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A butterfly is an apt metaphor for “Eden’s Edge: 15 LA Artists,” a current exhibition at the Hammer Museum. Fluttery and vulnerable, the work is skittish and fragile; lovely to behold, with a trajectory that could only be described by string theory, it rewards close-up looks and far away ganders; clustered on walls like butterflies massed on a tree, it’s ephemeral, process-oriented and poised for flight. Too bad it doesn’t sting like a bee. Curated by Gary Garrels, the exhibition suggests that postlapsarian Los Angeles has joined the ranks of historical metropolises as its artists confront their “existential condition” in all its multivalent grandeur. True, to a point. More likely, though, it has attained that rank because, finally, we can write of Los Angeles art as having a pedigree more longstanding than it takes someone to get an MA from Cal Arts, a one-person show and tenure, all in one year. |
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Eden’s Edge – James Scarborough
A butterfly is an apt metaphor for “Eden’s Edge: 15 LA Artists,” a current exhibition at the Hammer Museum. Fluttery and vulnerable, the work is skittish and fragile; lovely to behold, with a trajectory that could only be described by string theory, it rewards close-up looks and far away ganders; clustered on walls like butterflies massed on a tree, it’s ephemeral, process-oriented and poised for flight.
Too bad it doesn’t sting like a bee.
Curated by Gary Garrels, the exhibition suggests that postlapsarian Los Angeles has joined the ranks of historical metropolises as its artists confront their “existential condition” in all its multivalent grandeur. True, to a point. More likely, though, it has attained that rank because, finally, we can write of Los Angeles art as having a pedigree more longstanding than it takes someone to get an MA from Cal Arts, a one-person show and tenure, all in one year.
It’s a historical show: the holy trinity is Pittman, Jim Shaw and Ken Price, residents of the first three galleries; and then come the 12 acolytes, each with their own shrine, more of which will be discussed later.
Familial resemblances are vague (material, craft, process), and while it is indeed a multi-media show, undeniable similarities rest more in attitude. The show’s general tenor isn’t so much one of dystopia and dysfunction—or peachy-keenness—as one of gridlock and resignation. Walking through the galleries, the viewer doesn’t get a sense of bravura or cocksureness; any trace of modernist destiny has been thrown out the window like an In-n-Out burger-bag. Though it begins and ends with a bang, bookended by a large Lari Pittman and an exquisite Jason Rhoades neon installation, the narrative reads more like a big “Whatever!”—and with a subtitle of the soon-to-be-explored The Apotheosis of a Tempest in a Teacup.
Garrels wants us to experience the simultaneity, the instability and the all-over-ness of the Angeleno experience as refracted through the art on display. As evidence, he adduces work that sprawls and diffuses; work that is obsessive and ephemeral; work that exists on simultaneous planes and references the flicker of anachronistic celluloid and passing scenery.
So far, so good.
The best pieces in the show are those that oscillate and quiver, unwilling to be pinned down. Elliott Hundley’s whimsical Cave is a tumbleweed wreath he fashions from plastic, pins and a magnifying glass; it looks ephemeral but, made from mostly non-biodegradable materials, it will just rest on that junkyard heap. Jim Shaw’s Dream Object shows 19 scenes of businessmen whose faces melt and morph—à la David Hockney, Francis Bacon and Juan Gris—into a hedge of pornographic images, which nicely reference Parthenon figures.
Other pieces sprawl across the wall but are punctuated with patches of obsession. Matt Greene’s By the Lust of the Basidiomycetes (that’s fungi and spores) Shall Every Perversion Be Satisfied shows a roiling, light-diffused surface pockmarked with eddies of porn. In Lari Pittman’s Once a Noun, Now a Verb, #2, a figure, or noun, fluidly levitates the verb, through multiple planes and panes of particular times and places. Though Jason Rhoades’ magisterial Twelve-Wheel Wagon Wheel Chandelier commands a huge patch of ceiling, its interest resides in those hanging tendrils of lace and those skewed neon flashcards that illuminate fragments of platitudes and ads. We may have dined at Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, but Rhoades hosted the après-party.
Other work suggests spores, which suggests viral proliferation and process. Ken Price’s Zigzag looks like a pod that hopscotches up and down the evolutionary cycle. Rebecca Morales’s Triad, a precious gouache, watercolor, ink and pastel on calf vellum, looks like something that grows on meat left out in the sun as seen under a microscope. Ditto for Ginny Bishton’s Lavender and Yellow, which appears as something that skirts across a Petri dish, seemingly innocuous but which portends a potent biological hazard.
A few issues, however, undercut Mr. Garrels’ considerable and mostly positive effort. First, the vision thing. Garrels writes that Los Angeles has joined the ranks of historical cultural centers. But what exactly is that image of the city that he wants to project to the rest of the world? Is it something we can wear with pride on our sleeves as we otherwise try to slip anonymously through customs, masquerading as a Canadian? No. If this show is any indication, we are “Angstless in Teflonville,” a state motto equivalent of “Oklahoma is OK.”
As bodacious as Mr. Garrels’ choice of work and exhibition title may be, his essay doesn’t introduce anything new into the LA canon as much as it rehashes the same false dichotomies and clichés that he references, if not derides, in a catalogue essay for the recent “The Sunshine & Noir” exhibition.
Citing this city’s propensity for earthquakes, our flickering freeway vistas and our particular media environment, Garrels writes “there is no other city that shares all the formative factors that make Los Angeles.” With the exception of the absolute specifics of geography and architecture, this is not exactly true. I vouchsay the same could be said for Beijing, Bombay and Berlin. I also suspect that he commutes during off hours and against the traffic since fractured views from speeding cars are few and far between.
The one glaring omission in his essay is a discussion of the effect of world-shrinking, hierarchy-smashing technology on the work; though I suspect that, in so doing, he would blow his Angeleno-centric premise. He also writes of a bi-coastal dichotomony…“Art in California has never had the cool intellectualism of art in New York…” forgetting that Los Angeles alone does not define California art.
Whether it’s digital manipulation of images, the non-hierarchal casserole fusion of the local and the global, or the phenomena of Second Life, the virtual Third Place (home, work, Second Life), failure to discuss much less-broached implications doesn’t tell the full story.
Ultimately, though, what deflates the show is its installation. Garrels writes with incision and clarity about the works’ feedback loop of stability and metamorphosis. If that’s the most salient point of the show—which it is—then why does he academicize each artist within the context of his or her separate gallery? Why can’t the children dine with the adults? If he wants to show how matters of cultural simmer in a menudo of indeterminacy, why stake each artist out in isolation? The result is not so much a body of work that flounces its flux, but a show that herkily jerks like stop-and-go traffic: you get nowhere, you waste time and you get brain-freeze.
