JAN/FEB2025
Amy Gerstler on Dynasty Handbag
Artist Takeover: Emma Webster Peter Frank on Gustav Metzger Diva Corp on Olivia Mole
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POSTMODERN VAUDEVILLE
Amy Gerstler on Dynasty Handbag’s frenzied satire Titanic
Depression at MOCA
Amy Gerstler
ALTERNATIVE SPACES
A look at some of LA’s alternative art galleries
Photos by SAWA
DUELLING
REVIEWS: JOSEPH BEUYS
Two takes on Joseph Beuys at The Broad
Pat Williams, Daniela Soberman
ARTIST
Regen Projects
Hauser & Wirth
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PETER FRANK SAWA
DR. ROTEM ROZENTAL
M. CHARLENE STEVENS
EILEEN HAVANT TOWNSEND
EMMA WEBSTER
PAT WILLIAMS CAT KRON
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“Los Angeles is 72 suburbs in search of a city.” —Dorothy Parker
This is a column about the Los Angeles art world. Or at least it was supposed to be. I successfully pitched this column on Wednesday December 4th, 2024 and my editor assigned me a deadline of Saturday, December 7th. “But I can’t write about the art world in Los Angeles with a two-day turnaround while everyone is at Art Basel ,” I complained. “Nothing is going on.” She assured me I’d come up with something, but instead of coming up with something, I clicked around online looking for openings/readings/parties/raves I might attend until I felt disgusted with myself and everyone I know, and had to go for a cleansing swim at the gym. While I was breast-stroking, I actually had an idea. I was determined to start this column the way all lazy writers start essays, which is to look up the dictionary definition of the thing you’re hoping to write about, and ask: What even is an ‘art world’? I’ve used the term ‘art world’ with various degrees of derision for years, suspecting that each time I spoke of it,
SEARCH OF CITY A IN
I became further complicit in the thing’s existence. In this sense, the art world is not unlike ‘The Game ,’ the thought experiment where when you remember that The Game exists, you immediately lose. (Get in, losers.) The term ‘art world’ apparently dates back to the 19th century and initially referred simply to institutions— salons, museums, schools—that supported art production and exhibition. However, the current usage of the phrase originated in the 1960s and was best defined by philosopher and art writer Arthur Danto in his 1964 essay, “The Artworld .” Danto argued that ‘the art world’ is a way of seeing, a mindset that can change material reality by turning a Campbell’s soup can into something capable of pulling a cool quarter billion at auction. The art world is not a place but a shared vantage that unites galleries, viewers, critics, and artists. What Danto couldn’t foresee was the 21st-century marriage of fine art’s semiotic abstractions with the mathematical abstractions of high finance, which counterintuitively returned the term to the literal: Globalization gave us an ‘art world’ person, meaning someone who jet-sets to attend art fairs in Singapore and Switzerland , someone who as I am writing this is doubtless enjoying an array of oysters on the half shell from Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami . The speculative market also gifted us ‘the art city’ i.e. New
Los Angeles, California . “Los Angeles doesn’t have a self-sustaining art world,” a longtime Angeleno painter told me soon after I moved here from New York. It was early 2023. The market was cooling from its white-hot pandemic phase, but whole classes of Yale Painting students still seemed to be decamping to Los Angeles, presumably to bask in the glow of the new Hauser and Wirth and forthcoming David Zwirner campuses. “We’re on a five-year cycle,” said the painter, before ominously adding: “You’ll see.” I suppose I will eventually see, but so far the trickle-down economics that support positions like mine in the art world—studio assistant jobs, freelance art writing—have yet to totally dry up, and art world transplants like me still people the patios of Cafe Triste and El Prado , tirelessly discussing autofiction and identity. The studio assistant/ art handler/gallery attendant/freelance writer caste consider ourselves to be a part of the art world by virtue of having the best gossip about the jetsetting class. We console ourselves by hosting community-centric alt-lit readings in storefront art galleries while our bosses are out of town. Which is how I did actually end up finding an art world to participate in this weekend: A young friend of mine invited me to a Friday night poetry reading at Last Projects , a tiny storefront gallery in Lincoln Heights . The reading, hosted by writer and artist Marcel Humberto Monroy , featured ten poets and one DJ. A crowd of twenty-something attendees seated themselves on the floor amid deskilled queer sculpture, sporting outfits that nimbly referenced industrial raves, Grey Gardens , and the early aughts Disney Channel . The poets, all similarly young and fashionable, read directly off cracked iPhones . Most poems seemed drawn directly from the writers’ lives—doing drugs on Catalina Island , meeting guys off Grindr , losing a grandmother, talking to an emotionally distant father. I tend to associate poetry readings with awkwardness but there was none to be found at this reading, just kids supporting each other, loving each other, keeping each other free. I’m not well enough versed in my Marx to offer a full explanation of how this Los Angeles art world—the live, curious one that exists whether or not Art Basel is happening—connects to the art world that purportedly moves through Los Angeles in five-year cycles. But so long as the former exists, Los Angeles will remain a place that can offer young artists the world. I hope to devote future installments of this column to more fully answering the question of who and what makes up the LA art world. LA remains distinct from any other major art city in that our art world is less a monolith and more of a vast collection of art communities loosely connected by freeways. Dorothy Parker ’s quip that “Los Angeles is 72 suburbs in search of a city” (its 88 these days) suggests a course of action that I’ll try to follow: Keep driving. Eileen Havant Townsend11
STEVE TURNER
CHÂTEAU SHATTO
PHOTOS
BOB COULTER AND ARTILLERY STAFF
HENRY TAYLOR GALLERY
January 18 – March 8, 2025
LOS ANGELES
POSTMODERN VAUDE VILLE
AMY GERSTLER ON DYNASTY HANDBAG’S FRENZIED SATIRE TITANIC DEPRESSION AT MOCA
BY AMY GERSTLER
Even though the term ‘performance art’ has become a catch-all phrase, it still feels too narrow to convey the onstage antics of Dynasty Handbag, the performance persona of writer, visual artist and actor Jibz Cameron. When Titanic Depression debuted in New York in 2023, its sensibility was described by the New York Times as “queer vaudevillian.” That’s a more intriguing, and perhaps more accurate label. In November 2024, MOCA hosted three nights of Titanic Depression, Cameron’s multi-media live show, starring her alter ego Ms. Handbag. This show, lightly updated since its premiere, is a blockbuster solo performance: a zany, affecting dreamscape, hybridizing theatre, animation, cabaret, video, political critique and clowning.
Cameron’s work as Dynasty Handbag is sui generis with a vengeance. This is true of her stand-up comedy performances like The Bored Identity (now available on vinyl!) and of Dynasty’s turns as the trash-clad, gyrating curator/MC of her long-running underground variety show “Weirdo Night.” Cameron, a long time Angeleno, is a Guggenheim fellow, and
her visual work was included in the Hammer Museum’s Biennial exhibition “Made in LA” in 2023.
In Titanic Depression Dynasty Handbag embarks on a classic heroine’s journey. She confronts climate disaster, battles family repression, and has a sexual dalliance with an octopus, complete with an exhaustive, hand-penned, pre-coital consent form. She stumbles into a roomful of male cigar-puffing, planet-wrecking billionaire capitalist bastards from various eras, which provides a quick history lesson for the audience. And she suffers a searing bout of existential panic which she tries, for the most part unsuccessfully, to escape with the aid of meditation apps. The iceberg threatening to destroy her luxury cruise ship melts (thank you, global warming) but is replaced by an aggressive island of ocean trash, which may pose a greater threat. One of the loose through-lines in this wacky tale is the narrative’s ingestion and subsequent subversion of a few plot points from James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic. (About the shared Cameron surname: The fact checkers at Artillery are pretty sure Jibz and James aren’t related, but anyone with information otherwise is welcome to contact us… )
Cameron is a natural actor, mistress of a smorgasbord of cartoon voices that would make Mel Blanc proud. She’s got the manic, rubbery physical comedy thing down cold. She’s a skilled enough dancer that when she chooses to flail and dance ‘badly,’ you remain mesmerized. Her signature makeup for the Dynasty character brings to mind a demented mime, Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp and/or Faye Dunaway’s Mommy Dearest visage mid-facial. Thus constructed, Dynasty’s face harkens back slightly to silent films. Topped by a spiky black wig, that face is as elastic as bread dough and gymnastically expressive. Her costumes feature garbage bags and thrift store regalia. Her pantyhose, webbed with runs, often serve as stand-alone ragged pants (ooh la la!) worn beneath a short jacket. At one point she sports a flesh-colored unitard with cartoon breasts and squiggly pubic hair felt-penned over the appropriate zones. The overall effect of her costumes, which tend to slip or fall
off, is a mix of little kid dress-up, madwoman, and lesbian burlesque. She has a way of sending up tropes of conventional sexiness and exploding them.
In terms of props, repurposed trash litters the stage by the end of the performance. Items from what might be a recycling bin or treasure chest, jumbled up with junk from grandma’s attic get pulled out on cue when Dynasty is frantically searching for something to push the narrative forward or to get out of a jam. An overripe banana, her only live co-star, doubles as cellphone and as microphone for a crooned musical number or two. There’s a moment when Cameron sings a song she wrote to the tune of “When a Man Loves a Woman.” Her take-off on that song, “When a Man has an Idea,” is a comic lament about mansplaining and its dominating damage, inescapably wreaked on, well, everyone.
The backdrop for Titanic Depression is Dynasty’s most important co-star. The video by collaborator Mariah Garnett plays on a screen that spans the stage’s entire back wall. Animated video runs before the show even begins and continues throughout the performance. The video provides various settings, some aboard ship, some underwater, plus doctored clips from an array of films about the Titanic, as well as other archival material. Wonderfully misspelled text exchanges between Dynasty and her never-seen therapist appear, typed out in real time, courtesy of the video. Additional characters, fully animated or topped by Cameron’s actual videoed head gabbing away on caricatured bodies appear onscreen and interact with the live Dynasty. This means, for example, that while Cameron plays Dynasty onstage, on the video backdrop she’s playing Dynasty’s screechy, smothering mother, leading to a series of altercations with herself. The video backdrop is funny, eye-popping, and an essential, unifying contribution to Titanic Depression’s pace and look.
How is it that although this performance brandishes its seams, that only makes the work more intimate and effective? By “brandishes its seams,” I mean that Cameron regularly breaks character and addresses the audience using what one could call her “normal voice” and persona. There are glitches in the performance (usually trouble changing a costume, or a forgotten line) that seem intentionally inserted or at least expected, and embraced when they occur. These scattered moments provide Cameron a chance to stand outside the piece and make observations that a character conventionally enmeshed in the action could not. Rather than this feeling like a mistake, it worked for this viewer as a form of layering and another kind of through-line. We get both Cameron’s and Dynasty’s perspectives overlaid intermittently, situated
Dynasty Handbag, Titanic Depression . Performance documentation from The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Image by Daniela Soberman. Performer: Jibz Cameron.
A MIX OF LITTLE KID DRESS-UP, MADWOMAN, AND LESBIAN BURLESQUE. SHE HAS A WAY OF SENDING UP TROPES OF CONVENTIONAL SEXINESS AND EXPLODING THEM.
inside and outside the plot, via this device. Sometimes we’re even privy to tidbits about the construction and genesis of the piece. In other words, this is not a work of art intent on maintaining airtight illusions or preserving the so-called theatrical “third wall.” Instead, Cameron seems determined to periodically puncture the fiction she’s been constructing, so she can rebuild it again and again.
Cameron is great at creating a sense of the eternal now. Watching her work, one has the feeling that what she’s doing and saying on stage is being born in that instant, exploding from her mind as you’re seeing it, fresh and current, though it’s simultaneously clear that Titanic Depression is NOT mostly extemporized, but developed and rehearsed, complete with its audio, lighting, elaborate video interface, etc. When Titanic Depression makes a point to lean into its DIY improv aesthetic, appearing to embrace the spontaneous rather than having been rehearsed into rigidity, a creative, playful relationship to chaos emerges. We’re sucked into the vortex of Cameron’s rampant, humane imagination and indignation. We get the message that if we’re going to survive the coming
decades, we had better be ready to pivot at a moment’s notice. We had better get incredibly flexible and learn to be light on our feet. We’d better stay nimble and open.
I don’t know who Cameron considers her artistic influences to be, but it’s fun to speculate. There are bits of Lily Tomlin in what she does as monologist and repository of a panoply of characters. I wondered if Edward Albee’s sense of absurdity might have tinted her vibe. The barbed comedy of Richard Pryor came to mind as I watched Titanic Depression, as well as Jonathan Winters’ prodigious wizardry with simple props. (For example, there’s a moment late in the show when Dynasty picks up the drinking straw from a Starbucks cup and uses it as a flute).
Given the scary political drift of late, the Statue of Liberty might need a friend right about now. Perhaps Lady Liberty could use a second “...mighty woman with a torch...” to stand by her side for moral support, reinforcing her battered message. If anyone’s taking nominations, I’ll cast my vote for a 22-story, harbor-presiding likeness of Dynasty Handbag. Her blazing torch of gonzo comedy and razor-sharp satire casts a galvanizing light.
ALTERNATIVESPACES
A LOOK AT ALTERN ATIVE ART SPACES IN LOS ANGELES
Founded by
CHEZ CORONADO
and nestled in an unused portion of a basement under an apartment building,
specializes (so far) in works that, like the space, are small, intimate, personal and eccentric. Their most recent offerings include witty, crafty work from Joachim
and a moose-themed show from Molly McDonald.
Andy Little and Calli Webb
Chez Coronado
Castañeda,
Photos by SAWA
DEVOUT
Many tattooists learned to draw in the same spaces and for the same reasons as the gallery artists they tattoo, and in the pop-art positive land of Los Angeles the difference between the hip low-brow and the street-savvy highbrow begins to seem no more than academic. Formerly known as Raking Light Gallery and recently relocated to Echo Park, Taylor Lee’s Devout Gallery exists in this overlap of tattoo culture and contemporary art, and specializes in paintings and drawings by tattoo artists using the history of sacred imagery in their work.
THESE DAYS
A visual-art extension of downtown LA’s somehow indestructible punk rock scene, These Days is the brainchild of Stephen and Jodi Ziegler. It began life in 2008 as 118 Winston—a second floor project space named after its own address—and has since grown into a full-time endeavor. Half gallery, half coolest-bookstorein-the-city, exhibitions of local artists appear alongside everything from Noboyushi Araki monographs to old issues of Flipside to These Days’ own zines and books made in collaboration with artists.
It is impossible to spend any time in LA’s art underground without ending up at Last Projects. Originally started on the second floor of an old Hollywood Boulevard corner by Andrew Wingler and Ilona Berger, Last—now in east LA—quickly became a meeting place for everything under-exposed, marginalized and scrappy with a dedication to spotlighting first-time artists, and a willingness to experiment with a variety of event and exhibit formats.
LAST PROJECTS
TLALOC
Named after the Aztec god of rain and fertility, TLALOC is both gallery and communal work space, with 15 artists having studios within the art center’s warehouse complex. Begun by multimedia artist Ozzie Juarez, TLALOC stages exhibitions that pair emerging artists with established ones—the most recent show, “Amor Tuyo,” featured dazzling, colorful pieces from the likes of Yamepi and David Jien.
CU LT UR E TH AT SU RVIV E S AN Y CRISI S
Premium, all natural sljivovica made by hand on a mountain farm in Central Serbia using only hyperlocal plums and pure spring water
The 40-Year Funeral PAT WILLIAMS
There are very few people alive today that can remember a time when conceptual art was considered to be unusual. To most of us it came as a given, buried in among our earliest memories of museum-going. You enter with a parent or two and are presented with an enigma— not of form (it is often something you’ve seen earlier that day)—but of curation. Why this particular pile and why is it housed within these exalted white walls? Why must I be on my best behavior to look at something that resembles the bed I am repeatedly told I must make or the overflow of the kitchen trash I was told to take out? You find out, over years, by degrees and osmosis, that this is one kind of art: They just put things there. Why? If you remain curious about art until college, someone will tell you.
“Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature” functions less as an art exhibit than as an historical exhibition of a time when this kind of art was novel. The curators tried to fill the first-floor galleries with a large and wide-ranging sample of Beuys’ sculptures, multiples, images and ephemera. 1974’s Green Violin (Grüne Geige) stands out—by virtue of being one of the few pieces that isn’t brown.
Despite being an outspoken advocate for animals, plants, the downtrodden and the overlooked, there was one benighted minority for whom Beuys had no sympathy: the viewer.
A video of Beuys’ best performance, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965)—known to most students via the disturbing still-photograph of Beuys’ holding the titular animal in his arms with his own head creepily covered in honey and gold leaf—proves that the photo oversells it. We see an at-first-curious crowd shift in boredom after realizing there’s only so much conversation to be had with this morbid prop. In two hours, Beuys produced one compelling image—whereas any halfway-decent horror film contains at least three.
All this is blasphemy, of course. To his defenders (a group which historically has included the entire contemporary art world), Beuys has long been a secular saint of Teutonic eco-seriousness. Though the first room’s wall text thankfully debunks Beuys’ oft-repeated lie that his obsession with felt and fat began after he was rescued from a fighter crash by tribesmen and kept warm with this earth-toned pair of primordial substances, Beuys’ greatest aesthetic achievement remains in having endowed everything he touched with such a Holocausty aura that rejecting him seems not only uninformed but an unforgivable breach of decorum.
In funeral parlor fashion, pieces by Beuys are shown side-by-side with ephemera from his life— magazine covers, photos of the great man swimming, etc. This results in no visual or cognitive dissonance as it is all indistinguishable. His sculptures only ever were artifacts, in the original and religious sense of the word—souvenirs whose value derives solely from contact with a wholly conjectured divine.
Just as one’s reaction to the little-league jersey of a child taken too soon or a dead author’s battered copy of Strunk & White is taken as a measure of your sensitivity, to be moved by the mute testimony of Beuys’ felt suit or bottle of rainwater is to testify not necessarily that you knew the man, but that you are wised-up on all the context and symbolism tucked away behind the vulgarity of what is merely on display.
If the argument for the actual objects’ desultory irrelevance seems philistine, know that others have made it before—most prominently, the late Joseph Beuys. In a 1969 interview for Artforum with Willoughby Sharp, he says it over and over in a variety of ways:
Continued on page 30 DUELLING
Two takes on “Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature,” The Broad’s ecologically-themed retrospective on the seminal German conceptual artist.
Angst and Alchemy
DANIELA SOBERMAN
My love affair with Joseph Beuys’ work began at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, while I wandered through galleries brimming with German contemporary art angst. At the end of a series of rooms filled with far-too-serious art in a limited color palette (mostly gray), I entered an enormous chamber that offered relief in an unexpected form: A sculptural tribute to fat. It was, to be precise, beef tallow, and the piece on display addressed tallow’s use as an historic wound salve. The place was filled with overgrown sculptures made out of the yellow, dirtied substance—some six feet high, and placed on the floor in seemingly no particular order. It looked as if a family of giants had thrown a party and offered up a room-sized cheese plate. I immediately developed a full-blown and unshakeable crush.
The tallow sculptures I encountered are a part of Joseph Beuys’ Unschlitt/Tallow (1977), a series of works the artist made by filling a wedge-shaped 10-meter-long replica of a pedestrian underpass with the thick viscous material, allowing it to harden, then cutting it out into six sections. Beuys presented the work as “social sculpture”, a phrase coined by Beuys that refers to works that celebrate common humanity, which he believed would be a valid vehicle to bring about revolutionary change.
These slabs of tallow, created from an ingredient used to care for others in the form of salve, feed, or fuel—transformed into bloated cracking cakes—offer a study in dichotomies and a response to just how uncaring the human species can be. It wasn’t that the sculptures were good in the classical sense. There was nothing particularly special about their shape. Nor were they especially avant-garde—sculpture made from unconventional materials was nothing new, even at the time Beuys made these works. What captivated me was the choice to present the monumental chunks of smudged, healing tallow en masse, creating a lunacy-in-object that recontextualized the mundane as a fine art statement full of existential crisis. I felt very much as if someone had reached into the invisible spaces that surround us all and brought back a semisolid slice of a connected world operating on a scale far larger than I was used to.
This month I’ve had a chance to revisit Beuys work in person and re-examine what it is that makes his contribution so compelling to me. “In Defense of Nature,” on view at The Broad through March 23, 2025, contains over 400 of Beuys’ social sculptures and multiples (editions of objects meant to be sold or given away) while thoroughly explicating the godfather of modern conceptualism’s theory of social alchemy.
Upon entering the exhibition, one is presented with three of Beuys’ felt suit multiples, modeled after his own suit—concrete-gray, nondescript, stark, scratchy-looking—displayed in a row on the wall. These multiples comment on the relationship between the human figure and the working environments that constrain and define our bodies. The suits, hanging above so many casually and fashionably dressed Angelenos, provokes a simple, but oft-ignored question: What is my role here? What is the role of the artist? Especially as the empty suits unavoidably now refer to the absence of Beuys, a modern shaman no longer with us.
The exhibition soon transitions into an archeological presentation of a variety of deeply human artifacts: Beuys’ personal manifestos, tools and letters, all neatly displayed in plexiglass cases. In the context of Beuys’ struggle to bring the West out of the trauma of World War II and into a sense of peaceful alignment, each object asks more questions than there is time to answer. Observed through the Beuysian lens, every instance of the quotidian becomes what Harold Rosenberg calls an “anxious object”—a fulcrum where essential social adjustments might be made.
Continued on page 31
Continued from page 28
Sharp: Has your teaching at the Düsseldorf Art Academy for the last eight years been an important function for you?
Beuys: It’s my most important function. To be a teacher is my greatest work of art. The rest is the waste product, a demonstration.
Beuys: Objects aren’t very important for me anymore. I want to get to the origin of matter, to the thought behind it.
Sharp: Nauman’s work shares a similar sensibility.
Beuys: Yes, but I find it hard to define because I don’t know Nauman’s inner intentions. I place great importance on inner intentions.
Beuys: Yes, I keep on refusing to exhibit until someone like Schmela convinces me that it’s an absolute necessity.
Sharp: Is this a reaction against materialism in general, or is it due to the fact that there are more demands on you today than there were in 1967?
Beuys: Both. People are becoming more demanding. They are getting sharper. I was glad when Ströher took everything away. Things have to be some place, and I have never wanted to collect my own things. I like empty walls best.
Say what you want about the pretension of LA restaurants, but they don’t give you food made by chefs who like empty stomachs best.
Beuys asks us to judge his work on something other than itself? Let us do just that:
Beuys’ “inner intentions” are impeccable. He was a tireless advocate of democracy, a campaigner for student’s rights; his protéges include Lothar Baumgarten, Anselm Kiefer, Jörg Immendorff, and Blinky Palermo; he was one of the founding members of the German Green Party; he gave funny interviews.
All this is not bad for someone whose first recorded political act was volunteering for the Hitler Youth. While Benjamin Buchloh suspected him of fascist tendencies and said “The esthetic conservatism of Beuys is logically complemented by his politically retrograde, not to say, reactionary, attitudes.” I am not here to cancel him—canceling Beuys would be giving in to a myth he deeply believed in—that the art is nothing but an extension of the man. He was the opposite of a cancelable genius—here is an artist who was often right, but never good.
Anyone tempted to take Beuys’ rhetoric of art as “shamanism,” “spirituality,” “healing” and “social sculpture” on its own terms rather than just as how a hippie of a certain age and level of education talks would do well to examine the large room devoted to Beuys’ last major work, 7000 Oaks (1982). This massive project began when Beuys decided the German city of Kassel should have more trees. Rather than simply doing what George Clooney or Bono might have done and donate money, sell work, or use his public profile to raise capital for the undertaking and then go back to making art, Beuys donated money, sold work and used his public profile to raise money for the project while announcing it was the art. To remind everyone that the planted trees were art and not something that someone just did, he made sure that a nondescript stone pillar no more or less visually captivating than every other postcard or bundle of felt in the exhibition was installed next to each oak.
Joseph Beuys, Pala , 1983. The Broad Art Foundation.
Photo: Joshua White. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
It is difficult to argue with the painter I know who opined: “7000 Oaks is the most disgusting and conservative piece of art ever made. Oxygen, shade, sure. But as art—the whole reason humans invented art was so they could look at something besides one more fucking tree.” While at the time many might have argued that treeplanting-as-art was a radical gesture, it is impossible to overstate how little creative risk or experiment is involved in bringing trees to a country which consists of one-third forest. Works like this do not so much bring Beuys’ dictum that “Everyone is an artist” into doubt as beg the question of why anyone would want to be.
Beuys did have an answer to that question—he claimed that he was a provocateur, eager to spark discussion, and like all blue-chip artists, he has.
On YouTube, the briefly amusing Felt TV—where Beuys, among other things, punches a television—has garnered 8000 views and 5 comments, the highest-rated of which is, “I farted”.
On a Beuys documentary with 130,000 views, the top-rated comment reads “Just came to see how his name is pronounced. Thx”.
The second-highest rated comment says, “An absolute legend”, just below which someone asked, three years ago: “Why?”.
The comment remains unanswered.
Continued from page 29
Many pieces invite interaction in a more overt and literal fashion: 1968’s Intuition is a simple box in blond wood containing a penciled request that the owner fill it with observations about themself. As so often with Beuys, the very minimalism of the objects suggest a universe of invisible relations which require our attention, no matter how minor. The photographs of Beuys’ Bog Action (1971)—a dancelike improvisation which saw the artist moving, in his trademark hat and pouched vest, through water and reeds in imitation of the threatened wildlife—show the artist bringing attention to environmental issues through ephemeral interactions that bear the quality of practical magic.
A fascinating presentation of mail-art pieces dramatizes the basic act of communication in the form of battered old envelopes and postcards, highlighting the ephemeral and often damaged quality of human interaction. Pointedly, several are wholly symbolic—made of felt and wood—suggesting hidden hierarchies of what we can and cannot share.
Works less central to Beuys’ core thesis included a video piece showing him fronting an 80s Euro-synth band, highlighting his own unique brand of weirdness in a way that feels more like a window into the artist’s need for attention than anything else. Similarly disjointed were several primitivist red-pigmented pieces that felt as if they were created out of commercial necessity during a time when primitivism and cave paintings were gaining attention.
Overall, however, “In Defense of Nature” presents Beuys’ animated thesis clearly and intact. Contact with Beuys conjures a vision of an Eco-social web ever-reacting to the energies we invest in it, and a dense universe of symbol—personal and public—that deepens our understanding of the whole long after we leave the museum.
Photo: Joshua White.
TAKEOVER:ARTIST EMMA
EMMA WEBSTER
Leslie Dubois-Adkins • Adeola Davies-Aiyeloja
Denise ‘deLaSNP’ Coke • Dea Jenkins
Steven A. Johnson II • Denese King-Ashley
Kandy G. Lopez • Rosalyn Myles
Cheyann Washington • Fallon Williams
Curated by Naomi Stewart
Opening Reception: January 25th, 2pm – 4pm Gallery Hours: Thursday – Saturday, 10am – 5pm
Kandy G. Lopez. Las Dos Kandys , 2024. Yarn and paint on hook mesh.
JINGZE DU OLIVIA MOLE
Installation view of Walead Beshty “Profit & Loss” at Regen Projects, Los Angeles. November 7 –December 21, 2024.
Photo: Evan Bedford. Courtesy of Regen Projects.
WALEAD BESHTY
Regen Projects
Walead Beshty brings five distinct bodies of work together in his exhibition “Profit and Loss” at Regen Projects. In each of these projects, Beshty recasts familiar urban materials (vinyl, newspaper, cement) to expose the undercurrent of suffering and desperation in Los Angeles—a city within a city, hiding in plain sight. Beshty’s work reminds us that staying sane in LA is a daily effort. It is a decision to step over bodies as we move through the city, pretending not to see the tents and RVs lining the sidewalks. We try not to let empathy for the man passed out in the middle of the street, minus his pants, mess up our plans for the day. We try to ignore the people bent in half in a Fentanyl nod. Beshty’s work challenges this obliviousness and suggests that when we look away from the suffering of those at the margins, we also lose the ability to perceive the city in which we live.
The “Bandit Sign Painting” series—five large-scale and eight smaller paintings of common advertisements painted on top of newsprint—reference advertisements that people don’t notice unless they are looking for them out of desperation. These are communications for the disenfranchised—the poor, the undocumented, the unbanked, and the unhoused. Bandit Sign Painting [WE SAVE HOMES
$$$$ 323 310.9999 (Los Angeles Times, Sunday 12 May 2024; Los Angeles, California)] (2024), scales up a message that might be invisible except to those who find realtors, attorneys, housing, or employment from a hastily stenciled sign on a wall or fence.
What Goes Around Comes Around [TEST STRIPS
$CASH$ 424-443-1402] (2024), a reimagined billboard made from layers of peeling vinyl advertisements, plays with proximity. Bringing the scale of the billboard down to eye-level makes it difficult to ignore what dilapidation looks like up close. The artist also layers flyers over the vinyl, creating a collage resembling a wall of ads. The viewer can read at close-range the wear-and-tear that is inevitable for outdoor advertisements as well as the ephemeral nature of these communications that are repeatedly covered with new ones.
Interpolated with the vinyl series and the newsprint signage series are framed paintings of cigarette butts on newsprint, inspired by Italy’s migrant crisis and the
subsequent smuggling of cigarettes through the Port of Tripoli. Some of these Philip Guston-esque works reference Los Angeles through the titles, which name the newspaper surfaces of the drawings. In Los Angeles Times,Wednesday 17 February 2021; Los Angeles, California (2024), cigarette butts suggesting flaccid penises or bodies slump over in defeat.
With 3300 Block to 4400 Block, Union Pacific Avenue, between South Grande Vista Avenue and South Marianna Avenue, Los Angeles/Commerce, California, December 2020 (2021), Beshty urges us to see the working poor who cannot afford housing. The work is a part of a series of black and white photographs Beshty made by reconstructing, across the street from his Boyle Heights studio, a familiar Los Angeles scene: a line of RVs repurposed for makeshift housing. The photographs line a hallway in the gallery near a window that happens to look out on the street where sometimes a similar scene takes place.
Cell Device (Pager) (2024), a series of found blocks of cement and bricks sporting black electronic antennas made me think of the exploding pagers in Lebanon. Though the work may have been made before the 2024 IDF attacks on Hezbollah, I interpreted the pager clip and the stone fragment as a compression of time, representing both the intact explosive and the aftermath. The building materials originate from the renovations of the affluent. In contrast to the people who do not have a structure in which to live, there is another socioeconomic class that loves to destroy and rebuild. For “The Blind Collage” series of banknotes, Beshty pieced together cut-up US currency and rearranged it in geometric patterns. The seams are repaired with gold, emulating the Japanese Kintsugi practice of repairing ceramics. It seems as if the privilege of rebuilding and repair only belongs to the affluent.
“Profit and Loss” lays bare the dystopian Los Angeles that exists parallel to the idealized mythology of Hollywood and the broken American Dream.
—M. Charlene Stevens
The
Gustave Metzer, Liquid Crystal Environment , 1966/2021. Installation view, ‘Gustav Metzger,’ Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton, UK, 2021.
Gustav Metzger and the Gustav Metzger Foundation.
©
Estate of
Photo: Ken Adlard.
GUSTAV METZGER
Hauser & Wirth
The re-examination—some would say reawakening—of radical artistic movements in the postwar era has exposed the technological as well as ideological stew out of which the digital activism of today’s art emerged. The performance and conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s lay the foundations for current art-thinking and practice, prompting a new look at Happenings, Fluxus, Minimalism, and other late-modernist avant-garde movements designed to blur the distinctions between art and life itself.
Efforts to return the likes of the late Gustav Metzger to prominence as an inspirational model for artist/activists, art-science crossovers, and environmental protesters can only be welcome. Here was a dynamic figure, born on the breaking wave of man-made disaster, who went on to preach the constructive effect of destruction—in contemporary art, not in life—and the destructive effect of construction—in contemporary life, not in art. A Jewish native of Germany, Metzger was brought to England in the Kindertransport that saved (but necessarily orphaned) so many children from Nazi brutality. In 1960s London, Metger was best known as the organizer of the “Destruction in Art” festivals and symposia, but his investigations into cyberdriven design, city planning and other socially oriented arts ran parallel to the destruction-art spectacles he helped bring into being. Metzger was sensitive as well to the ecological implications of human consumption and waste, whether in urban or in natural environments, and he realized serious and practical proposals for curing or bettering everything from water sources to vehicular parking. In the meantime, the artist made his “own” art in various modes related, at least formally, to drawing.
“Gustave Metzger: And Then Came the Environment” does a compact but decent and almost thorough job of tracing Metzger’s long, fruitful career (he died in 2017 at the age of 90). Its curation assumes the considerable task of contextualizing his work as much with QR-code-embedded wall labels and other adjacent didactics as with artworks and documentation. One or two galleries, large as they are, can contain only so much material, most of which is not likely to be familiar to American audiences. Metzger has received many retrospectives across the Atlantic, and this show does much to rectify his absence from critical discourse in this country. Hauser & Wirth’s relatively confined look at a relatively large spirit and thinker—one who personified the oracular nature of experimental art in the early cyber age—is but a tantalizing start to our rediscovery. Now more than ever, Metzger needs a survey show much like that of his friend Joseph Beuys at the Broad: Touch all the bases, bring lived history into art, and shake up the thinking all over again.
—Peter Frank
Photo:
Savitsky.
Photo: Matt Savitsky.
MATTHEW LAX
Human Resources
On a rainy Saturday in early November, I spent the better part of an hour sitting cross-legged inside an XL dog crate. I did so in order to watch the screens mounted to the crate’s interior that broadcast Matthew Lax’s two-channel video, A TIRED DOG IS A GOOD DOG, PART TWO (2024), a video work from his ongoing project that is variously about queer “pup play,” dog training, and dog breeding. The video counterposes documentary footage of the artist interacting with “pups”—participants in a queer and BDSM-adjacent kink community of people dressed as dogs role-playing in dom/sub relationships—as well as his shadowing a professional trainer’s work with a real dog. Lax also includes a bit of archival footage from his own childhood as a quadruplet, which was spent on a farm, raised by parents who bred Collies. The video is one of a spare handful of video works spread throughout the gallery’s windowless interior; others include a monitor playing a 3D animation of a Collie doing a literary reading, and another with a succession of dog-related idioms flashing in white text on a black screen. Simple graphite drawings of dogs in various scenarios—fighting, peeing, wandering outside a sex club in Hollywood—line an adjacent wall.
I didn’t plan on watching 47 minutes of video art when I arrived at the gallery, but Lax’s work transfixed me. During my time in the crate, other viewers arrived and departed, some standing slightly outside the structure’s entrance or peering through the black wire while others tried to negotiate a comfortable standing position that didn’t involve leaning on unsupported walls. The makeshift theater struck me as an apt metaphor for the usual frustrations of seeing video art in a gallery: Who amongst art audiences doesn’t feel slightly caged trying to figure out how long the loop is going to run? The artist seems sensitive to such corollaries; not only to how the power dynamics between artist and viewer parallel those of human and animal, but also to the power dynamics between director and subject. To deal with this, Lax adopts a sort of “cinema verite lite” approach. The video is structured around a reading of French author Hervé Guibert’s Les Chiens, a 1982 erotic novella about a sadistic dom who chains two subs in dog masks. Lax doesn’t narrate, but he
himself features heavily in the video work as a halfparticipant, half-observer. In one scene, he shadows the dog trainer on a hike with a rescue dog suffering from PTSD. In another, he leads a conversation with a circle of people in pup garb. Lax is gay but doesn’t identify as a pup himself; he’s an outsider navigating the usual problems of documentarians working with subjects whose worldviews differ from their own. To level the playing field and to make himself vulnerable, he strips down. While A TIRED DOG’s Pups wear masks, the artist appears on video unmasked, wearing only a jockstrap.
The best thing about Lax’s approach is that his primary subject, the taboo borderland of animal-human relations, is completely fascinating, and Lax gets out of the way of its most compelling aspects. He stays with his subjects in long shots, at one point fully allowing the professional dog trainer to explain aspects of his work with his traumatized canine pupil; at another, lingering on a roundtable conversation with the Pups about interpersonal relationships and “consensual dehumanization.” Watching A TIRED DOG felt, in some ways, like watching a fire—my mind went quiet, reaching back toward a kind of fundamental, evolutionary attention to animals and sex.
The worst thing about Lax’s approach is that it can verge on the overly academic. The premise of the work (the animations, drawings, word play video, a couple essay chapbooks, etcetera) comes out of poststructuralism, and to this end Lax casts a wide net, nimbly counterposing literary excerpts alongside brief anecdotes of personal experience, without ever arriving at a conclusion. Instead, he counts on meaning to emerge, and perhaps he’s correct. Perhaps meaning, like human consciousness, can emerge from context alone if you provide enough of it. I can see the appeal in backburnering something as problematic as a conclusive narrative voice. The issue is that I still have a subjective experience and a nagging voice in my own head, and I have to assume Lax does as well. I’d be curious to hear his voice more clearly, even with all its messiness and limits. Including that, I think, would be more vulnerable than getting naked on camera.
—Eileen Havant Townsend
Lauren Bon “Concrete is Fluid,” exhibition view, 2024. Courtesy of Honor Fraser.
LAUREN BON
Honor Fraser
If the sculpture of concrete’s last big cultural “moment” (sometime in the 2010s) was typified by figurative and abstract cement statuary that merely winked at its Home Depot provenance, Lauren Bon foregrounds this material in all its blunt, obdurate force. “Concrete Is Fluid” was organized as an informal survey of the artist’s work with Metabolic Studio, the community platform she founded in 2005. Flanking the walls of the gallery’s foyer are three 3,000-pound triangular slabs from a set of 69 such massive puzzle pieces extracted via incisions into the Los Angeles River channel. The channel in question, a straight-shot gray sluice extending from the San Fernando Valley to Long Beach, currently entombs the river that had previously wound its way circuitously through the city. Bon’s strategic removal of chunks of the channel and insertions of copper and clay pipes is part of Metabolic Studio’s “Bending the River” initiative to divert wastewater buried beneath to a treatment center, after which it will be distributed to city parks. The ten-yearold project—aerial maps, photographic documentation, and construction ephemera of which is on view—is an ongoing project to “un-develop” (in the artist’s terms) the industrial landscape that has cropped up around the channel since it was constructed beginning in the 1930s to stem the periodic flooding of the river basin. To this end, Metabolic Studio has purchased over 75 city, state, and federal permits to break through the sheath of concrete and siphon out water buried beneath. Bon also holds the city’s only individual water permit for such use.
Taken cumulatively, the show’s documentary materials propose a brighter future for the river, one that relies not only on environmental consciousness but on the expertise of a dedicated team of scientists, civic planners, and legal consultants, without which its eco-justice mandate could not move forward. All of this, of course, costs money, and it’s worth noting that Bon, the heir to the Annenberg publishing fortune, bankrolls the Studio herself. The project could thus be read as philanthropy, which shouldn’t detract from its considerable achievement as an artwork. One could also argue that in terms of philanthropy, “Bending the River” is a far more useful monument than the endowed museum wings of turn-of-the-century industry barons, or, for that matter, the concrete-cast faux relics of turn-of-another-century artists.
In addition to “Bending the River,” Honor Fraser devotes its largest gallery to a room-spanning installation. Meandros (2024), whose title references an ancient Greek pattern symbolizing eternity and unity, featured loose soil, lava rock, and figurative clay forms with crystal quartz. Embedded within and presiding over this installation are Topanga Canyon Soil Landslide Column I and II (both 2024), ten-foot-tall wire mesh columns encasing loose soil from this past spring’s landslides; the structures were regularly irrigated by overhead sprinklers using water from nearby Bolona Creek. Meandros’s small sculptures, ritually crafted by Bon and collaborators and listed in the show’s press release as “birthing figures,” are clustered below them. The clay for these figures, sourced from the LA riverbed during “Bending the River’s” excavation process, gradually merged with the seeping landslide dirt over the course of the exhibition’s run, while plants latent within the displaced soil’s seedbank germinated and sprouted. How to square the precise methodology of “Bending the River” with the stone and crystal “birthing figures” that hold court in Meandros? The crafting of these figures may have been meaningful for their creators, but to my mind it did little for the river. Perhaps that’s my own failure of imagination. The divide between epistemological and mystical conduits for making sense of the world remains as entrenched as that between the concrete landscape and the clay floodplain beneath it. While the show’s accompanying text espouses the virtues of “adaptive reuse” of manmade structures, a confluence of concrete and clay, the experience of “Bending the River” landed me definitively in favor of native fauna over concrete jungles as a means of flood and landslide prevention. (Many ecologically conscious artists and architects have in recent years stopped using concrete in light of the catastrophic ecological effects—soil erosion chief among them—caused by the extraction of the sand used to make it.) Ultimately, the figurative sculptures, the land-art columns, and the slabs themselves registered less as sculptures and more as placeholders or placards to draw our attention to the monumental task of restoration.
— Cat Kron
Exhibition view of “Optical Allusion” at Lisson, Gallery Los Angeles, 15 November –January 2025. © Hiroshi Sugimoto, Courtesy of
Lisson Gallery.
Lisson Gallery HIROSHI SUGIMOTO
The entrance to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s exhibition at Lisson Gallery, “Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form” is partially blocked by a curved wooden wall. The wall commands recognition, separating the exhibition from the outside world. It immediately invites the visitor to become a conscious, active participant, as if asking us to wait behind the scenes for our cue to enter center stage. At the very least, the entrance articulates a request for commitment on the part of the viewer and establishes certain visual rules and sensorial dynamics. Beyond active participation, the massive installation indicates that the space will defy our expectations.
The show marks the return of the renowned conceptual photographer, artist and architect to Los Angeles for the first time in over a decade. Sugimoto, who was born in Tokyo and graduated from LA’s Art Center College of Design in 1972, uses cameras and photographic processes to explore time, light and the relationships between truth, fiction and vision. In past bodies of work spanning a decades-long career, Sugimoto documented dioramas at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and movie theaters across the country; he presented wax figures isolated from their museum context in ethereal, dramatic portraits; he captured bursts of electrical energy on dry plates in his darkroom; and he photographed horizon lines worldwide, framing cloudless skies and sharp lines as an origin point for his own consciousness. The artist’s in-depth investigations of visual perception, natural elements and photographic properties articulate a concern with collective and personal histories and the markings of time, as well as the limitations and possibilities of human perception.
Past the verso of the curved wall, viewers find themselves immersed in the meditative Brush Impressions, Heart Sutra (2023)—288 gelatin silver prints, each of which measures 19.5 x 23.5 inches and presents a Kanji character (Japanese writing that uses Chinese characters). Together, they depict the Heart Sutra, a key scripture in East Asian Buddhism. Considered the most frequently
recited text in Mahayana Buddhism, it discusses the fundamental emptiness of all phenomena and the transience of forms and objects. The title of the show is a direct quote from the Sutra, unveiling Sugimoto’s own preoccupation with challenging traditional notions of disciplinary, conceptual and sensorial boundaries. To produce the calligraphic prints, Sugimoto used a fixer as his painting material, applied to expired photo paper. When he turns on the lights in the darkroom, the color of the surface is fixed in black, while the calligraphy remains white. The resulting image is a camera-less work that speaks to the bare elements of photography.
Directly in front of the wall hovers Kuen’s Surface (2024), a slender, delicate sculpture made of stainless steel and acrylic. Sugimoto developed the sculpture’s form out of a mathematical equation that describes a surface with a constant negative curvature. This abstracted form seems to float a few inches above a curved block of stone (Sugimoto found the stone, a Chinese tool originally hitched to a donkey and used for farming). The sculpture elegantly engages with geometric ideas through handcrafted physical forms. Across from them are six images of Buddhas: groupings of sculptures found at a Kyoto shrine that has about one thousand figurines. The artist photographed the sculptures at dawn, and they appear to emerge from the dark. Sugimoto’s work exists at those meeting points—between darkness and light, horizons and skies, negative and positive, the possibility of emptiness and the inescapable presence of form—posing an infinite question rather than a finite response.
—Dr. Rotem Rozental
PICCLE P
CMH Autobody & Paint, CVS on Sunset Blvd, et al
It is a high season for Piccle P. People with no prior special interest in street art keep bringing him up on their stories and reels, asking about the work, and pointing out Piccles while driving—though they don’t know his name. “The heart guy,” they call him—because he paints hearts. The first bartender I talk to after a morning out with a photographer asks where I’ve been: “Looking for graffiti by Piccle P—you know, the heart guy?” “Oh, I love those!” he replies, though we’re several neighborhoods away from the work.
How does P stand out so much amid all the architecture, chaos and signage— not to mention the other graffiti? There is that balance of the striking arms and legs, often rollered-on, sometimes holding a dagger, against the needling, seeking, avid-eyed faces, which sometimes cry blood. But there are a lot of loud tags and talented painters on the streets. More than anything, I think, it is that the Piccle P hearts are so obviously selling nothing. Nearly everything we see outside is, on some level, a commercial appeal or is at least trying to make a point, with images all saying: “Get your car washed,” “Your favorite genius has an album out,” “Why not vote this way?” “Look, a great place to eat sushi.” Even most street art wants to advertise how good the artist is at drawing letters or robots after climbing up to some rarefied spot.
The Piccle P hearts immediately seem to not be about their artist or the everyday inscrutability of urban vandalism, but about us, like a classic soul song, only nastier: “Oh no, what has my heart gone and done today?” These hearts in black, white and pink: They creep, they grin, grimace and weep, they stab one another and lie in state, with great X’s on their eyes. If there is anyone who has never felt betrayed by their own heart, they are boring and I don’t want to talk to them.
Unlike a more subtly narrative matchstick-man merchant like, say, Laylah Ali, it helps Piccle P’s project that his creatures are public: they’d be less effective if they couldn’t catch you by surprise or broadcast their drama to everyone driving by. Piccle P’s star may be ascending because we spend so much of our time in public talking about what we do not want or how noble and normal what we do want is. Yet everyone in LA knows that we’re only putting up with all the crimes and traffic because of desires we would prefer not to discuss in mixed company. There are no entirely noble reasons to be here. When, across three or four lanes, we spot Piccle P putting the awkward and unsubtle heart right out there on display, spouting evil poetry, sprouting awkward limbs, feet all schematic and hands ham-fisted, we feel seen.
—Pat Williams
Photo by Bob Coulter.
T.J. Dedeaux-Norris in front of Plaintiff’s Testimony: Visual Reclamation (United States) #1, 2, 3 , 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Walter Maciel Gallery.
Walter Maciel Gallery T.J. DEDEAUX-NORRIS
T.J. Dedeaux-Norris had already segued from performance and music to painting and printmaking before completing her MFA at Yale, but she foregrounds the performative aspect of her approach in “Breach of Confidentiality,” her debut solo exhibition at Walter Maciel Gallery. Dedeaux-Norris developed the exhibited works around a kind of personal story, or as she might have it, a “narrative.” Upon entering the gallery, our first glimpses of that tale are willfully fractured; we see cut and collaged fragmented images, transformed into unique acetone transfer prints. These “reclaimed” images (as the exhibition text describes them) remap and recompose the artist’s identity over time and space; but the works are not merely about identity. The subject matter is an uncertain terrain, which the artist makes visually and materially manifest.
Throughout the exhibition, Dedeaux-Norris employs a variety of media and compositional strategies to self-reflexively tease out the generative implications of printmaking and explore the notion of what is actually ‘imprinted’. In Plaintiff’s Testimony: Visual Reclamation (United States) #1 (2024), Norris maps, plots, subdivides an image of her own face—the ‘plaintiff’s’ terrain, conceivably one and the same with her ‘testimony’. Eyes are freely sliced and spun off a facial ‘compass’, while a chin floats assertively in the lower quadrant. There’s a grisaille cast to the whole of the composition. Although flesh tones in certain fragments pop, others seem tamped down, almost greige. The fragments seem on the verge of floating to the periphery of the compositional field—a visually diasporic identity.
Two other iterations of Testimonies selectively repeat or reconfigure this bodily and facial ‘mapping’, variably reflecting presumed expressions of complaint (regret, sadness, anger, or consternation) and challenge the viewer’s instinct to construct or reconstruct the image into something easily recognizable. Dedeaux-Norris’s challenge —to our culture’s claim (or ‘imprint’) on personal identity—is expansive. As plaintiff, Dedeaux-Norris asserts a claim to everything she might be or wishes to become. Her Deposition series extends this challenge, positing herself as defendant, while fragmenting the field even more aggressively. Apparent concern or anger trouble eyes and facial fragments, although Deposition of Identity: Art As Witness, U.S. v. DedeauxNorris (#3), (2024) foregrounds fingers that might touch such troubled eyes.
Hanging weavings—of found or discarded fabrics woven through with yarns—extend and complicate Dedeaux-Norris’s inquiry into how identity is deposed and imprinted, highlighting the subjects’s inherent fluidity and uncertainty. Pale blue braided yarns or bits of vaguely plush animal-like garland snake through bits of scarves or sweatering, do-rags and discarded underthings
in North Hollywood Hearsay (2024), while long, twisted braids or lanyards of fabric and errant threads drip from its lower edge as if seeping away from a dubious field of causality. In Reseda Remains (2024), a long wrinkled length of printed sheeting spirals to the floor beneath, suggesting flight from long ago catastrophe—which may be more than just notional: the artist’s pursuit of a hip-hop career between high school and university exposed her to an environment easily as sexually predatory as it was creative.
The process of ‘imprinting’ is one thing, Dedeaux-Norris seems to say; while what remains—what stands or falls—is quite another. Along a corridor leading to the rear gallery, a series of hanging works further test out this theme. The artist collages onto small (8x8 sq.in.) wood panels hand-cut, variously hand-tinted, or glittered dry-transfer Roman style letters over printed fragments of diary entries and various writings from her childhood, with occasionally superimposed silhouettes or colored pencil drawing and doodling, the whole epoxied over into a kind of glossy souvenir of an impossible-to-memorialize, much less recapture, past. Titled Evidence of Silence (Exhibits A through N (2024)), they are anything but. These works are resonant, almost meditative objects that simultaneously whisper and shout. Some of the letters appear to flake or separate from the surface, underscoring their instability, or simply the distance between plausibility and proof.
The last gallery is given over to a tour de force display of work that is both exuberantly performative and subsumed within what the artist has compressed into a not-merely-decorative backdrop. Against one wall is an almost banner-scale inkjet print of the artist all but spread-eagled in an expansive, wildly balletic leaping pose within a wispy, vaporous aura (Body of Evidence: Latent Print, 2024). Against the other (and filling it floor to ceiling) is what appears to be a block-printed wallpaper that, on closer inspection display repeating matrices of asterisks which are themselves composed of identical miniature prints of the artist in grand jeté leaps—like a six-pointed ‘Spirit (or snowflake) of Ecstasy’. Perched salon-style across the wall are small (9x12 sq.in.) transfer prints of the artist in variously balletic or yogic poses, with gestural watercolor and pencil markings. Also titled Body of Evidence (January through December, 2024), they collectively offered a kind of reification of the aspirational ‘reclamation’ staked out in her Plaintiff’s Testimony—not of identity, per se, but of a fully realized self.
—Ezrha Jean Black
Jingze Du, Roar , 2024.
Courtesy of the artist and Steve Turner, Los Angeles.
Steve Turner JINGZE DU 57
Jingze Du’s exhibition “True Colors” features the most well-executed oils in recent memory and all of them are of cute animals. The animals are mostly uninflected white, and their cuteness is eerie and synthetic. The painting itself is restricted to points of defining darkness like ink drops in fields of snow—typically two eyes (or one when the animal is in profile) and the dark vertices of a mammalian muzzle are rendered with paint pushed deep into the canvas and then teased across until no brush marks remain visible. Only the tracks of the black paint’s footprint across the underlying canvas are left to provide a silkily photorealist gradient into the surrounding plenitude of raw white, extending outwards until a simple outline against a flat dark background shapes the whole into a creature.
For what they are, these paintings are perfect. The only remaining question for a critic is whether they lack ambition. Ancient Asian standards of beauty seem relevant when discussing any artist who starkly isolates and spotlights their touch as a tool for rendering in black and white. When Tang-era scholar and calligrapher Chang Yen-Yüan wrote “…the thing must be complete in the mind even though the manner of the pictorial rendering does not seem to be complete, otherwise no work of art will result, ” he was articulating the central principle of a Chinese art-critical tradition that, for the next thousand years, would inveigh against over- rendering and simple formal completion in favor of capturing the essence of a subject.
Du’s canvases capture not so much the essence of his subjects as the essence of our feelings about them—with their feckless vulnerability caged inside toy-like outer selves. The distortions of the figure bring digital filters to mind but the eyes still penetrate, unsettle, invite sympathy, and suggest a strange neonatal wisdom. What is remarkable is how few elements of oil painting are required to work this magic.
I hope the second room of the exhibition, further back, does not indicate a lack of confidence in the relevance of small, uncanny paintings of mutant pets. Here, Du provides much larger interpretations of famous European paintings in a drippier and more aggressive style that could be almost anyone’s. I don’t begrudge a rare talent the exercise of rendering five-foot tall sketchbook pages, but I didn’t need to see these to appreciate the seriousness of his intentions. After all, as early as the ninth century, Han-tzū addressed the question of the relative difficulty of subjects by saying “Dogs and horses are difficult, ghosts are easier; dogs and horses have been seen by everybody, but ghosts are quite effusive and strange”. Jingze Du’s paintings manage to merge each beast with its strange, effusive ghost.
—Pat Williams
Olivia Mole, “Nocturne,” 2024, installation view.
Photo: Chris Hanke. Courtesy of the artist.
Gattopardo OLIVIA MOLE
The shower scene in Psycho. You know it, everyone’s seen it. Go to the end. We follow a trail of blood and water through the tub, then push in as it swirls down the drain. In this moment, always, I beg Hitchcock to follow the zoom, to continue completely down the drain… to enter the void entirely! Instead, the shot dissolves to another of a lifeless eye, and we telescope back out. We never enter the drain.
This is the feeling that overwhelms Olivia Mole’s “Nocturne,” one of almost reaching exactly what it is that you’re after, only to have it soften into something else entirely. If you’ve felt this feeling before, it was likely in a dream, or possibly as a word slipped from the tip of your tongue, though it may have also been in a moment of love. Fine art rarely captures this feeling—at least not what we’ve been seeing lately. Even at its most oblique, today’s gallery-bound art tends toward the definitive, the unencumbered, the essentialized. Nocturne does not, and that is good.
Technically, the show is one work, Dopesheet Batman Ep VI, made up of seven “islands” of material, each grounded on a patch of industrial-grade, purple carpet. At times, objects are in motion—two inflatable projection screens tangle as they bloat alongside each other, filling with air; an oscillating fan periodically blows an opaque acrylic sheet over the mirror behind it; a mound of stuffed figures and camping chairs rotates on a turntable. There is noise and music and light, and three projections run at varying intervals—two lo-fi animations of the Charmin Bear and one text-based video with a corresponding spoken-word audio track. At the center of it all, practically hidden by the ostentation, sits a quiet bouquet of wilting tulips. The entire show cycles through every twenty minutes.
It’s all catch-as-catch-can, especially when it’s all moving. So much information, so much material. So much syncopation, too. A series of startling and then’s. You’re watching the silent video of Batman bear, and then the shrill spoken-word piece rings out, and then you catch your distorted reflection in mirrored acrylic, and then the moon bounce-like projection screens start to inflate, and then that fan turns on again, and then you finally make it over to read whatever it is that Mole has left Xeroxed on that table —evidence, perhaps?—and then the whole funhouse powers down altogether. Lights go off, things deflate, silence.
… yet, still, those tulips wilt. It’s the only part of the show that doesn’t stop, a punch unpulled. If we’re talking Psycho shower, the tulips—should we notice them—release us to the drain completely.
Considering the cyclical pomp and wreckage, one could easily interpret the show on purely systemic terms. A poetic indictment of the machine of so-called progress. Mole makes sure we don’t miss it, though. Her exhibition text consists of a single quote, uncredited, from the 19th century philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (“The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”), a sort of lamentation for man’s inability to understand history except in hindsight. Further, she summarizes her materials list—which includes “Stars and Stripes Forever” by John Philip Sousa (the American military march composer, recorded in Independence, CA) and USA flag carry-bags—with the phrase, “A spell for the end of empire.” Seen through this lens, the show is one of many in recent memory that takes on the spectacle of late-stage capitalism in the United States, documenting the twilight of a system built for the system’s sake, rather than for the people in it.
The explicit reference to empire, though—while formally incidental—becomes somewhat limiting when it serves as the only given frame for the show. It preprograms an otherwise labyrinthine installation toward a singular, simplified read; it gives us the right answer. And that dampens what is otherwise one of the exhibit’s greatest strengths: the agential wrinkle. Nocturne’s design requires that we situate ourselves in the rubble, that we move and decide rather than merely observe. As intentionally distracting as the show might be, almost every piece reflects back an image of the viewer to themselves—sometimes obstructed or distorted, often fleeting—via mirrors, acrylic sheets, or glass. This is deliberate, no doubt: we, as individuals, are implicated in our collective fate, and it’s up to us to notice precisely when and how.
If nothing else, “Nocturne” is a site of play or, as the Diane di Prima scanned text on one table makes mention, “a kind of detour” that breaks away from a more linear understanding of the world. The show pushes us to associate and connect. We sharpen our ears to hear through the dissonance, we meander about on a hunch, we turn just in time to see the mirror before the lights go off. Mole creates a playground that perpetually rebuilds and deconstructs, through which we can observe ourselves and perhaps even our conceits. In a demanding, yet dynamic way, “Nocturne” reminds us to be alive in time, and to notice it.
—Diva Corp
Susan Ossman
January 21 – February 20, 2025
Reception and Artist Walk-through: Saturday, January 25, 2025, 2 – 5 PM
Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery
California State University, Los Angeles
5151 State Unversity Drive, Los Angeles, California 90032
Image credit: Chergui, Susan Ossman, 2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 60 in.
Wrong Place, Wrong Time
by John Tottenham
Adrift between lust and sleep, the highway unwinds behind closed eyes, in scratchy sheets and stinging heat. A one-way street on repeat.
Cracking the veneer, stripping it away, in the obvious light of day. Coming from nowhere, going nowhere, but never far enough. The same signage mile after mile. Interminable layers of fast-food landscape surround dried-up downtowns where nary a soul strolls and bluecoats rigorously patrol. Most of the time is spent spitting bile at strangers, and making unflattering assumptions based upon surface appearances, just as the same assumptions are presumably being made about me, but with less authority.
I continue driving south, un-driven, through flag-ridden towns, and receive the familiar hard-eyed, tight-mouthed looks from suspicious matrons in floral-print dresses, presiding over their so-called antique stores, with anything related to Elvis Presley carefully preserved under lock and key; thank them graciously when I leave, and receive, by way of return, a begrudging noose-voiced grunt, indicating that I’m undeserving of verbal communication, just more Southern hospitality.
I take a room on the second floor of a defaced motel room in a faceless town, turn out the light and sleep for a few hours, until awoken by a television pounding through the floorboards. It feels like the end. It feels that way for a long time. Then the television is turned off and I go back to asleep.
I wake up in the morning and it feels like the end again: a ghost in an unhaunted place, seeking any perforation into the past in an unyielding present. On the street a panhandler says “This town ain’t shit,” a statement that it’s hard to contradict. I play pinball in an empty pool hall and split, ascending to new lows of dromomanic dysphoria, my woes, such as they are, thrown into stark relief by the impervious world I pass through, marveling at the nothingness of it all.
But sometimes nothingness isn’t enough, and those days, those rare hours, sometimes just moments of losing oneself in one’s surroundings: sometimes they don’t happen at all.
The rock-hard resignation you strove so hard to find is now yours to cherish. See where it found you… ignored potential, stuck in the experiential, with no itinerary and no more patience for mere experience, not knowing which road to take, knowing only that it’ll be regretted either way. That’s a given.
yiwei gallery
Wuhan, China
Nov ‘24 - Mar ‘25
ZONAMACO ‘25
Mexico City
vita kari
Photos courtesy of the artist.
AN ARTIST DANNY FOX ANSWERS QUESTIONS 1
Top 3 beers?
Okay, without a doubt—Guiness. And because I’m in LA, I’m going to say Pacifico. And a can of Stella.
5 4 6 2
Top 3 songs?
Dirty Old Town by the Pogues. Sara by Bob Dylan. Chelsea Hotel #2 by Leonard Cohen.
3
Top 3 dead painters?
Alfred Wallis. Vincent, of course. Norman Hines.
How do you like your eggs?
I like them (two or three free range chicken eggs) boiled for six minutes, peeled, rolled in sea salt and black pepper. This is good.
Give us an art world horror story?
Young painter attempts self portrait, however, upon completion realises he has only painted his father, again. What is the most beautiful thing in the world? To be carried away with someone.
Photo by Lissette Emma.
Please allow me to introduce myself...
In the UK, we are called ‘Agony Aunts’. But here in the states we are known as advice columnists, or ‘Dear Abby’, as a catchall. This one, however, is a bit different than the manners-focused columns that were once mainstays of local newspapers, and from their cloying contemporary reincarnation, the “ethics column”. This is a mental health advice column. No, I will not diagnose you, or anyone you know, nor will I absolve you of responsibility because your ex is a ‘narcissist’ or tell you that you are not an asshole, just autistic - or in the parlance of our time, ‘on the spectrum’. In other words, I will not respond the way social media seems to. Have you not wished, at least once, that your therapist would tell you what to do, instead of hinting or implying or making you get there on your own?
STAYING SANE(ish) DR.WITH TRAINWRECK
Why should you trust me? Because I have credentials. Good ones. Flawless, even. But more importantly, I have made a number of mistakes myself. More than mistakes actually: life altering and life shattering miscalculations that I have survived and learned from. I have slept with the wrong people, trusted in the wrong friends. I have spent nights in squats on the lower East Side and gotten scabies more than once. I stayed for a month at the Chateau Marmont. The front desk knows me by name at the Four Seasons, and the bartender at the dirtiest bar in New Orleans never lets me pay for my drinks, which if you are at all familiar with lower Decatur Street in Nola you know took some serious time and dedication. People I love have died, taken from me by drugs and AIDS and suicide and sheer stupidity. I had a childhood that would make the Menendez brothers wince and know things that most therapists just do not.
So write to me. Ask me your questions, And I will at the very least avoid clichés and advice involving finding your inner child or mindfulness or meditation or yoga. I might tell you to do more drugs, drink more gin, and get into more fights. I might advise a weekend in Vegas with your boys or a night with a stranger. In order to provide the best answer I can, please include a complete, albeit succinct, description of the problem and the parties involved.
I need data and context to arrive at a useful result. But rest assured, whatever you ask me, I will give you the best, most honest, least bullshit answer that I can. That answer will come from who I am, and what I have seen, and yes, decades of training at the worlds’ most prestigious institutions. I am Dr Trainwreck, and I am here to say the thing nobody else in your life will.
I gotta motor if I’m gonna make it to that funeral.
—Dr. C. Barnabas Westlake
I am an artist and I work in the arts, but I am plagued by the feeling that I am not doing enough to make the world a better place. Every day I fantasize about quitting my art world job and getting into a profession where I feel like I’m helping others directly. But I love art and I’m also afraid I’d feel alienated if I left it behind. How do I decide what to do?
UESTION Q
Sincerely, Guilt-ridden in LA
Dear Guilt-ridden
AFirstly, guilt often exists to remind us that we are, in fact, doing something wrong. Second, if you want to help people, you do. It is that simple. There are, of course, ways to bring your artistic self with you into a helping profession (think art therapy, community projects, murals, and so on). Without knowing what kind of artist you are, I cannot say what a good fit might be.
But I can say that if you feel guilty, it is likely because you know in your core you are not doing all (or maybe even anything) you can do for others. That said, art has always, and in my opinion will always, be at the forefront of revolution and resistance, and is vital to keeping the darkness at bay. So be an artist. But perhaps be an artist who falls more into the category of activist artist rather than self-indulgent artist. This is not a time to navelgaze or retreat to a studio and interpret the world on a canvas. This is a time to fight, to contribute, to stand up. As for feeling alienated and left behind? I for one would certainly prefer that to feeling—no, to knowing—that when people needed help, I chose to ignore that need. Be well, and do good things.
C. Barnabas Westlake
—Dr.
The ‘conversation’ (incidentally the worst possible way to describe anything other than an actual conversation, as in, human beings speaking with one another) around language and words is ongoing and, dare I say, rather boring.
That aside, it is vital that we reject the amorphousness and imprecision which seems to seep into everything—nuance is added to places where it does not belong, and absolutely rejected in areas where it should be encouraged, to the point where one could safely say that nuance has been cancelled. I publish in the sorts of academic journals that will reject a paper based on one’s use of contractions and so I believe, very much, in boundaries. Like art, most things begin with drawing a line somewhere. The words we use every day when we are upset, uncomfortable, or stressed out— words like ‘harm’, ‘trigger’ and ‘predator’— have psychological definitions. As do the words ‘autistic’, ‘sociopath’, ‘narcissist’ We should respect those definitions.
A student once complained to the dean at a university where I was teaching a course on psychology that I was ‘abusive’ because I did not give a trigger warning before assigning Freud. This was a master’s level student who presumably had at least a vague concept of what the man was on about. At first I was appalled, then frustrated, and finally heartbroken because what are we doing in academia, or the world, if we devote ourselves only to avoidance. Avoidance of unpleasantness, or controversy, or divisiveness. The entire human endeavour becomes impossible. It becomes static. When a person training to be a therapist says out loud that Freud makes them unsafe, clearly we have lost all sense of rigor and reason. To me, in my world, one is unsafe when going home drunk with a stranger or failing to use a condom or picking a fight with a biker. Unsafe means you are frightened of being hurt, physically and for real. It does not mean you are slightly uneasy in a classroom, a classroom situated on a beautiful campus in the heart of idyllic New England. Well, idyllic for rich white people, anyway. Which leads me to our word of the day: Trigger. Triggering is a physiological and
psychological event. It has an application that has nothing to do with 99 percent of the things to which it is attributed. Let us suppose you were the victim of a brutal assault, as I have been. Every time you smell the cologne that the son of a bitch wore you get queasy, your vision narrows to a point, and you feel exactly the same as that long ago night in the UK. You see, your brain (or mine) truly does not know that it is not still in that apartment, and you are not being choked into unconsciousness repeatedly for what seemed like days but which was, in actuality, 18 hours. That is what I mean when I say ‘triggering’. I am not, ever, referring to words on a page. Words on a page are not unsafe, you can close the book, turn the page, write a letter to the editor. But whatever you decide to do with those words, recognize that they cannot truly hurt you. In extreme cases, a single word can cause a trauma response. I can list 10 sadistic edgelords from the annals of true crime that did this to their victims on purpose, essentially conditioning them to respond to certain phrases with terror and helplessness. Personally, I refuse to say the names of my rapists out loud, but this is less about triggering and more about spite, and a refusal to give them even that recognition.
Of course, for me to blithely dismiss how some words and images can be an act of hate would be irresponsible. Some manifestos or calls to action have led to truly horrifying events. Some words and symbols are themselves a crime. Some words are not protected by our evereroding constitutional rights. Hopefully we know what these words are. I surely am not going to list them here. We can reclaim a few, but some…some just will not be rebranded. Take for example the ever-present and increasingly common swastika. No matter what that douche at a party says about it being an ancient symbol it means one thing, and one thing only. It is visceral, physical, bone-deep
and yes, traumatic, to see the red and black adorning the arms of men in our country. It is terrifying and powerful and reminds me every time I see it that I am unsafe. Like, taken-away-at-4 AM-by-the government unsafe.
So do you get the difference? Between unsafe and triggered and merely uncomfortable? Because I assure you many people seem to have difficulties with this. They seem to believe that being uncomfortable is by definition to be unsafe. That being triggered is an everyday, almost all day, commonplace occurrence. If this were the case, no one would do anything except sit in a dark room and cry forever. Yes, words can upset, incite tears or rage or even lead to violence. Words matter. How we use them matters. I implore all of you to be selective. Be mindful. Be honest. Know what the hell a word means before you ascribe it to a situation or to a person. My ex was not abusive; he was a prick. That time I watched Trainspotting and cried for two days? I was not triggered, just deeply saddened and missing a boy from my youth. And your mom really is a narcissist. Not because you think so but because she meets all of the diagnostic criteria to make that statement true. Finally, if this article upset you, please say that, but do not say it harmed you or triggered you or traumatized you or is somehow violence being perpetrated against you. Trust me, violence cannot be restrained by a page. And it cannot be censored or stopped and it does not give a shit about your safe spaces, your restorative justice, or your feelings. You want violence? Leave your apartment or your discord group or your mother’s basement and venture into the real world, where real people hurt each other every damn day.
—Dr. C. Barnabas Westlake
www.xartistsbooks.com
Photos by Bob Coulter, Brian Lee Hughes, and Artillery Staff
B E N D I X A R T N I G H T
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B E N D I X . A R T . D I S C O V E R Y .
Inspired by the cult status of Gustav Mahler among Angeleno symphonic fans in the ’70s, Gustavo Dudamel leads an exploration of Mahler’s monumental music and his inner world.
FEB 20–23
MAHLER’S JOURNEY
Los Angeles Philharmonic Gustavo Dudamel, conductor
Ekaterina Gubanova, mezzo-soprano
Simon Keenlyside, baritone
In the opening weekend, Dudamel leads Mahler’s Blumine, Symphony No. 10: Adagio, and musical poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn.
FEB 27–MAR 1
SONG OF THE NIGHT
Los Angeles Philharmonic Gustavo Dudamel, conductor
Dudamel describes Mahler’s Seventh as “a symphony of everything: from chaos to glory, sarcasm to tenderness, from a funeral march to a seductive tango. It is a cosmic symphony of perfect construction and galactic emotional scope.”
MAR 6–9
GUSTAV AND ALMA
Los Angeles Philharmonic Gustavo Dudamel, conductor
Sasha Cooke, mezzo-soprano
In Gustav’s Fifth Symphony and Alma’s Five Songs, Dudamel leads the LA Phil through the inner world and complex relationship of the Mahlers.
Through February 23, 2025 FREE ADMISSION
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