S H O P TA L K
Digital Art Happening In April there was a moment when Yours Truly realized we were finally, at long last, emerging from the pandemic that has shut us in for over a year. It was Saturday night, and we were lured downtown by “LUMINEX: Dialogues of Light,” a one-night art happening of digital art projected onto building walls in DTLA. During COVID-time I’ve driven through these streets on various missions, and they were so empty it was apocalyptic. But tonight, lower Broadway was percolating with barhoppers and diners and, as darkness fell, art fans and those who had been pent up too long. We started our rounds a little before the 7:30 official time— first stop was Sarah Rara’s “Perfect Touch 2021.” In a parking lot at 11th and South Olive, there was towering projection equipment and a handful of people, including guards and tech who were running the show. It was dusk, and we were told there was another half of the piece on the “other” side of the building— that is on the other side of the block. By the time we returned to look at the first piece again, it was dark, and there was now a crowd enjoying the sight of gigantic hands playing cat’s cradle—the string burning with light—and a voice reading a poem so aptly addressed to this strange, strange year: “The year of distance, the year of loss, the lost year,” the woman intoned, “The year of acknowledging fragility, interconnectedness.” I think we will soon be seeing more work about what we’ve been through. It’s been a traumatic time, our shared annus horribilis—and we need to work it out through art: all forms of art, including writing and performance. And it was not only disease that captured us, but also a megalomaniac in power and his minions, bent on destroying the fabric of our civil life. That night in DTLA we saw mesmerizing op-arty work by Nancy Baker Cahill and cascading images by Carole Kim, and a couple others. By 9 PM there were throngs of people on the sidewalks moving from site to site—mostly young and mostly elated to be out and about. Around us, new buildings were sprouting on nearly every block, some finished, others almost finished. What’s so surprising is that many are residential, housing for the new DTLA Urbanites. For some, the evening had just begun.
Projection by Nancy Baker Cahill at LUMINEX, photo Scarlet Cheng.
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LA Museums (Finally) Reopen! Museums also began to announce their reopenings in April, hooray! LACMA had a long list of exhibitions scheduled to open last spring and summer but, alas, did not. The biggest and probably most popular is the Yoshitomo Nara retrospective—he of the big-eyed girls holding little knives. To this day I never know what to make of his work—which has strong cartoony kitsch elements that play on its own commercial success. Yes, he is one of the most successful Asian artists today—in 2019, his painting Knife Behind Back sold for $24.9 million at Sotheby’s. I did enjoy looking at Nara’s early work, as he searches for his central themes. There is a reconstructed studio filled with drawings and small collectibles, which we peer into through windows. Then, as his canvasses grow in size and his brush becomes more impressionistic—as he turns away from his roots in line and drawing— he starts to lose me. The Getty Villa has just reopened, with the exhibition “Mesopotamia: Civilization Begins.” I found the smaller show down on the main level, “Assyria: Palace Art of Ancient Iraq,” far more memorable. The subject matter is more focused (bas-reliefs from Assyrian palaces of the 9th to 7th centuries BC) and the images are so vivid, even brutal, in their storytelling: men hunting lions, soldiers storming battlements, kings lording it over everyone. These are on loan from the British Museum. Also open are the Hammer (“Made in LA”), the Huntington (“Made in LA’s” second outside venue), California African American Museum (Sula Bermúdez-Silverman and Nikita Gale), and Forest Lawn Museum at Forest Lawn Glendale. Yes, the cemetery has a museum, and it’s currently featuring a terrific survey of work from noted stained-glass maker Judson Studios, based in Highland Park.
Installation photograph, Yoshitomo Nara, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2020, art ©Yoshitomo Nara, photo ©Museum Associates/LACMA.
