Baby, Baby, Where Did Our Love Go? – A Stroll Through Baby Bergamont in LA – by James Scarborough

Baby, Baby, Where Did Our Love Go? – A Stroll Through Baby Bergamont in LA

by James Scarborough

Critical apparatus? Theoretical scaffolding? This. A blue southern California sky. Theologians and poets who never read Wittgenstein would call it the vault of heaven. That is why cathedrals have that tall, arced ceiling: to approximate the realm in which lie the sun, the stars, the moon. With no trace of smog, for it was a windy day. Santa Ana conditions. The mistral in the south of France. Van Gogh wrote that he loved the blue sky of the south of France. Loved it so much that he wanted to show how much he loved it to someone else. To the viewer of one of his paintings or drawings. Forget all the tragic stuff, because not every artist kills themselves (but I’ve been told that they do bleed). They do, however, hold within themselves the chance to love or to hate. In other words to feel intensely enough about something to want to share it with someone else. This feeling is not namby-pamby. It doesn’t equivocate. It doesn’t try to be part of some esoteric coterie. It simply is.

It’s easy to look at art and look for sources of style, wonder how it will sell, how it will be reviewed. In other words, to look forward or look back instead of looking at the now. Lord knows I do it when I inveigh against chicanery and over-the-shoulder-ness. But I wonder how it would play to write about love. To set love as an absolute: an unconditional feeling towards something or someone, without limit or boundary. Cut through theory and smart-talk. Look at the work in a cluster of galleries in Los Angeles called Baby Bergamont. See the distance between love or something that approximates it. Gauge what that gap represents.

Jason Meadows made a piece at Marc Fox called Squaw. It’s made out of wood, Plexiglas, tape, canvas, paint, and hardware. A squaw is a Native American woman or wife. Was it made with love? I’m thinking right off the bat that Meadows did not love this woman. He did not think enough of a particular squaw or even the idea of a squaw to show her in any particular splendor. I mean, the materials are the sort of things one might use to make a totem pole. The expression "dime store Indian" comes to mind. Not that Meadows is a racist. much less a misogynist. His is not the mantle of stereotype. Not at all. It’s just that his intention is not that clear, given what is in front of me. This squaw’s right arm is extended as if to shake my hand. It seems more like, with all the harlqeuinned finery in which this squaw is attired, this right arm is the handle of a slot machine. Indian gaming. Now there’s an association. But why would Meadows make a piece that alludes to Indian gaming? I mean, he does play the role of gamester. Another piece, Win Place Show, made of wood, paint, stain, aluminum, iron, Plexiglas, hardware, and tin can lids, shows us a horse. This horse is not rendered with love. George Stubbs rendered horses with love. Marino Marini does too. Marini’s horses look like they pull the chariot of the Apocalypse’s horsemen. No, Meadow’s horse also refers to gambling. Is gambling love or it addiction? Is it hyper addiction?

At Karyn Lovegrove, Lawrence Beck shows well-crafted Type-C prints. Well-crafted because they are striking in their detail. Everything you want to know about white orchids is there, rendered with precision. Take Botanical Gardens: Royal Dream (White Orchids). This is a large piece: 69-1/4 x 56-3/4 inches. Were they rendered with love? It looks to me like they were only rendered with precision. I’m thinking here that Beck didn’t feel all that strong about White Orchids–or Golden Barrel Cactus, with all those prickly detail, another piece — in the first place. I’m thinking his first thought was, "My, what an interesting composition this would make." Then he went from there: the lighting, the framing, the shutter speed, all those things to make this picture "interesting" but not passionate. That’s what all the work in this show seems like. He takes pictures of plants in a botanical show. Last time I checked, there are people who curate these shows. So, in effect, Beck has photographed a body of work to show a show about a show. This isn’t nature unplugged; this is art mediated by the botanical garden’s curator through the lens of a camera. Remember, those things you see, for example, at the Huntington Gardens in San Marino are tended to by trained specialists, as are works of art. The pieces themselves are labeled, within the photograph, that is, each plant has its own horticultural label, and so what Beck is doing but explaining these things, not conveying an experience of these things. So, this is a second party thing, an illustration of a show. He is an interloper, yes, but he is not a lover.

At A.C.M.E., Daniel Adams creates a cubicle from form, museum board and paint. He calls the installation One Thing Or Another. Everything is there, down to the very last Post-It. Neat stacks of paper. A telephone with all the usual buttons. A framed photograph (looks like Gilda Radner), Post-Its on the wall, black vertical files, a computer with keyboard, monitor, C.P.U., mouse and pad, a fax machine. I love my fountain pen. It’s a Dupont, it’s from Paris, but that’s okay. It has heft and balance and has that retro deco look that sets my heart aquiver. It cost over $300, but I know artists who have a quiver of paintbrushes, the cheapest of which is $150, so I consider myself getting off cheap as far as tools of the trade go. But for me to express my love for this damn fountain pen, well, I could, but I certainly wouldn’t do it like this. I mean, the cubicle is sterile as sterile can be. All the Silicon Valley gizmos are there, but there is no work going on. No words on paper, no scribbles on pads, nothing on the monitor, nothing coming through the fax machine.

I don’t understand why Adams would want to show this to us. It certainly took a grand effort, for the thing is picture perfect. But strong feelings, one way or another? Anything approximating love? I think not. Nostalgia, maybe. The presence of an absence. Nothing human. That could be a very minor point, making a piece about something that occasioned a pang of loneliness. But to make that the theme of an installation? If Adams had done something to improve upon the solitude and antiseptic nature of the piece, that would be good; likewise if he had expressed something really strong. Instead, he just seems to say, "Ho hum," and then expect us to project all of our cubicle-dramas onto this thing. Really, it’s a cubicle-waiting-to-happen. I see the same thing in work that is made from the material that art gets shipped in. It’s like the artist(s) present something totally void of any strong feeling on their part and then wait for us to finish it. Have artists forgotten how to feel strongly one way or the other about things? I don’t think so. I bet if one of their loved one got paralyzed in a freak accident, if their visa application got squelched, if the rent on their studio quadrupled, I bet they’d feel something. No, I’m thinking that something else is going on. I think the artist thinks that it’s better not to feel, better not to wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve, so to speak. Better not to commit oneself to a an extreme position of expression, to put oneself on the line. There are many reasons for this: self-consciousness about career, sales, critical reception, baring their soul to the world. But I’m also thinking that if they want to create something that is truly great and not just sellable, then they must work through these boundaries. Really, what do a squaw made of scrap pieces of wood and other debris, a photograph of a curated botanical show, and the installation of a cubicle have in common? The fact that they’re for sale in galleries on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. It’s as if they are all part of one of those dining clubs at Ivy League campuses with all sorts of secret rituals and dress codes and such that date way back and that no one would think of changing because, well, that’s the way it’s always been done. Whatever it is that informed these pieces, insecurity, limp notions of art history, attempts to be mod-ish, is way wrong. There is nothing from the heart.

There’s a group show at Roberts & Tilton, "New Sculpture." The work of four artists, Eduardo Abaroa, Jedediah Caesar, Abraham Cruzvillegas, and Thomas Kiesewetter. My first thought was that this was an adjunct to the fabulous arte povera show at MOCA this summer. A sparse aesthetic, the sanctity of near-nothingness. Cruzvillegas makes a piece called La Providencia (The Providence) out of pieces of soap, shells, string, and a fishing pole. The fishing pole is cocked as it’s reeling in a big fish. He adorns the line with shells; he anchors the line with pieces of soap. The artist felt an affinity for these simple, unrelated materials and wanted to show us how they suddenly came together as something else. By an act of providence. A metaphor for precariousness, for temporal balance, for aesthetic stasis. Cruzvillegas also made a series of drawings, Mole Eating Drawings. They are nothing more than splatters of mole sauce on paper. They can be issuances of menstrual blood, blobs of sepia, or that horrible brown sauce they put on French fries in England. The point is, he saw these blobs and wanted us to see that they could be something else. Eduardo Abaroa made a piece, Cheap Nebula, out of plastic straws and silicone. As simple as simple can be. But it resonates with wit and relevance. Relevance because it’s about something cosmic, jillions of stars, represented by something so pedestrian, straws. It’s poetry. It’s love.

These shows make me think about the attitude artists take toward subjects and materials. Love being a two-way street, how can these pieces be loved, much less bought, experienced, written about without giving anything in the first place? The pieces that just seemed to plop themselves in the gallery space and beg for attention without offering anything interesting to say. Like gothed-out almost-famous models posing at geographical Ground Zero at gallery openings. They are simply there and, by virtue of their being there, they seem to think they are relevant, of interest, worth a second look. As if presence alone could merit conversation, much less interest. Unlike school and business, art is not about simply showing up. These world-weary pieces do not express ennui before an apocalypse. A perfect reproduction of a cubicle? Come on! Is this a Dilbert joke or something? Creating anthropomorphic curios from debris–squaws, horses–and asking us to laugh at its puny connection to readymades? No. A photo of a cultivated flower? Please. Why not just photograph a Frida Kahlo painting. Borges already did the quotation thing when he appropriated Don Quixote. The pieces in the "New Sculpture" show may not be monumental sculpture but they do have an angle on subject matter and material. An angle that pulls back from the material and the visual to the emotion and the intellectual. What does a woman want? Communication. The first three shows don’t communicate anything. The fourth does. There’s a syndicated sports radio guy, a wanker, to be sure, but he does make a simple, fair-enough request to his yahoo listeners: "Have a take and don’t suck." Would that a species of contemporary culture, the Passive, the Glazed, and the Vapid, follow suit.

Jason Meadows @ Marc Fox 1019-111602

Lawrence Beck @ Karyn Lovegrove

Daniel Adams@ A.C.M.E.

New Sculpture @ Roberts & Tilton