Silverlake Blvd.

Joseph Wright of Derby @ The Huntington

Wright of Derby’s “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” (1768) is currently at the Huntington, on loan from the National Gallery, in exchange for "The Blue Boy".

Can we keep it? It's a picture that's needed here.

Besides, we have Kehinde Wiley's brilliant "Portrait of a young gentleman" installed handsomely now in "The Blue Boy"s place. 

I first encountered “Air Pump” in the middle of the George W. Bush era, where it struck me of an alarmingly prescient allegory of my world.

But it is not an allegory; it’s a drama. The figures do not represent Natural History and Superstition or other ideas, but demonstrate distinct individual responses to the business at hand.

Which is what? Not an experiment in the sense of discovering new knowledge. Rather a demonstration a fact already established. But it’s also a theatrical spectacle – a magic trick.

The magician in question is demonstrating the creation of a vacuum with extreme vividness, by suffocating a lovely exotic bird. He is making concepts of air and vacuums concrete and impressive. He is imparting knowledge, first hand.

But if science is the pretext, but his pose, gestures and expression are of the stage. He looks like a veteran actor poised to emit a resounding universal curse.

His young assistant works away on the pump, looking over his shoulder doubtfully.

Two other young men look on, taking it in with earnest absorption.

Another pair – a young man and young woman ignore the experiment entirely, being intent on flirting with each other.

Two little girls recoil in horror from the sight of the bird being suffocated. They are gently chided by their father, who encourages them to focus on the important lesson being illustrated.

He’s an enlightened father, wishing his daughters as well as sons to have the benefit of this education.

Another old man sits at the desk lost in thought. He’s not looking at the experiment, but seems to be looking beyond it to all that will follow, to Watt’s steam engine, the power loom, the Luddites, railroads, mechanization, industrialization, electrification, digitization, … this.

Katie Herzog @ Klowden Mann

 

 

The new work at Klowden Mann lures you with funky, amiable gorgeousness: lush colors and textures. But then you begin to realize what you’re looking at. She doesn’t paint current atrocities, but artifacts of paleoconservative, libertarian, commercial or technological discourse behind it. “Discourse” literally: slogans, names, words.

 

The main series paints the covers of the paperback books distributed circa 1961 by the John Birch Society collectively titled “One Dozen Candles”. Each painting is heavily encrusted with melted candles. “Seeds of Treason” is the high point. It’s beautiful; but they’re all compelling.

 

The watercolors tend towards monochrome, highlighting the fact that she really can draw.

 

The “Ephemerisle” vinyl banners added a bright, crisp contrast, both in color and their genial spoofy mood.

 

The Malheur Refuge drawings take on another strain of utopianism: conservation. KH documents the gruesome, urban infrastructure that paradoxically comes with the idea of a nature preserve.

 

“Voting Booth Soft Sculpture” was my immediate favorite. Pathos, outrage, wit. It’s fabricated with an endearingly improvised directness. Goofy and alarming. I was not afraid of it, though I should be.

 

Philip Guston @ Hauser & Wirth, L.A.

 

 

The Guston retrospective of 15 years ago omitted work from 1971 – the year all the work currently at Hauser & Wirth was done. It was worth the wait. It was like getting a tour of his studio. Or, rather studios plural, since the work was produced in Italy and in U.S. The homeland of antiquity and the homeland of Richard Nixon are reflected, distilled, caricatured, restored, and quarantined. As George Seferis put it, “I woke with this marble head in my hands; / it exhausts my elbows and I don’t know where to put it down.”

Nudity & Costume @ the Getty

 

I ran into an old friend at “The Renaissance Nude”. It was by Raphael until it was attributed to Raphael’s teacher, Perugino. The pipe-player was Marsyas until experts started to i.d. him as Daphnis. Moreover, the Getty hung it in a LGBT corner, implying that Apollo and the piper are a couple. Does it make a difference?

 

If they’re a couple they don't seem to be having a good time. Apollo looks down – in both senses – on his companion. The piper is so absorbed in his music-making that he isn’t paying attention – despite the fact that Apollo is making an exhibition of his physical splendor. The piper is bald and not at all a Greek god, but Perugino (or whomever) has given him the beauty of someone wholeheartedly engaged in an absorbing task. He's the one you focus on.

 

Here’s where the name becomes significant. If he’s Daphnis, he’s going to be caught up in love triangle with some local nymphs which ends so badly for him that he devotes the rest of his life to sad songs. If he’s Marsyas, Apollo will take offense at his presumption in being a musician, and skin him alive. A lot going on in a 524-year-old, 15” x 11” rectangle.

 

 

The exhibition was such that it is possible to mention “the other Peruginos” on display, i.e. the big decoration with scenes from the Metamorphoses in the background and a “Combat between Love and Chastity” in the foreground; and an electrically charged “Baptism of Christ,” with Christ’s feet seen through the pale blue water of the Jordan.

 

 

But before the naked people from the Renaissance, we experienced how Rococo ladies got dressed at Maxwell Barr’s brilliant lecture/demonstration. He took us through the mechanics and logistics of how aristocratic Frenchwomen dressed throughout the day. I will never look at eighteenth century lace again without thinking about the extraordinary quantities of labor they embody, and their consequent function as a signifier of wealth.

 

Not to mention the labor of the women who put on and took off these signifiers! Barr encouraged our patient model to give frequent updates on how she felt at different stages - under the corset, the layers of heavily embroidered fabric, balancing on un-sensible shoes, ....

 

Kerry James Marshall @ MOCA

 

 

I suspected I would like the Kerry James Marshall show at MOCA, but that’s an understatement. I liked—loved—every single work. I can’t think I’ve ever felt that about anyone’s retrospective before. The early work, the big work, the littler work, even the prints and photographs.

 

He is a figure painter. His figures are black. KJM paints as if there were no white people.

 

The ban on white people is telling, especially since KJM has a real gift for using pale pink, as well as shrieking red, forest green, midnight blue, …. There’s an amazing red room, with a magnificent mis-appropriation of Barnett Newman. But even better is The Studio, a defiant challenge to Courbet, Matisse, Johns …. And a Manet woman posing on the grass, with a giant orange clamp in the foreground.

 

The themes and subject matter is essentially that of the Impressionists (Manet above all): boating, picnics and playing and posing on the grass on sunny days, gardens, city scenes, couples out on the town, studios, portraits in emulation of Velázquez, ….

 

But the treatment is that of religious paintings: icons and Fra Angelico at San Marco. A carefully delineated figure, haloed, set in the landscape of a legend, embroidered with heraldic and allegorical devices.

 

He has many manners. His grand machines tend to combine a variety of different styles. Such as …

• A flat, naturalistic, falsely naïve paint-by-numbers manner, usually reserved for backgrounds. Sometimes it creates the sense that the painting is painting on top of a photographer’s backdrop.
• The tightly drawn, dramaticly or elegantly poised, high-lighted black figures composed of Ad Reinhardty blacks-on-blacks.
• A free, figurative Abstract Expressionist manner for mid-ground details.
• Glitter ropes, curtains, …
• Beuys/Schnabel/Sigmar Polke splatters and crude prints.

Is he the best painter alive? Could be. Not that that means anything. What’s iteresting is how he synthesizes the work of his most distinguished and different peers: Mary Heilmann mixed with David Hockney, Alex Katz with Brice Marden, Elizabeth Peyton with Kehinde Wiley, ….

KJM does not tell stories. He commemorates public events, but the commemoration is private.

John McLaughlin Paintings: Total Abstraction @ LACMA

 

The sequence wasn’t rigorously chronological, but the paintings were given a lot of room to breathe. The second and third rooms were stunning. It had a similar quiet power that was similar—though different—from the Agnes Martins that just preceded them in those spaces.

 

Rectangles within rectangles, frames within frames. Blasts of high-keyed, not very natural colors, especially the tart contrast of aqua and lemon.

 

Sometimes the mood is sober and calm. Rectangles that interlock and fit together with a pleasing snap. Sometimes the mood is a bit more kinetic. A low-key, droll touch of op art. The push/pull, foreground/background implies not only space but time. There is a hint of sequence: first reading, second, third ….

 

I was struck by the marks of age on many of the paintings: dings, smudges, creases. More importantly, there was evidence that the paintings were made less-than-immaculate: clumps of paint from a loaded brush.

 

The painting (designated #7, 1970) at first glance seems merely nice. Waves of visitors to the BCAM galleries at LACMA gave it an approving nod, and passed on. Pleased, no doubt, to have spotted an inoffensive artifact of mid-century refinement.

But for those who lingered, the experience evolved, acquiring overtones. The more time you spend with #7, 1970, the less uncomplicatedly nice it feels. The unity disintegrated into discrete parts; the straight edges were revealed to be only as straight as careful hand-craft can make them, not intimidatingly crisp or clean. The picture surface that seemed uniform is revealed to have contrasting matte and semi-gloss finishes, …. Moreover, the flat planes of pure color resolve, on inspection, into horizontal bands of distinct brushstrokes.

 

These pictures were discovered rather than pre-determined. Their final appearance was the result of fine-tuning, adjustments by hand and eye. Immediate responses, in the moment.

 

The catalog is a handsome, welcome addition to the literature on JM. However it seems the case with McLaughlin’s work that reproductions capture the design, but falsify the actual experience. And the conventions for writing about the McLaughlin are fixed as a product safety warning. The required elements include …

• Expressions of outrage at JM’s omission from the standard histories of modernism (ranging from heated to mild, depending on the writer’s identification with Southern California)
• Writer’s story of delight at discovery
• JM’s reputation as an artist’s artist for the more celebrated younger So. Cal. Contemporaries.
• Discussions of the impact/lack of impact of the Four Abstract Classicists exhibition in 1959 that traveled around the U.S. and the UK

Michael Duncan’s essay “Driving Home in Neutral” stands out. It starts as a treasure hunt through the McLaughlin archives, and ends with a serious attempt to articulate what looking at McLaughlin’s paintings feels like:

 

The bare-bones nature of the works leads to awareness of phenomena as basic as light and dark, enclosure and void, elevation and descent. The works also invite contemplation of the more abstract concepts such as the disturbance of symmetry and the differences between the continuous and severed, the parallel and the intersecting, the partial and the whole. These visual and perceptual tropes are the building blocks of the objective and natural worlds, inherent in such essential phenomena as the earth’s horizon the contrast of light and shadow, human erectness, and skin. These primal concepts also relate to fundamental issues of social life: community, enmity, servitude, leadership, and partnership.

SFMOMA & the De Young

 

I finally saw the new SFMOMA. The galleries are strangely cut-off from city, but a huge improvement over Botta’s dumpy box. It seemed straightforward to navigate, though afterwards I realized I had actually missed the pre-WWII galleries on the second floor.

 

The big surprise was what was on view: the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection. Blue-chip hedonism: room after room of Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, The Bechers, .... No complaints from me.

 

It was a good that the two special exhibitions provided a bit of grit.

 

It is certainly not true that Bruce Connor was “one of the foremost American artists of the postwar era.” His music videos (of the 70s and 80s) are his central work, after which come a handful of fine films. Beyond that he made a few nice collages in the style of Max Ernst, and did two series of intricate, druggy and mesmerizing ink drawings—the thick, Kusama-eque squiggles and the ink blots (early 1990s). The rest of his work is bohemian thrift store junk.

 

It was also a good to catch the Anthony Hernandez retrospective. It’s easy to see why this L.A. photographer’s retrospective is not appearing anywhere in L.A.: his work is the most negative portrait of Los Angeles on record. His unknockable best are the various series from the late 1970s and early 1980s: Public Transit Areas, Automotive Landscapes, Public Use Areas, Public Fishing Areas. What in the world is that image with the woman sunbathing, the man fishing and the two trees poking out of the water? The woman struggling to relax and read in the uncomfortable angle of the office building landscaping! Landscapes for the homeless, #18 (1988) is the indelible drywall chair. I acknowledge the irony of the pains taken to produce fantastically detailed images, and then to print lushly colored, heroic scale prints … of nastiness that most people would rather ignore. Discarded things, garbage, salvaged by the desperate. The irony is the central thing. The possibility of apprehending beauty in conditions that are unpromising to say the least. It is also about keeping your mind open, along with your eyes. Looking even when you don't want to.

 

I’m glad I saw the Danny Lyon show—at the De Young—but it was one of those retrospectives that make you doubt your enthusiasm. His engagement with the civil rights movement, bikers, the destruction of Lower Manhattan, prison inmates, etc. … produced some indelible images. But I didn’t get the sense that it went any deeper than that. Photo essays? Not really. His goal was never getting at the truth of what was happening; his goal was adventure. I could be completely mistaken. I think I need to study his books.

 

It was interesting to see the Frank Stella retrospective again. The De Young’s was much smaller than the Whitney’s version—most of the big, craggy silver pieces were omitted. And it was displayed in the underground galleries. It’s not that Stella’s work is frail, but the absence of natural light made everything a bit flatter than it really was. At any rate, it was instructive to see the show again, after 10 months of thinking and reading about it. This version really made the case for the continuity between all the work:

• Everything, from the stripe paintings to the latest sculptures are assemblages.
• All his works employ negative shapes, cut-out shapes, left-over shapes.
• Colors, for him, are always things, embodied in things. Colors aren’t ideas, they are properties of specific, concrete things.

 

And then lunch, at the De Young’s terrific café.

London Calling @ the Getty

 

The Getty’s PR makes the “School of London” sound like a proto-Brexit Little Britain backwater that “rejected contemporary art’s preoccupation with abstraction and conceptualism in favor of the human figure and everyday landscape.” But is it true?

 

You might say they started with conventional intentions (capturing the model or landscape in front of them), deployed acuity and skill, but in the end created inventories of doubt. Like Dubuffet, Giacometti, De Kooning, and Wittgenstein—the most relevant literary parallel—the desire to observe and record is always frustrated by scruples about whether communication is possible.

 

 Whatever the pretext, the show was a pleasure, though not every painter was well-represented.

 

I still remember with delight the Leon Kossoff show at LACMA sixteen years ago of prints and drawings after Poussin. Unfortunately this time around, only Children’s Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon (1971) held its own. Likewise, the Bacons—except for one Reclining Woman from 1961—seemed intimidated by the company. Ditto the Kitaj paintings on view. But there were works on paper that more than made up for them. The world has been so full of lesser versions of The Rise of Fascism (1975/9) recently.

 

Michael Andrews is the name I didn’t know at all, but he certainly figures in. A Man Who Suddenly Fell Over (1952) is like a late- Neue Sachlichkeit spoof. I bet Hockney knew it. Melanie and Me Swimming (1978/9) is eerie and comanding. I gather it’s a popular favorite. 

 

The selection of Lucian Freud’s paintings and etchings demonstrated that he had been John Singer Sargent reborn: incapable of making a mark that was ugly or insignificant. Leigh under the Skylight (1994) is a swagger portrait if anything ever was. David and Eli (2003/4) has, per square inch, more visual interest than many eminent museums.

 

The Frank Auerbachs were a revelation. I’ve never seen so much of his work before. His room was worth the trip. It seems a gimmick—tricking out wild, frosting-slathers of pigment with hints of figuration—but it’s not. Isn’t that De Kooning’s game? But FA dares to to use colors that can’t appease. His Oxford Street Building Site I (1959/60) is a Beckettian vision of nothingness. A towering expanse of vomit-brown and blood red, with details here and there worked in with care, but without fussiness. Mornington Crescent with the Statue of Sickert’s Father-in-Law (1966) splits the difference between ugliness and beauty, composition and chaos. But the best of all—best of show—was Primrose Hill (1967/8)—not a scene, or an event but residue of seeringly intense inaction.

Human Condition @ L.A. Metropolitan Medical Center

 

Last Saturday night I saw art I liked at “Human Condition”:

• Katie Herzog’s paintings
• Owen Kydd’s transparencies displayed on X-ray reading boxes
• Louis Fratino’s homo Kitaj-y paintings
• Stuart Sandford’s adoring/ironic photo and bronze
• Amir H. Fallah’s stoner pattern & decoration meets Tadanori Yokoo paintings

 

Otherwise, the work and the setting proved that there really is such a thing as too much abjection and horror, even in a fine art context. When I first arrived in L.A. in the mid-Eighties I marveled at all the exhibits of snot on sticks. It still happens, but now in ratty old hospitals, complete with gruesome abandoned equipment, stains and and signs on the wall. It was fun for a few minutes, then …. I’m not on enough meds to hack it.

Vive le Roy

 

The Norton Simon’s “Duchamp to Pop” exhibit featured fabulous sculptures they’ve been hiding in their attic, including a rare Duchamp “Boite Alerte / Mailbox,” a roomful of Warhol Brillo Boxes, a touchingly ridiculous “Giant Soft Ketchup Bottle with Ketchup” by Oldenburg.

 

But without doubt the show-stopper was Roy Lichtenstein’s 32-foot long, polished brass “Long Modern Sculpture” from 1969. At once an affectionate homage to art deco, a sly comment on on preservation (it looks like a balustrade rescued from an demolished movie palace) and a “take that!” response to aggressively space-invading minimialist sculpture (it’s worth all of Serra’s steel plates and Heizer’s rocks put together). It should be in every guide book as one of the important things to see in Southern California—and it’s been sitting in storage. Hopefully it has been uncrated for good.