L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Rise of Rebellion: DailyServing’s latest week-long series

We continue our week long series, Rise of Rebellion, by taking a look at how resistance and rebellion overlap.

Brian Bress, Masked images. Courtesy LACE.

On the back left wall of Pepin Moore’s gallery space–the same endearingly domestic space that, just a few months ago, belonged to China Art Objects–there’s a noirish print by Brian Bress. It’s hanging in Second Story, a low-key exhibition that features a sampling of the artist’s multiples that will be shown in the upstairs loft once the  gallery’s official season begins. It depicts a bust that,  I think, once belonged to Natalie Wood. But the face has been obscured by torn strips of  paper and it’s the obscuring that matters most. The print recalls Irving Penn’s Saul Steinberg in Nose Mask (1966) or Marcello Nizzoli’s Portrait of a Woman (1936), a photograph in which a smiling female face is half covered by white paper and colored with green and red crayon. It resists beauty, but it’s still elegant.

This particular print feels like a distilled version of Bress’s more unruly installation and video work, and the crinkles in the brownish and purple paper that cover the face particularly resonate with the surfaces of Disaster Family, a limbless fantasia of felt figures that Bress included in LACE’s 2008 exhibition, Against the Grain. There’s something violent about Bress’s refusal to give figures flesh or features–it obscures individuality while internalizing intimacy and resisting the outside world.

Brian Bress, "Disaster Family," from Against the Grain, 2008. Courtesy LACE.

Resistance was more or less the point of Against the Grain; it aimed to subvert a stiff political aesthetic in favor of something more sensuously contentious. It responded to Against Nature, a 1988 exhibition  curated by Dennis Cooper and Richard Hawkins, and both shows took their titles from different translations of A Rebours, a melancholic French novel by J.K. Huysmans about a sickly nobleman who withdraws from society to live alone with his own exquisite sense of decorum. But only a few pieces in Against the Grain–Bress’s was one, along with Julian Hoeber’s series of glitzy bronze heads–came close to the seductive recalcitrance of Against Nature, which confronted the problem AIDS posed for artists who wanted to be provocative without being polemical.

By 1988, the clean-edged, unambiguous Silence=Death icon, designed by AIDS activists in New York, was already circulating. The back cover of Against Nature’s catalog echoed the slogan but did so by superimposing a seraph script over an  image of an apothecary dressed in a black-beaked, plague-resistant gown (he could have easily figured into Bress’s Disaster Family). Against Nature didn’t reject the political dimensions of sickness in general or AIDS in particular, but it did favor ornamental musings on beauty, bodies and illness and its fidelity to taste seemed strangely aggressive.

"Against Nature" catalog, back cover, 1988. Courtesy LACE.

In his catalog essay for Against Nature, which reads like fiction, Dennis Cooper navigates his desire for a man named Pierre, who is purportedly trying to help Cooper out by writing about the exhibition. The two men move back and forth in cagey,  often tangential dialogue. In the end, Pierre makes it clear that he’d rather not get too close to Cooper; it’s not because he’s afraid of AIDS but more because he just doesn’t know what to be afraid of or what to want in general. When Cooper reads what Pierre has written, he realizes it’s unusable:

(It’s a description of Pierre in very hackneyed, glowing terms . . . it doesn’t have anything to do with this show, [and there’s no way I’m going to print it] as beautiful as Pierre looks today, even upset. But he’s my friend so I’ll tell him he’s perfect.)

The essay, like Pierre, is evasive and uncertain. It resists pontification, though written in a moment that seemed (and was) politically dire, and it resists indulgently.

Indulging in ambiguity can be dangerous–you risk being misunderstood–but it’s indulgence that made Against Nature so timely and rebellious.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Helio Oiticica & Neville D'Almeida, "Cosmococa 5: Hendrix - War CC5-11," 1973 / 2003 C-print mounted on aluminum. Courtesy Michael Benevento, Galerie Lelong, NY and Joshua White Photography.

A friend of mine, a sculptor with immense brown eyes and a long figure that that always looks both cautious and comfortable with itself, was standing next to her brother’s Ford Explorer outside an Illinois gas station. They’d just been to see their grandfather in a rest home and it was the morning of Louise Bourgeois’s death, so my friend felt reasonably subdued. A man in a black sedan with windows down drove by and slowed to a crawl. “Do you have any idea how sexy you are?” he said to her, sort of jauntily. She dropped her eyes, turned and rammed her head up against the Explorer’s doorframe, keeping it there until the sedan drove off. She has no idea why she did this, and I’ve made her describe it to me, blow-by-blow, three times at least. Her behavior feels vulnerable, resistant, violent and yet weirdly liberated. It’s a reaction against sexy—or at least the breed of sexy the man in the sedan felt he could access. But it’s also sexy itself, the spontaneous assertion of an inexplicable instinct.

Spartacus Chetwynd, "Hermito’s Children," Video (color, sound), 2008. Courtesy Michael Benevento and Joshua White Photography.

Everlasting Gobstopper at Michael Benevento, an exhibition that’s more reflective than its title suggests, is sexy expressly because of the sexinesses it rejects. The show has a grittily commemorative mood, like the setting for a party that’s bound to be oddly romantic, Disco-indebted, yet still somber. The entry way walls are painted black—it takes a moment for your eyes to adjust—and a dark purple poster of a howling wolf, painstakingly drawn by Eva Rothschild before she moved on to Cold Corners and other wonky minimalist projects, hangs opposite the door. Next comes a posse of paintings from Spartacus Chetwynd’s Bat Opera series; Rothschild’s triangular black Perspex tower; counterculture queen Lil Picard’s terrifyingly delicate burnt polka-dot bow-tie; Michael E. Smith’s dry black paintings and crusty floor pieces; and Cindy Sherman’s piquantly pink autumnal death scene. But all these mostly serve as the supporting cast for Chetwynd’s Hermito’s Children, a three part video installation that plays out on 14 stacked monitors at the back of the main gallery space.

Like a filmic novella spawned by a Truman Capote – Jack Smith marriage, Hermito’s Children presents characters who are obsessive, articulate, eccentricity prone, and vested in one another’s sexuality, though only vaguely interested in sex. Watery graphics dance across the screen to the sound of portentous woodwinds as act one, The Case of the Poisonous Dildo, commences. Less mystery than cameo, The Case features a matronly protagonist who wears a zig-zagged muumuu and sounds like Edgar Oliver with a lisp. She tells viewers not to be frightened as she introduces her unconventional, androgynous family: an ex-husband who runs a raucously happy Jewish restaurant, an absent daughter, and a deep-voiced assistant with a hog’s nose. In act two, an innocent girl in a body suit listens to a worldly “puppet master” who tells her “a dancer who relies on the doubtful prospect of human love will never be great.”

Halfway through act three,called Helmut Newton Ladies Night, the muumuu-wearing matron reappears and refers to a tomboyishly debonair troupe of women. “You are seduced by these women,” she says. “[But] what they’re doing is not that dangerous. Your imagination exaggerates it.” Then “these women” ritualistically dance to experimental metal, spoofing on Helmut Newton’s iconic 1981 image, “They’re Coming,” in which four svelte figures advanced toward the camera.

"Everlasting Gobstopper," Installation View, 2010. Courtesy Michael Benevento and Joshua White Photography.

Newton once said he couldn’t work pornographically because he didn’t do rough: “Rough stuff is real; it’s not posed. The trouble with my pornography, it’s too chic.” The bodies in Hermito’s Children aren’t posed or chic, but they’re not rough either. They’re somewhere in between. One of my favorite moments comes near the end. A group of nude women form a  sculptural rectangle. It’s stoic, formal and literally objectifying. But then a face breaks from the group and erupts in an inaudible, punkish yell. I like the idea that incongruous, fiercely independent bursts of emotion could be a way to claim sexiness as your own.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Andy Warhol, Dennis Hopper, Screen Tests Reel #4, 1964-65.

I spent Sunday looking at boys. It began at LACMA, where I saw Catherine Opie’s quarterbacks, linebackers and surfers  followed by Thomas Eakins’s rowers, wrestlers and athletic but stationary nudes. It continued at the Egyptian Theater, with ten of Andy Warhol’s four-minute screen tests: Buffy Phelps with delicate, defiant eyes and blondish curls; John Giorno of Sleep, darker and rougher than Buffy; Kip “Bima” Stagg, equally dark but not as rough; Dennis Hopper, twenty-eight but looking younger; Hopper again, still near twenty-eight, but suit-clad and looking older; Gregory Battock with Clark Gable jauntiness; Richard Schmidt and Paul Winterbottom; Kenneth King and Richard Markowitz, who, along with Giorno and Hopper, would appear in the compilation The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys.

Because Warhol’s tests are meditative and slow, I lost myself in their static silence, and didn’t think about gender until the reel played out. “They were all men, weren’t they?” I said to the friend sitting next to me. He’d noticed before I had.

Collier Schorr, "Jens F.," 2005.

Three weeks ago, when Catherine Opie’s unprovocatively titled Figure and Landscape opened, Opie talked about her work in LACMA’s Bing Theater. She mentioned comparisons often made between her sports photographs and the work of Collier Schorr, which depicts, among other things, young male bodies posing and sparring. “Collier wants to be her boys,” said Opie. “I don’t . . . I’m not interested in seeing my butch body through them.” What she’s interested in is bearing witness, and she’s been witnessing a precariously in-between generation, some of which has gone to Iraq, some of which has died.

Being versus bearing is not so simple a distinction, of course–Opie’s boys, as poet-critic Eileen Myles has pointed out, tend to adopt the Opie expression, which resembles a “scary duh.” Even so, it’s possible Schorr wants to be her boys while Opie wants to be aware of her boys; certainly, Eakins wanted to be with his boys while Warhol wanted to collect them.

Thomas Eakins,"The Champion Single Sculls," 1871. Courtesy LACMA.

It’s Warhol and Schorr who most prominently prefer male subjects. Warhol’s Screen Test Reel #5 includes only two women and, like Reel #4, Reel #6 is an exclusive boy’s club. Schorr, when asked why she doesn’t photograph girls, has said she does; she just uses boys to do it. But the strange, sports-focused mannishness of the paired Opie-Eakins exhibitions is even stranger in light of both artists’ genuine interest in women. Opie’s girl-only Girlfriends series showed at Gladstone Gallery in New York last year, and Eakins consistently included women in his work, and even in his controversies. It was his uninhibited disrobing in front of female students and his insistence on the removal of a male model’s “loin cloth” during a drawing session women attended, not his obsession with his “beloved” (as one wall label reads) young men, that forced him to resign from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1886.

Catherine Opie, "Untitled #10 (Surfers)," 2003. Courtesy Regen Projects.

In Manly Pursuits and Figure and Landscape, Eakins and Opie, both realists, show themselves to be exquisite technicians with a virtuosic, if predictable, eye for poetic composition. In Eakins’s The Champion Single Sculls, a burnt sienna scull cuts smoothly across royal blue water and its inhabitant looks elegantly, if illogically, casual as he turns to look back. In Opie’s portraits, skin, eyes, pose, gaze, the position of the football helmet, have all been carefully considered; royal blue makes frequent appearances in her work as well. But both artists render the trappings of a conventional masculinity and gender-play to which neither quite belong–to which no one quite belongs–and it’s the work that revels in inaction that seems most gaping and honest.

A room at the back of Figure and Landscape features only surfing images, and, though Opie has made striking portraits of surfers she’s shadowed, none of those portraits are included here. Instead, there’s just expansive gray rectangles in which far-off bodies float, largely unmoving, waiting for a chance to resume their sport. They’re certainly skilled surfers; everyone Opie photographs seems to be good at what they do. They’re also like little pawns or bobbing black buoys. They don’t look volitional but they do look comfortable; like the artist who made them, they’re virtuosic and yet awkward precisely because they’re virtuosic.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Jack Pierson, "Tupelo," 2008. In the group show Country Music, at Blum & Poe, through Aug. 21. Courtesy Cheim & Reid, via Blum & Poe.

“I remember thinking when I first saw a show of Jack Pierson’s that it looked like a group show–Jack’s photos, big letters, a desk. I was excited by this possibility,” wrote Eileen Myles, “that anyone might start to look like a group.” That the peripatetic Pierson–who’s like a travel photographer fixated on minutiae but doggedly committed to the obligatory sunset shot (Myles has called him a hobo with an “Ivy League crook look”)–isn’t interesting as an individual is the most interesting thing about him. It’s like his nostalgic signage, paired with undifferentiated photographs of horizon lines, open books, young-ish nude men or Visconti-worthy table settings are together accidentally. Even his technical finesse, evidence that none of his projects are as flip as they seem, doesn’t keep Pierson from looking like a  library of other people’s wants, wallets and persuasions.

Summer is art’s season of group efforts, and Pierson’s Tupelo sign currently hangs in Blum & Poe’s seven-artist Country Music, a quaint  homage to sappy love and Nashville twang.  But what’s weirder and more exciting is the way in which the Jack-Pierson-effect, an unpretentious artist-as-meme mien, has somehow infected L.A.’s summer scene. The city’s best group shows aren’t really group shows at all.

Ryan Trecartin, "K-Corea Inc.. K (Section A)," video still, 2009.

At MoCA’s Pacific Design Center, there’s Ryan Trecartin’s Any Ever, the topic of this column last week. It works intertextually (and that heady term fits Trecartin perfectly, though his version includes a text message shorthand that Kristeva and de Saussure couldn’t have imagined) as a labyrinth of prissy voices, over-the-top flamboyancy and brash epitaphs. Slippery ownership of person-hood is a coursing theme:

“Cut my hair shorter. I like that kind of person,” says one character. “I define myself as a situation hacker,” says another. “Help me define myself.” “The economy of my body is booming and everyone takes part.”

But collaboration, not slipperiness, gives Any Ever its group cred. Perfecting each of the show’s details  involved a posse of helper-friends; Trecartin, though part control freak, manages to give his characters uncanny autonomy; and the videos fluidly feed actors, lines and moods to each other until it’s impossible to tell them apart.

Thomas Eakins, "The Wrestlers," 1899.

LACMA’s Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins includes photographs and paintings from the wide-ranging sport-focused repertoire of Eakins, the royal of American Realism. Some are platonic and tame–like The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull) (1871), in which Max sits mid-water,  lost in thought. Others get physically aggressive, like Wrestlers (1899), which shows bodies in a tangle. The exhibition also includes a swath of photographic studies featuring Eakins’ male students in the nude.  It’s a show of many Eakins: the anatomist, the observer, the transgressor, the seducer, the sentimentalist. And it’s best when the different Eakins fit together awkwardly, as they do in a series of equestrian and hunting paintings that make conventional manliness look uncomfortable with itself and studies like this  tug-of-war photograph in which sincerity becomes erotic and erotic becomes comic.

Brian Kennon, "Group Shows," Installation view, 2010. Courtesy Steve Turner Contemporary.

If Pierson begins to look like a group, Brian Kennon arrives as an already-assembled collective. His current exhibition at Steve Turner Contemporary (which closes tomorrow and is worth the last-minute dash) is called Group Shows and the plural–”shows” and not “show”–matters. Even Kennon’s groups are grouped. The exhibition includes two series and, for the first, Kennon composed mid-sized prints that put work of other artists, including John Baldessari, Franz West, Sherrie Levine and Wolfgang Tillmans, into curated conversations with each other. Though, in Dinner with Matthew, art talks to food. A bite-size image of Matthew Brannon’s Last to Know, which shows pink band-aids scattered across an invisible grid,  anchors images of an entree and Bostini Cream pie.  For the second series, Kennon merged gridded patterns with found photographs. One sleek print shows Bert Stern’s iconic striped-scarf photograph of Marilyn Monroe sitting above a gridded panel with an oval orifice which, in turn, sits above a vertical geometric column. It’s called Untitled (Monroe/Bochner Sex Joke).

Artist-linguist-prankster Mel Bochner plays a recurring role in Group Shows and, in the pithy Richard-Prince-quality narrative that serves as the press release’s epigraph, Bochner stands-in for Kennon:

Marilyn (through stripes) to Mel (measured): “If you were given the opportunity to initiate an orgy, one that would include anyone of your choosing, who would be in it?” Mel, in response: “Can you ask me the same question, but in regards to a dinner party? At a dinner party the host retains far more control over who can sit where.”

Kennon controls every interaction that occurs in Shows–which artist sits next to which, who appears in which grouping–but not in a stifling way. While Pierson’s work suggests “anyone might start to look like a group,” Kennon’s suggests a group might start to look like anyone and this sort of mutability makes summer seem really social, not just an excuse for another art-fair worthy melange.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Kalup Linzy, Conversations wit de Churen III: Da Young and Da Mess, 2005. Performance documentation. Courtesy the artist and Taxter and Spengemann, New York.

Because I don’t believe that big and bright equals beautiful, I am not a fan of West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center. A mammoth, reflective blue box that towers over the otherwise low-to-the-ground Melrose Avenue architecture, the PDC has more than its share of empty retail space. Inside, it often feels like a manicured ghost town. I voted for its simulated destruction last fall when artist Gustavo Artigas staged his Vote for Demolition project, which asked Angelinos to select the city’s least attractive building. Artigas virtually razed the winner, which turned out to be the Kodak Theater because, apparently, not everyone sees the world the way I do.

Despite my PDC resentment, I am fond of MoCA’s mini Pacific Design Center, a quiet beige cube that stands in the shadow of its big blue neighbor. It seems like an almost-joke—a Mecca of materialism’s carefully sized nod to the arts. Usually, design-related exhibitions that run in this MoCA satellite, like Las Vegas Studio and Folly–The View from Nowhere, cater to the curious without undermining the over-fabricated sterility of the whole PDC complex. But this past month, the MoCA mini-me has suddenly become a theater for outlandish projects that turn “over-fabricated” into a race toward synthetic delirium.

On June 24, during the invitation-only event Soap at MoCA, General Hospital filmed an episode starring James Franco. Franco played a demented artist, MoCA played the site of his opening, and artist Kalup Linzy performed in drag. Wearing a wig with bangs and a red and black floral print dress, Linzy recited the lyrics to Mad World while Franco yelled, “Don’t kill me! I know where the baby is!”, and then fell from a balcony to his fictional death. Linzy, accustomed to the drama of soap, wasn’t phased.

Ryan Trecartin, "Sibling Topics (Section A)," Video Still, 2009.

In his own soap, All My Churun (2003), a distraught, big-haired, striped-skirted woman (most women in Linzy’s films aren’t actually women) talks about the memorial service she’s planning for a murdered love named “Jo-Jo.” “Girl, you need to stop,” says her sister over the phone. “She needs to stop,” says her brother over the phone. Her mother and grandmother, also talking over the phone, act as if a memorial service for a dead man is the most flamboyantly frivolous thing a person could have.

Video artist Ryan Trecartin uses phones as liberally as Linzy, though his rarely have cords and sometimes they’re just pinkies and thumbs extended in the “call me” gesture. Phones turn life into a series of affected soliloquies and now that Trecartin has commandeered MoCA for Any Ever, a show that opened two weeks after the museum performed for General Hospital, soliloquies have become lurid and omnipresent. “You won’t recognize the PDC once you enter,” Trecartin’s New York gallerist Elizabeth Dee told the LA Times.

The downstairs bookstore has become a dark gallery. Cluttered with brand new benches, space heaters and superfluous metal chains, it looks like a graveyard for un-bought patio furniture. Trecartin’s Trill-ogy Comp (2009)—note the “trill”—screens on the wall opposite the entrance.  Comp consists of three videos, all of them loosely related. K-CorealInc.K (section a) follows a group of all-blond white collar workers called the “Koreas”; Sibling Topics (section a) follows four quadruplet sisters, all played by Trecartin. P.opular Sky (section ish) is a bit of everything. Upstairs, in a bedroom, office space, faux-stadium and family room–each with nick-free Ikea-style furniture–four videos from the R’Search Wait’S series play out. But following storylines is precarious. As Trecartin pointed out in a recent lecture, “Consequence can just pop out of nowhere and cause can have no effect.”

Ryan Trecartin, "P.opular S.ky (section ish)," 2009.

Everyone wears some form of garish make-up, women play men acting like women, or men play women posing as men dressed as women. The physical gets slippery. With rare exception, characters use winy, effeminate teenage voices and speak confrontationally. No one is melancholic, though plenty are restless. All wear brightly colored clothes that match their bronzed, painted faces and, since Trecartin is an obsessive editor, the brash, sashaying footage has no non-orchestrated lulls. Soliloquies–there’s never really dialogue, even when characters purport to address each other–use language in a way that feels almost-but-not-quite familiar:

“She hates diversity and women. She’d probably shoot me if she saw my very extreme breast reduction that I love.” “Put your breasts back on.” “I never had any.”

“How will I make drive to find you when I’m in automation?”

“Cut my hair shorter. I like that kind of person.”

“Put on your comfort pants and say things in nice voice because.”

“I can go on and on but I won’t. I can go on and on but I won’t. I can go on and on but I won’t.”

About thirty minutes in, Any Ever begins to feel like a dream that’s apolotical, political, apathetic, aggressive and increasingly fluorescent. It becomes exhausting and disorienting, enough so to make me want to hate it. And this means it’s perfect.

Note: Critic Jennifer Doyle recently wrote more extensively about James Franco and Kalup Linzy for Frieze Magazine. Read her essay here.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

M. Blash, Reel Image, "Go Forth" Commercial for Levi's, 2009.

In the spot filmmaker M. Blash created for Levi’s Jeans in 2009, Walt Whitman’s voice is like the Pied Piper’s pipe. “Come my tan-faced children, Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,” recites Whitman, played by an actor (an earlier Levi’s spot purportedly featured an actual recording of the poet). As he says this, the faces of slim, young, beautiful people turn or lean forward like they’ve been summoned; one woman with windswept blond hair and rosy cheeks looks as though she’s bracing herself for a fight. He continues:

Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger.

The young people begin to move, running through fields, scaling rocks and weaving through forests. Dusk approaches, and the “youthful sinewy races” converge, their silhouettes gliding across the screen in front of a still-blue sky. “So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,” says Whitman. “Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost.” There are fire works and shirtless dancing as it darkens, and the young bodies come together like the members of a euphoric hippie commune. “Have the elder races halted?” Whitman asks. “Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? All the past we leave behind.”

Ryan McGinley, known for his wispily androgynous photographs of young creatives, shot the accompanying Levi’s print campaign. I see one particular image, a black and white photograph of two twenty-something boys embracing a horse, each time I walk to the bakery in my largely Salvadoran neighborhood. It hangs on the inside wall of a mini bus shelter and, often, aging men and women who speak to each other only in Spanish sit in front of it.  Other times, my favorite panhandler, a tall, disheveled man who tells me baked goods are bad for me in hopes that I will give my money to him instead, lurks around McGinley’s sign. I don’t know what marketing strategy or loophole led this image  to this particular street, but the eerie, utopic youth culture that McGinley presents hangs right in the midst of the very people it excludes.

Ryan McGinley, "Tracy (Dripping)," 2009.

Anything utopic needs exclusivity, since creating an ideal community means shedding what doesn’t fit the ideal. Utopic ideals also need to be slippery; they can be imagined and represented but never attained, and that’s what makes them attractive.

Ryan McGinley understands utopia better than most. He’s a 21st Century artist who still has muses, and he’s mused these muses into scenarios and settings in which they withdraw from the world and exclusively invest in each other. In 2002, when he became the youngest artist to have a museum show at the Whitney, his photographs purportedly depicted an edgy, brash youth underground in New York but they did so in a way that was so romanticized and ephemeral that they felt like they’d flown in from an alternate universe. His images of Dash Snow the tagger-turned-art-star are especially compelling. Dash lived hard, fast and grittily, which made him muse-worthy but it’s not necessarily the hardness and grit that McGinley chose to present. “I love the idea of graffiti,” he told Ana Finel Honigman in 2003. “But I am not really excited by its esthetics. . . . I love the idea of a kid writing his name hundreds of thousands of times, over and over and over because he feels he needs to.” The Dash that McGinley presented over and over again had an immense, unbridled need for community. He existed above the surface of himself, drawing people to him with his hovering openness. “So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship.”

Ryan McGinley, photograph of Dash Snow

When journalist Ariel Levy shadowed McGinley and Dash Snow in 2007, she described the intimacy of their clique: “There is a physicality between these guys, in their photos and in life, that you usually only see among little kids.” Like most utopic fantasies McGinley creates, including those for Levi’s, adult inhibitions totally dissipate in his portrayals of Dash. All that matters is to constantly stay in motion and to move toward a collective future, bringing along the people who are young and beautiful. It’s never clear where that future is or what it represents.

“Pioneers! O pioneers!” wrote Walt Whitman in 1855. “Fresh and strong the world we seize.”

“Heroin, oh heroin, oh heroin,”  wrote McGinley for Vice Magazine in 2009, the year Dash died. “Taken the lives of so many great artists. Taken so many of my friends’ lives.” McGinley continued, remembering Dash’s “unconscious moving hand. He would be sitting there smoking cigarettes, writing his tag in the air.” It’s this weird collision of hopefulness, tragedy, beauty and listlessness that I think of now when I walk past the bus stop and see the two boys with their horse in the Levi’s “Go Forth!” ad that hangs where it doesn’t belong.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

"Breakfast at Tiffany's," film still, 1961.

At the start of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote’s charming novella about a troubled socialite looking for “what’s hers” and attracted to everything that’s not, the unnamed narrator receives a message from a bartender named Joe Bell. He meets Bell, an old friend, and the two clandestinely talk about Holly, the socialite who has long since disappeared (as the novella progresses, we find out why). Both men are still quietly preoccupied with her.

“If she was in the city, I’d have seen her,” says Bell. “You take a man that likes to walk. . . and all the years he’s got his eye out for one person and nobody’s ever her, don’t it stand to reason she’s not there? I see pieces of her all the time, a flat little bottom, any skinny girl that walks fast and straight–” Then Bell becomes uncomfortable. “You think I’m round the bend?”

“It’s just that I didn’t know you’d been in love with her,” the narrator replies. “Not like that.”

“You can love someone without it being like that,” Bell says. “You can keep them a stranger, a stranger who’s a friend.”

Francesco Vezzoli, "A Love Trilogy: Self-Portrait with Marisa Berenson as Edith Piaf", film still, 1999.

Strangers are friends in Francesco Vezzoli’s A Love Trilogy: Self-Portrait with Marisa Berenson as Edith Piaf, a short, wistful film that had been on view at MoCA’s Geffen Contemporary until July 12.  In it, the actual Marisa Berenson wears Valentino gowns, lip-syncs to the absent Edith Piaf and floats across the screen like a well-manicured ghost. “The result is a bit like catching a whiff of perfume lingering in an empty elevator,” wrote Richard Flood in a 2000 issue of ArtForum

At one point, Berenson whisks down a red-carpeted aisle in a chapel filled with rows of empty white chairs. Vezzoli patiently waits for her at the altar, wearing a tuxedo that, while certainly not cheap, appears unpretentious next to Berenson’s couture gown. Berenson closes in on him, though doesn’t get close enough to touch him, before spinning around and whisking out. And the whole time, Vezzoli looks boyishly content–when he made the film, he was only 28 years old, practically still a boy; Berenson was 52. Later, Berenson throws herself against a black casket. “When Marisa Berenson entered a room, people would clap: she was so beautiful it was unbearable,” Vezzoli told Massimilliano Gioni in 2001.

In A Love Trilogy, everyone dabbles with what doesn’t belong to them. Berenson, a diva, inhabits the life of Piaf, an earlier diva whom Berenson never met but admires enough to embody. Vezzoli, a diva devotee, shares screen space with Berenson, an idol of his but someone whose life he likely never would have entered if not under the guise of this film about Piaf. These triangulating circumstances keep the characters–and Piaf counts as a character–in Trilogy at arm’s length; their mutual admiration is the film’s narrative glue, but they have to remain strangers because of the gaps between their situations.

Divya Victor, "Hellocasts", FERAL-CAT ATTACK performance still, 2010. Courtesy Les Figues Press.

I saw Vezzoli’s film on a Sunday afternoon, before boarding the Red Line and riding to Hollywood for Not Content 2, one of a series of performances at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). LACE’s back gallery was set up as a haphazard auditorium and vodka-spiked lemonade sat on a table next to a boxed blue cake and a carton of water. Most importantly, a big Hello Kitty icon had been inscribed into the far wall and filled with text. During the second third of the performance, I found out why. Poet Divya Victor’s Hellocasts uses the multi-part poem Holocaust by Charles Reznikoff–which talks about S.S. officers throwing stones at groups of Jews, shooting bodies twice to be sure of death, and forcing orchestras of Jewish musicians to play as others died–as a starting point. The word Holocaust sounds like Hellocasts, which sounds like Hello Cats, which, of course, recalls Hello Kitty, a symbol Victor associates with silence (“Hello Kitty, the cat, has no mouth. Hello Kitty, the brand, always speaks for itself; is always spoken for by its consumer; is a felicific felicitation of affirmed desires,” she writes).

Victor’s voice read Holocaust by Reznikoff as seven performers transcribed what she said into Hello Kitty outlines on the wall, often on top of the big, already present kitty. These performers occasionally pulled audience members up and gave them their own Hello Kitty to write in, which resulted in a crowded and quickly filling wall. Victor kept reminding everyone present that the words she read were not Reznikoff’s when they became hers, and that they were not hers when they became the transcriber’s, and that they were not the transcriber’s when they became the audience’s. In other words, the Holocaust/Hellocasts belonged to none of us and all of us. No one seemed to want full ownership, either. Those of us who wrote seemed more than willing to be friendly, silently participating, jotting what we heard into the body of a kitschy kitty cat but keeping the distance of strangers between ourselves and our situation.