Ger van Elk, "The Co-Founder of the Word O.K.-Hollywood," 3 color photographs, 1971.. Courtesy the Artist and Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: by Brian Forrest.

The first time I visited downtown Los Angeles, I was surprised by its bareness. A friend and I, both of us art students, had driven in from Claremont for an opening, tackling the congested Santa Monica freeway for the first time, too. A fellow student and L.A. veteran had warned us that, even if we experienced smooth sailing through Covina, we’d hit an out-of-nowhere stand still once we’d “cleared that hill and past the Westfield [mall].” He was right, and we slowed to a laborious crawl 20 miles from the city. Braving traffic felt like initiation and we were proud of ourselves. However, once we arrived in the city proper and exited the I-10, all the people seemed to evaporate. The galleries we wandered through may have been well-populated, but, otherwise, downtown felt weirdly gutted of life.

At one point, my friend and I stood outside a café, staring up into the windows of what looked like an abandoned warehouse. A transient stopped to stare with us. “Amazing how they built this city up, huh? There’s no space left nowhere,” he commented, misinterpreting the source of our awe. We agreed, however—it was amazing that a city that had been so recently and extensively built up and out could feel both congested and desolate at the same time.

A comparable sense of lived-in bareness characterizes The City Proper, an exhibition of contemporary photography of SoCal’s urban landscape currently on view at West Hollywood’s Margo Leavin Gallery. Curated by James Welling, known for translucent and prismatic photographic experiments with color,  the show mainly features L.A. artists and loosely responds to New Topographics, a now seminal exhibition that first appeared at the Eastman House in 1975 and was rephrased by LACMA in 2009. The photographers in New Topographics, among them Lewis Baltz, Frank Gohlke (who also appears in City Proper), and Robert Adams, were preoccupied with man-altered landscape and replaced the humanitarian poetics of the West’s earlier documenters—think Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, or Dorthea Lange—with calculated, uninhabited aloofness.

Zoe Crosher, "LAX Courtyard by Marriott," Lightjet print, edition of 5, 2005. Courtesy the Artist.

The City Proper is perhaps less aloof than coolly curious. It includes an array of angular buildings, empty city streets and urban nooks and crannies. Ger van Elk, an artist whose fascination with man’s role in modern landscape once led him to travel a canal via a small rubber dinghy and, later, navigate the Atlantic, has contributed a series of three color photographs, collectively titled The Co-Founder of the Word O.K.-Hollywood (1971). Each image has that vintage, William-Eggleston-worthy orange-heavy coloring, and each shows van Elk posed in profile to the right of a framed bubble letter “O.” He has propped up against a pole, column or building facade, and raised his own arm and leg to turn his body into the letter “K”–so he is “O.K.” on a residential street, outside a convenience store and a block from the Hollywood Colonial. Though cars line the streets and colorful signs interrupt the skyline, few other bodies appear in the shots. It’s as if van Elk is a pioneering tourist in a man-made but barely occupied amusement park.

Zoe Crosher’s series of LAX prints also have a vintage ambiance to them, though they were made between 2002 and 2005. They depict slightly gaudy hotel rooms near the airport, which means seas of cars and the occasional ascending plane can be seen from the windows. The camera always looks out—out the window, or out the sliding door—and the result is a vague feeling of yearning, but since there is no specified subject to attribute the feeling to, it just floats languidly on the image’s surface.

Brandon Lattu‘s  angular, faux-minimalist boxes take bareness into three dimensions, presenting squares or rectangles covered by a solid color except for the murky photographic images of palm trees or city drags that peek out from the boxes’ edges. A similar nonsensical formalism characterizes Shannon Ebner’s Fixed Knot Fence, Los Angeles (2010), which shows a chain link fence crowned by barbed wire standing in front of a bare white concrete wall. Dry knotty tree branches create a formal frame around the perimeter of the image, making the scene geometrically, romantically rustic.

Brandon Lattu, "Random Composition 12-105," Pigment, polypropylene, paper, polystrene, and wood, 2010. Courtesy of Artist and Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Forrest.

In his quietly sentimental book, Why People Photograph, Robert Adams, one of the first to train his lens on the man-altered landscape, tells a story about a friend, a photographer who remains unnamed. This friend used to take pictures along country roads by sticking his body up through the sun roof and steering with his feet. No one could convince him to abandon this practice, because, to him, the view felt so right and so real. I imagine the resulting photographs showed little direct evidence of the recklessness that made them. In fact, they may have been as austere as Adams’ own images, or as uninhabited as the images in The City Proper. But when Adams says his reckless friend inspired him to take “grand, unsafe pictures,” he more or less means he wanted his images to feel right, to capture the mood of a space as uninhibitedly as possible. The photographs in The City Proper are insouciant, open, and characterized by a certain bravery. They show the cityscape to be a technological, gridded construction that, while made by humans, does not necessarily need a human presence to sustain it, but they also seem bent on conquering the city in a way that suggests urban impassivity can be subverted by those determined to understand it.

Riding on the heels of this trend, four San Francisco galleries — John Berggruen Gallery, Fraenkel Gallery, Ratio 3 and Altman Siegel Gallery — turn over their spaces to four of their represented artists to mine their backrooms to create a collaborative exhibition.  Titled They Knew What They Wanted, this exhibition is comprised of four separate group exhibitions out of the same collection. In a similar spirit, DailyServing has invited four of our San Francisco writers to use their perspectives to discuss each of the exhibitions.

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Shannon Ebner at Altman Siegel Gallery written by Julie Henson

Lee Friedlander, Egypt (1983), Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

Among the exhibitions included in this collaboration, Shannon Ebner‘s curated project at Altman Siegel Gallery offers a nice mix of investigation and understanding. Basing her choices on work that “express their existence outside the locality of time and place,” the end result is a collection of work full of mystery and object-hood. Each work is disembodied from its individual history and is reduced to abstract physicality and strange, disconnected environments.

Installation View, Altman Siegel Gallery

Many of the works in this exhibition, like Lee Friedlander’s Egypt, quickly lose their context and dissolve into an exploration of time and timelessness. Friedlander’s photo becomes cold and detached in the context of the gallery. Hidden distantly behind Lutz Bacher’s strangely displaced, object living in the middle of the space, Sol Lewitt’s Untitled (2004) and Ed Ruscha’s Unit, give small, intimate spaces for an investigation into questions of objects and textures, flatness and environment.  The exhibition successfully reflects the elements within each piece, allowing the viewer to engage each unit separately rather than depending on a collection or historical context to inform the work. On first introduction, the space seems distant and emptied, but on further investigation, the parts really do become greater than the whole.

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Robert Bechtle at John Bergguren Gallery written by Seth Curcio

Richard Misrach, Golden Gate Bridge, 3.18.00, 4:00 pm, 2000 / Chromogenic print 20 x 24"

Predominantly a photo-realist artist, Robert Bechtle took the role of curator to participate in the exhibition They Knew What They Wanted at John Berggruen Gallery. Clearly approaching the role of curator as an artist, Bechtle selected a collection of works that operate as an extension of his own artistic practice. The most obvious unifying concept within the exhibition is form in space, manifest mostly as object in landscape. However, Bechtle has stated that the main instinct driving his selections are an exploration of the mundane in everyday life, or what the press release states as the “formality of the ordinary.”

Straight photographic works by artists Robert Adams, Lee Friedlander and Richard Misrach sit in proximity to the constructed images of artist Gregory Crewdson and Miriam Bohm. Prints of non-descriptive figures sitting by a suburban pool by artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders fall into a rather easy dialogue with Paul Wonner‘s acrylic paintings of figures in a park.

Mitzi Pederson, Untitled, 2009 Wood, silver leaf, string, and bells 127 x 11 1/2 x 2 1/2"

The exhibition exists without many surprises or profound connections, but is interestingly interrupted through the work of sculptor Mitzi Perterson and the painter Garth Weiser. The inclusion of Peterson and Weiser complicates the exhibition through abstraction. These two artists’ work are reductive and formal, but continue to engage the greater exhibition in terms of both landscape and the mundane, adding new dimension to the exhibition and requiring the viewer to actually work to extract content through context.

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Katy Grannan at Fraenkel Gallery written by Bean Gilsdorf

Katy Grannan curates a fairly straightforward exhibition of portraiture at Fraenkel Gallery, and the work in each of the three rooms implies a connection to be made or a correspondence to be understood.  In the first room, the viewer encounters Barry McGee’s Mixed Media in Fifty-Two Elements (2010), a large aggregation of framed patterns and portraits of young men tagging walls.  Frantic and almost imposing, it’s a good start to the show but is misleading as far as what’s to come, as the rest of the exhibition is much more subdued.  Across the room, Grannan has installed a collection of small, black and white “photographer unknown” portraits.  Echoing the shape of Elements, these are arranged in an oval on the wall and invite the viewer to compare the anonymity of their makers to the young men compelled to brand, tag, mark, or initial public surfaces with their monikers.

Installation view of Fraenkel Gallery, curated by Katy Grannan.

The second room contains, among other works, N.Y.C. (2006), twelve photographs of backstage scenes of fashion models by photographer Lee Friedlander.  In the opposite corner is a life-sized sculpted human figure with no head, Manuel Neri’s Untitled Standing Figure (1957).  It’s as if Grannan wants the viewer to consider the form that is all face (the model) and the faceless form (the sculpture).  The two works make for a kind of mirror gesture, conceptually reversing what makes them meaningful.  Although these two pieces might have been moved closer, the distance allows for a connection that is less facile.

In spite of the interesting juxtapositions of the first two rooms, the exhibition flattens out in the final room of the gallery.  Among more portraits is a tight grouping of animal-themed images by Charlie Harper, Peter Hujar, Garry Winogrand, Will Rogan and William Wiley.  On the adjacent wall is a portrait done by Ms. Grannan herself (Anonymous, Los Angeles (2008)).  Here, it’s difficult to discern what correlation the curator wants us to find.

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Jordan Kantor at Ratio 3 written by Aimée Reed

By far the most interesting of these four is Jordan Kantor’s installation at Ratio 3 Gallery in the Mission. Kantor’s approach, unlike the other three, was to keep the drive simple: to “hang a show from what [he] found.” In his grouping, you will find an impressive diptych of ballpoint pen on paper by Alighiero Boetti; a Chromogenic color print of broken glass from Sara VanDerBeek; and a sculptural piece from Rachel Whiteread made up of four separate pieces of stainless steel. Even more noteworthy is Kantor’s selection of photographs, the dates ranging from 1887 to 2009. There seems to be no real rhyme or reason as to why Kantor selected each photograph beyond the fact that they create a cohesive aesthetic experience.

Alighiero Boetti, "Centri di Pensiero", 1978, Ballpoint pen on paper; diptych, 40.75 x 28.75" each, Image courtesy of Ratio 3 Gallery, San Francisco

This seems to be the point of Kantor’s entire directive. His professional background consists of time spent in the curatorial department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and one can’t help but notice that it must have been time well spent. Curators today seem prone to overtly themed exhibitions in a bid to justify their existence, yet, with Kantor’s contribution to They Knew What They Wanted, he reminds the viewing audience that simply loving the works can, more often than not, work. In this sense, Kantor seems to be the only participating curator able to have the confidence to know what he wanted. And for this particular viewer, I find myself wanting more of Jordan Kantor’s POV.

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What exists between these four exhibitions is more of a premise than a revelation – leaving the viewer searching for comparisons and contrasting the work of both the artist/curators and the galleries themselves. Although we are still questioning the gallery’s delineated roles, like artist, curator, exhibition, or collection, each gallery and artist alike put together an exhibition that is a quirky example of the artist’s point of view.  Yet in this case of artist curated exhibitions, we are left with a seemingly internalized and self-reflexive group.

They Knew What They Wanted will be on view through August 13th.