Annette Kelm, Untitled, 2012. Courtesy Marc Foxx and the artist.

We had just left Marc Foxx gallery, where Annette Kelm’s delicate C-prints look like illustrations from the most deadpan Children’s book ever, as if everything but tufts of grass had been excised from, say, Make Way For Ducklings. We were still in the little enclave of galleries off Wilshire Boulevard when a woman confronted us in something of a panic. She wore heavy, layered, unwashed clothes and a ribbed pink hat. She had lost her carpet, she said. “It’s blue and has four threads missing,” she said. “It was just here. Please help.” She sounded like someone who’s discovered the kid she’s been charged with wandered away. But everything about her suggested she was unhinged, and we couldn’t engage. “We’re sorry,” we said, in a concerned, confused way, then slipped into ACME gallery.

Lutz Braun, "Akira," acrylic on carpet and wood, 2012. Courtesy ACME.

“This would be a bad place for her to come,” said my friend, when we saw we were in a room full of carpets, some placed on thigh-high wood boxes, one hanging low enough on the wall so it trailed on the floor. Berlin-based Lutz Braun had painted on these with acrylic. The one he calls “Murdering the Season” was grayish with a fire-ravaged forest depicted on it. The one called “Bludgeon” was a white carpet with a watery landscape crossed out in the middle and an abstract triangle on the right. They were expressive in that the marks were loose in an expressionist style, and they had “visceral” iconography like skeletons and burnt trees. It’s also sort of gross to put paint, a gooey liquid until it dries, on carpet. But despite all this, Braun’s paintings managed to feel aloof and disengaged. Each shape, mark and figure — even garish, skeletal ones — seemed to have been rendered with restraint.

We left ACME and walked through the parking lot, where the woman had retreated to a little corner by the parking attendant’s booth, where some of her belongings were spread out. She came out to talk to us, her hat off, her hair somehow better kept than it had been before. “She found it,” she said to us, very seriously and eagerly. “But she really did need help. She’s not well. I helped her.” It took us a moment to realize “she” was the woman we’d talked to earlier, the same woman we were talking to now, only she seemed to have split into a different personality. We told her we were happy she’d helped and walked away — I was thinking that the blue carpet with four missing threads, something I hadn’t actually seen, would stick with me longer than anything I had seen so far that night.

Alex Israel's set for "As it Lays"

Later, we ended up at the Jim Henson Soundstage, where artist Alex Israel was debuting his series of celebrity interview videos at an event presented by MOCA. He calls the series As It Lays after Joan Didion’s iconic Play it As It Lays, a novel about Hollywood, depression and driving, and he’s talked to people like Vidal Sassoon, Jamie Lee Curtis and Larry Flynt. Israel asks deadpan, generic questions, wears sunglasses and doesn’t crack smiles. This night, he did a few live interviews. I missed his talk with surfer Laird Hamilton, but heard him with actresses Molly Ringwald and Melanie Griffith. While Ringwald played along, Griffith kept trying to crack Israel from the start. She wouldn’t answer questions sometimes (like when he asked her what she orders at Inn-and-Out and she instead told him about how she went there just the night before and why, and who she went with), and would interject, “You’re so cute, Alex,” and comments of that kind. It didn’t work — Israel didn’t crack — but it made Griffith likable, because she wanted a human interaction that wasn’t posed and restrained, that had room for slip-ups, detours and cracked smiles.

Because NEA funding cuts recently prompted Art21.org to stage a telethon, because this is fundraising season (a number of non-profits, included Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, had their annual auctions, galas or other fundraisers this month), and because I’m preoccupied with MOCA’s recent Transmission L.A. festival — which I mentioned in last week’s column –, I wrote the below. It originally appeared on Art21′s blog.

Screen shot of Debo Eilers and crew performing "My Little Sunshine" during the Art21 Telethon.

When I tuned into the Art21 Telethon this past Sunday, the 8-hour performance-filled fundraising marathon had been live-streaming for just over 3 hours and brought in just under $4,000. Curator and co-host Miriam Katz, wearing a great silky floral top, was saying, “Our next act was going to be an animal act but I think there was an issue with insurance.” Instead, artist Debo Eilers’ crew was setting up nearby amidst microphones and floor mats. They were wearing white tunics like hospital gowns and red animal masks that made some look like turkeys and others like floppy-eared dogs.

“You can [perform] however long, but right now longer might be better,” said artist Ronnie Bass, the “official” host, who had conceived the telethon along with Katz and Art21 artist Tommy Hartung, after NEA budget cuts left PBS programming financially crippled.

“And since the act that didn’t come was supposed to be an animal act, if you want to put in an animal theme, that could be helpful,” Katz added.

Then everyone seemed confused for a while, and Katz accidentally blocked the camera as the group slowly began singing “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine” in childlike voices. It took a while before they were in unison. One of the performers beat the wall with a strap and held a strobe light, and continued to do this after the song ended, until Ronnie said “Thank you” and re-explained to viewers how to donate.

The artists featured in Transmission L.A. posing outside MOCA

I tuned into the telethon right after leaving the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary, where the 19-day Transmission L.A.: AV Club, a festival funded by Mercedes Benz and curated by Beastie Boy Mike D., was on its last legs. It actually, weirdly, had a vibe similar to the telethon, a mix of confusion and free-for-all comfortability.

The festival was free, so people wandered in and out of MOCA at will. Artist Tom Sachs had designed a DJ booth that was out front, and galleries were full of video and light work (hip stuff — like Cory Arcangel and Takeshi Murata, who made even filmmaker Mike Mills, with his montage of appropriated pop images, seem like the fogey), and a black box theater in the back, where Lauren Mackler of the alt space Public Fiction had staged a series of performances. When I arrived, artists Ali Prosch and Meghann McCrory were “setting up” for their performance No Signal in Mackler’s black box. At least, I thought they were setting up — the set up turned into the performance so seamlessly that I didn’t notice at first. The artists wore all black and slowly moved scrims in front of lights, turned on projectors, and started up a fan that would rotate and cause fluttering, glittery light to move around the room.

Ben Jones video installation at Transmission L.A.

It was a durational, always-in-progress light show that ended with disco balls and tap dancing, and people felt free to walk into and leave whenever. (A little girl gasped when one rotating black box was disassembled to reveal a disco ball, but the same little girl lost interest and was ushered away by her mother about three minutes later.)

A lot of people wandered into the performance from next door, where the new Mercedes-Benz Concept Style Coupé was on display. The Coupé had debuted the festival’s opening night, and it now sat under lights that flashed on and off to the cues of specially composed music you could listen to by putting on headphones suspended under spotlights. You could also, apparently, touch the car — I watched a young-ish blond guy in board shorts spent about five minutes trying to close the back door he’d opened while three security guards stood on with arms crossed, not helping.

Because of these cars, the strobe lights, the Beastie Boy curator, an L.A. Times article and rumors I’d heard, I was sure Transmission L.A. was a durational fundraiser, what Art21’s telethon might have been if corporately sponsored and planned by a rapper. Why else would a museum debut a luxury car in its galleries? I put this fundraiser theory in print before I realized I was wrong.

Transmission wasn’t a fundraiser. MOCA would not benefit financially (at least, not significantly). The luxury cars weren’t a sponsor’s self-promotional push, I was told. They were there to be experienced like everything else in the galleries.

“LA is all about car culture. The tricky thing is to get people out of their homes,” says Mike D. in the Transmission A.V. leaflet. “[W]e’re trying to create this all encompassing sensory-rich environment.”

It was sensory-rich, and people did come out. And it was fun to travel through the mish-mash of cultural strata and sensibilities (luxury car, DJ, performance artist) and try to understand how they related to each other. But I didn’t know who had the power (MOCA, Mercedes, Mike D., the artists?), which is why, when I went home to live-stream the telethon for the evening, I felt less antsy. There, people who cared had the power: artist were raising funds for arts programming and mostly soliciting pre-exisiting art fans to do so.  Who knew a fundraiser could be a relief?

Hunter S Thompson and George McGovern during the 1972 Presidential Campaign. Photo: CSU Archive.

Writer David Shields tells a story about being a kid and liking Hunter S. Thompson’s obnoxious gonzo journalism way better than Steinbeck and other more classic fiction writers. With Thompson, you were never sure how fictional a story was going to get and it was always possible the craziest stuff was real. The young Shields believed, I think, that Thompson was telling the truth about having had a conversation with the Richard Nixon while at an adjoining urinal, but Shields’ sister thought the story was bull. The siblings wrote to Thompson, who responded, saying the sister was right and Shields was “a pencil-necked geek.”

Mercedes emblem hanging outside MOCA's Geffen Contemporary during Transmission L.A.

“But still,” write Shields, “it was liberating to read a work open-ended enough that the thought could occur to you that some of this stuff had to be made up or, even better, you couldn’t quite tell.”

When, at MOCA’s 19-day Transmisision L.A.: AV Club festival, curated by Beastie Boy Mike D., I pulled back a black curtain and accidentally walked into a storage closet, I felt similarly liberated. I had just been in the flashy gallery where Mercedes Benz, which backed and co-organized the festival, had its new luxury coupe on display under flashing lights, and so the closet, which I thought for a moment was an art installation, felt refreshing. It didn’t matter that “exposing-the-hidden-infrastructure art” had been done before. It just mattered that the flashiness of the Mercedes was being contrasted by something more “real,” with ladders, and boxes, and little to no lighting. Then I saw the security guard shaking his head and walking toward me, and I knew what I had entered was not part of the art at all.

There’s a photograph at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art right now, on the third floor of the Japanese Pavilion. The image shows a sleek photograph of a white woman’s perfectly made-up, fashion-ad ready face hanging on a red rack outside concrete buildings near an overgrown alley. It’s not of a closet, but I imagine photographer Daido Moriyama felt the way I did when he stumbled upon the scene in Tokyo last year: captivated by the co-mingling of what’s posed and polished –what’s clearly “art”– and what’s not.

Michel Auder, Cat Stranglers, 2009. Courtesy Kayne Griffin Corcoran.

I had a lazy Monday afternoon two weeks ago. A friend defended her dissertation and then we all migrated from the Inland Empire to my place, where I tried to show video art to one friend while another, the dissertation defender, slept. The internet connection was slow, and so we never finished watching any one work, but the sleeping friend woke and wandered into the living room while Kenneth Tam’s I no longer worry about shoes being worn inside the house was faltering along. “We’re watching two men do invented yoga-like moves,” I said. “But they didn’t know each other — they met on Craig’s List.”

“If they knew each other, it wouldn’t be video art,” she said. “It would be friends doing Yoga.” This was a joke, but one I thought about, because, off the cuff, I couldn’t name any art I’d seen and liked recently that dealt comfortably and explicitly with the familiar. In most new art that compels me, artist hurl themselves into the unfamiliar.

There’s Leigh Ledare and Michel Auder, whose recent, respective exhibitions at The Box L.A. and Kayne Griffin Corcoran mined the eccentricities of their own biographies. But those exhibitions confront you with an idea of intimacy that’s unsettling because of how confessional it is, and how near it veers toward psychological fiction. In some of Auder’s films, he uses hired actors; for some of Ledare’s photographs, he asked women he found through personal ads to pose and dress him so that he embodies their desires.

Robert Smithson, Ithaca Mirror Trail, 1969.

Then there’s Elizabeth Peyton exhibition at Regen Projects, which is delightful and refreshing, as her work always is, because it’s not at all high concept. Peyton’s portraits, of friends and pop culture icons, are just of people she likes. In her work at Regen, she depicts painter Alex Katz sitting with crossed arms on a couch, and a watery-eyed David Bowie staring  from a 14-inch tall panel. You leave thinking about people’s interior lives, of Peyton’s perception of herself and of others. Does Alex Katz really look as stoic and controlled as figures in his own paintings, or has the artist projected a bit? This question isn’t uninteresting, but it’s not an ambitious one either.

James Lee Byars, The Angel, 1989, 125 glass spheres. Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery.

Could art about the familiar ever be really daring?

I came across a description of a work James Lee Byars did in tribute to Robert Smithson recently. The two artists, contemporaries in the New York of the 1960s, would have crossed paths and, I imagine, liked each other, but I don’t know how well they personally knew each other. In 1978, five years after Smithson tragic death in a Texas plane crash, James Lee Byars added up the dimensions of all the mirror Robert Smithson used during his career — Smithson used mirrors a lot, lining them up in the landscape to “displace” the earth perceptually or using them in gallery installation. The sum of all Smithson’s mirrors measure 1000 feet by 1360 feet. Byars then took the giant mirror to Smithson’s gravestone, and took a picture of the stone seen through the mirror. This would be “a mirror displacement of Robert Smithson’s soul.” Then Byars purportedly transported the mirror to the Utah desert — I do not know how, or whether any documents exist to prove this actually happened — and used a crane to shatter it across the desert floor. He collected the shards of mirror, packed them in a box embellished with gold leaf, and sent the box to Nancy Holt, who had been Smithson’s wife, as a token of his sympathy. Perhaps this is the ultimate example of the familiar taken to an extreme. Everything about Byars’ tribute speaks to how well he knew and loved Smithson’s art, yet the project is gapingly ambitious.

Dasha Shishkin, "S INT N HO," installation view, 2012. Courtesy Suanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Rain in Los Angeles is apparently bimodal — there are dry years followed by a few wet ones — which means the average precipitation is reached by factoring the wet and dry years together. We must be in a wetter year now, because there have been multiple rainy days just this week. Dasha Shishkin, who is not from Los Angeles (she hails from Moscow and lives in New York), makes rainy day drawings, drawings that feel like they are insular, cozy and social by necessity.  The figures are thrown together in tight quarters and going “outside” of the picture plane seems undesirable to them. They are thus prime subjects for staring at.

Shishkin has said she does not paint, per se, because she is not a participant. “I am thinking of Picasso’s quote about painting as an act of active participation and drawing as an act of voyeurism,” she told Modern Painters in 2010. “I like being a voyeur for now.” The world she gazes into, or creates for us to gaze into, in her new show at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is an eccentric fantasy inhabited exclusively by women, who occasionally appear in the nude for no apparent reason and have eyes in strange places, like on their abdomens or their behinds. Some have long Pinocchio noses.

Dasha Shishkin, ""I don't care if I can't understand you, but you can't sit in the gutter all day," 2012. Courtesy Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Two of her drawings at Vielmetter Projects strike me most, and both of these turn vulnerability into a kind of strength. One is called “What does it matter to her ever creating womb if today matter is flesh and tomorrow worms.” (“Titles are like a cherry on a cake,” said Shishkin in that same Modern Painters interview. “The cherry does not make a cake a cherry cake, but it is still there to attract or distract an eye.”) It shows ladies in black dresses at a party in a restaurant with a checkered floor. Two sit in chairs in the foreground, gazing in at the rest. They seem perfectly content in their lonesomeness and, as you follow their gaze, you see a lot of the other women aren’t actually interacting with anyone else either. It’s a party full of self-sufficient, non-participant partiers.

Eve Babitz and Marcel Duchamp play chess at Pasadena Museum of Art, 1963.

The second drawing I like is more relaxed. It’s called “I don’t care if I can’t understand you, but you can’t sit in the gutter all day,” and shows three women on crimson bedding, two of them bald, with eyes on their breasts and nipples that look like noses. The middle woman has a goofy infectious grin, and you wonder if she is on some sort of drug. She reminds me of an essay by Eve Babitz, the writer who knew L.A.  inside out and often longed for rain.

The essay, called “Rain,” comes from the book Slow Days, Fast Company, and has a passage on Quaaludes, which seems to describe Shiskin’s grinning woman perfectly: “When you get very languid and sexual and smile like Cleopatra being fanned as she floats down the Nile, other people catch the mood and find themselves straying from the straight and narrow too.” Rain has a similar effect as the drug, according to Babitz; rain in L.A. gives you an excuse to “catch a mood” and get comfortable. “[Rain is] freedom from smog and unbroken dreary hateful sameness,” writes Babitz. “It’s freedom to be cozy. Cozy! You can be cozy and not even have to go to San Francisco.”

James Lee Byars, "La figura de la pregunta," 1986.

Unless you really take Lent seriously, and I don’t know many Protestants who do, Easter is a quick event. It’s especially so if you consider all it encompasses: betrayal on Thursday, death on Friday, mourning on Saturday, new life on Sunday. To condense all this into one weekend feels very Christian. We’re fixated on efficiency and the finite. The world is 6,000 years old and the rapture will probably come soon.

The Easter service I attended this April started at 6:30, but should have started earlier. “Pretend it’s still dark out,” said the pastor before asking the music leader to light the logs in the fire pit. “Someone more coordinated should do this,” said the music minister, passing the matches on to a young man in a windbreaker. It was an outdoor service, held in the backyard of a Presbyterian cathedral on Wilshire Boulevard, and they must have known not many would come out so early, because the nomadic, participatory itinerary would have been unwieldy with many more. We’d progress from one station to another, starting at a fire pit like the one the disciple Peter must have sat at when he infamously denied the newly condemned Christ: “I don’t know him.” In Andrew Lloyd Weber’s version, Mary Magdalene, the prostitute Jesus mentored, calls him out: “Peter, don’t you see what you have done, you’ve gone and cut him dead?” “I had to do it, don’t you see,” Peter replies, his singing voice whiny and fearful, “or else they’d come for me.”

Our fire pit must have already burned out all traces of denial, because we used it to light the big Paschal candle (“So much wax,” said the girl next to me), a stand-in for Christ as light of the world. Then, from the Paschal candle, we lit little candles for each of us to hold. We proceeded over to a wooden cross leaning against the easternmost fence. Someone had thought to wrap fishing wire around this cross, and we took turns sticking lilies through the wire after the gospel reading. Some of us tried to slide flowers through with candles still in hand, and hot wax dripped on our fingers.

We moved finally to the baptismal station, where more gospel was read and the Paschal candle officially baptized, bottom down so as not to put out the light of the world. Then we all baptized our small candles in the same manner, and put holy water on each other’s foreheads, saying “may you have new life” while making the sign of the cross with our fingers. A few of these rituals had roots in something traditional; others were likely invented that morning.

James Lee Byars taking questions on TV in Brussells, 1969.

The James Lee Byars exhibition at Overduin and Kite in Hollywood opened on Easter, which seems appropriate. Byars, a nomadic artist who lived in L.A., Germany, Japan, Egypt, and elsewhere understood sacredness as powerful. During Lent in1995, two years before his death, he installed The White Mass in the Church of St. Peter in Cologne. It consisted of a white ring right in the middle of the altar and then four marble pillars with signs inscribed on them: Q.R., I.P., O.Q., Q.D. Each set of letters stood in for a tenet of Byars’ Philosophy of Questioning, a belief system that really did just center on the conviction that questions — not answers — were all we humans had to push us onward. Q.R. meant “The Figure of the Question is in the Room” while O.Q. referred to “The Figure of the One Question.” No one could enter the installation unless they were participating in the mass.

James Lee Byars, "The Chair for the Philosophy of Question," 1996. Courtesy Overduin and Kite.

At Overduin and Kite, a collection of marble “books” shaped like sun and stars and encased in glass are like relics from some tasteful, medieval cult. In the adjoining room, a gold nail hammered into the wall recalls the crucifixion, and the Chair of the Philosophy of Questioning is installed inside a red silk tent. It’s not clear what one would do if sitting in that ornate chair; I suppose one would preside over the question-asking of anyone who ventured into the tent. “Basically I try to solve essential questions with questions,” Byars once said. But that makes his questioning feel particularly ritualistic; he’s living out his religion by refusing to ever answer.

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

Reyner Banhamthe Silurian Lake south of Death Valley in San Bernardino County, California. Photo: Tim Street-Porter. Via archpaper.com.

Reyner Banham, a British architectural historian, had blatant enthusiasm for Los Angeles that nearly got him blacklisted in an era in which the cultured loved to hate this city. He revered crisps, those small potato-based chip-like products that had gone from English bar fare to brightly packaged supermarket snack stuff. Banham, speaking tongue-in-cheek, called them a “triumph of progressive technology,” and, explaining away their utter lack of food value, wondered if they might be the “nutriment of angels rather than mortal flesh.”

It’s this sort of attention to pop minutiae that Banham brought to his study of the City of Angels. When he wrote Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies in 1972, he likened L.A.’s history of flourishes to a hamburger served with all the extras on the side, and nearly salivated over the freeway system, portraying Los Angeles as a city in which living was tied up in embellishment and movement. Critic Peter Plagans, then just getting his art-writing feet wet, wrote a scathing, sprawling review for Artforum that he titled “The Ecology of Evil.” In it, he pointed out that Banham didn’t actually have to live in the smog-stifled city he enthused over.

Still from "Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles," 1972.

When UCLA Press published a new edition of Banham’s book in 2003, architect Joe Day was asked to write the introduction. The Press wondered if he could consider, in this era of the green living push, whether there was anything “eco-friendly” about Banham’s ecologies. Not exactly, Day concluded; after all, this is a book written by the man who championed the nutrient-free crisp.

I spent the afternoon of Sunday, April 10 (in 2011), sitting in a circle on a 7^th Street sidewalk, just above the 110 Freeway in downtown L.A. and across from a grossly big, blandly beige apartment building. We were ostensibly a book club, meeting here to discuss Banham’s now canonical paean to L.A.’s status as architectural original. Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the L.A. Times was charged with leading the discussion, and Joe Day was also in attendance, along with architect Craig Hodgetts, who had known Banham personally (though that’s mostly anecdotal, Hodgetts qualified, as if knowing someone could be quantified).

Ed Kienholz sitting on his "Expert" truck, 1960s.

We could sit on the side of the street because much of downtown had been cordoned off for CicLAVia, an anti-congestion festival that L.A. imported from Colombia, which uses Ciclovias to create temporary public space where there is none. A steady, thick stream of bikers, roller bladers, and joggers passed, a sight that felt impressively utopian as we sat and talked about how Banham’s utopian vision of the city had been proven faulty in the years since.

The Los Angeles of the freeways, foothills, and flourishes has become less exceptional for its anti-centrality, interstate system (the Pasadena Parkway is now seen as a relic to be historically preserved) and once seemingly-endless supply of private family homes. The joke that getting anywhere in L.A. takes twenty minutes has now been upped to forty and no longer qualifies as funny. The beautiful thing about CicLAVia is that people came out—some of us to sit and discuss the city’s urban history, others to get unimpeded exercise, and still other just to be on the street. Maybe L.A. can still be the city of movement and flourish, and yet, actually, maybe, start to become ecological in a nutrient-filled sort of way.

B. Wurtz & Co. at Richard Telles Fine Art, Installation View

Two years ago, I met this guy, an artist from New York who was in L.A. to collaborate with an Indie rocker. I met him the day I was rendezvousing with someone I’d met through Twitter — we both wrote about art-like things, had similar taste, knew some of the same people and kept responding to one another’s tweets. So we thought we should meet in person. The Twitter friend had blogged about this New York artist (the one collaborating with the rocker) once and so the New York artist texted the Twitter friend to say, “Hi, I’m in L.A. Want to meet up?” The Twitter friend thought the New York artist was someone else, someone he knew better, and invited him to breakfast. After he figured out with whom he was breakfasting, and after they’d finished their meal, the Twitter friend, whom I had yet to meet in person, brought the New York artist with him to rendezvous with me. By the end of an afternoon spent gallery hopping in Culver City, the New York artist and I were convinced we’d met before. “Maybe at an opening or a party,” he said. “It’s a really small world we traffic in,” I said, meaning the art world is small. “I know,” he said. “It’s embarrassing.”

B. Wurtz & Co. at Richard Telles Fine Art, Installation View

I thought he was right: it is embarrassing to go to a meeting, reading, or opening and recognize half the people there. It impoverishes the world’s bigness and, sometimes, makes my own likes and interests seem about as wide and deep as a cocoon. But sometimes it also feels cozy.

B. Wurtz and Co., the show that’s up now at Richard Telles’ West Hollywood gallery, feels cozy. It’s about B. Wurtz — the New York-based artist who has been working since the 1970s, making delightfully, elegantly underwhelming art out of raw wood, plastic bags, wire hangers, stray socks and the like — and how he resonates with other artists who do or have worked in similar veins. The curator, Matthew Higgs, directs the New York alt space White Columns and chose the show’s title because he liked the title of a 2001 photography show that started at MoMA and traveled to The Getty: Walker Evans & Co. This earlier show delved into resonances between Depression-era documenter Evans, his contemporaries and his successors. Of course, Wurtz is different than Evans, in that he’s less famous and probably less immediately legible, but still, writes Higgs, the “serendipitous correspondences – both formal and psychological” between his work and the work of other artists are worth noting.

B. Wurtz, Untitled, detail, 2012, wood, plastic bags. Courtesy Richard Telles Fine Art.

When you walk in, you see plastic bags of staggered heights hung on thin wood poles attached to a wood stand by B. Wurtz. You see a pyramid of cobbled-together cat photographs by Vincent Fecteau on one wall and, on another wall, strips of rubber, locks of hair and paper twisted together by Richard Hawkins cascading down toward a shoe box on the floor. There is a framed collage of coin package wrappers lined up by Gabriel Kuri. Found objects are carefully re-purposed and composed in formally intelligent ways. Nothing even veers toward maximalism; this is minimalist abstraction made out of what you’d find blowing through the streets. It’s easier to appreciate if you’ve seen what minimalist abstraction looks like when it’s highly, expensively fabricated and commanding. This work commands and demands nothing; it’s happy to just exist for those who care to notice.

In an interview B.Wurtz may have conducted with himself (I have yet to confirm this, but the questions were certainly posed by someone particularly familiar with the artist), the interviewer asks where Wurtz made his work for a 1998 show. Wurtz answers, “in my apartment, the roof of my building, my studio, or a close friend’s garden. I saw no reason to go further.”

Dana Verkouteren's rendering of Gregory G. Katsas speaking in front of the Supreme Court Justices in Washington, March 26, 2012.

Driving home on March 28, the last day of the SCOTUS affordable health care hearings, I had the radio on and heard interviews with two or three female picketers who had set up outside the Supreme Court. I haven’t been able  to find the transcript of what I heard, but I remember it as one of those “can you tell who’s on what side” stories — like the one NPR did months ago, comparing the fiscally-obsessed language of a Tea Partier with that of a Wall Street Occupier. The similarity that struck me most between these SCOTUS picketers was the use of “I” and “my”: “my Constitutional right,” “my health,” “I have the freedom.” In an Associated Press piece I read later, a woman said of the health care act, “It is the epitome of being in my face and telling me what I can and can’t do for the rest of my life.”

The “I” and the “my” feel embarrassing: people speaking about what they want, and what they feel they deserve, but doing so in language that aligns them to “a side.” On both sides, the “I” and “my” seem in service to bigger red vs. blue, conservative vs. liberal interests, and, at least in sound bites, the speakers don’t seem aware of how unspecific their “I” sounds.

Leigh Ledare, who became notorious on a very small scale (he’s only had a few solo shows, some of them outside of the U.S., none in L.A. until now) for using his over-intimate relationship with his exceptionally uninhibited mother as his subject, has work at The Box gallery in L.A. right now. And though everything in his fairly extensive exhibition is in some way or another “confessional,” all you understand about the artist’s wants or likes has to do with his voracious interest in other people — he wants, or likes, to know about those who are or have been close to him.

Leigh Ledare, still from The Gift, 2008.

The Gift, fragments of a softcore film Ledare’s former-dancer mother made with friends, plays in a side room at The Box. Ledare’s mother sent him this  footage, apparently “as a gift,” and Ledare pared it down so that no story, only strange encounters between actors and director are left. In the main gallery space, a room-inside-a-room has been built to hold Double Bind, a wide-ranging series of photographs of Meghan Ledare Fedderly, formerly married to Ledare, interspersed with imagery from vintage magazines, postcards, and other such sources. According to an explanation hung near the entrance to the room that holds Double Bind, Ledare invited his ex-wife on a weekend in upstate New York, intending to photograph her. She agreed, but had remarried by the scheduled vacation came around. Ledare and she took the trip, but she and her new husband took the same trip, at Ledare’s request, soon after. Both ex-husband and new husband took the photos that Ledare assembled to make his “artwork,” and the images aren’t that different.

Leigh Ledare, from Double Bind, 2009.

Around the periphery of the makeshift room for Double Bind there are color photographs from Ledare’s Personal Commission series. In each, Ledare poses in costumes, often on or near beds. Women the artist found via personal ads, who had interests and desires that reminded him of his mother’s, have posed him and taken the pictures. Again, he asserts only his appetite for closeness to desires of others. Somehow, this makes him, an artist always putting himself in situations others would run from, seem cautious. Self-assertion, the kind those picketers outside the court plunged into, can make you look naive and exposed, and Ledare sidesteps that potential. It’s why his work fascinates and resonates, but also frustrates.

Mad Men Season 5 Billboard in West Hollywood. Courtesy DailyBillboard.blogspot

“It was mainly about trying to escape my own good taste, or good taste in general,” said John Baldessari, when asked why, in the 1970s, he first took his own photographs, then had someone take photos of him, then started using photos he’d found. Fashion matriarch Miuccia Prada has said the same thing, more or less: she’s always battling her own tastefulness to come up with something different, and new.

The fifth season of Mad Men, a show that’s tastefulness has won it accolades for art direction and design, premiers on Sunday. This means everywhere in this city and others, there are pictures of Don Draper staring at two mannequins in a window display. The girl mannequin is naked; the guy wears a robe and slippers. A married couple? A man and mistress? Don’s back is to us, but we can see his face reflected in the glass. As usual, he looks cool, untouchable, though slightly dubious. “This is a dreamlike image,” Matt Weiner, who conceived the show and designed the poster, apparently said. He thought it looked sort of like a De Chirico painting, and I suppose he was thinking of the Italian artist’s renderings of sculpted, bald, faceless figures that loom on pedestals. “By the end of the season… I guarantee you’ll know what it is about.” Weiner and AMC clearly trust theirs viewers to want to know. It’s such a vague and high-handed teaser, so full of  “significance”: Don, the ad man, looking at an ad, a fantasy version of the coupledom that keeps eluding him, while his reflection stares back at him. It feels kind of like a soap, which means it’s let its tastefulness slide. But not in a provocative way.

Still from 'The Good Wife' on CBS

Sometimes, tastefulness shouldn’t be “escaped.” Right now, I am particularly fond of  The Good Wife, a CBS show where everyone is a little bit prettier than anyone in real life.  Julianna Margulies plays a lawyer married to a politician. She always has a cagey facial expression and hardly ever says anything about herself.  But unlike in Mad Men, where unpacking Don Draper’s tight-lipped demeanor is part of the schtick, the maintenance of Margulies’ control is key to keeping up the show’s appearance. This actually makes The Good Wife seem self-aware: instead of delving into flimsy personal side plots, like so many so-so law dramas do, the characters’ resistance to such detours defines the show. In a recent episode, a lawyer from a rival firm, played by Michael J. Fox, tries to woo Marguiles’ character to his firm. She wants the extra money, but not to leave her current firm. So uses his offer to leverage a fairly significant raise. All this happens without no exposition. She never tells anyone how she feels, just acts smoothly. Her overly big eyes make you think she’s flinching a little inside. But you’ll never know for sure, because the plot is too doggedly tasteful to go there.

Mark Bradford, "Smite," 2007, mixed media collage on canvas. Hammer Museum, Promised gift of Susan and Larry Marx. © Mark Bradford. Image courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Collectors Susan and Larry Marx have good taste. Because they have pledged their art to the UCLA Hammer Museum, the museum stated the exhibition Intimate Immensities, to show off their collection. None of the work is very big, and all of it is concisely composed. Even the Joan Mitchell painting, only 27 x 26 in. and with all its drama pulling your eye to the middle, feels particularly efficient. The Ed Ruscha topography pieces, the Cy Twombly drawings, and the Mark Bradford collage look more modest and “aesthetically appealing” in this show than they usually do.  Wrote William Poundstone on ArtInfo, “[E]very artist and work is a smart, relevant choice. (There aren’t many single-collection shows for which you can make those two claims.)”

If collecting is itself a medium of expression — and, of course, it is –, then the Marx’s are aware of and comfortable with  the medium’s limitations. By not trying to stretch themselves beyond their own, consistent taste, they’re actually exposing more about the partial, confining nature of human desire and perception than they would otherwise.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, "The Banquet of Cleopatra," 1740s. Courtesy National Gallery of London.

The word stature is one of those that’s meaning and sound do not completely agree. Say “stature,” and it sounds like you mean something serious, like stature is the same as status: “Her stature alone commands attention”; “He was a man of great stature.” But of course, someone could have small, wimpy or weak stature. When writer Judith Thurman reviewed a Cleopatra exhibition the Guggenheim hosted in 2007, she wrote, “There have been other great queens, but none of [Cleopatra's] stature.” Then, in the next paragraph, she wrote, “That stature was petite — aristocratic women of her time were about five feet tall…”

So she was small, maybe even femininely delicate, but still commanding enough to prompt the Romans to inscribe on a stele carrying her depiction, “The queen himself.”

I have been thinking about stature because Michael Heizer, an artist of great stature (who is significantly taller than Cleopatra probably was) known for his earthworks and his secret City in Nevada, is making a work of stature. This work, if you have not heard, will be on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s campus and will involve a rock of great stature — 340 tons — that recently had to be moved from its point of origin in Riverside to L.A. This move, of course, involved street closure and hassle and quite a bit of spectacle. By the time it reached it’s destination, tens of thousands had come out to see the rock, which will ultimately sit behind the museum above a big concrete slot that viewers can descend into.

Night view of Michael Heizer's rock in transit, about to leave the Bixby Knolls neighborhood of Long Beach.

The rock has prompted extraordinary amounts of media coverage, but very little art criticism yet, understandable seeing as the work isn’t quite built. Christopher Knight of the L.A. Times finally did stick his neck out and offer some art critical thoughts on the rock and related fanfare. He’d wanted to dispel some of the rock-associated economic frustration, as the price tag hovers somewhere around $10 million — no taxpayer dollars were spent, LACMA and city officials assured the public as the route wound through the region. After making his money point, Knight wrote, “Besides money, what else draws easily distracted eyeballs toward budding celebrity? Ask Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian. Sex, in the case of the rock, requires a bit of explanation.” By “budding celebrity,” he meant the 340-ton rock; he referred to the whole transport as “the boy-toy.” He continued,

As a source of public fascination, art’s psycho-sexual position in American life matters. Art has a gender in popular consciousness, and that gender is female. Like it or not, art is presumed to be feminine, not masculine. Under those circumstances, if art in a patriarchal society is to have a prominent public life, femininity just won’t cut it.

His was a sort of vague argument, but the gist was this: if you were to assign gender to artworks, most would be girls. Unfortunately, femininity can’t hold its own out in public, however, which means all artists commissioned to make public work on LACMA’s campus were male: Chris Burden, Robert Irwin, Heizer, James Turrell and perhaps Jeff Koons. He called the boulder “just about as butch as it gets.” But I wonder if that’s true.

Michael Heizer, “Double Negative,” 1969. One of two slots in the Mormon Mesa.

The earthworks artists, their own gender aside, seemed always to be interested in crevices and nuances and indentations and interventions, even if they sometimes acted upon the landscape in  megalomaniacal ways (Heizer blasted out tons and tons of sandstone to make Double Negative, two deep slits in the Nevada desert). In contrast, Chris Burden’s recent sculptures have been interested in “erecting”–erecting cities or lampposts–and Jeff Koons makes aggressive stand alone work that has no interest in crevices. Heizer’s rock, despite it’s stature, has idiosyncrasy. Slated to hover over a deep dip into the ground (albeit a concrete-constructed one), it feels more gentle.

Gail Devers in Athens

Do you remember track star Gail Devers, with her absurdly long nails? I noticed her for the first time in Atlanta, on television during the 1996 Olympics, where she one her third gold. Then, her nails were painted gold to match the medal she had yet to win. Eight years later, in Athens, her nails were blue. That she had those nails at all made her seem smarter than her competitors, like she alone had figured out how to bend norms and regulations to make her body entirely her own. “I run with my feet,” she once said, meaning it didn’t matter what flourishes she had on her hands.

I thought of Devers when I read that Caster Semenya, the 2009 World Champion in the 800 meters race who was hindered from competing in 2010 when huge improvement in her time and her butch appearance made officials and others question her gender, has a new coach, a woman from Mozambique. She will no longer be working with the men who managed her as her career began, when she was often going off with other racers to prove to them her femaleness: ‘”They are doubting me,’ she would explain to her coaches, as she headed off the field toward the lavatory.”

Semenya has long nails, too, or at least she did when writer Ariel Levy tracked her down for a brief moment in 2009, not long after she had been subjected to a series of uncomfortable, publicly debated gender tests. “She wore sandals and track pants and kept her hood up,” said Levy. “She didn’t look like an eighteen-year-old girl, or an eighteen-year-old boy. She looked like something else, something magnificent.”

She looks magnificent in the photo artist Adam McEwan used in one of the fake obituaries he made in 2011, too: her face seems calm and unfazed but her right pointer finger is up, signalling, it seems, that she is number one. It’s perhaps the crudest of the obits by McEwan, who pieces together news articles about people who are actually still living but leads in to them with the words “has died,” then prints his “reports” on a large scale. He completed Semenya’s when the runner was barely 20 and controversy still surrounded her. The lead said, “World Champion middle distance runner whose gender came under intense public scrutiny” and descriptors throughout were painful: “even when young teachers sometimes thought she was a boy because of her liking sports and their company,” “she was considering boycotting the presentation of her metal to protest her treatment. She had to be persuaded…”, “It was unclear if she would have run professionally again.”

McEwan never specifies a cause of death, and it is impossible not to imagine that, had it been real, her death would have been somehow a result of the “intense public scrutiny” and the crassness of officials, especially as Semenya comes from a place where gender deviance is often seen as criminal.

When Levy tracked down Semenya that day in 2009, she told the runner she was writing about her. Semenya wanted to know why:

“Because you’re the champion,” I said.

She snorted and said, “You make me laugh.”

An exhibition in Chinatown right now captures this conflict between performance and personhood in a quiet, compelling way. You walk in to see images of women high jumpers mid-air, their backs arched and their knees parallel to or above their heads, which arch back toward the camera, so that the intense, sometimes pained focus of expressions is unmissable. The images hang on the wall, over string that’s threaded across the room, or suspended inside wooden hoops. Another series of images is domestic: a dog, a cityscape, a bedroom, a bowling alley, another bedroom. Text that accompanies the installation, a collaboration at Young Art between Cara Benedetto and Davida Nemeroff, refers to “a game that wont stop no matter how many tests are changed” and stats that “become important when we number pain.”

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

John Galliano, 2009.

John Galliano has a lavish-sounding last name (he shares it with an Italian liqueur), and lavish taste (“He knows, and we know, that no one would ever wear a 12-foot-wide crinoline over a baggy pair of printed drawers with, perhaps, a pair of plastic carrier bags on the feet,” wrote Sarah Mower for Style.com). That he would also take a lavish approach to outbursts, uttering a line of anti-Semitic epitaphs instead of just one or two, isn’t that surprising. So when, days before Paris Fashion week began, Galliano, the first Brit to head a French couture house, let his God-complex spin out and became, at least according to certain headlines, a dissolute failure, his fall seemed more irksome than surprising.

What’s happened since has been predictable; it’s exactly what happens when someone who’s found a certain niche of notoriety takes an egregious misstep and everyone sees. Dior let Galliano go; Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss urged him into rehab; then pregnant, pixie star, Natalie Portman, the antithesis of the punk designer in deportment and pedigree, became unwitting spokesperson against anti-Semitism in general and drunken fashion gurus in particular, refusing to stay on as face of Dior fragrance if Galliano stayed on, too. (In an effort to defend Portman’s spokeswoman clout, articles keep noting that her great-grandparents died at Auschwitz, a serious fact that this fiasco almost trivializes.)

It had been rumored, probably baselessly, that Portman would wear Galliano to the Oscars two weeks ago. Instead she wore simple plum Rodarte. Which is more or less where this string of who-did-whats has been heading: the work of the Rodarte sisters, whose somber idiosyncrasy recalls the Brontës, is the subject of a current exhibition at MOCA’s Pacific Design Center. Presented by Swarovski (yes, of the crystals) and curated by Rebecca Morse, Rodarte: States of Matter features a selection of dresses from the designers’ recent Fall and Spring collections and a few costumes designed for the Darren Aronofsky film Black Swan.

MOCA PDC fares much better when it remembers that it is the satellite of an experimental contemporary arts institution and not a history of design museum. It rarely does, however, and it’s installations too often stray toward the pedantic. But Rodarte: States of Matter tries too hard to push the other way, going to great lengths to present the gowns as sculptural experiences and thus making it a battle to appreciate them as design at all.

Vito Acconci, still from "Claim Excerpts," 1971.

Downstairs, Rodarte’s Black Collection is darkly lit and hung in the center of a black painted room. You have to get close to see the the raw alpaca wool that climbs up a mannequin’s chest toward the shoulder and the tulle that twists in on itself like nautical netting after a storm. Upstairs, the lighting is at first severe and all-exposing, but then it flashes black and the dresses from the White Collection glow like they would in a bowling alley. This theatricality doesn’t give the clothes the credit they deserve–after all, they’re gorgeously crafted objects, with a pre-Raphaelite gentility that butts up against a DIY scavengery—or doesn’t credit viewers with the ability to understand Rodarte’s drama without the help of special effects.

But as with Galliano, the MOCA exhibition fails only in stark contrast to success–it fails because it could have succeeded. That’s the most common, prominent kind of failure. It’s also the dullest, the kind that can be explained away and potentially remedied.

The last time I was in a room as dark as the one that now holds Rodarte’s Black Collection, I was at Emma Gray Headquarters, a tiny, narrow, bird’s nest of a space perched above the corner of La Cienega and Venice. Performance artist and photographer Dawn Kasper was re-inhabiting Vito Acconci’s 1971 workClaim, wearing a black hoodie, wielding a pipe and sitting blindfolded in a candle-encircled corner.

During the original Claim, Acconci, also blindfolded, sat at the bottom of a stairwell in the basement of a New York gallery with a crowbar, two pipes and and relentless tongue at his disposal, “claiming the space.” Any time steps approached, he’d swing his pipe, and threaten to kill. “I’ll stop anybody from coming down here in the basement with me,” he’d say, his outburst far less viscous but more ominous than any iteration of Galliano’s. “This space is mine.”

Kasper sat at the same level as her audience, not below. And her piece, more about wondering what could have compelled or propelled a performer like Acconci, lasted an hour to Acconci’s three. Carol Cheh of Another Righteous Transfer recorded pieces of Kasper’s intermittent monologue:

I want to be aggressive, I want to be convincing, I want to claim this space . . . I am alone in this space . . . but I don’t really want this space . . . I don’t want to be him, I am a woman, I am claiming my own space, my own honesty.

“My work was about getting to a place that you couldn’t get to,” Acconci said recently, looking back on earlier performances. In that sense, Kasper’s Claim succeeded by failing–failing to get somewhere she never could have gotten anyway.

Clement Greenberg speaking in 1961.

In 1983, art historian T.J. Clark delivered his paper, “More on the Differences Between Comrade Greenberg and Ourselves” at the Vancouver conference, Modernism and Modernity. Clement Greenberg, the critic who named kitsch “the epitome of all that is spurious” and had a Pollock hanging in his bathroom, was in the audience. I do not know if Greenberg participated in the Q&A, or spoke up for himself at all when Clark finished speaking. Certainly, he was not sitting center stage as Rosalind Krauss was yesterday in the L.A. Convention Center, when Benjamin Buchloh delivered his paper, “More on the Differences between Comrade Krauss and Ourselves.”

Annually, the College Art Association Conference, underway in L.A. right now, honors a distinguished scholar by assembling a group of other distinguished scholars to pay well-researched homage (or “femmage,” critic Hal Foster joked badly yesterday). Those assembled in Rosalind Krauss’s honor included, in addition to Foster and Buchloh, Yve-Alain Bois, Harry Cooper, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, and Briony Fer, all famous within the “art ideas” bubble for some contribution made to art history during the time Krauss has been making hers. All have published in October, the now-renown art theory quarterly Krauss, along with Annette Michelson, co-founded in 1976.

Rosalind Krauss speaking on Bruce Nauman at the Dia Art Foundation, New York, May 23, 2002.

As makes sense for homage, most of what went was said glowed with respect and generous affection, well-deserved for the woman who more or less made art theory a field. Buchloh alone pointedly took Krauss to task. And this, according to him, is something he’s done quite regularly since they met in the 1970s.

Buchloh encountered Krauss first when still an adjunct in Germany. He read her writing — I forgot which essay, but, given the timeline, it likely had to do with Modern sculpture and, quite possibly, with the work of David Smith — and had been bowled over by its critical clarity. This is after all, the woman who wrote, “Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language there are only differences” and who has appeared in every art theory textbook I have ever owned, sometimes talking about Mondrian, sometimes about Mike Kelley. She is and has always been agile, and Buchloh knew immediately he wanted to traffic in a world where someone like her could air such precisely articulated ideas.

Buchloh met Krauss in person some time later, probably still in the 1970s, at a conference in Canada where, to his surprise, he realized Greenberg, at least in the eyes of North American scholars, was not a provincial figure as he had previously imagined. He amended his critical canon accordingly, and went about becoming friends with the women helming art theory’s new, more academic wave, though they’ve been friends constantly at odds with each others’ ideas.

The main thing that still irks Buchloh about Krauss has to do with her continuous side-stepping of conceptualism. He noted the absence of conceptual art from Passages in Modern Sculpture, Krauss’ first book, and its absence when she embraced post-structural linguistics at the end of the 1980s. Why, in particular, had Krauss never written about Lawrence Weiner (a favorite of Buchloh’s)? “I can only repeat what my colleagues have pointed to,” said Krauss (I’m paraphrasing), when she had a chance to respond, “and point to my interest in the visual.” Conceptualism has just never been her thing.

Benjamin Buchloh teaching at Harvard.

The second criticism Buchloh leveled felt more powerful. He, like all his colleagues, loved Krauss for her stylistics, her mastery of language and her ability to sound official, assertive, incontrovertible when talking about practically anything: modern sculpture, assemblage, 19^th century painting. “The precision of her thinking,” Buchloh said, anticipated Krauss’ wrath, borders “on the tautological.” Her writing, like that of many of their other peers, “Does not even attempt to get its hands dirty.”

Why wouldn’t Krauss let her criticality choke her up sometimes, to think thoroughly through an issue but do it less than cogently, so as to risk unanticipated discoveries and/or blunders? Bruce Hainley, a SoCal art writer who has not written for October but knows its content well, recently published an essay in the form of a letter, “To Whom it May Concern,” in Bard’s Journal of Curatorial Studies. His advice for critics pushes even further than I imagine Buchloh’s would:

 I was actually going to quote Gertrude Stein (“Act so there is no use in a center.”) and then suggest that you doubt, if not exactly everything, then at least all the things in the grammar toolbox, all the blossoms in the writerly garden: mess with syntax; fuck with form (recognizing the genre you’re engaged in); piss off your (metaphorical) parents (few now helming October or the Whitney ISP ever have); ride the proverbial jocks of writers worth the bother (so as to organize some fresh rendezvous of questions and question marks).

The problem, of course, remains how to be centerless and self-conscious and subversive and do it well. Not to undermine Krauss’ achievements in the least, but it’s easier to be successfully tautological than successfully fucked up.