloquium at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, “Collaborations in Conserving Time-Based Art,” which I talked about last month with Jeff Martin. I started my research for this talk with my friend Mitchell Hearns Bishop’s article, “Evolving Exemplary Pluralism: Steve McQueen’s Deadpan and Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Anne, Aki, and God–Two Case Studies for Conserving Technology-Based Installation Art.” You can read that article on the American Institute for Conservation’s website.

Even though Mitchell worked for many years in various roles at the Getty and had both Robert Irwin and James Turrell as visiting professors in art school, I’d like to move a little bit away from concepts of contemporary art in my conversation with him.  Mitchell is now the curator of historic collections at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden and responsible for the historic buildings, collections, and the cultural landscape.  Of course, I recognize that the L.A. Arboretum is an environmental institution, which means that its mission is more closely aligned with ecological issues rather than art history. Or is it? As much as these disciplines are different, there are similarities.

Richard McCoy: How is the Arboretum different than a fine art museum, and how has your approach shifted from that of a conservation professional to one of a curator?

Mitchell Hearns Bishop: While we do have art in the collections, the overall context is environmental so my curatorial approach needs to be aligned with that. My botanist colleagues often refer to me as the “historian,” but for me that’s problematic, as a conventional historical interpretation independent from the environmental context is meaningless.

At the Arboretum, our purpose is to promote learning and provide inspiration and enjoyment, which isn’t really that different than an art museum’s function. Take, for example, the National Gallery in Washington—the classicism and monumentality of the architecture and the quality of the collection are inspirational in a fundamental way. A lovely garden or landscape with charming old buildings provides a similar feeling. While the Arboretum has a traditional educational role, it is in the context of pleasure and inspiration. We want visitors to go away feeling good. The site itself is what I refer to as a “geography of pleasure.” It was a resort, a recreational destination one hundred forty years ago and still is today.

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This Magic Moment: Diana Thater, Jeffrey Wells at the Santa Monica Museum of Art

Diana Thater, "Los Angeles Theatre Marquee," 35mm production still from "Between Science and Magic," 2010. Courtesy the artist.

The Oscars, aka prom night for Hollywood, are just around the corner! Who does The Academy love more: the noble savage, the noble soldier, or the noble soldier-turned-savage? Are you on the edge of your seat or what?

If you answered “or what” to that question, you might prefer to spend this Sunday at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, whose current exhibitions offer an excellent antidote to “movie magic.” Disassembling that particular phrase is the crux of preeminent video/film/installation artist Diana Thater’s newest work, Between Science and Magic. Thater’s installation (also on view across the country at David Zwirner Gallery until March 13) features a film of a magician repeatedly performing the iconic rabbit-in-a-hat trick, while Jeffrey Wells’s concurrent exhibition, Seeing While Seeing, represents a clever manifestation of Wells’s own distinctive approach to  deconstructing parallel themes of illusion, trickery, and suspension of disbelief.

Jeffrey Wells, "Seeing While Seeing," installation view, 2010. Courtesy Santa Monica Museum of Art.

The low-tech trompe l’oeil animations in Wells’s installation are just as psychedelic and phantasmagoric as the high-end CGI phosphorescent forests in Avatar, and are far more lively and dimensional. As you enter the museum’s project room, the walls begin to dissolve before your eyes. With a series of subtle projections, Wells deftly liquifies two corners of the room into wiggly lines, while strange after-image-like rectangles appear and disappear around the two pictures that hang on adjacent walls. Even as you attempt to anchor yourself by reading the exhibition’s wall text, the letters begin to dance off the page, glowing and pulsating. The exit sign suspended at the top of the doorway echoes itself onto the nearby ceiling and opposite wall, as though reflecting itself onto a watery surface. The effect of the work is simultaneously disquieting and invigorating. Suddenly, the world around you feels malleable, porous, and oddly comical. The projectors are revealed, but it’s not entirely possible to determine exactly how Wells produces these strange effects – and you kind of don’t want to know. Wells, like a magician, has performed a trick that leaves his audience buoyant with pleasant bewilderment and inquisitiveness.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Wells’s mutating wall, Diana Thater addresses both the intersection and divergence of art and magic in her installation commissioned by the SMMoA. I must say that I find it a bit of a stretch to describe this particular work as an installation, although Thater herself would probably argue that projecting her film on the wall of the Santa Monica Museum constitutes it as such. I would disagree entirely with this classification were it not for the two speakers that amplify the mechanical whirring of her two film projectors. This effect ultimately allows the work to fill the vast space of SMMoA’s main gallery, rather than simply existing on a single plane. In addition, the piece is comprised of two separate films, though the projectors align to produce a symmetrically balanced split-screen effect.

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Weekly Roundup

William Kentridge, Drawing for the film 'Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old (Soho and Mrs. Eckstein in Pool)', 1991. Charcoal and pastel on paper, 47 1/4 x 59 in. Collection of the artist. © 2010 William Kentridge. Photo: John Hodgkiss, courtesy the artist.

With 19 bits and bites below, this week’s roundup is a whopper:

• Five Themes, the traveling survey exhibition of work by Season 5 artist William Kentridge, has landed at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Featuring more than 100 works, the exhibition underscores the inter­relatedness of Kentridge’s various disciplines and mediums — drawing, print, animated film, theater models and books. The exhibition is organized chronologically and in five primary themes that cut across his artistic output: “Occasional and Residual Hope: Ubu and the Procession,” “Thick Time: Soho and Felix,” “Parcours d’Atelier: Artist in the Studio,” “Sarastro and the Master’s Voice: The Magic Flute,” and “Learning from the Absurd: The Nose.” The New York installation of Five Themes has been expanded to include 38 prints from the MoMA’s collection. The exhibition is on view through May 17.

• On March 8 at 7pm, Kentridge will perform his lecture/theatrical monologue/installation, I am not me, the horse is not mine, at MoMA. (According to museum press materials, the event is already sold out.) The piece is based on the short story The Nose (1837), by the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, which “follows the travails of a pompous Russian bureaucrat who wakes one day to find his nose has escaped his face and assumed greater clout than he.” In this solo performance, Kentridge combines narration, video projection, and a vocal and instrumental soundtrack. I am not me, the horse is not mine is part of an extensive body of work Kentridge has developed in preparation for his production of Dimitri Shostakovich’s The Nose, premiering at New York’s Metropolitan Opera on March 5.

• On March 12 at 7pm, the New York Public Library, in collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera, will host a public conversation between Kentridge and Paul Holdengräber, the Director of Public Programs for The Research Libraries. Read more about the program and purchase tickets here.

• In conjunction with all of the above, Dieu Donné, a non-profit space in New York City that focuses on the hand papermaking process in contemporary art, presents a new limited edition book of 18 watermarked images and text created by Kentridge. Sheets of Evidence was, according to the website, conceptually designed to reveal nothing at first glance. “The viewer is encouraged to delve deeper and quite literally look beneath the surface, allowing light to reveal the subtle images and text hidden in the white sheets of handmade paper…Through the use of the watermark technique the artist continues his exploration of light and perspective, and like his films these invisible drawings are revealed only when illuminated from behind.” The exhibition will also feature two earlier projects created in collaboration with Kentridge: Thinking in Water, a suite of three works; and Receiver, a limited edition book published in 2006, which features twenty-three etchings, photogravures, and dry points by Kentridge and seven poems by the Nobel Laureate poet Wislawa Szymborska. Sheets of Evidence closes March 27.

• On March 3, the Manifest Equality project will open a one-week pop up gallery in the center of Hollywood. The exhibition brings together international and local artists in “a call to present art that unites art, activism and the message of universal equal rights into a memorable multi-media moment.” Participating artists include: Barry McGee (Season 1), Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Harvey Pekar, Karen Kimmel, Robbie Conal, Ron English, Tierney Gearon, Clare Rojas, and others. Manifest Equality specifically responds to “the growing resistance to equal rights for the LGBT population” and seeks to “raise visibility for the grass roots efforts to ensure full Equal Rights to LGBT Americans.” Follow the Manifest Equality blog here.

• On March 5 at 5pm, Ida Applebroog (Season 3) will sign copies of her new monograph Monalisa, published by Hauser & Wirth. The event is part of INDEPENDENT, a hybrid model and temporary exhibition forum, conceived by New York gallerist and founder of X Initiative, Elizabeth Dee, and gallerist Darren Flook, from Hotel, London. Monalisa features an illustrated essay by critic and art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson and a photographic study of the Monalisa house by Abby Robinson.

• For the annual week of New York City art fairs, Galerie Lelong will present Sheela-Na-Gig at Home, an installation by Season 4 artist Nancy Spero. First created in 1996, the piece displays Spero’s “dark humor and interests in the female experience and the grotesque” and alludes to “women’s work.” Figures of Sheela-Na-Gig are repeated and interspersed with feminine lingerie and hung on a clothesline. Placed on the floor is a television monitor showing the artist hanging the drawings and clothes. Spero conceived Sheela-Na-Gig at Home as an “instructions” work that could be installed by anyone, similar to Fluxus and Conceptual works. This is the first time the work will be presented in New York since the year of its creation. Sheela-Na-Gig at Home will be on view March 3-7 at the Park Avenue Armory.

• Season 2 artist Maya Lin has received the National Medal of Arts, an annual award managed by the National Endowment for the Arts. Chairman Rocco Landesman said the winners represent “the breadth and depth of American architecture, design, film, music, performance, theater and visual art.” Lin’s latest project, What Is Missing?, was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal and on CNN. On April 22, her website www.whatismissing.net will go live, and a companion video will screen in Times Square.

• Three sculptures and 29 drawings by Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) are currently on view in Seoul, Korea at Kukje Gallery. Les Fleurs, Bourgeois’ fourth solo show at the gallery, focuses on Bourgeois’ interest in drawing corporeal and psychological subjects such as nature, motherhood and women. The artist has chosen the title to “speak to her adoption of the flower and women as symbols for vitality, desire and sexuality.” Les Fleurs is on view through March 31.

• Season 5 artist Jeff Koons (whose personal art collection was featured in the New York Times over the weekend) has curated an exhibition of work by Ed Paschke for Gagosian Gallery. Koons was Paschke’s assistant in Chicago in the mid-1970s while attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Paschke would prove to be an important mentor and formative inspiration for the young artist. The exhibition includes loans from public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad, as well as rarely seen works from the Ed Paschke Foundation. Read more about the show here.

• The Ashville Art Museum has opened the exhibition Limners to Facebook: Portraiture from the 19th to the 21st Century, which explores the persistent desire to capture images of self and others. The multimedia exhibition includes formal portraits, self-portraits, portraits of animals, and portraits of friends or models. In addition to photographs by Season 1 artist William Wegman, the show includes an image of Season 1 artist Laurie Anderson taken by Annie Leibovitz. Limners to Facebook closes July 18.

• For the March issue of Modern Painters, Anderson was commissioned to visit artist Marina Abramovic and discuss the recent evolution of performance art. Abramovic’s retrospective exhibition opens at the Museum of Modern Art, New York on March 14. Marina Abramovic and Laurie Anderson: Wise Women is available online. (On an unrelated note, The New York Observer recently reported that Anderson has been appointed to P.S.1’s Board of Directors.)

• Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas has acquired a work by Season 1 artist Kerry James Marshall for their collection. The museum describes the piece: In Our Town [1995], Marshall presents a tidy vision of suburbia not unlike Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play of the same title – apron-clad mother, cookie-cutter homes, two kids and their dog – and then undercuts it with the tense expressions and postures of the children in the foreground. Yellow ribbons are wrapped around most of the trees, suggesting war or other tragedy beyond the confines of the neighborhood…Floating above the image, heralded by bluebirds bearing ribbons, the title of the work calls into question who belongs in this American idyll.” Our Town will be included in Kerry James Marshall, a retrospective exhibition opening May 8 at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

• On March 5 at 6pm, the Salina Art Center in South Santa Fe will host a public talk by Marshall. Titled John Brown’s Body: The Representation of Black Bodies as Revolutionary Gesture, Marshall’s presentation will explore his ongoing investigation of African American identity and culture in the United States.

• On March 5, the Brooklyn Museum will host a free open house for teens in conjunction with Sojourn, the solo exhibition of works by Kiki Smith (Season 2). The event, planned by teens working at the museum, offers hands-on activities from 4:30pm until 7pm. To RSVP call (718) 501-6588 or e-mail teen.programs@brooklynmuseum.org.

• In conjunction with the exhibition Contemplating The Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum, Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, Spanish composer Héctor Parra, and Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie have collaborated on Hypermusic: Ascension, a new site-specific monodrama. The piece “inverts and renovates the genre of opera with an experimental score suggesting the expanding reality of a fifth dimension.” Hypermusic will debut in the museum’s rotunda on March 11 at 6:30pm.

• Reverend on Ice (2005) by Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) is on view at the National Gallery of Victoria. According to the Brisbane Times, this three-dimensional rendition of Skating Minister, an 18th-century painting by the Scottish artist Henry Raeburn, is placed in the 18th-century galleries to encourage visitors to “think about the migration of ideas and culture across boundaries, from the political to the historical.”

• Season 3 artist Krzysztof Wodiczko has been awarded a 2009 New England Art Award. The awards are organized by the New England Journal of Aesthetic Research to honor the best art made in New England and exhibits organized in 2009. The winners are picked by some 1,880 voters from across the region. In each category there are two winners — the critics’ choice and the people’s choice. Wodiczko won the people’s choice award in the category for New Media.

• Visit Bostonist.com to read about the public conversation between Roni Horn (Season 3) and John Waters that took place at the ICA, Boston a few weeks ago. Horn’s retrospective is on view at the ICA through June 13.

I Am Not Neda

AFP/Getty Image.

I drove into a Westwood parking garage late on Monday and saw that the attendant had been crying. After an uneasy moment–I wasn’t sure where compassion and polite distance met in a situation like this–I asked, “Are you okay?”  It’s such a disingenuous question but it seems to work when you want to say, “I give a damn.” The attendant half-smiled and averted her eyes in a way that made me think she wouldn’t answer. When she handed me my change, however, she said, “My mother died.” I don’t know what I expected, but that wasn’t it. “No!” I exclaimed. “You shouldn’t even be here.” I wish I hadn’t said that.  How do I know where she should or shouldn’t have been? I don’t know anything about her or her pain. All I know is that, in general, death hurts.

Tuesday night, an event at UCLA’s Hammer Museum dealt with death in a way that was less discriminating than I would have liked. The Museum joined forces with PEN USA to present a reading titled, “I Am Neda.” The event promised to bring together dissident poets and to celebrate freedom fighters in Iran. I went because, like so many others, I found the video of Neda Agha-Soltan, the unknown makers of which just received a George Polk Award for Videography, emotionally searing. I also went because the Neda phenomenon seems so heavily visual that I wanted to see how poetry could claim her image.

The Neda video that went viral on June 20, 2009, showed a young woman, shot through the chest during a protest, dying with  renegade grace. When she fell, her legs bent and flopped tom-boyishly, seemingly disregarding the mores of a propriety-obsessed society, and her loosely-fisted hands slowly collapsed to frame her blood streaked face. All of this made her an easy symbol for freedom. She was also young and attractive, so her photograph translated well to signs and posters that started appearing in the days following her death. International correspondents began calling her “the face of a revolution” and the “voice of freedom.” She was an icon before anyone actually knew who she was or what she had been doing on the day she died.

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The Puppy Wars

Jeff Koons, "Girl with Dolphin and Monkey" (The Whitney Museum of American Art 75th Anniversary Photography Portfolio), 2006. Courtesy Whitney Museum

The eerily small, closely watched world of New York art criticism experienced some infighting earlier this month, following the publication of February’s The Brooklyn Rail. “I think that there are some things you shouldn’t do, and promoting Jeff Koons is one of them,” wrote Rail editor John Yau, picking a fight with critic Jerry Saltz, who had championed Koons (featured in Season Five of Art:21) as “the emblematic artist of the decade” in New York Magazine’s end-of-the-00s issue. Saltz had also declared Koons’s work emblematic of America—it’s “crowd-pleasing, heat-seeking, impeccably produced, polished, popular, expensive, and extroverted—while also being abrasive, creepily sexualized…” It’s this last part that Yau resented; he titled his editorial The Difference Between Saltz’s America and Mine. “In Saltz’s America,” he quipped, “Puppy is great public art and Tom Cruise is the good, handsome German with an eye patch, trying to save the world from Hitler.” Saltz retaliated via his Facebook page, calling Yau “dickish,” “incoherent,” “self-satisfied,” and “irrelevant.” It wasn’t a pretty moment for art writing.

Jerry Saltz. Courtesy Kevin Wick/Longview Photography.

John Yau, taken during the video taping of Add-Verse, 2003. Photo: Gloria Graham.

I care about what Yau and Saltz say — partly because I’m a writer, and knowing what other, more visible writers write is part of my job — but also because both of them have influenced me. Yau’s Corpse and Mirror gave me new entry into abstraction, while Saltz taught me that Charles Ray can be likable and that lush adjectives can join with austere conceptualism. A lot of other writers and artists care too. So much so that I’m noticeably late to comment on the Saltz-Yau tiff. Art21 contributor Hrag Vartanian “broke” the story; Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes spoke up for Yau; artist William Powhida invited the critics to debate at #class; C-Monster, art blogging’s straightest shooter, kept tabs on the squabble; poet Michael Leong wrote that Saltz hadn’t found “enough critical distance to say anything productive” (and received a retaliatory comment from Saltz). Some — Vartanian, Leong and Green in particular — did justice to the ethical problem Yau had with Saltz. But there’s another more frustrating ethical problem integral to all of this. This problem has little to do with either critic’s ultimate point. Those were actually reasonable: Saltz said that Koons embodied an era in American culture; Yau said Koons didn’t, and that saying so evidenced tunnel-vision. The problem has to do with how they went about arguing. Continue reading »

Weekly Roundup

Charles Atlas, "Son of Sam and Delilah", 1991. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Greek tragedy, cross dressing, cooking shows, needlework, rowdy teens, storytelling, nighttime walks, and a few mystery plays in this week’s roundup:

• Virtuoso Illusion: Cross Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde at the MIT List Visual Arts Center explores how experimental art has been enlivened and advanced by artists who cross dress as part of their conceptual process. “The show is not intended,” according to MIT, “as an exploration of identity issues specifically, but more as an in depth look at current and historical strategies of cross dressing as an art of the irrational, the unexpected.” Artists include Charles Atlas, Matthew Barney (both Season 2), Claude Cahun, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Marcel Duchamp, Michelle Handelman, John Kelly, Katarzyna Kozyra, Kalup Linzy, Ma Liuming, Manon, Pierre Molinier, Yasumasa Morimura, Brian O’Doherty, Ryan Trecartin, and Andy Warhol. Atlas created video mock documentaries about the evolving twentieth-century performance avant-garde during the years he collaborated with Merce Cunningham. In Son of Sam and Delilah (1991), Atlas provides “a transporting view of a flock of gender indiscriminate performers.” Virtuoso Illusion, organized by guest curator Michael Rush, former director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, is on view through April 4.

• The highly anticipated exhibition Kiki Smith: Sojourn opens at the Brooklyn Museum this Friday. Smith (Season 2) draws on a variety of experiences in the cycle of life, from the milestones of birth and death to the daily chores of domestic life, with particular attention to the lives of women artists. An eighteenth-century silk needlework by a woman named Prudence Punderson that inspired Smith’s installation is on loan to the museum from the Connecticut Historical Society and included in the exhibition. Via the museum website: “Punderson’s stark depiction of a woman’s journey from childhood to death in the years leading up to and immediately after the United States gained its independence intrigued Smith because rather than following the stereotypical rites of passage in a woman’s life of the period…this young woman chose to depict a life of the mind for her subject, presenting a woman engaged in creative work.” Smith will install her work in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art as well as in two of the museum’s eighteenth-century period rooms. Sojourn closes September 12.

• Works by Laylah Ali (Season 3), Kara Walker (Season 2), Ghada Amer, Shary Boyle, Amy Cutler, Chitra Ganesh, Wangechi Mutu, Annie Pootoogook, Leesa Streifler, and Su-en Wong are on view at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery in Ontario, Canada. The exhibition, titled Pandora’s Box, offers a new twist on the myth of Pandora in which it is no longer about what is hidden inside of the box, but what is metaphorically reflected on the outside. Pandora’s Box continues through March 21.

• Through February 28, Tank.tv is showing two works by Season 5 artist Paul McCarthy: Family Tyranny and Cultural Soup. Both works — cut from two days of taped performance at a community television studio in 1987 — feature Season 1 artist Mike Kelley. Tank.tv calls the videos a “disturbing tableaux of familial horror, steeped in the stomach turning abjection” of McCarthy’s practice. Performed within a “barely credible domestic set,” the format and characters in the videos enact several tropes of television entertainment: the unruly teenager (Kelley), and the how-to format of cooking and DIY programs.

• Fifty photographs of nocturnal landscapes by Robert Adams (Season 4) are on view at Matthew Marks Gallery in the exhibition Summer Nights, Walking. These images of trees and houses, mountains and streets, fields and sidewalks captured between dusk and approaching dark were made between 1976-1982 near Adams’ home in Longmont, Colorado. Adams first showed photographs from this series in 1985. He recently said of editing his night pictures: “When I have looked again at the photographs that I might have chosen but did not, it has seemed to me that if I had included a wider variety, the result would have been, though less harmonious, more convincing, closer to our actual experience of wonder, anxiety and stillness.” This exhibition celebrates the publication of Summer Nights, Walking, co-published by Aperture and the Yale University Art Gallery, a revised and updated version of an earlier book. The exhibition continues through April 17.

• Delusion, a new work by Laurie Anderson (Season 1) will premiere at the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company, February 16-21. The piece is described as “a series of short mystery plays” populated by “nuns, elves, golems, rotting forests, ghost ships, archaeologists, dead relatives and unmanned tankers.” Delusion was commissioned by the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games and The Barbican Centre in London. Tickets can be purchased here.

• The lecture series Critical Conversations at the Roski School of Fine Arts in Los Angeles features talks by visiting artists, curators, theorists, writers, and other cultural producers, who engage in open conversations with graduate students and attending members of the public. Season 4 artists Mark Dion and Mark Bradford will speak on February 23 and March 2, respectively.

• Season 5 artist William Kentridge will lecture at The Cooper Union in New York City tomorrow, February 9. The event begins at 8pm and is free and open to the public.

• BMW has announced that Season 5 artist Jeff Koons will design their 17th art car. Read more about the project here.

If You Can Remember the ’60s, You Weren’t There

Ed Ruscha, "The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire," 1968, oil on canvas. Courtesy edruscha.com.

When I moved from Berkeley to Los Angeles five years ago, I thought I was done living in a town that was devoted to perpetually remembering the ’60s. But I soon discovered that Los Angeles also carries a mega-torch for that transformative decade. It’s easy to see why that era is appealing and continually inspiring these California cultural centers, respectively—it was during the 1960s that Berkeley distinguished itself as a hub of counter-cultural development and progressive action; meanwhile Los Angeles finally began to transcend its reputation as a vapid entertainment factory and, peeking out from under New York’s shadow, started to develop into prominent epicenter of contemporary art.

In her latest post, my co-columnist Catherine Wagley recounted how, during a recent panel discussion at LACMA, a young man asked what he should “take from” from art produced before his time. It just so happens that LACMA has good news for those of us who agree with Catherine’s conclusion that younger generations should make the most of things and “take as much as [they] possibly can” from the art of previous generations. This week, the 1960s art world became even easier to remember for those of us who weren’t really there (and even those of us who were). Two days before Steve Jobs introduced Apple’s slick Kindle rival, LACMA announced the creation of an online Reading Room–a virtual space in which the museum will present digital versions of LACMA’s publications. While the virtual Reading Room will eventually include more current books, their inaugural collection is exclusively comprised of out-of-print publications that focus on the Los Angeles art scene during the late 1960s (and late 1950s).  Now, the iPad Generation can virtually experience catalogues from ten seminal exhibitions including Six Painters and the Object, Six More, Art in Los Angeles: Seventeen Artists in the Sixties, and Late Fifties at the Ferus.

Ed Moses, John Altoon, Billy Al Bengston, and Irving Blum, 1959. Claxton Photo, courtesy ferusgallery.com.

Speaking of which, the Ferus Gallery, which exhibited almost all of the artists currently featured in LACMA’s Reading Room, has been enjoying a major revival. Last weekend, in conjunction with Art Los Angeles Contemporary (yet another new LA Art Fair, this time held at the Pacific Design Center), New York dealers Tim Nye and Franklin Parrasch mounted an exhibition entitled Ferus Gallery: Greatest Hits Volume I, at the exact site of the original Ferus storefront gallery space at 736-A North La Cienega Boulevard, which has served as a tailor shop in the intervening decades. The exhibition featured Ferus veterans John Altoon, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Jay DeFeo, Llyn Foulkes, Craig Kauffman, Ed Kienholz, Roy Lictenstein, Ed Moses, Ken Price, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol. Word on the street is that Nye and Parrasch may take the show on the road, reprising it at The Armory Show this Spring.

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The Fruit of Experience

Fallen Fruit Collective, "Elysian Park," 2005. Giclee print, 40 x 60 in. Courtesy the artists.

Fallen Fruit Collective formed six years ago through a project by artists David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young for the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. The trio created a street-by-street diagram of fruit trees growing on or over public property in their Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. While the city boasts bananas, peaches, avocados, lemons, oranges, kumquats, plums, pomegranates, and other fruits growing year-round, this bounty is not always shared. Mapping “public fruit” was a way to approach food resource and accessibility concerns in urban space. From the beginning, Fallen Fruit urged city officials, urban planning groups, and property owners to plant with the goal of yielding edible goods for the local populace. You might call Burns, Viegener, and Young the locavores of contemporary art.

Next month, Fallen Fruit will launch EATLACMA, a year-long investigation into food, art, culture, and politics at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Their ambitious plan consists of an exhibition culled from the museum’s collection; a newly commissioned work; seven curated artist gardens on the museum campus; two fruit tree giveaways; a participatory YouTube project; and Let Them Eat LACMA, a day of public performance and engagement involving over fifty artists and collectives. EATLACMA grew out of Fallen Fruit’s participation in a program at the museum in 2008 (organized by Machine Project), for which they mapped fruit in the permanent collection and designed thematic tours. In a recent interview, Burns explained this way of looking at the history of art:

“When you start organizing painting or history by looking at the subject/object/symbol of fruit, it’s really fascinating the way it collapses art. People put so much importance on the stroke, which is valid, and in what Impressionism [for instance] means, but forget that the reason [an artist] is painting oranges is because they’re colorful. Or you go back a hundred years and Dutch painters are painting them because they’re exotic, expensive, and oranges do not grow in Northern Europe. It’s a luxury item that is only possible because of shipping industries and world trade.”

In EATLACMA, depictions of fruit serve to connect the museum’s holdings in a whole new way and shed light on food in the history of human contact. (Burns informed me that fruit exists in the history of art more than any other food.) But it is living fruit that Burns, Viegener, and Young use to connect people today.

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Hollis Frampton Revival

Hollis Frampton, "Nostalgia," 1973. Film still.

Last November, I attended a panel discussion, held at LACMA, on photographs of man-altered landscape. The images in question—coolly composed prints by Stephen Shore, Lewis Baltz, and Robert Adams, among others—all hailed from the 1970s. Of all the panelists, only Douglas Crimp had been a full-fledged adult when the images first debuted. The others, including MOCA curator Philipp Kaiser and LACMA’s Britt Salvesen, had still been in the thick of growing up.

The ages of the panelists didn’t seem to matter much until, during the Q&A, a poised student who introduced himself as  “born in 1990” commented that, while the photographs appealed to him because of their obvious skillfulness, he wanted to know what someone his age was supposed to take from work created years before his birth. The panelists understandably stumbled—how do you convince someone to value a history he didn’t experience?

Hollis Frampton on "Screening Room with Robert Gardner," 1977.

A new screening series featuring the work of experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton brings this weird tension between the oldness and edginess of “historical” work into exciting focus. Frampton, who began his art-making career as a photographer, made most of his films in the 1960s and 1970s,  toying with the physical medium of film as much as with its narrative potential (in Frampton’s Critical Mass, screened last Sunday, a couple quarrels continuously and the breaks, repetitions, and strange overlaps in the frames make human behavior seem absurdly circular–the medium and story are indistinguishable). He also gave incisively smart interviews, and wrote about the practices and ideas behind film-making in a voice that managed to be both theoretically acute and imaginatively candid.

A recent book of Frampton’s writings, collected and edited by Bruce Jenkins, has contributed to an upswing in Frampton enthusiasm over the past two years. During the same time, Los Angeles gallerist Leila Khastoo began considering a potential exhibition of Frampton’s photographs, many of which have never been seen. This proved more difficult than anticipated, since the photographs belonged to public institutions and acquiring them would require a fair amount of finagling. But the process brought Khastoo in contact with Adam Hyman, Executive Director of the Los Angeles Filmforum. Hyman had also been interested in Frampton for some time (Filmforum screened Frampton’s Magellan series ten years ago, but most of Frampton’s work has not been screened in L.A.) and the two decided to collaborate.

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